This piece started accidently on Twitter as a tweet in response to a line Colson Whitehead had tweeted, about notes for a short story he was taking, although, he said, he didn’t write short stories. He thought he’d call it “The Full Iceberg.” My tweet grew into a riff, and then into its own story about Colson, shipwrecked on an iceberg, with a small penguin named Edwina. Not all the lines were tweeted, and some were subsequently re-shaped, but they all retain the “tweet format.“

***

 @colsonwhitehead sits cross-legged on the iceberg and stares back at the penguins staring at him. “Shipwrecked with non-talking birds,” he mutters.

A section of the ship still rests on the iceberg. Penguins waddle around and through it as if they are at a museum.

@colsonwhitehead pieces a quilt from comic books left in the ship’s bunkroom and stitches it with red thread. “Art,” he tells the penguins.

The penguins are impressed. Or at least they shift from one foot to the other and gurgle quietly as they eye @colsonwhitehead’s art-quilt.

I’ll call this art-quilt “The Full Iceberg,” @colsonwhitehead says. “Is it edible?” asks the smallest penguin. She has blue feet.

@colsonwhitehead looks closer at the smallest penguin. She has blue shoes on, not blue feet.  http://bit.ly/50AsV

“Like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves, as though we were drowning inside our hearts, as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul,” he says.

“Pablo Neruda,” the tiny penguin says. She blinks at @colsonwhitehead. “My name’s Edwina. And this story’s about me, not you and your wrecked ship.” “Fine by me,” he says.

Penguins dive off the iceberg. Plop-plop-plop. @colsonwhitehead hums as he watches a sapphire light deepen on the horizon. Edwina sidles near.

The ghost-ships on this iceberg crowd them. A cold wood flank touches warm one. Edwina clambers into @colsonwhitehead’s lap. Shivering.

“We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship, although it meant the end of travel,” Edwina whispers. “Elizabeth Bishop,” @colsonwhitehead says. “And I’d rather have the ship.”

“You need a flag,” she says. “First flag, then ship.” “Oh no,” @colsonwhitehead says. “I’m not using the art-quilt. I’ve already named it.”

“Well, un-name it.” “No,” @colsonwhitehead says. “I don’t un-name things, only name them.” “Oh pooh,” she says. “Think sideways for once.”

 With one wing Edwina sketches a shape in the frigid air. A white flag appears. Wavering. “Ghost-flag,” she says.

@colsonwhitehead looks at it. He sighs. “Nope. No more ghosts.” He hoists the red-thread-comic-book-art-quilt in the air. “Art-flag,” he says.

Edwina clicks her black beak in pleasure. Small fissures open on the iceberg. They zig-zag like ghost-snakes. The sound of branches snapping, breaking, unseen.

A sigh of night. Fissures widen. An all-black ship rises from lapping water and hangs, glistening, mid-air. @colsonwhitehead feels his chest squeeze. The sheer beauty.

“It worked,” Edwina says. “You can fold and put away the art-quilt-cum-flag now. Only one small problem.” “What?” says @colsonwhitehead.

“Um. The ship has only two directions. Up. Or down.” @colsonwhitehead glares at the small penguin. “THINK SIDEWAYS,” he says.

Edwina does. She thinks so hard that her blue shoes pop off and reveal blue feet. The black ship suddenly shifts in the air and balances on its prow.

There is sea-water raining on them. The cracks in the iceberg become maws. “You know,” says Edwina, “I don’t think we WANT to know the full iceberg. It might not be good for us.”

“Good point,” says @colsonwhitehead. “You’re coming with, right?” Without waiting for an answer he wraps her in the art-quilt and ties the ends around his chest.

Up @colsonwhitehead goes, fingering and toeing his way up the sideways-ship as if it were a tree. A muffled screech comes from the art-quilt.

“I don’t like heights,” wails Edwina. “There’s always something,” says @colsonwhitehead. “Now hold on.”

One fatal crack, like thunder, like a redwood trunk severed. The sky goes abruptly dark, a curtain pulled on the stage of the past.

Then the muttering of a TV. The smell of coffee. Edwina looks around, dazed, at the interior of a Brooklyn apartment flooded with sun.

@colsonwhitehead is sprawled on the floor on top of his art-quilt. Edwina studies him. “You look rather penguin-like around the eyes, you know,” she says.

@colsonwhitehead sits up. “And you,” he says, “look obnoxious around your beak.”

“Your art-quilt fell apart,” Edwina says. “It looks like a bunch of crappy comic books.” “No deconstruction before breakfast,” @colsonwhitehead says. “Now let’s eat.”

And so they do. One tall, one small, both smelling of brine and fish, scooping Cheerios into their mouths.  Waiting.

They hear a voice. “Some are asleep, on the bottom of the world, sucking the world in, and blowing it out, in wave-lengths.  Radiant ghosts.”

“Michael Dickman,” Edwina says.

“As [Anne] Carson said in her interview with Kevin McNielly:

Using words so that you create a surface that leaves an impression in the mind no matter what the words mean. It’s not about the meaning of each individual word adding up to a proposition; it’s about the way they interact with each other as daubs of meaning, you know as impressionist colors interact, daubs of paint, and you stand back and see a story emerge from the way that the things are placed next to each other. You can also do that with language. (“Gifts and Questions” 20)”

excerpted from: “This Breaking Where Red Things Wade”: Textual Hybridity in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, by Madeline Oatman

This is an excerpt from Anne Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay” from Glass, Irony and God, which gives a moving and unusual look at Emily Bronte:

WHACHER

Whacher,
Emily’s habitual spelling of this word,
has caused confusion…

 But whacher is what she wrote.

Whacher is what she was.

 She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night.
She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.

She whached the bars of time, which broke.
She whached the poor core of the world,
wide open.

“Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet,”
records Charlotte in 1828.
Unsociable even at home

and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out,
Emily made her awkward way
across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers.

This sad stunted life, says one.
Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment
and despair, says another.

She could have been a great navigator if she’d been male,
suggests a third. Meanwhile
Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question,

Why cast the world away.
For someone hooked up to Thou,
the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.

But in between the neighbour who recalls her
coming in from a walk on the moors
with her face “lit up by a divine light”

and the sister who tells us
Emily never made a friend in her life,
is a space where the little raw soul

slips through.
It goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel,
out of sight.

The little raw soul was caught by no one.
She didn’t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary
or a fear of death. She worked

in total six months of her life (at a school in Halifax)
and died on the sofa at home at 2 P.M. on a winter afternoon
in her thirty-first year. She spent

most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet,
walking the moor
or whaching. She says

it gave her peace.

“Like two dim forests edging together the Now and the Then stood, almost silent. What strange animals crept to the verge of each and stared at one another from their own territories?  What rough or velvet coats, and fearful eyes, bright claws and teeth, did each side see? Their shadows wove together and their sunlight and moonlight were the same, but they never approached each other, never mated.”

–an excerpt from “Seven-Days Monologue” by Elizabeth Bishop, quoted in essay “Elizabeth Bishop’s Bramble Bushes” in the book Modern Poetry After Modernism, by James Logenbach.

This excerpt is from Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson:

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else…These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Of course, there are several different ways to be. In the world of the Homeric epic, for example being is stable and particularity is set fast in tradition. When Homer mentions blood, blood is black. When women appear, women are neat-ankled…the sea is unwearying. Death is bad…Homer’s epithets are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption. There is a passion in it but what kind of passion? “Consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code,” says Baudrillard.

So into the still surface of this code Stesichoros was born. And Stesichoros was studying the surface restlessly. It leaned away from him. He went closer. It stopped. “Passion for substances” seems a good description of that moment. For no reason that anyone can name, Stesichoros began to undo the latches.

Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved.  Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless….or a planet middle night stuck. Or an insomniac outside the joy. Some substances proved more complex. To Helen of Troy, for example, was attached an adjectival tradition of whoredom already old by the time Homer used it. When Stesichoros unlatched her epithet from Helen there flowed out such a light as may have blinded him…”

For further information:   “Seeing Red”, the New York Times 1998 review of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red:   http://bit.ly/7MXqd

Geryon, the protagonist of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, as illustrated by Gustave Dore for The Divine Comedy.

Below follows an interesting excerpt from the Seed  magazine interview with Alison Gopnik, author of the new book  The Philosophical Baby. The interview takes a look at children and imagination, and the meaning it has for the adult world.

 Seed: You describe children as being “useless on purpose.” What do you mean by that?

AG: It’s related to one of the basic things that came out of our research: Why do children exist at all? It doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense to have these creatures that can’t even keep themselves alive and require an enormous investment of time on the part of adults. That period of dependence is longer for us than it is for any other species, and historically that period has become longer and longer.

The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use. So one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R&D department of the human species. They’re the ones who are always learning about the world. But if you’re always learning, imagining, and finding out, you need a kind of freedom that you don’t have if you’re actually making things happen in the world. And when you’re making things happen, it helps if those actions are based on all of the things you have learned and imagined. The way that evolution seems to have solved this problem is by giving us this period of childhood where we don’t have to do anything, where we are completely useless. We’re free to explore the physical world, as well as possible worlds through imaginative play. And when we’re adults, we can use that information to actually change the world.

Seed: You think Freud’s and Piaget’s conceptions of young children’s theory of mind are wrong. What do we know that they didn’t?

AG: Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both. The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults. A lot of their characteristic traits, like their pretend play, are signs of how powerful their imaginative abilities are.

Now that the uproar has died down and Alice Hoffman is off somewhere bandaging her tweet-wounds and regretting her  New York Times public apology http://bit.ly/lcVvb –and the Boston Globe reviewer has retired back to near-oblivion….

I’d like to say that’s the first public stoning I’ve ever witnessed. A virtual stoning, 21st century style.

Mostly it seemed to take place on Twitter, and the aftermath was re-hashed in print media. The fuss, for those of you who missed it, was over Hoffman’s response to a rather lukewarm and inept  review of her new novel, The Story Sisters, by Roberta Silman in Hoffman’s hometown paper http://bit.ly/4d7f4x . Hoffman essentially had a small fit on Twitter (and not a very dramatic fit either, since it lacked any cuss-words, firearms or hyperbolic threats), and topped it off by publishing the email address and (incorrect) phone number for Silman, suggesting that her readers contact the reviewer to complain.

The publishing of the contact information is what most tweeps–i.e. authors, book reviewers, journalists, and lit-bloggers–seemed to find beyond the pale.  Editors and literary agents remained studiously quiet, though they may have been frantically DMing (direct-messaging) in the background. Additionally, people seemed outraged at Hoffman’s lack of professionalism and good sportmanship in a public forum, and sent such a hail of tweets her way that Alice Hoffman finally ended her Twitter account and permanently withdrew from Twitterdom. This, one notes, occurred on the same day that Alain de Botton published on his reviewer’s blog the sentiment: “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.” http://bit.ly/UatCe .  Oddly enough, Hoffman’s decidedly less vituperative fit drew more attention.

Now, I definitely do not condone such childish behavior from a writer. Definitely. Never mind that I’ve acted equally immaturely in my private life on a weekly basis. Hoffman is a PROFESSIONAL, a FAMOUS AUTHOR, who manages the unnatural balancing act of being both literary AND a best-selling writer, and she lost control in public. And god knows, writers never act badly.  Ever.  I mean—remember when Richard Ford walked up to Colson Whitehead at a Poets and Writers party, and spit in his face, as a response to Whitehead’s review of Ford’s book http://bit.ly/zbKK8 ? Or when Norman Mailer punched Gore Vidal? Or when…well, here’s a couple of articles about other authors behaving badly, from Jason Pinter’s blog and Rachel Donadio’s  article in the New York Times Book Review : http://bit.ly/16e1ZZ and http://bit.ly/ucbzv. Cynthia Ozick (as quoted in Rachel Donadio’s article) says: “There’s a great deal of…jealousy, excoriation, disapproval, putting down. And the more successful a writer is, the more of that there is.” So perhaps the unique, visceral and immediate nature of Twitter lent itself to the deluge of disapproval.

I myself am an inconstant fan of Hoffman’s work. From what I remember of what I’ve read by her, I have admiration for her talent and her potential and her early work, but felt that some of her later work was a bit spotty and self-indulgent—which in fact might be laid at the feet of her editor,  since a lot of editors don’t crack down and actually edit. But still. I hate to see people bullied in the name of politically correct behavior.

1. No one pointed out that Roberta Silman’s email address was published at the end of the Boston Globe review. Silman herself made the email address public.

2. I didn’t think that Hoffman’s reaction was that interesting, in the context of the history of authors’ behavior. I did think the reaction of OTHER writers to her behavior was interesting. It’s possible they projected their own fears and anxieties onto Hoffman, and then attacked her for it.

3. My greatest perplexity was: Why Alice Hoffman? What was it about her that drew the ire? The fact that she’s so successful, and, hither-to, ladylike? Would people have been as shocked if, say, Elizabeth Wurtzel or Mary Gaitskill had lashed out at a reviewer? And why was more attention paid to Hoffman’s behavior than to de Botton’s behavior? Because he’s less famous? Or because he’s male?

I don’t understand why the audience to this tantrum professed such shock. We’re talking about writers here. You know—part of the Artist Species. The kind of wild creature that drinks absinthe and cuts off his or her own ears. Since when have writers become such docile animals toeing the corporate line? I realize they have mortgages to pay, people to suck up to, tenures to secure and books to sell. But does living in the real world also mean turning into a  Stepford Artist? We need to allow our writers and artists to act badly every once in a while, because sometimes we act badly too–whether in public or in private. After all, what did that early international bestseller say?  That those without sin among us should cast the first stone?   In retrospect, I think the people who criticized Hoffman acted worse than Hoffman did. It was like watching the Puritans tear after a fleeing would-be witch. And I think we’d all be better served talking about why the mob formed,  and why the mob went after Hoffman, rather than talking about Hoffman herself.

There’s no reason a writer can’t respond to a review of their work, and it’s not up to us to dictate the format or content of that response.  A response from the author creates a dialogue, sparks the imagination, and keeps the balance of power on even keel. And perhaps we should consider this cautionary note, from Donadio’s NYBTR article: “To some, the paucity of feuds is connected to the larger state of literary culture. ‘It’s not because we no longer have feuds,’ said Fran Lebowitz, the writer. ‘It’s because we no longer have literature.’