Re: JCO: On this day in 1938 Joyce Carol Oates was born.

I thought the same thing, Gary, with the same
surprise! Ten years!

Birthday greetings to one and all.

Cheers,

-anthony

--- Gary Couzens <gjcouzens@btinternet.com> wrote:

> And a happy 70th to Joyce Carol Oates!
>
> Long-standing members of this list may remember the
> tribute story some of us wrote for her 60th. Was
> that really ten years ago?
>
> Gary
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Carol Windley
> To: jco@usfca.edu
> Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 5:26 AM
> Subject: RE: JCO: On this day in 1938 Joyce Carol
> Oates was born.
>
>
>
> Thank you Jane for this (Today in Literature). I'm
> kind of a silent member of the discussion group, I
> admit, but today I was thinking of Joyce Carol Oates
> on her birthday with immense gratitude for the
> pleasure her novels and short stories have brought
> me since I first read Bellefleur back in the 1980s.
> I've just finished reading Wild Nights and
> especially loved the story of Emily Dickinson's
> return to earth in the form of a valued (and
> valuable!) and strong-willed robot. Who else could
> write such an amazing story and make it seem
> possible, even inevitable, but Joyce Carol Oates? No
> one, I think!
>
> Carol
>
>
>
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> From: jward1108@hotmail.com
> To: jco@usfca.edu
> Subject: JCO: On this day in 1938 Joyce Carol
> Oates was born.
> Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:44:21 -0500
>
>
>
http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=06/16/2008
>
> June 16, 2008
> Joyce Carol Oates: Reap & Sow
> On this day in 1938 Joyce Carol Oates was born.
> One of contemporary literature's most productive
> writers, Oates has more sections in her bibliography
> than most others have individual entries. At the
> rate she publishes these numbers may be unreliable,
> but they give the idea: 46 novels and novellas, 27
> story collections, 8 poetry collections, 5 play
> collections, 3 opera librettos, 1 children's book, 9
> essay and non-fiction collections, 16 anthologies
> edited or co-edited. Plus the creative writing job
> at Princeton, and the talks, newspaper articles,
> etc. Oh, and the 6 screenplays, sold but not yet
> produced (not to be confused with the 8 movies which
> have been made from her books but not adapted by
> her).
>
> There is something more than "prolific" going on
> here -- some say Oates has the "midnight disease,"
> hypergraphia -- but the writing bug bit early and
> hard. She began making picture stories at age three,
> with pretend writing underneath each frame. She
> remembers these to be "complicated narratives," and
> that many were done on the backs of her father's
> sheets of sandpaper. She remembers getting the gift
> of Alice in Wonderland from her grandmother:
>
> If you could transpose yourself into a
> girl of 8, in 1946, in a farming community in
> upstate New York north of Buffalo, imagine the
> excitement of opening so beautiful a book to read a
> story in which a girl of about your age is the
> heroine; imagine the excitement of being taken along
> with Alice, who talks to herself continually, just
> like you. . . .
>
> She had written "thousands of pages of prose" by
> the time the same grandmother bought her a
> typewriter, Oates now fourteen. She immediately
> began "consciously training myself by writing novel
> after novel" -- some dozen of them, she estimates,
> all thrown away as soon as completed. There were
> some boys and some groups at Syracuse University,
> but mostly there was getting top grades, and the
> typewriter. Classmates estimate a novel a semester;
> sorority sisters gave her the room most able to
> muffle the all-night clickity-clack.
>
> Joyce Carol Oates may have been the Emily Brontë
> of Lockport, New York -- shy, isolated, chaste, lost
> in her own fictive kingdom -- but there is more than
> Gothic imagination to all the violence and sexuality
> in her books. She recalls school as her introduction
> to an inbred "underworld" of "incredible cruelty,
> profanity, obscenity," the farm boys "giggling,
> gloating, rolling their eyes." She was molested
> behind the school outhouse, the experience even in
> 1993 still "so vivid in my memory, surrounded by
> such powerful inchoate emotions." In Foxfire:
> Confessions of a Girl Gang, Maddy Wirtz is a teenage
> girl growing up in a blue-collar upstate New York
> town in the 1950s. She "was the one perceived as
> having the power of words"; her chronicle of the
> gang's activities was to make it real, and be
> accomplished on the used typewriter she had saved
> hard to purchase at her uncle's store. The price is
> not only raised but changed at the last moment, in a
> back room; Maddy manages to escape, and report back
> to the sisterhood her disgust at what almost
> happened. Foxfire payback will initiate Maddy into
> violence, and begin an escalating series of revenges
> on a male and stupid world.
>
> Things will spiral out of control, but Maddy, at
> least, moves on -- to become an astronomer, and
> acquire "the proper telescopic instrument for
> examining look-back time." She remains tattooed with
> the gang's name, and passion: "FOXFIRE BURNS AND
> BURNS! FOXFIRE IS NOW!"
>
>
>
>
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>

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