here goes

She spent her life

The January 21st issue of The New Yorker had an article about Lee Miller. The first sentence explained that Miller was a model and photographer. This much was evident from the topless photo of Miller wearing nothing but a fencing helmet and a wistful look that took up the entire facing page. Later in the  first sentence, I found out Miller spent most of her life seeking adventure in Europe and the Middle East.

I stopped reading after that sentence, already jealous of this Lee Miller who knew what it took to seek adventure and how how to one spend an entire life doing it! How would I describe my own life that way?

I would be content to be reasonably confident that people would talk of me as a "writer and photographer" after my death. As of now, that would be a stretch. However, it would be a complete falsehood to say I was an adventure seeker -- at least in the same sense Lee Miller was. I was never much of a traveler, never a war correspondent and never a consort of artists and writers.

How would I respond to the question, "How did you spend your life?"

How would I fill in that blank: "Oh, me? I've spent most of my life (fill in the blank)." The answer I first think of to fill that gap is that I spend most of the week making other people's ideas work. Frankly, that doesn't sound very fun or rewarding. That amounts to saying that I spent most of my life avoiding poverty.

I could say that I spent most of my life seeking interesting and rewarding friendships. Many of my best friendships have been stormy, or long-distance ones, or so brief that I feel I must keep seeking them.

I could say that I spent most of my life looking for another "affair of letters." Those are even more difficult to come by than good friendships, but they never fail to provide fun and excitement.

If I want to feel gloomy and down on myself, I could say that I spent most of my life avoiding work and productive and creative endeavors. If I were writing myself an encomium, I would say I spent most of my life in service on non-profit boards, especially in the areas of housing and human services.

If I change my ways now, and poured all my time, energy and passion to work, say, on an attempt to create a great and heart-wrenching novel, no one could say "she spent most of her life" on something (assuming I live to age 88 or more).

Speaking of heart-wrenching novels, I'm nearly done reading Suite Francoise by Irene Nemirovsky. She was a famous Jewish novelist in the France who was killed by the Nazis during world War II. Her daughter, quite by some miracle, saved her mother's last novel from oblivion, carrying without knowing what it was from safe house to safe house for the rest of the war. Irene spent the first part of her adult life as a party girl and the last part as a writer, an author who wrote as quickly as possible, knowing she faced death almost any day at the hands of an occupying army. Her partial and final book is a marvel.

Lee Miller had no easy time of things either. She was raped at age seven and, perhaps in some demented form of therapy (according to the New Yorker article), her father made her pose nude. Outside. In the winter.

These women overcame what I consider to be great obstacles to create lives where someone could say "She spent most of her life" and "She spent her last days writing quickly."

I aspire for a spilt posthumous assessment like, "She started out playing it safe and getting her balance. Then, she really let loose."

Digital distractions and the decline of personal narrative

A while back, I alluded to other activities in my life that have been slowing my blog efforts to a near halt.

One cause is my recent obsession with digital storytelling. The technique involves using a personal story, normally in the form of a audio narration recorded by the person telling the story. The creators integrate video, still images, and either music or sound effects. Back in 2004, a heart-wrenching movie done in this digital storytelling style, called Tarnation, enjoyed a brief time at art-house theaters. Most digital stories run around 3 minutes.

Earlier this year, my favorite digital storytelling organization, the Center for Digital Storytelling, launched a new website for sharing digital stories, Stories for Change.  Not only is it a place where digital storytellers can share their often intimate work, it's also hosted in Drupal. (My other website is in Drupal).

Ever since visiting this and helping the CDS get a small grant for helping foster kids capture their stories, I've been obsessed with honing my three-minute digital storytelling skills. For one thing, I'm about to start giving presentations, and I want to do something other than the usual, boring-as-hell PowerPoint presentation. I've been writing and going through photos and digitizing videos and making digital art to go with my stories.

So, with all this great energy about people telling their own intimate, personal stories, I also sense a decline in the personal narrative. Stanford University is now offering a class called "Writing Beyond the Me," which promises to teach telling a story from another point of view and not tell a story like James Frey.

Not all personal narratives are deceitful nor told for the intention of securing monetary gain. I'll stay the course with my brief narratives. These really short stories, I hope, will help me hone my dramatic skills.

My father's formula for satire and insults...

A few years ago, I attended a week-long, intensive writer's workshop with a talented teacher and writer, an unusual and exciting combination.  Some of the best writers are lousy teachers and some of the best teachers are not the most compelling writers. This guy was great at both.  Among the little bits of advice he dispensed, the one I found easiest to implement was keeping a "writer's notebook.' I kept at it faithfully for a while, too.

A writers notebook is different than a journal. It contains random thoughts, phrases, snippets of overheard conversations, the fragments of a consciousness.

I felt compelled to add something to it tonight. I've gone for YEARS without knowing exactly where this particular notebook is.  Recently, I found it easily right by my bedside (This actually bad because I'm supposed to have it with me at all times to capture those fleeting thoughts.)

As is typical, rather than add things, I procrastinated. I read through the entries. It was a surprisingly rich and confounding view into my past mental states. I was shocked to see I'd actually filled 15 pages front and back with random observations. The view back is especially compelling because I added a lot of entries when I went to stay with my father after he had major surgery. I recorded a lot of material from my hometown and from the local hospital, which has since gone defunct in favor a gleaming new one on the other side of town.

I laughed when I saw the page titled "My father's formula for satire and insults." The page has three columns, one for each step in the satire-generating formula. All the columns are neatly filled out with examples of my father's acerbic wit. To give you an idea, dear reader, the table title on the left column is "Find a noticeable and embarrassing trait." Underneath, some entries include "stupidity" and "exhibiting penis to a schoolgirl" (not my father's penis, but someone else's, I assure you for I was that schoolgirl) and "drinking noisily from a water bottle."

I have no memory whatsoever of writing any analysis of my father's style of humor, so imagine my delight at finding it. My intentions in going to all that work were still quite clear. On the opposite page, I had added the title, "My attempt to practice the technique."  All I can say is, I really need to keep practicing.  I wrote things like "exploiting networking opportunities."  That's not a trait!  That's, that's just pathetic.

Disorganized!  Absent-minded! Weight-conscious! Those are traits!

Now maybe I can come up with such gems as "Do you need a tweezers?" next time someone flashes me!

I'm so glad I'm clear on that now.  Guess I'll sign off and write down more observations and devise more formulea.

Consuming all impediments

As I was reading this book one day recently,

 

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

I ran into an inspiring quote of Virginia Wolfe praising Jane Austen.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought... and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

Fowler's book provides the stories of members of a book club dedicated to reading all six novels by Jane Austen.  In the back of the book, Fowler includes reactions Austen's friends and family members' responses to Austen's work. Many of these excerpts are from Austen's own diaries.  Then, Fowler includes critics comments about Austen's novels.  Mark Twain was not a fan, apparently.  Wolfe, however, was.

I'm not a fan of Austen, or even so far of Wolfe's, but that quote is wonderful. How can I not be inspired to try to devour my impediments like a black hole of genius when I sent down to write when I contemplate a thought like that?

The Fowler novel, well, I had mixed views of it. It is more "literary" than another book about consumption I read recently, namely Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats, because it leaves more questions unanswered. Things are left more open at the end. In fact, I need to log my questions about it because my friend, who adores Austen has read it too and wants to discuss it with me.  If I don't write down my questions and irritations now, I will forget by the time someone asks me about them. I will provide some spoilers, sort of, so...

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

The Fowler book was written from a mix of viewpoints, especially for the character's back stories, including first person "I" from different viewpoints and third person accounts.  However, the primary narrator was an anonymous member of the group talking in the first person.  I found this incredibly irritating. I wanted the mystery of the identity of the narrarator to be solved.  Essentially, six people meet to discuss six books. Several reviews of the book claim the participants are transformed by reading.  I would dispute that. None of the people undergo any fantastic changes, just changes in circumstances any normal six or 8 month period may bring to a life. 

Only one of the book club participants is a man and he is by far the most weakly drawn, least plausible, contrived character in a book of contrived characters. Why is he attracted to a woman 10 or 15 years his senior, a member of the group?  Why does he attend fantasy conferences?  I know plenty of people who read science fiction who do not attend fantasy conferences. Is this a stereotype of some kind on Fowler's part?  In fact the male character has reason to hate Heinlein novels.

The other thing I did not like about the book is its overreliance on popular culture references.  This book will not age well at all.

On the other hand, I found it interesting in a way and found myself engrossed in the back stories of several of the characters, such as the lesbian whose girlfriend steals her secret stories and writes them into literary short stories and the high school French teacher who is attracted to her students just a bit, still, and the early middleaged man whose sisters rescue him from embarrassing social situations and bad love affairs.

*** END OF SPOILER ***

The next day, I finished a book that attempts to set up impediments to consumption:

Ruth L. Ozeki: My Year of Meats

Ozeki would not qualify for praise from Virgina Wolfe because she certainly wrote with a bit of preaching in mind. One protagonist is a very tall Japanese-American woman, a documentary filmmaker, who takes a job creating a TV show in Japan called "My American Wife!" (exclamation point included)  During the course of each show, the sponsors of the show want to present a "wholesome" American family cooking and eating meat.  The filmmaking protagonist pushes the envelope of "wholesome" and "meat eating" as much as possible by featuring vegetarian lesbians, Cajuns with unwed pregnant children. The other protagonist, the wife of the advertising account executive who landed the beef-producers account, learned not only a bit about American culture from watching the show and cooking meat (both under duress), she also learned how to leave her abusive husband.  Both women dabble with reproductive issues and the book winds up with a happy ending where both women get what they want, more or less and the bad guys are suitably humiliated.

While I enjoyed Ozeki's trip around America to visit different families (with the possible exception of the spiritual Southern black family) seen through the eyes of a Japanese crew, and I felt comfortable with the more-or-less timeless nature of the issues raised, I felt the book lacked a certain "literary" quality that the Fowler book had. Even though I laughed aloud on several occassions (for instance when the ultra tall Jane finally acheived a level of professional acceptance in Japan when she died her hair green, started dressing as a man, and taking on the masculne forms of speech because otherwise she was considered too odd), the happy ending depressed me a bit. The author took up such a bully pulpit from her character's mouths about the evils of modern beef production methods that I felt she could have left more of an impression that one crusading, lucky documentary film maker could not do much to solve the world's food problems. In fact, the main character is hypocritical in taking on a job about something that offends her while barely examining her complicity.  Releasing an not-quite tell-all documentary film at the end is supposed to redeem the main character's past? The book seemed to read more like a description of author's shower fantasies than any attempt to call forth the essense of what it means to act with integrity in a duplicitous age.

Despite its flaws, I liked the Fowler book's mystery narrator better in the end just because I like the irritation of uncertainty more than I like a neatly packaged, pellucid fantasy. I feel Fowler indeed came through her text more clearly than Ozeki (a pseudonymn, of course) came through in hers. Wolfe described so well the essense of "literary" writing that I am pleased to have so clear a way to measure texts.  I only wonder if it will do me any good to assess my own fearless writing. (I wish.)

Is listening ... radical?

I've been reading a book called called Radical Presence: Teaching as a Contemplative Practice by Mary Rose O'Reilley. It has been giving me ideas about an "experiment in friendship." I'll quote a bit from the book:

"In order to practice radial presence -- to come home to your heart and listen deeply to others who look for your there -- someone must first listen to you. Celtic spirituality calls this person the Anam Chara, or soul friend. For years I had wished for a true spiritual teacher ... What I fond instead was a buddy.

"... As we became friends, we decided to spend two hours a week in a process we called 'deep listening.' We developed a simple formula: you talk for an hour and then I talk for an hour. We didn't plan to ask a lot of questions or interrupt much beyond a few clarifications, or give advice. At various times, we broke most of those rules.

"How does this listening work, and what's deep about it? Don't all of us know how to listen? On the contrary, I think we know how to shut down. Self-preservation compels it. ... There is much to hear, but little worth listening to."

That passage got me to thinking (I heard it in a woman's writer's workshop in January). Even though the author started the practice of meeting for two hours a week with someone "radical listening" for spiritual reasons, I thought it would be very helpful for the process of writing. In my job day-to-day, I work on my own and I spend very little time interacting and talking with other people. By the time I sit down to by myself write, I feel anxious to go talk to someone, to socialize. To me, it would be enormously helpful just to articulate my problems and difficulties with creating a story, with the frustration of the writing life, with just anything that comes up. I think it would speed up my growth and development as a writer.

I certainly would not rule out reading and discussing my work with another writer, however, I want a bit different focus.  In the book, the author goes on to relate moments where people's lives are transformed just because someone listened to them. For me, as for the author, the talking for an hour was the hard part. If I can't even talk for an hour with my friends, how can I write from my heart for the hours on end it would take to finish my novel?

I have in mind that if, after listening to me for a while, that if someone offered to read my stuff, that would be great, but that I wouldn't necessarily ask or expect the other person to do so. I'm lucky in that I already have a lot of people willing to critique my writing. What I don't have is someone to talk to the doubts, the struggle with finding a voice, my fuzziness about technique, frustration with not finding or making the time to writer, about the whole process of writing and being a writer.

All these fantasies are moot, because I can find no one interested in experimenting.  Is listening to each other really so radical?  Really?

Another day of many firsts

Today was a day of many firsts, three that I'll write about. 

New thing #1

I had my first cortisone injection. For my ankle.  It was exquisitely painful.  Also, my youngish doctor does not have that clinical poker face down at all.  When I expressed suprise that pain shot up into my toes and the bottom of my foot went numb, he seemed not only intrigued, but suprised as well.  He assured me I had nothing to worry about.

My readers think differently on that point.  Thanks to P. for sending me a link to a James Mason movie, Bigger Than Life. It's like P. knows that it takes very little persuasion to get me to a James Mason movie.  I melt inside anywhere around the sound of his voice, even in Lolita.  P. said the movie depicts characters with cortisone-induced psychosis.  Sounds about right.  By the time my doctor prescribed it, I was indeed feeling psychotic.  I do not respond happily to chronic conditions.

New thing #2

What else was new?  I picked up our first order of food from the CSA group we joined.  CSA, or community supported agriculture, lets people buy shares of produce from local farms.  The farms set up distribution points for the fresh produce in local communities.  The idea -- and I think this is a good one esp. after reading reviews of TV dinners on metafilter today -- that buying local produce is better for the economy, the environment, gustatory exerience, and health.  The buyers benefit from consuming produce picked fresh from the fields that very morning.

New thing #3

I cooked and ate chard today. Chard was one of the fresh veggies we got in our share this week. I'm not at all crazy about chard. It burns my throat and leaves me a persistent oddly numb yet sore sensation.  Why anyone would it it in salads or as a side dish is beyond me. 

(The beets, carrots, romaine lettuce, strawberries, and leeks should give me a lot less trouble.)

New thing #4

Today was my first official coaching session. I hired a personal coach.  I don't have time to see my personal trainer because of 6 hours of physical therapy a week, but I do have time to talk to a coach every other week.  So, off I go to complete my assignments (or whatever they are called.)

The will to write

I'm afraid, the law of diminishing returns is very much in effect when I work. I find that when I try to work while fatigued, overly bored, emotionally drained or any sort of other depleted state, I spend most of the next session correcting the egregious errors that crept in while my focus wandered.

One guy who used to work for me -- a person famous for a clever, clever devise he designed -- surprised me once. Actually, he surprised me many times, but one time in particular leaps to mind. I was ill, probably a bad head cold, I came to work. He sat down in my office, ready and wanting to chat. He assessed my mental state (fatigued) and said, "When you powerful people don't feel well, you just turn all unnnghh." He made himself limp and drained looking to illustrate the way he saw me at that moment.

I remember very clearly in spite of my torpor thinking "Powerful? Me?" I thought about that a lot, for many years.

In many ways, the insights I gained from pondering that moment have caused me to change my way of being in the world. For instance, I have since stopped working all night. I sleep when I'm tired. I no longer use an alarm clock. I work when my "power" is at its peak, or at least not too far gone.

I stopped pursuing people hoping for insights. I liked those moments of surprise and the guidance I thought this person could give me. It turned out he was only able or willing to share his impressions of the moments. He was not at all willing or able to do it on demand, to guide me toward wherever it was I wanted to go. I am unboundedly grateful for sharing what he did. He confronted me in the gentlest way.

My subsequent efforts to find vision or inspiration from other individuals met with similar, unsatisfactory results. My present thinking is that it is impossible (for me) to find and maintain a muse. For me, the elusive muse is my own love of telling my own stories.

Granted, it would be helpful to have someone to help draw me out (I tend to retreat to my shell and venture out only rarely). I almost think a triad arrangement is best, in fact -- a unrequited love to irritate my psyche and my libido from afar and a companion nearby to goad me. I have not yet found this arrangement, so I compensate. More precisely, I try to compensate.

My latest compensation is to hire a coach.  We meet by phone every couple weeks and discuss goals I've set and goals I've accomplished in my writing.  With all my other activities and commitments, I have no idea how I will cram powerful writing time into my schedule, but that could be goal number one.

Because creative writing is a lower priority for me than many other kinds of work, it's too easy to attribute a diminished state to my power when, in fact, I'm just avoiding the pain of creative work. (For me, it is a bit painful, like stretching over-tired muscles or like having to look in the mirror to treat a facial rash.)

Where's my sense of fun and anticipation?  Developing one could be goal number two.  I had that conversation with my friend. I looked forward to that quite a bit. I enjoyed it when it happened. I feel good about it afterward. It would be nice to feel that sense of satisfaction with writing at least once in a while, writing something other than blog entries or emails or chess moves, of course.

Deep writing

To give you some idea of the delays I tolerate in expressing myself in my blog, I admit that I'm now reviewing a book I read in mid January of this year. I encountered this book at a women's silent writing retreat.  Normally, and let me be very clear about this, women-only events irritate me as much as men-only clubs and events do.  The only reason I tolerate this particular retreat is that it is silent.

Women, left alone to prattle on without men present, too often sink to complaining about men. I find such converation offensive and not worth my time.  So, because the leader of this particular retreat keeps people silent and focused on poetry and higher feelings, I run little risk of having to leave early, for I will not listen to men bashing.

The other reason I tolerate the "women-only" aspect of the weekend is that a friend invited me to go with her. I like this friend and want to stay in contact with her. We shared a two-hour ride to and from the event, so we got plenty of talk that weekend.

The retreat workshop leader, a lover of books and poetry, brings a collection of her books for others to peruse.  I spent most of the chilly January weekend slouched in an armchair in front of a roaring fire reading books.

Normally, I would not read books like Eric Maisel's Deep Writing, but it was there and the title looked interesting.  The book itself was largely an unsatisfying read, but it only took me four or five hours to finish it. According to Maisel, there are seven steps to writing deeply: 1) hushing the mind 2) holding the intention 3) making choices 4) honoring the process 5) befriending the work 6) evaluating the work and 7) doing what's required.

I found the book encouraging in that I was further into the Maisel's idea of the writing process than I expected. My issue is feeling anything but friendly toward my own work.  While I will not write letters to my book or do any of the other exceedingly silly excercises, I will try to view my work more graciously, as an entity with feelings and a reality of its own.

The other book I met that weekend, I really connected with -- much more so than with Maisel's book. I will finish reading this other, better book and will comment on it later. I bought my own copy.  Perhaps that book would make excellent plane reading...   I have a trip coming up....  Good time to read a good, fun, juicy book.

Lovely Words

This is my reaction about reading this novel:

Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones: A Novel

OK, OK, so I’m nearly two years behind reading what’s popular. Now everyone is reading The Secret Life of Bees a book I have, of course, but that will take me two years to get around to reading.

Back to Lovely Bones. (I’m interrupting my trip diary because I need to review this book and return it today to the reading stack my coworkers put together. I actually finished reading on a cot by the light from a bare light bulb in a room in Germany.)

Lovely Bones is Alice Sebold’s first novel. I tend to collect first novels. A writing teacher I had, Ron Carlson, suggested that we aspiring writers would do well to cultivate a habit of reading first novels four times through: 1) read it once for the story, 2) Read it again to look at how the author handles time, 3) Study openings and closings, 4) Examine the dialog.

Because I borrowed Lovely Bones, I only read it through once and I made no marks in it.

Before I read the book, I thought it would be horribly morbid. The plot does sound gruesome. A young girl narrates her rape and death at hands of a sexual predator. From heaven, she watches as her family falls apart after her death, then eventually comes back together. Sebold has an extraordinarily light touch, however, and I did not find the book to be macabre or overly depressing. She choses her words beautifully.

I enjoyed the book more than I expected. That is not to say I didn’t find some of the heaven-set prose disorienting and not as well-written as the earth-bound scenes. Sebold was rather vague and free-form about what heaven is like. Apparently, everyone gets their own heaven, but some heavens intersect. Susie Salmon, the main character, had a heaven that looked like her small suburb. She had an intake counselor and she met another girl her age right away. As time passed, she met up with other heavenly victims of the same killer. Not exactly heavenly bliss in my mind.

The Susie character enjoyed tracking, not only the lives of her family, but of her classmates, like Ray, the boy she almost kissed, and Ruth, the girl she almost became friends with. Ruth, in fact, could sense dead people and became something of a medium. The scene I found most irritating in a magic realism sort of way involved Ruth and Susie trading places long enough for Susie to fulfill her sexual fantasies from beyond the grave. OK. Whatever.

Now, I can hand the book to the next person in line to read it and I can go on reading New Yorkers and getting rid of stacks of paper in my living room-based office. I liked it, but I don't expect to buy my own copy to mark up and dissect a la Carlson.

Confusing words

I was going to write tonight about the primary theories of medieval medicine, about how there are four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and that all matter is made up of these four elements, about how each of the elements has properties (either hot or cold, wet or dry), about how the property of other objects are a mixture of the four elements, even people. Then, I would have to explain that the human body uses four kinds of fluids (called humors) to live, that these are blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, that each of these fluids have temperature and wetness properties and that, when these are out of balance, a person becomes ill. Then, I'd have to explain how, if a person has a chronic imbalance in their humoral fluids, they have chronic personality problems.

The interesting part for me of that whole theory is what happens when a person is chronically blessed with too much of any one of these completely necessary humors. Too much blood makes a person sanguine. Too much phlegm makes a person phlegmatic. Too much yellow bile makes a person choleric. Too much black bile makes a person melancholic.

It's a good thing that all my relatives and close friends are well-balanced, have no issues with their humoral fluids and are, therefore, completely healthy. Perhaps, those of my relatives who look for imbalances where there are none could be assured that a bit of phlegm, a bit of blood, a bit of black bile make for a perfectly normal person, and I sincerely hope this news doesn't rile up too much yellow bile. So, it's a good thing I'm avoiding the topic and discussing confusing words instead.

Humor, for instance, takes on a whole new meaning when you know that "humor" used to mean bile, blood and phlegm. So, did the medieval Good Humor Man sell top-of-the-line bile? It makes one pause.

Moving on, the other confusing word of the day is "livid." It's confusing because it means two different colors: white/pale and deep, bright red. I read this red livid meaning in the footnotes in a translation of Dante's Purgatorio, when Dante had to climb some stairs made of livid stone (meaning bruise-colored stone). So today, I looked at my livid bruised toe (I dropped a chair on it) and was mentally transported to Purgatory where I wouldn't have been able to tell my toe apart from those stairs.

So, when I'm writing, I need to remember that "livid" means both red and white. For now, I've been reading many medieval books, so it helps to know a bit of the authors' thinking about how human beings work. I try not to be bad humored about how very different it is than what we modern, reasonable, enlightened romantics think.