When writing-related blogs ask their writing audience when, exactly, they “knew” they were writers, the answer most commonly offered is: I’ve always wanted to write.
Not so, in my case. Up until seventh grade, I had no such ambition, although teachers and family members had often complimented me on my writing. (I remember one grandmother — this was probably when I was around ten years old — chuckling in her grandmotherly way at something I’d said. Then she stopped for a moment, looked at me, and said, It’s not so much what you say, Johnny. It’s how you say it. Obviously, I never forgot that moment.)
In high school, one of the teachers I became friends with was Mr. Hanlon, who taught trig, physics, and calculus. He kept telling me I needed to consider a career in engineering.
No, I’d say, engineering didn’t interest me. I wanted to be a writer.
A look of almost-mock horror would flash across his face. “A writer?” he’d exclaim. “What about engineering?!?”
From whiskey river:
I remember the word and forget the word
although the word
Hovers in flame around me.
Summer hovers in flame around me.
The overcast breaks like a bone above the Blue Ridge.
A loneliness west of solitude
Splinters into the landscape
uncomforting as Braille.We are our final vocabulary,
and how we use it.
There is no secret contingency.
There’s only the rearrangement, the redescription
Of little and mortal things.
There’s only this single body, this tiny garment
Gathering the past against itself,
making it otherwise.
(Charles Wright, Negative Blue)
I’m a godawful blogger in at least one sense: I don’t do much to promote RAMH, other than to visit sites I like — visit them regularly, for the most part — and just let this site be discovered, if the reader should choose, by (a) following the link to it from the “JES” in comments elsewhere, or (b) wandering in, all unawares, probably as the result of a misguided left turn in the halls of Google.
(When I do provide an explicit link to a post here, it’s always with a cringe and a hurried look away, in the other direction — almost hoping no one catches me in the act.)
Like, what’s wrong with me? Don’t I know how important it is that I suck in not only the intentional but also the accidental audience? Don’t I want to [insert gigundo-scaled objective here] sooner rather than later?
Apparently not.
Thus, positive attention from any quarter at all feels wondrous to me. It’s like waking up on a sunny morning to find a rainbow arching through the sliding-glass patio door and terminating mid-forehead.
So anyhow, generous Kate over at What Kate Did Next has seen fit to pass to me and four others this… this… “baton,” is it, Kate? This emblem, in any case, of something called the Superior Scribbler Award, first begun by The Scholastic Scribe in a post back in October. Here’s the driving motivation for the award, per the Scribe:
Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is the scribbling child in a grown-up body, wondering if anyone is listening.
(by Herbert Gold, elder statesman of The Beat Generation)
“Scribbling child in a grown-up body”: I can’t think of a nicer compliment, irrespective of anyone’s listening or not.
Recognize the handsome guy at left? Neither did I.
Then I read Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories, by Harry Lee Poe (a distant cousin of its subject). Turns out that this painting, by Samuel Stillman Osgood, was rendered in about 1845 — four years before EAP’s death.
Right: he had no mustache at all until the last year or so of his life.
More importantly for understanding him, he didn’t always look so troubled, so twisted up inside, so “Don’t talk to me — I’m ready to implode” as he did in the familiar pictures and daguerreotypes of his last years.
My review of the Illustrated Companion is (finally!) done, and posted at The Book Book blog.
He: So what kind of car did she get?
She: I don’t know, I forget. It starts with an “E.” Some kind of American car.
He: […prolonged thoughtful silence…]
[time passes]
She: I wish I could remember what kind of car it was.
He: Well, the only kind I could think of that started with an “E” is “Elantra,” but that’s a foreign—
She: I’m not sure it starts with an “E.”
He: Oh… Well, since she got it from a Chevrolet dealer, is it a Chevrolet at least?
She: I don’t know!… Name some kinds of Pontiac. A sporty Pontiac.
He: Well, there’s the Firebird but I don’t think they make them anymore.
She: They don’t. And it’s not a Firebird anyway.
He: […]
She: Name some more Pontiacs. Sporty ones.
He: Uh… Grand Prix?
She: No, it’s not a Grand Prix… Maybe it is a Grand Prix.
[dials phone, talks briefly]
She: Yes. It’s a Grand Prix.
One of The Missus’s ongoing laments involves the infamous curve, which she seems forever ahead of. “Did you see,” she’ll say to me, “that [insert name of formerly unknown person] just made [insert some number which includes many zeroes and a currency symbol] from [insert random clever idea here]? I can’t believe it. That was my idea!”
Over at the Writing Well Is the Best Revenge blog, a recent post starts out by touching on a similar phenomenon: encountering ideas they’ve never had, but wish they did. Specifically, they talk about the Publisher’s Lunch e-newsletter, which provides reports of recent book deals. BIG book deals.
I know it’s, what, masochistic? Not because I begrudge anyone the fabulous deals they made–oh no way! If books are getting purchased and publishers are humming along, I’m all for it.
No–what’s masochistic is the constantly recurring thought that I am unable to suppress. And that is: oh–I should have thought of that.
Or worse: Oh, I COULD have thought of that.
We won’t even discuss “I DID think of that, years and years ago, but didn’t do anything about it” [Ed. note: viz., The Missus’s lament] because that way lies true madness. (Two little words: Animal Planet.)
Which leads them — gotta love it, someone else is easily distracted, too — to consider the announcement of the sale of Christopher Bowles’s book, Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart:
From whiskey river:
Only horizon and sky are given up easily. Take the numbing distance in small doses and gorge on the little details that beckon.
(William Least Heat-Moon)
Not from whiskey river (one of The Missus’s favorite poems):
I Am Too Near
I am too near to be dreamt of by him.
I do not fly over him, do not escape from him
under the roots of a tree. I am too near.
Not in my voice sings the fish in the net,
not from my finger rolls the ring.
I am too near. A big house is on fire
without me, calling for help. Too near
for a bell dangling from my hair to chime.
Too near to enter as a guest
before whom walls glide apart by themselves.
Never again will I die so lightly,
so much beyond my flesh, so inadvertently
as once in his dream. Too near.
I taste the sound, I see the glittering husk of this word
as I lie immobile in his embrace. He sleeps,
more accessible now to her, seen but once,
a cashier of a wandering circus with one lion,
than to me, who am at his side.
For her now in him a valley grows,
rusty-leaved, closed by a snowy mountain
in the dark blue air. I am too near
to fall to him from the sky. My scream
could wake him up. Poor thing
I am, limited to my shape,
I who was a birch, who was a lizard,
who would come out of my cocoons
shimmering the colors of my skins. Who possessed
the grace of disappearing from astonished eyes,
which is a wealth of wealths. I am near,
too near for him to dream of me.
I slide my arm from under the sleeper’s had
and it is numb, full of swarming pins,
on the tip of each, waiting to be counted,
the fallen angels sit.
(Wislawa Szymborska;
translation by Czeslaw Milosz)
Finally, an undisputed master at the reverse: finding large things in the small (click Play button to start):
I wanted to try something… something different for our writing workshop back then.
Not something funny (or was it?). Not something in the psychological horror line. Not a genre piece, not an obviously literary piece. For that matter, none of the things that would pop into workshoppers’ heads when they sat down to read it and started to answer the question, What sort of story has John written?
I wanted to overturn expectations. They knew what sort of story I wrote, after all, or so they thought: a story with some quirky protagonist at center stage, acting out some strange mental drama in a world which stubbornly resisted his or her preconceived ideas of the way the world should work. A story with a lot of… of… thwarting going on.
They’d expect a story, furthermore, that went on for thousands of words.
I couldn’t wait for the plumber to arrive.
Just for him, I’d cleaned out the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and put a bucket under the trap. I’d emptied the (dirty) dishwasher. I’d spread a towel on the floor, thinking that his knees — even more than mine — might appreciate the cushion. I’d left the cabinet door open, and I gestured at it and the sink when I led him into the kitchen. “There they are,” I said, as though he might might have expected more than one sink and drain in the kitchen.
He took in the scene, nodding vaguely at my tale of frustration and woe:
The tale extended back in time hours, days, weeks, to the dawn of time, and it involved gallons of Liquid Plum’r and first a 25-foot and then a 50-foot auger, or “plumber’s snake.” (Perhaps that was the creature which had defeated Adam in the Garden.) The tale involved a dishwasher frothy with gunk-dissolving chemicals, a dishwasher run through multiple (brief) rinses and drain-and-dry cycles. The tale involved mopping and sweeping and more mopping and it merited, by God, a little manly sympathy.
The plumber walked around the kitchen counter and pointed with his thumb to the sliding glass door to the deck.
“All right I use this door?”
“Uhhh… yeah, sure, no problem.” Like, I didn’t know — maybe he and his partner would need to… um… trace the line or something. I pictured the two of them criss-crossing the yard, with GPS units in their hands and pipe-clog-detecting electronic sounding gear strapped to their backs and heads. Plumbing had obviously embraced the 21st-century World of Tomorrow. I opened the door, showed them out, and sat at the kitchen counter to watch.
No plumber(s) for a minute or two. Maybe I’ll just run down the hall to use the bathroom for a few secs, I thought. On my way through the living room, I glanced out the picture window at the driveway. Yes. The two of them were getting their gear. Probably emptying the little van.
As I returned to the kitchen, I heard a metallic clatter and crash out on the deck. What the—?
It was an extension ladder, propped up against the wall outside the kitchen window. The assistant plumber even now was climbing it, in his hands an industrial version of the apparently puny one which I’d spent so much loving, thrashing, cursing time wielding over the last few days.
A pause, the world in suspended animation. From the kitchen ceiling, suddenly, the sound of diamond miners drilling through our roof.
I went out onto the deck. And there I saw the culprit.
From S.J. Perelman, born on this day in 1904: