So, the festival is completed. Ernie Dorling had some nice grit and a strong messages about truth in non-fiction. Colin McEnroe gave a splendid talk on memoir with engaging and sincere discussion, and Professors Hamilton, Brown, and Abbot gave each excellent presentations on query letters, newspaper writing, and poetry. I left Abbot with considerations of my own work in the form and am considering returning to certain works, which have to be built as poetry–the images don’t work in the language of fiction. In that particular compressed language some things go, other things don’t. But I also left the poetry discussion thinking about poetic language as a “found” language, that the language of poetry works at this level. To impress the image we must find a language with which to express it. Thus is a poem a “return” or a “departure” or a “following”?

For a poem like The Wasteland, we must read the poem “in” its “language” and find it, as might archaeologists. Hmm.

The writer’s festival put together by Neha and the gang (Susan and other Narratives helpfuls) is going quite smartly. If Jerz or anyone else from SH read this then I urge you to put Ms. Bawa to good work, whatever the smoking policy. She’s a great organizer, has lots of potential as a writer and scholar, and has the steel to get things done.

I’m proud of the people running around Tunxis these days. We have lots of great students heading off and staying around, hopefully for a good long time. They often come back to, those that go, and tell us what we do right, what we do wrong.

Kudos to the presenters, although I feel I ran a little flat. David Pesci was dead on with the process, especially the real work of writing being that of revision. Timmons hit stride with IF, doing an excellent job of taking us through that world of narrative and structure, the great world of maps and configurations of the digital. We also made good friends with Victoria Zackheim, author of The Bone Weaver. She gave a great talk on the development of her novel and was insightful and direct in response to questions.

Looking forward to the next round.

What is it about Mark Twain? That’s a rhetorical question. In my understanding, Clemens, the writer was always willing to include himself among the “rabble,” about whom we spoke a lot in British Literature, and the duped. Consider this passage from “Does the Race of Man Love a Lord?” first published in North American Review (1902):

When we understand rank, we always like to rub against it. When a man is conspicuous, we always want to see him. Also, if he will pay us an attention we will manage to remember it. Also, we will mention it now and then, casually; sometimes to a friend, or if a friend is not handy, we will make out with a stranger.

Well, then, what is rank, and what is conspicuousness? At once we think of kings and aristocracies, and of world-wide celebrities in soldierships, the arts, letters, etc., and we stop there. But that is a mistake. Rank holds its court and receives its homage on every round of the ladder, from the emperor down to the rat-catcher; and distinction, also, exists on every round of the ladder, and commands its due of deference and envy.

Clemens is always all inclusive in his observations of human action and foible, in this case the ironic oddness and pervasiveness of envy. Twain writes,

To worship rank and distinction is the dear and valued privilege of all the human race, and it is freely and joyfully exercised in democracies as well as in monarchies–and even, to some extent, among those creatures whom we impertinently call the Lower Animals. For even they have some poor little vanities and foibles, though in this matter they are paupers as compared to us.

The essay stems from a “truism” that Twain extends–“An Englishman does truly love a lord” becomes “so does everyone else.” It’s not about royalty. It’s about class. It’s about “clubs.”

Take the distinguished people along down. Each has his group of homage-payers. In the navy, there are many groups; they start with the Secretary and the Admiral, and go down to the quartermaster–and below; for there will be groups among the sailors, and each of these groups will have a star who is distinguished for his battles, or his strength, or his daring, or his profanity, and is admired and envied by his group. The same with the army; the same with the literary and journalistic craft; the publishing craft; the cod-fishery craft; Standard Oil; U. S. Steel; the class A hotel–and the rest of the alphabet in that line; the class A prize-fighter–and the rest of the alphabet in his line–clear down to the lowest and obscurest six-boy gang of little gamins, with its one boy that can thrash the rest, and to whom he is king of Samoa, bottom of the royal race, but looked up to with a most ardent admiration and envy.

There is something pathetic, and funny, and pretty, about this human race’s fondness for contact with power and distinction, and for the reflected glory it gets out of it. The king, class A, is happy in the state banquet and the military show which the emperor provides for him, and he goes home and gathers the queen and the princelings around him in the privacy of the spare room, and tells them all about it, and says:

“His Imperial Majesty put his hand upon my shoulder in the most friendly way–just as friendly and familiar, oh, you can’t imagine it!–and everybody SEEING him do it; charming, perfectly charming!”

Noteably, everyone suffers:

We do love a lord–and by that term I mean any person whose situation is higher than our own. The lord of the group, for instance:
a group of peers, a group of millionaires, a group of hoodlums, a group of sailors, a group of newsboys, a group of saloon politicians, a group of college girls. No royal person has ever been the object of a more delirious loyalty and slavish adoration than is paid by the vast Tammany herd to its squalid idol in Wantage. There is not a bifurcated animal in that menagerie that would not be proud to appear in a newspaper picture in his company. At the same time, there are some in that organization who would scoff at the people who have been daily pictured in company with Prince Henry, and would say vigorously that THEY would not consent to be photographed with him–a statement which would not be true in any instance. There are hundreds of people in America who would frankly say to you that they would not be proud to be photographed in a group with the Prince, if invited; and some of these unthinking people would believe it when they said it; yet in no instance would it be true. We have a large population, but we have not a large enough one, by several millions, to furnish that man. He has not yet been begotten, and in fact he is not begettable.

But here’s my favorite part, when Twain, of course, being so fond of politicians, get’s to a favored example of the crux of the matter:

We all love to get some of the drippings of conspicuousness, and we will put up with a single, humble drip, if we can’t get any more. We may pretend otherwise, in conversation; but we can’t pretend it to ourselves privately–and we don’t. We do confess in public that we are the noblest work of God, being moved to it by long habit, and teaching, and superstition; but deep down in the secret places of our souls we recognize that, if we ARE the noblest work, the less said about it the better.

We of the North poke fun at the South for its fondness of titles–a fondness for titles pure and simple, regardless of whether they are genuine or pinchbeck. We forget that whatever a Southerner likes the rest of the human race likes, and that there is no law of predilection lodged in one people that is absent from another people. There is no variety in the human race. We are all children, all children of the one Adam, and we love toys. We can soon acquire that Southern disease if some one will give it a start. It already has a start, in fact. I have been personally acquainted with over eighty-four thousand persons who, at one time or another in their lives, have served for a year or two on the staffs of our multitudinous governors, and through that fatality have been generals temporarily, and colonels temporarily, and judge-advocates temporarily; but I have known only nine among them who could be hired to let the title go when it ceased to be legitimate. I know thousands and thousands
of governors who ceased to be governors away back in the last century; but I am acquainted with only three who would answer your letter if you failed to call them “Governor” in it. I know acres and acres of men who have done time in a legislature in prehistoric days, but among them is not half an acre whose resentment you would not raise if you addressed them as “Mr.” instead of “Hon.” The first thing a legislature does is to convene in an impressive legislative attitude, and get itself photographed. Each member frames his copy and takes it to the woods and hangs it up in the most aggressively conspicuous place in his house; and if you visit the house and fail to inquire what that accumulation is, the conversation will be brought around to it by that aforetime legislator, and he will show you a figure in it which in the course of years he has almost obliterated with the smut of his finger-marks, and say with a solemn joy, “It’s me!”

I wonder if it’s still the same today?

My wife and I finally got around to some of the comment features on Babylon 5 DVDs, a few interesting discussions of the making and other background. J. Michael Straczynski, the force behind Babylon 5, had a few criteria on character issues that are simple and foundational:

1. What does the character want?
2. How much do they want it?
3. How far will they go to get it?

The answers to these questions, the author intimates, leads to story, stories that may or may not write themselves. B5 has a great character-driven pull that drew from the talent that helped the original Star Trek find its character metal. Anyway, practicing the above 3 criteria calls for lots of thinking about Jim or Deborah.

D wants into Harvard. J wants to win at Chess. Already we have a means of getting into D and J’s worlds, simply by asking question #1. But the question could also come from this: D doesn’t want UCONN. J can’t take loosing. The three questions above shouldn’t be taken as the “prime” questions. But they do give direction and focus and they’re too uncomplicated to forget.

Another issue has to do with the nature of resolution: does the character get what they want?

I think this is excellent simplicity, excellent advice.

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and as his earlier novel, Suttree, are loaded with examples of readovers, as are Shakespeare’s plays. Here’s a readover example from Blood Meridian:

He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

This is interesting description, interesting sound (“phosphorescent seacrabs”). The second sentence, a fragment, is an elaboration of the first: a sort of sensual snap shot of what the protagonist of the novel, the kid, may or may not be seeing as he turns toward the lights of the town. The stuff out of the corner of the eye. Here the landscape is alive, but in the novel that “phenomenon”–the landscape being alive–takes on meaning in elaboration and action. We don’t know why the kid looks back, but he does.

The voice of the novel goes from near distance to far distance and the descriptive voice follows that distance into description that gives elements of the natural world fragility. The kid “watches,” the horse “watches.” They look “out there . . . where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.” This closer is related to the kid looking at the town, a human contruction, but the town faces another world so big and amazingly mysterious it calls for exactly what McCarthy gives it, a langauge that both grasps it but doesn’t grasp it, a hungry language, mysterious and scary: “where . . . whales ferry their vast souls through the vast and seamless sea.” It’s mysterious, frightening. But the image of the whale has an odd bouyancy, a lightness–it’s a “vast soul,” the sea “black and seamless.”

This language is delicate, light, perspicaciously placid, but in the context of the novel where so many horrible things happen, it haunts.

In this post Spinning considers how one should go about giving critique on a story. How the does the reader approach the work? What should the reader be looking for? Who should review?

Wed look for someone who is open, honest, and while knowledge of the art is not essential, some form of literary savvy in steering the writer towards the necessary elements of story is just as great a help as providing response as to the feelings a piece may give to the reader.

I think the answer has more to do with attitude as well as knowledge of the subject. People who love stories and talking about stories make good readers. In a workshop environment, knowing the elements and bringing an attitude of trust to the story under consideration makes for a great discussion, especially when the reader has invested in the life of the story. Best to get the writer and the reader charged, excited, ready to leave and get to the typewriter.

Lots of discussion is going on at Narratives and Wanderlust about dialogue. There are issues with this but I wonder how many people have sat in a public space and listened to what people say? No need to bring up the shade of Truman Capote in this regard who supposedly got in trouble for doing this to his own advantage. But good dialogue has something to with listening for sound and tension in general conduct.

Obviously, a listener can’t study their own talk. What do people say is mere factual catalogue. Why people say is the deeper issue.

“Could you please stop that tapping?”

“Could you please stop tapping your foot?”

“That tapping is really bugging me.”

“You tap your foot a lot.”

“You’re going to ruin your shoes that way.”

Five instances of the same situation but totally different contexts and intents.

I like the last one.

“You’re going to ruin your shoes that way.”

“You mean the way you ruined me?”

“It’s obvious that you have no respect for your elders.”

“My god, I have fifteen years on you.”

“I wish this damn rain would quit.”

And so forth.

In writing a poem about heights, it struck me that we have no word for the love of them, as we do for their fear, acrophobia.

In other words, is the draw of height and its description itself a poem if there is no word for it?

What does this mean?

My good friend Rina asks about the meaning of Prufrock:

“I get the impression it is about growing old? The reflections of an old man?”

I grow old . . .I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

This is a partial answer, the rest is somewhere in the poem. It has to do with mermaids and love.

But here’s another issue, one that extends the last two posts: the poem is the meaning. How does one paraphrase the guitar work of Lara y Reyes? Neither Lorca, Eliot, or Williams declair meaning. They merely write the image, the narrative, or the series of stanzas and the audience is left to wonder and respond. But what is a response? How does one respond to Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach in Death in Venice or this from Jimmy Santiago Baca, from Work We Hate and Dreams We Love:
. . .
Life is filled with work
Meiyo hates,
and while he saws, 2X4’s,
trims lengths of 2X10’s on table saw,
inside his veins another world
in full color etches
a blue sky on his bones,
a man following a bison herd,
and suddenly his hammer becomes a spear
he tosses to the ground
uttering a sound we do not understand.

Then there’s all I need to know from Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, lines 73-74:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

That’s it. Now there’s a red wheelbarrow.