JDueck.Net

Roots and Genesis

2012-05-12T16:50:26Z

(Download the MP3 audio – 7:37, 11 MB – Transcript)

Radio address for May 12, 2012, about our Original Garden, which doesn’t look like very much compared to the way we imagined it. Tie-ins to Mother’s Day are subtle, if even at all extant.

Music cues are Over the Hills and Far Away from the English Baroque album Chirping of the Nightingale, and Upward Over the Mountain by Iron and Wine.

You Do Not Know What a Bird Is

2012-04-28T21:16:17Z

(Download the MP3 audio – 5:46, 8.4 MB – Transcript)

Radio address for April 28, 2012, dictated verbatim from the spring wind and rain on the North Shore. Here you will ride in it — next week I will tell you all about it.

The first bit of poetry is mine, an unfinished piece from last year. Sources for the rest of the poetry are in the transcript.

Music cues are The Griffin’s Grotto by Richard Hartley, and Please Don’t Die & The Gravel Road by James Newton Howard.

The Good Wrong

2012-04-21T16:52:43Z

(Download the MP3 audio – 13:41, 19.3 MB – Transcript)

Radio address for April 21, 2012, in which our quiet, straightforward life keeps me humble by being too much to keep up with, and I hope it will always be that way.

Music cues are Wading Deep Water by Crooked Still; Romance: I Know a Little Forest by Jake Schepps; The Daily Grind by Anne Dudley; and History Book by Dry the River.

The Room You Are In Now

2012-04-14T13:41:27Z

(Download the MP3 audio – 6:28, 9.6 MB)

Radio address for April 14, 2012: A reading from the first two headings of my Red Book, about Existence and Inexistence, the first two stops on a journey of exactly one thousand steps.

The music is the cue Eat Meat and the Kill (The Blue Danube by Strauss) from the original soundtrack recording of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Download the transcript

Harnessed to a Star

2012-04-11T13:56:40Z

“There’s only one way to make a beginning, and that is to begin; and begin with hard work, and patience, prepared for all the disappointments that were Martin Eden’s before he succeeded—which were mine before I succeeded…”

This is a quote that’s been going around from Jack London’s brutally honest reply to a young writer who sent him a manuscript.

By the standards of most bloggers and hobby writers, the fact that Max Fedder even finished a complete manuscript and mailed it off would qualify as a pretty strong “beginning” — but this is, to Jack London, a mere nothing!

Max Fedder finished a manuscript, but without investing years of hard work to make his craft good, and without devoting some intense study to what kind of writing people would pay money for. Mr. London appears to be telling him that he has in fact skipped the beginning.

“If a fellow harnesses himself to a star of $1000 week, he has to work proportionately harder than if he harnesses himself to a little glowworm of $20.00 a week. The only reason there are more successful blacksmiths in the world than successful writers, is that it is much easier, and requires far less hard work to become a successful blacksmith than does it to become a successful writer.

“It cannot be possible that you, at twenty, should have done the work at writing that would merit you success at writing… If you are going to write for success and money, you must deliver to the market marketable goods. Your short story is not marketable goods, and had you taken half a dozen evenings off and gone into a free reading room and read all the stories published in the current magazines, you would have learned in advance that your short story was not marketable goods.”

In this light, you realize that a 50,000-word NaNoWriMo manuscript is not really a beginning for someone who seriously wants to be a successful writer. It is more like practicing to begin.

It’s possible, of course, that Jack was not speaking objectively. You might suppose that, speaking from a place of hard-won material success, he wrote off the manuscript simply because of Max’s extreme youth. You can’t, however, come by this conclusion honestly without actually reading the manuscript that was sent to him — and then it’s your judgment against Jack London’s, for crying out loud. It’s Jack for my money; if anyone disagrees with him I will be honestly interested to know whether they have come by widely-acknowledged success in writing by some much easier means than he did.

One final word about money: Jack London appears in this letter to use it as a yardstick for merit, which some might object to. But Max was clearly aiming for success in the marketplace — that much is clear simply from the fact that he sent his story to to someone who had already gained success in that marketplace, hoping for a good word and a quick reputation. Jack is only telling this fellow what he needs to do to succeed in the marketplace he has chosen. If you write purely for its own sake, you do well; but once you attach to any gaining idea — wealth, or fame — you cannot avoid having your effort measured by its market value.

Examine what it is you actually desire to accomplish by your effort, and whether your effort in that direction is pure, or whether it pretends to be something it is not. If you write purely for the sake of expressing yourself, do so without repentance towards anyone’s judgement, and do not hope to gain by it. If, however, you write for the joy of producing saleable goods that have recognized quality, this is how to make a real and honest beginning at harnessing yourself to that star.

The Annual Yarn: 2011

2012-04-09T17:02:09Z

Jessica and I have been together for nearly a year now. We never did get around to sending out Christmas cards, something we would ordinarily have enjoyed doing for our first holiday season together.

We opted to write a little book instead.

I knew early on in last year that I would like to produce my own version of an "annual report." Others who do this, such as Nick Felton, make their impression through the sheer density of numbers and data in their reports. There are several charts and infographics in my report as well, but I wanted to produce something focused more on the literary side of things: a book, with prose, poetry, and a personal voice.

The result is The Annual Yarn: 2011, the first edition of our first annual little book, a literary report of travels and milestones during the year we were married. It's a trade paperback the size of an A5 sheet (roughly 5.9″ by 8.3″) and runs 28 pages of black and white text, inky charts, floorplans, original poetry, one or two photographs, and some impressive whitespace.

This being our first time printing and publishing a book, it took quite a bit longer than we had planned, but we are very pleased with the result, and already accumulating prose, charts and paintings for this next year's edition. We plan to produce a new and experimental Yarn every year, until fifty rare and original volumes line the bookshelves (or bathroom reading racks) of our friends, family and loyal readers.

No more than 100 of this first volume will be printed, ever. The inside covers of each copy will be hand-numbered with its spot in the print run. At the time of this writing, about sixty copies of this print run are available for the cost-recovery price of $6 USD (includes US post and packing). We'll also put you on the advance list for next year's copy.

$6.00 USD

Click above to order with Paypal/credit card
Bitcoin price (including post and packing) is 1.4 BTC.
For international and/or bitcoin orders, send me an email.
Orders will ship Tue, Apr 17, 2012

Bees in the Air

2012-04-07T15:18:02Z

(Download the MP3 audio – 8:33, 12.3 MB)

Radio address for April 7, 2012, in which Trixie and I make plans to fly or drive all over the continent in every direction, and groundwork for the suburban apiary is contemplated.

The poem is The Tuft of Flowers by Robert Frost — read from p. 5 of The Road Not Taken, published by Henry Holt and Company.

Music cues are The Brain of the Purple Mountain by Leo Kottke, Flight of the Bumblebee by Bobby McFerrin & Yo-Yo Ma, and Time to Ring Some Changes by Jim Henry & Brooks Williams.

Download the transcript

The Smell of the Tea in the Rain

2012-03-31T13:53:51Z

(Download the MP3 audio – 11:10, 15.5 MB)

Radio address for March 31, 2012, in which city hall springs to life in a flurry of self-cancelling paperwork, and we listen to the north shore of Lake Superior call us while we brew tea on the porch.

The poem is Fishes’ Heaven by Rupert Brooke — read from p. 296 of An Anthology of Verse, Toronto Oxford University Press.

Music cues are Fishing Hole (theme to the Andy Griffith show) combined with Hope Fails from The Return of the King; Water Course B by Richard Harvey; and Corinna, Corinna by Leo Kottke.

Download transcript in plain-text (Markdown) format

(You can subscribe to this podcast via iTunes or RSS, or learn more about it and hear past episodes.)

Dirt and Leaf

2012-03-24T05:00:00Z

(Download the MP3 audio – 6:50, 9.6 MB)

Our backyard is small, very small, and it faces directly onto what is kind of a busy road. There were some lilac bushes between the yard and the road at one time, but they were scraped away when the excavators put in the final grade this last autumn, and they were weedy and scrubby anyway. In one corner there’s this ruinous rubble of brick, mostly covered in leaves and branches, that might have to go at some point. I’m not so sure though. The suburban householder tends to think by default in terms of cleaning out every corner of the yard, scouring and scrubbing it bright and removing every trace of natural untidiness, and I’m not so sure that I want to go that route — at least not until I have something to replace it with that appeals to the imagination at least as much as the mysterious old heap of bricks does. In a way, the ugly pile of bricks is the most interesting thing about our little back yard.

In the 1800s there lived in England, a young man named Gerard Manley Hopkins. Listen to these excerpts from his journal:

Ap. 27, 1868. Generally fine between hard showers; some hail, which made the evening very cold, a flash of lightening, a clap of thunder, and a bright rainbow; somne grey cloud between showers ribbed and draped and some wild bright big brown flix at the border of a great rack with blue rising behind…

May 4. Dull; then fine; cold, esp. in wind — Note the elm here on one side of beautiful build with great limb overhanging the sunk fence into the Park and headed like the one near the house at Shanklin but when seen fr. the opposite side to this the limb uninteresting or clumsy.

July 9. Before sunrise looking out of the window saw a noble scape of stars…Sunrise we saw well: the north landscape was blighty but the south, the important one, with the Alps, clear; lower down all was mist and flue of white cloud, wh. grew thicker as the day went on and like a junket lay scattered on the lakes. The sun lit up the bright acres of the snows at first with pink but afterwards clear white…. In going down betw. Pilatus and a long streak of cloud the blue sky was greenish. Since [then] I have found this colour is seen in looking fr. the snow to the sky but why I do not understand: can there possibly be a rose hue supressed in the white?

These are taken utterly at random; the whole thing reads like this, like the journal of a painter, littered with observations of the forms of particular trees and clouds, and exquisite colors at different times of the day and night. You would think from this that Hopkins was a painter, but as it turns out, he was a poet.

Reading these journal entries, I can’t help thinking that either the world was a younger, brighter place in those days, and that the air and the light have all changed for the drabber; or maybe the Nature painted the same way then that she does now, and Hopkins, like Sherlock Holmes, “saw it because he expected to see it.”

Here is an excerpt from the diary of C.S. Lewis.

Thursday, 15 June 1922. A free day, at last. I went out walking at 10 o’clock. It was the most delightful, cool grey skied summer day. I went up Shotover and down the other side to Wheatley, thence to my right over the railway bridge and up past the old windmill where I once went with Jenkin on bicycles. I was in capital form, getting “thrills” from everything, full of unspecified moemories, and, for some time, almost free from thought.

I read things like this with a certain amount of chagrin, because there are no railway bridges or old windmills where I live. I read things like this with a certain amount of disappointment in my American urban and suburban surroundings, and an almost grouchy ache for any sizeable amount of place that has more dirt and leaf and stone about it than anything else.

This post is syndicated from the original at jdueck.net, where you can listen to a beautifully produced audio version, either in your browser or as a podcast.

(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)

A Wolf and a Wish

2012-02-22T16:23:59Z

(Download the MP3 audio – 10:02, 13.9 MB)

Radio address for Feb 21, 2012, which you will have to listen to for yourself. Mention is made of a hunting season in Minnesota for the wolves coming off the endangered species list, which is actually true.

Music cues are Rickover’s Dream by Michael Hedges, and January Hymn by the Decemberists.

This post is syndicated from the original at jdueck.net, where you can listen to a beautifully produced audio version, either in your browser or as a podcast.

(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching-wand,
In every wheelrut’s now a brook,
In every print of hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task
These two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an axe-head poised aloft,
The grip on earth of outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

— Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time