Holy Fire
I read all one hundred and fifty-four of William Shakespeare's sonnets. I narrowly dodge loss of property, life or limb in a house fire.
Newly added to the complete reading list: Complete Sonnets by William Shakespeare.
Found in a Little Free Library here in San Francisco some months back. At the time I was living in a house owned by some friends while they were abroad; I decided that I would read precisely one sonnet per day, no more and no less, until I finished the book. I didn’t know at the time that one hundred and fifty-four days later I’d be staying somewhere new and that my friends’ house would be burned up along with all of its contents. I have been variously perplexed, inspired, amused and bewildered by Shakespeare’s sonnets as much as by modern life itself, and I wish I was making all this up because on paper it all sounds rather too corny to be true.
I also won’t do these poems the injustice of trying to say anything profound or insightful about the Shakespeare sonnet corpus, especially considering that I’m simply either not qualified or not bright enough to understand a good portion of it. I will note that it seemed, at least for a time early in the going, that Shakespeare returned often enough to the theme of encouraging one of the mysterious second-person subjects of his sonnets to procreate that I went so far as to half-joke to my novelist/professor pal (but only half) that the poet evidently had something of a breeding fetish. Which I have no problem with.
I also noticed on my own recognizance that the meter of Sonnet CXLV (“Those lips that Love’s own hand did make”) is incorrect as far as I understand the technical requirements that constrain a piece to the sonnet form; the selfsame friend backed me on this observation and did a little friendly research which explained that this alt-sonnet is the only one of Shakespeare’s in a “wrong” meter and that this has inspired some scholarly dispute over to what part of his life this particular poem should be dated. (We were texting about all of this while I was on the clock, but I’ve been showing up to that gig for 6am shifts working in the cold and owning some particular responsibilities that no one else really wants, so they are pretty much leaving me alone and I can text about, or for that matter in, iambic pentameter if I feel like it.)
Shakespeare’s final two sonnets comprise a two-parter full of blunt entendres about youthful feats of derring-do in the fucking and drinking sectors, a subject-form I am told is called Anacreontic and which reads as if Shakespeare were trying to write lyrics for AC/DC, or for what he might have imagined AC/DC to be like if someone had gone back in time and tried to explain rock and roll to him. Anyway in these closing sonnets he mentions a “love-kindling fire,” “this holy fire of love” which “many legions of true hearts had warm’d.” Since I now do and forever will associate this sonnet-reading endeavor and its bittersweet completion with getting re-uprooted from the house of my now-houseless friends and finally stabilized into my current pad, I hereby privately choose beyond reason and taste to interpret this holy fire as representing my sincere appreciation for my friends who have repeatedly shown up for me at moments in my life when I needed a crashpad to flop in and the many boxes and shelves of books in their home, some of which I read and all of which are now burned to smoke and ash.
Let’s wind the clocks back a year. It’s been a peculiar and disjointed one for me as much as for you. Amidst other things like trading mail art with a ten-year-old Ukrainian refugee and getting acquainted with relatives in Russia I didn’t know I had, I ditched another city where I was living for four years, traveled across the country entirely by train and stopped along the way to visit in San Francisco with a good friend and mentor who unexpectedly died a few weeks later just as I was arriving in my home area of Philly/Jersey. Thereafter I was encouraged by other members of that San Francisco friend group to come back to California and take up temporary residence in their homes while they were out of the country last winter. The second of these two house-sitting gigs was at the same house where I lived from the fall of 2016 into the summer of 2017 right before relocating to Seattle. It is where I was crashing in late 2021 and early 2022 while watching old Christmas movies, ringing in the New Year and obsessively consuming Tolstoy and Van Damme.
In 2022 I was given a clear impression that I could hold fast and hang around there indefinitely, roughing it in the basement when the owners returned and resumed habitation of the main area. It was a nice house in a comely part of San Francisco and was positively overflowing with art and books but it was always too much space for one solitary thirty-something bachelor layabout and I knew from past experience that I could scrape by holing up in the basement while looking for something else. Anyhow the owners ultimately changed their view of the matter, for which I don’t blame them given the ever-shifting circumstances against which we are each of us constantly trying to brace ourselves these days, and so I spent much of March 2022 scrambling to find a new room to rent for the following month. Which I got on with doing, nonplussed but determined and consciously working at maintaining a dispassionate equanimity so as to preserve my friendship with the bibliophile/aesthete owners of that beloved house with the overstuffed bookshelves of which I’ve availed myself on and off over the years.
I managed to find a new room in a new house. It was three months later almost to the day that my pals’ house burned. They told me that when the sparks suddenly sparked and the smoke began to billow they had less than thirty seconds to get out with nothing but their mobile phone and their lives. The house and everything in it is gone. If I’d been in that basement I would have most certainly at the very least lost all of my few and modest possessions. The job where I’m picking up work and texting about sonnets when the boss isn’t looking is right around the corner from where the house stood; the day after the fire I heard many folks around the neighborhood talking of hearing sirens and smelling smoke and seeing flames.
This is a bit frightening and quite sobering, though I don’t think there’s anything especially profound about any of it. The closest thing to a moral or lesson is some kind of grim, nodding conclusion that my pals were better friends than any of us could foretell by kicking me out and that I played my hand better than I might previously have had the maturity to do by quickly and adroitly settling on some pretty alright new rental accommodations. Viewing this transition as my own personal holy fire is a stretch but it was one worth straining to make when I closed the book Complete Sonnets and closed the complete-sonnet-reading chapter of my life, a chapter which stands astride a situation in an indefinite house-sitting crashpad and one with a proper and legal grownup lease of a kind I didn’t have for the months between leaving Seattle and moving into my current SF digs. Associating a particular book with a certain experience or time in one’s life is sometimes like that; it doesn’t always make good sense and can certainly take on meanings or resonances that the author may not have intended or been positioned to conceive of.
My friends the homeowners have a temporary crashpad of their own at the moment and I have done and will do what I can to help out. So far this has entailed rearranging some furniture at their temporary space and keeping my ear to the ground for new living opportunities, which seems relatively little compared with what they’ve done for me during times of confusion and uncertainty in my own life. From all outward appearances they seem to be doing quite an admirable job of keeping their chins up and their hearts open. I’ll try my level best to do the same.
Looking over the reading list, here are titles that I know for sure I got from the bookshelves and boxes in the burned house. Presumably books that are now all in ashes. (This list is not exhaustive for the following reason. Over the years I have volunteered as an adult literacy tutor for the public libraries of San Francisco and Seattle. From 2016 into 2017 I was hurling myself headlong into my first effort at tutoring; my friends the SF owners had a lot of children’s books in their basement boxes of which I and my learner were availing ourselves, and as I look over the list I sometimes can’t quite disentangle what was from the basement and what was from the library stacks. So with the exception of the first book listed below, I’ll leave children’s books out of this.)
Read in 2016:
Drummer Hoff adapted by Barbara Emberly and illustrated by Ed Emberly. A pretty good children’s book illustrated by one of the all-time great practitioners of the form, drawn in a denser and more illustrative style than I’m used to from him.
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. A book laying out an expert theory about how the universe may have arisen spontaneously out of nothing, according to what was the best current physical and mathematical theories of the time.
The French Cat by Siné. Peculiar little book of rather unremarkable gag cartoons.
Read in 2017:
Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. The male half of the owner-couple gave me this book to read and it launched my ongoing interest in Bukowski. If not for this push in the right direction I might not have engaged with Bukowski at all, let alone gone on to read all of his “Henry Chinaski” novels, of which when all was said and done the very good Ham and Rye was actually my least favorite.
Sam the Sudden by P.G. Wodehouse. I found this in a box in the now-burned basement during one of my stretches living down there. At the time I was deep in the thrall of an ardent obsession with Wodehouse and was making my way through every single one of his “Jeeves and Wooster” books, several of which I have now read more than once. Sam the Sudden is one of the few Wodehouse books I’ve read that is not part of the “Jeeves and Wooster” cycle. Reading more of them is on my to-do list.
Read in 2022:
Waiting for Food Number 3: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings by R. Crumb. You’re getting what it says on the tin: doodles on restaurant placemats by the quintessential underground freak cartoonist and one of the greatest and most complicated cartoonists ever in any genre.
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Took this down from the shelves because I was long overdue for a re-read of this legendary deconstructionist post-superhero graphic novel. It was better than I remembered.
Satiro Plastic: Drawings by Gary Panter. It was a nice surprise to find on the shelves a compact collection of jangly sketchbook work by one of my very favorite cartoonists.
95 poems by e.e. cummings. Hated this book sufficiently to have no desire ever to read cummings again.
In closing I will note that the owners, being the charitable and supportive types that they are, were nice enough to buy a copy of the book of experimental comics that I managed to get published in 2017. So, oddly that’s one copy of my book that I know for a fact has been burned.
Next: movie round-up, children’s books, comics and literature.