writing and writers – Page 144 – don't confuse the narrator

recycled rubbish

I think it is Blaise Pascal who is credited with having first said, “I’d have written a shorter letter if only I’d had the time.” That’s pretty much the way I feel about blog posts, which always take far longer than is reasonable for their length and (lack of) content.

The previous post was probably one of the quickest I’ve ever written, partly, perhaps, because most of it was simply linking together old ideas. I was also in a hurry to post because I had to catch a bus.

Maybe if I’d had longer to think I’d have censored it. As it is, I fear I mildly shocked certain readers by ‘using language’.**
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small worlds

Reading about Makemake on the BBC reminded me of a poem I wrote back in 2006 when they demoted Pluto from planet to dwarf planet.

In the dog house

My Very Excellent Mother used to be
the soul of generosity, and her beneficence
a universally-acknowledged truth.
Around the world, students rejoiced
when they recalled that she
Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas.

But as time passes, so it seems, the universe
contracts; mom’s liberality is capped
and scientists decree that students
will make do with
Nothing.

Supperless
I’m banished to my room. I must redo
my fourth grade science project.

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tooth in advertising

Having suffered at the hands of the dentist yesterday – and I do suffer, with the only consolation that, as a writer, I may later find it useful to know what it feels like to have hysterics – I was glad to see that the old Especialidades Juanse tiles are still in place in Madrid’s Malasaña district.
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questions arising

I see from the BBC website that “CIA director David Petraeus has resigned from his post, admitting he had an extra-marital affair.”

“Unnamed officials” say the affair was with his biographer, who is described in the article as having spent months “embedded alongside the then-general in Afghanistan while researching her 2011 book, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.”

Leaving aside that use of the verb “embed”, I think the story raises a few questions:

Did she include details of the affair in the biography? If not, can we trust the accuracy of anything else in the book?

Between a biographer and their subject, is there not a “power-relationship”? After all, she could make him look better or worse depending on how she expressed the information? Was he coerced?

She, too, was married. Is she going to resign as a biographer? (It seems to me that the affair impinges more directly on her work than on his.)

in the woods

Sunlight filterd through trees by a stream

I find by chance that someone has include my poem Vignette as an example in a writing exercise for students.

It has been attributed to me, and the poem is available online, so I don’t think there’s a big problem. I do, however, wish that they’d contacted me and told me they wanted to use it. After all, it’d be nice to be told they thought it was good. Equally, it’d be useful – though not as nice – to know if they were using it to demonstrate what /not/ to do.

I don’t seem to have posted it on the blog, so here it is:
Continue reading “in the woods”