It was a wild and windy day...

We were meant to hike in the Mournes today, however a very bleak forecast--50 mph winds--put paid to that.
Instead, I had a lazy reading day. I finished the Colm Toibin book called New Ways to Kill Your Mother. It was quite a joy to read an accomplished writer writing about other writers. He did a great deal of research on maybe 12 authors--reading their letters, their journals, published biographies--and then he explained the source of their creative works. Most of the men he wrote about were gay, as is Toibin, and there was quite a lot about their relationships with disappointed fathers, overbearing mothers, and neurotic sisters. Did you know, for instance, that Stanley and Stella in Streetcar Named Desire were based, on, respectively, Pancho Rodriguez, Tennessee Williams’s hot-tempered lover, and Williams himself? That both Williams and Henry James were very close to sisters who suffered from mental illness? With said sisters showing up repeatedly in their fiction?
Here Toibin is on the craft of novel writing:
"A novel is a pattern and it is our job to relish and see clearly its textures and its tones, to notice how the textures were woven and the tones put into place. This is not to insist that a character in fiction is merely a verbal construct and bears no relation to the known world. It is rather to suggest that the role of a character in a novel must be judged not as we would judge a person. Instead, we must look for density, for weight and strength within the pattern, for ways in which figures in novels have more than one easy characteristic, one simple affect. A novel is a set of strategies, closer to something in mathematics or quantum physics than something in ethics or sociology. It is a release of certain energies and a dramatisation of how these energies might be controlled, given shape.”
Here he is on Hart Crane’s poetry:
"In his poems he worked a gnarled, edgy sound against the singing line; he played a language dense with metaphor and suggestion against images and rhythms of pure soaring beauty. His syntax had something hard and glittering in it, utterly surprising.”

The common elements among these writers seems to be a great deal of travel, unhappy families, oceans of alcohol, and a boundless capacity to soak up the literary canon.
I’ve never read anything by many of the people profiled, including Jorge Luis Borges, John Cheever, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, or Brian Moore. Nor have I read the dozens of authors each of them read comprehensively. As an English major, I used to feel badly about my spotty reading habits. But the reality is, I’d rather spend a day hiking in the Mournes than in a library, and I’m OK with that. I don’t know John Dos Passos from William Carlos Williams, but I can swim a mile comfortably, do a Lindy circle with some style, and hit a cracker tee shot (occasionally). Maybe some day I’ll slow down and have the time and focus to read more. Until then, I’ll spend as much time outside as I can.
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