How It Was: Deck the Halls

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The time: late fall, 1990.

The place: Ashland, Virginia.

A young(ish) man sits at a card table by his bedroom window. He is temporarily jobless, by choice, and living on accumulated savings while he writes what will become his first book.

And he is panicking, inwardly, because nowhere in his budget is there sufficient flexibility for anything like Christmas presents for his family…

I think back on it now and know, know with certainty, that the panic was silly (if not foolish). Nevertheless, panicky I was.

And then I suddenly thought to myself: Well, self, you are after all presuming to be a writer. Surely you can put that to use. Give them something unique, something written, something true (if fuzzily factual)…

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Happy Birthday, Mr. Milton

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Wow — four hundred years, and (many) people still don’t even furrow their brows when you say the name “John Milton.” Most of us aspire to be remembered for one-fourth of that span, if that much.

Today, Milton’s memory is honored (if not read, exactly) principally for his epic works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained — and, to a lesser extent, for his other poetry.

But in his time he was also something of a political gadfly. Wikipedia speaks of his “radical, republican politics and heretical religious views,” which — coming, as they did, before, during, and after the English Civil War — ensured either his popularity (during Cromwell’s Commonwealth) or his ostracism (during the monarchy).

Among the forward-thinking issues which Milton made a point of espousing was freedom of written expression (what we’d call freedom of the press, today).

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Line Burners

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You’ve probably encountered references to NaNoWriMo here, at least in the comments — the so-called “(Inter)National Novel Writing Month” of November. This project encourages people who want to write fiction to, well, do it; everyone who signs up agrees to try writing a complete 50,000-word novel over the course of the thirty days.

(There’s no penalty for not succeeding, and “winners” — anyone who meets the 50K target — don’t win much more than the approbation of peers and a cool badge to display on their Web sites. A few NaNoWriMo participants, however, have gone on to publish what they started and finished there.)

If you do the NaNoWriMo math, dividing 50,000 words by 30 days, you get the average number of words to be written each day: a little over 1,666. It’s a pretty ambitious schedule for people with otherwise busy lives (day jobs, families and other relationships, keeping up with current events, hobbies, and so on). And yet, as I’m finding, there’s a writing challenge even harder — for me — to keep up with. It’s called Burning Lines.

Here’s how it started, with an exchange of comments on Kate Lord Brown’s What Kate Did Next blog. (Kate’s next post actually announced the start of the project.)

Years ago, I’d participated online in what we then called a “round-robin” story. The idea was to enlist, oh, a dozen people or so in a community writing project. We worked up a schedule of rotation: Writer 1, then Writer 2, and so on; each writer, in turn, would add a new installment to the end of a story begun by Writer 1. No deadline for each installment, as I recall, but it was understood that we’d have day to consider and post each one. So it unfolded in a stately pace (as it now seems), over the course of however long it took.

The Burning Lines project adds a whole ‘nother layer to the experience — a layer of… excitement? mania? fear? chaos? disorientation? all the above?

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Leaving a Light On the Reality of Writing

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Short-lived triumph, by Shannon Wheeler (click for critical last two frames)

[Don’t assume the above is the whole story. Click the image to see the
complete strip from Shannon Wheeler’s “How to Be Happy” series.]

Like me, you have probably heard more than once the assertion — pronounced in a gentle voice, at the end of a radio commercial (for the Motel 6 chain) consisting entirely of nothing but that gentle voice — “We’ll leave the light on for you.” Like me, you may have assumed that the speaker, self-identified as a “Tom Bodett,” either founded or at least owns or otherwise presides over Motel 6.

Not so. Here’s how Wikipedia summarizes his work: “…an American author, voice actor and radio host.” Far from having any official capacity for Motel 6, he’s just its “current spokesman.” (Many more details can be found at Bodett’s own site.)

In a commentary broadcast a couple years ago on Bob Edwards’s XM Radio program, Bodett talked about a side of “the writing life” which will be painfully familiar to just about anyone who’s attempted to take it seriously. Bodett himself is kidding. Sort of:

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Everyday Matters

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Giant screw

[Photo of a giant Archimedes screw. Funny, isn’t it — how
a giant screw can be both a problem and a solution?]

From whiskey river:

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

(by Eleanor Lerman)

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Why I Read Terry Pratchett

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Actually, there are a myriad reasons. (And I can’t think of a single legitimate reason not to read him. Uninformed reasons, yes, and/or reasons based on the faulty assumption that fantasy/SF has nothing to do with reality — or that funny has nothing to do with serious. But legitimate ones? Nope.)

This brief bit from Witches Abroad pretty much boils it down for me. The bare context you need at this point is that a conversation is taking place among three witches. Old Mother Dismass, the subject of this passage, has the ability to see into the future.

“You can’t tell me that’s worth tuppence,” said Old Mother Dismass, from whatever moment of time she was currently occupying.

No one was ever quite sure which it was.

It was an occupational hazard for those gifted with second sight. The human mind isn’t really designed to be sent rocketing backward and forward along the great freeway of time and can become, as it were, detached from its anchorage, seeing randomly into the past and the future and only occasionally into the present. Old Mother Dismass was temporally unfocused. This meant that if you spoke to her in August she was probably listening to you in March. It was best just to say something now and hope she’d pick it up next time her mind was passing through.

The writing is just right; even that “as it were,” which in a lesser writer’s hands might function as mere filler, adds an ironic distance between the author and the things and events which he’s describing.

I love the turnings of the mind behind this passage. Given a common convention of speculative fiction — second sight — just stop. Stop, and ask yourself what it would really mean to have this “gift.” Mightn’t life and thought actually be a little more unpleasantly complicated for the (ha ha) lucky seer than we normally take for granted? How would this power, if someone actually had it, affect those who had to deal every day with its bearer?

Finally, take that whole reductio ad absurdum of a notion and package it up into a supremely funny digression…

Damn. I’d love to be able to do that, and do it repeatedly, over the course of 25+ years (and counting).

Momentary Semantic Vertigo

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Please forgive an extended excerpt from a favorite scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty is here the initial speaker, and he is discussing birthdays vs. un-birthdays:

“…There”s glory for you!”

“I don”t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!'”

“But ‘glory’ doesn”t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that”s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they’re the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

“Would you tell me please,” said Alice, “what that means?”

“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”

“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

“Oh!” said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.

In the supermarket last night, I considered the flashlights displayed for sale. I’d been meaning to get a couple of little flashlights to distribute here and there in the house, for when we have power outages. (Not that we have a lot of them, but you never know.) I selected a couple of nice ones, each running on three triple-A batteries, and what I liked most about them was that their light came from this little cluster of bright LEDs instead of a conventional bulb. Five bucks each.

Took them home, and finally managed to cut through the insanely hard plastic bubble (invented, rumor has it, by the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Division of Impermeable Wall Materials and then released to the private sector for its own use).

Inserted the batteries, tested them. Great. All was in working order.

Dropped one flashlight here, another in another room, then returned to extract the cardboard packaging inserts from the plastic bubbles in order to toss the inserts into the recycling stack. Before discarding them, though, I thought Okay, you already know what you just bought but what the heck, flipped one over, started to read the fine print on the back.

Here’s what I saw first:

Sounds great, right? Then I read further:

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“Can I Kindleize that Velveteen Rabbit For Ya?”

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Like most writing and reading households, The Missus and mine has books way in excess of the available bookshelf space. We’ve lived in this house for more than eight years now, yet still — still! — somewhere around six or eight cartons and big plastic tubs of books take up space in our (mercifully dry) garage.

On the one hand, as The Missus soberly points out, we’re never going to (re-)read all the books we’ve already got. Why not donate them to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or just sell the damn things in a garage sale or on eBay?

And yet, and yet…

In just the six or or seven months I’ve been writing here on RAMH, on probably 15 or 20 occasions I have longed to put my hands on a book. Not just any book but a specific one for a specific occasion. A book containing a quote I know, sorta, but don’t know. Or a book containing some random fact which I don’t quite have the words for.

Every one of those books is in one box or another in the garage. I know exactly what their covers look like. Frustratingly, because some of them are in big translucent plastic containers, I can actually see some of them.

(Aside to The Missus: Don’t worry. I’m not about to start rummaging. We both know what will happen: I’ll find another book I wouldn’t mind having to hand, and then another, and then another… Within a half-hour I’ll have an empty box and even less space upstairs in the office for trivial activities like, oh, say, standing and sitting.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if I had all those books on… hmm… online, maybe? or digitized and placed on a little six-inch stack of Amazon Kindles?

A recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, by James Gleick*, tackles this problem. The piece begins by discussing the woes besetting the publishing industry (writers, agents, and editors as well as the faceless corporations themselves):

The gloom that has fallen over the book publishing industry is different from the mood in, say, home building. At least people know we’ll always need houses.

And now comes the news, as book sales plummet amid the onslaught of digital media, that authors, publishers and Google have reached a historic agreement to allow the scanning and digitizing of something very much like All the World’s Books. So here is the long dreamed-of universal library, its contents available (more or less) to every computer screen anywhere. Are you happy now? Maybe not, if your business has been the marketing, distributing or archiving of books.

If you’ve spent any time at all recently looking at the blogs of editors and agents, the angst will be familiar to you. It’s rampant not just among the bloggers and other opinion leaders, but among the commenters — often writers, nearly always passionate readers — upon their opinions.

Strangely, what is at stake — driving the panicky stampede over the cliff — isn’t the future of literacy, the real linchpin of civilization. It’s the future of books.

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Perfect Moments: The Boy, The Boy’s Father, The Sandwich

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Hoagie (click for full-size version, alas not for takeout)When The Boy grew up, he would tell people — with slight hesitation, thinking first of pizza — that his favorite food of all was sandwiches.

But there was a time when this was not true. There was a time when all that The Boy knew of sandwiches was what his mother made for him, and what he learned to make for himself:

Peanut butter and jelly, of course; tuna (with mayonnaise, lettuce optional); American cheese (in casual or formal versions, with jelly or mayonnaise respectively); ham and cheese (margarine and mustard); liverwurst (sometimes with cheese, always with mustard). Regardless of specific ingredients, these sandwiches all had one feature in common:

White bread.

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