The Discomforts of Diversity

Locked Horns

2012-01-27T19:30:00.000-06:00

In my novel-in-progress, two characters--an acrobat and his boss, the circus owner--argue interminably, getting exactly nowhere. I won't mention the topic of all that arguing; the point is the interminable arguing. A month or so ago, while working on these scenes and this relationship, the phrase locked horns came to mind. As it goes with the kind of writing I do, when an image seems fertile or resonant, I want to know more about, to see where it might lead me. So I googled locked horns, and learned quite a bit.
As some of you likely know, this phrase is a literal reference to horned animals and the kind of trouble they can get themselves into.

If you have those complex things on your head, you best be careful. As I read in several places, the situation of locked horns doesn't happen all that often because most animals know how to evaluate the dominance hierarchy, and where they stand within it. As a help in this regard, animals know how to position themselves just so to show off their size and strength. Any animal can see, the theory goes, who's the Alpha, and the non-Alpha knows enough to back off. Nevertheless, errors are made, and then trouble for the lock-ed ensues. Here's another pair.

As you can guess from these photos, and see in several online videos, including this one, once locked together, the two may not be able to unlock. Thus they cannot eat or drink, and they cannot move without the other. They drag each other hither and yon until one or the other dies, and then the still-alive one is trapped by the dead one, barely able to move, and so the two become locked together in death--a gruesome situation.

Here's a three-way, which I bet is not very common.

To understand all this, I probably spent about an hour--gazing at images, reading reports from hunters and others who had observed one of these to-the-death engagements, plumbing it. Only a few small details from this research will likely appear on the printed page, but I feel enriched by having learned all this. It won't be lost on you to say that many of such battles seem to be afoot or potentially afoot in this little world of ours today.

Economic Indicators

2012-01-21T15:29:00.001-06:00

A while back, I wrote a post about a a cafe in Iowa, and its business uptick (people ordering "a full lunch") as an indicator, perhaps, of an uptick in the economy. There, I also mentioned that what might be good for the cafe (higher bills/customer) might not be good for the customers and the rest of the world (more calories, larger waistlines, more heart disease and diabetes). Today, I have four more possible indicators--all from stories I heard on the radio this week.
1. Law School.

Apparently, many law students are concerned about their job prospects vs. the cost of a law school education. Complaints focus on misrepresentations by law schools and the ABA about the current career climate for lawyers. As my husband pointed out, it's easy to add more chairs to a law school classroom; it's not like in a science lab, where students needs high-cost equipment. There was a time (a long time) when a law degree was an excellent credential for a lucrative career path. It practically guaranteed one. I believe that this is not the case anymore.

2. Nuclear waste.

In a small town in Spain, described in the radio story I heard as located in the land of Don Quixote, the unemployment rate is so high that the townspeople (at least those interviewed for the story) are celebrating the deal they've just made to become a nuclear waste site. It is jobs that the people of this town want above all else. I am grateful that I am not in a position to have to decide between having a job and living above a nuclear waste site.
Here's another view of the town--with more of the Don Quixote feel.

3. Guns.

The economy in the Flathead Valley in Montana is booming because they manufacture guns there. The manufacturers are having a difficult time finding enough workers with the technical skills required, as these are more than straight assembly-line jobs. To try to satisfy the need for highly skilled workers, the gun manufacturers are partnering with local community colleges to implement training programs that suit their industry.

4. Mattresses.

A new nonprofit company in Nashville, called Spring Back Recycling is taking on the rarely attempted task of mattress recycling. In their words, they are working to "protect the environment by offering retailers, institutions, and consumers an economical alternative to dumping used mattresses in landfills," which, I learned from the radio story, is where most mattresses end up.

Each year more than 30 million mattresses are sent to landfills across the country. Because of their large size, mattresses take up considerable space and can take decades to decompose. Additionally, mattress springs frequently get caught in bulldozers, loaders, and trucks causing extensive damage.

The mattresses are broken down into raw materials such as cotton, metal, wood, and foam. Each of these component parts is bundled and sold to area scrap buyers to be reused in other applications.

Equally impressive, Spring Back employs previously incarcerated and homeless men to do this work.

We can all draw our own conclusions from my compilation of economic indicators, but I always like to see a little light at the end of a tunnel.

Birthday/Santa

2012-01-12T19:50:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow is my daughter's birthday, and I am sending her this digital cake. I wish I could send her or make her an analog cake (meaning a real one), but she lives too far away for that. Anyway, as many people know, having a child is one of the most life-altering experiences there is, so a child's birth-day, no matter how old she becomes, can stir things up. Last week, my husband reminded me of a memory I'd put aside for quite a while, and I think it fits well as a Discomfort or Diversity, so I've decided to tell it here.
Because we are Jewish, when our daughter was young (say 4 or 5) and Christmas came around, my husband talked straight to her about Santa. The reason was that he did not want her to feel left out or ignored by the jolly old gent and all his jolly gifts.

Perhaps he was being overly protective, but he did it out of love. If we lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood or town (as I did when I was growing up), perhaps he wouldn't have felt the need, but we don't, so he did.
Back then, we were very close friends with a family that also had young children. That family was not Jewish, and Christmas was a great, magical event in their home--tree, wreaths, lights, cookies, scented candles, and all the rest. One evening, around Christmas, we were visiting at their house. The children were in one room playing, and the adults were in a different room doing what adults do--probably talking.
Suddenly, the children came running in, a little frantic, and one of them reported that our daughter had declared Santa to be not real. No one knew what to do or say. Not the adults.

Not the children. Including our daughter, who I think might have been a bit shocked at the power of her words.

I understand the urge to protect the innocence and illusions of childhood, though I never had any particular feelings about Santa except terror. As a young girl, I did somewhat cling to the tooth-fairly illusion, which my parents were very cagey about--never really admitting how the exchange of tooth and coin occurred.
Perhaps we should all just "stick to our own kind" if we want to protect the innocence of our children. You know I'm kidding, right? But it is kind of confusing.

It Was Indeed a Matter of Time

2012-01-03T19:42:00.000-06:00

A few weeks back, I was talking to my friend L, on her birthday. We've known each other for many years, since we were college students, living in the dorm, so we've been witness to many profound and formative moments in each others' lives. For her, it was a birthday with significant meaning, and she said that one phrase kept running through her mind: "There's so little time." And this made me think--and say, "But it wasn't always that way. There were times that seemed endless, as if they would last forever." And this made me remember the way summer days or nights felt when I was a girl, that time meant nothing at all. And it also made me remember the endlessness of time in a different way--summer days in my 20s, when I was directionless and lonely, and I wasn't sure how to make it through a entire and endless, empty day.
I'm certainly not the first to write or think about the relativity and elasticity and sometimes-brevity of time. But that day, in that phone call with L, I felt it completely and intimately, and way down. As usual, context is everything, and in the context of our friendship, feelings run deep. We told each other stories--laughing and crying. Some of them felt like fairy tales.

I wonder how it would be if time were a mother instead of a father. What might she carry instead of a scythe?

World Book Night

2011-12-17T16:53:00.000-06:00

April 23, 2012, will be World Book Night. Until a few years ago, I had never heard of such a thing. But now I'm glad I did. World Book Night (WBN) started in the UK, and now it has arrived on our shores. The people who run this event have selected an array of 30 books. You can see the list here. If you sign up and/or are accepted to be part of WBN, you will select one of those 30 books, based on the fact that you loved it. The fine people of WBN will then arrange for you to receive 20 copies of that book, and on the night of 4/23/12 or thereabouts, you will go somewhere to distribute those books. Why? Because you love the book and you would like others to read it. In fact, you feel passionate about others reading that book.
As soon as I read about this, I immediately wanted to do it. The catch, at least for me, is that you have to distribute the books to light or non-readers--that is people who do not necessarily gravitate toward books. The idea is, then, that the book distributors become missionaries of a kind, spreading the love of reading. The problem? As part of the application process, you have to propose the place you would go to distribute these books to light or non-readers, and I am having a hard time thinking where that might be. I mean, we hear all the time about how nobody reads anymore and blah, blah, blah, but where do we go to find a bunch of those people all in one place.

As soon as I started to try to figure this out, I ran into a myriad of assumptions. I talked to a friend of mine who runs therapy groups for women in the Chicago jail, and I thought that might be a good place. Not necessarily, she told me. Plenty of those women want to read; it's just that they don't have access to decent books. So . . . that's not necessarily the kind of place that WBN is looking for. Then I thought of PADS, the local organization that provides overnight housing and meals. But why would I assume that just because a person is homeless, s/he is a light or non-reader. And even if s/he is, would s/he then want to have to shlep a book around the streets? The high school? People are always saying that young people don't read anymore, but how weird does it seem to go to a well-endowed high school and hand out books? A more likely place would probably be a school or neighborhood on the West or South sides of Chicago, but I need to feel safe going there. I guess that most of the places I tend to go are full of readers.

I'll be very curious to watch how this event develops and how people choose where to go to distribute and whether it's only me who find the question so complicated.

Riot/Rebellion

2011-12-08T20:22:00.001-06:00

I saw an interesting series of articles in the Guardian about the riots that occurred in England last summer. The pieces have titles like "Reading the Riots: Ask the Reason Why" and "Were the Riots about Race?" Not surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath, commentators and politicians were quick to attribute the massively destructive disturbances to race as well as to "common or garden looting or thieving." Now, however, after what sounds like a careful study by journalists in tandem with researchers from the London School of Economics, the understanding has deepened and complexified.
Although some participants freely admitted taking advantage of the situation to accumulate "free stuff," only slightly more than half the crimes were "acquisitive." The researchers did not find evidence either that rival gangs were behind the rioting; in fact, they found a kind of unity and "morality" among the rioters. Nor, as had been assumed, did the majority have extensive criminal records. Nor should the events be thought of as race riots. Hostility toward police was a big motivator, especially because of their stop-and-search powers. As the overview article concluded . . .

Stop and search powers are used, in some forces, disproportionately against black people. There is a generation of young Muslims whose lives have been shaped by the war on terror. But what unites our interviewees is a sense of alienation. Barely half "felt part of British society". Race contributed to it, but more often it was poverty and a lack of hope. Among our respondents who were not in education or training, more than half were unemployed. Some of them even admitted they had used the riots to vandalise places where they'd been turned down for jobs.

These ideas interest me, of course, because many of them are at the heart of my novel, Grand River and Joy. I appreciate the closer look into the dark heart of things. As the Guardian piece says, "our research is an attempt to explain, not to excuse."

Giving/Taking

2011-11-30T13:49:00.000-06:00

About 15 years ago, I wrote an essay about an experience I had on Halloween when among the trick or treaters at my front door was a man who asked me for money so he could take his kids out for hot dogs. I won't tell you how I responded to him, but the experience did lead to essay, and the piece was published in the Chicago Reader, a weekly alternative paper. I called the essay "What the Halloween Man Brought," but the Reader folks changed it to "What You Give and What You Get."
The essay begins by telling the story of the man coming to my door, and then moves into my response right there at the moment as well as in the weeks that followed, as ruminating and perplexity are significant parts of my MO. Most of the essay is structured around the eight dimensions of charitable giving, as articulated by Maimonides, the twelfth-century Jewish scholar, in his Guide for the Perplexed. That's him right there.

Here is the list of eight dimensions:

1. Giving reluctantly or with regret
2. Giving less than one should, but with grace.
3. Giving what one should, but only after being asked.
4. Giving before one is asked.
5. Giving without knowing who will receive it, though the recipient knows the identity of the giver.
6. Giving anonymously (the giver knows the recipient, but the recipient does not know the giver).
7. Giving so that neither the giver nor receiver knows the identity of the other.
8. Helping another to become self-supporting.

For the past few years, my friend Tom, who teaches writing at College of DuPage has used this piece in his class. He likes it because it begins with an incident from real life and also sets out the process of reflecting on that incident and coming to write about it. Even better, it has a very visible and explicit structuring device (the eight dimensions). So it works well in his class (at least I think it does), and after the class has read and discussed the piece, Tom always has me come to his class to give a reading and engage in a discussion with the students. Every time I go to Tom's class, I have a great time, and come away very energized and impressed with the students. This year was no exception. I went a few days before Halloween, and I came equipped with a big plastic pumpkin full of candy.

As usual, the students were very lively, and their questions very thought-provoking, but they did not eat as much candy as I had hoped or expected.
Anyway, the point of all this is that about a week ago, Tom emailed me an essay written by one of his students in response to my essay. The student is named Nathan Bassett, and his essay is completely wonderful and clever and funny, as he turned my whole thing on its head and called his "Eight Ways of Taking."
He structured his piece much like mine, including around the "eight ways":

1. Taking reluctantly or with regret.
2. Taking more than one should, but with grace.
3. Taking only what one needs.
4. Taking by guilting the giver into being a giver.
5. Being asked to take.
6. Taking what is lost or Ground Scoring.
7. Taking from an anonymous donator, benefactor, or spontaneous nudist.
8. Taking from another to become self supportive.

I'd love to find a way or a place to have the two pieces published together--to show what's possible and what can come of one small life incident, even all these years later. Ideas?

Magic/Magique

2011-11-25T10:46:00.001-06:00

In my novel, I am working on a scene in which an act of magic occurs. I was going to call it a trick, but as soon as I wrote that here, I changed my mind because the word seems to diminish the act or experience or whatever it is. Whatever I call it, as I write and refine and shape this scene, I have been thinking about magic more, and more deeply, than I usually do.
The thing I've been thinking has to do with the audience and the conflict I/we feel between wanting to know "how it's done"--to get behind the scenes and catch-out the "trick"--versus wanting magic to exist, to be a real thing that occurs in the world, to let go of our rational inquiring minds, to feel wonder, to submit.

I have seen magicians "do" things that seemed truly impossible--that defied laws of time/space/gravity. I have read discussions about the psychology of magic and the limits of human perceptions, including this definition of magic from the astounding Teller: “The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.”
The human mind is a mysterious thing--as is the human heart. We want to believe yet we don't want to be fooled. In writing a scene in which magic occurs, I don't have to contend with the laws of time/space/gravity in quite the way that a "real" magician does. After all, in the case of writing, it's all just dots on a page. But what could be more magical that that--creating a whole world built of dots on a page?

A Blessing on the God/Muse Frustration

2011-11-16T21:24:00.001-06:00

Last night on NPR, I heard the interview with Mark Kelly, husband of Gabrielle Giffords, about his wife's ongoing recovery. There is plenty to say about all of that, but my focus tonight is frustration, a discomfort that we are all familiar with.

Mark Kelly said that although his wife has made enormous strides since her traumatic brain injury last January, she gets frustrated with the slow progress and her limitations. Who can blame her? He also described a moment in the hospital when she first seemed to realize that she couldn't speak, and the terrible panic and agitation that overcame her. One can only imagine what that realization must have felt like.
Here's the thing he said about frustration that struck me:

You know, she struggles. She gets frustrated. I have to remind her that that's a good thing.
You know, getting frustrated--from what I understand--is one of those things that's helped rebuild those connections in her brain, is that frustration. So we try to make sure that she's frustrated.

Ah-ha, I thought, frustration as a motivator and a repairer. You're on the verge, says the frustrated brain, so hard at work. Go tear out your hair, but then get back to it. You're almost there. Don't abandon me now.

I wonder if it's always the hair they're tearing out because the hair is so close to the brain.

Some Colors

2011-11-09T19:55:00.000-06:00

are just beyond words.

Oh you can say orange or red or purple. You can say brown. You can even get a little fancy and say fuchsia. But admit it, that does not even come close to what nature herself can pull off.

Several years ago, when I had a writing residency at Ragdale, an arts colony in Illinois, my friend Laura came to visit me one afternoon. It was early November, and I was working on my novel, Grand River and Joy. Ragdale sits on 55 acres of pristine prairie, and Laura and I went out to walk on some of those acres. We saw many beautiful sights along the way, including many beautiful leaf-colors.

I was telling Laura how hard it was, sometimes, to find the right words, to describe something--say, the color of a fall leaf. I told her that when I looked at the work of the visual artists in residence at Ragdale, I felt a little jealous, because they used color in a different way. They didn't have to find the words for it; they just put it out there. Of course, they might have to find the right color, or mix the right color, know color theory, and so on. But how does one find the words?

I still remember Laura holding a "red" leaf against her palm, so we could both ponder it. I don't remember what she said, but I remember that moment--one leaf against her palm. To illustrate the transformative magic of the creative process, here is how that experience showed up in my novel--toward the end of chapter 1.

The leaves would be clinging and falling and twirling along Outer Drive, the big boulevard that crossed Harry’s block, and adorning the grand houses, carpeting their lawns in colors so startling they had no names, unless you made them up—like raspberry parfait or Tropicana burnt orange, or translucent copper-pink.

Cultural Diversity

2011-11-03T08:37:00.002-05:00

To glean, in the strictest reading of the word, is to gather grain left behind by reapers. The Gleaners, above, is a painting by Jean-Francois Millet. The Gleaners and I is a documentary by Agnes Varda. As described in the New York Times in 2000, Varda "crisscrossed the French countryside with a hand-held digital video camera and a small production crew, in search of people who scavenge in potato fields, apple orchards and vineyards, as well as in urban markets and curbside trash depositories. Some are motivated by desperate need, others by disgust at the wastefulness all around them and others by an almost mystical desire to make works of art out of things -- castoff dolls, old refrigerators, windshield wipers -- that have been thrown away without a second thought."
Yesterday, when I went for my walk, I took a trash bag with me, specifically to collect candy wrappers, as on the days following Halloween, this form of litter is particularly prominent. I do not put myself in the category of a gleaner in this sense, as I am not collecting for reuse but for appropriate disposal. Nonetheless, two women saw me pick something up, and one said, "You're picking up leaves. Why?" Which prompted me to explain, and them to exclaim, and they were visiting from New York, touring the Frank Lloyd Wright homes and so forth. I gave them some tips on where to eat and what to see in my town and in Chicago, and we parted ways.
Now we come to the gleaning part of the story, and eventually to the cultural diversity. In my town, we have many ginko trees. I'm not going to get into a big research project about ginkos, but I do see from Wikipedia that they are an ancient form (around at the time of the dinosaurs), and the oldest ones are in Asia--China, Korea, and Japan. It does have an unusual and beautiful leaf.

Ginko trees come in male and female varieties. And in the fall, the female variety produces what the experts call a seed but what to me looks like a fruit.

That is an idealized portrait, I think. As they age and fall to the ground, which they do as autumn progresses and just before people step on them, they look more like this.

The odor of the mashed glop on the sidewalk is intensely musky, but that does not quite capture it. Some people say "stinko ginko." I wish I were better at describing odors, and right now, I wish I were better at describing that odor.
     About a month ago, my neighbor who has a large ginko tree on her side lawn told me that every fall, an Asian man knocks on her door and asks if he can collect the dropped ginko seeds. Of course, she always says yes because she is happy to have them gone before they all get smashed on her sidewalk and tracked into her house on people's shoe bottoms, perfuming her life.
     "What does he want them for?" I asked.
     "I don't know," she said. "They make some kind of food from it."
     Some blog reader will now tell me that they've known about this for years, and where have I been all my life, but that was the first I'd heard of it. Oh, I know that I could in one instant google to find out precisely what kind of food someone would make from those astonishingly fragrant seeds, and how they would go about it, and what fragrances would be wafting through the house as they did, and what the end result would be. But I'll just leave that task to someone else.
     In the meantime, twice since my neighbor told me about this (but never before that), while I was out walking, I saw an Asian woman (the same one twice), stooped down near a ginko tree, a small paper bag beside her, picking carefully through the grass and leaves, gleaning ginko seeds.

On the Search for Lost Time

2011-10-27T08:50:00.000-05:00

Last week, I had an emotional unraveling. I was going to call it a "meltdown," but then I reconsidered because that sounded a bit too glib, a bit too hip and happening. Not quite up to the task of describing this.

Maybe it was the dishabituation (see last week's post), an after-effect of having the blinders removed for a time. But I was sad, weepy, achy, frayed. "Where has the time gone?" was my lament. "Where have the years gone?" Everything was a mess. I had let everything go. My office was intolerable. My drawers were crammed with clothing and papers and memorabilia. I felt so ashamed.

Every thought brought more tears, tears overbrimming. For years, my MO had been to push through, work, ignore. For some reason, I could no longer do so. "Where have the years gone?" I asked again. "Where has the time gone?" "How have I come to this?"

If I were a chronically and/or clinically depressed person, I imagine that I would have been incapable of coming up with solutions--confiding my feelings to my husband, crying in his arms, cleaning out my drawers and rearranging my office, scaling back with a focus and energy I hadn't felt for a long time (again, the dishabituation?). If I were a chronically and/or clinically depressed person, I imagine that these feelings would not have dispersed so quickly. And I will not say that they have dispersed entirely. The memory hovers, of how difficult those few days were.

Habituation/Dishabituation

2011-10-19T08:30:00.000-05:00

"Habituation refers to a gradual reduction in the strength of a response due to repetitive stimulation. Looking, heart rate, and respiration may all decline, indicating a loss of interest. Once this has occurred, a new stimulus--some kind of change in the environment--causes responsiveness to return to a high level. This recovery is called dishabituation."
This is a quote from one of Laura Berk's many child development books. Laura is a genius of the child development world, and I used to be her editor. Anyway, I've been thinking about her and habituation, but especially dishabituation.And here's why.
Yesterday, I saw a woman pushing a dog in a wheelchair. No, it was not like the image below.

I have seen this sort of device before, and I do not know why it is referred to as a chair, as a chair seems to be something in which one sits. Maybe there is a technical name for that gizmo above, and I do not know it. When I googled "dog in wheelchair," however, images like the one above came up.
     No, the dog I saw was actually in the kind of wheelchair that humans use, and it was strapped in, with multiple straps, and these straps were truly needed, as the dog did seem to be in a semi-standing position. It was not a very high-quality chair either, so it could not have been particularly easy to push. The woman who was pushing the chair (and the dog) seemed to herself have trouble walking. She moved with a kind of rocking motion, as if she had some disability in the hip region and perhaps also in her ankles or feet. She had another dog on a leash walking beside her.
     Part of me wanted to greet her in some way as we approached each other--at least smile--to acknowledge the interesting sight. I wasn't sure I would actually want to say anything because, what would I say? "Nice dog"? Or "How did you come up with that?" I didn't want her to think I was making fun of her, because I have to confess that part of me felt it was a tad absurd. But just a tad. There was a large amount of devotion about the image as well.
     I did glance at her face, to see if I might see any receptivity there, in case I might decide to deliver at least a smile or a nod. But no. My impression (which I understand is entirely my own) was that she was self-conscious, fully aware that someone might want to make fun of her, and meant to keep to herself.
     Only a few blocks later, passing an apartment building I have passed likely thousands of times, I noticed for the first time that someone, years and years ago when this building was erected, had put some thought into the brickwork. Always before, it had just looked like a wall of bricks to me. Yesterday, however, I noticed a somewhat elaborate design. Not as elaborate or elegant as this.

Nor as marvelously skewed as this.

But still, each brick had a texture--horizontal ridges. And these ridges had been used in interesting ways--both vertically and horizontally to create a pattern in the wall that varied depending on location: around windows and doors, lower and higher.
So I'm thinking that the woman pushing the dog in the wheelchair dishabituated my habituation, opening my eyes to a new detail in my world.

Rain/Dog

2011-10-13T20:55:00.001-05:00

It's not entirely true that I haven't posted in as long as it appears. I did write a post last week--about the Days of Awe--and when I came back here today to make a new post, I see that the Days of Awe post never made it onto the blog, or disappeared somehow into the ether with the Days of Awe themselves. But no complaining. No cursing technology. It's true my mind has been elsewhere and I have been remiss with the blog. Apologies to the universe and to any individuals within it who have missed my Wednesday posts. So here is a new one.

Today was an ambiguously rainy day. The kind where some people have umbrellas, and others seem to be doing fine without them. Some cars have the windshield wipers going, others have them on intermittent, and still others don't have them going at all. I was out for my usual midday walk, and I had my umbrella open for most of the time. It's true, I think, that the rain did pick up and trail off. During the last few blocks of the walk, the rain did not seem ambiguous, and I was glad to have my umbrella, which by the way, is a black one, but on the underside has a panel with blue sky and white clouds.

I like this umbrella a lot, but speaking of umbrellas reminds me of the wonderful little video I watched the other day about an umbrella and a woman. Please click on that link to have a lovely experience.
Anyway, the thing that caught my attention on the walk was a man walking his dogs. They were some kind of skinny, leggy variety. I'm not a dog expert, so I can't say, and I don't want to spend a lot of time investigating, so for our purposes, I'll just say that they were greyhounds (even though I don't really think they were).

I'd seen the man walking ahead of me for quite some time (he didn't have an umbrella), but then I thought he got home, because he went up to a house, opened the door, and the dogs went inside. Just as he too was going inside, one of the dogs ran out of the house, and began to run away. The man came out to get it. He sounded very stern: "Ruben," he called, "Stop." Ruben did not stop. The man began to run after the dog. "Ruben," he shouted, "get back here." Ruben, I think, slowed down. Now the dog was "Ruby," and the man was no longer angry. He was sweet and playful, with that dog-caressing sound in his voice (you know what I mean). At this tone-change, Ruben/Ruby, who seemed to be considering the virtues of obedience, rejected the notion and ran away again.
I was wondering, being a non-dog owner myself, whether the man had erred in switching from stern master to loving friend, because he seemed to make that switch several times, the stern voice getting the dog to stop, the switch, inspiring the dog to rebel. But the other thing I was thinking about was my husband's grandfather, whose name was Ruben and who was also called Ruby for short. Also that Ruben seems to be a very Jewish name, but that the skinny, leggy dog did not look Jewish at all (well it did have a big nose). I don't hear that name Ruben very often. And I thought my husband's grandfather was the only Ruben in the world who was also called Ruby.
Live and learn, I suppose

Kindness/Strangers

2011-09-14T16:03:00.001-05:00

I think it was 2003 when I went to London with my family. On one of our Sundays, we went to Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. This is the place where anyone can come and try to attract an audience to listen to what they have to say. Those who want to take a stab at it bring something to stand on--a little step stool or some such--as it helps attract attention.

All kinds of people come, and they talk about all kinds of things. Some people dress up a little, to help attract attention. Some people are kind of marginal or nutty and talk about things like why we should all use olive oil. Other people make heavy-duty political arguments. It seems enormously democratic--the idea of having a voice if you want to use it. It actually reminds me a little of blogging. Each of us in our little space, saying what we like, hoping someone will listen.

My family and I were fascinated, and we stayed for a long time, listening to a lot of people. Some people seemed to be regulars, and have a regular audience. It's interesting to think about why some people get the bigger audiences. Same with bloggers. Some people put up a post and get hundreds of responses. Others get zero. Oh well.

As you might be able to imagine, in 2003, we heard lots of speakers dissing George W. Bush and America. One fellow, who seemed to be a regular and who attracted a good crowd, said that Bush was a demonic terrorist. Also, this speaker made several claims and generalizations about America or Americans. My family and I were standing in the crowd, and let me tell you, it was awkward and uncomfortable to feel lumped together with George Bush and US policy in this way.
Near me were several African men. They had light scarring on their cheeks, which I recognized as African. Something about me must have been recognizable as American because one man reached over, gently placed his hand on my arm and said, "We know the difference between a country's policy and its people."

On the Occasion of Finally Understanding the Muse

2011-09-01T08:18:00.004-05:00

The past few weeks, I have been waaaaaaay deep into revising my new novel--hoping that this is my last pass through the manuscript. If it is, off it then goes to the agent and from there, if the agent thinks it's ready, to an array of editors and a range of fates too numerous to mention. Once it leaves my hands, I have little if any control over it. But while it's in my hands, I am the lord and the master. Authors sometimes talk about the characters "taking over" and so forth (I know you've heard this), but Nabokov once said something along the lines of "No way. This is the one place in the world where I am fully in charge." No way anyone was going to boss him around.
The thing is that with this kind of authority also comes responsibility--something wimpy types like myself may waffle over. It might sound good to be the decider, and I might not like the idea of others making decisions for me, but when I'm the decider, I have to decide. And stand by those decisions. Take responsibility.
Writing a novel, or creating anything, involves a practically infinite number of decisions--from the very small (where a comma will go, whether a verb will be in the past or present tense, what color a person's dress will be) to the medium size (how to describe a particular thought or emotion, to really get at its essence; how long to spend doing that; whether the character will say yes or no to the offer from the handsome stranger) to the large (will the character live or die?). And so on. This is where the Muse comes in. Or my new understanding of the concept.

The picture at the top of the post features the nine muses. Just above is a closeup of three of them. In many images of the muses, they are either very involved with each other (as in the top picture) or somewhat self-involved, as I think they are in this one. Maybe a better way to say it is that they have their own preoccupations. They are not necessarily thinking about ME.
Sometimes when I am writing, the work flows in a way that I can only describe in mystical terms--as if guided by something outside me. Perhaps this is what people mean about characters taking over. But in my case, it's not a particular character but a whole rush of a scene or its meaning or its emotional core. When this is happening to me, it is not a matter of making decisions. Even the word "decisions" doesn't seem to fit. Too analytical. Too cold. The feeling is very warm and floaty. To me, this is the presence of the Muse. Someone or something both outside and inside and all around that is guiding the enterprise, lifting the weight and the agony of all those decisions from my shoulders. I do not need to wonder whether I have made the right choice. It is simply there before me. Oh, fickle Muse, why don't you visit more often?
Muses come in many forms. I have talked about this on the blog before. Once I wrote about my mother--in pincurls, sitting at an old manual typewriter, a cigarette in an ashtray beside her--as my muse.

Every summer, Patry and I write about blueberries and bake blueberry pies for our muse(s). And one year, I came to think of the magnificent Sal as my muse. Now there's a muse who looks you right in the eye, even if she does wander off at crucial moments.

What People Do and How They Do It, Part 2

2011-08-24T19:59:00.002-05:00

When we left off last week, the door on my composter was still upside down, even though I had overcome my nervousness about calling the handyman back to correct his mistake. I was not laughing, nor was he. Though he wasn't angry or resentful or anything. On the phone, he sounded completely mellow about the whole thing. I couldn't imagine why, however, as every time I went out to look at that composter and contemplate the door, all I could see was that the whole bloody thing would need to be dismantled and reassembled. Yes, just to flip the door. It looked like a nightmare to me.

After the handyman stood me up twice, I called the composter-assembly hotline. The phone number was conveniently posted right on the assembly instructions. A woman answered, which (forgive me) surprised me. I described my problem, and without a moment's hesitation, she told me how to fix it. There are bolts, she said, right by the latches, and all you have to do is unscrew them, turn the door around, and reattach.
     "Wait," I said, "can you hold on while I go outside and look?"
     "Of course," she said.
     And the minute I looked, I could see that she was right. It was so very simple. She was so brilliant. I was so glad I'd called, and I told her so.

But I was annoyed with myself. I had been too preoccupied with the big picture and I'd failed to see the details--those simple screws, that simple solution. This is the complete opposite of what I've been struggling with in my novel--that is, I become preoccupied with getting a particular detail right, a word, a sentence, a color, and it becomes difficult to see the big picture. How do the parts fit together as a whole? What is the arc? How do the threads weave in from start to finish.
Both are important, of course. With a composter or a novel. The small details and the big picture. The forest and the trees.
I went out to the composter with my screw driver and my wrench, but those screws were on so tight, I could not get them to budge. But later that day, the handyman came back ("I'm a man of my word," he said), and he did the deed in no time.
Now back to work.

What People Do and How They do It

2011-08-17T20:58:00.000-05:00

I know a man who works for a contractor. This man is a great plasterer and painter and worker in general. He's careful about cleaning up after himself and attentive to details. I've known him for a long time, and he's done lots of work in my house. This man is very good-natured, and he likes to tell stories when he's here working.
One time, he told me about some of the mistakes he and the guys he works with make. Crazy, shocking things for a homeowner to hear--like ceiling parts falling down, or pipes connected wrong, or paint splashing on a customer's custom-upholstered couch, or dropping a new porcelain sink on the way into a customer's house and having it shatter on the pavement. I know this sounds crazy, but these are very responsible people, and they fix their mistakes, and everyone makes them, and with all the work they do, and all the equipment and the carrying and lifting and physicality and so forth, the mistakes may be louder or more visible than the ones you and I make.

But the point of the story was not so much the mistakes but the way these guys make fun of each others' mistakes. They laugh their heads off when someone else makes a mistake and taunt and tease unrelentingly, enjoying the pleasure of the moment, knowing (perhaps) all the while that retribution will be coming in the not-too-distant future, but not letting this diminish the pleasure.

This is so different from how I am that I barely know how to take it in. Still, this story did help me out today. How, you ask.
Yesterday, I hired a handyman to do a job for me. I chose him on a friend's recommendation. The job was to assemble our new composter because our old one recently fell apart. Here's what it looks like. It comes in a very heavy box, and it has a million parts, and assembling things like this is outside the comfort zone of my husband and me. We could do it, but it would likely take us a whole day and cause us extensive consternation. So I hired the handyman. He came, and in two hours, he and his partner put the thing together, and to me, that seemed like genius, and well worth the price.

After he left, however, and I took a good look, I realized that the door was installed upside down--or perhaps it was the panel that the door connects to, making it not impossible but exceedingly difficult to open and close. I knew I had to call the handyman back and ask him to return to fix it. But I felt awful about this. Would he have to dismantle the whole thing to install that panel the right way? Would it even be possible? I had a hard time sleeping last night thinking about this, but especially about asking him to come back to fix the mistake. But then I thought of that man I know who laughs at his friends' mistakes and lets them laugh at him. And that gave me courage. Call made, but the composter is not yet fixed, and I feel a little queasy but I'm trying to remember the laughing. Stay tuned for updates.

Oh, Dad

2011-08-10T14:41:00.000-05:00

Friday marks my father's yahrzeit--the anniversary of his death. He died in 1998, so it's been 13 years, which seems incredible. In honor of him, I'm re-posting this piece, which I originally posted in March of 2010.

As I've mentioned before, I live in what some might call an "edge" community--by which I mean I live in a town that is generally more affluent than its neighbor to the east. In this case, the neighbor to the east is the west side of Chicago--a mostly black and, in some places, distressed area. Streets severely potholed, food deserts, boarded-up windows and deteriorating buildings. Grated store fronts. When I drive through there, it reminds me a lot of the Grand River and Joy neighborhood I describe in my novel. Today, I want to tell a story about the place where I live and a colander

Many years ago, my parents came to visit. While my husband and I were at work one day, my parents got busy trying to help us out around the house. My father noticed that my colander--which looks much like the one in the photo above--was in need of repair. The ring at the bottom, on which the whole enterprise depends, was hanging by a thread. Well, he thought, he'd simply head out in the car and find a place that does welding--a body shop or some such. He was certain he could find something.

When looking for services, most people in my town head west (away from the Chicago neighborhood I described in the first paragraph) rather than east. Either my father did not know this, or he didn't particularly care, so he headed east. My father was not a large or imposing or macho man. I think he simply wasn't afraid of certain things. Or perhaps he was unaware that he should be more cautious in certain places and situations. I do not know. In any case, he soon found himself pulling up to a body shop on the west side of Chicago.

He got out of his car, this smallish gray-haired Jewish guy, colander in hand, and entered the building. There he found four black men, sitting around a table, playing poker and smoking cigarettes. I do not think in reality that they were drinking whiskey, but in my imagination (forgive me), they were.

"I'm wondering if you can weld this for me," he said. He showed them how the ring was flapping. The men looked at each other, likely somewhat incredulous. They put down their cards. They put down their cigarettes. (They sipped from their drinks.) And then one of them got up, came over to my dad, and said, "Sure. Let me see what I can do."

I still have that colander. And you can still see the welding marks. It wasn't the finest, most elegant repair ever, but it's held all these years.

Annual Paean to the Blueberry

2011-08-03T11:43:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time, my path crossed with a woman named Patry Francis. She was a writer and I was a writer, and she told a story about a long-ago time when she had been served a blueberry pie at the home of Marilynne Robinson, where Patry had the good fortune of being a dinner guest. The pie was not your usual blueberry pie--it had a layer of whipped cream and a layer of blueberries--and Patry remembered it fondly all those years, hoping to someday encounter it again. In stepped I, who was certain that I had the recipe for this very pie--from an old issue of Gourmet magazine. I sent her a copy (she lived on Cape Cod, whereas I live in Illinois), and we vowed to make this pie to honor the serendipity of our friendship and this pie-discovery and our writing muses (who always need honoring in whatever form they happen to take).

We have made this pie for multiple years now--she on the East Coast, me in the Midwest. Patry has written about it on her blog. I have written about it on my blog. Others have baked the pie and written about it on their blogs. One year, Patry was very sick, and I wasn't sure she would be able to make the pie, but she did nonetheless. One year, my muse was the little tomboy-girl Sal, from Blueberries for Sal. One year, I shared the pie with my book group. One year I shared it with my neighbors at our block party. Every year, I worry (but every year a little less) about whether the blueberries will cook down during their session in the pot with the sugar and corn starch (they seem so dry; it seems so impossible that they could transform).This year I was practically serene during this phase.

This year, I made the pie in phases--the crust on Sunday, then into the freezer with it; the cooked blueberry part before dinner last night, so it had time to come to room temperature then sit in the refrigerator for its allotted time before pie-construction would be permissible. Whipping the cream came after dinner, then assembly, then back to the refrigerator for another prescribed spell before eating.

My daughter is home for a visit, and I waited to make it so that she would be here to enjoy it with me. I have done this other years as well. We have what we call a pie party well after dinner each night. She eats very slowly to make it last.

Since Patry and I began making pies, we have both published novels; she has a contract for a second (which is in the editing phase), and I have a pretty solid draft of a second one, which is nearing readiness but not quite ready to head out into the world. Patry and I cannot attribute all this literary productivity to the pie effect on the muse, but why not attribute at least some of it?
My daughter pointed out that my pie is a little different this year, and I do agree. The crust is a little crustier (in an excellent way, I think), and there seems to be something a little different too about the way the blueberries settled onto the cream. And why shouldn't things be a little different from year to year over all these years? Below is the photo of this year's pie, which I placed next to an image from my desk calendar. I chose this calendar because its theme is magic, and for every week, it has a vintage poster or photo depicting magic in some form.
My new novel has circus and magic and illusion as one of its themes, and so I chose the calendar for inspiration. And now to the pie.

With Regret Still

2011-07-27T07:44:00.001-05:00

I know that this post is hopelessly materialistic, and that it has little to do with diversity (but some relation to discomfort). But still. I came across this photo in a mish-mosh pile on my desk. And then it was a moment of Proustian remembrance of things past.

Oh, dear. Are they not wonderful? I don't think you can get the detail, nor appreciate the colors from this photo (black with pink stitching on the left; reddish/rust with chartreuse stitching on the right). But these are the shoes I did not buy when I was in London five or six years ago. The stitching says "cha-cha-cha," and the footprints show how to do the dance.
I went back several times to this store to try on these shoes. My husband and daughter accompanied me without complaint. Why did I not buy? One size felt just a tiny bit too small, and the next size up felt just a tiny bit too large. And I couldn't decide which color to get, and I wanted both colors, but two pairs of shoes that I might not be able to wear? Discomfort.
I have looked (without success) on line for these shoes several times since. But why? Would they fit differently now?

Forest/Trees

2011-07-21T14:06:00.000-05:00

I sometimes joke that the Town-Namers around here had only a few words to choose from--Oak, Park, Forest, River, and Lawn--so they did the best they could, rearranging them in as many combinations as they could think of. Ergo, Forest Park, Park Forest, River Forest, Oak Lawn, and Oak Park, where I live. These names suggest places with bounteous trees, which in this case, fortunately, is true. Unlike Crate & Barrel, which has neither crates nor barrels, or Pottery Barn, which is definitely not a barn and has only a minor focus on pottery.
I am used to living in places with lots of trees, and I enjoy their many pleasures--watching them magically bud out in the spring, withdrawing into the cool of their shade in the summer, and marveling at their autumn color show. Even in the winter, their towering skeletons add definition to the landscape.
Here in Oak Park, we do have a good number of large, impressive oaks. We used to have elms, but those are almost all gone now because of Dutch Elm disease. Currently, our local arborists are removing all the ash trees because of the Emerald Ash Borer invasion. Fortunately, the arborists are replacing these tress with other varieties, and we will all hope for the best.We have lots of other kinds of trees, too--honey locusts, maples. The Maples make the most magnificent show in the fall.

I once had a friend visit from Belize, and she had never seen a maple before. She came running in the house to ask, "What is that?" The maple was as exotic to her as a frangipani or a baobab would be to me. Here's a baobab.

Another time, I had a visitor from Arizona, and she was spooked by all the trees and canopy they created. She said she was used to being able to see exactly where she was all the time and what was around her, and all the trees made her feel claustrophobic and vulnerable. Another visitor from Arizona (who had grown up on the East Coast) delighted in being able to sit under a tree and rest her back on its trunk--something you definitely can't do with a saguaro (ouch).

One of my favorite kind of tree is the Live Oak--the kind they have in New Orleans--which to me seem like some kind of plant animal hybrid, especially when they have all that moss hanging from them.

When I lived in Ann Arbor (originally, I think, named Ann's Arbor, because there was a person named Ann and there were lots of trees), I used to go to West Park. The park had a band shell, where sometimes they had rock concerts or poetry reading. This was around the time that my friends and I were all reading the Tolkein books, and there were a line of willow trees in West Park that I was convinced were the Ent Wives. Back then, and even a long time after, I found Willows to be the most romantic of trees.

When we bought our house in Oak Park, it had a large willow in the yard, and this was a very persuasive selling factor for me. The tree was, however, way too large for the yard, and its branches kept falling off and crashing through our garage roof or threatening to pull down all the power lines, or destroy our entire house, so we had it cut down. Instead, we put in a few maples, an oak, a honey locust, and some flowering crabs, so for a not-very-large property, we're pretty tree-rich.
I've been thinking about trees because, as you all likely know, it's very, very hot outside, and while I was walking today, I was thinking that even though they're not moaning and groaning about it (at least not in a way we can hear), the heat is likely as stressful for trees as it is for the rest of us creatures.

Giving

2011-07-13T09:08:00.000-05:00

A robot is defined, more or less, as a mechanical, intelligent agent that can perform functions on its own or with assistance. It is usually electro-mechanical and guided in "doing its thing" by a computer and/or programing. I'm sure we could quibble about this definition or about the borders between human and robot. As we all know, we can quibble about anything.
Robots can do almost anything these days.

Here's a familiar image of a robot.

We have a friend who runs a program at the local middle school in which students learn to build robots, and then they compete in competitions with these robots. This is a marvelously creative and intensely problem-solving-oriented activity, and these young people may very well be our future electro/engineering/mechanical problem solvers. The robots that these young people build are no so personified as some other robots that we are used to seeing.

My husband and I once saw a wonderful movie called Robot Stories. It was directed by a man named Greg Pak and consisted of four short stories about robots. In general, it explored the borders of human and robot, and how we are all somewhat robotic and how robots are all somewhat human. We enjoyed the film very much. Here is a photo from one of the stories, at the point when a young couple first meets and feeds their new, adopted robot baby.

See how happy they are. The baby is that egg-shaped pink thing in the lower corner, and the father is feeding it with that blue thing. I won't tell you what happens to these happy people. You'll have to find out for yourself.
Here's why I'm thinking about robots today. I was on the way to the open mic the other night when I heard a story on the radio about robot beggars. The story is that in several places in the world, people have built robot beggars and placed them in shopping malls or on street corners (where real beggars are not allowed), and passersby have been receptive to the idea and given money to the robot, which is then supposedly given to charitable causes. Google "robot beggar" if you don't believe me (or maybe you already know about this, and I am the one behind the curve). There are several YouTube video of these robots in action.
People are apparently more comfortable giving money to these mechanical beggars than to real ones. The robots are kind of cute, to start with.

Here's another one--more basic but still cuter than the homeless people you usually encounter on the streets.

I am extremely familiar with the discomfort of encountering people on the street who ask for money. Where I live, it happens all the time. I have written about this extensively in various forms in essays and in fiction. The experience, the discomfort. My husband is very generous with people who ask for money on the street, and this sometimes makes people who are with us (including me) uncomfortable.
Just yesterday, in a parking lot, a man in a wheel chair (motorized, just to give the experience a little bit of robotic feel) came up to me to ask for money to get something to eat. I was just getting into my car with my groceries, and I was thinking about what my husband would do and the story I'd heard on the radio the night before about robotic beggars and the fact that when I got to the open mic, I'd looked in my wallet and found more money than I thought I had, so I gave him $5. I didn't really look him in the face though, and I left as quickly as I could.

Winding

2011-07-09T12:43:00.004-05:00

A river can wind.

So can a road.

A staircase.

The innards of a watch.

And so can a person's thoughts--the innards of the mind. It's not that I've had nothing to say. It's that I've had too much to say. And that I don't know how to compile it in a communicable form. But the thing (or one thing) about winding is that it's a continuous form, not a fragmented one. So here's one place I might begin.

For my reading group, I've just finished a book called The Worst Hard Times, by Timothy Egan. Our group usually reads fiction, but this time the choosers chose nonfiction. And so this choice. It's the story of the Dust Bowl, the environmental disaster of the 1930s on the Great Plains of these United States. It's a horribly disturbing story (unrelentingly repetitive also, but that's another matter) of the human impact on the earth. The Great Plains area was once a perfectly adapted ecosystem--vast tracts of grass with deep taproots that could draw water from the earth during the endless droughts and hold on for dear life in the face of the endless winds. The bison who lived there, too, were perfectly adapted--able to withstand winters with temperatures of 40 below and summers of 110 above. No trees. Blasting sun. Continuous wind and drought. The Indians hunted the buffalo and used every single scrap.

Then the land speculators came, and others looking for a place to settle and a way to earn a living, and they drove the Indians off and plowed up the grass, and train lines were built, and cities grew up--hotels and restaurants and stores and schools and hospitals. People who had lived in little sod houses built real houses--with windows and porches. They bought pianos, and their children took piano lessons. They had a few years of good rains and good crops. And then the drought years began, and with no grass to hold the earth down, it began to blow.

It's easy to point fingers, or say whose fault it was. But the point is that people needed places to live, and they needed work, and they were interested in profits, in thriving, in getting ahead, for themselves and their families. And as we've seen in so many other cases, the means to these ends were shortsighted and disastrous.

This week, WBEZ ran a fascinating story about Canadian oil and the way it is boosting the Midwest economy. Of course, the Midwest economy, including Detroiters, who are benefiting from this Canadian oil industry, need the boost. One man who was interviewed has been out of work for three or four years. But the story also included the voices of people who live near the Kalamazoo River and suffered (and still do) from the oil spill last summer. I have written about these things before--the farmers versus the town folk when it comes to river flooding; the restaurant owner whose business is now doing better because people are eating a full lunch (including dessert) versus the obesity epidemic. It's not really "versus." We're all in it together. What do we do?

A Story Problem

2011-06-21T20:20:00.002-05:00

Say a young woman did something really horrible--like murder four people. While she was in the county jail awaiting trial, her public defender arranged for a social worker to visit her, talk to her, help her prepare for trial, and for what might come after. Say the social worker was a friend of yours, and she told you stories about this woman--about the abuse and deprivation the prisoner had suffered all her life, and say the social worker came to understand (as you surely will too) that this abuse and deprivation were central factors in the woman's path to this horrible crime. Say that your friend the social worker becomes a kind of friend of this woman, perhaps her only friend, her only support, the only person in the world who listens to her with compassion, so that after her contract to work with this woman ends, she continues to visit, and write letters, and send gifts. Even when the woman is tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and moved from Cook County to a prison that is two-plus hours away, your friend continues to visit. Even though the drive to the prison is long and bleak, and actually entering the prison is frightening and disturbing, your friend continues to go, because she knows she is this woman's only friend and because she wants to go. Even though your friend's heart is breaking every time she sits with this woman and listens to her hopelessness (she has young children who she may never see again), she visits again.

Say that one day your friend gets a letter from this prisoner, and this is what the letter says: In the middle of one night, guards entered this woman's prison cell, handcuffed and shackled her, and put her on an airplane to a prison in Florida. No one told her why. She was not allowed to take anything with her--her books, notebooks (she writes poetry), photographs. The prisoner described the life at the new prison, which involved a kind of orientation in which she was awakened every morning at 5 am, allowed to take a two-minute shower, then returned to her cell where she had to sit on her bed with her feet on the floor, all day, until it was time to go to bed and do this all over again. This was to go on for several weeks before she would be allowed any privileges, but before she could complete her orientation, she was again handcuffed and shackled and moved to another prison in Florida.
Why would this be, your friend asks you. She had been tried and convicted in Illinois. She committed the crime in Illinois. Why would she have been moved? You, of course, do not know the answer to this, but you wonder, and you thought it might be worth putting it out there to ask.

People can do terrible things and still be people. Recently my daughter told me about one of her college professors who was fired because 30-some students complained that he had sexually harassed them (my daughter was not one of the complainants). My daughter was appalled to learn this about her professor, but she also said that he was an inspired teacher, and that losing him would be a loss to the department. I was struck by the confusing truth that one can be a mess, even a monster, in one--but not all--aspects of one's life. This seriously undermines the concept of good and evil--especially the idea that we are either one or the other.

Every Obscenity and Hate-Filled Invective

2011-06-16T15:01:00.001-05:00

Another day. Another walk. Another human challenge. Today it was on a corner, near the high school. A beautiful summer day. Gentle breeze. Floral scents in the air. Athletic-looking people playing vigorous tennis. Students in small groups arrayed post-summer school, convening for the next phase of the day. Me, on the other side of the street. Then, a screaming boy. Standing with a small group--three or four other boys, perhaps a girl on a bike. The boy is screaming at someone down the street who I can't see. Hurling every taunt and challenge and curse and come-on, in the most hate-drenched language you can imagine. His friends (if that is who the people near him are) stay put but don't join in. The tennis balls thwack rhythmically in the background.
And we have I, on the opposite side (subtle Paul Revere reference for those of you who, unlike me, did not have to memorize the poem in 5th grade or so ["And I on the opposite shore will be, ready to rise and to spread the alarm, through every Middlesex village and farm"]). Transfixed. Want to keep moving. But can't. Can't imagine (or can) what might happen next. "Please stop," I yell. He doesn't.

The screamer isn't bulky like the guy in the photo. Not muscle bound. Actually kind of slight. Kind of skinny. And also white. He continues to scream. He is actually somewhat creative in his insults, which is to say non-repetitive. He keeps upping it, working the theme and variations--how his opponent looks, how he walks, what he does, who he does it with.
     Finally, the tormented one takes the bait. So here comes another slight, skinny white boy up the sidewalk, matching insult with insult. He's with two girls, but the girls hang back. The first guy's friends stay put, neither interfering nor encouraging. Oh, I wish I had my phone.
     The two boys circle each other. The second boy's friends leave. The tennis players play. I wonder if these boys know how to fight. I wonder if they've ever fought before. Finally, the second boy runs at the first boy.
     "Stop," I yell. "Hey, stop." I won't take credit for this, but they do stop and look over at me, and the second boy drags himself away, an impressive display of self-control, I think, but yelling threats as he does.
     "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard," the first boy says (referring to the threats).
     "And that's the stupidest thing I ever saw," I yell.
     So the first boy looks at me and tells me to mind my own business, which is a pretty stupid thing to say, as he's made this everybody's business.
     I'm tempted to cross the street, get more involved, but decide no . . . time to move on. When I'm a few blocks away, a police car comes speeding up the street, lights flashing, siren beeping, stops at the high school, right at that corner beside the tennis courts (thank goodness; someone else called). But I'm too far past to see whether the sad, stupid, rage-filled boy is still there. Ugh. Ugh. Ugly.

Spotty

2011-06-08T08:09:00.000-05:00

I know I've been spotty about posting on this blog the past few weeks. Oh, there have been the travels. And there have been the work deadlines and pressures. And there have been a number of inquiries from book groups about Grand River, and related conversations and exchanges with book group leaders (these are quite wonderful, by the way; no complaints or ho-humness about this at all). And there has been the perhaps deeper-than-usual immersion in the new novel--the mothers and daughters (as reported in my previous post) and many other things: acrobatics and geography and crime investigation and victimology. This immersion in the new novel, too, is a very good thing. All of it, really--the preoccupation and the spottiness--flow from pretty damn good reasons.

But still, I feel a little bad about being spotty. Though have you noticed, how really attractive--and water-related--spottiness can be?

Speaking of spotty, I heard a piece on NPR the other night from a young fellow who has been unschooled--not home schooled. His mother explained it by saying that when he was a few months old, she noticed that he was by nature learning everything he needed to know at precisely the rate he was prepared to learn it, and so she thought, why couldn't he just keep doing that. And so she hadn't sent him to school at all, and all his learning is self-directed. The son, for example, didn't learn to read until he was 10, but he learned then because he wanted to play a particular kind of game that required reading. This is an intriguing idea, especially that thing the mother said about how babies learn what they need to learn.
My favorite part of the story came, however, when the boy said that his grandfather worried about his education. How others may judge us is often a concern when one takes an unconventional path. And we heard the grandfather's voice, saying that he particularly worried that his grandson would lack the social world that school provides and that his education would be--you guessed it--spotty.

The boy admitted that his education has been spotty--for example, he never learned spelling. His mother wouldn't force it, because she believes there is a cost to forcing something. Though now, it sounded like, he might be ready to apply himself to the discipline (or whatever it is) of spelling. Spelling is an interesting thing. Some people seem naturally better at it than others. I don't like to see bad spelling, but with computer spell-checkers, this occurs far less frequently than it once did.
As I've said before, one thing I like about blogging is that I don't need to come to any particular conclusion.

Tangled Up

2011-05-26T08:08:00.002-05:00

I'm tangled up with two mothers and daughters in my novel. It's sitting high up in my chest, trying to get out.

With such a range of possibilities, you can see why this is difficult.

Floating

2011-05-18T08:29:00.000-05:00

I was away last week, which is why I didn't post on my usual Wednesday. I was floating. On a cruise ship. Up the West Coast, from LA to Vancouver. This was in part to celebrate my father-in-law's 85th birthday, so he was there, of course, along with his significant other, his daughter, his son (who is also my husband), and a band of about 15 of his friends. For those of you who haven't cruised before, it is a world unto itself. Better writers than I have dissected its diversity of pleasures and peculiarities (see David Foster Wallace, "Shipping Out").
Here's an interior view.

All that, to explain why I wasn't here last week. Possibly related, depending on your view of cruise ships, is my next topic.

Angstschwiess, German for the "cold sweat of fear." When I was a college senior, I needed a few more credit hours to graduate, so I chose to take a German class. I'd always been good at languages, and I figured, why not try another? It was summer school, so the class was not very full, and on the first day, a young woman walked in who was dressed in a very stylish and appealing way. Over the next few days, she wore a succession of similarly classy outfits, so I confuse them in my mind. There was a yellow sundress. A navy blue and white striped pants suit, among others, and always wonderful shoes. This person was/is named Jody, and we became very good friends, and she is still my friend, and it was her daughter's wedding I attended in North Carolina a few weeks ago.
But back to Angstschweiss. In this German class, the approach was to memorize dialogues that were presented in the textbook and then perform them for the class with a partner, the idea being that one would get a feel for the language in this way. The dialogues in this book were very peculiar. One was about a train or a car or maybe it was a milk wagon (Jody will remember) crashing at an intersection. And this was the dialogue in which we were presented with the word Angstschweiss, which I assume was a response to the crashing milk wagon. I still contend that this is a peculiar vocabulary word for an introductory language class, but at the same time it did fit with some of my feelings about Germany (ancestral memories and Jewish heritage being what they are).
The point of all this, and I know you knew there would be a point, is that the day before I left on the cruise, I received an email from the editor of Glimmer Train Stories, an excellent literary magazine, that the story I had submitted to one of their competitions had won second place, which equals a cash prize plus publication.

The story is called "Angstschweiss" and is based on a chapter from my novel that had landed on the cutting room floor when my editor suggested that was where it belonged. To be fair, he had also suggested that it might be the basis for a short story, as had several others when I described it to them at readings. I'd always nodded patiently at these suggestions when they arose, but a few months ago, I decided to try it. I felt like a sculptor working with a big block of stone or marble, shaving away, getting at the core. So satisfying to have the work appreciated . . .

The Farmers and the Townspeople

2011-05-04T19:37:00.000-05:00

I've written before about the way we're all tied together, that it's barely possible to give to one group without taking from another, or for one population to gain without another losing. This week I've been thinking about the story that has unfolded or exploded along the Mississippi River in Missouri--a long stretch of levee blown out, causing acres and acres of farmland (130,000) to flood, perhaps making them unfarmable for years, perhaps forever. And this was done in order to save the town of Cairo, Illinois, from flooding. How do people--in this case, the Army Corps of Engineers--make such decisions? How was it that they chose the townspeople

over the farmers?

How was it that they didn't choose the farmers

over the townspeople?

Did it take the wisdom of Solomon?

Two Ways to Look at a Subject

2011-04-28T17:41:00.000-05:00

This past weekend, my husband and I went to Chapel Hill, NC, for a wedding. If this were a different kind of blog, I would tell you what a wonderful time we had (which we did). What a warm, freewheeling, communal feeling this wedding had. How wonderful to see so many old friends and feel the history we've shared. But it's not that kind of blog, so you'll have to settle for that thumbnail and return to the question of diversity and its discomforts.
Following through on last week's post about the Civil War, I will instead show you what my husband and I saw when we walked for a few hours around the University of North Carolina--a lovely campus in one of those utopian locales called the college town.
First, the classic--a monument to the confederate soldier, young, armed, alert, and up on a pedestal.

And a more contemporary response--a tribute to the "unsung founders" (as the piece is called) who likely built this campus as well as so much else we see in the South.

It's a powerful sculpture. Here's a close up of the lower portion.

A lot to think about. Right?

Slavery, Liberation, Exodus

2011-04-20T20:17:00.000-05:00

Here we are again, in the season of Passover. Above, you see a map of the Exodus route of the Israelites as they emerged from Mitzrayim, Egypt, the narrow place, and became "a people." I always find a lot of things to think about this time of year, in the context of the holiday and the Seder, even if I am not among the most observant or consistent of Jews.
One thing I've been thinking about this year is the conversation I heard on the NPR program "Fresh Air"--the wonderful interviewer Terry Gross talking with Adam Goodheart, a historian who wrote a book about the origins of the Civil War. The book is called 1861. Goodheart said a lot of things, but the one that stuck in my mind had to do with the institution of slavery. I've always understood how deeply slavery was intertwined with the economy of the South, but Goodheart pointed out that being asked to give up one's slaves was equivalent to having someone ask us to give up all our savings or our retirement accounts or all our liquid assets. He kept apologizing for how horrible that sounded, to be speaking of humans as liquid assets, but he was saying it so that we could get a better handle on the threat and panic and anger slave owners felt at the thought of having to give up their slaves. He was not apologizing for slavery or arguing in favor of it, of even saying that we should feel empathy for the slave owners. He was, however, explaining a point of view that I had not heard before.
At least in part, then, because of the threat to a way of life, the war came, and many died and suffered and lost property of all kinds. And then the slaves were liberated, and the exodus began. As my husband points out every year, however, slavery still exists in many forms in the world. Liberation is far from complete. When will it ever be?

Deep in Conversation

2011-04-13T08:26:00.000-05:00

Not much in the mood for a full blog post this week, so instead I'll post something I've had in my hand-basket for a month or so--an interview I did with my friend Tom Montgomery-Fate, a writer and teacher and thinker. For our conversation, we were in the gracious and well-equipped studio of his school--College of DuPage--in Glen Ellyn, IL. The staff and crew were all very professional. We talked about my writing, the thematic connections between my fiction and my nonfiction, and my writing practice. When we finished our conversation, a woman who was working in the control room told me that my novel sounded interesting, and since I just happened to be carrying a few extras with me (something every novelist needs to learn to do, as embarrassing as that may sound), I sold her a book right on the spot.

Tom, himself, has a new book coming out very soon. I know his work well (we were in a writing group together for years), and it is deeply thoughtful--the kind of reflection I was ruminating over and voting for in my post about Rodin's Thinker.
Our conversation might not have had quite the celebrity of Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg, but it was pretty damn good nonetheless.

Passing Over

2011-04-06T20:46:00.000-05:00

This past Thursday, my husband and I went to an extraordinarily unusual (for me) event--a Seder at a black synagogue on the south side of Chicago: Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. This is an annual event, hosted jointly by the synagogue and the Chicago Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. The photo above does not portray any of the rabbis from Beth Shalom who helped to lead the Seder, but I do like that photo, the way it unites these seemingly diverse threads.
     This Seder was marvelously incongruous--the black rabbis, the funky-rock versions of "Mah Tovu" and "Go Down Moses" with electric guitars and conga drums but the familiar version of the Four Questions and "Dayenu," and of course, the familiar story of the Exodus and the various foods and rituals (the dipping and so forth).
     This Seder was also explicitly political--with references to immigration issues in Chicago, and the incarceration and hopelessness among black youth, and the plague of foreclosures in the synagogue's neighborhood. We even had a water main break down the street, so we had to rush to finish the Seder because the water was to be turned off at 8:00 (we didn't finish by 8, and the water was not turned off, but we did see the workers and trucks down the street).
      I loved the rocking music, and I admired the energy and voice of the young rabbi as he called out for new Moseses to come forward. I also enjoyed thinking of the four cups of wine as a progression toward community and liberation, each one a named stage in that process.
     As with all Seders, parts of it were boring and/or chaotic. But overall, it was enormously mind-expanding, as I had to keep reminding myself that these people were Jewish, pushing past assumptions, pushing past my own internal limitations. I kept thinking about my old-world, orthodox bubba and zeda, and how this group and this experience would have looked to them. And I believe that from now on, I'll think and think again before I say to myself or anyone else, "Funny, s/he doesn't look Jewish."

A Diversity of Thoughts

2011-03-29T20:42:00.000-05:00

You probably recognize this fellow. He's (I guess you could say) iconic. Rodin's Thinker. One of the places in the world where he sits is outside the Detroit Institute of Arts. Through rain, sleet, snow, dead of night, sweltering summer, and all the rest, there he sits.

Growing up in Detroit, I passed him more times that I can say. But it wasn't until I returned to Detroit a few years ago, to do research for my novel, that I really took him in, the way an adult mind can, especially an adult mind in the process of trying to understand. He seemed such an apt symbol for what has happened in Detroit over the years. Or not that exactly. He seems an apt symbol for the puzzle of figuring out what happened to his city. I mentioned him in my novel because this struck me in a powerful way. Oh, call it an epiphany if you like. I even named the last chapter of my novel after him.

I'm sure you read/heard the news this week about Detroit, about the population decline as reflected in the latest census figures, about the residents of Detroit who continue to struggle to stay in and support and believe in their city. It's a lot to think about.

There are a lot of other things to think about too. And I've been thinking that we don't take enough time for thinking. Please don't ask me who I mean by "we."

I've been worrying that too many important decisions--in business, politics, the world--are being made without sufficient time to reflect. I've been thinking that doing something like writing a novel is almost an anachronism, because it is such an exercise in deep thought. Don't worry. This isn't an announcement that I'm abandoning this particular form of anachronism. I'm actually making good progress with my novel, and am feeling it come into focus. But still, what am I to make of the frantic pace of things? What am I to make of the lack of time we have to think?

100 Posts

2011-03-22T20:16:00.000-05:00

I was all ready to write a serious post and had the thoughts worked out in my mind, but then I signed into my blog to discover the news that I have managed to write 100 posts.

I'm not very good at celebrating. This is something I struggle with. When there's still so much work to do, and always so much trouble/pain in the world, how can I justify a celebration?

Still, why not, once in a while acknowledge an accomplishment, feel some pleasure in a job (reasonably) well done? As Rohan Maitzen noted on her wonderful blog the other day, in the context of a discussion of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, a book I haven't read and probably won't, the "juxtaposition of beauty and degradation does create a tension, one she [Gilbert] is honest enough to admit, but to turn away from beauty out of guilt would be what Will Ladislaw calls, in Dorothea [from Middlemarch], “'the fanaticism of sympathy.'” Good grief. I want to be a sympathetic person. but I don't want to be fanatically sympathetic.

100 posts . . . that's no small potatoes. Right? Let's bring out that cake again.

Say amen, somebody.

A Diversity of Unimaginables

2011-03-15T20:37:00.001-05:00

The tragedies unfolding in Japan. They are unimaginable. Look at it, above, the serene garden, and below, this little wisp floating in the ocean. How is it possible that a place could absorb or contain so much damage and pain?

I know, it's complicated. I heard a Chinese man on the radio tonight discussing aid to Japan: "From the humanitarian perspective, I support it," he says. "But from a historical perspective, I do not. People my age believe Japan ought to be wiped out. During the Japanese occupation, they killed so many Chinese people."
Still, as with other huge events in places far away, we observers become students at a high-level seminar. For example, from the NPR website, this same story about Chinese aid:

On the streets, instinctive anti-Japanese nationalism is not unusual. Shockingly, online posts have been written celebrating Japan's misfortune. But at the same time, a new respect is emerging for Japanese virtues. People have seen pictures of orderly queues of evacuees, they've noticed the care and courtesy with which Japanese survivors have treated each other, and they've commented upon the lack of price-gouging in the Japanese quake zone. This stands in stark contrast to what happened after China's earthquake, prompting some introspection.

This business of the old grudge, I can somewhat imagine and relate to. I have often wondered how people or countries forgive each other for the devastation and brutalities associated with war. I like to think (in the context of China's contemplation of Japan) that the deep grudge could be tempered by new images, new information.
And then, as a different variety of unimaginable, there was the story I heard last night, about a young woman in Tokyo who spent $800 and 18 hours on trains, in cabs, and on foot, traveling to Sendai to find her parents and grandparents because she couldn't reach them by phone.

The family dog welcomes her to a home largely undamaged by the earthquake, and a mother stunned by her arrival.
There's no hugging or kissing, just gasps of surprise and shock as she stands and bows to her parents. They bow, too — the emotion of the moment palpable, even though nobody touches anyone.

That not-touching encounter is almost as unimaginable/foreign to me as the disaster/destruction itself.

Women/Words

2011-03-09T08:31:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was International Women's Day, and this got me thinking about a number of things.
      1. The discussion about gender bias in publishing and the (under)representation of women in the literary arts. You can read about that all over the place, including at the wonderful annual Tournament of Books, which (by coincidence) began yesterday (on International Women's Day).
     2. Then I got an invite from the lovely people at the Books for Walls Project, asking me (and others) to celebrate International Women's Day with them, which I scooted over and did.
     3. Putting two and two together (or would that be two and three or some other number), I got to thinking about women writers. Two in particular came to mind--both gone now.
     First, Grace Paley.

Paley was a poet, essayist, and short story writer as well as a peace activist. I heard her speak once (on a panel in Chicago, called "The Writer in the World"), and it was a pleasure being in the same room with her. Her stories made the "small" moments of women's lives (in the kitchens and nurseries and bedrooms; on the playgrounds with children: in the nursing homes and hospitals beside the aging parents) the subject of literature, made them heroic.

Second, Tillie Olsen.

Olsen, also a political activist, was best known for the stories in her book Tell Me a Riddle. One story, "I Stand Here Ironing," is simply stunning, and I recommend that you read it right now. Here is an excerpt.

She was a beautiful baby. She blew shining bubbles of sound. She loved motion, loved light, loved color and music and textures. She would lie on the floor in her blue overalls patting the surface so hard in ecstasy her hands and feet would blur. She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily's father, who "could no longer endure" (he wrote in his goodbye note) "sharing want with us.
I was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression. I would start running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running up the stairs, the place smelling sour, and awake or asleep to startle awake, when she saw me she would break into a clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet.

One reason, some suggest, for the gender bias in literature is that women's writing doesn't have the muscle, or engage the big subjects, that men's literature does. Oh well.

More Diversity, More Discomfort

2011-03-02T18:10:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine invited me to visit and speak with his college writing class. (No, that's not the cause of the befuddled discomfort.) I have been to my friend's class to speak several times, and each time I have enjoyed it very much. Also, in my travels with my book, I have now spoken with many groups and before many audiences and encountered questions and comments and people of many kinds. This time, however, something new occurred.
In addition to all the other students arrayed around the room, right in front of the table where I sat down was a young woman in a motorized wheelchair.

I could see by the way she moved her upper body and her arms and face that she had some complex combination of disabilities, but she was there, and that was fine. I began my reading and talk, and my friend, the teacher, moved to the back of the room. I read a combination of fiction and nonfiction--pieces that were thematically related and showed the way one could adapt the same material to either form. As I went, I stopped several times to see whether anyone had questions. Right away, the woman in the wheelchair raised her hand.
Fine. Except that as she spun out her question, I realized that I could not understand what she was saying, as she had . . . I don't know how to describe it . . . let's say that her voice and words were highly distorted. As she continued to speak, I felt myself becoming increasingly dismayed and almost panicked at what I would do when she finished speaking. A map of the inside of my brain would look something like this.

or this:

I did not want to embarrass her, and I did not want to embarrass myself, and I had never been in a situation like this, and I did not know what I was going to do. I thought I was listening with every nook and cranny of my listening capacity, but nothing was computing.
     She finished speaking, the room was silent, and then she turned around to look for my friend, the teacher, as if to say, "Can you tell her what I said?" or "What do we do now?" He said (very straightforward, relaxed), "I didn't catch all that." And then a woman sitting near her in the front spoke up and told me what my questioner had said. Ah. Okay. I answered.
     As the night went on, the woman in the wheelchair asked many questions, and every time, she would look to the back of the room to seek a translation/interpretation, and every time, someone in the class would speak up and tell me what she had said.
      When I told my husband this story, he said, "She's not letting anything hold her back," which I think is right and a great response. The amazing thing was that as the night went on, and she asked more questions, I came to understand more and more of what she said. Perhaps I was becoming more relaxed and thus more able to receive; perhaps she was becoming more relaxed as well and thus more able to communicate with me. By the end of the evening, when she bought one of my books for her boyfriend who she said needed "to learn more tolerance," I understood every word.
     By the way, my friend the instructor said that she's a very good writer, and when I asked her what she writes about, she said, "Crazy people." What I'd give to see some of her work.

The Messer/Anti-Messer Total Mind and Body Workout

2011-02-22T21:00:00.000-06:00

I've written on my blog before about my practice of picking up litter when I walk around my town. It's a simple way to do something useful. I focus primarily on cans and plastic and glass bottles because I want to make sure that they get into the recycling containers rather than the main garbage stream. I'm especially concerned about glass bottles because they can be broken and thus do serious damage, but I hate seeing beer cans lying around the streets of my town (it makes a bad impression and seems so . . . low brow), and the number of plastic bottles is astonishing. I always think of that Texas-sized plastic island of garbage (oops; just looked it up; it's now twice the size of Texas) that's floating out in the ocean somewhere. I don't want to see that become even larger.

Anyway, my husband and I were out walking last Saturday (it was my birthday), and we encountered the usual array and picked up a few things as we went. He noted that if people aren't even respectful enough of their environment to realize that when they leave their bottle or can in the street or on the grass or sidewalk, they're polluting, then what hope do we have to address something as huge as global warming. That's the surface of the earth where they're abandoning their trash, but for some reason it seems just fine to them to simply drop or throw whatever they're carrying and go forth. How can we expect people to make the big, hard sacrifices they will have to make to solve the big problems if they can't do something so small as put their item in an appropriate receptacle?

This discussion got me into thinking that I needed to get more intentional about my litter walks again. That is, I used to carry bags with me (one for recyclables, one for regular garbage) and then take the booty home to my own receptacles. But for the past few months, who knows why, I haven't been taking the bags, but just pick things up and drop them in other people's receptacles as I go. Sometimes this limits me because I can only carry a few things in my hands at once, so I have to leave some things behind.

This week, then, I started with the bags again. There's an unusually large amount of stuff lying around. I think it's because the big snow has now melted, revealing the multiple layers of leavings and droppings. And as I was walking, and picking, I realized what an excellent workout this is. First of all, as the baseline, there's the walking, which I do briskly. Second, there's the mental and visual acuity involved in spotting the items. Third, there's the quick pivots needed to cross the street or duck down an alley or veer over toward the bushes or whatever to nab the item. Then, there's the bending and the reaching (across a puddle, snow bank, or dog droppings) and (sometimes) the stretching (if something is under a bush or in some other hard-to-reach place). Then there's the memory factor when I don't have the bags--that is, keeping track of where the closest recycling bin is or isn't. Finally (this might not really be the final benefit; I might think of more, or you might), there is the benefit of mental fitness that comes from the meditation on the earth and the people who live on it and how they do or do not care for it and why they do or do not. Try it. Soon you too may look like Jane Fonda with her red leg warmers. As with so many other problems, perhaps appealing to self-interest is the way to a solution.

One Common Approach to Addressing Discomforts of Diversity

2011-02-16T08:13:00.000-06:00

Great Wall of China

Walls. I've been thinking (and writing) about walls. Not the Great Wall of China but . . .

Birwood Wall

The Birwood Wall, in Detroit, makes an appearance in my novel Grand River and Joy. In book discussions, it's gotten a lot of people talking and a lot of people stirred up. This wall was built so that white Detroiters (and builders and bankers and so on) would feel more secure investing in homes that were close to primarily black neighborhoods. Here's another famous wall:

Berlin Wall

And another:


Wall on U.S.-Mexico Border

And another:


Israel

A wall can be a beautiful thing, complex, evocative:


Stone Wall

It can contain and exclude, protect and isolate:

Fortress Wall

Yesterday, on NPR's Marketplace, I heard an item about walls, referred to as "separation barriers," which is a good way to think of them. A person named Niall Farell produced a documentary about these separation barriers in which he lists many of them. Here are just a few from his list, with dimensions and type.

Name: Baghdad Wall
Country: Iraq
Built year: Under construction
Length: 5 km
Type: Civil pacification
Name: Belfast Peace Lines
Country: Northern Ireland
Built year: 1970s
Length: .5 km
Average type: Civil pacification
Name: Ceuta Border Fence
Country: Spain/Morocco
Built year: 2001
Length: 8 km
Type: Anti-illegal immigration
Name: China-North Korea Barrier
Country: China/North Korea
Built year: Under construction
Length: 1,416 km
Type: Anti-illegal immigration
Name: Egypt-Gaza Barrier
Country: Egypt/Palestinian Territories
Built year: 1979
Length: 3.071 km
Type: Anti-terrorism and illegal immigration

We all know that walls can be scaled--some more easily than others.

So many things more to be said about walls, about separation, about barriers, about the ancient yearning for a sense of safety and security.

The Discomforts (and absence) of Perspective-Diversity

2011-02-08T20:31:00.000-06:00

I've written here before (several times) about the difficulty of listening to perspectives that differ from my own. Like that little boy, I just want to cover my ears and make a bad face. A recent article in the New York Times made me think about this again. The subject was social scientists, and one presenter at a meeting of said scientists was John Haidt.

[He] polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

This seems important to me. And others must also find it so, as this article is currently numero uno on the Times website list of "most popular." This is also a topic that blogger D. G. Myers has brought up several times in the months that I have been reading his blog. Here's one of them. I found out about D. G. Myers because he discussed my novel on his blog, and Google Alerts alerted me to same. And although not everything he said about my novel was complimentary, he also honored it, and this seems to be a pretty good thing in the world of reviewing. He's a tough critic (and an incisive writer), and the fact that he took my book so seriously was pleasing to me. One thing he said in a follow up to his review was that he liked my book because he couldn't tell what my politics were. Some books/novelists wear their politics on their sleeve, as (Myers says) Franzen does in Freedom (I haven't yet read his novel).
But that wasn't really what I wanted to talk about (politics in novels). The subject was general lack of exposure to and interaction with diverse perspectives and the impact of this lack. You probably can guess that I think this lack is not such a good thing but that I'm pretty much in the same boat as those social scientists.
And here's the thing I like most about blog posts. No need to wrap it up or come to some conclusion or final point. Some of my favorite blog posts meander and then leave it in the hands of the reader.

Feeling My Mind Expanding

2011-02-02T20:31:00.001-06:00

I was thinking how old-fashioned the word mulatto seemed. According to Phil Herbst's The Color of Words: An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Ethnic Bias in the United States (the book that got me started on this blog; see early entries if you're interested in the origins), the word comes from the Latin mulus, a "mule" or hybrid. "In early ethnic discourse," he says, "the term loosely meant a person of mixed descent, especially someone half African, or someone half Native American and half black, but typically now and almost always white and black." As with many of the entries in Phil's book, the discussion is extended, and extremely thoughtful (honestly, it's an amazing resource), but I will not present the whole thing here.
The reason I was thinking about this at all was a recent article in the New York Times about young people who identify as mixed race, noting that the percentage has gone up. As the article notes,

Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity. Ask Michelle López-Mullins, a 20-year-old junior and the president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, how she marks her race on forms like the census, and she says, “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”

This seems to me to be a good thing. Anytime I have an opportunity to resist or overcome or see beyond categories that have been externally invented, I feel that I grow as a human being. I actually do feel my mind expanding. So, one young woman describes herself as Japanese and Irish. A young man, as African-American-Portuguese-Haitian. Another as Ghanaian/Scottish-Norwegian. One as Japanese/Spanish. One as Black/German. You get the picture. These are complex human combinations that I for one might not have ever before imagined. Because of the human genome project and the ability to identify genetic ancestry, we now know (or can know) far more about our hybrid ancestries. Which brings me back to where I began

“Are you mulatto?” asked Paul Skym, another student [mentioned in the Times article], using a word once tinged with shame that is enjoying a comeback in some young circles.

Can you guess what's on my mind?

2011-01-26T20:42:00.000-06:00

It was nearing the end of her month-long writing sabbatical, and she hadn't gotten nearly as far as she'd hoped. She couldn't even begin to explain how she felt.

Balance and Moderation

2011-01-19T10:07:00.000-06:00

I am hoping for balance and moderation (as the title to this post suggests). Achieving this goal is likely impossible, as the the lines (of what? of everything) are constantly shifting, making the enterprise challengingly unpredictable. Nevertheless, I have come upon a few ideas lately (in print in various publications) that struck me as offering some guidance in this respect. First, from the New York Times.

David Brooks: I guess I should try to explain what I think moderation means. . . . I guess it means restraining your impulses and trying to gather evidence about the crime before rendering a judgment about what it all means. Moderation means understanding that we all have a tendency to exploit events in order to ride our own hobbyhorses, so it’s usually best to try to pause and put aside one’s prejudices and try to look at each event in as neutral a way as a possible.
Moderation is a disposition rather than an agenda. It means calibrating your opinions to the strength of the evidence. It means pausing to look at any event from alternate perspectives.

Second, from Moment magazine, from the editor, Nadine Epstein. Some of you know that several years ago, I won the fiction competition sponsored by this magazine. Ever since then, I have been a subscriber, in part because I appreciated their award and in part because I appreciate what they do as a magazine. Here's part of what Nadine had to say in the latest issue.

For several years now I have observed what I call the "Not in Mixed Company" syndrome, that pesky inability to talk about Israel in mixed company. By mixed company I don't mean Arabs and Jews or Jews and Christians, but Jews and Jews. Beyond the comfortable confines of a few select venues where it is understood that everyone agrees with one another, talking about Israel in organizational, public, or even private settings has become fraught with acknowledged and unacknowledged complexities. Jew-to-Jew, Israel is a deeply polarizing subject.

I'm with her, which I'm sure you realized, or I wouldn't have quoted her. A year or so ago, I got into an argument with a cousin of mine because he used the word savages to refer to . . . well, to be honest, I'm not sure what he was using that word to refer to. Arabs? Palestinians? those who are anti-Israeli or have negative feelings toward Israel or toward Israelis or at least toward some Israelis or toward some of the things that they have done? The reason I don't know is that I got too upset too quickly rather than finding out what he meant and telling him why I objected to that word. I thought I was reacting against him because of his extreme position, but now I see that I too was taking an extreme position because I didn't take the time to find out what he meant.

This cousin sends out multiple emails (sometimes several a week) on the subject of Israel (letters to the editor; articles he picks up from elsewhere; news about Israeli achievements in science and technology), and by some quirk of technology, I always get TWO copies of each. At first, I just deleted them without reading them, telling myself that I didn't like them because they represented an extreme position. I don't claim to be as well-informed about Israel as he is (in fact I don't claim to be well informed at all), but I told myself that I didn't like the strident tone. After a while, though, I guess he wore me down, and I took a peek. What I discovered is that they were well written and represented a passion and high level of fear and concern rather than anything really "bad."
Passion is good, but moderation is also good. In the novel I am working on, I have character who is learning to play the violin (and also learning to be a person), and her teacher points out to her that one of the great difficulties is doing the hard work of drilling and discipline but still being able to let go and soar. And by the way, I am currently reading David Grossman's novel To the End of the Land, and finding that for someone like me, literature is the best way to enter a difficult topic--in this case, Israel.
One more quote, from last week's Newsweek and an article by Stephen L. Carter called "Man of War," about Obama as commander in chief of two wars.

The need to pick from among several unappealing ways to defend the nation is what separates presidents from pundits. I believe that much of the virulent hatred directed at President Obama's predecessor, and at Obama himself, arises from a rejection of this proposition. To the hater, the world is simple, not complex. The answers are obvious. "If the president were only as clear-eyed and wise as I am," the protester thinks, "he would see the world as it truly is, and make better decisions." It turns out, however, that in time of war, very different presidents may see the world in roughly the same way.

Oh, that it were all simpler and the answers more certain. Oh, that we could find the balance between passion and reason, the balance between discipline and soaring.

Oh for a modicum of serenity.

Birthday Cake

2011-01-13T07:15:00.001-06:00

Today is my daughter's birthday. Happy birthday, sweet girl. I know your name isn't Becky, but it's the best I could do from a distance.

A Diversity of Discomforts

2011-01-12T21:45:00.000-06:00

That poor baby is teething, and that's what's causing her/him such discomfort. I'm feeling a little bit this way myself today (uncomfortable, not teething), so I decided to rearrange the words in my blog title to reflect this fact.
     Why am I feeling a diversity of discomforts? I suppose you can guess some of them. Tragedies in Tucson and accompanying rhetoric. I'd like to write more about that, and perhaps will next week, when I get my thoughts clear. One piece of it that I keep returning to is the shooter--and the massive impact that one person can have on an entire nation. One person is really relatively small (regardless of actual height and weight; in this regard the shooter appears to be relatively average) to have such a large impact. Having a semi-automatic weapon increases the impact, or creates the impact. But still . . . one person.
     Another important source of the discomfort is that this month--January--I have taken off from my commercial work (mostly taken off; I have a few smallish responsibilities) to work on my novel. My dream was that by the end of the month I would have a solid draft, perhaps even ready to send to my agent. Far more accomplished authors than I am would never admit that in public. When it's in progress, no one really knows how an artistic project will go, whether it can follow any timetable of completion, whether it is truly viable. This is the reality as I understand it from myself and others.
     So . . . the first week of my writing sabbatical was rousing. By Sunday, I had the first five chapters in a shape I felt quite good about (something writers are not supposed to say out loud, as the worm can turn at any time). Monday, starting in on chapter 6, the worm turned. By this morning I was in a panic.
     I calmed myself a little by moving away from the chapter and working on a structural overview, thinking that seeing the events of that chapter in context might help me solve my problems. This did help to some extent, and I managed to muddle through chapter 6. Decided to leave it for now, give it some breathing room, move onto 7, and continue to consider the structure of the whole work, how the parts may eventually fit together, how the threads weave in and out. But . . . I'm worried. And not just a little bit uncomfortable.

End of an Era

2011-01-05T10:32:00.002-06:00

Oh, sorry. Have to go off topic again. Because yesterday, the chic woman in the photo slipped away at the age of 104. She--named Ida Tumarkin when married to her first husband, Sam (pictured above)--was my husband's grandmother. Sam was his grandfather. When she was born, she was named Ida Zweig. And when she died (or slipped away), she was named Ida Kesselman. I love this photo, especially the easy physicality of their companionship. Sam loved boats, and here they are, on the water.
     I could tell many stories about Ida (Sam was gone by the time I entered the family). For now, I'll just share the above image and another one: that she danced in spike heels at her 80th birthday party. As my husband said of her, "The evening gown is her business suit." He said this because she was a very active community leader and fundraiser on the gala benefit circuit.
     Until about 10 years ago, she lived in a glorious light-and-color-filled apartment in Miami Beach. As my daughter said when she heard that Ida was gone, "She was an institution." And I suppose that's true when you've lived so long. For my husband, having Ida alive into his middle age prolonged a phase of life beyond what most people experience. Few of our contemporaries even have one parent alive, yet my husband still had Ida (and both parents). It's a family with lots of longevity. Jim's mother, Janet, is on her way to Ida's funeral as I write this.
     I remember my mother saying that no matter how old someone was, nor how long they lingered with their illness, it's always a shock when they die. It's that final finality, the hole left in the world.

Double/triple Standard

2010-12-29T20:47:00.000-06:00

As many of you know, I am a walker. Pretty much everyday, I take a long walk around my town. By long, I mean an hour or so. Occasionally, I have a walking partner, but mostly, I'm on my own. Occasionally, I take my cell phone and chat with my daughter or sister or friend as I walk. But mostly, it's me and the inside of my mind and the world itself. Sometimes, I have small adventures. Sometimes I pick up litter, especially plastic and glass bottles and drink cans. Sometimes I notice things that make me wonder . . .
One thing I saw a few months ago that made me wonder--about myself as much as the thing I saw--was a woman in a yard who had climbed up on a window sill and was trying to open the window.

I am a responsible person who has been known to report suspicious activity (although I'm never completely certain what qualifies as suspicious), but I immediately noticed that I was continuing with my walk rather than doing something along the lines of calling the police. I'll say right here that the woman was white. And, of course, the woman was a woman. But if she hadn't been either of those things, I realized, I might not have so blithely walked on by. (So finally I am getting back to the topic of this blog--discomforts of diversity, or assumptions related thereto).
A few days later, again while out walking, I saw a woman burying a small box among a row of box hedges next to an apartment building.

Again, this was not a usual thing to see. But the woman was doing this in plain sight, right next to the sidewalk, making no attempt to hide. The woman was white. And again, the woman was a woman. But what if she had looked Middle Eastern? or been a Middle Eastern man? In either of those cases, the burying of a small something near an apartment building might have seemed suspiciously scary.
I wish I had a magic photo wand I could wave to show the difference between what I actually saw (white woman at window; white woman burying small box) and what would turn that odd but supposedly benign sight into something supposedly suspicious. I guess that's what you call profiling. When one kind of person does something, it's probably okay. When another kind of person does it, it might not be.

Continuing the Sentimental Journey

2010-12-15T09:04:00.000-06:00

Okay. Maybe it's because of the holiday season. Maybe it's the dream I had last night about being back in my parents' house, which was about to be lost or was already lost (hard to explain this in non-dream reality). Maybe it's the latke fumes still in the air. But sentimental thoughts . . . And then I was sorting through some papers over the weekend, and I came across this.

That is my father's turkey recipe. Note that first he gives the standard recipe, taped to the page. Then he gives his own (typed at the bottom), which is the opposite of the standard way. I bet the typing is my mother's, as she did most of the typing. I love the typewriter-ly look of it with the corrections and the uneven line spacing and left-hand margin, and especially the crooked last line. I love the dark imprint of the scotch tape. And of course, we have the handwritten addendum, about the book group discussion (Wide Sargasso Sea, which I've never read but now am feeling inclined toward) and the potential suede jacket. He mentions Elaine, who is my sister. And he mentions "all three of you," which would be me and my two sisters. So he sent this to all three of us. Elaine tells me she has a copy hanging in her kitchen.
How long has it been since someone wrote to you and said they would love to buy you a jacket? My father was not a Saks kind of person by nature, so it's interesting that the jacket was from Saks. I did let him buy it for me, in the green. My mother got one in the tan. I wore it for years until the lining was completely shredded.
My husband makes the turkeys in our house, and they are quite delicious. He does not use my father's method, but I will say that my father's turkeys were remarkably delicious as well.

Auntie X and Auntie Y

2010-12-08T08:18:00.001-06:00

Every time I sit in on a discussion of my novel, I learn something new. Last night I attended the meeting of a local book group, and it was no exception. This was a group of perhaps ten women who have been meeting monthly for over ten years. I was invited because one member emailed me while she was reading the novel. She grew up in Detroit, in all the same neighborhoods and schools and synagogues that inhabit my book, and she was moved to contact me. One thing led to another, and there I was in another warm living room with people who have rich, interlocking relationships with each other, who love to read books, and who take the time and trouble to gather to discuss them. It's enough to give one hope for the world.
The discussion ranged widely around social issues and urban issues and "white flight" and migration patterns in Chicago, New Haven, and other parts of the country. The book group members discussed Harry and Ruth and Curtis and Alvin, asked questions about my process and my background, and shared stories of their own. Then, one woman mentioned the Chanukah party that takes place in the chapter called "Family." In particular, what she focused on were the latkes--the "good" latkes and the "bad" latkes.
In the picture above, you see what I think of as good latkes. One sign of a good latke is that the batter was grated by hand (not in a food processor or from a mix). How can I tell that this batter was hand grated? The well-defined potato shards. This is essential to a good, crisp latke. The latkes in the above photo are also golden, and you can thus be sure that they are very crisp. Now . . .

the soggy (bad) latke. You can see from the way these latkes drape over each other that they are not crisp. And you cannot not see the well-defined potato shards, so these latkes were likely derived from a mix or a food-processed batter. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I try very hard to be tolerant and empathic and understand differences/diversity. But on the point of good versus bad latkes, I am rigid.
The issue that the woman in the book group raised is that when you are seated at a table with these two plates of latkes, which are you going to eat? Are you going to be polite and eat one of Auntie X's soggy latkes so that hers don't sit untouched? Will you forgo Auntie Y's golden crispy ones just to make Auntie X feel appreciated? Will you forgo Auntie Y's crispy ones and settle for Auntie X's soggy ones so that others can enjoy the superior product (the martyr approach)? How will it look if the crispy pile disappears in a minute, and the soggy pile remains all evening? Perhaps more important, how will Auntie X feel about Auntie Y (perhaps they are sisters) as a result of this latke affair, and vice versa? There is always the possibility, of course, that some will prefer the soggy latke, that they don't see them as "soggy" at all but pleasantly accessible.

Chanukah

2010-12-02T08:21:00.000-06:00

You know how it is sometimes, when you start to say something, and you've got so many competing thoughts and feelings, all jockeying for position in the funnel that leads down from your brain and the funnel that leads up from your heart, all simultaneously toward the tip of your tongue and/or the roof of your mouth or wherever speech comes from? And it's so much at once that whatever it was you thought you might say comes out kind of like ba, ba, ba, a motor boat that can't quite get started, a babble of confusion, a twirling tongue? Well, that's me and Chanukah. At least this year. I mean, I don't even know where to begin.
     With the annoying opinion piece in yesterday's NY Times by Howard Jacobson, recent Man Booker prize winner trying to be funny? They say his award-winning novel is funny, and I had been anxious to read it until I read his NY Times piece yesterday, which I did not find at all funny or even clever.
     With the story of the time (years ago) when my mother called me to say Happy Chanukah? And it was a time when I didn't care (or didn't think I cared) about Chanukah, and she started singing Chanukah songs over the phone, and I felt annoyed, but then something clicked in, and I started singing with her, and soon I was crying.
     With the Chanukah song sheets, which I have in a folder in my file cabinet downstairs? These are song sheets that my mother mimeographed (yes, this was pre-Xerox), so the print is that purple color, and the letters are slightly swollen. She always brought them out on Chanukah, and we (the rest of the family) always acted annoyed. But I saved them. Okay, I know it's hard to see, but you get the idea. That's her staple in the upper left hand corner, and that's her hand writing, and that's probably her wine stain near the bottom right. A family heirloom?

Okay, call me sentimental. Fine.

Home for the holidays

2010-11-24T12:32:00.000-06:00

In honor of the concept of home, and the diversity of home-concepts, I present a simple multiple-choice quiz, with the pleasurable side benefit that there is no right (or wrong) answer. Which of the following homes most suits your innermost alternative-home fantasy?

Home number 1? Earth-sheltered house.

Home number 2? Tree-stump house.

Home number 3? Hanging-over-paradise house.

Or home number 4? Personal-moon house.

The Last Frontier

2010-11-17T08:37:00.001-06:00

I remember when my father joined the Gray Panthers. It must have been the early or middle 1980s, and it seemed very cool to me--a riff on the Black Panthers, a riff (and not just a riff but a movement) growing out of rage and focused on activism in the face of negative attitudes toward one's group.

I liked the idea of my father as an activist, and I remember when he came to Chicago for a regional Gray Panthers convention. Gray Panthers was started by Maggie Kuhn, who said "We are the risk takers; we are the innovators; we are the developers of new models." Here's Maggie.

I am writing this because although I am old enough to be a Gray Panther (and in fact, my hair is gray--that is, I allow it to be gray and thus find myself in a minority), I am still subject to ageist thoughts and reactions. I will level with you. At one of my readings in Michigan, two women came from a nearby seniors housing community. The activity director brought them. One was in a wheelchair. The other used a walker. Their posture was bent. And although I greeted and introduced myself to most of the people who attended the reading, I did not approach those two women. I realize now that it must have taken significant effort for them to come.

I can't say precisely why I ignored them, or I am too ashamed to say. I barely even glanced at them, though I was aware that they were there. After the reading, however, I noticed that my friend William was deep in conversation with them, which drew me over. William introduced me, explaining that one of the women had been a professor at Wayne State (can't remember now, what her field was; literature? anthropology?), had written extensively in her field, had donated her writings to the Walter Reuther archives at Wayne State and the Burton Collection of the Detroit Public Library. Only then did I begin to engage with her, to listen to her, and also to feel shame at my earlier ignore-ance of her.
As my friend Pat pointed out when I told this story, one sad thing is that it focuses solely on what this woman used to be. What about the present?

Extraordinary

2010-11-10T07:55:00.001-06:00

I just returned from the most extraordinary week in southeast Michigan and a series of book events--six of them in four days. I must have spoken to hundreds of people, both in groups and individually. I was delighted to learn that high school students at Cranbook in Bloomfield Hills and the Rudolf Steiner Waldorf school in Ann Arbor have been reading my book. Some of the Waldorf students came to my reading at the Ann Arbor Public library, and they warmed my heart with their earnestness and interest. I met people from my past, people who knew my sisters, people who knew my parents. People who did remember me from elementary school and high school. People who didn't remember me from elementary school and high school.
     I read from my book, spoke about identity and Halloween, spoke about dreams and aspirations (what drives us and what limits us). I read passages from my novel--the opening scene in which Harry is driving to work, the one about Harry and the bike giveaway, the one about Harry's visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts when Diego Rivera is painting the frescoes, the one about Ruth on the way to her meeting, the one about her when she finds herself at Margo Solomon's Moroccan luncheon.
     The capstone event was my visit with the U-Michigan Honors students and parents. I first met with them in an informal lunch setting, where I spoke about my life path, from shy, intimidated college student who never said a word in class, to editor and writer, now standing before them and not even nervous. A miracle. Here is the story that one student wrote about that lunch. Later that afternoon, I spoke to an audience of parents and students in one of the university's big lecture halls, and even then, I WAS NOT NERVOUS (unbelievable).
     At that session, I read a section of the novel that I had not read aloud before. It's from the beginning of the Riot/Rebellion chapter, when Alvin and his friends are heading out on a Saturday night, and it's the closest the reader gets to Alvin's inner life. I'd never thought about reading that scene aloud before. I've always felt a little skittish about Alvin--that perhaps I had taken too big a risk in trying to write from the point of view of a black teenage male. But I remembered something from a recent book event, where the facilitator pointed out that the wide-ranging book discussion had failed to say much about either Alvin or his father, Curtis, and that perhaps this represented a kind of discrimination or ignore-ance. So I read to the U-Michigan audience about Alvin, and I loved doing it. I felt that the section had energy, momentum, that it portrayed him (and his anger and his doubts and his wisdom) with respect. And I'm so glad I chose that section.
     I could say a million more things about this visit to Michigan, but now I am back, and now I am exhausted. Plus I am undergoing the rebellion of the electronics--both my oven (with Thanksgiving coming) and my laptop (with another novel to write) seem to be in a state of distress. And I have an award event to attend tonight--the prose competition of the Guild Complex (which I judged).

Halloween

2010-10-27T08:38:00.001-05:00

I've written about Halloween on this blog before--specifically, I wrote about it last October. In that post, I described the uncomfortable feelings I have about the strangers who come to my door trick or treating. I don't expect to feel differently about that this year. I've actually come to dread Halloween to some extent, though it's a rich mixture of magic and nostalgia and dread--perhaps an appropriate mix for this particular holiday.
At any rate, Halloween has special meaning for me, and as I've mentioned before, my novel begins on Halloween. I can cite multiple reasons for this, and as I have multiple book events next week (see schedule in right-hand column), I will use a deep dive into the meanings of Halloween as a launching pad for at least some of my presentations.
What I've noticed this year about the weeks leading up to Halloween relates to decorating trends. When I was a girl, although Halloween was a time of great excitement, people didn't decorate their houses at all (at least not that I remember). Of course there was the pumpkin on the porch or in the window, but that was it. Gradually, Halloween has become a marketing phenomenon, and decorations have become more and more extensive and elaborate. But they have also changed in character. A few years back, it was all about those nylonish-inflatable-type decorations. Bright colored and friendly and silly, at least until they collapse in a dirty pile on the front lawns. You know what I mean.

Other items I have seen with regularity are the spider-web things that people stretch over their bushes and so forth.

And there are pretty little lights. And pumpkins, of course: Real, ceramic, and plastic. Plastic or wood gravestones with funny inscriptions (can't think of any at the moment) are also common. Bony legs and arms and feet emerging from the ground. Skeletons hanging from trees. Witches that have crashed into trees.

What I want to say is that this year, I have noticed a decidedly more ghoulish look to the decorations. Large plastic rats. Zombie-like faces emerging from spider webs. Big hairy bats with fangs. A skeletal bride and groom enclosed in a cage and hanging from a tree. Other skeletal creatures with really horrible faces.
When I mentioned this "trend" to my husband, he said, "Scary things for scary times."

Stumped

2010-10-19T20:24:00.002-05:00

That's how I feel about this week's blog post: stumped. It's not that there are no topics available. There was that article in the NY Times a week or two ago, pointed out to me by a faithful blog reader, written by an African American man who takes the train to work into NYC everyday and who has observed that the seat beside him consistently is left empty by white passengers, even when all the other seats in his car are filled. And, he pointed out right off the bat, that he has excellent hygiene and wears very good business suits.
      And there's the novel I'm reading now, called Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) (the other Elizabeth Taylor, as she sometimes is called)--a British writer. The book opens when the widowed Mrs. Palfrey is moving to a rooming house for the elderly, all by herself and in a taxi, no one to help her, as she and her daughter don't care much for each other, and she and her grandson don't either. It's a fascinating book, about age and loneliness and odd bondings of people. One could say (and for the sake of unity in this blog post, I will) that the characters in this novel are in the same situation as that man on the train in the NY Times article. I could say a lot more about how it's got me stirred up and focused on age, but I won't.
     And then there are all the stories about people I've met and the stories they've told me at my various book events, some of which I have told in previous posts. But there are many more I could tell. Instead, I'll just tell one thing I learned at a book event last week: Even though the errors in my novel were corrected when the book went into paperback, they have not been corrected in the Kindle version. I'd like to do something about that, but really am not sure where to start. Ideas? Volunteers?
     So the word "stump" came into my mind as I was thinking about what to write this week, and I started looking at pictures of tree stumps, and I realized that some of them look like a kind of tunnel or entryway into the underground. The word omphalo comes to mind: umbilicus or navel. And the omphalos stone (meaning center of the universe) at the shrine of Delphi.

Sometimes at readings, I have told a story about a tree stump that inspired the ending of my novel. The story (in very abbreviated form) is that while I was researching my novel, I was a guest in the home of an old friend. She was out of town, so I was alone in her home for several days, researching, writing, pacing. It was summer and very hot, but her home was freezing because I could not figure out how to adjust the AC. So I would sit, wrapped in a blanket looking out her back window, which had a lovely view down a hill to a creek and a wooded area. One day I decided to go outside to warm up and walk down to the creek. I noticed a tree stump and headed for that, as a place to sit. When I got to the stump, however, I saw that although it looked solid from the front, like a place where one could sit, it was completely decayed and decomposed around the back when one got the full view of it.
You know what decaying wood looks like--spongy and moist and layered and orangish, with all manner of beetles and other insect life scurrying around. And as I stood there, looking at the solid front and the decaying back, it struck me that everything depends on perspective. What one sees depends on the angle from which one looks and how closely one looks. And this struck me as so important a thought, and so relevant to my novel, that I scurried back up to the house, opened my laptop, and drafted the last scene of my book. If you look at the last page of the novel, you will see a reference to that tree stump.
So there you have it. A stump can be an opening. It can even be a house.

Normal/Normality

2010-10-13T09:49:00.001-05:00

I'm not going to pretend to understand what happened in the "former Yugoslavia" in the mid-90s. I mean, I do understand that a brutal war occurred, that thousands were slaughtered, that atrocities against humans were committed, and that many lives were shattered. And I understand that ethnic divisions/hatreds/histories between Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians (or Bosniaks) were at the center.

At the time, I remember NPR reporters asking experts and insiders of all kinds to explain to the rest of us what the sources of these ancient conflicts were.

Historical battles, borders, territories. These were some of the answers. My friend, Vesna Neskow, a writer whose family comes from this part of the world has given up (I hope only temporarily) on the novel she wrote about these people and this world.

"It started to seem too much like a lesson in history," she told me, "as if I had too much of an agenda," she said. "Do people understand what that war was about?" she asked me. Speaking for myself, no, not really, but on the other hand, yes, of course.

What prompted me to take up this topic this week was a story I heard on NPR a few weeks ago. The story started out by saying that 15 years after the war, Sarajevo appears to be a city healed. But the reality of the region is that ethnic divisions remain.

Education, which should foster a multicultural society, has instead been manipulated by each ethnic group. There are separate education ministries, and each draws up its own ethnically based curricula and textbooks.

The part of the story that struck me most deeply was this:

In many towns and villages, few refugees displaced during the war have gone back to their homes. More and more young people are segregated: They've never met anyone from the other two ethnic communities. . . .
Says organizer Emin Mahmutovic, "Young people, they are starting to think that ethnic divisions are normal."

One thing I like about writing this blog is that I don't need to come to any conclusions. I can do with this material whatever I want, including simply putting it out there. While reading about Bosnia, however, I did learn that during the war, this beautiful bridge in Mostar was destroyed.

It has since been rebuilt, but what could be more metaphorical than a bridge destroyed? And what could be more normal (at least for me) than worrying about what normal can or should be.

Through the Back Door

2010-10-06T20:11:00.002-05:00

I've met a number of people because of my book. Some I have met at readings, and in a post-to-come I will tell about some of them and the stories they have told me. Others I have met via email--that is, people who have written after or while reading my novel because they have been moved by it or appreciated it or wanted to point out errors. One of the people who wrote to me (who signs in here as rasirds) lived for many years in Detroit (but does no longer) and has become a regular reader and commenter on this blog, and I thank you/her very much for your/her interest and participation.
Another person who emailed me, Marcy Feldman, still lives in the Detroit area and is planning to host a book event for me when I visit in November. She is an extremely dynamic and socially conscious person, and she heads an alumni association of people who attended her Detroit elementary school. This group raises money and provides many other kinds of much-needed enrichments and services to the students and families of this neighborhood school.

     One of the benefits of heading this alumni association is that Marcy has managed to keep in touch with many people from her past and get to know them as adults. Which leads to the subject of the post: the back door.
     Through Marcy, I heard this story from Lynn, a member of the alumni association who no longer lives in Detroit. Lynn kindly gave permission for me to retell it.
     When Lynn, who is African American, was a little girl, a Jewish friend of hers (let's call her X) invited Lynn to come over after school to work on a school project. As Lynn and X came up X's walk, however, an African-American woman--the "maid"--appeared at the front door. She studied Lynn very carefully, held the door open for X, then turned her attention to Lynn and said, "Where you think you goin'? You need to go to the back door."
     Here's what Lynn says: "Later that evening when I was dropped at my house, my mom was anxiously waiting to hear about my first study date. I told her what happened, and still today, I can remember the look of pain and horror on her face."

We can only imagine what X made of this. And we can only wonder whether X's mother knew about this, and if she did, what she would have said. And we can only imagine the damage that must have been done to the "maid" and/or her fears about her job and/or her place in the home of X's family to inflict this kind of treatment and humiliation on a little girl who had been invited to this home. And, certainly, we can all quietly sit with our own painful musings about the impact of this incident on Lynn all those years ago.

Because Marcy has rallied her fellow alumni, she has also had the privilege to revive this relationship with Lynn, and the two women have made it possible for me to tell you this story. In a follow-up email, Lynn said that she thought this must have been a very common experience for African-American children. This makes me realize how little I knew about the many black children (we used the label Negro back then) I went to school with and what I might hear if any of them stepped through time into my current life.

Some days . . .

2010-09-29T08:15:00.001-05:00

. . . the heart and the mind are tired, and one must take a less arduous path. So, here, for your viewing pleasure, a "simple" image, from the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Some might say that Grand River and Joy is not a "beach read," but clearly, not everyone would agree (shhh . . . it looks like she's near the end).

And (as a celebration of seasonal and locational diversity) another one . . .

She looks like she's nearing the last page as well . . .

Intersections

2010-09-23T07:37:00.000-05:00

I've just come back from a few days in New Orleans. We went to visit our daughter, a lighting designer. The theater company she is a member of was/is performing The Mad Woman of Chaillot, written by a French playwright in the '40s, a tale of corporate greed and oil lust. The New Orleans group decided to mount this play well before the Deep Water Horizon oil explosion. So History stepped up to intersect with their artistic concerns and interests.

* * *

I have always loved the bowl shape of the Mississippi where it hugs/contains/cradles the city of New Orleans. I spent some time looking at maps of New Orleans on this visit, as we stayed at a B&B that had many antique maps of the city on the walls of the dining room, and the B&B owner liked to talk about them and the city's history as we ate breakfast. One thing I hadn't known was that NO was originally planned as a walled city. This wall would have contained the area we now know as the French Quarter, the Vieux Carre. Our host did not think that any of the walls had ever been built. The walls were intended for protection from the native tribes. But, our host said, the settlers and the natives ended up getting along well, so perhaps this is why the wall project was abandoned. In my novel-in-progress, I have a character in a contemporary setting who is proposing to build a wall along the border of his town because he is afraid of the people who live on the other side. I do not think he will get very far with this project. But it seems worth exploring.

* * *

When we arrived at the B&B, our host introduced us to his wife, who was sitting in a corner of the living room, gluing glitter onto stilettos, and she had a whole shoe rack of amazing women's shoes waiting in line for similar treatment. They explained that she is one of the Krewe of Muses. In NO, Krewes are the groups that parade during Mardi Gras. And this particular krewe is beloved because as the muses float by on their floats, they throw the glittering shoes out to parade watchers (the things they throw are called "throws," and these shoes are considered to be high-quality throws.)

If you read this blog, you know that the muse is a concern of mine. Also, a concern of my friend Patry. My last morning in NO, when I went to check my email in the living room where the glittery shoes are produced by a Krewe Muse, I found a message from Patry, saying that she had just completed our collaborative muse-summoning/blueberry-pie-baking annual ritual. Furthermore, every time I am in NO, I contemplate the unusual/unpronounceable/impenetrable array of street names. Terpsichore, for example. Melpomene. Euterpe. When I mentioned these names to my godson over dinner, he shrugged, so casual. "Oh," he said, "the names of the muses."

* * *

The work of W. G. Sebald, one of my great literary inspirations, is saturated with just these kinds of intersections and "coincidences," as we call them. It is reported that when asked about the role of coincidence in his work, Sebald said that whatever path he took in his writing, he always, sooner or later, came across another path that led quickly back to some detail from his own life. He also said that the more one was attuned to look out for such things, the more frequently they occurred.

* * *

One morning at breakfast, we met a young woman who is in the army, stationed in Louisiana, part of an engineering brigade that works on vertical projects. She may have called it the "vertical unit" or the "vertical brigade" (I am not sure), but she explained it by saying they work on bridges, towers--anything, I guess, that takes one up. She was also one of the first responders during Hurricane Katrina, staying for a time in the Convention Center, then in a camp the army set up. An actual person who is trained to take charge in the midst of human catastrophe. Sitting quietly and eating breakfast. And I was thinking about that, with a hushed awe. I was thinking about that capacity in her, but I'll admit, I was also thinking about the circus act that occurs in my new novel--what I call the "Spiral Ascent"--and I was thinking about whether she might have any tips for me.

* * *

There's no real way to end a post like this but to sit with the idea of intersections, let it filter down and see where it takes us.

Feeling Lunar

2010-09-15T09:52:00.000-05:00

The dates of the Jewish holidays are based on a lunar calendar. And as "we" are currently in the midst of the Days of Awe (see previous post), I have been particularly aware of the moon. This doesn't happen to me every year, but this year, it has.

Rosh Hashanah occurs at the new moon (because, I suppose, it's the start of the new year). Makes sense.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which begins this Friday night and is the day on which the Book of Life and Death is written and sealed (or something along those lines; "who shall live and who shall die"), occurs at the half moon.

That ends the Days of Awe, but coming right up is Sukkot (or, as I used to call it Succos), the harvest festival, or the festival of booths, which occurs at the full moon.

In the most embarrassing, humiliating, regretable error in my novel, I wrote that Succos is a spring holiday. My friend Laura pointed the error out to me after the book was published (eternally grateful, Laura), and it has been corrected in the paperback. I cannot for the life of me figure out how I managed to make such an error, but my only excuse is that there are so many pieces and levels to a novel that "something's got to give."

Which leads me to the next phase of this post, which is that in all this lunar immersion (have you actually looked at the moon lately? If not, please do so tonight, as it has been quite an alluring presence), I have been thinking of and singing to myself all the moon songs I can think of. "Fly Me to the Moon." And "It's Only a Paper Moon." And "It Must Have Been Moon Glow." And "Moon Over Miami." And "Moon Dance." And "How High the Moon." I'm sure there are others I haven't thought or heard of, and if I did a Google search, I'd have multiples in minutes. But, please, if you have others to suggest, step up and do so.

To end, here is a lunar image of great merit. I tried to find the person to credit for this (and others to be found at the website) but couldn't actually find a person. So thank you, imaginative lunar visionary. Thank you.

Days of Awe

2010-09-08T09:07:00.004-05:00

In honor of the Days of Awe, I'm reviving a post from a year ago and reposting it with a few updates/revisions. A sweet year to all of you, and thanks for reading.

I usually don't listen to the radio on Sunday mornings while eating breakfast because I'm letting myself ease into the zone of writing and don't want to be distracted. But this past Sunday morning, I got engaged in a broadcast of the wonderful Speaking of Faith and an interview with Rabbi Sharon Brous about the Jewish High Holidays (which began last night). Rabbi Brous says that in her congregation during the High Holiday services, she pushes her congregants to lie prostrate--flat on their faces, hands outstretched and palms up. The more uncomfortable they are with doing this, she says, the more important that they do it--if only for a few seconds or minutes.

I couldn't find a photo that looked exactly like what she described, but I think you can picture it. The idea for Rabbi Brous is that when she prostrates herself in this way, she is acknowledging and accepting and experiencing the lack of control, submitting to some higher power. I'm not saying it as well or beautifully as she did, so I encourage you to listen. Here is some of what she has to say about the Days of Awe, from her website.

These are days in which we step out of our daily routines and attain a sense of the sublime, a sensitivity to the mystery of life. Each year we are given the gift of time to reflect seriously on the people we have become, and dream once again about who we can be. We engage in heshbon hanefesh - intensive self reflection, in which we review our behavior over the past year, identifying mistakes and shortcomings. And we make teshuvah - serious, sincere return, as we work to refine ourselves and repair broken relationships. We connect and reconnect with the best of ourselves, our family members, our friends, and God. Through this process, if we do it right, we are able to discover a renewed sense of wonder and mission in our lives.

Ah. There's an image with the open palms.

This year, as the Days of Awe begin, I am deeply into yet another revision of my second novel--with feedback from my agent as well as several trusted readers. Writing and revising are arduous, but I believe I am working toward greater depth, and toward realizing the potential of the story and the characters.

And simultaneously my husband and I have just returned from New Orleans, where we visited our daughter, and where one still (five+ years post-Katrina) feels such a rush of hope and devastation and recovery.

Not sure how to end this post. Perhaps I'll just lower myself onto the floor right now. Palms up to the sky.

What Makes Life Worth Living?

2010-09-01T09:09:00.001-05:00

Here's Woody Allen. It's a shot from Manhattan, near the end of the film. He's speaking into a tape recorder and pondering the question of what makes life worth living. He's on the couch, of course--a reference to psychoanalysis. It's worth watching the clip of these moments, as he discovers his answer. The acting is so natural, and his list is such a celebration of specificity. Also, it's such an antidote to discomfort, the recurrent theme of this blog.

Although discomfort is a recurrent theme in Woody's films and in all art and literature, sometimes we need a break. Lately, I've been seeking comforts, and in this idea--that it's the tiny moments and gifts that make life worth living--I have somewhat found it.

This is not a make-your-own-list-a-la-Woody challenge. Trying to do so after watching his performance on the couch in some senses feels like a pale imitation. But yesterday, as I walked around my town, I did try to notice the details that give me pleasure: a beautifully constructed stone retaining wall in someone's garden, living in a town with large trees and a variety of interesting houses, the tiny perfect blue flowers on the "false forget-me-nots" in my yard (nothing about them seems false to me, but this is their name; and they are just a memory at the moment, as they bloom in the spring and early summer and I never take enough time to look at them), the taste of a juicy peach (made especially compelling this morning when I read the NY Times article about Roger Ebert, who can no longer eat anything but remembers flavors and smells), the anniversary gift my husband gave me to celebrate our 27th year together--a subscription to The Paris Review, which he got interested in after reading an article in the Financial Times about the new editor. Oh, baby, I have tears in my eyes. If that man doesn't know me, who does? If that isn't a gift that goes to some of my deepest values and longings, what would be? Maybe I can't do it as well as Woody Allen, but I'm trying.

On a related note, What Makes Life Worth Living is the theme at the University of Michigan this fall. And it is in this context that they (the University of Michigan Honors College) chose my book as the one for incoming freshman to read over the summer (which I believe is about to end). I have been pondering the connection between my book and this theme. Certainly, having it chosen in this context is something that makes life worth living. But in the book itself? How does it fit? Was the selection panel thinking about the characters and what they do in the book? That is, trying to connect with others? Taking risks? Feeling connected to a place enough that losing it would matter? By the time I go to visit the campus in November, I'd like to have arrived at an answer. Maybe a session on the couch with a tape recorder would help?

In the Neighborhood Again

2010-08-25T09:03:00.000-05:00

I've written about my neighborhood before. My neighborhood is so central to me, shaping my perceptions and my feelings and my sense of community. It's where I live, work (home office), and walk everyday, and I'm deeply connected to most of my neighbors. As an example of how important my neighborhood is to me, I'll tell you that I have made it one of the settings for my new novel. I would not have expected that these two parallel rows of houses facing each other along a straight length of asphalt (or whatever they make streets out of) could become so intertwined with my identity, but there you have it.

My town is decidedly liberal in outlook. A joke my daughter heard in high school was that if someone wanted to vote Republican in this town, he had to go down a dark alley in a trench coat to do it. I suppose I feel a certain comfort in living among people who mainly share my worldview, though David Brooks in the NY Times today questions the benefit of living among too much agreement. Still, I've always lived in places like this, and I suspect I always will.

I have one neighbor who decidedly does not share this liberal worldview. He's lived in this neighborhood longer than I have, and I have to give him credit for being able to tolerate the liberal onslaught all these years and for having the courage to post the biggest McCain-Palin signs he could find (and Bush et al. before that) and come to the block parties and say whatever he wants. He even got together with my husband once, over drinks (this was after the Obama election), to tell him how worried he was about the country and hear what my husband had to say that might reassure him. He was honestly trying to understand.

I ran into this neighbor the other day when I was out walking, and he must have felt like talking because we lingered for about 15-20 minutes, chewing over the end of summer (he loves to swim at the neighborhood pool, but it closed early this year because of budget cuts), the departure of one household of long-time neighbors and how much we're going to missing them, where he'd like to move if he could (he's tired of living here, he said), the conflicts he had with his father-in-law, what a loudmouth he is (he said this, several times; I didn't).

One thing about this neighbor. Hanging from his front porch is that ugly poster of Obama made up to look like the Joker from Batman. I hate that image. It's nightmarish. My neighbor has an absolute right to hang whatever he wants from his house (I guess), but this seems to cross a line. After we parted ways that day, I thought that I might have found a way to say something to him about it. E.g., "I would never tell you that you can't have that image on your home, but why do you? No one on this block--regardless of their views about Bush or anyone else--ever displayed anything so provocative and disturbing." I regret that I didn't. If he had the courage to listen to my husband, perhaps I could have listened to him.

But perhaps this is "simply" what a "loudmouth" feels he needs to do to make his views known. Not everyone is the type to skulk down an alley in a trench coat?

The Discomforts of Sibling Rivalry

2010-08-19T08:05:00.002-05:00

No two people are alike. We know this. Even if we share DNA, which we all do. Of course, some share more DNA than others--e.g., siblings. But still. It all mixes up in its own special blend and expresses in its own special way related to both nature and nurture. I know this. So why can the differences feel threatening, or at least unsettling or discombobulating or stew-inducing?

That's me, above, at the beach. Photo courtesy of my sister, who is great with a camera and with original angles on things. We were at the Jersey shore, because I went to New Jersey last week to visit my sister and her husband. Even though my sisters and I can be a prickly bunch (I have another sister, but she wasn't with us in New Jersey), we had a good, rich visit. Still, I couldn't help noticing how the differences between us rattled me. Even what some might term superficial differences.

Example: clothing. My sister has a very interesting and stylish wardrobe, takes pleasure in putting her clothes together in intriguing ways, keeps her eyes open for new ideas, and looks good and put together pretty much all the time.

Not to say that I don't care about clothes. I do. And I too have some interesting pieces and try to put them together in interesting ways. It's just that most of the things I own are 20 or more years old. I don't shop much or easily. Agony is a more accurate descriptor of my feelings while shopping. Also, I work at home, so I don't need to consistently refresh my wardrobe. My approach to wardrobe issues makes sense, and most of the time I'm comfortable with it. So why did the fact that my sister's wardrobe outdid mine (see, now I'm framing it as a competition) have to stir me up?

Competition (or the related rivalry) is a discomfort that is built into most sibling relationships. At least in my case, this competition and the way I deal/feel in it, is a foundation for how I manage and negotiate difference/diversity in the world. I compare. I size up. I see where I stand in relation. I'm clearly ahead. I'm falling behind. Often, I'm fully side by side. But it doesn't take much to stimulate that comparative/competitive thing. Some say "celebrate the diversity," or "Viva la difference!" Yes and yes. But still. Diversity has many facets.

Discomfort Plain and Simple

2010-08-11T08:44:00.000-05:00

About a month ago, I found myself out for dinner at an old-school Chicago steak house. An odd place for me for a number of reasons, including the fact that I don't eat steak or beef. But my husband had received a generous gift certificate to this establishment, and so we went.

This was the kind of place that tried to make you think you were in the "good old days"--that is, before we knew what we know about alcoholism (martinis), lung cancer (cigarettes), or heart disease (huge, fat-marbled steaks as big as your head; butter and sour cream slathered on the baked potato). The days of Mad Men--sexism, racism, political incorrectness, all A-OK.

I was fine with living these illusions for a few hours of my life--a Disneyland-type experience. But I did not like the illusion carried into the bathroom, where I discovered a bathroom attendant, African American and in uniform. That photo above is captioned "bathroom attendant's work station." I do not think the woman in the bathroom of my steakhouse had such an extensive array of goodies to share with me, but this is the general idea--that she has your hygienic and cosmetic needs covered.

Ugh.

I had been in bathrooms before with attendants and always found it an uncomfortable experience. Not welcome. Not a mark of luxury. Not an assurance that the bathroom would be kept neat and clean to the highest standards or that if I needed any help it would be available. Although, I now see, these are the reasons restaurants and hotels have such people. Plus, in some places, they might be there to monitor unruly or illegal behavior.

The restrooms at the Drake Hotel used to have them. And a few other high-class joints that I can remember. They were always African-American women, while the customers were almost always white. They certainly were in that Chicago steak house.

Ugh.

I knew that it was good, in a sense, that she had a job. And I knew I should give her a tip. But I didn't want to. I didn't want to be part of the whole embarrassing world in which such hierarchies exist--where I was the white woman at the Disneyland steak house being handed a paper towel by a black woman in a uniform. I'm a generous tipper under most circumstance (at least I think so), but I couldn't make myself do it. It would have made the whole experience too real. Which it already was.

Dendrites, Neurons, Axons, and Tightropes

2010-08-04T18:59:00.001-05:00

In my dream last night, I found myself high above the ground, trying to make my way back home. The above-ground path I had been walking on for some time was made up of a comfortable network of interlocking bridges and tree branches with plenty of handholds and nothing to fear. However, just before I woke up panting, I realized I had taken a wrong turn off the comfortable network, and what lay before me was a very narrow, tightrope-like structure. The only option, it seemed, was to go forward. Not to get too technical about it, but as I reflect on it, I think it looked kind of like a neuron--a brain cell--with the axon as the pathway ahead.

See what I mean? This seems apt because although I have had a reasonably clear focus on this blog over the past year or so, last week I mentioned that I am not sure whether or how that particular path will continue. The thing about neurons, is that they exist in a dense network of connections, and once the brain-message gets across that narrow axon, it connects up with the network and can go in multiple directions. (again, excuse the lack of technical lingo and expertise re: neuroscience.)

Anyway, my sister, who is serious about psychoanalysis, told me that the reason a psychoanalytic patient sees the analyst at least four times a week is that so much happens in the human mind and soul in any one day that if you only go once a week, you simply miss too much. I have been thinking about this, as I blog only once a week, and every week, I think about or hear or read about a hundred things I could write about that are relevant to my blog topic--the discomforts of diversity. The world is so full of these things--ethnic clashes all over the world, recent events on the subject of race in the U.S., debates in my own local community regarding building low-cost housing or even the mention of LGBT issues in the elementary school.
This week, in Newsweek, which we get because we donate to our local public radio station, there was an article about Al Sharpton, a person I have always found fascinating and have actually admired. The year he ran for president, he gave a terrific speech at the Democratic Convention. I thought about writing about him. Also, in this issue of Newsweek was some follow-up on the Shirley Sherrod events, a multifaceted story to stimulate multiple brain pathways. I've considered saying something about her. You see how everything leads to so many possible places? I guess the other thing I could say about that tightrope/axon situation I found myself in last night is that one of the subplots of my new novel has to do with the circus, and in particular a circus acrobat. And when one is working on a novel, or any major writing or creative project, one is certainly facing a heart-pumping tightrope of a walk in practically every sense of the word.

School Integration

2010-07-28T19:44:00.001-05:00

I don't know if it was the blueberry pie or the discovery of the new muse (see last week's post) or the discovery of two new writing strategies, but in the past week, I have gotten deeply involved with the writing of my new novel, and I want to remain that way. So, I'll admit, when Wednesday morning rolled around, I was not sure how I felt about my commitment to this blog. It's not that I care less about the discomforts of diversity than when I began 69 posts ago (that's a lot of posts, by the way). And it's not that I had nothing to say. I actually had multiple ideas for what to write about (one thing about the discomforts of diversity: they never dry up). It's that I was thinking perhaps it was time to move on--to maintain my focus on the new novel, to dig in deeply to this new world I'm creating and avoid/resist distractions.

But I'm not the type to just disappear, or to abandon a commitment easily, so as I went for my walk today, I was mentally composing a farewell-for-now post. I had all kinds of things to say about the world of blogging and the world of novel writing and so on. But this morning, also on my mind were a couple conversations I'd been following on the Detroit Yes forum.

I've mentioned this place before as a very active site that has been supportive of my novel. One of this morning's conversations was "Where were you during the 1967 riots?" which evolved into a conversation about what has happened to Detroit and why it hasn't recovered while so many other cities have. The other conversation was "What direction is Detroit heading?" with multiple views, including up, down, and sideways. I piped up on that one with a paragraph from the last page of my novel, from the perspective of Harry Levine, the main character, who comes to a realization that everything is always in a state of rebuilding and destroying, that it's a matter of proportion, and what you see depends on where you happen to be looking. Also, on this forum, someone had posted a link to an article saying that the Detroit Public Schools had come in last in the country on reading and math scores. Horrible to think about.

Anyway, the conversation in all these threads eventually worked its way around to the troubled school system, and I participated in that, noting that even rumors about trouble in the schools (danger to one's children, or the possibility of lower standards) is enough to get people thinking about moving. It was certainly one of the factors in the white flight to the suburbs that took place in the 60s. At bottom, of course, it is related to racial fear. One of the other people on the forum responded (this was only part of her very-well-written response), "Seriously, what do people think that we're going to do to them? Do folks think that their K-12 education or their university degree is devalued just by the very presence of black folks?"

I felt so embarrassed. I don't know who the white women are in that famous photo above (from Little Rock). Not sure whether their names are known at all. They may see things in a whole new light by now (we can hope). But I am certainly glad not to be any of them. And I wouldn't want the woman on the Detroit Yes forum to think of me as anywhere in that ballpark. Not saying she did. Just saying . . .

Blueberries for Sal

2010-07-20T20:30:00.001-05:00

It's that time of year again. Meaning that my friend Patry and I bake a blueberry pie for our muses. For the full story, please follow the link in that first sentence. Although the recipe is the same every year, and for me, the pie comes out pretty much equally splendiforous every year (which is why I feel okay using a photo from a year past), there are always subtle variations: (1) What, in particular, I am hoping for from my muse. (2) Who I share the pie with.(3) How I'm feeling as I make and compose the various parts of the pie--the crust, which I always make from scratch; the blueberries, which I purchase from the local farmers' market on Saturday morning; how the berries look and how I feel about them as they begin to cook down in the pot; how the cream looks as it's whipping up and how I decide when to stop. (4) How the pie is received when I serve it and whether I feel comfortable telling the eater(s) about Patry and me and Marilyn Robinson and the muse and so forth.

If I went into all of this, you would likely abandon me as too verbose, as I actually have a great deal to say on all four of those points, including my decision on how many blueberries to buy at the market, and the farmer instructing me on the best "price points," but me being afraid to take advantage of those price points because I might end up with too many berries and they might go to waste. And then there I was worrying about what the farmer must have thought of me because I chose to buy fewer berries for the same amount of money that would have gotten me more berries . . . oh, well, I really didn't intend to go into that.

What I wanted to go into was the experience of the berries in the pan, which I have written about before on Patry's blog. The point is that you put the berries in the pot with sugar and corn starch and just a little lemon juice, and then you turn it on moderate heat and wait for them to "cook down." Every year, I get this same worried feeling, though, because the whole thing looks so dry, and I can't imagine that it's ever going to turn into anything other than that dry pile of berries. (You won't be surprised that I have similar concerns about my writing.) This year, however, with memories of past successes, I tried a new approach: watchful patience. Well, it was really a more auditory kind of patience than a watchful one. I lowered my ear to the pot and listened for burbling developments. I didn't stir prematurely. I didn't get overly anxious. I watched carefully, and I listened. And it likely took as long as ever for the process of "cooking down" to occur, but I felt differently about it.

The other thing I wanted to mention about the pie was that it got me thinking about my muse and who, exactly, my muse is. Many years ago, I wrote a poem (one of the few poems I've ever written) in which I envisioned my muse. And she looked something like my mother, sitting by the old manual typewriter, smoking a cigarette with her hair set with bobby-pins. I have written about my mother as muse elsewhere. This time, as an updated muse image, I have started to think of Sal, the little tomboy girl from the old book Blueberries for Sal. In the story, Sal is picking blueberries with her mother but dreamily wanders off and ends up following a mother bear instead of her human mother. It all turns out well for everyone, even if it's a little shocking at first. But I've decided now on Sal as my new muse. Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk--that's the sound of the blueberries falling into Sal's tin pail. And here's Patry and me, the one time I met her in person, when she came to my house during her book tour, and I made blueberry pie for her (with frozen berries), even though it was St. Patrick's Day and berries were not in season.

A Full Lunch

2010-07-13T20:45:00.000-05:00

Continuing on the subject of food, I want to mention that about a month ago, an NPR reporter was traveling around the Midwest, talking to local business owners to do a story on the state of the economy. She interviewed a woman who owned a cafe/bakery in Iowa. The cafe sounded lovely. I'm sure I would love it if I visited it (the photo is not intended to represent anything they would serve at that cafe). The owner reported that she had been through some hard times, business had been slow, and she'd had to let some employees go or cut back their hours (I can't remember now with certainty which it was). But, she reported, things were looking up. How could she tell, asked the reporter. Well, she said, during the bad stretch, customers would come in, and for lunch they would have only a half a sandwich, a cup of soup, and a glass of water. Now, she said, people were ordering a complete lunch, including a drink and dessert. The reporter laughed, and indeed, that was a very clever and concrete economic indicator.

When I thought about it over the next couple days, though, it made me think about interests--that we live in a world of diverse and competing interests (see, now I'm coming around to my blog theme: Discomforts of Diversity). Although I wish the cafe owner no harm, and I certainly want our economy to be vigorous and for small business owners to thrive--especially those who make lovely food from scratch and create welcoming atmospheres where people can gather--I am also consistently hearing about the obesity epidemic, diabetes, heart disease, and the drain on the whole economic and health care systems that these diseases pose. So the cafe owner who thrives when people order a full lunch represents one set of interests; a competing set of interests would argue that people might be better off with a half and sandwich, a cup of soup, and a glass of water. They (and the whole system) would also be better off if they skipped dessert. Which interest is more important? Moderation is likely the key here, but you see where I'm going.

This brought me to think of other competing interests: The spotted owl vs. the loggers. The ban on deep-water oil drilling vs. the people who are out of work because of it. Closing military bases vs. people losing jobs. Even ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan means people will be out of work. Government budget cuts almost always translate into people out of work. It's a closed system. We're all in it together. Someone always has to pay. How do we decide who?

Food versus War

2010-07-06T19:47:00.000-05:00

Last March, I was in Pittsburgh for a reading at the wonderful Gist Street Reading Series. I found Pittsburgh to be an interesting, rich, and wonderful place. And now, more news of Pittsburgh and its wonderfulness. I heard about this on the radio tonight, and had to report it here. Borrowing both the photo (above) and the text from their blog (below; all borrowed out of admiration and respect), I present you with this:

Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries that the United States is in conflict with. The food is served out of a take-out style storefront, which will rotate identities every 4 months to highlight another country. Each Conflict Kitchen iteration will be augmented by events, performances, and discussion about the culture, politics, and issues at stake with each country we focus on.

Kubideh Kitchen [the current iteration] is an Iranian take-out restaurant that serves kubideh in freshly baked barbari bread with onion, mint, and basil. Developed in collaboration with members of the Pittsburgh Iranian community, the sandwich is packaged in a custom-designed wrapper that includes interviews with Iranians both in Pittsburgh and Iran on subjects ranging from Iranian food and poetry to the current political turmoil.

Brilliant, yes? I do think that food is a welcoming and potentially persuasive way to enter into the world of another--even of a feared or hated Other. A way of breaking down barriers. A way of differentiating the people from the government/politics. A way of recognizing humanity.

How about a bowl of chicken soup with matzoh balls? Which I mention only because it is a warm and welcoming (and, some think, curative) food. Also because it's associated with Jews, and a lot of people have problems with Jews.

Learning from Your Characters

2010-06-30T09:04:00.001-05:00

When last we met, we were at the Frederick Douglass Branch of the Detroit Public Library (see prior entry), and I was holding hands with Millicent while looking deeply into her richly detailed face. Shortly before this moment, I had done a reading and Q&A with the group who had gathered that afternoon, followed by a book signing. C, the branch manager, had put her granddaughter (maybe 12-13 years old?) in charge of the book sales and money collection. When the selling and signing were finished (but before that moment with Millicent), C came over to do a tally of books sold and money collected. And she discovered that one book was missing. Now here was what the scene looked like: C was standing on one side of me as I sat at the signing table, and the granddaughter was standing on the other side of me. What had only moment ago been a celebratory scene turned serious. C became stern.

"When I give you a job to do," she said to her granddaughter, "I expect you to take it seriously." The granddaughter looked chastened, sorry, but did not say anything.

I felt uncomfortable sitting between them (no one likes to be scolded), and besides, I had a whole bunch of books in the trunk of the car, so it would have been very easy for me to make up the missing book. I felt tempted to make it light, say something like, "Oh, don't worry. It's not a big deal." But then I remembered the scene in my book where Harry (the main character) is in the midst of his (somewhat ill-fated) bicycle giveaway. In particular I was thinking of him trying to give a bike to a little girl who really wants the bike, but her grandmother does not like the situation (free handouts to the underprivileged, is how she might have been thinking of it), and she tells her granddaughter she cannot have the bicycle. Harry tries to joke with her, make light of it, get her to loosen up, and overall, the exchange does not go well, and I'm not sure whether Harry ever understood why. When I wrote that scene, I'm not sure I even fully understood why.

But at that moment, in the library, I kept my mouth shut. I realized (learning from Harry's mistake) that C had a lesson she wanted to teach her granddaughter, and it was not my business to intervene. Who am I to say what lessons that young girl needs to learn for her life, what challenges she will face, and who she may need to answer to? So I didn't say anything.

When all that was finished, I went to talk to Millicent.