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Monday
Oct082012

Stockholm in Fall

This is just a teaser, since I only have a few moments...there are more where this came from. I absolutely love fall, and just this past Saturday we got one of those stunningly gorgeous days. So I headed out on my bike, with my camera, and had a blast.

 

 

Sunday
Oct072012

"Explosion-Covered People"

Check out this article (and portraits!) from NPR's Picture Show blog, "Voices of the 'Explosion-Covered People.'" It's well worth the five minutes, if only to learn about the elderly woman who has been providing comfort-water to A-bomb victims for decades now. This type of documentation is even more critical given that many of these people didn't feel comfortable talking about their experiences until very recently, towards the ends of their lives.

Tangentially (and I will write about this in more detail soon), the phrases "explosion-covered people" and "comfort-water" enchant me. I don't speak Japanese--never studied it at all beyond the survival basics necessary for a trip to Tokyo once over New Year's--and maybe that's why. I'm convinced that true fluency is indicated only when you are able to appreciate poetry, as poetry depends on deviation from what its readers and listeners expect from a language. If you haven't internalized the expectations, you won't understand what falls outside of them. The bittersweet side of this is that until you're at that point (or at least, it works this way for me), just about everything rings poetic and leads you to consider the what/how/why and the strange beauty of what is being expressed. Once you're able to fully appreciate poetry, that pan-poetic awareness has been lost, necessarily.

And then head on over to Wikipedia, where the sidebar will tell you that today is St. Osgyth's day (as observered by Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox types). Muse on how you've never seen this name before (despite a full year of studying Anglo-Saxon) and check out her life story, circa 700 AD. Take a moment to wonder about what life was like at that point in British history--post-Romans, right? Pre-Normans, for sure; you know that much. Ponder what else might have been going on. Finally, read about her demise: killed by Viking marauders. How very appropriate of her! 

If you do all of this, you have experienced for yourself my lazy Sunday morning browsing.

Tuesday
Oct022012

Searching for Similes

I love Mark Twain. I was doing an internet search to figure out what other people had used to complete the phrase "dart like a ____," and one of the first results took me to a page out of a Dictionary of Similies from 1916. This page contained many of the usual suspects, such as:

 Darted like an eagle.
            —Aneurin
  Darted … like an arrow aflame.
            —Joseph Conrad

  Darted like a skimming bird.

            —Joseph Conrad


And others that made me smile, like:

  Darting like glittering elves at play.
            —Mary M. Fenollosa

  Darted away like a bird that has been fluttering around its nest before it takes a distant

flight.
            —James Fenimore Cooper

And still others that rely on a familiarity with things that might be just a tad out of date:

 Darts on like a greyhound whelp after a leveret.
            —Walter Savage Landor

Shakespeare even weighs in, timeless as he usually is:

 Their influence darts
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins of desolate society.
            —William Shakespeare

But the medal goes to Twain's simile, listed last, and a welcome relief from all of these romantic, flowery, natural images and--as one is wont to get from Twain--straight to the point:

Darted away like a telegram.
            —Mark Twain
Monday
Oct012012

Great Blog Find

So I just returned from the Göteborg Bokmassa (bookfair to the rest of us), and I'll put up some of my favorite moments, insights, and one-liners from the Romanian guy who sat on a panel in English. But for now, since I need to make some headway into the manuscript that I ignored all weekend, I'll just offer up a blog I recently discovered. Lydia Netzer is my new favorite person, largely because she admits in writing that her first book, which is currently collecting glowing reviews, took ten years. She also has some highly entertaining things to say about Twilight and relationships--and, fortunately, good things to say about actual relationships. Go visit!

Tuesday
Sep112012

Considering Apocalypse and Retro Culture

There's a great article just up at Longform, "The Revolutionary Energy of the Outmoded," that you can find on its original blog here. I'm still digesting every rhetorical move Christian Thorne, professor of English at Williams College, pulls when it comes to placing our '90s (and beyond, certainly, but the piece was written in 2003) near-worship of retro culture and obsession with apocalyptic films and books side by side. It's not a comparison that I would have thought to make on my own, but as I read the piece, I kept having those moments of complete recognition, the kind that make you feel kind of like an idiot for missing something that's so obvious once it's been explained to you.

And maybe it's because I'm also slowly making my way through The Gift for the first time, wherein Lewis Hyde (at least so far--don't spoil the ending!) argues that objects-as-gifts within a constant cycle of giving/receiving have a fundamentally different power and identity than objects-as-commodities as we know them in western capitalism, but what stood out to me most was this:

...[there] lies the buried aspiration of all retro-culture, even (or especially) at its most fetishistic. If you examine the signs that hang next to the objects at Restoration Hardware and other such retro-marts—these small placards that invent elaborate and fictional histories for the objects stacked there for sale—you will discover a culture recoiling from its commodities in the very act of acquiring them, a culture that thinks it can drag objects back into the magic circle if only it can learn to consume them in the right way. 

As a writer who is so often concerned with objects within my own work, and as a 30-something living in the 21st century who's necessarily been steeped in this retro-culture, reading this was less an "Aha!" moment than an "Oh. Duh." 

Thorne takes it one step further:

Underlying retro-culture is a vision of a world in which commodity production has come to a halt, in which objects have been handed down, not for our consumption, but for our care. The apocalypse is retro-culture’s deepest fantasy, its enabling wish.

I'm just skimming the surface here; the essay incorporates, the Left Behind series, Blade Runner, Delicatessen, The Truman Show, classic Chaplin-era slapstick themes, and, briefly, film noir.

I'll be giving the thoughts it's generated for me a lot more consideration myself. I'm not writing a novel set in the past, but I am writing a novel set in a foreign country and culture that is often exoticized, and idealized, in a way that's related to how we approach our reconstructed past. A large part of creating the world of 21st century Shanghai on the page, and making sure that the reader feels the same disconnect as my main character, lies in the objects that Will encounters. The objects are also implicated in the supernatural elements of the story. This and the distancing from home culture that living abroad necessarily creates seems to endow them with the kind of weight that Thorne argues we fantasize about getting from the apocalypse. The latter effect really just imposes another kind of scarcity; the former actually does, deliberately, endow them with magic of a sort.

I'd also be lying if I said that I've never considered writing an apocalyptic novel. At the moment, though, I think Octavia E. Butler has me beat out of the water before I've even made an outline, so that one's on the shelf for a bit.

I'm hooked. The essay is definitely worth a read.