“There is a lot of friction and movement in that general area.”
[From Slate]
Real War
Courtesy of Steve King’s Today in Literature e-newsletter, I learned that today was the birthday (1831) of journalist Rebecca Harding Davis.
Without further comment, I offer you here an excerpt of Harding Davis’s writing, looking back on the Civil War.
I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done in my cherry-tree when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders debouching in the misty fields.
[…]Yet with all this fever of preparation we never quite believed that there was war until, one day, a rough wooden box was sent down from the mountains. A young officer had been killed by a sharpshooter, and his body was forwarded that it might be cared for and sent to his friends. He was a very handsome boy, and the men in the town went to look at him and at the little purple spot on his white breast, and came away dull and sick at heart. They did not ask whether he had been loyal or a rebel.
“He was so young! He might have done so much!” they said. “But this is war — war!”
I remember that in that same year I crossed the Pennsylvania mountains coming to Philadelphia. It was a dull, sunless day. The train halted at a little way station among the hills. Nobody was in sight but a poor, thin country girl, in a faded calico gown and sun-bonnet. She stood alone on the platform, waiting. A child was playing beside her.
When we stopped the men took out from the freight car a rough, unplaned pine box and laid it down, baring their heads for a minute. Then the train steamed away. She sat down on the ground and put her arms around the box and leaned her head on it. The child went on playing. So we left her. I never have seen so dramatic or significant a figure.
When we hear of thousands of men killed in battle it means nothing to us. We forget it in an hour. It is these little things that come home to us. When we remember them we say: —
“That is war!”
For more on Harding Davis, see the Wikipedia article linked above (as well as the various references cited therein). For more examples of her writing, check this page.
“What Kind of Book Is It?”
One of the hardest — yet most important — questions an author often has to answer about his work is the one asked by this entry’s title.
Now, it’s not hard at all to answer, for many authors and even more books. When you walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble, when you browse Amazon, it’s all organized by “type”: romance along this aisle, SF over there, “literature” along the walls, and so on. The problem is that it’s these classifications which determine “what kind of book” a given title is — not the other way around.
Most-Loathed Books
Courtesy of the Times of London’s online presence, we have a list of books most loathed by various critics and writers.
This is a tricky list for a writer to read, and I’m surprised they got any writers at all to contribute to it. Why? Because any writer with his head screwed on properly knows just how fickle and arbitrary readers’ — or even a particular reader’s — tastes can be. Then there’s the herd mentality, demonstrated in those moments when a single verging-on-trollish wisecrack sends a swarm of commenters into ad-hominem assaults on one another, often forgetting what was being commented on in the first place. (Some people will jump into the fray with no opinion at all on that topic; they just love a good scrum.)
It reminds me of a couple of posts (and ensuing commentary, much of it feverish if uncertainly heartfelt) back in April, on Nathan Bransford’s blog.
The Smell of Pages Burning in the Morning
Not really. But the new Book Roast site (also linked permanently over there at the right, under the Je Ne Sais Quoi… category) promises to be not only a generous labor of love, but an audacious experiment in book and author publicity.
Here’s the idea: Each week, for five days Every day during the last week of each month, one author a day will post an excerpt from his/her recent book:
…followed by three questions loosely related to the passage. Some questions are silly, others are straightforward and the rest are plain crunchy. For dessert, the author picks the winner who answers the most questions correctly – or the most creatively.
The winner then will receive a copy of the book in question.
(It’s not spelled out, as far as I can tell, but the answers provided by site visitors will presumably be posted in the comments for each excerpt.)
They bill this as a contest, and so it is. But it’s also a very cool way for authors and readers to cross paths and interact… and (not incidentally) help the authors get much-needed exposure.
The first go-round begins Monday, June 23, with a “roast” of Bernita Harris‘s Weirdly.
How Important Is Reading?
Scary question? It depends on the answer.
A young actress, Ashley Brown of Broadway’s Mary Poppins revival, provides her take on it:
Not so scary, hmm?
Writing on Purpose
In the summer of 1990, I took my first steps away from a soft-cubicled work day. I had some money available, and my employer at the time offered an extended-leave-without-pay benefit that I decided would fit me just fine for a year, anyhow. I was desperate, see, to learn if I really could write — not just for my eyes and my family’s and friends’, but for the eyes of complete strangers.
(There was a secondary purpose, too — what I once described as my potatoes-in-a-colander purpose. I may write about that later. Not now.)
As I’ve written before, by then I’d been subscribing to the Compuserve Information Service, or CIS, for a couple years. There I’d “met” people from all across the country, especially writerly sorts of people. A lot of them gave me a lot of good ideas where I might want to live during my year’s experiment.
I wasn’t familiar with many of these places (sheltered life to that point, dontcha know: 40 years in New Jersey, and that was about it). So I opted to take a week or two simply to visit the ones that seemed most interesting. And then I’d decide.
At the top of the list was a small city in Oregon. I didn’t move there, as it happened. But I figured as long as I was going to be on the west coast, I might as well make a real trip of it. Happily, another of my CIS acquaintances would be running a weekend writing workshop in southern California, at the very start of the trip.
Package Design Slogans
One of my little… well, I hesitate to call it a fetish. Doesn’t have the same level of intensity. (Er, or so I imagine.)… Anyway, one of my almost unconscious preoccupations is to notice product packages. All kinds of packages: breakfast foods; video games; aspirin bottles; gift wrap; so on and so forth.
Of course the actual physical structure is often ingenious, all the Tab As and Slot Bs and spot-gluing. It boggles, simply boggles that someone was clever enough to create some of these things.
But aside from the structure of packages — the way the cardboard or plastic is folded, crimped, cut, and stamped — what interests me is the text printed thereon, by which I mean the non-functional text. Not the instructions. Not the FDA and FTC warnings and notices. Rather, I mean the product names (sometimes) and the flat-out advertising copy which graces the packages.
For instance, there’s the following. (Note that it’s trademarked, by the way.) Any guesses what product’s packaging might include such inspiring verbiage?
A hint for those of you who might be telling yourselves something like I know I’ve seen this somewhere…
Update, 6/19/2008 10:12 am: If you really really need to know the answer to this mystery, see the full package (with some product) here. And if you’re still not sure what that is, go to the manufacturer’s home page. Ponder, then, the larger mystery of the mystery slogan’s… umm… grandiosity?
A Broken (Family) Tree
A friend (Rick) was telling me last night about some genealogical research he’s been doing.
My understanding is that he may be writing up his findings himself. If so, I won’t steal his thunder by relating my (no doubt incomplete and/or flat-out wrong) version of the details. Just wanted to report one laugh-out-loud item.
Basically, Rick believes — or believed — himself to be a descendant of a branch of a sect known as the Harmonists (which, I am pretty sure, are covered here on Wikipedia). Why is this at all funny? Because among the principal beliefs of this sect was…
…celibacy.
Sing, Sing, Sing
This Sunday is Father’s Day in the US. Last week, 20 years ago, my Dad died. I thought a fitting tribute to both of these occasions would be to post here a short story which was, in many ways, a story of my Dad (although none of the actual events described in it occurred to him). That’s Dad in the photo at the left, circa 1943-44, when he was in training for a while at Texas A&M.
Below, I’ll excerpt the first couple-three pages of the quite old-fashioned story, whose title is “Sing, Sing, Sing.” It’s gone through many versions by now, the earliest written in the autumn of that year of 1988. The version which appears here is simply the most recent.
If you like that much of the story, feel free to download the complete version, in PDF form (146KB); a link to that appears at the end of the excerpt.
(Note: For what it’s worth, there has never to my knowledge been a newspaper named the New York Messenger. Should you go on to read the whole story, there’s never been a book called The Big Hall: The Good Times of Benny Goodman, either, or an author named Robert G. Ehling.)
Update (2008-08-07): I’ve done a more complete breakdown of the “Sing, Sing, Sing” performance, including full-length clips of the three main segments (which together make up a “triptych,” as the fictional Big Hall calls it).
