"That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise."--C.C. Baxter
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Cookie-Wise
My current "view from the blue" of the world...
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Touchstones
The last time I posted, I had just begun student teaching. Two months have passed. I miss blogging.
In the spirit of Sununu's touchstones, for the past several years I have been keeping track of all the passages I come across in poems, novels, and the like that strike me in some way. Often I record them because I find the language beautiful. When I saw this blog post by the fantastic Jhumpa Lahiri, then, I was immediately drawn.
She says everything I wish I could say. To quote one of my professors, "I love whenever great writing can describe how I feel better than I can."
from New York Times Opinionator
MARCH 17, 2012, 6:18 PM
My Life’s Sentences
In the spirit of Sununu's touchstones, for the past several years I have been keeping track of all the passages I come across in poems, novels, and the like that strike me in some way. Often I record them because I find the language beautiful. When I saw this blog post by the fantastic Jhumpa Lahiri, then, I was immediately drawn.
She says everything I wish I could say. To quote one of my professors, "I love whenever great writing can describe how I feel better than I can."
from New York Times Opinionator
MARCH 17, 2012, 6:18 PM
My Life’s Sentences
By JHUMPA LAHIRI
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.
I remember reading a sentence by Joyce, in the short story “Araby.” It appears toward the beginning. “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” I have never forgotten it. This seems to me as perfect as a sentence can be. It is measured, unguarded, direct and transcendent, all at once. It is full of movement, of imagery. It distills a precise mood. It radiates with meaning and yet its sensibility is discreet.
When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away. Rereading them, certain sentences are what greet me as familiars. You have visited before, they say when I recognize them. We encounter books at different times in life, often appreciating them, apprehending them, in different ways. But their language is constant. The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.
They remain the test, whether or not to read something. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.
Knowing — and learning to read in — a foreign tongue heightens and complicates my relationship to sentences. For some time now, I have been reading predominantly in Italian. I experience these novels and stories differently. I take no sentence for granted. I am more conscious of them. I work harder to know them. I pause to look something up, I puzzle over syntax I am still assimilating. Each sentence yields a twin, translated version of itself. When the filter of a second language falls away, my connection to these sentences, though more basic, feels purer, at times more intimate, than when I read in English.
The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response. Most days begin with sentences that are typed into a journal no one has ever seen. There is a freedom to this; freedom to write what I will not proceed to wrestle with. The entries are mostly quotidian, a warming up of the fingers and brain. On days when I am troubled, when I am grieved, when I am at a loss for words, the mechanics of formulating sentences, and of stockpiling them in a vault, is the only thing that centers me again.
Constructing a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: pressing the button, and watching something emerge. To write one is to document and to develop at the same time. Not all sentences end up in novels or stories. But novels and stories consist of nothing but. Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as the fuel. They are the cells, the individual stitches. Their nature is at once solitary and social. Sentences establish tone, and set the pace. One in front of the other marks the way.
My work accrues sentence by sentence. After an initial phase of sitting patiently, not so patiently, struggling to locate them, to pin them down, they begin arriving, fully formed in my brain. I tend to hear them as I am drifting off to sleep. They are spoken to me, I’m not sure by whom. By myself, I know, though the source feels independent, recondite, especially at the start. The light will be turned on, a sentence or two will be hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper, carried upstairs to the manuscript in the morning. I hear sentences as I’m staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing.
Over time, virtually each sentence I receive and record in this haphazard manner will be sorted, picked over, organized, changed. Most will be dispensed with. All the revision I do — and this process begins immediately, accompanying the gestation — occurs on a sentence level. It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving the forest any other way.
As a book or story nears completion, I grow acutely, obsessively conscious of each sentence in the text. They enter into the blood. They seem to replace it, for a while. When something is in proofs I sit in solitary confinement with them. Each is confronted, inspected, turned inside out. Each is sentenced, literally, to be part of the text, or not. Such close scrutiny can lead to blindness. At times — and these times terrify — they cease to make sense. When a book is finally out of my hands I feel bereft. It is the absence of all those sentences that had circulated through me for a period of my life. A complex root system, extracted.
Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can always reach out to smooth a stray hair. And yet, at a certain point, I must walk away, trusting them to do their work. I am left looking over my shoulder, wondering if I might have structured one more effectively. This is why I avoid reading the books I’ve written. Why, when I must, I approach the book as a stranger, and pretend the sentences were written by someone else.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of “Unaccustomed Earth,” “The Namesake” and “Interpreter of Maladies.”
This is the first article in Draft, a new series about the art and craft of writing.
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.
I remember reading a sentence by Joyce, in the short story “Araby.” It appears toward the beginning. “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” I have never forgotten it. This seems to me as perfect as a sentence can be. It is measured, unguarded, direct and transcendent, all at once. It is full of movement, of imagery. It distills a precise mood. It radiates with meaning and yet its sensibility is discreet.
When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away. Rereading them, certain sentences are what greet me as familiars. You have visited before, they say when I recognize them. We encounter books at different times in life, often appreciating them, apprehending them, in different ways. But their language is constant. The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.
They remain the test, whether or not to read something. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.
Knowing — and learning to read in — a foreign tongue heightens and complicates my relationship to sentences. For some time now, I have been reading predominantly in Italian. I experience these novels and stories differently. I take no sentence for granted. I am more conscious of them. I work harder to know them. I pause to look something up, I puzzle over syntax I am still assimilating. Each sentence yields a twin, translated version of itself. When the filter of a second language falls away, my connection to these sentences, though more basic, feels purer, at times more intimate, than when I read in English.
The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response. Most days begin with sentences that are typed into a journal no one has ever seen. There is a freedom to this; freedom to write what I will not proceed to wrestle with. The entries are mostly quotidian, a warming up of the fingers and brain. On days when I am troubled, when I am grieved, when I am at a loss for words, the mechanics of formulating sentences, and of stockpiling them in a vault, is the only thing that centers me again.
Constructing a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: pressing the button, and watching something emerge. To write one is to document and to develop at the same time. Not all sentences end up in novels or stories. But novels and stories consist of nothing but. Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as the fuel. They are the cells, the individual stitches. Their nature is at once solitary and social. Sentences establish tone, and set the pace. One in front of the other marks the way.
My work accrues sentence by sentence. After an initial phase of sitting patiently, not so patiently, struggling to locate them, to pin them down, they begin arriving, fully formed in my brain. I tend to hear them as I am drifting off to sleep. They are spoken to me, I’m not sure by whom. By myself, I know, though the source feels independent, recondite, especially at the start. The light will be turned on, a sentence or two will be hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper, carried upstairs to the manuscript in the morning. I hear sentences as I’m staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing.
Over time, virtually each sentence I receive and record in this haphazard manner will be sorted, picked over, organized, changed. Most will be dispensed with. All the revision I do — and this process begins immediately, accompanying the gestation — occurs on a sentence level. It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving the forest any other way.
As a book or story nears completion, I grow acutely, obsessively conscious of each sentence in the text. They enter into the blood. They seem to replace it, for a while. When something is in proofs I sit in solitary confinement with them. Each is confronted, inspected, turned inside out. Each is sentenced, literally, to be part of the text, or not. Such close scrutiny can lead to blindness. At times — and these times terrify — they cease to make sense. When a book is finally out of my hands I feel bereft. It is the absence of all those sentences that had circulated through me for a period of my life. A complex root system, extracted.
Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can always reach out to smooth a stray hair. And yet, at a certain point, I must walk away, trusting them to do their work. I am left looking over my shoulder, wondering if I might have structured one more effectively. This is why I avoid reading the books I’ve written. Why, when I must, I approach the book as a stranger, and pretend the sentences were written by someone else.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of “Unaccustomed Earth,” “The Namesake” and “Interpreter of Maladies.”
This is the first article in Draft, a new series about the art and craft of writing.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Good Poems for Hard Times
A while back I tried to read a poem every day from Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times, a hand-me-down from Kathleen. On my second day of teaching last week, though, the chaplain at my school gave me my very own good-poem-for-hard-times: "Read it on the bad days," he advised. Thought it was too good of a poem to pass up posting.
To be of use
by Marge Piercy
The work of the world is common as mud.
To be of use
by Marge Piercy
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
Love Interruption
Jack White just released a new single today, "Love Interruption," from his upcoming debut album Blunderbuss (which, as I just learned, is a kind of gun), available April 23. It's really good. Really dark.
I need to see It Might Get Loud.
I want love to
roll me over slowly
stick a knife inside me,
and twist it all around.
I want love to
grab my fingers gently
slam them in a doorway
put my face into the ground
I want love to
murder my own mother
and take her off to somewhere
like hell or up above.
I want love to
change my friends to enemies,
change my friends to enemies
and show me how it's all my fault.
I wont let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me
I wont let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me
Yeah I wont let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me anymore.
I want love to
walk right up and bite me
grab ahold of me and fight me
leave me dying on the ground.
And I want love to
split my mouth wide open and
cover up my ears,
and never let me hear a sound.
I want love to
forget that you offended me
or how you have defended me,
when everybody tore me down.
Yeah I want love to
change my friends to enemies,
change my friends to enemies
and show me how it's all my fault.
Yeah I wont let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me
I wont let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me
I wont let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me anymore.
I need to see It Might Get Loud.
I want love to
roll me over slowly
stick a knife inside me,
and twist it all around.
I want love to
grab my fingers gently
slam them in a doorway
put my face into the ground
I want love to
murder my own mother
and take her off to somewhere
like hell or up above.
I want love to
change my friends to enemies,
change my friends to enemies
and show me how it's all my fault.
I wont let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me
I wont let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me
Yeah I wont let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me anymore.
I want love to
walk right up and bite me
grab ahold of me and fight me
leave me dying on the ground.
And I want love to
split my mouth wide open and
cover up my ears,
and never let me hear a sound.
I want love to
forget that you offended me
or how you have defended me,
when everybody tore me down.
Yeah I want love to
change my friends to enemies,
change my friends to enemies
and show me how it's all my fault.
Yeah I wont let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me
I wont let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me
I wont let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me anymore.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Ruby Lee
Having recently sorted through all of my dad's records I acquired at Christmas (blog post on that process coming soon), I've been slowly getting acquainted with jazz, blues, and more from the '50s--back in the day of Gordo's prime, ha! So far, my favorite is B.B. King's "Ruby Lee" from his second album The Blues, released in 1958.
Take a listen!
Take a listen!
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Because Who Doesn't Love Arcade Fire?
Full hour episode of Austin City Limits with AF! Woohoo!
Watch Arcade Fire on PBS. See more from Austin City Limits.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Finally! A Trailer for Moonrise Kingdom!
I can't wait!!! Thanks to Kathleen for sending this my way. As she has perfectly noted, "All the classic Wes things are there - the monogrammed stationery, short declarative sentences, adults that act like children, children that act like adults, and Jason Schwartzman."
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