Mommy Brain

As my reading horizons have expanded, I am finding more connections in my reading. Mrs. Mental Multivitamin calls this synchronicity - that little zing you get when something you’re reading is connected to something else you’ve just read or are working on or were just watching… I love it when that happens!

A few weeks ago, I listened to (and thoroughly enjoyed) an audiobook version of Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier. Burning Bright is the story of two young teens - one Dorset boy and one Londoner girl - who meet and form a friendship with the poet and printer William Blake. The book describes Blake’s painstaking method for producing his books. Blake believed that to separate his poems from the drawings that accompanied them was to lose some of the truth - and so he developed his own method of handpainting plates and making each copy of his books by hand. His most famous was Songs of Innocence and Experience, which includes the familiar Tyger, tyger, burning bright… and others I am certain you would recognize. In Chevalier’s novel, the poem London, which expresses Blake’s sorrow over the social and political inequities in his town, is quoted often:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice; in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

(The above contains Blake’s original spelling and punctuation.)

I’ve been curious about Blake and his book ever since I finished Ms. Chevalier’s novel. When I was browsing the poetry shelf at Barnes & Noble on Thursday, I found this treasure:

Songs of Innocence and Experience

This is a slim paperback Oxford University Press edition - it didn’t look like much sitting on the shelf. When I took it off the shelf, however, I found that it includes color reproductions of every one of Blake’s original plates. This is a beautiful book. I read it over the weekend, drooling over the illustrations, and I will be reading it again.

Two other books I picked up at B&N:

I opened the Conrad and read his Author’s Note. (I did not, however, read the introduction. I love the B&N Classics, but I very rarely read the introduction by the literary “expert” until after I read the book itself - they have a tendency to give every plot point away. The person who wrote the endnotes even gave away the ending of the story in a note that could have very easily explained coal ships without ruining the story for me. Bah.) I then read the first story, “Youth.” It is a good sea yarn, and kept me enthralled with descriptions like this one:

“Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously; mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars. A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days. The surrender of her weary ghost to the keeping of stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph. The masts fell just before daybreak, and for a moment there was a burst and turmoil of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire the night patient and watchful, the vast night lying silent upon the sea. At daylight she was only a charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing mass of coal within.”

~from “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad

I then opened The Best American Short Stories 2007, and read the Introduction by guest editor Stephen King, who had the task of choosing the twenty stories (out of hundreds) to be included in this volume. In the intro, Mr. King lamented the fact that the journals and periodicals that publish short fiction have been relegated to the bottom shelf of the magazine rack (if you can find them at all) and speculated about what that is doing to the art of short fiction:

“Instead, let us consider what the bottom shelf does to creative writers - especially the young ones, who are well represented in this volume - who still care, sometimes passionately, about the short story. What happens to a writer when he or she realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily? Well, if the writer is worth his or her salt, he or she continues on nevertheless - because it’s what God or genetics (possibly they are the same) has decreed, or out of sheer stubbornness, or maybe because it’s such a kick to spin tales. Possibly a combination. And all that’s good.

What’s not so good is that writers - even those who claim to spurn Shakespeare’s bubble reputation - write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course; the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker).”

Zing! A connection. And now I’m excited to read the stories that King chose out of hundreds and hundreds to include in this book, because if he loved “Youth,” by Conrad, and I loved “Youth,” by Conrad, chances are I’m going to love some of the stories in this book.

Connections. Aren’t they fun?