Daily Poem

Walt Whitman 
A Noiseless Patient Spider

A NOISELESS, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

First Lines

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. - Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

Daily Poem

James Joyce

 I Hear an Army

I HEAR an army charging upon the land,
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name: 5
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore. 10
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

Daily Poem

Here's the very beginning of Faust, Goethe's epic.   FAUST I HAVE, alas! Philosophy,
Medicine, Jurisprudence too,
And to my cost Theology,
With ardent labour, studied through.
And here I stand, with all my lore,	5
Poor fool, no wiser than before.

First Lines

Some days, here on the Grass Roots blog, we'll put up the first sentence of novels and stories we like. First lines are great fun: good ones, like "Call me Ishmael" stick with you and sometimes gain a life all of their own in popular culture. Here's another great, famous one to kick us off:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. - J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Adventures here and there

Someday soon I just know (in the deep recesses of my heart) that the sun will come back.  When that day happens, I plan to get out and enjoy it.  Sometimes that means I putter around the garden, or sit in my favorite chair in the backyard (a resin adirondack chair spray-painted purple.  I know you're jealous...).  There are days, however, when I also just need to "get the heck out of Dodge," as I'm fond of saying.  Fortunately I have ready resources at my fingertips at Grass Roots to help me get things moving.

Close to home, Marys Peak is one of my favorite places to visit.  It's like being on a mountain without actually climbing a mountain.  I just climbed a really big hill.  The views are great, the wildflowers are lovely, and it's so close!  Sky Island Graphics puts out an excellent map on Marys Peak and McDonald Forest.  It clearly labels trails and forest roads, and notes points of interest.  As long as you're going to the top of Mary's Peak, you should pack along a copy of Wildflowers of Marys Peak Meadows, a small, spiral-bound guide produced by Steven E. Carpenter.  It has fantastic photos and useful information about the flowers found in our own backyard.

For a different kind of adventure, I'll check out Moon Spotlight: Eugene, Salem & the Willamette Valley.  It hits the highlights in the towns nearest to us.  There are times when a trip to Eugene sounds downright cosmopolitan, and this book handily lists restaurants, attractions, and hiking destinations close to home.

If I'm truly longing for a trip to "the big city," Portland is pretty darn close at hand.  Best Places Portland is a fantastic book highlighting the best of the City of Roses.  It points out restaurants, lodgings, attractions, cultural landmarks, shopping, and suggestions for short trips out of town, and then it rates them.  It is a fantastic resource.

Someday I just know my family will come to visit me and join me on some of these adventures.  To inspire them, I may send them my favorite Oregon photography book, Oregon: Portrait of a State by Rick Schaefer.  The photos are fantastic, and it's remarkably affordable for a hardcover, coffee-table book.

All these options, I don't know what to do first.  I'll think about it as I gaze longingly out the window at the rainy days...  See you at the bookstore, friends!

Pamela.

Daily Poem

For Once, Then, Something

Robert Frost

OTHERS taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
My myself in the summer heaven, godlike	5
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.	10
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

Daily Poem

Life, XLI
Emily Dickinson

The soul unto itself
Is an imperial friend,--
Or the most agonizing spy
An enemy could send.

Secure against its own,
No treason it can fear;
Itself its sovereign, of itself
The soul should stand in awe.

Daily Poem

Ok, so here's a long one. Take a deep breath and dive in... A poetic excursion might just do you good (It's about winter, but you don't have to worry about winter, no, not now you don't. Now is the time to read TS Eliot, enjoy him, and shrug off the dark stuff).
 
Preludes

 TS Eliot

I

THE WINTER evening settles down   
With smell of steaks in passageways.   
Six o’clock.   
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.   
And now a gusty shower wraps           
The grimy scraps   
Of withered leaves about your feet   
And newspapers from vacant lots;   
The showers beat   
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,           
And at the corner of the street   
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.   
And then the lighting of the lamps.   

II

The morning comes to consciousness   
Of faint stale smells of beer           
From the sawdust-trampled street   
With all its muddy feet that press   
To early coffee-stands.   
With the other masquerades   
That time resumes,           
One thinks of all the hands   
That are raising dingy shades   
In a thousand furnished rooms.   

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,   
You lay upon your back, and waited;           
You dozed, and watched the night revealing   
The thousand sordid images   
Of which your soul was constituted;   
They flickered against the ceiling.   
And when all the world came back           
And the light crept up between the shutters   
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,   
You had such a vision of the street   
As the street hardly understands;   
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where           
You curled the papers from your hair,   
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet   
In the palms of both soiled hands.   

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies   
That fade behind a city block,           
Or trampled by insistent feet   
At four and five and six o’clock;   
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,   
And evening newspapers, and eyes   
Assured of certain certainties,           
The conscience of a blackened street   
Impatient to assume the world.   

I am moved by fancies that are curled   
Around these images, and cling:   
The notion of some infinitely gentle           
Infinitely suffering thing.   

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;   
The worlds revolve like ancient women   
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Daily Poem

Home-thoughts, from Abroad

Robert Browning

O, to be in England   
Now that April’s there,   
And whoever wakes in England   
Sees, some morning, unaware,   
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf   
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,   
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough   
In England—now!   

And after April, when May follows,   
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!   
Hark, where my blossom’d pear-tree in the hedge   
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover   
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—   
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,   
Lest you should think he never could recapture   
The first fine careless rapture!   
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,   
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew   
The buttercups, the little children’s dower   
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Daily Poem

Good and Bad Children

Robert Louis Stevenson
Children, you are very little,   
And your bones are very brittle;   
If you would grow great and stately,   
You must try to walk sedately.   
 
You must still be bright and quiet,            
And content with simple diet;   
And remain, through all bewild’ring,   
Innocent and honest children.   
 
Happy hearts and happy faces,   
Happy play in grassy places—     
That was how, in ancient ages,   
Children grew to kings and sages.   
 
But the unkind and the unruly,   
And the sort who eat unduly,   
They must never hope for glory—     
Theirs is quite a different story!   
 
Cruel children, crying babies,   
All grow up as geese and gabies,   
Hated, as their age increases,   
By their nephews and their nieces.   

Daily Poem

Finland

Robert Graves

Feet and faces tingle   
  In that frore land:   
Legs wobble and go wingle,   
  You scarce can stand.   

The skies are jewelled all around,           
The ploughshare snaps in the iron ground,   
The Finn with face like paper   
And eyes like a lighted taper   
Hurls his rough rune   
At the wintry moon           
And stamps to mark the tune.

Daily Poem

To Certain Journeymen

Carl Sandburg

Undertakers, hearse drivers, grave diggers,
I speak to you as one not afraid of your business.

You handle dust going to a long country,
You know the secret behind your job is the same whether
you lower the coffin with modern, automatic machinery,
well-oiled and noiseless, or whether the
body is laid in by naked hands and then covered
by the shovels.

Your day's work is done with laughter many days of the year,
And you earn a living by those who say good-by today
in thin whispers.

What can you accomplish in a year?

Last week I was so proud of myself for two physical accomplishments.

First, I rode my bike to and from downtown twice, and it didn't kill me.  Woo hoo!  Okay, I admit I couldn't make it back up the hills to get home, and had to walk, but that's okay.  It's just something else for me to work toward.  Secondly, I ran a whole straight mile on the treadmill without a walking break.  (But I think I lose points for that one since the weather was SO nice, and I was running inside on a treadmill.  But I DID IT!)  These things happened after several weeks of gently persuading my body to move a little faster and get a little stronger.  If I keep this up for a whole year, what will I be able to do?

In a year I could cook my through the Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, live my life exactly as the bible tells me, and eat and live absolutely locally.  Well, some people could, and did, and they wrote about it.  Perhaps they will inspire me to accomplish something amazing in a year.

Julie & Julia, by Julie Powell, has become perhaps one of the most well-known chronicles of what one person at loose ends accomplished in a year.  The book is based on Powell's blog, which detailed her efforts to cook her way through Julia Child's famed cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  Her exploits and foibles are entertaining, even if I didn't always find her to be a very likable character.  Perhaps that is some of the appeal of the book.  The movie of the same name was only half-based on this book, and the other half was based on Child's fantastic autobiography My Life in France.  Now THERE was a woman who accomplished some things with her life.

Some year-long goals are accomplished a little closer to home.  Okay, maybe a LOT closer to home than the cuisine of France.  Barbara Kingsolver and her family, for example, spent a year eating food that was produced in the area where they lived.  Certainly if a family can do that in Virginia, it should be easy enough to to here where the produce is bountiful, fresh and delicious.  I am eager to read the results of her year in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. 
Kurt Hoelting took the challenge a step further and determined to live within a 100 kilometer radius of his home in Alaska.  He travelled only by kayak, bicycle, and his own two feet for that year, and chronicled it in The Circumference of Home.  He swears that there is plenty of adventure to be had in such close proximity to your own back yard.  Read the book and find out.

The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs, details a different type of journey taken over a year.  "...Increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world," Jacobs made the radical decision to obey the bible for one year.  Literally obey the bible.  To a tee.  The result is a fascinating and humorous tale of an unusual year and a rather unusual accomplishment.

Some days I'm just happy to accomplish another book read.  Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be running in any marathons soon, since despite my recent physical accomplishments, I managed to sprain my ankle in the second softball game of the season.  Yeah.  Go me.  Perhaps Born to Run will be the next thing on my list.

Keep trying, my friends!  See you at the bookstore--

Pamela.

Daily Poem

Due to popular demand, we are going to put a poem up on the blog every day, rain or shine. To kick things off properly, we have Walt Whitman:

Among the Multitude

Walt Whitman
Among the men and women, the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else—not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I
    am;
Some are baffled—But that one is not—that one knows me.
 
Ah, lover and perfect equal!
I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections;
And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you.

What a day for a daydream...

It is so incredibly thrilling to have some nice weather again.  When the days were gray and chill, I would often let my mind wander to dreams about Hawaiian beaches and warm sun and cold drinks.  Now that there's at least some sun and mild temperatures again, I want to get outside and play.  All that sunshine still makes me kind of daydreamy though, and brought to mind some of my favorite books to read while sitting in a chair on the back patio, wishing I was somewhere else.

One place I have wanted to visit for years is Italy.  I read Frances Mayes' first book about her own adventures in Italy, Under the Tuscan Sun, about 12 years ago.  At that time, I was in desperate need of being someplace else, and her words evoked the food, the people, the landscape, and the art beautifully.  It was so wonderful that I revisited it several times.  She recently added a new title to her collection about her life in Tuscany called Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life.  It made me as hungry as ever for the landscape and the food.  Someday I'll get there...

There are other days where my pale skin and I just do not think we could handle the injustice of the sun in Hawaii or Italy, and then I dream of Alaska.  I love wild places, and long to see glaciers and the Northern Lights at their boldest and most mystical.  (I did go to Glacier National Park last summer to see the glaciers.  I was successful, but what they say about the glaciers vanishing?  Totally true.)  Heather Lende is a writer at a small paper in a small town in Alaska.  Her first book, If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name, brought me into that world and tugged my heart right into it.  I laughed!  I cried!  I wanted more!  Fortunately she just came out with a new book, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs, that I plan on reading while ensconced in a chair in my backyard very soon.  Perhaps a book about a generally cold state will be excellent fodder while ensconced on a hot day with a very cold glass of iced tea.

Sometimes I don't know where to go or what to do, so I'll flip through 1,000 Places to go Before You Die.  It seems like there is always something fantastic to see or intriguing place to visit.  This book at least sorts it down to a very manageable 1,000.  When I need a new place to daydream about, I'll flip through this.

If you happen to pop into the store, and see me sitting behind the counter blissfully staring out the windows, I'm likely thinking of one of these places.  Please stop by and say hello and break my reverie; help bring me back to dear, lovely Corvallis.

See you in the bookstore!

Pamela.

Poet Laureate Kay Ryan reads this afternoon at LBCC

Kay Ryan, Poet Laureate for the United States, will be reading this afternoon (May 12) at the Russell Tripp Performance Center at Linn Benton Community College in Albany.  The event starts at 4:00 p.m.  The event is free and open to everyone. There will be Q&A and book signing.  Grass Roots Books will be selling books at the event.
For more information about the Poet Laureate, and samples of her work, visit the Library of Congress website.

Author Event tonight, May 7

Robin Cody will be reading from his new collection of nonfiction writings, Another Way the River Has: Taut True Tales from the Northwest.  Cody brings the ear of a novelist and the eye of a reporter to the people and places that make the Northwest, and Northwest literature, distinctive.  The reading will be held at The Corvallis Arts Center, 700 SW Madison.

The Pulitzer winner is here!

WE won! Well, maybe not US, but we did get
copies of this year's Pulitzer Prize Winner for fiction in stock. Tinkers by Paul Harding is finally here! Should be an interesting read.

Find reader reviews on Goodreads! 

Brushes with fame...

Having grown up in a small town, and later moving to Corvallis, I can safely say that I am not exactly a friend to celebrities. Growing up I knew who the high school quarterback was, and who was likely going to be the valedictorian, but I never knew anyone who could honestly be described as "famous." I have had to settle for "brushes with fame," and most of those are indirect.

I was first awestruck at the tender age of 17 when Scott Davis (a native of my hometown of Plainfield, IL, who went on to play for the L.A. Raiders from 1988-1994) came in with his dad to the restaurant where I worked and ordered a plain double cheeseburger and a small Diet Coke. He was HUGE. Have you ever seen an NFL defensive end? HUGE. I was awestruck and blushed to match the color of the ketchup I did not put on his burger. I can hardly believe that I remember what he ordered 19 years later. Me? Dork.

Beyond that, I have often referred to celebrities who grew up in the same area I did. Lionel Richie? Right over there in Joliet, IL. Cindy Crawford? Grew up in DeKalb, IL, where I went to college. Cheap Trick? They're from Rockford, IL. Danica Patrick? Grew up in Roscoe, IL. Hillary Rodham Clinton? Park Ridge, IL. Have I met any of these people? Heck no! But perhaps they walked where I walked, or drove where I drove.

I have brought that fascination with me to Corvallis. When customers buy a book by John Krakauer, I get such a rush when I say, "Did you know he went to Corvallis High School?" Did you know that? He did! Think of that when you read his tales of survival, including Into Thin Air and Into the Wild. (What was he thinking about in class...?)

My most recent "brush with fame" had me blushing even redder than the pizza sauce at American Dream.  I went over there for a slice for lunch last week, and standing in line ahead of me was Craig Robinson, head coach for the OSU basketball team.  Normally, the sight of an OSU coach in town would not leave me awestruck.  Coach Robinson, however, is also a recently published author, hitting the talk show circuit.  Oh, and did I mention he's President Obama's brother-in-law?  The author thing is what really put me over the edge, though.  I ordered my lunch and hemmed and hawed.  I truly believe in leaving celebrities to their peace, but I really wanted him to come over to the store and sign our copies of books. I sat at a table not far from where he sat with (presumably) some assistant coaches and a prospective player.  I deliberated for several minutes, reworking various requests in my head.  Finally I just decided to screw up all my courage and interrupt him as politely as I could.  Which is what I did.  My face was bright red as I stood in front of his table and rather meekly said, "Pardon me, Coach Robinson?"  I tried to be polite, and apologized for interrupting, and mentioned I worked at the bookstore across the street, and would he mind coming over and signing our copies of his books?  He was SO NICE, and said he would stop by later.  GAH!  When I went back to the store after lunch, I was so giddy, I told my coworkers.  And then Coach Robinson did come by and signed the few copies we had in the store of A Game of Character.  (We sold two of those while he was there.)  He seemed humble, and surprised when we told him that we had sold several copies of his book.  And he said he would come back and sign more.

It occurs to me now that I will need to have him autograph a copy of the book for me.  Mica read it and said it was a wonderful book, and now I will need this tangible memento of my most recent brush with fame.  We'll have more autographed copies in soon, so make sure you stop by and check.  You never know, you may have your brush with fame right here at Grass Roots...  (By the way, have you met April...?)

See you at the bookstore!
Pamela.

Alas! How we weep!

April is a much-loved month in the bookstore.  We had a fantastic Poetry Month this year, and everyone on staff enjoyed sharing the poems they love.  Sadly April is over, but it is possible to keep poetry in your heart throughout the whole year.  Here are some websites that post or broadcast a new poem every day:

The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
Poetry Foundation's Poem of the Day
Poetry Daily

How do you get your daily poetry fix?