slips into the sluice; ghost-fog; lovers’ secrets divulged near a rusted anvil; harmonica music; and a red-eyed drunk stumbles down a footpath toward the skull of the sea; o beautiful girl; o beautiful glow-worm; a sow in the furrow; turf in the hearth (the smell, the smell); sunplay on cobwebs in a barn; a dog in the doldrums; a mouth full of sprigs; a burlap sack; a whip; drizzle on your face; a bike on its side in the weeds; mud on the handlebars; mud in your hair; mud in your eye; mud everywhere (the smell, the smell); write it, write it; the quilt; the face; the shroud.
From the Memoir The Boy Detective
Imagine what you know. Shelley said something close to that in his A Defense of Poetry, and I have appropriated the idea in my memoir course. In the early classes, I talked about the difference between invention and imagination—the difference between, say, inventing a horse that merely talks, like Mr. Ed, and creating a horse that has something to say, like Swift’s Houyhnhnms that bear the burdens of civilization. The imagination has different levels. You can imagine something that has never been seen before. And you can imagine something that has always been seen, yet never in the way you see it. For that you need to dream into the object of your attention, to see the inherent nobility in the animal that has borne so much without complaint and to make that animal ruler of the universe. Imagine what you know, I tell my students, and what you know will become wonderfully strange, and it will be all yours. More truly and more strange.
To push this idea along, I give them short exercises for their dreaming. The first day of class, I brought in a pair of old sneakers, running shoes, tossed them in the middle of the seminar table, and asked the students to imagine the ordinary sneakers before them. One young woman produced a piece about a man in the apartment across from her, who left one sneaker in the hallway outside his door every morning, because he had but one leg, and he needed that one sneaker, and then he put two sneakers out at night, as if to indicate that the other leg existed. In another exercise, I asked them to listen to a piece of music and to write a piece on what the music inspired. Poetry, fiction, memoir, anything. I did the same for a painting. And for a flower: dream into a tulip. I asked them to write a piece from the point of view of a part of the body, and of a part of speech. You’re a semicolon, a hyphen. You’re a dash. Show dash.
I asked them to write a piece from the point of view of a machine, to dream into the machine. The students became a bathroom scale, two clocks, an iPad, several cars, a guillotine, a vibrator, and a tattoo needle that spoke in rapid stutters.
More dreams. I eat their dreams like candy.
From the Memoir Kayak Morning
Kayak. Ducky word. You can kick it. Hack it. Whack it. You can knock it over. In Kansas, Kashmir, or Karachi. It comes back okay, like cork. K-A-Y-A-K. And me, lucky kid, propped half-cocked in the cockpit pocket of my palindrome.
I am a fan of nouns. I tell my writing students that if they need three modifiers to describe something, they’ve probably chosen the wrong something. The noun carries its own weight, and the right one will not be made prettier or tastier or more important by anything that decorates it. It has all it needs. It contains what Emerson called “the speaking language of things.” The noun. The heron. The tide. The creek. The kayak.
The Giant Rat of Sumatra
For much of my youth, my passion for language centered on lines from movies. There were certain things said in movies—old ones seen on TV, or new ones—that I cherished. Things I knew I wanted to hear again and again. I sought to incorporate them into my life, which is to say that I wanted to work them into normal conversations. Friends would be conducting a perfectly sensible chat, and I would be listening, like a lion in the brush, for an opportunity to slip in a line from, say, Beau Brummel (“Who’s your fat friend?”) or Double Indemnity (“There’s a widespread feeling that just because a man has a large office, he must be an idiot”) or Pal Beach Story (as said by Rudy Vallee to Mary Astor: “You know, Maude, someone meeting you for the first time, not knowing you were cracked, might get the wrong impression of you.” For that one, of course, one would have to wait to meet someone named Maude).
To be sure, this hobby of mine did not make me the ideal social companion, but this is how it is when career and popularity are in conflict. The “fat friend” line earned me the everlasting hatred of a plumpish boy in high school, who was standing beside a friend of mine when I tossed in my movie question. I tried to explain to him that I was merely quoting Stewart Granger as Beau Brummel when he was miffed with King George III, but the boy seemed uninterested.
The lines I chose were never the garden variety, such as “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” or “Frankly, my dear . . .” and so forth, but rather ones that had a special attraction for me. The other day I heard such a line in a movie called Jack Frost, in which someone who was attempting to rid the world of a colossal maniacal snowman, explained: “We tried blowing him up, but it only pissed him off.”
For many years, there were two lines I had never been able to slip into any conversation. The first of these, I never did get in. It occurred in Earthquake, one of the disaster films of the 1970s, in which a man was stalking a young woman to do terrible things to her. One would have thought that an earthquake would have been enough to divert his attention, but he was determined. At the height of the quake, he finally cornered his quarry and was about to jump her, when George Kennedy (a cop, of course) appeared, threw the attacker to the ground, and shot him dead. Consoling the shaking woman, Kennedy said: “I don’t know what it is. Earthquakes bring out the worst in some guys.”
The other line was much more unusual and exotic so it presented a much greater challenge. It was spoken by Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson in one of the Sherlock Holmes movies of the 1940s when Watson was attempting to impress a couple on a ship who evidently were not familiar with Holmes’s exploits. “Haven’t you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?” asked Watson, referring to one of the great detective’s most famous cases. “Haven’t you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?”
Years, decades, passed, and I never came close to a moment when I might work in that line. The degree of difficulty was steep. There were so many elements to the Watson remark. If one heard an opening for the rat, there would still be the matter of its size. If the rat and the size were there, one still had to contend with Sumatra. Above these concerns stood the context. In order to make the question really fit a situation, the opening had to allow for an attitude of superior surprise. “Haven’t you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?” Implying: “Who has not?”
In the late 1970s, I was writing for The Washington Post, and I had all but given up on my quest. In all those intervening years not a single conversation had come remotely close to offering me my longed-for opportunity. Then, one day, some friends and I went out to lunch, and it happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Mickey Mouse. There was some chatter at the table about Mickey, to which I had been paying scant attention—how much he had contributed to American culture. The usual harmless claptrap. Suddenly, one of the guys sat up with a quizzical look and asked, “Has there ever been a bigger rodent?”
{ column in The Washington Post }
Flower Children
Their heads are bowed at their desks like the flowers I have given them. This is an in-class writing assignment: Write a page on what the flower smells like. It is an exercise in stream of consciousness for my students at the Southampton campus of Stony Brook University. The school is small and unadorned, spread out on a rise overlooking a bay. It is about to come into flowers of its own in the reluctant spring thaw.
Write what it smells like. Go into the past. Follow your nose. This is what you will do as writers. You will plunder the past to explain the present and make the present more intense. Think of stream of consciousness as a detour off the path of the narrative. Go where it takes you, and when you get back, the main road will have changed. So they sniff, dream into the pictures their minds unearth, and write. A boy’s hand