par avion

epistolary exchange from this afternoon, via emails

Dear Mr. Charyn, I wanted to drop you a line to tell you that I greatly enjoyed your novel. I've been enjoying your facebook page too. I don't have an account (I'm hesitant to sign up) or would leave this message there.

I recently listened to your great interview on WAMC's Booktalk with Joe Donahue. I don't see it linked on your facebook page - so here it is in case you're not aware that it's available online.

Also, evidently this morning NPR ran a piece on the NYBG Emily Dickinson garden exhibit. I enclose that link since you will be there next weekend.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago Lenore R. linked to a blogpost of
mine that touched on your novel. She left a comment, and I replied to it though I don't know that she ever saw it. So (FYI) here's that link, too.

Again, I greatly enjoyed your novel, the way you channeled E.D., seemed to enter into her mind, or a very credible (because imaginally truthful) variation of her mind. It's Memorial Day weekend and this morning a local radio host [Rick on WKZE] made unusually interesting comments along the lines of how so many artists toil their entire lives and never achieve fame or fortune - but when they die, they are discovered and it's at that point the worth of their artifacts skyrockets. He suggested that on this holiday we remember not only fallen soldiers, but all who have come before us and left their marks, their legacy. I think of Emily Dickinson in this regard. She seems to me to have achieved an unusually vivid posthumous immortality (of which she herself seemed both patient and prescient). I personally feel a growing connection with her - somehow by getting more insight into her I have been gaining a better understanding and acceptance of myself (as a woman of divided mind who for a long time unwittingly fought against artistic aspects of myself). What a very interesting intertwining and mingling of like minds - all of us who are so touched by her Muse. It seems to suggest something to me too about the nature of consciousness - that there is something so capacious ultimately about the compelling and living idea of E.D. that we are all drawn to her and inspired. I'm finding my own sense of theology, of the most profound personal beliefs, challenged and deepened in considering her. I am formally starting to think of myself as a latter day transcendentalist!

Thanks again, Mr. Charyn, for being a Muse yourself in all this. Have a great Memorial Day weekend and (if you haven't made it already) a safe and pleasant leap across the pond. Yours, Belle

***
Dear Belle, thanks so much for your very kind note! Yes, Emily was "a fallen soldier." But I think she was able to find a great deal of pleasure by traveling inside her own head.
Best, Jerome Charyn

Seeing Columbia County

Email conversation between Mr. North Fifth Street and Belle, 11 July 2008

Just catching up... nice article... do you have any images of the show that you could email me by any chance?

No, I don't have any images relating to the show, unfortunately. It's funny - perhaps that's one reason I wrote up the essay in such careful detail - so that I could conjure mental images of it, for my own purposes. But that doesn't help for now, does it. I wonder what other kind of "imaginal" image might work.

Just catching up and posted the essay. I really like it. Thanks.

That is the perfect image! I love it. Sorry I haven't been commenting recently - very busy with other pressing correspondence of late. But enjoying your blog, as always, and thanks for posting my essay. I'm very glad you liked it.

I didn't like it, I just reread it - it's so evocative about place and quality of life and values and all the things that are good about Hudson and Columbia County. I love it. It really pinpoints the importance of reality and real history vs. all that is fake and valueless. Thanks.

PS: where can I buy that quilt - the one with the heartfelt sentiment embroidered in the center? Woodbury Commons? QVC? Century 21? After all I am an American - I want to buy the sense of being loved, not earn it.

I know. There were so many homemade and handmade objects in that exhibition, many made by ordinary folk, not necessarily "artists." That sense of making things with love, with love being the very impetus for the making of an object, seems to be dying out. We feel (many of us) spiritually bereft and wonder why.

I get strange visceral reactions to many objects that were made in China. I actually think they were made with hate - and it comes through in the object. For example, I ordered some outdoor chair cushions online last year. When they arrived, I instantly hated them. The cushions are red but not a nice red, a SCREAMING red, and the tufts in the cushions suggested a nasty leering face. I lived with them for a while out of simple frugality, but they worked my every nerve. Finally, I had enough and tossed them over the porch railing in a pique, to be trashed. Very liberating.

The Lost Art of Conversation

Getting past the preliminaries...

On July 4, 2008, I wrote:

Hello Mr. North Fifth Street: Thank you for your wonderful blog! It is wonderful to have such a witty and intelligent forum in which to explore ideas about the local culture and beyond. I've been starved for intellectual stimulation, as you might tell, and your blog fits the bill... P.S. I am guessing that you are _____. If I'm right, then I think it's quite ironic that we should now be such Kindred Spirits on your blog.... since I guess at the time, you and I were Arch Enemies. Sort of. Or not really, since we had never met, and were both hired guns. At any rate, that's all past and I'm glad we're on the same page now. Anyway, take care, have a great Happy Fourth of July, and thanks again for your incredibly entertaining blog, which often makes me laugh out loud!

North Fifth Street replied: Good Lord ______ lives on State Street not North Fifth... Thanks for the compliment!