Monthly Archives: July 2009

A Day So Happy

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Back in the olden days, when this blog was new, I would, without any hesitation, write an entire blog post about why this morning at 10:43 a.m. (which is the time as I write this) I found myself so incredibly happy. But something happened, maybe a year or so ago, and I began to be afraid of my blog, afraid that what I was writing was ridiculous, or not worth anyone’s time, and who was I to give nothing of value to the people who come over here other than a few words about my own personal happiness?

I’m so over that this morning.

I’m happy because the eagle landed yesterday, and because buzz aldrin, a man not known for being poetic, described the moon’s “magnificent desolation” and it was right there on twitter, coming to me over my cell phone in little bursts, like I was simultaneously Houston, the apollo 11 spacecraft and the eagle. I remember when I was a child the summer of the moon landing was such a happy one. My mother rented a television, my father was in Germany, setting up things for our move from Maryland to Bavaria in the fall, and the ordinary rules of the house seemed a little more relaxed. You knew the astronauts were up there, overhead, and that made the sky and the moon look different, more magical and possible. That’s what people like Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury knew and felt and delivered, in the only kind of science fiction I’ve ever read and loved.

I’m also happy because I’ve discovered that tapioca pudding, which I hated as a child, is delicious when you make it yourself, as an adult, and you get to eat it while it’s warm, and also drizzle it on fruit. I discovered this because my neighbor, Helen, who is in her late 80s and dying of cancer, and right now is in a nursing home getting strong so she can come home for her last fall in Berkeley, asked us to bring her some one evening a week or two ago. It is not a happy thing when your beautiful and kind neighbor is dying, but it is an extraordinary gift to be able to be of assistance to her, and to witness how a woman of grace and strength approaches her final illness. It is true that we all die, but as I might have mentioned here before, we die only in a moment and the rest of the time we are here, alive, engaged in life, part of things. And so, just as it did that summer of the moon landing, knowing that while you go about your everyday life, someone else is engaged in a heroic and extraordinary endeavor, makes you reach for, insist on, and recognize the happiness in your everyday life.

Time for Everything in the World

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Shakespeare wrote 12 comedies (14 if you count The Tempest and A Winter’s Tale) over the course of 16 years or so, an output that seems even more prodigious when you realize he was also turning out tragedies and histories at the same time.

There’s something about the chronological list of the plays (which I looked up because I’m spending a lot of time reading the comedies, and I keep forgetting which one I’m supposed to be on next) that I find enormously interesting.

It’s clear that Shakespeare’s first preoccupations were with the question of how we learn to love well — an obvious enough first preoccupation.  And then (and also at the same time) in the histories his concern is with what is, essentially, the next important thing that comes up in becoming an adult — mainly family, both public and private, which is what drives the histories.

It’s the tragedies, though, where things sort of blow apart.  I mean, obviously, the tragedies are linked by the fact that they all end in death rather than in marriage.  But they’re each so  beautifully and particularly about life itself, and its problems — with love, certainly, but also jealousy, fidelity, and language’s failure — and our own — to say what we mean.  In the comedies, and in literature that mirrors the comedies, like Austen’s novels, the curtain falls on marriage.  What’s wonderful about Shakespeare is that the curtain lifts again and again on what happens afterwards.  Sure, people end up dying, but then don’t we all?

Today, though, I’m still reading the comedies.  Maybe because it’s summer, there seems today to be time enough to get to those other preoccupations.

Here’s the list, in case you’re interested:

1589 Comedy of Errors

1590 Henry VI, Part II
Henry VI, Part III

1591 Henry VI, Part I

1592 Richard III

1593 Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus

1594 Romeo and Juliet
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love’s Labour’s Lost

1595 Richard II
Midsummer Night’s Dream

1596 King John
Merchant of Venice

1597 Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part II

1598 Henry V
Much Ado about Nothing

1599 Twelfth Night
As You Like It
Julius Caesar

1600 Hamlet
Merry Wives of Windsor

1601 Troilus and Cressida

1602 All’s Well That Ends Well

1604 Othello
Measure for Measure

1605 King Lear
Macbeth

1606 Antony and Cleopatra

1607 Coriolanus
Timon of Athens

1608 Pericles

1609 Cymbeline

1610 Winter’s Tale

1611 Tempest

1612 Henry VIII

A Murder for You

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I read today someplace that if you are a writer, you should have an entire website, which should display excerpts from your work.  Good heavens.  How is it possible that I’ve written this blog for more than three years and never posted a single bit of my fiction (not to mention the utter absence of a website)?  Well, except that one time when I was trying to write about sex, and thought, “Now, THAT’s an interesting thing to post,” so I did. In 2007.  Otherwise, nada.

But I am indeed a writer, and I have in fact written an entire novel, and a number of short stories, one of which will shortly be coming out in a fine journal (in a separate post, I plan to flog that journal like mad, encouraging all of you to buy it, so they will know that I do have a few friends, despite the weird subject of that story).  So, I’ve decided I will follow that somewhat random piece of advice, and here post an excerpt from The Secret War, which someday might actually be for sale at your local Barnes & Noble (not to mention your local independent bookstore) if all goes well.

I picked the shortest, most coherent thing I could excerpt, which is the part where the first murder takes place.  This murder occurs in an interesting location, because all murders should.  The book itself is set in a small town in Bavaria, on the border of East Germany, West Germany, and Czechoslovakia.  From the names of those places, places that no longer exist, you might also guess that it is set in the past.  If you did, you would be correct.  It is set in 1969, in fact.   The village is home to a small American military base — on top of the highest hill on the base is a listening post.  There are a lot of antennas on that hill, and a mushroom shaped hut where guys sit around with big black headphones over their ears eavesdropping on the enemy.  

What are they listening for?  Well, the main idea was that if a lot of planes started to head from, say East Germany, to Western Europe, the guys in the headphones would let people know.  The listening post is not very secret –the antennas are hard to hide– but it is still not a place just anybody is allowed to be on.  And that’s why it’s good to have someone murdered up there who isn’t supposed to be there.  So, with that in mind, here it is — an excerpt from my novel.

Chapter 6

Every night, a few hours before the end of his shift at midnight, the soldier ran between the two buildings at the top of the hill, clutching the rubber pouch full of the night’s reports, eluding the spotlight that slashed the darkness with streaks of light. When he’d been a boy he’d played a game like the one he played tonight. Coming home late from a friend’s house, he’d cut around the puddles of light created by streetlamps, passing cars, and porch lights, eluding the lights as though they were his enemies. Darkness meant safety. Tonight he was not far from boyhood as he ran toward and through the darkness on this foreign hill in this foreign place, like a swimmer moving through clean, cold water.

Before he’d come here, when he’d thought they would send him to Vietnam instead, he had often dreamed of death. But he had never dreamed of the actual dead, only of their sudden absence. In his dreams, a loved one would fall silent or no longer be in the room. He’d notice their silence and know they were gone. Sometimes his dreams would be of the event right before death — the explosion, the burst of gunfire, the menacing face of the enemy. And so, before tonight, he had never seen the dead, not in repose and not in the moment immediately after they make their passage from life into death.

At first he thought the body was a bulky pack left on the path by a soldier during a march that had ended abruptly. He bent to move the object out of his way and saw it was a man, sprawled across the path as though he had known the runner would come this way and help him. But the young man knew instinctively it was too late to do anything to help.

He touched the body and his hand came away warm and sticky. The spotlight fell across the body and illuminated the dead man, the spreading pool of blood beneath him and the truth that our skin only just barely keeps at bay our blood’s desire to free itself from our bodies, the way a weak dam barely contains the water behind it.

The dead man — for the young soldier knew without a doubt the man was dead — was almost his age. His angelic face under a mop of light hair stared wordlessly at the dark night sky. He wore black trousers and a t-shirt that might once have been white, but was now soaked and dark. The sharp object that had ended the man’s life had slashed through the t-shirt.

But the young man didn’t think about any of this until later. At this moment, he thought immediate and terrified thoughts, chief among them being whether whatever dark and angry thing was out there in the night might be coming for him too. He turned from the sight he’d dream about for the rest of his life, and ran back toward the light of the listening hut, no longer a stranger to death.

Words and Pictures

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frogI love blogs that tell stories AND make pictures. 

Like Maira Kalman and this guy. (You really must go and look at these blogs — Maira Kalman is a genius.  And the ode to coffee on the second link is really terrific.  It is an inspiration to see what truly creative people can do with a blog post.) 

Sometimes I wonder why I can’t draw.  About five years ago, in an effort to overcome that deficiency, I decided that, at the very least, I could at least learn to draw things that could best be described as symbols of objects, rather than representations of the objects.  I did it with the help of Ed Emberley.  In no time, following carefully his directions, I was producing very attractive, sketchy things that could definitely be identified as:  Lawn Mowers!  Barns!  Typewriters!  It was wonderful.   

The only trouble is that I can never remember how to draw these things unless I have an Ed Emberley book with me.  I learned this when I was visiting my friend Debbie, who is a fabulous artist, and I discovered I couldn’t produce an umbrella in a game of Pictionary.  It was deeply embarrassing.

I think I will go back to Ed Emberly and try again.  Isn’t that what summer is for — learning new skills?

In an Utterly Unprecedented Move

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I’m going to blog instead of refreshing my e-mail in box.  And what, you might be asking, is SHE going to write about?   Does she even read books, the  ostensible purpose for this entire blog?  How could she possibly find the time, so busy is she obsessing over why no one is e-mailing her editing suggestions for her book, or giving her news of her stories!??

But it turns out, dear readers, that I do indeed read, and what a pleasure it is to have that to hold up as a shield against anxiety.  I gave my camera to a child to take on a trip, so I can’t actually document the book I’m reading, but I’ll just tell you here and now that I picked up E.B. White’s Letters (with a very nice introduction by John Updike) at Moe’s Books in Berkeley yesterday and I am in the happiest of reading experiences:  thumbing through the personal papers of someone I admire.

Ever since I received my first letter from an author (come to think of it, it was my only letter and was written in response to my gushing fan mail), which was from Noel Streatfield, the author of Ballet Shoes, I have lusted after the casual writing of people I admire — writers mostly.   The only thing I learned about Noel Streatfield from that letter was that she used a fountain pen to write her name in that proper up and down English writing, which is not at all the same as the kind of cursive you learn in the United States in the third grade, because it is far SMARTER, but well, that was good enough for me.

It’s a weird kind of nosiness, this snooping around in the letters, diaries and notebooks of writers.  I think I do it  because I want to know who these people are, and how they managed to get so  much real life down in a story.  But until today, when I began to refresh my inbox for the six millionth time, and decided instead it would be better to write about what I’m reading, I have never really given much thought to the charm of the diary, the letter, the notebook.

I’m pretty sure what gets me about these kinds of things is the possibility that you’ll edge closer to the magic in fiction, that by knowing something true about the person who created it, you will somehow be invested with that magic yourself.  But most of  the time what you discover isn’t magic, exactly, but more that the person who wrote something you loved was sort of weird, or very funny, or even more anxious than you are.   And that is just as good as the whole magic thing.

Here are some discoveries I’ve made reading letters and diaries, because that is what this blog post is about to become:  a compendium of my favorite bits from the letters, diaries and notebooks I’ve read over the years.

Well, first, there’s Rilke, whose Letters to a Young Poet is not really a book of letters, of course, but more a guide to the writer he probably once was.  But the tone of it is so confidential and kind, that even though the young poet isn’t a real person, which means these aren’t really letters, any more than Plato is talking to actual students in those dialogues, it’s still a great book.  My favorite thing in it?  The news that good things are difficult.  I cannot tell you how many times I have repeated this information — usually to my children, but to myself also.  And I aso rely heavily on its reverse:  if it’s difficult, that’s probably a sign that you’re working on something worth doing.   (Except of course, if what you’re trying to do is turn a nozzle ON by turning it in the direction that turns it off.  THAT is difficult because you are being stupid.  It’s important to know the difference.)

Let’s see.  Who else?  Oh.  Wallace Stevens’s notebooks are collected in a very cool facsimile edition called Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book.  Have I mentioned how much I like to look at the handwriting of great writers?  And how sad I am that my generation is the last to actually write things down and not type them?  (And most of us don’t even do that.)  Anyway, this book is full of things Stevens copied down about other writers, because he was sort of nosy too and liked to read things artists said about doing their jobs.  I am particularly fond of this, which is actually something Henry James said in a letter to H.G. Wells, back when letters were written down in ink:

It is art which makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

And then there is Henry James, himself, whose notebooks I have been reading in no particular order.  One thing I love about them is how James would sketch out the plots of entire short stories, as though he was describing the story to someone, and in fact, you realize that people told Henry James weird and interesting stories all the time, and then he’d steal them and make something really terrific of them.  Which makes me understand how it can be that people would sue someone like JK Rowling, because they too once thought it would be cool to set a story about some underage wizards in an English boarding school and maybe they were talking about it in some cafe in Edinburgh and a woman with a baby in a stroller who was sitting next to them was scribbling in anotebook the whole time they were talking and well. ..  The thing is, you have to be Henry James (or JK Rowling) to really make that work; those stories you hear from people aren’t fiction until you apply some magic to them.

And although there is much, much more, I see that this is where I can put my favorite thing from Virginia Woolf”s Diaries, which are very long and have a lot of great things in them, but this is one of the best and most beautiful of all those things and a good place to end this post, which has done two things:  made me realize how much I love books and kept me from that obsessive inbox refreshing thing, which is not refreshing at all:

to suppress oneself and run freely out in joy — such is the perfectly infallible and simple prescription.  And to use one’s hands and eyes; to talk to people; to be a straw on the river, now and then — passive, not striving to say this is this.  If one does not lie back and sum up and say to the moment, this very moment,  Stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying?  No:  stay, this moment.  No one ever says that enough.

June Report

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It isn’t June anymore is it?  I love the summer, but July always makes me a little nervous — you’re suddenly in the MIDDLE of summer, and you feel some urgency to get your summer things done, which is crazy because the whole point of summer is to not do much, and to enjoy the not-doing of much.

In contrast, June was a month when a lot happened.  Because I am spending more and more time writing 140 character accounts of myself on twitter and facebook, I have fallen a little out of practice with the longer form that is a blog post.  So I am going to make a list of what June looked like, thinking I might fool myself into thinking that a blog post is as simple as stringing together small accounts of yourself, which, in a way, it is:

1.  I discovered this month that death and sickness, which are with us always, need not be disasters.  My Uncle Martin died early in the month, and then two weeks later, another uncle, a lovely man we’d just seen on our way down from my Uncle Martin’s funeral, also died.  Jim Berlin was his name — a man whose preferred form of communication was the three line joke,  a guy who drove a truck for a living, fished and hunted and camped and swam and loved my aunt and my cousins, who were just toddlers when they married, and who are now grown men with trucks of their own.  His funeral was a few days ago in Colusa — one of those places in California where it gets really hot in the summer and people grow things like rice and tomatoes, and the gathering after the funeral is in the park in the middle of town, under huge shade trees, right next to the municipal swimming pool.  People bring macaroni salad and five hundred different versions of chocolate cake. And a lot of cold drinks.

What I learned in June  is that small communities are rich places.

2.  I spent a lot of time in  June refreshing my e-mail inbox, waiting to get editing suggestions from my new agent, waiting to hear about a writing residency I applied for, waiting to hear about stories I have out.  The results:  new agent is a terrific editor so far and really busy, as all people who sell books for a living are; I will be doing this great writing residency with Antonya Nelson in the fall in Florida for three weeks; and no one at the remaining literary journals that have my stories is alive anymore.  I can only hope that in small towns across America people are eating macaroni salad and chocolate velvet cake with cream cheese icing to celebrate the lives of those literary editors who are no longer with us.

What have I learned about waiting?  That if you aren’t careful, and don’t guard against it,  you can divert your attention from the stories you want to tell to the business of writing.  I’ve spent far too much time in the last year doing that, and am slowly weaning myself off the e-mail inbox refresh button.  Maybe I will write a blog post instead of opening my e-mail to see what’s in there besides offers to grow the penis I don’t have.

More things than that happened in June:  my oldest sons are off to high school in the fall, and there is a lot of new teenage energy in our house, and then there is the next novel, which has to get in a higher, faster gear, now that I have come close to settling the business of the last one.  Also, if I am going to be sitting around a table with a woman who actually writes amazing fiction, shouldn’t I be producing something that could at least be described as a credible effort?

But in July it would be lovely if there could be a day or two here or there when nothing at all happens, except lying around and reading and dreaming.  I hope that’s the kind of July all of you are getting to have.