Pastiche

In the past three months, I've read more than I've read in a year. Not the feet-high stacks of research articles: communication theories and qualitative studies and advertising (those don't count). And not because I don't love to read--I do--simply that time for things that once brought me pleasure (other than CSI) is almost non-existent.

And so, between the meetings and deadlines and few-hundred-miles-on-the-roads days, I've been reading novels and writing guides. I lug them around in the car in case the day grants me a spare moment. In carry-on luggage to pass the time in airports and in planes not spent sleeping. Half a novel a week--sometimes a whole book (it depends on the length)--and a few essays. Not the two or three chapters of research articles (those don't count).

Baxter and Root and McCullers and Krauss and Calvino and Auster and Covington and Kincaid.

Funny that I've learned more about writing from reading their prose and Baxter and Root's essays--thrown on the side like fries--than in a workshop. Like I learned to write like a journalist as an undergraduate PR student by reading the newspapers and pretending I knew what I was doing. (The first story I ever did: it was about a roving Vietnam Wall exhibit (I think I was 20) ran in the Orlando Sentinel. You cannot imagine the pressure; I cannot imagine the editor's grief, working through my words, crafting a too-long piece into something suitable for print. She later said the writing base was there; the craft I'd come to learn on my own reading newspapers and finally knowing what I was doing.)

And so I read half a novel a week--sometimes a whole book (it depends on the length)--and I wonder if I'm teaching myself to write in other ways again. I read with a yellow highlighter and a blue pen, mark the passages and turns-of-phrase that make me pause (White: "And in the east beyond the lilac and beyond the barn and beyond the bay and behind the deepening hills, in slow and splendid surprise, rise the bomber's moon.") Also, highlight mentions of books that probably should be read.

And sometimes I'll read something that, when the passage is past, I'll exhale and realize I'd stopped breathing.

Anne Dillard in Holy the Firm. The narrator is camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains, reading the poet Rimbaud's biography, when she sees the death of a moth in the candle by which she's reading.

"She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning--only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet."

Exhale.


Photo by Doug Landreth from Corbis