trying to get the engine idling ~ and news bits

last night i wrote three sentences. er, not exactly the fabulous outpouring of words i had hoped for. and one of the sentences doesn't even count since it was a quote from the Bible.

i'm having that "cold and in the garage for too long" problem. can't quite get the engine to turn over.

i'm still having difficulty picking the right place to begin. i actually had a thought yesterday that maybe i oughta use dates, but i really hate dates in books. they go right over my head.

there's something about bassico's Silk in the way he contextualizes the world of the story by presenting a short list of what's happening globally. and i am reminded of the parable quality of his work (as well as fermine's). there was a descriptor to this book that called it a fable. a fable about longing, loss, and the paradoxes of destiny. or some such. i don't necessarily argue with that. except that it's not really fabulous, now is it?

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it's sir arthur conan doyle's b-day today. Google has a cool commemorative logo to celebrate today.



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in other news, i've been watching the barbaro story. i want to preface this by saying that i think horse-racing is barbaric, but i respect the tradition of it in the same way that i respect bull-fighting in spite of my disapproval.

for those of you who are also following, you know they give barbaro a 50-50 for survival. his ankle was shattered so bad that he's now got 23 pins just holding it together. normally you put a horse down if it has this bad an injury.



it's a wee bit heartbreaking to be sure.

the strugglies ~ and yankees need love too

i'm having posting diarrhea today apparently.

but just to get this out of the way, i thought i had better offset my last ranting by saying that i'm not a rabid secesh and that i do, in fact, own a Joshua Chamberlain doll (oh man, i'm admitting this), and i'm a huge freak for the 54th massachusetts and the irish brigades and boy did the blues have it way worse in rebel prisons at the end of the day.

and even some of the bad yankees at least had good taste ~ check out brigadier general rufus ingalls with his carriage dog (it's got its head in the girl's lap at his feet).

: D



dalmatians in the civil war, man.
way cool.

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but about those "strugglies" ~

i'm forming an idea in my head for the shape of this book (yes, vaguely rectangular, buti'm not talking about the literal here). this nebulous mass, however, still hasn't managed to translate into anything like words. the day's writing generated an overwrought philosophical lament on the definition of "hero" which i immediately scrapped. boring, yuck, drek.

so i sat down and watched The Thin Red Line ~ well, stopped and started it a lot ~ i get overwhelmed by it so it's not something i watch all in one sitting, generally.

the guiding rule of poetry is that the objective is to focus on what is concrete: images. not ideas, not abstracts, philosophies, themes, etc.

images.

the opening chapter of maxence fermine's Snow:

Yuko Akita had two passions.
Haiku.
And Snow.

A Haiku is a Japanese poem. It has three lines.
And only seventeen syllables. No more, no less.

Snow is a poem. A poem that falls from the
clouds in delicate white flakes.

A poem that comes from the sky.

It has a name. A name of dazzling whiteness.

Snow.

the opening chapter of alessandro baricco's Silk:

Although his father had pictured for him a brilliant future in the army, Hervé Joncour had ended up earning his crust in an unusual career which, by a singular piece of irony, was not unconnected with a carming side that bestowed on it a vaguely feminine intonation.

Hervé Joncour bought and sold silkworms for a living.

The year was 1861. Flaubert was writing Salammbo, electric light remained hypothetical, and Abraham Lincoln, beyond the Ocean, was fighting a war of which he was not to see the finish.

Hervé Joncour was thirty-two.

He bought and sold.

Silkworms.

(and yes, those are complete chapters).

what i love about them is that they are spare, yes, but they are also very specific. they introduce you to the characters in a way that is immediate without describing anything, really, except their passions. by focusing on that one thing, the whole person emerges. we know that Yuko Akita is hyper-focused on the art of Haiku, and more specifically snow as Haiku. we know that Hervé Joncour, a disappointment perhaps to his father, is engaged in a trade of a sensual commodity despite a life of banal sort of orderliness (suggested by the ordering of the era, reducing it to its momentous highlights).

we don't need, in either case, pages of background and details and descriptions and conversations to make a very specific and compelling impression. it isn't that kind of immersive reading experience. it's immersive in another way: occupying the senses and disconnecting the brain from the necessity of a narrative crutch so that it can free-fall in pictures painted with words.

that's the sort of poetry i'm looking for. that's what the film of The Thin Red Line does. it tells you: experience this story you've heard a thousand times, but experience it in a new way, from a different facet of that old shape you thought was so predictable. of course, it's literally got pictures. the question is how to translate that to text. ron hansen could do it. alan lightman could do it. fermine, baricco, and ondaatje coudl do it.

i need to get some ducks lined up so i can take some practice stabs at this sort of thing and see if i can do it.

maybe if i am successful i will share some results later this week.

: D