Pathological Relations: Lamb
25 questions on reading
Lamb (@lmbonl) is an American writer.
The last thing you finished reading
Thomas Thatcher and I are writing something about brothers. I just read his latest pages. We were split from the same mountain, he from some higher point.
The last thing you abandoned reading
I picked up a book on ancient Chinese magic—a writing technique. Instantly, powerfully, I understood it was spiritually dangerous. I threw it out.
Next on your list
Back to Babel.
Something on your list but you never begin
The Morning of the Poem, James Schuyler.
The foot of the mountain Something in which you have no interest
Excession.
Worst thing you’ve read cover to cover
There’s this children’s book that somehow ended up on my daughters’ shelf…
A bird moves to the big city, thrilled with her new job, apartment, life. One day an old friend—an elephant—visits, depressed that no one back home likes her. The bird takes pity and invites the elephant to live with her. The narrator describes the elephant’s behavior in thorough, petty detail—talking on the landline loudly at late hours, eating the bird’s fridged food, inviting herself along when the bird goes out at night. Finally, the bird finds courage to tell the elephant she’s been ruining her life. The elephant moves out. It’s for the best. The bird is happy. The End.
Something you reread
The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot.
West of I-15 Something you never forget
In a letter, Sherwood Anderson recalls a lunch with a businessman who said,
I was at my prayers And the lust for women came to me. “That to me was a perfect poem. I went home and put it down as a testament out of his life to all of life.”
Conditions in which you read best
By lamp in the quiet dark of morning, on the good green couch. The dog asleep beside me. After prayer.
The dog on the good green couch Conditions in which you read most often
When I’m humble. Good literature humbles me. A circular thing and easily lost.
Conditions in which you cannot read
When the children are awake.
A favourite author
Braden Hepner.
A favourite genre, form, theme
The psalm.
A favourite title
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson. In a letter unrelated to the novel he writes, “Here is all America teeming with life that we haven’t really begun to cut into or to understand.” That’s Winesburg, babe.A favourite book cover
The Book of Mormon.
A favourite recent read
Walk, Robert Walser.
A favourite nostalgia read
Whenever I read Job, I consider how things were going at the last reading and think, I can’t believe I thought my life was hard back then. That I thought I could relate. Everything gets harder and everything gets better. These days I realize I’m less like Job and more like his friends. Maybe I’m becoming more honest.
A favourite greatest of all time, personal canon read
The Divine Comedy.
Do you annotate
Notes, underlines, etc. I circle unknown words, look them up, define them in the margin. I’m stupid, so every book gives me new words.
Do your books tend toward any condition
My books don’t feel like mine, but borrowed from my daughters. I try to care for them, for them. When folks tout tattered books, I’m reminded of a missionary I served with. He didn’t like to teach, so he spent most days just walking in the desert. He wore the same shoes for two years. His socks showed. When it was time for him to go back home, someone bought him brand new shoes. But he refused to take the old ones off—how else would his family know that he’d been serving God?
Borrowed books Do you have books that are prized possessions
I bought a first edition of Housekeeping for three dollars in Idaho. Gorgeous novel. Maybe flawless. I like the cover—watercolor.
A text that surprised you
We keep a book of Bible stories in the bag we bring to church. My daughters like to flip through the illustrations. In the middle of one drowsy service, I finally opened it myself. The prose woke me right up.
Bible stories A text that disappointed you
I found a book of Whitman’s prose. His imagined miracle of Christ is the one exception. It reads like the gospels, but perfumed. I was moved.
A text that altered you somehow
Chekhov’s “Misery.” He renders grief as I’ve come to know it, in failed conversations, some meek creature witnessing.
Open up a text and copy a line at random
Sunlight broke in the hazels,
the quick bell-notes began
a second time. I turned
at another sound:
A crowd of shawled women
were wading the young corn,
their skirts brushing softly.
Their motion saddened morning.
It whispered to the silence,
‘Pray for us, pray for us.’
Station Island, Seamus Heaney, 62 Lamb can also be found at: lamb.onl
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