I got this trick via Jim Krusoe, who attributes it to Carol Emshwiller. (Thanks, Jim and Carol!)
Writers of fiction: Take the first and last words of a piece, then put them together. The idea is that the resulting phrase might somehow relate to the whole. Here are mine.
The Watery Girl: “Something emerging.”
The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival (which is rough and will surely change): “Mim hands.”
Both, weirdly, work.
(Another post about what I eat for breakfast! Possible boredom ahead!)
I love Mark Bittman. I was sad when I learned of his stepping away from the Minimalist column, but he’s still around, and freer to opine. I’m loving him even more. Take, for instance, his opinionator blog post about McDonald’s oatmeal, from which I excerpt the following:
Others will argue that the McDonald’s version is more “convenient.” This is nonsense; in the time it takes to go into a McDonald’s, stand in line, order, wait, pay and leave, you could make oatmeal for four while taking your vitamins, brushing your teeth and half-unloading the dishwasher.
(Thanks, by the way, to Jennifer New at Mothers of Invention for sharing Bittman’s post, which I might have missed.) Bittman’s comment made me laugh, but it’s also kinda creepy because I think he’s been surveilling my home. This describes most mornings in my house, except that he didn’t mention the three-year-old on the step ladder, helping make the “avena con leche y miel” which is what we call it, or “avena,” which was one of the first Spanish words my child learned. (I’ll explain why another time.)
Anyway, yeah, what Bittman said. Oatmeal has gotten a bad rap, and it’s easy to make, and good for you. Eat it! You can even throw in a handful of cooked brown rice for extra chewy texture. Mmm, oatmeal!
I just read an interesting article in the NY Times about marginalia. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about “reading as a writer” and what that means, how interactive and not passive it can/should be… yet I have trouble writing in books, myself. So I take a lot of notes, recopy passages, and do my work that way. Maybe I need to rethink this, and break the water of the pristine book.
Today’s beautiful song… As much as Tom Waits was (and is still) a balladeer, it seems somehow accidental that he wrote and sang this song. I love the 1970s introspection, like he’s talking to himself… I wish I could have that time machine and go back and sit next to the piano for this one.
I love the way this song makes me feel. I am so glad not to be lonely. Hoping that anyone who’s lonely today will feel less lonely listening to this gorgeous little dream.
Tonight, my three-year-old daughter, who almost never watches TV, stared at the celebrations in Egypt on a big screen TV at a restaurant, sound muted, with Thai karaoke music playing in the background. In Fairborn, Ohio. At the restaurant owned by the Malaysian couple who catered her parents’ wedding.
I was busy eating curry laksa, chatting with my mother and stepfather, impressed with how still my daughter was–eating a spring roll, sitting across the table from me. Usually it’s hard for her to sit very long at a restaurant. Then I turned around and saw what she was watching. I asked my mother (who was sitting next to her) if the images were disturbing. No. Just a lot of people jumping, talking passionately, but in this room, strangely silent, except for the ever-present crawl.
(Disclaimer: For many years, I had cable TV and watched plenty of junk. I did plenty of surfing. Now I just don’t have time for it. I do still watch movies, and “Top Chef,” and various other high and low brow items I can find on DVD or iTunes, but canceling cable was much less painful than I anticipated. From what I read about TV and kids, it seemed wise to have my daughter avoid TV for the first years. It has been a somewhat exhausting choice. I’m not judging how other parents handle this issue. Like everything about life, these decisions need to make sense and work for the people involved, and the choices are very personal. Missing TV, I’ve also missed a whole lot of the visual imagery of our moment in time. I’m not sure how I feel about that.)
Then my daughter said, “Look, there’s somebody with a cat!” It was an advertisement for catfood. I am proud and ambivalent that she doesn’t really know what an ad is. But I suppose the idea of “cat” is much more relevant to her life at this point than Hosni Mubarak resigning his presidency in Egypt. (And as I type this, my newest cat mewling offstage, my view might be similarly small, focussed on whether she will wake my child, or whether she’s caught a mouse. Meanwhile, a grandeur I can’t fully appreciate emerges across the world.)
Next on TV came Obama, again mute, and stately. My daughter might have recognized him, because she has a hand-me-down teeshirt from a friend with his image, and the slogan, “Yes We Did.”
But the thing she mentioned was the cat.
Since Biology class in high school, I’ve had a periodic fascination with fruit flies. Even the name, Drosophilia melongaster, is poetic. See how the letters lilt and unroll from the words… Discovering the elegance in their genetic logic, for whatever reason, a sort of reverence for the fruit fly stuck with me. Mmm, I can still smell the ether in the jars, still recall putting them to sleep…
The other day I read about a previously unseen characteristics of their wings. Far from clear, they are iridescent and gloriously hued. There’s a good lesson here about a simple change in perspective, and what doors that change can open. From the article:
“You hold the wing up against the light, so you can see the veins,” said study co-author Daniel Janzen, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “If you’re looking through a microscope, you try to get a clear view behind the wing. It’s the antithesis of getting wing color.”
The researchers studied wings under microscopes, against black backgrounds. But once Janzen, who breeds wasps for his research on caterpillar-parasite symbioses, started to look, colors could be seen by the naked eye as wings passed over insects’ black bodies.
“They flash like little diamonds,” he said.
So now: how to take that new, open view and apply it to writing, to life? How to see the hidden colors, unveil the glory of what is in front of me?
(The following might be the final paragraph of The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival. It will make no sense without the novel that comes before it. It might not even make sense with the novel that comes before it. But what the heck. It’s my blog, I can post if I want to.)
Ladies and gentlemen. Jettison what you can recreate. Take the essentials: bolts, wire, rope. Other parts can be found elsewhere. Take what you most need. Take the things you can use: arms, hands, legs, and sometimes other parts. Hands.
What a day. What a lilting, bourgeois opera, but I have yet to write the libretto. The highlight:
1) I finished my novel today. The ice storm helped, offering time at home, and sound effects. That crackle of ice on limb on wind opened something and let me let it be done. The end of the story was very simple. Ends are weird, and I don’t know if this is the right one, but it came clear and natural, so I will let it be for now. There’s still a passel of work to do, but I got to the end of the story! This novel took me ages, what feel like lifetimes, to finish–the first note I have with the germ of idea is from 2001, and I’ve been writing it since 2004. But for now I’m done. In a way.
To celebrate, I opened the week-and-a-half-old bottle of wine from the fridge (a very good wine that my friend Kurt, owner of Emporium, recommended) and put on The Black Rider by Tom Waits. (Sounds from Tom Waits have been partially to blame for the novel.) My husband celebrated with me; my daughter said she didn’t like the music but didn’t insist I turn it off.
After dinner, I noticed the dripping from the picture window (a leak, we need to figure out why, and have it fixed) was tap tap tapping with a tad more force than it had been this afternoon into the yogurt containers there to catch the drips…still is, but now fortified by towels, and other vessels to catch the water…saw a thin line of shine, so just in case, I emptied the cabinet below of myriad cups, saucers, tea, cocoa, and other important detritus…all dry…so for now, all I can do it sit back and wait to see if this really is the storm of the season, and see if the power will go out.
And probably best to eat some ice cream, which is still frozen. That’s the most obvious bourgeois bit, the ice cream. Because I’m not trapped in an ice-covered wonderland without it.
But I just heard a really creaky sound outside…
Rebecca Kuder 