Doug Bruns

Posts Tagged ‘Writing’

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The thoughts in my pointy little head.

In Books, Life, The Examined Life, The infinity of ideas, Writing on February 19, 2012 at 10:14 am

So, maybe it wasn’t retirement but a sabbatical? Or, how about this, The first breakup never lasts? Regardless, since shutting this journal down (journal–not the right word, but close) two months ago, I’ve been thinking a good bit about what I was doing here and why I was doing it.  It was on this morning’s walk–the sun coming up, patches of snow here and there, Lucy running about fancy free and then my first robin of  (dare I say it?) spring–it was on this morning’s walk that I realized how much I miss the venue. What did I miss?

First, while writing this blog (God, I hate that word, blog, it is ugly, overused and common.) I paid more attention–more attention to life, to nature, to the books I was reading and the thoughts that were coursing through my pointy little head.

Secondly, and obviously, the discipline of the writing kept me on a course, albeit a meandering course, of discovery. It was an outlet, a place to exercise a notion or two about whatever was going on at the moment. Without that discipline I’m more inclined to glide along like the dumb-ass mother nature made of me. (Who cannot resist the temptation for self-improvement?)

Too, I quit the writing here because I wanted to save up the writing energy for other projects. That still concerns me, there being only so much time and energy in a day. The net effect, however, seems that the other writing comes and goes regardless of what I do here–or don’t do.

Lastly, I missed the little community of this place. We were a nice group, good-looking enough, demographically all over the board, a hearty group with brio and a penchant for interesting conversation. That community, whether real or virtual, served up a sense of place and I miss that.

So, here goes, gonna give it another go.

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One of the things I’ve learned during this hiatus is the value of an understood purpose. That is, as it pertains to this journal, having a surer path, a sense of definition. What’s it about? And for you, dear reader, whiling away a fraction of your finite mortality here, why visit this place?

The answer lies in a question, my personal BIG question, the one I’ve been asking myself since my eighth birthday (I’ll share that story in a future posting): How should I live my life?

The lesser question is: what are the themes and vehicles with which to tackle the big question? (Remember Socrates’s observation that the unexamined life is not worth living? Well, how does one do that? How do you examine a life such as to make it more worthy?)

It boils down to a small handful of themes and that’s the stuff I want to spend time on here:

  • Reading and writing
  • Nature and the out-of-doors
  • Groundbreakers: Thinkers, troublemakers & adventurers

(Thank you, Susan. Your comments this past week made all this jell. (If you’ve ever wondered: Is it jell or gell, check here.))

Okay, that’s all for now. Stay tuned. And thanks for reading!

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The Year in Reading – 2011

In Books, Literature, Writers, Writing on December 3, 2011 at 3:03 pm

Two years ago I wrote a piece for The Millions called Literature is a Manner of Completing Ourselves–A Reader’s Year. The title is a quote from Susan Sontag. (If you’re a reader you should bookmark The Millions. It’s perhaps the best of the general lit blogs out there.) I came to write that essay because I had for the first time taken note of the books I’d read that year. It–the reading list–was nothing more than a simple spreadsheet, a record, the transcript of a twelve month journey turning pages. (Yes, all the reading was analogue, real paper pages.)

I have below pasted the reading list for 2012. It is interesting to compare the years. This year I read twenty-seven books, not counting the current book which I will finish before year’s end. In comparison to last year, 27 is less by a full 16%. And last year included one thousand page beast, Infinite Jest. No thousand pagers this year.  The really interesting comparison is to 2009, the list I wrote about in The Millions. This year by comparison is less 2009 by 27%. That is to say that in three years my reading pace has dropped by 25%. (Too, that year included two books over a thousand pages, Bolaño’s 2666 and Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen.) A quick calculation brings me to the conclusion that at this pace in about five years I will have stopped reading altogether.

Speaking of reading lists. Are you aware of Art Garfunkle’s? He’s a serious reader who has been keeping tally of books read since the 1960s. Here’s a link. To really drive it home, he goes another step to list his favorite books. Browsing through his list is almost as good as studying the library of a dinner host. (Which beats looking into their medicine cabinet any day.)

Here’s my list of books read in 2011. (I’ve linked the books I reviewed.)

  • Jan 7    Bound to Last, 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Book — Sean Manning, Ed.
  • Jan 8   The Maine Woods — H.D. Thoreau
  • Jan 24   A Widow’s Tale — Joyce Carol Oats
  • Feb 19   Portrait of a Marriage — Sándor Márai
  • Feb 28   The Foremost Good Fortune — Susan Conley
  • Mar 5    Moby Dick — Herman Melville (This was a third reading.)
  • Mar 21   The Sweet Relief of Missing Children — Sarah Braunstein
  • Mar 28   Tinkers — Paul Harding
  •  Apr 5    Seeds — Richard Horan
  • Apr 25   Fire Season — Phillip Connors
  • Apr 30   The Pale King — David Foster Wallace
  • May 7    The Mind’s Eye, Writings on Photography and Photographers — H. Cartier-Bresson
  • May 15   The Ongoing Moment — Geoff Dyer
  • May 30  The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore — Benjamin Hale
  • Jun 15    Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself — David Lipsky
  • Jun 21    The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas  — Gertrude Stein
  • Jul 10     The Tao of Travel — Paul Theroux
  • Aug 3     Feathers — Thor Hanson
  • Aug 15   The Surf Guru — Doug Dorst
  • Aug 20  The Story of Charlotte’s Web — Michael Sims
  • Oct 1      Disaster was my God — Bruce Duffy
  • Oct 20   The Great Leader — Jim Harrison
  • Nov 3     Blue Nights — Joan Didion
  • Nov 9     Beautiful & Pointless — David Orr
  • Nov 19   Swimming to Antarctica — Lynne Cox
  • Nov 29  The Triggering Town — Richard Hugo

Two last notes, should lists be your thing. Here are two that I’ve studied for years. The first is the reading list of St. Johns College in Annapolis, MD. St. Johns is better known as the Great Books School. The entire college education at St. Johns is based on the readings of original texts. Here is the undergrad reading list. It’s heavy duty. A little lighter and less intimidating is the Modern Library list of 100 best: Nonfiction & Fiction. One could do worse than read a few of these.


False starts and other notions.

In Writing on October 30, 2010 at 12:29 pm

A friend visited last night, a writer friend. He was telling me about the work practice of a well-known American man of letters, a novelist and poet, with whom my friend is particularly close. “He has everything thought out before he even starts,” he told me. I was green with envy. The little bit of fiction I have written began with an opening sentence and what followed was the anthesis of the well-conceived plot line. The opening sentence is the kick-off to the game and I never made it to half-time.

Here are a few samples, opening lines to a few of my failed stories:

“Elder Stone and Elder Harris visited Dave Burns and asked if he had a relationship with God.”

“He packed as light as he ever had packed.”

“He lay looking skyward.”

“He wondered about what Julie said, that he lived large, and how it fed his appetite to live larger still.”

“Anymore it took work to get into a good mood.”

“That Anne came to live in Chile after reading Chatwin is not unusual.”

“I have been photographing seriously for several years and find it to be a convenient way to avoid writing.”

“A woman sat alone.”

Probably, upon reflection, it’s just as well they died the quiet death they did. It’s not only fiction that fails to construct itself properly. My non-fiction, the workshop where I spend most of my time, is also a meandering and stitching together of notions and themes. I was asked recently about this, about what I write about specifically. I’ve spent a little time thinking about this question and put together a proper and meandering response. You can read the essay, What Am I Doing Here? at The Nervous Breakdown.

Thanks for stopping in!

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The limit of anything is not a natural place.

In Books, Reading, The Examined Life, Thinkers, Writers, Writing on May 6, 2010 at 2:54 pm

I’m told the key to writing a good blog is to know a subject and stick to it. A blog should be focused and appeal to an audience interested in the subject. Well, that’s at least two strikes against me.

What am I doing here–here being the blog (although “here” being life is also under consideration)–and why am I doing it? I’ve been toying with these questions. It’s my way of sorting things out, toying with them. I go to other blogs and they are about something. Politics, culture, travel, finance, and so on. I have nothing so sexy going for me as all that. This blog is about me writing about me. That is, it’s about writing (not the explicit discussion of, but the practice thereof) , and the reading behind the writing. Secondly, and thoroughly intertwined, it’s about a life, my life. Together they make something of which I am unsure. I am the student of that something, trying to be more sure.

On the writing side of the quest–and it is a quest–I have been enamored with the idea of writing fiction, the novel specifically, all my life. Being enamored of a thing does not make it so. Despite attempting to train for the long haul, as Hemingway admonished, I have no endurance. If a gene for genre exists, mine would be inherited from Montaigne, albeit in such a diluted form as hardly perceptible. I am an essayist. And to make matters worse, in this day and age of the navel-gazing memoirist, I, if pushed for a confession, am most guilty of committing the crime of the personal essay. There, I said it and feel better for it.

The reading behind the writing is found throughout the postings here. I’ve said it elsewhere, I am–and have been–a lot of things over the years. The one thing that remains, and steadily so, is me the reader.

If this were simple math, the denominator in this quest fraction, is my life. Can I understand it better? How? Here’s the framework I like to use. Invert to the positive, Socrates’s admonition: The examined life is worth living. He did not  say, Answer the question of life; rather question it, examine it. He didn’t say, Develop a flow chart,  or create a matrix. There are no three-ring binders with tabs in this project. He exhorted, simply: Examine life. Accept nothing less than an adequate account. It is an open and expansive thought. It is drilled into us from childhood, seek and find, question and answer, open and close. Those are closed equations, for lack of a better phrase. For me, the power of Socrates is the open equation: examine.

Often, for me, to examine is simply to be awake to life. If nature instills a sense of wonder, it is a function of examination to be aware of wonderment. Just as often, the notion of the examined life is less effortless and more grinding, a struggle to be more authentic. Authenticity is, in my math, the result of life multiplied by examination. Authenticity is the anthesis of complexity, I think, and is, as Sartre, said, at the limits of language. That is the grind. The limit of anything is not a natural place.

So, back to where I started, the nature of this blog. To summarize, it–the blog–is the notebook in which I work out my quest to examine a life wishing to be authentic. My tools are ancient and simple: the words I cobble together.

What now?

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Thanks, guys.

In Curiosity, Writing on May 1, 2010 at 7:01 am

Although the archive to this blog reaches back a decade, it is only three months old in this incarnation. Yet, The House I Live In had over five hundred hits last month. I don’t know how that measures up in the scheme of all things blogging, but that doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. For me, word-smithing it here in my little workshop of curiosity, however, it is a big deal. Five hundred visitors. I’m touched–and encouraged.

So, please drop me a note, or leave comments, as the mood strikes. I see your tracks, it’d be nice to get to know you. And again, thank you so much for visiting.

Carry on!

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What is to be done?

In Writing on July 31, 2009 at 1:11 am

I came to Maine with great expectations. There was the writing that has never been granted the proper time; and the reading, short stints deserving more. The thinking. The meditation. And everything else.
I have been here two months now.
Most of that, the great expectation agenda, has fallen by the wayside. And I wrestle with the consequences. When you spend the better part of your life making excuses and complaining over what might have been, then through some stroke of genius, or luck, or complex consequences you discover that you have no excuse upon which to fall, like a Roman having lost both the battle and the sword. What’s to be done? And that is the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room, or whatever the metaphor is. (So many things escape me.)
“What is to be done” is the question of the day, the week, the month and I am coming to grips with it. And I think successfully so.

I have spent all my life attempting to get to a place that I felt was the place where I was meant to be. My magnetic north. Funny, the draw of a place based on something other that what you know, but rather what you think you know and finding it to be correctly imagined. Funny. So finding myself in the place where I was likely meant to be, and granted the time and energy to do that which I want to do, the question remains: What’s to be done?

Portland is my palette. Or canvas, rather. Perhaps both, perhaps medium and production. The paint and the brush. Regardless, the idea occurs to me to lift this city out of the cult of the postcard, the gloss of lobster and lighthouse and bay and show this city and all its vicissitudes: the boarders and the ink and the fishermen and the drunks and the fiddlers and the storms as well as the sunrises. The readers and the drunks and the quiet and the music and the engines and the waves; the odor and the perfume; the morning and the dark. All sing out now: We will rise above the single dimension. To wit: