Blogorrhea Junior

The Deadly Fallacy

There's a snarky dispute going on over at the UKs Telegraph at the moment about whether men can write romantic novels. The whole thing seems a waste of space and intellectual effort to me because, I mean, who cares? Although we all have our favorite authors, those of us who read seriously (not serious lit necessarily but quantitatively) are just interested in a good book. Who wrote it is a non-issue.

The only reason I bother mentioning this little tiff is that it involves the biggest fallacy in writing and the first rule made to be broken: write what you know. Never mind that there's a whole cultural morass behind what "romance" is or "what women want" even in a good romance, just imagine how dull fiction would be if authors wrote only about that which they had experienced themselves. Considering how little most writers I know get out, that would make for some damned dull reading (which may explain why I think Jack Kerouac is so much more fun than Raymond Carver—but that's another post entirely).

But this argument is not just about "write what you know," unfortunately, or it really wouldn't be worth my time to blog about. It's about the limitations we put on each other. And I'm really disturbed that it's a woman making these arguments.  After describing the soaring melodrama in a number of classic, women-authored romances, Liz Hunt says, "I would argue that only a woman can truly capture these emotions in a credible way, because she has experienced them or can imagine experiencing them in a way that a man simply cannot."

Excuse me? I've been known to make a few sweeping generalizations about men in my day (and I've got the cattle prod scars from Jen to show it), but this one beats me hands down. Men can't experience emotions the way women do? What is so special about the way women experience emotions? Express them, perhaps, but not experience them. C'mon, give the guys a little credit. They're not entirely made of concrete. There's a mushy little core in the most hard-assed of them or they'd have killed each other off millennia ago and we'd all be breeding by parthenogenesis. Men and women are capable of exactly the same emotions—fear, anger, joy, despair, horror, contentment, love, passion—no one gender has a monopoly on any of these, except as a stereotype. And this may be what Ms. Hunt is actually referring to.

I should probably admit here that I've never been much attracted to romance novels, classic or otherwise. I found Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre overwrought (Vilette, however, was marvelous), have never cared much for Jane Austen, stylist though she is, and the Russians (Anna Karenina, Doctor Zhivago) are just interminable as well as tragic (though the latter will forever be one of my favorite movies, thanks to Omar Sharif). Gone With the Wind? <sound of hairball being coughed up by asthmatic cat> Romeo and Juliet? Tiresome teenagers. And the Harlequins? Aieeeee! (All apologies to my friend Eva, who works there, and Kelly, who's been known to write them.)

This is not to say I don't like books about relationships. One of my recent favorites was Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant. But looking over my bookshelves, the common thread seems to be stories where the relationships develop in the background or are already established, and the focus of the story is something else—like Laurie King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series. In traditional romance, it's the other way around, which is what I find uninteresting and somewhat navel-gazing. Life is bigger than just our primary relationship with a lover (or it should be) and I find focusing that closely for the length of a novel claustrophobic—and boring.

So if this is how Ms. Hunt is defining romantic, then perhaps she's right. It seems to be a uniquely female talent to blow one relationship out of all proportion and mix it with a healthy dose of melodrama. Unless you read Graham Greene (The End of the Affair) as Ray Connolly points out. Or D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)—my favorite.

And never mind the marketing ploys of pigeonholing books by their supposed content: Westerns, Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy (why is that not a subset of Romance, or vice verse?), Chick Lit, etc. Even the Library of Congress headings aren't sufficient to define most novels except as "fiction." By definition, it's as varied as human experience.

But the real underlying issue here is this ridiculous idea that one gender has more claim to a certain type of writing than another. And I wish Ms. Hunt would consider how harmful her assertion is in its logical converse, and how limiting it is to everyone. as Connolly says, "the idea that one sex is simply emotionally incapable of understanding the way the other thinks is to deny everything men and women share – and, worryingly from a creative point of view, to deny all authors the possibility of understanding anyone of the opposite sex. And I can't believe that." Neither can I.

The logical extension of Hunt's viewpoint is that no woman can possibly capture the experience of men, and therefore cannot write convincing male characters—a statement that is patently a load of crap, as it was when asserted by many Dead White Men of the sort who discouraged the Brontes from writing. Pressed even farther to its ultimate logical conclusion, no one would be able to write convincingly about anything they hadn't in fact experienced themselves, firsthand.

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, that would make for some deadly dull reading. Fortunately, there's this wonderful thing that good writers have in abundance: imagination. Oh, and let's not forget empathy. An instinctive understanding of psychology. Or plain old research. And the fallback, when all else fails: mining other people's lives. Pay enough attention to the people around you, listen to their stories, the way and the things they tell about themselves, live vicariously through your friends long enough, and your "experience" can become vaster than you probably want. In this sense, writers do write what they know. It's just that not all of it is firsthand knowledge.

For which the reading public should all be thankful, otherwise you'd be reading about the personal woes of whiny shut-ins. Oh, wait. Isn't that Jonathan Franzen?

Banned Book Week

  . . . starts today. This is your cheap and easy chance to be subversive and rebellious. Here's a list of the 100 most frequently challenged books. Pick one and read it this week—publicly, visibly, proudly. Unsurprisingly, being the crazily hypocritically puritanical nation we are, at least half the books are those written for young adults, or books about sex, or books written for young adults about sex or even just about the physical changes of puberty.

If you're not up for YA books on the list, then pick up Isabelle Allende's The House of the Spirits, or To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, or The Color Purple by Alice Walker (currently on Broadway, corrupting visiting Midwestern families, in more ways than one). Toni Morrison must be doing something right because she's got no less than three books on the current most frequently banned list: Beloved, Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye. It's a good time to revisit Mark Twain (and that radical Huckleberry Finn) or Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, too. But someone explain to me who's freaking out over Where's Waldo? and why. Or Go Ask Alice, which is a far more effective anti-drug statement than Nancy Reagan and frying eggs.

But there, I'm expecting logic from this sort of mindset. Just last night I was reading excerpts from the obscenity trial of Howl in the latest issue of Book Forum, and instead of logic, you get exchanges like this:

Cross-examination by Ralph McIntosh, deputy district attorney of witness for the defense, Mark Schorer, professor of English, University of California.

Mr. McIntosh: Well, about the third line down, you understand what "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night" means?

Mr. Schorer: Sir, you can't translate poetry into prose; that's why it is poetry.

Q. What are "angelheaded hipsters"?

A. That's a figurative statement: of "angelheaded"—I would say characters of some kind of celestial beauty like an angel; "hipsters" is part of the vernacular today. I'm not sure I can translate it into any literal way, though.

Q. In other words, you don't have to understand the words to—

A. You don't understand the individual words taken out of their context. You understand the whole impression that is being created and in this first part particularly, where I have already used the word surrealist to describe it. You can no more translate that back into logical prose English than you can say what a surrealistic painting means in words, because it's not prose. Poetry is a heightened form of language through the use of figurative language and rhythm, sometimes rhyme.

Take your a angelheaded hipster self to the library or bookstore this week and get yourself a banned book. Support intellectual freedom, even for children. Maybe especially for children, who in a world of HIV and rising despair, need some accurate information about their bodies and the thoughts going round in their adolescent heads. Ignorance will not protect them. Knowledge is power. Let us all learn to think for ourselves.

Fetishes II

I've been off photographing the city again, in part for the Postcards project and in part just because I like doing it. I love the little camera that I bought a while back (a Canon  Powershot SD200) because it fits in any purse I carry, not matter how small, and it takes good pictures. The one thing I don't like about it is that what you see through the viewfinder is not what what you get on the screen. And the screen is entirely too small for somebody who's farsighted, like me. (It's a toss up: a new camera or new glasses. Hmmmm.) The bad thing about digital photography is that it's made SLR cameras too expensive for the average joe now. When I bought my Pentax back in 1981, I could actually afford a fairly good camera on the student travel grant I'd gotten. Now, I'm not so sure.

But the real point of the post is this:

This is the Scholars Gate to Central Park, at the Southeast corner just off Fifth Avenue. The Park has 23 named gates which correspond to most of the major pedestrian entrances. I've photographed it because I'm writing a series of interconnected stories that are associated with each of them. This happens to be the one I walked in through yesterday. I'd like to get pictures of all of them, though they're clearly marked on a lovely map from the Greensward Foundation.

Why do I want to photograph them? Well, because I can. Because there aren't any other images of them. Because photographing something gives you a sense of ownership. I've called my new York photos over on Flickr "Flee's New York" because it's the bits of New York that I love, that maybe no one else does, or even if they do, not in the same way or for the same reasons I do. They're memory triggers as well, which I find useful for writing descriptions (I'm a description-heavy writer) and conjuring atmosphere. I keep reference photos in much the same way cartoonists and artists do, I think. Writing is, for me, a very visual undertaking. I don't know if that's true for other writers, but I "see" scenes in my head much the same way you'd watch a movie. So visual cues help.

Besides, it gives me a project (yeah, I don't have enough of those) and it's also a procrastination technique. I don't have enough of those, either. Gates, 23. Photographs of gates, 1. One down, twenty-two to go! Where's my camera?

PWP (Plot? What Plot?)

In the genre of fanfic that I write (yes, fanfic has genres; why not?) there's a subgenre called the PWP, which stands for "Plot? What Plot?" This designation in a posting header (along with its movie-like rating system) signals that the "story" will be little more than a scene, sometimes in all its meanings, the purpose of which is to, well, let's just say it's the main purpose of most porn, even the literary type. PWPs tend to be short and to the point. Writer and reader (and characters) get, er, in and out in a fairly short order. Sometimes there's character development, but most often the pair is already established and the piece (I can't really call it a story) is just for the purposes of amusement. I suppose that's true of just about any story, but this type at least has a specific goal. Sometimes, PWPs become the kernel of a larger story and turn back into what they really are: just a scene lifted from a larger story.

So what's in a plot? I tend to think of plots in the old-fashioned sense of the word: a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but that's a little vague for my purposes here; even nothing more than a scene has a beginning, middle, and end. You start somewhere, go on until the end and then stop when it's over. Stories that are "a day in the life of" have those three elements, arbitrary as they are. Plots are more complicated and less arbitrary. A plot is framed more specifically (start here, end here), but it's what comes in the middle that sets it apart from the "slice of life" type of story. In these, there tends to be less of a sense of conflict, climax (which in the kind of PWP I'm talking about, is usually literal), or denouement, the traditional elements of a plot.

This is also true in novel-length PWPs. "Please tell me there is no such thing," you might be thinking. I'm sorry to inform you it's true. There are lots of plotless novels. They tend to be written by two types of writers: the inexperienced and the avant garde. Telling them apart is sometimes harder than you might think. For instance, as much fun as I think Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels are, they're largely plot-free in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and at this point, she's not an inexperienced writer. In her novels, Anita wakes up one morning (it could be any morning), stuff happens in rapid succession (any kind of stuff) without any really good reason, usually, and then stops. I know this sounds like a plot, but it doesn't build like one. It just hurtles along helter skelter in high gear in a random yet chronological sense, like any working mom's day, except the instead of getting the kids off to school, she mangles werewolves or raises zombies. The events are more a calendar of events to get through than a plot: Midnight: raise zombie for lawyers; 2 a.m.: check in with Jean-Luc about visiting master vampire; 3 a.m. clean visiting master vampire's clock. . . .

What's missing are the tricks of the trade: foreshadowing, complication, reversal, a concentrated conflict. But more than that, what's missing is the actual rhythm of a story, the sense of rising and falling action that plots (which are not necessarily "like life" though they can be realistic) usually have. What's often also missing is a subject. The story is not actually about anything. Taken as a whole, the Anita Blake series is about the assimilation of the "other" into society. Individually, they're more about Anita's character development and, in that sense, read more like fanfic.

Plotlessness doesn't happen just in genre fic or fanfic. What I think of as the Iowa Writers Workshop school of fiction (Raymond Carver et al) have made slice-of-life fiction the most common type of short story since the '80s or so. It's a minimalist realism with extremely ordinary characters to whom nothing much significant happens beyond what most of us experience every day. This has never had much appeal for me. My life is boring enough thanks, and the drama over other people's boring lives is too awful to bear.

What got me thinking about this was a review of Sarah Waters' new book, The Night Watch, by Grumpy Old Bookman, who opines:

The absence of plot is also deeply worrying. I do hope that Sarah Waters has not fallen into the dreadful trap of believing that she is god's gift to literature, and that she is therefore above such things. You may remember that E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, said something along the lines of Oh dear yes, there has to be a story -- as if the need for a plot was vaguely disgusting and perhaps best ignored; rather like the need to defecate from time to time. Forster took the view that a novel should just be allowed to stop, without the author having to bring things to a nicely rounded conclusion.

Generally, rounded conclusions are something I'm in favor of too, because the other alternative—just stopping—is so emotionally and spiritually unsatisfying. I can't tell you how many times I've tossed across the room in rage what has been until the last four pages a really good book, when the author chokes on the ending. The Historian, The Geographer's Library, and The Magus spring immediately to mind. I feel cheated when this happens. Worse, I feel insulted, as though I've been led on through this roller coaster ride of a book and at the end I'm just expected to fold my hands and walk quietly away, like I'm getting off a literally ride? I think not! That's like getting almost to the bottom  of that last hill and then getting stuck there for two hours. By the time you roll up to the platform again, the adrenaline rush is gone. After that, dammit, I want some catharsis!

This is distinctly different from having everything neatly wrapped up. I can handle loose ends if the story has been emotionally satisfying. In fact, it's good to leave your audience wanting more: more of the characters, another story about them, more of your wonderful writing. But this doesn't happen if a story just stops. What's needed after the climax is some kind of closure—generally a word I hate, but appropriate here since we're bringing a story to a close. Otherwise, it becomes either a cliffhanger, or an exercise in illustrating the pointless random futility of life. If that's what you want, fine then. But don't offer it to me. I think about that every time I get out of bed to go to work.

I'm in the camp of readers (and writers) who wants not just diversion but a feeling of accomplishment, an sense that I've somehow been changed when I read a story. If there's not some point to it other than mimicking my random episodic life, why tell the story? Stories are a distillation of human experience, concentrated, heady, patterned, and with a point. If it has no point, it's like listening to the endless monologue by your idiot coworker about his Club Med trip to Cancun.

Endings are hard. They're harder than beginnings, and far harder than middles. Knowing when to stop and how to stop a story—how, in essence, to frame it—is the trickiest bit of learning to write. It's a lot like learning to crop photographs. You have to teach yourself how to see all over again, not in panoramic 3-D super vision, but in discreet sections. It's an aesthetic, and therefore almost impossible to teach, though it can be learned. Just push on to the bottom of the hill, and bring the tale into the platform with your readers panting and wiping their brows.

More Reasons I ♡ New York

Part of an occasional series

Out doing photography last Friday for my Postcards From Home project. I started in Chelsea, on Ninth Ave. and W. 18th Street, where I went for an appointment, and since it was early morning, took myself off to Florent for breakfast afterwards. This is not a part of Manhattan that I know very well. I've been an East Side girl mostly from my jobs and association with NYU. My brief foray into the west side while working at Matthew Bender wasn't very happy; the Penn station area in the late 80s was nasty and offputting. And I occasionally visited Jen when she lived in the illegal 5th floor walkup sublet in the West Village and in Hell's Kitchen (exactly three times, until I had to call her from a crack-vial-and-syringe-infested phone booth to have her let me in), and I visit Laurie on the Upper West side, too. But my shrink's office was in London Terrace and that's when I started to get interested in Chelsea. The Meatpacking District, just south of Chelsea, is a complete mystery to me, since it's been an industrial area full of after-hours and gay clubs until the last couple of years.

It's been a while since I explored a new part of the city and I've got the blisters on my feet to prove it. But the blisters were worth it. The day turned out to be full of magical and amusing little moments, and I got some great pictures. Walking around with a camera makes you look at the city in a different way: always framing shots in your head. I'm much better at taking place shots than people shots, but I try not to lose sight of them, either, since the buildings are just the backdrop and the real entertainment is what's walking around in front of it.

Florent, where I had breakfast, is an old and typical kind of NYC diner, with a venerable history and a French twist to the menu. On the specials board were Flo's Tips for local shows, a snide and bitter bit of doggerel commenting on the Bush regime and Madonna's vanity as well as the Hudson River manatee (I kid you not) and an obit for Willie Ninja, who invented "vogueing." Breakfast was perfect. You wouldn't think you could ruin two eggs over, easy, with bacon and homefries (a treat I seldom indulge in anymore), but Mayrose managed it a couple of weeks ago, so this was both a pleasure and a relief. (I've totally given up on Mayrose. I've never had a good meal there. How do they stay in business?) The eggs were just the way I like them, the bacon was thick and crispy without being burnt, and the homefries (to my cholesterol count's horror and my tongue's delight) were red potatoes sauteed in butter. Yum! With fresh OJ and tea, I was set for the day.

From Gansevoort I walked back to 9th Ave.and walked a little uptown to 14th St.to start taking pictures. On my way, I ran into the first amusing moment, which consisted of one of the skinny neighborhood hipsters wearing a very old-fashioned cut suit, something from the 50's, in grey sharkskin, with a white button-down shirt, skinny black tie, black oxfords, and nerdy black framed glasses. Not just retro but nerdy retro: his tie was tucked into his pants (beneath a black belt), his pants were four inches too short and showed bare ankles because he was wearing shiny grey footies instead of socks. Ironic Devo escapee meets 1952 IBM refugee.

I love costumes.

On the corner of 14th Street and Ninth Ave., I took this:

What I liked about this shot was the black and white against the red brick, the low rise and the high rise, the new and the old, which makes for such an interesting contrast in this neighborhood. The Meatpacking District is still in the throes of being redeveloped and hasn't been completely overtaken by luxury high-rises yet, or had all of its original industry zoned out of the area. So there's still a great mix of hipsters, blue collar guys, restaurants, warehouses, club kids, and boutiques—a bit like pre-luxury loft Soho. 14th Street and the avenues are already pretty well colonized, but the smaller side streets like Gansevoort are still cobbled and pretty gritty. Hopefully it'll stay that way for a while, though it does scare me that the area's got its own website. That was the death knell for Williamsburg too.

While I was waiting to cross the street to continue east, Ray Kottner's free cab passed by me. I recognized him immediately because he was driving an old Checker, the kind you never see anymore, and his sign said "free." I looked inside (he was slowing for a light) and sure enough, there he was. I nearly ran after him to say hi, and then thought, Naaaah, he won't be amused. Why spoil it? I've written about him before, and there are other people who've caught rides with him and written about it too. It was just a kick to see him still tooling around. Not that the world necessarily needs more Kottners, since we seem to be a pretty crotchety tribe. It was just nice to see another one in the city besides me.

One thing about being anywhere outside of midtown or the financial district before noon is that half the businesses are still shut up tighter than a Republican's bank vault. Busboys and maintenance guys are hosing down sidewalks in front of their businesses and the air smells of wet cement. The streets look sleepy and deserted and everyone is yawning. You can tell a lot about an area from the business hours it keeps. A while back when Paul was here, we wandered down to Soho after dinner in the East Village, intending to do a little window shopping, and found everything closed at 8 pm. When it was an artists' enclave nothing but the galleries closed until at least 9, and often 10 or later, the way they still do in the East Village. Of course, they don't open until 10 a.m. at the earliest, often noon. But now Soho runs to the rhythm of tourists, not artists. That's another way in which the Meatpacking District has that pre-condo feel: it's still obviously a late-night area with the club kids just coming home at 6 or 7 (hence the all-night diners like Florent and the plethora of places serving breakfast).

And, like the old Soho, where I used to run into David Byrne, the occasional celebrity is sneaking out in sunglasses hoping nobody else will be up to ID him. I could be mistaken, but I think after leaving Ray on Hudson, I passed Brad Pitt going the opposite way. Or maybe it was just his stunt double. I thought Brad was taller. But he was instantly recognizable the way Kevin Bacon was in Madison Square Park with his film crew a couple of weeks ago (possibly for Death Sentence). So who knows? Everybody looks taller on film. So my celebrity siting score went up two in the last two weeks. Come to think of it, I left Eric Bogosian off that list too. But that was ages ago.

Speaking of closed businesses, I wandered down Greenwich Ave. to Tea and Sympathy to find it closed, too, which was annoying since I'm so seldom in that area and I'd wanted to pick up some more PG Tips and maybe some Cadbury chocolate or MacVitties Digestives. What's with this? They're not even open for Elevensies! I guess I'll have to go to Kalustyan's on Monday.

Nor was Three Lives & Co., one of my favorite bookstores, open at 10:30 a.m. But I did get two good photos for the book project:

Then it was on to the Blue Note, on W. 3rd Street, just off Sixth Avenue. I'd remembered it being on the Avenue, but I guess I was thinking of the now-closed Sweet Basil (which has become Sweet Rhythm) on Seventh Avenue. I did eventually stumble on it as I walked down W. 3rd. By which point I was pretty well stumbling, period. The Blue Note pictures weren't that exciting, so I'm not posting them.

I pressed on, looking for an open cafe. La Lanterna, just off Washington Square Park, was also closed at that hour, strangely enough, so I resigned myself to head over to the nearest Star*uck's. But on the way, I took this, thinking it might be my last chance before the park renovation:

I walked through the park, where I used to hang out a lot when I was still going to NYU, and it's definitely looking a little the worse for wear. I hope they don't change it too much. It's still a beautiful park with a lot of character. Making it all symmetrical and perfect would just ruin its character. I particularly hate to see it changed too much since I have some great memories associated with it. For one thing, somewhere out there, in some photographer's files, is a picture of me walking through the park that was later turned into a greeting card. It's also where met a terribly sweet maintenance guy who worked at NYU. We sat on the fence and talked about books and school and drank cheap champagne in the sun and when he found out I was a history student, he insisted on giving me one of the books he'd picked up that day from a vendor. That's when I began to realize that New York was nicer than anybody in the Midwest suspected. I also saw (twice) a great production of Midsummer Night's Dream, lit with flashlights, staged all around the park with the audience following the actors to new locations for each scene. And then there's Master Lee, who Jen blogged about a few weeks ago.

Finally, a couple of miles on a roundabout trail from where I'd started out at W. 18th Street and Ninth Avenue, I dragged my sorry, footsore self into the Star*ucks that used to be the Riviera at Astor Place. And lo! the Cube was back! Cleaned and greased and ready to shelter the derelict and form a backdrop for earnest NYU film students, both of which it was doing. It's a nice, gritty contrast to the smooth, impenetrable glassy facade of the Sculpture for Living behind it, about which several real estate reporters and blogs, even Curbed, are very snarky. The New Yorker can go on all it wants about how wealthy this area is, but it's got more than its share of the down and out and the middle to lower income too. Not to mention unruly students.

Case in point, the slightly crazy guy in Star*uck's who was playing musical chairs with himself as I was sipping my chai and watching the denizens and the weird reflections in the Sculpture for Living's facade. I was sitting in the glassed-in area near the street (the front of which is under construction and makes it look like the place is closed) when he came wandering in and headed for a seat behind me, then changed his mind, whirled and went for one nearby then spun again and lunged for one two tables away, then went back and forth several times before settling into the one nearest where he'd entered, where he sat for a minute then disappeared. Everything he was doing screamed OCD, poor guy: gotta touch that chair! gotta touch that chair! gotta touch that chair! One more time! okay!  And no one to get him meds. I'm sure the folks in the Sculpture for Living wouldn't be amused. But Astor Place is just one big performance space, even for the unintentional or compulsive performers. But then, the folks in the 39, $2 million+ apartments in that highrise are right next door to the Public Theatre. In more ways than one.

Little Lies

A friend of mine sent me a great little story about a dog named Daisy who supposedly led several hundred people out of Tower 1, from the 101st floor, then went back and led several hundred more out before the building collapsed. It's a lovely story of canine heroism and leaves you all sort of fuzzy and warm the way animal stories do. Unfortunately, it's a hoax. I'd sort of suspected it was as I was reading it. As obsessive as I was about the news in those hours and days following 9/11, I'm sure I would have remembered a story like this and I didn't. The facts seemed kinda iffy too. The planes hit on floors lower than 101, and anyone who was at or above those floors didn't get out. Whole floors and even the escape stairwells were on fire or full of smoke above that. Still, it was disappointing to find it was a piece of fiction when I looked it up on Snopes.com. It's such a lovely little story. It wasn't even the story itself that bothered me, but that it's presented as a fact.

I dunno, call me touchy, but it bothers me that people are already making stuff up about this event, even if it's something as seemingly harmless as a dog story. If it were presented as a story—as fiction—it wouldn't bother me at all; fiction is a way of making sense of our lives. But there was so much real heroism that day that a made-up story presented as fact seems to diminish it, especially since most of the dogs never got a chance to rescue a live person. It takes something away from the real victims and heroes, and it has a "cashing in on tragedy" quality to it that repels me. "Look, I have a 9/11 story too! Isn't it great?" Everyone who witnessed the event has a story, no matter where you were, or how far away. Why make one up and pass it off as fact unless you don't have one at all and you're greedy for attention?

It also bothered me that the friend who'd sent me the story knew it was a fabrication and sent it along without mentioning it. "I know it is a hoax but it is a great story and it made everybody who sent it to me feel good so I figured it did not hurt anybody," she said later. But I think it does. Not the dogs, obviously, but their handlers, who went day after day without finding anyone alive, and watched their dogs suffer for it. The rewards for being a rescue worker at the pit were few and far between. If Daisy's story were true, it would be a triumph that others could applaud. If it were presented as fiction, it would act as a piece of wish-fulfillment. "Damn, that would have been nice to see!" But a piece of fiction presented as fact is a cruel joke.

It's one thing if you've got your own story about 9/11, whether it's fact or fiction but let's be clear about which is which. It's too early to start distorting the facts. That will happen inevitably (and began to happen when George Bush linked Osama with Saddam), but there's no really good reason to distort what actually happened at those two buildings. It's too soon, and the event is too raw in many people's minds yet. It's still, to many people, a very personal story, though it's rapidly becoming part of the national mythos. But I think the people who were actually at the site, working, still have some claim to it and to what stories are told and how. It seems disrespectful to be making things up about them.

Reflecting, Five Years Later

Five years. I can hardly believe it's been that long. And I wonder at the same time why that seems such a significant marker. Because it's half a decade? It's funny how we give certain spans of time importance over others. Six months. A year. Five years. Ten. Twenty. Twenty-five. And the leap to 50, to 75, to the century mark, when all of us who lived to see this will be, despite miraculous medical advances, dead, most likely, and this will be just another moment in history, rather than a significant moment in our personal history, a "where were you when . . .?" moment.

I can't bring myself to call this an anniversary. Anniversaries should be for happy occasions in my mind. Calling it that strips the event of its portentousness, its horror, its sadness. Yet there's no other word in English for it. And because it's five years, there are reminders everywhere, more than usual, coupled with a new bickering about interpretation and what, exactly, happened, and I find myself remembering and thinking more than I really want to, and sitting in tears at what comes back. In those five years, I thought I'd moved past it, because God knows I've had enough else going on in my life since then, that's been equally uncontrollable. But, I suspect that, like many New Yorkers who were here that day, it's much closer to the surface than we expected, even after all this time and all this change.

Five years ago, I still lived in Brooklyn. Five years ago, we had no Axis of Evil. Five years ago, Kath and I were still fast friends. Five years ago we still had civil rights. Five years ago, I had a different job. Five years ago torture wasn't an official U.S. policy. Five years ago, Peri was still married to a nice man and struggling artist who hadn't seen a flaming fuselage and dead bodies. Five years ago, only the phobic were afraid to fly. Five years ago I still had parents. Five years ago citizens weren't disappearing as though they lived under a fascist dictator. Five years ago I'd never made a book by hand. Five years ago, we weren't at war. Five years ago, it was all so ordinary for us here, in New York, in this country. Five years ago. Five years.

So little time, so much change.

None Untouched

Some of us it broke,
the ones who were already fragile,
or who thought themselves
the center, and could not hold
in this new and sudden vortex.
Some were made the center
by character and action
or unwittingly by chance
and bore it with a fierce grace.
Some it brought a moment of clarity
wrapped in smoke and ash.
Some it plunged into darkness,
or made their own lurking night starless, moonless,
unnavigable.
Some, who’d known war, it brought
memory,
and to those who hadn’t,
revelation.
Some rose to the occasion,
some fell
never to rise again.
Many slates were wiped clean.
Some lost love, and a few gained only fear
and a new shrillness.
Some seized the opportunity
for power and acquisition
disguising it as vision, while
many of us, wandering, inhaled the dust of demolition
and cremation,
leaving more than lungs scarred,
and the memory of a hot electric stench
that will never mean anything else.

Just this one event
to tumble everything we thought we were
into everything we truly were
before, making us
what we are now,
after.

–September 7, 2006, NYC
© Lee Kottner, 2006

Requiescat in pace.

"Be the change you want to see in the world."
–Mahatma Gandhi

Embracing Change

First, a disclaimer: I'm not a Republican (or a Democrat), nor a Luddite, nor a science-illiterate. And that's as defensive as I'm going to be.

Now I'm going to talk about climate change and why the data do not entirely convince me—and what the current conclusions reveal about how we view the world and our place in it. This post will probably bring heaps of scorn from anybody who's seen "An Inconvenient Truth" (which I haven't), but I'm actually writing this in the spirit of inquiry. I've discussed global warming with several people who ought to know (mostly air quality scientists) and they've never offered me a sufficient explanation beyond "that's what the models show." My problem is that I wonder if the models are running with sufficient data to extrapolate from.

I've got a fairly complicated view of global warming, which seems wiser than not (or delusional), considering how complicated the topic is. Climate science is a complex and fairly young science, as sciences go. Although the disciplines used to study climate (physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology, oceanography, paleoclimatology) have well-established principles and methodologies long used to investigate other problems, modern climatology as a discipline is not much more than a century old. By contrast, the study of physics, chemistry, and biology date back thousands of years, and as modern disciplines were practiced with some degree of reliability since the Age of Reason. (Yeah, it's scary that rational science based on the ordered accumulation of facts is actually only a few hundred years old.) Compared to, say, physics, climatology still has that new car smell. This matters only because the younger a discipline is, the less research has been done and the more conflicting ideas about theory there are. It's not a bad thing, but it's not what non-scientists, especially policy makers, want to hear. They want absolutes and incontrovertible facts.

One of the factors that most hampers scientists in studying long-term climate changes is precisely this newness of the study as a scientific discipline. Science depends on reliable, cumulative data and before we started keeping track of precipitation, severe weather patterns, average temperatures, etc. in a systematic, quantitative manner around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the written data is pretty spotty and, far enough back, virtually nonexistent. Calibrated thermometers, for instance, weren't even invented until the 16th century. And it's hard to have a sense of a global climate when you haven't even figured out how many continents there are, or quite how large the earth is, or what the ratio of land to water is, or what the chemical elements are. From paleographic evidence, we have some idea about other drastic changes in climate, in the earth's magnetic field, of the arrival and departure of ice ages, and of the rise and fall of oceans. Written historical records, as far back as they go, have recorded smaller blips in the pattern of climate: the Little Ice Age in Europe and the corresponding warm period, long stretches of drought, volcanic eruption-driven "volcanic winters." But any absolute accuracy in the data only reaches back into the 19th century—just slightly more than 200 years of data in a system that's been running for billions of years through innumerable and unknown geological changes. Even scientists at NOAA acknowledge that "[t]here are not enough records available to reconstruct global or even hemispheric mean temperature prior to about 600 years ago with a high degree of confidence." [emphasis added] And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just significantly downgraded their worst-case scenario from models run five years ago, because of new and improved data.

So here's my question (and it's definitely not rhetorical. I really do want an answer): If we only have about 600 years worth of data on mean temperature for a planet whose rocks are roughly 4.54 billion years old (though its life-supporting climate is billions of years younger) how reliable is that? 600 out of say, even 4 billion is a pretty insignificant fraction. Somebody do the math for me; I suck at it. The point I'm making is that, even if in the last 200 years the climate has changed appreciably (and I'll give you that it has), how do we know the earth hasn't gone through similar periods at other undocumented times in its history? Could the answer actually be that we don't? And if we don't, what does that mean?

Cause and effect in studies of complex systems like climate and ecology is not always a clear-cut thing: Do X and Y happens, unless P interferes or M isn't present. For one thing, living systems are often complex beyond our expectations if not our imagination, and are always surprising us in some way. It's hard to model a system that you're still discovering new facts about. For instance, how much influence does the Amazon really have on carbon dioxide re-uptake (subscription required)? And the phytoplankton we thought were doing that job too aren't doing it as well as we once thought.

Do I believe global warming is a fact? Yeah, no problems there. Do I believe it's entirely caused by human factors. Um, maybe. Do I think there're some alarmist claims on the environmentalist side? Yeah, I do. Do I think the Republicans are stupid for ignoring them? Why, yes, I do, if only because none of their suggestions—decreasing our dependency on oil; finding clean, renewable alternative energy forms, cutting pollution and in general living more lightly on the earth—are in the least harmful to anyone but oil company CEOs and stockholders, who already have more money than God. Oil is a lousy source of energy and there are much cleaner ones that would not even require major infrastructure changes to implement. As far as I can see we already have the technology to maintain the lifestyle to which we've become accustomed with energy and manufacturing and transportation that's at least, at a guess, 25% cleaner than at present, and the only thing that's stopping us is greed.

So I have no objections to the Kyoto Protocols; I think the US needs to get on board that wagon. They're one of the reasons I don't own an air conditioner or a car. I have no doubt that the climate change forecast by most of the accepted models, if unchecked, is going to bring catastrophic changes to Life As We Know It.

And there's the rub.

Over the last few hundred years of human population explosion, we've done some pretty stupid things. We regularly build on vulnerable coastlines. We've dammed and diverted rivers, ruined watersheds, farmed land never meant to be farmed and created huge dust bowls, depleted resources at a fantastic rate, and basically crapped in our own nest. We have, in short, expected the earth's climate and ecology to bend to our desires, instead of trying to figure out how to best work within the system. This is an old argument, trotted out on a regular basis by the early radical ecology movement (c.f. Jackson Browne's anti-nuke anthem "Before the Deluge") and not unheard of now. But let's face it: human beings are control freaks and we don't, as a species, like change. This is one of the reasons global warming and its consequences terrify those of us who take it seriously.

Our complex climate is doing things we haven't been either smart or numerous enough to take note of previously except in an anecdotal way and we feel put upon. The ocean is going to come in and wash away our sandcastles and it pisses us off and frightens us. And it frightens us with good reason. Human beings not only don't like change, we don't deal well with it. Changes in the coastline will affect national boundaries and the amount of land available for the people living within those boundaries. Whenever changes of this sort happen, it makes people nervous enough to think of annexing their neighbors' land, or going in search of more. In earlier centuries, climate change may have sent the Vikings on their raids or been a factor in the French Revolution. If the availability of fresh water is already becoming an international issue, just think what the shrinkage of arable land will do.

New Orleans is a drastic example of what global warming might bring us (and what might happen to Battery Park City here in New York). Or such is the received wisdom. The fact is that New Orleans was built largely below sea level with poorly constructed and maintained levees and it was only a matter of time before a category 5 hurricane came roaring in from the Gulf of Mexico and inundated a city that was built where none should have been. Don't get me wrong: Katrina was a tragedy, but it was a statistical tragedy of tempting fate in the same way Venice and the lowlands of Holland are. Build below sea level or on marshy ground, and you'd better be prepared to get wet. And this is precisely the kind of change we're not prepared for.

We have a long history of this kind of risk blindness. People regularly build on the slopes of active volcanoes, on shifting barrier islands, on landfill, on fault lines, in the regular paths of typhoons and hurricanes. Instead of developing settlements in safer places, we attempt to develop ways to protect ourselves from natural disasters. Often we wait until they happen to even recognize the problem, let alone find a solution, which is basically what we're now doing with global warming. The trouble is that global warming doesn't only affect us, but the entire ecosystem we inhabit. The consequences might be not just the obliteration or inundation of our own structures, but the extinction of species.

As a rule, we think of extinction as a man-made problem, and yet there have been extinctions throughout history that had nothing to do with us. At least five times during the earth's history, 30-95% of its species have been wiped out, making way for the ecosystem we see around us now. Because it's familiar to us and because it seems to have been around "forever" in our foreshortened view of history, this is the ecosystem we think is "right" and that it should be preserved at all costs. But if global warming is not necessarily a man-made phenomenon, but a phase of a cycle that's been going on for millions of years, we may be witnessing nothing more than a natural change. Even if we've contributed to it, somehow sped it up, this is nothing that hasn't happened before.

And without change there is only stagnation and ultimately the death of the system. Humans often forget (if we only recently began to understand) that we're one very disruptive part of a much larger system. We're not, however, necessarily the most important part. No, really, it's not all about us, though we like to think so, in our solipsistic way. I suspect this is because our lifespans are so short, and history is so long. Strangely enough, humans also like to think that we're powerful enough to be the sole cause of all the world's ills, as well as of its marvels. There's as much hubris in that attitude as there is in the idea that we have the power and knowledge to "fix" something as complex as climate.

The point here is that we're looking at patterns in the history of an extremely long period of time, from a very narrow point of view which assumes that much of what happens is either due to our actions or controllable by us or is, at least, going to affect us the most. But the earth has been going through climatic and geophysical upheavals for billions of years without human intervention, and I suspect that it will continue to do so. Just because there are enough of us around to make note of it, and our civilization is advanced enough to begin to understand what is happening, doesn't mean that what's going on is unnatural—just that the changes we see happening are going to affect us as they never have before.

Change of some kind in our biosphere is inevitable and the flora and fauna we live with seem to be far more flexible in their ability to adjust to those changes than humans are. They adjust sometimes by becoming something other than what they were, in a process we call evolution. The question is not what we'll do about the change in climate, but how will we adapt to the changes already occurring. Should we stop trying to fix global warming? Absolutely not. Truthfully, though, I'm more concerned about the social consequences of global warming than I am about global warming itself. We need to remember that change is inevitable and not necessarily the thing to panic over that we frequently think it is. Sometimes change is just . . . different.

Adapt or die.

Book Lust

Just when I think there's nothing to write about, all kinds of stuff crops up. This is why it's good to change your Bloglines subscriptions now and then; it shakes things up. I was grazing through Grumpy Old Bookman, which I've subscribed to on and off, and ran across his exclusive scoop about a book thief in the bosom of the Manchester (England) public library. The story reads like an outline for one of John Dunning's Cliff Janeway Bookman novels. This guy stole some lovely stuff: an edition of Chaucer from the 1600's, some very very early John Donne, that sort of thing, and (wait for it) sold it on ebay. Which is how he got caught. That, and selling books with  Manchester Free Library embossed on it without a "deaccessioned" stamp or slip. Duh. Dunno what the guy was thinking, but he's going to be interviewed, apparently (or has been already), so perhaps we'll find out. It seems like nothing more than greed, since he was selling them, and with books, I don't really get that. I mean, if you're going to steal books like that, why would you sell them? I'd want them just to paw and drool over.

I'm not a book collector, per se, but I do like beautiful books, and there are certain beautiful books I'd like to own because their texts have special meanings to me. I'd like that pretty red faux leather edition of Lord of the Rings collected in one volume. I've got a boxed set of L'Morte D'Arthur illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, and a Barry Moser Pennyroyal Caxton Bible from Viking Studio. These are all books I've read and loved, that have played some significant role in my life or the formation of my ethics. For a while now, I've been subscribed to Powell's list of rare book acquisitions because I'd like to get a copy of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, printed in England by the Hogarth Press, which is the press that she and Leonard owned, which published much of her fiction in hand-typeset editions. Some of these Virginia helped typeset and bind herself, and I like the idea of owning a book she may have not only written, but also physically produced in some way, though I'll never really know. It doesn't have to be a first printing or first edition, or even in anything other than very good condition, just a copy from the Hogarth Press during her lifetime.

Or so I thought. Among the recent notices was one for the first edition complete set of her diaries, all five volumes, printed and bound by the Hogarth Press. Now, logically, I know she had no hand in anything but the writing of these, as they weren't published until after her death. But my trade paper copies of her diaries are pretty ragged and yellowing and these were in good to very good condition (which isn't that great in book collector's parlance, I gather), all five for $400. That's less than $100 a book. And I had a moment of book lust. They had the original dustcovers and and they looked like something designed by Vanessa, her sister, who often designed the dustcovers for Virginia's novels. They were lovely. I wanted them.

I made myself go look at the price of new paperback editions—less than $25 each—and that sobered me up. I'm not collecting her books; I just want nice, readable copies, except for that one novel, which I adore. I enjoy the hunt for it, the excitement of scanning through the list every day to see if it might be there, and seeing what else crops up, and how much the other books I already own are selling for. (Harry Potter! You would not believe what first editions are going for! and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Sheesh! Crazy! They're not even dead yet.) I half suspect that I enjoy the hunt at least as much as I will owning The Waves.

Of course, this was all moot when I got the bill for my latest lab test, which was almost as much as Virginia's diaries. I think I'll settle for the paperbacks.

A Book By Any Other Name

The first book art show I ever went to was the Center for Book Arts holiday show, which is scheduled a couple of weeks before Christmas every year. It's a way for the associated artists to show off some of their creations, advertise the center, and contribute (in the form of rented space fees) to the Center's coffers. Up to that point, I was unfamiliar with the concept of artist's books, though I knew a little bit about hand binding and art editions and incunabula. In my head, the terms book and text or story were more or less interchangeable. Books were the repository of words that were purposefully strung together to form some kind of narrative, whether poetry or prose. I knew such "repositories" came in other forms—scrolls, tablets, manuscript sheets—and many kinds of bindings, but it hadn't ever occurred to me that they could be anything but printed, handwritten, or blank and waiting to be filled. Boy, was I in for a surprise!

I've always loved beautiful books and blank journals just as objects, so I don't know why it should have surprised me that people made books—gasp!—with no words, that weren't blank books waiting for someone to write in them. I have to confess the concept still confuses me. I mean, what do you do with this clever little object by Molly Goldstrom (who sadly has no web presence, apparently), that I picked up at MoCCA's comic arts show a while back:

Is it a book? A comic? A piece of art? It's got a narrative, though it's a graphical one. What makes this a book? And I don't doubt this is one, as much as as my copy of the Robert Sabuda/Michael Reinhardt popup dinosaur book is one. It's so spectacular you hardly notice the text. But this little bat thingie is a beautifully integrated, self-contained story. It is, in fact, almost its own story. Is that why is this little bat-thingie is a book? And is it a piece of art too?

I think I've given up trying to define or explain what makes a book a book or a piece of art. Officially. Today. Because I ran into this site, home of Lotte Glob, Scottish ceramicist, courtesy of Joanne B. Kaar's website. Glob does some spectacular work that reminds me somewhat of of a grittier, earthbound Dale Chihuly. Where Chihuly glass is always about floating and flowing and water, even when it's not, Glob's work is all about earth: it's substantial, even when it floats, and rough and dirty. There's no transparency, even in her series of "pools." And then there are her books. Here's how she describes them, in part:

BOOK OF THE LAND

The spirit of the highland landscape are gathered on long walks - brought back to be fused in the kiln under high heat - transformed into sculptured books - challenge our perception of the book - viewed as artefact from the future or fossilised tomes from a distant past - the intangible and ephemeral.

This is my favorite of the lot.  The pages don't turn, but there are pages. There's no narrative in the usual sense, but there is information, a catalogue of the land she walks every day and her selections of it, so it forms her interpretation of it.

Then there's Miriam Schaer's girdle books, which are as much a sculpture as a book, and Tamar Stone's corset books, which are less sculptural but still have, uh, unusual "covers."

And I haven't even touched on altered books, because I really don't have my head around them, except that I know I want to try making one. Eventually, I'd like to do a reliquary, like one of these, with a vial of Mom's ashes, a piece of what's left of one of her china pieces that was smashed in the mail and who knows what else. I have to find the right book as a base though. And will that be a book, still?

Your guess is as good as mine.