Rats Country: Diane Keaton's mother said...

"...I keep a daily journal.  I like books, cats, nice people, good food, bourbon and sometimes gin, writing words, being alone."

from Dian Keaton's memoir, Then Again.

I'm in complete agreement, except for the cats.

Rats Country: Tipping Point at the Breakfast Table

She says:  "Blah, blah, blah."

He says:  "I can't hear you.  I'm chewing."

Rats Country: Oops! I missed Monday...

Oh well.  It would have been about gluttony and the assertion that there is no such thing as good turkey soup.  But...a friend posted this on my Facebook page the other day.  Not sure what it means.  I think it's a downer, though:

"If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans."

Rats Country: Here's a thought for Monday...

"For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all.  Don't we all secretly know this?  It's a perfectly balance mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life...A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark."

from Stephen King's new book, 11/22/63

Rats Country: I (heart) Mondays, cont.

I didn't begin the day by weighing myself.  I did brush my teeth.

Rats Country: Imbricate

         

            Imbricate

Overlapping edges give the illusion
we're sewn together by tiny stitches.
I told you something a moment ago.
You didn't listen.
Silence entwines us.

Rats Country: I (heart) Mondays, cont.

Be grateful for what you didn't do on the weekend:  drink too much; alienate a friend or family member; spend Sunday watching pro football on tv in Milt's doublewide.

Rats Country: No One Listens

Here's another thing I like about writing in a journal.  You can pour yourself a fresh cup of coffee,  sit down at your desk, and say to yourself, "Now tell me what you really think."

Rats Country: Another Reason Why I Love Mondays

"The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer for an artist.  The beginner's humility and openness lead to exploration.  Exploration leads to accomplishment.  All of it begins at the beginning, with the first small and scary step."

          Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

Rats Country: Define Failure

"The good taste comes when you know the difference between failures that are better off forgotten and failures that are merely successes that haven't grown up yet."

           Seth Godin blog  10/8/11 "Failures and the Dip"

Rats Country: Just Don't Stay a Dabbler...

"...Dabble for discovery...commit for mastery."

       StevePavlina.com  Personal Development Insights Newsletter 9/21/11

Rats Country: The Mad Housewife

Yesterday I cleaned behind the couch and under the bed, places where no one looks.  How do you tell a virtue from a neurosis?

Rats Country: Some days...

Some days you walk the length of the fallen log, finding your balance, not allowing yourself to feel the pull of the rocks nor hear the violent sound of rushing water.

Rat's Country: Funeral Fee

You go to a funeral to pay your respect.  That is the entrance fee.

Rat's Country: You Have to Be from These Parts to Get It...

"What did your father do to make a living while you were growing up in Elko?" I asked him.

"Around here, what is the most hated profession you can think of?" he replied.

I thought for a moment and said, "Work for the BLM."

"Wow!" he exclaimed.  "You got it on the first try."

Rat's Country: What Would Rover Do?

I'd like to shake off my petty annoyances the way a labrador retriever shakes off water.

Rat's Country: What I Can't Fix

I can't change your table mate,
the one whose teeth fall out on her plate
or the way your dinner
smells like death and ketchup.

Rat's Country: Harmonic Convergence

This morning wasn't staged.  It just happened:  the sound of a sudden thunderstorm and a Vivaldi violin concerto; the smell of rain and sage and fresh coffee.

It didn't last long.  That's okay.

Other People's Poems: A lovely poem by E.B. White

  Youth and Age

This is what youth must figure out:

Girls, love, and living.

The having, the not having,

The spending and giving,

And the melancholy time of not knowing.

This is what age must learn about:

The ABC of dying.

The going, yet not going.

The loving and leaving,

And the unbearable knowing and knowing

E.B. White

Poems and Sketches

Rat's Country: Imagining a perfect morning

Imagining a Perfect Morning

It’s seven in the morning on a June day and I’m riding up the canyon, listening to Thorpe Creek chuckle.  I appreciate the fresh rustle of aspen,  different from the dry warning in October.  I feel the twinkle of sun and shade in the morning light.

I’m surrounded by a bouquet of scents—horse sweat, saddle leather, sage, and wild rose—and I feel beneath me the sensual movement of this mare as she makes a quick jump over the creek and then the lurch and jerk, while climbing  the rocky trail.  Her gait smoothes out as we wind around the hillside, the sun bearing down. The saddle creaks and she moves the curbed bit around in her mouth.

I’m not thinking about anything on this ride.  Nothing.

Rat's Country: About muddle

"The one whose language is muddled cannot do it; only when the mind is clear can the language be noble."

WEn Fu, The Art of Writing


Well, it might be a cold day in hell when you begin unmuddled.  It's a process--the pond settles.  Finally you see through the turgidity and the pond becomes clear.

Rat's Country: Writer's Block Before the Invention of Pencils

"Sometimes the words come easily; sometimes he sits in silence gnawing at his brush."

Wen Fu, The Art of Writing

Notes on My Mother 1: Who's the grownup here?

A few weeks ago my ninety-something mother and I got into an argument, and she said, “You don’t like

me.  You never have liked me.  You disapprove of everything I do and I try so hard to get your approval.” 

Ouch!  That sounds like something a teenager might say to a parent.

Rat's Country: "Don't Put No Headstone on My Grave"

"Don't Put No Headstone on My Grave"

Charlie Rich

Those of us who have come lately have come to stay.  Don't ask why.  Don't believe our explanations.  We might not say it, but maybe it's to be close to the Tuscarora cemetery.  Everybody in town has friends or relatives there.    Long ago Milt told me he's going no further from his doublewide than "over there," he says giving the cemetery a nod.

Tour guides name Tuscarora a ghost town.  I say the wind blew the ghosts away long ago.  When I wander among the headstones, the wrought iron fences and weathered crosses, the new slabs of decorated concrete, I think of the named and the nameless as the same.  Gone.  

Rat's Country: Misogamy Monday

Misogamy  Monday

I’m suspicious of women

who marry impossible men,

but then,  the opposite

is  true—the hapless gent

who chooses a shrew.

Yet those cloying teams,

“He’s the man of my dreams"

Fill my throat with  nausea

thinking of that  devoted old goat

and nanny goat, too.

Poems by Other People: "Hay for the Horses"

     Hay for the Horses

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
   behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
     sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
--The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds--
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."

      Gary Snyder

Other People's Poems: "Poem about Morning"

          Poem About Morning

Whether it's sunny or not, it's sure
To be enormously complex--
Trees or streets outdoors, indoors whoever you share,
And yourself, thirsty, hungry, washing,
An attitude towards sex.
No wonder half of you wants to stay
With your head dark and wishing
Rather than take it all on again:
Weren't you duped yesterday?
Things are not orderly here, no matter what they way.

But the clock goes off, if you have a dog
It wags, if you get up now you'll be less
Late.  Life is some kind of loathsome hag
Who is forever threatening to turn beautiful.
Now she gives you a quick toothpaste kiss
And puts a glass of cold cranberry juice,
Like a big fake garnet, in your hand.
Cranberry juice!  You're lucky, on the whole,
But there is a great deal about it you don't understand.


          William Meredith

Rat's Country: "You can't always get what you don't want..."

"If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want."

     Oscar Wilde

 This quote from Oscar Wilde reminded me of an observation from Stumbling on Happiness to the effect that the New Yorker doesn't pay attention to how many times the pigeon doesn't shit on his head.  He only notices how many times it does.

Rat's Country: Pondering Indignation

What is the difference between righteous indignation and self-righteous indignation?

Rat's Country: Put your characters in a predicament and watch them squirm

..."my books tend to be based on situation rather than story...I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free.  My job isn't to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety...but to watch what happens and then write it down."

                        Stephen King, On Writing

Rat's Country: Perspiration and ecstasy...

"The practice of any art demands more than mere savoir faire.  One must not only be in love with what one does, one must also know how to make love.  In love self is obliterated.  Only the beloved counts.  Whether the beloved be a bowl of fruit, a pastoral scene, or the interior of a bawdy house makes no difference.  One must be in it and of it wholly.  Before a subject can be transmuted aesthetically it must be devoured and absorbed.  If it is a painting it must perspire with ecstasy."

          Henry Miller, To Paint Is to Love Again

Rat's Country: Keeping Your Distance

You can see who's coming as they turn north from the county road and up the two-mile incline to Tuscarora.  In the daylight, it's hard to be taken by surprise.  Of course, someone could sneak into town at night, but the moving headlights would show on the road; town dogs would bark; some insomniac would peer out the window at midnight and watch.

No, it's a great place for keeping your distance, for guarding your misery.

Rat's Country: godawful thought

What if your mother and your husband are versions of each other?

Favorite Quotes: Writing as Engineering

"It makes us realize once again that prose is a structure in its every part, that the imagination is engineered when we write.  A sentence may be in as perfect control as a church or a bridge."

     Eudora Welty, referring to a sentence in Faulkner's "The Bear"
            "Looking at Short Stories," The Eye of the Story

Favorite Quotes: "...to love what one does..."

"To win through by sheer force of genius is one thing:  to survive and continue to create when every last door is slammed in one's face is another.  Nobody acquires genius; it is God-given.  But one can acquire patience, fortitude, wisdom and understanding.  Perhaps the greatest gift little men have to offer is this ability to accept the conditions which life imposes, accept one's own limitations, in other words.  to love what one does whether it causes a stir or not.  Of the highest men Vivekananda once said:  'They make no stir in the world.  They are calm, silent, unknown.'"

          Henry Miller, To Paint Is to Love Again

Favorite Food Quotes in Literature: Anna Karenina

Oblonsky and Levin dine at the Anglia Hotel:

"Well, then, my good man, bring us two--no, make it three dozen oysters, vegetable soup...then turbot with thick sauce, then...roast beef--but mind it's good.  And why not capon--well, and some stewed fruit..."

"What table wine would you prefer?"

"Bring us the Nuits.  No, better still the classic Chablis."

...'Not bad,' he said, peeling the sloshy oysters from their pearly shells with a little silver fork and swallowing them one after another.  'Not bad,' he repeated, raising his moist and shining eyes..."



       Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Favorite Quotes: Good people don't know they are good people...

Only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves. 


                  Paul Auster, novelist and poet (b. 1947)   (I copied this from A Word A Day today)

"Harry Houdini Extricates Himself"

                         Harry Houdini Extricates Himself

Harry Houdini, submerged under water,

 has wrapped himself in rusty old chains

enclosed in  what looks like a bulletproof box.

Family and friends and naysayers, too,

watch the calm surface and think of  the struggle below.

They look at their watches and  whisper together,

then he bursts through the surface, his hands in the air.

“ I’m free!” he shouts and we breathe his relief

as well as our own.  We turn to go home

dragging the chains we wore to the shore

 when we recall he put himself in a terrible  fix,

 but  then,

by God,

 he got out of it.

Favorite Quotes: Elisabeth Bishop says a poem must have the following:

"In her notebook Bishop write that the qualities she most admired in a poem were accuracy, spontaneity and mystery."

  I can't remember where I found this quote...

        

Favorite Quotes: Oscar Wilde on two kinds of people

"It's absurd to divide people into good or bad.  People are either charming or tedious."

      Oscar Wilde

Favorite Quotes: "Alone..."

"Alone, I discovered myself looking hard at things, as if I were seeing them for the first time, or seeing them properly for the first time.  I wondered if solitude promoted this activity, or whether it was a result of having more time for everything, more time to look and see, more to concentrate on what I was seeing.

I was interested in the question because so often in the past I had thought it preferable to be accompanied to the theater, to the opera, to the ballet, on travels and vacations.  I had thought that there was a value to having someone along to "share" (how I have come to hate the flat, soft sentimental sound of that word) the experience.  but I began to see...a greater value lay in hearing and seeing from within that mysterious inner place, where the eyes and ears of the mind are insulated from the need to communicate to someone else what I experienced.  The energy necessary to express myself to someone else seemed to have been conserved for the harder look, the keener hearing."

     Doris Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude

Favorite Quotes: Adrienne Rich on Motherhood

"Because young humans remain dependent on nurture for a much longer period than other animals, and because of the division of labor long established in human groups...most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and tenderness, in the person of a woman."

Adrienne Rich, Of Motherhood Born:  Motherhood as an Experience and Institution

Favorite Quotes: Definition of a happy family. Really.

"Happy Family:  a collection of birds and animals of different natures and propensities living together in harmony in one cage."

     Oxford English Dictionary

Favorite Quotes: "I have the instincts..."

"I have the instincts--have them deeply--if I haven't the forms of a high old civilization."

      Henry James, The American

Favorite Quotes: Having lots of friends is like having lots of books

"By having a great many friends I do not prove that I have wide appreciation of human excellence.  You might as well say I prove the width of my literary taste by being able to enjoy all the books in your own study.  The answer is the same in both cases--'You chose those books.  You chose those friends.  Of course they suit you.'  The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop.  The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day.  In my experience it is affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who 'happen to be there.'  Made for us?  Thank God, no.  They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed."

     C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Favorite Quotes: We are all lunatics...

"We are all lunatics trying to stick pins into their own points, and it is thus that our frantic efforts to set the world to rights, and to extend our control over all happenings, inner and outer, are themselves the cause of most of our troubles.  All force is tension against the stream.

Everywhere there are now people absorbed in projects to change the world or to change themselves, and they will simply perpetuate, or merely change the form, of the very troubles they intend to avoid.  This is not to say that human life and conduct is inevitably a tragic mess.  It is to say that human life--and all life--does not work harmoniously when we try to force it to be other than what it is.

      Alan Watts,  Cloud-Hidden:  Whereabouts Unknown, A Mountain Journal.

Favorite Quotes: The backside of heroism...

"...But then the backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that.  They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that.  But achievement is smaller than men think.  What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul."

       Ursula LeGuin, "Sur"

Favorite Quotes: Ambiguity and the Meaning of Life

"Rather than asking for the meaning of life as if it were a single or comprehensive pattern that permeates all existence a priori, we do better to investigate how it is that life acquires or may be given a meaning.  This meaning is generally ambiguous, as Simone de Beauvoir argues in her book The Ethics of Ambiguity.  Criticizing the absurdists, she states:  'To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning.'  Beauvoir prefers the idea of ambiguity because 'to say that it [existence] is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.'  In other words, ours is not an absurd existence in which we seek for absolute meaning although we are convinced that the universe does not afford any such thing.  Rather we are creatures who create meaning for ourselves without having objective and unambiguous criteria by which to determine how we should do so."

     Meaning in Life:  The Creation of Value by Irving Singer

Favorite Quotes: Female Friendships

"Female friendships that work are relationships in which women help each other belong to themselves."

             from Among Women by Louise Bernikow

Favorite Quotes: "the path is the thing that matters"

"...the only certain thing at all is the worn path.  The habit of love cuts through confusion and stumbles or contrives its way out of difficulty.  It remembers the way even when it forgets, for a dumbfounded moment, its reason for being.  The path is the thing that matters."

     from "Is Phoenix Janckson's Grandson Really Dead?"  The Eye of the Story by Eudora Welty

Favorite Quotes: "...unhappy in unwise shoes..."

"Middle aged women, outsize in linen dresses, were huddled three or four to a table, their great legs battling for room in inadequate space, their feet hot and unhappy in unwise shoes."

          Alan Trevor, The Boarding House

Favorite Quotes: Remember this Ghandi quote?

"Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."

             Ghandi

Favorite Quotes: We're never really fooling one another...

"In some essential way, we are always speaking the truth to one another and--on a physical level, at least--always understanding one another."

I don't know where I found this quote.

Favorite Quotes: Two things always look better in the movies...

"Two things always look better in the movies...mental institutions and war."

         Barbara Gordon,  I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can

Favorite Quotes: How to have few regrets

"The fact that [Kay] Boyle preferred to live her life rather than examine it, eventually, her biographer says, 'diminished her as an artist' and always 'diminished her as a mother.'  Yet except for her championing of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, Boyle had few regrets about her decisions.  The writer Grace Paley, who got to know her late in her life, observed that people with full sex lives don't have regrets."

                 

(I don't know where I got this quote.)

Favorite Quotes: The Best Thing for Being Sad...

"'The best thing for being sad,' replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, 'is to learn something.  That is the only thing that never fails.  You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds.  There is only one thing for it then--to learn.  Learn why the world wags and what wags it.  That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.'"

T.H. White,  The Once and Future King

Favorite quotes: Judy Blunt quote on writing memoir

"You don't have to tell the whole story, but what you tell, make it honest."

                    Judy Blunt

Favorite quotes: Judy Blunt on writing

"There is a value to writing.  It makes us surer in what we believe."

Favorite quotes: Kurt Vonnegut's First Rule of Fiction

"Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted."

Rat's Country: Writer's Ice Block

If I were in an igloo, I'd find blubber to chew before I would sit down and write, and all the time I was chewing on blubber, I'd be blubbering about not having time to write.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #21

21.  Prefer the standard to the offbeat.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #20

20.  Avoid foreign languages.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #19

19.  Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #18

18.  Use figures of speech sparingly.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #17

17.  Do not inject opinion.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #16

16.  Be clear.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #15

15.  Do not use dialect unless your ear is good.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #14

14.  Avoid fancy words.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #13

13.  Make sure the reader knows who is speaking.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #12

12.  Do not construct awkward adverbs.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #11

11.  Do not explain too much.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #10

10.  Use orthodox spelling.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #9

9.  Do not affect a breezy manner.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #8

8.  Avoid the use of qualifiers.  Don't be a weasel.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #7

7.  Do not overstate.  It is a form of lying.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #6

6.  Do not overwrite.  It is a sign that  you are overwrought.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #5

5.  Revise and rewrite.  Know the difference between revision and crazed search for perfection.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #4

4.  Write with nouns and verbs.  Dream with adjectives and adverbs.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #3

3. Work from a suitable design.  Go ahead and believe God has a plan for you.  

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #2

2.  Write in a way that comes naturally.  Another way of saying "be yourself," which will take half a lifetime.

Strunk and White's Rules for (Life) #1

1. Place yourself in the background.  Give others room to come to you.

"Driving to Elko on a Winter Day"

Driving to Elko on a Winter Day

I see storm clouds stacked from here
clear to the Ruby Mountains.

I see Jesus rays beaming

downward in all directions.

Even Lone Mountain seems blessed

by  light,  and in the distance

it looks as though the whole town

rests on hallowed ground.

 For all I know—

and this is true—

a sacred light

shines right now

on me  or you.