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
