Short Fiction: “The Cabin”

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A few weeks ago, trying to kick-start my creative engine, I set myself a goal. The idea was to write a short story, by September 1, whose first and last sentences were “found,” that is, already written by someone else. For extra credit (don’t you love the way people play these games with themselves?), I said, I’d try to incorporate into the story — somehow — a picture of the two sentences’ author.

If you’d prefer not to know in advance what the two sentences are, and don’t care to see the picture of their author, you can read the first section here. (At the end of that page is a link to a PDF version of the whole story.)

If on the other hand you do want to read the details, the original challenge was here.

And, finally, if you want to read more about my experience of writing a story to these specifications, well, just keep reading below.

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Hard Questions

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From whiskey river:

The rest I have told you already

The rest I have told you already.
A few years of fluency, and then
the long silence, like the silence in the valley
before the mountains send back
your own voice changed to the voice of nature.
This silence is my companion now.
I ask: of what did my soul die?
and the silence answers

if your soul died, whose life
are you living and
when did you become that person?

(by Louise Glück)

And (not from whiskey river):

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

(by Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

And finally, just for a change, something of an answer:

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate — that’s my philosophy.

(by Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth — one of my all-time favorite plays to read)

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How Do You Figure?

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Crazy week upcoming (as if the last one wasn’t crazy enough)… More details on that later, but for now I’ll just say that I’ll have blog posts stacked up in the pipeline and ready to go, starting a week from today [double emphasis added 2008-08-29] and continuing for the next four days. (I know how the Web’s attention wanders if a site goes dark too long.)

The catch?

I hope but can’t promise that I’ll be able to get to a computer to actually post the things. All I’ll need, once the posts are written, is about ten minutes to read, revise as needed, and click the Publish button. But I won’t actually have a computer with me — so will depend on the kindness of strangers or family members or, I don’t know, Internet cafes. Don’t be surprised if you read reports of some guy in Groucho glasses and mustache, stealing laptops in bookstores and then returning them 15 minutes later.

Anyhow, to kick off that series of posts starting which shall start [clarification added 2008-08-29] in a week, let me introduce you to a slender volume (103 pages, with index) called Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase, by Arthur Quinn. (Amazon says the book is 112 pages long, which may be attributable to a later edition; the one I’ve got here is copyright 1982.)

From Quinn’s preface:

Graduate students in literature eagerly buy little dictionaries so that when a monograph intones about later Shakespeare’s penchant for the anthimeria, they will have a place to look it up. So they look it up, while their own prose often becomes more and more like a monograph’s, a groaning misery to read.

…Learning about the figures of speech should be less like learning about the periodic table of elements than like learning how to model clay. To ask a sentence if it has a zeugma is not like asking a rock if it has silicon. In fact, the very phrase “figures of speech” is misleading in its static, passive form. It should be the “figurings of speech” — or, better yet, “figuring speech.”

The figurings of speech reveal to us the apparently limitless plasticity of language itself. We are confronted, inescapably, with the intoxicating possibility that we can make language do for us almost anything we want. Or a least a Shakespeare can. The figures of speech help us to see how he does it, and how we might.

I’ve always been haunted by the possibility that I might be a better writer than storyteller. Discussions about story always have me glancing nervously over my shoulder, as though the ghosts of Homer and Twain and Hemingway are going to materialize and demand my credentials. “Papers, please,” they’ll say. I’ll pat my pockets, frown, slap my forehead, say “Jeez, my other suit–” and while they’re distracted I’ll take off in a broken-field run, heading for the safety of the Prose Mountains.

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Will Cuppy

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The most recent category for the links here, all the way at the bottom of the right-hand menu, is labeled “The Pantheon.” These aren’t authors who’ve necessarily influenced my style (although no doubt many of them have); they aren’t all authors who’ve meant a lot to me for my whole life (although some of them have). Instead, they’re authors who at one time or another bowled me over with the unexpected, offering surprising insights into what writing could possibly achieve.

One who didn’t make the cut, although I sure thought about including him, was Will Cuppy.

It was during the summer of 1964 that I first encountered Cuppy’s The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. Earlier that year I’d been introduced to James Thurber, thanks to my 7th-grade English teacher Mr. Krause; I had almost made up my mind that I wanted to grow up to be a Professional Humorist or, failing that, a Professional Teller of Occasional Jokes.

And then I hit Cuppy. (It was almost exactly like that, a collision.)

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Printability!

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A while back, I said I’d be trying to fix things so that printouts of Running After My Hat posts would look more like “real” articles or stories as opposed to Web-based content: omitting the left and right margins, increasing text font sizes, and so on.

Just in time for the ginormous “Fay, Part 2” post, that feature is now working.

I’ll be tinkering with it off and on, no doubt. In the meantime, hope it helps your experience here!

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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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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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The Extravagant Gesture

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From whiskey river:

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire since the word go. — Annie Dillard

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Caution *coughcough* New Construction

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Like a lot of bloggers, I use the Sitemeter service to keep tabs on how many people are visiting my site, how much time they spend here, and so on.

A couple weeks ago I decided to upgrade my Sitemeter account from free to paid status. I didn’t really care about some of the benefits of a paid account, but one benefit I cared about very much:

See, with the free (basic) plan, you can see what a site visitor’s entry page was — that is, the first page on your site that they came to during a given session; and you can see what his or her exit page was; and you can see how long his or session lasted, and how many total pages s/he viewed during that time. What you can’t see is which specific other pages (if any) s/he visited in between the entry and exit pages.

This is a little frustrating. If someone’s stopped to read ten pages on your site, wouldn’t you want to know what pages, exactly, were the eight pages between page 1 and page 10? Of course you would.

That’s the benefit I’m really paying for. And boy, it’s been instructive.

I mean, you expect a lot (er…) of people to come to the home page, sniff around a little, and then disappear. Others (like those who might be following your RSS feed), you expect, will see just the most recent post (and then disappear). What’s been really interesting to see is how many people sort of wander in the front door and then proceed to wander more or less aimlessly around the place, pulling open drawers, inspecting their contents, going upstairs and checking out the rooms there, and so on — before bailing 15 minutes or more later.

Thinking about this, I have concluded that maybe people just can’t figure out what sort of site this is. Unlike most blogs, it’s not single-purpose. I post often about books, writing, and so on, but somebody visiting just for that is likely to be put off by a post about (say) the Linux operating system. Somebody who sees this post show up in the Google hits for a search on “linux” is going to be completely confused on their arrival. And so on.

With all that in mind, I’ve added a new page to the site. It’s not a blog post per se, but it (like the About page) is linked at the top of every page in the blog, as “Navigating RAMH.”

If you need help figuring out where to start — or where to end, for that matter — that page is as good a starting point as any.

P.S. I’m also working on a style sheet which will enable you more easily to print out RAMH posts, if that’s how you prefer to read. (Killing trees is NOT a practice I recommend, though!) This style sheet will suppress the left- and right-side menus, and include other features more amenable to offline “reading” of the more verbose posts, especially. Assuming I actually write some.

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It Was Like This

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My weekly favorite selection from the incomparable whiskey river (which daily seems as unlike a blog as it’s possible for a blog to be):

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent – what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness –
between you, there is nothing to forgive –
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is now a thing only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

(by Jane Hirshfield)

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