The heirloom tomatoes are beautiful. The basil leaves are bright and fragrant. I was out of olive oil.
Have you been to the olive oil aisle lately? My eyes started swimming. Or maybe it was my brain that was gasping for air. Faced with rows of choices, I made up some quick basis for elimination. These ones are too expensive. Those have too much extraneous stuff: I don't need citrus-infusion and twigs of thyme in the bottle. Greek olive oils are too strong for this dish. These bottles are too big. Those are too small.
And still there are too many choices.
Pretty soon, I am rejecting bottles for random reasons: the label color is too trendy, the font is trying too hard to be old-world, the description has too many exclamation points.
All I want is a good-quality olive oil. Short of tasting every single bottle, how was I to decide? Are the oils described as" vibrant" the same as those described as "fresh?" What does "harmonious" mean? And how is "distinct" a helpful adjective? Why can't I remember any of the brands that I'd read in Cook's Illustrated or some other olive oil survey done in Simple Magazine?
In the end I bought an unfiltered extra virgin olive oil from Italy. I am sure I chose it in part because of ridiculous reasons: the pleasing shape of the bottle: straight sides, skinny; its plain label in a muted green and well-placed letters in a sans serif font; and descriptions that are devoid of hyperbolic claims and exclamation points.
Publishing is supposedly doing fairly well in the face of all the uncertainties of the industry and the wider economy. Books are still being published, lots of them. But when I browse in a bookstore, not even necessarily a big one, I feel the same way as I did in the olive oil aisle. How do I know?
In the end, I go with award winners and honorees, I go with authors I've read before, I go with recommendations from other readers, bookstore employees, librarians, blogger friends, I go with captivating titles and intriguing subject matters. I am sure book covers play a role in my decisions, unfortunately. I've come across many fine books but I can't help but fee las if I am missing out on some gems because they haven't managed to call themselves to my attention.
My olive oil tasted fine, by the way. Subtle and mild but not bland. But I wonder about that other bottle with the trendy label or the one who surely looks too common to taste good.
One of my most trying times at the conservatory was the semester we studied 20th Century music. Lectures and tutorials weren't the problem; it was the Weekly Tape. You see, for every period in history we studied, we had to listen to a cassette tape (yes, it was that long ago) containing music from that time. Listening to music as an assignment was usually my favorite part; it was like reading To Kill A Mockingbird for school.
But that was before I was required to listen to 120 minutes of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, followed by Steve Reich and other avant garde composers every week. (John Cage's 4'33'' was especially uncomfortable. Was I supposed to sit with the earphones in my head, listening to silence for exactly 4'33"? At least White On White doesn't demand its viewer to be still for a specific length of time.)
Did you follow the links? Did you listen to the music? What do you think?
I felt tortured.
But a strange thing happened after I listened to each tape multiple times; some of the music began to make sense. I started to enjoy, and later, love some of what was initially meaningless noise, such as Stravinsky's A Soldier's Tale, and Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht
This didn't happen to every piece of music. I remained unmoved by some of the compositions, despite acquiring familiarity and knowledge about them. I understood the purpose of their composers, appreciate their ideas, and maybe even admire the results at an intellectual manner, but I never sought out those pieces after that semester.
The many hours spent listening and re-listening to all that music was necessary. To be a musician, I had to know how the story of music has continued in the 20th Century.
Writers read. We do it because that's probably the reason we became writers. We do it because we love it. We do it to learn about other writers.
And we do it because we need to know the traditions on which our art is based.
I have a number of books I feel I need to read but find it difficult / intimidating. This post is primarily a pep-talk to myself, that I should put in the extra effort and time to read these not-super-accessible books.
Falling in love is exhilarating. Within a heart beat we completely embrace the object of our affection. Sometimes the feeling can even turn into something less exciting but longer lasting. Sometimes it doesn't.
Walking into love: taking slow, occasionally painful, steps, isn't as exciting. But it can lead to something deep and stable, something that makes us better writers, richer people.
Do you have books that are on the TBR, but also SI (Somewhat Intimidating) list? Have you had the experience of falling in love with a book that your originally could not get through? I would love to hear your stories.
This past week, I've been struck by passages from two different books, passages that made me stop and remind myself to breathe.Here's the first one from Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls. LIa, the teen narrator isalone in her room, mourning the death of her best friend, Cassie. They've both been struggling with eating disorders:Spiders hatch and crawl out of my belly button, airy little tar beads with ballerina feet.They swarm, spinning a silk veil, one hundred thousand spider thoughts woven together until they wrap me up in a cozy shroud.
...I breathe out and it begins.Thorn-covered vines creep across the floor, crackling like a bonfire. Black roses bloom in the moonlight, born dead and brittle. The web on my face holds my eyes open, forcing me to watch as Cassie steps out of the shadows, briars twining up her legs and around her body, reaching up through her hair....I can't make a sound. Spiders crawl on my face and leap across to her arms. They fly back and forth, knitting us together.The second passage is from The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.
The narrator is writing a letter to the Chinese Premier, trying to explain what life is like in Bangalore, India.
Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks...sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come
to an of
fice, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep--all these ideas, half-formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger on another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.
What makes these two passages, so very different in style and subject matter, to have startled me so much? Maybe it's because they are so unusual. Spiders crawling out of belly buttons? Definitely a memorable image. But uniqueness alone doesn't do it. I've read many other passages in other books where the unusual descriptions actually made me not read because they try too hard to be different, they are too self-conscious.
As I re-read the passages, they stirred up a sense of familiarity, which is strange. I have never been to India, nor have I suffered from eating disorders. What about them that makes me catch that glimpse of recognition, a kinship, almost?
And there, I think, is the answer. These passages are so engaging because, for me, at least, they create a perfect balance between the universal and the unique.
I've never been to India, but I grew up having lizards on the ceiling and reading interesting snippets of newspaper recycled as snack-wrappers. I've never binged and purged, or counted the calories of every bite, but I've definitely thought twice about indulging in an extra piece of chocolate cake or scraped off the sour cream from baked potatoes.
Much deeper than these connections, however, are the ones that are even more universal:
- lingering in that expanse between reality and imagination,
- feeling such a strong bond with someone that it seems we've been woven together
- grasping onto ideas that seem so promising, yet so unformed and elusive
- feeling the inadequacy of our abilities and experiences
Drawing on the invisible strings that tie us all to the same basic human experiences and thoughts, yet in such unusual and vivid ways:
that's why these passages caught me,that's why these are masterful writers,
that's what I strive for in my writing.
Day two of this event is hosted by Sarah Mulhern at The Reading Zone.
The subject today: choosing materials, for infants/toddlers to emerging readers to middle grader readers, fiction and non.
Publishing is supposedly doing fairly well in the face of all the uncertainties of the industry and the wider economy. Books are still being published, lots of them. But when I browse in a bookstore, not even necessarily a big one, I feel the same way as I did in the olive oil aisle. How do I know?
