Monday, March 28, 2011

Obama’s Birthplace or His Religion?

I agree with Donald Trump that Barack Obama should produce his birth certificate. However, I heard recently that the secrecy may be all about his birth religion, not his birthplace. Many think he is a Muslim. If he was/is, why should we be fair about that, when he tried to hide it? He should be impeached for several reasons, and such deceit would be at the top of the list.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Gems Hidden in Plain Sight

In cleaning out papers that have accumulated over the years, I began reading some pages of a little calendar containing information about various topics, fodder for a writer, one page for each day. Here’s a real jewel. Perhaps you knew this already, but I did not. The inner city of Amsterdam, Netherlands, is divided by a network of canals into some 90 “islands.” The municipality contains approximately 1,300 bridges and viaducts. This locale needs a James Patterson or a Daniel Silva or a Frederick Forsyte to commit murder and intrigue there. I suppose someone has accomplished this already, perhaps several of them, but I just don’t recall reading a story with this setting. If anyone knows of such a mystery set there, please let me know. A mystery in English, I mean, not Dutch.

Another touching comment has come in, about a blog I posted on February 17, 2010. This is from the second stranger who had read the book I wrote about, and read ever so many years ago, Yours Is the Earth by Margaret Vail. Each one was pleased I had the rest of the story for them, such as, if Margaret ever got her husband back from a German prison camp in World War II. Each time I was thrilled the answer to their question was right here in my blog. And that reminds me of something else:

To those who asked about the book, Deanna and Len, let me tell you I recently completed writing a short story with a WWII time period for a contest submission this year in Idaho Writers League. I had read two wonderful books, one right after the other, and then flew to my computer to begin that story, for one of them especially gave facts new to me, that begged to be details in my fiction. I may add it to my blog, for its only publication elsewhere, I intend, will be in the book of short stories I hope to get off the press someday. It won’t be going to a magazine. I think it has a chance of placing in the contests, though one must be ready for surprises in that regard. Whether it does or not, I will print it for you after the conference has announced the awards in late September.

The two books that spurred me to write “To Save a Bridge” were Joanne Harris’s Five Quarters of the Orange (fiction) and Don and Petie Kladstrup’s Wine and War (nonfiction). You might enjoy reading these and weighing my story against them. Quarters gave me mostly atmosphere and Wine gave me facts. While giving away books, these are two I don’t let go. Enjoy them. And thank you for your comments.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

However, My Choice Is . . .

I like to see a man at the head of many things and the presidency is one of those. The smartest would-be candidate is, I think, Newt Gingrich, and he has enough experience in leadership. All of the likely candidates seem to have baggage. Someone said recently we need to judge the person after he has cleaned up his act. He or she, of course.

Then today (Saturday), on C-SPAN, I met Iowan Representative Steve King. I liked what I saw and heard.

Much to think about before November 2012.

Bachmann and Palin

Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota has put out her antenna to test her chances for winning the nomination in 2012 on the GOP ticket. She is a native Iowan, in fact, a seventh-generation Iowan, I believe, and that may help her chances. She is also beautiful and well-spoken. One commentator last night said, without any hesitation, that she would take Sarah Palin’s votes.

I like Sarah Palin and she is beautiful too. Both women are highly intelligent and patriotic. But I’d like to suggest to Sarah that she learn to lower the scale of her voice a full octave. She should play back her recent interview with Greta Van Susteren and listen to it from another room. If my late husband had heard this, he would have said, “I’d never vote for a voice like that on television everyday [as Mr. O's is].”

But good luck to both these women!

No Surprise from the White House

If anyone doubted that a short career in community organizing was experience enough for running a country as large as the Unites States of America, or any country, you have your answer now. Our country is in such a mess that I wonder if it’s too late to clean up government and get the country back to normal. Plenty of others must believe it can be rescued, for numerous Republicans are considering running for the presidency in 2012. Occasionally these days we hear the word impeachment from a few members of Congress. Some of the public have long been thinking it. I heard two men agree recently on television, that Hilary, even with all her cunning and love of money, would actually have been a better president than Mr. O. I had already arrived at that conclusion.

As I observe the actions of the current man in the White House, it seems to me that every decision he makes is the wrong one, just the opposite of what it should be. He either doesn’t know how to lead the country in the right and moral way, or he does know but opts to lead it in paths alien to the United states but suitable for some other ideology. And he is too slow to announce a decision when it should be made, other than to say he will have a committee look into it. One of the first principles that marks a successful man is his making up his mind quickly and without a committee. Of course, the president should not make decisions that belong to the Congress or to the Supreme Court. We are supposed to have a separation of powers in the USA.

While Mr. O is out playing golf, vacationing in South America, or whatever, his czars back in Washington must be carving out the ridiculous laws forced upon us. That is SO un-American. November 2012 can’t get here soon enough!

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Japan, Libya, Wisconsin

Well, I’m back, not that I’ve been anywhere. I’ve been busy with other writings, with getting a virus out of my computer (don’t know how I lost the anti-virus protection), getting my papers ready for my tax consultant, and trying to keep up with the horrendous disasters in Japan, with one eye still on Libya. My heart breaks for the people of Japan. It’s hard to imagine losing family members in less than a half-minute of time, either to earthquake or to tsunami, and in the process, losing everything else, accompanied by the real threat of nuclear disaster. I can’t get this out of my mind.

I heard one news reporter in Tokyo say the tall buildings left standing were built to move on their bases during an earthquake. That reminded me of a bit of writing I had just completed in which I refer to the first earthquake-proof hotel in Japan, the design of Frank Lloyd Wright, architect of architects. Perhaps there are several of such hotels there now. In research for my paper, I learned a concrete base is not earthquake-proof, but a wood base can be, constructed in a specific way, of course.

We keep hearing, people in California aren’t saying any longer, “if” it has a really big earthquake, but “when.” I have several family members living in southern California, nine at least of the Rinards and the Justices (Lindsley side of family). One can survive an earthquake, but how many of us have a food supply ready for shortages such as Japan is going through now? I had the good fortune this week to receive a letter from one of my sons telling me he had ordered a supply of freeze-dried foods for me for difficult times if they show up here. How positively thoughtful a gift.

Those yearning for freedom in Libya seem to be losing the fight. We should have helped. How I long for America to be American again. I read in my grandson’s blog he was to visit with some of his friends from Libya last week, I think it was, or perhaps this week, in Las Vegas of all places. It will be interesting to read his report on that. He was the one, with his wife and little son, who got home from Libya early on, for they were already at Malta. But they left much behind in their apartment in Tripoli, which they believe to be lost now.

Such are only a few tragedies currently in the world, but I have no sympathy for the teachers and legislators who deserted their posts in Wisconsin. I was glad to hear about a thousand teachers are being fired for turning in false sick notes, apparently aided by some medical doctors. I don’t know if that latter part proved true, or if some agitators were merely posing as doctors. All that uproar is so ridiculous when one gives just one minute to comparing it with the real suffering in the world. ”Hurrah!” for Governor Scott Walker, may his tribe increase. [The last clause in that sentence is from a poem I had to memorize in junior high school.]

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

On Writing Poetry, Part 3

Turning out a poetic phrase is merely no more than placing one perfect word after the other, resulting from having a copious vocabulary and imagination. And both of these usually come from wide reading over a long period of time. I’m not talking about skimming five novels a week, but about reading every word on the page of great writing and paying attention to detail. For example, read the prose work Local Wonders (title shortened) by Ted Kooser, once the Poet Laureate of the United States. Notice that he writes of simple themes but in poetic detail.

One suggestion about detail: break down description to its tightest possibility. The progression may go from plant to flower to rose to tea rose to the tea rose called the Lady Hillingdon. Be specific: the Lady Hillingdon tea roses bursting into bloom three days before the wedding. Use your computer to discover such ideas. I just did.

I want to suggest an assignment for you to do, and I am dead serious about it. Go to a well-stocked public library and locate a book by Emlyn Williams called George, an Early Autobiography, published in 1961. If your library doesn’t have it, ask the librarian if she will borrow it from another library for you. That is often done. You don’t need a library card to inquire. You can sit in the library and fulfill the assignment in five minutes or less: read the first five paragraphs. It depends on how the publisher arranged the first page, but those five paragraphs may go to the second page. When I read this prose the first time, I got this far and said, “This is poetry.” Eventually I typed it up to look like a poem, one long stanza with long lines of his exact wording, showed it to others, and they thought it was poetry. But Emlyn Williams was a playwright. He probably wasn’t aware of being a poet. The page is loaded with ordinary words such as dog, bird, straw, free, gate, heat, frog, dew, grass, sun, well, floor, rag, but also sprinkled with words such as knickerbockers, conscient, quavering, tawny, incantation, tremulous, and the Titanic. This first page alone might have sold the book to the editor. I’d like to copy this passage here for you, but I don’t have permission to do so.

These two examples, of Williams and Kooser, are among the best you can find to illustrate “the turn of the phrase.” Remember that you are not seeking a long word as you write, but the right word, which may be only three or four letters long. Free verse poets need especially to read these selections. Many so-called must think anything goes, that free verse has no bounds. But it does. What you write needs to sound like poetry. When it doesn’t, it probably lacks the turn of the phrase.

The other point I want to stress is that serious lyric poetry must be about two things: the wording on the page and its other meaning. The surface expressions are only to support what you really want to say, hidden between the lines. You may start out by showing the reader luscious black grapes from Tuscany. But that is not enough. What thoughts did you have that inspired you to pick up your pen? If you thought the appearance of the huge grapes alone was enough to write about, then study further. They need to mean something.

The little haiku, so tiny, should be a tower of strength through its turn of the phrase and its two meanings, one hidden between the lines. Remember, haiku gets no adverbs and seldom a descriptive adjective, and is not a complete sentence, though you see published “haiku” that breaks all these rules.

I’ll end this perhaps somber blog with a joke. To write good poetry, choose your ancestors carefully. But then, maybe that isn’t a joke. Who knows? Let me know if this has been of value to you poets.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

On Writing Poetry, Part 2

This section talks about adverbs, nouns, and verbs in poetry, but first, the capitalization of titles. In all titles for prose and poetry verbs are capitalized, even if they are only two letters long, such as am, be, and do. The first word in a title is always capitalized, even if it is a two-letter preposition, as in Of Human Bondage, Of Mice and Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Adverbs and adjectives are capitalized, though articles are not unless they are the first word of titles, as in “The King’s Speech” but “Speak of the King.” Prepositions are capitalized if they are more than five letters, as in “Over the River and Through the Woods” but “Through the Woods and over the River.” All sources may not quite agree with this about prepositions, but my guide is The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, and what many editors prefer.

According to Nobel laureate, García Márquez, the –ly adverbs should never appear in your writing. For example, the adverb happily. The reader cannot know by this word if the happy one is tickled pink or laughing his head off, for the adverb carries no picture that the poet sees. Others of this ilk are awfully, kindly, quickly, slowly, and terribly, but there are oodles more. Whenever you are tempted to use such adverbs, switch gears and go for the exact noun and the powerful verb: perhaps ransom instead of money and cheesecake instead of dessert; zoomed instead of went and trilled instead of sang.

Nouns are a problem with many but it’s easy to understand the solution: use concrete nouns. Concrete nouns are names of things you can touch, such as desk, chair, plum, tree, and money. Touch, remember. This does not include hear, taste, smell, and see. The names of the senses themselves are not concrete nouns, but abstract ones. Here are some abstract nouns that ordinarily do nothing for your poetry: love, beauty, pain, time, death, yearning, happiness, joy, sorrow, contentment, excitement, surprise, faith, longing, and those that end in -ity, -acy, -ness, -ment, -ion, and the like. These do not paint a picture. One famous poem, “How Do I Love Thee?” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is the exception to this rule. However, she uses several one-syllable abstract nouns in the fourteen lines, such as death, love, depth, height, and breadth, and only three or so longer abstractions, being, level, and passion, if my memory serves me right.

Right on the heels of not using the –ly adverb comes the recent stress on cutting down on adjectives. This has always been true but if you haven’t read much and long of poetry, this probably got past you. My favorite tip is, “Cut to the bone.” Have only necessary words on the page. Leave out very, for example. In these two expressions: “It was cold” and “It was very cold”, which one is colder than the other? It can depend on how you read them aloud, but treating them alike, I say the shorter sentence is colder. It can be super cold without icicles hanging from it.

Of course, all parts of speech are for our use, just as the passive voice is for our use. We just have to read widely and long and study how good writing merits being called good. That can take a lifetime, but what a life! If anyone wants to know, I opted some time ago to write prose and not poetry. But if I do not stay occupied with the prose, poetic phrases pop into my head and I long to write poetry. These blogs are a fast job, for I’m not aiming for immortal prose, but for just communication. More TLC goes into my other writing. By the way, Dr. Seuss spent a year writing The Cat in the Hat. Do you have that kind of patience and determination? I spent most of a day recently writing a short story and have been picking at it every day since. Until a submission has gone out, I do pick at it until the reading indicates no better options

Part 3, the final part, will be about the turn of the phrase. That’s where the beauty comes into poetry or into any writing.