Fall Running Fragment

I recently found a fragment I wrote about running during the fall that I was going to use as a springboard for a longer post, but now that that the window has passed, i'll simply present it here without any fluff. Enjoy!
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Fall has arrived, and as the leaves pile up on the ground, the sounds of far-away trains and motorways travel farther through the skeletal trees, bringing otherworldly mechanical hoots and dull hisses that fight for prominence with my breath as I run down suburban roads. I say suburban, and there are certainly traditional suburbs on my running routes – too many houses on streets named for the trees that were cut down to make way for them. But one of the reasons that I love New England is the small scale of everything, and so my runs are punctuated with small portions of wilderness as nature fights her way through the structured settlements. Hence the scene as I run through southern Framingham, and as I transition from one suburb to another I find myself, if only for a quarter mile, on a country road, a small spit of pavement between two ponds, fall colors on the trees and also mirrored back to me on the still water, with only a few ripples coming from a shockingly white swan drifting about in the first light. Or jogging up a slow hill that divides a golf course, pale light floating down all around me through the early morning mist, not a car or person in sight.

Cross Posted on Thought Ambience

Wharton's Writing

TNC has been writing brilliantly about the greatness of Edith Wharton's prose. (Seriously, click the link.) Specifically, he's enamored with The Age of Innocence, but since i'm not yet ready to revisit that book (which I read in college), I did lay down 50 cents for the softcover of Twilight Sleep at a library sale.

I'm now six chapters in, and already I wouldn't characterize it as a great book - there's not a lot of plot, and what there is involves the über-privileged upper-crust of NYC society in the Jazz Age and their spoiled lives - but my oh my does she write some great paragraphs. To wit:

"But she had had glimpses enough of the scene: of the audience of bright elderly women, with snowy hair, eurhythmic movements, and finely-wrinkled over-massaged faces on which a smile of glassy benevolence sat like their rimless prince-nez. They were all inexorably earnest, aimlessly kind and fathomlessly pure; and all rather too well-dressed, except the “prominent woman” of the occasion, who usually wore dowdy clothes, and had steel-rimmed spectacles and straggling wisps of hair. Whatever the question dealt with, these ladies always seemed to be the same, and always advocated with equal zeal Birth Control and unlimited maternity, free love or the return to the traditions of the American home; and neither they nor Mrs. Manford seemed aware that there was anything contradictory in these doctrines. All they knew was that they were determined to force certain persons to do things that those persons preferred not to do. Nona, glancing down the surried list, recalled a saying of her mother’s former husband, Arthur Wyant: 'your mother and her friends would like to teach the whole world how to say its prayers and brush its teeth.'" p. 11

"Poor Arthur—from the first he had been one of her failures. She had a little cemetery of them—a very small one—planted over with quick-growing things, so that you might have walked all through her life and not noticed there were any graves in it." p. 25

I'm not sure i'm going to make it all the way through this one, but I've sure enjoyed what I've read so far. What more do you want out of a book?

Cross Posted at Thought Ambience

Advice for Writers

I loved this article about how best to encourage young writers that was summarized by TNC as "...not just good advice for making writers, it's good advice for parenting. Failure and boredom are underrated forces for good in this world."

(I'm assuming that posting about writing falls under the scope of the "reading" portion of this blog. If you disagree, just let me know.)