Hail Technology!

FRIDAY, MARCH 2, 2012

 I imagine Jane Austen sitting at her tiny table, writing on small sheets of paper with a quill pen, glancing occasionally at the front lawn through the window she faced, any poetic inclinations splinter like thin glass--in the face of technological reality. For the thousandth time I ask, "How did she do it?" Of course, the question applies to the myriad authors whose work has survived centuries and millennia, but somehow Jane is close enough to have become the emblem of all that labor. Besides, I visited her house once and saw that table in that room in that genteel brick house.  

For me it hasn't been merely the facility of editing and speed of comunication, the Net has provided relationships I could never otherwise have found. Support (emotional and intellectual) has dropped repeatedly into my proverbial lap as a result of some electronic connection. Not only have I found people I honestly consider to be friends, they have been uniformly generous with advice and information and encouragement.

Finding myself becoming a part of a community I never envisioned, it's amazing how the presence of those who preceded me helps to dispel the "outsider" discomfort. A little nudge from one of these new friends makes it possible to try to do this self-promotion. So herewith a note to anyone interested:

The Lowestoft Chronicle published a second poem. The first from 2011 is included in their print anthology and a list of "the best of the net."

If it weren't for that Net, I'd be sitting as lonely as Jane, though in a different sort of place and with nothing in print OR on line!

No Excuse

The truth is, I'm getting tired of humbling moments. I have a silly notion that by the time you're in your eighth decade, you ought to be above that sort of thing, i.e.: you're past being humbleable. (I know, it's not really a word, but I think you can tell what I mean.)

I live in a place full of people within ten years on either side of my own age, and half of them, I've become convinced, have either forgotten how to read or simply don't bother any more. I just submitted to a website entitled "My Name Is Not Bob." Its author had already sent me a message signed "Robert."

I claim a small excuse:  I'd just spent my third two-hour session with AT&T in an effort to regain my e-mail service, and I was cross-eyed. Still, I addressed this poor gentleman as "Bob!" What's really humbling about that is that I now have to swallow all those snide remarks I've been making about people who go into the library, ignore the 81/2" x 11" card posted to provide instructions on how to sign out a book. I have to restrain my scorn when reminding someone that the item is on the calendar. I have to admit that I suffer "senior moments" too darned often.

If I write down something I need to remember, sometimes I'll spend ten minutes trying to find the piece of paper the note is on--since I can't remember what I wrote, only that I wrote something. So now, I have to ask myself if I've always been that way. One thing I know for sure:  too often I'm in some kind of hurry. I like to think that 40 years ago I'd have written, "Dear Robert."

Sigh.

Unspoken

I was fortunate to receive a comment for the "blurb" on my short story collection called Peripheral Vision that gave me not only an ego boost, but reinforced a conviction of mine that I've seldom thought to articulate myself. "...pleasure...comes as much from what is withheld as from what is given..."

A few days ago, someone quoted to me:

Hard words will break no bones/ but more than bones are broken/ by the inescapable stones/ of fond words left unspoken.

Since I'm spending more time on writing poetry than on prose of late, both these quotations take on more freight of significance than they might otherwise. When you're asked to speak to a book club, or read for an arts group or at a library, you have to try to find the right beginning to get people curious enough to listen to what you have to say. If, heaven help you, you're hoping to get a sale or two out of the enterprise, it occurs to me that it's more important to hold back than to show all. But that's only part of the value of what's left out.

The challenge is not to withhold the wrong thing.

Catharsis

I'm reading a wonderful novel set during WW II, much of it in London during the blitz. Daily I go to The Hunger Site and click on the charities shown there, one of which is for animal welfare. The connection between these statements is the question that has bothered me most of my life as to how it is that most of us are more immediately and physically touched by pity and sadness at the pain and/or death of an animal than of human beings.

Is it a matter of becoming calloused of necessity, as George Elliot suggested when she said that if we could notice everything around us we could hear the squirrel's heartbeat and the grass growing, and we should die of the noise? We can't emotionally afford to react fully to everything.

Is it because so much of animal suffering is inflicted on total innocence? So many of the awful things that happen to people are caused by people--like wars and genocide. But what about the random horrors of natural disasters? You can sit in a movie theater and weep in the darkness while the faithful dog starves on his master's grave, and watch TV news with your jaw clenched, but in control, while images of starving children fill the screen.

Way back in Aristotle's day, thinking people learned about catharsis. Is it somehow easier to experience it at one remove?

Another puzzlement.

Oh, the book is The Postmistress by Sarah Blake.

Price Tags

We all realize that "literary" markets struggle to keep publishing, that they look often to contests to help them raise their profiles. To have the funds to offer prizes, they charge entry fees. I guess that's fair enough.

My problem is that my bank account is dwindling far too rapidly because without an agent, I find fewer outlets for anything I may produce that don't require a "reading fee." There's something wrong with a system meant to support writing that makes the writer pay for the privilege of being rejected.

"Tag! I'm it--again!"

To Be Loved or to Love?

A recent article about a group of well-known novelists discussing their work poses the question: why bother to write novels at all?

Why bother to write fiction at all? It's not a new question, and it has been supplied with various answers for several hundred years, but none seems definitive, and all seem to be influenced by the times and customs when they were put forward.  Presumably only writers of fiction are interested in the answers--and poets and playwrights.

Without repeating the article's contents, the most noteworthy takeaway for me was the notion that art and love are intertwined inextricably. An artist creates in part (in part only) with the objective to be loved. The greatest artists create with the objective of teaching the readers/observers/hearers to love.

I haven't stopped thinking about that since I read it.

New Tricks?

There was a time when I looked forward to writing something either as a parody or "in the style of." An assignment for 18th C. Literature in college involved writing an essay as Jonathan Swift might have done. I had a ball. At this late stage, an acquaintance whose taste and ideas I admire has been pressing me to write a novel using a theme he suggests with a plot line he supplies. It's not anything like what I've done before, and I'm finding myself truly baffled as I try to figure out how to go about it.

The idea is a good and probably salable one. It's a mystery (he defines only the conflict). I can't seem to manufacture the train of events leading to the crime and its aftermath. Furthermore, he fails to understand how hard it is to make a story unless you (the writer) know the characters who will act it out. I can't get my head around the four main ones. I have thus far three versions of a beginning, complete with different names in each attempt.

Having just taken a look at a passage from one of my novels, I realized something that doubtless should have been obvious from the start:  if my style or voice or whatever you want to call it is too set, how can I hope to create people and motives from someone else's original notion?

Apart from the challenge of producing something analogous to a work for hire, I now face a question that should have occurred to me long ago:  should I try to learn flexibility again, or should I stay stubborn and loyal to what I seem to have become?

And anyone who wants to point out the old saw about an old dog and new tricks, you may keep your remarks to yourself!   ;-). It's a fallacy. You can teach even an oldster if she's willing to learn.