Midlist Oblivion

Confessions of a Semi-Successful Author, at Salon.

Jane Austen Doe tells us that writing is no way to make a living, for those of us who hadn't already heard, but she goes farther than usual -- she tells us how much she made on each of her books, how her advances affected things, and what good and ill befell her. It certainly makes one feel sympathetic to her, and other midlist authors, as well as oneself, one's friends, etc. A friend, for example, waits tables with writers who have published several books. Makes you kind of glad you took your parents' advice and finished your degree in something vaguely practical. If you did.

"I Sleep Way Too Much and I Read Tremendously."

Junot Diaz, writer after my own heart (and cute, besides), at the Guardian.

Oh, and here is Alma, at The New Yorker.

Maya Angelou Goes for Hillary,

Toni Morrison for Obama. But, do the writers in any way reflect the candidates? At Salon.

The two writers do match their chosen candidates, then. Angelou, with a well-known and colorful life story featuring odds overcome and the triumph of the human spirit, has been embraced as an icon of middlebrow empowerment. With her, you know exactly what you're getting because you've gotten it so many times before, and yet you can congratulate yourself for (mildly) bucking the system. Electing Clinton would make history, but it also promises to bring a familiar presence back to the White House.

Morrison, as the only living Nobel laureate in literature in a fundamentally unbookish nation, is a homegrown exotic, the embodiment of the American notion that if you can't quite understand it, it must be literature. She is an overwhelming presence, handsome and stately, with a magnificent voice. Like Obama, with his Harvard degree and pristine, international sleekness, she seems too good and too smart for us, the sort of American appreciated by foreigners with obscurely discriminating standards. The electorate famously prefers guys they can imagine dropping by for a barbecue over intimidating intellectuals, but that insecurity has been biting us in the ass for the past eight years.

How Can You Get Ideas Off Salary?

Do you look like a writer? Did F. Scott Fitzgerald? Now that the writers' strike is over, this and other questions answered at the NY Times.

The reason Pat can’t (or won’t) write is that after dedicating his productive life to a 20-year maelstrom of constantly shifting opinions and producers, he has become so entirely rudderless that points of story or character or anything, for that matter, have been rendered entirely meaningless. At one point he goes so far as to propose giving a Civil War story a “Jewish touch.” He is, in other words, exactly the writer Hollywood would build if it could, minus the ideas.

What Is It You Plan To Do

With your one wild and precious life?

Poet Mary Oliver's appearance Monday at Benaroya Hall is the fastest sellout in the 20-year history of Seattle Arts & Lectures. It is sparking ticket action on the local Craigslist, where tickets to rock concerts and sports playoffs are regularly bought and sold, but rarely to poetry readings.

Take that, Minneapolis. The Twin City may have supplanted Seattle as the country's "most literate city" in an annual survey but the Oliver sellout demonstrates that Seattle still has its zealous literary enthusiasts. (At Seattlepi.com)

As if that didn't give us hope for mankind, as poet and friend GC Smith so kindly put it, farther on in the article, we came to this:

Oliver's "New and Selected Poems, Volume One" has been one of the all-time best-selling volumes at Open Books, the poetry-only bookstore in Wallingford.

There is a poetry-only bookstore somewhere in the world.

My favorite book of Mary Oliver's is still House of Light, and one of my favorite poems is The Kingfisher:

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world--so long as you don't mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn't have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water--hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don't say he's right. Neither
do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

The poem mentioned in the article, The Summer Day, from which the title of this post comes, is also in House of Light.

The article goes on to say that there are three poets who can be expected to sell out like this, the other two being Billy Collins and Seamus Heaney. I just saw Collins read with Frank McCourt at the AWP conference in New York City, and they were funny, Collins with Bob Newhart-esque delivery and McCourt, the former NYC schoolteacher, giving dead on imitations of his vocational high school students and their forged excuse notes. Now I will be adding Oliver to the to-see list. I have been reading her work for 20 years, but haven't seen her read yet.

On the subject of McCourt, he said he'd read something about cows at a reading and then been chastised that the father of one of the attendees had just been trampled to death by cows. He thought couldn't he have had a heads up, for that? It made me think, in his brogue, that "trampled to death by cows" must be the Irish euphemism for, "He was drunk in the barn and fell asleep and the cow tripped over him. Fell on him. He suffocated. And such nice handwriting he had, he's with God now." There is the proof of the power of McCourt's voice, that it got right into my head and I had to write that down, with a reference to his memory of the nuns' love of fine handwriting. Which brings me to another memory, of receiving a letter from my father in my teens in reply to one I'd written, in which his writing reflected what I knew was my own voice, which evidently had power, at least over him.

Sound of Silence

Nah, it's Art Garfunkel, reading.

Hm, wonder what Dylan has been reading.

This came in as a comment from mirrorball, but it's too good not to list: http://ralphriver.blogspot.com/2006/09/more-dylan-thefts.html

Course to me, those "thefts" are more in the realm of homage to earlier masters. See what you think.

Zen and the Art of...

Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

'I could not sleep and I could not stay awake,' he recalls. 'I just sat there cross-legged in the room for three days. All sorts of volitions started to go away. My wife started getting upset at me sitting there, got a little insulting. Pain disappeared, cigarettes burned down in my fingers ...'

It was like a monastic experience?

'Yes, but then a kind of chaos set in. Suddenly I realised that the person who had come this far was about to expire. I was terrified, and curious as to what was coming. I felt so sorry for this guy I was leaving behind. It was a separation. This is described in the psychiatric canon as catatonic schizophrenia. It is cited in the Zen Buddhist canon as hard enlightenment. I have never insisted on either - in fact I switch back and forth depending on who I am talking to.'

Catatonic schizophrenia gets my vote. I think it's important not to confuse enlightenment with insanity, just as it's important not to confuse artistic talent with insanity. Good book, though.

Here is John Daido Loori, Zen master and photographer, on simplicity:

To be simple means to make a choice about what's important, and to let go of all the rest. When we are able to do this, our vision expands, our heads clear, and we can better see the details of our lives in all their incredible wonder and beauty.

Simplicity does not come easily to us in the West. In general, we don't like to give anything up. We tend to accumulate things, thinking that if something is good, we should have more of it. We go through life hoarding objects, people, credentials, ignoring the fact that the more things we have to take care of, the more burdensome our lives become. Our challenge is to find ways to simplify our lives.

From Zen of Creativity: Cultivating your Artistic Life.

It doesn't require a schizophrenic break.

Happy Anniversary Roe v. Wade

I confess I read this headline as, "How Much Time Should Women Spend in Paris for Having an Abortion." I wasn't wearing my reading glasses.

Link from Jezebel.com.

Erica Jong also has something to say.

I am glad abortion has been legal in the US for my entire reproductive life. I hope it remains so.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe

To write about ferrets, this from Newsweek.

Nature writer Paul Tolme was surprised to find his descriptions of black-footed ferrets in a steamy romance novel about an affair between a Native American chief and a pioneer woman.

He was alerted by an email from some smart bitches.

Fiction and Nonfiction

And Norman Mailer.

The NYS Writers Institute had an interview with Norman Mailer on May 1, and, on being asked about the difference between fiction and nonfiction, he replied:

I'd say that it's all fiction. I'd say that one of the great swindles that civilization has been pulling on itself is that there are two literary forms - fiction and nonfiction, and that there really is a profound separation between them. And, as far as I'm concerned, nonfiction is fiction. Because you never get it right - in those times which I've really tried to get it absolutely right, when all was done...and I have much more contempt and respect for facts than most nonfiction writers, because I think that most facts are skewed, warped, and twisted in one form or another, whether outright lies or almost correct. And they get put together in these rickety structures which are then called history until somebody else comes along and casts it down for a new structure, and so forth. So, in that sense, it's fiction. Whereas in fiction, what you're doing is dealing with things that are not facts, but you're trying to move truthfully among several imaginations when you're writing. And that makes for some very interesting structures, which I think have more tensile strength, and - how should I put it - when you twist them, they tend to twist back, whereas with history, once you twist it - once you demolish a fact in history - it's gone. The history is savaged. It was a serious fact, and now it's seriously wrong.

Great Swindle? Uh oh, Norman sounded almost like a feminist there for a minute.

The blog of the NYS Writers Institute.

Thanks to my friend Bob Wright, for this.

Happy 100th Birthday to Simone de Beauvoir. See Her Naked Butt Here.

"My first thought on seeing the magazine was that they would never have considered putting a picture of Sartre's bottom on the front of Le Nouvel Observateur," she [Florence Montreynaud] said. "Luckily, perhaps. Then my second thought was 'what a fine bottom'. No male philosopher I can think of would have had such a lovely bottom. Mme de Beauvoir had a brilliant mind. She also had a wonderful body. Women win on both counts." At the Independent..

Women are made, not born? Incidentally, she is 44 in this photo, Simone de Beauvoir in Chicago, taken by Art Shay in 1952.

The Secret to Writing

What secrets there may be are either open secrets, or secrets that would be true only for the individual. Everything you need to know you'll learn, and can only learn, from writing, provided you don't delude yourself.

--David Mitchell at The Guardian.

Hm, wonder what he thinks about the proliferation of writing books out there. A friend once asked which ones I'd recommend, but I think any of them can help at a particular moment. It doesn't matter which books you read about writing, only that you do the writing. I don't think any of them will turn you into a well disciplined writing machine. Caffeine seems to help, though. Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, Number 9 Dream, and Ghostwritten prefers his in the form of tea. I'm a coffee drinker first, and tea drinker second, and even know a few writers and one potter who like mate.

And, while we are at it, the secret to Starbucks. Not my favorite place to get a cup of coffee, but definitely reliable. One of my favorite places locally just broke my heart by downgrading their coffee from a deelicious French roast to some common swill. They'd expanded to a neighboring storefront and are trying to save money -- what a mistake to cut the coffee quality! I'll never have breakfast there again. *SOB!!!*

Tattooed Writers

From the AbeBooks blog.

Friends of mine are tattoo aficionados. For me, it's too much like committing to wearing the same shirt or necklace for the next twenty years (until the tattoo fades and is redone). Good article, though.

"One sheds one's sicknesses in books,"

Plato said that the muses gave us the arts not for "mindless pleasure" but "as an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself". It's no coincidence that Apollo is the god of both poetry and healing; nor that hospitals or health sanctuaries in ancient Greece were invariably situated next to theatres, most famously at Epidaurus, where dramatic performances were considered part of the cure. When Odysseus is wounded by a boar, his companions use incantations to stop the bleeding. And the Bible has the story of David calming Saul: "And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, David took a harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him."

Bibliotherapy, at the Guardian. Reminds me of a friend whose method for recovering from a painful breakup was to read all of Shakespeare. He was better halfway through.