None of this sounds like a good thing.
I hope the Barnes & Noble/Microsoft partnership works out.
Barnes & Noble a secret weapon in Microsoft’s war with Apple?
Tuesday Morning Staff Meeting – Writing For The Dead
Love & Sleep
Having nearly finished the second of John Crowley’s AEgypt novels, Love & Sleep, I was finally beginning to understand Crowley’s purpose in his Aegypt novels: he creates a sort of dreamy atmosphere, topped with some new age mysticism, whose purpose is to capture the small mysteries of life.
The long digressions into Elizabethan and Renaissance alchemy and magic serves mainly to inform the sense of mystery and confusion Rosie Mucho feels when her daughter picks up an ordinary ear infection. In short, it is not really fantasy. Nor is Crowley attempting to be the American Umberto Eco.
But then, when I reached the last few pages, he threw in this bit of fantasy, implications of a possible real mystic conspiracy (though admittedly, a low stakes one) and the possibility that all the discussions of magic and alchemy was not actually a means to understand one’s present life, but that actually there used to be (and maybe still is) such things.
I should step back and talk about one premise of the book. The main character, Pierce Moffett, is writing a book. The premise of that book is that things changed. That sometime in the sixteenth century, magic ceased to work. Not only that, the records of it truly working are gone. Erased. All those miracles happened. But not really. Because when the shift occurred, the world changed so that they never happened. But some memories remain of the world where they did happen (could happen again). In short, that our world, is not the first (which, by the way, is the premise of the whole Maya 2012 prophecy thing – not that the world will end, but that the world will change dramatically, so that, in a sense, the old world will have ended and a new one begun).
So, I’m curious what the next volume (Dæmonomania) will hold.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the godfather of brooding, Protestant-American guilt, died on this day in 1864.
Have I mentioned that Pearl always creeped me out?
Critique Of The Collins Way
I am not a fan of Billy Collins. I have not been reticent about that. So that’s why I want to highlight this blog post by Elisa at The French Exit which provides a lovely critique of Collin’s poetic ideology.
I’ll let Elisa speak for herself.
I went to a reading and talk by Thomas Lux yesterday, and I was disappointed to hear him espousing Collinsian rhetoric (he actually name-checked Billy Collins) to the effect that poetry should be “accessible,” the poem should be “hospitable,” and even that difficult poetry is “rude.”
I don’t understand this mindset. It’s one thing to prefer a simple, straightforward, user-friendly, and personable poetics. It’s quite another to turn your tastes into an ideology, to frame accessibility as some kind of moral imperative. How exactly are we supposed to manage the arts so that everything is equally “accessible”? And isn’t “accessibility” almost entirely subjective, depending on one’s education, class, race, sex, culture, and so on, not intelligence per se? Accessibility, as far as I’m concerned, is racist (and sexist), because it’s defined so often by white men who assume that what is accessible to them is accessible to everyone. (Sorry to be picking on white men this week; fight racism with racism I guess.)
If you like “accessible” poetry (whatever that means to you), then write and read accessible poetry. But leave me my Stevens (not accessible at all), my Anne Carson, my Lyn Hejinian, my Kirsten Kaschock. You can have your Billy Collins.
Weekend Reading – The Reason For Poetry Is Hope
I Am Telling The Truth
“I am an artist…and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.”
-Ursula LeGuin
Midweek Staff Meeting – The High Cost Of Amazon
Gary Snyder
The final reading of the Folger Shakespeare Library‘s 2011-2012 poetry series was Gary Snyder, the great, west coast poet of deep ecology. It took place last night.
He was an engaging reader and speaker when by himself on stage. Not powerfully so, but still significantly so. He has obviously led an interesting life (studying Zen Buddhism in Japan, serving on tramp steamers, reaching the summit of Mount Saint Helen the day that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and his relationship with various poets of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat writers).
In the past, I have described him as a Beat, though he was never part of the original group in New York, but only met them when they came out to San Francisco. Now, I would be more likely to relate his poetry with the man who introduced him to the Beats, Kenneth Rexroth, than with the Beats themselves. Like Rexroth, his poetry is more influenced by the restrained aspects of spiritualism, rather than the ecstatic ones.
As befits a poet associated with the deep ecology movement, his writing is very much grounded in the physical and the concrete. The realities of the natural world and the realities of living in the world.
One thing he said struck me. While living in Japan and studying meditation and Buddhism, he often used to visit an English language bookstore and buy books on ecology to read. Then, he pointed out, ecology was about the relationship of things to the natural world – which mainly meant how things ate each other. Only later, did it acquire the quasi-political/spiritual/activist meanings now associated with it. When one speaks of ecology now, one is generally making a statement about politics and society. Then, it was simply a branch of science.
During the Q&A, Snyder was very short with a young man who stood up and asked him to speak about Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums. The main character is generally considered to be based on Snyder and some of the events in the book based on some trips taken together by Snyder and Kerouac.
Snyder dismissed the whole line of thought, basically saying that Kerouac wrote fiction and Dharma Bums is novel. Not even one of Kerouac’s best novels (and Snyder’s tone implied he thought it not a very good novel). Then he said that someone always asks him about this and he’s tired of answering so that’s all he’s going to say. And that was how the Q&A ended.
The novel was clearly a touchstone for the young man – a way to keep a connection to the wilderness and the west coast while living her in DC – and I felt bad for him and for what was almost a public shaming by Snyder.
And let me say that I’m just glad that young men still read Kerouac. Whatever I may think of him as a writer, I think it will be sad day when young people stop indulging in old rebellions and stop reading Salinger, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others when they are in their teens and twenties.
Whoever that young man was, kudos to him for finding meaning and solace in the turning to books.
the coffee philosopher 