PARTICLES OF LIGHT

Cracked

2012-02-08T19:33:00.002-05:00

Each time I sit down to write a blog post, I make a serious attempt to produce a piece of writing that is something more than "what I had for dinner," or "here's what I did today," or "here's how I feel today." This means I sometimes don't write anything. Instead, I sit and read, stuffing more into my brain, more ideas for the machine to use for building materials. This year, I'm hoping that my reading list will be richer in building materials. I read for pleasure, but reading for pleasure doesn't mean I'm not also working hard. In the past several years, I have read mostly about building a healthy self, and I think I needed that. I needed to work on myself. I'm not talking about books like He's Just Not That Into You, or Skinny Bitch, or the Millionaire Next Door. I mean Codependent No More, The Artist's Way, and The Art of Happiness.

It hasn't been a year of why doesn't he love me, or I wish I were thinner, or I wish I were richer. I could stand to lose a few pounds for my health, sure, but I'm not going to give up one of the greatest pleasures in my life to fit into skinny jeans. The way I look is a lot less important than my blood pressure, and if the doctor gave out awards for a good bp, I'd be able to paper the walls of my office with them. I could stand to have a better communication style with my loved ones, but I'm not pining for more love. And I certainly do not need any more money. In 2009, I was laid off, and my security looked pretty shaky, but I got a new job, and at least for now, they're treating me really well. If anything, this year I've been looking hard for a way to have more peace of mind, and I think I've been stuck in the bargaining stage of some great grief. I think that grief is about the loss of my ability to write fiction full time. Sadly, after that, I lost my ability to write fiction at all.

If you look at my bibliography (which I wish were longer, but it's what I have), you'll see that I started with kind of a bang, at least in my small corner of the writing world. One of my first stories took a 2nd prize in the Writers of the Future contest. Then, as a writing acquaintance of mine eloquently explained by drawing a diagram on a bathroom mirror (thank you, Jay Lake, may all the gods bless you and keep you), I began the sine wave of real writing. I'd had some small success, and then I wrote a bunch of meh. Then I had a spike (a sale), then a bunch more meh. And as Jay explained would happen, the spikes started happening closer together, and in 2008, I had six short story sales. And one poem (thanks, Goblin Fruit). And then, you'll see, it stopped.

As these things tend to happen, sales sometimes happen down the road, because if you're like me, you start at the very top of the list (aiming high), and you submit, submit, submit, until the story finds some editor who likes it, maybe in the middle of the list, maybe down in the "token payment" zone. So what you're seeing is that I stopped writing new things in 2006, and stopped fiddling with old stories in mid-2008. I took a stab at novel writing somewhere in there, and at a total of 340,593 total words written, I stopped writing fiction completely. I wrote a lot of personal poetry that I never submitted anywhere, and I lost my way. I think I lost my mind--totally cracked. I hope you'll pardon me; I was divorced in 2006 after writing full time for two years, and I think the two things, losing my partner and losing my creative space at the same time, broke my heart, and probably my mind. The passion was still there, but the gift had gone. Last year, in 2010, I went into a bookstore one day, and I saw no fewer than 4 new hardcovers on the bookshelf, written by people I know. Ken Scholes, Mary Robinette Kowal, the aforementioned Jay Lake, and James Maxey. There were more, but maybe I couldn't see them through the tears. I fingered the spines and the pages. I wished them well, and I spoke to them. I know you. Here you are. I'm not here, with you, and I'm sorry.

Since then, I've seen books from Will McIntosh, Ted Kosmatka, Alethea Kontis, Brad Beaulieu...and let's just say a lot of Facebook friends who have been so kind as to friend me, after meeting me once at a convention. I've watched other friends, various workshop partners, and associated acquaintances working like holy terrors, posting word counts, sometimes body counts (mother-in-law died, father died, spouse left me, etc.) and sharing their PhD pain, that great, horrible process of labor and birth that's so very much harder than producing an actual baby. How I admire you, all of you, for working so hard at this shared obsession, while I've been shattering my spirit and putting pieces of it back together with glue and string and staples. Bravo, brava, brilliant. I think it has taken seeing you there, on the shelves, to make this thing real to me. Before I saw you there, I have to say, novelists had a kind of unearthliness to them, some kind of sheen around them that said of the gods, not of earth. This not to say that I have lost respect for the novelist; not at all. Oh, my friends, I respect you so much. It's to say that you are all human, and you have all lived, and experienced pain, and made significant sacrifices to have accomplished what you have accomplished.

Until then, all I had for role models were the Johns (Updike, Carroll, Irving, Fowles), and authors like King, Straub, Gaiman, Atwood. Though, one time, I knocked back a bourbon with Peter Straub, I sat beside him as if in the lee of a great, mystical standing stone. This man wrote The Talisman with King. This shot of bourbon does not signify a human connection. It's as though I'm standing in an autograph line, and there are hundreds behind me, shifting from one foot to another, waiting for the signature to be delivered by the tired author, with the glazed look that says, "I really want a spicy tuna roll." The author does not intend lack of connection; it's just not reasonable to expect a genuine connection with someone who is wading through a sea of humanity, to the point where it all becomes absurd and abstract for them. I have hundreds of books in my home written by these folks, of the gods, not of earth. Now, Theodora Goss gives a reading of The Thorn and the Blossom in Kendall Square in Cambridge last night (go read a review here), and because of a scheduling conflict, I miss it, and that's unhappy making because she is one of those writers who to me has a heartbeat. I've watched her read her own poetry, and she's a very good reader. Dora does her own work justice when she reads, and because I know her, despite the beauty of her work, to me she is of the human beings, of the earth. She shows me in her blog that it's tremendously hard work, but that this writing thing is possible--that the books all around me were written by human beings, not handed down on tablets by the gods from high mountains.

I'm grateful to you, my writing friends and acquaintances. I can't actually be inspired by those I've read but never met. I can't eat a secondhand description of manna from heaven; I can only experience a wistfulness, shrug, and remain hungry. But I've met you; you are real. You sweat, you work, you cry, you sit at your computers and you look at Facebook, and you play Panda Poet, and sometimes you are just too tired. You have doubts. You question your sanity and maybe your integrity. If you're lucky, maybe you get a pat on the head and a cookie from loved ones, and if you're not, maybe you get a bitter stare: Oh you're doing that again. But you're crazy or stupid or driven enough to sharpen your pencil or blow the lint from your keyboard and open that one file, that one that's driving you insane, and you put in a few lines when you can. You type on the train using an Android phone and folding keypad. You write longhand in dollar notebooks. You write in your head while cooking dinner or rocking a crying baby. You have been bitten by the beast, and you have accepted your fate. It is not that I think "if you can do it, I can do it." I don't think that at all. This is me, seeing you, and appreciating you.

You're a writer, and you write.

Keep going. Please, keep going.

Winnowing

2012-02-07T20:41:00.004-05:00

This ceramic tea set comes from Ria Lira Levine (go look at her gallery). I purchased the set at Arisia 2011, and I assured the artist that I would actually use it for drinking tea. I don't buy things that are too pretty to use; if it's too pretty to use or too expensive to risk breaking, then I don't buy it. I do buy art that is not "useful" in a practical way, such as paintings and photographs, but if I buy a practical object such as a teacup, I put it to the use for which it was created. I do have a cup that I'm nervous about using, because the china is thin enough to read through, but what you do is put warm water in it for a little while (warm not hot) and then you put a teaspoon into the cup when you pour the hot tea in. If you don't take care, the thin porcelain will shatter on contact with hot water. This ceramic set is fanciful, and clearly made for use, but when I poured in the hot water, I did hear the glaze cracking (steady little pings). I worry a little, but I'm still going to use it no matter if it eventually means the set's demise. I select art carefully, because these are the things I want to live with.

This morning, I finished reading the Best Food Writing 2009, edited by Holly Hughes. If you want to know more about the book, consider reading this review of the book from someone else's blog (share the wealth, right?). I'm still thinking about the Stonecoast MFA program, what I might want to to propose as a course of study with respect to combined major of fiction and non-fiction. It's been a while since I spent this much time and energy focused on narrowing down the field of "what I want to write." I've been doing that in part by narrowing down the field of "what I like to read." This isn't easy, because for the most part, I'm an omnivorous reader, and my time is like diamonds dripping into the sea, and if I want my reading to be useful to my writing life rather than merely pleasurable, I need to winnow. I need to focus.

The winnowing has been a little bit like buying functional art. I only have so much money to spend, so I need to spend it wisely. Also, I have a certain aesthetic. I don't know enough about art to describe it in arty jargon, so I won't try. Suffice it to say there's a color palette. I have some art that completely violates the color palette (I have a Dona Nova painting that features safety orange and primary blue) but for the most part, the art makes sense as a collection in terms of color, theme, style. There are flashes of the macabre, the romantic, and the whimsical. Damask, gauze, lace, distressed brown leather, spirals, flowers, skulls, fairies, goddesses, spirits of the dead, at least one shocking nude that I take down when there are visitors. And in my house, there is usually beautiful food or plans for beautiful food. In my cupboards, there is crystallized ginger, five kinds of soy sauce, sweet rice wine, nutmeg, cardamom, turmeric, curry, bay leaf, dill, chile powders and flakes, coriander, garam masala, black mustard seeds, black sesame seeds, wasabi powder, and so on and so on. There are dozens of caffeine free herbal infusions, bottles of strange pickles, instant miso and five kinds of bouillon. Right now, I'm having a wedge of granular mexican chocolate (70% dark, from Taza).

Art, literature, food. Winnow, winnow, winnow.

For me, doing research on "what I want to write" is shaped like an hourglass. When I decided to give up on other art forms in order to write, I sold my guitars, put away my colored pencils, my pastels, my needlework, my sewing projects, my clay. I focused on writing, narrowed my attention to the width of a trickle of sand, and things exploded again. I could write, after all, about anything, and my focus blew apart again. I could write about books, film, photography, art, architecture, travel, on and on, my head exploding with possibility. I sat down and wrote short stories and poetry, and I meandered there, too. I wrote science fiction stories, fantasy stories, horror stories, interstitial stories, which are no kind of story and every kind of story. I sold some stories, sold some poems, and then my short stories started getting longer and longer, and no one wanted to buy them any more. I broke my body on novel ideas, and then my life got complicated and difficult, and I quit. Then I started writing this blog, and the hourglass expanded wider than ever, and I think that's what I needed for a while. I needed just to paddle along and stretch my fingers, and learn economy of phrase in a way unknown in my fiction.

I don't know what my fiction will look like when I start it up again, but I've been thinking about what I surround myself with, what I read. Art, literature, food. I've been doing readings of my short stories at conventions, and lately I've realized that most of them are about eating, or starving, or feasting, or using food as a substitute for feelings. In my stories, eating, or searching for food, is transformative. Food is not always at the center of attention, but the awareness of what we put in our mouths or don't put in our mouths is always there underneath, like the grumbling of an empty belly. Thinking about this, I looked into the vastness of the Internet, and I found these things:

From Wikipedia: "A list of some prominent writers on food, cooking, dining, and cultural history related to food."

From Mary Anne Mohanraj, a fellow SF writer: My students are reading food blogs this week. Recommendations, for your gustatory pleasure:"

From Delish.com: "Here it is: the creme de la creme of food bloggers. We've scoured the Web and found the tastiest, most delectable, most must-read food blogs of them all."

From Gherkinstomatoes.com: "Here's a very brief list of food-related novels and mysteries sure to keep your appetite whetted."

From the Online Education Database: "Read through these books to get a culinary and literary education all in one."

And it just goes on and on, into the Web, into the blogosphere. People are writing about food, fiction and nonfiction, and I can't get enough of it. I've just finished Best Food Writing 2009, and have 2010 and 2011 queued up on my reader. I laugh now, thinking about my recent posts about the Hunger Games and Harry Potter, two young adult series that approach food and eating from entirely different angles. On my desk, I have the Pat Conroy Cookbook, wherein the son of the Great Santini tells lush stories about food, each tale accompanied by mouthwatering low country recipes for shrimp, soft shell crabs, coconut cake, peach pie, benne wafers. I feel I have been circling, scribbling, winnowing myself to this place, where this blog becomes a food literature bibliography. Never mind the film reviews, you distractible woman, the music festivals, the incessant whining about anxiety and obsession.

Hitch that obsession to the plow and make it pull for you.

It's a fragile feeling. I feel like the delicate porcelain cup under the flow of boiling water. Without my protective measures, I may shatter at the heat of the flow. I am using a spoon, at present, between bouts of furious typing, but not to convey the heat away from my fragile body -- to convey chocolate mousse to my mouth. Winnow, winnow, winnow.

Art, literature, food. Heaven help me.

2011 Best American Essays, Part 2

2012-02-05T12:42:00.003-05:00

This is Part 2 of my reflections on the 2011 anthology of Best American Essays (ed. Edwidge Danticat). In my last post about it, I said, "Without fail, so far, these essays are about intense experience, dying, grief, terror, the incomprehensibility of natural disaster and murder," and after I wrote that, I became concerned that maybe essayists really only have one good/miserable/tragic essay in them, I mean, I'd certainly hope so, Augusten Burroughs aside. Down this line of thinking, of course, I'm considering the essay potential of my own life. It's certainly a life of quiet desperation at times, but certainly NOT full of riots, house-burnings, hurricanes, and so forth. Not firsthand, only what I see on the news, and honestly, I get my news from Facebook. Go ahead, throw rotten tomatoes, but it's true.

I was concerned that Ms. Danticat's selections meant that the Best American Essays must contain a personal disaster, and that, therefore, the writer algebra demonstrates that I do not have what it takes to write an essay anyone will ever call "the best." The Perfectionist says that if there's no chance of being the best, it's much more rewarding to reorganize the sock drawer. Balderdash, right? If I were you, I wouldn't argue with the Perfectionist. She has a knife for a tongue and will flay you where you stand. The Perfectionist and I curled around the rest of this book of essays to assess the remainder of the works, to see if the theory held water. Whitter, whitter, whitter. Here are the rest of the essays:

"Topic of Cancer" by Christoper Hitchens (from Vanity Fair): author discusses his battle with cancer.

"Chapels" by Pico Iyer (from Portland Magazine): after journalist's house burns down, he spends time in a Benedictine Monastery and lives a "more or less unplugged life in Japan." Journalist also mentions reporting in Sri Lanka "in the midst of its civil war."

"Long Distance," by Victor Lavalle (from Granta): author recounts his love life in his early twenties -- obese and socially phobic (5'9" 350 pounds), he conducted a two-year relationship with a fifty-year-old woman in New Jersey via an adult chatline. Later, he lost the weight and found a live sexual contact, but recounts at the end of the essay that the emotional scars of that weight remain: "I lifted my hand until it was bathed in the morning light coming through the thin curtains. I still couldn't believe what I saw. My new hand, slim enough to show the wrist bones; the knuckles now no longer lost in flesh. But this hand hand't replaced the old one; instead it was like this hand had grown around the fatter one somehow. Both were there, but only one could be seen."

"What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?" by Charlie LeDuff (from Mother Jones): a seven-year-old girl is killed because we have a race problem in Detroit, driven by poverty, corruption in the legal system, and corruption in the education system.

"Magical Dinners" by Chang-Rae Lee (from The New Yorker): Hooray! A Story about food! Except that it's actually a story about race, a family identity story told in the struggle between beef bulgogi and gu jeol pan and Hamburger helper, and the traditional American turkey dinner.

"What Really Happened" by Madge McKeithen (from TriQuarterly): the author makes a prison visit to see the man who murdered her friend; the murderer is her dead friend's husband.

"Rude Am I in My Speech," by Caryl Phillips (from Salmagundi): another essay about race. The author uses Othello to describe the immigrant's experience of being lonely, isolated, and "marooned" in their chosen new land.

"Lucky Girl," by Bridget Potter (from Guernica): the author retells the story of getting an abortion in Puerto Rico in 1962. "Three years after my trip to San Juan, illegal abortion officially accounted for 17 percent of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S."

"There Are Things Awry Here," by Lia Purpura (from Orion): a rambling, metaphorical, non altogether successful rant about the colonization and destruction of the earth by human industry. "The land didn't mean to be torn and tar-covered, wasn't meant to sprout stock farmers, farm women, and ranchers. The land asked to be considered, and seriously. The land wanted to speak..."

"Patient" by Rachel Riederer (from The Missouri Review): the author is run over by a bus, and almost loses her leg. The saving of the leg is gruesome.

"Pearl, Upward," by Patricia Smith (from Crab Orchard Review): the author's mother seeks a better life in Chicago, but finds out that there is no running away from the pain of life.

"Generation Why?" by Zadie Smith (from The New York Review of Books): a reaction to the film The Social Network, an analysis of the intentions of Zuckerberg, and the reductivism and social tragedy of "People 2.0". "What if 2.0 people feel their socially networked selves genuinely represent them to completion?"

"Travels with My Ex" by Susan Straight (from The Believer): white woman, black husband, half black daughters, daughter's black boyfriend: "The [basketball-playing daughter] got her first citation earlier that year, in January. The highway patrolman followed her for five miles on the highway and her pull over into the parking lot of a strip club. Our Laurie was in the passenger seat. He was questioned at length, about his identification, his address. The patrolman didn't believe he was seventeen. When our daughter called me, she was crying. She said she was afraid of what I would say. She was right. I was furious, but not about the ticket. 'When you get pulled over, you put D-- in danger," I shouted at her. 'You're risking his life. Don't drive even four miles over the speed limit! He could have been shot and killed!' Only some mothers say that to their children."

"A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay" by Christy Vannoy (from McSweeney's): Danticat saves the day by including this satirical essay about personal essays. "I am a personal essay and I was born with a port wine stain and beaten by my mother. A brief affair with a second cousin produced by first and only developmentally disabled child. Years of painful infertility would lead by straight into menopause and a hysterectomy I almost didn't survive." It was a painfully, painfully funny essay, and exactly the kind of self-mockery needed to keep the collection from being proscriptive of the quintessential essay.

"Unprepared," by Jerald Walker (from Harvard Review): the author reflects on the scarcity of black serial killers while recounting his refusal of money for sex when picked up as a teenaged hitchhiker.

"The Washing," by Reshma Memon Yaqub (from The Washington Post Magazine): the author volunteers to wash a corpse as part of an Islamic practice, where "family members of the same gender as the deceased are expected to bathe and shroud the body for burial."

Why have I bothered to excerpt all of these essays? It's an exploration, for me, this mapping of the Year's Best American Essays. It's a study, an investigation of what's possible. Do I have this kind of personal essay inside of me? Yes, yes, I do. Several. I could even write it in Christy Vannoy's voice of the Personal Essay, and it would be funny. If I did so, I'd show all my cards, shock the family, make people curse and faint from one end of the country to another. To write one of these essays, I would need to spill my secrets, and more frighteningly, the secrets of others. Part of being a writer, part of the suffering of being a writer, is making the choice about which story to tell, because it's never just your story. Your story almost always involves the stories of others, and writing the heart of a deep story almost always will show things best left unsaid, if you don't want to upset the family applecart. I write fiction to shroud my true stories in metaphor and myth, and if you know me even a little, you'll see how very thin a shroud it is.

Some day, I will most likely end up writing a Personal Essay about how difficult it was on my family for me to write a Personal Essay. I'm a middle-aged white female of no particular religion. I have no stories to tell about race. I've never had an abortion. I've never suffered grievous personal injury. I've never gone to war. I didn't grow up gay in the suburbs, and was never seriously bullied. There is no essay I could write at the caliber of the Year's Best that wouldn't reveal something other people would prefer I didn't reveal, a story in which some unforgivable Other was to blame for the central tragedy. Yet, I have emotional stories that would probably turn your hair white, if only I were brave enough to whisk away the shroud, and show you my truths.

I've heard some people say, "I've written my memoirs, and now all I need to do is wait until everybody dies, so I can send it to publishers."

I think it's true for most of us: our lives (even those of quiet desperation) would make a hell of a story.

David Foster Wallace: "Everybody Worships"

2012-02-01T20:04:00.000-05:00

Click here to read the transcript of "This is Water" is its entirety. If you do, this post will make a lot more sense.

The day I purchased "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace (DFW) in eBook form from the Sony Reader store, I had an immediate and reflexive reaction to its length versus its price. After reading the speech, I am now amused by my initial reaction. And today, I finished transcribing the piece in its entirety into my journal. After doing a little poking around on the Internets in search of a photo to use to illustrate my post (I didn't want to steal someone else's image, and so used a photo of my own feet, taken at Eno River State Park in North Carolina) I learned some things I didn't know.

There are a lot of unhappy people out there who purchased "This is Water," thinking it was something other than a commencement speech packaged as a rather pricey hardcover book about the size of your hand. They grumble about its presentation, about its price, about the fact that the editors did not mention DFW's suicide in the author's biography, that people are making money from tragedy, that people don't really understand the tragedy here. That this speech is about how to liberate your spirit from the crushing realities of being an adult, but that the author clearly didn't manage it himself. In 2005, DFW gave this speech about capital-T Truth, and in 2008, the author hanged himself at home, presumably in the grip of depression. I'm sure there's a lot to worry about here, a lot to analyze, maybe a lot of moaning and frustrated gnashing, but I'm not going to write about that. It doesn't make any sense to piss and moan and rend our hair in self-righteous wrath. I mean, you can choose to do that if you want to, to get all self-righteous and whatnot, but it occurs to me that if the words of this speech really mean that much to you, you might take a minute to reflect on what you're doing, and then have a quiet, compassionate laugh at yourself.

It's difficult to read "This is Water" and then go off on a self-righteous tear. It really is.

Lately, I've had the opportunity to exchange some letters with a self-proclaimed Buddhist atheist, and I've shied away from discussing atheism much, in that particular correspondence, and in discussions with other atheists I know, because as hard as I try, I don't buy atheism. I don't buy any kind of theism either, so I don't know what that makes me, if you wanted to label me. I just know that I agree with DFW when he says in this commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College in 2005, "This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship ... because here's something else that's true. In the day to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."

I'm sure there are finer points to the atheism argument that I'm missing, but I'm going to make a choice on how to think about atheism, a philosophy that is not part of my default setting. I do worship, I have worshipped, and I will continue to worship ... something ... but after reading "This is Water," I realize that I've been in the water all along, that is, the metaphorical water of the choices all around me, choices about how to think that I have not seen. Like the younger fish swimming by the older fish who questions her thinking, if someone asked me about water, I'd respond the same way. "What the hell is water?"

What does DFW mean? "The only choice we get is what to worship"? Please understand I know that I'm taking these pithy sentences out of context. Please understand that I know these ideas will be much the poorer from being pulled out of order. I'm sorry about that. But what DFW is saying in this speech is that even though we're all naturally hard-wired to be totally self-centered, and though the magnitude and intensity of how we feel about our own concerns leads us to believe that the entire universe should prioritize itself according to our own needs, a liberal education gives us the tools with which we might question our hard-wired default thinking. He says by questioning our default thinking and changing the way we think about things, "It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it."

Here's where I know I've gone wrong, maybe my whole life. I've known about the default settings for a long time. There's a gibbering, yammering, hideous voice inside my head that goes on and on, and in the shadow of it, choked in its terrible grip, I've needed to make my choices, most of them according to an internal set of principles I've hammered together like a lopsided treehouse over the years. My default settings say, "You need to do X in order to be safe. You need to do Y in order to be loved. You need to do Z in order to survive." The settings don't counsel me to question my perceptions. They say, "Get these stupid people out of my way. I need X, and woe-betide the person who gets in my way." How I've dealt with these shameful voices in my head is to beat them down violently, crush my feelings into a remote corner of my mind, and do what I think is right--only, it's not that simple; crippling self-doubt makes it hard to distinguish the default settings from the principles, and so I swim around in that water like the ignorant young fish, not seeing all the choices, not knowing that I need to let my default settings do whatever they're going to do with my feelings, but that I can actually decide how to think, and I can decide what to worship.

DFW says: "...an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual type thing to worship ... be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."

If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth.

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

And so on. The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful: it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called "real world" will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called "real world" or men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our tiny skill-sized kingdoms at the center of all creation.

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think.

The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" -- the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I have to tell you that this commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the Kenyon College graduating class of 2005 was devastating to my default settings. I sat, and sat, and transcribed these words into my journal, aware of how much of my life I've chosen, thus far, to sit entrenched in my default settings, not knowing that this is water. I've concentrated so hard on what I could "do" to help myself, to meet my needs, to achieve my goals. I've concentrated so little on how to think, on what to think about, and what not to think about. I believed that if I felt a certain thing, I had to act on it, to protect myself, to keep oxygen pumping into my suffocating little world. If he says, Y, then I'll have to do Z, so he'll know he can't push me around any more. It has not occurred to me to listen to Y differently. To really listen, and think, and choose, rather than bouncing up with my hand on my sword and the wings of death all around me to protect my honor.

I've worshipped power, and been fearful. I've worshipped my intellect, and felt like a fraud. I've worshipped my self-control and felt controlled. I've worshipped control itself and felt insecure. I've worshipped achievement and felt inadequate; and I can't explain how painful it is now to understand that I've been in water, all along. I am well fed, well sheltered, well compensated, and my defaults say that I must maintain this, that it is the Truth that these external things, this manufactured environment must be maintained, in this particular way, or I will perish. My defaults say that I need to look out for myself, or no one else will. They say trust no one, and show me "undeniable proof" that people are fundamentally untrustworthy. They prompt me to immediately evaluate the impact any event will have on me, me, me, my concerns, my opportunities, my various comforts and freedoms, before anything else. I both did and didn't know that I had a choice not to shore up these defaults, but instead spend that time and energy truly caring about other people, and also truly caring about myself--not in that deeply selfish, default way of unconscious assumptions and mindless reaction--but tenderly, with an open and compassionate hand.

I've never "had" anything, and I've never "lost" anything. I've meandered in and out of consciousness, as people will. The default settings have clouded my ability to clearly see; the "infrangible set of ethical principles" that I worship is like the Four Noble Truths, but as I said before, home grown. My beliefs have been hammered together out of fables, poems, fatherly aphorisms, science fictiony idealism, heroic fantasy, thousands of pages of feminist literature, my liberal education. On one side of the coin, these things illuminate my path and my freedom. On the other side of the coin, these things are the prison bars of my default settings. The first side is my heart, the second is my head. My head sometimes is my prison, and because the pain radiates in my chest, I've made the mistake of thinking that the pain is my heart speaking the Truth, but it's not. That pain is often the claws of the default settings, tormenting and confusing me, setting free the beasts to ravage my life and dismember my loved ones.

It remains for me to formalize my water practice, my water worship. It amuses and saddens me to note that at some point in my life, I became afraid of water. When I was a little girl, I swam like an otter, and now I barely can step foot in the ocean. It takes a great deal of patient coaxing for me to go in over my head, and it's been years since I've done so. At some point in my life, my default settings told me I always needed to maintain the illusion of control. It has felt impossible to feel safe and in control while submerged under water. Yet, I know I can be just fine in the water.

The woman in this photo is, after all, me.

100 Pages of the Best American Essays 2011

2012-01-31T14:09:00.000-05:00

In one day, I've read 100 pages of 2011's best American essays, that is, best per the editor, Edwidge Danticat (pronounce: Edweedje Danticah). I've been looking at MFA programs lately, specifically programs that encourage weird fiction and have a low residency option. The University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA program fits the bill, and they have an option to do a combined major in fiction and creative nonfiction.

Wait. Creative nonfiction. Oh.

Let's rewind to the last year of my blog, where I complain about "not being able to write," while churning out blog post after blog post about motherhood, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, my travels in gourmet dining, art and architecture, film, book reviews, and confession writing. Let's look at my library, which once was wall to wall science fiction and fantasy, then romance and mystery, then history and science, then psychology and ah, yes, the creative nonfiction category, swiftly overtaking everything. In 2010 I read more nonfiction than fiction, and in the last four years it's all I've written. But, I've protested, that's not real writing. Not the real stuff, mister, no sir. This nonfiction stuff is just blowing off steam while I endlessly lament about all of the real writing I'm not doing.

After I spent four hours talking to a friend about life, the universe, and low-residency MFA programs (yes, she's a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program), I went to Bunn's and Noodle and picked out a huge stack of creative nonfiction. I culled half the stack and came home with the 2011 Best American Essays (ed. Edwidge Danticat), 1001 Foods You Must Taste Before You Die (ed. Frances Case), and Consider the Lobster (essays by David Foster Wallace). Once I got home, I realized I could get both books of essays from the Sony Reader store, and so I will take both dead tree books back and keep only the food book, because it has pictures and text descriptions of things like the mangosteen and the durian, and I can't get it in ePub. I was, however, able to get the Best Food Writing of 2009, 2010, and 2011 (ed. Holly Hughes), the essay "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace, the first 4 George R.R. Martin books in the Game of Thrones series (as a package), The Best American Travel Writing of 2011 (eds. Sloane and Crosley), and Stephen King's newest novel 11/22/63.

On the 2.5 hours of commuting I did today, I read 100 pages of essays from the Danticat anthology, and I took a moment when I got home to hold my head in my hands and feel stupid about not taking the art of creative nonfiction seriously. Perhaps it's because my creative nonfiction is not like what I read on the train. It's my own creative nonfiction that I don't take seriously, not the form in general. Mine is about an overprivileged editor of a pharmaceutical company eating dinner with a stuffed Totoro. The essays in Danticat's anthology are about something else entirely.

1. "Buddy Ebsen" by Hilton Als (from The Believer): "It's the queers who made me." The author paints a self portrait in aggressive splashes of opinion, anecdote, and queer influences.

2. "Port-au-Prince: The Moment" by Mischa Berlinski (from The New York Review of Books): The author gives impressions of being caught in the earthquakes in Haiti. "Our faces suggested only the most profound surprise."

3. "What Broke My Father's Heart" by Katy Butler (from The New York Time Magazine): The author recounts the excruciating decisions her mother made with respect to cardiac care, first for her husband, and then for herself. Why she said yes for her husband, and then no for herself. Anyone faced with the decision to have a pacemaker installed into one's self or an elderly loved one should read this.

4. "Auscultation" by Steven Church (from The Pedestrian): the parallel worlds of cardiac diagnosis and the location of miners trapped by cave-ins and mine explosions.

5. "After the Ice" by Paul Crenshaw (from Souther Humanities Review): the author recounts the story of the murder of his 18-month-old nephew at the hands of his step-father, with ruthless self-examination and a bleak recounting of events, including the trial and conviction of the murderer.

6. "Beds," by Toi Derricotte (from Creative Nonfiction): in a series of vignettes focused on beds, the author tells a claustrophobic, autobiographical story about her relationship with her abusive father (not sexual abuse, but physical abuse), and her inexplicable, inevitable love for him.

7. "Grieving," by Meenakshi Gigi Durham (from Harvard Review): the author's husband is denied tenure, and the profound grief that results is at once destructive and galvanizing to their family.

8. "A-Loc" by Bernadette Esposito (from The North American Review): a somewhat showy-offy essay about airline disasters, with the author cleverly (too cleverly by half, in my opinion) probing her fear of flying by volunteering as an actor in an annual emergency disaster training exercise.

Without fail, so far, these essays are about intense experience, dying, grief, terror, the incomprehensibility of natural disaster and murder. I know that the books on food writing will be lighter fare, and that not all creative nonfiction has the blasted-earth quality of the essays in the 2011 Year's Best. But I imagine Danticat sitting in her study at home surrounded by piles and piles of essays, and pulling out only those that made her want to pull out her intestines in sympathy, and it's difficult for me to say that creative nonfiction isn't serious writing. Perhaps mine isn't, or hasn't always been, serious writing, but I think sometimes it has been. I've had experiences in the past year that I haven't been able to write about, because they hurt too much. Sickness, grief, death, existential crises, anxiety, depression, and fear of loss. I've written around the edges, but shied away from hitting the serious nail on the head, because I'm not ready to pull my guts out the way Danticat's authors do. I need to remind myself that these essays are written each by a different author; just because I'm reading them one after another in the same book does not mean all of these intensely scary things happened to one person.

However, each of these stories did happen to people. Each story is rooted firmly in the human experience. That's the point. I would be surprised if each of these essays wasn't the most intense experience of each author's life, and all of them racked up like this in an overwhelming row. It's easier to read a book of essays written by just one author, because it's never like this, this unrelenting, worst-life-experience ever kind of line up. There's some relief in your one-author collection, unless of course it's Augusten Burroughs, then you're screwed. I may mark my place in the anthology (the reader helpfully does that for me) and take a break with a little Bill Bryson or something to cleanse the palate. Some fiction from Steve Martin or Nick Hornby.

I did start out the day with a quick read of "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace, and I haven't decided if I'm so annoyed with Sony for charging me 10 dollars for a 16-page commencement speech that I'll ask for my money back, or if I'll curl around that speech as if for warmth, and read it ten times more. At a dollar a visit, I think it's a bargain:

"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning boys. How's the water?'

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories.

The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre ... but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be.

I am not the wise old fish.

The immediate point of the first story is merely that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about."

I did spend a little bit of my day scribbling horrible, unrepeatable things into the last pages of my most recent Moleskine notebook. I'm so happy that this notebook is full and I can throw it in the closet. I can start the next one in Febrauary 2012, and I will most likely transcribe the whole of DFW's speech into it, and for at least a little while, the journal will contain nothing but wisdom and beauty. Immediately afterward, I will start up with the horrible daily pages again, of moaning about my therapy, whatever terrible thing is going on at work or at home, nonfiction that is anything but creative, but keeps my hand and my mind going. Onward and outward, the chronicles of stasis and change.

I am not the wise old fish. Creative nonfiction is "real writing" too. Even if it's self-indulgent stories about a spoiled editor dining alone with a stuffed Totoro. That's part of my real, actual life; when I start writing about the things in the lacunae, the lighter, sillier things will not become less real, less genuine, merely less intense by comparison.

Lunch at the British Museum: A Sketch

2012-01-30T08:28:00.000-05:00

Reading Room, British Museum

From the London travel journal, mostly unedited:

I'm off to the British Museum.

Lunch atop the reading room. A pot of lapsang souchong, grilled squid salad with herbs, a plate of English cheeses for dessert. Squid salad is delicious, full of nice little micro greens, lemon-miso dressing, grilled squid. I was tempted to also order the pavlova, but I'm not sure if it's gluten free, so the cheeses for me. It seems the thing to need to ask for the check (the bill) or you could be sitting unattended for quite a while. It did make sense after a while (it's not to rush, a courtesy) but it took me a while to catch on. Last night, K and I had an indifferent meal in Chinatown (probably too close to the theaters, or just not the best place). The hot and sour soup tasted different (some sort of pickle providing an extra sour bite). Food has been the focus of this trip, with 3 days at the Leeds music festival (chips, ice cream bars)

Day 1 - Dinner at the Boston airport. Mall court roast chicken, veg., potato. Terrible hot and sour soup. Greasy chinese for K. Dinner served on the plane - beef stew, a tiny salad, salmon pasta for K. Head to bed, as I recall, upon checking into the hotel. No, left the bag at the hotel, and went to see Trafalgar square, National Portrait Gallery, the London Eye. We went to a pub, had drinks. Walked to Big Ben, Westminster Abbey... K had a steak and ale pie, I had bangers and mash, order at the counter, a bit confusing.

Rosetta Stone, British Museum

Elgin Marbles (left pediment), British Museum

Elgin Marbles (right pediment), British Museum

Day 2 - We got up and had our first English breakfast at our hotel (the other was at a cafe around the corner). I'm not sure what we did in the morning between breakfast and getting to the Tate Modern. Ah, yes, we went on an adventure to Notting Hill. Took the bus to Notting Hill Gate and walked to the center of the neighborhood, stopping for lunch at a Thai place connected to a pub. That was really good, a lovely green curry for me and pad thai for K. I had a Pimm's, she had a half pint of Strongbow cider. I don't don't think K was all that interested in seeing the landmark Travel Books before it closed, but I wanted to, so we did go. She looked bored, but didn't complain. We did end up getting to the Tate at about 2:30 or so and stayed until 5:30. I wrote notes on this visit earlier. At that point, K wanted to be independent and get in touch with her friend from Russia. They went out to dinner and hung out in Trafalgar Square. I went to Marylebone High Street and had tapas. The food was delicious but the service was bad. And this is where I learned that you need to ask for the bill (they don't call it the check). If you wait, expecting it to be brought unbidden, you'll be waiting a long time. The meal had chorizo, pickled peppers, mixed olives, fig jam, manchego cheese, baba ganouche, a glass of red wine. For dessert, strawberries in a vanilla meringue with passion fruit jelly and a thick cream with a pot of green tea, flavored somehow (floral, berry?) I'm not usually sensitive to dining alone, but in London it seemed less acceptable. I was not given very much attention. only at lunch in the British Museum was I made to feel truly welcome.

Reading Room, British Museum

Not sure what else I want to see in the British Museum. Saw the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles. My guide book says it takes two days to get through the museum, but I suppose not if you don't go face down in every bit of pilfered treasure. (The curator is amusingly defensive on the subject of the marbles, pointing out how much better you can see them at eye level, and how they would have otherwise been destroyed if not hacked to pieces and dragged to England.)

I've been very nicely invited to stay and write at the restaurant at the British Museum and have ordered a pot of Earl Gray to enjoy while I do. The manager said they were not in a hurry, and that this is a lovely place to write, and it is, so very much. I feel there are likely other things in London I should see, but what I'll do instead is go from place to place and write. Here, I write about the beautiful food and elegant white tableware, the pale green chrysanthemum, the elegant diners, of which I am one of the more bohemian with my gypsy colors and checkered pashmina. I'm in London, and on my last day, I'm writing. <...>

It's time to leave the British Museum and find somewhere else to write. Just as soon as my "bill" is settled and I find the ladies' "toilet." Same language, different words, and interesting lessons all around.

I've selected better (restaurant for dinner) this time - a Turkish restaurant on Marylebone High Street, already with better service than the fancier tapas place down the street. <...> I've had a bit too much wine. Dinner was awesome! So glad I came here! I wonder what's for dessert. My neighbors have sliced watermelon and Turkish delight. I have some too! And a cup of "sweet" turkish coffee (I hope I won't be up late, wired) and a little Turkish delight on a toothpick. Wow, Turkish coffee is mud. Leaving the Turkish delight for lat, hoping it's rose flavored. Two glasses of wine is a bit much. (end journal excerpts)

Coffered Ceiling, British Museum

Moral of the story: take better notes, travel/food/adventure writer. Write something while the taste of the olives is still in your mouth, and you're brave enough to write about what's in the lucunae. You're cutting out all the juicy parts, as Pema Chodron says; it's those feelings that feel unacceptable that make you the juicy, vibrant person that you are. Without describing the stuff in the lacunae that I can't bear to describe in this post, I feel like one of the headless toga bodies in the Elgin Marbles. I'm the person in the back of the crowd that's muscling in around the Rosetta Stone, taking bitterly amused pictures of the backs of more aggressive people's heads.

I'm thinking of myself traveling aimlessly around London, seeing the expected sights, unexpectedly alone on my mother-daughter trip, pining (much more expected) for the beloved left at home, because this was to be a mother-daughter trip. Writing terrible notes, getting lost on public transit, lamenting the terrible value of the dollar, puzzled over how my daughter had ended up with bed bugs, where I had none, arguing over maps on street corners, feeling that trouble-with-authority-figures feeling while standing in line to come back into the US, my passport in my hand, and remembering the time I came back into Puerto Rico, and I'd let my driver's license expire, and thinking I used to be so organized. I used to have everything under control. I used to have my hands on the controls.

My life didn't used to be such beautiful chaos.

SF at the British Library, No Really

2012-01-27T09:36:00.003-05:00

This is a photograph of Ghandi in Tavistock Square in London. This is the last photo I took before I ran out of time and needed to get back on the train at King's Cross to Heathrow Airport. Or maybe this was the day before, when my camera battery died, and I wanted to go back to take pictures of the churches I saw on the bus ride back from Buckingham Palace, but I gave up and went back to Marylbone High Street for dinner, because I had figured out how to get there, and I could find a good meal. This is what happens when you don't take notes.

I do know that this is the last photo I took before leaving London, because my photos were digital, and numbered. So I did not take any photographs inside the British Library, which at the time I visited, was showing an exhibit on guess what, science fiction. I actually didn't take any photos, but I did take notes, so I'll get them out and see what I wrote. Oh, I see I took some notes at the Tate Modern, too. The next part of this post is directly from my journal, and unedited. <...> These are lacunae.

Tate Modern Notes:

Victor Pasmore - What is the Object Over There? Points of Contact No. 17

Search the shores
of an ancient land,
under the stars
along the sand;
between the pines
and cactus tree
see the stone
where the lizard sleeps

What is the object
over there?
Who is the man
by the orange tree?
The voices calling
in the square?
The light that flickers
out at sea?

Monet - Water Lilies after 1916
Pollock - Summertime: Number 9A
Diane Arbus - From a box of ten photographs
-Identical twins
-Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, NJ 1963
Julian Trevelyan - Bomblet 1937
Paul Klee - Walpurgis Night 1935
Joseph Cornell - Planet Set, Tete Etoilee, Giuditta Pasta (dedicace) 195

The British Library Notes:

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre, conclusion, hand-written
Oscar Wilde
Joseph Conrad
Virginia Woolf - notebook on Mrs. Dalloway
JG Ballard - Crash, type-written with marginalia scribbled in multiple colors of ballpoint ink
Angela Carter - Nights at the Circus, handwritten with neat marginalia
The Magna Carta on parchment
The Gospel of St. John on papyrus

Letter from C.S. Lewis to Mervyn Peake
10 Feb 1958 profound impression of Titus Groan and Gormenghast working on him
Mervyn Peake's illustrations of Alice!!!!

<...>

After having visited the British Museum (I think I meant the British Library), I'm once again embarrassed by the content of my journals, and the number of years I've spent writing those (full of domestic complaints) and only recently in the past three years producing anything I'd want to show to anyone. I have a choice every day - write complaints in these journals, my emotional spew, write for the blog (generally, more well organized, thematic, cleaner spew, no quite so raw, subjective, embarrassing) and something else. Or nothing. I'm not sure now I can shut off the spew nozzle, or maybe I let it flow but use it better? I do nothing with the spew now except have endlessly circular discussions that feel like I'm piling the hours of my life on a bonfire that warms others and leaves me feeling empty and cold.

K and I took half a day on our trip to London (23 - 31 Aug) to go to the Dr. Who Experience, which was a kid's amusement type walk through kind of like Disney's haunted mansion only much simpler, and no cars, mostly a recorded guided tour of a Dr. Who themed funhouse. Bought "sonic screwdriver pen" and wondering if this is last trip where K will be sort of a little girl for part. Last night, she met up with a Russian boy who organized a rendezvous (having planned a trip to London prior to meeting K, but organized timeline to coincide). (Redacted) is his name. Must get last name.

Perhaps there is a secret to this. If I'm moved to write anything resembling 'Oh my god I can't/haven't been, won't be' etc., I will think about what I see right in front of me and write about that. My slightly queasy stomach, sitting in muddy straw somewhere in Sheeptown, England, listening to the Deftones, getting ready for the Offspring, melancholy texts from (redacted), deliberating over My Chemical Romance and going back to the hotel before Noah and the Whale.

<...> To K's frustration, after breakfast, but before going to the train station, I went to the British Library. I've already listed a bit of what I looked at. What I like best are hand-written manuscripts, with or without corrections. There's something poignant and painful about feeing the pattern of ink on paper, such an almost unbearable act of will. Seeing the handwriting is wonderful, neat or messy. Seeing the number and style of the edits, again neat or messy. Angela Carter's edits were meticulous footnotes, allowed on the large legal pad she used. JG Ballard's, perhaps predictably, a horror, more words lined out than left alone. I love watching the devolution of script over the centuries. It's clear that over time, people valued penmanship less and less. People looking over my shoulder on the train often remark on my style, but compared to the even writing of earlier hands my writing lacks uniformity, a mix of print and cursive that would have given a school-master fits (and my knuckles welts, probably).

It was a joyful thing, to go to the British Library and see a science fiction exhibit, with manuscripts from so many SF luminaries, and a model Tardis and K-9, the musical score for the theme song, hand written. And the Peake exhibit, so fulfilling. (journal stop)

That's all I wrote about the British Library. I lingered at the Peake exhibit for as long as I could, looking at the drawings, and wanting so much to transcribe the entire letter from C.S. Lewis to Peake, but my daughter was restless, and wanted to wait in the train station, closer to the travel. I satisfied some of my hunger by purchasing some note cards with Peake's drawings, and buying a book of his silly verses. I'll write a blog post on those things, later.

I have more London in the journal, for later. The lesson I learned writing this blog post is that I must take better notes, and I must remember to take photographs, and I must write from the notes while I'm in the midst of travel, not after.

I will do better next time.

Santa Claus is Not Evil, and Other Works of Art

2012-01-25T19:28:00.000-05:00

This is another post about my trip to London. To be precise, this is about my trip to the Tate Modern, on the other side of the river from where I stayed. Most of you who read my blog know that I like looking at art. I think most of you would probably argue with me about whether or not the Tate Modern shows us any actual art. I won't know how to argue back; as I've said many times, I'm not a scholar, certainly not an art historian, or anything like that.

The first photo is of a piece of lined paper tacked to a wall in a small gallery full of sketches and fanciful, lowbrow illustrations. If you can't make out the text, it says, in all caps, over and over again, "SANTA CLAUS IS NOT EVIL. THERE IS NO NEED TO DEFEND MYSELF AGAINST HIM." This reminds me of the time the Peabody Essex had a huge Joseph Cornell exhibition, featuring a spoof of a country newsletter, all hand drawn, with typed text cut out with scissors and pasted to thick sheets of construction paper--stories about prize chickens and weirdly large vegetables. I laughed out loud in the museum, and made people stare. Why can't you laugh in a museum, especially when the art is actually meant to be funny? Because Art Iz Seerius, Srsly.

The second photograph is a close up of the very edge of an enormous pile of sunflower seeds. This installation is deceptive, and I'm not sure what it means, but I loved it. Imagine seeing a big pile of sunflower seeds in the middle of an otherwise empty room. Would you do that thing a lot of folks do, and scoff at this without taking a closer look? "Well, I could open a bunch of bags of sunflower seeds. That isn't art."

If you did take a closer look, and read the catalogue copy for this, you would learn that each sunflower seed is made of porcelain and painted by hand to look as realistic as possible. The pile of "sunflower seeds" was about two feet high, with maybe an eight-foot radius. Can you just imagine how the artist created the various molds, poured the liquid porcelain, painted and fired the end product, doing something magical to get the matte sheen of sunflower seeds glazed with that powdery salt finish? Scoff, says the artist. Make assumptions, look no deeper than your expectations, and miss out on that feeling of dawning realization and, dare I say, peculiar awe.

Is the piece of paper with the OCD scrawl about Santa Claus art? Can art be funny? I laugh at art all the time, from pure delight. The third photograph is of a staircase made of red gauze. I included the people in the photo on purpose, for scale. As with many of the installations at the Tate Modern last summer, this was standing alone in the gallery that housed it.

Everything in this piece is red gauze, a reverse image of a floor and staircase. A staircase for red ghosts in a red gauze house where everything is backward and inside-out. Negative space. The treads of the stairs, the bannisters, everything cloth and thread. Nothing to stand on, nothing to hold for safety. Red air, in the air, representing space.

How did the artist make this? How did he install it? What measurements, and what sewing implements and shouted directions, and refitting, and cursing, and laughing at the spacial play. Worry that it wouldn't go anywhere, that it would be a year measuring and cutting and sewing, with no idea who would go for such a crazy damned thing, and doing it anyway.

Surely this next thing isn't art. Bundles of sticks in a room full of other things made of twigs and twine and stuff. For some reason this made so much more sense to me than the Ellsworth Kelly exhibit at the MFA in Boston. (Remember this post? Oh, a plank! And ... another plank. Wow, that's a lot of planks, there.) I have zero idea why I looked at all of the planks and yawned, but stood and stared at a bunch of bundles of twigs as if I'd never imagined such a thing in my life as a bunch of bundles of twigs leaning against a wall.

Likely, there's some big write up about this bunch of bundles of twigs, and the artist meant to say something really important with this installation. Heck if I know what, but the twigs do it for me, and the planks didn't. The Chihuly glass stuff was okay, when Chihuly was at the MFA, but not a lot of it was affecting, other than, "Hey, that chandelier looks like Cthulhu." I guess you have to skip the pretty blown glass and just give me a bunch of twigs, and I'll be happy. Don't ever let anybody tell you I'm a high-maintenance woman. He's lying.

This last photograph is my art, by which I mean I took the photograph (all of the photographs in this post, most of the photos in this blog). The Tate Modern was built from the shell of a "disused power station in the heart of London," according to the website. I spent an hour trying to capture the quality of the light with my third rate camera, and this is the best shot of the whole lot. I can't remember what this room was called, but the scale was massive. It felt as if I might turn around and find that a scale model of the Titanic had parked there beside the ticket window.

Part of the beauty of a museum, for me, is the building itself, which is the only reason why I think that museum mess of a museum, the Isabella Stuart Gardner, in Boston is worth a visit. No doubt some serious art fans will come out of the woodwork to tar and feather me for disliking the disorganized, dark, unlabeled jumble that is the Isabella. But the building is lovely.

Structure. Structure and surprises. Sound and light, play and thought. Juxtaposition and curiosity. The visitors of the Tate, many of them, were just moving through, the teenagers on tour more interested in each other than in the art. I watched them among the big Rothkos, circling, as beautiful as the art, not seeing it, but part of it themselves. All these people with all of their thoughts, with their children, wandering through this museum and its perplexing treasures, each of them coming out with a different sense of what had just happened.

Some saw bunches of twigs, a pile of sunflower seeds, my kid could paint that.

Some saw art.

The Sword and the Phoenix

2012-01-24T08:21:00.000-05:00

Just this morning on the shuttle, I finished reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Overall, I didn't much like this book, though I did enjoy the first book of the series. The writing wasn't as tight, many of the characters were grating rather than entertaining, and the plot seemed cobbled together, with a looseness I didn't find engaging. However, one moment of the book did actually touch my heartstrings, and by that, I mean I actually got the thrumming feeling of sympathy in my chest for Harry. A nugget of gold in a messy book.

In the first book, Potter is almost universally hailed as a hero of the first order, adored by nearly everyone (with the exception of Professor Snape, and even he finds himself compelled to defend Harry if only not to be in anyone's debt). In the second book, Harry is accused of being the "Heir of Slytherin," guilty of opening the Chamber of Secrets and setting loose a deadly basilisk to kill fledgling wizards of mixed blood. Because the Sorting Hat told Harry that it was a toss up whether he'd do just as well in the slithery house of Slytherin as in the brave and true house of Gryffindor, Harry had a crisis of self worth. Did the Sorting Hat see something in Harry no one else can see? Is Harry really a bad person deep inside? During the final battle of the novel, where Harry is fighting Tom Riddle (aka Voldemort as a 16-year-old angsty ghost), he reaches into the Sorting Hat, pulls out a sword, and wins the fight. When he's expressing his fears about his identity to Professor Dumbledore, and asks if the Sorting Hat put him in the wrong house, and ought to have put him in Slytherin (where all of the characters to date have been sketchy characters with no redeeming values), the wizard kindly points out the name engraved on the magic sword: Godric Gryffindor. He says that if Harry weren't brave and awesome enough to be in House Gryffindor, he never would have pulled that sword out of the Sorting Hat in the first place, and if not for his loyalty to Dumbledore, Fawkes the phoenix would never have come to Harry's aid.

Yes, Harry. You're a good person. Here's proof. This magic bird came to your aid. This magic sword came to your hand. Even though I didn't like this book overall, reading this scene brought a lump to my throat. If only it were that easy in real life. Whenever you had a moment when you doubted your own self worth, if only a magical bird arrived and cried magic tears on your broken heart. Whenever you had a conflict, if only the sword of justice came to your hand to show you that your feelings were valid, and your actions right. No wonder people read these books. No wonder people dress up like wizards from Potter's world at every SF convention I've ever attended (except Readercon, where people are too intellectual for cosplay, apparently). It's a sweet, sweet fantasy for these things to be made so manifestly apparent as your own human goodness. Even though you sometimes break the rules. Even though you sometimes make mistakes. Even though you are sometimes selfish, foolish, cowardly, or bitter.

For a while there, I wasn't reading these kinds of stories. I mostly read existential stories that explain why life is complicated, why there are no right answers, why it's so important to have and live by personal values; because there are no phoenixes, and no magic swords. Reading these stories, I feel a little like Edmund in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and his obsession with the enchanted Turkish Delight. The more I read, the more I want. I want to think that magic is real, that all I need is courage to get through the hard parts, and the phoenix will eventually come and heal me. I suppose I'll read these books, and then return to existential land, and see if I get whiplash, or if something else entirely happens in my heart.

Revisiting Potter

2012-01-22T10:01:00.000-05:00

Recently, I finished reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Here in the US, the book goes by a different title, but it's the same book. I'm not sure what, if anything, is different about the text, but that's not what this post is about. This is partially a cranky post about trends in commercial fiction, and how much of a curmudgeon I can be. I own a Sony eReader, for example, because I refuse to toe the line and buy a Kindle. I'm resistant, often, to reading the Next Big Hot Thing just because it's the Next Big Hot Thing, because I have little time and a huge reading pile. So the first time I tried to read the Potter books, when Goblet of Fire came out, I got to the giant Quidditch match at the beginning, got bored, set the book down, and never finished the series.

This isn't a post where I eat my hat and say how wonderful Harry Potter is. Neither is this a post where I denounce it as dreck. This is a post where I agree with Elaine Isaak, who said recently at Arisia at the Plot and Structure panel (and I paraphrase, probably poorly), that the plot of many successful commercial fiction novels is this: a likeable protagonist, against incredible odds, achieves a worthy goal. This is pretty dang easy to see in the Potter books. It's easy to see the techniques used to create the likeable protagonist. It's easy to see the incredible odds. It's easy to see the worthy goal. Wrap this in fun world-building, make the language entertaining and accessible, and it's really no wonder you have to stand in line at Potter World just to get into one of the gift shop attractions.

Lately, I've been looking at my old work, and kicking the tires. I have some folders on my hard drive: stories I've sold, stories I finished but haven't sold, and stories I never finished. I don't know what I want to do with those folders. In the past, when I've decided to spend more time writing fiction, I've opened up the folders and commenced fondling that old stuff. I opened one story yesterday and started noodling with it, but quickly shut it down. It starts in the wrong place. It's scoped to be 7500 words, but probably only ought to be 3500. All of my latest stories are over 5000 words. I remind myself that a novel is next. Not a short story to get my name back in the game, a novel. A novel, bonehead. I've been reading some short stories, but I'm mostly reading novels these days, and a lot of creative non-fiction. Read it, write it.

It's possible that my attitude toward the Potter books softened when I read and enjoyed the Hunger Games, which is today's Big Hot Thing. These books, in detail, are not alike. One has kids prancing around eating chocolate frogs and playing games on broomsticks, and the other has children hunting down and murdering one another. I hear the Potter books get darker later, and honestly, that's one reason I'm giving it another go. Read it, write it. I like dark stories. Am I studying up, so I can try to write a commercial fiction novel? Honestly, no. I can sit down and try to write something, but I can't sit down and try to write a commercial fiction novel. Or I could try, I suppose, but I'm not sure what the end product would be. I think setting out to write a novel at all is about all I can manage.

Can I learn something from the commercial fiction formula without actively planning to take what I learn and write a commercially successful novel? I think so. What makes a character likeable? What techniques are used in this book or that book to illustrate the incredible odds? Where does it get worse? What is the very, very blackest hour of the book, and how did the characters get there? How does the whole thing wrap up? Is there one ending (I prefer this) or seven/nine endings (see: the last Lord of the Rings film). What I can tell you about the Potter books in particular is that the writing in the first book is pretty darned ok, by me. But the writing in the start of the second book seems like it dripped from a different quill, and that's perplexing to me. I chalk it up to several things: most likely the author hunkered over the first book and polished it within an inch of its life, but didn't have the leisure to do that to the second; likely the same went for editing. I have the opportunity to read them all, back to back, in short order, and I wonder what other rhythmic things I will find. Afterward, perhaps I will read the entire Dark Tower series with the same ear.

Arisia 2012 Book Haul: Nymph

2012-01-19T18:41:00.002-05:00

I went to Cecelia Tan's Circlet Press party at Arisia 2012, and among my purchases was Nymph by Francesca Lia Block. It's a small, slim book with a nice design. It was an easy purchase, and an easy read once I got home from the convention.

This is book of interlocked urban fantasy short stories. It was a nice way to pass one morning and evening of train commuting, though I admit I was nervous that one of my seat mates would do what I often do on the train, which is snatch glances at the pages of nearby readers to see what they're up to. I admit that I use a concealing book jacket if I'm reading a book with a racy cover, and I've considered covering up the words as I read, but that last thing seems kind of jealous. If someone wants to look over my shoulder and get an eyeful of sex writing, they are welcome to. If it were me, I'd go to work that morning with a smile on my face. Those who would be offended should not be sneaking peeks at my book over my shoulder.

These stories were very pretty, but I'm afraid none of them worked their erotic magic on me. Once upon a time, I lived in California, though never in ultra body-conscious Los Angles, where the writer is from, and once upon a time I wrote stories where everyone was beautiful, androgynous, and spangled with fairy dust. I think I would have loved this book when I was in high school, and my yearning for beautiful androgynous people spangled with fairy dust was at its peak, but now I read it with crooked smile and an eye hungry for something that hurts me now versus something that hurt me then. The best I found was the story called "Milk," in which a nurse crosses a boundary with a dying patient (who, before he was sick, wasted, and thin, had been fit, tan, and awesome, like the other L.A. characters in the book). "Milk" gave me something to think about, but for the most part, reading these stories was kind of like sitting outside the Hot Topic, watching for skinny girls in gothy short-shorts carrying Hello Kitty packbacks to walk by. I'm 40 now, not 14, so I felt a little creeptastic.

For a collection of short interlocked urban fantasy short stories that made me feel creepy for an entirely different reason, see Midori's book, also published by Circlet Press: Master Han's Daughter.

I Went to London and All I Brought You Were These Lousy Photographs of a Bunch of Statues

2012-01-17T20:44:00.001-05:00

I had some trouble capturing light the way I wanted to on my trip to London last year. These photos are imperfect, because my tools were imperfect. Let it be known that I brought my third best camera to London, because I was afraid to lose the more expensive ones. Please note that this was a stupid idea; if I am too afraid of losing my best camera to bring it on trips, I should not have purchased it to begin with. Let me not be that person who buys an expensive sports car, only to leave it in the garage under a waterproof cover and drive the Toyota Corolla on the weekends. The first photograph posted here is from the fountain in front of Buckingham Palace. If I'd brought the Porsche of my camera collection, the colors would not have been washed out, but you can still see this beautiful mermaid well enough.

This next photo was taken at the British Museum, and illustrates why it's a better idea to blog about a place while you're still there, or take better notes than I do. I don't know who this is, or who made this, just that it was difficult to get a clear photo of her that didn't include passers by. Also, I struggled with the not-Porsche camera, and had to futz with the flash and the automatic settings until I got a shot that made her look like marble instead of yellow pottery. At this point, I acknowledge that I won't actually write much about my trip to London. I'll spend more time wishing I'd brought the right tools with me on the trip, so this blog post may as well be about that, as about anything.

When you're planning any endeavor, equip yourself for success. This includes bringing your confidence in yourself. I didn't bring either one to London, I'm afraid. If I'd brought my confidence, I'd have trusted myself not to lose my good camera, and these would be better shots. But they are what they are; I brought what I brought. If I'm to have confidence in myself, I suppose I'll learn from my mistake, but enjoy what I brought home anyway. One thing can be said for my trip to London: I did not overpack. I only brought two pairs of shoes, where I actually needed three, and that goes against my usual packing strategy, which means I only need two, but I pack six. I went with just a flight bag and a backpack. I'll explain about the shoes in another post that will hopefully have more recollections about London than this one does.

This was my first trip out of the country; I don't count Alaska, Puerto Rico, or Tijuana, because the first two are part of the US, and the last one is just a hop over the border of California, and is kind of like a Mexico-land theme park, not really Mexico at all. This was my first trip where I needed a passport, and it was a long time in the planning and execution. I may have written this already, but I was nervous. I don't enjoy air travel. I'd never gone through customs before. I didn't know what to expect. By the time I reached Buckingham Palace, however, where the photo at left was taken, I was settled. I was abroad, and it was different, but it hadn't killed me. Some would say I still haven't been abroad, because I went to a place where everyone speaks English, and so forth, but I thumb my nose at those people. I still had to figure out foreign currency, and I took it in the teeth with the exchange, thank you very much.

I lucked out with the shot above, the second of the Buckingham Palace photos. My camera didn't want me to take this shot. The slightest upward angle and this whole shot washed out white automatically due to some frustrating programming of the camera's. I had to trick it to give me this shot, with that lovely sheen of white picking out this statue's highlights. I wonder if I could have taken this shot better with the Porsche. I like to think not. By the way, it's a Nikon, not a Porsche, but I like the sports car image, so I'll use Porsche for now.

This shot was taken at Trafalgar Square in front of the National Portrait Gallery. Dad is carrying the porpoise so the kid can take a long spit, I suppose. This was my first day in London, and my daughter and I went for a bus ride, and got out at a random place with beautiful statues and big buildings; that was Trafalgar Square. We walked a long way, and she stayed with me all that first day. I'll write about that in another post, because we stopped and had a bite to eat, and I took photos of the pub signs I saw along the way. I'd just like to say the first day was very nice because we were together. At some point, sooner than I wanted, she took off on her own, and I was left to wander solo through this big city I didn't know. I didn't come prepared to spend most of my trip to London alone, but that's the way it happened. I wouldn't have had all these photographs had we been together the whole time, so there's a silver lining there as well.

The next time I go abroad, I'm going to bring some things (my Porsche camera, my own pair of wellies, more minutes for my phone, more patience, bed bug spray, my self-confidence) and I'll leave some things behind (primarily, my expectations). I will probably not have a better plan. On this trip, I saw most of the standard things tourists see. As you've already seen, I went to Buckingham Palace (I didn't pay to go in), the British Museum (you don't have to pay to go in), Trafalgar Square, and the Tate Modern. I went to a lot of other iconic places, but this post has all of the lovely statues I saw, not those other places, so I'll have patience. When I take photos, I think I'll take better notes. For some reason, I felt rushed. The first day, I think because my daughter has a different plan than I do on how to explore a city, but after that, I had no excuse. I could have spent the entire time I was alone taking photos and writing about them, but my notebook for the most part stayed in my bag, and I took photos without commentary, absorbed by the light and the colors, and the awareness that I might not pass that way again. I hope I will, but I'm not sure I will. The odds are against it. After all, there are a lot of other places I'd like to see. There's a whole world out there, and so little time. If I go back to London, it will be because I love London better than any other place I can imagine, and I'm not there just now. So in a way, I took pictures as if I'd never see London again, and yet I didn't have a planned itinerary. I bought a Not For Tourists guide and I just went here and everywhere on the buses and Underground, and tried not to get lost. Some places I got to because I got lost on the way to somewhere else.

Like this. I found the Ghandi in Tavistock Square because it was the last day, and my camera battery had run down, and I didn't have enough time to get all the way back to the Tower of London, but this statue was nearby. It was only a couple of bus stops away. By now, I was homesick, but still snapping, determined to bring home a thousand photographs to make the homesickness worth it.

The statue of Ghandi was seated on an altar-like pedestal and people had decorated him with flowers. In the altar alcove were more flowers, and candles, and incense. No one else was around in the whole square, and it felt strange to get off at that stop, with the rest of the city headed home from work. I was a tourist, out of time with the people who lived there, like the people who are riding in the duck boats in Boston when I'm on my way home from a long day in my glorified cubicle. Someone had taken the time to put a necklace of flowers around Ghandi's neck, but by the time I saw him, it was time for people to go home and be with their families.

This post feels disjointed, bare, much like my memories of travel this past summer. And now I understand that the writing is rich either where the images are fresh, or the memories are deep. I have not yet fully plumbed the memories of London here. I've just scratched the surface, and presented you with some pretty pictures, but pictures that I think are not as good as they could have been.

There's something here in all this. Hopefully, I'll figure it out.

Arisia 2012

2012-01-13T10:53:00.000-05:00

Here is my writing-related schedule for Arisia. If you want to find out about my other interests, why don't you drop by Arisia and see for yourself?

Fri 7:00pm Interstitial Fiction: Dancing Between Genres
Sat 7:00pm Plot and Structure
Sat 8:30pm Reading: Brusso, Marchand, & Wilson
Sun 2:30pm Use Your Words: Dialogoue, Prose, and Tone

Interstitial Fiction: Dancing Between Genres — 1hr 15min — Griffin (3E)
Interstitial fiction is writing made in the interstices between genres
and categories. It is art that flourishes in the borderlands between
different disciplines, mediums, and cultures. It crosses borders,
written by people who refuse to be constrained by category labels.
Some favorite examples will be discussed here.
Erik Amundsen, John Bowker, Joy Marchand (m), Julia Rios, Sarah Smith

Plot and Structure — 1hr 15min — Carlton (3E)
It is often remarked that there are only six original plots. How then
do you make the plot of your story stand out? How is plot used to make
a story come together coherently? Our panelists will discuss how to
make a story come together as a whole.
Grant Carrington, Elaine Isaak, Joy Marchand (m), Gail Z. Martin,
Charlie Spickler

Reading: Brusso, Marchand, & Wilson — 1hr 15min — Quincy (2)
Authors Charlene Brusso, Joy Marchand, and Trish Wilson will read
selections from their works. Please note: Joy Marchand does not sit behind the table and calmly read her work. She stands, she paces, she dances, she gesticulates. All in all, she is an experienced, expressive reader, and she has been told that this is a good thing, and that her readings are especially fun to attend. She will also bribe you with chocolate. Please come.
Charlene Brusso, Joy Marchand, Trish Wilson

Use Your Words: Dialogoue, Prose, and Tone — 1hr 15min — Adams (3W)
It's been said that the purpose of dialogue is to move the plot
forward. How do you do that effectively? How does choice of prose
change the reader's take on the setting and the story? If you have a
specific tone in mind—light and humorous or dark and full of angst—how
can that be conveyed effectively through your dialogue and prose? Our
panelists discuss the methods and mechanics for constructing effective
dialogue and prose to help set the tone of your story.
Debra Doyle, Catt Kingsgrave-Ernstein, Joy Marchand (m), Resa Nelson,
Kenneth Schneyer

See you there!

Talking About the Hunger Games After All

2012-01-06T17:19:00.003-05:00

As you may remember from this post, I wasn't ready to talk to the 11-year-old about the Hunger Games. As it turns out, his teacher didn't wait to get permission before giving him the Hunger Games books, and last night I found him about 100 pages from the end of third book in the trilogy. I've been doing a lot of thinking about that today; how to talk about those books, how to have a talk with the boy. Conversation between adults and kids is usually pretty painful, in my experience. Example: "What did you do today?" "Nothin'." "What do you think about that thing you saw?' "I dunno." Scintillating. I want to have those kinds of discussions ALL DAY EVERY DAY! That was sarcasm. I save sarcasm for the blog; I think sarcasm directed toward children is clumsy parenting.

I've been silently simmering with a medium-to-low-grade resentment all day. Underneath the resentment is a sense of helplessness; when the illusion of control is stripped from me, I get cranky. However, I remember being 11 years old, and I don't believe in sheltering. Ask my daughter. She's been in charge of what she's chosen to read and watch since she was old enough to read anything. I made sure that I gave her a heads-up before she started: "You can choose to read this, but it's got some sex scenes, impolite language, and violence." For a long time, she said, "No, thanks. I don't think that sounds like something I'd enjoy." As time went on, she judged herself ready, and afterward, we'd talk. Once, she "accidentally" saw something that freaked her out on the internet, and she confessed, and said it was horrible, and we needed to have a talk about the Internet. ("The internet is really, really great ...")

I've had open communication with my daughter for 18 years, and I feel I can trust her judgment because I've been in her life since she took her first breath, and I've seen her make decisions. I've only been in the older boy's life since he was 7. He and my daughter are nothing alike, and he and I are building trust slowly. Truth is, I recognize myself in the things he does. I didn't like talking to adults when I was his age. I didn't trust them to respect me as a person. I didn't like being talked down to. For this reason, I never used baby talk with my daughter, even when she was a baby. I treated her with respect, for the most part, and she sort of naturally became worthy of respect. I wish she'd scrape her macaroni and cheese out of the bowl before she chucks the bowl into the sink, but if, for instance, she stops seeing a boy because his values are screwed up, I know she's made the right choice for herself.

I'd like to think that all children can just be set loose in a bookstore to read whatever they can puzzle out, like I did growing up, but I believe it's a parent's responsibility to put things into context, to ask sensitive questions, and to teach a child values that will lead them well through life. This is why I didn't disguise my scorn for most reality television from my daughter. I let her watch it if she wanted to, but I told her what I felt about it. I don't like getting a charge out of watching people being cruel or selfish. I don't get a charge out of watching people lose their dignity. I do like competitions, so I was torn about American Idol. I was one of the people who cried soppy tears while watching Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent singing "I Dreamed a Dream." But I'm sour about how much these "surprises" are manufactured by the television producers, and how sometimes the people involved are destroyed by the experience. My daughter's father watched things like Fear Factor with her, and I didn't veto it, even when the contestants were eating raw pig intestines and vomiting, but I refused to watch it, and told her I didn't like it. (Note: a shout out to my prosthetic memory - "What was that woman's name, the one who was overweight and middle aged and turned out to be a great singer on that British version of American Idol?" "Oh, that's Susan Boyle." "Ok, what was that show where the contestants sometimes had to eat live insects and internal organs?" "Oh, that must be Fear Factor.") If you take the cruelty and stupidity out of a reality show, what you can end up with instead, if you're lucky, is a great documentary film, like Kings of Pastry; it's about pastry chefs competing for the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France competition (Best Craftsmen in France), a high honor in the world's culinary community. This is the kind of reality I appreciate as entertainment.

Long story short: I think much of reality television is morally ambiguous, emotionally treacherous crap. It requires explanation, and context. Children need to be taught that the people involved are choosing to do these things, people are choosing to watch these things, and choosing to take entertainment in these ways, and this has an effect on our spirit, on our culture, and on our compassion. Children need to be taught to make mindful choices about what they put into their minds. A parent that allows a young child to experience cruel reality TV without providing context is a careless parent, and may experience unhappy consequences later for not teaching their children how to add joyfulness to the world, rather than perpetuating ignorance. I want to be involved in my children's learning experience, and provide context, but I also understand that I can't stuff them in a bubble and shelter them. I wouldn't do it if I could, because people don't grow and learn sitting in a bubble. The best I can do is be trustworthy enough that they can come to me afterward and say, "I saw this thing the other day, and I need to talk about it."

That's where I am now.

I picked the boy up from drama club, and we talked about the The Hunger Games. It's his birthday today, and I told him I had a present for him. I asked him if he'd finished Mockingjay, the third book in the trilogy, and he said yes. He's devoured it, barely aware of the rest of the world continuing on outside the book. This used to be me when I was 11. Nose in a book, uninterested in other humans. As a small child, when I did speak, it was in complete sentences using a college vocabulary. It annoyed adults to speak with me. I asked the 11-year-old what his favorite character was, and he said Buttercup, the cat, because Buttercup was old and ugly, but loved the little girl who'd saved his life. When I asked what his favorite human character was, he said Gale, because Gale was cool and could hunt and set traps, and because he really cared about his best friend, Katniss. He valued his friends and family more than anything, and that's why he was the favorite. I felt stupid for not wanting to talk about the Hunger Games yet, and for being afraid I didn't know how to talk to the boy about values. It turns out I don't know what his values are because we don't talk very often. about things he cares about. I talk about the world of brushing teeth, doing homework, and keeping one's room clean. Only tonight was I willing to talk about children who fight each other to the death, about which characters in the book are admirable, about which characters are to be despised, and which characters are helpless dupes of society. I've never had a conversation with the boy like the one we had about the book about kids who kill each other.

My birthday gift to him is something my father did for me. It's a monstrously big shopping spree at the bookstore of his choice. Books only, not games. I told him that I enjoyed talking about books, and movies, and that I'd done so a lot with my daughter, and that I was looking forward to talking with him about the books and movies he likes, and especially about why, and how he feels about what he sees and reads, what he values, what he thinks about. I told him I'd be very interested to see what books he buys, and asked him if it would be okay if I read some of those books too, so we could talk about them, like we'd talked about the Hunger Games. He was bright, open, chirpy, and engaged. Yes, he'd love to talk about the books. He said he thought I'd make a good school counselor, because I was good at talking to kids about their feelings and thoughts. He asked if I would be a certain kind of D&D character, if I play D&D during his birthday party tomorrow, and I said his father thought I'd be something called an "ardent" if I existed in the Dungeons and Dragons world. The boy said, "Yeah, because you can read people's minds."

I laughed.

I can't read people's minds unless they talk to me. I couldn't read this child's mind, because he wouldn't talk to me, until I was willing to talk to him about the books I wasn't ready for him to read. I'm still sad, to have missed so much of the Disney stage (I wasn't around for much of that), but we're in the Hunger Games stage now, and that's that. We're entertained by swords, and traps, and fireballs, and dungeon crawls, and grim reaper costumes, and morbid comic books like Cyanide and Happiness. I myself as the proud owner of little plastic figures called Halfsies, which are cute little baby animals you can pull apart in the middle so they look sawed in half, and bloody, so I have no room to talk about morbid. This little male person is a lot like me, and it's probably why he irritates me so much, and worries me so much, and why I was sulking about having to figure out how to parent him. I know how difficult a child I was. I'm 40 years old, and there are people in my family who STILL delight in telling me just how difficult, as if still asking me to apologize for what I did when I was 9. I talked to the boy about the Hunger Games, and we connected, and I'm sad and happy about it at the same time. We have a chance to know one another if I can just be brave and take more risks, and give more, and stop worrying that if I parent the wrong way, he'll end up in prison, or lose his dignity on some reality show, digging for his 15 minutes of revolting celebrity.

Happy birthday, boy. I recognize you. It's ok to be strange, especially when you're 11.

A Club That Would Have Me as a Member

2012-01-05T19:37:00.011-05:00

For Christmas, among other very lovely things, I received a membership for the MFA in Boston. The giver made a very lovely handmade gift certificate which he enclosed in a card; this certificate featured my favorite statue in the MFA. The photo I've enclosed of Medea in this post is the side without the dagger. If you want to see her from the other side, check out this post. My second favorite statue in the MFA is Cleopatra. I thought it was wonderful that the gift-giver had included a photo of Medea on the gift certificate, and I thought it was wonderful when I saw Cleopatra in Amanda Palmer's blog post about posing naked in the MFA for Neil Gaiman.

I found this post after spending some time checking out the New Year's posts of some of my favorite bloggers, Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman among them. I found out that I'd been too art sotted to notice that Ms. Palmer had performed the voice narration of the guided tour of the current big exhibit at the MFA: Dega and the Nude. I went recently to see the exhibit with a companion after dining at Bravo, the restaurant in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Maybe I was distracted by the neon:

I have a membership now, so if I want to go back and see the Degas exhibit again, I can certainly rent the tour then second time around and enjoy Ms. Palmer's narration of the many, many paintings of women stepping from bathtubs and drying the left foot. I can listen to the voice of the lead singer of the Dresden Dolls and imagine her posing nude in the gallery among the Degas paintings, and imagine Neil Gaiman drawing her. Which is what they did, in that gallery, among Degas' nudes. I'm not sure how many of the things on that neon sign they did while they were there, maybe all of them. I enjoyed, relaxed, flirted, wondered, felt, mused, listened, talked, asked, touched, and used a camera, but did not sing or dance in any meaningful way. Maybe they did, though. They look like the sort of people who do such a thing. I didn't take my clothes off, either. Neither did my companion. I'm not sure they let just anyone take their clothes off in museums. Maybe only if you're famous. So I guess I need to become more famous, because I think that would be neat. My companion could sculpt me in Lego bricks or something.

Additional note: the neon sign says I wasn't supposed to eat, but I did eat. I ate in the restaurant, which I'm sure is encouraged. I had the steak tartare with part of my companion's salad (he ate my rolls so it was a fair trade), the braised lamb shank with pumpkin-spinach risotto, and a "Degas and the Nude" signature dessert: a white chocolate custard bomba with a cassis gel center. My companion won the dessert ordering wars with a salted caramel chocolate ganache tart with blood orange gel and pomegranate seeds. When I asked for gluten free rolls, the server rather arrogantly said that "This is Boston, not Porland; they don't do gluten free here." Except that I was served gluten free rolls at both No. 9 Park and L'Espalier, so I'm thinking Mr. Portland Transplant probably needs a little more time in my beautiful little city so he can better understand its charms. Maybe it's not Portland, of course it's not Portland; it's Boston. My city, Ms. Palmer's City, city of my heart.

I've never purchased a museum membership for myself because my home town has a pretty incredible museum (the Peabody Essex). It's not good "for a little museum". It's a damned fine museum, full stop. I don't need to buy a membership there because town residents get in for free. The special exhibits are better than the ICA in Boston, and I'm proud of it. I look at the membership fee and I worry that there won't be enough special exhibits to draw me for repeat visits and it won't be worth the money. This is one reason why I was delighted to receive the membership as a gift; it's something I wouldn't have purchased for myself. But I think I may have seen the error of my ways. I didn't expect all of the above, that the Boston MFA would be the sort of museum that would let a rock star get naked so her literary rock star husband could sketch her. I'm happy about that. Very much. My membership got my companion and I into the museum for free, and because we dined at Bravo, we had our very expensive parking fee waived. We wandered around the Linde Wing and thoroughly enjoyed what we saw, for the most part. There was that exhibit with the planks we didn't understand ("Look, there's a plank. Look, there's another plank. Wow, that's a lot of planks.") but for the most part, the art was stimulating and provocative.

That my museum visit extended beyond the visit, and echoed into my blog shopping for the New Year was wonderful. Yesterday, I ranted about how serendipity can bang stuff together in an unhappy way; today, I'm non-ranting about how serendipity can echo the good stuff, and show me how my path crosses the paths of people I admire, footprints in the physical world and in the virtual world. Echoes of a museum visit, of statues and paintings, of music and love.

Today, the world is benign and harmonic.

Something You Would Die For

2012-01-04T20:31:00.006-05:00

I saw a sign in the window of a gift shop on the way home from dinner tonight: "Find something you would die for, and then live for it." It was right next to the sign that said: "Keep calm and carry on." You know, that one. There's someone out there making big bucks printing this saying on coffee cups, stationery, and note cards, and maybe some people get some good from it; I don't know. I saw these signs, printed on canvas made to look like something you would buy from an antiques shop on Martha's Vineyard, in the shop window next door to the Greenland Cafe in Salem, and I'm afraid the sign about finding something you would die for made me pensive all the way home.

This isn't a restaurant review, but I feel obsessively compelled to disgorge a few details. I had a dry cocktail, a seltzer with lime, a spinach salad with warm bacon dressing, a rare sirloin steak with a side of roasted brussells sprouts and a lightly dressed arugula salad, a small pot of herbal tea. Because I'm back to low-carb, I can eat a horse without getting full, and so I'm at home now, in bed, eating Vermont farmstead spiced gouda (the spice is fenugreek) and some sort of cucumber pickle not made in the US. Some sort of better, slavic pickle.

While eating dinner, I was finishing the first book of The Hunger Games. This isn't a book review either, so if you want the exhaustive plot summary, you can go to any number of websites to get that. If you want to read a review of the book, read Stephen King's, here. It has the word "dilly" in it, and is a way more entertaining book review than I would write. This post is going to be pensive, because that's how I felt walking home. I felt pensive, ashamed, angry.

The Hunger Games, for my purposes, is about clever, starving adolescents winning a Survivor-like game against dumber, stronger, more well fed opponents in a dystopian future North America. The subsequent book, Catching Fire, is about that same future society rising up to conquer its oppressors. I finished reading the first book, and started reading the second book while noshing on 14 ounces of grass fed, "organic" beef, while other yuppies like me sipped obnoxious cocktails, some of which likely featured what the restaurant calls its "buzz button," which is a flower they add to the cocktails that provides a numbing, buzzy sensation in your mouth when you eat it. I probably hadn't yet burned off the calories from L'Espalier and No. 9 Park while sitting there eating my cow and reading about starving children poisoning one another and eating pine bark to survive. The characters in the book presumably do exactly as the sign in the shop window suggests: they find something to die for, and then live for it. Freedom, love, family: that sort of thing. It's big and romantic, and the whole concatenation of events made me surly.

Our older boy's teacher, well meaning, enthusiastic, wants us to consider letting him read The Hunger Games. Around about the time the book's heroine is dropping a nest of deadly, mutant LSD-hornets on her enemies, I was pretty sure I'm not ready for him to read these books. Maybe you're getting ready to throw a deadly, mutant LCD-hornet nest at me, but hear me out, ok? I'm sure it's not fashionable for me not to have the first idea what I'd die for, but the reason I'm surly tonight is because all of this romanticism has made me ashamed of not knowing, and pissed at being ashamed of my values. I've made most of my decisions for the last 18 years based on the effect those decisions would have on my daughter. Now, I have the chance to have a similar choice with two additional children, and I've spent a lot of the last year or so in bed, blogging about fancy restaurants, museums, art, how much it sucks not to have a finished novel or five in a box under my bed. What do I live for anyway? Blogging about expensive, rich food? Sharing sleepy kitten videos on Facebook? If I were any good at all, wouldn't I be spending more time mothering these two boys, and trying to figure out how to parse the moral ambiguity of The Hunger Games for a smart eleven-year-old boy who could use some intellectual stimulation and care?

I want him to read provocative things. I want ALL kids to read provocative things, and learn from them. But there's a reason little kids don't have all the rights of adults, and can't just do whatever the hell they want. Without context, there's some stuff out there that can tickle the human beast brain the totally wrong way, and things can get all tangled up in the developing gray matter and you end up with Rick Santorum in the Iowa Caucuses. This is the first and probably last time I'll put anything remotely political on my blog, but this is just in case anyone has forgotten that I would elect Dan Savage president in a New York minute if only to keep the hate-mongers out of my bedroom, and out of the love lives of my kids. I do care about politics, and my children, and the plight of the people of Tibet, and freedom of expression, and all that noble shit, but I found myself walking home feeling crappy for caring so much about cheese. Who lives for, or better yet, who dies for cheese? Or bacon? Bacon is so popular it has a cult following of people with the Bacon Explosion on their bucket list, but I somehow doubt we'll ever see a line of people sleeping in parks all over America and getting beaten up by police for the right to eat two pounds of sausage wrapped in a blanket made of two pounds of bacon and roasted in a BBQ grill.

I'm not very romantic, when it comes down to it. The sign about finding something you'd die for and living for it just makes me cranky, because I don't have an answer. I probably couldn't write a heroic tale like The Hunger Games, even one as dark. And I'm not brave enough to write a book like Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman, a woman who commits the horribly delicious "crime" of admitting that she loves her husband Michael Chabon more than she loves her kids. I do enough for the family, I think; I provide love, strategy and direction, and boss everyone around enough that the house stays clean, and the kids are attended to, and the garden stays green. I go to work and make money, which I spend partially to sustain my household, partially to put my daughter through college, and partially to entertain myself well enough to make working seem somehow personally rewarding. I dream of writing novels, and I peck away at my blog, at least sometimes, and I make plans to travel, and post sleepy kitten videos on Facebook, and I communicate with my parents very badly and sporadically, and I don't spend enough quality time with my dog, and have too many shoes, and take pictures of my stuffed Totoro at fancy restaurants, and have a silly, silly sense of humor sometimes, and believe in publicly funded art, but not enough to make a sign, or send a letter to my senator. I comfort myself sometimes by saying I help develop pharmaceuticals that help people, but then I see a sign in a shop window and all of a sudden, I see my contribution to the world as paltry and frivolous.

Inspirational signs aren't supposed to do that. I think they're supposed to inspire you to be a better person instead of inspiring you to dwell on how sad you are, how unromantic, how un-dedicated, how insular and self-interested you are. They oughtn't make you look around at the passionate people you know who are studying to be lawyers and doctors and professors, and wonder if they're actually happy doing what they're doing, or if they would look in the shop window too and feel like a fraud. There are a lot of posts going around the writerly blogosphere about anxiety and depression, and I think about contributing, and trying to say something lovely, and poignant, and meaningful, and I dunno, connected, and instead I'm all pissy-faced because I'm not sure I'm ready to do The Hunger Games with the eleven-year-old, and thus I'm a terrible, unloving person with crappy priorities and frivolous values.

So I'll say something inelegant; don't buy into this shit. Don't read the dark side of the coin on those inspirational signs. If you can't read them, and be delighted, and trip off on a fairy-fueled journey of Mr. Holland's Opus-like self-sacrifice and redemption, turn away from the stupid signs. Just don't look. Don't write yourself off as terrible, unloving, and frivolous just because on bad days, you live for the next really weird cheese, and you have absolutely no idea what you'd die for. You've probably never been in the position to really think about it--what you'd be willing to die for. Maybe you've never been really hungry, or really cold, or scared for your life sitting in a hole in the ground you dug yourself to hide in from authority figures who are looking forward to gassing you with chlorobenzylidene malonitrile. Maybe you've never been struck by the one person in the world who said they'd love and protect you. Maybe you've never seen anyone die, not even a pet. Maybe you've never had to pee outside because you locked yourself out of the house as a child, or do the walk of shame the morning after an evening at a bar, in the clothes you wore the night before, because you didn't have the dignity to say no when you meant no. Or maybe you some nasty things HAVE gone down in your life, and those experiences and wounds have drawn you inward, and strangely, the thing you'd die for is yourself, and you, yourself, are the best thing you have to live for.

Maybe it's not shameful to have survived your life so far, and to have no answers.

Maybe I'll be brave enough to explain The Hunger Games to the boy when he's twelve. Maybe I'll be brave enough to teach him it's ok to be passionate, and ok to be angry, and ok to be afraid, and ok to be sad sometimes. That sometimes, it's ok not to be ready for the next challenge, or to have the right answers, or to look good, or to seem smarter or braver or wiser than the next guy. Maybe it's ok to go through hell, and still have no clue what you'd live or die for.

Maybe someday I'll be brave enough to explain that it's ok to be him.

Table for One, Part Two

2012-01-03T18:35:00.016-05:00

Here is Totoro at No. 9 Park on the Boston Common. He had a great time, but didn't eat much. I don't think he likes uni emulsion. I told you I had reservations for the first and second of January; on the 1st, we went to L'Espalier; on the 2nd, we went to No. 9 Park. Both times Totoro and I had the tasting menu, but the experiences were different. Getting ready was the same as on New Year's Day. So if you want to know how the night started, you can get an idea by reading Part One. This time my phone's GPS system was really confused, but it got me through town well enough and in time to get seated a little early. This was good, because I got home from L'Espalier past 10 p.m., which as many of you know, is way past my bed time. I get up at 5 a.m. on work days, and I got addicted to sleeping in on vacation and knew it would be extra hard to get up in the morning, so I didn't want to be out as late on 2 January as I was on the 1st.

Imagine my happiness when the tasting menu only had 7 courses (8 total courses with the supplementary foie gras, which I couldn't pass on, so I had it) instead of the bonkers number of courses at Craigie and L'Espalier! No extra appetizer, no intermezzo, and I waived the supplementary cheese course (having learned my lesson with the Grand Fromage the night before). I did not leave the restaurant in distress from overindulgence. Here is the menu:

Chilled Nova Scotia Lobster - hearts of palm, lemon vinaigrette, arugula.

Sturgeon en Papillote - American caviar, Savoy cabbage, bacon (bacon!)

Grilled Abalone - spot prawn, bay scallop, sea urchin veloute

Carnaroli Risotto - Perigueux truffle, Parmigiano-Reggiano

Seared Foie Gras - pistachio, grapefruit, gluten free brioche

Berkshire Pork Shoulder - grilled mushroom, crosnes, Honeycrisp apple

Prime Beef Ribeye - Macomber turnip, bone marrow, beet jus

Cassis Ice - Champagne, orange blossom

White Chocolate Bavarian - cocoa nib, black olive powder, Meyer lemon sorbet

The food at No. 9 Park was wonderful, but the strange thing I have to say about it is that it seemed more like food than what was served at L'Espalier. I enjoyed it more. It landed somewhere on the spectrum between REALLY FANCY FANCY ART FOOD and GOOD GRUB and now that I've said that, I suspect I might spend some time later defining points on that spectrum. For now, let's say that if I were going to illustrate the spectrum using restaurants I've dined at in recent years, it would go like this, from FANCY^2 to GOOD GRUB and down to CALORIES FOR SURVIVAL:

10. L'Espalier (Boston)
9. Morimoto (Manhattan)
8. No. 9 Park (Boston)
7. Craigie on Main (Cambridge)
6. Bravo (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
5. The Mill at 2T (Tariffville, CT)
4. Toro (South Boston)
3. Rani Indian Bistro (Brookline, MA)
2. Soma (Beverly, MA)
1. Sugarcane (Peabody, MA)
0. Tennessee BBQ (Danvers, MA)
-1. Rickshaw Dumpling Bar (Manhattan)
-2. Outback Steakhouse (Danvers, MA)
-3. Omega Pizza and Subs (Salem, MA)
-4. McDonald's (Everywhere, USA)
-5. Fresh City (I-90, Massachusetts)

My companions and I debated heatedly over the order of this list. Admittedly, it's a terribly, terribly subjective list. What I'm trying to get at here is not about good food versus bad food. It's much more about food as art object versus food as calorie delivery system. At L'Espalier, the edibles were not at all about getting nutrients into a body; that's not why you put an oyster on a crystal pedestal with dry ice and LEDs. When I stopped at Fresh City on the way home from my recent trip to Troy, NY, there was absolutely NO REASON for me to eat the terrible terrible salad from Fresh City (hah!) except that my belly was rubbing my spine in an unpleasant manner and it had to stop. The chicken had been cooked sometime that week, I'm sure, and the green stuff had probably been pulled from the earth and sprayed with chemicals at least two weeks before to help it weather the trip from some aggro-conglomo-giant in southern climes. So, I actually kind of like McDonald's sometimes, especially since they got a conscience and started putting apple fries on the menu, so it's not about like. If I want a chicken nugget, I go to McDonald's for extruded chicken-product deep fried in salt-lard. (Have you noticed McNuggets come in four shapes? Parallelogram, oyster, dinner plate, and the state of Mississippi? This was hotly debated too--are there three McNugget shapes or four?--my house is SO FUN.)

L'Espalier is an institution of haute cuisine. That's what they're there for. They serve art, call it food, and charge you $250 per person. Morimoto is a vehicle for a celebrity chef. They serve somewhat more funky art, and charge you $200 per person. No. 9 Park starts to actually be food more than art, but there are still emulsions and foams and gels and things, but the pork shoulder tastes like pork. Craigie on Main is even more foodlike, with regional ingredients and more earthiness. This is dinner theater, where inventiveness is really important. From there on down the list each eatery (at least in my opinion) becomes less about food as art, and more about food as calories. Strangely enough, the further you travel in either direction in my spectrum, the less foodlike the food gets, from olive powder sprinkled over a White Chocolate Bavarian (Powdered olive, really! On a dessert! Woo!) to preserved poultry cubes on a bed of chemically treated greenery, all entombed in a corrugated plastic container (uck, urk, bleck).

Back to No. 9 Park, which is getting lost in all this marginalia. The wait staff was friendly and young. They smiled a lot, which the people at L'Espalier did not. The food there was Serious. No pork. No capes. The cocktails tasted as though they had booze in them, instead of the purple-silver lychee fairy liquid served at L'Espalier and Morimoto. I had BIG bites of good gluten free brioche at No. 9, and swirled it on the sturgeon plate to sop up the caviar without feeling even a little bit gauche. It was more yummy at No. 9 Park, less glossy and studied and none of the servers looked like s/he was wearing a ballroom dance posture brace under coat and tie. I liked it there. I liked looking out the window at the Christmas tree in the Boston Common, at the lights still in all of the trees. There was some uni emulsion, and so it's clear you can't have everything you want at No. 9 Park, but you know what? They asked me if I had any allergies OR AVERSIONS when they took my order, so I totally could have told them I think eating uni emulsion is like licking the smell of a bait bucket and they probably wouldn't have put any on my grilled abalone. But you know, I like the whole fancy art food thing, and you never know; I might actually grow to enjoy uni emulsion. Seaweed wasn't so great the first time I tried it either, and it grew on me. Not literally, seaweed growing on me, like Aquawoman or something, but it's tasty. I actively like seaweed now, although I thought it was gross the first time I tried it.

You know, I think the uni emulsion at No. 9 Park was actually much palatable than the one at L'Espalier. I don't know why. (Author's note: because it was uni veloute; that's why.) Maybe some day, I'll look at that bait-bucket smelling foamy stuff sitting all yellow and baleful on top of my poached seafood served in the cupped hands of an underwear model, and I'll go, "Oh, I LOVE UNI EMULSION!!!" You never know. It could happen.

Me and Totoro, signing out. We've blown our budget for anything higher than a 4 on the scale, for at least a while. So maybe me and the blue guy will take in a movie next time after scarfing a little Tennessee Barbecue.

Table for One

2012-01-02T09:20:00.008-05:00

I have long been in the habit of dining out alone. Generally, people seem to think this is weird. I'm a writer, so I give myself creative license to interpret people's expressions, their tone of voice, and so forth, in whatever way suits me, for dramatic effect. My interpretation of their carefully neutral looks, and wide smiles, and eye flickers to my hands and jewelry, is that they think it's weird that a woman will dine alone. I try not to do the mind-reading thing at home, though, because it just gets me into trouble there. But at a restaurant, especially when I'm dining alone, making up stories about what people are thinking provides entertainment value for you and for me, and so I present to you: Table for One at L'Espalier in Boston. I visited last night, the evening of January 01, 2012, and I was the only solo diner. Feeling puckish, I decided to bring Totoro with me to the restaurant to ring in the New Year. Here he is, sitting in my handbag. The maitre'd spotted him, but politely said nothing. I guess you never know when the Crazy Lady Who Dines at Fancy Restaurants with Plushies will cause some kind of scene.

Totoro turned out to be the least of their worries. The real trouble started when I took out my Moleskine notebook to annotate my meal. Suddenly, I was a woman dining alone in a fancy restaurant, taking notes, and the excitement started. I'm not sure who they thought I was at that point, but suddenly the descriptions of the food became very elaborate, and later in the meal, I was presented with the cheese menu, with the lineup of my grand fromage course carefully numbered, and a printout of the entire menu for Chef Frank McClelland's tasting journey, which I was told would be "nine or ten courses, all small bites - not a lot of food." (Side note: I suppose it's tough to calibrate what "not a lot of food" means. I don't think it meant the same thing to me as it meant to the server who said it.) Presented below is the printout of the tasting journey. It is an eight-course menu, but it doesn't include descriptions of the h'ors d'oeuvres, the intermezzo, the grand fromage, and the dessert tasting, all of which I will describe to the best of my ability. For some details all I have are impressions rather than the ingredients.

Warm Island Creek oyster with Maine sea urchin emulsion

Apple Street Farm egg mousse with Siberian Sturgeon caviar (the server said it was paddlefish caviar)

Butter poached Cacso Bay lobster with vanilla scented Apple Street Farm butternut squash, brown butter emulsion, and apple gel

Seared Hudson Valley foie gras with cognac-compressed banana, sauce Hollandaise, and candy cap mushrooms

Intermezzo

Spanish sea bass with Jerusalem artichoke puree, mushroom milk, pickled shallots, and "Maitre Gaspard"

Roasted squab with Black Mission "fig newton," pistachio, and burnt-licorice milk (my journey was gluten free, so I didn't have the "fig newton"

Roasted veal tenderloin with foraged mushrooms-Madeira ragout, hay-infused milk, and candied lemon peel

Colorado lamb loin, "cassoulet du Languedoc," with hazelnut-fines herbes sponge cake and Apple Street Farm root vegetables (no sponge cake for me)

Grand Fromage

Grand Dessert Tasting

That's what the menu said I would be getting (although it didn't mention the appetizers). I'm learning that when a chef says there will be eight courses, there will usually be four lighter courses (seafood or fois gras) and four "savory" courses (meat). But this doesn't include the appetizer (which in my experience is usually a trio), an intermezzo (which usually includes a sorbet), and a parade of "after dinner" experiences, such as cheese, desserts, truffles, petits fours, and so forth until you need a wheelbarrow to escape in. Each item placed before you is between one and three ounces, which, if you add everything up (a total of 6 oz. of cheese in the Grand Fromage), "not a lot of food" ends up being over a pound of very rich food. My advice to prospective travelers in the L'Espalier tasting journey: don't eat lunch. Don't take more than a taste of any bread that hits that table, or you may not make it through the journey without having to box something up. If you need to box something up, box up the cheese course, which will not suffer too much from transport and won't require your possibly inept reheating. Don't refrigerate it when you get home, just leave it on a cool place on the kitchen counter, away from the cat.

I'd like to back up now, in possibly annoying nonlinear fashion, to where my evening began. I booked two dinners for myself to celebrate the New Year: 1) L'Espalier for January 1st and; 2) No. 9 Park on January 2nd. Each restaurant has a tasting menu, and each is very expensive. Coat and tie is required (one would presume this is for the gentlemen; I didn't see any ladies in coat and tie). I dressed very carefully for dinner, diamond pendant, emerald and tanzanite rings from my rarely worn collection of such tony jewelry. New Mary Jane shoes, shiny candy apple red, but an otherwise conservative dark outfit with pinstripes. My black wool overcoat and cloche hat shaped like a bell. Strangely, I am not a clothes horse: I do not spend a lot of time thinking about clothing, shopping for clothing, or dressing. I shop without regard for labels, and think only of colors, patterns, and textures. I can wear anything with anything in my closet, because I have accumulated enough details in certain colors to bring any outfit together. Cornflower and cream, I can do that. Navies, cranberries, blacks, forest greens, rust colors, golds, browns. I am only ever conscious of what I'm wearing when I'm about to purchase something expensive and luxurious. Only then do I put on the diamonds. I think it has to do with the time I was once kicked out of an antiques shop in Sausalito, California. I was wearing a puffy denim jacket with a Tweety Bird on the sleeve, and apparently I didn't look as though I deserved to have anything to say about the quality of light on marble while wearing no makeup, and with Tweety Bird on my arm. I've found that if you add a few diamonds, they call you Madam and let you order whatever you want, even if you're dining with a stuffed Totoro.

This was my gift to myself for the New Year. I have resolved I will treat myself well this year. This doesn't mean I will give myself every comfort every moment; the comfort I'm giving myself today and tomorrow are symbolic of the care I will give to my spirit this year. I put on my diamonds. When I filled up my gas tank, I used Full Serve. When I drove to the restaurant, I used the valet parking. I tipped the valet, and I tipped the coat check lady for my coat and hat. I was escorted to my Table for One with everyone calling me by name, and they seated me by the window, at a very, very good table. The server noticed Totoro when I ordered my cocktail and was unfazed, but when he saw my notebook, he wobbled a little. There was a puff pasty in my appetizer trio, which he had to take away, because I had already several times specified my gluten intolerance. He brought the appetizer back, now with two barbecue sweet potato chips instead of the puff pastry, and spilled my cocktail while arranging the table for it. The cocktail was called the Aviation (gin, lemon, a very lush, dark Marachino cherry, creme de violette). The appetizer trio was the sweet potato chip (wedged into a pine cone for presentation), a spoon with a bite of smoked salmon with some sort of zingy foam and a few spikes of dill, and a shot glass with lobster bisque. When the server took away the empty plate, he came with an extra appetizer to make up for his spill: fluke sashimi with tiny radish and a citrus sauce flecked with herbs. A fluke for a fluke; I like to think L'Espalier has a sense of humor. I almost forgot that this was about me, about my comfort and luxury, as the dishes came out rapid fire and I tried to eat faster to keep up, but I eventually remembered, and gave myself permission to slow down, to carefully smell and look at each dish as it was set before me. Though it made the staff nervous, I took notes on each dish because it pleased me to do so. No doubt they thought I was a food writer, reviewing for someone or other. They probably get that all the time.

I love listening to the servers describe the dishes, especially when they do so with pride in the chef's inventiveness and the quality of his food. Good servers have an almost proprietary tone when talking about the dishes. This is the creation of their chef. He belongs to them, and his concerns are their concerns. His values are their values. The perfection of the food reflects on them, on their career decisions. There is nothing more prestigious and wonderful than to be striding across the dining room at L'Espalier carrying a cheesecloth full of mushroom powder that must be tapped over the fois gras to finish the dish at the guest's table. Good servers have a dignity in service that falls around them like a sacred order. I wonder if they have the same posture and accent when they bring dishes to the table at home. The romantic part of me hopes that they do, that's it's not just an act, that "chef" really is the honorific it sounds, and that they are proud of what they do for a living.

After the appetizer trio, and the complimentary fluke-for-a-fluke, the server brought me a plate of gluten free rolls, and I almost cried. They were redolent with parmesan, and chewy, hot, crusty. It was probably rice flour, and I was happy to have them while eating the rich and strange opening courses. In this blog post, I talk about my first experience with uni (sea urchin roe) and I'll admit that eating uni emulsion is similar to eating uni, which is like licking the smell of a bait bucket, only foamier. So I'm not such a fan of sea urchin, but the first course had such an amazing presentation, I would gladly experience the uni emulsion again. The server brought out a crystal bowl with a lighted pedestal center. In the bowl were river stones and strands of seaweed. On the lighted pedestal center was a pile of rock salt and the poached oyster in the shell. A bit of dry ice made the whole thing a misty, glowing sea jewel on the table. I'd never seen a dish so beautifully presented in my life.

If I had to pick my favorite of the dishes presented to me that night, it would be the egg mousse with paddlefish roe. It was rich and unusual and meltingly delicious, the server explained that Chef McClelland takes chief pride in the dairy produced at Apple Street Farm. I tried very hard to take good notes, but find that my notes aren't as good as the menu that I've reproduced above, so I will only lament that the menu doesn't capture the enchanting detail of a food experience of that caliber. The single leaf of celery on the poached lobster tail, the julienne apples, and various foams and gels and emulsions. The milk jelly with flash fried seaweed. The intermezzo was a spool of sweet cheese ribbon partially unraveled across a plate with two spheres of compressed pear, a tangy lime-and-something sorbet with a dot of creamy-something, and a savory crumble of something else. (Terrible notes!) The accompanying drink was presented in a cordial glass, two layers of apple cider with a "vanilla sphere" in the middle. Tapioca, or gelatin, or something, the sphere rolled across my tongue and burst with vanilla at the end of the drink, and I was so delighted I laughed out loud. Table for one; crazy lady with the plush Totoro cracking up with delight over the intermezzo. The server smiled and said he'd done the same thing when he tasted it for the first time; such kindness (he was not the spilly server who forgot I was gluten free, but another, more smiley and confident person). I had some liberal guilt over the dishes: the fois gras (duck abuse), the veal (baby cow abuse), the lamb (baby sheeps, baa!), and the squab. Squab is pigeon. I didn't feel sorry for the pigeon; I just thought it was odd to be eating something my father might call a "flying rat." I've noticed this about fine dining: you end up eating the oddest things. Bring out the beaver noses!

As I type this blog post, I'm eating the Grand Fromage for brunch. The fromager at L'Espalier is Louis Risoli, and my selection included:

Cloud 9: Woodcock Farm, Vermont. Brie style cheese, tangy and citrusy.

Coupole, Vermont Butter and Cheese Creamery, Websterville, Vermont. This yummy cheese is creamy, dense, and pleasantly goaty.

Pecorino Ginepro, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. A traditionally made, well aged cheese from Northern Italy. The rind is rubbed with juniper berry and balsamic vinegar; while the interior paste is light and flaky with a robust, buttery flavor. Excellent with honey and fruit.

Pleasant Ridge Reserve, Uplands Cheese, Dodgeville, Wisconsin. Seasonally made from the milk of seven breeds of cows. This outstanding semi-firm cheese has a spicy flavor, mixed with caramel and nutty flavors. A.C.S. "Best of Show is 2001, 2004, and 2011."

Nocciolo, Lombardy, Italy. A smooth-textured Taleggio-style cheese. This cheese is a nose-ful, but a nice dose of sweetness saves the day.

Bleu Benedictin, Abbaye St Benoit, Quebec. A tradition of French cheese making, established in Quebec in the 1600's, was maintained in this Abbey during the 200 "Cheddar Years" that followed the British conquest. This blue is well aged, with a natural rind and a deep, earthy flavor.

I love a history lesson with my cheese. Some of these cheeses are, indeed, a nose-ful, but it's delightful to sit here in my dining room, still enjoying the meal the next day when I'm not brimming with fish, and fowl, and all manner of culinary oddities. I had them pack up the Grand Fromage because I figured it would weather the best of all the choices, after taking a tiny bite of each of the cheeses and the accompanying garnishes of fruits and nuts (skipping the breads - another gluten free fail). I was glad to have saved a tiny, tiny bit of room for the Grand Dessert. There was a quenelle of ginger ice cream, two dense cylinders of chocolate (one dark, one caramelized white) with power-packed dots of blood orange gel, and a gorgeous, dense hemisphere of vanilla custard, the whole plate swirled with coconut mango cream. I'm reminded now of the parade of cutlery throughout the journey. I had a fork and two spoons to eat my dessert with. A knife and fork for the Grand Fromage. A fish knife for the bass. Sharp knives for the squab, veal, and lamb. Each course came with a special set of cutlery, sometimes shaped to the specific purpose. Each course came with a special plate for optimum presentation. For this meal, because of my seating, near a window in a large dining room, the focus was on the food, the service, the plate and cutlery. Bursting with eight courses and assorted warm ups and cool downs, I was faced with a box of petits fours. I took a white chocolate cranberry and a blueberry jelly, and with a trembling hand and ponderous belly, paid my bill, collected my coat and hat, summoned my car, and drove home with a bag of Grand Fromage in the back seat.

Between acts in the fabulous play of food, I took my entertainment in my fellow diners. The two thirty-something Asian women, one younger and slimmer, one older and plumper. A couple on their anniversary, sipping champagne and eating caviar. The woman was wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse and a strapless bra that provided shelf-like support for breasts she rested on the table while clapping her hands over the caviar. A Russian couple chatting away about nothing in particular, looking stoic and Vodka sotted, while consulting the sommelier for the "right" bottle of wine to have with their degustation (fewer dishes than the full tasting journey, but with the cheeses, desserts, and so forth). The thirty-something British couple possibly on a luxury vacation, possibly reveling in the power of the pound over the dollar. The upright, proper, perfectly postured wait staff, who escorted me to the W.C. three times, folding my napkin and tucking in my chair each time, with their encyclopedic knowledge of the sauces and emulsions and powders and potions on each plate. The professional coat-checker ensuring each guest received a pumpkin spiced madeleine from pastry chef Jiho Kim on the way out, with a gift card entitling the bearer to 20% off your next lunch. Going to L'Espalier was like going to a carefully choreographed modern dance. There were a few missteps here and there (I refuse to attribute the plate crash on the other side of the dining room to either Totoro or to my notebook) but it was altogether a splendid experience, and a beautiful way to start the New Year.

I feel my life telescoping strangely when I do these things for myself, when I reserve a table for one in this way, where I don't take out my reader, and instead experience haute cuisine intensely and joyfully. I admit that I Twittered the courses for those who stayed home for the sake of pocketbook and palate; after all licking the smell of a bait bucket isn't everyone's idea of a fun time, especially with that kind of price tag.

Happy New Year, food geeks.

Year in Review - 2011

2012-01-01T10:04:00.036-05:00

For the last several years, I've been posting a reading list for the year. Each year, it's my goal to read one book per week, so a "win" means there are at least 52 books on this list. I haven't always "won," but this year I have 53 books on the list that I read in 2011. I'm fairly sure that I read more books than this, but forgot to make note of them. This year, I have not created links. This year, I re-read several books, and there are no children's picture books to pad the list.

Here is my 2011 reading list.

1. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

2. The Magicians - Lev Grossman

3. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature - Gary K. Wolfe

4. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

5. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

6. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

7. Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

8. Aspects of the Novel - E.M. Forster

9. 1-2-3 Magic - Thomas W. Phelan, PhD

10. Codependent No More - Melody Beattie

11. The New Codependency - Melody Beattie

12. Romancing the Shadow: A Guide to Soul Work for a Vital, Authentic Life - Zweig and Wolf

13. We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love - Robert A. Johnson

14. Thoughts Without a Thinker - Mark Epstein

15. The Fractal Organization: Creating sustainable organizations with the Viable System Model - Patrick Hoverstadt

16. The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty

17. The Island of Jayne Grind - Lon Prater

18. The Artist's Way - Julie Cameron

19. Walking on Water: Reflection of Art and Faith - Madeleine L'Engle

20. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within - Natalie Goldberg

21. Stop Walking on Eggshells - Paul T. Mason and Randi Kreger

22. The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples - John Gottman

23. The 2011 Rhysling Awards Anthology - David Lunde, Ed.

24. Where Angels Fear to Tread - E.M. Forster

25. Love In Abundance: A Counselor's Guide to Open Relationships - Kathy Labriola

26. Manifesto - Anonymous (dedrabbit)

27. Warrior's Apprentice - Lois McMaster Bujold

28. The Vor Game - Lois McMaster Bujold

29. Cetaganda - Lois McMaster Bujold

30. Ethan of Athos - Lois McMaster Bujold

31. Brothers in Arms - Lois McMaster Bujold

32. Borders of Infinity - Lois McMaster Bujold

33. Mirror Dance - Lois McMaster Bujold

34. Memory - Lois McMaster Bujold

35. Komarr - Lois McMaster Bujold

36. A Civil Campaign - Lois McMaster Bujold

37. Diplomatic Immunity - Lois McMaster Bujold

38. Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold

39. The Marketplace - Laura Antoniou

40. Imagined London - Anna Quindlen

41. The Slave - Laura Antoniou

42. The Trainer - Laura Antoniou

43. The Magician King - Lev Grossman

44. Dear Raven & Joshua - Raven Kaldera and Joshua Tenpenny

45. Real Service - Raven Kaldera and Joshua Tenpenny

46. Sacred Power, Holy Surrender - Raven Kaldera and Joshua Tenpenny

47. Power Circuits - Raven Kaldera

48. Carrie's Story - Molly Weatherfield

49. Safe Word - Molly Weatherfield

50. When Things Fall Apart - Pema Chodron

51. The Wisdom of No Escape - Pema Chodron

52. Whip Smart

53. Howard's End - E.M. Forster

Many of these books were read on the commuter rail, on the line once known as the Boston & Maine. Several were read on my Sony Reader, which I have grown to love, as I can read one-handed, or with gloves on. I'm sure I'll strive to read a book a week in 2012; the big question is whether I'll give myself a writing quota this year. I suppose you'll see the answer here, or not.

No Compromise

2011-12-08T08:00:00.013-05:00

Hello, my name is Joy, and it's been 117 days since my last post.

In my last post, I said I was on my way to England. Just so you know, I went, I saw London, I sat in a cow pasture in Leeds for three days in the mud, and I listened to a lot of music. In London again afterward, I ate in restaurants and went to museums, and took a lot of photographs, which I haven't yet reviewed. By the time I process the photos, I hope I'll have processed the experience, and I'll have something to write about. I didn't take notes on my trip, so we'll see what bubbles up.

What have I been doing since I got home? Reading. Thinking. Going to restaurants I've never visited before. Thinking some more. Writing in my paper journal (which, as you know, is teetering on the edge of being thrown into the shredder). Sometimes, I do that. I just pack up my paper journals and throw them into the shredder and hit the reset button. I haven't done that lately; I still have five fat journals lying around, containing the thoughts too boring and embarrassing to share with the world.

I've been wanting to write about my most recent restaurant jaunt, because it came up in a message I sent to my new anonymous pen pal. (That's another thing I've been up to lately: cultivating pen pals.) I don't know who this fellow is. He's a series of photos and series of messages posted on a friendship and dating site. I'm putting myself out there to make friends, to see if anyone actually wants to talk about the things that interest me, like books, films, restaurants, photography. Though my life is full and wonderful, I have enough room in my life for friends, so I've struck up a correspondence that has inspired me to write a post about food and philosophy. How is this a new direction, you ask? It isn't; that's why it's wonderful. Here I am, back again, ready to resume writing about food and philosophy.

Craigie on Main is an upscale restaurant in Cambridge that has been on my wish list for a year. I enjoy going to all kinds of restaurants, and I very occasionally will go to an especially fine restaurant, as more of a "dinner theater" experience, where dinner is the theater. I went to Craigie on Main by myself a couple of weeks ago, and got a seat at the chef's counter. The weekend before, I ate at the chef's counter at The Mill at 2T, in Tariffville CT. If you visit the website, you'll actually see a photo of the chef's counter. That was my very first time sitting at a chef's counter, and it was a grand experience to watch the chef at work. Little did I know how wonderful it could be, though. The kitchen at the Mill was what you might expect for elegant bistro style cooking, with a sous chef, an assistant chef, and a main chef tossing things into pans with the kitchen guy ducking in with clean cookware every ten minutes, and everything manipulated with tongs in a fairly careful fashion, but eating at the counter at Craigie on Main was a different experience altogether.

I sat near the cold counter, and taped in front of the team lead was a sign in capital letters that said, "NO COMPROMISE." I have a lot to learn about kitchens, so the language I'm going to use will be ignorant of kitchen terminology. I'll make it all up, and hopefully you'll be able to follow. There were three people working what I've just called the cold counter, and one of them was the lead. He bossed the other two around. The whole kitchen was very talky; the restaurant has a tasting menu and whenever one is ordered, it's shouted into the kitchen. "Four sixes" means there are four six-course meals that have just been ordered. When the chef yells "four sixes!" the whole kitchen yells "four sixes!" back. Imagine, the chef's counter is six seats looking into the cold counter, with the dishwashers running in and out of swinging doors at the back. To the right is the grill, with four people dancing around each other, and further to the right four more people are managing the things that take a longer time to cook. At the back, people are feverishly keeping up with various prep activities. At the front, the chef stands directing the whole thing like a conductor directing a symphony. He yells for octopus, the octopus is brought to him, and with a practiced touch, he plates it beautifully, wipes the rim of the plate and yells for a runner. He does quality control. He keeps the trains running on time. He yells at the team leads to yell at their teams to keep up the pace. He's focused, an artist, a stage manager, a passionate tyrant, and he still has time to smile at the guests as they thank him on their way out past the reservation desk. He wears a perfectly low white toque (that's the chef's hat).

No compromise. I knew what it meant after watching the people at the cold counter. I don't remember my entire meal, but I remember what they prepared at that counter; I watched them moving through their routine, order after order. After a few passes, I think I could have given it a shot, but I could never have kept up. No compromise meant that each time the chef prepared the starting trio for a 6- or 8-course tasting menu, he took sparkling white dishware from refrigerated storage, three square dishes on a long rectangular plate. He took several plastic tubs from the refrigerator, and opened each one with a practiced swipe. With a pair of tweezers, he picked up a tiny sardine filet, blotted it on a napkin, tapped a blot of hummus into a dish, rested a crouton disk the size of a nickel onto the blot of hummus, set the tiny filet atop the crouton, and with another pair of tweezers, selected a perfect spring of micro-greenery across the tiny filet. If the green was not at the perfectly harmonious angle, he picked it up with the tweezers and re-positioned it for perfection. After two more tiny, perfect tastes of something were meticulously built in the other two dishes, he swept the trio to the chef with a barked alert, "Walking!" Once all four trios were delivered, he snapped all of the lids onto the plastic containers, put them away, wiped down his counter, and got ready for the next persnickety dish in line. All this time, he danced to avoid colliding with the woman building the plates of oysters and sashimi-style scallops, danced to avoid the dishwasher, who came in to replenish cookware for the entire kitchen every five minutes. When the lead was not building a plate of something, he was baking perfect nickel-sized croutons, frying strips of sweet potato for salad garnish, slicing chives in perfect, microscopic confetti. I think if you had measured carefully, you would see that each pinhead-sized bit of chive was precisely the same size and shape.

No compromise, oh no indeed. I suspect chefs have training similar to that of bomb squads; one false move means death. There was no wasted motion, no cockeyed dishes, each scallop, mussel, micro green, oyster shell, flower petal, and hand made pickle laid purposefully and mindfully in its place. They served ketchup, pickles, and slaw with the burgers (only available from the bar), and they arranged the slaw in a dish with tweezers, each mound piled with maximum artistry. They warmed the ice cream scoop in the palms of their hands to roll out a perfect round of celery apple sorbet onto each plate, with a little pile of brilliant green candied celery, and a knotty mound of stracciatella cheese. Passion, precision, speed. They called out times, one minute and thirty seconds to plating. Once, "A REAL thirty seconds for plating!" and yes, that plate went out in thirty seconds, looking as beautiful as all the rest, a quail arranged in sections, such that its little clawed feet rose perpendicular to the plate.

I had eight courses while watching the chefs at the cold counter, but I lost track of the number of dishes they set before me. I can't recall if the sorbet was meant to be its own course, or the hot mulled cider at the very end, with the malted barley marshmallow rocking on a cocktail sword across the top of the steaming cup. There were cockels and mussels, pork belly, scallops, pumpkin soup, a trio of BANG at the beginning -- tiny intense bites to wake up the palate -- quail, a complex ragu with rich organ meat of some sort, I can't remember it all, sadly. Next time, I will take my camera and capture it all, but what really struck me was that sign, NO COMPROMISE, and how important everything felt. How these people make a living building all these perfect and ephemeral things, dancing around one another without colliding, talking to one another, making agreements, solving problems, starting over if needed with such focus, there is no room for impatience. Mindfulness, everywhere. Intensity and artistry. And then the subtle shift near the end; when the last orders wrapped up, focus turned to replenishing plundered tubs of this and that, probably for the next day, everyone still moving, but everything more languorous and sultry.

I've been thinking about that sign ever since: NO COMPROMISE. After long thought, I realize that what I loved about the experience at Craigie on Main was the validation of perfectionism. According to some, and my therapist would look askance at me for reaching yet again for "the right answer", perfectionism can be bad and it can be good. Here's an article about that. I'm sure you could easily find more if you look. I think the kind of perfectionism I saw at Craigie on Main could be good or bad; it depends on the chef. If the chef with the tweezers goes home and thinks, "Well, maybe not every micro green was placed at a perfect 45 degree angle, but I love that whole mindful experience of disappearing into the work, the customers seemed happy, nobody threw a pan at my head or quit the kitchen (tonight), and wow, my partner is great, and I think I'll spend some time relaxing with him tonight," then I think this person is not harmed by his perfectionism. If he goes home and thinks, "45 degree angle, 45 degree angle, 45 degree angle, geez, I sure messed that up, 45 degree angle, please shut up honey, I don't care about your day, 45 degree angle, 45 degree angle, I hate myself when I can't pull out that 45 degree angle" then I think maybe perfectionism has this guy in its grasp in a bad way. Maybe he has become overly attached to that 45 degree angle to the point where he's an addict. No more 45 degree angle for you, you 45 degree angle addict.

I can lose time like an alien abductee, reading a sign like that, because it presumes to advise me, and I'm always looking for advice. I'm always looking for the way out of the struggle of life. I'm always looking for the solution. Just don't compromise, this sign says. And my gut reaction is to say, "Yes! That's it! If I crack the code of NO COMPROMISE, I won't suffer any more! Because if I'm a perfectionist, all I need to do to be happy, is to accept my perfectionism, and be a GOOD perfectionist! I love great food, and there's this sign that says perfectionism is good, and so what I really need to do in order to stop suffering is to be a perfectionist who's okay with not being perfect, like the chef who can stop being a perfectionist at home, and as soon as I have that revelation, I'll stop suffering!" Eureka! It's the answer! (Cue that AAAAHHHH! sound of the gates of heaven opening.)

And this is how a great meal, and a sign at a restaurant can throw me into a tizzy of unparalleled self-absorption, and whoosh, there goes the time. There goes all of the mindful now-ness, frittered away. And I can climb onto that sad thought and ride it to hell, too. I suffer over how much I suffer, and get bummed out that I can't seem to stop. I know I need to stop trying to stop, and I stink at that, and wow, here I am again. I'm terrible at this!

From The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron:

When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are.

Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.

One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are.

In one of the Buddha's discourses, he talks about the four kinds of horses: the excellent horse, the good horse, the poor horse, and the really bad horse. The excellent horse, according to the sutra, moves before the whip even touches its back; just the shadow of the whip or the slightest sound from the driver is enough to make the horse move. The good horse runs at the lightest touch of the whip on its back. The poor horse doesn't go until it feels pain, and the very bad horse doesn't budge until the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones.

When Shunryu Suzuki tells the story in his book Zen Mind, Beginners' Mind, he says that when people hear this sutra, they always want to be the best horse, but actually when we sit, it doesn't matter whether we're the best horse or the worst horse. He goes on to say that in fact, the really terrible horse is the best practitioner...because we find ourselves to be the worst horse, we are inspired to try harder.

Everybody who has ever felt even a moment of arrogance knows that arrogance is just a cover-up for really feeling that you're the worst horse, and always trying to prove otherwise.

And when, inevitably, I search through these phrases and stories to find the truth, I let my eyes wander to something else:

"If you are interested in these teachings, then you have to accept the fact that you're never going to get it all together." It was a shocking statement to me. He said with a lot of clarity. "You are never going to get it all together, you're never going to get your act together, fully, completely. You're never going to get all the little loose ends tied up.

You're never going to get all of the micro greens adjusted to a perfect 45 degree angle. There will always be one quail where the little feet don't stand up, with the tiny claws in the air; they'll be a little overcooked and dangle at the knees. The temperature of the bowl will be off just a little bit, and the peaks won't form in the egg white. You'll eventually find a grit in the clam. A dish will be dropped. The octopus will be burned. You'll set off the fire alarm. You'll go 117 days between posts. You'll leave a typographical error in a letter to your pen pal, wake up in the morning with bad breath, yell at your dog for being a dog. You'll want to touch it lightly with your mind, and move on, and instead you'll hold onto suffering longer than you'd prefer. You'll throw your journals away, and try to write them in a new style, a more perfect style, or you'll keep them as a reminder of failures, so lovely. If you're like me, you'll be the very worst horse, and you won't move until you feel the pain of the whip in the marrow of your bones.

Touch it, and let go.

Let's Get This Party Started

2011-08-16T11:30:00.010-04:00

Oh boy, do I hate airplanes.

Grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change
the courage to change the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.

I saw this prayer tattooed inside someone's forearm once. I'm glad there are tattoo artists out there who will do text, even though they'd prefer to be doing art. I have heard many tattoo artists complain bitterly about being artists not typesetters, but I'm still glad there are some who need the money badly enough to make a compromise. They get money for dinner, and maybe the vast majority of tattoo recipients get what amounts to a cheaply borrowed sentiment that only goes skin deep. I'm going to guess that for every 25 cheaply borrowed sentiments, there's one person who needs that tattoo like an A.A. meeting needs coffee. Who on earth needs the serenity prayer tattooed on their body somewhere easily viewed by the wearer? People who have a hard time doing what it says. People who have trouble accepting that there are things they can't change. People who know what needs changing, and who have trouble finding the courage to make that change. People who have trouble telling the difference. That's me, me, and me.

I've spent a lot more time in the past year writing about not being able to write than writing about anything else. I've spent most of three years thinking about and raging against things I can't change. I've hurt myself doing it. When I sat down to write this blog post, I saw that there was an unfinished draft of a post: more complaints about not being able to get unblocked, and I freaked out reading it. It finally hit me, finally. How much of my life am I going to spend thinking about how to spend my life, and complaining about not being able to spend it the way I'd prefer? How much of my life am I going to spend wrestling with the things I can't change? Maybe a little more, here and there. Sometimes, you have to turn your thoughts over in order to see what's going on. But honestly, once you know it's time to make a decision. You can't wish away reality. You can wait for reality to change, but you might be waiting for a long time. You might be waiting forever. You might get to the end of your life and regret all that waiting; I know I will, if I don't get my act together, accept the things I can't change, and change the things I can, to live a better life right now. I've taken enough time to ponder my choices. Now it's time to get out there.

I'm not altogether sure what this will mean for my blogging. This blog has been my sole creative outlet this year, and I've enjoyed making posts. I'm quite certain that I will not be able to post every day if I'm doing other creative things in addition to going to work, keeping house, tending my responsibilities, etc. I may need to move to a weekly model instead of trying to keep the daily posting going. Like I said, I'm not sure what's going to happen, but something must. It's time. It's past time, but it's time. I'm going to London in a few days, and I've just finished charging all of my electronics, printing out all of my confirmation pages, setting up my international cell phone service (all with a lot of help from someone special). I'm going to lay down and look at my travel book now, and then maybe I'll poke around the Internets to see what I can see. People keep saying, "Oh you MUST see the Tower of London." Well, I may, but again, I may not. I may instead go to places like the Museum of Broken Relationships, the Doctor Who Experience, the Tate Modern, the London Eye, and various and sundry restaurants (yes, we will have Indian, yes, we will have pub food, yes, I will let my daughter order something alcoholic). We will see David Tennant in Much Ado About Nothing. In the middle somewhere, we will attend the Leeds Music Festival.

Art. Music. Architecture. Food. Photography.

This is it. Let's get this party started.

The Future

2011-08-16T07:30:00.000-04:00

Saturday's film was The Future, by the performance artist Miranda July. You can see the preview here. Maybe the preview makes the film look weird, partly narrated by a cat named Paw-paw, who is most often shown in the film as two disembodied paws sitting on a sheet of newspaper, one in a plaster cast. Let me tell you: this film is weirder than that. The narrative lurches along from one idea to the next as if the story-boards were a free-association game, some sort of random series of events based on snippets of song on an alternative radio station. There's this mid-30's couple living in a modest city apartment as if only recently graduated from college. The scene opens with a soft-conflict over a glass of water, as they both sit entranced by the internet. "Will you get me a glass of water?" "I wasn't getting up; I was just changing position." "If we had a crane, we would be able to get a glass of water without getting up." "How would you turn on the faucet?" "With my brain." "It's sad that you aren't doing something else with your brain."

My companion watched the entire film wearing what she calls the "WTF face." Yes, the couple goes to the animal shelter and adopts a sick cat, who presumably only has six months to live, unless he bonds with them, and maybe it's five years. The reality of commitment, of maturity, rocks the couple's world (Sophie and Jason). They say that in five years, they'll be 40, and "40 is basically 50," and "that's it for us." What does an immature, 30-something couple do with their lives when they think they only have 30 days to live? One quits his job to sell trees door-to-door, the other quits her job as a dance instructor to make a series of YouTube videos of herself dancing. Both fail spectacularly. A desperate Jason stops time, and creates a parallel world in which he and Sophie sit frozen in their apartment, while another Sophie continues an affair with a divorced manufacturer of signs and banners. I feel bad about giving any more of a summary than this, because I wouldn't want to ruin the splendid "this is SO WEIRD" vibe that may or may not get while watching the film.

In his review, Roger Ebert says, "On the surface, this film is an enchanting meditation. At its core is the hard steel of individuality." It seems to me that Ebert took the film on its own terms and refused to critique it for what it's not. He's a smart guy; he's got better things to do. Instead, he saw the film for what it was, a quirky self-portrait, but a self-portrait of shadow things, stones skipping in the mind to create emotion-scapes. It's silly to expect a linear story in the shadow realms. Of course we will find our mirror selves there, emotional grotesques who do flips on ego-trapezes. There is part of me who is twelve years old, who will always be twelve, who would have understood why it was important to bury herself to the neck in her back yard while her father stood at the grill in his apron. The containment would have felt safe, when otherwise the world was blowing her apart. Talking to the moon? Stopping time? Well, sure. That's what happens on the inside of you, inside of me, in those turbulent shadow lands. Especially when those insides don't look so much like other people's outsides.

I'm given to wonder what we human beings would look like, if more people's outsides looked like their insides. If we would all be hunted down, seduced, and dragged from our hiding places by our security blankets, to return us home. Home, where we don't know what scary truth we will have to face next.

Exploding Spaceships

2011-08-15T09:22:00.003-04:00

There's an image of me that clings like Saran Wrap: Joy doesn't like stories (whether in book or in film format) that prominently feature explosions. There's an element of truth to this, but it's not an absolute correlation. I tend not to prefer stories that have a high explosion-to-dialogue (ETD) ratio, but it's not that I don't like explosions. What I look for in a great story is more often than not absent in films and books with a high ETD ratio, though there are several notable exceptions (see Band of Brothers and any number of war-themed films). To me, a great story comes from great characters thrown into difficult situations. A great story questions the meaning of my existence, and gets me thinking about my own life, my own choices, and whether I'm living the way I want to live. The stories that make me think stay with me long after I'm done watching or reading, and more and more, I'm prioritizing stories that make me think over stories that merely entertain.

I've been reading the Miles Vorkosigan books because they are important to someone I care about. I read Cordelia's Honor and The Warrior's Apprentice a long time ago, in high school, but I stopped seriously reading science fiction in my early twenties. I was going to college at the time, and my reading tastes changed as my mind matured. Back in high school, I wanted to be entertained; I didn't want to think about much. I disliked the required reading: Hawthorne, Melville, and Fenimore Cooper; it was too much work for too little pay off, where pay off was entertainment. George Orwell was not enough of a bridge between science fiction and "the classics." By the time I got to college and started studying Latin and Greek (and works of great literature such as The Odyssey, The Illiad, and The Aeneid), I was ready to think, I think. I'd gone through many phases of pleasure reading: science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, mystery, true crime, techno-thrillers, and I discovered that what I liked reading best (and still like) was a certain kind of fiction that was most often shelved in with the "general fiction," but that had a certain weird resonance of the fabulous: Murakami, Oates, Proulx, Roth, Updike, Irving, Fowles, Alex Garland, and so forth. I liked thinking about big things, and these authors made me think. Sometimes they made me think really hard. Sometimes, reading changed my life.

By the time I circled back to Lois McMaster Bujold at almost 40 years old, I didn't want to go back to mainstream science fiction shelved in the ghetto in the back of the bookstore behind the romance novels. I was accustomed to thinking and accustomed to improving myself, and I had prioritized what books I thought would help me do that best. I felt that reading SF was not a good use of my time, because it was too hard to search the chaff for the wheat. This time around, I said to myself, I would read the Vorkosigan books as a favor, and nothing more. I had them on e-reader, and I had tidied up my office and put away the to-be-read pile in favor of making a clean slate for myself and starting a novel writing project, and knew I could procrastinate my way through the series if nothing else. Unexpectedly, these books are giving me a lot to think about.

So far, I've read the following Miles Vorkosigan books and short stories, using the omnibus method:

Shards of Honor
Barrayar
The Warrior's Apprentice
"The Mountains of Mourning"
The Vor Game
Cetaganda
Ethan of Athos
"Labyrinth"
"Borders of Infinity"

I'm in the midst of the beginning of Brothers in Arms right now, which I've been told is "where it starts to get good." Apparently, I'm paying my dues so I can enjoy the payoff later. The novels and short stories have been firmly rooted in the space opera tradition so far, with lots of combat scenes and exploding space ships. Nonetheless, I have developed especial affection for Miles Vorkosigan's parents, Aral Vorkosigan and Cordelia Naismith. Aral and Cordelia aren't perfect; they are fully fleshed characters that I care about. They do things that they regret. They get enmeshed in things they'd prefer to leave alone. They're heroic indeed, but they're scarred by their heroism. They have a particular pathos that I recognize from my own life. At one point, Cordelia scolds herself for a momentary lack of acceptance in her relationship with Aral. She tells herself that if she wanted to be the wife of a happy man, then she ought to have married a happy man to begin with. Instead, Cordelia fell in love with the unbearable beauty of pain, and she only has herself to blame. Aral is Aral, and loving him is hard for a multitude of reasons, and loving him is worth the pain.

There are, perhaps, too many exploding space ships so far for my taste, but there is meaning in these books so far, if I have the energy to dig for it. There is a reason to believe that these characters have something interesting to say about the problem of pain. They have plenty to say about dignity, honor, compassion, integrity, and love. So much that I need to work hard while I'm reading to remember that the people in these books are not people, but the idealized workings of a liberal female mind. It's easy to fall in love with the romance in these books, to wish to be a little more heroic, a little stronger, wiser, and more compassionate. It easy to overlook the opportunities for heroism in a quiet life, where there are no spaceships, lower risk of death by squashing or plasma arc or starvation. Where people do not carry swords or walk around with devastating scars from life-changing trauma. It's easy to be seduced by the opera, and forget that real life is full of heroes, and opportunity for heroism. It's full of opportunity to love where there is no love, to accept where there is no acceptance, to fight the terrible gravity of anxiety, boredom, and mundane frustration.

I can see through the spaceships, and will do so if the reward is worth the cost. In this case, it's worth it.

What Do I Do Now?

2011-08-10T08:30:00.005-04:00

After giving that sermon on creativity, where did I go? I'm not blogging, so what am I doing about it? Am I taking my own advice on this creativity stuff? Shouldn't I be talking about that here? Well, yes, probably.

Here's what I've been doing about it:

With help, I cleaned up my office. The boxes of stuff were sorted and the stuff put away. The stacks of "to be read" books were shelved. There are now many, many books on the shelf with bookmarks in them. So be it. If they are on the shelf, out the way, they can't hurt me. Strangely, if they are piled on my bedside table, with bookmarks in them, they are officially "unfinished" and so on my to-do list. If they are shelved, they are no longer on my to-do list.

I unpacked the box of bathroom stuff into a big basket, which I put in the bathroom closet, where the box of stuff used to be. That was bothering me, something also on my to-do list. I cleaned the refrigerator downstairs, and the refrigerator upstairs, and put vegetable matter on the compost heap. I purchased a wine cabinet for my kitchen, and a small dresser for my bedroom, and reorganized some stuff to fit them. I put my clothing through the dry cleaner. I switched my winter/summer clothing from storage (all the sweaters are in a bin under my bed now). One of my companions did a reorganization of my CDs and DVDs. I try to keep up with the weekly delivery of organic produce from Silverbrook Farm.

I invited friends over for a BBQ. It threatened rain, so I sent out for BBQ instead, and it was delicious. We sat around talking, playing card games, doing nothing at all in particular. It was fun, the first time I'd had non-family guests in my new house. I hope they will come again.

All of that done, I put 1.5-hour blocks of time on the calendar, called "creative hour." It usually takes me 30 minutes of hemming and hawing before I settle down to work, so 1.5 hours is really just an hour. When those time blocks have arrived, I've looked at them, yawned, and picked up a book to read. Yes, you heard it here. What I'm doing with my beautifully reorganized life, and the momentum generated by giving an actual sermon on creativity: reading. I've read three books in seven days. You see, it's another thing that's been on my to-do list for a while, reading this series of books so I can talk about them with the person who recommended them. I've wanted to do it, and just not had the time. Guess what? I got things organized, and now I have the time to knock things off of my to-do list.

There are so many items on my to-do list, I think it could encircle the planet, and I just keep adding more to it. "Write a novel," is on the to-do list, but it has been deprioritized, because I haven't been able to figure out how to think on that scale. At home, I want the instant-reward system. Take out the trash, and get my brownie points. Success! It's satisfying. At work, I have very few of these instant-reward moments, because I'm a middle manager. It's my job to slog along, day-in, day-out, to cope with ongoing issues. It's like being chief of laundry in house of six people. If you work all day, you can achieve a moment where all of the laundry is clean, folded, and put away. But it only lasts for a moment, and then someone puts on a fresh pair of socks, and then it's over. I have those moments of rest at work, but they're rare. It's tough to get home from a job like that, and not want to just attack something easy on the to-do list, one you can do in five minutes or three hours. Attacking one that will take a year just feels like getting home from work, and doing the second job, only you don't get paid for the second job. In fact, you have to pay for the privilege in terms of energy, time, and relationship nurture. It's hard to nurture a relationship when you're glued to a computer.

Where this post finds me is having knocked many, many items from my to-do list, in preparation for having dedicated creative time every day. And there it is, on the calendar. Creative hour. And there I am, too. I stand there, look at the time I've blocked off, and then pick up another book to read. It's been such a long time since I could just read a book for an hour and go to bed early. I go to work, I come home, have dinner, do a few chores, go to my room, look at all of the well organized things that no longer need organizing, ignore my computer, read a book for an hour, and go to bed early. Lather, rinse, repeat, until I'm so bored I need to create something or die. Maybe that's the trick. The doing needs to be less odious than not doing. So, I sit and read for a while and enjoy it. Rest, read, think. Give it some time, see if the reading packs down into the muck to ferment, and start producing the ethanol gases on which the engine runs.

All of this is a fancy way of saying that I cleaned my desk, I cleared my calendar, and I haven't started yet. I still have all those inner enemies, yawping away, and I need to figure out how to get started anyway.

After Ever After

2011-08-05T10:45:00.003-04:00

Remember when I wrote about the 2011 Rhysling Award Anthology?

One of my writing friends commented on that post, and then went out and wrote this post, which is an invitation to discuss speculative poetry. She has invited a sort of link around, and so I'm closing my little part of the loop. It looks as though it's a kind of "anonymous author" sort of blog, so I'm not going to name names, here (though I suppose anyone with even a little Google fu will be able to figure things out).

Someone has already done some hard work assembling a list of URLs for online speculative poetry, so please consult the Wikipedia entry for speculative poetry to see that list.

Manifesto

2011-08-03T07:58:00.010-04:00

My copy of Manifesto came from the Newbury Comics in Peabody, MA. I was there to take a small boy window shopping, and I can't remember if I bought anything but the little white book. It's two hundred pages long, perfect bound with plain white card stock. It has no graphics, inside or out, no title on the cover, the spine, or the first page. The only identifying mark was the store's UPC sticker, and publishing contact information on the bottom of the last page, facing into the spine, a phone number, a PO box in Northampton, and an e-mail address (dedrabbit@yahoo.com) . My copy did not come with the flyer insert, but I've linked to the insert, below. I picked up the book because it looked like a mistake, a plain white spine with no writing, next to books by the Chucks (Klosterman and Palahniuk). Last time I'd seen plain little books bound in blank card stock with no titles on the spines, I was studying Russian at the Defense Language Institute.

Here is everything of interest I've gleaned from the internet on Manifesto:

Review from Perfect Porridge: Manifesto

Review from OC Weekly: Manifesto

A College Essay: Manifesto

Website, consisting of a list of vendors that carry the book: http://www.dedrabbit.com/

A copy of the flyer (typically printed on red paper) found inserted in some copies of the book: Flyer

Those other reviews do a good enough job of describing the book, analyzing its contents and speculating on the mystery of the author, so I'm going to skip all that. Instead, I'm going to poke at the marketing of the book. The flyer has three lists: 1) Manifesto is: 2) Manifesto is about: and 3) Influences. You can check out the flyer yourself by clicking the link, above. You could probably use the flyer as a checklist for my various media libraries: books, films, music. If he grew up in the east, and I grew up in the west, still it seems we've walked a parallel path through pop culture. I'm sure I'll be interested in the stuff on his list that's not on mine, and I'd put money down that he'd be interested in the stuff on my list that's not on his. If you liked ..., you may also like....

The flyer is calculated to evoke this feeling, I think. That "instant soul mate," I must have been separated from this person at birth thing, that oh my god HE IZ ME AND I IZ HIM! kind of cultishness. This thing is meant to pull my strings, to make me feel smart and superior and special enough to fork out my $7.00 and spend a couple of hours piecing together the nonlinear puzzle pieces. The marketing begs readers to help this thing become cult. It comes pre-loaded with all the earmarks of "instant cult classic." It's as if the author of the flyer did ten years of market research by passing out "list your top 10 favorite..." questionnaires at open mic nights and poetry slams all over New England, and wire-tapping the chat transcripts of several thousand art school drop-outs. Pull our heartstrings--we elite, wise, intellectual, fragile, ephemeral, transcendent, existential, misunderstood waifs who get addicted to drugs or develop other dysfunctional defenses to soothe our collective yet lonely anguish at how beautiful, wasted, and ironic everything is. Really, now. This book and its marketing is a parody of people like me. People who like Sigur Ros and Bon Iver, who cry while watching script-less foreign films about sheep farming.

Can you tell that I hate how much I love that flyer? It mirrors me, and it mocks me and I don't care. The implication of the listed works on the flyer is more than the book can handle: it's not the sum of its influences, but it borrows the glamour well enough to flip the switch on my self-absorption. I love all of those works listed, in the way that the child loves the velveteen rabbit, with that desperate focused love that smells like old dried thumb-sucking spit, so yes, I must necessarily also love this book, because it says I should, right here on this flyer. And the writing has merit; I'll show you. I guess I'm writing this blog post this way because I feel manipulated, and because I know I'm so easy to manipulate, yet hard to fool, I feel I must confess all of this. I confess that I love a sushi meal, and that I love that I share a taste for sushi with a lot of people I admire. Somehow, knowing that those people like what I like makes that thing I like taste better. I like the writing in this book, but the mind-games on that flyer are like the crack sprinkles on a Voodoo doughnut (joking: if Voodoo ever made a crack doughnut, it was after hours, and they did not sell it-they did sell Nyquil doughnuts though, and were ordered to stop).

Here are three passages from the book about reading:

Page 127. In the pages of books, surrounded by words that were true, the world as it was, people and places as they were, I felt more real, more myself, and happy. Even if the authors didn't understand the craziness, good ones at least recognized it. A good book made me feel like I existed, made me feel safe, that nothing could hurt me, that even under closed covers, cold and drab-looking, never read, all the greyness of my life life became pleasant and colored.

Page 144. I wanted to rip the flesh from my bones, vomit out the poisons, sit stark and removed, drinking water on a mountaintop.

I needed rest, silence, coolness--taking nothing into my body, only refreshing water, cool moist air, deep breaths. I wished I were ancient, calm, and free. I hated destinations, everything between and on the road to destinations. I hated being anything that wasn't myself. I was quiet and nice. I didn't want to hurt anything, not even myself.

I wanted to do nothing but quiet work and never talk and live till I was old, sad and calm, to find an enormous perfect book and read forever.

Page 160. A stupid fat man drank all day and had nothing to say to people who told him to change his ways. He listened to the radio. He flipped through the TV. He did the crossword puzzle. He swatted flies. In his mind he'd written a thousand books. In his mind he'd been so many princely men.

These passages won't mean much if you didn't read those other reviews--if you don't know that the whole book is about this guy who drops out of college and proceeds to drift from state to state, to drift overseas and back, sinking deeper and deeper into drug abuse, alcoholism and despair. It's not clear how the snippets of hope are like diamonds winking from piles of manure, that it's that movement that's important, not the destination--the movement is the lyric:

I wanted a true love and a house in impenetrable mountains, to live in a bright meadow with wildflowers. I wanted animals on a farm, not animals to slaughter or to milk or to make money off of. All the bodies living in a meadow would make me smile. I wanted to look over everything, like a wizard working a spell.

I worried about it falling to pieces. I didn't want children to think I was crazy. I didn't want strangers dropping bombs, invading and raping the valley. I could see my dream like a flower.

It was a devastating progression.

Recovering a Sense of Safety

2011-07-31T10:00:00.024-04:00

I'm preaching on Sunday! Yahoo!

Now, before my heathen readers get all panicky, let's get something straight. No, I haven't suddenly taken holy orders or signed up for divinity school. I'm part of a liberal Unitarian Universalist community, and I was invited to be a summer speaker while the minister's away. That's why this blog has been so darn quiet lately; instead of writing blog posts, I've been writing a sermon. My topic is "Creativity as a Spiritual Practice," and at my church, sermonizing isn't just about writing a speech. Because everyone involved in UU ministry is overworked and overcommitted, the powers that be hand the guest speakers some basic instructions, and then they get out of your way. Yes, you heard it right here. Guest speakers at my church can GO MAD WITH POWER! For a writer geek like me, saying I have creative license for a whole church service is like saying I get to make a movie, and I get to have it all my way; I get to write the script, cast the film, pick out the costumes, select the soundtrack, and call every shot! Woohoo! THEY LOVE ME; THEY REALLY LOVE ME!

Wait. Back up. My sermon isn't about any of that. My sermon is about letting yourself become an instrument of creativity, and the first step is to brave the wilds of your own heart and establish a sense of safety. More on that later.

Because this blog has been the sole outlet for my creativity this year, and I've figured out how to get the juices flowing by typing my thoughts into the "New Post" window on Blogger, I'm going to write my sermon here. I'm going to give the whole order of service from start to finish, complete with the cues my daughter needs to run sound and A/V equipment. A skeleton version of this post has already been sent to the church to be printed and handed out on Sunday. I'll post a link to the podcast once it becomes available. As the podcast only includes the sermon itself, and not the rest of the service, I will insert YouTube videos and other embedded audio/visual linky-dinks that you can follow in order to get an approximation of the whole experience. In no small part, I'm doing this so my family (spread across the country and overseas) can be with me on the 31st of July. This will be way better than videotaping me standing in the pulpit; I promise.

Unless otherwise specified, I am the speaker.

31 July 2011
First Universalist Society of Salem
"Creativity as a Spiritual Practice"

Centering Chime (The deacon, who is the speaker's assistant for the service, rings a chime to start the service.)

Prelude ("The Way I Am," Ingrid Michaelson - Original audio played for the service, cover by Ryan and Jenni Beatty via YouTube provided in this post.)

Welcome (The deacon welcomes the congregation to the service.)

Introduction of Guest Speaker (The deacon introduces me.)

An editor by trade, but a writer by vocation, Joy spends most of her free time going places, doing cool things, eating strange food, and taking pictures of weird and wonderful stuff that she can write about later. Joy writes speculative fiction and poetry under the name Joy Marchand, and a bibliography of her published creative work is available on her website. Joy has been attending services at the First Universalist Society of Salem for two years, and is grateful to have been invited to speak today.

Opening Words (from Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way - If this quote is longer than allowed by fair use, I will take it down.)

I have worked artist-to-artist with potters, photographers, poets, screenwriters, dancers, novelists, actors, directors--and with those who knew only what they dreamed to be or who only dreamed of being somehow more creative. I have seen blocked painters paint, broken poets speak in tongues, halt and lame and maimed writers racing through final drafts. I have come to not only believe but to know: No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.

*Opening Hymn ("Blowin' in the Wind," sung by the congregation for the service, and performed by "watermanbrad" via YouTube for this post.)

Chalice Lighting (The deacon leads the congregation in the Salem UU chalice-lighting hokey-pokey.)

Story for All Ages (Where the Wild things Are, by Maurice Sendak is read aloud by one of my family members to the kids and adults.)

Special Music ("Londonderry Air," is performed by my daughter on the clarinet for the service, and Alex Hutchinson via YouTube for this post.)

Affirmation of Faith (the deacon leads the congregation in the recitation of the Affirmation of Faith)

Reading (From Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones - If this quote is longer than allowed by fair use, I will take it down.)

Excerpt from "The Power of Detail"

I am in Costa's Chocolate Shop is Owatonna, Minnesota. My friend is opposite me. We've just finished Greek salads, and are writing in our notebooks for a half hour among glasses of water, a half-sipped Coke, and a cup of coffee with milk. The booths are orange, and near the front counter are lines of cream candies dipped in chocolate.

Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant, we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent, really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter.

Yad Vashem, a memorial for the Holocaust, is in Jerusalem. It has a whole library that catalogues the names of the six million martyrs. Not only did the library have their names, it also had where they lived, were born, anything that could be found out about them. These people existed and they mattered. Yad Vashem, as a matter of fact, actually means "memorial to the name." It was not nameless masses that were slaughtered; they were human beings.

It is important to say the names of who we are, the names of the places we have lived, and to write the details of our lives. We have lived; our moments are important. This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history, to care about the orange booths in the coffee shop in Owatonna.

Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life; the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things our life as they exists--the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

Prayer and Silent Meditation (This prayer was written by and read aloud by another family member.)

Spirit of life and love, each of us contains a creative spark, an expression of the divine that inspires us to bring new light into the world. Each of us expresses this spark in our own unique way, in music or art; in keeping a home, a garden, or a room; in raising children; in our daily work; or in our spiritual life here. May each of us have the courage to fan that spark into a flame, to express our true, creative selves freely and openly. May those who have hidden their spark because of pain, criticism or fear find aid in letting it show. May we encourage our loved ones and our friends in this spiritual community in the expression of this divine spark, and may all of us find the strength to combat the inner censor that says we are not good enough, creative enough, skilled enough or brilliant enough to live our lives as art. Please join me in a moment of silence to recognize the power of our own inner artists, to open our hearts to that spark of creativity and let it shine, and to express our own creative freedom.

*Hymn ("I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" sung by the congregation at the service, with a YouTube video featuring a performance by the New Seekers.)

Offertory (The ushers hustle the congregation for much-needed cash to keep the community running. No, I didn't play the Pink Floyd song at the service. The language is inappropriate, even for UUs. We UU's sing the "Old 100th," which sounds like this at Westminster Abbey, but not at my church, where there are usually about thirty people in the pews, and we sing a capella.)

Reading (From Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones"Why Do I Write?" Natalie Goldberg - If this quote is longer than allowed by fair use, I will take it down.)

Excerpt from "Why Do I Write?"

"Why do I write?" It's a good question. Ask it of yourself every once in a while. No answer will make you stop writing, and over time you will find that you have given every response:

1. Because I'm a jerk.
2. Because I want the boys to be impressed.
3. So my mother will like me.
4. So my father will hate me.
5. No one listens to me when I speak.
6. So I can start a revolution.
7. In order to write the Great American Novel and make a million dollars.
8. Because I'm neurotic.
9. Because I'm the reincarnation of William Shakespeare.
10. Because I have something to say.
11. Because I have nothing to say.

Why do I write? I write because I kept my mouth shut all my life and the secret ego truth is I want to live eternally and I want my people to live forever. I hurt at our impermanence, at the passing of time. At the edge of all my joy is the creeping agony that this will pass--this Croissant Express at the corner of Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, a great midwestern city in mythical America, will someday stop serving me hot chocolate. I will move on to New Mexico where no one knows how it feels to be here with the sudden light of afternoon, the silver of the ceiling, the half-smell of croissants baking in the oven.

I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me, and even more amazing, I don't know. Now that it's spring I can't remember what it felt like to be in forty below. Even with the heat on, you could feel mortality screaming through the thin walls of your house.

I write because I am crazy, schizophrenic, and I know it and accept it and I have to do something with it other than go to the loony bin.

I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in life. I write because to form a word with your lips and tongue or think a thing and then dare to write it down so you can never take it back is the most powerful thing I know. I am trying to come alive, to find the distances in my own recesses and bring them forward and give them color and form.

I write out of total incomprehension that even love isn't enough and that finally writing might be all I have and that it isn't enough. I can never get it all down, and besides, there are times when I have to step away from the table, the notebook, and turn to face my own life. Then there are times when it's only coming to the notebook that I truly do face my own life.

And I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I'll ever have.

When the old nag in you comes around with "Why are you wasting your time? Why do you write?," just dive onto the page, be full of answers, but don't try to justify yourself. You do it because you do it. You do it because you want to improve your handwriting, because you're an idiot, because you're mad for the smell of paper.

Special Presentation ("Believe," K's Choice)

Sermon: “Creativity as a Spiritual Path”

The topic of today's service, "Creativity as a Spiritual Practice," comes from a book called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. The books says that everyone carries the divine spark of creative potential - but some of us are creatively blocked and need help getting unblocked. After hearing those song lyrics earlier, ("Take me the way I am," "I believe in me") and seeing all those happy photos of me, you might think I've read The Artist's Way a hundred times, processed and accepted its message, and been miraculously unblocked. Honestly, I think if that were true, I'd be home finishing a novel.

I've read The Artist's Way twice, and I'm not unblocked. Reading this book is not magic. There is no button at the end labeled "Press now for automatic conversion!" I've read parts of the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Bhaghavad Gita, and a half dozen books by the Dalai Lama, and I'm not a Christo-Muslim-Hindu-Buddha-tarian either. Just as reading The Joy of Cooking has made me a hungrier person, not a better cook, reading The Artist's Way has made me a hungrier artist, not a better writer. The readings and songs I have presented to you today are not my personal accomplishments; they are my hopes and dreams, for myself, and for you.

I believe creativity makes our lives richer, more beautiful, and more meaningful.

Now, I work with a bunch of scientists. A lot of them hear the word "creativity" or "team-building" and they want to jump out the window. Their jobs rely on data and results. When forced to take vacation, they sit in gondolas in Venice glued to their Blackberries. I'm exaggerating. Most people at work are creative. Their Blackberries and laptops have pandas and turtles on them. They have kitty-cat screen savers and dog wallpaper, and drawings their kids made taped to their doors. One woman showed us photographs from her wedding in India, where celebrations last for days, with flowers and silk saris and beautiful food and henna tattoos and jewelry and music everywhere. Creativity isn't just about making a statue of a giant naked guy, or slopping paint on a canvas. Creativity is everywhere. Creativity is about putting a leaf of parsley on a dinner plate, or a flower behind your ear. One doctor I know has a pair of cufflinks made from tiny, functional hourglasses, which is extra super creative, but he's an outlier; everybody knows anesthesiologists are all kind of "out there".

I don't think the word "creativity" is going to make any of you jump out the window. I've seen some of our craft circle people knitting prayer shawls during services. This place is usually alive with music, much of it played and sung live. There is artwork constantly pouring out of the RE classrooms; the Peeps art shows was one of my favorite things so far. I think a lot of people in this congregation have already embraced art as part of their spiritual practice. Creativity is a gift of ourselves to ourselves, a gift to our families, a gift to our community, a gift to the world. Personally, sometimes I think art has saved my life. It reminds me that I'm not alone, that I'm not the only one who suffers. It reminds me there is too much beauty in the world to give up on it. I have Declan and Ronan's artwork on the fridge to give me hope for a bright future. I have Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial and the other monuments on the Capital Mall to give me the resolve to vote. I have the artwork produced by the marketing folks at work that inspires me to come in each day, to keep helping find the next breakthrough cure. I have the photography of Diane Arbus and Annie Liebovitz to give me inspiration to carry a camera everywhere I go. I have my daughter's wonderful alternative music recommendations to keep my imagination lively and curious.

Art is a powerful language, and a powerful gift.

You're sold, right? Hopefully, you picked up some art supplies before the service and you're just waiting for the sermon to end so you can spring into action and make some art! Maybe we could make a friendship quilt for the Transylvania church, and put witches on it for us and vampires for them. They'd never expect that! But if you're like me, this sermon isn't enough to get you unblocked. If you're like me, the flow of creativity gets walled up sometimes, and we have to break through those walls if we're to get it started again. I've read The Artist's Way twice, and I'm stuck on Chapter 1, which is called "Recovering a Sense of Safety".

Explaining how to recover a sense of safety is going to be hard. I certainly don't feel safe up here; it's high, and scary, and I feel exposed and vulnerable. I've managed to hide so far: Most of what you've heard in this service so far was written by other people: Julia Cameron, Natalie Goldberg, Ingrid Michaelson, Bob Dylan, Maurice Sendak, Sarah Bettens, and Scott. If anything, I've been a collage artist today. I wrote up a project plan, and made an assemblage of other people's work. The only pieces of my own work I've shown you were the photographs in the slideshow, and in this sermon. I'm going to talk about each of those things to show you what we're up against, and what can help us recover our lost sense of safety. It's going to be a little scary. I'm going to fire walk, and I hope you'll keep a bucket of water handy.

Julia Cameron says that our core negative beliefs present a clear and present threat to our sense of safety. She says that we all have something called the "enemy within." My "enemy within," those destructive voices inside my head that keep my creativity blocked sound like this: (deep voice) WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? WHO'S GOING TO WANT TO SEE THAT STUPID SLIDESHOW? PEOPLE MAKE FUN OF PEOPLE WHO SHOW SLIDESHOWS! A SLIDESHOW ISN'T ART. THAT'S LAME! YOU'RE NOT ANNIE LIEBOVITZ. YOU'RE NOT DIANE ARBUS. AND YOU CALL THIS BORING TALK A SERMON? GET IT OVER WITH SO THE PEOPLE CAN HAVE THEIR COFFEE, ALREADY. WHY SHOULD THEY LISTEN TO YOU? YOU HAVEN'T WRITTEN A STORY IN 3 YEARS; YOU'LL NEVER WRITE A NOVEL, AND IF YOU DO, YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO SELL IT. EVERYONE WILL BE MAD AT YOU FOR WRITING ABOUT THEIR SECRETS, NEGLECTING THEM, AND NOT SAYING ENOUGH NICE THINGS ABOUT THEM ON THE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PAGE. IF YOU WRITE, THEY'LL ABANDON YOU, YOU'LL BE BROKE, AND IT WON'T HAVE BEEN WORTH IT. YOU'RE STUPID, ARROGANT, NARCISSISTIC, DULL, UNORIGINAL, AND YOU CAN'T SPELL!!!

(Deep breath.) Ok, time for my "enemy within" to shut up. It's so mean. I think I need that bucket of water.

You might not have an enemy within. If you don't, I'm glad for you. If you do, maybe yours isn't as mean as mine, or maybe it's meaner. It's not easy putting yourself out there, and taking risks. If you do have an enemy within, at some point in your life, you were probably hurt. Maybe you were teased, bullied, ridiculed, put-down for being weird or different, or ignored, abused, abandoned, or disregarded. Did you know the enemy within was created to protect you from pain? It says, Don't stand out. If you speak up, stand out, sing, draw, paint, wear funny ties, make funny noises, or eat weird food, you'll get singled out. You'll be destroyed. It's better to hide. Better to blend in. Better to be invisible. Depending on how badly you were hurt, you might feel sheepish buying a pair of funny socks, or you might need to put on sixteen suits of plate mail armor just to buy a kiwi fruit at the grocery store. WHAT KIND OF WEIRDO EATS KIWI FRUITS? I myself eat kiwi fruits, thank you very much. And sweetbreads, and frog's legs, and liver, and eggplants, and plantains, and pickled broccoli, and stinky cheese, and bacon-flavored chocolate, and vinegar pie, and raw fish, and fish eggs, AND BUMPY BULBOUS SMELLY THINGS WITH EYES AND FANGS!

It's hard to recover a sense of safety with this ferocious, protective enemy bearing down on you from the inside. It's as if you've left the other 299 Spartans back home and you're standing in the gap at the battle of Thermopylae, facing a quarter of a million Persians, armed with nothing but a slingshot and a bucket of feathers. I see three options here: you can run away as fast as you can, and stay creatively blocked; you can stay and fight with fear in your heart, which is potentially disastrous; or you can accept the fear, make peace with it, and manage your demons with a quiet heart. I'd like to work toward acceptance, myself. I'd like to be more creative, give more of myself to myself, and to others. So what do I do? How do I manage the demons?

The non-magical text suggests that we manage our demons by developing an "inner ally," and here's where things take a spiritual left turn in this sermon, and I REALLY freak out. It seems like good news, that there's something we can do to be more creative. That sounds like a win, right? And yet, talking about the "inner ally" is almost as difficult as talking about the "inner enemy." I'm going to talk about affirmations. Maybe some of you cringed just now. If you did, you're not alone. There are a lot of us who hear the word "affirmations" and want to jump out the window. However, Julia Cameron says:

Affirmations help achieve a sense of safety and hope. When we first start working with affirmations, they may feel dumb. Hokey. Embarrassing. Isn't this interesting? We can easily, and without embarrassment, bludgeon ourselves with negative affirmations: "I'm not gifted enough/not clever enough/not original enough/not young enough..." But saying nice things about ourselves is notoriously hard to do. It feels pretty awful at first. Try these and see if they don't sound hopelessly syrupy: "I deserve love." "I deserve fair pay." "I deserve a rewarding creative life." "I am a brilliant and successful artist." "I have rich creative talents." "I am competent and confident in my creative work."

Did your inner enemies perk their nasty little ears up? Your inner enemies loathe anything that sounds like real self-worth. They immediately start up with the imposter routine: "Who do you think you are?" It's as though our entire collective unconscious sat up late nights watching Walt Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmations, practicing Cruella DeVille's delivery for scathing indictments.

I don't like doing affirmations. For an example of the "inner enemy," I could give you a bunch of them off the top of my head. But for affirmations, I had to look those up in a book. I'm not naturally good at math either, so with math and affirmations, I have to work really hard to get the knowledge to stick. Here are some affirmations from The Artist's Way that might help you fight the evil inner enemy. Even if they make you feel awkward at first, try them. Say affirmations often enough, and something might stick. You might to start to believe in your own intrinsic worth as a creative being, and something wonderful might happen to you:

1. My creativity heals myself and others.
2. I am allowed to nurture my artistic self.
3. My creativity always leads me to truth and love.
4. My creativity leads me to forgiveness and self-forgiveness.
5. Creativity is a wonderful, loving use of your time.
6. Creativity is a gift you give to yourself and others.
7. I can help build community with my creativity.
8. I can spread joy with my creativity.
9. I am a creative being.
10. Creativity helps me get in touch with my joyful self.

I've tried to achieve a balance in this sermon, between inspirational concepts and practical suggestions. I'd like to return to the practical for a moment. The Artist's Way has twelve chapters (modeled loosely on a 12-step program), and each chapter title is "Recovering a Sense" of something: safety, identity, power, integrity, possibility, abundance, connection, strength, compassion, self-protection, autonomy, faith. Cameron has two primary tools for unblocking creativity: the first is something called "morning pages," which are three, longhand pages of stream-of-consciousness thought written right when you wake up. The second is something called "the artist's date," which is a once weekly commitment you make to yourself to go out into the world and do something that sparks your creativity, like going window shopping at an antique store, or taking pictures down on Derby Wharf. Neither of these things needs to take a great deal of time, but both are intended to be meditative, nourishing, and spiritually liberating.

The Artist's Way is only one of many, many books I have on creativity. I've brought you this book today, because it's message is so clearly spiritual, and that's what I wanted to talk about. But the keys to unblocking creativity are the same in each book on writing and creativity that I have on my shelves at home. Each one says: look inside yourself, accept that, allow yourself to be that, expose yourself to art and creativity, ask it of yourself, invite it into you.

Ultimately, after you have accepted yourself, and accepted what you have to give, art is about relinquishing the self to the rest of creation Cameron says:

Over the years, I have learned that there is a flow of ideas that we as artists can tap into. The flow of creativity is constant. We are the ones who are fickle or fearful. I have learned that my creative condition and my spiritual condition are one and the same. Making art is an act of faith, a movement toward expansion. When I am stymied in my work, I am stymied in my spiritual condition. When I am self-conscious as an artist, I am spiritually constricted. I need to pray to lose my self-centered fears. I need to ask for selflessness, to be a conduit, a channel for ideas to move through. At a time like this, I post a sign at my writing station, "Okay, God, you take care of the quality. I will take care of the quantity." In other words, it is time to resign as the self-conscious author. It is time to let Something or Somebody write through me. How the ego hates this humbling proposition! And yet, great art is born of great humility." The grace to be an acolyte, a servant of the art, is the best prayer that an artist can offer.

*Hymn ("Blue Boat Home" sung by the congregation, arranged by Scott McNeil and presented via YouTube for this post.)

Announcements (this is the part where someone from the Board of Trustees reads the announcements, which includes an invitation to coffee hour, which, as they say, is the primary reason Unitarian Universalists get out of bed on Sunday morning.)

*Extinguish the Chalice (The deacon leads the congregation in a short unison reading and extinguishes the chalice.)

*Closing Words (The deacon reads some closing words.)

Our time in worship has come to an end,
so I bid you to go in peace,
Speak your truth in love and give thanks each day.
Live simply and approach life with an open heart and mind.
Let your faith not your fear be your guide.

Postlude ("Don't Stop Me Now," Queen - Original audio played for the service, video provided via YouTube for this post.)

Midnight in Paris

2011-07-23T21:18:00.007-04:00

An American screenwriter visits Paris in the company of his opportunistic fiancee and her Tea Party Republican parents, and is transported to his ideal time and place (Paris in the 1920's) at the stroke of midnight for a series of adventures with the giants of the age. The film was tidy and sweet, and for me the pleasure of the experience was in watching the protagonist's gobsmacked joy as he meets and interacts with his heroes: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Monet, Cole Porter, and so forth. It was a little bit like visiting Madame Tussaud's, where the wax figures perform clever little vignettes, channelling faces and voices and mannerisms gleaned from historical records and memoirs. A hysterical Zelda Fitzgerald attempts to hurl herself in the Seine but the hero calms her with a Valium. A magnetic Hemingway sits in a cafe and monologues with syntax as efficient as bullets, and in another scene, obsesses about hunting, draped around the neck of a 1920's Latin underwear model. Salvador Dali sits in yet another cafe and hilariously rhapsodizes about rhinoceroses. Through it all runs a fairly standard romantic comedy plot, wherein the hero is not truly loved or understood by his fiancee, goes wandering in the wilderness, finds himself, has an epiphany about the meaning of life, and dumps the fiancee for a pretty young girl who was planted earlier in the film like Chekov's gun on the wall.

It was enough to imagine standing in the streets of Paris at the stroke of midnight and being offered a ride by T.S. Eliot. Being offered a novel critique by Gertrude Stein (and having her say the book was good, but giving advice to make the book better). Meeting the surrealists and the impressionists. It was enough magic to carry me through the film with a goofy smile on my face and every intention of purchasing the soundtrack at the earliest opportunity. The central idea of the story is that people yearn to live in an age other than their own, that they always think a different life in a different place and time would be a better life, and that this idea is, of course, seductive but foolish.

Return readers will know that I have a habit of reading psychology and philosophy, and that I have a tendency to see examples of whatever theory I'm currently reading about everywhere I look. In this case, I'm reading The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples by John M. Gottman. This book is about how trust is lost in a relationship, and what can bring trust back again (a lot of hard freaking work, that's what). The book talks about something called an attachment injury. "These are the moments when one partner intensely needs the other for comfort and the other isn't emotionally available or responsive to the need...thus the 'atom of betrayal' may involve moments of turning away or against." One of the major betrayals Gottman describes in a relationship is when one or both individuals in a pair idealizes an alternative relationship, unfavorably comparing their relationship to something vague, dreamlike, and shiny and finding it lacking. This is one of those things that if you find yourself doing it, you can be sure that you're endangering the mountainside of your relationship as if packing it with deep explosives. Woody Allen and John Gottman seem to be on the same wavelength here; if you continue to yearn for what you don't have, that yearning will breed more yearning, and you'll be unlikely to find happiness in this life.

I've been asking myself for quite some time what it is that I want with my life. I haven't yet had the opportunity to wander the streets of Paris in the rain, much less travel back in time to hang out with Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds, but I've been doing my own version--riding the train between my home town and Cambridge, where I work. I've observed myself going into hiding for long periods of time, pretending not to be writer, putting the work aside for other priorities. I've observed myself going to writing conventions and feeling the fire reignite. I've observed myself sitting in a restaurant, reading a book, or scribbling in a notebook, or sitting in a movie theater with an enthusiastic crowd laughing and yearning to be transported in time with Owen Wilson, to Paris in the 1920's. I've wondered what my equivalent would be, in the 2010's. Where is the hub of creativity now? Was part of my 1920's Paris at Readercon, in Burlington, Massachusetts? Is in in New York, at SF readings at KGB? I find myself glad that there were no writing conventions in the 1920's; I'd rather not imagine Hemingway sitting on a panel behind a pitcher of water and a paper sign with his name on it, talking about doing internet research about hunting lions. This is my era though, and I don't mean to be contemptuous of it. All I'm saying is that Hemingway does not belong in my time, and I'll never know if I would have belonged in his. Certainly, I read about the era and am captivated, but for one thing, I'd have likely died at birth, or when I became positive for the antibodies for tuberculosis (I achieved viral cure with a 6-month drug regimen when I was 22), or any number of times I contracted one infection or another. I'm not as hardy as Hemingway; I would never hunt lions.

Dissatisfaction with one's life is often a catalyst for positive change, but sometimes it's a bummer, and it keeps you from living the life you've been given, exercising the gifts you were born with, accepting your own peculiarities and foibles. Sometimes, it keep you yearning for something you don't have, and ignoring the things you do have. Sometimes, that's a good thing; it helps you get through the hard parts, sometimes, to visualize your life the way you want it in order to know what you need to change. Sometimes it gets you paralyzed in fantasies, so enamored of an imaginary feast that you refuse to eat a cheese sandwich when you're hungry. Midnight in Paris suggests that the feast is wonderful and exciting, and you definitely do NOT have to eat the rotten tuna casserole, but you just may want to open your eyes and accept the reality and beautiful simplicity of walking with a baguette under your arm along La Rive Gauche. Maybe it isn't a feast, but maybe it is. You decide.

I've tried to give up writing hundreds of times, and yet here I am, sitting up past 10 p.m. on a Saturday, writing a review of a film in the context of a psychology book on trust-building. I may decide to quit writing tomorrow ("Good night Wesley, I'll likely kill you in the morning"), but I can't decide not to think, and if I'm thinking, I figure I may as well write the stuff down, send it out into the world, and see if it echoes.

The 2011 Rhysling Anthology

2011-07-22T16:02:00.006-04:00

The 2011 Rhysling Anthology is one of four books I came home with from Readercon 22. As per the usual when I read an anthology of poetry, I have my favorites, which I'm going to list here, with my favorite lines:

"Dogstar Men" by C.S.E. Cooney - "O Sirius, your houses are made/Of bougainvillea leaves/Your rain is pink and balsamic"

"Tonight the Character of Death Will Be Played by Brad Pitt" by Jaimee Hills - "That facial expression that Brad Pitt makes/is the same one you made today. In fact/you share many muscles with Brad Pitt/though his are bigger and more chiseled..."

"Domovoi, I Came Back!" by Sonya Taaffe - "that boy who wore his suicide like a rose/stuck in his lapel, winking from the bottom of every glass."

"Tertiary" by Mary Alexandra Agner - "my body is my body is my body/when I was born, first bled/and bled again, even the day/I took off my breasts."

"Bubba" by Robert Borski. I consider this a perfect poem because I can't take out one single line that means as much as the poem itself. Must be read in its entirety.

"The Sea King's Second Bride" by C.S.E. Cooney. Luckily, the entire text of this poem is available online here. I'm given to understand there's a podcast of it somewhere, but I can't find it. Help?

"Eight Top Vampire Hobbies" by James S. Dorr - "1. Breaking crosses/It takes an axe with/an especially long handle/but once they're in pieces/they make great firewood/After all, vampires get cold/on winter-fogged nights too/and castles are drafty."

"Courting Song for Selkies" by Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica P. Wick - "I'll kiss you, little bee/when you smell of laundry/when you smell of juniper, of moss/of wine, of wonder, of longing/of coffee, but beneath it all you'll smell of brine."

"Ravens" by Theodora Goss - "Once, I fell in love with a raven man/I knew that to keep him I had to take his skin/his skin of feathers, long and black as night/like e ebony, tarmac, licorice, black holes." Really, I have no favorite line. Again, I think this is a perfect poem, but I wanted to make note of at least one line so you'll go find the poem and read it.

"The Gabriel Hound" by Samantha Henderson. Samantha Henderson is one of my favorite speculate poets, and I hesitate to take a line from "The Gabriel Hound" because it tells a story, and therefore, my favorite line is the last line. Giving you the last line would ruin the joy of discovery, and so I just can't provide an excerpt. (Note: I realize that I've already broken this rule, but I'm not going to tell you where, so in this way I hope not to ruin the first reading of any of these poems.)

Consider putting your hands on a copy of the anthology and read it for yourself.

One thing I can't help noticing about speculative poetry is how much I love the poems I love, how utterly indifferent I am to many of them. I suppose that's not shocking; isn't it wonderful that there's something out there for every taste? I'm tempted to do the safe thing and say "to each his own," and withhold even anonymous criticism of something for which I have no academic, critical language. I can't rightly say why I think one poem is superior to another poem. I feel crass and stupid when I say, "I don't know anything about art, except that I like what I like," but there it is. I do like what I like, and I have no theory to prove that my opinion has merit.

All I can do is make a list of things I enjoy in a good speculative poem, and things I don't like. Things that make me want to hand a poem around, and things that lead me to read a few stanzas and then skip on to the next without having the feeling that I'm just too dumb to get it, and the poem is fine. I like emotional poems, whether they tell a story, or just illustrate a pregnant moment of epiphany. Poems that only tell a story, or exist only to paint a pretty picture with fancy words just don't do it for me. I want to know what hurts in that poem. If the poem is funny/satirical, I still want to know what hurts. "The Sea King's Second Bride" is tremendously funny especially performed, and yet it hurts too, especially if you've ever BEEN a second wife or a rebound girlfriend and been treated to the special joy of unfinished grief. Poems about spaceships that depend on an interesting image, or poems with fancy type, artistic repetitions, and other formal tricks often leave me cold and bored. This is a taste thing; I get that. Some folks like the formal fireworks, and think emotional poems are overwrought. Or perhaps there is one reader out there (the editor!) who's taste is eclectic enough to put a collection like this together. Thank goodness, I guess.

And yet. And yet. There are over 90 poems in this anthology, and I'll go back and read 10 of them again, probably dozens of times. At least 10 more I actively dislike and will not read again. The rest I'm unlikely to read again, although some had nice language, interesting images, and a pleasing enough shape. I wish I could do better than this, but I can't. I don't have the tools to explain "the perfect poem." I'm a gut reader, and I eat the words rather than parse them. I can feel the rhyme or lack thereof, bob my head to the alliteration and rhythms, leap with surprise when there are surprising leaps, follow an evocative metaphor into a particular pain, envision an arresting image(such as a woman sleeping in the bole of an old oak tree for love of a raven man) and let it uplift me, or shock me, frighten me, seduce me, or what have you. I love good poetry, and yet I find it so hard to read sometimes! Hard to quantify and explain to myself.

I suppose I'm trying too hard to keep poetry, when perhaps it's not to be kept. And yet, there are poems that once I've read them stay with me forever, and I don't know why, and would like to. Perhaps so I can do more than people do when they see a work of surrealist art and say, "Oh, I could do at least as well as that; it's just a few dribs of paint with chicken feathers crushed in. I could do at least as well as that."

So, I'll keep turning those 10 poems around, perhaps write them out by hand and feel them in my pen, and see if I can just will myself to understand what I'm seeing. Not demand I go forth and read 10 books on criticism so I can learn the grownup words for "I so like this poem."

Readercon 22, The Book Haul

2011-07-18T17:58:00.014-04:00

My favorite experience at Readercon this year was the Samuel Delany kaffeeklatsch, where the author sat with a large group of fans and had an informal conversation. Because I am no longer organized enough to have known he was in attendance, and I wanted to be supportive anyway, I purchased a copy of Shorter Views from the Wesleyan Press table in the dealer's room. I will read the book, and write my thoughts on it later. My favorite piece of wisdom from the kaffeeklatsch was in response to the question: "How do you make time to write, when you're busy working the job that pays the rent?" The answer: "Learn to lie, cheat, and steal time from everything that is not writing." It's a sobering answer; I think the questioner may have preferred to hear something else--some magical or technological solution. It is a real problem: people only have so much time, and only have so much energy. There is no more time, and there is no more energy than there is. There is no "making more." There is only time, and the use of time. The use of time is the thing we can control. Want more time and energy to write? Use less time and energy doing other things. Want to lose weight? Change your eating habits, and exercise. The answer is unpalatably, unavoidably true. I wonder what I need to cut out next from my life. I've been cutting and cutting, and the result, so far, has been the time and energy to write this blog. More cutting will be needed before I can get back to the business of fiction and poetry. The informal conversation was good, and Delany's reading was also good; he has a way of teasing a storyline free from the body of a novel that creates a better reading than most (where the author chooses a chapter and hopes the reader will be able to develop faith in the storytelling with a fragment and a promise). Consider keeping an eye out for Delany's new novel in October: In The Valley of the Nest of Spiders. I think the title is cool, even if some think it's too long, and needs a verb.

Another reading I enjoyed was the 2011 Rhysling Awards. I wish I'd gotten the names of the poets who read work not featured in the anthology. At least one was among my favorites, but I don't know the author by name. If you know his name, please tell me. He read the poem about bar codes in trees and fields of wheat. I loved it. I enjoyed Theodora Goss's reading of her poem, "Ravens." The delivery was strong and elegant, the language precise, cutting, sad, funny. Everything I love about poetry. I read the other poems also nominated in the category, and was sad that I had not voted (had not known how to vote), because I would have voted for "Ravens." Another strong poem, recited beautifully by the author, was the winner of the long poem category: "The Sea King's Second Bride," C.S.E Cooney. Had I voted, I would have been torn on who to give my first place nod, because these two, my favorite poems, were so different. Cooney's recitation of the poem (from memory) was performance art. It was a beautiful, dramatic monologue, funny, and frustrating, and sad, with rhythm and rhyme so compelling that each phrase was a joy (even the sad parts). I wanted to knock the Sea King's block off, myself. "'Agneta!' cries the Sea King, 'Agneta!' and 'Agneta!'"

Engines of Desire is one of those books that was written by someone I like personally, and so it's likely I will give some fawning useless critique of it that you should just ignore. But you'll be sorry if you ignore the book itself, because the stories are wonderful. I've read most of the stories already, but I'm going to read the whole collection through and give it a proper review. Unfortunately, I did not get to see Livia Llewellyn read, because she didn't attend Readercon 22. Hopefully, she'll be at Readercon 23, and I can ask for her autograph.

In order to really "need" Booklife by Jeff Vandermeer, I'll first have to heed Delany's advice, and get on with the lying, cheating, and stealing. The subtitle of this book is: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer. As you all know, my work (other than this blog) is stalled. But I'm going to read this book anyway, because it has tips on how to spend your time in an environment that can suck an infinite amount of your time and energy if you don't know how to navigate it wisely. Mostly, what I'm looking for is ways to learn better judgment, and I think this book has something to tell me that will help.

It will take a while before I post reviews of these books, but I will get around to it eventually. Next time I go to Readercon, I'm going to limit my participation to kaffeklatsches, awards ceremonies, and readings. I'm afraid the panels were unsatisfying this year, or perhaps I just picked ones that didn't suit. I prefer discussions that have some potential for conflict, and the panels I attended were not diverse enough to provide meaty and meaningful discourse. When all the panelists have the same opinion, I'm afraid I get bored and end up reading a book I purchased in the dealer's room instead of listening. I was sad to hear that I missed the opportunity to hear Neil Gaiman talk at the Shirley Jackson Awards, and I missed seeing Amanda Palmer (please read the blog post about The Secret Order of the Hugging Nuns). I'm not omniscient, or I'd have sensed a disturbance in the area, and naturally made my way there to see the shiny people. Better luck next time, I suppose.

Readercon 22

2011-07-15T13:41:00.005-04:00

It's been years since I've sold a new story, and so I'm anxious about going to Readercon. I remember when going to a convention like this was heavy networking, with cocktails, lunches, dinners, talking about editors, agents, recounting submission woes (whoa, your story's been held up for three years?). What am I writing right now? Oh, blog posts. Yes, primarily blog posts. And business process documents. Process docs are great beach reading! (I'd feel worse about writing process documents, but I don't think one could call any of my short stories good beach reading. Even the ones that actually take place at the beach.)

Not feeling particularly writerly, this year. I'm speaking on no panels, attending no parties. I may sit at the bar and drink martinis, and hope to see a friend or two in the course of the weekend. Or I may decide to attend Readercon as a ... reader. That's right. I'm a reader. I'd nearly forgotten. Not really. I'm fascinated by writing, and the process of writing, which includes reading, of course, and listening to people talk about reading and writing, which is what people do at Readercon. I'll be there for the dialogue, that great, ongoing conversation about the art of fiction and poetry. I can do that. I can go there, and listen to the dialogue.

What am I writing right now? I'm writing an actual, honest-to-humanism sermon, for delivery at a real spiritual institution at the end of the month (god help those poor people). I'm having some difficulty writing a sermon, because I'm more nervous about writing something like that than I am writing a post for my blog. Writing in a blog is like timed writing, like morning pages, where you can write any kind of crap. No matter that people read these posts, I write them automatically, editing only to fix spelling and punctuation. I'm having a hard time, because a sermon is supposed to be good, and so I've spent the last several weeks reading desperately in hopes I'll find the perfect thing to say, or find someone else who had already said it better than I can. Perhaps I can do an "all-readings" sermon, and totally chicken out. I can come up with some sort of idea to make the congregation do all the work. That's what I do at my day job: come up with stuff for other people to do, then sit and check e-mail. It should work at church, right? What am I writing right now? A sermon. Yes, it's not a fashionable-sounding thing to write. I should think up a nice juicy elevator speech for a novel I'm not writing.

I'm writing an allegory that takes place in the fat cells of my bottom, kind of like A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle, only the alien planet is my butt.

I'm writing a torrid romance novel between a Hungarian woman and the Eiffel Tower.

I'm writing a technical treatise on the husbandry of albino squirrels. I will not marry an albino squirrel for research purposes, but I may interview squirrel wives.

I'm writing an intellectual science fiction masterpiece that will make Neil Stephenson, China Mieville, and Ted Chiang cry in their soup. Okay, maybe not Ted Chiang. It will have a deep sociological element, and robots.

I'm writing a series of fantasy doorstops with so many volumes, they will encircle the earth, and harmonize the works of Robert Jordan, George R. R. Martin and Stephen King. It will be called The Really Awesome Wheel of Gunslinging Dragons and Some Multiverses and Stuff.

I'm writing a book so weird not even the Interstitial Arts Foundation will claim it. I could tell you what it's about, but I'd need a black hole, a cheese sandwich, and the Enigma Machine, and still your brain would explode.

I'm writing an autobiography of my future self, as a string of auto-erotic love letters. There's a chapter about ants, just in case I'm reincarnated as an ant.

I'm writing a detective novel that starts out in a tavern, with a swordsman, a thief, and a narcissistic con artist with a mace, a Cloak of Sexual Healing and a vial of holy water. The halfling illusionist has been murdered, and the prime suspect is a purple ocelot.

I'm writing a young adult novel about a bisexual half-elf, half-vampire with a half werewolf, half-goblin love interest. They sit at Starbucks, complain about how much the coffee costs, and write "spells" in their Moleskine notebooks while sharing iPod earbuds and listening to Sigur Ros.

I'm writing a series of haiku about cancer drugs.

I'm writing a film script about a ballet dancer who slowly turns into a turkey. It's kind of like "The Swan," only the dancer turns into a 110-pound gobbler, with the red wattle and everything, and her crazy mother keeps stuffing her tutus full of sage and cranberry sauce. The soundtrack is by Bjork, who totally wants to play the turkey.

Please say hello to me at the bar, and tell me which elevator pitch sounds plausible as something I've been working on since 2009, that I can plausibly still be working on when Readercon 23 rolls around, and I still haven't produced any pages. Really, it would be a kindness. It would not at all be enabling. Say hello to me, and I'll read your most recent book, and I'll make a fool of myself reviewing it to the eleven people who read my blog. Buy me a drink, and I'll listen to the elevator pitch for your next book about the alien plague, or the magic school, or the steampunk romance, or that roman a clef Lovecraft thing about your ex-wife. You know, the stuff that hasn't been done yet. I'll be breathless. I promise.

What am I writing? Something penned in the desperate flop-sweat of my mid-life crisis. It will totally sell.

Public Art, Part 1

2011-07-11T19:29:00.017-04:00

Among other things, I have a fondness for movies that are full of unexpected miracles. They are not always good movies, but sometimes they are great movies, and they speak to my spirit. One such bad/good movie is the Patricia Arquette/Gabriel Byrne vehicle, Stigmata. The plot: bad girl gets the stigmata; priest regains his faith and falls in love again with God. There is a voice, whispering these lines from the Gospel of Thomas, throughout the film. "Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." The idea was that a church is just a building; that god meant people to see him in everything, to see him everywhere. I'm one of those people who check "spiritual but not religious" when asked about my faith, and I love the idea of a divine presence in ordinary, everyday things--that you can find yourself, and greater meaning outside of organized religion. I look for public art wherever I go, and I consider it a prayer when I find it--less those purposeful installations, like the big contemporary metal statues they've carted into Salem for summer, but the little unexpected things, the hidden things that people put out there more to say something to the unknown creative spirit than for human beings to find it.

When I was in Peurto Rico, walking up to the radio telescope at Arecibo, one of my companions found these leaves on the path up the mountain. We were captivated by the idea of people scratching their names into the leaves, which would then scar over as the leaves continued to grow. We wondered who had thought of doing this, if people had scratched their names and come back to see the scars grow as the leaves grew. People tag rocks and leave graffiti everywhere, but this was the first leaf graffiti we had ever seen, and it was moving, because of its simple, ephemeral nature.

We found this tree in Newport, at the mansion called The Elms. There was a great number of elms planted in kind of a fairy circle on the grounds, the great curving branches which formed an enclosure under which the children of the Elms had spent time playing. And no doubt generations of young lovers and rebels had come to carve their names into the wood of the trees. I consider this public art. It's not the same kind of public art as what follows, but it's out there, and it communicates, and I love it.

This is a sign written on cardboard that someone put up at the Salem train station. Imagination is everything. There was once a Myspace page for something called the newhopeproject, but when I go there, the URL doesn't work any more. Transient, like I said, these moments of public invitation.

"Hide under water or anywhere, so undisturbed you feel the jerk of pleasure when an idea comes." The key phrase here, is "undisturbed." This implies a state of peacefulness I do not typically associate with being under water. Some people love being under water, or in water, but I'm not one of them. I enjoy swimming in ponds and lakes, such as Walden Pond, but these enjoyments are rare. I'm afraid of water, but in the context of this quotation, from a sign in the museum at RISD, I associate it with the Gospel of Thomas. For those who enjoy water, I can imagine that being under water could be very peaceful indeed, meditative, the held breath a kind of kinetic/artistic potential that can spring forth as one bursts to the surface with an epiphany.

There was quite a bit of graffiti tagging in Puerto Rico. I didn't take many pictures of tagging, but here's something I found that I liked, because I wondered if Loli was a girl being immortalized in spray paint. There's also a sacred heart with Loli's name, the flaming heart embraced by thorns to symbolize divine suffering on behalf of mankind. I find it touching that we small humans reach for such depths and profundity when expressing our feelings about love. Perhaps Loli is in a deeply loving relationship with the artist, or perhaps she is a love object, admired only from afar. Whetever the situation, the artist obtained paint, found a canvas, and used a powerful symbol to speak his feelings about Loli. Then again, if you look closely, you'll see the paint is different on the sacred heart. Contrary to my romantic notions, the two images could be related only by proximity.

While driving around in Puerto Rico, we found this abandoned structure. It was on spiral pilings, and had a spiral cement staircase leading to the concrete second floor. It was an improbable shrine, in which someone had taken some time to paint this image.

Perhaps I'm making a bigger deal of this than it deserves, and this was splattered on the wall by some kids who thought it would be cool to paint an octopus on an abandoned building, but if so, the image has become something else in the absence of the artist(s). It overlooks a stretch of Puerto Rico highway, and it seems to recall something both contemporary and ancient in its suburban decay. Something like this can look ancient the moment it hits the wall, and its voice calls back with an eerie echoing voice to unknown thoughts and rituals. Who knows what the intention was, here, but it has a seriousness despite the whimsy. The whimsical decoration of poverty and decay. It's a decaying offering to the god of creativity, and I would not be surprised to ascend the death-trap concrete steps and find candles, burnt cigars, empty bottles of rum, incense, empty beer cans, condoms, empty cigarette lighters, butts, disintegrating magazines, razor blades, evidence of troubled seekers.

The next post will have a collection of local graffiti. I'm afraid when I was transferring photographs from my camera to my laptop, I lost 13 images. This was a bit of heartbreak, because I know the pieces I photographed will not be there next time I go to that particular wall and shoot. Public art is on the move, ever changing. I think of those shots much like my lost blog posts, here today, gone tomorrow. Hours of my time evaporated. The difference is that the graffiti artists with the spray cans seem to accept the ephemeral nature of their art; the moment they leave the scene another tagger, or another artist can swoop in and paint right over it, and probably will. I make the mistake, with every post, thinking that these impromptu essays will remain, and not be lost in random backup accidents in some sweaty server room in a Google codemonkey warehouse.

I'm trying to get peace with the idea of impermanence, of turning the corner and seeing a piece of art, of seeing a moment of transcendence, that will likely not be there in a week's time. I'm trying to get peace with the idea of sending my images and words out into the world, maybe losing them, perhaps seeing them find no audience. Doing for myself, and doing out of a sense of participation in an ever-changing, ever-evolving artistic dialogue that is here today, gone tomorrow.

Imagination is everything.

The Island of Jayne Grind

2011-07-06T20:50:00.008-04:00

Let it be known that I have read neither The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells, nor Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. This post will not be an analysis of the treatment of those books, or their amalgamation, because such an exercise would be pointless, except where I might cheat and try to come up with something after reading the Wikipedia summaries of same. Let it also be known that my friend, Lon Prater, wrote this book, and that this of course calls anything I say about it into question.

I haven't read any of those other books co-authored by a dead person and a living person who clearly does not believe in an afterlife, or who has faith that if there is one, either they'll end up in the place other than that of the dead author, or that the dead author will have a great sense of humor about the whole thing. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters. Jayne Slayre. Queen Victoria, Demon Hunter. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The Undead World of Oz. Little Vampire Women. Mansfield Park and Mummies. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers - A Canterbury Tale. Android Karenina. Have I got them all? I don't know. I hunted up this list from Amazon.com and have read none of them. Sorry. It's going to be that kind of review.

Let it not be said that I'm completely ignorant of the charm of these books. It was a few Pi-cons ago, I think, wherein I played a leading role in a live reading from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. My companion, who owns the book, helped me pick out a passage to read - the part where the Bennet sisters use their super secret ninja assassin skills to fight the zombies. However, I'm not much for a joke that goes on past a few pages, and so I have not read the entire book. This is also the reason I'm not much of a MST3K fan. After a few scenes, the jokes pall, and I fall asleep. Hopefully, Lon isn't sweating. Don't worry, Lon. Not a whole lot of people read this blog, and if they do, they'll keep reading to find the part where I actually talk about your book.

Back when he generously provided me with a free review copy of the book, the author assured me that I was free to be honest in my review, so I will be. Because I'm not a fan of the genre, and because I'm not a fan of either influence this book mashes up, it took me a while to get into the story. It wasn't really until the titular character, Jayne Grind herself, starts to vamp to a captive audience about performing brain surgery on people to remove their altruism, did I really become engaged. I found the modern pop culture references scrambled in with the aged cadences of Wellsian language to be a bit jarring, but for the most part, the language was otherwise seamless, and I did settle in for a good read partway through, especially once the central idea of the novel started to bloom, and we find out that the altruism-ectomied people were volunteers, who had read the novelized cant of Grind, and had come across the sea looking for her, in order to become one of the lobotomized elite. It did help, after all, to review the summary of the original Moreau so I could understand the author's cleverness, and thank goodness I had absorbed enough Objectivism through cultural osmosis to follow along fairly well. Parts of the novel were pretty gross, and contrary to whatever tone my objections to the mashup genre may have produced, I liked the gross parts the best. After giving it some thought, I have decided that this piece would best be presented as a live-action play to an audience of undergrads studying Rand, possibly done as a drag burlesque, a la Harvard's all-male Hasty Pudding Club. It would be that kind of howling, snorting, whooping yet highly intellectual, sick-indy-movie crowd that would provide its own entertainment value.

So at the end of this highly qualified critique, I find myself the target audience for the novel, if not the genre as a whole.

After reading, I find myself a little peckish for some long-pig jerky and a microbrew.

Revealing the Third Body

2011-07-05T19:30:00.011-04:00

This photograph of two saplings entwined was taken at Eno River State Park in North Carolina. I was hunting with my camera that day, searching for images that could express the deep, complex emotions I was feeling at the time. The gentleman with me said--having patiently watched me photograph everything in sight--rivulets of water, rocks, the roots of trees, sunlight through leaves, my own feet, my shadow--"I bet most people don't understand you." Implicit in his statement was, "but I'd like to give it a shot." He did give it a shot, and I gave it a shot, and the Third Body we found when we understood each other well enough couldn't carry us through the pains of our situation, across the miles of our personal demons, or across the actual miles that separated us. The Third Body would have had to be a mighty dragon indeed to demolish those obstacles with its talons, fangs, and fiery breath. Couldn't we have made it so; couldn't we have built a Third Body strong enough to conquer all? That's what this post is about.

In Romancing the Shadow, Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf describe a relationship entity called "the Third Body," which they characterize as "the soul of the relationship." I've been thinking a lot about relationships, lately. More accurately, I've been thinking about relationships for most of my life. Common language says that a relationship is something people build. Buster meets Kim, Buster and Kim decide to get married, Buster and Kim form a relationship persona for the outside world, and underneath, according to Zweig and Wolf, "the shadow of the couple remains hidden: their apparent compatibility may disguise conflicting values or even domestic violence. Their bon vivant lifestyle may camouflage near-bankruptcy. Their puritanical religious doctrines may belie split-off shadows that act out in sexual affairs or perversions. At a more subtle level, they may agree, perhaps implicitly, that they cannot be vulnerable, angry, or depressed with one another, thereby sacrificing authenticity for the status quo."

"But at a background level, we propose that there is a transpersonal field that contributes to bringing two people together, thereby shaping their fate. From this perspective, the relationship is larger than they are, transcending their individual egos and shadows...the field that is the Third Body knits together the various dimensions of our lives; it holds our egos, shadows, souls, and the larger world together in a common story...The care and feeding of the Third Body is an ongoing part of maintaining a conscious relationship. Like a plant, it is alive and responds to the correct amount of water, air, and light. If we take it for granted or attend to it only when a problem arises, it may become dehydrated and wither. In its weakened state, it cannot tolerate more stress. But if we nurture it and maintain its delicate equilibrium, it grows strong and supports the life of the relationship."

What I'm not seeing here is the "building" metaphor. A relationship is "built" isn't it? Doesn't it take work, conscious effort to "build" a partnership or a marriage? Isn't it like building a bridge, where two people bring the building supplies, and they build this thing together? Maybe one is a really stable personality, and so what she brings are rocks, and the other has an "artistic" (read unstable) temperament, and so what he brings is straw. Can't they work together on the shore of the river and make mud-and-straw bricks, and pile those on top of the stones, and make a bridge? The metaphor almost works, except that you added water to make the mud. The water didn't come from either person, and suppose you really need that water in order to build the bridge. I'd argue that the building metaphor just doesn't work, because people usually come to a relationship with a notion of what they're trying to build, what it should look like, what building materials it requires, and then they kill themselves trying to build the thing, and end up drowned in the river instead.

Discard the building metaphor. Discard it. It won't work where we're going. The transpersonal field is not something that is built. Imagine instead that we're sitting at the knee of Michelangelo as he's studying a large block of Carrara marble, quarried with care from a mountainside. Michelangelo claimed that each block of marble already had a figure in it, and all he needed to do was to remove the extra marble. He was not building; he was not sculpting; he was merely revealing that which already was. This is how the transpersonal field manifests, I think. It is not built. It already exists, and the trick is for the people generating it to become familiar enough with one another to see it, and love it for what it is. It cannot be anything other than it is, because it is not an independent thing; it's a reflection, a spontaneous manifestation of the complex reality of the two people generating the transpersonal field.

This means if the people are cracked, the transpersonal field will be cracked. It doesn't matter if the personae are as smooth as David's buttocks once Michelangelo stopped polishing them; the cracks underneath will manifest in the Third Body. The shadows manifest there, because the Third Body will reflect reality, not the fondest Hallmark greeting card romantic comedy version of the people in the relationship. You can wish on a star, and blow out a thousand birthday candles, and take a hammer and chisel to the Third Body itself, but you'll get nothing. The chisel will go right through. The Third Body will be what it is, because it isn't itself, it's you. Some people take the hammer and chisel and try to hammer the people to fit a preconceived image. The Kims of the world take the hammer and try to chisel pieces of Buster off so the Third Body looks more like the statue of David, and less like a stack of bronze cheeseburgers. The Busters of the world take turns with Kim, and hammer and chisel at themselves, trying to "build" their relationship. Buster's sex drive is higher than Kim's? The chisel will take care of that! Only, no it won't, really. The stack of bronze cheeseburgers just looks like a stack of bronze dog poop now, and is no closer to looking like the statue of David. Kim can go out and buy a set of silicone breasts or a sexy negligee, but even though it might give her a little boost of confidence, if she's an insecure wreck to begin with, underneath she's going to continue being an insecure wreck no matter how great the fake boobs look in the negligee.

This idea, if mishandled, can be depressing. There's no escaping reality. There's no Barbie Dream House. Somewhere over the rainbow is a field full of cow piles. Why even have a relationship, if you can't realize your dreams of perfection? Well, hang on. There's where we've gone off the rails. There's that perfection thing again. It's true that the Third Body is only as mutable as the people manifesting it, but each individual person can elect to change and grow. They can have absolutely zero impact on what the Third Body looks like EXCEPT to choose to change themselves. They can send it into the crapper with the hammer and chisel, or they can choose to accept and value themselves (the first and second bodies), and watch the effect of this nurturing on the Third Body. That's the really good stuff.

"We suggest that, when the shadow erupts and we feel betrayed, instead of stepping onto the roller coaster of blame or caretaking each other like parents and children, we now have another option: to honor and nurture the larger field that is the relationship. In this way, as Robert Bly put it in his poem, we make a promise to love that body, to feed someone whose presence we feel but cannot see."

A man and a woman sit near each other,
and they do not long
at the moment to be older, or younger,
nor born in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are,
talking or not talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom
we do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come,
death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
something we know of, whom we have never seen.

Robert Bly

If you hide from your partner behind your persona, the Third Body will be invisible, and the relationship weak and transparent as onion skin. If your partner reveals his shadows, and you spit on them, the Third Body will be pitted with the acid of spittle, and may never fully heal, though you pour honey over the pits for the rest of your life. If you look upon the corrupted Third Body, tease apart the bits that are you, and the bits that are your partner, and love those bits, and then love them combined, you nourish the Third Body and give it life. You can't demand anything of the Third Body, any more than you can demand of your own reflection to get off its ass and mow the lawn for once, for chrissake. If you hate yourself, the Third Body will die. It takes courage to nurture the Third Body. It takes courage to nourish your own body, the first body, but the Third Body cannot bear the weight while you work things out with the first. It's a messy, parallel process, everything healed all at once or not at all. The Third Body reflects you, and this is one of life's most terrifying opportunities.

To look, to truly see, to accept, to love, to grow, to own your own shadows, and to own your own light.

With deep appreciation and gratitude to a certain North Carolina gentleman.

Reflections

2011-07-03T18:38:00.012-04:00

Sometimes, my brain just gets too busy, and nothing comes when I sit with the page. I've decided to re-read The Artist's Way by Julie Cameron, to jolt something loose, to reboot my creativity. My creativity has lain fallow for so long, strangled to death by my desire to write perfectly, that I have to read a book about being creative to remember how to be creative. This book, if nothing else, tells you to do something about it. It says to write three pages of anything each morning, even if it's just "I don't know what to write" a few hundred times. It says to go on little field trips, once a week to create some little spark of creativity. It says to take walks, and something inside of you will start to move again. More and more, when at a loss for something to write, I've returned to my library of images, which is, to me, vast. I keep looking at that number, 7,500, the number of pictures in my Aperture library, and in reviewing the images, I can usually make some association that starts my fingers moving across the keyboard.

The first picture was taken in Manhattan in 2010, in a fountain in Madison Square Park, which is adjacent to the famous Flatiron Building. When I was sorting through photographs this evening, this photo caught my eye, because the world reflected in the water is hazy, and upside-down. I haven't been writing very much this week, because this is one of those hazy, upside-down weeks. The environment is familiar enough for me to make it to work and back, but there is something between me and the world, a haze, and I have not felt comfortable. I have not felt grounded. There are too many unanswered questioned, too much uncertainty. I can see the world, but each thing I see makes me think of something else, and it feels as if I'm viewing the world through several layers of confusion. Hazy. Upside-down.

Because these photos are of reflections in water, most of them have trees in them. Twisted, shadowy, upside-down trees, with branches reaching downward like roots. When I'm trying to re-center, my mind digs down into itself, rooting for purchase. My mind seeks to root itself. Sometimes, it's a scary thing, using the energy to send the roots deep without knowing if there will be a reward. Maybe I will run out sap before the roots reach water. As anyone knows, if the roots stop growing before they reach water, the tree will die. The tree is taking a risk by sending out those roots. It's grow or die, and sometimes you have to throw out the roots like a desert nomad picking a direction in a sandstorm. Maybe this is the way toward life, or perhaps I'm striking further out into the desert and each step brings me closer to death. But it's better to take the risk than to conserve energy and die slowly, without trying, without reaching.

Then there are the photos wherein what is reflected is merely light. Everything reflected is merely light, right? Sometimes the light makes pictures (a tree, a beloved partner), and sometimes, there are no pictures, only light. When I named this blog, I was writing a novel for which I had done a great deal of research on quantum theory, among other things. If I describe it in detail, I will lose all hope of ever writing it, so I will only say that I learned a lot of about the properties of light. (A brief tangent: Please read "Divining Light," a short story in Asimov's by my friend Ted Kosmatka; you won't be sorry. It's brilliant. You'll love it.) Anyway, when I was doing the research for my novel about light, it seemed natural to name this blog Particles of Light, each post one particle in the light-picture of my writing life. Each time I take a photograph, I'm aware that I am capturing an image in light. The particles do so and so, the eye absorbs such and such, the lens, the aperture, the complex translation of an image by the human eye, to create a picture of chili peppers, of a dog, of a beach, of a plate of food.

There has been some major rearrangement of worldview and mental models happening inside of me lately, and these photos capture the resulting shattered foggy glistening of that process better than words. The images inspire a question: once I've nuked the site from orbit, where do I stand while I rebuild? Too abstract: I did not nuke any site from orbit. The earth still is. I stand on it. I sit here tucked in bed, typing on my laptop. Though worlds change and shift in my head, the externals are the same. I sit in my bed while I rebuild and reconsolidate my disintegrated worldview. I spend an hour in the kitchen washing and chopping and slicing for an hour (more kohlrabi, scallions, radishes, shallots, cilantro, limes, tomato, and avocado for a salad), searing tuna in a grill pan, laying everything on a bed of baby romaine for dinner. Crunchy, tangy, and real, while the stuff in my head dances like particles of light across the water, making no pictures, no patterns, nothing at all to hold onto.

I'll play here in the reflections for a while, and paddle my feet. There are a million possible futures, and I feel adrift in all those reflections of nothing, and yet, there are my feet. I may feel adrift in a hazy, upside-down world, but I have some choices to make. I can do what I did earlier in the week and splash around until I can't even see the light reflected any more (those are dark days, indeed), or I can sit in the water until I stop making waves and I can scry. Maybe I'll see some upside-down trees. Maybe I'll close my eyes and send my roots down into the earth, like I imagined at church this morning with the guest minister. Maybe I'll sit quietly long enough and see the world reflected in a surface as smooth as glass. But even then, I need to remember that all it takes is just a little tension in my body, and the ripples will break things up again, and the vision will be gone. The harder I struggle, the harder it is to make out anything of the world around me.

It is so difficult to let go, and so necessary.

Silverbrook Farm

2011-06-30T12:00:00.004-04:00

This year, I signed up for the company's organic farm share, and I'm splitting a share with one of my co-workers. What this means is every Tuesday, I march down to street to the distribution point with a post-recycled waste tote bag, wait in line, and transfer a random assortment of organically produced farm goods into the tote. This week, there was enough kohlrabi to choke a a herd of goats. I wish I'd taken a picture of this vegetable, but I didn't have the presence of mind, so I'll remember next time. I had five or six kohlrabi with full greenery still attached, which meant my tote was abundantly overflowing with leaves, and that was only one item. There were also purple spring onions, dandelion greens, a red leaf lettuce, sweet peas, snap peas, and snow peas, strawberries so ripe they had to be eaten the first day (smelled so sweet in my office all day), a little carton of red currants, and some cloumage, with is sort of a like a ricotta cheese, but more pungent (and more delicious, by far).

At home, I shelled the peas and served them steamed. They were beautifully fresh. I love fresh sweet peas. I sliced and caramelized the spring onions, which was sort of a shame because they're so pretty when they're fresh, but they were great poured over thinly sliced kohlrabi and tossed with chopped dandelion greens, olive oil, and lime juice. Lots of salt is needed to sale up a root vegatable, and this turned out very much like the turnip salads I made with last year's farm share, whenever another person in the office had too many turnips. Kohlrabi is crisper than a turnip, and not spicy, but is very good mixed with strong tasting things like onions and dandelion greens.

The week before, I came home with snap peas and snow peas, napa cabbage, kale, fresh eggs, green spring onions, and I'm sure other things that were great, but I just can't remember. I take so many pictures for a reason; no matter how much gingko I take, my memory is going. I do know that I enjoyed my half share, and I think I used all of it, which is pretty impressive for just one person. The other people in the family are indifferent vegetable eaters, which means half a share of organic produce a week is just a lot of washing, chopping, peeling, sauteeing, etc. One thing that's hard to get used to is that the produce arrives so dirty. I'm used to everything being washed and prepackaged and neat and tidy. Organic produce just isn't like that. It's dirty, and the leafy things are often full of holes because they don't use pesticides, but it's not like the stuff is full of bugs when it arrives, just dirt. So it takes some extra time to prepare, but I think it's worth it.

Last week I made a soup from the onions, kale, cabbage, some beef stock, and sliced packaged ham. Next time perhaps I'll use some uncured bacon instead, although the ham was quite tasty. I had the uncured bacon for breakfast this morning, with the farm fresh eggs and a dollop of the creamy cloumage cheese. Note to self: going shopping tomorrow, but PURCHASE NO PRODUCE. This particular organic farm also has fruit, cheese, eggs, honey, and occasionally brings plants for their farm shares. I don't know what it works out to, per half share, financially, but this stuff is paid in advance, so I need to make sure I eat it all up and waste nothing. Because of my crazy house (three kitchens, three cooks), it's sometimes confusing, figuring out what to cook so nothing is wasted. I'm still feeling my way through that, and things will be even more complicated when I start growing vegetables in the back yard.

It's expensive, and it's yucky dirty and needs to be washed really well before eating, and you need to make sure you eat it all to get your money's worth, but there's something deeply satisfying to me about not knowing what's going to show up every week. They do send out an e-mail ahead of time to give you an idea of what will be in the shares, but it's a funny thing. Sometimes, they say they'll bring bok choy, and it never shows up. Sometimes, they promise a potted plant, and you get strawberries instead. There's always something missing, and always something unexpected. It's almost as if they've got a secret agenda with the contents of the shares. Don't get your hopes up; anticipate something surprising. Don't get too set on one thing. Think creatively about how to plan a menu around mystery ingredients. A salad doesn't just have to be lettuce, and you don't have to cook everything you think you have to cook. You can eat sweet peas raw right out of the shell. My aunt taught me that, how good raw vegetables taste.

The vegetables in the market are often tasteless, tough, and old (because they've been on a boat or a truck for weeks before they get to you). I'm trying to keep my ears open when people talk about going blueberry picking, apple picking, or seeking whatever is ripe and available. I try not to pay exorbitant prices, but I am willing to pay a premium for an apple that tastes like an apple, instead of some fibrous nothing from somewhere far away. I'm trying to get organized enough to grow herbs in my yard. I have some chives back there, and a new mustard plant. I'm looking for foods that taste like what they're supposed to be, not bioengineered to resist bruising on a three-week long truck ride across country. I'm looking for melt-in-your-mouth, crisp, fresh, and full of life.

Life's too short to eat crappy food.

On Four Hours of Sleep

2011-06-28T19:14:00.004-04:00

I sat down with good intentions of writing a post, but I have to admit that my brain is full of fog. I stayed up very late last night writing the post about my uncle, and then had one of those strenuous days at work where I spent the greater part of the day moving from one crisis to another. I'm not a firefighter, so while I'm fighting the fires, I'm also laying in infrastructure for a good fire suppression system, and that kind of simultaneous right-now versus long-term thinking is exhausting. Some days, I come home feeling as if I've spent all day trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. Today wasn't like that. I did receive some very nice feedback from people that shows that over the long term, what I do at work creates lasting improvement.

I'm just tired. Tired, and not thinking well.

There's also the strain of trying not to fall into bad habits, and having nowhere to hide from myself. So I just have to sit there and feel things, and feel the desperate urge to use those old bad habits to soothe myself, and just refusing to use them. Instead, I'm rising above myself, watching my reaction, and saying, "Isn't that interesting? There's that urge again. Wow, it's a pretty strong urge. No wonder I've had such a hard time resisting it." All the time, not really resisting it, but not indulging in it either. Just witnessing, noticing, allowing myself to feel those things, and sitting with the agitation until something else catches my eye and without my noticing an immediate relief, it fades into other concerns.

Instead of indulging myself in flailing, I'm going to write a blog post, this blog post. I'm going to witness whatever feelings come as I wrangle with having no topic, and I'm going to let them be, and not try to stop them, and not allow them to inform my actions. That's what I've rarely managed to do; let things be. It sounds so passive. One of the things I struggle with is how to see myself as an active, powerful person if I just "let things go." But letting things go isn't about being passive, or letting people stomp on you. It's the opposite. Lettings things go means relinquishing control over other people, and acting only when you understand where your power to influence starts and stops. It means refusing to be controlled by the fear of not knowing which possible future will actually occur. Refusing to get lost in trying to figure out all of the possible outcomes, especially with new data coming in every moment. Imagine if you spent your life trying to solve a math problem where the variables won't stay put for longer than five minutes. Imagine the time draining away, the life draining away, as you sat in one place un-showered, and unfed, trying to figure something out that's just going to change every five minutes.

At some point, the sane person puts down the slate, and puts down the chalk, and decides to acknowledge the desire to be paralyzed, while chasing butterflies, and washing her hair. That's letting things go. Choosing to observe the brain hamsters while washing your hair with ginger shampoo, making tea and cookies, and making whatever other decisions are right in front of you. Not trying to decide on the millions of things that haven't yet happened. Not trying to come up with a contingency plan for every possibility. Not building a bunker in the basement to cover every possible catastrophe from the zombie apocalypse to the super flu. It's spending some time looking far enough ahead to determine what's likely to happen, and planning for that, but being flexible enough to shift in the moment, instead of freezing in place, in terror, all the planning in the world unable to save your life. Wouldn't that be silly? To plan for a million futures, and end up dying anyway, of the one you didn't plan for. When you could have been chasing butterflies, making pots, chopping dandelion greens and spring onions. I can't build a failsafe plan to be Vice President of my company in five years; however, I can take a class next semester, and then one the following semester, and another the semester after that. If I don't let it go, I won't take any classes, I won't write any blog posts, I won't chase any butterflies.

I'll just sit doing nothing on four hours of sleep, terrified of life's possibilities.

That's no way to live.

Wait and watch for the choices, carefully consider, and then act.

Repeat.

The Last Day

2011-06-27T21:47:00.037-04:00

Tomorrow is my uncle's funeral. I am not at my family's side as they honor this much beloved man, but I can do this. I can remember the last day I saw the man himself, in the summer of 2008, and I can share my impressions of that day, which I will never forget. The poem and the songs are not mine, of course, but the photographs are. I will not tag these photographs, but if you recognize yourself or your friends and family in any of them, and want me to take them down, I will do so immediately. It would not do for me to offer respect to one of my family by inadvertently offering disrespect to one of yours.

To those of my family who find internet navigation a little confusing: If you want to know what I was listening to while I was putting together this album, click the links between the pictures. Right-click to open YouTube in a new window if you want to listen while you look at the photos; or you can click the link to go to YouTube, and then click back to return to the blog.

Lullaby - Loreen McKennit

Amazing Grace - Leann Rimes

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

~ High Flight, John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Scarborough Fair - Carly Simon

Down in the River to Pray - Allison Krauss

This is Why We Fight - The Decemberists

Silent Lucidity - Queensryche

Big Rock Candy Mountain - Harry McClintock

Keep on the Sunny Side - The Carter Family

The Hill - Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova

Here Comes the Sun - Nina Simone

Somewhere Over the Rainbow & What a Wonderful World - Israel Kamakawiwo'Ole

Tears in Heaven - Eric Clapton

We'll Meet Again - Johnny Cash

Don't Stop Me Now - Queen

Drive - Incubus

Closer to You - Brandi Carlisle

You Will be My Ain True Love - Allison Krauss & Sting

Pithy Quotes

2011-06-27T09:22:00.002-04:00

A writing colleague, Luc Reid, has been collecting sayings from members of the Codex online writing community, and has chosen to post a few of mine, along with a nice bio and links to my websites.

Thanks, Luc!

Read about it here.

Ze Froggy

2011-06-25T19:46:00.003-04:00

Now for something completely different. Here are the clay thingies I made the other day with a young boy. I have 10 pounds of white clay to play with as well; I'm just trying to figure out what I'll make with it. I've always been fascinated with the idea of learning how to throw pots on a wheel, but I'm not willing to invest the time or the money in supplies. When I do a thing, I tend to obsess (no!) and I can see myself throwing down the huge bucks for a pottery wheel and a kiln or some madness like that, because I'm having some sort of mid-life crisis, and I'm trying to figure out what to throw into my life to give it some direction.

I'm resisting this urge mightily, and instead going for the 10-minute bake-in-the oven, or air-day kind of projects.

Like ze froggy.

If I Didn't Have to Be Perfect

2011-06-23T14:05:00.013-04:00

If I didn't have to be perfect, I might consider killing my darlings. Yes, this is a photograph of a statue of Medea. No, I don't mean I'd kill my actual human children. I mean the brain children I've been hauling around ever since I was 10; I'd maybe kill them. The best I've been able to do is to banish them to the basement. They're in a plastic tub marked "L's Dresser," because the tub was inherited from someone who didn't need them any more, twice removed, I think. Notebooks, that's what's in the tub. Notebooks and binders full of stories I wrote when I was 10. I remember letting a friend's older sister read the first page of a story once; I'd painstakingly typed a story out and put it in one of those folders for reports, the ones where you thread the bendy aluminum bunny ears through the holes in the paper and then splay the bunny ears to hold the paper in. She was so amazed by the first page, she read it out loud, and praised it. I can't help thinking she did me no favors, however well intentioned.

As a child, I was often praised for being smart, smarter than most other kids, and although that was done out of love, I'm not sure that was a favor either. When my writing was praised, I think I got addicted, and the stories became my children, which I'd die before abandoning. I wrote a lot from the age of 10 to about the age of 17, when I went into the Army. The Army killed my creativity, and I didn't get it back again until I was in my early 20's. Somehow, I was able to ignore the screaming of the old stories in the box, and write something new. Only a few stories in, I sent a story to Writers of the Future and won an award. I'm sure that this did me no favors. Looking back, I wish I'd labored for years before publishing a story, but I didn't. I wrote a few stories and then I won an award (second place that quarter), and they flew me from Massachusetts to Hollywood, and drove me around in a limousine, and let me shake John Travolta's hand on the roof of the Celebrity Center, where the Scientologists gave us a barbecue, with the cooks in chef's hats against the palm tree skyline of Hollywood. No favors. I also met my childhood idol, Anne McCaffrey, on that trip. Hers was the first SF novel I'd ever read, and I loved it so much, I started typing it out by hand, using a dime-feed typewriter at the library. The trip to Hollywood did me no favors.

There's a reason I don't have a large bibliography, and there's a reason none of my books are in the library. It's because with each story I published, the slower and more meticulously I wrote the next one. When I wrote a new story, I felt in my bones that I had to sell it. All the professional writers I knew said this was a stupid idea, and I nodded, but down in my heart, I refused to give up on a story. I'd rewrite a story every time I sent it out, and if I didn't sell it, I'd keep it in a vault on my computer and caress it with sickening obsession. "I'll write it again," I'd say to myself. "I'll write it until I place it. But I won't give up on it." There is a very real condition called obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I have it. I have an obsession: to sell every single story I write. Never mind that I've actually written hundreds of drafts of very few stories, and many of them became new stories during revision. My obsession said that, provided the story had the same title, and the same essential story seed, it was the same story, and come what may, I would publish every damn thing I wrote. Eventually, this perfectionism became paralysis, and I stopped writing. Ever since I was ten, I dreamed of becoming a novelist, but I have never finished writing a novel. The novels I wrote when I was fourteen went unfinished. I'd just write THE END at some arbitrary chapter, and then start on the sequel, and I never finished a "series" this way.

The reason I love the picture of the guy playing chess is because he's obsessed. He sits in Harvard Square and plays chess, gnawing a cigar, with a squirt gun on the table. I'm not sure what offense merits a shot from the squirt gun; maybe he squirts his opponent if he wins. I doubt he ever loses. The younger players stand in line to play with him. Some scribble in notebooks while they wait. I wanted to write novels like this guy plays chess, and turn out some intricate, ludicrously layered thing that critics and academics would pee themselves to write essays about. The kind of novel that could be taught in college classes. Yes, I am that narcissistic and self-destructive. I'm not kidding you. It's embarrassing, but there it is. If I didn't have to be perfect, I might have written several novels by now. I may even have gotten one published, if the novel were decent and I got lucky enough for all the publishing tumblers to have fallen into place (there is no guarantee). If I didn't have to be perfect, I'd probably be writing fiction right now.

I've included the photographs in this post, because I took most of them (the squirrel photograph was taken by my companion at the time, back in 2003. I don't have to be good at photography, so I take a lot of pictures. There are 7,500 pictures currently in my Aperture library, and at least a few of them are probably good enough to frame and hang. I'm a big fan of postcards, and I think some of my photos could probably be on postcards; I can't say. I've never tried to sell a photograph. I don't have to be good at photography, and I don't have to be good at blogging, so I can just take pictures, and write about them without breaking a sweat. This stuff I write isn't perfect; it's often riddled with typographical errors, and sometimes the writing just isn't very good. Because I don't have to be perfect at it, I blog often. I like doing it. It's fun. Writing fiction has stopped being fun. Writing poetry has stopped being fun. Because, you know. I have to be perfect at it. It's been my dream since I was 10, and because I had a pretty good start, with the limousines and everything, I had better be perfect at it. Because, you know, the work has to be worth the sacrifices. It has to be so good you're willing to starve to do it. I've heard people tell me this. You have to romanticize it, and be willing to starve.

Somehow, though, I don't have to be willing to starve to take a picture of a squirrel. I can just go to a park and wander around until I see a squirrel, and then take a picture of it while it's on a tree trunk, looking ridiculous. Taking photographs of squirrels is expectation-free. Nobody gave me a lift in a limo because of a picture of a woodland creature. Nobody has written me a letter to let me know how much the picture of the squirrel meant to them when they were deployed overseas, that the picture explained to him what his wife was going through when he was gone, and she was left behind, left alone. People mostly just say, "Heh. Cute squirrel," and the pressure's off. Nobody feeds my ego over this squirrel picture (and if you do, I'll hunt you down; I really will).

This morning, I wrote longhand in my journal. "Now that I no longer need to be perfect, does that mean I don't have to write a novel any more, or that I can start?" The person I asked about this, this morning, suggested it might be one or the other, neither, or both. When I was talking to my daughter last night about her fall schedule (first semester of college), I found myself encouraging her about calculus. I'm not very good at math, so I had to study a lot to be good at calculus. I wanted to tell her that calculus was hard for me, and that if she found it hard for her, I hoped she wouldn't get down on herself about it. She hadn't been given the math gene from anybody, but still I wanted her to know that being good at calculus could be a choice for her. It might be scary, but she could do it. People with good brains and determination can do a lot of things. They can do calculus, learn Latin, take pictures of squirrels, write prize-winning stories, but they can also lose their minds, and become paralyzed, and stop being able to do much at all. They're still smart, but they're paralyzed, and so being smart doesn't matter any more. The smart brain can turn on itself and cannibalize its creativity, and turn it to harmful purposes. A good brain can do a lot of things.

If I didn't have to be perfect, what would I do? I would throw away the tuna I bought on Monday, because it spoiled before I could cook it, and I'd say, "Oh well. Next time I'll only buy fish if I plan to cook it the same day." Then I'd cook a dinner of snap peas and snow peas instead, and a pot of soup made from my Silverbrook Farms organic farm share vegetables. Cabbage, and ramps, and chard, with a bit of Virginia ham thrown in. I don't have to be perfect when I cook. I just have to be good enough, and even when I'm not and I have to throw an experiment out, I just eat something else. I don't get paralyzed in the kitchen, feeling undeserving of the Wusthof knife I got for Christmas. If I didn't have to be perfect, I'd run out in the rain and buy clay, and an expensive set of clay tools, and sculpt a flower and a frog with a seven-year-old, and bake it in the oven. I wouldn't be sad when the "eraser clay" didn't actually erase anything. I'd give both things I made away, and think about what I wanted to make next time. I did that yesterday. I didn't have to be perfect at any of those things, and I had a ball.

I've been encouraged to take some of these blog posts and make them into magazine articles and sell them. I couldn't write anything for a couple of days after that. Oh, these posts are salable? That means they need to be perfect. Oopse, there go all of my ideas. There goes my fluency. Make sure the themes are deep, and the composition is right, and that you comb through obsessively for typographical errors. Better go back through old posts and edit them, because you never know when someone might happen across this blog and say, Wow! This should be turned into a book of some sort. Fie, fie. A pox on that noise. I'm writing. Leave me alone. Let me do this in peace. If I have to sell it, I'm doomed. I might as well hang up my blogger hat, and go into a coma in front of the television instead of working. In order to work, I have to fool myself. I have to use one side of my good brain to fool the other side. Good thing it's a sick brain; it's good at fooling itself, and I've somehow figured out how to work despite the paralysis.

There's a certain lack of perfection in the angles in this photo, curves and planes, and I don't know anything about photography, so I don't even know if it's good. Trinity Church seems a little skewed, and the Hancock Tower skewed too, but I like it that way, not knowing if it's a good photo. Never mind the weird ass angles, I like the cloud in the window glass. I don't know if this is a good picture, and I'm so happy with it.

I think if I didn't have to be perfect, I'd probably sleep like my dog does, with tummy-up, paw-twitching abandon. I'd work like a demon, guzzling the ideas flowing in from the spirit world. I'd spend more time at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in my paisley pants and my hat with the bumblebees on it. The hat is reversible, shapeless, unflattering.

I love that hat.

The Power of Models

2011-06-21T19:27:00.008-04:00

Hello, my name is Joy, and I'm not a fashion model. This photo was shot by someone who loves me. You can tell, can't you? The photographer waited for me to look my best, waited for the "right" angle, because I actually do have a good side. I'm not one of those people who look their best in every photo or even most photos. In most photos, I look awkward. In this photo, I don't.

I am a model in a lot of other ways. All mothers are models, whether they want to be or not. Every manager is a model. Every spouse is a model. Every friend is a model. I'm not talking about fashion models any more, of course. I'm talking about life models. I'm reading a new book, this one called The Fractal Organization: Creating Sustainable Organizations with the Viable System Model by Patrick Hoverstadt. I've been reading a lot of books on philosophy and self-help and psychology because I've been going through a lot this year, personally. I've been going nuts trying to create a sustainable organization in my house, pouring all of my creativity and energy into doing that, and along the way forgot how to nurture myself. Believe it or not, reading business leadership and organizational theory feeds my spirit as much as a trip to Mystic Seaport, which is where that photo of me was taken. A few months ago, I looked at the mess I had made of myself trying to "fix" my family, and I fell down the rabbit hole. I fell down, and I had a hard time getting back up again. I lost my faith and my focus and myself.

I knew I was a model for my family, and I tried to be a good one. I've also been a manager for a year and half, and I've learned a lot about modeling doing that. At home, I'm a mess at modeling the way I do at work, because although I thought the process was pretty much the same and I thought I was adapting and choosing my mental models as flexibly as I did at work, I wasn't. At work, I consider all of the data objectively, and I (relatively) patiently allow the most appropriate mental modeling to work for positive change. Here's a passage from the book I'm reading, which describes how our mental models influence the world better than I can:

The idea that the mental model you use affects the way you see the world is itself quite radical for some people, obvious to others. The idea that these models do not just affect the way you see the world, but also affect the way the world sees you and thereby affect the way the world interacts with you and in very practical ways effectively change that bit of the world you live in, is more radical and is quite scary to many. The obvious conclusion that you have real choices about this is for many deeply scary and for others deeply liberating. Scary because it means that you have real responsibility for the way you choose to view and interact with the world and that this will have consequences for the way the world interacts with you. Liberating because you have the power to change the way that the bit of the world to which you are directly coupled works, simply by selecting, testing, and using different mental models.

I won't claim omniscience, but I'm an INFJ. I'm one those people who instinctively understands systems thinking, big-picture thinking, and cascading consequences. Some call the INFJ, "the protector," and I have strong P tendencies as well in some areas of life, and some call the INFP "the idealist." Add perfectionism, and OCD, and anxiety, and codependence, and you have someone who runs after people telling them how they're messing up your perfect system, and if they would only CHANGE, the home machine would function, dammit! Can I enumerate all of the ways in which this is wrong thinking? I don't have time. You don't have time. Let's just say, "Oopse," and move on. Yes, the mental models you use are important, at work or at home. Recently, I've been trying on mental models for my entire life, like hats. Maybe I'll be a fiction writer, a poet, a college professor of some sort, a journalist (food writer, travel writer), a graphic designer, a photographer, an interior designer, a philosopher, a psychologist. Maybe I'll quit everything and be a professional lunatic. Maybe I'll quit everything and be a Buddhist anchorite nun. (Is there any such thing?) One of my many brain rainbows was about getting a master's degree in organizational psychology, and becoming a business consultant. I could write, travel, teach and/or lecture, and do what I do best, which is to analyze complex people-related puzzles and streamline processes for large organizations. I was so excited about this idea that I was literally jumping up and down and screaming with joy. I wanted to create the Grand Unified Theory of Organizational Everything, marrying integral leadership and fractal organization theories with Buddhist philosophy. I wanted to spread the good news that it's possible to have a completely integrated life, and even be happy and fulfilled at work! Then I got scared, and resumed obsessing about fiction writing. I would only be a successful person if I wrote a novel or used my creativity to make art for a living, so I slid back into depression, and resumed whacking my family with the only mental model I had for doing that. I took my problem and made it their problem. Well.

Do you control your mental models, or, do your mental models control you? If you are not aware that you have a choice of how to look at a situation or problem, if you are not conscious of the decision you have taken to use any particular model to understand that bit of the world, then you are using whatever happens to be your default model for situations of that type. The model is running you. If you are aware that you have a conscious choice, and you can weigh up what the benefits of the different models available are, then chances are that you are running the models, and not the other way around. But to be able to choose, you have to have a choice - if you only have one model of organization then, to all intents and purposes, you have no choice. That is the one you will use whenever you think about an organization.

As they say in Cyberland - *headdesk*. I struggled for a while at work to maintain my integrity in the face of great pressure to conform to other people's mental models of how work "should" be done, and what "couldn't be done." This month, I will be finishing up a project that my boss and the change management people of my division said couldn't be done. Somehow, I was able to select the appropriate mental model and implement it at work, though goodness knows I cried a lot getting used to how it felt to work that way, having the courage of my convictions every day, and every day questioning and adapting them to the environment, without feeling as if I were selling myself out. Then I went home, where I only had one mental model and I made myself and everyone else utterly miserable trying to implement it. This "should" work, I said, "Because I want it to." As someone close to me knows, that's a damn fool thing to say, but sometimes really smart people say it, because they have no other mental model to choose from. It's not that they're stupid. They aren't. They just don't know all of their choices.

For a long time, I have been able to see my choices clearly at work. I can witness my own human mess without allowing it to influence my decision-making. I let the demons yawp, yawp, yawp, and then I work the appropriate mental model. At home, I just run around, going yawp, yawp, yawp, and hammer at my one mental model like a mental patient, thinking that if I just do the same thing long enough, things will eventually go my way. Yawp, yawp, yawp.

There's a little gray box in this chapter of the book, titled: Pathological Archetypes:

1. The Fantasist. Confronted by a problem, an individual can act on intuition. Generally though, the members of a management team don't have the same intuition and even if they did, admitting to one another that they don't have a clue what is really happening is not always acceptable. Faced with a problem, they build models of reality to make sense of the world and to justify the actions they want to take. The archetype of the Fantasist happens when managers don't bother to check their mental models against reality, don't collect the necessary research, or deny the evidence that they do have available. Fantasist managers have not learnt Crow's Law: "Don't believe what you want to believe until you know what you need to know."

Oh great! I know what I need to know at work! I'm doing okay at work! (I know this, because I don't hide under my desk and cry at work. I mostly just type on the computer and play with Visio.) But how on earth am I supposed to know what I need to know at home? Aargh! Monstro, hate! Monstro smash! Honestly, I have no answers to the home question. I've never had an answer that worked for the long term, a way of flexible relating that was sustainable at home. I'm far, far too attached to certain outcomes. People grow and change, and it's hard enough to keep up with it at work, where I'm not attached to my co-workers beyond a healthy professional interest. Very few of the demons that run around in my head make mischief at work. Somehow they've learned that a woman's gotta eat, and she's gotta feed her kids. But once I get home and put on my sweatpants, the demons change their tune. They have not learned that a woman's gotta rest sometimes, and garden, and paint, and wallpaper, and write, and take pictures, and play with clay, and have more than one mental model for success: pay off debts, write fiction for a living. (Without a novel, my demons say, you are nothing. You will die, alone, in a cold room, and be eaten by Alsatians.) This is my mental model at home, and it stinks. The Beast that drives my writing life is the King Chief Grand Poobah of all Fantasists. I don't know if this nightmare demon is guarding my heart, or cutting my hamstrings, most days. More and more I'm suspecting the latter.

At work, I run the mental models. At home, the mental models have been running me.

Monstro smash.

Sweet Apples

2011-06-20T20:39:00.012-04:00

This is an angry post, because sometimes I get angry. It's also a hopeful post, because I'm learning how to be hopeful.

There's a colorful metaphor that describes having good boundaries when invited into a codependent conflict: "When someone hands you a crap sandwich, you don't have to eat it." I like to pretend this is a "family-friendly" blog, though, so I'm going to use the Snow White metaphor instead. "When someone hands you a rotten apple, you don't have to eat it."

Here's how it works. Someone you know and love calls you up on the phone and starts to verbally abuse you because you forgot their birthday, and you didn't send them a card. This is their rotten apple, not yours. They had it in their hand when they picked up the phone. It's possible someone else handed it to them when they were little, maybe forced it into their pudgy hands one Mother's or Father's Day, with some "innocent" little "teaching" comment where they were "just kidding," but something conflicted and confused inside them meant to deliver a wound little pudgy-hands would never forget. "If you love someone, you get them a card on Mother's or Father's day. And if you can't afford a card, you make a card. And if you don't have paper, you call them on the phone, even if you don't have a phone. You borrow a friend's phone. If you let this occasion go unmarked, it means you don't really love them. So you have to. Because if you don't, it means you don't love them, and if you don't love them, you're evil. Because if you don't love your mother or father, you're evil. And that's the truth." Wow! What a thing to teach a little tender person with pudgy hands! Maybe that person who has called you on the phone has been carrying this poisoned apple around their whole lives, but they think it's loving to pass it on to someone. After all, what if that other person doesn't know how to be a truly loving person? What if you're the only person on earth who could teach them to be a loving person. Wouldn't it be non-loving for you not to pass over the apple? Wouldn't that make you evil, if you knew about this whole card=love thing, and you never passed on that knowledge whenever needed? If you just go through life letting someone be unloving without teaching them what's right? Wow, that's borderline abusive right there! If you let that go, if you don't teach that love, then they're evil, and you're evil too!. And thus the poisoned apple gets handed over, sometimes out of love, because the giver mistakes a rotten apple for love.

One of the hardest parts of life is to know the difference between love and rotten apples. It's hard to see that some of your apples are rotten, and then when you do figure it out, it's STILL hard not to hand them out. There's a compulsion to hand them out, even after you see that they're rotten. It's as if they are controlled by some apple-flinging monster inside you, and you just stand there inside yourself, yelling "Nooooooo!" and hoping the recipient does bullet time, and dodges, but as soon as the apple hits, you have to take responsibility for it, and make the best of it. A transformation happens, some weird reality warp that throws an illusion over the whole transaction. Now you've done it. You handed over the apple. Now you have some choices: 1) Pretend the apple isn't rotten; in fact, fight to the death to prove it's a perfectly okay apple; 2) Insist that rotten apples won't kill you; eat an entire bushel of rotten apples right in front of the recipient to prove that they're just being a big baby by refusing to eat it. If they cared about you, they'd eat the damned apple to rescue you from the mistake of handing it over in the first place; 3) Blame the other person for taking the apple. Yeah, well I handed it to you; you're sure a stupid idiot for eating it; nobody in their right mind would eat that apple. Stupid-head. 4) Attack the other person for eating the apple. If you love me, you'd know I tend to hand out these apples, and you'd refuse to eat them. Not only that, you'd do it with compassion, because my wounds are great and therefore you are obliged to save me from myself. I'm bad, and it's your responsibility to love me anyway. If you don't fix this for me, you don't really love me, and if you don't love me, you're evil (but really, what I'm saying is that I don't deserve your love, and I want you to prove to me that I do.)

That last part is truly diabolical. I would love to be a person who can look at a rotten apple being handed to me, and just love that person with my whole heart. I would love see that apple, see its rot, and its worms, and see the twisted heart that's offering it, and somehow say no thank you to the apple, and yes to the heart. This is what compassionate people do. I did this with my daughter. I took the apple, saw that it was rotten, and just refused to eat it, no matter how much she kicked and screamed. Where I failed my own standard of perfection is that I kicked and screamed too. How DARE you try to hand me that apple. If you're handing me that apple, you CLEARLY don't love me. Oh my god, did I do that often? No, not too often. As a mother, I have my crap togather more often than not, but there were some times, oh yes, when I didn't just politely and neutrally refuse the apple, but I put that rotten bad boy into a slingshot and sent it flying into the face of the giver. Gonna give me that? I'll show you. Wa-BAM! I'm not proud of that. I'm humbled and grateful to have enough self worth to go back to her later and say, "I'm sorry. That was a rotten apple you handed over, but I'm the one who ate it. When someone hands you a rotten apple, you don't have to eat it, and you don't have to shove it back down someone else's throat to make sure they never do it again. You can just say no thanks, and I'm going to try to do that next time." I could say that to her more often than not, even if it was sometimes months or years later. With friends and, worse, with partners, it's much harder. Not twice as hard. A thousand times as hard. I'm much more afraid of failing as a partner than failing as a parent. Right now, I'm an apple flinger, and an apple eater. I hand them out, and when they're handed to me, I eat them more often than not.

I'm in the "conscious incompetance" stage of rotten apple dealing. I see them flying everywhere, and I have not learned the Kung fu that allows me to move through them with flexibility and grace. I'm not a Kung fu master; I am but a newly hatched ogre with a club. "I see rotten apple! Monstro smash! No apple! Apple bad! I show you not to throw apple at Monstro! Raaahhhh!" The shame of this is almost unbearable. I imagine gliding through the hail of rotten apples with a serene Quan Yin smile on my face with nary a smear of apple on my silken hem, and I feel sick. I want enlightenment! I want inner peace, and I want it RIGHT NOW!!! 99% percent of the battle is just SEEING the stupid apples, right? Once you see them, they're easy to deal with, right? Right? Wrong. Oh, so wrong.

We've been prepared, some of us, since birth, to screw up with the rotten apples. Sometimes, it's in our DNA to screw up with the rotten apples. Sometimes it's in our childhood. We were taught all kinds of things. We were punished so often for mentioning the rot, we were first convinced it was a bad to ever point it out, and then we were convinced not to believe our own eyes, and worst of all, we were taught not to see at all. Rot? There is no rot. This is how children are taught to distrust and hate themselves. They are taught simultaneously that there is no rot, and if you mention the rot that does not exist, you're evil. If you believe you see the rot, you're evil. If you see the rot at all, you're evil. And you can't unsee what you see, and so there is no avoiding the unavoidable fact that you're just plain evil. Yearning and striving and reaching for love of self and love from others, some will do anything. They'll believe anything. They'll let people hold their toes to the fire, and they'll just keep insisting they don't see a thing. They'll accept any kind of treatment in order to avoid the ultimate judgment of abandonment. They'll pack things down inside until they don't even see they're dying when they look in the mirror. It's just a migraine. It's natural pattern balding. Bodies just give out sometimes. Everybody gets depressed and can't sleep sometimes. If I mention that rotten apple, well, that means I'm evil, so I'd best not see that either. I've been saying "they," but what I mean is "we." These are my people, the people who speak to themselves this way.

I guess some people move through their entire lives like that, pretending to be Kung fu masters, but really sitting with an apple barrel over their heads and pretending it's a hat. Some people die like that, and think they're happy the whole time. And who am I to chase after them, screaming about rotten apples? Well, I'm that person who's afraid not to chase after people screaming about rotten apples. I'm that person who thinks it's her job to educate the world about rotten apples, because I'm afraid if I don't eradicate every last one, I'll keep getting hit with them. How misguided is that? I'm going to lob all these rotten apples into the world hoping to eradicate them. Wow, brilliant! It's a process, learning the esoteric art of declining to throw or eat rotten apples, and I've been all up and down the progress chart. Sometimes, I do pretty good Kung fu. I'm a black belt at work, and maybe a reddish blue in parenting (purple belt?) But at home, I fluctuate up and down the scale and sometimes, humiliated, I find myself busted back to white belt. On the once-in-a-blue-moon instance when I completely lose my shit and I hurl a hairbrush across the room, I take off my uniform altogether and scrub floors until I can get the beginner's white belt back.

First, you must learn to recognize the rotten apple for what it is. You can learn this by reading books, by having relationships, by going to therapy, by going to church and asking questions. Spending time with a lot of people, especially all at one time, reveals the rotten apples people hand to one another. If it's just you and one other person, it's easier for you both to pretend the apples aren't really rotten, and help each other avoid learning to see them. Folie a deux. It's harder to fool a group, though. Someone, at some point, will say, "Wow, look, it's a rotten apple!" and then it gets much harder not to see the rot. Once you see the rot, you have choices. You can decide that the rot is too pervasive, and throw out the whole barrel, give up apples completely. You can decide that you'll look carefully in the barrel, and only eat the ones you're sure are good, and keep your careful distance from people who sometimes hand you rotten apples. Or you can invite someone to talk apple talk with you. You can say, "I have this apple problem. I've been lobbing these rotten apples at you, and I'd like to stop. And I have this feeling some have been coming my way too, whether or not you mean to throw them, and I'm going to stop eating them. And I'm nervous about having to tell you this, but I need a commitment from you that if you hand me one, and it's rotten, that you'll take responsibility for handing it to me, even if I've already refused to eat it. Or I won't want to take any apples from you any more."

This conversation is particularly difficult to have with someone if your relationship has a long-standing habit of rotten apple exchange. Once the apples have been flying around, it's hard to believe that the other person will stop handing them to you, even if they pinky swear that they've stopped, honest, and they'll never do it again. Before you can get to a place of truce, you have to own those old rotten apples, and show that you know what a rotten apple looks like, and that you're willing to own it when you eat one, or throw one. An apple truce needs to be voluntary. You can't go chasing after somebody waving an apple and screaming that they threw it at you, and they have to apologize immediately, because it's likely all you'll get in return is more rotten apples. All you can do is apologize for throwing/eating yours, and hope for the best, and make a commitment to yourself to make amends for all the rotten apples you've exchanged over the years. For a truce to work when you've been handed a wagon full of rotten apples, you and the other person need to be willing to really forgive and respect each other. You must be willing to promise that nothing will be held back in the truce. "Okay, you threw one, and then I threw one, and I'm going to pretend I forgive you, and I'm going to pretend to accept your apology, but secretly I will still think it's your fault for throwing one first, or throwing one back" - this doesn't work. It's just another rotten apple in the barrel. Even if rotten apples look shiny and fresh, they stink. Some people have better noses than others, and some smell rotten apples everywhere because of old traumas, and some will keep handing them out long past the time when they know how hurtful it is, because they're addicted to handing them out. Relating with both of these types of people is extra hard. I'm one of the first kind. I smell rotten apples everywhere, even the ones that aren't there, or ones that were thrown long, long ago. Hand me one bruised apple, and I'll suspect every fruit thereafter to be rotten to the core, even if you never hand me an apple ever again. I am Monstro, argh! And that seems terrible, but it's not. I've come to accept that it's better to live and be Monstro, argh! than to die with an apple barrel over my head.

You have a choice, including the choice to pick your friends AND pick your family. If anyone tells you that you can't pick your family, they're just handing you another rotten apple.

You have another choice: you can hand out sweet apples, like the ones pictured in this post. The apples of compassion and love (tart Granny Smith notwithstanding). Like me, you can settle for offering a mixed barrel, some rotten (because they're in there, and I'm compelled to hand them out here and there despite my best intentions; nobody's perfect) but you can make sure some are fresh and sweet and real. Any time you choose to, you can, mindfully and without expectation of return, give out Pink Ladies and McIntoshes, Red Delicious and Yellow Delicious, Galas and Fujis, Cortlands and Braeburns, Honeycrisps and Pacific Roses. The most remarkable apple I've ever eaten was a bioengineered apple that tasted of Concord grapes. Technically, that's a Grapple (Gray-pul), but it's my party, and I can do what I want.

The Unexpected Diner Experience

2011-06-18T16:31:00.021-04:00

(To do list: go take another photo of the Salem Diner.)

When I first moved to Massachusetts, there were several things I missed about California. The produce was not an uniformly fresh, and menus were unreliable, even at very fine restaurants. You need to know what to order, here in Massachusetts, because the quality of the specials often has no overall bearing on the quality of the rest of the menu. One of the meals that I had a hard time with was breakfast. At first, I was charmed by the little railroad car diners. I liked the atmosphere enough not to be too worried about the quality of the food. Canned corned beef hash? Canned beans on toast? No biggie. Try to order beans on toast in California. It was "foreign food." Soon, though, the novelty wore off, and a diner was a just a place that charged you triple to open a can of something and dump it on your plate. I have a can opener at home, and I don't mind the washing up.

It took a while of shopping, and eating uninspired breakfasts, before I found Red's Sandwich Shop. An unassuming little place that looks like nothing much, Red's often has a line that tumbles out onto the sidewalk on Saturday and Sunday mornings. They have a dinner menu, but they don't serve dinner, so if you order dinner, you have to eat it for lunch. The menu is diverse and everything is pretty good. They have a breakfast/lunch counter near the grill, and Sunday breakfast is a great time to watch the line cooks do their jobs. It's the same guys doing the same jobs, Sunday after Sunday. There's the guy whose job it is to create thin sheets of egg the size of a king pillowcase, which another cook decorates with omelet fillings. Once the fillings are placed, the guy cuts the omelets out with his spatula and rolls each onto a plate. I've seen him do six at a time. There's a really tall guy who does the pancakes, which are like my uncle's: one pancake as big as a dinner plate is enough to feed two people. He drops chocolate chips or fresh blueberries on the bubbly side before flipping, then checks the done-ness with a fork before flipping onto a plate and garnishing with whipped cream and more of whatever went into the pancake. There's a guy whose job it is to do the meat and vegetables, with his pressing irons keeping maximum pressure on the sausages or the hash. The hash is made in the shop and it's the most unbelievably wonderful hash in the world. Just enough onion, just enough potato, savory shredded corned beef. Amazing. There's a guy who poaches eggs for whatever-Benedict (they have four kinds) by plopping eggs into perfectly swirling boiling water to create little poached egg packages without losing any of the white. I eat steak tips there, which are perfectly marinated in something savory before spending time under the iron on the grill. The shop is a little nothing of a place and people love it. The walls are covered with awards, Best of this and Best of that.

Red's doesn't call itself a diner, but it's a diner. It has the whole diner atmosphere and diner vibe. If you sit at the counter, chances are someone will talk to you about whatever's in the morning paper, or will at least smile at you when they ask for the sugar. It's a diner, and it's a good, homely diner with comfortable food.

I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I visited the Art Cliff Diner on Martha's Vineyard in Vineyard Haven. My companion was excited because it was a Zagat-rated diner. How many diners, he wondered, are Zagat rated? This diner must be special. It didn't look like much, the diner. Just a little cape-style building with bad parking, and cars piled atop one another as if they were selling sips from the fountain of youth. I thought of Red's Sandwich Shop, and I thought, yeah, okay. It'll be a pretty good little diner, and there will be awards on the walls, Best of this, and Best of that. I wasn't prepared for the menu. I wish I had made note of all the things they offered, but I'm going to have to do my best with what I remember. My companion had a ham and gruyere crepe with a mesclun green salad, and enjoyed it very much. My entree was the duck confit salad, and it was the best meal I had in all four days of being on the Vineyard. A confit is made from first salt curing the duck, and then poaching it in its own fat (yum!). It was a little bit sweet, but beautifully balanced by the mint, cilantro, avocado, mesclun, red onion, and the lemon thyme dressing. I feel sure I'm leaving out an ingredient, but each bite had a surprise in it, and it was a fresh and delightful final meal on the island. The atmosphere in the restaurant was exactly what one would expect from a diner except for the special boards, which detailed dishes with goat cheese, duck confit, brie, and artichoke, and lovely breakfast specials with poached eggs and dill, and fresh berries. I wish I'd taken a photo of the special boards, because I just don't think I'm doing the experience justice because the details are several weeks faded.

More recently, I went to a restaurant in the Seaport district in Boston set up very much like a diner. Seating was the familiar u-shape seating that you see in a lunch counter, except at Sportello, you might need to make reservations for a line of stools during the busy hours. This was my sister's recommendation; Sportello is one of her favorite restaurants to visit when in Boston, as it's around the corner from the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). She decided to deviate from her regular order (the tagliatelle) and had the strozzapreti, which was braised rabbit, picholine olives, and rosemary (perhaps with a pasta, but I didn't check). My companion had his usual order, which was the tagliatelle with bolognese sauce. It was a very nice bolognese, chunky and rich, and the pasta clearly fresh and tender. I ordered the pork osso buco with white beans, curious candied artichoke hearts, and a rich jus. This was not a cross-cut shank with the traditional bone-with-a-hole in the middle, but what seemed like a whole below-the-knee pork shank, roasted to falling apart perfection. Sometimes when I eat, I make little sexy moaning sounds, and I'm afraid I sounded a bit pornographic during my meal. It was that good. I will definitely go back again.

I didn't have dessert, but both of my dining companions did. The dessert on the left was a chocolate panna cotta with raspberry sauce, and the dessert on the right was a pavlova, which, for the uninitiated, was a sour cream custard served in a merengue with a strawberry rhubarb coulis. The pavlova won the ordering wars for dessert, and in my opinion, the osso buco was king of the entrees (because I don't eat pasta).

Speaking of the ICA, here is a picture of the media room, which was a lovely room projecting over the ocean, with a beautifully lit stairway and angled rail. In this shot, you can just barely see the heads of the people in my group, down by the expansive windows. Here is a photo of me and my sister, sitting down in that excellent room projecting over the ocean.

When I first approached the museum, I honestly didn't think it was visually interesting from the outside. But, Tardis-like, it seemed larger and more beautiful on the inside. It was a lovely evening. I had a great dinner at Sportello, and the evening culminated in some surprisingly lovely photographs inside the museum. The point of this post is that you can't always tell what kind of experience you're going to get by looking at the outside of things. You never know when you might see a menu that looks like every other diner menu, but it turns out that the food has a certain inexplicable something, whether it's freshness, or a unique seasoning or approach to a dish. You never know when the nondescript building has a fabulous interior, or when you'll fight through a crowd to eat in a restaurant that looks like everything should be greasy and poured from a can, but is full of fresh, surprising flavors, and ends up being the best meal you had all weekend.

Open yourself to surprises. Go to museums. Eat at diners. Bon appetite.

Feeding My Head

2011-06-16T17:55:00.012-04:00

Today I realized how much I procrastinate on feeding my electronics properly.

I have a very nice android phone that takes pretty decent pictures. Several clicks and five minutes later, I have the shots imported to Aperture and deleted from the phone. From Aperture, I will sprinkle editorial goodness on them, and export them back to my desktop, mid-route to this blog. The photos will illustrate an adventure I had last week.

Last week, I also went to the library and picked up Allison Krauss's A Hundred Miles or More, which I have ripped to iTunes and uploaded to my iPod for appropriate appreciation. If I enjoy the album, I will purchase my very own copy, which I will then park in my collection to justify its continued presence on my iPod. I'm looking forward to listening, very much. My daughter just got back from the Bonnaroo Music Festival, and had good things to say about Allison Krauss's live performance (as well as the live performances of 12 or so other bands). I'm listening to the album as I write this post.

After a desperate but fruitful search for the appropriate cable, I've transferred 300+ photographs from my Nikon D40 into Aperture. I spent a little time de-skewing a few, but mostly just filed them into projects and left them there. I have the shots I want in order to illustrate my next food post, and I'm happy to let the rest sit there and wait for next time. I've done all of this with the assistance of my beautiful MacBook Pro, which I love. Truly, madly, deeply. I appreciate my phone, my iPod, my digital SLR, my laptop, and my Sony Reader. Most of you have Kindles, but I chose the Sony, and I'm pleased with it. I've read quite a few books downloaded from Project Gutenberg, and also have some ebooks from friends that I'm meaning to read soon.

I just backed up all of my data on an external hard drive (500G) and feel safe now, with all my photographs safe and sound in case of hard drive meltdown. It only remains for me to figure out how to back up my blog posts in some less labor intensive way than saving each post in a text file (ridiculous, I know, but I am still a novice). I'm aware, more than ever, of how much of my work depends on this tangle of cables, this small pile of devices that will all fit into one backpack. My entire music library, part of a book library, all of my photographs and stories, packed up in under than twenty pounds. A miracle, and something I'm consciously grateful for. It makes for nervous travel when I have all the devices in the one pack, but I feel powerful too, like I could create anything.

I procrastinate by leaving CDs lying around, unripped, un-transferred, and therefore unheard. My iPod docks in my clock radio, which I keep next to my bed. If I don't sometimes undock it and synch it with the laptop, I get no new music, and there is a near constant flow of new music coming into my house via my daughter. I procrastinate by leaving photos on my camera, and photos on my phone. Usually, I take food photos with my phone, because I'm not going to do anything with those photos but post them here to illustrate this meal, or that meal. The photos I take with my camera are those I may enlarge and frame, to hang in the gallery at home. Until recently, I had never enlarged one of my photos and had it professionally framed. The shot at the beginning of this post is my first professionally framed photo. I took it on Seventeen Mile Drive in Monterey in February of this year. This flower is called Pride of Madeira (Echium candicans).

Once in a while, all this stuff beckons to me and I have an evening like this one, where I take the time to hunt down all of the cables, listen to music, and get everything uploaded/downloaded/filed/organized, and it feels good. Once in a while I stop the procrastinating, and I take the time to feed my head with images and words. Not only have I gathered things together, but I've also browsed through old folders full of photos, and spent about thirty minutes exercising my Google fu to find the name of the purple flower pictured above. I want to know these things. I bring home treasures, and I want to organize them, and pin them to mounting boards, but I also want to know what they are. I want to know about this stuff, the species, the details, the names. Isn't that a lovely name for a flower? Pride of Madeira. I would never have known, if I hadn't stopped on the side of the road on the coast of California and carefully composed a shot of some random shrub. There is was, and now it's in my head, and framed on my wall, forever.

It's a kind of magic, really.

www.joymarchand.com

All or Nothing

2011-06-15T17:33:00.016-04:00

Does she look like someone who says "all, or nothing?" How can you tell, one way or another? I can tell, because, of course, that's me on the bridge. That particular photo was taken in May of 2009, and believe me, I wasn't thinking "all, or nothing." I was thinking, "I want what I have."

I've flirted with "all or nothing" for a long time, though. I've advocated for figuring out what it is, this elusive "all", on this blog. I've said to myself: Focus. Dig down and distinguish dream from fantasy, separate the wheat from the chaff, and CREATE, damn you. Focus. Don't waste time! Get going right now! In order to focus enough to write, I have at various times cleared the deck of distractions. I've boxed up my art supplies, decimated my book collection, sold my guitar, crated up my needlework frames and threads. The only thing other than writing that I allowed myself was photography, so I have three cameras and assorted paraphernalia. But things creep in. I bought a house with a garden, and how I love that garden. I pulled a few weeds this very afternoon, and boy, does that feel good. I've learned to weed a little bit at a time, because otherwise I won't do it at all, and it will get overgrown. I've learned how to tend a garden little by little. It used to be I had to have everything done in one day, and then I was good for nothing else for a week afterward, because I'm not 19 any more, and I need to be gentler to myself.

Lately, I've been driving myself crazy trying to narrow things down even further. I need to specialize, I've been telling myself. I need to obsess, or I'll fail. I'll fail! I'm not a multi-tasker, so to get anything done, I need to simplify, throw out the old food in the refrigerator to get ready to cook a meal. I need to get the cobwebs out of the windows before I hang curtains in one room. I need to get the house furnished, and have that done with. I need to have the garden weeded and have that done with. I want to be a writer, and so I need to clear out the junk, and read, and I need to write. Everything else is superfluous, unless it feeds the writing. Focus, focus, focus. All, or nada! Get with the program! Only, that's not how it seems to work. The more I clear away, the emptier I feel, the more the page looms before me, terrifying, like a blank obelisk on the moon. You have given up everything for me, now it had better be worth it! Boo! it cries, and then I cry, and run off to bed to hide my head. Too much pressure. I don't feel like writing any more. It's too important. I gave up too much for it. The quality of what I create will never justify the sacrifices.

My goodness. Is this how I have painted myself into a corner?

That woman is still standing on the bridge, and has been standing there for quite some time, waiting for Prince Charming to give her a support system and a room of her own. Now, she has a whole apartment of her own (and pays for it herself, thanks) and an admirable support system. She has evenings and weekends with which to pursue any number of creative endeavors, and still she's frozen on the bridge. Cross? Or go back? If you read Searching for the Castle of White Marble, you may recognize this as a turning point, at which I stand thoughtfully, gazing at my own reflection in a Japanese garden pond. Sometimes, I think perhaps I'll be there forever, pondering my options. What does this mean? What do I do now? Where do I go? That woman has a full life, and still, she stands frozen on that bridge. It's been two years. You'd think she'd have worked it out by now, what she wants to do next.

Maybe she hasn't, and maybe she has. Maybe there isn't a bright light and a divine voice that whispers into her ear to tell her about her destiny. Maybe she has waited for the voice, and maybe it has never come, but maybe it has. Maybe it has come every single day from that moment, and she just hasn't listened. Or maybe she has, and her life looks like it did on that bridge, for real, every day. Or maybe it looks more like this.

Or perhaps this, frolicking on a castle drawbridge.

Or tea at the Russian Tea Room adjacent to Carnegie Hall.

Or horseback riding on the beach on Puerto Rico.

Or hanging out with Ken Scholes at World Fantasy.

Or hanging out with my dog, while a professional photographer just so happens to stroll by.

This is what has happened while I've been waiting to cross that bridge, while I've been dithering in my chiffon gown and my tiara of orchids. I've been playing the game of all or nothing. When will my life start? When will I have enough to time to write something meaningful? When will I succeed? When will I achieve? When will I win? When does it start?

Here is the receiver platform of the radio telescope at Arecibo.

Here is one side of the dish, which is currently the largest single dish in the world.

Sometimes, I think I couldn't find my ass even with this big a telescope.

Life has started. In the game of all of nothing, I've got it all. It's all around me, every day.

I have to pay attention. Or I'll miss it.