Attended my first-ever writers/writing program/writing faculty/editors/agents/publishers/booksellers conference a few days ago. One among the 14,000 or so people attending the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference March 27-30. An impressive, wide-ranging, energizing event. And a few days before I found that this national event was right down the street this year in my home city of Portland, Oregon. Even though I’m not superstitious, I know a sign when I see one.
Anne Sexton
I mostly took sessions on the nature of the business of writing and the structure of the industry. Afterward I even more motivated to pursue this interest. Wish I found the conference 15 years ago, but glad to have found it now.
The ideas in my book are important and urgent to me, and funny. But trying to extract/wash/craft an exquisite silver filigree design from out of the mud I’ve glopped around it remains a challenge. Do the words from my head performs as I’d like when they run through another person’s head?
Trying to balance my free time between continuing to revise the complete manuscript, seeking agents, and continuing to tinker with a writer’s platform. With all that in mind, for National Poetry Month I’ve got “Frenzy” by Anne Sexton in mind, a poem about the creative process.
And oh, I know it’s not all a silver filigree in there. There are silver daggers in there, too.
Frenzy by Anne Sexton
I am not lazy I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in. Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf at a live heart. Not lazy. When a lazy man, they say, looks toward heaven, the angels close the windows.
Click the image for more on National Poetry Month
Oh, angels, keep the windows open so that I may reach in and steal each object, objects that tell me the sea is not dying, objects that tell me the dirt has a life-wish, that the Christ who walked for me, walked on true ground and that this frenzy, like bees stinging the heart all morning, will keep the angels with their windows open, wide as an English bathtub.
I also designed a cover from scratch. Modifying existing paintings or sculptures of Zeus is, like, RIGHT THERE as an idea but since I don’t own the copyright to those artworks I decided to play with colors and typefaces and a simple design that I would clearly own. That cover design is in this post.
Have you used Wattpad before? It’s vast and active, but looks like a good way to interact with comments and sharing posts. Let me know if you have pointers.
My novel Zeus: The Autobiography combines mythology and parody of celebrity autobiography. What if a major deity decided to dictate the details of his life, especially the more sensational elements, to a modern-day scribe?
The story starts with the beginning of existence, the formation of the earth and its mating with the sky in a celestial love scene. Then the creation of the Titans and monsters, then of the Olympian gods including Zeus. How they battled for power, established rule, created mortals, family issues, and breeding with immortal spouses and other immortals and mortals on the side. Then various heroes come into play, the Trojan War, Greek history, Roman history, and the emergence of Christianity. I could not bring myself to overtly bring Zeus into modern times, with him, say, being startled by microwave ovens, video billboards, or the internet. But sly commentary on modern topics is woven throughout the work.
I’m posting the first chapter of this 19-chapter novel to get your feedback. Following chapters get chattier and funnier and dirtier and more provocative. READ THE INTRO & CHAPTER ONE and let me know: Do you like it? Do you want to read more?
If you know me, message me. Otherwise please leave a comment on this site and share this post out with others. I want to spark conversations.
“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.” – William Butler Yeats, “Anima Hominus“
Goddamn, I have got to get away from dunking my head in the politics bucket, and from the politics commentary bucket, then commenting on the politics commentary bucket, and put pen to paper on wrapping up the dirty book project.
Writing is progressing, but done in isolation. Commenting on political rhetoric is in the open and full of commiseration and wit and friends amusing each other. Maybe misanthropy would lead to more spans of time to tune things out and focus?
Note to the New York Times Book Review: if your cover review has “bestrides […] like a […] colossus” in its second sentence my self-preserving cliché survival mechanism kicks in and I cannot retain anything farther.
Now, I hardly read. At all. But the few things I do read I often re-read multiple times. Harold Bloom’s 80s & 90s books, especially The Western Canon (which I wrote about here) among them, and to a lesser extent The Book of J and the The Anxiety of Influence. So far as I can tell, the last few decades Bloom has largely been rehashing the same approach: encomium to classic/canon literature and comparing one established author to another even if he has already compared them to each other in other works. This new book, The Daemon Knows, appears to be more of the same. Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator.
April is National Poetry Month, here’s a short one to fire up the writing pistons:
Fog By Carl Sandburg
The fog comes on little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.
There’s a recording of Carl Sandburg reading the poem. I came across it during a long drive while listening to an anthology of poets reading their own work – part of an effort to make myself smarter by choosing literature over listening to podcasts of comedians talking to other comedians about that one time they did that one thing.
Anyway, the recording is on several videos people have posted on YouTube, but here’s an adorable reading that appealingly has images of cats throughout. Including a photo of a cat in the fog!
The death of Robin Williams got me to re-read The World According to Garp for the first time in several decades. I saw the movie in a theater (hip parents) at the age of 13, and after watching the movie a few times on home video, I read the book around age 16 or 17.
Back then, I was very dialed in to its dark humor. By that point, I could relate to the sexual elements (#ExplanaBrag) but had to synthesize and speculate what it was like to be in an adult relationship. The last fifth of the book is almost unrelentingly sad. The final line, which Irving said was originally much earlier in the book, then kept getting nudged throughout composition until it finally reached the end: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.” My teenage brain, as teenage brains do, may have confused feeling sad with feeling depth.
Back then, when filling out college applications that required an answer to what-book-inspired-you type questions, I cited Garp. These answers were probably embarrassingly shallow. My memory is they focused on the book making me feel like an odd sense of humor and morbid perspective were actually okay. Despite that shallow response, a couple colleges accepted me anyway. I also sent in an epic parody that was a hit in one college’s admissions office, with multiple staff people giving compliments when I stopped in.
Even then, into now, I am distracted by a couple things about John Irving’s image.
David Bowie endorses reading
My high school Advanced Junior English teacher had a poster of John Irving in wrestling gear (maybe also with protective headgear) in a badass/beefcake photo. I can’t find it in online image searches, but it struck me funny: like a fitness campaign for writers with the subtext “Hey, writers! Shake off the burden of consciousness and ennui! You can exercise, too!” Like those “Read” posters featuring celebrities to encourage youngsters to use libraries.
Irving’s character, T.S. Garp, is a wrestler and later a wrestling coach. Irving himself plays a wrestling referee in the movie. Later profiles of Irving during and after the campaign for the Garp movie featured a LOT about exercising. “Look at me, I’m a writer who can benchpress! And you other writers who can’t or won’t? Well, you should [looks writers up and down], consider it.”
John Irving and Robin Williams in “The World According to Garp”
I wasn’t a writer at that time, but that image and persona projection wants to nag me into exercising more. I did not start exercising because of it.
The book retains its charms over me, perhaps more, now with a few secret writing projects here and there done, fatherhood, life, all making Garp even easier to relate to than it was at the age of 17. The sentences are short and muscular. It’s difficult to not think of Irving, who is short and muscular. Jenny Fields, Garp’s single mother who becomes a political and feminist icon after her book A Sexual Suspect becomes part of a political movement, seemed less severely funny and more sensible to me reading it as an adult. Should I worry?
I have not read another John Irving book, and probably will not. I like Garp plenty, and cried over the Philadelphia Eagles memorial to Roberta Muldoon near the end, but it takes a lot of effort for me to read a living writer. Why? Haven’t pinned that down. And I want to keep reading Garp a singular event. I will continue to read/watch interviews with Irving. And, of course, he’s right to endorse exercise for everyone, including (especially) introspective creative types.
