Unprintable Version

Cooper. Rhymes with Super.

Link: Cool on the Hill:.

If you click on the photo, it will enlarge. If you click on "Main," you'll see more pictures of greyhounds.

Green Light

Our friend Mary makes the best movie recommendations. She recommended the French psychological thriller Red Lights. It's good. It's a movie about driving while dysfunctional, about the hypnosis and psychosis of the road,  but, unlike David Lynch's Lost Highway, it goes somewhere.  And the sub-titles are short enough to be readable.

Revision as Detective Work

Or deduction.  I realized that I had set a scene--a family story that happened before my birth--in February. Why did it take me six months to realize that, since the scene involves a trip to the Dairy Queen, it could not have happened in February?  I'd even gone to the trouble of researching the weather in Winona that month. And no one had claimed that the event happened in winter; I wasn't even debunking anyone; the culprit was just my own laziness.

This is important because, early in the book, there are some scenes where I was not present and in which I must necessarily speculate. These aren't fiction. They are straightforward attempts to discern what happened and to empathize with what people were going through. 

Other than that, good progress: three chapters cleaned up, one new paragraph added, proper files made of some new chapters I'd created.

Back from Fairmont

Went to Fairmont last night to visit my friend Kootch. Just got back and I've got that special tiredness that comes from driving. Special, I think, because the exhaustion is almost totally neural; it's all stress and readiness and reaction. That, plus a strangely tiring lack of movement.

No progress on memoir in the past twenty four+ hours.  But three deadlines met, two dog walks, one lunch meeting (at Khyber Pass--an underrated lunch place), one haircut, and one road trip which included community theatre production and cast party so totally worth it.   

Saint Paul Observation

As you drive North on Dale, you notice that Saint Paul keeps being sliced and stopped:  by 94, by Transfer Road, by the railroad tracks.  The stucco and siding neighborhoods north of Como between Snelling and Dale literally have a slower metabolism.  Odd: I've never liked those neighborhoods but I've liked almost everyone I've ever known who lives in them.

New direction working

The new direction for the blog--truly dashed off entries, regular forced reports on my progress on the memoir--seems to be working for me. Spent half an hour today going over two chapters that I'd already marked up. 

In half an hour you can make marked changes--clarify sentences, add some richness. May not be enough to simmer a completely new paragraph, which I also have to do soon.

New direction is working for me--but am I boring you, my regular readers, to tears?

The Damn Memoir

Took the section that addressed the reader directly and converted my handwritten notes to a typewritten draft. I don't know. I would be timid about showing this to a writing instructor.

Tegan and Sara

Soaring and syncopated melodies.  Beautiful voices with a tincture of rasp. Why aren't Sarah and Tegan selling out the Target Center? We saw them at the Minnesota Zoo, and they were great.

Writing Class

I've been poking around in Nelson Algren's The Neon Wilderness and the critical edition of The Man with The Golden Arm. The rap against Algren is evidently that he sentimentalizes the working class and the underclass.  At least in the stories I've read in The Neon Wilderness, this isn't true.

I compare what I read in Algren with what I read in Kerouac's Windblown Journals, which I thought did sentimentalize working people.  Two differences stand out: 1) Abstraction. There are no actual people in Kerouac.  2) Escapism. Kerouac wants to be a laborer because he wants a vacation from human complexity, which he somehow thinks is the  province of the educated.

Neither of these--abstraction, escapism--are present in the Algren I've read. 

Maybe it's time to spin Fitzgerald's famous reply to Hemingway: the poor are different from us.

Yes, they have less money.

This all matters to me  because I am writing about farmers, who get condescended to all the time.  And because the cubicle class has such contempt for anyone who actually uses a muscle.

Progress report: yesterday, half an hour revisiting the problematic chapter. The subchapters are starting to emerge.

Printable Version

This blog is called unprintable version because it is an offshoot of the literary web site printableversion.org.

Except for a literary editorial or two, printable version publishes other people's work. It is a place where good writing and good design can meet on the web.  As I intimated in "Maps and Legends," I am convinced that intelligence can be visual as well as verbal. And with the help of Michele Moore, who does the programming, we're able to showcase some great work.

And we've posted something new and, I think, extraordinary: Robert McGinley Myers' A Brief History of Dogs.