So, my first class of winter term begins tomorrow. I almost wrote that it’s a blank page for the core writing workshop to begin, but for me and the others it will be the continuation of an ongoing struggle. A struggle to work through what it is we need to write and to develop a voice to say it.
Another graduate writing workshop and a literature class on Camus and existentialism (Camus divorced himself from existentialism).
There’s no interview process for writing fiction. There are no background checks, no drug or character quality tests. You don’t need any spiritual awareness, but it helps. You don’t have to know philosophy, history, and so on, but it helps. You don’t need to have read thousands of books in your lifetime, but it helps. You don’t need to be a specialist in anything, but it helps. You don’t need an expensive education, but it helps. You don’t need to know famous people, but it helps. You don’t need to be well-traveled, but it helps.
Writing fiction is just the writer and him/herself and the raw universe. It may be the most difficult art a human being can create, because it entails the critical necessity for honesty and observation, neither which is rewarded or encouraged these days. It’s the exploration of what I carry inside me as a human being, without expectation, without explanations or answers; it’s all about experience and details, to paraphrase Camus about the absurd artist.
Last night we had a huge debate in my core fiction writing class. We were discussing David Means’s short story “Saulte Ste. Marie.” A woman in the story named Marsha describes in vivid, gruesome detail the beating of another character named Charlene. Not even film could possibly depict the visceral and bloody blows. Means spends the better part of a page on this, and then Marsha confesses that the scene may or may not have taken place. It happened off-stage, so if it actually “happened” or not remains ambiguous.
Tom Bissell, our instructor, goes around the class and asks our reaction to the stories we read. When he got to a woman (I’ll call her Rachael), her reaction was that she hated the story. She has studied the scientific effect of imagery on the brain, and she said regardless of the intent, regardless of whether the story is true or not, when we read stories our brains are affected, and when the stories are brutally violent like “Saulte Ste. Marie,” the imprint is destructive. That makes sense to me. Our brains are plastic and sensitive and easily imprinted with impressions and images. Rachael sees absolutely no redeeming value in reading the details of a woman getting beaten nearly to death on her face. I see her point. Clearly.
On the other hand, my take on the whole thing is that the range of human experience and emotion is extreme and varied; some might say infinite, in fact. To refuse to write or read about any aspect of human experience is to cut ourselves off from our humanity. Sex was appalling to read about in the nineteenth century (hence the lurid appeal of vampires); violence is the sex of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I’m not condoning violence. What I am saying is that when we censor various aspects of human experience, we are as good as censuring our existence. That’s just my opinion about a hot topic.
Post-thought: What does “vi-” mean? Is it a prefix? Vital, vitamin, vivacious, vivid, vivisection…violence? I’m not an entymologist and dictionaries aren’t conclusive. Do vital (life) and violence have the same prefix? Interesting.
Update: So Tom Bissell, our instructor, got in touch with David Means and told him about our class discussion on (gratuitous?) violence in literature. Apparently he was distraught that his story had caused such anguish in a student. What I learned about myself in this episode was that I was only parroting what I thought was avant garde. I didn’t give much thought to the effect of literary violence. I must applaud the student who showed conviction for what she believed in.
Yeah! Tonight at class I asked my really warm and friendly classmate where she got her wonderful notebook (the one I mentioned yesterday) and she showed me the name of the company. It’s Miquelrius, from Spain. Of course I’ve never heard of this brand, so inundated I’ve been with Moleskeine. So of course I ran home and jumped on the computer and searched for it. Voila! Found it. Click on the image to get to the website.
Have you ever seen someone with a working journal that intrigues you so much that you wish you knew where they’d found it? I’ve been looking everywhere for such a journal. It’s very THICK–maybe three or four inches, with a soft black cover, lined pages, and maybe 6″ x 4″ .
My dimensions may be off, but it’s the thickest journal I’ve ever seen, and it seems practical because you can keep your notes for a far longer time. They’re at hand, all together, instead of in a stack of individual books which you have to sort through if you don’t have a decent filing system (I don’t–I fly by the seat of my pants).
I’ve run out of ideas about what to plug into the search engine. “thick blank journal,” “thick blank book,” “extra-thick journal,” “extra-thick blank book,” “softcover + thick blank book,” etc. etc. I don’t see anything like it anywhere, in any country on the internet. But the person in my core writing workshop class has to have bought it somewhere because it doesn’t look handmade. It actually looks like a soft-cover Moleskeine, but I checked. That company doesn’t make books like that…at least not to my knowledge. <Sigh>
So why don’t I just ask you ask? Good idea. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll keep you posted.
You know the old saying, “a house is not a home,” right? I’ve moved around so much in my life since the day I was born that I’ve never really lived in a place that felt like home. As a result I’ve “misplaced” many objects that I didn’t miss until much later, and some of them carried a world of memory with them. I don’t know why.
Some of these objects were books. Have you ever had a favorite childhood book? I had an old book among my childhood collections that I was always aware of, and occasionally thumbed through because the images took me into other worlds; some of the stories also continue to haunt me today. But I just realized this year that I haven’t seen that book in years. I doubt I would have gotten rid of it on purpose. I have other childhood books that I cared a lot less about.
The book was a specific edition of The Happy Prince and Other Tales, by Oscar Wilde published by the Literary Guild of America: New York, 1940, 148 pages. Illustrated by Everett Shinn. The book had pictorial end papers and several full page color illustrations as well as numerous line drawings printed at the page edges beside the text.
The preface was written for adults by the illustrator Everett Shinn. The stories in the book included The Happy Prince; The Fisherman and his Soul; The Birthday of the Infanta; The Young King; The Star-Child; The Nightingale and the Rose (my favorite) ; and The Selfish Giant.
I didn’t know who Oscar Wilde was, much less that “Happy Prince” has gay implications, much less what “gay” even meant.
But now I recall the cover which is repeated in more extensive format in the end papers and I recall the wonderful line drawings.
Found a tin of vintage labels from Paris at a local hand-made paper store. Here’s an example (I’ll post more from time to time because I enjoy them, and you might too).
When we moved into this 1912 house (we rent) last year, we found a raggety old 1909 edition of Webster’s International Dictionary in the basement.
The dictionary has 1,681 pages of word entries and generous supplemental sections, with footnotes in a rear section that politely ask, “Webster’s International Dictionary is invaluable in the household, and to the professional man. Do you own it?” and “Will you not try to have your school supplied with Webster’s International Dictionary?” as well as “Ninety-nine per cent of the newspapers and periodicals of the United States adhere to Webster,” and “There are no better judges of definition than the courts of law where justice often hangs on the meaning of a word.” Sentiments of an obsolete age, for sure.
The supplemental material includes a wonderful “Classified Selection of Pictorial Illustrations” in finely detailed lithographs, a section on Indo-Germanic Roots in English, and a 
memoir of Noah Webster, and an Editor’s Preface to the Edition of 1864, among other features.
The dictionary is a frozen time capsule of culture at the turn of the 20th century and a sort of mini-encyclopedia of authoritarian knowledge. Regardless of its outdated patriarchal world-view, it holds a wealth of knowledge of forgotten culture.
When I was in seventh grade, a classmate of mine memorized the entire Webster’s dictionary, but I was too oblivious to ask her which edition. I can’t remember why she did this, but after Sister Dorothy Mary announced this news to the class, everyone regarded the student as a celebrity.
