wind chill dropping —
three days’ leftovers
become soup
Month: November 2010
Pen to Paper: ‘This is Water’
The text for today’s lesson is a commencement address David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. Despite having skipped both of my college graduation ceremonies, I have a fondness for reading good commencement speeches. Read Wallace’s now, and then come back for my take on what it means for writers.
OT: WikiLeaks
I have just two quick things to say about WikiLeaks and its work, and this should be enough to ensure that someone in the national security bureaucracy ever after reads Catsignal (or makes Catsignal and its author suddenly disappear):
1) My parents taught me, so long ago, that if I would be ashamed if something I did or said were to become public knowledge, then the thing was shameful in the first place.
2) We are often urged to believe (contra good sense and the Fourth and Fifth amendments) that if we have done nothing wrong then we have nothing to hide. This must surely apply to the government itself as well as to its subjects.
Fiction: Almanacs
Roy saw the new Chaffinch’s Almanacs sitting near the cash register. He paid for the odds and ends he was getting at the hardware store and plucked two of the free almanacs from the displays.
Chaffinch’s was the only almanac sexist enough to publish his and hers editions, in blue and pink covers. The women’s edition contained all sorts of stuff about that time of the month and children and homemaking that the men in Chaffinch’s target audience were certain they didn’t need to know.
Roy picked up a pink almanac for Enid so that if she saw him with his blue-covered almanac she couldn’t complain about his not getting her an almanac. Married life was full of little preemptory strikes like that, he mused.
Quotable 29
Ours is a useful trade, a worthy calling; that with all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it — the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and that whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties.
– Samuel L. Clemens
haiku 140
season’s first
wood-gathering —
sore backs all around
Pen to Paper: Keep Going
If, in the face of rejection slips, lack of comments or unkind comments, unenthusiastic friends or family members, you need a reason to keep going, to keep writing, here’s one.
In this interview with Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, Elie Wiesel tells a story:
A just man decided he must save humanity. So he chose a city, the most sinful of all cities. Let’s say it is Sodom. So he studied. He learned all the art of moving people, changing minds, changing hearts. He came to a man and woman and said, “Don’t forget that murder is not good, it is wrong.” In the beginning, people gathered around him. It was so strange, somewhat like a circus. They gathered and they listened. He went on and on and on. Days passed. Weeks passed. They stopped listening. After many years, a child stopped him and said, “What are you doing? Don’t you see nobody is listening? Then why do you continue shouting and shouting? Why?” And the man answered the child, “I’ll tell you why. In the beginning, I was convinced that if I were to shout loud enough, they would change. Now I know they won’t change. But if I shout even louder, it’s because I don’t want them to change me.”
Fiction: Bobblehead
Harry sat alone in the little house. It seemed larger now that Juanita was gone, which Harry liked. When she had lived there, they had fought day in and day out, and the house felt more like clothing that had shrunk in the wash. Now there was room for Harry to swing his arms and breathe deeply.
A car drove by the house. The vibration from the road rattled the old windows just slightly and rocked a little end table. A folded index card under the back leg of the table would have kept it from moving, but Harry had never noticed that the table wobbled.
What Harry did notice was the circus clown bobblehead on the table. It had been Juanita’s, and Harry supposed she had left it as her final gift to him. He didn’t want a farewell gift from Juanita, but a farewell gift had to be treated with respect.
Quotable 28
We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
– John Updike
haiku 139
hours …
throbbing … nausea …
migraine