Everyone, SO SORRY. That news about Joy is (happily) totally incorrect. My mistake - someone was putting together one of those pre-obits and reached out to me via a third party and I misunderstood. SO, SO sorry (and especially to you, Joy). :(
When the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean on a clear night sometimes a green flash occurs for a second or two. I've seen it , and it's well known, I don't know why it happens. Painters might be more sensitive to color than writers, since colors are their business. Almost anything in nature can be any color, it just depends ......
I've seen that green flash, living in San Diego. At Mission Beach, there is a plexiglas statue/display explaining the phenomenon known as the green flash.
Why did William Carlos Williams opt for the colour of the wheel barrow to red rather than green?
Why did he opt for white as the colour of the chickens... might link to why he chose red for the barrow... red & white the stronger contrast... offered just the specificity he discovered he had been looking for in his state of receptivity as brought his poem into being... and avoided two consecutive words with 'ee' embedded, which just he might have felt detracted from the minimalist quality of the poem?
Why yes, so much does depend on the fit of a word, just the right word in just the right place... it didn't start life with a title, if it had been his choice to go with
a green wheel
barrow
would the later titling of the poem as The Green Wheelbarrow have worked out so well, would the poem have made it to its place in the pantheon that is The Poetry Foundation?
Who can tell, I only know not I. I know only that every next time I happen across this poem I'll likely wonder what if green not red?
We have to stop and look at the wheelbarrow to take in this complication. Fixes both the shiny style of the colour and heightens the brightness of the colour itself. And the very existence of the wheelbarrow.
(Sorry about the "U"s, Tod, but "color" looks fake ;) )
What if? And then, might not "depend" be the more operative word, because aren't we always asking what the hell depends on a wheel barrow of any color. By the way, I just read it was Noah Webster dropped the u from your colour Rob, to make American color, red or green or puce or . .. .
Williams's wheelbarrow (whatever else it might be)
is the target of the poet's and reader's scrutiny
I do love the thought experiment of turning the wheelbarrow green; the poem already uses assonance (the long "i" in "beside the white," the long "a" in "glazed with rain")
Every year we talk about this poem in the Poetry Class I teach to 10th graders. Every year, I marvel at it. "Glazed" is the word that makes me smile though--all the work it does. And....I dunno....I kinda like "green" in this as much as "red."
I taught the poem in composition class, as a way to 1) teach students how to read, 2) teach students how to read poetry, 3) teach students how to choose words precisely, and 4) to give students confident that they can understand and "figure out" poetry with analytical attention. So much fun!
I (personally) think what makes green work just as well is its simplicity. This is a poem that doesn't cart out vermillion or puce (I always have to pause an extra instant to remember what color those words and words like it refer to, whereas the simple basic colors hit me instantly, in the way a haiku-writer wants you to be hit instantly, before thought)
I have a friend who studies bacteria. She was explaining to me how bacteria in a white sink sometimes has a pink tone to it. I really didn't know what the hell she was talking about! I said, "it's brown, isn't it?" I almost didn't believe her. That's what she does, though, she's a bacteriologist, and her brain saw pink. It took me a few weeks and one white dirty sink to see what she meant by pink.
I have seen this twice and it is a stunning moment. Most recently we went to visit my daughters who had the audacity to move their lives to Oahu. On our first evening my daughter Jessica and I witnessed it while standing i. The Pacific Ocean. That gift and having not seen her for almost a year moved me to tears.
It's so well known Jules Verne wrote a romance novel about it ("Le Rayon Vert", "The Green Ray", 1882 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Ray ) . The amorous couple searching to see it miss it completely because they are staring into each other's eyes at the percise moment when it appears.
Based on the idea, Eric Rohmer made a film with the same title and a variation on the theme of a young woman wandering in search of... some decent kind of a love relationship.
I remember when I learned that writing can be boiled down into "one sentence must lead to the next, to the next, and so on."
This landed for me when I was a senior writing my final final paper. My boyfriend at the time was a math and computer science guy and with a tall tale amount of patience, he sat with me in our little, grimy kitchen and coached me sentence by sentence on the force of my argument. This was a 20 page paper for an ethical theory course. For anyone curious, the paper argued (or attempted to argue) that "acknowledgement of the other" is the primary place to start in any interpersonal dynamic. Anyway, back to my startle-moment when the "sentence by sentence" lesson landed. I sat there, crumbled in a ball of shame. My paper was overdue and somehow I felt worse at writing as a senior than when I started college. Coherence felt so far away.
His advice was— don't worry about the entire 20 pages. Don't switch around sentences. Don't copy and paste those paragraphs every which way. Again my partner said, "Let's just look at each sentence. Each sentence, ask yourself, 'does the next sentence link to the next?'" Even more precisely, does THE END OF THE SENTENCE you're looking at immediately link TO THE BEGINNING OF THE NEXT.
I remember relaxing, not thinking analytically for a second but seeing my prose spatially. I saw my sentences as a line of dominos. I re-processed my partner's question, "does this sentence connect to the next?" as "does this sentence touch the next?"
We stayed up all night and applied the sentence-by-sentence touching approach. Come morning, I turned in the paper in, and my professor acknowledged, my final paper was a "night and day leap in excellence."
Like Anne Lamott's story about her brother panicking about a school report on birds that he has put off until the night before it's due. Her father gently advises him, to just take it Bird by Bird.
That's a wonderful story. I received similar feedback to you on a major revision of a story that I'd worked on forever that I deeply, almost desperately cared about. In contrast to your generous, evolved reaction, I remember being pretty comically infuriated to receive great reception to the transformed new draft. (Think: Rewrite Faulkner as Hemingway.) Intellectually, I knew I was supposed to enjoy the encouragement and go "atta girl, way to receive!" but instead it felt like I was being patted on the head like a yappy puppy who finally slept through the night with yap shut. It seemed to me in my hot temper that everybody was laughing at night-me for not being another, better, future day-me whom I couldn't see in myself. And it reaaaaaally rankled me, knowing that the critique was right. In my shame about my overreaction, I never finished the story, not though I fantasize about having one of those subconscious leaps that will "solve" the story that may only come when I take the feedback less personally, as another person's gift as you did.
Those magical turns of phrase! On the few occasions they have come to me, they have come unsummoned and fully formed from the subconscious. Maybe as we use our conscious mind to hone our craft, the subconscious engages more and more to deliver its magic?
The discussion of colors instantly reminded me of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, in The Great Gatsby. And then Fitzgerald gives us the blue lawn. Is a lawn ever blue? I am not sure, but it paints an unforgettable picture, as opposed to describing a green lawn which would be merely ordinary.
Vishal, so beautifully put! I so so hope that this is true—that the endeavor of the conscious mind creates space for the magic of the unconscious to “cross over”—that irreplaceable feeling of being inhabited by something strange and true, even if it exists only between the layers of one’s own self, and hoping that counts for progress…thank you.
When the mind has been revved (perhaps by re-reading the previous day’s work) and is humming along with the process (striking new lines here and there) the groove you are in suddenly becomes a vista and you can see all sorts of surprising things you didn’t see before.
Katy Kelleher wrote fascinating and witty essays for The Paris Review about colors: the history, chemistry, and sometimes the toxicity of certain pigments; the attempts to define what eau-de-nil looks like, etc.
I realize I've made these essays sound very academic and dry.
They are not; here is a link to one about verdigris:
and about those wonderful, serendipitous moments when the right word, or the right image, or the right melody comes to us... they are gifts that are as wonderful as their arrival is unpredictable.
But there are things I do that (I would like to think) increase the chances of their coming my way:
writing in early morning silence
reading widely, reading a lot, and keeping a commonplace book
Sometimes a color can seem wrong because we don't have the context. Like Homer's wine dark sea. I thought it was some weird metaphor then I saw the water in the Aegean and it is that dark and nothing like anything I'd seen before.
Jules Verne wrote a novel called The Green Ray (Le Rayon Vert). In it, a character hears about a flash of green light that appears when the sun sets and is supposed to reveal one's heart and the hearts of others. She refuses to marry until she sees the phenomenon herself. This is referenced in Eric Rohmer's excellent 1986 film of the same name.
Claire Keegan’s “Walk the Blue Fields” immediately came to mind. I remember the title grabbing my attention for being, as you said George, ‘not expected.’ I think this passage that references the title of the story is an example of what you described as having perceptual truth in the adjective and creating a ‘pausing to picture’ moment.
“The blue night has spread itself darkly over the fields. He pushes the timber gate and listens to the sound it makes closing behind him. He stands there and looks at the world. The spring has come, dry and promising. The alder is shooting out, her pale limbs brazen. Everything seems sharper now. The night has braced itself against the fence posts. The rake is a shining thing, well loved and worn.
Where is God? he has asked, and tonight God is answering back. All around the air is sharp with the tang of wild currant bushes. A lamb climbs out of a deep sleep and walks across the blue field. Overhead, the stars have rolled into place. God is nature.”
The mention of blue here, Anne, reminded me of a short poem I recently read by Dionne Brand: Verso 13, from her 2018 collection, The Blue Clerk. I don't want to reproduce the whole thing (because of copyright), but I'm hoping a couple of lines are okay--just to show the startling range of associations she creates with blue:
Blue tremors, blue position, blue suppuration. The clerk is
considering blue havoc, blue thousands, blue shoulder,
I studied Berlin and Kay's "Basic Color Terms" that discusses the linguistics of our words for color that are culturally determined but appear in a regular pattern. Very interesting. As for green sky ... I once drove a small truck pulling a trailer over the continental divide from southern California to New Mexico to start graduate school. The rain was so hard, I had to reduce speed to 10 mph. I could see lighting striking the grounds on next to the high red rock mesas. Up above, were 7 distinct swirling storm eyes, the most awesome display of weather in one sky I've ever seen. In the middle of each one, a green eye.
Thank you for this, especially today when I’m deliberating whether or not to see how long it takes to get canned for neglecting to revise old work. It’s not art, but replacing real words with safe new euphemisms seems like vandalism (even though nobody reads this stuff anyway).
"But for any one of us, regardless of our talent level, getting ourselves into that state of receptivity is, I think, the thing." For me, the book "From Where You Dream" by Robert Olen Butler, taught me a lot about getting into that state. I'm off to read a Joy Williams story.
"The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up amd reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come."
And that red desert that he rode red dust powdered brings to mind the opening line of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, first anthologised way back in 1765:
The king sits in Dunfermline toune drinking the blude reid wine, "O whar can I get skeely skipper, To sail this ship o' mine?"
My memory was of reading and reciting this opening line with 'blood red' being the colour but wow "blude reid" trips off the tongue so much more richly as I say it aloud just now. Of course, since it appears that there are as many as 18 versions of this ballad, with a bit of digging it could be that other ways of rendering the words 'blood red' or 'blude reid' might be encountered.
Thanks for this quote, Matt. I haven't read this particular book, and, in fact, despite my best intentions, I've so far only read one of this author's books (which I absolutely loved). Yet somehow I was able to recognize the author right away (I googled the last sentence to double-check). Now you've got me truly wondering (along with what George has posted today above) what is it, exactly, that triggers reader recognition of an author like that? Certainly the way the color "red" is worked with here is part of the answer. But it's so many other things, too, content-wise, form-wise, language-wise, and beyond. I feel drenched in beauty and dread.
It's really interesting that, as George describes it, this increasing specificity applies not only to the writing but to the writer as well. So, Tolstoy is becoming more specifically Tolstoy (and less something generic) as he chooses precisely this moment of sunlight gleaming off a button. Chekhov, I read somewhere, had a thing about green - that is why he emphasizes that particular color in the sky over the sea full of sharks (and also deep down in the ocean, if I remember right?). So, neither writer is aiming for an abstract notion of what is 'good' writing, but instead sharpens and particularizes and specifies what they see/think/write.
Everyone, SO SORRY. That news about Joy is (happily) totally incorrect. My mistake - someone was putting together one of those pre-obits and reached out to me via a third party and I misunderstood. SO, SO sorry (and especially to you, Joy). :(
Oh! I bet she has a sense of humor about things.
This is exactly the ending you want for this story. Glad she’s ok!
The sky in southern Saskatchewan is green, poison green, when a tornado is brewing somewhere between you and the horizon.
Is this a quote?
Not unless you quote me!
When the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean on a clear night sometimes a green flash occurs for a second or two. I've seen it , and it's well known, I don't know why it happens. Painters might be more sensitive to color than writers, since colors are their business. Almost anything in nature can be any color, it just depends ......
I've seen that green flash, living in San Diego. At Mission Beach, there is a plexiglas statue/display explaining the phenomenon known as the green flash.
it just depends....Tod? :)
so much depends
upon
a green wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Why did William Carlos Williams opt for the colour of the wheel barrow to red rather than green?
Why did he opt for white as the colour of the chickens... might link to why he chose red for the barrow... red & white the stronger contrast... offered just the specificity he discovered he had been looking for in his state of receptivity as brought his poem into being... and avoided two consecutive words with 'ee' embedded, which just he might have felt detracted from the minimalist quality of the poem?
Why yes, so much does depend on the fit of a word, just the right word in just the right place... it didn't start life with a title, if it had been his choice to go with
a green wheel
barrow
would the later titling of the poem as The Green Wheelbarrow have worked out so well, would the poem have made it to its place in the pantheon that is The Poetry Foundation?
Who can tell, I only know not I. I know only that every next time I happen across this poem I'll likely wonder what if green not red?
What makes it memorable, imo, is
glazed with rain
water
We have to stop and look at the wheelbarrow to take in this complication. Fixes both the shiny style of the colour and heightens the brightness of the colour itself. And the very existence of the wheelbarrow.
(Sorry about the "U"s, Tod, but "color" looks fake ;) )
Haha. I get it. But "colour" looks, well, British.:)
What if? And then, might not "depend" be the more operative word, because aren't we always asking what the hell depends on a wheel barrow of any color. By the way, I just read it was Noah Webster dropped the u from your colour Rob, to make American color, red or green or puce or . .. .
I wonder if there is a pun on "read":
Williams's wheelbarrow (whatever else it might be)
is the target of the poet's and reader's scrutiny
I do love the thought experiment of turning the wheelbarrow green; the poem already uses assonance (the long "i" in "beside the white," the long "a" in "glazed with rain")
Every year we talk about this poem in the Poetry Class I teach to 10th graders. Every year, I marvel at it. "Glazed" is the word that makes me smile though--all the work it does. And....I dunno....I kinda like "green" in this as much as "red."
I taught the poem in composition class, as a way to 1) teach students how to read, 2) teach students how to read poetry, 3) teach students how to choose words precisely, and 4) to give students confident that they can understand and "figure out" poetry with analytical attention. So much fun!
I (personally) think what makes green work just as well is its simplicity. This is a poem that doesn't cart out vermillion or puce (I always have to pause an extra instant to remember what color those words and words like it refer to, whereas the simple basic colors hit me instantly, in the way a haiku-writer wants you to be hit instantly, before thought)
I have a friend who studies bacteria. She was explaining to me how bacteria in a white sink sometimes has a pink tone to it. I really didn't know what the hell she was talking about! I said, "it's brown, isn't it?" I almost didn't believe her. That's what she does, though, she's a bacteriologist, and her brain saw pink. It took me a few weeks and one white dirty sink to see what she meant by pink.
Pink bacteria in a damp place like a sink is probably staphylococcus aureus. After you write about it, please clean the sink before you get sick.
so much depends upon...bleach.
Kitchen sink drama was pink, not grey?
There’s a “pink” hue to be found. Disgusting to me, fascinating to the bacteriologist.
So much depends on the pink sink, then?
Maybe the bacteria would look different on pink porcelain!
I have seen this twice and it is a stunning moment. Most recently we went to visit my daughters who had the audacity to move their lives to Oahu. On our first evening my daughter Jessica and I witnessed it while standing i. The Pacific Ocean. That gift and having not seen her for almost a year moved me to tears.
Isn't that amazing!? I've seen it twice now.
I'm so jealous, Cynthia, I've never seen it! There's a lovely film by French director Eric Rohmer – "Le rayon vert" (The Green Ray) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/01/le-rayon-vert-review-green-ray-eric-rohmer – in which this phenomenon becomes an epiphany, a moment revealing a quiet, deep joy.
We mentioned it at the same moment, it seems, Portia!
Well, John, great minds and all that.;-)
Exactly!
Maybe one day! Thanks for the film recommendation. I am a big fan of Eric Rohmer. Somehow missed this one.
It's caused by light from the sun is refracted into different colors
It's so well known Jules Verne wrote a romance novel about it ("Le Rayon Vert", "The Green Ray", 1882 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Ray ) . The amorous couple searching to see it miss it completely because they are staring into each other's eyes at the percise moment when it appears.
Based on the idea, Eric Rohmer made a film with the same title and a variation on the theme of a young woman wandering in search of... some decent kind of a love relationship.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Ray_(film))
I see a rainbow many nights after the sun dips almost all the way below.
Hi Tod, here is an explanation of why it happens:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_flash
I remember when I learned that writing can be boiled down into "one sentence must lead to the next, to the next, and so on."
This landed for me when I was a senior writing my final final paper. My boyfriend at the time was a math and computer science guy and with a tall tale amount of patience, he sat with me in our little, grimy kitchen and coached me sentence by sentence on the force of my argument. This was a 20 page paper for an ethical theory course. For anyone curious, the paper argued (or attempted to argue) that "acknowledgement of the other" is the primary place to start in any interpersonal dynamic. Anyway, back to my startle-moment when the "sentence by sentence" lesson landed. I sat there, crumbled in a ball of shame. My paper was overdue and somehow I felt worse at writing as a senior than when I started college. Coherence felt so far away.
His advice was— don't worry about the entire 20 pages. Don't switch around sentences. Don't copy and paste those paragraphs every which way. Again my partner said, "Let's just look at each sentence. Each sentence, ask yourself, 'does the next sentence link to the next?'" Even more precisely, does THE END OF THE SENTENCE you're looking at immediately link TO THE BEGINNING OF THE NEXT.
I remember relaxing, not thinking analytically for a second but seeing my prose spatially. I saw my sentences as a line of dominos. I re-processed my partner's question, "does this sentence connect to the next?" as "does this sentence touch the next?"
We stayed up all night and applied the sentence-by-sentence touching approach. Come morning, I turned in the paper in, and my professor acknowledged, my final paper was a "night and day leap in excellence."
Thanks all!
Like Anne Lamott's story about her brother panicking about a school report on birds that he has put off until the night before it's due. Her father gently advises him, to just take it Bird by Bird.
That's a wonderful story. I received similar feedback to you on a major revision of a story that I'd worked on forever that I deeply, almost desperately cared about. In contrast to your generous, evolved reaction, I remember being pretty comically infuriated to receive great reception to the transformed new draft. (Think: Rewrite Faulkner as Hemingway.) Intellectually, I knew I was supposed to enjoy the encouragement and go "atta girl, way to receive!" but instead it felt like I was being patted on the head like a yappy puppy who finally slept through the night with yap shut. It seemed to me in my hot temper that everybody was laughing at night-me for not being another, better, future day-me whom I couldn't see in myself. And it reaaaaaally rankled me, knowing that the critique was right. In my shame about my overreaction, I never finished the story, not though I fantasize about having one of those subconscious leaps that will "solve" the story that may only come when I take the feedback less personally, as another person's gift as you did.
I wanna read this final final paper!
Those magical turns of phrase! On the few occasions they have come to me, they have come unsummoned and fully formed from the subconscious. Maybe as we use our conscious mind to hone our craft, the subconscious engages more and more to deliver its magic?
The discussion of colors instantly reminded me of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, in The Great Gatsby. And then Fitzgerald gives us the blue lawn. Is a lawn ever blue? I am not sure, but it paints an unforgettable picture, as opposed to describing a green lawn which would be merely ordinary.
Vishal, so beautifully put! I so so hope that this is true—that the endeavor of the conscious mind creates space for the magic of the unconscious to “cross over”—that irreplaceable feeling of being inhabited by something strange and true, even if it exists only between the layers of one’s own self, and hoping that counts for progress…thank you.
"Maybe as we use our conscious mind to hone our craft, the subconscious engages more and more to deliver its magic?"
Yes!
I think of it as The Wordle Effect:
playing that silly puzzle every day prepares me for those times (rare, startling) when I solve the puzzle with my first guess.
That state of receptivity cannot be overstated.
When the mind has been revved (perhaps by re-reading the previous day’s work) and is humming along with the process (striking new lines here and there) the groove you are in suddenly becomes a vista and you can see all sorts of surprising things you didn’t see before.
Great lines have always come out of that.
about colors:
Katy Kelleher wrote fascinating and witty essays for The Paris Review about colors: the history, chemistry, and sometimes the toxicity of certain pigments; the attempts to define what eau-de-nil looks like, etc.
I realize I've made these essays sound very academic and dry.
They are not; here is a link to one about verdigris:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/11/24/verdigris-the-color-of-oxidation-statues-and-impermanence/
and about those wonderful, serendipitous moments when the right word, or the right image, or the right melody comes to us... they are gifts that are as wonderful as their arrival is unpredictable.
But there are things I do that (I would like to think) increase the chances of their coming my way:
writing in early morning silence
reading widely, reading a lot, and keeping a commonplace book
Great article. Thank you.
Thanks also for the link! Great article!!!
Thank you for reminding us that we can do something to collect a treasure trove of memories.
Sometimes a color can seem wrong because we don't have the context. Like Homer's wine dark sea. I thought it was some weird metaphor then I saw the water in the Aegean and it is that dark and nothing like anything I'd seen before.
Jules Verne wrote a novel called The Green Ray (Le Rayon Vert). In it, a character hears about a flash of green light that appears when the sun sets and is supposed to reveal one's heart and the hearts of others. She refuses to marry until she sees the phenomenon herself. This is referenced in Eric Rohmer's excellent 1986 film of the same name.
JP, I remember that movie casting quite a spell when I saw it; I hadn't realized it was based on a Verne novel.
Claire Keegan’s “Walk the Blue Fields” immediately came to mind. I remember the title grabbing my attention for being, as you said George, ‘not expected.’ I think this passage that references the title of the story is an example of what you described as having perceptual truth in the adjective and creating a ‘pausing to picture’ moment.
“The blue night has spread itself darkly over the fields. He pushes the timber gate and listens to the sound it makes closing behind him. He stands there and looks at the world. The spring has come, dry and promising. The alder is shooting out, her pale limbs brazen. Everything seems sharper now. The night has braced itself against the fence posts. The rake is a shining thing, well loved and worn.
Where is God? he has asked, and tonight God is answering back. All around the air is sharp with the tang of wild currant bushes. A lamb climbs out of a deep sleep and walks across the blue field. Overhead, the stars have rolled into place. God is nature.”
The mention of blue here, Anne, reminded me of a short poem I recently read by Dionne Brand: Verso 13, from her 2018 collection, The Blue Clerk. I don't want to reproduce the whole thing (because of copyright), but I'm hoping a couple of lines are okay--just to show the startling range of associations she creates with blue:
Blue tremors, blue position, blue suppuration. The clerk is
considering blue havoc, blue thousands, blue shoulder,
where these arrive from, blue expenses . . .
You can hear the author reading the poem (and also Verso 45 from the same collection) at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwZQs7DshVk
That was really nice thank you for sharing - yes amazing range of associations!
I studied Berlin and Kay's "Basic Color Terms" that discusses the linguistics of our words for color that are culturally determined but appear in a regular pattern. Very interesting. As for green sky ... I once drove a small truck pulling a trailer over the continental divide from southern California to New Mexico to start graduate school. The rain was so hard, I had to reduce speed to 10 mph. I could see lighting striking the grounds on next to the high red rock mesas. Up above, were 7 distinct swirling storm eyes, the most awesome display of weather in one sky I've ever seen. In the middle of each one, a green eye.
Thank you for this, especially today when I’m deliberating whether or not to see how long it takes to get canned for neglecting to revise old work. It’s not art, but replacing real words with safe new euphemisms seems like vandalism (even though nobody reads this stuff anyway).
"But for any one of us, regardless of our talent level, getting ourselves into that state of receptivity is, I think, the thing." For me, the book "From Where You Dream" by Robert Olen Butler, taught me a lot about getting into that state. I'm off to read a Joy Williams story.
I'd forgotten about that book. I might have to pluck it off my shelf. Thanks for the reminder.
The Joy Williams news is new to me. I can't find any online sources that she passed away.
When I was at WashU she came to speak and it was truly wonderful. So thank you Joy for a lifetime of excellent and pleasurable writing.
See above. Sheesh, I'm an idiot.
It’s probably because you were blinded by a flash of green light, right?
"The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up amd reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come."
And that red desert that he rode red dust powdered brings to mind the opening line of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, first anthologised way back in 1765:
The king sits in Dunfermline toune drinking the blude reid wine, "O whar can I get skeely skipper, To sail this ship o' mine?"
My memory was of reading and reciting this opening line with 'blood red' being the colour but wow "blude reid" trips off the tongue so much more richly as I say it aloud just now. Of course, since it appears that there are as many as 18 versions of this ballad, with a bit of digging it could be that other ways of rendering the words 'blood red' or 'blude reid' might be encountered.
It seems the wine has lost its colour in this particular version.
Hi Rob. I'm sure you're already aware of this youtube video, but just in case:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umZIDbdIgZA
Thanks for this quote, Matt. I haven't read this particular book, and, in fact, despite my best intentions, I've so far only read one of this author's books (which I absolutely loved). Yet somehow I was able to recognize the author right away (I googled the last sentence to double-check). Now you've got me truly wondering (along with what George has posted today above) what is it, exactly, that triggers reader recognition of an author like that? Certainly the way the color "red" is worked with here is part of the answer. But it's so many other things, too, content-wise, form-wise, language-wise, and beyond. I feel drenched in beauty and dread.
one of those books that eludes me, try as I have several times
It's really interesting that, as George describes it, this increasing specificity applies not only to the writing but to the writer as well. So, Tolstoy is becoming more specifically Tolstoy (and less something generic) as he chooses precisely this moment of sunlight gleaming off a button. Chekhov, I read somewhere, had a thing about green - that is why he emphasizes that particular color in the sky over the sea full of sharks (and also deep down in the ocean, if I remember right?). So, neither writer is aiming for an abstract notion of what is 'good' writing, but instead sharpens and particularizes and specifies what they see/think/write.