Verbicide, the misunderstood crime

The word of the day (happy result of a dictionary detour) is:  

verbicide

1. the willful distortion or depreciation of the original meaning of a word.
2. a person who willfully distorts the meaning of a word.

Note the deliberation: verbicide is a sin of commission. This isn't malapropism, mistaken identity, well-meaning thought getting out ahead of vocabulary. Destructive of language, destructive of meaning, verbicide might be a form of lying. A cause of loss, occasion for mourning, for fury. 

But I especially like the second meaning, the thought that one might be a verbicide. What might a verbicide wear, how might she try to conceal her crimes? Is there a Most Wanted list?

Now, cross-checking this definition in the little electronic dictionary embedded in my word processor, no verbicide appears. The closest options are herbicide and vermicide. Worm poison, plant poison-- lots of poisons in the world. No human agents of destruction (think parricide, fratricide) in those definitions. Just substances, slick and dangerous and, one hopes, sparingly applied. But verbicide goes unmentioned, unrecorded--the forgotten crime, the silent killer.

Riffing on verbicide, it's true, might lead me down that slippery slope, that primrose path paved with good intentions to the hell of depreciated or distorted meanings, decapitated verbs, slaughtered adjectives. And what of the adverb, so frequently maligned by the authors of writing how-to books? Who will protect hopefully, quickly, brilliantly?

Verbicide: stop it, prevent it, punish it! You can't be too careful.

I have never said of anyone, "He is an unrepentant verbicide," but I will be looking for my chance to do so.

Proofreading and Second Chances

It has never yet happened that, reading proofs, I haven't found some dreadful if trifling error--often after 20 or 30 error-free pages, when I was beginning to wonder whether the task was, indeed, worthwhile. But there it will be, the third i in the middle of a word, the second however in a row. No matter how many times I've reread, revised, and corrected the manuscript. Is correcting proofs worth my time? Yes. Always.

I've just been correcting the proofs for Trafalgar, Angélica Gorodsicher's novel-in-stories. Sure enough, there were a few things to fix.    

Lisa Carter, in a recent post on her blog Intralingo, offers 3 Reasons to Review Galleys and Proofs. One of these is learning from the editor. The copyeditor for Trafalgar didn't make too many big changes, but there were several pointed questions (third cup of coffee? two pages ago, he ordered his fifth) I was glad to resolve. Not to mention a slew of commas I should have put in to begin with.

It's hard to read the same text again, and again, and still imagine one is reading with fresh eyes. But some months had passed since I'd last looked at the manuscript, and by forcing myself to read slowly, as if I didn't yet know the stories, I caught a number of errors (an excess letter here, an omitted  "  there) that I would have hated to see in the final, printed book. 

And, though this might seem to contradict that "fresh eyes" aspiration, this time around I also found it was fun to revisit the translation process, to remember conversations about particular points, questions I'd had, discarded solutions. I was lucky enough to meet with the author regularly while I was in Rosario, working on the translation. Reviewing the proofs was like a mini mental visit.

Finally, at a couple of points, there were still translation issues to be wrestled with, in particular a paragraph in which I found I'd omitted the verb. I read it a couple of times before I saw what was missing. The passage didn't quite make sense, but was that because I had mistranslated it, or because something odd was happening in the original? One of the challenges in translation is the need to convey the points at which the author is experimenting or playing with the source language. Maybe there was never a verb to lose. . .  

But there was. And, once I'd retrieved it, it wasn't immediately clear how to incorporate that verb into the English sentence, a long catalog that needed to accumulate and pile up and intermingle without too much interruption. Appropriately enough, the chapter in question is titled "Mr. Chaos." 

I came up with a satisfactory solution. I think. If I reread the proofs again tomorrow, there might be other things I'd want to change. But that's the case with any writing, translation no more nor less than fiction or poetry or criticism. That last-ditch chance at correction is another reason to read proofs: it's not quite as scary (though also not as thrilling) as opening the cover of the published book. There's still time.

Thanks to Small Beer Press for including this translator in the process and giving me the chance to go over the manuscript one more time. 

The Observer in the Frame

We spent the last days of August backpacking in the Three Sisters Wilderness, one of my favorite places on earth. Camped on a mini-ridge above Camp Lake, we watched the moon rise--fast!--and then the sunset and then, just barely (hurling myself out of the tent toward the pink glow, tangled in tent flaps and sleeping children and boots that wouldn't find my feet) the sunrise. Pink, and then bright yellow light, and then sharp shadows. And lots of photographs.

Two images from that trip in particular seem to focus my current revision preoccupations.  

I have been amply persuaded that the manuscript I'm working on (a novel I had fondly believed was finished, and beautiful, and ready to greet the world) is in need of major revision. I even have some ideas about the form that revision will take. But I'm caught between planning the revision--mapping out what I intend to do--and just jumping in. And how much will be enough--is it a matter of cutting or of adding, or more properly of replacing? It's a question, too, of framing and motivation: I know what the story is, but why is the narrator telling it? And just how far should the territory of that story extend?

Sunrise, then, above the lake, trying to arrest its different colors against the trees, and finding my own shadow contaminating the frame. Lean back, then, lean away, move the camera a bit. . . until I thought, here's my point of view picture, the narrator just off stage. But not all the way off. Whether visible or not, choosing what to include.

Framing the story just right is part of the problem. There isn't a story without a frame, something to give it shape--beginning, ending, even words trailing off at the end of the page or when the ink runs out, a de facto border, no less real for being accidental.

Other times the borders of story or observation become less and less clear. Heading up the hill above Demaris Lake, I almost walked into this spider and its home. And here's the story again, but the frame's disappearing, the web that barely shows up once I have the spider well in focus.

I don't know what kind of spider it is. That's one of the story's unknowns.

Revision Detours

The beginning

Directions were meant to be changed.

   One definition of a detour, from the OED on line:  A turning or deviation from the direct road; a roundabout or circuitous way, course, or proceeding. That's certainly the kind of trip described in Detours. 

"Detour" can also describe the revision process. Revision often means reaching the intended destination by an unexpected route. It means keeping the end in sight while allowing for change, serendipity, or that harsh-sounding alternative, deviation. As if there were a clearly marked path that must be followed without fail; deviation brings punishment (shades of Little Red Riding Hood). 

Go back!

Try again.

   Revision might be avoidance: skip the pothole, the puddle, the flagger ahead, the expected delay--a roundabout evasion that can be a time-saver, or just the opposite. 

Diverge, converge, diverge

   But destination is another of those fungible categories. To a point. Rewriting, reworking a piece can be a means to a different end. It can be a long and complicated route back to the beginning, trying to say what I thought I knew I was saying all along, or a circuitous route that leads somewhere else--a longcut, not a shortcut, to a place I didn't initially understand I needed to go. 

Are we there yet?

Go left. No, right. Go another way.

     As I've been collecting detour signs, I've noticed the designers of those alternate routes are revising as well. Maybe not quite making it up as they go along, but reconsidering, reusing. Stockpiling against future need. There are models everywhere of ways to write, ways to think. As the traffic engineers responsibly recycle last project's sign, I might joyfully find a place in this poem for the glowing line that wouldn't fit in the last. 

Summer possibilities

Past or future route?

Here, again, is one of my favorite detour signs, an evident work in progress: 

"Path" may have been "route"? Ahead or behind? This way or that?

Detours can be ordered from Burnside Review Press. 

Detours (and Signs)

Some signs are more directive than others

Ordinarily, I grumble as much as the next person at the prospect of road work and its concomitant delays. But not lately: in preparation for the release of my chapbook, Detours, by Burnside Review Press, I've been collecting detour signs. Pictures of signs--I haven't stolen any yet. I pick out those orange signs in the distance and think not, oh, dread but oh, goody. My family laughs at me, but they help me look; strangers ask questions and I tell them, "Working on a little art project," that little meant to keep my activities just within the bounds of normal. I've gathered quite a collection, and snapped more than a few blurry smears out of moving vehicles.

Detours began as a detour from what I was supposed to be writing: my dissertation. More than a temporary variant on a routine route, it was a return of sorts--I started out writing poems and stories, not literary criticism. It's a side route I've maintained, sometimes in parallel, sometimes intersecting, as I've continued to write scholarly prose (I did finish that dissertation).

One way--only?

I think of Detours as a kind of journey. Fragmented, interrupted, but circling back on itself from time to time, the fragments interconnected. I'm interested in collecting, in splashed images and unexpected lights, in words that sound different in different places, and places that look different in different words. Roads taken and not taken, by chance or by design. 

Detours can be ordered from Burnside Review Press.

Rain or shine

Anniversary Toast

On Friday, my husband and I will have been married 21 years. Last year, impatient (why wait for 25?) and feeling more than a little pleased with ourselves for having so well enjoyed our first two decades together, we threw a big party. This year, we'll probably take the kids to the coast. But I've already received a gift. My wonderful aunt, who saves things, sent me an early draft of my grandfather's wedding toast to us.

My grandfather was a great spinner of yarns and an enthusiastic, if idiosyncratic, typist. I've long had a prettied-up copy of his toast, on good quality paper and with all the spelling straightened. Now, though, I've come into possession of the writer's manuscript. I feel like an archivist, a keeper of jewels. Misspellings, uneven ink (this was a manual typewriter), a few handwritten corrections in blue ballpoint pen. The paper's thin, long folded, a little torn. Soft around the edges with age. Rereading it, I hear my grandfather's voice in my head, see him standing at the reception, a little stooped. I imagine him at his desk. Was he a two-finger typist? I don't know.

We were married on my grandparents' 56^th wedding anniversary. Graciously sharing "their" day, they also shared advice. When they were married in 1935, my grandfather was county agent in Bear Lake County, Idaho. His hard-won advice: Don't post a dead calf or expect a gooseberry pie on your honeymoon. The source of this wisdom? His ill-considered decision to perform a postmortem on some farmer's calf on the way to a dance, thinking he could do his work and keep on driving. Except the work meant packaging up the calf's organs and shipping them off, and the groom and his car were far too smelly for his bride to want to go dancing once that was all done. The pie-promised gooseberries in turn went up in smoke when my grandmother, unused to cooking on an electric range, turned the burner on high before accidentally locking herself out of the apartment.

We have followed Grandpa's advice to the letter. It has worked like a charm. 

Some River Twice

Because it's not the same river, right? But it's a river all the same--another river, or the same pebbled bank on a different day, or the same water, further down stream.

I recently participated in a writing workshop with Gary Soto--even better, I went as my daughter's guest; a workshop spot was part of her winnings in a local writing contest. One prompt asked us to write about a river journey, point A to point B: what do you see?

Iguazú turtles (with bird)

I see the Red Cedar River, Mother's Day in Michigan and hot, our first big spring outing of the year. Just being outside, doing something outside: that's my mother's present. 

We're old enough to paddle two canoes--one kid, one parent each--up from the university rental dock. The turtles are out, the spring pollen is itchy, but here's the rub of memory: what I remember most are the turtles, baking their shells to summer hardness on logs or rocks, and the four of us in our hollow aluminum logs, burning rather than basking, because who remembers sunscreen, the second week in May? But were the turtles really out, so early in the year? I'm brought up short. 

We canoed later on in summer--maybe that's the source of my persistent memory of turtles. I can't think of the river without them. The scents I remember are the sweet sneezy haze of spring and the mildewed sigh of the orange lifejackets, also from the rental barn, last summer's damp that never dried out drawing a still underlayer to the spring heat smell, the drying mud.

Swimming near Wheatland Ferry

I haven't been on the Michigan State campus in years; I don't know if the canoe rental's still in place. But that was the first river that came to mind, like a slide flashing up on a wall of the library conference room. No need to elbow aside other, more recent rivers. They weren't even overlaid, one image crossing another. But now that I'm thinking about rivers, I'll list a few more: several times a week, I run beside the grandiosely-named Amazon Creek. That's not a river, I know. Once the rains really stop for summer, it will be scarcely be a creek. But the water's cloudy as milky tea after a storm, it sloshes against its banks, tempts nesting ducks. Point A to point B, I'm on the towpath, not navigating, but the watercourse suggests a route. Then there's swimming with my son near the ferry docks further north, or watching the fast, empty cereal ships cruising up the Paraná. Most recent basking turtles: just above Iguazú Falls in November. I was even there with my mother. 

I pulled out my little workshop notebook (more treats, more prizes), looking to retrieve that first river version. Like any revisited, reopened manuscript, it's a little different than I remembered. Some images are clearer, others are vague. It's a river all right, but it's not the same one. Still, it's what I have to work with. I'll just dip in a toe--over here, where the murk starts to clear with the current.

Happy Mother's Day!

Guest post tomorrow at The Blabbermouth

I'll be guest blogging tomorrow with agent extraordinaire Linda Epstein (Associate at The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency).  Linda always has something interesting to say about writing, publishing, reading, traveling. . .  and talking, naturally: her blog is The Blabbermouth.

I'm thinking about writing and saving, writing and frugality. A few days late, but still in time for Earth Day?

Do stop by!

Howling

Reading comfortably, cat on my lap, I was too lazy tonight to close the living room blinds, and so I looked out around 8:30 to see the moon just about full--or fully full? Clear sky after days of rain and slipped white clouds behind it, the kind that take on a shade close to brick just where the darkness resumes, and then a thin strip of gray cloud--steel gray, or darker--that seems to cross the moon itself.

Nothing happens, just a little movement, a little more, and still, it's fascinating. The moon is cupped in the frilly, still-bare branches of my neighbor's tree--willow? poplar? elm? I'll have to ask her. Something light, and this is the upper twigs (we're talking, after all, about the moon) and still, somehow, black lace against a deep blue sky, the spindly upper branches seem ready to take its weight if needed. The neighbor is a friend, a colleague, a person whose company I enjoy, one who has offered comfort in a time of terrible grief--she seems, in short, like the sort of person whose front yard tree would support the moon's weight, and more.

And then the moon rises further, the clouds slip south, and the sky behind the moon is like the deep blue velvet of my mother's first formal dress, one I could never really fit into properly, but loved.

And then I turn away from the window to help my daughter with her Spanish homework. When I look back, the moon is entirely gone, the sky is black: we live on a planet with neither moon nor stars. Perhaps the eternal darkness has begun.

But the cat is still stretched out on my lap, one leg extended languidly across my shin, a hind paw desultorily raised, tail lost under my book. He must weigh twelve pounds by now, maybe more. My legs, resting on a hassock, are starting to go numb.

Cheating? This is the moon from my apartment
in Rosario. But it is the moon, and I did take the picture.

The moon might return. There's a near glow to the puff of cloud just beyond the neighbor's tree. We had hail today (heavy, like someone in the sky pouring out a spent beanbag chair, shaking the white pellets down with a vengeance) and sunshine (enough for a good run) and more hail, a little wind. There's no reason to think, after dark, the weather will hold still until morning. So the moon might be back; later, it might be bright enough, outside, to read.

This isn't a story. But it might be where a story begins.

Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest

The official notice is up on the Burnside Review website, so I can spread the word far and wide myself: my sequence of linked prose poems/flash fictions, "Detours," was chosen by Blake Butler as winner of the 2011 Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest. I've been detouring with these words for a good while; winning the contest is immensely gratifying. I'm grateful to the literary journals that published portions of the manuscript in the past (Southern Poetry Review, Permafrost), and to friends who listened to or read all or part. And I'm looking forward to thinking about cover art, and planning a reading and release party for later in the year--with, I hope, some good wine and lots of friends. Cheers!

Conversation Starter

Waiting through one of my children's lessons this week, I had my ear talked off by a not-quite-acquaintance who was also waiting on a child. It was one of those small increments of time I had planned to spend reading, or maybe refining my to-do list, as if arranging my set of not-yet-accomplished tasks in the perfect order would somehow move them closer to done. But this woman started talking, and she asked me a question, and then I asked her a question--help, I'm politing and I can't get up--and pretty soon we were having a whole conversation and then I was getting the evil eye from an impatient pre-teen who really understands the value of time, unlike us older folks. 

Driving home, my first thought was, damn, I wanted to finish reading that story. But then I started thinking about how I'd describe the conversation--the odd (to me) topics she raised, the worries I simply don't share, though maybe I should. And then, eureka! I thought, might she fit (hand in glove) in the new story (or maybe it's a novel?) that's starting to take shape? I've been kneading at the idea like dough, throwing in a new ingredient now and then, letting it rise, punching it down, putting it back in the fridge to ferment (it's a sourdough, obviously). Maybe her worries--foreign to me, a little bizarre--are just the dough conditioner I need. Or maybe more like sprinkles, to keep the baking analogy but change the hoped-for dish. A little sugar confetti of newly understood anxiety, a mace and nutmeg dusting of aspiration.

The buses are full of people with problems, worries about money, about work, about whether and when they'll be able to retire, if their kids will get jobs, if they'll get a job, will it rain before they get home, this one day when the umbrella lies abandoned at the foot of the stairs. Most of the other drivers at the traffic light are fretting about something; if they're not bopping along to whatever's pounding out of the car stereo or hollering into their phone mics, they have the look of people who might be running late, might have left the stove on, might not have heard all the directions to the interview, might have misunderstood a crucial bit of grandpa's dying wish.

But my head is full to bursting with my own worries. Just my worries, the ones ragged and familiar as old flannel--and just as muffling, when it comes to sound from the outside. So that sometimes, in the interests of empathy but also of fiction, it is a real gift to be dragged into someone else's forest. Even if the trees of my own preoccupations loom almost immediately out of the fog to remind me that the to-do list is still a jumble and the plot starter is still mostly water and yeast.

Imaginary Weather (running and writing)

I have gone back to a draft of a story that takes place on a hot day. A really hot day. 

Today is not a hot day, not where I live, and it is taking a strenuous effort to muscle my imagination anywhere near air shimmering over asphalt, t-shirts sweaty around necklines, glare that makes you squint. Anything more inventive than the clichéd sizzle of eggs on the pavement.

If I want to sweat today, I have to run. If I run, under (or over) the sweatiness, I will be cold. Not freeze-your-eyelashes-together cold (thank goodness I no longer live in that climate) but throat-stinging cold, tug-my-fleece-beanie-a-little-lower-on-my-ears cold. Most of all, mud puddle cold. Only in the winter is the much vaunted ventilation of my running shoes really evident. The air goes right through them, along with the water when I inevitably misjudge as solid one of the floating islands that decorate the jogging-trail-cum-mud-wallow where we crazies congregate. Kind of the local variation on mad dogs and Englishmen, here where there's not much midday sun this time of year.

So, I'm going to run (because it clears my head even if it sogs my toes) and I'm going to try, flexing my leg muscles, to push that mental muscle back toward that hot afternoon when my story is supposed to start, the heat that is somehow motivating to my character (how? when has she ever experienced heat that would make you choose? where does she live, anyway?). 

I know that more than a few of my brilliant insights-while-running are lost among the woodchips before I get home--how else to explain the recalcitrance of certain drafts that stubbornly resist revision? So I don't run too fast, hoping any laggard inspiration might have the chance to catch me up before I round the bend. But as a plan, a run right now seems more promising than one more sunny-side-up stuck on the metal bus stop bench in my little urban desert that refuses, today, to be more than a mirage.

Sounds of Water

When it rains here in our favorite deluge style, the gutters on the front of my house sound as if they might soon tear away from the roof, though I choose to believe that's just the sound of water cascading over the edge. My own little waterfall--no need to leave home. The back gutters are easy to clean from a stepladder and I do so fairly regularly. The front gutters require outside help.

 It rains in Argentina, too; I slopped through Buenos Aires, cold and bedraggled, feeling a little sorry for myself but accustomed, after years of northwest rain, to going out in the downpour--what else was I going to do?

But the sound of water I remember--and the memory is clearer than the recording, though I recorded a short video, just to get the sound--the sound of water I remember from the trip is the roar of Iguazú Falls.

We took the long, long bus trip up from Rosario with the full group of students, stopping for supper at a gas station convenience store (a full array of options: ham and cheese empanadas, ham and cheese pizza, ham and cheese sandwiches), overnight and stiff, one bad movie after another at full volume, because the speakers only worked on one side of the bus.

No matter. I traced the route on a map so I'd know where I'd been, but the point this time, more than the journey, was the destination.

Magnificent, stunning, immense, imposing, thunderous, rushing, loud, awe-inspiring. . . it's a good place for adjectives of excess, of speechlessness (words fail me), big broad strokes that don't quite cover it.

It's a good place for a lover of detail. Practical soul that I am, I was impressed by the catwalks, long, almost delicate-looking metal pathways suspended across river channels and above muddy hollows, allowing thousands upon thousands of visitors to creep up close enough to peek over the falls without turning the forest into one big mud wallow, every day just a bit wider.

It's a good place for a waterfall collector. The main falls, the side channels--they're all stunning. They're all loud. And the sound, as in the repeated yet varied motion I never tire of watching, is also one big sameness, an indecipherable, indistinguishable roar--but it's also a thousand bells and shouts and hollow roars that, one by one, almost separable, always identical yet faintly distinct, make up the whole.