– Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way Every Day

I don’t think I’m yet in the process of recovering my creative self, but I’ll get there soon. I do still write, have been writing, but it’s been very sporadic, only about once a week lately. But I’m feeling something bubbling beneath the surface, and i’m hoping that I can bring it up soon. I believe I can.

It’s been a season of change. End of a relationship, end of an era.

I’m in my early 40s and wondering where did it all go, and where am I going from here?

I’ve been feeling like I’m learning to walk and talk again. Or going through puberty. Awkward, insecure, doubtful, emotional. I rescued a lost dog a few weeks ago and can’t get it out of my mind, but someone told me recently that I’m projecting, synthesizing the dog and myself (not that I didn’t know this, but to hear it from someone else stung and, of course, made more sense).

My teaching semester is coming to an end, and i’m partly relieved. It’s been a trying semester. But also partly sad. I love my Creative Nonfiction class. The students there are gifted, talkative (for the most part), opinionated. I love the energy of our workshops, the excitement in their faces upon hearing that your essay moved someone, the disagreeing, the challenging,  that we are dissecting and explicating and encouraging someone’s piece of writing– scary and exhilarating. I’m recalling my own days in workshops in undergrad and grad school–the nervous lump in your throat when you go up for workshop. The relief after. The walking out of the classroom into the cool night. The putting away of the piece for a few days then returning to it.

I want to take each of the writers in my class and shake them and tell them to not give up, to keep writing, to be serious, to try new things, to read read read, to write every day, to trust their creativity. I want someone to shake me up too. To tell me all of these things. To get unstuck. To pull me free.

A few days ago I found a grocery list in the gutter outside our house. Here it is.

I love the little details on it. What does it say about a person that they needed a 3 lb bag of tilapia and Orowheat bread? Or Kroger Value Bacon for that matter? And what about the Bratwurst Beer? Do they mean sausage or is there an actual beer that tastes like Bratwurst? They also wanted to ‘check on cinnimon [sp] and struttle cake, which they wrote a second time as struddle cake.

And check out the picture on the other side– I wonder why the person didn’t write on the side with the lines? Maybe they didn’t want to write on the cute little puppies’ faces?

Maybe I should send the list to FOUND Magazine?

This got me thinking about ‘lists’ in literature. What writers have used a list or lists in their writing? Aaron Hamburger uses them effectively in his novel Faith For Beginners, in fact, he opens the book with a list of plants that grow of the Wailing Wall.

And when we first meet Alma, the fourteen year-old narrator (or one of two narrators) of the glorious The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, she gives us her life story in a list that she actually continues through most of the novel.

I have to admit, I’m a fan of these literary devices or gimmicks.

So who else? What other writers, and what books or stories or essays use lists?

Last night at VSC 6 artists/painters/visual artists showed slides  and spoke briefly of their work. All of them were impressive and interesting and thought-provoking. I loved hearing about process and goals and intents, and seeing the varied forms of art– whether paint, wood, computer-generated, poured, poked.

One really moved me: Matt McConville and his paintings of nude men called “Figures in Landscape.” They were not all what I would expect from a title like which was his intention. These were nude men of a particular age and size– none of them perfect or buff or especially ‘handsome’–but in that honesty they were oddly beautiful. One article I found online explains that “McConville’s nudes aren’t the idealized youths of antiquity, but the pudgy guys next door, with all their rolls, holes, hair loss, and hairy guts.”

Some of the men are wrestling or on top of each other, but not sexual. Some are posed playfully– whimsically? [I'm not going to post photos of his paintings, as I don't have permission, but check them out on his website]

I was so taken by the humor and candor, and inspired because in a way, I felt the paintings speaking to me now that I’m a man of a certain age, with the little belly forming and the bits of hair sprouting from my ears (that I shave a couple of times a week).

Then, when I opened my [school] email this morning, this is what I found! How fitting.

Are they trying to tell me something?

Account: robert.williams

This is your quarantine summary from the Barracuda Spam Firewall.

You have 14 messages in your spam quarantine inbox.

• Click on the Deliver link to have a message delivered to your mailbox.
• Click on the Whitelist link to have a message delivered to your mailbox and whitelist the sender so that his/her messages will no longer be quarantined.
• Click the Delete link to have the message deleted from your quarantine.

It was only a week, I know, but when it’s just me and the kitties it gets a little weird. I wonder what he’s going to do when i’m in Vermont for a month doing my writer’s residency?

So, the other night in one of my classes a student, talking to me after class, asked: how long has your hair been thinning?

WTF??!!!

He is actually a very sweet student, but very chatty. Also, his own hair is thinning so I think he was trying to relate to me… in a strange way…

It did get me thinking though… my hair IS thinning. Not in the back but definitely at the top, or where my [feathered] bangs used to be. What is that part of the head called? Above my forehead.

It’s thinning enough that it’s just starting to look a little, er, funky. And not funky in a good way, but funky in a ‘do I look like I’m trying to grow my hair out so you can’t see that i’m thinning?’ kind of way.

I’m thinking it’s about time I stopped trying to rock a trendy mullet or faux-anything. I might be at the point where

GASP!

i’m going to have to start cutting my hair really really short. Not shaved, by any means, but really short. Sort of Chris Meloni in Law and Order SUV short.

Plus, i’m going to be in Vermont for the month of January, and that means I’ll be wearing winter hats, and that means messy hair, so why not avoid all that and cut my hair short?

I was also thinking of growing a beard, but nah. I like my stache still.

Speaking of beards, I found the COOLEST artist on the website Fecal Face, Keith Shore, and love love love his print called “The Bearded Portraits.” I’ve got to put a bug in Ted’s ear so he’ll get it for me for Christmas.

If you check out Shore’s website you can see more of his paintings– I like how they look almost childish, but there’s something in the way he paints the characters’ eyes and mouths that to me look very tense and real.

Anyway, The Bearded Portraits reminded me of Walt Whitman’s musings on beards so I thought I’d leave you with a couple of excerpts.

Whitman rocked his own beard, as you all know, and mentions them in the preface to Leaves of Grass.

About America, he writes: “Here are the roughs and the beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves.”

Then again in “Song of Myself”:

Washes and razors for foofoos …. for me freckles and a bristling beard.

*Whitman image from here.

“[The] author of the best seller Carter Beats the Devil, now gives us a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, heartrending and darkly comic, that captures the moment when American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging mecca of Hollywood intersect to spawn an enduring culture of celebrity.

Sunnyside opens on a winter day in 1916 during which Charlie Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary delusion that forever binds the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world’s last (and worst) Wild West star, as he finds unexpected love on the battlefields of France; Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America’s doomed expedition against the Bolsheviks; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vise of complications—studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother.”

(from Random House Website)

I’m a big fan of Gold’s writing– he’s also got a blog but doesn’t update it as much as I’d like!

One blog post from the end of the summer (August 2009) described a beautiful chapbook he created in limited quantity for Sunnyside, in which he worked with fabulous artists JD King and Patrick McDonnell (creator of the comic Mutts). The chapbook is the first section of the novel, Sunnyside, and –drat!–is no longer available (it sold out quickly). But I was intrigued to read how Gold came up with the topic of Sunnyside, which he explains here.

In short, he had been struggling with the novel for a while:

I had the first hundred or so pages in the bag. Except they were bad. It is a terrible thing that even after you are allegedly a professional, sometimes you fall off the beam. I wrote badly for a few weeks, put it down, did other things, then wrote badly again. The most terrifying thing about this was either that I kept trying new angles and I still wrote badly or that the pages sounded so much like me.

This went on for years.

Then, he explains:

I tossed the original idea for the novel away. I wrote essays, short stories, scripts. I started thinking hard about a small unanalyzed moment in David Robinson’s biography of Chaplin. On a Sunday in 1916, Chaplin had been the subject of a mass hysteria and had been seen in over 800 places simultaneously. How odd is that to hear? I’ve thought about it so much I can’t really tell anymore. Sometimes I dream a line of prose that, in my dream, has already been written. And I write it down in my journal and realize that, no, it’s just so much a part of my unconscious already that it feels like it’s been written already. That’s how the subject of Chaplin-as-delusion felt. I almost didn’t write about it because it seemed so obvious to me.

I wrote a few pages about this mass hysteria and read them aloud to my wife. I felt some shame because of how easily they had come. My wife told me I had finally found not just an interesting story but also the voice of my novel. In other words, what I thought was an incident was the beginning of something. I wrote the first draft of what is now “A Day’s Pleasure” fairly quickly, in about three weeks. When I got to the end, I had the structure of the rest of the book in mind.

(who is that wonderful wife? None other than writer Alice Sebold).

Anyway, the reason I tell you all this (all 4 of my readers) is because  1. the novel i’m working on has real-life characters in it, also from Hollywood/Movies, and 2. I got my idea in a similarly unique manner.

Like most twelve year-old boys in the early 80s I spent my Saturdays reading old film star biographies, and it was while reading the biography of husky-voiced 1940s-50s film star June Allyson that I came across a sentence that would eventually be the inspiration for the novel. It was a sentence that stayed with me for over 20 years, however (did I mention i’m a procrastinator?).

I’m not going to say what the sentence is, because I worry about talking about the novel too specifically while it’s still in very rough draft form, but I was wondering, does anyone else have interesting stories of how they came up with the topic for their book? What inspired your novel or a short story? An anecdote? A real event? A dream? A sentence read somewhere else? An overheard conversation? The shape of a cloud?

Merriam-Webster’s
Word of the Day

May 28

eclogue

\ECK-log\

noun

Meaning

: a poem in which shepherds converse

Example Sentence

"Be it in the appropriation of the goatherd or shepherd in the pastoral eclogue, or the neatly controlled terraces of the Georgics, the pastoral has always been an idyllicised representation of the rural world...." (John Kinsella, The Literary Review, January 2005).

Did you know?

Although the eclogue first appeared in the Idylls of the Greek poet Theocritus, it was the 10 Eclogues (or Bucolics) of the Roman poet Virgil that gave us the word “eclogue.” (The Latin title “Eclogae” literally meant “selections.”) The eclogue was popular in the Renaissance and through the 17th century, when less formal eclogues were written. As our example sentence suggests, the eclogue traditionally depicted rural life as free from the complexity and corruption of more citified realms. The poets of the Romantic period rebelled against the artificiality of the older pastoral, and the eclogue fell out of favor. In more modern times, though, the term “eclogue” has been applied to pastoral poems involving the conversations of people other than shepherds, often with heavy doses of irony.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Now go write your Eclogue! (i’m off to Cincinnati for Ted’s mom’s 70th Birthday).

Daniel Zalewski’s profile of the Atonement author (read it here) is so compelling, so readable, and SO long. I almost got a hernia on the elliptical trying to finish it (I didn’t–finish it on the elliptical or get a hernia for that matter– though I’ve already had two in my life–hernia’s that is– but that’s another blog entry).

I’ve decided i’m going to take a pen to the gym from now on so that when i’m reading the New Yorker on the elliptical I can mark places that I love.

Currently I earmark the page but sometimes I go back and look for what I was earmarking for and can’t find it. In fact, I earmarked a page in the McEwan piece and now can’t find why I had earmarked it.

Anyway…The other piece in this issue that I loved was on Donald Barthelme by Louis Menand. I first read him in grad school (60 Stories–here‘s a blogger who gives a pretty nifty analysis of Barthelme’s book) but was a little stymied by how he played with form; I was more of a traditionalist, linear writer then. Oh, my, how things have changed.

There’s a new biography of Barthelme, Hiding Man, by Tracy Daugherty (interestingly, a former student of Barthelme), which explains that “many people have got Barthelme wrong.”

“It’s not hard to see why they might have. Barthelme’s first short-story collection, “Come Back, Dr. Caligari” (1964), includes “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph,” which is based on characers from the Batman comics. His first novel, “Snow White,” which came out in 1967, is what they used to call, on the nineteen-sixties show “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” a fractured fairy tale–a modernized and mildly surealized adult version of an already Disney-ized story. His second collection, “Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts” (1968), includes a story, “The Dolt,” about a man preparing to take the National Writers’ Examination. In 1969, he published, in Esquire, “And Now Let’s Hear It for the ‘Ed Sullivan Show!,’” a scene-by-scene report of one of the programs in the manner of an agitated lover of the show. Many of the stories in his third collection, “City Life” (1970), are illustrated with images clipped from old books and magazines. Some of the stories are in Q. & A. form:

Q: Is the novel dead?

A: Oh yes. Very much so.

Q: What replaces it?

A: I should think that it is replaced by what existed before it was invented.

Q: The same thing?

A: The same sort of thing.

Q: Is the bicycle dead?

–”The Explanation”  (this excerpt from The New Yorker, Feb. 23, 2009)

I’ve only ever read 60 Stories, nothing else of Barthelme, but I’m thinking I might have to investigate these books. In the book I’m working on, I’m toying with the idea of using other texts throughout– letters, telegrams, photos, interviews, newspaper clippings, and various other documents i’ve acquired in my research.

Isn’t this called Mult-Textual? Intertextual?

Who else does this? David Foster Wallace, John Dos Passos… Who else? I know there are many more.

Is this distracting? Can it be done well so that it enhances the story?That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

Thoughts?

Every book takes you to the terror, that terrible place of possible failure.—Sandra Cisneros

I’ve been struggling with my book lately– the terror of failure, maybe. But also just the worry that it’s more than I can handle (the book is based on true events; i’m recreating actual incidents).

I look to books like The Danish Girl, by David Ebershoff, inspired by the true story of Danish painter Einar Wegener,the first person to undergo sex reassignment surgery in the 1920s.

(it was recently announced that a film version is on the way which Nicole Kidman will produce and star in).

Or Joyce Caroll Oates’, Blonde, which fictionalized the life of Marilyn Monroe.

Or, more recently, my fellow Columbian’s wonderful book, The Painter From Shanghai, based on the life of Pan Yuliang and set in early-20th Century China.

How did these writers do it?

Any words of wisdom for writing about true people, true events?

]]> http://www.robwilliams.org/2008/11/12/terror/feed/ 0 http://www.robwilliams.org/2008/09/21/heavens-to-betsy/ http://www.robwilliams.org/2008/09/21/heavens-to-betsy/#comments Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:09:22 +0000 rob http://www.robwilliams.org/?p=868 I’m obsessed with that NPR show “A Way With Words“– hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

It’s a radio show where they try to figure out strange words, slang, old adages, out-dated phrases and pretty much any words that stump people. They try to find out and explain the history of such words. I really like the banter they have with each other and the callers. Friendly, smart, funny.

Today someone called in and asked where the phrase “Are you still working on that?” comes from– you know that phrase that waiters use when they are trying to grab your plate from you and send you packing. They couldn’t figure out its origins but they both agreed it was a pretty awkward and strange way of taking a plate.

Martha Barnette said something to the effect of it was like they were maneuvering around a construction zone: mind the orange cones! Oh yes, i’m still trying to work on this, it’s heavy.

I remember being a waiter (I did it for almost ten years) and the things we would have to say to tables.

How is everything here? Have you dined with us before? How is everyone tonight? Can I get you started with some drinks? Can I take your order? and yes, Are you still working on that?

Though I preferred to say May I take your plate for you? or May I take that out of your way?

Ewww, i’m so glad i’m not doing that anymore. It was so fake. So phony.

Another caller asked what the term “Jet Black” came from. As in her jet black hair, or jet black eyes.

Apparently, jet is a stone.

The “stone” that gave its name to “jet” was actually a black form of lignite coal, very hard and glossy, commonly used for buttons and ornaments. “Jet” in English originally referred to the material “jet” itself, but by the mid-15th century “jet” or “jet black” was being used to denote the deep, glossy black of the coal. (from Word Detective)

Anyway, the show is fascinating to listen to. Check it out, it’s on Sundays from 10-11 a.m.

I’m thinking of emailing them or calling in one time to ask about the phrase “Heavens to Betsy.”

My grandmother used to say that all the time as an indication of surprise or wonder.

I just finished my teaching semester last week and this week I started teaching summer school, so I had about, umm, three days off in between. They call that a weekend.

On top of that i’ve got a cold, that feels to me like bronchitis, and I even lost my voice yesterday and for part of today (both times before or while I was teaching my class). Fun times. I’ve never lost my voice before.

Now I just sound like a cross between Demi Moore and James Earl Jones (I was going to say I sound like Selma Diamond but does anybody even know who Selma Diamond is anymore?).

I’m going away for the weekend– and promise to blog more when I get back.

I’m especially excited about Louise Erdrich’s new book, The Plague of Doves, that I started a few days ago. It’s stunning. Michiko Kakutani calls it her “most ambitious and … most deeply affecting work yet” in the NYTimes.
It originated as a short story in the NewYorker four years ago– read it here. I’ll talk more about it next week; i’ve already been picking out my favorite lines.

And finally, today, while parking at the mall in La Jolla, no less, to buy my nephew a birthday present I saw a bumper sticker that said : The Dixie Chicks Were Right! (photo from Adelphia.net)

Awesome.

********************************** Editor’s Note:

This Just In! I just discovered that Selma Diamond had an album (at least one, there might be more) out in 1960. It looks like a comedy album. Here’s the photo of the album and description:

STLP 5001 – Selma Diamond Talks…and Talks…and Talks… – Selma Diamond [1960] About “NOW”/About Being Single/About Men And Marriage/About “THEN”/About Four Minutes, 25 Seconds Long/About Her Aunt.

I’m SO Ebaying this.