thedayislikewidewater: October 2014

10/26/14 Sunday Book Review
nytimes.com/2014/10/26/books/review/jean-thompsons-the-witch-and-other-tales-re-told.html
The Witch & Other Tales Retold by Jean Thompson

rvw by Laura Miller, of Salon. /I first noted early web days ~ 2005 ? her rvws as outstandingly good.

okay, and this does strike me as v good, especially as get into second paragr Thompson as of school of narrative realism, vs fairy tale ~ fabulism a counter-literary-heritage. so she is writing fairy tales as psychological realism.
Miller astute re style, narrative.

but then gets murky. bcs wh I find deep here is: what is Thompson effecting in her translation? in what she removes, or adds?
Miller concludes re fairy tales have power in flatness, simplicity. quotes Pullman re wh is not in fairy tales: mysteries of human awareness.
yes. GKC. fairy tales state truth. only a mystery - a question - bcs our minds treat it as that. a story about our minds is 'realism' ~ a novel. but fairy tales are of the world.   ..... my thoughts working this out are below. >> to be (could be) worked through thought through more.... at least this dialogue of me with text laid out more clearly, for a start.

and Miller's middle ~fourth-fifth paragraphs re Bettelheim do not for me fit in the development of this piece of writing, her review. maybe I am underappreciating her point? which I am unsure of. may be that Bettelheim, by offering explanatory interpretive theory about fairy tales, is on the side fr wh Thompson now writes. she says he is wrong, re these being for childrens' minds. bcs as she says, we do not as adults stop wanting such stories. //well but does he actually say that?? I d n recall but feel it unlikely. yes the hopeful idea is that the child integrates the good and bad. learns to tolerate ambivalence.
but that does not make the fairy tales unappealing, does not exhaust "the uses of enchantment."
for one thing, splitting the good and bad is not all of what is going on in a fairy tale.
there are other things, or rather I think maybe that that splitting does have to do with what I am following GKC in thinking fairy tales are: stories of the world as Given. provided. providence. not as we experience it and wonder at it. as: it is. it is. it is.
and to extent re persons, psychologically, maybe there is good. there is bad. hmm. not that a person is ever either. but, forces. so yes GKC. christian. would say there is. Good. Evil. these are. Aslan. the Witch.

so, here, [her paragr 4-5
.. Bettelheim, re fairy tales split good from bad in people
[1976 The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales]
contrasting aspects of a single person are literally two different entities: loving Grandma and the predatory wolf dressed in her clothes.
the dramas of the psyche are externalized
Bttlhm argued that the recurring motifs of the form, particularly the wicked stepmother, offer children a symbolic language with which to understand the confusing and sometimes frighteningly mercurial world of adult behavior.
believed that eventually the child would learn to imaginatively integrate these two beings..

Now proceeding fr begin to end of her review, without that re Bttlhm in the middle of it.

[paragr 1
The practice of retelling fairy tales in the form of literary fiction is, if not quite hallowed, certainly established. The great Angela Carter’s revelatory 1979 story collection, “The Bloody Chamber” — a work of heady sensuality, intelligence, violence — remains the benchmark, but Kate Bernheimer’s Fairy Tale Review and the several excellent Bernheimer-edited anthologies spun off from it carry the standard forward.

[2
It’s unclear from reading “The Witch: And Other Tales Re-told” just how aware Jean Thompson is of this tradition. Carter and her literary descendants (it’s a daughter-heavy lineage) were mostly refugees from naturalism, the kitchen-sink* /evth in?, or just: common?/ school of narrative that predominated in mid- and late-20th-century fiction, and to which Thompson belongs. /the refugees fr that naturalism/Writers with a yen for the fabulist or gothic gravitated toward the fairy tale as an alternative literary heritage, *far older than psychological realism* and with its own set of aesthetics and rules.
//here is where, first reading, I thought: Laura Miller always so good//
* 'kitchen sink'    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_sink_realism#Origins_of_term    In the UK, the term "kitchen sink" derived from an expressionist painting by John Bratby, which contained an image of a kitchen sink. The critic David Sylvester wrote an article in 1954 about trends in recent English art, calling his article "The Kitchen Sink" in reference to Bratby's picture. Sylvester argued that there was a new interest among young painters in domestic scenes, with stress on the banality of life

[3
By contrast, “The Witch” looks like an experiment in the opposite strategy. //retell the fairy tales *as* naturalistic, psych realism. set in our time. // The subject matter of all but the two final stories in this collection is utterly — you might even say rigorously — mundane.
A brother and sister are sent to live with an unkind foster mother who locks them in the basement when she goes out /Hansel & Gretl/. A directionless galoot /huh just her twist on the prince/, freshly come into a financial settlement from a childhood accident, tries to find the girl he hooked up with at a drunken celebration; she left behind only a Lucite /ah: clear plastic. bcs wldn't be wearing glass/ shoe /Cinderella/. The surly pubescent Janice, sent to deliver dinner to her Nana, hangs around the A&W with her best frenemy, eyeing a boy who’s way out of her league/that's the wolf, huh. Red Riding Hood. //what titles does she give these?//. An abandoned husband asks his three sons to help him persuade their mother to return, and it is the youngest, the one with the least obvious wherewithal, who travels cross-country to succeed /hmm, which tale is this?/.

[paragr 6, following Bttlhm ~ what is the transitn? that Bttlhm was reductive?
According to the most reductive notion of how archetypes work, the stories in “The Witch” are what fairy tales are really about; they convert the tales’ figurative fancies into literal fact. “Little Red Riding Hood” is really a warning of the perils that adult male sexuality poses for young girls. “The Sleeping Beauty” asserts the impossibility of protecting our children from the world’s dangers.
/exs of Thompson's writing 'common-sensical' voice - unappealing.//

/this book as ~ experiment: What would fairy tales be like if we drained them of every last drop of their mystery? The answer is: rather pat. fairy tale templates give Thompson’s stories a firm narrative backbone that contemp literary short stories all too often lack /int/, but when they are rendered with such scrupulous realism, their endings register as predictable & overly tidy.

Even when Thompson depicts a character conversing with a stray dog, that character’s self-described craziness has been carefully established; you never for a moment entertain the possibility that the dog is really talking back.

//no magic. but everything is magic -- GKC    ....... below, in re last paragr .......... //

At their best, Thompson’s stories invoke the dark homeliness of Shirley Jackson’s short fiction [The Lottery], with its ruefully sardonic characters whose meek exteriors conceal a stark assessment of the world’s shortcomings &hypocrisies. But Jackson was Gothic to the marrow; everything she wrote had a door in it somewhere left open to the night.
Thompson’s fiction is a sunlit thing: shrewd, warm and often funny, but without shadows — or, at least, none of the unfathomable variety.

/last paragr of rvw:/
By some alchemy / GKC ~ wld say? that 'alchemy' is: TRUTH /, it’s the very flatness of fairy tales — their eerie, cryptic simplicity — that gives them their power.

In intr to his own recent retelling of 50 tales fr Brothers Grimm, the fantasy author Philip Pullman observes that
“the tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory, the promptings of half-understood regret /Margaret are you grieving/ or doubt or desire
that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel
are absent entirely” from fairy tales.
//hmmmmm. int. what he describes is - my fascination /// good good Mr Pullman
What heart heard of, ghost guessed: <<< Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed = It ís the blight man was born for,   --GMH
okay so yes, maybe that's very right. that is wh novel is about. (modern) human experience. and Hopkins, re suffering that is ours. intimations (especially of mortality, loss, death that we cannot comprehend -- this not ~apprehending but comprehending AS our suffering, our grief).
whereas fairy tale, GKC, truth, God's truth. ~ is absolute.
(Auden Limestone?? no important secrets? wld hv to revisit to recall, is that a place one wld want to be? a relief from incompr? or not really speak to this at all.)
you blow the horn, the castle falls.
The witch in the fairy tale says, “Blow the horn, and the ogre's castle will fall ”; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose..
but the question of cause-effect is not hers. not a question for fairy fabulous creatures.
it is what is. I am what I am. does not mourn herself, does not mourn incomprehension.
/whereas we reduce cause-effect as if can explain it. really always only stating this>that. not explaining. but we want to comprehend. reach out to know. but there is not knowing of "this is."
// fairy tales do not put as question. fairy tale says: it is. it is. it is.

but ~ Laura Miller:
[Fairy tales'] survival is not a repudiation of the 400-year history of the modern novel (and short story) so much as a counter-history, a ceaselessly whispered assertion of truths that cannot be reached by the straight and narrow road of realism.

wait, whispered assertions? seems to belie what is being said and is interesting here.
fairy tales do not *whisper*. are flat, simple, as she said. fairy tales straight up *say.*
assert, yes. aloud.

and this too:
What would fairy tales be like if we drained them of every last drop of their mystery?
-so mystery as the talking dog. the magic.
but as ~ per Pullman (or where I go fr wh he says), this is NOT mystery here. that is only a mystery of and for human awareness.
the fairy tale is ~? not about human. ~ is about the world. dog talks. why not, he barks? fact. fact. it is. it is. there is an is. world. everything that is the case.

so let me consider her point though. where wh Thompson is doing is removing mystery. by explaining in psychological terms. human. realism. ..... I'd want today: she is removing the flatness. the unexplained. the "it is."
~ does sound like she is treating the human realistic psychological as relatively not complex, which confuses the matter. bcs really if about how *we* are in the world, dealing with other people, especially bcs always dealing w ourselves, always mystery. questions. incomprehension.

here in human world, psychological realism, is where the unfathomable shadows are. bcs it is us trying to fathom -- reaching out to know -- and not able to.    Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
we cannot have it. cannot hold it. what heart hears, ghost guesses. truth.
that is what is in the fairy tales. as held. as not to be fathomed, but simply flatly there. it is. it is.

-

via 10/19/14 Nytime Sunday Book Review

Wall Creeper by Nell Zink ... birding ... Zink wrote as impromtu for Jonthn Franzen

>>

Dorothy, a publishing project
dorothyproject.com/books-gallery

10 bks, 2 yr ~ one more in realm of lit fiction (maybe in transl, and with sth int inventive w narrative); one more in realm of small press experimental poetry
= two worlds the publisher was involved in, via work at Dalkey Archive (designed covers) on one hand and her own writing in community of exprmntl poetr. says these two writing-reading communities not interact much, so her pair of books each year meant to encourage someone who comes for the one to also get read the other.

3 bks = trilogy by Renee Gladman /int
3rd Ana Patova crosses a bridge:
"magnificent, melancholy series about the city-state of Ravicka" Lyn Hejinian
pub'd year one, two, four   + + + in each pair, th other is the more lit fiction. /? yes. w lit shown first in pair, experimental shown to second (left-right)

year one 2010
+ Barbara Comyns / int Who was changed & who was dead. op brit. y, lit.

year two 2011
+ In th time of th blue bell by manuela draeger fictnl author creatn of pseudonym of poss male author. French, in trans.   = stories.    comprd murakami. y, lit.

year four 2013
+ Creature by Amina Cain = stories. more lit than experimental poetr I guess.

year three 2012
Promising Young Women by suzanne scanlon. /more ~lit, rtill int form but reads more as nrrtv,
Fra Keeler by azareen van der vliet Oloomi. iranian-american. / hmm this sounds ~ lit nrrtv but is the more experimental poetr ~ ?
or scanlon, written in fragments, is? maybe scanlon. no, per her website she seems pretty 'fiction'.
okay from *her* website Azareen van der vliet Oloomi seems assoc w experimental. /

note also praise Oloomi investigates a tripartite relationship between perception, reality, and textuality." --The Quarterly Conversation = wh I assoc //shld I? pretty much really bcs assoc w j waxman, who has writ for (I think)// w ~ Dalkey, Ctr Bk Culture /now no more maybe/, Open Letter Books (rochester translation chad post fr dalkey).
quarterlyconversation.com/fra-keeler-by-azareen-van-der-vliet-oloomi
hmm so yes maybe a crossover facilitated by Dorothy press?!
though shld not assume that Scott Esposito has not been int in more experimental...
/he is editor of Qrtrly Conversation; I noted him first in early days www ~2005 his site, linked fr Qrtrly as 'Editor's Blog': Conversational Reading - Since 2004. The blog of the critic, writer, and editor, Scott Esposito. //

and now
year five 2014 Wallcreeper by Nell Zink / more lit story always first
and          Dan by Joanna Ruocco / more expr~poetr always second? /y think so.
-

thedayislikewidewater

Sunday, October 26, 2014

fairy tales .. flat ...... GKC

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Dorothy, a publishing project

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Then - If it don't work out - You Can Tell Me Good-bye.

Bettye Swann {pandora }}}

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