So far, just a lot of wind (up to about 45mph, nothing to toss vehicles) and rain.
Looking forward to posting something for real later today… In the meantime, we’re headed to the animal hospital to pick up the (formerly) ailing Sophie. (“Sophie?” you ask. Hint: Sophie is not, strictly speaking, human.)
From whiskey river:
Air
Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.Young as I am, old as I am,
I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.
(by W. S. Merwin)
Hypothetical-question time:
You’ve just been introduced to the classic visitor from outer space. He (or is it she?) is in a hurry — in fact, will be leaving in about 20 seconds, starting, say, now — but has a super-important question which needs answering. How you answer is to determine whether the saucers will (a) blow Earth up or (b) let her (or is it him?) continue on its stately course through the stars, through terrestrial history, and through the annals of intergalactic comedy.
Here’s the question:
We are very interested in this thing you call ‘fiction.’ But we do not understand it, and it is the last thing on my chop-chop must-do last-minute checklist before reporting back to Grand Inquisitor Xarg. I need to get going. Can you please give me one word so that I may understand it?
(Tip: “Uhhhh…” will not count as a valid reply. Nor will “Wait!”)
So what’s your answer? And if you yourself write novels or short stories, what’s the one word which is the key to understanding your fiction in particular?
Back in the day — you know, the day — you could say (as I used to) “I work for the phone company” and no one would doubt which phone company paid your salary. That’s why Lily Tomlin’s old “Ernestine the telephone operator” could say, without ambiguity, “We’re the phone company. We don’t have to care.”
Aside: Okay, listen, this isn’t the point of this post but now that I’ve got Ernestine on the brain I just had to look her up on YouTube. She’s there, all right. Here’s a sample:
Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging…
Anyway, aside from the fact that there are now as many phone companies in the USA as there are neighborhoods, the technology itself has of course made huge leaps. Cell phones, obviously. Cordless phones. Caller ID. Phones that take pictures. In fact, phones do so much anymore that it’s easy to forget some of the things they no longer do.
For instance: when your power goes out, so do your phones.
In the Writers to Be Read category over there on the right, you’ll see a link to something called Froogville. Its proprietor, one (presumably pseudonymous) Froog, runs a second blog as well: Round-the-World Barstool Blues whose mission, he says there, can be summed up as “Musings on life & love from the bars of the world.”
In a recent post, titled “Great Drinking Songs (9),” Froog includes a video of a group of Cornish fishermen singing the song “[Bound for] South Australia.” Which is entertaining, sort of — in the way any given film of any arbitrary group of non-professional semi-professional [thanks, Froog] singers, singing any given drinking song on a beach in a vaguely disorganized way, is entertaining.
Much much better, though, is the YouTube video below (a simple link to which Froog provided in his post), of an Australian guitarist named Tommy Emmanuel — playing the same song in a manner which frankly left me slack-jawed with amazement. I have NEVER seen or (I think) heard anyone play a guitar this fast.
See what I mean? I close my eyes and hear not a guitar but a banjo, or maybe a mandolin. But guitar…?
To start the day, if not finish it, what’s turning out to be, apparently, a weekly habit: a Friday selection from among the previous seven days’ whiskey river postings:
Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water.
What a thing to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
(from Thomas Merton, Rain and The Rhinoceros)
And then, to balance that reflection, another — excerpted from Tom Bodett’s funny “Canus [sic] Minor and Other Dim Lights” (first read in The Funny Times):
I suffer from Compulsive Cosmology. The condition often manifests itself on clear summer nights when I’m out looking for the dog. For no good reason something in the sky catches my attention and the next thing I know I am standing with my head bent backward, slack-jawed, contemplating the scope and ultimate fate of the universe.
It is a cruel disease indeed that forces a middling intellect such as mine into this position. I was, after all, an English Major. The last science course I had was 12th grade Physics and my clearest memory of that was the teacher’s profoundly active case of dandruff. I never understood it. At age 17 even I had heard of treatment shampoo. That brief moment of intellectual superiority may be at the root of my Compulsive Cosmology. It left me with the unshakable delusion that I get the Big Picture.
Then as now what intrigues me about the universe is the utter impossibility of its scale. You cannot force your brain big enough to hold it and it is said to be expanding faster than you can think. Still, when I stare up at it and summer flies coast in and out of my mouth I feel as if I am on the verge of getting it. I see its shape, I feel its speed and know its age. And then the dog shows up and I go inside.
Longfellow says, in “My Lost Youth”:
A boy’s will is the wind’s will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
Adds Grace Paley:
I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
Today’s been a day for lack of focus (by necessity, not choice) and wandering around in brief, staccato bursts of Web activity. Among the periwinkles, whelks, and sand dollars scooped up: [Read more…]
Back in my college days, I took a course in semantics. One of the more revelatory learnings I acquired from that course’s professor was the power of function words: all the “stuff” which fills in among the supposedly more robust verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Presented with a paragraph of all those “important” words and no function words, it’s hard to make sense of it. Just a pile of verbiage, really. On the other hand, a paragraph of nothing except function words instantly, in your mind’s eye, acquires all the strength of an understandable structure — like a skyscraper’s underlying girders — because the function words define the relationships among words.
A classic example* is the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” as seen here with the function (and other “null”) words dimmed out:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome rath outgrabe.
…and here, with the function words emphasized:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome rath outgrabe.
A few weeks ago, agent Nathan Bransford posted two open-ended questions on his blog, a week apart: “What’s Your Favorite Word?” and “What’s Your Least Favorite Word?” I can’t swear to this, yet I believe every single nominee in both categories — including my own — was an “important” word. Let’s take all those commenters at their (ahem) word, and assume those are their favorites and least favorites.
Per the title of this post here, though, what’s the single most amazing word in the English language — the word whose weight is out of all proportion to its size and apparent significance? I bet it’s a function word. Here’s my nominee:
In lieu of a longer post still in the works, and with a nod to writing in the water‘s current discussion of knowing when the story is done, and done well and right: I offer this, Folk Tale #6 from Book Two (“Fire”) of The Zen of Programming:
Five novices went into the master’s office, crying “Woe, woe! We have heard that our project may be cancelled.”
The master said, “All things continue until they stop.”
Hearing this, the novices returned to work.
Short version: As an exercise, start a story with one “found” sentence, and end it with another:
First sentence:
I ask your forgiveness.
Last sentence:
I am a mountain tiger.
Note: The italics as presented above don’t have any significance; they aren’t meant to emphasize the text, nor do they indicate that these lines are spoken by someone.
Extra credit: Involve in the story, in some way, the image of the woman at the left. She may be a character in the story (either the “I” in the first and last lines or someone else), perhaps the story will be about the work of art itself.
Report back sometime before Labor Day.
Long version:
