am @ airport too early. up @ 515. ick! won trivia again last night, though! with the girl, friend b, and a random stranger. friend g bailed. now for work hell. have to be awake and smart and knowledgeable. um, oops?

am @ airport too early. up @ 515. ick! won trivia again last night, though! with the girl, friend b, and a random stranger. friend g bailed. now for work hell. have to be awake and smart and knowledgeable. um, oops?

Someone nudge meara, she's stuck!

You're welcome, bonny. How do you feel about:

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,

Memory by memory the mind -

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs

A poem should be equal to:

Not true

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean

But be

-- Archibald MacLeish

Maybe it's just me, but somehow this poem vividly evokes not only the disparate images it projects but also the vital importance of good, clear writing suited to its purpose. Of course, it may be less than helpful for your purposes. I don't care, any excuse to quote it is a good one.

Someone nudge meara, she's stuck!

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

One of my absolute favorite examples of precise writing comes from Heartbreak Hotel by Anne Rivers Siddons.

Her sense of place and time and the elegant facility with which she captures it—small university town in Alabama in the summer of 1956—leaves me breathless, no matter how many times I've read the book.

The making of Maggie Deloach was a process as indigenous to her part of the South as the making of cotton textiles in the fortress-bricked mills that crouched over the muddy fast-moving rivers of the Georgia and Alabama plateau country. But it was a process far more narrowly applied. In the cities of the South—in Atlanta and Birmingham and Charlotte and Mobile and Charleston—there were perhaps a hundred Maggies flowering in any given year, girls planted, tended, and grown like prize roses, to be cut and massed and shown at debutant balls and cotillions in their eighteenth year. Unlike roses, they did not die after showing; instead they moved gently into colleges and universities and Junior League chapters, and were then pressed between the leaves of substantial marriages to be dried and preserved.

In the smaller towns, there were always perhaps three or four current Maggies. And in the smallest, like Lytton, there was only a Maggie. Nevertheless, the technique of creation varied only in small details and circumstances. It was a process of rules, subtle, shaded, iron bylaws that were tacitly drafted in burned and torn households sometime during the Reconstruction by frail, reeling gentlewomen throughout the exploded South, laws for the shaping of new women who would be, forever after, impervious to casual, impersonal chaos. The formula lasted, with only those modifications that were a nod to the times, through a world war and a depression and another world war, and its end product, the young women of a certain caste of the South, were, on the main, as uniformly bright, hard, shining, and true as bullets from identical molds. There was no reason to think that The Rules would fail to hold, certainly no omens of mechanical malfunction, when the life of Maggie Deloach began.

She not only captures the nuances of a young Southern woman of a certain ilk so beautifully and so precisely, you know, just in those two paragraphs, who this girl thinks she is and who she's destined to become are two utterly different things. And how Siddons uses the greater canvas of the time and place and the historical significance of the events unfolding during that one summer to draw the story of this one girl is just remarkable. And she does that with the precision of her language.

I wanna write like her when I grow up.

(I know this is a long passage, but use what you will from it, if it's at all useful for you.)

I find the title of the sixth Amelia Peabody (by Elizabeth Peters) mystery to be particularly evocative: The Last Camel Died at Noon. It's precise, concise, and yet creates a picture that leads the reader to fill in many of details for him/herself without any red herrings.

"You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was "but we've always done it this way." A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?"

--Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant

From the top of the water tower, Vivi felt a relief spread through her. What a sweet small-town thrill, this was, like the delight of watching a parade from the top of a tall building. She could see the tangled Spanish moss hanging off the oaks in City Park. She could make out the camellia bushes and azaleas, the salvias; she could smell the night-blooming jasmine. Closing her eyes, she imagined she could look down into her house, into her bedroom and everything in it. The four-poster bed with the silk canopy Delia had bought for her in New Orleans; the new vanity her father bought for her fifteenth birthday, on top of which sat a photo of Jack clad in his basketball uniform, fiddle in hand; the tall armoire crammed with loafers and sweater sets; the ceiling fan; the tennis racket propped against the night stand; her tennis trophies; countless photos of the Ya-Yas, and one of Jimmy Stewart.

Looking away from her parents' house, Vivi imagined she could see the block she lived on, and then her whole neighborhood. She conjured all the people she knew and the few she didn't. She saw them tossing and turning in their beds, too hot to sleep. She saw lights burning on front porches; slivers of light where ice box doors were open, someone standing there, reaching for a bottle of milk, just an excuse to feel the cool air of the icebox. She saw a night lights in the rooms of the babies who dreamed soft seersucker dreams, drugged happy with the heat, their pink baby bodies curled against worn cotton, not fearing Hitler yet, their strong, tiny hearts beating in unison with the trees and the creeks and the bayous.

Vivi saw the flicker of candles burning at Divine Compassion for the souls of the dead; she spotted tiny fiery red tips of cigarettes dangling from the lips of sleep-starved souls seeking the faintest of breezes in back yards; she caught the soft glow from radio dials left on all night, in case a warning was broadcast, in case the Nazis or Japs invaded on this feverish night, executing the horrors that lived in the town's heart even as the bank opened for business, as the milk was delivered, as the wafer changed to body and blood.

--Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood