My non-fiction reading of late has included a lot of autobiographies and essay collecdtions by writers. One is Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon From The Cave, Too Far From The Stars, by Ray Bradbury. This afternoon I was struck by an event he recorded more than a half a century ago (p. 18-19).

… The screen writer sets out to masquerade for a few months, in the flesh, and look out the eyes of some author.

I did just that. Did I succeed? For a few hours on a particular morning in London in April of 1954, yes. I lived inside [Herman] Melville”s skin. How well did I live there? Others must answer.

How did I achieve a moment”s visitation?

By reading some parts of Melville two hundred times, other parts ninety times, still other parts thirty or forty times. Some parts only six or seven times; my instinct told me that this or that page, that or this chapter, would not be grist for the whaling mills. Or blubber, if you wish, for the tryworks

All I remember now is that on the morning of April 7, as far as I can recall it, I awoke in a terrible state of excitement. I imagine it was like those moments we hear about before an earthquake, when perhaps the dogs and cats fight to leave the house or the unseen, unheard tremors shake the floor and beams and you find yourself held ready for something to arrive but you”re damned if you know what.

What arrived of course, was the inventor, owner and operator, but above all the dreamer of Moby Dick.

On other mornings I had ordered breakfast

This morning I got out of bed, stared at my typewriter across the room, and marched toward it. On the way I caught a glimpse of my disheveled self.

Now, there is no way for this pink, round face to look insane, lunatic crazy or reasonably mad, if there is a reason to madness. What I saw was some sort of purpose, I imagine. A possible raving dedication that would last, if I took advantage, a few hours, never to come again.

I made a declaration to myself in the mirror:

I, I cried, am Herman Melville!

And, believing it, I sat down at the typewriter and in the next five to six to seven hours rewrote the last third of the screenplay, plus portions of the middle. I did not eat until long after the lunch hour, when I had a sandwich sent up and which I devoured while typing. I was fearful of answering the telephone, dreading the loss of focus if I did so.

I have never typed so long, so hard, so fast, in all the years before that day and all the years since. If I wasn”t Herman Melville, I was at least, by God, his ouija board, and he was moving my planchette. Or his literary force, compressed, all those months, was spouting out my fingertips as if I had turned on all facets.

I mumbled and muttered and mourned and yelled though the morning, all through noontime and leaning into my usual nap time. But there was no tiredness, only the fierce and steady and joyful and triumphant banging away at my machine with the pages littering the floor and Ahab crying destruction over the right shoulder and old Herman bawling instructions over the left.

What was happening, of course, looking back, was that at last the metaphors were falling together, meeting up, touching, and then fusing, the tiny ones to the small ones, the smaller with the larger, and the larger with the immense…

Seekers may go for decades before they experience Satori and then, as Molly says, chop wood and carry water.

I chop wood. I carry water. I write.

My Soundtrack: All These Things That I’ve Done by The Killers on WOXY

There was a time not so long ago when books were, because of their scarcity, precious things. But that is not the case anymore and we routinely throw books away from our personal and public libraries. Librarian Michael Whittaker was troubled by this and found a way, at least for a time, to put life back into books headed for the trash.

From the New York Times:

Last year, the Portland library joined forces with the Maine College of Art in Portland for a first-of-its-kind project: Long Overdue: Book Renewal. To inaugurate it, the library invited a Brooklyn-based book artist, Doug Beube, to lecture about his work. That was followed by a “book grab,” during which artists were invited to take any of the library’s discarded volumes and do with them as they pleased.

Nearly 200 artists, mostly from Maine but also from Boston, California and Wisconsin, participated. Megan Dunn transformed text into a spiny bracelet by cutting pages into long, skinny strips and attaching them to an elastic band. Susan Winn gutted a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and remade it into Field of Greens, [above, JH] a potted patch of turf in which the waving blades of grass are lines sliced from the book.

It’s like a magical recycling program, Mr. Whittaker said. They turned trash into art.

I prefer art into more art.

My Soundtrack: My Surname’s An Airplane by Miranda Sound on WOXY.

Today is the day that we celebrate as the anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare in 1564. Isaac Asimov once speculated that the bard’s writings have held English together for more than 400 years because they are touchstones to which we cling. Could we express ourselves otherwise?

My favorite line is from Macbeth: By the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes. From the Writer’s Almanac comes this reminder.

Shakespeare used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words, and he was the first writer to invent or record many of our most common turns of phrase, including foul play, as luck would have it, your own flesh and blood, too much of a good thing, good riddance, in one fell swoop, cruel to be kind, play fast and loose, vanish into thin air, the game is up, truth will out and in the twinkling of an eye.

And to the best of my knowledge that vocabulary meant that Shakespeare never needed to resort to the Anglo-Saxon fuck.

My Soundtrack: Hear Me Calling by Bob Mould on WOXY.

Going Postal 6 from Worth 1000.

There are, generally speaking, two kinds of writers. The first kind is rare. This is the writer who needs to write so badly that they panic when they’re not writing. The other kind, which includes most of us, want to write, enjoy the act writing, can’t imagine our lives without writing. And will do anything to put off writing.

From Slate today comes this tale from Sarah Hepola about how blogging became her anti-writing drug of choice.

One morning last month, I woke early, finished a book I’d been reading, and shut down my blog. I had kept the blog for nearly five years, using it as a repository for personal anecdotes, travelogues, and the occasional flight of fiction-all of which I hoped, eventually, might lead to a novel. And then, somewhere between the bedsheets and 6 a.m., I realized something: Blogging wasn’t helping me write; it was keeping me from it.

[Snip]

Blogging had been the ideal run-up to a novel, but it had also become a major distraction. I would sit down to start on my novel only to come up with five different blog entries. I thought of them as a little something-something to whet the palate-because it was easier, more immediately satisfying, because I could write it, and post it, and people would say nice things about it, and I could go to bed feeling satisfied.

But then I would wake feeling less than accomplished because a blog wasn’t a whole story told from beginning to end. I had shelves lined with other people’s prose while my best efforts were buried on a Web site somewhere, underneath a lot of blah-blah about American Idol and my kitty cat.

OK, Adam, Jill, John and Wendy, what do you think?

(And, blame it on Jill, Kristen?)

My Soundtrack: Blue Skies by The Young Republic on WOXY.

But it’s so much fun…

On Monday, Dan Gilmore dropped me a note touting the sale of Bayosphere to Backfence. I suppose it’s a good thing for those involved, but I don’t think it’s a good thing for the Internet. Why? Because we don’t need more clones. Because it’s another step in the direction of our Walmarting.

Backfence was in Bethesda, Maryland and Arlington, McLean and Reston, Virginia; and now it’s in San Francisco.

Take a look at the templates. The five sites are as cookie cutter as the horrible templates that Cleveland.com bought into. Here’s hoping that there’s never a www.backfence.com/home/index.cfm?mycomm=CE

We can do better. How would Cleveland webdesigners and writers do it differenlty?

My Soundtrack: Airbag by RJD2 on WOXY.

When I was editor of Aftermarket Business one the fun pieces we did each year was our annual racing issue. I got to interview people like Joe Amato and Richard Petty. Racing is a huge advertising tie-in in the automotive aftermarket and corporations needed ways to convince consumers that they were players in the game.

From Blogspotting today comes news that one of the companies I used to write about, Castrol, has decided to go right to the consumer with podcasts. How’d they do it?

…they turned to FeedBurner and its RSS network. They put ads about their podcasts in the feeds that FeedBurner manages. The whole idea was to put them into a conversation they might not have been in before.

Yet another example of how when we all own presses, no one owns the press.

My Soundtrack: Lookout Mountain by Drive-By Truckers on WOXY.

Chas Rich and I will be meeting at Cafe Ah-Roma, 2230 Euclid Avenue, tomorrow afternoon at 1:30. We’ll leave from there shortly before 2 p.m. for AleFest. All bloggers are invited to join us for 20 beers and blogging. Beer… Blogging… More beer… More blogging… Can it get better than that?

The facts in the Anthony Soltero case are still clear as mud. Now it seems that Soltero cut school and used the march as an excuse, but that is far from certain. LiveJouranl blogger Cruz531 has picked up the thread and the comments are interesting. The Los Angeles Times finally ran stories on the 15th and 16th.

The world needs more lawyers like John Mortimer. Today is the 83 anniversary of his birth. Of his writing he said that comedy is the only thing worth writing in this despairing age, provided the comedy is truly on the side of the lonely, the neglected, and the unsuccessful, and plays its part in the war against established rules.

And just as you figure it out, you’re old enough to go to work.

I owe Tom Ruble, the guy who keeps sending these to my dad, a six-pack.

In the fall of 2004 I helped to recount ballots in Cuyaghoga County. Now the Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition is calling for volunteers to conduct non-partisan exit pools next month. Next to casting your vote, I can think of no other action as worthy of your time than helping to ensure that our voting process is honest. See you at the polls.

I See Invisible People is hosting The Carnival of Feminists XIII and the midway is packed. The breadth and depth of postings on the topic of Feminisms and Challenges is amazing. To Terry’s credit she’s woven conservative as well as progressive voices into the mix. It’s going to take the better part of the next two days to read it all. Ah bliss.

From Ruebon Bolling…

Back in the late ’70s, when I lived I San Diego, I haunted a hobby shop named The Command Post. One of the inside jokes was a diorama that featured a PzKw V painted in an ambush pattern using shades of pink. If you don’t get the joke, look it up. From Boing Boing this morning comes a picture of a knitted pink cozy that covers a whole tank.

In the blogosphere there are primary bloggers, secondary bloggers and tertiary bloggers. Most of us are secondary (linking to and commenting on published events) or tertiary (commenting on events posted by others) bloggers. A precious few, however, are primary bloggers, those who go out an get their information right from the horse’s mouth.

In Northeaster Ohio we are blessed with at least three blogs that I’m aware of that can claim primary status: Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of View (the blog before there were blogs that is perpetuated on Real Roldo), George Nemeth, Tim Russo and Bill Callahan’s Meet The Bloggers (whose stellar status is rising) and the blogger that I first tapped as a successor to Roldo: Bill Callahan, who writes Cleveland Diary.

I first noted Bill’s ability to analyze raw data, talk with the right sources and make it all readable about a year ago (A New Roldo…)

This week Bill has taken apart a complicated issue for blogger Jill Miller Zimon and made it all make sense. The issue is the National Video/Internet Franchising Bill. I won’t abstract. Just read.

My Soundtrack: Horizon by Bats on WOXY.

Or War of Northern Aggression? I wish that one had been on the Yankee or Rebel test. It’s a dead giveaway. But the other words on this Internet test are almost as good. I think because I traveled and lived so many places and mingled with so many people, my speech has become a hodgepodge. I only scored as 44 percent Dixie.

Garrison Keillor goes off on spring silliness and how even theologians run off to Rio with waitresses named Amber when the robins sing and the crocuses open. I have a good friend who thinks of herself as a pistachio in spring: a green nut. It was Garrison’s conclusion that struck me the most. He wrote:

I have found the adage Step on a crack and break your mother’s back very useful as a guide in life. It has helped generations of kids imagine that acts have consequences beyond what we can imagine. Without meaning to, you might cause the old lady to suddenly fall to the floor, writhing in pain.

Who knows how it happens? It just does. So if you stay off the pavement and walk only on grass or bare dirt, you are likely to stay out of trouble. Try it for 30 days and see if I’m not right.

I do miss roaming the woods of Southeastern Ohio.

My Soundtrack: Bright Yellow Gun by Throwing Muses on WOXY.