Some Recent Reading

Feeling the need to update here, so here's a list of some recent reading with brief comments. It should be clear that I'm currently doing background reading for a new project, which I hope to get underway within the year.

The Twin Peaks experience:Lynch, Jennifer. The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer
Frost, Scott. The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes.
Welcome to Twin Peaks: An Access Guide to the Town
Frost, Mark. The Secret History of Twin Peaks

I've been working my way back through Twin Peaks for the--third? Fourth? time--and this time I'm weaving in the official tie-in books. Of the one's I've read so far (which is all but one--The Final Dossier, which I'll get to after I finish season 3), the really "essential" ones are The Secret Diary and The Secret History. The former is a shocking, deeply sad book that anticipates Lynch's project in Fire Walk With Me (and seems to contain some lines that crop up in the third season). The latter allows Frost to expand the show's mythos to include the entire (secret) history of America. There's a connection to be made here with Sinclair Lewis's insistence that Gopher Prairie is America.

The Edgar Lee Masters experience
Spoon River Anthology
The Domesday Book
The New Spoon River

I'm teaching Spoon River in a poetry class this semester, so I decided to take the chance to read some more Masters. Spoon River is, obviously, a great book--a great American epic--even if we allow for the unfortunate "Spooniad" and the epilogue. Reading it and re-reading it--and making use of the table of poems in the front--reveals innumerable subtle connections between these dead voices. The New Spoon River is less good, but there's something interesting about it. It's a more cynical book than the Anthology, and also somehow more fascinated with the figure of Jesus. I wish some enterprising publisher could bundle these two books together, because I feel like New Spoon River would benefit from being read alongside its predecessor.

Domesday Book is a rougher read. Masters shines in the fragmentary, the abbreviated, and this book...isn't. It concerns the inquest surrounding the death of a woman found beside a river (yes, my Twin Peaks alarms went off) and attempts to make the case that she is, in some way, indicative of the nation's health following World War I. The problem is that the book is over-extended and verbose; there's none of that gemlike brilliance Masters achieves in his Spoon River books. Worth reading if you're interested in Masters or stuff surrounding the Revolt from the Village, but not really necessary otherwise. 

The Small Town experience (Ok, a couple more):
Darrow, Clarence. Farmington
So Masters worked with Darrow and Darrow actually wrote his own small-town narrative. Who woulda thunk. This book isn't a novel, exactly, and it isn't really a memoir either. Darrow uses the small-town setting to offer his thoughts on society, education--the gamut, you might say. It's a pleasant read, and there's a couple of really solid chapters toward the end that seem to anticipate the sort of thing Anderson will do in Winesburg, Ohio. 

Speaking of Anderson, I'm about halfway through Windy McPherson's Son, which is the story of a small-town boy who goes to the city to make a name for himself. The first section takes place entirely in the protagonist's small town and it has about what you would expect--less demonic and tortured than what we get in Winesburg, but clearly on the same wavelength. 

I'll be in this mode for a while. Over on BlueSky, Bobby Derie at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein has pointed me toward August Derleth's massive Sac Prairie saga, so I'll need to dip into that. There's also more from Anderson and some other things that I'm going to be tucking into--and this is all background reading to whatever it is I'm about to be working up.

(By the way, check out Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein. There's all sorts of cool things to discover)