Classics Reading List

So, after half a year of reading tripe escapist books, I've cleared out my palate for some heavier dining. I'm trying to dig through some primary source texts on classic mythology. I read the first six books of Ovid's Metamorphoses a couple nights ago. Some of the stories in there are surprisingly captivating. All the chasing of virgin maidens to "ravish" (aka, rape) them gets old after awhile, but then every so often there will be a story like Echo and Narcissus or Phaethon (a story I wasn't familiar with before, about the Sun's son who borrows his dad's sun-weilding chariot and lights the whole world on fire) that are just amazingly written and captivating, even by today's standards. And the blood and gore scenes too - like when Perseus slaughters all the men who come to fight him at his own wedding feast with Andromeda - seems bloodier and gorier than a lot of other things I read. The men are slipping in the blood-drenched floors, skulls are crushed on stone, it's intense.

I picked up these other classic texts at HalfPrice today:

Ten Plays - Euripides
The Aeneid - Virgil
Theogony; Works and Days - Hesiod
The Homeric Hymns - ascribed to Homer

All of these mention Persephone, or talk about visits to the Underworld. I want to both read the Persephone stories from the sources, as well as get a feel for how the Underworld was envisioned. In general, it's much more horrible than I've written it so far in my novel. Ovid's version of Persephone is your classic chase and rape tale, though there are a couple of twists (like Cupid shooting Hades while the latter is inspecting Titans chained under a volcano because Aphrodite was pissed at Hades for something). And later, during Orpheus' story, in his plea for Eurydice to come back from the dead, he says to Persephone, "you too were joined in love" and this great line, "reweave, I implore, the fate unwound too fast".

I've briefly read "The Homeric Hymn to Demeter" before, but now I'll have it in book form. From what I've heard of Hesiod, he offers a more moral version of the pantheon. In the Aeneid, Aeneus spends a portion of his tale traveling through the Underworld to go visit his father and Tieresias (speaking of, I also found out how he got blinded! He's always just the "blind oracle", like in Oedipus, but Ovid tells how he got blinded, by pissing off Hera when he made her lose a bet. Hera's always getting enraged by one thing or other, and damn, she can get scary. I think she's the scariest character in the Metamorphoses).

So most of these I've read bits and pieces of online here and there, but I'm hoping to sit down and really soak them in and underline and highlight - basically, study them. Studying the books I want to be studying - what a novel thought! I love the freedom to do and read and study what I want.

Doing what nobody in the world ever gets to do

I quit work in order to write. Well, mostly. Like all things, the motivations are more complex and multi-sided including health difficulties, but the reality of my day to day is that I have no job and all the time in the world to write. Hmm, what I wanted to express in this post came out so much better in my head while I was showering. Basically, I'm terrified, and guilty-feeling for not being A+ productive suburbanite. Because nobody gets to quit thier job and do what they WANT all day! Unless you are going to college, of course, so that is how I justify this to myself - I'm basically having a self-created internship, or creative writing workshop - and the only money I pay for it is the money I lose by not working. It's a lovely cycle of self-justification and nagging guilt and feeling like a total ass to think that anything will ever come of my writing. And then I just have to try to get the fuck outside myself and worrying about all this and just write, or rather, edit, the Persephone novel. Which I've done in these total of two days into this crazy freedom land of no-work.

I'm just not good at transitions. I don't have a routine, and all I am doing is thinking, which gives me horrible insomnia when I'm not in the mindless go-go-go routine of work. And then I'm sleepy when I go to write, and then there is no point in any of it and I should have just stayed at my crap job that was horrible and suffered unhappily like a good little suburbanite.

Exciting!!!!

I'm really excited about this publication. To read my short piece, "Conversation With My Four-Year-Old", click here:

Paradigm Journal

I'm under the non-fiction section!

Acceptance in Paradigm Journal

Another acceptance into a literary journal - Paradigm! It's for a short non-fiction piece about the bittersweet tension of being a mother with a chronic illness.

I wrote this piece a couple of months ago, but have been especially reminded of how much I hate being sick lately. I've been sick for 8 years now, and the anger at it comes in waves - there's months when my norm seems like normal to me - as if, of course I walk around tired and weak and unable to do things other mothers can do - of course that's normal. And then there are days and weeks and months where I wish illness was a tangible thing that I could beat to a pulp and scream at for what it has stolen from me.

But then of course, it's not a tangible thing, only as tangible as my body, and hating my body as if it were a separate entity from me, the real, true me inside - dude, that's kind of fucked up. Lately I've been trying to come to terms that I can't separate my identity from my body - that I am both mind AND body, even though I'd rather only identify myself in terms of the former. I've been stretching and lotioning and got a new large beautiful tattoo - like I'm reclaiming territory, or at least control, of this physical body that so often feels like the enemy. But then the damn body kicks back, like this week when I tried to do too much light excersize, and the rage starts up all over again.

New Shoulder/Arm TATTOO!

It's kind of awkward to take a picture of the back of one's own shoulder, so here's the best angles I could get:

Cool as hell! I was freaking grinning WHILE the guy was tattooing me I was so excited about it. And I feel like it didn't hurt as bad as the one on my leg, or that could have been because I was so stoked!!

Literary Vs. Commercial

I just came across a good Newsweek article about the commercial/literary divide in literature. And the question I hear more and more - Is reading a good end in and of itself, or is reading so called fluff or escapist literature little better than just watching tv? Is escapist literature, and reading just for fun a potential "gateway drug" to more premium, difficult literature? Or is it just another brain-sapping activity?

In the article, Zadie Smith is quoted as saying, "readers fail when they allow themselves to believe that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced."

I think this is a valid point, especially about the nature of comfortable reading that only reinforces ones already-entrenched worldviews and values. At the same time, so much high-brow literary fiction is just so damn boring. Neither the story-lines, nor the language-usage is interesting or beautiful. For example, I read Zadie Smith's White Teeth. And I didn't like it all - I thought there were several bizarre story-lines that were held together by the contrived image of "teeth" in a novel that did shed light on a culture I was not familiar with, but felt overall pointless.

What drives me crazy is that there appears to be so little dialogue about creating a middle ground. Because each side is indignant and defensive against the other, calling each other alternately sell-outs or snobs, the accessible well-written fiction is hard to find. Why do we have to be afraid of literature that is enjoyable? Why is it either "genre" fiction or "literary" fiction (I mean, literary fiction is pretty defined by what it is NOT, i.e., NOT genre fiction)? Why don't MFA programs allow genre writers in? How do we expect to get better written genre writing, or more interesting and accessible literary fiction, or better yet, blurring the line so completely that its not entirely identifiable as one or the other?

Here's the link to the article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/193475

Bloggy

I've been feeling very blogg-y all of the sudden, ever since my sister-in-law wrote and asked why I wasn't blogging as much, and I was surprised I'd gone almost a month without blogging (I used to blog extensively at another site). It's been an odd winter, down in the dumps, and one I'll be happy to put behind me. The world seems to be perking up again - due in part to me working fewer hours, part because the weather is warming up, and warmer weather means a new shoulder tattoo! in the next couple weeks, and partiallty because it means I'm that much closer to getting to quit and focus just on school next fall. I'm finishing up one literature class that is a pre-req for grad school - Multi-cultural Literature Focus: The Southwest, so I need to get going on finishing it up.

I now have over a hundred submissions out, literally. So waiting for those responses to filter in, writing the occasional poem, tweaking short stories, but I think I'm going to take a breather from the heavy writing I'd been doing in the past few months.

The weather's warming up, which means Heather get's a new tattoo soon. Life is good. Hopefully I get the tattoo in the next week (victorian scrollwork pattern, on my left shoulder). Pictures to come!