This is not merely humor derived from words lost in translation.
We are in a recession and this symbolizes the thousands of English majors who are out of work and could be using their degrees and areas of expertise working as translators.
Thanks, February 2008, for publishing the funniest thing I’ve read all year. From Steven Millhauser’s short story “Cat ‘N’ Mouse” in Dangerous Laughter:
“The mouse is sitting in his chair with his feet on the hassock and his open book facedown on his lap. A mood of melancholy has invaded him, as if the brown tones of his room had seeped into his brain. He feels stale and out of sorts: he moves within the narrow compass of his mind, utterly devoid of fresh ideas. Is he perhaps too much alone? He thinks of the cat and wonders whether there is some dim and distant possibility of a connection, perhaps a companionship. Is it possible that they might become friends? Perhaps he could teach the cat to appreciate the things of the mind, and learn from the cat to enjoy life’s simpler pleasures. Perhaps the cat, too, feels an occasional sting of loneliness. Haven’t they much in common, after all? Both are bachelors, indoor sorts, who enjoy the comforts of a cozy domesticity; both are secretive ; both take pleasure in plots and schemes. The more the mouse pursues this line of thought, the more it seems to him that the cat is a large, soft mouse. He imagines the cat with mouse ears and gentle mouse paws, wearing a white bib, sitting across from him at the kitchen table, lifting to his mouth a fork at the end of which is a piece of cheese.”
I have a passing interest in writers and writing.
Someday, I aspire to be an aspiring novelist.
And some days, the good days, my vanity and stubbornness subside enough so that I am open to advice and instruction.
So recently, on one of these rare days of clarity and calm, I picked up a copy of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott.
While not as practical and straightforward as Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, nor Kundera’s Art of the Novel, nor even Wood’s How Fiction Works, Bird by Bird is far more enjoyable to read. It’s the writing guide for the budding scribbler looking for their writing advice to be translated to them by a moody, pessimistic Sarah Vowell who is absolutely hilarious and kind.
Lamott proves to be frankly blunt and honest about writing, limiting none of her acerbic sarcasm. She relates a story about a friend’s imaginary company whose business was having cats put to sleep; the slogan being “The pussy must pay.” Lamott encourages writers to let someone do this with their manuscripts.
Inbetween parables relating the act of writing to the act of executing family pets, Lamott peppers her memoir on writing with straightforward advice:
“To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care.”
“Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.”
At the very most, I will eventually write something. At the very least, I will have a few Lamott quotes up on my walls. Like this one:
“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
The New York Times recently ran a few articles beautifully illuminating the more writerly things in life.
There’s Immigrants and Gatsby.
Timothy Egan eloquently (and thankfully) rendered Steve Jobs’ silly dismissal of reading Out Of Touch.
And then there’s a gorgeous piece about a semicolon. Yes gorgeous. And yes a semicolon.
Though Kurt Vonnegut hated them, I have always considered the semicolon to be the second sexiest punctuation mark. Second chair only to that undulating harp that is the ampersand.
As if I wasn’t already enough in love with Zadie Smith for being hot and a great writer, now I love her for being more bad ass than Simon Cowell. In declining to award a Willesden Literary Prize this year Smith explains that, “We simply wanted to see some really great stories. And we received a
whole bunch of stories. We dutifully read through hundreds of them. But
in the end – we have to be honest – we could not find the greatness
we’d hoped for. It’s for this reason that we have decided not to give out the prize this year.”
Smith continues, “The little Willesden Herald Prize is only about good writing,
and it turns out that a prize faithfully recognizing this imperative
must also face the fact that good writing is actually very rare. For
let us be honest again: it is sometimes too easy, and too tempting, to
blame everything that we hate in contemporary writing on the
bookstores, on the corporate publishers, on incompetent editors and
corrupt PR departments – and God knows, they all have their part to
play. But we also have part to play. We also have to work
out how to write better and read better. We have to really scour this
internet to find the writing we love, and then we have to be able to
recognize its quality. We cannot love something solely because it has
been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.”
Haha! Isn’t that great??? What integrity! What confidence! What a depressing dose of reality for the state of letters in this country. But also, what a cowardly and easy path for already-established writers to take. How many stories have we all heard of amazing, legendary writers being rejected and rejected and rejected? Isn’t is possible that someone like that was in those submissions somewhere and the judges failed to see it?
But can you imagine how great it would be if Simon Cowell were to refuse to award someone American Idol (which he should do)?
I’d personally like them to award the $5,000 prize to John Grisham for at least having the self-awareness, humble gumption, and lack of vain delusion to recognize himself as an Entertainer and not an American literary Bard.
