All the Living

I just finished a lovely little book called All the Living written by C.E. Morgan. And while it’s true I picked it up initially because of the cover—it features a black and white landscape with a barn; I’m a sucker stories set on farms—I found the writing superb and the story satisfying. 

A young woman moves to Kentucky to be with her bereaved lover who is left to manage his family’s tobacco farm. While he retreats into monosyllabic communication, Aloma dreams of returning to the piano; their days are fraught with friction: she’s waiting for a proposal while he exhausts himself trying to save the farm. Aloma’s friendship with a preacher makes things…interesting.

Plus, as The New Yorker review points out, the author uses rare words like “letheless” (forgetfulness) and “mortise” (cavity in a piece of wood) that require me to get the hefty dictionary. No lazy words here.

Eat, pray, love and show up

Thanks to a blogger I stumbled upon, I discovered one of those ever-so-inspiring TED videos featuring Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote the phenomenal best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, and was intrigued by her thoughts on creativity and genius. If you’re a creative type—especially a creative type finding excuses not to create—check it out.

Gilbert posits the notion that instead of believing ourselves to be creative selves, we might do well to go back to what the ancient Greeks and Romans believed, pre-Renaissance, that creativity comes from the spirits. The result? Less pressure to create the work of your life, which might allow you to…create the work of your life. With this burden lifted, and the belief that you are a vessel through which the ideas will flow, an artist might be less stifled by expectations and blocks—and less prone to be a falling down drunk like so many 20th century writers who offed themselves. Just saying. So, no more quest for a muse. Let the muse come to you.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you wait around for inspiration to arrive. Your job is to be ready, to show up. Every day. Show up at your easel, your desk, your dance floor. Just show the hell up.

MLA, don’t you love books anymore?

In perusing the MLA’s new guidelines for a proper works cited page after a heads up from my co-worker, I was saddened to realize that good old-fashioned print sources (you remember books, right?) have been marginalized. It seems the balance of print vs. online sources has shifted; it used to be that you lugged home a stack of books on your research topic. You probably checked out every book the library had on the subject.

Then came the Internet and the occasional website provided excellent supplemental information. It was frankly amazing to find such comprehensive information on the Madagascar Sunset moth. Still, teachers were rightly skeptical. They limited online sources and demanded scholarly articles (no Wikipedia, for you), which often meant back to the library and print sources.

These days, everything is online; you can access scholarly articles through library websites and conceivably write a paper without ever leaving your desk. Indeed, students and scholars are accessing sources online primarily these days, leaving books to decay on library shelves (well, maybe it’s not that drastic). As a result, new guidelines call for noting if a source is “print” because it’s no longer the default. I don’t know about you, but while I find the Interweb is an information mecca, I’m still sad that books are getting short shrift.

Blindness is one scary book

I’ve been in a constant state of panic since beginning the book Blindness by Jose Saramago. Holy. The premise is this: a man suddenly goes blind while driving. When another man offers to drive him home, he goes blind too. You see where this is going. I’m in the middle of the outbreak where the government has quarantined everyone who’s been afflicted with this “white blindness” or who has come in contact with them. The group finds managing itself difficult and when a criminal element is introduced, it becomes all Lord of the Flies and terrifying, frankly.

When those quarantined discover freedom, they find a city where everyone has gone blind and is wandering around searching for food and shelter. Reminds me quite a bit of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The writing however, couldn’t be further from McCarthy’s spare prose with the long, clause-heavy run-ons that Saramago is keen on. He won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature for this book, so I suppose there are people out there who are OK with this meandering style. He does tell a mean story. My friend read it in her book club, and I can’t think of a more perfect book for discussion. Very meaty, but a book you should not read on your own lest you become nervous and depressed about the possibility of a similar outbreak happening, like say, swine flu. 

Kiriyama Prize

Do you love poring over the “best of” book lists when the finalists or winners are announced? I do. I love the National Book Awards, am always curious about who won the Pulitzer, like to check out the Booker Prize and have discovered some good local authors through the Massachusetts Book Awards. I’m a book list junkie, even if the winners probably have enough hype and what we really need is a Best Truly Undiscovered Book award or Best Book by an Obscure Publishing House.

One award whose books I particularly like every year is the Kiriyama Prize, given to an author on the Pacific Rim. Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Journey through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, an excellent memoir by Andrew X. Pham, was the  1999 nonfiction winner.  In 2006, I was transported to Siberia with The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky, an anthropological study of nomads living in the coldest environment possible. In 2005, I was excited to discover a new author who’s become one of my favorites. Nadeem Aslam won the award for his book  Maps for Lost Lovers that read like poetry. He has a new book out now, The Wasted Vigil, a story about post-911 Afghanistan told in the lyrical style that made Maps for Lost Lovers and his earlier book, Season of the Rainbirds such rich, enjoyable reads.

I’m only a third of the way through the new book, but as always, Aslam’s similes and descriptions are memorable, like the description of “the sudden startling bats that appear out of nowhere like flickering ink blots” or butterflies that have “green underwings so that—visible invisible visible invisible—they seem to blink in and out of existence as they fly amid the leaves.” Good stuff worthy of another award.

Food memoirs

I love reading a good memoir—digging in to people’s lives for inspiration and humor—and I love reading about food. Ergo, I love reading food memoirs. I’m reading two now, however, that I’ve had to quit. I won’t name them, because that feels mean, but the stories and writing are so conventional that they offer nothing new. One is a chronicle of some cooking classes that I thought would reveal the inside scoop on life as a chef-in-training, and I suppose it does, but, huh, it turns out to be just how I imagined it. The other focuses way, way too much on family background and entails a cast of characters that I had trouble distinguishing between; the food was a distant afterthought. 

What bothers me most, I suppose, is that if these books got published, I, too, could write a food memoir. The difference though, is that I know my story would lack drama—no stories of me eating urchins off the coast of Fiji, no fires or screaming matches in a hot kitchen—so, I wouldn’t subject anyone to it.

Of course, I do bear part of the responsibility in that I was wooed by the books’ covers, pretty photographs that drew me to them in a sweet little bookshop in Maine. The rest though, is on the writers.

Start a blog. Check!

Last year, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to jump start my writing by starting a blog. My computery technical skills were low and my frustration level high, but I recalled the time I thought I’d never transition from a journal to a word processor, so I soldiered on. I spent weeks mulling the content. Really, what was I gonna write about? I felt pressured to find the right title and just the right banner photo to reflect the feeling I wanted to project. I labored over what my first posts would be. Then I realized that I was doing what I always did when I sat down to write: procrastinating.

Oh, I love procrastinating. Not in general, so much, but when it comes to writing—oh, is procrastinating attractive. It used to be that I’d sit down in front of the typewriter (I started young), and I’d do a little test typing, hunting and pecking back then, to get in the groove. My desk would have to be just so. I’d eke out a sentence painfully, slowly, trying to get the sentence just right lest I have to employ the dreaded backspace and archaic correction ribbon.

 

Write. Now.

 

When I wrote longhand, my pencils had to be lined up and sharpened, crisp white paper at the ready. Desk dusted. You know how it is.

One year later: mission accomplished. I’m approaching my 200th post, and while the time isn’t always there, the urge to write is still strong. I like this medium, especially the format that encourages short bursts of writing. No novels here. And I love that friends and strangers drop in to read these musings; I enjoy reading every comment they post.

I never thought I’d give up my typewriter or my pen and paper; I couldn’t imagine writing on a computer way back in the 90s; yet, here I am, blogging and discovering that each tool offers something new to a writer, including thoroughly modern ways to procrastinate.

A poem’s journey

I spent an inordinate amount of time today at work enjoying an extensive interview with Billy Collins in the Barnes & Noble e-newsletter, in which he talks about his poems and the world of Poetry with a capital “P.” In particular, I was intrigued by his style of beginning a poem with a familiar, concrete first stanza and finding a way, at the end, to a newly created space. The interviewer provides an example in the excerpt below after which Collins describes one poem’s journey that starts as a simple memory, landing us eventually in an imagined world, a deft movement from the concrete to the abstract, from the known to the unknown.

Interviewer: The poem in the new book that I’m thinking of right now is “What Love Does,” which starts out with a familiar entry point, love songs on the car radio: 

A fine thing, or so it sounds
on the radio in the summer
with all the windows rolled down. 

Collins: So we’re all with that, we’re all together in the same car. Right.

Interviewer: Then, with a little twist that’s poignant in the exact sense, we come to: 

Yet it pierces not only the heart, 
but the eyeball and the scrotum 
and the little target of the nipple with arrows. 

And you proceed through a small catalogue of love’s effects, in which each of the three-line stanzas might be the kernel of a John Donne poem exploring love as arrows, or love as wrestling, love as a flower-hopping bee, and so on. All of this imagery is recognizable and easily embraced. But at the conclusion of the poem, you set us down in a strange land indeed, with an unexpected evocation of the puzzling ominousness of love, setting off on a journey to a forbidding city: 

It will travel through the night to get there,
and it will arrive like an archangel
through an iron gate no one ever seemed to notice before.

You’ve led us from a summer joyride, listening to the Beach Boys or Frank Sinatra or the Supremes, and then deposited us at the gates of a bewildering city both promising and fearsome.

Collins: The poem wants to move from a familiar place to an unfamiliar place, in this case, an imagined city. The theme is the way love passes quickly from one person to another, like a bee going from flower to flower. Even as the ink is drying on the new beloved’s name, love is off to visit someone in another city. It’s one thing to leave it at that. But the temptation is then to imagine this city, to actually particularize it. Where is this city? What city? Well, it’s a city of the imagination, obviously. But then, it’s particularized. It has chimney pots, and a school with a tree-lined entrance. So suddenly, the convertible we were driving in is forgotten, and we’ve moved into the reality of this city, which is a kind of unreality, but it’s particularized as if it were real. Then you have this metaphor of the archangel arriving at this city, in the spectral way of archangels, through a gate that somehow no one in the city ever noticed before — and that would be the entrance to the heart, now that I think of it. To commit an awful act of paraphrase on the poem: you don’t realize you’re susceptible to love because you’ve never noticed the possibility of that door being opened. And yet it appears to you in the guise of an archangel.

Nicely put. Even if Collins feels paraphrasing his own poem is a sin, the idea that love is not only a door to be opened, but a door that you never even noticed is an intriguing idea in itself. I love how the poem evokes memories of listening to the car radio, but even more, I would like to visit this city of chimney pots and tree-lined streets. In poems, you can experience both on a single page.

Read this at my funeral, please

One of my favorite poems is “Otherwise” by the late Jane Kenyon. It’s a live-for-the-day and be grateful poem that reminds me to appreciate the little things, the everyday. I have it posted on my wall at work:

Otherwise Jane Kenyon I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.

I asked my friend to read it at my funeral, when it will be, well, otherwise. A few stage directions for her to refer to here: read slowly and clearly, sniffling at appropriate intervals. If you can manage it, drop to your knees and yell, “Why???” Thanks.

Good prose

I read novels written in a variety of prose styles, spare like Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, simple yet indefinably beautiful like Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories, or rich and complex like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Sometimes I think it would be a fun exercise to rewrite say, a Bronte novel, in the style of James Patterson. A totally fruitless exercise, but an interesting one nonetheless.

Mostly though, I long for poetic prose where the writer has taken care with the language, as if each page were a poem. I’m reading Eve Green right now by British author Susan Fletcher and she offers up some beautiful lines, packing them with generous details. Of one character she writes, “She wore a dark-red knitted cardigan with buttons that looked like boiled sweets, and she smelt of washing machines.” A couple of perfect details and I already like the character. 

She describes her main character while still in the womb—a feat. “I’d been brought to Birmingham before I was born, before my mother knew if I was going to be a boy or a girl. She said she’d sit in the bath and watch my elbows poke up under her belly like chicken wings. We didn’t live near the chocolate factory, but sometimes I was sure I could smell the cocoa beans and cream.” The visual is memorable and the aroma of chocolate a sweet sensory detail.

If I had to pick, I’d say I care less about the plot and more about the elegance of the writing. Today’s literary market is flooded with plot-driven novels, which have their place for entertainment, but a more enjoyable read satisfies by achieving both a good plot and beautiful writing.

Nicholas Sparks. Why?

I saw a student reading the new Nicholas Sparks novel the other day and my snobbery kicked into high gear. “What are you doing?” I yelled. I grabbed the book and read the first few lines. Ugh. An overreaction to bad literature? Perhaps. “It’s pleasure reading,” the student said guilt-free. Well, of course, I thought. It wouldn’t be assigned reading. But pleasure? It’s all relative, I suppose. 

So, no, I’m not a Nicholas Sparks fan. I will admit here though that despite also being a movie snob, I went with a friend to see Nights of Rodanthe last month, a movie based on another Sparks novel, because I was wooed by Richard Gere and Diane Lane; unfortunately, their characters could not convincingly woo each other. The best part though was a tender moment when the two are close, talking about her keepsake box filled with trinkets. “What do you keep in your box?” Gere asks.

“My children,” Lane answered.

Well, that was it for my friend and me. We fought to contain laughter. She keeps her children in the box! we whispered obnoxiously. That’s ridiculous!

In that sense, you could say Sparks is pretty entertaining; I do love to laugh. I think the people around us, however, may not have appreciated our snickering as they sniffled into their tissues. That too, I found entertaining.

She’s (almost) all that

I go to a lot of author readings where the writer is introduced with a bio that goes something like this: “Ms. All That graduated from Harvard and has written numerous books, several of which have been included on the New York Times bestseller list. She is the winner of a National Book Award and most recently, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” She has also written for Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly, and Salon.com, and is a regular contributor to NPR. She teaches creative writing at NYU and is an expert on Vermeer as well as fashion in the Renaissance Age. She’s also a veterinarian in her spare time.”

Well.

You’ve probably been to lectures where the speaker was introduced in a similar way—a litany of work, awards and distinctions that make you wonder when the person buys their yogurt or bathes. I went to one such reading this week—I won’t mention the author because she was lovely and deserved the accolades—but just when I felt like this Super Woman was making the rest of us look like slackers, I gave her the once over and took solace in the fact that at least she can’t dress herself to save her life.

Ms. All That, it turns out, wore all black in a way that was not as chic as it sounds: a long drapey garment and shapeless sweater with black pants an inch too short and black loafers. Loafers. Come on, throw on the heels! It would be interesting to go to a reading where the author shows up not in comfortable shoes and a cardigan, but in strappy heels and a knockout dress. Let’s raise the level of readings, people.

Anyway, I may not be all that, but at least my outfits are cute.

This is just to say I overwashed the dishes

Apparently, using a dishwasher is not like riding a bicycle. Sometimes you just forget how things work. A co-worker who shall remain nameless called me the other day to relate a domestic disaster: she just moved into a new apartment and, after a 10-year dishwasher hiatus, was happy to have the miracle appliance again. Having managed to live only in dishwasher-less apartments, I was jealous.

Anyway, she relates that after filling the dishwasher with any old soap (read: not soap specifically designed for dishwashers), she went away to work on a poem at the computer, an epic poem perhaps, because by the time she went back to the kitchen, a foot of bubbly suds was covering the floor. I felt her pain. I’ve suffered from the “just a little more soap in the laundry will make my clothes extra-clean” fallacy, but that only results in soapy sweaters. I wasn’t sure what you do when you over-soap the dishwasher.

Treating it like a grease fire, she smothered it with a blanket.

She cleaned up the suds and made it to work but left an appliance full of super sudsed-up plates and pans. “What should I do?” she asked.

“I’d run the rinse cycle,” I said, considering that that trick works when it comes to laundry.

“Right,” she said. “I’ll try it.”

The rinse cycle, however, resulted in another overflow (really, I’m not good with the domestic advice but I tried to fake it), so she did the next logical thing: she brought the dish rack to the shower and rinsed off the plates in their own little spa ritual. Oh, poets. They’re a funny bunch. She’ll probably write a poem about it, but I put forth this one in the vein of William Carlos Williams’s poem “This is Just to Say” about plums:

I have oversudsed

the dishes

that were in

the dishwasher

and which

you were probably

needing

for dinner.

Forgive me

they were soapy

so soapy

and so clean.

Albee and Lahiri on writing

When Charlie Rose interviewed playwright Edward Albee this week, he asked him if the first thing mentioned in his obituary would be Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Sure, but it doesn’t mean it’s my best work, Albee said. Rose asked, What’s your best, then? “I don’t know,” Albee said matter-of-factly. “I haven’t written it yet.” Wouldn’t it be awful, he elaborated, to think that you’ve already written your best work?

Well, yeah.

Sure, as a writer, you can have your favorite novel or poem that you’ve penned, but the idea that you haven’t yet written your best is the greatest motivator to keep at the craft. With constant focus and practice, your writing can only get better. Well, I suppose it could get worse, but you’d have to be trying hard to fail, which would be sad.

Later in the same show, Rose interviewed novelist Jhumpa Lahiri who, in her softspoken, careful way, described how her writing comes largely from her role as observer. She was thoughtful and deliberate in her answers, and the long pauses before she spoke reminded me of William Safire’s On Language column in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. In this age of prepped talking heads with their talking points, he said, you rarely see anyone on television think anymore. Rose interpreted her pauses as discomfort, though Lahiri assured him that she enjoyed talking with him. “She’s thinking!” I yelled.

As a writer who won’t be invited to Rose’s table anytime soon, I couldn’t help but think how long it would take me to articulate an answer to one of his questions, like the one along the lines of “If it’s true your life informs your writing, does your writing also inform your life?” I’d need 10 minutes and some paper. Writers, after all, care about words; we’re afforded the luxury of thinking and planning what we write; but as a lot, we’re not the best public speakers. If you can embrace the pauses and wait us out though, we just might string together a nice sentence or two.

A January picnic

In an attempt to save my writing muscle, which is atrophying at an alarming rate, here I am with my first post, throwing my blog into the ring. After weeks of mulling it over, fretting over a name, and generally procrastinating to the point of ridiculousness, I decided today would be Post One.

Still, I may have been second guessing myself when I got on the bus to come home from work, because hey, this is putting yourself out there, when this woman boards the bus with a picnic basket. I live in New England. And it’s winter. Snow has blanketed the region. There is no reason for her to have a picnic basket in the middle of January. “Going on a picnic?” I ask. “I had to bring in food for a work party,” she tells me. I take it as a sign that I’ve picked the right name for my blog and that I’d better get this picnic started.