Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Ford, Fernando Pessoa

I was a grown man living in a tiny home in the middle of France when I realized I didn't have to finish reading a book just because I'd started reading it.

I was reading Dostoyevksy, "The Idiot," one of the few books in English available at the bookstore in Clermont-Ferrand. Even though I read the book for a few hours every day, knowing it was a classic and having practically nothing else to do, it seemed that it would never end. Not only would it never end, the more I read the farthur I seemed to be from both the beginning and the end.

So I quit reading it, just as I've just quit reading "My Sister, My Love" by Joyce Carol Oates.

It happened last night at approximately 3 a.m. I closed Oates' book about 75 pages from the ending, not knowing whether or not any of the family members had murdered poor little Bliss Rampike or if the pedophile Gunther Ruscha had indeed committed the crime. The book's based on the famous Jonbenet Ramsay case and has its virtues--it's a clever send-up of Christianity as practiced in upwardly-mobile American circles and the tabloid culture--but it's also long-winded to the detriment of the satire intended. Not having read much Oates, a few poems and short stories, I always feel after reading it that I could read more of her work if I didn't know she'd written it.

Richard Ford has a new book, "Canada." He was interviewed on PBS' News Hour last night by the ingenuous Jeffrey Brown. They both seemed like really nice guys. I'd read Ford's last book, "The Lay of the Land" on the recommendation of my oldest son and Walter Rosenthal, two sources for some of the reading I eventually do, and got through it all, though not with the enthusiam that I'd read Herta Muller's and continued reading her first 3 novels before crashing at "Traveling on One Leg."

Though I probably won't read Ford's new book, I'm pleased by the title. It's ironic, as he admitted in the interview with Brown, in the same sense that the idea I had the other day is ironic: that when the history books are written 100 years from now Canada may be considered a more enlightened, greater country than the USA.

I almost always finish reading poems. That's probably why I read them. I keep a Penguin Edition of the selected poems of Fernando Pessoa--A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe--closeby. I can open the book anywhere and feel like I'm putting my head in a cool, clear stream of mountain water. The air's always fresh up there where's Pessoa's writing, even when he's traipsing around Lisbon complaining about the heat or lighting another cigarette.

Just to prove what that I'm saying about opening up a book of Pessoa's poems anywhere and finding something of value, something that has the possibility of conveying what it's like to be human in the world in a completely straightforward way, I'll open Pessoa right now:

I want the good, I want the bad, and in the end I want

nothing.

I toss in bed, uncomfortable on my right side, on my left

side,

And on my consciousness of existing.

I'm universally uncomfortable, metaphysically

uncomfortable,

But what's even worse is my headache.

That's more serious than the meaning of the universe.