It had been on the vacant lot next to the church
For over half a year and no one in all that time
Could rustle up enough motivation to mow the lawn
Or clear it of rubbish. I thought of calling
The number on the back a few times but just couldn’t
Get motivated enough to ring or attend one
Of their weekly meetings
& I thought about something
A friend had said about running a Special Olympics
For the Motivationally Challenged but the problem
With that, I said, was that nobody would bother
To turn up. I thought then of the historically highly
Motivated: Hitler, Stalin, the rapacious bankers, Isis
And concluded that a low motivated populace isn’t
Necessarily a bad thing.
I was chatting with Worms the other day about Proust,
about his masterpiece, ‘Remembrance of Things Past’
and how neither of us had read it; Worms even found
the name ‘Proust’ intimidating; and I thought how many
of the world’s best known works I have never read,
like Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’, Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’,
even Shakespeare’s ‘Titus Andronicus’ and even though
everyone has heard of it, who’s read Dickens’ ‘Little Dorrit’?
There’s even a short story by David Gilbert devoted to
the George Elliot book that no one I know has ever read,
and few have heard of: ‘Adam Bede’. There must be others.
*can you think of any?
* have you read any of these books?
* what has put you off reading them?
pic of Proust courtesy of Wikipedia
I am about to read a book called ‘The Ninth Crypt’,
A novel I acquired for twenty dollars at the supermarket
But fear I may have made a grave mistake:
Browsing through the blurb I see mention of only
The ninth crypt, all well and good, but what about
The other eight? Perhaps the author is planning prequels
Based on the success of this volume but seeing he is
Now a septuagenarian who came to writing late,
This is most unlikely; perhaps if I bury myself deeply
in the text I shall disinter enough cryptic clues
To keep me happy — but at 800 pages !!! I await
Clarification; in the meantime this tombstone of a novel
Shall stand on my shelf of great unread books.
“What’s the worst thing?” I was asked in my zoom workshop.
“The worst thing? What a writer can do? Let’s see.” I said. “The worst thing is being staid”.
I had to spell the word to make sure they got the right meaning.
“You know what ‘staid’ is?” I asked.
:Yes,” Tamara answered. “Unadventurous. Dull.”
“Correct. And you know where the word ‘staid’ comes from?”
There was silence.
“It’s the adjectival use for the past tense of ‘stay’ which is ‘stayed’ so the worst sin of a writer is being rigid, unadventurous, unchanging, unwilling to take risks, staying the same.”
I let that sink in.
“Living things evolve,” I said. “Let your writing evolve. Take risks. Don’t worry if some don’t take off. Others will hit their mark. But you don’t know if you don’t try.”
We took a short break … and we all came back a little different.
John Malone 