Tag Archives: originality

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 5, 2012 · 4:51 pm

“Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”–Louis Dembitz Brandeis

When I was about twenty-one or twenty-two, I happened to see a production on television of the playwright Christopher Fry’s 1949 play “The Lady’s Not for Burning.”  The experience stayed with me for quite some time, and is still one of my fondest theatrical experiences.  Yet not much is heard about the play these days, and for many people Fry seems old-fashioned and full of sentiment.  I remember mentioning the play with fond affection to a theater instructor, who informed me that I had bad taste:  a taste for Fry in the theater, he said, was as bad as having a taste for the horribly purple prose of Thomas Wolfe in fiction.  Since at the time I rather liked You Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel as well, I shut up, convinced that I wasn’t sufficiently sophisticated, or cognizant of what I should know, or just plain intelligent enough to see the differences he was talking about.  Yet all these years later, in spite of having lost my interest in and taste for Thomas Wolfe’s fiction, I still retain a fond affection for the plays of Christopher Fry that I’ve read and seen (I’ve only the experience of two, “The Lady’s Not for Burning” and “A Phoenix Too Frequent,” though at one point Fry was quite popular in the theater and there are a number of other plays by him as well).  Today, I wanted to write a little about the first play I mention above, “The Lady’s Not for Burning,” in the hope, I suppose, of encouraging other readers and enthusiasts of verse plays to read him, and maybe even of spurring some interest in putting his plays on again, who knows?  One thought has a million paths in the outside world, after all.

The play is set in a “small market-town” called Cool Clary around 1400, at a time when witches were still being burnt and a war in Flanders was still recent.  The action centers around a dual problem which presents itself in the home of Hebble Tyson, an officious and by-the-book Mayor of the town; this problem is that at one and the same time a young woman comes to his house for shelter, being designated a witch by the townspeople, and in an at first unrelated case, a man, Thomas Mendip, comes in requesting to be hanged.  Thus, the “right of free assembly” in a time and place where such rights were not matter of course is being exercise willy nilly by an unruly mob, and not to gain other legitimate rights, but in fact to deprive a young woman, Jennet Jourdemayne, of her life and property.

In this case, it’s the language of Thomas Mendip which attempts, if not to “free men from the bondage of irrational fears,” to mislead the accusers and focus on him, because, according to him, he sees no point in continuing life.  His speeches are full of the excesses of existential bombast of our own day except in verse:  for example, when one of the other characters says she hears a cuckoo singing in the spring air of April, he responds:  “By God, a cuckoo!  Grief and God,/A canting cuckoo, that laughs with no smile!/A world unable to die sits on and on/In spring sunlight, hatching egg after egg,/Hoping against hope that out of one of them/Will come the reason for it all; and always/Out pops the arid chuckle and centuries/Of cuckoo-spit.”  Thomas Mendip steps into a situation already full of tension, because the young heir of Tyson, his nephew, Humphrey Devize, is awaiting the arrival of his bride-to-be, Alizon Eliot; Humphrey’s brother, Nicholas Devize, is locked in a sort of sibling rivalry with his brother Humphrey, and naturally wants whatever his brother wants, or whomever.  At first the brothers are competing over Alizon, but when Jennet comes into the picture, they both start to compete over her, even though she is doomed to be burned the next day.  It is her language which, due to her scientific upbringing and background, tries to “free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”

Each character has comic lines more than sufficient fully to paint their characters.  To take a case in point, Tyson is always saying things like “Dear sir, I haven’t yet been notified of your existence”;”Out of the question./It’s a most immodest suggestion, which I know/Of no precedent for.  Cannot be entertained.”;”I will not be the toy of irresponsible events”; and the like.  He’s clearly an official’s official.  The Justice Edward Tappercoom is another such case, though he is less interested in the matter of Jennet’s soul and her possible hexings of others than he is eager to confiscate and enjoy her property by the law of the time after she’s dead.  The mother of the two competing brothers, Margaret Devize (the Mayor’s sister) is more sketchily filled in, though she too has her moments:  when asked by Thomas to concern herself with the mob outside, which may soon be stoning or in some way harming a woman accused of witchcraft, Margaret replies, “At the moment, as you know,/I’m trying hard to be patient with my sons./You really mustn’t expect me to be Christian/In two directions at once.”  This quite effectively states her interests and obsessions for the length of the play, though she has many other lines–she is just the good mother and housekeeper who concerns herself purely with the domestic arrangements, and keeps herself to herself when it comes to public controversy.  Even a drunk, old Skipps, the man whom the “witch” has been accused of turning into a dog, turns up at the end to confound the judgement, and does so “poetically.”  He has been located by the parish clerk Richard, who has earlier run away with the bride-to-be, Alizon, and they have turned back to reveal the truth of Skipp’s existence, so that justice will be served.  Skipps, not knowing what he may be accused of, responds in a masterly joining of Biblical poetry and doggerel:  “Who give me that name?…Baptized I blaming was, and I says to youse, baptized I am…wiv holy weeping and washing of teeth.  And immersion upon us miserable offenders.  Miserable offenders all–no offence meant….Peace on earth and good tall women.  And give us our trespassers as trespassers will be prosecuted for us…” et cetera.

The majority of the truly poetic lines, however, are given to Thomas Mendip and Jennet Jourdemayne, as they are the two main characters, she trying to persuade the audience in the Mayor’s house that she is not a witch, while Mendip tries to persuade them to hang him as the murderer of two men he says he killed, old Skipps and another man, which facts they all dispute without certain knowledge because they can’t believe any man would willingly come to have himself hanged.  As he says of his military service, however, “I’ve been unidentifiably/Floundering in Flanders for the past seven years,/Prising open ribs to let men go/On the indefinite leave which needs no pass./And now all roads are uncommonly flat, and all hair/Stands on end.”  Thus, he knows what it is to kill, and perhaps (if an actor were trying to find additional character motivation for why the character so persistently tries to focus deadly attention on himself) he is feeling, like Hamlet, “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world,” or something of that kind.

When Jennet, conversely, tries to use reason and logic with Tyson, she says, “Asking to be punished?  Why, no, I have come/Here to have the protection of your laughter./They accuse me of such a brainstorm of absurdities/That all my fear dissolves in the humour of it./If I could perform what they say I can perform/I should have got safely away from here/As fast as you bat your eyelid.”  Tyson, unfortunately, takes this remark as a partial confession.  She goes on, “They tell one tale, that once, when the moon/Was gibbous and in a high dazed state/Of nimbus love, I shook a jonquil’s dew/On to a pearl and let a cricket chirp/Three times, thinking of pale Peter:/And there Titania was, vexed by a cloud/Of pollen, using the sting of a bee to clean/Her nails and singing, as drearily as a gnat,/’Why try to keep clean?'”  The two, Jennet and Thomas, go on with their fantasy of talk, vying with each other but with different motives, until Thomas says he has “bedlam” under his hat, and “the battlefield/Uncle Adam died on.  He was shot/To bits with the core of an apple/Which some fool of a serpent in the artillery/Had shoved into God’s cannon.”  To this exchange of two souls who seem immediately to understand each other, Tyson responds in his totally uncomprehending way, “That’s enough/Terrible frivolity, terrible blasphemy,/Awful unorthodoxy.  I can’t understand/Anything that is being said.  Fetch a constable./The woman’s tongue clearly knows the flavour/ Of spiritu maligno.  The man must be/Drummed out of town.”  After a few minutes of this, Thomas loses his patience with Tyson and says, “You bubble-mouthing, fog-blathering,/Chin-chuntering, chap-flapping, liturgical,/Turgidical, base old man!  What about my murders?/And what goes round in your head,/What funny little murders and fornications/Chatting up and down in three-four time/Afraid to come out?  What bliss to sin by proxy/And do penance by way of someone else!”

The matter doesn’t become any clearer for the officials, and as to the ostensible wedding party, they are in a regular chaos and disorder because guests to celebrate are expected that night.  Finally, the officials decide to let the two erstwhile “convicts” spend their last night in company, she as her last night on earth, he as one who needs to be cheered up and sent on his way.

The unraveling of the somewhat complicated plot involves a party going on in the background offstage, an initially frustrated elopement of the clerk Richard and the girl Alizon Eliot, and the further fighting of the two brothers.  In the midst of this disorder, however, Thomas and Jennet are also falling in love with each other.  In a sense, this is an existential romantic comedy told backwards to dilute the potential sentimentality of the romance itself.  For example, as Jennet suggests about Thomas’s claims to have killed old Skipps and another man, “There was a soldier,/Discharged and centreless, with a towering pride/In his sensibility, and an endearing/Disposition to be a hero, who wanted/To make an example of himself to all/Erring mankind, and falling in with a witch-hunt/His good heart took the opportunity/Of providing a diversion.  O Thomas,/It was very theatrical of you to choose the gallows.”  When I say “an existential comedy told backwards,” I mean that the action of the play begins not at the beginning, nor really in the middle (as in medias res would dictate for an epic or novel), but nearly at the postulated end of the woman being accused and in the process of undergoing imprisonment and trial.  Instead, however, Frye whips the rug out from under the feet of his oppressing (or as with some like Margaret the mother, just indifferent) characters, and resurrects old Skipps.

That this is an existential play and not a simple romantic comedy, however, becomes quite clear in the end, in the alternatives to go or stay which are presented to Jennet and Thomas, and in the conditions under which they will have to leave or stay.  That is, to stay is deadly, but to go has its risks and forfeits as well.  And all the risks and forfeits of life itself have been gone through in the magnificent poetic excursions of language, especially from these two characters.  The choices they make, including the loss of the fear of loving, show that they carry existential baggage despite their apparently greater dedication to reason than the superstitious characters around them, because they only overcome the fear slowly, at least in dramatic terms on stage.

What does this have to do with freedom of speech, you ask?  Well, for one thing, the officials in the play are all constrained by fear of exceeding certain careful limits, not only from freedom of speech, but even from freedom of thought.  Their minds run in carefully cut grooves, and never get out of the ruts.  Even when Tappercoom offers to let Thomas and Jennet go at the end, it’s not because he sees their points of view; it’s only so that he can get Jennet’s property now that she is less demonstrably witch-like.  Only Richard the clerk frees himself from his parish role enough to run away with the woman he loves from the loveless marriage which threatens her.  The brothers and Margaret their mother do not change from having the initial concerns they had at the beginning of the play.  They are a little freer in their speech, but they too do not have any real freedom of mind to go along with it, the brothers sunk in lechery and competition, the mother in her household concerns.  It is only Jennet and Thomas who represent the forces of freedom, she in having the courage to go along with him into the night without knowing where they will go, he in getting over his “irrational fears” of closeness and love.  But this comes out sounding far more schmaltzy and sentimental than it does in the play, particularly if you see a powerful performance of it as I did.  Perhaps it would help readers to know that Richard Burton, John Gielgud, and Claire Bloom among others worthy of note were in one of the first productions of the play–maybe it’s possible to visualize it just a bit more accurately when you can see fine dramatic actors in your mind’s eye.

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September 1, 2012 · 10:56 pm

Two beautiful poems about outer (and inner) space–by John Masefield and Conrad Aiken

In discussing the first poem I’ve selected today, John Masefield’s “I Could Not Sleep for Thinking of the Sky,” I want to illustrate some of what I think draws us into the subject of outer space, which is often a metaphor in poetry for our inner space, our reachings toward infinity in an interior direction.  What I am suggesting in fact is that in Masefield’s poem, the “sky,” “The unending sky, with all its million suns” is in fact an example of T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative.”  For, as Masefield continues, we see a place where the poet watches “the fire-haired comet run[],” and “a point of gloss/Burn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing.”  He tries to imagine what it would be like if he could “sail that nothing,” if he could “proceed” and see a sun’s “last light upon his last moon’s granites/Die to a dark that would be night indeed.”  That his poem is a masterful exposition about death itself becomes more obvious in his last lines, when he says he might experience “Night where [his] soul might sail a million years/In nothing, not even Death, not even tears.”  Thus, though the poem is concerned with the birth and death of solar systems, which take up ever so much more time than humans to die, he can imagine himself living a kind of immortality almost like that of a god in heaven, but in a literal heaven of planets, stars, suns, moons and the like.  In form, the poem is a sonnet, first eight lines, then six, and the set pattern of the form enforces a sort of masterful containment of emotion, a condensation of intensity and meaning which sets up parallels between the wide and limitless-seeming sleepless night, the dark sky above with isolated bright spots, and the final and eventual and otherwise unimaginable experience of Death with a capital D, the final death of an individual seeming so small beside the deaths of galaxies and universes.  Yet it is this supposedly limited human intelligence, this small and insignificant human being, who is having this vast experience of the heavens.  In small space and time, two very indicative words here, Masefield has painted both an exterior and an interior notion of vastness and illimitable places.

Conrad Aiken’s poem, “Morning Song of Senlin,” is both longer and more filled with comic ironies.  Yet, it too is about shooting through space.  Aiken’s poetic voice, however, does not see the experience of going through space at top speed as something he could or would or might do were it possible, but in fact seems to treat the inner space of his private existence as a foil and in counterpoint to the experience of travelling on planet Earth through the universe.  Yet the two experiences in this poem are intimately connected.  The poem begins, “It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning/When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,/I arise, I face the sunrise,/And do the things my fathers learned to do.”  It might be remarked that the name “Senlin” was said by Aiken to mean “little old man,” and so it is that we can imagine so easily the daily ablutions and activities of a precise, neat, circumspect senior citizen, whose unbounded if somewhat humorously ironical remarks about travelling through space as he completes his daily brushing and combing activities could easily take our own breaths away as we imagine them.  He seems so very smug and self-satisfied.  The first stanza ends, “And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet/Stand before a glass and tie my tie.”  The chorus occurs periodically throughout the poem and reinforces the sense of a very small and insular even if natural world on the Earth around Senlin:  “Vine leaves tap my window,/Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,/The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree/Repeating three clear tones.”  In the second stanza, we get again the repetition of the little old man looking in the mirror, tying his tie, combing his hair, but in this case the heavenly accompaniment to this activity is: “The green earth tilts through a sphere of air/And bathes in a flame of space.”

In the next stanza, final things are thought of, but again rather comically, as if in the attitude of a member of a boys’ club who has a special understanding with the club president:  “It is morning…Should I not pause in the light to remember god?/Upright and firm I stand on a star unstable,/He is immense and lonely as a cloud./I will dedicate this moment before my mirror/To him alone, for him I will comb my hair,/Accept these humble offerings, cloud of silence!/I will think of you as I descend the stair.”

The poem mentions, of course, that “The walls are about me still as in the evening,/I am the same, and the same name still I keep.”  Yet, this seems an odd sort of reassurance to juxtapose with the next of the travelling-at-high-speed-through-an-unknown-firmament passages, which reads, “In a whistling void I stand before my mirror,/Unconcerned, and tie my tie.”  The next morning comes and is related in similar form, in this fashion:  “It is morning.  I stand by the mirror/And surprise my soul once more;/The blue air rushes above my ceiling,/There are suns beneath my floor…”  We continue with the alternation back and forth through the rest of the poem of Senlin getting ready in the morning with such images from his mind as “I ascend from darkness/And depart on the winds of space for I know not where….”  The last we actually hear of Senlin’s voice, we hear “There are shadows across the windows…And a god among the stars;and I will go/Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak/And humming a tune I know…”  We get one final repetition of the natural earth-bound images in the chorus with slight variation, and thus the poem ends.

But what has Senlin actually said, when it’s taken all together?  There seem to be four main lines of monologue going on in this mind we are listening to:  one is that he’s abstracted with getting ready for his day, and his daily routine.  The second is that after all, there are daily images outside his window as well which can be seen as being nearly as reassuring as the routine itself.  The third and most terrifying set of images are associated with the fact that yes, he is on a “swiftly tilting planet,” and these images open the door to startling and frightening possibilities of collision, not so much of planets with each other, but of the quotidian with the unearthly and heavenly.  Yet, for Senlin’s convenience, in the fourth set of images he has imagined himself a god who, though “immense and lonely as a cloud” may still be appeased by someone going through his daily cycle, minding his own business, and giving a polite if highly conventional tip of the hat to the notion of god itself.  This is a strangely and hilariously apt picture of a man keeping his balance in ways which most of us practice from time to time, as we note that scary things do happen (but of course, not to us!).  And this is what makes this poem of universal interest to all of us, even those of us who are not getting on in years and able only to make the best of things in this way.

These two poems seems opposed in another way in the sense that Masefield’s poem takes place at night, and incorporates a sense of the sheer vastness of a life experience when it is filled with a notion of the unearthly and wide expanses of eternity.  And Aiken’s poem takes place in the morning, in a calm and domesticated setting, where the “wild” element is introduced by the thoughtful though somewhat dismissive acceptance of outer space and the earth’s place in it by the composed and superior-to-the-experience attitude of Senlin.  The first poem has somber and tragic tonalities; the second has counterpoint and comic irony.  Yet, both are about our place in the universe and how we face it.  For this reason, I’ve always loved these two poems, and found comfort, complexity, and amusement during the many times I’ve read them through.

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August 30, 2012 · 3:05 pm

If you’re going to skin a buffalo or steer, make sure your karma’s good….

Years ago, someone told me a story, a sort of folk tale which is circulated in parts of the West and Southwest, about a naive buffalo hunter who got stuck out in a snow storm on the range.  Though apparently the story is circulated among different groups of people as a tall tale based on fact, it has actually been written down and made into a literary work.  I wish I knew by whom, because several people have been credited with it.  Anyway, in this story the buffalo hunter, stuck out on the range when the storm hits, decides to wrap himself up in what turns out to have been a “green” (uncured) buffalo hide, with the result that he is smothered to death as the hide “shrinks.”  Obviously, he should’ve known the difference between a cured and an uncured hide.

When I first encountered the title of Annie Proulx’s short story “The Half-Skinned Steer” from her collection of stories Close Range, I assumed that it was some version of this story that I was going to read.  But her story, while to some degree lacking the sort of slapstick human element of the other story, is untimately more chilling.  The similarity between the two is not only in the skinning of a buffalo or steer, but in the unity in what’s being done to animals and how they are avenged on humans.  There’s a supernatural element in Proulx’s story, which yet can be explained away by those determined to do so as the natural demise in grief of a plain, boring, and everyday elderly rich man who rides an exercise bike and decides to drive himself across several states in a Cadillac to his brother’s funeral.

Mero, the main character, is contacted by his nephew Tick’s wife with the news that his brother Rollo has died.  This information provokes his decision to travel and causes him to reminisce about the past, and to wonder if his brother ever managed to steal his father’s girlfriend away, a “horsy” woman who evidently appealed to all of them in slightly different ways.  For one thing, she was a natural storyteller: as we are told, “It was her voice that drew you in, that low, twangy voice, wouldn’t matter if she was saying the alphabet, what you heard was the rustle of hay.  She could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire.”  The message that the storyteller conveys is one about how natural things are avenged on humankind, the interloper; it’s a question of Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw.”  When humanity participates in this earthly menage, it risks being treated itself in the same terms as its victims, even if by apparent “supernatural” influence.

The extent to which Mero’s lack of adjustment to a natural ranch environment is fairly complete is shown by the fact that he is living in city surroundings far away from his original home, exercising on a stationary bike when Tick’s wife calls him to tell him that his brother Rollo has died.  The main fact she tells him about the death is that Rollo has been running his ranch as a sort of Australian theme park, with emus (among other “Down Under” animals) on site; one of the emus has slashed him with its nails “from belly to breakfast,” an event which is thoroughly in line with what will happen later in the story.  It’s obvious from this death that even someone who is more accustomed to ranch life than Mero must still treat his surroundings with constant attention and respect, and one gets the feeling quite early on, from his determination to drive his Cadillac to his brother’s funeral in the midst of winter snowstorm conditions, that Mero has forgotten this very important adjustment.

He is given several warnings by his surroundings that he is not capable to take on this “mission”:  he is stopped while speeding by a policeman, and at first can’t remember what he’s driving for when the policeman asks.  Then, he has a collision and must purchase another car, which though also a Cadillac turns out to be a malfunctioning one.  But he thinks to himself about purchasing yet a third car on his presumed way home, “I can do whatever I want.”  Yet, even when talking to his nephew’s wife on the phone, he himself introduces the element of superstition in thinking:  he’d “never had an accident in his life knock on wood.”  And this superstitious element in the story becomes the correct way to confront the apparently supernatural picture of his downfall, in which the reader is pulled between seeing the story both as a pragmatic account of a man’s lack of forethought and caution, and also as a symbolic reminder of how his early beginnings get their belated revenge on him.

One might say, of course, that he is not concentrating while he drives.  But he is taken up with remembering his early life with his father, his father’s girlfriend the storyteller, and his brother.  The story which she told that is set up as a foil and in counterpoint to the story of his trip is that of “Tin Head,” a rancher who supposedly had “a metal plate in his head from falling down some cement steps.”  Tin Head is one of those archetypal figures from tales to whom odd things happen as a matter of course.  We are encouraged to believe that he made a series of bad decisions due to the plate “eating into his brain.”  This brought bad luck on his ranch therefore, really highly unusual bad luck sometimes, such as the chicks turning blue.  And all the while that Mero is thinking of the story of Tin Head and how he once half-skinned a steer and then left it while he went to supper only to come back and find it gone, he is also thinking of his father’s girlfriend as the only flesh and blood woman he’s ever known.  From the time he was 11 or 12, when according to his memory, he showed an anthropologist some cave paintings and learned that some of them were vulvas, he has thought of all other women as having “the stony structure of female genitalia.”

These three threads of storyline entertwine:  he thinks of himself as a “cattleman gone wrong” who doesn’t like rare steak and who considers he’s been preserving his health with exercising, “nut cutlets, and green leafy vegetables”; he thinks of Tin Head, whose luck turned permanently against him after he came out to the pasture in search of where someone might’ve dragged the half-skinned steer only to find it glaring at him from a far field, its “red eyes” full of hate; and he remembers the storyteller who could tell the story so well, and thinks about her appearance.  The symbolism and imagery of the story work as foreshadowing.  For example, during his trip he wakes up early in a motel room with his “eyes aflame” from lack of sleep.  Everything practical that one knows about safe driving and arrival at a destination goes against his logic, yet in the end, when he is stuck up in a snow drift and has to break a window to get back into his car after a trip out to see if he could perhaps walk (to a nearby ranch whose owner, he finally remembers, would be dead by then), it is the “red eyes” of his taillights winking that signal again just how much trouble he is in.  He all the while is assuring himself that he “might” find his way, or a truck “might” come by, but when he thinks of the “mythical Grand Hotel in the sagebrush,” we know either that he is acknowledging himself to be in desperate straits or that he really is delusional.

At the very end of the tale, the two threads of actual story, the story of Mero’s drive and the story of Tin Head’s bad luck, come together in a final tribute to the girlfriend’s act of storytelling itself:  for Mero notices some cattle in a nearby field, and one of them, whose “red eye” he thinks he sees, is stalking him, keeping up pace for pace.  The last line of the story brings the whole picture stunningly and neatly together, proposing in the “rhetoric of fiction” (Wayne Booth) that stories, however exaggerated, are what our lives come down to, that we are always joining another story which has come down to us “from before” (note the symbolic presence in the story of an anthropologist), and that a person is a fool who thinks that he or she can escape acting a role in some story which began even before he or she was born.

The collection of stories in Close Range is subtitled Wyoming Stories, and is the collection from which “Brokeback Mountain” originally came.  There are many other stories in it which deserve equal attention, but this is my post for today.  Naturally, my skill at retelling the story is not nearly as accomplished as Annie Proulx’s in the original telling, and I hope you will buy the book or check it out from a library, or get it online if it’s available there, and read it for yourself.  I think you’ll agree with me that it is a welcome and accomplished addition to what might be called New Americana.

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August 29, 2012 · 3:43 pm

Life strategies suggested by a poem by Seamus Heaney

Just how often, when you are smarting from some sort of a blow to your pride, equilibrium, feelings, intelligence, or perhaps more life-endangering, your physical person, has some other well-meaning and ultimately interfering soul muttered “Oh, well, we should all learn to turn the other cheek…”?  And usually their remark trails off into an infinity of foolish remarks, because most people do not suffer either fools or bullies or well-meant interference gladly, and you (listening to this from them), however much you are a follower of Scripture or perhaps only an admirer of some of the wisdom there, find other bits of doctrine hard to swallow.

Your hour has come!  Rather, it came back in 1996, when Seamus Heaney told the other side of the “turn the other cheek” story in his poem “Weighing In.”  This poem came to my attention first because it’s one of my brother’s favorites, and I felt compelled to read it and compare it with the man I know and see just what made the poem (and him!) tick.  Before I go any further with this, I should say that my brother is a very erudite and accomplished university teacher, who puts up with a great deal and never complains, or at least he seasons his complaints with the salt of jest, which never grows old.  He never complains about his students to me, of course, because his students don’t ask him computer questions and don’t ask him to design websites the way his sister has until recently.  But according to the poem, I’m not just supposed to say mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa and let it go at that.  I’ll try to give, in my prosaic and ultimately less interesting flow of words, some sense of what Seamus Heaney has to say on this subject in his poem “Weighing In,” which comes from his collection “The Spirit Level” (in Ireland, a spirit level is what we refer to as a “carpenter’s level” in the U. S.  You know, that straight hunk of wood or metal which has a little window full of liquid in the middle of it–when the liquid bubble is exactly in the middle of the window, then the surface you have it placed on is level!).

Heaney begins the poem “Weighing In” by describing another piece of builder’s machinery, a “56 lb. weight.”  He characterizes it as a “solid iron/Unit of negation.”  His main point in the first few stanzas of the poem is that it’s nearly too heavy to lift at all until placed upon a weighbridge (which holds another balancing weight on it).  Then, “everything tremble[s], flow[s] with give and take.”

Having established his governing metaphor thus in the first four stanzas of his poem, he goes on to consider what this imagery means in human terms:

“And this is all the good tidings amount to:/This principle of bearing, bearing up/And bearing out, just having to/Balance the intolerable in others/Against our own, having to abide/Whatever we settled for and settled into/Against our better judgement.  Passive/suffering makes the world go round./Peace on earth, men of good will, all that/Holds good only as long as the balance holds/The scales ride steady and the angels’ strain/Prolongs itself at an unearthly pitch.”

But having enunciated this poetic and sparse and tightly and neatly rhetorical principle in its human terms, Heaney goes on in the next section of the poem to elucidate what the two sides of the balance are in Scriptural terms, the part of the balance we’re familiar with hearing in terms of Christ’s “turning the other cheek” and the less familiar (if in realistic fact more common) command to “refuse the other cheek.”  For Heaney sees the knuckling down to others’ whims and egos as humoring “The obedient one you hurt yourself into,” a question therefore of masochism (though this makes a somewhat more simplistic idea of his intricate and involved picture of the emotional and psychological elements involved).  He suggests that what Christ did in fact when the soldiers were mocking him was to exercise “the power/Of power not exercised, of hope inferred/By the powerless forever.”  Then, he begs the party addressed in the poem, “just this once,” to say who hurt him or her, “give scandal, cast the stone.”

Finally in this mastery of poetical imagery and argument, he brings the poem down even more to the personal level and a specific time (“one night when follow-through was called for”) and apologizes for having withheld retaliation for a remark from his friend which required a swift and presumably angry rejoinder, and says that he thus “lost an edge.”  The last two lines of the poem tell us that this was a “deep mistaken chivalry,” and that “At this stage only foul play cleans the slate.”

This poem is a vital and thorough recognition not only of the struggles we go through in making and holding on to our accomplishments and strengths, but also of the difficulties we encounter in making and holding on to friends.  In relatively small space, the poem links our friends to our innermost habits of response and self:  do we forgive too readily, do we take offense too easily?  Is there a middle ground?  Can “chivalry” be “mistaken,” can we be too gentle with a friend?  And just when does a friend need to hear from us that he or she has gone too far, and not from the point of view of our own concerns only?  The entire question of a fair balance is, after all, what hangs in the balance.

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August 27, 2012 · 5:05 pm

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”–Mark Twain

As Mark Twain says of good books in the title of today’s post, so it is true as well of good posts:  you actually have to read them to get the benefit of your advantage of being able to read, having a computer, et cetera. Along those lines, the time has come around again for me to do homage to the sites which, though most of them aren’t new, are relatively new to me.  The blogs below make up the next five newest blogs I’ve been revelling in, with my comments appended.  If I’ve recently started to follow your site but haven’t commented about it yet on my own, it’s because I’ve started to follow you more recently than I did these folks below.  I’m reading and commenting on a lot of sites now, and at some point I’m going to reach the saturation level, where I can only write about sites I read without following them.  There are only so many hours in a day!  To those who have been Freshly Pressed or have won another award, I offer congratulations and sympathy:  they are very busy people right now, but I’m sure must be busily enjoying the recent attention.  So, here goes:

Peter Monaco– at http://petermonaco.com/ .  Peter defines himself as a husband and father foremost, and a worker in analytical mathematics.  So far (though he promises to come back some day and edit his early posts after he’s published lots of novels and mention them), he writes very witty, alert articles with innovative and funny titles, such as:  “If You Want to Write, Don’t Barf on Your Readers,” “A Query to All You Blog Stalkers Out There,” and in the mastery of the bright ripost, “Things to Say as a Jerk for a Day.”  These titles are probably tantalizing enough to draw your curiosity to him quickly, but if not, I should tell you that he does have more serious moments when he considers such things as the mechanics of writing (like characterization, for example).  He also features clever stick figure drawings as illustrations of the writing principles and jests he enunciates.  All I can say having observed his site so far is that you should beware of not taking your sense of humor along with you when you read him:  he’s serious-minded, but tongue-in-cheek at the same time.  So, without further ado (as they say in the MC business) I’ll leave you to it, commenting from my own perspective only that I think he has mastered pacing very well in reference to just when to drop the punchline (and though bombs aren’t funny, I can view him as one of his stick figures up in a glider, “bombing” us below with meringue pies).

The Long Summer– at http://thelongsummerblog.wordpress.com/ .  The promise of this site is also in what still is yet to come, for our writer here is a sort of foreign correspondent in the making, a teaching NYU Abu Dhabi fellow who will be teaching and tutoring in writing English for undergrads during the next year from this August to the end of next May.  His name on the blog is mattatthemovies, and his real moniker is Matthew J. Flood.   Though his two posts that caught my attention were on Susan Sontag’s distaste for tourists’ pictures and his comical essay about what it’s like to fly Business Class on a United Arab Emirates flight (versus Economy Class), he suggests that there are many more posts to come, not only on the topics and praxis of writing and teaching, but (pace Susan Sontag) also including a lot of wonderful photographs and visuals like the ones already on his site.  He’s probably getting settled into his teaching job right now, because it’s been a couple of weeks since he’s published a new posts, but all in all, I’ll be very glad to hear about him and his experiences in Abu Dhabi, and I hope you’ll all follow him, too.

Shelf Love–at http://shelflove.wordpress.com/ .  At this site are two simply wonderful reviewers of books, and their title is apt, for reading their reviews and comments not only draws one’s attention to excellent new and older publications, but also is a real act of “self-love” on the part of any serious reader.  Their names are “Jenny” and “Teresa,” and they attract what seems like a huge and faithful following of readers in all categories of writing except the cheap or tawdry.  For, they are attuned to quality and the pursuit of excellence.  If you have a question about any book you’ve happened to read which falls in the literary category, they’re really very hard to stump:  not that anyone would or should try, because their help is immensely more valuable than showing them up would be, even were one so underhanded as to try it.  They seem to have both further information at the tips of their fingers as well as recommendations, and have suggested more books for my list of things to read that I will probably be able to cover in a lifetime.  They will cause me to be extra busy with even the things they’ve recommended that I have time to read, but there are, after all, worse ways of spending one’s time.  Kudos, ladies, and keep those reviews and comments coming!

thelivingnotebook— at http://thelivingnotebook.wordpress.com/ .  Here we have a multitalented young writer much engaged with the question of what spurs creativity in general, and he theorizes, and writes, and draws analogies, and draws dream mandalas and basically includes us with great welcome in the things he’s learning and coming up with in his journey through graduate school (I don’t remember if he said it’s an MFA, but to judge by his output and perspective, it well could be, as well as whatever else he is engaged in academically).  He has thoughts on many different aspects of what makes writers write, and what in fact makes one person a writer and another a hack.  He seems fully in touch with both his inner angels and his inner demons, and I would guess is in the process of getting a compromise from the two camps, so that he can engineer a few creative projects based on their interaction.  Most importantly, he is in the process of crafting himself, which is, after all, what good writers really do.  I hope some day to see a novel, poetry, or short stories he’s written, especially since he is so generously sharing the journey to them with us.

Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat–at http://beautyisasleepingcat.wordpress.com/ .  Here is another excellent and considering reviewer and commenter on world literature, who also shows a wide conversance with different aspects of the literary endeavor.  “Caroline,” who has not only been Freshly Pressed but has also won the Liebster Award, in recent posts has covered such widely diverse topics as Dickens and “The Dickens Dictionary,” and the Canadian writer Mary Lawson.  She has held an Antonio Tabucchi week complete with a Giveaway.  She has a regular feature known as Literature and War, in which her latest feature was Aharon Applefeld’s “Story of a Life.”   This wide variety is only scraping the surface of her literary talents, however.  She also writes on different authors in the categories of American, British, German, French and Japanese literature.  She has in her cloud categories as well the subjects of short stories and non-fiction.  She seems either to be immensely educated literarily and/or to be a very fast, accurate and comprehensive reader with multiple enthusiasms.  Now her blogsite is one of my regular enthusiasms for the insights it offers.

That’s all for this post on other bloggers I’ve met through WordPress.com’s sites.  There will be more to come next week.  See you then.  Until then, I will be writing my usual posts on literary topics and interests of my own, and I hope you will enjoy these as well.  In leaving you today, I would like to quote what Gustave Flaubert had to say about writing:

“It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.  Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made then almost close their love-drowned eyes.  When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks if I knew he could hear me.  Praised may he be for not creating me a cotton merchant, a vaudevillian, or a wit.”

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August 24, 2012 · 9:17 pm

“When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the touch of the one in the play of the many.”–Rabindranath Tagore

In the quote I have added to my post for today, Tagore brings up the issue of the many and the one, and asks that he be always able to see each person as an individual, not just one person lost in a crowd, a sea of possibly opposed faces.  He also suggests that knowing even one person well is an entryway into knowledge of others in general.  This is a very complex statement of quite laudable values, and one which bears upon the book of short fiction by another Indian author, Jhumpa Lahiri, the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Her book Interpreter of Maladies, the title of which was taken from one of her stories by that title,  not only won the Pulitzer Prize, but was also a Pen/Hemingway Award winner and was selected by the New Yorker as a “Debut of the Year.”  The most intriguing thing about the relationship between the author and her book is in fact the degree to which she herself is an “interpreter of maladies,” the maladies of alienation and separation visited upon people either moving from one continent to another or from one state of being to another.  In each of her nine stories, whether they are stories of families travelling between India and the U. S. for love or work or recreation or whether they are portraits of unique and unusual loves and characters, she traverses the boundaries, both those which keep her characters separate and those which, being overcome, unite them more firmly to each other.  And as she does so, her characters and their dilemmas, however firmly they may be rooted in cultures which don’t understand each other intuitively, become the objects of a further development of intuition.  Just as Tagore says, understanding one person’s motives and concerns, even if they are very different from yours, and though the understanding may be hard won and have developed from a totally alien perspective, shakes one’s faith in the notion of alienation and causes readers to extend their minds to the faiths and concerns of others.  Suddenly, one can imagine the person as being like oneself after all; one can at least understand.

From the first story, “A Temporary Matter,” in which a young couple deals with the conditions of having been deprived of their child, the subject of alienation is strong.  In order to overcome the separation which has been occasioned by their mutual grief, they begin to confide in each other about things they’ve never before told.  Their reconciliation is made bittersweet by the recognition that they have perhaps never really known the other person fully.

“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” the second story, shows an Indian family joining forces in their support of a man from Dacca, a Pakistani (before Bangladesh became separate) who has some different traditions from themselves.  The story is told from the point of view of the young daughter of the house, for whom Mr. Pirzada brings treats every evening, missing as he does his own seven daughters.  He nervously watches the news on their television in a town near Boston, since he is unable to be with his own family in Dacca.  The manner in which the American society around them isolates the newcomer with his own hard luck is portrayed by a scene in which the young daughter is prevented by a teacher from following up on her interest in the geography and history of the region Mr. Pirzada is from.  The family must wait with Mr. Pirzada to find out if his family survived the conflict or not.  The ending is reported obliquely, not only by the news broadcasts the family continues to watch on their television set, but also by the letters Mr. Pirzada writes them after he leaves Boston to return to Dacca.  Clearly, it is up to neighbors to act locally in order to overcome cultural blindnesses.

In “Interpreter of Maladies,” Mr. Das and his wife, who were raised in the States and who are visiting India and various tourist sites there for the first time, rely on their guide, Mr. Kapasi, to show them around and inform them of local traditions.  Mrs. Das, however, upon finding out that Mr. Kapasi works for a doctor as a language interpreter, assumes incorrectly that he is a sort of psychologist who can help her with her problems.  Mr. Kapasi, meanwhile, has been misunderstanding Mrs. Das to mean that she wants to be special friends.  Gradually, though Mrs. Das has a rude awakening in discovering her error, Mr. Kapasi’s cover of polite and correct behavior aids him in preserving his equilibrium and delivering the family from a crisis which has arisen due to their own inability to adjust to their environment.  It is Mr. Kapasi in this case who has the epiphany, or perhaps the moment of wisdom, when he realizes just how the Dases see him:  for they are people who are estranged from the land of their origins, and are rather ordinary “ugly American” tourists.  Thus, he has correctly deduced their malady.

“A Real Durwan” is a tragic sort of story to which even someone unfamiliar with the idea of what a “durwan” is (a sort of underprivileged charperson) can relate.  It takes place in an Indian setting, where Boori Ma, the staircase sweeper and door guard of an apartment building, each day chants up and down the stairwells as she sweeps the tale of where she used to live (a much better place) and the life she used to live (how grand), and though the other residents of the building where she sleeps in an old quilt under the mailboxes don’t entirely believe her, until the landlord moves, they all treat her with a guarded respect.  The sad outcome is derived, ironically, from a promise the landlord makes to get her better sleeping arrangements, perhaps because it leads Boori Ma to “count her chickens before they’e hatched.”  Her friend the landlord forgets, with unfortunate consequences for Boori Ma, because the building has recently had a facelift and the other residents have become prideful, just as they blame Boori Ma for having been all her years there.  Was she telling the truth all that time, or only fabricating?  The ending doesn’t resolve this issue; it only portrays how the Wheel of Fortune can betray any one of us at any moment who is without friends.

In “Sexy,” a seasonal story if ever there was one, a young woman, Miranda, who is having a love affair with a married Indian man, learns the difference between seasonal and perpetual.  The story features a background plot of another love affair with a married person:  Miranda’s friend Laxmi also has a cousin who now knows that she’s being cheated on by her husband, a frequent traveller on airplanes between Delhi and Montreal.  Instead of coming home to the cousin in the Boston area, that husband has picked up with a younger woman he met on a flight.  The story in the background acts as a foil for Miranda’s relationship; besotted as she is with Dev, her own married man, the words of a young boy she’s babysitting for, who tells her she’s sexy just as Dev did previously, awaken her to what is actually happening.  She plans what to tell Dev, but the change of seasons, a sort of fate, articulates her points for her, in a fine and neatly handled end to the story.

The next piece of fiction, “Mrs. Sen’s,” tells the story of a friendship between a young boy, Eliot, and the Indian woman, Mrs. Sen, who babysits for him.  As Eliot watches Mrs. Sen chop vegetables and deal with her various fears and insecurities about living in a new community outside of Boston (where her husband teaches mathematics), he begins to understand something about her points of reference.  For one, she previously had a chauffeur, and now Mr. Sen is insisting that she learn to drive.  She is worried by the fact that she feels alone and isolated in the building where she lives, too far away for other people to hear her if she screams.  When she encounters further difficulty with the driving, it is in fact Eliot who hears her crying in the bathroom as Mr. Sen apologizes to Eliot’s mother for having involved him in an accident.  Eliot hears her, and has thus understood something about her fear and her difficulties.  And with this, he has gone through a learning experience of his own.

“This Blessed House” is a deceptively simple story about the nature of tolerance and belief.  When Twinkle and Sanjeev begin to find Christian ornaments hidden in every nook and cranny of their new home, Twinkle celebrates them, though she is a Hindu, by putting them all up on the mantel.  The objects by and large have no real artistic value, they are obviously the result of a sincere and devout observance, however one without much taste.  But as everything continues to go well for the young couple, Twinkle insists on retaining the objects, which costs Sanjeev something severe in the way of his ability to tolerate them.  It’s not, in fact that Twinkle is changing her religion:  she seems simply to regard the objects as good luck charms, and despite Sanjeev’s embarrassment when they have friends over, the couple’s lucky popularity is clearly a result of Twinkle’s open and receptive personality.  It becomes clear by the end of the story that despite disdaining Twinkle’s good luck charms themselves, Sanjeev cannot resist the charm of Twinkle herself.  He has a dark moment of the soul, as it’s called, when he realizes just what this will entail.

When we first begin the story “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” we have to wonder ourselves just what is wrong with Bibi.  From the description of the many different kinds of medical treatment and advice she has received, not all of them equally reputable, we have to ask if perhaps she is an unacknowledged hysteric, or perhaps if she suffers an unknown form of epilepsy.  Her fits are looked upon with sympathy by her friends and neighbors, which she has in spite of being closely quarantined by her family.  It’s only when Bibi’s own preferred solution and a chance event that it turns out no one can trace coincide that she finds herself an ordinary member of society.  This story seems to suggest that ordinary human interaction and good-heartedness can guide people to accept what seems at first like a totally anomalous situation, something which comes about without the sanction of restrictions and family rule.  Bibi is after all human, not a demon as her cousin’s wife, with whom she lives on and off, sees it; people may be demonized by someone around them, it is clear, but there are equally those prepared to accept what they don’t understand.

Finally, in “The Third and Final Continent” the book ends with a sort of summary story about the way in which a person originally difficult to understand in their ideas and motives can come to symbolize something precious for someone from an entirely different society.  A young Indian man leaves his home in 1964 to go to Boston and study, and to work in the MIT library system.  While there, he is at first situated in a YMCA, but soon moves to another room in a private house for the summer before his wife can come over from India to join him.  He meets a real eccentric in the owner of the house, Mrs. Croft.  At first, it takes some real practice of patience and conscious good will on his part to meet her halfway.  Soon, however, he meets her daughter and learns things about her that cause him to feel a genuine empathy for her.  Later, when he moves into another house with his wife, he still thinks of Mrs. Croft as an essential part of his establishing himself in America, and goes to see her.  The results of his interest in her affect the rest of his life, and become a watchword for his family as well.  As the story concludes in the character’s voice at the end, “….[T]here are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.  As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”  Luckily for us, we have Jhumpa Lahiri’s work of imagination to fall back on, so that if such things are beyond us for the time being, we can always find a translator, in fact an “interpreter” of our “maladies.”

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August 23, 2012 · 4:36 pm

When is borrowing acceptable, and when is it unacceptable (and actionable) plagiarism?

The twentieth century and the early twenty-first have not been kind to the notion of borrowing from others in order to create one’s own work.  From Ezra Pound’s edict “Make it New” to the constant reiteration in critical and creative writing courses for students of the priniciple “just do your own work,” the modern (1899-1945) and contemporary (1945-present) eras have put a high premium on originality, that loaded term of terms.

Of course, Pound himself was a great borrower from much earlier works, which he imitated, borrowed from, referred to, and essentially canonized in the more acceptable (read:  non-anti-Semitic) of his Cantos.  So, Pound’s instruction to “make it new” was less an injunction to create ex nihilo, or like Athena’s “springing full-blown from the mind of Zeus,” than it was to revitalize literature by returning to past models and revamping them for modern use.  It’s just that in returning to past models, Pound went further back in time for his models, instead of basing his work on that which came immediately before him.

T. S. Eliot, who had his poetry sculptured and shaped by Pound in Pound’s character of literary patron and advisor, is known to have further muddied the waters of clarity by saying “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” (from Philip Massinger).  Nevertheless, this statement is qualified by other things Eliot says, such as “[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor” (from the essential essay for students even now, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”).  He also says “The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time” (from Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca).  Of course, to some extent writers who are very self-aware of their status like to issue shocking or startling remarks like Eliot’s first one quoted above.  But wait–take these three quotes together and with their sources, and I think things become a little clearer again, at least with reference to T. S. Eliot.  We might have considered anyway that Eliot was referring to writers like Shakespeare in the first quote above:  for, Shakespeare regularly stole plots and sometimes whole plays from others, improved upon them immeasurably, and set them in their forms for generations to come, because of his sheer poetic and dramatic greatness.  The problem is, this took place at a time when it was the norm for poets and playwrights to draw freely upon the works of others, both contemporary to their own times and from antiquity.  But our times have insisted upon originality as part of the essence of a truly great work, and upon innovation as a necessary rite of passage in the struggle to turn out a good and creditable work.  It’s no wonder that those people who are genuinely confused by the issue of plagiarism are so taken aback by what seem like competing sets of requirements.

And then, of course, there’s the issue of writing articles and books in the academy.  If you can still find recordings of the Harvard mathematician Tom Lehrer’s hilarious satirical songs anywhere (and let me not wander too far from my topic, but Lehrer is well worth hearing; he’s the John Stewart of his time, in the 1960’s), you’ll run across a lyric about Lobachevsky, a Russian mathematician who evidently wrote things without proper attribution that were at least highly imitative of what others had written.  Part of the lyric reads:  “Plagiarize.  Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.  Remember why the good Lord made your eyes.  So don’t shade your eyes, but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize–only be sure always to call it, please–research.”  For another quote of this ilk, there’s Wilson Mizner’s “Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.”  These quotes are not meant to make students who might read my column cynical; rather they’re intended as an airing of the issues involved.  The best advice in the academic life is:  however much you may borrow, either credit the work outright and get consent, or if it’s an occasion between friends where no credit is needed, check that out with the friend or let them see it to make sure.  You can always credit it privately and impersonally for them if they are shy of attention, or can perhaps say something like “as a friend noted some time ago” or variations on the same.  If you’re working for credit in a class rather than writing a manuscript, let your instructor know that you are honest by crediting quotes as you are taught.  The basic rule is: be modest.  Don’t take credit for something which you have found somewhere else, and if it turns out especially that the other fellow or gal beat you to the punch and said what was just on the tip of your tongue (infelicitous mixing of metaphors here, but you get my point), give them credit anyway:  they historically said it before you did, even if the idea is a brand new one which just occurred to you.  If you find out too late to credit it that it was said by someone else first (after you publish or turn in an essay for example), tidy up behind yourself by mentioning (in any new edition or to your teacher) that you were previously unaware of the concurrence of remarks, and give the other person a footnote or mention.  Contrary to what you may believe, it makes you look better rather than worse.

To return just for a moment to Shakespeare and one of the reasons he got by with his extensive borrowings without credit (aside from the traditions of his time, that is) let’s look at the poet John Milton for a quote:  “For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted Plagiarè” (Eikonoklastes).  There have been a number of studies written, only a few of which I’ve even seen or had presented to my attention by my own teachers, that show how Shakespeare immensely bettered the other playwrights and poets he stole from.  So, in the traditions of his own time, in which it was essential to write upon some story that perhaps was well-known anyway, in the same fashion in which a realistic writer of our own time might use as inspiration a story which is covered by all the major news networks, Shakespeare “made the grade,” so to speak.

During the twentieth century also, the scholar and critic Julia Kristeva came along, with her idea of intertextuality, which is a way of referring to the intricate and intertwined relationships literary texts establish among themselves without recourse to authors’ intents.  As this is more a move to put consideration of what the authors’ intentions are out of the picture than an actual stance on plagiarism, it is a more theoretical issue.  It takes place after the fact of composition, however, not before the fact, so I’m leaving it out of account for now (and I’m being a bit lazy here–Julia Kristeva is a very challenging author to read, and I’ve only covered most of one of her books).  I’m just mentioning it because there is some tangential relationship to originality as a topic.

And what about all those columnists in the news in the last ten years who were fired for plagiarizing from other columnists or newspeople?  It’s tempting just to let Peter Anderson settle the issue.  He says, “Quotations are a columnist’s bullpen.  Stealing someone else’s words frequently spares the embarrassment of eating your own.”  Still, as we have seen, this doesn’t really settle the issue, because the columnists get fired anyway, and several of them have declared that the fault was unintentional.  What do we make of this?  Perhaps it would be generous in this discussion to remember the many times in which some of us literary wannabees copied out the words of others in our notebooks or on our computers because they seemed so strongly to chime in with what we ourselves wanted to say or felt.  I’ve certainly had times myself (in the days before personal computers) when I found thoughts scribbled in one of my writer’s notebooks, and said to myself complacently, “Boy, that’s really a good one.  I have to use that soon.”  And in the days before I started also to take the time to copy down the author’s name and possibly the source of the quote as well, I misremembered more than once and assumed the thought was mine, only to have a friend or teacher to whom I showed the idea furrow his or her brow a moment and say something like “That sounds like so-and-so.  Are you quoting or did you think of that yourself?”  It can happen, yes, which is why it’s a good idea always to note down under your quote where it came from and the author, if you know.  It only takes a little more effort, but more effort is what being a good writer is about.  And if it’s just a coincidence, look up the author anyway, and see how they developed their thought that was similar to your own.  This is what truly changes your work from plagiarism to research, which all kidding aside is a noble endeavor.  And there’s no rule that says you have to write only about your own little mud puddle or corner of the world to stay original; most good writers are either knowledgeable already upon some subject they want to write about or do actual research on it (and either directly or indirectly credit their sources).

My solution in fiction, which would not suit everybody, is to have a character mention the name of the author he or she is quoting, or initiate a literary discussion which makes it obvious what issues are being discussed.  In poetry, I give notes to my poems and let my readers know whom I was thinking of when I wrote, if anyone.  Most of all, I try to “just do my own work.”  And I put my whole heart into it, because what everyone on this planet has to say, despite all the many human things we share and the human experiences which join us one to the other, makes them as individual as myriad snowflakes, each one original and different.  Putting your whole heart into being your plot, being your characters, being your style, et cetera, and relying likewise on the best models you can find and the best literary advice is advancing a large step ahead on the path towards real originality.

P.S.  My own investigation of and meditation upon this topic was occasioned by dialogues I’ve had with the blogger at http://thelivingnotebook.wordpress.com/ .  By and large I think we agree, though he is advocating a freer system of borrowing than I feel comfortable with.  I rather suspect that he’s more interested in spurring creativity in others by his remarks than he is in actually encouraging people to steal freely.  He’s a little like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in that he knows enough about what he’s talking about to know just how far he can go without seeming unoriginal (and of course, he turns out a very original column, which I’ve much enjoyed).

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