Shop. Vote. Don't forget to be human.

After the Election. Ink on archival panel card, 5" x 7."
© 2017 Mary Boxley Bullington, all rights reserved.
See more of Mary's work here.
And if you are going to be in or near Roanoke this fall,
be sure and attend her open studio!

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Read the preface (nobody does, when it's a book!)

I'm not paying the least attention to whose ideas are best in my singular, possibly eccentric mind and in this post, partly because I don't think writers have any business dictating to others, partly because I choose to trust you to have some well-formed ideas, and partly because what I am interested in here is the decline in our ability to see others as human beings worthy of respect and interesting in their own right. This is, naturally, of a matter of intimate concern to me as a novelist and poet.

* * * * *

Shop. Vote. Don't forget to be human.

Also: thinking like a writer.

I’ve been thinking about the loud controversies of late and the various ways we Americans have changed the meaning of our identity as human beings. An American man or woman shopping at the mall is human—that’s a given, right? A consumer is important; is human. A voter is human, but these days it is only if he or she believes the same things we do and trusts in the same proper steps to transform the country (rather than some other, surely evil steps) and so votes for “our” party. The ideal of respect (sadly, not always fulfilled over the centuries) for one another is in pronounced abeyance. That’s natural, of course, because the ideas that the image of God shines through all mortal flesh is dead in what is essentially a post-Christian society.

In the states, we are all well aware (though we often don’t give a hoot because we are grossly, madly addicted to mall-going and such) that we are interchangeable moving parts in the complicated, well-oiled machine of the economic shopping machine. In great part, we mean in this country because we shop. I shop, therefore I am. Likewise, we are tiny parts in the voting apparatus, continually pestered to think according to correct party lines. If we are too young to shop or vote or too ill or decrepit, we just don’t matter much to the system—we’re not quite human, and others decide what to do about us.

But this is wholly wrong, isn’t it? We have forgotten what it is to be human if we believe that either consuming or voting correctly grounds us and makes us human, much less fully human (another large question!) But that akilter definition of the human is the strong impression one gets from vocal campus outbursts and the standard media and the blizzard of advertising tumbling around us….

As a writer with a dislike of malls and distrust of politicians, I have a distaste for these trends and tendencies. No wonder ideals of goodness, truth, and beauty have been shunted off to a corner. No wonder many post-post-modernist practitioners of what's called (or used to be called) fine arts resist all three. And what of story in the current milieu? To believe that only one sort of thinking and action is acceptable (a thing that a thousand thousand memes tell us, though they do not agree on what sort it is) is the death of the novel. An insistence on conformity kills story. Examples of writers apologizing for their words are on the increase. Novels have been cancelled by publishers for violating correctness. Groupthink? Maybe we'll get some good satire.

To attempt to enforce a set of proper ideas—even if and when they happen to look like pretty good ideas—onto all people is simply the death of narrative. Novels and narrative poems need varied, surprising sorts of human beings to propel them, and the writer needs to respect and fully know the peculiar depths of each one of them, no matter what characters believe, how they vote, or whether they "shop till they drop" or tilt against the system with all their tiny might. A novelist needs to love a whole world of people. She needs to be large, to contain multitudes, to be myriad-minded.

What survives

Ramesses II

The only thing that ever survives from a culture is its arts. Political power is transient. Political power is nothing. It will vanish.  The most powerful man in the world is nobody. The only way we remember any of the powerful men of the world is the way they were captured by artists, often anonymous artists in ancient Egypt and Rome. The bequest of any civilization and the test of its quality is its arts. I feel that the left and the right, everyone across the political spectrum is guilty of offenses against the arts, and I hope that you will now go forth and be ambassadors for the arts. 

           --Camille Paglia, minus a few okays and may be a so or two

Cat exploded? Make good art.

Illumination by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Thaliad

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and eaten by a mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Someone on the internet thinks what you are doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Do what only you can do best. Make good art.  --Neil Gaiman

Alternatively, spend some time with good art....

Sunlit morning, interrupted--

Thanks to Noah Clark of Erie, Colorado, sxc.hu

Started the green, sunlit day by politely explaining my allergy to politicians to a nice telephone lady from the one or the other of the two major U. S. political parties. I do hate to be interrupted when reading, perhaps particularly when the words come from Nabokov. (I say perhaps because it occurs to me that I have not read nearly enough Nabokov. There's another reason to regret that life is so brief!) I like what he said in answer to a question about what it is best to be: To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.

Dear Yale English majors,

Wikipedia public domain

Various people have reasoned with the demands of your petition (included below) on many grounds: the paltry numbers of "women, people of color, and queer folk" actively writing major work in earlier centuries; the fact that literature speaks to the larger human condition; the brutal truth that we can't time travel to correct injustices and insert diverse writers; the idea that foundation survey courses are, in fact, foundational. My business is not with these arguments, interesting though they may be.

In fact, I have no wish to reason with you. Instead, I speak as a writer and poet, and as a reader who is passionate about poetry.

Among you at Yale, I am quite sure there are young men and women who openly or secretly consider themselves to be poets. Some of them are "women, people of color, and queer folk." Now, when you take away the major tradition of poetry in the English language--Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and many others--you deprive your own future poets of the rock they will build on. The now-and-future poets of Yale may choose to write against these voices that belong to us all. Your poets may even write in distress or anger. And yet, whatever their background, their word-wielding force will not be unchanged--will accrue strength and power--by encounters with the work of the great writers of the past. Your poets may not even like some of what they read. But any dislike does not matter a whit. The way forward always involves the tradition, and strong poems of the past are still the rock on which your Yale poets will build. (I note that in no discipline or art do its followers throw away the past before starting their own work.) Great poems of the past remain the touchstones against which new poems of our own day will be measured.

And for a reader of literature who has no intention of becoming a writer? Like it or not, the great works of the past are still the touchstones of power--the words played with in joy until the work is bright--against which an understanding, informed reader instinctively measures the work of his or her time. Without respect and some degree of love for the achievements of the past, how can a reader assess the fresh achievements of the present? If they are worth surviving the flail of time, the poems of our own day will eventually live in the past. But what about the reader's work of supporting and sharing the best that is made now? Without regard for past monuments of the spirit and intellect, how can a reader begin to winnow today's gold grain from the chaff--in fact, how will the reader be able to tell what is gold from what is chaff?

As a reader and as a poet, I look forward to reading your future Yale poets, including "women, people of color, and queer folk." I wish them well. And I wish them well read.

Petition to the Yale English Department Faculty 

We, undergraduate students in the Yale English Department, write to urge the faculty to reevaluate the undergraduate curriculum. We ask the department to reconsider the current core requirements and the introductory courses for the major. 

In particular, we oppose the continued existence of the Major English Poets sequence as the primary prerequisite for further study. It is unacceptable that a Yale student considering studying English literature might read only white male authors. A year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity. The Major English Poets sequences creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color. 

When students are made to feel so alienated that they get up and leave the room, or get up and leave the major, something is wrong. The English department loses out when talented students engaged in literary and cultural analysis are driven away from the major. Students who continue on after taking the introductory sequence are ill-prepared to take higher-level courses relating to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, ability, or even to engage with critical theory or secondary scholarship. We ask that Major English Poets be abolished, and that the pre-1800/1900 requirements be refocused to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity. 

It’s time for the English major to decolonize — not diversify — its course offerings. A 21st century education is a diverse education: we write to you today inspired by student activism across the university, and to make sure that you know that the English department is not immune from the collective call to action. 

It is our understanding that the faculty must vote in order to reconsider the major’s requirements — considering the concerns expressed here and elsewhere by undergraduate students, we believe it would be unethical for any member of the faculty, no matter their stance on these issues, to vote against beginning the reevaluation process. It is your responsibility as educators to listen to student voices. We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention.

Desire for a riotous black comedy that will offend everybody--

Dome with flag photograph
by Robert Linder of Springfield, Missouri

Where is our Evelyn Waugh? Can the current scene drift any closer to black comedy? My fellow Americans (and any non-Americans watching with dropped jaws), this is fabulous comedic, dark-satiric material. We will not be saved by an unexpected knight from the powerful, crazy, possibly terrifying trajectory of the campaign, but we could at least use some vim and vinegar and absurdity-trampling lines from a novelist. And as I have long been a rather jaded and apolitical sort (due to an unfortunate allergy to politicians and an even worse allergy to political language), I prefer that it not be me.

Every blessed week brings fresh absurdities to light, absurdities that ought to ignite some comic genius out there. We need that flamboyant bonfire of words! Take the current instant. Sanders refuses to talk about what socialism has brought to our nearby neighbors in Venezuela, etc.  And when asked why not, what does he say? Because he is running for office, of course! You colossal dummies of the first water, why did you even wonder? Yet, think on this: who would have guessed a politician could be so candid? Meanwhile, the co-anchor of CBS This Morning, Gayle King, tells us that she was at a party on Wednesday, and guess what? Nobody at that party cared one teeny whit about Hilary Clinton's emails! Nobody! Not even those of the Other Party (the Other Party being the opposite of your own adherence, if you have an adherence.) Give Gayle King another lively evening out on the town, and she'll probably cross Benghazi and other troubling little Clintonian peccadillos off the list of voter doubts. Lesson? Go to more parties; frolic; be a Disney girl! Don't worry your little head about the details. In trumpery news, what could be more startling than television "personality" Glen Beck and guest Brad Thor chatting about "a patriot" bumping off the Donald in a hypothetical scenario? And it gets even better when Brad Thor calls Matt Drudge a "despicable lying scumbag" for drawing attention to the "hypothetical I [asked] as a thriller writer." Evidently Drudge was silly enough to take "a hypothetical" as a statement of possibility; imagine that! Personally, I prefer more Shakespearean epithets like churlish, lily-livered hedge-pig or prating pantaloon or mewling moldwarp over "despicable lying scumbag." Nevertheless, I notice with interest and some degree of satisfaction that nothing, nothing, nothing can cross the subject of Trump's strawberry-blond pouf off the national radar. That hair could be a star in the right novel!

Looking back, there's a mighty harvest, waiting, ripe (maybe even just a tad over-ripe?) with wondrous material. And though it's hard to single out any one thing, I just want to give a tiny, eensy-weensy tip of the hat to Carson on the pyramids as really big, big, big granary silos. Adore it! No doubt, dearest reader, you have your own favorite moments. No weak-witted hedge-pig, you! Have we ever had such a bumper crop of good material to draw on? Where, where, where is our novelist who can run riot with this stuff? Who will pluck these reeking canker-blossoms and arrange them into an astonishing, artful bouquet?

In Limerick Town

public domain, Wikipedia

Here are four after-dinner limericks, written while drinking a wee glass of Seven Kingdoms, part of the Game of Thrones series, product of one of our local breweries. Ommegang calls it a “hoppy wheat ale,” and it’s pretty good for an accompaniment to limericks. One would like a bit of hoppiness with a limerick.

I dare you to write a few of your own, with or without a Seven Kingdoms. Go on!

* * *

First up. No cartoonist can resist this subject, and neither can somebody daydreaming a limerick of the political persuasion:

Copious Poof

There once was a brash billionaire
Who was blessed with abundance of hair—
Like a sweet guinea pig.
Or a polyester wig,
Or a billow of very hot air.

My natural bent tends to be apolitical, and I have to force myself to take “an interest” in the current slate of candidates. Luckily for cobbled-up interest, a traditional limerick should be a bit scurrilous….

Game of Thrones

Just imagine the spunk it would take
To be on the political make,
Always ready to hump,
To grind and to bump,
Like a frenzied, concupiscent snake.

Although I am not particularly a fan of politics, I am a fan of Emily Dickinson. Also frogs in bogs. And of fancy words in humble limericks. Dive in!

Dinner with the Stars 
After Dickinson

How delicious to be a Candidate,
And to gasconade, guzzle, and prate
Like an eminent frog
In a notable bog,
For one hundred thousand a plate.

Perhaps 100K is a bit inexpensive these days? And here's a little bit about the jumble of promises abroad in the world in election year....

The Bait of Siren Songs

So you promise us borderland walls
And a passport to ivory halls
And no taxes, and we
Are to have health for free:
Like a Siren's, your come-on appalls.

Now it's your turn. Pay a visit to Limerick Town--it's a quick anapestic jaunt!

With forays into politics, always end on cake, if possible. So here's something sweet to end on: yesterday's pear cheesecake, made for Michael's birthday by our middle child. Was it good? Yes, it was!

Lovelessness and words

This morning I was thinking about writers and anger. In particular, I was thinking about a writer whose involvement in political causes has gone far to ruin her reputation as a thinker. Yet her books do well and suggest that what is called a push early in the publishing career is more important in finding readers than one's ideas.

I remember seeing her speak when I was around 20, and being astonished by a story she read, one that felt so loveless and racist (in the guise of being empowering to women and anti-racist) that she lost my sympathy for any virtues in the story. She was already quite famous, a sort of second-tier celebrity, and most of the people I knew at the reading rushed up to congratulate her, a fact that seemed to me a strong instance of irony.

The effect of the reading lingered with me a long time, and I can say that if I did not know such a thing already, it must have been a warning on denying understanding and love to a created character. Of course, I was a poet then, with no thought of wading into the waters where novelists sink or swim.

Bookish memory--

The world is full of dreadful news and noise and divisions between peoples and parties, but while I was dwelling on these things and "the dark lamentable catalogue of human crimes," as Churchill put it, I was reminded that President Carter, during his speech accepting his party's nomination for a second term as president, called Senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey by the name of Hubert Horatio Hornblower. Instantly I felt wonderfully cheerful, with a store of good will and hope for the world.

 * * * 

 Is that the funniest political moment having to do with books? It's much more funny than George Bush reading a picture book upside down, though that was amusing.

A failure of imagination--

I may have more of a mixed crowd among my Twitter and facebook friends than most writers do; I'm not sure. But for a long time I have been bothered about the vehemence and hatred I see expressed by many of my e-friends about an amorphous "they." Usually this means liberal friends expressing anger or scorn toward conservatives or their beliefs, though occasionally I see the reverse. That tilt is natural because I have a lot of friends who are writers and artists, and we tend to fall somewhere on the liberal spectrum. My academic friends are likewise.

Here's what's interesting to me from a writer's point of view about all this.

Novelists dream about that large category, people. Yet there is a whole mass of people about whom novelists won't write except from a stance of scorn. Can anybody tell me the names of some first-rate novels from the past decade or so by writers who tell a story about conservatives with a stance of love and understanding, rather than scorn? That attempt to grasp the worldview, that clamber inside a paper brain with more in mind that mockery and destruction?

The strange thing about this tendency is that writers, of all people, should be able to enter into the ideas and views of those unlike themselves with charity for all. But in this one case, they do not. Will not. And yet for novelists, that is our calling . . . Entering-in is our vocation, or a major part of it.

News x 3

1.  Epstein on the state of the liberal arts

Have I said that I very much like Joseph Epstein? I feel sure that I've mentioned his wonderful essay on Isaac Bashevis Singer. Here's a new essay of his that is in part a review of Andrew Delbanco's College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be but is also a frank, interesting response to the current state of the liberal arts on campus.

Clip: The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious subtraction. Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the population that has a proper standard with which to judge true intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial. The loss of liberal arts education can only result in replacing authoritative judgment with rivaling expert opinions, the vaunting of the second- and third-rate in politics and art, the supremacy of the faddish and the fashionable in all of life. Without that glimpse of the best that liberal arts education conveys, a nation might wake up living in the worst, and never notice.

2. Collaborating with Clive

Clive Hicks-Jenkins is judging the Fox Open Art Competition on the Channel Islands, and concurrently having a solo show of new art work (including images from The Foliate Head and forthcoming Thaliad.) It's called The Greening, and will be at the Jersey Art Centre. On the wrong side of the puddle? You can take a peek here.

3.  Emissary

Before the silver cord is loosed, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. -Ecclesiastes

It's the wee hours, and I am grief-struck by catching sight of an image of our ambassador's murdered, dishonored body dragged through the streets while terrorists snap photos on their phones . . . The beautiful idea of the emissary and his permission to walk safely in alien lands has been a part of civilization for a long time.

I consider my blog mainly a place for news about books--mine or otherwise--and sometimes for more personal comments. It is a politics-free zone. But there is something about sorrow for others never known and for a human ideal crushed under foot that can feel personal. I feel it so.

Update: I'm looking at the comments and numbers of visitors (the two not always correlated, though common sense suggests that they would be) to posts and feeling surprised at what receives most attention. I wouldn't mind a bit if passers-by left a note about what they would most like to see on the blog this winter. (I am planning on doing some posts related to this year's reading project, but that can't come until near the end of the year. Otherwise I am as flighty and changeable as ever. I have had a recent request for a visit from the Pot Boy. I might or might not include more Tinies. I'll probably do some posts about friends with new books. Etc. Suggestions and questions welcome.)

Fiction & Politics, with a dash of poetry

What I have learned from and since writing a post about the current election:

1. People may hate politics but they can't seem to stop talking about it; this is not like the case with poetry, for example. What would the world be like if people talked about poetry as much as they talk about politics? What would the world be like if we had a poetry these days that was deserving that kind of talk and interest? When will we again have a poetry that is again deserving of our fervor? When will we have a poet who is able to tie the shoes of W. B. Yeats or Blake or Shakespeare? Now there's a Messiah complex! Yes, I am fleeing the topic.

2. The reason I fly the topic is that I continue to have a great distaste for politics, which I regard as an inevitably-corrupting enterprise with little “place for the genuine,” beginning as it so often does with lawyers (caveat: I do know several honorable ones) and going on from there. I would never write a novel about politicians because the pen would fall from my fingers in boredom, despite the importance of their shenanigans. Just talking about the whole subject bothers me . . .

Now I am re-considering that boredom and contemplating how the current runners might appear in fiction and find that I have underrated them all--there is no one who, dwelt on with sufficient curiosity, will not begin to show possibilities as a fictional person. Palin, who has enormous vim (a highly desirable trait in a paper person) and is peppered with contradictions, might bag a major role, while Biden would make an excellent malaprop-style minor figure in a comic tale--his acts leavened with and undercut by humor. Obama: I’d go straight to the instant when his wife finally found something to be proud of in America, and I’d explore that two-edged Messiah impulse. McCain: I’d bee-line to those dogged, determined, sweaty years of survival in Vietnam.

3. Alas, I still have huge reservations about the current election plots and various unreliable narrators among the media. That means I am still unsure about the story circling around my own party's candidate. He is certainly attractive in his manner and appearance, and I hope his inner self proves worthy of the outer one.

4. "Have something that matters to you more" (credit: Annie) is wise, and I suppose is the way I have generally behaved—often averting my eyes from debacle. No doubt I will go on doing so.

5. I still don't imagine that what I think matters a whit, but I write it down to thank those of you who left a note to suggest that it might, even though it doesn't! On the other hand, those who left a few words probably couldn't help it because of the pressing logic of “People may hate politics but can’t help talking about it.”

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Credit: Thanks to photographer Lauren Burbank and sxc.hu for the patriotic barn.

The palace against pontification

Up ahead, down below--

1. Yes, I know that I was just pontificating.
So I offer this dear old chestnut in excuse.

2. A pontification against pontification.
(But but but!)

3. Small bite of a book;
or, what I am reading.

4. In which all
really is grass.

**********************

1. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."
--That, of course, was Leaves of Grass and Walt Whitman, who was just speaking under my feet--there, in that sensuous blade of grass, the crooked one with the dew drop hanging from the tip.

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2. On reading political rants by writers--

Be it hereby known that no poet, no playwright, no maker of stories, and no writer of novels has wherewithal and authority whereof to speak of matters political.

If you have any more authority than, say, a hill of stunted beans or a patch of crab grass, that authority flows from the poem, the play, the story, the novel, etc. When you speak of political matters in your blog or on your personal soapbox, you have no more authority than the Nepalese sherpa in that splendid bright hat, the friendly watch seller on a street corner in China, or the pock-marked teen who scrubs out the grease pan at your local McDonald's.

Go right ahead and yammer, but remember that.

Nobody cares what the teen who scrubs out the grease pan thinks about George Bush, Iraq, Somalia, and a thousand other issues. And nobody cares what you think, either. This is the cold hard steel of truth, my companion in the art.

So get back to the place where you have authority! The grass-growing place...

And remember, once you get there, that you must live in all skins of all shapes and colors and even beliefs. Otherwise, you'll never be a shapeshifter and storyteller worth a blessed bean.

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3.
"In a hundred years, will the mountains
exhaust themselves? Will the lake move on?
Will my hand, severed from mind, lie fallow
forever?"

--from today's reading, a book of poems
about mortality and the death of a mother:
Elizabeth Spires, Now the Green Blade Rises (Norton, 2002)

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4. The photograph "Grassbook," "a book of poetry coverd in Indoor/Outdoor turf with the words 'you're invited'" is a www.sxc.hu royalty free photograph by Steven Parry of Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. I thought that Walt Himself would like it...