Category Archives: Writing

Cooking, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Beets, Romans and High Fantasy

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Beltane                                                                       Early Growth Moon

Kate has been trying to reconstruct an amazing beet pureed soup we had at Fika in the American Swedish Institute.  The chef gave us some of his or her ingredients, all of them?  I’m not sure.  But Kate’s done a good job of closing in on it.  It’s delightful, tangy and creamy with a great feel in the mouth.

I’ve spent the Sunday beginning to check my Latin translations against the commentaries and entering notes into the file I’m keeping for the commentary Greg and I may write.  This is fun work, finding better words, puzzling over the thoughts of Ovid scholars.  Once I’ve finished the recheck, I’m going to start reading the Ovid scholarship I’ve collected.

In the afternoon I’ve proceeded with the revision, rewrite of Missing.  I’m well into the first third, adding thicker description, plumping up character development, making the narrative a more coherent whole.  This is fun, too.

Even so, my mind can only take so much fun before the brain that supports its work begins to wear out the rest of my body. That’s where I am now.  Tired. Enough for the day.

 

Art and Culture, Cooking, Great Work, Latin, Third Phase, Writing

Gotta Get Out More

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Beltane                                                                              Early Growth Moon

My docent class is on a 5 day jaunt to Chicago.  Were it not for Kona’s vet visits, I’d be there, too.  This is a full week now since I sent in my resignation to the MIA.  Nada.  Silence.  Nothing.  12 years.  Almost as weird as the weather.  It’s like the Institute has organizational autism.

It’s been a full day with work outside and inside, a quiet evening reading.

Though I can see that the chained mornings and the Latin in the mid-afternoons is very productive, I’m also seeing a desire in myself to get out more.  Kate had to sort of drop kick me into it, but now that she has I realize the path I’ve chosen will increasingly isolate me and us, if we’re not very intentional about getting out.

To that end I signed up us for a fund raiser for CSA Roots, apparently the former Community Design Center with which I did a lot of work in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  This fund-raiser features a hand-crafted, all locally sourced meal at the Heartland Restaurant across from the former site of the St. Paul Farmer’s Market.  Appropriately enough the dinner is on June 21st, the Summer Solstice.

We’re also planning a trip into the American Swedish Institute this week to see the Sami exhibition and eat at the Institutes new restaurant.  Hmmm.  Do most of our activities involve food?  Which by the way is ok since I’ve lost at least 14 pounds on this lower carb diet in addition to increasing the nutrient load of my food consumption and, the point of it, lowering my blood sugar well below levels of concern.

 

 

Garden, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Good Day, Even If It Is 95

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

Got outside around mid-day and planted chard, kale and carrots.  Need to get a second round of beets in the ground, too.  We’re well under way now, with beets emerging, leeks going well, garlic beginning to curl skyward though a bit behind, onions still a bit pale at the top, but progressing.  No bees today due to the cloudy morning, the best time to check on them, but not when its cloudy and rainy.  So tomorrow.

Using the time, the mornings for Missing, writing and revising in turn, trying to remember all the pieces.  A little difficult.  Like juggling chainsaws, bowling pins, feathers and knives.

Not unlike the afternoon’s translating.   Holding those words and ideas in the air, not committing, or at least not over-committing, to a particular meaning until all the pieces have been considered.  Mentally tired.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Literature, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Like Attending My Own Funeral

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Beltane                                                                                 Early Growth Moon

Sort of like attending my own funeral.   All day today notes have come in from docent classmates responding to my resignation from the program which I sent out in a private newsletter we have just for our class.  Mini-eulogies.  It’s interesting because it is often this kind of stuff that we don’t feel liberated to say until a relationship has been severed, either by death or by saying a permanent good-bye.  Would probably be good if we could learn to say these things more often.  Thanks to all of you who’ve written.

The revision process has legs now, new material being written, older material rewritten.  I’m back in the fictive dream of Missing, inhabiting the two worlds and living with their characters, their flora and fauna.  It’s a homecoming of sorts.  Though I’ve been into for a month or so in terms of writing, I’ve been at it for longer with reading material from beta readers, re-reading the text myself and plotting a strategy for this third revision.

Put another 5 verses of Book I into English today, making better and more notes about items for the commentary.  I really want this commentary to synch with Perseus, but I also want it to live on smartphones and tablet computers.  I want it to be the commentary for this media age.

Greg and I talked last Friday about how this kind of reading necessarily becomes close reading, a sort of reading often promoted, but less often executed.   You might call it slow reading.

Speed reading has its place, I guess, and I certainly tried to put it to use, having taken the Evelyn Woods program when I started college in 1965.  This program preaches adapting your speed to the kind of reading you’re doing.  So, say Time magazine or Sports Illustrated (of equal depth most of the time) might take your quickest scan, finger moving down the center of the page with some speed.  Philosophy on the other hand would go much more slowly, say 150 words a minute.  The idea preached by speed readers is that the quicker you go the more your mind concentrates on reading alone, not wandering away.  Maybe.

What I do know is that if you want to learn, slowing down to the pace translation forces, often word by word, looking up the word, its grammatical forms, figuring out how they fit together before the sense of the sentence begins to emerge, then you read slowly.  Letting the mind wander when it will, tracking words down through paths already in the mind, making connections, asking questions, probing the text.  This is how you make a work your own.

So, I’m for slow food, slow travel, slow reading, slow thinking.

 

Art and Culture, Family, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Laboravi

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Beltane                                                                     Early Growth Moon

Out to Famous Dave’s at 11:20 this morning, just ahead of the Mother’s Day rush.  We had a nice meal, discussing family, as the restaurant slowly filled up, the number of very large patrons noticeable unfortunately.

I’ve been back at work on Missing, now writing new material, most focused on John’s origins, where he came from and what if any implications that might have for his time on Tailte.  This will lead into the work of experimenting with point of view, which I’ve given a lot of thought but have not made any decisions about as yet.

Greg, Latin tutor, began to push me a bit this last time, saying how many verses he wanted me to tackle before our next time.  Up til now I’ve been learning at a pace comfortable for me, maybe a bit slow for him, but ok since I was the student.  Now, I’m closer to a colleague and we need to have adequate material before us each time we meet.  We’ve met in person once in the last three and a half years, at Kate’s retirement party at the MIA two Januaries ago.  Odd.

I sat down and pounded out five verses in a little more than an hour.  This includes making commentary notes in Microsoft Notes, words to highlight, helps, ways in which Perseus confuses the matter, words Perseus doesn’t have.

Here’s a strange, and a bit disturbing, thing.  I turned in my resignation from the MIA last Tuesday.  I’ve heard nothing from them.  12 years.  Nothing.  Weird.  And confirming of my decision.

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Writing

The Veiled Narrative

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Beltane                                                                       Early Growth Moon

Shane Carruth, Upstream Color (see below), was also the cinematographer.  Forgot that last night.

In answering questions, in particular about the density of his works, he made two points, both interesting.  First, he said he makes a narrative as it needs to be to tell his story.  That means it may take  more than one pass to take in all  the narrative has to offer.  Just like reading a book or seeing a painting.  Made sense to me.

(Barrias, French, 1893)

Second, all narratives, he believes, are veiled, which he emphasized in answers to more than one question.  In this he means the viewer or reader never knows the whole story and often knows a very limited portion of it.  I took from his overall answers that this conviction comes from life, where the future veils the narrative in every instance and, too, I suppose, since we never know the interiority of the other, veiled in that sense as well.

While I agree intellectually with this latter point, as an intention in a work of art, I’m suspicious.  It can too easily serve as an excuse for careless ambiguity and might enforce an aterminus approach to story telling; which, though it is true as Carruth said last night, that all film narratives must end (and by implication in that way deviate from the truly veiled nature of the narrative future) that departure from reality should not encourage pointless realism.

There may be some of that in this film.  Until I’ve had longer to consider it, and until I’ve seen it at least a second time, I’ll reserve my opinion on that.

 

Art and Culture, Writing

Writing.

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Beltane                                                                            Planting Moon

Writing and revising all morning.  A 1,000 new words.  More thoughts on how the story can unfold with fuller descriptive details, deeper character development and a unified narrative line.

More Ovid this afternoon.

In the wake of my resignation from the MIA I feel liberated, as I knew I would.  The sadness has begun to lift.  I will stay connected to my class, that will suffice in terms of relationships.  Just what it will take to keep me connected to the world of art?  Still unclear, but it’s something I can’t let slide either.

In fact, I’ll also be working today some more on Nighthawks and my interpretive matrix.  The world has so many opportunities, no matter your gifts or motivations.  I’m grateful, as my buddy Bill Schimdt says, to be Still Here to enjoy them.

Friends, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate, Writing

Cartography and Snow

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Spring                                                                                       Planting Moon

Spent the morning redrawing a map of the Winter Realm and Summer Realm on Tailte.  Tomorrow I’ll work on detailed maps of both separately, the islands and the Dark Range.  This was a constant among the beta readers and I agreed.  Doing them now will help the rewrite.

This afternoon I hit a wall on the next four verses of Book I, the Metamorphoses.  My mind seized up and would go no further.  So, I went upstairs and took videos of the dogs play in the already 5-6 inches of new snow.  And, it’s still snowing.  Supposed to get heavier over night.

Worked out, aerobic only because my back still complains from my lifting the hive box with honey on Tuesday.  I could have done without this, but I caused it so what can you do?

Sheepshead canceled.  With the snow coming down heavy now and predicted to be heavier still we decided to put it off.  It was a wise decision, but I will miss the conversation and camaraderie.   Wanted to hear what the Jesuits thought about the new pope.

 

Weather +Climate, Writing

Inspiration in Winter/Spring

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Spring                                                                         Planting Moon

Hmm.  Snow yesterday coated the driveway and the walk.  Then melted.  Last night, snow again, covering the driveway and the walk.  Again.  Still there at 11 am this morning.  Yowzer.

A Star-Tribune editorial cartoon yesterday compared April 2012 and April 2013 with sounds. April 2012 was chirp, chirp.  April 2013 was chip, chip.  Apt.  And funny.  Sort of.

I wrote confidently here about my new ability in Latin translation.  Well, I should have known that was actually the signpost to a new plateau.  A rough day yesterday with Greg.  A lot wrong.  Something of it was just hard, a corrupt line or two of manuscript, other parts it seems I had sleepwalked through.

(Wheel of Time map)

In spite of that set back I’m still going forward to Book I to begin a full translation and to take notes for a commentary.  I’ll just have to go slower and work harder.  The time exists as does the will.

This morning I finished the first book, The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan, in the Wheel of Time series, twelve books long and unfinished at Jordan’s death at age 58.  It’s an impressive achievement.  It’s reach is broad and his intention runs deep.  I’m not sure about the depth, but I am sure that the world he has imagined and the narrative threads he has uncovered within it are wonderful.

It will serve as an inspiration during the revision of Missing, number three, and for the rest of the novels in the Tailte mythos.

Poetry, Writing

Imaging World Enough. And Times.

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Spring                                                                           Planting Moon

World enough, and time.

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

Just realized what an apt summary of fantasy this is.  Fantasy creates new world, one which be enough to engage the reader and engage the reader over time.  Just the author invests a lot of time in the development of a world and narratives set within that world, a reader who bothers to learn the intricacies of this alternative world typically wants more than one story, often many more than one story, set there.

It becomes a kind of contract between writer and reader.  I will spend my time imagining this world and what goes on it and, if you like it enough to learn it, then I agree to write more.  It can have a deadening effect, of course, always working in one fictional space, but so far, in the Tailte mythos, I’ve found it liberating and energizing.  It grows bigger as I write, not smaller.  In fact, I have to find ways to limit it so I can tell bounded stories.