gall and gumption

Fran

2011-12-06T21:37:00.000-05:00

High Summer

She moved so fast
sometimes--in the house
and out and back in
in one rush--but unruffled--
just from her usual abounding energy
that one time
the dog sat up
and began barking
from sheer excitement

--Alan Stephens (Away from the Road)

Test

2011-07-29T21:43:00.001-04:00

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:On the way home from work

Before You Buy

2011-07-21T17:20:00.001-04:00

Before you buy Bob Blaisdell's book on Marvin Mudrick, listen to this short review in the form of a radio interview with reviewer David Kipen, formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle. Kipen had never heard of Mudrick till Bob sent him a copy of the book.

I've read it and would have written about it already but life got a bit busy and crazy. Also another reason is that I have appear in a supporting role in the story ("romantic lead" is the way one friend put it) that Bob tells and for a while I thought that that should keep me from blogging about it. But there's a lot more in there than just the little glimpses you get of me. Perhaps the biggest reason you should look at it is that, being readers (or else why are you hanging around here), you should be glad to read anything that is written from love, so you can be reminded of the best reason to do anything.

Real America

2011-07-11T11:54:00.001-04:00

Roy pays another visit, and not a monument in sight.

Things in DC that are not monuments

2011-07-05T17:08:00.001-04:00

Here's Roy photographing one.

Sidewalk

2011-06-14T23:46:00.000-04:00

So this afternoon I spot A. walking toward me on the sidewalk. A. did me a nice favor a week ago and has been very charming and kind over the so far very brief duration of our acquaintance. I wave to him and he stops and I remark on the fact that he got caught in the downpour that ended moments before; there are raindrops on the shoulders of his jacket. A. says something about getting some fresh air, I say something stupid in reply, then he absentmindedly turns around 180 degrees and starts walking in the direction in which I, not he, was headed. He walks a few steps alongside of me and then sort of shakes himself and says something about being busy and tired, and turns back and goes on his way. For some reason this encounter leaves me feeling an odd mixture of foolish, happy, and bewildered. I realize that it's because while I meet a lot of people and make nice with all of them, there are few of them that I want to like me, that I feel it would make a difference if they did like me. I like them just fine, but there aren't many of them that I want to go trailing after to find out what they're thinking about oh heck anything. But he, inexplicably, is one of the few. "The soul selects her own society," Emily Dickinson wrote.

He's Just Not That Into You

2011-06-13T15:08:00.001-04:00

Shakespeare's sonnets are the most beautiful representation of the most pathetic love, I mean the kind that is just guaranteed to make your life a living hell as the price of whatever short-lived pleasure you got out of it.

The whole thing is rigged against the narrator (we'll call him Shakespeare) from jump, and he knows it but he can only go forward. Don't you get the sense from the sonnets that the guy, the beloved, is just never really there? That Shakespeare is doing all the work of feeling and finding and assigning meaning? I mean, here's Shakespeare writing, you know, Shakespeare's sonnets, for crying out loud, out of the fullness of his heart--

23
As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart;
So I for fear of trust, forget to say,
The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharged with burthen of mine own love's might:
O let my looks be then the eloquence,
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.
O learn to read what silent love hath writ,
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

--but of course the other fellow never will learn to read "what silent love hath writ." Because he doesn't need to. He's not "o'ercharged with burthen of [his] own love's might; he's just going along minding his own business.

I picture Mr. Thing reading the insomnia sonnet in bed and falling asleep before getting to the end.

I read Sonnet 29 "When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes..." and I want to give him some advice a friend gave to me a long time ago: don't get accustomed to all the nice part because It Will Be Taken Away.

But they're friends! And what a comfort that is.

But if the while I think on thee (dear friend)
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.

Swell. But all the same I'd urge you not to hit the "Send" button because--

33
Full many a glorious morning have I seen,
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green;
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy:
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride,
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow,
But out alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.
Yet him for this, my love no whit disdaineth,
Suns of the world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth.

There. What did I tell you?

He's the best advocate for this bounder against his own self--

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done,
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
My self corrupting salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are:

--even when the guy steals one of his girlfriends from him.

This sort of thing just can't end well. According to the self-help literature--which I was reading FOR A FRIEND--Shakespeare is doing everything wrong. Instead of excusing and forgiving and indulging and accommodating, he should be noticing certain warning signs and strengthening his fortifications, protecting himself from these feelings instead of just letting them take him to the Bad Place where they're certainly headed.

I have to say that in my own experience this has never worked. But then I never really tried. Or by the time I needed to try it was already too late--I was already, emotionally speaking, a mass of bruises. But at least when things got to that point I only had to figure out how to get myself better--I had at least got the message that I didn't need to be figuring out what the other party really meant or if he meant anything at all. So that was something.

The self-help book had lots of examples of unhappy couples or unhappy people whose couple status went screaming off a cliff and they're crawling stunned and bewildered out of the smoking wreckage--but it didn't show any examples of happy couples. I suspect that I would not have liked their happy couples anyway. Isn't that interesting? I think I'm automatically suspicious of the attempt of any professional person to explain the happiness of other people. Just as I am suspicious of the "we" of the professional social scientist, the one they use when they are talking to the public: as in "We lie to make ourselves look good." I mean, then I just think, "Well, maybe you do. But not me. And maybe you need to hang out with a better class of people." Yet I am easily convinced by their portrayals of unhappiness. The happiest couple I can think of in literature is Admiral and Mrs. Croft in Persuasion. It's not that I don't believe in happy couples: I even know some! I just think that happiness itself speaks with greater authority about itself, in its own words, than anyone who takes it upon himself to define it.

But anyway Shakespeare. He doesn't take any of the good advice from the self-help books. The sonnets are about gradual but complete surrender to this feeling--at least until the very last ones when the feeling seems to have burnt itself out. But you read all the way through and there's no resistance, nor, until the later sonnets when he's talking about women again, any of the cynicism about such feelings that John Donne will frequently express. (I might mind Donne's cynicism more if he hadn't written The Good-Morrow, but really he's just a very different kind of artist.)

At a certain point Shakespeare had to have seen that he couldn't talk himself out of his feelings and they weren't going to invoke any corresponding return of feeling in the other party. No win, and no cure. Failure? I don't think so. It's something, after all, to add it to the record of human experience, to say it happened, it happens, it matters that it happens.

The Captain

2011-06-04T19:44:00.000-04:00

From the Notebooks:

Pan’s Labyrinth (in Spanish, El Laberinto del Fauno) is a fairy tale for adults, and its really scary horrors take place not in the Labyrinth where the fairies and monsters live but outside it, in the real world. The story is set in Spain, just after the Civil War, where the victorious Fascists are conducting “mopping-up” operations. A Captain presides over one of these operations in a remote mountain forest; he and the unit he commands are staying in an old mill house that has an old labyrinth in its grounds. He sends for his new, pregnant wife (widow of a tailor) and her daughter, Ofelia, a girl of about 10 who likes to read fairy tales. The mother, rescued from poverty and loneliness by her marriage to the Captain, wants the daughter to love him and call him father but Ofelia dislikes him. You know that in the adult world people try to reason away these dislikes: the child isn’t trying hard enough to like him; give it time; you haven’t noticed how good he has been to us. The mother in her simplicity actually believes all this, and besides, her pregnancy, very advanced, makes her sick all the time. She’s helpless, submissive, and trusting, grateful for the security that the Captain has provided for her.

He’s handsome, a fearfully competent disciplinarian and enforcer of order, constantly and minutely vigilant for threats and prompt to act on them. He’s a killing machine whose pride is in his complete self-dedication to his duty. He’s also (and this amounts to the same thing) mad.

On the level of his character you see that he is weak, mean, controlling and irresponsible; that he carries major Daddy issues (he has to be the soldier that his father was) and that for all his cunning he’s rather stupid. And he is prodigiously vain of the horrible character that he has created for himself. That is what he brings to the mix, but he’s not only a self-created monster. His peculiar brand of monsterishness is useful; it fills a need, and where there is a need such men will appear for duty. The individual who steps up so willingly and unquestioningly to do the work of extermination is mad, but it is a larger madness that summons him.

A group of bourgeoisie from the nearest town comes out to the mill for a dinner party, an incongruously formal affair, very stiff and constrained. They are all agreed as to the necessity of his “work,” and admire his zeal and dedication in carrying it out. They don’t know what he actually does – they could know but they don’t want to know – but whatever it is, it is necessary for their security. And this is of course flattering to them. That he takes pleasure in killing and torture (a moral pleasure) is beyond the scope of what they have to know. This is how they become complicit: they feed his insane convictions of his own morality. The even tolerate his small, mean corruption as long as they are the beneficiaries of it, and as long as the poor, whom they despise, pay the cost of it.

As the Captain works out his destiny (“character is destiny”) Ofelia, the little girl, works on her own story. She’s a lost princess who has to complete three increasingly difficult tasks before she can return home. The tasks are assigned by the Faun of the Labyrinth, and as frightening as they are, they are not as terrible as the goings-on in the real world ruled by the Captain and all he stands for. One of the beauties of the film is that it plays so delicately with ambiguity. Are the creatures of the Labyrinth real or just figments of Ofelia’s imagination? You can have it either way or both; what matters is what Ofelia believes, and she believes in goodness. That is, she believes that she must be good, and the fairy tales have taught her that goodness will be tested, must be tested. She passes the tests, of course: the heroes and heroines of fairy tales always do. But the third test, the hardest one, she passes without knowing she has passed it; without knowing that her whole time at the mill, the time in the real world, was the test.

We know how the real-world story ends: the Fascists ruled Spain for 40 years. Many, many innocents suffered and died, security was maintained, the mad and the guilty had their way for a good long run. But sanity lived among the fairy tales. What is that sanity but the belief that goodness is beautiful and necessary?

Ofelia’s innocence is a sort of mystery; innocence is a mystery, in the sense that it is hard to define or explain in terms cause or origin. It is if anything a negative good: in Ofelia it is the persistence of the belief that it is possible and necessary to be good, and that being good is worth more than anything you can trade it away for. It is at last the tenacity with which she possesses her own soul, which is bigger than herself in ways she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know she possesses innocence, she doesn’t know how her innocence possesses her.
In the fairy-tale world of the Labyrinth, she makes the choice not to be like the Captain and not to be like those who rely on his services. With this choice the storyline of the Labyrinth completes itself; the small piece of magic is accomplished. But here’s the thing that remains, here is where the two stories converge: goodness is like magic. It has to be imagined into being, it is against the grain.

Ofelia passes her last test by doing what is right in this world. With everything in both worlds at stake she refuses to agree to the infliction of even a tiny bit of suffering. When you take your security at the expense of suffering and death, you summon the Captain.
The Captain is mad but his is the madness of righteous conviction: if he had ever had a chance to be other than he is, he missed it long before we meet him at the mill in the forest. He has lost the capacity to question himself, and the world has closed around him, divided simply into enemies and potential enemies. Those who do not submit to his control are enemies; the others are all potential enemies. It becomes increasingly difficult for him to distinguish between his personal will and his duty as he conceives it. This is why 1) he succumbs so easily to corruption; the rationale for it is actually fed by his fanaticism; and 2) he creates around him an ongoing state of emergency in which he regards the least expression of dissent as an existential threat to his mission; his mission has given value to his personal feelings. He’s not a vain man; he’s a model soldier. He’s not an unloved son; he’s carrying on a family tradition of manly courage. He’s not a torturer; he’s a skilled interrogator who knows he can do whatever is necessary. He’s not a murderer; he is efficient and prompt in resolving crises. There can be no half-measures with such people. To grant them the right to one drop of blood, one minute of distress, is to give them everything. Eventually--and eventually is sooner, not later – they will demand everything. Because they do not know what innocence is: they do not believe in it. There is no compromising with such people because you cannot compromise with them without the sacrifice of innocence. You cannot divide the truth between the speaker of truth and the liar, between the murderer and his victim. When you do that, the liar gets half of what he wants (and will soon present you with a bill for the remainder) and the truth teller gets worse than nothing. There’s no such thing as a half liar or half a truth teller. If you make that sort of compromise you haven’t reduced the total sum of guilt; you have only displaced its cost onto the innocent. And when you force the innocent to bear this cost you become an accomplice in a crime for the sake of your self-deceit and whatever comfort or advantage it gives you. For people like the Captain to acknowledge innocence is to take the risk of making a mistake, of accidentally releasing an enemy.

The Captain is the absolute despot of the group of soldiers and workers of his domain. But despotism also rules him; we know that there are powers above that expect him to be thorough, to not let anything slip through; no food, no medicine, no suspect person can be allowed to escape. Competence becomes, by a cruel logic, attention to the most picayune details, and each potential conflict raises a threat that must be met by the assertion of force.

When this logic of despotism establishes itself it spreads downward; the whole system is maintained by lesser functionaries who, to prove their competence, must be sharp, resolute and prompt in dispatching threats to order, in neutralizing anything that may undermine their place. While they thus wage a quiet war against external enemies (the journalist who demands information, the writer of protest songs, the dissenting activist, the widow of the partisan denied a pension, the victim of land theft) they are waging another secret war against themselves, against the enemy within. People who are willing to make a sacrifice of their inner selves will naturally turn to making a sacrifice of others. They sacrifice themselves this way for any number of possible reasons. What they gain by it is moral certainty, a self that they can like better than the one they rejected; camaraderie, status, a sense of purpose, and an ongoing state of passionate arousal that satisfies itself in the detection and destruction of enemies. And all who are unwilling to make this sacrifice are enemies. Hence arises the necessity to pursue thought crimes and imaginary and hypothetical enemies: no one dares to say, “We have done enough,” no one wants to be the first to say that severity can be slackened. Because despotism has become a way of life, and people’s minds mold to it, taking the shape of it even while everyone is sure that they are decent, just and rational. They do it – and this is the horrible truth – for small things: for status, power, a little money, spite, vindictiveness. But the belief that they are serving a great cause transforms the appearance of these human motivations. The people who give up their selves to despotism don’t want these selves back on any terms; it’s a return to insignificance, defensiveness, doubt, and – when all the bodies are finally counted – guilt. They are therefore deeply invested in the fantasy selves that they have constructed; they are more invested in those selves than they are in the ideology that justifies despotism. About the ideology they are quite content to be as muddleheaded as they are about everything else. They are simple folk, with simple moral values! The like kittens and babies! You can’t expect them to figure out all that intellectual stuff. They are just ordinary people defending a way of life, and you don’t need to be an intellectual to do that, for crying out loud.

To the Captain and to the numberless others who rule like him every personal affront or grievance undergoes a transmutation, it’s framed as something that happens not to them personally, as individuals, but to the cause. This is of course convenient if you have any power at all – the power to rat someone out to the police, the power to go rummaging in their secrets and a public platform for exposing them, the power to withhold a job or a ration card or a promotion or a signature. The exercise of malice and envy and contempt becomes a necessity of virtue. This transformation of the personal into the political is convenient in another way: it keeps up the supply of enemies (and the system depends on the steady supply of enemies) by creating new pretexts for identifying them, and it offers opportunities for the display of righteous zeal.

To destroy your own guilt is nearly impossible; it requires a return of the rejected self that people demonstrate again and again that they cannot do. It is easier to destroy innocence, to destroy the idea of innocence first, which enables the destruction of actual innocents. For this result, contempt is necessary, and there is always a lot of that floating around in search of a worthy object. Once you have overcome your guilt at the suffering of others from poverty, deprivation, and injustice, contempt for them comes naturally: they have imposed on your good nature, and they will do it again at the least opportunity. So it becomes necessary to distinguish between the deserving poor and the undeserving, and for the latter more deprivation, more hardship, is the best remedy. When it comes to that, even the deserving poor had best be kept strictly in line and taught not to expect too much. This is why, in Jane Eyre, Mr. Brockehurst and his well-fed, well-dressed daughters could visit Lowood School and looking upon its ranks of half-starved, beaten-down, dispirited orphans and daughters of impoverished clergymen, see nothing but their own goodness.

They are also, of course, destroying witnesses and evidence against the day when it all collapses. On that day, forced at the point of a gun to admit that crimes were committed, the guilty retreat into a sort of twilight of willful amnesia about their part in the crime: they didn’t know what was going on, that they had no choice, and they always acted with the best of intentions and never had any other kind. Their exact relation to the machinery of crime will be hard to define, although it will always somehow be clear to them that they were victims, too, and that they are now doubly victims because they find that the world does not think as well of them as they wish to think of themselves.

The first of the Captain’s crimes that we witness is his killing of two peasants, a father and son, captured in the woods. They have guns, which of course immediately renders them suspect. They explain that they have been out hunting rabbits, but he doesn’t believe them. When they insist, he kills the son, brutally, for not shutting up. Having now created an enemy and a witness in the father, he must kill him too – which he promptly does. The father has only just dropped to the ground when one of the soldiers pulls a dead rabbit out of the bag the men were carrying. “Search them better next time,” the Captain says and walks away.

The Captain, authority, cannot be seen to have made mistakes. The peasants incriminate themselves by asserting a fact contrary to what he believes: he kills them because they are a threat to order and control – to his order and his control, which in his madness he has conflated with order in the world. For the same reason, he blames the soldiers for the killing. Thus the first time we see the Captain at his “work” we see that he is a failure: he’s stupid and incompetent. We must disabuse ourselves of the idea that his incompetence is unique to himself. Like his madness it is systemic; the very conception of the job he has been assigned is incompetent; failure is built into it. The Captain’s especial qualification for his job – what makes him such a model soldier to the bourgeois of the town, is that he is a failure as a human being. His moral imagination is broken, and the proof of it is that he willingly takes the job and goes about it with such righteous zeal. And those who hire the Captain have failed in their moral and political imagination. To make the kind of quid pro quo calculation of benefit to themselves versus cost to other people in suffering injustice, cruelty, and death – to take what you want at the cost of even a few small drops of the blood of one who can neither consent nor refuse – is to be a monster like the Captain. You cannot touch pitch without being defiled. You cannot sell your soul to the devil for just a little while. There is no trading away a little piece of the sacred.

For the society he serves the Captain is the expression of the will to control other people, and the will to control other people masks incompetence at the most basic personal level. It’s like being a poet I met once who, finding no audience for his poetry, had determined that this was the fault of the way society was organized. He had a job at the Ministry of Culture in a small Caribbean country, and the first thing he wanted to do was remove a fountain from one of the squares in the capital. The fountain, a piece of harmless Victorian kitsch, was for him a symbol of the colonial oppression that had corrupted the culture. But most people did not share his feeling about the statue: for them it was not associated with ideas about history – except for their personal history: memories of childhood, of events, the continuity of their individual lives through time, lives lived uniquely in that place. About all this – the very subject matter of poetry and literature – the poet was breezily dismissive. The people who cherished this irrational affection for the fountain would need to be brought round to the right sort of historical consciousness, and those who resisted it would be dealt with. He wasn’t kidding; he thought of himself as an enlightened, creative person denied fulfillment by an unjust society. He showed me a slim volume of his poems. They were bad – predictably, pitifully, irredeemably bad – and he would not have believed anyone who ventured to tell him so.

So he wanted power instead, and his conception of power was as poor as his poetry: of course it was – these things are all of a piece. He was a mediocrity turned part-time fanatic, and it was of some comfort to think of the peculiar resistance to fanaticism that has evolved in Caribbean culture; its irreverence, its hardheaded commonsensical materialism, would pretty much keep him from ever being taken seriously. He was not talented enough to be more than a placeholder. There were better propagandists and they were not encumbered with poetry.

That separation of good and evil must take place within us: it’s the separation of the good and evil that are within us. The will to control others is a double failure: the failure to understand oneself and, inevitably, eventually, the failure to control others.
Bad as the Captain is when we first understand what he is, over the course of the story he degenerates. It’s not the guerillas in the woods that break him down – his martial bravado endures all the way to the end when he is ready to meet the hero’s death for which, in a sense, he has been rehearsing in front of a mirror. Of its own power, his will to control keeps spiraling inward, until having created mayhem and chaos in his own camp, he is reduced to hunting down and killing Ofelia. There is no need to kill her: she has already given him back what he wants, but he does it anyway. This killing is, at last, the purest expression of his power and the real purpose of that power. A murderer: this is what he is when the mask of duty is stripped away. If he ever seemed to be more than that it is because society, in employing him to do its dirty work, gave him a stage on which to enact his mad bloody fantasies on the bodies of real people. His fantasies are the fantasies of his employers: his lost self and the corpses he piles up for his masters are sacrificial offerings, the highest price that can be paid for the ennobling of raw human meanness.

The Artist's Daughter

2011-06-03T22:44:00.002-04:00

Philip Guston's daughter pays a surprise visit to her father one winter, to introduce him to his new grandson. The baby has had health problems, and her marriage is breaking up. On the second night at the family place in Woodstock, where Guston has his studio, this scene occurs:

"How long were you planning on staying?" Philip asked gruffly the next evening. He was facing away from me, chopping vegetables to make a Chinese dinner for us. Suddenly struggling with tears, I couldn't answer his question. Was he really asking me to leave, so soon? I held the baby in my arms, more tightly, for comfort.

My father turned and looked at me, with that anguished, hooded look of his I dreaded. "Oh God," he said. "I thought you understood by now how I feel about my work." He strode out of the kitchen, onto the back porch, and across to his studio.

When David was asleep again, I slipped out the back door. ....

[Philip] was sitting in his chair, staring at his last painting, a cigarette drooping from his mouth. We argued. I wept. More open about my feelings than I had ever been, I told my father why I'd come, what I wanted from hm. All the time I was talking, a part of me hovered nearby, listening, somewhat aghast at the words that were coming out of my mouth. The rawness and immediacy of my own child's needs, the urgency of his cries to be fed and held, the hospital vigils--all those frantic hours of worry had altered my perspective somehow, made me brave where I hadn't been brave before. I knew what was important now, and it wasn't Art.

But it didn't matter, really. I could see Philip felt terribly guilty, but that didn't change anything. "I was working when you came, for the first time in weeks," he said. "It's been so hard for me, recently, to do anything, to feel that I--" He stopped and looked at me. He rubbed his lip with his thumb.

I stared back at him. Ordinarily, I'd have been solicitous, eager to hear his troubles.
He sighed. "Look, Ingie. I'm sorry. Really, I am. You don't seem to realize what an interruption this visit is." Then after a pause, relenting. "But I did enjoy last night."

"So did I," I said.

"Yes. Well. Maybe we should go back and finish dinner."

I left the next morning. As the bus pulled away, I felt an enormous sense of relief. And then loss--the terrible loss that accompanies saying at last what you have to say, and not having it matter.

From Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston.

The Other Gods

2011-06-02T17:33:00.001-04:00

When I was about 8 years old my grandmother gave me a simply enormous Webster's dictionary. It was a doorstop, about five inches thick. At the back, after all the definitions of words, were several more specialized dictionaries. My favorite was the dictionary of Greek mythology. I used to read through this--each entry was the name of a character or deity and a little summary of their story. And of course if I read about, say, Theseus, then I'd go read about the Minotaur at his entry, and then Medusa, and so on, and of course putting the stories all together. I read this part of the dictionary a lot.

The one thing I had a hard time understanding was what I now could describe (but couldn't then) as the amorality of the gods. Up through this time in my life I had gone to little Anglican schools where we sang hymns in the morning like "All Things Bright and Beautiful," and "Praise Him, Praise Him," and "Little Drops of Water" and "Immortal, Invisible." I did not believe a word of it, but I have a lingering affection for those hymns, and for years I could not shake the idea that if there were a God He would be nice to children and puppies and liked beautiful scenery.

So it was unsettling to read the Greek myths and find that there was, for example, a God of the Underworld who kidnapped Persephone, and I thought she was very foolish to eat the pomegranate seeds and cause so much inconvenience (I had never experienced winter, but from where I sat reading it seemed like a pretty harsh punishment, all things considered). Or Hera; what were you supposed to think of this jealous and vindictive personage? My favorite was Athene, but after all with Greek gods you can't just settle on one; you have to take the whole lot or none. It's polite. You can't just pull things to pieces. So these gods took up residence in my imagination--which was fine because they were fun, they were interesting, and they were only troublesome when I tried to make them fit some other model of good and evil. And this I didn't feel any compelling need to do. The general rule seemed to be "Don't get on their bad side," but then there were so many ways to get on their bad side. By not letting them catch you when they wanted to seduce you, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or giving them backchat, or showing off. Or by being born, like Oedipus.

As deities they seemed flawed, but powerful, and they certainly knew how to live it up. Compared to them the god of my churchgoing playmates (distant cousins, neighbors, and a few schoolmates) just seemed crazy mean. I don't mean the one I learned about in school, but the one they learned about from their parents. These children seemed to live in the apprehension of beatings and hellfire. With respect to the former, I regarded their fathers with awe, and was struck dumb with shyness in their presence, afraid that some minor unconscious infraction might cause one of them to start laying about him with a slipper or a belt. These playmates would occasionally try to impress upon me the threat of damnation and hell, but it just wouldn't stick. It was boring, and, I sort of instinctively felt, too mean to take seriously.

None of this affected me personally, except that when these various strict fathers came home from work in the evening it was usually less fun over at the friend's house.

When I read Milton's Nativity Ode, I always feel sorry for the pagan gods...

XIX,

The Oracles are dumm,
No voice or hideous humm
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shreik the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathed spell,
Inspire's the pale-ey'd Priest from the prophetic cell. [ 180 ]

XX

The lonely mountains o're,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent,
With flowre-inwov'n tresses torn
The Nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

XXI

In consecrated Earth,
And on the holy Hearth,
The Lars, and Lemures moan with midnight plaint,
In Urns, and Altars round,
A drear, and dying sound
Affrights the Flamins at their service quaint;
And the chill Marble seems to sweat, [ 195 ]
While each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat.

XXII

Peor, and Baalim,
Forsake their Temples dim,
With that twise-batter'd god of Palestine,
And mooned Ashtaroth,
Heav'ns Queen and Mother both,
Now sits not girt with Tapers holy shine,
The Libyc Hammon shrinks his horn,
In vain the Tyrian Maids their wounded Thamuz mourn.

...though I admit I wouldn't miss Moloch. Why couldn't they have been left alone to take care of things like Keeping the Stovewood Dry and Not Letting the Cottage Cheese Go Bad Just When I Felt Like Having Some?

I have a few things I read regularly to tune up my morals and generally refocus the big picture: Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, Persuasion, and Sophocles's Theban plays. Yes, this is a strange selection. No accounting for tastes, I guess, though I keep trying.

Reading and rereading Greek tragedy, in which those stories I read as a child were fleshed out, the characters given human voices, I reached the point where I understood, at least in literary terms, something about the not-so-good-but-still-great Greek gods. Or maybe it would be more right to say, I at least understood something of what these playwrights understood about the gods. I could see, for example, how Medea rationalizes her crime, talks herself into it, and how reason is put to the service of the mad jealousy that's really driving her. It's the same thing with Clytemnestra, in Agammemnon. It's the plausibility of their craziness that's so scary.

Or, by contrast, Oedipus coming to the absolute worst of self-knowledge and finding at last a sublime dignity and blessedness there, and you watch it sort of flame up in him over the course of the play as he gets stronger and more lucid each minute. Again, the presence of something invisible and powerful. You might say that his self-knowledge is the polar opposite of the madness of Medea; by it he becomes a divinity, by her lack of it she becomes a monster.

And still, there is so little of intention or will either way; one is always in doubt of one's power because, as the plays so powerfully illustrate, the gods are always just out of sight, their intentions are not revealed clearly, you don't know what is you and what is them, and that is, in a sense, what it is to be human. This is a much more interesting idea to me than the idea that so-and-so had a catastrophe because he got too big for his britches. So while Clytemnestra is making her perfectly reasonable arguments for murdering her husband while he's taking a bath, you realize that the arguments themselves indicate and invoke the presence of whatever divine power drives that crazy idea.

I got that. But it still wasn't personal.

Personal is when I realized I'm up against it too, I mean, up against forces in my own self, that distract me, that make me afraid or insecure or angry; OK I don't go murdering people in baths, but I murder time like nobody's business. A worry takes possession of me and I have to fight to get out from under it. A feeling tugs and tugs at my mind and won't let me settle down and concentrate on work I want to do. Or even stranger things. I remember years ago, not long after I had settled down into domestic life with The One, sitting down to read one afternoon, "Well, here we are, this is it and isn't it nice?" and after half an hour or so, instead of feeling contentment, I had panic, confusion, shortness of breath, and a desire to run like hell out of the house and never come back, a feeling of doom. I didn't run, but I was never quite at ease after that. And who hasn't had to talk themselves out of being in love at one time or another?

After all the excitement there you are with the slog back into your right mind, one foot in front of the other, day after day, in the hope of some small showing of grace from anywhere. The first virtue is endurance. This time last year I was in Sardinia.

Borrowed Finery

2011-05-28T10:58:00.000-04:00

THE BIRD
by Henry Vaughan

Hither thou com’st ; the busy wind all night
Blew through thy lodging, where thy own warm wing
Thy pillow was. Many a sullen storm
(For which course man seems much the fitter born)
   Rained on thy bed
   And harmless head.

And now as fresh and cheerful as the light,
Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing
Unto that providence, whose unseen arm
Curbed them, and clothed thee well and warm.
   All things that be, praise him ; and had
   Their lesson taught them, when first made.

So hills and valleys into singing break,
And though poor stones have neither speech nor tongue,
While active winds and streams both run and speak,
   Yet stones are deep in admiratiòn.
Thus Praise and Prayer here beneath the sun
   Make lesser mornings, when the great are done.

For each enclosèd spirit is a star
   Inlighting his own little sphere,
Whose light, though fetched and borrowed from afar,
   Both mornings makes and evenings there.

TW

2011-05-27T21:55:00.000-04:00

Another drive-by image by my brother. I'm just putting them up here till he decides to set up his own site. I like this one.

Photo by Yawn Penso

Merely Personal

2011-05-25T17:29:00.002-04:00

I was living in Nevis, had been living there for about five months. For most of those months I had my head down, working almost alone to produce a newspaper every week. The newspaper office was in a building at the end of a dead-end road just outside of town. On production nights I'd be in there all by myself, with the door open (it wasn't air conditioned at first) and swarms of bugs coming around the lights. If I closed the door it got suffocatingly hot. I was sending copy to St. Kitts, to my friend Roger, who was the page designer, and then sending each page to the printer in St. Maarten. Some nights I wouldn't get done until 3 a.m. Then I would drive back to my little apartment in town. I was still getting over the attack, and I remember that one night I came home and the gate to the property didn't look right. I called the police and had them do a look-over of the apartment and the yard before I would even enter the gate. I did not have any debate with myself about this; I simply didn't want to get attacked again and if I looked like an idiot then fine. They found nothing, and I was all right. Then the donkey spider moved in. This is a spider approaching the size of a tarantula. And I don't know if you've noticed this but spiders are fiercely territorial. My apartment had two bedrooms, one on each side of the living room. The one on the side that also had the bathroom was the bigger one, and that was where I'd been sleeping. This donkey spider decided that he (she) liked that side. So I'd be getting ready for bed and there would be this spider, the size of a mouse, rearing up on its hind legs at me. I let it have the big bedroom and moved into the small one.

Chickens came into the back yard in the mornings. Once I bought some cracked corn and scattered it for them, whereupon they all took fright and didn't come back for weeks.

Over this four months there was little time for anything but work on the paper. But things began to let up at last, and I began to get out and meet people. One night I was out at a popular beach bar, drinking with some locals and tourists. The tourists were this English couple, middle-aged, very droll and kind and full of good humor. In the group was also the Crazy Englishman. He sat listening, silent, through most of the conversation. I only remember one contribution he made to the conversation, but it was memorable. He suddenly announced, a propos of nothing that I can recall, "I can retract my testicles into my body--AT WILL."

Well, then we were running into each other other nights, and pretty soon we were going out, because he was really funny, and he had a sort of rough gallantry that was charming. Also he got along with the locals, which a lot of expats didn't know how to do. Pretty soon we were a regular item. And then one day he just pulled the plug. I was crushed. Totally bottomed out. And I still had a newspaper to run, stories to report and write, and the whole ordeal of production. On one of the nights when we would have gone out, I found myself alone at home.

I had moved from the tiny apartment to a small house in the hills on the windward side of the island. It was fresh and cool up there, you got the benefit of the trade winds but without the harshness and salt you would get if you were down at sea level. It was green, too, lush, quiet. Across the street was a rum shop, a nice rum shop run by a father and daughter. On Sunday afternoons I could hear the slap of dominoes from my porch. Next to the rum shop lived my friend Quentin the BeeMan. I knew other people in this neighborhood, which was so beautiful, and I felt safe there. So did Sweetie, who made friends with my downstairs neighbor Mike, a gentle person; she would flirt with him for hours. In the mornings I had my coffee watching the clouds chasing each other across the sky, and the way that it made the blues of the sea constantly changing, all shades of blue from silvery to purple to green, this continuous movement of color. That sea lay between Nevis and Montserrat. I could see the sunlight bounce off the tin roofs of the houses on Montserrat, and the plume of steam from the volcano.

But I was alone that night with this sadness and pain, and the wind was howling all round the house. And without going into a lot of detail, here's what I got out of it:

I thought falling in love was the way to it. I'd meet that Right Guy and we'd be all in all to each other and it would be perfect and I would never feel insecure or have the desire to bolt again, or all the irritating ambivalence in between those two extremes. But Right Guy somehow kept turning out to be Wrong Guy, with much blood spilled. The one thing I never did was ask myself what I wanted. "I want whatever you want, [insert name here]!" would have been the answer. Except I didn't want what he wanted.

There are people who think they won't be happy unless they get enough money to be able to buy all the things that supposedly make people happy. I've never believed this; I always figured that the best resource I had for making me happy is literature. Because for one thing then you can learn that a lot of the things that make you happy don't need money to realize them. Money buys security and luxuries, that's it. But happiness comes from relationship--to oneself, to other people, to nature, to being. If you wait for money or some other shit to get solved you're cheating yourself of the happiness that is mysteriously folded into almost everything. Well, I understood this about money but I didn't understand that it is also true about "love." But I began to understand it that night in Nevis, when I found myself very very alone and in much agony of spirit.

All these things Right Guy was supposed to get me--why couldn't I get them for myself? Since then this has been the big question for me. And I don't just mean material things. Do I want loyalty? How do I get loyalty? By offering loyalty. Do I want some space around me, some solitude to think and work in? Then make that space. Do I need to write? Write now. Paint? Go out and paint. Do I want kindness? OK I'll practice being kind. Want someone who can forgive? Then forgive people. Want someone to whom I can express my feelings about things? Then speak my mind truthfully and see who listens. Whoever it scares off, let them go. I needed to provide these things for myself, or else I could never have them from anybody else. It was up to me to make this world my home. Life in Nevis after that night improved almost immediately. Of the entire time I lived in St. Kitts and Nevis that was the happiest stretch of it and it was glorious--totally insane but glorious. In some ways it was one of the happiest periods of my life.

In addition Crazy English guy came back into the picture, but by the time he did so I had given up any attachment to him--it had simply fallen away. We still went out and played together, but it was for fun. We went on hikes; we explored ruins; we went to rum shops; we went out dancing; to Sunday dinner at another beach hangout; we drove down to the big pasture where someone kept a herd of tame and very beautiful Brahmin cattle, and admired them and petted the big, tame, gentle bull. We went to the races. It all felt very normal, even when he got crazy jealous and acted like a maniac. At those times he would try his best to frighten me and I would stubbornly refuse to be frightened. Something genuinely friendly persisted. Once, after one of these jealous fights, he invited me, with great remorse and formality, to dinner. I went to his house, and he had made these little open-faced cheese and ham sandwiches and carefully cut each slice of cheese into the shape of a heart. I think it worked because I wasn't "in love" with him and because, crazy as he was, you could trust him, you knew that he knew what loyalty was. I had identified loyalty as one of the things I wanted to have in my life. And loyalty was not complicated between me and him; it was simply the mutually acknowledged right of one to shake the truth out of the other for the sake of getting along.

I had begun to define what I wanted, and this seemed to change the whole field of play. Bad things still happened, and it wasn't always comfortable there, but I was all right. What you want in the world you have to imagine and make. The work wasn't finished but it was begun.

Once when I was in grad school I was talking to Al Stephens--whining to him, I'm pretty sure, about my miserable failure to be a disciplined writer. "What you need is a subject," he said. That was more than 20 years ago. I still struggle with subjects. I rarely seem to have anything given to me. I think my subject is literature; literature as an object of experience, not as an object of knowledge.

Literature as an object of trade gossip, or as an object of the attentions of middlebrow cliche-slingers, is of no interest to me. I don't find I share anything with these people--not even the same universe probably. I mean, Do you see me voluntarily associating with the sort of people who need Stanley Fish to "keep them honest"?

I suppose there's politics. There are people who have really strong political instincts and see the world in a terms of politics and write well about it, and this is very useful. I am not sure I could do that, because I am lazy, and then I realize that the only political writing I like is the kind that has literary qualities. The rest might as well be reports from Dow Jonse. My lit major way of looking at things keeps prevailing over every other way of looking at things. What I always seem to get at the end is literature. And literature, like all experience, happens to one person at a time. I write in defense of the point of view of that one person, or in celebration of it. It's the ground of everything. That the person, a lot of the time, in these pages, happens to be me is only a function of the quiet tenor of my life, the fact that I don't get out much. Sorry!

Normal

2011-05-25T14:36:00.002-04:00

The neighborhood that I want to move to reminds me of the Caribbean. The houses are all mismatched: different sizes, ages, colors, and less of that suburban putty colored paint that I loathe. I like junk in front yards and on porches, I like seeing people sitting on porches, strangely garbed, smoking cigarettes and watching traffic. If you walk around you smell cooking--maybe it's chile verde. It is utterly without pretensions, but when you turn a corner from what street to the next you never know what you'll see.

Photo by John Ward

The people who live there are not rich. They improvise. Or they fill their front yards with gnomes, green ceramic frogs, and a Bathtub Mary. My friend John and I went walking around there on Sunday and he taught me a new verb: "to Home Depot" as in (looking at a house) "they don't seem to have Home Depot'd it to death." He took this photo with my iPad.

The Sofa Wars--New Season

2011-05-16T17:31:00.000-04:00

For readers new to this series, first there was the red sofa. Everybody liked the red sofa. Sweetie pretty much lived on it in Germantown. When we moved to the Tick Ranch and we were all alone out there just the three of us, after dinner what the dogs preferred was that I should sit in the middle of the red sofa with Misha on one side of me and Sweetie on the other, laptop on my lap and the TV on.

But by the time we left the Tick Ranch the red sofa had become such a smelly loathsome object that it really made no sense to keep it. So the red sofa went on to the Sofas' Graveyard. A friend donated a foam loveseat that was lightweight (I could lift it all by myself) and folded out into a bed. This was when the sofa wars started to heat up because there was only room for one person and one dog on it--provided the dog was not Misha, who was a little fat at the time. She is a lot fat now, kibble-stealing hog that she is.

There was never any question of the two dogs sharing the loveseat, because they get along by maintaining a certain distance. The rules of personal space between the two of them are subtle, complex and subject to all sorts of exceptions and riders. But at any rate one of them was don't share the loveseat. Sweetie generally monopolized the loveseat, but occasionally of an evening Misha would get up there and then somehow the rest of the living room would become somehow--uncomfortable. Something was wrong, and after a while you'd realize that the uncomfortableness was emanating from Sweetie, mysteriously, silently and odorlessly and colorlessly. And you couldn't figure out what it was. Then Misha would get down off the sofa, to get a drink of water or stretch out on the cool of the wood floor, and Sweetie would hop onto the sofa and within a minute the invisible whatever-it-is that was making everybody nervous would stop.

After she rendered that sofa into an unspeakable object I had to get rid of it. I don't really have room in my apartment for a big smelly piece of furniture that only the dogs can use. Except the recliner. And the recliner is going. Even Misha won't sit on it any more and I would advise any human against it.

But one must sit somewhere. So the last round of the sofa wars was the purchase of a sofa-loveseat combo made of imitation leather. The thick, rubbery kind. And I was happy to see that the dogs HATED it. Sweetie got up there once and then got down with a look of disdain and loathing on her face that would have made me laugh if I didn't feel slightly guilty. Misha just looked tragic, which is her general response to all adverse circumstances not involving potential attackers. She would sit up there occasionally, but she's given that up.

To compensate, I bought them new dog beds and they quite like those. They are unclear on the concept of "Big" and "Small" but Misha doesn't mind sort of draping herself over Sweetie's little donut-shaped dog bed like a shipwrecked person clinging to a life preserver. And Sweetie can stretch out at full length in Misha's.

The main problem with the sofa and loveseat is that I hate them too. They are uncomfortable and cluttery, and while they might look nice in some sleek minimalist sort of environment they just look ugly among my bookshelves. So I think they have to go. Of course the presence of the two moochers means that I will never spend a lot of money for a sofa. Probably wouldn't anyway. I know what they want. They want another big comfy sofa where we can all sit together like in the good old days at the Tick Ranch. I would like a comfy sofa so I can sit in my living room like a human being, not like the leader of a dog pack. You can see there is some conflict here, and this is a conflict that unfortunately the dogs have been winning pretty steadily. My house is the last stop before the landfill for any sofa. It is hard to be motivated to buy one when this is the reality of it. Nevertheless, I ought to do it. But I kind of feel sorry for the sofa.

Snap

2011-05-15T22:48:00.000-04:00

I promised my brother that if he sent me this photo I'd post it here. A plane buzzed him as he was driving this empty stretch of road, and he caught a picture of it next to that mysterious sign.

Photo by Yawn Penso

Honk if You Know Someone Who Has Suffered from...

2011-05-14T08:33:00.002-04:00

Limerence. Don't miss the wikipedia page link either. I notice that at the end of it a new footnote informs us that David Brooks of the New York Times has written on the subject in his new book, The Social Animal. I believe that that may be the most unappealing thing I have ever read about a book. I mean it's somewhere on a par with overhearing that last night the fried earthworm appetizers at Uncle Bluto's House of Fish Offal and Accidental Digit Amputations were a little soggy and underdone.

The God of Poetry Wears Loud Shirts

2011-05-13T13:29:00.002-04:00

In response to a query from a friend about the short post preceding this one:

Carolyn, everything in that little piece is true. I mean, it is an account of actual experience. Experience of what? Grace, I guess. It assumes, first, that there is no meaningful distinction between the exotic on one hand and the everyday casual on the other—it’s imagination that is either working or not working. It’s about my complicated feelings about the island landscapes and seascapes which get inside my gut like nowhere else on earth--even places of more natural beauty. But for all this intense feeling about nature that I have when I’m there, it is, like everywhere else, a casual and everyday kind of place. I know nothing duller than the capital city of a small Caribbean island on a Sunday afternoon.

So this is kind of about how your possible happiness can come by a sort of grace, unsought, not as a solution to anything but just existing of its own right like nature. It comes among the ordinary things like the dude who promises to call but never calls, it comes among flat tires and laundry and all the things that need solving, but it does not come by solving them—unless the Gods of What We Want happen to be agreeable. And that is the great thing about it, it's what your aliveness is actually about, but I didn't understand this at the time. It was a fleeting experience of being in love, not with the sleeping man, but with being. There is no “why.” It just is. And being in love with being means finding a way to love the dull and ugly bits as well, the everyday, to find the whatchamacallit—Holy Spirit if you will or god of poetry—resident among them. You could say that the feeling of loss of grace, as chronicled by so many poets (Herbert, Wordsworth, Hopkins come to mind) is the conviction that for some reason you don’t have it within you to get that love of being, that you’ve lost something, you’re cut off. Being in love with someone is like the next best thing, and sometimes it is the best thing. (However, if you feel and suddenly express a sudden surge of love for being, you don’t have to waste weeks afterwards trying to figure out how to talk the fucker down out of a tree--which, it is probably safe to assume, is a waste of time anyway.) The solitude I feared, then, was full of promise; that’s what came in through the window that day, and something in me was yearning for it but feeling unworthy of it.

This thing occurred during a very unhappy time in my life, eight years ago, and although the experience impressed me I didn't know what it meant or what to do with it. Over all these years this experience kept trying to fit in somewhere--should it be in a novel, in an essay? I mean, I’ve tried putting it to various uses like that and while these experiments were fun they didn’t let me feel finished with the matter. Whenever I try to “use” anything it doesn’t work. Maybe one doesn’t finish. I put a man-of-war bird in this version and then I took the man-of-war bird out again. The man-of-war bird is a whole other story.

I am able to wholeheartedly welcome its persistence in my mind. That persistence, it occurred to me just recently, was part of the gift.

The "I'll call you" is a reference to the other party in the piece, the sleeping man, who always used to say, "I'll call you," but would never call. I mean you’d be walking down the street and “Beep! Beep!” he’s sticking his head out of his car window, “I’ll call you!” The call never came. This line is a joke at his expense.

You have to be unhuman sometimes for a while; be a man-of-war bird or just nothing. My vision of what that's like is the Caribbean, the sea there, perhaps because that experience was so common in my childhood.

See how long and boring this is compared to that?

Thank you note in response to an invitation to the beach (reconstructed and reposted)

2011-05-13T13:06:00.002-04:00

Dear J--,

On that windward coast, that afternoon, the god of poetry came barging into your room like a loud man in a loud shirt calling us to a loud party where he’d already had three beers. You slept beside me. Your skin touched my skin. You didn’t notice that either. I followed the loud man out the window into that sky. I had no word for that blue, but that was all right; I did not need a word. I was studying the conjuration of things: this blue inside the reef, that other blue outside the reef, the brown-ochre reef itself below the line of the whitecaps. The sea-blast rushed on to the shore, shaking the coconut leaves and the hibiscus bushes, losing itself in the scrub and never quite finding the village. It left salt in your room, there to touch and taste, a fine film, a crystalline grit, a light corrosion of metal, working quietly, secretly, as if I had asked in my prayers for love and faith and accidentally got salt instead.

Funny, after all that came after, this is what stays. I’ll call you.

Your friend,

K.

Oh Ick

2011-05-11T10:06:00.000-04:00

Boy, if you ever want to get depressed just take a dip into the comment spam folder on your blog. I'd like to hose mine out and wash it with bleach and then maybe just burn it down.

Shiny Things

2011-05-05T23:31:00.000-04:00

The old Karl Bohm recordings of Mozart's operas are still my favorite. All the time I spent with them really paid off in the pleasure I get from them now. This trio is such a pretty thing it could be a piece of pop music--and probably is in some mashup with Julio Yglesias or Sting and one or more of the various tenor triplets, perhaps in the cheap CD bin as "brunch music" or "music to get over romances with." What I got from the time I spent with Mozart's operas, listening to them over and over and over like an obsessed person, is having all the context around something like this, so that it comes at me riding the big wave of the story and all that the music has been sort of building and working the whole time. And that's what I want: the whole thing. It's this huge complete, full experience of feeling, and with Mozart the feeling is just never wrong. If it seems wrong, it's because the stagecraft or the diction or the acting is wrong. But the feeling in the music is never wrong. It comes at you with this generosity, so alive, so agile.

The more I write, the more it becomes apparent that the only reason for me to do it is to do it as I want. I mean, not all that long ago I used to envy people who had cool writing jobs. Oh wow, you travel to tourist destinations and write about luxury hotels? How come I could never find some such gig as that? It took me a while to notice that while I envied them the fact of being paid to write whatever they wrote, I didn't envy them what they wrote. I didn't read Miss Thing's luxury hotel blurbage and think, "Gee I wish I'd written that." I just thought it might be nice to have a free couple of nights at some hotel and spend the time writing. It took me a while to notice, too, that what I wanted to write on this imaginary fabulous gig was my own stuff--which no hotel would pay me for.

Movement is freedom for me, and when I get a taste of it I could probably spend my whole time just writing. In fact some of my best journeys are those I've made alone, like my trip to Dominica, in which I just wrote indiscriminately everything. And that's the kind of travel writing I like to read too. A friend today asked me if I had read Lawrence's "Sea and Sardinia" and in answering him (yes, often) it occurred to me that Sea and Sardinia was the most perfect travel book. There is such a long drop to the next travel book, it is really incomparable. The best of the ones at the bottom of that long drop are clever, or competent (defining "competent" very loosely) but they are not a sustained work of heightened passionate attention of a genius at the peak of his literary (read: perceptive, expressive, combined). Sea and Sardinia is genius. It's proof that genius exists and doesn't always look like Einstein. I envy that. And so I've learned to let the lesser temptations of writing go. I did not become a magazine feature writer, turning out smart things for the New Yorker.

In the lonely hours of yesterday morning when the Yogi Bedtime Tea wore off (4 a.m.) I woke up and was chatting online with a close relative on the West Coast, who keeps strange hours. He's figuring a lot of things out and he sorta wants to write, because when he talks with people about them he makes them uncomfortable--he's driven by an appetite to figure things out and to get it out and put it in play. This scares people. I encourage him of course. Anyway he asked me if I'd ever started writing and then got scared of where it might take me. That was making him hesitate, he said. At first I didn't understand the question and then I realized that that fear kept me from writing and made it painful and humiliating, for years. And I had forgotten how huge it was! That was when I was very much inside of the belief that I was somehow obligated to write things that other people had already imagined. And hearing someone else speak of that fear, that balkiness at the mind's desire to go where it wanted--I was able to look at it with some detachment. When I was younger it seemed like stupidity--my stupidity and incapacity. In him I see it as intellectual honesty and a prudent fear of uncharted territory. But I've been hanging out in that uncharted territory for some time now and I don't find it scary at all. I wade out into those scribbled-up notebooks and I haul something up onto the beach that doesn't look half bad. I have to accept that it's a slow business, that I write some things over and over again, that I could die and leave this big mess of ink for someone else to deal with, whatever. I don't care. I just go on. It's the medium in which every night I try to put myself right with the world, and the end result, I hope, is just a smidge more wisdom and some writing that I can respect. I say that now; when I'm actually writing I don't even think about that. I just think about what I'm writing about. Jesus, what a relief!

Out of the process, and sometimes even to order, I find I've produced something that I can share, and then I'll see what happens with that if I move it out into the world. But I'm not trying very hard to move it out. I should try harder, probably.

Who cares about this stuff anyway? Who wants it? How can it change anything? That's what my relative asked me, when I told him it stopped being scary after a while. I told him that the timeline for change by art is longer than the one for other things. You put it out there so that it can create the desire for it. You do not dispute with the rest of the world whether you have the right to create what you created. You just assert your right by letting this thing walk around on its own and live its own life, let it create the space it needs. And that does make a change.

There is no setup for the good; if you want it you have to make it. And you have to be unafraid of solitude. Not solitude as in no mate or pet or relatives, but that other solitude; the one that makes you retreat from the path your own thoughts want to take because you don't see anybody else already there.

From the Notebooks

2011-05-03T03:46:00.000-04:00

It was the man who claimed to have had this experience who told it to a group of people one Sunday afternoon at the beach bar. There is a village called C-- on the windward side of the island, just east of the airport. Once upon a time it was a way station for pioneers - the rich pioneers of the island’s tiny ruling class. They once lived in the capital, mainly on the heights at the west end of town. Then they moved to the Northern edge of town. Then they moved to an area a little further south of town, overlooking the east end of the harbor. They were driven on to C--, building new houses on the edge of the sea, their backs to the little village a half a mile inland. Here the sea-blast entered and got into everything, corroding metal, dulling varnish and leaving a fine grit of salt on every surface. But they might have borne with that, under the coconut trees, with the fresh air and the sea at their doors, at least until they were possessed once again with the need to move. What drove them out this time was not the advancing black middle class at their backs but the hurricanes that came roaring onto shore across their front yards and leveled their houses. So they moved to F-- Bay. They had been there for a few years when I arrived, but they were breaking ground on the steep, rocky, scrubby, arid hillsides at the very tip of the southeast peninsula, at the end of seven empty miles of winding road. After that, it was hard to see where they could go next.

The houses at C-- were never rebuilt--for one thing, it became the site of the new dump. It wasn’t a dump: it was a solid waste facility. South of the solid waste facility a new neighborhood was built, but set back a little bit further--only a little further--from the sea. But to the north, opposite dump, the rich never rebuilt. A dirt road ran between the fence and the abandoned ruins--sunbaked cracking foundations, the tree-lined driveways, a bit of balustrade separating one emptiness from another. There’s something about a ruin that draws people, or maybe it was the offchance that someone had balked at the dump fees and left something interesting or useful outside the fence. People liked to go poking around the ruins. Well, after all, who does not? They're like tide pools. I had a boyfriend once who, watching some people wandering among tide pools in California, said, "I'm always hoping I'll find a Rolex watch in one of those." At any rate this man, a taxi driver, mooching around the ruins at C--, and found a box. He opened it. Inside, he said, was a pile of American currency with a human head sitting on top of it. In fright and shock he flung the box from him. When he recovered his self-possession he looked in the box again and the eyes had popped open. At that he fled, not even taking the money, which he regretted because later, when he had had some time for reflection the box, the head, and the money were gone. The story was met with howls of laughter. It wasn’t true, and if it was he was a fool for not taking the money.
The taxi driver grew indignant; and swore it was true “A nice-looking Potegee man," he added, but the laughter got to be too much for him and he left in disgust.

Then there was the man whom I will call “Mr. Snuffalufagus” who paid a few visits. He was a returning national, one of many who retired to the island with a pension after years of working in the U.K. He lived alone in the house he had built with his savings, up in the hills somewhere.
He appeared at my office with a portfolio of documents and a strange story. While living in England he had worked as an agent for a rich Englishman who was interested in buying some land in F-- Bay. A piece of land had been found and the transaction was to go through but the seller’s agent, a person with political connections, had conspired to have the Englishman disappeared by a professional hit man whom Mr. Snuffalufaguss claimed to have seen in England - a handsome man in an expensive suit. Then they had altered the survey documents so that the piece of land was incorporated into a bigger piece that they owned, and destroyed all record of the existence of the Englishman’s piece as a separate parcel. It was a long complicated tale - which I have much simplified here - involving signatures and dates and stamps.
I promised Mr. Snuffalufaguss I would look into it, and I did. I went to the registrar’s office and spent hours with looking at land titles and surveys and transfer deeds related to the property but I couldn’t find anything amiss. When Mr. Snuffalufaguss appeared again in my office I told him so, and admitted that I was no expert in these matters and might have got a detail wrong or overlooked something. He seemed to think that that might indeed be the problem and he went over it all again. He was worried that the malefactors might be after him; a small plane had flown over his house. I went back to the registry office and looked at the documents again - again, nothing.
On his third visit Mr. Snuffalufagus told me, among other things, that he had passed some man digging on a road works project and knew that this meant that his pursuers and the CIA were about to act. He was sweating and in need of a bath. His shirt was rumpled and there was grime on the inside of his collar, and his eyes had a slightly feverish gleam. I realized at last that Mr. Snuffalufaguss was out of his mind. I got him out of the office somehow and never saw him again.
Now you can laugh at me for believing Mr. Snuffalufaguss for as long as I did, to the extent that I did. But the son of one prominent politician had famously disappeared years back. The killing of a police superintendent had never been solved; there were a couple of murder trials that dragged on for years in motions and countermotions with no prospect of any new evidence appearing to clear them up. There were skeezy land deals, then and now. There was the human hand, of unknown provenance, found in a bucket at the hospital. There were the people who told me stories of crooked share dealings, of Guyanese prostitutes, of shady offshore doings. Some of these stories were brought to me by people who had scores to settle, in the childlike conviction - true, probably, in retrospect - that the mere publishing of the story in the newspaper, without any kind of corroboration, would be a damaging blow to their enemies. But they always declined to be named as sources. Mr. Snuffalufaguss had at least brought me his bundle of incomprehensible papers.

Ruskin on Genius

2011-05-01T20:01:00.000-04:00

If you had a friend, for example, who went through the can of mixed nuts and picked out all the cashews and gave them to you, wouldn't you think that was sweet? Bob has gone through Ruskin and picked out a small volume of the very best bits so you don't have to search for them yourself and pick them out of the dull parts.

Love Bugs

2011-05-01T17:15:00.000-04:00

Photo by Tom

He blasts them with a hose.

Aubade

2011-05-01T13:44:00.000-04:00

Was I Wrong to Say That?

2011-04-14T22:17:00.000-04:00

So a couple days ago I was walking the dogs along the busy street two blocks over from mine. I was also talking on the phone. There is only sidewalk on this side of the street, which is narrow and very busy, and at that time of day has cars parked along it which makes it, of course, even narrower. The dogs stopped to sniff at some low bushes, and I stopped and let them. Suddenly this older woman stepped out from behind a hedge, where, as events suggest, she had apparently been lurking in wait, carrying a pink jacket, and started swinging the jacket furiously at their heads. I snatched the dogs out of reach. Here, edited for repetition, is the dialogue that ensued.

K: What the hell are you doing?

W: They were sniffing!

K: Yes, they were just sniffing!

W: I know what happens next! First they sniff and then they pee!

K: Well, you don't know that! What the--

W: Another dog just came by and did it!

K: And what does that have to do with me? Because of some other dog you're going to just step out and take a swing at my dogs? Who does that?

W: I wasn't going to actually hit them.

K: That is beside the point. You were rude. You saw me here, you could have said something, who the hell just comes out swinging...

W: I'm sick of dogs on my plants.

K: They're not on your plants, they're on the sidewalk!

W: You should walk them further away from my yard, then. I'm sick of dogs peeing on my plants.

K: (glancing around to see where on this street she was supposed to walk the dogs other than on the sidewalk and finding nowhere, has one of those flashes of all-consuming irritability like that one comic book character who was all just made of flames) There's nowhere else to walk, you fucking nutcase!

###

And then I went on my way, muttering similar strongly-flavored imprecations.

A Little Dream

2011-04-12T05:19:00.000-04:00

What a time we had! And then, too soon, it was time for you to go. We blew kisses at each other, you in the bus and me on the sidewalk. I watched it pull away and round the corner and I waited until I couldn't hear it, then I waited a little longer after that, the moment, listening as if it was the only bus there ever was.

Then things went back to normal. On my way to catch my train I lost my suitcase and passport; the train had not come or it had already left. This was impossible to determine because the station agent was a vampire and bore an eerie resemblance to George Jetson. I caught the very next train and soon we were speeding through deep forest, though not in the direction in which I wished to go. I arrived in the city (I am not sure which city--it seemed European) in time for the calculus exam on which so much was riding, although I still couldn't find the dog, and was distracted by several loose teeth. It is hard to write a calculus exam in ball point pen on a soggy flour tortilla. And then I had to pee. And do you know that every single restroom in that entire government building was broken or filthy or had the toilet or the door removed? You know how a nightclub toilet gets around 2 in the morning? It was one of the most epic instances of anyone having to pee of all time. I escaped from the flesh-eating zombies. Again. I found the hat of my dreams but it wasn't my size. All the other ones were ugly.

When are you coming to visit again? We could have another picnic.

Quiet Desperation

2011-03-29T12:10:00.000-04:00

Overslept. Stopped at Union Station for the post office. Back down to the platform to continue on the Metro, the train that pulled into the station had a sick passenger on it and was being offloaded. No one was to get on. Took a cab the remaining distance to the office (got caught in traffic and had to take a detour) and on the way saw this which was, it turns out, one block from my office and was over by the time I finished another errand, a cashier's check at the bank and the teller made two errors and had to redo the whole thing. And for some unfathomable reason this nice lady at the office, when I finally got here, a lady I don't know at all, started chatting away at me in the friendliest manner possible, quite charming, in Portugese. She was paying me compliments a plate I was holding. It wasn't my plate. I managed to smile and say, "Si," and escape. I'll be out of here for good before she finds out that I don't speak Portugese. My Ethiopian taxi driver's comment when I wondered about the cause of the smoke: "There are all kinds of people. Every morning when I wake up I thank God I am alive."

Natives Know it as "The Caribbean"

2011-03-26T08:33:00.000-04:00

Wonder how long it will take them to fix it.

Bus Ride 2

2011-03-16T17:53:00.000-04:00

My days begin in sorrow and woe and regret. I wake up between 2 and 4 a.m. and then lie around and read or write in bed, and then I doze off again and wake up much too late. In other words I oversleep almost every day but not really because of the waking up in the small hours thing. Then it's a mad scramble to get dressed and take the dogs out. The thing about walking these dogs is that they actually expect variety and interest in their daily life, so we don't walk the same route. Mischa is so used to the neighborhood now that she will actually continue to enjoy herself after 20 minutes or so (when we take a walk from somewhere we've driven in the car she can only go about 20 minutes before the anxiety makes her start looking for it and then you are fighting to drag her in any direction that is not toward the car), and Sweetie of course would happily roam all over the suburbs of DC if I were so disposed, and she is always hoping I am so disposed. Failing that, now that it is spring, she rolls out her whole repertoire of exceeding cutenesses to keep us out as long as possible. But nevertheless we must press on. Then it's home, and then I'm hurrying up the hill to the bus stop.

I know that terrible things happen all over the world but the feeling I get when I see the bus fly by the stop and me still half a block away is just horrible, it is like being rejected in love, only (mercifully) it doesn't last as long. So I get to the bus stop feeling crushed and stupid. My office mate, a level-headed young woman from Spain, says the feeling is remorse: "If only I had gotten out of bed a few minutes sooner! If only I had not stopped to look for [name non-essential thing]! If only I hadn't misplaced the [name essential thing]! And so there I am at waiting for the next bus.

All this would be bad enough but what makes it worse is that the buses are at least as unreliable as I am. I've waited out there for 20 minutes, which means it takes me longer to travel the 1.5 miles to the station than it does for me to ride the train all the way downtown. What's worse is that there is an alternative bus that comes a block away and takes a different, shorter route, and as I stand at the stop on the corner of my street I have to debate with myself whether I should hurry down the block to that stop and increase my chances--but what if the 12 shows up just as I'm in the middle of the block? Or, oh it's going to be here any second now, just wait! And so there have been times when, while waiting for the 12, I've seen two 25s go by. I don't know how I keep my sanity. I'm not alone in this frustration. There's a whole army of us who face this every day. I could list all my conjectures about the reason why the bus is so unpredictable but basically when I'm standing at the bus stop in the cold I'm pretty sure it's just that God hates me.

Well a couple mornings ago I waited oh I don't know 12-15 minutes or so for the bus (perhaps if I were a more exact observer of time I might be better at catching buses), and then I saw it, the 12, and, incredibly, right behind it, another 12. So apparenty the one that was supposed to get here at 8:45 got here at the same time as the one that was due 20 minutes later. The 8:45 didn't stop, but the 9:05 did, and so I was on my way. When I got downtown I stopped at the little bakery where I get coffee on my way to work and My Friend the Bakery Guy was there. He works the register, and we always chat a little, I'm not sure exactly when it started but for some reason our very brief conversations about nothing always seem to end in giggles. And now we call each other affectionate nicknames like "babe," and "kiddo" and "hon," and "dear", and the pace of the chat is just right. So I told him about the two buses arriving late that morning, and there really wasn't time to go into the kind of detail I've given you here but I can pack a lot of whining into a small space, you know. He listened to me, and then when I was finished he looked fixedly at me a moment and then said, "You're gonna let it go, right?" Of course I wasn't, but then, well, yes, what else could I do? "Yes," I sighed. "All right, then," he said approvingly. So the only reason I'm telling you this is because of what he said.

Bus Ride 1

2011-03-16T16:55:00.000-04:00

I got out of the Metro station quickly enough to be able to catch the bus that runs to my house. It was rather crowded and I was distracted and preoccupied and so found myself sitting in one of the back seats (they face inward, rather than forward) just as the toddler in the forward-facseat next to me began to scream. Opposite me was a Black Adonis of perfect manners. Next to me was a woman with a screaming toddler, for my sins, and this man spent a good part of the ten-minute ride smiling at the kid and trying to distract it. Not that scary smiling that creeps kids out but this sort of good-natured "Ah! There you are!" smile of recognition. It actually shut the toddler up by distracting him for a couple minutes. That was his way of dealing, compared with mine which was Crank up the iPod and Scowl. Then he, to my surprise, got off at my stop and as I stepped off the bus I almost collided with the passenger who had gotten off ahead of me (Mr Adonis was behind me) and this other passenger, pale and fat and looking somewhat unwell, was involved in some sort of contention or dispute with a signpost. The signpost was apparently not holding still long enough for him to grab it. He was fat and the sidewalk was narrow, and he kept sort of swaying slowly toward the post, grabbing it uncertainly, breathing heavily in deep concentration, and then, it appeared, he didn't know what to do next, and he'd lose his grip and have to start all over again. I watched this for about a minute and then I smelled the booze as in Whoanelly better get out of here so he doesn't vomit on my boots!, But Mr. Adonis was only aware of the struggle and not of the smell, and as I moved on I glanced back and saw him towering over the drunk man and heard him say, in a voice of the most unaffected gentleness and kindness, "Are you all right?"

The Peanut Gallery

2011-02-16T12:48:00.000-05:00

I have days when I find myself writing stuff in the notebooks that makes me think, as you, small, select, and precious readers, know all too well: Past it, brain cells turned to mush, over the hill and sliding down the side where everybody dumps all the plastic bottles and old mattresses and rusting car axles and fast-food containers and shopping carts.

The Life Force must be losing whatever brief and superficial interest it had in me; surely these labored banalities are the proof. All I've got is my brain, and look at what my brain is turning out! I think these things, and get moody and nervous and mildly depressed. And then, having temporarily lost my courage, I find ways to waste a lot of time in small quantities (on the Internet unfortunately), and if I am at home in the day I suddenly need a nap. This is what I do instead of bingeing on chocolate or handbags. This is the life of the Critic Without Portfolio. Am I necessary? As far as I can see, no.

THe harbingers are come. See, see their mark;
White is their colour, and behold my head.
But must they have my brain? must they dispark
Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred?
Must dulnesse turn me to a clod?
Yet have they left me, Thou art still my God.

Good men ye be, to leave me my best room,
Ev’n all my heart, and what is lodged there:
I passe not, I, what of the rest become,
So Thou art still my God, be out of fear.
He will be pleased with that dittie;
And if I please him, I write fine and wittie.

......

Yet if you go, I passe not; take your way:
For, Thou art still my God, is all that ye
Perhaps with more embellishment can say,
Go birds of spring: let winter have his fee,
Let a bleak palenesse chalk the doore,
So all within be livelier then before.

--George Herbert, "The Forerunners"

Maybe you remember this scene from Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth is returning home from her long stay with the Collinses.

``Now I have got some news for you,'' said Lydia, as they sat down to table. ``What do you think? It is excellent news, capital news, and about a certain person that we all like.''

Jane and Elizabeth looked at each other, and the waiter was told that he need not stay. Lydia laughed, and said, ``Aye, that is just like your formality and discretion. You thought the waiter must not hear, as if he cared! I dare say he often hears worse things said than I am going to say. But he is an ugly fellow! I am glad he is gone. I never saw such a long chin in my life. Well, but now for my news: it is about dear Wickham; too good for the waiter, is not it? There is no danger of Wickham's marrying Mary King. There's for you! She is gone down to her uncle at Liverpool; gone to stay. Wickham is safe.''

``And Mary King is safe!'' added Elizabeth; ``safe from a connection imprudent as to fortune.''

``She is a great fool for going away, if she liked him.''

``But I hope there is no strong attachment on either side,'' said Jane.

``I am sure there is not on his. I will answer for it he never cared three straws about her. Who could about such a nasty little freckled thing?''

Elizabeth was shocked to think that, however incapable of such coarseness of expression herself, the coarseness of the sentiment was little other than her own breast had formerly harboured and fancied liberal!

No one else knows what she is thinking. Apart from Jane and Mr. Darcy, it's hard to think of anyone in the novel who would care that she has had this moment of reflection. Only fiction can bring us to this place, inside of Elizabeth's own head, as it were. This is a representation of a single experience happening to one person. It is quite a complex experience; to detail all of the information, feeling, and experience that have brought Elizabeth to this point of self-awareness would take pages and pages. But you know Pride and Prejudice well enough, so you can put it together.

But there's no question: Elizabeth is questioning the feeling, not the language. She hasn't had to revise the facts; Mary King is still plain. Elizabeth is evaluating her own attitude. She finds herself guilty of having thought it perfectly reasonable to wish Mary King married to a man who does not love her so that he can have the use of her money. This is what shocks her--and the casual undeserved contempt for Mary King that it implies.

The choice for Elizabeth is not between being a hypocrite and being openly contemptuous. It is between feeling contempt and not feeling contempt.

Of course, it is not considered nice or polite or democratic to take the side of the paid critic (though, to be fair, she is paid very little) over the enterprising amateur who would like to shout anonymously on the Internet, but that’s precisely what is called for — unless, of course, the enterprising amateur writes better than the paid critic. The answer to the angry Amazon reviewer who mangles sentences in an effort to berate or praise an author is the perfectly constructed old-fashioned essay that holds within its well-formed sentences and graceful rhetoric the values it protects and projects. More than ever, critical authority comes from the power of the critic’s prose, the force and clarity of her language; it is in the art of writing itself that information and knowledge are carried, in the sentences themselves that literature is preserved. The secret function of the critic today is to write beautifully, and in so doing protect beautiful writing.

I didn't know there were sides. Did you know there were sides? How come only these? Did some other people get here early and take all the good sides? Because there is not much to choose between these two.

Forgive me, but I'm going to have to spend some time pulling this statement to bits. It one of a sort of panel of essays on criticism that appeared in the New York Times last month. The piece, by Katie Roiphe, is a timeless classic, a very nearly perfect specimen.

"It is not considered nice or polite or democratic..." You have to stop and gaze at this opening, because it is constructed with a breathtaking economy and slickness. When Ms. Roiphe uses the word "democratic" you must picture her making that quotation marks gesture with her fingers. It belongs in there with the other canting formalities we put on to make ourselves agreeable to other people. When we offer to share our chocolates with other people, it's only because it's considered polite, not because we take any pleasure in their pleasure. Who does? Come on, be honest!

We have to take her word for it that these people--the lady Catherine de Bourghs and Mr. Collinses of Ms. Roiphe's social universe, if you will--are quite without any ethical or humane view of the matter, as she doesn't raise that possibility at all. Paid book reviewing is in crisis and you must take her side. I mean criticism's side (I'm sure she was just kidding there). Stop listening to those mealy-mouthed hypocrites!

Everybody is driven by vanity, ambition, and the desire to cut a figure in the world, to profess opinions they don't have. And so you need to be told where to get the opinions that you are to profess as your own. Ms. Roiphe tells us what is not considered nice, polite, democratic, but she doesn't tell us who is making this judgment or why I should pay them any mind.

Why does she even hang out with such people? New York is a big place. I'm sure she could find lots of people who openly despise the opinions of those who haven't had all the advantages (educational, financial, and social) that float one into the exclusive real estate of the New York Times Book Review (it doesn't pay much, though!).

Perhaps she has found her real milieu, because the piece is a brave stand against the sort of riffraff you get nowadays. I never get tired of hearing about them, myself. (You can supply your own commentary on this poor fellow, if you like.) However, apart from the stare that the successful social climber bestows on the uncouth and filthy upstart breathing on his heels, there is a plan:

The answer to the angry Amazon reviewer who mangles sentences in an effort to berate or praise an author is the perfectly constructed old-fashioned essay that holds within its well-formed sentences and graceful rhetoric the values it protects and projects.

If I were literature I'd be all, like, "No, no, I'm fine, really! No need for you to come over at all!" Because this proposition is like the kindly neighbor who hears you have a cold and wants to bring you some of her special homemade chicken soup that tastes like ass.

More than ever, critical authority comes from the power of the critic’s prose, the force and clarity of her language; it is in the art of writing itself that information and knowledge are carried, in the sentences themselves that literature is preserved. The secret function of the critic today is to write beautifully, and in so doing protect beautiful writing.

And I like to know that an airline pilot can find the tip of his own nose with his index finger, but I don't actually believe that that's how he flies the plane. When I am filling the notebooks, and I find phrases like "force and clarity" creeping into my prose, that's when I know I have lost traction. That's when I see the gates of the Critic's Graveyard swinging open for me. As for "graceful rhetoric"--well, if you ever see me do that just take the pen away and put me in front of the TV till the Lord comes to call me away, is all I ask you.

Why should the critic's function be a secret? To preserve the franchise, I suppose, like being an Illuminati or a Mouseketeer. It is apparently essential for the critic to know that she is not like those people, The Entity Formerly Known as the Audience. Or possibly, just putting the word "secret" in a sentence helps to make it beautiful and mysterious. Just as putting the word "precisely" in a sentence makes it more precise, and writing "force and clarity" means you are writing with force and clarity. Although possibly she means that the critic's function is not a "kept" secret, just the kind of secret that exists because nobody cares. I've got lots of those; I can't give them away.

Being a custodian of beautiful sentences certainly sounds like a safe job, and I'd be the last person to offer to detain any critic who wants to gather up her skirts and her manuscripts and depart the fray, or as the libertarians say, Go Galt. By all means go! We'll manage without you somehow! But they never do go, do they? It's like this Chekhov story I just read where the daughter of a respectable widow runs off to "cohabit" with a neighboring landowner, who is, unfortunately, still married, though separated from his wife. The mother takes to her bed, of course, and there is an aunt in the house, and all we know about the aunt is that every day she orders the servants to carry her bags and boxes downstairs, and then at night, when she still hasn't actually left, has them carried upstairs again.

Also, beautiful sentences about what? Just beautiful sentences?

And then what?

I try writing beautiful sentences and--nothing. Apparently there are some people who can do it on demand. I can't. Perhaps it's a result of my degradation as a Critic. I do not get paid (not even a little, and in matters of literary judgment I am hopelessly accustomed to thinking for myself. It is one of the perks of being a literature major that I really enjoy. You'd have to pay me a lot to give it up--and no one has even made me an offer of a little. So it is harder for me to keep my mind up to that level of refinement. I cannot remember a time in my life when I could just summon up a beautiful sentence. Sometimes a beautiful sentence kind of sneaks up on me while I'm writing about a subject, but that seems to be the best I can do.

So circumstances seem to have placed me among the anonymous shouters of the Internet. Because I use swear words sometimes, and hell, I am one of those secrets nobody cares about. I was secret when secret wasn't cool, as it were. Whatever it is that is supposed to have happened to the Literary Critic and Book Reviewer--the loss of privileged status for one's opinions, the disappearance of an audience, the complete absence of demand for one's services, the fact that people who know little or nothing about literature come to their opinions about books and publish them without consulting me--has already happened to me. I am past fearing whatever it is that is to be feared from the knowledge that there are several billion people in the world who are not interested in what I do, or in how much I care about it. What have I to fear? I'm so low that when I want to find my intellectual and social inferiors I have to look upwards. I left and nobody even knew I was there, and I have no idea where I'm going. I got some money for criticism a few times. And now that I have reverted to amateur status I am not even enterprising.

My irrelevance is my own. It is, if you will, my real medium. I do not need to account for it by suggesting that it's because people write stupid reviews on Amazon. Answer what? It would be as if all my real painter friends were worried that my efforts at watercolor painting undermined their authority as painters, and needed to answer them. They don't paint in reaction to me.

The exclusive franchise of the paid literary critic is not a literary idea. It is a money-and-status-and-power idea. It is the critic worrying, not about literature, but about the status of the critic, which she conflates with the authority of the critic. So she finds a marker, a credential, "beautiful sentences," that will protect the critic's status, which she somehow thinks is the same as protecting literature. Because you can't actually damage Great Expectations by reading it and having wrong opinions about it that nobody cares about.

The status of the critic has always been in question. Because look, since we are calling a spade a spade and not being nice or polite: most professional critics are living off the prestige that was attained for criticism by a few great critics. They aren't adding to it. They do not know the origins of the literary capital from which they draw the small remittances that support their status.

It may seem that I am unkindly singling out this one writer for "berating" but the reason I was struck by this piece is because it is so superfically reasonable that it is representative of the voice of a whole industry--it is as perfect a specimen of professional cant as you could ever hope to see. It is the cant of the freshman composition teacher. It is the cant of the literary agent or editor who only wants authors who can write "great prose." (You don't want to know how long I puzzled over that one.) It is the cant of that one really tough teacher at Creative Writing School--everybody wants to get into his classes because he has contacts in the business and knows what editors want. It is the cant of the hack critic who reads the next product of the Creative Writing School teacher's workshop, the product that has made its way through the agent and the editor to the big table in the front of the bookstore where all the novels sound exactly alike and are about nothing. But the critic, who doesn't have the wit to know when she is bored, praises its competent execution--which is the only thing she ~~can~~ will allow herself to judge--and so her judgment reaches the dwindling number of readers who look to book reviewers to tell them what they are supposed to like.

To represent this system of "quality control" and your participation in it as some sort of heroic endeavor to keep up the values of literature is even more ludicrous than the image of the New York Times critic as cultural misfit and outsider. If you think you find any support for criticism by singling out some anonymous writer's awkward and naive prose in order to share a genteel titter of self-congratulation over it, or by sneering at the unknown young man in the coffee shop--whose thoughts, on the basis of his beard and his youth, you speculatively conjure out of your well-worn stock of received notions--you have stooped lower than I could ever reach, low as I am. If you had a meaningful vision of criticism, you would be too busy and intent on it to waste time in such cheap irrelevancies. But this is what you do with the privilege of the space you have been given, and I am going to conclude that this is what you think that space is for. These sneerings are vanity and they are meant to appeal to the reader's vanity--worse, to their fear of appearing to be identified with these two losers. That's how you recruit people to the side of literature in its time of crisis, is it? Nice. I'm sure Tolstoy would be impressed.

What happened to Balaam often happens to real poets and artists. Tempted by Balak's gifts, popularity, or by false preconceived ideas, the poet does not see the angel barring his way, though the ass sees him, and he means to curse, and yet, behold, he blesses.

This is just what happened to the true poet and artist Chekhov when he wrote this charming story "The Darling."

The author evidently means to mock at the pitiful creature — as he judges her with his intellect, but not with his heart — the Darling, who after first sharing Kukin's anxiety about his theatre, then throwing herself into the interests of the timber trade, then under the influence of the veterinary surgeon regarding the campaign against the foot and mouth disease as the most important matter in the world, is finally engrossed in the grammatical questions and the interests of the little schoolboy in the big cap. Kukin's surname is absurd, even his illness and the telegram announcing his death, the timber merchant with his respectability, the veterinary surgeon, even the boy — all are absurd, but the soul of The Darling, with her faculty of devoting herself with her whole being to any one she loves, is not absurd, but marvellous and holy.

It's Tolstoy's heart, not his theories of politics and the woman question, that move him to tears at this story even as he recognizes its comedy. What he understood about Olenka in this story you can see best in Anna Karenina. That quality of lovingly inhabiting the life of others is the greatness of Anna Karenina. When he wrote this piece he had pretty much given up on the kind of psychological and moral intuition that makes his best work so electrifying. It is the long-slumbering great artist in him that rises up--as the artist in Chekhov rose up and took charge of the story--to defend this poor dingbat Olenka from her creator's contempt and place her out of reach of the reader's contempt. He loves this story. He loves Olenka. It is all kinds of awesome. Not a word in it about beautiful sentences though. (You know, small and select readers, to find this passage online I had to wade through all sorts of inanities and stupidities about Tolstoy. I hope you appreciate it.)

If You Invite the Vampire Into Your House...

2011-02-11T13:18:00.000-05:00

Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, advisor to King Charles I, on the character of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, subject of Ben Jonson's great Ode:

...two things he could never bring himself to whilst he continued in that office [Secretary to the King], that was, to his death; for which he was contented to be reproached, as for omissions in a most necessary part of his place. The one, employing of spies, or giving any countenance or entertainment to them; I do not mean such emissaries as with danger would venture to view the enemy's camp, and bring intelligence of their number or quartering, or such generals as such an observation can comprehend, but those who by communication of guilt or dissimulation of manners wound themselves into such trusts and secrets as enabled them to make discoveries for the benefit of the State. The other, the liberty of opening letters upon a suspicion that they might contain matter of dangerous consequence. For the first, he would say, such instruments must be void of all ingenuity and common honesty before they could be of use, and afterwards they could never be fit to be credited, and that no single preservation could be worth so general a wound and corruption of human society as the cherishing such persons would carry with it....

[italics added--k]

Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion

The theory of interest as the exclusive master is false, but that does not prevent it from being very widespread. It even had a partisan of some stature--Napoleon himself. According to Constant, the Emperor's philosophy was reduced to that principle. Napoleon was "calculation personified" ("Appendice," 2, 159). "He did not look on men as moral beings, but as things" (Les Cent-Jours, II, 1, 206). "The conviction that mankind is devoted only to his interest, obeys only force, deserves only contempt," that was, according to Constant, Napoleon's judgment on men (I, 6, 130). And Napoleon's politics were founded on this concept of mankind: "If there is only interest in the heart of man, tyranny needs only to frighten him or to seduce him in order to dominate him." But Napoleon alone is not responsible for this deleterious doctrine. It was already practiced and promoted during the 18th century by the absolute monarchy, follower of a naive "Epicureanism;" in addition, it was professed by the materialist thinkers of the Enlightenment, who gravely affirmed that "man is motivated only by his interest." Finally, Napoleon was encouraged by the population itself, which liked to flatter those in power while expecting to be rewarded for doing so. The multitude "eagerly sought to be enslaved" (Conquete, "Appendice," 2, 260) and Constant was keenly aware that for twelve years he saw "only outstretched hands begging for chains" (Les Cent-Jours, II, "Huitieme note," 303).

In the final analysis, the falseness of the theory brought about Napoleon's downfall; at the same time, his downfall illustrates the falseness of the theory. "To know men, it is not enough to scorn them," Constant declared in a strong statement. He goes against the mainstream of Western thought that would suggest that the truth is necessarily alarming; politics based only on self-interest breaks down, even if this ruin comes about only over time. Here we see hints of the role reserved for scholars and thinkers--that of criticizing and improving the common representations of man and society. Napoleonic tyranny is at least partially due to the success of the philosophical theories reducing man to a being subject to the reign of self-interest.

Tzvetan Todorov, A Passion for Democracy: Benjamin Constant

A specialist is a man trained to perform a profession conscientiously but not necessarily honestly. Conscientiousness is a conventional way to escape the responsibility of an all-encompassing honesty. Honesty implies the responsibility of choice. Conscientiousness is the easy way to abide by certain conventional prohibitions. Conscientiousness is the opposite of art."

(italics in original)
John Graham, System and Dialectics of Art

You may view Exhibit A here. And yes, you must read Greenwald's piece.

Update: Fixed one spelling error.

New Year's Resolutions

2011-01-01T01:00:00.000-05:00

Resolutions:

1. (fill this in later)

2. (fill this in later)

3. (fill this in later)

4. (fill this in later)

5. Get laid.

6. (fill this in later)

7. (fill this in later)

8. (fill this in later)

9. (fill this in later)

10. Work on procrastination and leaving things till the last minute.

The Insomnia Sonnet

2010-12-25T12:20:00.000-05:00

27.
WEARY with toil, I haste me to my bed
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expir’d:
For then my thoughts—from far where I abide— 5
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see:
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view, 10
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee, and for myself no quiet find.

I tried white noise. That works for people? I could get that just from the furnace in my apartment. Or my neighbor warming up his diesel truck in the mornings. I don't get it. No, I tell you what, don't explain how it works, it will bore me.

I did fall promptly to sleep over the first two stanzas of Edward Young's Night Thoughts. So that's promising. It was madly popular in the mid 18th century. I want to know why, and maybe too why nobody reads them now.

I don't have much trouble falling asleep, to tell the truth. I have trouble staying asleep. I wake up at any time between 4 and 6, and then what do you do with those little odds and ends of time? I wish I were one of those people who wakes up before daybreak and brews a cup of organic chai and looks out the window at the neat slumbering flowerbeds and thinks organized thoughts about important things like policy. Or who perhaps spends the time--time that I spend trying to capture that extra hour of sleep that I feel the universe owes me-- composing neat, sparklingly original and timely handwritten Thank You notes. Or poems about their bird feeder.

This is not my favorite insomnia sonnet, though it sure opens well! I love it all the way up to line 6. Then I wonder why this sort of irony reflecting back irony at irony already seems slightly fusty and it hadn't even been around so long. It's like the last 8 lines just keep running back and forth in the same place. That sort of thing is at any rate much more bearable in the sonnets than it is in the plays. In the plays Shakespeare just runs amok. Small but highly select reader John W. called them "pun runs" when we used to teach. The whole sonnet for me is justified by that pair of lines "For then my thoughts--from far where I abide/Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee..."

Your Awesome Southern Soul Lyric of the Day

2010-12-04T19:00:00.000-05:00

...I need a man to quench my desires
And put a big old chestnut on my open fire.

"I Need a Lover for Christmas"--Sheba Potts-Wright.

Losing It

2010-12-01T07:53:00.000-05:00

I haven't had a book to be really excited about for some time. I've got things sort of scattered about the house that I'm reading, and I dip into them as I feel equal to the attention they require. About a week ago I was reading Andrew Marvell, happily, in bed. I've got a Terry Pratchett novel for those moments when I have no concentration. I'm reading Leopoldo Alas' La Regenta in Spanish, which is slow going but satisfying. I'm about 3/4 way through the first of the two volumes. I started dipping into Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws. And today I started rereading Faulkner's The Hamlet. And I just got a book on Grenadian history. So when I say I'm reading I'm sort of hopping among them and while they've all been good none of them have really spoken to whatever it is my mind is working on. I think that's why there are so many of them.

This is bad enough, but it would be worse if I were not writing every day.

But at last I did find something to read that was exactly what I needed. It was Fairfield Porter's art criticism, Art in Its Own Terms, which I had read years ago. But you see, if you read something years ago and you come back to it again, one of two things will happen.

1. You will wonder at your having liked such shallow, showy triviality.

2. You will find it better than you remembered it.

If (2) happens you are onto a good book--unless of course your taste is completely corrupted.

The reason I wanted the Fairfield Porter book was that I thought it might be nice to send to one of my small select readers. But I needed to make sure it was still good after all those years. It was better. So much better that I would read maybe a couple paragraphs or a page and then I'd get so excited I'd have to put it down.

And now I've lost it. The book I mean. Lost it downtown on Sunday. Can you think of any reason why I should not simply order another copy? Can I just do that? It seems such a simple solution.

From the Mountain

2010-11-30T12:38:00.000-05:00

A friend comes through town on a visit from Martha's Vineyard, bringing me, as usual, the latest and best that is thought there. If my friend were a cynical and jaded person like me, it would be OK fun. But my friend has a sincere faith in the laws that rule the tenure of ideas in places like that. And this makes it much more interesting. She is the most earnest, sincere, all-out, full-hearted status-seeker I have ever known. It is awesome, a thing of beauty and wonder.

A couple of years ago, by what twists and turns I don't know, Haiti became a big thing on the Vineyard. And all these well-to-do women were flying there to wash the feet of destitute sick people in a hospice. It was a profound experience for them, as you may imagine. Actually I can't imagine--or so I was told by my friend who had gone and washed feet.

Whatever happens to these people (the Vineyard ladies, not the Haitian sick people), I infer with some wonderment, is not like anything that has ever happened to anyone anywhere else. On this visit my friend tells me with great solemnity that it is very important to know where your food comes from. At dinner we order linguini with clams. She asks the waiter where the clams come from.

The entertainment part for me is that whatever an idea may be when it goes up the mountain of public opinion, when it comes back down the mountain it always seems to have acquired a layer or two of silliness and, somehow, unreality. I don't know why this is. My friend, committed now to the locavore movement, helped to slaughter a pig. Apparently there is a group of ladies who felt it was necessary to learn to slaughter a pig. As an experience.

It is always as an experience that one goes through these things. Experience is expensive, so a lot of people can't have it, you see.

My friend and I went to the National Gallery to see two exhibitions. The first was the paintings by Arcimboldo. They were great fun as stunts but they were rather ugly. In the gallery with them were four or five tiny drawings by Leonardo da Vinci--some of his grotesque heads. The biggest of these was not two inches high. And yet I spent more time with them than on the Arcimboldos. Despite all their clever detail, I did not like looking at the paintings. A roast squab that turns out to be a nose is two kinds of ugly, that's all.

What to do with the Rather Less Than Great Works of the Past may be the occasion for another blog post in the future.

Then my friend and I went to look at the exhibition called The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting 1848-1875. The show was mostly photographs, and these included portraits of some famous Victorians and a lot of staged "arty" photographs of young women and girls, just what you'd expect from the sort of earnest late-romantic vision of people like the pre-Raphaelites. When I look at such things, these ethereal-looking ladies with leaves in their hair and wistful dreamy remote expressions, that sort of "Why have you just woken me up?" look about the eyes, I have a harder and harder time separating them out from 19th-century capitalism. The otherworldliness of the pre-Raphaelite world looks like a rebellion against capitalism, but it also seems like a product of it. Not necessarily in a bad way. The juggernaut of capitalism as it chews up everything seems to throw off these nostalgias. The fact that the Victorians used photography to sort of capture images of it, as promptly as they turned to painting, and with such an adventurous sense of beauty, I find touching. They had a trust in the image. What do we get at this late stage of the Empire? We get that woman who dresses up newborn babies like bugs, and Thomas Kinkade, for our sins.

There were half a dozen or so paintings and some of these were very familiar. What I had never attended to in looking at reproductions of them was how small they are. Rossetti's "The Last Meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere" is tiny! The effect is startling. I mean, if you look at a reproduction of, say, a Monet in an art book and you go to the museum and there's the Monet full size, you think, yes, super. But you don't expect a painting to be hanging on the wall about the same size as it is in the reproduction. Especially when it is such a large subject.

Some of these painters could have taught Kinkade a few things about light. They went for this sort of jewel-like color and detail in rendering. It's the quality of attention that makes someone like Millais or Rosetti interesting to me, so it was kind of cool that the last painting just before the exit was one of John Ruskin's watercolors. He wasn't a pre-Raphaelite exactly but he advocated a sort of ethics of attention that they all shared: careful, truthful observation of outer things, honest intention in every single mark, that yields a sort of inner revelation. Trust in the observed thing and truth to it. So here was this lovely little watercolor of just some rocks in a rushing stream. You don't get to see these little Ruskin watercolors very often, and I was enjoying it because when I was in St. Kitts, living on a much more slender diet of reading I did, for some reason, have some of Ruskin's books on drawing. His integrity as a critic and writer, his seriousness, made him good company.

My friend from the Vineyard looked over my shoulder and said, "I've got friends who can do better than that."

"No, you don't," I said.

"Yes, I do," she said.

"No, you don't," I said. "This is Ruskin. You don't know what he's doing, you don't know how he does it."

"Yes, I do."

Well, fuck it. So I just shut my mouth. What can you do?

One Day

2010-11-26T23:43:00.000-05:00

Yesterday evening as I was about to take the dogs over to my friend Louise for Thanksgiving dinner I discovered that my Bose in-ear headphones had given out. What happens is that the join between the wire and the jack, where it goes into the iPod, gets so banged up traveling around in my pocket that eventually, after a year or so, it can't make the connection to carry the sound. It's obvious that something is loose because if you wiggle the wire the sound flips from one ear to the other and you have to fiddle with it to get the sound in both ears, and that's a recipe for driving me crazy.

So yeah, every year and a half or so I end up buying another pair of these. But I use them A LOT. They pay for themselves. And when I don't have them--especially for the dog walk but also for blocking out a lot of horrible noise (store music, gum-chewing, stupid overheard conversations on Metro, etc.,)--I get kinda panicky.

Which meant that this morning I had to go into the fray. Nothing but this necessity would have induced me to go. I went to Target first, but they were out of them, so I went to BestBuy. They had lots of them, and a crowd, and cops everywhere. And when the assistant gets the headphones out of the locked cabinet he carries them to the cashier. Well when I got to the cashier they had vanished and I was irritable because this errand had already eaten up half of a day in which this errand was the very last thing I wanted to do. So some sort of assistant assistant went looking for them and found them. The place was filled with people who apparently wanted to be there, that is to say, it was filled with loons and idiots. Or maybe a person (me, too, for that matter) turns into an idiot just by entering any big retail chain on Black Friday.

The other thing is that I'm still recovering from last week, when I was jammed up against this deadline, had my father's girlfriend in the house, PMS, unusual social activity, and the usual round of anxieties that decided to hold a calypso carnival in my head all week. By Friday the combination of the girlfriend and the work and the anxiety had killed my appetite (how? You ask. I am not at liberty to say) and I was running a sleep deficit. I'm still not caught up on food or sleep. So I actually recruited Louise to go with me on this errand because I thought that if I snapped or got faint, well, she could stand in line. Because I could not go a day without the headphones. As it happened this backup plan proved unnecessary. But most of the day was now gone.

I went home and forced myself to eat a sandwich, which took the edge off the anxiety. Eating is to be recommended. Then I pretty much waited 20 minutes or so for my blood sugar to get back up to some sort of functional level, so that I could take the dogs out.

And this is where it gets good. Because now, it is early evening on a fall day, there's this sky, a bright intense blue with fluorescent pink clouds visible through the now bare branches of the trees, and all the land colors are sort of muted and purply brown and mysterious, and leaves are still floating to the ground, and it's not too cold, just brisk and sharp, and I have my new headphones and I listen to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Schubert lieder. They just go together, days like this and music like that. It's like the music is in the atmosphere, and the things I'm seeing are making the music more emotionally vivid. I don't think I'm explaining it well. But it is this strange poignant pleasure, and it is enough. And this, more or less, was what I was able to save out of the day.

There is always this one day in November, every year, when I feel like I give up my resistance to the winter and instead go out walking to meet it. On that day I don't worry that the dark is coming on so early. I actually want to feel the cool air on my face. I don't want to go home till I'm tired and cold. I'm glad that all the clutter of leaves is gone from the trees and I feel as austere and wild and mysterious as they look. And it's weird how on that day every year, my personal All Hallows' Night as it were, what I want to listen to is Schubert.

Here's Schwarzkopf

So you see, I had to get the headphones.

Update: On YouTube you can also find Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing "Du Bist die Ruh" which I could have put here but it is too sublimely beautiful and therefore does not fit in with my plans for getting through the next several days.

No Shit, Sherlock

2010-11-25T12:22:00.000-05:00

"Falling in love causes our body to release a flood of feel-good chemicals that trigger specific physical reactions," said Domeena Renshaw, MD, author, Seven Weeks to Better Sex, director, Loyola University Health System Sex Clinic and professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. "This internal elixir of love is responsible for making our cheeks flush, our palms sweat and our hearts race."
Levels of these substances, which include dopamine, adrenaline and norepinephrine, increase when two people fall in love. Dopamine creates feelings of euphoria while adrenaline and norepinephrine are responsible for the pitter patter of the heart, restlessness and overall preoccupation that go along with experiencing love.
MRI scans indicate that love lights up the pleasure center of the brain. When we fall in love, blood flow increases in this area, which is the same part of the brain responsible for drug addiction and obsessive compulsive disorders.
"Love lowers serotonin levels, which is common in people with obsessive compulsive disorders," said Renshaw. "This may explain why we concentrate on little other than our partner during the early stages of a relationship."

I mean, couldn't you with equal truth say that some addictions and obsessions are like love and that's why they are so compelling?

Lyrics and translation here.

I don't really know the answer. I think of my own travails with this sort of thing, and the wear and tear on my nerves, the weight loss, the effects on my ability to concentrate, the hypersensitivity, the way it would seem to take over my whole life except when I succeeded in being distracted. And, of course, the pain of things not working out. All of it had me wondering, "Is this just me?"

The one thing, the great great thing, that got me through it was that I could always work, whatever the job was I would somehow do it. I can remember times when I felt utterly shattered, a light gust of wind would just sort of tip me into nausea and tears. It was great to realize that I could put my head down into some task and, without resolving anything of the situation (totally beyond my power at that point), breathe and lose myself. Then I remember these peaceful intervals, when I was neither looking forward to a romance nor recovering from one, and now they seem like they added up to a small amount of time in which I could feel all right in my own skin.

After I came back from St. Kitts the big thing I wanted was stability and routine so I could write, because that has to be a habit. You have to do it every day, or at least show up to do it. And I still wanted more of what I went to St. Kitts to get, which was the feeling that I was having my own experiences and not simply being an adjunct to someone else's experience. I also came back for a relationship, though, and then the relationship didn't work out partly because I kept making the choice for the things I wanted to do. We fought about time, I guess. (The rest of the reason was, of course, him. Or me, or whatever in him or me made me start going off him.)

I remember that little things were such a big deal for me--like being able to pursue my own pleasures--trying out new music, taking myself out painting. Again, it wasn't that I hadn't had such pleasures before; I think for example of all those happy years of ballet and all the fun I get out of reading, and of course the writing, and my amazing friends. And walking with the dogs, and numberless good things that come by grace. But I would get sort of besotted, and I would forget who I was. So then I'd have to figure out that I needed to rebuild my trust in myself, and then actually do it. Listening to my instincts I found that I didn't want to be bored, I didn't want to waste time, and that certain forms of dishonesty in relationships made me crazy angry. At last I got it: there were worse things than being alone.

So I've got that, anyhow. But I don't know that I've advanced in wisdom on the love business. Like for instance, while you're in that state you feel things more acutely, everything around seems to have more potential interestingness in it, it is all vivid. I get that when I draw or paint, too, and when I work at a certain level of intensity at writing--or even at editing, believe it or not--I can get that same change in quality of perception. That increased intensity of experience is a good thing to want. Of course when you fall in love with someone you associate these perceptual changes with the particular person you're in love with. Or at least I always have tended to do so. And because I was so muddled and insecure I didn't really believe I could get that kind of intensity any other way. Because I couldn't concentrate long enough on anything, because I was so insecure, I guess. On the one hand, being a lot more centered, having a lot more reliance on my own inner self, that's totally good. On the other, the inner Krazy Kat in me says that I'm missing out on something big.

Something like this, maybe:

I WONDER by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved ? were we not wean'd till then ?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly ?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den ?
'Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be ;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear ;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone ;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown ;
Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.

In novels people who are really in love almost never fall out of it, and certainly not without fighting it all the way (Mr. and Mrs. Morel in Sons and Lovers are the only ones I can think of, but I bet there's someone in Chekhov). Anna Karenina doesn't really fall out of love with her husband, Karenin, because she never loved him. I mean it's when she falls in love with Vronsky that she realizes how awful he is. That's that heightened perception thing, which Tolstoy understood so well. He's so great on the quality of perception. I mean, it's when Anna falls in love that her moral vision really reaches its full power and clarity. Suddenly she can't stand the society bores; her husband's mannerisms, that at most used to just sort of irritate her mildly, now revolt her. Her revulsion is so violent, too, because of how alive she feels. Not just feels, is. And the thing is, all her reactions are right; they are right about what she observes, and they are right in the intensity of her reaction. Her love might be blind with respect to Vronsky, but it opens her eyes to everything else around her. I have no idea how Tolstoy did it. It is just awesome, because it's true.

So, I suppose, that's what you miss. But a while back it occurred to me that maybe it doesn't always have to come from being in love with some guy. I mean, Vronsky is so, so dull. And at the moment when Anna falls in love with him she doesn't seem to be a person who needs to fall in love with anybody, much less this stick. That happens in real life too, though. So now I get it wherever I can--out of the pleasures of friendship, out of dog walks, out of writing, out of my trips to New York on the train. Listening to people and observing them. And looking at things I like to look at, reading. A year or so ago I remember taking a walk alone at night downtown, up 14th Street from McPherson Square to U Street, around midnight, after a party. Pure bliss. I was in love with the night. Most of the time this is enough. But sometimes...

I go around and around. Not too often though, these days. Nothing is solved. But there's no need to solve it either. I guess that's good.

Maybe this is all the effect of getting older, and not hard-won wisdom at all.

Stones on the Roof

2010-11-22T22:36:00.000-05:00

When I was in a small Caribbean island working as a newspaper editor I was sometimes a last resort for people with really peculiar problems. They thought that publishing their stories in the paper might bring about some kind of resolution that they could not get anywhere else. In each instance I couldn't help them in the newspaper, and mostly what I ended up giving was just a sympathetic ear. But that counts too!

Like the mysterious man I nicknamed "Mr. Snuffaluffagus" who would appear in my office with stories of a conspiracy involving land titles, a former drug dealer, and a couple of prominent citizens, and a rich English man who had mysteriously disappeared. Mr. S. would bring this folio full of letters, survey maps, copies of deeds and set my head to spinning with all of it and assure me that all I had to do was check at the courthouse where the land titles were registered and I would find the trail of fraud and murder. I tried, spent hours flipping through documents, but I couldn't make head or tail of it. After about his third visit I realized that Mr. Snuffaluffagus, who lived alone up in the mountains somewhere, was out of his mind. I think he caught on to the moment when I realized this, because although I never said anything about it he never came back after that. Some people have a sort of instinct for the moment when the magic won't work on you any more.

Another was the Desperate Deportee, deported from the U.S. after a successful career as a "businessman" in the drug trade. He told me a little about his "work" and it was more than enough. He was desperate because he had been attacked by the junior gangsters. They had damaged nerves and muscles in his right hand, and because he was a deportee, he could not leave the island to go to Barbados where there were facilities to treat it properly. So his hand was crippled. He had taken a job working at what, in the U.S., would be a dollar store, and then he had gotten laid off. He was very bitter and angry. In fact he was so bitter and angry that he went back to the dollar store and, pretending to have a gun in his pocket, grabbed a bunch of money out of the till. This sort of thing was beneath the dignity of a player like him, but he was in that state. He had come to me because he wanted the story to be told of why he had done the desperate act he was contemplating--he wanted to get revenge on the owner of the store, he wanted to rub him out. I listened to this and said, "I can see why you're upset. But before you do that, why don't you go and talk to this man?" I gave him the number of a preacher I had interviewed a few weeks before, who worked with prisoners. He took the number and left. Then I called the owner of the store and told him to keep his eyes open, but he wasn't terribly concerned. I didn't see the Desperate Deportee for a few weeks and then one day he waved me down as I was driving by and he was beaming. The preacher had put him to work counseling the ex-prisoners and helping them to re-integrate into society, and he loved the work.

Then there was Mr. B., for whom, also, the press could do nothing. He had come to me because he was, as he said, desperate and couldn't take it any more. Mr. B's landlord was throwing stones on his roof. Mr. B. lived in this little village, just a single one-way street that curved away from the main road to the bluffs and then back up to the main road. It was a sorry little place, but Mr. B. rented an apartment there for himself and his two teenage daughters. There were three units altogether; one was occupied by a single mother with a 12-year-old daughter, and the third one, which was upstairs and overlooked the other two, was occupied by the landlord, who was quite simply the nastiest human being I have ever encountered. He had "interfered with" the 12-year-old daughter of the other tenant. Then he had bought her mother off from testifying in court by offering her a year's free rent. On the day when he appeared in court, the tenant and the victim her daughter were somehow off the island. The case was dismissed. But now that he had "won" the case he wasn't so disposed to keep up his end of the bargain, so he was trying to get the tenant out. She had complained about it to Mr. B., standing outside of her place, and the landlord had overheard. He retaliated by cutting off the water to both apartments, and then, not satisfied with that, had resorted to throwing stones on the roof of Mr. B.'s apartment. Mr. B. had stuck it out about the water (a neighbor had run a hose into the living room and from this they washed, cooked, and survived). But the stones on the roof were an outrage, he was shaking with indignation when he told me about it. There was nothing the police could do, as there was no law against a man throwing stones on his own roof in the middle of the night--even if there had been the remotest chance of catching the landlord in the act.

This mystified me at the time, and even after Mr. B. took me to his apartment to show me the lay of the land and where the stones were, I could not understand it. Later, I asked a friend. He said throwing stones on someone's roof was very bad, very malicious. "What would you say about a person who throws stones on the roof of his own house?" I asked. "I would say that that person has gone completely off the rails," he said. Well, OK, but I still didn't get it. I got it at last from one of the reporters, a nice, quiet, well-brought-up young woman of great good sense who had lived in that village briefly as a little girl. I took her there to take some pictures in case I could ever somehow put this story in the paper, which I was hoping I could do. We took the pictures and she showed me the house she had lived in. As we approached the main road she said, "They used to have a lot of trouble with stones on the roof here a year or two ago. But that time it was jumbies." "How do you know?" I asked her. "Oh, they hang out here," she said. At the corner of the main road she pointed to an old rum shop that had obviously been closed for a long, long time. "They come out here at night and they just walk up and down, up and down. Until about 3 in the morning. Right in front of this shop here." "How do you know that?" I asked her. "Oh I see them all the time." "What do they look like?" "They look like everybody else."

It all seemed so self-evident to her. This time, though, she assured me, it was the landlord.

Anyway there is a Jamaican newspaper that I too often forget to read. Which is sort of ironic because once on a long visit to Jamaica I got the idea that I would love to work for a newspaper like that in the Caribbean. And then that was exactly what I ended up doing. And if I were working at the Star today I might have been one of the lucky reporters who got to cover this story.

Yesterday when THE STAR visited the area, people were standing on both sides of the street close to the house and the occupants were seen moving out.

The residents claim some persons had gathered there from Tuesday. "Up till 4 o' clock dis mawning (yesterday) people still de pon di road a try fi see what a happen ova di yaad," a resident told THE STAR.

Residents said the stoning started approximately three weeks ago but was not occurring often. However, on Tuesday evening things allegedly changed, as they claim the ghost intensified its actions.

It is claimed the ghost began a relentless stone attack on the property, assaulting the occupants and even hitting anyone who was brave enough to enter. To make matters worse, the residents claim the aggressive ghost brought other ghostly company.

"It is serious," one resident said. "One of my friends go over there. When he reached the gate he was hit with a stone. When him enter di house him get (hit with) a figurine."

That figurine! Oh, that figurine!

Here's one where a ghost attended a funeral and behaved badly, it has a picture of the ghost too. And the lede, oh my god.

"Bwoy, mi neva believe inna duppy but when mi see dis mi convince. The devil nuh ave nuh manners," said Jenine Scott, one of the persons who attended the funeral of the late Yolanda Samuels on October 26.

The service, which was held at the Fullerswood Church of God of Redemption in St Elizabeth, went quite normal for the most part. However, it was after Scott, the videographer, and others were reviewing the recording of the funeral later that evening that they made the jaw-dropping, eye-popping and head-swelling discovery. They said there was a 'duppy' in the video.

Note the head-swelling effect. I've heard people mention this one. The other notable thing about these stories (and if you go to the Star site and search for "ghost" you will get more) is that the reporters completely believe.

You see, sometimes I want to explain to people that there are two universes in the Caribbean. There is the one that you see as an outsider, but there is the other one, the world of the villages, where stones on the roof are a serious business, where ghosts misbehave at funerals, where malice is a supernatural force. The interesting thing to me is how adaptable and persistent the old culture is, what a powerful hold it still has on people's imaginations. I know there are places where these beliefs are the truth and science is simply the folly of foreigners, and where the question of belief is never whether you believe but who you believe in.

buckner: In the Galleries

2010-11-17T19:34:00.000-05:00

Ruth Pigeon, "Pieces of My Body"

This installation/performance/activist artist presents an intervention involving the use of her physical form to make significant gestures that address feminist concepts of body image. (Center for the New Woman, 55 Sontag Blvd.)

Marc LaCure, “Painting as Conundrum”

The anti-paintings of artist Marc LaCure evoke simian pastiches that refer to antediluvian gesture and symbolism, paving the way for a new understanding of the development of human consciousness. (Gugusion, 69 Rampard St.)

Ludwig Pensieri, “I Am Me Am I”

This conceptual artist will present an installation that catalogs a lexicon of printed words, evoking images that pass through the mind like floating glyphs, evading our attempts to attach specific meaning to them. (Hotten/Raushlich, 101 Wittgenstein Ave.)

Claire Enuff and Buster Wilds, “Take That!”

This collaborative team will create an extravaganza of sensory experiences with bombarding sensations of sound and light, enveloping the viewer in a miasma of disorienting socio-political implications. (CYSMC—Contemporary Youth Social Media Center, 23 1/2 Wherzat Blvd.)

Junket Loo, “Robotoid”

Hi-tech gizmo artist Junket Loo will delight us again with his robot-like constructions that mimic the complex relationships of sentient beings. His charming miniature “go-bots” are particularly evocative of the breakdown of postindustrial society. (OptoSpace2, 500 Avenue of the Sciences)

Randy Pitts, “Drawing as Social Construct”

The anti-drawings of artist Randy Pitts refer to the hopelessness of environmental degradation and the impossibility of creating anything of lasting interest or importance. His self-inflicted “body drawings” pave the way for a new understanding of the development of human consciousness. (Tanner+Hyde Gallery, Plunket Community Center)

Sheila Kliket, “Focus on the Beast”

Photographer Sheila Kliket explores nature with these wall-sized digital prints of domestic animals, seen through the lens of contemporary postmodernist analysis. Revealing the intimate details of canine anatomy, she expatiates on the nature of the “self” and the “other.” (Paula DeKline Editions, Ltd., 303 Onoudint Square)

Laziness Takes Talent

2010-11-02T00:29:00.000-04:00

Just ask Ella.

Inventory

2010-10-25T20:31:00.000-04:00

1. High Heels and High Jinks
Matilda works in publishing in a big city and she has lots of clever and well-connected friends but she can't find a husband! No, it's not that one again. Honestly!

2. The Yellowstone Chronicles
Ben takes a road trip with his charmingly quirky average middle-class parents and learns a lesson about the true meaning of family.

3. Grandma's Papadums
Ganesh learns that becoming American means learning to appreciate his immigrant family's rich Indian heritage.

4. Night Sweats
This dazzling stylistic tour de fource is set in a dystopic near-future AnyCity, America. A logorrheic serial killer is driven on a mysterious mission by a muddle of subplots involving literarily allusive and prophetic street people.

5. The Jane Austen Sells Anything Pie Club
Five strong female characters meet to make pies and talk about life and Jane Austen. One of them has an exotic fatal disease. They learn the true meaning of friendship.

6. Grandma's Pork Buns
Li learns that becoming American also means learning to appreciate her immigrant family's rich Chinese heritage.

7. Angels in the Corn
When her husband Jedediah dies in a gruesome farming accident Sarah, a strong female character, must raise the crops and her three children, Obadiah, Ezekiah, and Jeremiah, alone. A man with a mysterious past comes to town. He turns out to be an angel. A heartwarming tale about the true meaning of--oh, did I spoil it? Sorry.

8. Pearl
Pearl, a simple girl, is raped, murdered, chopped up in pieces and thrown down an abandoned well every Saturday. By simple faith, humility, and hard work, she triumphs over her circumstances and eventually buys a small neat little house with a porch where she sits and shares her memories and her special homemade lemonade.

9. Girl With A Pomeranian Dog Collar
Hidden in this famous painting are clues to a 17th-century murder and a jewel robbery shrouded in international intrigue, solved by Elsie, the model, a strong female character and an artist in her own right.

10. Grandma's Tamales
Maria learns that becoming American means learning to appreciate her immigrant family's rich Mexican heritage.

11. Seasoned in Tuscany
An American couple buy and renovate a Tuscan villa, which leads to hilarious misadventures as they encounter the quaint old-world eccentricities of the local villagers who are a wacky assortment of English professors and food writers.

12. Gloria Has Had It Up To Here With These Men
Gloria, a senior vice president for marketing at a big corporation, has three men in her life--a brain surgeon, a jazz musician, and a tycoon--but none of them will commit. What's a girl to do?

Update: Added one of mine, and thanks kindly to monkey.dave in comments. If I've left out any others please post them.

Take the Money and Run

2010-10-11T23:25:00.000-04:00

Total indulgence in the purchase of the Library of America's new John Kenneth Galbraith. I read The Great Crash in the months leading up to the Financial Crisis (it really needs a name, this one, and I'd supply one if I could think of one that wasn't R-rated). I'm looking forward to reading it again, but now I'm reading The Affluent Society, a book that was very influential once upon a time. He coined the phrase "the conventional wisdom" and in his introduction to the edition that's included in the Library of America volume he jokes that he should have taken out a patent. The irony of course now is that people who use the phrase "the conventional wisdom" are either a) totally innocent of even the remotest acquaintance with any other kind or b) savagely hostile to any other kind of wisdom when they do run into it.

Reading Galbraith is a bit like reading Edmund Burke. Most people who claim Burke as a conservative hero are usually referring only to what amounts to a few pages of his Reflections on the Revolution in France. They misunderstand his theory about tradition, too, thinking it is a defense of their view of tradition. And then liberals who haven't read Burke think, oh, if the conservatives like him he must be a wingnut too. Why conservatives like David Brooks or William F. Buckley should be trusted to be accurate in their representation of Burke when they can't be trusted to be honest intellectual brokers on anything they touch I don't know.

If I were to give the shortest possible summary of what Burke meant by tradition in the relations between the ruler and the ruled, it would be this: he believed that this relation should be founded in love, the kind of love that makes you love the dignity of the other. This is in a sense a sort of a formality, a fiction that becomes true because people commit themselves to acting as if it is true. They are loyal to the principle. It is only paternalistic in the sense that liberals are accustomed to speak scornfully of if you are prepared to deny the possibility that love can be based on respect for the dignity and rights of the person whatever their social standing or their means.

But Burke spent most of his long parliamentary career trying to raise the alarm about unfettered, unregulated multinational capitalism and the dangers of corporate lawlessness. He was fighting against the management of the East India Company that was basically running a vast, vicious extortion racket in India, using the power of law, and violence, to extract immense wealth from the small regional governments all over the subcontinent. Remember Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair, with the awesome title "The Collector of Bogley Wallah"? What do you suppose he was collecting? You need to remember that colonialism was not established in places like the Caribbean or India for the sake of spreading democracy or Christianity. The religious and historical and moral justifications came later. Adventurers, desperate characters, speculators, people with no better prospects at home, went there and got as much loot out of them as they could or died trying; they set up just enough government to help you do it. Preferably, as in India, the looting business was the government. Government, in the sense in which people think of it now, a set of institutional and organizational arrangements for the support and management of society and community, came much later. In the Caribbean you had the plantation owners working the land for sugar, and you had garrisons to protect them from other colonial powers who wanted to steal the islands back and then also protecting the plantations from the slaves too. Only after it became a matter of financial interest--only after there was clearly something to lose, was there any need seen for government. And if you found something there already, like in India, a whole civilization and a culture that had been managing its own affairs at least as well as, say, France 150 years before, these arrangements meant nothing, you could tear them to pieces at your convenience in the service of the great wealth-making project and the irresistible destiny-like glorious advance of capitalism. Individually, the plan was childishly simple; you extorted as much wealth out of the Pasha in India so you could go and live like one in England. And Burke saw it for what it was, saw the destructive potential.

BP in Iran, Texaco in Nigeria, the United Fruit Company in Central America; the conflation of national interest with corporate profit, at the expense of any other basis of value. That was what Burke saw coming, and he fought it, for twenty-odd years, mostly alone and not at all understood by reasonable moderate centrist people who couldn't see what the problem was when everybody was getting so rich. He lost friends over it. But the danger was so clear to him that he could not compromise on the seemingly narrow point at issue which was the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the East India Company's man in India. Hastings had connections and resources and influence to keep himself out of the hot seat for so long that the whole affair began to seem like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. But Burke never let up because he never lost sight of the point.

Burke's prose is harsh, as if it was hacked into shape with a rusty axe. And then in the middle of it you find something said that could never be said better, things that can move you to tears. Because although it is rough and harsh it is truthful, it is the sound of a mind that is discovering things.

The interesting thing about Galbraith as a writer is that he was just about the last living practitioner of the Grand Style of formal English prose. The only other great one I can think of in the twentieth century is Bertrand Russell, and Russell died of course years before Galbraith stopped producing. In writing, too, Galbraith sounds original. That is, he took this very literary and artificial style and somehow made it into his own voice, on first acquaintance a somewhat stilted voice, that warms up into this wonderful lucidity, sparkling with humor--this was a man, you can tell, who could probably reduce you to helpless giggles at the breakfast table by just reading out loud from the newspaper--and the narrative drive of a good storyteller.

There are a zillion cheap imitations of formal English, to say nothing of the ghastly failed attempts at it that you find in academic prose. Mutant monstrosities, really. And don't even get me started on the kind that takes its tone from the French. I imagine that in 30 years or so no one will claim responsibility for ever having written those horrors: "I wasn't there, I was out bowling with my friends, I was in a coma, I was rescuing small children from abandoned wells, I was sitting at home quietly reading Ernest Hemingway, I don't remember anything about it and I never met the lady."

I, Twit

2010-10-07T11:54:00.000-04:00

I've joined the Army of the Undead. Follow me!

Comments Fixed

2010-10-07T11:48:00.000-04:00

One of my small but select readers informed me that the spam-prevention gizmo that requires commenters to type some twisted letters is broken, so comments couldn't be left. I checked and it was true. I've turned it off. You may see more comments of the weight loss/pay to write your dissertation/amazing vitamin product/make millions in real estate variety. I hope not though.

I Scare Myself

2010-10-06T00:43:00.000-04:00

So tonight I had a long talk with an old friend in California and it was midnight when I got off the phone. Took the dogs out for a trip round the block so they could have a comfortable night and when we reached my building I saw a guy get out of my father's truck and start walking down the street. My father was asleep in his room. The guy had a hood over his head. I watched in disbelief for a couple of seconds and felt that same creepy feeling I had when the apartment was burgled. So I chased him. I just followed him down the street with the dogs a good way in front of me, calling out, "What were you doing in that truck? WHAT WERE YOU DOING IN THAT TRUCK?" Until he stopped and turned around and assured me that the truck door had been unlocked and he hadn't found anything to take. "But if you had found something you would have?" "Yes," he said. But he hadn't found anything. Did I mention that usually I take my cell phone with me in case something happens but did not take it tonight? "I could call the cops, you know," I said, which was more of a half-truth than a fib, strictly speaking. I mean, I just couldn't call them just exactly right then in that minute. He expressed the hope that I wouldn't let loose the dogs on him. Misha was of course barking and putting on a decent show of menace, but by the time I finished cussing the guy out I believe that she had undergone her usual conversion and was regarding him as someone who might need her protection and care.

I had no plan when I chased him. I mean, I could have started yelling for someone to call the police, but it all just seemed so pathetic, this kid just seemed pathetic and confused, and I hated the thought of all the commotion and I hated even more the thought of this kid going into the criminal justice system for something so lame as trying and failing to find anything valuable in my Dad's old truck. So instead of raising the alarm I told him that he had no right to go into people's vehicles even if they were unlocked, and that it was shitty to steal from people, and I pointed out that the people in the neighborhood weren't rich, that he was just creating hardship for people when he took their stuff. And then I told him that if I ever spotted him around there day or night he'd be in deep shit.

I felr little guilty about letting him go. The neighbors might not agree with this judgment call. Well, next time, though...

A Mystery Solved

2010-09-17T22:35:00.001-04:00

My evening routine has developed in such a way that I feed the dogs separately. That is because when we come back from our evening walk Sweetie insists on being tied up in front of the apartment so she can continue her archaeological research. Misha, having had as much of the big wide world as her nerves can stand, comes inside and waits while I fix her dinner. Once she is fed I go out and sit with Sweetie and write and have a single beer. Then Sweetie comes in, and she gets fed and then I fix something for myself. Sweetie likes to hang out near the entrance to the kitchen while I'm cooking my dinner. Misha will not come near, except occasionally she musters her courage and comes and lurks, slightly embarrassed, near the fridge. Because she is afraid of Sweetie at dinnertime. I have been aware of the fear but not really of what communication passes between them to prompt it.

Tonight I had eggs for dinner and offered the shells to the dogs as a treat. I put one eggshell in Misha's dish, and another in Sweetie's dish. Misha sniffed sadly at hers and Did Not Want, even when I held them out to her. Sweetie condescended to take hers by hand, so she was licking at the inside of the shells, while Misha watched from a distance looking despondent. I mean, her eggshell was still in her dish, I had offered it to her, she hadn't wanted it, and now that Sweetie was eating hers she was all like "Nobody loves me." I looked back at Sweetie for a second, she had paused in the egg-licking, and she was giving Misha that Look. It's her "Come an inch closer and you will learn a few new things about crazy, beeyotch." I'd seen her do it before, but never at home and never to Misha. It's the look Sweetie gets when she and I visit my aunt and uncle and she takes command of any area where food and attention are dispensed. She sort of quietly composes herself into a ball near the table and looks deranged. The intent is to frighten the bejabers out of their two standard poodles. It works too, which is remarkable considering that she backs it up with nothing but the most bloodcurdling snarls, and considering that the poodles each weigh twice what she does. Also she did it at once or twice at the Tick Ranch when she suspected that there was a critter's nest under the shed. Sat there like that, curled up, with the Look, in the boiling sun, for hours, and would not be induced to come inside.

Once we all went out on an outing to the Eastern Shore--my aunt, my uncle, my mother, the two poodles, and Sweetie. The others went off to lunch but I opted to stay, with Sweetie, in this nearby park and paint. I wasn't keen to spend two hours in a restaurant and I didn't want to leave Sweetie in the car with the other dogs. I set up my easel and Sweetie dug herself a little nest in some dirt a few feet away. We were quite content, the two of us, for the next couple of hours. The others came back, the two poodles bounding across the grass ahead of the people. They got within about ten feet of the easel and Sweetie, snarling, just sort of herded them out of the vicinity. She had apparently created a perimeter around herself and me, and these two poodles were not to be allowed into it. She sat back in her nest with the Look on her face, and whenever any of them ventured too near, Sweetie would spring up and escort him away.

Sermonette

2010-09-16T23:44:00.000-04:00

Cool Hand Kia

2010-09-10T23:30:00.000-04:00

I could eat fifty eggs.

Or I could read Jonathan Franzen's new book, Freedom. I like the title. It's so--Freedom! Just think: Freedom. Wow.

FREEDOM!!! HAAAGH!!! Freedom. Freedom.

That's really all that needs to be said, isn't it? Doesn't it just scream Great American Novel at you?

Gosh. I wonder what people are saying about it. Oh look here's Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times.

You know, it's odd, I almost never read Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times. Why is that, I wonder?

Wait here, I'll be right back. I'm gonna go see.

Call me prejudiced but I feel certain that a sentence that begins like this

Whereas Mr. Franzen’s first novel, “The Twenty-Seventh City,” borrowed liberally from the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo to create a dark, splashy picture of a futuristic St. Louis...

cannot possibly end well for any of the parties concerned.

...his 2001 bestseller, “The Corrections,” signaled his determination to write an American sort of “Buddenbrooks,” to conjure contemporary America — not by going for a cartoonish, zeitgeist-y epic but by deconstructing a family’s history to give us a wide-angled portrait of the country as it rumbled into the materialistic 1990s.

No, not this time either.

You may think I'm talking about sentence structure. But when I read a little further along, I am not a bit surprised to learn that Jonathan Franzen's second novel, The Corrections,

...felt, at times, as if he were self-importantly inflating the symbolic meaning of his characters’ experiences, even as he condescendingly attributed to them every venal quality from hypocrisy and vanity to paranoia and Machiavellian conniving.

Yes, but have you seen what he looks like? just look at his hair. Or that jawline. Or those goggly black intellectual glasses on his handsome preppy face. How his new maturity becomes him! In the photo that comes with this piece it looks like he's hurrying from one Deep Thought to another. "What was that you were saying, New York Times photographer?"

As the novel proceeds, however, Mr. Franzen delves further into the state of mind of his creations, developing them into fully imagined human beings — not Nietzschean stereotypes easily divided into categories of “hard” (shameless, ambitious brutes) or “soft” (pathetic, sniveling doormats); not bitter patsies fueled by ancient grudges, but confused, searching people capable of change and perhaps even transcendence.

Roll over, Leo Tolstoy and tell D.H. Lawrence the news!

Here. Let me help.

++++++@@@@@@**T*R*A*N*S*C*E*N*D*E*N*C*E**@@@@@@++++++

Can you feel anything yet?

What?

I said, "CAN YOU FEEL ANYTHING YET?"

I DON'T KNOW IF I CAN CRANK IT UP ANY HIGHER. IT OVERHEATED LAST TIME. DO YOU HEAR THAT SORT OF PANG-PANG-PANG NOISE?

WHAT?

WHAT?

WAIT A MINUTE LET ME TURN THIS THING DOWN...

Watch out don't lean on that; it's still hot.

No, no, I can see what you're saying about the noise. And the diesel fumes, of course. How about starbursts? How about two sort of Christmas card angels with the really long trumpets and the page-boy haircuts? I saw something in Martha Stewart Magazine. And some of that gold ribbon with the wires in it.

The thing is I'm flexible, is what I'm saying. I can work with you.

Just tell me what you want.

Do you know, that is the first time I have ever seen a book review written entirely in glurge? High-class glurge, the Pottery Barn of glurge, as it were.

It is not really a profile at all, it is some sort of blessing, a ritual in a debased language in which the speaker no longer even understands that words refer to things, or ever did. Meaning has been T*R*A*N*S*C*E*N*D*E*D.

It's cargo cult book reviewing. And yet, somehow, the gods deliver this time. Tom emails to ask me why Jonathan Franzen's new book seems to be turning up everywhere.

And so fearing to peer into its ineffable brightness, I, like a cargo cult theologian, the St. Augustine of literary T*R*A*N*S*C*E*N*D*E*N*C*E (yeah I toned it down a bit--the glare was beginning to bother me), I make inquiry of the divine. I suppose someone is reading it--who? Maybe it' on a bunch of Kindles. Does the book that the reviewer describes actually resemble the book that was written? Does the author that the reviewer describe actually resemble the author? How can we know? Do I have to read the book to find out? Why not? What are the odds that the book will be as awful as this review suggests?

No, I know she is praising it, thank you. That is my point.

Update: John Dolan at Exiled Online has actually read a Franzen novel. Not this one but the previous Great American Novel, The Corrections.

Inside of a Dog It's Too Dark to Read

2010-09-03T23:40:00.000-04:00

This non-review review by Alex Beam of the new movie of J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip has been irritating me. He describes the book as "preeminently disgusting."

And furthermore:

The first half is filled with graphic descriptions of the German shepherd’s bathroom habits. “Meaningless filth about dogs,’’ Dame Edith Sitwell wrote in 1956. The second half of the book is devoted to Tulip’s sexual encounters, in which Ackerley — a middle-age Brit bachelor then working for the BBC in London — enthusiastically participates.

Maybe he thinks you will take his word for the "preeminently disgusting," and that you therefore won't check up on what he says here. If you read the book for yourself and are capable of making judgments instead of taking them from critics unquestioning, you will see that it's really a stretch to suggest, as Beam does, that "the second half of the book is devoted to Tulip's sexual encounters...in which Ackerley...enthusiastically participates." It's either a deliberate misrepresentation or it is thoughtless, stupid carelessness about the obvious inference that the reader will have to deal with. And does anybody even read Edith Sitwell any more?

The fact that Queenie/Tulip was a shepherd is significant, because German shepherds are not quite like other dogs. A German shepherd forms an intense, single-minded bond with one person, and it's like a marriage, like Plato's idea of marriage where the two people are just each a half of a person until they meet and become complete. That's how it is for the German shepherd at any rate: two become one. This passionate devotion is the basis for the next nutty thing about German shepherds, their need to have a job, to show that they know the rules and obey them. In the absence of clear guidance on this they get even more nutty, because they will make up rules and make up jobs that involve the enforcement of rules and the relationship structures that give them their identity and their sanity.

One of the challenges of living with Misha, who is probably about 75 percent shepherd, is the need to continually disrupt the patterns that she is always looking for or trying to establish. My feeling about it is that we will have rules, all right, but they will be my rules, not hers.

All this is in context of intense connection; whatever she wants, she wants it with you. It's all about relationship with them.

My Dad has been away on another one of his long trips overseas, hopping around Europe with his new girlfriend. (Why are you looking at me like that? What? Well I am sure if I felt like making more of an effort I might--just shut up OK? Thank you.)

The dogs are consequently back to the routine of very long days at home without the walk in the middle of the day that they get when he's here. For Sweetie this means she can't spend the entire day perfecting her earthworks in the flowerbeds in front of the apartment. And Misha makes it through the day about 50 percent of the time. I keep plastic sheeting on the floor of my room because somehow it has become the emergency dog bathroom. Sweetie used to use my Dad's room as her emergency dog bathroom--I think you can see the symmetry of the thing--and then, because she is fastidious and dainty, would cover her poop up with any items of laundry such as socks that my Dad might have conveniently left on the floor. What Misha lacks in discretion she makes up in volume. I came home to a major cleanup project Friday, the second day in a row. And then we went out for a walk and there was still more poop, and I looked at her while she was getting into position (which always involves a fair amount of drama) and in my mind's eye for a minute she was just an overweight, furry, excitable, incontinent, tightly packed tube of poop with pointy ears and a nose at one end and a tail at the other.

I have started taking them out in Nature again, on hiking trails near here, hitting a new one each weekend. But they're both older and they have gotten very accustomed to their urban life, which they rather like. As dogs get older they get a greater and greater appreciation for routine. So on these excursions everyone is a bit jittery at things like, for instance, dragonflies and frogs. Also they think I am going to get them lost. It is nearly impossible to get lost because 1) Misha always knows where the car is and 2) after half an hour she is campaigning madly to get us all back to it. Nevertheless, let them come across a dead mouse, an owl pellet or other unusual animal droppings, and this gleam comes into their eyes, and the next thing you know they're rolling in it. They will eat disgusting things if you don't watch them; the only reason I can figure why some parts of our neighborhood appeal to them is that they are still thinking about discarded chicken bones even though they know there's hell to pay if they pick one up.

Did you know that dogs have these scent glands under their tails (well basically on either side of where the poop comes out) that make this fearful fug? It's what they are sniffing at when they sniff each other's butts. The amount of smell these glands normally produce is not really noticeable to humans but I took the late lamented Linus to the vet once and the vet wanted to check them to see if they were infected, and suggested I might like to leave the room. I got just outside the door when there was a single outraged yelp from Linus, and I almost fainted from the smell. The examination of the glands involved squeezing them to get them to express some of the liquid they produce.

Last year at a party I met a woman, probably not 10 years older than I am, who told me that she wipes her Jack Russell Terrier's bottom every time the dog poops. And she won't take it to the dog park because she doesn't know where all those other dogs' noses have been.

This is what happens when you have an open and honest face. You learn things.

I loathe most books about dogs--that is, most fiction and most memoirs about dogs. First off, I can't bear any depiction of the suffering of animals in any form, and the least intimation of it causes me distress that I don't really know how to deal with. And there's a certain kind of sentimentality about animals that I dislike intensely, especially now that I have a crazy dog to manage. Like all sentimentality it's self-serving. And in those sorts of books the dog always dies so the kid can Learn a Lesson About Life which lesson I guess is learn to be a heartless bastard early and get it over with.

I never seem to have the kind of dog that wants to learn tricks, though Misha, when she's feeling good, will sometimes show me that she can sit up on her hind legs. It moves me almost to tears, as it's a little offering from her memories of happier days before her trust was broken. Both dogs, if they have any other tricks, have come up with them on their own, behind my back, like sneaking onto my bed or discreetly picking up a chicken bone on the sidewalk and sort of oh I dunno just what with one thing and another, absentmindedly dropping back behind me on our walk and then, busted anyhow, pretending the whole thing was a joke. It's clear to me that their intelligence in these and other mischief that they get up to is just as real as it would be if I taught them--or got some trainer to teach them--to walk on their hind legs or fetch a ball. I am content to see the way they employ their intelligence to make themselves happy. I feel guilt towards them anyway because their life with me is constrained. I realize, though, that dogs get in their own way quite as persistently as people do. Misha can't enjoy herself at the dog park because she thinks it's a gulag. And Sweetie--well, her moods in relation to other dogs are a complete mystery, totally unpredictable. You never know if she's going to have a nice game of tag, decide to power-hump a cocker spaniel, huddle nervously next to my leg, or take exception to some big dog, steal his toy and then go all ghetto when he tries to get it back.

I also dislike the kind of story where the dog is a sort of agent of disruption and subversion--his lack of inhibition standing in for the owner's social courage.

My favorite dog book, and the only one I like, is My Dog Tulip. Queenie/Tulip is not one of these fictional dogs. She is a dog seen through the unillusioned eyes of love. Ackerley appreciated her great love for him and saw love as the only just return. And then, too, she was so beautiful and spirited, bathroom habits and all. If you live with a dog you have to recognize that for dogs, life with humans means forgoing some important dog experiences. Free access to sex, for instance; roaming and hunting in packs for another. Even though our two species have lived together for so long, we are different. And the burden of adaptation falls more heavily on the dog, who can't satisfy all its social needs and its instincts, and who can't talk itself out of them the way humans can.

So when Queenie comes into heat, she's frantically horny and he does what he can to relieve her. He gives her what help he can with his hands, and at last arranges for her to get laid. The partner of (Queenie's) choice is not an expensive stud (note that arranging sexual intercourse between dogs is perfectly unobjectionable when money, in the form of stud fees, is involved), but a disreputable-looking mutt who knocks her up for free. Ackerley is relieved, because he has been experiencing her distress. She has one litter of puppies, and once they grow up she's mainly rather bored with them. This is what Beam calls "enthusiastic participation."

Ackerley's last book, My Father and Myself, was published posthumously, for reasons that are clear from the the first page. It is a beautiful book, containing many startling disclosures. To write about such things he had to be free from worry about how the book would affect people's opinions of him. At the time of writing it, he was a well-known public figure. He was arts editor of The Listener, the BBC's radio programming guide. This might not seem like a big deal, but to get some idea of what this meant in England at that time you have to listen to someone like my stepfather, who grew up on the BBC's arts programming during the same period, and who still regards it as one of the great achievements of British culture. It was the medium through which countless people (including my stepfather, who is a chartered accountant and didn't get any postsecondary schooling in the liberal arts) got his education.

Ackerley, who died in 1967, was also openly, unambiguously, and promiscuously gay. He was a man of real, original moral courage and truthful self-awareness. One of the reasons why a lot of his love life was conducted in what I suppose then was called "rough trade" was because he was so smart. He had this fearsome lucidity, which made him totally unsusceptible to false feeling. And of course the terrible truth is that a lot of relationships are a sort of traffic in false feeling, in little agreements and conspiracies and temporary allegiances, an acting out of feeling that we think we ought to have and hope and believe we do have.

"My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, 'Sir, I am your most humble servant.' You are not his most humble servant. You may say, 'These are sad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.' You don't mind the times. You tell a man, 'I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.' You don't care sixpence whether he was wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don't think foolishly." [Samuel Johnson to Boswell, in the Life of Johnson

Ackerley is remarkable for a mind that was almost completely clear of cant. Whatever he may have hidden from other people, he never hid it from himself. And this made it almost impossible for him to have any kind of lasting romantic relationship. He couldn't lie to himself about it, and eventually--as happens so often in relationships--the rivets would start wiggling loose. Knowing himself, he accepted his limitations. There is not a trace of self-pity in his work. The only intense, committed love bond he had was with the dog, and he describes that successful relationship with the same sparkling clarity with which, in My Father and Myself, he treats the failures of his other relationships.

But it was real love. I have to say that the mind of the reviewer who could read this book and not see that, could look at the scrupulous truthfulness of this book about a dog and feel disgust because it happens to mention dog poop , is really just unknown country to me. Beam writes as if the book is something that happened to him: "I opened the book and it was full of poop!" And the nasty suggestion that Ackerley was a dogfucker. There was something to get here that was infinitely better than that cheap laugh.

Really Old School

2010-08-23T20:53:00.000-04:00

I feel old. This was the room that I shared with Clanger, Danda, Mary, Joyce, and Pippi. About halfway through the year Pippi moved out and Kendall moved in. Kendall, who I actually re-connected with recently (I still owe her a phone call) was the first genius I ever met. There still haven't been that many.

Incredibly, the big mirror on the landing is still intact.

Clanger (that was her nickname) was from Malawi--I mean when English people were from Malawi. She may still be there. Many of the English girls had come from Africa--and they had been sent to boarding school from a very early age and it was like boarding school was normal life for them. Clanger was like that. But oh what a good friend she was.

Pippi was part French I think and about 80 percent loony. Mary was Greek-American, Joyce was a math and physics nerd from Hong Kong who had lived a very sheltered life, Kendall was English, and Danda was a member of Swaziland's aristocracy. Not the British one, the Swazi one. She was constantly homesick, and she kept a photo of herself on some ceremonial occasion in which she was wearing little more than beads. There were photos of the rest of the clan, dancing and generally having a thoroughly good time, these great formal events. Her last name had a click! in it and it got more massacred in mispronunciation than anyone else's--more even than the Persian girls. The Persian girls (and they were by far the largest foreign contingent) were fearless and full of spirit and fun, except for that one girl who was very quiet, wore glasses that made her look like a hobgoblin, and was so rich it just sort of staggered the mind. They were part of all the oil money that was pouring into England, when it was Kuwaitis and Persians and Saudis coming to London, not Russian oligarchs. You really couldn't intimidate any of them. There was one named Lilli who got in trouble for swearing nearly every week, and she always wore kohl eyeliner, even though it was prohibited. The daughters of Iran's oilocracy, like the daughters of African government officials and Indian tycoons, were there to learn culture perhaps even more than to learn algebra or biology or Scripture, to become Britishized, Europeanized. They were already a good way there, except for Danda and Joyce and this one girl named Audrey who gave everybody the creeps.

From the outside, my room's the second floor (British first floor) on the left. It occupied two buildings, this one which was Lillesden House, and the one across the street, a perfect specimen of Georgian country-house architecture, Collingwood House, which had been the home of the astronomer Herschel, whose ghost was suspected of lurking about the place. Lillesden house was also haunted. Of course now it really looks haunted. It seems to have been used as a Doctor Who location, if you are into that kind of thing.

I remember on the days of school events, this driveway lined with luxury cars. There were several diplomats' daughters there. One of them left school as soon as she finished her O levels. She was a horrible person, loud and common in her manners in a way that was utterly without any redeeming charm, just a big vulgar bully. On her last night at school, while everyone else was at prep, she finished off her packing by going from room to room at Collingwood House, helping herself to anything she had ever fancied among the possessions of all the other girls. It was so blatant, so opportunistic and so shameless that when she was expelled on the day she should have left with good wishes and hugs, the whole school was against her. And usually among the students there was always some sympathy for a girl who ran afoul of the administration, for whatever reason. But this was too much.

My first memory of it is walking past the building down to the classroom in the back (one of a couple of temporary buildings that probably isn't there now), the last classroom of the three or four that were down a slight slope from the back of the main building. There was a tall tree there, immensely tall, some sort of cypress or pine, and rooks lived in the very top of it, and were constantly cawing and barking and chattering, flying in and away.

Update: Hello visitors from alicublog! I finally fixed the broken link to the site that tells you who actually took those pictures. It wasn't me, I hope you all didn't think so. Apparently there are little groups of people who go about the UK photographing beautiful old derelict buildings like my old school. I found them because I was looking for a web site for the school. But this is all there was--a derelict building. A few touches have also been added. I meant to do them earlier but the time got away from me.

Thanks for Clearing That Up

2010-07-28T22:46:00.000-04:00

What the whole Shirley Sherrod/Andrew Breitbart affair needed, of course, was less clarity. Trevor Butterworth, contract egghead at Forbes magazine, has brought it, in a post titled "It's the Inaccuracy, Stupid."

This is what you have now instead of a butler named Jeeves or a Tudor mansion imported in pieces and reassembled on Long Island. You have the English guy on retainer to make jokes of the "America and Britain are two cultures separated by a common language" variety harumph ha ha. Trevor began this Transatlantic two-cultures schtick sometime back with an article on the semicolon. Now he has worked his way up to irony.

If there is one thing that triggers a gag reflex in those of us from the English-speaking colonies of Pax Americana, it's the sentimentality. Were irony, sarcasm and cynicism sports, Britain and Ireland would be perpetual gold and silver medalists, while doe-eyed, good ol' U.S. of A. would barely qualify as an also-ran.

All reasonable people can be assumed to agree therefore that the widely expressed disgust over Breitbart's (initially successful) attempt to have a black woman federal employee fired from her job on the basis of a doctored video is just that American sentimentality again. Though it's good for boundless optimism!

You know that they sit in the bars of luxury hotels in Third World countries that they are buying piece by piece or to which they are shipping container-loads of small arms, and say things like "Now in America we have optimism. Why don't these people have optimism?" In fact old Fatcat probably believes, sincerely, that it was his optimism that made him rich, and not his cutthroat greed and meanness.

To this hopelessly constipated stupidity, Trevor, palming once again the same worn, greasy deck of dead jokes, stereotypes, and cliches beloved of the closet Anglophile and Imperial nostalgia buff--pining for the days when you just went around raiding shit and beating the rest of Europe to Africa, to a chorus of sentimental Christian propaganda that ended in the slaughter of almost a generation of young men--gives the use of his intellectual uh, credentials I suppose.

Breitbart, he admits sportingly, "screwed up."

On Monday, the day after the big thunderstorm that took out power over a large area of the suburbs around me--but not mine luckily this time--I took my car to the mechanic. He drove me to the Metro station and I went on to work, and near the end of the day I realized that I had left my house keys with the car keys, that is, with the car. I got my cousin D. to run me up there but we got caught in traffic (of course) and when we got there the place was all closed up and the owner unreachable by phone. Meanwhile the manager of my apartment building was at the beach. So I had to shell out $200 and change for a locksmith, and of course the lock was unpickable so he had to sort of blast it to pieces very noisily with a power drill while the dogs, probably desperate to pee, thought Armageddon was here again like that time last week when the power went out in a thunderstorm and things kept making buzzing noises.

See that? Forgetting the keys? That's screwing up. Screwing up is leaving the car parked in neutral on a hill without engaging the emergency brake. Screwing up is forgetting to turn off the fire under the rice. Screwing up is cheating on your partner or getting a DUI.

The expression "screwing up" suggests that Breitbart was trying to do something other than what he was doing and just, well, did it wrong, put Flap A into Slot B instead of into Slot A and that's why the drawer didn't work properly or the toy helicopter didn't fly. Trevor wants to suggest that the problem with the Sherrod video was mere inaccuracy and, what the hey, newspapers have never been accurate and he's got the charts and figures and a quaint bit of 19th-century lore to prove it.

Breitbart's intention was to harm Shirley Sherrod. He singled her out to misrepresent her before the world as a "racist." It was a deliberate fabrication, a misrepresentation of who she was in order to tell a bigger lie. Ruining her reputation and causing her the loss of her job was a big win for Breitbart until the facts came out. His subsequent self-defenses were as contemptibly dishonest and full of bad faith as the video. Trevor does not mention the ACORN video that effectively destroyed an organization committed to ensuring that the poor get to vote, but when a person gets caught in shameless lies twice it's something more than "screwing up." So far the only penalty that Breitbart has had to pay for the actual harm he has done is to endure the scorn of sane people, whom he despises because he is full as a tick with nastiness and rage.

But Trevor is there to defend him. I'm not a mean person, you know. If Breitbart ever ends up getting sued out of every penny or so disgraces himself that even his sponsors don't want to touch him, I'll drop a dollar in his hat as I pass him on the sidewalk. I don't discriminate. If he were in court I'd hope he had a good defense, and I have no doubt he has the means to get one in that unlikely event.

Breitbart had no grounds or standing to go and interfere in this woman's life and work. He had no legitimate motive. He did not find a case against Sherrod, he fabricated one by lying. Deliberately, and badly, for the purpose of making her look like a racist so he could prove that "Black people are the real racists." Now, it's bad enough that he goes and troubles this woman, but he does so with the intent of ginning up race hatred in a country that, it's clear, is still unable to deal rationally and justly with it.

It's not sentimentality that makes me find Breitbart and his methods so loathsome: it's his dishonesty and malice. This would have been perfectly clear to Samuel Johnson, who wrote, in response to just exactly the sort of glib consequence-free contrarianism that Trevor thinks is so very cool and which he deploys in defense of the indefensible. This pose isn't intellectual realism and detachment, it isa lack of self-awareness:

I am always afraid of determining on the side of envy or cruelty. The privileges of education may sometimes be improperly bestowed, but I shall always fear to withhold them, lest I should be yielding to the suggestions of pride, while I persuade myself that I am following the maxims of policy; and under the appearance of salutary restraints, should be indulging the lust of dominion, and that malevolence which delights in seeing others depressed.

I'd like to see someone try to tell Johnson that he was just sentimental.

The Civil Rights movement was about righting an ongoing, entrenched injustice. The victims of discrimination were not incurring an obligation to the indulgent kindness of sentimental Americans; they were getting partial payment on an obligation that was long, long past due. This has nothing to do with how anybody feels about Shirley Sherrod or any other individual black person or black people as a group. It has nothing to do with sentiments at all. Sentiments helped move the cause but at the core of it was a principle.

Here is Johnson with the principle:

If Trevor finds American sentimentality so gag-worthy, why doesn't he talk instead about the principles? They apply in exactly the same way to all forms of discrimination, like the kind that killed Shirley Sherrod's father, and they apply to Sherrod's own case. She did not do anything to forfeit her right not to be molested by some nasty political pervert with an axe to grind. And if she doesn't have the right not to be molested in this way, no one does.

If Trevor sees far enough into American culture to recognize that Americans often conflate sentimentality with morality, why doesn't he appeal, then, to a robust English tradition of unsentimental morality? Well, I really don't think that's what he's getting paid for. Instead of following up on Breitbart's abusive practices, he goes after some guy at the Baltimore Sun.

But Rodrick's argument that democracy lies in the distinction between the mostly trivial errors of the mainstream press and the mostly substantive errors of the upstart right-wing media is a sentimental illusion, utterly unsupported by accuracy studies or even straightforward observations of the "mainstream media failed to grasp the recent, systematic failures in the financial system" variety.

I'd be the first person to acknowledge the hip-deep horseshit that the news business talks about itself and its mission. Trevor and I went to the same journalism school, and the stuff is gag-worthy. But only a person who is willfully self-deceived or an idiot could believe that the malicious fabrications of a ratfucker represent any kind of viable "upstart" alternative.

Trevor has disappeared the moral question at the heart of the Sherrod affair and now he is in the act of disappearing it in journalism too. Just as he bypasses the question of whether there is a meaningful distinction between sentimentality and morality, so to he leaves in a muddle the question of whether there is a meaningful difference between journalism and "making shit up." Then, deploying his anecdotes about William Randolph Hearst and other Amazing Facts, he suggests that only a sap would try to act as if there was a difference.

Having disposed of the sentimentality Trevor lets the moral issue drop along with it. Which suggests, that for all he presents himself as a representative of the English grit and no-nonsensicality, he is no better at distinguishing these same two things than his audience of Americans. And there's where you can identify the service he's doing for his employers; because with the morality disappeared, even the sentimentality becomes a childish indulgence that can be dispensed with. He is performing the service of relieving his readers--those "boundless optimists"-- of the burden of even paying lip service to morality and truth. While, of course, joshing them about their soft, mushy centers and thereby, incidentally, insinuating that they are really actually over-endowed with sensibility. Gosh! That must be why the poor are constantly taking advantage of them and why the blacks are so ungrateful.

Johnson was onto that cheap dodge too:

Well, you know, back in St. Kitts I used to get accused from time to time of being in somebody-or-other's pocket. When I was attacked in my house, the opposition party newspaper wrote that perhaps I had been attacked because I had colluded with the government in hiding crime statistics. I was accused of being in the pay of George Soros (Oh! If only!). Even my friend Jamie Astaphan once accused me of secretly working for the Prime Minister--and that was the only time I blew up about it. I wrote him a long letter in which I basically explained that there was nobody in St. Kitts who could afford to buy me. I don't say I don't have my price, because that would be tempting fate. I don't work for a wingnut-funded science-debunking think tank. That's luck, mainly, but I'm glad that the temptation never offered. I really feel I can't afford to--that that would forfeit for me the little respect I hope to retain among the people I respect. That's all I've got, because I'm probably never going to be rich. And within myself there is a feeling that it would take a lot of money to recover or compensate me for that little bit of inner self-respect once I sold it. Even to say so much seems like asking bad luck to come and live with me. So I'll just hurry to the point. With the foregoing considerations I could imagine writing a defense of Andrew Breitbart's "journalism" under only one condition that I got a really big check. About four feet wide by about two and a half feet high, at least. I'd like to be photographed with it, like they do at those charity fundraiser things, with the donor's name clearly visible. And it would be big in the other sense of course too. Really really big. How big? Oh, a fleet of Brinks trucks would be involved. And I would then retire from my brief appearance in public life to the private Caribbean island that came with the compensation package.

That doesn't appear to be the deal that Trevor got, but seems to think he has found a way --a petroleum-based product maybe--*to touch pitch without being defiled.

*Scroll down to the comment section of this article and watch him tackle someone who asks who pays the bills at his statistics-debunking web site, STATS.

Lafayette Square

2010-07-02T20:49:00.000-04:00

Where I work is two blocks away from the White House. I wander over that way at lunch whenever the weather and the absence of errands permit; I'm trying to make a habit of it, not because of the White House but because of Lafayette Square. I find downtown DC a little dull to look at, as so much of whatever individuality and color it might have had has been developed right out of existence. My favorite things are the increasingly rare little survivals. But Lafayette Square has turned into a find. It's just exactly the right size for people-watching, and I find that if I just go somewhere and just watch for a while without feeling compelled to justify my existence in any way I get a big lift out of it. There is always always someone demonstrating; last week there was a group from the Congo, and yesterday a Vietnamese lady presiding over some anti-nuke signs. Yesterday there was also a street preacher. I had my iPod (of course) so I only caught little bits of his act: there was something about Jesus! Jeeeesus! Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus! and then I think the Vietnamese lady or some sirens drowned him out, and then a little later I heard him say, "You can say your blah blah blah, you can say yadda yadda" but I didn't make it to the end of whatever that thought was.

A regular in the park is the still rather buff older black man with long white locks and a long beard, who sits on a bench in his underwear or something looking very like underwear.

I passed him on my way to the pond on the east side of the park, where I was hoping to see baby ducks. But there were no ducks in that pond. All the ducks were taking naps in the other pond, and the only bird in this one was a struggling pigeon. He was just out of reach, and after looking at him for a while I started taking off my shoes. The place is swarming with cops as you can imagine, and I'm pretty sure they would not approve of someone climbing into the fountain. But I couldn't spot any of the park rangers (it's a National Park) and I didn't think it was the sort of thing you could ask one of the guys guarding the White House to do. So I thought OK. But then along came this blond kid about 16, he looked, a tourist who didn't speak a word of English. He caught on to what I wanted and waded into the water, grabbed the pigeon and handed it to me, and then just buzzed off to wherever he was headed.

Well there I was standing in the park with this soaking wet half-drowned pigeon in my hands. Still no sign of a park ranger, so I just sort of held it hoping it would recover. But after several minutes of wandering around looking for a ranger I realized that the pigeon had other problems than being half drowned. It was not long for this world. Rescue was not in its future, so I was started to think maybe I could hand it off to someone who would know how to put it out of its misery. And then I realized "I am standing here in the park holding a sopping wet diseased and dying pigeon in my hands." It was not exactly the sort of handful anyone would want to relieve me of. So I laid it on the ground under a tree and wished it the best--a gentle sleep.

Yesterday's best was the old homeless black man, sitting on a bench in the shade with a big suitcase and other assorted luggage, including several large sheets of poster board. These he had written on in blue, red and black magic marker--large, careful block letters. He was reading from a big, well-thumbed, leather-bound gilt-edged Bible. I got just close enough to him to read what was on the sign that was at the top of the stack--I was very curious to see what it said. I must say I was not disappointed.

"LATINO SERIAL KILLER RING OPERATING OUT OF UNION STATION
MCDONALDS MANAGER IS THEIR LEADER"

Further West, More Mysterious

2010-06-28T23:39:00.000-04:00

I don't know if you can read the text. It says

Welcome to the " Happy Girls" world. Lots of fabulous dreams and adventures are in store for you!And the odds are you will survive it!

Odds are that you won't, though, realistically speaking. Sorry.

This is the jewel of my small collection of Korean children's notebooks. I'd probably have more of them if I hadn't moved away from the source, which was a supermarket out near the Tick Ranch. They cost a dollar each, though I did pay $4 for one that had a sort of rodent (guinea pig? capybara?) in overalls standing in a little sailboat, apparently setting out to sea from an Italian fishing village. Every few weekends or so I'd run to this supermarket (it was also where I bought dog food garnish) and go into the kids' and babies' section to look for notebooks because they were so completely awesome. And I'd certainly have more of them if I didn't give them away.

But after all what else can one do with a bunch of wacky Korean notebooks? I have been giving them away as gifts but only to people who appreciate their specialness. Sometimes these recipients appreciate it a little too much: one twelve-year-old, given her choice of several, turned down the one with the mysterious blue fuzzy animal driving his convertible and grinning like a maniac because she said "It was too creepy." It was hard to disagree, to tell the truth.

Anyway I sort of forgot that I had these wonderful things until I found myself describing them to someone at the Big International Organization where I'm working now. And then I thought of someone else there who might like one, so tonight I pulled them off the shelves to admire them again, and to share with you, my small but select readers.

For those who might be frightened by the dark undertones of Happy Girls, I think you'll find you're safe with Chip Chip Star:

Again, the text:

Look at Chip Chip Star. She may be small, but she's very fashionable.

Rock on, Chip Chip Star! And to hell with the odds!

More Sardinia for You

2010-06-20T21:55:00.000-04:00

This is near the very very old church in the seaside town of Porto Torres. The church is behind me but I liked the old columns with the scooter and the laundry. Why can't we have peeling plaster like they do in Italy, is what I want to know. Why does their plaster peel in exactly the right way? How do they do that? For that matter, how do they make unpainted cinderblock look so interesting?

4:16 a.m.

2010-06-19T04:17:00.000-04:00

Dammit dammit dammit dammit dammit dammit dammit dammit dammit Goddamit.

No More Horizontal Blogging

2010-06-18T23:09:00.000-04:00

This morning in a joint effort at a full trifecta of stupid my Dad and I had our laptops stolen from the apartment while he was dropping me at the Metro station. I believe that between us we left nothing undone to ensure that it would happen.

The one time when I would rather like having Misha be a big fat belligerent hysterical German shepherd menace she was not on the scene. She was with us, in the car, barking at pedestrians, which is worse than useless.

I was just arriving at work when my Dad called and told me the news. I spent the rest of the day feeling slightly but persistently nauseated, my appetite quite gone. I felt like I'd been punched in the head.

It's strange but towards the end of the day (I was putting off coming home as long as I could) it seemed to me that this little burglary felt worse than after the attack in St. Kitts. I suppose it is possible that I felt as punch-drunk then as I felt most of the day: I remember that I missed a flight to Jamaica and ended up spending two nights in Antigua instead, alone in this kooky old hotel on a beach far out of town, it was the one my therapist used for workshops so she and her husband parked me there when I told them what had happened.

Perhaps because in the various Life Catastrophically Going To Hell Scenarios that I mentally rehearse on a regular basis, the first instruction to self is always "Pack up the dogs and the laptop..." usually in the car, where we are going to live when the bottom falls out of the universe or the sky falls in or whatever is the scary prospect I think up in the middle of the night.

And in the middle of the night was when I and my stolen laptop had our best good times.

I believe the chances of recovering it are negligible, and luckily I had backed up most of what was on it and saved what was irretrievable except for a couple dozen iTunes. Could have been worse. Well, no, the stupidity could hardly have been worse, really.

You won't mind if I don't tell you about the stupidity, do you?

At least not today. It's just so embarrassing.

The new desktop I bought, with the big screen for editing, was too big for the burglar to take away, so I'm writing this post on it and it will be HQ for a while. But until I get a new laptop there will be no editing while watching bad TV and good movies.

I shall miss that. Over the next few weeks I'll think about replacing it. I could take this event as an opportunity to change my habits I guess. I am such a slave to routine!

I never know whether that's because I'm getting older or because I'm still bracing myself against the crazy from a long time ago. I spent six years in one of these crazymaking personal relationships. If you ever hear someone say "I don't know why he/she stays with him/her when he's so abusive," you could read that piece, or you could ask me. I was only dealing with verbal abuse and I can tell you I spent three years just disoriented, simply unable to make any kind of rational sense out of what was happening. That was because only one of the two of us was allowed to make any sense out of anything, and it wasn't me. I believed that I was horribly messed up in my head, dishonest; I had an "agenda" though I could not understand what the agenda was, only he could; I talked bullshit regularly without knowing it and I was too phony to understand why it was bullshit; that was why it didn't matter that I gave up my bullshit career, and why it didn't matter how I felt about it; that was why he had no plan for any kind of future, because we couldn't even think about something like that until I got myself straightened out and stopped being such a mess and he'd tell me when, because (it goes without saying) only he could be trusted to make a plan. But of course he was never going to tell me I was OK. Never.

Anyway right about the time when I discovered, years later, freedom as something to look forward to even more than looking forward to "not being hegged and harrassed right out of my goddam mind," but as something for me to make something with, that's when I got that laptop. And what I wanted to make was writing. Now there was nothing between me and writing.

Do you remember the Horrible Job that was the reason why I moved to the Tick Ranch? OK that job behaved like that ex. Everybody was working way more than 40 hours. Management were going to fix it but first everybody had to give 150 percent and if they weren't giving 150 percent then they wouldn't deserve all the good things that would come eventually when management fixed it and we were all going to be shitting gold doubloons and it was our fault if we weren't there yet. We weren't trying hard enough...

I have never hated a job so much as I hated that one. I knew what was happening. At night, out at the Tick Ranch, I was really alone, which I needed and wanted. When I quit the job and had to commute nearly two hours each way to work in DC again I was happy, it was like this actual happiness that I had made by my choice and not expected from anybody else (see? maybe that was me not them). I am a slow learner at choosing for myself. But I felt myself to be coming along, and I know that one reason was because of that laptop. I was alone but I wasn't lonely. It was a lifeline to the people that I care about.

Now, this is sort of silly. I mean, I should have known better than to get attached to a piece of office equipment. Moreover I have all the work, sitting here on my desk in the little hard drive. And eventually that dependable little machine was going to give out anyway. Have I really lost anything valuable? I have lost a bit of history, I guess--as if there isn't enough history choking up this apartment. I don't know, maybe I have been liberated from something.

Well, I suppose over the next few weeks I'll see.

Update: I should clarify: when I said "Now there was nothing between me and writing," I don't mean to suggest that this person tried to keep me from writing. He actually encouraged me to write, but without understanding any better than I did why I was so demoralized. And I probably would never have allowed myself to try drawing and painting without his encouragement. That was one of many things I'm grateful to him for. I know that people who act like that are not necessarily evil, even though what they do can really hurt other people. I say this, and I still occasionally get mad sometimes, mostly at myself, for not understanding sooner just how screwed up the whole relationship was. But I was afraid to. So when I say that nothing got between me and writing I mean that I finally got desperate enough, I finally got to the point where I could believe that I, unassisted, might manage my life better, including writing. I gave up the belief that a whole bunch of other stuff had to be in place before I could write or live as me: that I needed to be securely attached to some guy I was in love with, that I needed to live somewhere else, I needed different space, more time, more money, before writing could happen. I mean, it would be nice to have more money, more time, a bigger apartment, less goofiness of dogs, etc. In my past belief that all these things had to be in place first, you can maybe see how I was running a "sick system" all by myself and the relationship disasters were just sort of supplementary assistance.

My feeling about time changed. The big change was beginning to believe that I had everything I needed (dog, laptop, books, art supplies). What I mean is that if these things (plus of course friends and you, my small and select readers) were all I had, then what I had was what I wouldneed to begin with. I sort of gave up the past, the expectations I had brought forward out of the past--well, it would be more accurate to say I forgot them. The future was easier to forget, as I am temperamentally disposed to the darkest pessimism. Anyway I hope I've made the difference clear.

Cheese

2010-06-08T06:15:00.000-04:00

Thiesi, Sardinia, is where Pecorino Romano cheese comes from. On a visit there we had lunch with Jeff's friend Cecilia who teaches at the elementary school where Jeff teaches his book-making class. For dessert she served us fresh Ricotta cheese (from sheep, not cows), made just the day before, with honey poured over it. If someone ever offers you this dessert, just don't ask any questions, forget about your weight or your other issues. You don't want to miss it.

I'm actually back, but I was having problems uploading photos while I was there, so I couldn't post any pictures and I was peeved. Also totally knackered at the end of every day. I don't know how to account for the font change but if it doesn't bother you we'll just live with it for now.

(Photo by Kia)

Update: Corrected spelling of Thiesi, Thankyewveddymuch buckner.

Oh, Death!

2010-06-01T10:59:00.001-04:00

This is a one of several impressive family crypts and tombs in the city cemetery of Sassari, Sardinia, where I'm spending a long week. Death is hauling these people toward the tomb entrance like a fisherman hauling in a net of fish. There's something about that meeting of the fictive and the real in this that just gets me. The tomb confers some of its actuality on the sculpture, and the sculpture invests the tomb with its meaning and emotional power--reality and imagination supporting each other. I have never seen anything quite like it. And yet it is after all just the tomb of some Sardinian solid citizen.

(Photo by Kia)

The Mysterious West--Wayyyy Out West

2010-05-20T22:55:00.000-04:00

I don't know where you get the multicolored camelias. Those are camelias, right? I think they are. Mostly. They are very fine of course as is the view across the lake, and the vaguely alpine-looking greenery on the far side of the turquoise-colored water, which, unlike most lakes, is brighter than the sky. I mean, usually the water is darker. Oh, heck, as if you care. The whole thing seems to proceed on the assumption that 1) camelias are nice, and the more colors the merrier; 2) a lake is nice; 3) some trees are nice; 4) a view of a mountain is nice; 5) a blue sky is also nice; and 6) some scruffy and utterly disreputable-looking pigeons are nice. It all adds up to a very generous and diverse array of nice. Except for the pigeons. I do not understand the pigeons at all. They add something, but what? It is a mystery to me.

Which is pretty great as pigeons are usually rather short on mystery.

No Time Like the Present

2010-05-09T06:46:00.000-04:00

Dear Ms. Kia:

It's inevitable. At a dinner party or on the sidelines of my son's soccer game, someone well-meaning will ask what I do. "I edit the Virginia Quarterly Review," I tell them. ... They nod politely, sometimes with the vaguest hint of recognition. Yes, they remember seeing in the local paper that we've won some big awards, right? It's well respected, isn't it? But the idea of editing a literary magazine seems, to them, only slightly more utilitarian than making buggy whips or telegraph relays."...

Signed
Invisible

Dear Invisible,
There is nothing quite like the pain of being misunderstood and unappreciated by a total stranger that I've just met at a dinner party or at the sidelines of a soccer game. Believe me, I have been there and done that. Just as you find yourself, I have too often been a Person That Other People Are Not Necessarily Interested In. You may well look at me, and ask, How do you do it, Ms. Kia? How do you carry on in the face of this callous and unaccountable indifference? Do you have any advice?

Do I have advice? If I could bottle and sell it, I would be a rich woman now. But I am generous. I give it away for free. When my friends complain that they once had a miserable time with people they don't know well, do you know what I say to them? I say, "[Insert friend's name here], Do you LOVE those people?" And [Insert friend's name] says, "No," and I say, "Well I don't see the problem then." Who are these people anyway? Wild animal trainers? Astronauts? Submarine captains? I recommend that you hang with a better class of people, Invisible. Or bring something to read.

Dear Ms. Kia,

Back in the 1930s, magazines like the Yale Review or VQR saw maybe 500 submissions in a year; today, we receive more like 15,000. This is due partly to a shift in our culture from a society that believed in hierarchy to one that believes in a level playing field. [Emphasis added, with some consternation--Ms. K] This is good—to a point. The reality is that not everyone can be a doctor, not everyone can be a professional athlete, and not everyone can be a writer. You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can't express your individuality in sterling prose, I don't want to read about it.

Signed
Mighty Particular Considering

Dear Mighty,
I'm going to write something on the blackboard.

Sentence A:
This is due partly to a shift in our culture from a society that believed in hierarchy to one that believes in a level playing field.

Sentence B:
You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can't express your individuality in sterling prose, I don't want to read about it.

Dear Mighty,
I hope you will not take offense, but the person who wrote Sentence A may not want to take quite such a high tone in Sentence B.

That small point of style dispensed with, let's turn our attention to the substance, shall we? I fear you are unclear on the concept of equality. During the years that you characterize by the belief in hierarchy lots of great literature was written and published. But to conclude that it was the result of hierarchy--that the exclusion of ethnic and religious and racial minorities assured quality--well, you would have to believe that the Age of Affirmative Action For Straight White Gentile Men was a pure, disinterested and perfectly efficient meritocracy. Do you really want to go there?

As for the idea that social hierarchy somehow nurtures quality literature--here are a few people who would disagree with you: Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, William Hazlitt, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce. Any of these writers could have made good use of a little bit of a break when they were starting out. I'd like to see you tell any one of them that their poverty and struggles were good for their art.

Dear Ms. Kia,

By the 1950s, young writers could apply to a dozen creative writing programs; the Beats could publish in Chicago Review, experimental writers in Black Mountain Review, internationalist writers in TriQuarterly, young Southern writers in Georgia Review and Shenandoah. All on the university dime. By the early '70s—and with the development of inexpensive offset printing—every school seemed to have its own quarterly. Before long, the combined forces of identity politics and cheap desktop publishing gave rise to African American journals, Asian American journals, gay and lesbian journals. Graduates of creative writing programs were multiplying like tribbles. Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies. In short, no one is reading all this newly produced literature—not even the writers themselves. And with that in mind, writers have become less and less interested in reaching out to readers—and less and less encouraged by their teachers to try.

Signed
Math Anxious

Dear Math Anxious,
Gee, I wish I could understand why for so many people history apparently began and ended in the 1950s when the unwashed started showing up in classes. Let's go a little further back. The 19th century writers we read now mostly in college English classes were popular writers, widely read. The firewall between popular and "literary" writing arose mainly after the First World War, though a case could be made that its foundations were laid even earlier--at least when the subject matter of poetry narrowed dramatically in range after the 18th century. But Modernism began in repudiation of the artistic, moral and cultural values that had led to the war, which was this catastrophe. The world wasn't the same afterward. Lots of other writers didn't take the oppositional stance of the Modernists; they were widely read then, and continued to be popular for years. Most of them, now, nobody reads. I read them in school because I happened to grow up in a culture that, in my childhood at least, was still remotely under the influence of Georgian (as in George V and George VI) values, at least in its literary tastes. I mean, my composition books in school had a portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth II on the cover.

The Modernists published their own literary journals, in small editions, sustained by private incomes and begging. They were mostly short-lived and nobody read them except for other writers. Everybody was still reading Masefield and Walter de la Mare and Palgrave's Golden Treasury.

The English professors started paying attention with Eliot; erudite, ironic, obscure, satire without an object, vaguely deploring the loss of some imaginary paradise and full of tight-lipped scorn for the unwashed and unlettered, Eliot's work was like catnip for English professors. One after another of the Moderns sort of began to gain his or her own cult following among literary types, people disposed to look for challenging literary work, that took them into the academic mainstream just about the time that people in universities were running out of original things to say about Shakespeare.

And there was lots of money, there was great demand for new teachers, and there were all the lessons all those GIs brought home from the War about the value of real liberal humanism. Two of my mentors were such people. But basically it was about money and about the belief that investing in the humanities had huge payoffs as in possibly preventing the horrors so recently witnessed. And the money was there, just as there was money for an Interstate Highway system, and, not long after, a space program. Subsidizing literary magazines fell naturally into this optimistic, liberal, expansive view.

Well, more than 50 years later, we are accustomed to hear people talk about "running a university like a business" and treating academic departments as "cost centers." Which makes about as much sense as building a highway system or a space program or operating a bus system that way. Some things cannot be made to turn a profit; there are other values besides profit. But of course now if you say that you are a hippie troublemaker etc. Now I call this a detail but it represents a huge shift in intellectual orientation, in ideology, in expectations not only of education but in fundamental beliefs about the aims and ends of human life in society. Interesting that you don't mention it, Math Anxious.

So it is remarkable that of all things creative writing programs should have proliferated, especially at the accelerated rate of the last 30 or so years when universities have been cutting away at the humanities as an unprofitable superfluity in the glorious free market. And let me tell you, the "liberals" on campus were down with that program.

When I entered graduate school in the mid 1980s I was assigned a graduate advisor, who at our first meeting suggested to me that writing fiction would harm my prospects for an academic career. I wondered why that should be: I hadn't gone to grad school to write fiction, and if I wrote fiction in my spare time and published it, why would that be any different from my other extracurricular activities like gardening, cooking, ballet? He was trying to keep me away from Marvin Mudrick, as I figured out about five minutes after I left his office. I mention this only because the idea that fiction was bad for your career was perfectly plausible cover for this bit of politicking. The person who gave me this advice was not one of old relics, no Professor Fuddy or Professor Duddy; he was a slick, expensive acquisition, a man who had the word "diversity" constantly in his mouth, who was rewarded for his perfect and uncritical conformity and courtier's skills with a fat gig orbiting around Jacques Derrida at UC Irvine.

In other English departments, though, some people could do math. Students, in growing numbers, wanted to take creative writing classes. Why wouldn't they? The earliest writing programs had track records of student publication and attracted visiting lecturers who were published writers. Students would pay to attend these programs. Now, suppose you are an English department. You start a writing program, fairly cheaply, and then let's say you admit 20 students. One gets a book deal, nineteen don't; but whether any of them publish or not, you get to keep the money. Moreover, a few book deals sort of generate a virtuous loop: they attract more students, maybe better students; they attract the eyes of publishers and agents; they attract better visiting faculty. Because most of the people who teach in creative writing programs are not living off their books.

Best of all, there is an apparently unlimited supply of people who are willing to dedicate a couple of years, a week, three months, whatever they can afford, to their development as writers.

If you have ever driven across the United States you may appreciate that it is a very boring place. Lots of it is empty, like out West. And then there are a lot of very dull towns, where there is no culture but what comes in via the TV and the chain stores. But writers get born in those places because there is no good place to be a writer, they're all equally good or bad, and they have to find other writers who, like they, are mysteriously intrigued by writing as an art--for whatever reasons, if only the hope that it will enable them never to have to go back to Gopher Butt or Soulless Acres. If you haven't driven across the country then I suggest you read Dawn Powell's My Home Is Far Away. Writers want to express themselves and they also want that audience of people who are interested in writing, who share the experience. And in the vast cultural wastes of America you may not luck into such an audience--the chances are you will have to go looking for it.

So you see? Writing workshop.

Here is what writing programs offer to writers: contact with other people interested in writing, guidance and instruction, an audience, possible connections to publishers or an agent, and time. Writers have always needed these things.

Why do you regard these hopeful writers with such contempt? Are you aware of the contempt? Is there a non-contemptuous way to refer to aspiring writers as a "precious snowflakes" Is there a non-contemptuous way to compare them to promiscuously reproducing vermin from outer space? What should these people be doing instead? Do the force and extent of this desire for self-expression suggest nothing else to you?

There have always been more people aspiring to write than there have been readers willing to read them; there are lots of readers, but they want to read the writers they already like. Writers who are not already established have always had to fight to win or keep their audiences--by luck, by skill, by vicious pamphlet wars, by publicity stunts, by manifestos, by low and devious cunning, by dying, by getting Oprah's endorsement, and, of course,by writing. They've tried everything, and most of the time they never made a decent living off it.

Now is as good a time as any to be a writer, or an aspiring writer. It is always the wrong time, it is always the right time. Other times might have been great for Hemingway, or for Jane Austen, or for Chaucer. Had you, Math Anxious, or my friend Bob, or that man over there at the bus stop been there then it might not have been any better for us than the present is. It's quite possible, in other words, that the good old days (whenever you imagine them to have been) would have been bad for you. Just as it's possible that in a former life you were not an Egyptian princess but the guy who cleaned up after the elephants.

To pull out of this tailspin, writers and their patrons both will have to make some necessary changes—and quick. With so many newspapers and magazines closing, with so many commercial publishers looking to nonprofit models, a few bold university presidents could save American literature [you're kidding, right?--Ms. K.], reshape journalism, and maybe even rescue public discourse from the cable shout shows and the blogosphere. At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers.

It's not the proliferation of uninteresting entertainments that besets me as a writer (although I find a horrid fascinationin Real Housewives of New York); I know how to switch them off. If you don't like the "blogosphere" don't hang out there. You sound like this boyfriend I had once who walked into a supermarket with me and said "Oh wow. Too much information." Somewhere in that supermarket was a single mother with two small kids that she picked up from day care on her way home from work and she was going to get her shopping done and get everybody home, fed, and to bed so she could start the next grinding work day. She deals with the information. Time and money are hard realities, and have been ever since ever; too much entertainment is the least of anybody's troubles.

I make my defense here of the aspiring writers, the 60,000 tribbles, though I don't read their books. I walk into the local bookstore and go right past that table with all the new titles. And even though I don't read their books, I'd never say to someone that they shouldn't write, or that they should write "sterling prose." Because, well, you never know...

I'm saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ's sake, write something we might want to read.

Oh, all right then. You go first.

Another Take

2010-04-29T13:20:00.000-04:00

The Ghost of Chuckling, in comments to my post on the movie Precious:

Hi Kia, I finally got around to watching Precious. I agree that your teacher Mudrick pegged the basic nature of the story. There must be a reason that story is told over and over and over again. The collective unconscious, perhaps? In this case, for a popular movie, I thought it was very well done. And it's not like she went on to live happily ever after. Pretty much anyone who had AIDS in 1987 was dead by 1991.

The whole thing came off as very realistic to me, at least with the caveats associated with the limitations of the form. The author was raped and abused by her father. She taught adult literacy in Harlem for five or six years in the late eighties/early nineties. She is a lesbian. It's not as if it had been written by a Bennington grad from the upper east side. And I (should say "we" because I watched it with my wife and we were mostly in agreement about it) had a totally different reading of the "what's that white bitch want" part. The "who's the real racist" angle didn't even occur to us. We saw it as a great example of how those two worlds are so far apart that communication is incredibly difficult, most often impossible. We thought it was very well-done for that type of movie in that it didn't explicitly make that point about communication, about how from their ghetto perspective they couldn't even fathom the possibility that the white bitch was going way out of her way to help them. All they could imagine, all their experience had ever taught them, was that the white bitch wanted to somehow punish them. Take away the welfare, kick them out of school. Whatever. In the really crappy movies, there's usually a magic character to explain all that.

We did question the well-trodden territory of The Color Purple. It is unfortunate that so many prominent African-American writers feature incest in their novels. Invisible Man is another famous example. Is incest an ethnic trait among African-Americans? Everything I've read suggests it's a class thing, not an ethnic thing. Being from south Podunk, all the examples I know of personally occurred in poor white families. But I think it is valid to argue that the inclusion of these scenes in so many prominent works does give the impression that it's an ethnic (racial for the really ignorant) thing. But should an artist consider that kind of political calculation, particularly when writing about things she personally experienced? I can't bring myself to say no, not when it's truly an honest and integral part of the story.

Regarding the issue of parodying the poor and propagating a message that they are undeserving, irredeemably horrible, dangerous parasites; we got pretty much the opposite message from the movie. And to be fair, that pretty much is the movie's message, that the poorest of the poor are not irredeemable. For us, that was where the Mudrick take was so painful. It might be believable that Precious could progress with the help of a wonderful teacher, but the liklihood of that whole class turning into happy, well-adjusted young women is pretty much nil.

Anyway, I don't mean to attack your take on it. We just saw those same issues a bit differently.

On another note, I'm currently doing a photo project with kids from one of the worst performing high schools in the South Bronx. As yet, I haven't been able to get much below the surface, but I can sense some of the same issues at work. Precious is a composite. How many real life characters is it made of?

This all seems very reasonable to me, and I think does better justice to the characters than I do. And yet, for me, it doesn't make my problems with the story go away.

Noted

2010-04-26T07:32:00.000-04:00

I. "What Are You Reading?"

I get asked for advice about writing and reading, sometimes not because people know anything about what I do (though yes, sometimes for that reason too) but sometimes because I’m reading “literature.” A couple days ago I went for a smoke at work and this other woman was there for a smoke. I was reading Bleak House and this woman expressed some surprise that anyone read Dickens for pleasure and then spent almost my entire smoke break telling me what her children were reading in school. Now, I would not go so far as to describe myself as a “people person” but I am not an ogre either. If I am outside with a book, taking in a little nicotine with my fresh air, and someone strikes up a conversation I’m in, especially if it is trivial. I love trivial conversation. Because I am, as you know, a deeply shallow person. So ordinarily I do not mind, that’s part of the whole salmagundi of life. But 1) this woman did not observe the polite forms, where if you start small talk with a stranger you give them room to not follow up, you let them go back to whatever they are doing and if they decide they want to talk to you they will freely choose. No, she just sort of came crashing in and wouldn’t shut up about her children. 2) She and her children were not interesting. So, when she said that they were having to read books that were too hard for them—one was reading something by Dickens I think, and another was reading excerpts from the Iliad—I felt entitled to speak freely instead of just agreeing to unsolicited silliness: I pointed out that in the old days children started studying Latin by the first grade, and that Dickens was always popular literature. And I said “Children’s minds should be stretched; they like it.” I began to suspect that this woman was the sort of person who just sort of unloaded whatever was in her head at whatever unlucky neighbor was in the vicinity, and what she expected was sympathy. Or else why should a person expect me to shake my head, go cluck cluck and oh dear because her son is reading excerpts from the Iliad for school? The readiness with which she granted my points suggested that the complaining was more out of habit than conviction. She probably managed to frame every observation as a complaint, even when she didn’t really have anything to complain of.

II. "What Are Your Writing?"

Sitting outside a couple nights ago doing my evening writing ritual. I get to this quite late sometimes, and except for reading on the train ride it is the first free piece of time I can claim for myself, and it is so short. On this particular night I was late again and it was dark out, and probably because the light on the front porch of the building is better I sat there. I should have known better.

Because like a spite (no not a sprite, a spite) my neighbor appears. You may remember The Man Who Does Not Know What Color Anybody Is. Him. And as usual he engages in some banter and the effect, as usual, is slightly depressing but I can’t figure out why. Although for one thing he’s not really very good at it, it’s like kicking a cement football back and forth with someone.

So he wants to know what I’m writing about all the time. “Books, mostly,” I say in a tone of voice, remote and curt, that I hope discourages further inquiry. No such luck. “Are you published?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a literary critic?”
“I’ve been called that.” (Note to self…)
“It seems this Irish writer, I think it might have been James Joyce (no no I can assure you it was not James Joyce you pinhead), was in a bar, writing one of his books, with the sheets of paper spread out all over the bar…” (Oh please God strike him dead with lightning before he finishes this joke if You are Merciful and Just) “…and the bartender accidentally knocks over his pint of Guinness all over the paper and the writer—I think it might have been James Joyce, says ‘I know you were a lousy bartender but yer a great literary critic!’ Ha! Ha!” (And You wonder why I don’t believe in You, You Bastard.)
Now, if I had told my mother that story up to this point she would say, “See? That’s the price of vanity. You should never have told him you are a published writer.” And she’d be right. Because the remainder of the conversation was all about how he doesn’t believe in literary critics it’s all a lot of bullshit anyway; he has some fiction that he wrote years ago and he doesn’t suppose it’ll ever get published because it is all about who you know, isn’t it?

No, I still have no life, thanks for asking

2010-04-12T22:16:00.000-04:00

Have I mentioned lately how much I love 18th-century English prose? Let me try to describe how much. One day when I was in Nevis, a friend of the Mad Englishman took the two of us sailing on a 30-foot sailboat that he had bought in a state of near-wreckage and carefully restored. We sailed across the Narrows to a little cove off St. Kitts' southeast peninsula and anchored in deep, deep clear water. One of the things you might like to know about the Leeward Islands is that some of the islands (Montserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts, Saba, and Statia) don't have very good anchorages. The place where we were was not a place you'd want to be in a hurricane--in hurricanes people move their boats to St. Maarten or to St. Bart's. But on a clear bright day it was fine, sheltered by steep bluffs that just dropped straight down to the water with almost no beach, inaccessible by road. I looked down into the water and it was very, very deep for being so close to shore. But still, I could see things lying on the bottom, rocks and seaweed scattered sparsely over the white sand. It made me exceedingly happy and I was the first one in the water, taking a flying, yelling dive right off the top of the cabin.

Taking up a decent--hell, even a halfway decent--18th century novel is a similar kind of happy plunge. I just dive right in over my head and don't want to come out. I class Austen among them, but that's a story for another day. Of the writers (nonfiction and fiction) who really were of the 18th century, my favorites are Sterne, Boswell, and Richardson. I read Tristram Shandy once a year, and I read Clarissa about once every other year, to tune up my morals.

To tell you all of what I get out of the 18th century writers would be yet another story. I may have to do it one tiny piece at a time.

It's a craving for the prose that drew me to read The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, by Smollett. Well that's part of it, because to tell the truth Smollett is not a very good prose writer, I mean, you won't learn to write better from reading him. But there's something.

I'm sure that Humphry Clinker does all the things that successful novelists and the creative writing teachers counsel aspiring novelists not to do. It is an epistolary novel and most of the letters (certainly the longest and fullest ones) are written by Squire Bramble and his young nephew Jeremy Melford. There is a spinster aunt (butt of much low humor), and Jeremy's sister Liddy, who is very sensitive and secretly in love with an actor--or, possibly, a young gentleman who for some reason was traveling with actors. Their one love-passage occurs in the earliest letters, and except for one appearance at Bath very soon after, he disappears from the story for hundreds of pages. Other correspondents are the spinster aunt Tabitha, Liddy, and aunt Tabitha's daffy maidservant Win Jenkins (butt of even lower humor). Yes, they are all stereotypes. What about it?

Each of these characters has just one correspondent, so the letters sort of run alongside of each other and there's no drama (such as you get in Lady Susan or Clarissa) between them except that of comparison between different accounts of the same events. Squire Bramble is taking this party, and a couple of strays who travel with them part of the way, on an extended tour of England and Scotland. He is in search of health for himself and giving his young niece and nephew a sight of the world. It's a "Visitor from Another Planet" story (the other planet is Wales, but the roads were not then what they are now), as well as a road trip, seasoned up with the romance and much slapstick and a few poop jokes. These very loose structures allow Smollett to pretty much go where he pleases; to make observations about English life, as seen through the eyes of the members of this family and the orthographically challenged Win Jenkins. The novel is a survey of manners, of morals, of habits, of characters in their settings. Which sounds kind of slow if you forget to consider how interested people are in seeing the familiar characters, stories, problems, and settings of their own times. Smollett was writing for readers who believed, who were looking to the novel for an image of their lives.

So about 50 pages in you give up on any expectation of dramatic tension. About 100 pages in, you give up all hope of ever understanding why the novel is named after an eccentric minor character who only turns up halfway through. You find out eventually, but startling as the revelation is it comes too late to save the story. There is, really, no story. And you don't care. You read to see what turns up. During the visit to Bath, Squire Bramble writes a letter describing with grim and persuasive relish just how nasty the waters at Bath must be. The family travel from Bath to London and then they head north, getting as far as the Scottish highlands. En route they stop at St. Andrews and observe yet one more strange Scottish custom (having observed several already at this point) and it is the only description of golf that I have ever seen that made it sound the least bit interesting or attractive. Odd characters come and go, and each appearance is itself an incident that most of the time includes the story of how this character came to be so odd--which is yer basic episode. Incidents, episodes, anecdotes, backstories, the main plot line having dropped completely out of sight, long descriptions of landscape and local customs, the occasional moralizing sermon on hygiene or the social habits of politicians. It is a novel almost entirely comprised of things that you are not supposed to put in novels. Not only that, Liddy's letters read like form letters, patched together out of maybe Richardson's guide to letter-writing, conveniently titled Letters written to and for particular Friends, on the most important Occasions. Directing not only the requisite Style and Forms to be observed in writing Familiar Letters; but how to think and act justly and prudently, in the common Concerns of Human Life, except with more fainting.

Nearly 300 years after Smollett, the reader expects all action and events in a work of fiction to have a motive that is related at some level to the dramatic tensions in the story. That is, the novel of now, at least as it is taught, is required to have something like what the old critics understood as the Unities. It doesn't have the same Unities as, say, a 17th-century French tragedy, it has its own set, and the key one is that all motive must come from within the story, must reside within the characters. An episode that doesn't "advance the story" is considered a narrative dead end. Smollett clearly has never heard of this rule. But somehow the novel manages without it, and the absence begins to be funny in and of itself after a while: here they are rolling along in the carriage each with his or her own thoughts and then Heigh Ho! the carriage runs into a ditch or tips over, they stay in a town, Mr. Bramble meets an old schoolfriend or a boorish nobleman or a practical joker, and so the next episode begins, ending almost always with a moral sentiment, a lesson learned.

I don't care how badly Humphry Clinker is put together. I don't care if it has a narrative arc or foreshadowing or any of that creative writing school novel-technique how-to baloney. In the 18th century, the novelist loaded up the novel with whatever he could get it to carry. For Sterne, this became a question--what could you get away with? an lengthy and exhaustive Latin curse with a simultaneous translation, elaborately set up running gags, a completely black page, a diagram of the plot represented as a squiggly line, a parody of Montaigne, a long rambling story, set in Strasbourg, about a man with an enormous nose, a dirty joke involving nuns and mules, a visit from Death, a romp across the plains of Spain, a whole separate other tour of Spain, a promise to write a chapter on buttons, never fulfilled...--and the punchline is that the joke never ends, "Such a head!" Tristram exclaims, suddenly aware that he is managing three narrative lines at once, "Would to God my enemies could see the inside of it." Smollett, at least in Humphry Clinker, is less ambitious; he is just a sort of packrat. Here is this carriage full of people on a Road Trip, and he just packs anything in with them that looks like it might be useful. Very near the end Squire Bramble runs across another old schoolmate, Mr. Baynard, who is unhappily married to a pretty woman. She is spending him into ruin, hates country life, and goes into fits whenever he tries to remonstrate with her: the same material that Edith Wharton could spin out vividly into The Custom of the Country, summed up in about four pages.

(Well, this is about where I should expect someone to pop up and tell tell me I don't know what amazing things the po-mo novel is doing and I dunno, that just makes me tired thinking about it. It's hard for me to take seriously any literary phenomenon that is born out of an academic fad. Sorry. I'm really talking about something else here. But you know, whatever floats your boat.)

So I'm reading along, you see, and I come across this passage. The Bramble entourage are heading south out of Scotland and, crossing the border, pass through a village where they witness this remarkable scene:

—As we stood at the window of an inn that fronted the public prison, a person arrived on horseback, genteelly, tho' plainly, dressed in a blue frock, with his own hair cut short, and a gold-laced hat upon his head. — Alighting, and giving his horse to the landlord, he advanced to an old man who was at work in paving the street, and accosted him in these words: 'This is hard work for such an old man as you.' — So saying, he took the instrument out of his hand, and began to thump the pavement. — After a few strokes, 'Have you never a son (said he) to ease you of this labour?' 'Yes, an please Your honour (replied the senior), I have three hopeful lads, but, at present, they are out of the way.' 'Honour not me (cried the stranger); but more becomes me to honour your grey hairs. Where are those sons you talk of?' The ancient paviour said, his eldest son was a captain in the East Indies; and the youngest had lately inlisted as a soldier, in hopes of prospering like his brother. The gentleman desiring to know what was become of the second, he wiped his eyes, and owned, he had taken upon him his old father's debts, for which he was now in the prison hard by.

The traveller made three quick steps towards the jail, then turning short, 'Tell me (said he), has that unnatural captain sent you nothing to relieve your distress?' 'Call him not unnatural (replied the other); God's blessing be upon him! he sent me a great deal of money; but I made a bad use of it; I lost it by being security for a gentleman that was my landlord, and was stript of all I had in the world besides.' At that instant a young man, thrusting out his head and neck between two iron bars in the prison-window, exclaimed, 'Father! father! if my brother William is in life, that's he!' 'I am! — I am! — (cried the stranger, clasping the old man in his arms, and shedding a flood of tears) — I am your son Willy, sure enough!' Before the father, who was quite confounded, could make any return to this tenderness, a decent old woman bolting out from the door of a poor habitation, cried, 'Where is my bairn? where is my dear Willy?' — The captain no sooner beheld her, than he quitted his father, and ran into her embrace.

Of course William pays off everybody's debts, settles an income on the aged parents, a dowry on his sister and makes a handsome donation to charity. The whole thing is like a scene out of Hogarth. And there the Bramble party was, you see, just minding their own business and happened to see it all. If the incident sounds vaguely familiar maybe it's because you remember the ballad "John Riley" in which a "fair young maid" is quizzed by a stranger about her faithfulness to her lover who has gone off to sea. There are lots of versions to it but I like this one because it is less wordy, it has some of the leanness the older ballads (the later ballads—17th century on--are sort of gabby sometimes). She answers his questions and then--

He picked her up all in his arms
And kisses gave her one, two, three,
Saying "Weep no more, my own true love,
I am your long-lost John Riley."

The dark version of this story is the ballad of the Demon Lover, also known by the title "The House Carpenter." When the old lover returns he finds that the woman has married a solid upstanding citizen, the house carpenter, and has children. The returning lover tempts her to go away with him. "I could have married a King's daughter," he says, just to let her know what he's given up for her. She resists but not for long. He's got six ships full of treasure, after all. Then a couple weeks out to sea (in one version "...she espied his cloven hoof...") she starts to miss her children, and then the ship sinks, and--

What hills, what hills are those, my love
That are so bright and free
Those are the hill of Heaven, my love
But not for you and me

What hills, what hills, are those, my love
That are so dark and low
Those are the hills of Hell, my love
Where you and I must go.

Well, just imagine any condition in which you could introduce what we would now call an "urban legend" into a novel without layers of irony and self-referential winks at the reader. But here it is. So what on earth is Smollett doing? Well, for a start, he's sort of repackaging a lovely ballad to make it presentable to his genteel readers, who would have looked down on ballads as little better than tabloid literature--which, in effect, the ballads were. Placing it in a novel like this was a way to elevate it as well, to bring it into the range of "serious" literary form. But mostly I think he's just doing it because he likes the story. It is a perfect fit for Squire Bramble's personality, it is just the sort of story that makes him get out his wallet and beam his countenance at people. And you have to remember, too, that the countenance and approval of a gentleman like Squire Bramble are instantly convertible into respectability for the recipient: respect and recognition are currency as surely as money is.

I notice the returning traveler's dress: the new blue smock (workman's clothes) and that little bit of gold braid on his hat. After we witness the reunion (Oprah would have loved this one) we can then reflect back on that first appearance. He doesn't dress above his station, he doesn't come back looking like a swell.

One of the things that sets off some of Squire Bramble's most high-octane harrumphing is that in the assemblies and public entertainments of London and Bath, anyone can get in as long they have adequately fashionable dress and the price of the ticket. This promiscuous mingling of the social orders really gets up his nose (literally: on smells he is as shrill as the Queen of the Night). With his jealously keen eye for such matters, he picks out of the crowd the apothecary's assistant, the lady's maid dressed in her mistress's castoffs. What distinguishes the real gentlefolk from the wannabes is sensibility--the capacity to be moved by objects of sentiment. The irony here, which escapes Squire Bramble, and Smollett, I'm afraid, is that the reading public who are being instructed by Bramble/Smollett on this point are also people trying to move upwards on the social ladder. They are a few rungs up from the tradespeople and domestics, but nevertheless they are possessed by their social aspirations. They have the clothes and the ticket, they want the morals. And The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, like Clarissa, like Pamela, is among other things a book of moral instruction.

And here Squire Bramble--and Smollett, apparently--misses another irony. The new classes appearing in the cities and intruding on the public entertainments and mingling with their betters--who are these people? And why does the returning son William find his family in such a plight--the aged father digging ditches to work off a debt, the brother in debtor's prison, the sister married without a dowry? And why did William go away in the first place? Squire Bramble does not connect these questions with the ongoing project of enclosure. As his party tours the countryside, he notes approvingly that some landowner has enclosed his fields; this shows that the landowner is serious about productivity. The unenclosed fields of other landowners are just so much undeveloped potential being sat on by slackers, and there is if not a legal duty there is a moral duty, perceptible to the person of sensibility, to improve productivity. But the well-known effect of enclosure was displacement: the rural poor lost their livelihoods. These displaced persons went to the cities. They went to America, they went to India, they went to the Caribbean. Some went abroad to settle, others, like William, to work for a while and return with the means to put a family back on its feet, or to marry. But the risks were high, and many who went away hoping to return rich did not return at all. These ballads of the returning sons and lovers represent far much more hope and longing and yearning than they do of reality. That is why they are so emotionally satisfying to read; they are a fantasy of a complete and rich restoration of what is lost. Despite all the years that have passed, he recognizes you before you recognize him; he did not forget you, you have not changed in his eyes.

Squire Bramble enjoys all the fine sentiments that this incident elicits. But he never makes the connection with its cause. It's as though the engine of economic progress goes chugging away on one track in his mind and the moral sentiments go chugging away on another and the two never intersect. But there we are.

"The novel is the one great book of life," said D. H. Lawrence. You don't know how true it is until you read the 18th-century novel and realize how true it was for those writers.

Shoe Repair

2010-02-28T22:49:00.000-05:00

The reason I didn't just buy a new pair of black Timberlands was because I had little hope of finding a pair exactly like these. I had got them on sale at Macy's nearly three years ago. They were waterproof, warm, and aparently indestructible. I wore them year-round, they were the the dog walking shoes, the shopping and errand shoes, the shoes to go out and play in, the shoes to wear to work when I was feeling grumpy even though they didn't look elegant, they were the shoes for doing chores in the yard at the Tick Ranch and for standing out in the meadow in the middle of the night listening for the sound of Sweetie's tags after she had sneaked off to chase something.

At last, though, it became apparent that the soles were getting thin, and the lugs had worn away so they didn't have any traction any more. I went looking for new Timberlands and ended up getting rather more expensive and rather more dressy boots to go with the new job where you have to look like a grownup. The bargain I made with myself to justify the more expensive boots was that instead of buying new Timberlands I would repair the old ones. No, no, I know it doesn't look good on paper but there you are.

Which was a great opportunity because I used to walk past the shoe-repair shop in Union Station on my way to work, back in the days when I commuted by MARC train, and then later on when I'd stop there for the Rustic Apple Pie that alas is no more. The shoe repair place, like the pharmacy, seems to belong to another age, when the station itself felt less like a mall. As though somehow they decided to stay just as they are, with their limp hair and then lips and figure flaws, while everybody else went and got a full makeover.

So I thought, "Great! I get to take my shoes to the cute old shoe-repair place," that already was as fraught with romance for me as an Edward Hopper painting.

The price they quoted me for replacing the sole was more than I had paid for the boots. But I was committed, determined. "They'll do it right," I said to myself, imagining all the important people who pass through Union Station and the expensive shoes they must bring to be repaired, and of course I had been composing fairy tales about these people in my head and they all chimed in and said "Of course we are very demanding," and another voice in me said, "I bet they wouldn't let you even do shoe repairs at Union Station unless you were really really great at it." Also I couldn't remember noticing any shoe repair shops anywhere in my neighborhood.

I picked the boots up a week or so later and they looked great. But then about two weeks later the lower layer of the sole, the part they had just replaced, started peeling back from the toe.

"You and your romances," I said to myself. "Look at where it got you." I should have taken them back to Union Station but I kept forgetting to pack them with me when I left for work, or else I'd take them and then get too busy to run over to the station, and soon weeks had gone by. Too embarrassed to take them back with a complaint at that late date I decided that I would find a shoe repair place round here, and pay again to have them repaired properly if that was the price of my folly. And then I began to notice shoe repair places all over my neighborhood.

There was one at the mall in Silver Spring, one in Kensington, there were a couple of dry cleaners who offered such services, they were everywhere. How had I not noticed this? I don't know. But still, almost the whole winter went by before I got around to taking the shoes for that second round of repairs. That was yesterday.

I took them to Langley Park. People around here groan about Langley Park. It is a confluence of strip malls at the intersection of New Hampshire Avenue and University Avenue. Really rather ugly strip malls, with vast expanses of parking lot and the shabby old stores, and everything somehow looks cheap. Everything is sort of cheap. It is the shopping hub for immigrants. On weekends the intersection is congested with vehicles coming in and out of the strip malls. All around the area are old apartment complexes packed with immigrants who sort of swarm across these two busy streets to do their shopping in the ethnic grocery stores and dollar stores and gaudy dress shops and beauty products places and chicken places and cheap furniture stores that occupy the strip malls. It is the Ugly Clock No I Mean Holy Cow That Is One Ugly Clock Capital of the World. I like Langley Park. I call it the Global Village.

In one of these strip malls I had noted the presence of a shoe repair place. I had somehow got the notion lodged in my head that the proprietor would be an older Latino man, all alone in there or maybe with one assistant and the usual shoe polish, shoe stretchers, shoe laces and related products for sale. Very dull, very quiet and slow. Which was probably part of the reason I had never made it into the place. But my other waterproof boots were no longer waterproof and I had never liked them as much as these. So there could be no more procrastination and scatter-brainedness.

It was a long narrow, surprisingly bright space with a counter running the length of it. Near the door a man stood behind a register, apparently planted there. He was African, and this gave such a jolt to my previous assumptions that I never quite recovered my balance. The whole time I was in the store I was in a sort of daze of wonder, finding it almost impossible to take it all in. There are just these--blanks. What was in the display case behind the register? What was in the window?

I held up my shoes and he pointed toward the back, where another African man stood behind the far end of the counter. He was wearing safety glasses that made him look look simultaneously hip and droll, as if he had been suddenly translated there from a cell phone service commercial and was determined not to look surprised. At the very back, separated from the rest of the store by a partition with a glass window, was what appeared to be a little dressmaking department where two women were having a discussion. The shoe repair man in the hipster safety glasses took my boots and immediately, without a word, started applying some glue to the sole. A tall slim young black American woman came in and sort of hovered about asking about a pair of white shoes that she had apparently left there some time before. He didn't seem to know anything about the white shoes but kept cheerfully gluing my boots and the woman kept chatting away about the boots and smiling and I began to wonder if she had all her marbles. I looked at the wall behind the shoe repair guy and there was an enormous poster advertising a book, "Crossing Cultural Worlds with an African Wife" was the title. Behind me I noticed an array of movies on DVD, all African and very soap-opera like. Right in front of me were lengths of patterned fabric in bright colors, neatly folded and arranged by price. The discussion between the two women behind the partition grew louder. It seemed to be wrapping up. Next to the movies along the wall were shelves full of hair products: straighteners, mostly, and pomades in brightly colored tins. I could see the woman who was seated at the table pointing as she spoke, evidently giving some last instructions about whatever business the two were transacting. Pomades! Such an old-fashioned word, and look at those tins! Wonder what they smell like. I expect they are really pungent. Who uses pomade? I didn't even notice when the woman who was the customer came out and went to the register. I only noticed her when I heard her, at the top of her voice, accusing the woman in the back of having stolen her dress. "Do you expect me to believe that she doesn't remember the dress, and when I brought it here she told me it was the most beautiful dress she had ever seen?" If the man at the register said a word in response I didn't hear it. "How could she forget the most beautiful dress she had ever seen? Oh, no, I see what she is about," I walked towards the counter, past the pomades and then past the videos and then past a stretch of wall that was dedicated to hair bobbles and assorted shiny things. "If you don't return my dress I am going to call the police! In fact I am going to call them right now. What is the name of this place? Telling me she has no memory of the dress. Right here in this shop she told me it was the most beautiful dress she had ever seen, she had never seen anything like it."

As if I hadn't seen enough in that place, now I was watching the very process by which a little thing like an extravagant, casually mercenary and probably instantly forgotten compliment to a customer had somehow become an intimation of the most sinister and conniving intent. And yet I would have put money down on the likelihood that that woman when she brought the dress put no small effort into positioning and angling for just such a compliment on the dress. But that wouldn't matter, I recognized the suspicion of envy, a powerful suspicion in many cultures, including some West Indian ones. Had she been harboring that suspicion all this time? Did it always attend compliments on one's possessions? I walked back out and I heard her giving directions to the police dispatcher but she didn't seem to have a clue where she was. "I'm in Langley Park," she kept saying.

Small Domestic Mystery

2010-01-14T21:36:00.000-05:00

Sometime after my Dad's return to live with us, Sweetie won the kitchen. How it happened when Misha weighs more than twice what she does, I don't know. There was no big scene, no fight. But one dinnertime Misha suddenly was afraid to go even near the kitchen, not even to eat. And she's the big eater. We had to place her dish far from the kitchen and then she'd eat sort of nervously, apologetically. Stranger still were these occasions when she would suddenly start dashing around the living room in a state of consternation, at last taking refuge in my bedroom, for no reason that I could make out, until my Dad pointed out that she did this every time Sweetie pushed her dish around the kitchen. Sometimes Sweetie doesn't feel like eating her dinner right away so she tries to hide it. She has a plastic dish that makes quite a racket as she pushes it around the kitchen in a futile search for some nook or cranny where no one will find it. This is apparently what drives Misha into a panic. But how this shift in their power dynamics occurred I simply have no idea.

Write When You Find Work!

2010-01-09T20:17:00.000-05:00

Saw the movie “Precious” on one of my days off.

The acting was wonderful; the young actress who plays the role of Precious, Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe, is one of those talents that seems to have riches in reserve, and you realize that a lot of it has to do with her physicality. She’s large, but that isn’t it. She inhabits her body with intelligence, sensitivity, and authority that are physical. And the vignettes from Precious’s daydreams show that she’s got comedy too.

The things I liked, I really liked. Like Sidibe’s performance. Mo’Nique, who plays her mother, was also wonderful to watch. I also liked the atmosphere of the horrible dark little apartment where the two of them live. It’s as thick with damnation as those rooms in Bad Lieutenant, except without the hipster irony and portentousness. This is a real hell on earth, it’s a trap where the spirit and fight would get worn out of you, a little bit every day, imperceptibly. I found myself peering into the gloom trying to figure out just what it is about this particular combination of objects and furnishings that is so depressing. But you couldn’t linger long over the furniture or the wallpaper (was it wallpaper?) because the mother was always there in all her menace and rage, the center of this ghastly little universe. Mo’Nique’s performance is so full of energy and conviction that I was quite a ways into the story before I realized that I was supposed to regard her as pure evil. I took her as a person wracked and angry with needs that never would be filled: for attention, for power, for experience, for some object worthy of sustained attention, for a life, basically. Of course I noticed that she was physically abusive and a bad person, but she wasn't like a horror-movie monster. And I think it was the acting that made it possible for me to see her this way.

What a shame, then, that the story is so, so bad. It’s a monstrosity, that’s the kindest word for it, and bad enough that the very quality that makes it so is its message of moral uplift. That lots of otherwise sane and reasonable people take this message at its face value is worst of all.

I reached this conclusion in sort of a roundabout way, again, because I went in so favorably disposed. But after I watched it the thought occurred to me that what was missing from this story was any vision of sexuality as anything other than a curse attended by brutality and exploitation. The only exception was that the light-skinned, straight-haired, pretty, heroic writing teacher has a light-skinned, straight-haired, pretty female live-in lover. This fact has no bearing what so ever on the plot, except that Precious notices that although these women are lesbians they are nicer than her parents and this is enough to make her tolerant of their differentness. So that's that little issue taken care of.

Early in the film we learn that Precious is pregnant with her second child. From Precious's flashbacks and things that come out in angry exchanges with her mother we learn that the father in both cases is Precious's father, who regularly raped her. Her flashbacks of these rapes are harrowing, made even more repulsive by their association with the sound and the image of frying eggs and meat. Ugly meat. Part of the mother's anger, we also understand, is her belief that Precious stole her man from her before he abandoned them both. Her abusiveness, her desire to humiliate Precious and break her spirit, therefore, has this dimension of sexual jealousy.

So Precious is not your typical wayward teenage girl. The central figures in her life are the father who appears, literally, as a grunting, sweating, humping, bestial sexual appetite and nothing else; and a sadistic, oversexed, jealous, feckless, self-pitying narcissistic mother whose only life skill--such as it is--is playing the welfare system. You know--black people.

There is a certain kind of narrative that Marvin Mudrick used to refer to as a "sensibility story." Students who took his course regularly learned to identify these stories. The "sensibility story" inevitably featured a protagonist who was the only moral sensibility in the story. Every other character was something (usually unpleasant) that happened to him or her. These stories were written in the expectation that the reader would identify and sympathize with this much put-upon protagonist. Stories like this could be executed with great proficiency, but their failure was not a problem of execution; it was a failure of imagination, a failure to be able to imagine other people's lives as they themselves experienced them. The solution was not to try to write it better, but to understand why you should not bother to write them at all. "Don't write about people you don't respect," Marvin would tell us. Often, after a discussion of one of these, he'd add, to encourage us, "Just remember: nobody gives a shit about you."

Writers who have been unable to profit from this advice keep producing such stories. The more sophisticated examples turn up in literary magazines; they used to turn up in the New Yorker--in fact another Mudrick nickname for them was "New Yorker story." They were a feature of the Shawn years, where they appeared regularly, decorous, dull, and endless. There are really only a couple of things you can do with this kind of one-sided storytelling; add sensationalism of language or add sensationalism of action. Sensationalism of language appears as the sort of mannered, hyperactive pyrotechnics of style that critics announce are a "new voice." Sensationalism of action means that the protagonist becomes a victim of ever more extreme persecutions: she's bulimic with uncaring parents, she's a religious/poetic/intellectual girl whose mother, a floozy, makes fun of her. Precious fits the formula; she's plain, she's fat, she's got an abusive mother, she's been raped by her father, she's black, she lives in the ghetto; she is HIV-positive. All these circumstances increase the payoff for the viewer. The more extreme Precious's sufferings, the more compassionate we are in our identification with her. If only they could also have had her get stuck at the bottom of an abandoned well!

And so we enter the well-trodden territory of The Color Purple: a black person who is, again, the victim of black people. In fact the only reference to race in the film is the mother's ludicrous indignation when the principal from Precious's school tries to visit. The principal gets no further than the door of the building, and has to shout her message into the intercom. This is enough to make the mother feel that her home has been invaded by a white person and it's of course all Precious's fault. There's no indication that there might be any reason why a black woman of no education, completely dependent on welfare, living in a claustrophobic apartment in Harlem in 1987, might fear the visit of a white person in any official capacity, which is really the only capacity she can imagine. In the absence of the history, the cultural patterns, the experiences that would explain the mother's attitude, her reaction to this visit is easily interpreted: Well, now, who's the real racist?

The movie is set years before the passage of the 1996 welfare reform Act., and can't quite get itself past the idea that welfare is a social evil because poor people try to get as much out of it as they can for themselves. But this attitude seems unjust to me; it would be more reasonable to blame the parsimony, kackhandedness and cynicism with which welfare was administered and in which it was conceived. Was doing it well ever even on the table? But we don't need to trouble our beautiful minds with that far larger and far more harmful moral failure; instead, we can relish our horror at the mother and the humping beast father and feel all the delights of virtuous indignation at these two losers. Surely the money spent to keep these two human horrors in their hideous little apartment is thrown away. Or thrown at them, I suppose. Remember when people used to say "You can't solve problems by throwing money at them"? As though given only the choice between the incontinent throwing of money at the problem (poor people) and not letting the problem (poor people) have any, it was better to keep the money away from the problem (poor people) while wiser heads figured out what they needed instead. Every single person I ever heard say this fancied himself or herself as liberal-minded and reasonable, making an observation rich with profundity and judicious, worldly seriousness. And then, if you ever consented to the apparent commonsense of this proposition you found later that you had taken all sorts of just weird shit on board along with it.

Precious would be due for a small share of the moral repugnance her parents draw if she had gotten herself knocked up in the usual way. But she is a victim, not an "out-of-control" teen, and the specific crime of which she is a victim completely desexualizes her in the viewer's eyes. Which, as it happens, makes us able to identify with her without compromising ourselves. She is intent on pulling herself up out of this mess somehow. She's going to defy her mother and not follow the family trade of welfare-scamming. We can cheer her on because the movie has gone to such extreme lengths to establish that nothing in her life history is her fault, presumably because if she were found to be at fault we could comfortably damn her to hell along with her awful parents.

My whole trouble, you see, is that I feel for the undeserving poor, too. The movie caters to certain beliefs and expectations about them--that they're irredeemably horrible and dangerous, parasites. I expect that horribleness is probably equally distributed among all social classes. But for this, as for so many other things, we seem to expect the poor to pay more. The effort involved in making this unjust and unhuman attitude flattering to the people who possess it just seems monstrous to me.

Further thought: I read a statistic years ago that said that there were more Jamaicans living in the United States than in Jamaica. That means there are more than three million of them. And yet the woman who plays Precious's Jamaican classmate is apparently an American who studied Jamaican with Miss Cleo. Why? This is such a common occurrence that I am beginning to draw dark inferences from it (haha I made a funny): that a Caribbean person on film must sound not like a Caribbean person in real life, but like what Americans think a Caribbean person should sound like because that is somehow more real to them. I'd really like to be wrong about this. Soon.

Happy Dogs

2009-12-27T23:56:00.000-05:00

That's what they've been since my Dad has been back. Here you can see each doing her favorite thing, though one thing you can't get from a picture is the noise that she makes while she's in this position. These coquettish moans:

Misha's idea of a good time that doesn't involve the car pretty much consists of this:

Sweetie's completely over her depression (combination of smoke alarm at the underground cave and my cell phone). Also she has learned that when a bunch of dogs are running around together and wrestling it isn't necessarily a fight.

A Close Thing

2009-12-23T21:42:00.000-05:00

My scattered extended family is all a little rattled today. If you look at a map of Jamaica you will see that Kingston Harbor is bounded to the east by a long narrow peninsula. It's called the Palisadoes Peninsula "Palisadoes" for short, which is what we also called the airport before it was named for Norman Manley, and the city of Port Royal was at the very end of it (half of Port Royal sank into the sea in the earthquake of 1692). The airport is out near the end of it. At the point where the peninsula attaches to the mainland is a roundabout. Because of the crash, police had stopped all traffic to Palisadoes. My cousin got to the barricade on her way out to pick up her son, who was arriving on that flight. The plane landed but for some reason couldn't stop and would have shot right off the end of the runway into the sea except it got stopped by a sort of embankment. The water is warm, of course, and it's also quite shallow--I doubt that right there it's even as much as five feet deep. So probably if they had skidded right into it they would have been all right too. But still, this was quite as bad as it needed to be.

Niko Hurley, who was travelling from San Francisco and connected in Miami, told the Observer that the lights in the plane went out, the overhead bin opened and luggage fell onto his head.

"We smelt fuel and realised that some people were injured and we began to help them out of the plane because we weren't sure if there was a bomb or something," he said.

His mother, Bambi Fowles, who was on her way to pick up her son, cried as she told the Observer that she heard about the accident when she got to the Harbour View roundabout and saw that it was blocked by police.

"I begged and begged the policeman to let me through," she said, her voice cracking. "I'm just so relieved because I feared the worst."

My Dad gave me my first driving lesson on a stretch of tarmac that runs parallel to the runway out there. I was eleven and we were waiting for someone's flight that was delayed. The site is also near where we used to go in my father's first boat, a little old wooden powerboat that he had bought used when I was about seven; we'd pile everybody into it (including my cousin Bambi) and go creeping through the mangrove that grows all along there--there's actually a gap in it along the airport waterfront)--the water was shallow and clear and clean, not like now, and my Dad and my uncles would swim among the roots and pick oysters off them for us to eat. That was how I first ate fresh oysters, small and gritty and tasty. Beyond the airport on the way to Port Royal was a forgotten graveyard that my parents, my brother, and I used to visit when I was very small. We'd drive out there on a Sunday morning usually. Almost everyone buried in it had died of yellow fever in the 18th and 19th century. They were soldiers and people who for one reason or another were associated with the garrison. I suppose someone must have figured out that the reason so many were dying was because they were posted to a garrison on the edge of, literally, a fever swamp. But that might have been one of those things where the interested parties thought it was worth the risk. During slavery days the planters liked having lots of soldiers around in case of insurrections. Reading the gravestones was extra entertainment; what we really went there for was to pick and eat sea grapes, which grew abundantly there. My mind roams along that Palisadoes shore, place of so many memories for me, because right now I miss the places and I think of my cousin Bambi and all of her extended family on her mother's side; we were all just sort of the family when I was growing up; we all played together, spent nights sometimes six of us crowded into a bed (sleeping crossways) chatting and laughing and just being kids way into the night; later, in my last few years I remember how being picked up after school was this major undertaking as the driver would sort of do this tour of Kingston picking up the various children from the various schools, and then the car, practically bursting from the sheer numbers of us, would then go to my father's office where we'd sort of wait to be redistributed to our various houses. And I remember how just decent they all are, of their simple dogged loyalty and unfailing kindness and gentleness to one another. I can call up the images of them as children, all of them, their faces as they were then, and I can remember outings and adventures and sometimes just long boring visits to the country, where some of them lived, and I cannot remember among the whole gang of ten or twelve of them a single unkind act or word. Bambi and I more than made up for the deficit in bitchiness though, and we spread it around liberally. And what was the result? Nothing but a lot of time wasted between me and her, quarelling and misunderstanding each other, only to learn at last that neither of us is quite what the other thought we were. Now we can talk; we share that Jamaican childhood and all the family memories from that time, not all of them as pleasant as all our messing about in boats. We don't so much explain as compare notes. I have really only two or three people I can do this with about that period of my life. So this all came close to home, and I wish I wasn't quite so far from them just now.

How did that happen? Well, some of us just have to leave home without knowing if we'll ever really get back or how. To quote the Stanley Brothers, it's "the price I have paid, to live and to learn."

Snow Days

2009-12-20T22:56:00.000-05:00

I took a long walk with Sweetie late in the day yesterday, part of the way along Long Branch and the snow on the rocks with the water flowing black between them was just somehow very moving. I think it's an image that Kurosawa likes, too; it seems to turn up a lot in his films. I wonder what it is about water, stones, snow? We walked all the way to New Hampshire Ave below where it crosses University and then took the long long way back. The few people that were out seemed to share the same spirit of adventure and novelty I was feeling. Everybody seemed extra nice.

More of same today, took another long walk in the middle of the day, except that now Sweetie is heartily fed up with snow. There's a field near here where I let her run off leash and when she ran into it her feet couldn't touch the ground--the snow was over my knees--so she was very annoyed. The thing Sweetie hates most of all on earth ls Losing Control of the Situation. She would take these standing leaps straight up into the air to get out of it, leap-plunge. It looked funny as hell but she was not amused. After that she just wanted to get home, anybody's house would do--she kept dashing up onto people's porches which is what she does when she's out and it's raining very hard. Every snowbank was a negotiation. We've lived here for four years and this is the biggest snowfall we've seen. She didn't seem to have an opinion about snow one way or the other in all these years, but now she has apparently made up her mind that she doesn't like it. I don't expect that to change, unfortunately.

Misha went out with my Dad yesterday only to take a dump. This was the first of two outings with this purpose, and it was a failure because she refused to uh, "perform" in the snow and dragged him all over the neighborhood looking for somewhere where there was no snow, just maybe some grass and leaves which is what she likes. She is one of those dogs (usually female) who always have to make a big to-do whenever they poop. Pace up and down and find the right spot, get into position and then sort of shimmy back and forth back and forth until their mysterious and complex criteria for the Ideal Poop Experience are all met. And that's when conditions are favorable, which they weren't yesterday. There was snow all over everything. She gave up altogether after what for her is a long long walk. Dragged my Dad home, he was wet, cold, and annoyed as all hell. And then he had to go out with her again maybe an hour later when she couldn't hold it in any more and didn't care where she went. That was Misha and the Great Outdoors.

The Mysterious West: Be the Life of the Party!

2009-12-20T00:06:00.000-05:00

The text below the "image" on the box says "with Drink Recipe Suggestions" and "Enhance Any Drink with Mr. Penis Ice."

Seriously now. Admit it. I live near the Mother Lode, the Source, of Occidental Mystery. You would have to prove to me, with pictures, that you live near a dollar store that can beat this one. A couple nights ago after work I took my dog for a walk and we walked by it, just to stand and look at the windows. The word that comes to mind to describe the overall effect is "frantic."

Possible Proof of the Essential Benignity of the Universe #384

2009-12-19T23:58:00.000-05:00

A Man Named Poonanny.

Juke joint full of smoke,
Men lined up around the walls
Every time she bend over
You can see it all.
Let's go baby,
You got a hole in your drawers.

Ramming Home the Fruitful Tidings

2009-12-01T05:55:00.000-05:00

From this morning's Guardian story announcing the winner of the Literary Review's bad sex in fiction award:

The American winner of the Prix Goncourt, Jonathan Littell, has added another feather to his cap. His novel, The Kindly Ones, was tonight announced as the winner of the Literary Review's 2009 bax[sic] sex in fiction award.

The Kindly Ones, which tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of one of the executioners, beat off stiff competition from a stellar shortlist that included entries from Philip Roth, John Banville, Paul Theroux and the literary rock star Nick Cave.[emphasis added--ed.]

Gade Deye

2009-11-19T15:51:00.000-05:00

In my last year of high school I lived with my family in St. Croix, USVI. St. Croix, in a neighborhood called Estate St. George. It was west of the middle of the island but not all the way west. It had been, like many St. Croix neighborhoods, an old sugar estate, and near the entrance to our road the ruins of the great house and the old sugar plant still stood, in process of being restored as a sort of historical park. But it was still partly being hacked out of the guinea grass that grew in the fields where the cane used to grow. Our house was uphill from the great house, in a relatively new subdivision of houses that were probably built in the 1960s. It faced south, looking across the cane fields at a stand of woods, beyond which was pretty much more empty fields and then the sea. Nothing. Above us on our street the road eventually turned back downhill without penetrating further into St. Croix's central mountain range. So we were, in effect, on a hillside.

You must imagine a very quiet place--no traffic to speak of, except one neighbor or another slowly driving by. A half a mile's walk in any direction led you into thickets of woods or dense growths of guinea grass.

But at night we would hear music. It came from the bottom of the hill northeast of us. Over there was a public housing project called "The Grove" and near to it, a drive-in movie theater that was slowly going out of business--would have gone already perhaps had it not rediscovered itself as a nightclub and concert venue. The prevailing wind, blowing from the east, would carry the sounds right into our bedrooms, late into the night. The bands had names we had never heard of before, and mostly never heard again: one group I remember was called "Milo and the Ten Sleepless Nights." I used to think that they just let anybody play there, and concluded that there was an insatiable demand for local bands that nobody had ever heard of, because apparently crowds of people were turning up for these shows every weekend. I was missing something--that some great music was being played there and that was why the crowds were showing up. It was really that simple. But things that simple were hard for me to get in those days.

So perhaps you need to understand another thing about St. Croix in those days; it was a very socially segregated society. The native Virgin Islanders and the down-islanders mixed socially, but they did not mix with the Statesiders, mostly white, who had settled on the islands. Neither group mixed much with the Puerto Ricans who made up a huge part of the population there. My brother and I socialized with the Statesiders, mainly because we went to school with them, our fathers, engineers, may of them, all worked at either Martin Marietta's bauxite plant or at the Hess oil refinery. Within the communities of the two plants there were exceptions to the segregation, but the general pattern was that way, and within the plants professionals and their children didn't mix it up much outside of work with the blue-collar people. A considerable number of the blue-collar workers at both plants were from down-island, from Antigua, Martinique, Trinidad, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, every island in the Eastern Caribbean. The accents! Among them, probably, were some who sent greetings home via Radio Antilles.

But their world was socially separate from the one my brother and I were born into, and separate from the one in which we found ourselves in St. Croix. Young and sheltered, feeling imprisoned, we lay in our rooms at night and listened to the sounds that drifted over from a nightclub where for any number of reasons we would not have dared to go. Thankfully, we are both over that foolishness!

The voice of the MC would be perfectly loud and clear as if he was shouting into the mike not far from our windows. And the music would come too. What we heard was, among other things, this:

And this:

(One night my brother made a tape recording of the music. He kept it for years, the way he does with a few precious objects of almost no value but great personal significance like his 40-year-old pillow). One night, years after we had left St. Croix for good, he played it for me and my mother at our apartment in California. What we noticed first was the roar of crickets and night creatures, peeper frogs, geckos, the whole singing buzzing chirping peeping, grunting humming animal kingdom of the night. And sort of weaving faintly but clearly through it, the music, so very distinctly itself, so insinuating, so sweet, and, on those nights in St. Croix, all we had heard.)

That tape recording happened because my brother, who was what you could call a "late bloomer" suddenly developed a passion for music--specifically, this music. And somehow at the same moment he sort of stepped forth fully formed as it were out of his solitude--it was like he wasn't going to pretend to be an adult till he could do it perfectly--and found a social life and friends among a bunch of Creole-speaking down-islanders. He even learned to dance, a thing that I never imagined would happen--he was very shy and very withdrawn as a teenager, hardly spoke. But when he started to dance to this music, it was as if he had done it all his life.

His passion for this music was like an obsession; he found the record shop where these songs were sold, and he bought the records and listened to his favorites over endlessly. There was one surreal night when I went out in a group with my cousin Mike, my friend D., and her brother and sister for a night on the town. D., and her brother and sister lived next door to us, they were Jamaican and worked at the plant too but they were strict Baptists and played hymns on the piano and spent almost the whole day in church every Sunday. But D. had now been at college for a year and rebellion, smoldering quietly for years, had finally broken out. We all went to meet our other friends at a nightclub in Fredericksted where a sort of reggae-rock band was playing. This strange wild tall thin man in a big hat was the lead singer and he had the whole place spellbound. Around 2 a.m. we returned home, D. having put away a decent quantity of vodka-mixed-with-something-dreadful but still clear-headed, just angry. Their father met them at the door when we pulled up and forbade them to enter the house. These were the good kids! Now they were really angry. So they all came trooping over to my house (my father and stepmother were off-island and the woman they had left to housesit had gone off with her boyfriend), and we sat up late into the night and D., angrier than all the rest of them put together, steadily worked away at a bottle of vodka and then nearly got into a fight with her brother when he tried to take it away, which was only a brief interruption to the way she was mainly passing the time: brooding and playing this one song (I think it was a Barry Manilow song) on the stereo, over and over. It was about this time that my brother arrived home from his late night out, his head full of romance and Creole music. "You have to listen to this," he said, and he put on one of his favorites and then, as if he couldn't help himself, began dancing, short shuffling steps and the most discreet but totally committed swinging of the hips, done to perfection. All of this with that simplicity and single-mindedness that are my brother's two leading characteristics and that baffle everyone who knows him. The fact that half the B. children had been kicked out of their house for going out drinking at night and were now camped out in our living room was just--well, an opportunity for him to listen to this wonderful song. They were tired and cranky and they didn't want to listen to it, and he simply couldn't understand it, he was sure they would be thrilled when they heard it, so completely abandoned to it he was.

My brother had fallen in love with a musical genre that had only been in existence for about three years: cadence. This music came into existence in the Creole-speaking islands of the Eastern Caribbean--in Martinique, Dominica, St. Lucia, Guadeloupe. They added something to Haitian music, which was of course sung in Creole also. But it is a distinct sound. It came from Dominica which in the early 1970s was an even smaller more remote and sleepier place than it is now. Zouk is a later form of it, but this was the original, the raw material, it wasn't all that far in time or place from the instant when the spark struck and it went from being village music to world music. Now, it seems like a wonderful gift to have been able to experience it just coming in through the window as simply as the sounds of peeper frogs.

Eventually despite his best care my brother lost the tape and the records in his adventures somewhere. And that was that. Then a couple of months ago he got an iPod. Since he realized that he can find cadence on the Internet he has been on an obsessive quest, finding all the old songs on obscure music sites, a few on YouTube, and sending links to me: "You've got to listen to this," as if 30 years hadn't passed. Once again, it's all he talks about.

The groups he likes best are Grammacks (probably the best known of them), Exile One, and Reflex. There are others though, and this is his area of expertise, not mine, so I'm sure I'm missing some. But I found that hearing those songs was like a kick in the head, they had gotten inside of me too. We've both got them on our iPods now, unfortunately without the singing of the night creatures. I try to imagine them back in, though.

Everybody Peepin'

2009-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Now that it's dark early and the gardens are pretty much finished for the year, on my dog walks at night I like looking at the windows of houses. In Iowa, when I lived there, I'd walk at nights with the late lamented Linus the streets with all those lovely old houses and the light inside so warm and it was very evocative for me. I wasn't curious about the people in them, I just liked the light, the color of it. I think the only way I can describe the feeling (I was very alone there, loneliness was the defining experience of that place for more than a few people), is that I would picture myself living an interesting life there--something easy and warm, not like my lonely anxious one. So it was nicer if the rooms were empty, if they had books on the shelves or nice furniture, or interesting objects on the walls and shelves and looked lived in. But then often I'd see the blue glow of the TV set and it would sort of break the little spell I was under.

When I ride public transit, I look at what people are reading. I suppose there, too, I'm looking for something like me. But about half the people I see reading are reading Malcolm Gladwell books. This I find even more depressing than the TV. I remember trying to slog my way through his New Yorker pieces from time to time, and giving up in the face of the unremitting dullness. It was worse than John McPhee, it was like after McPhee, Gladwell stepped up to carry on that mysterious New Yorker tradition of the interminable piece--you keep turning pages looking at the cartoons and ads and glancing hopefully at the text and by God, no, it's still going!--that no one reads except, for your sins, some geezer at a party who corners you and tells you about it at length. And of course if you say you can't read Malcolm Gladwell, when you finally get a word in, they are either wounded or assume you're illiterate and lacking in taste. OK me. That sort of thing happens to me.

Popper says that interesting hypotheses take risks; if they're wrong they'll be unambiguously wrong because they are sufficiently specific to be wrong, or at least specific enough for disagreement or questions to take hold of something substantive. Gladwell's writing leaves me persuaded only that whatever he's saying, the opposite is probably true too, he's going to say so several dull paragraphs later, and I can't bring myself to care much either way.

Here's some Hazlitt meanwhile.

It is only with very vigorous or very candid minds, that the understanding exercises its just and boasted prerogative and induces its votaries to relinquish a profitable delusion and embrace the dowerless truth. Even then they have the sober and discreet part of the world, all the bons peres de famille, who look principally to the main chance, against them, and they are regarded as little better than lunatics or profligates to fling up a good salary and a provision for themselves and families for the sake of that foolish thing, a Conscience! With the herd, belief on all abstract and disputed topics is voluntary, that is, determined by considerations of personal ease and convenience, in the teeth of logical analysis and demonstration, which are set aside as mere waste of words. In short, generally speaking, people stick to an opinion that they have long supported and that supports them.

Literary Remains

Marvin Mudrick taught his students not to be afraid of generalizations; you throw out a conjecture based on your sense of the subject, you are trying to build something, you should not be punished for it. If it's wrong, you change it or abandon it. The aim and end of it was to think better, act better, and find life more interesting. This is something a bit more than being able to do a creditable impression of a respectable dullard.

Sometimes it seems to me that we move through the world sort of paddling through the sludge of what everybody supposedly thinks about everything. I suppose I do too; I know there are all sorts of areas in which I don't think clearly at all, and when I feel incompetent I will probably grab blindly at whatever looks like common sense. Then later I discover that what I thought was common sense was just a reflection of my own temper of mind, the way I habitually think or not-think.

Most of my blind spots are close to me, though. I know I think by habit about those things. That's why my hair looks the way it does, for instance. I don't think clearly about my own feelings about people, so I try not to think about such feelings at all--except when I like the people and the feelings. But even those feelings sometimes just have to be ignored along with the others--and I can only ignore them for a while. I can see them in the corners of the room, holding their breath and blowing themselves up like Thanksgiving Day parade balloons, leering at me. Anxiety, Fear, Irritability, Guilt, Sadness, with their big cartoon faces. Oh, and that hissing noise? That's Infatuation deflating itself.

In other words I don't even pretend to conduct the life of my mind on purely rational principles. People who tell me that their opinions are based solely on objective facts and completely free of bias just give me the creeps. If they really believe it, they've been mis-educated; if they don't believe it but want me to believe it they are liars and bullies, and I can't deal with them for long without risking some sort of Loss of Temper event. There are people in my life who think that because I don't profess this sort of objectivity I must be incapable of it. I do not say that I am completely unsusceptible to self-deceit. I only know that I am not susceptible to that one. It's not a visible skill; it's not like being able to draw superheroes or get my dog to do tricks. This is one of those skills that if you don't have it you are likely to believe that 1) no such thing can possibly exist; or 2) it does exist and only a few geniuses have it and I (that is, me, Kia, your friend, hello! [waving]) do not look like the sort of person who has it; or 4) you have it in spades because you are as reasonable as a human being can or need be.

I am aware that a lot of people are afraid to be seen to be in error, and they protect themselves from this embarrassment by confining what they say to what (they believe) no right thinking person would ever disagree with; that is, tautology. But there's another thing too. When I was at my last job there was a woman who sort of glommed on to me, and considered me her particular friend because I had been kind to her on her first day. She had had some hard hits in life and now she was an editor and she had also just been laid off from a publishing company that, apparently, had an abusive corporate culture, the kind where everyone is kept in a state of terror and anticipation of backstabbing. She was a little frightened on her first day at the place where we both worked, and I just reassured her that she was among the kindest people and she herself came to see that after a while. But after that she would drop into my cube to complain about things or to try to get me to eat chocolate.

Oh, don't go psychoanalyzing people! you say. Listen. We would have these editorial meetings at work, one a week. Once I brought up a style issue that was sort of subtle, about an increasingly common misuse of the infinitive. It's hard to explain this thing because, like a dangling modifier, it's different every single time and you have to find the place where the logic went wrong. At the same time it looks all right, just as a dangling modifier does. So I had collected several examples from the journal I was editing, and brought them. Some people couldn't quite spot what the issue was, and I kept trying to explain it: not everyone in the room was a copy editor, and even among those who were some didn't see it. So I pressed on, fully aware that that even if they did get it everyone might agree that it wasn't worth bothering about, as far as they were concerned. Which would have been all right, you know, that's the editing business: you can't expect to have things all your own way. But while I felt that people weren't seeing the problem I of course kept trying to explain it so they could see it.

And then I began to be aware that someone was, figuratively speaking, firing spitwads at me. It was this woman. She was making these little jokes, these little humorous put-downs of my eccentric behavior in persisting with this matter. Apparently I had crossed some invisible line of decorum that existed entirely in her head. Let me see if I can lay out the thinking: first, she was afraid of the risks I was taking and was, in effect, making these little jokes that were intended to put me in my place and dissociate herself from the embarrassment she was sure I was bringing on myself; second, it was a wonderful opportunity for her to reaffirm her commitment to never departing from the straight and narrow path of acceptable opinion; third, a suspicion, on her part, that I was pressing this point not because I was interested in a thing but because I was making a claim for attention--more attention than I in my position deserved; teensy weensy bit of bully? yes, probably, but only I think because she had been bullied and frightened half out of her wits for all those years at her previous job. That is, I don't think she was evil.

But that's when I become evil. Because I take a deep satisfaction in seeing such efforts fail, so I like to make sure that they do. If she thought I was talking crazy before she started dropping hints...

buckner: To Whet Your Appetite

2009-10-27T19:03:00.000-04:00

Here are a few spectacular pictures of Sardinia.

Quick! Think!

2009-10-26T23:08:00.000-04:00

Wednesday is my last day at the Big Scientific Institution. Monday I start a new job at another outfit which I shall not name. I have two days off plus the weekend. Why did I not take more time off, I hear you wondering. Lots of reasons. They need not concern you. But anyway here are my two free days. And I figure I should do something nice with myself for one of them, maybe even two.

New York? Could do, but whenever I go to New York I run myself right into the ground and come back a shadow of my former self, trying to see everybody I want to see and get to the bookstores and Pearl Paint. I have considered taking the train up, hurrying across town to the Morgan Library which has a William Blake exhibition that I would like to see (I am told that the actual engravings are way more brilliant and detailed than they ever appear in reproduction), and then I would march myself back across town and get on a train to Washington and not even think about using my phone. But then you see I think "Oh I bet it's a short run from there to New York Central Art Supply, which is heaven for people who love paper." And then I see how easily I could succumb to the city's temptations.

Philadelphia? The Barnes Foundation. Here's my chance to go on a weekday. It would be easy to do if I drive but there's almost no point if I drive, because half the point of the whole thing is to take the train. Because as you know, just being on the train is like a vacation for me. But if I take the train then it has to get there in time for me to travel across Philadelphia (a city I do not know at all) to the Barnes place and it just seems like one of those things that I would likely screw up. Stay overnight? Where? See how complicated it gets?

The non-travel portion of my two days of wild abandoned freedom I would like to load Sweetie and some painting gear into the car and drive out to one of our old hiking places up the Potomac and paint there for a morning and then come home and do laundry and have a big fat nap. But it will probably end up being nothing but errands.

Baltimore? Not far enough.

Virginia? I have spent quite enough time in Virginia, thank you.

The beach? I am picturing myself shivering.

Yeah, I'm talking big. Laugh if you like. With luck I'll be able to make a real getaway in the spring or summer.

The Latest Thing in MoBay

2009-10-25T05:01:00.000-04:00

I learn from the Jamaica Gleaner that children are being recruited into the lottery scam in Jamaica. They call their US victims from their cell phones.

2008 was the peak year. For some reason it has been operating out of Western Jamaica, mainly Montego Bay, and during the last couple of years there were several killings that now appear to have been related to the considerable sums of money that were coming in. When I say several killings I mean a lot. This little outbreak in March, after law enforcement got things quieted down, killed more than a dozen people, just in Montego Bay, in a period of less than two weeks.

In 2008 the death toll from the scams was 219. Most of these killings occur in Montego Bay's poor inner city slum areas, and I suspect tourists don't even know such places exist. But the money from the lotto scam has funded an increase in firepower among the gangsters that operate in these places, with a corresponding increase in violence. I am sure that some of it has gone to "lifestyle-related expenditures" for local dons.

I don't know what ever became of this effort, though the violence in Montego Bay seems to have subsided a bit.

The school kids are encouraged to get into it because their parents are desperately hard up. The money helps them buy things like books and school uniforms. In some families the child is now the main breadwinner. The kids who are in high school are not the absolutely worst off, either. I mean, there are people who are poorer than they are. It would be hard to be a parent living in a slum in Montego Bay and not know just how deadly this business can be, and yet they allow the kids to participate.

When contacted on Friday, Colin Blair, director of communication in the education ministry, said the ministry was putting measures in place to deal with the problem without giving specifics.

However, up to press time, Blair had not indicated what, if anything, the ministry has done to tackle the problem.

I cannot imagine what they could possibly do. Give them a firm talking-to? US$30 million dollars flowed into those communities last year. Most of it probably went to the gangsters, but still. The arrival of such a sum in all of Jamaica would be a big deal, and it was just this one little section of one parish where most of it was headed.

You know, when I get some of those Nigerian emails, I am always struck by how amateurishly they are written or cut and pasted together. I wonder if it's because schoolchildren are running those as well.

Ben

2009-10-24T23:06:00.000-04:00

To disorder the moral sensibility, and to reap profit from ill-educated appetite, seems the major work of contemporary culture.

In my more paranoid moments I imagine that this work is a deliberate and systematic assault. But then I calm down and then I think it's probably more like South Sea bubbles or tulip mania or Dot Com Booms or the fabulous world of derivatives or the Tower of Babel. Eric Hoffer wrote that the dragon is a composite of all the things that humans have to fear from nature, while the Devil is made up of all the things humans have to fear from each other. The Devil has been with us a long time, and he keeps up with trends.

I think it has always been hard to sort out our moral priorities. When I was working at the Horrible Corporate Job (HCJ) the two directors of my department were these two older women who ran it as a sort of "mother-hen" operation. The women outnumbered men by that critical amount that encourages the propagation of the "mother-hen" culture. If you were "good" you got praised and if you were "bad" you were made to feel vaguely disgraced and unworthy. That is, we weren't just doing a job, we were all "friends"; the most favored "chicks" were those who habitually let it be known how they were martyring themselves for love of the job. You were less good if you did not show that you were eager to please, and you were bad if you showed that you were displeased at the casual abuse of your free time. The "good" chicks got praised and fussed over and went back to their cubicles feeling virtuous and loved. If I had gotten over the "PhD thing" and wanted these two dreadful women directors to love me, I suppose I would have been going along peep peep behind all that cluck cluck. But there are bigger things in life than being sure that everyone finds you lovable, and again, this is, for me, a matter of dignity. I make a sort of calculation: "What have you done for me lately?" What would two dishonest, manipulative, incompetent, frightened women give me in exchange for me giving my countenance to this loathsome caricature of human relations? Interesting conversation? The means to buy my own Caribbean island? The shining light of their moral insights? And yet that one of them who said, "This is corporate, if you don't like it you can leave," sincerely thought of herself as my friend. And in the spirit of friendship I said in reply, "I can respect that people might have to submit to these conditions out of necessity but I hope I never live long enough to hear myself say that to anybody. I hope I never get to the point where I'm carrying such a thing around in my head." No one who asks me to make such a bad bargain can be a friend. This made her cry, but I doubt that I'd make many people cry if I spoke to them like that. She was one of those people that cries easily.

One of the things I learned from my friend Jamie Astaphan the evil steroid drug doctor was that when you trade your truth away to get along with people they never give you full value. I mean, when they demand that of you as a condition for the offering of mere decency, you do not win. You give them a dollar of self-respect and they give you back 43 cents and a bottle cap and think they have been recklessly generous.

Therefore I have been constrained to think about what I must be willing to live without, and what I can't live without. I think I've chosen the way with the hard landings; I had a famous academic once yell at me that I was practically committing theft in acting as though I could study literature in the way I chose rather than obediently following the leadership of theorists such as himself. He had worked very hard to get to the point where he could have opinions that people listened to: who was I to have opinions of my own? That I should think myself so entitled was a gaucherie. He made this little speech in a room full of people, and apparently my contempt for what he said was so visible on my face that it set him off again. He kept demanding to know why I was looking at him like that.

We are all so tempted and challenged. That's why so much literature treats the subject of temptation and corruption. And then there's that whole other thing of recognizing reality, of getting ourselves out of the suburbia of our minds so that we can recognize what is happening and call it by its proper name, "to praise what deserves praise and sow blame for wrong-doers." This is very hard. You have to understand what deserves praise and be able to recognize wrong-doers. And then there's that other thing:

...life doth her great actions spell,
By what was done and wrought
In season, and so brought
To light : her measures are, how well
Each syllabe answer'd, and was form'd, how faire ;
These make the lines of life, and that's her aire.

Same old stuff, you see. The Ancient is the Modern. Jonson put a lot of work into it. Is it any harder now? I don't know. Probably best to keep the r-word to ourselves.

Fire Up the Wrecking Ball, Mary P!

2009-10-09T20:03:00.000-04:00

My plan for world domination has just taken another step toward completion.

You don't know what I'm talking about, do you? Well, that's all right.

What Not to Say

2009-10-06T23:15:00.000-04:00

If you happen to be one of the people on my reference list DO NOT tell any prospective employers the following:

About that time when I was 8 and ate hot dogs for lunch at Aunty Fay's house and then got sick and it got all over the toilet seat.

About that time I put birdseed in this guy's underpants while he was actually wearing them.

About my weakness for cheesy How-to art books. Well, what? You have the food channel, this is what I have.

About that time when I was walking to the transit center in Germantown one afternoon to catch the bus to the Metro and I stepped on something sort of spongy and it turned out to be one end of a pair of pantyhose that I had forgotten to remove from inside my jeans the night before, so then I stopped, reached down, grabbed it, and sort of hauled and wrestled it out from underneath and it sort of came out with a sproing! and flew past my head and I caught it and then that's when I noticed I was standing in front of the window of the Chick Fil-A. There will be no need to mention that at all.

You can also skip mentioning that I am not completely at my ease in high heels.

I have ceased to eat raw onions or any relatives of raw onions, so you can leave out all that ancient history.

I haven't been on a date in five years so I think my taste in boyfriends is sort of moot at this point, though I'd prefer that you not bring up my not having been on a date in five years. OK there was one little datelet but it was just a workday lunch and it was perfectly polite, platonic, and sentimental. But don't bring that up either.

On the subject of my recent cravings for the music of my teenage years (that big orchestra-heavy soul music of the mid 1970s and also the odd things like the Carpenters) I enjoin a tactful silence. In fact don't even talk to me about it, much less to anybody else.

Alas!

2009-10-05T22:57:00.000-04:00

My email to Da Gator bounced. However, I am hoping that if I keep listening to this station at work while I'm editing articles about asphalt, I'll hear that song again.

Update: I did talk to da Gator. He told me the song was called "Red Negligee" but he couldn't find the name of the artist. I found out the name of the artist, Katie Webster. However, the song "Red Negligee" is not the song I heard, though the voice sounds the same, and it is the same kind of thing, one of those leisurely talky songs where the singer doesn't even really sing at all. What I heard is a whole other song featuring negligee. I'm hoping it was by Katie Webster, even though I can't find it on any of her albums that I tracked down. So I shall be following up the matter with Da Gator or one of his assistants to see if I can clear it up. Katie Webster's other songs rock too, though.

From the Correspondence Files of

2009-09-26T23:13:00.000-04:00

From: Kia

To: Da Gator

Dear Gator,

So I was driving home from some errands this afternoon catching as much as I could of the Saturday programming on WPFW, as usual. Honestly I could listen to it all day, and sometimes I do. But I only caught the very tail end of your show and the bit I caught was almost entirely taken up by this one song that was so awesome that when I got home I sat in my car listening so I could write down the information about the artist. But I guess you must have done that beforehand.

It was the song about the lady whose man hadn't given her any action in 6 years and it was their 20th anniversary so she went out to Frederick's of Hollywood and got three nekkid jays (after you put it on you're still nekkid as a jaybird) to sew together to make one big one and then she cooked him some pork chops and ordered his favorite booze, had it delivered from the liquor store; it was Ripple, two bottles. And then after all that he didn't show up so she drank all the Ripple and then she ate all the pork chops and went to bed and woke up to find him snoring beside her and drooling all over her arm, and when she reminded him it was her anniversary he told her he didn't want to hear about it. So the next day after he left for work she changed all the locks. And then when he came home she had all this cooking--greens with smoked meat, macaroni and cheese, a roast chicken and about three different kinds of cornbread, with the windows open so the smell was blowing down the street. That song. It rocked my world and made my day. Who was the artist and what was the song? I bet it's not his/her only good one.

I know you're busy, but I hope you have time to tell me just this little thing. And thanks for many awesome Saturday afternoons.

Kia

The Mysterious West: Did That Popsicle Taste Funny to You?

2009-09-25T20:12:00.000-04:00

Well, I've tried. Is there possibly some folkloric tradition involving a baby and a giant eggplant or possibly a normal sized eggplant and a very very tiny baby? But that wouldn't explain the popsicle though, would it, unless they had popsicles in the Ancient Far West. Possibly these are based on the theory that among the peoples of the West anything can be improved by simply sticking a baby on it.

"Great is Truth..."

2009-09-16T21:13:00.000-04:00

Photo by Erasmus Williams

I meant a while ago to take note of this little news item, but it sort of got away from me, what with one thing and another.

But I've wanted to get back to it, because if I were to tell you all about me and Mr. Bramble you would think I had made it up.

So this is just a little.

When I was in my senior year of high school--the only year of school I had in the US before college, I lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands. This was the year after my year at the English boarding school. My father and stepmother and my new baby brother had been sailing round the Caribbean and settled in St. Croix, just by a sort of fluke, really, and we had all been reunited there, and I discovered that I loathed the place and was stuck there, miserable, miserable. First of all I disliked my stepmother (it was mutual and hardly a secret) and second of all it was such a small place--and the locals had this accent that was an affront to my Jamaican ear. I had gone to a place that was closer to Jamaica than England, and more similar to Jamaica than England, and I guess that was something. For a long while St. Croix for me was just the non-Jamaica, the almost-Jamaica, with just enough of a resemblance to offer a sort of teasing delusion that something real for me as Jamaica was might be hidden there somewhere. And my year there was one long lesson in the futility of that hope. But in spite of my resistance I learned to appreciate some features of life there for themselves. One of the first was Radio Antilles, The Big R.A. It had a powerful signal and broadcast from Montserrat, of all places, to all the Leeward Islands and even as far north as the St. Croix, where on Sunday afternoons I'd listen to it, partly because of the signal; you could hear it, it was the strongest and clearest one.

What I didn't know about the Eastern Caribbean then I am ashamed to admit now; but Jamaicans in those days did not condescend to know anything about the small islands. I began to learn from listening to The Big R.A. And what I was listening to was greetings. The format was familiar, but the accents weren’t, the names weren’t, the places weren’t. Norma in St. Thomas was sending happy birthday to her beloved brother in St. Kitts; a young man in St. Maarten sent his love to his special lady friend; Icilda sent love to Irvin; a whole family in Tortola said happy birthday to a great-grandmother in Antigua. It had nothing to do with my social or educational ambitions. I'd be loafing around the living room, with nowhere to go, reading and trying to think cool thoughts, and this noise would be the background and I would find myself drawn in, my attention arrested by all those messages of love crossing the water. It made me think, in my complete ignorance, that Montserrat was a big, important place.

And then I went away to college and escaped from the Eastern Caribbean. When I went to St. Kitts in 2002, Radio Antilles had long gone. It had had money troubles and then at last even the building was gone, destroyed by the volcano along with the whole city of Plymouth. Mr. Bramble had been a sportscaster for the big R.A., but I learned this from him long after he had become a hero to me anyway.

Except for his time at Radio Antilles, a whole generation ago, I don't think he has ever worked for a major news organization--even a Caribbean major news organization. Most of his fame as a journalist rests on his newspapers. He had one in Montserrat, and after the volcano he moved to Nevis, where he started another one. In Montserrat he had experienced his family connections to the government (he was the son of one Chief Minister and the brother of another) as both a liability and an asset. In Nevis, though, he was on his own. He wrote and gathered the editorial content; his female assistant, a young woman with a high-school education and singular presence of mind, tact and kindness, who laid out the paper, took in the few ads, and helped manage the commercial printing press that subsidized the whole thing, and a couple of printers who operated the press. If his circulation ever topped a few hundred issues of each weekly edition I never knew about it. Occasionally, because of one problem or another a paper wouldn't get printed, there'd be a gap. But it would always come back. It was about 12 pages in all, three spreads, printed on sheets of bond paper. He had to travel to Puerto Rico in person to buy things like printing inks.

When I first encountered it at the all-night grocery in St. Kitts, I didn't know what to make of it. On the front page, typically, the sort of screaming headlines usually devoted to major catastrophes (144-point block caps) would declare Mr. Edric Stanley's opinion of some latest piece of Nevis politics--a land deal, some proposed program, some bit of ministerial malfeasance. Below the headlines there would be a stock photo of Mr. Stanley. Sometimes it was not Mr. Stanley but some other prominent Nevisian, who would basically have almost the whole front page to air their views. These Nevisians were businesspeople, mostly, who found themselves in opposition to the government. Page 2 was usually occupied by a full-page ad for a hotel on the waterfront in Basseterre that belonged to Mr. Bramble and his wife. There was another regularly running half-page ad promoting, weirdly, gasoline and vitamins. This ad, I learned eventually, was for Mr. Stanley's gas station. The rest of the paper was mostly the same edited government press releases that filled up half of the other local paper, a puzzle and comics page, and a couple of regular columnists including a public health nurse. It sounds terrible, except that what it supported each week was one piece of serious journalism written by Mr. Bramble, and a funny, nervy, and completely original editorial written by Mr. Bramble.

In his one piece of actual journalism, and in his one weekly editorial, Mr. Bramble showed two rare virtues: one, he wrote beautifully, and two, he was tenacious. He did not let go of things. He did not move on, he did not forget or let you forget. He had a special gift for attacking certain sacred cultural assumptions. There was a minister of government at the time (he's dead now), he was actually the deputy premier, a big useless lump, grossly obese. The brother of this minister was considered a Great Man because he had a very successful ice cream shop in New York and had once been featured in one of those "model immigrant makes good" stories in the New York Times. The ice-cream shop brother's aura of fame and success sort of extended as far as the big useless minister brother. And Mr. Bramble did not spare them. I just remember one editorial in which he was attacking some government project of dubious public value but probably considerable private benefit, and announced that if it went through, "Mr. Guishard will be able to sit up to his neck in ice cream..." He was a genius at needling. He was shrewd enough never to come close to running afoul of the libel laws, but he just stayed steadily on the attack, he just wouldn't move on.

To understand what is at stake, you need to consider a couple of things. In the Eastern Caribbean newspapers first appeared as organs of political parties. Each party has its own paper, embarrassingly partisan and with almost no content outside of political exhortation, self-congratulation, and mud flung in the general direction of the other side. Governments tend to think of newspapers as extensions of their political arms, and have a history, throughout the region, of trying to make sure that newspapers stay in that role. Because of what I call the system of "status patronage" there are numberless opportunities for conflicts of interest between supposedly independent newspapers that, say, stand in need of subsidies from the government or want printing contracts (no newspaper can pay for itself in any single country in the Eastern Caribbean); and so the basis is found for little backroom deals, not to mention the multifarious family and business connections. All this, plus the actual threats, have been challenges to the emergence of independent media.

In recent years, attempts to require annual licensing fees on Montserrat and Antigua and to revise the penal code on Montserrat (both potentially punitive to the press), were proposed and withdrawn. The Newspaper Registration and Surety Ordinance, as the bill was called, stipulated a prohibitively-high EC$50,000 bond for publication. Considered an effort of the anti-Bramble political faction, it was written two months after Howell Bramble started the Montserrat Times in 1981. Montserrat's legislation must be approved by Great Britain, and in this case the British foreign secretary said he would not consent to the bill. The 1983 revision of the penal code, thought to be aimed at journalists, would have given the government the right to decide on potentially seditious material. (Mass Media and the Caribbean, by Stuart H. Sulin and Walter Soderlund, 1991)

What Mr. Bramble did in his newspaper career is, against great difficulties, hold on to independence. And he's not a man who has had an easy life, or a man of extraordinary brazenness or recklessness. No one was paying him a big salary to do the brave thing he did, just hanging in there. He did it because he couldn't not do it once it was there to do. But not satisfied with that only, he also insisted on being decent.

He told me once about one transaction involving his most vicious competitor in the newspaper business, a man who enjoyed all sorts of advantages because of his mostly favorable position in relation to the party in power, in other words, a man who had built a career in sweet little deals and a newspaper on what I call the "status patronage" system that operates even when you don't see any money changing hands. Despite all his connections this competitor was once arrested at his workplace. Mr. Bramble had gotten wind that it was going to happen, and a photo of the event would have sold out his little paper--but he wouldn't do it. And yet, when the same man knocked up a young woman on the island, he published a an account of it as told by her mother.

One day we were both down at the ferry terminal in Nevis, waiting for the arrival of some paper from St. Kitts. I was probably grumbling about something. Mr. Bramble and I were both unhappy in those days, for various reasons; you will notice that I don't work at that paper any more. Neither, sadly, does he--and that's a much greater loss. Well, on this particular day I was bitching and he, I presumed, was listening, gazing out past the dock to the sea. Well, you know how you can suddenly notice that the other person has not been listening and you've been talking to yourself? I had that moment, and I paused.

There was no sign of the ferry, but the coast guard's inflatable dinghy, the one with the absurd-looking wooden kiosk sprouting up out of it, was tied up to the dock. That meant the governor-general was on the island, having sailed over from St. Kitts in his little box. He was probably engaged on one of his main official duties in Nevis, which was shaking hands and delivering a birthday card on behalf of the Queen of England to every senior citizen who reached the age of 100. There are a surprising number of them in Nevis.

"I wonder how the governor-general gets in and out of that boat, though," Mr. Bramble said. I glanced over and I didn't know how, either. It was about four feet from the surface of the water to the top of the pier. The governor-general is a large, pear-shaped man in his eighties.

Mr. Bramble sold the paper to its current owners, and for a little less than a year I worked for them, alongside him, and learned things from him about real courage, real dignity, and real goodness that I hope I never forget. I was happier when he was in the office--the workings of his mind were a source of continuous delight and wonder to me, not to mention big, happy laughs. Of the days before my departure from St. Kitts and Nevis, the one I recall with the most sadness was the evening when I sat with him on the balcony of his hotel in Basseterre, and we talked and I felt the minutes speeding by much too quickly, knowing that when I walked out I would not know if or when I'd ever see him again.

For me Mr. Bramble's great achievement is that all the respect he now receives and so richly deserves, is for work that completely originates with him--from his own editorial judgments, which, as I said, are first of all moral judgments; from his own self-created writing style, formal, funny, and thoughtful; from all his struggles to do what he loves, to report and write the news even when the most ordinary contingencies (wife needs car) get in the way; to do brave and generous things because as much trouble as they are, it would be a lifetime of trouble if he took the coward's way; his large and kind human curiosity; his natural gallantry and magnanimity. He owed none of this to any boss, to any compulsion, to the hope of any material reward. It was a continuous struggle, for the thing for its own sake, with what modest resources he had, and I doubt it ever earned him a dollar. What he finally made was himself, as a source of action in the world, action that originated in his own considered values and out of his struggles with contingency, a self that's a good man and not a monster, standing for something. So maybe this won't mean much to you, but I'm so glad to see some recognition of his value.

The Elect, Heard From

2009-09-11T06:27:00.000-04:00

Below is my posted response to "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Screenplay," a piece at the Village Voice site by this screenwriter named Josh Olson who got an Academy Award nomination and now is approached by all sorts of people wanting him to read their scripts. I'm not familiar with his oeuvre--a guy like that, with so many pressing demands on his creative judgment and all, must surely have an oeuvre--but I don't think that matters.

If Olson can make a judgment about a screenplay within a page or two (I don't doubt it's possible--I do it all the time with other types of writing) why does he have such a big pile of screenplays on both sides of his bed? Surely he'd be getting through them quickly? Are they coming in at such a prodigious rate?

Second of all my own feeling is that the person who gets to do what they love for a living is enjoying a sort of privilege. I'd like everyone to have that privilege, but I acknowledge we are far from that state of job Nirvana. In the meantime it's nice for the lucky ones to share, to give a little, instead of imagining that one's material success is necessarily a proof of one's greater deservingness, which the not-yet-pros don't appreciate or they wouldn't importune you with their pathetic hopes etc. Notice that there is a sort of reflexive hostility of insiders toward outsiders? You ever notice how easy that is? And how easy it is to like and admire the person you're looking up the ladder at? You haven't noticed that or learned to question it yet? There is no surer sign of the insecure parvenu than these snarls toward those approaching from below. Someone's got to show the beginner where to begin. Kindness is needed so it might as well start with you. If that doesn't motivate you, then consider that those writers are your most attentive readers. It can be a way to give back, and you can make sensible arrangements to do it so you aren't waylaid and it doesn't take over your life, just like any other formal giving. Hire an intern for four hours a week and pay them to learn how to move the crap out the door. "I have a great mountain of scripts by people I like more than you and are better writers than you" is very likely untrue and definitely rude.

If someone's screenplay or short story appears to you to be rubbish after five minutes's perusal, then tell them so in the sixth minute. Why waste any more time? Honestly, if you need weeks to figure out why and how to say it then maybe you don't know your shit as well as you think you do. Or you're marketing your own profundity or something. Because the amount of money it would take for me to lie to people about my opinion of a piece of writing would have to arrive in a fleet of armored trucks, and I am certainly not going to bother to do it for free.

Finally, stories about real life are funnier when they're true and accurate.

See that? That engaged with the writer's ideas and endeavored to teach him something about his responsibilities as a writer and how he might more satisfactorily fulfill them. Took me a little more than half an hour.