This one's for Wiley, a great admirer of fast-twitch suspicion:

Alain de Botton wrote that, referring to a week he spent writing at a desk in the middle of an airport.

Thank you PSFK.

(Note: I'm again and again impressed by the jolts of happiness that good metaphors give me.)

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book - to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

John Steinbeck wrote that, two blank pages before chapter 1 of Cannery Row begins.

Been almost a year since I tagged a metaphor on this blog. Clearly I'm not paying enough attention.

Thank you Giuls.

Highly illegal to post this, I guess.

But why would Faulkner want his words hoarded?

He was "using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail among whom is already that one who will someday stand where I'm standing."

I think that counts as permission to share.

I found these words, scribbled:

morning run in NH

New England heart
sparkling dew
magic mist
endless fence post
squishy mud
expect a rainbow
ferns you want to lick, eat

And turned them into these, an email to the original's author:

morning fun on earth

dew brings the heat
ferns misty in magic mud
endless
like a rainbow
or a fence
posts sparkling
and squishy
to eat

Mr. Stanley, my romantic poetry and travelwriting professor, would tell me that isn't a poem. Not yet, anyway. It's a reaction. An impression. A clever joke (his adjective, one I've never really been able to incorporate). A beginning. A draft.

The poem comes later. When every letter, every comma or capital not included, is a choice. A poem is a poem when it's fully intentional.

Stanley and I argued about that sometimes. What about jazz?, I'd ask. He'd shake his head and write the same comment on every piece of writing I ever gave him: It'll get better if you spend more time on it.

He's certainly more right than I was.

And that, above, is not a poem.

But it does have an alternate title: lick my heart, baby.

This came in the mail today:

Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and advebs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place. - Wiliam Strunk and E. B. White
 
Makes me want to look at everything I've written over the past 6 months, tally, evaluate, and probably cry.

Uh oh. Already. Probably. I have a long way to go. Clearly.
 
Also sets me imagining the building of adjectives. I picture Santa's elves: chiseling giant wooden letters out of treestumps, packed around coffeestained conference tables, diagramming on whiteboards, arranging the letters on huge Scrabble-style trays, and pondering.

I'm reading Philip Pullman, loving it, thinking about it in relation to (comparison with) the JRR Tolkien Middle Earth Project, and wondering about value.

I think Tolkien's work is immensely impressive in its imaginative scale and as a demonstration of accessible but ambitious storytelling, and I think it's educationally valuable in that it turns people into readers, writers, and explorers of the originally weird thoughts we all have.  In my opinion, however, Tolkien's orcs are a very big worry.  I think it's fundamentally unethical to tell war stories in which the bad guys don't have families.

So.

How do we teach Tolkien?  (If we teach Tolkien.  Which I'm pretty sure we do and I'm pretty sure we should.  Because of the imagination, the fact that his work can be a gateway to literature and learning and love of stories, words, and communication.)

Maybe we teach the man with the work? Explain his personal weirdness and how it contributed to his (in my opinion problematically simplified) vision of good and evil and the virtue in violence? 

Worth some thought I think.

And then there's Pullman.  I'm halfway through the second book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and, so far, I love it.  So far, it feels questioning and complicated and real. 

So.

So far, I say teach it.  For imagination.  For storytelling.  And for truth.

Yikes.  Bold statement from someone that still has 500 pages to read.

Pretty sure this is my second favorite one line song.

Guesses on my favorite favorite?  Your favorite favorites?

All the Tired Horses is track 1 on Self Portrait.

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

David Foster Wallace wrote that.

I agree.

And sometimes I'm afraid that lots of people forget it.  Not that what goes on inside is more than words can handle.  Easy to remember that.  But that it's fast and huge and interconnected.  And unique.  And awesome.  So awesome, in fact, that even our most inadequate sketches are probably worth sharing. 

Thank you D.T. Max and The New Yorker for the quote.

As I chip away at this tagging project, I'm discovering blog posts that I don't remember writing.

Most notably, this one, which is about the airport in Marquette, Michigan, an airport that sells no gum except for sugary chicklets in a coin drop glass bubble.

That post includes both a reference to road trips and soggy lettuce and the Pain song Easy Out.  I made that very same wet lettuce reference less than a week ago in a post about the moment I fell in love with Sublime.  And I posted Easy Out again even more recently in a post about baseball and my sometimes embarrassing fanaticism.

The fact that I'm retelling stories and reintroducing songs is a little bit worrisome, but I do enjoy comparing the writing and thought processes, and I guess it is important to remember that memory imperfection is the biggest reason we write all this stuff down.

Charlie Dean died in Laos in 1974.  A few months earlier, he had been living just west of Cairns, Australia, with my uncle Kim and Kim's best friend Richie on Rosebud Farm, the commune that Kim and Rich had started a few years earlier.

Louella Bryant, wife of Harry Reynolds, who went to high school with Kim and Charlie, just wrote a book about Charlie, and, a few hours ago, she drove up to my grandfather's house, where she's spending the next two nights.

When Hal, my grandfather, handed me the book a few weeks ago, he directed me to one chapter in particular.  It was set on the Great Barrier Reef, and Hal wanted to see how well I thought the author had described it.

I read:

Eager for a swim, they took turns jumping overboard with speargun and snorkel, careful not to brush up against the hard limestone corals - a gash could be disastrous.  Those aboard watched for sharks and box jellyfish, whose tentacles inflicted fatal stings.  The blue-ringed octopus, the size of a golf ball with a poisonous beak sharp enough to pierce a wet-suit, could kill a man in minutes.  All of the fifteen species of sea snakes on the reef had small fangs with lethal venom, and the barbs on a stingray's tail would cut deep.  If any any of the men was adept enough - or lucky enough - to spear a fish, there was real threat of shark attack.  So, the trick was to keep out a wary eye, and if you hit your mark, head back to the boat and climb aboard with all haste before the sharks smelled the blood.

Not well I told him.  Sensationally.  Hyperbolically.  And totally unnecessarily so.

One of the first things I found out tonight, of course, was that Hal had passed my review immediately back to the author, and, as soon as she connected me to the objection Hal had brought up with her, she wanted to hear more.

Luckily for me, as soon as I started explaining, Hal interrupted, told a ridiculous and tenuously tangential story, derailed the train of thought, and accidentally rescued me.

So I stayed quiet and listened.  Louella talked about Charlie, Kim, writing, and the questions she had been asking audiences on her book tour, and Hal, the archetypal 87 year old ex-politician, raved on about Vietnam and India and philanthropy and government, paying little attention to questions asked or subjects under discussion.

And, quietly, off to the side, I developed a little theory.

Louella Bryant, an author quite distant from the story she's telling, has gathered her events and settings and characters from people like Hal.  She has built her book on material collected from incorrigible storytellers, from entertainers whose language sprays out sticky from the sap of their overflowing imaginations.  She is embellishing upon embellishments, and, when she describes the dangers of diving on the Reef at least, she drifts a dangerous distance from the truth of actual experience.

Maybe.  It's the beginnings of a theory anyway.

I started to tell her about it when I walked her to her room, and we'll discuss again tomorrow night I'm sure.