One answer to the Narrative question struck me for its Puritanical snottiness: Somebody called Exploding Mary responded "If what you write with matters more, or as much, as how you write-- then what you write won't matter much." Nobody had asked whether the "what" matters as much as or more than the "what with." But the "what with" does matter. It's the source of the sheer aesthetic physical pleasure of pulling letters, words, phrases, sentences, metaphors, images, out of the not-yet into the here-it-is. And there is physical pleasure that is part of the writing process. Just ask Laraine Herring (Writing Begins with the Breath).
Later that night--this is still Wednesday we are talking about--about midnight I was lying in bed when I wasn't tossing in bed, and realized I just had to get up and put my pen to work across the patiently waiting pages of my new APICA CD15HN scribbler with the linen-finish covers in sage green. The scribbler with the silky-finished paper that welcomes fountain pen nibs and ink without the scratchy fibrous tendrils bleeding off in more random directions than the words themselves follow or take up. The scribbler that I keep in a Conception Cuir leather folder my wife bought me three summers ago in Quebec City. The leather scribbler cover with the embossed red flower on it. The embossed red flower she selected instead of the geometric in black and white pattern she thought I might find a bit more "masculine." Or at least less "feminine." I think she thought the flower was more feminine because she liked it better. And she is a woman. So . . . Anyway, she expressed her doubts to the salesman. He asked the perfectly logical question to settle the issue: "Does your husband ever wear pink shirts or shirts with pink in them?" She had to admit that, yes, I did. That's how I got the gorgeous embossed red flower patterned notebook cover. When she pointed out the geometric the next day as we passed the same shop, I shrugged at it. Boring. Maybe that's why she thought it was more masculine.
As very late Wednesday became very early Thursday, I took my favorite writing instrument in hand and spent a late hour filling page after page. It took a while to get fluid and fluent again, after doing nothing but practical writing for six weeks and then some. But eventually, after having to stop to refill the ink reservoir with Private Reserve Midnight Blues ink, I found the words began to get more lively.
And a later eventually, I flagged a bit and headed back to bed. Then I got up and came back to the pen and notebook.
I had ended by putting down a sentence (or an interrogative clause) from Haraki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which my son, David, had left for me when he went back to Montreal after Christmas: "...how many times in the course of a lifetime would the equator be a significant factor?" It seemed a promising place to start one of the exercises Natalie Goldberg suggests in Writing Down the Bones, an exercise she learned from Russell Edson, who would sit down and write off ten short pieces in a session, always beginning with a teasing, often absurd, but strong first sentence. I wrote about that on November 14 last, enclosing some products of such outings. Some of them begun with a fountain pen in the predecessor of the CD15HR, a CD15NV. The HR and NV are color codes, evidently. NV was a darker teal blue. There is also a marvelous WN that is a creamy white.
What I realized when I got back to bed was that there was another sentence asking for the same opportunity, one I hadn't got from any source I was aware of but my own playing mind: "The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment."
My plan, being no Russell Edson, is to try a few extensions of that sentence over the next week or so--probably in narrative, but who knows. And maybe some from the Murakami clause.
If you are tuned, stay that way.
Oh, by the way--I've been filling pages ever since. Not always with my "Starry Night." It's my favorite, but I'm not, Exploding Mary, incapacitated without it.
One inspiration was going to a poetry reading by Richard Harrison after work on Friday. Among other things, Richard writes of hockey and of superheroes. Lately he has also been writing of his father, who died a year and a half ago, or about six months after mine. His father was also a World War II vet, who carried a lot of baggage from that experience.
One line from Richard about his father, referring to how his father had thought of the war, sticks with me. Richard writes of how his father found in his wartime duties "the last days in his life he knew exactly what to do." It has a ring to it when I think of my own father. It meant I got another several pages filled within hours. Some of that might make its way here one day soon, too.
P.S.: this was executed mainly on a Toshiba Protege Z830 Satellite Series Ultrabook laptop keyboard. Not my favorite writing instrument, Exploding Mary, but one of many different computer keyboards and configurations I have used since the late 1970's, one of many that has helped and continues to help get the job done.
I had ended by putting down a sentence (or an interrogative clause) from Haraki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which my son, David, had left for me when he went back to Montreal after Christmas: "...how many times in the course of a lifetime would the equator be a significant factor?" It seemed a promising place to start one of the exercises Natalie Goldberg suggests in Writing Down the Bones, an exercise she learned from Russell Edson, who would sit down and write off ten short pieces in a session, always beginning with a teasing, often absurd, but strong first sentence. I wrote about that on November 14 last, enclosing some products of such outings. Some of them begun with a fountain pen in the predecessor of the CD15HR, a CD15NV. The HR and NV are color codes, evidently. NV was a darker teal blue. There is also a marvelous WN that is a creamy white.
What I realized when I got back to bed was that there was another sentence asking for the same opportunity, one I hadn't got from any source I was aware of but my own playing mind: "The light at the end of the tunnel was an indistinct disappointment."
My plan, being no Russell Edson, is to try a few extensions of that sentence over the next week or so--probably in narrative, but who knows. And maybe some from the Murakami clause.
If you are tuned, stay that way.
Oh, by the way--I've been filling pages ever since. Not always with my "Starry Night." It's my favorite, but I'm not, Exploding Mary, incapacitated without it.
One inspiration was going to a poetry reading by Richard Harrison after work on Friday. Among other things, Richard writes of hockey and of superheroes. Lately he has also been writing of his father, who died a year and a half ago, or about six months after mine. His father was also a World War II vet, who carried a lot of baggage from that experience.
One line from Richard about his father, referring to how his father had thought of the war, sticks with me. Richard writes of how his father found in his wartime duties "the last days in his life he knew exactly what to do." It has a ring to it when I think of my own father. It meant I got another several pages filled within hours. Some of that might make its way here one day soon, too.
P.S.: this was executed mainly on a Toshiba Protege Z830 Satellite Series Ultrabook laptop keyboard. Not my favorite writing instrument, Exploding Mary, but one of many different computer keyboards and configurations I have used since the late 1970's, one of many that has helped and continues to help get the job done.
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