A New Season

My favorite eagles are back at the Norfolk Botanical Garden -- and as of yesterday, they're again nesting three eggs!

The young usually hatch in mid-March and fledge in June. Watch it all live here (I keep a link on my blogroll) and dig deeper via the blogs by Virginia's Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and Center for Conservation Biology.

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

Keyboard Inspiration

I like the FAO Schwarz keyboard-dance scene in Big and I like the old music of Johnny Mercer (link: audio alert).

Combine the two and I love this*:

*from the 1937 film Ready, Willing and Able, discovered via a recent segment of CBS Sunday Morning

2010 on the Blog

Something I’ve noticed, and analyzed, and found interesting, is my volume of posting here on the blog:

2007: 156 posts
2008: 85
2009: 46

That it’s decreasing is a concern, but how it’s decreasing is interesting: in a stick-straight line. Year 2 (2008) had 54% as many posts as Year 1 … and Year 3 (2009) had 54% as many posts as Year 2. And with two posts so far in this year’s trended volume of 25, I’m exactly on track.  :(

The laws of mathematics assure me I can maintain this trend into infinity and never reach zero. But the laws of blogging require posts to come as whole numbers and, on this path, I’ll eventually dip below “1.”

That’s just sad! And so my goal this year is to nurture the part of me that comes to this place of creativity and play -- and in the process turn that trend around.

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

Six-Word Resolutions

From the Leonard Lopate Show and Smith Magazine (the group behind the books of six-word memoirs) came a segment about six-word resolutions. Before I was even five minutes into the 35-minute podcast (audio here), and before I’d thought about my own resolutions, I heard one that stuck:

This year, I’m only saying yes. (quin browne)

It’s like in good improvisation, where the actors always say Yes to one another. Not a literal Yes of dialogue or action, but a creative Yes -- an agreement to openness, to be in the moment; that whatever is offered from one is accepted, responded to, built upon by the other. Yes moves improvisation forward; resistance kills it.

It reminds me of a quote on my refrigerator:

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love. (Wally Lamb)

Yes, thank you.

Yes, let’s veer off our practiced scripts and improvise life a little in 2010.

Gotcha!

Recently, the final step in an online form required me to type the answer to this Captcha:

What is the first word in the phrase "gadux usu lihab cutagu ofuza"?

Feeling like I’d stumbled into an anagram from NPR’s Sunday Puzzle, I searched for an English word hidden amid the letters and spaces. When I was unsuccessful after a minute, I wondered if I was over-thinking the matter. Wasn’t a “word” simply one or more letters, grouped together?

I entered “gadux” and the website was happy.

Writers: What Not To Do

It began as the fifth review of a book on Amazon.

Then, O.M.G.

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.

O! Canada

Curiosities noted during a recent visit to British Columbia:


(Left) Ye olde Gastown neighborhood of Vancouver, where the lamps are powered by ... CFLs!

(Right) Sharps (needles) disposal box in the ladies' room of Victoria's luxurious Empress Hotel ... a sign that self-injected therapies have expanded 'way beyond occasional insulin.



(Left) Self-explanatory from a church in Nanaimo -- and a concept I could get behind.


(Right) Again from Nanaimo, and I think I know what they mean.

Brush With Celebrity (Accommodations)

My husband's childhood home in Iowa was full-up with family over Thanksgiving, plus a cat I'm allergic to, so we checked into the tiny town's motel. At the registration desk, I noticed a framed photo of the owner and her family with Barack Obama. I knew he'd campaigned here before the 2008 primary -- last year, I'd walked past the main-street storefront that housed a fitness center and someone had pointed to the treadmill he'd worked out on -- but the overnight accommodations hadn't occurred to me.

I asked about the photo and my question launched her spiel. He'd stayed there. Room 200. His advance team had called about accommoda- tions, and after answering a few questions she'd said, "I don’t think you know how small we are, what kind of place this is." They said, "Oh, we know." In the end, they'd taken 18 rooms. The next morning, she'd made his breakfast herself. She's good with omelettes but he'd wanted three eggs, over medium. It took seven eggs before she'd managed three over medium.

My husband and I exchanged glances. “Is Room 200 available?”

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!

30 Covers in 30 Days

I’m not participating in National Novel Writing Month this year, but what a treat to click on my blogroll and discover that Chris Papasadero from Fwis Cover Design is! -- in his own way. His variation: Design 30 book covers in 30 days, each based on a novel synopsis posted by a participating wrimo.

The goal here is to challenge myself like you writers; I believe the criteria for selecting whose book gets a cover designed by yours truly consists of a very elegant-and-complicated-but-totally-fair algorithm developed by the NaNoWriMo team. [...] I am going to be as experimental as I can with them for my own selfish artistic edification...

These covers are currently grouped together as the most recent entries on his blog (from the top down through the wrestlers on the cover of The Business). Click on a cover to read his notes and professional designers’ comments. (Talk about putting hastily created work under the bright lights!)

Or you can browse the 30 Covers, 30 Days forum at nanowrimo. See a list of links to the covers in the first post of this thread; then find links to each novel's synopsis and read wrimos’ comments in the individual thread devoted to each cover.

Like most participants, Chris is behind and trying to catch up … it’s a 30-day marathon after all, not necessarily 30 separate sprints :)

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.)

Another Way to Go

From my pre-vacation post:

I’m dreading the packing part -- the tediousness of choosing and preparing everything, the discouragement that I tend to pack heavy.

So what was my reaction when this guy swooped in and sat next to me at the airport gate?


Envy! And astonishment. And delight.

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...

Why Me Lord?

“Why are you picking me…” time after time as taxi driver to this disagreeable woman?!



Edited to add:
CHEERS to Steve Hartman for developing a terrific
narrative arc in this video!

JEERS to CBS for labeling it with a spoiler title :(

Sign (Size) of the Times

September Vogue issues:



Left: 2009


Right: 2007 (note prophetic headline)