Via agent Janet Reid, whose taste in videos (even when she’s not sure what to call the thing video’d) is impeccable:
The poem, and I guess the performance, is by the poet (Taylor Mali) himself, although the video was put together by “student Robert Bruce.” As Mali’s site says:
I have no idea who he is (and he didn’t ask for permission), but what would you do when the result is so good?
Last night, The Missus and I attended a combined reading-talk-Q&A session with Margaret Atwood. (For the curious, if you’re ever in this neck of the woods in (mostly) February, do check out this arts festival.)
The bandwagon of people who believe that those of diminutive physical stature tend to compensate with outsized personalities and ambitions is one crowded bandwagon; it’s safe to say Atwood belongs in the stockpile of evidence. Atwood is a pixie, a sharp pixie: polite, well-spoken (well, duh), and good-humored but assertive. Questioners who hoped to throw her a curveball were likely to find themselves swinging and missing.
I’ve activated a feature here at the site to let you subscribe via email to follow-up comments on a post. To do so, you’ve actually got to leave a comment yourself — including (duh) an email address; then check the little box labeled “Notify me of followup comments…,” which appears just above the reCaptcha form.
Background: Why do this? Because I’m posting less often, I (and other regulars!) are actually visiting RAMH less often. This means that conversations via comments tend to sprawl over the course of days, even weeks.
Also, I’ve been using my “smart phone” more often these days to access blogs blocked (for whatever reason) by my employer. Because the phone loads Web pages much more slowly than a real wired Web browser, constantly returning to a blog just to see if there have been more comments is a constant drain on my patience. Thus, I’ve come to appreciate the “subscribe to comments” feature on other people’s blogs: I need return to an earlier post only when I see a follow-up comment to which I want to reply.
We return you now to our regularly scheduled broadcast.
Chauncey Totman, the children’s-book author whose name I would least like to share, has done it again in his latest, Margarita, The Bearded Fox. The question for us to ponder, of course, remains (as always with Totman): What is it, exactly?
[Caution: spoiler alert! Do not read the rest of this review if you’d prefer being surprised! And/Or if you don’t know what a “spoiler” is!]
Margarita the fox lived — or so Totman would have his readers believe — deep in the wilds of New York City’s Central Park. She was a lonely sort of fox, and no surprise there, because her eyeballs bulged alarmingly, disproportionately large, at the center of apparently psychedelically-induced spirals. (A handful of mushrooms are growing under her in the cover, as if we needed the hint.) Or perhaps she’s just been spending too much time staring at the Sunday crossword, or sitting in an IMAX theater watching Avatar without the 3D glasses; it’s never made clear, exactly. (Totman has never been one for clarity.)
Anyway, she’s lonely, and she’s a fox. A fox of a fox, indeed, or so she believes. Yes, Margarita is a very vain little creature, proud of her tail, proud of her ears, her paws (at the end of those stumpy little pencil-stub legs), her pert little button nose, her nightmare eyeballs. Proud, even, of her pride:
It was such a good-looking sort of pride! A pride like no other fox’s!
But she forgets all about herself when she encounters the other fox, the fox of her dreams.
She first beholds him late one spring afternoon when she is standing on a rock looking out over a pond. She has never stood on this particular rock before. It is right at the water’s edge, and she spies him by — get a grip on the armrests of your chair — by looking straight down! How marvelous! She mistakes her own reflection for another fox! She thinks the mossy underside of the rock she’s standing on is the other fox’s beard! *giggle!*
Yes, gentle reader. I know, I know. You are not a child. You are sick unto death of authors plundering familiar mythology — like the Narcissus story, in this case — and tarting it up in cheap fabric for their own misbegotten ends. So am I. So am I.
But children will perhaps fall for it, especially very young children, especially if read to in that special tone of cloying adult condescension which, you know, children just love.
The crude illustrations are uncredited. My guess is that the illustrator requested anonymity once s/he found out with which author s/he’d been paired by the cruel machinery of kidlit publishing.
Careful readers will recognize in the tale of Margarita the plot — I nearly said the plight — of Totman’s previous title, Martini, The Mustachioed Owl. Curious readers, especially those who are themselves authors, may wonder how such a prodigiously unimaginative jackass as Totman keeps getting offered book contracts (not that I know anyone who wonders such a thing in so many words). Perhaps it was for just such circumstances that the cruel gods invented the notion of coincidence.
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Note: Thanks for the inspiration to Tanita S. Davis, who in a blog post now a few months old introduced me to the general meme:
CREATE YOUR DEBUT PICTURE BOOK COVER
1 — Go to “The Name Generator: at http://www.thenamegenerator.com/
Click GENERATE NEW NAME. The name that appears is your author name.
2 — Go to “Picture Book Title Generator” at http://www.generatorland.com/usergenerator.aspx?id=243
Click CREATE TITLE! This is the title of your picture book.
3 — Go to “FlickrCC” at http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/index.php
Type the last word from your title into the search box followed by the word “drawing”. Click FIND. The first suitable image is your cover. It will give you the option to go to Picnik.
4 — Use Photoshop, Picnik, or similar to put it all together. Creativity is, of course, encouraged.
5 — Post it to your site along with this text.
The “review” of the “book” so created? Not required. Just my penance, for jumping on the bandwagon so late.
[Photo above, “Standing Still,” is by Beth Dickman. Click to see the larger original.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Moment
In the Romanesque church round stones
that ground down so many prayers and generations
kept humble silence and shadows slept in the apse
like bats in winter furs.We went out. The pale sun shone,
tinny music tinkled softly
from a car, two jays
studied us, humans,
threads of longing dangled in the air.The present moment is shameless,
taking its foolish liberties
beside the wall of this tired old shrine,awaiting the millions of years to come,
future wars, geologic eras,
cease-fires, treaties, changes in climate —
this moment — what is it — justa mosquito, a fly, a speck, a scrap of breath,
and yet it’s taken over everywhere,
entering the timid grass,
inhabiting stems and genes,
the pupils of our eyes.This moment, mortal as you or I,
was full of boundless, senseless,
silly joy, as if it knew
something we didn’t.
(Adam Zagajewski, from Mysticism for Beginners [source])
They say we shouldn’t anthropomorphize animals. We shouldn’t project onto their behaviors human motivations, so goes the advice; maybe we could develop a Maslow’s pyramid for them without stretching too much, but it’d be a mistake to give them them an upper level labeled “self-actualization.”
Still, you know, it’s hard — almost impossible — not to at least ask questions about mysterious animal behavior. Why are they doing X?, What’s the survival or evolutionary value of Y?, and so on.
Given a red-rubber toy like the one shown here, and little crunchy treats wedged into the opening, a dog (they say) will of course attempt to get the treats out. The act of figuring it out, and then executing it, can occupy (they say) a dog’s mind for long blocks of time.
All this theory seems to work just fine with The Pooch in our household. What we can’t figure out is what, exactly, was the… hmm… the decision-making process which led to her particular solution. The solution goes something like this:
Now, unlike the stereotypical small dog, The Pooch — a Yorkshire terrier weighing less than five pounds — is not generally a yapper. But give her one of these toys and she loses all mooring in common sense.
Exhibit A, my first YouTube upload ever:
Frightening, eh wot?
“Ambivalence” doesn’t even come close to capturing my schizoid views about magic (or magical) realism.
The term has been around since the early part of the twentieth century, and for most of its life has been associated especially with the work of certain Latin American authors. Here’s part of the definition from A Glossary of Literary Terms (6th edition, 1993), which I found here:
The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England. These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements… These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic — and sometimes highly effective — experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.
Nicely placed editorial “sometimes” there, huh? But in the hands of, well, a true magician, magic realism just slays me: beneath the gray, mundane surfaces of everyday life writhe fantastically colored creatures of plot, setting, and character — a reality behind the reality — and I find it difficult not to be hypnotized when I discover good examples of it. (I linked to one such story in yesterday’s whiskey river-inspired Friday post.)
(Note, by the way, that “magic realism” isn’t synonymous with “fantasy.” Fantasy takes place in unreal worlds, unrecognizable worlds, while the action in works of magic realism is grounded on good old terra firma. Soil is soil. There’s only one sun in the sky, and only one moon. Country roads are paved with asphalt or gravel, not with yellow bricks.)
But wow, is the technique subject to abuse, or what? A lazy author can find it all too tempting to reach for the supernatural to explain something otherwise inexplicable; if anyone challenges a sudden rainfall of fiery goldfish in the used-car lot (or whatever), the writer can just stare, goggle-eyed, at the the ignorant questioner before replying, “It’s magic realism, you jerk!”
[Image: “Good and Evil,” by Daniel Merriam. See the original, more clearly, at Merriam’s own site.]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book (“the pursuit of fantasy“):
Writing in the Dark
It’s not difficult.
Anyway, it’s necessary.Wait till morning, and you’ll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.Fumble for the light, and you’ll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen, ballpoints don’t always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There’s nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are our tools.Never mind about crossing your t’s, dotting your i’s–
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.
(Denise Levertov [source])
…and:
Surely you remember
After they all leave,
I remain alone with the poems,
some poems of mine, some of others.
I prefer poems that others have written.
I remain quiet, and slowly
the knot in my throat dissolves.
I remain.Sometimes I wish everyone would go away.
Maybe it’s nice, after all, to write poems.
You sit in your room and the walls grow taller.
Colors deepen.
A blue kerchief becomes a deep well.You wish everyone would go away.
You don’t know what’s the matter with you.
Perhaps you’ll think of something.
Then it all passes, and you are pure crystal.After that, love.
Narcissus was so much in love with himself.
Only a fool doesn’t understand
he loved the river, too.You sit alone.
Your heart aches, but
won’t break.
The faded images wash away one by one.
Then the defects.
A sun sets at midnight. You remember
the dark flowers too.You wish you were dead or alive or
somebody else.
Isn’t there a country you love? A word?
Surely you remember.Only a fool lets the sun set when it likes.
It always drifts off too early
westward to the islands.Sun and moon, winter and summer
will come to you,
infinite treasures.
(Dahlia Ravikovitch; translated by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch)
Many writers hate the question from non-writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” I suspect one reason they hate it* is that they themselves don’t really know, but wish they did — so they could return to the well again, and again, and again…
No such luck in the real world, of course. Some story ideas do come directly from identifiable triggers — we see a mother slapping a child’s face, say, and suddenly we start to wonder what led up the moment of unhinging, or what will follow it. But I believe most stories just sort of emerge half-formed (if that much), from the mind’s restless sifting through and folding together of the everyday, long after we can attribute the ideas to something specific.
Still, explicit sources of inspiration aren’t to be sniffed at. When you’ve just gotta get moving at the keyboard, but have nothing to move you, you can turn for instance to automated brainstorming aids. You might play with reCaptcha word pairs (like here or here), or take a handful of simple emotions and toss them into the subconscious’s blender.
Here’s one more source for you: the Portrait of Words blog:
Welcome to our bi-monthly writing challenge known as a “Portrait of Words”.
In a nut shell here’s how it works. Every other week we will give you a set of categories along with photographs to use as inspiration for your story. Look at each of the pictures and interpret them, then create a story based on what you see and feel. It’s really that simple.
(For more detailed guidelines, click the above link. The “set of categories” guideline seems to have been dropped, though.)
As an example, see Portrait of Words #22, from November. It includes four pictures, including these two:
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Do those two photos, taken together, suggest a story to you?** If so, you might want to hang onto a Portrait of Words bookmark.
[Hat tip to Susan Carleton’s excellent Stony River blog for the link to Portrait of Words. I found Susan’s blog by way of the Write Your A** Off map.]
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* The main reason for hating the “Where do you get your ideas?” question may be the suggestion that ideas come to us from the outside, rather than from within.
** This probably indicates some deep-seated mental imbalance, but all I can think of — now that I’ve thought of it once — involves the pigeons getting mangled in the Ferris wheel’s machinery. And yes, I know: sick, sick, sick. But art isn’t always pretty. :)
[Image above depicts a representation of The Parthenon as it appears at a location in the Second Life virtual world/alternative universe/simulation/etc. Click the image for more information, including a link to the location itself.]
From whiskey river:
We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others’
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren’t hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
(Adam Zagajewski, from Another Beauty)
…and:
This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.
There is my creed.
(D.H. Lawrence)
