Blogorrhea Junior

9/11 Year Six

I'm doing two things today, both significant: I'm going shopping for a cocktail dress for a friend's wedding and afterwards, I'm going up to the New-York Historical Society to see Here is New York: Remembering 9/11. If it seems disrespectful to go shopping on a day like this, so be it. The thing about death is that life goes on around it, no matter how much we would like the world to stop and howl with us. I'm not saying that we should forget, but that we should let go and move on. It's starting to become like the widow who flings herself onto the coffin and won't let go. It was a shocking murder of over three thousand people, but no more shocking a murder than the more than half a million Iraqis who've died since the war started.

That said, I give you this:

Nothing Epic

The City rebuilds itself on its own ashes,
like Troy on Troy,
this burned-out hulk where cop and fireman died
herding the innocents
no different from the charcoal plain
left beneath centuries more of new habitation in Anatolia.
Except—
without a Homer to name their names,
call their metaphorical attributes,
and send them in perpetuity
to the smoking site
with their doomed engines of salvation,
who will know them fifty, a hundred years hence?
Already we forget the names—if we ever knew them—
of the soldiers new-fallen in Assyria's ashes
by the waters of Babylon,
the half-million citizens
dead of our retribution
against a false enemy.

No bells toll
so read the names,
but read them all: Agamemnon, Father Mike, Hector,
the footsoldiers, Spartans, Amazons,
Greka, Moreno, Jimenez (dead in Akkadia),
the cops, the firemen, the EMTs,
the lawyers, brokers, office workers,
Helen and Cassandra,
the busboys, janitors, CEOs, salesmen, and after,
the volunteers, rescuers, dismantlers
still choking on the dust and ash.

All that’s missing is the gods
and even they forget
or don’t care.

© Lee Kottner 2007

Afternoon Tea, Cut-throat Croquet, and Irises

Very satisfying day all around. Slept late, as one should be allowed to do on Sundays. Pottered around, made a stack of tea sandwiches (mostly cucumber/butter/dill but also a couple of egg salad and salmon/cream cheese capers) and hied myself off with them and a box of figs to Ellis Avery's mad, end of summer tea party in Central Park, which turned out to be a huge spread with china tea cups, silver pots, scones, jam and everything else a high tea should have, except, perhaps, clotted cream. I was sorry I hadn't packed the tea sannies with a china plate, but I'll know better next time.

Perfect weather and a really interesting mix of people, and some folks I already knew, including Gretl, Cheryl, & Heidi, who are all friends of Ellis. I was drafted into the croquet game, which we set up on the rather infelicitous wood chips  instead of the lawn, so early on there was much landscaping and engineering of the field and a great deal of taunting to accompany it as the guys (who started it, the the more cutthroat women gave in after a while) cut nice little ditches for their balls to follow. (Rather hilariously, we were short a blue ball.) I'd almost made it to the final wickets when I was knocked out of the game, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself. And it's funny: I've been wanting to play croquet again for a while now. We used to have a set when I was a kid and I was wicked at it. It was fun to rediscover that skill, even with the Scottish golf course we were playing on.

And the day ended with flowers from the two girls next door that I helped out last night, though truthfully all I did was let them stow their stuff here, check their mail, and feed them beer while we waited for the locksmith they'd already found. (The full story is that Larissa sublet her apartment to two young women from Montana, one a dancer with an internship at Parson's and the other an opera singer who's going to be job hunting. They were only given the mailbox key and the Parkchester key for the door, not the security lock, so it had to be drilled out and replaced. This after spending three days on a train getting here. What a nice intro to the city. Well, at least they weren't mugged.)  But they brought me irises & baby's breath, which was really sweet.

And so to bed.

Madeleine L'Engle, 1918-2008

One of the most influential writers of my life, Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time (among many, many other books), has died. I'm crushed.

The moment I picked A Wrinkle in Time off the library shelf in elementary school stands out in my memory as a pivotal act in my history is both a reader and writer. Seriously, there should have been trumpets and light streaming from heaven. It was easily the smartest book I'd read up to the age of . . . let's see, I must have been about 8, and one of the first children's books that didn't assume I was an idiot. It used multisyllabic and wholly unfamiliar words like "tesseract" which I didn't again encounter anywhere until the fiction of Robert Heinlein in graduate school (The Number of the Beast, specifically, where it's used as a plot device in a such a similar way that it's almost a rip-off*). And they weren't made-up words, either; they were the names of real scientific concepts. This was my first inkling that science might be something cool. And not just science in general, but physics and cosmology. From there, it was a quick downhill slide into the hard stuff. Within a few years I was reading Heinlein, Clark, Asimov, and Asimov's non-fiction about chemistry and biology and astronomy. Then Niven and Pournelle. I was doomed.

This shaped my reading habits for years to come, and whetted my appetite for mixing science and philosophy, science and mythology, science and the ineffable. Years later, when I came across Clarke's Rule—"A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"—that made perfect sense to me. It still does. Magic is just a code word for Things We Don't Yet Understand, or Haven't Yet Built the Right Instruments to Study, like dark energy and dark matter. (The dark energy link will take you to a video of Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll explaining both concepts in the most basic way possible, a skill at which Sean excels.)

Though I didn't realize it at the time, the most important concept I learned from A Wrinkle in Time was that Women Could Be Scientists Too. Mr. Murry was some kind of physicist working on something secret with echoes of the Manhattan Project, but Meg's mother wasn't just a housewife and mother, either. She worked at home—as a chemist. There were Bunsen burners and beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks in their house, in a real lab. And though the Murrys were considered weird because they were smart and sciency, their status as the book's protagonists made everyone else who made fun of them seem mean and small-minded. Science involved the fundamental nature of the universe and life, which made it both cool and important. And Meg and her mom weren't too stupid to grasp this just because they were women. Amazing, that.

As one of those kids who was usually ahead of the curve, I identified with Meg and her family, who were scorned by the locals for being "too smart for their own good" and "better" than other people because they were smart. My soon-to-be best friend, whom I would meet the following year, was the school district's brainiac and only avoided the torture of our schoolmates by virtue of being cute and blonde and highly musical as well. But I was like Meg: dark-haired and dorky. And A Wrinkle in Time made that okay. I read the book over and over again to reassure myself of this fact.

It was also important to see a woman writing smart books with hard science in them, especially one like L'Engle who wasn't a scientist. That meant it was comprehensible to the ordinary person, and not some secret club. L'Engle's work made me seek out others, like C.J. Cherryh and Ursula LeGuin, and gave me a life-long love of both science fiction and the many disciplines of science itself.

Thanks Ms. L'Engle. I hope generations of girls to come enjoy your work as much as I did. You've left quite a legacy.

*I like to think that Heinlein is giving a nod of recognition to L'Engle when he reveals that Hilda Burroughs built models of tesseracts in the gifted program when she was in school.

Call for Book Artist Submissions

Call to Visual Artists

Food Art at the Athens (GA) Institute for Contemporary Art

(Deadline: November 9, 2007)

Seeking works in all media, especially sculpture, book art, new media, and performance which explores food politics and issues, and in particular the impact of food production on ourselves and our environment. No prospectus, no sales, no insurance. No entry fee. Contact Lizzie Zucker Saltz at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art at [email protected] or go to http://www.athica.org.

[via COCA-Notes]

Seeking works in all media, especially sculpture, book art, new media, and performance which explores food politics and issues, and in particular the impact of food production on ourselves and our environment. No prospectus, no sales, no insurance. No entry fee. Contact Lizzie Zucker Saltz at the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art at [email protected] or go to http://www.athica.org.

[via COCA-Notes]

Writing in Interesting Times

May you come to the attention of those in authority
May you find what you are looking for
May you live in interesting times

—Legendary Chinese Curses

Coming up on the sixth anniversary of 9/11, I've just finished editing part of a fiction manuscript that uses it as its backdrop. This far away from it, I didn't think it would bother me much to read about it, but it did, particularly one scene where the main character is fleeing from Lower Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge with his employees, carrying servers and hard drives and pursued by a roiling wall of ash and pulverized building materials. The image it conjured up was something like this sandstorm in Iraq, filmed not too long ago by a soldier stationed there:

And that image sparked the beginnings of a poem, which I have yet to write. I've been planning to take the initial 15 poems I wrote for Stories From the Ruins (not the prose poem) and write more, to make it a full-blown collection. But now I'm not so sure. Now I don't know if I really do have enough distance from it.

I started thinking about this after reading the Author2Author conversation between TJ Fisher and Joshua Clark, two New Orleans authors, on Beatrice.  Clark, right off the bat, says that the disaster of living through Katrina in the French Quarter broke a 7-year-long writer's block for her. In her words, "a torrent of emotions and words flowed out of me like floodwaters." That really struck a chord with me, because I felt the same way immediately after 9/11. I hadn't been suffering from writer's block, but I was suddenly suffering from logorrhea (hence the name of the blog that originated then, of which this one is the spawn). I couldn't stop writing because writing is a way of working through my thoughts, or "processing" as shrinks say. But it's also true that disasters tend to breed interesting stories. This is why Anna Karenina starts with the line, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

It's not that happiness is bad; god knows we all want it and most of us deserve it. But unhappiness, especially big unhappinesses—natural disasters, war and other intentional violent acts, mass accidents—force us to look at ourselves and each other, our society and our world, in ways that the state of happiness forestalls. They jolt us out of our complacency, scare the shit out of us, and drop us back into a world that's just a little—or sometimes a lot—different from before. It changes our point of view just a little.

And sometimes it scars us. I won't say that I've actually been scarred, but I've definitely been changed by 9/11. Like many New Yorkers, I'm quicker to fear unusual occurrences than I was before the Towers were attacked. I'm quicker to think they're intentionally hurtful rather than the result of bad odds. When the steam pipe exploded in Midtown in July, recreating the chaos of 9/11 in miniature, my first thought was a bomb, like many New Yorkers. When it turned out to be just crumbling infrastructure, I was relieved, but that didn't stop the pictures of vapor rising from Midtown from reminding me of smoke from the Pile with an added frisson of fear.

But maybe that's a good thing, or at least something I can use as a writer. Later in that Author2Author conversation, Joshua Clark adds that,

Forcing myself to write this book, there certainly was a purging of emotions—has anyone ever had to write a memoir about a national tragedy this soon?—and it's forced me to deal with many things that many New Orleanians have avoided and hence continue (and will probably always continue) to suffer from.

Maybe that's part of the job of being a writer: dealing with things other people avoid. Stating the obvious. Telling the Emperor he's naked. Pointing out that it's normal to think a steam pipe explosion was a bomb, that being made to think it might have been makes us more susceptible to manipulation by unscrupulous people in power. If writing is a way of processing, then reading can be too. If Clark and Fisher can bring themselves to write so passionately about their drowned city so soon afterwards, there's no reason for me not to face the ghosts of 9/11 six years later.

I'm gonna go write that poem now.

Cup and Pen Small Press Fair

Just found out about this, so I'm sorry I didn't post it sooner.  See you there!

Cup and Pen Small Press Reading Series presents
The Cup and Pen Small Small Press Fair, 2007

Saturday, September 8th 2007
2pm-6pm
Free
Small press enthusiasts, littérateurs and zine-heads unite! Come to listen actively, converse heartily and drink organic beverages (now including wine and cheese) slowly with the Cup and Pen Small Small Press Fair, 2007. Cup and Pen, a twice-monthly small press reading series in the back room of Think Coffee, offers you a small press pupu platter from publishers who are both new and returning to the
series. Huzzah!

Readings from Belladonna Books, Litmus Press, Booklyn Artist Alliance, Sona Books, Ballyhoo Stories, Hotel St. George Press, The Lowbrow Reader and Heeb Magazine may not only give you a varied look at some of the most exciting writing and work coming out of independent presses today, it may just save your soul. Respectfully emceed by Rebecca Alvarez.

2:10pm- 2:30pm Belladonna Books
2:40pm- 3:00pm Litmus Press
3:10pm- 3:30pm Booklyn Artists Alliance
3:40pm- 4:00pm Sona Books
4:10pm- 4:30pm Ballyhoo Stories
4:40pm- 5:00pm Hotel St. George Press
5:10pm- 5:30pm The Lowbrow Reader
5:40pm- 6:00pm Heeb Magazine

Think Coffee
248 Mercer St and 3rd Street, NY 10012
BDFV to Broadway Lafayette/6 to Bleeker/ NRW to Prince Street
(212) 228-6226

[via riffRAG]

The Topography of Paper

One of the delights of paper, at least for me, is its texture. I recently bought a cheaper brand of printer paper (which shall remain nameless) for my inkjet, which was equally bright as my usual Hammermill but of a truly awful texture, which I could hardly wait to have run out. It skeeved me just to touch it. I love paper with inclusions, especially some of the Nepalese paper with bamboo in it, and its shiny surface. Then there's the texture you make yourself, like Noriko Ambe, who uses stacks of paper to create miniature sculptures that mimic topographical terrain models.

She not only creates free-standing pieces like this one, but uses artist's storage drawers to create a sort of secret map to another world. Imagine opening a drawer and finding a chasm inside it, where you expected, say, bottles of ink. (Click thumbnails for larger views.)

I'm completely enchanted with both of these, but especially the drawers because they remind me of Cabinets of Curiosities.  I like the idea of opening the drawer and find a world in  miniature inside it, in this case, a snow- or desertscape, which looks as though its been eroded over time. When I see pieces like this I always think, "what if it really is a little world in there?" It's similar to the appeal that doll houses have, or Slinkachu's Little People. Come to think of it, Little People would go great with this.

It would also be kind of cool, I think, to make a text-based book like this, drawer after drawer. Although the viewer actually reads the "maps" in these drawers the same way, this doesn't feel quite like a book to me, although the argument could definitely be made that it is. Is it art or is it a book? Is it book art? You make the call.

(Via The Merry Go Round)

Maundering On . . .

Think of this as an addendum to "Why I Left," posted earlier. One of the reasons I bailed out of grad school, among many, was that I desperately wanted to write fiction and the voice I was learning to use to write lit crit was strangling it. I found it impossible to shift between my analytical, argument-building prose, and my fictional voice. Oddly enough, I didn't have that problem with poetry. In fact, it was during grad school that I really found my poet's voice.

Now I suspect that I couldn't write fiction then because I had nothing to say. Who does, really at at 22, or 23? What do you know, then, about anything except your own navel, which is why poetry can be easy at that age. Now that I'm older and slightly wiser, I've got lots to say, and I also have a good strong voice in which to say it. Or at least I have one that's strong enough not to be threatened by something that's not fiction. What I really mean is that I have more confidence in myself as a writer. Well, most of the time.

I have a very clear sense of the different voices in my head, and there are lots of 'em. (No cracks about what good meds that make for that now.) I know when I'm in "poetry head" or "fiction head" or "blogging head," and conjuring them up is easier than it used to be. My non-fiction/essay voice is the weakest of the lot (she says help meee! Help meee! a lot in that voice from The Fly) and I don't have much confidence in it yet in part because of what I've been writing.

I spent the last three years writing a lot of marketing fluff in a voice I didn't much care for but that suited the stuff I was writing. It was bright and chirpy and slung a lot of marketing-speak without much real work. All that has changed now that I've gone to work for one of my grad school buddies who has her own communications company. She writes business-to-business white papers and analytical reports, many of them financial, for some pretty impressive, uber-corporate clients.

It's hard.

I think it might have been easier when I was right out of grad school because I still had that impersonal, dead passive(/aggressive), royal we-of-the-academy voice. But 20 years of fiction, fluff, and blogging have drowned the bitch. Now I'm trying to resuscitate her and it's not going so well. She is, not to push a metaphore, pretty decayed. (And I seem to not be the only one with this problem. Dr. Em complains about it too.) My pal, thank God, is patient, though I suspect a little disappointed (and who can blame her?). I haven't had to think this hard about anything since my last paper on, er, hmm, uh, critical theory? Philology? The chemistry of archaeology?

I'm finding I have the same problem that I do with my own essays: I get lost in the trees and can't see the forest. So for the last bit, I actually sat down and wrote—gasp!—an outline. I never write outlines. I've never had to before, or darn seldom, but it definitely helped organize my thoughts in this case, and made the shape of the argument clearer. Well, I thought it did, anyway. We'll see. One thing for sure, if I keep doing this (i.e., if my pal can put up with me long enough), I'll come out the other side with a good essay voice and a very sharp ax. Look out trees! In the meanwhile, I seriously need a whetstone.