This month has been a battle of words. Since my current novel’s draft is in the mail to me, I didn’t want to start working on the new novel idea that popped, quite unbidden, into my head last week. So, to keep myself from working on either novel so that I’m ready to work once the mailed draft arrives, I have taken February as a writing challenge month. I missed NaNoWriMo this year—too busy surviving my career and address change to add intense writing to that month, but I wanted to devise a similar, non-novel challenge while I wait for the mailman.
My writing challenge: each day I must write something creative based on whatever chapter of Proverbs I read that morning. Once I had this idea (on January 28th), each morning I woke up excited to start, but I was disciplined and waited until February 1st. That’s also almost when I stopped the challenge. Oh, I hear the voices and even see their words on the page. I could hear faint echoes of the Fool, describing his life in a Robert Browningesque “Portrait of My Late Duchess.” I saw the limerick on the page of the Sluggard, his hand buried in his bowl of porridge, too tired to put the food in his starving mouth. And, in a moment of ambition (or hubris), I saw the Sonnet Corona of Wisdom’s Call. But as soon as I start writing, the voices and images hide. I fought with rhyme and meter for three mornings as I forced Wisdom’s Call into iambic pentameter. My satisfied grin when I finished a line of the first (and still only) quatrain faded when I realized that it ruined the rhyme scheme. After coaxing the line to end with the right rhyme, I remembered that the idea I had just written was supposed to be in the third quatrain, not the first. One rather snide voice in my head—my inner Literary Critic—sniffs at my work and asks if I think I’m Edna St. Vincent-Millay. A cynical voice—my inner Social Critic—laughs and asks whether the modern reader would even notice whether I followed the strict sonnet form I’m fighting for. I tell them both to be quiet since they are talking louder than the creative voices I’m trying to capture on the page. Since neither is very polite, they don’t usually listen. Add to this inner conversation William Zinsser’s voice since I’ve been rereading his On Writing Well this month. Even though his work focuses on nonfiction writing, his insistence on precise language guides my poetry writing. His voice reassures me, too, that we writers are not writers: we are rewriters. His admission that he does not like writing but rather likes to have written is exactly how I feel each day as I stare at the blank pages of my poetry challenge notebook. Were I not expecting my polished, sparkling Sonnet Corona to unfold on the page with perfect precision, I would be able to write a sloppy second quatrain. While I know that I will have to rewrite and rewrite my sonnet into a semblance of elegance, I am paralyzed because the messy attempt will ruin the perfect potential of my idea. While I doubt Solomon was writing about the art of writing, I find no truer words to describe my pristinely empty poetry pages than “where there is no ox, the crib is clean.”
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Startled by the ending of the recent film The Circle, I read some reviews to see what others thought. Naturally, one amateur reviewer led with “the book was better.” Now I want to read the book, which I didn’t know existed, not because it supposedly is better, but because I thought the story was intriguing enough to want to interact with it in a different medium.
As an English teacher, I love books. They are friends and teachers in ways that movies cannot be. But I tire of hearing the cop-out criticism: the book was better. Of course, it was! Film and print are different media with different strengths, limitations, and purposes. No one looking at a photograph of Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel would think of saying, “The Sistine Chapel is better.” Most of us cannot spend hours staring at Michelangelo’s work on the ceiling; the photographs are as close as we get to his work and allow us to see in greater detail than were we awkwardly craning our necks far below his painting. Similarly, movies based on books are retellings focused on parts of the story. I cannot begrudge a movie for not being a book. And a movie adaptation can complement its parent-book. That complementary relationship is why I love both the book and movie The Phantom of the Opera. The movie shows the kaleidoscopic whirl and grandeur of the opera house; the book explores the lonely torment of the phantom and lonely naivete of Christine. The film and movie do, in fact, tell different stories, but those differences enhance the essence of the narrative. I enjoy the film’s final musical conflict between the phantom and Raoul just as much as I enjoy the book’s climax with Christine’s dilemma in saving or destroying the theatre’s audience. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (the first movie and book) is another complementary pair. The movie contains significant, but necessary, changes in the plot. Honestly, Lena’s introspective conflict in the book works only in print; introspection seems lifeless on film, so her story had to change for a different medium. Her character’s essence, however, is unchanged. And her story which left me unmoved in the book made me cry in the movie. In the opposite way, I cried through Tibby’s grief in the book (the first time I cried for a book), but I mirrored her deadness in the movie and remained empathetically detached. And then, there are the movies that are—dare I say it?—better than the book. I love teaching Little Women in my unit on Transcendental writers, but in the book, the differences in the March family are camouflaged by the more obvious differences of the era. The movie, crafted for a modern audience, captures what living based on Transcendental tenants looks like in a way that my students can grasp without my interrupting every chapter to give important information about the era. Certainly, some film adaptations are sloppy and add nothing to the narrative. Knowing this, my students goad me by praising the great movies Percy Jackson and Ender’s Game in the hopes that I will digress from our regularly scheduled activities to enumerate the movies’ flaws. But even when I bite their bait, we discuss not that the book was better, but how or whether the movie could include elements we thought were essential to the story. A student recently asked me whether I were a coffee snob or not, and I heartily affirmed that I am. An experienced barista, I can smell and taste the difference between good and bad coffee. Most importantly, I enjoy coffee for only the flavor, unaffected by caffeine that drives many to drink coffee-like substances just for the kick of caffeine. When I moved abroad, I brought with me two bags of coffee, a treasure hoard that I guarded as carefully as any self-respecting dragon. Because my love language since college has been to make others coffee, this stinginess hurt. But I rationalized that most of my new friends don’t like coffee and those who do have been drinking ersatz coffee for so long that they wouldn’t notice the difference. My brother sent me another two bags of coffee for my birthday, so my hoard lasted until the end of December. In my rationing of coffee in those early weeks, I learned some sobering truths about coffee here. Yes, there is Starbucks. (After all, if we ever colonize another planet, the first business to open will probably be Starbucks, which, while not serving a great cup of coffee, at least serves consistent coffee.) Knowing that eventually I would deplete my coffee hoard, I scoped out the local Starbucks menu. The holiday flavors should have been listed, but alas, I didn’t recognize any of the flavors. But the worst truth is this: there is no regular coffee in this country. When I order a regular cup of coffee at any coffee shop in town, I get an Americano. Sorry, but watered-down espresso is not a cup of coffee. Worse than being a coffee snob in a country of non-coffee drinker, I am a creamer snob in a non-dairy country. Good cream is even more elusive than good coffee. Yes, I splurge and buy cream instead of milk, what the other coffee drinkers here use. Admittedly, I’m not sure what it really is, but it claims to be cream. Cream should mix with the coffee and change its color. The white stuff I’m putting in my coffee feathers and stays in a mass floating on the top of the coffee. It barely even changes the flavor. It might as well be plastic for all the good it does my coffee. (And it coats my mug with an impenetrable film.) Out of desperation, I have been experimenting with creamer substitutes. After searching the web for some options, I started with coconut oil, which is easier to find than cream. After I got passed the feeling that I were putting Crisco in my coffee and after admiring the mesmerizing multi-layered oil bubbles, I tried a sip. Once I get back to the States, I will immediately switch back to International Delight creamer, preferably Cinnabon. Last week, a student took me a new market and proudly showed me the imported coffee section. I perked up (oh, sorry, unintentional pun). But every single bag of coffee in there was espresso. To add insult to injury, the only brand of flavor syrups they carried was Monin—my least favorite flavor syrup. Sometimes I worry if my coffee taste buds will stop working out of self-defense. Yet each time I make another cup of coffee, I am reassured that it still tastes as un-coffee as the last cup. |
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