Monthly Archives: September 2012

September 29, 2012 · 7:22 pm

“When he hath tried me I shall come forth as gold.”–Job, Kurt Vonnegut, and “Breakfast of Champions”

To start with the boring stuff and get it out of the way first, here’s what I had for breakfast today.  I have it for breakfast six days a week, and on the seventh, I have some version of scrambled eggs (or fried eggs) and toast:

1 cup fat-free plain yoghurt, 5 strawberries sliced, 1/2 banana sliced, 1 Tablespoon peanut butter, cinnamon, 2 packets Splenda, 1 cup sugar free Langer’s pomegranate juice.

Here’s what I usually have for lunch, unless it’s a day when we haven’t cooked beans, in which case I have some sort of sandwich (an egg sandwich if I didn’t have eggs for breakfast):

2 scoops of beans, cooked with fragments of red and green bell peppers or carrots, and onions.  4-6 wheat crackers.  Water.  (Alternate days are sometimes big chef salad and croissant days, rarely).

For dinner, I have various things, no red meat usually:

1 green vegetable, steamed without sauce but with some salt added after cooking, 1 yellow or white vegetable with margarine or 1 cup pasta with red sauce, 1 3-4 oz. serving of fish, chicken, or turkey.  (On alternate weekends, I have one pizza with veggies meal.)

After dinner:  1 apple or orange, average size.

My constant struggle:  to avoid salty snacks and to try to limit desserts with meals.

That was the boring part, and now it’s over.  But is it?  Kurt Vonnegut and his spokesman Kilgore Trout from Breakfast of Champions say “No.”  I picked up the book today to look for the section which has stuck in my mind all these years (and I won’t say exactly how many) since I first read the book at 21.  The section of the book I’m referring to is the section in which Kilgore Trout is sitting in a pornographic film theater and he imagines the subject of a new book while he is sitting.

The story he imagines takes place on “a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids.  The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.”  When a human astronaut comes to this planet, they give him a big feast, but of course the food is execrable.  Their dinner table conversation is about censorship, of all things.  Their whole city is innundated with “dirty movie” houses.  The residents of the planet want to put the theaters out of business without limiting free speech.  So far, it sounds like a real-life script we’re familiar with.

But when the astronaut goes with his hosts to see a movie presentation “As dirty as movies could get” on his own home planet, Earth, what he sees is something he would never have predicted.  I quote at length:

“So the theatre went dark and the curtains opened.  At first there wasn’t any picture.  There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers.  Then the film itself appeared.  It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear.  The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva.  He took his time about eating the pear.  When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focused on his Adam’s apple.  His Adam’s apple bobbed obscenely.  He belched contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the planet:  The End.”

“It was all faked, of course.  There weren’t any pears anymore.  And the eating of a pear wasn’t the main event of the evening anyway.  It was a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.”

“Then the main feature began.  It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat.  They ate steadily for an hour and a half–soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie.  The camera rarely strayed more that a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s apples.  And then the father put the cat and dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too.”

“After a while, the actors couldn’t eat anymore.  They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed.  They could hardly move.  They said they didn’t think they could eat again for a week, and so on.  They clearred the table slowly.  They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.”

“The audience went wild.”

The astronaut, Don, goes outside only to find food whores on the sidewalk, who offer real food goods that aren’t actually obtainable on that planet.  The “humanoids” say that a whore could take him home and cook expensive petroleum and coal products for his consumption, “[a]nd then while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.”

Though every blurb on the book and every reviewer I’ve run across mentions Vonnegut’s great satirical and comic status, what really stuck in my mind about this particular part of Breakfast of Champions was how painfully close it is to a future we are really threatened by, and it’s close on several levels.  Firstly, the point about pollution is even more well-taken now than it was when Vonnegut published this book, back in the early 70s.  Secondly, we are exploiting all of our natural resources at such an alarming rate that it has finally become a real issue in a presidential election coming up this fall, and though it has been mentioned in previous years, now it is serious as it has never been before.  We have invented so many of the necessities of our lives from petroleum and coal that we can almost imagine an earth fated to subsist on them entirely.  We no longer have the illusion that our earthly goods are unlimited.  Thirdly, we are in a season of despair and frenetic groping after the subject of love itself–not only do we look to movies, television shows, and various kinds of shrieking publicity to obtain our love from others, both “brotherly” love and sexual/passionate love, but we are involved in intricate dances of love and hate with figures in the public eye through various media outlets.  Finally, and perhaps most tellingly for Vonnegut’s satire, much of the world is starving right now, in their own countries from famine and drought, in other countries in refugee camps, and in all sorts of bad weather conditions which have, in turn, caused the food shortages we are suffering from.  So, through global warming the satire circles back upon itself here.

My point about Vonnegut’s book, if anything, is that even just that one part of his satire which I am claiming for my inspiration today–and the whole book is full of such moments of self-recognition with only a slight wry twist for fantasy’s sake–is more than enough to ensure that though Vonnegut died a few years back on April 11, 2007 and before that lived an event- and trauma-filled life, he can justifiably say, with Job, “When he hath tried me I shall come forth as gold.”  The quote from Job appears at the beginning of Breakfast of Champions.

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September 28, 2012 · 4:11 pm

“To correct an error and rectify a fault….”

This post is put up basically to correct an error I made a day or three ago, and to rectify a possible fault.  In writing about Richard Bausch’s novel Peace, and a short story of his, “Something Is Out There,” I passed along my misunderstanding that Caroline’s site “Beauty Is A Sleeping Cat” was already finished with its Literature and War Readalong for 2012.  In actual fact, that readalong is still going on; Caroline is writing about the Bausch novel Peace starting September 28, 2012.  The next novel to be read will be one by Maria Angels Anglada titled in English The Auschwitz Violin.  That part of the readalong starts on October 29th, 2012.  My apologies to Caroline for giving readers of mine and readers we may share a mistaken impression.

The possible fault I wish to rectify is only a potential fault, though I understand that it concerns important issues.  When I read the two works I covered by Richard Bausch, what I was struck by was the coincidence of structure, theme, and weather cues in two forms as different as the novel and the short story.  It’s not that I was unaware of the issue of the moralities (or lack thereof) of war, simply that I was writing about a different issue as it is reflected in fiction.  Still, I have read Caroline’s most recent post today on her site about just the novel, Peace, and she is greatly concerned with the morality of the book, and I understand her concern.  My comments on her site, should she accept them, should provide further apologies for not having discussed, perhaps just in passing, these issues relating to what soldiers actually are called upon to do in wartime, and the suffering of both soldiers and especially civilians in WW II, with emphasis on pogroms and mass executions.

Caroline is a worthy correspondent and commentator and her site is immensely valuable for its learning and acceptance of many different world literatures.  Again, my apologies for not having given correct information and for perhaps appearing to neglect important literary features.  I’m not sure I’ve got down the principles correctly of doing a pingback or a backlink, but I’m going to try:  see this link for Caroline’s site and her posts on Literature and War 2012.

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September 27, 2012 · 4:14 pm

“We all have the strength to endure the misfortunes of others.”–La Rochefoucauld

In a general way, the short story I will be writing about today, Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson,” is about the reverse side of “endur[ing] the misfortunes of others,” which is what the mostly unseen rich white people in the story do; it is about learning to think beyond one’s own advantage and gain the ability to form strong bonds with others for political and social purposes.  Yet, grouped around the main adult figure in the story (a college-educated, “properly” taught member of the African American community named “Miss Moore”), the children in the story compete, and riotously and in laughter bring about the minor misfortunes of the other children, their friends, by jeering at them, engaging in physical displays of hostility, taking things away from them and so on and so forth.  Which is to say, they are acting like many a child in many a place and time.  But their time and place happens to be New York City, in some place near or like Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant (where Bambara herself grew up), and they are bored, antagonized, and sometimes puzzled by the class and ethnic consciousness which Miss Moore is trying to teach them.

Miss Moore does not give many lessons an outright exegesis, of course; rather, she confronts the children with the situation as it is and allows them to draw their own conclusions.  As children, they often are sidetracked by side issues and unimportant details, or at least by non-essential features of the scene.  And yet, when she takes them to view the large toystore F. A. O. Schwarz on Fifth Avenue, they all seem to understand the lesson, even when its main outcome is that they are frustrated by what they learn:  the cost of a simple model sailboat at this elite toystore is enough to allow their families many necessary items of daily existence.

Though the children are allowed to give the five dollars to the cab driver and retrieve the change (which Miss Moore never asks them for) and two of them keep it defiantly after she has had her chance at impressing them with what they need to overcome to be equal citizens, it is in fact possibly this defiance itself–though wrong-headed in this instance, since it is aimed at Miss Moore, who is their mentor and wants them to succeed–which will give them the energy and knowledge and strength to defy what is oppressing them.  Sugar, when asked for her conclusions about the toystore, comes out with the knowledge of what they’ve seen, which causes her to say “‘[T]his is not much of a democracy if you ask me.  Equal chance to pursue happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?'”  Sylvia, the main character, is just as cognizant of the lesson implied, but she spends her time trying to impede Sugar from articulating the truth by standing on Sugar’s foot while Sugar attempts to answer Miss Moore.  She even ends by rejecting Sugar’s peace offering to share the extra cab money they’ve scored by refusing to make friends again.  Still, her energy and strength are the two other components I’ve enumerated which can help the children, and she races away from Miss Moore and Sugar and thinks to herself, “‘[A]in’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin.'”  Thus, she too has absorbed “the lesson,” though her reaction to it is not to take the rest of the money and derive what small advantage the day allows.  Instead, she proposes to go “to the West End and then over to the Drive to think this day through.”

We see therefore that Sugar, who has the correct intellectual answer to the problem, yet decides to take the rest of the day as a sort of holiday from further thought about the situation while enjoying the benefits of the money she so seldom has at her disposal, while Sylvia is planning for the future, though at first she was not willing to be cooperative with Miss Moore to the point of answering her intelligently.  She may or may not be partially right to suspect the path of learning Miss Moore has taken, yet it is from Miss Moore’s perspective the right thing to do for her to help out her own community by making things for them, doing things for them, and going about enlightening their children about the “something better” which nearly every human soul not especially blessed by fate and fortune wishes for.  The misdirected hostility of the children towards her “lessons” is in fact possibly derived from a suspicion of lessons which others, seemingly built on the same model as Miss Moore (though perhaps whites or consdescending fellow African Americans), may have articulated.  The children must thus decide for themselves which models are true to the heart and which are “false leaders.”  Toni Cade Bambara is quoted by Ann Charters as saying of herself, “While my heart is a laughing gland and my favorite thing to be doing is laughing so hard I have to lower myself on the wall to keep from falling down, near that chamber is a blast furnace where a rifle pokes from the ribs.”  In this story, we see both the laughter of the children and their rough play with one another, and the “blast furnace” and “rifle” which are at the source of their reactions.

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September 25, 2012 · 8:52 pm

Richard Bausch and open-endedness in fiction–in “Peace” and “Something Is Out There.”

A few weeks ago, I commented on short stories in general that they often have a surprise ending, and that this is characteristic of the short story form.  While this is more true than not of the traditional short story, in some short forms (such as Richard Bausch’s short story “Something Is Out There,” the title story of a 2010 collection by the same name) the seemingly truncated surprise or what is often called the “open-endedness” which has become a regular feature of novel writing these days is followed, and a prime example of that quality in fiction is evidenced in another Bausch work, his 2008 novel Peace.

There are other similarities as well between the two works, not only in the way they are put together, but in narrative voice and setting/climate of the action.  The narrative voice in Peace is faintly reminiscent in its restraint of Ernest Hemingway at his best, though we fortunately escape from the sometimes chicken-playing maudlin tough guy attitude of the main characters in Hemingway’s war novels, which appears to some extent even in the war novel which I personally believe to be his best, For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Though the lofty grandeur of Hemingway one-liners is also missing, in its place in Peace we have what seems a more honest approach to the subject of war from the point of view of a corporal named Marson and two privates in Italy in WWII who are charged with going forward over a mountain to ascertain where the enemy is and in what number.  They are guided by a possibly disloyal Italian guide, and have also to contend with a sniper somewhere in the dismal, wretched winter forest around them.  In “Something Is Out There,” a Virginia family is weathering a winter snowstorm too, after their male breadwinner has been shot off the roof by a former business partner.  In this fiction, the part of the “sniper” is played by the fears they suffer while waiting for a cousin to come through the storm to celebrate Christmas with them, not only because he is late, but because they keep getting calls and an unknown visitor comes, all wanting to speak to the father, who is in the hospital.  The mother of the family, Paula, plays the role of the commanding presence which is analogous to the role played by Corporal Marson in Peace.  Both must defend the others grouped around them, and just as the soldiers in the novel are all unashamedly afraid of dying, so the family with perhaps equal cause feels hunted by what they fear may be lurking in the winter landscape around the house in which they are gathered.  Both the soldiers in the forest and the family in the snowed-in house are plagued not only by the weather, but by uncertainty and the elemental forces around them.  The soldiers don’t know if they are being followed or not, and have to contend with hearing shots in the night without knowing at first who is shooting or being shot; the family in the house is waiting for their family member Christopher to arrive in his Jeep, and is speculating whether the father who was shot is involved in illegal business; both the soldiers and the family have to deal with repeated snowfalls or bad weather, and both are forced to function in the dark, the soldiers because they are out in the night forest, the family because they are in the middle of a power outage.  All of these things constitute similarities between the two stories.

Probably the most structurally interesting thing about the two fictions, however, is that both are left open-ended.  While not wanting to reveal the endings entirely, I can safely tell you that the soldiers go on being soldiers in the midst of conflict without playing out entirely all the different threads of plot which are provided them earlier on:  Marson comes to certain realizations and resolves, but he goes on being a soldier whose first mission is to kill the enemy.  The family members all do various things to make themselves feel safe, but even for Paula, the main character, there is no assurance that her solution is going to safeguard her family or the house:  there is not even an absolute confirmation that they are being rational instead of merely needlessly panicky.  The storm has in some sense dictated isolation, but their isolation is no assurance, since for all they know “something is out there,” the most primitive fear of humankind hidden in the “cave” of its fears.  In fact, it is the open-endedness of these two fictions which helps the reader identify with the fears felt by the characters in each case, fears which bring out basic character traits that sometimes lead to an inability to get along with each other and less frequently to a genuine sort of heroism.  And it is the open-endedness of real life, imitated fictionally here, which makes the two works so convincing and so capable of speaking to what we know of ourselves and others.

(I would like to reference Caroline’s blog Beauty Is A Sleeping Cat for her Literature and War Readalong 2012.  I was not able to get around to reading Richard Bausch in time to participate in her readalong, but her blog was the inspiration behind my getting the book Peace and reading it in the first place when I was able to, and also led to my checking out the book of Bausch’s short stories.)

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September 24, 2012 · 3:20 pm

Just what kind of bird was it? And what was the cat doing there?

Today, I read a new post by another blogger whose site has provided me with many pleasurable hours spent reading.  The blogger is Emma McCoy, and her blogsite, which I recently reviewed, is at http://emmamccoy.wordpress.com/ .  Today, Emma wrote about the problem of writer’s block, though she doesn’t dwell on that topic.  The main gist of her article is about how one can free up one’s mind with the process of free association (learned from psychology, a field in which Emma seems to be an expert).  Emma starts her own free association and lets it run for a while, letting us see openly just what some of her inner connections are within the topics her mind runs through.

This is significant to me right now because I’m in the process of working on my fifth novel and am stuck in place, having left off at the last point where I had anything to say and having been unable to pick up for about a week now.  So, following Emma’s example in my somewhat quirky way, I decided not to free associate, but to pull out a little poem of my own which stays in the back of my mind as a sort of chant, and which sometimes lures me back into the creation process when I find all else murky and dark.  Here it is:

“It flew over the fence without a word.

The heart of cat is caught by bird.”

This little poem comes up somehow in my mind every time I’m stuck, and I don’t even know why, but sometimes it helps me back into writing what I want to continue with.  Of course the bird “flew over the fence without a word,” it’s a bird, after all!  One has to posit a third actor, perhaps a human watching the bird-cat interaction; the knowledge of the cat’s overweening interest in the bird stirs in the human the idea that it’s not just the cat’s possibility of catching the bird that’s at stake here, but the fact that the sight of the bird twittering and dancing in the grass or on the fenceline, or pulling up a worm or sitting in a bush only seconds later perhaps to startle and fly away over the fence has captured the cat’s attention much more effectively than the cat could have caught the bird.  But this is to make prosaic a line or two of poetry (I know, it’s not great, but it is poetry).

So, the same thing goes for the writer and the reader both.  What catches the reader-as-cat’s attention is of course getting into the whys and wherefores of the story, the drama of the encounter depending upon explanations inasmuch as the explanations are the scaffolding of the dramatic encounter.  What the reader’s main attention is on, of course, is the actual interaction:  Does the cat leap?  Does the bird get away?  What does the cat do next?  Some of the details might be:  Just what kind of bird was it?  And what was the cat doing there?  Was it an outdoor scene entirely, with a real risk implied, or was Tabby an indoor cat watching from behind a picture window?  Fulfilling this sort of question-and-answer contract with the curiosity of one’s readers is akin to giving them a good scratch behind the ears (no condescension intended, it’s my cat-within-cat metaphor getting away from me) and a treat, and helping them to console themselves, perhaps, for not having seen the end of the story, that the bird would in fact fly over the fence and into other perspectives.

First, however, the initial cat/bird metaphor to be fulfilled is not the contract between writer and reader, but the contract between the writer and herself, to find a bird worth watching and a cat who just might leap, given the chance.  Lest you think I’ve wandered away from my basic metaphor again here, let me just say that it’s as you suspect:  before the bird can fly over the fence taking your heart with it, so must it do in analogous form for me.  I have to sit watching the bird through the window, preening my whiskers as I think of being able to knock it down and bite into that feathery mass.  But it has somehow to escape sucessfully from me, too:  it has to surprise me and catch me off guard and carry my own heart over the fence with it until I say, “Ah, yes, now that’s a bird after my own heart!”  For of course, it’s the old tale of “the one who got away” except that the tale itself is the point, and the tale comes not only from a capture, but from imagery and incident and detail and (here’s the tricky part) allowing the spirit to fly away over the fence, which is after all the essential part of what it is to be a cat watching a bird and feeling one’s own heart airborne as well.

This is my possibly pedestrian evaluation of one of my own poems, and how it recurs in my life at some of my trickiest moments of fiction writing.  I would love to hear from you about what gets your creative mind working.  Thanks to Emma for her free association, which you can see and respond to at her site, listed above.

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September 20, 2012 · 3:44 pm

On the subject of taking a few days off….but I’ll be back!

Dear Readers,

As John Keats has it, Autumn  is “the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”  Autumn, specifically September, is also the season when my much-beloved mother has her birthday.  So, from today until the end of the weekend, I will be away with family celebrating and making merry and also reflecting on much that has happened for our family during the time my mother has been alive.

Because my mother is blessed with a copious and fairly exact memory of past events, she not only always remembers others’ birthdays and important events, but she can also reconstruct what we did on that day twenty years ago, or thirty years ago, and can even come up with some of the conversations and debates of the time, not only on the national stage, which is a matter of public record (in case you suspect her of cheating by looking at an almanac or history book), but on that much smaller, more intimate and more significant for us personal stage which is the background for family acts and scenes.  She can tell us what her parents were doing and their activities for various dates and times, and she remembers what family traditions tell her was said and done at times before she herself was born.  In a way, it’s a shame that my mother is not the novelist herself, because she has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to family stories and quips and knowledge of the era she has been living in.

I, who am the novelist, have relied on my mother for the first complete reading of each and every novel I write.  When she likes something, I know I’ve put heart into my fictional world; when she questions the precision of something or doubts that it would happen that way, I listen to her fine realist’s sense of timing and actuality, though sometimes I do plead against her meticulous judgements; when she doesn’t feel that I’ve captured my audience’s attention, I know that I have more work still to do.  She is a business expert and has taught business classes, has an excellent sense of the economy and how things are going on the national stage, and brings this to what she reads as well.  I can get by with only so much writerly impressionism in these matters.  She calls me on outmoded devices I mention in my work, so that I either have to make a point of the characters’ using them as a deliberate plot device or characterization, or I have to update my reference.  All in all, she approaches being a sort of ideal reader who gets in behind the scenes and helps out, rolling up her sleeves to help wheel out the “stage scenery.”  She has helped with every novel I’ve written in these ways, in spite of the fact that I’ve written not one single mystery novel, her favorite category right now.

My mother and I spend a lot of time together doing what are fairly ordinary things:  sharing meals, visiting the library, shopping, going places in the car, planning family holiday events.  She has supported me through the most tumultuous and difficult times of my life, but has also done the same for other people, many other people, who are not her children; in this, she takes after her own mother and father, and she is justifiably proud of them as good parents and as good examples.  She has taken the more difficult road of opposing me when I have done or said things that are not only not for anyone else’s benefit, but also not even for my own, and has persisted in efforts to help me become a better person far beyond what most parents would feel called upon to do.  It’s a little odd to suggest that all this zealous effort and endeavor should be rewarded only at Christmas, Mother’s Day, and her birthday, the occasions when busy adult people usually find time to celebrate motherhood; so just let me say this:  Mom, you are the first face I saw with any degree of attachment, I know; you are the bearer of my lantern when the light at the end of the tunnel appears to have gone out; you are the inspiration for my continuing my own breath of life, and will always be, as I both encounter and remember the examples you have set me, though I may not be able to live up to them.  Happy Birthday, Mom!

I’m back on Sunday or Monday, readers!  (But I’ve plenty of posts that you may not have had a chance to read yet in the Archives, so feel free to browse while I’m away.)

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September 19, 2012 · 9:15 pm

“Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.”–Franklin P. Jones

In other words, as the quip above suggests, honest criticism can be hard to take from anyone.  Luckily for me, the sites I follow usually have something worthwhile, challenging, beautiful, or just plain interesting (that so totally non-descriptive word which is nonetheless accurate in this case)  to follow.  Today, I’m going to take the opportunity to mention six more sites which I enjoy, not all for the same reason and not all in the same way (i.e., some of them are more visual and others more wordsmithy).

djkeyserv140– http://djkeyserv140.wordpress.com/ .  This blogger prefers mystery, for the time being at least.  He or she is working on a fantasy/science fiction/RPG type novel, and periodically publishes posts on the actual construction and how it’s coming along, without however revealing the characters’ names or the specific content of the novel itself.  We must respond to a structural analysis appeal here.  These hints and glimpses are very tantalizing, combined with some of the remarks the blogger makes on other people’s sites about the practice of fiction.  I can’t wait until the final planned-for novel comes to light and I can actually read it.  I wait most impatiently.

Stephen Kelly Creative– http://stephenkellycreative.wordpress.com/ .  First of all, Stephen is a photographer based in San Francisco who has posted a whole series of wonderful slide shows of different surrealist and pop-surrealist painters, which are worth going to his site for even were there nothing else on the site.  He has featured Sergio Mora, Hsiao-Ron Cheng, Paul Barnes, Leonora Carrington, and Robert Deyber.  But that’s not all he has on his site.  There is also a Weekly Photo Challenge, an A-Z Challenge (in which the subject of the photo is initialized with a certain letter of the alphabet), and usually a few shots from another blog called “Ailsa’s Weekly Travel Theme” from Where’s My Backpack.  All photos are outstandingly beautiful and striking, while some are also just plain fun.  Stephen is appreciative of beauty, but not solemn or overawed in his attitude towards it.  On the blog as well is a copy of his resumé, which proves him to be a highly centered and creative individual in addition to his photographic skills.  He also writes columns for a couple of magazines.  Finally, he is currently participating in the Post-a-Day contest on WordPress.com for 2012.  As it looks now, not only will he keep the record, but he’ll do so thoughtfully, beautifully, and well.

The Saturday Morning Post– http://joeponepinto.com/ .  Joe Ponepinto, or Jpon as he signs himself, is a Book Review Editor for the Los Angeles Review who publishes a blogpost known as The Saturday Morning Post once a week (on–you guessed it–Saturday).  In it, he takes up stimulating and sometimes quandary-filled issues made to appeal to writers and considering their interests and concerns.  There is always a vital and informative discussion between him and his post readers, and one can learn much about everything from publishing to entering writing contests, to avoiding bogus book reviews, to how criticism itself is made and furthered.  He also has a companion site known as “Third Reader” where he offers editing and tutoring services.  This blog is one well worth one’s time and attention, as it is not only highly intelligent, but offers readers a sort of “insider’s track” to the publishing world.

Londoner’s Musings– http://scribedoll.wordpress.com/ .  This is a blog written by an erstwhile theatrical agent who has kept alive her literary contacts within the theater world, and has a lot to say on other literary issues and societal issues as well.  The first post of hers that I read was a delicately imagined and delightful piece on maintaining the cursive handwriting with pen (preferably with ink-dipped nibs); she herself has a neat script hand.  She has also covered issues such as “female solidarity,” the lovely tradition of church bells ringing in a town, and the sad passing of such places as “Dress Circle,” “a famous musical theatre shop” in Covent Garden.  Her category archives contain such headings as “Words and Civilization,” “Double Standards,” “Pet Hates,” “Odds and Ends,” and “Travel.”  She has a direct and decisive, no-nonsense voice, and yet can be very poetic in her musings.  Her site is definitely worth spending some time on.

Bertram’s Blog– http://ptbertram.wordpress.com/ Pat Bertram is a five-time author whose books (Light Bringer, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Grief:  The Great Yearning) are published by Second Wind Publishing.  Yet her site is far more than merely a forum for her book sales.  She writes about all aspects of the writerly challenge, from finding time to write to achieving discipline in one’s writing, to using Facebook and Twitter correctly, to one’s inner emotional relationship to one’s writing.  Pat has sadly lost her life partner within the last three years, and often mentions this without apology for the deflection into the personal tone, yet her matter-of-fact grief and acceptance of going forward are inspiring in themselves for others who grieve, for whatever reason.  This site is chockful of writerly topics, and offers a place where Pat’s readers can comment and compare notes on all the issues I’ve mentioned above, and then some.  Check out her site for all of these many features and reasons.

Emma McCoy’s Blog– http://emmamccoy.wordpress.com/ .  This is simply one of the most exciting sites I’ve come across in a while, and it’s mainly because of a complete eighty-five chapter novel of suspense and mystery called Saving Angels which is post in its entirety there.  At first, I was merely following the story along, but then signed up to follow the site, as it is also one on which intriguing short posts are stored.  Some of the posts are:  the importance of daydreaming to our creative minds; a movie review of a movie which seems rather chilling; some descriptions of what it’s like to write various stages of a book like Saving Angels; and lovely and evocative nature pictures.  Emma is shortly planning to publish her first novel on Amazon Kindle, but also she is engaged in experimenting with the finished first draft of a new book about a counselor who begins a relationship with a client.  Quite logically, it is titled Unethical.  I dont know about others following this site, though I have seen a few enthralled remarks from other readers, but I can hardly wait to read the second novel too.  Kudos, Emma!

These are the latest sites I’ve followed, and while some of them have been Freshly Pressed, not all of them have.  But each and every one fulfills some part of what I look to other sites for, whether it’s the analysis of the way literature works, what we live for, what we draw from experience for our works, or the lovely or funny things we see around us every day.  I hope that you will enjoy these sites too, and will visit them often.

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September 17, 2012 · 3:16 pm

“Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”–Jorge Luis Borges

As Jorge Luis Borges says, writing may be “nothing more than a guided dream,” but when one has issued this reductive-sounding remark about writing, a great deal more remains to be said.  What, for example, is a dream?  How does a dream inform and shape one’s writing?  And now, I’m going to babble forth another quote, which taken together with Borges’s, may tell us something of the true value of writing, if we are so disposed to see it:

C. G. Jung, the famous psychoanalyst, said of dreams:  “The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was a conscious ego and will be soul long beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”  So, if and while one writes, one is in touch with “primeval cosmic night,” and is revelling in the “most intimate sanctum of the soul”?

Everyone of course has dreams, not just writers, but both writers and non-writers have often been curious about just what makes writers tick, and if we want to spy on our own writing souls and those of others, one of the best places to look, it seems logical to assume, would be the dreams writers report having.  In 1993, Naomi Epel compiled a series of writers’ dreams called Writers Dreaming, consisting of the dreams and attitudes about dreams which twenty-six writers consider noteworthy or relevant to their waking and writing lives.  Though this book isn’t one of the most recently published of the books I’ve reviewed, it’s still available from Amazon.com, in collectable, new, and used paperback prices ranging from $5.96-.01 (plus shipping and handling).  (Don’t worry, I’m not shilling for Amazon:  but I paid $12.00 for my paperback edition originally, and I’m amazed that a print version of this worthwhile book is still available for such a low price.)

From Isabel Allende, we learn that she has often had very surrealistic dreams of soldiers (due partly, she seems to suggest, to being in Chile when there was war going on), dreams which have as much to do with her inner development as a person as they do with actual outside events.  We read from her that she has “inherited” a dream from her mother which her mother also dreamed in times of stress,  a dream in which she might be forced to decide which child of hers to save.  As well, she seems to have had some prophetic dreams, although she also recounts that this ability is not predictable, since not all disaster dreams of hers come true.  About the importance of dreams, she says, “They say that if you don’t dream you go mad.  That even dogs, animals dream.  I don’t know.  I think that it’s wonderful that one can dream.  The first thing my husband and I do in the morning when we wake up is tell each other what we dreamt.  It’s not that we sit there and analyze our dreams at all.  We don’t have time for that.  But we learn a lot about each other in this way.”

Richard Ford is of another mindset entirely about dreaming.  He says about metaphor, which is so often at its most alive and well in dreams, “I never try to make metaphors.  My flag is staked on the turf of the literal….I am always trying to bring literature down to the level below emblem knowing full well that it will perhaps become emblematic as soon as it leaves my room.”  From this view of the way writing works (which is certainly manifested in the way Ford writes), so comes his view of dreams:  “I don’t like thinking that what I write comes from or is synonymous to a dream.  I’ve heard writers speaking about novels as being extended dreams.  I don’t like that because dreams, to me, mean selfish gestures.  I like the other notion that literature is a gift from the writer to the reader….The teller must tell you something which she or he thinks you can use.  Not just to let you be the receptacle for all of his ups and downs and sins….I can’t think of any reason I should tell a dream to anybody that could be anything more to someone else than watching cartoons on Saturday morning.”  This is a succinct statement such as Richard Ford usually makes, and reveals something about him willy-nilly, though it is in the negation of dreams rather than in the acceptance of them.

Jack Prelutsky, primarily a children’s poetry author (though he has written a book for adults, There’ll Be a Slight Delay, and Other Poems for Grown-ups) recounts various dreams which have lead to poems, whether for children or for adults.   A particularly gifted writer in his field, Prelutsky relates several specific dreams and how they are related to his poems.  For example, he one day was shopping in the store for boneless chicken breast.  “I asked myself, what about the rest of the chicken.  Was that boneless too?  Well as soon as I thought of that I started asking questions about chickens.  I mean can a boneless chicken walk?  Can it fly?  What do the other chickens think about it?  Where does it make it’s [sic] home?  Does it have friends?  Can it walk erect?  I played with those ideas when I got home.  I went to bed and I actually dreamed about this….[F]rom this dream two poems have happened.  One is ‘Last Night I Dreamed of Chickens’ and the other is ‘Ballad of a Boneless Chicken.'”

As I said before, twenty-six writers of varying styles and subject matter are featured in this book, along with their remarks on dreams and dreaming and some of their favorite, most frequently occurring, or most significant or threatening dreams.  Some of the authors are:  Maya Angelou, Clive Barker, Spaulding Gray, Stephen King, Bharati Mukherjee, Anne Rice, Anne Rivers Siddons, Art Spiegelman, and Amy Tan.  All of them have fascinating stories to tell about their dreams, daydreams, and creative impulses.  But this is not just a “game” for the great notables and well-known writers.  Do you have a favorite dream or dreams that keeps recurring, has some special significance to your life, or has helped you to be creative and innovative in your waking life?  Is there one that you just consider weird and quirky, without having a clue as to what it means?  Why not write in and share it?  As long as you’re not writing the whole of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” I think I and my readers have plenty of time to hear it.  I certainly take a lively interest in dreams, so feel free to share.

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September 15, 2012 · 5:24 pm

“Where, oh where have the heroines gone?”

Today’s post is not so much about a specific story or stories as about a now 14 year old collection of stories about heroines from around the world collected by Kathleen Ragan, with a foreword by Jane Yolen.  The collection is entitled, Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters:  Heroines in Folktales from Around the World.  These folktales are not, however, so-called “chick lit,” and are opposed in every way to that concept.  They do not deal with women in reference to men, except as it is necessary not to leave out the other half of the human race:  the women are not gossipy gal pals seeking for husbands or passive ladies in castles waiting to be rescued, but are instead active instigators of their own future actions and constructors of their own fates.

As Jane Yolen points out in the “Foreword”:  “Hero is a masculine noun.  It means an illustrious warrior, a man admired for his achievements and qualities, the central male figure in a great epic or drama.  A heroine, on the other hand, is the female equivalent.  Or is she really his equal…?  We might as well have called her a hero-ess or a hero-ette, some kind of diminuitive subset of real heroes….Or so the Victorian folk tale anthologists would have had us believe.  They regularly subverted and subsumed the stories that starred strong and illustrious female heroes, promoting instead those stories that showed women as weak or witless or, at the very best, waiting prettily and with infinite patience to be rescued.  And the bowdlerizers did it for all the very best of reasons–for the edification and moral education of their presumed audiences.”  The enduring yet submissive model of womankind was of course the Victorian ideal, one which demanded that women leave to men all the decisive action.  These versions of womankind were passed down to women even as late as the 1950’s, when they appeared in some Disney cartoons in which the main drift of the heroine’s effort–and I use the word “drift” deliberately here– was to be rescued from a victimized status and fall into the arms of the rescuing prince.

In the “Introduction,” Kathleen Ragan tells how her search for books for her young daughter which featured true female heroes went (and in some quarters the term “heroine” has gone the way of “stewardess” and other words which are deemed antiquated).  They were reading a lot of Dr. Seuss at the time, but disturbingly in this great author’s works for children, Ragan began to find that there were almost no female role models, or at least none which were positive in nature.  She started by changing the pronouns when reading to her daughter, but this presented problems of its own, because with the astounding memory of children her daughter caught every mistake and slip-up.

Ragan then resorted to her local library, but had trouble there, too.  As she relates, “Although there were five to ten editions of ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘Snow White,’ and ‘Cinderella,’ each illustrated by a different person, there was a very limited depth to the stock of heroines in the library picture book collection….The current selection of fairy tales presented to children makes a sharp differentiation in the treatment of boys and girls.  The female role models are beautiful, passive, and helpless victims….Male role models include a range of active characteristics:  adventurous Jack the Giant Killer, resourceful Puss in Boots, the underestimated third son who makes the princess laugh, and the gallant knight who rides up the glass mountain.”  And when she did resort to anthologies of folktales, she found that “many of the women were negative characters:  a nagging mother-in-law who makes life intolerable even for the devil, a woman who personifies the misery in the world, or women who allow themselves to be mutilated by loved ones.”  There were also wicked witches and wicked stepmothers.  Ragan, taking her mission quite seriously, considered that it was time to fulfill a need, “the need for an anthology of folktales with positive women as the main characters.”

Ragan reviewed over 30,000 stories, and found positive heroines in tales from all over the world.  They had just become submerged.  “These forgotten heroines are courageous mothers, clever young girls, and warrior women; they rescue their villages from monsters, rule wisely over kingdoms, and outwit judges, thieves, and tigers….[A] female Prometheus brings navigation to Micronesia.  Seven Thai women, after severing the head of a monster, carry it for seven years to free their country of the monster’s curse.  A Cheyenne woman gallops into the thick of battle to rescue her brother.”  Ragan also mentions the original German edition of Grimms’ fairy tales (Kinder und Hausmärchen, published in 1812).  Among the tales in this collection, there is a Little Red Riding Hood who goes through the woods another time, encounters a second wolf, and “vanquishes this wolf herself.”

Ragan recounts how some people argue that gender doesn’t matter in a story, because the child reader will empathize with the hero or heroine.  But her anecdotal research suggested that the case was far otherwise:  regardless how gripping the story, both girls and boys identified with characters of their own sexes, no matter how miniscule a part that character or characters played in the action.  So, she kept up her search, assigning fairy tales a key role in her adult reading too, “because I felt that somehow they were meant to answer questions and fulfill a need.”  After reading through story after story, she finally concluded that characters didn’t have to be perfect in order the meet the readers’ empathetic needs:  “[I]t seemed to me that the heroines I chose no longer had to be perfect.  I found I could smile at a cantankerous character and admire her perseverance….I could even forgive myself for not becoming as patient or as beautiful as Cinderella.”

In choosing the tales, Ragan went for “source books” that were in English or had been translated into English.  This automatically meant that there were more stories available from countries that either still have or at some time in the past have had connections colonial or otherwise with England or North America.  She notes a certain “dearth” thus among the stories collected from “South American Indian” stories.  Nevertheless, the overall drive of the collection was to go for multiculturalism in the stories.  She has also tried to stick closely to the oral form the stories take, following the words and word choices of their tellers rather than tidying them up for a literary audience.  She followed several criteria relating to the choice of the stories themselves, one of which was quite interesting from a “victorious heroine” point of view:  her eldest daughter begged her not to include any stories in this collection in which the heroine dies at the end of the tale.  Though this may seem at first like an unfair limitation, ask yourself just how many heroes’ tales end with the hero dying without his subsequent being going on to grace the heavens, or figure as some important element in the biosphere, atmosphere, or other “heavenly” location, and chances are you won’t be able to think of many.

Ragan started out by observing heroines for a standard who were parallel in qualities to heroes, but soon at least some of her emphasis had changed.  “[A] whole new class of heroines emerged.  Some ‘heroines’ did things that resonated with my innermost feelings but that refused to be classified as heroic:  a woman who sensed the importance of an insignificant looking coin, a girl who loved to dance, or a woman who told a story.  A simple conversation between two women when taken at face value could elicit a shrug of the shoulders.  Yet underneath this ordinary conversation, the effort that women make to keep relationships alive in a family or community swells like the incoming tide.”

In quoting so extensively from this book’s “Foreword” and “Introduction,” I realize that I’ve done a lot for you of what you are perfectly capable of doing for yourself, assuming you have the book in hand.  Yet because it has been out since 1998 (published by W. W. Norton and Co.), and there is still sometimes a noticeable dearth of good collections of stories featuring strong women and girls as role models, I feel it’s important to let as wide an audience as possible know of this valuable effort in folklore research.  True, in the field of children’s books there has been a boom since 2000 in the more gender-free language and roles assigned characters in books, so that it’s easier for boys to admire girl characters as well as the tough-guy heroes they historically have admired; there are also more leading female and male role models which girls can imitate and still “feel like Mommy,” and thus not odd in any way (I’ve often thought that though children are credited usually with being highly creative and innovative, which they are, they are also nature’s conservatives in their views of which parent they want to imitate, and in a certain sense of individuals perhaps this is right, but in some ways it’s a shame.  A girl with an admirable, strong, outgoing father figure should be as free to imitate him as to imitate her shyer more reclusive mother; likewise, a boy who likes to tidy house or cook should be free to imitate whichever parent does this the most, without feeling peculiar).

You may wonder–or you may not, but I’m going to tell you anyway, I hope you won’t mind–which folktale was my favorite as I was growing up.  It was “Clever Gretel,” I think from the Grimms’ Brothers collection, though I’m not entirely sure.  It’s the story in which a servant girl manages not only to eat portions from the chicken her master, due to arrive any moment, is saving for a guest, but manages to persuade the guest due to the continuing of an initial misunderstanding that the host is going to chop off his limbs (she does this as she trims off each limb of the bird and eats it in the kitchen).  When the master comes home, she cleverly lets him think that the guest stole the bird, whereupon the master begins to pursue the already terrified and fleeing guest, and Gretel settles herself in the kitchen and finishes off the bird.  Another thing about children–their moral sense is still in development, so Gretel’s cleverness is far more appealing than her dishonesty is significant.  And another thing about me–I still consider the story my favorite!

Do you have a favorite folktale, about hero or heroine?  Feel free to mention it here, I’m not prejudiced!

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September 13, 2012 · 4:03 pm

Guy de Maupassant and obsessive states of mind

Guy de Maupassant is a writer for whom the states of mind of his characters are sometimes very important, whether they are apprehended from the outside or the inside of the character concerned.  To consider this point today, I would like to contrast two stories from Selected Tales of Guy de Maupassant which, though very different in nature, both show how adversely characters can be affected by negative or excited states of mind.  The first is “The Horla,” often interpreted as a simple ghost story about possession, and the second is “The Piece of String,” one of de Maupassant’s citizen peasant stories.

In both cases, the main characters are obsessed, but in different ways.  “The Horla” is written in the form of diary entries in the first-person by an unnamed person in comfortable circumstances with his own home and servants, and is thus subjective in form.  “The Piece of String” is told in the objective third-person voice about an unfortunate citizen peasant, M. Hauchecome, and what results from an encounter he has with an old enemy, M. Malandain.  Both main characters in both stories become obsessed by coincidences; in the first case (the unnamed diarist), these coincidences are things such as having seen a ship coming from Brazil in the harbor on the very day he becomes ill with “melancholy,” having read an article about a supposed vampire from Brazil, having watched a “doctor” hypnotize his cousin, and having a male servant in his absence fall ill from the illness which he himself seems free of as long as he is not at home.  Each and all of these things can be explained away, but the character takes them all together and concludes that he is more or less possessed by a demon spirit.  M. Hauchecome in “The Piece of String” starts out with a much simpler obsession:  he sees a piece of string in the street and due to his being “economical like a true Norman,” perhaps another sort of obsession, must bend and retrieve it.  His enemy M. Malandain, seeing him, and either hearing fortuitously of a missing pocketbook or just spreading gossip before the fact, sets it about that M. Hauchecome has found the pocketbook and not returned it.  The obsession of the writing character in “The Horla” is one for which there is no visible outside objective cause easily observable by others.  In “The Piece of String,” though there is only a preexisting interior conflict between the main character and his chief enemy to start with, it is a real objective situation with real legal consequences which comes about.

The two main characters both suffer from obsession, it is true, but in the case of the aristocratic diarist, he diagnoses himself as suffering from “melancholy” at a time when melancholy was a general term for almost any kind of mental illness other than mania, no matter how simple or how severe.  In some manifestations, it was simply a sort of hobby for upperclass people just as minor psychological traumas are today, in other cases it was quite serious and was treated in the asylums of the time by doctors other than medical doctors.  It could range from mild depression to depression plus psychotic episodes.  The character is wealthy, apparently has nothing much to amuse himself with, spends a lot of time alone by himself in the surrounding landscape brooding, and is thus in one sense “asking for it,” assuming that is, that one takes this as a purely psychological story.  But it also has key features of a good rousing vampire story complete with ghostly elements, much as the story of the governess in Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” did.  People have argued over James’s story for a very long time as well, some arguing that it is a ghost story plain and simple, others insisting that the governess was a hysteric.  By contrast, in the story “The Piece of String,” the events are shown from an objective point of view as a simple obsession which entirely takes over a man’s mind due to external circumstances which are real to start out with.  In this case the results are brought on by the deliberate connivance of an enemy and disbelief of the other townspeople in M. Hauchecome’s honesty.  The obsession, however, causes him to go into what used to be known as a “decline,” an illness usually reserved in fiction for aristocrats and wealthy people, in this case suffered by a citizen peasant with a peculiar inability to let well enough alone.

In M. Hauchecome’s case, his isolated social status as an apparently unmarried citizen peasant is such that his final demise affects mostly himself.  Again, though it is brought on at first largely by the ribbing of others about his dishonesty, the real irony in the case is that he is painfully aware that he is intrinsically dishonest and cunning enough to have done what they insist he did, though this one time he happens to be innocent.  In the case of the unnamed wealthy diarist, his social status, though he is isolated sometimes at home by his own choice, is one in which his final dissolution of sanity affects his servants as well.  Other people die because of his obsession, part or all of which may be a vampire, or part or all of which may be due to hypnotism or hallucination.  He himself at first verges toward hypnosis as an explanation before becoming totally taken up totally supernatural answers–but because we see this all from within the orbit of his own mind, we don’t finally know which it is.

Thus, though Maupassant is too good a story-teller to engage in many outright “morals to the stories,” one thing he seems to be quite determined to communicate, whether in the lighter handling of “The Piece of String” or in the more solemn and spooky atmosphere of “The Horla,” is that obsession is not only an unhealthy state in and of itself, but it can also prevent one from seeking adequate terms in which to combat oppression, whether by a ghost or by a doubtful populace.  The diarist does most of what he does in order to convince himself that he is sane, yet also seems to be trying to persuade himself at the same time that he “sees” a vampire; the citizen peasant, instead of returning cunning for cunning and trying to think of a way out of the dilemma his enemy caused him, instead allows himself to be put in the much weaker position of protesting vociferously to one and all on every occasion (even that of his own death) that he is innocent.  If there is a “message” to these two stories, it is perhaps this one:  obsession can visit both high and low status people, without regard for person or circumstances, and if persisted in leads to extremely negative consequences for someone.  Taking it thus with a grain of salt, whether by shaking one’s head ruefully at the diarist (or perhaps looking over one’s shoulder to make sure there are no invisible vampires about!) or by laughing with and at the peasants is often the best we can do when confronted with such lapses of luck and judgement.

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