Strange Questions (Jillian)

One aspect of being a writer is that one is always coming up with strange questions - not necessarily seeking an answer, but enjoying the question in all its fullness. Even the smallest anecdote can open the doors to new worlds.

Today's whimsical question, happened upon this evening as I watched (and heard) a flock of geese fly northwest in the darkening sky:

Are those geese confused about dates, or do they know something we don't about the coming of Spring?

Hmm...

About the Bread Quote (Jillian)

If you look to your right, you may have noticed the excerpt from Jeff Smith's soda bread recipe. You may be asking yourself why this is relevant to a blog about writing, so I'll explain.

Lately, I've been thinking on the idea of kneading dough until it is ready, pouring a primordial lump of flour and buttermilk onto the counter and kneading it "until everything comes together." It is not a complicated formula. In fact, it isn't even a formula at all. Having made this recipe many times, I can tell you that the dough is sticky and cold, and it does take more than a tidy minute for it to transform into a loaf.

Writing is like this - in that the initial writing phase of a story or a novel-chapter (90%, I'd say) is difficult, messy, inconvenient and sometimes uncertain. But in order to create a beautiful loaf ready for the oven, or a story or part of a story to be ready to share, you have to work at it. You have to get your hands caked in the thick and sticky substance of the craft. Despite the mess, it will definitely be worth it.

Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre (Michelle)

I've been getting a lot of delight lately out of a wonderful shoestring (ho ho ho) theater company known as the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. Here is their highly moving King Lear:

Basically, mainly, they're funny. Let us never lose sight of this basic fact.

But, they are also very witty, very well-informed parodies based closely on the actual texts they parody. The Socks are also a wonderful example of the truth that you don't need tons of fancy equipment to be witty, sly, wise . . . to be art. These socks would never have gotten out of their wellies (so to speak) if their creator (Kev Sutherland) hadn't had the confidence to start making campy, witty, well-rehearsed satires with the materials at hand.

Also, if you watch enough of the sublime Socks, you start to notice that they play off one another --- which is remarkable because as I understand it, they are played by one man. But I feel that he must be an extremely talented artist --- you can almost imagine him projecting his characters up his arms.

But mostly they're funny. Enjoy. I'm off to the beach. :)

Birds (Michelle)

Pennsylvania has finally surrendered to spring, and the yard is full of dandelions, greenery, and birds. I watched six goldfinches jockeying for position in a flowering tree the other day, and I am trying to learn a few birdsongs. My sister and her children are embarrassingly good at identifying birdsongs --- while I'm still not entirely convinced that kildeer is even a bird, really.

So, spring is sprung, and it's appropriate to return to the subject of birds.

Here, Adam O'Riordan at the Guardian's books blog wonders why birds remain such powerful, fertile images.

Here, there are recordings of birdsongs. As a novelist, at least, I find that I am constantly in need of expanding my concrete knowledge of the world --- to describe not a tree, but an oak, a maple, an ash. Likewise, with birds --- who croaks, who warbles, who screams.

Guerilla Theater (Michelle)

My lovely and talented friend Kelsey posted this video on her Facebook profile. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of "guerilla theater," basically it involves organizing some kind of performance that appears to happen spontaneously in a public place with a highly unsuspecting audience. The wonderful occurrence in this video happened in a train station in Antwerp.



Mostly, I just deeply deeply wish I could have been there. Life should be like this more often. We live in limbo between the artificial and the mundane anyway, so why not enjoy it?

Neil Gaiman on Colbert (Michelle)

If you scroll past the pictures of Neil Gaiman's daughter with and without braces, you will find here on his blog a video of his recent appearance on the Colbert Report. It's pretty fantastic, of course, especially if it's true that the Tom Bombadil thing was utterly unrehearsed.

Gaiman recently won the Newbery for The Graveyard Book, and is also the author of Stardust, Coraline, Neverwhere, and the Sandman series, among other things.

Colbert himself is of course poised to take over the world.

Duck or Dog? (Jillian)

Not meaning to totally steal the scene today, but the Telegraph has an article about a pet duck that thinks she is one of the dogs - likes to be walked on a leash and competes with her fellow pets for food, etc. Isn't this world amazingly hilarious?

More Monsters (Michelle)

Nothing deep today, I'm afraid, just a collection of whimsies.

First of all, a big thank you to Yahoo for continuing to keep us informed of which automotive vehicles, specifically, would be endangered by various prehistoric creatures. This time we've got a pliosaur from Svalbard called Predator X. I'm not making this up. What a marvelous beginning to a short story this would make: "On the snowy plains of Svalbard, the men are restless. They fear the predator..."

For those of you less into EXTREME dinosaurs, Yahoo has also been kind enough to supply us with information on the iddlest biddlest wittle dinosaur that would nevertheless bite your ankles off here.

I'm a bit frustrated with my own writing at the moment and am somewhat convinced that David Bowie's "Heroes," if written by me, would begin: "I...I wish I could swim. Like a person, who's learned how to swim." I'm sure I'll be posting whatever wisdom I manage to grub out of these difficult days in the near future, but meanwhile, pliosaurs from Svalbard will have to keep us happy.

Chickens in Sweaters (Michelle)

Chickens in sweaters are the subject of this Daily Telegraph article. It's not as loopy as it sounds, actually, because these animals are being rescued from egg-production farms and genuinely need the extra warmth because they're balding.

Still, I doubt that the stripes and Christmas-themed patterned are strictly necessary. But if I had to knit tons of chicken sweaters, I'd probably try to make it fun for myself.

This picture reminds me of an illustration from Jerry Pinkney's The Talking Eggs.

In Our Time (Michelle)

In Our Time is a BBC Radio 4 program hosted by Melvyn Bragg. Each week, they assemble three or four experts on a given topic and let them talk about it for an hour. Topics range from "The Physics of Time" to "The Library at Nineveh," "The Sassanian Empire," and "The Fisher King." Yep, yet again, all hail the BBC.

I have a low-grade addiction to the program, meaning that I subscribe to the podcasts and they collect in my iTunes folder until I get sick and decide to listen to them, at which point I learn many, many cool things and wonder why I don't listen to them more often.

This week's program is about the Brothers Grimm, so I thought it might be of interest to the mythopoetic among us. I might even listen to it soon, even though I'm completely healthy!! You can download the program for free from iTunes, or you can go to the program website and click on "Listen to the latest edition." You can also browse around the archives, which is good fun.

Snakes and Salamanders (Michelle)

Forget giant prehistoric salamanders! How about this AP report of giant prehistoric snakes?

I love the tone of this article, which is similar to an eleven-year-old gushing about how really, really, big these snakes are. Bigger than a bus! No, they could eat a cow! Man, you would be toast if you met one of these guys. And dude, what if they got on a plane???

Puppies and Flowers (Michelle)

I have mixed feelings about this blog, which is inevitable given how mixed its content is, but I've finally decided to post it for your consideration. It's called "Puppies and Flowers: ...For when you need to think of something else in a hurry," and it does what it says on the tin. It's a collection of random photos, news stories, videos, and links. I stumbled on it one day when searching for photos of, I think, Anglo-Saxon jewels.

It has a pretty strong post-modern bent, with a lot of interest in advertising as art, and there are a number of posts that I'm not comfortable with at all. But it's a place to go, well, when you need to think of something else in a hurry. In part, the fact that it often does differ so markedly from my own sensibility makes it a fresh voice when I'm stagnating.

Some recent posts:

• Scrabble keyboard
• Top 10 space photos of 2008
• Photos of abandoned mansion in Beirut
• Movie posters for The Birds

Valhalla, I Am Coming (Michelle)

Whimsy, whimsy, and nothing but whimsy to the point of utter inanity. Do not follow this link if you take your Led Zeppelin songs very seriously. If Viking kittens sound interesting to you, however, please have yourself a good laugh.

ShakespeaRetold (Michelle)

From dire illness, I return (gradually) to the land of the living and, hence, the blogosphere. And I return with a film recommendation that made me want to write like mad!

I've been exploring the BBC's 2005 miniseries, Shakespeare Retold. There are four 90 minute adaptations: Much Ado About Nothing (set in a provincial newsroom), The Taming of the Shrew (with Kate as a stroppy politician), A Midsummer Night's Dream (in a faux-rustic resort), and Macbeth (in a gourmet restaraunt).

Usually I avoid modern retellings of Shakespeare that excise the language, not from snobbish impulse but because they're usually just not very good. I do enjoy 10 Things I Hate About You as much as the next teenybopper, but it has to be said that just a tad of the original play's richness is lost, and I'm usually acutely aware the entire time that whatever is being said, Shakespeare said it better.

Not so with these adaptations. Occasionally I do miss the language (when Beatrice says, "I love you so much I can hardly breathe," I do wonder what was wrong with Billy Shakes' "I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest!"), but most of the time I'm just slavishly admiring the creativity of the scriptwriters and the skill of the actors.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, Peter Bowker captures the spirit of the conflict between nature and artifice in the original play with its touristy setting in DreamPark. Sally Wainwright, the scriptwriter of The Taming of the Shrew, makes some brilliant strokes as well, including some clever adaptations of the totally over-the-top, utterly un-PC farce of the original.

And there are so many good performances, too, but some of my favorites are Rufus Sewell's Petruchio, Shirley Henderson's Kate, Imelda Staunton's [Hip]Polly[ta], Dean Lennox Kelly's Puck, and Sarah Parish's Beatrice. If you like British TV, it's a good actor-watch. A good half of the cast have been on Doctor Who at some point or other.

The scripts are frequently eloquent, moving, and hilarious. For example:

"My advice to Titania and Oberon? Leave the forest. It's this place. It gets into your head. I mean, all this nature...it's not natural, is it?" (Puck)

"He just didn't want you to mistake him for one of the grown-ups. In reality, he's probably not more than about...six." (Petruchio's friend whose name escapes me.)

"Love is probably one of those things that a man grows into, like...jazz! And olives." (Benedick)

"If Beatrice doesn't watch it, she's going to grow into one of those women whose idea of a big night is a really big bowl of hommus." (Margaret)

"If you don't get it right, I'm going to turn you into a novelty key chain." (Oberon to Puck, of course)

A Misummer Night's Dream, written by Peter Bowker; starring Bill Paterson, Imelda Staunton, and Johnny Vegas

Much Ado About Nothing, written by David Nicholls; starring Sara Parish, Damian Lewis, and Billie Piper

Macbeth, written by Peter Moffat; starring James McAvoy and Keeley Hawes

The Taming of the Shrew, written by Sally Wainwright; starring Rufus Sewell, Shirley Henderson, and Stephen Tompkinson.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/shakespeare/tvdramas.shtml

Words Creating Pictures (Jillian)

Once again, the Daily Telegraph has me completely under its spell... because it just takes the time to celebrate art... art that totally takes us by surprise in its ordinary yet magical ways! (follow the lovely link at your leisure!)

Today's subject of intrigue: typewriter art by Keira Rathbone! Literally pictures, portraits and landscapes brilliantly rendered from ink strokes and letters on a typewriter! It creates this brilliant metaphor in my head - of words threading themselves together into a tapestry to create an striking picture, creating layers, hidden messages... ah! Not to mention, I wish I had an old typewriter... not necessarily to create pictures (I'll leave that to Keira's amazing talent), but to connect with words in that special way. Perhaps the next time I venture to a garage sale or an antique shop! Wonderful, wonderful whimsy!

Thank you Daily Telegraph! You are my inspiration!

Salamanders, Part 2 (Michelle)

Happy New Year!

For those of you who were intrigued by the Renaissance idea that salamanders live in fire, I finally found that Thomas Browne reference. I'm on a mild pre-modern science kick, as that quote from Plutarch's Moralia also indicates.

Anyway, Browne, writing in 1646 or thereabouts, is actually debunking this idea with his "new science," but in so doing he describes the previous belief. Here we go, from the fantastically named Pseudodoxia Epidemica:

That a salamander is able to live in flames, to endure and put out fire, is an assertion not only of great antiquity but confirmed by frequent and not contemptible testimony...Pliny assigns the cause of this effect: an animal (saith he) so cold that it extinguisheth the fire like ice.
...
It hath been much promoted by stories of incombustible and napkins...which endure the fire, whose materials are called by the name of salamander's wool [how cool is that?!]; which many, too literally apprehending, conceive some investing part, or tegument of the salamander. [Browne goes on to explain how in antiquity the bodies of kings were burned in "salamander's wool" to keep their ashes pure. Goodness knows if this is true.]

There you go. A particularly arcane piece of whimsy to start off 2009. With the holidays behind, I hope to start posting a few more substantial things soon. But meanwhile, enjoy some eggnog!

Twilight: On Ice? (Michelle)

A friend sent me this link --- suggesting that Twilight would work best as a figure skating pairs routine --- to make me laugh. Which I did. I hope you do too.

BUT. Maybe it's just all the Nutcracker I've been watching lately (my niece and nephew not being satisfied to watch it just once or even 300 times) but I'm starting to think this is a good idea. It would make a good skating routine or even ballet.

Ballet and ice skating, after all, rely heavily on the fiction that the woman weighs nothing more than a feather, while the man is stronger than a thousand suns...it would be fun to have that be an actual tenet of the plot of a ballet. And look at this picture: he looks like he's about to bite her neck anyway, and this ballet has nothing to do with vampires at all.

There's also something about Twilight that belongs firmly in the age of Tchaikovsky, Victoriana, and the damsel in distress. Vampires, after all, do feel most at home in the 19th-century Gothic novel. Doubtful? Check out this horribly disturbing Fuseli painting.

But all those weird Gothic accoutrements in very poor taste aside: there's something profoundly non-verbal about Meyer's novels. The strength of them, as has been observed a hundred times, isn't in the writing style so much as the story. They addict because they tell a good, classic beauty-and-the-beast tale, really. So, why not cut out the words altogether and embrace the theatrical, quasi-operatic proportions of the whole thing? (The dark side of all this is that we're much more likely to end up with Twilight: The Musical a la The Phantom of the Opera in a couple of years than we are to end up with a decent ballet...shudder.)

I wasn't going to post on this, because I'm not sure exactly how it relates to writing per se (should I really be recommending the excision of words on a blog devoted to writing???)...but I keep thinking about it, for some reason, and I think it's feeding some thoughts about the problematic "damsels in distress" in our culture that I may blog on in the future.

As long as we're talking Victoriana: only 4 more days until the Doctor Who Christmas special, when Cybermen meet A Christmas Carol!!! Cannot wait. (Couldn't resist, either, apparently.)

Endlessly Winter (Michelle)

It's sleeting like mad where I am today, so perhaps that's why the following quote struck a chord with me. Thanks to my friend Rachel for posting it as her gmail status today! :)

"Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer."
---Plutarch
Moralia

Salamanders (Michelle)

A distressing dearth of whimsy on the blog of late. Without the random firing of neurons, where would creativity be?

I am trying to rectify this with a completely random article on an ancient and huge salamander-like creature that took bites by lifting its upper jaw instead of dropping its lower jaw. I still remember the first time I realized I couldn't move my upper jaw --- I felt utterly paralyzed.

More salamander/amphibian facts:

• In the Renaissance it was believed that salamanders lived in fire. Cool, no? I'll try to dig up the Thomas Browne reference to this for a future post.
• At the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in D.C., there is a much-neglected room in the dinosaur section devoted to ancient amphibians, petrified wood, eggs, and seeds. (I'm not exactly sure what all of these have in common.) They have a little display in the floor of dozens of fossilized amphibian heads in situ. It's surreal.

In the City of Cinnamon Sticks (Michelle)

More whimsy to fuel a free-write:

I took these pictures the Christmas before last in D.C. The Botanical Gardens had an exhibit of Washingtonian monuments constructed out of autumnal edibles, like cinnamon sticks and varnished pears and great brown nuts. I wish all our national affairs really were conducted in buildings more like these, which seemed to be culled from Act IV of The Nutcracker.

I also wish I had taken pictures of more of the monuments, but I'm afraid I'm not very good at having an experience and taking pictures of it at the same time.


The Capitol:

The Jefferson Memorial: