I didn't grow up making lists. I resisted lists the first five years of my marriage. I still resist them. Why? They help me make sense of the world. They help me make order and help me progress and get things done and finish things through. I've always compiled lists of my favorite things: teams, movies, books, music. Why not make lists for everyday tasks. For the non-esoteric things that actually need getting done. So I find myself more and more making lists. It's helpful. Unbelievably helpful. Things suddenly get done. I feel better. Life feels better. But it's still not in my nature to make lists. Maybe I resist them because it diminishes some creative impulse, or could squash that impulse. The impulse I hold as tightly as I do my kids in a crowd. But it doesn't. If anything it frees up that impulse. Keeping to from drowning among the maelstrom of things that need to get done and the best and most orderly way to get things done.
I suppose that's the whole idea behind limitations. Behind the freedom that exists from coloring within the lines. It may seem like it's inhibiting. It may seem stifling. But it's not. Boundaries. Borders. Lists. Order. It's necessary. It's better. It avoids the foggy haze of being unsure if I can color something blue here, or red here. And if I use yellow or brown or black will it still look right. If the lines are drawn, if the lists are made, a natural order of things progresses. Leaving me more time to focus on using the right colors in the best places.
More than I can remember I've resisted lists. But I've always been a staunch purveyor of maps. It being inherent within me to plan the direction I will take from point A to point B. Lists. Maps. It's all the same thing.
I'm finding that my Art is too. That I benefit greatly from setting aside definitive times of day to focus on writing. And to make lists and maps of things I need to accomplish. Maybe my writing is nothing more than a coloring within the lines, something a child could do. But I assure you, though I aim to work within the set and fixed borders, the creativity that emerges paints some pretty wonderful pictures.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Some Thoughts On Two Great Books
In the past few weeks I've finished "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel and "Let The Great World Spin" by Colum McCann. Both made my top five list of the year. Not that that means much or anything. But I consider these books, already, to be among the best works of fiction I've ever read. Both were invariably page-turning, eminently readable, prestigious-ly award-winning. Yet they varied a great deal in why they were so good. McCann's book I know was better. Every part of me knows it was the better story, the better writing. And in lieu of "Life of Pi" I find that laughingly ironic.
Life of Pi
The prose was good. Not memorable. But it couldn't really be memorable. It couldn't sweep you away to a bustling, rumbling India at the time of The Emergency like Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance" could. It couldn't wrap you in warm smelling perfumes of India like Rushdie's "The Moor's Last Sigh" could. Inevitably it was limited by it's narrator. The limitations of the young narrator in any story are always glaring. Words are smaller. Places smaller. The sense of the past, history, is weaker. Adult narrators and voices carry much more weight than that of a child or teenager (perhaps why I ended up not liking "The Lovely Bones" as much as a I thought I would). The young narrator just gets old. Their voice, their views, the words they use. But Martel doesn't succomb to that at all. He rises above it. Often some passages reading like diary entries or how-to manuals or mere lists; ending like it does with a transcribed interview.
Where Martel gets you I can't say if you haven't read it. But it grabs you. Chokes you and makes you well up with the need to inhale quickly, to turn every page faster and faster, breathless, because you can't quite grasp that the story was about that until it's over and you're left breathing, finally, among the stale air over a closed book with nothing to do but think. To take inventory. To value it's worth. It was a remarkable book. And I am better for having read it.
Let The Great World Spin
McCann's book on the other hand was some of the best prose I've ever read. His language, his words, his descriptions of 1970s New York City swept around me like a breeze through the city. Over buildings, around corners, through drain gates, through sound and bustle and noise and decay and life and death. It was a strong breeze, his language. A good, steady, soul-cleansing breeze. Where the story gets you, because it's not really about anything other than New York City, is it's characters. It's exquisite portrayals. The Irish, the African-American, the priest, the hookers, the artist, the judge, the Park Avenue bourgeois, the Vietnam vet, the computer nerds. I'm not sure where it left me because it left me at a completely different place than "Life of Pi". Not at some mountaintop contemplating. But dropped, breathless, awed, over-stimulated on the streets of NYC where I need to keep moving so I don't get hit by a cab. I'm not better for having read it, certainly not that type of book. But having read it, I sense something is better. Something is better.
Life of Pi
The prose was good. Not memorable. But it couldn't really be memorable. It couldn't sweep you away to a bustling, rumbling India at the time of The Emergency like Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance" could. It couldn't wrap you in warm smelling perfumes of India like Rushdie's "The Moor's Last Sigh" could. Inevitably it was limited by it's narrator. The limitations of the young narrator in any story are always glaring. Words are smaller. Places smaller. The sense of the past, history, is weaker. Adult narrators and voices carry much more weight than that of a child or teenager (perhaps why I ended up not liking "The Lovely Bones" as much as a I thought I would). The young narrator just gets old. Their voice, their views, the words they use. But Martel doesn't succomb to that at all. He rises above it. Often some passages reading like diary entries or how-to manuals or mere lists; ending like it does with a transcribed interview.
Where Martel gets you I can't say if you haven't read it. But it grabs you. Chokes you and makes you well up with the need to inhale quickly, to turn every page faster and faster, breathless, because you can't quite grasp that the story was about that until it's over and you're left breathing, finally, among the stale air over a closed book with nothing to do but think. To take inventory. To value it's worth. It was a remarkable book. And I am better for having read it.
Let The Great World Spin
McCann's book on the other hand was some of the best prose I've ever read. His language, his words, his descriptions of 1970s New York City swept around me like a breeze through the city. Over buildings, around corners, through drain gates, through sound and bustle and noise and decay and life and death. It was a strong breeze, his language. A good, steady, soul-cleansing breeze. Where the story gets you, because it's not really about anything other than New York City, is it's characters. It's exquisite portrayals. The Irish, the African-American, the priest, the hookers, the artist, the judge, the Park Avenue bourgeois, the Vietnam vet, the computer nerds. I'm not sure where it left me because it left me at a completely different place than "Life of Pi". Not at some mountaintop contemplating. But dropped, breathless, awed, over-stimulated on the streets of NYC where I need to keep moving so I don't get hit by a cab. I'm not better for having read it, certainly not that type of book. But having read it, I sense something is better. Something is better.
Best of 2010
Twitter doesn't quite allow me to extrapolate on any type of "best of..." lists. 140 Characters is not enough. Not that I've got anything to say. It's just not conducive to lists. So, here's my list of best and some worst of 2010. Of note is that these elements may or may not have been made last year, it's just that last year was when I encountered them.
Best Books Read in 2010
1. Blood Meridian
2. Let The Great World Spin
3. Life of Pi
4. Everything is Illuminated
5. (tie) Harry Potter 1-7
Jayber Crow
Worst Books Read in 2010
1. The Shack
2. The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Best Albums of 2010
1. Mumford & Sons
2. The Trumpet Child & The Long Surrender by Over the Rhine
3. The Suburbs by Arcade Fire
4. Messenger by Joe Pug
5. In Feast or Fallow by Sandra McCracken
All totaled I think I read or attempted to read more than 40 books (42 exactly. I didn't finish 7 books and I only regret one of those). As for albums I lost track but imagine that total to be close to 40 as well as I added numerous albums based on others' top ten lists, like Mavis Staples and the Avett Brothers. Sometimes I can't even keep track.
Best Books Read in 2010
1. Blood Meridian
2. Let The Great World Spin
3. Life of Pi
4. Everything is Illuminated
5. (tie) Harry Potter 1-7
Jayber Crow
Worst Books Read in 2010
1. The Shack
2. The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Best Albums of 2010
1. Mumford & Sons
2. The Trumpet Child & The Long Surrender by Over the Rhine
3. The Suburbs by Arcade Fire
4. Messenger by Joe Pug
5. In Feast or Fallow by Sandra McCracken
All totaled I think I read or attempted to read more than 40 books (42 exactly. I didn't finish 7 books and I only regret one of those). As for albums I lost track but imagine that total to be close to 40 as well as I added numerous albums based on others' top ten lists, like Mavis Staples and the Avett Brothers. Sometimes I can't even keep track.
Short Neck Giraffe
Back to blogging. Back to blogspot.
The blog, the quote, all came about after digging through some G.K. Chesterton for a bible study I'm participating in. I found the quote startlingly appropriate to my life. To me as a person, husband, father, writer. It's true of all of us, in some way, I suppose. We all try to make something fit some frame. To squeeze it, shove it, shave off the edges of something to make it fit. Only when we do we find that the picture has changed completely. That what has fit is not what it once was and is thereby unfit. A giraffe with a short neck. I do this all the time.
Mostly as a writer. As I struggle with stories and ideas, trying to make them work when they're not at all what I'm trying to make them out to be.
For my son, Isaac, I worry often that people will make him out to be a short-necked giraffe. That they will try to mold him into something he is not.
What I consider to be good music or movies or books.
My view of God sometimes.
If Art is limitation. If a giraffe can only have a long neck. Maybe it's about time I figure out what the hell I've been drawing.
The blog, the quote, all came about after digging through some G.K. Chesterton for a bible study I'm participating in. I found the quote startlingly appropriate to my life. To me as a person, husband, father, writer. It's true of all of us, in some way, I suppose. We all try to make something fit some frame. To squeeze it, shove it, shave off the edges of something to make it fit. Only when we do we find that the picture has changed completely. That what has fit is not what it once was and is thereby unfit. A giraffe with a short neck. I do this all the time.
Mostly as a writer. As I struggle with stories and ideas, trying to make them work when they're not at all what I'm trying to make them out to be.
For my son, Isaac, I worry often that people will make him out to be a short-necked giraffe. That they will try to mold him into something he is not.
What I consider to be good music or movies or books.
My view of God sometimes.
If Art is limitation. If a giraffe can only have a long neck. Maybe it's about time I figure out what the hell I've been drawing.
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