My First Meme for YouYou

What the hell is a meme?

Is it anything like a screaming meme?

I think I figured it out, though. I was tagged by Sam of Ten Thousand Things. (Remember when being tagged meant you got slapped on the arm by your friend who had orange popsicle remnants and dust streaked across her face as she chased you down the summer hot asphalt of your neighborhood?)

Anyway, cyber-tagged I was, for a meme (still don't know what it meansmeans) to come up with 10 quotes from 10 different writers that say something about my ars poetica philosophy.

Here's what I came up with:

"Poetry is loving the names of things." (Gertrude Stein)

"I have it set so all flattery and criticism go down the same drain, and I am quite free." (Georgia O'Keefe)

"There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be." (Michael Cunningham)

"The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination." (Carson McCullers)

Artists "love what is raw and degratded as much as what is seemingly fine . . . [They are] awed by creation and cannot let a single aspect of sensuous experience go unadmired." (James Agee)

"Craft is also spiritual." (Sharon Dubiago)

"The novel cannot submit to authority." [True for the poem too.] (Julian Gough)

"Out of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric. Out of our conflicts with ourselves, we make poetry." (Yeats)

"The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books." (Edmund White)

"Talent is a long patience." (Flaubert)

"End with an image and don't explain." (Stanley Kunitz)

Now, being the lightening-quick-learning cyber-riffic gal that I am, I tag:
Dustin, Strega, Ellen, Arlene, and Talia.

(not Collin because he already did it)
(not Max cuz he already gave me some skin today)

February House

Did you know that W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee all lived together for a few years under the same roof?

Their fixer-up Brooklyn brownstone was "host to an explosion of creativity, an extraordinary experiment in communal living, and a nonstop yearlong party" as the book jacket of Sherill Tippins' February House reads.

Many of these people will make appearances in my new novel. I'm reading Tippins' book as part of my research. This is the best kind of research, where you lose yourself in great reading that evokes the complexities of people and their time.

Carson McCullers and Jane Bowles--both of whom were married to men but had passionate affairs with women--will figure prominently in my as yet unnamed novel. I'm discovering so many interconnections among the (mainly queer) literary figures of the era that I'm gloriously drenched in the chaos of discovery.

The more I read about Auden and his lover Chester Kalman, the more I think that perhaps I have two or three novels coming out of this research.

I wish I could say more, but I've got to run off to the university to take part in a departmental reading of student essays. It's an all-day affair of reading anonymous paper after paper, scoring them based on a 1-6 rubric. A weird tradition, a bit like self-flagellation. It requires a lot of caffeine to stay on task.