Archives for August 2008

Staying, Moving

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From whiskey river:

Air

Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.

This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.

I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.

Young as I am, old as I am,

I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.

This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.

(by W. S. Merwin)

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Boiling It Down to a Single Word

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Hypothetical-question time:

You’ve just been introduced to the classic visitor from outer space. He (or is it she?) is in a hurry — in fact, will be leaving in about 20 seconds, starting, say, now — but has a super-important question which needs answering. How you answer is to determine whether the saucers will (a) blow Earth up or (b) let her (or is it him?) continue on its stately course through the stars, through terrestrial history, and through the annals of intergalactic comedy.

Here’s the question:

We are very interested in this thing you call ‘fiction.’ But we do not understand it, and it is the last thing on my chop-chop must-do last-minute checklist before reporting back to Grand Inquisitor Xarg. I need to get going. Can you please give me one word so that I may understand it?

(Tip: “Uhhhh…” will not count as a valid reply. Nor will “Wait!”)

So what’s your answer? And if you yourself write novels or short stories, what’s the one word which is the key to understanding your fiction in particular?

[Read more…]

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The Hurricane Phone

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'Hurricane phone' enclosure - top ('requires 4 AA batteries')Back in the day — you know, the day — you could say (as I used to) “I work for the phone company” and no one would doubt which phone company paid your salary. That’s why Lily Tomlin’s old “Ernestine the telephone operator” could say, without ambiguity, “We’re the phone company. We don’t have to care.”

Aside: Okay, listen, this isn’t the point of this post but now that I’ve got Ernestine on the brain I just had to look her up on YouTube. She’s there, all right. Here’s a sample:

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging…

Anyway, aside from the fact that there are now as many phone companies in the USA as there are neighborhoods, the technology itself has of course made huge leaps. Cell phones, obviously. Cordless phones. Caller ID. Phones that take pictures. In fact, phones do so much anymore that it’s easy to forget some of the things they no longer do.

For instance: when your power goes out, so do your phones.

[Read more…]

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Short Fiction: Forager

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One of the shortest stories I’ve ever written clocks in at under 1500 words — a miracle, for me.

It’s based on a true story from some years ago, maybe the early to mid-’90s, the details of which I no longer remember. I do remember that the true story, too, took place in New York City. And without any hesitation at all, I can say I never forgot the most surprising ingredient in the story; that was part of the true story, as well.

Forager

Clay was lost that night somewhere way the hell out in the West 50s. Wind-blown, tacking erratically from one side to the other of the narrow cross streets, holding himself erect in painstaking dignity as he traversed the broad avenues. Muttering. Cursing the drivers of the rare passing cars. Enjoying but at the same time trying like hell to walk off the effects of the nearly full bottle of MD 20/20 that the teenage couple had left behind in the park when they fled, yelling, from his ragged bearded countenance suddenly rising up out of the bushes, fumbling with his stubborn, twisted zipper.

Shutting his eyes a moment, still in motion, he collided, kaboom, smack in the bull’s-eye of his goddam crotch with one of those goddam standpipes, and lurched, doubled over, around the corner of a building and into an alley. That’s when he saw it.

[Read more…]

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Overwhelmed by Ursula Vernon

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'Overwhelmed,' by Ursula VernonOkay, look — so I don’t have kids of my own, and my niece and nephews and stepkids are all grown and the next generation is still somewhere out on the misty horizon.

But I keep coming across these nominally “children’s” books which I then wish I had a non-adult excuse to read. Much of the credit (or blame) for this must be placed at the doorstep of the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog, whose focus is principally (but not exclusively) on children’s and young-adult books. (The 7-Imp innkeepers, Eisha and Jules, are school librarians.)

Once a week, 7-Imp features the work of a single children’s-book illustrator. This week, the subject was one Ursula Vernon.

Vernon apparently came to children’s books after first succeeding in the Web comics world, as the writer and artist behind Digger, which she describes thusly:

…it is a story about a particularly no-nonsense wombat who finds herself stuck on the wrong end of a one-way tunnel in a strange land where nonsense seems to be the specialty. Now with the help of a talking statue of a god, an outcast hyena, a shadow-being of undeterminate origin, and an oracular slug she seeks to find out where she is and how to go about getting back to her Warren.

That sounds rather… well, precious — right up until you hit the “outcast hyena/oracular slug” part. And indeed, despite her fascination with cute and furry creatures, Vernon does apparently have a knack for putting them in dire straits, depicting them as dangerous characters, and at the very least writing — and writing damn well — about them.

The picture at the top right, for example, is titled “Overwhelmed.” I discovered this and other outstanding bits of her work in her gallery at the DeviantArt site, where she says of “Overwhelmed,” briefly:

And once again, we prove that Ursula trying to do angst = hamsters.

Oh, well. At least they’re expressive little buggers.

[Read more…]

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Lightnin’ Pickin’

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In the Writers to Be Read category over there on the right, you’ll see a link to something called Froogville. Its proprietor, one (presumably pseudonymous) Froog, runs a second blog as well: Round-the-World Barstool Blues whose mission, he says there, can be summed up as “Musings on life & love from the bars of the world.”

In a recent post, titled “Great Drinking Songs (9),” Froog includes a video of a group of Cornish fishermen singing the song “[Bound for] South Australia.” Which is entertaining, sort of — in the way any given film of any arbitrary group of non-professional semi-professional [thanks, Froog] singers, singing any given drinking song on a beach in a vaguely disorganized way, is entertaining.

Much much better, though, is the YouTube video below (a simple link to which Froog provided in his post), of an Australian guitarist named Tommy Emmanuel — playing the same song in a manner which frankly left me slack-jawed with amazement. I have NEVER seen or (I think) heard anyone play a guitar this fast.

See what I mean? I close my eyes and hear not a guitar but a banjo, or maybe a mandolin. But guitar…?

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“Allow Me.” “No, Allow Me!”

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LogrollingAn interesting article by Rachel Donadio will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review, on the practice of blurbing — that is, authors (generally best-selling ones who, as the saying goes, Need No Introduction) providing capsule reviews to appear on the back covers and jacket flaps of books by authors who, well, generally need every introduction they can get.

Specifically, the article covers the work of a new company called Blurbings LLC. From their site’s About page:

[Read more…]

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Skywriting

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To start the day, if not finish it, what’s turning out to be, apparently, a weekly habit: a Friday selection from among the previous seven days’ whiskey river postings:

Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water.
What a thing to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

(from Thomas Merton, Rain and The Rhinoceros)

And then, to balance that reflection, another — excerpted from Tom Bodett’s funny “Canus [sic] Minor and Other Dim Lights” (first read in The Funny Times):

I suffer from Compulsive Cosmology. The condition often manifests itself on clear summer nights when I’m out looking for the dog. For no good reason something in the sky catches my attention and the next thing I know I am standing with my head bent backward, slack-jawed, contemplating the scope and ultimate fate of the universe.

It is a cruel disease indeed that forces a middling intellect such as mine into this position. I was, after all, an English Major. The last science course I had was 12th grade Physics and my clearest memory of that was the teacher’s profoundly active case of dandruff. I never understood it. At age 17 even I had heard of treatment shampoo. That brief moment of intellectual superiority may be at the root of my Compulsive Cosmology. It left me with the unshakable delusion that I get the Big Picture.

Then as now what intrigues me about the universe is the utter impossibility of its scale. You cannot force your brain big enough to hold it and it is said to be expanding faster than you can think. Still, when I stare up at it and summer flies coast in and out of my mouth I feel as if I am on the verge of getting it. I see its shape, I feel its speed and know its age. And then the dog shows up and I go inside.

Read the rest.

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Restless Sojourner on the Web

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'Footprints in the Desert' by David and Catherine ThambiratnamLongfellow says, in “My Lost Youth”:

A boy’s will is the wind’s will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

Adds Grace Paley:

I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

Today’s been a day for lack of focus (by necessity, not choice) and wandering around in brief, staccato bursts of Web activity. Among the periwinkles, whelks, and sand dollars scooped up: [Read more…]

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Review: Douglas Preston (with Mario Spezi): THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE

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My review at The Book Book is up.

Probably not a book for everyone — if you disliked, say, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, you’re probably not a good candidate for reading and enjoying (?!?) The Monster of Florence. Unless, that is, the reason you didn’t like the former was that it was too soft-focus or something. The Monster book definitely has a harder edge to it.

You’ll probably also like The Monster of Florence if you have read and liked (as The Missus and I have) the suspense thrillers which Preston has co-authored with Lincoln Child, especially the Agent Pendergast series.

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