The Divine Comics

Take it easy

2012-02-13T05:10:00.000-08:00

Clearly, I'm just about the world's worst blogger, so I'm going to put this blog into the deep freeze for now. I just don't have the energy or interest to keep it going. I remain so grateful for anyone with the vaguest interest in my books, though. Keep it in the road and turn up the music. And thanks.

Poem for Valentine's Day

2012-02-11T06:04:00.000-08:00

Bringing Home the Bread

That was the year the morning glories

bloomed unexpectedly, frost just gone

beyond our neighbor’s hill. And you asked

me, as I left, to buy fresh bread when

I came home, and I said, I surely will.

The wheat was green as gravegrass

upwind on old Taggart’s road. A combine

stood undriven for a season or more.

And in that yeasty photograph, I imagined

that the grain was not asleep but rising

in the lovely ovens, hot as August, ready

for the staleness that will break our bones.

You stood by the morning glories, waving

as I drove away, not saying what we say

to make our love rise each old day,

answering with your eyes

what I meant to ask and then forgot.

You said, I will,as the blossoms curled

and loved along the sunstroked sill.

You said, I surelywill.

--Philip Lee Williams

Still around

2012-01-27T06:45:00.000-08:00

Everyone--

I have been a slow and sloppy blogger, but I'm going to get better starting soon. There are many things I want to write about. One thing that has been a source of confusion lately is the discount for The Divine Comics on Amazon. It started at 24 percent and then, for reasons even my publisher doesn't know, changed to 4 percent. This obviously was a problem, but lo and behold the discount went back to 24 percent last week. So as always, look for the best price. More soon.

New Year

2012-01-06T05:53:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone and happy 2012.

After a month away from blogging, I'll try to update this site more often. I'm not by a nature a member of the social network--not a member of Facebook, and I don't have a Twitter feed. I remain a private person as much as I can, though that is precisely what writers aren't supposed to be in this day and age.

The Divine Comics is selling a few copies--I never expected that a 1000-page re-imagining of The Divine Comedy would be a bestseller. But I'm proud of it, and I believe it will last. I've never thought of my writing as a career--that is, a way to make a living. Most literary writers make money by doing collateral things, not by the sales of their books. But whatever this one sells, I'm glad I wrote it.

I spent a good deal of December building a new trail in our woods. It's starting to look very nice indeed, though a lot of work remains.

Hope you all have happy trails in 2012.

Self-interview about TDC

2011-11-29T05:29:00.001-08:00

Q. What in heavens name gave you the idea to reimagine Dante's Divine Comedy and spend 30 years doing it?

A. In 1970, when I was a sophomore at UGA, I read the John Ciardi translation of the Inferno section of Dante's masterpiece, and I was absolutely overwhelmed. My tastes run toward classical and highly literary writing, and even if I had read it before, I wouldn't have gotten it. Since then, I've been reacting in one way or another to Dante throughout my life.

Q. Why did you decided to name it The Divine Comics?

A. There's a pun in the title. I use "comics" to mean both stand-up comedians or the Sunday "funnies." Either way, the idea is that where Dante saw life as a deeply serious, religious journey, I see it as a chaotic, fractal, hilarious, idiotic, and, yes, purposeful journey.

Q. Is it crazy-unreadable like, say, Finnegans Wake?

A. No, no, no. It's a lot of fun, though as non-realistic fiction it asks the reader to be ready for damn near anything.

Q. Let me get this straight--it's three different novels that flow into a place where they all join?

A. Sort of. The thing that joins them, however, is a faithful homage to Dante and how he saw humans trying, every day, to rise from the muck of life to something more exalted.

Q. How did you begin writing it?

A. In 1981, when I was editor of a left-wing paper called The Athens Observer in Athens, Ga., I would walk every day at lunch down to the town's library, sit at a table, and write. I wrote the whole first section of the book that way--it took more than a year.

Q. Did you ever try to get just that first part of the novel published?

A. Sure did. Got a lot of interesting comments. One of the top editors in NY wrote me back and said I should "Take a look at what kinds of books are being published these days." When I saw that, I knew I had to keep going and write the whole thing.

Q. Who will it appeal to?

A. I'd think people who like Pynchon and David Foster Wallace and Mark Z. Danielewski and writers like that. But I promise it's a wild, pleasurable ride.

Why it's vaudeville

2011-11-28T07:53:00.001-08:00

Hey everybody. First off, the shipping dilemma from Amazon is fixed--The Divine Comics ships immediately. Thanks to Mercer University Press and Amazon for fixing that.

I've been wanting to write a LONG entry on why anyone should shell out good money for a 1000-page novel, even at the discounted prices of the online stores. And I'll do that later. But for now I just want to stress what I think I've made clear all along--this is a huge comic novel that will amply repay anyone who wants a deep and lengthy experience with some seriously messed up characters. It is a fine gift--a wild romp that is unlike its original but like it, too.

But mostly, like the old postcard here, it's vaudeville--jokes, games, skits, songs, bad taste, and a constant juggling of dozens of interlocking ideas. I hope you'll take a chance. I think you will be glad you did.

It's here

2011-11-21T06:14:00.001-08:00

I finally got my hands on The Divine Comics, and I have to admit I'ma bit dazzled. It's 1002 pages of wild nuttiness, a postmodern ridethrough life ending with some conclusions, hard though they may be toferret out. At any rate, I'm extremely proud of this book and delightedit's out.

One note: Amazon says that the shipping time is 4-6 weeks, and this is crazy wrong. I'm trying to get this changed ASAP.

Ifany of you are in touch with creative writing program listings and canhelp pass the word, I'd be grateful. Thanks again for sticking arounduntil it came out.

One more day

2011-11-16T06:34:00.001-08:00

Ah, the beauty of autumn rain. I was supposed to head off to Macon, Ga., today to see the first copy of The Divine Comics, but with heavy rain and slick roads, we've put it off a day. So now I will get to spend the day enjoying the rain, writing (which I've already done), and reading. I may paint a bit, too. Do all of you paint? A great many, I bet. Right now I'm reading the new bios of Joan Mitchell and van Gogh, and both are wonderful.

I love these old woodcuts from 19th century America and am cramming a lot of them in a manuscript I'm working on.

Have a lovely day.

Almost here

2011-11-14T10:13:00.001-08:00

I will see a copy of The Divine Comics this week. The publisher says they've arrived at the warehouse. I'll report more soon on that and other things.

Amazing Discovery

2011-11-07T05:40:00.000-08:00

I have been collecting my papers for quite a while now--many yearsworth of correspondence and so forth in the writing business. And Ihave been going through old notebooks and such. And I found three ofthe four original handwritten spiral-bound notebooks of the first partof The Divine Comics over the weekend. And to my astonishment, I foundthat I started the book in October 1981. So this book is a full 30years in the works, not 28 as I have been saying. I'm aware of what Emerson said about a foolish consistency, but I'm still pleased that I stuck it out and never gave up on getting it published.

November 18

2011-11-03T06:41:00.000-07:00

We finally have a date when The Divine Comics should be in the warehouse at the press: Friday, November 18.

I have been waiting to see this book since 1983, and so this will be a banner day for me. It's a book that's challenging, very funny, loud, soft, and in places quite moving. It is about survival and redemption, true, but it's mostly about the interior journey that we all pass in life--what is inside our heads and never totally comes out.

Mostly, though, it's meant to entertain, and I think it does. Very few 1000-page novels have ever been published, so I hope you will help spread the word and encourage people to take a look.

(The 19th century image of "heading out" shown here reflects how I feel about this journey.)

Philip

The Cover

2011-10-17T04:48:00.000-07:00

This is the REAL cover of The Divine Comics! The figure on the cover is original artwork by Mary-Frances Burt, and I feel very fortunate to have her as one of the designers for my work at Mercer University Press. Pub day slowly approaches.

Ain't it a peach?

Good news

2011-10-11T05:48:00.000-07:00

It's a great joy to report that my former student Lucas Klauss will have a young adult novel coming out from Simon & Schuster next spring! From his early years at the University of Georgia, he knew he wanted to write for children and young adults. I helped him a little (he didn't need much help) getting into the New School in Manhattan, and the rest is history. He now lives is Brooklyn and is getting ready to exult in the joy of his first published book. His novel is called Everything You Need to Survive the Apocalypse.
I have only a few students who are moving along strongly as writers long after graduation (Hi, Ashlee!) but this is the first published novel by a former student of mine.

Here is a brief Q&A from Lucas's page at S&S:

Q. What is your motto or maxim?: A. Work hard and be kind.
Q. What’s your greatest fear?: A. Rollercoasters.
Q. If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you choose to be?: A. In a karaoke room singing "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen.
Q. Who is your favorite fictional hero?: A. Beatrix Kiddo
Q. Who is your favorite fictional villain?: A. Dr. Frank-N-Furter
Q. What is your favorite occupation, when you’re not writing?: A. Worrying that I'm not writing enough.
Q. What’s your fantasy profession?: A. Being Bill Murray's professional best friend.
Q. If you could eat only one thing for the rest of your days, what would it be?: A. It already is hummus.
Q. What are your 5 favorite songs?: A."Philosophy" Ben Folds Five, "Surf Wax America" Weezer, "Fantasy"Mariah Carey, "Just Like Heaven" The Cure, "Creeping Death" Metallica

Mid-November!

2011-10-07T06:40:00.000-07:00

Everyone: The pub date for The Divine Comics is now set for mid-November. Sorry for the delay but these things happen. Also, the real cover is now at online bookstores, so you can get a good look at how lovely it is. That's original artwork on the cover by Mary-Frances Burt. This book is a bit pricey, for sure, but it's a great deal of fun, and I think it will be a permanent addition to your library. Thanks for hanging in there with me!

A little late

2011-09-27T05:13:00.000-07:00

Getting a thousand-page novel ready for publication is a mammoth task, so it's not going to be quite ready for the announced pub date of Sept. 30. I'm guessing it is still another two or three weeks away.

In the meantime, I need to mention that the book is in paperback only. I should have mentioned this before. The costs of a hardback novel of this size would have been prohibitive. But it should look gorgeous in paperback!

2011-09-07T07:25:00.000-07:00

Nearing the finish line with the galleys for The Divine Comics. And it's for sale online at sites around the world.

I can't say enough good things about Mercer University Press and its visionary director Marc Jolley. He has given me the space to publish books that some commercial presses in this economy won't touch. But he's publishing many other wonderful books, and one to watch next year is a new novel by my friend Marly Youmans, whose brilliant poetry collection I wrote about earlier this year.

We got a couple of inches of rain from Tropical Storm Lee--the first sustained rain here since last April. And the highs are in the 70s after months near or over 100. Bliss.

Beginnings

2011-08-26T06:55:00.000-07:00

My readers may well be surprised by the voice in The Divine Comics: A Vaudeville Show in Three Acts, but the truth is that it's been there since the beginning.

In 1983, before my first novel was even sold, I began working on Act One of this huge book. This was in days before I had a computer that could do much of anything, so I walked on my lunch break from my office in downtown Athens to the Athens Regional Library, which was then downtown but has since moved.

Every day I sat there writing in spiral-bound notebooks, adding more and more to the story, with its crazy echoes of Dante and its homages to postmodern tropes. I finished it finally, and I paid my friend Felicia Mitchell (now a professor) who also worked at The Athens Observer, to type it for me. Over the years, this first section underwent revisions and rewriting, but that voice was there from the beginning of my writing career.

I still have those spiral notebooks, just as I still have the paperback Ciardi translation of Dante's Inferno that I bought in 1970.

More on DC; libraries carrying the torch

2011-08-23T05:34:00.000-07:00

Even though I haven't even finished with the galleys on it yet, I'm delighted to say that The Divine Comics is now for pre-sale on Amazon and B&N.com.

One note: The nice cover online isn't the final cover. The geniuses at Burt & Burt designers are still working on the Real Thing!

*

I wrote in my last post how amazed I am when I see my books for sale at stores all over the world. Even more amazing is how many copies of my books are in libraries all over the world. I check this about once every year or so, just to see the reach of my work.

I'll just take a few of my books to point this out. (That's the old library at Trinity College, Dublin, on the left, by the way.)

My first book, The Heart of a Distant Forest, is in libraries everywhere from Athens, Ga., to Singapore. It's in libraries all over Australia (most of my books are in libraries Down Under) and new Zealand, and even in the Bogazici University Library in Istanbul. Happily, it's in the American Library in Paris and the British Library in London.

My epic poem The Flower Seeker is in the University of Cambridge Library and all over the U.S. in places such as Stanford and the Los Angeles Public Library.

All the Western Stars has a huge distribution in libraries worldwide, from the National Library of New Zealand, to the U.S. Army Hawaii Library at Schofield Barracks (attacked on Dec. 7, 1941) to another military facility, the U.S. Army European Regional Library in Heidelberg.

My Civil War novel A Distant Flame is at the University of Melbourne Library and in the Randwick Public Library of Marouba Junction, Australia. I'm also pleased that it (and my book of poetry, Elegies for the Water) are both in the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich, not far from James Joyce's grave.

Finally, most of my books are in the great university libraries of the U.S. The Campfire Boys, for instance, is in the libraries at Yale, Harvard, U Conn, and Southern Cal. (And in hundreds of public libraries all over the country. Thanks to all of them!)

I love libraries insensibly, and knowing someone out there somewhere in the world might be checking out one of my books to read makes my day. As writers, we sometimes tend to forget the reach of libraries. And it's a good time to remember that even with the internet, there is no substitute in a community for a public library.

A brief stop

2011-08-16T11:10:00.000-07:00

I'm reading proof on parts 1 and 2 of The Divine Comics, and while it's an edgy, funny book, this part of things is always a chore for me.

I've been working on this book since 1983, and knowing it's finally coming out leaves me a bit stunned. As usual, I'm heading off into new territory, since clearly I never wanted to write the same book over and over. But I think this is a journey that will be worthwhile.

Meantime, I continue to get nice notes from readers all over the place. My books are in libraries all over the globe and for sale in bookstores worldwide, too. It still surprises me to find out I'm being sold, say, on the Channel Island of Guernsey (shown).

Who knew?

Back to work

2011-08-09T05:28:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. I have been away from this blog for a month. But things have begun to move along on The Divine Comics, and I'm glad to be back.

As I've said before, a great part of my slowness in summer in the South is just the unbearable heat. The heat index here has been at or over 100 for two months. True, it's not as bad as Dallas or Oklahoma City--when it's 110 there, it's 99 here. But that's small comfort.

Still, public school has started again, college starts soon, and even better, so does college football. It will still be hot, but at least there's a sense of moving on.

Estelle Faulkner once said to her husband, while they were sitting outside, "You know, Bill, there's something different about the light in August." He supposedly leaped up, ran inside, and wrote down the title of one his finest novels." Well, it's not the light; it's the humidity.

I well remember the days when no homes had AC at all, and in summer, one just sat in the shade, drank tea, and waited it out. At least we can stay cool now. But go outside and it's like being mugged.

I've proofed the first section of the galleys for The Divine Comics--and I admit it's a wild and strange book, but it's one I'm fond of. More soon, but nothing more, I promise, about the heat.

Summer

2011-07-09T05:29:00.000-07:00

I hate summer--anyone who knows me knows that. So I'm basically in a fetal position waiting for October. I will post more soon, but for now I am waiting out the heat and the humidity.

*

Note to the person who left the note on my previous post about the train ride: I have tried several times to leave an answer to you on the blog, to no avail, but I did write your email address. All comments on this blog also come to my Gmail address, and I got your comment there just fine. So I wrote you back from there. Leave another note here or try again at philipleewilliams@gmail.com if you want to contact me. Something seems wrong with the comments section on this blog. I have changed the settings to the least-restrictive positions. Dunno.

Ceaselessly into the past

2011-06-14T04:37:00.000-07:00

I have always thought that F. Scott Fitzgerald's reputation was built on the ending of The Great Gatsby. Of course, the whole novel is nearly flawless in construction and execution, but what I remember most is the very end:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I have come back to those lines again and again over the decades. It's about far more than the mystery of the past, of the nostalgia for the road not taken. (Or even the road taken.) It is simultaneously ominous and hopeful, as life is.

Anyway, I just found out something amazing that brought it back to me.

During World War II, my father had the great good fortune to be stationed at a U.S. Army Air Force base just outside Oxford, England. While there, he was befriended by a first-rate musician and wonderful human being named Donald Sprinck. My brother, sister, and I grew up hearing about Donald, and since his death in 1985, those who loved the man have been building all kinds of memorials to him.

You see, Donald (left), while a brilliant musician (he gave my father keyboard lessons during my father's off-times from the war), stammered so badly he was nearly mute for all of his 85 years. Think about that. A man who lives by the glory of sound and who is unable to speak without terrible effort and pain. If that's not heartbreaking to you, you don't have a heart.

Anyway, there was an event recently in England in honor of Donald, and in the notes for it, the writer mentioned in passing that Donald (who was born in 1900) studied in his youth with noted English composer Charles Villiers Stanford. Since I knew Stanford was quite famous, I began looking for Stanford's teacher, what I found astounded me. Here it is in a nutshell:

*Charles Villiers Stanford studied with the German composer and teacher Carl Reineke.

*Carl Reineke studied with Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, and Franz Liszt.

*Franz Liszt studied with Antonio Salieri (and Liszt's father was a friend of Haydn and Beethoven).

*Antonio Salieri taught Beethoven and Schubert and was a colleague and friend (he was) of Mozart's.

So there is a direct pedagogical line from Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Liszt to my father. Stanford was a friend of Vaughn Williams, Gustave Holst, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and many other well-known composers in England, too.

Since my father was my first piano teacher and also the first teacher of my sister Laura Jane, then both of us can also trace our pedagogical line directly to Salieri through Liszt and Reineke.

I don't for a minute think such links are that uncommon. Using Ancestry.com, my father found that I am related to nearly everybody, from Abraham Lincoln to William Faulkner. But for a musician, such things have a kind of lovely aesthetic significance.

We are all being borne back ceaselessly into that past, whether we know it or not.

The Throne of Psyche

2011-06-12T05:58:00.000-07:00

My friend Marly Youmans is one of America's finest writers. Anyone who knows her work even slightly would have little trouble reaching that conclusion. From the very beginning of my awareness of her work, I realized that her voice was unique, her grasp of technique poetry and fiction stunning, and her imagination boundless. She seems to combine two impossible-to-resolve things simultaneously: traditional forms and an edgy, almost avant-garde sensibility.

Marly and I had been slated to be on a panel in Nashville together some 10 years ago, and she emailed me to see how we might share our time on that panel. I wound up unable to attend because of a bad back, but we began as penpals and over the years became close friends, sharing stories of our children as they grew up and suffering together over the loss of parents.

Her new book of poetry, The Throne of Psyche, just out from Mercer University Press, is, in a word, magnificent. In fact, if you wanted one book that most accurately deals with Marly's interests and obsessions as a writer, this is one to buy. More, it is a book of such power and depth, such richness and wisdom, that you will be reading it forever with gratitude and joy.

Marly's writing, at its core, deals at times with being human in ways possible in the real world and at other times with a world of pure imagination, tied into a deep knowledge of mythology, fantasy, and a profound understanding of her Christian faith. Her work is rarely "easy," though in a few poems of this collection she uses forms that on the surface are simple but on re-reading are anything but.

But if it is rarely simple, her work is consistently beautiful, both in terms of her absolute mastery of language and her deeply insightful knowledge of pain, suffering, and pleasures of daily life. It is a book whose manifest beauties are not easily gained and whose lines often can be read so many ways that spending time with them is like trying to decode what makes love lovely. I come away not so much with answers as with clouds of rhythm and insight that wrap me in places both venturesome and somehow eternally verdant.

The physical book itself is gorgeous, with cover art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, a Welsh painter who just had a much-lauded retrospective of his work. He is a friend of Marly's and his cover painting is luscious and meaningful. The book itself, especially the hardcover edition, is an art object.

But it is the content of the poems that makes it such a special journey. Many writers are also critics. I am not one of them. I have written in many forms, but criticism is not one of them. I don't disparage the form, though. I love well-written criticism and I read it all the time. Still, I can do little more than give you a single poem of Marly's to stand for the riches in this book:

Gulf

Turn the earth for her bed,
Tuck her in moss and fern--
Let the snails be her pearls,
For she's too small, too slight
To ford the cataract
Or cross those bridges, black
With might of bolted iron--
They are too much for her.

Canals on trestle stilts
And boats made gay with flags
Are forbidden to her.

Nor could she bear the deep
Devoid of mystery,
And emptiness of dark.

And long she longed for change
As though the world were husk . . .
She dreams a breastbone, worn
Until it gleams like stars.
It might be all that's left
Of albatross or angel--
A light the stream of sleep
Is washing toward her hand.

Just beautiful. If you love poetry (and I think most people do), please buy this book. It will grace your days as it sets out markers on our way toward peace.

An aura of art

2011-05-23T04:52:00.000-07:00

My brother, sister, and I received great gifts from our mother--wild and rampant senses of humor, a love of popular music of all kind, and the joy of reading fiction. We also got, along with those joys, the lifelong problem of migraines. I have had a headache of one variety or another virtually every day of my life. My migraines are usually not the horrible "vise on the skull" sort, where one has to hide in a dark room, moaning for two days. (I do have those, though.) But what I do see, often several times a week, are auras, visual disturbances common to migraine sufferers. My visual artwork (almost always acrylic paintings) has been heavily influenced by my migraines for years, and I'm sure my fiction and poetry have been, though the connection may be more subtle.

Malte Urbschat's "Phosphenes and Scotomas" describes his migraine
aura symptoms. (Malte Urbschat)

An increasing amount of study has begun to go into auras and art, and last week there was a superb article in the Los Angeles Times about it (below). I hope to find out more about it in the near future.

By Emily Sohn,
Special to the Los Angeles Times

May 23, 2011

It can be hard to explain how your world looks to someone whose reality is very different. That's especially true for people with epilepsy and aura-filled migraines.

Increasingly, instead of struggling to explain with words, people with these illnesses are producing art that does a better job.

The artists begin to feel less isolated and alone. Their doctors get a better understanding of the symptoms they are trying to treat. And researchers gain new insights into how some neurological diseases affect the brain.

"If you have a migraine, you may have visual disturbances, you may have sensory disturbance and you may have pain," says Klaus Podoll of the department for psychiatry, psychotherapy and psychosomatics at the University Hospital Aachen in Germany. "It is often very difficult for patients to describe something like that in five or 10 minutes. In a picture, you can show them all, at the same time."

Epilepsy, he adds, can bring similarly complicated sets of symptoms — and with a picture, "you can immediately be sympathetic and understand what a patient is suffering."
The idea that migraines could inspire compelling art has been around since at least the 1970s, when Derek Robinson, a marketing representative for an international pharmaceutical company, came up with the idea of having a migraine art competition as a way to promote a new drug for the condition. The response was overwhelming.

Over the next 10 years, the British Migraine Assn. (now the Migraine Action Assn.) helped sponsor four British competitions that collected more than 900 paintings and illustrations from migraine sufferers around the world. Further publicity came from British neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, who included 15 of the images in a 1992 update of his book "Migraine."

A series of American competitions followed the British ones, and the field of migraine art was born; since then, plenty of artworks have been sold, bought, acclaimed and displayed in galleries.

In late 1990s, Podoll began to study nearly 600 images from Robinson's collection and asked more than 130 of the artists for descriptions of their illnesses. He documented his findings in a series of research papers and in the 2008 book "Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience From Within."

In many of the images, Podoll found depictions of unusual, bizarre and overlooked symptoms. During some auras, for example, migraine sufferers may feel as if parts of their body are becoming extraordinarily large or small. Or they might see double, triple or quadruple.

Patients can be wary to tell their doctors of symptoms like these, fearing diagnoses of mental disorders. But seeing drawings by other sufferers that show the same symptoms can validate and reassure them, Podoll says. The art can also help doctors see symptoms they may not have known about before.

Migraine art (along with offshoots for other kinds of skull pain, including tension headaches and cluster headaches) has helped legitimize illnesses that have a long history of stigmatization. As a growing number of artists who have migraines have begun talking publicly about how their headaches and auras have influenced their art, scientists, in turn, are starting to reanalyze the work of famous artists whose hallucinatory styles may have arisen from neurologically driven visual disturbances.

Georgia O'Keeffe is one example, Podoll says. So is Lewis Carroll — whose auras, Podoll suggests, might explain the strange experiences of Alice in Wonderland. There is also convincing evidence that visual migraine auras inspired Giorgio de Chirico, who founded the pre-Surrealistic style of Metaphysical art in the early 20th century.

Some neurologists have wondered if Pablo Picasso suffered from migraines, although the evidence for that is poor.

Epilepsy art too has been featured in books and gallery shows. Like migraines, epilepsy is both a neurological and a silent disease, profoundly affecting those who suffer from it. Seizures can bring hallucinations, dreamlike states, chaos and fear, but the illness remains hidden to just about everyone else.

Through art, valuable dialogues about the disease open up, says Steven Schachter, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston and president of the American Epilepsy Society. And there's evidence, he adds, that the disease might in some way be responsible for the artists' inspiration.

Some will depict the experience of a seizure, which can involve distorted vision, music and other fleeting and difficult-to-describe experiences. Others show what it's like to live with epilepsy between seizures, with themes of loneliness and ostracism and images of empty pillboxes and other constant daily reminders. A third set of artworks shows the anxiety and depression that often go along with the disease.

Schachter points to an epilepsy-inspired photograph he finds especially powerful: A man representing an epilepsy patient is dressed as a clown, standing in a busy public space. The clown stares directly at the viewer as the crowd buzzes by. Nobody looks at the clown.

"It can be an unburdening of a person when they draw a seizure or in some way try to express their experience," Schachter says. "When they encounter other people who've done the same, they don't feel so lonely anymore. They are part of a community."

health@latimes.com

The work

2011-05-09T05:13:00.000-07:00

It's no doubt just anecdotal as far as evidence goes, but I'm noticing more and more people who once had lively blogs changing to brief, cryptic comments on Twitter. Maybe both formats will be replaced soon (tomorrow) by something else, but it's true that blogging requires thinking and writing--something I see very little of in many of the Twitter feeds I follow.

I think it's partly due to the supposed briefer attention span people have these days. Anyone accustomed to daily multitasking normally deals with a little information from many sources, not a great deal from a single source. Will fiction catch up with that?

Some think it already has, but I think there is room for more change. And I'm especially intrigued by fictions-to-come that will be filled with multimedia as well as word-based narratives. Stay tuned.

*
My friend Marly Youmans' brilliant new book of poetry, The Throne of Psyche is just out from Mercer University Press, and it's drop-dead gorgeous, in every way possible. I'm especially thrilled that she dedicated the book to me. We have been penpals for more than 10 years, and we have gone through the ebb and flow of our literary careers together. Obviously, I'm thrilled. I'll be writing more on it soon, but for now here is the dust jacket copy, cut-and pasted:

In The Throne of Psyche, Marly Youmans sweeps back and forth between what is human and what is other, binding the two together or crossing the thresholds between them. A prize-winning writer of stories and novels, she pursues tales both otherworldly and earthy with passion and formal power in this eighth book, her second collection of poetry (following Claire, from LSU).

The title poem’s narrative governs the entire collection in its yoking of Eros to Psyche. Psyche is the young girl brought in fear to a marriage chamber that transforms into forest as “The little stars” go “shrieking through the wood” and her childhood innocence is “struck asunder.” But she is more than mortal as she passes in and out of time: the child who hears a dryad prophesy, the goddess who sits on a throne or plays “in the arms of Love / As starlight steadies in his perfect flesh,” the figure of meditation and grief who walks along the broken palace walls of home, the bold adventurer who has been to hell and drunk the blood of memory in the place where all she once loved is now shadow.

Elsewhere in these poems are other potent narratives and revelations where mortal flesh slams into death and transformation: a woman dances with God, the poet speaks in the form of a dryad, a sister transforms into a fish and swims away, a doll is cast out from home and overtaken by a demon, the otherworldly infiltrates the leastmost dust, and a new mother walks with Death in his forest.

Such metamorphoses and broodings on the door ajar between human and other remind us that editor John Wilson (Books & Culture) claims Marly Youmans as “the best-kept secret among contemporary American writers. She writes like an angel—an angel who has learned what it is to be human.”

Difficult books

2011-04-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

When it comes to difficult or lengthy novels, people are quick with opinions. Many loathe novels that aren't clean, brief, and clear. They argue that difficult books that attempt a great deal, especially long ones, are pointless exercises in self-indulgence.

The same is true (maybe even moreso) they say, of poetry. Mention Wallace Stevens, and a lot of people almost snarl, even though he was born in the 1870s. Talk about Pound's Cantos, and these same people point out how chaotic, incomplete, and apparently meaningless it can be.

There is, however, a large group of readers who love the long, difficult book, who want to head out on a complex journey with an author over a complicated mental landscape that lasts for hundreds and hundreds of printed pages. I'm in that group. Sure, I love Hemingway's short stories with their brevity and directness. But given a choice, I'll take Gravity's Rainbow over something brief and to the point any day.

I think part of the issue is how we have trained ourselves to read. If we want to get to the point, to be the first to decode the "mystery" at the heart of a book, then it's no luxury to follow an author through 800 pages of prose that includes back-stories, flash-forwards, and so forth. If we want to see the problem and its solution in short order, we won't be reading Pale Fire. But if we come to a novel or poetic text with a desire to luxuriate in its complexity and length and perhaps even have to learn to read in a new way, then there are plenty of books to satisfy that urge.

I love these books, from The Sound and the Fury to Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. I think I was most influenced by the Cantos, starting around 1969. Rather than be frustrated by this huge poem's crazy canvas, I wanted to learn to read what Pound wrote. (And to loathe a lot of it--many of his social and political opinions were and are ghastly, appalling.) I just want to tell an author: Give me some meat. Show me the depth and breadth of things, whether you write like a 19th century Realist or a Postmodernist.

Of course, length and complexity in themselves mean nothing. When making lists of long, difficult novels, few people omit Atlas Shrugged, for example. But I find Rand nearly unreadable, and she once said that the absolute worst thing about the 20th century--the time that brought us Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot--was altruism. I'm not making that up. She was seriously nutty as far as I'm concerned.

Among books I admire for various reasons but have never made it through are Finnegans Wake and In Search of Lost Time. The former can be read--I've read the first 150 pages probably three times before giving up yet again. And it is certainly entertaining. But it is simply too difficult (for me) either to enjoy it or learn much from it. I'll keep trying. The Proust masterpiece is not at all difficult to read. And the prose is transcendentally gorgeous. But I am so far from caring about the society-hopping and the world of social engagements he writes about, that I don't find any place to hold on firmly to it. Maybe one day.

I'm mentioning all this because I am having back to back difficult books published. Last fall was my The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram. It was a 450-page poem that dealt with the life and travels of the 18th century botanist and artist Bartram. And this fall, it's my thousand-page novel The Divine Comics.

Difficult? Well maybe. But readable for all that, and I believe both are entertaining--something I think writers should attempt. A boring 95-page book can seem interminable. Will they one day be on a list of someone's favorite long, difficult works? Perhaps. But for now, I'm just delighted that I've had the chance to publish them.

And note: My next book, out in the spring of 2012, is a VERY short novel, less than 200 pages!

Dali and Dante

2011-04-18T04:56:00.000-07:00

If you happen to live near Athens and love Dante or Dali, the Georgia Museum of Art has a show in progress you need to know about. Here's the press release:

Writer/Contact: Jenny Williams, 706/542-9078, collardj@uga.edu

“Dalí Illustrates Dante’s Divine Comedy” on view at Georgia Museum of Art

April 10 to June 19, 2011

Athens, Ga. – The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia will exhibit “Dalí Illustrates Dante’s Divine Comedy,” organized by the Las Cruces Museum of Art, Las Cruces, N.M., April 10 to June 19.

The exhibition at GMOA is part of a 10-city national tour during a three-year period containing all 100 prints from Dalí’s Divine Comedy Suite. The exhibition also features text panels in English and Spanish. The tour has been developed and managed by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, an exhibition tour development company from Kansas City, Mo.

In 1957, the Italian government commissioned Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) to illustrate Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) “Divine Comedy.” Dalí’s watercolors were to be reproduced as wood engravings and released as a limited-edition print suite in honor of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth. Often considered to be the greatest work of medieval European literature, the “Divine Comedy,” written between 1307 and 1321, describes Dante’s symbolic journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio) and Heaven (Paradiso). The epic poem comprises three books of 33 cantos each, plus an introductory canto.

Upon receiving the commission, Dalí immediately began creating a series of 100 watercolors, each one illustrating a canto from the poem. When the project was announced to the public, Italians were outraged that a Spaniard had been chosen for it, and the commission was rescinded. Dalí, confident that a publisher could be found, continued to work.

To translate Dalí’s watercolors into printed plates, two artists hand carved 3,500 blocks, an average of 35 separate blocks per print, a process that lasted five years. French publishers Éditions les Heures Claires and Éditions Joseph Horet jointly produced the Divine Comedy Print Suite in 1964. Dalí considered this project one of the most important of his career.

As a young artist, Dalí moved freely among various forms of art, including traditional painting, cubism, futurism and metaphysical painting. A visit to Paris introduced Dalí to artists and writers influenced by the controversial theories of Sigmund Freud. His artistic activities also included sculpture and film, and he is credited with contributions to theater, fashion and photography.

Born in Florence in 1265, Dante is regarded as Tuscany’s greatest poet. His first written work, “La Vita Nuova,” was completed in 1294 as a tribute to his love and muse Beatrice, who guides him through Paradiso in the “Divine Comedy.” Dante began composing the “Divine Comedy” in Verona, Italy, where he was living in political exile, and completed it in 1321, shortly before his death in Ravenna, Italy.

“The interdisciplinary nature of this exhibition especially befits a university museum,” said Lynn Boland, GMOA Pierre Daura Curator of European Art and the exhibition’s in-house curator. “In addition to connecting 14th-century Italian literature and 20th-century visual art, the suite also makes references to, for example, hyper dimensional geometry.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, a large-scale bronze by Dalí entitled “Angel of Victory” from the museum’s permanent collection will be on view in the Patsy Dudley Pate Balcony.

The exhibition also will offer insights into other artistic representations of Dante’s Commedia—from Botticelli to Robert Rauschenberg—with a reading area organized by Boland.

(Woodcut is The Black Demon from Inferno. I have no information on specific pieces in the UGA show.)

Government

2011-04-11T05:06:00.000-07:00

The two novels I wrote about the Civil War, A Distant Flame and The Campfire Boys, deal with issues that are still much in the news these days. One of the main ones, and one I grew up with, is the role of the federal government.

In Civil War days, most southerners thought the federal government (I'll call it the Feds from now on for simplicity) was evil because it was trying to change the South's "way of life." Though some southern cultural groups still laughably claim that slavery wasn't one of the proximate causes of the war, the Truth has a way of sneaking through the cracks in a wall of lies.

When I was growing up in the South in the 50s and early 60s, the term States Rights was on the lips of many southerners. Of course, it meant one thing: the right to discriminate against African Americans, deny them equal rights to vote, and, in many cases, kill them with impunity. When most southerners screamed, purple-faced, against the Feds, it meant a claim that states could ignore the Feds when they felt like.

I grew up knowing in my heart that States Rights was evil. Not just wrong, but evil. It was a philosophy that led to pervasive discrimination and worse. And it took the Feds to right that wrong. Now, few people argue that the States Right people in the South were right and the Feds were wrong.

And yet, with the rise of those who want to destroy most government, if not all of it, the subtext is roughly the same. If people want to pollute, they have the right. If they want to discriminate, they may. And if they want to open society for any evil that pops up, that is their right.

In some ways it is worse that the super wealthy have convinced the poor and the intellectually bankrupt that government is evil. I grew up with these people. They waved Confederate flags and said, "Hell, no, I ain't fergittin'!"

Government can be terribly and pointless oppressive. There is, of course, waste. Always has been, always will be. But waste isn't the point of today's anti-government forces. What they want, by and large, is the ability to do whatever they want without restraint. That means there is no corporate need to fight for clean air and water; no fight to find the center of most arguments; and no need to help those who can't help themselves while fatcats laugh at how easy it is to co-opt the national dialogue.

The national Democratic Party is pretty much a joke. President Obama's first two years in office were genuinely pathetic. And yet for all its mistakes and weaknesses, the Democratic Party looks like a center of sainthood compared to the GOP and the monstrous indifference to all human suffering of the Tea Party.

All of this, and much more, is what I wrote about in A Distant Flame. If we cannot find a way to find the center in all this, where are we heading? Another Civil War? There are plenty who'd love one, and who wouldn't mind at all the loss of a number similar to the 620,000 lives lost in the first civil war.

And that would be evil. And we can see it coming from years away.

A Distant Flame

2011-04-04T05:11:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to announce that the University of Georgia Press has just issued a new edition of my novel A Distant Flame. The new paperback was designed by the brilliant Erin Kirk New and is now for sale at bookstores everywhere and online.

I have a great deal of affection for this novel, which came out originally in hardback from St. Martin's in 2004. It is the first of two novels about Southerners who were against the South's position in the American Civil War. As any who knows me realizes, I am a political liberal going back some 40 years, and I felt it was time that someone spoke for the other side--and believe me, it was large, though usually subdued.

There are no two ways about it: in that war, the South was morally, legally, and ethically wrong. Worse than wrong, actually. It defended human slavery, and those who claim that the war wasn't about slavery or that slavery was a minor part of it all, are being disingenuous at best. Of course slavery was one of the main reasons for it. If you don't believe me, Google Alexander Stephens' "Foundation Speech" and read it closely and critically.

My novel, though, isn't a book of political arguments. It's a novel about the Atlanta campaign and about the human toll the war took on Southerners--and there were many of them--who realized that the South's positions were indefensible. And yet, caught up in the insanity, they had no choice but to fight.

One would think we might have evolved past such things, but as the Bush-Cheney Iraq War, which surely will, among other things, mark them among the worst presidents and vice presidents in American history, showed we still have far to go. (In my mind, Bush is among the worst presidents; I believe Cheney is the worst elected official in American history, which is really saying something, considering Sarah Palin was elected a few times in Alaska, though she couldn't be bothered to serve out her term as governor.)

At any rate, it's a book that won the Michael Shaara Prize as the best Civil War novel published in the United States in 2004 and which I received in ceremonies in Boston in 2005. I hope you have a chance to check it out.

The Inferno

2011-03-21T08:46:00.000-07:00

I have often been struck, speaking with other lovers of Dante, that they first fell in love with the Divina Commedia by going to hell.


Another Dore engraving: Dante and Virgil out of hell		.

I've never met anyone who first read the Purgatorio or Paradiso sections of Dante's great poem and finally got around to the Inferno. Why? Well, it's certainly no mystery. Dante's Inferno is theatrical, frightening, brilliant, funny (yes, it is), and wildly imaginative. It is the Thunder of the Underworld.

I knew all about the Divina Commedia in high school, but I was an idiotic 20 years old before I read the Inferno. By this time in my life, I was already madly in love with caves and the mystery of what is beneath the surface of the Earth. My brother Mark and I dug a "hole to China" in the pasture behind our house in about 1957. We got down about 3 feet, as I recall. But I was desperate to find out what lay beneath.

A few years after that, I began to read about caves and tunnels and hidden places. I fell in love with The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone, a Scrooge McDuck comic that dealt with an underground labyrinth. I visited some commercial caves and finally years later went twice to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. My son Brandon and I went down as deep as they'd let tourists on a day trip. God, it was wonderful.

Science and history were wonderful. But they were nothing compared to imaginative literature. When I was about 13 I began reading Edgar Rice Burroughs's Pellucidar series--a complete lost kingdom beneath the Earth's crust. (Tarzan is fine, but he is among the least of Burrough's creations. The Mars series is almost as good as the Pellucidar books.)

I suppose if I had read a translation of The Divine Comedy at 15, I wouldn't have appreciated it. But age 20 is, if one has read deeply and well, an age of discovery and rapture in the printed word. And when I first read the Ciardi translation of the Inferno, I more or less forgot about everything else in my life for several months. This is a guess, but I am certain I must have read it 25 times straight--starting over as soon as I got to the end.

I didn't get around to reading Purgatorio for another year, and I'm pretty sure I didn't read Paradiso until I was perhaps 24 or so. Since then (and that was a long time ago now) I've read the entire poem dozens and dozens of times. "Obsession" is too modest a word. I have bought many, many translations. And on occasion had the good fortune to talk to translators about their English versions of the DC (Mark Strand was one of them.)

My first reactions to the work were, of course, poems. Many, many, many poems. Then a cycle of poems. When I was in my early 20s, I turned the entire Inferno section into a libretto (too stupid to realize I was violating John Ciardi's copyright) and began composing a "hell" opera. It didn't get far, fortunately. (More than 30 years later my Ninth Symphony was based on Dante, but it was all orchestral.)

When I was about 33, that number of mystical and biblical import, under the influence of Gravity's Rainbow, which had come out a few years before, along with a number of other experimental novels, including my beloved Ulysses, I began work on a fictional version of the Inferno. My idea was to write a book that had little to do with Dante's vision of hell--and everything. For instance, the book (now the "Fire" section of The Divine Comics) is set at a music conservatory in North Carolina. Not very hellish. But I had come up with an extremely elaborate design for retelling Dante's story--one that would take a literary critic years to unravel.

For the next 28 years, I have worked on this vast canvas. While Dante's book has nothing to do with "comedy," as we know it (the word meant something else entirely in 15th century Florence), my book is comic--in every way we understand that term, from wild farce to faux intellectual skits. That's why the book is subtitled "A Vaudeville Show in Three Acts."

It has been a lifetime's joy, and the only real "inferno" awaiting me is reading proofs.

*

The annual Georgia Writers Hall of Fame events take place today and tomorrow. As a new member last year, I know what an honor it is. I have the great joy of being the one to welcome my dear friend, the late James Kilgo, to the Hall. Jim deserves it, and his presence makes it a finer place for us all. If you are near Athens, the main event is tomorrow, Tuesday, at 10 a.m. in the rotunda of the Learning Center in the middle of the UGA campus. (Joyce would have called it our omphalos!) Come if you can. Others being welcomed are the great Natasha Trethewey, the marvelous Melissa Faye Greene, and the late Johnny Mercer, one of the finest lyricists who ever lived.

Divine or Not, Pub Day Will Come

2011-03-15T06:03:00.000-07:00

My excitement level over the publication level this fall of The Divine Comics is growing. It has been one of the major preoccupations of my creative life for the past 30 years, and I have begged whatever gods may be to let me hold in my hand a copy of this book before I'm gone.

I have to be honest and say that this isn't beach reading. It's a closely considered re-imagining and reconstruction of Dante's Divine Comedy, and it's huge. The printed book will be more than 1,000 pages. I've written about my obsession with Dante before, so I won't go back into that.

But it's a fact that no single book, not Shakespeare, not Proust, not anything, affected my creative life and world as much as Dante. I still take out my paperback copy of the Ciardi translation with the date 1970 in it frequently, just to remember how I felt when I read it.

Critic Harold Bloom believes that writers frequently create new works of art through "creative misreadings" of older books, and I've always thought that's an insightful idea. My novel Perfect Timing was deeply influenced by Bellow, for example. The books I have written that deal with the natural world, have obvious predecessors, especially Thoreau.

And yet the voice in which I have wanted to speak as a writer has been mute, at least to the world of publishers, for the past 30 years. While I have written and published many books, the fabulist concoctions, the frothy comic effusions with constantly shifting narrative ploys that I have always wanted to publish, have been left behind in my study.

Until now. I wrote them, grimly determined to leave what I believe to be my most interesting and possibly best work. Now, through the good graces of Mercer University Press and my editor, Marc Jolley, the books will see the light of day.

I'll tell more in coming weeks about the structure of The Divine Comics and how it ties in to Dante, but for now, I just want to luxuriate in the knowledge that soon it will be published, be real.

(Illustration: Gustave Dore, from his Dante images)

An Alphabet of Writers

2011-03-07T06:12:00.000-08:00

Some of my faves:

John Ashbery, Raymond Andrews
Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow
Joseph Conrad
Don DeLillo, James Dickey
T.S. Eliot
William Faulkner
William Gaddis
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce, Henry James
Franz Kafka
James Merrill, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Mann

Vladimir Nabokov
Eugene O'Neill
Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon
Roman Rolland, Theodore Roethke
Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, James Schuyler
Lev Tolsoy
Ulysses--Okay a novel, but the greatest ever written
Kurt Vonnegut (Not as good as the others, but a V anyway)
Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, David Foster Wallace, Richard Wright
William Butler Yeats.

I like lists like everyone else, but this one is just as meaningless as all other lists. Many of these writers are ones that have been lifelong obsessions: Joyce, Pound, Bishop, and Hemingway. I didn't really get into Nabokov until I was in my late 20s, but I now believe he may well be the greatest author writing in English in the 20th century. Certainly a multilingual, transcendent genius. Romain Rolland is there because of Jean-Christophe, which I read at 15 at my father's urging. I have read it several times since, and if not a genuinely great novel, it changed my life. (Rolland did win the Nobel.)

I realize there are too few women and writers of color in that list. I'll work on that, but these are just from the very top of my head.

I'm re-reading Brian Boyd's two-volume bio of Nabokov (pictured above) for about the fifth time. It is the greatest literary biography ever written in English. And yes, I've read Richard Ellman's great biography of Joyce many times and have a number of copies. It is a masterpiece. Boyd's book is better.

Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster

2011-03-02T15:22:00.000-08:00

Very few people, if any, have done more for southern writers and writing over the past 25 years than William W. Starr. For many years, Bill was book editor of The State, the daily paper in Columbia, S.C., and from his position there, he wrote hundreds and hundreds of reviews of new books, bringing to his work a sensitivity and talent that stood out nationwide.

Bill was an early and ardent support of my books, and I could never repay what I owe him. We have been good friends now for many years. Since 2003, he has been executive director of The Georgia Center for the Book in Decatur and has done a magnificent job there.

Now, Bill has published one of the best travel/essay books I've ever read: Whisky, Kilts and the Loch Ness Monster, just out from the University of South Carolina Press. For heaven's sake, buy it. Buy one for yourself, but almost as good, buy it as a gift for anyone who loves Scotland or who simply loves to travel.

Bill's book is brilliantly written, imaginatively conceived, and a pure delight from beginning to end. It's subtitled "Traveling through Scotland with Boswell and Johnson," and in the book he closely copies the legendary journey taken by those two justly famous English writers in 1773. Hemingway famously said he didn't want readers just to get a picture of a place--he wanted them to feel as if they were really there when they read his books. Bill's book does that and more--it's that good.

Here is a brief part of the catalog description:

"An accomplished journalist and aficionado of fine literature, William W. Starr enlivens this crisply written travelogue with a playful wit, an enthusiasm for all things Scottish, the boon and burden of American sensibility, and an ardent appreciation for Boswell and Johnson—who make frequent cameos throughout these ramblings.

"In 1773 the sixty-three-year-old Johnson was England's preeminent man of letters, and Boswell, some thirty years Johnson's junior, was on the cusp of achieving his own literary celebrity. For more than one hundred days, the distinguished duo toured what was then largely unknown Scottish terrain, later publishing their impressions of the trip in a pair of classic journals. In 2007 Starr embarked on a three-thousand-mile trek through the Scottish Lowlands and Highlands, following the path—though in reverse—of Boswell and Johnson. Starr tracked their route as closely as the threat of storms, distractions of pubs, and limitations of time would allow. Like his literary forebears, he recorded a wealth of keen observations on his encounters with places and people, lochs and lore, castles and clans, fables and foibles. Starr couples his contemporary commentary with passages from Boswell's and Johnson's published accounts, letters, and diaries to weave together a cohesive travel guide to the Scotland of yore and today, comparing reflections from two centuries ago to his own modern-day perspectives. The tour begins and ends in Edinburgh and includes along the way visits to Glasgow, Inverness, Loch Ness, Culloden, Auchinleck, the Isles of Iona and Skye, and many more destinations. In addition Starr expands his course to include two of the farthest reaches of Scotland where eighteenth-century travelers dared not tread: the Outer Hebrides and the Orkney Islands, remarkable regions shaped by distinctive weather, history, and isolation.

"Blending biography, intellectual and cultural history, and comic asides into his travelogue, Starr crafts an inviting vantage point from which to view aspects of Scotland's storied past and complex present through an illuminating literary lens. The well-read globetrotter and the armchair adventurer will each benefit from this compendium of fascinating revelations about Scotland's colorful, volatile heritage; its embrace of myth and legends; its flirtations with both tradition and commercialization; and its legacy as more than a source of single malts, bagpipes, and kilted genealogies."

And yet that barely scratches the surface of this fine book.

I read every single page in enchantment. And I have never been to Scotland, though, like Blake, I have been a mental traveler. This book is a major achievement, and I promise you that you will love it.

Here it is at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Whisky-Kilts-Loch-Ness-Monster/dp/1570039488

Bill Starr is one of the finest men I've ever known. Now I know he's one of the most talented. This book is occasion for rejoicing, and I'm delighted to tell you about it!

More soon

2011-02-28T07:37:00.000-08:00

I know, I know. I've been away from blogging too long. Part of it was a heroic bout of insomnia that lasted four days--I began to feel like I was in a Tim Burton movie. But I'm hopeful that I won't be Sleepless in Georgia much longer and that when next you hear from me, I will be rested, awake, and ready to go.

Finished draft

2011-02-15T05:51:00.000-08:00

Just after four this morning, I finished the first draft of a novel that's not set to be published until 2017. How's that for hubris? In fact, I have at least two more years of writing on the manuscript, but after having spent 14 months on it, I feel a bit like celebrating.

The book is called Thoreau's Last Theorem, and the manuscript is 1132 pages long. This actually, is the first layer of the book. It's a book about ciphers, codes and theorems, and there will be at least two more full layers in the book--material in text boxes, footnotes, and scads of marginalia that will tell the whole story.

Following in the steps of The Divine Comics, it's a vast comic epic dealing with a journey across the United States. Narratively, nothing is ever what it appears to be--not even close. And yet, by the time I've finished with the whole thing, it will be an encyclopedic pilgrimage, an interior passage in memory and in honor of a friend of mine who died far too young some years back.

Writing this book is a great joy, and it will continue to be a pleasure for several years to come.

White

2011-02-10T07:44:00.000-08:00

Lovely snow last night--starting around 1 and lasting until about 5. We got two inches, and it's melting faster now than it fell. I love snow but I'm not yet sure it's worth the trade-off: hundred degrees for weeks on end in the summer vs. more snow in the winter.

I've been a science writer for years, and believe me, global warming is the overwhelming consenus of climate scientists around the world. People who don't believe it are like the anti-evolutionists who don't know a thing about biology and claim the Earth's 4000 years old and all species popped fully formed into being. All those people have one thing in common: they think God is incredibly stupid.

Evolution through natural selection is more beautiful than most people can imagine. Global warming is real. And snow is the South is still a glory.

The Throne of Psyche

2011-02-05T14:57:00.000-08:00

I'll be writing more soon about the great poet, novelist, and short story writer Marly Youmans, but for heavens sake if you love great poetry, go online and pre-order her new book The Throne of Psyche. This dazzling collection of poems will only solidify her position as one of the country's great writers. When it comes out in a few weeks, you will have a true collector's item.

And I'm glad she's a friend. We have been penpals for nearly 10 years now, and in that time we've both published many books. Her brilliance shimmers in everything she writes. There is no other voice in the country like hers, and this tremendous book will grace your home. Buy it now!

http://www.amazon.com/Throne-Psyche-Poems-Marly-Youmans/dp/0881462322/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296945517&sr=1-4

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Throne-of-Psyche/Marly-Youmans/e/9780881462326/?itm=4&USRI=marly+youmans

This is just the latest literary masterpiece to be published by Mercer University Press, rapidly becoming one of the country's major sources of marvelous writing. Check out their website and Marly's while you're online. Marly also runs one of the best literary blogs in the country.

Keith

2011-02-01T08:59:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Keith Richards's new autobiography, and it's been a long time since I've enjoyed anything so much. I have a lot more respect for the human body after knowing what he's done to his for the past 65 years. But the best parts to me, as a musician (though classically trained and a sub-pathetic guitarist), are all Keith's essay-length discussions of open tuning and his influence from the Chicago blues. My brother Mark is a genuine expert on the blues (and about three dozen other things), and it was fun to chat briefly with him a couple of days ago about the intersection of rock and the blues.

Unrelated: I am sick to death of state officials around the country who never hesitate to blame teachers for students' poor work and yet never, ever blame parents (or the students themselves!).

Unrelated: Anyone who fights for the right to take guns in churches, schools, bars, and other such places, and who believes that massively large ammunition clips are good is insane. In many, many things, we are a national of moral cowards. The people in the streets of Cairo right now should make the gutless morons in elective office who won't do the right thing ashamed. Then again, most of the people (above the local level--they're our neighbors, as least in small towns) who hold elective office are serious defectives anyway.

Unrelated: As we get close to pub date for The Divine Comics, I intend to write a lot more about Dante and about my lifelong obsession with him. I couldn't even count how many times I've read almost all his works.

Just Kids

2011-01-26T05:59:00.000-08:00

There was a bit of a stir a few weeks back when Patti Smith's book Just Kids won the National Book Award. Could a memoir by a rock singer (and poet) really be the best book in its category published in the country last year?

You better believe it.

It has been many years since I've been this moved by a memoir. It's the story of her young love with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in New York City in the late 60s and early 70s, and it is told so artfully, with such delicacy and such humility, that I read it three or four sessions of intense attention. In truth, I'm not sure I breathed the whole time.

Think of A Moveable Feast as told by Hadley, but a Hadley who was Ernest Hemingway's equal as an artist. In the story's beginning, Smith's life has gone off the rails, but when she moves from New Jersey to New York City to begin her life, one of the first people she meets is Mapplethorpe. Almost immediately, they are thrown together in the kind of circumstances most of us face when we are young and poor.

One thing held them together and was their lifeblood, first as lovers then as lifelong friends: art. While Robert was heading into areas of male eroticism that many find difficult to look at much less absorb (and I'm one of those), she was becoming a poet and then, well, a rock goddess. Living in NYC, especially when they moved to the Chelsea Hotel, it seemed as if everyone they knew was famous. Salvador Dali would stroll through the lobby. Allen Ginsburg tried to pick her up at the automat when he thought she was a boy.

Mapplethorpe wanted to be part of society and live the life of Andy Warhol. That urge, which also possessed and moivated Proust, is so far from what I like and want, I could barely understand it, much less identify with it. Patti Smith, on the other hand, prays all through the book, even as she loses the religion of her childhood and replaces it with a more pantheistic look on life. She also loves her family and seems always a sane figure in the midst of the crazy storm of 60s and 70s performance art.

Mapplethorpe died of AIDS. Smith, having become a star, decided to drop it all for family life in Chicago, where she and husband Fred "Sonic" Smith, a noted guitarist, had two children. Still, Patti's young love for Robert never died, and toward the end of his life, she promised him she'd write their story.

The book is as exquisite as the dust on a butterfly's wings. The writing is accomplished and often gorgeous. The story and its sentiments are timeless and deeply moving. I'm guessing the film rights were sold before the hardback came out. (It just came out in paperback.)

Do yourself a favor. Buy Just Kids by Patti Smith and relive young love in a time of turmoil. It's a marvelous book, gracious and humble, terrible and sometimes wrongheaded. (Smith believes, for example, that Gregory Corso was one of our greatest poets; well, no). But you will come away changed. And that's what art can do--change us from the heart up. This absolutely wonderful book does just that.

Bellow's Gift

2011-01-21T23:25:00.000-08:00

Every Christmas, I buy myself an expensive literary book so I can snuggle down in that wonderful week of decompression between Christmas and New Year's by the fireside and get lost. This year, it was Saul Bellow: Letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor.

Bellow and I go way back. (Not literally--I never met him.) I first read Herzog in 1970, and I found its humor and intelligence a dazzling combination. I liked but didn't love Mr. Sammler's Planet. But I have to admit that Humboldt's Gift knocked me dead. I love intricate combinations of high and low art, and Humboldt was a beauty.

Alas, in his later years, Bellow, got lost in what to me was nutty right-wing politics. But I have always tried to take the long view--I figure that nobody in the end will remember or care that John Wayne or Charlton Heston were so crazy when it came to politics. (Not that I'm selling them as great artists.) That's why I bought myself the Bellow letters book.

I love artists who continue to work deep into old age, and Saul surely did that. Unfortunately, most readers (including this one) find a steady falling off of quality in everything after Humboldt. I had hoped that the letters would let me inside as it were, allow me to see how he lost his way. And in a sense they do. But the real problem is that so many of the letters are to old friends and not to the movers and shakers we all know from the literary and political worlds.

The insights I gained into his literary world were minor. One obvious thing was his need to be forever on the move--he traveled internationally almost to the end of his life. I'm the polar opposite--a stay-at-home who explores on the Web and remains mostly a mental traveler. I also learned a great deal about the context of a Jewish writer's life in mid-century America. I found that quite valuable and touching, especially his frequent shifts into Yiddish when writing to old friends.

But in the end, there seems to be something missing at the heart of these letters to me. I was puzzled about that for awhile until I remembered that no one's letters (or emails--letters are dead and gone) should necessarily do much of anything but say, Hello, I'm thinking about you. Of course, business is business, and one must communicate about that. But in the end, I found the book interesting, worth reading, but really not compelling. In other words, it's like his later fiction.

In the end, though, he will be remembered, I suspect for a handful of extraordinary fictions, and the good news is that's enough. If you like Bellow, buy it.

One more obsession

2011-01-18T11:07:00.000-08:00

How could I have forgotten my obsession with Eugene O'Neill? For many years, I have studied his plays and his life. Long Day's Journey Into Night is, in the minds of many, the greatest play ever written by an American. I certainly agree. It's shattering. I remain puzzled as to why he isn't in the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, since he lived in Georgia for several years and wrote at least two full plays here, including Ah, Wilderness!, his only comedy and a play that is still in the repertoire. And O'Neill won FOUR Pulitzers and the Nobel Prize. The time is long past due for Georgia to reclaim O'Neill.

Obsessions

2011-01-16T04:41:00.000-08:00

I am a man who becomes easily obssessed. I once spent ten years studying American Indians--10 years. In my early writing career, I must have read 40 books about and by Ernest Hemingway, though my passion for Ernie has by now dwindled to his short stories. I've had obsessions with Jackson Pollock, Gustav Mahler, the Green Bay Packers, Yogi Berra, all the Transcendentalists, and Thomas Mann. It goes on endlessly.

One of my oldest and longest obsessions, though, is with Dante Alighieri, the great, great Italian poet. I read John Ciardi's translation of the Inferno section of The Divine Comedy when I was 20, and I was off on a lifelong love of all things Dante. I've written about this before in blogs and other places, but I have finally reached the apotheosis of my love for Dante: The Divine Comics, my 1,000-page rewriting and updating of his masterpiece, will be coming out as a paperback original from Mercer University Press this fall.

The illustrations for The Divine Comedy by Gustave Dore fanned my early love of Dante, melodramatic as they are:

But in the end what I loved most was Dante's wild imagination, his willingness to leave the realistic behind for the True. I have spent my entire career as a writer trying to move into a mode of epic dark comedy, a world in which anything is possible, even probable--talking animals, shape (and scene-) shifting plot points, a world of allegorical marionettes and metaphors. Along that way, I have written and polished five novels that we will be publishing in the next few years.

The Divine Comics is something I've been working on since 1983. When I was editing The Athens Observer, the late, great alternative newspaper in Athens, Ga.. I would walk every day at lunch to the Athens Regional Library, in those days in downtown Athens, and sit at a quiet table and write by hand in a notebook. I will be the first to admit that early in the process I was most influenced by Joyce and Thomas Pynchon, but over the years I worked on the manuscript, I developed a voice of my own.

It may seem odd, but I have never considered myself a realistic novelist, and I have known since the beginning that my art was more fanciful and less constricted that the fiction of well-made realism. I do love realistic fiction--the highly crafted, the memorably plotted, with unforgettable characters. But what I have always wanted is a voice that combines a willingness to go anywhere (narratively) with an outlandish sense of where the Real lies.

In a sense, I had to earn the right to publish these books, though I kept writing them all along because I knew this was the literary legacy I wanted to leave. I don't know if I have earned it or not, but Mercer, increasingly one of the top literary presses in the country, has decided to publish these books, and I have a sense of joy that's as deep as it is wide.

The Divine Comics is hilarious, brittle, humane, wild, and even, at times chaotic. It follows Dante's epic poem closely and carefully, but it attacks it (in many senses!) from completely different angles. When I see it, hold it in my hand--only then will I feel as if I have, in a sense, reach the place from which I started.

Maybe that's how Dante felt when, in his imagination, he emerged from hell into the stars, Vergil by his side.

Snow Days

2011-01-12T22:50:00.000-08:00

We've been snowed in since Sunday, buried in white on Wildcat Ridge. When I was a little boy, our school sang a lovely song about the snow falling through the night, making a blanket "soft and white," and I still remember the tune after more than 50 years and have sung it to my children and grandchildren. What joy.

And what a boon for a writer. There's something about the profound meterological silence that comes right before a snowstorm that seems to make a creative person want to pick up the pen or brush or head to the piano keys. I've done all three.

Here is our house in the snow:

I wish. But the outside is sanctuary-quiet when the snow begins.

After three full days of being housebound, we're getting ready for it all to melt. But I will try to hold fast to the feeling of lovely isolation I have in such weather in the South.

In the meantime, the excitement is building around here for the publication of The Divine Comics, even though it's still months away. There are very few 1000-page novels published these days, and this one is special for me. I'll be talking more this year about Dante and this new book, along with celebrating the beautiful new edition of A Distant Flame that will come out in April.

In the meantime, echoing President Obama, peace to all.

Hello all

2011-01-05T04:11:00.000-08:00

I've been away for a couple of months, decompressing from the intense work of finishing and getting published The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram.

While sales have been modest (it is an epic poem after all,) the reception has been wonderful, and in December it hit a high note when it was named Book of the Year by Books & Culture, a national literary journal. Here is a link to the article naming the journal's favorite books of the year, with my book as Book of the Year at the end:
http://www.booksandculture.com/

There is also a lengthy podcast talking about the book, and you can find that at:
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/podcasts/upload/williams.mp3.

I also want to clarify my "retirement" from public life, since it seems to have caused no end of confusion. First off, I am not stopping writing or publishing. I have two exciting publishing projects this year alone (see below), about which I will be talking at great depth later. What I have done is retire from nearly all public appearances and autographings. As I said in my old blog, I have been doing this for nearly 27 years, and it's time to let someone else have the stage. So, I'm here and am going nowhere. But you won't see me at a bookstore or event soon. Sorry!

More to come . . .

Hello

2011-01-04T10:01:00.001-08:00

Creeping back.