William Blake’s Notebook and some other stuff

Via the Poetry Hut Blog, here’s a link to the British Library’s online gallery of William Blake’s notbook:

Blake wrote and sketched in this notebook, which came into his possession after his brother’s death in 1787, for 30 years.

The closely-filled pages give a fascinating insight into Blake’s compositional process, allowing us to follow the genesis of some of his best-known work,

If you scroll all the way to the bottom of this page, you’ll find navigation tools that let you flip through the notebook page by page.

Poetry Hut’s owner, Jilly Dybka, is going through some rough times. Some money in her tip jar would be appreciated. She is one of the best aggregators of poetry news on the blog that I’ve ever run across.

Jilly also provides a link to this article, Of dead mules and Southern lit, by Ben Steelman.

Which brought me back “Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature in the 20th century,” a 1997 paper by Jearry Leath Mills in The Southern Literary Journal.

Mills, a retired Renaissance scholar from Chapel Hill, argued – at least semi-seriously – that the one unifying factor in all Southern lit is that any novel, or any short story of any length, will have a dead mule in it. He cited more than 200 examples from the works of Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright and, of course, Doris Betts’ story “Dead Mule.”

In Truman Capote’s “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” a mule named John Brown is found hanging from a chandelier in a decaying Southern mansion, with a spittoon tied to its leg.

According to Mills, the champion mule-killer is Cormac McCarthy, a Tennessean who’s usually thought of as having defected to the West with such novels as “All the Pretty Horses” and “No Country for Old Men.” In “Blood Meridian,” however, McCarthy disposes of no less than 59 specific mules, as well as having dozens of others driven off the side of a cliff. (Trivia question: In which Cormac McCarthy novel does an opera singer chop off a mule’s head?) No mules were harmed in the writing, or filming, of “The Road.”

In case you might jump to the conclusion that this is where the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature got its name, I think you’d be wrong. The DMSSL has been running since 1995, Mills published his paper in 1997.

The Mule has a new issue up with poems by Anne Whitehouse, Peg Duthie, Joyce A. Taylor, Michael Benton, Amanda James Dill, Susan Washinsky, Peggy Heinrich, Joseph Lisowski, Jozef Lisowski, Danny P. Barbare, Neal Whitman, and William Sorlien

Also, at the blog of the New York Review of Books, Charles Wright talks to Sasha Weiss and reads from Sestets.