Writing – Page 109

So Deep a Sound in Autumn

September 25, 2009 by John 11 Comments

[Image: “Autumn Grasses,” a two-panel folding screen by 19th-century
Japanese artist Shibata Zeshin. Click image for more information.]

From whiskey river (which has been on a William Stafford binge for a few weeks, not that you’ll find me complaining):

Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

(William Stafford [source])

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The Missus and I saw District 9 on Saturday. I’m tempted to review it in full, but fear I’d reveal too much of its plot. So I’ll just say that District 9 is one of the, I don’t know… two or three best movies I’ve seen for the last 10 or 15 years — in any genre. It raises important questions about what it means to be human, and it leaves them dangling in the air, just daring the audience to answer them. And it does so in the context of a science-fiction, summer-blockbuster, mock-documentary-cum-action film which should be a natural draw for audiences across the board.

Which may sound like a recommendation. You need to see it if you haven’t already, right? But, uh, well… No.

Why not? Because of the ick factor: surgical close-ups; exploding bodies; individual and societal violence (and threat of same)… Some people might even be put off just by the, well, icky appearance of the aliens, who look like viscous love children of THE alien from the Aliens films and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.

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Travels

September 18, 2009 by John 9 Comments

From whiskey river:

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes
among
things that change. But it doesn’t
change.
People wonder about what you are
pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s
unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds, may your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

(Edward Abbey, “A Prayer for the Traveler” [apparently not a title Abbey himself used: source])

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Confuse-a-Dog

September 17, 2009 by John 8 Comments

An old Monty Python skit posits a service called “Confuse-a-Cat.” (Veterinarian to anxious elderly couple: “I think I can definitely say that your cat badly needs to be confused.”) I started to explain the whole thing but was laughing too hard to type properly; I’ll include the seven-minute routine in its entirety at the foot of this post, for those of you who don’t know of it — or just want to see it again.

I remembered this skit this morning, after an episode of complicated human-canine choreography. (A cat was involved as well, peripherally — and perhaps in confusion.)

The Missus and I share one car, which works well for us (with some periodic adjustments) maybe 97% of the time. But boy, that remaining 3% is a killer, and today definitely fell into the 3% basket. Without getting into the details, here’s what had to happen:

The Missus needed to use the car for an hour or two, starting at 8 a.m.
Our Yorkshire terrier Sophie — who normally goes to work with The Missus — had to stay home. She’s done this before, so it wasn’t exactly a crisis in itself. But there was a catch, or maybe two:
We have a housecleaning service come in every couple of weeks…
…and while Sophie is much much better at dealing with strangers than she was a year ago, she still completely loses it when a stranger first enters the house. (Translation: high anxiety for both dog and housecleaning personnel.)

The solution I came up with: I’d stay home with Sophie until The Missus got back with the car; this would help keep Sophie calm, or at least distracted. And because that part of the plan required separating dog and housecleaner as much as possible, we’d stay isolated in the upstairs offices (which we clean ourselves). And that part of the plan required that I get not just Sophie, but all her… her appurtenances upstairs with us. (This would be the same upstairs area where our dog-phobic cat lives, by the way. And where Sophie never visits, therefore, except accidentally.)

Some of the appurtenances involved:

a collapsible gate which I could set up at the top of the stairway, to keep Sophie upstairs
food dish and water bowl (and food and water, of course)
bouncy ball
dog bed (in the unlikely event that she’d want to sleep)
treats A, B, and C
the hard-rubber doggy gizmos into which we insert treat A, B, or C and thus make Sophie work for them, by God
various materials to enable prompt, sanitary handling of what we might call “dog spillage”

I also needed to take my shower and get dressed for work, pack up the various bags we bring with us each day, get a few things out of the housecleaner’s way, leave a note for her on the front door so she wouldn’t be freaked out by the footsteps and (probable) barking and yelping and reprimanding and pleading overhead, write a check for her, be sure I had a bottle of water for myself — and ditto my Blackberry, to keep me entertained (on the Web) while, as I hoped, Sophie would be entertaining herself.

I had one hour to do all the above. And I wanna tell you, I was sweating when done.

And you know what? If you want to completely reverse the behavior of a hyperactive little dog, this appears to be a great approach: disappear into the bathroom for a half hour and emerge clean and completely dressed; run around furiously, snatching up all of said dog’s everyday sacred objects and carrying them off to forbidden territory; setting up the hated collapsible gate at the top of the stairs; grabbing said dog herself and depositing her on the far side of said collapsible gate, in said forbidden territory; clamber over the gate yourself; flop (soaked and interestingly perfumed) onto the floor, alongside said dog; and there pluck from your shirt pocket a small black rectangular object which you immediately start poking at, madly, with your thumbs.

Worked great, I tell you. Instant and total physical inertia of the canine sort — the opposite of confusing a cat, in fact. And even though it didn’t last, it was thoroughly satisfying for those few minutes.

__________________

Here are the Pythons and their Confuse-a-Cat skit (and here’s the transcript, if you’d like to follow along):

Enough Is Enough! (Er, Isn’t It?)

September 16, 2009 by John 14 Comments

From Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig:

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

From “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a story by Jorge Luis Borges (translation by James E. Irby):

[Menard] did not want to compose another Quixote — which is easy — but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes…

The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.

—-

Edit to add (2009-09-17): If you’ve already read this post and the postscripts which follow it, you already know about the book Mrs. West’s Hats. The author/photographer has kindly given permission for me to use an image from the book, which I’ve added to the P.S.

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On the Inside, Looking In

September 11, 2009 by John 13 Comments

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Private Writing vs. Public Having-Written

September 9, 2009 by John 14 Comments

It’s twenty-five(ish) years ago. Lunchtime on a workday. Walking the landscaped grounds of a building especially constructed for the two to three thousand programmers, managers, and support staff — and giant mainframe computers, hard drives, and other hardware — in the service of what, for now, is still the world’s largest telephone company.

I’ve got two buddies with me, let’s call them JB and JDS (not not *cough* their real initials). All three of us have talked, sometimes, of Going Outside for a living. JB aspires to make and sell software and training for programmers to use while they themselves work to make software. JDS seems to like the ideas JB has, and has even offered to help — although he also seems more clearly destined to manage people like JB and me. (He’s so level-headed; the other two of us never have more than one foot planted firmly on the ground.)

Me? I’ve been telling them about the second annual week-long vacation from which I just returned: a vacation during which I went nowhere and did “nothing” except write stories, in longhand, stories which I then type up and file away. I tell them: I might try doing something like this fulltime someday. (The “someday,” back then, is still four or five years in the future.)

JDS is talking with me about practical matters — what would I live on, and where, like that — but JB has stopped in his tracks. JDS and I have actually gone a few steps further (the momentum of dreams, y’know) and have to turn around and go back for him.

JB’s got a faint smile on his face. He looks at me.

“What do you do?” he says to me.

“You mean—?”

“When you’re writing. What do you do?”

“Uh…” I still don’t know what he’s talking about.

“You just sit there in a chair,” he says, “and you pick up a pencil, and some paper—”

“Well, yeah—”

“…and then you… you just write?”

“Sure, yeah—”

But he’s not listening to me. He’s laughing, softly. JB has two sorts of laughter: rarely, a short bark of derision when he’s feeling cynical; more often, when delighted beyond speech, a soft heh-heh-hff sound. Today, at the thought of someone sitting at a table while fiction pours from the point of a pencil, today he is laughing the good way.

—

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Real-Life [Movie] Dialogue

September 5, 2009 by John 16 Comments

[Above still depicts the Martian “war machines” devastating the California countryside. In the foreground lies a small propeller-driven spotter plane of terrestrial origin, which has crash-landed — as they are wont to do at the peak of military operations against aliens.]

So last night we’re watching the 1953 Hollywood version of The War of the Worlds, starring Gene Barry and directed by George Pal. First time I’d seen it in a long time — and, more importantly for me, the first time I’d seen it with closed captioning.

The first scene I’ll highlight occurs early in the film. Somewhere in the hills outside Los Angeles, a “meteor” has crashed to the Earth. Fearful for some reason (this is around the time we sat down to watch it, so their motivation isn’t clear), the people of the nearest town have picked three men from among them to stand guard around the thing.

(Obviously they’re not that fearful, since all the rest of them then adjourn to a barn dance.)

The three men engage in some conversation which pegs them as, like, not scientists. The “meteor” starts to make a pinging sound, like a sonar device, and one of them draws the obvious conclusion:

That’s not a meteor — it’s a bomb!

At this point they notice something strange about the “bomb”: it has something on the top which looks like a hatch or manhole cover. As they watch, this hatch cover begins to turn… slowly…

[Following dialogue is all by one speaker.]

That’s no bomb. Bombs don’t unscrew!

[Hatch cover continues to turn… and turn…]

It’s the darnedest thing. It keeps unscrewing!

Eventually, of course, the hatch opens and a colored, three-lensed “eye” comes out on a long stalk. So now they know they’re dealing with something pretty seriously odd — probably, well, Men From Mars. They determine to approach the meteor bomb extraterrestrial vessel on foot, with white flags, because “everybody knows” a white flag means the bearer intends no harm. But they still have a problem. Luckily, one of them has an immediate solution:

Guy #1: What do we say to them?

Guy #2: “Welcome to California.”

So things go rapidly to hell from that point forward, as you can imagine even if you haven’t read the book or seen the film. But the US military, with help from their counterparts elsewhere, notices that the big levitating “Martian war machines” behave similarly wherever they land. They always come down in threes, for instance, and then there are those artificial eyes with three lenses — modeled on the Martians’ own three-eyed selves. Perhaps the people of Earth can use these observations to combat the aliens… if only they could figure out some of the remaining mysteries…

Military officer: Pattern-wise, one lands, then two, making groups of threes joined magnetically. Is that possible?

Scientist (Gene Barry): If they do it, it is.

Eventually, the government and military decide to use the “atom bomb” (which presumably isn’t unscrewing) against the aliens. Everyone in the (surviving) central cast and a bunch of other people (who are a little dumber and hence don’t take cover behind walls and such, and come to be tossed around like rag dolls in the shock wave) don radiation-proof suits and goggles so they can observe the explosion. As they watch, a PA system’s loudspeaker counts down the minutes and seconds:

Four minutes to bomb time…

Indeed.

Thinking Good

September 4, 2009 by John 9 Comments

[Caption: “I want you to start thinking good thoughts about someone new at our house. I want you to start thinking good thoughts about a pussy cat.” Cartoon by George Booth, from his 1975 collection, Think Good Thoughts About a Pussy Cat.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Sojourns in the Parallel World

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension — though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal — then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
— but we have changed, a little.

(Denise Levertov [source])

…and:

Things to Think

Think in ways you’ve never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

(Robert Bly [source])

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#wordsfail

August 29, 2009 by John 10 Comments

Somewhere, in the so-far unseen pages of your work in progress — or the pages of WIPs gone by — somewhere lurks a phrase so graceless, a metaphor so aluminum-foil-on-dental-fillings, a sentence so raggedy-ass, a title so forgettable or a character’s name so laughable, something that made you realize you may be a writer but you’re also a doofus. Come on. You know it’s there. Maybe you’ve got to rummage through old rough drafts, crusty short stories and anguished poems from high-school or college days. Or maybe you found it in a paragraph you wrote just the other day but didn’t find until revising this morning (and, when you came to, immediately hacked out with scissors or carving knife).

‘Fess up — in the comments here, or on Twitter with the #wordsfail hashtag.

Groans encouraged — groans of empathy, damn it. Because if you’ve written nothing like this, it’s only because you’ve forgotten the key word: yet.

To kick things off, here’s one from me. This excerpt comes from close to 30 years ago, a faux-Irish-brogue poem called “Sodden, Betrodden, and Noddin’.”

I was leanin’, it seems, besides on me dreams,
Rather close to the fellow next to me.
Full six foot he sat (when not wearin’ his hat),
And his face it was tired and gloomy.

Note especially the way you need to read the second line to force the rhyme with the fourth: next TO me. Alas, at that point in the stanza you don’t even know line 4 is coming up. So you’ve gotta get to the last line, realize your mistake, and back up.