Posts filed under ‘WRITING & READING’
My favorite ellipsis
Last night in the essays class I teach at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, the subject of ellipses came up. In a story, an ellipsis consists of leaving something out. The “something” can be anything from a few words to entire events. Unless we are reading quite technically, we usually only notice an ellipsis when it goes wrong - when the gap seems awkward or omits information we’re looking for. But when an ellipsis goes right, especially at the level of a sentence or a phrase, it can produce prose that is wonderfully economical and far more enjoyable than if the writer had included what has been omitted.
Here is perhaps my favorite ellipsis of all, in a passage from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration - even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!”
Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them - with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.
He reached in his pocket, and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell into my palm.
“That’s the one from Montenegro.”
To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look. “Orderi de Danilo,” ran the circular legend. “Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.”
“Turn it.”
“Major Jay Gatsby,” I read, “For Valour Extraordinary.”
Fitzgerald here is like a magician on his day off, absent-mindedly pulling a pigeon from behind his ear in such a way we are convinced we merely overlooked the bird: a sleight of hand so quick and deft as to seem natural and not a trick at all.
Samuel R. Delaney and the “annealing moment” of doubt
Reading the excerpt below makes me think of how difficult yet rewarding it must be to peel and eat a durian, that strange fruit found only in southeast Asia, and guarded by not only a foul odor but a thick husk of thorns. The excerpt comes from an essay by the science fiction writer, literary critic, and teacher Samuel R. Delaney called “Of Doubts and Dreams.” It’s part of a collection of related essays by Delaney titled About Writing.
Delaney is talking in this essay about doubt - doubt as a barrier to writing anything at all, to start with; but doubt also as an aid to good writing, or more accurately to the search for good writing. In particular, he notes, cliches of both language and thought must be seen for what they are and discarded - even though they are often the first things that come to mind when we set out to write. He goes on:
The act of refusing to put down words, or crossing out words already down, while you concentrate on the vision you are writing about, makes new words come. What’s more, when you refuse language your mind offers up, something happens to the next batch offered. The words are not the same ones that would have come if you hadn’t doubted . . .
If there is a privileged moment somewhere in the arc of experience running from the first language an infant hears, through the toddler’s learning that language, to the child’s learning to read it, to the adolescent’s attempts to write journals, tales, dramas, poems - if there is a moment, rightly called creative, when the possibility of the extraordinary is shored up against the inundation of ordinary rhetoric that forms, shapes, and is the majority of what we call civilized life, it is here. This is the moment covered - in the sense of covered over - by the tautology against which so many thousands of would-be writers have stumbled: “To be a writer, you must write.” You must write not only to produce the text that is the historical verification of your having written. You must write to project yourself, again and again, through the annealing moment that provides the negentropic1 organization which makes a few texts privileged tools of perception. Without this moment, this series of moments, this concatenation of doubts about language shattered by language, the text is only a document of time passed with some paper, of time spent pondering a passage through a dream.
What wonderful yet thorny motives this passage suggests - not for why we write, but why we ought to write.
- “Negentropic,” if you’re wondering, means “characterized by a reduction in entropy, and a corresponding increase in order.” ↩
Byrdcliffe At Dusk
Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, September 2009
Twice a month each summer, a small walking tour comes to a halt on the dirt road outside the cabin where I live at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in Woodstock. A dozen or so persons with little maps in their hands listen as the guide speaks, gesturing now and then in my direction. I can’t quite hear what she’s saying, but I’m sure she’s mentioning the name of my cabin, Quartette, and adding that like the rest of the colony, this low little building was built in 1903 or thereabouts and is therefore historic.
I am invisible behind my window, I know. And as I sit there, looking at all these people looking back at me but not seeing me, I find myself wondering about this veneration of an official past. I have lived at Byrdcliffe each summer for nine years, and it seems to me that not only myself but my neighbors, who like me have foolishly persisted in trying to be artists and writers, inhabit a reality undocumented by historians. It is a fragile reality, but alive — as beautifully ugly as a chicken-of-the-woods fungus growing on the bole of a tree. And you can’t press a fungus into a history book without killing it.
To read more, download the PDF.
New look for home page and services page
If you stop by what was “Whole words, Whole Sight,” you’ll notice the site now looks quite different. I’ve decided to move the blog proper inside - you can find it via the TIPS BLOG link in the menu.
That leaves the home page free to explain more of what I do as a book doctor for nonfiction authors. I’ve also created a new Services page that expands on this theme & includes what I am gingerly calling an introductory offer for those who want to try me out. Onward, commerce! Onward, good nonfiction writing!
If you do stop by for a look, let me know what you think - you can back-channel me at or just put a comment under this post.
Memoir alert: Hats and Eyeglasses out in paperback
I had been playing poker with Martha Frankel and her crew up in the Woodstock area for well over a year before I learned she was semi-secretly writing a memoir about, among other things, poker. For a while after that, I didn’t hear anything more. Martha was an extremely experienced magazine journalist, but I knew how hard writing a book can be - especially your first book, and a memoir to boot (something I’ve never dared). And I knew too how long the odds can be against getting published.
But Martha landed an agent - and then a deal. And when Hats and Eyeglasses, as the memoir is called, came out in hardcover last year, it got loving reviews.
Now it’s out in paperback. I rarely read memoirs, but I’ve read this one and recommend it. Am I biased? Sure. Is it good anyway? Yes. Is it about poker? Yes - sort of. It’s more about family and about sticking together, even under the worst of circumstances. I won’t say too much more except to give you just a paragraph from one of my favorite scenes in the book. Martha has traveled to Ft. Lauderdale to visit her cousin Keith, who (a) is a cook, and (b) is going to teach her poker.
So now we’re in his kitchen in Florida, and he’s telling me about straights and flushes, but he refuses to divulge whether it’s capoccolo or prosciutto that gives his lasagna such a zing. “Why should I tell you?” he taunts me, hiding a jar of red pepper flakes. I ignore him and stare at “the list” I’d made up for myself.
It says:
ONE PAIR
TWO PAIRS
3-OF-A-KIND
STRAIGHT
FLUSH
FULL HOUSE
4-OF-A-KIND
STRAIGHT FLUSH
Keith hates the list and doesn’t understand why I need it. “Because I can’t remember what comes between three-of-a-kind and four-of-a-kind,” I whine.
“You better remember, because those are the hands that are going to win you money.” He lights a cigar and holds the match under the list. “You’re smart,” he says as it bursts into flames. “Just remember the fucking thing.”
P.S. If you’re the cautious type and want to know a bit more about Martha before investing your $14.95, you can check out this profile in The New York Times.
Essays by Grossman, Pamuk
Not book reviews, just quick notes -
Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics, by David Grossman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008; 144 pages, $18). Grossman is an Israeli who writes essays, commentary, and occasionally journalism - but mostly novels. I’ve never read his fiction but his essays are wonderful. The title piece in this collection was first delivered in 2007 as an address at the Pen American Center. Like much good writing it seems artless at first, almost shapeless - think of Montaigne or “The Golden Notebook” - and yet at the same time utterly assured. In this and the other essays, Grossman gropes his way through the dark to celebrate the triumph of private language over the debasement of words by governments and interest groups at war with each other. Grossman writes from a country at war, and yet what he has to say is quite pertinent to the U.S. , a country busy conducting not one but two wars out of the immediate sight of its citizens.
Other Colors, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage paperback reprint, 2008, 464 pages, $15.95). I’m actually reading the 2007 hardcover edition, which I picked up a couple of weeks ago at The Strand over on Broadway and 12th Street in Manhattan. I enjoyed though never finished an earlier memoir by this Nobel prize winner, Istanbul: Memories and the City - hmm, I’ll have to get back to that one at some point. What I like about Pamuk is his slow style, abhorrence of confession for its own sake, masculine sentimentality, and willingness to muse about meaning rather than merely present a string of scenes. A nice change from the relentlessly present-tense memoirs churned out in this country.
Victory in Lost Clove Valley
Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, September 2008
Just before a stand of mountain trees is logged, the loggers mark those trees to be felled with strips of blue paint around their trunks. These trees are always the very best: loveliest to look at, and capable of producing the finest veneers when run through a sawmill. This is a story about hundreds of such trees crowding a remote Catskills mountainside. The trees were carefully shepherded by the owners of that mountainside for more than a century, up until just a year or so ago - only to be finally marked with blue paint.
That should have been the end, yet it wasn’t. Thanks to a highly unusual agreement between an old Catskills clan and an enterprising conservation program, the loggers have had to look elsewhere. The trees will stand tall on that mountainside for hundreds of years to come -in human terms, forever.
To read more, download the PDF.
Animal Invasion
Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, August 2007
One of the most beautiful, yet frightening, short stories I’ve ever read is just a few pages long. “House Taken Over,” by the Mexican writer Julio Cortázar, tells of a brother and sister living together peacefully in their home after their parents die - and then the house is taken over by unknown and angry spirits. We never see the spirits, but the brother evidently knows just how dangerous they are.
One by one, rooms are rendered off-limits as the spirits spread, until at the end, brother and sister flee altogether, with the brother locking the front door and throwing away the key - not to guard what’s no longer their property except in name only, but to protect any poor fool of a burglar from being tempted to enter a seemingly empty house.
I was thinking of the story the other day when I considered how thoroughly creatures other than us take over our cabin each summer, here on a wooded hillside in Woodstock.
To read more, download the PDF.
You can also listen to an MP3 audio recording of this article.
Looking outward, not inward, to change careers
Working Identity, by Herminia Ibarra (Harvard Business School Press, 2004, 199 pages, $16.95)
Countless self-help guides to switching jobs or careers assume you’ve got just one true identity in life, and therefore, just one true purpose. Your task is to look so deep inside yourself that you discover this purpose. It’s a little like the old notion of a soulmate - that out of all the billions of people on this planet, only one can be our true love. You plow through these sorts of books doing endless exercises, ranging from the conventional (Briggs-Meyers) to the unconventional (list your top 10 most enjoyable memories). Once you nail your personality type, or your “genius,” or whatever it is that supposedly makes you unique, you’re home free - or so the books assert.
“Working Identity” is refreshingly different; one might even say refreshingly adult. Ibarra, formerly on the faculty of the Harvard Business School and now a professor at INSEAD, a business school in France, notes that the real way most of us change careers isn’t through introspection, but experimentation: going back to school part-time, for example, or slowly building a freelance practice on the side, or hanging out with people in the line of work we’re interested in to see what it feels like. This sort of dabbling and detouring, says Ibarra, is a healthy reaction to our possessing not a single “true” self, but many selves, among which we’re constantly choosing:
Movie Madness
Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, March 2007
Last summer, I read an article in a local paper that described how, in March 2005, filmmakers had descended on a series of locales in Orange and Ulster counties and used them as stand-ins for rural Wisconsin.
These locations included the Sky Top Motel in Kingston, the Reservoir Dairy Deli in Shokan, and the Phoenicia Diner. This seemed both magical and bizarre to me. How, I wondered, could an ordinary diner, whose pancakes and sausages I was intimately familiar with, be transplanted to a Midwestern state I’ve never even visited? And why had the filmmakers picked the Valley for their sleight of hand? This demanded investigation.
To read more, download the PDF.
