Juvenilia – pl. n. Works, especially written works, produced in one's youth.

As a side project this summer, I’ve been transcribing the contents of Emily Dickinson’s fascicles which I will eventually assemble into a single, book-length collection. I’d be happy to go to a bookstore and pay for a reading edition of Dickinson’s fascicles, but, inexplicably, no such book exists. Rather than wait for who knows how many more decades before some Dickinson scholar or publishing house decides to compile and release an edition, I’ve just decided to do it myself.

Dickinson interests me because I place her within the modernist literary tradition. She’s a sort of proto-modernist, along with Blake and Hopkins. Her poetry, even in the unfinished, unpublished form she left it, was at least a century ahead of her time. Maybe even 150 years, given that no one has yet published a reading copy of her fascicles.

Dickinson’s fascicles are the closest thing that we’ll ever get to finished, edited copies of a large portion of the poet’s work. What makes them valuable is that the poet created them herself. In the early 1860s, while America was locked in a civil war, Dickinson was gathering together her poems and sewing them together into little homemade chapbooks. She made 40 such fascicles composed of some 800 poems. So instead of reading some editor’s interpretation of her work, when we read the fascicles we get to see how Dickinson thought her poems should appear and how they should be read.

One of the problems with the many collections of Dickinson’s poetry that are available today is that editors always want to “correct” her poems — they want to fix her spelling or arrange her lines or ignore the alternate versions of many of her poems. Rarely does a reader get to see a precise transcription of her poems. So one of my objectives in this project has been to reproduce, as precisely as possible, the poems as they appear in the fascicles that Ralph Franklin painstakingly reconstructed a generation ago. It’s a task that sounds easier than it really is. It isn’t so much her words that are a problem (Dickinson had some challenging handwriting, but I’m getting better and better and deciphering it); the biggest problem lies in interpreting Dickinson’s punctuation marks. Her famous dashes don’t always look like dashes in the manuscripts. Sometimes they’re not much more than dots, and unless we are to assume that Dickinson invented some new punctuation mark (which wouldn’t surprise me, actually), those dots have to be interpreted as dashes. Or sometimes they are commas. Or sometimes they are periods. You can see how it can get confusing.

Another challenge is that Dickinson didn’t always clearly indicate where one poem in a fascicle ends and the next one begins. Dickinson’s editors have made assumptions about where certain poems begin and end, but I make no assumptions. When two poems seem to run together, separated only by a stanza break, then I let them run together in my transcription. I also will not be trying to title or number the poems, since Dickinson didn’t do that either. I also leave in her misspelled words (she famously writes “opon” whenever she means “upon,” and she plays fast and loose with apostrophes).

This project has proceeded slowly so far. I’ve only transcribed 6 of the 40 fascicles. There’s a very good chance that I won’t finish it this summer, as I had hoped. And even when I finish transcribing them, I’ll still have to spend time proofreading my transcriptions to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes, which will take more time. But I’m looking forward to the day when I can possess my own reading copy of Dickinson’s fascicles, even if I’m the only one in the world who has it.

Late last week, disaster struck. The hard drive in my computer suddenly died. Well, maybe it wasn’t that sudden. I had been receiving warnings for a few weeks now that something was wrong. Once or twice a week, my computer would suddenly shut down unexpectedly, as if the power cord were suddenly pulled from the socket. For some reason, I didn’t really think that was a big deal.

Then, one evening last week, it happened again. I did what I always would do: I started the computer back up and continued my business. 30 minutes later, it shut down again, and then it happened a third time.

Now I was worried. So I dropped everything and set about making sure my most precious files were backed up. (I learned the necessity of backing up my files long ago, so I was ready). The first two sets of files were the two I consider irreplaceable. The first of these is my collection of teaching files — all of my lessons and tests and data and worksheets and presentations. The other set of files is my collection of creative writing: my drafts of Juvenilia (as well as Leah, The Spring, and other assorted poems and stories).

With those two collections safe, I set about updating the next priority: my vast music collection. It was in the middle of this that my computer died at last. It shut down again, and while I could restart it, Windows would no longer boot. I would either get the blue screen of death or the computer would shut down again in the middle of booting up. In short, my computer was rendered useless.

So I had to buy another one. I wasn’t happy about that either, but my computer was getting old and for the past year I have been flirting with the idea of getting a new computer anyway. One nice thing about the upgrade was that I am now using Windows 7. I’ve used it at work, but now I’ve had the chance to use it in depth, and I like it a lot.

With the new computer up and running, I began installing all of the backed up files I had saved. My teaching stuff and my creative writing were safe in their new home. Unfortunately, I found that I had lost about 15% of my music collection — everything that I was in the process of backing up when my old computer went down for good.

I’ve lost a lot of other stuff, too — stuff that wasn’t backed up at all. For example, the dozens of book covers posters that I’ve been creating since last summer. Almost all of that is lost. All I have is what I printed and framed on my apartment walls. That’s been the most heartbreaking loss for me.

I’ve titled this post “Disaster!” Not too many years ago, a title like that might be considered hyperbole, but for a lot of people, me included, it’s not an exaggeration at all. For good or ill, my computer is one of the focal points of my existence. It’s where I do much of my work, it’s where I create, it’s where I communicate, it’s the source of my entertainment (my TV sits nearby, with a film of dust covering it, unused and forgotten). The only thing that I can think of that would be more disastrous than my computer dying would be if my apartment building burned down (and that would be disastrous primarily because my computer would be lost in the fire!).

Flickr: Abizern

So I’ve had the past week off. Along with sleeping late, filing my income taxes, and taking care of some other business, I’ve been reading through the second draft of the novel.

With my first draft done, my first step in revising the novel is to read through it once and highlight (literally, with the word processor’s highlighting tool) any major structural problems with the text. In the past, when beginning to revise Leah and The Spring, I found myself highlighting quite a bit of things. This time, curiously, I haven’t highlighted quite so much. The biggest problems with the text have been gaps in the story and poor transitioning. With a fragmented novel such as this, in which different texts from different voices compete for space, establishing strong transitions between those texts will be extremely important if I want the book to have any sort of continuity at all.

But beyond the gaps and the missing transitions, I haven’t highlighted a whole lot. Sure, I’ve noticed plenty of weak prose which I’ll have to rewrite eventually, but as far as big structural problems, I haven’t encountered many. The order of the chapters and texts is pretty much locked in to place, although “Chapter Beach” has given me some problems. It needs to go in the second half of the novel, after Rosemary’s initial encounter with Ethan in (where else?) “Chapter Ethan,” but I’m not exactly sure where would be the best place for the chapter. Right now, I have it as the tenth of the twelve chapters, which seems a little late in the novel. Yet it doesn’t fit very well if I try to move it to an earlier spot.

Another idea that has occurred to me this week has to do with Rosemary’s poems–her contribution to the book. Before this week, I imagined that I would clump her poems together, into a single intermission between two of the chapters. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to scatter her poems through the entire story. Scattering them would certainly raise new transitioning challenges for me (as well as throw my table of contents into chaos), but on the other hand it might place Mark’s texts and Rosemary’s texts on a more equal footing. If I do scatter them, I’ll need more of them, however. I had planned on using only about a dozen of Rosemary’s poems, if they are all clumped together, but if I scatter them, Rosemary may have to provide me with as many as 20 poems.

It’s these kinds of big-picture problems that I’ve spent the week identifying and thinking about. Unfortunately, I may not have much opportunity to work on the novel until the end of the school year. It’s a shame, because this week I’ve been able to stick to a writing schedule every day. It’s a good habit I’ve fallen in to, but come Monday, I’ll have to break it.

Flickr: CrazyFast

I had an interesting dream last night. Apparently a movie adaptation of Leah had been made. It wasn’t a Hollywood blockbuster; from the looks of it, it seemed more like a low-budget indie movie, but there it was.

It was an interesting dream because just as a filmmaker might do, my dream-imagination took some liberties with the text. The young “actress” playing Leah Nells wasn’t quite what my waking-imagination pictures (she looked a couple years older than Leah’s 14), but it wasn’t inconsistent either. The actress had a gawky look about her which fit the character.

The first scene of the “movie” took place outside — at school perhaps. Leah was being picked on by a couple of girls (was Heather one of them? I don’t know). Interestingly, Leah tried to defend herself by trying to fire back an insult or two of her own, but her words fell flat and made her look even more foolish.

The second scene took place at her home, and here the “movie” set more closely resembled the set of stage play. The rooms in the house were small and cramped and bare. The kitchen was in the foreground of the scene while Leah’s bedroom was directly behind it (thus, the viewer could see both rooms simultaneously). Later, when I awoke, it occurred to me that if Leah were to be made into a play, it might make sense to build a two-story set, with Leah’s bedroom directly above the kitchen. Thus, Leah could remain hidden in her room where she could listen to other characters carry on conversations directly below her.

Leah’s parents were not in the second scene, but a brand new character, a younger male sibling of Leah’s, was. There was some dialogue between them, and again, Leah’s replies were awkward and forced.

I’ve never given too much thought about how Leah might be adapted into a movie, because I’ve never believed that it could be done — not unless some brave filmmaker wants to revive the lost art of the silent movie. But last night’s dream seemed to offer a solution to the lack of dialogue: give Leah weird and awkward lines to emphasize her social ineptness.

It’s rare that I dream about my stories and characters, so last night’s dream was a nice, unexpected treat.

Here’s a fourth set of book cover posters that I’m creating for fun. This may be my last blog post on this subject. I don’t want my new favorite hobby to hijack this blog. :)

The image that I used for One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those images which is absolutely perfect for the story I’ve attached it to. It captures beautifully the “magical realism” of the novel. And I love the color.

Die-hard Plath fans may take exception at my cover for The Bell Jar. What I had in mind here was Esther’s starting point. At the beginning of the novel she’s orbiting the high-fashion world of New York, surrounded by young women who hope to make a career working in the fashion industry. So this image, as well as the symbolic sunglasses, seemed to fit, but I know not everyone will agree.

I actually have an idea for future book cover posters that involves matching the titles of works of 19th century female writers (like Austen and the Brontes) with images that are clearly from the 21st century, images showing fully liberated women in modern contexts. That’s a project for the future, though.

The Dickinson cover evokes the familiar legend: that Dickinson was a reclusive poet creating her great works of beauty and art in secret (that’s not exactly true). The title of this fictitious book, Fascicles, is a sort of literary fantasy for me. When Dickinson was alive and writing, she would collect some of her poems together and construct little chapbooks, or fascicles. Each fascicle contained roughly 20 poems, and she produced about 40 fascicles. The fascicles were Dickinson’s way of organizing and making sense of her vast collection of poems. Poems within a fascicle were often connected by theme or motif, and they commented upon each other. Unfortunately, her earliest editors ignored, and even destroyed the fascicles. Even though Dickinson scholars have been able to piece them back together again, the commercial editions of Dickinson’s collected poems still completely ignore the existence of the fascicles and still use the arbitrary numbering system that Thomas Johnson uses in his famous collection. Although I own a copy of Johnson’s edition, what I really want is my own copy of Fascicles, complete with the alternative words and lines that Dickinson playfully included. I have half a mind to just make my own collection of Dickinson’s fascicles and publish them myself. (Dickinson’s poems are public domain, aren’t they?) But that would be an enormous project, equivalent to writing a novel, requiring long hours in university libraries. Maybe someday, if nobody else is willing to do this important work.

Lastly, I made the Naked Lunch cover  a couple of days ago. Nothing much to say about it; it is what it is. Nice minimal design. I’ve found that I feel like I can get away with sans-serif fonts when I use them on books from the mid and late twentieth century. Anything before that, it seems, needs to use a serif font.

The other day, I placed a trial order for the three Dante posters I created. Hopefully the posters will arrive soon, and if they look good, then I will begin ordering more posters as I complete them. Although I’m tempted to go into business and start selling some of these posters, that would just get me into legal trouble, so for now, these posters are just for me.