In 1990, having finished the first (the blitz) draft of Crossed Wires — during whose composition I read mysteries almost exclusively — I stopped at a bookstore in South Jersey, hungry for something to read. My appetite of the moment was for a book, any book, which I’d been curious about for years but had never read. I wanted something substantial, preferably not overpowering (no Finnegan’s Wake, please). A classic, but one which I could carry in a hip pocket.
I departed the store with Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.
Many have had a similar chance encounter with the tales of King Arthur, and like me have said to themselves, “Hmm…,” and then gone on to investigate something more of the story, which leads them to more, and then even further to other related back alleys of myth and literature. The hobby seems so innocent at first, just a pleasant diversion — deluded (as such hapless folk are) into thinking it’s all “just” the story of Knights of Old, the Round Table, the Holy Grail, Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot…
Finally they emerge at the far end (if they ever do) blinking, as though they’ve just spent a week spelunking and emerged at high noon in the desert. (High noon, right. It wouldn’t much surprise us to be greeted by Gary Cooper, wielding a broadsword instead of a revolver: that’s how surrealistic the experience can feel.)
Suddenly they know more than they ever imagined knowing about odd stuff like metallurgy, pre-Roman Britain, the odd and quite mysterious turnings and mergings of one legend into another, medieval French Romances, ecclesiastical rumor and history, and… Wales.
…but I just had to share this. It’s suspenseful, in a humorous way. And it’s funny — in a suspenseful way. Or maybe it’s just me.
(Discovered at the Out of Character blog.)
From whiskey river:
On Angels
All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:day draws near
another one
do what you can.
(Czeslaw Milosz)
Ah, the writing life. We know it’s a stereotype, (almost?) never true, but the image remains skulking around our collective unconscious:
The disheveled hair. The soulful eyes, staring out the window of an upper-floor barely-furnished apartment in which the heat has been turned off, a “scarf” — fabric torn from the edge of a bedsheet — collaring the neck, the fingers poised above they keys of a typewriter into which one has not yet bothered to insert paper because nothing is coming, dammit, nothing even resembling the first word, let alone sentence, and accomplishing an entire paragraph feels like something only gods can pull off. Meanwhile, the landlord is banging on the door demanding at least token attention to seven months’ back rent; food molders in the lukewarm fridge; and yet the Muse — the Siren — still sings to one from nearby rooftops and trees…
Glamorous, eh? No wonder so many (as it seems) want some of it.
This blog post was inspired by and involves, but is not actually about, the author A.L. Kennedy. On the off-chance she’s new to you, you may want to know something of her before we proceed. Says Wikipedia, she:
…is a Scottish writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is known for a characteristically dark tone, a blending of realism and fantasy, and for her serious approach to her work as well as a passion for the art of yodeling. Alison Kennedy lives in Glasgow with her pet Luwak.
When telling people about my flipping back and forth from technical writing to fiction, I usually say I went for five years without writing anything at all.
That’s not exactly true. Truth is, after about four years I’d had enough. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t have anything specific I meant to write, but just sitting around — I wasn’t, really, but you know what I mean — was starting to make me a little crazy.
So I told The Missus I meant to get up early the next morning and I did. Staggered to the computer, bleary-eyed, with a cup of tea in hand. Opened the word processor. Let my hands hover over the keyboard and typed:
It’s 1927, late on a mid-June morning.
A few things about this very brief sentence:
The story which came out of that brief fling with an early-morning routine — it lasted maybe a week, maybe two — is called “The Running Boy.” I never finished it; got a little over 6,000 words into it and just ran out of steam. Not abandoned by the Muse, not tired of the story itself. Just plain tired. (I hadn’t adjusted my bedtime to allow for the early morning schedule, instead counting on the adrenaline rush of writing again to carry me through a day on four hours’ sleep. Say it with me: Duh.)
But “The Running Boy” continued to interest me for a number of reasons (some of them hinted at in that opening sentence).
The plot itself — or rather, the thing-which-the-plot-seemed-to-be-about, what Hitchcock used to call the MacGuffin — caught me completely unawares. I wish I knew how it turned out.
I experimented (again, no idea why) with writing dialect. While I often give my characters characteristic rhythms of speech and other little verbal tics of their own, what I’ve got of “The Running Boy” represents my only attempt to give characters what you might call accents. And I don’t think it’s too heavy-handed. (We’re not talking Joel Chandler Harris here.)
The story has three main characters — probably two too many for a short story. But while it lasted, I had great fun working out their relationships. (In the back of my mind, they’re continuing their adventures with one another somewhere.)
Finally, the genre is one which I’d never seriously attempted. At that, the genre itself was a sort of MacGuffin; “The Running Boy” — at least its first 6K words — has even less to do with the genre than it does with, say, computers and the Internet. The story more or less announces its genre within the first few paragraphs and then more or less forgets it; the point, as it happens, seems to have been the characters after all.
Anyway, for what it’s worth — and for the sake of whatever my mind thought itself to be achieving — here are the first 1700+ words of “The Running Boy.” (I haven’t edited this at all, just copied-‘n’-pasted it from the document, so it doesn’t take long to make me cringe at stuff I wish I’d rewritten.)
Got a couple of words for you.
The first is the one in this post’s title. This is:
…a word coined by H. L. Mencken which means “people who read too much and so are generally oblivious to the world around them.”
Many of you probably know such people.
And then there’s dord. Yes: dee-oh-are-dee. Dord.
What an odd word, you’re thinking. It certainly doesn’t look like English. Well, it looks kinda like word. Especially if I tell you it’s a noun, meaning “density.”
There’s just one catch: it’s pretty much impossible to use it in a sentence — at least, if you’re not discussing dord AS a word. Why? Because it doesn’t exist.
[This borders on “for geeks only” territory. But I think it’s worth at least some attention if you aspire to get — and keep — a reading audience for your words on the Web.]
A highly respected site for Web-site designers, typographers, and so on, is called A List Apart. It’s been around for years, freely dispensing advice and information from various experts on how to make pages look good and behave properly.
You may or may not know that a given page looks differently when viewed in one Web browser vs. another (Firefox vs. Internet Explorer vs. Safari vs. Opera vs. whatever); even if you know that, though, you may not know why you perhaps should care… let alone what to do about it. If that bothers you, and if you’re not too intimidated by tech subjects presented gracefully, A List Apart needs to be in your bookmarks list.
Regardless of your expertise, I want to draw your attention to a recent article by Mandy Brown, “In Defense of Readers.” It will be of interest to anyone placing his or or her words online, in an environment — like a blog — where one hopes or expects to attract readers as well as mere visitors.
From whiskey river:
The Moment
Walking the three tiers in first light, out
here so my two-year-old son won’t wake the house,
I watch him pull and strip ragweed, chicory, yarrow,
so many other weeds and wildflowers
I don’t know the names for, him saying Big, and Mine,
and Joshua — words, words, words. Then
it is the moment, that split-second
when he takes my hand, gives it a tug,
and I feel his entire body-weight, his whole
heart-weight, pulling me toward
the gleaming flowers and weeds he loves.
That moment which is eternal and is gone in a second,
when he yanks me out of myself like some sleeper
from his dead-dream sleep into the blues and whites
and yellows I must bend down to see clearly, into
the faultless flesh of his soft hands, his new brown eyes,
the miracle of him, and of the earth itself,
where he lives among the glitterings, and takes me.
(Len Roberts)
Not from whiskey river:
From Variety (courtesy of The New Yorker‘s “The Book Bench” blog):
Rocket launches ‘Predator’
Clark to direct aliens vs. Jane Austen pic
By MICHAEL FLEMINGElton John’s Rocket Pictures hopes to make the first Jane Austen adaptation to which men will drag their girlfriends.
Will Clark is set to direct “Pride and Predator,” which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.
[…]“It felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre by literally dropping this alien into the middle of a costume drama, where he stalks and slashes to horrific effect,” [Rocket Pictures’ David] Furnish said.
I do love a punchline — or a cartoon caption — which makes me pause for a split-second before making me snort. (Score another for the Bizarro strip.)