Blogorrhea Junior

Retelling Peter

I'm taking the day off of work today, having slaved for 13 hours on Saturday to lay out and print a proposal, and I've vowed to do nothing that isn't fun: no cleaning, no extracurricular work, lots of lounging. I am, in fact, still in my pajamas and yukata, which is probably TMI. To this end, I open my bookmark for Christopher Baldwin's "Bruno," which always makes me feel better because Bruno's life so much more messed up existentially than mine, and get a bonus: the link to Bill Mudron's retelling of Peter Pan. Only 19 pages so far, but it looks to be amazingingly ambitious and is full of twists and turns, visual and plot-wise. Lovely artwork, clever pacing, and slightly jarring dialogue. This isn't, by any means, your childhood Peter Pan, although I think it's one that carries on the darker impulses you can see in the original. And while I don't claim to be a Peter Pan wonk (as I could, without bragging, claim to be both a Tolkien and Star Wars wonk), this strikes me as grittier than the original, because the original wasn't nearly as cute as the Walt Disney version. (What is?) One of the good things about encountering this comic is that it's made me want to re-read the original, and catch up on the newer versions of the movies, including "Finding Neverland" which stars the luscious and brilliant Johnny Depp. Hmm, I see a Peter Pan marathon in the offing.

I love the way stories like this get retold, and it's a shame that it doesn't happen more often, although I suppose if you count movie adaptations it does. I'm not even venturing into the realm of fanfic, which is the nearest thing we really have to a communal retelling of (and reshaping) of stories we like, the place where stories become public property whether the originator likes it or not. This opportunity to retell is one of the reasons it's important to let copyrights expire within a reasonable time. Certainly 75 years after the author is dead is not too soon. I'm sure even Christopher Tolkien will have reaped enough lucre from his dad's genius by then, thanks to Peter Jackson.

(As a side note here, I don't quite understand people's resentment at family members reaping the rewards of their ancestor's talents for a reasonable amount of time. This is, after all, what people whose ancestors started successful businesses do. And their patents expire after a time too, unless renewed. It's also wildly more likely that children of authors and artists are eventually going to have to get out and scratch for a living when the money runs out, cuz, face it, artists and writers don't make near the capital that corporate robber barons do, and even get their hands on venture capital, unless you count grants.)

Spider Robinson has written an intriguing if polemical story on the dangers of unending copyrights called "Melancholy Elephants." The gist of it is laid out in one of the character's (a woman I suspect is based on Virginia Heinlein, Robert's wife) speeches:

" `Ars longa, vita brevis est,' " she said at last. "There's been comfort of a kind in that for thousands of years. But art is long, not infinite. `The Magic goes away.' One day we will use it up—unless we can learn to recycle it like any other finite resource." Her voice gained strength. "Senator, that bill has to fail, if I have to take you on to do it. Perhaps I can't win—but I'm going to fight you! A copyright must not be allowed to last more than fifty years—after which it should be flushed from the memory banks of the Copyright Office. We need selective voluntary amnesia if Discoverers of Art are to continue to work without psychic damage. Fact should be remembered—but dreams?" She shivered. ". . . Dreams should be forgotten when we wake. Or one day we will find ourselves unable to sleep. Given eight billion artists with effective working lifetimes in excess of a century, we can no longer allow individuals to own their discoveries in perpetuity. We must do it the way the human race did it for a million years—by forgetting, and rediscovering. Because one day the infinite number of monkeys will have nothing else to write except the complete works of Shakespeare. And they would probably rather not know that when it happens."

Now I don't think this is one of Spider's better stories, but the premise scared the crap out of me when I read it, so it's at least successful, as I'm pretty sure that was his intention. I recently read a new Lord Peter Wimsey novel that I thought was rather indifferently written but which I enjoyed anyway because it was a chance to visit Peter and Harriet and the marvelous Mrs. Malaprop-like Dowager Duchess again. You might almost call authorized continuations of series like this legal fanfic, and like fanfic, you get varying degrees of competency in the writers. Somewhere out there is another really splendid writer who is capable of really capturing Sayers' wit, erudition, style, and masterful plotting. Alas, that person has not yet been found, but I'd love to see other folks give it a whirl, as many have with Sherlock Holmes.

There again, some are better than others, and it's not always true that the good writers prevail. I realize the publishing companies and literary executors do this to keep what is in essence a lucrative franchise going. But it serves the purpose of perpetuating the stories and characters as well, until they become part of the cultural consciousness. I suppose movie remakes serve something of the same purpose, though I'm not sure either Scooby Doo or Starsky & Hutch need to become part of our zeitgeist—at least not the way, say, Tolkien or Star Wars or Peter Pan have. But that's my personal prejudice.

Anyway, go visit this new Peter and enjoy the artistry, derivative as you might think it is.

More on Tsunami Aid

A plea from the folks at Alternet:

We here at AlterNet have been cowed by the magnitude of the calamity that befell South Asia on Dec. 26. The earthquake and resulting tsunami, which have now reportedly claimed over 200,000 lives, continue to be forefront in our minds.

What can we do? Aid has rushed into the affected countries, but the UN has issued a call saying that even more is necessary. With long lists of aid agencies—and reports of questionable use of aid—it's hard to know where to put our money.

For guidance in how to best help the survivors of this terrible event, we look to our friends. David Mendoza, a longtime advocate of artists, human rights and freedom of expression, reported for us from the Bali terrorist attacks in 2002. He is now volunteering for a Bali-based organization called Yayasan IDEP  ("yayasan" means foundation) which launched its Aceh Aid program on Dec. 27 to provide aid to the citizens of Aceh, Indonesia, which is at ground zero of the disaster.

The UN is reporting that fatality rates in some parts of Aceh are over 75 percent. In the town of Calang, 90 percent of the population was killed by the tsunami. Until Jan. 10, when IDEP's chartered vessel—holding 80 tons of supplies—arrived in Calang, no aid had reached the area. The survivors had almost no food or clean water for two weeks.

This is just an example of the work that IDEP, which was created out of the crisis of the Bali bombings, has been doing. Because of the reputation of its programs and close connections with other NGOs in Sumatra, IDEP was able to mobilize before the big international aid groups and is better connected at the ground level. The goal of IDEP with regard to this disaster is to help the survivors rebuild their lives and not create a new and long-term group of refugees living in camps. This can be accomplished by understanding what the survivors need to rebuild (repair fishing boats or build new ones, clean or dig new wells, clear land to plant new food crops, build houses).

Mendoza reports that despite the logistical problems involved in running a major aid operation out of a tiny office with limited resources, "this band of heros and warriors have managed to accomplish truly remarkable work. I have observed them in awe and respect. Dedicated people, young and old, from Wales, Australia, U.S., Canada, Indonesia, U.K., France. My humble assignment was to help raise funds which I must say, by comparison, seems like such a minimal task. Some day the tale will be written about what has happened out of the IDEP office, negotiations with the Indonesian military, delivering relief to a region that has been in civil war for 30 years and cut off from outside contacts.":

An Australian Broadcasting Company news segment on IDEP's work in Aceh aired on Jan. 27 to mark the one-month anniversary of the tsunami.

A story in the Jan. 7 Washington Post, written by Michael Dobbs, a Post reporter, relays his thoughts on how to choose whom to donate to. Dobbs notes that while the large aid agencies are important, much of the money is not efficiently spent—"eaten up by administrative overhead or salaries for American contractors." He suggests that "their efforts can and should be supplemented by other, more personal networks built around direct ties between communities here and communities in the disaster-affected areas. That way we can associate names and faces with the people we are trying to help, and have a built-in accountability mechanism to track what happens to our money."

IDEP is the kind of ethical, honest, transparent, and caring grassroots organization that we know and love. It has been accepted by Tides Foundation to channel funds and Microsoft has agreed to match employee gifts to IDEP via Tides.

Please check out their web site to read the latest update.

We hope you will consider making a donation to Aceh Aid at IDEP.

Don Hazen and the staff of AlterNet

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How to Help Aceh Aid at IDEP

The best way for people outside of Indonesia to help Aceh Aid and IDEP now is by making a contribution. Note that both methods are channeled via the Tides Foundation, which is tax deductible for US taxpayers. However, IDEP does not receive the names of donors via this method so if you wish to receive an e-mail update about Aceh Aid's relief efforts with your donation please e-mail David Mendoza and ask to be included on the e-mail update list.

1. With a credit card, via PayPal, an internet payment system which allows you to make payments from 45 countries (not including Indonesia—if your credit card billing address is in Indonesia this will not work). Follow the instructions from this address.
2. By check payable to "Aceh Aid at IDEP/Tides Foundation" and mailed to Byron Miranda, Accounting, Tides Foundation, P.O. Box 29903, San Francisco, CA 94129, USA.
   
   If you have questions or interest in sponsoring particular projects, supplies, equipment, or about contributing in other ways, please contact David Mendoza.

Lost Opportunities

After a while, when you've lost a loved one, you start noticing all the things you reflexively want to share with them and it makes those experiences just a little poignant, perhaps forever so. Mom and I shared a lot of interests and I find myself thinking, "I have to tell Mom about this," quite often. It's a bittersweet moment composed of anticipatory pleasure followed by a sometimes-brutal, sometimes just sad, reality check.

I've been sharing things I've learned with her ever since I was a kid. One of my most common memories of childhood was coming home from school and telling her what I'd learned that day, whether it was a new word or a new concept. One of our running lines was, oddly enough, about eutrophication, which I can't believe I even remember how to spell. This was sometime during my junior high years, at the height of the ecology movement. Our house is near a small, shallow lake which is gradually turning into wetlands, especially at our end of it, so it was a concept we could both see at work. Mom not only never forgot it, but we actually talked about it over the years as the north end of the lake grew more and more swamp-like, filling with ducks and phragmites, herons and cattails, beaver and muskrat.

So we have a long history of sharing ideas. It's hard to shut that off.

Music was one of the interests we shared, and since the cultural opportunites in Northern Michigan were somewhat lacking (even if you live, say, in Traverse City near Interlochen Arts Academy) and radio is pretty sketchy up there too, I was always on the lookout for new types to introduce her to. I'd gotten her into jazz when I was in college and she left behind quite a collection of vocalists, from Ella Fitzgerald to Diana Krall. I thought she'd probably like Queen Latifah's new CD, The Dana Owens Album, too. And when she was here in October, I mentioned Fado to her, thinking that she would probably like it, or at least be interested in hearing some. I've heard it but don't happen to own any, so I promised I'd find a couple of representative CDs and send them to her. I'd gotten as far as fishing around online for some but hadn't actually ordered any when she died. Now, of course, she'll never hear it.

Books were another common interest we shared. Though I never got her truly interested in science fiction, she eventually wore me down about mystery and detective fiction. I have a fondness for the hardboiled noir and classy English mysteries while she likes the psychological investigations. Occasionally, we overlapped, as we did with Nero Wolfe. On the train today, I started a new book in a detective series we both followed: Robert Tannenbaum's Butch Karp books. I think she started me on these, having discovered them in the Alcona County Library (which has a large supply of detective fiction for those long, cold, snowed-in, winter months). This was one she hadn't read yet, a really good one, and for just a moment there I was looking forward to telling her about it, anticipating her anticipation.

There are other opportunities we've missed now, too, among them travel. Mom always seemed to be waiting for me to take her places the way she'd taken me when I was kid. Though she'd live in Europe herself, in Germany, for quite some time before I was born, she complained that Dad had never taken her anywhere. I found this bewildering because I would have just gone myself, regardless of social constraints or fear. I don't know how she raised her daughter to be like that without having some of it herself, and she must have because she flew alone to Germany to marry Dad. The problem with us traveling together, as I saw it, was that she wanted to go first class and neither of us could afford that, i.e., she could afford it for herself, but not for both of us, and I couldn't afford it alone, even. My two trips to Europe in my 20s were of the "college kid abroad" sort with a backpack, though I prefered B&Bs to hostels. When she was making the reservations, it was always the best hotels: the Four Seasons if possible, a Hilton at the very least. I think she would have envied my friend Paul's set of Louis Vuitton luggage.

We never got to England together, though she really wanted to go with me. By the time I could afford to go in the style to which she was accustomed, she was too frail and too ill to travel. Going to Japan is going to be a different travel experience than it might have been because I'll be seeing it purely for myself, not thinking about what she would want to hear about. I'll be looking through the lens of my own interests, rather than sometimes searching out things that she'd find interesting. I won't be looking for souvenirs to send her, or postcards.

And there's one lost opportunity I'm regretting for her:

On Mom's last visit here, I discovered Bobby Short, her favorite jazz/cabaret musician, was playing one of his last gigs ever at the Carlyle Hotel. Tickets were $100, which meant that with dinner and transportation, we'd drop something like $350 for a night on the town. Not much for that kind of a New York night on the town, but not pocket change for people like us either. Mom decided not to go. Two months later, she was dead. What would it have hurt for us to go see him? We'd have had some really good food, some fab drinks, heard some great live music and rode giddily home in a cab. It would have been a good, fun blowout for an old lady. Her last hurrah. I regret I didn't try to talk her into it. There won't be a second chance.

ZZZs:

What I'm not getting enough of right now. It's been a grueling two weeks, and it ain't over yet. Lots of overtime, a couple of ten-hour days, and now weekend work. Of course, Jen's up this weekend, and I'd really hoped to see her, and I'll probably be absolutely incoherent by Sunday, dammit. On the other hand, this is going to be one big, fat paycheck to spend on furniture and paint. And I got my memory foam mattress pad today, which is even now lying on top of my luscious bed, trying to forget what it was like to be tightly rolled up in a plastic bag. And poor Em must think I hate her because she's called several times this week and I've been too fried to talk. I was thinking of her last night when I treated myself to a bento box at Mishima in which the teriyaki salmon was good but the spicy tuna roll was just . . . boggling. Mishima: Lexington between 29th & 30th. Down two steps from the street. Tiny. Don't miss it.

And now I'm going to go encourage my memory foam to remember something else, like the shape of me, on top of it. If only that were as salacious as it sounds.

Reading Time

Rob says, in an email: "I read your blog this morning. HOW did you find time to read all those great books?"

1. No TV.
2. A job I leave at work.
3. A longish commute.
4. Practice.
5. Desperation.
6. Scheduling.
7. No TV.
8. Forgot one last night: No kids and no spouse.

I read ebooks on my pda on the train in the morning. I read magazines over a meal at home. I read before I go to bed at night. My time doesn't get sucked up with TV (or grading papers, for that matter, like poor Rob and many other teacher-pals). I also read pretty quickly, and can get through a really engrossing book in a day, if I ignore everything else, or a low-brow paperback off and on over the weekend. I usually make sure I have one on hand, in fact. Facing a weekend without a book is unbearable—like I never have any books lying around that I haven't read. Right. Sometimes I just want something that isn't very demanding, though.

Most of what I read doesn't take a lot of concentration. I save books like that for the weekend, or drag them on the train where I can use them to make the trip go more quickly. I used to do my reading for grad school on the train, too. I've been known to sit in bars and restaurants and coffee shops and read by myself. When I'm home, I'm doing one of four things: housework, making something (e.g., food or books or some other craft project), writing, or reading. If it's a really good book, more often than not I'll chuck my other plans for the day, if they don't involve someone else, and finish the book.

Of course, there's also that point-of-no-return event horizon in a book where you must . . . finish . . . ARGH! no matter what time it is. It comes at unpredictable points, depending on the plot and I can usually sense it coming up and either choose to put the book down before I reach it and get a good night's sleep, or plunge on and stay up half the night finishing the book. I try not to do this on school nights. It makes me really stupid in the morning at my age.

I would read while asleep, if I could figure out how.

Not having a TV allows much more time for reading, especially for someone like me who's so easily enthralled by it. And for my money, it's better entertainment. There's nothing more wonderful than curling up in a big piece of furniture with a hot cup of tea and a blizzard or an all-day rain outside, and a good book on my lap.

In fact, enough of this tonight. I'm going back to the Fifth Book of Peace.

New Poem

"Dowsing," over at my site. Third one down, after "Dying in Winter," the newest, and "With Spalding Grey on the Ferry," written almost exactly a year before.

Book Blizzard

I've been wanting to write about some of the books I read this year that I really enjoyed and got as far as the few short paragraphs below when I realized that I've totally lost my ability to write analytically or descriptively about books. I love reading other people's blogs about them, and book reviews in pubs like Ruminator and January Magazine (though not, sadly, in Bookmarks, which I don't really find useful  or interesting despite its synthesis of reviews), but if I have to sit down and say what I liked about a particular book, I draw a complete blank. It's as though I've held them to my forehead and divined what they're about somehow, rather than really read them in depth, though I do. Read them in depth, that is. I'm left less with a concrete idea of what the book's about than I am its emotional impact, its "atmosphere," and the stray facts that may stay lodged in my head while I'm reading. I'm sure this is why I have such a hard time with synopses too. I can't boil a book down to its essence anymore to save my life.

Instead, I'm overwhelmed with all the great things I've found in a really good book. Wow, there was this and this and then there was this other thing, and this one character . . . Ideas and facts seem to go into my head, float gently on the surface for a short while and then sink into the muck at the bottom like a whale's slowly decomposing carcass. I can unearth them again later if need be, but only in response to a specific inquiry, like a very picky search engine.

This is a bit sad, because I used to be both a good reviewer and a good analyzer of books, and I've lost interest in doing both, apparently. I read non-fiction for ideas and facts and craft, and fiction for the story and the craft, neither of them for the meta ideas that drive or shape them. The more I've turned to writing for myself, the less interested I am in a book's place in the world. I'm interested in their structure, in how the tools of the trade have been employed and, with nonfiction, how specific ideas relate to my own thinking. I'm a very personal reader now, which is not surprising considering I've never been big on theory.

Books for me are like a daisy chain or toppling domino tiles: one leads to another in some way. I'll go through a whole series written by one author (everything by Ann Pachett or Elizabeth George), or books on all one subject (like the spate of reading I'd been doing about Japan) or a certain type of fiction with particular themes. For instance, I got sucked into The DaVinci Code (and Dan Brown should be grateful I'm not reviewing it because it would be one long rant about what a piece of crap it is on so many levels, from his research to his plot and character development and the quality of his prose; Katherine Neville did this so much better in The Eight); progressed to Codex by Lev Grossman, which was better by a geometric factor but didn't have quite the satisfying ending I was hoping for; continued with The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, which was better yet again exponentially and which reminded me a bit of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which I adored; and ended up just recently with The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which was a wonderful read, even in translation. They're all secret mystical conspiracy books about texts, like Umberto Eco's fluffy but fun The Name of the Rose, or A.S. Byatt's Possession, which riveted me the first time through but which I've never been able to get through again, or The Club Dumas (sadly disappointing) by Arturo Perez-Reverte, or the scariest book I've ever read, and the one with the most ingenious structure, House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, which is less about a text than it is a meta text itself.

I like the way all these books link up in my head, in a kind of mental Borgesian library, and that's much more interesting, I think, than what I started with tonight:

Notwithstanding that a good half of my library is still in boxes, some of it still unread, and that I gave away ten boxes of books to Housingworks Cafe before I moved here in February of last year, and that I don't have enough bookcases yet, I immediately started buying books again. As usual, most were brain candy, mere trifles to pass the weekend with, but a few stick out:

From my Japan kick: Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto. This wonderfully evokes the strangeness of being abroad in a culture you only think you understand, with people you can't read because of the language barrier, and all the expectations travelers bring with them. It's also a poignant tale of one woman's effort to carve out a life for herself in middle class Japan that's something beyond wife and mother, in a culture that values conformity. The most foreign terrain here is the one that lies between men and women, whether of two different cultures or not. Iyer's descriptions are also so evocative that it made me hunger to see the country:

Besides, Kyoto was lovely in the mist—the air rising clear above the hills, the dogs barking in the hillside temples. The singing cries of children rang out in the ringing air, and everything was green and cleansed, Kyoto back streets were lovely too, on shiny afternoons after days of heavy rain: the tangerine trees in bloom, and monks on slow-moving bicycles, and ladies bent over rain-washed alleyways, rearranging flowers. The Heian Shrine was all patterns of sunlight and reflects in the water: girls crouched meditative over ponds; orange gates solemn under blazing autumn skies.

In a similar vein but a quite different slant, there was Alex Kerr's Lost Japan. Originally written in Japanese, it's a kind of lament for the country Kerr has watched change over his 30 years of residence there. Under the Tuscan Sun meets Geography of Nowhere, it's a lament for the Japan that's being plowed under and demolished in the rush to modernize since World War II. Kerr gives a fascinating tour of the worlds of Kabuki, antiques, and a rapidly disappearing pristine countryside. He knows a lot about Japanese art of various sorts, especially calligraphy, and he writes lovingly of his several old-fashioned and traditional houses. Those were some of the most interesting bits for me because I love teasing out what houses and interiors reveal of their owners and I've always liked writing about interiors, imagined and otherwise.

That's as far as I got before I started to bore myself. Well, not just bore myself but scare myself at how much work this was going to be. So you're getting a book report or summary instead.

Here's what else I've been reading, and what led up to and away from it:

While I was helping Jen with research for her book, I was reading Samuel Pepys : The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin, who won a Whitbread Award. Tomalin's prose, needless to say, is a joy to read. Pepys was quite a character and Tomalin's book is a joy to read because she doesn't stint on any of the details that made him such a rascal, but she also portrays him as very human. She also plants him very firmly in his time, which was a fairly unsettled one in English history, with or without the Great Fire of 1666. Pepys crossed paths with Isaac Newton fairly often (they were both members of the Royal Society at one time or another) and the next book I got into was a novel called Dark Matter, by Philip Kerr. It's a murder mystery, and while it's not the best one I've ever read, many of the details in it overlapped with the Pepys bio and fleshed out the history a bit more. It also made me more curious about Newton himself, and since Jen had a couple of research questions she wanted me to track down, I bought The Life of Isaac Newton by Richard Westfall. While not as interesting as the Pepys bio, Newton was certainly an odd enough duck to provide lots of interesting fodder for a biographer. The logical progression from here would have been to go back to Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography, which I've been plowing through, but which is currently buried in a box somewhere, and from thence to his Clerkenwell Tales, but that will have to wait. So many books, so little time.

From men's biographies I went to women's memoirs, and that was a real mixed bag. Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran came first. I was very wary of this book and resistant to it because of all the hype surrounding it, but I deeply enjoyed it largely because I wish I'd taken Nafisi's classes. Her way of talking about literature does place it firmly in the world and asks what it can tell us about the world and about human nature, which is the aspect of fiction I've always found most fascinating. It was interesting to read her descriptions of censorship in Iran at the same time Ashcroft et al were eviscerating the Bill of Rights and Constitution over here. The parallels in justification were frighteningly similar. This is a book I gave Mom to read while she was here visiting in October because I knew she'd love it.

The next memoir I picked up was Nuala O'Faolain's Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman, the sequel to Are You Somebody? : The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, which Dr. Em had loaned me not long after it came out. I liked both of these, but it's hard to read about a woman who thinks so little of herself, despite her achievements. It did spark an essay I'm editing into something saleable though.

From there, I dove into Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, which is about her years following her departure from the convent in England. A few things stand out in this book for me: one is her desire for the mystical and ecstatic experience of God that I've secretly longed for myself, her amazing courage in utterly remaking herself after leaving the convent, and how appalled I was and how heartbreaking it must have been for her to have her dissertation rejected at Oxford. That's just . . . wrong. She's obviously not a stupid woman and no one gave her any real reason to suspect it might be rejected. It reminds me also of the run-in I had with a professor from Fordham who didn't like my feminist critique of one of his favorite history books. While I find her theology a bit simplistic, I agree with many of her ideas about the sociology of religion, especially the dangers of fundamentalism.

About the same time, I bought Elaine Pagels' Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, but I haven't read that yet, though it dovetails nicely with the Armstrong book. Instead, I've moved on to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace, which harks back in structure to The Woman Warrior : Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts in that it's both fiction and memoir. I'm not done with this yet, but it's a pleasure rediscovering how much I like her writing. It's a good book for me to read right now, because it starts with the loss of both her father and her book manuscript and it's focused on anti-war activism.

The two isolated ringers in this list are Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II and Richard Cohen's By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions. I could not put Shadow Divers down and actually missed a stop reading it on the subway. I love submarine and diving stories anyway (which explains why I also read Micky Spillaine's Something's Down There), and this was written like a good Clive Cussler adventure story. Likewise, I'm a sucker for a good swashbuckling tale, and By the Sword was just so, so charming, for want of a better word. It's self-deprecating, amusing, outrageous and full of larger-than-life personalities and ridiculous situations both fictional and factual.

There were lots of other books in between this, many of them ebooks I read on my pda on the train, mysteries and science fiction and fantasy, and I've got a huge stack beside my bed that I'm ploughing through. In the meanwhile, I should stop buying them for a while, at least until I get some new bookcases.

Yeah, right. Stop buying books. That'll happen.

Bedding Down With the Bourgeoisie

Tonight is the last night I'm spending in my futon. Tomorrow morning, The wonderful delivery guys from Weissman Furniture are bring me a brand new, queen-size, maple sleigh bed with new box springs and mattress. This is the biggest bed I've ever had and I'll have to go out and buy new sheets for it before I can even sleep in it. I've been talking about getting a new bed for literally years. It was one of my reasons for leaving my old apartment: so I could get a "real" bed.

I haven't had a real bed for 22 years.

In grad school, I had my old twin box springs and mattress propped up on an improvised platform of milk crates. Then I bought a futon, and I've had several of those since, including one with inner springs that is now doing serious damage to my back. In small apartments they're great: versatile, handy for extra guests, but anything but truly comfortable, at least not after a year or so by which time the cotton stuffing inside has been thoroughly compressed. I don't care how thick they are, sleep on them night after night for a year and they will become the consistency of granite. I thought buying one with springs inside would circumvent this problem, and it has, to a certain extent. Unfortunately, while it's still too stiff to fold up on the frame well, it has absolutely no support in it. I'd be better off with a chunk of memory foam than with this thing. And yet I've hung on to it for years, partially from lack of funds to replace it and partially because, well, it's the last vestige of a certain phase of my life.

There's a wonderfully ironic and self-mocking song by Joni Mitchell called "The Boho Dance," that I've always liked. In part, the lyrics run like this:

Down in the cellar in the Boho zone
I went looking for some sweet inspiration, oh well
Just another hard-time band
With Negro affectations
I was a hopeful in rooms like this
When I was working cheap
It's an old romance-the Boho dance
It hasn't gone to sleep

But even on the scuffle
The cleaner's press was in my jeans
And any eye for detail
Caught a little lace along the seams.

Like a lot of middle class young people of the artsy fartsy persuasion, I was deeply attracted to the "romance" of suffering in poverty for my art (cf., "Moulin Rouge" for the latest take on the starving writer in the Paris garret). How cool it was, how righteous and superior, to live in a crummy neighborhood in a tiny apartment in a run-down house where everything you own doubles as something else in function: kitchen table/workspace; landing/library; couch/bed. Alan Ginsberg did it, and Patti Smith and so many others.

Some of us do this with more panache than others. My friend Jen has an uncanny sense of which neighborhood is cheap enough to live in and yet somewhat edgy and cool enough to be on the artist radar, and to get in just before the real estate people descend on it like the homogenizers they are, then get out before they ruin it. Over the years, she's pioneered Park Slope, Hell's Kitchen and the East Village and has moved on to Columbia Heights in DC, where she now owns a really lovely condo that's doubled in value since she bought it four years ago. I, on the other hand, usually manage to move out of a neighborhood just when it's becoming cool, as Sunset Park is.

Most of us, I daresay, are just playing at being poor. If, by some horrible misfortune, we wind up really being poor (e.g., if we lose our crappy day jobs, or the checks from Mom and Dad run out), all the fun goes out of it. I had a couple of really bad years where pay checks from freelancing were late or uncertain or just nonexistent, and I became particularly good at making neck-bone soup, which I now hope didn't harbor any Mad Cow prions. (Hmm, that could be the 21st Century version of tragic and artistic death by TB. Oh wait, that's AIDS.) While I can't say that I didn't learn something from the experience, it's not one I'd like to repeat and it wasn't in the least bit enjoyable. Being poor sucks and there's not much that's noble about just not having any money or health insurance and no safety net.

And you were in the parking lot
Subterranean by your own design
The virtue of your style inscribed
On your contempt for mine
Jesus was a beggar, he was rich in grace
And Solomon kept his head in all his glory
It's just that some steps outside the Boho dance
Have a fascination for me.

You read those books where luxury
Comes as a guest to take a slave
Books where artists in noble poverty
Go like virgins to the grave.

Okay, there's a certain amount of nobility in people who give up their worldly goods for a spiritual cause, but art is not a particularly spiritual cause, or rarely is. And it takes money to make art, even the one I practice. Used to be that you could be a writer hours with a stack of cheap paper and a ballpoint, but I'm not even sure that a handwritten manuscript would be taken seriously now. This means at the very least buying a typewriter or paying someone to type it for you, neither of which is cheap if you're living on ramen noodles. Then there's postage for those repeated submissions, and the lousy pay if you do get published. Unless you hit it big, there's not much return on your investment. And if you're a painter or videographer or filmmaker or sculptor the costs are even higher, just for materials, let alone studio space.

Besides, it's damn hard to think about your art when you're worried about eating and paying the bills and it's just not nice to mooch off your equally impoverished friends. There are always grants, but the paradox of those is that you have to produce to get one, but you often can't produce without getting one, or at least not without some superhuman effort and maxing out your credit cards.

Dude, I'm tired of that. Frankly, I'm just too old for it. It's often said that ideals are the prerogative of the young, but I think it's still possible to have artistic integrity and a fairly comfortable life. Maybe that's the wisdom that age brings.

Like a priest with a pornographic watch
Looking and longing on the sly
Sure it's stricken from your uniform
But you can't get it out of your eyes.

So with the departure of my futon, I have officially sloughed off the last vestiges of my boho credentials and joined the bourgeoisie. At 44, my salary is finally more than my age for nearly the first time in my life, and I have money for a few little luxuries and to travel. And while I'm not yet a property owner, I have a beautiful, reasonable rental with some really nice furniture in it, including a bed that's almost too high off the ground for me to get into easily. I need a little set of those steps, like Louis the XIV.

Forget the cake. Let them sleep on futons.

Cathexis

Noun: (k-thkss) Concentration of emotional energy on an object or idea.

I've been back in the city for a little over a week, and back to work as well. Just got all my laundry done and errands run, mail sorted out, Dad's bills set up online and paid, and my own banking done. I need to clean and cook yet and do my yearly shred of superfluous paper that I usually do on New Years and haven't gotten to yet for obvious reasons. I haven't written much since I've been back because I've been so busy playing catch-up with friends and chores, and because I seem to have pinched a nerve in my right arm that's making it hard to work on a keyboard. Paul was in town and took me to dinner and talked about the cookbook I'm putting together for his parents and we had a really nice time. When he called today, though, just to see how I was—I dunno, it just depressed me. Not his call, but the fact that I was here alone. I felt trapped suddenly.

For some reason this has been a bad day, the worst I've had since being back.It hasn't helped that my friend Peggie is having a breast cancer scare right now, either. I've been trying to hang tough for Dad, and trying to get through the work week without breaking down into tears every time someone says "I'm sorry," and I think I'm really just getting started on the grieving process. I don't know how long it's going to take and though the thought of some mood enhancers has crossed my mind (better living through chemistry! Yay!) some part of me doesn't want to dull that. It's part of living and I want to be able to feel all of that.

I've been listening to Rob's Vox CD, "Josquin and the Lost Generation," and there's something deeply comforting about it. I can pick out his voice if I listen hard, and then, of course, it's such beautiful music, too. I made the mistake earlier today of putting on a bunch of depressing pop and folk: Springsteen's "The Rising," Lucy Kaplansky's "The Red Thread," Richard Shindell's "Courier." There were three more in the mix, but that was as far as I got before I was ready to kill myself. What possessed me to put on "The Rising," which still makes me sob, I'll never know, but I was standing by my bed tucking pairs of socks together and looking at the grey snow clouds out the window with tears running down my face.

The grey clouds got me thinking about this other poem I've been working on for a while, that I finally realized was another 9/11 poem. It's not gelling somehow so I've been letting it sit, but I went back and read it again, just for a look. Then I made dinner and sat down to eat and read an article about John Gardner, whom I've always liked as a writer. I love his fiction, especially Grendel, but never bothered to read his books on writing. I wish I remember better the lunch I had with him my freshman year at Chatham, and I wish I'd been more aware of him as a writer then. Four years later, he was dead in a motorcycle accident and I was studying poetry with his friend Diane Wakoski.

One of the paragraphs in the article about him struck a nerve it might not have on another, better day:

Gardner asserts in On Moral Fiction that every artist works from a psychic "wound." Though woundedness, Gardner writes, is part of the human condition—perhaps a first cousin to original sin—the artist's sense of woundedness is usually magnified by life events or circumstances. "It is the pain of the wound which impels the artist to do his work," he says.

This smacks of the "my pain is different" whine of poets that Em and I love to make fun of, but one of the reasons I, at least, make fun of it is because I've always secretly (or maybe not so secretly) agreed. Pain drives art. All suffering is fodder for the writer, and that's one of the reasons I don't want to take the edge off this particular experience. It's also a way of asserting and reminding myself that I'm still alive and starting a different phase in my life.

So as I'm reading this article about John Gardner, with another poem and the image of grey clouds in my head, and one of Arvo Pärt's choral pieces in my ears, this came out, hand-written with a fountain pen as I haven't done in a long time, in three drafts:

Dying in Winter

Perhaps this
is what made it seem fit
if not right.
If death is always wrong
there is no season for it.
If it’s not loss or grief
that also shapes us
but only joy
then what are winter and sleep
and darkness?
What is the heavy, low grey
of snow on the horizon
if a gentle rain
were all we needed?

It rained at first
while you were passing
until the hard and bare December ground
was flooded and the living were chilled
like the drowned.
But when it was over
and you were gone in the dark of morning
snow came
like it had in my childhood:

a white curtain falling, a drifting veil,
and silence to wait in.

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jig

If only it had been that simple.

Gad, what a long day it's been. Up at five, courtesy of terminally early and antsy Dad. Not that it mattered much, since I didn't sleep for stressing over whether the predicted whopping snow storm would arrive before or after I'd managed to make it to the airport 40 miles away. A long, white knuckled ride with Dad, who doesn't drive well in the dark (he's fine in daylight), but we beat the snow there, at least. Flight out at 8:15 AM to Detroit through lots of icy crap onto 2 inches of it on the runway and ramps. A one-mile (at least) jog on slidewalks from one gate to another that could not possibly have been farther away, arriving with minutes to spare, only to discover there was an unposted delay. Our plane was trapped in Wisconsin due to weather. Cooled my heels for two hours, boarded, pulled away from the gate . . . then sat there for another half hour waiting for a landing slot on the other end, where it was only raining, but very backed up. Once we got in the air, it was like the slow train to Peking, but without the rhythm. I think we were going just fast enough to keep the plane from falling out of the sky. Arriving over LaGuardia almost an hour and a half later, we circled the drain there waiting to land. I didn't start to relax until we actually got to the gate.

My mistake.

Long line for taxis, and when I got one, we got about 500 feet before another one pointed out we had a flat tire. At that point, you just have to laugh. It still doesn't match Gruhn's return-from-London-in-a-snowstorm saga, which is the original "Planes, Trains, and Open-Toed Shoes," but it was tiring.

I think I'm still in that sort of numb stage right now. We'll see how I sleep in my own bed, and if that helps. More when my head clears.