19 Friday Aug 2022
Posted in creativity, Random, Story, What they said
Sometimes you queue up a rom-com because it’s been a long week and you pick “Lost City” because Sandra Bullock is fun to watch.
And you get an unexpected gift.
Her character borrows a slogan from the crest of the Ferguson clan: Dulcius ex asperis, Latin for “sweeter after difficulties.”
In the middle of challenges, it’s a reminder that making an effort has rewards.
19 Wednesday Jan 2022
Posted in Random, Retro reads, What they said
Shout out to historian and newspaper columnist Patrician Ann Edwards for capturing this great quote in her history of Lorane Oregon, “Sawdust and Cider,” now sadly out of print.
She’s quoting farmer and former Lane County Commissioner Oral Crowe: “This soil is so bad that a man couldn’t raise hell on it with seven naked ladies and a barrel of whiskey.”
I believe our local library has a copy and I will be tracking it down. Edwards’ blog also looks pretty delightful.
08 Saturday Jan 2022
Posted in creativity, Random, What they said
Thanks, Google, for letting me know that I am reading “A Brief History of Time” on author Stephen Hawking’s birthday. And thanks for creating such a great animated video with Hawking narrating. One of the quotes: “One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist. Without imperfection neither you nor I would exist.” What a stellar human.
07 Friday Jan 2022
Posted in family, Random, What they said
My mother and I confessed our shameful secret to each other on New Year’s day. Irene told me she had stopped practicing the piano and I said I couldn’t remember when I last picked up my guitar. We commiserated on our failure to be our best selves, and then agreed that we’d help each other by promising to report via email every day that we had done at least a little practicing, even just 10 minutes.
And this is what I adore about my mother. That at 96, and wheelchair-aided and living in a nursing home in southern Alberta, she’s still got game. I took this picture of her when I visited in November 2020 — height of covid, no vaccines available. I had to quarantine in Canada for two weeks before I could see her and let me just say that she was worth it. We had so much fun. On the last day of my visit it had been snowing, and when I arrived at the nursing home for a last goodbye Irene was busy putting on coat and hat and gloves.
“What are you doing?” I asked
“I’m going outside. It’s snowing!” she said with that gleam in her eye that always brightens a room. I would say she wears her soul on her sleeve, not just her heart.
So. We didn’t say anything about resolutions for the new year. We just agreed we’d be a practicing support system for each other. We are a week in, and we are good.
04 Tuesday Jan 2022
Posted in Random, What they said, writing
I like serendipitous encounters. I had been trying to get my mind around a particular area of quantum physics and stumbled on Roger Penrose, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who shared a Wolf prize with Stephen Hawking and who did the math on how stars collapse to form black holes. I found a YouTube video interview with Roger Penrose that I completely could not follow, and as I was sitting there feeling dumb, YouTube dished up another random video, a Ted Talk with Dominic Walliman, whose specialty is explaining quantum physics to kids. There were many fine moments in his 15-minute talk, but my favorite came at the end when he said: “You know, science shouldn’t be about whether you’re good at it or not. It should only be about whether you’re interested. …. There’s so much good information out there these days, just pick a subject that you’re interested in, find some material and then from there, follow your curiosity.”
I think “Follow your curiosity” will be my mission statement for 2022.
10 Tuesday Apr 2012
Posted in Random, What they said
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Apparently, those who follow celebrities have been talking trash about actress Ashley Judd’s face. From what I recollect of her movies, she has a lovely face. Miffed by the ridiculous focus in the celebrity reporting realm on the apparent puffiness of her face and what it says about our culture, she wrote a little something for The Daily Beast to rant against this dangerous obsession with the perfect female figure.
I think she’s a fine actress, a lovely woman and an OK writer (tip to Ms. Judd: never ever use the world “promulgate.” Even the people who know what it means really don’t like it that much), but she said something in her piece that I really liked. Here it is:
“I do not, for example, read interviews I do with news outlets. I hold that it is none of my business what people think of me. I arrived at this belief after first, when I began working as an actor 18 years ago, reading everything. I evolved into selecting only the “good” pieces to read. Over time, I matured into the understanding that good and bad are equally fanciful interpretations. I do not want to give my power, my self-esteem, or my autonomy, to any person, place, or thing outside myself. I thus abstain from all media about myself.”
I’m so on board with that. But it’s difficult to keep myself from being spun by other people’s opinions. Believing in one’s own worth, appreciating but not embracing praise, hearing but letting go of criticism. That’s a worthy goal.
Note to self: Try not to envy Judd for her face, puffy or otherwise.
25 Sunday Mar 2012
Posted in Random, What they said
An intriguing piece in the April Scientific American describes how even mild stress can inhibit conscious self-control. (Find a summary here; to read the entire article requires a subscription.)
According to Yale professors Amy Arnsten, Caryolyn Mazure and Rajita Sinha, stress does more to us than trigger hormones that drive the fight or flight response. It also messes with our higher order brain center, the prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain that keeps us from eating that extra cookie, reminds us that it’s time to exercise, helps us bite our tongue so that we don’t yell at the boss.
Stress apparently bumps high level control from the prefrontal cortex to the hypothalamus and other earlier evolved parts of the brain, Arnsten, Mazure and Sinha say. So those higher-order decision-making functions drop into the part of the brain where binging seems like a good idea.
My job as a reporter has plenty of stress, some of it mild, some of it more intense. Of course, it’s not as stressful as many other jobs — police work, firefighting, soldiering, those are serious blink-and-you-or-others-could-die stressful. But journalism stress is nothing to be sneezed at. It’s pretty relentless, and sometimes the stakes are high.
Given that, my current weaknesses — the overeating, the excess drinking, the lost weekends as a couch potato — all start making some kinds of sense.
It also helps me understand why sometimes when I’m covering a night meeting — where a school board is making a decision at 8 p.m., and I have to write a cogent story about it by a 10 p.m. deadline — I sometimes just freeze up for several minutes, my brain a blank, and its difficult to even get the first sentence down on the screen.
The authors refer to this weakened state of the prefrontal cortex under stress as a “devastating handicap in circumstances where we need to engage in complex decision-making.”
I wonder if knowing this will help me be more resilient, and I wonder if there is a cumulative effect where years in this stressful biz make it harder to keep my PC engaged and doing its higher-order thing.
05 Monday Mar 2012
Posted in Random, Story, What they said
Here‘s a succinct little essay on electronic publishing from the Atlantic, (thank you Alan Jacobs) that I love not only for its respect for the value of copy editors, but also because it introduced me to this great quote from Colorado College librarian Steve Lawson: “Publishers are scared that the Internet is going to disintermediate their asses into the dustbin of history, and the best response that many of them have come up with is to express their fear through hatred.”
Don’t know about that, but I do know that I will now be spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find a way to use “disintermediate their asses” in a conversation.
03 Saturday Mar 2012
Posted in Random, Story, What they said
Writing is easy. You just open up a vein and bleed onto the page.
I’m paragraphing Moyle Q. Rice, an unparalleled professor at Utah State University who taught many things but who taught creative writing with passion and heart. I thought of him this week because someone reminded me that I have been making my living with words for 28 years now.
When I stumbled — hopeful and stupid — into his creative writing class so many years ago , he could well have quashed any glimmer of hope I had about writing. I was terrible. I still remember the red pen notes he wrote on my short stories. The first one said: “Don’t make a crusade of it, but brush up on the rules of punctuation.”
Isn’t that generous and helpful? As were all his red-ink notes. I looked forward to reading them because he was encouraging and direct. There are some who would take great pains to circle every comma-spliced sentence and misused semicolon, every overindulgent exclamation point and unfortunately deployed elipsis. Moyle, with his fey smile, had no interest in crushing souls.
He saw something in me and nursed it along, not as professor to student, but as reader to writer. He took his students seriously, although he was funny and ironic and took very little in life seriously. He nudged me toward the best in myself.
And he wasn’t the only one. USU in the those years harbored another brilliant soul, Kenneth Brewer who wrote and taught poetry and who knew that meaning is slippery and that words paired in certain ways could change everything.
I did not know before I took classes from Kenneth Brewer that trees could speak of heartbreak and birds could speak of leaving and that water could tear down the fabric of the soul. As a poet, he was a master of evoking mood in his own writing with nary an emotion mentioned and he was as nuanced in his teaching. He would hold back when you were broken, but push you hard when you were slacking.
They didn’t know, and neither did I, that I would become a journalist. But they laid the foundation. They gave me the tools. You wouldn’t necessarily think that poetry and creative writing come into play in journalism. But they do. The art of writing headlines corresponds with poetry. Meter and line length matter. And narrative arc matters in a news story just as it does in fiction.
Ken and Moyle have moved on to other realms. I miss them. And I salute all the teachers/professors/mentors out there who understand how to keep a student’s dreams alive, while giving them the tools to grow. It’s difficult, beautiful, worthy work.
24 Tuesday Jan 2012
Posted in Story, What they said
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Robert McKee’s “Story” is my current best writing friend. It’s a book about how to write screenplays, but it is excellent as a guide to sorting out the architecture of a good story regardless of the format.
I love it for being pragmatic. Here’s an example: “Here’s a simple test to apply to any story. Ask: What is at risk? What does the protagonist stand to lose if he does not get what he wants? More specifically, what’s the worst thing that will happen to the protagonist if he does not achieve his desire? If this question cannot be answered in a compelling way, the story is misconceived at its core.”
But I also love it for recognizing why we love stories: “We not only create stories as metaphors for life, we create them as metaphors for meaningful life — and to live meaningfully is to be at perpetual risk.”
McKee makes me want to simultaneously write well and live well. How cool is that?
from page 149 of the 1997 hardback edition.
Exquisite Now 