On Writers II

...A continuation of my favorite takeaways from The Paris Review Interviews I (begin with Part I here).

Robert Gottlieb:

In book publishing, the editor and the author have the same goal: to make the book as good as it can be and to sell as many copies as possible. In a magazine, it’s a different matter. Of course a magazine editor wants the writing to be as good as possible, but he wants it to be as good as possible for the magazine, […A] book publishing house is much less bound up with the personality of its editor in chief. […] A magazine, on the other hand, is in a sense an emanation of its chief editor […] A magazine’s subscribers and advertisers and owner have a right to get every week or month whatever it is they’ve been led to expect they’re going to get.

Ernest Hemingway:

A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

Dorothy Parker:

It’s easier to write about those you hate -- just as it’s easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

Richard Price:

If you’re the first generation of your family to go to college, the pressure on graduation is to go for financial security. The whole point of going to college it to get a job. You have it drilled into your head -- job, money, security. Wanting to be an artist doesn’t jibe with any of those three.

Robert Stone:

You construct characters and set them going in their own interior landscape, and what they find to talk about and what confronts them are, of course, things that concern you most. […] In all the arts, the payoff is always the same -- recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way thing are.

Kurt Vonnegut:

When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do. […] Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. Modern life is so lonely, they say. This is laziness. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. […] Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted. Mechanics fix automobiles.

Rebecca West, revelatory about how the dead influence the living:

We had lots of pleasant furniture that had belonged to my father’s family, none that had belonged to my mother’s family, because they didn’t die -- the whole family all went on to their eighties, nineties -- but we had furniture, and we had masses of books, and we had a very good piano my mother played on.

Billy Wilder, with a secret every modern writer now grows up knowing*:

I have a black book here with all sorts of entries. A little bit of dialogue I’ve overheard. An idea for a character. A bit of background. Some boy-meets-girl scenarios.

* but it’s the only passage I marked before Wilder carried me away on a tell-all tour of his writer-director experiences in the old movie-studio system; the pages flew!

On Writers

I just finished The Paris Review Interviews I (there are four volumes), a collection of conversations with writers initially published between 1956 and 2006 in The Paris Review literary journal.

My stand-out favorite is with editor Robert Gottlieb, in which writers (Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, John Le Carre, Toni Morrison, Michael Crichton among others) comment on working with Gottlieb and he responds -- it’s illuminating and hilarious! But all of the interviews are terrific, and I found myself marking passages throughout. Decided to pull one takeaway from each of the renowned novelists, poets and screenwriters to post here. (I’m all about “short,” so will post half today and half tomorrow.)

Saul Bellow, about sources of inspiration:

I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. […] When E.M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” he was perhaps referring to his own prompter.

Elizabeth Bishop, about childhood:

You are fearfully observant then. You notice all kinds of things, but there’s no way of putting them all together.

Jorge Luis Borges:

When a writer is young he feels somehow that what he is going to say is rather silly or obvious or commonplace, and then he tries to hide it under baroque ornament […] Whenever I find an out-of-the-way word, […] a word that is different from the others, then I strike it out, and I use a common word. I remember that Stevenson wrote that in a well-written page all the words should look the same way. If you write an uncouth word or an astonishing or an archaic word, then the rule is broken; and what is far more important, the attention of the reader is distracted by the word.

James M. Cain, about formula writing:

You seem to think there’s some way you can transform this equation, and transform it, and transform it, until you arrive at the perfect plot. It’s not like that. The algebra has to be right, but it has to be your story. […] If it’s too easy you have to worry. If you’re not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn’t going to, either. […] There are problems to be solved. […] Suspense comes from making sure your algebra is right.

Truman Capote:

I believe in hardening yourself against opinion. […] Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.

Joan Didion:

I generally have a point of view, although I don’t usually recognize it. Something about a situation will bother me, so I will write a piece to find out what it is that bothers me.

T.S. Eliot, about unfinished work:

It’s better, if there’s something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it’s in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.

Jack Gilbert, about writers’ complaints that writing is difficult:

They should try working in the steel mills in Pittsburgh. That’s a very delicate kind of approach to the world -- to be so frail that you can’t stand having to write poetry.

Tomorrow: Part II

2010 Reading Preview

My recent reading tells me I most enjoy mainstream and literary fiction, and memoir and science-related nonfiction. I’m especially drawn to coming-of-age stories; debut novels; stories set in workplaces; and following my curiosity, especially into books with humor, original premises/styles, or twists of perspective (moments of awareness). Having focused on science rather than arts from high school on, I’m beginning to fill in some of the history and literature I’ve missed.

This year: more, please! In content, that is; not volume :) Plus, some specific areas of interest: the origins of civilization; the Middle Ages; the Holocaust; historical disease epidemics; physics and higher mathematics; classic literature; and creativity.

I already own many terrific books along these lines and have gathered the juiciest here to keep them in mind. See a fluid chart of my year’s finished books here, and follow my reading comments here.

And because I’m thrilled by sparkly new books (new releases or merely new-to-me), I welcome your recommendations!

2009 Reading Recap

999 Challenge:
Read 9 books in each of 9 categories during 2009

Done! (And I’m definitely done with this volume of reading!)

My list follows, including ratings. Click the link to read my review. Click the book’s image (most are included at the end of this post) to peruse it on Amazon. Brief comments about every book can be found on my Challenge thread at LibraryThing.

Biography/Memoir
•Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman (****) (See review)
•Direct Red by Gabriel Weston (****) (See review)
•Homer's Odyssey by Gwen Cooper (****) (See review)
•Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (*****)
•Lucky Girl by Mei-Ling Hopgood (***) See review)
•Spiced by Dalia Jurgensen (***) (See review)
•Stitches by David Small (*****)
•The Lives Our Mothers Leave Us by Patti Davis (****) (See review)
•The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson (***) (See review)

Fiction
•Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott (****)
•Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (****) (See review)
•Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (*****) (See review)
•Ravens by George Dawes Green (****) (See review)
•Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (****)
•The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano (****) (See review)
•The Long Fall by Walter Mosley (***) (See review)
•The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister (*****) (See review)
•The Visibles by Sara Shepard (***) (See review)

Reading Globally
•84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff (****)
•A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve (****) (See review)
•Coraline by Neil Gaiman (***)
•Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery (***) (See review)
•Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea (****) (See review)
•Off the Tourist Trail ed. by Dorling Kindersley (*****) (See review)
•Small Kingdoms by Anastasia Hobbet (****) (See review)
•The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan (****) (See review)
•The Spare Room by Helen Garner (*****) (See review)

Banned/Challenged/Taboo-Topic Books
•And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell (*****) (See review)
•Cut by Patricia McCormick (****)
•Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation by Olivia Judson (*****) (See review)
•Guys are Waffles, Girls are Spaghetti by Chad Eastham (***) (See review)
•My Little Red Book ed. by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff (****) (See review)
•The Blue Notebook by James Levine (****) (See review)
•The Call of the Wild by Jack London (****)
•The Color Purple by Alice Walker (****)
•The Last Bridge by Teri Coyne (****) (See review)

Laughing Out Loud
•Border Songs by Jim Lynch (*****) (See review)
•I Did It His Way by Johnny Hart (****) (See review)
•Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen (***) (See review)
•New Tricks by David Rosenfelt (***) (See review)
•Notes From the Underwire by Quinn Cummings (*****) (See review)
•On the Money: The Economy in Cartoons ed. by Robert Mankoff (*****) (See review)
•Really, You've Done Enough by Sarah Walker (***) (See review)
•The Family Man by Elinor Lipman (****) (See review)
•The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes (*****) (See review)

Looooong Books
•A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff (***) (See review)
•American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld (****)
•Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (*****) (See review)
•Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (*****)
•Inkheart by Cornelia Funke (***)
•Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (*****)
•Something Happened by Joseph Heller (****) (See review)
•The Help by Kathryn Stockett (*****) (See review)
•Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann (****)

Artist Dates
•ABC3D by Marion Bataille (****)
•Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics by Ina Garten (*****)
•Bellevue Literary Review (Fall 2009) ed. by Danielle Ofri (****)
•Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal (*****) (See review)
•Fodor's Italy 2009 (*****) (See review)
•Lonely Planet Bluelist 2008 (****) (See review)
•Martha Stewart's Cupcakes ed. by Martha Stewart Living (****)
•Momofuku by David Chang (*****) (See review)
•The Other Side by Istvan Banyai (***) (See review)

Nonfiction
•Conquering Fear by Harold Kushner (****) (See review)
•Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (****) (See review)
•How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman (****)
•In Cheap We Trust by Lauren Weber (*****) (See review)
•Listening to Prozac by Peter D. Kramer (****)
•Methland by Nick Reding (****) (See review)
•Summer World by Bernd Heinrich (****) (See review)
•The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra (***)
•You Were Always Mom's Favorite! by Deborah Tannen (***) (See review)

Wild Card
•Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville (***) (See review)
•Bird in Hand by Christina Baker Kline (***) (See review)
•Change the World for Ten Bucks: Small Actions x Lots of People = Big Change (**) (See review)
•Freaky Monday by Mary Rodgers and Heather Hach (***) (See review)
•How Not to Look Old by Charla Krupp (***)
•Sink Reflections by Marla Cilley (****)
•The Miles Between by Mary Pearson (****) (See review)
•The Truth About Middle Managers by Paul Osterman (**) (See review)
•When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (****) (See review)

Notable Off-Challenge Reads
•Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals by Christopher Payne (*****) (See review)
•Drive by Daniel Pink (****) (See review)
•Love, Loss, and What I Wore by Ilene Beckerman (****)
•Thin Places by Mary DeMuth (****) (See review)

*My 2009 Top 10* (in alphabetical order)
Border Songs by Jim Lynch
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Stitches by David Small
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes ed. by McSweeney’s
The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister


Next Post: 2010 Reading Preview
Soon-ish Post: What I Learned While Reading in 2009

A Minute a Day

I'd felt creatively flat and had recently returned to the wellspring -- Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and its twin practices of Morning Pages and Artist Dates. So I was interested to see that Cameron has sliced her material in a new and accessible way in The Artist's Way Every Day, a collection of daily excerpts about the creative process. Might there be magic in her tiny inspirations, ingested every day?

I opened the book to that day's entry, November 14:

So often in a creative career, the magic that is required is quite simply the courage to go on. Singers must sing their scales. Actors must learn their monologues. Writers like myself must spend time at the keys. We would like a break in the weather. We would like a break, period, but the breaks, if they come, will not come today. Today is about keeping on.

!!

I marked that page to make it easy to find later, and I’ve marked half a dozen more pages since then. Highly recommended to inspire -- and ground :) -- anyone in creative pursuit.

I Want That Book!

I'd just read about David Chang’s process of opening Ko -- which seats just 12 diners and is the third New York City restaurant featured in his terrific memoir/cookbook, Momofuku -- and had loved the following:

There are things we say in the kitchen, a codified lexicon, that explain some of the kitchen mentality at Ko. “Make it soigné” means make it right and make it perfect. [...] ... said with a slight tilt of the head or a leading tone, means take this thing and cook it right, cook it the best way you know how. Our dishes often evolve from having an amazing ingredient arrive in the kitchen and a cook “making it nice.”

I was still under the spell of it when I visited a book design blog and found echoes of making it nice on the small scale in Cecilia Sorochin’s post about her approach to book design:

As a boutique book design studio we craft each book carefully, dedicating the time that each book needs without rushing into random ideas.

And then I saw her walk the talk -- making something perfect from an amazing ingredient -- in a post about the layout and typography of an upcoming children’s poetry book.

I want that book!

Something Worth Knowing More About

I know that terrific story seeds are right here, out in the open areas of daily life. And that for me the best ones -- in the premise of this blog -- are in the specifics, the fine details that resonate.

So I liked this passage from Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer's new nonfiction book about factory farming:

[Male layer chickens] serve no function.* Which is why all male layers -- half of all the layer chickens born in the United States, more than 250 million chicks a year -- are destroyed.

Destroyed? That seems like a word worth knowing more about.

I love when that happens! The world goes on ahead while a writer’s mind stays fixed on some detail. The skill is in noticing the fixation, and capturing it instead of running to catch up with the world.

* From Foer: “You probably thought that chickens were chickens. But
for the past half a century, there have actually been two kinds of chickens --
broilers and layers -- each with distinct genetics. [...] Layers make eggs. [...]
Broilers make flesh.” (Therefore: male layers serve no function.)

Vacation Reading

I’m planning a vacation and, as usual, I’m dreading the packing part -- the tediousness of choosing and preparing everything, the discouragement that I tend to pack heavy. Hate it...

...except in one area: vacation reading! There, I make multiple passes through the to-be-read books on my shelves and I frankly don’t care if I pack twice as many books as I’ll read.

A dozen books remain in my 999 Challenge, five of which will probably make it into my suitcase:

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Charm School by Nelson DeMille
The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

Of course, I’m still debating about a few more...

David Sedaris, meet Quinn Cummings

I often write book reviews and link to them in a sidebar on the left here -- an individual link if the book is a new release, or bundled in the “See more reviews” if it’s been out awhile. But a new book written by someone who’s been in my Blogroll for my blog’s whole existence? -- that deserves a post!

I loved young Quinn Cummings in the '70s film, The Goodbye Girl, and now that we've grown closer in age (!) I devour her woman-next-door blog, The QC Report. So I'm thrilled with the release of her book of essays, Notes from the Underwire.

Outside, the cover’s image of a woohoo-ing woman on a runaway roller-coaster (pulled from Maidenform’s 1950-60s I Dreamed I … ad campaign*) is prophetic. Because inside, Cummings writes hilariously about her unruly roles as woman, mother, homeowner, pet rescuer … and a few essays about Hollywood. There are touching pieces, too -- when she’s 14 and her mother is diagnosed with lymphoma; when she’s 18 and the early days of AIDS have already claimed a quarter of the men in her neighborhood, prompting her to volunteer on a national support hotline.

Ah, I always want more! -- am glad I have a portion of her blog's archives still ahead of me.

* A little more about Maidenform’s campaign is available here.

Great Month for Ad-Men Fans!

I admit to still catching the occasional rerun of the ‘60s TV sitcom Bewitched, and to being happy that the late-‘80s drama thirtysomething is finally being released this month on DVD.

Combine those series into AMC-TV’s retro-‘60s drama, Mad Men, and you’ll find me over the moon at tomorrow night’s Season 3 premiere. For a full immersion, I’m going to add an ad agency-based book -- either Peter Mayle’s memoir-ish Up the Agency, or Joshua Ferris’s workplace satire, Then We Came to the End.

Some Fun Now

From the Foreword:

As she would say, "We had such fun!"

From the Introduction:

Those early years in France were among the best of my life. [...I...] had such fun that I hardly stopped moving long enough to catch my breath.

I wasn't even to the official first page of Julia Child's My Life in France yesterday before those and two more passages poured pure joy onto the page. "Joy" isn’t my dominant impression of Julia Child; "serious" fits better.

"Serious" describes me, too. So maybe it took all those references to fun to prepare me this morning for Jill and Kevin's wedding video (audio alert).

It'll either annoy you or bring you to tears. Me? Tears. (of joy!)

ABC3D

Marion Bataille’s ABC3D is a book of the alphabet -- done pop-up style in red, white, and black ... and one mirror.

The design is clever, though he uses only about 12 concepts and repeats several of them across different letters. But what is extraordinary is how he surprises the reader with similarities among letters (E/F, sure; but wait until you get to O/P/Q/R!) -- and within letters (there's a mini-me in G!). He makes me want to learn about typography and alphabet history.

Watch a video of the book (audio alert) below. Note: It shows the entire book (in a little over a minute) but, in my opinion, doesn't "spoil" it. I watched the video and immediately put the book on hold at my library. And I still may get my own copy!

Reading Lessons

I read more to learn than to be entertained (learning = entertainment!) and two recent novels have lessons I'm still thinking about.

One is Kathryn Stockett's phenomenal debut, The Help. Narrated from 1962 Mississippi by two black domestics (the "household help") and a young white aspiring writer -- all of whom see things differently than the people around them -- it's about race, class status, gender roles, friendship, and the definitions of family. It's full of emotion, film-quality imagery, palpable suspense ... with subplots so seamlessly woven that I only noticed when they intersected and it became apparent how perfectly they'd been set up. The novel is compelling -- and even life-changing, if the fictional editor's advice about writing is extended to a metaphor for living:

"Don't waste your time on the obvious things. Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else."

And so these three narrators -- and author Kathryn Stockett -- did.

Another is also a terrific fiction debut, Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone. It's the story of Marion Praise Stone, born in 1954 Ethiopia of Sister Mary Joseph Praise (an Indian Carmelite nun) and Thomas Stone (an exceptional British surgeon), and (temporarily conjoined) twin to brother, Shiva Praise Stone.

Set mostly in and around a mission hospital in the capital city of Addis Ababa, the first hundred pages are riveting and the next 400 are fascinating, tender, and funny explorations of family, immigration, politics, loyalty, and the practice of medicine and surgery. With something to keep in mind when struggling in difficult work:

I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. […] I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. "What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?" she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.

I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. "Why must I do what is hardest?"

"Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?"

[…] I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field -- internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.

For more (no spoilers), see my comments in LibraryThing's Reading Globally Africa Theme Read. And NPR has a nice podcast of Abraham Verghese reading one of my favorite passages -- the descriptive, touching, and very funny performance of a vasectomy. Which brings to mind another takeaway from Cutting for Stone: Verghese's entreaty that healthcare personnel return to the bedside -- and remember the presence of the actual patient there, instead of industrial medicine’s increasing emphasis on patient as data in a computer -- a la:

Q: "What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?"
A: (See the comments)

What Kind of Writer Are You?

In his terrific restaurant memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Anthony Bourdain describes several types of cooks:

You’ve got your Artists: the annoying, high-maintenance minority. [...] so ethereal and perfect that delusions of grandeur are tolerated.

Then there are the Exiles: people who just can’t make it in any other business, could never survive a nine-to-five job, wear a tie or blend in with civilized society -- and their comrades, the Refugees, [...] for whom cooking is preferable [to other work].

Finally, there are the Mercenaries: people who do it for cash and do it well. Cooks who, though they have little love or natural proclivity for cuisine, do it at a high level because they are paid well to do it -- and because they are professionals.

I see, in those descriptions, several types of writers. The literary Artists whose originality and perfection stop my breath and force me to endure beats of despair until I accept that such will never be me. The Exiles (whom I don't understand) and the Refugees (whom I'm currently aligned with, although reconsidering). But overall, being a practical person at heart (with an enormous love of literature) and good at execution, I am, I suppose, a Mercenary.

Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman -- not an artist. There’s nothing wrong with that [...] Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying. And I’ll generally take a stand-up mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day. When I hear “artist,” I think of someone who doesn’t think it necessary to show up [...]. More often than not artists’ efforts [...] are geared more [to themselves...] than satisfying the great majority of dinner customers.

What kind of writer are you?

Cover (back)Story

I like behind-the-story stories -- seeing the moment that sparks an idea, seeing an accumulation of moments that combine into new meaning … and then seeing what story evolved from the inspiration. (Hence the link to M. J. Rose’s Backstory in my blogroll.)

And from the opposite end, I like seeing how a finished story is reflected in a title and book cover. I haven’t discovered a source for titles yet, but did enjoy Barnes & Noble Studio's (caution: audio alert) short-lived video-interview series, Cover Story, and its discussion thread.

And now I’m over the moon about a blog on book covers by the graphic-design firm, Fwis. It’s admittedly focused on the visual art, but literary and publishing details do pop up in the comment threads or by following the links to designers’ websites. Go. Enjoy!

Hints of Unreliability

In his New Yorker review of John Wray’s Lowboy, a novel acclaimed for its evocation of schizophrenia, James Wood examines the details that lead readers to believe in a narrator’s unreliable point of view:

In standard third-person narration, a tiny slippage often suffices to alert us to a character’s fiction-making. For instance, if I were describing the New York subway, in the third person, from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old boy, and I wrote, “The doors closed after ten seconds and the station fell away,” […it] would be unexceptionable. If, however, I wrote, “The doors closed after exactly ten seconds and the station fell resignedly away,” the two adverbs might stiffen the reader’s posture. Who is this boy, for whom exactitude is so maniacally important, yet who also sees the world so lyrically? And if I wrote, “The train fit into the tunnel perfectly,” or “He decided to get out at Columbus Circle. To his surprise it happened very simply,” the reader would sense a world of mental difficulty, in which trains may not always fit properly into tunnels and a teen-age boy may not always negotiate the exiting of a train.

Wood has engaged me into accepting this fiction, and such a character, by the time he excerpts a passage from the novel:

The train pulled into the next station and the car began to fill with halfdead people. That’s the tiredness, thought Lowboy. They want to curl up on the ground and go to sleep. He yawned at them as they came in, showing them his teeth, and some of them yawned back.

Psychologists say that empathy increases the contagiousness of yawns. I must say, I’m yawning.

Believe Nothing, Laugh Often...

…when you view this overview of book publishing, created by the Digital Marketing Team at Macmillan:

Books as Artist Date

Take the curious and meaningful moments of a life, assign a keyword to each, then organize them alphabetically by keyword -- encyclopedia-style. The result is Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s thoroughly original memoir, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. A few of her clever and tender observations run several pages, most are a paragraph, some a mere sentence. Here’s one:

CREAM SAUCE
I love any kind of cream sauce. My mother hates cream sauce but craved it when she was pregnant with me.

Notice where your thoughts go ... to the contradiction and coincidence? To yourself and your own mother? That's Rosenthal at work, turning her ordinary life into something universal and creatively engaging. Reading the book felt to me like an Artist Date -- a little playdate that fills my mind with imagery and energy -- companion creative tool to Morning Pages, both of which Julia Cameron presents in The Artist's Way.

Maybe I’m unique with books as Artist Dates; I'm still experimenting to discover what makes one vs not one. In the process, I've tagged some possibilities from my library. I'm eager to find more.

Whatever, the Encyclopedia has engaged me, and my muse is eager to start listing and categorizing in a sheer sense of play.

Virtual Mentors III

I wouldn't have thought today's quote was necessarily true, thus its intrigue. But the reference to readers in the final sentence, a la "If a tree falls in a forest... ," clinches it.

From Flannery O’Connor's Mystery and Manners:

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

Darrel

I’ve blogged previously about The Oxford Project which, through photographs and interviews with the residents of tiny Oxford, Iowa, provides confirming evidence that everybody has an interesting life story.

But further, it suggests that people are complex characters in their interesting stories.* Consider this quote from a 75-year-old man named Darrel:

We lost one of our daughters to cancer two years ago. I still talk to [her] every day. She had a great sense of humor. Always did, even as a little girl. The loss of a child is about as bad as it gets. The last thing [she] said before she died was, “I love you, Dad.”

Darrel’s comments break your heart, yes? In a novel, he’d be a 100%-sympathetic character. But in real life, a few pages earlier in the book, we saw another side of him (and that daughter) through the words of a 35-year-old woman named Robin:

I met Karen when I worked at a theatre in Amana [Iowa]. A week later, we went on our first date. When I told my mom, I think she cried, but in front of me, all she said was that she was disappointed. Mom told my brother Ben, “You need to hate the sin, not the sinner.” My grandfather Darrel and I don’t talk.

----------
*aha: maybe the complex part begets the interesting part?