The Rrrrrandom Rrroundup

Thank you 

to Clive for a fresh post on Thaliad.

Not a bit surprised

Ted and Sylvia invoke spirits:

"Mention Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to the average poetry fan, and the first thing that comes to mind (other than the poetry, of course) is likely to be images of doomed romance, suicide, or love gone sour. Less well known are the pair’s experiments with the Ouija board. According to Hughes, in a note to his wife’s poem, Ouija, Plath “occasionally amused herself, with one or two others, by holding her finger on an upturned glass, in a ring of letters laid out on a smooth table, and questioning the ‘spirits’.”

The article goes on to talk about other interesting things such as Coleridge and the anima mundi....

Scott G. F. Bailey is baffled at Six Words for a Hat 

"I pause yet again to consider the state of American publishing. I confess myself baffled by it. It's rare when a new novel comes out that excites me, and when I look at the catalogues of independent presses I feel a definite estrangement from the books they're putting out. Everyone claims to be transgressive or experimental, but to me it's just a lot of formal gameplaying to hide, I strongly suspect, some pretty pedestrian ideas and inelegant writing. One is not supposed to say that aloud, if one is a writer, but there it is. I am aware that every novelist who can't get a book deal says the same thing. I am unable to critically evaluate my own novels, of course, as every novelist is unable to critically evaluate his own novels. So I can't even claim, honestly, that I write good books. I can only claim that I write books, that I have written eight of them. The most recent book I've written is called, for now, The Hanging Man, and I wrote the final sentence of the first draft around 1:00 PM, PST, today."

@tedgioia tweets

"I was especially impressed by [the late Arthur] Danto's claim that the future of art wouldn't be the pursuit of 'progress' but a return to serving human needs."

Dear journalists,

And yet another thing you're neglecting...

Could we spend slightly less time on the latest fracas du jour and a little more time on the plight of the honey bee? You gave the bee its moment and then moved on. We really need those little gold-dusted creatures. (Sylvia, bee poet, you should have stuck around and helped the honey bee!)

Triptych with artisans, art, and music

Hand of St. Valentin. Paul Koudounaris

If a common thread runs through this three-stranded post, it is that each of these things I find interesting this morning made me see something new and anew--the past and church history, a Frost poem so familiar that I couldn't imagine it being unfamiliar again, and the state of culture. In each case, I saw or heard through another, and enjoyed what I found for that reason.

1. Catacomb Saints

Photographs like this one by Paul Koudounaris are suddenly popping up around the web. I find them fascinating too, though they seem to be an excuse for many people to flog various dead horses of the past and church history, at least in comments on various sites. Go here for a reasonably respectful treatment of the "catacomb saints."

Koudounaris's new book is Heavenly Bodies. He claims "spectacular" as a descriptor in the subtitle, and that seems to be true from the many samples of photographs online. It's too bad that the book does not appear to have much apparatus to tell us about the photographs which, detached from their historical context and meaning, may well be seen as fabulous but freakish. Many artisans spent years laboring to decorate these bones, seeking to make them an image of the saints in glory . . .

"In 1578 the remains of thousands of individuals assumed to be early Christian martyrs were discovered in Rome. The remains were given fictitious names and sent to Catholic churches and religious institutions in German-speaking Europe as relics of saints to replace holy relics that had been destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. Reassembled by skilled artisans, encrusted with gold and jewels and richly dressed in fantastic costumes, the skeletons were displayed in elaborate public shrines as reminders of the spiritual treasures that awaited the faithful after death."

Last night I saw one of the images on Nathan Ballingrud's facebook page and had a sudden memory of an anecdote. A friend (who shall remain unnamed) was visiting an eastern European castle and allowed to take a peep into stone coffins down in the basement, including one of a recently-deceased aunt. I still remember an odd detail of her fine, detailed clothing. It would make a wonderful story...

2. Eric Whitacre making the over-exposed new

Here's the original version of Sleep from Whitacre's blog. The text was Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I love the way it estranges the text and makes it uncanny again. The Frost estate did not give permission for the use of the text, and so there is really only one version of the piece available, so far as I can tell. The Concordia Choir.

3. Gioia x 2

If you are interested in arts, music, culture-building, education, business-and-the-arts, or religion, take a look at the double interview with Ted and Dana Gioia:  The Arts: Agents of Change and Source of Enchantment. Here are a few clips to entice:

Ted Gioia: I am convinced that, if you have a vocation in life, you don’t choose it. It chooses you. The religious phrase we use to describe this process is the right one. You receive a calling, and the only proper thing you can do is respond to the calling.

Dana: The modern assumption that writers and artists are dreamy, impractical people is both odd and quite insulting to creative people. Sophocles was a general, Goethe a scientist and statesman. Shakespeare was the most successful entertainment entrepreneur of Renaissance England. 

Ted: . . . people are just as hungry for serious culture as they ever were, but are stymied by entertainment-driven media that refuse to give a platform to anything deep, challenging, or sophisticated. But let me make a prediction. Popular entertainment of the current sort will not satisfy this hunger.

Dana: Both jazz and poetry became too academic and intellectual. This is not unique to these two arts. It reflected the general isolation of the arts in our society. They have been relegated to small subcultures and cut off from the general audience that once supported them. That separation has hurt both the arts and the general culture. . . . We need to take responsibility for creating the culture we want to live in. That means to express our values—aesthetic as well as ethical—in our daily lives.

And a late addition--

Thanks to Stephen Roth for reviewing A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage at his blog and at Amazon! For more review clips, see the page tabs above. Evidently Stephen's first book will be out next year--congratulations to him!

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…