Shards from the Kaleidoscope

The Emperor's New Clothes

Horrible for aspiring literary writers yet delicious for the satirist is the evidently newsworthy fact that topless model "Jordan" has published a second novel called Crystal. "'It begins: "Oh my God, look at the queue!" Crystal exclaimed, taking in the long line of wannabes which snaked out of the London hotel and halfway down the road.'" Adam Lusher reports that Crystal's pursuit of a singing career has sold far more copies than the entire Mann Booker list put together. (Three have sold less than two thousand copies; two are still under the three-thousand mark. One hates to think what the numbers would have been without the help of an important prize.)

The idea of a half-naked model arriving for her book launch party in Cinderella's crystal carriage and escorted by a bevy of handsome fellows is an almost perfect image of the state of the Land of Books in our time: truly, the successful Emperor and Empress of Books must have no clothes and look darn good in her relatively-new birthday suit (surgically and cosmetically enhanced, of course!) To be strictly truthful, I must admit that it's alledged she wore a dress on the occasion, but who wants to be strictly truthful in this context? After all, she acknowledges help in what is called the authorship of the book, so she does not appear to be so very strict an author.

Good news

For the past few months, I've been chucking half-read books out the nearest window. I began to believe that I was now unable to finish reading a novel. Yesterday I went down to that exemplary used book store, Willis Monie's, and bought a book for R, Kafka's The Castle for me, and David Grossman's See Under: Love. And I am reading happily. I even stayed up too late and felt exhausted today. This made me feel oddly pleased. I'm still a reader.

Sight of the week

On Wednesday night an enormous peach of a harvest moon was hovering over soft blue trees when I went to pick up N from football. The little boys--and a few little girl footballers--drifted out of the clouds that had settled on the playing fields. Many of them wore team shirts that appeared the same orangey shade as the moon in the dusk. Everything was simplified: twilight blue, the moon-peach color, the white clouds clinging to the playing field, the green grass. Utterly fetching.

Photo credit

Diane Slocum, member, Friends of the Library, Huntington Library, Oneonta. A cropped version of this picture ran in our local Cooperstown Crier, along with an article by young writer Dan Pelletier. He took a good deal more trouble with the article than most people do, and has garnered praise--people say that the quotes "sound like me." If you've ever been interviewed for a feature, you know that accuracy in quotes is rather unusual and worth saluting. Dan is an M. F. A. student at Goddard College who freelances for the Crier and works at Hartwick College; you may see his stories and novels-to-be some day.

A story, a prize, a summer

PHOTO: "Cloistered Assemblage" paperweight by Paul Stankard, glassblower and lover of words. I'm drawn to his floating orbs and tiny root people (look carefully at that tangle of roots) and mystical blossoms. For more, go to http://www.paulstankard.com/. Yes, you may send me one!

BRODKEY'S CEIL

The house had very large windows that went down quite close to the floor. These windows had drawn shades that were an inhumanly dun-yellow color, a color like that of old lions in the zoo, or the color of corn tassels, of cottonwood leaves after they have lain on the ground a while—that bleached and earthen clayey white-yellow.

Some time ago—I don’t remember when—I thought to rid myself of this sort of repetition of metaphor, rhythmical and hypnotic but redundant. It seemed to me a sort of tic of our time. The more metaphors one piled up, the more detailed and yet more diffuse the original subject became. They had no function; there was no adequate reason for their existence.
But in Harold Brodkey’s story, “Ceil,” that sort of repetitive piling-up of detail that cannot finally lead one to a single clear vision is the whole being of the story—structure, goal, impossible desire. The narrator’s struggle to bring into focus the mother who died when he was a baby is a heaping up of detail that cannot call her into being. It is all “useless significance.”

It seems that all flaws are usable.

By the end of the story, one finds that even living women are difficult to know. The narrator's gleanings, quoted from the woman who raised him, give way to a comments about her by a third woman. Ultimately, the truth about women—or, indeed, about any human being—proves slippery.

One of the things about the story that I find interesting is the way Brodkey moves from two tiny paragraphs: “I was born in her bedroom, at home” and “I feel her, I feel her moods” to a thing that the narrator believes to be a memory. A train passes and shakes the house.

One thing that interests me here is inheritance. The description of the train with its build-up and falling-away strikes me as one of those passages that owe their existence to Mark Twain’s famous description of the arrival and departure of a steamboat in Huckleberry Finn. In part that may because I’ve written a description of a train that reminded me of Twain. But if you are an American writer, you very likely can’t help remembering Twain when any human conveyance arrives with great bustle and departs, leaving a lull in its wake.

I think of Hemingway’s claim that all American literature descended from Mr. Mark Twain.

The long train passage appears to have some sort of correspondence with the simple statement that the narrator was born in the house. The steady shaking that moves with “quickening rhythm” toward “unremitting noise,” “battering waves,” and a state where the house “throbs in an aching shapelessness” is an analogue to his mother’s body and the uncontrollable rhythms of childbirth. All these details—so clear when placed together—are submerged in the larger description of the train. Afterward, in the next section, he remembers the country smell of the house. Then he recalls his mother’s torso in a print dress. The next section is the one quoted above, beginning with “the house had very large windows.” Juxtaposition makes one read the country house as a parallel the country-loving Ceil. Likewise, the closed-in house suggests an analogue to the “isolated” mother.

People are link-making creatures. The less “bald” the links are, the more satifying it is to leap the chasm.

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SHAARA FROLICS

My penpal Howard Bahr has won The Michael Shaara Award for his novel, The Judas Field (Holt, 2006). Since most news on the literary front is discouraging—the decline of book review sections and the death of reading and poor sales seem to be the focus of book-related headlines these days—I feel very glad for this piece of news. It’s curious that Howard, my penpal Philip Lee Williams, and I have all won the Shaara. We’ll have to chalk it up to good taste and put up a clubhouse sign; I’d like a treehouse somewhere.

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"MY SUMMER VACATION"

Summer has flown. Among other things, B and R experienced a certain amount of gainful employment. N attended a prodigious number of day camps and one away camp. While he was there, I went with R to the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. She was under their age limit, so I served as chaperone and sushi provider for a week—went to Steve Bissette’s movie night but otherwise kept my head down except at the end of the day, when I popped in to look at the work done. We stayed at the down-at-the-heels but pleasant Hotel Coolidge, just down the street. After it rained, a fire hose hung off the roof, discharging water in great arterial bursts. It was my easiest week of the summer. I worked on a book, walked, and had picnics.

At the end of the summer, the children and I zoomed off to North Carolina—to Cullowhee and afterward to Aiken, South Carolina and then to Sunset Beach, all with my mother; I regret that I didn’t make it to Chapel Hill, as I wanted to see many people. But it was lovely to spend time with my mother and one of my cousins, and my husband flew down for a stay at the shore. R was stung by jellyfish. How long does it take for that irritation to go away, I wonder? I had two especially grand days for poems at the beach, and came home with six new keepers. Good fishing!

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FAE MALANIA

For those of you who were interested in Fae Malania and the reprint of her book, Fae is in the hospital. She is 88 now, a time when hospital visits are not so much of a surprise. Yesterday she seemed much better. I smuggled N over for a visit, as he is good for spreading cheer.

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AT HUNTINGTON LIBRARY

Is it possible to talk about books and do a reading without meeting some young, aspiring writer? Only if he or she is shy and doesn’t speak, I suppose. I like talking to them but also feel a kind of sadness, since the path through publishing can be so thorny. One wants to warn them about peril and black slough and promises that are only a fine glitter. Perhaps their way of publishing will be altogether different from mine, given the flux of things.