Hermits, sociable writers and the quest for myth

For me 1977 was the year that my writing began to take the form of a novel. Writing is such a personal and private thing for me that it's taken me years to understand that some people write well in groups (as it was for Anne Beatts below). That kind of writing still seems to me to be more akin to music than words, but I could see how it would work well for comedy as a performing art, which has a particularly strong rhythmical component.

January 3 to 20, 2007

Titters : The first collection of humor by women, Deanne Stillman and Anne P. Beatts
It’s been awhile since I read this. I didn't quite get at the time just how difficult it was for women to be taken seriously in humor...does that make sense? I mean that there were a lot more male humorists being published than women.

Beatts has famously written about the early Saturday Night Live as not welcoming women:

"The only entrée to that boys club was basically by fucking somebody in the club," Anne Beatts tells Shales and Miller. "Which wasn't the reason you were fucking them necessarily. I mean, you didn't go "Oh, I want to get into this, I think I'll have to have sex with this person.' It was just that if you were drawn to funny people who were doing interesting things, then the only real way to get to do those things yourself was to make that connection."

Here's that quote

This book has been called dated, but I don't have the copy I bought, so I can't check it. I still remember selling my copy at a garage sale. It was the first thing to go—snapped up immediately at a premium price. Maybe the cover…?
Here's what Beatts is doing now.

Intermission, Anne Baxter
This was a fascinating book, one I’ve read more than once—the story of Baxter’s leaving Hollywood for love and a life on a remote cattle station in Australia

Anne Baxter

Homage to Daniel Shays, Collected essays, Gore Vidal
This page gives an idea of the scope of Vidal's life and accomplishment, and ideas that shine in his essays.
Vidal

Early del Rey, Lester del Rey
Here's an interesting 1968 review of 2001 by del Rey
Review

Wampeters, Foma & Grandfaloons, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
My comment was “bravo!”
Vonnegut Quotes


January 3 to 20, 2007

Lately I've been retreating even further from the sociable model. The Middle Earth book below gave me some insights into why. I think it's a cyclical thing for me. I remember (like so many people) reading Tolkien as a refuge at 14, and again at 24. After an intermission of decades, I'm back seeking fantasy wherever I can find it.

Crazy in Alabama, Mark Childress

This was unexpectedly fun and funny (I understand there was a movie, and reading the book I can imagine that). The narration alternates between the parallel stories of 12-year-old orphan Peejoe Bullis in a small Alabama town in 1965, and his Aunt Lucille, who has parked her six children with her mother and is bound for Hollywood accompanied only by her murdered husband’s head in Tupperware container.

The Publisher’s Weekly review suggests that the author manages to inject: “magic in his mixture of humor and pathos, boyish candor and time-earned understanding. The narrative has a unique gentleness that tempers even the most extreme horrific or comic events without dismissing or oversimplifying them. Terrible crimes go unpunished, and good people face tragedy--not always nobly--but this remains a tale of laughter and great hope, one not easily forgotten.”

That’s a pretty accurate assessment of an extraordinary narrative accomplishment.

Thunderbird Falls, CE Murphy
The second book featuring Joanne Walker, Seattle beat cop and apprentice shaman. Not as fast-moving as the first book Urban Shaman, but still worth the read.

Meditations on Middle Earth, Karen Haber (Ed)

This book has some great contributors like Terry Pratchett, Poul Andersen, and Robin Hobb
The essays in this book gave me some insight into my own reading tastes lately—

Lisa Goldstein’s essay put it:

“Why do people read and reread these books? Why are they so powerful? What do we get from them that we can’t get anywhere else? ...

“My guess is that it’s because we need myth. Not just because myths are entertaining stories, or because some of them come attached with a moral. We need them, the way we need vitamins or sunlight.

...

We need them because they are magnificent stories, of course, tales that have been told as long as people have existed. But we also need them because they are stories about the hero who journeys into a dark place and comes out transformed, and that is a story we allknow intimately, a story each of us experiences in his or her life. Those dragons are our dragons, those magical helpers are our helpers. And sometimes the dragons are inside us, a part of us, and this is the most terrifying struggle of all.”