Tom Robbins, author of such books as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume, has a unique style of building books and storylines. He adds subplots that seem to be unrelated to the main story, or tangential to the theme as diversions and comic relief. Readers familiar with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues will recognize his absurdist chapter breaks, but those who aren’t fans of his work find it off-putting that he doesn’t keep his stories on track.

In Still Life With Woodpecker, he developed at least two subplots that seemed totally unrelated to the story. One subplot, the illustrations on a pack of filterless Camel cigarettes, found its way into the main plot towards the end of the book and gave the main character a revelation that was necessary for the plot’s resolution. The other subplot, that of his difficulties with using an electric typewriter while writing the book, he used to illustrate what I think is an important development in the evolution of modern English writing style.

English has become mechanistic. Various composition teachers have coached me that, in order for my readers to engage in my points, I must follow a trend towards simplification and reduce my use of flowery and poetic language. I remember discussing the work of William Styron in his books Sophie’s Choice and The Confession of Nat Turner and how I love the way that his language flows so that the reader is enveloped in the story. The person with whom I was discussing it complained that Styron has tendency to show off his vocabulary, to “use a fifty-cent word when a ten-cent word will do.”

I was puzzled by this response, frankly. My goal has always been to stretch my vocabulary when both reading and writing. I love the use of words and the play of sentence structure, and I find that my favorite writers have the ability to clarify complex concepts both fictional and factual by pulling in words and phrases that are not in the common vernacular of everyday English. Styron is one of those writers who drives me occasionally to the dictionary but more often teaches me new vocabulary using context.

This is where reading is fun for me, and writing for you is more challenging.

The tools of writing have changed rapidly since the middle of the 19th century and the development of keyboards to convey thoughts. We use a keyboard layout designed specifically to inhibit the speed of typing. Early typewriter designers found that skilled typists were typing faster than the strikers could handle, so keys frequently jammed. The layout that we have on the QWERTY keyboard places the most commonly used letters in English on the left, so that right-handed typists are slightly shackled.

Tickling a Writer's Muse

Prior to the development of typewriters, people wrote by hand. The process of writing was directly connected to the person and the paper. Yes, it was tedious. Yes, people with poor penmanship (I’m looking at you, Andrew Jackson!) were often handicapped in communicating. It seems to me, though, that because writers were more closely connecting their thoughts to the paper, they were more expressive. They had a “feel” for what they were writing, and it seems to me that quill pens had something to do with that.

Classical literature reads as though the words and language had been “tickled” from the writer by the feather of the quill. When I read “The Lady of Shalott,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, I imagine him at a writing desk with a goose quill pen in hand deliberating to come up with these two stanzas:

Only reapers, reaping early,
In among the bearded barley
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly;
Down to tower’d Camelot;
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers, ” ‘Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.”

There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.

In my observation, modern writing has lost that tickle and tease in the effort to push writing into a crammed little box of clarity for the most common reader.  In the mix of journalistic and business writing, we are taught to reduce our verbiage and to let the reader skim the works while still getting the full gist of our themes and plots.  Cut back! Clarify!  Stop with the flowery phrases!

I have found that this has had an effect on my own writing.  Not only in the essays and posts I write here, but in the poems I write.  I struggle to make them romantic, or to convey the depth of my meaning.  I write with a keyboard, and I have instant feedback and I can backspace as I need to but I am afraid that the “teasing” is remote and I am dragging the muse along pissing and moaning as I use Blunt Force English.

I have a hard time shifting writing styles between what is needed for work and what is needed for creating more interesting pieces, such as those I write for Quiche Moraine, or even the poetry I write.  My vocabulary has shrunk as I seek similes.  Perhaps I need to go back to writing by hand.

Towards the conclusion of Still Life With Woodpecker, Robbins the writer has added Robbins the writer as a character who has gotten fed up with using a fancy new electric typewriter because it doesn’t give him the language that he needs. He had already discarded his manual typewriter, and so he finishes the book with handwriting.  He is satisfied with the way he has become a writer again.

My birthday is a the end of August.  A quill pen is on my wishlist, as are writing tablets.

As a fourth-grader, I was often praised and rewarded for the essays I turned in, and I started to get the grandiose idea that I would someday grow up to be a novelist or an essay writer.  I read constantly, not only to gather information, but to learn about style, phrasing and voice.

My teachers throughout grade school and high school were excellent guides in the process of my development.  Many took a personal interest in giving me extra assignments and resources.  I should probably add that these extra assignments were never given to me as punishments, but as rewards.  They were singling me out as someone who had a potential talent to write as a professional, and the extra assignments gave me the opportunity to use tools that they were giving me beyond those they presented in the classroom.

My own insecurities took effect as I became an adolescent, and I started wondering whether in fact I was not so much “special” in regards to writing as I was demonstrating to them that I was paying attention to what they were teaching on the basics of spelling and grammar.  As I read other writers, I became envious that they seemed to have original ideas while I was practicing regurgitation but within the bounds of the rules.

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. (Eccl 12:8)

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun. (Eccl 1:9)

As I tried to write poetry and songs, most of what I wrote was derivative of my favorite songwriters.  I was taking their ideas and trying to make them my own.  Sure, I was able to occasionally sneak in some original turns of phrase.  Sure, there were times I came up with an original rhyme.  For the most part, I was unhappy with the results.  But because of those few originalities I created, I tried to save everything in notebooks in case I needed to return to them at some future date for reference or reuse.  I envisioned that at such time it would be in the context of an original thought.

I tried my hand at fiction but again ran into the sad fact that most of my plot lines were mere variations of what I had read from other writers.  I also had a problem writing dialogue because I lack the gift of gab.  In my own conversations, I am more frequently a listener than a talker.  This is okay, because I don’t like to run on, but it causes a problem when I try to write multiple characters and imagine their conversations.

I eventually decided none of these limitations should deter me from writing just to practice writing.  I decided to work on putting sentences together, to write poetry when it struck me.  So I did, and I wrote just to write.  I did it for me, and it became a sort of release.

Our culture is based on deception.  In the majority of our social situations, we are expected to put on a good front.  Our moods are not allowed to be honestly expressed; our doubts and fears are to be kept to ourselves.  This is true in the workplace, in our politics, in our casual social settings and in our interactions with all but those in whom we place our most intimate trust.  This expectation of dishonesty, of telling people we are doing well when we aren’t, causes us to suppress emotions.  We place walls with brightly painted murals between ourselves and our society.

Nobody is perfectly happy all of the time.  Without some sort of release from the pressure of having to pretend that we are always all right and that life couldn’t be better, I would never be able to make it through some days.

[Note: This segment has been removed. MH]

That’s me on fire.
My second wife one day decided that the poems were a problem for our relationship, and she made the assumption that I was hanging onto the pain of the first relationship through the poems.  After a particularly difficult relationship talk, she waited until I had gone to sleep and destroyed the poems.  All of them.  I woke up in the middle of the night, hoping for some makeup sex, only to find that she was gone. So were the poems.

Of course, I was angry and, when she returned, explained once again why I had been saving them.  She would have none of it.  As far as she was concerned, keeping those poems that I had written were equivalent to hanging on to old keepsakes and photographs of past lovers.

The poems were part of me, and I wish that I had access to them now.  They were me, exercising my voice and practicing the phrases that I needed to use to express my emotions towards one person.  Like pictures and keepsakes, they are more permanent than any relationships that I have had. I have a poor track record when it comes to lifelong commitments.  I wanted the poems for when I was older, so that I could occasionally pull them back out and look at them, to review my life.  Should I marry again, the internet is not so easily destroyed as a batch of notebook papers. (Hah. Even with that, Google’s cache has a long memory!)

The second wife asked me one day why I never wrote poems like that for her, and she was mostly right.  I rarely did. I didn’t want to tell her that she was such a critical reader I didn’t feel free to experiment and take risks with my poetry. More importantly, performing on demand for such a critical audience would have felt like a chore. I didn’t think that she would appreciate it if I didn’t have it “just right” and original. (Writing love poems as a metaphor for marital sex?)

I didn’t have an explanation for her, but I do for the readers  of Quiche Moraine.

When we were first dating, she was still good friends with one of her old boyfriends. She had reconciled to being “just friends” over a year before I had met her. Tim was a music snob and had made many mix tapes for her.  She was living in Monroe, Louisiana. I was living in Dallas, Texas and driving to Monroe to be with her on the weekends, but I had time to spare on the weeknights.  I was often bored, so I made many mix tapes for myself and decided that with all of the CDs and LPs that I had available, I could make a killer mix tape for her.  And I did.  I thought it was a great mix tape.

The next weekend we went to a party in Monroe, and her old boyfriend was there.  They started talking about music, and she mentioned that I had made a mix tape for her but that the music was lame and that she wanted him to make her another tape.  I didn’t show that it hurt in front of her ex.  Who knows, she may have been testing me.  I just didn’t want to give him any sort of satisfaction, because I didn’t like him.  I carried this hurt with me, hidden behind a “positive attitude” front.  I finished my beer rather quickly.

I realized that if she could dismiss my mix tape, I would be risking much greater hurt if I put myself into a poem for her, only to have her compare it to something that someone else had written for her.  I never was able to put my trust in her after that, and it hurt our relationship. It was a wall between us that I could never tear down.  She blamed it on the first wife, and she was partly right.  Number one had indeed betrayed me deeply, and I had let my guard down for her.  It is a guard that I’ve always had trouble releasing since then.  But the tape didn’t help.

So now, when I write for blogs or for myself, I still see it as a release.  It is in writing that I express my experiences in ways that never feel comfortable in casual conversation.  This process still helps me practice writing, even though I no longer harbor the illusion that I will ever be a famous writer.

(Today I was at a coffee shop, and one of the customers mentioned the name Michele Bachmann in a derogatory manner.  I told him he should take a look at the “Replace Michele Bachmann” carnival at Quiche Moraine.  The barista said “Quiche Moraine?  I’ve heard of that.  It’s kind of a collaboration, isn’t it?  I read about it somewhere.”  Hello, barista, if you are reading this.)

It is sometimes a chore, because I have a deadline here at Quiche Moraine. I agreed with Greg and Stephanie that I would have a post ready on Sundays for publishing on Mondays.  Every Frickin’ Week!  I had intended for today to reuse a post I had originally written for Tangled Up in Blue Guy.

I changed my mind because I needed some release from the pressures I have been feeling lately.  The post largely wrote itself, as I started with a title and let it flow from there. I hope that you have found something original in this.

Writing this helped me.

But of course, I deeply disagree.

Fat Lorenzo’s is actually in a stunning location and has an outstanding ambiance, and I’d like to tell you about these things. I am, however, going to say nothing about the name. I mentioned to an Australian colleague who recently had a sufficiently long layover in the Twin Cities to grab a bite to eat that we could run over to Fat Lorenzo’s from the airport and grab a beer and some food and he said “Sounds gross, but okay…” So we’ll just skip the part about the name.

Fat Lorenzo’s is in one of my favorite neighborhoods of Minneapolis. It sits just across from the park at Lake Nokomis. Lake Nokomis is part of the Hiawatha, Nokomis, Minihaha Falls park system. Do you know Nokomis? No? Nokomis is the grandmother of Nanabozho and Hiawatha (who, in turn, are probably roughly the same person). You know, like this:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest.

That is a tiny fragment of the poem by Longfellow. It goes on much longer than that. Which, had I not already known, I would have discovered one day in a very surprising manner.

A few years ago, when I lived walking distance from Nokomis and Minihaha Falls, my good friend and colleague Sir Dr. Francis Thackeray of South Africa was visiting. So Francis and I went over to the park, because I wanted to show him an example of a glacial lake, as well as the Mississippi river channel and some of the local hard rock geology, as well as an interesting glen loaded with native carnivorous plants, which are all in this park. And as we were walking in the general direction of the carnivorous plants, we passed a large stone and concrete open-air monument thingie, and Francis leaped up on top of the monument (about a foot high, big wide flat thing) and started reciting the poem with his eyes closed.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

And so on and so forth. And I’m thinking, “Wow, how does he know that? And why is he saying it now?”

I recognized the Longfellow poem because I grew up five city blocks from a location that was said to be the Vale of Tawasentha…

“In the vale of Tawasentha,
In the green and silent valley,
By the pleasant water-courses,
Dwelt the singer Nawadaha.

It turns out, of course, that every other creek and vale in New York and New England and much of the Upper Midwest is linked to such a claim. Also, I also used to walk by the Longfellow house (where he was born or died or something) every day when I worked in Cambridge, MA, and a friend of mine lived in a house (in Maine) that sports the stairway from one of his famous poems, and of course the local subway went across the Longfellow Bridge, and so on and so forth. You can’t swing a dead stanza in New England without hitting a Longfellow reference.

But why Francis, why now? And why are his eyes closed like that?

Then I looked down and saw that the monument was actually the poem he was reciting. The low circular wall had the poem, The Song of Hiawatha…

“There he sang of Hiawatha,
Sang the Song of Hiawatha,
Sang his wondrous birth and being,
How he prayed and how he fasted,
How he lived, and toiled, and suffered,
That the tribes of men might prosper,
That he might advance his people!”

…carved in it, and Francis was doing this with his eyes closed to demonstrate that he knew it by heart and was not just reading it off the giant cheat sheet made of stone and concrete that otherwise resembled a 19th century alien landing strip.

Anyway, Nokomis, Hiawatha and Minihaha Falls parks, include some of the finest glacial geology and a bit of nice hard rock (sedimentary) geology, as well as some very nice walking paths. My ex (well, not my ex at the time, but…oh, you get the picture) and I used to walk around this lake once or twice two or three times a week. Then she got a real job and we could not do that any more. Once for old times sake we walked all the way from home to the park, about three miles, with the intention of eating at Fat Lorenzo’s then walking back home. So we worked up this huge appetite, gorged at Fat Lorenzo’s, then could not move for the next hour.

Walking three miles to your lunch sounded like such a great idea at the time. In retrospect, I do not recommend it. It’s like this:

Ye, who sometimes, in your rambles
Through the green lanes of the country,
Where the tangled barberry-bushes
Hang their tufts of crimson berries,
Walks too far before some dinner
To eat too much homemade pizza,
Can’t stand up when it is over,
Wants to take a cab back homeward,
Should have had a different plan for
Getting exercise and food while
Sitting by the park so green and
Wetly lush by Fat Lorenzo’s,
Waddle to the park nearby and
Read the writing on the ground, so
Full of all the tender pathos
Of the Here and the Hereafter;
Stay and read this rude inscription,
Read this Song of Hiawatha!

So, getting back to Fat Lorenzo’s and away from Longfellow…

The restaurant is clearly in a good location, on Cedar just by the park. There are a few parking places in the lot in back, but you can park on the residential streets nearby if necessary. The tables are medium size and the pizzas are huge, so they solve this problem by placing a huge can of tomatoes in the middle of your table, and propping the pizza pan on top of that. The beer selection is not impressive but is quite adequate, and the various Italian sandwiches are all excellent.

And the ambiance is fine, and they are expert at takeout.

Specific recommendations: The artichoke dip appetizer is outstanding. I’ve never had the salads. I have had the Steak and Cheese, Italian Sausage and Meatball hoagies, and all are top notch. I’ve seen but not tried the pasta, and it looks fine. But people go there for the pizza. The first two or three times you eat there, this is what you should do. Try the pizza.

Oh, and the building is painted with locally famous murals, inside and out.

Bon appetite!