The Impossible Master

Ah, another candidate for Shakespeare! The more the merrier—back in high school I scribbled a paper about Shakespeare “really” being the Earl of Oxford. And I thought that it mattered for a few addled days.

It appears that we still can’t believe that an Elizabethan of middling rank and moderate education—though how many of us these days have even “small Latin, and less Greek”?—might actually wield a pen with lightning power. Nor can we fathom that imagination might allow him free access to both hovel and throne room.

Perhaps it is our day that blinds us; after all, we invented the worship of celebrity, and our latest awards are the “Quills,” given not to the best but to the bestselling writer. We grow unaccustomed to the idea that a potent writer might be a person of some modesty, and that he might stand with humility before the mysteries of life and death. Humility, despite all mastery…

And so we find it impossible that such a person—having dipped his feathered pen in an immortal ink bottle—could retire from London and choose a village life with what was left of his family. We find it difficult to conceive that he might very well have been taught by his own words that both kings and commoners end in a handful of dust, and that he might have left The King's Men and departed for a country life “in content / To liberty, and not to banishment.”

The Book Tour as Acorn-Strewing

I wish Some Bright Official Bookperson would decide “once and for all”—and especially for me—what works and what doesn’t work to get the word out about books and to build that highly desirable and seaworthy vessel, a readership. Heaps of recent articles and blog posts have argued that the institution of the Book Tour is hoary, unpleasant, and a waste of time for any but those who are promoted mightily. This is something that a writer not receiving a solid “push” (i.e. one of the 98 or 99% of us) sometimes feels while on a tour, especially in its boggier moments, so it has an unpleasant whiff of truth about it. But just when I decide that I’ll be like Anne Tyler and forget the whole unwieldy abandon-the-three-kids-to-Daddy enterprise, along comes Miss Snark with a post about her Acorn Academy.

What’s an author to do?

For now, ignore. The rampant confusion may go away.

I’m feeling pleased with the week so far, as Monday-Wednesday brought these developments: 1. I found my name on one dedication page; 2. I was asked to write a book; and 3. I have fresh reason to feel good about my newest editor. 3 for 3. Not bad.

"Our Absolutely Deplorable Literary Situation" & Other Thoughts of a Man of Letters

"In saying that our literature must separate itself from the book and magazine industry of the metropolitan Northeast, what I mean is that it has got to be able to function on terms that do not require it to compete with the commercial mass market expectations of the entertainment industry, centered as the latter are on the television audience. The only way to arrange that is to operate independently of it. And that cannot be done as things now stand, because the two industries, publishing and showbiz-TV, are too massively and intricately tied together up and down the line.

"To state the proposition in book-business terms, obviously considerably more money is to be made from promoting a book so that it will sell 100,000 copies instead of 25,000, than from promoting a book so that it will sell 10,000 copies instead of 5,000. No publishing house, especially if owned by a conglomerate, is going to try to do both. That is why the deck is now so cruelly stacked against literary publishing. What the future welfare of our literature depends upon is the kind of book publishing that will concentrate on doing the latter rather than the former.

"It comes down, then, simply to this: so-called print culture must be removed from the auspices of the TV-centered mass entertainment industry. It is too valuable to be allowed to go by default--which is what seems to be happening now. We are letting it dwindle away toward oblivion. It does not follow, either logically or practically, that because many more people regularly watch Geraldo than read Annie Dillard or Mark Helprin, literature is therefore doomed. But when we allow the same industry to preside over the promulgation, distribution, and critical evaluation of all three, as if they were equally engaged in showbiz, how much chance do the latter two have?

"We have therefore got to sever the financial bands that have connected contemporary letters with the popular entertainment industry and let literature flourish on its own, as the product of literary folk writing for a literary audience."

--Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog: On Writers and Writing (Columbia: University of Missouri, October 2005)

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On matters of writing or publishing or writers-and-academia, it's always good to listen to Louis Rubin. He's the founder of the writing program at Hollins, the University Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Chapel Hill, mentor of many Southern writers, and the founder and former president of Algonquin Books. He is the author of some fifty books, including his recent My Father's People: A Family of Southern Jews, and he has received many, many awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle.

The book is elegant, with a reproduction of Carroll Cloar's Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog opposite the title page and on the jacket. And I am thrilled, tickled, and all-around surprised and abashed to be on the dedication page...

Table of Contents

1 The Ordeal of Unconstant Moose
2 On the Literary Uses of Memory
3 Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog: A Time, A Place, A Painting
4 Thoughts on Fictional Places
5 Questions of Intent: Some Thoughts on Author-ship
6 Bloom's Leap: Or, How Firm a Foundation
7 What Are All Those Writers Doing on Campus?
8 The Progress of Poetry: Or, a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Bookstore
9 Slugging It Out with Dempsey and Others
10 Polemical Coda: Our Absolutely Deplorable Literary Situation--
and Some Thoughts on How to Fix It Good

Malania Book Launch & the Templeton Pumpkin Festival

The shameless Sunday book-flogging for my little old lady friend, Fae Malania, went off very well. I found homes for all 60 of the books that I'd ordered, and I even sold most of her author copies. By the time the stragglers show up, we'll go over 70.

It was a peaceable, teetotaler's party--and much cheaper than champagne for 100--your basic C & T plus cake. I ordered a Gargantua-sized cake with yellow roses and an icing book on top with the sugary words, The Quantity of a Hazelnut by Fae Malania--made by an enterprising Templetonian baker--plus pots of red and white cyclamen and ornamental peppers from the Farmer's Market. And those went home with a few of the many people who have helped Fae.

There is a perfect riot of confusion in my brain about the money in little baggies and the checks, but I suppose it will be sorted out before long. Some have not paid but have taken a book. Some the reverse. Some didn't show but reserved... Sigh. I do not like to play accountant, extortionist, and delivery girl.

I celebrated book-launch success by taking my youngest to the second day of Pumpkinfest. Yesterday we saw Merdwyn the Mediocre do his famously mediocre magic show at the Doubleday Field. My son got him in a corner (difficult in an open-air festival) and talked candy and magic and other important topics at him until he begged us to go.

We inspected the giant pumpkins, including a 1,407.3-pound winner. That's one thousand four hundred and seven pounds, plus. Or as my third-grader says, poring over the problems in expanded form: 1,000 + 400 + 7. I don't know what he'd do with the smidge left over. I don't think he does expanded-form-with-fractions as yet.

Each of the four mega-pumpkins on stands in front of the Doubleday Field gates broke the New York state record. Which just goes to show that a little sunshine--what marvelous weather we have had this year--helps with all kinds of expanded form. I could deal with weather like this year round. If it was up to me, I would deal with weather like this year round. Most Templeton summer mornings I get up, put on a sweater, and lodge two or three complaints before breakfast. Some fall mornings, I put on snow boots and the giant down blueberry. It's so big that it stands up by itself and sticks its arms out. More expanded form at work.

Here is something I learned at Pumpkinfest: grossly fat pumpkins look just as weird and astonishing as grossly fat people. I thought my Southern cohorts might not know that, and it's an interesting fact. We have the spectacle of 450-pound humans pretty much everywhere these days, but it's not so often that we see a really excessive pumpkin down South... Pumpkin giants flop as they grow, lose their flower ends and umbilicals in wells of flesh, and sprout stretch marks.

In today's installment of pumpkin mania, my son played silly games and had his picture taken while sitting inside a pumpkin, next to a Grumplie, an equally large pumpkin carved in high relief. Sour-faced: hence, Grumplie. Our favorite part was watching the Catskill Puppet Theatre do "Hiawatha" with rod puppets; we'd seen the show once before, but one of us was only a toddler and didn't recall.

Alas, we missed the Regatta, though we did go and inspect the wet pumpkin boats behind the Lake Front Motel.