The line in my title is, and likely will always be, the first line of Updike’s prose that anyone reads.  It starts “A&P,” a  short story about a young man working in a supermarket.  The first line I read? The far less memorable “Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a blackboard bolted to it.” Rabbit, Run blew me away, in some respects even more than Catcher in the Rye did.  To this day I don’t quite understand why that was the case. Perhaps I understood, even then, that Catcher in the Rye was about a person and a life I would never be a part of but Rabbit, Run could easily describe the person I (and in fact most of my peers) would become.

That spring in 1986 I became a fan.  By the end of the summer I had read a number of his novels and before I graduated from high school I began collecting first editions of his work.  Sometimes I would look at my collection and wonder if it was worth the money I put in to it. After all, it is about reading the words, not possessing them in some arbitrary format. Sometimes I joked that when he died I’d be able to cash it in. Now that he’s gone I find myself regretting that I hadn’t taken the opportunity to complete my collection. Doing so now may be nearly impossible.

I came dangerously close, in college, to becoming a scholar of Updike.  Thankfully my academic advisor at the time convinced me that I should write my senior thesis on some obscure English poet rather than Updike.  This freed me to continue reveling in his prose, to be able to discuss it’s deeper meaning if I wanted, or just tell people that I really liked it, without having to ascribe more to it than an amused smile.

As time has gone on, I’ve kept up with his new work and tried my best to go back and read the few bits and pieces–criticism mostly–that I’ve missed. Until my son was born, I would frequently have his new books read within a day or two of release. One of my small, prideful moments came when I realized I’d written the first Amazon.com customer review for Seek My Face (2002).  Sadly, it took me far longer to read his last novel, Widows of Eastwick.

When Updike was in Sacramento last November, he spoke in terms of “wrapping things up.”  He described writing a sequel to Witches of Eastwick as a way of tidying as he approached the end.  Given that he died of lung cancer, it makes me wonder if he had already been diagnosed by the time he was here. I read in one story today that during his November tour of the west coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento [!], and Seattle) he had “walking pneumonia,” but that he had chosen to continue because people had already bought tickets. In any case, I feel fortunate to have seen him.

A long time ago, a magazine writer criticized Updike for being the kind of writer who steps outside his door, looks around for a few minutes, and writes. In other words, he wrote from a very limited world view. That may be the case, but I often think that Updike in those few minutes of observation was able to catch aspects of human nature that most of us never see or deny exist.  Despite the sad state of his characters, Updike’s work also contained a fair bit of wonder of the simple fact of being alive.

Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough.

So, Narcissius like, I’m about to make a claim that is sure to be thwarted by someone, somewhere, in summertime:

My sonnet represents the first occurrance of Google – meaning the trademark name of the Internet search engine – in a sonnet written in the Shakespearean style, and possibly in any formal sonnet style, period.

Prove me wrong. Remember, a sonnet is a formal style. Just because you call a poem a sonnet, that does not make it so.

Furthermore, if you know of other poems where Google occurs, I would love to know about them, especially if they’ve been published in an established tree killer.

Verified at 50,230 words. And to think, just a week ago, I almost gave up.

A few brief observations:

1. Shutting off your inner editor is harder than you think. The easiest way to achieve a high word count is to play fast and loose with the script. However, the inner editor will always be telling you “that’s a tangent, that’s totally unnecessary.” Mutant ninja turtles do not belong in a work of literary fiction. But in a Nanowrimo work, if you need them, they should be there for you.

2. I only told a few people this year that I was doing this. I should have told everyone.

3. The next novel will a) not be in the first person and b) will not be limited to two days.

4. Next time I should maybe participate in some of the gatherings. It was a little lonely out here.

5. No, you can’t read it.

“We’ve been making a lot of lousy [films] lately. But I’m writing an article called ‘Better Silly Than Stupid,’ and anyone who’s seen Van Helsing knows what I’m talking about.”

Boy, do I ever.

(via BoingBoing)

In “On Writing and Reading,” Blork wonders

does an extremely high volume of on-line consumption not reduce the process of reading down to a simple input function?

The danger I think, is that reading for input does not allow us the time to chew over what we read, to process its meaning and to understand its nuances. Think of it as the difference between drinking a glass of wine and savoring it.

It is a thought worth chewing over. I realized recently that, in sheer numbers of words, I am probably reading more, faster, than I have at any point in my life (and I was a literature major). But I’m getting less out of what I read, and blogging may be contributing to that.

Why? Because one of the cardinal rules of blogging is immediacy. If I can’t respond to something as soon as I consume it, I might as well not respond to it at all. This makes me uncomfortable because I don’t like to write things down until I’ve chewed on what I’m writing for a little bit.

Perhaps blogging will teach people to write tighter prose faster. But the tighter your fist of prose, the more uninvited meaning will slip through your fingers.

Anyone?

We have a Poet Laureate. His name is Ted Kooser. Too bad the Library of Congress’ official Poet Laureate site doesn’t bother with an example of his poetry (except by link). Oops.

Self Love and Blogging

When Narcissus first visited my blog,
He found reflected there a leftward lean,
And on that first post, he had to slog
Through turgid prose, common among the green
Bloggers who think everyone will love them.
Narcissus found himself and preened and cooed
And babbled about this or that new gem
Of thought, of a philosophy that wooed
All who found it. He cried when Google said
Nothing of this blog on its firstmost page;
He beat his chest when clicking more links led
Nowhere. He smashed his mirror and in a rage
Said “There is no love but my own for me;
No one will quote my words hence in history.”

(an exception to the Creative Commons license on this site, this poem is copyright 2004, uneasyrhetoric.net. Any use not permitted by the owner of the domain will make me very, very angry.)

Unfortunately, I spent a lot of my time talking fresh students out of very bad habits they had picked up in high school. I had to remind them to flesh out their ideas before finalizing the paper. I had to convince them, through much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, that paper lengths were generally a suggestion and that content mattered more than quantity. (By extension, I also pointed out that my papers generally were longer than required because I learned that, if I didn’t hit the length mark, I was probably forgetting something.) I had to remind them about the power of a thesis statement. Worst of all, I had to tell students to rewrite. I was vicious about it. I had few repeat customers.

A 12-Step Guide to Research and Writing: One Essay at a Time is “common sense” (Lakoff would say that means they deserve closer study). Although focusing on the research paper, they have much in common with the basics of writing a news release: Say what you are going to say, say it, and say what you just said. And almost all of them are recommendations students will avoid due to “time constraints” or “I only write final drafts” or “I can’t edit my own writing” or “but I need twelve pages!”

I would only do one thing to improve the list: I would promote the phrase “context is critical” into the actual recommendation text of number four:

4. Start your preliminary research. Context is Critical. [emphasis mine]

Especially for public policy work, it is important to chose data that fits what you are trying to say as closely as possible. Also, if you are comparing two data points or time series, make sure they really are comparable.

This list should be stapled, Lutheran edict-like, to the forehead of every incoming writing student.

(found via CultureCat, a blog by someone who really is studying rhetoric, not just pretending)

Her first reason, letting the world know about you, gets to the exhibitionist part. However, three of her reasons get directly to the personal: getting to know yourself, deepening our understanding of human nature, and a hope for blogging to make us better people.

Granted, those are all a bit touchy-feely, but they present one of the main reasons I’ve been drawn to blogging. As someone with a wide variety of interests and a broad knowledge of trivial topics with little depth in any one subject, I have often found it difficult to make and defend arguments. It is always more comfortable for me to step into the other person’s shoes in order to avoid confrontation. I have never apologized for being a liberal or an intellectual (for example) but I have also not adequately defended those positions. Blogging allows me to take steps to change that. I can work out my opinions and express them in a forum that is very much my own but that nevertheless has a potential public audience.

Do I think blogging will make me or any of my readers better people? Probably not. But if it gives me a little clarity and a little confidence in this uncertain and uneasy world, then I’m okay with it.

(found via ni vu ni connu, who cites reason number seven, “You never know what you might find” and comments that the list is “A perfect does of honesty, realism, and utopia”)

To Autumn
by John Keats (1795-1821).

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

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