A: Good question. I guess take a midnight ride with wheelie-poppin’ wildlife, and keep riding?
(love, my bat-lightning-heart.)
Archive for November, 2008
Q: What’s a Girl To Do?
Sunday, November 30th, 2008What I Saw and My Inner Bookworm
Sunday, November 30th, 2008
Lately, I’ve been feeling the acquired NY survival-abilities of multitasking, noticing the 25+ things my students are doing, and looking in 5 directions while walking down a busy street, have taken over my brain, resulting in a near inability to complete, finish, focus. (look, I hardly stopped to punctuate or finish that sentence!) For example, I’ve taken to dip-reading into 5 books at once, and barely finishing one, all excitement, little follow-through, as the leaning tower of paperbacks on my bedside table attests.
Enough! In an attempt to prove to myself I can still be Focused and Smart, my before-New-Year’s resolution is to return to reading one book at a time. Thoroughly, completely digesting it. Underlining even. Like I used to in college, or at the dinner table when I was eight.
Luckily, I started my mission with this book.
I picked Judy Blundell’s What I Saw and How I Lied because of a friend’s recommendation and the fact that it just won the National Book Award. And its YA, and I’m writing YA, and needed to do some applicable Research.
The experience of tearing through a novel, being annoyed at interruptions like Real People and Holidays, et al, and slightly mourning when it was over was resurrected for me. Yay! I reconnected with my inner bookworm. I was immersed in Blundell’s world, and am kinda sad to be back in this one. I miss the finger waves, red lipstick, espionage, spooky hotel, and cute boy with the sexy forearms!
The book was mostly a swampy run through post-WWII Florida, when Palm Beach was off-limits for Jews (wha?!) and people pocketed their war-secrets like cigarettes for after-dinner. It was fabulous to try to piece together what the adults were up to through the eyes of a swoony yet earnest 15 year old. And to watch her grow.
The book leaves us on 48th street in Manhattan, just as I was gratefully rolling in to 42nd after a Weekend Away.
“Dusk had fallen, and lights were coming on in all the apartments around me. Little squares of gold. … Behind every square of gold was a person. Maybe a family. How nice it must be to wake up and know so many busy lives were around you, in the humming hive of the city.
I felt something clear and straight inside me, and I knew I’d found home. I’d live here one day. I’d be in one of those golden squares of light. Around me would be a bunch of lives, some better, some worse. I’d be smack in the middle of all that living.”
Swoon! Thanks, Blundell. I guess I don’t have ADD after all.
Alphabet Juice
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
“Real writers are supposed to “murder their darlings” — that is, purge any vivid phrase that calls excessive attention to the author. This advice has been variously attributed to Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Orwell, Auden and others, but Blount traces it to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1916 book, “On the Art of Writing.” “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — wholeheartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press: Murder your darlings,” Quiller-Couch wrote.
As one who labored for 15 years as an editor urging writers to birth their darlings and nurture them so that we would have something interesting to publish, I cheered after reading Blount’s critique of this maxim. What is “murder your darlings” but a giant, throbbing, attention-grabbing darling itself? Quiller-Couch could have written “kill your pets” or “eliminate your sweeties” if he was so keen on scrubbing his copy of brilliant phrases, Blount writes, demolishing the famous directive by quoting passages in its vicinity. They swarm with darlings!”
read here
New York Cheat Sheets
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008- i have so many of these in my head…
I love this Kid.
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008these make me want to hang out with a French kid…..
this french girl cracks me up
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
poetry and emotions
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people, but the moment you feel, you’re nobody- but- yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time – and whenever we do it, we are not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world – unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on Earth.
-e.e. cummings
A poem begins as a lump in the throat.
-Robert Frost
The Exhale
Monday, November 17th, 2008Today my yoga teacher said something that struck me as simple and amazing: The exhale will save your life.
I was in my triangle pose, like, wow…..
This makes me think of a dharma talk I attended this week in which the teacher spoke about the “rock” we all carry around with us…the rock of emotions (some would say baggage, but it feels more like a rock to me) that we protect and shelter at the same time its bringing us down.
Why is it so hard to let go of these things, to exhale…and how great to practice, and how great when one does it….even a bit….or fully….
I think about the tightness some people have from carrying things for years…decades…without even thinking about it…and how even when we do think about it sometimes there are blind spots…
Exhaling, letting go, over and over…
emptying my quote drawer of poetry
Saturday, November 15th, 2008“Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you – like music to the musician – or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Exuberance is beauty.” – William Blake
“A poem is a naked person.” -Bob Dylan
“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” – W.H. Auden
“A poem is made of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.” – Emerson
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” -Sylvia Plath
Keeping Things Whole
Saturday, November 15th, 2008In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
-Mark Strand
