Monthly Archives: September 2008

prosaic

Posted on by

0

The Oxford American Dictionary defines this beautiful sounding word as

  1. like prose; lacking poetic beauty.
  2. unromantic; dull; comonplace.

The top three definitions of prose are

September 30, 2008 Columbus, Georgia

September 30, 2008 Columbus, Georgia

  1. the ordinary form of the written or spoken language
  2. a passage of prose
  3. a tedious speech or conversation

A prosaist is either

  1. a prose writer; or
  2. a prosaic person

If someone calls you a prosaist, it could go either way.  Writers of fiction are often called prose writers to distinguish them from writers of poetry.  I personally don’t want anything further to do with this word.

For anyone who loves words and shapes, check out this very cool site: 
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
.

sheet rock

Posted on by

0

The Country Life, published in 1997, is Rachel Cusk‘s third novel.  She is spacing them out like children–one every two years.  As opposed to The Temporary, the writing is solid throughout, continuously propelling the reader forward.  The first sentence tells you that the narrator is supposed to take the four o’clock train from Charing Cross to Buckley.  The author then does a very good job of keeping you reading by supplying all sorts of details regarding the departure (although I wanted even more) without stating what Stella, the protagonist, will be doing when she arrives at this new destination or what specifically has caused her to make the journey.

Stella is an intriguing character from the first page.  Late in the novel, she says, “I don’t know what love means.  If it’s just a feeling, then it can stop.  I don’t see the point of trying so hard to preserve it.”

The Country Life was a delightful book to read.  To continue with the house-building metaphor (which perhaps should be dropped, but I tend to like to finish things I start), Rachel Cusk, in her writing life, is past the foundation and the framing, and into the sheet rock.

My three favorite lines:

“We are all, in our journey through life, navigating towards some special, dreamed-of place.”

“In a larger house, a knock or ring is a plea for entrance; in a small place such as my own, it is a demand.”

“…I turned off the light, closed my eyes, and forced myself, as one would force the head of a man beneath water to drown him, into sleep.”

I’ve just started her fourth book, which is a memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.

otherwise

Posted on by

0

One of my favorite poems is “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon.  It begins

“I got out of bed

on two strong legs.

It might have been

otherwise.” 

 

For the complete poem, please go to
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/050.html
.

“Otherwise” first appeared in Harvard Magazine and was then published in 1993 in Constance.  Jane Kenyon was born in 1947, and she died in 1995 after a fifteen-month battle with leukemia.  This poem also appears in Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, as well as in her Collected Poems.

the slow construction of a writing life

Posted on by

0

With her first novel, Saving Agnes, Rachel Cusk laid the foundation for her writing life.  The Temporary is her second novel.  It was published in 1995, two years after her first.  And I see improvement.  The author is using fewer words, and in places, she goes deep.  Overall, though, the writing is uneven.  Here are some highlights:

Waking, Ralph thought, ”The hands pointing at one o’clock seemed so impossible, so wild in their assertion that a great swath of time had gone by without his supervision…”

“the terrible membrane of silence”

“He groped for a date and remembered then that it was still only February.  The year stretched before him in all its unavoidable detail, the hundreds of days and thousands of hours which he would endure as if something more lay at their end than mere repetition.  He wished that he could be tricked, as others seemed to be, by the close of each week, seeing in their false endings the immience of some sort of conclusion, like a soap opera.  He wondered why he had never fallen into step with this pattern of days, comprehended in the helpful clarity of a week’s tiny eras–birth, growth, productivity, decline, dormancy, regeneration, played out beneath the celestial presence of longer phases of weather–a system that might ease the slow construction of his life.”

I have sixty pages left in her next novel.  I might finish it tonight.

like watching a house being built

Posted on by

0

In July, I read Arlington Park and discovered a writer new to me–Rachel Cusk.  She was born in Canada in 1967, grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives in England.  Arlington Park is her most recent novel.  Although I thought it was slightly brusque in its movement between characters and slightly haphazard in its structure, I also thought the writing was outstanding.  Upon finishing it, I immediately wanted to read it again.  Instead I decided to read all her books in chronological order. 

It’s like watching a house being built–seeing how a writer develops over time.

The foundation:  Saving Agnes, published in 1993.  It won the Whitbread First Novel Award (now the Costa First Novel Award).  I started it the first week of September.  It’s kind of chick-litty in subject matter, but after all the author would have been 26 when it was published.  It also seems to take the author too many words to say what she has to say. 

Nevertheless it’s a great beginning for a writer, and it contains some engaging images, like “a row of teenagers sat on a bench like crows on a telegraph wire,” and  ”Days when she was expecting a call stretched out before her like empty motorways….” 

It also contains some interesting lines like “She’d never known loneliness until she’d had company.”  And this combination of an intriguing idea and an image to match:  “She had changed, she knew, but she didn’t quite know how or when.  Like an old car, the addition of new parts over the years had left little of her original material, but her form remained unaltered.  Could she, she wondered, still be said to be the same person?”

More tomorrow on the framing…

first day of fall

Posted on by

1

September 22, 2008–the autumnal equinox–fall at last.  My favorite season. 

And it felt like fall this morning.  Canada geese flying over.  The first leaves changing color.

It’s no surprise that in two of my all-time favorite books, the authors write of fall.

In Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton wrote of a September day, “The sun is out.  I woke to lovely mists, dew on spider webs everywhere, although the asters look beaten down after the rain and the cosmos pretty well battered.  But these days one begins to look up at the flowering of color in the leaves, so it is easier to bear that the garden flowers are going one by one.”

In Light Years, James Salter wrote, “In the morning the light came in silence.  The house slept.  The air overhead, glittering, infinite, the moist earth beneath–one could taste this earth, its richness, its density, bathe in the air like a stream.  Not a sound….Autumn morning.  The horses in nearby fields are standing motionless.  The pony already has a heavier coat; it seems too soon.”

And then there’s Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth:  “The afternoon was perfect.  A deeper stillness possessed the air, and the glitter of the American autumn was tempered by a haze which diffused the brightness without dulling it.  In the woody hollows of the park there was already a faint chill…” 

That’s what we had in Columbus this morning, a faint chill, presaging the lovely fall days ahead.  Only one hundred days left in the year.  Here they come and there they go.  Catch as many as you can.

sanctuary

Posted on by

0

At the end of The Hours, in the Acknowledgments, Michael Cunningham thanks Three Lives and Company for being in existence. He describes this bookstore as ”…a sanctuary and, to me, the center of the universe.  It has for some time been the most reliable place to go when I need to remember why novels are still worth the trouble they take to write.”

It’s the real books–made of paper and ink–that I find in libraries, bookstores, and on my own shelves, that give me this same feeling of being worth the trouble they take to write.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon, writes, “Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul.  The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.  Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”  from The Shadow of the Wind

It’s the real books that create this feeling of a hallowed place–this feeling of sanctuary.  It’s sitting among them, holding them, smelling them, running your finger down the soft creamy pages…

casts

Posted on by

0

Niagara Falls All Over Again  (published in 2001) is a well-crafted novel written by Elizabeth McCracken.  In the space of two and a half pages, the author uses several techniques to pull the reader into the story. 

Early in the novel, the author describes an accident as it is occuring, but she suspends the action before the impact. 

Mose waits:  “I waited for her to land in my arms.  I waited to learn the trick.”

As readers, we are held there, in that moment of suspension, for a little over a page while the narrator, an older Mose, telling the story many years later, reflects on the loss ensuing from that day.  Then, after a space break, the author takes us back to the day after the accident.  She shows Mose being helped into his shirt by his father.  Mose is trying to “sneak the casts on my wrists down the sleeves.” 

Then we go into Mose’s thoughts:  “Two steps closer, and I would have caught her.  I was certain of this.  She fell into my hands, and then my wrists gave way.  I tried to remember the feel of her silk dress rushing past my palms, but I couldn’t.”

So the reader does the work.  Oh, we think, so…. 

We are not told:  He broke his wrists.  He couldn’t catch her.   Instead, we see Mose trying to get dressed with cumbersome casts on his wrists.  The power of showing and not telling.  Then we go into the character’s head to see how he’s reacting to what happened.  We feel it as he does.

friday night lights

Posted on by

0

Last Friday night, at Leon Coverson Stadium in Greenville, Georgia, the Patriots faced the Cougars.  It was the red and black against the blue and white.  At the start of the game, the sun lingered behind a cloud.  A few minutes later, smoke from the concession stand floated over the field.  After four long quarters, the mighty Brookstone Cougars emerged victorious. 

photographs courtesy of Jennifer Horne

Louise Gluck writes:

I summoned you into existence

by opening my mouth, by lifting

my little finger, shimmering

 

blues of the wild

iris, blossom

of the lily, immense,

gold-veined—

 

from “September Twilight”

The Wild Iris

 

until I see what I say

Posted on by

7

One of the reasons I write is to find out what I’m thinking, what I mean to say, and then to be able to hold onto it.  When I talk, I often repeat myself with such slight variations that it must be maddening to a listener.  I tend to want to summarize.  I want to get it right and then lock it in.  And if I keep coming back to a problem, circling around it from different angles, I can get closer and closer.   Revision is my favorite part of writing–getting the words just right.

In The Habit of Being:  The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, she writes to her agent, “…I have to write to discover what I am doing.  Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think unitl I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.”  She was 23 years old.

One of the reasons I read is that I love finding those moments that are expressd so exactly right in someone else’s story.  Yes, I think, that’s the way it is.  I underline them or copy them in a notebook, always trying to hold on to them.

Bookmark and Share

twinkling leaves

Posted on by

0

I hear the rain, and then I don’t.  I look out the window to see the bright green end-of-summer leaves twinkling, like stars, better than stars.  I look to the sky for an explanation.  The drops of rain are carefully spaced apart, and the sun is shining.  The drops hitting each leaf cause the movement.  The sun supplies the light.  Twinkling leaves.  It lasts maybe sixty seconds.  I try not to blink.

 

Jane Kenyon writes:

The grass resolves to grow again,

receiving the rain to that end,

but my disordered soul thirsts

after something it cannot name.

 

from “August Rain, after Haying”

Jane Kenyon Collected Poems

playing with books again

Posted on by

2

Last Sunday I was looking through Ellen GIlchrist’s Falling Through Space trying to find the passage where she writes about getting down on the floor to play with her books.  Well, I couldn’t find it, but in the process, I discovered that Falling Through Space had been republished in 2000 with the addition of fifteen new esssays.  I ordered a new copy.  It came yesterday, and I read the whole book again.  I couldn’t stop.  I love the way she writes, her honesty, her outlook on life.  I may read it again today.

I found the passage, by the way.  Apparently she had said on a radio program that “we should all learn from two-year-olds and go to work by different routes and take all our books off the shelves and throw them on the floor and play with them.”  She writes, “I can talk a good game but where is the action.”  Then, “…I walked on home and went into my house and started pullng all the books off my bookshelves and piling them up on the living-room floor.  Pretty soon I had a carpet of books.”  She describes it as “one of the best weekends I’ve ever had.”  This process of “being into everything” is so important to her that she mentions playing with books again later in the book.

 

That’s what writing here has been like for me:  playing with books.  It’s as if the books are jumping off the shelves.  Write about me, each one is saying as it takes a leap into the air.

specious and torpid

Posted on by

1

I’m a writer.  A writer who hasn’t yet published her novel.  And I had a dream.  Not I have a dream–which of course I do, to publish a novel.  But I had a dream.  In my dream, a literary agent told me my writing wasn’t good because it was specious.

When I woke up this morning, at first I didn’t remember the dream.  I went into my study just like I do every morning.  I began to read “The Painters,” a poem by Jane Kenyon–recently I’ve been starting my morning of writing by reading a poem–and she used the word torpid.  The flies were torpid.  I couldn’t remember exactly what that meant. 

And that’s when I remembered the dream.  And the word specious.  I couldn’t look it up fast enough.  Sure, I’d heard it before, but I had no idea what it meant.  Deceptive.  More precisely, “having a false look of truth or genuineness.”

Is there any way this could possibly be a good thing?

no extra words

Posted on by

0

If you want to see a writer move seamlessly from one scene to the next without any extra words, take a look at this passage from the “Big Bertha Stories” in Bobbie Ann Mason‘s collection, Midnight Magic:

Jeannette wanted to stop for ice cream.  She wanted them all to sit quietly together in a booth, but Donald rushed them to the car, and he drove them home in silence, his face growing grim.

“Did you have bad dreams about the snakes?” Jeannette asked Rodney the next morning at breakfast.  They were eating pancakes made with generic pancake mix.  Rodney slapped his fork in the pond of syrup on his pancakes.  “The black racer is the farmer’s friend,” he said soberly, repeating a fact learned from the snake man.

September 11th

Posted on by

3

“He said, ‘It still looks like an accident, the first one.  Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I’m standing here thinking it’s an accident.’

‘Because it has to be.’

‘It has to be,’ he said.

‘The way the camera sort of shows surprise.’

‘But only the first one.’

‘Only the first,’ she said.

‘The second plane, by the time the second plane appears,’ he said, ‘we’re all a little older and wiser.’”

The Falling Man, Don DeLillo

Today will be a day when the skin of most Americans prickles in memory, starting a chain reaction through our bodies to our hearts.  Seven years later, writers are beginning to delve into just what that moment was for us and how it radiates out into the rest of our lives.  Two novels I read this year do just that.  Falling Man by Don DeLillo and A Dangerous Age by Ellen Gilchrist.

September 30, 2008 Columbus, Georgia

 

two first novels

Posted on by

0

The short list for the Booker Prize was announced yesterday.  Six novels were chosen from the long list of thirteen.  Of the six, two are first novels!  Only one was written by a woman.  Unfortunately, I haven’t yet read any of these.  The short list is as follows:

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger  (Atlantic)                             
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture (Faber and Faber)                        
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies (John Murray)                                  
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago)             
Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate)                    
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton)

For more information, check out the website: 
http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1134
.

that moment

Posted on by

2

“A story,” Graham Greene wrote, “has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”  The End of the Affair.  The first sentence.  Of course, then there was the movie, Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore.  I’m watching it again now.  I left it, a moment ago, to stand on a stool, then lunge to stand on a shelf, to reach the book on the very top shelf.  From the last page, I saw I had read it in August of 2001.  Unfortunately, my paperback references the movie on the cover.  It must have been the only copy I could get my hands on at the time.  I can’t remember the words.  I want to read it again.

the day itself

Posted on by

0

On Monday, February 26, 1951, John Steinbeck wrote,

“I don’t understand why some days are wide open and others are closed off, some days smile and others have thin slitted eyes and others still are days which worry.  And it does not seem to be me but the day itself.” 

Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

Is this wishful thinking by John Steinbeck?  For surely, it is me.  And not the day itself.  Usually, I have plans for my days–scaffolding, Annie Dillard would say.  Certain things I always do on Monday–exercise.  A particular thing I want to do this Monday–work on my new novel.  And then there’s the email, the phone call, the car that won’t start, the brain that won’t work.  What if the scaffolding comes tumbling down on top of me?  Well, then I can use tape or glue to force it back up or I can pause for a minute to see if a new shape might be emerging from the pieces.

Every day that John Steinbeck worked on the first draft of East of Eden, from January 29 to November 1, 1951, he began the day by writing a letter to his editor, who was also his friend.  For anyone beginning or in the middle of a novel or any other long project, this book is proof that day by day, it can be done.