"Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller’s is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fond­ness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnest­ness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat’s; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writ­ers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident."

—John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

The haiku by Masaoka Shiki that opens with the head-note "Before the Garden" strikes me as a deft example of the quality suggested by Basho, that of simultaneous non-objectivity and non-subjectivity. The "inability" of the narrator to determine the number of cockscombs with precision is presented not as a problem in need of resolution, but as an epiphenomenon associated with the interplay between observer and observed. The poem is poised in that moment when we characteristically choose between objectivity and subjectivity, but asks us instead to consider the existence of that indeterminate cluster of cockscombs as its own discrete reality, one that cannot be properly labeled either objective or subjective.

The Japanese poet Basho reportedly told one of his students that the problem with most poems is that they are either objective or subjective. The student asked, "Don't you mean they are either too objective or too subjective? Basho replied simply, "No." Objectivity in poems privileges the validity of an external reality. Subjectivity in poems privileges the validity of our internal reality. Poetry, according to Basho, must seek the balance between these two perspectives—or, rather, must escape the trap of this false dichotomy entirely.

Yesterday I finished reading Cecil Brown's Stagolee Shot Billy, a study of that class American outlaw ballad. Reading it was a frustrating, disappointing, and odd experience. Afterwards, I looked up several reviews of the book, because I knew it had gotten excellent notices and I wanted to compare their comments about the book with my own experience. One of the few reviews that matched my own impressions was by Mark Schone and appeared in the Boston Globe: "Stagolee Shot Billy is flawed by the author's need to romanticize his subject, and by his strained efforts to prove that the real Stagolee was a pimp. When it comes to the life and career of the man behind the song, the book is an object lesson in what happens when a writer starts with a theory and then forces the facts to fit. When it comes to the meaning of the song, Brown has a nostalgic allegiance to what Stagger Lee signified in the '60s, and an inability to see that his hero is more tragic than revolutionary. . . . Brown, 60, has lived in the Bay Area since the days of the Black Panthers, and he knew them. He seems to have absorbed that brand of black nationalism in which sexual potency is a revolutionary duty, and feminism a form of counterrevolution." Anyway, here's the review I posted on Amazon:

I have to conclude that other reviewers have actually been reviewing their own ideas of what this book might have been. I wish I could give it such a favorable write-up myself. But despite the interesting information Brown provides about the historical background and recording history of this classic American song, the book itself is disappointingly repetitious, contradictory, sloppily edited and organized, and poorly written. At one point, Brown calls Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" (1982) the "first rap" record [page 92]; elsewhere, he speaks of rap's rising popularity "during the 1970s and 1980s" [222]. In one discussion, he attributes the same poem to both Margaret Walker [197] and Gwendolyn Brooks [199]. And in one paragraph, he claims both that "Madame Babe allowed May [Irwin] to adapt" a particular song and - two sentences later - that "May Irwin may have stolen" that song from Madame Babe [107]. Oh, and he extends New Orleans r&b pianist Archibald's stage name to "Archibald Cox," perhaps as a nod to the Watergate prosecutor [172]. Obviously, writing history based so extensively on oral tradition is going to be difficult, but virtually every other sentence in this book is qualified with a "maybe," "perhaps," or "possibly." Those qualifications are representative of Brown's approach to history, in which he bends the facts as best he can to fit his preconceived notions. Brown's study is filled with generalizations and over-simplifications, and his use of theory is heavy-handed and unconvincing. I'm glad that I read this book - I learned a lot about a subject that interests me, and I found many of Brown's speculations provocative - but, unless Brown is assigned a firm-handed editor for the next edition, I can only recommend it with an armful of caveats.

There is nothing more subjective than the illusion of objectivity.