#and still lolita is my most reread book ever

[winged-cries]

i read lolita every single year. is this normal

[jessequinones]

Writing Lesson: Remembering the Past

I moved from the United States of America to Australia and since then I’ve tried to rewatch some cartoons from my childhood, mainly ones from either Cartoon Network or Boomerang and I can't find them. They're not on any streaming services and I can’t buy physical copies because they’re extremely expensive. Sure Tubi might have some old cartoons such as Popeye or the original Superman, but I didn’t grow up with them. I wanted to rewatch cartoons from the 60s-early 2000s, shows such as The Jetsons, Flintstones, Yogi Bear, the original Animaniacs, Dexters Laboratory, you get the picture.

So why am I bringing all of this up when it comes to writing? Well it got me thinking that yes, while these shows were racist, and aged like milk being left out in the sun, I would argue that it’s still important to rewatch them. Not just for nostalgia shake but as a writer it’s a good idea to remember the past so we don’t repeat it.

I know, “if you don’t remember the past you’ll be doomed to repeat it” but the thing about that saying is, it’s not actually wrong, but I think it get’s overused so no one understands why we say it.

Stories change and evolve over time. The stories we read and were told as kids, might not be the same ones we tell our children because it doesn’t work for them and that’s ok. Stories are supposed to evolve over the years because they show that we as humans are evolving as well. However, if we start to no longer show the past what lessons can we learn to improve?

You see history is a funny thing, if we know our history and the lessons it brings we can do stuff to avoid making the same mistakes as the previous generations. However, if the previous generation's mistakes are lost in time, how can we avoid them if we don’t know what those mistakes are to begin with?

That’s what the saying means. Remember the mistakes our parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so on so we don’t make those same mistakes. This is one of the reasons why every couple of generations society seems to go backwards since the mistakes of the past are being forgotten or ignored and we do them again.

Now I’m not one of those people who think we should stay in the past, life was better back in the old days because let’s be honest, it wasn’t. We were just kids and didn’t understand how the world works. I think we should be able to tell new stories while also not wiping the old ones from existence just because the old ones no longer make money. Of course, they aren’t going to make money the people who like old things are old and there'll always be fewer old people compared to younger ones.

All I'm saying is that if we could keep the old stuff available for as long as possible, we should try and do so. Is the past embarrassing and racist? Yes, but so are we. As a society, many stories are being told that I already know aren’t going to age well in the next couple of decades but we shouldn’t forget about them. Keep learning, keep improving, keep being better.

If you want to reread some old books as a bit of a history project I got some for you. "The Giving Tree", "Gone with the Wind", "Lolita" (my god is that a bad story, why was that ever popular?) "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "Stranger in a Strange Land". I could go on but those are some classic stories that it would be best not to forget about them. It’s important to understand why they were popular and what newer lessons we can get from them.

I also understand history for most people is kind of a boring subject, and while I don’t have advice on how to make learning fun. Perhaps if you’re a writer, and don’t want to read some old books in the genre you writing in, there might be a Youtube video you could put on or something? I’m not asking anyone to do a ten-page history report, just to try and remember some of the mistakes that were being taught in the old days so we could create new and more progressive ones instead of just repeating the same mistakes and never moving forward.

[sassmar]

ten books to know me

ohhhh tysm for the tag molly @mblematic my beloved !! <3<3 this looks so fun except that now. you will all know what created my twisted brain ah well. alas!

the outsiders by s.e. hinton haha had to start with this one! read the outsiders for the first time at like 11/12 yrs old and it was truly truly formative! PONYBOY! SODAPOP! johnny and dally!! also it's quite gay.

a separate peace by john knowles continuing with the themes of male friendship, homoerotic subtext, and books i read in middle school that fundamentally altered my brain chemistry and turned me into the freak i am today or whatever.

lord of the flies by william golding look i know the ~*~mOrAL*~*`! is arguably misanthropic/malthusian/whatever but also. forget about that. it is very gay thats all that matters. and it is ANOTHER book that i first read in middle school and then immediately reread like at least three more times bc it made me absolutely feral. also . . . . . . sucks to your assmar!!

stoner by john williams :) this one has nothing to do with weed (it is about sad academics) and also i did not read it until my twenties but. i did write like forty-five pages about why it is secretly gay! (also it is starkly beautiful and very heart-rending, i do love a book that digs around in my organs and squeezes mercilessly like a toddler playing with slime.)

the waves by virginia woolf finally a book that isnt gay JUST KIDDING it is in fact also a lil gay but mostly it's just fucking beautiful. possibly the most beautiful novel i've ever read idk, hard to say and its not a quick read but like. read it for the first time in high school and have returned to it a number of times since then and. her prose my GOD. its a novel but also a poem, just a very long love poem to .... everything ....

fun home by alison bechdel technically it's a gRapHiC nOvEL and i only read it for the first time about a year ago but. have reread it since and it continues to haunt me istg this memoir is STUNNING the most gorgeous graphic novel & most gorgeous memoir i have ever ever encountered. an actually brilliant piece of literature in every right. makes me sob. (also, yes, it is very gay.)

the heart is a lonely hunter by carson mccullers well i HAD to include carson mccullers on the list dear god!! also so formative...read this book for the first time in high school, have returned to it a number of times since. it is. truly beautiful !!!!!! what else can i say <3.

who's afraid of virginia woolf by edward albee this is in fact a PLAY (!!) also an amazing movie but. i have read the play many many times it is SO funny, SO smart, SO painful. who needs whips when you and yr partner are. mentally torturing each other for sport. another one i read for the first time as a teen so again.... rather formative.

lolita by vladimir nabokov all right well honestly i read this for the first time in high school and enjoyed it, especially part one, thought it was smart n funny n that part two was kinda all over the place but still yknow overall felt positively about it. BUT. gave it a reread last year and jesus CHRIST i was just like !! i missed SO much !! it is not only so goddamn beautiful but SO much more complex and brilliant than i ever picked up on as a teenager my god. the prose is like the most intricate beautiful renaissance painting and the plot is like the most infuriatingly complicated game of CHESS but. it's ?? the product of a genuinely brilliant mind ?? idek but i will probably read this book at least five more times before i die its just. wow.

the raven cycle by maggie stiefvater HAHA copied you molly !!!!!! :) :) devil emoji etc. thought about choosing a book of poetry or just something else Literary but like, i recognize this list is already pretty full of Boring Classic Literature and such so i guess i can loosen my corset or whatever and say. these goddamn ya books. SPECIFICALLY the dream thieves (you are so right!) but also just the series generally jfc. i thought i hated ya but these books have changed me and everything i thought i knew about myself ....... maggie writes such poetic sentences...... "his exposed shoulder was raw and beautiful as a corpse" JESUS FUCKING !! only just read these like six months ago or something but they have utterly rewired my brain chemistry and maybe shifted the entire trajectory of my life so. i cannot. i cannot even. <3

oh shit i forgot to tag ppl um @billsfangearring @forlorngarden @shipsnsails @everythingbutcoldfire @colgatebluemintygel @perverse-idyll no pressure whatsoever xx

[baladric]

What first got you into writing? How did you develop your style? And have you got any tips for other budding writers out there? Also who are your favourite authors and poets?

this got LONG but i'm going to tell myself you were ASKING FOR THAT and take a breath a;ldfkjwo;dfjsf

i can't remember if my inuyasha self-insert fic days predated my gaiaonline roleplaying days, but it was one of the two! definitely entirely a form of escape from a very painful and lonely life, but i think it was actually several years after i started definitionally Writing™ before i got into it, you know? i don't remember what kickstarted it, but somewhere along the way, i realized that i could really do whatever i wanted to, and i discovered figurative language and non-linear storytelling really went hogwild on some super niche death note fics ;alkfjwd and from there i started writing prose-poetry and really just. splashing around in there. i've been a musician my whole life, and it was like i'd realized that i could put music into the written word, like i wrote entirely for the way things tripped off my internal ear—like this one line from a poem i wrote when i was 14 still sticks with me, Leaves stain, leaves stains (rough obviously, but it was my first foray into writing about visual imagery that stuck in my sad little head)

my style started as its own nascent messy little thing, and like. man, people on here don't talk about Lolita because. you know. it's literally the apotheosis of the stuff that gets people wound-up in fandom spaces? literally a novel about SA and pedophilia and grooming—but the thing is, there's a reason it's considered a central part of the western literary canon, and that book revolutionized me as a writer. nabokov's entire thing really is just. ear-worms as text, like i cannot even express how often i still think "I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup", or how many times i'll echolalia my way through this one line from the intro bit of the book: "Lo-Le-Ta: The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth." take or leave the content of the book, nabokov does it like none other—or he did until ocean vuong published On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, which is just. idk if you haven't read it, please please please, do yourself a favor and make space for it. it's the most effecting book i've ever read, as well as the most gorgeous and the most lovingly, grievingly composed.

You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hugry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, "Look."

if i can ever write a single sentence that pins the wide universe and the complex sorrow and joy of the human experience in place the way ocean vuong does, i will die happy. honestly.

favorite authors/poets is in vein with that last bit, but the short list anyway:

ocean vuong, esp On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (novel) and Time is a Mother (poetry)

maggie stiefvater, specifically The Raven Cycle—i could (and have) gone on for hours about the way she puts her readers into a tactile, vivid world, and her singular skill for spinning characters so contradictory and multifaceted that, to my mind, they're whole entire people, instead of the archetypes or loving stereotypes of most other fiction

richard siken, for Crush, which. i mean, i'm a gay man obsessed with words, this one really goes without saying lmao, if you read nothing else from it, read Snow and Dirty Rain. it is my gospel and my lifeblood, i have it memorized and still i reread it every week.

katherine addison taught me so much about storytelling, unreliable narrators, and the complexities of healing/trauma recovery while contending with rigid society (tragically pertinent to our present lives)—her Chronicles of Osreth (comprised of The Goblin Emperor, Witness for the Dead and The Grief of Stones)

maggie nelson, both for Bluets and The Argonauts

becky chambers—Psalm for the Wild-Built altered me as a person, it is gorgeous and soaring and humble and such a necessary book

donna tartt, obviously

anne carson, also obviously

freya marske—will read anything she ever writes, her language is lush, her worldbuilding is unique and spectacular, and her smut is HOT

alexandra rowland, for the same reasons as freya marske, but also their characters are so stunningly sympathetic, as well as really loving examples of neurodivergence in fiction (evemer hoşkadem, my deeply autistic beloved)

robin hobb really writes a toxic, complicated relationship saga like none other, i am stunningly enraged by Realm of the Edlerlings and also am physically incapable of not thinking about it constantly

and then there's the authors who taught me about magic: Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom Series), Holly Black (Modern Faerie Tales), Tamora Pierce (Protector of the Small), and Francesca Lia Block (Weetzie Bat)

writer tips!!!!!! this is hokey, but honestly my main advice is READ and also HAVE FUN. storytelling is the oldest human act, and language is the show where everything's made-up and the points don't matter. language is a sandbox, and it's there for you to literally just fuck around in. it can be whatever you want—it can be your raison d'être as a writer, but also it can be incidental. it can be a means to an end, economical, and some of the best stories are taken with that approach. but also you can paint with language, if you want to. you can compose music with it. you can do whatever suits your fancy.

my second tip is WORD COUNT DOESN'T MATTER. stop counting. stop stop stop holding yourself to the weird, quantity-obsessed writer culture. 2,000 words a day? nobody has time for that except full-time writers or those really rare writers who blink and 5k words fall onto the page. personally, if i'm sitting down to write and i'm really determined to actually get something onto the page, whether or not it's necessarily good, i'll force out 200 words. 200! i can't remember where i got this tip, but the point of that number is that 200 words is attainable even on the most blocked day, and by the time you hit your 200th word, you're gonna be in the middle of a sentence or a thought that you'll have to finish, and you end up with 300. or you hit 200 and you've broken through the fog and warmed up to it, and you leave with 700 or 1,500 (or a couple wild times for me, 5k).

my third tip: if you're a writer, EVERYTHING IS WRITING. this goes for art, music, literally any creative pursuit. walking out your door in the morning is writing, because you're learning things about the world, you're processing stimuli, your wheels are never not spinning. every video game you play, every show you watch, every fic you read is inherently a generative act, because that story is entering your store of knowledge to be processed and synthesized and lend you inspiration for the kinds of stories you want to tell, or the characters you want to make, or even the kinds of things you want to avoid as a creator. i can't tell you how much i've learned from games (Outer Wilds, i'm lookin at you!!) or tv (Station Eleven....) or music (Joanna Newsom really should be on my list of authors) or fanfiction (if you're a goblin emperor beastie and you haven't read celebros's Blackbird series, RUN, don't walk. i learned literally everything about creating character conflict within a framework of love that really motivates characters to work at it and not just get angry and walk away, and i remain uhhHHH fuckin Gobsmacked and reeling that she wants to write with ME a;lkdjfalw;dfs also literally one of my most formative collaborative and creative experiences came from reading kingdom hearts fanfiction in 2010, so) so!!!! just live your life!!! think about what makes you tick, what makes stories tick, think about the stars or birds or the history of glassblowing, whatever lights you up, and that energy will find its way into the things you make.

oh and also NEVER FEEL BAD FOR TAKING BREAKS. and i don't mean a 5-minute break, or a few days. i mean weeks. i mean months or years or what-have-you. sometimes it's just not there, and that's not a failing. your creations aren't content, they're little critters you make with love, and you can't love a thing you're banging your head against day and night. take breaks. allow yourself ebbs and flows in your creativity. everything hibernates, and i promise it'll wake up again and it'll be better than you left it.

end point: i Love You, and if you're writing or hoping to write or planning to write, i love your writing, too, nascent or tangible.

[starsdies]

i see you’re a literature major and wanted to ask what your favorite books are? i will use them as recs lowkey

what a nice question! thanks for asking i’d love to talk about my fave books. i will list some gen ones and then talk about my favorites!

i enjoy: wuthering heights, the bell jar, tender is the flesh, the vampire academy series is a guilty pleasure shhh, never let me go, karen miller’s sw books, persuasion, dorian gray, if we were villains, lolita, confessions of a mask, kim jiyoung born 1982, the thirst series (another guilty pleasure), norwegian wood, cursed bunny, milk teeth, klara and the sun.

my ultimate favorites however … have to be

“what’s left of me is yours” by stephanie scott. i believe it’s her debut novel and it’s so beautiful. the descriptions of japan and the immersive dialogue. fascinating family dynamics. it follows the store of a daughter looking back at her mother’s murder and basically we know on page one that her lover killed her. this lover was hired by the husband (in japanese: a wakaresaseya - literally “professional breaker upper”) to infiltrate their marriage, seduce the wife/mother and get caught. that way, the husband gets leverage in a divorce. but things go south when the wakaresaseya falls in LOVE with this woman and it results in her death. it tells you she’s dead and then works backwards, it’s fun, it’s stunning. please read it!!

“the song of achilles” by madeline miller. i think this one is obvious as an obikin and patrochilles truther AND classics student so i won’t say much more. just beautiful writing and really hits it out of the ballpark with the tragedy aspects.

“the forest of hands and teeth” series by carrie ryan. this entire series is just so lovely. each book has a new protag but it’s kind of a family line thing. in the first book we follow mary who lives in a very religious village in the middle of a forest, surrounded by a gate and zombies. everything about this is just beautiful and i cried so hard i snotted, so. a love triangle (with mary and two brothers) done well imo, religious guilt, obsession, zombies and tragedy!! i cant remember the second book very well bcos it’s my least fave but the third book is also KEKCLOCCL. it follows mary’s adoptive daughter in a new setting (i won’t spoil) and introduces a new set of characters, including my fave, “catcher,” who we discover is immune. it’s also super grimy, has twins and devastated cities, good romance and another like … love square … but it works out and is very good read. i love this series a lot and it’s been a fave since i was like 17. my fave topic ever is zombies and this was such a fun take on it. very introspective as well!!

and finally my fave book of all time “the secret history” by donna tartt. again… embarrassingly on point for my specific interests. but i love academic settings, dubious morals and pretentious idiots. i love mystery and guilt (or lack of), murder and undertones of queerness. this book is one i just finished rereading a few days ago actually. it’s annotated to Shit. as someone learning greek it also just pleases me. this aesthetic tartt flawlessly knows how to compose is just !!!! and i want to thank her for giving me the most god awful character known to man and still letting me enjoy him: bunny corcoran. who is fruity gay for henry no i do NOT accept criticism!!

[dillydedalus]

what i read in july

THAT’S MORE LIKE IT aka i’m finally out of the (relative) reading slump for good & my bro james joyce was there

men explain things to me, rebecca solnit the original mansplaining essay is great, and still scarily relevant; the others in this collection (most on feminist issues) are also quite good; some aspects are a bit dated & problematic so be aware of that. 2.5/5

erschlagt die armen!, shumona sinha (tr. from french, not available in english) short but very impactful novella about a young french woman, originally from india, who works as an interpreter in the asylum system and becomes more & more broken by this system of inhumane bureaucracy and suffering, until she snaps and hits a migrant over the head with a wine bottle. full of alienation and misery and beautiful but disturbing language - the title translates to ‘beat the poor to death’ so like. yeah. 3.5/5

fire & blood: a history of the targaryen family I, george r r martin look, it’s a 700-page-long fake history book about a fictional ruling dynasty in a fictional world, and i’m just That Obsessed & Desperate about asoiaf (and i don’t even care about the targs That Much). anyway, now i know more about the targs than any ruling family from, you know, real history, which is like, whatever. this is pretty enjoyable if you are That Obsessed, although i will say that some bits are much better than others (there are some dry dull years even in everyone’s fav overly dramatic dragon-riding incest-loving family) and the misogyny really is. a lot. too much. way too much. BUT i did really like Good Best Queen Alysanne (her husband king joe harris is alright too i guess) and i found my new westerosi otp, cregan stark/aly blackwood, who both have Big Dick Energy off the fucking charts. 3.5/5 (+0.5 points for cregan and aly’s combined BDE)

the old drift, namwali serpell hugely ambitious sprawling postcolonial nation-building novel about zambia, told thru three generations of three families, as well as a chorus of mosquitoes (consistently the best & smartest parts). there is A LOT going on, in terms of characters, of plot points, of references to history (the zambian space programme) and literature (finally my knowledge of heart of darkness paid off) and thematically, and honestly it was a bit too much, a bit too tangled & fragmented & drifty, and in the end i probably admire this book more than i liked it, but serpell’s writing is incredibly smart and funny and full of electrical sparks 3.5/5

a severed head, iris murdoch the original love dodecahedron (not that i counted). iris murdoch is fucking WILD and i love her for it. this is a strange darkly funny little farce about some rich well-educated londoners and their bizarre & rather convoluted love lives. not as grandiosely wild as the sea the sea, but fun nevertheless. 3/5

midnight in chernobyl, adam higginbotham jumping on the hype bandwagon caused by the hbo series (very weird to call the current fascination with chernobyl a hype bandwagon but you know). interesting & well-written & accessible (tho the science is still totally beyond me) & gets you to care about the people involved. lots of human failure, lots of human greatness, set against the background of the almost eldritch threat of radioactivity (look up the elephant foot & see if you don’t get chills), and acute radiation syndrome which is THE MOST TERRIFYING THING ON EARTH . 3.5/5

normal people, sally rooney honestly this is incredibly engrossing & absorbing once you get used to how rooney completely ignores ‘show don’t tell’ (it works!), i pretty much read the whole thing in one slow workday (boss makes a dollar, i make a dime so i read books on my phone on company time, also i genuinely had nothing to do). i also think rooney is really good at precisely capturing the ~millenial experience in a way that feels very true, especially the transition from school to uni. BUT i really disliked the ending, the book never engages with the political themes it introduces (esp. class and gender) as deeply as it could and the bdsm stuff never really gets TIED UP LOL. so overall idk: 3.5/5

störfall: nachrichten eines tages, christa wolf quiet reflective undramatic little book narrated by a woman waiting to hear about the outcome of her brother’s brain surgery on the day of the catastrophe at chernobyl - throughout the day she puts down her thoughts about her brother and the events unfolding at chernobyl, as well as the double uncertainty she is trying to cope with. really interesting to read such an immediate reaction to chernobyl (the book came out less than a year after chernobyl). 2.5/5

the man in the high castle, philip k dick it was fine? quick & entertaining alternative history where the axis powers win the war, some interesting bits of worldbuilding (like the draining of the mediterranean which was apparently a real idea in the early 20th century?) but overall it’s just felt a bit disjointed & unsatisfying to me. 2.5/5

fugitive pieces, anne michaels very poetic & thoughtful novel about the holocaust, grief, remembrance & the difference between history and memory, intergenerational trauma, love, geology and the weather. i’m not sure how much this comes together as a novel, but it is absolutely beautifully written (the author is a poet as well) and very affective. 3.5/5

american innovations, rivka galchen short collection of bizarre & often funny short stories about neurotic women whose furniture flies away, or who grow an extra breast, or who are maybe too occupied with financial details. very vague & very precise at once, which seems to be the thing with these sort of collections. 3/5

fool’s assassin (fitz & the fool #1), robin hobb YAASS i’m back in the realm of the elderlings!!! i thought this was one of the weaker installments in the series - i still enjoyed it a lot, and Feelings were had, but it just doesn’t quite fit together pacing-wise & some of the characterisation struck me as off (can i get some nuance for shun & lant please?) and tbh fitz is at peak Selfcentred Dumbass Levels & it drove me up the fucking wall. molly, nettle & bee deserve better. still, completely HYPE for the rest of the trilogy. 3.5/5

JAMES JOYCE JULY

note: i decided not to read dubliners bc it’s my least fav of joyce’s major works & too bleak & repetitive for my mood right now AND while i planned not to reread finnegans wake bc……. it’s finnegans wake…. i kinda do want to read it now (but i also. really don’t.) so idk yet.

a portrait of the artist as a young man, james joyce y’all. i read this book at least once a year between the ages of 15 and 19, it’s beyond formative, it is burnt into my brain, and reading it now several years later it is still everything, soaring and searing (that searing clarity of truth, thanks burgess) and poetic and dirty, and stephen is baby, and a pretentious self-important little prick and i love him & i am him (or was him as only a pretentious self-important teenage girl reading joyce can be him - because this truly is a book that should be read in your late teens when you feel everything as intensely and world-endingly and severely as my boy stephen does and every new experience feels like the world changing). anyway i love this book & i love stephen dedalus, bird-like, hawk-like, knife-blade, aloof, alienated, severe and stern, a poet-priest-prophet if he could ever get over himself, baby baby baby. 5/5

exiles, james joyce well. there’s a reason joyce is known as a novelist. this is….. a failed experiment, maybe. a fairly boring play about an adulterous love-square and uh… love beyond morality and possession maybe??? about how much it would suck for joyce to return to ireland??? and tbh it’s not terribly interesting. 2/5

travesties, tom stoppard a wild funny irreverent & smart antic comedy inspired by the fact that during ww1, james joyce, lenin, and dadaist tristan tzara were all in neutral zurich, more or less simultaneously; they probably never met, but in this play they do, as dadaist poetry, socialist art critique, and a james joyce high on his own genius & in desperate need of some cash while writing ulysses, AND the importance of being earnest (joyce is putting on a production of it) all collide in the memories of henry carr, who played algernon & later sued joyce over money (tru facts). not my fav stoppard (that’s arcadia) but it’s funny & fizzy & smart & combines many many things that i love. 4/5 

ulysses, james joyce look i’m not really going to tell y’all anything new about ulysses, but it really has everything, it’s warm & human(e) & cerebral & difficult & funny & sad & healing & i always get a lot out of it even tho there’s bits (a lot of them) i’ll never wrap my head around. ultimate affirmation of humanity or whatever. also stephen dedalus is baby. 5/5

dedalus, chris mccabe the fact that this book (sequel to ulysses about what stephen dedalus might have done the next day) exists and was published ON MY BIRTHDAY is proof that the universe loves me. 

anyway this is very very good, very very clever, extremely good at stephen (less good at bloom but his parts are still good), engages w/ ulysses, portrait & hamlet (& others) very cleverly & does some cool meta and experimental shit. y’all it has stephen talking to a contemporary therapist about how he’s stuck in joyce’s text which is all about joyce & very little about whoever stephen is when he’s not joyce’s alter ego/affectionate but slightly amused look at younger self and ithaca is an interview w/ the author about how his relationship to his dad influenced his response to ulysses and I’M INTO IT. the oxen of the sun chapter replaces the whole ‘gestation of english prose’ w/ just slightly rewriting the first pages of about 10 novels published between ulysses and now & it does lolita w/ “bloom, thorn of stephen’s sleep, light in his eyes. his sire, his son’ and i lit. screamed. anyway i don’t want to give this 5 stars (yet) bc i think some of the experimental stuff ended up a bit gimmicky & didn’t add that much to the text but fuck. that’s my boy & i want to reread it right now. 4.5/5 ALSO it’s a crime no literary weirdo woman has written ‘a portrait of the artist’s sister’ about delia ‘dilly’ dedalus, shadow of stephen’s mind, quick far & daring, teaching herself french from a 3rd hand primer while her father drinks the nonexistent family fortune away and her older brother is getting drunk on a beach & starting fights w/ soldiers bc he’s a smartarse

[passionpluto]

Premiere Nebula Fun Facts!

I was planning on writing a character profile for Io tonight, but since I’m feeling a little under the weather, I’ll just give you a few Premiere Nebula fun facts about each character. So, here goes!

Valka: Probably my oldest character ever, to the point where she’s almost more of an imaginary friend than a disposable character. Underneath her serious and deeply traumatized mentor-like nature, she has quite the snarky side, and often exchanges quips with her adoptive sister, Io. She was an Ixi (goat-like species) when I first came up with her on Neopets, so sometimes I imagine AUs of her as a satyr or werewolf (since her backstory mirrors a werewolf myth). The nickname Io gives her, Valvi, originally made a ton more sense when she was on Neo, because she married a certain Neopets sports player character with “vi” in his last name, so it was like a J.Lo thing. Now it’s just a play off how many athletes have similar-sounding nicknames AKA I liked the name too much.

Omega: She was originally conceived as an emotionless girl type, which I later repurposed into Koto. The beginnings of her current personality were sparked by me rereading Harry Potter and wanting to create a nervous hero who later becomes strong, like Neville Longbottom. She kinda took the main character position from Valka after that. Outside of sports, she’s great with all sorts of art, especially painting and jewelry-making. Has light brown hair with rainbow tips, which a ton of people think are lame, but she finds them really cool.

Xue: Basically the magical girl mom friend taken to its logical conclusion AKA the sort who uses empathic powers to pester you into fessing up your issues. Annoying at times, but also a great leader who helps Valka out a lot. Loves vintage, lace, and all things cute, while still being the most educated of the group (she’d probably paint her therapy office in wall-to-wall pastels). High physical strength, fairly low magical strength.

Xing: Xue’s sister, who was captured by the Firebrands many years before the story’s beginning. Also likes vintage fashion, but is more into the ‘80s and ‘90s scene than her sister. Was a local singer in the Square before capture, who specialized in disco and rock music. My image of her is based off black disco queens like Donna Summer, and I just know she listened to her stuff a ton as a kid. (She also really likes Motown—she even modeled her hairstyle off Diana Ross.) Basically, someone who seems stuck in the past, but really wants to change the future. High magical strength, weak constitution, gets sick a ton.

Koto: Her race was pretty uncertain after I changed her from a Neopet to a person, but someone I really value and who really values my ideas is Filipina, so I made Koto of that descent to honor her. Clones have fascinated me since I was a child, and a science fiction book I read about them had a clone who could play the piano even though his counterpart couldn’t—so I decided to make Koto learn to play violin in secret. She seems like dumb muscle, but Star Corporations realized the importance of educating her, so she’s quite smart. I often have writing discussions with my boyfriend, and since she hasn’t come in the story much yet, he often calls her “Shego” (since both are mook types with green themes). Since Koto is usually a rule-following type who mostly rebels when her friends are in danger, I jokingly call these situations “Captain America moments.”

Stelle: My favorite character to write tends to switch between her and Valka. Her color scheme (green+silver+black) is probably my favorite. She often switches between a comedic mood and a more depressive mood, which is seriously making me consider giving her ADHD or bipolar. Due to her whole “dark past as a brainwashed assassin” thing, she has “Bucky Barnes moments” to match Koto. (I swear, I didn’t watch any of the Marvel movies until their characters were finalized! It’s just a coincidence, albeit one that might draw Stucky shippers to my story.) Has always been 100% gay in my imaginings of her (it took Koto a little longer).

Io: By far, the most fun character to write. The teen character who curses a ton and secretly has plenty of hidden depths. Will probably be an indie movie director when she grows up. She’s actually the Manufacturer’s daughter, which I love because hero/villain’s daughter relationships are typically romantic rather than sisterly (like her and Valka). Watches a ton of old movies, as well as movies from our era. Would probably love/relate to all the “troubled relationship with father” characters, and I can especially see her liking Gamora and Todoroki in a modern AU. (Despite my lack of father issues, I have similar tastes in that regard.)

Kaine: Originally just a villain to be killed, is now a Chaotic Neutral turned Chaotic Good character. A lot of this change was based on a Precure season in which a chara’s dark clone was killed, which made me realize I really didn’t want this to happen to Kaine. Was also originally a Yandere, but was changed to just a flirty character who falls in love easily (because I’m not huge on that trope anymore). One of the rare sniper-type Actresses I have planned. A 30-something adult who never got out of her goth phase, and whose magical girl form is pure Gothic Lolita. (Hers is one of my faves for this exact reason.)

Phea: The newest Nebula gal—I’ve only had her in my head for a year or so. Most of her concept was based on my love for model-themed magical girls and the (actually useful) celebrity activist trope. Since she has long ombre teal hair and is a plus-size model, the plus-size modeling community on Tumblr gave me a ton of inspiration for her looks. Only goes by her stage name—even I don’t know what her real name is yet! Her Actress name, Nymphea, happens to be both a flower (water lily) and a Pokémon (the Japanese name for Sylveon); the former was intended and the later was a happy accident. She was Valka’s old college roommate, and the two were quite close (Phea personally fantasizes about an “oh my god, they were roommates” scenario with Valka, but hasn’t confessed yet.) Loves photography and dogs—the bigger and fluffier the better! (The “Phea has a huge dog” headcanon is a joke born from the fact that many celebrities have tiny ones—Phea, on the other hand, would have a Saint Bernard and still give her a cutesy celebrity dog name like Rosetta.)

[sveareads]

Read in December

1. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962): I loved this so much, a very original novel and also the funniest book I've ever read. It went onto my list of all time favourites immediately.

2. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut (1961): Vonnegut is one of my favourite writers, but this one was not my favourite of his books. Still enjoyed it quite a bit.

3. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945): This was wonderful, so many interesting characters and beautiful writing. Highly recommending this one!

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955): The most challenging book I've read all year, but in the end it was so worth the effort. I'm already looking forward to rereading this one!

[songofanothersummer]

reading meme

(tagged by the ever-lovely @the-girl-that-no-one-ever-knows)

1) Do you have a certain place at home for reading?

Just my bed, mostly. 

2) Bookmark or random piece of paper?

I’m guilty of using receipts, clothing price tags, and the occasional movie ticket stub. I have about three actual bookmarks from when I was a kid and they are likely still holding the place of books I’ve yet to pick up again but fully intend on revisiting someday.

3) Can you just stop reading or do you have to stop after a chapter/a certain amount of pages?

I try to stop at a chapter or a break, but it doesn’t bother me too much if I don’t. If I have a choice, I’ll stop at a clear stopping point, but I often read on the bus so I don’t always get to make that call.

4) Do you eat or drink while reading?

Not usually.

5) Music or TV while reading?

Neither, though white noise if anything.

6) Reading at home or everywhere?

Everywhere. Waiting for the bus, on the bus, in the park during my work break, in waiting rooms, and long train rides for the most part. And then, yes, my bed.

7) Reading out loud or silently in your head?

Silently for the most part. If I’m rereading something I wrote and am about to edit or continue, I tend to read everything up to that point out loud. I don’t usually do that for others’ work but sometimes I’ll mouth poetry to myself while I read to get a feel for the rhythm and sound of it.

8) Do you read ahead or even skip pages?

Not usually at all but... I used to have this tradition with myself, at least with Harry Potter books, where upon each book’s release I would glance at the chapter names and illustrations before diving in. When reading Half-Blood Prince, I mistakenly saw a sentence with the phrase “Dumbledore’s funeral” on the opposite page when looking at a chapter title towards the end and vowed never to do that again. So yeah, I semi-spoiled Dumbledore’s death before the whole “Snape kills Dumbledore” joke was even a thing (I kept telling myself it could mean a number of things, even the phrase “It’s your funeral” is not literal, so... yeah -_-). I broke that promise when I read A Song of Ice and Fire though. I would often look ahead to see whose POV the upcoming chapters would be from, and while that in itself was not too spoilery (I would only look ahead one or two chapters at a time depending on who it was) but upon reading that Arya loses her sight in A Feast for Crows in her last chapter of the book, I skipped ahead to her chapters in A Dance with Dragons just to see what happened to her afterward. But other than that, no :)

9) Breaking the spine or keeping it like new?

I’d like to keep books as new and pristine as possible, despite my answer for the following.

10) Do you write in your books?

Rarely, unless I’m studying and dissecting the text. I’ve written all over my copy of Paradise Lost and a few other books I wrote papers on for school (namely paperbacks of Shakespeare plays, Lolita, and some of my Gothic Lit books). I actually intend on doing the same when I reread A Song of Ice and Fire sometime next year and the idea has inspired me to start a “currently reading” journal dedicated solely to whatever I’m reading at the time, whether it be book, audiobook, fanfiction, or tumblr poetry. 

tagging: @fortheloveofmango, @katlypso, @madworlddiary, @loved-the-stars-too-fondly

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Isha Upanishad by Mario Petrucci

In this review, Nasim Luczaj considers the metaphysical wonders and linguistic oscillations of Mario Petrucci’s new translation of the Isha Upanishad (Guillemot Press, 2019). 

> You know when you walk into a museum and either breeze through or get hit and pressed down to the tiles by the sheer age of everything? The latter, in my experience, is best facilitated by mummies, even when these are considerably younger than standalone stone or coral in the cabinet next door. Their shape recalls you; you recall death. You’re ever so transient but if you really try, an outline of your body might remain.

> For an ancient text, like a mummy, to be ‘preserved’, it must be adjusted to its onlookers while offering just the right level of peep into its age. The balance between affirmation of time gap and making contemporary is crucial to how we receive the work – to whether we breeze through, get hit, or something in between. What the thing to be preserved is (the frame? the possibility of movement? the weight?) and how much dragging into the current state of our language it requires will depend on the text as well as personal taste.

> There’s not much I can say about the original text of the Isha Upanishad. I have only just walked into this particular museum on a whim. I am walking around reading the plaques and exploring its reverb. I have no knowledge of Sanskrit or much in-depth acquaintance with Hinduist texts. What I do have are insights of an observer in a new beloved space and some sense for how a text might be performing the balance between overtly archaic and openly present. I will approach Mario Petrucci’s new translation of the Isha Upanishad chiefly in relation to how I receive this performance.

> The Isha Upanishad is one of the shortest out of over 200 Upanishads – ancient Vedic texts, some of which were written in poetic form, which lay out the central ideas of Hinduism. Mario Petrucci’s rendition, recently published by Guillemot Press and contained in a near-square, thick-papered book the height of a child’s hand, neither allows you to breeze past the fact of its age and sanctity, nor lets you worry about it too much. Whenever I read it, it’s like looking at a stone I know is old and savouring the opportunity to hold it in my hand, to choose how tightly I hold on. It shines with the grease we put on it by asking it back into our palms via translation and reading. The persistence of its stillness, its parallel timespan, carves its way into us. Just what we want. A stone carried out of a river, cool with current, balancing quaintness with a sense of refresh. Coming back from old renditions is like going back to reading a Sappho not translated by Anne Carson having already read If Not, Winter. You want to believe the original is this flippant. You want to trust the calm density of the translation, much like that of a body of water, and play its brim like a glass with your finger. It’s that kind of thinking, that kind of prompting, that kind of whoa you’d like to receive.

> Here, perhaps slightly too much quaintness is reinforced by regular capitalization, then counterbalanced, in places, by neologism. Some stanzas shout novelty, others hardly suggest our century. There is a charm and controlled purposefulness to this oscillation. Nevertheless, it forms a rift between passages. Creases emerge in their unity. Depending on the verse, you’re either ignoring the age of things as you walk through the museum, or you have your forehead placed against the glass dividing you from that time and also allowing you to glimpse it. You’re on one side of the valley or the other – the stream in between inconsequential, only a letter – but somehow the vegetation is noticeably different on either side, and the presence of alternatives, within smell and sight, distract.  

Here’s one side – verse 3:

Ignorance is a form of possession

whose owner dons perfect sunlessness.

They follow death in procession:

those hollowed by flesh who bodily

deny consciousness.

The neological quality of ‘sunlessness’ adds to its no-caps feel, although this term is present in all other translations I have encountered and follows the original closely. The rhythm of the second stanza, too, oddens the verse – the sentence structure seems necessary but nicely impossible. It also withdraws our attention from death. Emphasis naturally falls on ‘procession’, the colon, the ‘hollowed’ sonically enacting the following. Then the denial is like a twig being bent very nearly to breakage but not quite allowing for it.

> That same death, in verse 14, surfaces capitalized:

The Eternal and its Effects –

those who place these two together,

by the Destructible need no rebirth,

by the Indestructible taste no Death.

Perhaps there is a difference between these ‘deaths’ that is supposed to be signalled here. In the Sanskrit original, however, this would not have been done via capitalization, which, to my knowledge, did not exist in their alphabet. The capitalization can be productive when demarcating ‘This’, ‘That’, ‘It’, which do require additional ballast for us to focus on them to the extent we focus on ‘Sun’ or ‘Cosmos’ by default. Nevertheless, Petrucci’s choice to capitalize more heavily in some verses than in others becomes stylistically confusing. I cannot read the original – perhaps there are differences in tone between parts of the Upanishad that are conveyed in this way, but I doubt it. You might end up longing for a striking off of pompous capitalization or for a more consistent marking of the more important concepts in relation to nouns of less stature, instead of taking the text in as a unified piece which does not admit tweaking. I found it dizzying to oscillate between verses, though each had a tremendously cohesive, complete, and self-contained air when read on its own. At times I would lose myself in testing comparisons – is this more like Anne Carson, Blake, Winnie the Pooh, or, God forbid, the opening paragraph of Lolita (an association I owe exclusively to ‘Pillar of All, / Lone Fire / Orchard-keeper’ – but still)?  

> To my mind, the greatest strengths of Petrucci’s translation lie in aspects in which he has the most poetic license – punctuation, line breaks, stanza division. You can tell he is free. You can tell he is purposeful. There are fantastic clusters of dashes and colons, and full stops that you would just like to thread between your toes to look down on as you walk. My previous encounter with Petrucci’s work involved not his translations, but a poetry collection – i tulips – which I remember mainly for the daze of its line breaks – smooth mirrors sharpening up both all in view and all out of it. I wanted to read this Isha Upanishad if only to see what happens to such an angular style when confronting the mould of ancient text, an entity we may be prone to conceptualise as claylike, earthy, elemental, but must resort to try to get in touch with via Spark-Note-sharp-dull renditions. The poetically-minded translator can cookie-cut to whim, but to do so with the same cookie cutter as they use for their own work would most likely amount to getting carried away (when professing to be a responsible driver of a metaphysical tour bus).

> What makes this Isha such a nourishing reread – I’m really not sure how many times I flicked through, tasting the same lines over and over without the slightest loss of pleasure – is its staccato. Sentences never stumble, yet they are persistently gritty in the way they call out, firm while exhibiting an awareness of the inherent issues with conveying truths in words. Our words are like those toy cars set in their own rink for kids to collide with. Sometimes they need seizing and readjusting to true roads. This driver is slow with moments of clutch and then perfectly eager acceleration until a pedestrian – another thought – pops up and we’re clutchy again. My favourite stanza, which demonstrates clutch to perfection, comes from verse 5:

It is action – yet It

remains dormant. Beyond

all reach – It

is more intimate than blood.

I find no mention of intimacy, not a dash of blood or even just a dash, in other translations of the Isa Upanishad. There’s nothing of the velocity, the gift of oceans, rivers, the multitudes of loud trees, the ‘Orchard-keeper / of Karma’ Mario Petrucci offers as generously as he can while staying true to the philosophical content of his source text. The world comes towards our mouths. The world is our eyes coming towards world. The world is modernised through elementality, not technical fervour. You get to it and it turns out to be compact, just as you want more.

> The free meat-grindery translations I glimpsed online didn’t have a tree in them. They merely made me skim and mourn the insistence on the persistence of a dichotomy between light and darkness which never does darkness justice. This still hurts me here but is inevitable, an essential part of the original message that I can get past through focusing on the wonders of everything else. For example, of how the lines in verse 5 stop at ‘It’ to change gear and keep ploughing up a hill – a hill which actually stands for encouragement to stop trying to make it up anywhere. I’m not sure how far up I park in the shade of Upanishad, but park I do. Nothing left to read. I open the door and air comes through from somewhere, at some angle, some temperature, at some leg of mine, which is hesitant at the touch of something holy. Light hits all manners of dust, especially the broken CD input. I like being here. A seatbelt gleams like a hiccough of holiday sea. Everyone has moved on and maybe they’re wrong. It can be so fast to stop. ‘Take stillness from stillness: / Stillness still remains.’ It can take you everywhere, the halt. Thank you.

Isha Upanishad is available to buy here via Guillemot Press.

~ 

Text: Nasim Luczaj

Image: Guillemot Press / Cover design by CF Sherratt.

Published 6/11/19

[samenkomen]

11 Questions for the Mun

    tagged by  :  @disalvos

    tagging  :  @cherryvixcn  /  @haharlarious  / @notracefound  /  @knitcrowned  / @shirtcrowned  /    @spitfcre  /  @luncrwolf

Answer the 11 questions posted for you

Create 11 new ones (optional, you can use the previous)

Tag 11 people (optional as well)

Repost, don’t reblog!

My 11 Answers

1  .  What drew you to Tumblr Roleplaying ?

i was using other platforms and i saw that people were doing it here and it seemed more stable / long term.  i tried to make a meg masters sideblog to my personal and then i ended up learning how it was done.   i don’t really remember aside from that.

2  .  Did you RP somewhere else prior to Tumblr? Where else ?  

skype,  omegle,  emails,   texts with friends,   and i still will use skype   &   discord to rp. 

3  .  What is your favorite part of RPing ?

meeting new friends !!!   it’s so rewarding,   and the kind of people you meet could end up being in your life for years like kitty  &  des.    so,   i mean the plotting and the everything and the friendships and the screaming and the introducing each other to fandoms.   it’s so much fun. 

4  .  What is your least favorite part of RPing  ?

sensitive people.  people who get offended at every little thing.   people who shame people for what they choose to rp.   petty drama.   people who bring race into it or think they’re on some kind of crusade.   people who wont follow someone back because their blog isn’t fancy enough. shit like that.  it’s bullshit. 

5  .  Any former muses you miss writing  ?

ok so like,  yeah.   even though i made this blog to shove all my inactive muses on and love them again,  there’s still muses who haven’t made it yet.   I miss playing Freddy Newandyke the most, but also Derek Vinyard from american history x.   he was a delight,  &  my first male muse tbh.  

6  .  What’s your favorite thing about your muse ?

you’ll have to be more specific.

7  .  Do you think that if you and your muse were to meet, you would get along ?

some of them,  yes.   not randal cause he hates lotr and i’m not ok w/ that.  

8  .  Is there any genre or setting of Roleplay that you cannot stand ?

nope.

9  .  Do you ever reread threads? Which ones  ?

yeah i reread my threads obsessively tbh.  

10  .  Is there any particular plot or dynamic which you haven’t yet had the chance to RP that you want to  ? What is it  ?

uh.   i don’t know tbh like it all depends on the muse.  

11  .  What are your favorite books  ?

fight club,   lolita,   lord of the rings trilogy,  i am not spock,   the autobiography of james t kirk..

[how2to18]

IN Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Brian Boyd reports that Richard Wilbur, when his flight was delayed, arrived tired and hungry for a poetry reading at Cornell University. Standing on the stage about to read, he observed the author of Lolita seated by himself in the front row. Wilbur, who had already written in “Ceremony” of his preference for “wit and wakefulness,” told Boyd that he “passionately wished that I had eaten something, that I felt better, that my poems were better.” He needn’t have worried.

Like his mentor, model, and friend Robert Frost, Wilbur has been routinely misunderstood by admirers and detractors alike. To some among the former, he is safe and wholesome, like oatmeal. To his more emphatic critics, Wilbur commits heresy with every act of elegance, wit, and declaration of faith in the cosmic order. In this sense he was a well-mannered outsider, a fugitive from fashion. If Wilbur, who died October 14 at age 96, ever wrote a mediocre poem — one that is perfunctory, careless, egocentric, or empty — I couldn’t remember having read it. After his death, I resolved to read his Collected Poems 1943–2004 sequentially, cover to cover, wishing to reassess his accomplishment. After all, reading a writer attentively is the truest, most respectful act of criticism.

Collected Poems is arranged in reverse chronological order, beginning with new poems and winding backward to his first volume, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947), published when he was 25 and newly discharged from the Army. Two appendices attached to the back of the book, “Show Lyrics” and “Poems for Children and Others,” suggest Wilbur’s versatility. My goal was to avoid the chestnuts and pay attention to the poems less well remembered. Poems embalmed in anthologies too often blind us to unexpected duds and delights. Here, from among the new poems, is “Green,” one of many that indicate Wilbur was our poet laureate of trees without being, in the banal sense, a nature poet:

Tree-leaves which, till the growing season’s done, Change into wood the powers of the sun,

Take from that radiance only reds and blues. Green is a color that they cannot use,

And so their rustling myriads are seen To wear all summer an extraneous green,

A green with no apparent role, unless To be the symbol of a great largesse

Which has no end, though autumns may revoke That shade from yellowed ash and rusted oak.

A reader could almost gloss “Green” as a lecture on photosynthesis, from the Greek for “putting together with light” (which is not a bad way to describe Wilbur’s poetic practice). The fourth couplet expresses the poet’s persistent notion that creation is a gift, a bountiful gratuity for our enjoyment. Wilbur’s working assumptions in most of his poems are quietly, nondenominationally Christian. The world can be a cruel and dangerous place, but randomness is deceptive. Nature is arranged gracefully, like a good poem. The chlorophyll in leaves absorbs red and blue wavelengths of light but reflects the green. For the tree, green is gratuitous; for us, sheer beauty.

In the introduction to a posthumously published collection of her father’s poems, Penelope Fitzgerald writes: “Light verse is a product of civilization, for it is a sign of being civilized to be able to treat serious things gracefully.” Wilbur ranks high among recent poets of civility and civilization. The stridently earnest can be brutish in manners and morals, while the civilized are courteous and deferential. How are we to pigeonhole “To His Skeleton,” published in The Mind-Reader: New Poems (1976)? Is it light or heavy?

Why will you vex me with These bone-spurs in the ear, With X-rayed phlebolith And calculus? See here,

Noblest of armatures, The grin which bares my teeth Is mine as yet, not yours. Did you not stand beneath

This flesh, I could not stand, But would revert to slime Informous and unmanned; And I may come in time

To wish your peace my fate, Your sculpture my renown. Still, I have held you straight And mean to lay you down

Without too much disgrace When what can perish dies. For now then, keep your place And do not colonize.

The speaker is all surface, which is not a slur. His bones are internal scaffolding, concealed. Cartoonish emblem of death, the skeleton is the structure that enables life. Without our bones, we are “informous and unmanned,” like poems unmindful of meter and rhyme. The speaker admonishes his skeleton to bide his time. Call it graveyard humor with a metaphysical bent. Even a minor Wilbur effort such as “To His Skeleton” feels accomplished. As always, Wilbur is the wizard of rhyme, shoring up his poem and amusing us with music: “with”/“phlebolith,” “stand”/“unmanned.” In an essay he wrote 70 years ago, “The Bottles Become New, Too,” Wilbur says:

The presence of potential rhymes sets the imagination working with the same briskness and license with which a patient’s mind responds to the psychologist’s word-association tests. When a poet is fishing among rhymes, he may and must reject most of the spontaneous reconciliations (and all of the hackneyed ones) produced by trial combinations of rhyming words, and keep in mind the preconceived direction and object of his poem; but the suggestions of rhyme are so nimble and so many that it is an invaluable means to the discovery of poetic raw material which is, in the very best sense, far-fetched.

Note the order in which Wilbur describes composition: “fishing” for rhymes, sorting them, winnowing, rejecting most, all the while remembering the “direction and object” of the poem. A good rhyme isn’t the snap of a lock but a key to open the imagination. The ability to write first-rate poetry, like the gifts for mathematics and music (composition and performance), is a freakishly rare combination of rigor and openness. Few have been so lavishly gifted as Wilbur. Tin-eared critics will dismiss rhyme as handcuffs, something artificial to bind the imagination. On the contrary. When Wilbur likens rhyme to a psychologist’s parlor game, he’s not suggesting repressed memories and the unleashing of buried anguish and guilt. Music goes deeper than that. So melodic are some of Wilbur’s poems, so gracefully arranged, one might be tempted not merely to read his lines but intone them, as in these from “A Black Birch in Winter” (The Mind-Reader: New Poems, 1976): “Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth, / New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth.” Ella Fitzgerald would sing this bouncily, allegro moderato, with light stress on the nouns.

Wilbur once wrote that poems “should include every resource which can be made to work,” and in his best poems, no motion is wasted. They resemble happy athletes: the flab has been trimmed, the muscles are limber. They move with confidence and strength, and they make it look effortless. Consider one of his Frostian efforts, “Hamlen Brook” (New and Collected Poems, 1987):

Without broadcasting his erudition, Wilbur will often exploit etymological echoes in commonplace words. The stream’s “jet” is “lucid,” an adjective that customarily describes moments of intelligibility in an otherwise confused consciousness; Wilbur musters the original meaning — shining, luminous — in contrast to the “alder-darkened brink.” As he prepares to drink, he sees “[a] startled inchling trout / Of spotted near-transparency.” Its shadow on the stream bottom appears more solid than its translucent body. “[S]liding glass” suggests a specimen on a slide observed through a microscope, with the reflections of dragonflies, birches, and “deep cloudlets” on the surface of the water adding more layers of visual reality. I wonder if Wilbur had in mind an untitled poem by John Keats, written in 1816, known by its first line, “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,” which includes these lines:

[S]warms of minnows show their little heads, Staying their wavy bodies ’gainst the streams, To taste the luxury of sunny beams Temper’d with coolness. How they ever wrestle With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand. If you but scantily hold out the hand, That very instant not one will remain; But turn your eye, and they are there again.

For both poets, creation is bottomless, more than we can hope to understand or even perceive. George Eliot in Daniel Deronda writes: “Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy — in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.” Wilbur adores “solid facts,” but he never deploys them as an end in themselves. His speaker does not drink but asks: “How shall I drink all this?” The final stanza is his answer. The joy-minded — in Wilbur’s case, the attentive and grateful — are “dumbstruck” by nature’s bounty, which slakes our thirst and leaves us thirsty for more. Keats’s rhyming couplets lend a finality to his poem. The minnows, the beams of sunlight, and the speaker’s hand are simply there and raise no questions. “Hamlen Brook” is trickier and more complex. The first and last lines of each stanza rhyme and are written in iambic trimeter. The second and third lines are in iambic tetrameter and iambic pentameter, respectively. The form mirrors the multiple visual layers without quite capturing them. There’s no bottom to this stream.

Wilbur’s other mode is a playfulness that respects readers regardless of their age. He published five volumes of poems for children (“and Others”). Wilbur loved writing limericks, riddles, and jokey verse that never descend into Edward Lear–like nonsense. Even his poems for kids feature a logical hinge in the middle, and they frequently skirt the mythical divide separating poetry and light verse. They exhibit the same regard for clarity and craft as his verse for adults. This poem is from More Opposites (1991), a volume dedicated to the poet’s granddaughter:

The opposite of kite, I’d say, Is yo-yo. On a breezy day You take your kite and let it rise Upon its string into the skies, And then you pull it down with ease (Unless it crashes in the trees). A yo-yo, though, drops down, and then You quickly bring it up again By pulling deftly on its string (If you can work the blasted thing).

Like poets, children revel in that species of logic we might call mock-logic. It differs from nonsense by possessing a superficially orderly appearance, like one of Groucho’s gags, but under the surface you’ll find nothing but ridiculousness. We might think of this as the opposite of Wilbur’s understanding of the world. Chaos, observed with a sufficiently discerning mind, discloses an unlikely and sometimes even beneficent order.

Wilbur founded no poetic school, though imitators abound. His mingling of good manners, masterful technique, and philosophical sophistication is rare and increasingly unfashionable. Wilbur wrote “For Dudley” (Walking to Sleep, 1969) after the death of his friend Dudley Fitts, the poet, teacher, and translator from the Greek. It begins:

Even when death has taken An exceptional man, It is common things which touch us, gathered In the house that proved a hostel.

The speaker is visiting the dead man’s house. On his desk he finds an incomplete sentence, “Not to be finished by us, who lack / His gaiety, his Greek.” The “quick sun” illuminates a chair previously in the dark. Wilbur, as ever, is mindful of light and its absence:

It is the light of which Achilles spoke, Himself a shadow then, recalling The splendor of mere being.

To honor the “exceptional” dead is a sacred trust. Their fate will soon be ours. Light is life. The waiting darkness is patient. Fitts was “brave and loved this world,” as did Wilbur. The poem turns to prayer and concludes:

Yet in the mind as in The shut closet Where his coats hang in black procession, There is a covert muster.

One is moved to turn to him, The exceptional man, Telling him all these things, and waiting For the deft, lucid answer.

At the sound of that voice’s deep Specific silence, The sun winks and fails in the window. Light perpetual keep him.

¤

Patrick Kurp is a writer living in Houston, and the author of the literary blog Anecdotal Evidence.

The post “The Exceptional Man”: Rereading Richard Wilbur appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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IN Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Brian Boyd reports that Richard Wilbur, when his flight was delayed, arrived tired and hungry for a poetry reading at Cornell University. Standing on the stage about to read, he observed the author of Lolita seated by himself in the front row. Wilbur, who had already written in “Ceremony” of his preference for “wit and wakefulness,” told Boyd that he “passionately wished that I had eaten something, that I felt better, that my poems were better.” He needn’t have worried.

Like his mentor, model, and friend Robert Frost, Wilbur has been routinely misunderstood by admirers and detractors alike. To some among the former, he is safe and wholesome, like oatmeal. To his more emphatic critics, Wilbur commits heresy with every act of elegance, wit, and declaration of faith in the cosmic order. In this sense he was a well-mannered outsider, a fugitive from fashion. If Wilbur, who died October 14 at age 96, ever wrote a mediocre poem — one that is perfunctory, careless, egocentric, or empty — I couldn’t remember having read it. After his death, I resolved to read his Collected Poems 1943–2004 sequentially, cover to cover, wishing to reassess his accomplishment. After all, reading a writer attentively is the truest, most respectful act of criticism.

Collected Poems is arranged in reverse chronological order, beginning with new poems and winding backward to his first volume, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947), published when he was 25 and newly discharged from the Army. Two appendices attached to the back of the book, “Show Lyrics” and “Poems for Children and Others,” suggest Wilbur’s versatility. My goal was to avoid the chestnuts and pay attention to the poems less well remembered. Poems embalmed in anthologies too often blind us to unexpected duds and delights. Here, from among the new poems, is “Green,” one of many that indicate Wilbur was our poet laureate of trees without being, in the banal sense, a nature poet:

Tree-leaves which, till the growing season’s done, Change into wood the powers of the sun,

Take from that radiance only reds and blues. Green is a color that they cannot use,

And so their rustling myriads are seen To wear all summer an extraneous green,

A green with no apparent role, unless To be the symbol of a great largesse

Which has no end, though autumns may revoke That shade from yellowed ash and rusted oak.

A reader could almost gloss “Green” as a lecture on photosynthesis, from the Greek for “putting together with light” (which is not a bad way to describe Wilbur’s poetic practice). The fourth couplet expresses the poet’s persistent notion that creation is a gift, a bountiful gratuity for our enjoyment. Wilbur’s working assumptions in most of his poems are quietly, nondenominationally Christian. The world can be a cruel and dangerous place, but randomness is deceptive. Nature is arranged gracefully, like a good poem. The chlorophyll in leaves absorbs red and blue wavelengths of light but reflects the green. For the tree, green is gratuitous; for us, sheer beauty.

In the introduction to a posthumously published collection of her father’s poems, Penelope Fitzgerald writes: “Light verse is a product of civilization, for it is a sign of being civilized to be able to treat serious things gracefully.” Wilbur ranks high among recent poets of civility and civilization. The stridently earnest can be brutish in manners and morals, while the civilized are courteous and deferential. How are we to pigeonhole “To His Skeleton,” published in The Mind-Reader: New Poems (1976)? Is it light or heavy?

Why will you vex me with These bone-spurs in the ear, With X-rayed phlebolith And calculus? See here,

Noblest of armatures, The grin which bares my teeth Is mine as yet, not yours. Did you not stand beneath

This flesh, I could not stand, But would revert to slime Informous and unmanned; And I may come in time

To wish your peace my fate, Your sculpture my renown. Still, I have held you straight And mean to lay you down

Without too much disgrace When what can perish dies. For now then, keep your place And do not colonize.

The speaker is all surface, which is not a slur. His bones are internal scaffolding, concealed. Cartoonish emblem of death, the skeleton is the structure that enables life. Without our bones, we are “informous and unmanned,” like poems unmindful of meter and rhyme. The speaker admonishes his skeleton to bide his time. Call it graveyard humor with a metaphysical bent. Even a minor Wilbur effort such as “To His Skeleton” feels accomplished. As always, Wilbur is the wizard of rhyme, shoring up his poem and amusing us with music: “with”/“phlebolith,” “stand”/“unmanned.” In an essay he wrote 70 years ago, “The Bottles Become New, Too,” Wilbur says:

The presence of potential rhymes sets the imagination working with the same briskness and license with which a patient’s mind responds to the psychologist’s word-association tests. When a poet is fishing among rhymes, he may and must reject most of the spontaneous reconciliations (and all of the hackneyed ones) produced by trial combinations of rhyming words, and keep in mind the preconceived direction and object of his poem; but the suggestions of rhyme are so nimble and so many that it is an invaluable means to the discovery of poetic raw material which is, in the very best sense, far-fetched.

Note the order in which Wilbur describes composition: “fishing” for rhymes, sorting them, winnowing, rejecting most, all the while remembering the “direction and object” of the poem. A good rhyme isn’t the snap of a lock but a key to open the imagination. The ability to write first-rate poetry, like the gifts for mathematics and music (composition and performance), is a freakishly rare combination of rigor and openness. Few have been so lavishly gifted as Wilbur. Tin-eared critics will dismiss rhyme as handcuffs, something artificial to bind the imagination. On the contrary. When Wilbur likens rhyme to a psychologist’s parlor game, he’s not suggesting repressed memories and the unleashing of buried anguish and guilt. Music goes deeper than that. So melodic are some of Wilbur’s poems, so gracefully arranged, one might be tempted not merely to read his lines but intone them, as in these from “A Black Birch in Winter” (The Mind-Reader: New Poems, 1976): “Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth, / New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth.” Ella Fitzgerald would sing this bouncily, allegro moderato, with light stress on the nouns.

Wilbur once wrote that poems “should include every resource which can be made to work,” and in his best poems, no motion is wasted. They resemble happy athletes: the flab has been trimmed, the muscles are limber. They move with confidence and strength, and they make it look effortless. Consider one of his Frostian efforts, “Hamlen Brook” (New and Collected Poems, 1987):

Without broadcasting his erudition, Wilbur will often exploit etymological echoes in commonplace words. The stream’s “jet” is “lucid,” an adjective that customarily describes moments of intelligibility in an otherwise confused consciousness; Wilbur musters the original meaning — shining, luminous — in contrast to the “alder-darkened brink.” As he prepares to drink, he sees “[a] startled inchling trout / Of spotted near-transparency.” Its shadow on the stream bottom appears more solid than its translucent body. “[S]liding glass” suggests a specimen on a slide observed through a microscope, with the reflections of dragonflies, birches, and “deep cloudlets” on the surface of the water adding more layers of visual reality. I wonder if Wilbur had in mind an untitled poem by John Keats, written in 1816, known by its first line, “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,” which includes these lines:

[S]warms of minnows show their little heads, Staying their wavy bodies ’gainst the streams, To taste the luxury of sunny beams Temper’d with coolness. How they ever wrestle With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand. If you but scantily hold out the hand, That very instant not one will remain; But turn your eye, and they are there again.

For both poets, creation is bottomless, more than we can hope to understand or even perceive. George Eliot in Daniel Deronda writes: “Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy — in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.” Wilbur adores “solid facts,” but he never deploys them as an end in themselves. His speaker does not drink but asks: “How shall I drink all this?” The final stanza is his answer. The joy-minded — in Wilbur’s case, the attentive and grateful — are “dumbstruck” by nature’s bounty, which slakes our thirst and leaves us thirsty for more. Keats’s rhyming couplets lend a finality to his poem. The minnows, the beams of sunlight, and the speaker’s hand are simply there and raise no questions. “Hamlen Brook” is trickier and more complex. The first and last lines of each stanza rhyme and are written in iambic trimeter. The second and third lines are in iambic tetrameter and iambic pentameter, respectively. The form mirrors the multiple visual layers without quite capturing them. There’s no bottom to this stream.

Wilbur’s other mode is a playfulness that respects readers regardless of their age. He published five volumes of poems for children (“and Others”). Wilbur loved writing limericks, riddles, and jokey verse that never descend into Edward Lear–like nonsense. Even his poems for kids feature a logical hinge in the middle, and they frequently skirt the mythical divide separating poetry and light verse. They exhibit the same regard for clarity and craft as his verse for adults. This poem is from More Opposites (1991), a volume dedicated to the poet’s granddaughter:

The opposite of kite, I’d say, Is yo-yo. On a breezy day You take your kite and let it rise Upon its string into the skies, And then you pull it down with ease (Unless it crashes in the trees). A yo-yo, though, drops down, and then You quickly bring it up again By pulling deftly on its string (If you can work the blasted thing).

Like poets, children revel in that species of logic we might call mock-logic. It differs from nonsense by possessing a superficially orderly appearance, like one of Groucho’s gags, but under the surface you’ll find nothing but ridiculousness. We might think of this as the opposite of Wilbur’s understanding of the world. Chaos, observed with a sufficiently discerning mind, discloses an unlikely and sometimes even beneficent order.

Wilbur founded no poetic school, though imitators abound. His mingling of good manners, masterful technique, and philosophical sophistication is rare and increasingly unfashionable. Wilbur wrote “For Dudley” (Walking to Sleep, 1969) after the death of his friend Dudley Fitts, the poet, teacher, and translator from the Greek. It begins:

Even when death has taken An exceptional man, It is common things which touch us, gathered In the house that proved a hostel.

The speaker is visiting the dead man’s house. On his desk he finds an incomplete sentence, “Not to be finished by us, who lack / His gaiety, his Greek.” The “quick sun” illuminates a chair previously in the dark. Wilbur, as ever, is mindful of light and its absence:

It is the light of which Achilles spoke, Himself a shadow then, recalling The splendor of mere being.

To honor the “exceptional” dead is a sacred trust. Their fate will soon be ours. Light is life. The waiting darkness is patient. Fitts was “brave and loved this world,” as did Wilbur. The poem turns to prayer and concludes:

Yet in the mind as in The shut closet Where his coats hang in black procession, There is a covert muster.

One is moved to turn to him, The exceptional man, Telling him all these things, and waiting For the deft, lucid answer.

At the sound of that voice’s deep Specific silence, The sun winks and fails in the window. Light perpetual keep him.

¤

Patrick Kurp is a writer living in Houston, and the author of the literary blog Anecdotal Evidence.

The post “The Exceptional Man”: Rereading Richard Wilbur appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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