Reading list
The week in the Great White North is predominantly so the wife can spend quality time with the family, and she did plenty of that. I, on the other hand, settled in with herr’s Twain and Kipling on my Crackberry.
It’s nice to be able to sit for eight hours at a stretch and read, especially such incredible authors. I’m boggled at the high powered snark of Twain and the deft way he paints a picture. From “A Tramp Abroad”:
The first discovery I made was that the
beauty of the lake had not been exaggerated. Within a day or two I made
another discovery. This was, that the lauded chamois is not a wild goat;
that it is not a horned animal; that it is not shy; that it does not
avoid human society; and that there is no peril in hunting it. The
chamois is a black or brown creature no bigger than a mustard seed; you
do not have to go after it, it comes after you; it arrives in vast herds
and skips and scampers all over your body, inside your clothes; thus
it is not shy, but extremely sociable; it is not afraid of man, on the
contrary, it will attack him; its bite is not dangerous, but neither
is it pleasant; its activity has not been overstated–if you try to put
your finger on it, it will skip a thousand times its own length at one
jump, and no eye is sharp enough to see where it lights. A great deal
of romantic nonsense has been written about the Swiss chamois and the
perils of hunting it, whereas the truth is that even women and children
hunt it, and fearlessly; indeed, everybody hunts it; the hunting is
going on all the time, day and night, in bed and out of it
That kind of subtle and yet incredible sarcasm is the kind of thing you don’t find most places. You have to read it several times to catch all the little double entendres located therin.
Likewise, Kipling has a gift that is stunning to behold. Having seen the spencer tracy crap called “Captains courageous” I can say, that until I read the story on thursday, I never saw even the slightest glimmer of the genius of the piece, nor the clear analogies to the world of today. This is going on the Oglet’s summer reading list, she has a week and change left before school starts. It’s an amazingly quick read.
I don’t know if this can be taught. I don’t know if, once you get past the basic rules of grammar (many of which which most of the great authors break at will anyway) a lot of writing seems to be about developing your own way of viewing the world, and expressing your perceptions in a way unique to you, and interesting to others. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there. Certainly, I’ll never be Twain or Kipling. Still, I want to sharpen those chops, and I need to spend more time doing so. I’ve been to a few writer’s workshops and even found some helpful. What I need to do, is write. I need, probably, to go someplace without internet access and just write.
