Blast from the Past, 2009

 How long has it been, since a single face had the power to buckle my knees? 

Can't remember.

Does it matter? 

Not really.  

     We get older, supposedly smarter.  Care less about the packaging.  So why do I pine after Tim Riggins...??

    Wonder if I'll ever have anyone who takes my breath away like that again.  Or if from now on it's just about understanding and empathy, a sense of humanity, a conscious effort to reach out, to love.  To close the gap, exteriority be amned.

     As opposed to having your heart pound so loud your head feels crowded with how badly you simply, sheerly want THAT PERSON.
     Now it's tenderness, not desire.

     Experience, not ambush.

     Saying aww, not WOW JESUS GOD.

     With certain people always feel my worst.  Aggressive, unevolved.  Impulsive, selfish.  Ridiculous.  Deluded.  Adolescent:  Lazy, insensitive, shallow.  Typically female.  Excessively self-centered (but then, how not to be when you live alone?)  As well as unable to rise above either my self or the society I live in.  Apolitical.  Uninformed.  Hopeless.  Flighty.   Alone.  Sad.  Without resources.  Living off other people.  Not working hard enough!

     News news news! (we goan gitchoo!)

  

    Or:  SELF-PORTRAIT OF A NOT-SO-YOUNG WOMAN IN HER MID-FORTIES.

    Hip hip.  Fuck off.  Hip hip.  Fuck off.  Hip hip. 
    Yeah, I'LL say hip hip!

    Fuck off.

31 March, 2009

soon, I will be dead

(HOW soon?  Not soon enough).

Re-making the American Dream

The need to stop acquiring STUFF.  How riches create fences, and fences empires with ever-expanding spheres, like unhealthy, gluttonous waists, which completely coheres w the obesity/diabetic epidemic – we are crashing our pancreas, blowing them out just like the tops off mountains to mine whatever we can find out of them. 

     Mine:  Yup, thar's the problem – the humanity problem.  I had a teacher once, Rhagavan Iyer, who said that the first time man's consciousness separated him from everything else he looked around and his first thought was, 'mine'.

     Imagine the intricacy, the complexity of the bio-habitat, how everything has grown to support each other – the prairie dogs and the soil, the mongoose and the snake, the cactus finding water deep down in the desert, the tiny deer mice and the deer they share the woods with, the flowers upon flowers, the grasses and vines, the fennel chrysales, the caterpillars and butterflies, the bees dancing forward then flying back to their intricate, octagonal hives made of wax and layered with the pollen that accumulates around their legs like Flashdance legwarmers, soft and gold, waiting to be turned into honey, and then the bears who raid them, ignoring a thousand stings just for craving that sweetness -- 
     Sweetness which makes me think of the songbirds dying in the hundreds of thousands from eating the leftover lead lodged in bark, vines, soil and the branches where they raise their young, and then think of the wild turkeys with their hidden nests (and it takes a lot of land to hide a nest!) now seen walking the streets of the Laurel District, clearly having been evicted (Silicon Valley wanted those hidden nests!  They had NEED!) 
     Look up to see the red-tailed hawks, kestrels and eagles, raptors with piercing eyesight circling on thermal waves looking for rabbits, and then the predators that seem to shake nature into balance from the top – bobcats and panthers and coyotes, shot on a daily basis by farmers with cattle humped up on each other, no grass to eat --
     And, on another level entirely, the hundreds and hundreds of years' old trees still growing in copses, birch with its peeling scroll-like bark calling up the idea of paper (which all seemed to begin in scrolls, be it Israel, Egypt or Rome) and pine and the gorgeous, slightly medicinal-smelling (yes we know, we KNOW) non-native eucalyptus that ridge mountain crests, providing shade and nesting sites and nuts for all the foragers – those wild flying (and just nimble) squirrels -- entire forests of them, even, trees and bees and butterflies and squirrels and opposum and raccoon, swans in hidden ponds, geese flying overhead, beaches dedicated to nothing but plover -- but you better believe those are just the less and less 'protected' areas (if only by one gang at a time, just like the Mafia) – let a Republican majority prevail, and it's all about releasing poison everywhere so as to pathetically peck for the last of the gas – and there are hardly, if any, funds available to pay for this ongoing protection – yeah, like public radio, it's all about fund-raising from the people, who used to but now cannot afford either the time or the money it takes to get there and enjoy it, who don't have an extra $25 in the budget for Fresh Air, who are now third-generation buyers of poison in supermarkets, nbd (GMO's the latest but before and still all those transfats and hydrogenated oils and high dex/fruc/tose corn syrup to 'yummify' everything, to create cravings, chips and cookies and soft drinks and 'snacks,' all sold cheaply and clamored for by children) -- except in France, where they have a long tradition of not snacking between meals and hey!  Very very little obesity.  Portliness, stoutness, barrel chests, broad hips, big busts, yes – but rolls and rolls of poundage?  Non non non non non!

- Despairing rant, Part II:

   I do not understand why everybody doesn't want to know, just to know, as they fall asleep, that when they wake up there still exist great wild places – big, huge, dramatic, awesome wild places -- the Arctic, say -- places that are not infested with people (did you know when you compare our growth on the planet, it compares quite precisely with the way bacteria grows?  Not a lot, then suddenly way, waaaaay too much!)  Which, if you want to push the metaphor, means we share the same imperialist (and poisonous, killing) goals as a lot of bacteria does – or, as The Botany of Desire writer mused (and it was so hard not to find proof in his words, so difficult to refute – now there was an innovative mind at work, and thank you for those humans, God, Earth, Sun, Water, Plants, Animals, and whatever is not fucked up about our evolution!)

     We have moved into controlled environments and tried to pretend we aren't animals, just (as an alien in Star Trek.O -- ie original, once said), plain old 'ugly bags of mostly water,' and somewhere along the way – pretty early, I bet, as the human male now must shows off his wallet the way the baboons display their bright & bulbous pink asses, it became about accumulation:  real estate, vehicles, flying and four-wheel (see:  squirrels, above), until very few people owned great swathes of beach front, mountain tops, beautiful valleys, hillsides, along with enormous houses in which to put mounds of furniture and tons of art, all cherished – if cherished at all – by just the chosen few.

     And how much this culture pushes us all to want to be the chosen few!

From Tom Cooper, the ultimate post-Katrina novel, The Marauders

From a very spicy novel set post-Katrina on a Louisiana bayou, with a bunch of salty, laconic, generations-long people who've stayed in the mostly destroyed city of Jeannette (where most men shrimp for a living, work for BP, who has just ruined their livelihood and the ecosystem for hundreds of miles both in breadth and depth), each character somehow more cracked, more grievous, more eccentric than the last, here's a wonderful characterization of one particular place:

From The Marauders, by Tom Cooper:

'For better or for worse, the Barataria was his home.  Whatever that meant.  Home was the peaty odor of Spanish moss in the first spring rain.  Home was the briny sweetness of fresh oysters thirty seconds out of the water.  The termite swarms of early May.  The cacophony of swamp frogs in the summer.  The locusts in the day.  The crickets at night.  The lashing five-minute thunderstorms of late July.  The sugarcane trucks rumbling through town in the autumn.  The carnival giddinesss of Mardi Gras.  The blessing of the fleet.  The petit bateaux clustered in the bay.  The pinpricks points of their pilot lamps like yuletide lights on the horizon.  The strange green glow, supernaturally vivid, of cypress trees in spring gloaming.  The earthy smell of crawfish boils.  The pecan pralines and boudin and gumbo.  The alligators and herons and redfish and shrimp.  The Cajun voices, briny and gnarled.  The old wrinkled faces as strange as thumbprints.'

Lagniappe.

Dzanc Books honored my decades-long wish for this to be its cover

Dzanc Books, a wonderful company that seeks to rEprint literary fiction, bought both Velocity and Some Girls (Hollywood Savage was turned into an E-book by Simon & Schuster, apparently under the contract -- yes, I am sooooo careful when somebody wants to give me money!)

Anyway I love Dzanc, and they finally let me put up the cover I always wanted for my first novel, which happens to be a painting by the very brilliant, multi-talented Jeffrey Bennett, who back in school was filming Jared Harris' first film, painting, and graduating with a degree in Engineering (civil?  perhaps not!  Electrical, mechanical?  I imagine both, but I don't know (not really) --

anyway here's the cover, in its gorgeous noir indigo with ochre representation of a railway crossing in Durham, North Carolina, late in the evening (nine?  ten??) just before the sun went down and meant it:

Simple Tibetan Spiritual Exercise to Get Rid of 'Grudgements'

 BREAK FROM SCHEDULED PROGRAMING:  

This is a mantra/prayer device -- spiritual exercise might be most adequate term -- for opening, and keeping open, heart chakra...which only truly begins to happen when anger has been scoured away...when the heart is pure, and free of the weight of its own judgments -- ve-ry (ber-ry) hea-vy (he-bee), our Lama used to say w/ his irrepressible giggle -- and 'grudgements,' he used to say that too, 'we say, in Tibetan it is this way also, that we carry our grudgements, do we not, and this also is very truthful in referring to the weight such negatives have upon the heart -- so, you see now why heart is such a strong muscle in the body?  Must work very hard!'  (More peals of laughter...impossible not to be attracted to such an inarguably simple 'religious' view -- theory of mind, Lama Gyutso says ('tee-o-ry,' is how he says it, though) –

Okay, Mistress of Digression here!! – the (long)-above exercise referred to consists of putting palms together in prayer position in front of the heart and saying namaste in its English translation:  I bow to the god within you-- substituting name of person you're having problems w/, hold a grudgement against, have spite or malice for...ie, I bow to the god within – (then list names, but probably best to concentrate on one at a time).

Well, I have my own list, but publishing it would be the exact opposite of this exercise.

Though I will say that while thinking of my list, and of my own flaws, this quote came up for me:

"What kills love?  Only this:  neglect."

Can't remember the author – Vonnegut, maybe?  Carver?

Thought I'd take time off literature (yes, please!!) and put in something somebody who might read this may find useful.

Howzzat for self-confidence?? 

Janet Hobhouse, from Nellie Without Hugo and her last, tour de force, The Furies

From the very great, much much too early late Janet Hobhouse's canon of work (here I'm quoting Nellie Without Hugo, a slim volume with deep insight into the state of living with another person, what you get and what it takes away.  These are the lines that jumped out at me:

"It isn't that you repress anything.  It's just that I am all things Hugo creates the space for me to be.  And I don't always want to get my space from him.  I want sometimes to be altogether new."

         "But if someone else came along, you'd just get a different space from him.  It's a silly daydream, Nellie, so undignified and egocentric.  You really want someone else because of what they do to and for you.  Perhaps we all do.  How appalling.  So ignoble; perhaps we should do without."

         "No, because then you're just left your horrible self, watching it and checking up on and it and taking its temperature.  Living with someone at least is a relief from that."

--p. 45

         "And then she wondered if she hadn't perhaps married Hugo to protect herself from them, and so she wouldn't have to go through these things -- long forgotten as they were -- the humiliations and terrors of love."

--p. 98

         "But it seemed to Nellie that the picture wasn't about that, but about dread and not naming things, or not seeing them wholly and hence dreading them."

--p. 135

         "Because she would be asked to consider once again whether marriage, with its built-in guarantee of emotional boredom, with its almost guarantee of sexual deception was such a good idea when there was single life available, with its guarantees of sexual and emotional boredom, of course, and spiritual degradation and so on, both to be weighed and considered and compared until in the end all deviations from the ideal are just forgiven in exchange for the pleasures of forgetting."

--p. 151

         "The consequence of revelation was change; one might have to live one's life differently if such things were to be taken seriously, or if one allowed one's mind to accept the wisdom of the body."

l--p. 155

         "Well, I suppose I was wanting there to be one [affair] that would completely cast me and Hugo out, like ghosts, so that I could go on with someone else.  Really in order to be someone else myself.  You become in a way what they need you to be, what they've chiseled you down to or built you up to, you know, and you end up suspecting that there are a great number of other ways possible for you."

From The Furies:

         "...was gone over line by line, look by look, even in the moment, at least in the beginning, those hot and intense, even awful moments of simultaneity when one was simply trying to survive the emergency of actual coexistence with the beloved."

And re writer's solitary routine:

         "All the symptoms of his current loneliness and depression I read as choices, heroic and exemplary."

         "Maybe I knew enough about the costs of Jack's spartan life, though it wasn't till much later that I knew it up close:  the purposeful deprivation that allows you to work, the cultivation of dullness so that writing can be an escape from it, the only pleasure in an unpleasured world, really only the cessation of pain of being there, that place you have pulled down around you, made empty and ugly with loss.  I certainly understood his depression and melancholy."

--p. 199

         "I really meant to settle down with Ned as I had vowed, but the smallness of our current life -- his emotional absence from it, which left behind for us little but habit and loveless intimacy -- was enough to make me feel the 'not yet' -- it can't be all over yet.  There were these circumstances and there were the ordinary ones of any long-term relationship, the limitations and reductions of what is possible in the light of what has always been, the increasing claustrophobia of the known.  Given the ghastly smallness of longtime intimacy, who hasn't longed for the crash in the china shop of the affair, the created clean uncluttered space where one may act, impersonate one's best self, do the little dance of how one might be if one were free, if life were other, if this other were one's life?"

--p. 200

 

A Letter to Mona Simpson, re her 'Casebook'

Miss Mona -- just wanted to write and tell you how much I loved Casebook (and Hollywood and all your writing in general) -- just finished it, and there were some indelible lines -- re married sex 'Get it over with. I always feel better after. It's just before. The DREAD. -- oh god yes. And bits of weird facts, courtesy Boop Two: Snowflakes are hexagonally symmetric. Like viruses.' And brief, perfect descriptions: 'She smiled. Everything tilted.' Plus all the Uncle Albert quotes, like 'As simple as possible but not more so.' Just so, AE. Also, I spent way too much time trying to come up with more words that end in -dous, and it hurt my brain (in a good way). Plus the great insights, ie: '...and the attention felt natural, even to me, though we'd rarely gotten it before. That was the thing about attention when it finally came: it never seemed amazing. It felt, if anything, maybe just a little LATE.'
And that beautiful, beautiful poem: 'O Western wind, when wilt thou blow/That the small rain down can rain?/Christ, that my love were in my arms/And I in my bed again!' Kind of says everything. As well as WE ARE WHAT WE HABITUALLY DO.
Anyway -- as a novelist myself (I think Velocity came out at the same time as Anywhere But Here), I love it when people point out the specifics, and wanted to do this for you.

Lastly, thank you, SO MUCH, for all your work.