Litrefs Quotes

I've put my list of 1277 literary quotes into blogger at Litrefs Quotes. Feel free to use them for articles, essays, etc.

Writing and psychological distance

• "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot" - Chaplin et al
• "a poet even as falling down the stairs, will observe his fall" - Holub
• "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity" - Wittgenstein.
• "you must hide profundity. Where? On the surface" - Hofmannsthal

Some people have little resistance to changing their psychological distance from events. As a result they may be accused of adopting "inappropriate" positions or performing disruptive switches of perspective. They may be viewed as detached, prying, over-analytical or over-familiar, of taking things out of context, of not seeing the wood for the trees, or vice versa. The results may be amusing (the "Pull-Back-And-Reveal Gag"), anti-social or (because it's non-standard, non-linear) considered artistic - zooming in on alliteration, a grain of sand or brushstrokes, then pulling back for the big picture, seeing ourselves as others see us; watching a tear trickle down your lover's face, psychologically withdrawing but not turning away; a penchant for synecdoches.

The easy passage between extremes of scale may also lead to a lack of appreciation of the distance that the psychologically astigmatic might feel between them. Agile zoomers might see the surface as little more "obvious" than the depths. Making poorly hidden secrets or assumptions explicit may be stating the obvious to some, but to others it may come as a shock. Bringing the cosmic into the everyday may cause eyeballs to roll.

I think people with the gift might be drawn to Poetry, seeing it as a legitimizing vehicle for their natural tendencies (though perhaps Art might suit them better). The person's instinctive zooming movements may be adroit in the eyes of the audience, or they may appear medically symptomatic, disorganised. Controlling this gift is what transforms the juxtaposed, multiple viewpoints into art or comedy. The person may need to rewrite (re-order and re-integrate the source material) before it "works" for others.

Is this gift of rapid perspective-changing useful for writers? I think it helps when gathering material - they can happily dive into new experiences knowing that they can make a rapid psychological retreat if necessary. I think awareness and orchestration of the multiple perspectives is useful for writers of many persuasions - not just stream-of-consciousness writers. The speed isn't necessary, though it may assist the integration of the different perspectives.

Conformity and success - some poetry articles

Jon Stone's Pluralism versus Selectivity considers some pros and cons of ecumenical anthologies. Todd Swift wrote of "Identity Parade" that "What is odd is how this compression of talent ... manages to diminish even the larger figures in the midst of the pack, who feel a bit crushed in the crowd" and David Kennedy wrote that "anthologies with a relatively small number of poets tend to reflect exhaustion, a coming conservatism, or a combination of both".

Marjorie Perloff's Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric looks at how "The demand for a certain kind of prize-winning, ‘well-crafted’ poem has produced extraordinary uniformity", how new names replace old names, though the poetry's the same. "the lack of consensus about the poetry of the postwar decades has led not, as one might have hoped, to a cheerful pluralism animated by noisy critical debate about the nature of lyric, but to the curious closure exemplified by the Dove anthology"

She adds that "the poems you will read in American Poetry Review or similar publications will, with rare exceptions, exhibit the following characteristics: 1) irregular lines of free verse, with little or no emphasis on the construction of the line itself ...; 2) prose syntax with lots of prepositional and parenthetical phrases, laced with graphic imagery or even extravagant metaphor ...; 3) the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany"

Peter Riley's Poetry Prize Culture and the Aberdeen Angus also identifies a formula for success - "the first-person singular is very prominent as mediator between the poem’s material and the reader. ... the poetry is basically subjective and the process at work is, typically, one of internalisation ... an insistent metaphorism, sometimes remote but generally clever or arty ... initial obliquity, teasing the reader with an almost riddle-like opening which is later solved ... the avoidance of idiolect or dialect, as too of disrupted syntax, neologisms, references beyond the cultural sphere, and avoidance indeed of any serious degree of abstract thought ... heavy end-rhyming, argumentation, or flashy displays of street-wise contemporaneity"

Oulipo - my contributions

• Russian Doll (published in Aesthetica). This is in the "Russian Doll" form - to get the continuation of the piece, take the first letter of each word. Continue this process, taking the first letter of the continuation's words, and so on until only one word is left - the final word is 'inside'.
• Met a Star's Eyes/Metastasize (published today in "The Journal of Microliterature"). This is a long homonyn (if the sound isn't the same, the spelling is)

Both are feasibility studies, potential works.

Medical Humanities?

Medicine and Literature cross paths in several ways. There's

• Poetry on the Brain - Helen Mort's Neuroscience-inspired approach
• Your Brain on Fiction - a New York Times article about brain scans and novels. "when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like 'The singer had a velvet voice' ... roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like 'The singer had a pleasing voice' ... did not". "individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective"
• Psychology, psychiatry and writers, which is more to do with mental health

I didn't realise there was a discipline called "Medical Humanities". According to the wikipedia entry, "The humanities and arts provide insight into the human condition, suffering, personhood, our responsibility to each other, and offer a historical perspective on medical practice. Attention to literature and the arts helps to develop and nurture skills of observation, analysis, empathy, and self-reflection - skills that are essential for humane medical care."

It sounds like an excuse to watch "Gray's Anatomy" rather than go to lectures. To give you a flavour of the more academic approach, here's the start of the abstract of "Illness narratives: reliability, authenticity and the empathic witness" from Med Humanities 2011;37 - "Several scholarly trends, such as narrative medicine, patient-centered and relationship-centered care, have long advocated for the value of the patient's voice in the practice of medicine. As theories of textual analysis are applied to the understanding of stories of illness, doctors and scholars have the opportunity to develop more nuanced and multifaceted appreciation for these accounts. We realize, for example, that a patient's story is rarely 'just a story,' but is rather the conscious and unconscious representation and performance of intricate personal motives and dominant meta-narrative influences."

There's also Hektoen International (a journal about medical humanities). Literature, Arts and Medicine Blog looks interesting too.

Two articles about the state of literature and publishing

From a newspaper description of a program tonight: "A 31-year-old amateur poet from Bournemouth discusses his difficulties dating". The word "amateur" reveals the difference between the public perception of literary writers and the harsh reality. Here are 2 recent reality-articles that are well worth a read -

• Poetry and Tribalism - Jon Stone's examination of poetry factions. He finishes by writing "Our collective responsibility, I think, is to change the mainstream without destroying it - or worse, replacing it with something similarly flawed."
• The real story: publishing, four and a half years on - Sharon Blackie, of Two Ravens Press, writes about sales, marketing, blogs, reviews, money and motivation - "Even though our sales through Amazon, for example, go out at the highest discounts we ever give, we love them. Because they represent firm sales, and they never come back again." ... "We’ve had e-books for a couple of years now, sold through our website and also fully distributed through a major wholesaler, and our bestselling e-book has sold about ten copies."

Interview with Joel Lane

I've posted an interview with Joel Lane, poet and story/novel writer. Our paths have crossed in many magazines.