This book is the classic work dealing with the psychology of death. The five stages of grief were first outlined here, though they are focused more on those dying then the people grieving after they are gone. Kübler-Ross interviewed terminally ill patients as part of an interdisciplinary seminar on death, as a means of understanding what happens when people have a lot of time to face their own deaths.

It would have been good for me to have read this book in 2003 when my mother was very sick and spent eight months in a hospital before dying, but it was only recommended to me recently. It would have felt inappropriate to have read it then in many ways, which is precisely the sort of anxious denial this book critiques. While many argue that the stages of grief outlined by Kübler-Ross are too rigid and specific, there is benefit to being aware of the concepts, as long as we remember that grief is personal and specific to the people and their relationship.

NPR did a story on Kübler-Ross in June 2004, showing her to be rather impatiently awaiting her own death.

It’s probably time that I returned these photo books I took out from the library months ago. (There were a few others, but I didn’t spend too much time with them before I returned them.)

I’ve been admiring this full edition of the Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills for a while. Even if you are familiar with her work, this book is worth a browsing for her essay “The Making of Untitled,” which goes into the background of how she got into character building and her self-portrait techniques, as well as various anecdotes about the making of certain photos.

I wrote about this book for my photo class:

     This collection of photos strikes me with its fictional intent. So often photography is implied to be some kind of eye to “the truth,” an unquestionable witness. But photos can often be misrepresentations of some kind of reality, even if they accomplish documenting some facts. Here there is no pretense of truth, the subject of each one is the photographer: disguised and costumed, choreographed and posed. The idea of self-portraits is subverted – instead of taking self-portraits to convey ideas about or representations of herself, Sherman is taking self-portraits to create characters.

     I like the mystery and the implied (and encouraged) stories. Sherman writes in the introduction how she attempted to imply people sitting just outside of the frame by the edge of a chair, the character’s look in a specific direction, and even a small cloud of cigarette smoke like someone had just exhaled. I love the idea of an image that communicates something that isn’t seen.

     The photos speak a lot, some have many details in the facial expressions and backgrounds to process, but at the same time they are almost muted. It’s all a guessing game, trying to understand what the photographer’s motivations were for each shot, and knowing somehow that maybe she doesn’t know the whole story about each one. These images work entirely with what we bring to them and invent around them. The characters are presented in their sets and in costume, but the context of a narrative has been stripped away – yet we are still expecting to understand the plot even though it’s missing.

     The photos aren’t always technically “good” (I’m thinking of at least one that is blurry and a couple that are washed out due to an accident while developing), but that is part of what lends their weight to the performance – a collection of stray stills from some old obscure film.

One of my favorite books as a kid was Jennifer and Josephine, and though I never read any other of Peet’s many children’s books, I considered him a favorite writer. I spotted this book at the library—an illustrated autobiography! It seems that I forgot I already had known he did a lot of work for Disney. His insight into the early years of the Disney animated features and Walt Disney’s personality are some of the best parts of the book. It is also inspiring how long he strived towards writing books for children until finally, slowly, figuring it out. He obviously was a pretty down-to-earth guy with an ironic sense of humor and sentimentality, so it’s no wonder his books are still relevant today.

This compilation of writings by Cartier-Bresson is pretty random and obviously written over a long period of time. But its brevity makes up for the lack of flow. His opinions of photographic technique are interesting, sometimes useful and sometimes not. He was not a fan of color photography: As opposed to black, which has the most complex range, color, on the contrary, offers only a fragmentary range. Though that was largely because of the state of color film processing at the time of that writing, 1985. His philosophy of “The Camera as a Sketchbook” is certainly well received by the photobloggers of today, though who knows what he thought of digital photography. The writings on particular places his visited to photograph (China, Moscow, and Cuba) are perhaps the best part of the book.

Albany Bus Station

The same fat man with the fluorescent vest
is playing cards for cash
at the same table by the window;
the same easy jean-jacketed girl
slaps the back of the same red-faced man
whose shirt hangs out below his sweater.
And the same dusky man joines the game,
angry as before — ready to shout and throw
his deal down. It’s the every day crowd
that comes in when the mesh gates
are pulled back and the lunch line
offers chicken wings and gravy.
I’m here, too, in my moon boots from Ames,
my pink quilted coat, holding this brocaded
handbag lumpy with face cream, toothpaste,
bottles of vitamins, carbon receipts,
a plastic bag of quarters, and my dim-store
glasses. My poems and books
are in the borrowed suitcase under the table.
I’m sitting here with the small
cup of decaf, watching them play cards.
I am homeless. I forget who I am
or where I was before I got here.
For two hours I am in their avant-garde
drama by Beckett. I am nowhere.
Until outside the window, the big ultra-real
green and white Vermont Transit Bus
pulls in to take me home to Brandon.

Parts of this book I loved, but mostly it seemed that the sequence wasn’t right—more chronology might have helped provide some kind of general narrative. But then many poems covering the same topics might have read completely repetitious if right next to each other. I found myself liking the more banally personal poems and curious to read more Ruth Stone.

I’m giving up on this book. I’ve been reading it since I finished A Wild Sheep Chase and going on a month, only halfway through—I just don’t see the point of forcing myself through it any longer.

This coming-of-age epic inspired a documentary film by Mark Moskowitz, which I read about a few years ago. Since then I’ve been very intrigued, and when I first saw the republished version in a bookstore several months ago, I’ve been wanting to delve into it. I watched (most of) the documentary this fall and got the book from the library shortly thereafter.

The novel is divided in three sections, representing distinct moments in Dawes Oldham Williams’s life—a not so subtle representation of “Dow”—who is growing up in Rapid Cedar, Iowa—not unlike Mossman either. The first section is a lyrical and at times confusing narration of a visit to the family farm in the western part of the state. Past and present are woven together to create a clear picture of the relationships between Dawes and his family. There is a lot of gorgeous language and not a whole lot of driving plot. The second section is a series of antics Dawes and his high school friends take part in—a lot of drinking and reckless driving and first encounters with girls. Again, there isn’t much of a narrative arc, and eventually I got sick of living in a world of adolescent boys. The third section finds Dawes in Mexico, following his path to being a writer. Though I believed that struggling through this would be rewarding in the end, I’m starting to think I am just distracting myself unnecessarily from the pile and lists of books I am a little more certain I will enjoy from start to finish.

The interesting thing about this book is that though it garnered a rave review in the New York Times Book Review, it has been the only book Mossman published. When Moskowitz finally read the book (having read the review and bought the book in the 70’s), he was curious why Mossman never published anything again and his attempt to track him down is documented in the film. This might be the only time I would recommend the film over the book, though it’s not an adaptation of the story, so I guess it’s not the same thing.

The unnamed narrator is the youngest of three sisters. She has lived her entire life in the Hôtel Splendid. Her grandmother built it next to a swamp. Her sisters traveled the world with their mother. When the mother died, the sisters returned.

Groups of speculators, geographers, contractors, and eventually workers come through under a plan to build a railroad through the swamp. Up against the decaying hotel, the swamp that threatens to engulf it, and the sisters who don’t give her any help, the youngest perseveres through the ups and downs. There’s something enigmatic about her accounts though they are largely banal: the state of the plumbing and the health of her sisters are most common. Maybe it’s the short, non-compound sentences. Or the profound image of the isolated hotel in the middle of a hungry swamp created without long, descriptive passages.

I was in the middle of the epic Stones of Summer when I went away last week—not about to bring a nearly 600 page hardcover tome with me, I instead started in on some of the books that have been calmly waiting for me to get through the Mossman book. I bought this one used several weeks ago because I liked the design (will try to get an image up later).

While looking for some information on Dan Rhodes, I found this long review, which is much more than I could write about this morning in my current jetlagged state. Also I can be lazy and refer to it, like saying that the parts I liked best were the Calvinoesque histories the dog unveils on his travels. Most of the rest, especially the end, I felt were either forced or just weak.