Intro, body, conclusion...Magic!(?)

Back when I taught writing, we were told we had to drill into the students' heads that they needed to have an intro paragraph, some body paragraphs, and a final paragraph in which they basically reiterated the intro and drew some kind of conclusion based on the evidence or argument in the body paragraphs. What was so hard to get across was that in that intervening space between beginning and end, between inception and closure, there was supposed to occur a kind of transformative alchemy between the intro and the magical concluding paragraph. In that conclusion, everything was supposed to come together in a package to create something greater than the sum of the essay's parts.

That was the trick -- that secret alchemical process whereby the base metal was turned to gold. There were some students who got it, but most of them just didn't. The really swell part of teaching writing was that nobody quite knew how to impart that secret knowledge. If you scratched the truly decent writers in any composition classroom, chances were that under the surface you found that they had already spent their lives as readers. And that seemed to be the whole secret -- the training they had learned by reading good writing.

As teachers who owned these students for 16 weeks at a time, we couldn't make up in a few weeks for a lifetime of neglect. We could force them to read thousands of words during that brief space during which they were our wards, but the lifelong non-readers in those composition classes always seemed to struggle the hardest to write a decent essay.

So here I am, years later, trying to write a concluding chapter to a non-fiction book about a naturalist/writer. I've only been working on this thing since 2004 or so, and really its history goes all the way back to my dissertation days, back in the dark ages of the 1990s. Since a non-fiction book is often nothing more than an essay writ large, I find that I am taking the same path that my students did. I am taking up the themes I mentioned in the introductory chapter and reiterating them in the conclusion. What I don't know is if that alchemy I was hoping for, and which I used to hope would visit my students sometime during the composition process, has really taken place. So I will spend this weekend beating my head against the wall in hopes that something magical falls out. That's why I spent my life reading....right?

Writing, rock-sculpting, cloud surfing....

I'm leading a double life: grant writer by day, career biographer by night.

Grant writing is a tenuous, and temporary, occupation for me, and one that might stretch into a permanent university position, if I get lucky. It's a kind of writing that feels like trying to coax sense out of stone. Sometimes the columns of statistics seem impervious, and as if nothing sensible can be made out of them. But slowly something begins to emerge until finally you have something that might -- just might -- land some money for your program. There is only functional prose here, the stuff of moneychangers and bureaucrats, but if you get the money for your program, you might send some disadvantaged kids to college who wouldn't otherwise be able to go.

By evening I'm at home still trying to put the finishing touches on a book begun long ago in an access of optimism. The subject is somewhat elusive, the prose and poetry I am trying to capture is a will-o-the-wisp on the arid wind. The famous writer I am trying to write about is a kind of desert dervish, a ghost in the Utah canyons, and sometimes I feel as if I'm trying to capture a spirit made of air. All of it is for her glory, and a little reflected glory for myself. Writing becomes the sticky wicket that I sometimes can't shake words out of: I have never experienced full-blown writer's block, but there are times when the sentences come out only half-formed or still-born, or nothing emerges at all. I wonder if I can keep going to the well if I keep squeezing words out of the rock by day, and trying to coax them out of the air by evening.

Sometimes I just want to come home and close my eyes be wordless for a while.

Ojito Wilderness, 30 miles northwest of Albuquerque

The Ojito Wilderness, some 30 miles northwest of Albuquerque, is a landscape of redrock and painted desert, along Cabezon Road, just off Highway 550.

My Aunt Marks 40 Years with King County

I've always been proud of my Aunt Judy, who lives in Seattle. She just passed a big milestone with the county government where she works. She has always been the cool aunt, the one you could tell everything. (Much to her chagrin, I pretty much did exactly that.)

Musing on McCarthy

Read The Road over my holiday work break. Cormac McCarthy's prose verged on poetry, as usual, but I cannot quite imagine trying to translate his vision into film, so I have my doubts about going to see the John Hillcoat movie. From what I understand from reviews the filmmakers actually soft-pedalled the bleakness of the book....Blood Meridian still appears to me to be McCarthy's greatest accomplishment, but it would take an unconventional filmmaker to carry off an adaptation in this era when movies are market-tested to death. The potential to produce an epic visual palette is there -- I'll carry his jagged, lightning-struck cordilleras in my mind's eye for the rest of my life. McCarthy's vision of human nature is unrelentingly grim; I have to honor him for being more honest that many mythologizers of the old West have been -- there is nothing sentimental in Blood Meridian. As good as they were with No Country for Old Men, I still can't imagine even the Coen brothers pulling it off.

Mom, Dad, and Aunt Judy Visiting New Mexico, Sept. 2009

L to R: Mom, Aunt Judy, Dad, and Kathy, when we were at El Pinto, north Albuquerque, September 2009.

Vandenberg Air Force Base, California: Sept. 2009

At Vandenberg AFB in California, we visited this crater, which is all that's left of a Titan missile silo that exploded in the early 1960s. It's amazing that these ICBMs weren't involved in more accidents, and a lucky thing too. We were there to collect data on old Air Force facilities, part of the DoD's Legacy program to save data on its historic sites. Vandenberg has the distinction of being an Air Force base that is focused on missiles and rockets rather than on conventional fixed wing aircraft. So the base consists mainly of old rocket gantries posted like sentinels along the foggy central California coastline.