“One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decline of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.
“The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.”
Fr. de Plüm stops by
with apple kringle and coffee.
Father Norm says he’s tackling, of all things, a political thriller with novelist Mark Mitchell.
“I’m temperamentally unsuited to collaboration. I like things just so. And Mitchell is a terrible atheist. I agreed over a martini. Those things are the absolute devil.”
it turned out to BE a play
They defied description.
They had a certain je ne sais quoi.
They came, they saw, they were a little vague on the details. They stayed under the radar, between the lines, open to interpretation. They were the stuff of dreams. They did not leave a message. They resisted categorization, remained difficult to grasp, proved hard to pin down, were reluctant to lend themselves to definition. They did not respond to calls from this reporter. They were Grandfather’s axe, the sum minus the parts, what was there before the Big Bang. In the beginning was the Word, and they were it, or rather its nuance. Hard to peg, tough to nail down, slip’d twixt cup and lip, lost in translation, they were what was there once you were freed from your own projections.
But you knew them when you saw them. They left everything to the imagination. They left no aftertaste. They were, more or less, in a manner of speaking, The Ineffables.
“If someone says, ‘Don’t say that,’ it’s all I want to say. And also, something I learned in therapy… which is darkness can’t exist in the light. And then that made me think of something Mr. Rogers said, which is, ‘If it’s mentionable, it’s manageable.’”
you night owls
all mrs. goblington's
notes UNDERWRITTEN By
I find myself in a House
of many Mansions,
Large Home of a Kind.
Jesus made the Chattering Demons
Leave the Abject Man. In Practice
this does Not Happen All at Once.
They appear before me in
The Communion of Consciousness,.
I welcome their appearance
in Light of Day.
When Life doth Give You Demons,
Sayeth the Lord,
Make Demonade.
But in Dark of Night
They Have me.
[Always we look forward to your notes, and pray for you often, Mrs. Goblington.]
Comes from the Greek τύπος for the substance left in your hand once you squeeze all the blood from a stone.
A synopsis serves to communicate the heart of a novel in precisely the same way that a resume is useful in seducing a lover.
tell him we sent you
Tonight you stop by the big old indie bookstore kittycorner from Union Station. It’s just before closing, but you only want to pop upstairs to see if the new St Aubyn is in. You’re hardly in the door when the woman comes on the PA system to say the store closes in ten minutes.
It’s as you’re crossing the 2nd floor maze of towering stacks that you notice it. Where HORROR ends and YOUNG ADULT begins, there’s a ten-inch gap between the shelf units. It doesn’t strike you as any kind of egress; you’d have to turn sideways to squeeze through. But on the other side, you see a sort of nook with shelved books. Thumb-tacked to the end cap of the Horror stack is the mailing face of a postcard with a penciled arrow pointing the way through. Under this, in thin letters with over-emphatic serifs, is OLD CHILDREN.
You oonch your way in.
It is a snug little reading room no bigger than a service elevator, walled in solid on all sides with books. The only exit is the narrow slot. Surely no fire inspector ever laid eyes on this.
Three soft armchairs. End tables between them, with parchment-shade lamps. Someone’s cup from the coffee shop downstairs.
And maybe you’d thought of fire because out of the corner of your eye you’d registered the little hearth in the middle of the right wall. In it, a silent blaze of paper-birch logs. A fake fire, of course; there’s no chimney above — but it’s an awfully good one, the first really satisfying artificial fireplace you’ve laid eyes on, with no gas hiss, and green and purple flames intermittently wagging from the ends of the backwall log. But then you feel the warmth on your face, and smell woodsmoke that brings to mind a great house when you must have been very small, with a servants’ stairway off the kitchen, and streetlamps throughout the gardens, and a great stable with four wings and what you still believe was a dance floor in its midst.
By now you’re taking in the individual shelf labels. They’re written out in the same hand as the postcard. CLASSICAL WONDER, ANAGOGIC WONDER, MAGICAL REALISM. Well, you recognize the last one.
The ceiling lights flash twice. The woman announces the store closes in five minutes.
The categories make no obvious sense. Here’s C.S. Lewis’s trilogy of sci-fi stuck next to the Murakamis. The next shelf down is taken up by the new Harry Potter premium editions, the ones adults buy to replace their old hardcovers falling apart, if they're not put off by the author’s pet hatreds. These overbear a few thin volumes of Harvey by Mary Chase. On an adjoining shelf, faced outward to display the front cover, is the latest Phillip Pullman. And next to that is A Wind in the Willows, the edition with illustrations by A.E. Shepard. And adjacent, a couple of John Masefields.
The overhead lights flicker again, and go dim. You’ll have only the sconces along the walls to light your way out and down now. And anyway you can’t make out the spines anymore, not in the firelight and the glow from the little lamp.
Steam rises from the coffee cup.
Now you notice, in the chair nearer the fire, how sunken the seat cushion is. But not by many bottoms of many hours.
No, you’re looking at a pair of rounded, crisp depressions made in the cushion by an invisible sitter.
In the mailbox, a big thick envelope containing a Virginia Quarterly Review. We scan the contributors list on the cover, and there’s Koye. Koye Oyedeji was one of the waiters at Bread Loaf, and he was in our workshop. After Bread Loaf later sent out a link to mp3s of the Waiter Readings, we played Koye’s three-minute reading for our teenage nephew while he was in the kitchen making a sandwich. He looked up from his sandwich. “That’s unshakable writing,” he said.
If Koye were here, we would have him sign our copy of VQR, and we would offer him the most troublesome praise one human being can offer another.
“You,” we would say, “should write a novel.”
