Loose Leaf Notes

1. I like that the words diverse and universe have the word verse right in them, calling to mind a sense of poetry.

2. And I’ll never get over that the word good has god right in it.

3. Since poetry is a per-verbal language, the most a poet can hope for is to speak broken-poetry.

4. Thirty traits happy people have in common via Sweet Tea and Sunshine HERE.

5. Oatmeal is like crack to my chickens.

6. Web sites to get stuck on: Letters of Note. THIS one is a letter to an aspiring writer from F. Scott Fitzgerald, which starts: I’ve read your story carefully and I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.

7. I was taught in school not to compose run-on sentences and, so, was surprised to learn that Faulkner wrote a sentence in one of his books that had over 1,000 words in it.

8. I couldn’t find an example of the 1,000 word sentence, probably because the one sited was 15 pages long, but I did find an explanation of why Faulkner wrote long sentences: He wrote long sentences for two reasons. First, he was writing with “a foreknowledge of death,” and thus a pressure “to put the whole history of the human heart on the head of a pin.” Second, he explained, “a character in a story at any moment of action is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him, and the long sentence is an attempt to get his past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does something.

9. HERE is an excellent video clip of an interview with the co-founder and producer of Floydfest, Kris Hodges on the history of the four-day summer festival. I was surprised to learn while watching that Jackson Browne, one of the headliners this year, contacted Kris wanting to play Floydfest.

10. My energy is like a ball I’m trying to keep up. If it falls, it stays down for a while. ~ From 100 Things About Me.

11. “I believe that goodness is our natural state and that we don’t need the fear of a wrathful God to make us good.” ~ also from 100 Things About Me. Read more HERE.

12. Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. ~ Carl Sandburg

13. I really like the zing in amazing.

Thirteen Thrusday