It’s three am and I’m about to go work a fourteen-hour shift. Mark my words, I’m finally ready for a grown-up job.

I finally finished John Casey’s novel about a fisherman building his own boat in Rhode Island. It’s also about his financial troubles, his affair, and some drug smuggling. A few weeks ago I griped about excessive praise on book flaps–the NY Times said this was possibly the best book since The Old Man and the Sea. I don’t know about that comparision–the ocean is a big deal in Spartina, and I guess there’s some thematic resonance, but the novel reminds me more of The Great Gatsby, in that it’s about a guy who really wants something (the American Dream), and struggles to achieve it. Like Gatsby, Spartina is a lyric book, and Casey’s descriptions of the salt marshes are amazing. He also writes well about sex. The Guardian just released this year’s bad sex awards, and while I’m sure you could pull individual lines out of Spartina and submit them as unseemly, overall the descriptions were impressive. Casey does more than “they closed the bedroom door. A while later they were smoking a cigarette,” and he wisely avoids clunky maneuvers–”he put his hand here and she turned her head this way”–instead using lyric ocean metaphors to get the point across. It’s a very honest and tender book overall. I put it down for two weeks to teach another book, and when I picked it up I remembered everything, like I’d just put the book down for a few minutes, which I think is the best praise I can give it. It’s memorable.

This past week I’ve been reading Seamus Heaney’s selected poems, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. The book has perhaps a dozen poems from all of his books between Death of a Naturalist (1966) and The Spirit Level (1996), and it’s interesting to see how his poetry changes over the course of his career. The early poems are visceral, close to nature and manual labor. I don’t know if it’s because he’s Irish or just puts most fiction writers to shame, but I had to read with a dictionary and added about a hundred new words to my vocabulary. He writes about bogs and iron workers and scruffy Irish landscapes. The poems in North might be my favorites because a lot of them are about ancient bodies preserved in peat, which I find fascinating. And the language there is at its most compressed:

and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.

And:

Quagmire, swampland, morass:
the slime kingdoms…

Earth-pantry, bone-vault,
sun-bank, embalmer
of votive goods
and sabred fugitives.

Heaney’s language changes in his later period. Beginning with Field Work, long blocks of iambic pentameter fill the page, and he writes more about art. He translates or reworks older poets like Virgil, and meditates abstractly on language and what it means to be an artist. Those poems might be more mature, more in touch with the history of poetry, but I was less interested in them. This is just a generalization, but while the language in his later work is authoritative, and the poems read like classic poetry, they sacrifice some of the surprise and accessibility of his earlier work.

Here. I scored 28/33, a solid B. I missed a few of the questions about which branch of government has the power to do what, at least according to the Constitution.

Here’s what’s playing at my local theater, with some of Roger Ebert’s analysis, which I think is all that needs to be said:

1) Bolt–no Ebert review, because he’s an adult
2) The Duchess–Ebert liked this one, but he has the occasional interest in historical spectacle that I don’t share
3) Fireproof–so bad that it doesn’t have any critical reviews on Yahoo
4) The Haunting of Molly Hartley–same
5) High School Musical 3: Senior Year–no Ebert review, because it’s the third high school musical movie
6) Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa–Ebert: “This is a brighter, more engaging film than the original Madagascar.”
7) Quantum of Solace–I fell asleep; Ebert didn’t like the Bond girl: “We fondly remember the immortal names of Pussy Galore, Xenia Onatopp and Plenty O’Toole, who I have always suspected was a drag queen. In this film, who do we get? Are you ready for this? Camille. That’s it. Camille. Not even Camille Squeal. Or Cammy Miami. Or Miss O’Toole’s friend Cam Shaft.”
Saw V–Ebert didn’t review it, because fuck it how many Saw movies are they going to make
9) The Secret Life of Bees–Ebert liked it, but he has the occasional interest in schmalz that I don’t share
10) Soul Men–Ebert: “Soul Men is the one that’s really going to make you miss Bernie Mac.”
11) Twilight–Ebert: “…will mesmerize its target audience, 16-year-old girls and their grandmothers.”

Can someone please explain to me why Hollywood is worried about ticket sales? Or rather, what don’t producers understand?

The award for fiction this year went to Peter Matthiessen for his novel, Shadow Country. The novel is apparently a revised combination of three of his earlier novels, and you can read about the book and Matthiessen at the NY Times. The Times is curious about the status of Shadow Country, whether it actually is a new book, seeing as its parts have been published before, but you can’t fault the awards committee for wanting to grant the prize to someone who maybe should have won it by now. That happens a lot with the Pulitzer, the award going to someone as kind of a lifetime achievement thing–Faulkner’s A Fable, Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, arguably McCarthy’s The Road. I’ve never read Matthiessen, so maybe the book is fabulous, but I’m a bit disappointed that they didn’t at least nominate Rash’s Serena for the prize. That slight is about like Harriet Arnow not getting the Pulitzer for The Dollmaker the same year Faulkner won.

I’m not sure what the right grammatical term would be, but here’s a lovely article about legalizing marijuana, complete with this linguistic gem in the first paragraph: “In 1982, as a young man not yet 30, my mother was slowly dying of brain cancer….”