Posts Tagged writing

Split Rock Lighthouse

Here in the North Country, April snowstorm after snowstorm had us doubting whether spring would be coming this year after all. But predictions of 60- and 70-degree days have us happy and hopeful at last.

From my writing desk I look over snow-free yards of grass yearning to turn green. I watch birds moving between feeders and the snow-free earth and the branches of still-bare trees.

Between snowstorms, I have walked along the edges of a few of the nearer ponds and heard the songs of redwing blackbirds… the surest sign of all to me that spring must truly be near.

We live indoors and act in so many ways as if we have conquered nature, but in the end, we are merely creatures of nature ourselves. At least that is what we are meant to be.

I continue a routine of writing in the morning before heading to work… newer poems as well as older ones that need a bit of dust shaken off of them. The small notebook of ”finished” drafts continues to grow. Soon it will be time to do something with them.

This poem is a new one.

Enjoy!

_____

some cover art

For the past six weeks I have been re-reading the original six Mike Hammer novels beginning with his second novel, My Gun is Quick. Today I take a look at his very first novel, I, the Jury.

From the beginning of MontanaWriter – over three years ago now– I have tried to think and write about books and poetry here always in the light of Auden’s six characteristics of a critic. (See the introduction to Book Reviews at MonatanaWriter.)

Auden, his prologue to Dyers Hand,  wrote that a critic should:

1. Introduce me to authors or works of art of which I was hitherto unaware.
2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.
3. Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
4. Give a “reading” of a work which increases my understanding of it.
5. Throw light upon the process of artistic “Making.”
6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.

I undertook re-reading and “reviewing” Mickey Spillane for the same reason that I have chosen to write about most of the poems or books that have been reviewed here: because they are works of art worth thinking and writing about.

There is an irony, of course, to quoting Auden in a review of Mickey Spillane. While Auden enjoyed reading mysteries and even wrote one of the best essays ever written about the genre, he clearly doubted the “literary merit” of the books he viewed merely as enjoyable reading for winding down at the end of a day.

Auden was a lover of “cozy” mysteries, the British kind… not the hardboiled American kind. He was most certainly not one of the many millions who made Mickey Spillane the best selling writer in the world.

Yet it needs to be said, while Auden was as great a poet and critic as any in the 20th Century, he was dead wrong in one thing: mysteries can be true literature.

Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Mickey Spillane are not merely great genre-writers, they are true artists… certainly some of the most significant literary stylists of the 20th Century.

While Chandler’s literary reputation has grown now over the years, and Ross MacDonald’s to a lesser extent, Spillane remains an artistic pariah… a greatly under-appreciated hardboiled genius.

In  a five year period between 1947 and 1952, Mickey Spillane wrote six Mike Hammer novels:

• I, the Jury (1947)
• My Gun is Quick (1950)
• Vengeance is Mine! (1950)
• One Lonely Night (1951)
• The Big Kill (1951)
• Kiss Me, Deadly (1952)

Based on a character that Spillane had in mind for a comic book, Mike Hammer and Mike Hammer’s voice must have been inhabiting the dark streets of Spillane’s imagination for some time before he finally sat down in front of his Smith-Corona Super-Speed and cranked out this pulp classic.

While I, The Jury was written in just 19 days, it is clear in the opening sentences of the book that the fully-formed character of Mike Hammer that comes into the room shaking rain off of his hat is already a force of nature, one of the great literary archetypes to ever step out of the pages of a book and into the world. In language and tone, writer and detective hit us hard immediately like a punch in the gut.

Returning now to I, The Jury after having spent the last month and a half reading the other five initial Hammer books made me appreciate this literary classic all the more.

Here are the opening lines of I, the Jury.

Enjoy!

The opening paragraphs of I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane

 

I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room. Nobody said a word. They stepped back politely and I could feel their eyes on me. Pat Chambers was standing by the door to the bedroom trying to steady Myrna. The girl’s body was racking with dry sobs. I walked over and put my arms around her.

“Take it easy, kid,” I told her. “Come on over here and lie down.” I led her to a studio couch that was against the far wall and sat her down. She was in pretty bad shape. One of the uniformed cops put a pillow down for her and she stretched out.

Pat motioned me over to him and pointed to the bedroom. “In there, Mike,” he said. In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle. Jack, the guy who said he’d give his right arm for a friend and did when he stopped a bastard of a Jap from slitting me in two. He caught the bayonet in the biceps and they amputated his arm.

Pat didn’t say a word. He let me uncover the body and feel the cold face. For the first time in my life I felt like crying. “Where did he get it, Pat?”

[Spillane, Mickey (2001-06-01). The Mike Hammer Collection: Volume I: 1 (p. 5). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.]

 

_____

The Rev. Hugh B. Jones’s Notebooks

The feature Hugh’s Journals has appeared here on Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

It has been awhile since I posted a page or two from Hugh’s Journals. For reader’s unfamiliar with the Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones, he is my wife’s paternal grandfather and was a Welsh Presbyterian minister and army chaplain. He was an intellectual, a fly-fishermen, and always a pastor. During his long reading life, he kept notebooks where he typed up quotes and passages that he could use in Sunday sermons, at funerals and weddings, or when he was visiting parishioners. My wife inherited some of these notebooks.

I have moved his journals up now to my own writing desk. My own journal of typed-up poems sits next to his. The multi-volumes of notebooks created by a Presbyterian pastor who loved language and poetry sitting next to the small but growing journal of one who was very, very briefly a Lutheran pastor who also loves reading and language.

You can see from Hugh’s date-notations that he returned to these lines often. The first time in 1940 and the last in 1960. 73 years after he first used them in a sermon, I post them here.

Enjoy!

 _____

keys

Poets end up writing about the writing process because they spend so much time thinking and wondering about it. It is the same reason Hollywood ends up making movies about making movies. We naturally write about what interests us and what we know best.

Years ago I started wondering for the first time about how writing on a computer changes my writing.  I had never like the soft sound of computer keyboarding and began to wonder if that sound somehow impacted how my poems sounded to me.

This is a poem I probably first started sometime in the mid-1990s. It is the first one I re-worked on my “new” Smith-Corona Super-Speed.

Enjoy!

Underwood 319

When I first began writing seriously, it was on borrowed manual typewriters… the portable kind. For those who grew up typing, not keyboarding, there is a nostalgic-comforting sound to old manual typewriters. It is the same feeling I get from the sound of basketballs bouncing on a gym floor or the sounds of a bowling alley.

Writing on a manual typewriter is a physical thing, a tactile thing, an auditory experience. The click-clacking of the keys. The bell at the end of the line. The joy of advancing to the next line.

A number of years ago I picked up a manual typewriter of my own, an Underwood 319 at a garage sale. I dusted it off, played with it for awhile, then put it away. There was no easy place for it to stay. And so it went downstairs to collect dust and to wait.

A new working-space in my house has now opened up. It means that after a number of years I have room again. Today I went downstairs and brought the typewriter up. Took it out of the case and began to write.

My Underwood 319 (pictured) is tan and well-used and now sits in my new writing space. Researching on the internet, I came upon this information about the machine.

 Underwood, the great American typewriter manufacturer, was acquired by famed Italian typewriter manufacture Olivetti in the 1960s. The merged company continued to manufacture typewriters under the name of Olivetti Underwood or Underwood Olivetti. In the late 70s, however, the Underwood name was revived and used on machines that the company manufactured in Spain. One of these was the Underwood 319….
    The body of the machine as well as the keys is made from molded plastic, but the interior mechanism is all-steel and is based on Olivetti’s famous Lettera machines…. The font style is Pica, which looks like a large Times New Roman. In fact, it most resembles the American Typewriter font that Apple includes in its office suite. As you can see, it is sober, well-spaced, and very readable. (cf. Retro Tech Geneva)

The first poem I typed (on a “stale” ribbon) is, appropriately, one about time.

Enjoy!

_____

It is the unflagging beauty of the writing, day after day, that confirms [Thoreau's Journals] greatness among writers’ journals. ~ Alfred Kazin

Here in the North Country, duck season has opened. In the mornings, we hear the echo of shotgun blasts from the river bottom. I have never been a hunter myself but it is a sound that always leaves me smiling.

Walking along the edge of the wildlife refuge this week we heard the sound of duck-calling and across the river spotted a hunter  standing up in his blind. He was facing south with his back to us and to the steep riverbank and broad river between us. Far below him, swimming unnoticed, a single pied-billed grebe paddled and dived in the slow moving river.

Farther down the trail at one of the beaver ponds that parallel the river, we came across a dozen wild turkeys who tried to move as quietly as they could through the dry leaves. Hiding is difficult in late autumn woodlands.

Thoreau’s Journals read like prose poetry. It is what makes his Journals for me, my favorite of all his writings. At 47 manuscript volumes and seven million words, his journals are one of the great literary works of the western world. They would be a daunting undertaking if it were not for the number of redacted editions that are available in the public domain.

As I have said before on previous Thoreau Thursdays, I read Thoreau because reading him is “like spending time in the wilderness that he so loved: it restores your soul.”

On an overcast October day, Thoreau seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

A few quotes from Thoreau’s Journals

 

Oct. 24. Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest. The pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil, the harder woods a strong and fruitful mould. So this constant abrasion and decay makes the soil of my future growth. As I live now so shall I reap. If I grow pines and birches, my virgin mould will not sustain the oak; but pines and birches, or, perchance, weeds and brambles, will constitute my second growth. [Thoreau, Henry David; Searls, Damion (2011-11-16). The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 (New York Review Books Classics) (p. 3). Random House Inc Clients. Kindle Edition.]

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

WHAT TO DO
March 5. But what does all this scribbling amount to? What is now scribbled in the heat of the moment one can contemplate with somewhat of satisfaction, but alas! to-morrow— aye, to-night— it is stale, flat, and unprofitable,— in fine, is not, only its shell remains, like some red parboiled lobster-shell which, kicked aside never so often, still stares at you in the path. [Thoreau, Henry David; Searls, Damion (2011-11-16). The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 (New York Review Books Classics) (p. 6). Random House Inc Clients. Kindle Edition.]

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

COMPOSITION
March 7. We should not endeavor coolly to analyze our thoughts, but, keeping the pen even and parallel with the current, make an accurate transcript of them. Impulse is, after all, the best linguist, and for his logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, it cannot fail to be most convincing. The nearer we approach to a complete but simple transcript of our thought the more tolerable will be the piece, for we can endure to consider ourselves in a state of passivity or in involuntary action, but rarely our efforts, and least of all our rare efforts. [Thoreau, Henry David; Searls, Damion (2011-11-16). The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 (New York Review Books Classics) (p. 6). Random House Inc Clients. Kindle Edition.]

_____

Sumac Red

From time to time I come across an article about “the writing life.” Occasionally I will even read one, or parts at least. When I do, I seldom recognize much that is familiar from my own writing life. I am hoping that a slight adjustment in my second-job work schedule may help with that.

Writing takes time… as does reading… as does most things in life that matter.

When you are in your 20s, you are by nature impatient yet still able to take time and health and life itself for granted. When you are in your 50s, and have been paying attention to the things you should have been paying attention to, you may have finally learned at least a little patience. Yet, irony of irony, at half a century you now realize that you can no longer take anything for granted.

In the past few months I have been feeling an urgency about many things that I have been putting off for awhile… some for months, some for years, some for decades. Things I have been assuming I would finally get to “later… when I have the time and money.”

Autumn is the perfect time for such thoughts. As trees drop their leaves, we think of the dross and drivel of our own lives… the things that once seemed so important but now can be easily let go.

I find myself making mental lists. One is of all the things I have wanted to do but have not yet done. Some of the things on that list have been there for 40 years, some have been added and altered over time, and many things that would have once been there are long deleted. Time distills dreams.

The other list I make is of things I am ready to let go.

The cottonwood behind my house is mostly bare now. The locust and ash trees are just beginning to show signs of color around their edges. Driving out of my neighborhood, greens and yellows seem to mix equally with the cool blue of the late September sky. It is autumn in the North Country.

AUTUMN, by Amy Lowell

All day I have watched the purple vine leaves

Fall into the water.

And now in the moonlight they still fall,

But each leaf is fringed with silver.

 _____

Beware the barrenness of a busy life. ~ Socrates

"Temple Garden" by Paul Klee

Busyness has been the order of the day for me now for quite some time, and hence, there has not been much action at MontanaWriter of late. Being busy is not, of course, my natural disposition… far from it. Poets are not doers but dreamers. And dreaming requires nothing less than plenty of time and quietness. Alas for now… there can be little of either.

While I allude occasionally here at MontanaWriter to my personal life, I notice looking back through posts that I seldom say very much directly. It is the same way in my personal life. I work and hang out with people who have no idea that I blog, or write poems and western short stories, or read poetry, or went to seminary and was once a chaplain and a pastor…. The list goes on. An introverted personality and a natural western reticence to talk about myself keep me from sharing much more than few comments about the weather or last night’s game… even with those with whom I drink beer.

I notice I do the reverse here at MontanaWriter, hardly ever write anything about my life.

I have been thinking lately of how to bring these two sides of my self together, hoping perhaps that bringing them together will give me much needed creative energy. It certainly couldn’t hurt.

For those who know me only through MontanaWriter here is an introduction of sorts, to my non-blogging life these days:

I currently work full-time, 40 hours a week, doing tech support for a public school system here in Minnesota. On top of that, I have also been working a second job, 15-20 hours a week, at one of our local Apple Stores since last August… almost a year now.

Mornings come early when you are working two jobs. I start at 7:00 a.m. on my “day job.” I get home between 9:30-10:30 p.m. from my second, part-time job. Since it takes awhile to “wind down” from that second job, I usually try to read a bit on my iPhone: a couple of blogs I follow, some sports sites to catch up on scores and news, a book on my Kindle app…. just easy, light reading.

It is not the kind of reading that a writer needs and not the kind of time… but it is what I have. I am mindful that Wallace Stevens and Ted Kooser and William Carlos William had full days and still managed to write some of the most original poetry written by Americans. And I am also mindful that in an economy where so many are out of work only an ingrate would complain about being lucky enough to have two jobs they enjoy.

My energy for writing and blogging ebbs and flows… MontanaWriter shows this. During the latest “hiatus” I have done some planning to help make things easier on myself during times when creative energy is hard to find. I am excited about some new directions and trajectories. I hope you will be too.

For now, it is is enough to be writing and posting again….

_____

This month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about the month of March. For more March poems, click here.

A gray day puts me in a gray state of mind. That is often the way it is for me. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I think better and write better when the sky feels closer to earth. On days of fog and low-slung clouds I naturally stay closer to my self… am less likely to feel dissipated and refracted.

Writing is a brooding art… not a social one. A sunny day on a beach does not lend itself to brooding. A foggy, rainy day on your couch, surrounded by shelves of books, naturally does. I like to brood. It is, in the end, what I do best. It is what poets and writers do best.

In the poem “It is March,” Merwin writes about March, and writing, and such days.

Enjoy!

It Is March
It is March and black dust falls out of the books
Soon I will be gone
The tall spirit who lodged here has
Left already
On the avenues the colorless thread lies under
Old prices

When you look back there is always the past
Even when it has vanished
But when you look forward
With your dirty knuckles and the wingless
Bird on your shoulder
What can you write

The bitterness is still rising in the old mines
The fist is coming out of the egg
The thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses

At a certain height
The tails of the kites for a moment are
Covered with footsteps

Whatever I have to do has not yet begun

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

At a certain height
The tails of the kites for a moment are
Covered with footsteps

Whatever I have to do has not yet begun

Merwin is the “suffering singer”… the writer who makes beauty out of pain. I have written of Merwin elsewhere at MontanaWriter that:

Merwin is at his best when dealing with the emotions of loneliness and guilt… universal emotions occasioned by finitude, by living in a fallen creation. There is nothing occasional about loneliness and guilt. They are the  human condition… the field that we all labor and sing in.

Themes of loneliness and guilt are central to “It is March”. And yet, there is also behind it all – or more appropriately – beneath the words and images of this poem a subtext of hope. Without hope after all, there can be no music, no art, no language, no words.

____

Nick slipped off his pack and lay down in the shade. He lay on his back and looked up into the pine trees. His neck and back and the small of his back rested as he stretched. The earth felt good against his back. He looked up at the sky, through the branches, and then shut his eyes. He opened them and looked up again. There was a wind high up in the branches. He shut his eyes again and went to sleep. ~ Hemingway, cf. “Big Two-Hearted River”

Longtime and regular readers of MontanaWriter may know that each year I re-read Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”… my secular Lenten discipline I suppose. Usually I wait for April to arrive before I read it again. This year, maybe because it has been so unseasonably warm… maybe because I have been feeling of late the need to be re-connected with the most essential parts of myself, I opened Hemingway’s book of collected short stories earlier than usual and  – for the 30th time at least –  read the story again.

Hemingway was the first writer that mattered to me. The first that showed me what literature could be. The first that made me want to read and to care about art and beauty.

Hemingway occupies a special place in my pantheon of writers… along with Yeats and Heaney and Auden and Whitman and Keats and Shelley and Blake and Milton… The list is long, but he is the first non-poet I put on the list.

Hemingway has always seemed poetic to me… the most poetic of all prose writers. It is is something in the rhythm of his language and his use of space. You see it especially in some of his short stories and in The Old Man and the Sea. This is one of the reasons that it has always seemed strange to me that so few women I know like to read Hemingway.

Hemingway understood… better than any prose writer I know… that the key to great writing is to leave things out. If things are written well we do not have to be told specifically what a character thinks or believes, we do not need to know the character’s back-story, we can tell by actions: actions (not back-story) reveal character.

We are never told by Hemingway that the character of Nick in “The Big Two-Hearted River” is trying to use a fishing trip to keep from thinking about something great and terrible. A lesser writer – and let’s face it, most writers are “lesser” writers – would tell us this fact directly. They would write something like, “Nick tried not to think of the terrible time when….” or, “Nick who had just ….” Even more likely they would start their story by creating a long back-story, a whole novel, and end with what Hemingway wrote as a final scene. They would not trust themselves to tell the story the way Hemingway does nor trust their readers.

Hemingway trusted his talent enough to leave things out. He writes the story in a way that even though almost everything is left out… left unsaid… we can still know by what Nick is doing what is happening. It is a marvelously difficult way to write… the most difficult. It places immense demands on the writer and the reader. It is daring writing. It is poetic prose. It is the kind of writing we should all aspire to.

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. ~ Hemingway, cf. letter to Max Perkins

* * * * * * * * * *

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things. ~ Hemingway, cf. Death in the Afternoon

____