Read more...It is another world inside. It is stone sheen, gold, and gaslight. “Oh, Anna,” Katherine says, and Anna presses her hand to her heart. Even then, even before she knows what will be stolen from her, even before she is aware of the possibility, Katherine wants every inch of this one birthday evening for keeps. She wants to lodge it deep, for all of time. She leads the way up the stairs and through the crowds and toward an arch and through a door and down the aisle toward their cushioned seats, holding Anna’s hand. High above is the crystal chandelier, and Anna won’t take her eyes off it; in Anna’s eyes it shines. It’s like the icicles that form on the edge of a roof when the sun gets trapped inside—a cascade of ice and sun.“Like sitting inside a jewelry box,” Anna whispers, and Katherine nods.
Overall it's a good place, and you fill the pages with your name and several of your pseudonyms. You cover the world's largest naval base and its air wings, NATO, the shipyards, the weapons centers, and anything else that interests you, and it all does. You interview admirals and senators, enlisted men, pilots, and junior intelligence officers in their crisp khaki shirts whom you talk into taking you into the restricted areas down in Dam Neck. You write editorials for the Op-Ed page, and you write scathing letters under fake names back to yourself, and you write letters the next week in answer to those, and you feel like Mark Twain, and it's a lot of fun to feel like Mark Twain.Read more...
So conservation became not only important to America, but it became one of our greatest exports, as America’s beauty shone as a beacon to the world. And other countries started adopting conservation measures because of the example that we had set.Read more...
Protecting this legacy has been the responsibility of all who serve this country. But behind that action, the action that’s been taken here in Washington, there’s also the story of ordinary Americans who devoted their lives to protecting the land that they loved.
That’s what Horace Kephart and George Masa did. This is a wonderful story. Two men, they met in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina -- each had moved there to start a new life. Horrified that their beloved wilderness was being clear-cut at a rate of 60 acres a day, Horace and George worked with other members of the community to get the land set aside. The only catch was that they had to raise $10 million to foot the bill.
But far from being discouraged, they helped rally one of the poorest areas in the country to the cause. A local high school donated the proceeds from a junior class play. Preachers held “Smokey Mountain Sunday” services and encouraged their congregations to donate. Local businesses chipped in. And students from every grade in the city of Asheville -– which was still segregated at the time –- made a contribution.
So stories like these remind us what citizenship is all about. And by the way, last year Michelle and I, we were able to walk some of the trails near Asheville and benefit from the foresight of people that had come before us. Our daughters, our sons were able to enjoy what not only Teddy Roosevelt did but what ordinary folks did all across the country. It embodies that uniquely American idea that each of us has an equal share in the land around us, and an equal responsibility to protect it.
Once while I was working I looked up and saw a woman digging her window box out with a fork. It was cold. Late November. She dug and pulled the dry stalks up, shook the roots and put the old flower heads into a little basket. Then she hit a tough spot—it must have been frozen—and had to dig hard. The fork caught the plant's root and flipped it in air. She watched it go down. Put her hands on the rail and watched as it fell. Then she stopped altogether. Left the fork in. Left the window box like that, half-finished, all winter.Read more...
We began class by listening to Sylvia Plath and Etheridge Knight read their work—tape recordings from years ago played out loud to a quiet room so that we might understand long lines, short lines, loud inside soft, the daring image inside the purposefully mundane, the right repetition, the empowered list. We had listened to that, and then we had read out loud. We had dreamed about our memoirs, closed with lines from Lia Purpura, packed our things; we were almost gone. Except that B was still there, his laptop open. You were speaking of poetry, he said. You should hear this.
I have watched and listened to this three times now. I share it with you. A former Penn student in a scream sing from the very top, as he says, of his fingertips, while President Obama looks admiringly on.
Remarkable.
Thank you, B.
We seek a means of exchange, a language which will renew these ancient concerns and make them wholly, pulsingly ours. Instinctively, we go to our store of private associations for our authority to speak of these weighty issues. We find, in our details and broken, obscured images, the language of symbol. Here memory impulsively reaches out and embraces imagination. That is the resort to invention. It isn't a lie, but an act of necessity, as the innate urge to locate truth always is.Read more...
Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that?Forster writes of the novel, and I teach memoir, but there are lessons here, of course, just as there are lessons on every page we read. We are honing our idea of good. We are turning away from that which flattens our curiosity, our desire to know.
Example 1: By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat. We arose in the dark, hours before sunrise, when there was barely a smudge of indigo along the eastern sky and the rest of the horizon was still pure pitch. We lit our kerosene lamps and carried them before us in the dark like our own tiny waving suns. There was a full day's work to be done before noon, when the deadly heat drove everyone back into our big shuttered house and we lay in the dim high-ceilinged rooms like sweating victims. Mother's usual summer remedy of sprinkling the sheets with refreshing cologne lasted only a minute. At three o'clock in the afternoon, when it was time to get up again, the temperature was still killing.
Example 2: Nailer clambered through a service duct, tugging at copper wire and yanking it free. Ancient asbestos fibers and mouse grit puffed up around him as the wire tore loose. He scrambled deeper into the duct, jerking more wire from its aluminum staples. The staples pinged about the cramped metal passage like coins offered to the Scavenge God, and Nailer felt after them eagerly, hunting for their dull gleam and collecting them in a leather bag he kept at his waist. He yanked again at the wiring. A meter's worth of precious copper tore loose in his hands and dust clouds enveloped him.Read more...
Read more...Operti’s is an aromatic cove of high skies and blooms. Gas lanterns float like kites overhead. Potted trees shadow the paths. There are the bright flags of celosia and astilbe, the yellow sleeves of forsythia forced well past their season, begonias the color of dandelions and fire, and in the midst of it all, the orchestra stage. On every wall, frescoes, and in the very back someone has painted a rock cliff of schist and granite, then turned some sort of spigot on, so that water, real water, cascades down. The sound of Operti’s is gush and violins, the squeak of a chair, the leak of gas in a jet above, a stifled sneeze in the vicinity of the gardenias, and above that the silence of every single place that has ever lain in wait for an evening audience. By the time that Katherine has taken it all in, the girl, the mysterious mistress of the bird, has disappeared.Katherine breathes. Miraculously, she is not asked to leave. This much beauty, she decides, is a painful thing. Paris in Philadelphia wasn’t right, and Operti’s isn’t either.Now from behind, from above comes a swish-wash of sound, and when Katherine turns, she sees the creature’s wings—white as a magnolia bud in spring. The bird has been set free. It flies high, arcs wide past the suspended color globes, toward the cliff of painted rocks, the waterfalls. It swoops low and to the right, extending its wings and holding, ascending again and holding. It is the freest bird Katherine has ever seen. It leans, swoops down, and descends over the room of empty chairs and flowers and palmy heads. It drifts toward the orchestra stand where—on the very edge, between pots of calla lily and candytuft—the child sits with the empty gold cage.
People liked or loved you or they didn't, according to their own needs. Not a single night of the months in Maine had she lain awake agonizing over the possibility that she might accidentally have slighted someone, or that she might have exhibited favoritism to some member of the family as opposed to another. She knew perfectly well that she was capable of—and had indulged in—a certain spitefulness now and then, and generally she had apologized. If she happened to slight someone by accident or through ignorance, or just through a failure to rein in her tendency toward bossiness... Well, she no longer tormented herself about it. Her newly hardened indifference was unexpected; it was a state of being that she hadn't known existed.After finishing Being Polite to Hitler, I went back and read my review of The Evidence Against Her. That review begins like this—words that strike me as still utterly relevant and true. Read Robb Forman Dew.
Read more...Perhaps the only thing more bewildering than gauging one’s own mind is imagining the minds of others—the residues and imprints that spark and shadow foreign thoughts. Of all that has happened in a life, what gets remembered, what signifies? Of all the improbable influences, what finally persuades?Those of us who struggle to answer such questions for ourselves have little choice but to admire a writer of the caliber of Robb Forman Dew, who has demonstrated, in both her fiction and her nonfiction, a near savantism when it comes to mapping psychological terrain. Dew’s characters are fiercely imagined, fiercely alive on the page—complicated, contradicting, equally prone to shame and to sweet triumphs. No detail is too small for Dew to dwell on or to share. Nothing escapes her formidable and wholly empathetic imagination.
I Wanted
I wanted the whole moonwhite where it is, blue how it falls.
I wanted the earth,collapsing and folding.
I wanted the ocean to riseand unberth us.
I wanted the loudest thingin the morning lightto be my heart,still beating.
The short breakin a long poem.
The glass to stopbreaking.
Any attempt to teach writing ... out of anything other than that which the teacher knows intimately rather than theoretically is also doomed. Theories of creative writing I find even more damaging than questions of craft. It seems to me that as teachers of writing, we are there only to make the widest and most thoughtful sense of our own experience. Out of that alone comes useful exploration.Read more...
My only thought yesterday was of the beguiling, deceptive charm of writing and music.— Norma Herr, as quoted by her daughter Mira Bartok, in the remarkable memoir The Memory Palace, about which you will soon be reading more here. For now, I hurry to the Penn campus, to share these words and others with my students Read more...
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