Daily Prompt | The Gad About Town

Ten-Minute Answers

Posted on October 9, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

I do not know if “1874: First Impressionist Exhibition” is the all-time greatest name for a blog or the 75th greatest name, but it attracted my attention when it appeared in the blogging world a month or so ago.

Donald Barthelme

The creator usually illustrates her posts with works of art, paintings mostly, from the entire history of art, and is thus compiling a personal version of “The Story of Art.” This caught my eye, as it reminded me a bit of Donald Barthelme, and I think it also raised the bar for my website. (From the start, almost a year ago, I have included music and photos in here; an example: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”)

For the third time this week, The Gad About Town has been noticed and given an award, the Liebster award, given by one blogger to another. It is the second Liebster this year and I am very thankful to “1874: First Impressionist Exhibition” for the attention.

In the blogging world, there are some rules of etiquette in the form of paying forward the “Liebster” attention. Here are the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for the award.
2. Display the award on your blog—by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget.”
3. Share 11 facts or things about yourself.

In no order: A. I spend too much time thinking about me. B. Strawberries are my favorite food, and I wish they had protein so they could be a complete meal for carnivorous me. C. Being in recovery makes every day feel like an awards ceremony. D. My love of the number 4. E. Yankees, Giants, Knicks, Rangers. F. When it is fall I think that spring is the best season, and in spring I think that fall is. G. Independent bookstores. H. “Too skinny” my entire life. I. Nascar fan, which no one expects. J. Have not yet owned an mp3 player. K. I want to see Mt. Everest but only see it.

4. Nominate bloggers you admire whose sites have fewer than 200 followers and inform nominees by commenting on their blog.

I am going to repeat something I wrote earlier this week. I have been participating for the last 10 weeks in responding to our WordPress service’s Daily Prompt, which has helped spur my most prolific period of writing since graduate school. (This prolific-ness is a good thing, too, because I am working on a terrific project, due out soon, with another blogger.) Most of the writers with whom I have been communicating regularly, several of whom ask me questions and give me applause every single day, I met via that service. My subscribers have doubled and so has the number of blogs that I subscribe to. Go to the Daily Prompt any day and you will see the several dozen blogs that I read and often like every day.

“1874: First Impressionist Exhibition” is one of the blogs to which I would have given a Liebster Award. A couple others: Joatmon14, A Body of Hope. The under-200 stipulation really is a great and understandable limit, but it truly is limiting.

But, you all get an award! Check under your seats and pass it forward if you would like to.

5. Answer 11 questions posted by the presenter and ask your nominees 11 questions. These are the questions I was given. (This is like being interviewed and this is the part I am only spending 10 minutes on.)

1. What’s the best piece of advice on writing you’ve received?
My first version of any piece of writing is usually an example of over-writing, a case of stating things in a complicated fashion; this is almost always done for comic effect, and then I read it and realize that I am the only audience for the complicated version of the joke. Keep it simple.

2. How often do you write or work on writing (e.g. researching)?
Lately, every day. I was silent for a decade, so perhaps I am catching up on lost time. As I am working on a book, I know that these muscles need exercise.

3. Are you an atheist, agnostic, a believer or something else?
I believe that life is a force that goes on. I do not believe that there is a Big Boss in charge, or that my particular consciousness was around before me or will continue beyond me. But life, whatever that energy is, will. I have a higher power in my life, in that I believe that neither you nor I are figments of my imagination.

4. Do you think this affects your writing?
It has an effect on my outlook on life, so I think that it has an effect on my writing, certainly any personal memoir writing.

5. What’s your favorite book?
“The Secret Parts of Fortune” by Ron Rosenbaum.

6. Who is your favorite author?
James Joyce. Sometimes I think that I like Richard Ellmann’s “James Joyce” more than Joyce, but then I look at “Ulysses” again. Nabokov. I am reading Martin Amis’s newest, out last week, “The Zone of Interest.” Nonfiction: John McPhee.

7. What’s your favorite movie?
“The Maltese Falcon.”

8. Who is the awesomest person you know (or know of), dead or alive?
I am proudest of my sister, for reasons she knows. I can not take my eyes off my girlfriend.

9. How would you define creativity?
Making 2 + 1 = G. But not every time.

10. How long have you been on WordPress?
According to WordPress, since May 2013, but this blog went live in December after starting it on Blogger.

11. Do you write for a living?
Not at the moment …

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 9 asks, “10 minutes. You and your keyboard (or smartphone. Or tablet. Or pen and paper). No pauses, no edits, no looking back: it’s free-write time!” And that is why my answers are what they are.

A S(n)ob Tale

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

“Hi, my name is Mark, and I’m a snob.”

“Hi Mark.”

“I don’t like going into new situations or meeting new people. That means I’m a snob about everything, right? A social snob. If I already have it or know it or know you, I don’t want it or you to be added to or replaced by anything because the new thing or person can’t possibly be as good as the one I know or own.

“But this goes against what I tell myself and what I know from experience is true: that every new person I meet might—in just a few weeks—might be a best friend who I can not imagine life without. Every new person is a friend I am going to feel snobbish about and possessive of in a little while.”

“I think we’ve had a breakthrough. Shake hands with the two people next to you.”

“No.”

* * * *
Snobbishness is my form of insecurity about my own likes and loves; I resist introductions to new things and people (to my detriment, as even I acknowledge, but I resist all the same), as if I am insisting that what I already possess and love is sufficient.

At its most benign, this gives me a collection of quirks. At a bookstore, I do not purchase the book from the top of the pile of identical books. Instead, I find a copy below, as if “my copy” sat there untouched by human hands and unseen by human eyes until I found it. Yet I love used books and their lived-in qualities. My own books appear unread, with the spine uncracked. I do not lend books to people who crack them open, and I know which of my friends treat books in said fashion. In my world, there is a right way to read books.

At its most malignant, this gives me a truly stand-offish air, a self-presentation that of course only serves to reinforce my prejudicial thought that the people I love and the things that I already know are quite fine as they are.

* * * *
De gustibus non est disputandum. Loosely translated, this means, “There is no reason to argue about matters of taste.” There is no fighting over subjective personal likes or dislikes such as colors or sounds. You can not successfully argue me into liking certain smells. I can not punch you hard enough to like what strawberries taste like. I can show you how to make coffee the way I like it, which of course is the only way to make it, but there is no amount of money I can present to you to convince your taste buds to agree with mine.

(Dark roast, half-and-half—I know, I am such an American—enough half-and-half to convince me that the color has changed, even though a painter with a color wheel might be hard-pressed to find the change, so, no, not much half-and-half. Sugar.)

I am aware that there are best practices for using tools and producing things and enjoying many foods and drinks, and I know that these are usually merely socially agreed upon practices developed through experience. They are not universal physical laws or properties of mathematics. They are suggestions. One ought not teach a student to play piano like Chico Marx, but if you meet someone who taught themselves his method, do not urge them to un-learn it.

I took a lot of pride in and occupied too much of my brain with knowing these “best practices”: the best way to make a whatever or know which color goes with which season or which performance of this or that piece of music is the one to enjoy. Knee-jerk snobbishness is the opposite of enjoying something. It is blind and deaf and meekly resistant (no matter how loud the protestations) to the new.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 8 asks, “Even the most laid back and egalitarian among us can be insufferable snobs when it comes to coffee, music, cars, beer, or any other pet obsession where things have to be just so. What are you snobbish about?”

Two Awards in One Day

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

Two fellow bloggers separately named “The Gad About Town” as a winner of the “Lovely Blog” award today. That is as cool as it gets.

Both are blogs that I enjoy reading regularly, by two very different writers in different parts of the world: Tidlidim and The Reluctant Baptist. Thank you both. Both writers have strong personal voices in their work and sometimes include their own photos.

In the blogging world, there are some rules of etiquette in the form of paying forward the “lovely” attention. Here are the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for the award.
2. Add the “One Lovely Blog” logo to your post. Display the award on your blog—by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget.”
3. Share 7 facts/or things about yourself.
4. Nominate 15 bloggers you admire and inform nominees by commenting on their blog.

The last one first. I have been participating for the last 10 weeks in responding to our WordPress service’s Daily Prompt, which has helped spur my most prolific period of writing since graduate school. (This prolific-ness is a good thing, too, because I am working on a terrific project, due out soon, with another blogger.) Most of the writers with whom I have been communicating regularly, several of whom ask me questions and give me applause every single day, I met via that service. My subscribers have doubled and so has the number of blogs that I subscribe to. Go to the Daily Prompt any day and you will see the several dozen blogs that I read and often like every day.

I fear I will leave someone out, is all I am confessing.

Several random facts about me:

1. The number four is my lifelong “secret lucky number.” (Anyone who has gambled with me knows about this. Read: The Gad About Town: Against NYS Proposition 1.) Now, I know that in most of the world’s luck traditions, if one declares out loud that something is secret and lucky, one has immediately kiboshed all secrecy and luck out of that thing’s existence, but that is the beautiful thing about my “secret lucky number 4”: It remains lucky and maybe even grows in power every time I speak of my special relationship with it. Maybe.

2. I left New Paltz in 1995 to work in Narrowsburg, NY, and moved back to New Paltz in 1997. I left New Paltz again in 2000 to work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and returned to New Paltz in 2006. (There are legends about New Paltz and eternal return and gazing upon the nearby Wallkill River—I am legend, I suppose.) And then I had to move again, this time to Goshen, NY.

3. Depending on my relative levels of optimism or pessimism, I may refer to my spinal muscular atrophy as an “illness” versus a “condition.”

4. I pretended to write before I knew how to write. There may even now be pieces of furniture at my family’s house with my crayon scribblings on them and in them—I did not draw, I wrote, wavy lines that I would then inform my parents was a story. I’ll guess I was about three or … four. See? It must have been a lucky number.

5. I am very audiologically sensitive (I do not know if that is even a term). I can identify voiceover actors, even when famous ones are used anonymously. The downside of this is a sensitivity to certain noises … if the faucet in your kitchen sink is dripping, I will excuse myself from your living room to see if the tap can be tightened or if the faucet swung away from any container under it. Bloop bloop bloop. Sadly, this sensitivity does not translate to any musical ability. I have none, just an appreciation for music and performance.

6. I see words as I speak them.

7. My favorite animals growing up were dinosaurs. My favorite dinosaur was the triceratops. In the children’s books about dinosaurs, the triceratops always seemed to get into a tangle with the fearsome T-Rex and walk away, unscathed.