Nonsense Verse

It speaks!

For word nerds: my book review of Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style."

Ron Carlson Looks Into My Soul

“The most important thing a writer can do after completing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence or to go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen. But. It’s this simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room.”

—Ron Carlson Writes a Story (Graywolf Press, 2007)

Reading this, it was like Ron Carlson had spied on my life, seen all my bad habits, and written a piece of advice just for me. It’s such a simple directive—and so seemingly obvious. But. It’s so hard! I can be very bad at staying in the room.

This passage has been swirling in my head all week, both for its content and for its humor: the image of leaving the room to “celebrate” the completion of the sentence; the television “like a dormant monster” (though in my case, it would be the computer, gateway to that demon portal the Internet); the idea of having to “rest up for a few days” before the next good sentence can bubble up. And then the cadence of “But. It’s this simple” — which I couldn’t help mimicking, it was so catchy.

On the editor's task

My most recent blog for Paper Cuts: a review of "The Subversive Copy Editor." Click here.

On keeping a journal

This essay was revised for a recent class, and so, I repost it here. 4.23.09.

***

I have been trying, and failing, to keep a journal for the past twenty-five years. It’s shocking to realize it’s been that long—as Sugar Kane said in Some Like It Hot, “That’s a quarter of a century; makes a girl think”—but a relic I found on a recent trip across the country confirmed it. The day I arrived to visit my parents in the northern suburbs of San Francisco, I went snooping around their attic. It’s a small space, all exposed wooden beams and unfinished walls, full of boxes and old furniture cast off from my childhood, but also from the apartments I inhabited, in San Francisco proper, after leaving home—eight apartments in nine years, and with each move, a change in style, a shedding of a rug or a glass table, to conform to the tastes of the new me, or of the new me that with each move I suppose I wanted to be. Now that I think about it, perhaps in all that moving lies a clue to my inability to commit to a journal. Words on paper have a permanence that my transient self distrusts. They may be ushers to the far reaches of memory, but they are also betrayals—of choices made, obsessions nursed, naïveté indulged, some of which is good to remember, but so much of which can also be more comforting to forget.

I’m not sure exactly what I was searching for amid the flotsam in my parents’ attic. But then I spotted a particular box—unlabeled, yet conspicuous for the sagging agedness of it. The box hadn’t been opened in years, and when I lifted the lid, it expelled a puff of dust. Inside were old art projects and writing assignments, penmanship tests, mini-essays from my first three grades of elementary school. I found drawings of Garfield the Cat that I’d made for my little brother, who went through a serious Garfield phase: bedsheets, lunchbox, plush toys and pencil cases. What phases had I gone through, in those long-ago cartoon years? A clue lay in this box as well. For beneath the curling papers with their cursive exercises and Crayola flecks, I found my old Hello Kitty diary: tomato red, five inches long, four inches wide and one inch thick, held closed by a copper-colored clasp, the key to which still hung from the book by a string.

I remember choosing the diary from the Sanrio store in Santa Rosa, at the big shopping mall an hour from home, where we used to buy all our school clothes. I wanted it badly—it was shiny, and it was red. I loved red, and I loved that the diary had a key, which in my seven-year-old imagination meant that anything put inside became immediately clandestine, and bigger than it was, and profound. I remember having to beg for it. My mother had looked at the price, then asked, “Will you really use it?” Yes! I said. I would write in it, every day.

So much for that.

In truth, I had no idea what to write. I was seven—any drama in my life was more likely to be processed through tears than through pages of angst-ridden prose. I remember opening my diary and, even then, hearing the voice of doubt in my head: You are seven years old. Your life is peachy. Nothing exciting has happened to you. Who do you think you are?

And yet, I made a valiant effort, filling the first dozen or so pages with neatly printed hot-pink ink. I seem to have favored the Pillow Book method, making a list of “my favorite people,” for instance, then expounding on their greatness in short bursts of prose. My social circle was rather small: “Dear Diary,” I wrote, “my favorite woman is my mama”; “my favorite man is my papa”; “my favorite brother”—that is, my only brother—“is Jason”; “my favorite boy is ...”—but even in this spare list are found clues to the person I was to become. I liked my papa, I wrote, because “he brings us surprises, and sometimes those surprises are cookies!” I liked my brother because we “played stuffed animals.” I liked the boy because I was a boy-crazy little girl. And today? I still use exclamation points when talking about cookies, I have loved my share of boys, I travel with a stuffed monkey tucked into my carry-on bag. My favorite color is still red.

The Hello Kitty journal was kept diligently for two weeks.

In the years since, I have bought with hard-earned money, and then barely used, an embarrassing number of attractive notebooks, thinking they would inspire me to write. I started a blog nine years ago, hoping the pressure of an audience would do the same. I even blogged about acquiring a notebook, my first Moleskine, and about the novelty of writing longhand after so many years spent tapping out words by key. That was in 2004: “I’ve rediscovered the satisfaction of putting pen—pen that leaves my fingers achy and inky—to paper. I’m making a concerted effort to write legibly. ... This keyboard stuff has been death for my penmanship.”

I filled one small Moleskine with words and pictures over the course of just a few months. But my journal-keeping, on paper and online, has lapsed again. Part of the problem is that life has gotten busier—although one might argue that this is exactly when one should begin journaling (the fuller life gets, the more there is to forget). Part of it is a lack of discipline. Part of it, no doubt, goes back to that fear of the betrayal of print. Or maybe I simply possess some kind of anti-journaling gene, evident when I was seven and persistent to this day.

I left the Hello Kitty journal in the box in my parents’ attic, but I’m thinking that the next time I’m home, I ought to retrieve it and bring it back to New York. I could use it to replace my Moleskine. Or perhaps it will become a talisman—something to keep on my desk, to remind me of childhood, and lost time, and all the empty pages still to be filled.

Catching Up ... Again

I've been blogging (for others) and doing other writerly things these past few months, so allow me to direct you to parts elsewhere:

A review.

Contributions to a serial novel:
    Chapter 2.
    Chapter 7.

Blogginess.

Catching up

A review.

A related blog post.

An unrelated blog post.

Cheers.

Adjusted for daylight saving time

The cell phone alarm goes off. (Do. Do! Do-do-dee-do! Do. Do! Do-do-dee-do!) I’m lying on my stomach, face mashed into the pillow. It feels as if I've already been half-awake for hours. I reach out to silence the thing: 8:30, it says. And then, too cheerfully: “Adjusted for Daylight Saving Time!” “I know,” I think. “I adjusted you yesterday. Yesterday, when you didn’t bother to adjust yourself, you useless thing. But thanks for the confirmation.” I wonder, for a moment, if this could mean that — but no, my cell phone wouldn’t be that cruel.

The light in the room is strange, too young, but it is, after all, technically earlier than usual. I roll over in bed. No reason to linger here. And so I haul myself out, head to the bathroom, and get ready to face the day. I’m supposed to be to work by 10.

I do all those morning things one does, and at 9:08, by my phone, I step outside. Birds are chirping, and I am bleary. The air feels early — crisper than usual. Everyone headed to the subway is bundled up tight against the cold, half-awake, heads down. I descend to the subway. There’s a smattering of people. Either I just missed a train, or they’re running so regularly that the commuters haven’t had time to accumulate. Excellent. But the Q pulls up, and it’s packed. Strange. Did the people deeper in Brooklyn all oversleep? It’s too early to care.

I step onto the train. It’s shoulder to shoulder all the way to Midtown. I try to peer at people’s watches. They all say different things. At Times Square, a flood of people get off the train. So many people, so many of them running late.

I walk to the coffee cart. “So early!” the lady tells me. “I know,” I say. “It does seem too early. Daylight saving time.” I shrug my shoulders and raise my hands because it seems the thing to do.

I usually get a small coffee, but I decide I need a medium.

I enter the building. A man in a suit precedes me through the security turnstile. And that is all. Odd. There are usually more people here. More people, more casually dressed. The man gets into an elevator — all his own — before I even have time to push a button. I push the button (E, it says). The doors of E bank open immediately, and I step inside. I have the elevator to myself. It goes straight to my floor. I step out and turn the corner. The lights over the first set of cubicles are off, and every desk is empty. I walk past, and the lights, sensing motion, go on overhead.

By now, of course, I already know what has happened. I look at the clock on the first wall: 8:48. I knew, I think, as soon as I woke up. I look at the clock on the next wall: 8:48. I knew, and yet — “Why stay here?” I thought. And so I got to work at 8:48, and sat down at my desk, and began to write.

“Adjusted for daylight saving time.” Twice.