New New My$tikal Troubadour$ & Autumnal Knavery

"The appearance of mediocrity is often useful in life because it weakens tautly strung strings and sobers up people's self-confident or self-forgetful feelings, reminding them how close they are to mediocrity as well."  -- from Turgenev's Fathers and Sons
             

Fate

The(se) Summer Rounds

"From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody." - Shelley

Honors Brit. Lit.

Lying (in an Open Field)

An Allusion to Coleridge's Verse Contained Herein

From Whitman's "A Woman Waits for Me"

I draw you close to me, you women!             

I cannot let you go, I would do you good,     

I am for you, and you are for me, not only for our own sake, but for others’ sakes;           

Envelop’d in you sleep greater heroes and bards,        

They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me.               25

 

It is I, you women—I make my way,            

I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable—but I love you,            

I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you,               

I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for These States—I press with slow rude muscle,      

I brace myself effectually—I listen to no entreaties,     30

I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me.          

 

Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself,       

In you I wrap a thousand onward years,       

On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and America,           

The drops I distil upon you shall grow fierce and athletic girls, new artists, musicians, and singers,     35

The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes in their turn,    

I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings,       

I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I and you interpenetrate now,             

I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of them, as I count on the fruits of the gushing showers I give now,

I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death, immortality, I plant so lovingly now.

"Our Faith"

"We are yet but young in deed."

"The Same Old Rock"

"The Jovial Shepherd"

"I must point out that it is a very dangerous move for an artist to expose himself so completely.  Indeed, in other times it would have been fatal for an artist not yet full grown to show us his sores and wounds, real and illusory strengths.  Until very recently the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.... However, it may possible to get away with this sort of thing today, for we live in the age of confession.... The audience no longer consumes novels, but it does devour personalities.  Yet what happens after one is eaten?  Is one regurgitated?  Or does the audience move on to its next dinner of scandal and tears, its previous meal absorbed and forgotten?

The human mind is in continual flux, and personality is simply a sum of those attitudes which most often repeat themselves in recognizable actions.  It is naive and dangerous to try to impose on the human mind any system of thought which lays claim to finality.  Very few first-rate writers have ever subordinated their own apprehension of a most protean reality to a man-made system of thought.... And those who take solemnly the words of other men as absolute are, in the deepest sense, maiming their own sensibilities and controverting the evidence of their own senses in a fashion which may be comforting to the terrified man but disastrous for an artist.

Of course it is sometimes the work of a lifetime for an artist to discover who he is and it is true that a great deal of good art results from the trying on of masks, the affectation of a persona not one's own.... Telling stories does seem a silly occupation for one fully grown; yet to be a philosopher or a religious is not easy when one is making a novel.  Also, in a society such as ours, where there is no moral, political or religious center, the temptation to fill the void is irresistible.  There is the empty throne, so... seize the crown!  Who would not be a king or high priest in such an age?  And the writers, each in his own way, are preoccupied with power.  Some hope to achieve place through good deportment.  Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to have been discretion) made it.

Yet all the time [the writer] knows perfectly well that writers are not in competition with one another.  The real enemy is the audience, which grows more and more indifferent to literature, an audience which can be reached only by phenomena, by superior pornographies or willfully meretricious accounts of the way we live now....  He wants to influence those who are alive at this time, but they will not notice him even when he is good.  So each time he speaks he must become more bold, more loud, put on brighter motley and shake more foolish bells.  Anything to get their attention, and finally (and this could be his tragedy) so much energy is spent in getting the indifferent ear to listen that when the time comes for him to speak there may not be enough strength of creative imagination left him to say what he knows."

--excerpted from "Norman Mailer's Self-Advertisements" by Gore Vidal (1960)

Postscript: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2501890/But-did-literary-giant-Gore-Vidal-hide-monstrous-secret.html