There Are Some Cures for Pre-Summertime Blues

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Wanted to draw your attention to a couple of recent donations to the “life is complex and frustrating, so let’s go have some fun!” cause.

First, you can generally look to the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog for a pick-me-up. (And before breakfast, say researchers, is when 99% of the populace most needs picking up. (The other 1% need it most while they’re sitting on barstools and fantasizing about Mr. or Ms. Right, as the case may be.))

But today’s post, “Some Cartoons for You,” just made me grin from ear to ear. (It might even have made the grin wrap around to the back of my neck — an alarming sight, no doubt, for the people behind me in the elevator this morning.) As is usually the case at 7-Imp, the focus is on children’s books and illustrators — specifically, in this case, illustrators who favor a cartoon-like style of art.

It’s pretty darned hard for me to look at this without smiling, and it’s not even the whole image (from “Mr.” [Tom] Warburton’s 1000 Times No — see a reproduction of the entire page at the 7-Imp site):

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Very Dead Things, and a Small Box of Chocolate Bunnies

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If you’ve read my most recent Friday post, you’ve probably figured out that the early-1990s TV series Twin Peaks looms large in The Missus’s and my collective imagination.

(Actually, we have a habit of latching onto odd, off-center network series which don’t have a chance in hell of surviving past the first season or two — simply because of the confusion and venality of network executives. Don’t even get us started on American Gothic.)

When we met, online, in 1991, the show was in its first season. Prior to the premier, I’d read a review by — of all people — Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, and it made up my mind that I just had to watch that episode, even if none of the later ones. I can’t find this review online anywhere (even though, with my subscriber’s credentials, I’ve got access to the magazine’s entire archives; maybe I read it somewhere else?). But Kael was nuts about the premier episode; she wrote of the first glimpse of Laura Palmer as something like “quite possibly the deadest thing you will ever see on network television.”

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Her Little Voice

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[Above is the longer version of the Twin Peaks opening title sequence, including a fairly
 complete cast listing (at least for the recurring characters). The “official” and higher-
quality version, with a truncated theme song and cast listing, is here.]

[Note: Comments disabled for this post, for what will eventually be obvious reasons. :)]

From whiskey river:

And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the “real” world — rock, bone, wood, ice — and elements of the real — not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself — inside stories and tales and dreams.

(Rick Bass)

Not from whiskey river:

your little voice
Over the wires came leaping
and i felt suddenly
dizzy
With the jostling and shouting of merry flowers
wee skipping high-heeled flames
courtesied before my eyes
or twinkling over to my side
Looked up
with impertinently exquisite faces
floating hands were laid upon me
I was whirled and tossed into delicious dancing
up
Up
with the pale important
stars and the Humorous
moon
dear girl
How i was crazy how i cried when i heard
over time
and tide and death
leaping
Sweetly
your voice

(E.E. Cummings)

…and:

Love one another, but make not a bond of love
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you
be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with
the same music.

(Kahlil Gibran)

And finally, who could argue with this?

One woman can make you fly like an eagle, another can give you the strength of a lion, but only one in the Cycle Of Life can fill your heart with wonder and the wisdom that you have known a singular joy.

(Deputy Tommy “Hawk” Hill, Twin Peaks)

…Okay, I said “finally” up there but, heck, as long as we’re on the theme we may as well go for broke:

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is about 5½ minutes long.

[audio:falling_juleecruise.mp3|titles=Falling|artists=Julee Cruise]

Falling
(lyrics by David Lynch; music by Angelo Badalamenti;
performance by Julee Cruise)

Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.
Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.

Then I saw your face
Then I saw your smile

The sky is still blue
The clouds come and go
Yet something is different
Are we falling in love?

Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.
Don’t let yourself be hurt this time.

Then your kiss so soft
Then your touch so warm

The stars still shine bright
The mountains still high
Yet something is different
Are we falling in love?

Falling
Falling

Are we falling in love?

Happy anniversary, Baby. ♥

Robert Frost, Grouch

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Update, 2009-10-19: If you’ve come here by way of the BBC’s Justin Webb’s America piece on “Space, youth, and hope,” welcome! If you’re also here straight from the UK, , I also suggest that you skip over to the Phoenix Artist Club in London on November 3 for the London book launch event for artist Helen Couchman‘s Mrs. West’s Hats. You won’t be disappointed!

Steve King’s always-interesting daily e-newsletter, Today in Literature, reports that “Robert Frost’s Steeple Bush, his eighth and second-last collection of poems, was published on this day in 1947.”

We don’t normally think of Frost as a social commentator, but apparently he fell off that wagon numerous times in Steeple Bush. In the poem below, says King:

…he gives his take on the boom in trade, specifically the vogue for mass-produced, Asian kitsch… it shows Frost in a frisky, nearly foul-mouthed mood.

Wow, eh?

An Importer

Mrs. Someone’s been to Asia,
What she brought back would amaze ye.
Bamboos, ivories, jades, and lacquers,
Devil-scaring firecrackers,
Recipes for tea with butter,
Sacred rigmaroles to mutter,
Subterfuge for saving faces,
A developed taste in vases,
Arguments too stale to mention
‘Gainst American intervention;
Most of all the mass production
Destined to prove our destruction.
What are telephones, skyscrapers,
Safety razors, Sunday papers,
But the silliest evasion
Of the truths we owe an Asian?
But the best of her exhibit
Was a prayer machine from Tibet
That by brook power in the garden
Kept repeating Pardon, pardon;
And as picturesque machinery
Beat a sundial in the scenery —
The most primitive of engines
Mass producing with a vengeance.
Teach those Asians mass production?
Teach your grandmother egg suction.

[Text confirmed here.]

Again: wow. Robert Frost, the kindly white-haired stammerer at the JFK inauguration, wrote stuff like this? Who knew? And, um, excuse me: “frisky”? I don’t know about you, but when I think of “frisky” I think of frolicking like a flock of lambs. Or satyrs.

_______________

(Note: In looking around the Web for more about this poem, I found some suggestion that Frost meant the whole thing satirically. For instance: “…the poem ends with an ironic twist, turning a prejudiced conception of the East back on the general public that held it.” Which struck me as reaching, but whadda I know.)

The “Critical Mass” Progress Meter

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Just kidding. I don’t really have such a meter — except in my head.

The progress being metered, as you may guess if you’ve visited here before, is progress towards completion of a book — especially a novel. You can find real such tools scattered around the Writing Web, enabling you to depict your progress en route to some expected goal (a word count, most likely). A particularly snazzy one is at the StoryToolz site (requires free registration); not only does it show the progress linearly, it also provides a link to more detailed information, showing how the daily word count progressed (or didn’t) day-by-day, for example.

In the weekend writing workshop I took years ago (and wrote about here and here), David Gerrold provided us with blank daily progress tracking sheets. Like other such tools, they require that you set a daily word-count goal, using whatever criteria you want. A given writer might work it out like this:

Hmm, I have a day job, so maybe 100 words would be good on those days…

…and maybe 500 words a day on weekends…

…which totals up to 1500 words a week, or on average say 200(ish) words a day.

So you’d set your benchmark at 200 words a day. Every day, without fail, you’d record the number of new words you set to paper, and note the percentage of your target achieved. I forget what the exact rules of thumb were, but David told us that on average, say, a 30% accomplishment, especially day after day, constituted “breakdown”; 50% or above, success; and 80% or above, breakthrough.

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Paying Attention to Your Sense of Play

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I’d already written this post’s title. And I almost began the body of it with these words: “Sometimes, you just have to”—

But, nah. I don’t think everyone, not even every writer, “just has to” do almost anything, much less experience the sort of off-the-wall moment I did one afternoon, years ago. And even less than that, to actually follow up on it.

This was back in the days when I was living on my savings and trying to Be a Fulltime Writer. (If you notice the contradiction in terms there, on either side of the and, you’re not the only one.) I was reading the paper one day after lunch. It had been a productive morning writing session, and I was feeling a bit burnt-out but still not quite ready to toss away the afternoon on something other than writing. Just, y’know, not necessarily that writing — what I was working on every day.

So I was reading the paper, as I said, and my attention was caught by the Ann Landers advice column on the page opposite the comics. “Dear Ann Landers,” it began (they all began that way). “I was a closet smoker who went through a pack a day for 20 years and tried to quit dozens of times. I failed because I felt as if I was depriving myself of a great deal of pleasure even though I knew in my heart that cigarettes were killing me…”

To this point, a fairly conventional letter. Yet even as you read of this guy’s struggle with the Tobacco Demon, you could sense, lurking in the wings, a but. You could sense he wasn’t writing to seek advice. He was writing to offer it.

And so he did.

Something about the solution he came up with just suddenly struck me as bizarre. Flat-out hilarious, even. I’d been a smoker myself, and the thought that I might actually employ this solution back then, on the occasions when I’d most wanted a cigarette, just, well, it just unhinged me.

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Airborne

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From whiskey river:

As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.

(Native American Indian saying)

Not from whiskey river:

Don Juan and don Genaro stood up and stretched their arms and arched their backs, as if sitting had made their bodies stiff. My heart began to pound fast. They made Pablito and me stand up.

“The twilight is the crack between the worlds,” don Juan said. “It is the door to the unknown.”

He pointed with a sweeping movement of his hand to the mesa where we were standing.

“This is the plateau in front of that door.”

He pointed then to the northern edge of the mesa.

“There is the door. Beyond, there is an abyss and beyond that abyss is the unknown.”

Don Juan and don Genaro then turned to Pablito and said good-by to him. Pablito’s eyes were dilated and fixed; tears were rolling down his cheeks.

I heard don Genaro’s voice saying good-by to me, but I did not hear don Juan’s.

Don Juan and don Genaro moved towards Pablito and whispered briefly in his ears. Then they came to me. But before they had whis­pered anything I already had that peculiar feeling of being split.

“We will now be like dust on the road,” don Genaro said. “Perhaps it will get in your eyes again, someday.”

Don Juan and don Genaro stepped back and seemed to merge with the darkness. Pablito held my forearm and we said good-by to each other. Then a strange urge, a force, made me run with him to the northern edge of the mesa. I felt his arm holding me as we jumped and then I was alone.

(Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power — the last words of the book. I always thought Castaneda’s entire “Don Juan” series would have ended perfectly at this point, but no: he went on to write numerous further books, none of which attained the convincing — and impeccable — power of the early ones.)

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It Is a Tweet Universally Acknowledged…

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Truly brilliant stuff. Very brief excerpt:

TheRealJaneAusten:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.

MrsB:
A Mr Bingley–worth 50,000 followers a year–has joined Twitter! He’s brought a friend, Mr Darcy–worth 100,000 followers a year! Pls RT

MrsB:
@JaneB @LizzyB @MaryBsaphorisms @KittyB @LydiaB I will have one of you girls married into internet fame yet. Just you wait.

LizzyB:
@MrsB But mother, I think we can pull ourselves up by our dooce-straps just fine.

MrsB:
Blogcasting: How to find husbands for your daughters: http://tinyurl/momblog Now with free giveaway from our Etsy embroidery shop. Pls RT

LizzieB:
@JaneB If I could love a man who would love me enough to take me for a mere 50 followers, I should be well pleased…

LizzieB:
@JaneB …but such a man wouldn’t be sensible & I could never love a man who was out of his twits. LOL

JaneB:
Oh @LizzyB, it is my ardent wish to marry 4 love. Love, respect AND dual laptops would be most agreeable. #iamdullbutpretty

…and it gets much, much better. I am in awe.

[Hat tip to Maggie, Dammit.]

[Aside to self: In any week when you really need to use the Web for productive reasons, do not allow Google Reader to open, under any circumstances.]

Real-Life Dialogue

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Patient (handing appointment card for his regular checkup to receptionist at desk in Super Mega Giant medical center): Hey, how you doing, I’m—

Receptionist: I know. Got you right here. (Hands exam paperwork to patient; calls out to someone out of sight behind her.) He just got here! I’m sending him right back!

(Patient wanders around corner, meets nurse at door leading to warren of exam rooms, check-out area, etc.)

Patient (to nurse): Wow. You took me fast. I even brought a book up h—

Nurse: I know! You got here just at a good time! Come with me, please.

(She leads patient through maze. Patient’s imagination starts to get better of him; he believes he sees a troll at the check-out window, and a gnome taking phone calls. This can’t be true, although the corridors are getting narrower and more twisty and the walls are running with slime.)

Nurse (gesturing at scale): Step up here, please. (Looks startled.) Hmm. (Purses lips. Makes notation on pad.)

Patient: Something wrong?

Nurse: Step down, follow me… No, sir, nothing wrong!

(More corridors. Spiders on ceiling and walls. Oil-guttering torches. They arrive at the correct exam room.)

Nurse: All right, I’ll just sit here at the computer (she sits) and you sit there on the table. (He does so.) Now let me just verify your prescriptions, okay?

Patient: Okay—

Nurse: Fosamax.

Patient (eyes crossing): Uh, Fosamax? Isn’t that for, like, wom—

Nurse: Okay, no Fosamax? Okay. How about aspirin. You still taking aspirin?

Patient (relieved): Yep! Enteric—

Nurse: Right. The 81 size, right?

Patient: The, uh, 81—?

Nurse: And how about the [insert what sounds to patient like a completely improvised brand name with many x‘s, z‘s, k‘s, and a short a or two]? Are you still—

Patient (taking command of the situation): Y’know, I’m getting a little worried. I don’t recognize these prescriptions you’re talking about. Are you sure—

Nurse (glances at patient, glances at screen, glances at paperwork in her lap): Oh my gosh! I’ve got the wrong patient! Come with me, please.

(They exit the exam room. Nurse leads patient back into corridors. A left, a right, straight ahead, dodge the pharmaceutical salesman, the falling stalactites and screeching bats, and suddenly back into the relative daylight of the waiting room.)

Nurse (to patient): Just have a seat, please. Someone will be right with you. (To room at large) Stephenson! Julia Stephenson!

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