Category Archives: Full of literary ambitions!

February 28, 2014 · 3:30 pm

“My trade and my art is living” (Montaigne)–or, Francesco Marciuliano’s “I Could Pee on This (And Other Poems By Cats)”

In my lifetime, though you might not guess it to observe me now, I have had many friends, and many types of friends.  And during my life, I have also known and loved many a cat friend, both my own and other people’s.  So how does it come about only now that I finally happen across this excellent collection of “poems by cats” (sic), and am able to convey my heartfelt appreciation for such a fine and noble effort of “editing” as Francesco Marciuliano has done with the work of his feline artists?  The fact of the matter is, that no one else has thought to seek out the works of cats before now (the small, conveniently gift-packaged size volume only came out in 2012).  Up until now, they have been reduced to the meow, the miaow, the mew, the–but complete the list in your own favorite world language:  the fact of the matter is that they have been short-changed as to their place in the world’s pantheon of poets.  As the flyleaf of the book points out, “All cats are artists, as demonstrated by their abstract hairballs, expertly stripped curtains, and the precise way they arrange themselves on top of your pile of freshly cleaned clothes.”  There is a pdf of the book on Scribd, and I understand from at least one link that the book started as an online venture, and then grew to a full-scale published book, and now there is a second volume out, which I have not yet had the chance to peruse.

In this book, you will find the true meaning of many a thing your cat does and says to you, little though you have previously understood it.  There are even photographs of cats in the brief volume, just to prove that this effort met with their cautious approval (I say cautious, because caution is evident any time a cat chooses to try to communicate with us; he or she is clearly taking a risk with an obtuse listener, the human, who only thinks of owning him or her and doesn’t properly understand the true ownership equation).

This excerpt from the book (the title poem) is published on the Internet on the advertising site:  “Her new sweater doesn’t smell of me/I could pee on that/She’s gone out for the day and left her laptop on the counter/I could pee on that/Her new boyfriend just pushed my head away/I could pee on him/She’s ignoring me ignoring her/ I could pee everywhere/She’s making up for it by putting me on her lap/I could pee on this/I could pee on this”

Or, the more action-packed poem for those who like to hover uncomfortably at the edge of their seats wondering what will happen next:  “Nudge/Nudge nudge nudge/Nudge nudge nudge nudge nudge nudge/Nudge/Your glass just shattered on the floor”

Then again, perhaps a “dawn song” (a medieval form of poetry between two intimates) is more to your taste:  “I lick your nose/I lick your nose again/I drag my claws down your eyelids/Oh, you’re up?  Feed me”

There are other even more ingenious and humorous and heartfelt poems in the volume, but I can’t print them here because they haven’t yet been featured on a totally free site on the Internet, and I not only want to abide by copyright conventions, but also wish to pay proper tribute to this wonderful success at meeting a real need by encouraging you to buy the book, out at Amazon.com and other sites, and in fine bookstores everywhere, for only $12.95 (for all I know, Amazon.com has some used copies for even less, though you would probably not buy those for a gift, but for your own bookshelf).  So, what do you say?  How about a gift package for the next important occasion in a fellow cat lover’s life?  A small basket, a cushion, a few tins of pricey cat food or some expensive cat treats, and this book–even if you yourself are only a cat tolerator, surely you can rise above your odd prejudices and buy this book for a friend.  As the book blurb explains, “You’ll discover why cats do things like sit on your face before the sun comes up, help clean your bedside table with their tail, or confirm that there really are one thousand sheets in a toilet paper roll.”  And for this voyage of knowledge and discovery, you have only to visit online or in person at a bookseller’s.  Can anything be easier or more desirable than that?  Look deeply into the next set of bright cat eyes you happen to meet, and realize that they are only waiting for you to meet them halfway–and then the other half.  Well, what did you expect?  Ancient royalty and modern artistic genius have their privileges.

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February 14, 2014 · 6:58 pm

Three different considerations of the difficulties and goals of one’s life work, one from Browning, two from Yeats….

Having written recently about the intersection of inspiration and technique in one’s art or craft, I come now to three related writings, all poems, about the commingled doings of inspiration, technique, difficulty, success, and of course everyone’s creative bugbear, failure.  Let’s begin with a story told in first person, one of Robert Browning’s famous dramatic monologues.  It’s called “Andrea del Sarto,” and has the subtitle “(called ‘The Faultless Painter’).”  It’s much too long to reproduce here, so I’ll have to content myself with repeating the gist of it and giving you the most important quoted section for my post.  It’s basically an imaginary monologue based upon the life of Andrea del Sarto, an actual painter, who was once a court favorite of King Francis I of France, but who was drawn away from court and from support of his aged parents by his infatuation for his wife Lucrezia, who was also his model, and who led him a dance.  The poem itself indicates that she grudgingly gave him attention, even to his work, which was supporting them, and instead spent her time with a largely spurious “cousin,” a usage which implies that she was cheating on del Sarto.

Browning’s monologue is one which is filled with certain regrets del Sarto supposedly has about having left court and lost his following to paint pictures of Lucrezia for the odd patron who comes along and falls in love with her beauty.  Of course, being in love with her himself to an uxurious degree, del Sarto constantly forgives her and speaks against his own ambitions.  Still, they do not go entirely unmentioned.  And when he comes to the subject of art, he not only gives himself a harsh consideration, but puts forth a “theory” of art, which shows that his work is also never far from his thoughts and that it is in fact the pull between his love and his art which is making him miserable.  This is how that part of the poem goes, with its famous lines about heaven and achievement of the utmost:

“There burns a truer light of God in [my rivals],/In their vexed beating stuff and stopped-up brain,/Heart, or whate’er else, than goes on to prompt/This low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand of mine./Their work drops groundward, but themselves, I know,/Reach many a time a heaven that’s shut to me,/Enter and take their place there sure enough,/Though they come back and cannot tell the world./My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here./The sudden blood of these men! at a word–/Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too./I, painting from myself and to myself/Know what I do, am unmoved by men’s blame/Or their praise either.  Someone remarks/Morello’s outline there is wrongly traced,/His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,/Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?/Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?/Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what’s a heaven for?  All is silver-gray/Placid and perfect with my art:  the worse!”

And so on and so forth, comparisons to both lesser and greater painters of his time continuing.  He criticizes his art, and sometimes to a hesitant and slight degree his model, Lucrezia, and says it’s “As if I saw alike my work and self/And all that I was born to be and do,/A twilight-piece.”  All of this relates to his own strange pull amongst ambition, and perfection of craft, and love, with his awareness that the nature of aspiration demands one must always have another level to ascend to, another goal, something that possibly cannot be reached.  His wife “rewards” his love for her in this manner willy-nilly, and it is as if he is a partially beaten man, wondering if his art will do the same thing.

Yeats, who has written many poems about art and artists and the life of the same has his own moments of expressing either a strange mixture of exhilaration and defeatism, or a calm acceptance of failure–the difference is, of course that the former is about his own work, the latter about that of another.  In the first poem, he documents his contrary and mixed emotions of infatuation and personal vexation with his job as director-manager of the Abbey Theatre.  It’s called “The Fascination of What’s Difficult”:

“The fascination of what’s difficult/Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent/Spontaneous joy and natural content/Out of my heart.  There’s something ails our colt/That must, as if it had not holy blood/Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,/Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt/As though it dragged road-metal.  My curse on plays/That have to be set up in fifty ways,/On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,/Theatre business, management of men./I swear before the dawn comes round again/I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.”

“Our colt” is of course the divine horse Pegasus, emblem of creative inspiration, yet Yeats shows quite clearly in this poem how he reacts to all the stops and starts and quandaries and problems of a practical nature that afflict those working in his theatre, with special reference to his own role and his temptation to “find the stable and pull out the bolt” and let the horse escape, probably more occasional than he lets on, since I suspect just writing this poem relieved some of the tension.

Finally (though of course there are so many aspects of the complicated questions having to do with inspiration and achievement that writers and artists will always have more to say), there is Yeats’s poem entitled “To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.”  It is in this poem that I sometimes see the Yeats I like least, the Yeats who is not always at his hard-headed best, but who is a little sentimental, coyly daft, and perhaps a bit glib, with his famous mysticism thrown in and passing for a genuine vision, whereas in other poems it’s quite remarkable and eerily convincing.  At the end, I have to suppose that Yeats may have been aware that this poem is one of his own which is an encapsulated experience of what it is itself discussing, i.e., he may have known that this tribute was a partial failure of his own art, yet was perhaps unable to offer better:

“Now all the truth is out,/Be secret and take defeat/From any brazen throat,/For how can you compete,/Being honour bred, with one/Who, were it proved he lies,/Were neither shamed in his own/Nor in his neighbours’ eyes?/Bred to a harder thing/Than Triumph, turn away/And like a laughing string/Whereon mad fingers play/Amid a place of stone,/Be secret and exult,/Because of all things known/That is most difficult.”

On the other hand, if one looks for one of those many connecting highways and by-ways and intersections and coincidences so common in Yeats’s poems, one will notice the coincidence that he uses the work “difficult” in both poems.  It seems to suggest that possibly the “Triumph” spoken of is only actually a question of public personal acclaim, and that the work itself, whatever it may be, which his friend accomplished–or himself, Yeats was not above “dividing” himself into two and writing one to the other–was in fact a Triumph of a private sort, not a failure at all.  The familiar Yeatsian take on the “mad” person, one who is inspired by something not usual or not usually of this world, is thus included here as another emblem of the divine as it enters the humdrum world of human life, just as the horse Pegasus was seen as a ragged and whipped colt in the world of theatre politics and arrangements.  Take it as you will.  Yeats’s shoulders are creatively certainly broad enough to bear my previous charge, that he is sometimes a bit too whimsical.

Thus, to take it all in all, neither Andrea del Sarto with his wandering wife, nor the complaining theatre prime functionary, nor the “mad” talent in the third poem who is advised to let harsh words pass are any of them really expected (and perhaps are not inclined) to give up the fight and actually throw in the towel when it comes to artistic goals and aspirations.  Their trials are just the bumps one can expect to find along the road to art, should one be so “daft” as to make the artistic and creative one’s perpetual mental habitat.  So, if you are a person who for one reason or another likes to make ideas or things, or simply one who likes to mull over and meditate in print or otherwise on others’ creations, perhaps my post today will provide some fodder for your own private “Pegasus,” and keep him from kicking down the walls of his stable the next time you fight through your own creative struggles and torments.  Here’s to the high road of creative reward and difficulty alike, for my choice!  How about you?

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February 9, 2014 · 5:11 pm

How Firesign Theater, Stanislavski, and I are (loosely and tangentially) connected….

Let’s start with the facetious, progress to the serious, and then wind down (or up?) with the point of my post for today.  It’s not a long post, in any case, but I hope to raise a few thoughts and speculations about how we bloggers go about blogging and adhering to a schedule of publication even when it’s a gloomy winter and our fingers are a little bit frozen as they peck the keys, and we really haven’t been reading much lately, so we have nothing much to blog about (or at least not if our posts are usually about literature).  What have I been doing instead of blogging and reading good literature, you ask?  Well, I’ve been trying to drag and haul and “unpack” (as Shakespeare somewhere or other would have it) words from my “word hoard” (the ancient Anglo-Saxon for “vocabulary”) to fill the pages of my novel.  I also took time out to watch an opera production over the computer from Met Opera On Demand, “Madama Butterfly,” to be precise.  So it’s not that I’ve been totally unproductive:  I’ve just not fulfilled my (self-appointed) duties as a blogger very well.  But I promised you something facetious, so let’s begin at the beginning.

For those who like comedy routines and have a memory which reaches back a few years, there’s the comedy team called “Firesign Theater,” a group of several talented no-longer-young comedians who by now have cut a number of records, of which I am the proud possessor of about four.  Those who have their spoofy take-down of Shakespeare album (and who still have a turntable to play it on) may well remember, I believe from their jests about weather conditions in “Hamlet” or possibly “Macbeth” on the heath, the immortal lines–delivered in the true ornate Shakespearean manner and accent–“Crack, cheeks; blow, wind,” and other such gems of parodic genius.  There’s also the school adventures of Porgie Tirebiter (a spoof of Archie and Jughead-style teenage fables) from “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus,” their parody of Sherlock Holmes entitled “The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra,” and the topical albums (they were popular in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s) “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers” and “In the Next World, You’re On Your Own,” to name only the albums I’m personally familiar with.  There are more, which a search on the Internet will turn up.  These four inspired raconteurs of rowdy routines were (and I hope still are) Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor.  And here’s the nub of it:  though they had obviously had to rehearse their routines to get all the remarks and the sound effects filled in in their appropriate spots, they had a way of playing off each other’s jests which struck one as more truly like improvisational theater than planned writing.  It is absolutely delightful what they can do with words, concepts, events, and other people’s creations.  And the freshness is preserved by the sense of their being especially inspired on the instant to make their jokes.  And here (though of course “many a truth is spoken in jest,” as we know) we switch to the serious part of my post.  How does one access one’s inspirational genius?

One of the most interesting and vitally creative and worthwhile books I’ve ever read is the famous Russian director and teacher Konstantin S. Stanislavski’s book An Actor Prepares.  It’s all about how he went about training his students to act by the manner now know as “method acting,” of which he was the main inventor.  Nevertheless, though it is about acting and acting students and the theater and plays and playwrights, it is a work which everyone, painter, actor, literary critic, sculptor, academic, novelist or poet, or anyone in any other creative field should read, for its advice on inspiration.  Though there are many scenes and incidents in the book in which Stanislavski spurs his students to new heights of creativity by his advice and teachings, there is one key scene which I will have always in my memory, and which is the gist of my own thoughts on creation to the present day.  Stanislavski was reproaching a certain student for his slipshod work in the manner in which he portrayed his character.  The student, like many a student everywhere, earnestly (but perhaps a trifle lazily?) responded that he had tried and tried, but he didn’t feel “inspired” that particular day with that particular character.  Stanislavski’s response?  He lectured the student that it was not his primary job to “be inspired,” rather it was his job to develop his “technique.”  He believed that technique was the bread and butter (or the meat and potatoes) of the creative world.  Inspiration, by contrast, was something that came along where and where it would, and was more like the icing on the cake.  It could not be relied upon, because it was a will-‘o-the-wisp, likely to disappear if too heavily relied upon.  The best possible creative solution was always to have one’s technique at the ready and in operation, and while maintaining one’s openness to allow inspiration to come along, always be prepared to do a simple workmanlike job in the event that it deserted one.

And where do I come into this post, as I indicated that I would at the beginning?  Well, it’s only that I’ve tried day after day (like Stanislavski’s erring and excuse-making student) to come up with an inspiration for a post, and finally today while I was looking for something to post upon, my eyes ran across a book by a theater person named Sonia Moore, written on the Stanislavski method.  And a light bulb did indeed go on over my head, so I guess it was really a kind of inspiration, in a way, but before I could just take the improvisational moment and the inspiration and run with it, I felt it only fair to share not only my original reading of the book, but also to connect it up with all the ins and outs of the vexed question of inspiration and improvisation themselves.  And so, here it is:  a post a bit longer than I thought it would be, but one I hope which will repay your attention and give you too something to think (or read) about the next time your inspiration lags.  Toodle-oo! for now–post done!

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August 16, 2013 · 9:03 pm

And now for something completely diabolical–The year without a summer (1816) and its monsters….

For the second time this summer, a reader and/or writing colleague has written something that struck a chord and gave me the subject for a post.  This time, it was my friend DJ (the writer of some fine fantasy/science fiction/historical stories), who is also a frequent contributor to my “comments” collection.  He implied that he didn’t see the attraction of vampires.  Now, I don’t know that I do either, but when I was a lot younger, Barnabas Collins on the television show “Dark Shadows” certainly had me going.  But Barnabas was what we regard now as a “typical” vampire, a sort of middle-aged, mysterious, tall, pale, and thin brunette with a forbidding manner and a compelling, hypnotic way with the ladies all the same.  He wasn’t a neophyte teenager or young adult with bulging muscles and sex, sex, sex oozing out of his every faithful word.  In other words, he wasn’t in any way related to Edward of “Twilight” fame.

But at one point, even that aristocratic middle-aged vampire was news, hard though it may be to believe.  And he had his genesis in an odd summer shared by some famous poets and their hangers-on during “the year without a summer,” 1816, when the weather in parts of Europe and North America was violently stormy, full of crop failures and famine, and ripe for tales of monsters and demons to be born.  The entire tale of that summer is longer, and you can find it elsewhere, for example in the background history of the tale of Frankenstein:  or, the Modern Prometheus, which had its genesis in the same famous group of writers.  Let me set the scene….

It’s 1816, at the Villa Diodati, on the wind-tossed, thundery, and lightning-struck shores of Lake Geneva.  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley has accompanied her new husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Claire Clairmont (Mary’s step-sister, who is pregnant with Lord Byron’s daughter Allegra) to visit Lord Byron (currently at work on “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”) and his personal physician John Polidori.  They are isolated by the weather and decide after reading some ghost stories (including William Beckford’s fantastic Oriental tale “Vathek”) to write ghost stories of their own.  When during this time Lord Byron reads aloud from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s scare-fest of a poem “Christabel,” the poet Shelley becomes so frightened and disorganized in his thinking as a result that he needs to rush from the room, and they find him in a near-hysterical state.  They go off separately to write.

Though the Frankenstein tradition (author:  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) is the most famous to come out of this group reading, both Lord Byron and John Polidori elect to write about vampires, with Polidori’s completed story being inspired by Lord Byron’s “Fragment of a Novel,” never completed.   Several important things happen as a result of this collaboration.   First, the vampire, which was merely a form of monster in European and pre-European folklore, something like the werewolf, begins to have human characteristics and traits, and a standard personality.  In his “Introduction,” Polidori attributes the legend to the Arabians and the Greeks originally, possibly a reason that the vampire’s “death” (and subsequent return to life) take place when a young friend, at first perplexed and then appalled by sensing that a former friend is a vampire, and the erstwhile noble friend–or should that be “fiend”?– are travelling in the East.  In both Byron’s unfinished story and Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” the seemingly cynical and yet dying nobleman makes the request of his young friend (in Polidori’s case, swears him to keep an oath) that he will not reveal the death for a certain amount of time.  In both stories, this is evidently intended to be a way of allowing the nobleman to come back to life and find a place in society again unimpeded, though that is only implied in Byron’s story and not written out.  In Polidori’s story as opposed to Byron’s, also, the connection of the vampire with night (and even with the moon, more traditionally associated with werewolves) is evident, as the nobleman asks to have his corpse exposed to the rays of the moon.  Both of the literarily famous vampires have strange burial requests, moreover, something that is carried over in the by now hackneyed notion of the vampire’s necessary tie to his coffin.  Even the name of one of the two original vampires owes something to other parts of literary history:  Lady Caroline Lamb, a former lover of Lord Byron’s, wrote the Gothic romance Glenarvon.  In it, she chose to put a Byronic figure named Lord Ruthven.  When Byron’s and Polidori’s stories were published, both were originally attributed to Byron, because not only was the author’s name of Polidori’s manuscript given as “Lord Ruthven,” but even the vampire in the tale was named “Lord Ruthven”!

So much for the background.  Do you know an aristocratic, cynical, not yet old but seemingly eternally young man or woman who frequents high life without seeming to gain much actual pleasure from party-going, though all the women (or men) in his or her life seem to be drawn thitherwards without being able to stop themselves?  Does this person go around at night a lot more than in the day?  In fact, when’s the last time you saw them during the day?  Do the victims of the opposite sex seem to wither away and die, and have strange marks on their necks that no one can account for?  (But they do look like bites, don’t they?  No, you’re being overly imaginative.)

If you’re the young hero, here’s what you’ve of course told yourself when you doubted your friend the nobleman, à la Byron from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”:  “Yet must I think less wildly–I have thought/Too long and darkly, till my brain became,/In its own eddy boiling and o’erwrought,/A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame:/And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame,/My springs of life were poisoned.  ‘Tis too late!/Yet am I changed; though still enough the same/In strength to bear what time can not abate,/And feed on bitter fruits without accusing Fate.”

And I think that could the “vampyre” speak from the heart, he would utter another stanza from that long poem, to explain his fall from grace:  “I have not loved the world, nor the world me;/I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed/To its idolatries a patient knee–/Nor coined my cheek to smiles–nor cried aloud/In worship of an echo; in the crowd/They could not deem me one of such; I stood/Among them, but not of them; in a shroud/Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could/Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.”  (Standing “among them, but not of them” is in fact exactly how Polidori first paints the picture of his “vampyre,” one who is in an earlier poet’s words both “daungerous” and “digne,” that is “high and mighty” and “overly proud.”)

Finally, the fact that Byron was also working on “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” when he experimented with his vampirish “ghost story” is perhaps even indicated by a sort of cross-fertilization of topic and theme here.  For, unlike the proud nobleman, who continues the fatal course of holding himself apart from his fellows in a high-handed way, Byron in the very next stanza continues speaking of his character-narrator’s frame of mind:  “I have not loved the world, nor the world me–/But let us part fair foes/ I do believe,/Though I have found them not, that there may be/Words which are things,/hopes which will not deceive,/And virtues which are merciful nor weave/Snares for the failing:  I would also deem/O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve;/That two, or one, are almost what they seem–/That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.”  Perhaps having this in mind was what kept Byron himself from turning into a metaphorical “Lord Ruthven,” and certainly he went on in his next long poem “Don Juan” to parody the picture of the proud and distant Byronic hero who slays women’s hearts with a glance (never mind a bite), a sure sign of emotional health:  after all, when have you ever heard of a vampire making fun of himself?  (If Edward does it, be sure it’s only because he’s in his first reincarnation and still has time to get old and bitter–maybe we should look to Anne Rice for that chuckly innovation!)

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July 12, 2013 · 2:49 pm

An Update (Intermission) Post of a Talented Fantasy, Historical, and Sci-Fi Writer

Though my next scheduled post on famous women forebear writers is due soon,  I couldn’t resist offering an intermission here covering the works being done by a talented and imaginative writer whose blog I’ve covered before when it was under another title.  D. James Fortescue is the writer in question, and for his territory he has carved out the broad areas of historical fantasy, fantasy, and science fiction.

The first story of his I would like to mention is currently completed, and is entitled “Mune and Mura.”  It is a historical work about two Japanese swordsmen, actual historical figures who in reality were from different eras, brought together by DJ as friends and accomplices.  This story is a tribute to friendship and an energetic and insightful view into feudal Japan and its history.  (I’m not going to tell what happens finally in any of the tales, in this case because I don’t want to spoil the fun and in the case of the next two stories to be described because I don’t yet know what the endings are and wouldn’t want to spoil them in any case.)

A work which DJ has nearly finished and has been posting in segments is a work of fantasy named “Sayeh and Zia.”  It’s yet another fine work, this time set in ancient Persia and Egypt, concerned with the merchant and cavaranserai cultures, and composed largely of fictional characters from DJ’s rich imagination, though real people and historical places are mentioned.  In both this and the aforementioned swordsmen historical tale, magical objects figure importantly, in “Mune and Mura” magical scrolls and swords, in “Sayeh and Zia” magical masks.  I leave the reader to unearth how these objects are used and their pertinence to the characters involved.

Another work which DJ has nearly finished is “On Venusian Cloud Colony Number Nine,” a work of science fiction which explores the relations between people and between peoples nearly as much as it does between planets.   This work is as gripping and suspenseful as a whodunit, which in a sense it is, because when one of the members of the mining team on Venus comes down with strange symptoms, “whodunit” is indeed the pertinent question, not why.  I won’t say more, but this tale, in its trip from Venus to Earth and back to Venus, is my favorite of the short fictions DJ has given us, though they are all three meritorious and worthy of respect.  I eagerly scan my mail every day for signs that “Sayeh and Zia” and “On Venusian Cloud Colony Number Nine” are being continued for me to read, and I sometimes imagine that I am like an old-time reader of Charles Dickens’s serially published works, waiting for the next installment to come out, or like an aficionado of the radio in the old days when cliffhanger endings were provided for each on-going radio adventure series.

As well, DJ is engaged in writing a lengthier WIP which seems to have stalled sheerly because his brain is teeming with so many good ideas at once that he has been rushing to put them down for us to read.  The three aforementioned short stories are a case in point.  As well, he not only takes time to mention the works of others and pay tribute to published authors, of whom he keeps up a rigorous reading schedule and posts on his site the names and some assessing information about the works he reads, but he also generously covers the works of others like himself whom he calls “aspiring fellow writers,” of which I have been lucky enough to have been one, even though we don’t write similar sorts of fiction.

In all of these ways, DJ has clearly thrown his hat into the ring to be considered a serious and valuable addition to every reader’s library from the ‘net, and I hope you will travel across to his site and have a look at all the work he has done and what he has accomplished:  I promise you won’t be disappointed.

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July 3, 2013 · 5:40 pm

Celebrating A Year’s Presence on My Blog with New Stories

Dear Readers,

As of tomorrow, July 4, I will have been publishing material on this site for exactly a year.  The date signals not only my independence from the tyranny of the need to deal with agents and editors and the whole literary infrastructure which supports the very big business of publishing in standard print mode–though if asked I would be willing to publish that way too, face it, I’m a realist!–but it also marks my celebration of a year’s consistent effort to turn out reasonably good and responsible posts on literature at the same time as I publish my own efforts.  I hope you will have a look at my stories, published here under the lengthy title Sympathy And Centripetal Force and Eight Other Young and Hopeful Stories.  The title, though cumbersome, is at least honest in that it marks the stories frankly as revisited efforts from my literary past, and indicates that I still think these early efforts, never before published, were worth updating some and putting before you, my public.  Though I have modernized a few aspects of the stories, there are some “dated” items in them which I have left unaltered because they carry the flavor of the time and place of the story, and I wanted to leave them be.

So, though I will certainly return to the recent project I mentioned in my last post, that of commenting on some of our feminist and feminine forebears in writing, I wanted to take this opportunity to mark my own special anniversary by diverging slightly on this path and putting up a new page.  I hope you will enjoy this short collection, and for those of you celebrating the Fourth of July tomorrow, Happy Independence Day!  (For those of you who are from elsewhere in the world, please excuse our silliness and fireworks, it happens to everyone at sometime or other!).  Shadowoperator  (aka Victoria Leigh Bennett)

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June 26, 2013 · 4:33 pm

Filling in blanks in a literary education via early feminists and women writers….

Recently, it occurred to me (the more especially when I read about Colette on Wikipedia) that I had for too long now neglected several important writers who happened to be female and part of the history of the world novel.  Oh, I’d read Mrs. Ann Ward Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho in a Gothic literatures class, but I’d not followed up on the lead provided into the world of famous female writers, who often were the inspiration for later male writers, a thankless task which in fact often received little thanks and credit from the male writers who followed them, or at least none from the male literary establishment (I’m thinking now of the fact that Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela is usually talked about as the first epistolary novel, a startling innovation for the time (1740), and his further novels Clarissa (1748) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753) continued the tradition, but the actual initiator of the epistolary novel was the feminist writer Aphra Behn, with her novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, which was written in 1683).  I also consider the fact that Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s Claudine series, her first published works, were published under her first husband Henry Gauthier-Villar’s pen name “Willy,” and that she had to go through extensive legal contortions to get them back in her own name, with the proof being in her original manuscripts.  As well (and on a milder note, though still discouraging to female writers), Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, Baronesse Dudevant (alias George Sand) first published her own collaborative works through a liaison she had with the writer Jules Sandeau, under the pseudonym “Jules Sand.”  The name “George Sand” continued to be her pen name for the rest of her life.

At any rate, it seemed good to give some time and space to several female writers selected from amongst the many early female writers at random, and I’ve determined to write posts on some of their many works in turn (though not necessarily in chronological order).  the writers I’ve selected are Mrs. Radcliffe, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, Aphra Behn, Colette, and George Sand.  I’ve felt no commitment to unearth their most popular books or their most scandalous (in some cases, the two were one).  I thought that today I would start with a few novellas and a novel I found by Sidonie Colette which just happened to be the first ones that came in at the library when I was ready to work on them.

There’s first of all a distinct difference in the two volumes by Colette which came to hand.  The one I picked up initially was the set of three novellas in one volume, Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances.  While mildly evocative of a scandalous mode of life, the book had no listed translator, there was no foreword or introduction about Colette, in short, the book was an old-fashioned attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too, by publishing three slightly naughty stories by a noted female libertine without proper framework and introduction being offered.  The stories fall well within the range of Colette’s true topic, which as far as I can see without reading everything thing she wrote but by reading these three novellas and a widely different novel, The Pure and the Impure, is not sex and sensuality of various kinds per se, but is instead the topic of sexual politics as it affects everyone, whether straight, gay, or one of the many shades of in-between which Colette’s almost visionary world allows.

Most people have seen either the screen or the stage version of Gigi, have read the book, or know the story by hearsay.  The story is that of a young woman born into the demimonde and struggling innocently against the restraints and liberties practiced and the understood rules followed by her own female relatives, all of whom seem to have been rich men’s mistresses and public performers at some point, the latter of whom historically speaking were always “loose” women however inwardly respectable their instincts because that was the life forced on them by public understandings of their role.  The story is a charming one with a happy ending, and doesn’t at all prepare one for the bittersweet tale of repeated divorces and romantic misadventures contained in the second novella in the same volume, Julie de Carneilhan, which is about the daily life of an impoverished divorced woman in Paris whose days are often haunted by the spectre of hunger and worn-out clothing.  This is grim, to be sure, but even Julie makes her escape, in her case back to the past with her brother, in the end of the tale.  The third tale, Chance Acquaintances, takes a more autobiographical tone, is narrated in the first person, and in it the speaker is addressed as “Madame Colette.”  This is a tale drawn (however exaggeratedly or truly) from the days in Colette’s life when she herself was on the music hall stage, and when it was beginning to be fashionable for people in a higher walk of life (not just the men, but the women also) to be on first-name terms with music hall performers.  The perspective is the one taken of a conventional marriage from the point of view of Colette, who is drawn into its sexual politics willy-nilly and takes a hand in keeping the seamy underside of the marriage from one of its participants.  “Chance acquaintances” being the topic, we are drawn sympathetically close to the speaker, who does not spare her casual friends from our stricter views of them, and whose most devoted friend seems to be her cat, who travels everywhere with her.  As she is packing to leave the resort where she met the man and wife who occupy center stage in her tale, she says of the cat, who is “helping” her pack by getting amongst the suitcases, “I think she had understood it all, and that she was appealing to me yet once more to extricate both of us from chance acquaintances and from bitter disappointments–the full horror of which I had been hiding from myself–from fortuitious towns and strange rooms and all the rest of it.  She was imploring me to blaze a trail just wide enough for my feet and for hers, a trail that would be obliterated behind us as we went.”

By contrast with the three novellas, Colette’s novel The Pure and the Impure is more direct (though since in this case we are provided with a translator’s name, Herma Briffault, and an introduction by Janet Flanner, we can also wonder if it just wasn’t translated more honestly).  It starts out with a chapter taking place in a residence which serves as a casual opium den and dosshouse for sexual liaisons of an “irregular” nature, whether between two unmarried heterosexuals or cheating spouses, two women, two men, or some other variant on a theme.  The first chapter concentrates a lot of attention on the subject of Charlotte, a woman “of a certain age” who flatters her younger lover by “singing” like a nightingale when he gives her pleasure.  The suggestion is that her faking it is a generous act of love rather than the impiety and hypocrisy which our own time insists on seeing it as.  The very suggestion that the faking is a part of the true love act itself when it occurs (and it seems that she derives pleasure from the confidence and assurance she gives the younger man) is a real eye-opener from a twentieth-century stick-to-the-truth point of view.  The hypocrisy is still troubling, but Colette writes with such complexity of the love act and the politics of loving between whomever that she at least introduces some doubt into the equation of “duplicity equals lack of love.”

The second chapter of The Pure and the Impure focuses on an aging Don Juan-like character and his attitudes towards his conquests.  Colette writes as herself doing something like interviewing him, only for her own benefit instead of for a news station.  She compares and contrasts his attitudes about sex and sensuality with what she imagines were the perspectives of the great legendary Don Juan, and comes up with some surprising conclusions.  The most unusual thing about her way of considering his views is that she often sides with what would seem to a woman of our time to be sexist politics aimed at making women less secure and comfortable in their love.  She reiterates often, though, that this man is not a lover of her own, but a friend to whom she is talking, and thus more or less excuses herself from challenging him except in a friendly way.

As if brought on or excused or justified by the combination of the previous two chapters (one in which a woman feels bound to fake or at least exaggerate orgasms and the next in which a man articulates a seemingly unfeeling and predatory attitude towards women), and always assuming that anyone thinks such life choices have to be justified, the rest of the book is predominantly about gay relationships, first among women, then among the famous two “ladies of Llangollen,” then among men.  She provides then a short chapter focusing on how and why a jealous quarrel over a man is in reality a strong and vital relationship between the two women fighting over him.  Finally, the question of what is pure in love is mooted, and Colette’s last remark in the book is:  “The word ‘pure’ has never revealed an intelligible meaning to me.  I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it–in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.”  Thus, for Colette, there is presumably no “white light” in love, but only a collection of various shades and hues.

If I didn’t know better, I might almost think the two volumes by Colette were written by two different people.  The book of novellas is terse and sometimes cynical, but not outspoken in the usual sense of the word–it is allusive and elusive both.  Sexual pleasure is rather an arrangement two people come to for the predominant pleasure of one over the other, with one party clearly losing out.  The novel, by contrast, though there are opportunistic relationships like this spoken of also, is mainly about consensual sexual and romantic relationships, however unusual or improvised, which give pleasure to both people.  Colette is only one writer, of course, and only one person, and her views are those of her own experience and lifestyle.  But I’d like to think that regardless of what particular “team” one “plays for,” to quote a much-overused sexual metaphor of our own time, Colette in her quest for emotional, sensual, and sexual freedom and the supremacy and sanctity of the love relationship in our makeup speaks for us all, and that we can all learn something from reading her sometimes sad, often quizzical, but also frank and open “essays” on the art of love.

(My remarks on the other writers I’ve mentioned in this post will follow in days to come.)

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February 17, 2013 · 5:01 pm

A Poem and a Meditation on Being an Individual, and On What “Read[s] Human and Exact.”

In searching for poems to write about this morning (and I was definitely in the mood to write about good poetry, having recently finished a longish bout with prose in having published a fifth novel), I was reading through my own favorite poems in a treasured Norton anthology and came across a poem by Robert Graves which has always struck me as particularly talented.  Luckily, since it has been in at least one published version since 1938 and has already been published in full on the Internet at least once, I can share the whole poem with you here without transgressing copyright laws.  Here is the poem:

The Devil’s Advice to Story-Tellers

“Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue,/Keep probability–some say–in view,/But my advice to story-tellers is:/Weigh out no gross of probabilities,/Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of/Known instances of virtue, crime or love./To forge a picture that will pass for true,/Do conscientiously what liars do–/Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid/The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade:/Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps/That may shake down into a world perhaps;/People this world, by chance created so,/With random persons whom you do not know–/The teashop sort, or travellers in a train/Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again;/Let the erratic course they steer surprise/Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes;/Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)/Motive and end and moral in the air;/Nice contradiction between fact and fact/Will make the whole read human and exact.”

This is excellent compositional advice for prose, and I think of it every time I remember my maternal grandmother, who used the expression “telling a story” to mean “lying.”  She would look at me gravely during a particular moment of my stellar mendacity and say, “Now honey, are you sure you aren’t telling a story?”  It would always make me grin ruefully and would thus give the game away, but the dialectal expression itself was so apt and funny that I couldn’t help myself.  There were even one or two occasions when I was telling the truth and she almost didn’t believe me because of my typical reaction when she made her query.

So, now, what does this poem have to do with “being an individual”?  Just this:  I have recently discovered, thanks to a friendly and frequent commenter writing in, that there are at least three other Victoria Bennetts with writing aspirations, some in poetry and some in prose, and my feeling is that the mild adventure I’ve gone through in coping with this does indeed “read human and exact” even better than if I’d come up with a glorious lie about it.  I am probably the oldest of the Victoria Bennetts currently writing (I was 55 on my last birthday), arguably at least one of the best or at least most conventionally educated, and have had experience writing both poetry and prose.  Most of what I’ve written or at least what has been published is available on this site, though there is more to come if I live long enough.  Having said that, it’s now time for my big adventure:

Today, in trying to revise my “About the Author” page to contain my middle name (my full name is Victoria Leigh Bennett), I inadvertently eliminated the whole page instead of just the PDF of information, and so lost all of the kind and wonderful comments that were also stored on the page, along with the notices of awards people have from time to time nominated me for and at least one movie which a fellow blogger, JM at thelivingnotebook, was kind enough to send me for this weekend.  The movie is one I had copied down the link for, and I plan to watch it this weekend, the only time the movie is available, so at least that wasn’t totally lost, but I would have liked to have retained the other material as well.  But people do write in to the “About the Author” column from time to time, so I hope and trust that I will hear from people again there before all is said and done.

No, the real adventure was contained in finding out just how many other Victoria Bennetts there are around.  It is a particularly euphonious and stately name–don’t worry, I’m not complimenting myself–after all, I didn’t name myself–very Latinate, and though I respond to various nicknames, I have learned also to answer to my full name, which for some reason as one ages gets used more and more.  Now, I was used to the idea that there were Victoria Bennetts in home decorating, Victoria Bennetts who ran office companies, and various assorted other and sundry Victoria Bennetts who either bore the name from birth or had married into it as regards the last name.  But what I was really shocked to find was that there were several other WRITING Victoria Bennetts around.  On the advice of my commenter who informed me of one of these in particular, I found that just on one website there was a Victoria Alexander Bennett, a Victoria Louise Bennett, and yet another Victoria Bennett who, like me, had chosen not to use a middle name.

This was sobering indeed.  That there were so many of us (and doubtless more to come!) was very discouraging.  But then I thought:  if it doesn’t discourage me that there are so many people writing in general every year, and that I am in competition with all of them, then why should it bother me that there are several other Victoria Bennetts, who moreover don’t even all write the same sorts of things, to judge by my research?  And I also thought that after all, writers are very determined and tenacious when it comes to tracking down authors whom they want to read.  As long as no writers are copying the ideas of other writers explicitly and misusing them, there’s plenty of room for us all, surely.

And as to Robert Graves and his delightful, whimsical, mischievous, and diabolical little poem?  I’ve got news for him and his devil–though they may know how to write fiction so as to “make the whole read human and exact,” when it comes to reality and finding one’s own individual space, it’s like the man said:  you can’t make this stuff up!

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February 8, 2013 · 9:26 pm

New novel up on this site–why not have a look?

Yes, I’ve finally finished novel #6 in the 8 part series I’m working on.  And I know that those of you who can count will find only 5 novels published on this site in toto, and will probably think that I’ve slipped a gear, or at least that I myself can’t count.  Take it from me, though, this is novel #6.  I was working on novel #5 at the same time as I worked on this one, and #5 lost out in interest to this one, because this one had a lot more to say for itself early on, and so got ahead in life.  #5 novel will be out as soon as I can manage it, and will also be slotted into the lineup, in its proper place, I hope having gotten a lot more interesting to me (and therefore one hopes to you too!).

In the meantime, you probably want to know something as to what novel #6 is about, its title, so on and so forth.  Well, it’s called Abyss of an Attendant Lord, and it’s a short novelette.  It’s also an academic satire, and those of you who know how much time during my life I have spent in academia may wonder (as of course you have a right to) just how much is fictional and how much is based on fact.  Let me say that I have done no deliberately unkind portrait-painting, though I have teased now and then, here and there.    I have relied on comic types for “the unkindest cut of all” sorts of remarks.  The action is such as could conceivably happen in any large university prone to committees and academic groups foregathering, though of course many an English major will say, “Just when and where did any English department manage to get so much clout for itself in these science-and-technology ridden days?”  Let me answer to that caveat that this part is a sort of pipedream, though of course I am far from wishing to cast aspersions on the science and technology folks as some of my characters do; in fact, “Big Bang Theory” is one of my favorite shows on television, though like Penny, I rarely understand much of the technological vocabulary.  What small amount of technological verbiage is in the novel is from the same pool of university dialect and jest as the writers of “Big Bang Theory” have borrowed from, too.  My basic reaction to any kind of debate is a sort of “Now, why can’t we all just get along?” sort of attitude, so peaceable am I in person.  But never mind that!  Let’s have a little fun with our differences.  I do hope that all my readers will be able to have a fun time with the book, as I had a great deal of fun in writing it.  And with respect to all those who may feel that they are singled out for attention, I can only answer, as did the main character in “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” on television a good thirty or forty years ago.  She asked for anyone in her audience who felt they had had fun poked at them to stand up, and lo and behold! a major portion of her audience stood up!  These are faults and foibles of all of us from time to time, and I include myself in that number, so I hope you will enjoy laughing at all of us.  And please, let me know how you felt!  From time to time, someone reads a novel or some of my poems on the site, but mostly people don’t seem to comment.  Comments of a polite variety, whether positive or not, are always welcome.  So, let me know what you think!

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December 8, 2012 · 5:15 pm

Scrooging the Liebster and the Very Inspiring Blogger Awards–What’s wrong with me? (I don’t know!)

Now, let’s get one thing straight!  I’m not denying either the worthiness of the awards or my own personal worthiness to be nominated for them.  Awards are important for focusing attention on noteworthy achievements, and for maintaining a sense of community solidarity among participants in a given field.  As to my own personal achievements, I have a certain amount of pride in my literary accomplishments to date, whether of the fictional variety on my pages (the titles of some novels and poems are featured at the top of the front page above the picture of books) or of the critical/scholarly variety placed in my posts (the titles appear on the front page, either running down the page, in the right-hand margin, or in my Archives section).  So, why, you may ask, when two different people with whom I’ve exchanged compliments and comments before nominate me, at almost exactly the same time, for two different awards (Forever More – Reviews! nominated me for the Liebster and Emma McCoy nominated me for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award), why, you repeat, am I not agog with excitement and feverish haste to participate?

I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with having eaten too much candy, and not feeling worthy at this particular moment, and being generally disgruntled and out of sorts.  Before Christmas, you ask?  Shades of Scrooge and his like!  What do I mean by it?  Do I want to bring down the bad luck fairies on my hapless head?  Here’s the thing:  I think the bad luck fairies have already had a go-round with me, or I wouldn’t be feeling this way.  When I say I’ve eaten too much candy, though I probably have done that in a literal sense in the last few weeks since the middle of November (note that date, it becomes important in our investigation, Inspector), I’ve also done it in a figurative sense:  I’ve been self-indulgent and weak in the extreme, and have thus gotten mentally flabby and out-of-shape in a major way.  And being aware of this in myself, I have hence felt extremely unworthy even to pretend to be worthy of an award of any kind, and in turn this has made me irritable and crabby (these two words are not close synonyms–“irritable” is what people with pretensions become, whereas the least significant among us can lay claim to being “crabby”).  As you can see, I’m not really sure what’s wrong with me (though I have that date of significance, the middle of November, to figure from in terms of time), but I’m gradually working it out here, in prose.  As to the bad luck fairies?  Well, some of the ancients believed that too much praise of a person made them susceptible to bad luck, so that there are good reasons why your Aunt Matilda always says something insulting about you and spits twice in your shadow after someone lauds you to the skies in the hearing of the heavens and everyone (and the heavens are known to be particularly envious of good luck).

So, what about the middle of November?  Well, if you recall, that was the time when I went North to Canada for my graduation.  And don’t get me wrong, it was a blast!  I got to see my friends there again and party with them, I got to put on flamboyant clothing and stride out in front of a lot of people who were all indulgently clapping and have my picture taken and hear my name read out and shake hands with several people on a podium, all of whom are far more important than I will probably ever be, and I got to go to the art gallery and the ballet, things which I’ve had logistical problems with transportation- and cost-wise since living where I live now.  I also met a number of very nice strangers from all over on the trains up and back, and all in all, I had a wonderful time.  (Can’t you just hear the bad luck fairies plotting and grumbling?)  So what did the b-l-fairies have in store for me?  Well, they always hit you the best and the hardest when they hit you with your own weaknesses.

My weaknesses?  One is that I have a lot of trouble getting up and running again after a short time off for good behavior.  Add to this a general tendency to make excuses, and there’s one major sinkhole of weakness (and yes, I know this post is a prime example, but what would you have?  If I didn’t tell you the truth, you might think I didn’t appreciate the nominations, which I definitely did, especially since they came from people whose sites I follow).  The “too much candy” comes in not only in the literal form of actually having bought and eaten candy galore since I came back to the States (and I didn’t eat candy in Canada, so where do I get off, anyway?), but also in the figurative form of having heard my own praise too many times and having repeated for interested friends and acquaintances here too many times just what I’ve been doing and where I’ve been and what was said and done there.

Here’s what it is:  I need to talk about something other than myself (this post is a bad example of modesty, I’m aware), and winning awards and writing answers to questions about facts relating to myself only prolongs the agony.  One of the real drawbacks to having had so much time off since the middle of November is that like an old plowhorse I’m having trouble getting back into harness.  When I first started my blog, I did a post a day for quite some time.  Then, other obligations forced me to cut back to a post every other day.  Since I got back from my recent trip, I’ve only written about five posts, which is NOT a post every other day (you caught me, I’m trying to sneak this mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa post in as one of the five), and which makes me feel ashamed of myself, though I’m not currently aware of how to remedy the situation, because I’m also not reading as much or writing as much fiction or even doing as much crocheting as I did before I left, though all these things have started to budge a bit in the last day or two, mainly because I had a happy call from my friends in Canada and I realized that whatever happens in my part of the world, where they are life goes on, and if I’m wise, I’ll try to get back into harness and find a field I can plow.

So, to my two friends who’ve been kind enough to keep up with my blog and nominate me for the Liebster and the Very Inspiring Blogger Awards, I thank you and want to say just this:  I’d always rather read what you have to say on your sites and read and write comments back and forth with you than win all the awards in the book.  I get a real kick out of different people’s personalities, and find my own rather boring by comparison.  And to all my readers who may be wishing me well and hoping I’ll get out of my funk and start living life again, when you wish me well, just remember to get Aunt Matilda and her saliva spray going at the same time:  I don’t want to give those b-l-fairies another chance!

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