In the year since my father died my grief lost its fangs. One morning this summer, though, I awoke and could think of nothing but my father. As if Dad’s spirit put a spell on me, I craved his musty, old closet smell. I longed to see him in his old man outfit of suspenders and forty-year-old brown polyester slacks. My ears hungered to hear his scorched voice on the phone, his habit of clearing his throat before he said hello.
Success means *being heard* and don’t stand there and tell me you are indifferent to being heard. Everything about you screams to be heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has its end in its audience.
I’m here a week now… waiting for a mission… getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter.
Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now
I appreciate having a week off for Thanksgiving. I do. But by day five, this is how I feel.
A little manifesto.
My edit (for myself) on #17: I will keep mixing in books from “the canon,” because there are a lot of good reasons those books are revered, but I won’t feel guilty about the canonical books I haven’t read yet.
This is my friend Jim.
Jim runs the coffee shop where I go just about every morning. Over the last five years, I’ve probably seen Jim more than I’ve seen anyone else in the world not named Furuness.
A few months back, he showed up with a pressure bandage on his head. When I asked him what happened, he told me he’d just had an operation to take care of some skin cancer. “There was this spot that just wouldn’t heal,” he said, “so I finally went in and they said, ‘Yep. Cancer.’ They were able to get it all, though, so that’s good."
"That’s good,” I echoed, trying not to show that I was freaking out. See, I had a little spot near my eye that hadn’t healed for a couple of years. A part of me knew this was a problem, but another part of me was like SHUT UP EVERYTHING’S FINE JUST DON’T THINK ABOUT IT.
After talking with Jim, though, I set up an appointment with the dermatologist. Yep, cancer. And yep, yesterday I had the same operation. And yep, they got it all.
This morning I showed Jim my bandage and my swollen pig-eye, and I thanked him. That’s when he told me that his story was similar to mine—he had gone to the dermo because a guy he knew had been diagnosed with skin cancer, making Jim think, Maybe I better get this spot looked at …
Which makes me think I should pass this on. Maybe I can be the warning-signal guy for you. Maybe you have a spot you’re ignoring, or maybe you’ve been meaning to go to the dermo just to get a baseline check. Stop waiting. Make the call. Save your own skin, then pass it on and save a friend’s skin.
Thanks, Jim.
Me (holding up aluminum foil): You know, in Australia, they pronounce it al-oo-MIN-ee-um.
Eli: I know. That’s how my friend Steven says it.
Me: Oh, he’s Australian?
Eli: Nope. Atheist.
Some moments reveal character. Like when a bug falls from the ceiling and lands on a student’s desk.
Consider the student who calmly picked up the bug and took it out of the classroom without calling any extra attention to herself. This moment reveals her poise and leadership.
Or consider me, who heard the squeals, saw the bug, and said, “What’s that? Something needs killin’?"
Actually, let’s not think about what that reveals.
Everyone’s looking for a magic wound.
I sort of distrust anybody’s defining what the novel is or even isn’t. I am afraid somebody would define me out of it. People have to use it for what they have to use it for, Hemingway had to test his manhood with it and V. Woolf had to make it a laboratory, and A. Huxley a place to give lectures in. Given themselves I don’t suppose any of them could have written any other way. You can criticize what they had to do with it, but you’ve got to leave the form vague enough to include them in it.