Good vs. Good and Adaptations

Peter Nathaniel Malae, author of Teach the Free Man, came to speak to my students about writing.

He said that when writing, what's most important is that you stay true to the vision of the story. And that the great stories are about the "human heart in conflict with itself." (I like this. It reminds me of Tolstoy's famous comment that the greatest stories aren't good vs. evil but good vs. good.)

Peter is one of five finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lion Prize, which is given to authors ages 35 or under. The otherfinalists are:

Ron Currie, Jr., God Is Dead

Ellen Litman, The Last Chicken in America

Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Emily Mitchell, The Last Summer of the World

I'd love to read all of these. So much to read, so little time...But right now I'm focusing on a big old fat biography of Auden (research for my historical novel).

I just finished Elegy for Iris by John Bayley, which is about his wife Iris Murdoch and her descent into Alzheimer's. Damn he loved her, a fierce and admiring love. A wonderful book--funny and moving and raw and intelligent. Much better than the film based on the book, Iris.

I also read "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," the Alice Munro story that was the basis for the film Away from Her. The film is surprisingly close in style and substance to the story. I think that in general stories make for better film adaptations because with novels so much has to be cut out. It's intriguing to see how a writer's style can be conveyed visually through film images, color, camera movement, and so on.

Lately I've been reading . . .

W.H. Auden, poet, prophet, provocateur. Here are three poems.

Epitaph on a Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

*

The Question

All of us believe
we were born of a virgin
(for who can imagine

his parents copulating?)
and cases are known
of pregnant Virgins.

But the Question remains:
from where did Christ get
that extra chromosome?

*

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

7Up, Ellen, Surprise Money, Sushi and Soulmates

Usually this time of year, summer is beaming down its promise on me. The promise of so much time to write and to follow my rhythms. Not this year, though. Everything feels askew, with my father gone two months and my mom suffering in the hospital. Today I brought her 7-Up and slip-on shoes and magazines. When I walked in the door she said, "It's sure good to see you." (Funny, she never said that when I was a teenager!)

We walked together up and down the hallways, her holding onto her IV pole for security. I know she's afraid of falling again. Who can blame her. We watched Ellen together. Ellen makes her laugh. Ellen, I love you for that.

When I got home, I had a surprise email from the Bellevue Literary Review telling me they received a grant and so are paying all the contributors to the Spring Issue a retroactive $100 stipend. I feel like I put on an old jacket and discovered cash in the pocket.

I also heard from my friend Janelle who's been at Cannes (because) -- and she said it's a magical place. She's already scheming of ways to move there.

Annie whisked me off to sushi. California Rolls and Sapporo are great comfort food.

I'm continuing to try to slip in research for my novel, reading Jane Bowles' letters. I'm struck by how she and Paul were married for many years but didn't live together much and had lots of (same-sex) relationships with others. And yet they were clearly very connected. Kind of like Auden and Chester Kallman. Chester, who was 14 years younger than Auden, broke Auden's heart by not being monogamous. But over the years they remained soulmates of a sort; Auden died at age 66, and Chester soon followed.

Yesterday Was . . .

. . . 12 hours with my mom, getting her transferred from the care facility back into the hospital since she she's been having more health problems.

Today was fielding phone calls about her care and a transfer to another hospital since there's no room in the one she was taken to yesterday.

The day before yesterday was a glorious 22-mile bike ride with Annie, here,

along the Coyote Creek Trail. Hawks with wingspans like open-doored cars swooped over our heads, and we swerved around two magnificent rattlesnakes who were grabbing some rays on the trail.

In the midst of it all, I've been continuing research for my novel. I've mostly been reading about Auden's and Britten's creation of the operetta Paul Bunyan. In the lyrics, Paul Bunyan expresses the hope that Americans will be saved from the

Pressure Group that says I am the Constitution,
From those who say Patriotism and mean Persecution,
From entertainments neither true nor beautiful nor witty . . .
From the dirty-mindedness of a Watch Committee.

Auden witnessed the devastating rise of facism in Europe. And yet he was not a blind patriot for Democracy. He recognized that all systems have their pitfalls and need their critics.

Speaking of critics, GO JIMMY. And swallow any possible apologies. I don't know why it's considered such an anathema for one President to speak his truth about another. Patriotism serves to silence.

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.