PUGGY'S HILL

My love for the Israeli writer David Grossman is great. Ever since I discovered his novel See Under: Love, I have considered him a personal pet of mine - even though I have not read enough of his other work. (Kelly Link did give me a copy of his YA novel The ZigZag Kid, which is terrific.) My love is renewed as I read his essay about Bruno Schultz in a recent New Yorker, and came upon this (a reflection on being a first novelist - or, as we say in the specfic field, a "young writer"):

A new writer is sometimes like a new baby in the family. He arrives from the unknown, and his family has to find a way to connect with him, to make him a little less "dangerous" in his newness and mystery. The relatives lean over the infant's crib, peer at him closely, and say, "Look, look, he has Uncle Jacob's nose! His chin is exactly like Aunt Malka's! Something similar happens when you first become an author. Everyone rushes to tell you who has influenced you, from whom you have learned, and, of course, from whom you have stolen.

We went last week - or was it the week before? or sometime before that...? - to the Irish Repertory Theater to see The Yeats Project, which 2-night spree deliasherman has brilliantly summarized here and here.

I was not as moved by The Countess Cathleen as Delia was - until they got to the final lines, which utterly break my heart:

Tell them who walk upon the floor of peace
That I would die and go to her I love;
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.

Particularly poignant that they are spoken by Cathleen's foster mother (nursemaid). (I had meant to put this up for Mother's Day, but forgot in the weekend's flurry.)

I wonder if Dylan Thomas loved them, too?
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower . . . .

Really, we'd be watching these OK plays - listening, really, as they're solid verse without much action - and every few minutes a full, gorgeous unknown bit of Yeatsian glory would pop out......

Well, as T.S. Eliot said, "Yeats had nobody; we had Yeats."

An anonymous someone is handing out million dollar checks for scholarships for women & minorities, mostly to state schools. One check came with this note:

“It is hoped that this will make a substantial difference to your students during these challenging times, enabling a more confident, sharper focus on their studies with improved career and life prospects.” -- NYTimes, 4/25/09

Oh, my, yes. That's it.

British poet Ruth Padel's grandmother, Nora Barlow, was Charles Darwin's granddaughter and edited his letters. Barlow lived to 104, and Padel visited her often:

“I was looking after her one rainy Cambridge summer when she was pushing 100,” Ms. Padel said of her grandmother. “She had lost her short-term memory, but her long-term memory was very keen. She politely asked me what I was working on, which at the time was my Ph.D. thesis at Oxford, about images of emotion in Greek poetry. ‘That’s very interesting,’ she said, and then started talking about Darwin’s book about the expression of emotion in man and animals. Five minutes later she’d ask me again and she’d have a completely different association with Darwin. It was like talking to a highly intelligent drunken ghost." -- NYTimes, 4/18/09

I now want to write a story about talking to a highly intelligent drunken ghost. Thank you, Ruth Padel, for reminding us that inspiration for fantastical fiction is always waiting for us in the wonders and grit of everyday life.

Here's a photo!

Also, did you see the NTimes profile on Michelle O's cousin the Rabbi? Capers Funnye is in the "Hebrew Israelite" movement - a fascinating chapter of African-American history & culture all by itself - and also studied at a mainstream Jewish Spertus Institute. He leads a Hebrew Israelite congregation in Chicago. My favorite bit from the terrific article by Zev Chafets:
On one of the days I was there, in early February, I was the only white Jew in the shul, and an old guy in front of me kept turning around and showing me the right page. There’s a nudnik like him in every shul I’ve ever been to.

I forgave him, though, during the Torah service, when a young man faltered over the blessings and looked mortified. “Not your fault, young man,” the nudnik said. “The fire of the Torah burns so hot to where sometimes it just confuses your mind.”

Oh, yeah!

Delia & I are home now, and realizing we were so focused on getting my Mom's house Pesadikhe, we totally forgot to make sure we had any food when we got home! Shopping lists have now been made, and recipes dug out. We are doing half-measures (don't ask, Mom!) but trying to be strict about what we're eating for the remaining 6 days. It's an annual Spiritual and Physical Discipline I like to practice. Almost everything has to be prepared from scratch, from a limited set of ingredients. If I lived like this year-round, I'd surely weigh less and be healthier, too. I always watch what I eat (and don't have much of a sweet tooth), but I'm a big Grazer, and my Passover snacking options are limited to Fruit & Nuts.... Every year I think I should at least make a stab at it. But it's Work, and I never can. At least this is an 8-day period when I am supremely Conscious of what I eat, and that carries a little.

It also means I get to tell my favorite Matzah joke again! (Just consider me the annoying uncle who asks each year if you've heard this one, and ignores you if you say, YES!):

So (famous blind musician) Ray Charles goes to a Passover Seder, and they hand him a big square piece of matzah. He holds onto it for a moment . . . .
. . . and then exclaims,
"Who wrote this shit?"

Old friends are The Best. Many hours spent last night with "Isabel, who listened & ironed" (isabelswift) when I was trying to write Swordspoint. (I'll never forget stomping through Central Park with her on a pretty day, worrying about how the novel should start, and she talked about the beginnings of operas: "'Carmen, Carmen, oh, that Carmen -- Why look, here she comes!'" It worked.) She fed me chicken on gorgeous Italian pottery plates. We made pomegranate syrup & Pellegrino fizz. We talked about her projects, and we talked about mine. We talked about the Washington Post's "Date Lab" column, and how to kindly say you won't quote on a novel unless you're really blown away by it, even if it's by a person you like a lot . . . I looked at her and said urgently, "Could you please go back 20 years and tell me that now I never go on another blind date, and instead have to worry about fighting off people wanting me to blurb their books?"

I'm once again stuck on a novel opening - the voice, this time - and also working on 2 stories & a script simultaneously. Out came the Boyfriend similes: "You can date them all, but in the end, figure out which one will really be there for you for the long run." Turns out she's never read libba_bray's divinely wonderful (and accurate) piece, Writing a Novel: a Love Story - so, as I was looking it up to send her, I've linked to it here, in case you haven't either.

I've loved the work of Damon Runyon for years - maybe even before I saw Guys & Dolls (5 times) at summer camp. I cited his Broadway underworld characters as an influence on Swordspoint, which only made sense to a few (are you one of them?). Some years ago I pulled out my battered old copy (my dad's originally) of Runyon short stories for Delia, and she was so enchanted that she read me nearly all of them aloud. I know. You haven't lived til you've heard her Nicely-Nicely Jones. So much did she love that guy that she put him in her nice little kid novel, Changeling: the Producer of Broadway is, in fact, a (magical) Runyon character.

Now that Broadway's reviving Guys & Dolls, the New Yorker's published a terrific piece by Adam Gopnik on him, which neatly nails both Runyon's appeal and his technique - which has almost everything to do with language: "Like Wodehouse, whom he in some ways resembles, Runyon inherited a comedy of morals and turned it into a comedy of sounds, language playing for its own sake." The narrator of my coming-out-any-year-now story, "The Duke of Riverside," is my attempt to do a Riverside Runyon voice: "the unchanging, perpetually nameless and anxious-eager Narrator, with his warily formal diction and his cautious good manners.... The Narrator is, crucially, one of the lowest-status figures in Runyon’s bicameral world, where the petty hustlers and horseplayers who haunt Lindy’s by day are set against their sinister opposites, hit men and gangsters, who mostly hail from Brooklyn and Harlem and arrive at night." (and now that I've read this article, I'm not at all sure I succeeded, and it is taking all my strength - and Delia's iron advice - not to demand that Ellen Datlow give me the ms. back so I can rewrite it....).

Also: don't miss Delia's more than somewhat excellent post on pitching your novel to editors (or, I would add, not boring someone silly when they politely ask you what your book's about. Just sayin').

My dad sent me the link to this "This I Believe" essay, I like it enough to pass it on to you.

"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy . . . .

"Who reads this shit?"

OK, in the actual joke it's "Who wrote it?" - but that's not my punchline for this post. See, it's like this:

On Saturday we went to a new play at Vital about the loving relationship of two adult sisters, one of whom gets cancer, and the other has to decide whether or not to pursue her mid-life dream of being a Writer, which involves taking a grueling grad school degree from a Bigshot Writer. She works hard, even beating out the hipster guy who wins prizes for stories that essentially come down to "Will my protagonist get laid?" (which, having now read a ton of submissions to various places, I am here to tell you is what a shocking percentage are about. Yawn. But that's another post....) . . . and her reward, her big marker of success, is that her mentor recommends her stuff to a prestigious literary Little Magazine. Which, after many edits & revisions, publishes her story. I suspect only the dying sister reads it. Though possibly she dies first.

The next day, Guy Kay (an old pal from our mutual Struggling Writer days) sends me this from Harper's (read it and laugh so hard you'll snork. I particularly like "This sentence is short, not because it is brief—which it is—but because it has few words.") Very cheering. But.

So here's the thing: What made me - and most people I know - want to be writers is that we loved to read. We read a lot. We wanted to write the kinds of books we loved to read.

Schools are full of grad students whose highest goal seems to be getting published in small literary magazines with minute circulations. But have they actually read those magazines themselves first? Did they love reading them?

I'm probably being an idiot here, but I've already written the post, and it seems a waste of time to delete it now. Also, it gives me a chance to offer you the link to the Colson Whitehead piece.

from eegatland who got it from sovay

Grab the book nearest you. Right now. Turn to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post that sentence along with these instructions in your LiveJournal. Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

"Poor things, I thought, sweltering in their robes and veils!"
-- Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day

It's too bad I'm so scrupulously honest, as both the 4th & 6th sentences on p. 56 are much more interesting.

Actually, the whole reason this book was sitting on my desk so long after I finished it was that I was planning to type out a couple of passages for you here. Clearly, it is meant to be This passage is set in 1921; the narrator, Agnes Shanklin, a schoolteacher from Cleveland (whose sister, a missionary, was a friend of "Lawrence of Arabia"), observes some chitchat amongst British players in the Cairo Peace Conference:

"Arnold," Miss Bell was telling Colonel Wilson, "when we have made Mesopotamia a model state, there won't be an Arab in Syria or Palestine who won't want to be part of it, but they will never accept direct rule...."
( Read more... )

Miss Bell's first line comes directly from Gertrude Bell's actual writings - and I bet a lot else here does, too!

I also loved Mary's narrator ruminating on p. 137:
"Why do we travel, really? If we are of a thoughtful nature, we may wish to improve our minds, to examine the manners and customs of others . . . But is it really an education that we yearn to acquire when we travel? Or - be honest, now - do we more sincerely desire souvenirs? What tourist returns with lighter bags than those he packed at home?"

Ouch. She's got me there, dead to rights.

Well, now I can put the book away.

jonquil tells us all about Bricktop (and not the one you're thinking of....this is the one with the custom silver-handled 5-inch blade that did for Long Charley).