True BS

"…we approach style in its broader meaning: style in the sense of what is distinguished and distinguishing. Here we leave solid ground. Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent? These are high mysteries….Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, ‘Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.’ This moral observation would have no place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what you are, rather than what you know."

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An Approach to Style

“Nothingnot cracked isso exact andof a piece”
Kay Ryan reassures us. Pages later, in another poem, she asks a question that is as much a confirmation as her statement about wholeness:
“howcan we feedas upon nectarupon need?”

“Optimism,” I said to her, not knowing if it was advice or a warning or an explanation of something. “You stay and stay and stay in the race, especially when it looks hopeless.” We were not talking about racing.

the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference.

—Creeley

before the writing

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Mike Magnuson and I have been exchanging cajoling and joking and ridiculing and self-deferential and searching emails and messages for some months in relation to a narrative he’s doing for the magazine. He’s a mess right now. He’s finding his way into being able to write the story (and do the ride the story is based on), and this part of working with writers is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable parts of what I am lucky enough to do. This is the bit I sent him this morning, a response to a panicky email telling me that knows I find it amusing when he panics:

“It’s not amusing — much too light of a word for the amount of entertainment I derive. Event day is always different. You know that. Cosmic internal shit will commence, you will rise to the occasion, you will plunge to smithereens, you will phoenix up et cetera and so forth, cry like a baby, milk deep the pap of life itself, stop for a snickers and meet a sage wearing a gingham apron and wrist deep into a jar of pickled eggs, and from all of such riches you will find a story. And have a great ride. The worst ones are the best.”

“It is easy to be beautiful;
it is difficult to appear so.”

I have witnessed in my life mostly the reverse, and, aside from a few sentences sometimes and less often a partial or entire passage, I have barely achieved either state. But this is O’Hara, and so for me worth thinking about.

the kid went with tie-dye jersey and striped socks for soccer tryouts. That’s a win.

“…if anything is going to save us, it’s the truth. Every other marriage I know is based on lies. We know the absolute worst about each other. I’ve put scars on you you’ll carry to the grave. And you’ve hurt me in ways God himself couldn’t name…we’ve been through the fire but if anything saves us it’s that fucking fire.” Want to find This Thing Don’t Lead to Heaven next.

tool new to me—a barb-wire-fence puller. Those spikes scare the shit out of me.

I embrace revision; I disdain copyfitting — the necessary-for-print step of cutting lines from a story to fit the page space.
This selection from my column started the production process like this… “He had that easy and endless temperament to his spin, and that aura of absolute relaxation in the saddle that was a shroud for something coiled always within him, some elegant and awful spring under such pressure there was about him when he was on a bike a kind of non-aural high hum.”
…and ended with the printed version, which inaccurately states that the “easy and endless temperament to his spin” is the aura that was a shroud for the coiled thing.
As a tougher and smarter writer friend once said to me, “You cashed the check, didn’t you?”

day in the yard, watching the brush fire burn down, flies on my dog, talked to my mom, saw a hawk high against the bluest blue of the year.

“Then he reached down and lifted the hawk to his wrist. For the first time, she gripped his fist with her feet. The pressure of her talons touched his blood with something very like the heat of a woman. His heart leapt; his loins flooded with a feeling like warm wax melting. He slowly and carefully lifted the long flight feather and stroked her trembling breast twice. A sound not unlike a baby’s came from his mouth.” Figured I ought to go ahead and read up the last of Harry’s books I never got to while he was alive.)

I have three torque wrenches in active use, and more in a closet, clapped-out ones and older ones with hash marks you eyeball instead of precise dials that click out when the bolt reaches the exact setting. My favorite is the most beautiful, the Giustaforza, which is slim and spare, and has a knurled handle, and tiny numbers on an elegant dial, and which can’t be ratcheted back—you spin the bolt, disengage the wrench, fit it back into the bolt and turn it again. Something in this purposeful omission of convenience speaks to me about the deliberate nature of working on bikes that often becomes lost in the hurry to get things done, or, once long ago, the familiarity I had with the tool and the parts. This morning my Giusta told me I’d reached 5 nm and I thought, no, surely no, the calibration on the tool was off, the reading was wrong, my hands could feel that I hadn’t tightened so much so soon. It was there in my fingers, the way it used to be, when I could set with my hands torque within a few decimal points of a single nm because I knew what it all felt like. I even stopped checking myself after awhile back then, and never broke anything. Then I stopped working so much on bikes. This morning installing a stem I turned in turns, then turned one until my fingers said to stop, and I turned the three other bolts in succession until I felt again each time that lost wonderful knowing, and I thought to do one round of snugging, just a twelfth of a turn, a twentieth, a fiftieth, just a pressure against the bolt almost like a bow at the end of a great play instead of any actual mechanical motion. And I snapped the bolt. There is a feeling you get when your feeling is gone, and that is as important to know as the feeling you no longer know.

an amadoodle—tiny painting on a wall—by Nedko Solakov, in the tasting room of Castello di Ama, above Lecchi in Chianti. Says the catalog of the drawings and phrases that dot the walls: “The same inebriating potential of wine and its effects on the personality are the subject of other small episodes, to the extent that even the waves of an imaginary sea, carved out by tracing the veining on the wall, become freely intoxicated in this revealed landscape. But this is probably just the beginning of my own story. Every viewer will build another one, and another again, and as Solakov seems to indicate to us, this is a necessary and inevitable condition in a contemporary world that is increasingly fragmented and ungraspable.” Either that, or this room of strange doodles and words will make you happy for a while.

“…the alchemists believed that a creative work has a sort of life all its own independent of the creator, straddling the worlds of psyche and matter, of both and neither. A subtle body, they called it.”