John – Page 161

Comes the Dawn

January 6, 2009 by John 2 Comments

[If you’re a regular reader here, you may recall this post from a couple weeks ago, co-written with my co-blogger. In which case, you may be wondering, What about Part 2? Patience, patience. Gargoyles celebrate Xmas for — guess what? — twelve of our days.* Part 2 of “A Gargoyle Looks at Xmas” will probably be up this Thursday.]

Yeah, “Comes the dawn. Also “A light bulb went on over my head”; “Eureka!”; “Now I get it…!” The slap-in-the-forehead moment that we literary types sometimes call… epiphany.

Writerly-advice gurus, agents, and editors will often tell you — rightly — that forms of the word “sudden” are overused, because most often things just happen at their normal rate. A “sudden” occurrence is more likely one which has been taking place all along; it just took someone a long time to notice.

But epiphanies and suddenness go hand-in-hand. There’s a slow but steady accretion of evidence which eventually reaches critical mass and explodes like a fireball in a character’s head: the flashpoint is the epiphany.

(The word’s roots are Greek, literally translating as “a showing forth.”)

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“I Have un Gros Ventre.”

January 5, 2009 by John 5 Comments

I see Moonrat is dipping one of those little furry paws into the deep sparkling waters of Yiddish. Reminds me of one of my own forays into non-Englishdom…

When we first became acquainted, online, in 1991,The Missus and I decided for reasons that probably made sense at the time that we wouldn’t exchange photos until (and of course unless) we’d actually met already.

At the time, The Missus had written a short story whose protagonist, a woman named Alice, was taking French lessons and liked to try out new words and phrases by dropping them at random into conversation. As I recall, The Missus herself either was taking a course in French at the time, or had already taken one and was renewing her interest in the language.

I had never taken French (my high-school and college “foreign language” was Latin). But in my travels somewhere, I think at a bookstore on Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, I’d once picked up a reference book called Harrap’s Slang Dictionary: Anglais-Français/Français-Anglais.

Why that book?

Exhibit A: On the front cover, people at a cartoon cocktail party were saying, in English, things like “One for the road,” “Go jump in the lake,” “It’s my shout,” and “Up yours.”

Exhibit B: On the back cover appeared a mini-quiz, labeled “Test your English slang.” For each of the five English phrases, it offered three possible French phrases — from among which, one was supposed to choose the correct translation. But my eye was caught by the nature of the English phrases:

To get tanked up
Pull your finger out! (This one cracked me up right there in the bookstore. Loudly.)
The grapevine
To frame someone
A nice bit of stuff

In short: How could I have resisted it?

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Navel-Gazing

January 3, 2009 by John 4 Comments

Need to do a fairly simple post today — too much going on for a real thought-y one:

Complete virus/spyware/adware scan of The Stepdaughter’s PC, which I have to keep swiveling around to monitor (I stab at thee, Internet Explorer!);
Urgent post-holiday cleanup needed, primarily attributable to:
- New Year’s Eve dinner and, er, aftermath
- a Christmas tree which has mysteriously opted not simply to go dry, really fast, but seems actively to be flinging its needles (and the ornaments which depend on them) to the floor; and, especially,
Tonight’s postponed edition of the annual “Christmas date” with The Missus (more on which later, at some point), which not only will require some prep time but also imposes a deadline on everything else.

So I’m pulling out the cheapest stunt in the lazy blogger’s bag-o’-tricks: wondering about the site’s cumulative statistics — page visits and such, and what it all “means” (to the extent it can be determined to mean anything).

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Suchness, Muchness

January 2, 2009 by John 6 Comments

Alice, the March Hare, the Dormouse, and the Hatter

From whiskey river:

It’s true, I think, as Kenko says in his Idleness,
That all beauty depends upon disappearance,
The bitten edges of things,
the gradual sliding away
Into tissue and memory,
the uncertainty
And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from,
And their frayed loveliness.

(Charles Wright, The World of the Ten Thousand Things)

Those without stories are preordained to repeat them,
I saw once in the stars.
Unclear who underwrote that,
But since then I’ve seen it everywhere
I’ve looked, staggering
Noon light and night’s meridian wandering wide and the single sky.
And here it is in the meadow grass, a brutish script.

We tend to repeat what we don’t know
Instead of the other way around —
thus mojo, thus misericordia,
Old cross-work and signature, the catechism in the wind.
We tend to repeat what hurts us, things, and ghosts of things,
The actual green of summer, and summer’s half-truth.
We tend to repeat ourselves.

(Charles Wright, A Short History of the Shadow)

…and:

We are called to wake our hearts from the dark dreariness of never being good enough — a pretty startling call for anyone not suffering terminal arrogance. Since most of us suffer an oddly modern mix of anxiety and arrogance, there are few among us who make it through our lives without some hours (years, decades…) in that dark, self-doubting territory where anxiety defines the very air itself. That we are whole, and home, and needed by all of life is where Buddhism begins, in a sense. Most of us, though, have to take quite a journey to arrive where we’ve always been. Like the love that has no opposite or end, suchness is unconditional, in that it reaches absolutely every condition of experience. We intrinsically have the countenance of the person of suchness — nothing we can do or have ever done places us outside that embrace.

(Bonnie Myotai Treace)

Not from whiskey river:

“You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter; “so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well — eh, stupid?”

“But they were in the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice this last remark.

“Of course they were,” said the Dormouse; ” — well in.”

This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some time without interrupting it.

“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; “and they drew all manner of things — everything that begins with an M — ”

“Why with an M?” said Alice.

“Why not?” said the March Hare.

Alice was silent.

The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: “– that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness — you know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’ — did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?”

(Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

Finally, Andrew Bird discusses the thin border between suchness and muchness, at the Bonnaroo Festival in 2006 [lyrics]:

Celebrity Horse Moments (Bogus Edition)

January 1, 2009 by John 5 Comments

A famous horse, probably Author Sara Lewis Holmes tells us, at her Read Write Believe blog, of a worthy New-Year’s-resolution of a cause:

Flying Horse Farms is a magical, transforming and fun camp for children with serious illnesses and their families. It’s an Ohio based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization and working to become a member of Hole in the Wall Camps, the world’s largest family of camps for children with serious illnesses.

I talked with the director, and he said that rather than one central library, he would love to have books available at several spots around the camp—the stables, the craft room, the main activity hall, the cabins, maybe even the dining hall.

The books would be…

For kids to read while they wait for their turn on a horse.
For kids who suddenly discover they love pottery or archery or fishing and want to know everything about it.
For kids to share and discuss a cool quote or an inspirational person during nightly reflection times.
For kids who need a fast idea for a drama skit, or a nature craft, or a easy recipe.
For kids who need to rest.
For kids who love to read.
For kids who are kids and want to be kids and must be kids even if a serious illness complicates their lives.

Sara offers several suggestions for supporting Flying Horse’s “horse and camp books for kids” project, including making purchases from her Amazon Wish List, blogging about one’s own experiences with horses and/or camps, and so on.

Now, I was convinced I wanted to help somehow, but none of those suggestions were really options for me, for one reason or another. What to do, what to do…?

I’d heard about the Flying Horse project via the Seven Impossible Things… blog, so there I posted my characteristically muddled questions: what if I can’t, for now, make a purchase or donation? what if I can’t blog about horses because I don’t know jack about them?

An answer came from Sara Lewis Holmes herself:

If it helps, I know nothing about horses either, except that I’m rather scared of them. :) I imagine it’s the same for some of the kids who will come to camp too.

Heck, blog about what you DON’T know if you want. Any little bit that spreads the word helps. I’m thrilled by all the ideas so far, and I’ve updated my original post with the links.

And that provided the (ha ha, hehe, I crack myself up) spur I needed for the rest of this post — with a twist.

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“… 3… 2… 1… 0… I Said ZERO, Dammit, ZERO!”

December 31, 2008 by John 11 Comments

[This post’s title alludes to this little tidbit of news: 2008 will last
a second longer than most years.]

The New Year, per usual, calls to mind resolutions about what we hope will come within the next 365ish days. I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, though, I want to note that whatever else it stands for, December 31 also marks the anniversary of a pop-culture phenomenon’s passing. I speak of the final Calvin & Hobbes strip, December 31, 1995.

The frames reproduced in this post aren’t from that last strip. Its creator, Bill Watterson, had for years fought with newspapers about the constraints imposed on cartoonists by conventional newspaper page size and layout. Eventually he won that battle, at least for his Sunday strips, and the final one (like many others preceding it) shows the result: a gorgeous sprawl of irregularly-sized and completely non-rectangular moments in his characters’ lives, much of the space simply blank. The idea of either (a) reducing the whole strip to fit RAMH‘s layout or (b) slicing it up for the same reason, well, it just felt blasphemous.

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Paying Attention to Action — or Is It Character?

December 30, 2008 by John 4 Comments

I’ve written here before (here and here) about the terrors of newly-published-authordom — particularly, when the bad reviews land in your mailbox.

But sometimes, even a bad review contains a nugget you cling to when the whole damned thing threatens to come unraveled, when your spirit sags and you wonder why you’re even bothering to continue.

In my case, that nugget for Crossed Wires appeared in a review which on the whole was not particularly flattering. (This was the review referring to “occasional patches of arty prose.” Which was true — which was why it rankled so much!) Specifically — I’m going on memory here but think it’s pretty close to the real wording — it said: “The action scenes are winners, some of them quite funny.”

The reason this comment stuck with me wasn’t the “quite funny” part. That’s something people had been telling me for years about (much of) my writing; while it was nice to know that a stranger concurred, I more or less just nodded to myself at that point — because I was still savoring the first half of the sentence.

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Here Be Dragons

December 29, 2008 by John 4 Comments

[Caption: “It must be yours. I have no imagination.”
Cartoon by Charles Barsotti in The New Yorker, November 27, 2006]

The end of a year heralds all sort of soul-searching not just among writers, of course, but among everyone else. Did I do everything I could do? Did I do it as well as I could? What did I overlook? How did I fail? And so on.

And yet — at least for (re-)beginners — the professional angst of writers and other creative people seems especially exquisite. We have a product, after all, a product we’ve spent many lonely hours producing. With no assurance of “success” (however we choose to measure that). With no firm idea, in many cases, why we embarked on the latest project (or the career itself, for that matter).

We have to finish the work in order to sell the work — just to find out if it’s at all salable or even remotely interesting to people in a position to get it “out there.”

I mean, I myself know this is how it works but it terrifies me.

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Smile After Smile

December 28, 2008 by John 6 Comments

JES, en mosaic They say old habits die hard, and I guess it’s true.

But traditions are a sort of shared old habit, and traditions don’t die hard at all — although they don’t flat-out die, either. Traditions evolve. People come and go. What’s possible replaces what you could never do, and what you used to do all the time gets a lot harder as the muscle aches and stray indecisions of age set in.

So all right, I know: the “Christmas traditions” I remember from my four decades in New Jersey are probably long gone.

(Early in the week, I asked my mother what she’d be making for Christmas dinner — feeling all nostalgic, y’know, for turkey and pies and fruit cake and all that, to say nothing of the many-voiced family sit-down conversation around the table. “Meatball sandwiches,” she said. “What?!?” “Well,” she explained, “it was just getting too complicated trying to get everybody here at the same time, for the same length of time. This way they can drop in whenever they want and stay as long as they want.”)

But the one tradition that lives on — one that I haven’t been able to take part in, not for many years — is just seeing everyone at Christmas.

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The Case of the Missing Human

December 27, 2008 by John 2 Comments

All men are dogs, they say. But not all dogs are men.

And I should know. My name’s Sophie. I’m a private eye. And yes, I’m a dog. But I’m a bitch.

****

Things were looking pretty good that Friday morning when That Woman came into the back room of my office. I don’t let just anybody do that, but That Woman and I have a history, you might say.

“Good morning,” she said.

I said nothing, just yawned and looked at her. That Woman knew what do and she did it. Made a fuss over me like she does. I took it like my due, because it was, and then I led her from the room. She didn’t simply follow; she trailed along in my wake. Oh yes, she knew what to do all right.

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