Real Terms, No Context: Vol. 27

acute perplexity

eternalism

"Wot's For Lunch Mum? Not Beans Again!"

faciality

mad praxis

Anarchy Centre

dividual

Speculative Archive

transient presentism

artificial darkness

Recently Reading #7: Donna Miller

Corresponding with writers and bibliophiles about what we've been reading lately.

Donna Miller is in her 70s and, as a writer and artist, feels that she carries within her, vividly, all the ages she has ever been. She enjoys expressing herself from those accumulated perspectives. She attended Rhode Island School of Design in the 1960s, but, to her, that is incidental. Her creative education has been largely self-motivated, from an incessantly curious and imaginative mind. Every day is "back-to-school" day, exploring the unknown with relish. She has been a bookworm and artist all her life.

Nate: If I understand correctly, you've maintained an almost lifelong journaling practice, is that right? What's your practice like today? 

Donna: In a way, I started journaling at age four—in pencil drawings depicting my ordinary life events. I still have some of those drawings. This progressed to verbal stories, again about the myriad little details of everyday life. I told them to myself in bed at night and to my baby sister, who found them soothing.

Written journals began later. When I was eleven years old, I acquired a pink plastic Five-Year Diary with a lock and a tiny key. I kept it securely hidden behind a batch of items on an out-of-the-way shelf in my bedroom. I wish I still had that diary, as I am intensely curious about what I wrote, but, alas, it disappeared ages ago. I do remember, however, that from the first entry, I scrapped the idea of a "five-year" format. I had a lot more to say each day than would fit in 1/5 of a small page. It became a one-year diary, and I wrote in it faithfully every day—in tiny script, so I could say as much as possible.

I went from there to using loose leaf notebook paper (more room and without printed dates), and I kept them stashed in various hiding places—under my mattress, in my closet in a box filled with old paper dolls, or any other spot I thought my mother would not look. These pages were filled with the overblown emotional longings of my teenage years. I identified with orphans, even though I had a quite typical nuclear family of the 1950s and early 60s. I discovered Judy Garland at age fourteen, and her plaintive vulnerability won me over. I did not see The Wizard of Oz until my twenties, as it was always on TV on a Sunday, and, in my family, we had to take a break from tv on that day. Often old movies were shown in the middle of the night, and I would set my alarm whenever the TV Guide announced a Judy Garland movie. I'd sneak down to the TV room, far enough away from my parents' bedroom to watch the movie in the darkened room, low volume. I didn't care if I was tired the next day at school. It was worth it.

I learned about Judy's hard life, and my journal pages were filled with fantasies that I would lose everything, be orphaned and alone, roaming the streets in a thunderstorm, seeking shelter. I would see a house, go up to the door, fall in, begging for sympathy, only to discover that it was Judy Garland's house. In the fantasy, she adopted me and, together, we faced the inevitable sadness of life. I no longer have those pages either, but I remember vividly the satisfaction I got making up those extreme dramas. In real life, I was not a melancholy sort nor a loner, but using this journal format to process my darker emotions was very effective.

I entered college in the fall of 1964, after seeing A Hard Day's Night eleven times that summer. My journals began to replicate John Lennon's two books, which I carried with me everywhere and, at parties, read passages aloud while standing on a table. Existentialism came next, and that became the tone of the journals. 

I was always a voracious reader, and I dove into many authors in my college years, each one leading to a phase of imitation. Even though the journals were about my own life, the author's style and perspectives on life were blatantly represented in those journals. They included Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Proust, Tolkien, and many others.

One Proustian journal entry—long sentences of meticulous detail—was about the light shining in my bathroom window and how it affected the folds in the shower curtain, the bathmat, my toothbrushes, and every single other object in the room, along with descriptions of my own nuanced emotions as I stood in the hallway. Unfortunately, a few years later, I was hit with a great bout of embarrassment and tossed that whole batch of imitative journals in the trash. Yikes! Why, oh why?

Since then, many of my journals are art related, containing collages, drawings, paintings, and also text. They have explored any area of life that caught my fancy, and I still keep this type of journal. I also still do some self-exploration—personal issues and observations—and I have several travel journals, often with drawings or photos included. I sometimes use fiction writing as a doorway into deeper exploration, allowing me to turn various parts of myself into characters that interact with each other. I love that process, and it yields a lot of surprising insights.

Nate: I've always been fascinated by Judy Garland as well. What are some of early memories of seeing her films?

Donna: The first Judy Garland film I ever saw was quite unexpected. I was in ninth grade, and in my high school we occasionally had assemblies for some unknown reason. This was such a day. We all filled the school auditorium and were told that we would see a movie. It turned out to be Judy Garland and Gene Kelly in The Pirate. Wow! I was thoroughly transported all the way through!

In this film, Judy's character Manuela is a young Spanish woman unhappily engaged to the mayor and longing for true romance. Gene Kelly is a circus performer named Serafin who falls in love with her but is unsuccessful at getting her to abandon her marriage plans and run off with him. He hypnotizes her and she breaks into an utterly astonishing song and dance number—"Mack the Black"—about a wild, dashing pirate. In this number, the Judy elements I grew to love show up in spades. She sings and dances (with a whole troupe of performers) in a piece with over-the-top energy and passion, but not without her innate gift for comedy. This wild belting out is then contrasted by a soft segment where a closeup of her face reveals her innocent, plaintive longing for genuine love. Coming out of hypnosis, she forgets the whole thing and again rejects Serafin and sadly goes through with plans for her wedding and a future life with the stodgy mayor. As a last resort, Serafin pretends to be the real pirate Macoco (Mack the Black) and a lot of crazy, topsy turvy events occur, including a comedic scene in which Manuela, discovering his deception, smashes a painting over his head, throws every breakable object in sight, yelling in derisive anger about his being "only an actor." Judy's shows her sense of comedy timing and her talent for making angry rants charming, never losing her wide innocent eyes and rosebud mouth. This made me, as a fourteen-year-old beset with very similar romantic dreams and repressed anger, completely identify with her. They do get together, of course, and the movie ends with Manuela joining Serafin in his circus act, both of them singing and dancing "Be a Clown". The film was directed by Vincente Minelli with songs by Cole Porter and in groundbreaking technicolor (1948), spectacular sets and costumes, and Gene Kelly at his athletic best, so it had many features to capture me, but it was Judy herself who was the draw.

I was entirely hooked! As I watched her other films, I grew to appreciate her range, but also saw more deeply her greatest gift—expressing the subtlest, most complex emotions in both her facial expressions and her voice. Every phrase of a song seemed to come straight from an unguarded heart. An early example of this was a small bit she had in Broadway Melody of 1938, when she was only fifteen and sang a love song to a picture of Clark Gable. Already she was masterful at the musical phrasing and nuanced tones she became known for. That number made MGM take notice and want to manage her career—a tale of both success and tragedy, as we all know.

Watching all her movies, I was delighted as well by the brassy bold numbers and the tongue-in-cheek comedic elements she had. I learned later that this quirky sense of humor was a feature of her personality in real life as well. The skill to be funny in the midst of heartbreak was so inspiring to me in those teenage years, when opposites were so wildly at play inside of me. 

I could list many movies I loved, but probably the most influential element of those years was the double album of her comeback concert at Carnegie Hall in 1961. I was fifteen at the time and went out immediately to buy the album. I literally played it every day, often several times a day. I sang along with her and memorized every song. Even today, I cannot sing any of those numbers without using her timing and adaptation. Luckily, my mother loved Judy as well, so she did not mind my blasting that album each evening as I washed the dinner dishes and sang my heart out. Knowing much of her history by then, it was especially poignant to hear her triumphant brave comeback and, once again, marvel at life's inclination to place blessings and burdens in close proximity.

Nate: I wonder if you have any advice on how to maintain a writing and art-making practice? I've always been impressed by how you seem to be self-motivated; you're not necessarily focused on public presentation but rather on personal expression, is that fair to say? 

Donna: Yes, that's true, but it requires a bit of explanation. My need for personal expression comes from a strong force within me for generation—for giving form to something that wants to be born. Perhaps it's a strong maternal instinct spread out into all of life. I fall in love with some aspect of life, let's say, shadow and light—ignited by a pattern on the floor in the morning or by seeing a black and white photograph or a classic example of film noir. The enticing blend of contrasting darks and brights, along with the myriad gray tones, may thrill me. I then want to leap into that quality, explore it deeply, and, out of that, produce offspring—a work of art, a piece of writing. I may then delve into a stint of pencil drawing with many tones or a period of working only with black ink or writing a shadowy short story. It's an act of love, a way of paying homage to whatever it is that attracts me so much, a way of making concrete something that exists as a heart-filling and mind-filling feeling. Giving expression to it through a creative act completes something within me. This is imagination—the process of entering the invisible realms of life and turning them into images, something visible. The visible expressions of imagination can be material—a painting, a film, an article of clothing—or it can be an action—children saying, "Let's pretend you're a knight and I'm a sneaky rascal who makes mischief all the time." Another child pipes in, "And I'll be a wild tiger who leaps out at them in the woods." On and on they go, giving story form to the floating thoughts within them, acting them out in their play.

For myself, I'm not content to just perceive, gather, enjoy, think, and learn, although this inner exploration is quite absorbing. I also want to give back, or give out, to declare to many aspects of life, "Yes, I see you. I love you. I want to express that love, and I will do it with this work of art, this piece of writing." The creative expression is not particularly for other people, but for life itself, for my connection with the universe, so to speak. 

Occasions of public presentation may come along from time to time, but I don't seek them out. Even when I owned and ran an art center, my impulse was to attract co-explorers, kindred spirits who also approached art as an act of love and a desire to express. The art center's gallery exhibited my own work along with the work of many others, but mine was often shown under a pseudonym. I love to create personae that represent different aspects of my creative impulses. For example, Bobbysox Einstein is that part of me that is madly in love with numbers, diagrams, charts, grids, with all their orderliness, but, at the same time, wants to mess with that order, morph it in a playful way and create unexpected combinations. Scooter Glithorthian loves to combine photographic realism with elements of utter imagination, often a blend of a realistic scene with imposed cartoonish forms placed within it. One persona, Leapin' Lulu, came from an impulse to work within a strict boundary, to simplify, as it were, and she works only in red and white. There are many more of these, and they give me freedom but with a direction. And they release me from the egotistical temptation to care too much what others think of my work. It is not so much a fear of criticism, but rather the danger of too much personal attention: "Oh, do more of that! You must do more of that! Everyone will love you if you keep doing that!" My creative spirit does not want to fall into the trap of getting hooked by others' admiration, as my ego might.

It would be difficult for me to advise others about an art or writing practice, because each person's motives are different. Someone who wants to create a practice for the purpose of mastering a skill or a medium—let's say, watercolor painting or calligraphy or writing poetry—might benefit from a disciplined routine, practicing every day, perhaps with a tutor or using a book with a sequence of steps. Someone else, who feels a great need to release pent-up energy or emotions, may need to let loose with no restrictions—write or make art like a child using finger paints or scribbling with wild abandon or making up songs or stories that make no sense but are pure release. Or if they are like me—wanting to explore, learn, and express what they love—they can use catalysts of all sorts. Looking at art books, watching videos, going for walks, listening to music, reading any book or even opening a book at random can all be means of sparking a creative impulse, and then the technique is to just plunge into it, make the time for it. Learning to prioritize creative expression is key to all of these purposes—to not allow the ordinary business of everyday life to gobble up all our time.

I truly believe that the world needs creative expression, in the spirit of love and genuine appreciation, as much as it needs attention to the challenges and troubles that are always present.

Nate: I know that you are also an avid reader. What have you been reading lately?

Donna: Avid reader, yes! A young man once asked Annie Dillard if he had what it took to be a writer. She replied, "Do you love sentences?" That answer thrilled me, as it explains not only why I myself write but also why I read. I do love sentences! And I love phrases, all sorts of wordplay, and the myriad aspects of words themselves—their sounds, their rhythm, their nuanced meanings, their vast and fascinating etymologies, and even their look on a page. That's why I love your blog, Nate—you are a kindred spirit word lover! Now to answer your question.

I'm always reading several books at once—at different times of the day and for different purposes. Currently, I have these books in progress:

At breakfast, I have three that I'm coursing through. Two are nature books—The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl and A Countrywoman's Year by Rosemary Verey. Both are set up to take the reader through a year of changes in nature, especially the plants and animals we can observe in our own backyards. The first of the two has a reading a week, divided into the four seasons. I read that one every Monday morning. The author lives in Nashville, so the ecology is typical of that region. Today (July 28th) she highlights the thick humid fecundity of summer—birds and other critters, flowers, weeds, and, especially, the very abundant bugs—then adds a great sentence: "In the corner of our windows, spiders profit in the damp." I loved that! The other book is British (given to me by Adrien) and it is utterly delightful, in that the author is madly in love with the quaint environment in her corner of Gloucestershire. This book has a chapter for each month, with six or seven anecdotes per month. It makes me crave hedgerows and winding lanes and the charming plants unique to her spot of country!

The main book I'm reading at breakfast is by the renowned astronomer/anthropologist, Anthony Aveni. This one is called Conversing with the Planets and was written in 1992, shortly after he wove the two fields together as his life's passion. He is considered a pioneer of the field now called archaeoastronomy. In 1991, Rolling Stone Magazine voted him one of the 10 Best University Professors in the whole U.S. and, since then, he has won numerous awards and written more than forty books. I am just now discovering him, and I'm staggered by the amazing perspectives he points out about how ancient cultures related to planets and stars. Without telescopes or other sophisticated technology, they worked out intricate patterns, largely from viewing the sky's relationship to the horizon as it changed in subtle ways throughout the year. They discovered useful information regarding their crops and crucial weather systems, but they also believed that everything in the universe was in constant dialogue with everything else. Thus, they invested the planets and stars with powerful, influential qualities, their very names used as magic words, truly serious ones to them, and they used them with great respect and care. Aveni weaves this all together with brilliance, much detail, and a deep respect both for rigorous science and the mythologies constructed by cultures through the ages. I am only 46 pages into a 224-page book, densely packed on each page. It will take me a while. Then we'll see if, as is my custom, I want to read all the rest of his books! I love this mix of human culture and objective scientific data. Nothing is isolated.

A number of my books are for dipping into at various times of the day, when I want a break from ordinary activity or just find a curiosity popping up. Two of these, at this time, are The Complete Essays of Montaigne and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and his eclectic journal-like collection, Specimen Days. These are books that lend themselves to opening up at random, as any page within them will bring a smile to my face and send my mind off in an unexpected direction, loosening any grip my everyday responsibilities have on me. They can also easily spark a creative project—writing or art. Their effect is similar to one of my beloved favorites, Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood, a book always within easy reach on my shelf, as its nothing-but-questions format opens up grand mental adventures.  I know you also love that one, Nate!

At bedtime, I read novels. I am currently on book three of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, which is six books in all. The first, A Wizard of Earthsea, was published in 1968, and was notable in that the heroes—the wizards with power—were brown-skinned and the main character was short in stature. In the second volume, The Tombs of Atuan, women play a prominent role. Ursula broke into a lot of new territory in the Fantasy genre with these books. I am currently reading the third volume, The Farthest Shore. These books, Le Guin says, were originally conceived as YA novels. The main characters start out as teenagers. Later, though, she realized they have ageless appeal. The six books are often seen as two trilogies, as the first three were written in quick succession, and the last three twenty years later. They have been compared with The Lord of the Rings, but I find them vastly different. I loved The Lord of the Rings and read the whole trilogy four times and was fascinated by Tolkien's connection with Norse mythology, with names and concepts he derived from those stories. The Earthsea Cycle seems to be radically original, even though the stories involve wizards, sorcerers, witches, dragons and the like. In Earthsea, these often have highly unexpected characteristics, even the opposite of cliche definitions.

Finally, I love to go to the library regularly and choose an aisle at random, glance over a section of books, regardless of the topic, and choose a few books that look interesting. I've been doing this since my early teenage years, and it has introduced me to many subjects that did not hold particular appeal, only to discover enriching perspectives, wild or helpful approaches to life different from my own, or just new (or archaic) ways of expressing knowledge. These library books I read in the late afternoon, when I've finished whatever work of the day I had going. This reading interlude is like a self-declared treat to round off a day. I have four current books: Samuel Beckett's Short Plays, two poetry anthologies—one American and one a worldwide collection—and a delightful personal journal Ursula K. Le Guin wrote as a blog, when she neared and reached her eighties. It's called No Time to Spare and it's about her experience with aging. It's witty, profound, and full of humorous anecdotes. It was published in book form in 2017, and she died a year later, so it's a poignant last work for her and interesting for me to read at the same time I'm reading the Earthsea books, written more than forty years earlier.

That's all for now, except for those books that always lean against my reading chairs or the legs of my desk and lure me to revisit when the mood strikes. These include many wonderful children's books, art and creativity books, and one of my recent favorites—The Art of Slow Reading by Thomas Newkirk. For reliable laughs, I keep a good collection of Roz Chast books.

Nate: So much good reading here, I love the variety! You mentioned The Lord of the Rings: for the past three years I've been reading Tolkien aloud to Leo at bedtime, about three pages a night, starting with The Hobbit, and now we are down to the last forty pages of The Return of the King. It's been an incredible journey (this is my first time reading them) and I'm feeling a bit sad about coming to the end. But already Leo is looking back at earlier books in the series and revisiting certain passages, so I have a feeling we'll be returning to this world. 

I too have a similar collection of books "for dipping into at various times of the day" as you put it. Well, books and magazines I should say, because I do the overwhelming amount of my magazine reading during in-between moments (eating lunch, waiting for water to boil, taking a ten minute break from work). But there are also a handful of film reference books that I consult almost every day, usually to read reviews of movies I watched in the past couple days, but while I'm in there I always find my eye wandering to interesting titles and serendipitously finding suggestions for future viewing in that way. Danny Peary's Guide for the Film Fanatic, Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide, Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies, and Halliwell's Film Guide are probably the books I reference most often but there are a lot more in the mix on a weekly basis too, like essay collections and genre-specific film guides.

And I'm enjoying The Art of Slow Reading (slowly) as well, thank you for bringing that one to my attention. It's been a very encouraging book because I also consider myself a "slow reader" in Newkirk's sense of someone who internally "auditorizes" the written word, taking the time to memorize short phrases or poems, and re-reading sections to ensure full understanding. Like you and Annie Dillard, I am devoted to sentence-level beauty and excellence, that's what I'm looking for as a reader: beautiful prose on a phrase-by-phrase, sentence-by-sentence basis. But I always have a lingering sense of guilt as a reader/watcher/listener because of all the books I've never read, films I've never seen, music I've never heard. And the more you read/watch/hear the more you discover you haven't read/watched/heard! Even just in the realm of "classics" alone I always feel hopelessly behind schedule. So, The Art of Slow Reading is a good reminder that mere accumulation isn't necessarily the goal of reading and that slowing down and deeply internalizing the written word is a venerable creative practice in its own right. 

And speaking of the love of words, I wanted to mention a book I read recently called The Dictionary People by Sara Ogilvie, gifted to me by my mother - a retired librarian and a wonderful lifelong reader herself who noted my own fascination with language and wordplay beginning when I was a toddler! Ogilvie's book is about the decades-long global research project that culminated in The Oxford English Dictionary, probably the grandest and most mind-boggling act of scholarship in the history of the English language. I've been interested in the OED for a long time, I used to sit on the floor of the Ames Public Library and open volumes (one for each letter of the alphabet) at random and read definitions and etymologies. And, of course, I was riveted by Simon Winchester's jaw-dropping book The Professor and the Madman about John Minor, one of the most prolific contributors to the OED, who is also profiled in The Dictionary People. 

What made the OED different from any English dictionary before it was the effort to locate the first usages of words in print, examples of the changing meanings of words over time, and representative sentence samples of words used in their published context. And to do this for every single meaning of every single word in English. This project spanned generations of scholarship and involved the work of thousands of volunteer correspondents who, like John Minor, engaged in independent research to discover unique usages in print, catalog them according to editorial specifications, and mail them to the Oxford headquarters of lead editor James Murray (who was later knighted for his lifelong efforts in completing this virtually impossible project). The Dictionary People is a group portrait of a few dozen of these contributors organized alphabetically in chapter headings by their professions, interests, or distinguishing features ("C for Cannibal"; "I for Inventors"; "S for Suffragette"). 

As that sampling of chapter titles suggests, the lives of the contributors are as interesting, varied, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally tragic as the example John Minor set. Many were on the outskirts (or perhaps the cutting-edge) of social standards, including same-sex lovers, first-wave feminists, and a pornographer. Others were specialists in a particular field, like archaeology, astronomy, or world languages. And they were located all over the English-speaking world which, in this era of peak British colonialism, spanned multiple continents. Crowdsourcing is today facilitated by a world wide web of instantaneous communication; imagine trying to retrieve sources from a crowd of thousands in an age of ships and hand-delivered mail. Ogilvie, a contemporary OED editor, conceived of the project after discovering James Murray's address book in the Oxford archives. She was able to use the document to discover the identities of some of the uncredited OED contributors and then build out their biographies from research into correspondences and contemporaneous records.

                                            Sir James Murray, editor of the OED

She makes a point of stressing that, although the OED is a monumental feat of scholarship, it was largely accomplished by "autodidacts and amateurs rather than professionals." Even lead editor James Murray himself was an "outsider" in the world of academia. This idea had great appeal to me and in a way reminded me of my own relationship to scholarship, and to Oxford University Press in particular. [Disclosure: I am a freelancer for OUP]. As an indexer, I design a tool for scholarly research but am not myself a scholar or a researcher. My work appears in published books that I did not author. Like many OED correspondents, indexers are on the fringes of academia making small but substantial contributions to an enormous publishing enterprise. And, like them, indexers are first and foremost readers seeking usages and phrases and organizing them into a coherent, alphabetized structure. 

Donna: I love the fact that you've been reading The Lord of the Rings with Leo—especially that you're reading it slowly! They are certainly books whose beauty, to me, is in the long, slow journey, which was not an aspect emphasized in the movies of the trilogy, where they merely hinted at the slow parts and jumped from one action sequence and dramatic interchange to another. As I said before, I read the whole trilogy four times, each time savoring more deeply the subtler nuances of the story and the writing. I often do that with both books and films—engage in repeat readings or viewing in order to focus from different angles. Rewatching movies, I will sometimes choose a vantage point each time, such as lighting, editing (visual, sound, and dialogue), camera angles, pacing (consistent or dramatically varied), sets and props, and so on. It's like a self-structured film course, which I thoroughly enjoy!

I know the dilemma of being a slow reader, savoring each sentence and phrase, and also having a gigantic list of books I'm eager to read. I don't have a solution (the lists fill notebooks and folders), but the effect is that my rooms are loaded with stacks of books "waiting in the wings," and they are both comforting (so much to anticipate) and tormenting (will I ever get to read them all?!), not to mention new discoveries of books I must add to my lists or stacks!

One of those newly added must-read books is the one you mentioned, The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie. I looked it up and, Wow, that's my kind of book! And, Nate, what a cool discovery to find that we both read dictionaries for the fun of it when we were young! I don't think I have ever encountered another person who shared that habit with me. I did not have access to the OED, which sounds utterly awesome, but my family had the World Book Encyclopedia, and it came with a dictionary that comprised three large, fat volumes—way more intriguing than the junior dictionaries we had at school. Any page in those large dictionaries was filled with word-lover delight, and I made many lists of favorite words, especially the very exotic ones and the ones whose sounds were irresistible to say over and over again! I also had the habit of opening the encyclopedia at random every day after school and reading whatever was on that two-page spread, which then led to further research of discovered topics.

I also loved reading the phone book. They were larger back then, as everyone had a landline and hardly anyone was unlisted, and we lived in good size cities. So many amazing names! My imagination took off like crazy, making up personalities and stories about those unknown people with astonishing names. Both the phone book and the dictionary are made up of lists and, like Leo, I'm fascinated with lists—both delving into them and creating them. And you, of course, as an indexer, create a kind of list none of us avid readers could do without!