WordWacky

Garrison Keillor and Andy Warhol may not have much in common. At all. But today’s Writer’s Almanac celebrated the birthday of someone much more well known for his visual art than his writing. Maybe.

Today’s poem, “Andy Warhol for Familiar Quotations” by Peter Oresick is one with repeating lines (if anyone can identify it as a specific form, please let me know — I couldn’t find it anywhere). It begins:

Andy Warhol said, Always leave them wanting less.
Being born, Warhol said, is like being kidnapped.
Everyone will be famous, Andy said, for 15 minutes.
I thought everyone was just kidding, said Andy.

Being born, Andy Warhol said, is like being kidnapped.
Think rich, said Warhol, look poor.
I thought everyone was just kidding, said Andy.
Dying, Andy said, is the most embarrassing thing….

At first I wondered what Andy Warhol was doing on the Writer’s Almanac, but as the quotes wedged their way in again and again, I realized how pithy and quotable the man was. While quotes may not be exactly writing, they require thought, editing, and precise wording. Sounds a lot like writing to me.

Back to Andy and Garrison: there’s a pleasing converse, parallel effect between them. Andy was the very epitome of cool and — despite what he said — for a lot longer than fifteen minutes. He took the popular and ordinary and lifted it from its day to day to make it extraordinary and even more popular. (Are you gonna tell me you don’t think he sold soup?)

Garrison, on the other hand, is the very epitome of uncool. He’s midwestern, nerdy, and old fashioned. He takes the bizarre and unpopular and makes it extraordinary and at least a little popular.

I don’t know if I’m right, but I suspect they’d be friends, were Andy still around.

Be well, do good work, and always leave them wanting less.

I bought business cards the other day. They identify me as a writer.

There are many opinions about when you get to call yourself a writer [Ed: see comments]. I like to think that like other parts of one’s own identity, it arises from within — only you know whether you’re a writer or not.

Doubts I have, though this identity has been with me as long as my oldest friends. It’s been a secret. It’s been a title. It’s been a lie. It’s been the only thing that keeps me alive. I have rolled around in the mud with writer, wrestled it and conquered it, only to lose on rematch.

And even when you get over coming out as a writer and you claim the identity, there are other people in the world to think about. Will they call you a writer?

Apparently the late, great George Carlin struggled with this side of the dilemma. He was not just a comedian, but a writer. From his last interview, with Psychology Today:

It sounds like you think of yourself much more as a writer than a performer—is that true? How do you think about performing?

It’s my primary delivery system. I used to, in my early years, when I would do an interview I was always proud to tell the writer that I wrote my own material, if they asked me or even if they didn’t. I wanted to be distinguished from the ones who didn’t do that, and I was proud of it, so I would say I am a comedian who writes his own material. And then at some point, I discovered what I really had become was a writer who performs his own material.

This was a really important distinction for me to notice—it happened way after the fact. I’m a writer. I think of myself as a writer. First of all, I’m an entertainer; I’m in the vulgar arts. I travel around talking and saying things and entertaining, but it’s in service of my art and it’s informed by that. So I get to write for two destinations. The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.

Last year a group of us from the little writing school that could, Bent, went to Saints and Sinners, a queer literary festival in New Orleans. Traversing one of those cobblestone streets en masse, we talked about the fear of calling yourself a writer. And we practiced. In turn, we said it, out loud, so that everyone with us could hear. “I am a writer.”

I am a writer.

Those of us who have come out in other ways know how scary – and ultimately liberating – coming out can be. But when I came out as queer, it was just done. From then on I could be. Could love. Could  breathe and smile and curl up in the arms of the person I loved and who loved me, freely.

Calling yourself a writer means that now you must work. Because if you don’t have “something to show for it,” sadly, nobody will believe you.

You may as well tuck that journal back under your mattress and go back to keeping secrets.

There’s nothing more to say about this book, it’s true. Yet I also believe my reading experience is enhanced by a multitude of ideas around a single work.

This is the book your creative writing teacher wants you to write. It is sparse, and the verbs are active. Epic without being overwritten, it has a verbal landscape that exactly mirrors the charred country the protagonists traverse.

Yes, it’s apocalyptic; yes, it’s man versus man — along with man versus nature (himself?). It is every paranoid’s fantasy taken to its impossible, right-around-the-corner conclusion. It is predictable in this way.

You won’t care.

This is a story of love and commitment under the harshest imaginable conditions. Our unnamed heroes walk on, always at the brink of unthinkable deaths, and still there are lessons, a father’s lessons, his legacy to his son, a son’s lessons of innocence for his father.

Most of the insights of the father go unspoken, however: “The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone.”

McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks to mark dialogue. His commas are so infrequent, you almost believe they’re completely absent (on two full pages of complicated sentences, I counted two). All of the -n’t contractions lack their apostrophes. Many to-be verbs are just missing. Civilization has broken down completely, and with it all order, says McCarthy with these omissions.

The placement of text on the pages — lone paragraphs and vacant expanse of page — contribute to the barren landscape of the characters’ worlds.

A paragraph separated by breaks on either side:

In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.

I had to read this paragraph several times, inserting mental commas as I went. I enjoyed every reading of it more than the last.

What do you want when there’s nothing left to want? Who do you trust when there’s nobody left to trust and the rules you learned to live by no longer fit — how would you even figure out who to trust? What would you do — or not do — to survive?

These are worn out questions that are haunting and dusty and new and familiar in The Road.

Writer’s block is a controversial idea among writers. While some struggle for days, months, years to slay the beast, others mock it as fiction: so much Sasquatch.

You can count James Frey in that latter camp, and an off-the-cuff, quotable comment he made at a reading has injured the feelings of — not writers, but bankers.

Frey is easy to pick on — even Oprah, the guardian angel of modern American women, has had her turn. And unlike Oprah, the field of banking has never been known to champion the underdog, so it’s not surprising that they’d resurrect his past “mistakes” [Editor's note: I believe these same mistakes to be present in all memoirs, to a greater or lesser degree.] and call him a “Fake Writer.” A fake writer he is not.

From Dealbreaker:

At a reading last night, when asked by an audience member if he ever found it difficult to come up with material, he responded, “Writer’s block is for chumps. To me this is a job, like being a banker, or a teacher. You never hear of banker’s block.”

Well, it turned out that some bankers had heard of banker’s block. Said one particularly eloquent banker:

“I’d like to see how long it would take Frey to try and write a public filing that describes the ass-rape of Bear Stearns without using profanity. Do you have any idea how long I sat there trying to come up with an acceptable alternative? At first I thought, okay, how about the ‘non-consensual fucking of Bear Stearns,” but that didn’t work. Then I tried “backdoor surprise,” but that didn’t cut it either. I literally sat there for hours with nothing but that infernal cursor staring me in the face before deciding to go with “involuntary and immediate liquidity injection requirement.” Late at night, I lie awake and see visions of that cursor. Taunting. Mocking. Making a fool of me. So don’t you dare tell me there’s no writer’s block in banking.”

Is the point that in all pursuits people have lackluster days, days where nothing’s flowing, no progress is made? Or that some people, whatever their pursuit, are chumps, staring at the mocking cursor?

Or maybe there’s more in common between writing and banking than we previously realized, Mr. Frey. Whaddya say? Career switch?

…own a bookstore located on their farm in Wisconsin. It’s not marked; it’s not centrally located. They never advertise, and their only regular hours are 9-5 on Saturday.

They have more than a million titles, which is many more than a shopping center chain store.

This inspiring couple will amaze you.

Lenore says that the most important book of all is Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes:

“If a child knows eight nursery rhymes before the child is four years old, that child will be an excellent reader when he is eight years old.”

(The video is a little slow to start, since there are a couple of intros edited in. But it’s worth it.)

[via My World... My Perspective...]

In a Radiohead-like move, author Paulo Coelho increased sales of his books by offering downloads of them for free. His publishers, inspired by the increase in sales, later did the same.

Coelho himself has an answer to my title question, “Why buy the book…?” from Torrentfreak:

“A (real) book is easy to carry, easy to read anywhere. Reading a book on a monitor on the other hand is very tiresome, and it would be even more expensive to print (considering cartridge prices) than to buy a paperback,” he says.

Coelho considers the downloads previews, and hopes that previewing encourages readers to buy the book. It has, too — in its 34th week on the Bestseller List, The Alchemist is number six.

Never mind that citing Coelho as a favorite will lose you dates, if you believe the readers of the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts (read the comments). This is the same New York Times that maintains the bestseller list on which Mr. Coelho has managed to rise back up to #6 with a book that is fifteen years old.

[via Shelftalker]

Someone once told me that among writers, there are those who underuse and those who overuse the comma. I am in the latter camp. That there are precise rules to govern comma use is a surprise to some — many liberal comma users like myself are more interested in the pace of their piece than adherence to standards.

According to Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, as quoted in Wikipedia:

A passage peppered with commas — which in the past would have indicated painstaking and authoritative editorial attention — smacks simply of no backbone. People who put in all the commas betray themselves as moral weaklings with empty lives and out-of-date reference books.

While it would be easy to feel offended by this, I am instead encouraged to do things my own way. Strange quote for a book subtitled, “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” 

Also from Wikipedia — commas have history:

(more…)

It’s been a long time since I’ve been behind the wheel at a blog. Picture me stretching, because that’s what I’ve been doing: re-familiarizing myself with name servers and redirects, getting up to speed on the new technologies available to me.

Truth is, blogging hasn’t changed much. What has changed is the marketing of blogs, and that industry has exploded.

When I pulled the plug on my personal blog in 2005, I knew that blogging wasn’t over for me, but I also knew my next endeavor would have to be something less personal and more topical—but what? Since then I spent some time blogging professionally, but when the company’s blog goals changed, so did my motivation.

So here I am, starting a word blog. A blog about words—what they are, what they make—even, sometimes, what makes them (typography and etymology are fair game, in other words). Other words! Word industries, word games, the spoken word, the written word, lyrics and anti-lyrics. Words, words, and more words.

To ensure a variety of content, I have extended an invitation to at least one other potential word blogger, and we may see more people pop up on this blog as time progresses. Or you may just be stuck with me. Some things I have planned; others will be pure improv.

Why, you ask? Aren’t there plenty of word blogs around? What could I possibly have to add to the blogosphere at this late date?

To quote Henry Miller, a writer whose intensity and proliferation I admire, “Writing is its own reward.” Does the same statement hold if I substitute blogging for writing?

This is not to say that I don’t believe blogging is writing—far from it. But is blogging its own reward, or is the reward elsewhere? In community, in traffic, in financial gain, in credibility, in authority? I know what I got out of my personal blogging endeavor, but I suspect new rewards await me in this next incarnation of the blogger’s I.

I picture myself looking back on this post with amusement. This is how I will go forward: boldly, and with confidence. Join me if you would like. If not, I’m sure I can dig up someone else to come along…