Janus-post: look both ways

Why do you feel that it is important that commercial fiction receive critical attention?

Jodi Picoult: Because historically the books that have persevered in our culture and in our memories and our hearts were not the literary fiction of the day, but the popular fiction of the day. Think about Jane Austen. Think about Charles Dickens. Think about Shakespeare. They were popular authors. They were writing for the masses.

vs.

Appreciation! Recognition! is Jove appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of his great allegory--the world? Then we pigmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended. 
--Melville to Hawthorne, in reply to a letter about Moby Dick, long considered a failure

"Thank goodness you're a failure--it's why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you--look at the successes. Would you be one, on your honour?” 
--Henry James, The Ambassadors

Good-by to all that--

Yesterday, the day of sad news and the giant Winnebago stuffed with yipping dogs (alas, parked directly in front of my house, which stands, like many old village houses, rather close to the street) is done. Heralded by two hungry cats kneading my prone and possibly edible body, one barking dog and many cheeping sparrows hopping about from the dripping giant rugosa to the hunch-backed lilac, the new day has begun. It's full of little creatures not bothering to think about matters of death and life, not worrying their brains about selves or fictional worlds (or, if one makes sub-worlds, whether the world-building is properly established) or even (save us!) genres or marketing and promotion.

No, they tear the world into little chittering bits; they bark it and miaou it with cheer. I like this washed, broken world. It has filled my head with rain and the confused movement of leaves in morning breeze. In a moment, I shall go out and navigate my way between raindrops--

Internal exile

What I find interesting this morning:

Writing is a temporary surcease from exile. It is not a search for one’s "voice" or "subject"; it is not the invention of a "self" nor even of a "world." These are the concoctions of critics, who study the scattered places where the writer momentarily relented from his unrelenting search for some place to relent from his unrelenting search. The word writing is a progressive verb. The writer is distinguished by his progressive activity, not by what he has written. Nor by the kinds of things he has written. Someone who has written stories is not necessarily a writer, nor is someone who hasn’t.  --D. G. Myers 

I'm feeling a little obsessed with Myers because he makes remarks that have little thorny hooks that catch and stick in the mind. He has no business latching onto my brain that way--or maybe that is exactly his business, maybe that's what he's for... at least in part.

 There's much that is interesting in that passage and about the bond between writers and the idea of exile, but what I'm thinking about right now is "exile" as starting in early childhood. For a while, I was going to call The Throne of Psyche after a short poem, "The Exile's Track," and I have had a strong feeling of being exiled since about the age of four. First there was a feeling of exile from family, of things being sigodlin, askew because of a death. Then there was the constant ripping away, at least every three years, from the place I knew and where I had made friends. And this was particularly acute in my second and third moves, when I was dragged out of fairyland, as I conceived it, in the form of crawfish and Cajun playmates and tropical blooms and shrimp and alligator turtles and moonvines. We moved from Gramercy to Baton Rouge, but there was much that I loved there as well. But after second grade I was dragged entirely out of Louisiana and the South. I wept with relief and joy when, at almost 13, they told me we were moving to North Carolina.

After a while, one is always a little uneasy, or balanced somewhere between a past and a future uneasiness. And that's not what Myers is talking about, but it's related.

If a writer ever felt completely at home in a tale and satisfied, he would then have found home and would never need to progress again. Instead, writers are all melancholy around the edges, even the happiest of them, because they can never pluck the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun and are condemned to go on wandering with Aengus, endlessly searching, endlessly almost capturing, endlessly letting go.

Or perhaps we are like Odysseus, wandering on, creating a kind of archipelago of islands, temporary stays. Maybe we are Penelope, endlessly working over her strange warp and weft, throwing the shuttle--always tearing down, never satisfied, never quite at home even though at home.

No wonder all stories seem to herald an arrival or demand a departure...

Fool party

After yet another five hours spent in ferrying two children and then waiting in Oneonta while they drove around with Ted of Baxter's driving school, I am ready to party! Being a writer and hence capable of large amounts of peculiar behavior, I am working on the poems in The Book of the Red King for my reward. That means I am revising some, tossing some, slightly tweaking others, and patting a few on the head with no change. Here's one, the first of thirteen that appeared in At Length in the past year. (More poems here. It's easy to see an alchemical influence in this group.)

DEFINITION OF FOOL

What does it mean to be a fool?

Is it to reel about the world
Like stars made out of icicles,
Dangerous and breakable?

What does it mean to be a fool?

Is it to make the things no one
Can recognize or put to use?
For the beautiful, for hurt joy?

He spins around, wanting to learn.

The Fool is dreaming that he lies
With truth—across a grave like glass
He lies, the shaft shoaling with leaves.

What can he do with schooling dark?

Each minnowed leaf says leave-taking.
He shakes his rattle at the dark
And fills his antic hat with leaves.