Sunday, April 22, 2018
haiku day announcement
OK, Earth Day and birthday are gone, haiku day five days past, and still no e pluribus haiku. You deserve an explanation. Here it is.
I got to about 975, which is pretty good for a single year; I had really hustled, and written as many as five, six a day. But suddenly, right around the time my dad died, I got obsessed with the Puritan Leveretts, absolutely obsessed. Turns out they were pretty wild characters, with all kinds of surprises in there. The guy I was named after signed the document that started the first American public school. His son was the first student. That son became governor, and was the first important colonial to flip off the crown. He literally told them that their instruction was of no consequence to him; he even refused to take his hat off in the process, which was a quakerly kind of thing to do, but very symbolic in the sense that he really didn't care for the crown as he saw it, and let it be known very clearly.
so he kind of told them to shove it you know where, and they came back and revoked the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and a whole chain of events was set off from there.
But there's more. A simmering brewing feud between the Leveretts and Cotton Mather came to a head around the time of the witch trials. Poor Cotton got tarred by his involvement in those witch trials. But what he wanted was the presidency of Harvard, and he didn't get it; John Leverett did. By now we're down to the fourth generation, not our ancestor, but nevertheless, this guy, by his opposition to Cotton Mather, established liberal education as we know it in the USA.
SO all the time I'm reading this stuff, and I can't write a single haiku. Zip. Now I've reached the point where I can sit down and just write a few, but all of a sudden, writer's block. Nothing.
So I roll with the punches. It's the pressure, really, that I put myself under. But once Haiku Day, Apr. 17, my self-imposed deadline, passed, and I got back on the crank. Here I am today at about 997, and a little editing to do, have to get the redundancies out of there. Which I will do.
Keep your eyes out. After that, it's the novel.
I got to about 975, which is pretty good for a single year; I had really hustled, and written as many as five, six a day. But suddenly, right around the time my dad died, I got obsessed with the Puritan Leveretts, absolutely obsessed. Turns out they were pretty wild characters, with all kinds of surprises in there. The guy I was named after signed the document that started the first American public school. His son was the first student. That son became governor, and was the first important colonial to flip off the crown. He literally told them that their instruction was of no consequence to him; he even refused to take his hat off in the process, which was a quakerly kind of thing to do, but very symbolic in the sense that he really didn't care for the crown as he saw it, and let it be known very clearly.
so he kind of told them to shove it you know where, and they came back and revoked the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and a whole chain of events was set off from there.
But there's more. A simmering brewing feud between the Leveretts and Cotton Mather came to a head around the time of the witch trials. Poor Cotton got tarred by his involvement in those witch trials. But what he wanted was the presidency of Harvard, and he didn't get it; John Leverett did. By now we're down to the fourth generation, not our ancestor, but nevertheless, this guy, by his opposition to Cotton Mather, established liberal education as we know it in the USA.
SO all the time I'm reading this stuff, and I can't write a single haiku. Zip. Now I've reached the point where I can sit down and just write a few, but all of a sudden, writer's block. Nothing.
So I roll with the punches. It's the pressure, really, that I put myself under. But once Haiku Day, Apr. 17, my self-imposed deadline, passed, and I got back on the crank. Here I am today at about 997, and a little editing to do, have to get the redundancies out of there. Which I will do.
Keep your eyes out. After that, it's the novel.
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