A Book's Second Story

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the richness and importance of books –not only for their words, but simply for their tangible existence.  Andy Goldsworthy has a poem called “Library.”  In it the author is describing a collection of books.  He writes:

This book saved my life…
This book I tried to carry balanced on my head with seven others.
This book I actually licked.
This book — remember? I carved a large hole in its pages, a "how-to
magazine for boys" said this would be a foolproof place to hide my
secret treasures. Then I remembered I didn't have any secret treasures
worth hiding. Plus, I was down one book…
This book, from when I was five, its fuzzy ducklings, and my mother's
 voice in the living room of the second-story apartment over the butcher
shop on Division Street.... I'm fifty now. I've sought out, and I own 
now, one near-mint and two loose, yellowing copies that mean to me as
much as the decorated gold masks and the torsos of marble meant to the
excavators of Troy…

I have books like that. I have a book that ruined my life and also saved it in ways I can’t explain to anyone.  I have a copy of Streams in The Desert that was owned by my great grandfather McCleary, a Presbyterian minister, which contains a pressed carnation from my great grandmother’s funeral.  My Bible contains an interesting assortment of mementos that anyone else might find random and meaningless. 

Each has a distinct story that goes beyond the words contained in their pages.  Anne Fadiman also talks about this in her essay “Never Do That to a Book.”  She explains that there are two types of readers:  courtly book lovers who gently care for their books to keep them in pristine condition, and carnal lovers who love their books to pieces. To the Fadiman family “…a book’s words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated.  Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.”

She goes on to recount stories of reading experiences –a book critic who read The Collected Poems of Edgar Allen Poe on a backpacking trip through the Yucatan and closed an interesting bug in-between the pages, an avid bird-watcher who left a note from the first time he saw his first trumpeter swan, a mother who cherishes the stain of an egg yolk on a cookbook from her child’s first batch of blueberry muffins…

There is a certain intimacy to be gained in the experience of defaming a book. Handling it allows you to connect with it in an extra special way.  Anne Fadiman says “Just think what courtly lovers miss by believing that the only thing they are permitted to do with books is read them!” Books can be used as decorations, doorstops, paperweights, mementos… anything.

Recently I discovered an art form that takes this idea a step further: Literary Art.  On a recent visit to 2nd April Art Gallerie I browsed a gallery full of intricate and innovative sculptures, posters, and jewelry made out of old books.  The artist was wearing a sunburst necklace out of book pages.  I was thrilled.  I signed up for a class to learn how to create a piece of book art. I’m excited to interact with a work of literature in a tangible way, in an act of courtly love.

The class will be at 2^nd April on November 15^th at 6:00 P.M.  The cost is $20.00 and includes all supplies.  Anyone interested can contact Pam Neff at 

330-685-2276 or piecesofapril@neo.rr.com

The Rough and Tumble

Well… I have a confession.  My blog is late today, because I chose to be an irresponsible student and to spend my night at Muggswigz seeing The Rough and Tumble, an Indie Folk band.  I hadn’t planned on going, but after listening to them at a song-writing workshop this morning I couldn’t resist. 

Mallory, a Malone graduate, and her friend Scott spent some time talking to us about their experience becoming a band, and writing songs together. 

One thing they expressed was that it’s easy to get artistically frustrated, something I know I can relate to.  Right now, as a college student, it’s hard to write for me.  It’s hard to just sit down and commit myself to working on a piece, even if I care about it immensely.  It’s hard to produce something and feel like it even matters that I took the time to create it.  Hearing two established musicians relate to that experience was indescribably encouraging.  Mallory said at one point “Everything you’re doing right now looks like a really big deal, and it is.”  It’s important to work hard and push yourself to learn because it builds you into an artist.

 

They also talked about the concept of criticism, and how it can be healthy, and also really difficult to take.  “We’re fragile people, and we play fragile instruments…” they told us.  “People are fragile, and so are the ideas they have.”  Even though other people’s opinion can be invaluable, at the end of the day you’re both your worst critic, and yet you’re the only one that really matters.  That’s why you need to learn to be a healthy critic of yourself.  Over time you will develop an artistic instinct that goes beyond just what’s good and what’s not. Discernment comes when you’re really aware of who you are, and why you need to write. 

The keys here, I think, are experience and dedication.  Good art doesn't just appear magically.  It costs hours of sleep and sanity, and it might cause you to miss a due date.  But, as Mallory said “You have to do whatever you’re trying to do now, and do it really hard or just stop doing it.”  I was challenged to keep making time for my writing, with hopes that someday I’ll be able to look back and be glad that I did.

Muggswigz

I really like this! Except… maybe you should just change everything.

I feel like I’ve become an editing machine in the last few weeks.  I’ve been working in my university’s writing center as a tutor, have gone to a writer’s workshop through Sightlines, and have been work shopping poetry by both myself and others for a poetry class.  It’s as if I exist to analyze and pick apart.  It’s enough to drive even the craziest writer sane.

Anyone who’s ever worked extensively on a piece of writing will tell you that the hardest part of writing is rewriting.  It’s not the generating ideas, or even putting them together, it’s the fine-tuning them. It’s trying to make your words convey the message you’re trying to express, or stir up the emotion you’re looking to evoke. 

Editing a piece is like being in labor -at least what I imagine labor must feel like.  Those delivery scenes on TV look pretty painful…  Or maybe, a better comparison might be getting a skin graft.  That’s exactly what searching through your entire vocabulary for that right word feels like. Cutting that one line you love is still like cutting your arm off out of pure necessity.  You bleed for a little while

Of course, there’s moral support, but sometimes even that wears thin.  After the third edited draft of a poem I’m working on I accusingly pointed out to one of my best friends that she hadn’t commented on what I’d done with it.  “Oh, you mean the part where you replaced that one word, and moved an entire line to the next stanza?” she said rolling her eyes.  At that moment I wondered if she knew how irritating it was to have my entire pathetic writing career laid out in front of me like that. Yes… just that one word and that one line…. But I think they really clarify my underlying theme!

Other writers, you’d think, should be more sympathetic.  Yet, I think sometimes they’re just more eager to feel better about their own work then they are to actually support yours.   As a writer, your workshop experience might go something like this:

You read your piece.
There is a long, awkward, unavoidable but excruciatingly long pause…..

And then somebody says something to the effect of “Oh I really like the metaphor you use about brushing your teeth,” but promptly misunderstand it.  Your workshoppers start to tell you what you mean, or what you should mean, and you get defensive, trying to flesh out to them the soul of that particular image.  Then, somewhere in their well-meaning and insistent, but wrong explanations you begin to understand the right one well enough to write a doctoral thesis on it, let alone a poem.

Billy Collins says it well in his poem Workshop:

 “Maybe it’s just me,
But the next stanza is where I have a problem.
I mean how can the evening bump into the stars?
And what’s an obbligato of snow?
Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets.
At that point I’m lost.  I need help.

The other thing that throws me off,
and maybe this is just me,
is the way the way the scene keeps shifting around…
The rain and the mint green light,
that makes it feel outdoors, but what about this wallpaper?
Or is It a kind of indoor cemetery?
There’s something about death going on here.

In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here
is really two poems, or three, or four,
or possibly none.”

Sometimes they’ll give you valuable feedback, and sometimes the things they say are only helpful because they make it clear to you what you need to make readers understand within the work.

This kind of work can be tear-your-hair-out frustrating, but, if you’re lucky, after countless hours of labor, rather than scrapping the thing altogether, you’ll have a brush with the thing that inspired it.  Something about the way the sun is shining, your hair is falling, or someone is smiling at you will just melt away all tension, inexplicably cause the creative gear in your brain to click back into place, and enable you to write again.  Insanity intact, you can finish what you started.