Dear old Blogspot,

Have I mentioned that Facebook has a thing for me? Facebook is constantly asking me what's on my mind, though it (he?) never offers to give me a penny--not one red cent--for what's on my mind. What's on my mind, Facebook? Twitter. Where I just discovered the following important information: 1.) Definitely not keeping up. Entirely missed until now that WaPo declared Hillary Clinton to be "style icon"; 2.) Had no idea there was also a Khloe K. until poet A.M. Juster kardashianized my mind. What is this obsession with the "K"? " 3.) And the thing seen first on Twitter this morning: rules for "your novel." Makes me want to (cheerfully) burn "your" book. Bonfire of the Inanities. Also, I am going to reread my friend Ashley's Facebook post about art and appropriation and see what people thought because that post lacked anything about a presidential candidate's upholstery or an important K, for that matter, and it also had that odd thing, substance, and did the good work of setting firecrackers under a few rules. Which is satisfying in a world where the number of rules for the arts appears to be on the increase. Yes, general corseting of the mind and the arts is as common as web pages, and those in turn are as common as particles of styrofoam in the seas.

And what, Facebook, is this magic thing where you turn small-f Facebook into large-F Facebook? Even on my blog. Here. Yes, exactly like that. You like it like that.

You (you-reader, not you-Facebook or you-blogspot) may possibly be able to tell from the above that I read Andrew Sullivan's "I Used to be a Human Being" yesterday. (Subtitle: An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too. Clip: "There is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen.") And so, human nature being a weathercock, I contemplate whether I should drop out of Facebook and twitter (and possibly blogging), or whether it is possible--wishing to be moderate in all things save those few in which I am genuinely and joyfully and purposefully immoderate--to be moderate with the 'Net.

The whimsical, whirligig wind blows; I turn about and decide that the world is billionated with human beings, and that it doesn't much matter if I talk to myself here and there or not. Except: time. So precious and falling through the hourglass. Must go meet some human beings face to face, and then put some words in the right order.

Update, or threat-tweet from A. M. Juster: You'll like my k-heavy Kardashian double dactyl in next year's Waywiser anthology. Evidently a double dactyl anthology is forthcoming! Better put it on your To Buy list. There may never be another one.

At play in the fields of the word--

What is the front of the jacket of Glimmerglass
doing here? Because the book is now in
pre-order, and I have a duty to thrust
it in front of noses! So here,
I have done my duty by my publisher,
and I hope you'll read it. If you do,
let me know what you think. It's
very, very different from my 2012 novel,
A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage.
Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.

OPENING THE MATRESHKAS

Today I feel like exploring Dan Piepenbring's article in The Daily Paris Review about Cory Arcangel's little book (Working on My Novel) of other people's tweets. The tweets are things like this: "Currently working on my novel and listen [sic] to music. Yeah I'm a writer deal with it." Examining the essay is a bit like exploring the outermost box in an array of puzzle boxes (tweeters inside Archangel inside Piepenbring), but I think the effort may reveal something about the state of things. What things? Oh, art, literature, writers.

CULTURAL BOX OR MULTIVERSE?

Dan Piepenbring is fairly severe on the book:

it’s the story of what it means to live in a cultural climate that stifles almost every creative impulse, and why it so often seems we should stop trying. Arcangel suggests there’s something inherently ennobling in trying to write, but his book is an aggregate of delusion, narcissism, procrastination, boredom, self-congratulation, confusion—every stumbling block, in other words, between here and art. Working captures the worrisome extent to which creative writing has been synonymized with therapy; nearly everyone quoted in it pursues novel writing as a kind of exercise regimen.

Well, that is a sad assessment, isn't it? To counter it, I'd say that a good many of us have managed to build our own little world inhabited by fellow artists near and far, and that there are many worlds inside this one. It really is a multiverse, even when you don't leave the planet. I have plenty of friends in the arts who feel some sort of struggle with invisibility, but I don't see their attitudes in that depressing, sour list of adjectives. Nor do I find "exercise regimen" as a good description of novel-making by my friends, though I know exactly what Piepenbring means. Those of us who pursue the arts don't have to live in that kind of atmosphere. We can shape our own world within this world. We can choose.

PROVING GROUND OR JOYFUL PLAY?

Even as fewer people read novels, we’re made to feel that writing one is a worthy, rigorous enterprise for serious thinking people, a means of proving that we have reservoirs of mindfulness and discipline deeper than our peers’.

Really? Could this be a sincere statement? I am not made to feel such things. Making a piece of art does demand a certain amount of focus and persistence, but I'm bemused about why anybody would write one simply to prove him- or herself better than others. That's certainly not my experience. I write a novel when I have a whopping desire to tell a story, to thrust words around in wonderful patterns, and to revel in truth and beauty. I want to frolic in language.

And also I want to write a novel or story or poem because of that old-fashioned word, inspiration. I may feel a rush of inspiration; it's heady; it's joyous; it's wondrous. I want to make something because life is bigger and more satisfying when I make things. (Reading, I should say, is also a participation in making a world and is an experience made by writer and reader together.) For a writer, there's little better than what Tom Disch called the lyric gush, and once experienced, a writer tends to want that sensation again and again. It's found more in poetry, but also at times in the novel.

NEED TO? WANT TO?

And so we try to write fiction, though certainly we don’t need to, and, as this book attests, we often don’t especially want to, even if we greet the task steeled by a perfect cup of coffee, a glass of red wine and a hot bath, or an Eminem song.

Nah, we don't "need to"; the human race got along just fine without novels. But hey, some of us want to write novels and stories and poems and long-poems. We just do. We feel the desire bubbling up like a spring--like pent joy. We don't need the right pen or the right drink or the right background sound because we have the rush of desire, the onset of high playfulness, and the pleasure in pouring words into new shapes.

FAILING / BETTERING 

Indeed, if you hope to Fail Better—and if you hold up literature, as a writer or reader, as a form of bettering yourself, warts and all—you risk ensnaring yourself in a paradox that Jonathan Franzen wrote about in 1996, more than a decade before Twitter even existed:
You ask yourself, why am I bothering to write these books? ... I can’t stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don’t believe that everything that’s wrong with the world has a cure, and even if I did, what business would I, who feel like the sick one, have in offering it? It’s hard to consider literature a medicine, in any case, when reading it serves mainly to deepen your depressing estrangement from the mainstream; sooner or later the therapeutically minded reader will end up fingering reading itself as the sickness.

The Glimmerglass minotaur is here
because I thought he went well
with Beckett. Didn't Beckett
advise young writers to despair?
And youth was sacrificed to
 the original minotaur...

Okay, we're back to Beckett once again and the recent converting of a literary phrase into a fashionable buzzword for the business and sports world. Fail better. Failbetter. Really? Is that a workable goal? Did anybody ever continue reading and find out what came next? As, "Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good." Etcetera.

This "better yourself" business is a peculiar way to look at art. Piepenbring and Franzen are both right about that. But the idea is not wholly wrong because art is one of the things that makes you bigger on the inside. It just is. There's no way to avoid that change. Pursue truth and beauty (rather that bestsellerdom and fame), and you will live a larger life. Period. Maybe that's not something you can take to the bank, but it is wonderful. It's silly to reduce everything to dollars.

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL

Hawthorne's Artist of the Beautiful, Owen Warland, looked very strange to his American materialist friends, but the art he made and shared with them--whether they appreciated it or not--did indeed change the world. Pursuing beauty and mystery and the truth of nature changed him. It enlarged his being. It changed his life. It changed his discernment. It added to the sum of beauty and truth in the world, even if his perfect work of art lasted only a little while.

ESTRANGEMENT

Moreover, what's wrong with being estranged from the mainstream? I grasp the whole passage and its tone, but I still don't like it. Being "estranged" from the mainstream tends to be a positive good for that unfashionable substance, the soul--or if you don't like the idea of a soul, well, it's a positive good for the mind and heart. I think both writers probably know this, but it's not fashionable to talk about heart or soul except in an ironic way; that's part of why the reader ends up "fingering" literature itself as sickness-causing and estranging. He's already estranged from parts of himself...

UNTRAMMELED JOY IN CREATION

And so Working on My Novel is a brilliant litmus test—there are those who will read it as a paean to the fortitude of the creative spirit, and those who will read it as a confirmation of the novel’s increasing impotence. A form that should provide a “radical critique of the therapeutic society,” as Franzen writes, has instead been co-opted by that society. It’s failing better than the best Fail Better adherent could hope.

"Paean to the fortitude of the creative spirit" is deliberate jargon, a glass of liquid horse manure with a twist of lime, as the writer of the article meant it to be. The tweets chosen don't seem inspiring to him, so the writer may well be leaning toward "increasing impotence" in his judgment of culture and the novel. But you know what? Writing or making art generally is not about "fortitude" of "the creative spirit." It's about the unfailing energy of Creation; it's about a person longing to catch some of that waterfall energy in a net of words, in sub-creation. It's about the sheer, raging joy of playing with words. It's about having more life. It's about trying to make something live--to capture the feeling of life and energy in words.

THE LIVING NOVEL

There's more than one way to make "radical critique of the therapeutic society." A truly radical turn away from current-day culture could well be a book that looks nothing like the "realistic social novel" to those who like to categorize types of novels and romances. (I don't, and I don't believe in realism. As I've said many times, if we could reach realism, we could replace reality. Novels are all on a spectrum, and they are all fantastic in nature, being worlds made out of words.) In fact, any truly living novel would automatically be a critique of an ailing culture simply because it held life and energy.

You know, it doesn't matter if somebody thinks the novel increasingly impotent. Because the novel will either be replaced by other forms better suited to the age, or else people will come along and show us that everything we thought about the novel has to be considered anew. Why? Because they will take the form and do something irresistible with it. It's that simple.

Facebook, twitter, words, us--

Wondering what Facebook and twitter and such places tell us about words, about ourselves... While terrible things can result from being part of such a community, my experience has been primarily positive. I've had the fun of getting letters and comments from readers, and I've met a jolly bunch of people. It's interesting to see characters emerge through brief snips of words. From time to time, friends from the past surface.

To my surprise, such sites have even been useful to me as a writer. Blog comments tend to appear more frequently on Facebook than at the site, so it widens the reach of the blog--good for a busy woman. I've been introduced to writers and critics I value, some of whom have gone on to be a help to my in-print books, and I've been able to help others in turn with advice or an introduction. Some readers have discovered my books through twitter and Facebook. That's community, and I like it, especially since I live in a remote place with few writers, no full-service bookstore, and little in the way of support for books.

The things I don't like are pretty clear. I very much dislike all forms of proselytizing in print, even when I care about the issue. And when compassion and humor are both missing, I feel deeply wary. Humorless proselytizing without a heart for other people is especially difficult.

I've noticed that people are quick to anger if the reality of someone on Facebook comes into question. Some of this is because of fears of various sorts of abuse. The curious thing is that a mob mentality comes into play quickly and leads to a sort of e-witchhunt, a version of Salem that may or may not be grounded in truth--didn't the Salem residents vary in their opinions as well? One ill leads to another, just as in off-screen life. Meanwhile, on twitter the fictional person tends to be in-your-face false, the moniker of a dead author or well-known figure, or some fantastic creation.

Friends with mental problems and personality disorders are on facebook, just like the rest of us. One good thing about that is the way they can form a community where they are not judged by appearances but are free from bodily constraints. I've been touched by the way some I know "in real life" (it's all real life, isn't it?) have built a little world for themselves.

Announcements of family deaths are tricky: on a blithe stage, a dark note can sound peculiar if handled awkwardly--and what death is not a break in the flow of life? There's a clash between the nature of most posts and death. And yet one has more of a daily sense of the wheeling nature of life as births and deaths scroll across the screen, and surely that is a good effect in a culture that tends to hide death from the living.

Twittage, during which my brain was replaced by cloud--

Vignette of lake for Thaliad by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

I appear to have exhausted the contents of my head while on twitter this morning. And have nothing more to say to the world. Meanwhile, I must go finish packing up bookplates for Thaliad...

Cloud and ignorance appear to be the order of the day. I believe the dawn cloud must have crept inside my head. I believe that my brain may have been replaced by vapor.

However, I still manage to like this quote and to be astonished (California friends, watch out!) by the article it came from: "It has been said that an actuary is someone who really wanted to be an accountant but didn't have the personality for it" (Kessler, WSJ.)

Morning twittage, since I have naught else to say:

• The universe so big, so much to fathom... But children say wonderful things out of insufficient knowledge. 
• Contemplating the well of my own ignorance. It is very great and very blue. 
• Believe that refers to the scattering of sleep across the globe. Dark conspiracy of the Sopora Sleep company. @DeathZen @MrsDarkly 
• Recollecting my daughter at 5: "Have you ever heard of a five-year-old teenager?" @saladinahmed 
• Could we quit using "beyond words," Twit-buddies? Very few things are so, and usually not the ones we say are. 
• Recommending Richard Krawiec and Jacar: @jacarpress.
• Cloud that has filled the village nudges my cheek, creeps inside my mouth when I speak, breathes me. Odd, lovely morning. White smudge sun. 
• The birds drag long streaming paths through the cloud that has filled up the village. 
• The dog is trying mightily to bark to bits the cloud that used to be a yard. 
• The yard is cloud. The lake is cloud. Cloud is snared in the rose canes. Infinite confine.

Meeting me elsewhere: Excerpts from 2012 books (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, The Foliate Head) at Scribd. Thaliad at Phoenicia Publishing. (Thaliad is on sale during Poetry Month. Hardcover is only available through Phoenicia, and the paperback anywhere.) See page tabs above for clips, links to reviews, and information on those brand new books plus The Throne of Psyche from 2011, and more. 

Tweetheads

NBA Young People’s Literature - Winners, Finalists, And Judges On Twitter If you are on twitter or follow it, this might be an interesting list to pursue--lots of people I did not know were on. And now, back to the big summer read...

And speaking of things discovered on Twitter, where, oh where is the angel with the flaming sword when you need him? First Billy Collins unbuttons Emily Dickinson and now, infinitely more bothersome, this. Outrage, as newspapers used to say when they meant rape. Austen? Just shatter a Grecian vase over my head, will you?

As long as we're in the realm of strange things learned on Twitter and the removal of undergarments, please note the fascinating discovery of a 15th-century bra! No doubt fashion historians are scribbling revisionary texts at this instant.

Twitterbrained

I'm trying Twittering. Just signed up and already Corey Mesler has found me. How is that possible?

Movie moment
Harry Potter: We have something worth fighting for, something that Voldemort doesn't have.
N, age 12, under his breath: Girls.