I just filed my 447th consecutive weekly Bismarck Tribune newspaper column. From my third favorite coffee house. It came pretty easily today, because I am in a gentle, no fight in me, spirit. After a long period of very high winds, the plains of North Dakota have quieted down in the last three days. Some rain, gray skies, drizzle, about 65 degrees by mid afternoon. The first two or three shirtsleeve days of the year have occurred in the last week. Im reading Charles Dickens. If you are looking to cheer up, there is no book better than The Pickwick Papers, Dickens happiest book. It has some dark moments, because Dickens is a genius who looks at life as it really is, but for the most part it makes you smile out loud. Because it has no serious plot, you can pick it up almost anywhere and find something amusing. Ive been trying to figure out what it is about Dickens--what is the source of his magical capacity with prose. It lies somewhere along the lines of drollery, a kind of generous irony, not so far from Garrison Keillors accepting view of small town midwestern life, but with something uncanny in Dickens understanding of how damaged each of us is, and in being damaged, how interestingly fixated or eccentric or mechanical in some way or other. I dont think anyone has ever really explained this in its fullness. There is some kind of emotional detachment in the narrative. Nothing of the sort exists in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or even Jane Austen, though she is closer. And Im reading the great miniaturist Nicholson Baker, best known perhaps for his erotic novel Vox, which caught the easily-caught attention of Bill Clinton back in the Lewinsky phase of his restlessness. Baker writes about how paper clips work, why shoelaces break in the same place at about the same time, left and right shoe. Yesterday on the road I read his essay on the Discards of the old card catalogues, an essay of genuine genius. His best book is the Mezzanine, which gets down to particulars in a marvelous obsessive but always delightful way, and the next best is The Size of Thoughts, with the aforementioned essay on the culture crime of throwing away card catalogues in libraries. The meadowlarks have been here for a month. They are thick in the badlands, somewhat lighter than before in north Bismarck. The trees are budding. My grass is gray green and green gray. My tiller wont start. Lots of trips to Menards. My indoor plant racks are bursting with new green life, tomatoes mostly, and beans of the fairy tale fecundity. First thunder May 5th, but it was half-hearted thunder. We await the first hot day, the first night where you can linger on the deck until 10 oclock, the first sockdolager of a thunderstorm, and the opening of the Medora Musical. I love to write. the way to learn to write is to write all the time, the simplest sentences you can muster, with an emphasis on communication not flourishings. Dr. Johnson was right, Anyone can write if he will set himself doggedly to it. Best Pickwick: Penguin edition. csj
Posted on: Wed, 07 May 2014 15:35:54 +0000
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