dreaming on paper

"Midbrow in Paris"

2011-07-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

For some time people had been saying that Woody Allen had shot his artistic wad. For me this has been true pretty much since Annie Hall, a film whose aggressive clichés were tempered (if that’s the right word) by Allen’s colorful neuroses, adding some breaths of fresh air to what would otherwise have been a pedestrian boy-meets-girl / boy-loses-girl story. After Crimes & Misdemeanors, I stopped bothering with Allen’s movies: by then he was well into his serious phase, and already I’d made up my mind that the words “serious” and “Woody Allen” didn’t belong in the same sentence. However, based on the recommendations of some friends whose opinions I respect, and several strong reviews of his latest film according to which, apparently, he has broken a long string of mediocrities, I decided to give Mr. Allen another chance.

Alas, Allen’s latest project merely exposes his long-running fraud. For all its superficial innocence, Midnight in Paris is a deeply cynical movie, shameless in its exploitation of his die-hard fans’ wish to take Mr. Allen—and, by extension, themselves—seriously. When not indulging in it outright, Allen has made his long career out of either plunging headlong into or skirting around the edges of lampoon. Or—less charitably—out of fooling otherwise reasonable people into mistaking for art what is, at best, burlesque and (at worst) utterly derivative.

Midnight in Paris tells the story of a “hack” Hollywood screenwriter’s (played as well as possible by Owen Wilson) wish to write a novel and (paradoxically, given the vehicle that conveys him) to be taken seriously as an artist. On a visit to Paris with his wealthy fiancée, at midnight, by means of a chauffeur-driven yellow 1920 Peugeot, Gil is transported to the Paris of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, et al., to the “golden age” wherein Modernism was born. No sooner is this cute, clever, and extremely trite premise established than the movie descends (not that it has much altitude to fall from, having so far been nothing but a Cook’s slideshow tour of the City of Lights) into a hodgepodge of the most condescending clichés and stereotypes of that period, with Fitzgerald as Yuppie glamour boy, Zelda as air-head, Hemingway as pugnacious boozer, and Gertrude Stein as Bohemia’s answer to Aunt Bee.

As grotesque and insulting as these stereotypes are, in the hands of a better, less lazy auteur they might, at least, have offered some intelligent if negligible fun. Instead, by virtue of his miraculous carelessness, somehow Allen manages to render these characters not only trite and superficial, but stupefyingly dull. When not wielding a bottle of Calvados and spouting bad parodies of his own prose, Hemingway either invites his listeners on safaris or challenges them to boxing matches. Gertrude Stein, arguably the most brilliant literary mind of her generation, has nothing intelligent to say—but then neither do any of the characters (even Picasso, never at a loss of words in real life, finds himself utterly speechless, his hairdo doing all his acting for him).

But then—and though this is a movie about a man who finds himself transported to an age that, arguably, may have crowded more geniuses into one room than any other—except when gratuitously spouting familiar quotations (“the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past”—Faulkner), none of the characters in this film ever speaks an intelligent word. The closest Allen comes to intelligence is pedantry, explaining why he’s most in his element when creating pedantic characters, like the fiancée's paramour, Paul. Yet even true pedantry is beyond Allen’s supremely limited grasp. In waxing pedantic about Monet’s water lilies, the best our snobby expert can do is spout vapid chestnuts out of a undergraduate art student’s notebook about “closure” and the “roots of abstract expressionism.” Later in the film, the already trite premise having descended to a deeper level of triteness (with the characters transported to the Paris of Moulin Rouge and the Impressionists), pressed to arrive at the last “golden age” before the belle époque, the best that Allen (via Degas and Gaugin) can come up with is the Renaissance, as if the Enlightenment, among other “golden” epochs, never happened. But then a grammar-school mentality might not know about, let alone remember, the Enlightenment.

Some will argue that this is irrelevant to a charming, lighthearted comedy, but where is it written that to be funny, let alone “lighthearted” or “charming,” a movie has to be stupid? In fact, in any one of Owen Wilson’s recent comedies (and I include the Jackie Chan films) I guarantee you that you’ll find, in approximately proportionate amounts, not only more intelligence and less pretension, but more humor.

The sad truth is there is no intelligence in Midnight in Paris, which exploits and insults its viewers’ innocent wish—shared by the main character—to rub shoulders with brilliant minds. Instead, we brush up against wax figures stuffed with heinous clichés, the kind designed to comfort middlebrows of the lowest sort—those who want to seem sophisticated without having to sacrifice their familiar, superficial comforts, or face up to their limitations. Hence, Hemingway the drunk; Fitzgerald the playboy; Picasso the womanizer; etc. Bottom line: it’s okay to appreciate “great artists,” so long as its understood that they also happen to be bums and jerks. It's a film custom-tailored to elicit knowing chuckles from latent philistines.

On one level I agree with the critics: Midnight in Paris isn’t another mediocre film by Woody Allen. It is, to quote Paul Fussell, Bad with a capital “B.” It is the worst kind of middlebrow art: that kind that passes itself off successfully as the real thing. Hermann Göring famously said, “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” From now on, whenever I hear the words “Woody Allen,” I will reach for whatever is left of culture, and hold on with all my might.

The Draw Fan

2011-07-14T06:41:00.000-07:00

I remember the sound of the draw fan in the ceiling at the top of the stairs by the linen closet, thrumming through hot summer nights. My father, an inventor, had rigged up a crude timer switch, with a little pulley wheel for a dial. I used to imagine that a mysterious creature lived in there, half vulture, half vampire, a bird-monster that made its home in the fan’s louvered nest (that opened mysteriously when the fan turned on).

Though the fan was off-limits to me and George, my twin brother, I’d sneak out there in the middle of the night and give the dial a hefty turn, so it would go on and on all night long, billowing the blue curtains next to my bed. Most nights, my mother would wake up and sabotage my wish; I’d hear the closet door (where the switch was kept) open, and then the fan would stop, and I’d lie there, awake on top of the sheets, hostage to the sizzles and chirps of cicadas and crickets singing their stifling songs.

Running the fan all night was an extravagance, sure, but it comforted me. It wasn’t just coolness I was after, but the sound—that roaring, rumbling rhythm, like rolling thunder, or ocean surf, or the turbines of a passenger steamship—a sound that conveyed power, authority, and steadfastness: a soothing masculine growl that assured me that together, somehow, no matter how hot and humid and long, we’d get through the night.

How to Buy Hat Factory Painting

2010-10-13T06:31:00.001-07:00

Bare walls give me the creeps. I'm always distressed and frankly a bit amazed especially in the homes of well-off people, homes equipped with the best appliances, expensive furniture, and two-hundred dollar faucets, when people either have nothing at all on the walls, or some very expensive signed stupid lithograph by a famous artist for which you know they paid way too much money at some gallery. These are the same people whose book shelves, if they have any at all, are lined with first edition hardcovers of worthless airport novels, still in their pristine dust jackets as if barely read or not read at all: in fact, one gets the sneaky feeling they bought them simply to adorn the shelves (in which case one wonders at the mentality that would do so, say, with novels by James Patterson and Jackie Collins rather than by Tolstoy or Proust).

But never mind; this post is about paintings, not books, and about the bare walls that should be under them. Bare walls disgust me. Every naked space on a wall is space that could be taken up by a piece of art, and not just some prefab kitsch like those horrible wide-angle framed photos of island beaches at sunset with corporate bromides typeset an small-caps with very wide kerning, a sure sign that whoever inhabits the place is a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying philistine. Nor do I mean commercial posters whose frame jobs cost twenty times more than the artwork they contain. Nor do I mean signed lithographs, silk-screens, or other expensive reproductions of Calders or Picassos or Dalis or any of the dead fat-cat artists on whose corpses the commercial fine art world continues to gorge itself, or try.

I mean the works of living and struggling artists who are not famous yet but trying mightily to be, or maybe they aren't trying at all, maybe they simply paint for the joy of painting. There are many of them, and their paintings belong on people's walls.

Why, when it comes to fine art, are so many otherwise intelligent people so willfully ignorant? It's not merely that they don't appreciate good art, it's that they don't even try, ever. They know less, most of them, about art than they do about the engines under the hoods of their cars. They think it's too complicated, elitist, an enterprise for snobs. They don't seem to get that a piece of art, a painting, a good painting, it very simply something done by an artist. Among all the living artists they are entirely free to choose those works that appeal to them: nothing wrong with that. They need not fear the scorn of critics who may not approve their choices. However, they deserve to be scorned when, rather than make any effort to live with genuine art, they put overpriced insincere bragging-point crap selected by experts on their walls, or worse, nothing at all.

How do you go about buying real art, then? Genuine art that isn't overpriced or otherwise out of reach? Let me show you how simple it can be.

A few weeks ago I happened to read in a back issue of a literary journal that had been left behind on a shelf in the office I've inherited with my new job a short story by a woman named Jennifer Moses. I enjoyed the story very much, though it is not the point here. In the back of the journal were biographical note on the authors, each of them accompanied by a small, personal photograph. In place a a photograph of Jennifer or her family, I found one of a painting. For Jennifer, it turned out, is a writer and painter.

Now, two things struck me about this painting. First, it was done in a naive style. Naive art, for those who may not know, is art that either purposefully or by accident dispenses with the "rules" of perspective, light, proportion, composition, scale, and so on. Rousseau was a naive artist, but there have been many. I myself am a naive, and proud of it. In fact I felt as if this painting could have been done by me, which, I guess, is a rather narcissistic reason for my liking it, but then why would I paint my paintings not to like them?

The second extraordinary thing about this painting is that it was a painting of a hat factory. And hat factories, as you may know, are central to the novel I have been working on.

So I checked the artist's website, and sure enough she had done many lovely paintings, but only this one of a hat factory. So I emailed her and asked: is it for sale? Mind you, I really can't afford to be buying painting these days, but I had to ask. She wrote me back very quickly saying a)that the painting had already been sold and b) but she would be glad to do another for me. The price: $200, framed. And (she added) if I was not pleased with the result I needn't buy it.

Well, I guess I don't have to tell you my response. The painting hangs in a place of honor in the university home where I am living, whose walls, when I moved in, were bare. And that's how you buy a painting.

From a Novel-in-Progress

2010-10-11T16:22:00.001-07:00

I've been working hard on a new novel, and also on my "Your First Page" blog, and hence I have been neglectful of this blog. When that will change I don't know, but here at least I can offer my few intrepid followers a sample of my work-in-progress, from a novel I'm calling HATTERTOWN (the capital letters are important: they are meant to mimic the names of the towns extinct hat factories as they appear in block letters down the shafts of the equally extinct smokestacks that shoot up from the landscape like ruddy brick fingers.

The sample paragraph is from a scene fairly early in the book in which the narrator imagined his mother's reasons and regrets with respect to marrying his stepfather, the owner and operator of the town's last dying retail hat store. You'll read it and tell me if you think it's any good.

"From where I half-crouched behind the beaded curtain I couldn’t see my mother, but I could picture her lying there, spread out on the parlor sofa, her long former dancer’s legs hidden under a plaid throw, cigarette in one hand, sherry glass in the other, for to go with her smoking she had taken up this other habit, a glass of creamy sherry every evening before bed—and sometimes, lately, more than one. She drank, I suppose, for the same reason she’d started smoking again, to take the edge off her disappointment, the disappointment of a woman who, having married a second time not out of love but for money, discovers that in fact she has done so for neither. Had my mother, when she married him, the vaguest inkling that Walter J. Waple was in financial straights? Certainly not. Had she had any such inkling would she have married him? Again, no. But she’d had no such inkling. About Walter J. Waple she had known very little, as a matter of fact. She knew only that he was a widower who lived in a grand stone house on Crown Heights Boulevard with a wraparound porch and stained glass windows and a turret with a witch’s hat roof and a circular driveway edged with day lilies—or were they daffodils? He had a retarded son, poor man, and perhaps for this reason he was alone, though it seemed not a very good reason, not to my mother. He owned the town’s only retail hat store, and so he must have been rich; at any rate, he was not poor, and he did not work in a hat factory. He did not smell of fusty damp wool and harsh chemicals and sweat, but of sweet pipe tobacco and cologne. His fingernails were polished and trimmed square with no a trace of factory grime under them. He didn’t swill bourbon or try to drown or disfigure his children. He was courteous and well mannered and never once presented himself to her without a bouquet of roses. Perhaps he was not rich. Perhaps he was not worth a fortune but only earned a considerable income. Still, it would be enough. With said considerable income he would buy her gowns and in his shiny blue Buick would take her out to dine (not to eat, mind you, but to dine) at gentile New England establishments with names like The Cobbs Mill Inn, The Wild Turkey, The Old Oak, The Spinning Wheel, or to that Swedish place on the lake, what was it called, the Viking’s Table, the one with the smorgasbord, where the chef always came out to greet the patrons in his puffy hat. He’d order a martini, extra dry with a droll olive, and she a Brandy Alexander. At the long banquet table buckling under steaming vats of half-drowned meatballs, golden one-eyed fish, gleaming amber turkeys, diamond-scored, clove-studded hams, and pantied racks of lamb, Mr. and Mrs. Walter J. Waple would fill their plates and life would be good."

The Elephant in Marshall Field’s Window: My Glimpse of Saul Bellow

2010-09-14T16:17:00.000-07:00

As we pulled up the driveway there he was, an old man with white hair sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of his Vermont farmhouse, reading the newspaper. I was with my friend Oliver. We’d been invited to the Bellows for dinner that night. For a while we sat drinking beers in our own rocking chairs to either side of Saul as the sun started down and he turned the pages of his paper—the Sunday Times—though he wasn’t reading it. He was eighty-five years old then, still pretty much there, though he had stopped writing, and he tended to repeat himself. Otherwise, though, he seemed content in that way that only great men seem able to achieve, and only when they arrive at grand old age after long lives filled with struggle and success, the contentment born of finally laying down the sword and shield. As a writer Saul Bellow was finished and he knew it, but he had nothing to regret or apologize for, having done all anyone could have asked him to do and more.

And now he sat there in his rocking chair on the front porch of his Vermont farmhouse turning the pages of his paper with the sun about to go down, telling a story about Trotsky, probably his favorite story of all, how when he was an undergraduate studying anthropology at the University of Chicago he and a fellow student decided to hitchhike to Mexico and gain an audience with the expelled Bolshevik revolutionary.

“We got there a day too late,” Bellow said. Trotsky had been killed the day before. “But,” Bellow went on, “we were allowed to see the body.”

He and his friend were escorted to a room. There lay Trotsky, under a starched white sheet in a hospital gurney, his beard brown with iodine or blood—either he couldn’t recall or had never been sure. Both what he remembered he saw with perfect clarity, as if it hadhappened the day before. “It was the sort of thing you never forget,” he said.

Before the sun went down completely Oliver and I went for a swim in the Bellow pond, a Huck Finn style pond with a small sagging dock and bullrushes all around. The water was murky but cool. Some of the Bellow girls swam with us. Except for Saul and his three-and-a-half year old daughter, the rest of his family consisted of brunettes of all ages, all of them beautiful. We finished our swim and walked in wet bathing suits back to the house for dinner.

I forget what we ate. Something warm and good—stew with salad and warm beets, something like that, or a vegetarian dish, served with a red wine. Oliver, Saul, and I sat together at one end of the long rustic table (everything about the place was rustic). As Oliver tends to when we're with others, he let Saul and I do all the talking while he listened and laughed and smiled. Saul, on learning that I had written a children's book, said he once had an idea for one himself.

“Really?” I said, taking a more than polite interest. “What was the idea?”

“It’s called ‘The Elephant in Marshall Field’s Window.’”

“Sounds great. What’s it about?”

“I don’t know,” Saul leaned in close to me and whispered conspiratorially. “All I know is it’s called ‘The Elephant in Marshall Field’s Window.’ I haven’t worked out any of the rest.”

From there somehow he drifted back to seeing Trotsky when he was eighteen years old. This sensational episode of his young manhood, it occurred to me—an event that may or may not have played a role in his becoming an author—had become for him a sort of reference point, a lighthouse at sea, shining a beacon that lit up his past—but fitfully, as beacons will.

After dessert, and after watching Saul’s three-and-a-half year old daughter dance for us, Saul, who’d had a long day, said goodnight, and Oliver and I in turn bid our farewells to the rest of the Bellow clan. Saul died three years later. He was eighty-seven.

Among today's young writers and readers Bellow has since fallen into something like neglect, a shame, since his books remain worth reading. I still think of him as a literary Titan, our most legitimate heir to Melville. Those who wish to disparage his works point out that when writing fiction the man had trouble checking his intellect at the door—and that starting with Augie March he stopped trying. True, true. But then who among us wouldn't have trouble keeping Saul Bellow’s intellect at bay? Among all his books you'd be hard pressed to find a single uninspired line. The texture of his prose alone is worth the substance of most others'.

As for me, from now on I’ll think of Saul Bellow as a neat old man who once glimpsed Trotsky’s bloody beard and imagined an elephant in Marshall Field’s window. Oh, yes, and who wrote a few masterpieces and won the Nobel Prize.

Photo by Jill Krementz

Miss Connecticut

2010-07-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

She must have gotten on in Springfield while I slept. I awoke to find her sitting there next to me, wearing a zippered down coat and looking, as far as I could see, much too pretty to have landed there beside me on a stinking Peter Pan bus bound for Danbury from Brattleboro. I must have been twenty-two, twenty-three, something like that. 1980, or thereabouts.

As dusk settled on the tobacco fields and barns and crowded in on the tired bus, fusing together shapes in the dim cabin, we got to talking. I explained that I was returning from a visit with some of my high school chums in Vermont, all artists of one sort or another, all waiting tables or washing dishes. She in turn and with a hint of reluctance confessed to having been crowned Miss Connecticut a few weeks before, and being on her way to New York City, where she would spend three all-expenses-paid days at the Grand Hyatt hotel before boarding a plane for Miami, to take part in the Miss America pageant there. Though in the darkness I couldn't see it, I heard the smirk in her voice, along with a note of sad disbelief, as if she considered the whole affair slightly ludicrous.

I myself had always thought beauty pageants silly, so why was I self-conscious sitting next to Miss Connecticut, as if she were a goddess or the Pope? In the darkness I imagined her in white taffeta with sash and crown, smiling for the cameras, her sparkling teeth throwing back the glare of flashbulbs. I cracked a bad joke about Bert Park’s dentures, to which she said, “Who?” betraying both our ages. We spoke of nothing for three or four miles before she turned to her book, and I to the dark window.

I wondered about physical beauty as applied to people. Is it really skin deep? Are physically attractive people not somehow superior to plain or ugly ones? I'd been reading Middlemarch, by George Elliot, and remembered her disastrous affair with the Darwinist Herbert Spencer, of his own conclusion that the end was a preordained by Elliot's famous ugliness by her "heavy jaw, large mouth and thick nose"—qualities no intellectual attraction could redeem. "The lack of physical attraction," Spencer admitted—bragged?—later, "was fatal. . . Strongly as my judgment prompted, my instincts would not respond." I wondered how many potential lovers I'd never given the time of day to for similar reasons? Do believers read divine judgment in the distribution of beauty? What makes less sense than a contest where the participants exercise no skill, where the winner is determined by the performance not of the contestants, but of the judges?

The bus rolled on. And though it remained too dark for me to see her, and though I did my best not to be moved by the received wisdom of a silly contest, the more it rolled, the more beautiful my fellow passenger grew there next to me. Or maybe I'd been dreaming. Maybe she wasn't so beautiful. Maybe she'd pulled my leg and had the face of a gorilla, or a lizard. But no, she was Miss Connecticut, and gave off the sweet, silent, secret, intoxicating essence of beauty.

By the time we pulled into Hartford she'd fallen asleep with her head on my shoulder. For the rest of the trip I didn't budge. I was very uncomfortable, but felt like the luckiest man alive.

Cornered by Criticism

2010-07-22T04:04:00.000-07:00

It's been months now since my last entry here. I've been two-timing you, giving my attention to another blog, this one called "Your First Page." There, I invite authors to submit (anonymously) up to the first 350 words of a manuscript-in-progress, and offer a free critique. To date I've commented on 40 first pages.

It's been a lot of work, and fun. I worried first that no one would send me their pages, then that I'd be overwhelmed with submissions. Neither worry has materialized. I get a trickle of pages every week—usually no more than five or six—just enough to keep up with. When I've done 100 I'll stop.

I've enjoyed the process. Each page presents a sort of puzzle, or several puzzles. First, I have to decide what's working and not, and why. That's probably the easier part. The next task is to contextualize the issues raised by a first page. To give an example, one of the last pages I commented on was from a detective or crime novel. And so, along with the critique, I did a short historical overview of detective fiction. That sort of thing.

Then there's the challenge of offering advice and criticism that's honest without being brutal or condescending, or worse, belittling--a trap I fallen into at least once. The author let me know it. As his comment reveals he was angry. I don't blame him. In the end I made good, and he has since become one of the blog's biggest fans. You might say we "met cute."

Belittling people is one of the risks one runs when offering criticism—especially when trying to make the criticism relevant and entertaining not just to the authors of the works in question, but to others. Attempts at humor can easily come off as condescension, as humor at the expense of the authors who have bravely offered their works to public scrutiny.

There's an even worse risk with respect to my own writing. Criticism and creativity are at odds. I used to not think so; I used to tell myself, "Why can't critical commentary be an art form like any other?" Sure there's an art to it. Whenever we shape thoughts into paragraphs we create something. But it's a heady art, an intellectual art, and art that engages the brain, not the heart. And the more time you spend in your brain the less well you know your heart, until it atrophies, its tissues dry out and harden.

Have I sacrificed my own creativity at the alter of criticism? Will I finally be one of those who (as one critic said of my work recently) can't, therefore he teaches? I never wanted to be a teacher who writes; I wanted to be a writer who teaches. Speaking of another kind of art, actor Paul Schofield described himself between performances as an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the next role. Outside of his roles the actor has nothing to say or add. This is why (Schofield said) interviews with actors are terribly boring. There is nothing beyond the art itself. Any discussion or analysis of that art diminishes both the art and the performer. Between roles, the actor should disappear, or at least keep his mouth shut.

Schofield's words touched me. All this writing I do about writing—how much has it diminished me? Am I strangling myself? Cutting off the blood supply to my own creative work, turning it into dry criticism? It that what I really want, to be a critic and not an artist? For years now I've wondered if teaching has hurt or helped me as an artist. Now I worry and wonder if it's too late, if I've poisoned the well of inspiration with all my critical ink. Am I creating, or destroying?

Whatever we do with a generous spirit is creative. Whether we write criticism or poetry, whether we're paid or not, whether it's published in the Paris Review or the Cappuccino Foam Review (or nowhere at all) doesn't matter. What matters is intent. If the intent is pure, the work will be pure. If we write out of generosity and not out of ambition, whatever we write can rise to art.

Pure Flux: The Writer Revisits His Murdered Darlings

2010-06-05T11:22:00.000-07:00

Like Depression-era mothers, we fiction writers hate throwing things away. Instead of hoarding used Saran Wrap and dunked tea bags for rainy days, we squirrel away used words: titles, phrases, sentences, paragraphs—sometimes whole chapters or scenes—stuff that never made it into our finished stories or novels, or made the first cut only to be excised during the ruthless process of revision. Some of mine:

Story idea: A letter written from a far-away planet, in every sense an ordinary correspondence but with occasional passing references to alien weather, flowers, fauna, etc. A romantic letter from a lover in outer space.

Campaign against public buses masquerading as trolley cars.

Dust settled onto the knick-knacks, on the lids of canned fruit and tomatoes, on the brown shoulders of the gallon bottle of Taylor Cream Sherry, into the nooks and crannies of doilies, the braids of the rug, the folds in her Japanese fans, the slats of her blinds, the gold-pocked fabric covering the speaker holes of her brown Phillip’s radio, made of brown Bakelite.

Park Slope yuppie talk: "We've kept the grand ballroom intact and we have a library."

Woman wetting dry dog's nose.

The injunction telling us to “murder [our] darlings” says nothing about where or how to dispose of the bodies. And so many of us do with them more or less what Norman Bates did with his mother. Stuffed into sagging shelves, tucked into file folders and notebooks—reams of dead inspirations on yellowed paper, to be perused during fits of writer’s block, as if somehow our own dead words might spring to life and rescue us from artistic decrepitude.

WASP eating habits: potato salad, macaroni salad, borcht w/ yogurt, Russian salad. Mayonnaise fetish. Arterial sclerosis.

“Be careful going down those stairs.” Lights turned on and off. Sort of house people get murdered in. Smell of basements. Dust and debris. People who never throw anything out. “When it doubt, throw it out.” You can learn a lot about people from their basements.

Mr. B's wife's former husband Congressman.

Titles of books put on shelves. June suspects him of stealing book; sees it in his shoulder satchel; he thought Mr. B had lent it to him.

Tell me you’ve never had so little faith in your power to generate new words that you’ve gone, in despair, after the old ones like a kid prying chewing gum from the bottom of a church pew, that you’ve never been so creatively down at the heels that you’ve gone slumming in your own refuse heap for an inspirational bone or two. We’ve all done it, all of us who justify ourselves by filling pages with words. We excavate our verbal compost heaps in hope of finding a fresh carrot or potato growing there, and turn up nothing finer usually that orange peels, sodden coffee grounds, egg shells.

Yet sometimes amid the rinds and refuse a glimmer catches my eye. I’ll read a sentence with curiosity, admiration even, fragments equivalent to unpaired socks, and as useless.

X spilling his salad dressing, blaming the world for his clumsiness, cultivating his phobias like a squirrel hoarding nuts

I have never been enlightened in my life, not for a day, or an hour, or even a minute. Wisdom is not something that sticks to me.

When do we get to be artists?

“The frilly skirts of waves teasing the shore.”—Nabokov

Blue of:
—cheap cigar smoke
—blue whales
—distant mountains
—Siberian Husky eyes
—cardiac arrest
—frozen winter nights
—faded color movies
Black of:
—black holes
—subway grime
—metal stained fingers
—tarnished silver
—dried blood
—missing teeth
—wet streets at night
—eclipsed moons
—electrical tape

Of all the things I've ever written, none are more pleasing to me than the random jottings in my notebooks. The finished plays, essays, stories, novels—I can hardly stand to look at them anymore, so dead are their words on the page. They have nothing left to offer me, none of the unexpected and sometimes even jolting surprises that the random jottings in my notebooks give me. That's what I want most for myself as both a writer and a reader: to be continually surprised, to write, or to have written, words that, no matter how many times you read them, they come to you fresh and clean as if you've never read them before.

Scratchy looking trees, naked branches crackling against the winter-white sky

Poetry: the “radiance”—words that open us up to eternity, that break through the walls of reason and time, that go beyond our so-called understanding to give us a taste of Eden, the “heavenly moment.”

Tinnitus—this “om” in my head, the undercurrent of the universe, all vowel sounds combined, existential feedback, the humming universe, a silver needle threading its way through my skull, the immortal/eternal silence announcing itself.

Our worries grow old.

I've dreamed of writing a book of such random fragments, a plotless masterpiece. And why not? Miller, Becket, Genet, Joyce, Durrell—all wrote books with little if any plot. Prompting the following syllogism:

Tropic of Cancer is a great novel.
Tropic of Cancer has no plot, therefore
To write a great novel, simply dispense with plot.

Ergo, Pure Flux, the title of my projected plotless wonder of a book. Not only would it hold no trace of plot, there'd be no characters, so settings, no scenes, no useful information, and few if any worthy ideas, nothing of psychological, historical, scientific, or social significance. It would be a pure book, unsullied by such things, consisting entirely of fragments detached from whatever meaning[s] they might have had within a context—as pure and without reference to external things as an abstract expressionist painting, something by Rothko or Kline or maybe Richard Pousette-Dart. Archibald McLeish said, “A poem should not mean but be.” My novel would mean nothing and be entirely irrelevant to everything.

“Like trying to preserve soap bubbles.”

All these people who think bottled water will save them.

He breathes rare air.

Beckett counting his farts.

He lay splayed on the rock with his eyes closed, the noon sun painting abstract masterpieces under his eyelids. The sun warm, the air cool, no sound but the wind through the trees, the honking of geese, a distant dog bark.

So long as things are in flux, everything is possible. As soon as they solidify all the bright possibilities turn to gray stone.

“It was evening. I had just crawled out of the shelter for my evening guffaw and the better to savor my exhaustion.”—Beckett, Malloy

“When you lay in the grass you were under the azure map of clouds and sailing continents, you inhaled the whole geography of the sky.”—Bruno Schultz

Tsvetaera: The Noise of Time

To my knowledge such a book has never been written. Tropic of Cancer —a book that is by turns shocking and shockingly dull (much duller now that I'm no longer eighteen and in love with all things audacious), Miller's book is about many things—misogyny, hunger, sex, bodily functions (especially digestion). There are scenes in Tropic of Cancer, characters, too—surreal scenes and caricatured characters, vicious assaults on the men and women who were foolish enough to offer the starving author their beds or their bankrolls—or both. A gob of spit in the eye of God, Miller calls his book, but this serves him too well; it's more like a bucket of bile spewed up by Miller by way of thanking his benefactors.

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

But long before Miller spewed his bile there'd been other plotless novels, Huysman's A Rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature, 1884), for instance, with its garden of poisonous flowers, mouth organ of chromatic liquors, and banquet of all-black foods (olives, caviar, blood pudding). But Huysman's book too is about something: fin-du-siècle decadence. And what it lacks in plot, characters and drama is more than makes up for with its bravura set-piece descriptions. My plotless tour de force would go further, dispensing with narrative altogether. It would describe nothing. It would be anti-descriptive, the literary equivalent of one of those black holes in space.

We are death. What we call life is the slumber of our real life, the death of what we really are. The dead are born, they don't die. The words are switched around in our eyes.—Bernardo Soares, The Book of Disquiet

To my "black hole" standard two other novelists—if you can call them that—come closer than Miller or Huysmans. One of these was Fernando Pessoa, the Portugese poet who, when he died of cirrhosis in 1935 at age forty-seven, left behind a trunk of unpublished writings, thousands of pages of poetry and prose scribbled mostly on loose scraps of paper, and attributed to a retinue of imaginary characters or heteronyms, each with his own biography, including one Bernardo Soares, whose temperament most closely matched Pessoa's. Pessoa credited Soares as the author of his planned but never completed Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego), a "factless autobiography" consisting of most if not all the prose fragments found in that trunk. To the extent that a "book" exists at all it exists not thanks to Pessoa, but to the intrepid editors, scholars and translators who compiled and collated these fragments, and the publishers who slapped them between covers. Would that every dead writer with a trunk full of scraps were so lucky! In spite of which, The Book of Disquiet remains a fragmented, arbitrary, infuriatingly redundant performance, held tenuously together by nothing more than its author's obsessive love affair with gloom and ennui. Strip away all of the biographical baggage—Pessoa's and his heteronyms'—and what's left is a commonplace book of tedium, and more than a little tedious itself.

Title: Damn it all to Hell

Cupcake Monologues: jokes about cupcakes.Differences between cupcakes, muffins, brioche, etc. discussed. Muffins as renegade or reformed cupcakes: puritan, Episcopal cupcake. Lutheran cupcakes. Purged by the Inquisition. Hidden by the Dutch under floorboards. Do you know the Muffin Man? And did he really wake up so early in the morning? Brother asleep on couch, downing aspirin, in constant need of analgesics, always in pain. “Do you mind if I lie on your bed? I promise I won’t mess it up too much.”

Title: If You Must

Walking with Brother, each telling the other what book he should write. “Why don’t you write a book called Crap?” Write your own crappy book. Peter examining G’s wristwatch, imagining the pain and unhappiness of the man who wears it. The pain absorbed by the face of the watch.

Story: Too Close to Home

Closer to our own time and place are the plotless "novels" of David Markson, one of which is in fact titled This is Not a Novel. Most readers won't disagree. In place of the usual ingredients of a novel, Markson serves up a tapas menu of trivia mainly to do with famous authors and how they met their ends (Gibbon died of complications from a hydrocele). Mixed in with these morbid factoids are occasional lines devoted to the book's only "character," and I use the term loosely, referred to simply as "Writer" (note the capital 'W')—who's goal, we learn, is to write a novel without plot, characters, and so on: i.e. the one we're reading.

Katherine Anne Porter died of Alzheimer's disease.

It's a "Look ma, no hands!" performance. Does Markson bring it off? Arguably, provided one describes a novel very loosely as a work in prose of a certain length that holds a reader's interest and ends well. With its litany of highbrow morbid trivia, Markson's book does indeed hold one's interest, much the same way a bag of potato chips ("Bet you can't eat just one!") satisfies one's appetite while not amounting to a meal. As for ending well, the book simply ends, but then one doesn't expect it to do anything else. In fact with its ample white spaces I found Markson's book irresistible. I kept it on my night stand and would drift off usually after learning how three more famous writers had died.

But even Markson's book has a subject—its author's unwillingness to bow to the requirements of a standard novel—and thus fails to live up to my dream of Pure Flux. It was left up to me to write such a book. If theme was the stumbling block, my book would do away with it.

He had a terror of crowds, afraid their ordinariness would rub off on him.

He looked with infinite kindness upon the elderly, who wore their sufferings like pearls and could no longer bear the future. The liquid sadness in their eyes reflected his destiny, the future a sky-blue tear.

Worst possible name for a dairy: Golden Flow Dairy

Closer to Pure Flux are the so-called "Waste Books" of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (produced between 1765 and 1799), books that make no claim to being formal literary works but are merely observations or aphorisms collected by the author as one collects seashells. François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac (1613-1680) is best known for his maxims, most of them only two or three lines long. Produced around the same time, Pascal's Pensées appear at first to be nothing but random notes and jottings, many incomplete at his death, though most scholars agree that had Pascal lived he would have cut and pasted these draft notes into a more coherent form, very possibly to their detriment. Then there are writers like Goethe, whose maxims have been culled from other writings and made into books without their author's aid or approval, so they don't count. On the other hand, commonplace books or "commonplaces" were albums or scrapbooks of quotes compiled by readers who who, like the hermit who builds sculptures out of junk, wished to create something uniquely their own out of other people's words.

My brother danced like a professor, something halfway between a foxtrot and fornication.

Title: The Treachery of Everyday Objects

Game: walking down the sidewalk deciding which faces belong to people who would save your life (good faces/bad faces). Man plays this game with wife/girlfriend.

The eternal question: what do I think about when I think about nothing?

My dream of Pure Flux is nothing more or less than the alchemist's dream of making something worthwhile (gold) out of something worthless (lead), something new and fresh that lives on the page as if composing itself before our eyes as we read—not written, but thought or felt, without purpose, without plan, without premeditation, without contrivance . . .

And best of all without much effort, with the fragments accruing like lichen on the surface of a rock. Anyone who's ever studied lichen knows what beautiful colors, shapes, patterns and textures it often forms, the abstract masterpieces it produces on the surface of rocks. I ask you, Gentlemen: What purpose does lichen serve? None. I rest my case.

Swimming to The End: A (Plot) Twist in the River

2010-06-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

One Labor Day Weekend a couple years ago some friends and I decided to swim across the Hudson River. We rode across the river in a Zodiac piloted by Peter, our tidal expert. According to Peter slack tide would start at three thirty, meaning the river’s southward current would balance with the incoming estuary tide, and we would avoid being pulled up or downstream.

Once across there was some confusion getting underway. Steve forgot his goggles; Susan suddenly confessed to having next to no experience in open water, let alone water with currents, tides, barges and freighters. Two of the three kayakers that were supposed to escort us never showed up, and since the exhaust fumes from its outboard were sure to asphyxiate anyone swimming less than a dozen feet behind it the Zodiac proved quickly useless as a guide boat.

By the time we got underway it was three thirty: slack tide had peaked. It would take at least thirty minutes to cross. By then the current would be flowing again, or else the tide would be coming in—I wasn’t sure.

The river was gray-green and murky, too murky to see my hand break the water in front of me. I aimed for the yacht club: a tiny white triangle on the distant shore. Every time I looked up, the triangle was further to my left. I was drifting; we all were. The Zodiac came by. Peter shouted, “Oh-point-two-five,” meaning we had three-quarters of the distance yet to go. I felt like I’d been swimming forever. I kept going.

A few days earlier the students in my writing workshop had challenged me to explain plot, to give them some recipe or formula to follow. Like most writing teachers, plot is a subject I approach with dread and loathing. Having invoked Philip Larkin’s recipe (“a beginning, a muddle, and an end,”) I drew two points on the blackboard and connected them with a straight line. Then, using a dotted line, I showed how, two thirds of the way through a typical story, the trajectory symbolized by the straight line is thwarted: something unanticipated occurs, throwing the plot off course, sending it in a whole new direction toward a surprising, yet inevitable, ending.

As I kept swimming, seeing my target veering off further and further to the left in spite of my efforts to compensate for the current, I thought of that illustration I’d used to diagram plot in our class: how the author begins with an inciting incident, Point A, which then leads into the heart of the story—the middle (muddle) of the river—with its complications (barges and freighters churning up wakes); how the plot widens and deepens as it moves toward the distant Point B, the likely or obvious outcome: the tiny white triangle. But then, halfway across, more or less, something totally unexpected happens: the current builds, the tide comes in; a cramp grips the calf of one’s leg. By now I was some two hundred feet downstream of my target. I kept swimming. The plot had shifted, twisted; the element of surprise had come into play. But more surprises were to come.

The current grew stronger and stronger. I tried to fight it, swimming at a sharp angle to it. That’s when my left leg gave out; I couldn’t move it. The cramp seized up my calf and corkscrewed its way up into my thigh. I stopped swimming and treaded water, and told myself to keep calm. When the cramp subsided, I started swimming again, aware that I was now at least three hundred feet downstream. The Zodiac was nowhere in sight.

The image of the plot curve kept recurring to me as I swam on, that simple line on a blackboard delineating drama: incident, event, surprise, the unexpected. Could that simple line with it’s unanticipated twist at the end represent the tragedy of this day? Had I inadvertently followed the rules of plot to a ‘T’—as in Tragedy? Who was it that said that tragedy was all very well when it occurred on a stage, but that in real life it seemed closer to absurdity? If one of us died on this day, on this glorious, cool, sunny day with not a cloud in the sky, would it be tragic, or merely absurd? Or both?

And how fitting that, viewed on a map or from the sky, the course of each of our journeys would correspond exactly to that classic plot curve, bending like a bow from Point A (best laid plans, hopes and aspirations, innocence) to the wholly new and unanticipated Point C (comedy, tragedy, irony—but in any case, The End). Would people trace the last moments of our lives on that graph and say, “They died dramatically, in perfect form, with strict adhesion to the rules of good story telling?” Would they think silently to themselves, “Like all good endings, a surprise but, in retrospect, inevitable”? Or would they simply think, “Unbelievable; highly improbable if not impossible and hence, unsatisfactory. Another draft, please!”

But for me, swimming ahead, with the shore refusing to come any closer no matter how hard or fast I stroked, the plot had begun to seem all too inevitable. The pedant was about to be hoisted on his own petard. Would the others die of my pedagogy? Would we all be the victims of the perfect plot?

It took me another fifteen minutes to reach the rocks. By then I’d suffered a second bad cramp; I was barely able to beach myself.

Twenty minutes later we were all on dry land. The current had carried Steve six hundred feet downstream. Susan was swept halfway to the Spuyten Duyvil railway bridge, another three hundred feet. Had we set off a few minutes later she’d have been swept to Staten Island.

In the end, the plot twisted itself back into a more-or-less straight line, with comedy tempered by only the potential for tragedy. The air was crisp and sunny and dry and so was the champagne that we all drank.

The Muffin Man

2010-05-25T07:19:00.000-07:00

Do you know the muffin man, / The muffin man, the muffin man, / Do you know the muffin man, / He lives on Drury Lane?

Yes, I know—or I knew—the Muffin Man, though I'm not sure I knew his street address, or, if I did know it, that I had any idea where Drury Lane was. I learned of him from Pam Albert. She lived in a silver house down the street with a pond in the front yard that we called Pollywog Pond, since it was full of tadpoles.

From when we were two until we were seven, the three Albert sisters— Pam, Peggy, and Sally— babysat for my twin brother George and me. From them we learned about pollywogs and tadpoles, daddy long legs and inchworms, cattails and milkweed, the Milky Way and the Big Dipper. The Alberts all but adopted us. When we got lost in the woods behind our house, Mr. Albert, who cleaned and repaired furnaces for a living, lead the search party.

Though I loved all three Albert sisters, Pam was my favorite. She taught me the Muffin Man song, the first song I ever learned. Thanks to that song for me the Muffin Man rose to a position of mythic stature equal to that of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, while the simple lyric planted firmly and forever in my child's mind the image of a plump man in a white smock with matching puffy cap peddling his cart piled with steaming golden muffins, plump as their maker, down the street at dawn, ringing a bell with which he roused his customers from the depths of their sleep. As with most fairytale characters, there was something equal parts reassuring and foreboding about The Muffin Man, something to be desired mixed with something to be feared.

When I first heard the song I'd never seen, let alone eaten, a muffin. My Italian parents were still coming to grips with sliced Wonder Bread. Odds of a muffin materializing in the Selgin household were nill. Yet I could taste them in my mind, and even imagined their smell wafting through my bedroom window as the Muffin Man pushed his cart from house to house. Other children woke up craving waffles and Maypo; I woke up craving muffin.

Back then, in the early 1960's, muffins were much less common than they are today. Until late in the 19th century, what we today call a muffin didn't exist at all. The first recipe for a 'muffin' in print dates back only to 1879, in a book titled Housekeeping in Old Virginia, a recipe calling for a batter "the consistency of pound cake [baked] in snow-ball cups as soon as possible." As for the word "muffin," it dates back only as far as 1703, its origins uncertain, deriving most probably from the low German moofin, muffen, or muffe, meaning "small cake," though etymologists also suspect some connection to the Old French "moufflet," meaning "soft."

Though for a time nothing distinguished the American muffin from its English equivalent, as the two nations parted ways so did their recipes, with the English muffin remaining a flat, round, spongy, air-filled concoction prepared with yeast-leavened dough and cooked on a griddle, while the American version evolved into a sort of "quick bread" prepared from a sweet batter and baked in individual molds.

If anyone deserves credit for the American muffin, it should probably go to Professor Eben Horsford and George Wilson who invented baking powder in 1854. Before then housewives had to rely on much slower potash. Thanks to baking soda, muffins could be made quickly and easily, and thus became an ideal breakfast food. Unfortunately, as quickly as they were made, they grew stale, and thus were rarely seen outside of private kitchens until preservatives appeared in the 1950's. These early muffins were made from common grains—corn, oat, wheat bran—with nuts, raisins, and apple slices sometimes added to the batter. By the turn of the century, muffins had grown so popular in her 1898 Boston Cooking School Cook Book, Fannie Farmer provided no fewer than 15 recipes for them. By then baking pans with lozenge-shaped molds were often used, pans rendered obsolete in the 1950's, when paper muffin cups were invented; the paper cups in turn gave way to Teflon and other types of non-stick pans, some in elaborate shapes. Around the same time packaged muffin mixes became hugely popular, making the easy muffin even easier. Meanwhile entrepreneurs sought for muffins the franchise food eminence enjoyed by doughnuts and french fries. It was not to be. Though muffins never attained the dubious distinction of world's most popular fast food, by the the time Pam Albert taught me the Muffin Man song every diner in the country featured an array of them under a glass pastry dome. In such places muffins were as obligatory as Heinz ketchup bottles.

* * *

My first muffin is more memorable to me than my first non-innocent kiss (in fact I've forgotten my first kiss). It was at Caldor's department store, the 1960's equivalent of K-mart. At the front of the store was a counter where you could get sandwiches, ice cream sundaes, and other snacks. We were on our way out, my mother and brother and I, when I spotted it there, glowing under a glass dome—a lonesome golden corn muffin. It was late afternoon. The bright counter was deserted; the man behind it rinsing a stainless steel milkshake cup in his conical paper cap. I tugged at my mother's blouse. She shook her head: it would spoil my appetite for dinner. Please, I said. At last my mother relented. Out of the bargain my brother finagled a hot dog.

The counterman offered to warm the muffin for me, but I couldn't wait. Before I could stop him he cut it in half—not from the top down, but sideways, creating two hockey-puck like wafers. He served it to me on a small round plate edged with a green stripe. Even allowing for having been split in two, in shape it was unlike today's muffins. For starters it far more modest in size, three inches across at most and maybe two inches high, and lacking the bulbous, mushroom-like caps of current muffins. Instead, this muffin was nearly flat on top, with the subtlest rise at its center, and an even more subtle gradation forming a flange or brim at its circumference. From top to bottom it was a perfectly even, golden-brown, spongy in texture. Not wanting to mute its flavor with soda or chocolate milk, I ate it with a glass of water, ignoring the knife and fork the counterman had given me, choosing instead to tear it into bite-sized bits with my bare hands. Its grease coated my fingertips, so I was forced, forced to lick them following every bite. I ate with Zen slowness, wanting to savor every morsel, to prolong the experience, picking up crumbs and licking them one by one like flecks of gold off glossy, greasy fingers. At last my mother could no longer contain her impatience. She yanked me off the stool and dragged me—still licking my fingers—through the store's automatic doors and into the parking lot where her boat-like black Mercury waited. All this time the Muffin Man's song ran through my head.

Years later, when I was a struggling artist in New York City, muffins became my all-purpose food. I ate them for breakfast, lunch, and sometimes even for dinner. Corn muffins were my favorite. They were the perfect "starving artist" food: tasty, inexpensive, and filling—not terribly healthy, but not that unhealthy, either. And muffins offered something more than nutrition: the were a source of comfort, too. Their very shape suggests comfort: round and soft, like a mother's breast. Add warmth and sweetness and you get the full package. Other foods might have done more for me by way of vitamins and other nutrients, but few offered more solace. On my worst days, days permeated with gloom and doom, I'd step into a coffee shop, sit at the counter, and order a corn muffin toasted lightly with butter and a cup of coffee. No sooner would it be placed before me than the gloom would dissipate, replaced by something warm and reassuring, the sense that somehow things would be okay after all. How doomed can a world be with corn muffins in it?

Eventually my source of comfort turned against me. Having spent the better part of a decade eating practically nothing but corn muffins, I developed an allergy to them that left me bloated, feverish, and with epic headaches. I spent the next decade avoiding all foods with corn or corn syrup in them, meaning just about everything from pickles to coffee creamer.

Just as I forwent my beloved muffins, the rest of the country developed a mania for them. Suddenly—like the mushrooms they so resemble in shape—muffins sprang up everywhere: not just in diners, but in cafes, health food stores, even in posh restaurants. And just as suddenly they went from being a humble, working-class food to being trendy, gaudy and huge, pumped up to grapefruit size on muffin steroids. And where once they'd been simple concoctions of whole grain augmented with a sprinkling of raisins or nuts, suddenly muffins were made of everything from zucchinis to sour cream, from peanut butter to avocados. Granola muffins, cappuccino muffins, strudel muffins, applesauce muffins—muffins whose entire purpose in life seemed to be nothing less than denying their muffinhood. And just what, I ask you, distinguishes a chocolate muffin from what we used to call a cupcake? Take away the whole grains, add a ton of sugar and some frosting, and what have you got if not a cake by some other name?

And though a good muffin may be many things, a cupcake isn't one of them. The difference isn't merely semantic. Muffins are—or were—less sweet, and never frosted; some were even savory. They were meant to exist somewhere in the continuum between cake and bread. Still, I'd bear no grudge against alternative muffins if within their swollen ranks one could still find a classic corn or bran muffin. In fact those are the two types of muffins one is least likely to encounter these days. Except in diners (themselves a vanishing species) one isn't likely to find corn muffins at all. That the purveyors of postmodern muffins show such ignorance of—contempt for?—the prototype should annoy more people. It's one thing to come up with variations on a classic; it's another to do away with the original altogether. To those who like chocolate muffins, I say let them eat cupcakes. Only let me have my corn muffin, too.

Like most cries in the dark this one will go unanswered. Times change, and so must muffins, I guess. Soon my beloved corn muffin will have gone the way of ocean liners, locomotives, and other quaint relics of the past, resurrected every now and then as a museum piece or curiosity for the sake of a handful of nostalgic geezers. The future belongs to the young. And the future of muffins belongs, apparently, to cake eaters.

Meanwhile I still eat corn muffins wherever and whenever I can find them. And whenever I'm troubled by this changing world, I take solace in the lyrics of a song my babysitter taught me. Do I know the Muffin Man? Indeed I do.

Leaving This Place

2010-04-30T14:23:00.000-07:00

Soon I will leave this place. No more house shaped like a big A. No more gentle walks over spiky pine cones down the gentle slope to the gray, lonesome dock. No more swimming across the lake and back. No more twenty minute drive to and from campus, stopping the car by the mailbox on the way home, leaving the engine and the radio on as I check the mail. No more turning on NPR at seven thirty in the morning while waiting for the espresso pot to bubble. No more waking up at 3:30 in the loft bed and searching the bookshelves as if by magic some new, unread book might have self-generated there. No more sleepover visits by the fat neighborhood stray calico cat with the stiff lump of fur on its back. No more climbing down the rusty dock ladder and avoiding its spider webs. No more glasses of wine on the rear deck with the sun setting red and blue over the lake. No more view of same lake from loft office where I spent too much time at the computer. I have graded my students. I have examined their portfolios. I have attended my last departmental meeting and thesis defense. I will miss my students. I will miss my colleagues. I will miss the little town where I've felt so welcomed. I will miss the student dives and the fancy restaurant (one) where I had my martinis at the bar. I will miss getting those peanut butter cup cookies at the Blackbird Cafe. I will miss having Pam make me double decaf espressos with just a little hot milk in the other cafe, the one in the library. I'll miss my little office (that wasn't mine, really, but only borrowed). I'll miss the people I worked with here. I'll really miss them. I won't say their names. I'll leave a piece of myself here, in Georgia. Such is the visiting professor's life.

Hewlett-Packard

2010-03-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

Corvallis, Oregon, 1980. 4:30 a.m.

Too tired to go home and sleep, you wander with your guitar to the park, a square block of grass in the middle of the town. Under a full moon the grass glows. At the northern water fountain you bend to slurp, then sit on a bench serenading yourself. As you do a voice from nowhere says, “You play beautifully.”

You look up at a short, pudgy, dark-skinned boy with a droopy hangdog face. “Oh, please don’t stop. Please—go on.” As you start playing again he says, “Do you mind?” and sits down on the bench next to you.

He says he works the graveyard shift at the Hewlett-Packard factory, his voice soft and dripping with sadness. “I get home too early to sleep and too late to talk to anyone. Honestly,” he says, “I’m a little bit depressed. Sure you don’t mind me sitting here?” You shake your head and keep playing. He watches you with a hungry look. “You play beautifully,” he says again. Then: “Would you mind doing me a favor? Would you come back to my apartment and play your music for me there? I’ve got a color T.V. and some movies we can watch. You can sleep on my sofa if you get tired. It would be a lot nicer than staying in the park all night long, wouldn’t it?” You’re reminded of that Robert Frost poem, the one that begins, I have been one acquainted with the night.

You go to his apartment. By then, you see, you don’t give a shit. You have nothing to fear. And you understand, too, that, whatever intentions this person may have, his loneliness is real. When you lived in New York, when you were going to art school and trying your luck in show business, you got used to telling strange homosexual men to piss off, or just stepping over them, as you did with the actor who looked and sounded like Richard Basehart and who claimed he was with the Royal Shakespeare Company before inviting you to the studio apartment he had sublet and mixing you both screwdrivers. Soon he was stretched out on the floor reading aloud dirty passages from Henry Miller’s Opus Pistorum, his hand busy in his pants as you stepped over him on your way out the door. No: you had no qualms about telling such men to piss off. Sometimes you waited too long, but you had no qualms.

But this man is different. He’s younger than you, first of all, and he seems so sad, so thoroughly depressed and lonely. You resent the fact that life has left him and others like him so alone. You want revenge for his sake, for the sake of all lonesome people everywhere, yourself included. To the conditions that give rise to such extremes of loneliness you wish to convey one great Fuck You! So you go home with him.

His apartment is in a modern building, a single room with an attached kitchen modestly furnished, with white plush carpeting and no paintings or posters on the walls. While he fries up some Jiffy popcorn and mixes up a batch of cherry Kool-Aid you peruse his video collection, settling on Escape From Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood.

Halfway through the movie you doze off. The boy’s whispers wake you. “Hey, there,” he whispers. “Do you trust me enough to let me give you a back rub?” You nod. As he kneads your shoulders you drift into a dream. You dream yours lying in a field. In the dream, while lying there some farmers come with torches and set fire to the field. You wake up choking on smoke, groping for an escape, but it’s too late; you’re surrounded by flames. You see yourself from above at the center of a ring of fire.

When you wake up there’s a blanket covering you. The boy sleeps nearby on the floor. You massage his shoulders for a while. Then you cover him with the blanket and leave.

Memories for Mom

2010-03-06T16:07:00.000-08:00

I think of growing up and remember all kinds of things. I remember our house on the hill, and big willow trees along the driveway, and all those magical places in the woods and fields that we turned into “forts.” I remember the Wolf House, the rotting shell of what had been a guest house in the woods, and the old dilapidated chicken coop down by the barn that our inventor father converted into his laboratory, and that my brother and played in until it collapsed.

I remember the white picket fence that was always in need of paint and with tines missing here and there, and the mulberry tree that grew at one end of it, remember? And the time I nearly sawed down one of the three enormous maple trees around the house. All kinds of things like that I remember. The little slate stone patio next to Nonnie’s room and that we never used, and the forsythia bush that was visible outside of her window, and under which we built a baseball dugout that we used maybe twice, since there really wasn’t enough room in the back yard for a baseball field (instead George and I played “catch” on the grassy raised terrace behind the house). All these things I remember, but there are thousands more, all kinds of sweet little memories, like the space under the stairs leading down to the basement, how George and I would worm our way behind the trunks and other things stored there and play “Gilligan’s Island,” though what the basement stairs had to do with a motley crew of stranded castaways is anyone’s guess.

But the other thing I always remember is riding around in your black Mercury, how enormous that car seems in memory, so much like a boat, with its big chrome bumpers and scratchy upholstery and the hump in the middle of the rear seat. I remember us going to Danbury, to Jenung’s and the Bargain World and McRorey’s and other shops in and around Main Street, to Woolworth’s where I’d search the lollipop rack for my favorite flavor, root beer, and where we’d sit at the counter and order frankfurters for lunch. There was another store, too, that stands out in my memory because it seemed to stretch infinitely backwards, a never-ending store, I don’t recall its name, but they sold lady’s fashions and probably boy’s clothes, too (though these, I think, may have been upstairs at the top of a creaky wooden escalator).

These are good memories, very good memories, memories so good they make me slightly queasy with nostalgia. You were a good mom. You took us everywhere and did lots of things with us. I remember the carousel in the Buster Brown shoe store: do you remember the carousel? It was in the back of the store. And the Marcus Dairy bar—we used to go there, too. There was one on Federal Road on the way to Caldor’s; at least I think it was a Marcus Dairy, now I’m not so sure. And the one by the airport, though we didn’t go there so often. I remember the one on the way to Caldor’s had these big bowls of green relish on the counter, and how I would order a hot dog just to eat the relish.

Oh, yes, and there was another place you used to take us to on the way to Lake Candlewood, to the Landing (remember the Landing?), a place just at the start of Federal Road, before the Howard Johnson's there, called the Chuck Wagon, where they served fried chicken and had a salad bar with baked beans, coleslaw, and three-bean salad: George and I were crazy about that place, and especially about the three-bean-salad, so sweet it turned vegetables into candy. We liked going there and we liked going to Val’s Hamburgers and Carvel: all of these good places were on the way to the Lake Candlewood, where we’d meet up with Dotty and Hank and Papa Joe and Vera and Dut and other people whose names I don’t remember anymore. Papa Joe would take me out on his Sunfish sailboat, and Hank would take us out in his little motorboat that he’d always have to bail a bit first (with the bilge water smelling of gasoline). Afterwards we’d all eat obliquely-sliced barbecued skirt steak with macaroni and tuna fish salad. I hated the skirt steak; liked the macaroni and tuna fish. I remember, too, that we had all kinds of elaborate rubber and plastic gear (bought at the Bargain World) with which to broach the Lake: a rubber raft that took forever to inflate, goggles, and fake plastic scuba tanks whose nonfunctional air hoses George and I sliced through with steak knives playing Lloyd Bridges in "Sea Hunt."

But mostly I just remember lumbering around in the back seat of the Mercury, a car I didn’t much like back then (I thought it gave me headaches), but which I look back on very fondly now: I even look back fondly on the car that replaced it, the poor Rambler, which no one but you and the collector who bought it from you for $500 liked. I remember going to visit to Hollandas, and Ludwina B. and her daughter Jane.

In reliving all these memories I don’t know whether to feel happy or sad, because I miss things so much. I miss the innocence and simplicity and protection I felt back then, as a child. I had no idea, of course, how lucky I was, what a heaven childhood is: no child really knows it until it’s too late. As children we long to be men, and then at last we become men only to realize our longing for childhood. We appreciate everything once it’s gone. I do. Why is life that way? I miss so many things. I miss shopping at the Grand Union and the First National with you, and insisting that you buy frozen baked clams and prepared spareribs sticky with red Chinese barbecue sauce and Ovaltine and egg nog and anything highly caloric and otherwise useless.

Now I've got a daughter. Some day I'll be part of good memories like this of hers. I hope.

Well, I’d better stop reminiscing. It’s probably not all that healthy. But I do enjoy remembering. And my memories are almost all like these ones, good. And I felt like sharing them with you.

The Lady Who Gives Permission

2010-03-04T05:40:00.000-08:00

Today I’m going to see The Lady Who Gives Permission. Her apartment is on the Lower East Side, near Orchard Street, where vendors hawk shoddy clothes from their stalls. It’s a five story walk-up. The Lady Who Gives Permission lives on the fifth floor. It’s out of the way. But then The Lady Who Gives Permission is not a convenience. She doesn’t make house calls, either. You go to her; she doesn’t come to you.

Okay, maybe you don’t go to her.

But I do.

Every week, once a week. Sometimes I need to see her more often, in which case she does her best to squeeze me in. The Lady Who Gives Permission is on a tight schedule. Her dance card, as they say, is pretty full.

So I climb up the five flights. On each landing more light bulbs are blown so ap-proaching the top is like swimming upstairs into deep water, until there’s no light left at all and I start imagining secret black fish with tentacles. The stairwell smells of dead tuna fish, dust, mold, boiled cat urine. Why The Lady Who Gives Permission lives in such a dump is beyond me.

I wipe the sweat from my brow, knock. It takes The Lady Who Gives Permission five minutes to unbolt her six locks plus police bar. She opens the door a crack and peeks through, and out floats a stiff whiff of her perfume, a blend of roses and funeral lilies. She lets me in without a word.

There are two chairs, both rattan. The Lady Who Gives Permission has a thing for straw. No other furniture. Just a bean bag in the corner next to a guttering candle, and the large wicker chair that’s hers alone. The candle flame is repli-cated in the hundreds of beads of a curtain that divides the room, her “parlor” she calls it, from the rest of her apartment.

The Lady Who Gives Permission doesn’t ask me how I am, doesn’t offer me a drink, doesn’t hand me a tissue to wipe the sweat from my brow in summer or the snot from my nose in winter. She sits on her big round peacock-like wicker chair, lights a thin black cigarillo and looks at me, exhaling, the faintest of smiles cross-ing her dark lips.

“Well, now,” she says.

Those lips, by the way, are thin. The Lady Who Gives Permission has Hennaed hair tied in a rutabaga-sized bun behind her head. Her eyes are also thin, her cheeks rouged and flat, her earlobes droopy, her forehead shiny, her skull dandruffy, her fingers nicotene-stained, her teeth as golden as corn, her breath a heady blend of garlic and wine. Needless to say I am not physically attracted to The Lady Who Gives Permission. She does not interest me that way. Nor am I drawn to her mind, or her soul. From The Lady Who Gives Permission I want but one thing, and that is. . .permission.

“So, Julius, what’s on your mind today?” she asks, relighting her Tiparillo, or whatever it is, with a silver lighter in the shape of a grenade.

“I’ve been thinking,” I say hesitantly, “of going to Turkey.”

“Turkey?” she says, lifting a heavily made-up eyebrow. “You’ve been thinking of going to Turkey, have you?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’ve been thinking of going to Turkey.”

“Would you like permission to think of going to Turkey, Julius?” she asks with a tight little smile.

“No,” I say anxiously. “I want permission to go to Turkey.”

“Oh!” She takes a sip of mineral water. She always keeps a bottle of mineral water handy next to her wicker chair, but never, ever offers me any. For all I know there’s vodka inside. Or paint thinner.

“Turkey,” she says, bombing her Oriental rug with ash.

“Yes,” I say. “Turkey.”

“Why Turkey?” she shrugs. “Why not Greece? Or Rome? Or Timbuktu?”

“Because,” I say standing my ground. “It’s Turkey.”

She looks up at me, annoyed. “So, go to Turkey then. What do you want from me?”

Now it starts: the squirming. There’s no point fighting it. It happens every time. It’s part of the ritual.

“Just tell me it’s okay, okay?”

“Okay,” says TLWGP. “It’s okay. There. Satisfied?”

“You didn’t mean it,” I say, trying to keep my cool. “You have to mean it!”

“Of course I didn’t mean it, you fool! You expect me to mean it? You expect it to be that easy, big boy?”

“I just want your permission,” I say, my voice turning whiny already. “And don’t call me big boy. I hate it when you call me big boy.”

“What should I call you then, little boy? Would you prefer that?”

“Don’t call me big boy or little boy,” I say.

“What should I call you?”

“Don’t call me anything.”

“Are you being rude to me?”

“No! No, I wasn’t—I mean, I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“But you were, weren’t you? You say you didn’t mean to be, but you were mean to me just now, Julius, weren’t you? You came here to ask me for something. Wouldn’t you say it behooves you, under the circumstances, to be nice to me?”

“Yeah, sure, but--”

“Yeah? Sure? But? Is there some reason why you shouldn’t be nice to me?”

“No, but--”

“But?”

I look around helplessly, my knees knocking together. I wonder why I’m here. I always wonder. Why this woman? Who is she to me? And why doesn’t she do something about the air in here, like open a window?

“Very well, Julius,” says The Lady Who Gives Permission. “You may go to Turkey.”

“I may?” I say.

“Yes, you may.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you!”

“Please stop thanking me, let go of my hand and get up off the floor.”

“Sorry.” I get up and sit back on one of bean bag chair.

“And please don’t apologize. How many times do I have to tell you not to ever apologize to me?”

“Sorry. I mean—”

“For God’s sake. Never mind. What else?” She clips a fingernail.

“I’d--I’d like to have. . .an affair,” I blurt.

“Oh, so now you’d like to have an affair?”

“Is that asking too much?” I wonder.

“I don’t know, is it? What sort of an affair?”

“You know,” I shrug. “With a woman.”

“A married woman?”

“No! Well, yes. Could be. I don’t know.”

“You mean you haven’t made up your mind?”

“How can I make up my mind when I haven’t met her? Yet.”

“Oh, you haven’t met her yet. Why would you want to have an affair with some-one you haven’t met?”

“I thought if I had permission ahead of time it would. . .you know. . . simplify things a little.”

“Oh, you want things simplified,” says TLWGP. “That’s understandable. We all want things simplified. Very well: you may have your affair, once you find whoever. Just try not to get caught and don’t get any diseases.”

“Oh, I won’t, believe me, I won’t!” I say enthusiastically.

“Will that be all?”

“I’d like to stop swimming.”

“You’d like to stop swimming?”

“I swim a mile a day.”

“You’ve said so.”

“Well I’d like to at least, you know, cut down.”

“Which is it, then, stop or cut down?”

“I’d like to cut down first, then, eventually, stop,” I decide.

“I see: you’d like to cut down first then eventually stop. Hmm. Well, I’ll have to think about that, won’t I.” TLWGP thought. “Very well, you’ll cut down first, and then, eventually, stop. And what else can I do for you today, my dear?”

“My mother,” I said sheepishly. “Do I have to call her once a week?”

“When will you learn not to ask me such questions?”

“I’m sorry. I mean. . . I meant. . .Can I--”

“May you what?”

“May I call her every two weeks?”

“Done. Will that be all?”

I stand up and give her the money. Cash only. I’m about to go when something occurs to me. “Beggars,” I turn around and say.

“Mmm?”

“Panhandlers? Do I have to keep giving them money?”

“I don’t know: do you?”

“It’s just that. . .well, there’s at least one every block between the subway station and where I live. That’s six blocks, six panhandlers, a quarter per panhandler--that’s a buck twenty-five each way, coming and going. That’s two fifty a day. It adds up,” I say reasonably.

“And you would like to. . .” She cocks her head.

“If I could just give to every other panhandler.”

“Why don’t you give them all dimes instead?”

“Dimes. . .dimes!” The idea hadn’t even occurred to me. You have to admit she can be brilliant. “You’re right!” I said. “Jesus, you’re right!”

“We really have to stop now,” she says.

But I can’t resist; I’m on a roll. “Masturbation. I do it . . .like. . .three times a month. In the shower. While my wife reads in bed. Can I keep doing it?”

“Can you?”

“May I?”

“Of course you may,” she says wearily. “Really, Julius, must you waste your permissions that way? I’m sorry, but I’ll have to charge you for that.” She holds out her hand; I pay.

I’m at the door when something else occurs to me. “I pick my nose.”

“Ditto,” she says, and I hand her more money.

“And I don’t always wash my hands after--”

“I believe we are through for the day,” says TLWGP.

She opens the door for me. I hesitate.

“Wait. There’s—one more thing.”

“What is it?” she asks, blowing a sigh, tapping her foot.

“I’d like a hundred million dollars!”

“See you next week,” says The Lady Who Gives Permission, shutting the door behind me.

Blackout

2010-02-28T09:33:00.000-08:00

The first time I got someone pregnant I was twenty, living on a loft in Soho, a different place then, in the summer of 1977: tougher, grittier, its cobblestone streets jammed with unloading trucks and strewn with dumpsters slathered with graffiti and torn bill posters (this before Balthazar and the boutiques took over, when lofts were still raw and illegal and real artists lived in them).

The loft belonged to a professor at the Pratt Institute, who sublet it to me and three other students while he retreated to Vermont. My loft mates were a sculptor, a filmmaker, and a graphic designer with two kittens, one black, one gray, named Sacco & Vanzetti.

I was a painter; anyway, I wanted to paint. The professor left behind a flat file filled with large sheets of blank paper, and a dozen cans of household latex in assorted ugly shades, grays, purples, pinks. Perfect.

I carried everything up to the roof, and spread out a dozen sheets, their corners held down by bricks and bottles. With lettering stencils, a roll of masking tape, and a very rough plan in my head, I went to work. Pollack and Johns were still the kings of contemporary art, and the paintings I made up on that roof that day, surrounded by ventilators and tar paper, owed everything to them.

It took me all day, working under a breezeless summer sun. The forecast called for a cloudless night, so I left the paintings there to dry and went to bed in my cube. Each of us had his or her own private area. The filmmaker had one of two lofts, the sculptor the other; the graphic artist had her own room at the loft’s north end. And I had the cube: a windowless box built into the loft’s center and painted fluorescent white inside and out, the absence of color relieved only by a smudge or two. It was like living in a giant sugar lump or a square igloo. I considered hanging some of my paintings in there, but then it occurred to me that those barren walls bearing down on me might be just what the doctor ordered: an infusion of sensory deprivation to inspire my own artistic imagery.

The next day I woke up to find the floor of the loft covered with pink, purple, and gray paw prints. I ran up to the roof. All of the paintings were ruined. Sacco & Vanzetti had ruined them. Those traitorous kittens. I wanted them dead.

The next day, July 13, Sally called. She had been my high school sweetheart, a quiet girl into whose silences I read depths that almost certainly weren’t there. I say ‘had been’ since we weren’t in high school anymore, and I wasn’t sure I was still in love with her. A habit I didn’t know how to break, that’s how I’d describe our relationship. Still, I took comfort in meeting her train at Grand Central Terminal, in my arm around her as we rode the careening subway downtown, in heading straight for the loft—my hard-on throbbing like a second heart in my pants—in undressing her in my cube, in our moans reverberating off its empty white walls, in the silence that rushed in to fill the void left by our lovemaking.

She was two months pregnant. No, she would not get an abortion. She wouldn't hear of it, she said. How could she face herself? I reasoned; I argued; I pleaded. Sally’s silence was more than a match for my impassioned eloquence. I'd taken the phone into the cube. My words were sucked up by those pure white walls.

After I hung up, I walked out on the fire escape where, as I watched the towers of Wall Street glow against the deepening dusk, I pictured my artistic dreams in burning piles around me like the aftermath of a jetliner crash. Superimposed over this image was one me among the workers down at the Fulton Fish Market, unloading crates of frozen fish from the backs of trucks, an iron hook grasping the shoulder of my red and black checkered coat—like the one Brando wears in On the Waterfront. Here is your new future, I thought. Between fatherhood and fishmongering I saw no clear distinction. As I sat out there, John, the sculptor, stepped out in his bathrobe. He stood six-feet-four and did construction work on the side. “You know, Peter,” he said, seeing my eyes raw from purely selfish tears, “if you were a woman right now I’d want to make love to you.”

That’s when the lights went out. Except for a few neighborhoods way out in the Rockaways, the whole city went completely dark. Looters shouldered frozen turkeys and TV sets. Four thousand commuters had to be evacuated from subway trains and tunnels. Whole neighborhoods were destroyed and terrorized by anarchic mobs. In all thirty-seven hundred arrests were made. Con Ed called the blackout “an act of God.” But at least one man in Bushwick held a different view. “We are without God,” Father Gabriel Santacruz told his candlelit congregation.

* * *

In a Burger King in Bridgeport, Connecticut, across the street from Planned Parenthood, my mother and I sit across from each other at a table, sipping milkshakes, hers strawberry, mine vanilla. It’s a bright sunny day. The table is right next to the window; the sunlight paints a thick slab of yellow brightness across it. Neither of us says a word.

Damian

2010-02-24T07:27:00.000-08:00

He hadn't had sex in two years. Except for a run around the park now and then, he never exercised. Two weeks out of every month he lived on fruit juice and nuts, and that's when not fasting. The rest of the time he ate avocados, bananas, and other fruits. He had wanted to be an actor since he was five years old, when he saw James Cagney in White Heat on TV. He would practice with a toy gun in front of a mirror. You slap me in a dream, you'd better wake up and apologize. He was twenty-four years old.

We met at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. We were both undergraduates. I was there mainly to study painting and illustration, though I had no idea, really, what I wanted to do. I'd done some acting back in high school, and Pratt had a theater department. So I signed up for an acting class. That's where I first saw Damian.

He wore a waist-cut shiny green (it must have been satin or nylon ) bombardier jacket with a furry collar over a red tee-shirt. The teacher, whose first name was Nancy, had us doing improvisational exercises. In one exercise we were supposed to be trapped with people in a stuck elevator. I watched Damian and three other classmates do the exercise first. They got in the elevator and acted normally, facing the front, not speaking. Then Nancy said, "Stop," meaning the elevator had stopped. Everyone reacted in different ways. One student cried, another panicked, a third cracked jokes. Damian's improve stole the scene. He started convulsing. We couldn't tell if Damian's character was having an epileptic seizure or a heart attack. Whatever it was, it was very convincing, so convincing Nancy broke in and cut the scene. But Damian kept convulsing. A thin stream of vomit bubbled out of his mouth and down the front of his red tee-shirt. Nancy yelled for someone to go call the police. That's when Damian broke into a smile. It was all part of the act, vomit and everything.

He was extremely good-looking, Damian was. He looked like a Puerto Rican version of young Marlon Brando, with dark brown skin. This alone would have impressed me, since I was a big Brando fan and considered Brando the epitome of male beauty. He had the same tall forehead, sculpted jaw, thick flat brows, thick neck and broad shoulders. He knew he was beautiful, you could tell by his walk. He didn't walk; he strutted. I asked him if he worked out. "Nevah." He said it just like that, "Nevah," with a kind of mid-Atlantic accent and a whif of disgust. "I don't believe in exercise."

I asked him if he didn't exercise how he stayed in such good shape?

"I was born this way," he said with a smile. "And I eat well."

He invited me to his home. He lived in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side in the high nineties, in a high rise apartment building on Amsterdam Avenue. I remember walking into a brightly lit lobby with a security guard and linoleum and waiting a while for the elevator, which had graffiti all over it, and pennies jammed into the round holes drilled into a cover on the porthole window, which had been smashed. Damian lived in a studio on a high floor. Sounds of at least five radios leaked out into the hallway, but once I entered Damian's sanctuary and he closed the door those noises were left behind, replaced by a woman's voice crooning some old American standard.

"Who's that singing?" I asked as Damian took my coat.

"You don't know?"

I shook my head.

"Judy," he said.

I had no idea who Judy was.

Damian took my coat and put it on a hanger in his sliding closet, next to his green satin jacket. I was impressed. I'd yet to meet anyone with an apartment of their own, let alone one in Manhattan, let alone one with a sliding closet door. He showed me the view from his window. If you looked hard over roofs and past the buildings and trees you could see gleaming white patches of the Hudson River. It was winter; the streets were full of snow. The sky was a bleary gray watercolor, wet on wet. Damian showed me around the apartment. There was only one room, really, shaped like an L, with the bedroom occupying the bottom of the L, and a galley kitchen just off to the side of it through a curtain. Over the bed he had draped sheer yellow fabric, forming the impression of a Bedouin tent or Mongolian ger there in his apartment. A stick of incense burned. The walls were decorated with his paintings, macabre works featuring dead birds and funereal flower arrangements on crackled black backgrounds. To the center of one painting a small, coffin-shaped box had been affixed. "Go on," Damian said. "Open it." I did. Inside was a small dead bird. It gave off a sharp whiff of decay. I closed the box.

"Death intrigues me," Damian said.

"Why?"

"I don't know. Because it's everywhere. It's part of life. It doesn't depress me. It's just part of the cycle. If things don't die then nothing can be born."

I nodded.

That afternoon we went for a jog in the park. Although philosophically opposed to strenuous exercise, Damian didn't mind jogging. It relaxed him, he said. He had an extra jogging suit that he lent me. By late in the day the sun had melted the snow so the streets were full of slush. We jogged around Central Park. The same hills that had me gasping Damian broached effortlessly, without exertion. "All you all right?" he asked, jogging in place as i caught up with him. "Fine," I said, panting. We had gone once around the park--a distance of over six miles--when he waited for me again and said, "Are you tired?" I shook my head. "Good," he said, and started around a second time.

That same night, as I lay sore and exhausted on his couch, Damian prepared dinner. He made a dish called "baccala," with salt cod, tomatoes and avocado, and sat watching me eat as he sipped from a large plastic bottle. "Aren't you eating?" I said. Damian shook his head. "I'm in my fast," he said. He fasted for three weeks at a time. Nothing but water with a dash of honey and lemon juice. He did it four times a year. "You should try it with me some time," he said.

So I did. We fasted together. We started in November. Three days of fruit and leafy vegetables, three days of juice, six days of water (flavored with lemon juice and a few drops of honey), and then the reverse. Through the course of the fast I'd want to do at least three enemas, Damian informed me. "Otherwise nothing moves."

When doing a fast like that, you're not supposed to overtax yourself. No strenuous exercise, so said Damian. I didn't listen. After two weeks, once I got past the hunger and headaches, I felt so great I wanted to go out and run ten miles. So I did. I ran all the way from Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, where I was living, to Damian's apartment building on the Upper West Side, a distance of over ten miles. It felt great, my body like a feather on air. I felt I could run forever. Damian scolded me. "You could have passed out in the middle of Broadway," he said. "You could have died."

"Death intrigues me," I said.

The watery part of the fast fell on Thanksgiving day. I was invited to a Thanksgiving party at my friend Crystal's apartment in the Village. I remember standing among the guests holding my little bottle of lemon and honey flavored water and sipping from it as they ate turkey, stuffing, candies yams, the works. I didn't mind. The only thing that bothered me was that every other word people spoke seemed to be about food. That's all anyone talk about. What they'd eaten the day before, what they were going to eat the next day. This meal, that meal. This restaurant, that restaurant. This recipe, that recipe. It amazed me how obsessed everyone was with food, with the very thing I was doing without. "Have you ever eaten at..." "Did you try the pad thai at..." Twenty days earlier, under President Jimmy Carter's watch, a group of militant Islamists had raided the American embassy in Tehran and took 53 hostages. We were going to war, I was sure of it. And here all these people were stuffing their faces with turkey and talking about food. I left the party in disgust. How could people waste their time with such trivialities as food? I made up my mind that eating was disgusting. I'll never do it again, I thought, sipping from my water bottle.

When I next saw Damian I had broken my fast and was eating normally like everyone else. He asked me how it had felt.

"Strange," I said. "At first it felt great, but then I couldn't get along with eaters any more."

"That's what happens. If you do it regularly you'll adjust."

But I never did it again.

I think it was on my third or fourth visit with Damian that I slept over. We shared his bed, the one under the yellow drapes. I remember feeling a strange combination of comfort and fear as I lay next to him, feeling the magnetic pull of this beautiful dark body next to mine, both of us in our underwear. It wasn't so much that I wanted to touch him (I was never that way), only that I knew how nice it would feel is I did. But I didn't. We slept like brothers. He was like a brother to me, Damian was. My Puerto Rican brother. He called me that once. His white twin. No, he didn't say brother; he said "twin," "my white twin." I remember how proud it made me feel to hear him call me that. As if having one twin wasn't good enough; I needed two. I needed a Puerto Rican twin who looked like a dark Marlon Brando.

We went to the Dominican Republic together. It was Damian's idea. He went there regularly. We booked a hotel in Santa Domingo and rode a packed bus to the beach called Boca Chica--"Sweet Mouth." Our first afternoon on the crowded beach, Damian rubbed a concoction of baby oil and merchurochrome on his brown skin. Then he told me to wade out into the surf about two dozen yards and look back at the shore. "Just watch," he said.

I did as ordered. I waded out twenty meters or so and then I turned and faced the shore in time to see all the heads there turning as Damian paraded his mahogany limbs down the beach. Men, women, children, dogs, no one could take their eyes off him, he was so magnificent. For the rest of that long day strange women threw themselves at him, inviting him point blank to sleep with them. I saw it happen. Damian showed absolutely no interest. He waved them away like flies. I asked him why. "Oh, Peter," he said. "I am so thoroughly bored with all of that. I've had enough sex to last me a lifetime." He sighed. "Life is too short." In fact, I remember thinking, my friend Damian didn't need anyone else to make love with. He had himself. And who could compare?

"But don't you get lonesome?"

He shook his head. "Me? Lonesome? Nevah!"

For many years we were very close friends. He really was like a brother to me. Then suddenly Damian stopped returning my calls. I still remember my last visit to his apartment. I remember it because of an odd thing that happened. Remember that green jacket he used to wear? Well, it had been a while since I'd seen him wearing it, and so I'd asked, "Whatever happened to your green jacket?"

"What green jacket?"

"You know--the one you always used to wear? The satin one with the fur collar."

"Oh, that awful thing! I burned it!"

"Burned it?"

"Yes--I burned it! I couldn't stand to look at it any more."

"Why burn it?" I said. "Why not give it away? Hell, I'd have liked it!''

"You don't understand, Peter. If I gave it to you I'd have to look at it whenever you come over. And I couldn't bear that!"

"What about Goodwill--or the Salvation Army?"

"It's the same problem. One day I would be walking down the street and--ugh!--there would be that awful jacket, following me around like a ghost! No, I wouldn't have it. And so I burned it. I always burn my old clothes!"

The reason I remember my last time in Damian's apartment is because, while he was showering, I just happened to look in one of his sliding closets--not the one where he would always hang my things, another one. There, hidden deep behind some other clothes, was the green satin jacket. I reached a hand in to caress the fur collar. As I did I heard my name and turned. Damian stood there, dripping, with a towel around his waist. He slid the closet shut.

That was my last visit there. After that I called and called and always he made excuses, until at last I got fed up and stopped calling.

By then I was myself living with my wife on the Upper West Side, less than ten blocks from the apartment building where Damian still lived. It bugged me whenever I thought about it, to know he was that close and we never saw each other, that he had so completely lost his interest in our friendship. Why? Because I was married? Because he hadn't become a great actor? He'd played a member of a street gang in a low budget feature. That was it, his biggest role. Okay. So what. I hadn't been so successful myself. In fact I was something of a failure. Life is like that. New York is tough. Who cares? We'd known each other--what? Over ten years. And he no longer returned my calls. Fuck him! it made me so angry.

Then one day--this was around 1990, I guess--I was walking alone down Broadway when I saw a man in a plaid shirt selling posters. I recognized one of the poster images. It was a lithograph of one of Damian's paintings, the one with the dead bird in a coffin, only the coffin wasn't three-D. I turned to the man in the plaid shirt. "I know this artist," I said. The man looked at me. As he did I realized: the man was Damian. Only it wasn't Damian. He was too short, too slim, too old and insubstantial to be Damian. This man had gray hair. His shoulders were bony. He had dark red scabby blotches all over his face. This, I said to myself, is Damian, but in another dimension, in the Dimension of Death. This is Damian dying.

"Damian?" I said--and instinctively, without thinking, reached out to touch one of the scars.

"Don't!" he said, and pushed my arm away.

"Damian--how are you?" But of course I knew the answer: he was dying. He had AIDS. How did he get it, without having sex? I asked myself but didn't wonder.

"I'm fine," he said. But his eyes said something else. They looked deeply, fiercely into mine and said, Keep walking, go away. Forget you have ever seen me like this.

I forget what was said then. Somehow we parted--awkwardly. I left him there on a corner of Broadway selling his posters, dying. I never saw him again.

The Tiresomeness of the Hedgehog: Some Books on Tape

2010-02-20T09:13:00.000-08:00

Lately I find I can't read anything, or maybe I can't find anything worth reading, I'm not sure. I get halfway through a book, or less than halfway, a third of the way, a quarter, a chapter, three pages, two paragraphs—and I can't go on. It's not just a matter of the effort required to read a book. Books on tape have also failed me—or I've failed them. I'm not the type who reads books on tape, at least I never thought of myself as the type. But should you find yourself driving regularly nine hours back and forth from Milledgeville, Georgia, to Carbondale, Illinois, then, you, too, may be tempted to listen to one.

The first book I tried was The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery (translated from the French by Alison Anderson). The book was recommended to me by someone who shall remain unnamed and to whom I'd expressed my desire to listen to something on tape. "Not some potboiler, airport novel. Something literary. Something really interesting and good. And well-written," I'd said. This book came immediately to this person's mind. "A bestseller," he told me. That should have put me on guard. I never trust bestsellers. Well, all right. I decided to give it a try.

Halfway through the third disc I was cursing my CD console. I wanted to drive off the highway, that's how angry the thing made me. Oh, Barbery can write, no question about that. But in this book at least she had little if any story to tell, and only two developed characters to speak of, an aging apartment building concierge who conceals the fact that she's an autodidact with a deeply cultivated knowledge of philosophy, among other things, and a twelve year-old girl who has a coincidental interest in philosophy. The story, albeit very slight, is told in alternating chapters through each of these annoying characters.

I can't tell you how boring it is to read this book; I can only tell you that to listen to it read, even at eighty miles per hour, is an exquisite form of torture. That the actors charged with reading it accentuate both characters' pomposity makes it worse. As usual when I find myself angered by a book, I had my alter-ego write an Amazon review. Here is what "Andrew" wrote:

A very short story padded with pseudo-philosophy, whose narration, though split between a "precocious" twelve year-old girl and a widowed concierge, merges into a seamless monologue of pretentiousness. Amazing what one gets away with in the name of "literary" fiction! The second star is for talent. Barbery has plenty; I'll come back for her next book. But reading this is like listening to a spoiled child play Fur Elise over and over again.

Two stars.

There's a used-book store in Carbondale where you can trade in your used books on tape for other used ones (plus a smaller fee). There, I found Kent Haruf's Eventide. Haruf's previous book, his first novel, Plainsong, had been a bestseller. Haruf is a local writer, that is, a writer with some roots in the Midwest. I think he may have had something to do with Southern Illinois University, where Jung persues her MFA (and the reason why I drive to Carbondale regularly). Haruf has worked on chicken farms, hospitals and construction sites; he taught English in the Peace Corps. He seems to know a good deal about cattle ranchers. Anyway he seems like a nice guy.

And he writes well, or he can write well. As I settled in for the long ride home—having merged with the traffic heading south on Interstate 57--I hit the "play" button on my CD console, and let Haruf's words and his world (very well read by actor George Hearn) take charge. The first paragraph is fine:

They came up from the horse barn in the slanted light of early morning. The McPherson brothers, Harold and Raymond. Old men approaching an old house at the end of summer. They came on across the gravel drive past the pickup and the car parked at the hogwire fencing and came one after the other through the wire gate. At the porch they scraped their boots on the saw blade sunken in the dirt, the ground packed and shiny around it from long use and mixed with barnlot manure, and walked up the plank steps onto the screened porch and entered the kitchen where the nineteen-year-old Victoria Roubideaux sat at the pinewood table feeding oatmeal to her little daughter.

Granted, this owes a bit too much to Hemingway, and that last run on sentence reads like a barrel rolling down a hill. But there's a sureness of tone and a strong sense of place and of these people, in whom the author feels deeply invested, at first, and in whom he soon invested his reader—or listener.

But then, less than halfway through the book, author and listener both stopped giving a damn. Haruf's book doesn't fall apart so much as it winds on and on just like that last sentence, but for whole chapters . . . well, here's "Andrew's" take ("Prairie Snooze"):

Haruf's novel which starts out so well splutters and dies less than midway through and glib violence doesn't rescue it. Stock characters drift through pointless scenes like ghosts through a haunted house, and I wondered if Haruf gave a damn.

The five-star reviews astonish: to earn fewer stars from his fans Haruf would (apparently) have had to leave the book's latter 200 pages blank, or mooned them directly. Either performance would have improved over the clichéd yawn we're treated to instead.

If this review seems resentful, it is. The novel's first chapters are damned good, the characters real and moving (the cattle auction scene is great). Then to see it all turn to cowplop. Haruf, editor, agent: feel shame for foisting such shoddiness on readers.

Why do so many novels start out so well and end badly? Worse: why do they start out well and turn bad less than halfway through? Are the same agents and editors I castigate above guilty of not reading past the first 50 pages? Do they calculate that their publishers and readers won't read further, and hence see no reason to fret over the rest of a book's quality? I'm reminded of those Hollywood sets, where the fronts of buildings look so real you'd never guess they were hollow inside. Or of the dickies people used to wear instead of real shirts under their tuxedos. Have a strong concept, write a good opening chapter or two, and let the cover designer and marketing folks worry about the rest.

Life of Pi was my third disappointment. Of this bestselling melange of magic realist survival tale and philosophical treatise I had low expectations, since bestsellers have never failed to bore me. But this book starts out wonderfully. My God, I thought, having read the first fifteen or so pages, I must now disembowel myself—in despair of never writing so well myself.

I went [to the municipal pool] with him three times a week throughout my childhood, a Monday, Wednesday, Friday early morning ritual with the clockwork regularity of a good front-crawl stroke. I have vivid memories of this dignified old man stripping down to nakedness next to me, his body slowly emerging as he neatly disposed of each item of clothing, decency being salvaged at the very end by a slight turning away and a magnificent pair of imported athletic bathing trunks. he stood straight and he was ready. It had an epic simplicity. Swimming instruction, which in time became swimming practice, was grueling, but there was the deep pleasure of doing a dtroke with increasing ease and speed, over and over, till hypnosis practically, the water turning from molten lead to liquid light.

This is good prose: limpid, without bumps or spurs. And there are scenes in the book's first hundred pages that are masterpieces of philosophical slapstick, like the one where a pandit, a priest, and an imam each try to sell his god to the protagonist, who insists on worshiping all three.

Then the protagonist's zookeeper father must relocate his zoo. They and the menagerie board a tramp steamer bound for Columbia. It sinks. The protagonist finds himself at sea in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. And this outrageous premise occasions a hundred pages of excruciatingly dull prose. At least aboard his lifeboat Pi has cans of water to drink! But the reader's thirst for the good novel he'd started is never satisfied—or hasn't been up to page 200. That's the page on which I left the book splayed open on the bathroom shelf and there it has remained.*

(*In fact I must now amend this post, for I have picked up the book again and begun reading where I left off, in part because I suspected my judgment as harsh, premature, and made perhaps in haste and in a dispeptic mood. Anyway I am reading again. And what is most interesting, I've noted since, is that while reading in bed--which is where I do much of my reading--I am joined by an orange and black striped calico cat, a stray from the neighborhood who visits frequently and is in the habit lately of spending evenings here with me, sharing my bed, which is quite all right with me since she is quite clean and well-behaved. But the interesting thin is this: that for reasons to do with my insomnia and general neurotic condition I have for a long time now been in the habit while falling asleep of pretending that whatever bed I am in is actually a boat adrift at sea—a life boat, as a matter of fact. And so here I find myself reading a story about a man adrift in a lifeboat at sea with a Bengal tiger in it; and I awake from fitful sleep with the reading lamp still burning and Life of Pi fallen either onto the bed next to me or onto the floor and there, a few feet away, still asleep at the foot of the bed, is my own Bengal tiger—my own "Richard Parker." And so the book has acquired this extra layer of authenticity for me, a personal authenticity having nothing really to do with the book's intrinsic virtues, only with coincidence. All the same, I'm disposed to revisit my earlier judgement and say that it's not such a boring book. But wait: tomorrow or the next day or the one after that I may have changed my mind yet again: stay tuned.)

Having given up on literary novels, again on a friend's recommendation I tried one of those Dick Francis horse racing detective stories. I forget the title. It, too, started out well. In fact I was all set to say that these damned literary authors should all go to hell—or take lessons from guys like Francis on how to tell a real story. But alas, his book, too, breaks down and turns both boring and stupid less than halfway through, to where I felt I would die of boredom if I listened to any more (in fact and by a complete coincidence the author himself died while I was reading his book; I hope my sentiments had nothing to do with it).

Now I'm at a loss. On the one hand, I don't relish the thought of another bad book on tape; but then neither do I relish the thought of another nine hour drive with nothing at all to amuse me. I would ask for your recommendations, but I won't, since I may end up hating them, too, and then we'll both think less of each other. No, from now on I think I'll just stick to the radio.

The Charmed Life

2010-01-07T10:29:00.000-08:00

Home with Audrey now for two days. She’s very fussy when awake, and (much like her Papa) seems to find the waking world unsatisfactory in almost every way. Unlike him, she hasn't yet learned to express her dissatisfaction in words and pictures, so she resorts to a cruder if no less effective medium: screaming. For hours on end Jung and I find ourselves trapped within the stretcher bars of Munch’s most famous painting. But as soon as she feeds or sleeps “The Scream” turns into "Lullaby for Strings” and her parents fall in love all over again.

Hopefully, as time goes on, Audrey will find the world more to her liking, or at least develop more subtle ways of expressing her discontent!

Meanwhile it's snowing here in Carbondale; forecasters predict six inches by mid-afternoon. Already I’ve been out shoveling, feeling like the father in Robery Hayden’s "Those Winter Sundays," whose love for his family is best expressed by tending the fire. I’ll say this: it is better to clean the snow off the car with a baby in the house than without.

A year ago if someone had told me I’d be a daddy, I’d have laughed in his or her face. For me, then, the charmed life consisted of tidy quiet rooms equipped with drawing supplies, writing implements, books, and cozy corners to read in. The phrase "charmed life" conjured a sunny cafe fronting the Mediterranean. A pied-a-terre in Paris, maybe another in Rome. Two swims a day, one in a lake, one in the sea. An aperitif at four in the afternoon giving way to quiet meals eaten under grape arbors with good friends--all of them childless.

And here I am in Carbondale, Illinois, in an apartment crammed and cluttered with baby implements—swing, stroller, bassinet, car seat, diaper bags, baby tub, crib, breast pump, swaddling blankets ... what Zorba would have called "the whole catastrophe." In four days Jung and I have slept maybe eight hours. Clothes and shoes scattered everywhere, dirty dishes piled in the sink. Last night we were so exhausted we left a pan of re-heated takeout egg foo yung on the stove. No time for tidying up. I remember in my younger days walking into homes like this one--homes of fresh parents--hearing the baby's screams and saying to myself, “There but for the grace of God.” For me having children was something other people did out of some perverse masochistic instinct, a form of self-sacrifice that made about as much sense as setting yourself on fire.

Now, fresh from brushing the snow off the car, I crack open the bedroom door and bear witness to my child sound asleep in her mother’s arms, and the words "charmed life" take on a whole new meaning.

The Train

2009-10-21T13:24:00.001-07:00

I remember one locomotive, in black and white, smashing into another.

At seven years old--not something you forget. The moving image of those two trains colliding, the accelerated chuffings of one locomotive bearing down on another splayed across the tracks, a collision inevitable, imminent, and yet impossible: they're not really going to crash into each other, those two trains. And they do.

The first time I saw John Frankenheimer's "The Train" I must have been around seven years old. The screen I saw it on was that of a wooden, boxy Magnavox in the living room. Back then you saw movies in one of two places, in the theater when first released, or on television when and if one of the three or four networks broadcast them. If memory serves me, I saw it on Channel 9, WPIX, on The Million Dollar Movie (please don't check facts).

The title alone would have drawn me. What boy of seven (or six or eight...) isn't drawn to trains? By then I already had a Lionel train, the one my parents got me for Christmas, set up in the playroom downstairs: one locomotive and a circle of track set up on a table made from a large sheet of thick plywood laid across two saw horses. No houses, trees, buildings, nothing but the bare tracks and a transformer than hummed, grew warm, and gave off a dull, metallic odor when in use. It was enough. Down there, with my Lionel set, I could do with my train what I liked. I could make it go backwards. I could make it jump the tracks (all too easy to do); I could put things on the track for my train to crash into: a wooden box, a shoe, a Matchbox car.

The movie, starring Burt Lancaster, has a simple but stirring plot: at the close of World War II, an obsessed Nazi general, played to perfection by Paul Schofield, contrives to deliver a trainload of so-called "degenerate art"--contemporary masterpieces by Braque, Cezanne, Picasso, Renoir, ransacked from the Jeu de Paume--into Germany before the Allies close in. To achieve his goal Colonel von Waldheim commandeers a train and the services of LaBiche (Burt Lancaster), a railroad man who happens also to be a member of the French resistance with his own orders: to see to it that the train never arrives in Germany while also protecting it from allied bombers.

Adding great dimension to this simple premise is von Waldheim's passion for the paintings he has plundered. However "degenerate," he realizes their value not only in Reichmarks, but as art. He is in love with the paintings--so much so that he is willing to sacrifice many lives, including his own, to "own" them however vicariously and briefly. This equation pitting the value of art against that of humanity runs as deeply and thoroughly through the film as the chuffing refrain of locomotive engines, the staccato Maurice Jarré score, and the deep, depth-of-field black and white photography that gives each frame the quality of a Cartier-Bresson photograph.

"The Train" may be the first noir-action-war picture, one whose starkness is complemented by a plot of nearly pure action (man must stop train) such that the very minimal dialogue--much of it dubbed over the voices of French actors--is scarcely necessary. One thinks of Buster Keaton's "The General," with its similar plot and theme. "The Train" is the direct descendant of that 1927 silent comedy classic, harbinger of countless "chase scenes" and "action movies" to follow.

But when it was made in 1964, "The Train" did something that practically all action films made since have failed to do: it took its time. Instead of a lot of jump-shots and quick-cuts, we watch sensible action sequences played out in real-time. When Burt Lancaster rigs an explosion, we watch him prepare the detonation fuse, stripping the wires, twirling them into each other, and sinking them into the plastique, covering the fuse and explosive with ballast, then unspooling the wires to where he attaches them to the plunger contacts. The sequence takes minutes. The whole movie is filled with such painstaking processes. Blowing things up takes time (from today's films you wouldn't think so). There are no special effects. A rail yard is blown to bits--for real (in fact it was due to be demolished; Frankenheimer and his crew obliged.) A single short sequence where the train is strafed by a fighter plane cost as much to film in itself as the rest of the movie.

But the real beauty of "The Train" goes deeper than explosions and crashes. Through watching it, I got my first dose of culture. Art was no longer an abstraction. Something of great value was packed inside those wooden crates. All those locomotives chuffing and crashing, they served a high moral purpose. Spoiler alert: When it's all over, amid a sea of crated paintings and human carnage, the defeated General confronts his nemesis, LaBiche/Lancaster, who faces him with a loaded machine gun. "The paintings are mine," he claims. "They always will be; beauty belongs to the man who can appreciate it! They will always belong to me or to a man like me. Now, this minute, you couldn't tell me why you did what you did." Lancaster looks at the paintings, then at the bodies, and then at the General. His machine gun answers for him.

To my knowledge, the first act of verbal suicide on film.

Wild, Wild West

2009-09-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

Like most if not all boys I wanted to be a hero, and tuned in to the TV to see what latest models were available. There was one program, black and white at first, called The Wild, Wild West. Maybe you remember it?

Onto a western format, the series grafted a James Bond spy motif with science-fiction plots straight out of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, with a dash of rococo thrown in for good measure. The James Bond secret service hero, named—appropriately—James West, answered directly to President Grant while touring the nation in a glammed-up private railroad train with his sidekick, Artemus Gordon, man of a thousand disguises.

But James West—or Jim, as Arty and others called him—got the fights and the girls. With a combination of martial arts that included lots of kicking, double-hammers, and karate-chops, he could dispatch ten bad-guys at once, flinging them over balconies and out of windows like so many sacks of potatoes. As for the girls, he no sooner flashed them his devastating dimples than they swooned into his arms—often with a dagger or a derringer behind their backs, but that they never got to use: with nothing more than kiss Jim disarmed them.

How I wanted to be that guy. He wore tight gold vests that emphasized the V-shape of his fighter physique, and an equally tight bolero-style jacket and pants that looked painted on (and must have split dozens of times during those fight sequences). I wanted to wear tight clothes like that, and vests made of gold brocade with exploding buttons and knives concealed in secret pockets. I wanted a pair of black boots with triangular heels that opened up to hide exploding balls. I wanted a spring-loaded derringer up my sleeve and ten bad guys to beat up at once, starting with Bobby Mullin, the Catholic school bully who used to beat me up regularly at the bus stop for not believing in God.

But mostly I wanted girls to swoon into my arms, to be rendered paralytic by my dashing good looks—though I had no dimples, devastating or otherwise, and my hair was too curly, and my Italian eyes were too big and too brown, when they should have been squinted and blue. One makes allowances. I bought a pair of black cowboy boots, and had my mom sew me a chest-constricting brocade vest, and wore the tightest jeans I could squeeze into.

Jim West was played by actor Robert Conrad, a short, cocky, chisel-jawed jock, five-foot-eight if that. And that was one of his great appeals to us boys: he was like us, short; we could measure up to him. If he could stand up to a dozen bullies, we could stand a chance with the two or three assholes we had to contend with. He gave us all hope, Conrad/West did. When the series ended after four short years, Conrad went on to do a series of increasingly poor shows; his looks faded and with them his appeal: he was no great actor, never was. But the role of Jim West was his and none could have done it better. He countered Ross Martin (Artemus)'s hammy caricatures with a deadpan delivery that made him salt to Martin's pepper. Conrad did his own stunts, too.

Forty years later, Jim West still represents for me the definition of masculine beauty, strength, and style—an obsolete standard, to be sure, better suited to the black and white world, the world of Playboy clubs and cold wars, than to that of fundamentalist zealots and hardcore: a world that still believed, however ludicrously, in heroes, villains, and damsels in distress. And that by rights I (along with everyone else) should have long ago outgrown.

Weaving an Empty Web

2009-09-16T13:55:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the mind goes blank, blank as the white page, as an empty glass, as a cloudless sky, as a spider's empty web.

I get up from my desk. I would pace, but there’s no room up here in my loft to pace. So I walk down the stairs from loft to living room and wear out the strip of carpet behind the sofa. But since the house is small the kitchen is a mere three steps from the sofa, so I end up pacing to the refrigerator, where I search inside for god knows what: milk? juice? yesterday’s sauteed fillet of mystery fish? salvation? I take the orange juice out, pour and drink a splash, put it back. I don't feel saved. I linger awhile in the cold breath of the opened refrigerator, then close the door. To keep looking in there is futile.

I turn to the windows, look at the lake. When in doubt there's always the lake. I put on my clogs and head out the door. On second thought: should I take my Speedo and towel? No, just go to the dock, I tell myself. Just go and stand there and think how lucky you are to be so completely empty in such a beautiful place.

And so I do. I go down to the dock. I walk down the sloping lawn over the pine needles. My clogs thump down the dock's gray wooden boards. I check to see what latest webs my spider neighbors have spun. There’s a fresh one on the ladder, of course. I tried to save the last one, but in climbing out of the water after a swim I forgot and ruined it, and felt terrible for a while, until I reminded myself that spiders have nothing better to do than make webs, and by ruining one I was keeping a spider employed in this state where unemployment levels touch ten percent. Is it the same spider, I wonder, that week after week keeps on building the same web across the dock ladder, making it impossible for me to climb up and down without committing an act of destruction that, from the spider’s point of view, must seem purely malicious?

It's that guy again, the spider must think, surveying the damage each time. That writer fellow who lives up there in the A-frame. He can't write so what does he do? Comes down here and messes with MY work. His mind is blank, and so he takes it out on my webs. Jerk.

It's really true, the spider thinks. Those who can’t create destroy. Ah, well . . . And goes to work weaving his latest web.

Well today I won’t destroy your web, my spider friend. Jealous though I may well be of not only your creativity and talent and of the perfection you achieve time and again through your designs, but also of your industry, your tenacity, your perseverance, your productivity . . . you who never run out of webs to weave, of nets to spin, of perfect plots, you who spin the most delicate and intricate yarns. . . while I sit at my desk spinning nothing but loose threads of empty thought . . .

Today you have nothing to fear from me: I won't tangle with your latest work; I'll climb around the ladder, or jump into the lake, and later clamber up the rocky shore.

And will console myself with this:

That though I made nothing this day, neither did I destroy anything.

The First Sip of Coffee

2009-09-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

There are little things one lives for, and for me the first sip of coffee in the morning is one of them. Without my morning coffee to look forward to, I would still live, but it would be a muted, sorry, flavorless life.

I say "coffee" but to most people what I drink is espresso. In fact espresso is coffee, but in a form so vastly superior to what commonly goes by that name here and in the United Kingdom and in certain other deprived corners of the world, these places don't dare use that other name.

I once met a coffee expert, a man who traveled the globe sampling coffee in different countries, who did tastings and rated coffee for several coffee trade magazines, an interesting and articulate man. He kindly brewed me a cup of what he claimed was the world's finest coffee—no milk, no sugar—and had me taste it. It tasted good, but it didn't taste like coffee, not to me. And it was frankly less satisfying than the very simple espresso I brew in my cheap little aluminum Bialetti moka pot (by the way, aluminum does not cause brain damage; that's a tired old myth). When, as politely as possible, I said so to the coffee expert, the coffee expert replied, "Well, espresso is something else altogether." I agreed.

As for what they serve in Starbucks, don't get me started. Somehow—as difficult as it is to do so—they manage to make a bad espresso. Their American coffee is even worse. Just the smell is enough to depress me. Back in New York, if when walking down the sidewalk I came across a Starbucks, I'd cross the street just to get away from the smell.

I get up between six and seven. I'm a morning person. I dislike and even resent the hours between ten and dawn; they don't like me much, either. As far as I'm concerned those hours are good for insomnia and sleep. Usually, I get some of both.

Even when I sleep, I don't like it that much. In a movie, "Journey to the Center of the Earth," I think it was, once I heard a character describe sleep as "those little slices of death." What might be worse than death, though, is insomnia, which I suspect is more like being buried alive. It's enough to make you hate going to bed. When I do sleep I don't dream; anyway I don't remember my dreams. A few times a year sleep presents me with a dream fragment, which by the powers of my imagination I convert into a whole and satisfying dream. Otherwise sleep gives me nothing but oblivion, and not enough of that.

The only thing I get from sleep is my love of and gratitude for morning. Unlike most people, when morning comes I don't feel perturbed, resentful, annoyed, half-dead, or even groggy. I feel relief, like I've been rescued from an unpleasant chore or a form of passive torture.

I celebrate with a bowl of espresso and hot milk.

The moka pot comes in two parts. I unscrew them and fill the lower section with water up to its little nipple. Then I fill (but don't pack: loosely) the aluminum filter with fine-ground espresso coffee— it makes very little difference which brand, as far as I'm concerned. Then screw the halves together, put the pot on the stove with the heat high, and wait about five minutes—first it will gurgle, and then it will gurgle and hiss and splutter. Then it's done. So simple.

Add to piping hot milk, drink.

The Italians, who guzzle the stuff, call it by one word: caffelatte.

Translation: Good Morning!

Town of My Dreams

2009-09-10T17:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes at night, as I drift off to sleep, or when I can't sleep, I play a game with myself. I imagine that I'm in Bethel, Connecticut, my home town, circa 1965, when I was seven years old. I imagine myself walking down Greenwood Avenue, the town's main street, and into its stores as they were back then.

The object of the game is simple and it is this: to recall, as vividly as possible, the town I grew up in, as it exists in my earliest memories.

Bit by bit, store by store, I put together the town of my childhood, now of my dreams. I start with Tony's food market, at the north end of town where the main street climbs up a hill. I see the meat section there, and the mounds of ground beef that looked, to me as a child, like spaghetti. Tony Junior stands in his bloody white smock behind the meat counter, while his father, Tony Senior, works one of three cash registers, the one nearest the door. Tony Senior's hair has gone gray, but he's younger than Tony Junior today; younger than the man dreaming this now (Tony Senior has passed away).

From the meat department I go down the aisles one by one, seeing the cereal and oatmeal boxes, the stacked cans of soup, vegetables, and fruits, the frozen peas and lima beans and ice cream boxes in their freezers, the racks of spices and baby food, the bins holding oranges and peaches and other fresh produce, the pyramid-like stacks of tomatoes.

And it all makes me happy. Why?

From Tony's I head down to Noe's clothes store, where for years my mother outfitted my twin brother and me. As I step in the door I smell the blue jeans piled up on shelves, a deep, rich, cottony smell. I see Mr. Noe with his yellow tape measure behind the counter, and next to him a white-haired woman, I forget her name—but she's always there, with red lipstick and pinched face.

In the dream I see and even recognize some of these people, but they can't see me; I'm invisible. It makes me wonder. The ghosts whose presences we feel every so often, are they people like me lying in bed and dreaming in some future that I will never live to see? Will somebody somewhere someday dream up me?

I could name all the stores going all the way down the street: the hobby shop, with its glass cases and golden trains, Jerome's Five-and-Ten-Cent store, with its candy racks of Life Savers and Pez (and Mr. Jerome on crutches with white shirt), Nelson's hardware, Norton Jewelers, Elsa-Edna, the Booklet: the little white house where books were sold, and where I first fell in love with a book (called The Ship, packed with beautiful, full-color illustrations)....

When I dream my town this way, I always feel a sense of wonder and warmth: for the boy I was back then, and for the town that was so much a part of me it seems to have been one with my substance, and vice-versa.

Later, as I grew older and sophisticated, I would find things to complain about, how my town was boring, how small its minds were, how little it had to do with the world, how small, how drab, how provincial, how dreary—how the only hope it offered was that of escape.

Later still, my attitude would soften. As life in the big city dealt me blow after blow after blow, I would think back on my small-town past with a nostalgia as sweet and brown as honey, but that my occasional visits back home failed to support. In this alone I may have something in common with Samuel Johnson, who, in middle age, found the experience of returning to his childhood Litchfield less than satisfactory:

I found the streets much narrower and shorter than I thought I had left them, inhabited by a new race of people, to whom I was very little known. My play-fellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I was no longer young. My only remaining friend had changed his principles, and was become the tool of the predominant faction . . . I wandered about for five days, and took the first convenient opportunity of returning to a place, where, if there is not much happiness, there is at least such a diversity of good and evil, that slight vexations do not fix upon the heart.

If I were to return bodily to Bethel now, I too would find the town that I knew as a child gone, replaced by one vastly less charming. Now the only way back there is through my dreams.

Tonight, I'll go there again.

I never get tired of going.

And Baby Makes Me

2009-09-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

Congratulate me.

In less than five months and for the first time I will be a father.

What does it mean? I don’t know, really. My sense is one of impending delight and doom. Before it was more doom, now it is mostly delight.

I did not plan to be a father; in fact for the first half-century of my life I successfully avoided it. My papa had me when he was forty-seven, and there were many times growing up when I felt he was too old, much too old. Papa was a lovely man, and even a great papa, but Papa was old. He wouldn't throw a baseball. He wouldn't throw a football. He wouldn't throw any kind of ball. He wouldn't jump in the water like all the other fathers. "Jump, Papa, jump!" I'd scream at him, to no avail. "I can't; I'm too old," he'd say as he entered slowly, wincingly, massaging palmfuls of water over his pale, sagging chest. Too old: those two words rang in my young boy's head like the tolling of a doomed, cracked bell. I would never inflict my old age on a child. Never.

I am fifty-two, five years older than my papa when he had me.

I have passed through all the initial stages: shock, horror, denial, anger, grief, resignation. I am somewhere now (I believe) between acceptance and joy, much closer to happiness than to its opposite, but having yet to arrive there—not quite. I am told that, until the moment comes, it’s impossible to second-guess or even to imagine how I'll feel. That's the thing that frightens and worries me most: what if I don’t feel what I should? What if I’m not overwhelmed with paternal joy? What if I don't fall in love with being a father?

Yesterday Jung, the mother of our child-to-be, sent me by email two sonogram images from her most recent visit to the Shawnee Women’s Health Center in Carbondale, Illinois, where she has gone to obtain her master’s degree in poetry. Two small, grainy, blurry, black and white images, one showing a pair of tiny arms with even tinier hands, the other a very round head with distinct features—a nose, mouth, eyes, ear, the works (we both concur that these features are patently Italian, and that pasta dishes will be the order for the day for years to come).

My daughter, I say to myself, looking at it. This is my daughter. Audrey (the name we’ve chosen). This is my daughter Audrey. My daughter, my daughter, my daughter. No matter how many times I say them to myself, the words don’t seem any more real to me than the picture. It must be a mistake; it must be someone else’s fetus I’m looking at. For me to be a father is impossible.

That last thought, of course, is a carryover from the last few decades. For all those years it really was impossible for me to be a father, otherwise I would probably have become one. It was impossible because I was too immature, too selfish, too frightened, and too hungry and even desperate to establish my own presence in the world—through words, through song, through novels and stories, by any means available to me (and some not so available), to even consider being responsible for a presence other than my own. Instead I gave birth to works on paper, I scattered my seed in the forms of words and sentences, I spread it over surfaces in acrylics and oils and watercolors. I did my best in my own way to procreate. And I was prolific.

Where are the fruits of all those scattered seeds? Filing file cabinet drawers and flat files, mostly. No, that isn’t fair; my works have been read and appreciated. But still, something was missing, or I was missing something.

I remember, back when I had just graduated from Bethel High School, a classmate of mine also named Peter, Peter Smith, a very bright, very athletic guy, and the first of any of my friends to marry and have a child, which he did that year ... I remember him saying to me, apropos my art and his fresh fatherhood, “Pete,” he said, “I know you’ve written lots of stories and made lots of great pictures, but I gotta tell you, man, until you’ve held your own child in your hands and felt its heart beat and heard it breathing, you’ll never know the meaning of creation.”

For that remark I would resent Peter Smith for many years to come, thinking: who was he to say what I would or would never know? But even then I had the sneaky suspicion that he was right.

Come January I’ll know for sure.

At least it's a girl. I won't have to throw too many balls.

Stained Waters

2009-09-03T06:02:00.000-07:00

“…the waters stained yellow by sunscreen and human flesh.”

Who’d have guessed that such a line would ignite a debate?

For more than half an hour we debated the merits and drawbacks of that one phrase, the eight students of my Advanced Fiction Workshop and I.

It started as such debates always start, with a student singling out a phrase or sentence for praise or damnation. This time the student was Sheila, and the first volley consisted of praise. I asked her to specify.

“I like the rhythms of the sentence, and the vivid image it summons of a crowded public beach.”

Others, though not everyone, agreed.

Now my turn to play devil’s advocate. “But do you really see YELLOW water? Do you WANT to see yellow water? What sort of a public beach are we talking about here, one along the Ganges? Does sunscreen really stain water? Does it stain it yellow? If so, how much sunscreen is required to stain a whole beach?”

Sheila objected. “We’re writing fiction here!”

“So?”

“As a reader I know exactly what the author means,” Richard, another of my students, said.

“What does the author mean?”

“He means that the water seemed to be stained yellow with sunscreen.”

“If that’s what he meant, why didn’t he say so?”

“But that IS what he said?”

“No, he said the waters are stained yellow, not that they seem that way.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference is that one statement is true, and the other is false.”

“So,” said Sheila, “if TJ had written, ‘...the waters seemed to be stained yellow by sunscreen and human flesh’ that would be okay?”

“That would be a solution, though not a great one.”

“Why not?” asked Warren.

“Because ‘seemed to’ is a wishy-washy cop-out. Why say what something seems like when you can say what it really is?”

Heads shaken.

“But how do you know the original statement is false?” Sheila again. “How do you know the waters weren’t stained yellow?”

“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t know. But I’m not convinced. In fact I have serious doubts. I have never seen a public beach stained yellow by sunscreen, or by anything else, for that matter. Nor have I ever seen water stained by human flesh.”

“But I think he’s talking about the water being ‘stained’ by the reflections of human flesh,” said Gwen, who usually stays out of these things.

“Then maybe he should have said so, in that case.”

“But it’s implied," Warren said with a gotcha look on his face. "You’re always saying, ‘Don’t state what you can imply.’ Aren’t you always saying that?”

“On the contrary, he’s not implying that the waters are figuratively stained with reflections of flesh. He’s stating that they are stained with flesh.”

“The implication is implied!”

“A fact was stated—an inaccurate and unconvincing fact, in my opinion—and yours, apparently, since you feel the need to convert it into a figurative statement. But it shouldn’t be the reader's job to make such conversions.”

“Why not?” asked Sheila.

“Because in the moment in which such conversions are made, the action of the story, however briefly, is frozen, stopped; as readers we are no longer having the experience described; instead, we are pressed into service as editors, doing damage control, however subliminal.”

“You’re crazy,” Warren concluded not for the first time.

“Maybe so.”

At this point TJ, the author, spoke up. “I was at that beach. The water had a yellow tinge. I asked a lifeguard about it. The lifeguard said the yellow tinge was from sunscreen washed off of people’s bodies.”

Warren smirked. Sheila smiled. Looks of satisfaction spread around the conference table, as they usually do when I am made to eat my pedantic words.

“So, Professor,” said Sheila, “now what do you think of the line?” (Note: if and when my students elect to call me "Professor" it's usually with a touch of sarcasm, to indicate that I'm being an ass.)

“If the description is factually true, then the author is completely right to insist on such a phrase, since, though it may raise doubts like mine, it's nevertheless accurate.”

Warren: “Are you saying that it’s okay to write something no one will believe, as long as it’s true?”

“I’m saying the author is within his rights in doing so. That doesn’t necessarily make it a wise decision, but it makes it a justifiable one. And one could argue, too, that in describing water stained yellow by sunscreen the author is telling us something about the world that we—or at least I—didn’t know. That’s worth something.”

“Yes,” said Tom, who'd made a valiant effort to shut up until now. “But you didn’t believe it!”

“Now I do," I said.

Sheila looked exasperated. So did everyone. Eight pairs of eyes rolling. Since throwing marbles as a kid I'd never seen so many bright shiny objects revolving.

“Let me explain. First, if I were reading this story, say, as published in the pages of the New Yorker, or a literary journal, with that phrase in it, certain things would be true that are not true here, now. First, the story would, presumably, be working well as a whole (it isn't now). By the mere fact of its being published my confidence in the author would be preordained, so to speak, and would only grow as confirmed by my reading. By the time I reached that phrase in the story, assuming all has gone well up till then, my confidence in the author’s authority being by then well-established, I would surrender any and probably all doubt and immerse myself—if not luxuriate in—those yellow-stained waters.

"That isn’t the situation we find ourselves in here. No such authority has been earned. By telling us that the description in question is indeed based on fact, the author has won the right to stick by his guns: here, now, in this room, among us, his peers. However, he still faces the problem of authenticity—or of the appearance of authenticity—with readers not privileged by his immediate presence and attendant charm, good-looks, etc., and to whom he can present his case and make his explanations apart from the text in question. In other words, once the rest of his story works, when it is convincing as a whole, then his earned authority will buy him yellow-stained beaches and whatever else it can afford. Until then, TJ can’t get away with it—or he can, but in a limited way, with a few readers, and that's not good enough."

"So what should TJ do?" asked Tom.

"If this were my story, and that were my phrase to tinker with, the solution, for now, for me, would be to cut the word ‘yellow’ and add the word ‘reflected’ and write:

‘...the waters stained by sunscreen and reflected human flesh.’ ”

There were those in the room who didn't agree. But no one said a word. But then they'd had enough of me and my pompous sophistry, and you have, too.

A Path of Words

2009-09-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

The other day a student of mine stopped by my office. She was disturbed. She had been trying to write, she said, and failing. “I just can’t seem to find the right words,” she said. This student, an undergraduate, can’t be more than nineteen or twenty years old. She said every morning she sits down with her coffee and notebook, only to end up gazing off into space for an hour, and maybe scribbling a few lines that she crosses out. It’s been going on that way now for at least three weeks, she confessed to me.

At some point in her or his career almost every writer goes through something like this. We call it “writers block” and there have been all kinds of articles and books written about it. But my student’s plight was more specific. She is, after all, just beginning her journey as a writer; she has no “career” yet, to speak of. She is still in her apprenticeship, and just beginning that.

So we talked for a bit, and this is what I had to say:

Think of your writing life as a journey, I said. You’re on a road or a path—a long and (we know) an often bumpy or otherwise difficult road toward the goal of becoming an accomplished and maybe even a wonderful writer. But that long path or road isn’t paved with asphalt or dirt. It’s made of words. The goal is there in the distance—none of us know how far, exactly. But to get to it you know this: that you must traverse so many words.

Let us say that to reach your goal you have to “walk” a million words. Does it matter, really, what words they are, or even what order they are arranged in—any more than it matters what any road we take to get anywhere is made of, knowing that’s the only road? When we have a journey to take, and when the path is known and clear, however rocky, do we stop and question the quality of the passageway? Do we let the fact that there are bumps or potholes or fallen trees blocking the way stop us, or throw us off the path?

No: we walk around or over the obstacle. If necessary we beat a detour through the woods. But we keep going. Because the point is not to repave the road, but to walk down it to get where we must go, to get over the first million words.

This is why, especially when starting out to write, it’s probably not such a good idea to think in terms of expectations or standards or results, or to even think about, for instance, the quality of the sentences that we write, of how “good we are” or how well we are writing. The thing to do is to write, to see ourselves as voyagers on a path made up of words, and to proceed—not without effort, shamelessly or thoughtlessly, but again without putting too much emphasis on the quality of the road. To proceed not beautifully, or swiftly: but sincerely, with determination, keeping in mind your goal. And the only way to that goal is by way of so many sincere but imperfect words.

After you’ve journeyed across a million words, what if you still haven’t arrived, what if your goal still hasn’t been met?

Then you keep walking. Across the next million words. And the next. All the while knowing that each word brings you closer to your goal, and that you are willing to walk forever, to cross as many words, good and bad, as necessary, as long as it gets you where you are going.

The path through life may be everything; the end nothing. But with writing the opposite may be true. The path is nothing—nothing but a bunch of words to be gotten over. And no, the end isn't all.

But at least it's a start.

Dissonant Music

2009-08-25T23:22:00.000-07:00

Music—the literal music of singers and instruments—but also the music of words as conveyed through Joyce’s writing itself, plays a key role in his long story, “The Dead.” Music is referenced throughout the story, beginning in the first paragraph where the “wheezy doorbell” clangs, a harsh and already dissonant note foreshadowing dissonance to come. A page and a paragraph later we learn that Mary Jane had “had an organ in Hadington Road” and that she gives concerts every year. Aunt Julia is a soprano, and her older and more feeble sister, Kate, gives music lessons “to beginners on the old square piano in the back room.” The event in preparation is billed as an annual dance, but clearly music lies at its core.

Metaphorically, on page two, Joyce sounds two more dissonant notes (if one counts the clanging doorbell as the first). These are expressed by the aunts’ distress over the tardiness of two of their guests, Gabriel Conroy and his wife, Gretta, and over the possibility that another guest, Freddy Malins, will turn up “screwed.” The first fear is quickly put to rest as the Conroy’s arrive, with Gabriel “scraping snow from his galoshes.” The first mention of snow arrives with its own special dissonance. That, like music, snow is to play a key metaphorical role in the story is made clear by Lily’s stating portentously, “I think we’re in for a night of it”—words that could be applied with equal accuracy to the snow, to music, or to other, darker things. No sooner does Lily speak these words than Gabriel, fresh out of his overcoat, looks up at the ceiling shaking with the stampings and shuffles of other guests’ feet, and hears the muted piano notes drifting down (like the snowflakes later), and casts the first of many glances at his wife, who already seems distanced from him—a glance that sounds it own dissonant note here, however muted like the piano notes from above.

In describing Gabriel, Joyce notes that his eyeglass lenses and frames “scintillated” restlessly on his hairless face: another musical reference. Having rather condescendingly tipped Lily, and been subtly rebuked by him, he makes his way to the threshold of the drawing room, where while waiting for the waltz to end he listens to the music of the dancers’ swishing skirts. As he waits, he muddles over a quote for his speech, concerned (again condescendingly) that he may choose something over his listeners’ heads, that he “would fail with them just as he had with the girl in the pantry.” Now the dissonance is borne of the clash of classes. Gabriel feels superior, but his superiority renders him insecure. Presently the two aunts arrive, with Aunt Julia, the elder, drawn and gray and her younger sister “all pucker and creases,” a “shriveling red apple.” It’s hard not to see the sisters as variations on a theme of living death, with Gabriel “their favorite nephew.”

On the next page, discussing his wife, Gabriel says, “she’ll walk home in the snow if she were let.” The foreshadowing here is clear when we reach the story’s end, by which time the falling snow and Greta’s dead and buried lover have been thoroughly linked—and she does indeed “walk home” with him—in fact she will go to bed with him, at least in Gabriel mind. But for now Greta lets out a “peal” of laughter, and all join her, and the talk turns to galoshes.

The story’s next movement sees Freddy Malin’s arrival, delivering its promised comical dissonance. A break follows in the wake of his “bronchitic” laughter, and then we have Gabriel unable to listen to Mary Jane’s academic playing which has “no melody for him.” Mr. Conroy has little tolerance for dissonance, whether in music or in his own marriage. As he listens, or tries not to, his eyes wander to a picture of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, with the perfect harmony of their death-united love contrasting sharply and ironically with events to follow later in the story.

The next note of dissonance is struck on page 188 (Penguin edition) when Gabriel is taken to task by Miss Ivors for having written a book review for The Daily Express, “a rag,” as she calls it. Gabriel, unwilling to risk a highbrow or haughty response, tries to smile and murmur his way out of it. But he is clearly caught off guard and disarmed and made to feel ill at ease. Miss Ivors then takes his hand and changes the subject, inviting him and his wife on an excursion of the Aran Isles, which offer he fends off, betraying his lack of patriotism—in fact, he is above such sentiments, and even admits to being “sick of my own country”—a confession that sounds a dissonant note indeed, and leaves its speaker hot with emotion. To sublimate his agitation, Gabriel joins a dance in progress, avoiding Miss Ivor’s eyes and the sour look on her face. But he can’t escape her when she boldly calls him a “West Briton.” If this hasn’t spoiled the party for him, what could?

The dissonance is this confrontation with Miss Ivors is born again in the scene between Gabriel and his wife later, when Gretta urges him to take the trip, and he responds, coldly, “You can go, if you like,” adding yet more distance between himself and the person supposedly closest to him. Things are getting very cold around Gabriel. Now begins his steady withdrawal, which will deepen and darken. He retires to the window to prepare for his speech, thinking “how cool it must be outside,” and wishing, in a paragraph that will be recalled almost verbatim at the story’s close, that he were “out there” alone in the falling snow and not at the dance party: he will be.

He is called out of his musings when Aunt Julia takes her place at the piano to play Arrayed for the Bridal, another set-up toward the story’s climax. In the wake of her singing Gabriel applauds loudly, but only to achieve the excitement and escape of “swift and secure flight.” He doesn’t want to be there. By now his very presence sounds a harsh, dissonant note within himself and in the story as a whole. Meanwhile others—including the drunken Freddy Malins—agree that Aunt Julia’s voice has improved greatly as memories of her youthful promise are rekindled, and the refrain of distant or lost music (grace) is heard not for the first time, or the last: the refrain will haunt the rest of the story.

Miss Ivor’s exits laughing—a laugh that Gabriel can’t help feeling is somehow at his expense. To break free of its implications, he applies himself boldly to the task of carving the goose, plunging the carving knife firmly into its fatty flesh (need we guess where the laughing Miss Ivor’s has gone?). With Miss Ivors symbolically slices to pieces Gabriel’s mood improves considerably, to where he is even fit to make jokes about stuffing. Gabriel resists both literal sweets and those of small talk; he sits at the head of the table literally and figuratively, placing himself above others. The divide reasserts itself as the theme of death rises to the fore, with the monks sleeping in coffins so as to remind themselves “of their last end.” The association between bedrooms and death will, too, have its pay-off in the final episode. Death has sounded its first dithering, dissonant chord. With it still resonating Gabriel, his fingers trembling on the tablecloth, looks up to the chandelier, hearing a waltz played again on the piano, drifting once again mentally outdoors to where the air is “pure” and the snow continues to fall. Here, too, the final paragraph is telegraphed (at the top of page 202), with a mention of the park and the trees “weighted with snow.” The music Gabriel hears is no longer simply that of the waltz, but the haunting music of the falling snow, the waltz of death.

It’s time for Gabriel’s speech. It’s a haughty, reactionary speech, one that harks back to the old days and summonses the memories of the dead, the “gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die,” words that will certainly ring true for him later, if they don’t as he speaks them. Joyce pays careful attention to the cadences and intonation of the speaker, whose voice is described as “falling into a softer inflection”—using the words “falling” and “softer” that will echo in the final paragraph. Gabriel promises not to “linger in the past”—a promise soon to be broken. The speech concludes with a volley of stentorian acclamations and requisite toastmaster puffery, with Freddy Malins the fool with fork. His speech—however unctuous— has served its purpose, gluing Gabriel back to “his people.” He tells the story of the mill owner, Johnny, and his horse, arousing laughter, ending the evening, as far as the dance party goes, in good form. Now all he needs to do is get his wife back to their room. Before leaving he catches a glimpse of Gretta listening to Mr. D’Arcy sing The Lass of Aughrim, and a “sudden tide of joy” leaps out of his heart, a joy to be crushed later when he learns about the boy whom she first heard sing that same song, and a pleasing melody turns again to dissonance. From there everyone knows where the story goes, falling faintly and faintly falling, toward its final, deadly glissando.

Truth & Delight

2009-08-25T05:27:00.000-07:00

Among the least pleasant chores of a writing teacher: dissuading his students of the notion that what sounds good in a piece of writing is, necessarily, good. It's the part of my job that I most dread and dislike, the part where I'm forced to play bad cop opposite a dozen good cops who reply, "but I liked it!" Yes, yes, I say. I know you liked it. But it doesn't mean anything, and it's not true (which is why it means nothing).

Inexperienced writers, especially young ones, sacrifice meaning for effect. Sound and sense are divided—or anyway not faithfully joined. And so for them it's possible for something to "sound good" even when what is being said lacks rigor, precision, or truth.

Having once been a young writer myself, I was no exception to this rule. I fell in love with words not for their meanings but for their shapes and their sounds. Like all healthy young people, I was a sensualist, a glutton for whatever tickled and otherwise amused or delighted my senses, for things sharp, bold, bright, dazzling, smooth, saucy, bitter, sweet, for colors and smells and surfaces. I cared little about what lay hidden and invisible under the words, for their precise meanings and implications. The depths would come later; meaning could wait. Life offered too many sensual delights and pleasures on its surfaces to bother about hidden things.

This was how I felt, and I think it's not unusual for young people to feel this way. The words "truth" and "meaning" weigh too onerously on young hearts and minds. They imply drudgery, duty and grimness, and other things antithetical to youth, to pleasure and delight: i.e. no fun at all. What's the meaning of a song or a dance? What is rigorous or "true" about shapes, or colors? Life is all about experience, sensation. Those are the things that matter. Meaning is something ugly, dry, and dusty, a chalk board eraser thrown at you by the likewise dusty schoolmarm as you daydream, her smile pinched, her hair pulled into a severe bun.

I still remember the poems I wrote when I was in my early twenties, when I'd just started writing, verses aggressively void of meaning, but that tickled my senses with their word play and fancy rhythms. Sat upon the way vast upon deep beyond the tree wide and wind . . . That sort of stuff. I wrote oodles of it, tickled by the sound of my own voice (or what I then thought was my own voice; in fact a distorted echo of Hopkins and other poets). I remember at Bard College showing a sheaf of these poems to poet Robert Kelly, who back then weighed a good three-hundred and fifty pounds, so enormous he couldn't walk without a cane. He gave them a quick perusal and then pronounced, with a sigh, "I find your poems arbitrary in every way." He didn't give a damn what my poems sounded like. He didn't recognize anything in them apart from what they meant—or what they failed to mean. Back then I considered his verdict harsh, cruel, even. Now, thirty years later, I consider it just, and most generous. (I feel similarly toward Frank Conroy, who in a summer workshop threw a story of mine over his shoulder for using the word "preponderance.")

And now I find myself in the role of the "veteran" author insisting upon the very qualities that I myself resisted at your age, on "rigor" and "meaning" and "truth" and "authenticity." And I ask myself: do you really want to do this, Peter? Do you really want to devote your days to dampening the still-fresh-as-wet-paint enthusiasms of these talented young people with your fogey values? What good will come of it? Why not shut up and leave them to their fun?

Then I remind myself: these are not ordinary young people dabbling in their diaries. These are young people who want to learn to be good writers, young people serious about the craft of writing.

Let me put myself in their shoes. Let me ask myself, at their age, would I have preferred to wait, say, ten or fifteen years to discover the things that it would indeed take me ten or fifteen years to discover—namely that, though the immediate thrill of a sentence may be found in its texture, its shape, its sounds, still, that pleasure is transitory, lasting only as long as the sentence tickles us, as it takes to taste and swallow a bite of food, whereas the pleasure of meaning and significance and of the sentence's crucial contribution to the whole, to the singular effect of the entire work of art, will (hopefully) resonate—not just for a moment, but for hours or days, or, if the work is truly inspired, will lodge itself in the readers' mind for the rest of his or her life.

When we swallow food, we notice taste and texture first. But what stays with us is the substance, provided there is any substance. The poems I wrote in my youth were cotton candy; no sooner did you taste them than they disappeared. Like eating sweet air. Bob Kelly was right: they had no value. To be good for us, to have value and permanence, words need not be tasteless; words can both delight and mean at the same time. To be any good they must.

The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild, warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily colored crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging, unceasing murmur.

Meaning and sensual delight go hand in hand. But they won’t go hand in hand unless we exercise rigor, and resist mere seduction by surface effects.

My Lake Loves Me

2009-08-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the lake is white, sometimes gray, sometimes blue. Sometimes it mixes those colors. Today the lake is blue-gray. I sit there now, on the dock, with my striped drawstring pants rolled and my feet in the water. (If I could sit on the water I would.) As I sit, a heron—the same gray as the water—soars by, skimming the lake's wrinkled skin. It lands on a neighbor's dock.

When I cannot write, when I have nothing to say, when all of the books on the shelves have been read and often twice, when there is nothing to snack on in the refrigerator, when I've already had my quota of coffee, when it's too early or I don't feel like having a drink, when I have reached my saturation point with NPR and cannot take another note of Bach or Glenn Gould, then the thing to do, the only thing to do, is to walk down to the lake.

That's what I do here, mostly, in my new home: I go to the lake. First thing in the morning, when the day is barely lit, I put on my bathing suit, my dinky rotting Speedo, grab the gray-blue towel (the same color usually as the lake and as the blue heron that soared to my neighbor's dock) and make my way in bare feet down the sharp pine-needle covered lawn that slopes down past an overturned aluminum canoe and dilapidated picnic table to the dock.

The morning and the evening, dawn and dusk: those are my two favorite times to visit the lake. But also in the afternoon, when it's terribly hot. When I'm sad, lonely, depressed, worried, eager, anxious, confused, frightened, happy, or simply and totally at a loss: those are all good times for a visit with my watery friend.

This morning the lake wears a mantle of gray clouds. On the far shore somewhere a dog barks. Sounds: waves lapping, water slurping, bubbles breaking. A motorboat in the distance. Trees rustle. The wind sings into my ears while rubbing my shoulders.

Usually I get in the water. I swim. To the opposite point of land and back. Or around the point where I live, to the right or to the left—either way is fine. I count the neighbors' boathouses and docks that I pass. Six docks makes for a decent swim. I never see my neighbors. Their houses look abandoned. Their boats hang unused from gantries. Their lawns are manicured and their docks are sturdy, but cobwebs droop from ladder to post, from rudder to propeller.

The ghosts wave to me as I swim past.

In three weeks here I have seen only one neighbor. She was out watering some plants. I walked to and introduced myself. We made small talk. About the weather. About the water in the lake. It's such beautiful water, I said. Very clean, I said. Supposed to be the cleanest lake in Georgia.

Is it? said the woman.

That's what I read on the Internet.

Oh, the woman said. Really? I didn't know that.

That's what I read.

Oh.

One day I heard the rasp of lawnmowers in my yard and went out to inspect. An elderly man sat on a rumbling lawn tractor. He introduced himself as "Old Man Howard." We chatted for a bit. When our chat was over Howard said, "Why you're just the nicest person I've met in a long time. I meet a lot of folks, and you're one of the nicest. I'm so glad you're living here."

And yesterday morning the postman knocked on my door. I'd forgotten to put a return address on a parcel I left for pickup in the box. We spoke for a few minutes. Robert, his name. Said he's pushing sixty and thinking of retirement. Doesn't really want to retire. Said that the average life expectancy of men after they retire is twenty-four months. Imagine that? he said. Said his father has just been diagnosed with colon cancer. "He's eighty five," Robert said.

I asked if he'd pull through.

"Oh, yeah. They'll cut out a piece 'bout this big." Robert showed me. "But you know, eighty-five, it's not one thing it's another."

I am glad for these encounters, but more glad for being alone with my lake. It's a good thing I didn't take a place in town. I'd feel landlocked; I'd feel lost. For all the people who'd surround me, I'd feel more, not less, lonesome. Oh, yes, I do still feel lonely at times. I miss my girl, my friends, the people I've known who've been good to me for years. And I have regrets that just won't leave me alone, too many to even list here. In fifty-two years I've made some terrible mistakes, with more to come. Like Mr. Wright on his hammock, I, too, have wasted my life.

But when I am with my lake I feel none of those things. I sit on the dock and look at the water, and I am comforted. My lake loves me. It forgives me. Better still, it will not desert or abandon me. It understands me. I sit there with my feet touching the water, waiting for the heron to take off from my neighbor's dock, thinking that moments like these have an important lesson to teach: namely that of doing nothing.

I think the problem with life, one of the problems (if I may generalize boldly) is that too many things happen. If we could prevent things from happening, or anyway, if we would all, each of us, try from time to time to do our best to make nothing happen, then I say on the whole things would improve. What the world needs—what we all need—is a place in which to do nothing, a place where doing nothing is not only allowed, but is the only thing that makes sense.

I have found such a place here, with my lake. I can't meditate. At all enlightened acts I am an abysmal failure. But I know how to sit with my lake doing nothing, or maybe just swimming (which is doing nothing in motion). For all my ambitions and hopes and failures and deeds worthy or noble, this sitting by the lake feels as worthy and noble as anything. It's my way of paying tribute, I guess: to love, to life—to god, if you like.

It is the only form of worship that I know and trust.

How to Love Yourself

2009-08-15T14:54:00.000-07:00

To love yourself it is not necessary to be tall, beautiful, buxom (or muscular), to have strong features or good hair. All of these things, however recommended, are not necessary. Although on the whole to love yourself it is better to be a woman, on occasion men have been known to do it; I have seen them. (That said, sightings of men who loves themselves realistically, despite or even against their egos, are increasingly rare).

To love your self it helps to have a good diet. Eating frozen foods or peanut butter out of the jar is not recommended, nor is sweeping food crumbs off the counter into your hand and then tossing them into your mouth. I suggest a moratorium on cheese Doritos and buffalo wings.

If you are serious about loving yourself—and many people are—then it helps very much to commune with nature now and then. If you live in the country, this is easy. You simply walk out the door and keep walking, beyond the mailbox, a half-mile will usually do.

For city dwellers the situation is less simple. Typically, you can resort to parks. If, for example, you know of an area of a park where there is a shady grove or the equivalent, I suggest you spend some time there, preferably with your back against a tree. Otherwise a pond inhabited by large swans or white geese will do. For some reason other kinds of animals always make us feel better about ourselves. I don’t know why.

Avoid going to the movies alone. Too much TV, too, is a bad idea. If you must surf the Internet, then surf away, by all means, but avoid pornography as it will bring you nothing but self-loathing and the attendant grief. The point is to love yourself, yes? How can you love yourself and fill your eyes with filth? Answer: you can’t.

To love oneself, one does not need to be a monk. In fact though good at loving God monks are not especially disposed to love themselves, so let’s drop that whole notion, okay?

An extra-firm mattress does not for self-love make. It may not hurt, but don’t think of it as THE answer.

Finally, if you really want to love yourself, I suggest that you engage in one or more of the following activities:

1. make a cup of tea
2. sautée vegetables
3. wear carpet slippers
4. call and joke with your mother

In the Soup

2009-05-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

“Alain makes zee best soups,” Rolande had told me. “Oh, wait until you taste one of Alain’s soups. Zey are zee best soups in ze world.”

I’d been invited to live as an artist-in-residence in the village of Bozouls, in the southwestern corner of France. Hugging both the base and the rim of a deep river gorge, the tiny village featured two medieval stone sentry towers, attached to one of which was an efficiency apartment equipped with a small pool and a Jacuzzi that would be my home and my studio for three weeks. As things happened, I never saw my hostess. An international attorney, Rolande was tied up with a complicated case back in New York. Aside from Alain, the caretaker, and Mama Maguy, Rol-and’s eighty-nine year-old mother, who lived in the tower proper, I was completely on my own. Which suited me fine. I had my own door, and my own key. After having driven me to Bozouls from the station, Alain seemed to disappear. As for Mama Maguy, though I knocked more than once on her door, it never opened. A dog barked inside. That was all. I wondered: would I ever get to taste Alain’s famous soup?

Finally, one afternoon, I ran into Alain at one of the town’s two cafes. “Ah, Pee-taire! You must come for soup this evening!”

Soup--the magic word! After days of surviving on croque monsieur (grilled cheese) at the town’s only cafe I was starved for some authentic and homemade French cooking!

Having barely finished a painting outdoors I was late for my 7 p.m. dinner invitation. I arrived to find Mama Maguy and a young girl sitting at a big oak table. The young girl was Magalie, her housekeeper--one of her many housekeepers, it turned out. Mama Maguy looked her age, with large blue eyes rendered even larger by thick lenses. She wore a red and white striped blouse that accentuated the pale whiteness of her skin and her parchment-colored hair. She sat at one end of the table and Magalie sat at the other, both with napkins tucked, waiting. On the oak table candles burned and the famous pot of soup sat waiting next to a bowl of grated cheese and a cutting board with some bronze, crusty bread sliced into cubes. And there, at the center of the scene, stood Alain--Alain with his long stringy dark hair and pointy goatee, looking like one of the three Musketeers as he stirred his famous soup.

“Ah, Pee-taire, Pee-taire,” he wagged a bony, warty, castigating finger at me.

“Excusez-mois,” I said.

As Alain ladled the soup, pouring over the grated cheese and croutons, I smelled its rich, mushroomy smell. Wineglasses were filled and Alain said grace. My hand reached for my spoon when suddenly Alaine stood and announced that he had to make a phone call. Taking a cell phone from his pocket, he dialed. For the next forty-five minutes or so he paced back and forth along the table’s length talking in a rapid, non-stop voice. My French being adequate at best I could barely make out a word, though I understood him to be talking about the global economy, then about the Algerian dilemma, and then about Protestantism and the Catholic tyranny and why wood finally replaced coal as the fuel of choice in French villages. To whomever he’d phoned he explained why Amsterdam was a terrible, evil place and why drugs generally were evil, and how depression was not genetic and he could prove it, because three--three!--of his cousins had attempted suicide, one successfully, while he had never, ever in his life been depressed--not the slightest bit! Also, he refused on principle to drink Eau de Vie or Aquavite. And did you know, he told whoever was listening, that during the Second World War the corpses of over a dozen fetuses were found by soldiers in a barrel in the woods behind the local abbey?. . .I looked at my watch. I’d been sitting there for over twenty minutes. Another twenty minutes passed and Alaine was still on the phone, with the soup congealing in our bowls. He went on and on and on, endlessly, oblivious of our soups getting cold. Every so often he would throw us a nod with his D’Artagnan chin, indicating that we should start without him. But Magalie refused to touch her soup or even sip her Bordeaux until we were all seated. As for Mama Maguy, she seemed used to this scenario, as if it were part of the dinner ritual. Alaine went on to discuss fluoridation, global warming, the expanding/contracting universe debate. I wondered: who on earth is he talking to? Who would listen to all this? Eventually I broke down and took a sip of from my wine glass. I hadn’t eaten all afternoon and was parched from painting under the hot sun. Alain sucked his teeth, shook his head and nodded saying, “Bien sur, bien sur; peut etre, peut etre. . .”

I was sure we’d never eat our soups.

Just as I gave up all hope, he put away the phone. “Alors,” he said, and had just tucked in his chair when a voice rang up from outside. “Ah--moment,” he untucked himself, went to the window and leaned his head out to start another conversation as we sat there with our soups turning to mush. With whoever was outside the window Alaine launched into yet another monologue. To escape the sight of my congealing soup I excused myself and went to the bathroom. There, where the odor of cooling soup hadn’t permeated, I smelled the old smell of invalid people, the redolence of cat box and leaky catheter, the scent of old Europe. Still, I was glad to be in the bathroom, glad to be momentarily free of Alain’s moulin a paroles and of the terrible sound Mama Maguy made with her supposedly real teeth--a grinding, scraping sound like marbles being rubbed together--a sound that made me squeeze my eyes shut and try to think of places far, far away. When I couldn’t justify staying in the bathroom any longer I returned, only to find Alain still deep into his flux de bouche, with no end in sight, and Mama Maguy grinding her teeth louder than ever, and the intrusive guest outside the window still invisible but listening.

Finally, with an “A demain! A demain!” the invisible window guest apparently shoved off, and Alain bustled back to the table in high spirits.

Now at last it was time to eat the soup--or so it seemed. Alain said grace again. Again I lifted up my soup spoon. But then--before we could actually eat the cold glop--we had to hear all about how it had been made, how Alain had gone to over a dozen markets in search of the very finest ingredients at their height of freshness: mushrooms, carrots, onions and leeks. . .how he had chopped, diced, sauteed and sliced, creating his own stock from veal and chicken bones, which he simmered, stirring in butter and salt, folding in cream for what sounded like hours, days, weeks. . .But that was only the beginning, for as Alain explained (at great length, of course) the secret to a good soup was not in its original creation, but in its evolution, its accumulating character, so to speak, over time--its journey from meal to meal, with enhancements along the way, for the chopping and dicing of which he spoke had happened ages prior, and the soup that (with any luck) we were at last about to savor now was in fact dozens of soups melded and grafted and simmered into one another over time, a soup of soups, with the original Ur-soup apparently dating back to the beginnings of life on the planet--to the amino-acid soup of creation itself.

“Bon apetite!” said Alain, toasting.

Finally, we ate.Though lukewarm, it was a good, thick, salty soup, gray-brown in color and porridge-like in consistency. Still, I questioned all of Alain’s dicing and slicing. Those tiny bits of vegetable floating in my bowl looked vaguely dehydrated. And there was that unmistakable essence of industrial-strength, MSG-enhanced bouillon cube. Nevermind, at least we were eating.

And then Mama Maguy, who’d been silent as a sphinx all this time, spoke up, and kept speaking, as if she were an internet site than had taken all this time to download. She loved Paris in the Fall, she said, and drank only Bordeaux in Summer, and loved her home, and herself. “Look at my stone walls,” she said. “Look at my thick beams, look at my straight nose and my still blonde hair and my spanking white pigeons. Damned if I’m not the talk of this town! (They say that my daughter, Rolande, is the talk of the town, but it’s not true--I am the talk of the town. I always was the talk of the town.) Look at me, don’t I still look good? Under this eighty-nine year-old flesh there is the body of a raving beauty. Oh, I was beautiful--much more beautiful than Rolande! You know, I almost gave her up, and probably should have, the little wench! But I didn’t; I stuck it out. No orphanage for my daughter. Of course she worships me now--and why shouldn’t she? I saved her life! If not for me God knows--imagine what a different life she would have had--possibly no life at all--had I given her up as I had every right to do! We were so poor, you cannot imagine. Poverty--the worst disease of all! Every three months we had to pack up and move to cheat the landlord, always farther and farther away from the center of the city, my beloved Paris. Once I even made Rolande leave behind her doll collection in order to fool the patron into thinking we were coming back. Oh, she cried tears as salty as this soup (I think, Alaine, that you have put too much salt in it this time)--but it was better than the alter-native, wouldn’t you say? And do you think she was grateful? Of course she was! And then I even found her a father, a respectable man who gave her a last name. Yes, that’s right: gaze upon me in awe and wonder here in my tower with my caretaker, my maidservant, my white pigeons and my squeaky teeth!” Cold soup dribbleed from her chin.

In addition to her occasional sly farts Mama Maguy gave off a faint but pungent odor of fermentation as some old people will, a tangy smell closely related to the smell in the bathroom and which invested itself into every spoonful of soup and sip of Bordeaux, making me gag slightly as I ate, watching her talk with her soupspoon dripping onto the collar of her red striped blouse, her pale globe-like eyes darting back and forth, back and forth under milkbottle lenses. Meanwhile Alain has gotten back on his cell phone again to continue the conversation of before, his whisp-thin lips moving at the speed of sound under his D’Artagnan mustache, his S’s faintly whistling through the gap in his front teeth, his phone-free warty hand stirring the now ice-cold soup. He spoke of Global Commerce, the situation in Nepal, the need for earthquake-proof construction in third-world nations, the threats being posed to the sovereignty of the Euro. . . He held forth on fortified wines and genetic engineering and improved techniques of spinal surgery. . .all the while stirring his prize soup, his Soup of Ages, his Infinite Soup, like an alchemist in his medieval tower-laboratory. And just as Alain’s soup was made 90% of past soups, and men’s bodies are made 90% of water, Alaine’s life, I perceived, consisted 90% of words, his own homemade, sliced, diced, constantly simmering words, flowing endlessly, like a river of soup.

“Bien sur, bien sur,” he said, referring to the Jacuzzi, which after five days of tinkering on his part was still unfunctional. “Sans doute, sans doute! Certainement! Certainement! Peut etre! Peut etre!” (Incidentally, was I aware that it was a Frenchman who had invented the so-called “whirlpool bath”? However--as with so many other French inventions-- the man, being something of a nincompoop, had neglected to apply for his patent on time, and therefore--). . . .

Barber

2009-05-06T04:47:00.000-07:00

Today I’m going to get a haircut. I just decided. There’s no barbershop in sight. I don’t even know of any barbershops in this neighborhood. The urge to get a haircut has come upon me suddenly, like an early afternoon sun shower. I don’t know this part of the city well, yet already I feel a heavy sense of comfort, a balanced feeling scented with Lilac Vegetal and talcum powder as I drift along in search of a barber pole, one of those red, white, and blue cylinders that whirl 'round and 'round, hypnotizing people into having their ears lowered, as if getting a haircut is the most patriotic thing a person can do, up there with voting, giving blood, and joining the Marines.

As a boy I dreaded getting my hair cut. I dreaded the mechanical white chair, the barber’s sneaky, small-toothed smile, the snipping sound his scissors made next to my ears, as bad as the whine of a mosquito, though not as bad as the buzz of dog-clippers, as we used to call them.

I remember the barbershop: there were two in my hometown, Patsy’s and Chris’s. My mother took me to Chris’s, though to me he wasn’t Chris, he was Floyd, the barber on The Andy Griffith Show: a short, slope-shouldered, seedy little man with an Adolph Hitler mustache and salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back in tight little curls. And though I liked The Andy Griffith Show I hated Floyd the barber. His hands were too small; so were his teeth. They were the hands and teeth of a mole. The barber who cut my hair had the same lecherous smile. I imagined him doing nasty things to kids in the mysterious room hidden behind a stained blue curtain (where he kept dirty magazines in a drawer, I guessed).

As with all suspicious persons you couldn’t say where Floyd was from, exactly, somewhere far away, like Bulgaria, or Romania—one of those places ending in 'ia'. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find out he was a taxidermist on the side, or a cannibal, and that the refrigerator he kept in his back room was packed with things floating in jars. He spoke in a thin raspy voice that oozed bad breath and was the equivalent in sound of the sound the files labeled “bastard” made when my father used them to scrape burrs off metal in his laboratory: a voice dripping perversion and espionage.

On the little table of his barbershop Floyd's real life equivalent kept a spread of old comic books for his customers to look at, yellow with age. Most had to do with war: flamethrowers, tanks, and U-boats with commandants gritting their teeth while peering through periscopes. The floor was linoleum tiled, with alternating beige and green squares resembling head cheese and creamed spinach. I’d sit in the chrome and vinyl chair thumbing the same comic I’d thumbed a hundred times before, watching the same tanks blowing up and flamethrowers spouting and U-boats firing torpedoes at allied cargo ships, feeling queasy as though I were in the dentist’s waiting room, kicking the backs of my P.F. Flyers (guaranteed to make me run faster and jump higher) into the chrome chair legs, hearing the snip-snip of Floyd’s scissors, watching the miniature tumbleweed-like tufts of dead hair tumble down to the cheese and spinach tiles from the scalp of the guy getting his hair cut, an old man (whose hair meant nothing to him) whose place I would soon be taking. I’d note the pattern of hair falling on the floor, how much fell on green vs. beige tiles, seeing faces, ships, cars, trains, and States of the Union in the proliferating blobs before Floyd kicked them out of place with his wing-tips.

Click-snip. Snip-snip. Zwick-zwick-zwick.

Most of Floyd’s customers didn’t seem to have enough hair to bother cutting, old men with more hair sprouting from their ears than from their sculls. Fathers brought sons in baseball and Boy Scout caps, as if ashamed to have let their hair grow beyond three-quarters of an inch. I’d always go with my mother, who’d abandon me to Floyd and his sharp little teeth and bad breath, then go across the street to Tony’s Supermarket. How I dreaded the moment when the customer in front of me would stand up from the big white complicated chair, hand Floyd two dollars, and with a zinnng! Floyd would ring it up on the big silver cash register whose drawer always stuck. Then he'd return to the chair (one of three in the shop, but the only one he ever used), pump it all the way down, snap the seat with a flick of his towel, and look at me with a lecherous smile over his half-moon glasses. Please, not yet, I’d say to myself, looking around, hoping by some miracle there would be someone ahead of me, someone who had been hiding there all that time, dreading the barber as much as I did.

I get up and go sit in the chair, and Floyd pumps it back up again. Then he flaps out the striped smock, filling it with air, ridding it of the last customer’s dead hair, and lets it come billowing down on me gentle and soft like a parachute. He tucks it in with tissue behind my neck. I feel his fingers tucking, tickling, giving my neck an inadvertent massage. He glides a skinny black comb through my frizzy brown hair, not saying a word, not asking how I "want it," tugging out the stiff hairs as if to let them know who's boss, seeing how long and reprobate they have grown, sighing and going tut-tut-tut with his tongue against his tiny teeth as if to say, ‘Well now, it should never have come to this.’ He yanks my hair so hard with his comb my head kerks from side to side. It's all I can do not to cry “ouch,” but I don’t; I refused to show him my pain. I stare dead ahead into the cracked mirror, which Floyd has tried to fix with masking tape, past gleaming green and gold bottles and the the tall blue jar of Barbacide with combs floating like pickles there.

My eyes well with tears.

Suddenly, with a neat flick of his wrist, from the breast pocket of Floyd’s white jacket the scissors emerge and snippety-snip-snip he starts cutting, sending gouges of frizzy brown hair to the floor like envoys from atop my head, tufts thick as Brillo pads, swick-switcka-swick, rolling down the front of the striped smock onto the tiles: my hair, once: no longer. When a half-dozen clumps have fallen Floyd’s heretofore sealed lips part, and he starts talking, as if to find his tongue he had to snip through so much hair that blocked his way. Then his bad breath oozes all over me. Don’t ask me what he says; I have no idea; I'm not listening. I'm too busy being horror-stricken by what's happening to the top of my head, counting the frizzy gobs that like downed birds shot from the sky, my arms pinned under the striped smock, wanting to catch them, to take them to my lips and kiss them goodbye.

Talk-talk, snip-snip, talk-talk.

After a while I can't bear any more. I close my eyes, squeeze them shut, waited for the torture to end, opening them only when he holds the mirror behind my head. No matter how much I hate what the mirror says, I nod, since there's nothing Floyd can do but cut off more hair, right? He can't put it back, can he, now? Besides, by then I just want to get out of there. The barbershop is a ghoulish place, the place where I go to have my hair amputated by a foul-breathed Romanian spy-pervert.

But Floyd isn’t finished. It's the old fakeroo! He flaps out the parachute smock then puts it back on again with a fresh tissue. It will never end. He will go on cutting my hair forever, for the rest of my life.

But after a few more zwickety-zwicks Floyd takes the smock off again. He sweeps the back of my neck with a big brush dipped in talcum powder (which I have to admit feels good). Then he wets his fingers with fluid from a tall green bottle and drags them wet and cold against the side of my head, leaving it slick and shiny and smelling of lemons, ocean air, pine trees, limes and vinegar—which I confess also feels good. A few more last-minute zwick-zwicks. With a decisive snap of his towel and a squeeze of my shoulder that's it' I'm done. Floyd's finished.

I hand him the two crumpled one-dollar bills my mother gave me and that I’ve been holding the whole time. She meets me at the door. It's all over. I can breathe again. For another month or so.

Ahead of me down the block a barber’s pole swirls, blending red blood, blue skies, and white surrender, drawing me to it like a ship in a stormy sea to a lighthouse. I stand before the plate glass watching the barber at work, a man no older than me, but with hair is gray, and so he’ll do. Maybe it’s nostalgia, or I’m just getting old, but for some some reason today I long to sit in one of those big white complicated chairs with flat filigreed iron plates for the souls of my shoes and with a phalanx of colored bottles lined up before a cracked mirror mended with masking tape.

A tinkle of doorbells announces my entry, the same bells I heard as a kid, only I’m an adult now, motioned by the barber toward his chair. No sooner do I sit than I’m thrown back to a time when the scariest thing in the world was going to the barber. I feel the barber’s firm yet supple fingers adjusting the tissue around my neck, tucking the smock, giving my shoulder a paternal squeeze before getting down to business. The same fingers touch my head lightly here and there, making minuscule adjustments, coaxing me ever so gently, precisely.The barber knows just how much pressure to apply, doesn’t need to ask, doesn’t need to say a word. I can sit and daydream, nod toward sleep without ever actually arriving there, exist for a half hour or so in that blissful state between dreams and reality, the gentle swick-swick of scissors forming a minimalist percussive soundtrack to my reveries.

These days I love the barber. He is my father, my white-frocked priest, my confessor, a pair of scissors his staff: I trust him with my life. In his hands I’m a kid again, an innocent kid wearing P.F. Flyers, whose worst sin is that of having let his hair grow too long.

Half Moon Overlook

2009-05-02T15:42:00.000-07:00

Sometimes this life is a meal too big for one.

Today, a perfect Saturday. Sunny, not a drop of moisture in the air (though the forecast said rain). I spent the post-swim morning reading, and most of the afternoon commenting on student essays (subject: Darwin's theories of evolution and survival of the fittest as played out in A Streetcar Named Desire).

By five o'clock I wasn't done, but I was done. All day long I had watched the patch of tantalizing blue sky through the part in my curtains, and heard the birds singing (songs about the weather, no doubt, and how good it was). I saw the light playing off the bricks of the apartment building across the street, and the girders of the blue bridge that reigns over this neighborhood and that is named, like so many things around here, for Henry Hudson. For spending such a magnificent day indoors I felt a combination of foolish, guilty, stupid, and sad. At five o'clock, finally, I closed the lid on my computer, grabbed a random book from a shelf and went out, neglecting to lock the apartment door behind me. Hell, I must have thought. Let whoever steal all of indoors.

Mine is a neighborhood full of parks, but my favorite by far is the one that everyone who lives around here calls the Overlook, short for Half Moon Overlook, Half Moon having been the name of the ship Mr. Hudson (whose statue stands atop a high column in another park) came here on. As parks go it must be one of the smallest, a sixteenth of an acre, if that, shaped (intentionally? ironically? accidentally?) yes, like a half-moon, with room scarcely for one long curved wooden bench—another crescent. The overlook occupies a strategic point overlooking where the two rivers—the Harlem (Spuyten Duyvil Creek, technically) and the Hudson—meet. From it one has a view of the swing bridge connecting Manhattan to parts north, and of the Palisades clear down to the George Washington Bridge, the New Jersey-side tower of which is just visible to the right of the mound of trees that is Inwood Hill Park, Manhattan.

What luck: no one else was there. Usually there's at least one couple. On a sunny day to have the spot all to myself was a luxury. I sat with the sun in my face and opened my book, a collection of stories chosen by editors of literary journals, accompanied by essays wherein the same editors espoused their ideals of great literature. To read is pleasure; to read outdoors on a dry, sunny day with a view of the Palisades and the sun in one's face and no one around touches Heaven. I read a paragraph, looked up at the view, read another paragraph, and so on, neither able nore willing to choose among two beauties: of language and of nature.

Then a couple, a man and a woman, entered through the squeaky, cast-iron gate to break my perfect solitude. They were middle-aged: a term once far removed from my condition, but lately having crept so perilously close I felt it lapping at my doorstep (in fact it has entered and taken up residence).

The man wore an aqua blue sweater and green baseball cap. The woman wore a purple sweater and a thin brown flowing skirt. Though they had already swept passed the point where I could have seen their faces, and now stood facing the view to my right and in front of me, still, even from behind I could see that they were fit, healthy people, their fitness suggesting care, intelligence, responsibility. He had a gray mustache (its ends stood out from the contours of his face); she wore large classes. I felt their intelligence, their loyalty to their children as well as their participation in community events all to the good. I read it in their body language, their goodness, and in the way they stood admiring the view, saying nothing, as intelligent people will when confronted by beauty. They were people such as I might have wished to befriend in some other life, I suppose. I lowered my book and watched them watching the sun as it settled slowly toward the Palisades, which had taken on a bluish-gray cast, while the sun itself still burned hot and white, hot enough to heat my brow so its skin tightened. I wondered where they had come from. They were not locals; I had not seen them around. Maybe they were visiting others, early for dinner, killing time. Were they as aware of me as I was of them, thinking of me, wondering who I was, where I had come from, what I knew, whom I would be eating dinner with (a pair of turkey cutlets thawing on the kitchen counter, each for none but me)?

To be in such close proximity to strangers in a closely defined space creates a special energy, an energy of intimacy, but also a protective, cunning, defensive energy. After all, though the park is public, they had invaded my privacy, and surely they must have known it. Whosoever sits alone on a public park bench commands that bench, however briefly. And in a park so small the same formula extends, multiplies itself by a factor of Y, to include not only bench but gate, fence, view, water and sky. This was my territory, my world to which they had added themselves, and now I looked upon them as a landowner looks upon trespassers, however obviously benign.

These thoughts I entertained or ones like them when the man turned and spoke to me.

"Beautiful day, isn't it?" he said.

"Yes," I said. "Beautiful."

"It's a great spot," the woman added.

"It is," I said.

"You come here to read?" said the man.

"Sometimes. And to write."

"Oh. You write?"

"Sometimes," I said, and nodded toward my notebook, which I'd also taken with me, but which sat unused on the bench.

"What do you write?" asked them man.

I shrugged. "Stuff," I said.

In its stinginess that answer was meant to discourage further discussion, at least of that subject, and it did. The couple soon turned back to what was not their view as much as it had been mine, and which shared more with them than I was willing to. They watched the river, with its line of shadowy barges, and the cliffs of the Palisades, which by then had turned a deep gray under the floating sun, itself gone from white to a yellow, like an onion carmelized. I no longer felt its heat on my forehead. The air felt suddenly cool, and the same top three buttons of my shirt that I'd undone before I now buttoned again. Now I felt like leaving. My restlessness had found me: no point arguing with or trying to evade it. I gathered my things.

But just as I was about to rise the man took hold of his companion's hand and said, "C'mon; let's go." And with a nod to me that was simultaneously friendly and a rebuke he and she made their way out through the swinging gate, which squeaked again—this time louder and more plaintively than before. A howl of pain.

I was alone again, back in the solitude that I had craved earlier, but which now looked like the spoils of a meal I had ordered with one appetite, and had failed to finish with another. What had been a feast now sat before me, a pile of leftovers, greasy and coagulated. At once the thought of returning to my vast and empty apartment (and to those bloody essays: why, why had I foisted Williams, let alone Charles Darwin, upon a bunch of sweet but mostly callow undergrads?) repulsed me. My life repulsed me. Moments ago it had been a charmed thing; now it seemed nothing but wretched.

It strikes me now, and with a blow as firm as any delivered by the wooden mallet with which I pounded those turkey breasts so thin you could have read the Times through them, that in not sharing with that couple, with those two strangers, in my blind greed for solitude I had denied not only them my company, but myself theirs.

And I wonder now, too, by extension of that thought, if that same sort of Pyrrhic greed, a greed in direct opposition to itself, has informed my decision not to have children, to have the world and this life all to myself--a meal much, much too big for one.

Books, Books, Books

2009-04-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

I have been asked by a Facebook friend to respond to the following series of questions.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Nelson Algren, whom I loved when I was younger but whose books have not aged well.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I have two copies each of two favorite books, paper and hard, including Caine's Book by Alexander Trocchi, and The Disenchanted, by Budd Schulberg. The paperbacks are for thumbing; the hard get taken down only on special occasions.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
I teach undergraduate comp and have seen worse.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
None save my own when things go well.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children)?
Excluding drafts of my own work I would say Cain's Book, for the quality of prose.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
Caps for Sale: a Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys, and Their Monkey Business, by Esphyr Slobodkina. My babysitters would read me this story of a peddler whose stock is taken hostage by a gang of m onkeys in a tree. It made a profound impression on me.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
The Road, Cormac McCarthy. It may have been more than a year ago, but my disgust lingers. McCarthy can write and I have loved some of his work, but if you ask me (you did, sort of) this is an egregiously simple-minded and even cartoony exercise in apocalyptic sentimentality served up in a prose style that all-too-perfectly suits it's subject: abominable.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
I very much liked a book called My Friends by Emmanuel Bove. Alas, it and he have both been entirely forgotten.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
I'd have to choose differently for each, wouldn't I?

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
I don't care.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
One that means little to me.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
One that means a great deal (but there's little fear of that).

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I once dreamt that a manuscript of mine was returned via UPS. I opened it up expecting the usual letter of rejection. Instead I found my own submission letter stamped with the phrase "GREAT ENOUGH" in big red block letters. An accompanying note from an editor explained that though my novel was neither great nor poor, it was great enough, and had therefore been accepted for publication.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
I've tried without success to read James Patterson, Dan Brown, et al. I usually get only a few pages into such books before I have to stop. It's not just the poor writing, but the utter lack of logic and hamfisted sensationalism. I don't get why anyone reads them. I've read some popular books that weren't so bad but I don't remember what they were. I remember enjoying Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Not lowbrow, really, but very popular. It doesn't hold up.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Finnegan's Wake--but I bailed after thirty pages.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
I don't recall--it was too obscure.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
French. Those Russians talk too much. Though Dead Souls is hard to resist. And then there's Lolita, but that's an American novel with a French plot written by a former Russian.

18) Roth or Updike?
Updike—when he's good. Though Roth is never as bad as Updike when Updike is bad.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Neither, if you must know.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Shakespeare.

21) Austen or Eliot?
Eliot.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Gaps, plural. Parade's End, Ford Maddox Ford (I've read the first novel); Proust (ditto).

23) What is your favorite novel?
It's like choosing among children. Can't be done. Shouldn't be done.

24) Play?
A toss-up between Streetcar and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but the latter mostly for sentimental reasons, since it was the work that turned me from painting to writing.

25) Poem?
The Observation Car, by A.E. Hope.

26) Essay?
Again, too many to choose from. But off the beaten path I'd go with How to Build a House, by Lawrence Durrell.

27) Short story?
A Distant Episode, Paul Bowles. I'm also very fond of Cheever's Goodbye, My Brother. All You Faceless Voyagers, Ivan Gold. These are pretty heavy tales. On a lighter note: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

28) Work of nonfiction?
The question is so broad--how can the answer be narrow? I just threw a dart and it landed on Father & Son, by Edmund Gosse.

29) Who is your favorite writer?
Used to be Algren. Now I love so many good writers. Bellow I've liked consistently. I don't think he could write a bad sentence. But more obscure writers like Ivan Gold and John Fante interest me more.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
There are quite a few of these, several of whom live in Brooklyn. And that's all I've got to say about that.

31) What is your desert island book?
Cain's Book. A purposefully, aggressively bad novel in superb prose by a man in rebellion against ambition in all its forms.

32) And... what are you reading right now?
Beautiful Losers, by Leonard Cohen

Publication Day

2009-04-15T14:22:00.000-07:00

Three important events mark this date of April 15:

1. On this day 97 years ago, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, taking over 1200 souls with her.

2. Income taxes, in case you don't already know, are due.

3. My novel, Life Goes to the Movies, has been published.

The first two events are familiar to practically everyone. The third event—if you can call it that—will, I'm afraid, remain obscure to all but a handful of my friends.

This, I admit, is unfortunate—especially for me, since I spent nearly twenty years, off and on, working on the book. Yes, folks, twenty years—counting all the revisions, all the drafts, all the queries and submissions and rejections to and from agents, editors, contests, you name it. If between 1989 or so, when the novel was first drafted, and today there were places to which a novel might be sent, rest assured that it was sent there.

I will not back into the murky water's of my novel's history. If that interests you, there was a fine essay on that subject written (by me) a few years ago and published in Poets & Writers. Or write to me and I will send it to you, if you're so curious.

My subject here is a different one, and it is this: the very LOUD and ABSOLUTE silence that has greeted this event. For as someone once remarked: "Nothing is louder than the silence of a book being published." (The someone, too, happens to have been me.)

What people don't but should tell those who dream of writing novels is that, among other things, it is a waiting game. You wait for an idea, and then you wait to have the time to execute it, and then you wait for more ideas—for sentences, paragraphs, and pages to take shape (true, this is a more active kind of waiting that some people call thinking, but really it's more like waiting with a pencil or pen in—or keyboard at—hand). Then, when the work gets done, you wait for people to read it, and wait, and wait, and when they have read it you wait for their remarks, which may or may not come, and when and if they do come you realize that you must go back to work and wait for more ideas, brighter, better ones, hopefully, since the first ones weren't so bright after all, and then more waiting for more ideas, until at last the next draft is done and the next and then you send it out and then more waiting. You wait for the agents who wait for the editors who have hundreds of manuscripts to read (all, incidentally, as or more important than yours). And then, when at last they have gotten to your plucky little monument of paper, you wait for them to read, and when they've read, you wait eagerly, patiently, for the rejection notice that will in all likelihood follow.

But then, at last, and assuming you are very, very lucky and talented, at last, an editor takes the book, and then you wait for him or her to sell it to his or her bosses, which takes another forever and may not happen at all. But let us not draw things out unnecessarily here. Let us assume that all has gone perfectly well and that, voila, you have your book contract in hand. Then you wait to have your editor's feedback, and you wait to find the time to do ANOTHER draft, and then you wait for your editor to be satisfied, and then you wait as the manuscript sits in a pile somewhere collecting dust while waiting to be copy edited. And you wait and you wait.

Then come the copy editor's notes. And you make another round of corrections. And then you wait for the galleys. And then the galleys come and you make MORE corrections. And then you wait for the corrected galleys. And then you wait for the cover. And you wait for the authors to whom you have written begging for blurbs to respond. And if and when they respond and say yes then you send them the book and then you wait for the blurb, and wait and wait. And finally you have all or enough of your blurbs and you write the jacket copy and then you wait some more. And so now, you ask yourself, what are you waiting for? For the DATE OF PUBLICATION.

And then the DATE OF PUBLICATION (which may or may not fall on the day the Titanic sank and taxes are due) finally arrives.

And you wait. And you wait. And nothing happens.

Nothing.

But—however—if you sit quietly and listen very, very hard, you may just hear it. Hear it? That sound. Do you hear it? Listen. Beyond the birds singing in the trees (if you live where there are trees and birds), and the rush of traffic on the highway (if you happen to live near a highway), and the clatter of freight cars on the train tracks (if you live by a railroad): do you hear it? Yes? No? Listen . . . Listen . . .

Hear it?

That, my good friends, is the sound of my book being published.

The Virgin of Crete

2009-04-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

From an old notebook, Chania, Crete, May, 1996:

"Talk will save us."—Bitsy

"Bitsy"—that's the name she went by. A professor of English and history on leave from a U.S. Navy supply ship at port in Sondra. We'd been together less than an hour when I said, "Look, we're not going to get married. We're not even going to have an affair. We won't have sex, and most likely we'll never see each other again. So we can at least be totally honest with each other. Which may prove more interesting than all of the above."

And so we did it, we were completely honest, well, up to a point.

Until I got to know her better, I could have sworn that I had met a woman so virginal she made Doris Day look like Marilyn Chambers. She confessed to me—her first and biggest confession— that at twenty eight she was still a virgin. Then she went on to explain why she talked so much, which she did: an endless stream of banter and chatter, of rapid-fire puns and quips delivered with the relentlessly desperate zeal of a stand-up comic playing a dead crowd. Hyperverbal, and smart as all get up especially when it came to her principal subjects (Raoul Dahl and Faulkner her favorite authors).

She liked to season her talk with nautical jargon, none of which I can remember beyond "bilge" and "stow." I distinctly recall her using the word "loppertyjawed" to describe the crooked style in which the Toonerville Trolley was drawn. According to her, her Kentucky home life was a mix of "To Kill a Mockingbird" (with dad as Atticus Finch) and "Little House on the Prairie," but with a mother who quoted Keats and Eliot and dad taking her to watch the May Day parade, shaking every hand that passed by, and no hobbies or talents, none. "Shaking hands with everyone—that was dad's hobby."

But also art songs, opera, American musicals, the Navy, ships, torpedoes, Kentucky, and sex. At last we got around to discussing that. An interesting discourse, with Doris Day and me sitting on the dark quayside with a crescent moon peeking down at us through spongy appliqué clouds, and a rock 'n' roll band throbbing away behind the Naval museum, the green phallic lighthouse flashing its ("pulsating, hot") red light across the dark wet harbor. I wore my white linen shirt and freshly laundered blue Dockers and felt I looked quite handsome, with my deep suntan and brushed back hair. She wore dark glasses that made her look her age, almost, and not eighteen. A plain, healthy, American face, destined, I thought, to improve with age. She told me I looked like Maxmilian Schell.

It was funny how, when we finally got around to the subject, she relaxed, became more sincere, spoke more slowly, stopped quipping and punning. It was a good, honest talk. She said she wanted to save her virginity--if not for the perfect man, at least for one who might be worth marrying. Meanwhile, she told me, she contented herself with orgasms in storage rooms and under blankets ("You men can't get away with that!"). As for her fellow Navy boys, they would either use the shower stalls or "have themselves a sock date."

"What's a sock date?"

"A date with a sock."

"Oh."

The subject having turned to masturbation, we spoke of our preferences, our favorite strangest places (her: "aircraft carrier supply room," I: "a moss-lined craggy split in a rock in the woods behind my childhood home"). Then on to more elaborate topics, like the smells of both sexes (men: Clorox and mushrooms; women: vinegar and chips). Bitsy even brought up the caloric count of semen: three calories per teaspoon. ("Happy dieting!")

And then I walked her home, but not before remarking the literary symbolism of our lighthouse companion ("pulsing its red hot light," "green with envy," "hard and silent in its lonely vigil"). The last bus back to the Navy port left at one a.m.; it was only a quarter past eleven. But I was tired, eager to return to my lodging, to get showered, do some writing, jerk off and go to sleep. One the way to the bus stop we encountered a gang of her shipmates seated at a cafe. They eyed me suspiciously, as a father eyes the first boy to date his sixteen year old. We walked right past them. "Let's give them something to talk about," said Bitsy. Then I left her at the stop, saying, "Will you be all right here?" Foolishly, since she had the whole U.S. Navy looking after her.

I said we were completely honest "up to the point." The point was when I left her with a phony name and address. To this day I'm not sure why I did it, and to this day I regret it.

Sorry Bitsy, wherever you are.

The Ship That Keeps on Sinking

2009-04-10T05:10:00.000-07:00

In the mid 1990’s, Franklin, my therapist, suggested that I do a self-portrait of myself as a naked child. The assignment was designed to liberate an innocent, joyful, spontaneous spirit from the anxious, striving, and self-conscious man I had, by age thirty-eight, unfortunately, become.

Like eating vegetables, meditating, and all things meant to do me good, I resisted the exercise. I didn’t want to paint myself as a child. I pictured those cloying, doe-eyed paintings of children that decorated the waiting room of my pediatrician’s office. Every week my therapist would ask, “Have you done the painting yet?” Finally, he stopped asking.

Around the same time, while in Philadelphia on business, I wandered into an antique shop and saw a reverse painting on glass of the sinking Titanic. As a child I’d always been fascinated by ships, and especially by ocean liners, a fascination ignited by my first visit to New York City with my papa when I was five years old, and I saw a group of them, the Queen Mary, the France, the United States, lined up and looking, with their vanilla superstructures and red-cherry funnels, like gargantuan banana splits in their berths.

Around the same time I first saw, on the boxy wooden Magnavox in our living room, the film version of A Night to Remember, Walter Lord’s minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the Titanic. The vision of the liner’s counter stern rising out of the water, looming with its lights still ablaze against a starry sky, made an indelible impression on me; possibly my first experience of awe. On the brown shopping-bag covers of my school textbooks, and in my loose-leaf notebooks, I sketched the sinking Titanic over and over again, as if somehow by sketching it I could bring the events of that incredible night up close and make them personal. And though I included in my sketches tiny bodies plunging into the water, I never thought about those people, I never considered their horror; I never concerned myself with the human tragedy. I only thought about the ship, about funnels and propellers and portholes and that looming, massive hull. The first long paper I ever wrote for a school assignment was about the Titanic, complete with a cutaway illustration of the ship—its details completely improvised, down to the wallpaper on the cabin walls.

The painting in the antique shop was about four-feet wide and a foot and a half tall, with a cheap gold-painted plaster frame. My then-wife and I had just bought our first apartment on the Upper West Side. The apartment featured a sunken living room with a dining alcove above it. We painted one wall of the alcove bright red, and docked our most extravagant and expensive furniture item there: a 1920’s maple English bar unit, with a hinged top that opened to a Busby-Berkley display of blinding light and mirrors etched with droll cocktail shakers and martini glasses. The painting, I thought, would look splendid over it. It was not a realistic depiction. All the details were somehow, spectacularly wrong. The funnels were much too tall and wide, the iceberg a monumental exaggeration, the colors impossible. It was a child’s dream of the Titanic sinking, a work of unfettered naiveté. It reminded me of the sketches I had done in grade school. The antiques dealer wanted $800 for it, too rich by far for my blood, so I let it go.

But the painting wouldn’t let me go. It haunted me, as a matter of fact, so much that tried recreating it from memory. The result fell well short of my aims. So I tried again, and again. Rather than attempt any form of realism, I aimed for what I had seen in the reverse painting: a child’s interpretation of the disaster, with everything somehow perfectly, inevitably, sublimely wrong. Soon, like Monet with his lily pads, Degas with his ballerinas, Morandi with his dusty brown bottles, I’d found not only my perfect subject, but a perfect style to go with it. I was a naive artist.

There followed some 75 paintings of the Titanic. They lined the walls of our Upper West Side apartment (with its appropriate sunken living room), in both sinking and non-sinking poses.
One day I brought one of the paintings to my therapist.

“Congratulations,” he said.

I had done the assignment.

* * *

The sinking of the Titanic has obsessed generations. It is the Belle Epoque’s answer to Noah’s Ark. As legends go, it looms as large. It has all the necessary elements: a drama of disaster unfolding upon a world stage. As with Noah and his ark, it is a tragedy where a select few prevail, while the rest are doomed. And while the story of the Titanic may not take in the entire globe, it takes in quite a big chunk of humanity: rich, poor, heroic, cowardly. The ship’s passenger list represented almost as many specimens of humanity as the beasts aboard Noah’s vessel stood for all species. Indeed, had the Titanic story never happened, sooner or later someone would have had to invent it.

In fact someone did. In 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic went down, a struggling author of seafaring tales named Morgan Robertson penned a novel about a magnificent liner’s fateful encounter with an iceberg in the north Atlantic on a freezing cold April night. As Walter Lord describes it in his chilling forward to what remains by far and away the best book about the Titanic disaster (one that treats the events of that night cubistically, like a still life by Braque or Juan Gris):

The real ship was 882.5 feet long; [Robertson’s] fictional one was 800 feet. Both vessels were triple screw and could make 24-25 knots. Both could carry 3,000 people, and both had enough lifeboats for only a fraction of this number. But then this didn’t seem to matter, because both were labeled “unsinkable.”

On April 10, 1912, the real ship left Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York. Her cargo included a priceless copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and a list of passengers collectively worth $250 million dollars. On her way she too struck and iceberg and went down on a cold April night.

Robertson called his ship the Titan; the White Star Line called its ship the Titanic. This is the story of her last night.

The title of Robertson’s novel was Futility, and as Lord points out it was meant to underscore the folly of all human attempts to rise above their limits and rival their gods.

Having finished seventy-five Titanic paintings, I decided to hold a salon. We did it in our apartment. My wife made period hors d’oeuvres to go with the champagne. I hung a trumped up Titanic life preserver (the real ones didn’t say her name) on the apartment door, and hired a solo cellist to play ragtime and Nearer My God to Thee. The event took place on a Saturday. Over a hundred people stopped by throughout the day, coming from as far as Vermont, Washington D.C., and Georgia.

Only one guest disappointed us by not being able to come, a man who lived across town, but who, because of an infirmity, responded with regrets to my faxed invitation. However—his typed letter went on to say—if I gave him a rain check he would do his best to come some other time.

Two Sundays later, in a wheelchair pushed by his attendant, Walter Lord arrived, trembling with Parkinson’s disease, but alert and eager for my offerings. Tea and crumpets were served. One by one as he sat at the dining room table, I took the paintings down from the walls and showed them to him, and he nodded his approval. When I asked him to explain his own obsession with the Titanic, Mr. Lord gave this quite simple answer, “Well,” he said, as if it were perfectly obvious, “if there’s anything better than a great ship, it’s a great ship that sinks!”

* * *

But Mr. Lord (who died in 2002) and I were far from alone. Few are not drawn to the story of the Titanic. The salient feature of all legends and myths is that they need to have happened. Something in our collective unconscious yearns for them. What reality can’t or won’t provide, we concoct (“The Abominable Snowman.” “Elvis lives!”). Even when, as with the story of the Titanic, reality is generous to a fault, providing us with as much awe and horror as we could wish for, still, we feel the need to enlarge, embellish, and to otherwise augment her best efforts.

People need disasters; we need tragedy; we need horror. But we need to enshrine—to protect and preserve and contain—it in myth, like a lion in its cage, where it can fascinate yet do us no harm. The world is a dangerous and often grim place, life itself a treacherous and tragic enterprise, with doom our ultimate destination and no possibility of escape.

We are all passengers on the Titanic.

Hence, despite all attempts by oceanographers and historians including Walter Lord to put to rest any lingering doubts as to what, exactly, happened on that cold April night—thus sinking all Titanic myths once and for all—still, the ship, along with her precious cargo of legend and lore, keeps bobbing up again and refuses to stay sunken. The reason is simple enough: the supply of facts may be limitless, but the imagination knows no limits.

Children are especially susceptible. One day as I was walking through Grand Central Terminal, bringing one of my seventy-five paintings to a downtown gallery, a little girl walking with her dad caught what must have been a very brief glimpse of the canvas. She cried, “Daddy, daddy—the Titanic!”

She couldn’t have been more than four years old. Yet she knew.

She knew.

After the Planet Uranus

2009-04-09T03:19:00.000-07:00

She was a good-looking woman, though I didn't appreciate it at the time. Greek. Ourania, her name. After the planet Uranus, third largest and seventh from the sun. Pronounced: ooh-ray-née-yah. Small, dark, petite. She came into the snack bar of the state college in Connecticut where I was an undergraduate. I had transferred out of two other schools. This was my third, and, I swore, would be my last. At twenty-three I was older than most of my fellow undergrads, a dubious distinction that I wore as a kind of ragged badge, thinking of myself as having been "out there in the real world." Thinking of myself as worldly, jaded.

Everything about her was oval. Her eyes, her cheeks, her lip, the overall shape of her head. She looked like a collection of eggs from all different kinds of birds. I was sitting there, alone at one of the big tables in the snack bar, plucking the Spanish guitar that someone had given me in exchange for an art school drawing. She introduced herself.

"I think we should get to know each other," she said.

I said, "What for?"

She drove an oval car, an Anerican Motors Pacer. It looked like an egg on wheels, like something hatched rather than built. Ourania's egg-like quality should have made her seem cute to me, since eggs are cute. But it only made her that much more ridiculous (eggs are also ridiculous). In her giant red egg she pulled up my driveway the afternoon after we first met. I remember thinking, God, here we go.

It was winter. There were still a few inches of snow left on the ground from a storm a few days before. My parents were away, gone off on a rare trip together somewhere in Mexico. My twin brother was away at Drew in New Jersey—or was it Duke in North Carolina? I never could get George's colleges straight. But then I never got anything straight back in those days.

It was strange having that big house all to myself. The day before the storm I had been sitting alone in the living room when I heard a strange scratching sound coming from the fireplace that we never used. Squirrels were known to get trapped in there. I figured it must be a squirrel, and jiggled the flue. With a feathery flop something brown fell to the fireplace floor, then took off and sailed across the room, straight into the far wall, where it fell to the floor again. It picked itself up and flew on into the dining room, where I found it perched on the china hutch: an owl. For the next two days that screech owl was my constant companion. I sat there with guitar serenading it, and it sat up there staring at me with those two yellow eyes, so big they all bit filled the creature’s face. We didn’t let each other out of sight. Finally, having failed to get it to eat raw hamburger, I caught it and threw it outdoors and watched it fly away.

Though the house was empty, and we would have been more comfortable there, Ourania, who had grown up on a barren island in the Cyclades, insisted that we go into the woods. We carried a blanket and a thermos of hot tea, our boots crunching through snow and cracking twigs. I remember, as we walked carrying a blanket and a bottle of wine, seeing through the thin layer of snow the broken remnants of childhood toys my brother and I had played with, shards of green plastic tanks and other war-game gear, a plastic helmet, a plastic hand-grenade. The woods hadn't changed. Only the games were different. Make love, not war. We climbed higher to a grassy clearing and stretched the blanket over the snow.

A few days later she found me in the snack bar again. "I want you to know that I'm leaving my husband," she said. I hadn't even known she was married, or maybe I'd forgotten. I said, "Why tell me?"

She said, "I thought you'd want to know, that's all."

Through the whole rest of that semester she kept after me. I made it clear I wasn't interested, that we'd had a fling and that was that. She wouldn't give up. I tried being reasonable, I tried being rude. I even laughed at her. Nothing I did or said could dissuade her. Finally, when the semester ended, I moved back to New York City, and figured that would end it.

It didn't. She kept after me. Letters and phone calls. I finally said to her, "What is wrong with you?" But the letters kept coming, so did the calls. I'd hang up on her; she'd call back. I had to change my phone number, it got so bad.

I started out knowing why I was telling this story and now I've forgotten.

I'd been in New York for about six months, struggling with my friend Mark Borax to make it as a musician, playing gigs in seedy, empty dives, living in a ratty tenement over the Holland Tunnel, where the grease fumes from the coffee shop downstairs saturated the air in our bedrooms, and the noise and flashing lights from the tunnel obliterated sleep. Gruesome times, these were. To pay the rent we worked in a Xerox shop, sucking toner fumes and dealing with angry customers who complained when their copies weren't straight. One day, home from work, as I climbed the tenement's twisty staircase, I twisted my ankle. The next day I couldn't get to work and so the boss fired me. I found myself unemployed and desperate.

Then a letter from Ourania came. She was living in New York, working as a typographer at a midtown advertising agency. "I hire freelancers," she wrote. She could pay up to $35 dollars an hour. Good money back then. "If you like," she wrote, "I can teach you."

What choice did I have? I wrote her back right away and said I was willing. She told me to meet her at the agency the following Saturday morning. We spent the day there, alone in the empty ad agency, with me learning typesetting code. Afterward we had dinner together, her treat. When I asked her why she was being so nice to me, she said, "Because I like you."

A few weeks later, when I'd learned to set type and was freelancing regularly at her agency while still living in that smelly, noisy hole over the Holland Tunnel, Ourania asked me if I would like to move in with her. I didn't hesitate. I said yes. By then, I was so grateful to her for having bailed me out of my crashing life, I would have agreed to almost anything she wanted of me. Who was I, after all, to turn down her hospitality—I who had made such a botch of my own existence, and who owed my sustenance to her?

So I broke my lease, packed up my things, and went to Astoria, where she lived near the second to last stop on the R elevated line, in a neighborhood of low, ugly, flat-roofed buildings sprinkled with Greek cafes. These days Astoria has some panache, but back then it was a dreary nowhere land. Even the fruits and vegetables on display at the corner grocery stands looked unhappy. The railway bridge, which soared over the neighborhood on massive, stone, Roman aqueduct pylons, cast its shadow over a park where children and adults played, and which, though green and full of trees, oppressed me no less than everything else in the vicinity. It was as if George Seurat's La Grande Jatte had been piled onto a barge and tugged to Hell.

As for Ourania's apartment that we lived in, about it I remember as little as possible, beyond its being a one-bedroom over a garage. In its modest dining alcove Ourania had installed a massive oak dining table meant to seat twelve, with the ludicrous result that on could not move around the goddamn thing; you had to get up and push all the chairs against the wall, and even then it was hard to circumnavigate. We had our first fight over and about that table when I suggested, insisted, that she remove a leaf or two. But no: she wished to impart the illusion that we entertained guests in great numbers and high style—to whom I cannot say, since we never had any guests, ever. Furthermore, and like everything else in the apartment, the dining table was covered with a thick polyurethane sheet; I assume it was polyurethane, or polystyrene, or some other substance with a hideous chemical pedigree. Sofa, chairs, pillows—everything but the coffee table was swathed in this substance that might have been used to manufacture body bags. The effect was to make the apartment's already funereal cheap reproduction Louis XIV furnishings look embalmed. In fact a smell of formaldehyde did indeed linger throughout the apartment's three rooms. This may have been from the fixative that I used to spray the pastel drawings I had started to make around then, or it may have been the solvent Ourania used to dissolve the hideous scarlet nail polish she wore, or her hairspray, or it may have been the polyurethane coverings. Whatever it was had a high ether content. It's odor permeated every sip of beverage or bite of food I took in that place.

We did a lot of fighting in that apartment. Oh, we fought like dogs. Worse, like cats we fought. Though she was quite little, with fists small enough for me to wrap mine around, still, she could pack quite a punch. I would wake up the next day with bruises and welts all over my arms and chest. She threw things, too. Along with the cheap Louis XIV furniture, the apartment bristled with cheesy ornate vases and other decorative objects of glass. These were what Ourania threw when she got angry, to where I wondered was that what she'd bought them for in the first place?

To get away from her vases and our fights, I'd take my pastels and sketchpad out into the streets of Astoria and sketch the bums living in our neighborhood. There was a group of them living in an abandoned playground nearby, that did nothing but pass around bottles of hootch in brown paper bags. I still remember their names: Jimmy, Red, Tex. They sat around there day after day, sucking from what appeared to be the same wrinkled bag. Their clothes, their gestures, the way they talked, suggested another era, as if they had been beamed into that apocalyptic landscape from 1932, brown bag and all. I found them amusing, but mostly because I dreaded going home. I dreaded the fights, sure, but I also dreaded the lovemaking that followed them just as surely as mushrooms follow a spring rain, and which was the only way out of those fights: a lovemaking that, for me, felt as obligatory as emptying the trash, or hauling ashes from a furnace. I got to hating our lovemaking as much as I hated the fighting that gave way to it. And if all that wasn't enough to not look forward to, I hated her cooking, too. Though her father was a professional cook, Ourania had apparently inherited none of his gift. She would bake spaghetti in the oven, as Greeks apparently do, but she would either burn the stuff or drown it in grease. Whatever she put in the oven she burned. I'd come home to thick acrid clouds and charred meat, and have to sit at that miserable dining room table chiseling my way through dinner like some famished Michelangelo. If I offered to cook myself, Ourania would burst into tears, equating my offer with her failure, one of her many failures, including her failure to get me to love her.

Oh, I tried, I really did. I wanted to love Ourania. I felt that she deserved my love, that she had earned it, and that I owed it to her. And yet—one doesn't have a choice in these matters, really. The heart does its own choosing, its own tabulations. Love may be blind, but no one ever said it was fair or just. But I did try. I swear I did. I tried especially because, never having lived before with a woman, I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it and do it right. I had this image of domestic bliss, of slippered feet on the hassock and martinis before supper, and of spontaneous lovemaking between sections of the Sunday Times. Compared with the sort of life that I had been living, of gritty floors and tuna out of cans and the sounds and lights of the Holland Tunnel infesting my dreams, living with Ourania had to be an improvement. And I had wanted it to work. I had wanted to prove to myself that I could be domesticated, and that I could create in partnership with a woman an atmosphere of comfort and support, a place of safety and warmth and stability, what my mother and father, who'd fought viciously throughout my childhood, had failed to create for me. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do better, that I was not biologically determined to repeat their failure, their misery.

One muggy summer evening, Ourania having turned the lamb shishkebabs into charcoal briquettes, at my suggestion that we go out to eat, she grabbed the knife from the counter and, still holding the serving plate of ruined lamb, threatened to disembowel herself. I stood there, not knowing what to do or say, wondering if this was some sort of joke. But her tears were real, and the knife shook with alarming vigor and authenticity in her grip. “Calm down, calm down,” I said, and, having disarmed her, eased her out of the smoky kitchen and into the bedroom, where we sat side by side on the polyurethaned bed, and where we we made love, our sweaty bodies sticking to the stiff plastic.

Things only got worse after that. Our fights spread out of that small apartment and into the streets of Astoria and beyond. We fought in the streets; we fought on the subway. Something about screaming at each other that way in public exhilarated both of us. There's the sense of power that comes, in part at least, from gathering in the frightened responses of bystanders. People are afraid of screaming couples, with good reason. The level of murderous rage evoked by their screams is high enough to scare off the most seasoned gang members and hardened criminals. Types you would normally cross the street to avoid, gold-chain bearing thugs with barrel-sized arms bulging from T-shirt sleeves would back out of our way, the looks on their scarred faces saying, "No way am I messing with that." It gave us a power we otherwise lacked: at our jobs, among acquaintances, over our own lives. Where fighting alone with each other at home just made us feel sad and desperate, having it out in broad daylight made us formidable, turned us into a blend of street performers and terrorists. It got to where fighting at home just didn't do it for us anymore; our hearts weren't in it. We had to take it into the streets; we needed the R train; we needed witnesses. From Vernon-Jackson to Newtown and 29th; from Queens Plaza to Hunter's Point, from 23rd and Ely to Ditmars we'd scream, our enraged voices tangled up among the R train's elevated girders.

It ended when she caught me seeing another woman, a cartoonist that I'd met and who lived in an apartment building on the other side of Ditmar's Boulevard. It was not a significant affair, yet it provided me with some respite, with a little nook of comfort in a life that otherwise seemed to consist of nothing but sharp corners and razor blades. I thought O. would murder me. Instead she packed up and moved out, leaving me there alone among those plasticized furnishings and walls ingrained with the smells of charred meat. She even left me the kitten that we had rescued from the pound, and that we had hoped, naively, would bring some calm into our lives. I waited for her to return for her furniture, but she never did, and when, a month or two later, I left that apartment, I left all her things there with it.

That's it. There's nothing more. I never saw her again. Having reached the end of this story, I still find myself wondering why I have told it. Maybe someone out there will tell me.

How the Vest was Won

2009-04-01T04:48:00.001-07:00

"The king hath yesterday declared his revolution of setting a fashion for clothes which he will never alter. It will be a vest. I know not well how, but it is to teach nobility thrift and it will do good."--Pepys in his diary

The king was Charles II, the year 1662. Thus what began life as a cassock in the mid 1400's and evolved into a doublet by the first half of the 16th century underwent its final transformation to become a small, sleeveless jacket shorter in length and open in the front, providing ample opportunity for men of the period to show off their frilly shirts. The vest was born.

Others were less enthusiastic than Mr. Pepys. In his own diary of 1666 John Evelyn records how when the King "put himself solemnly into the Eastern fashion of the vest...divers courtiers and gentlemen gave his Majesty gold to wager that he would not persist in this revolution."

They should have kept their purses shut. For though the history of men's fashion is replete with styles that have come and gone (stove-pipe hats, spats, leisure suits), vests endure, and have for over four-hundred years, longer than neckties and collars.

A waistcoat, a "coat of the waist." Who needs a coat for the waist? No arms, no legs, no collar. A square yard of fabric--hardly enough to keep warm in. You can't tuck your pants or shirt into it. And those silly little pockets good only for pocket watches and snuff boxes, things no one uses anymore.

What good is a vest? You may as well ask what good are peacock feathers? Vests are made for showing off. Poor hairless and featherless man, his rubbery flesh available in but a few dull colors, his choice of suits even duller. And the necktie--that skinny, skimpy concession to individuality. A man needs more. Like the peacock he needs to strut his stuff, to show his true colors. Hence the vest!

It was another king, King George IV, who initiated the fashion of leaving the bottom button undone. He did so by accident, having forgotten to button it before attending a party in his honor. His friend, fashion arbiter Beau Brummel, quickly, so to speak, followed suit. The habit persisted.

As did vests, growing more functional in the 1800's, made of lush fabrics depicting everything from hunting scenes to naval engagements, their mysterious myriad pockets hiding everything from love letters to pearl-handled derringers.

There followed the age of the fop, whose extraordinarily expensive vests featured buttons of perfumed wood or mother-of-pearl, and floral fabrics which, according to Constantin and his Almanac des Belles Maniers, could "be seen from one end of the street to the other." Admired or loathed, the wearers of such vests were impossible to ignore.

Over time the brilliant expensive fabrics were replaced by plainer stuff, velvets and silks of rich but solid color, cypress greens and heady violets. In the late 1800's they came in paisleys, plaids, and checks, and these in turn were followed by still more sober fabrics, until vests grew as plain as the clothes worn over them, giving rise to the three-piece suit.

Today vests once again trumpet their rich fabrics, and so they should. For unlike a suit, the best is no starched-down disciplinarian, no buttoned-down banker, no stiff-collared preacher, but a colorful orator whose locutions are as inspiring as they are manipulative: the Elmer Gantry of garments.

But a vest is more than a manipulator. It's a seducer, a set of signals as subtle as whispers or as obvious as flashing ambulance lights.

Note the geometry of the vest, a series of V-shapes or chevrons aimed downward, indicating a man's belly as the way not only to his heart but to his other desires, the focal point of his libidinal urges, his masculine center of gravity. Sexual attraction may start with the eyes, but from there it heads south. Indeed, the "humble" vest, with its trail of buttons and V-shapes pointing to the groin, may fill a more vital need than any other garment in the male closet, namely that of procreation.

As a boy I instinctively felt the power of vests, out of fashion when I came of age in the early 70's and available in stores only as a dull component of duller suits. Inspired by a TV show called The Wild, Wild West whose James Bond-style hero wore tight ones of dazzling brocades, I had my mom sew me one. With a tight brocade vest, I, too, would beat up dozens of bad-guys at once, including Bobby Mullis, who went to St. Mary's and used to persecute me at the bus stop.

Off we went, my mother and I, to the fabric store, where like prospectors sifting for gold we sifted through bins and racks of elaborate brocades to emerge with one yard of the most expensive fabric in the store, along with six buttons no less ornate and costly. An hour later I stood watching from behind as mom stooped over her Singer, making sure she curved the lapels just right.

Two days later, at the bus stop, wearing my vest, when Bobby Mullins shoved me I shoved back. We exchanged blows. His broken nose spattered its blood across my gold vest. I left the stains there. Blood and gold.

Years later, when I worked as a caricature artist at parties, I wore dazzling vests that I designed myself. I needed to keep my drawing arm free and unencumbered by any sleeve. But that was just an excuse. It was the peacock, not the artist, who needed his vest. I had my tailor make me a dozen, each more showy than the last. Two years later I outgrew them all, my chest broadened from swimming laps.

Today I seldom wear vests, mostly because I never see any that I like. The referees of fashion can't seem to get it right. Vests shouldn't be loose-fitting or boxy. They should slim the wearer by emphasizing the V-shape of his torso, and should never come down to the thigh lest they resemble the doublets of yore. The buttons should be small, and thus avoid looking like coals on a snowman. A vest should have lapels; without them they look flimsy. As for the fabric, if it doesn't call any attention to itself what's the point? Not a moose-call, or a peacock dance, but more than a stage-whisper. The same fabric should be used front and back, black satin backs being a concession to cheapskates aware that backs wear faster than fronts, but since vests these days are worn often without jackets, they should look good from all directions. Finally, vests should never be made of recycled neckties, washable paper, or canceled American Express cards.

And remember: leave the bottom button undone. Who are we to argue with kings?

The Great American Diner

2009-03-31T06:19:00.000-07:00

Of the American diner Henry Miller wrote, “Everything is at its worst in this type of eating place.” We must allow Henry his verve, but need not accede to his accuracy. For if everything is at its worst at the diner, it is also at its best. Best, that is, in the American sense of the word.

Meaning not subtle or shy or in modest quantities. Whether a slice of apple pie or a t-bone steak or a bottomless cup of thick black coffee, it is robust, it is big, it will fill your belly and put hair on your chest and send you back on the road to wherever you're going (or think you're going) feeling like you never left home, or, for that matter, have been anywhere beyond than the huge, brawling, un-pin-downable network of greasy truck stops and gloomy gas stations snared in a harness of highways, biways, thruways, freeways, parkways, and superhighways that we who live here call America, as in the United States.

Not all Americans drive trucks, of course, but in our hearts we're all truck-drivers, renegades, mavericks, cowboys. We get on those highways and start driving and next thing you know, we're looking for a place to eat. Like the real cowboys they once served the chuck wagons are gone; so are most of the orange-gabled HoJos. Our only surviving hope is the diner.

I speak of those gleaming stainless-steel, streamlined wonders along the highway (even if they're not alongside a highway, they ought to be), shining brightly as if fresh from silicon molds, trying (but not exactly succeeding) to look like Pullman cars; since that's what they used to be, back in old days when two-bit entrepreneurs fashioned greasy spoons from discarded rolling stock. Rip out passenger seats, add a counter, stools and griddle, pour in a hundred gallons of liquefied lard and voila: Restaurantus Americanus.

You’ve been there. As a boy you spun on the stools, kicking the chin of the trucker next to you, who gave you your first bona fide dirty look. As a teenager you had your first slice of apple pie a la mode there, the one in the glass and chrome hat box? No mere apple pie, but a patriotic metaphor: Land of the Free; Home of the Brave. And though not exactly free, at fifty cents it was a bargain.

As for brave, you had be brave to order it, having no idea how long it had been sitting there, turning to rubber in its glass tomb.

But you had to be brave anyway, since America was a dangerous place back in those frontier duck-and-cover days when the Federal Highway System was born, a land of hungry refugess looking to stake a claim, willing to die and kill for one, and hungry, too. Dreaming of fallout shelters and ketchup (“catsup”) bottles lined up in rows.

A young man on lunch break from your very first job, you flirted with the waitress, Margie, Connie, Jan or Meg. For her time stood still: so long as she wore too much mascara and called you Dearest or Honeybuns or Sweetheart, chewed Juicy Fruit, and stowed an abbreviated pencil behind her ear--all was okiedokie with the world. She was your surrogate mom. She was everyone's surrogate mom. And the country had an Edible Complex. Oh what longings, appropriate and otherwise, Meg could inspire while dishing out two over easy whiskey down and a burger with fries.

Now you've grown older, beyond those fine ketchup-slathered truckdriving days. You stand and wait for a booth, hang your coat neatly on a brass hook, search in vain for a seat neither split nor sticky with duct tape, and study the superlaminated menu as if you didn't know everything on it by heart, order a tuna salad instead of a burger (opting for mercury poisoning versus cholesterol). Sit back, or slump forward, read the newspaper, follow the headlines. As she stoops over your wife the waitress dares still to call you honey: for it means nothing now, an appellation as hollow as God in the mouth of an atheist. Nor does the pencil behind her ear yet point quite so firmly heavenward.

But the counter still gleams, and the stools spin however wobbly with time on their axles, and the food is still exactly, miraculously, the same. There's that same slice of apple pie you resisted ordering twenty-five years ago, with the same glutinous glob of jellified apple oozing outward. There's that peach melba, and that lemon meringue, and that...what the hell is that, anyway? There’s the Coke dispenser, and the Hamilton Beach blender, and the stainless-steel cow full of milk, and the inverted Bromo bottle, bluer than blue, and goosenecked soda fountains, and black-knobbed syrup squeezers, and Sylex coffee orbs, and the sign over the chromium register:

If You Believe in Credit,
Loan me Five Bucks

And the sacred ubiquitous bottles of Heinz: precious frank fluid, elixir of burger, lubricant of liverwurst, myrrh of French fry, frankincense of hash and egg. What diners bleed when cut.

Whether it's Detroit or Milwaukee, Biloxi or New York or the lonesome prairee; whether called diner, cafe, coffee shop, restaurant, or luncheonette, it's the same, still the same, ever and always the same; whether the waitress is Greek or Polish or Hungarian or as midwestern as the Kellogg's rooster; whether the blue-plate special is pierogi or goulash or moussaka or barbequed pulled beef w/ sauteed collard greens, it's still the same, always the same. Because the menus are as overstuffed as the filet of flounder and the coffee refills are on the house; because the tuna platter comes with a mound each of coleslaw and potato salad; because, however mightily they try, they owners can never quite spell soup du jour right, and offer pie a la mode with ice cream.

Because the diner is there when you need it, and you need it more than you know, though you may not appreciate it. For the diner will always be nothing more than a means to an end: the end being a full and slightly queasy belly.

And that's what counts, for whatever diners lack in sophistication they make up for in consistency. Just over the hill, around the bend, at the next exit, the next corner, the next intersection: radiant with wasted light, lodged in the dark underbelly of the American dream. Through times good and bad, the diner will always be there (we hope): a beacon of comfort and familiarity in the limitless, highway-crossed, desolate American night. To warm and feed you; to fill your stomach and empty our bladder. But mainly to make you feel like you know where you are, wherever you happen to be, despite never having been there ever before: a place where you feel as if you’ve come back where you belong.

The Diner: America's home away from home.

Cheever's Basement

2009-03-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

I heard or was told by someone not long ago that John Cheever wrote the bulk of his short stories in the boiler room of a midtown office building, where he had contrived to set up a little office for himself, presumably with a desk, lamp, and a bottle of whatever liquor he preferred. Since then it has become almost impossible for me to read his work without being distracted by an image of Cheever in tie and shirtsleeves bent over his dark, gloomy desk, composing in longhand on a legal pad with a big, burly black fellow (straight out of an early Eugene O’Neill play) stoking a furnace somewhere in the stygian darkness surrounding him.

The image is especially distracting given Cheever’s subject matter, those tame Westchester suburbs and cool Cape Cod seascapes, not to speak of the cool characters inhabiting them, people whose concept of Dionysian ecstasy is a game of charades in the living room or Scrabble on the sun deck (augmented, to be sure, by another round of cocktails). At first it’s impossible to reconcile these two images—Cheever’s boiler-room Inferno and the sunny world populated by pale faces and witty cocktail shakers. Furthermore, there is that devilish look on Cheever’s perspiring, concentrated face (which he mops every so often with a monogrammed handkerchief) as he leans over his writing tablet, the look of someone sadistically clairvoyant when it comes to human failings and shortcomings, a man who knows the people he writes about so well that he can predict the exact time and circumstances of each of their sad deaths, not to mention when they will pour themselves their next drink. He’s a frightening entity, this devil-author in his brimstone-stinking cave, scribbling away while the civilized world tears itself to bits above him.

Don’t get me wrong. I love these stories, and love the way Cheever writes. There’s beauty in just about every one of his sentences, which seem less written sometimes than pulled from the sky. E.M. Forester talks about the need for both flat and round characters in fiction, but none of Cheever’s characters are flat. Even the maid who answers the door and waters her boss’s gin is given her fully dimensional due. One gets the feeling that, whatever original impulses may have given rise to his stories, Cheever cannot resist applying the full force of his satanically clairvoyant powers to every single character his pencil touches in its careening subterranean journey.

Indeed, there are moments in “The Sorrows of Gin” where he seems to forget, or at least not to give that much of a damn, whose story he’s telling. Cheever’s omniscience is omnivorous: it consumes anything it touches: children, household servants, even pets—in his hands even the landscape itself, his “verd stone” colored seas and glinting swimming pools, are not exempt from empathy, or its evil twin cousins: complicity and condescension. One feels these people doomed by their affluent trappings, by the sunny porches and brine-pickled summer homes poised to plop into the sea. Oh these poor doomed sunny families and their gin-soaked sorrows. Oh what can we do for them, when the sun has gone down, after the last drink has been poured? And why, when he gets near the end of a story, does Cheever almost always swoon, his sentences mounting into a feverish Whitmanesque rhapsody heralded more often than not by the obtrusive entrance of the anachronistic “Oh”? And when he does swoon, when he opens his mouth to catch a last, dizzy breath before the brain-cells start their gasp, shaping it into that wide, oxygenated “Oh”, we can be pretty sure then that the plot will be the first thing that all that excess oxygen burns, that Cheever, in his swoon, will forget whatever particular story he has set out to tell, to wax generally about “men such as this” and “women such as that” and the “obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless”—true, true, oh so true, and so generic you could end any story on such grace notes.

Some writers abandon their stories, pull the red emergency handle and bail. Some drive a stake through their stories’ hearts. Not Cheever. He gets so moved by his own characters he has something along the lines of a literary orgasm, gives a last resounding howl and dead faints.

That’s not a complaint; I’m not even sure it’s a criticism. I love these stories. And even as they disappoint me their endings thrill.

One more thing. As hard as it is for me to read these stories now without the double vision of Cheever in his underground man’s bunker, it’s just as hard not to see the ghost of Frederick March hounding his suburban husband characters, accosting the maid for sacking his gin, or Colleen Dewhurst as the backgammon playing, brandy-nipping WASP matriarch. Not Cheever’s fault, I’m sure, but the fault of life (and movies) imitating art. But even if some of his characters have become archetypes, and his stories are less devilish for it, still, who won’t forgive anything of an author who has the sea say, “Vale, vale.”

Count on a Murderer for a Fancy Prose Style

2009-03-23T04:44:00.000-07:00

The plot of Lolita, to the extent that one exists, is about the contest between poetry and prose, between style and substance. Hear me out on this. I’ll focus first on the book’s style, specifically those moments where author Nabokov, through his narrator Humbert Humbert, calls attention to his own use of language, whether directly through parenthetical asides, or through the use of elaborate puns, gestures, and/or invented words and phrases.

To point out stylistic flourishes in Lolita is (to warp a cliché, as H.H. is so very fond of doing) like shooting schools of bright purple fish in a barrel. Just about every line of Lolita holds some stylistic flourish, and with its profusion of subordinate clauses, its raised-eyebrow semicolons, its profusion of parenthetical asides and italicized French (mon dieux!) the book is often more pleasing to the ears than to the eyes, which grow weary under the weight of such prosaic richness. This sort of writing demands to be heard, specifically in the voice of an “aging” European intellectual with a posh mid-Atlantic accent and mobile features who happens, incidentally, to be a pederast.

I begin my annotation on page 43 of my text (Vintage International Paperback) with the 2nd paragraph, the one that begins, “Monday—Delectatio morosa. I spend my doleful days in dumps and dolors.” That last line, so encrusted with puns, alliteration and double entendres, could easily be borrowed from the allusive rag and bone shop of Finnegan’s Wake. I ask myself: what’s Humbert/Nabokov up to, what’s his game? Is this meant to charm, disarm? How does the use of such self-conscious stylistic language achieve, or subvert, his end, which, I take it, is to get the reader to ingest the 300 some-odd page confession of a child molester? Nabokov says it himself: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Yes, but why? Does the fancy style make Humbert easier to swallow? Or is it a decoy designed to call the reader’s attention away from the disgusting facts? Am I being seduced?

Page 58: “The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl.” It’s a good description; a great description. But not the kind that goes down like clear water, leaving the reader only with the intended image: a magazine splayed across a carpet, and not—as here—a flurry of winged words flapping their feathers, so the dazzled reader must stop for a moment and rub his eyes before seeing a magazine again, and not a duck or a chicken. This is description not as depiction but as a form of distraction, not meant to help the reader see but to dazzle and deflect the reader’s sight. This is showing off.

Humbert makes a good case for his own decency, this man who (pg. 62) steals “the honey of a spasm without spoiling the morals of a minor” and later (pg. 63), “I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child.” He doesn’t tell us, of course, to what end he intends to protect it. But he tells us in language as sweet with its own honey, language that Humbert fondles and caresses and holds out to the reader for his or her own delectation just as he holds Lolita (the book, not the nymphette) out to us, for us to slobber over, to make us complicit in his crime. If we hold Humbert guilty of child abuse, then we must as surely hold him guilty of a mannered style. But if, on the other hand, we not only forgive his mannerisms but allow ourselves to be seduced and to even gain pleasure from them, then we must also forgive him his other crime. This, I think, is the method of Humbert’s madness, also a possibly key to the style of Lolita. His two wrongs (snobbishness and pederasty) may make a right, if only by nullifying each other.

Later (page 71) “. . .I might blackmail—no, that is too strong a word— mauvemail big Haze into letting me. . .” Here Humbert goes to extremes to demonstrate his passion for accuracy, le mot juste, even to coining his own terms when existing ones won’t do. But Humbert also knows he’s making us laugh, and that, I suspect, is his true aim, to get us to see what a (to borrow a phrase) “charming bugger” he is. Here, let me freshen your snifter—just a dram. It goes without saying that a man so playfully exacting with language wouldn’t harm a little girl, would he? Here, let me kiss your skinned knee.

Further down the same page; “the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman. It is with great effort of will that in this memoir I have managed to tune my style to the tone of the journal that I kept when Mrs. Haze was to me but an obstacle.” And later, ending the same paragraph, “But I am no poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.” The point is arguable, since only a very fine line divides the skillful stylist and the poet, and often they’re indistinguishable. And anyway our narrator is being coy, since he’s nothing if not a poet. “Poets never kill,” we’re told later, on page 88, in the same passage where Humbert throws his hands in the air and declares on behalf of all pederasts, “We are not sex fiends!” In either case he dost protest too much. No wonder poets are distrusted. To be sure Humbert is a fiend, a fiend for the English language.

Of course the poet’s main aim is to tell the truth, while the stylist may —inadvertently or not—deceive. But Humbert does tell the truth, factually, but in words that are so beguiling we hardly notice, at times, the truth that we’re being told. When it comes to language, even more than when it comes to nymphets, Humbert is a voracious seducer, a man with little self-control or restraint: he cannot help himself.

But with respect to style this may be in his favor. Were Humbert any more humble, any less determined to arouse through the snobbishness of his prose an antipathy so thorough it would survive a “not guilty” verdict by any number of juries, then his readers (the real jurors) would really hate him. As it is, we must choose between our strongest antipathies. Indeed, Humbert is as defensive of his literary style as of his sexual predilections.

Pg. 77: “(to prolong these Proustian intonations)”. Humbert’s style is riddled with parenthetical asides like this, often embodying some form of internal literary self-policing, to remind his reader that, if he’s behaving badly, that is, if he’s going too far, he knows it. Not only does he know it, he’ll be the first to tell us he’s doing so. I know I’m pompous; I’m so pompous I can apologize pompously for being pompous. Often parenthetical asides are used to tell us exactly how to read a line, even how to punctuate or typeset “(underlined twice)” it. These days most authors consider parenthesis eyesores, to be avoided. But like so many aspects of Nabokov’s style, I think he wants to poke you in the eye with his parenthesis, to interrupt the narrative flow, to call attention to the scrim, the artifice of words.

Literary slumming. Often Humbert bursts into “common folk talk,” as on Page 87 where he writes, “But what d’ye know, folks. . .” This refined European sensibility dipping his toe now and then into the reeking muck of the vurnacular, just as he dips other parts of himself into pedestrian little girls. The whole book, after all, is about a refined gentleman’s slumming, literally and sexually, in America, wallowing in its neon-tinged highway gutters, fascinated by its homely giddiness and grit. Often, reading this book, I’m aware that America is Humbert’s real nymphet, only he’s the one losing his virginity to it, having his cherry popped (so to speak). He’s certainly as in love with the landscape that floats past the windows of his car as with the girl in the passenger seat beside him (a passing truck’s break lights: “backside carbuncles pulsating”). . .The more I read, the more clearly a triumvirate of obsessions comes into focus: a certain type of pubescent girl, America, the English (American) language: each tempting in its own way; each in its own way dangerous; each in its own way potentially damning. In the end, Humbert’s love for the English language will seduce, trap, and betray him as surely as Lolita; he will make his own bed out of words and lie in it, this fancy talking sexual deviant, this stilted orally-fixated predator, this intellectual European snob come to our shores to rape our little girls. Inarticulate American brutes and blockheads, feel vindicated! This guy with all his fancy talk makes y’all look good!

But it’s the English language which we think of as our own—as our innocent child—that’s been ravaged. Left alone in a room with her, Humbert’s fingers fondle and probe mercilessly. What’s that lump there? An adverb. Supposing we stick it here. And that adjective, let’s stick that there, thus.

The real object of these pages is no pubescent girl, but the American language and landscape, still virginal to Nabokov, as fresh, as untouched and untainted as any brown-skinned nymphet.

To return ("by a commodius vicus of recirculation") to my original premise: Humbert, the poet-seducer, in love with his new language, must seduce her away from Plot, spelled with a Q, as in Quilty, the Dramatist. A tug of war ensues, a cross-country battle, an interstate chess match (quilt = chess board = patches of cultivated terrain as seen from the sky) of wits and wills with Quilty in pursuit of Humbert, insisting that he release his drunken grip on Lolita (language: trippingly off the tongue) and deliver to us, the readers, a book with a shapely, eventful narrative: a plot. Humbert will have none of it. He wants to be free to take the language where he wishes and do with it what he wants to do; by no means does he wish to ploddingly plot his way through 300 some-odd pages, but to soar away free, stopping occasionally at a seedy motel for a bout of pure linguistic cunnilingus. But Quilty keeps interfering with Humbert’s plan (to write a book with no plot), and so the contest. In the end, Plot is riddled (almost to his satisfaction, one senses) with bullets (made not of lead, but of words) and murdered. Loyal to the end, Quilty staggers through a dozen pages. Dramatist dead. Contest over. End of Plot.

Cain's Book

2009-03-04T14:34:00.000-08:00

Like rock stars, some novels are eaten alive by their fans. Embraced by a severely circumscribed subculture, they turn from works of art into manifestoes, or worse, Bibles, and cease to be read by ordinary folk. Scottish-born Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book (Grove Press, 1960), his one intentionally literary performance (unlike Helen and Desire, an earlier book written for and published by Olympia, the erotic press), is a good example. Written by a heroin user who made no bones of his addiction—indeed, he embraced it almost as part of his “craft and sullen art”—no sooner did Cain’s Book hit Brentano’s shelves than it was hailed by addicts less as a masterwork of prose than as a vindication. Like Burrough’s earlier Junkie, the book was seen as a poetic license to shoot up.

In the form of a somewhat arbitrary journal, the book (for its own sake, for now, I’ll back off calling it a novel) chronicles an unspecified period in the life of Joe Necchi, junkie, who captains a scow for the Mac Asphalt Company in New York Harbor: the perfect junkie job, since it requires almost no effort. The book opens with a description of its narrator watching the sky above Flushing Bay turn pink. “The motor cranes and the decks of the other scows tied up round about are deserted,” Trocchi writes, capping an almost homey first paragraph. Then, on a line all it’s own:

“Half an hour ago, I gave myself a fix.”

Thus the book’s two poles are fixed: the soft-lit, contemplative, introspective world of the brooding poet at one extreme, and the sharp, angular, staccato world of junkiedom at the other. On Trocchi’s behalf one hesitates to label these poles “positive” and “negative,” since he would surely argue against such polarization: that the junkie’s world is one and the same as that of the poet, that both extremes arise out of the same instructional oblivion, that special brand of “here-and-now” ness attainable only under the influence of certain soluble narcotics, with a little hash or weed thrown in now and then. The book goes on to describe, in elaborate and even loving detail, the act of shooting-up, after which the narrator lies contemplating the movements of a fly on the wall as it “worries” the dry corpse of another fly.

All of which may seem tedious, but isn’t, thanks in large measure to the fine quality of Trocchi’s prose, which rarely slips beneath the level of poetry. Soon thereafter the narrative drifts into a meditation on the state of the mind under the drug, and from there into its virtues, chief among these being that it empties the mind of such nagging questions as What the hell am I doing here?, “transports them to another region, a painless, theoretical region, a play region, surprising, fertile, and unmoral.” In due time we come to realize that the narrator seeks more than mere oblivion: he seeks total emancipation from the demands of civilization.

Specifically, he wants to avoid two things: questioning his life, and working.

And so we arrive at the book’s real theme, which is not heroin or drug addiction, but the illegitimacy of the Protestant work ethic, and, above and beyond that, the indecency of the whole concept of “work” itself. This is the heart and soul of Trocchi’s book, which appears to have been lost on its junkie adherents. Joe Necchi thinks work a bad idea and an even worse habit— worse, to be sure, than junk, which, though it may take possession of its user’s bodies, at least doesn’t rob them of their very natures, their souls (the assumption being that one’s nature is not to work, but to nod off watching sunsets and flies).

The book’s rambling, fragmented, arbitrary form is itself a testimony against rigor: I’ll write my book if I please, when I please, any damn way I please. Transitioning merely by means of sheer strips of white space, narrative gives way to philosophy, or perhaps a random quote from the narrator’s journal—as if what we’re reading isn’t random/journal enough. Part of Trocchi’s plan— the better part of his genius as well—consists of proving to his reader just how free he can be, no less than Picasso painting bulls in the dark with a candleflame, or Nijinsky dancing naked in a Baltic hotel room. Trocchi knows he can write; he doesn’t have to prove it (though he does, in several brilliant set pieces, including a warmly funny reminiscence of his neurotically obsessed father, and a terrifying description of a storm at sea—as good as anything in Conrad or Melville). Rather than satisfy the dry thirst for a crisp, clean narrative, he slakes his own thirst for artistic freedom, and writes only when inspiration, or the mood, strikes.

The result is a book which, however formless, is never without poetry and vigor. Even when waxing didactic (as when railing against our judicial system’s fanatical pursuit of its drug addicts) Trocchi does so with poetic verve. But the book is no diatribe, nor is it meant to be a manifesto. It is in fact a novel in the best sense of that word, in that it shapes its narrative in a new, untried and risky way, unlike so many books today that take no risks, that read as though vying for, if not Oprah’s, the Writer’s Workshop Seal of Approval.

But lest anyone think I praise Trocchi merely for being a renegade, I offer the following evidence that he was, first of all, a writer:

I was standing in the wind, clutching at the doorway of my shack, the sea falling steeply away under my narrow catwalk, and for a moment I had the impression of tottering at the night edge of a flat world. Then I was going down like you go down on a rollercoaster, braced in the doorway, the cabin light flooding out round about me as though it would project me into the oncoming blackness. Black, then indigo as the horizon moved down like a sleek shutter from somewhere high above and flashed below the level of my eyes. A moment later the sea rose with a sucking sound and slid like a monstrous lip on to my quarterdeck about my ankles. It was icy cold. At that moment, staring down at it as it swirled round about the battened hatches, it occurred to me that I might be about to die.

Alexander Trocchi (who remained a heroin user for the rest of his life and died in 1984) never wrote another book, in part because he jettisoned whatever scraps of discipline he’d clung to. In the end, as much as his addiction, his philosophy did him in. “Love and work,” said Freud. And Trocchi, rebelling against the latter, killed off the former—his love for writing, his poetry, his passion.

Little Gray Men

2009-02-23T05:12:00.000-08:00

In the early 1960's, before the Kennedy assassination and Little Rock, before "I have a dream," on a lonesome country road in New Hampshire, a mixed-race couple, him black, her white, encounter a flying saucer, which assails them with its spiraling red and white lights before landing nearby. Before the episode ends, the aliens abduct the couple and perform bizarre examinations on them during the course of which they discover that the man, Bernie, wears false teeth. The aliens, it should go without saying, have big heads and large eyes. Oh--and they happen to be gray.

This is the rudely summarized plot of Peter Ho Davies' short story, "The Hull Case." And it could be read as a blatant and even clumsy metaphor for the anxieties, hopes, delusions and fears of a racially mixed couple living in a still very segregated society, with the gray aliens standing in for the biological children they could not have. But the story turns out to be true: Davies based it on the famous case of a real mixed-race couple and their highly publicized encounter with extra-terrestrials--an encounter which, in those post-Rosewell years, was taken quite seriously by the likes of LIFE magazine and the United States Air Force, who sent an officer to interview the couple at their home. The scene of the couple being questioned by "the colonel" forms the backbone of Davies' tale, with a devoted yet reluctant Bernie forced into the role of unwitting accomplice alongside his overenthusiastic and even evangelistic wife, Bessie, for whom their encounter with aliens is more than freak occurence: it is touched with Destiny and Purpose; it has given meaning not only to their lives, but to life in general.

One of the themes of the story as written by Davies is the very human need to give shape and substance to existence, to find meaning not only in everyday occurences, but in tragedies such that they are mitigated, or at least made bearable. For Bernie and Bessie, the tragedy is their inability to have children. That's Bessie's tragedy, anyway. For Bernie, though, the tragedy runs deeper. For unlike his white and rather innocent wife, Bernie is no innocent. He is all-too aware of the prejudices that divide him from the wider white society around him, and of the fear with which he navigates his way through a "whites only" world. When while driving to Niagara Falls for their second honeymoon they first see the swirling lights in their rearview mirror, Bernie jumps immediately to the conclusion that it must be the police; that they are being pulled over, and dreads what may ensure when the officer shines his flashlight in their mixed faces. Top be kidnapped by aliens would, for Bernie, have been the lesser of evils.

We all, to greater and lesser extents, at least from time to time, yearn to be removed from the gravity of our own circumstances, to be free of the local earth and the tremendous weights and pressures that life imposes on us. Add the pressures of prejudice and bigotry and the existential wound inflicted by childlessness, and you have a recipe for an abduction fantasy. Like the aliens who populate it, the kidnapping fantasy itself becomes a substitute for the child this couple never had, the life that might have served as their emissary into a more tolerable and tolerant society, a world where skin colors wouldn't matter so much; indeed, one where a black man might even be made President of the United States. Of course, space aliens are emissaries. Typically, they bring a wider view of things, of a universe wherein planet earth is but one of many planets with a culture and civilization. And being far wiser than us they bring warnings, dire ones, usually, of imminent self-annihilation. They come in peace to save us from ourselves and to remind us of all that we have to lose.

Children serve that function. They tell us, first of all, that there is more to our lives that just our selves, that there will indeed be a future, and that we have a stake in it. For Bernie and Bessie, that future had been cruelly excised. It was almost as if the mis-matched colors of their skins precluded it, as if all the forces of nature and society--at least the bigoted society that Bernie has embodied within him in the form of primal fear--conspire against their taking root in the world. Bernie wears false teeth; he has lost his "bite." A toothless animal is helpless against its enemies. Bernie is physically and emotionally impotent, powerless to change the world, irrelevant to its plans. For Bessie, this sense of powerlessness is liberating: in being abducted by space aliens she feels a sort of rapture. In what she cannot explain or control she takes solace and even finds a form of salvation. This makes more than a little sense because Bessie is a woman, and a woman's body is made to be "invaded"--first by the man's penis, then by his sperm, and finally by the fetus that occupies and grows in her womb. For a woman this type of surrender is not only natural, but blissful.

For Bernie things are different. To the extent that he must surrender himself (to his impotence, to his powerlessness, to Bessie's will), he feels nothing but shame and guilt. A man's role is not to surrender, but to fight and to fertilize; to defend himself and his family; to push forward into the future, staking claims along the way. But Bernie's only future now, aside from a pension from the post office where he works, is that of a toothless spent warrior whose fighting days have ended before they have even begun, and whose legacy will likely be determined by the degree of credibility assigned to the story that he and his wife tell to the Colonel--a tale that, even as he corroborates it, Bernie knows is absurd, laughable. His life, in other words, is a joke. The one thing he is able to nurture, his only stake in the future, is as a footnote to an absurdity: that will be his legacy.

If the "children" of Bernie and Bessie's marriage are gray, it is not only because they have skins of different color. The "mixture" goes further than color. The gray here is that of mixed feelings, the gray of doubts and regrets, of uncertainty and of dubious claims. After all, whether Bernie is indeed the co-creator of the abduction story, of his wife's "child," is questionable: for all he knows that seed may have been planted without him. There, too, his role may be superfluous. The child she carries for them both may have resulted from a virgin birth: a divine, if not an immaculate, conception.

Head Paintings

2009-02-21T11:16:00.000-08:00

In my waking life, I've been a figurative painter and illustrator. But in my dreams, or just lying in bed, I was an abstract expressionist.

For years I dreamed paintings—if "dreaming" is the right word, since often the paintings appeared with me still awake, dozing off, sleepy but not yet sleeping. At first the paintings (here, too, the term doesn't quite fit: they weren't paintings at all; they were hallucinations, visions, or a combination of both) came to me unbidden. I would be lying there with my eyes closed in the dark, having just switched off my bed lamp, when suddenly my mind's eye would turn into an art gallery, with image after image presenting itself. But unlike a gallery where you stroll from painting to painting, this mental exhibition consisted of a single fluctuating canvas or screen on which one image gave way seamlessly to another, and another, with colors, shapes, and textures melding, shifting, swirling—like the flames of a fire or chips in a kaleidoscope.

Something similar used to happen to me when I'd go swimming in my favorite lake. Afterwards, I'd lie sunning myself on a flat rock at the shore. With my eyes closed, the combination of sunlight and blood vessels produced the most thrillingly brazen abstract paintings behind my eyelids, works that could have given a run for their money to any by Rothko, Gorky, or Miro. By squeezing my eyes or shifting my head a little this way or that, I could adjust the paintings, alter their shapes, their hues, even their brightness and intensity. I could "conduct" them like Toscanini conducting a symphony.

But the paintings I saw in bed were different. There, no sunlight explained the phenomenon; the room was in complete darkness. Nor did my blood vessels contribute in any way to what I saw (here, too, "saw" is probably the wrong word. Imagined?). Nothing physical accounted for the display. These "paintings" were purely the work of my unconscious, with no collaboration from outside.

And they were good paintings, very good paintings. Describing abstract feelings with words is hard enough; describing abstract paintings is all but impossible. And there were so many, and no two alike.

But let me try.

Picture lichen or mineral deposits growing in all different colors and patterns on the surface of a perfectly flat, even rock, or flowing, multi-colored lava, swirling and spreading itself across a smooth surface. Sometimes these molten colors arrange themselves within crude geometries of rugged, rough line—as if snared by a net. Others were grouped in geometrical patterns, like the bricks of a wall (I think of Sean Scully’s “brick” paintings; but the bricks is mine were smaller, less rigid, and more crustily textured). Sometimes, out of the colors and textures, faces would emerge—grotesque and likewise crude, as if drawn by a child with a blunt crayon.

Much of the beauty of these visions lay in their perfect randomness, the sort that painters, who are always hoping for happy accidents, struggle to but rarely achieve, a randomness both arbitrary and inevitable. (The closest thing I’ve ever achieved to it lies on the shelf of my easel, where a coral-like thick crust of paint has accumulated over the years: at this coral-like crust of paint I would gaze admiringly and think, “Why can’t you paint like that on purpose?") If you’ve ever looked with an artist’s eye at a patch of concrete, or a cracked wall, or the side of a garbage dumpster plastered with torn bill postings, you’ve known the beauty of randomness.

And yet the images I saw night after night for a dozen nights were remarkably consistent—works produced, as it were, by the same hand. The paintings changed; but the "artist" remained the same. More impressive still--at least to me--was the fact that, though entirely unfamiliar, the paintings on display felt like they were mine. I'd never painted anything like them, and yet I felt that I ought to paint them, that no one else would or could. Consciously or not, they were informed by my aims, principles, and desires. Something in me had created them.

But here again the word "created" isn't right. Doesn't creation involve effort? Yet no effort was expended; the paintings simply appeared. It made me question the whole notion of creativity. Supposing I had a magical button the pressing of which would transform my mental paintings into physical works on canvas. Would that be cheating? Could I truly take credit for "creating" them, in that case? If the artist doesn't labor to produce his visions, does that make him less of a visionary? Would it render his visions any less valuable, or valid?

As someone who has worked with computer applications like Photoshop and Illustrator, I am fascinated by the whole concept of a "virtual image," one that exists not as paint or some other substance on a ground or in any tactile form, but only as a series of pixels whose colors, in turn, are determined by binary values. With a computer, the artist doesn't actually "paint" anything; he simply assigns those values to an array of pixels; there is no "painting," per se. And yet effort is expended; work is done. Hard work, as a matter of fact. And a product is achieved; an image that can be shared with others is produced.

My head paintings were different. They were shared with no one but me. In fact the only proof you have of their existence is my word. If I say they were beautiful, if I call them masterpieces, you have every right and reason to doubt me. And yet I swear it's true. But before you write me off (and accuse me of immodesty, to boot), let me repeat that I didn't make the paintings; they were made for me out of a mixture of memory, experience, and desire.

And sometimes with a little prodding from me. For as with my eyelid paintings, I taught myself to "conduct" them. And so, for a dozen or so nights, night after night, in collaboration with my unconscious, I "head painted" thousands of head paintings—an output surpassing even that of Picasso in its abundance and variety.

At first I welcomed this abundance; in fact I couldn't believe my luck and even felt blessed. But after four or five days I also felt exhausted, since along with whatever pleasures they offered, each of these thousands of head paintings came with an obligation to go to the easel and produce the real thing. For a while I kept a sketchpad on my night stand, and tried to reproduce, in rough outlines and color notes, the best of the best of these offerings, switching the light on every five or so minutes, with notes accumulating, displacing sleep. I was reminded of that episode of the Lucy show, the one where she's working on a cake assembly line that keeps going faster and faster. And anyway my task would have been impossible: the only way to do justice to paintings isn't with a pad and pencil, but with paint on canvas. After ten nights I felt like shouting, "Enough, already!"

At last, the images stopped coming. I made them stop. I forced myself to think of other things. If a "painting" popped into my mind I mentally batted it away. I needed my sleep.

* * *

Like a fawning grandparent, the unconscious gives us more goodies than we can ever need or use. In his book Musicophelia, Oliver Sacks tells the story of Berlioz' "lost symphony," how the composer supposedly woke up twice with the same symphony fully formed in his mind, only to put it out of the same mind, his situation at the time being such that he could scarcely take the time to write down a symphony, even one "pre-composed." It happened again, and again Berlioz put it out of his mind, but this time with the remorse a parent feels for an aborted child. Thereafter, night after night, Berlioz awaited the return of his dream symphony, but it never came back. He never forgave himself.

On the other hand, some "masterpieces" may best be left to the imagination. That may be their natural medium, the soil in which they flourish. They don't belong in the real world, exposed to harsh daylight and the even harsher scrutiny of audiences and critics. They are too personal, too private, to delicate. Like those bodies perfectly preserved in peat bogs, once exposed to oxygen they disintegrate into mud.

I was going to attach an image to this post, but then I realized there's no point. No actual image, my own or anyone else's, can do justice to my "head paintings." In this they have something in common with most if not all fantasies:

They're better left in the mind.

Songs That Have Hummed Me

2009-02-18T07:01:00.000-08:00

Some time ago I stopped being able to listen to music when writing. First I had to cut out music with words, then strong rhythms, then all forms of percussion. For a while I listened to movie scores, but soon they, too, took over, dragging me away from my own stories and into the movies whose scenes they orchestrated, ditching me in sweltering, neon-stained New Orleans, or dangling me from Lincoln’s Beard on Mount Rushmore. That left me with lullabies, etudes, and chamber music, a Debussy nocturne, a Mozart quartet. Like one of those people with horrible autoimmune dysfunction, I found I could no longer listen to anything while working but an occasional Brandenburg concerto or two—a diet of pure salade frisée. Then the concerti, too, wore out their welcome. And the rest was silence.  

But not quite. For I don’t mean to suggest that music hasn’t been very much a part of my writing. It always has been. It’s that the music hasn’t always been playing except virtually, as a sort of aural hallucination, a CD spinning around in the back of my brain. One way or another, always, in writing, I’ve had music somewhere on my mind.

But there were days when I worked to real music. My first unbearably bad unpublished novel I wrote to strains of Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody played over and over again—to the displeasure of my college roommates, who suffered it continuously despite attempts to drown George out with the Boss and Steely Dan. What did Gershwin or his rhapsodies have to do with the novel I wrote? Nothing, really, except that the novel was set in New York City, and no music reminds me more of New York—or at any rate of the New York of my (and perhaps everyone’s) dreams—than Gershwin’s (think of that opening clarinet glissando in Rhapsody in Blue rising up, up, up into the stratosphere—like those stainless steel vaults crowning the Chrysler Building; music to build skyscrapers by).

My second (and slightly less bad) novel I wrote almost exclusively to George Winston’s Thanksgiving. Titled The Sidewalk Artist, it was the story of a successful Madison Avenue advertising executive who quits to become a chalk gypsy or screever, someone who draws on sidewalks with colored chalk. Here, too, the relevance of the music was unknown to me then. But in hindsight Winston’s spare, deliberately melancholy composition (played in bare feet) perfectly suited a melodramatic tearjerker set during a harsh New York winter, wherein my protagonist finds himself living among urchins in an abandoned rail tunnel under Grand Central Station. It was music to feel sorry for your protagonists to.

Sometimes the connections between songs and stories are obvious; other times they need a Freud to rout them. When I wrote “The Girl in the Story,” one of the stories in Drowning Lessons, why did Ruby Tuesday keep flitting through my brain? Easy: because the real-life prototype of Stephen O’Shan (a.k.a. Colin David McDoogle)—the luckless leprechaun of an Irishman whose girl the narrator sleeps with—and I dropped acid together once in his garage loft, and spent most of our subsequent trip “digging” that song (a fine song, by the way, to dig to on acid; by five in the morning I was convinced that I had written it).

And does Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D-minor go with “My Search for Red and Grey Wide-Striped Pajamas” because the tune was written into the plot of the story, or was the tune written into the plot of the story because it was in my head at the time when I wrote it?

Honestly, I don’t remember.

Other cases offer more mystery. Why, when writing “The Wolf House,” a story about a gathering of old high school chums for a comrade’s funeral, did I play the score to Bridge on the River Kwai? No idea, but today I can’t read or even contemplate that work without hacking my way through a sodden Burmese jungle en route to destroy a bridge built by a fanatical British Colonel (Alec Guinness) for the Japanese army he despises.

And what does The Blue Danube have to do with a story about an African-American caretaker in charge of the last remaining survivor of the Titanic disaster (“The Sinking Ship Man”)? Oh, yes, now I see: In the 1958 film A Night to Remember as the gloriously illuminated ship (actually a large model) steams past the camera we hear strains of Strauss’ most famous waltz as played by the ship’s band—the same band that, hours later, in the movie and according to legend, would play ‘Nearer My God to Thee as the doomed liner nosed under).

You see that movie score music plays a big part in my writing life, maybe because what I mainly ask of music is what I demand of my work: that it take me places: not just to physical places, but that it transport me in and out of various moods, something movie scores are designed implicitly to do. And so when I wrote Life Goes to the Movies, my forthcoming novel about a Vietnam Veteran-turned filmmaker who goes over the brink of madness, I listened continually to Alex North’s jazz-inspired theme for A Streetcar Named Desire—logically, because the book is about movies, but specifically because the novel’s antagonist, Dwaine Fitzgibbon, puts the narrator in mind of a young brooding Marlon.

I will end on this note: that music—songs especially—can be dangerous, especially if and when we ignore their implications. For better or worse, there are usually reasons why they are there, in our heads or on our CD players or ipods. Two summers ago, at a writer’s colony in western Massachusetts, while drafting a novel I played two songs over and over again —not while I wrote, but mostly in my Honda Civic while rolling around the countryside, enjoying the beauty of the Berkshires. Both songs were by the Beatles. One was Ticket to Ride, the other Yesterday. I came home to learn that my wife of twenty years had decided that she didn’t want to be a wife anymore.

More recently, on another fellowship at another colony (where I steered clear of love songs, thanks very much), I listened obsessively to The Moldau, Bedrich Smetena’s tone poem tracing the course of the Volga river in Czechoslovakia from its humble origin as a series of sparkling streams merging, past a hunt in the woods and peasants celebrating at a wedding along its banks, through a moonlit night and thunderous rapids leading it towards its own triumphant wedding with the open sea. The first time I heard The Moldau I was five years old. In his ratty laboratory at the bottom of our driveway my inventor papa kept a small turntable and a short stack of records, including some Maurice Chevalier recordings and a ten-inch, 78 rpm Decca recording of Alfred Wallenstein conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 1952 rendition of Smetena’s masterpiece. That the record was full of cracks only added to its appeal. Five years old and smitten with Smetena! But for me it wasn’t Smetena’s music as much as it was my father’s, belonging to him as much as the smells of solder flux, orange rind and scorched metal from the sanding machine and the lathe that filled his laboratory. Now, forty–six years later, the theme reasserted itself as that of a novel (“The Man in Blue”) about—among other things— a Czechoslovakian-German-Jew survivor of World War II, who owes his survival, in part, to a daring escape from a Nazi labor camp into a moonlit river. As with Drowning Lessons, water courses through this work, too, supplying its major metaphor. But the theme of water itself runs not just through my novels, essays and stories, but through my life. There are no accidental metaphors.

And there are no accidental songs or pieces of music. Which is to say: songs don’t lie. Not if they’ve gotten into your head, they don’t. And all music, if it works at all, works subliminally.

Whether we play music consciously or not, by accident or by volition, or even if we don’t play it at all, still, that won’t stop music from playing us.

Was This Review Helpful? The Search for an Unassailable Masterpiece

2009-02-02T06:36:00.000-08:00

Not long ago I asked the young students in a fiction workshop I was teaching to name a few novels that, in their view, stood the best chance of becoming seminal works of their generation. Among titles that came up more than once was that of Dave Egger’s first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity. Curious, I got hold of the book, read it, and found it awful (for the record, I’d very much enjoyed Egger’s memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, up to a point). Which made me wonder: was I completely out of touch?

To find out I did something I’d never done before. I looked up Egger’s novel on Amazon and checked out the customer reviews. If I wasn’t out of touch I was certainly outnumbered. The novel had earned an average rating of five stars (the highest), with enthusiastic reviews stacking up ten-to-one against those less favorable, and satisfied customer after customer proclaiming Egger’s novel the “best” he or she had ever read—making me wonder just how many novels those reviewers had ever looked into. To vent my indignation I submitted a review of my own—a drop of vitriol against the flood of unalloyed praise.

That calmed me down for about ten minutes, until an even more disturbing thought crossed my mind. What might the same unprofessional critics have to say about the books I’d loved as a younger man? If I looked up the customer reviews of, say, The Man With the Golden Arm, On the Road, Tropic of Cancer, or A Catcher in the Rye, what would I find? These were books that I’d not only read, but carried around with me in the back pocket of my jeans like talismans, cheap paperbacks whose acid-rich pages I dog-eared and fondled into ochre crumbs and dust. I had grown up with them no less than I’d grown up with my family and friends, and loved them just as much. What would today’s readers have to say about them? I hesitated to find out, yet I couldn’t resist.

I started with The Man With the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren’s 1948 novel about a heroin junkie set in and around Chicago’s seedy, neon-lit Division Street. I discovered the book at age thirteen, while alphabetizing Mr. Berg’s library (see "Dirty Books" below: where I call him "Mr. Boyd"). Mr. Berg was a parsimonious widower who lived alone in a modest shingled house at the top of a woodsy hill. The library was in his basement, in a room holding an army surplus cot and a dehumidifier. The room stank of mildew; the dehumidifier didn’t work. The books were all cheap Signet and Plume paperbacks, which, when he bought them in the fifties and sixties, cost somewhere between a quarter and seventy-five cents. As I pulled them from the shelves their desiccated spines snapped; their pages broke free and fluttered, like brown autumn leaves, to the floor. As I picked them up some of the pages caught my eye and I’d read them. The page of Algren’s novel that fell out happened to be the first page. It begins:

The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightfall in that smoke-colored season between Indian summer and December’s first true snow, he would sometimes feel half drunken. He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the leaden station house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep and lay his head across his arms upon the query room desk.

To date I’d probably read two books, both about ships and heavily illustrated. Still I went home with Algren’s novel tucked in my pocket and over the next week or so gulped down its four hundred-plus pages with the fervor of a parched man slaking his thirst. Something about Algren’s prose, the lilt of its sentences, gripped me and wouldn’t let me go. For the first time, thanks to Mr. Algren and Mr. Berg (who, in my mind, had merged), I fell in love with novels. Now, thirty years later, what would Amazon’s customers have to say about the book that turned me into a reader—and ultimately into a writer?

There were less than a dozen customer reviews posted, with the average review totaling a respectable four-and-a-half out of a possible five stars. Among these most were laudatory—no wonder, since the book won the first National Book Award. Still, as I scrolled through the reviews a sinking feeling came over me, a sense that the positive reviews were mostly by people of my generation or older, and not representative of contemporary tastes—a suspicion reinforced when I came upon this review by “mojo navigator”:

[The Man With The Golden Arm] is ponderous, turgid and lacks any sense of urgency and desperation that its central theme—heroin addiction— should necessitate. Situations and relationships are one-dimensional and cardboard-cutout-like rendering them thoroughly implausible. However, the real failure of this novel is in its dreadfully antiquated 'hip speech', a failed attempt on the part of Algren to capture the street lingo of the time ¼ [Algren’s dialogue] sounds false and clumsy, making the novel unnecessarily difficult to read. Bottom Line: If you're looking for an accurate depiction of drug addiction in '50s America, you won't find it here.

Ouch! A cyanide-tipped arrow straight through my literary heart! The worst thing about “mojo’s” review is that he (or she?) is right; Algren’s novel has dated badly. It was as if I’d been shown a photo of my first heartthrob only to realize that she had crossed eyes, pimples, and big ears.

Let’s concede that The Man With the Golden Arm had been a great book in its time, and remains a good one, but it’s an eccentric book and hardly one for the ages. I decided to try another favorite, one that, for my generation at least, certainly qualifies as a “classic.” Into the Amazon search field I typed “on the road,” and then, with breath held, scrolled down to the reviews.

The first two of five hundred and sixty-two reviews I found weren’t all favorable, but they weren’t that bad. One reviewer, having proclaimed the book “the classic beatnik novel,” confesses that it took him four tries to get through it. Some of the reviews are sharp. A Matt Martin of Fort Collins, Colorado damns Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece with faint praise, then distils the books’ main problem down to its “fusillade style” which “preemptively fore[goes] ¼ real character complexity or narrative development.” Ultimately, he dismisses On the Road as a “personal travelogue” and disses it with a paltry two stars.

But compared to others Matt’s review is generous. After coughing up a single star for the book that sent me and thousands like me hitchhiking across America, “manwithnoname” of Melrose, California, opens his review with a typographic snooze, “ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz........” —then apologizes for having fallen asleep while reading the book. Then, having proclaimed the book utterly plotless, he excuses himself and goes back to sleep again. Richmond “Spider” of Florida, having cast his own “death star,” describes On the Road as a “disjointed story” about a “dude with no background being lead around by a pseudointellectual jerk [Dean Moriarity, a.k.a. Neal Cassady] with no respect for anyone but himself.” So much for a classic.

Maybe On the Road wasn’t the best choice. Even when first published, it was a controversial book that earned mixed reviews. How about that other classic of youthful rebellion, A Catcher in the Rye? Surely the classic coming-of-age novel wouldn’t suffer an ignoble fate in the hands of Amazon’s loyal customers.

To be sure the book still has its fans, as indicated by the four-out-of-five star average. But the bad reviews come fast and furious, with Linda “Ayeldee” warning potential readers that, though funny in parts, the book will make you “want to kill yourself,” and pitying those forced, like her, to read it in school since “you can’t throw it out the window and get rid of it.” Two reviews down, things get worse, with another involuntary reader, “Cher630” of the Bronx, calling the novel’s protagonist a “whiney, immature, angst ridden teenager who need[s] a smack in the head.” Cher goes on to brand Salinger’s hero “a phony.” Holden Caulfield, a phony?

Oddly, some of the reviewers who hate the book most sound remarkably like its narrator. Listen to John Hechtlinger of Fort Lee, New Jersey: “This book killed me. . . somehow I never read it as a teenager or college student but it seemed alot[sic] of people read it and loved it so I wanted to finally find out what the book is all about . . .Well, anyway, it’s definitely not great literature, that’s the first thing I discovered, and he writes with this phony pseudo alienated-but-artistic-youth style that makes you pretty much wanna throw up.”

After a dozen reviews like that I felt pretty sick myself, as if it my own novel had been lambasted. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.

If this is what contemporary readers thought of Kerouac and Salinger, I hesitated to imagine what they’d say about my other hero, Henry Miller.

“Sex belongs in the bedroom, NOT the library!!!!” writes Jon Deepcreek in his review of Tropic of Cancer, and goes on to say, “This book is filthy. I had to take a shower after I read it. Why doesn’t he [Miller’s narrator] get a job? Why does he have to live in France? Why doesn’t he save his money instead of investing it in alcohol and hookers?” These are good, practical questions to ask of Miller’s protagonist, but also ones that fail to take into account the spirit of rebellion in which Miller’s book was written, and which, aside from its notorious (yet surprisingly scant) sex, is its chief virtue. The children of the counterculture that embraced works like Miller’s have apparently taken to wagging their fingers at their parents’ favorite authors, blaming them for the less-than-enlightened world they were born into. Which may explain why vast majority of the customer reviews of Miller’s book boiled down to three words: “Get a job.” So much for the spirit of rebellion.

Possibly a novel without a countercultural theme, one written by a man, would fare better? What about Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980), a novel I’ve recommended to many without reservation. Gorgeously written (so I felt—and feel), with a cast of quirky, complex characters and the indelible image of a house half-submerged by floodwaters. What’s not to like?

According to Amazon’s customer reviewers, plenty. “This book is without a doubt the most dull, uninteresting, and painful piece of literature I have ever set my eyes upon,” writes Karl (no address given). How something can be dull and painful is worth pondering. Conceding that the author is “not without talent and intellect,” Karl berates Robinson for serving up “beautifully crafted scenarios” via “a multitude of metaphorical sentences” that add up to “no real meaning.” Karl concludes, “This book is an utter waste of time.” One star.

One star for a book I’d recommended to dozens. I should have dismissed Karl as a crank; it would have been easy enough, since his was by all means a minority view. But how can you argue with someone’s feelings? For whatever reasons, Housekeeping bored Karl stiff, such that the texts of Catallus and Cicero (which, Karl claims, he read in Latin class), though equally tedious and hard to understand, at least made some sense to him.

What it took Karl three paragraphs to say, “Nose in a Book” of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, summed up in one word: “Blech!!!” While such outbursts don’t exactly flaunt a reviewers’ intellectual or verbal powers, who can deny their eloquence and concision?

By now I was all but convinced that there is no such thing as an unassailable classic. All but. Two final tests remained. To perform them, I’d have to find books that had been both popular and critical successes, bestsellers beloved by millions, and not just over a decade or two or three, but for at least forty years.

It took me three seconds to arrive at To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s perennial bestseller about murder and racial injustice in the deep south. True, the book has its flaws, including Atticus Finch, that stick-in-the-mud emblem of paternal righteousness, and also its child narrator’s tendency to favor words like “assuaged.” Still, what’s to hate? Right?

Of a whopping 1,529 customer reviews, the majority were decidedly uncritical, with “AWESOME CLASSIC!!!” a typical response, down to its orgy of exclamation points (with “I love this book!” coming in a close second). I had to scroll through seven pages to find a dissenter

“Picked up this book from the library due to the reviews,” Yoo Win writes, “plus heard from the conversation between 2 colleagues that it is a page-turner. However, it is to my disappointment [sic] from page 1 to page 40. I could not drag myself to wade through page 40.” Okay, so English isn’t Yoo’s first language. Still, he gets his point across. “It seems like a book with no clear objective to convey. It might be the greatest literature book as is claimed, it is just not my kind of book.”

Not a knockout punch, but no love-tap, either. The decisive blows were yet to come, like this one from “Kid,” whose staccato caption delivers its verdict like a judge pounding his gavel: “Worst. Book. Ever.” Kid continues: “Let me just say this: the book is boring. It starts out with Scout talking about how her brother once broke his arm. Who cares? The book’s most exciting part [the trial?] is extremely confusing, and don’t tell me I’m stupid; I have an IQ of 140.” But even this review is a rave compared with what Nadia of Wisconsin says. “This book is very nasty. It depicts scenes I would not care to see if I was being PAID. It’s just a sick book. Don’t read it, kids.” So much for the inviolability of To Kill a Masterpiece—ur, a Mockingbird.

I tried one more book, one that had not only been soundly embraced for a solid century. What sort of nasty things would Amazon’s reviewers have to say about Jane Austen’s greatest novel, Pride & Prejudice?

This time I had to scroll through seventy out of seven-hundred and fifteen reviews to get to one that was even mildly excoriating. “Read this,” writes Ikaro Silva, “if the sole goal of your life is to get married.” Ikaro goes on to reduce Austen’s novel to “just a new version of Cinderella” and one that “portray[s] all women as conformists.” Take that, Jane!

But even this reviewer gives the book two out of five stars. The only one-star review I found was by Juan Camarillo of San Antonio, who writes: “From a fan of IMMANUEL KANT, this was too boring.” Juan proceeds: “I had to study the Diamond Sutra and the Book of Job to get the vapid feeling out of my head." Juan then quotes another reviewer who had written, “as Blake saw the world in a grain of sand, so did Austen see the world in a drawing room.” To which Jake responds, “There is a vast difference in seeing the world in a drawing room and thinking that the world IS a drawing room.”

What strikes me about even the most outrageous of these reviews is that they all hold some truth, if only the truth of one reader’s experience, and novels are meant to be experienced intimately, by individuals, not en masse. And just because the views expressed are those of a minority doesn’t make them any less valid. Nor can they be written off as the opinions of amateurs, since by and large novels are written for amateurs, not for critics.

And I also have to confess to taking some comfort—and even a certain twisted pride—in the fact that great works are as subject to censure as my own modest performances: a fact that makes it possible, through the following syllogism, for me to equate my work with theirs:

Major Premise: All great works are subject to criticism

Minor Premise: My work is subject to criticism

Conclusion: My work is great

On the other hand there’s something undeniably upsetting about having your favorite books flogged in public, even if the flogging is administered by one or two cranky dissenters amid throngs of rabid devotees. As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out with characteristic wit, a critic laying into a novel is like someone putting on a full suit of armor to attack a banana split.

Still, ours is a democracy where—so far, anyway, at least about harmless things like works of art—people are still free to say what they think. That leaves works of fiction not only open to interpretation, but subject to opinion. What touches one reader may injure, offend or bore another. So it goes.

That said, though a novel may be subject to opinion, its greatness isn’t. That masterpieces exist is all the evidence we have against artistic relativism, but it’s damning evidence. The quality of a work of art isn’t a matter of opinion any more than the shape of a snowflake or the smell of rotten eggs: it simply is. And like those who so freely give them, opinions come and go. But masterpieces endure. In the end the only stars that matter are those cast by time.

Meanwhile, since we have no choice, we should welcome the opinions of others—even if we have to take them with a Taj Mahal-sized grain of salt. And remind ourselves, while doing so, of the immortal words of G. C. Lichtenburg:

“A book is a mirror. If an ass looks into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

John Hoyer Updike, 1932 - 2009

2009-01-31T07:42:00.000-08:00

How sad to learn that writing and publishing 60 books—many superb—does not make one immortal. He never won the Nobel Prize. He didn't need to. The quality of his best work will carry him. His plots weren't memorable; unlike Dickens or even Steven King, he was no great story teller. He will be remembered mostly for the textures he created with words, and for the ideas, acute observations, and feelings those words carried. At his best he could wrap a feeling in language better than any living American writer. At his worst be overdid it. As his contemporary Norman Mailer complained in Advertisements for Myself, "[Updike], like many good young writers before him, does not know exactly what to do when action lapses, and so he cultivates his private vice, he writes." But observe how gorgeously Updike abuses his talent. Listen to him here, for instance, describing an encounter with a box of cough drops in Grand Central Station:

Coughdrop Hill took its name from its owner, whose coughdrops (“SICK? Suck an ESSICK!”) were congealed by the million in an Alton factory that flavored whole blocks of the city with the smell of menthol. They sold, in their little tangerine-colored boxes, throughout the East; the one time in my life I had been to Manhattan, I had been astonished to find, right in the throat of Paradise, on a counter in Grand Central Station, a homely ruddy row of them . . . In disbelief I bought a box. Sure enough, on the back, beneath an imposing miniature portrait of the factory, the fine print stated MADE IN ALTON, PA. And the box, opened, released the chill, ectoplasmic smell of Brubaker Street. The two cities of my life, the imaginary and the actual, were superimposed; I had never dreamed that Alton could touch New York. I put a coughdrop into my mouth to complete this delicious confusion and concentric penetration; my teeth sweetened and at the level of my eyes, a hollow mile beneath the ceiling that on an aqua sky displayed the constellations with sallow electric stars, my father’s yellow-knuckled hands wrung together nervously through my delay. I ceased to be impatient with him and became an anxious as he to catch the train home.

If this be sinning, then give me chastity, by all means—but not yet! Here is a writer who could make the paint on the side of a slowly passing truck seem to "weather in transit" in its slowness. There are countless moments like this in Updike's prose. It's the kind of writing you read for the sentences, and maybe the paragraphs, rather than for the scenes, chapters, and stories.

I watched a long cable television interview recently with Updike its subject and wherein viewers were allowed to phone in with comments and questions. One of the callers, after praising Updike's refusal to damn President Bush and his administration (a Republican, clearly) and noting the "technical perfection" of his work, went on to add "however" and to say that he found Updike's entire ouvre "boring." Mr. Updike sat with a bemused yet still painful look on his face, and then, when the caller had finished, said something to the effect that luckily for readers there were a great many books of all kinds to choose from, and so one needn't be bored. It was an extremely gracious reply to an extremely rude comment, and it made me realize one of Updike's chief characteristics as both author and man: his elegant decency. Those two words, perhaps, for better or worse, best describe him as a writer (they certainly describe him as a reviewer, one whose decency often skewed his assessments of other authors toward charity and even a touch of paternalism). They also describe his prose, at times too elegant and "decent" for its own—or its subjects'—good. Unlike Bellow, Updike could never roll up his sleeves, whip off his tie, and roll in the mud with thugs and hooligans: the vernacular simply was not in him. Stories of his like the heavily anthologized "A&P," in which he adopts the slang and bad grammar of a subliterate teenager, fail to convince: for all his wanting to get down and dirty Updike cannot keep his hands off of words like "deliberate' and "hereafter." If Updike's elegance got the best of him, it was because it was the best of him. I'm told he wore a rut into the floorboards under the desk where he worked from kicking his shoes back and forth in concentration on the floor. This tells me he wore shoes at his desk; it would not surprise me to learn that he wore a suit and tie as well. His was a buttoned-up soul. And America distrusts men who are too elegant. It feels much more at home with macho writers like James Jones and Mailer and slobs like Kesey and Kerouac.

A WASP who wrote mainly about WASPS, whose favorite sports were tennis and golf. Though I befriended him through his writing, I doubt very much that we'd have been friends for real, we were of such different worlds. Though we did share one thing in common: we were both big on cartoons, and had we been in the same class together he would have appreciated the caricatures I drew of everyone in high school—though by then he would already have been a devotee of the New Yorker, while I was reading MAD magazine.

The passage that I quoted above cost me two hundred dollars to use in my book about writing. That's how much Alfred Knopf charged me. I still have the piece of paper Updike himself signed for the transaction. At the time I thought it was a stiff price to be charged for what I saw as a tribute; I felt, furthermore, that I needed that two-hundred bucks way more than Mr. Updike did. Now that he's gone, though, I'm glad to have paid him both money and tribute. He may not have won the Nobel Prize, but long ago he won my admiration.

Six Stories That Influenced Me

2009-01-28T11:47:00.000-08:00

In no special order:

1. A Painful Case—James Joyce. Like everyone else in college I had to read Joyce’s Dubliners. I remember being touched by a passage in “A Painful Case” where the protagonist’s entire sad existence is equated with a solidified deposit of grease from the cabbage on his plate. Joyce could be gritty, but his was a grittiness of supreme elegance (in one of his tales a pervert exposes himself to a group of pubescent boys, one of whom says, “By Jove, he’s a queer old josser”; the entire event is compacted into that line of dialogue). Dubliner’s also served as a corrective for the tendency to melodrama that infects most early writing: from those stories I learned that drama isn’t contingent on sensational events, that small moments or “epiphanies” can carry dramatic weight.

2. The Swimmer—John Cheever. Cheever’s stories take the same lesson closer to home. With Cheever there’s an added element of urbanity, of wit, and a more than occasional dose of surrealism. A story like “The Swimmer” is hardly realistic, yet it doesn’t read like fantasy or fable: it is deeply gritty and unrelenting in its portrait of a man confronting mortality. (John Cheever's son, Benjamin, by the way, is a superb writer himself, and a friend.)

3. The Face on the Barroom Floor—Nelson Algren. As an antidote to what is beginning to sound like a very shopworn list of influences I’ll add Nelson Algren’s The Neon Wilderness, his only book of stories, and especially “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” where in the character of Railroad Shorty one encounters the least pitiable cripple in all of literature. Algren taught me that you can be ruthless and funny at the same time, that “serious” themes do not, necessarily, demand earnestness or preclude humor (I can think of few tragedies funnier than A Streetcar Named Desire—though Hamlet comes close).

4. All You Faceless Voyagers—Ivan Gold. Writers who aren’t funny are doing something wrong. Whatever else can be said for the truth, it ought to be good for a laugh. Ivan Gold, whose stories are collected in Nickel Miseries, knew this. Gold writes sentences of an acrobatic virtuosity that Carsisle might have envied. But for all his virtuosity his pages burst with as much savage honesty as Bukowski’s. “All You Faceless Voyagers” tells of a savage attack by an insane cabin passenger aboard a “one-funneled” tramp steamer, a tale gruesomely funny. Stories like it prompted Lionel Trilling to predict that its author would become “one of the commanding writers of [his] time”—a prediction that failed largely due to Gold’s drinking.

5. How to Build a House—Lawrence Durrell. Other influences briefly summed-up: Lawrence Durrel’s Bitter Lemons (nonfiction), particularly a story about building a house on Corfu, for its evocation of character and setting—and for treating them as one (ditto Paul Bowle’s “A Distant Episode.”). Durrell, too, can be quite funny while painting rich landscapes in thick word-impastoes.

6. Hey Sailor, What Ship—Tillie Olsen. I’ve not mentioned any women yet, but Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle was a collection I carried around until the pages holding “Hey, Sailor, What Ship,” broke free of the spine in protest of my repeated gropings. Books like hers gave me persmission to try things I wouldn’t have tried otherwise, to experiment with texture and voice, for instance, and rebel against the tyranny of a linear plot structure. Permission to try things: more than anything else, that’s what I’ve sought from other writers.