Enjambment

I don't understand prose poems make me rethink my major is art mostly looks like someone let their three year old finger paint on the wall was a face with only the colors out of the tube can't get any brighter than the sky today.

Confused? Me too.

I'm not a poet. The art of poetry writing is interesting to me, but not enough to make me pursue it through the dark and sticky mire of my inadequacy. There are other things that are as challenging that I find more rewarding. But I will probably continue to dabble in it. One thing that I like about poetry is the device of enjambment. Basically enjambment happens when the line ends, but the sentence in a poem doesn't. It can be used to break a pattern and then catches the reader (or maybe just me) off guard. I get used to pausing and, or, finishing a thought at the end of a line. So the instant after I have comprehended the meaning of the line, I find that the idea continues on the next line and must adjust my understanding. That haltering thought adjustment, like the quick step one takes to avoid falling when one's foot has caught on a broken edge of sidewalk, is an interesting thing to be able to cause in someone else's mind.

(Does that make me a sadist? I want to mess with everyone's mind. *evil laugh*)

I also like the way the word sounds. Enjambment. It looks rather like a word I would type out and then realize I had made some egregious spelling error.

(Had to attempt "egregious" three or four times before I looked up "terrible" in my thesaurus and found it. I would never have guess it began with an E. I thought I had the last part wrong some how.)

The B belongs there so delightfully adding to the surprise of the idea. I can think of several words that ought to have Bs in them and don't. And some that have them and shouldn't. So the spelling pleases me. And the way it looks, that poor B squished uncomfortable between Ms and the J looks like the N has stepped on it's tail and it is about to trip over the A, rather they way my mouth and nose feels trying to get all those sounds in between nasal consonants.
Cough.
Sometimes my mind feels like an enjambment. If I start talking before a thought it fully formed, I tend to start multiple sentences before I decide which one I really want to say out loud. This leaves the person I am talking to rather confused. I suspect that I will do this without realizing it when I get old. It will be very amusing. And I find that I change my mind about where a sentence is going half way through it. I usually start over. But now and then, I find a sentence that started to say one thing and half way through decided to conclude a different thought. It is not always clear when the shift happened. One or two words might belong in either sentence. I used to see this in other students' writing a lot when I was a writing tutor.

(Who thought it was a good idea to make me a writing tutor?)

Learning to write was a challenge to me because I didn't think in sentences.

(Sound off, people. Who thinks in complete, grammatically correct sentences? Anyone?)

I think in a tangle of related ideas that exist in a images and key words that act like hinges, swinging one idea to meet another. I can be frustrating to try and express these thoughts because they are a web rather than a string.

(Thus, the loosely organized chaos of this post and many others like it.)

Sometimes I sit down at my keyboard and can't write a single sentence. Sometimes I free write, letting words connect to each other independent of the words preceding or to follow.

(Preceding is a rather confusing word. It means "come before" something and "go ahead of" something. Does anyone else find that spatially confusing. I want to it be in the back, or in the front. The head or the foundation. but not both.)

I think it would be fun to try and express a very specific idea that way; weaving together ideas and images that suggest something larger without completing a single sentence. It would continually trip up your brain, like an enjambment. (Like those school yard songs that always change the subject just as they are leading up to saying a dirty word.) All those ideas bounding around and you catch glimpses of them as they flash past in a whirling jumble of possible sentences.

I spun ideas till I got dizzy and wanted to hurl magic words at all the misunderstandings could be avoided like the plague wasn't started by rats but we continue to ignore them and they get bigger all the time until they walk out the door and parents remember all the things they should have told me how to do this in school today I met a person who raised his hand and made us all be quiet until he thought of exactly how do you ask the right questions anyway.

Wayfaring Stranger

Thinking about a lot of things. And I've been looking for an excuse to post this video. I think it's lovely and I want to be in a group that is good enough to do it someday.

The immigrants and the slaves of the first half of our country's history were so uprooted that they had a deep understanding of what it means to be in this world but not of it. In their songs they express a longing for a perfect home, shared with their loved ones who are separated from them by oceans and mountains and often death. Sorrow and pain are not supposed to be part of our life. But we are passing through this world, where they are. The place where we are meant to live, in joy and peace, our true home, is on the other side of the time we spend here.

As I am going into my last year of undergraduate study, I am SO ready to be done and on to the rest of my life. I am young and naive and see the future full of bright possibilities. The more I dream of the life I want to set up for myself, the wonderful things I want to do, the harder it becomes to remember that this world is not my home. I worry about finding a job. Will anyone in this world want me to work for them? Will I be able to make ends meet? Will I get to do something that I love? Will I be able to live near people who love me? As an adult, I need to sort out all of these questions and prepare myself to answer, or let God answer each of them. I have to let go of my fear or rejection. It's God's job to make someone willing to hire me. It's my job to apply diligently.

Among all these questions and searching, I need to take a step back and regain a proper perspective.
My true job is to love the Lord my God with all my strength, heart, and mind. It was much easier to believe in this when I was a child, having my basic needs met by my parents. Now I must be active in this walk of faith. I need to find road by which to walk through this lonesome valley, not a place in it to call my own.

Growing up has often felt like a training course to make me fit to live in the world. Being a grown up will be a training course to make me fit to live in the next world.

Music and Writing

Looking at grad school programs. Some of them are really interested in making sure writers know how to talk about their writing process. This is a mysterious and personal subject. Certain things help everyone, but no two processes are exactly alike and no method will always work. Everyone hits a wall sometimes.

I like to listen to music. But it has to be a certain kind of music. I love music I can sing along to, but that makes trouble when I am supposed to be writing because I end up typing song lyrics in with whatever I'm working on.
The solution to this is sound tracks and classical music without vocals, or with vocals in another language.

Recently I have been reading various authors talk about what it feels like when they are writing well. A lot of people describe a feeling of discovery rather than creation, letting characters go their own way, rather than inventing a character and making them do certain things. I don't know if I've ever had that experience. But I have slipped into a mode where ideas come and language flow easily and it builds until I am not stopping to scratch my head about how I'm going to describe something or come up with a motivation for a character to do something. It's a really great feeling.

In trying to articulate this, I found myself using the same kind of language that I might use to describe some of the music I like to listen to when I write. This is what it feels like. 

(and if you haven't seen How To Train Your Dragon, you should look up the clip that corresponds to this track. Animators having fun with body language, no dialogue necessary.)

And before this dragon movie became my guilty pleasure, (along with kung fu panda) I listened to this:

That's what a good writing day sounds like.

Reading for spite

The Tapestry:
The Hound of Rowan
By Henry Neff 

I had to look it up to figure out which of these titles was for the book, and which is for the series. My research says that the book is called "The HOund of Rowan" and "The Tapestry" is the name of the series. Neither title makes much sense to me, but whatever.

This series seems to be a shameless knock off of Harry Potter. It involves a boy named Max who discovers that he has magical powers and is immediately swept off to a school where he will learn to use them. There are magical creatures, wacky teachers, special games, lighthearted banter between new friends, a bully, and rule breaking. What would happen if Harry Potter went to school on the East coast of the good old USA?

Some special and unique features of this book are an ogre and a hag who make the meals at the school. Magical bedroom and room mate selection, creatures that can only be described as seriously evil werewolves on steroids, a singing bullfrog that removes, ahem, social inhibitions, magical pets and an ancient ship which student must not sleep on lest its sea dwelling guardian make waves that toss them overboard.

Generally, I think knock offs are rather annoying. But I gave this one a chance because I am curious to see if other authors are trying to amend Rowling as I would like to. I rather hate Rowling for failing to deliver on so many good ideas. She is really good at half the things you need to tell a good story. But this is a rant for another post. I can't help comparing this book to Potter, since it's clearly in the same sub-genre. It's an interesting comparison.

I enjoyed this book because most of the characters were believable. They were distinctive and memorable, yet not overly simplified. The adults were reasonably competent and mature and also had believable disagreements, personal grudges and biases. The children were petty and rude, often terrified, secretive, hot tempered, and sometimes rose above what was expected of people their age to show real virtue. There was one exception. I guess you could call him the Draco Malfoy equivalent. They never gave him even Draco's excuse for his bad behavior. He was just mean for the sake of being mean. Maybe they will further explain his character in another book. I was awfully proud of Max, however, because he was willing to put aside their animosity when it really counted.

I disliked some of the narrative choices the author made. There were scenes that were merely passing jokes and insignificant insidence that were not written as such. They were sometimes given more narraitve weight, so to speak. A reader can sense when the author is giving them a detail they are supposed to pay attentiong to. One of Rowling's strengths is that she is really good at leaving hints around, leading her reader on, and then tying it all up like a Christmas package. In The Tapestry there are several dramatic events that ought to hide some kind of secret or clue to be reincorporated later, and they don't. It would be tempting to dwell on such events just for the sake of the humor or drama of the whole thing. But they didn't actually have the significance in the greater story to merit it.

Another stylistic thing that bothered me was the Neff's habit of ending chapters with drawn knives, pointed guns, strangers stepping out of shadows, or new clues being uncovered, only to pick up two weeks later in the next chapter. We are not given the benefit of seeing how the characters process these dramatic events. We must just assume that they did and latch on to whatever they are interested in now.

Another thing I loved about this book was that there was no thirty pages of exposition right before the final action of the climax. The explanation of the mysterious bad things that keep happening is revealed slowly throughout most of the book and the last hundred pages are pretty non stop action with only minimal explanation. Some questions are never explained but merely proved. A character who has been portrayed as a villain for the first half, swears his good intentions half way through, leaving us in confusion, and then proves what side he is on in the climax. No explanation necessary.

Speaking of the climax, wow. The immediacy of the whole thing and the high stakes made it pretty darn intense. The climax of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (my favorite book so far) comes close. Creepy ritual, blood, desperate fighting, painful sacrifice, heroics. Only without the long monologue from the big bad guy.

Overall, The Hound of Rowan's tone was less charming (if just as whimsical. Did I mention Max has to babysit goslings for a goose who likes to shout insults at the referee at sporting events?) and darker than Potter's world in the early books. Come to think of it, it was less emotional. There was no lack of children with tragic pasts, but no one was threatening to take away Maxes birthday, so there was not the same tug on the old heart strings. Neff is weak in some of the areas in which Rowling shines, but also very strong in some areas that I think Rowling could use some work.

So, what about knock offs? Do we give our unswerving allegiance to originals only? Or do we allow imitation to be the most sincere form of flattery? If it is obviously an imitation, but done really well, does that make a difference? Is it a crime against the original creator, or homage to their art?

Reading for pleasure

Rosemary Sutcliff liked to write in very ancient ages. A clash of invaders and natives of the British isles, usually. Knight's Fee, which I just finished reading (in tears) is set at the end of the eleventh century. That's a little more modern than some of her stories. The Eagles of the Ninth just got made into a movie. I haven't seen it yet. I wonder how Sutcliff would translate to screen. If any of you have seen it, (and better yet if you have also read the book) please tell me how you liked it. That one, of course, is set when the Romans were running around Britain. King Arther figures in one series and my favorite was set in the Bronze age.


She does not have a lot of flashy marketing appeal. It is sort of a dense read, thick with atmosphere and rich language, not the snappy images that we get in a lot of youth lit. I like to write a picture in a few words, but there is also something about describing a voice as "hairless" that makes for more sensual experience. She dips her reader into this lugubrious world so that we start to smell and taste it.

The story itself was not fantastic or even very original. It's simple and true, exploring the growth of a human heart. I guess she probably could have sold it as a rags to riches cinderella story. Boy raised among hunting hounds (and beaten with them) becomes a knight at the age of twenty-two. But that's like saying that The Lord of the Rings is about lost jewelry.

I suppose I like this, and most of Sutcliff's books because it is really a friendship story. Mostly, she writes stories about male friendship. I wonder if she ever wrote about girl friends... I'll have to look it up. The heart of this story is the little moments that make a friendship. In this book, a goldfinch is the beginning of the central friendship. The two boys being quiet together, beating each other up, sharing a public moment in a very private way. These slow, subtle events are so true to real life, though few of us really think about the difference a goldfinch makes in a relationship.



So, the bottom line is, I would read Rosemary Sutcliff no matter what she wrote about because her language is so beautiful. It just so happens that she likes to write about one of my favorite topics; friendship.

P. S.
Sun Horse, Moon Horse was not the first Sutcliff book I read, but for some reason, it is my favorite. I don't remember much about it. Spoiler: it ends with the death of the main character and it's quite a horrible death. But I would have been disappointed with anything less. For a long time I thought I had imagined that I had read it, or dreamed that it was a Sutcliff book, because I couldn't find it on any of the lists of her books and I couldn't remember the name. But there it is. It's real and I liked it.

Summer

Along with the usual agonizing search for a job (how come so many other people manage to get summer jobs and I'm never one of them?), I have a long list of more pleasant and interesting things to do this summer.

I find myself at the inevitable point in my life when most of my childhood friends are off having adventures of their own and do not return like homing pigeons to their parents during the summer months. This is the third Saturday I have been home and I have not interacted with anyone other than my family and the strangers I meet at the library and the bank. It's a little odd. I miss my friends, but I am a big girls, so I can handle it. I have no idea who reads this blog anymore. But if you are in town, don't forget to say hi.

Through that magic substitute for real human interactions known as the internet, I am keeping in touch with most of my friends, old and new. One of my summer goals is to finally read Harry Potter. A handful of people from my school are reading with me. I set up a blog for us all to geek out, rip to shreds, and otherwise enjoy each other's company while he get through these cultural icons. It's kind of a fun group. Some of us have never read them before, some grew up with them. I am interested in looking at how Rowling plays with fantasy conventions and traditions. When does she use traditional symbolism to her advantage and when does she turn it on it's head for her own purposes, and when does she simply throw it out. And since I am a writing geek, on top of the fantasy obsession, I like to critique her writing strategies, and mentally edit and rewrite the book in my head. I swear this is not a sign of contempt on my part. I do this with all the books I read lately. In any case, you can read our collective Potter ramblings Here

My other major summer project includes rewriting a short novel that I have been working on since I was twelve. I officially finished it a year or two ago. And when I say I'm rewriting it, I don't mean editing or revising, but literally sitting down at a blank Word document and starting from the beginning. This allows me to fix problems that bugged me but I was too focused on finishing the silly thing to solve. While I'm at it, I've changed the sex of the two main characters. This is REALLY interesting. They were two boys, and they did all the sorts of things that boys in fantasy novels for kids do. They ran around with swords and fought dragons and that kind of thing. But there are a grand total of three girls in this story. So, being the rabid feminist that I am, I decided it would be worth it to rewriting the whole thing with girls. It really changes things... a lot.

I'm rewriting the story for my own enjoyment, but also because come fall I will be doing an independent study in Fiction writing with an English faculty member. I'll be applying to grad schools this year, so I need some writing samples to send out. Twenty to thirty pages of exemplary work. Yikes. So I have also been doing the old college search again. I really enjoy researching schools. I hope to have a short list of three or four schools to send my twenty pages of nonsense to, plus a short essay saying "I write good, le'me in."

With all this writing I have to do, it is perhaps a blessing that I didn't bring home any art supplies. But I have a sketch pad and a pencil so that's enough. I am listening to some books on tape and drawing. Right now I'm in the middle of Children of Hurin. So I'm drawing portraits of the Valar. Because I'm a geek.

That's the update. And now I don't have to feel guilty because I haven't posted since February. Now I'm going to go watch Tangled with my siblings.

St. Zita's Project

A few weeks ago, my room mate Bernadette asked me if I wanted to go on retreat with her. The Sisters of Mary Mother of the Eucharist have very successful discernment retreats a few times a year. Retreats "throw off my groove," which is probably the point. I don't like strangers, I don't like big groups of people, I don't like being away from home. But when Bernadette asked if I wanted to go, I said yes. I made myself do it, because I wanted to say no. It was a deny-yourself-take-up-your-cross-and-follow moment.

So I found myself on this retreat. I just prayed that I would be open and not over think things.
Some things helped; like the impressive spiritual maturity of the other young women. I say women, but most of them were girls; young teens who behaved like women. They were all their to pray. That was really a blessing because I didn't want to talk with any of them. I was there to pray.
Bernadette, however, was also a blessing because we could just be friends all weekend in that delightful open way that does not distract from our deepening friendship with Christ. Also, Martha, the younger sister of my friend Paul was there, and for some reason that was special. I tend to adopt my friend's families very readily.

One of the first things that happened was that the Sister at the door asked me if I wanted to "talk to Sister Joseph Andrews." Just the threat of having to talk kept me focused. I had a list in my journal of questions I wanted to ask her about religious life, vocation discernment, and her order specifically. I wanted to play along. I figured, if I felt a call to religious life, these are the questions I would have. I just prayed for the grace to understand what God wants from me. And I entertained the idea that this order might be it

I had a peaceful, prayerful, sleep deprived weekend, but I didn't walk away with an answer. I was waiting for God to say "I'm sending you a man" or "marry me!"

Not getting an answer of that kind was alright with me. It would be too easy and fast for God to just hand me the answer in one weekend. I hadn't earned it with years of fervent prayer. So I left with the resolution to pray more deeply, more fervently before the Blessed Sacrament. Maybe if I dig deep enough in a prayer life, awakening these parts of my heart that have lain dormant in apathy, God will bring to light a passionate, burning desire to be His spouse, or to be a biological mother.

Do you see how this works? I keep pretending, or trying to produce that feeling of being called.

This morning God told me that I'm not called. Not to marriage and not to religious life. Not now, maybe not ever.

When I got home, Liz handed me a paper that someone had given her on the single life as a vocation. I took it rather grudgingly. The first part was all about loneliness.
I've always assumed that the single life was a transition vocations. My vocation right now is to be single. But eventually, God will let me know what he really wants for me. I'll get my real call when I am ready for it.
The other thing about the single life is that it is such a secular American ideal. You are free to do many things that are impossible when you have a family.  You put together your life style just the way you want it, like a facebook page. This has always been attractive to me. But I recognize it as a temptation. It's just selfishness. There is no one to serve, no one to sacrifice for, no "till death" vow of self giving, no mother superior to obey. Whose feet will I wash?

So I didn't really want to read it. But I said yes to that by putting it in my back pack and pulling it out during lunch. One phrase caught my eye:

"For whose salvation will you walk alone."

I may not be any more lonely than the average woman, but I do have to recognize that living alone is a cross. Not having those burdensome people to sacrifice for is actually a challenge and a suffering.
I read a little here and there until nearly the last page. "The Jubilee Day for Single Persons" said the top of the page. I mentally rolled my eyes at it. Is this another form of Single Awareness Day, or Loneliness Awareness Day, or Chocolate Appreciation Day, or all those other things people who don't have dates call Valentines Day.
But in the bottom right corner there was a thick black line with the words


"St. Zita - April 27"    

St. Zita was single!

I knew that. She's not a religious. She's not married. She was a servant for a family basically her whole life. She never left the world, she never married and raised a family. She had a vocation to single life.

I can be a saint without a vocation to marriage or religious life!

I read that page. It pretty much described the kind of holy lifestyle I would like to live. I never felt a call because Christ wasn't calling me to be a nun or a wife. What I do have a desire for is to dedicate my life to art. To translate the beauty of God's truth into music and art and especially stories. To reach people the way my heroes  Brian Jacques, Lloyd Alexander, Rosemary Sutcliff, C. S. Lewis and Tolkien do. I have always been frustrated because the married life lived well doesn't allow that. And very few orders that I know of allow for that. But that is my desire and the way I long to serve God and others.
St. Zita was a blessing and a gift to everyone around her, and she didn't belong to any of them; not to an order, not to her family, not to the people she worked for, just to God.

There is real sacrifice, and real service, and real holiness in this vocation. It was a great relief to know that I didn't have to worry any more. I don't have to look for men, and I don't have to research religious communities. If God does want this to be a transition, he will drop something in my lap and give me the grace to say yes. But I have already said yes and am living a vocation that has everything I have ever wanted or needed to bring me to heaven.