Woke up this morning feeling like I might have gotten into some debauchery…but no. I was just worn out from a late night of playing charades.
I wish I were kidding. And I wish I were kidding when I say that for a few moments I positively channeled the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. But alas. There must have been something in the pear tart.
Seriously: these fellows can cook. Apple tarts, pumpkin cheesecakes, carrot soups, even a biscuit cook-off, which I volunteered to judge (it was a draw—I’ll require more biscuits). It’s amazing to a person like myself, whose attitude toward cooking leans toward the utilitarian. Why make quiche when you can just eat an egg? To which one of the biscuit makers said: “So, instead of making a biscuit, you’d just eat a handful of flour?” I ceded to her point, but with the secret knowledge that I’d probably just buy some Saltine crackers. What can I say. I’m a philistine. But cook on, you lovely culinary artists, cook on! You need eaters like writers need readers, and I’m always here, ready to ingest, to sing your praises, and to ask after the recipe, which I’m sincerely interested in, but probably won’t attempt.
It has been a week of firsts: my first Nor’easter (Hurricane Noel); my first time looking for post-storm flotsam and jetsam (found nothing but a dead bird); my first Halloween in an old mansion with a blue-lit cupola where a whaler’s wife used to watch the sea, waiting for husband’s return (or so said a man dressed as a shamanistic elk spirit, who stood with me in the cupola). I was dressed as Emiliano Zapata. From the street, we must have cut a strange profile.
I’ve also been contemplating first novels, and what Jane Smiley has to say about the form in her book, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. I usually avoid books about writing, because my chief trouble in composition is that I try to edit everything as (if not before) it is written, and reading about writing seems like just the thing to heighten one’s self-consciousness. But her book has had the opposite effect. She describes a novelist as a kind of scientist, who has a hypothesis about the world, and a wish to observe it closely: “A novelist also shares with the scientist a partial and imperfect knowledge of the phenomena he wishes to observe. And so both novelist and scientist say, what if? What if milk teeming with bacteria was heated to a certain temperature and allowed to cool? What if some uneducated country people were to set out on a journey by wagon to take the corpse of their mother back to her place of origin?”
I love this idea, because it allows the writer to be unenlightened, even ignorant, at the outset of a project, and to write from a place of mere curiosity. When I sit down to write, and the weight of all a novel is supposed to accomplish (entertain, transport, suspend disbelief, be original, have universal themes, have relevance) settles down onto my shoulders (not to mention the combined achievements of every author I’ve ever read) I’m likely to get up and start making a quiche. But it is easier, and good deal more fun, to think of oneself as an explorer setting off into the wilds of your imagination. So hurray for the question not being “What do you know about the world?” so much as “What do you wonder about?”
And hurray for dressing up as a shamanistic elk spirit—wherever you are, guy, I raise my coffee cup to you.
-AR
