Apple Dropping into Deep Early Snow

A jay settled on a branch, making it sway.
The one shriveled fruit that remained
gave way to the deepening drift below.
I happened to see it the moment it fell.

Dusk is eager and comes early. A car
creeps over the hill. Still in the dark I try
to tell if I am numbered with the damned,
who cry, outraged, Lord, when did we see You?

~ Jane Kenyon

García Márquez involved in peace talks

Peace talks between the ELN and the Colombian government began today in Havana, Cuba. Gabo has gotten involved in these historic meetings:

The Government, the Eln and citizen guarantors agreed yesterday on a list of those attending the inauguration of conversations they will hold today in Cuba, among them the Nobel Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Additionally, delegates informed the three parties set the start of the "formal exploratory meeting" that seeks to initiate a process of reconciliation, for 5:00 in the afternoon. Delegates of the three parties will attend the inauguration, plus Cuban Government officials, representatives of the accompanying countries.

Colombian newspaper El Tiempo has more (includes photo):

“Estoy pesimista como siempre, pero optimista como cada vez que hemos empezado estos esfuerzos”, afirmó el Nobel.

("'I'm pessimistic as always, but optimistic every time we have begun these efforts,' affirmed the Nobel.")

Deserving writers

Yet one more reason to love the litbloggers! The Underrated Writers Project is a necessary antidote to those end-of-the-year lists that tend to blur into one another. Jeff and TJ (of Syntax of Things and Creekside Review, respectively) have compiled links and info on 55 writers that are very much deserving of your attention. The suggestions came from

15 different litbloggers who hailed from four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Australia). Of these 55 writers, we had only two who received more than one vote. In addition, the writers ranged from obscure Brazilian poets to a surrealist painter to young adult science fiction writers. Some names are familiar; others we're sure you won't recognize.

Feel free to take a look around and add your own comments and recommendations (plus, check out my own picks).

The Poem as Mask

Orpheus

When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, god-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself.

There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies!

Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.

~ Muriel Rukeyser, born on this day in 1913

Wind inside a letterbox

Hunter Davies remembers...

The first memory that always comes back is swimming in John's pool at his house in Weybridge. I'd gone to spend the day with him, but when I arrived, it turned out he had decided it was a day for not talking. I walked round his garden with him, not talking. Cynthia made lunch and we ate it, not talking. I sat with John in his cramped little den, under a sticker saying "Safe as Milk" while he watched children's television, not talking.

Then we had a swim, round and round in his pool, not talking, but while we were swimming, we suddenly heard the noise of a police siren floating up the hill from Weybridge itself. It was giving that familiar two-note wail - Ah, ahh, ah ahh, ah, ahh. John started playing with the two notes - humming them, while not actually talking.

Then he went inside, went to his piano, till he had turned the two notes into a song, or at least half a song. John was very good at half songs, quickly growing bored, often needing Paul to coax the other half out of him. A lot of their joint working sessions were like competitions - to show the other what they could do, or make the other do better.

That particular tune didn't appear on any record till Let It Be, when I recognised it on "Across the Universe".

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

~ Wallace Stevens

(A friend asked for my view of this poem. I'm no Helen Vendler, but I'll give it a shot.)

Robert Pack notes that Stevens "dramatizes the action of a mind as it becomes one with the scene it perceives, and at that instant, the mind having ceased to bring something of itself to the scene, the scene then ceases to exist fully." This would be a perfect analysis but for that last phrase--I think it's quite the opposite. Once divested of mind, of the intrusions of personality, the scene can finally "exist fully."

He goes on to explain,

We, with the "one" of the poem, begin by watching the winter scene while in our mind the connotations of misery and cold brought forth by the scene are stirring. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, we are divested of whatever it is that distinguishes us from the snow man. We become the snow man, and we see the winter world through his eyes of coal, and we know the cold without the thoughts of human discomfort. To perceive the winter scene truly, we must have the mind of the snow man, until correspondence becomes identification.

I'd change that last word to "unification." Deep understanding requires more than mere identification. It isn't empathy for the snow man that occurs (or for winter, emptiness, deprivation, loss), but a process of becoming. A transformation into what is initially perceived erases distinctions between "cold" and "warm," "bare" and "full." This lack of differentiation produces "nothingness"--or, at least, its illusion ("the nothing that is").

On a purely subjective note, the poems speaks to me of the nature of grief and the resignation that follows loss. It is only with time that things become bearable--not because grief fades, but because the self conforms to it until perception is subsumed completely. I'm reminded of Emily Dickinson's lines,

After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--

This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--

It isn't a negative process, it simply is.


UPDATE: Anne offers some lovely thoughts re. Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf on the consolation found in turning to the Greeks: "What Penelope, Antigone, Electra, and Clytemnestra all show is the power of inconsolability, the fidelity and courage of a mourning that never ends."

Necessary absurdity

Umberto Eco on the decline of religion and the ascent of credulity:

I was raised as a Catholic, and although I have abandoned the Church, this December, as usual, I will be putting together a Christmas crib for my grandson. We'll construct it together - as my father did with me when I was a boy. I have profound respect for the Christian traditions - which, as rituals for coping with death, still make more sense than their purely commercial alternatives.

I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" The religious celebration of Christmas is at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial celebration is not even that.

All things are poetical

Yesterday I received the latest newsletter from my new favorite website, the Poetry International Web. It features an insightful interview with Chandrakant Shah, a Boston-based Gujarati poet:

The rhythm of life became my writing, and my writing became the rhythm of life. I love that line from Longfellow: “As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.” [...]

The form of poetry nourishes our roots; it sustains us in elemental ways. We grow up with poetry, starting with lullabies, farming songs, songs hummed on the streets, nursery rhymes. Some people abandon poetry as they grow up while others carry it with them. [...]

If I didn’t live in the US, I suspect I’d never have written my long poem, ‘Rear View Mirror’, which is a comment on desi (local Indian) life in America. Many Gujarati critics shy away writing about my poems because they can’t understand where I am coming from.

My poetry emerges from long drives, speeding tickets, golf lessons, river rafting, gambling on football in Las Vegas and standing endlessly on the sidewalks of Manhattan. I write while driving. The faster I drive, the better I write. Most of the Blue Jeans collection was written at the steering wheel of my Honda Accord.

The site also features "six young new urban Marathi voices, and an Italian poet writing on Japan while living in Paris."

Contact

In today's column at Inside Higher Ed, Margaret Soltan pinpoints the source of decay in current English departments and posits a solution--a return to the "direct experience" of literary texts:

The political and more broadly theoretical abstractions that have been thrown over the artwork from the outset, as it’s often presented in class, block precisely this complex, essentially aesthetic experience. This experience, triggered by a patient engagement of some duration with challenging and beautiful language, by entry into a thickly layered world which gives shape and substance to one’s own inchoate “cravings” and “longings,” is the very heart, the glory, of the literary. Students — some students — arrive at the university with precisely these powerful ontological energies. Certain novels, poems, and plays, if they let them, can surprise these students, both with their anticipation of particularly acute states of consciousness, and their placement of those consciousnesses within formally ordered literary structures.

One of the noblest and most disciplinarily discrete things we can do in the classroom is to take those ontological drives seriously, to suggest ways in which great works of art repeatedly honor and clarify them as they animate them through character, style, and point of view.

One of the least noble and most self-defeating things we can do is avert our student’s eye from the peculiar, delicate, and enlightening transaction I’m trying to describe here. When we dismiss this transaction as merely “moral” — or as proto-religious — rather than political, when we rush our students forward to formulated political beliefs, we fail them and we fail literature. Humanistic education is a slow process of assimilation, without any clear real-world point to it. We should trust our students enough to guide them lightly as they work their way toward the complex truths literature discloses.

Remembering Rilke

"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke,
born on this day in 1875


Selections from Letters to a Young Poet (translated by Stephen Mitchell):

"In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn't matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!" ~ 23 April 1903

"If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." ~ 16 July 1903

"And if it frightens and torments you to think of childhood and of the simplicity and silence that accompanies it, because you can no longer believe in God, who appears in it everywhere, when ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you have really lost God. Isn't it much truer to say that you have never yet possessed him? For when could that have been? Do you think that a child can hold him, him whom grown men bear only with great effort and whose weight crushes the old? Do you suppose that someone who really has him could lose him like a little stone? Or don't you think that someone who once had him could only be lost by him? - But if you realize that he did not exist in your childhood, and did not exist previously, if you suspect that Christ was deluded by his yearning and Muhammad deceived by his pride - and if you are terrified to feel that even now he does not exist, even at this moment when we are talking about him - what justifies you then, if he never existed, in missing him like someone who has passed away and in searching for him as though he were lost? Why don't you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?" ~ 23 December 1903

"It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation." ~ 14 May 1904

"We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love." ~ 12 August 1904

Poems are not . . . simply emotions . . . they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things . . . and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you have long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained . . .; to childhood illnesses . . . to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel . . . and it is still not enough. -- The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

"It would not be enough for a poet to have memories," said Rainer Maria Rilke's protagonist and oracle, the young poet Malte Laurids Brigge. "You must be able to forget them." His author lived by that credo, saving and storing each life experience before expunging it with cold dedication.

It is not difficult to imagine a setting for these remarks: the dingy room on the Left Bank of Paris by the flickering kerosene lamp, the poet's pen scratching on paper pulled out of stacks heaped on table and chairs; or perhaps, as so often in the Bibliotheque Nationale, amid silence, clearing throats, and shuffling feet; or a few years later in a cottage near Rome, or later still in the dying Swedish summer, under a beech tree.

Until the end, the poet knew that real life finally exists only within, waiting to become something other than itself.

~ from Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke by Ralph Freedman

Entrance
(After Rilke)

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,
Out of the room that lets you feel secure.
Infinity is open to your sight.
Whoever you are.
With eyes that have forgotten how to see
From viewing things already too well-known,
Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree
And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.
And you have made the world and all you see.
It ripens like the words still in your mouth.
And when at last you comprehend its truth,
Then close your eyes and gently set it free.

~ Dana Gioia

Breathing room

After final exams, report cards, portfolio filing, closing ceremonies, goodbye hugs, mass cleanings, and a farewell lunch...yesterday was the last day of school...

...which means I actually survived my first year of teaching.

(Note: None is more surprised by this than I.)

Tomorrow I begin the happy work of library organization and inventory. The rumor is that we'll have more space next year...and more books! Thus, I shamelessly admit that I'm looking forward to a week of cataloging prior to a well-earned vacation, in which I hope to do a lot of reading, planning, and research for next year.

But for now, I'm relaxing with the MetaxuCafé, a beer, and the sunset view from my balcony.

Cheers!

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless,--
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest,--or a child.
Forgetfulness is white,--white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

~ Hart Crane

The song goes on its way, meandering the halls of time, heedless of tempo or space. The bird could spend hours bathed in such timelessness--sea and sky might as well be one and the same. Water falls, aiding the dreams of the sleepers beneath roofs in the dark...perhaps in the woods where only the trees remember. Children have ephemeral soap-bubble emotions: grudges, tears, and laughter follow where old moons go. There is blankness on the face of it, or of the limbs bleached by the ceaseless, roaming wind. No ending or beginning, alive to nothing but itself. The sybil might blink and speak and forget to remember that eons have gone by with silence as the only answer. The Gods follow the opposite course--smothered by centuries, decades, years of disregard.

I write this to recall the blessings of oblivion.

Visions

William Blake...mystic, pre-Romantic poet, engraver, printer, painter, visionary.

Born on this day in 1757.




















'Tell me what is a thought, and of what substance is it made?
Tell me what is a joy, and in what gardens do joys grow?
And in what rivers swim the sorrows? And upon what mountains
Wave shadows of discontent? And in what houses dwell the wretched,
Drunken with woe, forgotten, and shut up from cold despair?

'Tell me where dwell the thoughts, forgotten till thou call them forth?
Tell me where dwell the joys of old, and where the ancient loves,
And when will they renew again, and the night of oblivion past,
That I might traverse times and spaces far remote, and bring
Comforts into a present sorrow and a night of pain?
Where goest thou, O thought? to what remote land is thy flight?
If thou returnest to the present moment of affliction,
Wilt thou bring comforts on thy wings, and dews and honey and balm,
Or poison from the desert wilds, from the eyes of the envier?'

~ from "Visions of the Daughters of Albion"

A difficult paradox

Linda Leavell on "Marianne Moore, the James family, and the politics of celibacy":

Her mother explained one of the inspirations for ["Marriage"]: "One day when skating in Central Park, and coming to a statue of ... Daniel Webster, [Marianne] noted the words inscribed, ... Liberty and Union, now and forever,' and thought his notion was as appropriate to the family as to the state." (48) "Liberty and union" is the paradox of American democracy, and of family love, that Moore returns to again and again. It is significant that in "Marriage" she deletes the third phrase of Webster's famous quotation--"Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable"--because it would upset the balance in favor of "union." [...]

Repeatedly her poetry resists categories, resists stereotypes, resists expectations, resists, in short, unions. To lean against the prevailing wind of erotic desire and of most lyric poetry demands "gusto" (Complete Prose 420-26) on Moore's part, if not "criminal ingenuity" (Complete Poems 62). And yet what she chooses ultimately is not the myth of the solitary artist or lone American pilgrim. Self-sufficiency can be as egotistical as "love in the mistaken sense of greed." Rather, her model of national and personal identity lies in the difficult paradox of "liberty and union," each impossible without the other.

(Via wood s lot)

from "Marriage"

Below the incandescent stars
below the incandescent fruit,
the strange experience of beauty;
its existence is too much;
it tears one to pieces
and each fresh wave of consciousness
is poison.
"See her, see her in this common world,"
the central flaw
in that first crystal-fine experiment,
this amalgamation which can never be more
than an interesting possibility,
describing it
as "that strange paradise
unlike flesh, gold, or stately buildings,
the choicest piece of my life:
the heart rising
in its estate of peace
as a boat rises
with the rising of the water;"
constrained in speaking of the serpent --
that shed snakeskin in the history of politeness
not to be returned to again --
that invaluable accident
exonerating Adam.

~ Marianne Moore, born on this day in 1887

Removing context to preserve meaning?

Boris Fishman has written an excellent essay for Nextbook on what went wrong with Bee Season's adaptation to film, and poses some interesting questions about the possible implications:

Though screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and the directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel retain the book's enchantment with Jewish mysticism, they have leached it almost entirely of its context. "We didn't want the religious side of Judaism to overwhelm the spiritual side of the story," the directors told me before the film's release. In the film's production notes, they explain, "We wanted to explore a more universal and accessible vision of what an internal spiritual quest of any kind might be like." [...]

[I]n the book, Saul's stewardship of an ordinary congregation implicitly explained his obsession with mysticism; in the film, the avocation comes across as random and weird. These are certainly spiritual times in America, but it may be premature to assume that kabbalist aspirations require no more explanation than a gardening habit. A more specifically Jewish setting might have had a clarifying effect, making the material easier to relate to for non-Jews. Indeed, if Siegel and McGehee are right and Jews have become thoroughly integrated, non-Jews shouldn't find that backstory too difficult to absorb.

The film does pose an intriguing, if inadvertent, question absent from Goldberg's novel: Does anything indivisibly Jewish remain after the traditional markers of American "Jewishness"—the stock characters, the rituals of the shul—have been removed? Is there something uniquely Jewish about this story, or is the Jewish teaching it portrays so universally applicable because it's so unspecific? As American culture performs on Jewish tradition the loving evisceration to which it subjects other cultures before they can join its mainstream, what remains?

There's also an insightful audio interview with Myla Goldberg.

(Via MoorishGirl)

Unaware

I imagine...

the confident and euphoric Melville at his cigar-and-port dinner with Nathaniel Hawthorne on or about publication day, unaware that the British edition was out, or botched; the British reviews describing his novel "as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature" winging their way to Boston by boat that very minute; the U.S. papers about to quote and re-quote the British press, showing not just a similar lack of insight but that they had not read the book, as the American edition was different, and not botched. The long-term personal and professional impact could not have been greater: "Taken all in all," writes Parker of Nov. 14, "this was the happiest day of Melville's life."

For on this day in 1851, Moby-Dick was published.

(Via Today in Lit)

Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.

~ Theodore Roethke

(With much gratitude to wood s lot. This has become a new favorite.)

And there was much rejoicing

Yesterday saw the completion of my in-class observation and now I am a certified TEFL grad! I was pleased to discover that it was much more rigorous than I had originally thought...and wonderfully practical. Plus, it was great to be a student again.

Next year will be a whole 'nother ballgame: five classes (25 teaching hours) devoted entirely to English and History. And the miracle is...I'm actually excited about it.

The latest from my favorite FPLA

It has been an evil day filled with many gradations of malevolence--from finding out about the death of John Fowles to having to extract a wad of gum from the lovely black tresses of one of my students (the work of an infatuated seven-year-old boy).

So what do I do? Stay in and read the John Hodgman interview at One Story, of course (and offer thanks to The Elegant Variation).

Many moons ago when I was barely out of college, I stumbled upon Hodgman's "Ask a Former Professional Literary Agent" columns in McSweeney's. As this was before I discovered the marvelous universe of litblogs, I would email friends with the links so they, too, could bask in the seasoned wisdom of Mr. John K. Hodgman.

Later, I moved to Brookline, Massachusetts and became a proud patron of the Coolidge Corner Theatre myself. (Every word he has written about it is lovingly true.)

Now I discover he has just released a new book, The Areas of My Expertise. Or, as he so aptly explains,

Everything you need to know about my book is contained within its title: THE AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE. That is actually the shorthand title. The full title is:

"An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled With Instructive Annotation and Appranged in Useful Order by Me, JOHN HODGMAN, a professional writer, in THE AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE, Which Areas Include Matters Historical, Matters Literary, Matters Cryptozoological, Hobo Matters, Food, Drink, and Cheese (a Kind of Food), Squirrels & Lobsters & Eels, Haircuts, Utopia, What Will happen in the Future, and Most Other Subjects."

Which is to say that it is a handy desk reference and book of interesting trivia in the tradition of THE BOOK OF LISTS or THE PEOPLE'S ALMANAC, with the distinction that in MY book, all of the historical oddities and amazing true facts contained within it are entirely MADE UP, by me. This, paradoxically, allows it to be more true.

Of course it does.

So for old time's sake (and because I needed a laugh), here is a glimpse from The Best Column Ever (or in the immediate case below, "Ask A Brilliant But Eccentric Sleuth Who Is As Mysterious As The Many Legendary Crimes That He Has Solved, And Who Has Since Gone Into Hiding"):

Lisa L. F. asks: Marcel Duchamp once remarked that no book should be longer than 99 pages, but still most seem to be much longer. Why?

JKH, WOWAD: Because pages are printed in groupings of 16 or 32 (called "signatures"), the longest a book can actually be is 96 pages long. Most are much shorter: "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which many believe to be a very long novel, is actually only ten sentences long. There are two explanations for the phenomenon, called "page inflation," that you have observed. Wide margins are partly to blame. But more commonly the fault lies in the conjuring of an evil magician, as magicians are the sworn enemies of logic, literary brevity, and, of course, detectives. Electronic publishing will change all this.

And for good measure:

Monica S asks: Is it ethical for a writer to say that she has been published on the website of a literary journal, even if said writer has merely contrived to have a letter printed in that journal's Letters section?

JKH, FPLA: Oh, absolutely. This is common practice in publishing, just as it is entirely acceptable to say that your novel is "being seriously considered" by a publishing house so long as you have not yet opened the rejection letter.

Giddy

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility. If you love something, you want to look after it.
~ Philip Pullman


On Thursday, I received a lovely brown package in the mail (hooray for parents and belated gifts!): Literature: A Portable Anthology. Since reading an article back in August on "How schools are destroying the joy of reading," I've wanted to get my hands on this book. It's exceeded my expectations. I got the same feeling as when I was in college and bought my Norton anthologies--beautiful tomes with Bible-thin pages full of friends old and unmet. This anthology by Bedford/St. Martin's is specifically for introductory lit classes (high school) and has wonderful bios and excellent supplementary info (not to mention the 35 stories, 250 poems, and 9 plays by everyone from Sir Philip Sidney to Sandra Cisneros). I plan to rely on it a lot this coming year. (I've been reading through it in my spare time--revisited "Bartleby, the Scrivner" and "A White Heron" yesterday.)

Most days I'm terrified of what lies ahead. But then there are days like last week when I needed to carry a volume of Dylan Thomas in my mochila and devour a few poems during breaktime. Like a schoolgirl with a crush, I wrote his lines all over the blank cover of my new journal: the words of a Welshman in handwritten black ink to serve as a talisman to ward off mediocre thoughts and banal forms of despair.

So for now I won't think about my lack of experience and the vastness of all I don't know. The weight of this new book in my hands reminds me of a time when I knew what I was doing and loved every minute of it.

miracle

I have just listened to this
symphony which Mozart dashed off
in one day
and it had enough wild and crazy
joy to last
forever,
whatever forever
is
Mozart came as close as
possible to
that.

~ Charles Bukowski

Mi ratoncito favorito

"Speaking the Heritage," an anonymous column that appeared this week at Inside Higher Ed, exposes the tensions and complexities of Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S.:

For my students who are what has been called Heritage speakers of Spanish — those whose home language is Spanish, and speak it with varying degrees of proficiency — their relationship with the language is quite different from the one the non-Heritage speakers and the native speakers have. In these years I have worked close to la frontera, I have come to understand that, for many of the heritage speakers, Spanish is much more than just a language: it is a source of pain, no matter how well or how poorly they speak it. Some have come to tell me how they were ridiculed in elementary school for now [sic] knowing how to speak “proper” English. Others told me of other times when the newcomers from Mexico or other Spanish-speaking countries make fun of their Spanish and tell them that they do not speak any Spanish, even in the university!

The professor goes on to relate a particularly heinous experience with a university board. Ultimately, it is the students who suffer.

It is true that "there are all kinds of Hispanics, some of whom, unfortunately, do not recognize somebody who is an ally, and would rather have only people of one ethnic group teach any subject related to the interests of that ethnic group." I'm very familiar with the type of anxiety the author refers to. I think that's part of the reason I abandoned my plans for graduate school and hightailed it back to Colombia. I'm ashamed of what I don't know, of my merely adequate Spanish, of the crater-sized gaps in my knowledge of Latin America. My father knew no English when he arrived in northern California in the '70s, and although both English and Spanish are spoken at home (my Anglo mother is fully bilingual), inevitably, English predominates. (He speaks excellent English--I wish I could say the same for my Spanish!)

The longer I'm here, the more I learn about my father...and myself. (I feel more at home here in a lot of ways than I do in the States.)

As children, my brothers and sisters and I didn't have the tooth fairy. Instead, whenever we lost a tooth, we'd awake the next morning with a carefully folded note from "the Big Mouse" under the pillow. The Big Mouse always drew his self-portrait on his notes by way of signature (which included a cheeky Cheshire-like grin). These notes sent us off on "wild-goose chases" throughout the house--each clue sending us off in search of another until we found our small presents.

I'd always thought this tradition was invented by my dad--and certainly parts of it are. But last month (only last month!!) I found out about el Ratón Pérez--the mouse who replaces teeth with money under pillows all across Latin America and Spain. So I did a bit of digging...

Apparently, Sr. Pérez was partially the creation of Fr. Luis Coloma (a member of the Spanish Royal Academy) for the Spanish king Alfonso XIII when he was 8. In the story, the mouse lives in Madrid with his family in a big box of cookies in a candy store not far from the Palacio Real. The night he goes to take the tooth from underneath the prince's pillow, the prince wakes up and they go on an adventure together. The prince is turned into a mouse and travels with Pérez to meet his family and tag along on his other errands. Ratón Pérez visits many children, and the future king "discovered that there were many different children that endured hunger and cold, but they were also his brothers because all are children of God."

If you go to the Centro Virtual Cervantes site and click on "Exposición," you can view a slide show of 79 different illustrators' depictions of my old friend the Big Mouse. I'd love to add my dad's version to it.

The Wonder of It

How wild, how witch-like weird that life should be!
That the insensate rock dared dream of me,
And take to bursting out and burgeoning--
Oh, long ago--yo ho!--
And wearing green! How stark and strange a thing
That life should be!

Oh, mystic mad, a rigadoon of glee,
That dust should rise, and leap alive, and flee
A-foot, a-wing, and shake the deeps with cries--
Oh, far away--yo-hay!
What moony masque, what arrogant disguise
That life should be!

~ Harriet Monroe

Ahoy, it be a trrruth uni’ersally acknowledged...

Over at The Valve, Laura Carroll (of Sorrow at Sills Bend) has effectively shaken me out of the doldrums with her witty and incisive critique of the latest adaptation of Pride and Prejudice:

With swiftly rising spirits I anticipated how this bold new adaptation, for such it suddenly seemed to be, would develop. Perhaps the respectable London merchants the Gardiners would turn out to be Cornish wreckers swinging lanterns over the rocks by night to lead unsuspecting merchant ships to their doom. Mr Bennet might choke to death on a doubloon and his five daughters forcibly abduct Mr Collins and make him walk the plank. Charlotte Lucas could housekeep and cross-dress her way to the top of the British navy, drinking a bottle of wine every day as she went. Instead of running off with Wickham, Lydia Bennet could head up a failed mutiny & be abandoned in a whaleboat drifting on the Pacific with no parasol and nothing to eat but Kitty. For this, I thought, I am willing to bear Keira Knightley’s smirking, blank-eyed version of Elizabeth, Donald Sutherland’s glassy, senile Mr Bennet with incongruously glittering Beverley Hills bridgework, and all the boringly heavy hints about how hard an intelligent but impoverished woman’s lot was in c18, how critically important to make a good marriage, blah blah, zzzzzz.

I was mentally putting the finishing touches on how the dialogue ought to go - “Yarr, Darcy, I must have ye dance, ye whoreson bilge-drinker. I hate t’ see ye standin’ about by yourself in this mangy mannerrr. Ye had much better dance - or be keelhauled. Arr!” - when these enjoyable musings were spoilt by the arrival of a pair of ominously unsmutched Bingleys toting [Comeback Special Elvis] a Darcy about whom it must universally be acknowledged that he is not, and is unlikely to ever turn into, Colin Firth. How can such a thing be? Women all over the world are desperately trying to understand.

As my salty dreams faded and the movie inexorably ground on, I began to think that demonstrating the utter irrelevance of Colin Firth to its universe is indeed the chief motive of Pride and Prejudice ‘05 (that and making a squillion million, of course.) The movie is too conscious of the 1996 TV serial: it wants to duplicate that version’s success, but without acknowledging it as an honourable and still impressive precursor. The film makes a long string of adaptational choices and decisions which have no purpose I could guess at other than to drive the BBC / A&E series out of everyone’s minds. (A bit like telling a person not to think of an elephant.) And so some seriously self-defeating innovations are introduced.

Read on!

Rescuing Macondo

I found last month's story on town officials' plans to capitalize on Aracataca's literary fame strangely wistful:

In the sculpture park, under the shade of almond and mango trees, the public will gather for lectures, readings and other cultural events while gazing at the towering Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta peaks rising to the east. [...]

Yet for many Aracatacans, the dream of turning their city into a tourist destination seems as quixotic and fanciful as Garcia Marquez's fiction, where a man can be transformed into a snake and the living speak to the dead.

Just this week, Santa Marta's local newspaper reported that the two-year-old highway connecting El Retén to Aracataca has already suffered extensive damage and attempts are being made to halt deterioration. It's difficult to pinpoint why development here in general is such an uphill struggle--almost as if a virulent strain of entropy infected the land long ago and we're blissfully unaware that it works differently anywhere else.

Arias said he last met with his famous cousin in November 2004 in Cartagena, where they spent three hours talking about family, old friends and Aracataca, which this year is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding.

"I told him Aracataca is completing its one hundred years of solitude," Arias recalled. "I told him that nothing has changed and there has been no progress."

Arias said Garcia Marquez replied optimistically: "Someday, there will be better years."

It is a testimony to the resilience of the Colombian people that such dogged optimism is so common here. Dreams will always intermingle with reality.

(Via Syntax of Things)

Hardworking book pirates

At Splinters, Chris discusses international book piracy and points to an excellent article of his at Travelhappy, "Bootleg Books in Cambodia and Vietnam":

The kids around the temples at Angkor are breathtaking in their English ability - their average age can't be more than eight or nine but they speak English fluently, almost without a trace of an accent. They are adept at cajoling and bargaining with you - everytime you step out of your car to go look at a temple, a gaggle of them will descend upon you, grinning, shouting and waving books, silks, ornaments and t-shirts at you. The smaller ones prod you in the belly to get you to look downwards at their merchandise. Others mark you from the start: "When you come back from the temple, you come and buy from me. What's your name? My name is Vanna. I remember you, you remember me?" So it goes as you move inch by inch surrounded by this mini-riot until you get to the temple entrance. It's pretty intimidating at first, but smiling your way through it all works a lot better than shouting.

They've got a hard gig - sometimes you see them in tears at the end of the day because they've sold nothing and have to go home to the parents empty handed. On the other hand, selling bootleg books to the likes of me means they can earn considerably more than the average Cambodian wage of a couple of dollars a day. I wonder what's going to become of these kids, how they will grow up, whether their English skills will help them get ahead and whether their bargaining skills will make them all become entrepeneurs. Following the life of one of them would make a good book in itself.

Don't they have to take some sort of literacy test?

Maud has been posting some very interesting thoughts on the perverse nature of modern bookstores:

If booksellers and publishers can’t even coordinate to get books into the stores by the time they’re being reviewed, it’s no wonder sales of everything but the likes of Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, and The Purpose-Driven Life are down.

Even more disturbing, it seems that there are bignamebookstore employees who don't know their ass from their A.S. Byatt:

Today was the day. The day that a new novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was due for sale in bookstores. I show up at Barnes and Noble at 10:30am on my break and begin scouring the New Fiction tables for the book. I don't see it anywhere. So I ask one of the workers for help.

"Excuse me- I heard the new book by Marquez would be for sale today. Is that true? I don't see it."
"By who?"

Okay. We're already off to a bad start. It is my not-so-humble opinion that you shouldn't be working in a bookstore if you have to ask, "Marquez who?". Put your hands in the air. Drop the books and no one gets hurt. There's a job waiting for you at Sam Goody over at the mall. Now get outta here.

He goes to the computer. "What was the author's name again?"
Sigh. With infinite patience I say again, "Gabriel. Garcia. Marquez." I resist the urge to run to the cash register and buy this guy One Hundred Years of Solitude. If I thought he would put down his John Grisham paperback long enough to read it, I would consider it a worthwhile investment.

"Title?"
Crap. I knew he was going to ask that, the clueless git. Under my breath, "memoriesofmymelancholywhores."
"What?"
"Memories of My Melancholy Whores." He looks over at my belly judgmentally. I'm not being sensitive, shut up, he did! "Yes, I'm seven months pregnant and I'm reading a book about sad whores, okay? It's not a romance novel, it's by a Noble Prize winning author who...nevermind."

"Oh, is he the guy who wrote that Oprah book?" Yeah, now I have to murder him. In the parking lot. Just as soon as his shift ends. "Ahhh, here it is. We just don't have it out on the tables yet. Let me go get you a copy."

And that, friends, is how I walked away with the very first copy sold of Marquez's new novel at my local Barnes and Noble. Next time I'm going to Full Circle. I guarantee you every single employee at Full Circle knows my good friend, Gabo.

"The guy who wrote that Oprah book."

God help me.

A fine line

Going through some old notes, I found what amounts to John Harwood's parting shot in Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation:

Interpretive ingenuity is in one sense limitless, and yet obsessive readers are doomed to met their own reflections wherever they look. 'Once the context goes, anything goes' is a standard complaint about deconstruction, but the record of deconstructive practice is quite the reverse: as in a glass darkly, the method discovers itself in every text it scrutinises. New Critics hungered for paradox and irony, and found that even the despised Tennyson would, in the end, yield up those qualities. Deconstructionists seek indeterminacy, self-subversion, transgression, vertigo and aporia, and find them everywhere. Postmodern theorists fascinated by 'textual reflexivity' display, unwittingly, a fascination with their own mental processes. The real 'problem of interpretation' is not to prevent it from being arbitrary, but to restrain the power of obsessive or reflexive reading. Theorists of several current persuasions would argue, inconsistency notwithstanding, that any such restraint is (a) impossible, (b) repressive, and (c) politically motivated. Obsessive reading, however, is closely related to fundamentalist reading, which is by no means the exclusive property of the far religious right. Teachers who believe that they are radicalising ther students by demanding that they uncover a politically correct message in every text are, like their apparent opposites in clean-cut Bible colleges, giving instruction in fundamentalist reading, which is not something that should be taught, however ineptly, in universities.

As for the argument that all we can ever see are our own reflections, it is routinely disingenuous: the real thrust is that all you can see in a text is your own mystified reflection (or that of the ideology which has 'constructed' you), whereas we, possessed of theoretical insight, can see through it.

Out of the Sighs

Out of the sighs a little comes,
But not of grief, for I have knocked down that
Before the agony; the spirit grows,
Forgets, and cries;
A little comes, is tasted and found good;
All could not disappoint;
There must, be praised, some certainty,
If not of loving well, then not,
And that is true after perpetual defeat.

After such fighting as the weakest know,
There's more than dying;
Lose the great pains or stuff the wound,
He'll ache too long
Through no regret of leaving woman waiting
For her soldier stained with spilt words
That spill such acrid blood.

Were that enough, enough to ease the pain,
Feeling regret when this is wasted
That made me happy in the sun,
How much was happy while it lasted,
Were vagueness enough and the sweet lies plenty,
The hollow words could bear all suffering
And cure me of ills.

Were that enough, bone, blood, and sinew,
The twisted brain, the fair-formed loin,
Groping for matter under the dog's plate,
Man should be cured of distemper.
For all there is to give I offer:
Crumbs, barn, and halter.

~ Dylan Thomas, born on this day in 1914

Collecting clues

The server was down for nearly a week due to lightning-struck towers (of some sort) and now I'm back, breathless. The school year is winding down, final exams are being devised, plans for the new year are becoming finalized. I've also been taking a TEFL course--much busyness, a few more hurdles to clear. Amid all this, my reading has been catch-as-catch-can: too much randomness, too much neglect of my Spanish. But there have been many golden times in spite of it all. Elie Wiesel says it best:

I read a lot. I teach my students, not creative writing, but creative reading and it is still from my childhood. You take a text, you explore it, you enter it with all your heart and all your mind. And then you find clues that were left for you, really foredestined to be received by you from centuries ago. Generation after generation there were people who left clues, and you are there to collect them and, at one point, you understand something that you hadn't understood before. That is a reward, and as a teacher I do the same thing. When I realize there is a student there, in the corner, who understands, there is a flicker in the eye. That is the greatest reward that a teacher can receive.

I think I'll pin this one to my wall.

Wrecks

(from "The Drunken Boat")

I long for Europe with its aged old parapets!

I have seen archipelagos of stars! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to sailor:
- Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights,
Million golden birds, O Life Force of the future? -

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter:
Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours.
O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!

If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the
Black cold pool where into the scented twilight
A child squatting full of sadness, launches
A boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.

~ Arthur Rimbaud, born on this day in 1854

(I was also born today, in 1977. It isn't age or even time that makes me despise birthdays so much. It's the intensification of a lifetime's worth of disappointment concentrated on one particular day of the year. I'm hoping that one of these days it won't matter so much. Thick clouds hover over the slate-grey sea and I am fiercely glad.)

Annie Dillard remembers,

I loved Rimbaud, who ran away, loved his skinny, furious face with the wild hair and snaky, unseeing eyes pointing in two directions, and his poems' confusion and vagueness, their overwritten longing, their hatred, their sky-shot lyricism, and their oracular fragmentation, which I enhanced for myself by reading and retaining his stuff in crazed bits, mostly from Le Bateau Ivre, The Drunken Boat. (The drunken boat tells its own story, a downhill, downstream epic unusually full of words.)

Now in study hall I saw that I had drawn all over this page; I got out another piece of paper. Rimbaud was damned. He said so himself. Where could I meet someone like that?

~ An American Childhood (a.k.a. my very favorite work of nonfiction)

Wow, where to begin?

Birnbaum's interview with Jonathan Lethem has reignited many thoughts. To begin with, I'm inspired enough to dust off a post I never quite finished. So here goes...

I think there is a parallel between the false dichotomy of "realist" vs. "anti-realist" fiction and the status-quo mindset that sets the sciences above the humanities.

Lethem says,

Fiction is a gigantic construction, a bauble. A novel is not life. That’s why it’s so pointless that this relentless baiting goes on, where ‘realist’ fiction is pitted against ‘anti-realist’ fiction as though one of the two has made some kind of commitment of integrity to be real, a responsibility the other has abdicated. [...] Fiction, like language, is innately artificial and innately fabulous. It’s made of metaphor. Language itself is a fantastic element. It’s not possible to plant words in the ground and have seeds grow up and feed on the results. It’s not part of the biological or mechanical world.

The same Lombardi article that provoked my earlier response also contained the following:

We lose influence on campus to the sciences on one side because they appear and act as if they know exactly what they are doing, how they do it, and for what purpose they do it. We lose influence on campus to the professionally oriented disciplines on the other side because they have a purpose and a method anchored directly in the center of the real world their disciplines address.

We in the humanities, and very frequently as well in the social sciences, often do not know and do not agree on what we think we are doing. We have few common standards and we ask little of our students who have time for non-academically related campus activities. We wonder why our voices carry such little weight when our culture seems to need us so desperately to sort out fundamental issues of values and judgment.

He's on to something, but doesn't take it far enough. My question is, "What exactly is the 'real world'?"

In Living by Fiction, Annie Dillard relates:

Science, that product of skepticism born of cultural diversity, is meant to deal in certainties, in data which anyone anywhere could verify. And for the most part it has. Our self-referential mathematics and wiggly yardsticks got us to the moon. I think science works the way a tightrope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes it is operating in midair. At any rate, the sciences are wondering, again, as the earliest skeptics did, what could be a firm basis for knowledge. People in many of the sciences are looking at their feet. First Einstein, then Heisenberg, then Gödel, made a shambles of our hope (a hope which Kant shared) for a purely natural science which actually and certainly connects at base with things as they are. [...]

Physicists have been saying for sixty years that (according to the Principle of Indeterminacy) they cannot study nature, but only their own perception of nature: “method and object can no longer be separated” (Heisenberg). Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, British Astronomer Royal, said in 1927: “The physical world is entirely abstract and without ‘actuality’ apart from its linkage to consciousness.” It is one thing when Berkeley says this; when a twentieth-century astronomer says this, it is a bit of another thing. Similarly (and this is more familiar), Eddington’s successor Sir James Jeans wrote, summarizing a series of findings in physics: “The world begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” The world could be, then, in Eddington’s phrase, “mind-stuff.” And even the mind, anthropologists keep telling us, is not so much a cognitive instrument as a cultural artifact. The mind is itself an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and inventing coincide: we call their collaboration “knowledge.” The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.

In other words,

The world is caught in a crossfire between necessity and possibility; the world is the fabrication of a billion imaginations all inventing it at once.

Lombardi concludes his piece by asking,

What to do? I am not sure, but the first thing would be to pay close attention to what people are reading, what they are seeing, and how they do engage the common culture. The message of “Reading At Risk” is that something other than literature in print form engages more and more of our fellow citizens, and we might want to try to learn how to speak to them in the voices they want to hear.

This latter idea sets off all sorts of alarm bells in my brain. Why must people be spoken to “in the voices they want to hear”? How can people change and grow if they are given what they want? What ever happened to the notion of expanding the capacity of the individual to embrace what was formerly thought as “difficult”? Isn’t enlarging understanding one of the goals of education? How can the "status quo" ever be effectively challenged this way?

Towards the end of the book, Dillard analyzes "Kubla Kahn," demonstrating how "the poem is a form of knowledge":

But what is knowledge if we cannot state it? If art objects quit the bounds of the known and make blurry feints at the unknown, can they truly add to knowledge or understanding? I think they can; for although we may never exhaust or locate precisely the phenomena they signify, we may nevertheless approximate them--and this, of course, is our position in relation to all knowledge and understanding. All our knowledge is partial and approximate; if we are to know electrons and chimpanzees less than perfectly, and call it good enough, we may as well understand phenomena like love and death, or art and freedom, imperfectly also.

All that to say that when the Rake declares "woe to those who confuse truth and fact," I can only add my own hearty "AMEN!"

Unveiling

After much research and investigation, the intrepid volunteers (myself included) were able to discover the truth about Lemony Snicket's Book the Twelfth, The Penultimate Peril. (Dare I admit it? It was actually quite fun.) The entire first chapter is now online:

“Trust?” Sunny said quietly, and this was the most important question of all. By “trust,” the youngest Baudelaire meant something along the lines of, “Does Kit Snicket seem like a reliable person, and should we follow her?” and this is often a tricky question to ask about someone. Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree, because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch, or you might simply get covered in sap, and for this reason many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors, where it is harder to get a splinter. The Baudelaires did not know very much about Kit Snicket, and so it was difficult to know what their future would be if they followed her down the sloping lawn toward the mysterious errands she had mentioned.

You can also make your own Misfortune Teller following these insidious instructions.

Librarians speak up

Scott McLemee has some great news and gives a bit of background on the behind-the-scenes drama:

The Association of College and Research Libraries — which has 12,000 members working in the various sectors of secondary education — has now launched a group site called ACRLog. Actually it has been running since mid-September, but only in warm-up mode. Its existence was officially announced yesterday [...]

The anger touched off by “Silence in the Stacks” in June was actually a continuation of the furor over a notorious (well, in some circles, anyway) statement by Michael Gordon, the president of the American Library Association, earlier this year. In the pages of Library Journal, he lashed out at “the Blog People” in his own profession — attributing to them sundry lapses of taste, judgment, and intelligence.

It was as if he were conducting an experiment to see if they could carry a grudge. Guess what? They can.

It would be good to think that the new group blog started by the Association of College and Research Libraries will rise above the old hostilities. So far, four academic librarians are involved in running it.

It will be interesting to follow their progress. Best wishes to this timely new endeavor!

Eternal us

you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now'and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.

Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush "tie it to my hand"-- [...]

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question

~ E.E. Cummings, born on this day in 1894


It's no secret that Cummings is one of my favorite poets (right up there with Eliot and Yeats). Thanks to wood s lot, I've discovered a treasure trove of his paintings, from which the above work ("the book") is taken. (If you've got a few thousand lying around, you could even buy one!)

Random notes:

In the past, I've attempted to wax eloquent on the kinds of things that go on beneath the surface of his poems.

The Fairy Tales he wrote for his daughter, Nancy, are quite wonderful. "The Old Man Who Said Why," "The Elephant and the Butterfly," "The House That Ate Mosquito Pie," and "The Little Girl Named I" are all beautiful little stories that I fell in love with as a child.

When I lived in Boston, I tripped up to Cambridge to see the family home--right across the street from William James' place. A friend and I also ambled through the cemetary in Jamaica Plain where he and Marion are buried. A lovely place, actually.

It's the little things

Mr. Beck has outdone himself. Again.

BUMFUCK, NC (AP) -- In a stunning upset over Brittany, Ashley, Madison, Ethan and Zachary, Jen Beckville has been named the winner of this year's Man Booger Award for her lyrical anthology of gagging and wheezing collectively known as Phlegm.

And it doesn't stop there...

The award was not without controversy, however, as just hours before the announcement, Phlegmish Academy member Knut Rocknee quit in a huff over the crowning of last year's winner, Caitlin. Rocknee dismissed her work as "violent hacking, choking, barf-up-a-lung scatology."

Essklown promptly dismissed the suggestion Caitlin was not Booger-worthy and claimed to be mystified by the timing of Rocknee's complaint. "I don't know why it's taken him a year to get his Pampers in a wad over this," said Essklown. "And anyway, it's not like she was picking her nose and eating it. Because, you know, that's just gross."

Broken Dreams

There is grey in your hair.
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing;
But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing
Because it was your prayer
Recovered him upon the bed of death.
For your sole sake--that all heart's ache have known,
And given to others all heart's ache,
From meagre girlhood's putting on
Burdensome beauty--for your sole sake
Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,
So great her portion in that peace you make
By merely walking in a room.

~ W.B. Yeats


After long-since giving up hope, I'm finally thumbing through my beloved edition of Yeats' collected poetry. And it only took ten years.

I recently recovered some boxes my family had to leave behind when we left Colombia in the mid '90s--seven to be precise. Seven. Boxes. It was like a school time-capsule experiment with the emotional equivalent of watching a corpse stir (well, almost). Unsettling in the extreme.

It took me two days to open them, which I did very carefully (accompanied by a bottle of Negra Modelo), while cataloging the contents in emails to my family. I've experienced the essence of "bittersweet"...several times over. The existential ruminations they inspired are dark, brooding things. But I've spent the past week hiding away from the rest of the world and rereading old favorites. L.M. Montgomery has kept me company as of late; Louisa May Alcott is next on the docket (to be read by candlelight since the lamp has gone out). It's really uncanny how you can go years (a decade!) without reading a beloved book, and then once it's taken up again, the lines unreel themselves in your head right before your eyes find them.

And then there are the memories of who you were when you first loved them...

But I'd be lying if I neglected to mention the buried-treasure element involved. My complete sets of Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, and Alcott are stacked near collections of Yeats, Tennyson, Blake, Chaucer, Dickinson, and Frost. There's a complete illustrated Longfellow from 1888, alongside an ancient second edition of Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm and another of Scott's Waverley novels--also from the 19th century (all I have left of my grandparents' old home).

Then there's Twain, Tolkien, Dostoevsky, Lewis, Sayers, and Burnett's A Little Princess...right next to Helter Skelter and novelizations of Braveheart and the original three Star Wars films (!).

The fragrance of old paper greets me when I enter my apartment--I've left everything out in plain sight. These last several days have been overcast, and the sea has been more turbulent and noisier than usual. Clouds have been constant--something to be grateful for as autumn is my favorite time of year. I'm glad to have at least a little bit of it in this year-round summer.

So here's to old friends that inhabit long-lost pages...and solitary evenings by candlelight...in spite of ruined dreams.

"New" Pessoa

Exact Change announces the release of a newly-translated work by Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic:

“I transferred to Teive my speculations on certainty, which lunatics have in greater abundance than anyone.”

Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was a multitude of writers: his works were composed by “heteronyms,” alter egos with distinct biographies, ideologies, influences, even horoscopes. The Education of the Stoic is the only work left by the Baron of Teive, who, having destroyed all his previous attempts at literary creation, and about to destroy himself, explains “the impossibility of producing superior art.”

The baron’s manuscript is found in a hotel-room drawer — not unlike editor and translator Richard Zenith’s own discovery, while conducting research in the Pessoa archives, of a small black notebook whose contents had never been transcribed. In it he found the missing pieces of this short but trenchant complement to Pessoa’s major prose work, The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa himself noted that despite their dialectical differences, the middle-class author of The Book of Disquiet (assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares) and the aristocrat Teive, “are two instances of the very same phenomenon -— an inability to adapt to real life.”

An excerpt can be found here:

There’s no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral. I don’t know what game or irony of creation makes it impossible for man to be both things at once. And yet, to my misfortune, this duality occurs in me. Endowed with both virtues, I’ve never been able to make myself into anything. It wasn’t a surfeit of one quality, but of two, that made me unfit to live life.

Doing something

I'll echo MoorishGirl:

Do you really need to be snacking on a $5 latte and a $4 blueberry scone as you're reading this? Perhaps you might consider giving it up for the rest of the week. People in India, Kashmir and Pakistan could use your help after Saturday's devastating earthquake. Here's a link.

An auspicious beginning

I've started up a LibraryThing account for the school, and hope to create an efficient check-out system and card catalog for our little library soon. I showed Biblioteca: Libros Gratis to a co-worker, and now we have many more Spanish volumes downloaded into our server. There's a great selection of public domain English works that have been included as well (and I hope to explore Bibliomania more).

It's "Reading Week" here and for 20 minutes each morning teachers from the upper grades read to the younger students and those who teach the young ones read to the older kids. It's been a lot of fun swapping classes and just letting loose. I may have gotten a bit carried away while reading from Jon Scieszka's Knights of the Kitchen Table to the 5th graders--but they loved it. (Hope to try A Wrinkle in Time with the 7th graders on Friday.)

Also, the book quest continues. A friend sent me several volumes in July and I was able to bring two large shopping bags' worth back from the States with me over break. But we've still got a long ways to go. If anyone is interested in helping out and would like to save on shipping, I'll be heading up north in December and will pick up any books sent to a certain stateside address. (Email me at currerbell at hotmail dot com for more info.)

Read "This Illiterate Brazilian's Home Speaks Volumes"--an amazing article that comes via LibraryThing's blog (and makes me realize how much more I can do!):

They inaugurated the library on March 20, 2004, with 100 volumes, most of them literary and historical treatises donated by someone Pena knew. Since then, the group has been amassing books at a feverish pace. Many come from rich Brazilians in whose homes they work as cleaners, handymen and the like.

Because everything is by donation, the collection is eclectic and quixotic, but impressive in scope: from Shakespeare to Agatha Christie, Umberto Eco to political theorist Antonio Gramsci, William Faulkner to James Joyce, not to mention textbooks and reference works. There's no Dewey decimal system, or even strict alphabetical order; books are simply grouped by subject. [...]

Not a single penny has come from official sources — "not from the politicians, not from the government," said Da Penha, who is on medical leave from her job as a cleaning lady at a local school.

"What's here is what we've done ourselves," she said. "We've sacrificed a lot to help the people here. But it's a sacrifice of love."

The surrender of choice

Bad Librarian reads Whitman, Lao Tzu, and Rilke...

It cultivated a stillness that, to me, is a large part of the transformative nature of poetry and one of the great pleasures of reading, or hearing it.

...and rages against the "May Pole of Linguistic Doom":

I don't mean to incessantly harp on the common idiom, because I am amused by a stupid cliché as much as the next guy (for comedic purposes, gratuitous group-think is oh-so-amusing and well satiates my heightened sense of elitist scorn). It's the surrender of choice that really scares me about other people's speech. By relying on lingo and tired jargon, meaning is abdicated and docile formulaic speech becomes the norm. By compartmentalizing and packaging words into easy-to-use metaphors, language is stripped of emotional value and becomes rote noise without human connection, all done for the sake of some idiotic sense of "normalcy". By creating a language-based lowest common denominator (all of us saying the same stupid shit) we cheapen our most profound means of communication. By doing so, we in turn, cheapen ourselves.

Poetry on the other hand, connects us to the world, enlivening our relationships and personal encounters with its music and magic. Poets are the protectors of the artful word and by staying with them, and by reading their work, we show our love and appreciation for what they do and what they stand for: language as art, art as divinity. I make my own language with these men and women, and with language, I am freed. With language I can think and say what I please, exactly as it is and without dilution. I am unbound from the constraints common culture places unconsciously within me. With language, I can make the world as it truly is, and so can all of you. Just ask Whitman:

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd / the earth much? / Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? / Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the / origin of all poems / You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are / millions of suns left,) / You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor / look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the / specters in books / You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things / from me / You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Don't worry. I'm sure that before long you'll be able to say you've "joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus / to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose".

Suerte.

In Progress

Ten years ago it seemed impossible
That she should ever grow so calm as this,
With self-remembrance in her warmest kiss
And dim dried eyes like an exhausted well.
Slow-speaking when she has some fact to tell,
Silent with long-unbroken silences,
Centred in self yet not unpleased to please,
Gravely monotonous like a passing bell.
Mindful of drudging daily common things,
Patient at pastime, patient at her work,
Wearied perhaps but strenuous certainly.
Sometimes I fancy we may one day see
Her head shoot forth seven stars from where they lurk
And her eyes lightnings and her shoulders wings.

~ Christina Rossetti

(For my sisters.)

Gray Room

Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl--
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you...
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.

~ Wallace Stevens, born on this day in 1879

Glimpses

The BBC announces, "Classic English literature should remain central to the teaching of English, a study suggests." As Mr. Champion so aptly quips, "In other groundbreaking news, it is believed that the theory of relativity might just help you sort out electromagnetic waves. And maybe, just maybe, 3.141592675 might have something to do with circles."

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Michael Dirda reviews the new Melville biography:

Long ago, Borges recognized in Melville a precursor of Kafka, especially in the great short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853), that tale of the mousy clerk who one day, when asked to perform a simple clerical task, quietly says, "I would prefer not to." The result is an unforgettable account of existential loneliness and of our failure to connect with the less fortunate among us, but also a study in the (all too contemporary) frustration resulting when people in power, people of goodwill who view themselves as "civilized" or as upholders of propriety and tradition, must suddenly confront those who adamantly refuse to recognize their values, their authority.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily)

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Carlos Fuentes sings the praises of the novel:

By multiplying both authorship and readership, the novel, from the times of Cervantes to our own, became a democratic vehicle, a space of choice, of alternate interpretations of the self, of the world, and of the relationship between myself and others, between you and me, between we and they.

Religion is dogmatic. Politics is ideological. Reason must be logical. But literature has the privilege of being equivocal. The quality of doubt in a novel is perhaps a manner of telling us that since authorship (and thus authority) are uncertain and susceptible of many explanations, so it goes with the world itself.

(Via A&L Daily)

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The new Self-Made issue of Boldtype, guest edited by Maud Newton and Mark Sarvas is out. Looking forward to following the discussion...

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Ron Silliman shares some wonderful observations about Martin Scorsese's Dylan documentary, No Direction Home:

One of the more interesting moments in the film is Allen Ginsberg choking up as he recounts his experience of first hearing “Hard Rain,” played for him at a party in Bolinas by Charlie Plymell. “I wept,” Ginsberg says, clearly recognizing the reflection of his own influence in Dylan’s lyrics, “The torch had been passed.” I remember my own experience, first hearing that song. Lacking Ginsberg panoptic reading (he was 37 in 1963, I was 17), I can clearly recall the hair on the back of my neck standing up: I had never heard anything like that before anywhere. It was an announcement that the world was going to be different very very soon – in spite of its apocalyptic message, the song gave me an unshakeable optimism that I would return to often over the next couple of years.

Ginsberg’s presence on the film makes great sense, not simply because he knew Dylan. Nor is he the only writer in the film – James Baldwin shows up twice, we hear a snatch of Kerouac & in a shot of heads at the Cedar Bar you can make out Frank O’Hara as he blurs past, unannounced & unquoted.

(Via wood s lot)

Two Women

The woman without
graces has a husband.
She has Volvo, sons
of three heights,
a club foot, glasses.
In fact she has several
pairs of glasses she's
purchased at Sears
of the half-moon variety.
Time, the woman knows,
is her worst enemy.
Dinners bisect Mendelsohn
and Metternich.
The sweater unravels
further each washing.
The hair refuses
to be smoothed.
The daughter holds
damp arms around her neck,
damp cheek to damp cheek,
at the shallow end of the pool.

The woman with graces
is thin stuff, thin stuff.
Thin are the arms emerging
from the cashmere shell.
Thin are the legs beneath
the linen sheath,
hard and knotty as pine.
Thin is the kid wrapping
each teetering anklet.
Thin are the letters from lovers.
Time, the woman knows,
is her worst enemy:
the buzzing cocktail phone
and the showered skull
emerging from its tiled chamber.
A whiff of ambrosial
compact and cleanser
between her and herself:
reams and reams of thin stuff,
an invisible knitting.

~ Elizabeth Skurnick