Blogs

Chuck Palahniuk Is an Old Hat

Well, more like my favorite shirt. A shirt I will wear once a week for 10 years. One that I refuse to let go of, that has stitching resembling crooked scars to patch up the holes and it frays at the edges. One day it will have more homemade stitching than original fabric. It’s comfortable and familiar and I won’t throw it out.

Who is not completely fascinated by Henry VIII? My interest in Tudor England began with a trip to England with an Episcopal choir. We sang Evensong service every night for a week at Ely Cathedral. We were also fortunate enough to go to Canterbury, York, Lincoln, and London. When you process into the choir stall and walk over stones that literally have been worn thin by worshippers before you, the sense of history is palpable. Also lingering are the remnants of the major social, political, and religious upheavals of King Henry’s reign.

In The Yellow Wallpaper , Charlotte Gilman Perkins first introduced me to the concept of synesthesia, the odd, kinetic sensation of having the senses cross pathways: Being able to ‘feel’ a color, hear images, or smell sounds. Perkins links this strange neurological condition with the protagonist’s ‘hysterical depression’. The character’s exact cause of her synesthetic sensations is debatable.

One result of reading fiction is that it often lets you into the skin of people you wouldn’t otherwise meet or know – by walking around inside their skulls, metaphorically speaking, you develop an empathy, an understanding, of their needs, their fears and hopes, their very humanness.

Sometimes I hate that.

Especially when I am determined to hate a character(s).

I, for the record, completely disagree with T.S. Eliot. And Pablo Picasso. The beaten-in-the-ground-so-many-times-it-has-turned-to-powder quote that ‘good artists borrow, great artists steal (actually, it originally reads as ‘immature poets imitate, mature poets steal) has become a catchall excuse for bad imitation. I personally would appreciate some subtlety. A mere nod, or a tip o’ the hat, perhaps, could go a long way.