writing about music

"you, you're a history in rust" by do make say think is just plain amazing. I mean, the individual songs are great... but I just finished listening through it the entire way for the first time in the five days that I've had it. After the last song faded, something seized my heart, and I could not move or speak or do anything: it was as if the happiest moment in my life had just brushed up against my chest, surprising me completely, stopping me, breath held, just before tears rushed to my eyes.

That is one good album.

As a multi-instrumentalist myself, I know that creating music with moments like that is difficult, let alone making an entire album have that effect. I feel like this difference can be likened to the difference between a really good short story, and a really good novel. I've been trying to quantify what I like about some writing more than other writing lately,and the best that I've been able to come up with is the idea of things that aren't said explicitly but are nonetheless received. For instance, throughout the album, there are little moments... for instance: a really pretty instrumental section coming to an end with people making funny noises with their mouths. Only you don't realize that it's people making these noises. And then all of a sudden they stop, and they laugh good-naturedly in the one second of silence before a guitar picks up the melody again. It shows the humanity behind the music, but it fits so perfectly. This is a poor example...

Also, of supreme relavence: http://xkcd.com/304/

Slightly wonderful?

Heroic Simile

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai
in the gray rain,
in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
he fell straight as a pine, he fell
as Ajax fell in Homer
in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
the woodsman returned for two days
to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,
hacking the small limbs off,
tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;
the logs from midtree they halved:
ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
moons and quarter moons and half moons
ridged by the saw's tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle
are standing in midforest
on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.
They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. They are too canny
to call in neighbors and come home
with a few logs after three days' work.
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!
The old man smokes a pipe and spits.
The young man is thinking he would be rich
if he were already rich and had a mule.
Ten days of hauling
and on the seventh day they'll probably
be caught, go home empty-handed
or worse. I don't know
whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean
and there's nothing I can do.
The path from here to that village
is not translated. A hero, dying,
gives off stillness to the air.
A man and a woman walk from the movies
to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.
There are limits to imagination.

-Robert Hass

I know this is poetry, but it inspired me- the language, the tone, the twists on perspective- I even recommended it to Lindsey in workshop today... Maybe you'll like it, too. :-)

Hello, I was just writing to see if everyone received the story I sent out last week and if they were able to open the attachment okay? I don't have microsoft word right now, so I wrote it in this strange word processor, I don't even know what it's called, and then converted it to a word document. So hopefully the conversion worked okay, but if anyone had trouble with it just let me know!

Andy

Swooning

over this:

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2006/20060320/flying-f.shtml

New story love.

Butler

"Once you have that link to your character's yearning, only then does the real work of literary fiction begin."
a.) this seems like sage advice
b.) it seems like sage advice, for literary fiction writers, that is, there it is, Butler is fully admitting that this is what he's talking about, writing literary fiction. And yes, he's a snob who looks down on "genre" fiction like romance and sci-fi/fantasy, etc., but his advice will let your (if that's what you want to write, those of you whom I think of as wanting to write) "genre" work rise, like Kelly Link's, above it's little "genre" ghetto and be thought of as literature, and what writer doesn't want her/his work to be thought of as great literature? None that I know. Stephen King may like making the money, but he wants to be thought of as a serious and talented writer, I'm guessing, more than anything else in the world.
(The photo is of Robert Lax, poet, who went from NYC success to a hermetic life on a Greek island. For too long, I thought that this is what you had to look like to be a "real" writer, more or less.)

Yes, those of you who've somehow heard, I will be reading for about 15 minutes at Amherst Books this Friday, along with two colleagues. Show starts at 8.

George Saunders on The Colbert Report

Click here.

inspiration

a little exercise.

I don't have anything left to say. I'm hollowed out. I just want to stop, right here, stop hard and fast and hollow. Wait for my heart to stop pounding, and then to stop beating. And then just wait in the silence.