Writing – Page 82

Answers in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

February 3, 2012 by John 10 Comments

[Image: xkcd #936, on password strength. Click image to enlarge; see xkcd itself for the full six panels and the punchline.]

From whiskey river:

This accidental
meeting of possibilities
calls itself I.

I ask: what am I doing here?
And, at once, this I
becomes unreal.

(Dag Hammarskjöld [source])

…and:

Ch’ui the draftsman
Could draw more perfect circles freehand
Than with a compass.

His fingers brought forth
Spontaneous forms from nowhere. His mind
Was meanwhile free and without concern
With what he was doing.

No application was needed
His mind was perfectly simple
And knew no obstacle.

So, when the shoe fits
The foot is forgotten,
When the belt fits
The belly is forgotten,
When the heart is right
“For” and “against” are forgotten.

No drives, no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions:
Then your affairs
Are under control.
You are a free man.

Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.
The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.

(Chuang Tzu [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Pendyrus Male Choir, “Cwm Rhonnda”

February 1, 2012 by John 9 Comments

[Image: the valley of the Rhondda]

I’ve mentioned before that while writing Seems to Fit, I used a variety of musical playlists to put me in the proper frame of mind for a given chapter. The selections on the day’s playlist were among those which (so I imagined) would be favorites of the character most heavily featured in the section or chapter on which I was working at the time. Two characters, for instance, were World War II veterans, so (naturally) they listened regularly to Big Band/swing music… and so did I.

Actually, I took it further: one of the two preferred the smoooooth sound of Glenn Miller; the other, the more raucous Benny Goodman Orchestra. They argued about it periodically, one sarcastically, exasperatedly, and the other with gentle good humor.

Anyway, a handful of chapters scattered throughout recount the story of an eighteenth-century Welsh brewmaster named Emrys ap Rhys, and how he came to brew a particular ale which plays a significant part in S2F‘s storyline. Even Emrys had his own “My Music” sort of playlist, which may sound like a tall order… unless you know about the history of music in Wales.

Briefly, the Welsh love music, particularly choral music — and further particularly, choral music performed by men. The tradition goes back centuries, with much of the music composed and sung in the performers’ native Welsh language rather than English. As it happened, then, it wasn’t hard to build a good soundtrack for the Emrys chapters.

One tune in particular stands out.

“Cwm Rhondda” (Welsh for the Rhondda Valley, in South Wales — the Rhondda being a river there), like many tunes, isn’t in itself a song to be sung. It has no words of its own. Instead, the melody which goes by that name is used as a scaffold for the lyrics of a hymn: several hymns, in fact. Although the tune is sometimes described as the unofficial national anthem of Wales, the hymn has no lyrics of a typically national-anthemic sort. (Given the title, for instance, one might expect a praise song about Nature’s beauty on display in the countryside of South Wales.) Instead — at least in the versions I know of — the supplicant just asks God for help on his or her journeys through life and the world. Nowadays, the tune also underlies the chants of You’re not singing anymore! which erupt among Welsh fans, from time to time, when their football teams are on the field.*

(The specific circumstances calling forth this chant, apparently, are a form of Schadenfreude: delight in someone else’s troubles. If one’s culture encourages one to burst into song when things are going well, then a sudden turn in fortune tends to shut one up.)

My favorite writeup about “Cwm Rhondda” is the one on the h2g2 site. (This is the pre-Wikipedia and often much more informal online encyclopedia originally established by Douglas Adams as the Earthbound counterpart to the one described in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.) It’s tempting to quote the entire piece, but I’ll offer just this:

‘Cwm Rhondda’ is a belter of a hymn that defies one to sing it quietly… It is the very embodiment of hwyl, the Welsh love of homeland and of culture, and as such has come close to supplanting the official Welsh national anthem. This is especially the case at rugby ‘internationals’, where the faltering, bathetic, falsely-devout Land of My Fathers [JES: that’s the actual Welsh national anthem] is soon dispensed with in favour of something far more robust. England fans often respond with their own countermeasures, often the Negro spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, but soon buckle under the sonic onslaught of ‘huge gangs of tough, sinewy men… terrorising people with their close-harmony singing.’

Ha!

Anyway, here’s the Pendyrus Male Choir (Welsh-language version of their home page here), and “Cwm Rhondda”:

When the group hits and holds those high notes, it makes me wish I could join them in song. (Not a reaction I commonly have, which many people would consider a mercy of the gods deserving a hymn in its own right.)

Tracking down the lyrics to the above is complicated by my not recognizing spoken (let alone sung) Welsh. This page (about which I know pretty much nothing) suggests that it’s the hymn called “Lo, Between the Myrtles Standing,” which you can find in Welsh and English translation at Wikipedia.

(By the way, yes, I know: the tune “Cwm Rhondda” was actually composed in the early twentieth century, and thus would have been unknown to a real Emrys ap Rhys. So would his late-twentieth-century creator. :))

___________________________

* Videos of these mass outbursts constitute almost an entire sub-genre… and given the context (cellphone and other handheld video cameras; the natural rowdiness of crowds at sporting events; mass quantities of brew), their quality is, well, all over the map.

The Kindness of Every Split-Second

January 27, 2012 by John 12 Comments

[Image: display window of “mini-prints” taken with the Fujifilm Instax camera (originally from the Photojojo store). See note at bottom of post for more.]

From whiskey river:

You know what I believe? I remember in college I was taking this math class, this really great math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped midsentence and said, “Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.”

That’s what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it — or my observation of it — is temporary?

(John Green [source])

…and (italicized portion):

In the Storm

Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
It was snowing

hard, from the east,
and the sea
was in disorder.
Then some sanderlings,

five inches long
with beaks like wire,
flew in,
snowflakes on their backs,

and settled
in a row
behind the ducks—
whose backs were also

covered with snow—
so close
they were all but touching,
they were all but under

the roof of the ducks’ tails,
so the wind, pretty much,
blew over them.
They stayed that way, motionless,

for maybe an hour,
then the sanderlings,
each a handful of feathers,
shifted, and were blown away
out over the water,
which was still raging.
But, somehow,
they came back

and again the ducks,
like a feathered hedge,
let them
stoop there, and live.

If someone you didn’t know
told you this,
as I am telling you this,
would you believe it?

Belief isn’t always easy.
But this much I have learned,
if not enough else—
to live with my eyes open.

I know what everyone wants
is a miracle.
This wasn’t a miracle.
Unless, of course, kindness—

as now and again
some rare person has suggested—
is a miracle.
As surely it is.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Loreena McKennitt, “Down by the Sally Gardens”

January 25, 2012 by John 3 Comments

Loreena McKennitt seems to love anything which hitches the adjective Celtic to the noun music. She’s traveled the world to record music both Celtic and Celtic-like, often (even on brand-new songs) using instruments which might have been recognized 2,000 years ago across the whole range of the Celts’ distribution. She’s certainly traveled farther afield than many performers nominally in her genre; with its odd but infectious rolling rhythms of ancient woodwinds and percussion instruments, her music often sounds more Middle Eastern or even sub-continental Indian than conventionally”Celtic.”

But her 2010 album, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, had her returning to the recognizable. Recorded at a historic temple in Ontario, it includes classics like “Brian Boru’s March,” the title song, and a RAMH favorite, “The Parting Glass.” Among them: “Down by the Sally Gardens.”

William Butler Yeats first published his poem called “Down by the Salley Gardens” (that’s “Salley” with an “e”) in 1899. Per Wikipedia, he claimed inspiration from the singing of an “old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo,” who apparently sang two or three lines, repeatedly, which stuck in the poet’s head.

About that one odd word in the title, at a site called, simply, The Irish Page, I found this information:

A salley is a willow tree. It was once common to have gardens of willows for osiers (willow rods). These gardens were kept to have material for basket-making and for thatch roofing of cottages. The Gaelic for willow is saileach, which comes from the Latin, salix for willow tree… One more use for willow is the bark, which contains salicylic acid from which aspirin is made. Use of willow bark as an analgesic was known since ancient times.

With one exception, McKennitt’s arrangement keeps it simple; the accompaniment (if I’m reading the track listing correctly) includes just harp, electric and acoustic guitars, bass, and uilleann pipes (okay, that one’s a stretch — Wikipedia: “the characteristic national bagpipes of Ireland”).

But McKennitt’s voice — wow. Whatever Yeats heard back in that Sligo village, however much inspiration he drew from the old woman’s words, I bet her voice didn’t raise the hair on his arms.

[Lyrics]

As an aside, this song’s lyrics — and of course Yeats’s poem — seem awfully close, up to a point, to those of an old Irish/Scottish/American folk/country/bluegrass song, “Down in the Willow Garden.” But as you can see from its Wikipedia entry, the story’s outcome, and the overall message, is quite different:

“Down in the Willow Garden,” also known as “Rose Connelly”is a traditional Appalachian murder ballad about a man facing the gallows for the murder of his lover: he gave her poisoned wine, stabbed her, and threw her in a river.

Part of wants to laugh out loud at the contrast between the songs, and part of me— Oh, hell. It’s just bizarrely funny in an Edward Gorey way. Or a Coen Brothers way, come to that:

Unquiet Large, Quiet Small

January 20, 2012 by John 12 Comments

From whiskey river:

In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

(Dag Hammarskjöld, from Markings [source])

…and:

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

(Wislawa Szymborska, from her Nobel lecture The Poet and the World [source])

…and:

The Sciences Sing a Lullabye

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

(Albert Goldbarth [source])

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“You Didn’t Forget the Words, Did You?”

January 17, 2012 by John 11 Comments

[Video: a zebra teaches a little girl to scat-sing. Found it at Zooglobble, home of “kids’ music worth sharing.”
Warning: do not visit that site if you are even mildly distractable.]

My Dad taught me many things about music, especially jazz, even (I’m certain) in ways which I have yet to understand or even recognize. But on one point he was (I believe) mistaken:

We were watching Ella Fitzgerald on some variety-TV show; after pausing for a musical break by the band, all of a sudden she burst into this chain of nonsense syllables: Obba-dobba-DOO-dah, ba-dadda-da-doo-da-DOO… (or whatever). Her eyebrows waggled like Mexican jumping beans, and she smiled slyly. Dad burst out laughing. “She always does that,” he said, “when she forgets the words.”

Like I said, I think Dad was wrong about that (especially given how enthusiastically he welcomed instrumental improvisation). But singers who depart radically from the composed lyrics must brace themselves for the inevitable skepticism. Judges on televised singing competitions lose patience with contestants who forget the words to the songs they’re singing. I’ve seen such contestants (and woebegone karaoke’ers) freeze, lock up hopelessly, stuck in a loop of flickering blankness. They stammer, neurons misfiring; they’re like desperate smokers rummaging through a drawerful of out-of-gas cigarette lighters. Sometimes, you can see on their faces, they know it’s coming even before they get there: they take off at a wild dead run at a gap they know they won’t be able to cross — they gallop right up to the edge and leap, bursting out in something like charismatic glossolalia: Obba-dobba-DOO-dah…

Then their eyes dart from side to side as they smile, weakly, as though to convince the onlookers: I’m doing this on purpose, y’know. “Norwegian Wood” can always be improved by some good scat.

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The Absorbing and the Absorbed

January 13, 2012 by John 23 Comments

[Image: a Menger sponge overgrown with vines, found here. Wikipedia explains how
to construct a real Menger sponge, noting — without elaboration — that the resulting
object “simultaneously exhibits an infinite surface area and encloses zero volume.”*]

From whiskey river:

You know when you see something like a marvelous mountain against the blue sky, the vivid, bright, clear, unpolluted snow, the majesty of it drives all your thoughts, your concerns, your problems away. Have you noticed that? You say, “How beautiful it is,” and for two seconds perhaps, or for even a minute, you are absolutely silent. The grandeur of it drives away, for that second, the pettiness of ourselves. That immensity has taken us over. Like a child occupied with an intricate toy for an hour; he won’t talk, he won’t make any noise, he is completely absorbed in that. The toy has absorbed him. So the mountain absorbs you and therefore for the second, or the minute, you are absolutely quiet, which means there is no self. Now, without being absorbed by something — either a toy, a mountain, a face, or an idea — to be completely without the me in oneself, is the essence of beauty.

(Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Love and Loneliness [source])

…and:

… It’s 1500
in the book of Chinese watercolors: scholar-artist T’ang Yin
is asleep inside his mountain cottage, dreaming that a self of him,
that looks like him, is floating in the air above
the highest peaks, that looks like air we’d have
if lakes of milk gave off a vapor.
… From the Everfloating Void
above our world, a human image slowly drifts back down
and joins its earthly body once again, reenters
days and nights of wine shop, scandal, lawyers
— for such (in part) is the life of T’ang Yin.
He’s been dreaming. And now he’s going to set it down
on a wafer of unrolled rice paper. Writing:
Rain on the river. That’s all. That’s his poem.
He’s writing:

Rain on the river.

(Albert Goldbarth [source])

…and:

I’m for mystery, not interpretive answers… The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

(Ken Kesey [source])

[Read more…]

It’s Right in Front of You

January 6, 2012 by John 20 Comments

[Image: unretouched photograph of an anamorphically-painted building interior, by French artist George Rousse; I found it here. As suggested at that site, be sure to see the video about Rousse’s “Durham (NC) project.” And while you’re at it, check out the similar but sometimes entire city-sized work of Swiss artist Felice Varini. I couldn’t decide which artist’s work to feature here and finally flipped a coin.]

From whiskey river:

Flaws

I had been worrying once again
about sad lives
and almost perfect art, Van Gogh,

Kafka, so when that voice on the radio
sang about drinking
a toast to those who most survive

the lives they’ve led, I drank that toast
in the prayerless
sanctum of my room, I said it

out loud in a hush. Then I thought
of Dr. Williams
who toward the end apologized

to his wife for doing everything
he had loved to do.
He was speaking of course to death,

not to her, though death instructed him
how valuable she was.
I thought of a lamp the neighbor’s child

had broken, then pieced back together
with wires and glue.
And my friend, the good husband,

kissing the scars his wife brought home
after the mastectomy.
I drank that toast again, though silently.

The radio was playing something old
and bad
I once thought was good.

Flaws. Suddenly the act of trying
to say how it feels
to live a life, to say it flawlessly,

seemed more immense than ever. Then
I remembered
those Persian rug makers built them in,

the flaws, because only Allah was perfect.
What arrogance to think
that otherwise they wouldn’t be there!

I allowed myself to wonder
about the ethics
of repair, but just for a while.

Sleep, too, was on my mind
and I knew
the difficulty that lay ahead:

how hard I’d try when I couldn’t,
how it would come
if only I could find a way

to enter and drift without concern
for what it is.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.

(William Stafford [source])

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Writerly Distractions and Neuroses: Fiction and Word Counts

December 31, 2011 by John 11 Comments

[Image: “Doodle with Measuring Tape,” by Bryan Reyna]

I came across an interesting site this morning, called Renaissance Learning (subtitle: “Advanced Technology for Data-Driven Schools.” In general, Renaissance Learning is a resource for (as you might guess) teachers and other educators. One area of the site, the Quiz Store, peddles quizzes about specific books. What interests me today about the site — and may interest others among you who are also writing books — is one particular page at the Quiz Store, the “advanced search” page.

Here’s why this page interests me even though I’m not in the market for a literary quiz: when you do a book or author search, among the information you can easily learn is the number of words in the book.

Traditionally, the answer to the question, How many words should my book be? is It depends on your book’s genre. Then the answerer goes on to spell out, for each genre of interest, a range of word counts — 70-80K words for Genre X, up to 125K words for Y, and so on.

And yes, I know — this all probably sounds like so much foofaraw to those of you who aren’t writing for publication, or are writing to self-publish. You’re thinking: Just write the damn book, right? It takes as many words as it takes, period. Alas, neither the real world of publishing nor the minds of most writers work that way.

The problem with these guidelines, it seems to me, is two-fold: (a) they’re only rough guides (the recommendations always say things like, “Of course, there are plenty of exceptions!”); and (b) they presuppose that your definition of your own book’s genre will match the definition of the genre as used by whoever’s supplied the word counts in the first place. A more common-sensical approach, I think, is just to come up with a list of books and/or authors you like, vaguely “like” your book (and/or you) in terms of desired readership, career aspirations, and so on. How many words were in those books, as published?

The Renaissance Learning site doesn’t include statistics for every author, let alone book, ever published. But I think it includes enough to be instructive to curious writers (and readers!).
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Perfect Moments: The Author’s Book, to Its Author

December 29, 2011 by John 12 Comments

[Ed. Note: minor identifying details of this recently discovered letter have been obscured, to preserve the anonymity of the parties involved.]

Dear J_____,

So, you have finally finished me. I suppose I should offer not only thanks but congratulations to you — if so, then, sure: Congratulations! But I also can’t help thinking that maybe we both pulled our weight on this project.

True: you “had” the “idea” for me, twenty years ago. You’ve told the story often enough, in my presence and otherwise; it’s hard for me not to know how it went. You’d just finished reading Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, about the cantankerous elderly friends living out their lives in Wales. And you were in a bookstore — a Borders, wasn’t it? or a Barnes and Noble? — in Marlton, New Jersey, looking around for the next book to read. Maybe a classic, you thought, embarrassed as always and forever by the gaps in your self-education. And there you found it, in paperback: an edition of Le Morte d’Arthur. “I’ve never read that,” you thought. “It’s about time…!”

Well, however it came to you — you need to know: authors don’t own their ideas. Their books don’t even own their ideas. Stories are just sort of floating around all the time, in the air, waiting for someplace to tie up. An author is just a big ol’ Zeppelin mast, and a book the cable which moors the one to the other. So don’t go getting all full of yourself. Right place, right time: that’s you, for once. But that’s me, too. And that’s our big old Zeppelin.

And how’d we do, finally?

You probably have no idea at this point. I know I sure as heck don’t. But it’s been a kickin’ fun ride, hmm?

(I mean, when we haven’t been flat-out sick of each other; people who know each other as long as we have, face it, eventually run out of stuff to say and imagine there is nothing more to say. We’re always wrong about that, of course. And often the best conversations just come out of nowhere, the peculiar sort of nowhere marked by deep, prolonged silence. We had some of that, too, and plenty of those conversations.)

One thing I always enjoyed watching you do was fretting over a plot point that you knew stuck out like a misfit prosthetic. It was almost cute. (Sorry. It was.) You’d sort of write through the awkward moment, often recognizing right away that you’d have to come back later — marking it with [square brackets], and sometimes also caps and boldface and punctuation for emphasis, like [SAY WHAT?!? HAVE GOT TO FIX THIS!] If you were a hairdresser and I was the client, it’d be like a brightly colored clip you fastened to a handful of my hair. All I could do was sit there in the chair and pray that you’d remember it before (in one of your characteristic impatiences) sending me out the door. I didn’t think I’d have the nerve to remind you myself. But I didn’t need it. In the final editing passes you — wily you — had your word-processor’s text-search feature tuned to look for the square left bracket character, knowing full well that you never used it in “real” text.

So you cleaned me up, finally, and then you went through me once, twice, three times with what you hoped was an ever more finely toothed comb of language. I’d see you brought up short by a dull passage. Jesus Christ, your eyes said, If I think this is dull…! Out would come the power tools — a pneumatic jackhammer at the outset, in later phases one of those little battery-powered Dremels — and you’d go to work on the verbs and the prepositional phrases, doing that little thing you do when an adjective bugs you and turning it somehow into a phrase which said the same thing. (A character would not be satisfied, you’d think at such moments; he or she would glitter with satisfaction.)

If nothing else, then, even if you — we — didn’t always do the absolute best for the story, we always managed to keep ourselves entertained with the puzzle of presenting it.

I don’t know what any of that means, not in the big picture. (Remember, at this point I’m no more capable of dispassionate appraisal than you are.) I don’t know what comes next, not really, and am a little scared by it (as I imagine you are). I hope you continue to at least like me, even if “love” right now is a state more to be aspired to than a description of our actual relationship.

But I remember what it was to fall in love, J_____, oh yes I do. And I bet you remember it, too. I think in six months’ time, a year, five years, somewhere downstream, we’ll both be able to look back at this moment and say:

Ah, yes. That’s what I really meant when I said I wanted to love, isn’t it?

Your book, always,
S__________