You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
My Binghamton sojourn reflections at my Thistle Finch editions free digital bookstore also include a Chronicles set of notes, Escapes to Cornell, and the photo lookbooks/storyboards Somewhere North of the Big Apple, reflecting my novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and Dark Transit, for Subway Visions. In my life, these could have been the rings of Saturn.
Do take a look.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
My time in Upstate New York did generate a prolific amount of poetry, which you can now find as free PDF chapbooks at my Thistle Finch editions blog. Among them are Susquehanna, Splitting the Rent, Halle Street, Riverside Neighbors, and Still Tender. There’s also a prose piece, Escapes to Cornell. So much of note was happening in my life when it seemed nothing of importance was. On top of that, I do wish I had been journaling back in the summer of ’68 when I lived in a boardinghouse across the river from the office and had only a bicycle and my feet for everyday transportation. Whatever scribblings I had from then, alas, have been lost in letters to a long-vanished lover.
Do take a look.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet. Maybe you’ll even sit beside the river with me. I won’t say anything about the bed.
In the Southern literary tradition was a linkage with Scotland, a love of Walter Scott and, unsaid, its Presbyterian literal Bible, clans becoming klans, some of the same intonations and expressions, a shared rebellious nature, plus the repulsion of Quakers in general.
Yet many of its young writers in the ‘50s devoured Jewish influences (Mailer, Malamud, Bellow) and then the Calvinist Congregationalists of New England (Updike, in particular) and then their own Thomas Wolfe and Faulkner. So I’ve read.
Their own writers had been presenting the Dixie heritage as all happy and macho, which did not fit what they observed. The Jews and Congregationalists, on the other hand, were presenting something hard and ugly about themselves.
From that, I’ve wondered: where and how my Midwestern heritage was being addressed or examined. I saw escape but no reality being addressed. Things that ought to be said but weren’t, at least in the mainstream view.
The best I’ve come up with is Jeffrey Eugenides, Greek-American of Detroit. And, my, how he delivers.
Just consider:
Could Anais Nin really keep such detailed notes of her daily activity?
As the Red Barn delves into my earliest journals, I’ve mentioned that we’re skipping over many of the entries that have already been distilled into my previously published poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose. I do hope you find what’s turning up to be brilliant and, uh, let’s back up, somehow engaging. It was a unique time and journey.
Still, I’m coming across material that seems more suitable for a different typographic and visual presentation apart from a straight Red Barn post, and that’s led me to create a Chronicles category at my Thistle Finch editions free digital editions “bookstore.” Offerings at that site allow me more flexibility in formatting, especially for you to download or print. Quite simply, it often feels more “literary,” with its own satisfactions.
Initial posts there as an outcome of my journals review are now available as free PDF downloads. Among them are New Novelists Back Then, notes from a lively contemporary fiction course, meaning cutting-edge novelists back in the ‘60s; Hitching, drawing on thumbing-on-the-road encounters in the hippie era; and The Past Still Speaks, three literary quotes that still resonate.
Another presentation there is a photo album, Mulberry Row, with images of a dormitory quad that prompted much of the action in my novel Daffodil Uprising. Collecting those images, which become this “lookbook” or “storyboard” was helpful in re-envisioning the narrative. Perhaps it will help readers, too, in internalizing the scene.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
Here are some more examples.
Contributors’ notes at the back of a literary quarterly or toward the beginning of a glossy magazine can sometimes be among the most entertaining reading in the entire volume.
Or they can be among the most deadly, as I’ve been thinking while scanning those in the Paris Review, where they run along the line of so-and-so is the author of the new insert-title-here book of poetry or fiction. It’s so one-dimensional.
Don’t know about you, but I definitely want to know what makes a writer tick – unique details help. Hopefully, something more than where they’re also teaching.
Yes, I know as writers we’re all hustling our books, but ultimately, we’re the brand, like it or not. (God, it hurts to admit that, but it’s true.)
The celebrity Proust Questionnaire at the closing of Vanity Fair magazine issues is a great prompt.
So here I am, pushing a whole lineup of volumes while hoping at least one of them jumps out at you and makes you get it, free or at a price – yes, I’m shy about asking for money – but still!
This matter of self-identity came into play with my poetry collection Hamlet, a village of gargoyles, which built on exercises where I found it much easier to say who I’m not than who I am.
So here I am, with a few potential contributor notes I may have sent out:
While we’re at it, let’s ponder the faces on back dust jacket or cover.
How few seem like people I’d like to meet. How much anger, hatred, envy, darkness – brooding – comes through? How little serenity, how little joy? Multiplicity of personality. Just who am I? Who are you? Empathy. Discomfort. All the rest.
Who are you in relation to all this?
The Four Noble Plants [and a quest for American equivalents]
Too bad those book collections are still in storage.
As for “noble,” in America? Even that needs an equivalent.
The odd syllable counts of my poetry lines: quite female! And quite flexible. Contrast to “maleness” of iambic pentameter or other club-feet.
The luxury of wasting a whole notebook, an entire sketchbook. [Oh? Did I pitch that out already?]
Good poetry takes leave of tight meaning … pointing to “lunatics” as “originals” … the way flames do.
Jnana's Red Barn 