crappy writing

There were a lot of official and unofficial traditions at my high school. The Washington Post covered some of our unofficial traditions. Of course, it came out after some perky staff member wrote a note to the editor about Mad girls being gamma girls not alpha or beta (i.e., mean girls). But, one of the unofficial traditions was posting your college acceptance and rejection letters. I enjoyed the tradition a lot more as a underclassman. Our headmistress drilled it into us that we would fail more times than we succeeded– that failure is a necessary and productive component of life. Implicit was the concept that there would be some success. The official motto is “Festina lente”. One of the unofficial mottos is “function in disaster. finish in style. remain calm at the center of your being.” Oh, a single success or acceptance would be welcome right now. Not that being kicked continually while one’s down doesn’t have its own satisfactions. In the spirit of the tradition of posting rejection letters, here it goes:

“Thanks for checking in. A couple of us in the newsroom have given
your latest script a careful look and I appreciate your work on revisions. The piece contains some good descriptive and creative writing. However, we still feel that the essay doesn’t establish and “flesh out” a clear theme, in a compelling way. So we’ll need to pass on this submission.

“Thank you again for your interest in providing commentary material to WFKU and you’re welcome to submit a future piece for consideration.”

My favorite part is the modifier, some, before “good descriptive and creative writing”. So, “we” can rule this venue out. C’est la vie. Or, perhaps it would be more funny to inundate them with lots of my craptastic writing. “We”‘ll see.

My idea of a good day is one without any blatant rejection. Call me a weakling.

favorite words

Today at writing group, we revealed our favorite words as the conclusion to an exercise assigned at our last meeting. I hadn’t done any of my homework, including this, but I’m pretty good at winging it. I scribbled “gargantuan” at the top of my blank page just so I wouldn’t look like a total slacker.

But, do they mean “favorite” as in frequency of use or “favorite” as it sends a shiver of delight down my spine? My verbal frequency list would be embarrassing: “dude” and “ridiculous” would have places of prominence. My verbal ticks should belong to a high-school dropout, but they’re mine mine mine.

I tend to notice words I loathe over words I adore; my glass is never half full. For instance, “very” and “nice” irk me. They demonstrate linguistic (ultimately intellectual) sloth. I prefer “lovely”, “delightful” and “splendid”; however, as a rule, “fantastic”, “super” and “cool” miff me. (Exception: these words work well when being sarcastic.) And, ye gods, “unique” infuriates me. What exactly does it mean? Why not “singular” or “one of a kind”?

Words that thrill: “chap” and “fellow” are charming alternatives to “guy”. “Charming” works. “Cordially” beats “sincerely”. I’m inordinately fond of “fond”. I like “cheery” too. I find “snazzy” all jazzy. I am a minimalist: pith and precision keep language fresh. Using big words for the sake of big words is tacky, although I fall prey to it sometimes.

Freshly coined words delight me. “Craptastic” makes a girl smile while relieving frustration. I have a deepening appreciation for “splendiferous”.

Writing this ditty has made me realize that good writing isn’t about perfect words but about perfect fits because words, like their authors, are social critters. Loner. See, “loner” doesn’t work by itself. Favoritism limits thought. But, it was interesting to note the aural and letter patterns in our lists. The word’s sound matters. There is a physicality and dexterity to language that number people take into account. Precise diction is an art that insures clear communication and provides a rewarding challenge for a writer.

Other words (a growing list inspired by my commentor (is that a word?)):
enchanting
snarky
rambunctious
raucous

I’m serious

I declare May 1st a day of writing. (It’s openings like this that make my blog so popular and reader friendly.) Get this– I’m working on pieces about my family, sewing, home and laughter. There’s one word for this blog and my writing in general: sexy. Good luck containing the excitement! I’m gearing for 10 pages of material for my writer’s group I’ve already got six written.

Here’s a finished piece I’ve submitted (it’s a rewrite after talking to the head hauncho). I removed it.

smart people

I saw Smart People after reading all the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. It isn’t spectacular or reality-altering. But, it is thought provoking and well written. Its soundtrack is excellent.

Critics panned the script for being too ambitious. I prefer big to safe so I was fine with all the ideas bouncing around on the screen. The movie is like brown bread with high fiber content, it’ll stay with me longer. The film’s beauty is the protagonist’s transformation from bitter to alive. There’s mystery to the tipping points that lead to growth.

The writing is taut. The dialogue was witty and believable, which is a tough feat. My favorite phrase was “you, litigious little shit”: it’s believable and alliterative. However, the critics’ discussion of the elevated vocabulary left me a little disappointed; they didn’t use a single word I didn’t know. (Silly critics, that ain’t no esoteric diction.) And, the actors manage profound moments sans sentimentality. The scene where Chuck and Ellen Page’s character resolve their conflict is deep and comical. Ellen Page’s character functions much like Jacques in Twelfth Night. The characters hide from their humanity; they use their intellects to buffer and justify their shortcomings.

You heart develops an ache for the characters and their prisons built of their own device. The controlling idea is that after a certain point, pain is a choice. A person develops the habit of pain and alienation. There is a rawness inherent to relationship, and a person can choose to avoid it. It reminded me of the CSL quotation: “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

It is a good matinee.

poetry slam

I yawned during my run today. I actually yawned while running; this is unprecedented. As the yawn indicates, the run lacked inspiration. It was just one of the runs that makes me appreciate the magical ones.

I made nanaimo bars and key lime bars. The nanaimo bars are dynamite; I took them to a friend’s apartment so I wouldn’t be tempted. The key lime bars are okay but they have a wonky after taste– they’re from a boxed mix.

I had a great time with a friend tonight at a Poetry Slam. Some of the poetry was amazing. “We all break too easily.” My friend described the poetry as intense: the subjects were incest, rape, racism, abuse, classism, prejudice, sex, love. The intensity is in the details. I was in awe of art: what other venue does this facet of reality get addressed. The survivors get the final say. The poets described and diagnosed the evil and brokeness so well, but their solutions of self- esteem and smiling left me wanting more. Yet, it seems as the church we steer away from the train wrecks that these men and women swan dived into. I found the experience life affirming in that all the intense things were affronts to our innate beauty. That evil doesn’t have the last word. Art is good.

On Poetry: Pinsky’s cheeky q&a

This piece on Slate is entertaining and informative. He uses poetry to answer questions about the relevance and role of poetry in contemporary culture. He dispells the rumor that lyrics are modern poetry and other urban myths. Here’s an excerpt:

7. But what about living American poets—how come they don’t write about politics or current events?

C.K. Williams, “Fear”

1.
At almost the very moment an exterminator’s panel truck,
the blowup of a cockroach airbrushed on its side,
pulls up at a house across from our neighborhood park,
a battalion of transient grackles invades the picnic ground,
and the odd thought comes to me how much in their rich sheen,
their sheer abundance, their hunger without end, if I let them
they can seem akin to roaches; even their curt, coarse cry:
mightn’t those subversive voices beneath us sound like that?
Roaches, though … Last year, our apartment house was overrun,
insecticides didn’t work, there’d be roaches on our toothbrushes
……and combs.
The widower downstairs—this is awful—who’d gone through
……deportation
and the camps and was close to dying now and would sometimes
……faint,
was found one morning lying wedged between his toilet and a wall,
naked, barely breathing, the entire surface of his skin alive
with the insolent, impervious brutes, who were no longer daunted
by the light, or us—the Samaritan neighbor had to scrape them off.

2.
Vermin, poison, atrocious death: what different resonance they have
in our age of suicide as armament, anthrax, resurrected pox.
Every other week brings new warnings, new false alarms;
it’s hard to know how much to be afraid, or even how.
The second world war was barely over, in annihilated cities
children just my age still foraged for scraps of bread,
and we were being taught that our war would be nuclear,
that if we weren’t incinerated, the flesh would rot from our bones.
By the time Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off over Cuba,
rockets primed and aimed, we were sick with it, insane.
And now these bewildering times, when those whose interest is
to consternate us hardly bother to conceal their purposes.
Yes, we have antagonists, and some of their grievances are just,
but is no one blameless, are we all to be combatants, prey?

3.
We have offended very grievously, and been most tyrannous,
wrote Coleridge, invasion imminent from radical France;
the wretched plead against us … then, Father and God,
spare us, he begged, as I suppose one day I will as well.
I still want to believe we’ll cure the human heart, heal it
of its anxieties, and the mistrust and barbarousness they spawn,
but hasn’t that metaphorical heart been slashed, dissected,
cauterized and slashed again, and has the carnage relented, ever?
Night nearly, the exterminator’s gone, the park deserted,
the swings and slides my grandsons play on forsaken.
In the windows all around, the flicker of the television news:
more politics of terror; war, threats of war, war without end.
A half-chorus of grackles still ransacks the trash;
in their intricate iridescence they seem eerily otherworldly,
negative celestials, risen from some counter-realm to rescue us.
But now, scattering towards the deepening shadows, they go, too.

Frank Bidart, “To the Republic”
Ann Winters, “The Displaced of Capital”

futility as art

Another excruciating day filled with futile emails and interviews, I’m developing a deep regard for addicts; they’re on to something. About three minutes into the interview (really before the interview), I knew the position was no fit for me, and I became conscious of the mechanics of the interview and conversation. In my head, a meta-conversation dialogue ran parallel to the actual. My reaction to the interview is this: I did not read Plato in Greek to clean a bitchy woman’s toilets. Although toilet scrubbing skills would serve me better than critical thought. I cannot see the big picture in this other than learning to regret my education and brain, recognizing them for the albatross they are. I wish my mom had raised cheerleaders. There’s a job market for cheerleaders.

Right now, I need the phoenix from the ashes motif to show up in my life. The remnant imagery from Isaiah, the pruned bush, the beaten but not defeated attitude of the psalmist. You know hope and faith. So, of course, I turned to some poetry.

In high school, one all school assembly a year was dedicated to Emily Dickinson and her poetry because of some of the English faculty cult-like adoration. I enjoyed the assembly, and am getting drawn more to her poetry and ideas. Looking at her drafts of a poem is awe-inspiring. Her poetry provides companionship and consolation.

280
(680)

Each Life Converges to some Centre-
Expressed- or still-
Exists in every Human Nature
A Goal-

Embodied scarcely to itself- it may be-
Too fair
For Credibility’s presumption
To mar-

Adored with caution- as a Brittle Heaven-
To reach
Were hopeless, as the Rainbow’s Raiment
To touch-

Yet persevered toward- surer- for the Distance-
How high-
Unto the Saints’ slow diligence-
The Sky-

Ungained- it may be- by a Life’s low Venture-
But then-
Eternity enable the endeavoring
Again.

305
(749)
All but Death, can be Adjusted-
Dynasties repaired-
Systems-settled in their Sockets-
Citadels- dissolved-

Wastes of Lives- resown with Colors
By Succeeding Springs-
Death- unto itself- Exception-
Is Exempt from Change

i am in need of music

CS Lewis wrote, “We read to know that we are not alone.” Today these poems softened the terrain that lies between a rock and a hard place.

My favorite Bishop is one hell of a poet. Her name is Elizabeth. More people would attend church if all bishops were as talented as she. Both of these poems are considered to be in the top 500 contemporary poems in the English Language. If you read them out loud, you’re in for a treat. They’re poetry in every sense.

Today was a day in desperate need of art. As I was driving to an interview, I realized that the single consolation to having a hard life right now is the fabulous soundtrack that comes with it. I was listening to Rachel Yamaguchi’s “Wore Me Down”, thinking about how apropos the chorus is; the song made the day ache less. Therefore, I present to you Bishop’s sonnet, describing music’s solace.

I Am in Need of Music

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

Elizabeth Bishop

I studied the next poem in a Contemporary Poetry class I took my first year of college. By recommending the class, I almost lost some friends who took me up on my suggestion. Apparently, I’m one of the few people who loved it. In the middle of the semester, they’d ask me incredulously, “What exactly did you like about this class?” This poem and about every other one in the entire friggin class. And, then I came across it again in the movie, “In Her Shoes.” It is no mistake that “art” is in the title: the craft is stunning as is her juxtaposition. Her facetious tone and playful manner are genius with such a dark subject. This villanelle is brilliant, disturbing and true: it’s literature.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

“The Law That Marries All Things”

Off the top of my head, my favorite parts of being southern are: Walker Percy’s novels, Wendell Berry’s poetry, Flannery O’Connor’s essays, Eudora Welty’s stories, Carson McCuller’s melancholia. Perhaps, a person need not be southern to appreciate these magnificent writers, but I’m hard pressed to imagine a life-long New Yorker interact with this poem’s truth as a farmer would.

Like introducing a new beau to your friends, loaning a loved book is scary but exhilirating. Wendell Berry’s poetry gives as much pleasure as sipping bourbon and discussing life, literature and love with a lifelong friend. Enjoy:

The Law That Marries All Things

1.
The cloud is free only
to go with the wind.

The rain is free
only in falling.

The water is free only
in its gathering together,

in its downward courses,
in its rising into the air.

2.
In law is rest
if you love the law,
if you enter, singing, into it
as water in its descent.

3.
Or song is truest law,
and you must enter singing;
it has no other entrance.

It is the great chorus
of parts. The only outlawry
is in division.

4.
Whatever is singing
is found, awaiting the return
of whatever is lost.

5.
Meet us in the air
over the water,
sing the swallows.

Meet me, meet me,
the redbird sings,
here here here here.

– Wendell Berry

lil nibbles

Rob Sheffield’s love is a mix tape is an entertaining read: well-crafted, hilarious and, at times, profound.

Here are some nibbles:

On “Whatever doesn’t kill you…”:

“It’s the same with people who say, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying (190).”

On kindness:

I was helpless in trying to return people’s kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that’s for sure. Cruelty isn’t that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they wanted to steal some money, nothing personal. That’s the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn’t make me feel stupid. If anything it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid.

Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don’t live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don’t burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don’t know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don’t need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can’t. I found myself forced to let go of all kinds of independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people’s psychic hearts (166-7).

On having a loud, embarrassing family:

…. At any wedding we attend, my family is the problem table, the one everybody gradually drifts away from out of self-preservation. It’s a proud family tradition. Now this was our wedding, and nobody could stop us. Giving us a crate of champagne and a dance floor was like handing a madman the keys to a 747 and saying, “Now, seriously, dude, don’t crash it. Promise? (84)

Even if he weren’t as funny as David Sedaris, his use of commas is praise worthy.