De Libertas Quirkas

Visited the neighborhood of Fremont, Seattle today, known alternately as "The People's Republic of Fremont" (for its association with various counterculture elements) and "The Center of the Universe." Their unofficial motto, De Libertas Quirkas, translates roughly to "the freedom to be peculiar," and everywhere this motto rings true. Below are several pictures of landmarks in Fremont, including the Fremont Rocket, the "Fremont Troll" (a troll under a bridge!), and a massive statue of Vladimir Lenin. Learn more about Fremont here, if you'd like.

Format?

For the sake of my own sanity and to give myself a concrete framework in which to work, several months ago I decided to approach this writing project not as one monolithic, single-voiced string of words--an entire book, if you will--but rather as a series of essays centered on a common theme. Again, at the time I made this decision, it was purely for psychological reasons, to make me more at ease as I approached the project. But the more I think about it and the deeper I get into the book, the more I am thinking that perhaps rather than just a little sleight-of-hand tool to put me at ease, this idea might be an actual format I should consider using in fact. Consider: a series of essays, each on a different event or topic, but centered around the same general subject matter, which is to say, my experience on the campaign. It may make for more readable and digestible material and would also give me concise, mini-projects to work on. I'll be pondering this as I continue my work.

Seattle

For those of you who know me personally, you will know that my family recently moved to Seattle. I am presently with them, having arrived Saturday morning at 3am local time after a nearly four-hour delay at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. I am sitting comfortably in our home in the Magnolia neighborhood. Outside our window, to the south, like some beautiful painting, Mt. Rainier towers over all below it. For some scientific reason beyond my understanding, the mountain appears to be floating, its base shrouded in the same pale blue as the sky above and around it. Magnificent.

From our rooftop, one can view the many fishing boats in the water below as well as the tops of the houses all around. This home is smaller than our previous homes; it is three stories with roughly three rooms on each floor, including a fourth floor that is an open rooftop. Below, the lights from the boats and surrounding buildings dance upon the water's dark, gently swaying surface. Here is a place of peace.

I will stay here until my appetite for the city has dissipated sufficiently for me to gin myself up to go back to Kentucky. I will occupy myself with tourism, to be sure, but my primary hope is to spend much of my time writing. Writer Julia Cameron says in her book "The Right to Wright" that when a writer possesses a concrete sense of place, it "make[s] for writing that a reader can connect to." This is my challenge.

Which is why it is so important that I left Kentucky for a time. I need to break routine and change my environment in an effort to be more productive. Here's where we see if that gamble pays off.

Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"

Shortly after the Second World War, in 1946, George Orwell published his now-famous essay "Politics and the English Language." As one writer writing to other writers, this essay is an indispensable item in my toolbox as I approach my various projects. Orwell writes:

"Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

In the essay, Orwell lays out several examples of what he considers to be poor writing and then lays out six rules that he suggests may be implemented by English writers seeking to turn the tide back in a progressive direction with regards to our language. It is striking that Orwell wrote this essay in 1946, long before things like Facebook, text messaging, E-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, and online comments sections have dragged the English language through the mud more than just about anything else in the history of the language.

Orwell's six rules are the following:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Any writer endeavoring to produce decent material would be wise to take these rules to heart. Oh that it were so easy as just applying rules....

Recommended Blog

If, like me, you are interested in the lifestyles of writers, I highly recommend the now-dead blog "Daily Routines." When the anonymous author was posting regularly, this was one of my must-read sites. It features posts on "how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days." Here's one of my favorites, about Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Philip Roth:

If turbulence remains one of Roth's dominant literary tones, "Order in living" is now his credo. "Philip lives like he's at Fort Dix," his friend Ross Miller, who teaches literature at the University of Connecticut, told me. "Everything precise and hospital corners." Roth wakes early and, seven days a week, walks fifty yards or so to a two-room studio. The front room is outfitted with a fireplace, a desk, and a computer set up on a kind of lectern where he can write standing up, the better to preserve a bad back. There are pictures here and there of his family: his father, Herman, who sold insurance for Metropolitan Life; his mother, Bess; his older brother, Sandy, who used to be in advertising and now paints. Most of Roth's books are in the big house, where they run, room after room, in alphabetical order by category.

When I came to visit, it was a late-winter morning, and the snow was piled high around the studio. Roth was wearing a blue Shetland sweater, green corduroy pants. Often there is tweed. He dresses like a graduate student of the late fifties. He led me to the back room. There was a team photograph of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. There were free weights, a lifting bench, and an exercise mat. He had quintuple-bypass surgery eleven years ago and is determined to keep in shape. He stays out here all day and into the evening: no telephone, no fax. Nothing gets in. In the late afternoons, he takes long walks, often trying to figure out connections and solve problems in the novel that's possessing him.

"I live alone, there's no one else to be responsible for or to, or to spend time with," Roth said. "My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don't have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don't have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back out and I work for two or three more hours. If I wake up at two in the morning--this happens rarely, but it sometimes happens--and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can't sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I'm on a call. I'm like a doctor and it's an emergency room. And I'm the emergency."

David Remnick, Reporting: Writings From The New Yorker

My Project Meets George Orwell

Lately, I've been reading George Orwell's fabulous (if dated) book on the Spanish Civil War called Homage to Catalonia. For those not familiar with this work or the story behind it, Orwell wrote it shortly after he finished his stint fighting with in the war against the Fascist forces led by Francisco Franco. During his time in Spain, Orwell was eventually badly wounded by a gunshot to the throat. He writes movingly of the effect the war had on the general civilian population, and writes of the horrors as well as the boredom of life on the frontlines. It's a powerful work of journalism that I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys history, good writing, or simply Orwell himself.

But how does this tie into my writing project?

As I've read Homage, I've realized that the book serves as a sort of template that I could potentially use in my own project. Orwell manages to weave the day-to-day narrative of his own experience artfully in with the broader picture, the bird's eye view, if you will in a way that is at once powerful and lucid. So I've thought: perhaps I could use this as a guide for writing my own story!

I think that the day to day narrative of my story will almost definitely be more boring than Orwell's day to day narrative, so why not spice it up with a bird's eye view every other chapter or so? There's a huge story to tell, and as with any writing project, the stated intention to write a story of this magnitude and scope is bound to strike some as narcississtic and arrogant, but that's the risk, again, that any writer takes.

What do you think?

Hmm...

I've had this blog template up for a while (I know, fancy template, right?), but have been pondering for some time what shape I want this to take. For me, like many people, blogging is like journaling or learning a new language, losing weight, or quitting smoking: something we talk endlessly about but never actually do. There is a long line of aborted blogs in my recent past and so the notion of starting a new one is always a bit daunting.

I've titled this blog "Brick by Brick, Block by Block," as a partial quotation by Barack Obama who said, and I paraphrase, "we can change this country brick by brick, block by block, calloused hand by calloused hand." I used this quote as the inspiration for the book project I am working on. It is a memoir about my time on the campaign, which lasted from June 30th, 2008 to November 7th, 2008. I worked in Southern Ohio, predominantly in Scioto County, where Sen. Obama netted roughly 46% of the vote. There are a number of memoirs about the campaign in the works from what I understand, but I have yet to hear about anyone writing from the ground level, which strikes me as a bit funny.

The campaign that put so much emphasis on and which revolutionized the grassroots has yet to be written about from the perspective of those on the ground: the organizers, volunteers, and others who, to put it simply, made Obama President. So that, in the most basic sense, is what I hope to achieve with my work. Whether I succeed or not (and what, really, is success?) is yet to be seen.

I hope to use this website, then, to occassionally post excerpts from my work, to ponder out loud the challenges that I face, and to solicit input from others about various aspects of my work, as well as simply post interesting stories and links as they arise. I hope you will join me as I attempt to tell the story of the most important and groundbreaking political campaign in decades.

It should be a fun ride.