Writing – Page 134

Celebrity Moments (Bogus Edition)

September 8, 2008 by John 7 Comments

I love finding new, really well-written blogs. But I don’t like using services like StumbleUpon and Technorati et al. to find them. Many of my favorites I came to almost accidentally; someone comments astutely on someone else’s blog, for example, and I follow up the link from the commenter’s name, and lo, there I find a rich verdant pasture of daily commentary and/or howling snarkery, or whatever.

So it was that I landed on The Misssy M Misssives (yes, those are triple S’s), subtitled “Stories from a Besom and Blether.”

In particular, I landed there on a post from May, entitled “David Bowie sold me a raffle ticket”:

…in my life, it appears that I have met quite a few famous people. I thought I’d list some of them for you for a laugh. They are all true.

True. All right then. That’s interesting. And they are funny. (Likewise all the comments, in which visitors listed their own brushes with the notable.)

(Note, though, that not all these celebrities will be familiar, capital-N Names on this side of the Atlantic — or maybe just on this side of 40-some years of age. Like, Christopher Lee? Sure. Even Roland Gift, whose name gave me a little ego puff because I knew who he was before she said so. But “Wet Wet Wet’s Marty Pellow”? Sheesh.)

I’ve got no “celebrity moments” to report at the moment. But I thought it might be entertaining (well, to one of us, anyhow) to riff on the idea of celebrity encounters which never actually happened…

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The Touraine Passenger

September 6, 2008 by John 4 Comments

Flag of former French province of Touraine Writing exercise, short version: Write a story (or poem or essay or what-have-you) (blog entries don’t count, ahem) whose title is “The Touraine Passenger.” The “the” is optional, but the other two words must be used in that order in the title; one or both may, at the author’s discretion, be italicized.

(If you’ve no other ideas for how, even generally, to use the word “Touraine,” er, well, you do know by now that Google can be your friend, right?)

Need more details? Read on.

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Flying, Not Flying

September 5, 2008 by John 2 Comments

From whiskey river:

To the Light of September

When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullein fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know
that you have come
the seed heads of the sage
the whispering birds
with nowhere to hide you
to keep you for later

you
who fly with them

you who are neither
before nor after
you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew

(by W. S. Merwin)

…and, from elsewhere:

Evolution in Indiana

I thought that species took ten thousand years
to gradually evolve new strategies
to deal with shifts in climate or environment,
but after two snow-free years in a row
the local robins all at once decided
to winter here instead of flying south.
I watched them pace my lawn in late November,
debating like small Hamlets with their instincts:
“It’s way past time to migrate; why haven’t I?”
Since, every fall, a few old feeble ones
decide they’d rather risk starvation here
than drop off dead of fatigue in Alabama,
at first I thought it was their kind I glimpsed
rummaging discarded Christmas trees
for grubs and squabbling with the greedy squirrels
stealing birdseed from my neighbor’s feeder.
But then, one drizzly January walk,
I spotted dozens, looking sleek and healthy,
plucking worms who’d washed up on my sidewalk.
Why here, where I was forced to grub for money
all winter long, when they could fly away,
I wondered as they hopped out of my path.
Does flying hurt so much they’d rather shiver
and see the sun once every other week
than perch in palms swayed by an ocean breeze?
If I had wings, I’d use them… and on and on
I muttered as I trudged around the block
in pointless circles, just for exercise,
hands thrust into my pockets, arms tight to sides,
like some huge flightless bird, while overhead
the most successful members of my species
winged effortlessly southward in high Boeings
invisible from our side of the clouds —
we well-fed and hard-working flock of Dodos.

(by Richard Cecil)

…and finally, the following. Downloading the original, alas, isn’t an option. Following right behind, though, at a very close second choice, is this unplugged version by one of the four original performers:

[audio:blackbird_paulmccartney.mp3|titles=Blackbird|artists=Paul McCartney-Live on MTV Unplugged]

Water Falls. It Really Does.

September 3, 2008 by John 6 Comments

[First, to get this out of the way, allow me to introduce you to Miss Globe-head. That’s her over there on the right. And if you don’t know why I’m introducing the two of you, please check my previous post.]

For a number of reasons — most of them having to do with writing, by the way — I’ve been fascinated for years by the country of Wales.

(The Missus might argue with that “most of them,” by the way. She believes that I must have lived a former life there, and maybe she’s right. Not that I have any memory of it. Or evidence of it, for that matter, beyond the fascination.)

This Welsh thing of mine has taken several turns. I’ve got books about the history and culture of Wales. I’ve got a Welsh-English/English-Welsh dictionary. Somewhere along the line I even picked up a cassette-tape “teach yourself Welsh” language-instruction course.

Sometime in the early ’90s I was in a used bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, and came across a beautiful picture book called The Waterfalls of Wales, by one John Llewelyn Jones. (And it was beautiful, despite the fact that except for the cover, all its photographs were in black-and-white.)

Aside from the Welsh connection, I think what drew me to the book was the subject: waterfalls in general.

Now, if you’ve been following weather news during this hurricane season, you know that the topic of running water is especially fraught for people around the state of Florida right now. But the water-borne terrors of Fay, say, are of a completely different character than the sorts of running water I’m thinking of.

Consider, for example, this photograph (not from the book) of Sgwd Isaf Clun Gwyn, Afon Mellte (roughly, “White Meadow Lower Falls, [on the] River Mellte” — and if anyone can supply more polish to the translation, please speak up!):

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Short Fiction: “The Cabin”

September 1, 2008 by John 2 Comments

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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Gene-Mapping Your Work

August 31, 2008 by John 8 Comments

Everybody, writers included, likes a list. (As soon as someone starts a sentence with the words, “There are N kinds of [people, whatever] in this world…,” he’s started to construct a list — even if N is only 2.) It’s one of the signs that among other things we are, humans are mathematical creatures. Even writers and other artists, who often profess ignorance about such things, just love to put one thing… after another thing… after another thing… And more, once they’re listed, to ascribe relative value to each item in the list.

Consider a recent post at Shelly Lowenkopf’s Blog, in which he explores the notion of a “dramatic genome.”

You’ve probably heard the term “genome” before. From the Genome News Network:

A genome is all of a living thing’s genetic material. It is the entire set of hereditary instructions for building, running, and maintaining an organism, and passing life on to the next generation. The whole shebang.

In most living things, the genome is made of a chemical called DNA. The genome contains genes, which are packaged in chromosomes and affect specific characteristics of the organism.

…Each one of earth’s species has its own distinctive genome: the dog genome, the wheat genome, the genomes of the cow, cold virus, bok choy, Escherichia coli (a bacterium that lives in the human gut and in animal intestines), and so on.

So genomes belong to species, but they also belong to individuals. Every giraffe on the African savanna has a unique genome, as does every elephant, acacia tree, and ostrich. Unless you are an identical twin, your genome is different from that of every other person on earth—in fact, it is different from that of every other person who has ever lived.

Most often, a genome is represented by a sequence (yeah: a list) of letters indicating the order in which various components of DNA exist in a particular species or individual: A (for adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), or T (thymine). If you’re a molecular biologist, a sequence like ACCGTAG means something different than TGGACTA — even though the components (A, C, T, and G) are identical. If you can learn enough to understand what each component represents, then you (presumably) can know how the sequence “AC” will differ, in practice, from the sequence “TG.”

Similarly, Lowenkopf proposes that writers interested in understanding their own work construct a “genome” of those units of drama (meaning fiction in general, not just stage works) which are most important to them. This job is a little harder, though, because Lowenkopf lists not just four components but twenty-nine. In alphabetical order, these are the ones he came up with — plus some others I might add:

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Hard Questions

August 29, 2008 by John 6 Comments

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)

How Do You Figure?

August 28, 2008 by John 3 Comments

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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Creating in the Margins

August 27, 2008 by John 2 Comments

After yesterday’s post about and the tendency of things to break down along edges, I was reminded this morning about the other side of the matter: the tendency of interesting and indeed surprising things, good things, to happen between two adjacent experiences.

A few weeks ago, I set myself a general writing objective (to write a story with a given first and last sentence) and a specific deadline: Labor Day, September 1 (this Monday). I had plenty of other stuff to do in the meantime, but my main motivation was a sort of writer’s guilt. I was bothered, see, that I’d been so distracted by other stuff (marketing Merry-Go-Round, blogging, and then of course I do have a day job, a wife, and books to read!) — so distracted by all that stuff that I hadn’t been able to write something new.

(Well, I did write myself a few sentences into a MGR sequel. But that wasn’t “real” writing.)

The main effect of this objective was, alas, not that I sat down, raised the lid of my inkwell, and began to write. The main effect was to foster a different and somewhat more exquisite sort of writer’s guilt: the guilt of not-writing when you know you quote-unquote “have to.” Especially when under your own deadline (you know you can’t weasel out). Especially when you publicly announced your deadline (you know everyone will know, even if you do try to weasel out).

So this morning I’m lying in bed. The alarm has gone off once, been snoozed, and gone off (and been snoozed) again. I’m kind of semi-conscious. It’s 5 a.m.

Then a picture starts to form behind my eyelids: A man in a cabin, dusting something off, it’s not his cabin but someone else’s… Wait, no, that’s not dust — it’s snow… He picks up a scrap of paper and reads it… He finds another scrap of paper, and reads it, and sometime later he finds an old photograph…

…and so on, to the end.

There, in the crevasse between waking and sleeping (or between pokes at the snooze button, if you will), there I found my story.

I’ve always loved the sensation of falling asleep, even more than I like sleeping itself (which I love quite a bit!). But the transition to wakefulness can bring its own rewards.

Cramming Technologies into an Elevator

August 26, 2008 by John 9 Comments

My brother the architect once explained to me the key to building things successfully. By building he meant not just framing, erecting walls and roofs and so on, but everything: flooring, painting, pouring foundations, and so on. All of it, he said, had one critical element: edges. How an architect or builder or home handyman handles edges defines his or her success at it. Buildings fall down; patterned wallpaper fails to match up at the seams; bookshelves wobble, and a marble placed on the floor rolls freely from one corner to another.

This doesn’t apply just to physical structures, to edifices. It applies, I think, to just about everything artificial.

One of Merry-Go-Round‘s underlying themes is the fragility of technology. Any one piece of equipment or software, even two or three, may work just fine after being tested and tested and tested. The word for this is “robustness”: the more robust a system, the closer it is to that magical (and mythical) state commonly known as fail-safe.

Where problems begin to arise is, yes, along the edges: those conceptual little nooks and crannies where the surfaces of multiple technologies come together.

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