The Expectant Father and clear thoughts

The Expectant Father
by Armin A. Brott, Armin A. Brott

I've been reading over this book that my sister gave me about being a father. I've been reading it because in eight short months (well, a little less), that's what I'll be. My fiance and I were swimming a few days after we watched the little pink line appear on the test - affirming our intuitions. While we were swimming I thought of how lucky I was to have this woman, who is going to be the warmest and most joyful mother on earth, swimming with me. I thought of the peanut-sized life swimming inside her. And because it was a beautiful day - sunsplashed and sweltering - I realized that the baby swimming in her was the luckiest life in the world because even though its mind cannot imagine a world as beautiful as this, the inner world in holding it is an equally radiant mystery in its own way, to me.
The book was, however, less of a magical experience. It holds imoportant reminders such as: Be nice to each other and Babies are expensive. Sucking the joy out of the walls doesn't fully express the tiresome sections on finance and scheduling for prenatal visits. One of the problems with reading a book like this so early is, of course, the nagging fear that the author plays on. Namely: You aren't ready to be a father. But some of the fears the book brings up are too strange for me to comprehend. For example, the book repeatedly points out that 60% of all fathers have the irrational fear that the child might not be their own - a suspicion which could never cross my overwhelmingly joy-addled mind. I am amazed by all of this too much for my mind to really hold, and too dizzy to read anything but poems with what can be called clarity. I opened up Malena Morling's collection Ocean Avenue instead, in which clouds take the shape of our inner workings, where the lit dust falling between city buildings is the marriage of space and time, and that, finally, started to make some sense.
Drew McNaughton

book sale books

I went to a book sale several weeks ago which benefitted 826 Seattle, a literacy program that is an offshoot of the San Francisco that the McSweeney's people started. Among the books I picked up were Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson and The Last Life by Claire Messud.

I read Guterson's Our Lady of the Forest when it came out and thought it was great, and Cedars was pretty good too. Cedars takes place in the mid-1950's in the Puget Sound area.There was a movie a few years ago with Ethan Hawke which didn't get great reviews. I don't read a lot of mystery, but I do like the way the details are revealed slowly, asking you to look at the story from the angles of different characters. This novel is ostensibly a murder mystery but in reality is trying to solve the much more mysterious problem of how to deal with the post-war conflicts between the Japanese and the white residents of a tiny island of fishermen and strawberry farmers.

Claire Messud I hadn't heard of, but upon reading The Last Life I am looking forward to reading more of her stuff. In this novel she tells the story of her family as if it were a mystery, which to the teenage narrator it largely is, revealing bits and parts through the personal histories of different members of her family. Sometimes they are telling their own stories and sometimes others are telling them, so the narrator gets a lot of different points of view to choose from when figuring out her family.

Both of these books really worked for me because I am a sucker for stories about storytelling. I haven't been able to enjoy a work of fiction since I read Alice Munro's Runaway last fall -- nothing could live up to it -- but these books got me back on track. Plus they were great to read on the bus. So the moral of the story is: if anyone opens an 826 wherever anywhere near you, go to the book sale. Those kids have great taste.

-angie kritenbrink

The Dictionary

I was flipping through the old 1936 edition Webster's Universal Usage Dictionary housed at the coffee shop near my house. There's this thing called a Ducking Stool, which was used to dunk kids under water when they acted up in school. It was also used on witches, but that was less interesting to me than the schoolkid definition. The definition was something like: "A tool for disciplining miscreant or misbehaving youths by means of immersion in water." And what it looks like is a chair at the end of a big pole, which is hinged at the center like a see-saw. I thought about what a process it must have been to discipline a kid with this thing. What if it was winter, and the water was frozen over? Did the whole class get to come and watch? What if the teacher wasn't strong enough to pull the kid back out? I thought of a PTO meeting in 1780; I imagined a short frail teacher in front of the bearded school board Pilgrims, explaining some student's death by drowning for making an armpit fart or something. Mostly, though, what caught me was the term 'Ducking' for the 1936 definition of a bodily immersion in water. I think that the image is more accurate than the contemporary 'dunking' used to describe the process. Dunking supposedly comes from this German religious group, who called themselves something like Dunkers, and who were fascinated with the ability of water immersion to cleanse sins. I like the idea of ducks better.
Drew McNaughton

Born On A Train

Though there is no title story for Jon McManus' collection of thirteen stories that's actually called Born On A Train, it's a hell of a title. The stories make me see how much it matters that there are still writers out there who we can call badasses. The collection rides roughly on the edges of Americana, where people still say, "What in tarnation!?" They could make fun of its characters, peolpe living in the woods and RV parks of our nation, but the stories cut much more to the bluish-white bone of the characters than alot of today's writers, whose joyless flayings of ruralites stem from the straight-toothed academia from which they leer. In Earl of Credition, a family fills a truck cab and bed, rides to Kmart to return a pair of gunshot and bloodied pants, claims ties to English royalty, and eventually draws the line between the old America and our new, fluorescent nation. McManus' first collection, Stop Breakin' Down, was in a similar vein, but in Born On A Train, he takes more time populating his stories with fuller bodies, and rather than whizzbanging across our inner eyes, the scenes in his new collection pull us deftly into the landscapes we often drive by, and run us out of gas there.
Drew McNaughton