AMBITIONS: to develop a widespread readership aka bestseller; also, revive the Society of Friends
ONE DAY: to be influential and famous
Tag: Musings
Looking back over the year, with gratitude
For me, this is something other than thanks-giving. Its part of an annual exercise and self-discipline that includes revisiting what I set out to do a year ago and seeing what was accomplished and what remains to address. Other parts simply acknowledge joys and blessings. It rather dovetails into sending out the Christmas greetings, too.
In 2024, I’m especially grateful for:
- Our home renovations. The transformation of our upstairs is a major quality-of-life improvement. And how, especially with three of us here now rather than just me.
- Sitting beside our wood-burning stove on otherwise chilly mornings and evenings.
- A steady supply of real tomatoes, once they started arriving in our raised beds in mid-August. Add to that gratitude that the local deer did not break down our chicken-wire fencing.
- Scallops in season. (And local blueberries, cranberries, lobsters, and crab.)
- My second week camping on the water, meaning a cruise on a historic schooner.
- Events at the arts center. Concerts, plays, open mics, contradances and lectures, in addition to rehearsing and performing with Quoddy Voices.
- My continuing appearances resulting from my book Quaking Dover. You can still find some of them online.
- All the eagles I observed during the alewives’ run and additional encounters after. Always inspiring.
- Using my passport. We do live right next to Canada, after all.
- Learning to watch for the Northern Lights. And then photographing them with my phone.
Confessions with a few natural observations in the background
1
My own world was fracturing
when glacier-clad Mount Saint Helens erupted
and sent me in exile
to here
at the easternmost fringe of the nation
forty years later
2
As a friend said
the other day
of piloting a warship
and noting
no seals
on their familiar outcropping
indicating
a shark
on the prowl in the waters
3
In my case
a starched white-shirted shark
had invaded
Let’s have a few more novelists weigh in
To continue the writing advice from last week, here are ten more points:
- “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day. It helps.” – John Steinbeck
- “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.” – Ray Bradbury
- “I particularly like to write characters who are bits of shades of gray, so we don’t know exactly where they’re going to go. They’re at a turning point in their lives and they’re under extreme stress, because it’s a thriller. So, will this break them? And not even just your main characters, but all the characters. And suddenly there’s something interesting, for me, to show up for in the mornings.” – Lisa Gardner
- “I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer … would come home every day from my office and say, ‘Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written.’ At that point, I didn’t realize I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part. From there, it was comparatively easy. It was like I had some Play-Doh to work with and could just keep working with it – doing a million drafts and things changing radically and characters appearing and disappearing and solving mysteries: Why is this thing here? Should I just take that away? And then realizing, no, that is there, in fact, because that is the key to this. I love that sort of detective work, keeping the faith alive until all the questions have been sleuthed out.” – Miranda July
- “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” – Margaret Atwood
- “My biggest tip for writing is: If you get stuck, move forward to a scene that you’re looking forward to working, and that just tends to give you your joy back. And then often you’ll find that the space between them is actually a lot smaller than you thought it was, and maybe a kind of easier way to work it.” – Jojo Moyes
- “Don’t panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends’ embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there’s prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.” – Sarah Waters
- “Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.” – Neil Gaiman
- “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” – William Faulkner
- “The first draft of everything is shit.” – Ernest Hemingway
Drafting a manuscript is just the start
These perspectives apply to far more than NaNoWriMo, but they just might give a needed push to those of you trying to get a novel written within this month.
- “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” – Terry Pratchett
- “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway
- “If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” – Dan Poynter
- “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” – Natalie Goldberg
- “On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut – it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.” – Stephen King
- “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” – Joshua Wolf Shenk
- “Write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them – without a thought about publication – and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.” – Anne Tyler
- “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou
- “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – Douglas Adams
- “In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.” – Rose Tremain
Some manmade problems will never go away
Bad decisions can have long-lasting consequences.
One here in Maine was the application of industrial sludge containing PFAS to nearby farmlands. At the time, it was touted as form of recycling. Today, you don’t dare drink water drawn from the wells.
The problem’s not unique to Maine.
Here’s the take.
- These ” perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances,” more commonly known as “forever chemicals” or “forever pollutants,” have been around since the 1940s. As the nicknames suggest, they don’t break down naturally. They may take hundreds or even thousands of years to decompose.
- There are more than 9,000 known PFAS compounds, with 600 currently used in the U.S. in countless products to make them resistant to oil, heat, stain, or water.
- They’re found in everything from cosmetics and outdoor gear to firefighting foam and carpet treatments to non-stick pans and other cookware to dental floss and food wrappers and even fast food.
- They’re found in water, the ground, the air, the ocean floor, wildlife, and the human body.
- In humans, they’re seen leading to higher risk for kidney or testicular cancer, increased cholesterol levels, higher blood pressure, high cholesterol, thyroid disease, pregnancy-induced preeclampsia, and damage to the liver and immune system.
- The Department of Defense has allocated $1.5 billion for cleanup at its sites around the country.
- PFAS have been reported in thousands of private wells near military facilities, while a recent report concludes that they’re likely found in the most of the public water Americans drink. Other studies report slightly lower rates.
- Researchers are searching for ways to filter them out of the water supplies, but that leads to another problem: What do you do with the stuff left behind in the filter? It won’t go away.
- Incinerating it has similar risks. Breaking up the longer strands can result in shorter strands, that would then pollute the air, soil, and water. And some, like Teflon, can withstand temperatures of 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
- The use of ultraviolet radiation and possibly microbes to break down the substances is emerging as an affordable glimmer of hope.
What makes me mad
Injustice of all sorts. Whiny diatribes and mud-slinging, character assassination.
TV/Rock obsession. Illiteracy. Consumerism.
Loud sound systems in cars. Drivers who think they bought the highway. Drivers who ignore changing lights.
Clutter and pollution.
Senseless regulations, corporate, not just governmental, let’s be fair.
Being put on hold while I’m present in a store.
Presumptuous artists.
The super-rich.
Some road names have a poetic twist
Country roads sometimes carry imaginative monikers.
Here are some ones that stand out in my encounters:
- Bellsqueeze (Maine)
- Cat Mousam (Maine, named for Catherine Mousam)
- Clay Lick (Indiana)
- Diamond Mill (Ohio, named for the pattern on the mill’s label rather than little gems sparkling in the pavement)
- Feedwire (Ohio)
- Indian Ripple (Ohio)
- Labor in Vain (Massachusetts)
- Needmore (Ohio)
- Snakeroot (Maine)
- Sweet Potato Ridge (Ohio, in some truly flat terrain)
Charles Ives saw music ‘as the lens through which we can glimpse the divine’
For him, that also shook up the universe.
The 150th anniversary of the birth of the American maverick takes place Sunday, the 20th, and despite his relative obscurity, he was a giant as an uncompromising modernist classical composer and as an innovative executive in the insurance industry.
Born in Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, Charles Ives’ musical transformation was certainly one of the most extraordinary cases in history, made all the more remarkable by the fact that he was forced to compose largely without hearing many of his adventurous works played by an orchestra or soloists until a half-century or more after their composition. Even the sonatas, songs, and chamber music suffered from widespread neglect.
As a matter of confession, I am quite fond of his music, from the wonderfully rich late-Romantic scores of his youth to the craggy, thorny modernist fireworks of only a few years later. I am among those who feel scandalized by the fact that this season orchestras aren’t playing even one of his symphonies in celebration, much less all four. Two of them did win Pulitzers, by the way, once they were finally aired, and riotous cheers often break out at the conclusion when the works are performed.
For a biographical overview of this American original, turn to my post, “Thoughts while listening to Charles Ives,” of November 5, 2013, at my blog, Chicken Farmer I still love you.
Today, I’m offering a Double Tendrils. Let’s start with ten quotations about music.
- You goddamn sissy… when you hear strong masculine music like this, get up and use your ears like a man.
- It is more important to keep the horse going hard than to always play the exact notes.
- Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have – I want it that way.
- In “thinking up” music, I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.
- The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized.
- There is more to a piece of music than meets the ear.
- Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
- Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently, when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.
- The beauty of music is that it can touch the depths of our souls without saying a single word.
- Good music is not just heard; it is felt with every fiber of our being.
~*~
And here are ten Ives quotes about life itself.
- The word “beauty” is as easy to use as the word “degenerate.” Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you.
- An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly … A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day’s unity.
- Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.
- Every great inspiration is but an experiment – though every experiment, we know, is not a great inspiration.
- Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone’s. The meaning of “God” may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world.
- You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.
- The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.
- Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.
- The humblest artist will not find true humility in aiming low — he must never be timid or afraid of trying to express that which he feels is far above his power to express, any more than he should be in breaking away, when necessary, from easy first sounds, or afraid of admitting that those half-truths the come to him at rare intervals, are half-true; for instance, that all art galleries contain masterpieces, which are nothing more than a history of art’s beautiful mistakes.
- Most of the forward movements of life in general … have been the work of essentially religiously-minded people.
Reclaiming Passamaquoddy
Living adjacent to the tribe’s Sipayik reservation opens new perspectives in my awareness. It’s not quite osmosis, but perhaps a willingness to listen.
One of the big breakthroughs for the tribe has involved access to 36 wax cylinders from 1890, the first field recordings ever made, when anthropologist Walter Jesse Fewkes came to Maine to test the Edison equipment before he headed off to Navajo and Hopi lands.
For decades, the recordings were kept in museum vaults, unknown to the tribe. And then, slowly, they came into consciousness, first through taped copies full of scratchy static and more recently cleaned up into digitalized files that tribe historians are carefully gleaning.
As a writer, I believe in the power of stories and the importance of language itself.
Here are some of the insights I’m hearing from my neighbors.
- Dwayne Tomah’s reaction on hearing the recordings the first time: “I wept. These were my ancestors speaking and singing to me.”
- The language has only two genders – animate and inanimate.
- Its wider family, Algonquian, features prenouns, a form shared only with Japanese and Korean.
- Translations from a tribal side, rather than a nontribal institution, can be revealing. For instance, rather than “Trading Song,” it’s more accurately “Let’s Trade.”
- The recordings preserve more than the language itself. There are also the stories, songs, and advices, sometimes with context.
- The Tides Institute’s latest map of our region portion of Maine and New Brunswick includes the Passamaquoddy place names. Tribal historian Donald Soctomah has used that to explain hard-to-translate subtleties, such as those describing qualities of water encountered in canoeing in a specific location.
- A Passamaquoddy-English dictionary, still growing, is available online. It has a range of expressions for anger that are totally missing in English.
- The language is being taught in elementary schools. (For generations, it was banned, even in homes.)
- The recordings are helping the tribe’s branch in neighboring Canada in its quest to gain First Nations status. One song, for instance, refers to what’s now the location of Saint Andrews.
- Even a few commonly understood words spoken among the tribe are rebuilding identity and pride, even when the rest of us watch on.
