here goes

Everything is about writing

I recently finished Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything Is Illuminated

It's about a young Ukrainian man corresponding with a young American Jew who wants to meet a woman who may have helped, or at least known, his grandfather during World War II.

On a certain level, it is about how writing can change history and perception. After the American's visit, the two young men correspond about how they relate the events of the war and what led to them. The American writes in lyrical, but distant, style of magical realism. The Ukrainian writes in a more immediate first-person style and realizes the power of writing as indicated in the quote from the book:

"This is why I relish writing for you so much. It makes it possible for me to be not like I am, but as I desire...  I can be funny, because I have time to meditate about how to be funny, and I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes, and I can be  ameloncholy person in manners that are interesting, not only meloncholy. With writing, we have second chances."

I wrote a short story of my own along this line, but not nearly as creatively told as Jonathan Safran Foer's book. I do know, quite well, the sentiment in the quote. This book falls into both the "first novel" and the "writer writing about being a writer" category.

A little gift for my co-duprass member

"Reluctant Writer" certainly fits as a blog name, but something equally apt might be "Enthusiastic Reader."

Images from Cat's Cradle have certainly stuck with me, especially a scene where the nearly a whole "karass" is on an airplane flying to the fateful island of San Lorenzo.  If you are not familiar with Bokonon thought, a karass is a group of people, connected by fate or God, whose lives intertwine and whose interactions affect events in unexpected ways. The narrator describes the couple in his row as follows:

They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by.

The couple was a "duprass," a karass of two.

When I first read Cat's Cradle, the idea that a karass was not merely an invention of Vonnegut's, but also a true and apt description of my relationships certainly seduced me. Now, twenty-odd years later, I'm a bit more jaded about the notion that the unexpected influence of friends and strangers has has any impact over the course of my life or world events.  However, the idea of a duprass, a karass of two, now seems more appealing, more manageable, certainly more comfortable than a karass.

That description in the quote exactly describes our behavior on airplanes, doesn't it, W.?  Well,  our behavior toward each other most of the time, really.

Just thought I'd share...

Horribly delightful reads

So I've taken a break from writing my reactions to books by and about women. I've taken a break from blog writing in general. Now that I have thing to procrastinate about at home, back to blogging!

Lately, I've been reading for sheer fun, much like I used to do in my youth.  I see a book I like and, rather than check it out from the library, I actually buy them. Even the smallest things will send me to the store.  Recently, I read that Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle is considered impossible to adapt to a movie. I read enjoyed this book ages ago, so I recently reread it.

Cat's Cradle

Is it impossible to adapt?  I don't think so.  I'm not sure it would make a good movie though.  Perhaps, that's the rub.  The story follows a man who wants to write about the "day the world ended", that is, about the U.S. day the atomic bomb dropped on Japan. The narrator wanted to describe the way people spent the day, especially the scientists that developed the bomb. In his research, he comes across the freakish children of the inventor of the bomb, a new religion, and the infamous ice-nine which could easily bring about the actual end of the world.  There are moments of wry hilarity.  I particularly loved the following quote (obviously written before feminist studies):

"When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and comfort and enlightenment at top speed."

Even though some people think if anyone tried to film it, Richard Kelly is the man to do so. I vote for David Lynch, perhaps because I just picked up his new book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. Frankly, Lynch's book reads like a Vonnegut novel -- at least the parts I scanned in the book store.

Why is this book horribly delightful?  Any book about atomic bombs, suicide, and the end of the world are bound to be a bit grim no matter how witty their repartee.

For a gorgeously written and devastating book (if you like that kind of thing as I obviously do), try The Pearl Diver, a lovely book by Jeff Talarigo.

The Pearl Diver

The Pearl Diver is about a young woman's life on a leper colony island in Japan right after World War II. The lepers there were housed in horrible conditions and were kept away from the rest of society by government edict and ostracized from their families. The middle section of the book, which describes the atrocities and moments of mercy and grace, is one of the most moving pieces of prose I have read. I particularly like how Talarigo uses stories about artifacts found on the island to tell the stories of "Miss Fuji" and the other patients she helps. For her, the disease was arrested early by new drugs that became available in the 1940s and 1950s. Even though she didn't appear ill, she was still trapped.

Example of the artifacts: a hand-drawn map of a small nearby island. White urns adorned with calligraphic numbers that represent the remains of the leprosy victims and the order in which they died. Over time, new leprosy patients grew fewer and fewer, the days of those remaining seemed more and more finite. A speaker phone. 

Since I've read the book, I've spent hours, maybe days, thinking of the stories of the artifacts in my own experience.  Each day, my appreciation for Talarigo's delicate artistry with prose grows more pronounced.

I posit that filming a movie about a leper colony in Japan would be a much greater challenge than filming a movie about the end of the world.  Maybe someday, someone will take it on.

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?

Fear no state of mind

After a failed attempt ages ago, I finally read I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein carefully and from cover to cover. It was painful, it was fun, and I got a lot more out of the experience than I expected.

Back in my early 20s, I stopped reading Evil after getting only 50 pages into the book. I detested Heinlein's inside look at what he thought it would be like to be a twenty-something woman. The book's story, simply, is that the brain of a rich old man is successfully transplanted into the body of a beautiful young woman. The new person establishes his/her identity in the face of legal challenges, learns to act and dress like a woman, explores the wonders of sex, and makes nice with the household staff.

Now that I'm a woman in my early 40s, I'm more amused by an old man's fantasies about what life as a woman is like. That perspective is not why I tried rereading the book. What actually drew me back was that I remembered Heinlein's powers of foresight were simply outstanding, miraculous, even.

Passages about women's fashion actually made me stop reading. Heinlein seemed fixated on secretaries wearing nothing but body paint. I could stand no more of this sort of prose:

"...some days I may wear nothing but paint -- stilt heels to make my legs look even better -- yes" ...

"Tomorrow you are a mermaid."

"All right."

"And tonight. Upper body seagreen with rosy glow showing through on lips and cheeks and nipples. Lower body golden fish scales blending at waist. Undersea background with sunlight filtering down. Traditional seabottom symbols, romantic. But upside down." ...

She gurgled happily, "Joe, you're a genius!"

Lately body paint has been in the news, and every time I see body paint, I think of Heinlein. Seeing nipples under body paint comes up a lot in Evil. A losing candidate from New Zealand, Keith Locke, promised to go around nude if he lost the election. He did go naked, except for the body paint.  And the underwear.  And the shoes. (That's cheating).  It really is hard to see his nipples. 

I even saw a woman wearing nothing but neon body paint in an attractively applied assortment of colors at the 2005 Bay to Breakers race. (I have photos of her, too, but mostly from the side and back.)

Heinlein's depiction of the "Crazy Years," the famous time roughly in the late 20th century in Heinlein's fiction when civic structures break down, made me laugh out loud, cheer, and quote passages out loud to my spouse as I read Evil all the way through. I remembered his descriptions of such craziness and thought it might soothe me to see the associated horrors handled in a fictional way. G.W.'s behavior lately reminded me of the civic lunacy that seeps through some of Heinlein's fiction. One of my favorite remarks by the main character is:

"... and now we are a de-facto anarchy under an elected dictator even though we still have laws and legislatures and Congress."

Right on, Mr. Heinlein!  I could not have said it better myself.

I enjoyed the little interludes at the beginning of some sections that describe the Crazy Years. The astronauts union (AFL-CIO) gave me a chuckle as did some old, but still funny jokes about behavioral psychologists (every time a dog salivates a behavioral psychologist has to ring a bell). Sadly, Heinlein puts such prose in only as an after thought.

After the first 150 pages, I found the novel hard going. The book is dull from no action. The characters lay around and get painted, or are invalid, or are recuperating. If they are actually sitting, they are meditating, or thinking, or yakking, or commuting.

In preparation for this blog entry, I did a bit of research on Heinlein and I have come to respect the man.  Apparently, he was one of the pioneers of modern science fiction. His greatest contribution was that he described characters who took their fantastical worlds for granted. Older sci-fi characters spent pages and pages and describing technological marvels to each other. How tedious! Thanks to Mr. Heinlein, we have more gripping adventure stories and a controversial oeuvre to consider.  Did Heinlein stay liberal to the end or did he turn libertarian and pseudo-fascist as some people say after Starship Troopers came out? I have my own, completely unsubstantiated, opinions now.

I'll add Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love some day.  I may even go back and read Have Space Suit -- Will Travel.

Finding myself supported, sort of

John Stuart Mill wrote the following sentences in a letter to his good friend David Barclay:

"There is only one plain rule of life eternally binding, and independent in all variations in creeds, and in the interpretation of creeds, embracing equally the greatest moralities and the smallest; it is this: try thyself unweariedly till thou findest thyself the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances being both duly considered, and then DO IT."

Besides possibly being the possible origin of a pervasive tag line for an athletic-wear company, this is inspiring text to contemplate as I formulate my campaign. Finding the highest form of campaigning, of starting a political life is challenging, indeed.

I am not a person who seeks out conflict.  However, I seem to have a knack at times for provoking it.  The news is out that I'm running against an incumbant. I've been getting calls, not many, but some.  One caller has been abusive and threatening.  Other callers lend support, gossip and offers of help and campaign contributions.

The one troubling thing, now that I've come out in public, baring my motivations and psyche to public scrutiny in hopes of being chosen to serve the common good, is the decision I have forced some of my supporters to make.  I have had more than one person tell me that they will support me "behind the scenes" but not in public. This essentially means that they won't sign my endorsement cards and will evade questions about whether or not they support me or know of my activities.  Presumably, some of these people may sign endorsement cards for my opponent while still lending support to me.

Welcome to the wonderful world of politics.  Already I'm meeting people who'll say they'll do one thing while they'll tell someone else they'll do another, but they really mean it for me.

Well, good. For me. This time.  I suppose.

Very interesting.  Bears further scrutiny.

Longing on the internet

This article about Justin Hall's retreat from blogging contained a quote:

"What if intimacy happens in quiet moments?" he said. "I think the Web makes me not alone and I feed it my intimacies, and the Web is my constant connection to something larger than myself ... but what if something you do, something you practice like religion as a dialogue with the divine, drives people away from you?"

Reading Justin's words takes me back to words written by our mutual friend, Marshall, about his idea of gravitas, the human creature's need for the physical presence of others, the need of the experience of another person in the same place and time rather than a mere disembodied entity glimpsed through words and images on a glowing computer screen:

i'm not so sure it's all joyous on the internet. i suspect there's a lot of loneliness at the heart of the typing, some fantasy or wish that somehow one leave the web of words and hear a voice, see a face, touch a body...

At the time I read these typed out in cyberspace by our friend Marshall, I was in need of contact myself. I encountered Marshall on an online forum and these words of his about need.  I felt these words to my core, I felt the need like an ache, impossible to deny or ignore.

I feel Justin's doubts. Really I do. My friends, some of them, have fallen away from me precisely because I wanted to write. Who wants their foibles immortalized?  Most writers do, perhaps, but everyone else wants anonymity.

Marshall's words inspired me to reach out and I did so by responding to him on his online forum with this:

I recently read Thoreau's "Walden." Thoreau writes

"Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives... We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-of-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. Great Looker! Great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England's Night's Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, it expanded and wracked my little house..."

This quote evokes in me a sorrow that such conversations are to me more often the stuff of myth and literature than of experience these days. I wonder if all our advances in communication technology merely mask our lack of skill in its art.

Within a week, Marshall and I spoke on the phone. Within a year, we eschewed our public, online conversations for other forms of communication. Now we exchange email once in a while. Perhaps, one reason I started to blog was because I missed the writing, the longing, the struggle to imbue my words with life, to communicate through words alone with another human creature. Now, rather than talking with another writer in a very public way as Marshall and I did online for a while, I find myself talking to myself in the dark room of this blog. Sure, I get the occassional comment and the occassional email, but it is not the same.

I believe Justin will resume public life with something expressive. But, I'm not so sure he will ever blog again.

Cuban Situation: Now versus 40 Years Ago

In preparation for meeting former President Clinton, I'm studying up by watching documentaries, like The Fog of War that relays to the viewers all the eleven life lessons Robert McNamara learned in his 80 or so years. I'm only partway through lesson 4 and already, I found much to transcribe.

McNamara describes what he witnessed during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. As the film shows a teletype machine spelling out the message, McNamara quotes like he's done it a thousand times the first message Kruschev telegraphed to the Kennedy in the White House during those tense October days.

We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope. Would you have tied the knots of war? Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied, and then it will be necessary cut that knot. And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles, and then mutual annihilation will commence.

After quoting Kruschev, McNamara goes on to give his own reactions, now that he's had 40 years to think about it what he witnessed and to hear what was going through the minds of his adversaries and collegues,

In the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war... Rational individuals -- Kennedy was rational, Kruschev was rational, Castro was rational -- rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.

I know what I am about to write has been written before and described more clearly by others, but listening to McNamara quote Kruschev, I could not help but think how conflict and war have changed, about how our feelings about it have changed.

First, our present administration does not seem to have rationality as its primary defining point. Next, there was not a civil exchange between the two leaders of the opposing sides before lives were lost. Osama bin Laden and George Bush will not send each other text messages that acknowledge destruction would be mutual and that the powers have equal weight in causing it.

By living so long with the threat of instant annihilation, we have grown callous to the pain of war on others and tired of fearing death. Have we become nonchalant about inflicting death and destruction? There is no greater military power on earth than the U.S., even though there are no fewer weapons than before. The struggle is no longer balanced. Osama bin Laden has no nation with set borders, no fax machine in his office wired to receive communiques from the White House. Bush has no empathy for bin Laden and bin Laden has no empathy for Bush.

Now, two powers -- an amorphous, irrational one and a structured irrational one -- are facing off again in Cuba: the all-powerful U.S. who have detained prisoners in Cuba for months versus the alarm and dismay of the rest of the world.

The knotted rope has frayed and snapped.

Another brick in the wall

Today while I visited a couple of old friends who live in a retirement community, someone of an older generation took me to Memorial Hall & pointed, "There's where you can put another brick in the wall." No one of my generation was around with me to be amused that donors get their names on a brick.