Hodgepodgery

Hodgepodgery, or thoughts collected and bits of articles read over the past Sunday and Monday and tossed into a post in disorderly fashion... Stew over them as you will!

"Madison," WCU, circa 1904.

Marly in Cullowhee

What hometown fun! Thanks to undergraduate Amelia Holmes for the article on me in Nomad: The Quasquicentennial Edition (Western Carolina University), written for Dr. Kinser's senior seminar course. "The students wrote about topics related to Western Carolina University, highlighting the university and its faculty over the course of 125 years." My father was professor of analytical chemistry, and my mother head of serials at Hunter Library, WCU.

Rereading. Christopher Beha on "Holy crap":

So here’s my main point: books that one doesn’t know how to read, books that challenge our ideas about what fiction is supposed to be doing, are more interesting to talk and think about. And at least when it comes to fiction, these are the books that I want professional critics weighing in on, so these are the books that I want the TBR to cover. Unfortunately, the phrase we most frequently use to describe such books is the same phrase we use to describe members in good standing of the conventional genre called “literary fiction.” This is one reason I don’t really like the phrase “literary fiction.” It is also one reason I don’t like thinking about books as members of genres at all. Instead I like to think about individual books. If I have to think about genres I suppose it could be said that the genre of fiction I find most interesting to talk and write and read about—the one I think the TBR should be reviewing—is the genre that has the genre specification “does not conform to any genre specifications.” For our purposes I would call this genre “Holy Crap fiction.” In case I haven’t made this clear, lots of Holy Crap fiction isn’t all that good. Certainly lots of it is objectively worse than the average competent genre novel. But even bad Holy Crap fiction is far more interesting to talk about and read about than a competent genre novel, because it requires making sense of. A corollary to this is that there is no such thing as a merely competent Holy Crap novel.

Launch day

Gary Dietz's book of heartfelt, real-life narratives about fathers and disabled children has its launch day today. I've updated the page on Lady Word of Mouth to include more purchasing links and the book's facebook page--please visit and like.

More thoughts on patreon 

10 p.m. Monday: At the end of 48 hours on patreon, I have three patrons... and am still pondering whether this is: a.) desirable; b.) useful; c.) all-around okay; or something I can do, since I am somewhat allergic to vigorous horn-tooting. Anyway, tonight there are three pieces up, all free. Nevertheless, I could dither over my opinion if I had time. However, I don't right now. Maybe after tonight's eclipse, if I don't crash. Should peak about 3:00 here. Yawn. However, it seems to be . . . raining.

Art for Glimmerglass by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

2nd pass galleys, Glimmerglass 

The galleys are done. I proofed and made five little tweaks. And that's THE END of that. Next time I'll see a .pdf with Clive's art in place, so that will be exciting. The design for chapter openers looked lovely. Then will come lovely new books.

Great poetry giveaway

We're about halfway through the time for the giveaway. One lucky person will receive a couple of books...

At Salon: David Foster Wallace was right: Irony is ruining our culture 

But David Foster Wallace predicted a hopeful turn. He could see a new wave of artistic rebels who “might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels… who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles… Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.” Yet Wallace was tentative and self-conscious in describing these rebels of sincerity. He suspected they would be called out as “backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic.” He didn’t know if their mission would succeed, but he knew real rebels risked disapproval. As far as he could tell, the next wave of great artists would dare to cut against the prevailing tone of cynicism and irony, risking “sentimentality,” “overcredulity” and “softness.”

Wallace called for art that redeems rather than simply ridicules, but he didn’t look widely enough. Mostly, he fixed his gaze within a limited tradition of white, male novelists. Indeed, no matter how cynical and nihilistic the times, we have always had artists who make work that invokes meaning, hope and mystery. But they might not have been the heirs to Thomas Pynchon or Don Delillo. So, to be more nuanced about what’s at stake: In the present moment, where does art rise above ironic ridicule and aspire to greatness, in terms of challenging convention and elevating the human spirit? Where does art build on the best of human creation and also open possibilities for the future? What does inspired art-making look like?    --Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll

Dear Salon, 

Look harder. A lot of us out here in the wilderness have been making art out of words and paint and more, setting ourselves against the grain of the times. Plenty of us have devoted our lives to making a kind of art that can soar up above nihilism and despair and irony--making "art that redeems" in opposition to what is most lauded and supported by the system that tells people what art to see and read.  Put on your glasses. Those who have eyes to see, let them see.

So touching...

I love this little article about writer Hugh Nissenson. He was no failure but seems to have often felt himself one. So I am glad to see this tribute. No doubt if he had been more sentimental and less of a truth-teller, he might have had more readers. In this age, it is his glory that he hewed to his own path.

Home.Clive.Pinned

HOME 

I'm posting from beautiful Cullowhee, North Carolina, where the clouds have bedded down on the mountains, and those in turn have gone a lovely fawn color while the eldest trees (clothed in lichen) are a luminous pale green in the rain. Everything is soft and waiting, with little birds flying to and from the feeders. It has a lovely Advent sort of feeling.

CLIVE

Clive Hicks-Jenkins has been working on the bookplate for lucky early buyers of Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing, just out!) You may see his work here.

PINNED

Although my daughter declares Pinterest a silly site (which, indeed, it often is--though not here, I hope), I have collected a lot of Thaliad images here and made a page collecting all my books into one place here.

Kathryn Stripling Byer in the NCLHF

Kathryn Stripling Byer has been inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame--many congratulations to her! Kay was the first writer I encountered on a regular basis, back when I was in high school, already thinking of myself as a poet. I'd bump into her at the university library where both she and my mother worked at the time, and often we'd chat there or outside.

We had a similar background in some ways--I spent part of every summer in Georgia, where she grew up, and we both had lighted on Cullowhee because of other people's jobs. I still read Kay's books and am in Cullowhee often, so I have many reasons to think of her.

She has been an active poet laureate for North Carolina, generous to other writers and young people. I am glad to see her now collecting another tribute to her long faithfulness to the art.

You may find her at Here, Where I Am: http://kathrynstriplingbyer.blogspot.com/.

Being inducted into the state Hall of Fame, serving as poet laureate, winning the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Hanes Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers – Byer’s body of work has been duly celebrated and honored. -Quintin Ellison, The Sylva Herald

Hunter-gatherer of names--

That's a picture of a tabletop in Cullowhee, North Carolina, with some of my mother's embroidery thread spilled across it and a picture of me in my very early 40's...  The other picture is of her brand new 4-harness loom, threaded to make a chenille scarf for my eldest son.  From this project she learned that she hates working with chenille! But he has an old chenille scarf that he loves, so chenille it is. When I am 82, I hope to be forging ahead with new creations, as she is.

I've collected a list of people who want to hear about my books from facebook and elsewhere, and if you would like to receive a copy but I haven't gathered up your name yet, please leave a note with your e-address or write me an email. I'm having a little spate of new books, starting with The Throne of Psyche, and need all the help passing news on that I can get! I'll be starting a newsletter some time soon--it'll be via email so easily forwarded. I'm also interested in more blog mentions, reviews, features, so forth, so feel free to write me about any of those things as well.

New poems at Lucid Rhythms

Somehow I keep forgetting to post links to new poems online. Here are title and openings from two (from The Book of the Red King manuscript) at Lucid Rhythms, edited by that energetic poet, writer, and editor, David W. Landrum.

Just for fun, I'll slap in a few pictures from my family home in Cullowhee, North Carolina.

***

The Silver Cord

The Fool has no mastery of his mind
But is as helpless as a skittles top,
Reeling drunkenly from mystical


The Yellow Day


The Fool is whittling doors for fairy houses
Lapped in moss and sheathed in silver birch,
While children gather close to watch the knife

Spring snow

When you live far from the region where you were raised, you miss certain things. Sometimes it's food: okra, lady peas, black eyes, crowders, the kind of fragrant peaches and other fruits that don't transport well. Sometimes it's the sounds of accents, sweeter voices or even strange mountain voices that have a lot of hush puppie in them. Sometimes it's a certain kind of courtesy, a flower leftover from another age, faded but still able to make life more beautiful. Sometimes it's plain old (but not plain) flowers: stands of man-high cardinal flowers, crepe myrtles, orchids and ladies hatpins in ditches, redbud, and dogwood.

When I came back from Wales, the dogwoods were in bloom and having their best spring in years. Here's some glimpses of mountain-top Cullowhee in bloom...

Alighting from Wales: Cullowhee, the valley of lilies

Robin Rudd takes a picture. May 12.

More on Wales, travels, and The House of Words after I make it to Cooperstown...

Here is a picture with me at the middle level of the house in Cullowhee, taken by Robin Rudd (aka Robin Egg), one of my students from last summer when I was writer-in-residence at Hollins. Robin has just finished her M.F.A. there and came up from Greenville, South Carolina for my reading at City Lights in Sylva. The dogwood peeping from right is in astonishing bloom this year.

Robin Rudd takes another picture! May 12.
The view from where I am sitting in the first picture.

And here is Robin with her alarming Shadow.

Were he a Pullmanesque daimon, I'd be worried for Miss Egg.

Carolina, dreams and nightmares

Lately I have been e-prodded and nudged and generally bothered for the crime of blog hibernation: reprove no more; here is the post! For the past nine days I have been on the road or else in Cullowhee ("the valley of the lilies") with my mother and two younger children, making forays outward to visit my eldest and to frolic in the mountains, so this will be a high-elevation post. In between two driving bouts of 888 miles, I managed to visit with a few people, haul my children to the Mountain Heritage Center, see "Coraline," take in a number of shows at the Western Carolina art gallery, and go to a concert. So that is what I'm mulling because here in Cooperstown I find that I have 700+ pages to sign and manuscript proofs to read for Val/Orson, as well as many mundane things to do. And there is not a lot to say about signing one's name 700+ times except that I am not bigheaded enough to find such an act fascinating! And it is still (still! and at this very moment) snowing in Cooperstown, just as though the crocuses and primroses and daffodils (most not quite popped, but even a green swollen stem is a welcome sight) and one anemone bud of last week in Cullowhee had been just a dream.

Artwise, my favorite things turned out to be--as usually happens when I go home to the mountains--crafts taken to a point of mastery. I especially liked a massive blackware pot by Joel Queen (one of the Bigmeat family of potters, Eastern Band of Cherokee). As his website declares, "They are tradition, true traditional Cherokee pots. They were created with hand-dug clay the same as thousands of years ago, sifted by hand, kneaded by hand, hand-coiled, stamped with hand carved wooden paddles, and fired in a traditional pit fire. They are created at the same sophisticated level of quality as the ancient Mississippian pots. They are created with a consistency of thickness, depth in the incisions, and fired at a precise temperature vitrifying the clay body, rendering the pots waterproof. These are skills learned only from a knowledge and mastery of the clay." I also admired a recent Norm Schulman vessel and a 2008 Mark Hewitt salt glaze vase donated by Joel Queen. I used to see Hewitt's work often when I lived in Chapel Hill and liked it, and his translation from Stoke-on-Trent and Spode, the traditional family business, to a role as independent art potter not far from the pottery center at Seagrove is a good Carolina pottery tale.

A woman-dominated show of jacquard and entrepreneurial textiles at Western Carolina University was interesting, though I'm afraid that "smart textiles" with electronic components woven into the fabric and "performance and interactive textiles" strike me as something of an abomination, rather like using plastic in a blooming garden. I imagine that I reacted to them in about the same way as William James on reading the complex, late Henry James: impressive, marvelously accomplished work, but why do it at all?

Some of my favorite pieces were white weavings by Pauline Verbeek-Cowart, although when I look at the description of her work at her home academic institution, I think she maligns herself and her fine achievements: "Most of her weavings span several feet in both directions and comment on the nature of woven surfaces. Through structure, material, image and/or surface treatments, she demonstrates that weaving is unique in building an image." Several feet in both directions: no doubt they got that right, although the ones I saw happened to be more than several. "Comment on the nature of woven surfaces": this is the sort of thing I dislike in arts and handicrafts commentary. The thing is itself. It is satisfying as a thing, a beautiful thing that is a special kind of experience. It does not comment. It does not write monographs. It does not need footnotes. It does not strain to understand its nature. To be so beautiful as to appear effortless is quite rare enough all on its own. "Unique in building an image": why say it? It's just academic justification for beauty, and that's not needed. Academic justification for beauty is, in fact, an offense against beauty.

I also admired the clothing of Leslie Armstrong and Anke Fox (Armstrong Fox Textiles, Canada), whose designs had lovely rich colors and weaving and draped beautifully. Most pilfer-worthy for the light-handed gallery-goer, so I hope the guard chihuahuas are out! The real thing is infinitely softer and more subtle in shade, but some pictures are here.

Last, I attended a recital by composer and percussionist Mario Gaetano, particularly Ney Rosauro's "Brasiliana" for wooden idiophones ("Eldorado" for metal idiophones being slightly less magical but also good) and Gareth Farr's "Bali," "Japan," and "South India" from "Kembung Suling." And I liked Gaetano's "Music for Two Doumbeks," played with his daughter. In fact, I liked it all, even the marimba with tape piece that now seemed so dated. Perhaps my in-house percussionist, age 11, saw some reason for that annoying activity, practice...

I had a grand time in Cullowhee and the mountains, although my heart was riven for the nth time by the utter dearth of zoning and thoughtfulness about development in western North Carolina, particularly the area around Sylva (so un-sylvan these days) but extending on to Asheville. The descendants of the so-called "Ulster Irish" (many of them northern English and Scots Protestant borderers transplanted to Ireland for "planting" in the 1600's) are still just as stubborn and independent as ever, but what they never seem to grasp is that their birthright is being sold for a mess of cold porridge. Strangers (wake up! the Yankees are here!) have come in and seized the inheritance. Natives have valued the greeny pile of dollars over the mountains that their ancestors felt were God's blue walkways to the sky. Now it's lift up thine eyes to the hills and find a dratted chain hotel or chain fast-food joint, or else lift them up and find the mountain missing entirely. To bulldoze a mountain is a crime against nature and against the future, whose children will blame those who failed to zone with hard words. It is also a stupid thing to do in a region of landslides and mudslides--one sees butchered half-mountains everywhere, held up by braces of stone and wood so that a big box store or some other pernicious piece of real estate can be erected. (Walmart, of course, removed "their" mountain quite completely, and threw up a massive store and even more massive parking lot.) Moreover, those lucky souls who live in the mountains completely lack foresight even about their money interest--destroy the glory of the mountains, and what tourist will come to spend their dratted dollars? The blight of what was the most beautiful land on the east coast of North America for the sake of human greed is an ongoing tragedy. As William James nailed it in a letter to H. G. Wells a century ago, "The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease."

Photograph credit: Image of Crabtree Falls, courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/ and photographer Greg Pinkston of Oklahoma, U.S. Crabtree is a pretty waterfall, about a .25 mile walk from Crabtree Recreation Area, Blue Ridge Parkway (milepoint 339.5).