Reading – Page 25

Man of Mystery

January 29, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

Recognize the handsome guy at left? Neither did I.

Then I read Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories, by Harry Lee Poe (a distant cousin of its subject). Turns out that this painting, by Samuel Stillman Osgood, was rendered in about 1845 — four years before EAP’s death.

Right: he had no mustache at all until the last year or so of his life.

More importantly for understanding him, he didn’t always look so troubled, so twisted up inside, so “Don’t talk to me — I’m ready to implode” as he did in the familiar pictures and daguerreotypes of his last years.

My review of the Illustrated Companion is (finally!) done, and posted at The Book Book blog.

Paying Attention to Meaning

January 14, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

I wanted to try something… something different for our writing workshop back then.

Not something funny (or was it?). Not something in the psychological horror line. Not a genre piece, not an obviously literary piece. For that matter, none of the things that would pop into workshoppers’ heads when they sat down to read it and started to answer the question, What sort of story has John written?

I wanted to overturn expectations. They knew what sort of story I wrote, after all, or so they thought: a story with some quirky protagonist at center stage, acting out some strange mental drama in a world which stubbornly resisted his or her preconceived ideas of the way the world should work. A story with a lot of… of… thwarting going on.

They’d expect a story, furthermore, that went on for thousands of words.

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Surprising the Audience

January 9, 2009 by John 4 Comments

[Above still from director Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), which sounds like one of the most
interesting films I’ve never seen. Click image for more info.]

My regular Friday post inspired by the mysteries of the past seven days’ entries at the whiskey river blog. This one’s a little more complex than most — one or two more selections, and a small cluster of strangely relevant associations from elsewhere around the Web.

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Comes the Dawn

January 6, 2009 by John 2 Comments

[If you’re a regular reader here, you may recall this post from a couple weeks ago, co-written with my co-blogger. In which case, you may be wondering, What about Part 2? Patience, patience. Gargoyles celebrate Xmas for — guess what? — twelve of our days.* Part 2 of “A Gargoyle Looks at Xmas” will probably be up this Thursday.]

Yeah, “Comes the dawn. Also “A light bulb went on over my head”; “Eureka!”; “Now I get it…!” The slap-in-the-forehead moment that we literary types sometimes call… epiphany.

Writerly-advice gurus, agents, and editors will often tell you — rightly — that forms of the word “sudden” are overused, because most often things just happen at their normal rate. A “sudden” occurrence is more likely one which has been taking place all along; it just took someone a long time to notice.

But epiphanies and suddenness go hand-in-hand. There’s a slow but steady accretion of evidence which eventually reaches critical mass and explodes like a fireball in a character’s head: the flashpoint is the epiphany.

(The word’s roots are Greek, literally translating as “a showing forth.”)

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Suchness, Muchness

January 2, 2009 by John 6 Comments

Alice, the March Hare, the Dormouse, and the Hatter

From whiskey river:

It’s true, I think, as Kenko says in his Idleness,
That all beauty depends upon disappearance,
The bitten edges of things,
the gradual sliding away
Into tissue and memory,
the uncertainty
And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from,
And their frayed loveliness.

(Charles Wright, The World of the Ten Thousand Things)

Those without stories are preordained to repeat them,
I saw once in the stars.
Unclear who underwrote that,
But since then I’ve seen it everywhere
I’ve looked, staggering
Noon light and night’s meridian wandering wide and the single sky.
And here it is in the meadow grass, a brutish script.

We tend to repeat what we don’t know
Instead of the other way around —
thus mojo, thus misericordia,
Old cross-work and signature, the catechism in the wind.
We tend to repeat what hurts us, things, and ghosts of things,
The actual green of summer, and summer’s half-truth.
We tend to repeat ourselves.

(Charles Wright, A Short History of the Shadow)

…and:

We are called to wake our hearts from the dark dreariness of never being good enough — a pretty startling call for anyone not suffering terminal arrogance. Since most of us suffer an oddly modern mix of anxiety and arrogance, there are few among us who make it through our lives without some hours (years, decades…) in that dark, self-doubting territory where anxiety defines the very air itself. That we are whole, and home, and needed by all of life is where Buddhism begins, in a sense. Most of us, though, have to take quite a journey to arrive where we’ve always been. Like the love that has no opposite or end, suchness is unconditional, in that it reaches absolutely every condition of experience. We intrinsically have the countenance of the person of suchness — nothing we can do or have ever done places us outside that embrace.

(Bonnie Myotai Treace)

Not from whiskey river:

“You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter; “so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well — eh, stupid?”

“But they were in the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice this last remark.

“Of course they were,” said the Dormouse; ” — well in.”

This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some time without interrupting it.

“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; “and they drew all manner of things — everything that begins with an M — ”

“Why with an M?” said Alice.

“Why not?” said the March Hare.

Alice was silent.

The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: “– that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness — you know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’ — did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?”

(Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

Finally, Andrew Bird discusses the thin border between suchness and muchness, at the Bonnaroo Festival in 2006 [lyrics]:

Figure, Ground, Imagined, Real: Not So Very Different

December 26, 2008 by John 4 Comments

From whiskey river:

The Cutting-beam

Imagine this blur of chill, white, gray, vague, sadness
burned off.
Imagine a landscape
of dry clear sunlight, precise shadows,
forms of pure color.
Imagine two neighboring hills, and
your house, my house, looking across, friendly:
imagine ourselves
meeting each other,
bringing gifts, bringing news.
Yes, we need the heat
of imagination’s sun
to cut through our bonds of cloud.
And oh, can the great and golden light
warm our flesh that has grown so cold?

(Denise Levertov)

…and:

We might imagine that our thoughts, feelings, or the essence of who we really are is intrinsically private – that we fundamentally exist inside our mind and our body and that we can only imperfectly send and receive messages out into a world of other separate, isolated minds.

But the fact is, who and what we are is constituted, and constantly, moment-by-moment, re-constituted, by the world we live in and are part of. We are all part of a common fabric of being. All of us are simply human beings trying to clarify what it means to be human, and to come to terms with the suffering that being human entails.

When we imagine that our experience is unique, we may imagine ourselves particularly talented or particularly hopeless at whatever it is we’re doing. But since all of us are struggling with the same problems inherent in being human, it turns out that all those things we thought were so unique about ourselves are precisely what we have most in common.

(Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness)

Finally, not from whiskey river, the trailer for the film of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline* (opening February, 2009):

“You’re just in time for supper, dear.”

“You’re not my mother. My mother doesn’t have… b-b-b-buttons?”

“Do you like them? I’m your other mother, silly.”

________________________________

* Selected reviews of the book:

“A virtuoso adaptation…a master of fantastical landscapes, [illustrator P. Craig] Russell sharpens the realism of his imagery, preserving the humanity of the characters and heightening the horror, even as Gaiman’s concise storytelling ratchets up the eeriness.” (Booklist)

“This book will send a shiver down your spine, out through your shoes, and into a taxi to the airport. It has the delicate horror of the finest fairy tales, and it is a masterpiece. And you will never think about buttons in quite the same way again.” (Terry Pratchett)

“I think this book will nudge Alice in Wonderland out of its niche at last. It is the most splendidly original, weird, and frightening book I have read, and yet full of things children will love.” (Diana Wynne Jones)

Something to take a look at, eh?

A Quirky Eclectic Christmas Music Playlist

December 23, 2008 by John 3 Comments

Okay, let’s do this playlist thing… These artists and numbers appear, back-to-back, in the playlist:

Peter Robbins et al.: dialogue from A Charlie Brown Christmas
Anonymous 4: Hodie Christus Natus Est
Waverly Consort: Three Spanish Villancicos – Dadme Albcrecias
Perry Como: Home for the Holidays
Mannheim Steamroller: Joy to the World
George Winston: The Holly and the Ivy
Celtic Woman: O Holy Night
John Denver and the Muppets: The Twelve Days of Christmas
Al Hirt: Nutty Jingle Bells
The Roches: Deck the Halls

(Note: After some experimentation, I’ve found there doesn’t seem to be a simple way — like a single button to push — to fast-forward to the end of a number. What you do instead is drag the little progress-meter thing all the way to the right, to the end of the track; this cues up the next number in the list.)

Next: I can’t put a YouTube video into this audio-playlist thing, but Christmas music doesn’t get any better than this. Judy Garland, in Meet Me in St. Louis, introduces the world to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — and more or less ruins it for every succeeding performer:

(As Jordan Baker of the Dealing in Subterfuges blog recently reminded readers, the original version has none of this hang-a-shining-star/highest-bough stuff. What that verse actually — much more piercingly poignantly — says is:

Someday soon, we all will be together —
If the fates allow.
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow…
So have yourself a Merry Little Christmas now.

Got that???)

Finally, the music of Christmas writing. Dylan Thomas reads his own A Child’s Christmas in Wales (in two parts, back-to-back — thanks, WordPress Audio Player plugin!):

(The complete text is here, if you’d like to follow along; link opens in a new window/tab, so you can move back and forth from the text to the audio stream.)

________________________

Bonus: Video from 1979’s Christmas Together special, which shows John Denver and The Muppets singing the Twelve Days of Christmas (audio only is in the above playlist, obviously):

Don’t you wish you could see the chaos “backstage” as all the Muppeteers, their arms waving, squeezed in around John Denver?

Getting There, vs. There

December 18, 2008 by John 5 Comments

From an appreciation of novelist (and biographer, etc.) Penelope Fitzgerald, by novelist (etc.) Julian Barnes, appearing in The Guardian in July:

Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route-maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. And their structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent, being based on the tacit network of “loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures” that makes up human relationships. Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does; except with a greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in [Fitzgerald’s] The Beginning of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says “There are no accidental meetings.” The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is.

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Bookwormed

December 14, 2008 by John 7 Comments

Seems I have been “bookworm tagged” by Julie Weathers.

“Bookworm Award” rules:

Open the closest book — not a favorite or most intellectual book — but the book closest at the moment, to page 56
Write out the fifth sentence, as well as two to five sentences following
Tag five innocents [or more]

With the assumption that “book” means “published book, not your own manuscript, Mr. or Ms. Writer,” followed immediately by the thought that it would be interesting, in fact, to apply to writing friends’ manuscripts, Julie has added another step:

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for your own manuscript.

So, umm… okay.

I’m going to disregard tech-reference books, which are stacked over and around my computer. The closest other book I can put my hands on without getting up and looking around is a well-thumbed 1967 paperback edition of Catch-22, which is still on my desk from when I reviewed it for MoonRat’s “celebrate reading” series back in June.

In this passage, the protagonist, Yossarian, is talking with his friend Hungry Joe about nightmares. Hungry Joe is speaking sentence #5 on page 56, and the conversation continues:

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Why I Read Terry Pratchett

December 4, 2008 by John 5 Comments

Actually, there are a myriad reasons. (And I can’t think of a single legitimate reason not to read him. Uninformed reasons, yes, and/or reasons based on the faulty assumption that fantasy/SF has nothing to do with reality — or that funny has nothing to do with serious. But legitimate ones? Nope.)

This brief bit from Witches Abroad pretty much boils it down for me. The bare context you need at this point is that a conversation is taking place among three witches. Old Mother Dismass, the subject of this passage, has the ability to see into the future.

“You can’t tell me that’s worth tuppence,” said Old Mother Dismass, from whatever moment of time she was currently occupying.

No one was ever quite sure which it was.

It was an occupational hazard for those gifted with second sight. The human mind isn’t really designed to be sent rocketing backward and forward along the great freeway of time and can become, as it were, detached from its anchorage, seeing randomly into the past and the future and only occasionally into the present. Old Mother Dismass was temporally unfocused. This meant that if you spoke to her in August she was probably listening to you in March. It was best just to say something now and hope she’d pick it up next time her mind was passing through.

The writing is just right; even that “as it were,” which in a lesser writer’s hands might function as mere filler, adds an ironic distance between the author and the things and events which he’s describing.

I love the turnings of the mind behind this passage. Given a common convention of speculative fiction — second sight — just stop. Stop, and ask yourself what it would really mean to have this “gift.” Mightn’t life and thought actually be a little more unpleasantly complicated for the (ha ha) lucky seer than we normally take for granted? How would this power, if someone actually had it, affect those who had to deal every day with its bearer?

Finally, take that whole reductio ad absurdum of a notion and package it up into a supremely funny digression…

Damn. I’d love to be able to do that, and do it repeatedly, over the course of 25+ years (and counting).