Best advice I ever got from a literary character

She never minded admitting she didn't know something. So what, she thought; I could always learn.

--Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy


We'll officially be studying poetry for another week at least, but in deference to its being the last day of National Poetry Month, one of my favorite epitaphs from Spoon River Anthology:

MARGARET FULLER SLACK

I would have been as great as George Eliot
But for an untoward fate.
For look at the photograph of me made by Penniwit,
Chin resting on hand, and deep-set eyes--
Gray, too, and far-searching.
But there was the old, old problem:
Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity?
Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me,
Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel,
And I married him, giving birth to eight children,
And had no time to write.
It was all over with me, anyway,
When I ran the needle in my hand
While washing the baby's things,
And died from lock-jaw, an ironical death.
Hear me, ambitious souls,
Sex is the curse of life!

--Edgar Lee Masters


Via Tingle Alley, a compilation of poetry used in movies from the Michigan Quarterly Review.

Dragging out the baby pictures

Claudie as a kitten.

Remember to check out The Ark on Fridays and the Carnival of the Cats on Sundays for a round up of the best and latest pet blogging photos.

The interplay between reality and fantasy

The day Quixote and Sancho rode out from their unnamed village, a fictional
blueprint came to life. Don Quixote is our prototypical text, the first story to
emerge out of a self-awareness of its own fictional form, to take as its theme
the gap between appearance and reality; to be, in our terms, modern. It is to
the modern novel what Sigmund Freud is to psychoanalysis. Freud, in fact, was an
admirer of Cervantes: in the summer of 1883 he confessed to his fiancée Martha
Bernays that he was more interested in Don Quixote than in brain anatomy. He
found Quixote's dialogues with Sancho Panza significant for the lesson they
offered of the need both to discriminate between reality and fantasy and to
understand their interplay. He expressed an oddly romantic sympathy for
Quixote's idealism: "Once we were all noble knights passing through the world
caught in a dream, misinterpreting the simplest things, magnifying commonplaces
into something noble and rare, and thereby cutting a sad figure… we men always
read with respect about what we once were and in part still remain." (Prospect)

Firefly

Wash: This is going to get pretty interesting.
Mal: Define "interesting."
Wash: Oh God oh God we're all going to die.

Pardon the squee, but the trailer for Serenity is on line (via the Modulator) and unless I'm mistaken will also be shown on the big screen tomorrow when Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy premieres.

A chapter in Joy Comes in the Morning prompted me to bring Matthew Sharpe's The Sleeping Father home from the library last night so I could compare a scene from both.

I'd firmed my conviction to read Joy based on an early glimpse of Henry, an elderly man planning to kill himself, who "retained a good head for the words of others even as his own words, particularly after the last stroke, sometimes eluded him." Later in the novel, his suicide attempt prevented by another stroke, Henry manages to distance himself from the humiliation of having Lev, his grown son, change his diaper by reciting the Gettysburg Address, while Lev wonders what the prayer is that his father is muttering.

I flashed back to a similar situation in The Sleeping Father. Bernard Schwartz has also suffered a stroke, his brought on by a pharmacist's error, and is experiencing aphasia as well. His teenage son Chris visits him in the rehab center and reads—and explains in his off-kilter way—William Butler Yeats' "Leda and the Swan." The scene itself really isn't comparable to Rosen's since Sharpe proceeds with great black humor to juxtapose Bernie's doctor reading him "The Second Coming" with Chris's, ah, tryst with a speech pathologist in her office down the hall. Rosen uses his scene to lead to Lev's realization that God, "however much He might or might not exist, played no role whatsoever in human affairs." Lev's rabbi girlfriend Deborah, who is actually the novel's main character, will experience her own dark night of the soul beginning in the very next chapter.

Since all but one of the people Rosen thanks on the acknowlegments page are women you'd think someone would have told him to watch for overkill in the tears department. He must have assumed the psalm saying "weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning" gave him tacit permission for an otherwise strong character to spend much of her time in tears. I don't know that I've encountered such a crier in literary fiction since Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. Interestingly enough, Rosen, whose own wife is a rabbi, says he was affected by Dinah, the charismatic Methodist from Adam Bede, in his portrayal of Deborah (Nextbook). Since I've yet to read Adam Bede, I don't know if Dinah weeps profusely as well.

A hundred or so pages to go. It's definitely worth reading despite my quibbles with Shifting Perspective and Characters Who Cry Too Much.

Peregrine falcon nest cam. Way cool. (Via the Modulator)

Self publishing and print on demand

We had a lengthy power outage last night and the computer has been acting weird ever since. Only one quick link, therefore.

Patry Francis writes:

"What if a small number of writers, say five or ten, banded together and created their own imprint, using one of the big self-publishing companies as a vehicle? What if those writers edited each other, supported each other, and put all their creative ideas, their contacts, and blogging skills into marketing each other? Isn't that really the next step in the revolution that began with little blogs just like mine, many of which have now become real cultural forces?

"Is it the best idea I ever had? Or just another fatuous writer's dream? You decide. Because for the first time ever, you have the power."