Weird Rollicksome Hornet Amplifications

REGARDING FORAYS TO THE HORNET'S NEST

Note to self, regarding prior post: never write about sex and books on blog.

My own final flourish (at least until some other hot-spirited soul shows up) in the comments:

Let all writers follow the thread of story until they reach the heart of the labyrinth, whatever it contains.

That's where I stand on writing.

Get rid of age divisions for books created by marketers. (My little fantasy!) If a child or a teen is ready for adult fare, fine. If he or she is not ready for adult fare, fine.

That's where I stand on children, teens, and reading.

"What I’m more interested in is the teacher who is not trying to convey a message about sex or anything else but who shines with passion for books, and who can help a teenager catch a little spark of that fire."

I stand by this.

MERVYN PEAKE, TRALA

The December 5th post from my beloved e-haunt, Giornale Nuovo, contains poems, quotes, and "details from a set of sketches and completed drawings done by Mervyn Peake for a projected illustrated edition of Dickens’s Bleak House, which, however, never came to fruition." Go see! And the transforming-to-sheep picture above is, of course, from his illustrations to the great Lewis Carroll.

OTHER PEOPLE SAVING US THE TROUBLE OF THINKING

At The Reading Experience, Dan Brown* has continued and amplified--I think this is one of his gifts, to latch on and develop--my post on rereading. I find in him much that is of interest, whether I agree or disagree, plus an appealing streak of the curmudgeon!

*Penitential update: Note what a rollicksome, careless mood can do. Poor Dan Green is now Dan Brown. From here on out, I shall either expect him to be an absurdly weathy fellow or else give him a different color name whenever I meet him--Dan Pale Ecru, Dan Lavender, Dan Puce, Dan Lemon Yellow, Dan Dandelion Silver, and so merrily on.

IRRATIONAL JOYFULNESS SPRINKLED ABOUT

Despite the fact of too many things on my list today and too many events this afternoon (five at last count), despite the snow (pleasantly covered with giant crows), despite the fact that I just remembered how the incredibly well-read editor John Wilson called me The Invisible Novelist (it is delightful to have titles, though!), and despite the fact that it was a mistake to pull the gutters off the house, I am feeling absurdly happy.

It must be the Bleak House illustrations.

Or maybe it is because Cooperstown is, as always, wonderfully dressed for Advent, and has an old-fashioned, Old World feel--rather like the corner of St. Michael's churchyard in Charleston, South Carolina that Henry James declared the most English bit of America.

Perhaps it is because I am reading and liking Clare's 98 Reasons for Being.

I feel quite, quite rollicksome (a portmanteau word in honor of Carroll.)

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Rereading

Lately I’ve been rereading Yeats, and once again thinking that there is no reading like rereading. I ought to do even more rereading, particularly of current books, because it is in rereading that a story or poem reveals itself—and tells us the extent of its merit. Most reviewers know only the first cursory passage through a work when they pen a review; a reader can know more. Though life is short and art long, we ought to reread often, because it is there that we “dive,” as Melville would say.

I’m finding that Yeats stands up. He manages to speak to me differently at every age. Right now I am touched by some of the youthful poems—they speak so eloquently of dreamy youth and aspiration—but it is the power of the old man Yeats that shakes me, and his determination to live to the end, to make first-rate art until the end of making. His creation of an alternate universe for himself seems far more sensible as a poet’s tool than it did when I was younger.

While I tend to read a lot of older writers again and again and again—a thing that began with my first-grade obsession with Lewis Carroll—there are few contemporaries that I’ve treated that way. If I try to pick out what books and stories and poems by living authors that I’ve read for a second or third time in the course of 2006, I can’t recall very many: poems in Catching Light by Kathryn Stripling Byer and Philokalia by Scott Cairns; Christopher Logue’s War Music; various essays in Seamus Heaney’s Finders Keepers; the story, “Creation,” by Jeffrey Ford; the delicious fairy tale, Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones, as well as a Chrestomanci story or two; a translation of Leena Krohn’s Tainaron: Mail from Another City; various poems and stories by writers who are penpals. No doubt there are others that don’t immediately jump to mind, but what I remember is more first-time reads. Reading to children makes me reread living authors, I see, and it seems that I may reread poetry by them more often than prose.

Perhaps next year I should reread more books by living authors. And it would be interesting to collect a list of what other people find satisfying as rereads by contemporaries . . .

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The photograph is courtesy of www.sxc.hu and Nils Thingvall of Orlando, Florida. “Readers Under Diamonds” is a picture of "readers in the Seattle Public Library under an expanse of diamond-shaped windows."

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