Bluebird

Apropos of nothing but a Dream State

Random Quotes of Fiction....

 

Overheard on BART:

"He's turning 22 the same day I turn 29 forever."

Overheard in Safeway:

    "Isn't there a movie called The Story of Gravy?"

    "I never heard of it. What's it about?"

    "Six degrees of fat separation."  

    "You're such an idiot sometimes, but I love you."

the slamming of the cupboards...

he rises early most days

before the stellar jays

start crowding out the back patio

with their soulfull sounds of selfishness,

nonstop insistence

that we all get up and look for bugs to catch.

still, he lets me sleep 

knowing odds are I was awake

a good part of the previous night

despite the jay's rousing cacophony.

sometimes I've no idea if he's up-and at-em

until I hear the slamming of those damn cupboard doors

echoing from the kitchen as he prepares their lunches

and brekkies too, no less.

all before I've tilted myself into a coherent state.

Trying not to take as such for granted

I turn the cup upright and realize

a keeper's one who beds you first,

however feistily attractive,

and then is penanced to

the holy making of school lunches from now on.

these be the results of nights so not misbegotten

now requiring nonstop sammies

prepared most diligently while

upholding to each one's own peculiar taste-buds.

after convincing the doormouse of my worthiness

of ten minutes more in the cozy sleep-drunk teapot

I busily slumber on towards at most

a fitful selfish half dream-state.

still I knew full well

how those cupboard doors would slam against the evening light,

in fact-that very night-in fact

as I made dinner most devotedly

when homework was all done

and he drowsed off to the evening news-

but only when there was no golf to see.

 

when she was cross referencing a cross-dresser...

So I read this terrifc article on NYTimes about a cross-dressing poet critic. The sidebar recommended several poems he liked and I liked them too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/stephen-burt-poetrys-cross-dressing-kingmaker.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&src=dayp

Then I clicked to the Paris Review and read some more poems--not all of which I liked.

Then I read "Four Poems" by Robert Haas and almost cried. It's about his brother's death and features four ruminations, each in a slightly different style that's still cohesive. It's utterly lovely. 

Four Poems

Robert Hass

August Notebook: A Death

1. River Bicycle Peony 

I woke up thinking abouy my brothr’s body. 
That q That was my first bit of early morning typing 
So the first dignity, it turns out, is to get the spelling right. 

I woke up thinking about my brother’s body. 
Apparently it’s at the medical examiner’s morgue. 
I found myself wondering whether he was naked 

Yet and whose job it was to take clothes off 
And when they did it. It seemed unnecessary 
To undress his body until they performed the exam 

And that is going to happen later this morning 
And so I found myself hoping that he was dressed 
Still, though smell may be an issue, or hygiene. 

When the police do a forced entry for the purpose 
Of a welfare check and the deceased person is alone, 
The body goes to the medical examiner’s morgue 

In the section for those deaths in which no evidence 
Of foul play is involved so the examination 
For cause of death is fairly routine. Two policemen, 

For some reason I imagine they were young, 
Found my brother. His body was in the bed 
Which was a mattress on the floor. He was lying 

On his back, according to Angela, my brother’s friend, 
Who lives in the building and is schizophrenic 
And always introduced herself as my brother’s 

Personal assistant, and he seemed peaceful. 
There would have been nothing in the room 
But the mattress and a microwave, an ashtray, 

I suppose, cartons and food wrappers he hadn’t 
Thrown away and the little plastic prescription 
Bottles that he referred to as his scrips. 

They must have called the ambulance 
And that was probably a team of three. 
When I woke, I visualized this narrative 

And thought it would be shorter. I thought 
That what would represent my feelings 
Would be the absence of metaphor. 

But then, at the third line, I discovered 
The three-line stanza and that it was 
Going to be the second dignity. So 

I imagine he is in one of those aluminium 
Cubicles I’ve seen in the movies, 
Dressed or not. I also imagine that, 

If they undressed him, and perhaps washed 
His body or gave it an alcohol rub 
To disinfect it, that that was the job 

Of some emigrant from a hot, poor country. 
Anyway, he is dressed in this stanza, 
Which mimics the terza rima of Dante’s comedy 

And is a form that Wallace Stevens liked 
To use, and also my dear friend Robert. 
And “seemed peaceful” is a kind of metaphor. 


2. Sudden and Grateful Memory of Mississippi John Hurt 

Because I woke again thinking of my brother’s body 
And why anyone would care in some future 
That poetry addresses how a body is transferred 
From the medical examiner’s office, 
Which is organized by local government 
And issues a certificate certifying that the person 
In question is in fact dead and names the cause 
Or causes, to the mortuary or cremation society, 
Most of which are privately owned businesses 
And run for profit and until recently tended 
To be family businesses with skills and decorums 
Passed from father to son, and often quite ethnically 
Specific, in a country like ours made from crossers 
Of borders, as if, in the intimacy of death, 
Some tribal shame or squeamishness or sense 
Of decorum asserted itself so that the Irish 
Buried the Irish and the Italians the Italians. 
In the South in the early years of the last century 
It was the one business in which a black person 
Could grow wealthy and pass on a trade 
And a modicum of independence to his children. 
I know this because Earlene wrote a paper about it 
In school and interviewed fourth-generation 
African American morticians in Oakland 
Whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers 
Had buried the dead in cotton towns on the Delta 
Or along the Brazos River in Texas, passing on 
To their children who had gone west an order 
Of doing things and symbolic forms of courtesy 
For the bereaved and sequences of behavior 
At wakes and funerals, so that, for example, 
The eldest woman in the maternal line 
Entered the chapel first, and what prayers 
Were said in what order. During Prohibition 
They even sold the white lightning to the men 
Who were allowed to slip outside and take a nip 
And talk about the dead while the cries 
And gospel-song-voiced contralto moans 
Of grief that could sound like curious elation 
Rose inside. Also the rules for burial or burning. 
Griefs and rituals and inside them cosmologies. 
And I thought gratefully of Mississippi John Hurt’s 
Great song about Louis Collins and its terrible 
Tenderness which can’t be reproduced here 
Because so much of it is in the picking 
Of the twelve-string guitar and in his sweet, 
Reedy old man’s voice: 
            When they heard 
            That Louis was dead, 
            All the people dressed in red. 
            The angels laid him away. 
            They laid him six feet under the clay. 
            The angels laid him away. 

 

When he mentioned Mississippi John Hurt's song "Louis Collins," I had to go and find it on Youtube. I really like his name. And his face. The song's heartbreakingly beautiful.

 

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8hAN8hg3XDI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAN8hg3XDI

Here's the link to the Paris Review for the rest of the Hass poem.

http://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/5979/four-poems-robert-hass

because dead flowers are so beautiful

Yes, he'd been laid off, completely unexpectedly.

Yes, they'd immediately reined in excess expenditures while she applied for a multitude of jobs, six on Wednesday, four more on Friday. As many as she could find, but there were only so many in less than a week.

Still, she had to have Chinese for dinner that Sunday night. Not take-out either because her favorite dish of salt and pepper prawns didn’t hold up too well when transported home in a carton. And no cheap-o fake-o joint even if it was close to home, with its just okay pot stickers, spring rolls, and chow Mein for the kids. It had to be their new favorite—that place in Alameda they’d gone to on his birthday, where they’d been the only non-Asians. Less than ten days ago, just before the fallout. It seemed like ages.

Catching her reflection in the side mirror as they sped through the Webster tunnel she noticed that with her hair pinned back and her lips painted she bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Wallis Simpson.

“Well why not,” she thought lifting her chin. “Wouldn’t Wallis assume a confidently serene disposition no matter the forecast?”

They couldn’t just cower in the house, they had to rally. Appearances matter almost as much as faith, all the more so when circumstances conspire against you. They had to go on, best face forward and all that, because anything was possible—bad, good, maybe it’d work out even better than before.

The point being, it was so much easier to be positive if she got her prawns.

I had to look up several words just reading her obituary

Christine Brooke-Rose, Inventive Writer, Dies at 89

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: April 10, 2012

Christine Brooke-Rose, an English experimental writer known for wielding words with the ardor of a philologist, the fingers of a prestidigitator and the appetite of a lexivore, resulting in novels that exhilarated many critics and enervated others, died on March 21. She was 89.

Carcanet, via Guardian of London

Christine Brooke-Rose

Her death was announced on the Web site of her British publisher, Carcanet Press. Fittingly for a writer whose work could take artful pains to dispense with seemingly indispensable linguistic foundation stones (she once wrote an entire novel without using the verb “to be”), the “where” of Ms. Brooke-Rose’s death — whether it occurred at her longtime home in the South of France or elsewhere — was unspecified.

The author of more than a dozen novels, as well as short stories, essays and criticism, Ms. Brooke-Rose was one of relatively few Britons to maintain a long association with experimental fiction. Her stylistic techniques — playful, polyglot, punning, postmodern and slyly self-referential — are more typically associated with writers of the French Nouveau Roman school.

Because she often used alternative narrative devices (including unorthodox chronology and unusual typography) to create alternative realities, her work is sometimes classified as science fiction, though much of it is beyond category. As with much postmodern fiction, her writing — organized around an unspoken compact between the author, who is unspooling the text, and the reader, who is watching it unspool — is about the act of writing itself.

Her best-known novels include four whose combined titles run to just five syllables — “Out” (1964), “Such” (1965), “Between” (1968), “Thru” (1975) — followed by a syllabic splurge: “Amalgamemnon” (1984), “Xorandor” (1986), “Verbivore” (1990) and “Textermination.” In “Textermination,” published in 1992, literary characters from a spate of famous pens — Austen’s, Flaubert’s, Pynchon’s, Rushdie’s — convene in a San Francisco hotel to importune readers for their continued existence.

Ms. Brooke-Rose was a linguistic escape artist. In book after book she dons self-imposed syntactic shackles, and in book after book she gleefully slips them.

In “Between,” the very nature of identity is called into question by her avoidance of the verb “to be” in all its forms. In “Next” (1998), about the dispossessed in London, her characters are literal have-nots: throughout the book, she avoids the verb “to have.”

In “Amalgamemnon,” narrated by a literature professor about to lose her job, Ms. Brooke-Rose uses only verb forms — including future tense and subjunctive mood — that conjure conditions unobtainable in the present.

Ms. Brooke-Rose’s earliest novels, published in the late 1950s, are conventional satires of manners. But as early as her third novel, “The Dear Deceit,” published in 1960, she had begun to play with narrative form. The novel opens with the death of its protagonist and, in successive chapters, works backward to his birth.

This convention has a time-honored analogue in narrative nonfiction, as when, for instance, a newspaper article begins with word of its subject’s death and, only lower, reads:

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva on Jan. 16, 1923, into a French-, German- and English-speaking household. Her enigmatic English father, who left the family when she was a child and died when she was 11, had been, she later learned, an Anglican Benedictine monk and a convicted thief, though not necessarily in that order; her American-Swiss mother became a Benedictine nun after the dissolution of her marriage.

Reared in Geneva, Brussels and Britain, the young Ms. Brooke-Rose worked at Bletchley Park during the war, decrypting intercepted German messages. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oxford, followed by a doctorate in medieval literature from University College London. From the late 1960s to the late ’80s she taught British and American literature at the University of Paris.

Ms. Brooke-Rose was married three times. (Her second marriage was to the prominent Polish writer Jerzy Pietrkiewicz.) Information on survivors was not available.

Her other books include an autobiographical novel, “Remake” (1996); the story collection “Go When You See the Green Man Walking” (1970); a volume of criticism, “A ZBC of Ezra Pound” (1971); and translations of the French experimental writer Alain Robbe-Grillet.

What proved to be her last book was a novel published in 2006. It is presciently titled, in the manner of a catalog entry, “Life, End Of.”

 

 

  

LATimes Elmore Leonard interview

by Megan Abbott

PHOTO: DAN BORRIS

“I was just watching “Cheek to Cheek’ [in Top Hat] on channel 66,” legendary crime novelist Elmore Leonard says over the phone from his home in suburban Detroit. “Astaire and Rogers. They’re not very good dancers, but the songs were wonderful. Except Astaire sings them with his little weak voice.”

Listening to the critique, it’s hard not to see a parallel to Leonard’s own adventures in the screen trade. With some notable exceptions—foremost Steven Soderbergh’s wily, intoxicating Out of Sight—most adaptations of his work have failed to capture his blend of audacious storytelling, true grit and dialogue that twists, snaps and curls in the characters’ mouths. But with Justified, the FX series based on his short story “Fire in the Hole”—and featuring U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, introduced in 1993’s Pronto—Leonard finally has a singer worthy of his hardboiled song. Set in the hollows of Kentucky, the show centers on Givens (Timothy Olyphant) as he wrestles with drug rings, coal-mine feuds and his own itchy trigger finger.

The new novel Raylan, his 45th, emerges as a gift to fans of Leonard’s fiction and the show, the supremely cool eponymous hero navigating a menagerie of lowlifes (where, in classic style, the organ thieves have a slight moral advantage over the coal-company executives). The author happily settled in to discuss his storied career, Tinseltown and the mysteries of inspiration.

Who did you read when you were starting out?
Hemingway, [but] I never cared for the man. I used to read a lot of him till I learned he had no sense of humor.

Did you read many of the hard-boiled masters?
Never read Chandler. Not much Hammett. James M. Cain was an influence way back. Spillane, I haven’t read in 40, 50 years. I remember his first books, thinking, Man, this guy is good. And I met him—good guy. But he remained the same. His books never changed.

While Spillane is often accused of sexism, you seem to love women.
Years ago, a reviewer for the Detroit News said my female characters were like Spillane’s. After that, I paid more attention. I don’t think of them as women. I think of them as a person and go from there. Sometimes female characters start out as the wife or girlfriend, but then I realize, “No, she’s the book,” and she becomes a main character. I surrender the book to her. A few years ago, my researcher gave me this photo: a female marshal in front of Miami’s courthouse—this Colombian drug trial. It was her and another marshal, and she was just standing there with a shotgun, hip cocked and angled, holding it half up. And I thought, She’s a knockout. And she’s a book.

Is a lot of you in Raylan?
I suppose, sure. In a given situation, I just know he’s gonna shoot the guy. But it takes me a lot longer than Raylan to come up with the good lines. It can take days to come up with that scene ender. I spend most of my time on those. But for Raylan, the words just come. Dialogue is easier to me than narrating—[it] has that sound.

Sound seems especially important in your writing. It has such a unique cadence.
I’m not aware of a cadence when writing, but I hear it after. I write in longhand, and that helps. You’re closer to it, and you have to cross things out. You put a line through it, but it’s still there. You might need it. When you erase a line on a computer, it’s gone forever. [Timothy Olyphant] recites the lines just as I wrote them for Raylan. His temperament is exactly the way I wrote him.

You’re happy with Justified?
Oh, I’m so pleased with the show. The dialogue works, and the actors just get it.

Do you work closely with the producers and writers?
I’m not in much contact with them. We get together for appearances sometimes, which is great. I hear the writers wear wristbands: WWED: What Would Elmore Do?

That’s pretty unusual.
Very unusual. Writers—all writers, even screenwriters—like to make their mark. I don’t think many screenwriters can write. They pass as writers. But it’s not like that with this show. When they sent me the first script, I read it and didn’t see a word to change. It was perfect.

The show is referred to all over the place, even by its producers, as a western. Do you consider it a western?
I have never thought of it as a western. The only reason they’ve tagged it as that is the hat. It’s not the hat I described. I pictured it like a businessman’s Stetson—like the marshals arresting Jack Ruby but well worn with a certain shape unique to him. It was just an old worn hat.

When you write Raylan now, do you picture the bigger hat?
No. I’ve never seen a hat like the one on the show. The brim is fairly straight. He doesn’t try to get cute with it. At first I didn’t like it, but I’m getting used to it.

Do you think the creators are more into the western elements than you are—the hat, the music? Raylan seems angrier, more like a classic sheriff.
Angrier, yes. The music, though, is down-home, not western, but with a mean beat. It goes with Kentucky. They shot it in Pennsylvania and now L.A., but they really get the feel of Harlan County. It has the sound, so you feel you’re there. The accents are so good—every one. The dialogue of the locals, it’s just a different sound down there. It takes you to that place.

Justified creator Graham Yost has likened Raylan to the cowboy and detective heroes of old, with their strong moral codes. But he doesn’t have any of the self-righteousness we might associate with that tradition.
I never cared for cowboy heroes or PIs. I’ve never understood PI novels, because I’ve met a few PIs, and they didn’t seem particularly smart. Raylan is not self-righteous. He can’t understand why marijuana isn’t legal—the only people against it have never tried it. Give them a puff, see if they like it.

You’re the master of creating “bad guys” with quirks that utterly charm. In Raylan, Boyd Crowder corrects another character’s poor grammar.
Yeah, Boyd—he’s dumb, but he thinks he’s smart. You know, I just love them all. There’s only one character [I’ve written] I don’t like—in Glitz. The guy killed women under the Atlantic City boardwalk, and he was so nice to his mother, so cloying. He’s the only bad guy I ever wrote.

You did your time working in Hollywood but ended up returning to books.
I quit in 1993. I got so tired of writing and rewriting the script. This producer from Paramount wanted me to do a rewrite on an existing script. The original story was so dumb. I woke up at 5 a.m. in this hotel in L.A. and came up with a story, a way to fix it. Then I had to wait three hours for him to wake up so I could tell him about it. He loved it, but I didn’t have my heart in it. It’s on a shelf. But I got paid for it.

The books are truly your own.
With books, when you put it down, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. My editors don’t tell me what to do. The copy editor has special instructions not to mess with my sentences. I end Raylan with this shower scene with him and a girl. She asks if he remembers the scene from Young Frankenstein when the monster gets it on with the woman [Madeline Kahn], and she starts singing “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” He asks what made her think of that. She says she doesn’t know. And that’s the end. I was surprised the publisher let me do it. I knew it would be the ending when I wrote it, but I was sure it wouldn’t fly. They didn’t touch it.

I heard you’re not reading many crime novels these days.
I haven’t read much at all in the last year. I used to always have a book on the bedside table. I can’t understand these best-sellers. I got halfway through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I don’t get it at all. What’s the big thrill? It’s boring.

What are you working on now?
It’s going to be a book about private prisons. I’ve been reading all about them. They’re corrupt, and they don’t work. This one’s going to be south of Palm Springs. Raylan’s out there. A warden, a former marshal, is killed during escape, so Raylan goes. I just went to Palm Springs for the first time, stayed in a house there. It was a knockout. The whole time I kept thinking, I can’t wait to set a book here. My Hollywood agent had me write up a five-pager about it: “A world apart from the desert towns of westerns...the superrich and movie stars.”

I’m hooked.
You’re hooked? Good.

MEGAN ABBOTT is the Edgar Award–winning author of five crime novels, including The End of Everything, Queenpin and Bury Me Deep. Her newest, Dare Me, will be published in July.

 

I got an A+ this last class, but it is so not easy...

I am not bi-polar, but I love how this article discusses the effects of depression and the like on creativity. I know from experience that challenges beget brilliance.

"One of the surprising things that's emerged from the study of moods is that putting them in a bad mood — making them a little bit sad or melancholy — comes with some cognitive benefits. ... So sadness, although it is not fun and is not pleasant, it does sharpen the mind a little bit. And one of the long-standing mysteries in the field of creativity is this correlation — and this was first identified by Kay Redfield Jamison and others — is people suffering from various kinds of depression and creative output. People who are successful creators — especially writers — are anywhere between 8 and 40 times more likely to suffer from bipolar depression than the general public. And no one's known what to make of this. It's tough to associate creativity with mental illness because obviously if you're very ill, it gets in the way. ... But one of the theories now is that the terrible swings of the mental illness – of bipolar depression – you get these manic highs, these euphorias, where the ideas just pour out of you. And you need to write them down. That's followed by this dismal low period when maybe you're a better editor. Maybe it's easier for you to focus and refine those epiphanies into a perfect form. ... The thinking is maybe the correlation exists because the swings of mental illness echo the natural swings of the creative process."

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/21/148607182/fostering-creativity-and-imagination-in-the-workplace

foto of graham greene, famous bipolar-ized writer

H.B. Mr. Dickens

EDITORIAL | SUNDAY OBSERVER

The Whirling Sound of Planet Dickens

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: January 14, 2012

In death, Charles Dickens still keeps his greatest secret to himself — the essence of his energy. None of the physical relics he left behind betray it. The manuscripts of his novels — like “Our Mutual Friend” at the Morgan Library — look no more fevered or hectic than the manuscripts left behind by other novelists.

Rischgitz/Getty Images

Charles Dickens, from a negative by Herbert Watkins.

E

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Two memorable characters from Charles Dickens, Micawber and the young Copperfield.

The handwritten words on the page, round and legible in blue ink, are the marks of a mind that has already settled itself to composition.

Dickens, who was born 200 years ago, wrote a long shelf of novels, 14 in all, not counting “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” which lay half-finished at his death. They sit plump and bursting with life, spilling over with the chaos of existence itself. It’s easy to imagine writers working the way Dickens’s prolific contemporary, Anthony Trollope, did — steadily, routinely, knocking off his 2,000 words a day until, by the end of his life, he had written 47 novels. But this is not how Dickens wrote.

Find the tumultuous heart of your favorite Dickens novel, the place where 19th-century London seems to be seething, smoking, overcrowded, in a state of vulgar contradiction. Then imagine Dickens working in the midst of it — a small, brisk figure rushing past you on a dark and dirty street. He is lost in a kind of mental ventriloquism, calling up his emotions and studying them. Every night he walked a dozen miles, without which, he said, “I should just explode and perish.”

Under the pseudonym Boz, he wrote, “There is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy,” walking through London as though “the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind.” Yet there was nothing remotely solitary about Dickens. One person who saw him in the highest spirits at a family party wrote that he “happily sang two or three songs, one the patter song, ‘The Dog’s Meat Man,’ and gave several successful imitations of the most distinguished actors of the day.”

It’s a wonder Dickens didn’t explode and perish long before his death in 1870, at age 58. Quite apart from the act of composing his novels, he was a whirlwind, living a life that is nearly unmatched in its vigor. He had one entire career as a magazine editor, another as an actor and manager of theatrical productions, still another as a philanthropist and social reformer. The record of his private engagements alone — dinners, outings, peregrinations with his entourage of family and friends — is exhausting to read. The novels stand out against the backdrop of hundreds of other compositions, all of them written against tight deadlines.

Dickens’s energy, which he made no effort to husband until he was nearly dead, was inexplicable. Call it metabolic if you like. Perhaps it was a reaction to the uncertainties of his childhood and the shame of his days as a child laborer, when he knew that as a precocious young entertainer he was already a spectacle well worth observing.

He was driven by gargantuan emotions, and the ferocious will needed to keep them in check, to release them in the creation of characters he loved more than some of his children. He could drive himself to anguished tears while writing the death of Little Nell, in “The Old Curiosity Shop.” And yet he could also coldly disown anyone who sided with his wife, Catherine, when they separated, including his namesake son.

Even Dickens didn’t understand his energy. He grasped that there was a wildness in him, and so did nearly everyone who knew him. When Dostoevsky met Dickens in 1862 — a meeting that is hard to imagine — Dickens explained that there were two people inside him, “one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite.”

Out of these two people he constructed his universe of characters, good and evil. Dostoevsky’s comment is laconic and ambiguous. “Only two people?” he asked. Dickens’s public readings, which began in 1858, drew tens of thousands of people in England and America. They came not only to see the author himself but also the people who inhabited him — Scrooge and Pickwick, Micawber and Mrs. Gamp.

Those characters, and dozens more, still live with all their old vitality. And though we feel the unevenness of Dickens’s novels more plainly than when they were appearing in monthly parts, it’s easier now to see that the unevenness in most of them is symptomatic of his overpowering energy.

The man himself was uneven and could not be beaten into consistency any more than he could beat every one of his novels into perfection. The fact is that Charles Dickens was as Dickensian as the most outrageous of his characters, and he was happy to think so, too. Soon after the publication of “A Christmas Carol” in 1843, he wrote of himself to a close friend: “two and thirty years ago, the planet Dick appeared on the horizon. To the great admiration, wonder and delight of all who live, and the unspeakable happiness of mankind.” Planet Dickens feels as real as it does to us because he stalked the world around him.

And when he finally settled at his desk, he was still driving himself through a world of his own invention, peopled by characters waiting, as he said, to come “ready made to the point of the pen.”  

Editors' Note: January 18, 2012

 

In describing an anecdote about Dostoyevsky meeting Dickens, this Editorial Observer failed to note that scholars are divided about such a meeting. While some have written of it and of a letter in which Dostoyevsky was said to have described it, others have questioned the letter’s authenticity and whether the meeting occurred.

 

H.B. Robert Burns

January 25, 2012, 3:37 PM

A Toast to the Bard of Ayrshire

By ROSIE SCHAAP

It’s entirely possible that, just a few weeks ago, you sang the fine old tune “Auld Lang Syne” to welcome the New Year. You might still puzzle over the lyrics, no matter how many times you’ve sung it, and you might not know that the man responsible for the song as we know it is Robert Burns, the Scottish poet who was born on this day in 1759. “Robert Burns and ‘Auld Lang Syne,’” a lovely little exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, can take care of explaining the lyrics; seeing it would be a great way to kick off your celebration of Burns Night, the Scottish holiday marking the birth of the Scottish poet behind the song.

I’m not Scottish, but any holiday honoring a great poet — and featuring whiskey — is, in my book, a worthy occasion for all. Still, I haven’t observed Burns Night with a full supper of haggis (if you’ve never tried it, don’t be put off by its fearsome reputation — Burns hailed it as “Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race,” but it’s essentially a big oatmealy sausage), neeps & tatties (turnips and potatoes), Cranachan (a traditional Scottish dessert), whisky and singing, in over a decade. The hosts of my most lavish Burns Night supper, Susan and Angus (she’s American, he a native Glaswegian), left New York for the U.K. not long after that memorable feast. Recently, I’ve often taken a more low-key approach: I like to meet up with a friend at a cozy bar, each of us bearing a volume of Burns’s selected works. We drink a neat Scotch single malt or two (I briefly discussed my preferences in one of my Drink columns), then each choose one poem to recite. Invariably, I make a hash of many of the Scot’s words, but I like to tell myself that the feeling matters more than the pronunciation.

It’s a satisfying way to honor the Bard of Ayrshire, but I admit that I miss Susan’s refined take on Cranachan: instead of the usual parfait, she makes a variation on panna cotta (fortified with whisky), which she marries with oatcakes and raspberry sauce. An excellent and instinctive cook, Susan has, alas, never written down a recipe for it. But you can find instructions for a far more traditional Cranachan here — also delicious, and very easy to make.

But if you’d rather let someone else do the cooking (and recite the odes), you might head down to Mary Queen of Scots on the Lower East Side, where there will be haggis and bagpipes (they’re booked solid but may have room at the bar for walk-ins), or you can head up to Riverdale for a cultural celebration atAn Beal Bocht.

Whatever you do, remember the poet who wrote that “Freedom an’ whisky gang thegither!” Even if you don’t speak Scots, you get his drift. Happy Burns night.

 

believermag:

I recently conducted an interview with Joan Didion. We spoke over the phone; she from her hotel in Washington. She was on tour for Blue Nights, a reminisence about the life and death of her daughter, Quintana, and Didion’s thoughts about her own mortality. Over the next few weeks, we will be posting highlights from this interview, then it will all be posted on The Believer website.

- Sheila Heti

THE BELIEVER: When you were a little girl you wanted to be an actress, not a writer? 

JOAN DIDION: Right.

BLVR: But you said it’s okay, because writing is in some ways a performance. When you’re writing, are you performing a character?

JD: You’re not even a character. You’re doing a performance. Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.

BLVR: What is the nature of that performance? I mean, an actor performs a character—

JD: Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don’t think it’s performing a character, really, if the character you’re performing is yourself. I don’t see that as playing a role. It’s just appearing in public.

BLVR: Appearing in public and sort of saying lines—

JD: But not somebody else’s lines. Your lines. Look at me—this is me, is, I think, what you’re saying.

BLVR: And do you feel like that me is a pretty stable thing, or unstable? Is it consistent through one’s life as a writer?

JD: I think it develops into a fairly stable thing over time. I think it’s not at all stable at first. But then you kind of grow into the role you have made for yourself.

BLVR: How would you gauge the distance between the role you have made for yourself—

JD: —and the real person?

BLVR: Yeah.

JD: Well, I don’t know. The real person becomes the role you have made for yourself.