If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He’s not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he’s really needed.
– Vaclav Havel
Quotable 83
haiku 194
season’s first snow –
young dog usurps
straw bale shelter
Pen to Paper: One Writer’s Life
I have read a few things – a very few things – by Vaclav Havel. I don’t remember what they were, though. I read them because he wrote them, and I knew who he was, and when you respect someone you are inclined to read at least a little of what he has written.
Havel was one of those rare, shining creatures – a writer whose words made an enormous difference in his own lifetime – that the rest of us scribes admire and, in our weaker moments, envy. He was a playwright who became a dissident and helped to lead his people from life under the Soviet yoke to one of self-determination, and who led then as president of his country. That’s a heck of a story arc, but few of us would care to emulate his years in prisons and a labor camp, no matter how many books we might sell afterward.
He is gone now, but his words and his example remain for us always.
Author’s Note: Nothing This Week
Sorry, readers, but there’s no new story this week. Too much work and too much of a cold. I’m going to try to have a good Christmas story for you this time next week, so check back.
Meantime, here’s Catsignal’s 2009 Christmas story for you to enjoy.
Quotable 82
You can revise crap. You can’t revise nothing. Now get in there and write some crap!
– Saundra Mitchell
haiku 193
near the graveyard
The Turtles are
happy together
Pen to Paper: Revisions
A confession (and, simultaneously, an undignified boast): I was always that kid in school who did a perfect or near-perfect first and only draft of a writing assignment. After years of voracious reading, I knew how sentences should be constructed because I had seen so many of them, and I was a good speller. From handwritten work through my typewriter years, I did one neat, well-crafted version and handed it in.
I despised the occasional assignment which required a messy, marked-up first draft and then the revised, neat, finished paper. I would always write what I needed to and then reverse engineer a rough draft to satisfy my teacher’s pedanticism. Such, then, was the state of my abilities (and my ego).
After getting a word processor, though, and discovering the endless joys of painlessly changing a word to improve a sentence, and of moving entire paragraphs around, I have become an inveterate revisionist reviser editor of my own work.
And that is how the best work is produced. The writer must go back through his story and make certain that every word, every concept is as it should be. Sometimes this will be a simple process; other times, it will mean rewriting the story essentially from scratch.
Posted in Pen to Paper
Tagged Charles Dickens, draft, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Leo Tolstoy, Pen to Paper, revision, Roy Peter Clark, Thomas Jefferson
Occupy: An Arrest in Los Angeles
Take good note of this first-person account of being arrested at an Occupy Movement event in Los Angeles. Note that the brave, dedicated men in blue did what they could to inflict violence and pain and humiliation on unarmed, peaceful people whose crime was sitting down and exercising their First Amendment rights.
Three points:
1) The men and women who nearly collapsed the global economy are still at it, still employed by organizations deemed too big to fail, still receiving enormous paychecks and bonuses.
2) Those who peacefully protest against the oligarchy are brutalized and given the maximum sentences possible for misdemeanors. The protestors are dangerous to the economic elites, and what the elites order the police to do is a direct measure of their fear.
3) That the police commit such acts of barbarity shows us that they are no longer members of the communities they are sworn to serve and protect; they are militarized in mind and body, and all they care about is taking down the enemy. By which they mean us.
Fiction: Some Slight Provision
A uniformed officer backed through the door to the detective division. He turned around and everyone could see he was carrying a box.
“Detectives Okuno and Haycock?” he called. “Here’s that little present for you.”
“Presents are supposed to be wrapped, Pinkus,” Haycock said.
“Actually,” Pinkus said, “it’s a lot of presents. How many wallet snatchings are you working in the financial district?”
“Twenty-seven,” Okuno said.
The officer set the box on Haycock’s desk. “Well, here are twenty-seven wallets, so you’re covered.”
Quotable 81
Let us withdraw from the cold and barren world of prosaic fact if only for a season; that we may warm ourselves by the fireside of fancy, and take counsel of the wisdom of poetry and legend.
– David Rhys Williams
