blue girl

Gentle but Mordant Wit

During the years of our friendship, though I was aware that he might be suffering private misery, Kurt scuttled his demons with elan as we played tennis and Ping-Pong, skipped off to afternoon movies and jaunts around town, feasted at steak houses and French restaurants, watched football games on television, and twice sat as guests in a box at Madison Square Garden to root for the Knicks.

With his signature gentle but mordant wit, Kurt participated in family celebrations, meetings of writers' organizations, and our gab and laugh sessions with Morley Safer and Don Farber, George Plimpton and Dan Wakefield, Walter Miller and Truman Capote, Kevin Buckley and Betty Friedan. I don't think it is an exaggeration to suggest that I, as well as Kurt's other friends, felt that time with Kurt was a momentous gift no matter how light our conversation. We often found ourselves imitating his amused reserve about his own foibles and those of the world.

Along with the fun and warm support he so graciously expressed to his friends, Kurt Vonnegut treated me to intimate glimpses of the master storyteller whose ironic and frequently startling observations of people emphasized the moral complexities of life. Walking uptown after a memorial service for an unmarried female author who had devoted her life to literary criticism, Kurt said to me, "No children. No books. Few friends." His voice expressed empathetic pain. Then he added, "She seemed to know what she was doing."

From the forward of Look at the Birdie, written by Sidney Offit.

How to Write about Your Life

1. Assume you are not all that interesting.

Oh, man. Now my whole world view must change.

One Must Blog if One Aspires to be an Inky Wretch

Last August I entered a creative non-fiction contest for bloggers. I don’t remember all of the details, but I think they said the winner’s post would be printed in their creative non-fiction publication. In ink! And boy, oh, boy wouldn’t that be cool, I thought to myself. Along with, What am I? An idiot?  I’ll never win.  I have no idea what I’m doing. I can’t even spell. And what about my random comma placement? They’ll judge that. They’ll judge me. I hate when people judge me. Well, of course they’ll judge you, you idiot. That’s what happens when you enter a contest.

Should "an" have been capitalized in my headline?

I need a ghostwriter.

So, I set about (Yes, set about, because when one is going to be published, one sets about doing things. And refers to oneself as one.) finding a post to enter for the mean, stupid people who would be judging me. I decided on a post and started rewriting where I had links because if it’s printed in ink you can’t click on links and aren’t I smart that I thought of that, maybe I’ll get extra credit!

Months and months went by and I never heard from them. I thought about it off and on but decided I wouldn't set about finding out who was judged too harshly, laughed at and called an idiot. One doesn’t set about acquiring confirmation of one’s deepest, darkest fears, now does one?

Wednesday night I was blubbering over Jon Swift. I was clicking around the blogosphere all broken hearted when I decided to check my emails. Saw that I had an email from someone I didn’t know that didn’t look like spam, although the subject line had a rather judgmental tone to it, now that I think about it. I didn't know it was from Those Who Judge until I was well into the second paragraph where it stated they "forgot" to send out emails letting everyone know what had been decided awhile ago.

Well, thank, you, very, much!

Right away I figured I didn't make the cut because this was the first time the losers were hearing anything about what Those Who Judge forgot all about.

I skipped the third paragraph (so wordy, Those Who Judge!) and skimmed the fifteen finalists. Nope, I wasn’t on the list. Fine. I thought... One has more important things to be blubbering about than some stupid non-fiction contest where Those Who Judge are so wordy and forgetful!

Then, through my blubbering, I noticed something. I recognized one of the finalists. I perked up! Then skipped down to the last paragraph.

This blogger I “know” wasn't only a finalist, but the winner!

I decided Those Who Judge weren’t so stupid after all. Forgetful, yes. Stupid, no. They’re actually pretty smart judges. Because who wouldn't forget all about me, who chooses to believe she was sixteenth out of eight hundred plus entries -- one who only missed it by this much! -- once they've read this winner's work?

The fifteen finalists, who were Judged by Alice Bradley of finslippy, were:

Almost Dorothy
Europe on Five Bad Ideas a Day
Franklin Chronicle
Happy Days
The Honest Truth
Mindbook
Miss Grace's Disgrace
My Madeleine
No Titles
Odd Spine and the Emptiness
Planet of the Blind
She Laughs at the Days
Stories
Tradevoices.com

One must recognize the one I “know” who won if one has been reading my blog for any length of time. And if one would like to read The One’s Winning Post that will be printed in ink! One must acquire the mid-March edition of Creative Nonfiction.  One can subscribe here.

Those Who Judge ended their email by letting the forgotten losers know that there will be an opportunity very soon to enter another contest. So, if one is ever going to be published in ink, one must set about finding a new post to rewrite because one never gives up, does one? No, one does not.

And Kuusisto? Stay out of the next one, will ya? Geez.

Headed for Trouble

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy. The fox is mine. He wants to destroy my form of society -- a society of free geese, of Bantams unconfined. So I react in the natural way, building up my defenses, improving my weapons and my aim, spending more and more time on the problem of supremacy. This morning the wolf and the fox compete for my attention; I am a hunter divided against himself. Either animal could slip easily through my guard while I am thinking about the other. When I realize what a vast amount of time the world would have for useful and sensible tasks if each country could take its mind off "the enemy," I am appalled. I shot a fox last fall -- a long, lucky shot with a .22 as he drank at the pond. It was cold murder. All he wanted at that moment was a drink of water, but the list of his crimes against me was a long one, and so I shot him dead, and he fell backward and sank slowly in the mud.

The war between me and the fox is as senseless as all wars. There is no way to rationalize it. The fox is not even the biggest and meanest killer here -- I hold that distinction myself. I think nothing of sending half a dozen broilers to the guillotine. Come June, heads will be rolling behind my barn. Foxes are now carrying a disease called hardpad, but even that is insufficient reason for shooting a fox. My puppy, I presume, could pick up hardpad from sniffing around in the dooryard, and then I would have a dachshund that was not only hard-headed but hard-footed, too, which would try my patience. But if you were to solve the problems of disease by shooting the sick, you'd have to shoot Aunt Mollie when she got the flu. I have plenty of convictions but no real courage, and I find it hard to live in the country without slipping into the role of murderer. From where I sit I can see a piece of suet hanging on a crab-apple tree. A hairy woodpecker is digging away at it contentedly. The suet is from a steer we killed last fall -- I gave the order for the hatchet job. Imagine killing a steer to feed a woodpecker! (We also got 367 pounds of beef for our freezer, but I can't see that that changes the matter any. The fox and I are up to the same mischief; we differ only in technique.)

Hunters in this state killed 40,142 deer during the 1957 season. It was the third-highest kill on record. Maine is a bit touchy about its deerslaying and prefers to break the record each year. In 1951 the hunters tagged 41,730 deer, and that figure still stands as the one to beat. I don't know why people feel unhappy when the curve fails to keep going up, but they do. Even when we find something we'd like to reduce, such as highway fatalities, it doesn't always sound as though we had our heart in it. On the eve of every holiday, the National Safety Council broadcasts its prediction that such-and-such a number of motorists are "expected" to die over the weekend, almost as though it were a man's duty to go out and get killed in order to make the estimate come out right. I didn't shoot a deer, but someone brought me a hindquarter and it was good. A moose came to town right in the middle of the battle, and somebody shot him and cut his head off, leaving the meat to spoil. Everybody was stirred up about the incident of the moose: there is a heavy fine for killing a moose nowadays, but there is an even heavier assessment against anyone's wasting good meat.

Shortly after the close of the deer season, there was a lead editorial in the paper complaining that there had been a drop in out-of-state hunting licenses and urging that Maine get busy and appropriate more money for development, to attract hunters to the state. The theory is that if you shoot forty thousand deer one year you aren't getting ahead unless you shoot fifty thousand the next, but I suspect there comes a point where you have shot just exactly the right number of deer. Our whole economy hangs precariously on the assumption that the higher you go the better off you are, and that unless more stuff is produced in 1958 than was produced in 1957, more deer killed, more automatic dishwashers installed, more out-of-staters coming into the state, more heads aching so they can get the fast fast fast relief from a pill, more automobiles sold, you are headed for trouble, living in danger and maybe in squalor. If that theory is sound, Maine won't be in a solid position until we kill at least forty million deer and with a good prospect of making it fifty million the following year. But that would be the end of the wilderness, and without its wilderness Maine would feel awfully naked.

From A Report in January by E.B. White, written January 30, 1958.

And Then What Happened?

"Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you'll get a plot," Margaret Atwood says when asked where her ideas come from. When questioned about whether she's ever used that approach, she adds, "No, I don't have to."

Margaret Atwood on how to write a great novel.

h/t Inky Girl

How it Turned Frosty

Dan Baum tweets his short career at The New Yorker:

...I must say, though, the office itself is a little creepy. I didn’t work there. I live in Colorado. But I’d visit 3-4X a year.

Everybody whispers.

It’s not exactly like being in a library; it’s more like being in a hospital room where somebody is dying.

Like someone’s dying, and everybody feels a little guilty about it.

There’s a weird tension to the place. If you raise your voice to normal level, heads pop up from cubicles.

And from around the stacks of review copies that lie everywhere like a graveyard of writers’ aspirations.

And then it turned frosty.

Where Glum Avenue and Rhymey Road Intersect

I have two posts in the works that keep getting completely out of control. They both keep going off in directions that are unexpected. Which would be okay if when going their merry way, they'd skip off in cheerful directions, but, alas, that is not the case. For some reason, they keep taking Glum Avenue.

I shall have none of that!

So, I decided to Google quotes on writing to seek inspiration. The thought that was going through my head was clunky, clunky writing. I wanted to find a quote that talked about clunky, clunky writing. When I couldn't find anything, I thought maybe I should just write my own. But all I could come up with was...

Clunky, clunky writing
Clunky funky punk writing
Who needs it
Flunkies
Junkies
Hunky dory plucky monkeys

So rhymey!

I did find a quote I liked by Douglas Adams.

Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds.

What a plucky monkey.

Now back to that detour off Glum Avenue.

Wren to the Rescue

Five minutes ago I was going to quit blogging. Forever.

I can't write anymore. I have nothing to say!

So, I was just sitting over here drinking my Sprite Zero, whimpering, feeling sorry for my wordless, boring self when I decided to click over to see what Blue Wren's been up to. And I got a real kick out of it...

Today is the first day of the rest of your life, so they say. I have to agree. How can you not? After all, the other days of your life are already gone. Yesterday is yesterday, lost. You can't do it over. You've really only got today. And today, there are so many distractions that keep you from doing things just as you'd like. Although today, I did do something just as I liked. I took a shower with the window wide open, and just outside, it was snowing and windy. I pretended while I was in the shower that I lived in Norway, and that soon, I would run outside naked and throw myself into the snow and roll around and get all tingly down to my soul before running back inside to get dry and warm and drink hot chocolate and maybe eat a big steamy bowl of potato soup with crusty bread.

Blue Wren fell under the spell of Dr. Wicked's web application, Write or Die! It's a site that lets you challenge yourself to write as many words as you can in a certain amount of time. And it also punishes the tendency to avoid writing. As long as you keep typing, you're fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences.

Consequences! I think that's just what I need to start writing again. Like Dr. Wicked wrote...

If I don't write my own stories I am only disappointing myself. I experience perpetual disappointment in myself so I'm kind of used to it.

Sigh. I can relate. Dr. Wicked's consequences are:

Gentle Mode: A certain amount of time after you stop writing, a box will pop up, gently reminding you to continue writing.

Normal Mode: If you persistently avoid writing, you will be played a most unpleasant sound. The sound will stop if and only if you continue to write.

Kamikaze Mode: Keep Writing or Your Work Will Unwrite Itself

I'm going to visit Dr. Wicked every morning to try to get back into the swing of things over here.

I'm a little scared but why should I be? Like Wren said, Oh, This is fun...

Here's to hoping!

The Reader of Himself

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

--Marcel Proust

h/t John Baker

Dan Leo? Are you there? You can't say you haven't read your line of Proust today! There's more at the Proust link above.

Cute Words

Here's how Tom Watson imagined me on vacation all last week:

Bet she's always organizing hikes, and outings, and visits to interesting new restaurants.

Hikes?

Hikes?

If hauling my lobstery self over to the Conch Cafe for a Nutty Monkey is considered a hike, then I was a master hiker, well conditioned and now ready for the Rockies.

A Nutty Monkey, if you care to know, is a frozen drink made with a mixture of banana tasting something or other and Amaretto.  So good.  I would also order a Seawich.  Their clever term for sandwich.  Why did they feel they had to change that word?  I mean, it's already sandwich.  Anyway, that was one of the great issues of the day I was contemplating on all my hikes last week.

I'm back home now.  Not hiking -- no Nutty Monkeys in sight, but I'm still thinking about words.  I keep running across such cute ones in the blogosphere.

Bumbleberry

Fusspot

Crockpottery

All better than seawich, if you ask me.

Have you run across any cute words lately?  Or, are there any words you just think are cute, but haven't used in awhile?  I'd go looking for more on my own, but I am tired from all the hiking I've done recently.