Hardly anyone will recognize the letters I used to title my thoughts today. “Any Solid Color Other than Black” is a class in AKC shows for American Cocker Spaniels (ASCOB is pronounced ass’ cob). For the record, I have never owned or shown American Cocker Spaniels of any color, though I do have a scar on my upper lip from being bitten by one when I was a small child.
This is not a post about bites or even dogs. There are no assignments or exercises. A few crows. Trees. Our condo news.
I got in a couple of running miles this morning. We have pretty much nailed down our weekly routine but I still have to think when I first wake: Where am I?
We found nineteen pieces of sea glass yesterday, seventeen the day before.
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.
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.
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.
Continue readingYes, 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.
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.
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.
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.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 