Carolina picks

J. Peder Zane, books editor of The Raleigh News & Observer, has published a new column, Books on the Tar Heel Mind: 32 writers of our region weigh best fiction of the past 25 years, that defends "lists" while it takes a jab at the "parochialism" of the recent New York Times list of "the best" fiction of the past 25 years.

I had the fun of being a pick--or perhaps I should say, one quarter of a pick--as well as the fun of being asked to contribute a pick. It is pleasant not to be wholly forgotten at home, even when one has been dragged away to a Yankee snow drift. The heat kicked on this morning. That's June 12th. It has been known to snow here in July...

Here's the pick:

A final tossup

Louis D. Rubin Jr., the distinguished writer and founder of Alqonquin Books of Chapel Hill, refused to play favorites -- at least not absolute favorites.

"It really isn't possible for me to select a best novel of the last 25 years," he says. "I'd have to choose between Clyde Edgerton's 'Raney' (1985), Lee Smith's 'The Last Girls' (2002), Jill McCorkle's 'Ferris Beach' (1990) and Marly Youmans' 'The Wolf Pit' (2001). How could I possibly do that? Of course I'm biased! And I'm probably forgetting someone."

And here's my choice:

* "Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, and Memoir" (1998).

"Measured by my desire to reread, Welty's stories reign. ... I knew the stories in high school, and had the scary thrill of eating lunch with their sharp-witted author at college. And all these years later, I still want to go hunting for a drowned bride with William Wallace and to sit on a stile in the rain with Virgie Rainey, listening to the magical beat of the world." -- Marly Youmans.

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I am the only non-Algonquin writer of that foursome... I have a wide, deep respect for Louis Rubin--a writer of fiction and nonfiction, a critic, founder of the Hollins College writing program, holder of a chair at UNC, and founder of Algonquin Books.

Take a look at the list before it vanishes into archives. It's fun to see what the "picks" are. Mine was the first Library of America volume awarded to a living U. S. writer.

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I know the eminent Mr. Keillor does not waltz by the Palace at 2:00 a.m. However, the e-aetherial plaints and comparisons emitted by the Palace may have wafted west and touched his tender sensibilities, because on the morning of the 13th, he read a poem by Yeats and one by Wilbur. No dull professors drinking coffee and reading the newspaper with a dog. No women having to pee while chatting on the phone. No lack of music and general scratchiness on the ear. Hooray!I hope he'll have a greater number of contemporary poets who have a love for singing-school in the future.

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The picture above is from Laurelines, the blog of Laura Murphy Frankstone (Creative Commons license). And it's a writer's cabin--once belonging to playwright Paul Green--now ensconced in the botanical gardens at Chapel Hill. I often paused there, and my children always loved to peek into the loft and run in and out the doors. I love the shimmery light on the tin roof in this drawing.

As you can see--or not see--that's a complete fiction because the Blogger image upload has been ailing lately, and at the moment it's as dead as a crooked old roofing nail. You'll have to imagine it, visit Laura, or wait until Blogger rises from its sickbed--and then I shall add the playwright's cabin. Picture anon, I hope.

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.

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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...

Pontificatory Palace, etc.

The Palace at 2:00 a.m.
menu du jour:

1. small pontification
of the Beggar Queen,
pontificated over laundry--
possibly ridiculous,
as is the wont of
pontifications

2. poem with God and also
an unexpected zipper

3. lunar Rilke, without glowworms

not 4. I am desolate: we are all out of the wild boar pâté de campagne.

yes 4. haywire credit
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1.
In between bouts of laundry, I’ll be working on a longish novella today. This morning I’ve been mulling about how few people there are who see a thing whole for what it is, and not for how it deviates from some set template of the thing—a “poem,” a “story,” a “novel”—already implanted. This lack of freedom goes for writers and readers, editors and reviewers.

And that idea of a template… How quickly one settles and solidifies in the mind! A story can be perfectly satisfactory—indeed, superior of its “kind”—and yet not fully satisfy because it has not gone beyond the maker’s own prior sense of what “story” is and can be. In a particular story, that may mean that he has not gone beyound his mental construct of what a character is, what a shape is, what causality is: any number of elements.

Those leaps beyond what has been imagined in the writer’s past and into some newness carry with them blood and vigor and electricity that convey fresh life to the story. The little trodden world already created in past stories is a world where the writer is entirely too cosy. The inner landscape of the writer herself needs to be transformed before the work gains newness of life. And I imagine that is true in all the arts, whether one is a painter or choreographer or poet or some other permutation of the artist.

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2. NeoVictorian / Cochlea just picked up the only poem in the universe that contains both God and a zipper, "Dream of a Waltz with God." Perhaps there is another... And yet I doubt it. If there is, it couldn't possibly fool around with waltz rhythms as well. I gather that after print publication, it will appear on the website.

The above makes me feel virtuous, because I finally sent out a couple of those little envelopes stuffed with poems--something that I detest doing. Needful for a book-to-come, yes, but an annoying frittering of time.

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3. From today's reading--
Uncollected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke,
selected and translated by Edward Snow
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986)

Forget, forget, and let us live now
only this, how the stars pierce through
cleared nocturnal sky; how the moon's whole disk
surmounts the gardens. We've sensed so long already
how the darkness breeds many mirrors: how a gleam
takes shape, a white shadow in the radiance
of night. But now let us cross over
and invest this world where
everything is lunar--

Paris, early summer 1909

And isn't it lovely to be Rilke in 1909 at this particular moment, when fragrance is rising from the gardens and a single star is jumping a hurdle and falling, falling, falling with a splash that breaks up the moon caught in a distant fountain?
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4. The photograph of book browsers at Haye on Wye was taken by Anne Koth of Dresden, Germany, www.sxc.hu.

Baroush Baroush

I just opened up the Penguin Young Readers Group catalogue for fall, and I'm pleased to find a double page spread in the Firebird section for The Curse of the Raven Mocker and Ingledove, just after one for Diana Wynne Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. The books look lovely and have fine quotes and are clearly distinguished as "American" in mode, something that I hoped to see. If you'd like to see for yourself, hop over to the e-catalogue and skim along until you reach pages 68-69.

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I've been a bit lax about the blog, because I haven't been lax about my three children, N.'s multiple 9th birthday celebrations, N.'s recycle tiger project, the still-forthcoming will-it-ever-end end of school, the summer schedule, and writing. I'm making the O. V. A. not to spontaneously combust. That's Old Valiant Attempt. Ought to be a Wodehouse acronym, really. Be a good egg and pretend it is, will you?

In other breaking news: N., among other delightful gifts, received additions to the current menagerie. (Thank you, very much, Dr. Laurie. I really needed two more pets that poop.) We now have two Russian (and never, ever rushing) tortoises. The tiny gentleman tortoise, named by N., is Baroush Baroush. After this important decision was made, N. graciously allowed his elder sister to name the much larger lady tortoise. She is now known as Louise Louise. Louise Louise is a real hog on grapes, carrots, and lettuce, and in general manages to keep her mate on the small side by kicking him ever-so-slowly away from the food that she is gently, steadily devouring.

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