Chapter headings, French, late 1800's.

Dear Books,

I am thinking on chapters today.  Why & where the break?  How does a writer choose when to suggest, fairly strongly, that the reader stop there, for a half page of empty or a month of dust gathering?  

I know the rule for the paragraph; put is where you change topic.  But that, that is a matter for debate:  if I fret over it too long, I don't string sentences at all.  I start mulling and stop writing.  But, again, those are the same, or at least, writing and mulling don't call for a paragraph change.

Mostly, as I was educated on the feral side of civilization (yes! a true cave, with an actual dingo for a dad and wolf for a mother- should this go in a different paragraph?), mostly I try to keep the stripes of text and space looking nice- oh, and to have three of course is nice- having three, or five, makes my writing seem learned, proper.  One definitely wants something to seem proper, especially when it isn't, or there is doubt about it.

And so the chapter continues to mystify.  Maybe there is a class or course I never got to; a class beyond the paragraph rules, a course that defines the preferred form for chapter breaks?

PS  

Well, yes, I know, this PS could make the fifth, and I could look it up, and you know, I tried to; very feebly, in the way that a mountainous surfeit of a thing (information) makes a person not really want it.  I clicked on a link to an essay on the history of the chapter and it had a paywall, and well, there we go then, choosing to frugally stay in ignorance, but more than just that, also to in this case stay in wonder, to stay in further contemplation of the chapter instead of seek a Definitive Answer.  As Violette LeDuc's Lady and the Little Fox Fur says "...after all, ignorance was also a perpetual promise."  

voice & notice

 

Buzzard, from Dog Ear series, Erica Baum, 2016.

Dear Reader,

Why, or how, are there voices in written words?  I was reading an article, and I recognized the voice, or maybe style?  It's not the one I hear in my head, it's not just the sound of my own lips moving.  I was taught to read silently, and not to move my head across the page- why the fuck, anyway, I wonder?

I am moving my lips like mad these days, and yes, I am pretty sure it is The Texbook Indication of The Right On Time Signs Of Dementia*, but what matters now is that I even catch myself making sounds- I have been a talk to myselfer for as long as I can remember... and when my brain talks to me, it says things like:  get a horse.

So, what gives a series of words, a sentence, a particular voice?  And another thing, I know you don't need me to tell you what the genius of a song is; I know you have noticed it too; so why tell you?  I guess because the verb to notice, the word notice as verb is a kind of affirmation;  I sometimes worry I won't get it all noticed in time.  In time, you know, to die.  It's a kind of weird and personal form of reverence, but for me, just noting it isn't as good as writing it, too, and what about the voice of that written noticing?  I wonder.

*  The Signs of Dementia is a pretty good band name!  "SoD" printed on the bass drum!

refused upon delivery

 

Dear Author,

I want you to stop giving me tragic heroines.  I want you to go back, recall every copy, and put the woman's name where the man's name is now.  I want you to redact all the actions of the female character, and replace them with the actions of the male character.  Do it.  And I don't want to hear from you until you have done it.

Once you have cleaned your mess up, I want to talk about the Damage You Have Already Done.  I want to explain to you, very patiently, that women who get their way in your stories do not have to be killed or punished for it.  That if, for example, your female character bops along for 200 or 300 pages, and then, Realizes What She Has Missed, you do not need to have her slip into the abyss rather than accept her 200 (to 300) pages of loss.  How about you have her, at the very least, ride off into the sunset?  Better yet, might you let her shrug her shoulders and start writing her memoirs?  Or move to a new town?

Or she could sing this little ditty, your song for today.

long felt want

 

Untitled (Banjo Player and Dancing Woman), 1920's, e. e. cummings.

Dear Beloved Reader,

I have been treasuring this little trio of words for about a year now; long felt want.  Let's look at them this way:

long

felt

want

So much of it is the sound, things that poets and academics would know what to call- vowel sounds, meters, stressed syllables, a bunch of stuff we don't need to discuss.  Except, and this is a big exception, if it helps us to love this phrase more deeply.  In that case, have at it, English Majors, Creative Writing Folks, Scholars of all kinds.

I have been waiting, I suppose, for the moment to be right to bring it to you, but that's not quite it either.  I have been waiting to tell you about it through the lens of Another Thing.  A Like Thing.  I often want to bundle the greatness into a larger package; to send you not one great thing, but two, or even three or more.

So, I wait for Another Thing.  Sometimes it is a long wait.

I have been working on some projects that are kind of odd, they kind of don't have beginnings, or even ends.  The projects are for the long time- do a little one day, then leave it for a week or so.  That kind of pace.  The project I will begin soon is changing my address book.  I have sewn a new cover for a new book, and it is time to transfer in all the names and locations of the people that are not dead (physically or metaphorically- it was a tough couple of years, mind you; many old acquaintances and objects have moved from the category of Why Do I Still Have This to I Threw That Out.  Don't worry, not your name, of course!).* 

This project (and others like it: example: painting the closet doors a new color) are Long Felt Wants.  I do worry a little, because, well, I think I might be lonely if I never worried at all, that the Want may not end when the projects do.  

As usual, I am telling you all this, so that I can figure out what I might mean by all of it.  Have I told you lately how much you mean to me?  I thought not.  Please try to remember it!

But, back to the phrase.  I lifted it from e. e. cummings' book The Enormous Room.  I am trying not to read old white men, as you know, but this book and perhaps all of e. e. cummings' work shall have to be an exception- let us think of  him/them as an honorary non-white brown/black non-binary kind of a they author, because, ooh, it's a book recording a great beauty and love for humans.

* Don't you just love that we can put !). down like that and no one to correct us??  Writing is the best, just like painting or drawing, because we are always building another world to reign as Queen in.

Writer, indeed!

 

Untitled (Never Perfect Enough), Barbara Kruger, 2020.

Dear Writers,

Another little incident around the extended family table, another little day of hashing out what the hell all that could have meant.  

One thing I know, is that I was offended at the notion of not being noticed as a writer.  What, is there a minimum page requirement?  Psh.  Are people using words without a publisher exempt from this action, then, of putting down words on to a screen or page?  These ones are 'not-writers?'  Psh.

I guess what I am saying here, and I invite you to rise up with me and claim your place as a writer, is that I WRITE, therefore, I AM (A) WRITER.

PS

I know, it's pretty forceful, but, I am pretty sure that I have already pleaded with, permitted you, to claim your place as artist, and I believe that the saying it is what makes it true, not anything else really.  Let me try to give you an example...  How many words in a language constitute knowing how to speak it?  How many times do you need to pedal around your block before you are a bicycle rider?  How many hours do you need to play guitar to be a musician?  Of course I am aware of the fine points, of the tens of hours a week practicing, of the notion of some-  I know some Spanish, un poquito.  I play a few chords.  Et cetera.  If it makes you feel more confident, you can add the some:  I am a sometimes artist.  I do some writing.  I can live with that; but I cannot live with arbitrary gate-making and -keeping, or the false notion that unless you make money at it, you are not it.  The difference between you singing in your car and the singer in the band is that you are not in a band currently.  Period.

to do/done/diy

 

Minoan Snake Goddess

Dear Darlings,

You have heard already, of the stacks of lists, notebooks, scrap paper of to do's that are scattered like stars over all horizontal surfaces here at the Dodo.  It might seem like things are humming along on schedule from your side of the digital interface, but, from my viewpoint, it sometimes feels like despair.  

Let me be plain; I want to send you some messages about fairy eggs, Anthony Gormley, Edna Lewis, honeycomb mould, Renilde de Peuter, and Julie A. Hersh.  The delays in getting these great things to you are varied like the bunting:  Attention issues, insecurity, muddleheadedness, etc.  If you just can't stand the wait, you can sniff out some of these topics, a DIY blog post, if you will.  If you won't, have patience, and also, let's talk about Julie A. Hersh, and how she came to me, as everything does,

circuitously:

Several quarters ago, I watched, in the course of my duties as Dodo writer, a documentary on book shops in NYC.  I don't really recommend the film, it's presentable, but not great.  If you are a doc film zealot (six modes!), then, okay, knock yourself out.  For the rest of you, know that in my search for something of deeper substance in this film, I watched some of the bonus/extra junk, and a Sci Fi 'zine was mentioned: 

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet:

When I say that this magazine is good, and you should get it, I mean that it comes only quarterly, it's on nice, plain paper, it is crammed with interesting voices, and you can get it in a special 'chocolate bar' package.  Yes, they get you! and me, and they ship it to you with a large, enjoyable chocolate bar!  In number 45, from last year, there was a delightful tale titled 

Snakes and God, by Julie A. Hersh:

The hitches in getting this information to you have been the aforementioned mental issues, including the additional fact that I kept on misspelling her name, and thought also that she was Jane, not Julie.  Once I overcame these banal difficulties, I still had the biggie: it's not digitally available.  So, we come again to the DIY portion of today:  Search out Julie A. Hersh and her writing, and read some of it, it is really good, and curious, and filled with thin membranes, and it fluctuates in a satisfyingly pluralistic way between point of view, category, mood, & place.

writ/read

 

Dear Reader,

To the Bat Cave, Robin, I must write!   Because, you were always on my mind.  Sometimes, I ask myself:  what goes here?  In fact, it might be my most asked question of myself.  What an awkward sentence!  

A week or so ago, I led a little group in a meditative drawing exercise, and I felt so clearly the wave of concentration and, hmm, what is the thing?  Not just concentration, not just intention, not just care, but maybe, maybe it was love.  It was ecstatic like that, so it might have been.  A little field guide would be handy here, wouldn't it?  With a cross-reference of 'feels like' and then a page with what it is you might be experiencing?

On the topic of my writing you, I think you should know that I never use auot correct when I write you here, be cause it would be less true for my hurrying, let alone what denigration partnering with a machine might feel like when you are reading.  This is funny, of course, but also, my true feelings on the matter.  I think we get some out of whatever we put in.  

Which leads me to two things: this digital tool is not a threat to anyone, or any notion of quality or honesty.  If you don't want to use your thumb to scumble out 't h a n k  y o u' on your device, I still believe you meant it.  And if writing is a chore, or even tortuous for you, I give you permission, utterly and completely, to use as much AI as you you like.  I won't even complain that it tastes like canned.  It's all Gide* anyway.

Second thing, is that I have some old blue ink on lined paper writing of mine, and I love to note things like this:  BE cause.  Now, that doesn't look like it is; I used (and still do use, but less) a weird (& expedient) mix of capitals, lower case, and cursive in my penned writing.  If, as a human, it is possible to lift our self loathing even a tiny bit, I would do so, in order to tell myself how sweet and charming a mistake BE cause is.

PS

You 

were 

always 

on 

my 

mind.

*Toutes choses sont dites déjà; mais comme personne n'écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

the written word

 

Ed Ruscha

Dear So & So, and You & You,

I woke up wondering what in the world to bring to the potluck.  Roasted squash?  Gingerbread?  Cheese and crackers?  Shortbread?  Jello?  None of that sounds right. 

Next I wondered what kind of narrative a son or daughter would create of the deeds and words of a parent.  What story would one write:  My mother was a good woman.  My mother was honest.  My mother was a fish, she smoked, she vacuumed up my toys out of spite.  My mother was distant, on another planet.  She never had time for me, just her cases.  My mother had eyes in the back of her head.  My mother was an octopus.  My mother could fix anything.  My mother soothed with chocolate.  My mother always sprayed stinging medications on injuries.  My mother was vain, she obsessed over her looks.  My mother was heartbroken that she could not fit into the standards of beauty.  My mother never learned to drive.  My mother was confident.  My mother was controlling.  My mother worried too much.  My mother didn't care enough.  My mother let me down, she lifted me up, she put me on a pedestal and I could never live up to it.    

Why such a narrative in the first place?  Because people will ask you who you are and why you are.  You will be called upon to have to some answers, and people are accepting of the kind of answer that seems to contain causality:  I am this way because my parents were that way.

This is not all I woke up thinking about; I was also counting the books on the shelf, and thinking about writing.

When I was in preschool* they would write, on little lined sheets of paper, stories I would dictate.  I always supposed all 3 and 4 year olds narrated in this way; but now, I wonder.  I was inordinately pleased with these little sheets of loose paper.  Like the murky, magical workings of the world had been captured and made manifest.  Look at this amazing evidence of the invisible mind!  Look at how it can be read, over and over!  And so, maybe, everyone does "write" these stories in preschool, but maybe not everyone experiences their words on the page as a miracle.

* Preschool was my introduction to formal education, which, when we moved, was put on hiatus until I was 16; community college.  The other 12 years were spent in what would now be called "unschooling."

a letter about things

 

Untitled, Dan Flavin, 1973.

Dear You,

Hey!  It's me again!  I have bee thinking and unearthing all kinds of detritus and ideas.  Ideae?  Idee? I would like an apostrophe s-less plural here, and I am going to have to make it on my own, I guess.  Anyway, I found an old poem, a pome, a pomme, which I give to you here, but, in characteristic Dodo style, I also want to associate by proximity and whimsy, these other items:  

A song, and

A bit of writing on Dan Flavin's pieces.  

Ooh, now maybe the order is all wrong?  I should have given you the poem first, then the Flavin thing, then the song?  Or, no, you have the image of the Flavin first, or no, the first thing you get is words, in the title, and then the image.  Well, wrong or right, these are the details I consider when I am addressing you.

(found in desk drawer in October 2022; written in, 2009?)

A poem about time’s inner workings.

 

If you come in here,

I’ll show you a little bit of how

time works.

You turn the world down to one mile-

this would be the old days-

then, more miles, 

less miles,

four miles,

two miles,

today.

Then it’s zero miles, because 

we don’t know what’s going to come 

after that,

I think.

 

it was like this

 

Dear Reader,

A sort of a story for you today, which I hope will amuse you.  I hope it will be a nepenthe for your weariness and sorrow.

part one:

There was a concrete driveway that sloped away from the garage- it met a large pool of macadam.

It was not a lone Victorian with lace curtains.

part two:

I was not an orphan, in a high garret.  

I lived on a high plain, far from everyone; and I had a radio.  A large, 1950's one, with a lot of beguiling veneer.  Late one night, listening close, and secretly, I heard pilots and static.  Another time, I heard Language is a Virus, and it opened a wide space of possibility.

part three: 

This is maybe not yet written.  It might go like this:  They moved away.  They packed up a big, black automobile, and they moved.  They left a lot of broken dishes and a rusted screwdriver.  They left a worn down broom and a broken umbrella.  They left a hole where a camellia bush had grown.  They left a sprinkler.  They left some bent wire hangers.  They left two receipts and a torn photograph of a woman on a horse.  They left a photo of a man waving from an ocean liner.  They left a cassette tape and a bottle opener.  They moved.  Away.  They packed up.

a letter

 Amy Vanderbilt

Dear A.,

I am beside myself.  Perhaps it is just the weather- today there is a sultry, warm rain, and little breeze.  This tropical exhibition comes to us by way of the furthermost fringes of a Hurricane.  Here, it is nothing but mildness, but I cannot help but wonder if its centered, powerful force is not also in some effect here, too, as I am in a fury of sorting and discarding items.

Perhaps, though, it is the influence of my acquaintances- whom travel, and move, visit and relocate themselves of late.  Some, indeed, have gone away for good.  Would that you were here beside me, on the porch, with the scent of the dampened bromes around us:  I would pour us two small glasses of a monukka wine, a dessert wine, into wee crystal cups, carefully, slowly, lentamente, so as not to disturb the lees.  We would set here, with bird and insect song all about us, and I would seek your counsel on a book that I consider parting with:  Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette.

It pains me to part with it, and yet I realize that I cannot expect the possession of a book of manners to improve my own:  I desire to act in accordance with etiquette, but I do not consult the book, and what is worse, I am an oar without a boat to paddle, in that whatever is left of the forms of this book ate 64 years old, and my only opportunity to practice them will be with people of, shall we say, at least 80 years of age?

Missing you,

signed, 

M.

Slipping

 

The String of Pearls, William Paxton, 1908.

(ghastly, isn't it?)

Dear Friends,

I have been slipping.  I have been remiss.  I have been playing video games instead of writing to you regularly.

I have some things I want to send you soon:  a cut and paste project I am working on, some photos, a complaint about Other People.  Maybe I won't send that to you, you know it all already anyway.  But, for now, there is this, a funny thing, a wry thing, that I hope you will enjoy!

Fixed-in-time.

Dear Others,

Do you hate it when you don't like a book?  I do.  I feel like I am letting the book down.  I feel like I should learn, or even force myself, to like its characters.  Discipline myself to believe in its world.  

I search out support for my dislike- asking others, hey, listen to this- do you like this sentence?  Do you like this plot?  This idea?  It's about a guy who is imprisoned in a bakery for his war crimes, and he is in love with the commandant, but the commandant is of course not allowed to love men, and so he cuts himself nightly, chipping out pieces of his bicep; The commandant keeps his arms covered at all times, because they are pocked with pothole scars.  He punishes himself so he can get to military police heaven, but, the author has suggested strongly that there is nothing but hell for those who perpetuate violence.  Also, there is a girl;  she is besotted with the baker, because he seems to her to be the giver of life, the bringing of nourishment to her war-torn village.  She thinks he is a demi-god; but of course, the baker knows that he has killed and maimed beyond tallying, and so he secretly dispenses misshapen and poorly risen loaves to this girl, who shares them out daily amid her crumbling, bombed buildings.

Growing desperate for validation, I look up what the internet thinks- does it like this book?  Does it say this book is understood and beloved by decades of intellectuals?  By people with better taste, better knowledge, bigger bank accounts, and better hair cuts than I?  Just who is it who likes this book?

Or maybe I am uncomfortable with this book's hard truths.  Am I desperately seeking validation from others, anyone, even fictional characters?  Do I hate the characters because they remind me of myself?  Is hating a book just more of my tedious self-loathing?  I put myself on the couch; asking myself "why do you hate your Mother?"

Because, a bad book is not just a bad book, is it?  It's a failure on my part to comprehend, I am rejecting the gifts offered by the author.  I imagine these writers, with their pen, pencil, typewriter or computer:  They sit and slave, they erase, they write, they erase, they write, they strike through, they write, they write, they write, on and on, pages, chapters, volumes.  300 pages of words!  And I, miserable reader that I am, cannot find anything useful in all that generosity?  I am heartless, cynical, a jerk.  I should learn to recycle better. I am profligate.  The kind of person you dread coming to your party because they will only talk of over population and pollution, melting ice and rising seas.  And they don't think any good songs have been written since Stairway to Heaven.  

Well, I guess I can live with the lack of popularity, but I always feel like I am missing out-  books come in with 8 pages of glorifying praise, millions of copies are sold (but perhaps not actually read?), prizes and awards are bestowed, they are on long and prestigious lists of 'bestsellers.'  

Oh, and then, there is my lack of confidence.  Maybe I don't hate it, maybe I am just a cranky reader, a doubting Thomas, a negative Nellie.  

Conversely loving a book is so easy; reasons I adore it seem to spring from the air; books I love inspire great gobs of intelligible, imaginative praise: Oh, you will love this book!  It is like a beautiful handsewn crazy quilt, of deep colored velvet, with tiny stitches holding brocade trim to the edges!  And besides which, I never feel like I have to explain, to defend, my love for a book.  Which, I guess, might mean that loving is the easier thing to do.

PS  

I wanted very much to use the word 'bestown' in writing this, but the goldarned internet said I couldn't, and I guess, because I am feeling like a bad girl for not liking a book, I followed the rules instead of having fun.  Now isn't that kind of sad?  I hope you won't respond like that, punishing yourself for not liking a book. 

Quiet as it's kept.

 

Dear Readers,

Follow me now, and it won't be easy, because the way things happen is not a straight line; the way things happen is meandering at the minimum and tangled at the max.  

A good pal of mine read a book a several months ago.  She read a book, like she often does, but this time it was harder to read, because she was worried about a pandemic, and fretful.  She made a plan and a schedule and a time to read each day, and she traced with extra difficulty the words, and pages, and books.  

And one of the books was this one:  The Book of Delights.

It's made of small pieces, this book.  

And my pal gave it to me, knowing I would like it.  I read slowly, or nearly slowly, because I wanted each piece to really last, like a a hard candy that I would not crunch down on.  

And I wanted to read you so many of the pieces.  Or pieces of the pieces, like this one:

Prose, though, I often write on the computer, piling sentences up quickly, cutting and pasting, deleting whole paragraphs without thinking anything of it.  for these essays, though, I decided that I'd write by hand, mostly with Le Pens, in smallish notebooks.  I can tell you a few things- first, the pen, the hand behind the pen, is a digressive beast.  It craves, in my experience anyway, the wending thought, and crafts/imagines/conjures a syntax to contain it.  On the other hand, the process of thinking that writing is, made disappearable by the delete button, makes a whole part of the experience of writing, which is the production of a good deal of florid detritus, flotsam and jetsam, all those words that mean what you have written and cannot disappear (the scratch-out its own archive), which is the weird path toward what you have come to know, which is called thinking, which is what writing is

For instance, the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender Le Pen make the loop-de-looping we call language.  I mean writing.  The point:  I'd no sooner allow that fragment to sit there like a ripe zit if I was typing on a computer.  And consequently, some important aspect of my thinking, particularly the breathlessness, the accruing syntax, the not quite articulate pleasure that evades or could give a fuck about the computer's green corrective lines (how they injure us!) would be chiseled, likely with a semicolon and a proper predicate, into something correct, and, maybe, dull.  To be sure, it would have less of the actual magic writing is, which comes from our bodies, which we actually think with, quiet as it's kept.

Meanwhile, another pal heard Ross Gay on the radio (or something like the radio- a podcast, possibly) and she told me she was instituting a daily delight practice based on the book. She was looking, now, for delights everywhere.  

And finding them by the bucketful.

And, I saw a delight on Sunday that I want to tell y'all about:  Ambling down the highway towards the East, I saw the Three Mules!  You may recall me mentioning the Three Mules here on these pages some time ago.

And, now it is time for you to go out and read this book, or find a delight, or maybe you will even do both.

 

Why & How

 

Dear Readers,

Do you know why I am here?  Did I ever tell you why I write to you?  It might be a good time to remind you, even if I did tell you before.  I write here because of time.  I saw so many things evaporating; things like bowling alleys, telephones with cords, film cameras, all kinds of stuff that maybe isn't very meaningful actually, but it seemed like a lot of good stuff was going the way of the dodo, so I thought I'd make a little list, a little collection, and give it to you, here.  But, I didn't really do that.  I started on it, and sometimes it seeps in, but I thought it was kind of sorrowful to just send you lament after lament.  So that was what I planned to do here, but that isn't what I do, and this leaves my purpose here intentionally ambiguous.  How about you?  Why do you come by?

A hurry.

 

Untitled (doll's shoe & drupe), 2019



Dear Little Ones,

I must break my pattern to send you this right away!  You have probably noticed lo these many years, that I like to send you something every few days, maybe twice a week, with a kind of flexible reliability.  I don't want to leave you so long that you get lonely, but I also don't want to crowd or overwhelm you.

I was sent this beautiful bit of writing from a valued & treasured pal, which is what makes up so much of my substance in this venue.

I know you will love it as I do!

His Shirt Said

Dear Whomever,

I have been thinking of you; a lot.  I haven't wanted to write, because I could only think of complaints.  I know you don't want to hear all that.  And you know I am committed to giving you the best of what I have here.

I enclose this poem- I hope you will read it, and know what I mean.





His Shirt Said


I was going to tell you about how it is here,
where I live,
about the beauty of it all;
the branches, the breeze,
even the chrome and the people; but
a man was walking across the road
and his shirt said
his chest read:
Because I Said So.

Thought by thought.

Dear Radio Dodo Listener,

Your song for today is a really full pail; a stack of a song, that tells it all for everyone.  Steer Your Way.

There haven't been any songs here from this beautiful, beautiful final album from Brother Leonard, because I haven't yet wanted to talk to you about this album.  The day after he died I found myself in conversation with other mourners and I could not really accept their thoughts.  I didn't even want their thoughts.  I only wanted my thoughts, my place of private grief with a single, high window, and maybe a candle for when the sun went down.  I wanted my cot there, my plain table, a tiny chair, and blank paper and a good fountain pen.  What did I want to write there?  Something I still cannot write: all the things I want to write; the love, and the gratitude, and the deep, are always beyond my reach.  The only elegy I can write is hash and stale borrowings.  It's like that though, even for the great ones, I think.

I have listened to the album enough to have changed my mind four times on which is the best cut, and I am ready to tell you that this is it.  No further listenings will yield a different choice.  It's this one, but oh! so many of them are terrific.  You want it darker?  Listen to the whole thing.

Images of Matchstick Men

Dear Matchstick Man, 

A sculptor I know asked about the difference between sentiment and sentimentality.  Right now, run and write down what you think it is, before I go and ruin your gestating definitions.  If you like what you write, you can keep writing, and skip this reading.  If you really like what you write, you can keep writing and then write it to someone.  Maybe to me, maybe to The World.  If you really really like what you write, you can put it in a book, on a shelf, in a library.  Then, you should rest, I think, because that's a lot of doing.




Meanwhile, a few of you may have not run and gotten a pencil, and so let us now consider what might be meant by 'sentiment.'  A sentiment is a nice thought or feeling when you look at that sugar bowl that used to be your great grandmother's, as you remember her fondness for tea with sugar, and her enormous aluminum tea kettle, her hob, her back stoop, her crocheted hot pads.  This is well and good and it's what makes Proust great.

'Sentimental', now, is a little stickier perhaps.  It can mean that you are being too soft, or blinded to the hard truths.  Great grandmother is long dead, her kettle is long gone, and there was a time when they thought that aluminum cooking utensils and pots were giving us all Alzheimer's.  Plus what, there must be 7 million other great grandmothers who liked sugar in their tea and Proust has already written all we could hope for in one lifetime of reading.

Now what?  Another thought experiment: let's risk it, let's go ahead and be mushy instead of erudite.  It isn't all that bad, these hearts, flowers, and cliché symbols where a tender, delicacy of expression might have been.  If that is the worst we can do, to make a silly greeting card when we were shooting for a pietà, well, so what? 




I hope your book is done by now, and I hope it is filled with the truths and beauties of a thousand years and a million gestures of kindness and insight.






Oh, yes, and don't forget to take this song with you, when you go.

The Near and The Far

Dear Readers,

I will now publish (in the blog post sense) the world's shortest novel for you, dear reader! 

You recall my project for this year of writing a novel, which came about from being inspired by the Novel in a Month folks.  I decided February was ideal for a month-long project, because it is short; the shortest, even. 

On February first, I began.  I typed into my computer for a good long time, trying not to judge my work, but unable to keep the promise of never hitting the delete or backspace key.  I just couldn't move on down the sentence with 'herad' there instead of 'heard.'  After a while of never going much of any place, as in following a line this way, then cutting it off, and heading down another path, I thought, yes, this is writing a novel and I can do it.  After more time, I thought I'd stop and review, just to see how many of the 2,000 daily words goal I had set down; surely something like 4,000 by now, I imagined.

522.  Yes.  I was done already, with only a quarter of the quota.  I think I am done in fact, with novel writing, but I give it to you anyway, unedited, but fairly deeply and perhaps too harshly criticized:









The Near and the Far

They came in plaid dresses, six of them. They came to tell of what they’d seen and heard. The first asked if they ought to begin. No one said a word

The far.  It was a long view.  The light was coming in low and slanting under clouds. The hills had taken on a furzy appearance, like a mist was rising up from them. They seemed blurred, warm, and giving. This was to be the place of The Telling.

The near.  As the women approached the hillside, they fidgeted with their cuffs, and straightened their hems. A few of the women were quite young, and wondered how The Telling would go. They asked each other questions and murmured encouragements. What did they have to tell that anyone would want to hear?

The far.  The walk had been long from the shore. They had met the boat, the ship, the birds that carried the messages. They wore plaid, because they’d made their dresses of old draperies that had been scavenged from abandoned seaside hotels. Simple sheaths, without sleeves, and wraps to cover their arms from the cold. Shoes were out of the question.

The near.  One was the daughter of an older one- she would hold her mother’s hand as they walked. The mother and the daughter would talk more than the others. They said: when you see a sad thing, you feel sad, but when you think a sad thing, your feelings pass along ridges in your mind, changing into a story, and then, what does it become? Is it sadness anymore? Are sad stories more true than the happy ones, she would ask her mother. The others would listen, but they said very little in response to this pair and their conversation at first. Later, the other four would come to contribute to their conversations.

The far.  It happened a long time ago, that the people moved away, most of them, to a far place that after a time, stopped sending messages back.  It’s an old story, some of the tribe heads off to find a better land, a better way. Sometimes they return, some of them. But many evaporate into time and space. The distances, really, even between two people standing quite close are astronomical. They can’t be measured at all. Distance isn’t very easy to fool, or shorten, or shrink, despite what you may read.

The near.  Sewing by hand, with dull needles, is slow. The space between where the needle slips under, and then back up again can be large or small, but if it is large, the wind can come through. So, they made the spaces small, and their fingers and hands would cramp and shake.

The far.  When things first began to look lonely, they’d tell each other not to worry, that the others would return. Then, they spoke less and less of it.

The near.  "When they come back, we will clear this debris, we will mend these things, and begin to organize.” They felt less and less like organizing, so they didn’t. They arranged rocks to make pathways, and lined up sticks in patterns. They wondered at their future and they made patterns. As before. The sticks had fallen from the trees for many years and they were of many lengths. Some would sort them by color, or texture. Many would arrange them by size.