http://horsesandhorsesandhorses.blogspot.com/
Amy McDaniel helps run the Solar Anus reading series in Atlanta, where she was born and raised. By writing and teaching, she provides for herself and her dog, Annette. She co-edited From the Second Line, a collection of her students’ essays about Hurricane Katrina.
It was definitely an adventure.
This is what I tell people when I don’t have the inner resources necessary to describe what really happened in Bangladesh. Or when I don’t have the time.
Sometimes, I elaborate slightly on the experience of leaving everything behind to teach writing seminars at a small college called The Asian University for Women, with plans to stay at least two years, maybe more, working with some of the brightest students (from 12 different countries) whom I have ever encountered — only to be so emotionally ravaged by the (in my mind, illegitimate) administration of Kamal Ahmad and Ashok Keshari that I left after only one semester (though it felt like much longer), unable to cope with the stress-induced hair loss and the nightly crying jags, knowing that every minute I spent in the classroom was vitally worthwhile but also knowing I would crack if I stayed any longer. I might elaborate like this:
A week after I arrived in Bangladesh, before I’d even recovered from jetlag, my boss, the provost, an academic of international repute who made the school the great place it was, was terminated and barred from re-entering the country. New faculty orientation was cancelled because her replacement, Ashok Keshari, could not be bothered to return to campus early. Two weeks later, the founder, Kamal Ahmad, who had carried out the coup against her, offered me a 20% raise and promotion to a position above the eminently worthy faculty member who interviewed and recruited me (including an incredible Bengali cooking lesson) and became a fast friend, and who was not offered the promotion even though she already was responsible for half of the job description. Clearly, the offer to me was based not on merit, but on Kamal Ahmad’s suspicion that he could manipulate me because I was new and unversed, and, possibly, that he could set me up to take the fall for something. So I declined, against the urging of colleagues who thought I could stand up to Kamal Ahmad from that position. At around the same time, I along with several other faculty members had to take it upon ourselves to organize class registration because every administrator with enough institutional knowledge to do so had resigned in protest.
For there is a violence within words, one that can only be felt and absorbed, that narratives can’t expose. One that facts and documents carefully skirt.
Yet I will keep trying, probably forever. With that in mind, I provide below two emails. Before you laugh at the awkward phrasing of the first, remember that Ashok Keshari is in a position of real authority over approximately five hundred young women. What might seem silly in its idiomatic bizarreness seems less so when you consider that Ashok Keshari’s decisions have actual consequences for actual, wonderful people.
In this week’s installment of 6 Books, Deb Olin Unferth, author of the brilliant, laconic memoir Revolution, recommends 6 nonfiction books. Here are her picks:
To After That (Toaf) by Renee Gladman
It’s a book dedicated to a book she has written: what is a cooler premise than that?
Parrots for Dummies by Nikki Moustaki
Yes, from the Dummies series, a simple how-to book: feeding, cleaning the cage, etc., but stay with me here. I found the book very moving. Her portrait of the parrot is of a tragic figure in a cage—it feels almost Kafkaesque. She captures the personality of the parrot as a beautiful, complex, panicky person who you’d do anything for in hopes that it’ll fall in love with you. And there’s also the sadness of the author, who you can tell is struggling: she has to write about clipping, though she mostly hates it. She has to talk about breeding though she thinks it’s a terrible idea. She includes pictures of birds flying in the Amazon—there, isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that where they belong? They fly a hundred miles a day out there, while here they can move only a few feet. Which is better for them, do you think? she wonders.
Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith
This book has shown up on so many lists now that it’s almost like putting Consider the Lobster on this list. But I’m including it here because you know what? Zadie Smith is a badass.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein
This may be my favorite book of all time. This is the book that made all my short shorts possible, that made my memoir, Revolution, possible. I first read it riding a train to Chicago and I’ve never been the same. How to write about war and make it funny. How to write about furniture and make it sad.
A Giacometti Portrait, by James Lord
For Lord—who agreed to sit for a portrait for Giacometti—what initially seemed like a pleasant afternoon turned into an existential nightmare, as Lord discovered just what “finishing” a portrait meant to Giacometti.
Atlas of Remote Islands, by Judith Schalansky
How can descriptions of islands far, far away—islands that I’ll never visit, islands that the author has never visited—feel so lonely?
This is Part III in a series where I ask writers I like for 6 book recommendations according to some loose guideline. Part I is here; Part II is here. This week is another installment on nonfiction, this time brought to us by Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets (Wave Books), the forthcoming The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton), and five other books of poetry, criticism, and essay.
This is Part II of a series where I ask writers I like for 6 book recommendations according to some loose guideline. Part I is here. This week, Kevin Sampsell, editor of Future Tense Books out of Portland, Oregon, doyen of Powell’s Books, and author of the wildly excellent memoir, A Common Pornography (Harper Perennial). To give you an idea of the goodness of Kevin’s book, I’ll confess that the first copy I had didn’t make it through my ravenous reading of it and I had to switch to another.
I asked Kevin to recommend 6 nonfiction books, old or new. He obliged, and then some:
Black Box: Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-Flight Accidents by Malcolm MacPherson
I’m fascinated with this book and the way these transcripts reflect the collected calm of airplane pilots and then their sudden confusion, panic, and tragedy. An eerie and morose reading experience.
I Remember by Joe Brainard
Whenever I go talk to a writing class about memoir, I always point out this book and read a little from it. Then I have the class write a few of their own “I Remembers.” It’s such a non-threatening and easy way to access parts of your life that you think are uninteresting and trivial, but turn out to be engaging and universal.
Time Out of Mind by Leonard Michaels
Besides his fiction and his essays, this book is a bit of an oddity because it’s more like disjointed journal entries. It took me a few pages to lock into Michaels’s groove, but once I did, this book turned into a thing of uncut beauty. I would have to say that Leonard Michaels is the author I’ve been most obsessed with for the past year since I read his novel, The Men’s Club.
Oedipus Wrecked by Kevin Keck
This book is so dirty and hilarious, but also sweetly heartfelt. For fans of Jonathan Ames and other straight-faced pervs.
This is the first installment in a new feature where I ask a writer to recommend 6 books, old or new, sometimes according to some roomy guideline. In this case, I asked Dinty W. Moore, editor of Brevity and author of the memoir-in-essays, Between Panic and Desire, to recommend 6 memoirs. Here’s what he had to offer.
Narrowing my list of representative memoirs down to six was an agonizing task, because there are so many solid examples. To keep the undertaking manageable (barely), I’ve limited myself to the last twenty years or so, and instead of a ‘favorites’ list, I’ve chosen six examples that I think show the range of what memoir can do.
My concise description of memoir is “the truth, artfully arranged.” Now we can argue about the meaning of the word truth for weeks, but I’d rather not. I think – despite all of the weakness of memory (and for that matter, observation) – that sophisticated readers understand that the truth they are given in memoir is the author’s subjective truth. There is no hope of objective accuracy, nor would that be as interesting to read. But you go after your truth, with honest intent. That means that an author who is willingly, consciously subverting what he remembers is not writing memoir, by my definition. Cross that line, and you are writing fiction. Which is fine, but it is another project entirely.
So I’ve pulled these six memoirs down from my shelves to illustrate how a life can be presented artfully. Starting with:
This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff (1989): Wolff’s memoir is the first that I remember reading. I had read autobiography, of course, and long-form journalism, but Wolff’s brutally-honest, cinematic childhood memoir was the first to give me what previously I had only found in novels: the ability to escape into someone else’s life and another world, another time. Wolff wasn’t the first to write memoir in this way, but This Boy’s Life remains a touchstone to me and many other writers. I love the opening note to the reader: “I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology. Also my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome. I’ve allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell.”
The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison (1997): Like many people, my first introduction to this book was the wave of denunciation that followed its release: denunciation of the author’s life (she engaged as a young woman in an incestuous relationship with her estranged father), and denunciation of the author’s decision to speak of it in this book. Thank goodness I eventually read The Kiss. Harrison’s restraint, her precision, her shocking honesty, and the chilling detail combine to create an unforgettable psychological portrait. Should victims remain silent? Hell no. (Random House is reissuing The Kiss next month.)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Dave Eggers (2000): Not my favorite book to read, frankly – it goes on too long in places, seems too clever by half in others – but Eggers shook up the form, opened possibilities, brought younger readers into the genre, and I tip my hat to him for the chances he took.
I’ve been reading, finally, The Orchid Thief, the first third of which, at least, is about a collector and other collectors like him. Of orchids. These collectors have this life- and body- and marriage-overtaking urge to hunt for the most, the weirdest, the most unusual, the most hidden. When a hurricane hits Florida, some orchid lovers there think hardly about the devastation and wonder instead what seeds have blown in from the tropics, what odd variety will bloom next in some remote corner of a swamp, and will they be able to find it first. The main guy in the book, John LaRoche, first collected turtles with the same ardor, dropped those, and started something new until he finally arrived at orchids.
If I had a garden (and I do), it could be filled with the commonest things as long as it were beautiful.
For I’m not a collector and I never will be, not of anything tangible, though on many days I wish I were. Collecting requires zeal for something so great that endless, mostly fruitless tedium can be endured in its pursuit. Collecting requires the acquisition of so much knowledge–it is after all not for the novitiate to know what is rare–so much that thinking of it makes my eyes hurt. There is a kind of ruthlessness, too, that I find whenever I read or hear about great collectors, whether it’s orchid thieves who will kill or be killed rather than surrender their finds, or used-book dealers elbowing and scratching one another when they spot a rare jewel at a book sale. I lack the zeal, the thirst, the ferocity.
I’m missing out. Walter Benjamin, a more famous collector than LaRoche, writes, “How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!” Whereas if you wander aimlessly, with no object in mind, everything remains misted, hidden and dull. The best things don’t happen when you least expect them; the best things happen when you are stalking some other prey.
There’s no prey that taunts me that hasn’t already been shot down. This is why I can’t be a literary scholar. For what would I say? I love all the writers whom so many others already love. I couldn’t endure navigating some lesser, less-known terrain. So, mightn’t I find a new angle? This isn’t possible either: what I love about Austen and Nabokov and Woolf is what others love about them. It’s just that I think my love overpowers theirs.
This is what separates collectors from aesthetes. [Confession: I'm adapting/expanding this whole post, and especially the following two sentences, from something I posted on twitter last night.] Collectors prize what’s rare, and convince themselves that the rare is beautiful. Whereas aesthetes prize what’s beautiful, and convince themselves that their love is rare. I mean this last clause in two senses: they believe their love=the beloved is rare, in that sense of “as any she belied with false compare,” and they also believe the quality of their love=their own feeling for the beloved is rare, as in, more potent than the feeling of their rivals.
Both, of course, are softly deceiving themselves (ourselves) [see photo], and I would hazard that each has reason to envy, miserably, the other. I can’t know for sure, as it’s always near-impossible to find the enviable in one’s own sorry state.
I’m all for seasonal cooking when it counts, but some days, especially good industrious days when I’ve expended as much as I can, I want something homemade and restorative, but there’s nothing much in the larder except dried beans, a can of tomatoes, a dried crust of bread, and a few staple vegetables–carrots, onions, celery.
And so bean soup. It is a lovely thing, that lasts. I made one last Monday and ate on it all week, and it’s Monday again and I’m already tempted to put another pot on. For someone who has as short a culinary attention span as I, that’s saying a lot about the simple rightness of this soup.
What I did was, I dug up this 20-ounce bag whose label said “15 Bean Soup.” But it wasn’t soup, it was 15 kinds of dried beans (and a paper envelope labeled “Ham Flavor” that I discarded). I brought half the beans (so, 10 ounces, and this was everything from lentils to cranberry beans to something even bigger, so any kind of beans you got will work) to a boil with enough water to cover by an inch, turned off the heat once it boiled and let them sit covered for about 45 minutes. This, instead of soaking them all night. I’m told by people who know that beans don’t need to soak or even pre-cook, but this soup was so delicious that I want to give it to you just as I made it.
Thanks to all who participated in the Second Grammar Challenge. “essysea” is the winner; if you are “essysea,” contact me in some way that allows me to contact you back, and I’ll do you a prize. There were 47 comments on the post, which is fitting.
Here are my answers and, in cases where I missed something, Wallace’s edits to my answers:
(1) It was the yuletide season like I had never seen it before.
It was the yuletide season as I had never seen it before.
(2) We were in Innsbruck, Austria and we could not find a place to stay the night.
We were in Innsbruck, Austria, and we could not find a place to stay the night. [Comma after Austria]
(3) We passed by the inn.
We passed the inn. [By is redundant]
(4) It has made its way into the mainstream of verbal discourse.
It has made its way into mainstream discourse. [Discourse is already verbal]
The poet and beloved teacher Paul Violi died early this month, and I’ve just found out that the Best American Poetry blog has a section devoted to thoughts and memories shared by friends and associates; anyone who has something to share may contribute. It is here.
Coldfront did a nice tribute w/ poem here.
I hadn’t the pleasure of studying with Mr. Violi at the New School, but I was lucky enough to have a conversation or two with him and to hear him read a few times, which was always a great treat. For someone like me, who didn’t really know him, he was nevertheless a fixture at my school in the best possible way, and it’s hard to imagine the place without him. It is surely a keen loss to those who knew him. If you didn’t know him, it will be your gain to discover or rediscover his work now. Here is a list of what you can find online.
This is for fun.
This is a contest. It is taken from a homework assignment in David Foster Wallace’s Extremely Advanced Composition class at Pomona College. It was a creative nonfiction workshop.
The contest is, correct these sentences for what Wallace, at least, perceived as errors in mechanics, grammar, punctuation, syntax, idiom, and/or usage. You get a point every time you are the first person to correct an error in comments (by rewriting the sentence correctly), but I’m going to wait to get lots of answers in to reveal the answers, so don’t hesitate to tackle a sentence that someone else has already tried. You may make multiple guesses on the same sentence, and you can guess out of order. Some sentences may have more than one error. One point per error. Prize TBA.
Some of these are pretty basic. Some are very obscure and speak to Wallace’s particular peeves, some of which I don’t share. The point is to figure out what he thought was wrong with these. No use arguing with a dead man.
And I quote:
English 183D 10 March 2004
” . . . every such phrase anesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.”–G. Orwell
(1) It was the yuletide season like I had never seen it before.
(2) We were in Innsbruck, Austria and we could not find a place to stay the night.
(3) We passed by the inn.
(4) It has made its way into the mainstream of verbal discourse.
(5) Cross burning began in medieval times on the green hills of Scotland, where clans used them to rally their kin and kith against enemies.
(6) “Get used to it.” I said to myself.
(7) As the president is a Christian, he prays every morning.
(8) I can support this claim with quotes from several published sources.
(9) It consisted of only two brief 50-minute workshops which one speaker enticingly described as “therapy session sized.”
I received the following email last fall in my campus inbox, and ever since I’ve wanted to launch a guerilla mascot campaign of my own.
Dear Students and Campus Colleagues,
I wanted to send everyone a quick email to respond to questions regarding the appearance of a man with a white Scottish terrier on campus recently and their presence on social media as well.
Xxxx Xxxxxxxx is the president of the Scottish Terrier Club of Greater Xxxxxxx and he reached out to several offices over the summer to express interest in collaborative measures between the club and our college due to our shared interest in the “Scottie” dog. A meeting was scheduled for September 8 to discuss opportunities for the Club’s participation in several upcoming college events where the presence of a group of Scottie dogs would be welcomed.
Before this meeting could occur and any campus officials be consulted, Mr. Xxxxxxxx went forward with plans that the college had not reviewed or approved. Although we appreciate the club’s interest and their president’s obvious enthusiasm, the decision to have a real “mascot” belongs to Xxxxx Xxxxx not an outside group.
His dog named “Hayley” has a Facebook page with misinformation about her status as “mascot” and her relationship with the college. We have requested that he make corrections to the site.
Please be assured that we are working to resolve these issues in a manner that is in the best interest of our students and the college.
If any students or other community members have questions or want to share their feedback, please contact me in the Alumnae Office at (XXX) XXX-XXXX or xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.edu.
Thank you.
Xxx
Xxx Xxxxxxx ‘XX
Director of Alumnae Relations
So, here is Annette, bichon frise, age 5. I searched coast to coast for a dog whose physiognomy reflected Blake, Ryan, and Gene’s combined physiologies. It was a tiring process, with a lot of heartbreak along the way, but finally I settled on Annette. She is also my own dog. Bichon frise means “frizzy pampered,” and the breed once traveled with Mediterranean sailors, who employed them as “friendly ambassadors” when they hit land. They later became favorites in the court of Henry III.
I recognize that declaring Annette to be the HTMLGiant mascot is not as bold as “Hayley’s” claim of being the mascot of a college with which she is in no way affiliated. But I still anticipate backlash, and if we get through that, I’m prepared to make her the mascot of the internet.
A little more on Annette: today, she helped me amend soil. “Soil amendment” is apparently not a euphemism for genocide; it is something that must be done if you want the right kind of flowers to populate your front yard.
Please welcome Annette!
First, some anecdotia:
1. Last semester, I assigned the essay “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White to my students. Most of them were not into it. I suggested that the author’s inner conflicts about change and aging might be more real to them when they are older; they were even less into that. I don’t blame them for being offended; it’s no good to be told we are too young to understand something. I’m not much older than them, so in my mind I was implicating myself in that, but even so.
2. When I was twenty, a much older friend told me that, at my age, I had to listen to Horses by Patti Smith. I did, a lot, and rarely do anymore. Around the same time, I read something in the New Yorker about how the author loved Sylvia Plath in her (or his? can’t remember) late teens/early twenties. I felt somehow offended. I never read much Plath, but I was reading a lot of Sexton at the time. I don’t read much Sexton anymore.
3. When I was 13, I tried reading Austen. I didn’t get very far. When I was 16, I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I liked it, but I don’t remember thinking it was very funny. That year, I also read Lolita up to the point of the motel sex scene, then quit. I don’t remember thinking the writing was particularly special. These days, I count Emma, Huckleberry Finn, and Lolita as top-favorite most-important-t0-me novels. The ones that delight me the most.
4. Last year, I went to a Leonard Cohen concert. I’ve always really liked his songs, especially the early ones. Birds on wires, Janis Joplin giving head and all that. The concert was by all definitions amazing. Technically perfect and highly charged. He kept falling to his knees or something. But I wasn’t moved as much as I would have liked. I kept thinking, he is old. He has accomplished so much, and here is the fruit of all that. A packed house. What more could he want. I believe that my failure to be moved had to do with not being able to comprehend what he still wanted, feared, needed, regretted after so many years and so much success without seeming to compromise. Sure, he must fear death and regret something, but I didn’t hear that in his singing.
This kind of thing is still happening to me. Does it happen to you? Are you offended yet, as I was and still probably would be if someone told me I’m just not ready for Cormac McCarthy yet, or that in time I will grow out of Frank O’Hara?
Research shows that our brain is still developing into our late twenties. What effect if any does that have on our taste in books? On how much delight we feel, or how much we “get it,” or when we are moved or not? Something in me resists it.
On the other hand, it’s comforting to think that there is something additive about aging. That we keep understanding more things. That an increased knowledge of and commerce with language and the world will further unblock us from art. READ MORE >
This is in response to Kyle’s comment on Sean’s post. Or, maybe in reaction. In the comment thread, I responded to part of what Kyle said, but the rest of my response veers pretty far from what Sean was asking, so I’m going to develop it here instead.
I want to take up the ideas of workshop as democracy and workshop as therapy session. What does it mean, really, to say you don’t like those ideas? I should just let Kyle answer that first, but I’m going to say what I make of those terms first.
Workshop as democracy: If I was the one saying that, I would mean that a workshop is a chance to hear from a group of the kind of people who would be your readers. With nobody’s reading being privileged, including the professor’s, who is just one reader. The professor certainly is there to teach how to respond to peer work, how to read and respond sensitively, but hers shouldn’t be the final word. Bruce Covey was telling me last night that he never speaks during the workshops he teaches. Each workshop, a student facilitates. I think this is a wonderful idea. Sure, workshops can work beautifully in other ways, too, but I think this is one good way. This can come down to tiny details. It’s great to know whether 10% or 80% of readers don’t catch a certain reference. To be in control of that, of how obscure the references are. I prefer the perhaps squishy sounding term “focus group” to “democracy” for this function (not the only function, but one function) of a workshop.
Workshop as therapy session: This is thrown around a lot, always negatively. Workshop shouldn’t be therapy. I think there are two problems with this. One, what kind of therapy are we talking about. Substitute “person” in what Kyle says at the end. “…from there, to help a [person] do the thing the [person] really wants to do as powerfully and truly as the [person] can.” That can be (should be?) the goal of therapy, no? When I went to therapy, that’s what I was looking for, and I found it. This happened in many ways and on multiple levels, but I’ll use an example that has to do with writing. Toward the end of my course of therapy, my main problem was that I was behind on my thesis. (After I finished, my therapist said it was time I set new goals or quit therapy. I quit, and we kept in touch.) My therapist said, how about writing five pages a day (I think she said three at first, but I explained I wouldn’t make the deadline that way). I started writing five pages a day. I finished the thesis. I sent the critical component of the thesis–which was never workshopped–to someone I interviewed for it. He wanted me to adapt it for the magazine he edits. Made $1500 for the article. Didn’t pay for my whole course of therapy, but it more than covered the session where she said to just write 5 pages a day. Why shouldn’t a workshop do this?
If Chickpea Curry is my number one dinner all-star for cooking without shopping, then my lunch/breakfast/brunch all-stars are fried rice and migas, which I think of in my head as tortilla eggs. I’ll do fried rice once I make/photograph it; today is all about migas, which I made yesterday. Basically, I make fried rice if I have leftover rice and stir-fry or vaguely Chinese leftovers, and I make migas if I have vaguely Mexican leftovers or bits of Mexican-y ingredients and corn tortillas. Flour tortillas might be good too but I’ve never tried it.
The only essentials for migas are tortillas and eggs. And hot sauce or salsa or something similar. Yesterday, I ate it with some Melinda’s Chipotle Ketchup that I bought at Marshall’s (it’s a really great Marshall’s. I also got sesame oil and walnut oil).
At left, not-migas; unhappiness. Below right, migas; less unhappiness. Below left, Melinda’s Chipotle Ketchup; happiness.
Other bits that go well in migas:
Mushrooms
Red onions, scallions or other onions
Leftover chicken or beef or pork or shrimp or tofu
Jalapenos or other chili
Poblanos or bell peppers
Spinach
Leftover cooked potato or sweet potato or squash
Tomatoes / tomato sauce / tomato paste
Avocado
Cheese
Yesterday, all I had were eggs, tortillas, shredded Colby-Jack, and leftover tomato sauce from when I served handmade cheese tortellini. So the tomato sauce already onion and garlic in it.
Here’s the method: Cut all your non-egg, non-sauce ingredients in little bits. Tear the tortillas into bits (around 1-inch square but precision is NOT necessary and indeed frowned upon because it’s good to have some crispier bits and some softer bits and besides tortillas are round). Beat eggs, with milk if you like, salt and pepper. Heat some fat (vegetable oil, butter, say about 1 tablespoon per egg, at ~2 eggs per person) in a pan/skillet. Add all the non-egg non-sauce non-cheese bits including the tortillas (but if you are using avocado, for the love of god add that at the end). Season with salt and pepper and fry in the oil till they get to desired softness/brownness/doneness. Add eggs, sauce, cheese (which you could have also added to the eggs in the beating stage). Kinda scramble those eggs with everything until cooked. Eat with hot sauce/salsa/Melinda’s Chipotle Ketchup.
In France*, cheese-making is really two processes. On dairies, milk is collected from cows, goats, or sheep, is cultured, maybe cooked, somehow molded. That is the first process. After that, an affineur takes over. The whole job of an affineur is to age cheese. Keep it at the right temperature, rotate it, maybe dust it off from time to time. When you hear about cheese caves, that’s the affineur part. In the small-producer cheese world, the affineurs are the stars, the ones whose name you would know if you worked in that industry. Pierre Androuet, Herve Mons, Marcel Petite (O the Comte from the cellars of Marcel Petite!). One affineur might get wheels from several different trusted dairies, whose names never make it on the packaging (unlike in the US, where most cheeses seem to be branded by farm/dairy).
So it goes with films–the editing is done by someone else, not the director or screenwriter. Walter Murch was the editor and/or sound editor (he’s the only person to win Oscars for both) of Apocalypse Now, The Godfather II, The Conversation, and many many others. His work on The English Patient acquainted him with Michael Ondaatje. The two had a series of conversations/interviews (Ondaatje is asking the questions, primarily) that are collected in a book called The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film.
The book is a trove. I’ve been meaning to write about it here for over a year (!), but I’m still not all the way through it. Obviously, I’ve put it down a lot, but also I just really want to take my time with it because there is so much to learn and reflect on. I’m fascinated by how these two men, both of whose work I adore, find these nexuses between film editing and book editing. It’s a reminder of how much we as word-people have to learn from people who work in other media. The reason I started with the cheese example is that the big overarching thing the book makes me think about is the relationship between making and aging/editing/tending/revising. Below are a few passages that stood out for me. But really, you should have this book. It was assigned to me in grad school by the great Susan Bell, author of The Artful Edit, which, if a friend hadn’t made off to California with my copy, would get its own post. But with all respect to Bell and Stunk and White and the rest, The Conversations is the best writing manual (not that it’s trying to be) that I’ve ever read. So, here are some bits (O for Ondaatje and M for Murch):
M: It’s a stage in the process I call “editing with eyes half closed.” You can’t open your eyes completely, which is to say, you can’t express your opinion unreservedly. You don’t know enough yet. And you’re only the editor. You have to give everything the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, you can’t be completely without opinion, otherwise nothing would ever get done. Putting a film together is all about having opinions: this not that, now not later, in or out. But exactly what the balance should be between neutrality and opinion is a very tricky question. The point is, if you squash this down, then you push the whole curve of the film down, whereas it might have righted itself by its own mysterious means. If you try to correct the film while putting it together, you end up chasing your own tail.
This is a new feature I might do — easy things to cook that are great. I figure I’m picking up where Mark Bittman is (sadly) leaving off.
The first recipe is an all-star one that I can make some version of at almost any time without shopping, provided I have some canned chickpeas (or white beans, or dried lentils, or I’m sure canned black beans would work). I usually have it with rice, which I always have in the house.
The first step is to chop (smallish) and saute whatever hard vegetables you have on hand. For me, this usually means some combination of carrots, onions, and maybe celery, though I’ve made it without some of those too. You can use anything that’s pretty hard. If you use potatoes or sweet potatoes, you might want to chop them extra-fine or even grate them. So, heat a few tablespoons of vegetable oil in a pot, add your chopped vegetables, and saute stirring occasionally for 5-10 minutes, until softened and maybe browned, or longer if you want to caramelize them. But they will keep cooking a little throughout the process. At the end of sauteing, throw in minced garlic if you like. Minced fresh ginger is good, too. If you have tomato paste, add a tablespoon or so now.
Next, add a can or two of drained and rinsed chickpeas (or other beans), as well as any soft vegetables you have around (except soft greens, which I’ll get to). This could mean eggplant, mushrooms, fresh or canned (with juice) tomatoes, summer squash. Canned tomatoes are probably the one I most frequently add. Then add some liquid, a cup or two depending on how much stuff is in the pot, enough to make it a little stew-like so it won’t burn. Tomato sauce, chicken broth, water, whatever you have. Then add curry powder, salt and pepper to taste. If you don’t have curry powder, add some combo of cumin, coriander, chili powder, cayenne, ground mustard, smoked paprika, garlic powder, onion powder.
Bring it all to a boil and then turn down immediately to a slow simmer. Stir occasionally. Cook until everything is at a nice, eatable consistency, say twenty minutes. At this point, stir in fresh or frozen spinach or something similar, if you have it (I don’t always), and cook until cooked (wilty-looking). If you have any parsley, cilantro, scallions, basil, or chives, chop some and add them. Then it is ready to eat with rice or any other cooked grain that you have cooked. In a pinch I have eaten it with toast. I would eat it with tortillas, if it came to that. It is really good with chili paste or hot sauce.
Again, this is really adaptable. Maybe all you have is carrots and chickpeas. That will still be really delicious if you add enough spice. The great thing about this dish is that you don’t have to have anything fresh–canned beans and tomatoes and some frozen spinach along with your dried spices work great. Leftovers are even better than the first go-round.
The pendulum has swung, as pendulums are so woefully apt to do. When I was small, and first starting reading about what writers said about writing, they all seemed to say that it was better not to discuss a work in progress. At the time, this seemed a kind of magic trick, a superstition of some kind. But I’d be damned if I didn’t take their word for gospel, even though I didn’t understand it any better than I understood the actual Gospels (I heard “Jesus is everywhere” and imagined a thousand teeny tiny invisible Bethlehem babies lounging around even as I bathed).
Apparently, I was damned. By the time I started writing in earnest, the whole mechanism had to do with not only discussing but sharing your work in progress. In college, this was great, because I wasn’t in any way ready to complete anything to the point that it could be published. So participating in workshops was like army boot camp. I learned lots.
In MFA school, I still learned, especially in literature seminars, but I certainly didn’t complete anything publishable. But this time, I was probably ready to, but was hampered by the workshop process. There were three reasons for this, I think. 1, in no workshop that I took did anyone say that a piece should just be abandoned. All criticism was constructive, which was the point, but in reality some work needs to be torn down so that something better can be built in its place. I’m very impressionable, so after hearing my work discussed for 20 or so minutes, I became convinced it was worth my continued attention even if it really wasn’t. But I ran into trouble with the continued attention because 2, my classmates’ and professor’s opinions about any one piece, even a 3-pager, were so conflicted, and the problems they unearthed so convoluted, that I was totally lost when faced with revision. To make matters worse, 3, my professors and classmates (not to mention lots of other people in my life–they all agreed) also told me what book they thought I should write, and how I should go about it. Almost five years later, I have only just really decided that they were wrong, and that the book they had in mind is not the one I should write, at least not right now. Like I said, I’m very impressionable. I have confidence in my own work, sure, but there is something powerful about everyone you know saying they want to read the same as-yet-unwritten book by you. Powerful and dangerous.
Internet Depersonalization Goes Both Ways
Also, the story involves someone whom people know. Someone I’ve met once, but who I have something like 75
facebook friends in common with. By comparison, my best friend of 25 years and I share only 53 mutual friends. So, there’s this question of whether to say who the someone is. This goes back to the earlier point–it isn’t important who, in terms of why I want to tell this story. I’m not telling this story to call someone out. So, don’t say who it is, right? But then what if people think it is someone who it isn’t, and have resulting feelings about the wrong person? Maybe I should turn comments off? But I don’t want to turn comments off. Not yet. I would like there to be a discussion about what I’m trying to say, but not about who I am talking about. So, please, don’t try to guess; if you do I’ll flag the comment for Blake to delete.
So. Mean Week 2009 was less than a week into when I started writing for HTMLGiant. I hadn’t read it super regularly, and I
wasn’t sure what Mean Week was supposed to be, and I did it really wrong and felt really bad feelings. The worst feeling I had came from a horrible, virulently misogynist, hateful, anonymous comment in the form of a beyond-degrading epithet directed toward me. Anonymous meaning the person identified himself by his first name but there was no link attached or anything indicating who the person really was. (See why I am reluctant even NOT to say who it is? By this unspecific description, you might think you know who it is. Like, Jereme Dean uses his first name with no link, and if you didn’t know that I’ve never met Jereme even once, you could think it is him. But it is not. To my knowledge Jereme is not hateful even if he disagrees with people a lot.)
Again, this was early in my tenure here. I didn’t know the game. I don’t have a thick skin. I’ve always been called sensitive, as if it is a bad thing, and certainly there is this idea that I shouldn’t let things like this get to me, not on the internet, not on HTMLG, certainly not on Mean Week. I disagree. Sure, it may have negative effects on me, but I think it is dangerous to disregard hatefulness. This is why I am telling the story.
Of course, though it affected me and made me cry, I had to somehow get past it, and the way I did this (I thought) was to reason
that the person didn’t know me, and didn’t really think of me as a person. Like, in response to another nasty comment directed toward me by someone else, Blake commented (for which I thank him), “would you say this to her face?” This made me feel better about both commenters. They just see my name and don’t really think about that name being attached to a real person with real feelings. They couldn’t.
I still think that’s true. But here’s the twist: Six months later, I met the person who made the hate comment, and, apologetically, he identified himself as the commenter, and said it wasn’t really about me, or something, and he was sorry.
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February 27th, 2011 / 4:11 pm