Covetable Copy (2)

I thought it was about time that I pay tribute to the writing of Anne Sexton.

"Depression is boring, I think, and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave"  Anne Sexton, The Fury of Rain Storms

Seeing as I drew the name of my blog from this quote, I obviously consider it to be covetable copy. Like other Sexton phrases that stick in my brain, it declares darkness with a flippant shrug. It's an almost Chekhovian line. I have a particular love and envy of writing that has that Janus face of comic and tragic.  

My favorite Sexton collection is probably Transformations, her retelling of a cluster of classic fairy tales. Written years before Sondheim and Lapine began Into the Woods, Sexton's take on these stories is both darker and funnier than theirs and, oddly, more contemporary. With fairy tales trending so strongly right now, I'm hopeful that Sexton's work will be discovered by a new generation of readers.

Covetable Copy

Sometimes I come across a piece of writing I wish were mine! A recent Facebook wall exchange with a friend reminded me of this brief meditation on branding from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003): 

"simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A dilute tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row ... There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."

Speculative fiction novelist William Gibson is best known for his often eerily prophetic cyberpunk works. Pattern Recognition (2003), together with Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010)
make up what is now considered to his Blue Ant Trilogy and, unlike much of his other fiction, looks no further than the day after tomorrow. In these three books, Gibson looks no further than the day after tomorrow, which he views through a prism of present hindsight that enables him to provide an almost retrospective examination of the first Public Generation. 

Dystopian Present #001

Close the gun show loophole!  We require background checks for those who care for our children, why not for those who want to kill them?

Out of the Zeitgeist - Publishing Edition

For my entire life, I've had a problem with zeitgeist. It's not like I've made an effort to do this. Life, especially childhood and youth,  would have been a whole lot easier to be "one of us"—of any "us." It's not that I don't want to walk to the same drum, it's that I can't even hear the beat.

Case in point: today's NY Times Book Review best seller lists. I read a lot. So you'd figure if there was any place I had a chance to align with the zeitgeist, this might be it.

Well, I went through this week's Fiction best sellers. Of the individual titles represented (regardless of format; some are selling loads in several), here's how I map:

• read/purchased   6/58
• vaguely interested in 6/58
• would rather read a laxative label  46/58
  (since the majority of books on these lists are genre fiction, you may be getting ready to make a snarky comment about elitism. Oh? Of the last 20 books I read, 13 were scifi, fantasy and/or mystery. I just don't want to read any of these.) 

Seeing that this is where I stand as a reader explains a lot about me as a writer, doesn't it?

Annual Reflection

Yes, we measure time by artificial constructs. But we do measure; and we make our rituals to observe the passage. December has always been my month for reflection. So what did I come up with this year?

A year can hold a lot.

What it holds will be good, bad and/or indifferent, in different combination and to different degrees for each of us.

Mostly the indifferent fades over time and we hold onto the good. Or hope to. Sometimes, as for the families and friends of 26 people who were killed in Newtown, Connecticut, last week, the bad in the year is too overwhelming.

The image on this page is a patchwork of the good from my year 2012. It represents travel to places I enjoy, time spent with family and friends, a satisfying hobby, one happily-achieved "bucket list" goal and one promise kept. And unseen on the page are the shadows, sometimes directly behind these images, plus a whole lot of indifferent connective tissue. Only when I see these moments all together here does it occur to me that everything good had to be made to come about; nothing just happened.

What will next year hold? There's no way of knowing. There never is. You must live it to find out.