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Another word for blah blah
Synonyms for blah-blah include trumpery, malarkey, nonsense, rubbish, bull, rot, trash, garbage, tosh and balls. Find more similar words at wordhippo.com Synonyms for blah blah blah include yada yada yada, , boring, and yada yada, and yadda yadda, etcetera, and others, and so forth, and so on and and suchlike. Find more similar words at wordhippo.com Synonyms for blah-blah-blah include hot air, nonsense, drivel, hogwash, twaddle, rubbish, balderdash, claptrap, blather and poppycock. Find more similar words at wordhippo.com
Find 15 ways to say BLAH, along with antonyms, related words, and example sentences at Thesaurus.com, the world's most trusted free thesaurus Another way to say Blah-blah? 136 synonyms for Blah-blah (other words and phrases for Blah-blah)
Synonyms for blah include boring, humdrum, monotonous, pedestrian, dreary, plodding, bland, banausic, monotone and dim. Find more similar words at wordhippo.com Synonyms for Blah Blah (other words and phrases for Blah Blah). Log in. Synonyms for Blah blah. 17 other terms for blah blah- words and phrases with similar meaning. Lists. synonyms. antonyms. definitions. examples. thesaurus. phrases. yada yada. yadda yadda. bla bla. blah blah blah. blah dee blah. blah fucking blah. la di da. la la
Synonyms for Blah Blah Blah (other words and phrases for Blah Blah Blah). Log in. Synonyms for Blah blah blah. 36 other terms for blah blah blah- words and phrases with similar meaning. Lists. synonyms. antonyms. definitions. examples. thesaurus. words. phrases. Parts of speech. adjectives. nouns. adverbs. whatever. and so on. yada yada. whatnot 67 synonyms of blah from the Merriam-Webster Thesaurus, plus 44 related words, definitions, and antonyms. Find another word for blah. Blah: language, behavior, or ideas that are absurd and contrary to good sense Viewed 17k times. 2. You might say blah blah blah when you're not interested in what'd be said. I sometimes say whatever to convey the same idea, which does not share the nice rhythm effect of blah blah blah. As a non-native speaker of English, I often pronounce blah blah blah in a very awkward way when speaking out very quick Find 15 ways to say BLAH, along with antonyms, related words, and example sentences at Thesaurus.com, the world's most trusted free thesaurus. (Page 2 of 6 Synonyms for blah-blah in Free Thesaurus. Antonyms for blah-blah. 4 synonyms for blah: bombast, claptrap, fustian, rant. What are synonyms for blah-blah
What is another word for blah-blah? Blah-blah Synonyms
Synonyms for blah in Free Thesaurus. Antonyms for blah. 4 synonyms for blah: bombast, claptrap, fustian, rant. What are synonyms for blah
What is another word for blase? SYNONYMS FOR blasé apathetic, jaded, cloyed, sated, glutted, surfeited, world-weary. Does blah come from blase? Etymology. Sense Idle, meaningless talk (1940), probably imitative or echoic in origin. Perhaps, but cf Greek barbarbar 'unintelligible sounds' (Grillo 1989:174)
Blah definition is - silly or pretentious chatter or nonsense. How to use blah in a sentence
Blah definition, nonsense; rubbish: What they say is blah. See more
What is another word for blah blah blah
blah-blah. Opposite of senseless or absurd language, behavior, or ideas. Opposite of the excess use of words, especially using more than are needed for clarity or precision. An awkward silence filled the room as the crowd waited in bated breath for the magician to complete his death-defying stunt.
noun. informal. 1. (also blah-blah) mass noun Used to refer to something which is boring or without meaningful content. More example sentences. 'the first 20 pages are a lot of blah about budgets and stuff like that'. 'Here's some blah-blah from the table of contents about it: 'As robots become more anthropomorphic, they are engaging.
Synonyms: blah blah, blah blah blah, yada yada yada Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, Mom, you said this all yesterday. And then he was like, Oh, my brother's an Internet millionaire, blah blah blah. Like I care! Representing the sound of vomiting. Synonyms: bleah, blech, bleh; Translation
Synonyms for 'blah, blah, blah': secondly, firstly, lastly, thirdly, et cetera, etc, second, whatnot, inter alia, and the like, among other thing
BLAH-BLAH 'BLAH-BLAH' is a 8 letter word starting with B and ending with H Synonyms, crossword answers and other related words for BLAH-BLAH. We hope that the following list of synonyms for the word blah-blah will help you to finish your crossword today
Blah-blah-blah definition, and so on; and so forth. See more
What is another word for blah-blah-blah? Blah-blah-blah
Synonyms, crossword answers and other related words for BLAH BLAH BLAH [etc] We hope that the following list of synonyms for the word etc will help you to finish your crossword today. We've arranged the synonyms in length order so that they are easier to find
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blah-blah-blah - WordReference English dictionary, questions, discussion and forums. All Free
talk too much; blah blah, yadda yadda. Search Tips and Pointers. Filter word: Enter a keyword in the search box to see a list of available words with the All selection. Click on the page number if needed. Don't forget to click back to All when you search another word with a different initial letter
Synonyms: blah blah, blah blah blah, yada yada yada Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, Mom, you said this all yesterday. And then he was like, Oh, my brother's an Internet millionaire, blah blah blah. Like I care! Representing the sound of vomiting. Synonyms: bleah, blech, bleh; Translations Ver
al piece Blah, Blah, Blah (2008). My feeling was that there were ways of extending, or re-inventing.
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BLAH Synonyms: 15 Synonyms & Antonyms for BLAH Thesaurus
something that means nothing. The Golden word of English Literature! It is mimed behind people's backs to suggest that they talk too much or that they talk about useless topics for no reason. It is also viewed as a word expressing indifference, or lack of a preference. blah is sometimes assumed to mean something negative because it is used to replace a word that may be unpleasant, but blah. He was a great soldier, the people loved him, blah blah blah. C'était un grand soldat, le peuple l'aimait, blabla bla. You'll tell me that life is beautiful and I have to be brave and I'll say, yes yes yes, blah blah blah. Vous me direz que la vie est belle et qu'il faut que je sois forte, et je répondrai : Oui Blah blah blah is a phrase that is a negative commentary on the quality of what someone is saying.Blah blah blah is used when the listener believes that the speaker is spouting nonsense, drivel, or words or information that is meaningless, boring, or has been said many times before More 50 Et cetera synonyms. What are another words for Et cetera? And so on, and so forth, and the rest. Full list of synonyms for Et cetera is here
Blah-blah synonyms - Other Words and Phrases for Blah-bla
noun. informal. 1. (also blah-blah) Used to refer to something which is boring or without meaningful content. More example sentences. 'the first 20 pages are a lot of blah about budgets and stuff like that'. 'Here's some blah-blah from the table of contents about it: 'As robots become more anthropomorphic, they are engaging with us in. Weed, ganja, cannabis sensamillia, marijuana, reefer, grass, pot This page provides all possible translations of the word blah blah blah in the French language. bla bla bla French r/conspiracy members who claim to be proud supporters of EITHER corrupt party, can get FUCKED and navigate themselves back to r/propaganda by BernieBroOrBust in conspiracy. [-] -blah-_-blah-_-blah-. 1 point. 2 points Blah synonyms, Blah pronunciation, Blah translation, English dictionary definition of Blah. 3. Blah Blah Blah Lyrics: Badda-da-dah, badda-da-bah-bah / Coming out'cha mouth with'cha Blah, Blah, Blah / Zip your lip like a padlock / And meet me in the back with the Jack at the jukebox / I don't . 15
What is another word for blah? Blah Synonyms - WordHippo
We've got 2 shorthands for Blah Blah Blah » What is the abbreviation for Blah Blah Blah? Looking for the shorthand of Blah Blah Blah?This page is about the various possible meanings of the acronym, abbreviation, shorthand or slang term: Blah Blah Blah
Looking for the abbreviation of blah blah woof woof? Find out what is the most common shorthand of blah blah woof woof on Abbreviations.com! The Web's largest and most authoritative acronyms and abbreviations resource
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Lettris is a curious tetris-clone game where all the bricks have the same square shape but different content. Each square carries a letter. To make squares disappear and save space for other squares you have to assemble English words (left, right, up, down) from the falling squares
Blah Blah synonyms - 17 Words and Phrases for Blah Bla
blah - WordReference English dictionary, questions, discussion and forums. All Free We've got 1 rhyming word for blah blah blah » What rhymes with blah blah blah? This page is about the various possible words that rhymes or sounds like blah blah blah.Use it for writing poetry, composing lyrics for your song or coming up with rap verses Watch: New Singing Lesson Videos Can Make Anyone A Great Singer Blah blah, blah blah, blah blah Y'all take y'all selves to serious Calm down if you want to hang with us Calm down if you want to hang with us Blah blah, blah blah, blah blah Y'all take y'all selves to serious Calm down if you want to hang with us Calm down if you want to hang with us Oh brother, here I go again Getting on the.
Definition of blah-blah-blah in the Definitions.net dictionary. Meaning of blah-blah-blah. What does blah-blah-blah mean? Information and translations of blah-blah-blah in the most comprehensive dictionary definitions resource on the web Synonyms for 'Yada yada'. Best synonyms for 'yada yada' are 'yadda yadda', 'blah blah blah' and 'blah blah' Available for sale from David Benrimon Fine Art, Mel Bochner, Blah Blah Blah (2012), Monoprint with collage, engraving, embossing and oil paint in colors, More 100 And all synonyms. What are another words for And all? Also, too, furthermore. Full list of synonyms for And all is here
blah, blah, blah phrase. DEFINITIONS 1. 1. used instead of a word or thing on a list when it is not important to say exactly what that word or thing will be. Synonyms and related words. -. Words used for saying that something is unimportant. whatever. anyhow Available for sale from David Benrimon Fine Art, Mel Bochner, Blah, Blah, Blah (2018), Monoprint with engraving and embossment on Twinrocker handmade pape What does blah mean? Low in spirit or health; down. (adjective) Sat around all day feeling blah This blog will provide a way for me to share with my family and friends our adventure and keep them up-to-date on what is going on in our lives. Lastly, I look forward to connecting with other bloggers out there that I have read and related to in some way. So here it goes my blah blah blog Define blah. blah synonyms, blah pronunciation, blah translation, English dictionary definition of blah. Informal n. 1. often blah blah or blah blah blah Meaningless or uninteresting remarks. 2. blahs A general feeling of discomfort, dissatisfaction, or..
Just shut the fuck up! Blah Blah Blah is a song performed by Dutch DJ and record producer Armin van Buuren. Well, there it was! blah, blah, blah meaning: 1. used to mean and other words that mean very little: 2. used to mean and other words that. This all sounds like a Y Sec'y, 4 days over Chapter 4 {officedown} for Word. The key features of package {officedown} are : Compatibility with the functions of the package officer for the production of runs and blocks of content (text formatting, landscape mode, tables of contents, etc.).; Ability to use the table styles and list styles defined in the reference_docx which serves as a template for the pandoc document With Reverso you can find the English translation, definition or synonym for blah blah and thousands of other words. You can complete the translation of blah blah given by the English-Italian Collins dictionary with other dictionaries such as: Wikipedia, Lexilogos, Larousse dictionary, Le Robert, Oxford, Gréviss Use of synonyms-thesaurus.com. In your daily life, for writing an email, a text, an essay, if you want to avoid repetitions or find the opposite meaning of a word. This site allows you to find in one place, all the synonyms and antonyms of the English language. Synonyms-thesaurus.com is more than 70,800 synonyms and 47,200 antonyms available Formed in Chicago in 2007, Blah Blah Blah is a band created by a group of like minded musicians with one common goal: to 35 videos - 1.48K subscribers Blah Blah Blah - Topic 40 videos - 539 subscriber
Blah blah blah Just another WordPress.com site. RSS. TOO GOOD GOOGLLE. Posted by Totie Bash on July 16, 2014. This morning I happened to miss type Googlle with a double L and went to www(dot)googlle(dot)com. To my surprise, I was greeted with some very creative work I favor scheme.While it can refer to plans more generally, the connotation is commonly negative. From the Oxford English Dictionary, bold for emphasis: . 5 b. Hence, A plan of action devised in order to attain some end; a purpose together with a system of measures contrived for its accomplishment; a project, enterprise Synonyms for 'last but not least': secondly, firstly, lastly, thirdly, et cetera, etc, second, whatnot, inter alia, and the like, among other thing Document procurement companies - Just another WordPress site. Legal Insight. Business Success. Smart approaches to legal solutions with exceptional service. Legal talent and expertise necessary to meet our clients' needs in an ever-changing and fast-paced environment. Get In Touch Solid Practice
Video: Blah Blah Blah synonyms - 36 Words and Phrases for Blah
Blah Synonyms, Blah Antonyms Merriam-Webster Thesauru
ating the word 'other' at least doesn't give readers the ammo.
Love Songs for Stella is a collection of 23 poems blah blah blah blah blah. Order. The Audio. Love Songs for Stella. Love Songs for Stella is a collection of 23 poems blah blah blah blah blahUt per causae insolens maiestatis, inani placerat sim ilique his ei. No sit veniam corpora gloriatur. Ad nam dicant consequuntur definitiones
Before posting here, I went on the person's profile and left a comment on the fic itself and another comment on their public profile. I basically said something along the lines of: 'hey, you've stolen my work and I'm really not okay with that. I worked really hard on this for three years blah blah blah
Tree Care 02. blah blah blah. Chipper & Operator Hire 03. blah blah blah. About us 04. Video. Contact us 05. blah blah blah. G a r d e n s
Pete Rock: 'Real Could Be Another Word For Original' : Microphone Check I met James Brown as a kid. I was seven years old, says the renowned producer. I wasn't the same since
Synonyms for blah blah blah This thesaurus page is about all possible synonyms, equivalent, same meaning and similar words for the term blah blah blah. Wiktionary (0.00 / 0 votes) Rate these synonyms: blah blah blah (interjection) A stand-in for trivial, obvious, or boring content
Blah! Blah! Blah! Written by Cherry Carl synonyms: babble, talk, gossip . Some people like to sit down and blab with a friend over coffee. Some people like to stand up and blab with a friend over coffee. Some people like to blab on the phone with a friend. Some people like to blab on th
Find all the synonyms and alternative words for blah-blah-blah at Synonyms.com, the largest free online thesaurus, antonyms, definitions and translations resource on the web Define blahs. blahs synonyms, blahs pronunciation, blahs translation, English dictionary definition of blahs. Informal n. 1. often blah blah or blah blah blah Meaningless or uninteresting remarks. 2. blahs A general feeling of discomfort, dissatisfaction, or... Blahs - definition of blahs by The Free Dictionary
(chiefly US) And so on; and so forth.· (chiefly US, less commonly) blah blah blah.··^ OED ^ OED ^ yada yada yada, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. ^ Dictionary of the Scots Language ^ Wright, Joseph, The English Dialect Dictionary (1898), London: H. Frowde; New York, G.P. Putnam's Sons ^ On this date, Seinfeld made Yada Yada Yada a. blah blah blah blah blah-face blah-faced BLAM Blame blamps. blanchable. blancmange bland Blandest blandish Blandly blank blank cheque permission blankard blanked-off corridor blanket blanket drill blanket hornpipe blanket ripper blanket stiff blankie blaps. home recent additions webmaster page banners feed a chil Mel Bochner, Blah Blah Blah. Nov 13. Art Miami December 4th through 9th, 2018. Mel Bochner Biography. Mel Bochner (Pittsburgh, 1940 - ) and this is the baseline constraint when setting up his synonyms. Once this is tackled, rearranging begins based on the feel and look of the words next to one another. Generally there is a directionality.
Blah, Blah, Blah We spend too much time talking when we should be listening. Is there another word for mature youth now - some new quirky thing like matouth? - The matouth was in charge of an organization responsible for overseeing four major organizations with offices nationwide, a loving husband, a hands-on father of two, and. Go to Insert > Header or Footer. Choose from a list of standard headers or footers, go to the list of Header or Footer options, and select the header or footer that you want. Or, create your own header or footer by selecting Edit Header or Edit Footer. When you're done, select Close Header and Footer or press Esc 2. user enters the information, and let's say they also type in blah blah blah. 3. The code below fires as an OnExit macro in the last formfield in Letter1. In any case, Letter2 opens and IT has formfields also named Name, Address. If you have declared the documents as object, you can retrieve the information easily between them And you, you one-man freakshow, take your blah-blah to the blah-blah-psychologist, because if you are so stupid to confront the chief of medicine over some quasi-offensive endearment, then you've just gotta go ahead and change the captain of your brainship, because he's drunk at the wheel. Elliot: You're right, you're absolutely right Your next right action might be to tap into your senses — sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing — to fully appreciate your life. If you're feeling blah because nothing new or exciting is.
• Some blah blah blah about a such-and-such that wastes no time in getting to the point. blah blah 2 adjective American English spoken informal 1 BORING not having an interesting taste, appearance, character etc The chili was kind of blah. 2 ILL SAD/UNHAPPY slightly ill or unhappy I feel really blah today. Origin blah 1 (1900-2000) From the. Disembody. blah blah why would you ask this on wiki answers? What is another word for beg? Most dictionaries will give you a selection, such as plead, ask, importune, solicit 4 Answers4. Active Oldest Votes. 14. You should not say for another example. The phrase for example does not tell the reader what you are about to say, it tells the reader why you are saying it. This is why we use the preposition for, just as we might say for better understanding or for comic relief, and it is why we do not say for an example blah, blah, blah blah, blah blah. blah, blah, blah spoken. BORING KNOW something. used when you do not need to complete what you are saying because it is boring or because the person you are talking to already knows it You know how Michelle talks: 'Tommy did this, and Jesse did that, blah, blah, blah.' → blah Examples from the Corpus blah. We have 37 synonyms for baloney. Find the perfect synonym of baloney using this free online thesaurus and dictionary of synonyms. Thesaurasize - When you need a better baloney word
synonyms - Any other way of saying blah blah blah
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Synonyms for 'Yadi yadi yada'. List search. Special characters '?' and '*':??? - shows 3-letter terms; a??e - 4-letter terms starting with 'a' and ending with 'e
blah blah definition in English dictionary, blah blah meaning, synonyms, see also 'belah',bah',blanch',bleach'. Enrich your vocabulary with the English Definition dictionar
About the Authors. Anna Kaley is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Prior to joining NN/g, Anna worked for more than 10 years in user experience architecture and digital strategy. She conducted complex user research, service, and experience design for healthcare, agriculture, finance, tourism, retail, and engineering clients
If the quotation has only one sentence, use a comma after the introductory phrase: According to Mr. Smith, The government goofed again. Block Quotation. Use the colon to introduce all block quotations: Mr. Jackson said: We must now decide the issue once and for all. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and so on
Maybe just forget it 'Cause by the time you get this Your number might be blocked [Pre-Chorus] Stay and blah blah blah You just want what you can't have No way I'll call the cops If you don't.
al piece Blah, Blah, Blah (2008)
They feature lists of synonyms, many gleaned from Roget's Thesaurus, and often colloquial and vulgar ones. As with the blah blah paintings, there's a hint that the artist himself might be. Synonyms / Similar Phrases: 1 Blah blah 2. So and so forth. Origin: This phrase has a few alternate spellings, which include 'yatata yatata,' 'yadda yadda,' and 'yada yada.' There is also the phrase 'blah blah blah' that essentially shares the same meaning. Where these words derive from, I believe, is unknown This is a New Post!! 21 Mar. This is a new blog post about bicycles and their effects on the modern world. Blah Blah Blah. Categories Uncategorized
So here we are. Let's talk about beginnings. Namely, the start of two things that I've seen in the last week: Martyr by ATC at the Unicorn, and Pascal Rambert's Clôture de l'amour at Dublin Theatre Festival. Both were bollocks at the beginning. Like, yeah yeah yeah, blah blah blah, acting acting acting. You know what I mean Scattergories and Words Starting with Certain Letters ��. English Languag Jamie climbs up after Hayes and says all the right things to get Hayes back down in a wildly drawn-out scene where Hayes almost falls and Jamie holds on tight and blah blah blah
The 10 Best Board Games to Play With Your Children. Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah In entertainment on November 26, 2008 at 1:35 am. You're under arrest, Jill. And I'm breaking up with you.. Oh, snap! Chuck sure told Jill! I enjoyed yet another episode of Chuck this week. I loved when Morgan and Lester got separated through the glass door and did a shout-out to Kirk and Spock If anyone has a problem with the context driven Synonyms function going missing again there are two options. Option 1: If you don't care about losing any macros etc, just restarted word, create a new file write some blah blah and save the file. These actions will force Word to create a new blank Normal.dotm in C:. How to replace a word with another word in a cell array (case insensitive) Follow 17 views (last 30 days) Show older comments. hjo on 16 Jul 2020. Vote. 0. ⋮ . Vote. 0. blah limelemon blah blah blah. blah blah blah blah lemontree. replaceword and withthis remain the same.... filename = 'lemon.txt'; replaceword = 'lemon' dl324. Joined Mar 30, 2015. 12,871. Jun 7, 2017. #2. When working with CMOS, everyone should understand that VDD is the positive supply, VSS is ground, and VEE is any negative supply. If you choose to use non-standard terminology, it will be clumsy. GND is often used as a synonym for VSS and VCC is often used instead of VDD
A great memorable quote from the The Powerpuff Girls Movie movie on Quotes.net - Blah-Blah Blah-Blah: I, uh uh, Blah-Blah Blah-Blah, shall uh, create a sauce of chaos a-a-a-and stir up trouble with a destructive force known as uh-uh-uh-uh The Tormato.Mojo Jojo: Tormahto?Mayor: Tor-may-to Concur and agree are synonyms, but I couldn't agree more is a set phrase. While they technically mean the same thing, replacing agree with concur in that phrase sounds a little peculiar. Concur is highly formal, commonly found in legislative or judicial settings. Agree is a more frequent and common word. I couldn't agree more is somewhat. BEWARE THE ENDING ; This is the only place in C/C++ where you have the sequence }; and it's very easy to forget. While we're talking style I suggest that you Put your struct definitions in a .h file (and #include that file in any .c file that uses the struct) Do not declare actual struct variables in the same statement that defines the struct type You can create your own. This message is everything. The connections the repeatitive introductions �������� the friendly workers blah blah.its quiet an amazing experience And I almost don't want to go back to school The field is an amazing place and working with people is quiet an interesting phenomenon. Like Liked by 1 perso Looking for the poetry matching blah blah blah? Find all about blah blah blah on Poetry.com! The Web's largest and most comprehensive poetry resource
Blah-blah synonyms, blah-blah antonyms - FreeThesaurus
Just another Wordpress.com weblo Young people in the USA view the sex education they receive as outdated and insufficient. The prevalence rates of sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy among adolescents further attest to the inadequacy of current sex education paradigms. In order to identify suggestions for the improvement of sex education, we conducted six focus groups with 38 college students at a southwestern US.
Blah synonyms, blah antonyms - FreeThesaurus
BoP n 1: the law enforcement agency of the Justice Department that operates a nationwide system of prisons and detention facilities to incarcerate inmates sentenced to imprisonment for federal crimes [syn: Federal Bureau of Prisons, BoP] 2: an early form of modern jazz (originating around 1940) [syn: bop, bebop] v 1: dance the bebop [syn: bop, bebop] 2: hit hard [syn: sock, bop, whop, whap. Test Slider. Blah Blah Blah Test Slider. Previous Next. Test. Blah Blah Blah Tes The increase in numbers of international students who have English as a second language (ESL) and are studying in English-medium universities has renewed the emphasis of English language development in higher education, particularly concerning academic writing. Much of the discussion has concentrated on developing best practices in providing support via Language and Academic Support (LAS.
What is another word for blase? - Mvorganizing
Racism, Blah-Blah-Blah Yadda-Yadda Let's talk about racism. I mean, it's the subtext of every politicized, tiresome interaction in America. So why should we be any different? In a recent column of Tom's, he patiently dismantled the incoherent Woke view that every white person is implicated in racism. None of us has any choice Từ đồng nghĩa, cách dùng từ tương tự Trái nghĩa của blah blah blah
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Habitat for Humanity and Bates Technical College Partnership Reaches Milestone, Fuels Real-World Experience for Students
TACOMA, Wash. – When Bates Technical College instructor Dave Leenhouts approached Tacoma/Pierce County Habitat for Humanity eight years ago, he hoped to forge a partnership. Today, that partnership has helped yield 50 affordable homes for families in our area.
"My goal was to be able to educate our electrician students on the newest technology in energy efficient homes and new construction," said Leenhouts, who teaches the nine-quarter Electrical Construction program. "This fall, we'll begin work on our 50th house—a major milestone for us."
Fourth-quarter student Ken Lincoln just completed a TPC Habitat house located on Swan Creek Lane, west of Portland Avenue. The former boat builder from Port Townsend said his Bates education helped him get the skills needed to work on the house.
"In the college's facility, students go through labs that include mock-ups of residential buildings. I learned to install lights, switch receptacles, wire an apartment, and a 1,000 square-foot home. The opportunity to learn in labs before working on a Habitat for Humanity house is instrumental for our success," said Lincoln.
The experiences between lab work and construction on a Habitat home are different, noted Lincoln. "At a Habitat site, students interface and work in tandem with professionals in the construction trade," he said. "The most important part of this hands-on learning experience is that we do finish work on a completed house. Students hook up wires, so it has to be done right, and it's got to last," he added.
Director of Site Development and Construction at TPC Habitat Gomer Roseman, said supporting technical education is important. "Bates students not only provide extra work and volunteer power to our organization, their knowledge of the trade, and the instructors' involvement in the project, allows our site managers to take a hands-off approach," he said.
Brandon Rogers, dean of instruction at the college's South Campus is proud of Electrical Construction instructors Jeff Llapitan and Leenhouts for forging this partnership, which offers a unique experiential learning opportunity for their students.
"A hallmark of the Bates experience is that students graduate with both a credential and a work resume'. For our Electrical Construction students, the Habitat partnership means we also invest directly in our community. It's a model we celebrate," said Rogers.
Lincoln just started work on the community home at The Woods at Golden Given, located in Parkland. "This experience is a great opportunity for us to work on new construction. We go into an enclosed single-family dwelling and mount the meter and panel. We drill our own holes, pull wire, and when ready, hook up the appliances, receptacles and switches. We get to see the reality of all the home runs coming into the panel. Then, we troubleshoot to ensure everything was done correctly," he said.
Adds Lincoln, "Working on Habitat homes is something we feel good about. The fact that we have an opportunity to help a family in need move into an affordable new home is incredible."
To learn more about Bates' Electrical Construction program, go to www.bates.ctc.edu/Electrical, or call 253.680.7000. To learn more about Tacoma/Pierce County Habitat for Humanity, go to www.tpc-habitat.org.
← Habitat Challenge FAQ
Neighbors Turn Into Friends at Swan Creek as Site Construction Comes to a Close →

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text:
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Feast is being hosted by the prestigious Castle Hotel Taunton where there will be a wide activity programme all based around food and drink and aimed for all the family. As part of the celebrations there will be a 2-day food and drink festival on Castle Green showcasing all the fabulous produce Somerset and the South West has to offer.
A free to attend event with over 60 producers from hot dogs to chutneys and Cheese to Gin you will be able to experience a wide variety of produce from across the region.
Creating the festival vibe will be live music from many of Somerset's finest musicians.
With all the myriad of experiences, demonstrations and tastings available we think that this really will be foodie heaven in the heart of Somerset!
Please see our website Feasttaunton.co.uk for a list of the celebrity dinners, demos, talks and children's activities taking place.
Free food market, talks and demos.


text:
President of the Republic of Lithuania
President Gitanas Nausėda
Presidential Functions
The President's Engagements
State Decorations
The President: I wish European leaders determination to act against real threats
The President: Lithuania cares about the democratic future of Georgia
The President: Lithuania has an ambition of becoming a green economy and digitization leader
The President will attend the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp
The President leaves for the World Economic Forum in Davos
The President offered condolences over bushfires in Australia
Gitanas Nausėda congratulated the President of the Swiss Confederation on assuming office
New Year Greetings from President Gitanas Nausėda
Gitanas Nausėda congratulated the President of Estonia on her birthday anniversary
Christmas greetings from President Gitanas Nausėda and First Lady Diana Nausėdienė
Talented school students will create a more advanced Lithuania
Wednesday, December 19, Vilnius - President Dalia Grybauskaitė met with the participants of international Olympiads and competitions for school students and congratulated the winners, their teachers and team leaders.
The President said that all of Lithuania was delighted to see their achievements in international competitions and world Olympiads. Each year, Lithuania's education system turns out many talented and creative young people who compete successfully and gain the highest-level recognition around the world.
"Creativity and youth in science paves the groundwork for the future of our country. Without talents we cannot build an innovative economy and ensure Lithuania's progress", the President underlined.
According to the President, it is tremendously important that talented people work for Lithuania. She stressed that every effort should be made for bright young people to receive world-level education and to create the necessary conditions for them not only to unfold their potential, but also to develop their talent and make their ideas a reality in their home country.
This year, 70 school students from Lithuania won 43 medals and diplomas at international Olympiads and competitions in chemistry, natural sciences, philosophy, geography, astronomy, astrophysics, and music.
Press Service of the President
Last updated 2012.12.19 13:04
© 2019 Office of the President of the Republic of Lithuania.
Tel +370 706 64 154, fax +370 706 64 145, e-mail: kanceliarija@president.lt
Legal entity code 188609016
Solution: UAB "Fresh Media"
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Presidential Clemency
Flag Replacement Ceremony
Centre for Civil Education
Requests for Accreditation
Use of Published Data
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ppolitics
I Don't See Patriotism In His Letters – Tanko Yakasai Blasts Obasanjo Over His Open Letter To Buhari
Tanko Yakasai Has This To Say To Obasanjo Over His Open Letter To Buhari!
Nigerian politician, human rights activist and former Liaison Officer to President Shehu Shagari, Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, has said that he doesn't see patriotism in General Obasanjo's letters to Buhari.
Yakasai's full statement reads:
I don't see patriotism in General Obasanjo's letters.
In fact, all the letters written by General Obasanjo to all Military Heads of State and Presidents of the Federal Republic of Nigeria are not guided by patriotic considerations.
My experience with Nigerian political situation is that the top echelons of the Military are always fighting one another, either when in the service or when on retirement.
It is from this angle that I always view most of the writings of General Olusegun Obasanjo to any military officer who is a Head of State or President in Nigeria as unpatriotic.
Even the ones he wrote to former Presidents Goodluck Jonathan and the late Umar Musa Yar'Adua were not patriotic. They were guided by selfish interest.
General Obasanjo did it during Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida's era. He did it during the late General Sani Abacha's regime, which later resulted to accusations that he was trying to overthrow the government, which eventually led to his imprisonment.
General Olusegun Obasanjo also wrote a number of letters during General Abdulsalami Abubakar's regime and he is still writing letters in this current presidency of General Muhammadu Buhari.
So, this attitude of writing unpatriotic letters has been part of General Olusegun Obasanjo.
Buhari
Obasanjo
Obasanjo letters
Why Youths Are Not Carried Along In Politics – Churchill Olakunle
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I Will Be President Of Nigeria, Mark My Words – Rochas Okorocha
Rochas Okorocha: I Will Be President Of Nigeria, Mark My Words! Imo state governor, Rochas Okorocha, has said…
Ambode Hands Over To Sanwo-olu, Here Is His Farewell Address
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What Sanwo-olu Needs To Do Once He Resumes Office – Darey Alade
Nigerian singer, songwriter and performer, Darey Art Alade, has advised Babajide Sanwo-olu of what to do once he…
#LagosDecides2019: PDP Congratulates Babajide Sanwo-olu
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)'s Lagos State chapter has congratulated Babajide Olusola Sanwo-olu for winning Lagos state 2019 governorship…


text:
How Should a Writer Be? An Interview with Sheila Heti
The Millions Interview
Claire Cameron June 12, 2012 | 3 books mentioned 10 8 min read
Sheila Heti is the Interviews Editor at The Believer and author of five books including the critically acclaimed Ticknor. Her new novel How Should a Person Be? feels different from her previous work. It is deeply personal, while also detached and experimental. The sex is rough, the revelations are raw, and the form is strange. Heti lays bare what many writers try to hide — the mismatch between how we feel and what we do. Miranda July calls it a "book that risks everything."
The main character in the novel, Sheila Heti, is reeling from a recent divorce and struggling to write a commissioned play. Seeking inspiration, she records conversations with her best friend, a painter named Margaux, and has an affair with a devilish and handsome painter, Israel. Sheila dives into both relationships, a journey that is steeped in philosophy and that uses email transcripts and recordings as clues on a search for the heart and mind. Ultimately, Sheila discovers how an artist can create work in the face of her own self-doubts. As a writer, I read the novel as a story that explores writing and rejection and moving on, but the themes can be more widely applied. It is a book about finding a way to move forward again.
I first read the book when it came out in Canada this past September. Given the theme of revising, it felt fitting when I read in The Paris Review that Heti has since rewritten parts of the just released U.S. edition.
Making changes a book that has already been published strikes me as both unusual and risky. If a writer makes changes, is it an admission that the original work wasn't good enough?
I did a line-by-line comparison of the Canadian edition to the U.S. edition and then put the question to Heti.
The Millions: How did you start How Should a Person Be?
Sheila Heti: My last novel, Ticknor, was so neurotic. It was inside one person's head. I wanted this one to be about a system among people. I didn't want to just be in my room. I wanted to write it in the world.
I wanted to know, could I write without torturing myself? Well, I did end up torturing myself, but less. Less than I did with Ticknor.
TM: Many writers develop a style or a thing that they become known for, but this book is very different from Ticknor.
SH: I guess. Editors don't buy two books from me. They say that they don't know what my next book will be, so they will only buy one at a time. That's fine. It could be that I won't or I will find something that I will do and repeat, but maybe not because I like newness. I don't like doing the same thing over and over in any area of my life. I don't find it stimulating.
TM: How much did you work with your editor on this book?
SH: Lorin Stein, who is now the editor at The Paris Review, bought Ticknor at FSG. He was the person who I showed a draft of the book to first, apart from Margaux. It was a very early draft. He didn't really like it. He told me this story about a young writer he knew who had a big book out then, and he said, "You know, he wrote a whole other book before this book, and he threw it away. Maybe this is that book for you."
TM: Wow.
SH: I felt a lot of despair. I put How Should a Person Be? in the drawer. Finally I took it back out. I decided it was the wrong thing to do. I couldn't accept that a drawer was the fate of this book. I felt determined to make it work.
I might be misremembering how all this went down with Lorin. But anyway, so you see he was very useful. The book was much, much more fractured in its earlier form. He and I talked a lot about it. I tried to show him that it was better than he understood by explaining to him this complicated process I had used to write many of the sections, with three decks of cards. It didn't seem to change his feelings about it!
TM: I wonder if that's a description of people who end up publishing books? You get angry. Rejection steels you, rather than breaks you?
SH: Hopefully, right?
TM: Hopefully.
SH: I was at Yaddo around this time. There was a writer who told me about how he had a great editor at FSG. This writer felt that he had showed the editor his second book too soon. He was never published by FSG again and said that he should have never showed the draft so soon. It ruined his career. That story became my horror story. I was convinced that would happen to me.
TM: The career of a writer is always an exception. There is never one way it happens, but the temptation to draw conclusions from another writer's experience is always there. Do you find it tempting to try to follow the path that someone has taken? This is a theme at the heart of How Should a Person Be?
SH: Yes, but life doesn't work that way. I don't know what you can realistically learn from other people. Everyone's experience is so different.
TM: Did you know that before writing this novel?
SH: No. It was something I figured out.
TM: Is that why you write, to figure something out?
SH: I hope so, yes. I don't write from the place of "I know something that I'm going to tell to you." I write from the place of "there's something I don't know and I need to write this book to figure it out."
TM: Do you start a novel with an outline?
SH: I've tried. I find it too boring.
TM: Do you have to torture yourself every time you write a book?
SH: There always comes a point of deep uncertainty in the process. And it affects your feelings about your certainty as a human. I don't know if you can get away from that, writing. Even with the children's book I recently wrote, We Need a Horse, there were several days that were just deeply terrible. But when you look back, those are the days you romanticize. You realize that's when you were really working.
TM: So How Should a Person Be? was published in Canada first?
SH: Yes. A lot of publishers saw it and didn't want it, but Anansi took it.
TM: Do you think that's because it isn't like anything else? It's a different kind of book, especially a different kind of book from a woman.
SH: Maybe. I wasn't modeling it on other books. I was thinking about movies made by Werner Herzog and TV shows like The Hills. Other mediums are doing this kind of thing more.
Why do you think it's different kind of book for a woman?
TM: It's based on ideas. Is that sad? I think it is. It's a book that is brave and exposing and maybe some women work to cover up what you are willing to expose? Or I guess I'm saying that I would. Why don't women tend to publish 1,000 page novels?
SH: I kind of wanted this to be 1,000 pages. At one point it was 600 pages.
TM: You'll have to write a book that length next time.
SH: [laughing] Yes! Or I'll do another version that is 1,000 pages.
TM: How did you decide to re-edit the book for the U.S. edition?
SH: When the book came out in Canada, I felt like I didn't really pull it off. It wasn't a specific thing, I just knew it in my body. When it was going to be published in the U.S., I saw it as a chance to finish.
TM: Did your editor at Henry Holt give you notes?
SH: Yes, her name is Sarah Bowlin. She gave me very good notes and I thought about them. I sat down and I started pulling in things that I liked and had written but weren't in the book. There was very little that I wrote newly; mostly it was stuff I had written before but didn't end up using. I'd been thinking and living with this book for so long that the edits happened very quickly over a weekend.
TM: I went through and did a line-by-line comparison of the Canadian edition to the U.S. edition to see your changes.
SH: That's nuts.
TM: It was kind of weird, but I found it so interesting. The changes are subtle, but the way you articulate the relationships between Sheila and the other characters is quite different. The divorce has been brought to the fore in the U.S. edition. What was your thinking behind this?
SH: I thought it might help the reader understand one of Sheila's motivations for asking how should a person be? if the tipsiness that follows divorce was emphasized a bit more.
TM: There is a new email from your ex-husband's mom.
SH: All these changes, where something was added – all of those were things that at one point I was thinking of putting into the Canadian edition, but did not. There is just so much material I amassed, so I had to make choices. I made a bunch of choices for the Canadian edition, and whatever I put in and left out – that all worked to make one whole. But when I wanted to rewrite it for the American edition, I put in new things and took out some things and changed others, which made another whole. I just wanted a different feeling in this new book, something more full and resolved, maybe to reflect me feeling more full and resolved than I did when I finished the Canadian edition.
TM: How many drafts did you do for this book? When did you start?
SH: It's hard to know what the start was, but sometime in 2005. I didn't know I was writing a book. I didn't know I was writing this book. I was finished Ticknor…I was reading a lot of things. I was reading the Bible and business books and Forbes and books about companies…
I was thinking about art critics and how do they make decisions. How do they know what they like? I got a tape recorder. Mostly, I was trying to write a book that came from the world. I had note cards with all these sentences, which I carried around with me. I started recording myself narrating. I wanted to find a new way to write that would take things from the world.
I went through a crazy period where I had all these cards. Each card had symbols on them. It was a way of making scenes. All the symbols related to something real that happened in my life. I reduced those anecdotes down to a word and then I put those words on cards, and put those cards together randomly with a few other cards and then I'd try to come up with a scene from that. So it was a way to try and write about life, but not write about my life.
Somehow all these different things that I was writing started to come together. A draft started to assemble itself, but there were a thousand different drafts of the book.
TM: In the U.S. edition, you talk about your ancestors much earlier in the prologue. Why?
SH: My editor suggested that change. I agreed it was better that way; the Prologue is a kind of fugue so it really should have all the book's themes in it. I hadn't realized that this one was left out.
TM: In the Canadian edition, the Acts are numbered using roman numerals – Act II. In the U.S. edition, these become numbers – Act 2. I loved finding this kind of small detail. Why the change?
SH: I didn't realize this! I guess that was a design decision they made without me.
TM: There are fewer words on a page in the U.S. edition. In the Canadian edition, this sentence appears all on one line:
There is so much beauty in this world that it's hard to begin.
There are no words with which…
In the US edition, the same line looks like this:
There is so much beauty in this world that it's hard to
begin. There are no words with which…
As a writer, does it make it feel like a different book?
SH: I didn't notice that either. I don't think it makes a big difference. I'm not a poet.
TM: There are a minor changes peppered throughout, like "she said it had already departed" (p. 72) changes to "she said it had already left" or "When the sun went down" (p. 99) changes to "After the sun went down…" Is there a systematic reason for these smaller changes, or how did they come about?
SH: It was just from going through the pages on computer, and then the galleys, and changing things to what I liked better. The usual.
TM: Does this interview feel exposing? This is a book about the revising the creative process and then you went through the process of revising it for the U.S. edition. Isn't that scary?
SH: No. I just really wanted to make the changes. I thought, "that feels right." It suits the book. It makes sense.
TM: In doing this interview, I am asking you to tell me things that most writers avoid discussing. Am I in danger of killing whatever it is that allows you to be a writer in the face of your doubts?
SH: No, no, this book is done. Whatever I do next I will do in a way that's different from how I did this book.
TM: If the book comes out in France, will you rewrite it again?
SH: Never! No, this is it.
TM: How should a writer be?
SH: They should do whatever they want.
Claire Cameron is a staff writer for The Millions. Her novel The Last Neanderthal is published by Little, Brown and Co., was recently featured in The New York Times, and is a national bestseller in Canada. Her writing has appeared in the Lenny Letter, The New York Times, Salon, and The Globe and Mail. Follow her @clairecameron or read more at www.claire-cameron.com.
Sing You a Book: Josh Ritter Gets Out of His Comfort Zone
Robert Birnbaum May 17, 2012 | 3 books mentioned 7 14 min read
I had never heard of singer/songwriter Josh Ritter, but I was moved to find out about him because his debut novel, Bright's Passage, received very positive notices. Additionally, I was curious because of the diverse backgrounds of the people (Thomas Ricks, Jesse Kornbluth, Dennis Lehane, and Robert Pinsky) who were singing his praises.
Bright's Passage tells the story of WWI veteran and widower Henry Bright taking flight from both a raging forest fire and his malevolent in-laws. His passage takes place in the company of his infant son and an unusual guardian angel in the Appalachian foothills of West Virginia as Bright's recollections range from his childhood to his traumatic experiences in the killing fields of France. It's a tale told with great assurance and skill as might be expected from so skillful a songwriter.
Josh Ritter and I spoke in late June 2011, when Bright's Passage first came out and the discussion ranged across writing fiction and songs, books he loves, making music, growing up in Moscow, Idaho with a love of reading, and more. Bright's Passage is out in paperback today.
RB: What was growing up in Moscow, Idaho like?
JR: It was good. I don't have much to compare it to. We grew up pretty far out of town — my brother who is four years younger than me and my folks and kind of parade of psychopathic dogs.
RB: What distinguishes a psychopathic dog?
JR: I haven't figured that out.
RB: I haven't checked a map — is Moscow near a river, and thus its name?
JR: No. No one quite knows. It's the same with Idaho as a name. No one really knows where the name came from. There are a lot of theories.
RB: The Indian word for "potato" (laughs).
JR: Somebody said it was based on real estate, like a sub-division, like "Hardwood Acres." No one really knows.
RB: Not an Indian word.
JR: No, no. And Moscow was the same sort of thing. Some people said it was from Russian immigrants. It was originally called Hog Heaven.
RB: (Laughs).
JR: And then they decided they wanted to get some girls there and so they called it Paradise Valley. And then Moscow finally.
RB: You'd think they might have changed the name during the Cold War because of John Birchers.
JR: Yeah, yeah. There's a big file out there somewhere.
RB: When did you leave Idaho? How old?
JR: Eighteen. And then I moved back after I lived here in Boston for a while. And then to New York.
RB: Why back to Idaho?
JR: I was on the road all the time and there was a moment when I realized that I was going to freak out unless I had something familiar. And it was, in a way. Coming back gave me a sense of familiarity I really needed at the time.
RB: No big airport that was conveniently located?
JR: There's Boise but that's eight and a half hours south.
RB: So Moscow is up north. Is there much evidence of Native American culture?
JR: Definitely. All around — there is Nez Perce to the south and Coeur d'Alene to the north. All kinds, Blackfoot, all kinds around.
RB: So you came east when you were 18.
JR: First to Oberlin, to college. And then from there to Boston. (Actually I lived a block down the street from here.)
RB: Oberlin has a fine music department, though little known on the East Coast.
JR: Amazing music department. I took some [courses]. I still play with Zack who I met there. He's an amazing bass player. And then Darius, who is my manager, who I met there as well, were roommates. So it was great for music — lots of music-minded people went there.
RB: Somewhere in Ohio—
JR: The old Northwest.
RB: Did Oberlin have a football team?
JR: It actually did and it lost the entire time I was there. They did not win a single game.
JR: It became a point of pride.
RB: I read that you began writing Bright's Passage, this, your first novel, at Oberlin, which reportedly was written because you felt you couldn't express certain things in a song.
JR: I always felt that the songs — my favorite songs are usually stories. A lot of times I feel like a song can be an instant. Like a love song, but there is always a setting. Always a sentiment expressed. Always, you know, a moment. And in other songs there can be a whole story. So I think songs are really great, kind of, delivery vehicles for a story. They allow you to make your own conclusions. Good songs never give you everything. So I really believe a song is like an envelope. A novel, you can unfold from a song. Say like "Tennessee Stud" or "Isis" or "The River." Or "Famous Blue Raincoat." You could unfold stories from them. So I was finishing my last record and I had a bunch of long narrative songs on there. I was pretty much done and I had this song and I thought it might be too long. It might make the record — there would just be one too many of these longer songs. But I had nowhere else to put it. So, I figured that I had been talking about it for a while — how songs and novels were closely related. So I thought I would just do it, you know. Or try it. I had come out of a long spell of not really feeling excited about some of the writing. And suddenly I was writing all these songs and then I didn't really turn off the tap. So I just started writing this [Bright's Passage] without thinking too much about it. It was exciting — it began as an experiment.
RB: So as you are writing this novel do you know how it's going to end?
JR: No. No.
RB: That was a discovery made along the way.
JR: Absolutely.
RB: So why a novel and not a short story — it's a big jump from songs.
JR: I have never been interested in short stories.
RB: You don't read them?
JR: I mean, I read them. I read a lot of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver and Dashiell Hammett stuff. Mostly because I felt like I needed to relax in something.
RB: Reportedly people read short fiction less today — which I don't understand given the demands on time that exist.
JR: Right, yeah.
RB: But many writers will say that short fiction is more difficult. Less forgiving.
JR: That's true. I agree. I totally agree. The thing about good writing is concision and when it's a song in which you tell a story, it has to be as tight as possible. You cannot have anything that's going to obfuscate if you are telling a story in a song. You can do lots of missteps in a novel or go off on some tangents and still bring it back.
RB: I agree that songs are stories — what's the difference in writing a song and writing fiction?
JR: Well, I guess there's a time frame element. Which is that you can write a song — it may take an afternoon. It may take eight minutes or a week. But it's a fairly short amount of time. And then when you are done you constantly play it for people and get that excitement of kind of pulling the sheet off of the statue and saying, "I did this." That instant gratification — which is a great feeling. With a novel you sit and work on it, little bit by little bit, every day. People see you working with your headphones on and then you close the computer or you put down the pen and you have nothing that you are going to show for that day. That kind of thing was a big adjustment for me. I wrote the first draft in two months and then the subsequent 10 drafts over the next year.
RB: Ten drafts, wow.
JR: It was a big first experience for me.
RB: Ten drafts before it went to an editor at a publisher.
JR: I had several drafts before an editor came in and looked at it. And then that process — it was a lot like a song. You write a song first. The song is done in your mind. Then you work with a producer and they pose problems for you to solve. It was a great experience.
RB: Everyone needs an editor.
JR: Yeah, yeah. It's like an extra set of ears. Yeah, yeah.
RB: How long have you been out touting Bright's Passage?
JR: Basically since yesterday. (Laughs).
RB: So is the book tour integrated into the music tour?
JR: I'll never read and do a show at the same time — luckily, I travel for the music and then I go and read at bookstores or something like that. Yeah, I love it. The experience of writing the novel was such a fantastic experience. I have read so much more since. And I have gotten a whole other appreciation for the books I love and reasons to understand books I might not like very much. And also to have a lot more sympathy for stuff I don't like. Because I know how hard it was to do.
RB: Talking about books you love. What are some of those?
JR: The very first books I really remember loving was a series called The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. They're the first books I ever read on my own. They are beautiful books — kind of Welsh mythology. And then all those fantasy books like J.R.R. Tolkien and then moving on to Carl Sagan and Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke—and 2001. Lots of those. Moving forward, all sorts of history books. You know one of the great things about growing up where we grew up is that we had a TV, but we only got two stations. We lived out in the woods and we didn't have a car to drive anywhere. Not that we would have had anywhere to go. So reading became a really important thing. We never thought about it as something different; it was just that it was all there was to do once you got home at the end of the day.
RB: So your so-called formative years were full of books.
JR: Yeah.
RB: Did your reading level off when you entered a wider world? When on tour do you read a lot?
JR: Yeah. On tour you have to do stuff to stay busy. Luckily the band I'm in all the guys are all pretty big readers. That's nice. You don't come into a place and the TV is instantly on. I love watching TV, but feel like it fractures your brain before you go on stage. We pass books around — we were passing around Neal Stephenson. Neil Gaiman as well — American Gods, which everybody passed around. It's fun — whatever is getting passed around is really good. I get all sorts of great stuff from Zack [bass player].
RB: Do the people who like your music know you like to read?
JR: Yes.
RB: Do people send you books?
JR: Yes, all the time. Or after shows, they give me books. I usually make little notes about what I am reading at the time. I'm reading William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways and Robert Penn Warren.
RB: The road book — a quintessentially American story.
JR: Yeah, I agree.
RB: Occasionally, someone revisits de Tocqueville's itinerary.
JR: And Jonathan Raban travelling the full length of the Mississippi River [Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi]. Seems like British people like to do that…
RB: I always envisioned travelling the circumference of the U.S.
JR: That's a great idea. That'd be amazing.
RB: With my dog, Rosie.
JR: Like Travels with Charley.
RB: So you are beginning to be interviewed for the book — are those interviews much different than for your music?
JR: I thought it would be roughly similar. In some ways it is. But I feel like with songs, there are so many other things to talk about. Production choices — all these sorts of things. With a book you are dealing with one kind of long extended idea. Also, you write something and you don't necessarily know what it means until you're done. Really, what you were actually thinking about. Or what you think you were thinking about. I like that about records as well, but it is interesting to suddenly be kind of holding myself to account about a longer piece of writing, really wondering what it is.
RB: There is so much that is subjective about it. You may read a book when you are 20 years old and then when you re read it later you have a different view. Which may happen with your own writing– being really pleased.
JR: Yeah, really. That's magical. Or embarrassing. (Laughs).
RB: You seem very happy with what you do.
JR: Yeah, I am.
RB: So you are encouraged to do more?
JR: Absolutely. I understand song writing in some ways because I have been doing it for 10 or 12 years now. At this point I wanted something new — something that made me nervous or made me feel like I didn't know what was going on. And I really felt sorta like I was a horse in a field and I look over and see a whole other field. And I want to be over there.
RB: Out of your comfort zone.
JR: Yeah, totally. In so many different ways. I feel with a song, people get a glimpse of a part of what you are thinking and a little bit of your brain. With a novel the vulnerability seems much larger. People can see you for all you might be or potentially how simple you actually are. Which is funny.
RB: I assume you want to get "better" as a novelist/writer?
RB: How would you go about that?
JR: You just gotta keep on doing it. I really do think that showing up is the biggest part. While I put stock in school, I really think that school only teaches you that you don't know very much. And get used to that. Like knowing the limits of your own abilities is good. I never thought that going to school would make me a better writer; maybe a more aware writer. But I didn't go to school to write songs and I didn't feel the necessity to go to school to begin to write a novel. Writing the novel was certainly going to school for me. And I have learned a great deal at least about what I think I want to do better on my next one. It's funny I was reading this thing that Annie Dillard said — the reason you have writers who have written 12 books is because they have been dissatisfied every time. (Laughs). Which is cool.
RB: Are you dissatisfied after you write a song?
JR: No
RB: You don't feel that there is more you can do?
JR: I mean in that way, most of the songs I throw out, not throw out, but I don't use 85 percent of what I write — cuz, I just don't want people to see it, you know. And the stuff that's there, that actually makes it on a record is stuff that I know is good. Maybe people won't like it, but I know I liked it and I know why. And over time I will still feel happy performing it. I won't dissociate.
RB: So, have you begun your next fiction?
JR: Yeah, I wrote a fair portion and then decided I wanted to go back and restart. But I have a really good idea. I don't feel stressed out by it
RB: There is no pressure on you to write fiction?
JR: No.
RB: There must be some for song writing?
JR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's pressure, but it's pressure to account for myself. When people buy a book and give you a chance — I see it as they are buying a book to read, but they are really giving me a chance to go and do something else. My job is to write. I love it. I love it. I'm in this great incredible position right now to be able to write and enjoy it and the pressure is to make it good and to make it good the way I feel it should be.
RB: Well, it's a different pressure than worrying about your kid's dental bills, or the mortgage
JR: Yeah — right.
RB: What's your vision or sense of your future? Continuing writing?
JR: Yes, definitely.
RB: Movies?
JR: (Laughs). I would love to write a movie. And I would love to write another 10 novels. There is a place to put stories now that isn't just in songs. And that's really important. Not just because it's fun but for me right now. It's really important because I want to continue to feel hungry — really hungry and get a sense — I get a real buzz off of writing.
RB: It's impressive that apparently you can write anywhere. As far as know, not many writers do that.
JR: Yeah, I guess when I was deep, really having trouble writing I asked Robert Pinsky who I've gotten to know. He's got grandkids, he travels a lot and he's doing all this stuff and he has a lot of demands on his time. I asked him if he believes in writer's block? He said that if you ever have an empty stretch of time coming up, fill it. Like with stuff. Fit your poems in, you know. And I really think that's true. If you are going to be real precious about where you write then you are kind of admitting you are easily swayed by everything. And mostly I just like to put on music that doesn't have words. And I sit, put on my headphones and I have a much easier time writing prose on the road than I do writing music. Which is nice, it's nice to feel productive in another way.
RB: Speaking of people you know, how do you come to know [journalist] Thomas Ricks?
JR: In 2006 he was working on Fiasco. And he heard "Girl in the War," which is a song of mine, and he wrote a section of his book to the record. So he wrote me a note and we met and when I was in Washington D.C. he gave me a tour of The Washington Post, which I was totally geeked out on. It was awesome. And then we have stayed really close friends.
RB: And Jesse Kornbluth is another big fan of yours.
JR: Yeah. You know him?
RB: I know his work. He reviewed your book in the most glowing terms
JR: Really, yeah, yeah.
RB: You must be very active to have these contacts outside the world of music? Are you a pop musician?
JR: I would say so. I am certainly not — it's amazing how a song can go through the ether to people and find them and if they are interested, it's easy to find out more. The people that I have met doing this stuff have been though music. Dennis Lehane — he wrote some of his book to a record of mine. That just happens that way. And it's really cool that they will give me some time to try this.
RB: Have you talked to your writer fans about writing fiction?
JR: I talked to Ricks a bunch about it, yeah. He has a beautiful way of looking at it.
RB: Is he retired from The Post?
JR: Yeah, he's writing books now and has this defense blog. He is working on a history of American generalship from WWII to the present. It's a big one.
RB: Is there any way that writing fiction has interfered with writing music?
JR: It's true that it used to be if I had an idea for a song I would never think about is this idea for a book. But thankfully they are different enough I get so much energy from performing and recording and it's such a social activity with my gang, my wolf pack of people that I love. I could never give that up. I love writing for the group I am with. And I don't think I would be satisfied writing — I am very lucky because if I was sitting and just obsessing over [writing] I wouldn't be as happy as I am when I go and work and play.
RB: You have choices.
JR: That's it, yeah.
RB: Give me a sense of how much you tour?
JR: It used to be 150 to 175 dates a year. You'd be on the road eight or nine months a year. Some days off in between.
RB: I wonder how cultural information [books, movies, music] impacts anyone who creates things. How does it reach you as you crisscross the country? Do you travel outside the country also?
JR: Yeah, all over the place. All over Europe and Australia. Not too much in Asia although I 'd love to — it's great. Basically every day you wake up and you meet new people and find your way around a town. There's time for reading and you meet people after shows and they give you books. I think that's what people who are writers do. They assimilate whatever is — all the stuff people are thinking. You get a range of different impulses and you try and write about it.
RB: Lots of visual information that's almost subliminal.
JR: Definitely. I remember reading Johnny Cash's biography and him saying that after so many years traveling that he could wake up and know within five miles where he was in the country. And I thought he was full of crap.
JR: But it turned out as time went by at least you know what state you are in. (Laughs).
RB: Who are some of your musical idols, for lack of a better word?
JR: Of course for inventiveness and seeming fearlessness, somebody like Tom Waits has been — I would buy whatever he puts out. I like that he is just trying things. [Bob] Dylan is inescapable. Radiohead, like Tom Waits for their inventiveness and their searching. And there's people like Alfred Deller—
RB: Early European music–
JR: Yeah. Counter-tenors. Gillian Welch has a new record out who I love. Lucinda Williams. I like Jay-Z. I like a lot of stuff. I like people more and more like Neil Young who have chosen to make music and I can tell how they have chosen to live their life. Which is important to me.
RB: Young strikes me as an authentic renegade.
JR: Yeah and he also has a family and has a good family life.
RB: I am trying to think of who else has stayed on top of their game — Leonard Cohen. He got screwed by his manager. On the other hand that's how many people wake up after Enron and the like.
JR: I saw him [Cohen] at the Beacon in New York. I never have cried at a show. I am always too busy watching what's going on. I lost myself totally that day.
RB: He is pretty compelling and poignant. I came to like him later in his career especially after his album Ten New Songs with "That Don't Make It Junk."
JR: And "Alexandra Leaving." That's an amazing song.
RB: I was glad to see that my musical tastes hadn't calcified and that I was still open.
JR: That is really cool. It's interesting that you say that — so many people respond to his earlier stuff and have trouble getting in to his later stuff.
RB: Do you have a title for the next book?
RB: Did Bright's Passage have a title when you began it?
RB: Like Steve Martin says, You started out with a blank sheet and pen.
JR: That's how it is with records too. The title is always the last thing to come. It's the last distillation of whatever you are working on.
RB: Well, thank you very much
JR: Thank you, man. Thanks a lot.
Image courtesy of the author.
Robert Birnbaum | 3 books mentioned 7 14 min read
Just Try and Stop Me: Jane Smiley Sets Her Sights on the American Century
Michael Bourne November 25, 2014 | 3 books mentioned 4 6 min read
"Have you ever taken the Myers-Briggs personality test?" asks novelist Jane Smiley. "Well, I have and my personality comes up as 'improviser.' That's me."
We are having lunch at a pricey seafood restaurant overlooking the water on an unseasonably sunny autumn afternoon in Vancouver, and Smiley is explaining how she plotted Some Luck, the first in a sprawling trilogy of novels that tells the story of the American Century through the lives of the seven members of one Iowa farming family. First, she says, she laid out some simple ground rules for herself. The book would begin in 1920 and end in 2020, with each short chapter covering a year, and the prose style would be straightforward and unfussy. Once she had decided on the basic outlines for the trilogy, she sat down and got to work. "I just started and let them live," she says of her characters. "I knew when they were going to be born, and that's all I knew."
This looseness of design shows in Some Luck, which was longlisted for the National Book Award when it was published earlier this fall. At times, especially in the earlier chapters, not much seems to be happening. Major historical events — the stock market crash, the rise of Adolf Hitler in Europe — scud past like clouds on a distant horizon as the Langdons, Smiley's farming family, plow their fields and care for their children and worry about the weather and crop prices. Characters appear out of nowhere, as if pulled from the author's back pocket, and take up central roles in the narrative. But slowly, like images from an old-fashioned Polaroid, the characters come to life on the page, smart and quirky and full of opinions, until, by the end of the first volume, one is hooked — not so much to find out what will happen, but to know whom these people will become, what fate has in store for them.
Vital to this narrative pull is the Langdons' eldest son Frank, who is the closest thing to a protagonist in Smiley's crowded cast of characters. Headstrong and smart, Frank thrives by upending the expectations of his parents, and later the world around him. "It was beyond Frank to understand why he sometimes did the very thing he was told not to do," Smiley writes early on, when Frank is still a boy. "It seemed like once [his parents] told him not to do it — once they said it and put it in his mind — then what else was there to do?" Frank's father, Walter, beats him with a belt until Frank is "too confused by pain" to count off the blows, but when it's over, it's clear that the lesson Frank has learned is not that he shouldn't disobey his parents, but that his will is stronger than theirs.
There is a touch of the charming sociopath in Frank — later in the book, he is recruited to root out spies for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI — but only a touch. Mostly, he is a survivor, a man determined to live life on his terms. This is true of all the members of the Langdon clan, who are each in their own way attempting to break out of a mold the world has shaped for them. "One of the things that goes through all three novels is characters attempting to live with and make something of what's happening around them," Smiley explains. "They're not defying it. They're not living back in the Ozarks and going against the grain. People don't do that in Iowa. They're attempting to make something of what is happening around them. They all mean well."
Before our seafood lunch, during a panel discussion at the Vancouver Writers Fest where Smiley was appearing to promote Some Luck, she told the crowd that she had conceived of the Langdon trilogy as a single long story and had originally envisioned stopping each volume in the middle of a sentence, which would then be picked up in the next volume. Her publishers wouldn't let her do that, but she says she still views the three books as a single continuous ribbon of narrative, each volume covering a third of a century in the lifetimes of the rapidly expanding Langdon clan. (Volume two, Early Warning, which takes the characters up to the 1980s, is due out this spring; and the final, as yet untitled volume is scheduled for fall 2015.)
The idea for the trilogy, Smiley says, arose in part out of her fury over the political situation in the U.S. since the Bush Administration and a desire to understand "how the country got where it is today." She set the book in Iowa farm country, territory she explored in her 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, because she wanted to cut through contemporary Americans' ignorance about where their food comes from. "We forget," she says. "We know, but we forget. We think it comes from the grocery store. There's this constant tension in American life about, 'Does my food come from General Mills or does it come from the ground?'"
Smiley addresses this tension directly in the later chapters of Some Luck, set during the postwar years, when Frank's younger sister, Lillian, marries and leaves Iowa for Washington D.C. to begin raising her family. The child of a father who farmed oats and couldn't start his day without a bowl of oatmeal, Lillian is stunned to discover Cheerios at the neighborhood supermarket. She is also delighted to be able to feed her son formula made with purified city water in sterilized bottles, rather than breastfeed.
For Smiley, Lillian's attraction to these consumer conveniences is a rational response to a childhood spent on a hardscrabble rural farm, but also emblematic of how an entire generation allowed itself to be "suckered" into a reliance on corporate America. "I love Lillian," says Smiley, "but the way she chooses to feed the kids, the way she chooses the cereals she chooses, she's a sucker. She thinks, 'We've skirted along the edge of serious food-borne illnesses [growing up on the farm] and so: I believe. I believe that General Mills is going to give me something more nutritious and more safe than what I grew up with. I believe I don't want manure in the yard.' Well, that's the way we felt in the '50s."
Smiley herself was born in 1949 and grew up in Webster Groves, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. She moved to Iowa in her early 20s for graduate school and remained in the state for more than two decades, teaching at Iowa State University until the mid-1990s when she moved to the coastal resort town of Carmel, Calif., where she now lives with her fourth husband, a real estate developer. Though A Thousand Acres, the book for which she is perhaps best known, is also set in Iowa, her fiction has traveled widely in the course of her long career. One early novel, The Greenlanders, is set among the Norse peoples of 14th-century Greenland. A more recent book, Ten Days in the Hills, loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, is set in Hollywood during the early days of the Iraq War.
In the case of the Langdon trilogy, Smiley says she set out to tell the story in simple, unadorned prose. "One of the things I was doing while I was starting to write this book was reading a lot of Alice Munro," she says. "Alice Munro writes in a very straightforward style, and that allows her to take up a lot of issues and discuss a lot of things because you trust her."
The novel's omniscient narration, which weaves between characters, sometimes directly accessing their innermost thoughts, and at other times merely reporting their outward actions, allows Smiley to cover a great deal of ground. In the first volume, the reader becomes immersed in life on a small Midwestern farm without running water or tractors, then is whisked off to North Africa and Italy where Frank serves as a sniper in the U.S. Army during World War II, and lands finally in early-'50s suburban Washington and New York where Cold War-era paranoia reigns.
Asked how she mastered the details of these wide-ranging worlds, Smiley offers a modest authorial shrug. "I'm not a scholar," she says. "I don't have to master it. I only have to appear to master it. Some things are fairly self-contained, so in order to appear to master them, you just to learn the facts and think about it and figure it out. Other things are not so self-contained so you have to spend more time trying to sort out what's essential and what's not essential."
Much of classic 20th-century fiction, she acknowledges, operated on a narrower scale, focusing on the author's subjective filter on the world rather than on the world itself. Even today, authors can be reluctant to venture too far from their own experience, fearing that they have no right to tell a story that doesn't belong to them. This, clearly, does not count as one of Smiley's chief fears. "The question, as I view it, isn't 'What right do I have to do this?' but 'Just try and stop me,'" she says. "The reader is the one who decides whether you have the right to do it or not. Your job as an author is to draw the reader in, and to get the reader to willingly suspend disbelief. I don't have to second guess myself already. The reader's there to second-guess me. That's his job or her job."
Michael Bourne | 3 books mentioned 4 6 min read
The Millions Interview: Kate Zambreno
Anne K. Yoder August 26, 2010 | 3 books mentioned 4 16 min read
I am saying that amidst all of this banality there's something really dangerous in terms of how we swallow horrible things happening because they make us uncomfortable and ignore all the fucked-up-ness and like let's talk about The Bachelor as opposed to Haiti and as a society we're still totally totally repressed.
Anne K. Yoder | 3 books mentioned 4 16 min read
Bodywise and Brainwise: The Millions Interviews Nina MacLaughlin
Edan Lepucki March 16, 2015 | 3 books mentioned 8 min read
I'm not sure when I began following Nina MacLaughlin's Tumblr, but for at least a year I've admired her thoughtful and elegant writing; it sometimes feels as if I'm reading a poem rather than a blog post. Just recently, for instance, she wrote this:
The wood, white oak, has the look of driftwood. Weather worn, sea bashed. The hole, former home of a long-gone knot, brings eyeballs to mind, or portals, entries to other worlds. Two inches thick, the slab got sawed to size yesterday afternoon, from a length of six+ feet to a little over two. In the cold air of yesterday's afternoon, I sawed, which warmed me fast, and did a first run of sanding with coarse grit paper. Snowbanks have eclipsed the fence behind the house, and snowflakes, more, falling slow and small, landed on the board as I worked. They disappeared, but not for melting — I watched one linger on the wood — but for being sanded into the board, an adding and a stripping at once, layer by layer, instilling and smoothing. This is the beginning of an end table.
MacLaughlin's beautiful and wise first book, Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, recounts how she left her job as a journalist at an alt-weekly in Boston and became the apprentice to a carpenter named Mary. When she started, Nina was burnt out from her former career, but had no experience working with her hands. Now she can tile a bathroom, build a deck, and renovate a kitchen — among other projects! — and remains energized by the work. The book not only lets its readers experience Nina's career shift along with her, it also sneaks in some carpentry lessons and history. In Hammer Head, MacLauglin poses questions both big and small, and its default mode is one of consideration and wonderment: How did that wall get there? How do we decide what's right for our own lives? It's like if Annie Dillard had her own show on HGTV.
Nina was kind enough to answer some of my questions via email. What follows is that conversation.
TM: The book is organized by tools — the saw, the tape measure, the screwdriver, and so on. How did this organizing principle come about, and can you talk a little bit about how you balanced the book's dramatized scenes (the memoir aspect of the book) with succinct histories of said tools?
NM: I'm drawn to books that braid together the personal, political, historic, cultural, and philosophical. Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, Eula Biss, these are writers who, when they write about themselves, address questions on a human-wide scale, and when they write about politics, geographies, or journeys, demonstrate how decisions, history, and powers impact us as individuals. So I wanted to write something that did a little bit of blending. In early drafts, the book was much more heavily weighted on the meditative side. So much ruminating! Some of it had to give way for the sake of a forward-moving story. As for the tools, they provided a sort of spine, a way of grounding the story in the work. The order of the tools as they appear in the book loosely follows the order in which you'd use them on the job, a way of moving through time based on the state of completion of the project. First thing you're likely going to use is your tape measure. The level comes at the end to see if what you've done is true.
TM: There are so many wonderful literary references in the book, from Ovid to Joan Didion. Did those just surface as you were working, or was that another organizing principle for the book?
NM: When I sat down to write the second draft, I started reading the Metamorphoses, which I'd somehow never read, despite majoring in classics in college. I figured poetry of that sort wouldn't overly influence the writing I was doing, would be a good way of continuing to read without having someone else's sentences, rhythms, ideas, etc. weasel their way into what I was up to. Wrong! It ended up being an enormous influence, and a guiding principle behind the whole book. I'd recommend everyone read or revisit Ovid's Metamorphoses. (I read Alan Mandelbaum's translation.) It's violent, sexy, dark, beautiful. There's a section in Book VIII that makes me cry every time I read it.
The other references happened more spontaneously and surfaced along the way. In reading, I'm often underlining, and when I'm lucky I'll remember a particular passage when it relates to something I'm trying to get at.
TM: I love your descriptions of Mary — the wisdom she imparted, her small physical frame, how hard she worked. What was your process like for depicting her on the page?
NM: It's so nice hearing how much people respond to Mary in the book. Whereas describing in words (and making clear and compelling) the act of tiling a floor or swinging a hammer proved tricky, writing Mary happened naturally and easily. That likely has a lot to do with who she is and what she's about as a human being. She is so much who she is, a complete person, and that's rare, I think, and it made it easier to present her on the page. We've also spent a lot of time together, working in close quarters, and you get to know someone pretty well when you're in an attic crawl space trying not to cut the person's hand off or bang them with a hammer.
TM: You came from a journalism career, but this book is very much about you and your evolution, your gathering of experience with and knowledge of objects and building, of working with your hands. How was it to write about yourself? Were there any sections in the book that felt difficult for what they revealed to the reader about you?
NM: Discomfort comes when I think about the people closest to me reading the book. It's obviously strange to know that my parents and my boyfriend will read that I thought about boning the plumbers we work with, but that's something you just have to deal with. I know as a reader, it's difficult when reading a memoir not to think that this is this person's whole life, that you know everything about them. In this case, I shone the flashlight on a narrow and specific part of my experience. In that way, it feels strange that people who I knew for six weeks while we renovated their kitchen and will likely never see again in my life, got more attention on the page than the people closest to me.
I suspect it's true of all writers at some moment, but I definitely had to make big efforts to quiet the voices that said: Who cares about your dumb life? Why would anyone want to read about you? You had a job, then a different job, who cares? What makes your story more worth telling than anyone else's? Those voices are still there, demanding attention as much as they did when I was writing. I try to hush them by reminding myself that everyone, really everyone, has, at one point or another, wanted to do something other than what they're doing. We've all wanted to change our lives in big or small ways. It's a human urge to want to leave one life for another, and it's a story that can resonate with anyone who's had a job or a relationship or a shitty afternoon. That's my hope, anyway, and what I tell myself to quiet the voices that say otherwise.
TM: You write, "Finishing a piece of writing, the sensation was relief coupled with a spentness, a short temper and depletion, grinchy and hollow." In contrast, you say of working with Mary, "I looked back on everything we'd built with satisfaction and pride." I wonder how the writing of this book — rather than your past journalism — felt. Did writing this book feel like journalism did, or is writing about working, about doing, about the physical world, somehow different?
NM: Working on the book, the grinch quotient was high. More so than working on journalism stuff for sure. Writing about my own life as opposed to someone else's turned out to shorten my temper and deplete me in a much more pronounced way. And so did the scope of the project and the length of time I worked on it. The book went through multiple drafts. It took me a long time to figure out how to write it, shape, pace it, make it a story. All I've done my whole life is read books and write about them, and I very wrongly figured that along the way I just absorbed how to do it, that I would just sort of know how to shape a book. I didn't! I didn't at all. I had a lot of trouble. It was a raw experience of coming up against my own limits, up against so much that I didn't know and that didn't come easily — a lot like my entry into carpentry. I was not good company for stretches while working on the book — I'm much better to be around after a day building a deck. But even in the pits of it, in some deep gut-level place, when I woke up in the morning and knew I had to work on the book, even if I was hating it and hating myself and wishing it were done or gone, in the deepest part of myself I felt happy — or not happy exactly, but calm and serious and motivated and grateful and glad — that I had this thing to work on, that I knew exactly what I faced, that I was doing what I always wanted to be doing.
TM: You're still a carpenter and you've also returned to writing. How do these two careers balance and inform one another?
NM: What I've found: after a stretch of writing, I get antsy to get out of my head and back to the satisfaction — physical and mental — of building. I get antsy to leave the screen, leave my apartment, joke with Mary, use tools, forget about words.
And the same is true in the opposite way — after a bit of time goes by (usually a matter of about three days) where I haven't written, I start to feel an itching in my head, and all I want is for some time putting sentences together. It feels a little like a hunger. A deep need. And it can be satisfied by writing a blog post or a book review. The best days usually involve some combination of the two.
There's something about putting your brain where you hands are that frees up the word-centers of the mind, maybe a bit like meditating. It could be knitting or cooking or playing guitar or drawing or whatever. Letting that part of the brain go quiet allows things to cook in there without the grinding at the desk and the deliberate footfalls of one word after the next. Bodywise and brainwise, I feel so lucky to have these two pursuits in combination.
TM: When one is hiring a carpenter, what questions should one ask? What's the closest way to a carpenter's heart?
NM: Don't be afraid to ask hundreds of questions if you don't understand what's being explained. People in the trades are fluent in the language of their work, and often forget that not everyone knows, for example, what sistering a stud means. Ask us to translate! Ask us the most basic questions. Don't know what a joist is? Ask. Don't know what 16-on-center means or how it relates to the wall you're having built? Ask. It's sort of like going to the doctor. There's a specialized vocabulary, and it's being spoken quickly and it's good to slow down and make sure you understand what's happening to your house. As for a way to our hearts, Mary and I have had good luck working for kind, warm, patient people (with a couple of exceptions). It's a funny sort of intimacy that develops — we come to your home and spend days there, making a lot of noise. The people we tend to like most are ones who take interest in the work, who ask questions, who seem excited about what we're up to and the changes taking place, who chat with us, and, gosh, a cookie every now and then definitely boosts morale.
TM: And, finally, because The Millions is a literary website, I must ask: What's the last book you read and loved?
NM: I just finished up Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone. It instantly transports you to a specific time (late '60s) and a specific place (southern California) and a specific atmosphere (crumbling of the counterculture, strung-out, confused, chaotic, disillusioned, failed gurus, dead dreams). Stone writes great sentences and the story moves fast.
Edan Lepucki | 3 books mentioned 8 min read
I read THE MIDDLE STORIES a few years ago and I really enjoyed it. I haven't read any of her other stuff, but HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? looks really interesting. I really enjoyed this interview and it shows how she comes at her writing from a different place than other writers. I especially love what she was trying to do with the index cards. She went off in a new direction and it gave her the bits she needed to write the novel.
I'm curious about how she mixed her real life with fictional elements in the new book. Is there any concern about public perception and what parts are the writer Shelia Heti and what parts are the character of Shelia Heti? Does it feel weird considering the one-way relationship of fame – that fans of her work "know" her through something that blurs the line between fiction and reality? It's more clearly defined for most writers… I dunno, I'm just thinking out loud here…
justaphotographer says:
Thanks for this, the book sounds intriguing.
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Pingback: Q: How should a writer be? A: They should do whatever they want. – Kommafeil
stephen tully dierks says:
cool. i like the response "they should do whatever they want."
Pingback: Sheila Heti – How Should A Person Be? A Novel From Life | The Storey Shelf
One of the worst 'writers' out there — how are people still paying attention to this terrible, narcissistic rambler?
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'I Don't Experience the World as a Single Voice': An Interview with Krys Lee
José García August 11, 2016 | 3 books mentioned 6 min read
The Millions Interview: David Bezmozgis
Paul Morton June 30, 2011 | 3 books mentioned 1 10 min read
Telling Toni Morrison's Story: The Millions Interviews Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
John Maher June 26, 2019 | 3 books mentioned 4 min read
The Pieces I Am presents Toni as the person that I know. Audiences will see her as the brilliant, strong woman she is. They will love her more than ever.
John Maher | 3 books mentioned 4 min read
Literary Testimony: Fernando Aramburu Tells the Basque Story
Julian Zabalbeascoa April 17, 2019 | 3 books mentioned 5 min read
When all is said and done, a novel is a means whereby we impose order on human experience, always leaving to the readers the possibility of reaching their own interpretations.
Julian Zabalbeascoa | 3 books mentioned 5 min read