LITERATURE: The Consolation of Philosophy – Application to the Times

Posted on January 12, 2006 by susan

Just received the book on this today, although I had ventured into it online but found such difference in the translations.

Of course I realize that there is no purpose to taking these readings and applying them to oneself personally, as they are meant rather to help one personally to understand human nature and mankind as a whole, but I found some immediate relevancy to exactly my own situation when I opened the mail today, just from the Introduction by Richard H. Green:

(…) but its general popularity and its pervasive influence in later literature derive from its humane consideration of profound human problems which have confronted all men everywhere.  The apparent power and success of injustice, fraud, and senseless cruelty against the apparent weakness and failure of reason and virtue is a dismaying part of the common experience of mankind.  (Consolation, p. vii)

When a family member has forgotten how to divide by three, seizes the lion’s share and wants to use estate funds for personal benefit, and to see lawyers and judges who are not outraged by blatant disregard for legal documents and a sense of fairness, and facing a probate court hearing next week, maybe Boethius will help me to understand it all.

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REALITY?: The Symbol

Posted on January 12, 2006 by Susan

Every day I seek him in the sky, outlined on the branch that is his own.  Today, finally I see the eagle, a hood of white above the wide black span of outstretched wing.  He circles over the brook, his talons grip my heart and carry it aloft a while to soar above the earth.  I watch, he drops it like a fish into the water.

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WRITING: Lit Journal Submissions

Posted on January 11, 2006 by Susan

Even as my fingers waffle between the print button and the wait-a-minute-this-would-sound-better-editing of the keyboard on Big Tim Dawson, and with my cover letter zippy and not my usual Suzie Secretary proper with a touch of a self-deprecating please?, I am pleased to read and point out this article by Alex of Bookface that he’s readily shared with Metaxucafe readers:

Literary Carpet Bombing Campaigns

But back to these literary carpet bombers a moment, and their form cover letters. There are a number of strange philosophies guiding people when they write a cover letter, most of which are hilarious and some of which are mystifying.
There’s nothing better than getting it straight from the horse’s mouth (no offense meant personally, Alex, except I suppose at the use of such a cliche’).  Unfortunately, some people trying to break into the world of published author also think they can break the rules as well; check out the comments on Miss Snark’s posts on the simple requested SASE here and here.
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BLOGGING: Fiction and Not

Posted on January 11, 2006 by Susan

Ah, after some surfing this morning I find how more literally literary sites than mine own come away with less personal posting.

They get their frustrations out on people in the literature field.  I prefer to save the full force of my fury on real people I know.  But there’s a lesson here in passion, and importance and story.

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REALITY?: Healthcare

Posted on January 11, 2006 by Susan

This disgusts me: 

In the Treatment of Diabetes, Success Often Does Not Pay

"But seven years later, even as the number of New Yorkers with Type 2 diabetes has nearly doubled, three of the four centers, including Beth Israel’s, have closed.

They did not shut down because they had failed their patients. They closed because they had failed to make money. They were victims of the byzantine world of American health care, in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications.

Insurers, for example, will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000."

(Urbina, NY Times, 1/11/06)

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LITERATURE: Ploughshares – Spring ’05

Posted on January 10, 2006 by susan

Quite excited about this issue, even delved a bit into the poetry.  Read the six fiction stories and all were very interesting and well written.  Also read the two nonfiction pieces and I herein admit that had I not known they were such, I would never have guessed.  Same imagery, sense of story, inviting voice, story arc, structure, etc. that I used to think was reserved for fiction only.  I’m glad I’m wrong.

Let me highlight a couple of the stories for specific reasons.

Refund, by Karen E. Bender, is the story of a couple living in NYC that find themselves financially strapped.  When they get a chance to go down south for a month to earn some extra money they sublease their apartment.  Unfortunately, it is during the 9/11 disaster and the tenant moves out after ten days and demands her $3,000 full refund for fear and suffering and claiming some dirt and silly crayon marks as more reason.  The young wife refuses to grant the full refund, knowing that the money is already spent and also that there are ten days that the tenant was there and she left the windows open to the dirt and soot.  The e-mails back and forth between the wife and the former tenant are very funny and yet turn poignant, even as the tenant keeps demanding more to come up with a grand total of $54,000 due her.  But the twist is too good to leak here.  The characters learn, change and interact nicely.  The element of the e-mail correspondence is a nice touch and the story is just very well done.

Alyson Hagy’s Border reads like a novel that pits character against the odds.  It is exquisitely done and again brings in a sympathetic protagonist, a teenager who steals a puppy and meets up with various characters along the way as he tries to escape and learns how much he’s willing to do for the puppy.  The ending here is powerful and unexpected, yet built within the arc gradually.

The Great Cheese by Luke Salisbury is a story within a story as a father repeats a tale he’s told his son many times of how he and his brother tried to bring the biggest cheese ever made across country as a gift to President Andrew Jackson. There is the adventure of that tale interwoven with the relationship of the man and his son that is structured very well in that one naturally flows around the other.  There is another story being told within the tale, and that is one of racist behavior of others in the south at that time, and that brings in the element of tragedy probably more eloquently for its place within the setting in the drama.

Valerie Sayers’ Sleepwalk is the story of lost love that returns twice in a married woman’s life, and the episodes and backstory blend in in perfectly planned narrative structure so that the final impact is built by many timelines instead of just one.  Nicely written, nicely plotted out.

I must leave you with this excerpt from Ira Wood’s nonfiction piece, Instead of–it is the opening paragraph:

This is a story about not doing; this is a story about everything else.  The trouble with writing is that it’s too easy not to do.  Imagine if eating chocolate was as easy not to do as writing.  Or paying your mortgage.  Or making an eight o’clock class.  Imagine if you were firmly convinced that all the stupid things you do instead of writing were also more important than sex.  Oh, no, I don’t want to take you doggie-style, I have to check my e-mail.  (Ploughshares, Winter, 2005, p.195)

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LITERATURE: Lit Journals

Posted on January 10, 2006 by Susan

Well, so much for Prairie Schooner.  Just got the Winter 2005 issue in the mail.  There are four short stories in it.  Four.  I think I’ll just let this subscription run out, which appears to be summer of ’07.  But if you’re into poetry, essays and reviews, it looks to be a bonanza.  I’m just a fiction writer and frankly, even though I want to be a poet, I’m really not learning anything too much from the new stuff–at least without learning the old ways better first.

But this is not to discourage anyone from subscribing because not only are the journals usually full of good stuff to read, they’re also a learning tool if you want to write.  As a matter of fact, Dan over at the Emerging Writers Network has a wonderful offer on many of the major journals that gets you an extra subscription free so check it out.

My next post, should I choose to accept it, will be an overall view of a Ploughshares issue that I’ve just about finished (I read all the fiction, scanned through the poetry, and insist on reading both nonfiction pieces because they’re good.

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LITERATURE: Seeds of Sense

Posted on January 10, 2006 by Susan

At long last, an honest and understanding literary journal which has a grip on reality and really does display an interest in writers and sees their side of the publishing wall:

"And, yes, we do consider simultaneous submissions. After all, we’ve heard that the average story is submitted twenty (or more) times and rejected twenty (or more) times before being published. At that rate, without simultaneously submitting, it would take at least five years to place a story. That just seems mean. We’re really nice people."

(Submission Guidlines, Orchid: A Literary Review)

I hope I haven’t just inundated them with submissions via this post, but they certainly deserve recognition for fearlessly making the above statement.  With the three to four-month average notification time, it’s useless to assume that writers will (or should have to) wait on acceptance or rejection slips to send a story out only what, four times a year?  Most writers, it seems, just don’t adhere to the rules unless they have enough stories in the hopper to circulate different ones to different mags and keep a spreadsheet on who has what.  I’ve done this, but have backed off because I’m concentrating only on what at this point in my writing believe to be really, really good.  That right there is restricting enough.

There are other journals too that have come to terms with the simultaneous b.s., and I applaud them all.  It does in fact make good sense for the journals themselves to adopt this outlook as well:  do they want to have an equal shot at that superstory or do they want to be tenth, twentieth or so in line for it?  Eventually, they’ll run out of the big names and unless they start assisting new writers in getting work published, they’ll run out of content as well.  More and more lit journals are starting up to combat the elitist attitude of some of the old timers, and they’re willing to take their chances, to do the reading, to put in the time and effort to more than equal their established counterparts for offering excellent content and grow their readership. 

Maybe the move is on.  Maybe the outlook is brighter for both authors and readers.

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LITERATURE: The Consolation of Philosophy – On Writing

Posted on January 9, 2006 by susan

So here I am, once again caught in the throes of dying artist, and Boethius seems here to speak to me and point out a direction; in short, be done with it and leap the cliff:

When she saw that the Muses of poetry were present by my couch giving words to my lamenting, she was stirred a while; her eyes flashed fiercely, and said she, ‘ Who has suffered these seducing mummers to approach this sick man? Never do they support those in sorrow by any healing remedies, but rather do ever foster the sorrow by poisonous sweets. These are they who stifle the fruit-bearing harvest of reason with the barren briars of the passions: they free not the minds of men from disease, but accustom them thereto. I would think it less grievous if your allurements drew away from me some uninitiated man, as happens in the vulgar herd. In such an one my labours would be naught harmed, but this man has been nourished in the lore of Eleatics and Academics; and to him have ye reached? Away with you, Sirens, seductive unto destruction! leave him to my Muses to be cared for and to be healed.’  (Consolation, Part I)

Is poetic writing then a threat to intellect and deeper meaning rather than the reverse as is believed?  A danger to one who "has been nourished in the lore of Eleatics and Academics" and best left instead to those within "the vulgar herd"? 

The narrator speaks of death, and how writing that once brought pleasure brings pain.  Is that the time to seek out philosophy instead, the timeliness of importance in one’s life and the importance of timeliness?

Possibly not the best time to be reading this, but then, if time is short, it need be known.

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WRITING: Oh the Horror!

Posted on January 9, 2006 by Susan

Maybe I should just go back to my roots and write horror stories.  I’m too easily led astray by what I read in contemporary literary fiction to be satisfied.  I was all set to send one out that I’ve worked on almost non-stop for a month and now, after reading what’s being published, mine looks hokey in comparison.  Old fashioned.  Dopey.

So, of course I brought it up on the screen, and started throwing in feelings.  Showed more depth of the relationships in dialogue and flashback.  Described the damn parlor to set the stage.  Added more words and muddied the action.  I don’t like it anymore.

This long morning has probably answered the questions raised originally by Steve Clackson at Sandstorm about reading while you’re writing.  Maybe the answer is: Don’t.

In the meantime, I have a killer cover letter all done for a story that’s evidently…not.

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LITERATURE: Next Up – Ploughshares, Spring ’05

Posted on January 9, 2006 by susan

Before I allow myself the pleasure of The Best American Short Stories, I’d like to work on the backlog of lit journals a bit more, especially when I’m so close to clicking the "print" button on one of my own pieces.  This particular issue of Ploughshares has only six fiction, two nonfiction and about a million poems in it; this last which I do not feel obligated to read immediately since nothing’s going to help me there except a new soul filled with poetic and lyrical language automatically attuned to meter and imagery.

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LITERATURE: Glimmer Train #50 – Nostalgia

Posted on January 9, 2006 by susan

Finished this issue; of the last five stories, three are first person pov, two are in third.  The stories:  A man in his early sixties plans to leave his wife who has advanced Alzheimers and take off with a younger woman, but at the last minute changes his mind (we don’t know why); a young man whose wife and young son died in a boating accident while he survived invites a fifteen year-old girl into his room (?); a med student can’t make up his mind if he wants to apply for a surgical residency and feels he needs a woman to help him make the decision; a man cycles his way through the streets of his village in China ferrying passengers; a woman’s father is aging and threatened with death and creates within her own story that of a woman she meets who is going home for the funeral of her own mother.

In three of the thirteen stories, sausage is used as a metaphor–for fingers or cushions–so sausage is a biggie (although I would think rather cliche’). 

I don’t know what I’ve learned from reading this issue; certainly that nostalgia and feelings are what count in creating a story that these readers are interested in.  Self-reflection seems to be a common theme.  Lots and lots of detail akin to the idea of that lamp in your grandmother’s house that you’ll always remember.    I think what I’ve learned is why I’ll probably never have a story included here.

Good writing voices, some very good narrative structure and imagery, but what I’ve had drummed into me for five years I can’t help but repeat:  What is the story?

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LITERATURE: Metamagical Themas

Posted on January 8, 2006 by Susan

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep up intellectually with this book, but I just love the ideas and hope that I can come to understand it:

Whirly Art became a (very) idiosyncratic language, with its own eshetic and traditions.  However, traditions are made to be broken, and as soon as I spotted a tradition, I began experimenting around, violating it in various ways to see how I might move beyond my current state–how I might "jump out of the system".  (p. xix)

This is in the Notes on the Cover by Douglas Hofstadter.  It is a brief explanation of his development of and obsession with a design he started playing with as a kid and kept working and exploring for years, all based on the alphabet symbols of various languages.

And as he tells us, he brings in mathematics and seeks a unifying theme to life that can be found in language as well as music and science. 

This is going to be good.  Tough, but good.

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LITERATURE: Glimmer Train #50

Posted on January 8, 2006 by susan

Eight stories read out of thirteen.  Four first person pov, four third. 

A man getting over the death of his wife; a middle-aged woman anxious to make somebody aware of what she did as a kid; a man with marital problems wonders if he’s gay and why he’s never been honest; a neighbor’s noisy bird flies away, is missed, and comes back; a divorced dad spites his ex-wife, grabs the kids and leaves the state; a resentful young woman starts fires whenever someone pisses her off; a young Russian writer leaves home and stays with a friend in NYC and goes to a free play instead of his friend’s party; a man reflects on his childhood and his uncle who builds a beach and takes it away again.

Almost all of these stories are very heavy into backstory, the "I am the way I am because this, this and this happened when I was a kid" ruminations of either the old or the young who want to blame somebody.  I am surprised at the lack of action, the words spent on what would seem to be a rather boring background conversation over wine between a couple in the beginning stages of a relationship.  Depth of character is one thing, but even my friends don’t feel the need to tell me all this shit.  I’m also not looking for slash and crash action, but something that is the impetus for the thinking, the reflection.  It could be a broken finger nail an hour out of the salon, but there should be something that initiates it, no?  Some of these just seem purposeless.

The amount of detail within these stories are more suited, I would think, to a novel.  And yes, I admit I’m starting to skip through them, no longer obligated to read every repetitious dragged-out sentence.

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REALITY?: Snowed

Posted on January 8, 2006 by Susan

It’s snowing again. Probate Court again.  Snowplowed in with balls of ice and incompetence of lawyers. 

Hibernate.  Quickly find a cave and hibernate before it is too late.

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