I Kilt a Firefly

I feel horrible. I killed a firefly because I thought it was a Boxelder bug. Stupid. I know. He was walking around the backsplash in my kitchen and I guess he got in Sunday night when I had the back door open during the rain. I was sitting outside and a flurry of Fireflys came into my back yard, it was like magic. There are few bugs that I get in a twist over and Fireflys top that list. I was one of those kids that never put them in a jar or smashed them on my arm to see the glow. I just let them be, flying haphazardly around without grace but purposeful. I realized it was a Firefly when I was squashing him he lit up. I was instantly filled with regret. It reminded me of the moment in the D.H. Lawrence's poem "The Snake",

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

Moving on.

I was reading The New York Times Book Review this morning on the train and was very interested in the Andre Dubus III review of his novel "The Garden of Last Days." It's a follow-up to his novel "House of Sand and Fog," a novel that I read (and saw the film) and renamed it, "House of Death and Sorrow." Don't get me wrong, I like this novelist (loved his father, after much hardship of getting him crammed-down my throat in grad school), but the comments this book got from the reviewer reminded me of many of the comments I got on my first thesis from my committee. It reminded me that writing is damn difficult, even for a guy like Dubus III. I particularly loved the last line of the review, "Journalism needs only to tell us what happened; fiction, which deals in hypotheticals, has a higher threshold of truth." Exactly.

The other review that caught my eye was "Notes on a Life" by Eleanor Coppola. Fancying myself a bit of a life documentarian (of my life, naturally), it was interesting to discover how her work reads. I saw the documetary "Hearts of Darkness" and found it riviting, in fits and starts, and a bit long in other portions, but interesting overall. In reading reviews I find writing lessons litered throughout the texts (sometimes reading book reviews is more valuable than reading the actual book being reviewed), in this review, Sarah Kerr writes, " Coppola is an observer, and her method here has changed less than you might expect. But a life is no easy thing to pull into focus." That line made me pause and consider what I'm writing now (a memoir, but of course) and how I struggle to pull into focus the last three years of my life (which is my time-frame). Next chapter up: my time at mighty South Dakota State University. Watch-out, here I come, but I promise to steer clear of the Fireflys, they're my thwarted friends, after all.

Today's links: http://www.blogher.com/
http://www.chickchatradio.com/index.php/main/about/

Daily Coyote