Impossibilities

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Let’s pretend you have never, but never (ridiculous, I know, but bear with me) wandered through the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog which I often mention here. Consequently, you don’t know anything about their structured interviews with (mostly) children’s-book illustrators and authors.

Maybe even further, even more basically, you don’t know that the blog’s title alludes to Lewis Carroll. (In which case, go here* and scroll down a bit.)

Imagine now that you’re an author or illustrator who doesn’t know any of that stuff, and you’ve been approached for a 7-Imp online interview. So when you run into the very first sentence of the request, you’re immediately baffled. Mind you, now, I’ve no idea how the first sentence actually reads, but let’s suppose the request opens something like this:

Dear You,

We would like to feature you in an upcoming interview for the Seven Impossible Things blog…

What runs through your head then?

Right. As it apparently ran through the great Ed Young’s head when invited to his recent interview there (#79!). Born in Tientsin, China, grown up in Shanghai, a survivor of the Japanese occupation in WW2, he is drawn to questions of philosophy. So his first response — even before Yes or No — is a simple question, but it comes out weighted with unintended significance:

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Finding What’s Important, Holding onto It Once Found

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From whiskey river:

Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one’s time is to do all these things.

(Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Inside You)

Not from whiskey river:

Happiness

Why, Dot asks, stuck in the back
seat of her sister’s two-door, her freckled hand
feeling the roof for the right spot
to pull her wide self up onto her left,
the unarthritic, ankle — why
does her sister, coaching outside on her cane,
have to make her laugh so, she flops
back just as she was, though now
looking wistfully out through the restaurant
reflected in her back window, she seems bigger,
and couldn’t possibly mean we should go
ahead in without her, she’ll be all right, and so
when you finally place the pillow behind her back
and lift her right out into the sunshine,
all four of us are happy, none more
than she, who straightens the blossoms
on her blouse, says how nice it is to get out
once in a while, and then goes in to eat
with the greatest delicacy (oh
I could never finish all that) and aplomb
the complete roast beef dinner with apple crisp
and ice cream, just a small scoop.

(by Wesley McNair, from The Town of No and My Brother Running)

…and —  simply because Wesley McNair has landed in my mind, swooping in out of nowhere, and now I keep finding more of his stuff I love — this:

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Quote of the Day

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From S.J. Perelman, born on this day in 1904:

I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.

Ha!

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Paying Attention to Bits of Everyday Life

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Insignificant Detail, by Piotr Moszczenski (click for original and info)

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?!?”

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Deciding to Stop; Deciding to Start Again

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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)

…and:
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Real-Life Dialogue

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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.

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“Shoulda Thoughta That.” And the Worst. Songs. Evah.

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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:

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A Career Made of Fiberglass, Foam, and Fun

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[Gotta get back into the online rhythm again after a couple days off… digging out the draft of a post I’d meant to put up some time ago…]

If I had my own personal MacArthur Foundation-like setup for rendering “genius grants” to people in all walks of life, I would give one tomorrow to Mark Cline. (Today’s, of course, I’d give to myself.)

I first learned of Cline in a post on the io9: Strung out on science fiction blog, where I encountered a post with the arresting title “The Alternate History Theme Park Where Dinosaurs Fought in the Civil War.”

At right is one of the photos used in that io9 post. From the text which accompanies it:

…roadside attraction creator Mark Cline has imagined an entirely different kind of Civil War science fiction. His fiberglass creations tell the tale of a group of Union soldiers who discover a lost valley of dinosaurs in Virginia and plot to use them as weapons against the South.

The attraction, called “Professor Cline’s Dinosaur Kingdom,” imagines a lost chapter from Civil War history. It supposes that in 1863, a group of paleontologists inadvertently stumbled upon a valley of live dinosaurs. The discovery comes to the attention of the Union Army, who, recognizing the destructive power of the giant lizards, decide to capture them and unleash them on the Confederate Army. Naturally, it results in Jurassic Park-inspired carnage.

(I encourage you to visit the io9 post to see more photos.)

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The Satisfactions of the Small, Found in the Large

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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):

[audio:billcosbychickenheart.mp3|titles=’Chicken Heart’|artists=Bill Cosby]
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