Dog Days Reflections--Or What I Read This Summer

So already, first of all, the word "reflections" in the title of this blog is somewhat misleading: I haven't been reflective AT ALL this month. Recently I bought the birthday card shown in the adjacent photo to put aside for the November birthday of a dog-loving friend. All month long, I've been more like the dog on the right--jumping up and looking out and changing my mind about what I'm seeing--than like the philosophical, "looking inward" dog on the left. Consequently, this blog is not profound.

 

Second of all, the phrase "Dog Days" in this blog's title is also somewhat disingenuous. This year I completely forgot about the Dog Days, that time of year when "the Sun occupies the same region of the sky as Sirius, the brightest star visible from any part of Earth . . . [that's] part of the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog."*  

 

I suspect that if I'd been out at our cabin sometime between July 3 and August 11, I would have been aware of them: In rural upstate New York, it's hard to avoid seeing constellations in the night-time sky. 

 

But I was in Quincy, living through the final weeks of my kitchen remodel, and then the period of kitchen resettlement, which included not only putting my old kitchen things into their new kitchen places, but eliminating the evidence of the weeks of construction--not so much ashes to ashes, as dust to dust. My mind was ping-ponging, ricocheting between "there or there?" 

 

It was exciting and fun, but it made it hard to settle myself down and be Sirius (okay, bad pun) about writing: the space in my kitchen had taken over the space in my mind. 

 

But seeing out was not just about looking out of windows and noticing squirrels that were really leaves. Or looking into new kitchen cabinets and wondering what object really would be better in a different spot. It also meant looking outside of myself and away from my morning pages (I've been doing Julia Cameron's Walking in This World course this summer, as I mentioned in my July post) and into books. Once I started reading other people's writing, I kept reading. It felt good.

 

Once I'd finished reading Sarah Hurwitz's Here All Along, I picked up Queen Bess by Maria Vetrano. Vetrano's literary agent is one of my former Marblehead High School students** who recently fulfilled a long-held professional dream by founding Green Light Literary + Media, LLC, which she owns and operates. I was honored to receive an advance copy from her, and I loved it. As the Simon & Schuster website explains, "Self-made billionaire Dakota Wynfred is convinced that the only way to save American democracy is by putting the last Tudor Queen in the Oval Office." The book is scheduled for release on October 15. 

 

Just as I was wrapping up Queen Bess, a very different book came to my attention, one co-edited by one of my former Cambridge Rindge and Latin Pilot School students***, and containing chapters written by several others of them.**** I haven't finished all of From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Identity--of course, I began by reading chapters written by "the Cambridge kids"--but already I'm thinking thoughts I haven't thought before, and remembering moments as a teacher when I wish I'd done better or accidentally did well. As one of my former Cambridge bosses***** has said on a number of occasions, "I am always learning from my former students." I am looking forward to reading this book in its entirety and continuing to learn.

Days after the official end of the Dog Days and the arrival of White Folks, my husband Scott and I headed out to our very low-tech cabin, where I tend to do my best reading. Given our quarter-mile walk to the cabin from the road, we think hard about what books to bring since bringing them means hauling them. I brought four books--a work of fiction, a work of non-fiction, and two books of poetry, all of which I read: immersion is so much easier in a place without alerts, notifications, and a beckoning television screen.

 

The first of the books I read was written by a former CRLS colleague****** and published in 2002. Who Will Say Kaddish? A Search for Jewish Identity in Contemporary Poland combines autobiography, history, and on-the-ground inquiry centered around the questions of who is really Jewish and how (and when) Jews choose to identify themselves to themselves and others, Jewish and non-Jewish--questions that persist in 2024 in America, Israel, and elsewhere. Since Scott read the book, too, we had lots to discuss.

The two poetry books I read were perfect reads for rural Berlin. The late Rebecca Elson was an astronomer who wouldn't have overlooked the Dog Days. According to A Responsibility to Awe's back cover, she viewed poetry as "a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it." 

 

My poetry reading group hoped that reading Kathleen Jamie's The Overhaul would let us experience the landscape and people encountered recently by one of our members on her trip to Scotland and northern England.

The fourth and final of my cabin reads was James by Percival Everett. I saved it for last because I was so curious about it. First, because I know The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so well, having taught it to six years' worth of Marblehead High School white ninth-graders (hardly the same experience as being a white teacher teaching it in "the hood"), ******* I was curious to see what parts of Twain's work Everett would maintain and how. I was also curious what he would add to the narrative because Huck and Jim aren't always together in Twain's book.

Second, I was curious because I'd recently read Everett's The Trees, a history-based novel that managed to be really funny and deadly serious as it dealt with the topics of systemic racism and white supremacy. Would Everett manage that same mesmerizing balance here? The Trees is great, and must-read for anyone who'll never forget Emmett Till, whose body was discovered sixty-nine years ago today.

And James is great, too--funny, terrifying, disgusting, depressing, deadly serious, deeply touching, inspirational. I can't do it justice in one short paragraph. But I can talk about my first impressions briefly. Over the years, I've read a number of novels about the experience of enslaved Americans that made important lasting impressions on my mind, heart, and imagination--most recently Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend. But James layered other sensibilities and possibilities of enslaved experience onto the images I'd accumulated and ideas I'd developed. 

As I read, I found myself using the word "grotesque" to describe many of the manifestations of the institution of slavery that I encountered in the book--and language is very important in the story. Like other grotesque things, slavery was twisted--and therefore twisting of almost anything and anyone it touched. Ironies abound in this novel--and the people in the novel who've become blinded to them, willfully or not, become grotesque. If these grotesque people are white, they become especially dangerous and deadly.

So I missed the Dog Days this year. And introspection was much less pressing than inspection--of my new kitchen by the city electrical, plumbing, and building inspectors. I may not have looked inward much this summer, but I did do a lot of looking outward and through--specifically through the eyes of the writers whose books I read this past month. I enjoyed it and was enriched by it. And if you've made it this far, thank you for reading!

* Farmers' Almanac Staff. (2024, June 7). What are the Dog Days of summer? Farmers' Almanac. https://www.farmersalmanac.com/why-are-they-called-dog-days-of-summer

** That would be you, Maura Phelan.

*** That would be you, Sam Seidel.

**** Those would be you, Adam Weinstock, Adam Seidel, and Eli Tucker-Raymond.  

***** That would be you, Ray Shurtleff.

*(6) That would be you, Larry Mayer. I'm proud to be your writing partner: I learned so much from your book about how to intertwine autobiographical narrative, non-autobiographical narrative, and exposition. And your questions linger in my mind.

*(7) I stopped teaching Twain's book when I got to Cambridge when the only African-American student in one of my classes told me how difficult it was for her to have her white classmates respond to the racism in Huck's world only intellectually. I wish I'd had some of the professional learning opportunities my younger colleagues have had recently to help them become more responsive teachers of literature that elicits strong difficult emotions in our students. I still believe that Huckleberry Finn, is a great book, an American must-read and must-discuss. But that doesn't mean one must read it before the age of 18.

*(8) “Good Smells: A Memoir of A Lifelong Pursuit” by Clancy – image copyright Sue Clancy 2019. Image accompanying and screen shot from Clancy, S. (2019, February 13) reading and books in art. sue clancy -- artist. https://sueclancy.com/2019/02/13/reading-and-books-in-art/comment-page-1/