Home » Posts tagged 'joyce-carol-oates'

Tag Archives: joyce-carol-oates

Preparing for Halloween

Posted on by | 2 Comments

British Gothic Novelist Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)

Usually, I spend much of the month of October each year reading gothic or horror fiction. I have already started reading Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), after which she quietly stopped writing and spent the last twenty-six years of her life as a private person. I have fond memories of reading her novels The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

Also, I will inevitably read one of Joyce Carol Oates’s underrated gothic novels or collections of short fiction. Other possibles are Thomas Ligotti and Robert Aickman. And I will certainly re-read some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories.

In November, I will write a post detailing with gothic/supernatural/horror titles I have read.

“In the Desert”

Posted on by

American Writer Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

One of the great “What Ifs” of American literature is what we would have had if Stephen Crane had not died at the age of 28. As it is, we had a great novel (The Red Badge of Courage), an interesting novelette (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets), and two great short stories (“The Open Boat” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”). Here is a short poem from Crane, the last two lines of which were used by Joyce Carol Oates as the title for one of her early novels:

In the Desert

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

Pig

Posted on by | 1 Comment

“Probably Bacon Now”

“Probably Bacon Now”

I came across this poem in an excellent article by Joyce Carol Oates in the August 13, 2015 issue of The New York Review of Books. It was quoted in an article about literary imagination entitled “Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature.”(When is this woman finally going to get her Nobel Prize? She deserves one five times over.) The poem is called “Pig” and it is by Henri Cole:

Poor patient pig—trying to keep his balance,
that’s all, upright on a flatbed ahead of me,
somewhere between Pennsylvania and Ohio,
enjoying the wind, maybe, against the tufts of hair
on the tops of his ears, like a Stoic at the foot
of the gallows, or, with my eyes heavy and glazed
from caffeine and driving, like a soul disembarking,
its flesh probably bacon now tipping into split
pea soup, or, more painful to me, like a man
in his middle years struggling to remain
vital and honest while we’re all just floating
around accidental-like on a breeze.
What funny thoughts slide into the head.
alone on the interstate with no place to be.

Oates writes in her particle: “(Parenthetically, I should mention that I read this poem when I taught several writing workshops at San Quentin in 2011, on my first meeting with the inmate-writers; in fact, I had to read it twice. The students were fascinated and moved by this poem, in which they saw themselves all too clearly.)”

What’s odd about the poem is that the driver begins to identify with the pig midway through the stanza.