Not Intent On Arriving

Here are a couple of fun travel web pages:

• Matador is "a place to share travel stories & photos, meet people in the places you're going, get info and advice from experts, become a paid travel writer, collaborate with local organizations, and get inspired everyday with articles about sustainability and world culture."
• CouchSurfing is "a worldwide network for making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit."

"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving."
-- Lao Tzu

Prodigy

by Charles Simic, who was announced this month as the next U.S. Poet Laureate

I grew up bent over
a chessboard.

I loved the word endgame.

All my cousins looked worried.

It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.

A retired professor of astronomy
taught me how to play.

That must have been in 1944.

In the set we were using,
the paint had almost chipped off
the black pieces.

The white King was missing
and had to be substituted for.

I’m told but do not believe
that that summer I witnessed
men hung from telephone poles.

I remember my mother
blindfolding me a lot.
She had a way of tucking my head
suddenly under her overcoat.

In chess, too, the professor told me,
the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards
at the same time.

From Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Charles Simic.

Disclosure

I recently ate alone in a café connected to a popular independent bookstore in DC. The white noise of the multiple conversations surrounding me was a deliciously impenetrable ambient word stew, perfect for reading.

A couple sat to my left. Their meals arrived while I looked over the menu. I ordered the butternut squash ravioli stuffed with goat cheese because it came with corn bread. The space between our tables was so narrow that it was more conceptual than physical. A narrow negative space that we would ignore if we were all together: the couple, me, and the two women sitting alone on my right who were talking into their cell phones while they ate.

I opened a book that I’d already started reading, but my eyes moved over the same sentence again and again, its meaning refusing to flow along the usual circuit. I was distracted by the heavy silence between the couple.

Then man spoke first. He told her that the meal proved their maturity. He told her that his final gift to her would be to remember her in a favorable light. He paused now and then and I could tell without looking at him that he was fighting back tears. He told her that even though the divorce was now final, he still wanted her to consider him as a friend she could call if she ever ran into trouble.

She said that she had asked for no mayo on her sandwich. She scraped it off and tried to get the waiter’s attention to ask for spicy mustard. I wondered if she was regretting her order. There was no evidence that she was regretting the divorce.

I pictured her telling him that she needed something more from him. More attention. More warmth. More zing. She repeating the need until it felt like she was nagging him. But still nothing. Maybe a couple of awkward attempts at some overly literal response to the words she'd used to approximate the problem. Then nothing at all. The opposite of the vague something that was beginning to feel selfish and silly.

Then she found herself being drawn toward someone who could fill the lack, the unmet need she’d been repeatedly broadcasting. I imagined him being angry when he found out. He focused on the other man, the betrayal, the sex. And then she realized that he simply wasn’t capable of providing what she'd been struggling to ask from him. She watched from a safe emotional distance as he missed the point entirely. Time went by. Their lawyers negotiated the details. Their careers were both going well. There were no children to complicate matters.

They had a quick hearing in front of a judge. Just a formality. They decided to grab a bite to eat. They were silent when they stood up to leave. Neither of them had any idea what would come next, although they were already tangled up in the details of their jobs, projects they'd started in their new homes, and plans they had made to get together with friends over the weekend.

Our Capacity for Empathy

Richard Flanagan discussing his most recent novel, The Unknown Terrorist, on KCRW’s Bookworm:

"I don’t know why this is but over the last several years we’ve lost our capacity for empathy, except if it’s presented in the most histrionic and manipulative way through the media. We seem to have become strangely callous to the horror around us. And I did want to create a character who the reader would feel was sort of an every-woman-every-man sort of character who would lead the reader to think what would it feel like if it was me they came for next? Because increasingly, the currency of the day seems to be lies. And the lies are always directed against the weakest and the most powerless. And the lies seem to serve--at the end of the day--power and money. And yet we have slept walked through all this."

Choosing Evil

"No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks."

--Mary Wollstonecraft

Consciousness Writes Reality

From As She Climbed Across the Table, a clever satire by Jonathan Lethem about a campus love triangle between a physicist, her social anthropologist boyfriend, and a black hole created in the physics lab:

“Everything is only potential until consciousness wakes up and says, let me have a look. Take for example the big bang. We explore the history of the creation of our universe, so the big bang becomes real. But only because we investigate. Another example: There are subatomic particles as far as we are willing to look. We create them. Consciousness writes reality, in any direction it looks—past, future, big, small. Wherever we look we find reality forming in response…I think there is a principle of conservation of reality. Reality is unwilling to fully exist without an observer. It can’t be bothered. Why should it?”

How To Be A Poet

(to remind myself)

by Wendell Berry

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill--more of each
than you have--inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

From Given: New Poems © Shoemaker Hoard, Washington, D.C.

Nothing Can Be More Dangerous Than Nothing

"Humanity's always been uncomfortable with zero and the void. The ancient Greeks declared them unnatural and unreal. Theologians argued that God's first act was to banish the void by the act of creating the universe ex nihilo, and Middle-Ages thinkers tried to ban zero and the other Arabic 'ciphers.' But the emptiness is all around us — most of the universe is void. Even as we huddle around our hearths and invent stories to convince ourselves that the cosmos is warm and full and inviting, nothingness stares back at us with empty eye sockets."

--Charles Seife, author of Zero: The Biography Of A Dangerous Idea

The Gold is Right Here

"The basic notion of lojong is that we can make friends with what we reject, what we see as 'bad' in ourselves and in other people. At the same time, we could learn to be generous with what we cherish, what we see as 'good.' If we begin to live in this way, something in us that may have been buried for a long time begins to ripen. Traditionally, this 'something' is called bodhichitta, or 'awakened heart.' It's something that we already have but usually have not yet discovered.

It's as if we were poor, homeless, hungry, and cold, and although we didn't know it, right under the ground where we always slept was a pot of gold. That gold is bodhichitta. Our confusion and misery come from not knowing that the gold is right here--and from always looking somewhere else. When we talk about joy, enlightenment, waking up, or awakening bodhichitta, all that means is that we know the gold is right here, and we realize that it's been here all along."

--Pema Chödrön, Always Maintain a Joyful Mind

The Ethics of Eating

Barbara Kingsolver discussing her new book—Animal, Vegetable, Miracle—with Krista Tippett on Speaking of Faith:

Ms. Tippett: Now I'm looking at the sweep of your writing over, say, the last 10 years. It seems to me that that September 11th also kind of formed the sense of urgency that you have now. You talked then about the prideful wastefulness, our prideful wastefulness as a nation. I think you just described that in more detail.

Ms. Kingsolver: Sometimes I think it's prideful. Sometimes I think it's just clueless. I mean that to describe myself as much as anyone. We don't have a clue sometimes about how or what we are wasting. It's so easy for us to have, for example, foods that were grown on the other side of the world and brought to us, without any idea who grew it, who worked for what low wage to harvest it, who had to breathe pesticides in order to put it on a truck. You know, those questions have — a curtain has been drawn over the whole process so that we've come to look at our food as a product. It isn't. It's, it's all…

Ms. Tippett: Those are moral questions.

Ms. Kingsolver: It's all a process and those are moral questions. If we care to draw back the curtain and look, it isn't all bad news. I think the subject of food seems daunting because there are so many different questions, so many different problems. And that's something that really compelled me about writing this book. I love to start with a huge unanswerable boggling kind of question and see if I can whittle it down into the shape of a really good yarn. You know, I just love to see if I can give it a plot and make you laugh all along the way and maybe make you cry at the end, and create something that will invite you in. And then when you're finished and you close the book, maybe you'll step out into the world in a slightly different way and ask your own questions and answer the questions in your own way.

---

And this from Small Wonder, her collection of essays written in the wake of September 11th:

"Something new is upon us and yet nothing is ever new. We are alive in a fearsome time, and we have been given new things to fear. We've been delivered huge blows but also huge opportunities to reinforce or reinvent our will, depending on where we look for honor and how we name our enemies. The easiest thing is to think of returning the blows. But there are other things we must think about as well, other dangers we face. A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves — these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation."

Phil Hansen's Art

"An art school dropout, Phil Hansen works as an X-ray technician by day, spending all of his spare time and money on his art...His breakthrough piece was a time-lapse video of a two-day project called Influences. He painted 30 pictures on his own chest, one over the other, with each picture representing an influence in his life...Hansen often uses the technique of pointillism, in which the canvas is dabbed with tiny bits of color, rather than fluid brush strokes, to create a larger image. But he gives pointillism a modern twist. You might call it "kinetic fragmentism" — pointillism in motion." -- People of the Web

As of April 30th 2005

A Moment

Concentrating, Being Nice, and Being Terrified

Insights from my in-flight reading:

“For me, it’s about concentration, right? Now, I’ve done scenes that people are like, ‘Oh, that’s so heavy. Do you stay in character? Do you take it home with you?’ I don’t. I do it and I get it done. It’s really just about concentrating very hard.”

—Clive Owen, Details

“You don’t have to do a lot to be seen as nice. I guess some of these people must be such rampant pricks that people are amazed when you say hello. I don’t know why people like me, and I don’t know if I want to know. That might be the kiss of death. I’d rather people not know a lot about me and go see the movies.”

—Matt Damon, Entertainment Weekly

“I think your work can be great when you’re completely terrified and don’t know at all what you’re doing. Took me seven, eight years to figure it out—I’m a slow learner. Acting to me now is interesting because I feel like I’ve achieved a base level of brutal competence.”

—David Duchovny, Entertainment Weekly

Matinee

by Patrick Phillips

After the biopsy,
after the bone scan,
after the consult and the crying,

for a few hours no one could find them,
not even my sister,
because it turns out

they'd gone to the movies.
Something tragic was playing,
something epic,
and so they went to the comedy
with their popcorn
and their cokes,

the old wife whispering everything twice,
the old husband
cupping a palm to his ear,

as the late sun lit up an orchard
behind the strip mall,
and they sat in the dark holding hands.

[American Life in Poetry: Column 124]

Watermelon Snow

A guidebook for the Rocky Mountain National Park warns against eating the pink snow which can be found along the Trail Ridge Road in August:

The color is caused by thriving communities of algae. The snow may look and even taste like watermelon, but it is actually a concentration of radioactive chemicals and has a laxative effect.

Matt and I didn't encounter any of this suspicious snow today when we hiked to Mills Lake.

Made Up of Scenes

“I think that all books, like film, are made up of scenes. Then you have to kind of meld them together in some way that builds the characters as you go along. I tend to kind of focus on character. I’m interested in two or three characters and how they kind of grow while I’m writing and then how they interact and that creates a story.”

--Michael Ondaatje, Barnes & Noble's Meet the Writers interview

Revision

"The first draft, for me, is a difficult part of writing. If I can get through a fairly decent first draft, then I work and revise. And that’s about ninety percent of what I do, is revision."

-- Joyce Carol Oates, Barnes & Noble's Meet the Writers interview

A Dirty Little Secret in the Center of Humanity

"One does not need to go looking for silence. One does not even need to become still. You just realize that everything's swimming in silence. All the sound is swimming in silence. That silence, that's the sound of reality. And a mind that's thinking can never know how silence operates. Silence created everything you see. You look into the stars, you look into the galaxy, it was all created without a thought. Silence did it through no thought. There was another intelligence operating. There was no belief. There was no should, no shouldn't. There were no good ideas or bad ideas. But what was created was of a precision and complexity that minds have been trying to understand for millennia and still can't catch up with it. That's what I mean when I say a mind cannot know what life is like when life is not lived according to the mind. The only thing a mind can know is life lived according to the mind. It can't know otherwise. And when you really touch upon it, what most human beings start to see is that their whole life--and specifically their whole spiritual life--has been a movement away from this--what I call a dirty little secret in the center of humanity. The dirty little secret in the center of humanity is what is true without thought. And there's a great big emptiness, an enormous silence that's just waiting. And you notice that it's the same silence that's looking through your eyes. That which is looking through your eyes actually has no problem. We move into a totally different way of being. A way where being itself instead of thinking is guiding each action."

~ Adyashanti

Never Forget. Never Forgive.

Filming has been completed on Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd which is one of my favorite musicals. There is no way it could be more riveting than the pared down arrangement we were lucky to see on Broadway a couple of years ago in which the cast doubled as the orchestra. When Patti Lupone wasn't singing, she was playing the tuba or striking a triangle dangled from the yarn she was knitting into a red scarf. But I still can't wait to see what Tim Burton does with Stephen Sondheim's deliciously dark and twisted story. The film cast sounds fun and includes Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd), Helena Bonham Carter (Mrs. Lovett), Alan Rickman (Judge Turpin), and Sacha Baron Cohen (Signor Pirelli).

Novel Resonance

Chitra Divakaruni writing about how reading 300 novels as a National Book Awards fiction judge provided new insights into the novel form:

It is this resonance, finally, that separates the successful novel from the others. The cast of major characters may be small or large, clowns or kings. The backdrop may be modest (a room) or ambitious (a continent). The vocabulary may be simple or flamboyant, literary or colloquial. The melody may be created by a single flute, or performed by an entire orchestra. But through it all, there's a sense that what we're seeing is not all that this is about.

The novel continuously opens into something larger than the specifics that form the boundaries of the story, though paradoxically these specifics must be concrete and convincing if we are to intimate a larger truth through them. Reading it becomes a three-dimensional experience, beginning in the book and ending in ourselves. Such a novel, while it is a mirror of, and a commentary on, a particular event, people, country or time, is on some level about each one of us, our central truth. Each successful novel gives a special flavor and shape — and tone — to this truth, but does not limit it to these. In this it is similar to the bell, which shapes sound without enclosing it.

I Still Find I'm Yearning for It

"People say very easy things to me like 'there's usually a bag of money in your films.' But that represents that yearning for something that's not necessarily going to be good for you, but you stretch for it. And the kind of background I come from, it's kind of very much part of your mentality. I come from a working class family and I wanted to get out of that working class environment. I wanted to get into this world of the arts. I yearned and yearned for it. And I still find I'm yearning for it even though--to other people's perspective--people would regard me as being successful. But I still yearn for that. I still feel like I'm sort of trapped in my background in a way. And yet on the other hand, you want to get back to it in some way, as well, because its values are often what you relate to more closely than more new, learned values. So there's always that tension going on. And everybody I know who's come from a similar background to me who's ended up in the arts, has a very similar feeling."

--Danny Boyle discussing his newest film, Sunshine, with Elvis Mitchell on KCRW's The Treatment.

In the Anonymous and Triumphant Totality

“I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain. I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”

--Ingmar Bergman (July 14, 1918 – July 30, 2007)

Train Your Mind

"We have no idea how much plasticity there really is in the human brain until we see what intense mental training, not some weekly meditation session, can accomplish. We've gotten this idea, in Western culture, that we can change our mental status by a once-a-week, forty-five minute intervention, which is completely cockamamy. Athletes and musicians train many hours every day. As a neuroscientist, I have to believe that engaging in compassion meditation every day for an hour each day would change your brain in important ways. To deny that without testing it, to accept the null hypothesis, is simply bad science."

"I believe that neuroplasticity will reshape psychology in the coming years. Much of psychology had accepted the idea of a fixed program unfolding in the brain, one that strongly shapes behavior, personality, and emotional states. That view is just shattered by the discoveries of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity will be the counterweight to the determanistic view (that genes have behavior on a short leash). The message I take from my own work is that I have a choice in how I react, that who I am depends on the choices I make, and that who I am is therefore my responsibility."

Richard Davidson, Ph.D University of Wisconsin-Madison quoted by Sharon Begley in her book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. [From Kit]

A Gift and a Commodity

Jonathan Lethem talking with Michael Silverblatt (KCRW's Bookworm, 7/19/07) about his latest work, You Don't Love Me Yet:

What bothers me about plagiarism is not that I don’t believe there can be such a thing. Anyone can identify the fringe activity where something is appropriated joylessly and unimaginatively and deceptively. And we can all condemn that very easily. But what fascinates me is that people work so hard to ignore the resemblance between that activity and what artists do routinely, necessarily all the time in their procedure which is grab on to stuff, move it around, transform it. And when the same thing is done and value is added and influence is acknowledged, well this is culture making. It’s not some minority activity, this is culture making at its most central. This is what people do.

It’s not that an act of art making is either a commodity transaction or a gift transaction—to use Lewis Hyde's vocabulary, the author of The Gift—but that it’s innately both. If I do what I do—do what I mean to do—when I offer a book into the world, sure I’d like to get paid. But if it’s any good at all, I hope to transmit something far more valuable than the $23.95 you’ve shelled out at the bookstore. I want it to sink into you and become a part of you and trouble you. It’s something I could never ideally be repaid for and I wouldn’t want to try. So it’s a gift and a commodity at the same moment. And this is what artists do.

An Amalgam

“…we are not just the products of our mothers and fathers ... I am not just my adoptive parents' child and I am not just my biological parents' child. I am simultaneously all of their children and their parents' children and their great-grandparents' children…I describe myself as an amalgam of these four parents, but what’s amazing is that in my biological child I also see my adoptive family. There was a moment about a year ago when I took a photograph of my daughter and she somehow had the same expression on her face as my grandmother who she never met. So she too is an amalgam of all these things.”

--A.M. Homes talking with Steve Inskeep (Morning Edition, 7/26/06) about being reluctantly sought out by her biological mother. She wrote about meeting her biological parents in her memoir, The Mistress's Daughter.

Lady Bird Johnson

"It has been a wonderful life. I feel like a jug into which wine is poured until it overflows."

-- Lady Bird Johnson, 1912-2007

Keep Feeding the Lake

"All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake."

-- Jean Rhys

The Character You Know Best

Howard Jacobson discussing character on Ian McMillan's Writing Lab:

...there’s a general thing to say about characters, which is in the end, no matter where you find [them] from, and no matter how closely you are looking, or no matter how interestingly you’re observing, in the end a character will originate in the seedbed which is your own mind, your imagination.

The characters who give me most trouble are the characters most like myself. And that’s to say the male hero because I mainly do have male heroes. And the reason they give you so much trouble is because there is something you’re needing to honour that’s not to do with just what you’re creating in your mind or on your desk in that hour. A minor character comes and goes and you owe no-one anything, he’s yours. You’re not trying to live up to something that you’ve seen, even though you may have seen something interesting.

When you’re writing about yourself, there is the tumult of you that you have to do justice to, and that you will feel you’ve failed it if you’re too easy on yourself, if you’re too hard on yourself, if you’re too kind, if you’re too funny about yourself or solemn about yourself. So to get the balance of feelings towards yourself and you too are a character in a novel if your novel’s any good. You, too, are a character, you’re not just the voice, you are the character. So you are fretting all the time about whether you’re doing justice to yourself. The character you know best is the hardest character to write.
...

I think one thing to avoid with character is the idea that you can go out and find it. There is an assumption that if you overhear people, on a bus or a train, and repeat what they say, you will have the real feel of life. You won’t. If you write what you’ve overheard, it will sound like something that you’ve overheard. It has to go; it has to pass through you first. It has to have the permission. A character has to have the permission of your soul before it becomes a character. A character isn ’t vivid by virtue of your having seen a vivid person in life. Nothing lives, nothing in a novel lives, neither character nor story nor anything else until it is written. By which I mean until it has become yours.

No character is a picture of a real one. You couldn’t write if you haven’t lived in a real non-fictional world but your characters, once you’ve made them, are yours, accountable to nobody but you.

[mp3 of interview]

Simple Religion

"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."

- The Dalai Lama

The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow

"If I could snap my fingers and become nonautistic, I would not - because then I wouldn't be me. Autism is part of who I am."

-- Dr. Temple Grandin

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Books by Temple Grandin

We Didn't Have the Tools To See

Dr. Esther Sternberg discussing new insights into the molecular level of the mind-body connection on Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett:

Scientists need evidence. We need measurable proof. That started with Descartes in the 1600s. And at that time, 400 or 500 years ago, science didn't have the tools to measure something as ephemeral and not concrete as abstract as an emotion.

You can measure disease. Disease is an abnormality of anatomy. So with the anatomists of the 16th century, when they started to dissect the human body, they discovered that when there was a pneumonia, there was a hole in the lung. You know, there was a problem in the liver, there was an anatomical problem in the liver. So the assumption became that disease is associated with an abnormality of anatomy, which allowed huge advances in medicine. You know, Laennec, in the 19th century, when he developed the stethoscope, developed it so that you could hear problems in the lung. Without seeing them, you could actually hear them. And so that's concrete; that's easy to understand.

But we didn't have the tools until now, until very recently, to see the living human brain at work with neuroimaging. We didn't have the tools to see into how the nerve cells function, the biochemistry, the chemicals that change, the nerve chemicals that are released, the electrical activity that changes. We couldn't see into the genes that make these cells function until very, very recently.
...

And here is a quote from the book:

"Emotions are always with us but constantly shifting. They change the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves. Diseases come and go but on a different time scale. And if they change the way we see the world, they do it through emotions. Could something as vague and fleeting as an emotion actually affect something as tangible as a disease? Can depression cause arthritis? Can laughing and a positive attitude ameliorate, even help to cure disease? We all suspect that the answers to these questions are yes, yet we can't say why and certainly not how. Indeed, entire self-cure industries have been built on this underlying assumption. But physicians and scientists, until recently, dismissed such ideas as nonsense because there did not appear to be a plausible biological mechanism to explain the link. Part of the reason for this is that scientists and lay people speak different languages. But so do emotions and disease. Poetry and song are the language of emotions. Scientific precision, logic, and deductive reasoning are the language of disease."

Ratatouille

Remy, A young rat with a refined sense of taste wants to become a chef. His family doesn’t understand why he can’t be content with eating trash and contributing to the common good of the pack. Remy’s father, Django, takes him to the exterminator shop with dead rats in the window.

DJANGO: The world we live in belongs to the enemy, we must live carefully. We look out for our own kind, Remy. When all is said and done, we're all we've got.

REMY: No. Dad, I don't believe it. You're telling me that the future is - can only be - more of this?

DJANGO: This is the way things are; you can't change nature.

REMY: Change is nature, Dad. The part that we can influence. And it starts when we decide.

DJANGO: [Remy turns to leave] Where are you going?

REMY: Hopefully, forward.

Reviews

Existentially Lonely

“Americans have become existentially lonely. We’re disconnected from nature and from the animal parts of ourselves. We’re living in cities and we’re generally frustrated by our work and dissatisfied with politics, technology and religion, all of which have mostly failed to uplift us as promised. So we’ve been turning to animals for companionship and love and emotional support.”

—Jon Katz, author of Dog Days, quoted in "Best Sellers That Woof and Meow," New York Times (7/15/07)

To Evoke Sensation in the Reader

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

—E. L. Doctorow

A Good Experience for Both Partners

“The century I have inhabited has not seen the abandonment of war and violence. It has not solved the problem of poverty, nor has it improved human nature. However, we can credit the century with producing the public realization that sex has to be good for both partners. That is also the key to writing both fiction and nonfiction. It has to be a good experience for both partners, the writer and the reader, and it is a source of distress to me to observe how frequently writers ignore the pleasure of their partners.”

—Sol Stein, Stein on Writing

We Are Shaping the Past that Shapes Us

"I think for most of us, we need to come to terms with the past which is continually shaping us. And I believe that we are every moment of the waking day we’re being shaped by the past, but I also think—and this is where it gets interesting for me—that we are shaping the past that shapes us, at least in part through the stories that we tell. So we’re telling stories about what we did, who we were, who we knew, who we avoided, whatever. And the telling of those stories about our past creates the thing that shapes us in turn. And that back and forth, that sort of cyclical thing is where the role of story comes in for me."

—Mark Slouka, speaking with KCRW Bookworm's Michael Silverblatt about his novel The Visible World

• Excerpt from the novel.
• Conversation with the writer.

Louder Than Before

Why New Music Doesn't Sound As Good As It Did?

The Wind

Never Let the Best Man Win

“…you never let the best man win. Fuck the best man, that’s always been my motto. It’s the man who ducks his head and moves on through no matter what wind or weather who gets there in the end. A man with guts and application. A man who doesn’t give a shit. A man with a rigid sense of duty. There’s no contradiction between those last two statements. Believe me.”

—Harold Pinter, Ashes to Ashes

No Explanation Outside Fiction

“The story and its analyses are not mirror-opposites of each other. They are not reflections, either one. Criticism indeed is an art, as a story is, but only the story is to some degree a vision; there is no explanation outside fiction for what the writer is learning to do.”

—Eudora Welty, On Writing

On Chesil Beach

The bride was not hurried in her movements—this was yet another of those delaying tactics that also committed her further. She was aware of her husband’s enchanted gaze, but for the moment she did not feel quite so agitated or pressured. Entering the bedroom, she had plunged into an uncomfortable, dreamlike condition that encumbered her like an old-fashioned diving suit in deep water. Her thoughts did not seem her own—they were piped down to her, thoughts instead of oxygen.

And in this condition she had been aware of a stately, simple musical phrase, playing and repeating itself, the shadowy ungraspable way of auditory memory, following her to the bedside, where it played again as she took a shoe in each hand. The familiar phrase—some might even have called it famous—consisted of four rising notes, which appeared to be posing a tentative question. Because the instrument was a cello rather than her violin, the interrogator was not herself but a detached observer, mildly incredulous, but insistent too, for after a brief silence and a lingering, unconvincing reply from the other instruments, the cello put the question again, in different terms, on a different chord, and then again, and again, and each time received a doubtful answer. There was no set of words she could match to these notes; it was not as if something were being said. The inquiry was without content, as pure as a question mark.

—Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

• Jonathan Lethem's review in the New York Times (6/3/07)
• Podcast interview
• First chapter

That Uncomfortable Feeling

"It would be strange to get in the car and think you were going to pick up the kids at school, but not be really sure. But there are moments in the process of writing a story when you must tolerate that uncomfortable feeling: You stay alert to everything that is happening and by listening and watching, you find out where you are going by going there. Somebody else may get in the car."

— Ron Carlson, from Ron Carlson Writes a Story (Available 9/4/07)

The Writer Interview (July 2007)

The Absence of Peace of Mind

Great quote sent to me by my friend Kit from a book she just finished reading:

"The call of the God experienced in Christ is simply a call to be all that each of us is -- a call to offer, through the being of our humanity, the gift of God to all people by building a world in which everyone can live more fully, love more wastefully and have the courage to be all that they can be. That is how we live out the presence of God.

God is about living, about loving and about being. The call of Jesus is thus not a call to be religious. It's not a call to escape life's traumas, to find security, to possess peace of mind. All of those things are invitations to a life-contracting idolatry. The call of God through Jesus is a call to be fully human, to embrace insecurity without building protective fences, to accept the absence of peace of mind as a requirement of humanity.

It is to see that God is the experience of life, love and being who is met at the edges of an expanded humanity. That is surely what the author of the Fourth Gospel meant when he quoted Jesus as proclaiming that his purpose was that they might have life and have it abundantly."

- John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the non-religious : recovering the divine at the heart of the human

No Calculation

"There's no calculation: I can't write what a lesser writer writes or what a better writer writes. This is what I write."

- Harlan Coben, quoted in The Atlantic Monthly

Not Knowing Even as We're Seeing

"It's kind of a paradox of being both a writer and a teacher, I want to preserve the mystery of art. Whatever illuminations art gives us depends upon some aspect of not knowing even as we 're seeing and understanding more. At the same time, I'm trying to teach my students something about it. So what can I say? This is how mystery is made - no I can't say that, there's no formula. But it is something that I'm increasingly fierce about, the preservation of mystery, of uncertainty in these times when certainty leads too easily to fanaticism. I want to weaken that connection. I want to find in art the means to get us thinking about the importance of uncertainty, the agile beliefs that can change, minds that can reflect again and find a different answer."

- Joanna Scott, speaking with Michael Silverblatt about her new collection of short stories, Everybody Loves Somebody

Excerpt at KCRW's Bookworm

To Make You See

“My task I am trying to achieve, is — by the power of the written word — to make you hear, to make you feel. It is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more. And it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand — and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”

- Joseph Conrad

Let the Image Pull You

"When people try to write stories they tend to drag the stories behind them. They think the story and question it and try to arrange it into something understandable, which is no fun at all! It makes a person feel exhausted and cranky. The best way to write is to let the image pull you. You should be water-skiing behind it, not dragging it like a barge. Writing should take you for a ride."

- Lynda Barry

Images That Shimmer Around the Edges

"When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I'm not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinagens, but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you try to keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer."

- Joan Didion, Why I Write (The New York Times Magazine, 12/5/1976)

Patriotism

"What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?"

- Lín Yǔtāng

The Idea of a Certain Artificial and Elegant Repose

Adam Smith writing about the human cost of capitalist progress in Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759:

The poor man's son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of the rich...Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it...

Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which in spite of all our care are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor. They are immense fabrics, which it requires the labour of a life to raise, which threaten every moment to overwhelm the person that dwells in them, and which while they stand, though they may save him from some smaller inconveniencies, can protect him from none of the severer inclemencies of the season. They keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to death.

Stasis

Two men playing tennis in the park this morning. Both wearing washed out beige shorts and bright white shirts. Their arms and legs are flushed the same pink. They are both balding and letting their remaining gray hair grow unhindered in the untended style of Einstein. One wears a blue brace on his right knee, the other wears a blue brace on his left knee. Each hovers at his center mark hitting the ball directly to the other, a tacit agreement not to force the other to chase it much. Matching skills. Matching motivations. The only breaks in the friendly volley occur when the ball falls short, striking the net, or flies too far, striking the fence. A tally of these errors would likely reveal an equal number from each player.

Once

Trailer

Once movie site

Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová Live at Sundance

New-Style Musical: Hansard and Irglova in 'Once' (NPR 5/13/07)
The Frames

Serve the Story

“Don’t do it if you don’t love it, and be enthusiastic about your work. Really invest it with everything in your being. Do what has to be done. If you have to get up at 2:00 in the morning because an idea strikes you, get up at 2:00 in the morning and don’t wait until you get up at 6:00 or 7:00 or 8:00. Do it when it’s there. Be alive to your career. Be alive to the story. Stories deliver themselves in their own way and in their own time and if you’re not there to receive it, you miss it. It’s gone. Be there. And be there continually in your writing. Be a conduit. Don’t think it’s you making it. Be aware that you’ve been given the gift of the story. Serve the story.”

—Bruce Joel Rubin, Learning from the Masters (The Dialogue Series)

Mountains

From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn:

A mountain of shoes reaches nearly to the ceiling. In another corner a mountain of t-shirts beside a mountain of sweaters. Mountains of pants, suits and underwear rise up one floor above. Tectonic fashion plates colliding. These new mountains loom above where the men sleep...

Above the men sleeping at the doomed Fort Point ("the Fort") rise the mountains of clothes. A couple of live-in staff workers tear open trashbags of donated cast-offs, toss them into the appropriate mountain, using shovels, rakes, mostly their hands. Another couple of guys are in charge of sizing the shoes and pants, marking the size on a piece of masking tape. A job with no end, for the mountains before them grow faster than they can measure.

Finally it's decided that some of these clothes should be sold to the Rag Man, sold by the pound, the money used to buy new socks and underwear. Never enough socks and underwear. The Rag Man sorts through the clothes, quickly--anything usable will be put in his buck-a-pound bin, the rest will either be shredded for mattress stuffing or donated to Third World countries as a tax write-off.

My father will end up sleeping at Fort Point even after he's unbarred from Pine Street. Six months outside have filled him with bitterness. Or brought to the surface the bitterness he always carried, and this bitterness is directed toward Pine Street. The months he sleeps at Fort Point I will not see much of him. Within six months he will be barred from there as well, for bringing a bottle of vodka up to his bed one night, after months of going downhill. It's February again, and he is Johnny Bench.

Paris, je t'aime

14th Arrondissement
Directed by Alexander Payne
Starring Margo Martindale

Faubourg Saint-Denis
Directed by Tom Tykwer
Starring Natalie Portman and Melchior Beslon

Official site
IMDB

Practice and Commitment

“Practice is the best of all instructors.” -Publilius Syrus

"Submit to a daily practice. Your loyalty to that is a ring on the door. Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who's there." -Rumi

"This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way." - W.H. Murray

Soup Yet

She walks in ten minutes after they are scheduled to open, five minutes after he unlocks the door in response to my knocking. He has already ladled tomato and carrot bisque into the quart jar I brought with me and screwed the lid back on. She clocks in with her back to us lined up behind the counter. Her jeans can’t contain the top of her pink underwear or the soft flesh around her hips. She asks him if he needs her to bake anything. He says she can help the next person in line. She does not look at us. She places her hands against the sides of my jar of soup and yawns.

A Native of an Unknown Country

From Archetypes for Writers: using the power of your subconscious by Jennifer Van Bergen:

I am talking about your writing. I’m talking about your subject, your characters, your story: what belongs to you and no one else. These all reside in your subconscious. They already exist and you already “know” them, but at the same time, you don’t know them: you may search for others to tell you how to find them, how to write the novel you want to write, how to tell your story. As Proust wrote in The Captive: “Every artist is a native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten…but remains all his life attuned to.”

Part of the reason why people both know and don’t know their own subjects is the principle that you must find outside material to substantiate everything inside of you…The other part of the reason is simply that it’s in your subconscious. Things can emerge from and disappear back into the subconscious, like ghosts.
…
Each of us has a “little life” – a life that is less than that which we are capable of understanding. Yet, writing is not about NOT having that little life. It is about accepting that little life in ourselves and in others, and giving oneself and others permission to be human and experience all those “little” things, but at the same time, watching oneself and others and noting one’s own and others’ patterns and rhythms, and loving oneself and one’s life, such as it is, and others and their lives, as they are.
…
The big problem is that in trying to embody ourselves, we change what we are into something we aren’t, something we think we ought to be, etc., and we lose the simple being-ness of being ourselves. So the trick is to be ourselves, to read ourselves accurately, and to transcribe ourselves as we are, while still being (and not losing our sense of self). This is as true of our own selves as with other selves, other persons we observe.

• Table of contents and sample chapter
• Michael Wiese Productions

A Deeper Respect for the Demands of Complexity

Norman Mailer discussing his novel The Castle in the Forest with Michael Silverblatt (KCRW's Bookworm, 5/12/07):

One small example of what I'm trying to do here maybe. I was very struck with Clara, Hitler's mother, because she adores him when he's a little boy. She loves him so much. And she really believes she's created an angel. There he is--outrageously spoiled by her when he's young. And I thought this is one of the disproportions of life that we live with so often which is that good mothers can give birth to children whom they turn into monsters through their love. That's how difficult love is. That's how difficult our existence is. There are perversities at every turn. And it's as if there is no single rule that say to you 'This is the way to live.' That indeed, what we have to do is we have to embark as human beings on a deeper respect for the demands of complexity.

And if I find anything disturbing in American life, and one of the reasons I've despised George Bush from the word go, is he's a simplifier. And in doing that, he's injuring a great democracy, because the virtue of a democracy is that the openness and freedom for thought in the country enables us to enter more and more difficult domains of moral ambiguity. We live in moral ambiguity. It's usually a small person or a rare person who can say I'm a good person or a bad person. Generally we sit there and we say, "Who am I? What do I stand for? Am I moral or am I immoral?" Because for so many of our actions, we have no guides. The churches can't guide us. The scientists can't guide us. The psychoanalysts can't guide us. And my vanity, since I'm a novelist, is occasionally good novels come along that can be a bit of a guide. Because dealing with fancy, not fact, they can create models that sit there as hypotheses...When we read a really good novel, it sits with us afterward as one more human possibility and we keep bringing it up and thinking about it and saying, "Do I believe in this or don't I?"

For instance, we read Kafka. We love his notion of absurdity and frustration and they become models for us in times in our lives when everything seems to be going wrong. We say to ourselves, "My lord, this is Kafkan." And doing so, he's relieved us of incredible tantrums and terrors. And in that sense, you can point to all the great novels and they all give us something that is a model of possible reality. And that is what we need. What we need is an entrance into more and more complexity rather than the assumption that I want to have answers.

One of the most intelligent people I ever knew in my life once said in the middle of a lecture when he was on fire, someone said to him, "You never give us answers, all you ever offer are questions." And he said, 'There are no answers. There are only questions.' And I've used it to live with for the rest of my life.

Unkowns

"I sometimes think that people's hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what's at the bottom. All you can do is guess from what comes floating to the surface every once in a while."

-- Haruki Murakami

"What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unkown."

-- Marcel Proust

The Shape of a Finely Made Story

"Story has a form that brings a certain order. The shape of a finely made story has the same energy as sexual energy or life energy. It's like the ebbing and flowing of tide and of storms. I think this goes through our bodies, it goes through our psyches, and the shape of story takes that same cyclical form."

--Maxine Hong Kingston speaking with Bill Moyers about her latest book Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. "For the past 15 years, Kingston has been working with veterans – more than 500 soldiers from World War II, from Vietnam, and now, from Iraq - as well as other survivors of war to convert the horrors they experienced into the words and stories that Kingston believes will help them cope and survive."

I Accepted Monsters In My Heart

Guillermo del Toro discussing his film, Pan's Labyrinth with Terry Gross (Fresh Air, 1/24/07):

When I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time in my grandmother’s garden, and I would actually do insane stuff. Like I would spend hours watching an ant hill. And I would try and recognize the ants from one another every day. And of course the garden was full of insects and I would name them and I admired them. I think they’re present in most of my movies because I have such admiration and fear of them. And I always thought, listening to Bible tales, I don’t know why, I always thought that archangels should look like insects, because archangels were sort of the tough guys of God’s army and I always imagined them looking like this. Shelled, armored creatures.

And I believe that the girl’s reality in the movie, you should be able to read it as existing in her mind or as being a really raggedy, left-out-in-the-rain kind of magical world because she has been gone from it for so long. So the movie allows you to interpret it both ways. For me, funny enough, to me what she see is a fully blown reality--a spiritual reality. But I believe her tale not to be just a reflection of the world around her, but to me she really turns into the princess of the underworld.
...
I think that there is a point in our life when we’re kids when literature and magic and fantasy has a strong presence in our soul as religion would have in later days. I think that it’s a spiritual reality as strong as when people say, “I accept Jesus in my heart.” Well, at a certain age, I accepted monsters in my heart. The girl is basically sort of autobiographical for me.
...
I think that the entire world we live in is fabricated. So when I think about, you know Republican, Democrat, left, right, morning, night, geography borders, all these things are conceits. Borders are not visible from a satellite picture. The fact that you can have a civil war where two sides kill each other and essentially from afar they look exactly the same. They are both the same human beings. They share the same taste for food. They sing the same songs and so on and so forth. This imagined conceit can create such horrors. And I think when people talk about fantasy and they demean it, like “Oh, fantasy is such a low concern,” well, I think politics, religion, are equal inventions for me at least.
...
The Pale Man is, in function, a prototypical ogre in the fairy tale—a devourer of children. But in appearance I wanted it to look like essentially a monster a child could imagine. A monster from the id.

What I noticed early on is I ordered first the make effects company to create sort of an old guy that had been very fat and had shrunken so the skin was loose and hanging, and at the same time, I asked them to remove the face. Because I remember manta rays upside down they have this thin mouth and the little nostril-like openings and they have a very disturbing neutrality to them.

And then one of the things I remember as a kid is one of the first things you do is you draw your own hand, you trace it, and you put an eye or a mouth or a face. And it is very often that child psychologists find that one of the first things a kid does in inventing a monster is displacing the mouth or displacing the eyes. And I came up with the idea since the character had stigmata, I said Let’s put the eyes in there. And what came out instinctively was an incredibly brutal incredibly Freudian or Jungian creature.

A Treatment of Our Own Life

"Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones."

--Benedict Carey, This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It), New York Times, 5/22/07.

Go Now

Away From Her is a heartbreaking film adapted from a beautifully crafted short story by Alice Munro. Julie Christie portrays Fiona, a woman with Alzheimers, who feels like she is disappearing. Grant, her husband of over forty years, watches powerlessly as she drifts away.

Driving home, he noticed that the swamp hollow that had been filled with snow and the formal shadows of tree trunks was no lighted up with skunk lilies. Their fresh, edible-looking leaves were the size of platters. The flowers sprang straight up like candle flames, and there were so many of them, so pure a yellow, that they set a light shooting up from the earth on this cloudy day. Fiona had told him that they generated a heat of their own as well. Rummaging around in one of her concealed pockets of information, she said that you were supposed to be able to put your hand inside the curled petal and feel the heat. She said that she had tried it, but she couldn't be sure if what she felt was heat or her imagination. The heat attracted bugs.

"Nature doesn't fool around just being decorative."

***

In the town where he used to work there was a bookstore that he and Fiona had visited once or twice a year. He went back there by himself. He didn't feel like buying anything, but he had made a list and picked out a couple of the books on it, and then bought another book that he noticed by chance. It was about Iceland. A book of nineteenth-century watercolors made by a lady traveler to Iceland.

Fiona had never learned her mother's language and she had never shown much respect for the stories that it preserved--the stories that Grant had taught and written about, and still did write about, in his working life. She referred to their heroes as "old Naj" or "old Snorri." But in the last few years she had developed an interest in the country itself and looked at travel guides. She read about William Morris's trip, and Auden's. She didn't really plan to travel there. She said the weather was too dreadful. Also--she said--there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for--but never did get to see.

First-time director Sarah Polley's wrote an essay, On Marriage and Fiction, which appeared in a recent issue of Zoetrope All-Story about making the significance of the story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain, which inspired the film.

Like the Fire Through the Mountain

"The truly contemporary force is something that is built of the past, but with a difference. Most of what calls itself contemporary is built, whether it knows it or not, out of a desire to be liked. It is created in imitation of what already exists and is already admired. There is, in other words, nothing new about it. To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air."

--Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

No Longer a Solitary Act

From Sex, Drugs, and Updating Your Blog by Clive Thompson (New York Times, 5/11/07):

When Jonathan Coulton first began writing his weekly songs, he carefully tracked how many people listened to each one on his Web site. His listenership rose steadily, from around 1,000 a week at first to 50,000 by the end of his yearlong song-a-week experiment. But there were exceptions to this gradual rise: five songs that became breakout “hits,” receiving almost 10 times as many listeners as the songs that preceded and followed them. The first hit was an improbable cover song: Coulton’s deadpan version of the 1992 Sir Mix-a-Lot rap song “Baby Got Back,” performed like a hippie folk ballad. Another was “Code Monkey,” his pop song about a disaffected cubicle worker.

Obviously, Coulton was thrilled when his numbers popped, not least because the surge of traffic produced thousands more dollars in sales. But the successes also tortured him: he would rack his brains trying to figure out why people loved those particular songs so much. What had he done right? Could he repeat the same trick?

“Every time I had a hit, it would sort of ruin me for a few weeks,” he told me. “I would feel myself being a little bit repressed in my creativity, and ideas would not come to me as easily. Or else I would censor myself a little bit more.” His fans, he realized, were most smitten by his geekier songs, the ones that referenced science fiction, mathematics or video games. Whenever he branches out and records more traditional pop fare, he worries it will alienate his audience.

For many of these ultraconnected artists, it seems the nature of creativity itself is changing. It is no longer a solitary act: their audiences are peering over their shoulders as they work, offering pointed comments and suggestions.

Code Monkey

Part of the Process

"...the writing gets easier; you become more skillful unless something is wrong. And you waste less time. I can remember this and I see it in my students—this idea that I have spent all these hours, days, even weeks, on these pages, on this story, they must be good. Well, the truth is that it is quite possible that they aren’t. It doesn’t matter that you spent all this time on it. It still might not work. And after you have done this for a while, you are much more willing, much smarter, you know, to throw that away. You have to realize that that’s part of the process and not this big waste. You are able to say that won’t work and cut it. Whether it’s a sentence, a paragraph, a page or a whole story or chapter, you learn how to tell sooner when it’s not working. And you begin to feel more confident because you know you’re more skillful as a writer. But when it’s working, when the actual writing is going well and you know you’re doing a good day’s work, that’s enormously satisfying. And in that sense it is fun."

--Sigrid Nunez

Spare-Ohs

Andrew Bird performs Spare-Ohs as he strolls through Montmartre at sunset.

Spare-Ohs is on Armchair Apocrypha which was released in March.

More Take-Away Shows from Blogotheque.