atalantasapples

Bloggered

"Where did you go?"
        "Away. Nowhere. Here and there."
"What did you do?"
        "Some of the 10,000 things . . ."

Fortunately TypePad remembered me and I was able to log in after such a long absence. Looking back at my planning diary for the past six (?) -- yes: six -- months with its scrawls and cross-hatching is enough to prompt mental shuddering. Every entry, every activity, fell into the category of "good" but obviously there can be too much of good things, pax grammatica. Any attempt to pick up prior ambitions and readings seems far less possible than picking up the sweater I began knitting on Prince Edward Island ten years ago: the pattern of both the object and my original intention have vanished. Time to start over.
Although not having actively posted to this site or my other one, gates of another world, I have in a sense kept in touch (in itself an odd idiom for maintaining a form of connection to something intangible, with the only physical touch being fingers on a keyboard) by checking in to sites that reliably and with intelligence transmit news from the great world of events mostly literary and that in a context that is in the best sense of the word "cultural." My touchstone has been Chekhov's Mistress, not only for the writing there but for the links to other sites that take me onward to even more writing, book news, ideas. And ever onward, link after link, and the trail becomes more diverse and distracting until after two hours of exploration, I begin to feel oversaturated with words, more specifically: the words of others. The writing is engaging, the topics and books discussed -- exciting, the urge to respond  -- tantalizing, but the loss of Self in the process is not at all in the nature of loss of Self in zazen: it stimulates thought and language rather than quieting them.  Also, when the time designated for my own writing has mostly evaporated from excessive litblog immersion, the only word I can construct that fits this experience is that I begin to feel "bloggered."
I need to step back and consider the entire phenomenon of litblogging and my role in it: passive trail follower; peripatetic commenter; active contributor; all of the above; none of the above.
The questions that litblogs raise for me may not have ready answers, and I doubt that I have the stamina and purpose of so many of the regular, articulate folks out there who post daily and whose contacts with the sphere of literary publishing and events beggars my imagination. As it is, the main effect on me is the alarming accumulation of even more books than ever, reaching crisis proportions both spatially and financially. New titles mentioned on the sites I check into are rarely available (either 'yet' or ever) from the public library. The hunt for the same titles at independent bookstores in this city is especially time-consuming when one hesitates to sell one's soul to the conglomerates and prefers to browse in a "real" bookstore wherein dwell "real" booksellers who read "real" books and don't clutter the aisles with yoga chotchkes and bizarrely-scented gift items. Once the desired books are borrowed or bought, then the discussion of same is either fleeting, or elusive, or too intensive to keep up with. Following one's own path through the woods is one thing, but we're talking here about something even more complex: the mycorrhizae that form the living underground network that nourishes the plant life itself.
Enough said. Time for a few more pages of Nuruddin Farah's Links, which was also being read by the main character in Khalo Matabane's film Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon, one of the more impressive films I managed to see at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Only 60 pages into Links and I suspect that this book will be one of the greats in my personal list of important books. Along with Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire and Andrei Makine's Requiem for a Lost Empire. The former two writers will NOT be at this year's International Festival of Authors in Toronto in October, and although Makine was originally listed to appear with Julian Barnes, Michael Crummey, and David Baddiel on October 25, the online listing consulted today does not include Makine. I have yet to do a count of how many of the authors at the international festival are Canadian/American/British; it would be interesting to consider, having stumbled on an editorial from the IFOA of two years ago in eye that still seems relevant, viz the following:

"It's a problem that comes from living and reading in the dominant linguistic culture. We write a lot, we English-speakers in Canada, the States, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. And thanks to the Americans and the British before them, we're terribly effective cultural imperialists, which means Italians and Eritreans and Saudis have a tendency to want to read Stephen King and Margaret Atwood in their languages in a way that we simply could not be bothered to do with their writers."

It's worth noting in the above that those writing in English in India and the Middle East are missing from  the above observation, and that part of this cultural imperialism is the linguistic dominance of English (even in an officially bilingual country like Canada), which means that English speakers are less likely to speak second languages (or more) and are reliant on translations, which in turn requires distribution of works in translation from publishers for what is in itself a more limited or exclusive market. There's another enlightened perspective from Robert Gray, the literary cicerone of Fresh Eyes: A Bookseller's Journal, that appeared last May at Words Without Borders in connection with his promotion this past spring of books in translation, "Reading the World." I diligently made note of each book from the five publishers, tracked down a few from the library, bought most of them, and now most of them are still waiting to be read, and will be read, thanks to the initiative of the publishers, booksellers, and litbloggers who supported the idea. I also added a number of my own choices, adding more books by women, and more poetry. Robert Gray's awareness that books written with serious intention offer readers an opportunity to cross borders and inhabit even in our imaginations the lives of others, no matter what the country and language of origin, is fundamental to literature in all its manifestations, including litblogging.

All of the above constitutes no doubt a rationalization of my blog indulgences, a justifcation for become bloggered/overwhelmed by blogs, but still amounts to a full literary larder for the coming winter months. None of the above constitutes what is new and exciting and of the moment in the world of literature (e.g. readings, awards, publishing, festivals) but perhaps is indicative of the fundamental passion of a reader and writer for books that I hope will endure.

"Never on autopilot"

Further thoughts on blogs, nets, connections:

Blogs can help encourage the habit of seeing the world of discourse as a conversation rather than an avalanche of information. And being prepared to respond means your critical thinking hat is never off. That's information literacy. Always with a question, always engaged, never on autopilot. That, I think, is the goal of a university education, regardless of field.

-- this, from ongoing thoughts by a subversive librarian, highlights for me the kind of connection that can be made in a world of discourse that encompasses the responses of literate folk to the larger world.

The excerpt above captures so insightfully the attractions of setting down in blog form (still the word itself annoys -- oh for a lovelier neologism from our extensive word-hoard) some of the links made through individual seeing and being in and listening to the world. This morning, for example, in the phase known as "waking up", which runs the gamut from initial shuffling through coffee-making to the proper focusing of sight on text, I encountered the current issue of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, a periodical so rich in enduring content and excellent writing that I pray for the continued good health of its editor (since 1973), Herbert Leibowitz.

There is an interview of Leibowitz (by Christopher Bakken) on Contemporary Poetry Review (in the CPR Archive, alas only available through subscription, which seemed to me worth it for the wealth of coverage therein) in which the fastidious editor comments: "At its best the art of reviewing conducts a civilized and engaging conversation with the poet and with readers who are curious about how poems are put together, why some succeed and others fail. Above all, reviewing demands the exercise of informed judgment and that requires knowledge, analytical power, style, fairness, not short sound bytes or pompous pronouncements."

Make no mistake: the "conversational" tenor of a blog can not possibly aspire to the depth and informed analysis of the kind found in Parnassus. But within the confines of a blog connections can be made to writings of such quality. I accordingly ingested with my caffeine a brief (by Parnassus tradition, at barely 10 pages) yet incisive consideration of Harold Bloom as a literary critic. "Power Games", by poet Adam Kirsch, is a review of the hefty anthology edited by Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost (2004; HarperCollins). In the sense of "reviewing" as propounded by Leibowitz, Kirsch's essay is exemplary and indeed goes beyond the confines of review to look at the limitations of Bloom's poetry criticism. Kirsch's remarks are supported by numerous examples of Bloom's own "anxiety of influence" and are delivered with both candour and respect. In the spirit of Randall Jarrell, Kirsch in this fine review manages to give readers a glance through "the telescope through which the children see the stars" -- a phrase of Jarrell's that he quotes out of respect for the late (and much revered by me) poet and critic. Jarrell's "telescope" metaphor might seem a shade romantic to our universe-jaded eyes these days, but it nonetheless captures the capacity of a well-written review essay to engage the reader and take her beyond the one given text to venture further. The kind of "judgment" exercised in this case is of the kind that opens discussion and encourages further exploration.

And so I went to my shelves, and pulled down Jarrell's Poetry and the Age, and found in "A Verse Chronicle", this relevant passage:

"This is so much the age of anthologies that it is surprising that poets still waste their time on books of verse, instead of writing anthologies in the first place. If you are about to print a book of poems, don't: make up a few names and biographical sketches with which to punctuate your manuscript, change its title to Poems of Democracy, and you will find yourself transformed from an old pumpkin, always in the red, to a shiny black new coach. For the average reader knows poetry mainly from anthologies, just as he knows philosophy mainly from histories of philosophy or textbooks: the Complete Someone -- hundreds or thousands of small-type, double-column pages of poetry, without one informing repentant sentence of ordinary prose -- evokes from him a start of that savage and unreasoning timidity, that horror vacui, with which he stares at the lemmas and corollaries of Spinoza's Ethics. Those cultural entrepreneurs, the anthologists, have become figures of melancholy and deciding importance for the average reader of poetry, a man of great scope and little grasp, who still knows what he likes -- in the anthologies."

It's not for me to temper Jarrell's own melancholy with regard to "the average reader of poetry" -- possibly an even more endangered type than ever. Kirsch makes it clear that Bloom's anthology errs on the side of prose in the presentation of many of the poets included even to the extent of commending several poets without actually including their work. "Power Games" provides a strong argument that, in accord with Jarrell's own comment: "Anthologies are, ideally, an essential species of criticism." In the case of Bloom's anthology, however, I get a keen sense that the result is less than "ideal."