Good to Hear

"You can't have three people looking over your shoulder, and you have to make sure not to censor yourself. You have to be willing to be wrong and you have to be risky. You have to take a certain amount of abuse, and the reason you're willing to do that is because you love the truth."

-- Grace Paley

Carson McCullers: Reflections in a Golden Eye

I just finished reading my first Carson McCullers novel: Reflections in a Golden Eye. I had never heard of her work before (which, of course, reveals how much I have yet to read). I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this slim little novel.

This is her first sentence: “An army post in peacetime is a dull place.” And then she goes on to disprove this very notion. True, the post is all about routine and drill. But she takes us into the homes of the officers and their wives and into one enlisted man’s head. The horrors are there just behind the picket fence and inside the otherwise stark barracks. The characters fall in love with the wrong people (most often ones to whom they are not married) and take out their inner angst with garden sheers used on their own nipples, in one ghastly example. Those Southerners. Cukoo. McCullers gives every single one of her characters a lobotomy.

The insanity and despair of the characters is made even more compelling by McCullers extremely tight prose style. The sentence structure and diction are militant—no lyrical episodes to take a trip into metaphysics or provide enough words for a soft landing. These characters are doomed to fit into their little sentences.

colorful vocabulary, phrases and some sentences too

sward
the grassy surface of land

mufti
ordinary dress as distinguished from that denoting an occupation or station ; especially : civilian clothes when worn by a person in the armed forces

“He had a sad penchant for becoming enamored of his wife’s lovers.”

slattern
an untidy slovenly woman; also : SLUT, PROSTITUTE

fractious grace

termagant wife
an overbearing or nagging woman : SHREW

grim vivacity

badinage
playful repartee / banter

cerise curtains
a moderate red

merriest malice

cynosure
one that serves to direct or guide / center of atrraction or attention

frippery
something showy, frivolous, or nonessential : LUXURY, TRIFLE

"The sun and firelight were bright in the room."

"Like all very stupid people she had a predilection for the gruesome, which she could indulge in or throw off at will."

"And having given up life, the Captain suddenly began to live."

hauter
arrogance, haughtiness

sluggish grace

repressed agitation

hobbledehoy
an awkward gawky youth

lazy tenderness

velleity
the lowest level of volition / a slight wish or tendency (inclination)

sough
to make a moaning or sighing sound

some useful links

Biography of Carson McCullers

The Carson McCullers Project

Audio Recording of McCullers

The Tragicomic Vision in McCullers (literary criticism)

Dance: Keigwin + Company

I will head out in the rain to do some errands and see this show tonight:

http://www.larrykeigwin.com/company.php

3 Word Lines and at least one question Poem: First Draft

“I love you,”
answers the physicist at sundown near the edge of the back yard in spring.

Tell me, why
is grass greener
twenty steps beyond
our lawn across
the thicket fence?

Let’s see: Yes,

You look down
at our lawn
and see bare
spots of earth.

Yes, let’s see:

You look over
there and see
grass blades tall.

In short, you
see the forest
over there, dear,
and here see
only sparse trees.

In fact, grass
is always greener
where you can’t
see raw earth.

Is it not?

Narrative Poem: First Draft

July 16, 1990: Election Day for Pope Michael I of Kansas

Superman grew up there.
His heavy denim rugged,
his letter jacket torn by sheer
velocity when he took flight, unexpectedly.
He learned the truth about home, and left for the Big Apple.

Kansans tilted chins when he joined the East Coast liberal Media Machine.
After all, he was alien, kryptonite-sissy,
lily livered freak
in blue tights and red speed-o, not to mention
his cape. So long sissy, those New Yorkers need your bleeding-heart ass.

Dorothy risked her curls and Toto’s too,
she faced the Wicked Witch of the East
to get back home there.
Miss Kansas herself wanted two things:
to get home and to love her dog.

The Witch—green tight-lipped, single, magic mistress, femi-nazi—
sizzled at Dorothy’s humble bucket toss.
She desired to extinguish the Eastern Witch,
not kill. And see the thanks she gets
from those who trembled under the witch? Not a penny.
The Ozites sent her home and forgot her, entirely.

Superman’s first home, Dorothy’s Ithaca,
this is the land where John Brown killed to fight slavery,
and Pizza Hut was born.

In Wichita, the “Summer of Mercy” clenched
prairie souls and recruited soldiers for the unborn,
back in ’91. Christian agape flushed the Ar-kansas river banks,
cartoon babies pled from hand-lettered signs along the highways,
Save the Children! Choose Life! Your mother did!

Pope-fearing Catholics
simmered on the hard-scrabble plains,
took flight and turned to home, the Vatican way off in Rome,
for guidance when the protests turned violent.

Some Catholics there, in Kansas, just sneered:
We don’t have super powers or Dorothy’s glass slippers,
wouldn’t click our heels anyway to see the Pope and kiss his fat gold ring.
If we could see the Holy Father, we’d say:
You, all do respect, are a scoundrel and a fraud, a victim
of sociology and hand-holding guitar-strumming new-age professor types.
Latin is God’s tongue.

Pope Michael had reigned already a year,
when civil protests exploded,
but as far as the record goes,
he didn’t have much to say or
no one listened.

Deborah Eisenberg: Twilight of the Superheroes

What I am reading now: Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes.

This collection of short stories is as "hot" as such a thing can get. I keep hearing/reading about it everywhere I go. So far, it deserves the good press.

Useful link:

'Twilight of the Superheroes' Explores the Senses
NPR Book Review by Alan Cheuse

Ethan Frome

I am currently taking a novel writing course at Emerson College. We will read several short novels to examine the author's craft as we go along crafting our own first novels. We just read Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. A terrible story, worth reading.

Below I collected some colorful phrases,
vocabulary and even a few good lines:

careless powerful look

degenerate
having declined (as in nature, character, structure, or function) from an ancestral or former state / having sunk to a condition below that which is normal to a type; especially : having sunk to a lower and usually corrupt and vicious state

rich Irish

exanimate
lacking animation : SPIRITLESS / being or appearing lifeless

declivity
downward inclination / a descending slope

fatuity
something foolish or stupid : STUPIDITY, FOOLISHNESS / archaic : IMBECILITY, DEMENTIA

rill
noun : a very small brook
verb: to flow like a rill

a growl of rapture

white and scintillating fields
scintillate: to emit sparks / to emit quick flashes as if throwing off sparks , sparkle
scintillating: brilliantly lively, stimulating, witty

"His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty." (Chapter 3)

"Ethan was suffocated with the sense of well-being." (Chapter 4)

aver
to verify or prove to be true in pleading a cause; to allege or assert in pleading /
to declare positively

ebullition
a sudden violent outburst or display / the act, process, or state of boiling or bubbling up

adjure
to urge or advise earnestly

Trip to the Boston Public Library

I will return the following Young Adult books:

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

and

the perks of being a wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Both books are extremely popular for high school students. I can see why. Both worth a read, especially if you want to hear voices from that netherworld of adolescence.

The library has the following books on hold for me:

Consider the lobster, and other essays by David Foster Wallace

and

From beginning to end: the rituals of our lives by Robert Fulghum.

I intend to read only selected portions of the above books.

I just finished reading Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (for my novel writing class)

and

I am currently reading for book club (even though they already discussed this one!) The Writing on the Wall: a novel by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.

and

I am working my way through The Kenyon Review and Special Handling, a book of poetry by Mark Pawlak.

What's on your shelf?????

Michiana Chronicles: Vagina Monologues

April Lidinsky, one of the five local writers who write
"Michiana Chronicles" for the local (South Bend, Indiana)
NPR station, broadcast this yesterday.

http://www.mchron.net/ee/radio/the_plays_the_thing/

Friday, January 27, 2006

The Play's the Thing

Ok, folks – time for a literature quiz that should take you back
to, oh, maybe your Sophomore language arts class.  So: Who said the
following line:  “The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the
conscience of the king.” Anyone?  Ah ... I see lots of hands.
And yes, “Hamlet” is correct.  But with that line, Shakespeare
illuminates something larger than Hamlet’s desire for revenge.
That line reminds us that the best theater catches everyone’s
conscience, and makes all of us shift a bit in our seats. 
Art is political– it’s about power.

A friend once gave me a t-shirt, decorated with Andy Warhol
images and the jaunty motto, “Art can’t hurt you.” I wore it a few
times, feeling pretty bohemian-hip, until a colleague said, “You know,
that t-shirt is totally wrong! It can too hurt.” And ... he was
right.  To say art can’t hurt us is to say it doesn’t have any teeth, any
power– that art doesn’t matter. A quick reflection on the long
history of censorship reminds us that art has always been under suspicion
for blasphemy or sedition.  Art makes arguments we don’t always want
to hear.

But unlike editorials or ranting TV commentators, art rarely
presents one single perspective, which might be its greatest virtue.
Perhaps you, like me, have stood in front of a painting, or in a theater
lobby at intermission, muttering darkly, “Huh ... I don’t get
it.”  Art, at its best, reminds us that we should never assume we
“get” anything at first glance. Even those pastel-pretty landscape
paintings by Claude Monet say to us, “You think you know what a
pile of hay looks like?  Think again.  Look at a haystack in this
light. And now late in the day.  And again in a storm.
And again in wintertime.” First impressions are always partial, imperfect.

Art usefully undermines our assumption that we know it all; it keeps
us from thinking simply, and from simply taking sides.

In my college classrooms, sometimes students feel sopassionately
about ideas they want to pick a fight with everyone who disagrees
with them.  Not so fast, I urge them – if you tell people
they’re full of hooey, you’ll only get an “Am not!” for every one of
your “Are too!”s.  So how do you invite someone to try on a new
perspective?  Well, reach back to your childhood, and remember
how those interactions with friends went.  Something like: “Ok, now
you play like you’re a such-and-so, and then I’ll play like I’m a
something-or-other, and then let’s play like ...” and on and on.
Remember?  Yeah – the play’s the thing.  Trying on new roles is
a skill that weakens, sadly, with our harrowing passage to
adulthood.

But art reminds us to play with ideas. To empathize with
perspectives that stretch us, however uncomfortably.

And that is why I teach plays like Eve Ensler’s The Vagina
Monologues, and why college students everywhere have found power
in producing the play themselves, despite the controversy that
often surrounds it.  The Vagina Monologues is a response – a creative
response – to a terrible truth about power, and that is that
women worldwide suffer – and resist – the mental and physical effects
of sexism in ways that are both readily apparent and everywhere
ignored.

But instead of dashing off a rant in the face of gruesome
statistics, Ensler wrote a play, with a multitude of perspectives
for us to try on.  Now I’m not comfortable, myself, with every
voice in that piece.  But when I watch students practicing for
the production, I see the power of art at work as they inhabit
these different roles, empathizing with an amazing range of
human experience.  I test myself by the students’ brave example:
How could I become a person who wouldn’t leave a battering husband?
How might I live a life in which fear or belief led me to
inflict violence on others?  What would it be like not to
feel vulnerable in my own body?  And I wonder,
why are these questions threatening to ask right now?

I think of a playwright controversial and censored in his own
time, Molière, and the pleasure I get every year when I attend the
exuberant undergraduate performance at Notre Dame, all in
French, and this year coming in February, just like some productions
of The Vagina Monologues.  While full of humor, Molière’s political
satires still leave tooth marks, thanks to talented student performers
who inhabit his hypocritical, unjust, and foolishly lovable
characters so fully they feel familiar to us, despite the period costumes.

The cliché says that, “Life is not a dress rehearsal.” But how
much better off we’d be if we acted as if it were. Art strengthens
our atrophied empathy muscles.  It says, play like you’re born into
a Bangkok slum and sold into sexual slavery.  Play like you’re a
president.  Play like you’re a person who lets someone tape a
bomb to your chest, and really feel the power of your belief, the
strange weight of metal and wires, the pull of the duct tape on your
skin.

What is your life like?  And what powers of imagination might
revise your story?

The play is the thing.  And the conscience that needs catching
is always our own.

Lecture: James McBride

Last night L. and I went to see James McBride lecture and play a little jazz at Northeastern University. I taught McBride’s memoir, The Color of Water, to my sophomore class last year. It is an amazing story that tells of his heritage: his mother was a Polish Jew and his father was African American. It is a book that I highly recommend.

Last night McBride took the stage and began to speak. His manner was so relaxed and witty and fun. He spoke about his childhood and young adulthood. He was careful to tailor his remarks for the college students in the crowd, many of whom were writers and musicians themselves. He spoke at length about his experience writing his memoir and how its success has impacted his life.

He is a gifted speaker. I can easily say that it was one of the best lectures I have attended by an author. I just wish my students, and other students could hear him speak.

A few interesting things I learned: He did write the chapters in his mother’s voice first and only when an editor suggested that he tell his own story did the memoir as it stands take shape. Also, his mother and her long lost sister did reunite after the book was published, although it was not the Hallmark moment you might see in a made for TV special.

McBride spoke passionately about being politically aware and active. He supported liberal arts education and independent book stores. He played a little jazz.

Afterwards, we walked a bit on Northeastern’s campus for the first time. I saw my first rat scurry across an open sidewalk. The cafeteria must have been near. Ugh. We grow rats with tails in Indiana.