Edward Ashburnham is soooooooooooooo dreamy

I'd like to leave off the week with this lovely bit of description from Ford Madox Ford. Although I wouldn't normally be so bold as to write about a book I haven't finished yet, I am feeling very strongly about "The Good Soldier" right now so I think I'll make it through. Plus, this is too delicious to resist.

Let me just say that I think for me these two short lines somehow sum up what's great about Modernist writing (sort of a tall order). They let just a little bit of instability into what would ordinarily be a throwaway line about yet another pair of baby blues. They show how tightly bound together language and experience are, and how reference is not a given -- just when you think you know what someone is pointing to it shifts out of range.

Or maybe I just have a thing for blue eyes?

"I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a certain type of box of matches." -p. 26

OK, that's all.

Have a good weekend!

A Writer's Guide to New Year's Resolutions

New Year's resolutions are a species of list which is why I love them. Many people don't, I think because they view them as actual things they're supposed to accomplish instead of just a writing exercise. But, like the facebook status update, I think making resolutions is a kind of Trojan horse that can be used to smuggle scraps of poetry into everyday life.

The perfect number of resolutions is the same as the number of witches or princes or guesses in any good fairy tale: three. So there's one clue already -- resolutions are related to fairy tales in their balance and structure, and the way they help us tie our goals and anxieties up with a nice, big bow.

And just as fairy tales establish a sense of balance by teetering between extremes, it's important to craft a set of resolutions that covers the spectrum from the transcendental to the mundane. Each pole helps put the other in perspective. The best example of this is the parting advice my mother gave to me my freshman year of college, right before driving away: "Whatever happens, just listen to your heart...and take your vitamins."

I think that some of the difficulty lies with the word "resolve" itself, which means several things at once, including (according to the OED Online, which if you have a San Francisco public library card you get FREE access to, hello, is that not amazing?):

• To determine or decide upon (a course of action, etc.)
• To cause (a discord) to pass into a concord
  
• To decide, determine, settle (a doubtful point)
• To disintegrate; to break up or separate into constituent or elementary parts
  

Resolving "resolve" into the different aspects of its meaning -- teasing apart its threads to better understand the whole cloth -- suggests how resolutions should be approached. They are not unified, impenetrable objects that we must either take in their entirety or abandon altogether. They are not bricks or cars or things that can be thrown across a room. They're not buildings that we can choose to enter or to not enter.

They're more like a fine rain slowly soaking into your sneakers or a jar of honey you can't quite empty. Viscous, grainy. Coffee grounds clinging to the inside of the pot. You have to take them apart and then put yourself together around them and you can't expect that when they're done they'll look the same as they did at the beginning.

Really, they're just a chance to express yourself in a different way, to take all the angst that oozes out from the space between who you are and who you want to be and put it into a form that is acceptable to share at happy hour or the office. They can be rhetorical figures, metaphors or something else -- just images, maybe.

And if your resolution is to write more this year? They're the best place to start.

If my blog were a character in a John Hughes movie...

...it would totally be the Ally Sheedy character who shakes out her own dandruff over the picture she's drawing in order to represent snow. I don't even remember the name of her character even though I majored in The Breakfast Club in college, probably because I've been standing too close to the microwave all these years even though it's one of the many things on my to-not-do list...

What is Ally Sheedy even up to these days?

Look how cool she is:

I actually may be too old to still be writing poems

"We should be a statue somewhere"
I said, long ago, at the beginning,
in the year of the kiss
when my eyes saw so quickly
that the wave of a hand
seemed as slow as moss swallowing stone.
Now I see that a couple is an outpost,
a crop of purple between the rocks,
a bloom beneath the heat,
bright against the sandy hills,
and we are no monument
but quick shimmering things,
tattered, clinging to the side of the slope.

***

At the end of each day we gather the hours
emptied and stacked like cardboard boxes under the sink
and tear them up and fold them into the bricks
of the walls we are building.
Rooms have sprung up around us where before there was only grass, sky.
A thicket of stone.
At night I walk the corridors.
Whether I am keeping watch or just keeping busy
is hard to say.
Sometimes I think we are under siege
but then it is only the rain, a bird that is lost and calling out, a cloud
sliced open by the sun.

And besides it is a beautiful day out.