Begin in the Middle

“Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.”
― Harlan Ellison

A Pizza Waffle

for 4 waffles

14 oz pizza dough, 1 tube, or homemade pizza dough
4 tablespoons marinara sauce
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
12 slices pepperoni

Preparation

Slice the pizza dough into 8 equal pieces, then press each piece flat.
Place 4 pieces of dough into a preheated, greased waffle iron.
Spread one tablespoon of marinara, ¼ cup (25 grams) of mozzarella, and 3 slices of pepperoni on each piece of dough.
Top with the 4 remaining pieces of dough and seal.
Cook for 3-5 minutes, until golden brown, then serve.
Enjoy!
https://tasty.co/compilation/waffles-4-ways

A Brief Moment

“Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.”
― Harlan Ellison

Roasted Red Potatoes

Red Roasted Potatoes

Ingredients

2 pounds small unpeeled red potatoes, cut into wedges
2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon minced fresh rosemary or 1 teaspoon dried rosemary, crushed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Directions

Place potatoes in a 13x9-in. baking dish. Drizzle with oil. Sprinkle with the garlic, rosemary, salt and pepper; toss gently to coat.
Bake at 450° until potatoes are golden brown and tender, 20-30 minutes.

Nutrition Facts
1 cup: 114 calories, 4g fat (0 saturated fat), 0 cholesterol, 155mg sodium, 18g carbohydrate (1g sugars, 2g fiber), 2g protein.
Originally published as Oven-Roasted Potatoes in Reminisce November/December 1992

People

“The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. [...] There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal', the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is the mirror itself. And what we are shown should illuminate and alter our perception of the world around us. Failing that, you have failed totally.”
― Harlan Ellison

Hardest

“Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching. ”
― Harlan Ellison

Ability to Dream

“The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.”
― Harlan Ellison, Stalking the Nightmare

Pain

“I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.
Adult. You have become adult.”
― Harlan Ellison, Paingod and Other Delusions

Informed

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you–as if you haven’t been told a million times already–that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
HARLAN ELLISON

Story

When we’re under the spell of a compelling story, we undergo internal changes along with the protagonist, and her insights become part of the way we, too, see the world. Stories instill meaning directly into our belief system the same way experience does—not by telling us what is right, but by allowing us to feel it ourselves. Because just like life, story is emotion based. As Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert said, “Indeed, feelings don’t just matter, they are what mattering means.” In life, if we can’t feel emotion, we can’t make a single rational decision—it’s biology. In a story, if we’re not feeling, we’re not reading. It is emotion, rather than logic, that telegraphs meaning, thus emotion is what your novel must be wired to transmit, straight from the protagonist to us.

LISA CRON

Successful Hermit

“I’m a heartless optimist. This combination could make me lethal, but mostly it has led to a successful hermit lifestyle.”
― Sarah Noffke, Awoken

Consciousness

“Consciousness is a born hermit.”
― George Santayana, The Life of Reason and Other Works by George Santayana

Silence is the universal refuge

“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
― Henry David Thoreau

The Continual Condition

“now it’s computers and more computers
and soon everybody will have one,
3-year-olds will have computers
and everybody will know everything
about everybody else
long before they meet them.
nobody will want to meet anybody
else ever again
and everybody will be
a recluse
like I am now.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Continual Condition: Poems

Hermits

The cookie

Listening to the night rain on my roof

“Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.”
― Ryokan

Livingston Taylor

It didn't seem to be about money, power or fame. Success seemed to be about gratitude. The ability to recognize that your presence here on the planet at this time is a gift and nothing more need be expected or offered. Gratitude is success; and success is gratitude. They are interchangeable. It's true not just in a career, but in life in general. Self-acceptance, forgiveness and gratitude are very attractive qualities on stage.
-Livingston Taylor, Stage Performance (page 77)

Music is my Mistress

It's the birthday of the man who said, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing": Duke Ellington, born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C. (1899). His father's job as a butler paid well, his mother dressed him in fancy clothes, and so his friends gave him the nickname "Duke". When he was seven years old, a piano teacher refused to teach him, because he wouldn't stop improvising and experimenting with off-tone chords. So he taught himself to play by studying the family player piano. He said, "I never had much interest in the piano until I realized every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left, and another to my right."

Ellington thought of his band as a musical laboratory, and he experimented with many different styles, everything from "swing" to "bop". He said, "Playing 'bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing." He went on to compose jazz standards like "Mood Indigo" (1930). In his later career he combined jazz and classical music in works such as Black, Brown and Beige (1943), a musical portrayal of African-American history.

His autobiography was Music is My Mistress (1973), in which he said, "Jazz is a good barometer of freedom. In its beginnings, the United States spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free, that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country."
Writer's Almanac

“Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.”

“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“Writers transform: they throw a hand grenade into the notion of reality that people carry around in their heads. That's very dangerous, very destructive, but not to do it means you are satisfied with the status quo - and that's a kind of danger as well, because a kind of violence is already being perpetuated.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“All Stories are True.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“Paradise Lost is a poem. The old, blind bastard’s trying to sing to you. Listen, as the Isley Brothers say, to the music. You must learn to do that before you can expect to understand. Slowly. Slowly. A few licks at a time.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“Thank you, Jesus, for blindness that every once in a great while allows one of us to hit the target.”
― John Edgar Wideman, Fanon

“Looking at each other like, What the fuck's going on here? We big-time undercover supercops.”
― John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers: A Memoir

“The two of you well fed, tanned, pretty, Beg pardon folks, just passing through, through the cesspool your bad intentions and good intentions created, the sewage in which human beings must make lives for themselves swimming in centuries of your filth. What did you imagine yourselves doing. What do you imagine you're doing with me. What gives you the right to rub the privilege of your whiteness, your immunity, in dying people's faces. Slinking through a place so down and out even niggers with nothing to lose avoid it if they can. Dog-eat-dog back-of-the-wall and at night too. Who the fuck did you think you were. What kind of daydream were you strolling around in.”
― John Edgar Wideman, God's Gym: Stories

“My father was intelligent and closed-mouthed. He knew a lot more than what he was ever going to tell you.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“They killed everyone in the camps. The whole world was dying there. Not only Jews. Even a black woman. Not gypsy. Not African. American like you, Mrs. Clara.

They said she was a dancer and could play any instrument. Said she could line up shoes from many countries and hop from one pair to the next, performing the dances of the world. They said the Queen of Denmark honored her with a gold trumpet. But she was there, in hell with the rest of us.

A woman like you. Many years ago. A lifetime ago. Young then as you would have been. And beautiful. As I believe you must have been, Mrs. Clara. Yes. Before America entered the war. Already camps had begun devouring people. All kinds of people. Yet she was rare. Only woman like her I saw until I came here, to this country, this city. And she saved my life.

Poor thing.

I was just a boy. Thirteen years old. The guards were beating me. I did not know why. Why? They didn't need a why. They just beat. And sometimes the beating ended in death because there was no reason to stop, just as there was no reason to begin. A boy. But I'd seen it many times. In the camp long enough to forget why I was alive, why anyone would want to live for long. They were hurting me, beating the life out of me but I was not surprised, expected no explanation. I remember curling up as I had seen a dog once cowering from the blows of a rolled newspaper. In the old country lifetimes ago. A boy in my village staring at a dog curled and rolling on its back in the dust outside a baker's shop and our baker in his white apron and tall white hat striking this mutt again and again. I didn't know what mischief this dog had done. I didn't understand why the fat man with flour on his apron was whipping it unmercifully. I simply saw it and hated the man, felt sorry for the animal, but already the child in me understood it could be no other way so I rolled and curled myself against the blows as I'd remembered the spotted dog in the dusty village street because that's the way it had to be.

Then a woman's voice in a language I did not comprehend reached me. A woman angry, screeching. I heard her before I saw her. She must have been screaming at them to stop. She must have decided it was better to risk dying than watch the guards pound a boy to death. First I heard her voice, then she rushed in, fell on me, wrapped herself around me. The guards shouted at her. One tried to snatch her away. She wouldn't let go of me and they began to beat her too. I heard the thud of clubs on her back, felt her shudder each time a blow was struck.

She fought to her feet, dragging me with her. Shielding me as we stumbled and slammed into a wall.

My head was buried in her smock. In the smell of her, the smell of dust, of blood. I was surprised how tiny she was, barely my size, but strong, very strong. Her fingers dug into my shoulders, squeezing, gripping hard enough to hurt me if I hadn't been past the point of feeling pain. Her hands were strong, her legs alive and warm, churning, churning as she pressed me against herself, into her. Somehow she'd pulled me up and back to the barracks wall, propping herself, supporting me, sheltering me. Then she screamed at them in this language I use now but did not know one word of then, cursing them, I'm sure, in her mother tongue, a stream of spit and sputtering sounds as if she could build a wall of words they could not cross.

The kapos hesitated, astounded by what she'd dared. Was this black one a madwoman, a witch? Then they tore me from her grasp, pushed me down and I crumpled there in the stinking mud of the compound. One more kick, a numbing, blinding smash that took my breath away. Blood flooded my eyes. I lost consciousness. Last I saw of her she was still fighting, slim, beautiful legs kicking at them as they dragged and punched her across the yard.

You say she was colored?

Yes. Yes. A dark angel who fell from the sky and saved me.”
― John Edgar Wideman, Fever

“They beat me, and fucked me in every hole I had. I was their whore. Their maid. A stool they stood on when they wanted to reach a little higher. But I never sang in their cage, Bobby. Not one note.”
― John Edgar Wideman, Fever

“Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“Too much is made for us; too much is given to us - even those of us who are underprivileged. The poverty is given to us. The difficulties are given to us.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“The title of my book is 'American Histories,' plural. And as far as I'm concerned, my reading of history is it is a sort of nightmare. It is a sort of nightmare, and I'm trying to wake up from it. And as any nightmare, it's full of much that is unspeakable.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“Professor of Comparative Literature, B.A. Harvard. Ph.D. Sorbonne, Oxford. Somewhere certificates pasted in full-of-truth blue book. At points we diverge, essential points in fact. Always a clean white page to begin on. Où sont les neiges. The boy had been strangely unreluctant. Although detached, even cold in a numb, childish fashion, the boy had willingly submitted. First his shoes, then his socks and trousers pulled off by the Doctor’s trembling white hands, his priest hands moving of themselves, mechanical but infused with timeless primordial mystery that guided his fingers with a logic more powerful and comprehending than his own being. The flesh presented to his lips, staleness of his own groin floating up to meet him as he knelt. Breath of a dying wino. With this kiss I thee wed, the lean black bridegroom puff of veiled white beside him arm curled into his as they stood rigid with grotesque, confectionery smiles atop the pyramid of cake. Stale cake toppling then as knife keenly enters collapsing with a wheeze the creamy icing. He gave of himself in grudged thin spasms. The hierophant rose on stiff knees.”
― John Edgar Wideman, A Glance Away

“I wonder how far away it is somebody should know somebody should find out and tell people cause I’m sure they want to know look at them both closer to my fire now and both looking at the flames I wonder what it feels like to burn it if always hurts once your hand is in it deep and if it pops and sparks like wood and if the color is the same and if it hurts and where does it go if you keep it in smoke rises through the trees to the sky towards the black roof where the sun will come if the sun comes tomorrow does it hurt or smell and how high up the smoke kids do it stick their hands right in you gotta keep them away or they’ll do it like buys who get too close and burn up I see why they try once why they want to touch I can see it in Eddie’s eyes in the white man’s eyes that stare at the flame they want to touch to put them in and see if it keeps hurting I can understand why kids do it cause I want to touch myself just like one I want to put my hand in I want to go to smoke and see how high…”
― John Edgar Wideman, A Glance Away

“Real change is always violent, but it may hurt a lot less than what's in place before the violence occurs.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“I think I was kind of melancholy as a kid. I spent a lot of time inside my own head, a lot of time sort of staring into space wondering the hell was going on.”
― John Edgar Wideman