Category Archives: writing

Creativity

Warning: this is a mild bummer, forced up like a synthetic hairball; it contains little of the spontaneity it seeks to evoke

The pursuit of creativity (he begins pedantically) might sound like a frivolous add-on for somebody who already has enough and might want to enrich some downtime.  I could be drinking my own Kool-aid, but to me creativity is essential to just about everything.  Creativity is the life force, what makes our lives here possible in the first place, and as rich as they can be, no matter how otherwise poor, after that.

Why bother to invent a new way to say things when the old ones are tried and true, fine and dandy?  Because we need to, cleverness is a net gain, like a laugh, the difference between a grim march and a healthy hike.  Why do we laugh?  If I have to ‘splain it, Lucy, it won’t be funny.  We laugh because we hear something comically unexpected, or see something that surprises us and makes us lose it.  If the moment hadn’t been spun that way, by someone creating it just right, we’d still be yawning.

Creativity is a moment of grace that refreshes and restores the creator and the beneficiary of the creation, the aerialist spinning amazingly from one trapeze to another rather than plummeting to splat like a pumpkin as the crowd shudders.

Creativity is a moment of faith, taking a chance to do something new with belief in success.  It’s done with a freedom we might not otherwise see in our day.  

Lack of creativity makes us wince, someone trying to be original by imitating something many others have already done trying to be original.  Or when the attempt misfires like, for example, a mildly embarrassing moment from yesterday’s nice chat with an old friend.  This guy is very funny, and it struck me, toward the end of a serious talk, that we hadn’t had a single laugh, which is rare for a conversation with him.  The subjects we talked about had been serious, we were both concentrating hard.  My mind was sluggish trying to shift gears as I was reminded by something he said of a certain joke.  I asked him if he’d heard the one about…. and I dick-fingeredly handled the joke by the punchline to jog his memory.

“No,” he said with a smile.  I could hear over the phone that the same smile was there a few moments later, along with a slightly surreal laugh, as he acted like the punchline I’d already told him had been a surprise.  He created a little reaction to distract us both from the embarrassment of my moment of anti-creativity.

But how about the person somewhere down south who first described someone’s clumsy attempt to do something as being “dick-fingered”?

Supremely creative.  If you think about it, even for a hot little moment, you will realize I am right to extoll its importance.  Now go forth, be fruitful and multiply yourself, and have a nice day.

Better This Than That

I know people who meditate daily.  They recommend it even as they acknowledge it doesn’t seem to help much with the thousand tiny horrors that gnaw at them on the average day.  Others, to my surprise, use religious rituals the same way.  Same results.  There are no two ways about it– this world is a challenge.

I sit here tapping out a few words, the fewer the better.  The effect is about the same as meditation or a religious ritual, I would think.  I focus on writing clearly.  The world is work enough without writers flexing, flourishing their pens and making the point a little harder to grasp.

So, to be clear– these few moments of clarity are often the better part of my day, like meditation for others.  I sit and the keys clatter.  I watch the words on the screen, change a few, go back, read it from the beginning, make a change here to make it more clear, there to make it less clunky.

Unfortunately, I can’t do this all day.  It’s time to get back to the biting tics.

meditation

There are small kindnesses, everywhere, that are very easy to do and yet are beyond us.  We may even see them laid out for us, ready to be picked up and given like the precious gifts they are, but not do them.  After all, our day may have sucked with sharp teeth and nobody did any small kindnesses for us.  We may even be dealing with monsters all day long.

The person you love the best may say “yeah, you’re real gentle,” letting the sarcasm ring without a hint of poetry.  The thought that she says this because she thinks you should have been kinder to her, no matter how else you’ve tried to be gentle, may make you feel like snarling.  You don’t snarl, but that look on your face, as you stare at the road ahead, will do nicely.

“See?” she will think to herself, and feel absolutely just to think this.  She will even be right to feel that way, though it will burn you in that moment.

Any of a dozen small kindnesses you could have done earlier could have softened it, even a second or third if the first wasn’t appreciated.   Gentleness must be endless, or it is not really gentleness.

Fucking hard, though.  I know.

Avoiding the Shutout

In baseball a shutout occurs when the losing team scores exactly zero runs.   Excitement mounts in the stands, in TV Radio and Internet land, during the waning moments of a 1-0 game.  If the team being shut out scores even one run the game will be tied, the shutout lost.  No team wants to be shut out, it adds insult to injury, as the saying goes.  Better to lose 5-1 than being shut out 5-0.

I was thinking about this late yesterday as I glanced at my stats page.  On the stats page I see a running tally of the individuals who look at this blahg.   I don’t know why I glance at my stats page, it has become a tic.  That kind of tic is the reason I don’t keep a phone with the internet in my pocket.     I started writing on this blahg on August 2.  I don’t know why I do that either, except that I love to write, and good writing takes practice, and that I daydream, sometimes, about being on a public radio talk show discussing my breakthrough book with a perceptive host.   Maybe I’d also jump up and down on Oprah’s couch talking about this remarkable book that, like my fascinating organization for largely doomed poor children, resides entirely in my head.   

Anyway, every time I checked how many people had read my recent posts the answer was the same, none.   “I’m being shut out,” I thought, as other perplexing thoughts wheeled through my head, illuminating the truly puny magnitude of my concern for the stats of gratituousblahg.   An hour later the tally was still zero, as it was six hours later.  At around 11 I checked the stats, and I was still being shut out.

“I got shut out,” I said to myself, glumly, going about some other business shortly before midnight.  It would break a streak of at least one person reading these words since August 2.

Apparently, though, just as the day was about to end, some time right before the stroke of midnight, the shutout was broken up.  I had one reader yesterday.

“Yes!” I said out loud, for no reason I could grasp, except that the sports metaphor had really taken root.

Today, so far, I’m being shut out again, and so soon after setting high water marks for readers in a day and in a week.  Well, like Robbie Cano’s torrid and cool season shows, these things go in cycles.  Maybe I’ll be 5 for 5 tomorrow, eh, Coach?

On the A train

heading uptown

with new brushes

black ink

the entire universe

anything that cannot be said

by pausing

string bent

to lay a bit of

succulent silence

against the beat

 

on cue

tres payasos

in cowboy hats

clubbing a Mexican beat

to death

with upright bass

buzzing twelve string

and a squeeze box

 

Mama

don’t let your baby

grow up to be a payaso

with a squeeze box.

Who Zaskin’?

It’s a funny thing, in a way, writing here.  I like to write, and I write everyday anyway, mostly in the form of smoke signals sent via emails that blow away in the virtual breeze.   Hopefully what I’m writing will be of interest or help to someone, but, it’s still a funny thing, to be writing here.

Admittedly not “ha-ha” funny, you know.  I mean, here and there I have a little jest, like pretending to love Paris Hilton (though she was very endearing with her boyfriend in that video, I truly thought), or calling for the Republicans to let Dick Cheney speak at their convention.  But these are, admittedly, very little jests, more gestures of a jest than jesters in their own right.

Outside, some St. John’s students have a powerful speaker mounted and they are blasting what sounds like a witless live or robot DJ, punctuating the pulsating beat music at exactly the wrong moments.  If Kissinger rapped this is what he’d sound like.   Outside the window of Sekhnet’s bedroom St. John’s University has placed a red banner with a cross and the words Ecce Agnus placed where Christ’s heart would be.  I assumed, incorrectly that the Latin meant “behold the agony” but it means “behold the lamb of God”.  Either way, we are wondering what it is doing on a public lamppost, positioned to be seen from our bed.

At the university the beat goes on.  I’m wondering who I’m actually writing to, as I also wonder “who zaskin’?”

Line and Color

I love lines, which come into existence mainly under a human hand.  I love making lines, dragging ink, or graphite, or a color, over a surface.  I love refining them (though I almost never erase them).   Making lines on a page is one of the great pleasures of my life, and one of the great exercises in freedom.   Often it doesn’t matter what those lines form themselves into– words, symbols, images– the tactile pleasure of making the lines remains.

You can see tiny kids scribbling, making lines is clearly a pleasure one can appreciate early on.  As the fine motor skills improve, the enjoyment of making purposeful lines grows too, but there is enjoyment to be had even scrawling, the pen gripped in a hand that is like a foot.

Since we live in a highly specialized world of false dichotomies, where everything is set against something else, we often hear visual artists divided into draftsmen (their craft being line) and colorists (their realm being the juxtaposition and combination of colors.)   Line or Color, take your pick.  

If I had to pick one, and fortunately I don’t, it would be line.  I love color, to be sure: it’s an incomparable pleasure to pour a beautifully colored ink on to a white page, watch it shine like a wet floor then dry into a luminous panel of pure color.  Or to blend them, or mix two or more colors to alchemize them into a new one.  I’d be hard pressed to pick my favorite color.  I love a golden yellow, a little more orange than a sunflower’s petals, but I also love the blue gradient of the sky toward sundown.  I love scarlet, mustard color, many browns, the green of a tender sprout, hippie purple, grey.  Shoot, I love ’em all.  There are very few colors that leave me indifferent.

But with line, and enough determination to learn how to wield it, you can create many gradations between black and white.  These blocks of gradated darker and lighter blacks form a kind of color too, though without chroma.   You can make lines with color, of course, but a colorist isn’t primarily interested in that.

It is like this in many things humans do.  In music there is rhythm and melody, sometimes held to be distinct in the manner of line and color.  I find that line and color work best together, enhance each other ridiculously.  Same with rhythm and melody.  You can play in tune, play all the right notes, but it isn’t music unless it they are sounded and held against the rhythm.  In that regard, like the false choice between line and color, I’d have to pick rhythm if I could only have one.  A song without melody is not much of a song, but a song without rhythm, what the hell is that?

I close this little shot-in-the-dark with an observation about writing and another false dichotomy: love of language or love of story.  In the previous post I briefly compared books by William Kennedy, a former prize-winning journalist turned prize-wining novelist, and Stephen King, fantastically imaginative writer of numerous books that have been made into justly famous movies as varied as Carrie, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.  Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning Ironweed was made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Fred Gwynne, Nathan Lane and Tom Waits, for the record.

I described Kennedy as being in love with language, and spreading its colors lushly on the page, and King as more plain-spoken and focused on the story, more of a draftsman laying down the essentials with a sharp, bold line.  Both writers are in love with language (who wouldn’t be in love with this miracle?) and both are intent on telling their stories.  Kennedy is more flamboyantly in love with words, King more low-key about it.  My favorite writer, Isaac Babel (as artfully translated by Walter Morrison) was madly in love with language and an inspired teller of highly condensed tales.  He tells unforgettable stories and doesn’t waste a perfectly-chosen word while painting scenes and drawing characters.  There is a line we dance on as we proceed, considering which darlings to murder and how, composed of all the colors of the rainbow.

What is it?

It’s astounding to realize that there are literally millions of people keeping journals on-line.  Countless web logs, “blogs”, bloggers, tweeters, twitterers, content creators of every stripe, filling the air with song and noise on tens of thousands of subjects.  A chorus of millions who can only potentially hear each other. 

Is this just the suddenly available mass expression of Zora Neale Hurston’s oldest human longing?  The need to tell our story to another, to be heard as we reveal what moves us?   I looked for the quote just now on the internet, my battered copy of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God miles from where I’m typing now.  I recalled the scene of the two women talking in the night, filled with ‘that oldest human longing’, to make themselves known to each other.  Perhaps it mixes in my memory with proverbs I loved, since I read the book decades ago, but the quote I found “They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Janie full of that oldest human longing -self-revelation,” seemed less elemental than the one I remember Hurston hitting me with when I was in my twenties.

Never mind.  I am sending these words out like the solitary space traveller forcing a rolled up slip of paper into an air-tight bottle and ejecting it through a one-way valve into the black infinity of space.

Wondering about this oldest human longing, as I recall the long story I heard last night of a new friend’s travails in an Asian military academy thirty years ago.  I sat at his kitchen table, with other things on my mind, like a guitar that needed to be fixed, though neither of us knew exactly how to get at the electronics inside the F-hole, and listened to a long story about things that happened decades ago.  I listened carefully, as I am only now learning to do, and reminded him a couple of times, when he got tangled up, where his diversions had taken off from.  The stories were interesting and put me in mind of others, which I did not tell, preferring to hear where these were going. 

I thought of Sammy, Sekhnet’s father, someone she often dismissed when I first met her.  I am interested in stories, particularly the stories old people tell of a disappeared world I can only imagine.  I have questions for them.  They like that, but not too many, of course, because they are trying to tell a story.  Sammy and I got along very well, largely because I was genuinely interested in what he had to say.  Another part of that oldest human longing, to have our words taken in respectfully by someone else.  But story, I notice over and over, is key.

I thought of two books I took out of the library recently.  One was by William Kennedy, the other by Stephen King.  Kennedy started with a flourish, his agile prose a song snapping like a flag in the breeze, now moving like a tango, now to sweaty barrelhouse piano twelve hundred miles north.  Soon he was dancing out his sheer love for language and dealing ten flavors of nuance, as a complicated story began to decant itself.  I read the first chapter, then took a look at King’s novel.  King did not flourish anything, there was no dance, he never sang more than a note or two.  He started right off, in an engaging voice, telling the story I soon found myself reading until it was told, 500 pages later.  I later finished Kennedy’s book and liked it too, but I was sucked directly into the story King was intent on telling me in 11/22/63.  The name of Kennedy’s book did not stick with me.

The writer recommends

A prolific writer, whose many books have moved and entertained me, periodically writes a slim book of advice, a nonfiction attempt to be part of the change he wants to see in the world.  I have one here now, called Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation.  I have to say, he does his work much better in fiction, like in the magnificent recent novella The Gift of Fire.

Read The Gift of Fire with an open mind and you may find yourself deeply moved by the author’s vivid, animated example of the kind of world humans could have if we followed our deeper, higher natures.  A description of the story will not do the short book justice, get it from the library, read it.  Another great book by my favorite living writer.  I highly recommend it.

We turn now to his latest book of advice.  Published because he is a famous writer who has made millions for his publisher, it has little of the charm of the novels, but it moves toward the same end– showing what the world could be, if people only struggled to open their eyes and live in accord with what we all know in our hearts to be the right way to live.

One of the twelve steps the author prescribes for waking from our media-induced trance and finding out who we are and how to fix this severely broken world is to write daily.  My man is a writer, and he writes daily, and he is paid well several times a year for his new books, probably given large advances for each next one.  He’s had books made into Hollywood movies starring Denzel Washington.  He lives the life I’d like to live, if I had any idea how to start down that road.

He gets up every day and writes for three or four hours.  That’s his work day.  Then he goes out into the world, does whatever one does out there.  Returns at night to sleep.  Gets up the next day and writes for three or four hours, and so forth.  Every few months, it would appear, he has a new manuscript finished.  It goes to his editor, they work it over a bit, it’s out in print and I get a copy of it it at my local library.  A nice arrangement for everyone.

Step Six of the Twelve Steps Toward Political Revolution is called Everyday.  What we should do every day, those of us who are serious about not living as exploited zombies but doing what we are meant to do on this earth, is to write.  This should be done, the writer says, 365 days a year.  He says we don’t need to spend much time doing this, the drill is that it must be done daily.  The time of day doesn’t matter, after work, before work, the main thing is to have a regular practice that sits us alone with our thoughts daily and causes us to organize them while digging toward the deeper truths of our lives.

“Yes,” I think, “it is a good practice.  Shoot, I do it myself.  But you must realize, man who makes his living by writing what it pleases you to write, that it is easier for you to put in the recommended  ninety minutes to two hours a day searching your soul than it is for the bus driver, the cop, the campaign contribution bundler, the single mother with three kids, the school teacher, the data technician, the salesman, the career guardian ad litem.”

I don’t know where else to go with this thought, except to note that this famous writer and I were in the Creative Writing program at The City College at the same time.  His mentor was a guy named Tuten, mine was Mirsky, and our paths never crossed, that I can recall.  His imagination and drive led him to create a brooding detective character that became a franchise.  I was less productively consumed by my brooding which rumbled through the more amorphous and problematic things I produced.  I assume Tuten was a help to him, I believe I read something to that effect.

Mirsky always expressed a great belief in the importance of what I was writing, and lamented that, like much of his recent work, there was just no place in the market to sell it.  He did eventually hook me up with an editor, the grand-daughter of the Straus from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.   Somewhere I still have the accomplished young English major’s letter.  The writing was good, she said, but the pages I’d sent her indicated that the narrator had not undergone the kind of epiphany and transformation necessary for every great novel.  She closed with kind regards.