Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Sunday, November 17, 2013
A Courier Kind of Mood
I am in a Courier kind of mood today. A no nonsense look and feel. But how long can I walk along the straight and narrow; I mean, really? In the end my feet always wander from the path to those glens set off to the side. Someplace secluded, where twisted trees can shield us from the blinding stare of the sun and the too-pure blue of a cloudless sky. Here there be shadows cast, where us lesser beasts seek shelter; bloodied rabbit, severed snake. This is merely shade, though; to seek a deeper kind of dark we must crack the crust, breed new beasts in the belly of the quarry.
Believe in the fickle fiend. I’ve seen him. He breathes deep draughts of air in the pit of my chest. Shuttling from corner to corner, feeling with fingertips the grooves on the wall, looking for a loose nail or cracked board that can be pried loose for escape for use as a weapon, whatever the situation requires.
Come back. Try to find my way back to the fold. Today I was going to pick up the thread of old stories I had begun but allowed to trail off. One is a completely unplanned story where the only structure in place is the geography of the town, Suttersville, and the characters that live there. Each morning when I sit down to write, I walk into town and see what’s up. Throw in an argument here, an affair there, introduce a body washed ashore or the reading of a will that leaves half the town aghast, the other wondering what was really going on between the deceased and the benefactor. Each morning, I settle into a familiar place with familiar faces but something not quite right, and I need to figure out what’s going on.
In my writing, I’m torn between the equal desires of both beauty and brutality. The ugly and angelic. In all of this — what should I call this energy, inspiration? — I seek an untapped oil reserve. I’m drilling through shale and granite. I’m finally feeling something from inside flowing out, natural and untainted. Would my writing teachers advise against this unchanneled method? After all, an untended garden is no longer a garden, but a jungle.
Don’t blame me, where else could I go? Even a simple, straight-lined font like Courier cannot reel me in.
Tuesday, October 08, 2013
Dreams Doomed Never to Come to Pass
From the Writer’s Block blog on the Loft: "Entangled in mutual dependence, their breath clogged with the unique vapors of dreams on their downside or possibly doomed never to come to pass, these characters wield cudgels of bitter years and lacerating longing every time they open their mouths to speak to one another."
This made me think about my own life, and the degree to which my frustration and anxiety is linked to the awareness of a dream doomed never to come to pass. What is my dream? No matter how many years pass, I always come back to the same answer — “writing.”
Why not hold up the pursuit of love, living my days in happiness, landing a career both meaningful and fulfilling? Why cling to a childish dream that requires an activity that I am always avoiding? Those other dreams are as abstract as air - Love, Happiness, Meaning. Maybe their incarnation is best encapsulated in this simple act of words.
Does writing bring me love, happiness, and meaning? Truth is, writing is anxiety, fear, frustration, and hard labor. Writing beats my head bloody. Writing has become for me a dark cloud on the horizon from which I cower. I have placed writing at un unattainable height, but it has no business being up there. I am fully aware that I have fallen into the same rut that all would-be writers encounter, but knowing I am in a hole does not grant me a way out.
In that same Loft blog, the writer shared this tip about what makes for great writing: "One of the criteria of great writing is that it inevitably confronts truth. It represents an act of courage on the part of the writer, the sort of boldness that by necessity we spend most of our waking hours maneuvering around in order to present a unified and reasonably placid face to the world. It’s telling that O’Neill wished for his great play to be hidden from the world for so long: There are truths that a writer wishes to keep from the public, or from one’s family and friends. Some truths are so powerful that the anonymity of decades might seem the only proper protection."
This made me think about my own life, and the degree to which my frustration and anxiety is linked to the awareness of a dream doomed never to come to pass. What is my dream? No matter how many years pass, I always come back to the same answer — “writing.”
Why not hold up the pursuit of love, living my days in happiness, landing a career both meaningful and fulfilling? Why cling to a childish dream that requires an activity that I am always avoiding? Those other dreams are as abstract as air - Love, Happiness, Meaning. Maybe their incarnation is best encapsulated in this simple act of words.
Does writing bring me love, happiness, and meaning? Truth is, writing is anxiety, fear, frustration, and hard labor. Writing beats my head bloody. Writing has become for me a dark cloud on the horizon from which I cower. I have placed writing at un unattainable height, but it has no business being up there. I am fully aware that I have fallen into the same rut that all would-be writers encounter, but knowing I am in a hole does not grant me a way out.
In that same Loft blog, the writer shared this tip about what makes for great writing: "One of the criteria of great writing is that it inevitably confronts truth. It represents an act of courage on the part of the writer, the sort of boldness that by necessity we spend most of our waking hours maneuvering around in order to present a unified and reasonably placid face to the world. It’s telling that O’Neill wished for his great play to be hidden from the world for so long: There are truths that a writer wishes to keep from the public, or from one’s family and friends. Some truths are so powerful that the anonymity of decades might seem the only proper protection."
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Captor in the Field
How like a writer is this killer? Or how like a killer is our writer, there is little difference. He stretches his limbs spread eagle over the soil and peat moss in the moonlight, stretches his neck to look at the stars swirling about the celestial dome like a whirlpool sucking him in. He sheds his skin and gleams anew for all the stars to see. Cryptic syllabile, metered out in iambic pentecost, grew like pyroglyphic crustaceans upon his peculiar tabular rosa.
He is pulled to his feet by the moon, and goes in search of a reader.
How like a reader is this victim, or how like a victim is our reader? She regained consciousness to find herself being dragged across a recently harvested cornfield. The severed stalks poked her shoulders and scraped across her back. There it is again, that hideous moon bearing down on me, she thought. Wicked leer of Moon Man. The grip on her wrist was strong, a calloused hand with hairy knuckles, thick wrist with a thick silver bracelet. A medical bracelet? His boots crunched over the dirt, crushed dried husks fallen from the plants. It never occurred to her to wonder where she was being dragged. Does a rabbit grasped by its hind legs wonder where its captor is leading it? It simply hangs in the grip of its captor, watching the world sway as it rocks like a pendulum. It might be considered Mercy, the way the mind distances itself from the physical predicament of the body when it knows it will soon be separated from its longtime counterpart.
Words come out of the dark, lighting his way like a jolt of electricity through a conductor. Are you beneath there still, he wonders, under the skin, trying to resurface after a year’s long abstinence? His fingers grow stronger as the morning comes, and the keys heated beneath their constant pounding. There’s light in the Eastern sky, a bruised backdrop for his latest work
He is pulled to his feet by the moon, and goes in search of a reader.
How like a reader is this victim, or how like a victim is our reader? She regained consciousness to find herself being dragged across a recently harvested cornfield. The severed stalks poked her shoulders and scraped across her back. There it is again, that hideous moon bearing down on me, she thought. Wicked leer of Moon Man. The grip on her wrist was strong, a calloused hand with hairy knuckles, thick wrist with a thick silver bracelet. A medical bracelet? His boots crunched over the dirt, crushed dried husks fallen from the plants. It never occurred to her to wonder where she was being dragged. Does a rabbit grasped by its hind legs wonder where its captor is leading it? It simply hangs in the grip of its captor, watching the world sway as it rocks like a pendulum. It might be considered Mercy, the way the mind distances itself from the physical predicament of the body when it knows it will soon be separated from its longtime counterpart.
Words come out of the dark, lighting his way like a jolt of electricity through a conductor. Are you beneath there still, he wonders, under the skin, trying to resurface after a year’s long abstinence? His fingers grow stronger as the morning comes, and the keys heated beneath their constant pounding. There’s light in the Eastern sky, a bruised backdrop for his latest work
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Skull Vacancies
A human skull sits on a corner of my desk. My uncle left it to me in his will. Not his skull, but one that he had come across in his professorial days bouncing from college to college between improprieties. Why did he leave it to me? Just to make me wonder, I suppose. He liked to pose unanswerable questions to me, riddles that he would drop into my lap at family get togethers as he made his way to the food table for a second helping of mom’s potato salad.
Now, the skull spectates on my morning ritual of writing. What a heroic waste of time, it says from the vacancies that were once its eyes. The skull serves as a reminder of how quickly all of me, except my bones, will drain into the soil and transition to something else. What else? Why do I come here each morning to ? Is this merely a time killer? Do I really think I will rediscover my voice after all these years? I need to leave out crumbs of bread to attract the little bird. Or maybe more drastic action is required, a lighted torch and raised pitchfork to flush him from the ruins.
An angry mob gathers at the foot of the the hill where he is holed up, but they lack the courage to drive him from his haven. They cower in his shadow beneath the august moon, in a light that leaves blood the color of oil. He curses the stars and scribbles words into a wrinkled and muddied notebook. Children run wailing from him whenever they stumble upon his huddled form, reciting the words with a voice like a raven caw.
Whatever was meant was left behind, whatever was given was taken, whatever was foul was left to fester. I did not want it any more, could not take it any more than I could leave it, could not make do with what was left, could not eclipse what demanded to be seen. And now when the pressure lets up, nothing comes out. There is a requirement for conflict, a necessity for nihilism, a preternatural lust for the proper and prim. I did not ask for these misfits but bore them in spite; I much more preferred exposed fields and ramshackle huts sinking into the fallows. Is that a word, is that a place, is that a face familiar in the lineup of my suspects? Yes sir, right there; that word accosted me on the night of the 17th, in the cool light of day, may the titmouse be my witness.
He is grinning at me now, that skull; he is having a good ol’ time.
Now, the skull spectates on my morning ritual of writing. What a heroic waste of time, it says from the vacancies that were once its eyes. The skull serves as a reminder of how quickly all of me, except my bones, will drain into the soil and transition to something else. What else? Why do I come here each morning to ? Is this merely a time killer? Do I really think I will rediscover my voice after all these years? I need to leave out crumbs of bread to attract the little bird. Or maybe more drastic action is required, a lighted torch and raised pitchfork to flush him from the ruins.
An angry mob gathers at the foot of the the hill where he is holed up, but they lack the courage to drive him from his haven. They cower in his shadow beneath the august moon, in a light that leaves blood the color of oil. He curses the stars and scribbles words into a wrinkled and muddied notebook. Children run wailing from him whenever they stumble upon his huddled form, reciting the words with a voice like a raven caw.
Whatever was meant was left behind, whatever was given was taken, whatever was foul was left to fester. I did not want it any more, could not take it any more than I could leave it, could not make do with what was left, could not eclipse what demanded to be seen. And now when the pressure lets up, nothing comes out. There is a requirement for conflict, a necessity for nihilism, a preternatural lust for the proper and prim. I did not ask for these misfits but bore them in spite; I much more preferred exposed fields and ramshackle huts sinking into the fallows. Is that a word, is that a place, is that a face familiar in the lineup of my suspects? Yes sir, right there; that word accosted me on the night of the 17th, in the cool light of day, may the titmouse be my witness.
He is grinning at me now, that skull; he is having a good ol’ time.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
The Grand Tour: Conclusion
The Aunt is a sister of The Uncle, not a wife. She was an amateur artist whose life and art was augmented by schizophrenia. Her art consisted entirely of crayon stylings on mail envelopes and postcards. She was middle-aged and…I can’t remember her face. Odd. Can’t remember her body or her eyes, though I held both that night. When tea was served she gracefully slipped under the table, where we joined her for a cup and a biscuit under the table cloth, while she told us about her date with a clown earlier in the day. I gathered that the clown was not metaphorical but quite real, having just returned from a child’s birthday party and still in costume. They had a picnic in a park. She spoke English as best she could, for my benefit; “There we were, laying on our plates…”
“You were lying on your plates,” asked The Uncle, “and what fine gentleman was eating you?”
She either did not catch his meaning ignored him, “…and then he asked me if I wanted to taste his Bobo? What’s his Bobo?” she asked, turning to me.
I looked to Odlef for rescue, but he only shrugged and drained his cup of tea. We crawled out from the table and moved on to wine, something from Hungary called Bulls Blood. Before opening the next bottle, The Uncle took the empty bottle by the stem and tossed it through an open window, where it cartwheeled twenty feet down and kerplunked into the mote. “Back in the day of our forebears, they always threw their empties into the mote. As a preservationist, it is my duty to uphold their customs in the highest regard. Do as they did, I say.” He laugh was more of a giggle, a bead of wine clinging to his curled mustache.
The Aunt brought our dinner, a half dozen smoked eel in butcher wrap. The Uncle smoked at the table. Odlef was a blond blur at the edge of my vision, laughing and alternating from Dutch to English, though it didn’t matter because I could understand neither. Talk led to my writing aspirations, the state of literature today, the need for a new commune of writers like the Lost Generation. Who would be our Gertrude? Was Odlef our Fitz drinking away his talent? I was none of the above, but they saw in me what they wished. When I talked about Morrison and wanting to be a visionary, and about Artaud and Rimbaud and how writing could be inspired by the unsettled mind, I forgot to whom I was talking. The Aunt cautioned me about romanticizing mental disorder. Was it worth the price, in the end? As if in explanation, she escorted me from the dinner table to the makeshift studio The Uncle had set aside for her in one of his many rooms. She opened the door to a simple room; four walls, a table, a chair, but plastered across the walls and ceiling were hundreds of envelopes, each consumed by brightly colored flames, curling at the edges, wrinkled, pressed flat again. On the floor they gathered like so many fallen leaves. Each burned and yet did not expire; they were only crayon flames, I realized, and the crayons that ignited them were scattered across the table, some snapped in half like broken fingers or rubbed down to the nubs. I looked more closely at the envelopes and found that not all were only made of colors following the folds of the envelope, but some also held stick-drawings of bicycles and trains and boats and planes, suns and flowers and sons and daughters.
It wasn’t good. I didn’t get it. I felt deflated. I wanted her to be brilliant, but she didn’t care to be, knew she was not, aspired to be nothing but who she was. At twenty I didn’t appreciate that. At forty I wonder if you grow up or grow in. At sixty I hope to understand if the evidence of that growth, the product of all my exploration, like her colored envelopes, is meant more for myself or others. Shit, who cares.
We went back upstairs and drank and smoked, stacked dishes and tried to fish empty bottles from the mote. I fell asleep on the sofa with the aunt. Awoke in a tangle of limbs and clothes in ray of blinding sun.
It was a morning of hangovers and shame, putrid cigarettes and cotton mouth, bad smells lingering in the rooms from the night before. While The Uncle brewed a pot of strong black coffee, I drew away from the group and slipped out the door to the castle grounds still wet with dew. I walked down winding cobbled paths, through a maze of wood neatly stacked in cords, through the shade of the trees spared from emperor’s ax, and by the time I made it through the maze to the mausoleum, I had in my mind the beginnings of what would be my first novel.
Odlef and I stuffed our backpacks to catch the last train home. The Aunt presented me with her latest envelope creation, which she must have colored over her morning coffee. Was it something in the image she drew in childlike crayon, or was it in the recognition of her chosen medium — an envelope? Whichever caused these chemicals to collide, I had received her message carried over a great distance, not only the very real ocean that would soon divide me from my grand tour of Europe, but also a message that bridged the space between her art and the irrational world in which she had learned to live, and with which I was only now coming to terms.
“You were lying on your plates,” asked The Uncle, “and what fine gentleman was eating you?”
She either did not catch his meaning ignored him, “…and then he asked me if I wanted to taste his Bobo? What’s his Bobo?” she asked, turning to me.
I looked to Odlef for rescue, but he only shrugged and drained his cup of tea. We crawled out from the table and moved on to wine, something from Hungary called Bulls Blood. Before opening the next bottle, The Uncle took the empty bottle by the stem and tossed it through an open window, where it cartwheeled twenty feet down and kerplunked into the mote. “Back in the day of our forebears, they always threw their empties into the mote. As a preservationist, it is my duty to uphold their customs in the highest regard. Do as they did, I say.” He laugh was more of a giggle, a bead of wine clinging to his curled mustache.
The Aunt brought our dinner, a half dozen smoked eel in butcher wrap. The Uncle smoked at the table. Odlef was a blond blur at the edge of my vision, laughing and alternating from Dutch to English, though it didn’t matter because I could understand neither. Talk led to my writing aspirations, the state of literature today, the need for a new commune of writers like the Lost Generation. Who would be our Gertrude? Was Odlef our Fitz drinking away his talent? I was none of the above, but they saw in me what they wished. When I talked about Morrison and wanting to be a visionary, and about Artaud and Rimbaud and how writing could be inspired by the unsettled mind, I forgot to whom I was talking. The Aunt cautioned me about romanticizing mental disorder. Was it worth the price, in the end? As if in explanation, she escorted me from the dinner table to the makeshift studio The Uncle had set aside for her in one of his many rooms. She opened the door to a simple room; four walls, a table, a chair, but plastered across the walls and ceiling were hundreds of envelopes, each consumed by brightly colored flames, curling at the edges, wrinkled, pressed flat again. On the floor they gathered like so many fallen leaves. Each burned and yet did not expire; they were only crayon flames, I realized, and the crayons that ignited them were scattered across the table, some snapped in half like broken fingers or rubbed down to the nubs. I looked more closely at the envelopes and found that not all were only made of colors following the folds of the envelope, but some also held stick-drawings of bicycles and trains and boats and planes, suns and flowers and sons and daughters.
It wasn’t good. I didn’t get it. I felt deflated. I wanted her to be brilliant, but she didn’t care to be, knew she was not, aspired to be nothing but who she was. At twenty I didn’t appreciate that. At forty I wonder if you grow up or grow in. At sixty I hope to understand if the evidence of that growth, the product of all my exploration, like her colored envelopes, is meant more for myself or others. Shit, who cares.
We went back upstairs and drank and smoked, stacked dishes and tried to fish empty bottles from the mote. I fell asleep on the sofa with the aunt. Awoke in a tangle of limbs and clothes in ray of blinding sun.
It was a morning of hangovers and shame, putrid cigarettes and cotton mouth, bad smells lingering in the rooms from the night before. While The Uncle brewed a pot of strong black coffee, I drew away from the group and slipped out the door to the castle grounds still wet with dew. I walked down winding cobbled paths, through a maze of wood neatly stacked in cords, through the shade of the trees spared from emperor’s ax, and by the time I made it through the maze to the mausoleum, I had in my mind the beginnings of what would be my first novel.
Odlef and I stuffed our backpacks to catch the last train home. The Aunt presented me with her latest envelope creation, which she must have colored over her morning coffee. Was it something in the image she drew in childlike crayon, or was it in the recognition of her chosen medium — an envelope? Whichever caused these chemicals to collide, I had received her message carried over a great distance, not only the very real ocean that would soon divide me from my grand tour of Europe, but also a message that bridged the space between her art and the irrational world in which she had learned to live, and with which I was only now coming to terms.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
"The Book Thief," by Markus Zusak
I finished “The Book Thief,” by Markus Zusak, and immediately started reading it again. When I come across a book that achieves something unusual, I like to read it twice: once as a reader, and second as a writer. That second reading allows me to try to see how he does it, not that this will reveal all of the young Aussie’s tricks.
What is unusual about this book? The first thing: you wouldn’t expect a book narrated by Death himself, about Nazi Germany and a foster girl’s family hiding a Jew in their basement, to capture so much beauty. The dichotomy of humankind, the capability for both brute ferocity and tenderness all within one species, in one country, in one city during an infamous moment of time…well, it even makes Death take notice: “I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race—that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”
Zusak sums up what the book will be about on the fifth page:
“It’s just a small story really, about, among other things:
* A girl
* Some words
* An accordionist
* Some fanatical Germans
*A Jewish fist fighter
*And quite a lot of thievery”
The girl is a nine-year-old foster child named Liesel, given up by her Communist mother to stay with a couple in a small town outside Munich. Her younger brother dies on the train, and it is during her brother’s burial that she steals her first book, “The Grave Digger’s Handbook.” She doesn't even know how to read yet, but she senses the power of books and how they will hold the key to what is happening to her.
Her foster mother is a squat, harsh woman with a penchant for swearing, who holds within her a combination of both cruelty and love, in keeping with the book’s theme. Her foster father, however, is all kindness, spreading a quiet calm around him. “When he turned the light on in the small, callous washroom that night, Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel, upon seeing those eyes, understood that Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.”
He sits up with her after she awakens from nightmares, and at her request, teaches her to read with her first stolen book, “The Gravediggers Handbook.” With her faithful friend Rudy—a boy that always tries to negotiate a kiss from her—she goes on to steal several other books from the unlikely sanctuary of the Mayor’s personal library. It is not until after her foster parents hide a runaway Jew in their basement that words break free from their books and become a tool in her hands for capturing and understanding the world around her.
She tries to bring to him the beauty of the outside world. “The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole…” As Death describes it, “The words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.”
The aware reader will also notice the concentric circles of what is going on here, the matryoshka dolls each tucked one within the other. While Leisel is discovering the power of words, so too is the author, in this rare experience of writing a book that would soon capture the world’s attention. Zusak’s short, staccato rhythm of words might first distract the reader, but after about ten pages, I began feeling the effect. Short blasts, like gunshots, but impactful:
“That last time.
That red sky…
How does a book thief end up kneeling and howling and flanked by a man-made heap of ridiculous, greasy, cooked up rubble?
Years earlier, the start was snow.
The time had come. For one.
***A SPECTACULARLY TRAGIC MOMENT***
A train was moving quickly.
It was packed with humans.
A six-year-old boy died in the third carriage.”
It was during my second reading of the book that I could truly appreciate the care with which Zusak rewrote the later drafts of his novel, with that omniscient knowledge of all that would come later and weaving it into the story. He excuses this prescience with the vehicle of Death as narrator. For many readers, this broken timeline may be confusing and frustrating, but for others it will add another layer of meaning to the text. Poignant, bitter sweet scenes colored with the knowledge of what will come.
What is unusual about this book? The first thing: you wouldn’t expect a book narrated by Death himself, about Nazi Germany and a foster girl’s family hiding a Jew in their basement, to capture so much beauty. The dichotomy of humankind, the capability for both brute ferocity and tenderness all within one species, in one country, in one city during an infamous moment of time…well, it even makes Death take notice: “I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race—that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”
Zusak sums up what the book will be about on the fifth page:
“It’s just a small story really, about, among other things:
* A girl
* Some words
* An accordionist
* Some fanatical Germans
*A Jewish fist fighter
*And quite a lot of thievery”
The girl is a nine-year-old foster child named Liesel, given up by her Communist mother to stay with a couple in a small town outside Munich. Her younger brother dies on the train, and it is during her brother’s burial that she steals her first book, “The Grave Digger’s Handbook.” She doesn't even know how to read yet, but she senses the power of books and how they will hold the key to what is happening to her.
Her foster mother is a squat, harsh woman with a penchant for swearing, who holds within her a combination of both cruelty and love, in keeping with the book’s theme. Her foster father, however, is all kindness, spreading a quiet calm around him. “When he turned the light on in the small, callous washroom that night, Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel, upon seeing those eyes, understood that Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.”
He sits up with her after she awakens from nightmares, and at her request, teaches her to read with her first stolen book, “The Gravediggers Handbook.” With her faithful friend Rudy—a boy that always tries to negotiate a kiss from her—she goes on to steal several other books from the unlikely sanctuary of the Mayor’s personal library. It is not until after her foster parents hide a runaway Jew in their basement that words break free from their books and become a tool in her hands for capturing and understanding the world around her.
She tries to bring to him the beauty of the outside world. “The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole…” As Death describes it, “The words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.”
The aware reader will also notice the concentric circles of what is going on here, the matryoshka dolls each tucked one within the other. While Leisel is discovering the power of words, so too is the author, in this rare experience of writing a book that would soon capture the world’s attention. Zusak’s short, staccato rhythm of words might first distract the reader, but after about ten pages, I began feeling the effect. Short blasts, like gunshots, but impactful:
“That last time.
That red sky…
How does a book thief end up kneeling and howling and flanked by a man-made heap of ridiculous, greasy, cooked up rubble?
Years earlier, the start was snow.
The time had come. For one.
***A SPECTACULARLY TRAGIC MOMENT***
A train was moving quickly.
It was packed with humans.
A six-year-old boy died in the third carriage.”
It was during my second reading of the book that I could truly appreciate the care with which Zusak rewrote the later drafts of his novel, with that omniscient knowledge of all that would come later and weaving it into the story. He excuses this prescience with the vehicle of Death as narrator. For many readers, this broken timeline may be confusing and frustrating, but for others it will add another layer of meaning to the text. Poignant, bitter sweet scenes colored with the knowledge of what will come.
Before each part or chapter, it is like Zusak shares with us his outline:
“PART EIGHT
The word shaker
Featuring:
dominos and darkness—the thought of
rudy naked—punishment—a promise keeper’s
wife—a collector—the bread eaters—
a candle in the trees—a hidden sketchbook—
and the anarchist’s suite collection”
Humans are capable of great beauty and brutality. So too are words. On one hand, words are used by Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to spread the Nazi propaganda, while on the other, Liesel’s stolen books provide her with grateful escape. In the Mayor’s library, she sits among a pile of “the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brim of their bellies with paragraphs and words.
You bastards, she thought.
You lovely bastards.
Don’t make me happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come of any of this.”
She comes to learn, as she starts to write down her own experience in a notebook that she will title “The Book Thief,” that words are not meant to make the world beautiful or ugly. “I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
Those are Liesel’s words, but they are also Zusak’s. In an interview with the author, he explains how the book is about trying to find beautiful moments in an ugly time. Inspired by a family story about a German boy giving a piece of bread to an old Jew being marched through the town, he explains, “On one hand, you've got pure beauty, which is the boy giving the bread, and on the other you've got pure destruction, which is the soldier whipping the old man for taking the bread. You put those two things together, and you've got humans."
“PART EIGHT
The word shaker
Featuring:
dominos and darkness—the thought of
rudy naked—punishment—a promise keeper’s
wife—a collector—the bread eaters—
a candle in the trees—a hidden sketchbook—
and the anarchist’s suite collection”
Humans are capable of great beauty and brutality. So too are words. On one hand, words are used by Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to spread the Nazi propaganda, while on the other, Liesel’s stolen books provide her with grateful escape. In the Mayor’s library, she sits among a pile of “the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brim of their bellies with paragraphs and words.
You bastards, she thought.
You lovely bastards.
Don’t make me happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come of any of this.”
She comes to learn, as she starts to write down her own experience in a notebook that she will title “The Book Thief,” that words are not meant to make the world beautiful or ugly. “I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
Those are Liesel’s words, but they are also Zusak’s. In an interview with the author, he explains how the book is about trying to find beautiful moments in an ugly time. Inspired by a family story about a German boy giving a piece of bread to an old Jew being marched through the town, he explains, “On one hand, you've got pure beauty, which is the boy giving the bread, and on the other you've got pure destruction, which is the soldier whipping the old man for taking the bread. You put those two things together, and you've got humans."
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Eleven Years Ago Today
Every now and then, I’ll think I’ll post a past entry from my journals – one, five, ten years ago to the day. Like this entry, March 11th, 1999:
I am so good at deleting, better than at writing. I just wrote several lines about a coworker, then turned back and deleted them because it was so much telling. I realized that a true writer would have painted a picture of this person and let the reader make judgments like "he was awkward in social situations." Why not write the scene of him standing at the foot of my cube, looking over my papers, standing with that poker face of his, not revealing a thought or expression, just a stone wall face with the sharp cut of his nose and standing there like a guard before the gate.
Where's the creativity, hiding back there in the shack at the far end of a field gone fallow? Back when I was ten or twelve, my friend and I would run out across the tall grass to a wooden shack. Pull dead weeds and sticks and stuff them into a coffee can, then strike a match and watch it burn. The smell of burning grass, the sudden crackle of the flames, the smoke chugging out of the can like the smoke stack from a steam engine. In the shack we would find wrinkled clippings of naked women from Playboy magazine, the clippings handled so many times by grubby adolescent fingers that it'd grown soft, almost like cloth. Out there we also stashed away the compass and hunting knife that I stole from my dad’s top dresser drawer.
I pause, stare into the art prints on the walls of my den, music softly playing, the flickering of the candle on the desk, staring off into space and realizing that theme and meaning in a story must be drawn between the actions, must be plucked from the observances and the events, and I look off into all the shapes around me and try to depict the patterns, and wonder if any can really be drawn, wonder what truths I can really claim to see. I realize after a while that it is a waste of time. Why try to write, when I know that I don't have any truths for my readers. Perhaps that's why I don't have any readers. The act of writing has become merely masturbation, a self-absorbed indulgence of my sensibilities.
Bang! The starting pistol goes off and I launch myself out across the field, past the shack and over the smooth waters of the pond and up into the air above the woods. Then dive down into the dirt and the grubs and the Indian burial stones trod on by the tennis shoes of boys out to find beer cans in the weeds. I drank beer out in the woods until I was thrilled with liquor and stars, wavering in the rings of friends, crushing cans and tossing them away and grabbing another. Then off into the night in our cars, creeping down quiet suburban streets, past the darkened houses where the girls we loved slept.
I pause. When I write, I write for myself. My children play outside the door to the den, trying to draw me out to play, but I am playing here, in the space just above the keyboard, where my fingers dip and weave through the air like a dressmaker or a potter or the baker kneading his dough. It was something in the beauty of the words all scattered across the screen, forming shapes by the paragraph breaks and the curve of the letter "c". The languor of the dipping letters and the crossed T’s like a lifeline on the palm of one who had died too young.
I am so good at deleting, better than at writing. I just wrote several lines about a coworker, then turned back and deleted them because it was so much telling. I realized that a true writer would have painted a picture of this person and let the reader make judgments like "he was awkward in social situations." Why not write the scene of him standing at the foot of my cube, looking over my papers, standing with that poker face of his, not revealing a thought or expression, just a stone wall face with the sharp cut of his nose and standing there like a guard before the gate.
Where's the creativity, hiding back there in the shack at the far end of a field gone fallow? Back when I was ten or twelve, my friend and I would run out across the tall grass to a wooden shack. Pull dead weeds and sticks and stuff them into a coffee can, then strike a match and watch it burn. The smell of burning grass, the sudden crackle of the flames, the smoke chugging out of the can like the smoke stack from a steam engine. In the shack we would find wrinkled clippings of naked women from Playboy magazine, the clippings handled so many times by grubby adolescent fingers that it'd grown soft, almost like cloth. Out there we also stashed away the compass and hunting knife that I stole from my dad’s top dresser drawer.
I pause, stare into the art prints on the walls of my den, music softly playing, the flickering of the candle on the desk, staring off into space and realizing that theme and meaning in a story must be drawn between the actions, must be plucked from the observances and the events, and I look off into all the shapes around me and try to depict the patterns, and wonder if any can really be drawn, wonder what truths I can really claim to see. I realize after a while that it is a waste of time. Why try to write, when I know that I don't have any truths for my readers. Perhaps that's why I don't have any readers. The act of writing has become merely masturbation, a self-absorbed indulgence of my sensibilities.
Bang! The starting pistol goes off and I launch myself out across the field, past the shack and over the smooth waters of the pond and up into the air above the woods. Then dive down into the dirt and the grubs and the Indian burial stones trod on by the tennis shoes of boys out to find beer cans in the weeds. I drank beer out in the woods until I was thrilled with liquor and stars, wavering in the rings of friends, crushing cans and tossing them away and grabbing another. Then off into the night in our cars, creeping down quiet suburban streets, past the darkened houses where the girls we loved slept.
I pause. When I write, I write for myself. My children play outside the door to the den, trying to draw me out to play, but I am playing here, in the space just above the keyboard, where my fingers dip and weave through the air like a dressmaker or a potter or the baker kneading his dough. It was something in the beauty of the words all scattered across the screen, forming shapes by the paragraph breaks and the curve of the letter "c". The languor of the dipping letters and the crossed T’s like a lifeline on the palm of one who had died too young.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Anguish and Reward
He comes home in the evening after a long day at the office, settles into his den, turns on his laptop, and in the cool glow of the screen he starts to make-believe. Interesting phrase: he makes believe. His fingers lightly tap on the keys, and a world begins to appear. He smiles, at times chuckles, at other times frowns and drags his fingers across his scalp. Creating worlds—bringing people out of the mortal soup into living breathing flesh—takes a lot of effort, mixed with pleasure, thrill, anguish, uncertainty. With the effort comes reward; these characters start to speak, at first only with hollow words that are obviously coming from himself, but within moments, their words start to stray from what he intended. Soon, they are jabbering away in their own tone of voice about their own cares. They say things he wasn’t expecting, and he doesn’t quite know how to reply to them, so then invents another character, and soon that character is refuting the first, and now the writer feels like he is just watching from a corner while these two people play out the scene. This is when he starts to smile, when his eyes catch fire with interest and wonder. What is going on here? He feels a little guilty for eavesdropping, but not enough to make him stop, for it is the guilty pleasure of the voyeur.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Get It In Writing
Writing creates a world totally within my control. There is something comforting in that, even though I never considered myself a control freak. As I write, the pace of life slows down and falls into a rhythm, each word moving in concert with that which it describes. Sometimes I think I am more wholly in the world of my imagination than in the world around us. If I was not describing it with these words, how much would I have noticed the sound of the wind outside, the smell of mellon coming from the kitchen, or the stillness of all the objects in my den except for the movement of my fingers and my thoughts? Get it in writing, they say. How true.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Little Bird
Sunday morning in the family room. I love my wife and kids dearly, but all I can think to myself right now is “Leave me alone.” I announce that I am going to my den now to write, and I slip away to that corner of the house where the windows are small, where potted palms sit on the floor in what little pools of light gather in this corner of the house. At first, I avoid the typewriter perched on the desk. I still use a typewriter. I am a walking cliché. I smoke a pipe, leaf through nineteenth century novels, scratch notes on scraps of paper, and eventually sneak up on my type writer and settle slowly into the wooden desk chair, careful not to spook it. I stare at the keys for a moment, afraid it is going to burst into a flapping of wings and escape out a window. That’s it. My typewriter on the desk is like a bird trapped in a room, panicked, breast thumping, trying to find a way out. My fingers must be gentle with it. Once it least expects it, I clamp my hands around it so that it can’t get away. I stop typing to scribble this metaphor on another piece of scratch paper for later.
There’s a quiet knock at the door. Must be my son. “Come in.”
“Dad, will you play Chutes and Ladders with me?”
“Not now, Sam. Your Dad’s working. Didn’t Mommy tell you not to bother me when I’m up here?”
“Yes,” he says in that little mouse voice that usually allows him to get his way.
“Why don’t you go play with Elizabeth?”
“She’s over at Jacqueline’s house jumping on the trampoline.”
I pull him up into my lap. He’s still in his pajamas. What time is it, I wonder? Why hasn’t Susan gotten him dressed yet? She’s probably down at the computer, chatting with her sister or with her friends from work. Jesus, she sees them all day during the week; why can’t she give it a break on the weekends to get her children dressed? “Why don’t you go get your big boy clothes on and we’ll play in a little bit. I’ve got to do some stuff yet, and then I’ll come out. Don’t knock though. I’ll come out when I’m ready.”
“Okay,” and he slides off my knee, leaves the room and gently closes the door behind him. I smile at this gesture of his, so careful around me, but then I see how like an invalid I have become, tucked away in a closed room, not to be disturbed. How long have they been tiptoeing around me?
I try to get back to my story, but the characters have wandered off, the backdrops faded, and in the world of my imagination I am losing the light. Damn it. But if it hadn’t been Sam, it would have been something else. A loud truck out in the street. A blue jay flashing by the window. I was able to finish three sentences, though, before the little bird died in my hands. I guess I clutched I clutched it too tightly.
There’s a quiet knock at the door. Must be my son. “Come in.”
“Dad, will you play Chutes and Ladders with me?”
“Not now, Sam. Your Dad’s working. Didn’t Mommy tell you not to bother me when I’m up here?”
“Yes,” he says in that little mouse voice that usually allows him to get his way.
“Why don’t you go play with Elizabeth?”
“She’s over at Jacqueline’s house jumping on the trampoline.”
I pull him up into my lap. He’s still in his pajamas. What time is it, I wonder? Why hasn’t Susan gotten him dressed yet? She’s probably down at the computer, chatting with her sister or with her friends from work. Jesus, she sees them all day during the week; why can’t she give it a break on the weekends to get her children dressed? “Why don’t you go get your big boy clothes on and we’ll play in a little bit. I’ve got to do some stuff yet, and then I’ll come out. Don’t knock though. I’ll come out when I’m ready.”
“Okay,” and he slides off my knee, leaves the room and gently closes the door behind him. I smile at this gesture of his, so careful around me, but then I see how like an invalid I have become, tucked away in a closed room, not to be disturbed. How long have they been tiptoeing around me?
I try to get back to my story, but the characters have wandered off, the backdrops faded, and in the world of my imagination I am losing the light. Damn it. But if it hadn’t been Sam, it would have been something else. A loud truck out in the street. A blue jay flashing by the window. I was able to finish three sentences, though, before the little bird died in my hands. I guess I clutched I clutched it too tightly.
It began with a letter. Ever since I received the envelope addressed to me in a hand faintly familiar, I could never return to the old life I knew. I have since burned that first letter, but it went something like this…
Monday, July 30, 2007
Heedless Speckle of Stars
He sleeps easily now, and that bothers him. What right does he have to sleep so soundly? He never admitted with what relish he suffered in his younger days, those restless years of spiritual searching and his tired affectations of a struggling writer. He thinks back on his various experiments: fasting in the woods like a suburban shaman to see visions; subjecting himself to sleep depravation for three days to see visions; following a spirit of a young Navaho boy across the desolation of Utah. Great arches of stone formed a natural amphitheater from which to cup his screams and fling them skyward. Heedless speckle of stars.He tries to stay awake all night like he used to, but can’t resist turning on the tv and falling asleep to Jay Leno. What more can you expect from a corporate middle manager? He thinks about buying a tank of ether and a mask and resorting to artificial means of hearing voices. He wants to see hallucinations whipping about the room, imaginary children playing in the hedges, recently escaped from Our Sacred Heart of the Feeble Minded. He looks dejectedly at the sterile rooms of his apartment. What kind of atmosphere do you need to lure the muses? They need a welcome mat, a comfortable abode in which to spend their long weekends, a place that feels like a bed and breakfast for the beyond. He pictures himself small-talking with them in the late morning hours, sipping tea and nibbling on pastries. What would they talk about? Probably how bad the traffic was coming out of Olympus, or the humidity, or his hammer toe.
He wonders what a muse looks like: silvery white, like a sculpture of Michelangelo’s that has learned to flex its limbs? Jade eyes in a marble face? No, his muses had always been the dead idols...Rimbaud, Artaud, and Morrison. He felt closest to Artaud; they shared the same despair. Morrison was his college comrade, his drinking buddy, his idol of excess raising hell and dancing on ledges. Rimbaud was the brilliant prodigy, the cocky boy of sixteen that invented a new language, and then disappeared into the jungles of Africa never to be heard from again. And who has become his muses now? Steven Covey? Scott Adams? Who comes to mind first when he sees the name Homer?
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Tax Deductible Expenses
Touchy dragon photo by Jukkie.
I was trying to write a story last night, typing away on my laptop. I sat by the living room window looking out over the city from twenty-five stories up, a view that had provided inspiration on many nights, except now I had seen it so many times that I suppose it was no more inspirational than what a ground-dweller feels when looking out to a dried-up birdbath. Since the words weren’t coming, I had a decision to make: either continue my labors at the noble art of expressing the truth through lies, or file my taxes. I was just logging into TurboTax when a dragon crashed through my window and perched itself on the windowsill. It shook a few shards of broken glass from its head and wings, then leapt into my apartment and, with two hops across the room, alighted on the back of my sofa. It opened up a bag of trail mix that I had left on the coffee table after watching Forrest Gump the previous night and started to nibble. It picks out the pretzels and tosses aside the peanuts.
It looked at me with this satisfied expression and appeared to be about to speak when instead it grabbed an open bottle of Newcastle, tipped it back and downs it in two gulps. It belched, emitting two small puffs of smoke, and then jumped down from off the back of the sofa. It hopped across the room, much like a sparrow hops, back up on the window sill and then plummeted at least a dozen flights before those papery wings caught enough air to propel its considerable mass away from the concrete. It took off towards the Warehouse district, where hip-hop clubs were already forming lines at the doors. I was left standing in my empty apartment with a cold wind blowing in, feeling almost certain the whole thing was imagined, until I heard screams from the girls propped up on their high heals alongside the velvet ropes outside the clubs, heard the screech of tires, the crunch of metal on metal, and a fiery belch. The circling spotlights outside Spin caught the dragon banking across the night sky for a moment, then it was gone.
So my question for you is can I file a tax deduction for the broken window? I mean, it is an expense incurred while in my line of work.
Grandmother and the dragon photo by Anandamide.
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