haiku 126
no Perseids yet —
just the Milky Way
and a million stars
Pen to Paper: Basho
I think it would be valuable to spend some time looking at the four greatest names in haiku: Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki. These haijin shaped haiku and set many of the standards we live by today. We’ll look at them chronologically.
First is Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). The link goes to a short biography and you can click through to some of his haiku at the top of the page.
In his indispensable book An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki, Harold G. Henderson tells us Basho created a new style of the poetry form renga. His first poem in this style set the stage for modern haiku:
Fiction: A Normal Evening
The couple walked out through the double-wide sliding door as a woman pushed an older man in a wheelchair into the building. The door closed, leaving the couple alone outside.
“Now what?” the man quietly asked his wife.
She considered a moment. “Let’s go to Tim’s Pizza.” It was a normal thing for them to do.
They ordered a hand-tossed Canadian bacon and mushroom pizza and root beers. The girl behind the counter smiled at them because she’d been working there just long enough to realize it was their usual order.
They talked of this and that as they ate, just like always. When they left the restaurant, he opened the car door for her, which he usually did. They stopped at Barnaby’s for a bottle of her favorite merlot. “Always keep that in stock for you,” Mr. Barnaby said with a smile. They smiled back and walked out to the car and drove home.
She turned the TV on as he opened the wine and poured it into a couple of glasses. He handed her one glass and sat on the couch next to her. His wine was at his left and his hand lay between them, next to hers but not touching, as usual. They watched a nature documentary and the news through the weather. Then she turned off the TV and they got ready for bed, as they always did at this hour.
They got in bed, shared a perfunctory kiss and said “ ‘Night.” She turned off the light and they lay together in the dark as they had since getting married. The end of a perfectly normal evening.
Until she said, “I’ve set the alarm for 5.”
And unlike any night in their lives together, tears spilled down his cheeks and he took a slow, deep breath to keep from sobbing. That had been their tacit agreement. “OK,” he said quickly.
They had to be back through the double-wide sliding doors at the hospital by 6. Her surgery was scheduled for 7.
Quotable 14
When an honest writer discovers an imposition it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any other course would render him unworthy of the public confidence.
– Mark Twain
haiku 125
lightning blazes
low on the horizon
under the Big Dipper
Pen to Paper: Mark Twain’s Writing Advice
Mark Twain is back in the news, not that he ever really left it. His unexpurgated autobiography is being published shortly, and I expect more than a few graveyards will hum with all the spinning some of the residents will be doing. (N.B.: I wrote the phrase “unexpurgated autobiography” before hunting up the NYT article that also uses it. Great minds, and all that.)
Twain had something to say about most everything, and he certainly did not spare his own field. He left us a great many thoughts on what makes a good story. Here is one collection of those thoughts and here is another. Finally, we have his masterful blast against novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Early on, Twain gives us twelve solid notions of what a writer should and should not do, and he makes note of how Cooper violated these points of literary order.
Enjoy, and make good use of what the old master taught us.
Fun with Spellcheck
I am editing a book for a friend; he recently found a few hundred letters to the editor that he wants me to turn into a book detailing his political philosophy. While working on that yesterday, I was trying to get the worst of the spelling errors out of the way. Some are his, and some are because we scanned his typed hard copy and ran it through an OCR program, which is always an iffy proposition.
The spellcheck comes to Khada-fy, and I get several options (none of which is to close up the two parts of the name) that read thusly:
Khayyam
Khalif
Khalid
Khazar
Khartoum
Dickhead
Some might argue, and persuasively, that this list provided all the alternatives I needed under the circumstances. I think, however, it better serves as a reminder that word processing programs have terribly limited, if occasionally intriguing, spelling capabilities. Proceed with caution.
Fiction: We All Scream
The digital clock slipped from 5:16 to 5:17, and I sighed. I sighed every day at that time, because in one minute – the clocks in the neighborhood were all synchronized – Mrs. Caperson would begin four minutes of scream therapy.
Four.
Minutes.
She had good lungs and a Teflon-coated throat. I couldn’t have done it, that’s for sure.
She had gone around to all the neighbors within earshot to say her therapist, Dr. Weingarten, recommended this practice for her nerves. We all wondered if the good doctor would recommend we scream back for our nerves, but I don’t know that anyone ever asked him. I didn’t anyway, that’s for sure.
Four minutes of synchronized screaming every day except holidays. Or maybe there was enough in-house noise on holidays we just couldn’t hear her. But that doesn’t seem very likely, considering Mrs. Caperson’s ability to attract attention.
And on account of her being a Caperson and all, none of the cops or the city fathers saw fit to tell her to put a sock in it. That’s where money gets you, especially if you’re thoughtful enough to live modestly in a middle-class neighborhood.
“One of these days,” I told Bud Forbish, the guy on the other side of us, “one of these days someone is going to kill that woman at precisely 5:17 p.m., and we won’t be any the wiser.”
Quotable 13
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
– Anton Chekhov
haiku 124
ignoring the phone
avoiding the clock
waiting for her call
NEKWE
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