bellascribe

Taking a vacation, I expect this blog will be a little lean in the days to come. Meanwhile…

There’s a new one-minute vacation
over at the QuietAmerican. “One-minute vacations are unedited recordings of somewhere, somewhen. Sixty seconds of something else. Sixty seconds to be someone else.”

I am particularly taken by the artist’s commentary on leaving, who says, “It is a terrible and wonderful thing to be an outsider.”

He also says (I’m being unfair in providing these snippets — really, you have to read the whole thing.)

To travel is to step outside. Leaving affords an opportunity rare in my insulated world: a chance to be completely out of my depth. Even when I travel with someone familiar, as I did recently with my wife, I may find myself in situations beyond my understanding. In such moments, at risk, I gain the world….

So the situations I am interested in, that I push myself to find, that I most fear, are those that defy intuition and stymie comprehension. These are often occasions of acute humility.

Another kind of vacation, an old favorite: il mondo del Fubbs

The Best Photography on the Web
according to American Photo staff (May/June 2006)

After three months of clicking and cruising, we have found exemplary Websites from ten very different photographers, each of whom is taking the medium into new areas and new levels of communication.

Make something. The best Polaroid transfer tutorial on the Web via Make (Technology on your own time) blog.

This seems like A worthwhile project using photographed images: Changeme. “An open conversation that brings people together to share ideas through powerful imagery.”

A novel project. The Guardian reports on Noveltwists is a new (to me) iteration of the Ebay.

A first-time author has bypassed the traditional route of getting an agent, and is publishing a collaborative thriller on eBay. The novel is being written one page at a time, one writer to a page. As each installment is finished, the chance to create the next is offered for auction on eBay. So far, 17 pages have been completed, with 234 to go, and while the quality of the writing might charitably be described as variable, there is no shortage of plot.

Last, one to watch: QuickMuse.

The person behind it — Ken Gordon — wrote an essay, Improvisers and Revisers: An Experiment in Spontaneity, published in Poets & Writers, discussing the project that also covers some interesting ground. The beginning of the essay (which follows) articulates a little bit about what’s important in the discussion/debate of why (I think) it’s probably a good thing for a writer to blog.

It took a long time to write these words. I’m not referring to the psychosomatic affliction known as writer’s block. I mean the delays caused by the process of composition and revision. The clichés I’ve killed! The drafts I’ve lost! The existence of this page—this paragraph—is a marvelous feat of Darwinian staying power. It has gone through so many minor and major tweaks that I can barely recall what it looked like when I began (on December 11, 2005, at 8:14 P.M., to be precise). The road from rough draft to final manuscript was a lengthy, indirect one, with so many wrong turns that I feel carsick just glancing back in the rearview mirror.

In her essay “Education of the Poet,” from Proofs & Theories (Ecco Press, 1994), Louise Glück asserts that “most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea. The only real exercise of the will is negative: we have toward what we write the power of veto.” Writers don’t get just one shot at putting words down correctly. It’s not like having to hit a professionally pitched baseball. It is in the nature of the literary arts to revise. You get far more than three strikes in writing; you can have three hundred, if you need them. When asked about revision, Ernest Hemingway said, “I rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.” I use the same labor-intensive approach, and so do almost all the writers I admire.

The goal of all this revision? To create a coherent human voice, or even a chorus of voices, so that when a reader picks up the work, it seems a form of spontaneous generation, in which sentences arrive one perfect word after another. When this succeeds, the reader believes in the writer’s authority. As Buddy Glass, the narrator of J.D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction (Little, Brown, 1963), says, “We read, and usually we believe; good, bad, or indifferent, any string of English words holds our attention as if it came from Prospero himself.”

But the real Prosperos are improvisers—the artists, musicians, comedians, and writers whose compositions seem to erupt fully realized from the mind or mouth or instrument. The artifice of most literary composition is, when you think about it, a little embarrassing when compared to what professional improvisers do.