Everyday Canvas

Last Four Days' Prompts

Prompt: Today, I was reading Sidewalk Oracles and one of the interesting exercises was to randomly flip open a book page and read a line. Any line doesn't matter just the one line. As your day goes on, how many things happen to you during the day that connect with that one line. So grab a book, any book and discuss the one line... what about that one line? In what way does it connect with you or your life?

Like for example In the book, the man said, "I cannot come right now" It was a couple of hours after I read that one line, the driveway repairman called and said he couldn't come right now. I said, to him, "I know." I had read it earlier.

---

This is a great exercise. Except, during the rush of my day, I’d probably forget all about it and wouldn’t recognize it even if it came up again.

Even so, I decided to try it. This morning I opened up a poetry book and came across a poem The Trout Map by Allen Tate. From it, is this line.

“We walked a confident hour of victory.”

Well, I was on my feet all day, mostly cooking, and as to that “confident hour of victory,” do little victories count? Like I didn’t break, drop, spill anything, or burn myself... yet!

I’ll do this exercise again with some other book on a good, unrushed day, that is if I can find one.

Prompt: "There comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book."~Josh Jameson

Use this quote in your entry today.

===

Yes, there comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book. I just closed a book of fiction and vowed never to read from a certain famous horror writer, since this book was more politically biased than literary. The ads for the book never mentioned the author’s opinion-forcing tricks but they concentrated on the plot and the characters.

I understand and respect the personal slants of all authors, but then, maybe this certain example happened because it has to do with the present-day politics and not the all-encompassing, good-for-humanity, personal or social concepts.

I have respect for the opinions of everyone, but if the writer of a book, a book I pick with the idea of enjoying fiction, begins lecturing people through examples and innuendos on his present-day politics and tries to swerve the readers’ opinions, he is a dead duck for me. If he were to offer something that said the book was solely written for expressing his opinions, and/or even if the ads for the book had mentioned the bias and the intent of the book, I wouldn’t be so irked and maybe I would have kept turning the page.

In general, whether I agree with the ideas or not, I don't like anyone's effort of pushing people into accepting anything under false pretenses and through the use of literature.

Prompt: What brings joy into your life?

===

Just about everything I do, see, and appreciate, although I get tired a lot. It took a long time for me to find joy in everything almost always.

I guess it takes a person a long time, until nearing the end of things, to find enjoyment in all things. This may be due to the fact that we don’t appreciate what we have and what there is around us, until we feel things will not be the same in a short while.

I am not sick or anything, but I have been reassessing stuff during the last few years, and even on the most difficult days, I search and try to see the beauty and the myriad of enjoyable possibilities around me.

Prompt: "Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity." P. T. Barnum
Write anything you want about this.

I so agree with this quote. We have literature because literature is the music of language and then some, as language is something humans have used since the dawn of civilization. Music usually expresses what other art forms cannot. Adapt music to language and you’ve got literature or at least some form of it. Then, added to the music, literature has ideas, philosophies, partialities, and reflections of the human experience.

Moreover, as societies and understandings change so do their patterns of expression, as oral or written literature. Another plus is, literature encourages creativity with or without any training or education, letting most anyone try their hand in creating stories, poems, and novels.