“Wine is sunlight held together by water.”
This morning the sun is streaming through our windows and, preparing for the hot day ahead, we just went out to water our strawberries and hanging plants. I was reminded of this quote by the Italian scientist and philosopher who was born in Pisa in 1564. Perhaps with Galileo’s knowledge of astronomy and with the improvements he made to the telescope, he was apt to link wine with the solar system. A toast to the weekend!
“It took me time to understand my waterlilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.”
At a London auction at Christie’s this week, one of Claude Monet’s waterlilies series titled Le Bassin aux Nymphéas sold for $80.4 million. Funny that Monet was thinking more like a gardener than a painter when he planted his now famous waterlilies. Thank goodness this French impressionist followed his early creative yearnings rather than going into the family grocery business as his father wished.
“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”
“The soft gray of the dawn had lightened and the sky was the wet pale blue of a watercolor sky just painted and not yet dried.”
“It was the time of afternoon when the bars of sunlight crossed the back yard like the bars of a bright strange jail.”
“In the gray of the kitchen on summer afternoons the tone of her voice was golden and quiet, and you could listen to the color and the singing of her voice and not follow the words.”
I blogged about Carson McCullers last Friday, and now as I continue reading The Member of the Wedding, I am struck by her descriptions of the summer days experienced by 12-year old Frankie. That watercolor sky would not be so memorable if McCullers had not told us it was still wet. And when she talks about the bars of sunlight, I can see them slanting into Frankie’s yard. She is a master of writing the atmosphere in this story which McCullers once referred to as a fugue.
“How come when it’s us it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken it’s an omelet?”
Irreverent and original, George Carlin’s love of words came through in the stand-up comedy he shared for almost five decades. Carlin died yesterday at age 71. Carlin said his parents loved language and passed that along to him. He was known for his word play and long list of oxymorons including “jumbo shrimp.”
Carlin saw the absurdities in life. “This is my art, to interpret the world.”
How do you edit your writing? Do you let it sit overnight? Read it aloud? Sometimes, I print out a composition since my eyes tend to see things on paper they don’t see on a screen.
James Kilpatrick’s current syndicated column titled Redundancy Good, Redundancy Bad asks when words should be struck, or kept for cadence or clarity. Kilpatrick cites Strunk & White’s rule to “Omit needless words” which comes from my favorite writers’ reference book.
My personal beef is business emails. In my corporate days, I noticed they were often the wordiest writing I encountered. How annoying on a busy day at the office to plod through flabby sentences! When you separate the chaff from the wheat, the meaning is stronger.
“There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.”
I’ve just discovered writer Carson McCullers (1917-1967). I am reading her book The Member of the Wedding about a lonely girl, jealous of her brother’s wedding, who feels she doesn’t belong anywhere. In 1946 Saturday Review wrote about her book, which also became a Broadway play: “What makes this story so unusual is the fact that most of it takes place through the medium of desultory conversations between three really weird people sitting in an even weirder kitchen. Nothing or almost nothing occurs here, and yet every page is filled with a sense of something having happened, happening, and about to happen. This in itself is a considerable technical feat; and, beyond that, there is magic in it.”
McCullers’ life was filled with writing, personal sadness, health problems, alcoholism and literary acclaim; you can read more about her here. Let me know if you’ve read any novels, short stories or poetry of McCullers whose style is often referred to as Southern Gothic.
“I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.”
A good thought well worded from Spanish writer and poet Rosalia de Castro (1837 to 1885). De Castro is speaking figuratively about her journey through life but it also makes me think of physical travel. On vacations, you hope to see certain sites, then make discoveries of the unknown which can be more inspiring than what was planned. Perhaps because school is out and everyone seems to be going on vacation, I feel the travel bug too. Where are you traveling?
I think Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches should be required reading by all world leaders. Remember the story about the star-belly Sneetches who act superior to the plain ones? The plain Sneetches feel left out until Sylvester McMonkey McBean, who calls himself the Fix-it-Up Chappie, comes along with a machine that changes everything. In the end, McBean gets rich off the Sneetches prejudice but they finally learn to get along.
“Just pay me your money and hop right aboard!”
So they clambered inside. Then the big machine roared
And it klonked. And it bonked. And it jerked. And it berked
And it bopped them about. But the thing really worked!
When the Plain-Belly Sneetches popped out, they had stars!
They actually did. They had stars upon thars!
Theodor Seuss Geisel published more than 60 children’s books. Along with his wonderful rhymes and funny made-up words, he usually has a message in his books such as this one. Also, there is a driving rhythm in his word choices. I learned the poetic meter Seuss often wrote in was anapestic tetrameter which has two unstressed syllables followed by a strong one. So that’s the secret behind his books which make them so fun to read aloud.
Bed In Summer
In winter I get up at night,
And dress by yellow candle light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day,
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street,
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
My Robert Louis Stevenson poetry book titled A Child’s Garden of Verses (published in 1885) was one of my favorites growing up. Most of us remember having to go to bed when it seemed the grown-ups were still awake having fun. Here there’s light still at 9:00 in the evening which extends our day as we sit outside watching the deer stroll by.
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