Tom Swift Writer’s Notebook

I would have skipped over this piece three years ago — that is, before our first dog arrived and quickly raised my awareness of creatures large and small, legged and winged, that I previously disregarded — and what fascinating stuff I would have missed. Such as:

“Most young birds, even those hatched just weeks ago, don’t travel [south for the winter] with their parents or even their siblings. Instead, they follow a flight plan embedded in their brains.”

Whoa. And …

“Whether it’s a first trip or one made by a seasoned veteran, bird migration is a finely calibrated phenomenon. A small feathered being, weighing less than 2 ounces, may fly 3,000 miles or more in spring and fall, able to navigate with such precision that it may land in the very same tree it left six months earlier.”

I cannot tell a warbler from a catbird. But I know that before traveling a couple-three-thousand miles, you need a decent meal. So I had better keep the Swift bird buffet (pictured) well stocked. I filled it up last night and by mid-morning they were munching.

Quick — grab your iPod, iPad, iPhone, smartphone, or laptop and listen to this program.

I’m not the biggest Joan Didion fan you’re going to meet, but having just read Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I see why others are drawn to the quasi-classic. She’s clever, at times very clever, and while seldom breezy, even a slow reader like me turns her pages quickly. (Sometimes too quickly; because she rarely constructs scenes, I kept think of a fastball pitcher who forgets to mix in an occasional change-up.)

When essays or memoirs fail to grab me, it’s usually because they lack reflection, and that is the case with many pieces in “Bethlehem.” Didion is an expert at information selection — “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” a work of journalism and the book’s opener, shows off that gift — but much of the time she is not terribly interested in rumination. Which is too bad because when she does linger, she shows how deeply and interestingly she thinks. Here I am thinking of a meditation called “On Self-Respect.” I can’t get enough of these sorts of observations:

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. … At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.”

I can always use a reminder about inflated language. John R. Trimble (in Writing with Style) offers a good one:

“Simple prose is clear prose. And simple prose, if smooth and rhythmical, is readable prose. Let your ideas alone do the impressing. If they look banal to you, there’s only one remedy: upgrade them. Don’t try to camouflage their weakness with razzle-dazzle rhetoric. You’ll razzle-dazzle yourself right into a bog of bull.”

It has been my good fortune to be invited to read and speak and sign at more than twenty events now, and I have never been made to feel as comfortable as I was last night at the John Hassler Theater. What a warm and welcoming group of curious readers and fellow writers. I read more than I usually do; audience members asked great questions (the Q&A is always the best part of my events); and they made the “open mic” a whole lot of fun. Thank you, Carolyn Bizien, Dean and Sally Harrington, the Austin contingent, and everyone else who made the night such an enjoyable one. I will not soon forget your support.

Every third Wednesday the Rural America Writers’ Center invites an author to read from his or her work. Tomorrow happens to be the third Wednesday in August — as hard as that is to believe; I can still hear the echo of Fourth of July fireworks — and the author on the schedule happens to be one lucky dude: me. The Rural America Writers’ Center 
is managed by the Rural America Arts Partnership, whose affiliates include the Jon Hassler Professional Theater and the Plainview Area History Center. My reading at 7 p.m. will include time for Q&A. Immediately following, the center will host an “open mic” night. All writers of prose and poetry invited to share their work. No judges. No fees. No reservations required. Just a fun time. Can’t wait.

From Charles Bukowski by way of The Writer’s Almanac:

“This is very important — to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you’re gonna lose everything. Whether you’re an actor, anything, a housewife … there has to be great pauses between highs, where you do nothing at all. You just lay on a bed and stare at the ceiling. … The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.”

Buy a massage or tickets to a play — not the latest gadget or doohickey. That is, if you want to be happy, says this piece in the Times:

“Current research suggests that, unlike consumption of material goods, spending on leisure and services typically strengthens social bonds, which in turn helps amplify happiness. (Academics are already in broad agreement that there is a strong correlation between the quality of people’s relationships and their happiness; hence, anything that promotes stronger social bonds has a good chance of making us feel all warm and fuzzy.) And the creation of complex, sophisticated relationships is a rare thing in the world. As Professor Dunn and her colleagues Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson point out in their forthcoming paper, only termites, naked mole rats and certain insects like ants and bees construct social networks as complex as those of human beings. In that elite little club, humans are the only ones who shop.”

Thank you, James Surowiecki, for writing a column I hope is read by sane legislators (and presidents) everywhere:

“People in the ninety-fifth to the ninety-ninth percentiles of income have represented a fairly constant share of the national income for twenty-five years now. But in that period the top one percent has seen its share of national income double; in 2007, it captured twenty-three percent of the nation’s total income. Even within the top one percent, income is getting more concentrated: the top 0.1 percent of earners have seen their share of national income triple over the same period. All by themselves, they now earn as much as the bottom hundred and twenty million people.

“The current debate over taxes takes none of this into account. At the moment, we have a system of tax brackets well suited to nineteenth-century New Zealand. Our system sets the top bracket at three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, with a tax rate of thirty-five percent. (People in the second-highest bracket, starting at a hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars for individuals, pay thirty-three percent.) This means that someone making two hundred thousand dollars a year and someone making two hundred million dollars a year pay at similar tax rates. LeBron James and LeBron James’s dentist: same difference.”

Speaking of Mr. Ebert … I caught a Fresh Air podcast over the weekend featuring a great old interview of Ebert with his late partner, Gene Siskel. The show also includes a discussion between Ebert and Martin Scorsese. My favorite slice:

EBERT: What I feel so strongly in talking to people about movies, frequently people will — they know I’m a movie critic — they will discuss the subject matter as if that is what the film is about. Oh, it’s a film about boxing.

SCORSESE: Yeah, I know. Right.

EBERT: Or, oh, it’s a film about gangsters.

SCORSESE: Right. Right.

EBERT: Or whatever. You know, like when they hear what “Breaking Away” is about. Oh, I don’t know if I want to see it. A film is not about its subject. It’s about how it’s about its subject.

SCORSESE: Right. In fact, when a …

EBERT: A subject is neutral. People don’t understand that. When people say, whenever anybody makes a statement, I don’t like to go to movies about and then fill in the blank …

SCORSESE: Yeah. Yeah.

EBERT: … my response is, anyone who makes that statement is an idiot.

Journey through Canyons from Metron on Vimeo.

Good news from down on the farm:

“Concessions by farmers in [Ohio] to sharply restrict the close confinement of hens, hogs and veal calves are the latest sign that so-called factory farming — a staple of modern agriculture that is seen by critics as inhumane and a threat to the environment and health — is on the verge of significant change.”

From Are Liberals More to the Right Than They Think?:

“The study does contain a cheering side note for the liberal at heart. Those who identified themselves as leftists and whose views reflected the same were happier than those on the right.”

That’s funny. Whenever I hear a clip of Rush’s xenophobic, paranoid rants, he always seems so bubbly.

Turns out, the world’s greatest movie writer is a great writer period. I don’t know how, as he battles cancer, Roger Ebert can review six movies a week, write books, and pump out thoughtful missives on everything from the BP oil spill to the beauty of Chicago architecture. But he does. A recent post at Roger Ebert’s Journal about Christopher Hitchens also delves into Ebert’s flirtation with death and questions death forces upon us:

“One night, unable to speak, I caught the eye of a nurse through my open door and pointed to the blood leaking from my hospital gown. She pushed a panic button and my bed was surrounded by an emergency team, the duty physician pushing his fingers with great force against my carotid artery to halt the bleeding. I was hoisted on my sheet over to a gurney, and raced to the OR. ‘Move it, people,’ he shouted. ‘We’re going to lose this man.’ I was calm and completely lucid. I watched like an interested observer. The pain medication probably detached me. My wife hadn’t then told me that after a previous rupture, I’d been declared dead on the operating table. Dying isn’t so bad. It’s getting sick and dying that’s the hard part.”

…

“I was asked at lunch today who or what I worshipped. The question was asked sincerely, and in the same spirit, I responded that I worshipped whatever there might be outside knowledge. I worship the void. The mystery. And the ability of our human minds to perceive an unanswerable mystery. To reduce such a thing to simplistic names is an insult to it, and to our intelligence.”

Marisa Helms interviewed me this week for a MN90 radio short she’s producing about Charles Bender. The segment will air on Minnesota public radio stations — I do not know when — and will eventually turn up at ampers.

I saw a few “ah”-inducing streaks in the sky early this morning. The show is supposed to be even better tonight (i.e., very early Friday morning), with a meteor a minute. That is, if it isn’t raining.

If the excerpt of the forthcoming book I read in Granta tonight is any indication, I predict big things from this Mark Twain guy.

Belated snapshots from Atlanta:

• Sign in the airport: “Temporary Detour.” In the words of Col. Nathan Jessep, is there another kind?

• The hotel was great — and the service fantastic, maybe the best I’ve ever experienced — but it wasn’t far from a dubious part of town. The morning after I arrived, I walked by an abandoned trophy store. I looked in the window and thought about bowling banquets that don’t happen anymore and the joy every kid feels after earning that first piece of hardware. The storefront glass was dirty and broken. But I could see inventory left behind — tall and shiny awards, the last trees in a lost forest.

• On the other side of the same street, I received a fist bump from a man who called himself Homeless Joe. He offered advice I’m pretty sure he hoped would not be free: Don’t come around these parts after dark. You’re right to think I looked slow, Joe, but I could figure that one out on my own.

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From John DuFresne’s essay “Holdalls,” published in the new anthology Writers and Their Notebooks:

“The constant use of the notebook keeps you working and writing, and provides a mine of material to be used down the road. Keep anything pertinent to your development as a writer: character sketches, found poems, observations, all of the preliminary stuff for the first stages of the writing process. What you write down now goes toward all of the writing you will ever do.”