I've been sick

Another extended break. Not from the reading, but from the blogging.

My essay for today was "A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls" by G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton defends the romances that the lower class read. They may not be good art, but they are not meant to be. And they convey a more solid core of morality than the higher reading of the educated. I like where he says, "Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." Wow. Interesting to read this after seeing what a high value Jefferson placed on fiction as well, though for different reasons. I also recently read O. Henry's story "Schools and schools." Also worth recommending. I think that as popular as this piece was, it would probably qualify as art to Chesterton. As Chesterton also says, "A work of art can hardly be too short for its climax is its merit. A story can never be too long, for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, like the last halfpenny or the last pipelight." How true. Few would want to continue reading about O. Henry's characters. That is not their point. Very different when it comes to Robin Hood. To find something in-between, I think you would have to talk about Sherlock Holmes. We are always happy to begin reading another case. We hardly care about the case. It is Holmes and Watson we're reading for. Though from the outside, the stories appear to exist for the plot. My poem for tonight is "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. It's in the collection "Break, Blow, Burn" by Camille Paglia. She has commentary on the poem. I don't. Perhaps because I am a chicken. (Hey! Do read the poem before you imagine you know what that means here.)

Recent "Eats"

I just finished an essay by Gore Vidal on "Robert Graves and the Twelve Caesars." He seems to appreciate how Graves doesn't tidy the Caesars up like many folk do, or more to the point, interpret each as an aberration from a supposed norm. No. According to Vidal, this is what the typical person would do with absolute power. Some of this seems to be a defense of Vidal's own understanding of sexuality. But it also seems to overlap with certain corollaries of a staunch doctrine of Original Sin. In any case, along with Vidal, I do prefer those writers who don't tidy things up too much.

I've also read a couple of essays by G.K. Chesterton recently. There is a lot of cheap Chesterton available for the Kindle.

I haven't stopped "dieting"

Last Tuesday I had forgotten to take blood pressure meds for a couple days and fainted and fell into some metal shelves. I'm doing fine, now, but this interrupted many things. I have read some stories and essays in the intervening days, but have not posted. That should be remedied soon, but I wanted to let people know I see this as a long term project.

Day Five

For my fifth day, I read an essay by Robert Frost titled "The Figure a Poem Makes" (1939). This essay discussed abstraction in poetry. What you might get if all you cared about was sound, apart from any meaning, for example. Frost seemed to be arguing almost the exact opposite from T.S. Eliot. My favorite line was this: "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting." There must be a natural unfolding, one that might even surprise the writer him or herself during the writing process. This is against any idea of controlling one's poem. Polish might be important afterwards. You cannot polish it into being, however.

For my short story I read "The Chaser" by John Collier. Three pages long. A reminder of what can be achieved with a few words. If you follow me into this diet, realize that choosing the shortest story possible because of length is NOT cheating. You might read a gem of a story.

For my day's poem I count the one by A.E. Houseman read in honor of luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. You can read it here.

Day Four

My essay for this day was "Pamplona in July" by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was in Spain with his wife, and talked about the bull run and the matadors. My first exposure to Pamplona was the beginning of the movie City Slickers. James Hillman has also spoken of the career of Monolete, and how to read a life backwards instead of forwards (Manolete was a mama's boy because his soul knew that in the future it had to face bulls). Some extra material on The Looney Tunes Gold Collection spoke of travelling to Spain to record the crowds during a bullfight, and how hard it was to get generic cheering rather than cheering with someone prominently yelling something you didn't want in the recording. I was impressed with the fact that they used not only an authentic crowd, but one from a real bullfight. Then a few weeks ago I watched a Netflix film of Orson Wells at the bullfights in Madrid. Hemingway's account fit these descriptions pretty well, except that more people died during the bull runs earlier in the century. Also I enjoyed his discussion of how a normal man doesn't stand a chance versus a matador in the esteem of his wife. We're just lucky more women haven't seen bullfights. I don't know whether or not this is true, but it's certainly funny.

My short story was "UNDR" by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is a great writer if you wish to follow the Bradbury diet, but can't commit too much time. Borges went blind in early adulthood. (He says his world was not black, but bluish-green. Interesting note.) This made him choose to write shorter projects because he could keep track of them better. I suppose when he edited, he could find his way around more easily. His average work was about five pages long. If bedtime rolls around and you haven't read, Borges won't man an abbreviated night's sleep. "Undr" explores a kind of idea that Borges enjoyed exploring. Since he was a rare explorer of the idea, it is difficult to articulate, especially without offering a spoiler. But what I found interesting is how this rare idea occurred again in Robert Frost's essay the following night. When you remove one element of a work, what can the rest of the elements carry? Think of musical transcription, where something written for orchestra gets transcribed for piano. Certain keys end up standing in for the woodwinds, and others for the brass. Something is surely lost, but more is occasionally carried than you imagined possible. Borges's story suggests the possibility of a one word poem.

My poem for the day was longer than one word, however. It was "Corpus Christi Carol." The poem seems to be a riddle. I can find more than one solution to it, though I don't think I have found the right one. [Since posting a few minutes ago, I could see it being the inspiration for the folk song "One Tin Soldier," though. The more I think about it, the better it fits.]

Day Three

Except for the essay, I did my reading late last night.

I actually read two essays earlier in the day. One was T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," from 1919. The other was Cynthia Ozick's "A Drugstore in Winter" from 1982. They make for interesting comparison. Eliot argues against individuality. And given what he means by it, he may be right. The poet must learn from tradition so that he doesn't sound like everyone else in his own age. Tradition will free him from faddishness. So far, so good. But there was also an idea of being a laboratory for emotion even while not having the emotion decide what went into the writing that I found cold. Cynthia Ozick's piece was quite different. She wrote autobiography of a kind where she knew that the nitty gritty details of place and time were likely to hit a resonating frequency in others from other very different places and times. I think she showed the good side of individuality. Yet I also knew that the first sense of Eliot's tradition might have taught her how to do this well. In any case, I think Eliot is more right than wrong, but I think the recent discussion on reason and emotion carried on by someone like Antonio D'Amasio would show where Eliot fell short.

My short story was by Roald Dahl, and my poem by William Drummond of Hawthorndon. Both of these were worth reading, but I don't feel like writing about them now. Anything worth saying about them will take some development. It may well be worth it, but I can't quickly jot worthwhile notes on those.

Day Two

I went to the library to find some of the material Bradbury mentioned. I found a book of stories by John Collier, and a collection of Greatest American Essays of the Century, which had an essay by a writer Bradbury liked, Loren Eiseley, even if it did not have the specific essay, "The Fire Apes," which he said was fantastic.

The story "The Frog Prince" was absolutely hilarious. About five pages long. Saying anything about what happens would spoil it. But I will say that the best part was all in dialog. The essay I read was from 1956 and called "The Brown Wasps." There was a lot of beautiful anthropomorphism in the essay. I'm sure some naturalists could have attacked him on that score. The images from this essay will linger with me, I think. I also got a sense that some writers know how to write about loneliness in a way that makes it communal. In a certain sense it seems to take the bite out of it and allow people to see a beauty in it. I'll be keeping my eyes open for more of that. The poem I read was "The Epicure: Sung by one in the Habit of a Town Gallant" by Thomas Jordan (ca.1612-1685). A funny carpe diem poem, saying let us eat, drink, and be merry, for we'll all be gone or what have you "a hundred years hence." Some reference to a hundred years hence is found at the end of each stanza, and the minor variations are interesting.