August 13, 2013

Fly and Me

8-13-13

The lake house my wife and I are at is perfect. This may not be the nicest thing to tell you. It lacks grit and reality for any reader and changes even the least boastful of all writers (which I already severely lack any claim to) into a bit of a braggart. But I cannot tell you this tale without starting here. It is perfect here. And perfection, personal and eternal though it may be, also somehow only exists in bookends, in the niggling bits of imperfection that obsessively sketch its borders. This is about a small imperfection looming large and the restoration of harmony.

We are much in and out here, onto the balcony, testing the air, down to our great lake, in and out through sturdy wood doors made, like our walls here, mostly of glass. Outside there are sometimes many bugs, and I have perhaps enough mosquito bites to satisfy those readers bored with my claims of perfection. Sometimes we are chased inside or just choose to come inside and someone slips in with us. A moth is not so great a problem, and I have caught one in a glass and taken it out. A mosquito or two is a misery, but it is not hard to get lucky with a stray swat, and, if not, ten minutes of concerted hunting will always do the trick. A fly though, a fast, uncanny, smart fly can be a small torture of surprising persistence and near unsolvability. Last night such a fly slipped into our house.

This fly was a genius and a miracle of speed, a master of irritation. It began its visits at dawn, buzzing loudly about our heads, landing on our skin, circling, racing, always patternless and endlessly interested in our company. For reasons of its own it would disappear until the exact point where my spirit would start to calm, and then it would return. All through the morning hours I'd engage in long, futile hunting expeditions with a rolled up magazine. I'd wait for it, through long tracking operations, to land some place whackable, and I'd whack. There'd usually be a slight injury to my hand, a loud noise, and a curious sense of missed opportunity, curious because one wonders what opportunity I was missing when I was not getting within the realm of distant hope of even coming near this fly.

I wanted to kill this fly very much.

I was not going to kill this fly.

The morning advanced and the fly only grew faster and louder and smarter.

I so wanted to kill this fly.

I won't draw this all out with all the long tales of all the ridiculous things whacked and flung with all the comedy of something so utterly without effect. But it was all there. Know that it was there.

I was in the kitchen. The fly landed on the counter. My thousandth chance. I swept my hand across the counter, an odd attempt even more futile than most, and the strangest thing happened. I caught the fly. I caught the fly!

I took the fly outside. I threw it out of my hand onto the wide wooden plank of the balcony railing. The fly, unphased, looked up at the sun and clouds and felt the wind.

"It's nice to be outside." It seemed to say.

I breathed in the perfect air that smells of pines and almost of the sea. I was calm for the first time in five hours.

"Yes it is." I seemed to say. "Yes it is."

August 13, 2013

August 13, 2013 

Fly and Me

The lake house my wife and I are at is perfect. This may not be the nicest thing to tell you. It lacks grit and reality for any reader and changes even the least boastful of all writers (which I already severely lack any claim to) into a bit of a braggart. But I cannot tell you this tale without starting here. It is perfect here. And perfection, personal and eternal though it may be, also somehow only exists in bookends, in the niggling bits of imperfection that obsessively sketch its borders. This is about a small imperfection looming large and the restoration of harmony.

We are much in and out here, onto the balcony, testing the air, down to our great lake, in and out through sturdy wood doors made, like our walls here, mostly of glass. Outside there are sometimes many bugs, and I have perhaps enough mosquito bites to satisfy those readers bored with my claims of perfection. Sometimes we are chased inside or just choose to come inside and someone slips in with us. A moth is not so great a problem, and I have caught one in a glass and taken it out. A mosquito or two is a misery, but it is not hard to get lucky with a stray swat, and, if not, ten minutes of concerted hunting will always do the trick. A fly though, a fast, uncanny, smart fly can be a small torture of surprising persistence and near unsolvability. Last night such a fly slipped into our house.

This fly was a genius and a miracle of speed, a master of irritation. It began its visits at dawn, buzzing loudly about our heads, landing on our skin, circling, racing, always patternless and endlessly interested in our company. For reasons of its own it would disappear until the exact point where my spirit would start to calm, and then it would return. All through the morning hours I'd engage in long, futile hunting expeditions with a rolled up magazine. I'd wait for it, through long tracking operations, to land some place whackable, and I'd whack. There'd usually be a slight injury to my hand, a loud noise, and a curious sense of missed opportunity, curious because one wonders what opportunity I was missing when I was not getting within the realm of distant hope of even coming near this fly.

I wanted to kill this fly very much.

I was not going to kill this fly.

The morning advanced and the fly only grew faster and louder and smarter.

I so wanted to kill this fly.

I won't draw this all out with all the long tales of all the ridiculous things whacked and flung with all the comedy of something so utterly without effect. But it was all there. Know that it was there.

I was in the kitchen. The fly landed on the counter. My thousandth chance. I swept my hand across the counter, an odd attempt even more futile than most, and the strangest thing happened. I caught the fly. I caught the fly!

I took the fly outside. I threw it out of my hand onto the wide wooden plank of the balcony railing. The fly, unphased, looked up at the sun and clouds and felt the wind.

"It's nice to be outside." It seemed to say.

I breathed in the perfect air that smells of pines and almost of the sea. I was calm for the first time in five hours.

"Yes it is." I seemed to say. "Yes it is."

February 2, 2019

There comes a time in every blogger's life where, under the imperative of writing a daily post, they must sit down to write not knowing what they're going to say. There is a time in every writer's life where they have no plan.

This is my 473rd time for that personally.

So you are in experienced hands.

But what if you want to know how it all works? What if you are, perhaps, a blogger yourself? Or maybe you dabble in one of the lesser writing forms? What if you saw the title of this post (which I am going to make up just now): "100 Things to Do If You Don't Know What to Write" and you want to learn the techniques I am employing to dazzling effect at this very moment?

Well, worry not. I present to you:

100 Things to Do If You Don't Know What to Write

1. Go big. 

Promise the stars. It gives you something to shoot for. You can always, on the off chance it becomes necessary, adjust things in the accounting later.



93. Just start writing. 

It's not like we don't speak until we have something to say. We almost all have nothing to say. We merely say it and then pretend like we meant to do that all along.



94. Take inspiration from your immediate surroundings. 

Like there's a computer in front of me with a half written "humor" piece called "100 Things to Do If You Don't Know What to Write". So I'm writing about that.



95. Never give up on y





96. Don't be afraid to rethink things.

Trust your first instincts and stick with them.



97. Whoa, I am getting so dizzy.

But this brings up an essential point; the reason we write is to create a tiny Universe in which we are gods. Try to have fun with it. Like the work of all gods it's all going to contradict and end in disaster anyway.



98. Random anything just words cheese Thursday keep going blue light horizon.

There is nearly always time to clarify and refine in the editing process.




99. Throw in a quote by someone famous to inspire yourself and your readers.


"Il n'est pas de plaisir plus doux que de surprendre un homme en lui donnant plus qu'il n'espere."



100. Never underestimate your audience.

I, for instance, would not even think of doubting your ability to read French!



101. But hedge your bets.

After all, as Baudelaire once said: "There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a person by giving them more than they hope for."

August 29, 2014

Occasionally it occurs to me that not everyone is inured to the detailed workings of libraries. There are people out there, even ones who read my missives, who have not spent 20 years deep in the minutiae of library life, philosophy, politics, and operations. Whereas Jason Bourne may size up hundreds of details of risk in just the moment of entering a room, so I can walk into a library and sum up its collection, staff, and procedural limitations in mere seconds. Even not in a library I can give a nearly instantaneous general accounting of the reading materials in any room I'm in or have recently have been in just as Bourne can tell you where a gun is most likely to be hidden.

Because of this it can at times be difficult for me to imagine the confusion that people face in their encounters with libraries. Culturally, we the people are most acquainted with commercial institutions. We know what it means to be lured and sold to. We understand the spaces related to that. We also have an acquaintance with mystifying, machine like bureaucracies that insist on our participation and resent us at the same time. We even have a fair amount of peculiar overlap between the two. But the library is an unfamiliar creature to us. 

The library is a nearly imaginary glimpse of a reality in which we, collectively, as people, are not assholes.

Yes, that is a pungent way of putting it, but the collective endeavors of humanity, while presenting some amazing and much vaunted exceptions, are probably best described by the word "sick". I don't mean "sick" in the contemporary slang sense of "Wow, that nollie 360 heelflip was sick!", but more in the conventional usage of "Wait, they were put to death for skateboarding? But that's sick!" We the people hold within us the power to make a paradise, a wonderland, a garden. But unfortunately we have found thumbscrews irresistible and it's all sort of run away with us. 

But there stands the library, maybe a million of them in the world, like something from a really lovely passage in an Ursula K. LeGuin novel where you think "What a beautiful idea. If only something like that really existed in the world." Well, this one does, but it is so sweet hearted and visionary and better than us that it can be a trifle difficult to navigate. Plus it is entirely run by people who mostly live in that culture of marketing and bureaucracy and so perches precariously on the edge of them, ever in danger, ever compromising, ever trying to hang on.

Your library is real so it looks like the world. It is just another building, another government entitlement, a hard coded symbol of human culture. It is just a place in your city. It is not so fancy, or beautiful, usually. A lot of these books smell. Some of the workers there are friendly. Some are not. The library may or may not have what you wanted today. It might be noisy. It might be closed. It might let you down.

So it may be hard for you to see what is at hand when you go to a library. But I am a student of them, and I am here to tell you.

When you walk into the library, any open, free library, anywhere on earth, on any day at all, you walk into a miracle.

November 26, 2013

How To Be Funny in Public

from Nov. 26, 2013

Have you longed to be a comedian about town, a nut, a fool, a secret font of wisdom, hilarious? That is, do you want to be funny? I advise against it. It's a long, hard, cold road. Fraught with perils, it can be dangerous and nerve wracking. But if you reject my first advice I won't abandon you. If you just have to make people laugh, if the comedian persona has clutched you in its ferocious paws, I say "Go for it!" Clearly you have no choice. But heed my advice below.


1. Set jokes will be your doom. My father used to ask all grocery store cashiers if they took Rubles. I heard that joke thousands of times. Was it new to each cashier? Mostly. Was it a bad joke? No, no, it's fine as a joke for our purposes. Did he perfect it through such intensive repetition? Perhaps. But still I must speak against it. You cannot keep running the same material without becoming complacent, unnatural. You've got to stay hungry, and you must always be testing new material or you won't notice it when people start humoring you all of the time instead of just some of the time.


2. Know your audience. Professional comedians complain about tough audiences, but I laugh at professional comedians! Their audience is made up of a specific sub group of people who at least theoretically like comedians and are even willing to pay to see them. Your audience is anyone! Anyone! Sure, some of them are up for a laugh, but some of them are easily insulted, some of them have almost no sense of humor, and some of them don't even know what to do when a joke happens and will stare at you, bewildered. You will need to instant read your audience. You will need to pitch jokes to their level (which you had to deduce only a second ago). You will need to adjust your level of daring to their level of daring (all jokes are daring, which means they can also, in the wrong context, end up as mean, offensive, disturbing, and/or inappropriate). And you may even need to guide them along in receiving your joke properly, perhaps with a twinkle or a chuckle that lets them know that, no, the director of your Library doesn't actually fly about in her own fleet of jets equipped with bowling alleys, you're just being wacky. Sometimes this is enough to let them know they can laugh, which may be all the stronger for the relief in it.


3. You cannot joke all the time. Joking thrives on its relation to the serious, to the real. Real life is like cream and comedy is like the air and whisking. If you whisk nothing you have nothing. But whisk the right amount of cream and you get whipped cream, which, of course, is hilarious. Keep whipping the whipped cream and you get butter, which is excellent on toast and is the famous secret of French cooking.


4. It's okay to challenge your audience. While it is imperative to know your audience (remember point two?) that doesn't mean you can't challenge their limits. Plus, you can only know your audience so much, and throwing out a wide net of material not only keeps them off balance and amuseable, but also helps you refine your material and become better able to actually read your audience in the first place. Writing here I have little or no opportunity to read you as my audience, and so my comedy approaches have been especially diverse. And so too it's a nice approach if in this sort of situation you can present a lot of challenging or minor material in a way that lets it fail without too much notice. For instance, an early joke in this piece was "...I laugh at professional comedians!"  This was a joke far better than my usual standard, but also one that, if you missed it, you didn't stop and say "I didn't get that joke." You merely, possibly, didn't know there was a joke there in the first place. There is an added benefit here that once it's pointed out as a joke it's unmissable.  As to the absurdist humor in point number three, what with the meaningless analogy to butter, it was even more challenging as far as comedy goes, and usually if I did that kind of joke in person I'd have to laugh winningly to assure people that I'm not a lunatic, I'm just being funny. But here, in text, since I can know that at the least you are the sort of person who would actually read all of this post, you might be up for a slightly bizarre and challenging burst of absurdist humor.


5. Try to be nice. This is a tough one because it cuts out at least 30 percent of your material off the top. Professionals perhaps can't afford this one, or, possibly, don't need the restriction due to the depersonalized and formalized relation of their work. You, however do need this, because even though it may seem like comedy comes first, it doesn't. Humanity comes first. Warm laughs are beautiful. Hard, brittle, exploding and snickering laughs are, well, great, I won't lie, but great like fast food; crappy if you actually are paying attention, obesity and cancer causing, and horrible to the world. So be careful. Besides, for all that professional comedians like to go on about the aggressiveness of comedy, its violence (i.e. I killed them out there) they're mostly wrong. You do not want to be a master jokester in order to express your hatred of the world and force people to laugh against their will. Really, you don't. You want to be funny because laughing is fun and sweet, soul purifying, unifying, wise, healthy, and full of love. You want to be funny because it it a force for good! So, remember that out there. And go knock 'em dead.

August 19, 2013

Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood

August 19, 2013

You cannot see these people just anywhere. They are not in the movies, nor on TV, not in magazines or written into the pages of any books, fiction or non fiction. They don't appear on the Internet, in newspapers, or even in the imagination of anyone. They can even be hard to see when they mill about on their peculiar missions right in front of you. And yet I do see them, if I dare to open my eyes wide enough, any workday I want to. These are the people that come to my library.

This is not a just folks, salt of the earth post about the wondrous diversity of humanity as it really is, and neither is it a cynical take-down of the same. All I am saying here is that if I in anyway tried to show you these people on my own, even were I given vastly greater skills, equipment and assistance than I possess, through film, sound, prose, patience and respect, humor and vision, my, or really anyone's project in this regard, would fall hopelessly flat. Any attempt to convey the however many hundreds of people I see in a day would be unbelievably bizarre. Unbelievably. It would also be too boring to watch, and it would be cynical, treacly, fantastical, mundane, uninspired, desperate in its hopefulness, plodding, pointlessly weird, and needlessly depressing. It would be unfair, inaccurate in its representation, confusing, glamorizing, too good to be true, evil, unintelligible and inappropriately whimsical.

Just like life.

Sept 4, 2015

Friday, September 4, 2015

My handy publications submission letter

Dear

___ Magazine Editor:
___ Newspaper Editor:
___ Mailroom Intern:
___ Department of Homeland Security Agent:


I apologize for contacting you with a form letter. I simply submit too many irrelevant and unpublishable pieces to media such as yours to write a bespoke letter of introduction. However, as you see, the form I use is able to be specifically tailored to you. I hope this thin patina of personalness will help endear me to you while still limiting my workload.

Please consider the following

___ blog post
___ essay
___ short story
___ pithy quote
___ collection of barely legible post it notes


for inclusion in your publication. I have

___ read
___ never read
___ occasionally browsed
___ looked at the pictures in
___ become aware of


your magazine or newspaper, and I feel that my work would

___ look especially pretty trumpeted loudly on your cover.
___ be a poor match for any publication, so why not send it to yours?
___ fundamentally alter the nature of your publication for the better.
___ halve your circulation numbers, but don't you think you've gotten a bit too big for your britches?


For your response I have

___ enclosed a SASE.
___ included my address. Stamps are not cheap, and I am not made of money.
___ included my address and a bank routing number for your first payment.
___ left no contact information whatsoever.


I hope you will also consider

___ running my work as a regular column and thus catapulting us both to fame and glory.
___ eating better and getting more exercise.
___ reconsidering your decision on this.
___ sending me a letter about how you enjoyed my submission but will never publish it.


I thank you in advance for your

___ time and attention.
___ condescending dismissal.
___ weird and frankly unprofessional response.
___ fawning praise.
___ unusable advice that is nevertheless well meant.


Yours truly,




F. Calypso