Nonsense Verse

Choices: Alice Munro

I’m back.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to resurrect this blog without its becoming totally redundant. I toyed with making it a lit blog, but there are so many good ones out there already, why even bother competing? I follow those sites. If they write something nifty and I want to point it out, maybe I’ll link to it. But come on: Have you seen Maud Newton’s link collection? Why in god’s name would I want to try to replicate that?

So. Best to make this a more personal site, then. The thing is, books are pretty much my life now, so Nonsense Verse can’t help but dip into the lit-bloggy world. How to differentiate between the blogging I’ll do here versus the blogging I’ll do over here, for instance? And how much should those two worlds communicate?

I’ll be figuring it out as I go along.

I’m leaning toward making this site about the tiny readerly things I get super-obsessed with — stuff that you may read about here and just go, “Huh? Whatever, lady,” but which gets yours truly extra excited. (I did this before, of course. I’m just going to try to do it more often.)

For example: I’ve been reading Alice Munro’s Progress of Love. Many awestruck things to say about it. But here’s a micro detail that made me dog-ear one of the pages: In the title story, bottom of Page 10 in my edition, Munro shifts strikingly from past tense into the present, and then back:

The shadow was a rope, a noose on the end of a rope that hung down from a beam overhead.

“Mama?” says Marietta, in a fainter voice. “Mama, come down, please.” Her voice is faint because she fears that any yell or cry might jolt her mother into movement, cause her to step off the chair and throw her weight on the rope. But even if Marietta wanted to yell she couldn’t. Nothing but this pitiful thread of a voice is left to her — just as in a dream when a beast or a machine is bearing down on you.

“Go and get your father.”

That was what her mother told her to do, and Marietta obeyed.

Munro could have stayed in the past tense throughout. Yet the choice she made, to bring us suddenly into the world of Marietta’s disturbing present, was perfect. Understated, but oh so shrewd. It’s an easy enough detail to read right over, but when I got to this part, it knocked me out. I had to go back and read it again, and again.

Wild Things

My review of Graeme Gibson's anthology The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany, for The New York Times Book Review.

A Century of Bugaboos

Language may change, but pedantry is forever. And as Jan Freeman demonstrates in Ambrose Bierce’s Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic’s Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers, so too is the tradition of modern-day pedants’ picking apart the outmoded irritants of the quibblers who came before them. Here's the full blog post.

Style and Alchemy

My review of Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, for The New York Times Book Review.

Buzzy Book

I wish I’d had the chance to read Lorrie Moore’s new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, before heading to the Boundary Waters area of Minnesota in July. I spent most of the vacation flailing wildly and slapping at my body and squealing and crying in the woods, and feeling altogether ridiculous — all because of bugs! Ms. Moore would have understood, I think. Here's the full blog post.

Ron Carlson

The most important thing a writer can do after completing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence or to go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen. But. It’s this simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room.

— Ron Carlson Writes a Story

Ron Carlson knows all my bad habits and has written a piece of advice just for me. (How'd he do that?) It’s a fine directive — so simple, so obvious. But. It’s so hard! I can be very bad at staying in the room.

This passage has been swirling in my head all week: the image of leaving the room to “celebrate” the completion of a sentence (pop the bubbly!); the television “like a dormant monster” (though in my case, it would be the computer, gateway to that demon portal the Internet); the idea of having to “rest up for a few days” before the next good sentence can bubble up (writing: so exhausting).

Margaret Atwood

From The Blind Assassin:

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible, of course.

From The Blind Assassin:

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible, of course.

John Updike: One Sentence, 200+ Words

In the two weeks I was in Europe I carried around one book: Rabbit Angstrom. I'm currently in the middle of the third novel, and I'm trying to get through it as quickly as I can, before the fall semester starts. But I had to interrupt my reading to share just one passage, a sentence so virtuosic that I had to put the book down, step away from it, throw up my hands and just marvel: How did he do that?

First, back up a tad: sentence. Now look below — this indented bit looks awfully long, does it not? In fact, it's more than 200 words long, long enough to require numerous breaths, and mental rests, to absorb all that's happening and how it links up so seamlessly with what has come before, not only within this single sentence but within the past 843 pages. I'm not often a fan of never-ending sentences; so few authors can pull them off, and even when they do, the reader is often left wondering, All right, that was lovely, but was it necessary? Here, though, at this major turning point in the characters' lives, it works. Updike wraps us in the moment and reminds us of the inside jokes and the years of joy and pain and bitterness, and shows us the beauty and tragedy of the passage of time, just as his overwhelmed protagonist must have experienced it. (For those who haven’t read the Rabbit books, a little primer: Harry, aka Rabbit, is our hero; Nellie is Nelson, his son, whom we first met when he was a toddler; and Mim, Harry's sister, we've also watched age through Rabbit's eyes, from 19-year-old ingénue to — well, you'll get the picture.) Read it slowly:

And outside, when it is done, the ring given, the vows taken in the shaky young voices under the towering Easter-colored window of Christ's space shot and the Lord's Prayer mumbled through and the pale couple turned from the requisite kiss (poor Nellie, couldn't he be just another inch taller?) to face as now legally and mystically one the little throng of their blood, their tribe, outside in the sickly afternoon, clouds having come with the breeze that flows toward evening, the ridiculous tears dried in long stains on Harry's face, then Mim comes into his arms again, a sisterly embrace, all sorts of family grief since the days he held her little hand implied, the future has come upon them darkly, his sole seed married, marriage that daily doom which she may never know; lean and crinkly in his arms she is getting to be a spinster, even a hooker can be a spinster, think of all she's had to swallow all these years, his baby sister, crying in imitation of his own tears, out here where the air quickly dries them, and the after-church smiles of the others flicker about them like butterflies born to live a day.

In the two weeks I was in Europe I carried around one book: Rabbit Angstrom. I'm currently in the middle of the third novel, and I'm trying to get through it as quickly as I can, before the fall semester starts. But I had to interrupt my reading to share just one passage, a sentence so virtuosic that I had to put the book down, step away from it, throw up my hands and just marvel: How did he do that?

First, back up a tad: sentence. Now look below — this indented bit looks awfully long, does it not? In fact, it's more than 200 words long, long enough to require numerous breaths, and mental rests, to absorb all that's happening and how it links up so seamlessly with what has come before, not only within this single sentence but within the past 843 pages. I'm not often a fan of never-ending sentences; so few authors can pull them off, and even when they do, the reader is often left wondering, All right, that was lovely, but was it necessary? Here, though, at this major turning point in the characters' lives, it works. Updike wraps us in the moment and reminds us of the inside jokes and the years of joy and pain and bitterness, and shows us the beauty and tragedy of the passage of time, just as his overwhelmed protagonist must have experienced it. (For those who haven’t read the Rabbit books, a little primer: Harry, aka Rabbit, is our hero; Nellie is Nelson, his son, whom we first met when he was a toddler; and Mim, Harry's sister, we've also watched age through Rabbit's eyes, from 19-year-old ingénue to — well, you'll get the picture.) Read it slowly:

And outside, when it is done, the ring given, the vows taken in the shaky young voices under the towering Easter-colored window of Christ's space shot and the Lord's Prayer mumbled through and the pale couple turned from the requisite kiss (poor Nellie, couldn't he be just another inch taller?) to face as now legally and mystically one the little throng of their blood, their tribe, outside in the sickly afternoon, clouds having come with the breeze that flows toward evening, the ridiculous tears dried in long stains on Harry's face, then Mim comes into his arms again, a sisterly embrace, all sorts of family grief since the days he held her little hand implied, the future has come upon them darkly, his sole seed married, marriage that daily doom which she may never know; lean and crinkly in his arms she is getting to be a spinster, even a hooker can be a spinster, think of all she's had to swallow all these years, his baby sister, crying in imitation of his own tears, out here where the air quickly dries them, and the after-church smiles of the others flicker about them like butterflies born to live a day.

Thomas Mann

From Garner's Usage Tip of the Day:

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
— Thomas Mann

Speaking My Language

Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer, on the connection between reading and writing:

More often the connection has to do with whatever mysterious promptings make you want to write. It's like watching someone dance and then secretly, in your own room, trying out a few steps.