May 31, 2007
Happy place
These images always make me think of my grandparents house in Newton - and my aunt Regina, who had a big book of Maxfield Parrish's work in her room. I was transported by him. Still love him - and every year when I buy a wall calendar, it's a Maxfield Parrish one. Maybe it's the smidgeon of romantic spirit left in me (Keith would laugh at me for saying that. "You're over-the-top romantic, Sheila. Gimme a break.") - but I find him almost gushingly fantastic. I look at his stuff and I find myself going off into lovely beautiful worlds in my head, ramparts upon ramparts, vaulted clouds in the sky. You know. Romantic! I'm not generally into fantasy (as a genre), or pretty Renaissance Faire princesses running through misty woods wearing big cone-hats. Not my style. But Maxfield Parrish? Bring it on. There's something psychedelic about him. Druggy. (More on Parrish here.)
Happy happy place!
(That last one is my favorite of all - I wrote a wee bit about it here.)
More happy places here!
The Books: "Sugar and Other Stories" - 'The Dried Witch' (A.S. Byatt)
Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:
This excerpt is from "The Dried Witch", another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories - by A.S. Byatt. This is an early version of one of Byatt's fables. It has the sound of myth, or legend ... there's an impersonal tone to the narrator (which is quite different from the more chatty or subjective tones of many of her narrators - like the one in 'Racine and the Tablecloth', among others). The story takes place in a primitive society (primitive meaning: not modern, no dishwashers or cars, so just calm down) - perhaps in Africa - somewhere definitely hot. It's not a Muslim community - the villagers believe in many gods. But it has the same hatred and suspicion of women. You just can't win if you're a woman. Everything is your fault. Infidelity? You brought it on. Sexuality is in women's hands, completely. You're raped? Your fault. The crime? Being a woman. Don't try to win, you won't be able to. Women are beheaded for being alone with a man who is not her relative. That fear hangs over all of the interpersonal relationships in the village. A-Oa is the heroine of our story ... which feels like an analogy for menopause, but I may be reading too much into it. It feels like the devastation of not being OF USE anymore. A-Oa is a woman who has suffered extraordinary losses. She had four sons - all of whom died. Her husband went off to fight in some war - and never returned. The village now suspects that she is a "jinx". She is bad luck. Not only is she bad luck - but she is purposefully malevolent. (She actually isn't - but that's how the village feels about her). She scares them. It's like whatever bad luck hovers around her is catching. There's also a fiery drought on. Everything is drying up. Is this the fault of the "jinx" too? The whole story has a malevolent feeling to it - A-Oa is blameless, yet is she? It's almost like the demands of communal living insist on a literal interpretation of events - not too much room for grey areas. A-Oa has interactions with people full of subtlety, like we all do ... but again: the literalists will take over, they turn everything ugly - those literal-minded people ... and that's what happens here. Meanwhile, A-Oa is also overwhelmingly aware of the dryness of her own body, the lack of saliva - it's a torment.
I would say the story is about 5 or 6 pages too long. It loses its impact just a tiny bit .... the ending is powerful and terrible. Byatt could have gotten there quicker.
Here's an excerpt.
Excerpt from from "The Dried Witch", another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories - by A.S. Byatt.
The courtyards were busy and chattering: worshippers moved between greater and lesser temples, brown-robed monk ofs carried baskets of rain and vegetables, families squatted in the dust and argued. In the greater Temple were the huge figures of the Wise Ones, three and awful, taller and wider than the eye could ever see at once, so that it was as much as you could do to focus on a heavy knee, or monstrous, mountainous hand, or far away the three faces, up in the dark of the roofspace, staring quietly out over the heads of the worshipping ants, wonderfully, characteristically blank, bearing a family resemblance in their perfect stillness. The brass lamps were all at the level of the altars, which were themselves below the level of the vast feet, which were dusty but not travel-stained. This gave the illusion that the Wise Ones towered away for ever, out of sight, out of apprehension, out of form. A-Oak bought an incense stick from a monk, lit it, and stood it with the others on one of the smaller altars; she bowed repeatedly, and set out her dishes of beans and fruit before kneeling to pray, her black and silver hair in the dust. It seemed to her that she did not know how to pray or what to ask for. In the past she had asked for sons: or to be forgiven for whatever had caused the sons she had to sicken and fail. To one side of her, standing beside the altar, was a small squat brass boy, a fat and polished child, not dusty like everything else in the huge, smoky and rattling place, but gleaming where countless soft dark hands had touched and caressed him. He wore a small scarlet cloth on a string, just large enough to cover whatever he had between his legs. It was known that his touch brought luck, brought boy-children. On every previous visit A-Oa had touched him. When she was young and humorous she had tickled him like a lover, laughing back quietly at her husband; after the loss of the first child she had touched the warm metal with fearful fingertips. Once she had come with Da-Shin and had touched the boy furtively, laying her fingers over his metal ones, asking friendship, complicity. He had a smile that took up his whole face, curling both mouth and eyebrow corners. She tried to tell the Wise Ones that she was afraid, that she was not herself, that there were changes she couldn't describe. All she was conscious of was the presence of the grinning boy, the sheen of countless handlings, gratified or denied, the dangling red cloth that was never lifted. She thought: when I am dead, this will be over, meaning by "this" the boy and all his works. The Wise Ones vouchsafed no relief, perhaps because she expected so little, was closed to their silent lines of life as her tongue and palate were to water.
May 30, 2007
Writer's rooms
Edna O'Brien's room. I'm lovin' it. The fireplace. Beckett and Joyce - and also the red. There's something very nice about that red. Also, the "harvest of dregs" inscription made me laugh.
The bookcases in Kureishi's writing room make me want to weep from envy.
And there's something I really like in this one too. The slants, the bookshelves - and that CHAIR!
Oh, and since I'm in the "Byatt" section of my bookshelf - for the daily excerpt - here is HER writer's room. That one doesn't appeal to me as much - too modern - that lamp doesn't work for me (as inspiration, I mean) but I am interested to hear her words about why the room works for her.
One size most definitely does not fit all.
More glimpses into "writer's rooms" here.
COMMONPLACE BOOK
Member my old commonplace book? Here are a ton more. Many of them are writers either talking about their writing, or commenting on other writers. I feel I should say this: whether or not I agree with the sentiments of the quotes is irrelevant to me. It's the quote ITSELF I am interested in. [For example: I agree with all of the quotes bad-mouthing James. I hate James. But I am also highly interested in the opinions of those who found him brilliant. It's all good to me. It's all part of learning more about life, and writing, and people.] I feel I have to say this because when I've posted such quotes before, some readers get defensive - like: "Hey! I love Henry James!" or whatever - some tiresome remark like that. The quotes are not endorsements one way or the other. I like the quotes because they are a montage of artistic comments ... it's a jigsaw-puzzle of responses, and reading over them make me feel alive. They make me remember my own intellectual curiosity, my own ambitions ... and they make me love (all over again) people who READ. People who inquire, and love, and hate things strongly. This is why I keep those quotes.
My commonplace book is to remind me never to stop questioning, never to think, "There. Now I'm DONE".
It helps keep me in the conversation.
I hope you enjoy the quotes - I hope they make you think, or make you laugh (some very funny ones!!) God bless Oscar Wilde and his wit!
Commonplace
Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?
Thank you!
Thomas Lanier Williams
-- Tennessee Williams, letter to editor Harriet Monroe, March 11, 1933
Commonplace
Dear Madame, you make an absurd, though common mistake in supposing that any human creature can help you to be an authoress, if you cannot become one in virtue of your own powers.
-- Charles Dickens, letter to reader, Dec. 27, 1866
Commonplace
Had I been a passionate man ... we should now have separated, I living in Montevideo as H.M. Minster and she breeding Samoyeds in the Gobi desert.
-- Harold Nicholson, diary entry, Dec. 24, 1933 - on his marriage to Vita Sackville-West
Commonplace
I have a higher and greater standard of principle [than George Washington]. Washington could not lie. I can lie but I won't.
-- Mark Twain, 1871
Commonplace
The works of [Samuel] Richardson ... are pictures of high life as conceived by a bookseller, and romances as they would be spiritualized by a Methodist preacher.
-- Horace Walpole, 1764
Commonplace
Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
-- Heinrich Heine
Commonplace
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
-- Emily Dickinson
Commonplace
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
-- James Thurber
Commonplace
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of 15.
-- Willa Cather
Commonplace
I have no more right to the name of a poet than a maker of mousetraps has to that of an engineer.
-- William Cowper
Commonplace
It resembles nothing that I know of, and reminds me of everything I admire.
-- Jean Cocteau on Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way"
Commonplace
Like Peter Pan, he never grew up, and he lived his own stories with such intensity that he ended by believing them himself.
-- Ford Madox Ford on Jack London, 1916
Commonplace
It is curious how vanity helps keep the successful man and wrecks the failure. In old days half of my strength was my vanity.
-- Oscar Wilde letter to friend following Wilde's release from jail, Nov. 16, 1897
Commonplace
His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.
-- Edmund Wilson on Evelyn Waugh
Commonplace
Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.
-- Fran Lebowitz
Commonplace
I don't mind what the opposition say of me, so long as they don't tell the truth.
-- Mark Twain, 1880
Commonplace
The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things and yet are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
-- TS Eliot, 1950
Commonplace
Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or engraver into my hand ....
-- William Blake, letter to William Hayley, Oct. 23, 1804
Commonplace
It was good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.
-- Samuel Butler on Thomas Carlyle
Commonplace
Lord Sandwich: "Wilkes, you will die of a pox or the gallows."
John Wilkes: "That depends, my lord, on whether I embrace your lordship's mistress or your lordship's principles."
Commonplace
To write adequately one must know, above all, how bad are one's first drafts.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Commonplace
I'm a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard and cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent and inscrutable that she repays friendship.
-- Virginia Woolf on Katherine Mansfield, journal entry, Oct. 11, 1917
Commonplace
Some drunk dame told [James Thurber] at a party that she would like to have a baby by him. Jim said, "Surely you don't by unartificial insemination!"
-- Nunnally Johnson, letter to Groucho Marx, Oct. 9 1961
Commonplace
Thomas Hardy taught me to like Edgar Allan Poe, and Poe taught me about those 'Mimes in the form of God on high, blind prophets that come and go.'
--John Cowper Powys
Commonplace
I'm writing my third autobiography. The other two were premature.
-- Louis Untermeyer, said on his 90th birthday
Commonplace
It is in order to shine sooner that authors refuse to rewrite. Despicable. Begin again.
-- Albert Camus, Sept. 30, 1937
Commonplace
For my part I keep the Commandments, I love my neighbour as my selfe, and to avoid Coveting my neighbour's wife I desire to be covered by her; which you know is quite another thing.
-- William Congreve, Sept 27, 1700
Commonplace
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
-- Red Smith
Commonplace
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Commonplace
Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn't time for it.
-- George Bernard Shaw to actress Ellen Terry on performing Shakespeare, 1896
Commonplace
[I am working on] a poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades, unless it becomes a bore.
-- Ezra Pound, 1915
Commonplace
I always write my last line, my last paragraphs, my last page first.
-- Katherine Anne Porter
Commonplace
I don't play golf, am not a joiner. I vote Democrat, read as much as my eyes will stand, and work at my trade day in and day out. When I can find nothing better to do, I write.
-- William Carlos Williams
Commonplace
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
-- Robert Benchley
Commonplace
The possessor of a brilliant and almost inimitable prose style, and of scarcely any ideas at all.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald on Sherwood Anderson
Commonplace
The most complete example of human symbiosis I have ever seen.
-- Edmund Wilson to John Dos Passos on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
Commonplace
Well, I hope they understand one another - nobody else would.
-- Wordsworth, 1846 - musing on the marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
Commonplace
Now, my darling Nora, I want you to read over and over all I have written you. Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual; all of it is myself.
-- James Joyce, letter to Nora, Sept. 7 1909
Commonplace
In the time of your life, live - so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and where it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed.
-- William Saroyan, preface to "Time of Your Life"
Commonplace
I am earnest, terribly earnest. Carlyle bending over the history of Frederick the Great was a mere trifle, a volatile butterfly, in comparison.
-- Joseph Conrad to critic Edward Garnelt
Commonplace
I am following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.
-- Dorothy Parker
Commonplace
The fictional Christophr Robin ... and his real-life namesake were not always on the best of terms ... In pessimistic moments ... it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders.
-- Christopher Milne, son of AA Milne
Commonplace
The simple truth is that she was the poet, and I the clever person by comparison.
-- Robert Browning on his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1871
Commonplace
The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in.
-- Samuel Pepys, diary, Aug. 12 1665 - during the plague
Commonplace
He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia he didn't know; there was little else that he did.
-- Auden on Tennyson
Commonplace
First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry ... Consequently, as I think, she starved into austere emaciation a very fine original gift.
-- Virginia Woolf on Christina Rossetti, journal entry, Aug 5 1918
Commonplace
I go to bed feeling terribly Edwardian and back-number, and yet, thank God, delighted that people like Wystan Auden should actually exist.
-- Harold Nicolson after a reading by Auden
Commonplace
[I have been] weeping steadily because once again I had come to the great healing chapter of the brothers Karamazov. It always chokes me up and fills me with a love of mankind which sometimes lasts till noon of the following day.
-- Alexander Woollcott to Mrs. Otis Skinner, Aug. 2 1935
Commonplace
If I could I would work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.
-- Emily Bronte
Commonplace
He hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him.
-- Oscar Wilde on George Bernard Shaw
Commonplace
What a commonplace genius he has; or a genius for the commonplace.
-- DH Lawrence on Thomas Hardy, 1928
Commonplace
I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.'
-- Edith Sitwell on Virginia Woolf
Commonplace
You never cut anything out of a book you regret later.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald to Thomas Wolfe, who was struggling over his revisions of "Of Time and the River"
Commonplace
When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes, and that is my idea.
-- Ernest Hemingway
Commonplace
With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.
-- James Thurber, 1955
Commonplace
[Henry] James felt buried in America; but he came here to be embalmed.
-- George Bernard Shaw on Henry James becoming a British subject
Commonplace
... this voluble Jack-of-all-Trades ... this carnivorous vegetarian.
-- NY Times critic on George Bernard Shaw, 1898
Commonplace
He is a very great loss. He had a large loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.
-- Queen Victoria, journal entry - 2 days after the death of Charles Dickens, June 11, 1870
Commonplace
The picture of you in the newspaper saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit line in the neighborhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street.
-- TS Eliot, letter to Groucho Marx, June 3, 1964
Commonplace
A most surprising compound of plain grandeur, sentimental affection, and downright nonsense.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman
Commonplace
I could readily see in Emerson ... the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
-- Herman Melville
Commonplace
Her writings are a capital picture of real life, with all the little wheels and machinery laid bare like a patent clock. But she explains and fills out too much.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Jane Austen
Commonplace
A delicious little old dandy ... Much of what he said would have been commonplace but for his exquisite delivery.
-- Evelyn Waugh on Max Beerbohm, 1947
Commonplace
... rather ill and rather American ... But by no means to be sniffed at.
-- Lytton Strachey on TS Eliot, May 14, 1919
Commonplace
... a purge, at the end of it one is empty ... like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.
-- Daphne du Maurier on writing a book
Commonplace
I heard TS Eliot read his poems the other night ... He is an actor and really put on a better show than Shaw.
-- Edmund Wilson to John Dos Passos, May 11, 1933
Commonplace
For several days after my first book was published I carried it about in my pocket, and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.
-- James M. Barrie, 1888
Commonplace
It really is most unfortunate that she rules out copulation - not the ghost of it visible - so that her presentation of things becomes little more ... than an arabesque --- an exquisite arabesque, of course.
-- Lytton Strachey, 1927, on "To the Lighthouse"
Commonplace
Well, Jim I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell.
-- Nora Joyce, letter to Jimmy, 1940
Commonplace
"Yes, that's a good one, and tomorrow I shall be telling it on the Golden Floor."
-- A.E. Houseman, 1936 - he was on his deathbed, and his doctor told him a dirty joke. This was Houseman's response
Commonplace
"I quite agree with you, sir, but what can two do against so many?"
-- George Bernard Shaw, 1894. "Arms and the Man", opening night - unanimous cheers and hullaballoo - Shaw goes up onto the stage to take his bow. As he does so - ONE man boos. And the quote above was Shaw's response to the boo-er.
Commonplace
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.
-- Oscar Wilde
Commonplace
I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, and it's splendid.
-- Thornton Wilder on his 70th birthday
Commonplace
Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new, but that is enough.
-- Eudora Welty