(With apologies to site visitors who might be unfamiliar with one or the other work…)
[via the reliable, insanely good taste of literary agent Janet Reid]
Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so
by John 9 Comments
(With apologies to site visitors who might be unfamiliar with one or the other work…)
[via the reliable, insanely good taste of literary agent Janet Reid]
by John 6 Comments
[See the note at the end of this post for info about the above song.]
From whiskey river:
Falling
Long before daybreak
none of the birds yet awake
rain comes down with the sound
of a huge wind rushing
through the valley trees
it comes down around us
all at the same time
and beyond it there is nothing
it falls without hearing itself
without knowing
there is anyone here
without seeing where it is
or where it is going
like a moment of great
happiness of our own
that we cannot remember
coasting with the lights off
(W. S. Merwin [source])
…and:
It is this admirable, this immortal, instinctive sense of beauty that leads us to look upon the spectacle of this world as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven. Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendors beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise.
(Charles Baudelaire [source; the above is the version at whiskey river, a somewhat different translation])
by John 8 Comments
I’ve just posted my latest review for The Book Book; it covers non-fiction author Mary Roach’s Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.
This was Roach’s second book. The first, Stiff, was about what happens to the human body after death. You can see that she’s attracted to odd, even icky topics; and you may guess from the title, too, that she uses humor to distance the reader from the ick. She’s one of my favorite non-fiction writers, certainly among the most enjoyable.
As I say in the review, my only real reservation about her work has to do with that sense of humor. Sometimes she drops a punchline into the text just a little too insistently, and it falls flat.
Compare this approach to, say, Bill Bryson’s. He too loves to make people laugh, and he too never shies away from the humor in a situation. But the jokes are good ones, not limp asides inserted for the sake of comic timing.
But I don’t want to hammer at that point too hard; I don’t want you to think I don’t enjoy Roach’s writing. Whatever she comes up with, I expect to be among those happily reading it.
by John 6 Comments
[This is one of what will no doubt become a series on my experiences in using a Kindle 2. It’s not a drum I want to beat often — don’t want it to become one of those “I have X but you don’t, haha!” gloatfests. But it might be useful for people on the fence about the whole e-book deal.]
Frequent RAMH commenter DarcKnyt wondered recently over at his place: What are the pros and cons of e-readers? He asked for comments particularly from people who’ve used them. I probably gave him way more that he wanted/needed — it would’ve made for a long post here, and that’s saying something.
Here’s the bottom line, for me:
In general, I think the transition to e-books will resemble any other transition to a new/different technology. It will come with inconveniences and drawbacks… but ultimately people will learn to live with them (or the tech will advance to the point where they no longer apply), for the sake of the NEW conveniences and features they couldn’t even have faked the old way. (No doubt, when cavemen first started to light fires at night, a subset of them swaggered around, sniffed haughtily, and hitched up their fur loincloths, insisting that things were better when we kept watch by moonlight and the stars — and we sure didn’t have to keep getting up to dump another log on the moon every time the previous one burned down! And you couldn’t drop the moon in a river and put it out! It gave everything a much sleeker, more romantic look, than fire ever could! The moon didn’t threaten to get out of control and burn down the whole damn forest! Etc.)
(If you’d like to see the full thing, which includes more details of my experience so far, it’s resting comfortably over across the Web, at Darc’s place.)
I’ve since thought of a few other things I might have mentioned:
by John 8 Comments
This Paying Attention to… series on writing fiction concentrates, for the most part, on what to do when writing. More exactly, it covers things I need to remind myself to pay attention to — particularly as I’ve been working on Seems to Fit.
In this post, I want to look at what to when not writing — particularly, while writing-blocked.
Ask me about my first novel, and I will invariably tell you about a mystery, Crossed Wires. In doing so, I’m not counting the book I started in the mid-1970s: a picaresque science-fiction extravaganza called As Luck Would Have It. It was humorous, or rather “humorous,” and (or so I imagined) intellectually wide-ranging, and full of all sorts of stylistic pyrotechnics like punning character names and a portentous prologue.* While I never finished even a single draft of the book’s manuscript, and indeed the manuscript never even made it to digital form (I’d handwritten and typed it), I always liked and remembered the book’s central conceit:
by John 8 Comments
From whiskey river:
It was almost dark on an early summer eve, and the forest was never more enchanting than now, at dusk. At dusk the mountain begins to withdraw its force back into itself and become quiescent. If you too can become quiescent, so still that you can’t think of your name, you can feel this as a palpable fact. Just become so still that your mind won’t be bothered to remember the mundane, and then you’ll feel it like you feel the shifting of the winds. Then you’ll know when the mountain changes from exhaling to inhaling. That’s not so important in itself, but the mind that is quiet enough to notice is. The mind that is not always caught up in detail is your only treasure. Stop chasing details and become still to feel it. The mind that sees details clearly but is not caught by them is like a vast borderless mirror. That mind does not oppose itself.
(G. Bluestone [source])
by John 18 Comments
[Above: portion of letter from Aaron Copland to Harold Spivacke, Chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress. Original in the Library of Congress’s Aaron Copland Collection.]
[“Appalachian Spring (7th Movement)” (about 13:30 long)]
[…or, if you’d prefer, the whole thing (about 35:57)]
Note: If you’re interested in the early history of “Simple Gifts,” rather than its resurrection in the 20th century, you might want to begin with Part 1 of this two-part series, posted a few days earlier.
In late 1942, choreographer/dancer Martha Graham first approached composer Aaron Copland. She hoped he could score a new ballet for her troupe. She had a grant from the Library of Congress’s Coolidge foundation to fund the work, but at that point she didn’t know the details of the project — certainly not the title. She hoped to premiere it in the auditorium of the Library in Washington, DC, within a year.As you can see from the portion of the letter reproduced at the top of this post, as of the following spring Copland had heard no more from her about the new ballet and moved on to other projects. But by June, 1943, he’d received Graham’s first notes; by July, he’d managed to compose the first third of the ballet. The premiere date was now set for October 30, at the Library of Congress as Graham had hoped. (One constraint: the orchestra would be limited to 13 musicians, because of the small size of the orchestra pit there.)
What Copland knew about the ballet at this point was the general story it would tell. It would be about a young farming couple in the hills of Pennsylvania, early in the 19th century. Graham hoped it might capture of the same spirit as Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town (1938). Of course, with the US and the world in the grip of war — and because the life of a pioneer farming couple would not have been easy — it could not be too sweet and sentimental. Importantly, it still had no title. (Copland settled on Ballet for Martha as his working title.)
But it did have a main theme, one which Copland had found almost by accident.
by John 10 Comments
[Partial amazon.com screen capture, July 9, 2010]
Funny thing is, for some books — not all of them “great” ones, either — I might actually hesitate before deciding to go the cheap route, even with a price spread as broad as this. (I’m talking about you, you thick-page, large-format “children’s” book on natural history whose name I’ve long forgotten.)
How about you?
by John 13 Comments
[Image above, “Don’t Wait for Tomorrow” (original oil on board, 92cm x 122cm),
by Nadeem Chughtai]
From whiskey river:
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.
(Joan Didion; quoted widely, allegedly from a 1975 commencement address)
…and:
The time allotted to you is so short that if you lose one second you have already lost your whole life, for it is no longer, it is always just as long as the time you lose. So if you have started out on a walk, continue it whatever happens; you can only gain, you run no risk, in the end you may fall over a precipice perhaps, but had you turned back after the first steps and run downstairs you would have fallen at once – and not perhaps, but for certain. So if you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, and if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards.
(Franz Kafka, quoted at Memory Green from a work called The Advocates)
by John 14 Comments
The great tangled rope of popular music (American and otherwise) includes so many disparate strands that to speak of it as a single “thing” invites ridicule: show tunes and jazz, bluegrass and ragtime, country, folk, rock, metal, rap, and hip-hop… And then what about “easy listening”? and popular classical music, like Gershwin’s and Copland’s? New Age? Heck, what about Christmas music?
So in declaring (as I did) that this What’s in a Song series would explore “American popular songs with long histories,” well, I might as well have announced upfront that anything listenable was fair game.
Under the circumstances, inevitably, I’d find myself bumping into the category known loosely as “sacred music” — at least, those bits of it which have percolated out into pop culture. Off the top of my head, only two songs in this category appealed to me as subjects. The first, “Amazing Grace” — okay, that’s been tackled by an impressive roster of pop artists. But I have one problem with celebrating “Amazing Grace,” beautiful though it is: few performers seem able to resist milking its very “sacredness.” What emerges from the throats of such performers isn’t a song about grace, even about the special grace of music: it’s a song about the singer.
But almost by definition, the other song has resisted manipulation at the hands of the lugubriously self-righteous. That song is the subject of this two-part post.