Yet another GOODIE FROM GIL. Thank you Gil, for providing moral support and iced coffee while I sit around with my leg up and my brain a little dialed down.
In a recent interview (writes Gil Reavill) Woody Allen belched forth about his writing process in ways that struck a sympathetic note with me.
Here are a couple excerpts:
“What people who don’t write don’t understand is that they think you make up the line consciously — but you don’t. It proceeds from your unconscious.”
“The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself.”
This comes close to what I’ve experienced about writing.
1) “You,” the ego-locked soul pushing the pen, is not really the author in any credible sense. Instead, it’s what used to be called the Muse, what Mr. Allen calls the unconscious. Sentences and phrases tend to leap out fully-formed and pre-created, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.
The byline is the biggest fiction there is. The greatest authors ever—Homer, Tu Fu, Shakespeare—are ciphers as individuals, to the degree that some people insist they never existed or didn’t even write their works.
2) At best, what you create is nothing more important than a diversion for yourself and others, a distraction from boredom or a way to excuse oneself from facing the howling void of the universe. Forget Art with a capital “A.” Forget literatoor. In other words, don’t take yourself or your work too seriously.
Doggerel fits the bill quite nicely. I indulge in it often and most of it never sees the light of day (thank the Lord, you might respond). Limericks, parodies, couplets, one-offs—and clerihews.
Here’s Wiki on the rules of writing the clerihew:
“A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem’s subject, usually a famous person put in an absurd light. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and meter are irregular. Bentley invented the clerihew in school and then popularized it in books. One of his best known is this (1905):
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”
A few years back I entered the clerihew contest of the literary society in the village where we lived. I wrote a whole slew of them. (A cleri-slew, says Jean.) One of them won second prize, a gift certificate to a local bookstore that I never cashed in. It was an honor just to be nominated. Plus it was the Muse’s doing, not mine. Blame her. See if you can guess which of these took the silver.
Meeting Charlotte Brontë
I would say, “Enchanté,
“Your hero’s charismatic
“But who’s that in the attic?”
Emily Brontë
Wrote less than Dante
One book to four
Proving less is moor
Brontë, Anne
Youngest of the clan
Wrote ‘til she had blisters
But she’s still not her sisters
Moving on from the Bronte clan…
Charles Dickens
At injustice sickens
His muse quickens
And the plot thickens
Ken Kesey
Makes us uneasy
When he gets on the bus
And leaves without us
Raymond Chandler
Had a wife but he banned her
From reading his books
About killers and crooks
Homer
Told of a sea roamer
The hero Ulysses
Who missed his wife’s kissies
The heretic Tyndale
Saw flames start to kindle
When he translated the Bible
And at the stake was held liable
Victor Hugo
Never drove a Yugo
He preferred a fiacre
In which he met his Maker
Leo Tolstoy
Was a good ol’ boy
Who fled from his wife
At the end of his life
George Eliot
To hear biographers tell it
Wrote as a man
But lived as Mary Ann
James Cain
Waited in vain
For his royalty checks
Now his postman’s an ex
Aeschylus
With comedy can thrill us
But an eagle did hurtle
And he was killed by a turtle
[Snopes.com discounts the tale, saying there is no confirmed factual information regarding the death of Aeschylus]
David Foster Wallace
Was not quite as tall as
The length of the rope
And the loss of his hope
Bentley, Ed Clerihew
Created a merry brew
Of rhymes for the very few
So no one would say “Cleri- who?”
NIce. The one about DFW reminds me of this one by François Villon about himself:
Je suis Françoys dont il me poise
Né de Paris emprès Pontoise
Et de la corde d’une toise
Sçaura mon col que mon cul poise.
Translation by Galway Kinnell:
I am François which is my cross
Born in Paris near Pontoise
From a fathom of rope my neck
Will learn the weight of my ass.
Hahaha! Now, at this moment, I imagine that every one of your readers is pondering the possibilities…
Gil Reavill
Of evil
Wrote words.
Had you heard?
Ha ha — everyone’s a critic. My dear wife edited the cleri-slew stew and left out the erstwhile prize-winner:
Jane Austen
Wrote books to get lost in
When “Do you read novels?” I hear
I say, “All six, every year”