. Spinning .

Yes, I’m STILL reading Confessions of Nat Turner and will post on it soon, but it’s obvious that I haven’t been the twice-a-day poster girl here for a while. Well, there are some good reasons for that. I’m writing. And, I’m getting quite a few stories published.

So in this age of me-me-me, I’m focusing on my own writing more than reading someone else’s–though I am reading about fifteen stories a day on the writers colony site fictionaut. There’s a sense of enthusiasm and support from the writers gathered here that I’ve not found elsewhere at this high a level of quality writing. These people aren’t wannabes, they’re for the most part, published authors and editors so they have that burning fire and unrelenting drive that makes writing a big part of their lives.

In the past few months, I’ve realized my own ambitions of being published or forthcoming in literary journals such as The Blue Print Review, elimae, Bewildering Stories, The New River Journal, fourpaperletters, metazen, Litsnack, Istanbul Literary Review, and others. A Valentine’s Day Challenge turned into a group of 25 stories and poems that will be published in chapbook form and I’m glad to say that my story is included. But it’s taken me a long time to get to this point and I can’t sit and rest on my laurels. What pleases me very much is that a couple of the stories were written in hypertext and that I’m finding publishers willing to work with me on this and include it in their journals.

So that’s where I’ve been and that’s where I’ll be for a while, particularly now with many of the submission deadlines closing before the summer. I’ve got a whole batch of new stories that need endings, and a long way to go before I can rest, but Spinning and its sister Hypercompendia are not dead, just holding their breath while I play on the railroad tracks.

Mary Ellen, taking a course called Electric Literature (ain’t that cool?) at Trinity College in Hartford, CT recently brought up the question of defining literature beyond the restriction of the written word.

I’ve just started reading Richard A. Posner’s The Little Book of Plagiarism and found this:

“But “plagiarism” turns out to be difficult to define. A typical dictionary definition is ‘literary theft.’ The definition is incomplete because there can be plagiarism of music, pictures, or ideas, as well as of verbal matter, though most of the time I’ll assume that the plagiarist is a writer.”  (p. 11)

Now Posner is not a literature professor; he is a judge on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School (and I took that pretty much straight off the book jacket). It appears that to him that literature is separate from music, pictures or ideas and verbal matter. Obviously ideas can be expressed in literary form as well as any other.

So, in this day of new media, when novels are written in hypertext and read online, how will the definition of literature be affected?

Revvin up for next week’s local library book sale. Though at the rate I’m going with Ishiguro, I likely have enough to last me the rest of my life.

You know, there’s nothing to compare to the old when it comes to story writing and someone such as Chekhov:

The gloomy pines, with their rough roots that but a year ago had seen him so young, joyful and hale, now did not whisper together, but stood motionless and dumb, just as if they did not recognize him.

There is a mood set here, a change of character, personification, imagery, tone. In this setting that Chekhov has placed his main character, we feel the changes as he recovers from what may have been madness in his hallucination of the black monk. Chekhov knows how to use setting to establish a base and then use it to involve the reader in its progression through the story.

Much different, maybe old-fashioned, but very satisfying in contrast to much of what is being touted as story these days.

Or perhaps just with his character of Egor Semenych, an elderly man whose love of his garden is his life’s passion. Who worries that when he is dead, his garden will go to ruin, and even the idea of his daughter, Tania, taking it over does not console him:

She gets married, children arrive, and then there’s no time to think of the garden. What I chiefly fear is that she’ll get married to some young fellow, who’ll be stingy and will let the garden to some tradesman, and the whole place will go to the devil in the first year! In our business women are the scourge of God!

I take offense; I who start grapevines from snips of wood, cut thousands of peaches into desserts, turned stubborn raspberries into wine, make sauce, jelly and wine from the crabapples other people rake up and throw away, coaxed the rocklike quince into jewels of jelly.

Scourge of God indeed!

Within this story of a man’s preferred connections to the literary communities there is a relationship between his sister and him that begs attention. A disillusioned and heartbroken woman, Vera Semyonovna spends her time pondering the meaning of life.

“I’ve been haunted by a strange idea since yesterday. I keep wondering where we should all be if human life were ordered on the basis of non-resistance to evil?”

An interesting thought, and her brother cannot come up with an answer that puts her mind at ease. She cannot forget it and a short time later,

“You are probably right, but it seems to me, I feel something false in our resistance to evil, as though there were something concealed or unsaid. God knows, perhaps our methods of resisting evil belong to the category of prejudices which have become so deeply rooted in us, that we are incapable of parting with them, and therefore cannot form a correct judgement of them.”

Her logic carries it to a conclusion:

“Perhaps man is mistaken in thinking that he is obliged to resist evil and has a right to do so, just as he is mistaken in thinking, for instance, that the heart looks like an ace of hearts.  It is very possible in resisting evil we ought not to use force, but to use what is the very opposite of force–if you, for instance, don’t want this picture stolen from you, you ought to give it away rather than lock it up.”

Chekhov has a knack for recognizing the diversity in human thinking. He makes the lady’s theory clear and concise, and yet while we may (or may not, granting that many believe this very thing) see it as illogical, it is presented in true and honest form, exactly as our adversaries do. What Chekhov is showing us is realism.

One thing I’ve always loved about Chekhov is how he homes in on the simplest aspects of human nature or human interaction and makes it important.

In The Kiss, with an entire army and a military scenario, the focus is upon a man’s loneliness and his dreams of love based on an instant in which a strange woman unknowingly kisses him rather than her lover as expected in a dark room. In Verotchka, we have a studious young man–though at 29 he doesn’t know love. The story opens with him enjoying the recall of good fortune in spending time with a family who has been more than good to him during his stay. As he is leaving, his kind thoughts of his host’s 21 year-old daughter are turned into mass confusion as she professes her love. It is so simple, so intimate, these problems that Chekhov’s writes about and yet they are something that while encompassing the nature of all mankind, need no drama of global war, famine, illness or strife of any kind over that one on one human connection.

One more thing I’ve realized is a tying together of two completely different stories and cast of characters by detail. In Verotchka:

Ivan Alexeievitch Ogneff well recollects an August evening when he opened noisily the hall door and went out on the terrace with a light cloak and a wide-brimmed straw hat–the very hat which now, beside his top-boots lies in the dust underneath his bed.

And from The Match, as the officials break into the bedroom of the suspected murder victim,Marcus Ivanovitch Klausoff:

Beside the bed, the little table, and the single chair, there was no furniture in the room. Looking under the bed, the inspector saw a couple of dozen empty bottles, and old straw hat and a quart of vodka. Under the table lay one top boot, covered with dust.

I, of course, wonder at the meaning of the hat and boots that Chekhov has brought into each story. Is it a detail that just has stuck itself into his mind and comes out in his writing? It would seem that the head to toe coverings might indicate something more metaphorical. Or it could just be where Chekhov normally stored his hat and boots when he slept.

I’ll need to do a bit of research to find out the dates these two stories were first written or published; that may bear some clue as to meaning or it may indicate no intent of any particular meaning at all.

Another thing I note here is that even as Ishiguro’s writing in The Unconsoled is something like Chekhov’s in it’s formality, I find Chekhov’s so much easier to read and find that my interest in the characters is more easily established even as nothing dramatic or fast-paced is happening.

This article in the The Chronicle Review on Poets’ Puffery is just too funny and maybe too sadly true. Worse however, it seems to extend beyond poetry and literature to all areas of man’s life and accomplishments. I particularly liked this:

Most poets today are magnificently oppressed, lashing out fearlessly against the “mainstream,” which consists of everyone except the poet in question. Their biographies make them seem to jockey for the best of both worlds: Gerald Locklin (1941-), for example, is “an outlaw, underground poet, and college professor who has published more than 100 books of poetry and prose.” How underground can he be?

The first thing I’d point out is that Miss Rhys is very likely one of the first to present a classic novel that can possibly be considered fanfic. The first time it hit me was with the name of Grace Poole, towards the end of the book, and clues come together as we see Antoinette’s husband insisting upon calling her Bertha, and the background name of the Masons, though we are carefully never given the name of Mr. Rochester until the very end.

I must say that I truly enjoyed this rather brief novel, in that the level of insight into the characters was handled exceptionally well by Jean Rhys. Against the backdrop of a tropical island that steams in racial hatred that is either masked by condescension or openly aggressive, there is the struggle between the sexes as the main character fights to control her own life yet must submit to the power still wielded by the men in her life. Under this pressure, and with the ghost of her mother’s own madness shadowing her, Antoinette is brought down.

Rhys has given us a new view of Charlotte Bronte’s story from the madwoman’s perspective, also going back to her childhood to assemble a reason for the way she has ended up in Bronte’s England, locked up in the towers of her husband’s estate. It is an interesting story, either read completely apart from its parent narrative or as its prologue.Rhys’s own background is brought in as the base of her character.

From what I understand, this is Rhys’s last novel and the one that brought her recognition for her talent in bringing vibrant characters into a controversial situation while keeping it a fairly simple narrative plot. Her writing style is something I really respect, and though I’m not nuts about using someone else’s characters, I well understand the appeal for both Rhys and her readers. Jane Eyre is a wealth of character and questions, fully open to this sort of development.

I’m going to go ahead and call the “looking glass” image a symbol rather than metaphor. It becomes clearer when Antoinette’s husband uses the mirror to watch a confrontation between his wife and a servant who obviously harbors prejudicial hatred and disdain against her white mistress.

No one was about. The kitchen door was shut and the place looked deserted. I went up the steps along the veranda and when I heard voices stopped behind the dodor whic led into Antoinette’s room. I could see it reflected in the looking-glass. She was in bed and the girl Amelie was sweeping.  (p. 99)

There are so many secrets, so many hidden emotions between all these people that I see the looking glass as a chosen point of view of these characters. There is a distance that a mirror brings; a wall that no matter how close one gets, one cannot get beyond, even as we see ourselves and others beyond that wall. I may be that wall that is their preferred way of seeing things, clearly and yet untouchable.

As well as leit motif I suspect; the recurrence of a “looking glass,” a mirror. In this section of the narrative, the point of view has remained as first person, but the narrator has changed to be the narrator’s husband. We find out that the whirlwind romancing of Antoinette was an arrangement that he agreed to for money. On their honeymoon, as they are staying at a mountainside home of Antoinette’s that still, while shabby, has servants and is in a beautiful natural setting, she tells her new husband of a memory she has of this place:

“And then suddenly I was awake. I saw two enormous rats, as big as cats, on the sill staring at me.”
“I’m not astonished that you were frightened.”
“But I was not frightened. That was the strange thing. I stared at them and they did not move. I could see myself in the looking-glass the other side of the room, in my white chemise with a frill round the neck, staring at those rats and the rats quite still, staring at me.” (p. 82)

Earlier we had Antoinette’s description of the moment after the fire as she watched Tia after the girl had thrown a rock at her:

“We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass.”

And there are a few other references to mirrors. What I find interesting is that while the looker sees himself, and in Antoinette’s early scenario, believes Tia to be herself, a mirror is in fact the exact opposite of what we are. Simply put, our left side is our right side as we view it; very different from what others see us to be.

Is the looking glass then a metaphor for illusion? for hope or belief that we’ve no reason to take as reality?

Before the fire that destroyed her house, the narrator had a friend with whom she shared a good part of her life. They had parted in an argument that grew nasty with racial name-calling and we wondered if the bond of childish friendship, so tainted by the world in which the two girls lived, could overcome. But here, in the dark night of the fire, as the family tries to get safely away and the crowd has dispersed, the narrator sees her friend:
Then, not so far off, I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all that was left of my life as it had been.

We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her. Not to leave Coulibri. Not to go. Not. When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry, We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass. (p. 45)

Two young girls, at odds with who they are, where they are. Unable to get beyond the required behavior of their society once that bridge if innocence has been broken by knowledge. They reach out to close the gap; one with hope, one with stone.

With the mood set early on as one of quiet hatred and fear, Rhys gets us involved in dramatic action as the house is set afire and the mother, her new husband, her two children and the servants must escape for their lives.

We have an image of the mother, Annette, as prone to unhappiness, willing others to step forward rather than making life liveable for herself and her children. When she has used up all her resources to maintain a lifestyle she manages to nab a rich Englishman. When he doesn’t safely take her away from the squalor of the by now rundown homestead, she makes his life fairly miserable. He doesn’t seem to understand the hatred the natives feel for the white people. He doesn’t have the respect for them that she has learned to have to be able to live among them.

Maybe her symbol of freedom is a parrot she keeps. The bird certainly holds meaning to the natives.

I opened my eyes, everybody was looking up and pointing at Coco on the glacis railings with his feathers alight. He made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed him and he fell screeching. He was all on fire.

I began to cry. “Don’t look,” said Aunt Cora. “Don’t look.” She stooped and put her arms round me and I hid my face, but I could feel that they were not so near. I heard someone say something about bad luck and remembered it was very unlucky to kill a parrot, or even to see a parrot die. They began to go then, quickly, silently.  (p. 42)

The people had set fire to a back room where the narrator’s young brother, an invalid, slept. He was supposed to have been guarded by one of the servants. His mother ran in to save him just as his crib caught fire. Then as they all fled the flames, she tried to go back in to rescue her pet parrot.

The parrot of course couldn’t fly–his wings had been clipped by Mr. Mason, Annette’s new husband. Coco the parrot and Annette; two of a kind, flighty types that depended upon others and were held by that dependence for survival.

There’s no reason why I should force myself to read something just because it’s listed as one of the 100 books of all time and a must read. But there’s a reason why these books are listed as such, even if time has produced books far beyond it’s groundbreaking qualities.

That said, I believe I’ve so immersed myself in website changing (two weblogs and a home page) because I’m really not into Neuromancer. It indeed is a book that took the new technology of computers into a vision of a new world, and it is well written, of course, by the excellent William Gibson. While I haven’t read sci fi in a while, it was one of my favorite genres for a long time and I thought that it would be a welcoming reacquaintance. Somehow this world, which I imagine as rendered in ‘brown and white’ is just not something I’m open to right now and I think it may be best to put it aside for something more in line with my mood rather than do it injustice in my reading.

Found this somewhere on the web this morning on the newsfeed (likely from MacUpdates) and ended up downloading it myself to perhaps try it out and see if it’s a decent organizer of my reading. It’s called Book Hunter, downloaded here, and they seem to have software available for DVDs and games as well. So far, it seems kinda neat, and quite sophisticated for a freebie. Here’s a shot of the main page where the total inventory can be cataloged and sorted:

While I’ve just started playing with it a couple of minutes ago, it appears that there’s quite a bit of information that can be kept in this application. Besides the publication data and an image of the book, there is a place to put in links and I’m sure that I can link to Amazon, or even my own reviews of the book on Spinning. Here’s another screenshot of just one of four menus to fill out on each book:

This may keep me busy for a while.