Beautiful things

A leaf from a commonplace book, on that interesting topic, beauty...

Hugh Nissenson:

One of the things that I felt I wanted to do as an artist was to expand the frontiers of my imagination as much as I could; to follow wherever my imaginative facility took me, and to create alternate worlds. I believe deeply that one of the reasons that we get a kick out of reading novels -- for that matter going to the movies -- is that it plunges us instantaneously into an alternate reality....

What is consistent in my work is thematic material. The themes remain the same, but the metaphors that objectify these themes have changed utterly over the years. My objective has been also, quite frankly, in addition to trying to evolve, to push the form of the novel in ways that are new -- and writers don't talk about it -- but I wanted to make beautiful things. I really feel compelled to make beautiful things, beautiful artifacts, out of my words.

Hawthorne, "The Artist of the Beautiful":

Thus it is that ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical. It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force of character that seems hardly compatible with its delicacy; he must keep his faith in himself while the incredulous world assails him with its utter disbelief; he must stand up against mankind and be his own sole disciple, both as respects his genius and the objects to which it is directed.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

Favorite story in the Torah? Is there a single story in the Torah which is not beautiful? They all are. Absolutely all. The story of Sodom, or the story of Joseph and his brothers, and the story of Lot, and Jacob and Rachel, Isaac and Rebecca--it's all beauty.

Longing for Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Cloister gate" (detail), courtesy
of sxc.hu and Alfred Borchar of Lindlar, Germany

At times one (this one, anyway) aches to bring back a certain departed writer and see what he would do with some absolutely delicious material. In this case, I wish that Isaac Bashevis Singer could be here in plaid suit and mismatched tie to give us a wondrous story inspired by Ari Mandel, the ex-Chassidic man and activist who earned an education and served in the U. S. Army, who posted an intangible for sale on eBay--his place in olam habaah.

What might Singer do with the complexities and absurdities of our day, and how might he introduce temptation and impulse and a sharp-tailed little demon into the whim of a moment, planting a strange seed into the head of Ari Mandel? What musings on the sense of humor of God and Satan might Singer have been led to--what might he have said about a contemporary's atheism? How might the character Mandel live after selling his soul's home, and how might he die, his rightful room in heaven sold away? Where might the soul go? Would an imp pop from his bedroom mirror and whirl it off to warmer climes?

This small moment in the history of the internet shouts Singer! Mandel was, after all, offering a signed contract for his place in heaven, as well as another promising his permanent alienation from religious life and his vow never to attempt stealing his place back again. Isaac Bashevis Singer, this was made for you...

Bookishness

Illustration at left: Clive Hicks-Jenkins, painting for Val/Orson cover and jacket.
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Here are a few Melvillean "fast fish" from the wide net. Each has made me pause of late; each has interested me. As you might expect from my writing, the catch contains poetry fish and children's-books fish and novel fish and more. And feel free to leave me a fish or two in the comments. There are an awful lot of "loose fish" in the sea.

UPDATE: CAN'T RESIST ADDING THIS ONE:
THE NEW MATH OF POETRY BY DAVID ALPAUGH
http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Math-of-Poetry/64249/

This small essay packs into many of the problems created by a runaway poetry market full of back-slapping and academics and an overgrowth of poetry magazines. While it makes me feel very glad that I quit teaching right after tenure (costly thing, that, but it would have been more expensive in ways that matter not to do so), it also emphasizes that I ran away from the Club, and that I am out wandering in the wilderness where a would-be and occasionally genuine poet lurks under every stone and leaf. So far the comments jostle wildly--all to the good, I expect.

"Every now and then someone asks me, 'Who are the best poets writing today?' My answer? 'I have no idea.' Nor do I believe that anyone else does. I do have an uneasy feeling that a Blake and a Dickinson may be buried in the overgrowth, and I fear that neither current nor future readers may get to enjoy their art. That would be the most devastating result of the new math of poetry. The loss would be incalculable."

TED GIOIA ON MESSING WITH REALITY
http://www.conceptualfiction.com/notes_on_conceptual_fiction.html
This is a delicious series of meditations on what is called "literary" and what is called "genre," proposing that the literature currently coming into being finds its roots not in modernism but in mid-twentieth century fantasy and science fiction. I've been to this site before and always find Ted Gioia interesting.

"A critic as astute as James Wood--who ranks, for better or worse, among the most influential writers on literature in our time--can continue to pretend that the "realist" tradition in literature somehow reigns supreme. Yet any perspicacious reader should be able to see that tinkering with reality is the real driving force in contemporary fiction, and has been for a long time."

CLIVE'S ARTLOG
http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who painted the wonderful cover of Val/Orson, has started an “Artlog,” and I highly recommend it. If you’ve at all interested in the visual arts, how painters think, or how a sensitive and highly verbal visual artist might describe his wanderings through the theatre (dance, set design, choreography, direction, more) and toward a life of painting, go! Clive is one of my favorite people, and his writing has great charm. See you there...

MAKING LEMONADE FROM MARKET-LEMONS
http://pickingbonesfromash.com/lectures.html

Though this approach to marketing is not new, the examples are illuminating and could be helpful to other writers: when she found that bookstores are often not as welcoming for new writers as they might be, Marie Mutsuki Mockett wrote a series of talks related to her first book. She used them in alternate venues as a way of promoting her novel. Every writer could use a dash of Mockettian boldness and enterprise.

GREG LANGLEY INTERVIEWS ERNEST GAINES
http://www.2theadvocate.com/entertainment/books/84251567.html
I happen to be fond of The Baton Rouge Advocate, in part because I love Louisiana and in part because editor Greg Langley has been so supportive of my books and in part because it's one of the few newspapers left that has held fast to book reviewing. I remember doing my first book with FSG and being told that Greg Langley "was one of the good ones." He is. Here his wonderful in-depth interview with Ernest Gaines.

"Age, then, was a logical complication in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Gaines sees her age, her endurance as the defining facet of her character.

“I think anybody who can live to 110 years old, who can have baseball and ice cream at 110, they are heroic to me,” he said.

“I was criticized by a lot of my young, black militant critics in the ’70s (for that). Here’s this little old lady, there’s no shotgun, no machine gun in her hand — she’s not doing anything. What is heroic about it?"

TALES FOR BOYS
http://fomagrams.wordpress.com/boy-books/

One of the more interesting pieces I’ve seen on the subject of “boy books” is this consideration of what pleases boys in stories. David Elzey's references to research are useful; the bit about boys writing noisy prose and being reflective not about what is past but about what must be done next I found especially good. While not yet complete, the essay so far discusses the uses of humor, feeling, action, and violence. The examples and discussion of them would be especially illuminaing for a young writer. David Elzey also does a lot of reviewing on two other sites and is a brand new M. F. A. who plans to write many books for preteen and teen boys.

As I just finished the third draft on a novel designed especially for my third child, a boy of twelve, I was torn between being glad I hadn’t read this before beginning and some regret for the same.

BOOK MANIA
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=22-08-024-f

Nobody at the Palace has read or seen anything of the Twilight series, but that didn’t stop me from being fascinated with John Granger’s reading of the books as Mormon allegory—I don’t know too much about Mormonism, so I’ll have to take his knowledge on faith.

Mr. Granger has long considered the curious business of why the Harry Potter and Twilight books have elicited such a huge response from readers. In both cases, he leans on this core idea: “Mircea Eliade, in his book The Sacred and the Profane, suggests that popular entertainment, especially imaginative literature and film, serves a religious or mythic function in a secular culture.”

Considering Twilight, he reaches this conclusion: “In a nutshell, Bella is Eve and Edward is the Adam-God of Mormon theology. Their “Fall”—when Bella/Eve/Man chooses the apple from the tray of Edward/Adam/God, although rife with dangers and difficulties, is the beginning of a spiritual transformation culminated by an alchemical wedding with the God-Man. The story is a romantic allegory depicting the roles and responsibilities of the divine and human lovers, but it has the specifically Mormon hermetic twist that sex within marriage is the endgame and the only means to personal salvation and immortal life.”

And that article made me look back to an older one…

"THIS DRAMA, WITH ITS SENSE THAT ONE’S ACTIONS MATTER"
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/783obafc.asp

Now and then I still think about this wonderful Joseph Epstein article about the art of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Need I say, to remember an article long after it was read is rather unusual? It has some lovely consideration of particular stories, and it sheds some light on some contemporary problems with triviality and lifelessness in the book-making line: “What makes Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction so immensely alive is that its author understood that nothing has successfully replaced this drama, with its sense that one's actions matter, that they are being judged in the highest court of all, and that the stakes couldn't be greater. No contemporary human drama has been devised that can compare or compete with the drama of salvation, including the various acquisition dramas: those of acquiring pleasure, money, power, fame, knowledge, happiness on earth in any of its forms.”

“BUILD IN SONNETS PRETTY ROOMS”
http://www.cprw.com/Misc/finch2.htm

Here's Annie Finch on the sonnet in “Chaos in Fourteen Lines: Reformations and Deformations of the Sonnet” at Contemporary Poetry Review: “The very familiarity of the sonnet expands a poet’s possibilities for working with and changing it, and, on exploration, the apparently confining poetic structure of this stubbornly persisting form may prove one of the most accommodating poetic shapes.”

MUST HAVE?
http://www.slate.com/id/2244933/

Between gifts at Christmas and an unusual number of friends with recent and forthcoming books, I have a wildly tottering To Read stack. But somehow I need just one more…