An imperturbable demeanor comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune and misfortune at their own private pace like a clock during a thunderstorm.—Robert Louis Stevenson
Florida beach condominiums need serious work. One condominium building collapsed and suddenly people [insurance companies] are paying attention to a problem that has been “building” for decades. The Florida building boom really took off after WW2, and for a long time there has been inadequate oversight of building on land that is itself artificial. That’s because “a lot of inspection practices in the boom years were ‘a fiasco, a joke’ and not ‘worth a damn.” And owners have been reluctant to address structural issues because of the costs involved.
Ours are the five windows in the middle top, shown on the east side at right here. The main entrance is on the south. There is almost no brick or fancy concrete detailing on the west, north or courtyard facades.
Several recent attempts at reading have been… depressing? discouraging? demeaning? Delight might be what I am after. I am wide awake in the middle of the night. Eight hours last night, tonight just four? I don’t know, maybe it’s time for some serious funny.
Just now, our son Ian is making short films. (The ballet is at rest and he is between random gigs so keeping busy.) I came across this one almost by accident. He rarely tells us about shows he’s working on, and this video is delightful: “Harry Potter Can’t Blink.” (Honest, you want to see this.)
Finally getting cell phones (yes, two, one for each of us) and putting together a simple Ikea bookcase on the same day was probably not a good idea. We took long naps, each had two drinks, and went to bed early. I did not read or work on my novel. This morning I ran two miles. Then I attended a Board meeting that lasted nearly three hours. I will not be reading much today either beyond budgets and emails.
Over the course of a year, I generally read fifty to seventy books. I have always read a wide range of books going all the way back to grade school when I was mostly reading books with horses, but also How to Raise and Train everything from goats to hamsters, Winnie the Pooh, a biography of George Washington Carver, and even struggled through Huston Smith’s World Religions. These days I read nonfiction, poetry, memoir, history, and fiction. All sorts. There are a few books I have read over and over when I was teaching them, and several I reread for pleasure. One of those is Dreamsnake.
The author photo and novel cover used in The New York Times obituary for Vonda N. McIntyre. This highly fanciful cover was on my first paperback. The first edition hardcover has a better image. SF covers are often unrepresentative of the book.Continue reading →
Yesterday morning I was reading the Brevity blog, one of my favorite sites. Jeanne Bonner explains “The Obituary We All Need (To Write)” citing the one she wrote for her father. At 250 words it utterly failed to capture her father, the person he was, the parent, the complications of their relationship, her grief at his death. She felt she had to write more. She argues that many of us need to do this, to write the complete obituary with more thought, and that words pressing the bruise might be just what we need for our pain to begin healing. That a more complicated view might return the brightest moments we treasure.
A close-up of the backing and front of a quilt sewn entirely of vintage Indian cotton.
I am skipping my original Exercise #4 because it is only about how to express the same idea several ways in an academic essay (especially the thesis), which was what I was teaching. We’ll skip ahead to something more interesting.
Yes, I am writing this part of my Monday post early so that by the time you read it I will be someplace else and doing something other than writing. There, see how I did that? Present tense and future in a single sentence?
I ran two miles, only some of it uphill, on Friday morning. I earned my Kouign Amann pastry from the bakery. I do not, sadly, think they will hire me. The “Hiring” sign is still in the window and the back-of-the-shop manager I talked to was encouraging, but the two men I talked to the first time looked at me as if I were stale bread. I know that look.
This is not one of my new weavings but an image I found filed away. My December warp is greens and the one I just finished for January is blues and violets, some smokey and some near peacock-bright. February will be corals and copper reds with pale lavenders. Maybe. One warp a month—I’ll see where I am with my huge stash at the end of the year.Continue reading →
I began writing this on Tuesday, three days ago, and you won’t read it until Friday morning. It was a chilling, damp morning but we walked north to the headland, zig-zagging back home. We spotted the little shore birds on our way north, found sea glass walking both directions (35 pieces by the time you read), and heard five sirens and met a couple of friends and dogs we know on our way home on the inner road. A log truck drove off the road and into a muddy bank. I don’t know how that went or if anyone died. I will not even know by Friday morning.
Shorebirds waiting out the terrible weather. (Gulls ion the other side of the creek. Can you see the little birds on the near side, mostly with their heads turned away?) We missed our walk two days this week, but went out in damp and drizzle the other five days. My fingers chilled to pale and senseless on those days we went out for an hour or two as I bent over for dozens of rock and bits of sea glass.Continue reading →
2. The monster sentence. Begin with a simple short sentence—“I baked bread”—subject verb object—and then turn it into a “monster sentence” of at least 100 words. This exercise is straight out of Stanley Fish's playbook. Use every trick you know to ensure that the sentence is grammatically correct and not a run-on, use long dashes (em-dashes), semicolons, lists. Then explain what you’ve created, reviewing what you’ve written, phrase by phrase. NOTE: The explanation should be longer than the original sentence. Write nonfiction, then explain your work.
My assignment grew long, I mean reeeeealy long. I only needed 100 words and I have considerably more words… and that’s after I edited and carved it back a little. Then I revised and cut it back into shorter (but still with monster) sentences. And that’s when I found the point of it all.
In Seattle, especially while I was a student at the UW, people would ask, “Is the mountain out?” They meant, could you see Mount Rainier? Locally, it’s Castle Rock, 0.6 nautical miles offshore, that sometimes disappears behind a cloud bank or fog.Continue reading →
On Wednesdays, the local coastal alarm system broadcasts a cow mooing. This is followed by a man explaining it’s only a test. It’s impossible to ignore, sounding loud even inside the house. The system exists to warn about potential danger, especially tsunamis. During a genuine emergency, we would first hear a siren and then receive specific instructions. Oh, boy. If only.
This sunrise that swung all the way around from east to west, north and south, is from a couple of days ago. The camera is pointed SW.Continue reading →
Writing Good Nonfiction Sentences… one exercise each Friday.
First the necessary introduction. NOTE: several of these exercises are inspired by How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish, Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin, and other sources.
A good essay has a goal—to convince, delight, enlighten, instruct, warn, or to review and question. Part of becoming an accomplished writer involves understanding the work that every word must accomplish.
Each sentence has specific work to do. In a very real sense, sentences are the basic building blocks of writing. Lay down one word after another until you have created a logical idea in the mind of the reader and that is a sentence. Do it with grace and style and that’s good writing. But in order to write a good sentence (or to read and appreciate a good one), it helps to understand the various ways a sentence can function in the essay. Forget about content (for the moment) and try pushing the envelope with these exercises about sentences.
THE EXERCISES: These brief exercises require you to write a nonfiction sentence. Sometimes they require that you write several. Look at the examples and follow the directions after “assignment.” AND Whether this is specified or not in the instructions, on the same page you should also explain the sentence in detail. Don’t be surprised if the explanation takes up a lot more space and time than the sentence. What does the sentence you wrote accomplish? What did you learn by writing it and thinking about it? How might you have learned a skill you can transfer to other writing?
That said, this assignment is pushes sentence-length to create a single “monster sentence.” There is a model and explanation following. My students loved this assignment.
Gary is standing beside the larger stump revealed by the shifted coastline—note that I wasn’t exaggerating about it being four feet across.Continue reading →
I start this post sitting on the sofa just before 8am. It’s wet out but no longer dark. A reminder: If we were on DST all year around, it would be dark here until almost 9am. Apparently golf courses would make a bundle from after-work greens fees and candy companies are certain that a longer afternoon helps their sales during Halloween—they are the two biggest lobbyists wanting high noon to happen at 11 in the morning.
Anyway.
Mount Hood was white and brilliant in sunrise as we ate breakfast. I had made a frittata with the last of the eggs, thawed sweet bell peppers that needed to be used today, and the remainder of a wedge of really great Rogue River Creamery blue cheese. I am trying to empty the fridge before we go back to the beach tomorrow. (Tricky because we thought we would have company last weekend and bought fresh veg accordingly. I still have a bit of spinach and a big bag of mixed greens that need to be consumed, immediately.)
The dawn. It was one of the requirements when we looked for a condo: sky. There had to be sky.Continue reading →
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