4 October 2007

Revelation

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone really find us out.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

__________________________


Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1923). His novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) became the definitive literary novel about World War II, and it made Norman Mailer famous at the age of 25. His next two novels flopped, and critics said that he had failed to live up to his promise as a writer. He was depressed by the bad reviews he had gotten, and he decided that he would take a break from trying to write the great American novel. Instead he wrote one of the most confessional books that had been published up to that time, Advertisements for Myself (1959), about his own ambitions and fears.

Mailer became a regular and controversial guest on late-night talk shows, trying to stir people up against conformity. He also helped invent a new style of journalism, in which the journalist himself was a character in his own stories. He used that style in his book The Armies of the Night (1968), which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.

His most recent book is The Castle in the Forest, which just came out this month (2007). It's a fictionalized version of Adolf Hitler's childhood.

*A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

*America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

*Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

*Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

*Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

*Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

*God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

*I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

*If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

*In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

*In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

*Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

*Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.

*Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

*Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

*The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.

*The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

*The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

*The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.

*The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

*There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

*Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

*We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

*With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

*Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

__________________________

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1911). Her father died when she was a little girl. Her mother had an emotional breakdown from grief and spent the rest of her life in various mental institutions. Elizabeth spent most of her childhood moving back and forth between her grandparents in Nova Scotia and her father's family in Massachusetts. For the rest of her life, she was obsessed with travel, and she never felt at home anywhere.

She was painfully shy and quiet in college, but during her senior year she mustered all her courage and introduced herself to her idol, the elder poet Marianne Moore. The meeting was awkward at first, but then Bishop offered to take Moore to the circus. It turned out they both loved going to the circus, and they both also loved snakes, tattoos, exotic flowers, birds, dressmaking, and recipes. Moore became Bishop's mentor and friend, and she persuaded Bishop that poems didn't have to be about big ideas, that they could be precise descriptions of ordinary objects and places. Bishop began to write poems about filling stations, fish, the behavior of birds, and her memories of Nova Scotia.

She was an extremely slow writer, and published only 101 poems in her lifetime. She worked on her poem "One Art" for more than 15 years, keeping it tacked up on her wall so that she could rearrange the lines again and again until she got it right.




One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.