What I’m hoping to accomplish with this blog is to generate a conversation about the creative arts across the centuries and the continents. If that sounds a bit too ambitious and grandiose, I apologize. I’m always going to be aiming to connect with readers with shared experiences, and I hope to marry discussions of popular culture with classic works of the past. That’s hardly original, I know, but if The New Yorker can offer “The Talk of the Town” to its readers, then surely I might aspire, here from my home in southwest Virginia, to present “Talk of the Provinces” to a few inquisitive souls. Note that I’m not claiming to post the talk of the provinces, merely some of it.
I retired from teaching at Woodberry Forest School in June of 2020, and since then I’ve been on something of a tear in my writing—at least for me. While I was teaching, I would maybe finish a short story every three or four years. During the twelve months after my retirement, I finished two short stories (one of which has been purchased by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine) and one of which, a non-mystery, is under submission at literary journals. I’ve also tweaked and edited a novel manuscript and, to my great pleasure, have trimmed it from 122,000 words to 98,000. All that work was lots of fun.
Now, however, I find myself in that awful state of being between projects. I’m not like Anthony Trollope, who wrote from 5:30 to 8:30 a.m. and kept himself on a strict schedule of 250 words every fifteen minutes, for a total of 3,000 words per day. If Trollope finished a novel before the three hours had expired, he started a new one. Good for him, but I can’t do that. I have to wait for the imaginative well to fill up again, and I have learned over many years that there’s nothing productive about demanding a visit from the Muse before she is ready to sing. But I’m ready to get started on a new project and am feeling impatient. So what am I doing to keep myself open for the next big idea?
First, I’m reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and am finding it a fascinating mess. By the early 1950’s, when Steinbeck was assembling the novel (published in 1952), he was famous and well established and had already won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award for The Grapes of Wrath. Now that I am 500 pages into East of Eden, I’m thinking that the early success bred a degree of languor over editing and revising this big, sprawling, erratic saga. The first fifty pages read like brainstorming or free-writing, the kinds of things we writers might do if we’re trying to find a way into a story. But I sense that Steinbeck simply wrote what was on his mind for any particular day, saved the pages, and handed them over to his editor without another glance. I’m still reading. I’m still a fan and an admirer of Mr. Steinbeck. But his novel strikes me as surprisingly undisciplined.
Second, when I learned that HBO Max had re-acquired the rights to broadcast all eight of the Harry Potter movies, I decided to give them another look. I had seen them all when they had first appeared in the theaters and had read all the books, but it had been several years since I’d visited J.K. Rowling’s most famous creation to date. Rowling, like Steinbeck, is a story-telling genius and a remarkably prolific one, but I thought that she, too, grew a bit undisciplined starting with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when there were so many characters to track and so much story to absorb that the books began to feel bloated. Waiting for a new book or movie in the Potter cycle to appear, I would lose track of some of the secondary characters. So a couple of weeks ago, I decided that I would celebrate what I came to call Harry Potter Hanukkah: eight consecutive nights of watching one Harry Potter movie per night, a festival of narrative binging.
I established several rules. I couldn’t start watching before 10:00 p.m. because I wanted to guarantee that I would accomplish something less self-indulgent during daylight hours. It also seemed right to be watching while it was dark outside and getting late, to add to the sense of bonus entertainment at the end of the day. I couldn’t skip ahead and watch more than one movie per day, though I was allowed to cue up the next one in line for the following night’s viewing. All these rules were arbitrary, of course, but I sensed (correctly, I think) that it would be quite possible to overdose and to spend too long in the land of Hogwarts, like eating an entire box of candy at one sitting. As King Henry IV said to his son Hal, it’s possible for one to begin to loathe the taste of honey, “whereof a little more than a little is by much too much.” But eight movies in eight nights turned out to be just right—enough for me to keep fresh with the unfolding epic without sacrificing exercise, regular meals, and human contact.
The pleasure of such an exercise came for me in watching those young actors grow up on the screen. In Sorcerer’s Stone they are children, and they—as characters and as actors—had no idea of what kind of international celebrity they had launched when Ron, Hermione, and Harry met on that train for the first time. I felt the same ripple of awe that I get when I look back at Chapter 6 of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Here’s the moment I mean:
Tom hailed the romantic outcast:
“Hello, Huckleberry!”
“Hello yourself, and see how you like it.”
“What’s that you got?”
“Dead cat.”
Neither Tom Sawyer nor Huck nor Mark Twain himself had any inkling of just what a monumental, controversial, beloved, provocative character had just made his entrance onto the world stage. I’d argue that Huck’s entrance was every bit as significant as Falstaff’s three hundred years earlier in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. And while I loved to see J.K. Rowling bring her mammoth undertaking to such a satisfying and grand conclusion, I loved the beginning even more. I love to be there at the start, when so much of the adventure lies ahead.
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