Story's freedom

The quote below was trawled from a youtube podcast advertised as discussing, among other things, "the effect that a new ideological thinking is having on art and literature." As that is an interesting subject for a writer, I listened. If you want to listen, go here.

Tim Lott: As a novelist, I've got to be allowed to be wrong without being accused of being twenty-seven different things [i.e. racist, sexist, transphobic, etc.]... I've got to have my characters express the way real people are... 

I can't just say this is the way they should be because that's the death of literature, and that's why literature and the arts in Russia died the moment the Communists took over from a wonderful, rich history of literature and art: suddenly [claps hands] dead.  

* * *

Art: I can't find much about this oil-on-canvas painting, but it's by René de Groux (Belgian, 1888-1953.) And I can't find much about the painter, either!

Selected Reading, 2016 Happy New Year

Selected 2016 Reading List, in ABC order by author

Books by friends, books recommended by friends, 

new reads, lots of rereads, books read to review or blurb. 

Of course, I lost my list (so me!) partway through the year, 

so here's what I remember right now in the way of books read in full.

Aldhelm, Saint Aldhelm's Riddles, translated by A. M. Juster. Reviewed for First Things. (Yes, I liked it and gave it a great review.) My husband bought me a copy at the same time I bought myself one, so clearly it must be a "me" sort of book!

Jane Austen, Persuasion. Reread, again. It has climbed higher on the Austen list. Maybe I'm finally old enough to appreciate its virtues.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Reread for the Nth time. In the kingdom of the novel-in-English, I can never be done with rereading Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Hawthorne, and Melville.

Jane Austen, The Watsons (fragmentary novel.) If you're a fan....

Willis Barnstone, translator of The New Covenant Volume I: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse. Translated from the Greek and informed by Semitic sources. Extensive introductory and appendix essays. I don't always agree with him but the essays and notes are interesting, and so is the translation, which uses Aramaic / Hebrew name ways and returns the text to poetry.

Michael Bishop, Joel-Brock the Brave and the Valorous Smalls  Read in manuscript to write a blurb for Kudzu Planet Productions. Illustrated with charm and abundance by Orion Zangara.  Full blurb: "Joel-Brock Lollis's family has vanished into the labyrinthine Sporangium below a curious Georgia emporium, Big Box Bonanzas. Glimpses of an older J-B Lollis of the Atlanta Braves on a BBB television suggest that Joel-Brock may never get back his parents and sister. The Valorous Smalls--almost-ten Joel-Brock, lively teen Addi, and tiny detective Valona--forge their way into the mushroom realm to change that possible future. Young readers who enjoy quests with marvels in the kingdom of the weird (mushroom warriors! mazes! time games! giant slugs!) will find much to interest, amuse, and surprise them in Michael Bishop's unusual fantasy, Joel-Brock the Brave and the Valorous Smalls, well and profusely illustrated in pen-and-ink by Orion Zangara."

Louise Bogan, The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968. Fine poems, well worth reading. As with Muir, I like the mythic ones a lot. That may be because they were the first I knew, as both writers were in a mythic poetry anthology by John Alexander Allen bought when I was seventeen.

G. K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse. If you're a fan of LOTR, read this! Clearly a major source, far more suggestive of Tolkien than I expected.

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. Reread yet again. Such a marvelous "sensation" novel, such curious characters, such moody "set pieces," starting with the initial encounter with the Woman in White. While it was very clear on the unequal status of men and women (particularly as regards inheritance) at the time, I suppose that its marked fluidity of male and female roles within a Victorian world always conscious of what is proper must be of new interest to scholars in our era.

John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England.

Annie Dillard, The Abundance. If you like Dillard, which I do, you might order this thinking (as I did) it would be chock full of essays. I was rather disappointed that this selection was not a little more abundant in its choice. Great starter book if you haven't met her before.

Seb Doubinsky, Predominance of the Great: non-haikus. Narcissitic comment: always so pleasant to have a poem dedicated to you--to find out what words the poet thought suited to "you."

Jeffrey Ford, The Shadow Year. Interesting to read another Ford novel. But if you have not but wish to read him, start with the short stories.

Richard Goldbeer, The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England.

Georgette Heyer, The Marriage of Convenience. Read this one because Ellen Kushner kept talking about Heyer. It is frothy--rather as if Leon Garfield, Jane Austen, and P. G. Wodehouse had a word-frolic.

Clive James, Poetry Notebook. Wonderful essays, well worth reading. If you write or read formal poetry (you know, the stuff we used to just call poetry, back before Modernism), you will find him congenial, I expect.

Mary Kinzie, The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling. Learned about this one via a Michael Juster tweet. This book would be salutary for any young poet to read, no matter his or her bent, because he or she would be challenged by the description of the poetry of our day. Even if the poet radically disagreed (perhaps especially then?), such strongly formulated arguments would be helpful in coming to understand his or her own thoughts.

Ursula LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea.  Holds up from the first read, many years ago.

Ursula LeGuin, The Tombs of Atuan. Ditto.

George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind.
I loved this as a small child; it feels dated but still has the MacDonald sweetness.

George MacDonald, Phantastes. Foundational book for 20th-century fantasy.

Jo Mazelis, Ritual 1969. You can read my review of this collection (her third) for Planet: The Welsh Internationalist. "Jo Mazelis’s well-crafted stories in Ritual, 1969 (Seren, 2016) stand at a crossroads—liminal place between worlds where criminals and suicides were buried—of the fantastic and the homely real."

Alda Merini (Susan Stewart, translator), Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini. I have read this book twice, trying to see why I should be a fan. Still not, alas. It seems more than a language problem, as I once again felt let down. Truly, I would like someone to explain to me why I should admire the poems. I would welcome a little enlightenment. Alessandra Bava tells me that Alda Merini is quite good, and I believe her but still can't see.

Edwin Muir, Collected Poems. I had not read him in a long time; I like his poems, especially the myth-tinged ones.

Garth Nix, Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, Goldenhand and To Hold the Bridge. Y. A. fiction. The two last are new, a novel and a collection (the title novella is set in the Old Kingdom.) Thinking about going back to a novel for teens than I abandoned when almost finished, but I think this is about all the contemporary Y. A. I read last year.

Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself. I tweeted a lot of quotes from this book in the fall, and regret that it has not had a wider readership. If you love irrealism of any sort, try it. If you love Kant, try it. Oh, just go ahead and try it!

Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped. Enjoyed as much as when I was a mere sprat. The "flight in the heather" (admired by Henry James) and the roundhouse battle are well-handled pieces that mix action with forcible inaction and watching. I also like the wild weirdness of the hideout for Cluny Macpherson, Jacobite rebel. The relationship between David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart is effective in great part because Alas is so rash and bold and childish and proud, and David is tested in his loyalty to the man who has saved him. Set in the eighteenth century and making use of the murder of Colin Roy Campbell the Red Fox near Ballachulish (the Appin Murder), the story is well worth a read if you missed it, growing up.

Michel Tournier, Gilles and Jeanne (translated by Alan Sheridan.) Definitely should not be the first Tournier read. I think it must be called a failure, though failures are, of course, important to art and shed light on related work or can be transitional bridges to something more successful. Yet I dislike it. You know it's not kindred when the book is short and you start skimming anyway!

Robert Walser, Oppressive Light (selected poems, translated by Daniele Pantano.) Walser made me write a few poems in opposition to his, so I am grateful to him. I was a little disappointed--somehow expected more, when I should have been simply curious--but interested all the same.

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering our Hidden Life in God. The self as kingdom flourishing within the divine kingdom.

W. B. Yeats, Crossways.
I always read Yeats, but this year I'm looking at his poems as separate collections instead of hopping about at whim (although I am doing some of that as well.) New poem "I Met My True Love Walking" has a sigodlin relationship to "Down By the Salley Gardens."

W. B. Yeats, The Rose.

Philip and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings. How lovely to have such a wonderful setting, to be a writer in a setting where words mattered so very much. How sweet to grow and aspire in a small, encouraging country that cares about its literature.

3 readings in time and art

Wikipedia Commons

Literature in time
Sven Birkerts at LitHub:
"Can the 'Literary'Survive Technology?"

Sven Birkerts has been depressing me--stylishly so--for many years. Here's a recent clip:

...I don’t see the literary as we have known it prevailing or even flourishing. With luck, it will survive for some time yet at the present scale, which is, in terms of societal influence and prestige, already much diminished from former times. But we should keep in mind that those were times when the seemingly sedate verbal art was not yet beset on every side by the seductions of easily accessible entertainment. In the future, literature will likely not command enough marketplace attention to make it commercially viable at any corporate level, but might rather become (and this is not a bad thing) an artisanal product that functions either as a vital inner resource or else as a status marker for its reduced population of consumers. What we might think of as old-school “serious” literature may come to function as a kind of code among initiates. At that point charges of elitism will not have to be defended against—they will have been fully earned.

Elder artists, 2
Elder Eden:
clips from Art News

Here's more on artists (sculptors and painters in this case) continuing to work well into old age:

A historical look reveals that a striking number have been highly productive and turned out some of their best work late into old age, including Bellini (who died at 86), Michelangelo (d. 89), Titian (d. between 86 and 103, depending on your source), Ingres (d. 86), Monet (d. 86), Matisse (d. 84), Picasso (d. 91), O’Keeffe (d. 98), and Bourgeois (d. 98).

“Working becomes your own little Eden,” Thiebaud says, while acknowledging the challenge of overcoming the traps of what others think and say. “You make this little spot for yourself. You don’t have to succeed. You don’t have to be famous. You don’t have to be obligated to anything except that development of the self.” 

Obliterating the past
"The Anomaly of Barbarism":
John Gray at Lapham's Quarterly

And here is a clash between ancient art and year-zero desire:

 The destruction of buildings and artworks, which ISIS has perpetrated at the ancient site of Palmyra among other places, has several twentieth-century precedents. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks razed churches and synagogues in Russia. Mao Zedong demolished large parts of China’s architectural inheritance and most of Tibet’s, while the Pol Pot regime wrecked pagodas and temples and aimed to destroy the country’s cities. In these secular acts of iconoclasm, the goal was to abolish the past and create a new society from “year zero”—an idea that goes back to “year one” of the calendar introduced in France in 1793 to signal the new era inaugurated by the French Revolution. Systematically destroying not only pre-Islamic relics but also long-established Islamic sites, the aim of ISIS is not essentially different.

Rips in the fabric of culture--

Portrait of the artist as flourishing, flowering...
Division page image by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for my just-out Maze of Blood (Mercer.)
With this story, inspired by the life
of Texas pulp writer Robert E. Howard,
I got to revel in the life of someone
who died before I was born, who
was unlike me in almost all ways,
save for his love of words.

My third child is now in college, and I've thought a lot about how English departments have changed since the year when I gave back my just-won tenure and promotion and became a full-time writer and then also a mother. Clearly it's now possible in many places to obtain an "English" degree without having much acquaintance with Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton, and it's quite possible to have little acquaintance at all with the legacy of the classical world with its great transcendentals. In fact, it is so very possible to go without reading the life-giving, important writers of the past or present that studies tell us many people never bother to read a book again once they graduate from college!

Likewise, I've seen many mentions of MFA students who do not know the tradition--I feel sure that complaint is not always justified, but it appears to be true often enough for many complaints to be made in print. Similarly, the visual arts have suffered from a lack of craft and skills in student training. But what is an artist alone? We are not spiders working and spinning alone but one body with the work of the past--those of our own culture and works in translation as well. Moreover, the tools and techniques of the past are part of how an artist thinks, and without them, he or she is lessened. Artists of all sorts are linked together through time and space, and the fallen generation just past grew out of the work of all previous artists, and the generations alive now from them in turn. To make art out of ourselves like a spider is to ignore all the power, truth, beauty, and good work that came before.

As an inhabitant of a small, often convulsive world, I find alarming the tendency to avoid reading books. Novels and stories and poems are gifts to us across barriers of space and culture and time. They are a vital way for us to experience the mind and living energies of the Other, the person who is not like us, not our sex or race or religion or culture. They are a path to understanding and empathizing with another's mind, heart, and soul. They are often the closest we can come to experiencing--to being pierced and affected by--another's dailiness and pleasures and sorrows. And stories and poems catch us up with the sheer joy of creation.

Without these wonderful little time-and-space collapsers, we are lesser beings, caught inside ourselves, less able to empathize and to love the world in all its shapes and colors, less able to love one another. As a writer, I have been able to stream outside myself and become a seventeenth-century woman in the wilderness (Catherwood), a nineteenth-century soldier (The Wolf Pit), a Texas pulp writer (Maze of Blood), a Depression-era boy in flight (A Death at the White  Camellia Orphanage), a child in a post-apocalyptic world, fastening together the pieces (Thaliad), a painter in the heart of a hill, searching for truth in a labyrinth (Glimmerglass), and much more. My readers have been those things as well, choosing to take my hand in the wondrous storyteller-and-listener dance that has been going on for hundreds, thousands of years.

What can we say in the face of ongoing news of decline, except that there is much more to being alive than what is useful and practical? Without art and culture, we are left in a dry landscape of the useful and practical, without an oasis in sight.

Readings and thoughts for the first day of Christmas

"The Angel Door"
Here is a Christmas commission by a friend from college, artist
Mary Boxley Bullington. I suggest to those of you who love
and collect art that she is highly collectible and, indeed,
under-valued at this time. Her work is full of energy and beauty.
Click for a large version.

I heard this sung by Fr. Mark Michael last night, in a church that has for several centuries been a notable home to writers--novelist James Fenimore Cooper, nature writer Susan Cooper, poet W. W. Lord, essayist Fae Malania, children's author Paul Fenimore Cooper, and many more. It is one vision of things that have eternal life and power:

The Proclamation of Christmas

Today, the twenty-fifth day of December, unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth and then formed man and woman in his own image. Several thousand years after the flood, when God made the rainbow shine forth as a sign of the covenant. Twenty-one centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah; thirteen centuries after Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt. Eleven hundred years from the time of Ruth and the Judges; one thousand years from the anointing of David as king; in the sixty-fifth week according to the prophecy of Daniel. In the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad; the seven hundred and fifty-second year from the foundation of the city of Rome. The forty-second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus; the whole world being at peace, Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming, being conceived by the Holy Spirit, and nine months having passed since his conception, was born in Bethlehem of Judea of the Virgin Mary. Today is the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

And here is a clip from the discussion of another vision of immortality--cultural immortality--yoked to its debunking:

On the presumed immortality of fame as a cause of art and cultural significance.

Fame, according to Socrates, is therefore a form of reproduction. For those who can achieve it, it is far superior to the messy biological kind. Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory? Socrates is here expressing a fundamental belief of the Greeks: that acts of heroism or epic poems are not only nobler than mere sprogs, but also considerably more durable. Where living things fall like leaves in autumn, our cultural objects can endure. Kingdoms, titles and honour survive to be passed from one generation to the next; stories persist to be told by new generations of bards; bronze statues do not fall sick. Unlike human children, cultural offspring promise to be ‘everlasting’.  --Stephen Cave, Everlasting glory: There are few fantasies so absurd as the idea of living on through fame. So why does immortality still beckon?

Thoughts on literary immortality

Mary Boxley Bullington,
Winged Creatures,
Acrylic and mixed media collage on paper, 22" x 25"
December 2014

Some day the glacial lake some hundred yards from my door will vanish; some day a mountain may stand where it sank in earth. All things on Earth pass and change, as do we. 

Stephen Cave's vision of humanity's striving to be noble (or simply plain old famous for being famous, like a Kardashian) or make lasting art as an absurd quirk of biology and evolution is interesting, but in the end it means little to me. I do not write for glory or to have my name enrolled in stone. I write because it gives me joy, and because as I pursue something larger than myself, I also become larger than myself. What I am on the inside is then better and bigger than it was before. So I write to redeem the time and give a gift to a world in which I have sometimes been harmful or mere useless lumber--as we all are at times, more or less. 

In thinking so, I am far closer to the sentiments of a figure like the ignored, scorned, solitary artist of Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful," who creates the beautiful mechanical butterfly that flies with grace and natural motion but who also catches a "far other" butterfly--who becomes greater than he was before because he has participated in creation. The soul has long been compared, in art and words and on tombstones, to a butterfly. Like Hawthorne, the artist gives the creation of his heart and soul away, knowing it may be accounted a trifle, knowing it may be mocked. But he gives it freely in love.

Christmas wish

Experience sublime and beautiful things and be alchemically transformed to metaphysical gold, be in surpassing peace, love one another, be merry...

Butterflies on Mary Boxley Bullington's
cherry tree in Roanoke, Virginia.

Morning thoughts: on making

Interior decoration by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Glimmerglass, out in September.
A lion, a leaf, and a crown--surely they are
nothing if not realistic. And yet, put them together...

AB OVO

Often I'm startled by my own absurd temerity in saying anything about books. What do I know? Why don't I stick to my own narrative and lyric frolics and words and keep my mouth fast shut otherwise? A writer is always making things up, beginning at the very beginning--knowing nothing about how to make what she must make next. It's yet another thing about being a writer that enforces (or should enforce) a kind of humility, whether a writer wants it or not. Having revised a poem or novel or story, I hold an amount of strange knowledge . . . and yet it all flies out the nearest window, never to return, when I sit down with the blank page, the not-yet-born next.

Yet I do persist in this mania of having and changing opinions, thinking that I know things about what I do. For example, I've long felt that the roots of our literature in English are quite other than what is often praised--this thing called realism that so dominates much of our thinking about books. And I've felt, in fact, that there is no such thing as realism, just as there is no such thing as the fantastical or irrealism. These words are but handles, convenient ways of describing points on a continuum. As I've said before, if a book could be perfectly and wholly "realistic," it would then replace reality in one Borgesian swoop. All works of literature are made from nothing, or from Yeats's "a mouthful of air." That is the nature of creation and the sub-creation that is literature.

From Beowulf to Gawain and the Green Knight to The Tempest to Tom Jones to Bleak House to the latest narrative in prose or verse, what matters in poetry and fiction is energy. Is the work alive? And the answer to that question has little to do with where a work falls on the continuum between realist and irrealist, and everything to do with whether it captures something of the energies of life.

* * *

ON RESOLVING TO SHUT UP (AGAIN)

It occurs to me (once again) that I have already said these things before, in some way or another. These morning thoughts, written before the dawn . . . Waking, making. Making is a kind of waking, isn't it? And a maker desires to be awake, to wake others.

* * *

OUR BORING, MODERN OBSESSION

Here's Jacob Bacharach, author of A Bend in the World, at Huffington Post:

Sometimes I think that all the really great works of surrealism predate our boring, modern obsession with dividing the real from the unreal, truth from fiction, the conscious mind from the dream. I'm using surrealism in its common and not specific sense; a lot of the works I'm going to mention are what you might call magical realist, or experimental, or postmodern, or just plain weird. I'm actually a fan of weird fiction myself. If my own writing ever spawns a genre, that's the name I'll lobby for. Anyway, in working on a current unfinished writing project, I've been rereading the Bible, and it's reminded me that of a friend of mine who once said that Revelation was his favorite science fiction novel. I'm a fan of Job, myself, which would give Burroughs a run for his mugwumps, although for true weirdness, you really ought to reread Genesis, in which the utterly ordinary and the utterly otherworldly coexist and commingle in a manner totally alien to the modern ear and imagination; the poetry of creation gives way to genealogy, and God flits between instantiating His word and dickering with little humans over the specific price and measure of disobedience...
I tend to think that all great literature has an element of the fantastical and the surreal: Bolaño, Melville, Djuna Barnes, Anne Carson, Laurence Sterne... Each era throws up writers who take their elbows to the way we're supposed to see things, and these are the ones I come back to when I am bored with being bored.

Via that interesting young seminary professor and writer, Wesley Hill

Being culture-makers--

Creation, courtesy, and change

detail, "Maternity"
Mary Boxley Bullington

A possible delusional, middle-of-the-night post from the depths of the great tax-gathering night... Now my tax materials are sorted into little happy heaps. And the dog woke me after four hours of sleep. 

Here's a comment I left on a facebook thread Monday that relates to some current issues with publishing. I left it in response to a number of writers and readers who complained about people posting poems and images on the facebook pages of others without asking permission. 

I just imagine there is a lot of desperation around these days as people try to adapt or don't adapt to changes in the publishing/art world. Perhaps that feeling of being helpless in the grip of change overrides careful courtesy at times. I've never gotten quite so many requests as I have recently--requests from writers that I help a certain book in some way, or that I buy a copy of a certain book. When you know a lot of writers, you can't buy their every book, even if you exceed your book budget. Because of those requests, I recently started a book announcement/information site for friends and e-friends. In addition, I do think it's important to share work you find wonderful. We still see mainly the books that are anointed as lead books from publishers, and that is not very helpful to either readers or writers; the internet (with a bit of courtesy, one hopes!) can help make books visible.

Caring for culture

We need to "care for culture," as my friend Mako says. One thing caring for culture means is that we need to share work we find beautiful and meaningful, that we not allow it to be obliterated by the roaring tides of twilight and 50 shades of grey.

Really, we know that such a swamping of worthy art happens all the time.  We know that not many people care for culture, and that many beautiful things are lost or nearly lost in the tide of what's pushed by publishers and the media. There's nothing revolutionary about admitting what we know but mostly ignore.

But we all may be culture-builders if we allow ourselves to be so. Here in the age of the internet, we can wrest the making of our culture from those who would use it for primarily material ends. And isn't that a revolution, a turning away from a lesser thing and toward a better one?

We can battle against the promotion of drek by lauding what is beautiful and true and valuable to the human heart. We can ourselves share what is a good and living art, and not a handful of dead leaves and maggots. In this way, we can bring our world closer to the heart's desire.

"Maternity" by painter Mary Boxley Bullington,
a friend of mine from long-ago college days

"And are built again"

I wonder if there is really a reason to grieve the passing of this Platonic thing we have called Literature, with its periods, its crafts, its canons of major and minor “figures,” and, most precious, its faith that it is possible, as the critic W. K. Wimsatt once put it, for a work to “endure as a poetic monument.” There are at present few things more Ozymandian than the idea of a poetic monument. The “great works,” the classics, are themselves now “colossal wrecks,” and their only context is a culture “boundless and bare.” The respectful privilege we once reserved for a work like Shelley’s “Ozymandias” now seems like something from a past full of childish illusions. You can no longer refer to a work as a “classic,” as T. S. Eliot liked to put it, without provoking a kind of amused condescension, as if to say, “You don’t still believe in those, do you? It’s so 1950.” The narrative of the “Great Works” has lost its legitimacy, and we have lost our credulity.  --Curtis White, in Lapham's Quarterly

All things fall and are built again
--Yeats, "Lapis Lazuli"

I choose to be like a child in the face of Curtis White's essay. No kingdom worth being  part of can be entered in any other way... I put on the mantle of childlike innocence and the little wooden sword and shield.  Because I want to keep on pushing to the edge of what I have done in words and then beyond, again and again and again, enlarging a world made out of words.  If a few megalithic corporations of the world eat all publishers and all stores and even readers and writers, I will still keep right on dreaming a world and writing it down in words.  And in joy.

That I promise.

More to come...

Dear Professor Currie...

This morning I read “Literature and the psychology lab” by Gregory Currie, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham. Among other things, he suggests that writers may be not more but less reliable than others at understanding the minds of others because they are so often a tad schizoid or bi-polar, an increasingly common way of investigating the artist these days. He believes that literature in general is not such a great measure of human understanding and that human imagination is not very accurate—even that creators don’t actually care much about other people, a thing I find manifestly wrong when looking in my own heart. (I note, as he does, that the research on writers and psychology he cites comes from male writers.)

Having come from neurologically strange stock myself, I find these sorts of arguments to be interesting but not very useful. Yes, someone with a dash of something or other may be looser on the mental leash that others are, may have access to rather different ways of thinking and, more importantly, to different ways of clicking words together. I may have had what is called a “splash” of something myself, having been notable as a child for a scissors phobia that eventually gave me hair that could tickle the backs of my knees when unbraided, an extreme aversion to tags and often seams, an ability to talk in paragraphs before the age of one but delayed walking (luckily I could tell people where I wanted to go), odd food proclivities (obsessed with raw veggies, I was an early raw foodist), etc. I certainly had a deep rage to read that caused me to read everywhere and at all times (a young mistress of how to read during class.)

We still live in an age when educators insist on justifying literature and finding a “reason” and purpose for art and when researchers are constantly whittling away at the artist’s “authority” as a voice for his or her fellows and times.  I am afraid that I don’t care a whit for these sorts of difficulties. They mean very little to me, even though I could make a perfectly fine argument for the tragedy of Oedipus as having great meaning and purpose, showing us the deep need for repentance and that even the most ignorant of evils must be accepted and borne and by the doer.  But all these avenues for discussion are lesser ways of talking about art, and they are insufficient for any artist. Writers do sometimes talk about literature this way, but writers often say silly things in audio interviews. If you want to ask a writer something, hand a question to him on a piece of paper or send it by email.

When I make something, it is because I am absolutely in love with the sensation of words rising from the fount and flooding through me, sluicing and driving, carrying me away, out of myself and into a larger and brighter realm.  The intense and piercing joy of making and word-twisting is what draws me on, what makes me sacrifice a good portion of my life to sitting in poky corners tapping at machines. And you know, I still hew close to the ancient idea that beauty, truth, and the often betrayed need for purity of soul (i.e. goodness) shine through the best works.

Perhaps I am a little bit mad, although I would be surprised to find it so: since about the age of thirty, I have lived a fairly quiet and perfectly ordinary life, the sort of life one needs to live in order to write. Like many people in the 21^st century, I am often too busy. I have all the usual demands of a mother of three, and I meet them as they come, just like other women. I try to help my publishers by doing events and publicizing my books, and like most other writers, I wish that the books would just sell themselves so that I could have more time to write.

At the same time, I am doing something that pushes against the norm and is counter to the rather trivial, noisy, game-like culture of our day.  I am accreting the pearl of what I call my soul (you may call it whatever you like), in great part by making poems and novels, lapping nacre over the grit of my life. And in defiance of Professor Currie (forgive me, my book-loving professor!), I would say that far from not caring about other people, I consider everything I have made as a gift tossed into the sea of humankind. (Admittedly, they sometimes pay for that gift, and I am grateful to those those who by doing so vote for the continued publication of my work, supporting me and my publisher.) It makes me glad when people fish up one of my poems or stories or novels and like it and say so. I often have a strong feeling for people I have never met and may never meet because I know that they have walked with me through forests or city streets, just as surely as if we were the dearest of friends and had gone for a “real” walk, hand in hand.

The Long Grass Books, again

The Marketplace prefers there to be a great story attached to a book. In fact, it often cares more about the attached story than any labored-over manuscript. The Marketplace may be willing to love your new novel, but it will love you better if you are a beautiful unwed quarter-Nepalese mother of seventeen, a recovered addict, highly photogenic despite your missing hand, cut off by your brutal father with the sword his own father had brought home from Japan in World War II. If you can be all of those things, or some, or none but with just-as-colorful alternatives, you are a story, and that kind of story can be sold as sweet meat for the marketplace.

There’s a peculiar kind of disrespect to the reader in these tendencies: they’re nothing new, of course, and have been written about endlessly. They present a great NO. They are the trees planted to obscure a forest. The big books on the billboards are always new and trendy and changing. The other books are behind the billboards in the long grass. They persist, though they’re mostly invisible.

The Marketplace Taste and “good taste” are not the same. They can coincide, but often they simply don’t. Other eras spent a lot of time thinking about “good taste” and beauty and truth in art; ours doesn’t. But even eras that thought about taste didn't have much liking for Melville and Hawthorne or Dickinson (her little efforts to reach out, all misunderstood) and many another. That's the kind of thing that can kill you, if you're a John Kennedy Toole, say--or many another.

Sometimes I read a book on the billboard. Often I like to lie in the grass and read the unregarded books. They’re hard to find, deep in the long grass. But there are rewards that make up for the effort to find them.

Today we are due for an ice storm on top of our many feet of snow, and school is closed--we are using our last scheduled snow day already. And what I really want is a wonderful book to read. I’ve been re-reading Yeats, and I’m ready for a story that can bear the light of his tragic joy and beauty. Be it new or be it old, what shall I read? What are the really wonderful books that I’m missing, wandering in a grove of billboards?

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Prior Long Grass Books

3. http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2007/02/paean-to-long-grass-books-no-3-bilge.html
Bilge Karasu

2. http://www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2007/01/paean-to-long-grass-books-no-2-willow_09.html
Jeanne Larsen's translation's of Tang poems by women

1. http://www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2007/01/paean-to-long-grass-books-no-1-98.html
Clare Dudman

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The photograph above is courtesy of www.sxc.hu/ and Neil Kemp of Egham in Surrey, England.

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A Shiver in the Curtain of the World

A few weeks ago, a salesman popped through one of the side entrances of the palace—a dark, Poesque little tunnel with aphorisms taped to the cobwebby walls—and tried to sell perfume and mineral makeup and motorcycles and assorted whatnot. I told him that he was not allowed to sell here, and that a footman would accompany him to the nearest door. To comfort him, I sent the footman in mineral makeup and an attractive perfume compounded from a lost buttercup and the remains of an exploded star, and I had the Pot Boy (who was standing around looking decorative and useless) wheel a beautiful motorcyle, sweet as perfume and as shiny as a bottle, to meet him at the door. Attorney Clendon had not yet vanished, and so served him with a writ; the salesman named Eric may not return in the guise of a salesman, although he may drop by for tea and books.

The infinite library of the web has shifts the world and set things askew. We have entered the world of magic. I say that I have a footman; he promptly appears and escorts my visitor away in an excess of politeness. He is an under-footman. I suspect that he wears mineral makeup because his skin is bad, although he is good-looking in a Jaggerish sort of way—the so-ugly-he’s-cute mode. Mack is his name. Mack the footman. I do not think that Mack is his real name. His pants are creased a little too sharply and fall without even the merest little twitch of a wrinkle. I am afraid that he is ambitious, but for what I do not understand. If I knew fully, I might be a little afraid.

Now don’t these unexpected encounters rock the world, just a little bit? The line between real and unreal, technology and magic is abraded and grows shadowy. Won't people quickly grow accustomed to this dreamy zone between what has been called real and what has been called imaginary? And won’t literature be changed because of it, for good or ill? Strange elements are seeping into the mainstream, sweetening or poisoning the waters that have long run the same, the very same.

Perhaps we will at last swim out of the fishnet of Modernism-and-after, into the deep green veins of the river. And there we may find ourselves more ourselves, though more strange. We may even meet the dreams of the past made fresh and new--Beowulf's monster, the Green Knight, Arcadian shepherds, and Mary with the sweet Medieval dew dropping onto her thigh.

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The perfume bottles are courtesy of Laurelines.