Desert Journal

Excerpt:

On Interstate 8 [in Arizona] there is a brown sign that announces a petroglyph site. Exit now. And so I obey that instinct that is slowly coming back to me, the one that says, “This is your road.” Eleven miles, the GPS announces when I punch it up. There is no need for the navigational device: the road cuts across a llano between shallow fields. There is nowhere to turn, nowhere else to go, but to follow the road to its ending.

Mountains rise up on the right and left across fields dotted with cacti, tall and thin, their arms raised in praise or surrender. Some farmers are at work on big machines in a field, but I wonder where they have come from. No house or shelter can be seen as far as my eyes can see.

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Shakespeare's Birthday: Much Ado About A Lot

William Shakespeare was generally agreed to have been born on April 23, 1564 (we aren’t positive, but he was baptized on the 26th), and he died on April 23, 1616.  April 23rd happens to be the Feast Day of St. George, patron saint and protector of England.

Shakes was a celebrity in his day, the entertainer-in-chief of London.  (For fun, take a King James Bible, published in 1611.  Turn to Psalm 46.  Count 46 words from the beginning of the psalm and 46 words from the back.  You get Shakespeare’s name.  Just the sort of word-and-number game that the English Renaissance adored.)

He was a playwright, as all the world knows, and knew.  But his aspiration was to be a poet.   His 154 sonnets are a psalm-cycle to the human spirit, to the human condition, and to human transcendence.

Celebrate. 

Go watch Kenneth Branagh’s outstanding adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing.  Or Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet, or Olivier’s King Lear.  Or Ben Kingsley’s Twelfth Night. 

Give it up for the man who pushed English farther than it thought it could go, a poet whose day-job changed what we thought possible in language, and therefore who we are, if we attend to him.

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Random Notes On Writing & Reading

No time right now to write much, but wanted to throw a random thing out from readings and cultural gleanings I’ve been up to:

“Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.”

— Georges Simenon

Maybe so: it’s certainly easiest to write when you’re trying to get underneath something that matters. And for things to matter, you really, really have to care about them. And that hurts a bit.

On Creativity and Narcissism

A close friend and reader tells me this: 

I hate it that you have to be in so much pain to be so creative.

Like a lot of creative people, I can be a tremendous narcissist.

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The One Good Eye

EXCERPT:

But Abakahn, whose name will always be remembered, saw him, and lusted after the bright clear stone and wanted to possess it.

“Here, boy,” he called across the street where the cattle wandered as confused and aimless as drunken old men with no work to do.  “What have you there?”

“Water, sir,” said the boy.  “Beautiful water, clear and cool and see how I can see you through it with my one good eye?”

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Check Your Math, Man...

From a Student's Paper:

Approximately, seven billion people walk the earth today.  Roughly, fifty percent of the total world's population is unemployed.  Thirty percent of the remaining seventy percent is underpaid.  The twenty percent left over are professional athletes.  Professional athletes are not paid too much.

My comment in the margin:

Check your math, man.  You have 120% or possibly 140%.  Which, if you have 7 billion people, actually gives us 8.4 billion.  Or possibly 9.8 billion.   If you're confused, imagine how your reader feels.

Imagination and The Autistic Spectrum

The effortless imaginative furniture of "normal" is learned in autistics, and sometimes I think there's something almost approaching a second-language issue in my son's writing, a sense that he feels more than he can quite say.

But there he goes, clattering away on the laptop, page after halting page of meandering dialogue, gradually growing sharper, gradually painting the world as he has been told it is.

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Love In the Ruins: Teaching Writing In America in 2011

There's a kind of breathtaking insouciance in the student's work.  If you're going to rip off somebody's words, it should be a sentence like, "A charge of plagiarism can have severe consequences, including expulsion from a university or loss of a job, not to mention a writer's loss of credibility and professional standing."  And it should be from a site dedicated to helping you avoid plagiarism.

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Sunrise

Always write when you wake.

And if possible, a little before you wake.

Poetry is the language of dreams. 

Everything else is trying to find out what you want to say.

Update: Cancer, Freshman Composition, and Other Evidences That There Is Not A Good God in Control of This Place or Rather That "Goodness" Cannot Be Defined In Terms of My Personal Well-Being

I swear I think her North Georgia accent gets stronger the weaker she gets.

Yesterday was a good day.  Mom was alert.  They took out the gastric tube that was causing her immense discomfort, and she was in good spirits.  They put her on antibiotics and blood-thinners.Don't Even Get Me Started

Just got a text from my über-kuhl wife, who spent the night with her at the hospital.  Mom's got a fever today.

My feelings are a seismograph.  You can plot my bipolar swings next to mom's vital signs.

Today is a peculiar exercise in horror: they lock a group of us in a room with eighteen sections' worth of Freshman Composition portfolios.  We evaluate them.  Painstakingly.  Painfully.  Horribly.

I have it in mind to win the lottery and build a ziggurat in the quad, and to dress myself in academic robes and, with elaborate ceremonies, to perform human sacrifices once a term as a warning to Freshman Comp students that the gods must not be bored.

At the best of times (that is, when one's mother isn't freshly diagnosed with terminal cancer) this is an ordeal.  

Today...?

I'm just really looking forward to that.  Really.  No.  Seriously.