Comments on: Choosing How the Sun Goes Down

By: Ominous Rabbit

Ominous Rabbit — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 23:24:15 +0000

Thanks, chi-town. This getting old and dying thing ain’t for the faint of heart, is it? Miss you, chicago.

By: chicago

chicago — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 19:58:53 +0000

“But our son, his grandson, is a great light rising in the east as Dad is setting slowly in the west.”

thank you for writing this. i feel these words looking at my nephew and dad. the beauty is being able to stand in the full sun.

love.

By: Momsterin

Momsterin — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:08:14 +0000

Love, since I am an old print medium writer, the flow of electronic narratives and blogs are something of a mystery to me. Of course, because most are self edited, they range, in my admittedly limited experience, wildly in quality from amazingly personal literature–as in yours–to ignorant rants. (The ranters know who they are, damn them.) You are, in my estimation, an excellent word-bender. I think when a reader described this entry as “discursive,” that was accurate, but not negative.

The journey your father is preparing to take, and which every living thing on earth, even the earth and its neighbors, will eventually make, is a thing both profound and quotidian. It is appropriate to such a monumental subject to stretch out a little in prose. That’s why truly great writers are often quite expansive when the Big D is at the center of their works. Think Tolstoy digressing into observations of the ordinary, even frivolous aspects of life in “War and Peace.” Melville taking on the minutae of shipboard rendering of whale oil in “Moby Dick.” Virginia Woolf musing on the boring little details of being middle-aged and middle-class in “Mrs Dalloway.”

Maybe it’s the dingbats that are no longer charming to readers. We mostly read too fast anymore. I love dingbats. . . And ellipses. . . By the way, I’m not really a shy online correspondent, just a criminally lazy one. I seldom read e-mail more than once a week.

“These are private words addressed to you in public.” I wish I could write that without the quotation marks–but it’s the last line in a poem that T.S. Eliot dedicated to his young second wife. I only steal from the best.

By: Ominous Rabbit

Ominous Rabbit — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 17:40:49 +0000

Thanks, Dad, my strongest supporter and most ardent fan! I love you, and thank you again for reading my stuff–over and over again!

By: dad

dad — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:01:50 +0000

Hi Q., Good edit! The Palazzo di Milo deserves an entry of its own. With pictures! Love, Pop

By: dad

dad — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 01:45:47 +0000

Hi Q, I think that the issue of discursive arises here for a couple of reasons, the first and most obvious at least to me is that it covers a much larger time span than most of your other blogs–you had a lot of material to catch up on. The second thing has to do with the way you’ve chosen to break the page–the inclusion of material not necessarily related to cancer could be intended to indicate that the flow of life goes on around the cancer, not dominated by it, but the breaks in the page seem to set the narratives apart from each other. To me they seem too frequent. If I were editing it, that’s where I’d start.