Writing is hard. I should know. I have tried to teach it for most of my adult life, knowing all the while that it can't be taught. Or that I, at least, can't teach it.
But attending can be taught, and if one attends to the world and to words, sometimes magic happens.
Richard Rodriguez is a magician: his words appear as fast as any rabbit from a hat, and they delight and surprise.
On a day without walking (weather and work), some of his words from Darling will serve.
Of Elvis Presley, this: "The platter spun at 45 rpm. The aural helix opened like a can of white-meat Apollo: an engorged voice; a slurred diction; a humpy, syrupy croon."
Of Liberace, this: "Liberace addresses us as the Big Bad Wolf might address an infant or a canary or a little lamb lost -- a petting voice, not unkind. Necessarily, he supplies all the answers to his petit catechism. It is exactly the cadence and the Socratic method of Mister Rogers. He tugs the tonnage of his train along the lip of the stage."
At the beginning of the "Sisters of Mercy," this: "I would never in a million years have thought of lobbing a 'darling' Franz Schurmann's way, though Franz and I had lunch almost every week for twenty years. Now I wish I had, for Franz would have sluiced the noun through the brines of several tongues, finally cracking its nacreous shell."
And finally this about cloistered orders: "Often the founders of such congregations came from upper-middle-class families, but most of the women who swelled the ranks of missionary orders had left peat-fumed, sour-stomached, skinny-cat childhoods behind."
Better than any walk or any set of photographs today, these words leave me both sated and hungry for more.
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