Writing – Page 92

One Fine Day

January 14, 2011 by John 6 Comments

[Video: time-lapse film of an entire year in a wooded area, over “One Fine Day,” by David Byrne and Brian Eno (lyrics in the note at the end of this post)]

From whiskey river:

The Storm

Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.

Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. Life is now, every moment, no matter if the world be full of death. Death triumphs only in the service of life.

(Henry Miller [source])
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Real-Life Monologue (Anthropomorphism Edition)

January 11, 2011 by John 15 Comments

[For information about this photo, which doesn’t precisely relate to the post,
see the note at the bottom.]

The scene: A suburban home in northern Florida, USA. He is trying to get the household denizens out the door promptly in the morning. He has walked and scooped up after The Pooch. He has fed The Pooch; He has fed The Cat. He has prepared the snacks/lunches which He and She will need during their respective workdays. The Pooch, at the gate to the kitchen, tosses her paper plate in the air, signaling breakfast done-age and, hence, ordering a second course. He ignores her. He sets out the various daily medications which He and She take. The Pooch barks. He ignores her. He brings the newspaper in. The Pooch noses her empty plate around on the tile floor. He ignores her. He gets His water bottle from the refrigerator. The Pooch barks again.

He (to The Pooch): Jesus Christ, all right already, I hear you! You think you’re the only person in the house?!?

_________________________

About the photo: We have a wet bar in the living room, and after we get home from work at the end of the day one or the other of us will usually go there to make a drink. We stock the bottles of sweet-and-smoky-smelling liquids in a cabinet below the sink, as you can see at the right of this photo. About eight of every ten times we do this, The Pooch comes to her water bowl to drink, as shown (here wearing her red Team Woof hoodie). This completely cracks us up.

What Are You Getting At?

January 7, 2011 by John 4 Comments

[Image: “Mean,” 2007, brass sign by Danish artist Kasper Sonne. (Original here.)]

From whiskey river:

Dew Light

Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

(Stephen Fry, from Moab Is My Washpot)

…and:

Can we have the aspiration to identify more and more with our ability to recognize what we’re doing instead of always identifying with our mistakes? This is the spirit of delighting in what we see rather than despairing in what we see. It’s the spirit of letting compassionate self-reflection build confidence rather than becoming a cause for depression.

(Pema Chödrön, from Taking the Leap)

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“Why Do You Like to Write?”

January 5, 2011 by John 2 Comments

Writers don’t talk about this question too much. Much more fun and entertaining, after all, to complain about the difficulties and pains; who doesn’t like people to feel sorry for them? But the quote below (with my emphasis added) excerpts an answer from Jon Fosse, at the Poetry International Web (sorta awkwardly translated by May-Brit Akerholt, in my opinion, in comma-spliced and run-on form):

…when I write something I feel is well written, something new has come into the world, something that wasn’t there before, I have, as it were created existence, and this, the joy of writing people and stories, yes, whole universes no one knew about, not even I, before I had written them, surprises me, and gives me joy. No one knew about this, not before I wrote it. And where does it come from? I’ve no idea, because it is new to me as well. I probably hadn’t thought about it before. Writing, good writing, will therefore always be a place where something unknown, something which didn’t exist before, is given existence. And that, writing as a state where something, yes in a sense even a whole new universe, is created and given a kind of existence for the first time, is perhaps what I enjoy most about writing. A whole new universe comes into being every time you write well. Because all good texts, yes poems too, are in a certain sense a new universe, which did not exist before, but which is created in good writing.

I’ll add: for me, one of the great joys of reading good writing lies in experiencing, vicariously, the writer’s delight at the moment something unexpected happened on the page or screen. I think I sense this sort of exclamation-point moment in books and other “formal” writing, but I’ve also seen it between the lines in casual text: text messages and chat sessions, one-off blog posts, and yes, even some Facebook status updates and Twitter posts.*

___________________________

* Sorry, Froog. :)

The Fluttering of Things Going ‘Round (and Sometimes Away, and Sometimes Back)

December 31, 2010 by John 1 Comment

[Video: La Fée des Grèves, or The Fairy of the Surf, a 1909 silent film by Louis Feuillade, dubbed “film’s first fairy tale” by the Film: Ab Initio blog]

From whiskey river:

A Blessing For Absence

May you know that absence is full of tender presence
And that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.
May the absences in your life be full of eternal echo
May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere which holds
The presences that have left your life.
May you be generous in your embrace of loss.
May the sore of your grief turn into a well of seamless presence.
May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear from.
May you have the courage to speak out for the excluded ones.
May you become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life.
May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle words or false belonging.
May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight are one and may your longing inhabit its deepest dreams within the shelter of the Great Belonging.

(John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes)

…and:

Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.

(Margaret Atwood, from Cat’s Eye [source])

…and:

Days begin and end in the dead of night.
They are not shaped long, in the manner
of things which lead to
ends — arrow, road, a person’s life on earth.
They are shaped
round, in the manner of things eternal and stable —
sun, world, God.
Civilization tries to persuade us we are going towards
something, a distant goal. We have forgotten that our only
goal is to
live, to live each and
every day, and that if we live each and
every day, our true goal is achieved. All civilized people
see the day
beginning at dawn or a little after or a long time after or
whatever time their work begins; this they lengthen
according to
their work, during what they call “all day long;” and end it
when they close their eyes. It is they who say
the days are long.
On the contrary, the days are round.

(Jean Giono, from Rondeur Des Jours [source])

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Real-Life Dialogue (Remote Possibility Edition)

December 29, 2010 by John 8 Comments

[The scene: a home in suburban northwest Florida. He and She are in the living room, watching TV (by way of a satellite-TV DVR). She clicks the remote control, pausing the show in progress to ask Him a question. Discussion complete, She clicks the “un-pause button” to resume viewing. Nothing happens.]

She: It’s not doing anything.

He: “Not doing anything”?

She: The remote. It’s not starting the show again.

He: Try changing the channel.

She: [Pushing various buttons] Doesn’t work.

He: Can you get to the program-listing screen? Or the list of shows we’ve recorded?

She: [Continues to push buttons] I’m telling you: it’s not, doing, anything… Wait. We can use the remote control for the TV, right?

He: Uh-uh. We can use the TV remote to adjust the volume, or, y’know, select whether to watch satellite, or DVD, or the VCR, nothing else though… Let me try.

[He “tries.” Confirms: it is indeed not, doing, anything. He polishes little transparent smoked-plastic cover over the thingum which flashes infrared signals to the DVR. Nope. No button has any effect at all. He puts remote back on end table, goes to DVR, dons reading glasses, squints at DVR’s front panel.]

He: Oh, I see. Watch. If you want to change the channel, you can just press these up and down arrows here.

[She contemplates scrolling through hundreds of channels in this way, and shoots Him a look telegraphing Her reaction.]

She: One channel at a time?!?

[She goes to DVR herself, begins experimenting with buttons on its face. They all “work,” inconveniently.]

He: Look, it’s not perfect, but at least you can watch it that way. I’ll call the satellite company, get ’em to send us a new remote.

She: So we’ll have to do this for DAYS until the new one gets here?

He: Nah. They’ll probably overnight it. They’re real big on customer serv— Hey, wait. It’s probably just the battery. The battery in the remote’s probably dead. I should’ve thought—

She: I’ll do it. I’m already up. Just sit there. I’ll get the battery.

[She retrieves new battery from cupboard, replaces old one. Trembling with anticipation, They both watch as She points remote control at the DVR, at the TV, back again. Their faces fall.]

She: Maybe we can watch something we’ve got recorded.

He: [Gets up] I’ll go to their Web site, see if I can find out something. At least how to request a new remote.

[At company’s Web site, He learns of an intriguing possibility: not all AA batteries are manufactured to exactly the same size. Particularly problematic for this company’s remote controls have been AA batteries like the one She just installed. Technician in forum recommends inserting a scrap of aluminum foil between positive battery terminal and metal contact in remote. He goes downstairs, eager to test this little bit of too-wacky-not-to-be-true electronic arcana.]

He: Let me see the remote a sec… Guy on the Web site said to put a little bit of foil… [Moves to better-lighted area.] …foil between the…

[Prolonged pause as He gazes, blinking, into the remote’s interior. He removes battery, re-inserts it.]

He: There. Try it now.

She: It works! Yay! What did you do?

He: I turned the battery around.

She: Turned the battery— Wait. You mean the old battery was dead, and I put the new one in upside-down?

He: Yes.

She: [Laughing] Oh.

In the Dark, (Un)Watching the Watcher

December 24, 2010 by John 16 Comments

[Image: The Night Watch, by Rembrandt van Rijn. Click the photo for a larger view. For more information about the painting, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it — it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less —
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

(Robert Frost [source])

…and:

Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.

(Anne Sexton, from “Admonitions to a Special Person” [source])

…and:

If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.

(Baba Ram Dass [widely quoted, but I haven’t yet found a source])

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Useful Typos, and the Voice of the Muse

December 21, 2010 by John 4 Comments

[Video: the “Red Room” scene from the last episode of Twin Peaks. I’ve adjusted the starting point to begin at what’s relevant to this post; if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, you can stop it at about 2:04.]

I have zero training as a typist, but type pretty fast anyhow just from, well, practice. No doubt someone with real experience would look over my shoulder and wonder why I use my pinkies (or whatever) so seldom, why I make my fingers reeeeeach so much, and so on. It all works out pretty good for the most part… except when I’m sort of flying along, tappy-tappy-tappy, and looking at some source material rather than at the screen, and one or more fingers drift just a littttttle bit to one side. What results looks vaguely like English, and if I check the keyboard I can trace it back to see, Oh yes, the left hand got out of sync there, or just the index finger or thumb.

I had one of those moments earlier today. The word I was typing in a comment box: manuscripts. What actually came out: nabyscruots.

Which, oddly, fit the context. That’s exactly what the damn things are sometimes. It’s not quite right, this nabyscruot. Maybe if I poke at it a little it’ll turn into a real manuscript.

It occurs to me now that this is actually the voice in which The Muse speaks: she doesn’t speak to artists and writers in our native languages, but in a sort of nasal, distended voice which sounds almost like gibberish unless we listen really, really hard*. Which would explain why it’s so difficult to answer the seemingly obvious question, “Where do you get your ideas?”… and so frustrating to try. If we answered honestly, our listener — many times, at least — would have to strain to “get it.” It’s so much easier to speak in metaphors and plainspoken shortcuts, the equivalent of the subtitles in the above video.

People ask me where I came up with the idea for the book I’m working on now. I tell them, “truthfully”:

I’d just finished writing a mystery. While working on that book, I’d read mysteries almost exclusively.
The first non-mystery I read afterward was Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils.
Visiting a Borders store in New Jersey — the first Borders I ever went into (and it’s now one of the ones about to close, sigh) — I decided I wanted to follow The Old Devils with a classic which I’d never read.
Thinking, as I wandered into the back left corner of the store: Huh. There’s one. How come I never read Le Morte d’Arthur? Wonder if it’s at all like all the other King Arthur stuff I’ve ever seen? Wonder if it’s at all like that movie the Pythons did?
…
“The [first-draft] End”!

But that’s pretty misleading. In fact, I have no idea how I connected all the pieces (including not only The Old Devils and Le Morte d’Arthur, but ales, motor homes, archery, and the rest of it). I just listened, really, really hard.

But we can’t just say that, can we?

______________________________

* Or think of the old Lassie TV show. The dog’s barking frantically, almost apoplectically, jumping up and down and falling over, and all the thickheaded human can say is, “What is it, girl? Did Timmy fall down the well? No? You hungry? You wanna go for a walk?”

______________________________

P.S. Here’s the backwards-talking little man from that Twin Peaks episode, explaining how to talk backwards — before, of course, the sound and video editing crews step in to play your backwards-talking voice backwards. (Got that?)

Experience, Meet Hope

December 17, 2010 by John 9 Comments

[Video: “Wiley vs. Rhodes,” a live-action Road Runner cartoon]

From whiskey river:

Ten Thousand Idiots

It is always a danger
to aspirants on the Path

when they begin
to believe and act

as if the ten thousand idiots
who so long ruled and lived inside

have all packed their bags
and skipped town
or
died.

(Hafiz [source: none canonical, as far as I can tell, but it’s quoted at various places around the Web, including here])

…and:

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. It’s true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

(Carl Jung, from Memories, Dreams, Reflections [source])

…and:

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

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Rummaging

December 14, 2010 by John 21 Comments

Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, has for the moment taken up graphic novels. (She illustrates as well as writes them.) The first installment in a planned series of them, The Night Bookmobile, was published in September.

From a recent interview with Niffenegger at the Newsarama.com site (italics added):

The Night Bookmobile, a new release from Abrams ComicsArts, tells the story of a young woman named Alexandra who goes for a walk one night and comes upon a mysterious “bookmobile” that contains every book she’s ever read, igniting treasured memories of her past. The library eventually disappears, and Alexandra becomes obsessed with finding it again…

Niffenegger admitted that she has her own “bookmobile,” which is just the memory of everything she’s ever read and looked at.

“It’s stocked with novels, comics, various books I’ve read for research purposes, poetry, printmaking manuals, art history books, travel guides, plus all the ephemeral stuff like signage, soup labels, math tests and so forth,” she said. “I have been reading avidly since I was a child, so my daily life is partially real and partially literary. It makes my imaginary world stronger, to feed it on a diverse diet of books. Too much ordinary life is limiting to the mind.”

Got that? Not just everything she’s ever read; everything she’s ever looked at.

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