Boswell’s Meditation on Place and a Pudding
August 29, 2009
Last week I did a pleasant book-signing at Boswell Book Co. (for A Guide to Fantasy Literature; my thanks to Daniel Goldin, proprietor, and Jason, for hosting!).
Boswell Books is a Milwaukee indie bookstore, named for James Boswell (1740–95), a literary Scottish laird, described by one biographer as a complicated fellow, with “his rippling good nature, his extravagance and folly and weakness, his odd piety, his awful glooms, his alternations of revelry and solemnity . . .” and known today mostly as a companion of Samuel Johnson, the famous dictionaryist (okay, lexicographer).
He loved good conversation, liquor, travel, writing . . . hey, a man after my own heart.
Anyhow, the Boswell Books signing made me recall a lovely, fanciful “sense of place” piece from Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, written on a long excursion with Samuel Johnson in the fall of 1773 to the western isles of Scotland.
This is Boswell’s recollection of an afternoon bit of playfulness:
“. . . . He [Johnson] then indulged in a playful fancy, in making a Meditation on a Pudding, of which I hastily wrote down, in his presence, the following note; which, though imperfect, may serve to give my readers some idea of it.
MEDITATION ON A PUDDING
Let us seriously reflect of what a pudding is composed. It is composed of flour that once waved in the golden grain, and drank the dews of the morning; of milk pressed from the swelling udder by the gentle hand of the beauteous milkmaid, whose beauty and innocence might have recommended a worse draught; who, while she stroked the udder, indulged no ambitious thoughts of wandering in palaces, formed no plans for the destruction of her fellow-creatures; milk, which is drawn from the cow, that useful animal, that eats the grass of the field, and supplies us with that which made the greatest part of the food of mankind in the age which the poets have agreed to call golden. It is made with an egg, that miracle of nature, which the theoretical Burnet has compared to creation. An egg contains water within its beautiful smooth surface; and an unformed mass, by the incubation of the parent, becomes a regular animal, furnished with bones and sinews, and covered with feathers. – Let us consider; can there be more wanting to complete the Meditation on a Pudding? If more is wanting, more may be found. It contains salt, which keeps the sea from putrefaction: salt, which is made the image of intellectual excellence, contributes to the formation of a pudding.”
A delightful little piece, by a couple of writers lounging about a Scottish inn on a lazy afternoon, speculating on place and pudding.
(Reminds me of a similar, more modern “sense of place as seen in food” piece by Linda Hasselstrom. I’ll dig it out and share in a coming post.)
A Sense of Place Pilgrim – Annie Dillard
July 21, 2009
To learn to see and write better, there are great books to inspire you.
One of the finest, an exquisite book of nature writing, is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), winner of a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, an account of a year spend looking closely at the world centered around a creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
As Eudora Welty (no slouch herself when it comes to sense of place), wrote in the New York Times Book Review: “The book is a form of meditation . . . about seeing.”
Here’s a brief sample, about a breezy late afternoon in a plowed field:
The wind is terrific out of the west. . . . It’s the most beautiful day of the year. At four o’clock the eastern sky is a dead stratus black flecked with low white clouds. The sun in the west illuminates the ground, the mountains, and especially the bare branches of trees, so that everywhere silver trees cut into the black sky like a photographer’s negative of a landscape. The air and the ground are dry; the mountains are going on and off like neon signs. Clouds slide east as if pulled from the horizon, like a tablecloth whipped off a table. The hemlocks by the barbed-wire fence are flinging themselves east as through their backs would break.
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
A page or so earlier, she wrote:
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here.
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
A beautiful work, compared to Thoreau’s Walden. In another book, The Writing Life, she talks about writing, in her wonderfully exalted, prosaic style, about climbing into a desk that floats in the air, as birds fly underneath:
Get to work. Your job is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
I strongly recommend Annie Dillard’s books, full of open eyes, open heart, and beautiful prose, books to open and read again over the years.
And then, seek in your own way to write descriptions of Place that give a sense that you are in a wonderful place on “the most beautiful day,” passages that combine the two things Dillard says give birth to seeing: knowledge and love.
The Wonderfully Eccentric Characters of Charles Dickens
April 6, 2009
Don’t know about you, but I’ve been enjoying Little Dorrit on PBS the last few weeks.
Reminded me of some lines from G.K. Chesterton (Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874–1936, author of the Father Brown mysteries, The Man Who Was Thursday, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man, which had a big influence on C.S. Lewis, among others). Among Chesterton’s many works: Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906).
Here are a few bits by Chesterton (from Chapter 10) on the eccentric, outlandish, quirky characters of Dickens:
The humble characters of Dickens do not amuse each other with epigrams; they amuse each other with themselves. The present that each man brings in hand is his own incredible personality. In the most sacred sense, and in the most literal sense of the phrase, he “gives himself away.”
. . . Now, the man who gives himself away does the last act of generosity; he is like a martyr, a lover, or a monk. But he is also almost certainly what we commonly call a fool.
The key of the great characters of Dickens is that they are all great fools.
. . .
It is impossible to do justice to these figures because the essential of them is their multiplicity. The whole point of Dickens is that he not only made them, but made them by myriads; that he stamped his foot, and armies came out of the earth.
. . .
It may be noticed that the great artists always choose great fools rather than great intellectuals to embody humanity. Hamlet does express the æsthetic dreams and the bewilderments of the intellect; but Bottom the Weaver expresses them much better.
. . .
There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word “suffer,” and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word “gladly,” and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation.
[Found the entire text of Chesterton's Charles Dickens: A Critical Study on a few web pages created by Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Nagoya University, Japan.]
As you may know, I’m a proponent of the quirky character (here’s a recent article, “In Praise of Eccentricity,” from my newsletter).
Indeed, let’s “make our familiarity with fools a delight”! And who better to learn from than the great Mr. Dickens?
Read Your Work Out Loud
November 10, 2008
In a 2004 interview with Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate (2004-06), on the PBS News Hour, Kooser talked about writing with clarity – so that a piece or passage (in his case, a poem) could be understood by the average person. He recalled how early in his career, when he worked in the insurance business, he would bring a poem in to work and read it to his secretary:
I’m always revising away from difficulty and toward clarity. [. . .] I’d write every morning very early, and then I would bring my work in [to the insurance company where I worked] and I’d say, “Joanne, does this make any sense to you?” And if she said, “Well, no, it doesn’t,” then I would try to find out where it fell down for her.
– Ted Kooser
In an article I did not long ago for my Great Lakes Lit newsletter on the value of reading stories aloud, I mentioned a similar story from a few centuries earlier. The intro to the 1786 edition of Gulliver’s Travels refers to Jonathan Swift asking two menservants whether they understood the meaning of passages read out loud to them.
Swift’s desire: to ensure that his meaning was clear . . . not just to him but to a broader audience.
So often, we fail to recognize how our words force a new reader to stumble, or be puzzled, or to roll their eyes at some intrusion of purple prose or a lame cliche.
Reading passages of your work aloud, whether to your writing group or to a spouse (so few of us have valets, let alone secretaries, to listen to our drafts), is an excellent way to test at least the opening lines of a story or the key paragraph in your pitch letter.
Even if the audience is an imaginary one, reading aloud on your own will allow you to hear your words afresh, using a different part of the brain (and one that was less invested in writing those words . . . and more likely to find a few clunkers that can be improved).
NaNoWriMo, a Literary Feast of Fools?
November 5, 2008
No Plot! No Problem!
Or as the Guinness guys shout: Brilliant!
Or is it: No clue!
What is NaNoWriMo? A great surge of literary energy? Or a Feast of Fools? From their website:
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
In 2007, we had over 100,000 participants. More than 15,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline. . . . They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.
This NaNoWriMo blog has lots of positive anecdotal stories:
Every year of NaNo, I feel like a winner, just for taking time for myself to do something I love, and to do it intensely.
I agree that Writing, for a lot of us, means taking the time, finding that core of passion, and dealing with the intensity of the process. Personally, I find ways to motivate myself (here are 6 of them), like grabbing a glass of red wine and telling myself “I’ll just write for 15 minutes.”
Writing often seems a solitary struggle: man/woman against the blank page of infinite possibilities. We all need writing buddies, real and virtual.
So I understand that for some, the cheerleading and sense of community of NaNoWriMo gets the writer’s blood pounding and fingers flying on the keyboard.
Personally, I recommend a more steady, stick-to-it approach. For most, 500 words a day and a good 3-month plan will get you further than an intense November.
As an editor of books of advice for writers, I’ve studied for years the techniques of successful authors of all genres and approaches. Only a few (Georges Simenon, Belgian author of the Maigret crime novels) comes to mind as ones who did anything like NaNoWriMo. The Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Simenon says “Typing some 80 pages each day, he wrote, between 1923 and 1933, more than 200 books of pulp fiction under 16 different pseudonyms, the sales of which soon made him a millionaire.” Zounds!
This story about Simenon is attributed to Alfred Hitchcock:
Alfred Hitchcock was said to have telephoned, only to be told by Simenon’s secretary that [Simenon]e couldn’t be disturbed because he had just begun a new novel. Hitchcock replied: “That’s all right, I’ll wait.”
Here’s another Simenon story:
What brought Simenon . . . to the attention of the public was not so much his skill as his extraordinary energy as a writer. . . .So notorious did his speed of composition become, that on 14th January 1927 he signed a contract with publisher Eugène Merle undertaking to spend seven days in a glass cage outside the Moulin Rouge nightclub, during which time he would write a novel which was subsequently to be serialised in Merle’s newspaper, Paris-Matinal.
(The paper folded before the event took place, but Simenon kept the advance and enjoyed the media interest for the planned stunt.)
So . . . I can’t say the intensity of NaNoWriMo, or being locked in a glass cage for seven days outside a night club to write, will do any serious harm to a writer. Most will probably build up at least some ideas, passages, maybe self-confidence (or not), maybe some progress on a project.
But that’s a lot of energy to spend on something that’s better training for pulp fiction than for most writing aspirations.
My November challenge: ask yourself, honestly, what really works for you? Not what is fun, or a literary adrenalin rush, or a heightened sense of community, or the power of an oath of commitment (good things in moderation). . . . but what is really going to advance your writing?
For some, NaNoWriMo is going to be the trick that works. No problem! But then . . . what’s your plan for the next three months, and beyond?
As I said in my Afterword to The New Writer’s Handbook, Vol. 2, “One of the oddities of the writing world is that it allows you – in some ways glorifies the tendency – to continue in fruitless ways. To grow as a writer, be more honest about evaluating what works.”
Oh, The Places My Brand Will Go!
August 29, 2008
I’ve been reading several biographies of the peerless Dr. Seuss, and realized how gifted he was . . . not just in the field of children’s literature but also as a practitioner of personal branding for writers.
If you’re like me, you grew up with Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, The Cat in the Hat, Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose, and all the other zany creatures, places, and situations devised by this master of the rhyming, readable children’s book.
Pick up any Dr. Seuss book, even one you haven’t opened before, and you have a good inkling of what you’re going to get. And each book delivers. This is the essence of branding.
In a Seuss book, you expect:
Rollicking, read-out-loud rhymes. Smile-inducing lines that stick in our heads for years: “I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox. I do not like them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am.” From Green Eggs and Ham, of course.)
A memorable, intriguing pen name. Seuss was Ted Geisel’s middle name, his Germanic mother’s family name. It originally rhymed with “voice,” but later was Americanized to rhyme with “juice.”) The “doctor” part was an imaginary self-awarded accolade, something he’d never earned in school. It combined one part respectability, one part the wacky world of a patent-medicine quack.
A delightful overdose of imagination unleashed. Seuss wrote and drew a pantheon of imaginative creatures and landscapes, the likes of which we’d never seen before (no one knew what a Grinch was before Seuss showed us his nasty, conniving, easily irritated soul).
A plain but playful vocabulary. A Seuss book tosses words joyfully back and forth like a jump-rope chant, with pleasure in silly sounds, multiple meanings, and odd associations of words that rhyme or just pop out.
In the end, a moral to the story. Geisel said that in a story, there are only two choices: the good guys win or the evil ones win. He made sure the good ones did, so Thidwick wanders off a happy moose, his goodness intact after his antlers fell off, while his selfish freeloading friends get their comeuppance.
All this adds up to Geisel/Seuss having become one of the most successful children’s book authors of all time.
Born Theodore Seuss Geisel in a German-American family in Springfield, Mass., he attended Dartmouth, then England’s Oxford, but was more passionate for classroom doodles and comic quips than for serious academic studies. He came of age in 1920s, the clever-quipping, convention-breaking era of the flapper. After graduation, he plunged into the advertising business in New York City, submitting cartoons and writing jingles. His big break-through was a jingle for bug-spray: “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” The short tag-line was the core of a 17-year campaign; it became embedded in the American consciousness, a line used by radio comedians like Jack Benny for a quick laugh. Branding at its best.
So like many successful writers, Geisel thought hard and professionally about how to capture people’s attention and imagination quickly. And in his books, he knew how to talk about important subjects: friendship, exploring the world, telling the truth, doing the right thing.
(And like many, he also had to endure some bad reviews, such as a letter received from a convict on death row in Texas. It read, “If your stuff is the kind of thing they’re publishing nowadays, I don’t so much mind leaving.” Ouch! Ted kept the letter.)
One of his masterpieces, The Cat in the Hat, grew out of a challenge from a friend and publisher, William Spaulding of Houghton Mifflin. Following the public furor of a popular book, Why Johnny Can’t Read, Spaulding presented a challenge to Geisel: write a book for young readers using only 225 words of basic vocabulary, a list he provided.
It wasn’t easy. It was like trying to make, Geisel said, “strudel without any strudels.” But he stuck with it, and eventually the wily cat with the goofy hat and his canny cohorts, Thing One and Thing Two, came into the world to delight and enchant generations of young readers.
Laura Backes of Children’s Book Insider wrote, in a wonderful article, “What Dr. Seuss Can Teach Us” (reprinted in The New Writer’s Handbook 2007), why The Cat in the Hat not only encouraged kids to read but offered a new kind of literature:
It also changed how children’s book authors learned to write. Instead of telling a thin story based on a simple, everyday incident, Seuss packed the plot with action that escalated on every page. Rather than relying on one-note characters, he populated his book with quirky, complex and surprising personalities that didn’t always cooperate with one another, thus creating tension and conflict.
I highly recommend the biography, Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel, by journalists Judith and Neil Morgan, for wonderful insight on how Geisel’s successful techniques in marketing himself and growing a career. He invented a new brand of children’s book. And he built it one book at a time, thinking about young readers and what they liked to read, think about, imagine.
Myself, I never imagine a Dr. Seuss book except as a well-worn slim volume, held in my own hands as I read it to my kid brother . . . enjoying each page, again and again, as much as he did.
The books of Dr. Seuss are reliable in delivering a distinctive product: a combination of bright imagination, flowing rhymes, crazy critters, and a sense of what kids really like to read.
Now that’s branding.

