Richard Price's The Wanderers

This afternoon I read Richard Price's The Wanderers (1974) and really enjoyed it. It is about a gang in the North Bronx (my old neighborhood) in 1962 and how they slowly drift apart as they grow older. I enjoyed it partly because of its depiction of the Bronx, including businesses I would go to like the White Castle on Allerton Avenue and Alexander's on Fordham Road, partly because of Price's gift for description (there isn't much food in the book, but it made me hungry every time it was mentioned), and partly because Price makes the reader care about the characters even though most of them are hoodlums.


The novel depicts the desperation felt by young Americans at the beginning of the 1960s that led to the societal tumult at the end of the decade in a heartwrenching, mesmerizing way. I couldn't put the book down. I don't feel very articulate about it yet because I am still processing it in quiet awe. It put David Bowie's "Star" in my head, mostly for the understated, needy, defeated mood of the music, but also because of the lyrics: "Tony went to fight in Belfast / Rudi stayed at home to starve / I could make it all worthwhile as a rock & roll star." The characters in The Wanderers all want to do something to break out of their routine, soul-crushing lives. If they could just find that one thing to make it "worthwhile" for themselves and the ones they care about...

Going West

I am excited about getting to see some of the American West this summer. I'll be flying to Hawai'i for my sister's wedding in July and then moving to Salt Lake City in August, which will include a road trip across two states I've never been in, Nebraska and Wyoming. I have always had an abstract desire to see more of America, but any time I have money to travel my first choice for where to go is New York City, so I did not know if I would ever get to see the West.


The entire experience of getting a job in Salt Lake City has really (re)affirmed for me the notion that one never knows where life will lead, and also that life is long enough for a lot to happen, which is something I often have difficulty remembering or conceiving of because I am only 31. It will be a good adventure.

Tim Dlugos Lives!

I just found out today that Tim Dlugos's Collected Poems is coming out next month, edited by David Trinidad. Dlugos died of AIDS in 1990 just as he was becoming established as a significant poetic voice not only in the gay literary community, but in the wider poetry community as well. Since then he's been virtually ignored by anthologists and critics with the exception of a few short articles by Trinidad.


I was introduced to Dlugos's work when a professor of mine suggested I do a paper on him about five years ago (I have been remiss in failing to either revise it for publication or at least present it at a conference, but will have to revisit it once the new book is released). I love his poems because they have a vitality to them that is Frank O'Hara-esque. O'Hara is my favorite poet; thus that is one of the highest compliments I can pay another writer.


For instance, here is "Not Stravinsky" in full:


Dark-eyed boy in tight designer jeans and sneakers on your way from basketball practice at Bishop Somebody High, I


don't know what you're playing on your Walkman but it probably is not Stravinsky. (Powerless 46)


I love the Whitman-esque long lines (the poem is only two lines long even though each line is long enough to take up two lines of print) and subject matter. The same-sex desire expressed in the poem is beautiful, a fleeting moment of both enjoyment and sadness (the desire going completely unrequited) for the speaker (presumably Dlugos), the knowledge that all the two will ever share is a fleeting moment in passing that isn't even recognized by the boy, but is striking enough for Dlugos to commemorate in a poem. We see here the immediacy of O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems, that urgency to get an experience down on paper before one moves on with the day, with the rest of life. Dlugos's "On This Train Are People Who Resemble" is also in this vein, an everyday list poem colored by the New York City vibe and references to pop culture. In fact, one could pass it off as a lost O'Hara poem to readers unfamiliar with Dlugos's work.


Hopefully this new collection will put Dlugos back on readers' radar because his work is too good to disappear outside the boundaries of the canon, which, for all its problematic characteristics, is useful for keeping essential literature in print. The best-case scenario would be for Dlugos's Collected Poems to do for his critical reputation what O'Hara's did for his when it was first published in 1971 (O'Hara was more well-known then than Dlugos is now among poetry lovers, but not yet among critics from the academy). Dlugos's Powerless: Selected Poems 1973-1990 (New York: High Risk Books, 1996, also edited by Trinidad), which is an excellent, concise collection, unfortunately did little to stir interest in his work.

Thoughts on Re-Reading

Later this afternoon I am going to begin re-reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses for the first time since I bought it at the Strand (12th and Broadway in NYC) in summer 2003. I claim Rushdie as one of my favorite authors, but I haven't actually read any of his work since reading Midnight's Children in late 2005. Thus I am excited to get back to him.


I have done hardly any re-reading over the past seven years while I've been in graduate school (except in those instances where a book was assigned in several of my classes or I assigned a book to my classes multiple times [e.g., Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close], and also when studying for my Ph.D. exams) because I have not had the time. This is a practice that I miss, because I almost always find that I gain new insights into a text the second (or third, etc.) time around. I like the idea of having a set of texts that one returns to for sustenance throughout one's life as reminders for who one is and where one finds beauty in the world. Religious persons would use the term "sacred texts" to label what I am describing, and I like this term even though I am not religious and don't really care whether a "God" exists (actions are what is important, not whether some unprovable supernatural being is out there or not) because it signifies the idea that some texts help us experience the sublime, the beauty of the world (which are both important concepts for secular folks to claim) better than others.


Texts that have played this "sacred" role for me in the past and that I wish I had time now to re-read, but do not, include Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev, Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Di Brandt's poetry. Two authors that I have been able to re-read and continue to re-read as I have the time are Walt Whitman and Samuel R. Delany, both of whom I try to teach whenever possible. In Whitman's case, it's much easier to find time to re-read a poem or two (or a section of "Song of Myself" as the case may be) than a novel.


Part of what makes it so difficult to re-read is that I am always finding new books to read as well. I have at least a dozen new books on my shelf (mostly novels) waiting for me. Certainly my book-buying addiction does not lend itself to contemplative returns to old friends.


Also, sometimes I love parentheses a little too much.