Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Writer’s Life
Anonymity? What anonymity?
I’m starting to think that linking doctorhoffman.com to Balls and Walnuts wasn’t such a hot idea.
My boss has seen this blog, and the woman who has his ear reads me regularly and leaves comments. I met with the local hospital’s Chief of Staff this morning, and he recognized me thanks to that most recent pic I posted. (He didn’t like the pic, either. “You need a livelier background.”)
I didn’t mind when my patients began reading my blog; they gave me positive reviews, most of them, and in any case there’s a limit to how much grief one patient can dish out. Actually, now that I think about it, NONE of them ever gave me any grief. I did get one pan on the magnum opus video, though. One of the maintenance guys back at St. Mammon Community Hospital saw it and, well, let’s just say I suspect he thinks Walt Disney’s animated movies went too far. He’s still giving poor Leann and Catrina dirty looks.
I miss my anonymity. I miss not being able to let it all hang out in this blog. I haven’t lost the desire to blog — far from it. It’s just that I have the urge to . . . well, you know how in movies when a driver is trying to lose the car that’s following him, and he pulls a really dangerous 180 tying up all the traffic and maybe causing a few cars to crash but ultimately losing the person who’s following him? Yeah. That’s what I’m after.
I would need a new blog name, of course.
I’m thinking “Nads and Almonds.”
D.
He has a wife, you know.
If this Palin runs with McCain, I might even vote Republican.
The wife and I consider this one of the best comic scenes ever. It has it all, the writing, the acting, but above all else the timing. We find it vewwy . . . wisible. And it never stops being wisible, no matter how many times we watch it.
The move and the new job has killed my drive to write. Used to be that if I wasn’t writing, I was at least thinking about writing. I would be thinking about a particular story or looking for new stories. But not now. The muse is in stasis.
Meanwhile, I’ve taken on more critting assignments than I can probably handle . . . but I really really want to read Summer‘s new book (which isn’t on that page — whuddup widdat?) And Paul Meloy’s collection, Islington Crocodiles, is finally out, and Meloy is a stupendous writer . . . and Jackie’s gonna send the Furies after me if I don’t review her new book . . .
Oy.
D.
Failing and excellence
I’ve been trying to tweak Jake’s writing so that he can wow a high school English teacher. (Listening, Sis?) Maybe I’m maligning secondary education, but based on what I experienced at Berkeley, the bar isn’t merely set low for “writing excellence,” the bar is hidden by weeds.
Here is my contention: to get an A on a high school paper, the student need only (A) have a clear thesis statement in the first paragraph, (B) have clear topic sentences for each supporting paragraph, (C) support his thesis in a factual way in the body of the essay, (D) restate the thesis at the end, and (E) avoid egregious spelling and grammatical errors.
I suggested to Jake (and, for my troubles, he accused me of sounding like this summer’s latest Feel Good Inspirational Movie) that this isn’t good enough. If he is capable of excellence, he should strive for excellence.
What’s lacking in the “A paper” I’ve outlined above? The deficit lies in (D), the restatement of the thesis. I told Jake that most A students only manage to reword their thesis statement and bring nothing new to that last paragraph. Thus*,
Paragraph 1: In this paper, I will demonstrate my love for fried food.
Paragraph 2: I love all the common fried foods. I love French fries, onion rings, and Tater tots.
Paragraph 3: I also love fried meats. Sweet and sour pork? Bring it on! Fried shrimp? Can you say, “All you can eat”?
Paragraph 4: I even love uncommon fried foods such as fried smelt, fried zucchini, and battered-and-deep-fried Snickers Bars.
Paragraph 5: In conclusion, if it drips grease and clogs your arteries, I’ll eat it up like a bag of Lays Potato Chips.
See what I mean? The summary statement tells us nothing we haven’t already learned with the thesis statement in Paragraph 1.
I would argue that the best essayists give the reader an idea where the essay is going in Paragraph 1, edify the reader in the paragraphs that follow, and conclude with a summary which, while echoing the initial thesis statement, brings much more to the reader than the reader had at the outset. That’s what great essayists like Lewis Lapham, Kurt Vonnegut, or Andrei Codrescu manage to do (and they make it look easy, too). And that’s the goal to which my son should aspire.
Pull that bar up out of the weeds. Put it in the clouds. Set the kid up for failure, yeah! Better to fail at a lofty goal than succeed at a trivial one. And isn’t that the exact opposite of No Child Left Behind?
The brain is like a muscle. Yes, that’s my expert medical opinion. If you don’t use it, it atrophies; if you exercise it and push it to the limit, it grows stronger. Push it to the “fail” point and, next time around, the “fail” point will be that much higher.
On the other hand, maybe I’ll only succeed in giving the kid a nervous breakdown. Do people still get nervous breakdowns?
D.
* For the literalists, like my son: NO, I do not mean to imply that this “essay” would get an A. I’m trying to make a point, okay?
Sleepless in Seattle Brookings
It doesn’t happen that often, but WordPress just ate my post.
And, as the above title suggests, I’m way too tired to reproduce it. Too bad, really; it would have made you laugh, and cry, and reevaluate your world view, and donate all your worldly goods to the orphaned puppies and kitties of the world, and changed your amalgam fillings to gold caps, and made your breasts grow one cup size, assuming of course that you want your breasts to grow one cup size.
Good night. Let’s see if I can get more than four hours of sleep this time around.
D.
P.S.: Okay, let me put a romantic scenario to you, followed by a few questions. Boy breaks up with girl, discovers his true feelings only after breaking up, comes crawling back. Familiar scenario? Has it happened to you? Did you take him back? Under what circumstances would you take him back — or is he toast forever? Phrased a bit differently: would the trite romantic comedy climax (guy performs some ridiculous feat, like Steve Carell’s bike ride at the end of 40 Year Old Virgin, proving his oh so stubborn love) ever work for you?
Mondegreen? Get the hell off it, then!
In a recent AP story*, I learned that Webster’s Collegiate recently had added 100 new words to their dictionary, including such head-scratchers as “dirty bomb” (it took them this long to add that?) and edamame (if I’ve been eating it for over twenty years, it sure as hell better be in the dictionary). One new addition is mondegreen, defined as a word or phrase frequently mistaken for another word or phrase . . .
It comes from an old Scottish ballad in which the lyric “laid him on the green” has been confused over time with “Lady Mondegreen.”
The AP story provides a few examples: ‘Lucy in the sky with Linus,’ from the Beatles song of almost the same name; ‘there’s a bathroom on the right’ (Creedence Clearwater’s ‘there’s a bad moon on the rise’); and “‘scuse me while I kiss this guy” (kiss the sky — Hendrix).
Funny how all of these come from song lyrics, but that’s all I can generate, too. Iron Butterfly’s “In A Gadda Da Vida” came to mind, and Wikipedia confirmed that the title may be a mondegreen of “In the Garden of Eden,” or perhaps, “In the Garden of Venus.” Also, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” is full of mondegreens.
Guess that Bob Dylan song.
The challenge is coming up with mondegreens not derived from song lyrics. The American Pledge of Allegiance has a famous one (who the hell is Richard Stands, after all? or is it “where witches stand”?) And when I was a med student, one of my dictations — “a large abdominal aortic aneurysm” — became “a large abdominal area cancerism.”
“Cancerism” still makes me cringe. What a word!
Also in the medical vein (sorry, sorry, I know we’re not doing puns today), there’s a famous one, perhaps apocryphal, that has a woman believing “fibroids of the uterus” is actually “fireballs of the Eucharist.” Christ the Avenger, I guess.
When I snuck a look at the Wikipedia entry, I saw that a whole song was composed of mondegreens. Release date 1943, and one of the writers shared my last name. Can you guess it without cheating?
How about it — do you have any favorite mondegreens?
D.
*AP had a hissy fit not long ago about bloggers linking to and quoting from their articles. Why they want to shoot themselves in the foot like this, I don’t know — but fine, I’ll reference it without providing a link or attribution. Nyah, nyah.
Oh, and here’s a whole great pile of mondegreens, if you’re enjoying this.
In addition to Simon alone, there are still more Simon and Garfunkel mondegreens, including Aaron Bernstein’s mishearing of “silence like a cancer grows” as “silence like a casserole” (from the hit song “The Covered Dishes of Silence”), and Clare Tiss’ joyful singing of “I have a watch, I have it o-o-o-o-o-n . . .”
“I am rock, I am an island,” of course. Makes more sense if you’ve heard it.
Let’s talk poison
No, not that Poison. (And, might I say, Ew? Looks like these guys cornered the market in lip collagen injections.)
Yeah, that poison.
Today, I’m thinking about writing. This is an improvement. At least I’m thinking, plotting, speculating, devising, and not playing Diablo II on Nightmare level.
Monday Evening Snippet
I’m exhausted from traveling, so I’m gonna pull a fast one on you. A really fast one. I’m posting a short excerpt from my WiP, She Came From Earth.
Here’s what you need to know: Lisa and her baby brother Billy Ray have been abducted by an extraterrestrial cyborg Brad Pitt. She’s not sure what they want with her, but she’s figured out why they want Billy Ray: extraterrestrial cyborg Angelina Jolie wants to adopt a real human baby!
Meanwhile, extraterrestrial cyborg Steven Spielberg is busy directing a rip-off of Lost and he’s keeping Lisa nearby because all the cyborg actors want to steal glances at the Real Human Girl.
Lisa’s has had just about enough of all these extraterrestrial cyborg pseudo-Hollywood types, but she’s held captive by two burly Roon Vissars named Rolf and Kevin. Roon Vissars are . . . well, you’ll figure it out.
L’Absinthe
enchantée, originally uploaded by Kat Walks.
No, this doesn’t have much in common with Degas’s painting, but it reminded me of it just the same. Probably nothing more going on than the woman, her drink, and the green tones.
I had another “working weekend.” Didn’t even come close to opening up my word processor (not for creative writing purposes, anyway).
How are your writing projects coming along?
D.
Why I’ll never make it as a chick lit author
1. I refuse to work a pun into my title.
From the blurb for Kim Wong Keltner’s The Dim Sum of All Things,
Have you ever wondered:
- Why Asians love “Hello Kitty”?
- What the tattooed Chinese characters really say?
- How to achieve feng shui for optimum make-out sessions?
- Where Asian cuties meet the white guys who love them?
. . . which leads me to,
2. I cannot write saccharine cutesy-pie synopses.
3. I don’t accessorize well.
From Sophie Kinsella’s Remember Me. Emphasis mine:
When twenty-eight-year-old Lexi Smart wakes up in a London hospital, she’s in for a big surprise. Her teeth are perfect. Her body is toned. Her handbag is Vuitton. Having survived a car accident—in a Mercedes no less—Lexi has lost a big chunk of her memory, three years to be exact, and she’s about to find out just how much things have changed.
4. I’m not good with cliches.
From Jennifer Weiner’s In Her Shoes. Emphasis mine:
Meet Rose Feller, a thirty-year-old high-powered attorney with a secret passion for romance novels. She has an exercise regime she’s going to start next week, and she dreams of a man who will slide off her glasses, gaze into her eyes, and tell her she’s beautiful. She also dreams of getting her fantastically screwed-up, semi-employed little sister to straighten up and fly right.
Meet Rose’s sister, Maggie. Twenty-eight years old and drop-dead gorgeous. Although her big-screen stardom hasn’t progressed past her left hip’s appearance in a Will Smith video, Maggie dreams of fame and fortune — and of getting her big sister on a skin-care regimen.
and
5. All the trite titles have been taken.
Meg Cabot has Boy Meets Girl, Every Boy’s Got One, and The Boy Next Door. Jennifer Weiner has Good in Bed, In Her Shoes — and in case I wanted to consider any polyglot shenanigans, Gut im Bett and En Sus Zapatos, too. Carly Phillips has Sealed with a Kiss, Claire Cook has Life’s a Beach, and as I have already whined, Megan McCafferty has Sloppy Firsts, damn her. (I really wanted that one for my romance.)
See? It’s hopeless, I tell you. Hopeless.
Can I count this as an early Smart Bitches Day Post?
***
Live blogging: tonight at 7:00 Pacific. See you there!
Make it 7:40 PM. Gotta eat first.
Did I say 7:40? I meant 8:20! I bet you’ve all bailed . . .
D.
Tasty pudding
I have internal nazis. If I eat fatty food, I get cramps which keep me up half the night. If I go more than a week without exercising, my lower back tortures me. And then there’s the guilt nazi, who keeps me on the straight and narrow about everything else.
So, no, I haven’t really tried out this panna cotta recipe, but I have it on the authority of my wife and son that this stuff is GOOD. Easy to make, too — that much, I can vouch for.