Author Topic: Annie Proulx wrote this -  (Read 8759 times)

Offline Toast

  • BetterMost 1000+ Posts Club
  • ******
  • Posts: 3,542
Annie Proulx wrote this -
« on: August 08, 2007, 08:36:28 am »
May 10, 1999

WRITERS ON WRITING
Inspiration? Head Down the Back Road, and Stop for the Yard Sales
By ANNIE PROULX

The Irish singer Christy Moore clips out "Don't Forget Your Shovel," a song I like not only for its tripping rhythm and sly social commentary but for its advice to the diggers of the world, a group to which I belong.

A whole set of metaphoric shovels is part of my tool collection, and for me the research that underlies the writing is the best part of the scribbling game. Years ago, alder scratched, tired, hungry, and on a late return from a fishing trip, I was driving through Maine when a hubbub on the sidewalk caught my eye: milling customers at a yard sale. I stop for yard sales.

Pay dirt. I found the wonderful second edition unabridged Webster's New International Dictionary with its rich definitions and hundreds of fine small illustrations. On a collapsing card table nearby sat Harper's Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities, The Oxford Companion to English Literature and other weighty reference works, discards from a local library and the best catch of the trip.

I am an inveterate buyer of useful books on all possible subjects. Collectors pass up ex-libris books, but I need reading copies. And because I often fold down page corners and scribble in margins, it is best to keep me away from first editions.

On the jumbly shelves in my house I can find directions for replacing a broken pipe stem, a history of corncribs, a booklet of Spam recipes, a 1925 copy of "Animal Heroes of the Great War" (mostly dogs but some camels); dictionaries of slang, dialect and regional English; a pile of Little Blue Books (none are blue) from the 1920's featuring titles like "How to Be a Gate-Crasher" and "Character Reading From the Face." One of these, "Curiosities of Language," treats us to the tortured orthography our grandparents thought hilarious:

There was a young man, a Colonel,
Who walked in the breezes volonel;
He strolled in the aisles,
Of the wooded maisles,
And, returning, read in his jolonel.

This digging involves more than books. I need to know which mushrooms smell like maraschino cherries and which like dead rats, to note that a magpie in flight briefly resembles a wooden spoon, to recognize vertically trapped suppressed lee-wave clouds; so much of this research is concerned with four-dimensional observation and notation. These jottings go into cheap paper-covered notebooks that I keep in a desultory fashion, more often onto the backs of envelopes and the margins of newspapers, from there onto the floor of the truck or onto the stair landing atop a stack of faxes and bills.

The need to know has taken me from coal mines to fire towers, to hillsides studded with agate, to a beached whale skeleton, to the sunny side of an iceberg, to museums of canoes and of windmills, to death masks with eyelashes stuck in the plaster, to shipyards and log yards, old military forts, wildfires and graffiti'd rocks, to rough water and rusty shipwrecks, to petroglyphs and prospectors' diggings, to collapsed cotton gins, down into the caldera of an extinct volcano and, once or thrice in the middle distance, in view of a snouty twister.

I listen attentively in bars and cafes, while standing in line at the checkout counter, noting particular pronunciations and the rhythms of regional speech, vivid turns of speech and the duller talk of everyday life. In Melbourne I paid money into the hand of a sidewalk poetry reciter to hear "The Spell of the Yukon," in London listened to a cabby's story of his psychopath brother in Paris, on a trans-Pacific flight heard from a New Zealand engineer the peculiarities of building a pipeline across New Guinea.

The grand digging grounds are still the secondhand bookshops. Every trip ends with boxes of books shipped back, dusty old manuals on the hide business or directions for the dances of Texas with footprints and dotted lines reeling across the pages. But bookstores are changing. Recently I rattled the latch of a favorite in Denver before I saw the sign announcing that it was forever closed, but the inventory could be "accessed" on the Internet. Another dealer, a specialist in local histories, operated from his living room for years and put out an interesting catalogue from time to time. Both the catalogue and a visit to his bookshelves are things of the past, rendered obsolete by chilly cyber-lists.

I rarely use the Internet for research, as I find the process cumbersome and detestable. The information gained is often untrustworthy and couched in execrable prose. It is unpleasant to sit in front of a twitching screen suffering assault by virus, power outage, sluggish searches, system crashes, the lack of direct human discourse, all in an atmosphere of scam and hustle.

Nor do I do much library research these days, though once I haunted the stacks. Libraries have changed. They are no longer quiet but rather noisy places where people gather to exchange murder mysteries. In bad weather homeless folk exuding pungent odors doze at the reading tables. One stands in line to use computers, not a few down for the count, most with smeared and filthy screens, running on creaky software.

I mourn the loss of the old card catalogues, not because I'm a Luddite, but because the oaken trays of yesteryear offered the researcher an element of random utility and felicitous surprise through encounters with adjacent cards: information by chance that is different in kind from the computer's ramified but rigid order.

This country swims in fascinating pamphlets. In a New Mexico greasy spoon I pick up a flyer that takes St. Paul sharply to task on the subjects of hair style, clothing and women. ("Shorts, miniskirts, halters, bikinis, etc., are all O.K. You don't have to listen to Paul. . . . God wants women to look nice and be in style with the times. As far as men, Jesus had long hair. Paul must have been a religious fanatic.") A hundred miles later I read a narrow sheet with advice on how to behave in the presence of a mountain lion. ("Do not make direct eye contact. . . . Try to appear as big as possible.")

Food and regional dishes are important research subjects. Some you can order in restaurants, but others exist only in out-of-print cookbooks and must be prepared at home, like a duck roasted inside a watermelon, a dish called Angel in a Cradle, or another called the Atlanta Special, which sounds like a train, although the ingredient list begins, "1 beaver (8 to 10 pounds.)"

I like to drive the West, making a slow drift over caliche and gravel roads, volume cranked up and listening to music (this, too, is research), usually regional subtexts of alternative genres. But two that I never tire of hearing are Glenn Ohrlin singing "Barnacle Bill, the Sailor," in his two-tone voice, and the good ol' boy Texas country-and-western yodeler Don Walser with the Kronos String Quartet, sliding a heartaching "Rose Marie" straight at me.

The truck wanders around intersecting roads as tangled as fishing line. At times topographic maps, compass bearings or keeping the sun at my shoulder are better direction guides than signs, usually nonexistent or bullet-blasted into unreadability. The rules of road drift are simple: Always take a branching side route, stop often, get out and listen, walk around, see what you see. And what you see are signs, not direction signs but the others, the personal messages. We live in a world of signs.

I am amazed when people mourn the loss of the Burma Shave jingles. Better stuff is all around us, in public restrooms, in phone booths, on rocks, stapled to telephone poles, struck on lawns. I remember a large billboard that stood for many years on a back-country road in Colorado. The community used it as a kind of enormous greeting card, welcoming home a son on leave from the Navy, congratulating a child on her fifth birthday, inviting neighbors to a party.

The signs of urban panhandlers seem to indicate that many of them took creative-writing courses. These messages are always printed in neat capital letters: "WILL KILL FOR FOOD," "BIG DUMB UGLY BUM NEEDS YOUR HELP," "MY MOTHER LOVED ME BUT NOW SHE'S GONE."

The digging is never done because the shovel scrapes at life itself. It is not possible to get it all, or even very much of it, but I gather what I can of the rough, tumbling crowd, the lone walkers and the voluble talkers, the high lonesome signers, the messages people write and leave for me to read.

NYTimes Link


   WRITERS ON WRITING

   This article is part of a series in which writers explore literary themes. Previous contributors have included John Updike, E. L. Doctorow, Jane Smiley and Sue Miller.

mvansand76

  • Guest
Re: Annie Proulx wrote this -
« Reply #1 on: August 08, 2007, 09:10:17 am »
This is fantastic, thanks for posting.

I love how she mentions that doing research on the internet is not her thing because the information is so inaccurate. I find that too when I do research for my writing, I stumble upon the same problem, and my teacher always said that 99% of the information on the Internet is utterly unreliable.

But... and here's the deal, unlike Annie Proulx,  I am not able to just go out there to every region I write about and do research like she does, and which is the best way to do research. So unless I earn enough money by writing, the only options are the Internet and the library!

Offline MaineWriter

  • Bettermost Supporter!
  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 14,042
  • Stay the course...
    • Bristlecone Pine Press
Re: Annie Proulx wrote this -
« Reply #2 on: August 08, 2007, 09:43:56 am »
I also think the Internet has changed tremendously since 1999, when this article was written.

L
Taming Groomzilla<-- support equality for same-sex marriage in Maine by clicking this link!

Offline fernly

  • Brokeback Got Me Good
  • *****
  • Posts: 392
Re: Annie Proulx wrote this -
« Reply #3 on: August 08, 2007, 09:50:56 am »
Thank you so much for posting this.
What a wonderful voice she has.  Among the many revelations of her Brokeback Mountain was the complex structure and rhythm of her sentences, same as she has in this piece. And the specificity and resonance of what she notices in the world and puts into her work.

Quote
I need to know which mushrooms smell like maraschino cherries and which like dead rats, to note that a magpie in flight briefly resembles a wooden spoon, to recognize vertically trapped suppressed lee-wave clouds; so much of this research is concerned with four-dimensional observation and notation...
... to hillsides studded with agate, to a beached whale skeleton, to the sunny side of an iceberg, to museums of canoes and of windmills, to death masks with eyelashes stuck in the plaster...
The truck wanders around intersecting roads as tangled as fishing line.

It's so tremendously unfortunate that she was hounded into shutting down her website. She had posted some very interesting essays on it.
If anyone happened to have copied those, could you let me know?


on the mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter air

moremojo

  • Guest
Re: Annie Proulx wrote this -
« Reply #4 on: August 08, 2007, 11:14:15 am »
It's so tremendously unfortunate that she was hounded into shutting down her website. She had posted some very interesting essays on it.
Do you mean people were constantly pestering her with questions and requests there (probably regarding 'Brokeback Mountain')? One of the last times I checked on that website, there was a polite codicil posted to the effect that Ms. Proulx would no longer be fielding questions related to 'Brokeback Mountain'.

Online Front-Ranger

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 30,290
  • Brokeback got us good.
Re: Annie Proulx wrote this -
« Reply #5 on: August 08, 2007, 12:14:09 pm »
Do you mean people were constantly pestering her with questions and requests there (probably regarding 'Brokeback Mountain')? One of the last times I checked on that website, there was a polite codicil posted to the effect that Ms. Proulx would no longer be fielding questions related to 'Brokeback Mountain'.

From what I understand, it was more harassment by extremist homophobic and religious organizations as well as the garden variety trolls that forced her to take that step.
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline LauraGigs

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • BetterMost 1000+ Posts Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,447
    • My Design Portfolio
Re: Annie Proulx wrote this -
« Reply #6 on: August 08, 2007, 12:15:27 pm »
Wow, what fun to read that article.  I loved it.  Thank you Toast!!   :)

moremojo

  • Guest
Re: Annie Proulx wrote this -
« Reply #7 on: August 08, 2007, 12:21:39 pm »
From what I understand, it was more harassment by extremist homophobic and religious organizations as well as the garden variety trolls that forced her to take that step.
Now that is sad.  :-\ Proulx is a prophet, is she not?

In light of this news, I actually feel less embarrassment for Proulx regarding her anti-Academy piece from last year, where she alluded to the not-so-veiled homophobia that robbed that beautiful film (her grandchild, so to speak) from its rightful honors. It must have felt that the boys were being whopped by a tire iron all over again (that's certainly how it felt to me).

Offline ifyoucantfixit

  • BetterMost 5000+ Posts Club
  • *******
  • Posts: 8,049
Re: Annie Proulx wrote this -
« Reply #8 on: August 08, 2007, 12:31:27 pm »



          This is off topic, a bit.  But a slight reference to Scotts statement.  I think the biggest reason "Our" movie didn't win the
Academy Award.  Was more than just the homophobia.  I think the main two reasons were worse than that.  More trivial. 
They didn't want their award to seem like a redundancy.
They felt like the movies surge had come and gone.  It was already on the downhill slide of popularity and buzz.   JMO



     Beautiful mind

Offline LauraGigs

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • BetterMost 1000+ Posts Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 2,447
    • My Design Portfolio
Re: Annie Proulx wrote this -
« Reply #9 on: August 08, 2007, 12:38:39 pm »
Quote
I actually feel less embarrassment for Proulx regarding her anti-Academy piece from last year, where she alluded to the not-so-veiled homophobia that robbed that beautiful film (her grandchild, so to speak) from its rightful honors.


Especially since Brokeback has proved to be a phenomenon (not just to Brokies) — reverberating through the human heart and the mass culture in so many ways and on so many levels.

And Crash has . . .  well . . .  not.


 ;)