Writing Life

Archive for March, 2010

Yesterday I mentioned that visiting a place where antiquities are sold can be like taking a tour of one’s own past. But the experience can also provide one with an opportunity to tour a lot of other people’s pasts as well. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve said before that Julie and I enjoy browsing antique shops because it allows us to wander through our own pasts. We’ve spent the last three days doing exactly that. On Friday we drove to Placerville, where we whiled away the day visiting six or seven antique shops along Main Street. On Saturday we attended the Sacramento Rare Book Show and Sale at the local Scottish Rite Temple, where we inspected not just rare books but also old posters, postcards, letters, maps, and more. And on Sunday we strolled through an antiques flea market held in the parking lot of a Carmichael strip mall. It was at the Carmichael event that I witnessed a perfect example of how an antique store or flea market can work as a collective memory repository for the community it serves. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I promised to write an entire essay about “1066: The Year of the Conquest,” David Howarth’s short history of England’s most tumultuous year. Today I shall fulfill that promise. I read the book not so much for the history but for the prose. I was told by a local bookseller that Howarth, who died in 1991, was a writer of graceful, unpretentious sentences, which is exactly what I aspire to be. The bookseller did not lie. Read the rest of this entry »

This past weekend I read a book called “1066: The Year of the Conquest.” I read it not because I had any strong interest in William the Conqueror’s invasion of England but because I had been told (correctly, as it turned out) that the author, the late David Howarth, possessed an admirably clear and elegant writing style. I hope to comment on Howarth and the Conquest in a future installment of this blog. Today, however, I wish to focus on just a single thing that Howarth mentioned briefly in his book – the nautical strategy known as either the deliberate error or the deliberate miss. Read the rest of this entry »

The Style section of yesterday’s New York Times contained a story about a New Jersey school librarian named Jim Brozina and his daughter Kristen. On November 11, 1997, Brozina sat down with Kristen at bedtime and read to her from one of L. Frank Baum’s books, “The Tin Woodman of Oz.” Their goal was to read together every night for 100 nights in a row. The project was conceived as a father/daughter bonding exercise as well as a way of encouraging Kristen, who was a fourth-grader at the time, to take an increased interest in books and literature. But once the twosome had achieved their goal of 100 consecutive nights of reading together they realized they had set their sights too low. At that point, they decided to shoot for 1000 consecutive nights of reading together. But even that goal proved a bit too modest. In the end Jim and Kristen Brozina read together for 3,218 nights in a row, concluding on September 2, 2006, Kristen’s first day of college. This stupendous accomplishment is known in Brozina family lore simply as The Streak.

As it happens I began a streak of my own in the same year that the Brozinas’ streak began. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always been envious of writers who have partners. Lennon and McCartney, Kauffman and Hart, Julius and Philip Epstein (who co-wrote Casablanca and other classic movie scripts), Richard Levinson and William Link (who co-created Columbo, Mannix, and other TV shows), Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (who co-wrote Inherit the Wind and dozens of other successful plays) – the list goes on and on. My idea of a great writing gig was nurtured in my youth by The Dick Van Dyke Show, a situation comedy in which a trio of impossibly witty people gathered every weekday in a small room to play darts and write skits for a TV variety show. To me, that appeared to be the ideal job – cranking out creative work in collaboration with a friend or two. Alas, I have never had a writing partner. I have been fated to do all my writing alone. Still I can’t help fantasizing about what it would be like to have a collaborator. Read the rest of this entry »

Many classic fairy tales employ a principle known as “the rule of three,” wherein various elements of the story come in threes: three wishes, three blind mice, three billy goats gruff, and so forth. According to the Wikipedia, “things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things…A series of three is often used to create a progression in which the tension is created, then built up, and finally released.” This is not merely a conceit of western literature. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m always searching for metaphors in the specifics of science, art, sport, nature, and history that can be used to illuminate a larger human truth. Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent blog entry, I mentioned in passing something known as the Mercator Projection. Invented in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, the Mercator Projection is a formula that allows a round object (usually the Earth) to be entirely mapped on a flat surface. The major flaw in the Mercator Projection is that it causes landmasses near the North and South Poles to appear larger than they really are. On a standard Mercator map, landmasses at the equator maintain their relative size in relation to the earth, while landmasses near the poles can appear many times their actual size. The reason for this is fairly simple. Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Darrell calls me every morning from Ashland, Oregon, to air a few grievances before he begins the day. Today his main grievance was a writer named Melissa Febos. He heard her interviewed on National Public Radio yesterday and has been incensed ever since. Read the rest of this entry »