Building Buildings, Building Books

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A recent Murderati blog entry by Toni McGee Causey just knocked me out. Her “simple” premise: our designing and constructing the imaginative world of a book resembles an architect’s designing and constructing a real-world building.

Excerpting it here would not do justice to what the piece says about buildings and books. But her conclusion is worth hanging on the wall of anyone’s workspace, whether they’re a writer, an architect, or otherwise:

…take the time to enjoy the people around you. Take the time to look at the things you have done and enjoy them. Dwell. Be. Replenish. The world and the race will still be there when you’re ready to re-join. There is no one final race anyway, but millions of races. If you don’t join this day’s race, you can join tomorrow’s.

(Thanks to Janet Reid for the recommendation.)

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Perfect Moments: Birds of an Earnest Young Feather

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How do people form their first enduring friendships, anyway — I mean, their very first friendships (like at age 5 or 6), and very enduring (like spanning decades)?

Maybe it’s different now, what with parents arranging “play dates” and similar activities. But when I was a kid, these things (looking back on them now) seemed to develop haphazardly, utterly by chance, with friendships forming and disappearing like condensation on the inside of a window…

I have dim memories of my very first friendships, because those boys moved away within a year of my meeting them. (I remember, specifically, a name — Craig Brashear — although I’m not sure of the spelling, and  no longer recall if he was the one who lived on Walnut Street or the one who lived on… was it Edgewood Avenue? Oakford? Craig, are you out there?)

But I do have specific memories of my friend Ron: I think he was the first one I started hanging out with on my own, rather than as a mob of boys who’d gather (say) in the Clipsham family’s side yard to play football.

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Off Balance

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[Image by Jan Piller at redbubble.com. Click the image for the original/to purchase.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Taking a walk with you

lacking the wit and depth
that inform our dreams’
bright landscapes,
this countryside
through which we walk
is no less beautiful for being only what it seems.
rising from the dyed
pool of its shade,
the tree we lean against
was never made to stand
for something else,
let alone ourselves.
nor were these fields
and gullies planned
with us in mind.
we live unsettled lives
and stay in a place
only long enough to find
we don’t belong.
even the clouds, forming
noiselessly overhead,
are cloudy without
resembling us, and, storming
the vacant air,
don’t take into account
our present loneliness.
and yet, why should we care?
already we are walking off
as if to say,
we are not here,
we’ve always been away.

(Mark Strand [source])

…and:

Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being [source])

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On the Page vs. Around the Table

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From yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, we have an essay on “When Writers Speak“:

Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I’m expressing opinions that I’ve never uttered in conversation and that otherwise might never occur to me…

I’m willing to bet that more gray matter starts quivering when I sit down to write than when I stand up to speak. In fact, if you were to do an M.R.I. of my brain right now, you would see regions of it lighting up that barely flicker when I talk. How do I know this? Because I’m writing! In fact, I’m so smart right now that I know my cerebral cortex is employing a host of neurons that are cleverly and charmingly transforming my thoughts and feelings into words. But if I were talking to you about all this, a different set of neurons would be triggered, different connections and associations would be made, and different words and phrases would be generated. In short, I’d be boring the pants off you.

All of which raises a whole lot of questions in my head (while putting a smile on my face).

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So Deep a Sound in Autumn

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[Image: “Autumn Grasses,” a two-panel folding screen by 19th-century
Japanese artist Shibata Zeshin. Click image for more information.]

From whiskey river (which has been on a William Stafford binge for a few weeks, not that you’ll find me complaining):

Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

(William Stafford [source])

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The Ick Factor

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The Missus and I saw District 9 on Saturday. I’m tempted to review it in full, but fear I’d reveal too much of its plot. So I’ll just say that District 9 is one of the, I don’t know… two or three best movies I’ve seen for the last 10 or 15 years — in any genre. It raises important questions about what it means to be human, and it leaves them dangling in the air, just daring the audience to answer them. And it does so in the context of a science-fiction, summer-blockbuster, mock-documentary-cum-action film which should be a natural draw for audiences across the board.

Which may sound like a recommendation. You need to see it if you haven’t already, right? But, uh, well… No.

Why not? Because of the ick factor: surgical close-ups; exploding bodies; individual and societal violence (and threat of same)… Some people might even be put off just by the, well, icky appearance of the aliens, who look like viscous love children of THE alien from the Aliens films and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.

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Travels

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From whiskey river:

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes
among
things that change. But it doesn’t
change.
People wonder about what you are
pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s
unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds, may your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

(Edward Abbey, “A Prayer for the Traveler” [apparently not a title Abbey himself used: source])

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Confuse-a-Dog

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An old Monty Python skit posits a service called “Confuse-a-Cat.” (Veterinarian to anxious elderly couple: “I think I can definitely say that your cat badly needs to be confused.”) I started to explain the whole thing but was laughing too hard to type properly; I’ll include the seven-minute routine in its entirety at the foot of this post, for those of you who don’t know of it — or just want to see it again.

I remembered this skit this morning, after an episode of complicated human-canine choreography. (A cat was involved as well, peripherally — and perhaps in confusion.)

The Missus and I share one car, which works well for us (with some periodic adjustments) maybe 97% of the time. But boy, that remaining 3% is a killer, and today definitely fell into the 3% basket. Without getting into the details, here’s what had to happen:

  • The Missus needed to use the car for an hour or two, starting at 8 a.m.
  • Our Yorkshire terrier Sophie — who normally goes to work with The Missus — had to stay home. She’s done this before, so it wasn’t exactly a crisis in itself. But there was a catch, or maybe two:
  • We have a housecleaning service come in every couple of weeks…
  • …and while Sophie is much much better at dealing with strangers than she was a year ago, she still completely loses it when a stranger first enters the house. (Translation: high anxiety for both dog and housecleaning personnel.)

The solution I came up with: I’d stay home with Sophie until The Missus got back with the car; this would help keep Sophie calm, or at least distracted. And because that part of the plan required separating dog and housecleaner as much as possible, we’d stay isolated in the upstairs offices (which we clean ourselves). And that part of the plan required that I get not just Sophie, but all her… her appurtenances upstairs with us. (This would be the same upstairs area where our dog-phobic cat lives, by the way. And where Sophie never visits, therefore, except accidentally.)

Some of the appurtenances involved:

  • a collapsible gate which I could set up at the top of the stairway, to keep Sophie upstairs
  • food dish and water bowl (and food and water, of course)
  • bouncy ball
  • dog bed (in the unlikely event that she’d want to sleep)
  • treats A, B, and C
  • the hard-rubber doggy gizmos into which we insert treat A, B, or C and thus make Sophie work for them, by God
  • various materials to enable prompt, sanitary handling of what we might call “dog spillage”

I also needed to take my shower and get dressed for work, pack up the various bags we bring with us each day, get a few things out of the housecleaner’s way, leave a note for her on the front door so she wouldn’t be freaked out by the footsteps and (probable) barking and yelping and reprimanding and pleading overhead, write a check for her, be sure I had a bottle of water for myself — and ditto my Blackberry, to keep me entertained (on the Web) while, as I hoped, Sophie would be entertaining herself.

I had one hour to do all the above. And I wanna tell you, I was sweating when done.

And you know what? If you want to completely reverse the behavior of a hyperactive little dog, this appears to be a great approach: disappear into the bathroom for a half hour and emerge clean and completely dressed; run around furiously, snatching up all of said dog’s everyday sacred objects and carrying them off to forbidden territory; setting up the hated collapsible gate at the top of the stairs; grabbing said dog herself and depositing her on the far side of said collapsible gate, in said forbidden territory; clamber over the gate yourself; flop (soaked and interestingly perfumed) onto the floor, alongside said dog; and there pluck from your shirt pocket a small black rectangular object which you immediately start poking at, madly, with your thumbs.

Worked great, I tell you. Instant and total physical inertia of the canine sort — the opposite of confusing a cat, in fact. And even though it didn’t last, it was thoroughly satisfying for those few minutes.

__________________

Here are the Pythons and their Confuse-a-Cat skit (and here’s the transcript, if you’d like to follow along):

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Enough Is Enough! (Er, Isn’t It?)

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From Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig:

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

From “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a story by Jorge Luis Borges (translation by James E. Irby):

[Menard] did not want to compose another Quixote — which is easy — but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes…

The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.

—-

Edit to add (2009-09-17): If you’ve already read this post and the postscripts which follow it, you already know about the book Mrs. West’s Hats. The author/photographer has kindly given permission for me to use an image from the book, which I’ve added to the P.S.

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On the Inside, Looking In

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From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

(Mary Oliver [source])

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