Per usual, the Friday selection from whiskey river:

We suffer not from our vices and our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.

(by Daniel J. Boorstin)

…and a bonus:

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

(by Eric Hoffer)

…and — not from whiskey river — this:

Introduction To Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

(by Billy Collins)

Finally, the deep-blue version (lyrics follow):

You Don’t Know Me

You give your hand to me
Then you say hello
I can hardly speak
My heart is beating so
And anyone can tell
You think you know me well
But you don’t know me

No, you don’t know the one
Who dreams of you at night
And longs to kiss your lips
And longs to hold you tight
Oh I’m just a friend
That’s all I’ve ever been
’cause you don’t know me

I never knew
The art of making love
Though my heart aches
With love for you
Afraid and shy
I’ve let my chance to go by
The chance that you might
Love me, too

You give your hand to me
And then you say good-bye
I watch you walk away
Beside the lucky guy
You’ll never never know
The one who loves you so
Well, you don’t know me

[break]

You give your hand to me, baby
Then you say good-bye
I watch you walk away
Beside the lucky guy
No, no, you’ll never ever know
The one who loves you so
Well, you don’t know me

(by Cindy Walker and Eddy Arnold, performed by B.B. King and Diane Schuur)

The scene: an elegant restaurant.

A waiter crosses the floor, headed your way. His dress is formal, his manner both imperious and humble. As he approaches, you can’t help admiring the grace with which he avoids other diners, other staff, furniture placed apparently where he’s most likely to collide with it. You wonder — you doubt — whether you could ever move with such assurance.

The waiter arrives at your table. He raises an eyebrow, ever so slightly. He bends at the waist. The beverage is yours for the taking; he will not presume to touch it or place it before you.

A pause.

You raise your hand to the serving tray. Your fingers close around the stem of a glass…

What I don’t know about music theory could fit in a stadium, if I was lucky. (Yes, be patient, I’m not really changing the subject.) And as you know if you’ve been around here for even a few weeks, my hearing presents some obstacles when listening to anything at all.

But with music, the obstacles are minor as long as there aren’t any words involved. I can hear the instruments and the notes and rhythms just fine. And every now and then, I think I hear music do something interesting. And then I hear it again, in some other piece. And then I wonder if there’s a name for this something, or if I’m just imagining things…

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A new addition to the blogroll here, one “Cuff” of the Countersignature blog, recently made what I think is a stupendous find: a 1914 book, by one MacGregor Jenkins, entitled The Reading Public, available via Google Books.

Here’s how Cuff introduces the book’s content:

Jenkins divides the “reading public” into book readers and magazine readers. He further subdivides the book readers into three categories from least to greatest numbers: the sponge reader, the sieve reader, and the duck-back reader. The sponge reader reads “fewer and better books than his fellows” — resulting, according to Mr. Jenkins, in his being ignored by authors and publishers. The sieve reader reads quite a bit and is full of surface facts and plots and literary gossip, but doesn’t have the critical acumen of the sponge reader. Meanwhile, the lowly duck-back reader, while great in number, absorbs absolutely nothing and is entirely unchanged by reading because reading is for the duck-back simply a way to kill time (Jenkins believes the swelling of this number to be caused by the increasing phenomenon of commuting).

I wonder what kind of reader I am? Sad to say, it feels more sieve-like (although I’d love to be a sponge). The Missus would say this has something to do with my being a Gemini, and/or being born in a Chinese Year of the Rabbit. Grasshopper, not an ant. All that.

Interestingly, Jenkins’s book — despite the title — also has quite a bit to say to authors. (He was apparently a magazine editor.) Remember again that this is from, well, a century ago, to all intents and purposes. Bear in mind all that Maxwell Perkins, golden-age-of-authors-editors stuff. And, of course, make some allowances for the pre-World War I syntax:

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Like many — most? — people who like to think of themselves as creative, I’ve had my share of disappointments with the success of others‘ ideas:

• Sometimes I’ve used a plot device, a character type, even a simple phrase in something I hope to have published… only to find it in some other work already published by some other author — who’s become fabulously successful. Argh, I think, why couldn’t that have been ME? Why did I wait so long? As though the gimmick (whatever it is) somehow caused the success.
• Sometimes somebody uses a plot device, character type, etc…. and the work tanks miserably. Argh, I think, I could have done so much better with that! And been successful, too! As though the (mostly imaginary) mishandling of the gimmick (whatever it is) somehow caused the failure.
• I once wrote a horror story which, even now, I think is publishable. Except for one thing: After I’d sent it to exactly one publication (where it was rejected — surprise! — because it was too long), a horror movie came out in which the “monster” might have been the one in my story. Argh, I thought, now I’ll have to hold off for a few years to give people time to forget the film. And then, a few years later, came the sequel. Which wallowed at the box office, much to fans’ surprise. So far I’ve been holding off for over ten years.

And then there are ideas which don’t fall into the disappointing category at all. You think to yourself, Why didn’t I think of that myself? or at least, Why didn’t SOMEBODY think of that sooner? (Think Harry Potter here, kiddies.) All you can do is applaud in wonder.

And finally there are the ideas — especially combinations of two or more other ideas — which are so bizarre that you’re surprised anyone at all ever thought to put them together.

I think this falls into that category. I give you the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain, performing… the theme from Shaft:

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Somewhere in her book of advice for writers, Starting from Scratch, Rita Mae Brown says something about writing a story from the point of view of a character other than the author’s own sex. I don’t remember the exact words, don’t have my copy with me, and can’t find the quote online. But she says something like this: “Until and unless you can write convincingly about a protagonist who’s the opposite sex from you, you can’t say you’re a mature writer.”

I thought this was challenging, to say the least. Who doesn’t want to be a mature anything? Who wants to believe they’re not already mature?

So I tried a couple things. For one, I made the protagonist of Crossed Wires a woman. I also did a handful of short stories from a woman’s POV.

“The Iron” is one of those stories.

It also is one of those stories which has been workshopped and revised to within an inch of its life — some would say beyond, probably. Agent X (whom I spoke of here) hated one element of the story, which unfortunately was the central element: a steam iron’s place in a position of importance in a story about a married woman.

(Agent X’s point, as she explained it, had something to do with the iron as a symbol of the oppression or outright enslavement of women, and hence an unsuitable vehicle as an object of a wife’s wonder. Something like that, anyhow.)

As you will see, the steam iron in question has many features unlike those of ordinary appliances. Hope you like reading “The Iron” — regardless of your (or the author’s) sex. Here it is.

Update, 2008-10-08: Thanks to Marta’s gentle prodding in the comments on this post, I finally managed (thanks, Amazon!) to find exactly how Rita Mae Brown’s Starting from Scratch addresses this subject (emphasis added):

You must create men who love women and women who love men or your books will be lopsided. In the beginning of everyone’s work the dice are always loaded toward one’s own sex or sex preference. Learning to unload those dice, to throw the bones honestly, is what maturity as an individual and as a writer is all about.

I’ve always liked black-and-white photographs — especially family snapshots (even of other people’s families) taken in the 1950s and earlier.

It’s not that they satisfy some inner longing for quaintness (I’m not a fan of quaintness in general, and the adjective “whimsical” often makes me want to reach for the X-Acto knife (especially, ha ha, when someone else uses it)). Nor is it — just — a nostalgia for things which I know are gone, sometimes long gone.

No, it’s not the overall elegiac atmosphere. It’s not the places. It’s the faces of the people.

In candid snapshots, especially, those unguarded glimpses into the souls of their subjects reveal more than their words ever could — or, truth be told, than my own words ever could. But it’s something to aspire to. (Which is one reason why a near-cliche of fiction is the moment when the protagonist glimpses herself in a mirror, or examines the creases and tears in a photograph of himself as a boy. At some level, people’s faces say everything there is to be said about a person — at that very time, even, if photographed or if described in heartbreaking verbal detail.)

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