Gulliver's Travels

To say this is a classic of political and social satire is unfair, because Swift INVENTED the genre with this raucous novel.

The wayward traveler - Lemuel Gulliver - ends up on a series of bizarrely populated islands. First he is a giant among little people, but then sees the situation reversed when he's surrounded by giants twelve times his size. Next he finds himself in the clouds, in a society of devoted but ultimately hapless mathematicians. Lastly, his journey brings him to an island where incredibly noble horses must deal with a race of uncouth, reviled ape-men: the Yahoos. The satire is thick and unrelenting, but certainly not specific to the time and situation when Swift wrote it, and thus it has been read and beloved for centuries.

Though she's spent a good amount of her eight years in the car, Gertrude Stein can hardly be called a good sport when it comes to traveling. She howls. She hisses. She growls. She scratches. She attempts to open her own carrier. She does just about everything a cat can possibly do -- and, I think, quite a few things that cats can't do, or shouldn't be able to do -- so that I'll open her carrier. She's persistent and obstinate and stubborn and grumpy and terrible, and it absolutely works, every single time. The thing is that she doesn't want to do much. She doesn't want to climb over the luggage, or drink from the water bowl I put out for her, or get in the driver's seat, or attempt to drive the car. She actually doesn't even want to get out of her carrier. She just wants to stick her head out of the door. As annoying as this is, I think there's a lot to learn from Gertrude Stein -- at least when it comes to writing. To be a writer, you have to be like Gertrude Stein. You have to be persistent and obstinate and stubborn and, sometimes, you even have to be terrible. This is certainly true when it comes to publishing, but I'm starting to think that it's also true when it comes to writing itself. You have to push, and push, and push. You have to be persistent and stubborn. You have to keep going towards what you want, where you want to go, no matter what -- because, let's face it, even if you just want to stick your head out of the door of your carrier, sometimes it feels impossible, and persistence -- even in the face of an angry owner (the self!) who tells you to stop, to please shut up, to go to sleep -- is absolutely necessary.

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