Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 83: Bob, You Angelou You, Write Like This

 

Happy end of the week, y’al! I collect sentences. There, I admitted it. Here are three really good ones that came into or back into my life this week as reading summer rolls on.

Three Things, episode 83:

                          

1. Dylan 

Here’s the line: 

Something there is about you that strikes a match in me.

It’s the opening line from "Something There Is About You," which is song #5 on Side 1 of Dylan’s Planet Waves album. (Parenthetically, it’s the album that features as the last song on Side 1 and the first song on Side 2 the same song, "Forever Young," as if to make clear to the listener back in 1974 that Dylan would himself stay young by re-birthing different versions of his songs.) (Again, parenthetically, the same song with the line that I’ll get right back to contains a lovely, autobiographical reference to the rainy days a young Robert Zimmerman spent tramping around the hills of old Duluth. It’s gorgeous. Dylan is not appreciated as a nature poet, but he should be. In "I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You," one of his most recent recordings, he gives us poignant images of the flowers coming and going, the first snow falling, a shooting star shooting. In his epic song "Brownsville Girl," we get the painted desert and the sun comin’ up over the Rockies. In "Jokerman," there’s the sun setting, the moon, the stars and the nightingale. Dylan is not just a lyricist for the coffee houses and the concert halls. He is from somewhere outside.  But that’s not the item.)

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Something there is about you that strikes a match in me is.

There are at least three meanings to how the woman he is singing about strikes a match in him. The first is the surface meaning: she ignites a passion. The second is illumination. The singer apprehends something about himself in her light—that he’s capable of wonder, that he has a musical gift. But, as the song reveals, he knows he is not faithful to one Muse. I hear this as a third meaning of strikes a match in me—this time in the sense of swiping left. It’s a striking line. It hooks me.

2. You Angelou You 

Here’s a life sentence from Maya Angelou:

 

And those dead folks would give anything, anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of that plowing that person was grumbling about.

The sentence happens in the chapter titled "Complaining" in the book of essays from 1993 called Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now. It’s a quotation from the author’s stoic grandmother, who draws a lesson from the constitutional grumbling about things that some of her customers bring into her store in Stamps, Arkansas. They deposit complaints about the weather. They lament the state of the field and animals used to work it. Grandma takes granddaughter aside and sows some wisdom. All the griping is a waste of time. Grandma conjures up the shades of all the people in the world who had died the night before. Divided on earth by the things that divided them on earth—race, wealth—they are now united in the awareness of precious time’s passing.  Little bits of time are, from the grave, seen clearly for what they are. They are everything. 

There is something else in the sentence that reverberates in me—that pronoun "this" in front of the noun weather. What kind of weather is it not worth complaining about? This weather, meaning, well, any weather. I don’t know how much time she spent in the north wind, the freezing rain and snow, but her sentence, which I go back to often and have again, layers me up for the winter months in Edmonton. 

I’m out of my league, but I think Angelou is hunting bigger game than the weather. She is challenging her readers to imagine a world with less complaining (picture one percent of the world’s population being complaint-free, she memorably says elsewhere) and to imagine how kindness and courtesy and respect for life might take its place. Complaining, we are led to believe by the Seneca of Stamps and her granddaughter poet, does not stay content long to take aim at just the weather.

3. Write Like This 

The short sentence is a neatly wrapped gift. My fondness for short sentences might stem from the fragments and brief descriptions I silently apply to things I see. Like on this morning’s bicycle ride. Magpies squawk, I said to myself. There’s the river, I noted. Two picnic tables there, should tell Shelagh. Then, a jogger approached on Buena Vista Road and, at the same time, we used the same short sentence—Good morning!—out loud. 

Our first short sentences get barnacled over as we get older and start to use our noticings to build heavier sentences to persuade and sell and convince. We learn simple and then go compound-complex, we play with exotic punctuation and we write sentences linked by strings of conjunctions and clouded by jargon. This is industrial writing, but we are short-sentence folks from the get go. That’s why it’s a joy to read Daniel Behrman’s The Man Who Loved Bicycles: The Memoirs Of An Autophobe, left in the mailbox by my friend Dave. Behrman can and does write floridly. But he also circles his prey—in this case a purported bicycle ally and proponent of physical fitness who, nonetheless, viewed roadways as the exclusive domain of automobiles—and this quarry he attacks with a short thrust of pointed sentence: 

He seemed to be a firm believer in exercise but not as a way to get somewhere.

Writing short like that brings back a long forgotten truth: it’s how we started to record our world.

Thanks for being out there, friends. See you next time!