"There will be time, there will be time"

"To lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."

John Lubbock

Found on the Local Weatherperson's Blog

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression in unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost."

Martha Graham

From: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

image by Gordon Parks

"My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

Langston Hughes

A Rare Saturday Post

I loved the Daily Literary Quote so much, I had to immediately Web-nap it:

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

Mary Oliver

Enjoy your weekends, bloggees!

Me loves this.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, --
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson

From: "What Do Women Want?"

"I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath..."

You can hear Kim Addonizio read this poem aloud by visiting the Academy of American Poets Web site.

Loves her. Don't want to infringe on copyright though, so go read the whole thing. Read more from her book Tell Me at her author's Web site.

From: "Thirty-three"

Deep in thought, I forgive everyone
as the cluttered streets greet me once again...
Tomorrow's just an excuse away,
so I pull my collar up and face the cold
on my own.

...

For a moment, I lose myself
wrapped up in the pleasures of the world.
I've journeyed here and there and back again
but in the same old haunts I still find my friends.

Mysteries not ready to reveal,
sympathies I'm ready to return:

I'll make the effort.
Love can last forever...

"Thirty-three"
Smashing Pumpkins

From: A Certain Slant of Light

"I thought if I could read you what I wrote, you could give me some advice."

He was struck silent, rarely having heard these words from a student's lips. "Of course." He motioned me to sit in the front row. "Is it a poem?" he asked.

"No," I said, letting my bag clunk onto the floor beside the chair as I sat. I cherished his attention so much, but now it was difficult to bear. I kept my gaze on the paper in my hands. "Not exactly."

"A short story?"

"Well, it's short."

Be bold, I told myself. "A Letter from a Muse to Her Poet," I read. He leaned back in his chair. "Dear sir, I was called away and couldn't bring you, but now I feel haunted." He was staring at me, which made my cheeks prickle. "I know that sometimes you felt I was a part of you and that losing me would leave a hole in your heart, but that's not true." I looked up now, knowing the rest by heart. "I liked to pretend I was the core of your talent, but it wasn't me. Everything you do, the ideas you weave, the lines you write, the words you choose, it was always only you." He was still as a statue. "Please forgive me," I said. "I'm sorry that I didn't say goodbye."

A Certain Slant of Light
Laura Whitcomb

P.S., A friend of mine is reading a certain vampire book and of course she loves it, but her main qualm is an interesting one. She gets perturbed when the vampire speaks with incorrect grammar. The other characters' bad grammar doesn't bother her, but as she put it "THAT IS NOT HOW HE SPEAKS! HE WOULD NEVER SAY THAT!"

Secret: long ago, when I only dreamed of being a writer, I convinced myself I did not need to pay attention to all that grammar stuff because "my peeps talked real." I was really limiting myself, I later realized, by not even learning the tools required to write intelligent characters.

Why am I telling you this? Because bibliophiles and grammarphiles will love A Certain Slant of Light because the main characters speak so well. It's their very nature. Plus, OMG, IT'S SO GOOD!

From: A Room With A View

"Though you fly to Greece, and never see him again, or forget his very name, George will work in your thoughts till you die. It isn't possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal."

A Room With A View
E. M. Forster

From: "The Black Art"

"A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl."

Man, I love me some Anne Sexton.

Apropos

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
at the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

James Wright

From: "Tickle Me Pink"

"Pray for the people inside your head,
for they won't be there when you're dead."

Tickle Me Pink
Johnny Flynn

The Latest Disease: Do you have it?

If you've ever been unemployed long enough to get into Dr. Phil, you know about body dysmorphia--a social disorder that makes people obsess about a perceived physical flaw. It's a "perceived" flaw because the flaw isn't nearly as horrendous as the perceiver thinks.

According to Wikipedia, the most freaked-about flaw in people who have body dysmorphia is acne. Wrong again, Wikipedia. Meet my new anxiety disorder (I have several. I collect them.):

Writing Dysmorphia

I have no friggin' clue if my writing is any good. How does one tell? Just this week, I've described my writing with one or more of the following adjectives:

crisp / stilted
funny / cheesy
gripping / WTF?

You know those people on American Idol? You know the ones! So confident they're going to blow the judges away, they open their mouths and we viewers are stuck between laughter and the immense guilt of watching someone's genuine dreams crushed on international television for our entertainment.

What if I'm one of those people?

Perusing the web-definitions of dysmorphia, I came across this tidbit:

"Body dysmorphic disorder interferes with functioning and may lead to social isolation..."

Oh my, yet another symptom I exhibit. While my friends hit the local hipster hangout, I lock myself in a tiny upstairs room à la Bertha Mason, deleting and re-entering commas, reading aloud, pacing. I am sick, y'all.

Writing brethren, two of my non-virtual writer friends tell me that writing dysmorphia is rampant. In fact, they say everyone has it. Is this true?

Do you have writing dysmorphia? Have you any idea whether your writing is good, bad, or fugly? How do you gain this objectivity? Cure me, peeps!

Found: People Braver Than Me

The coolest people in the world post their naked pictures at Bookworms with Ink. My picture will probably never be posted there because I change my mind too much and I dislike pain. Like a lot.

So here is my question for you: If you were going to get a literary tattoo, what would it be?

From: “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”

"And one day we will die,
and our ashes will fly
from the aeroplane over the sea,
but for now we are young:
let us lay in the sun
and count every
beautiful thing we can see."

Neutral Milk Hotel

Some of the Saddest Stories are True

I'll be (blog) silent most of the day while I keep promises and meet deadlines.

Thanks to the Divine Miss Cecil Catellucci for writing about two cool characters who stumble across an interesting site in Los Angeles in her book Beige. Without this scene, I might never have known about figure 8 wall, a picture of which appears at the top of this post.

After Elliot Smith died, the wall that serves as background on the cover of his album Figure 8 became a place for people to pay tribute. They covered the white space with messages to Smith.

Elliot Smith is one of my voices.

From: "Between the Bars"

"The people you've been before
that you don't want around anymore:
they push and shove and won't
bend to your will,

I'll keep them still."

Arts & Crafts: Writing and Painting

Occasionally, I like to slap a painting up here on the Booknapped, and offer a few facts about its artist or the period when it was painted. Perhaps pictures deserve their own blog like Artnapped or The Painter’s Almanac, but that will not do.

This excerpt from an interview with Ernest Hemingway explains the connection between painting and writing:

Interviewer: Who would you say are your literary forebears, those you have learned the most from?

Hemingway: Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgeniev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto . . . Goya, Giotto, Cezanne, Van Gogh . . . I put in painters, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers . . . I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.

Painters, writers, musicians: we are all telling stories, creating atmosphere, using perspective, pacing, and color to create feeling in our audience.

For instance, the image above this post titled Du Mourron pour les Oiseaux by Raymond Peynet, a French illustrator, offers a nice example of how big a part description of buildings should play in a love story. Translation in words: Not big at all.

You can see more art by Peynet at this site that wouldn’t let me copy its images. My favorite is this drawing. The saying at the bottom comes from the French idiom “On ne peut pas vivre d'amour et d'eau fraiche.” In English, “You can’t live on love and water alone.”

Apparently, this is what French people say to French children who don't want to work, just want to bang on the drum all day.

A Quick Laugh for the Enlightened

Do you think of Google as an extension of your brain? I do, so I thought this comic was hilarious. Thanks to Citizen X over at tanjentsdotcom, an Internet culture blog, for turning me on to it.

"I'm afraid you have a brain cloud, Joe."

If you stared at this image long enough, you read my novel--sort of.

Wordle is a nifty site where users can create word clouds from blocks of text. Words that appear more often in the text are bigger. So, you writers who are afraid you use "was" or "two" too much, you can use Wordle to get a picture of the words you use the most.

Apparently, I use "like" a lot--more than my main character's name even. I'll be de-like-afying my ms in the coming days. I removed some of my other characters' names from my word cloud--one in particular--because his name was huge. To rectify that, I'll be adding more scenes with other characters to balance things out.

That's Wordle in action: letting you know where to pare down and where to biggify (to use the parlance of one of my favorite blogs).

So head over to Wordle and build a word cloud. Then, copy the code of your creation into the comments section. I'd love to see what's on your mind.

Happy Birthday, Salvador Dali.

The Tower, 1934

"[W]hen you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape"

Federico García Lorca