The Mother of Invention
Operating in the no-man’s-land between languages can challenge you to get inventive. I’ve thus (knowing mostly just karate words in Japanese) had some of my most delicious conversations with English-impaired Japanese friends, and I had one tonight. Trying to explain to a brilliant, gentle philosopher and his (ditto) poet wife the inexaggerable (?) importance of one writer for English, I found myself saying (with lots of help from my hands): You know when you’re making a pot you put it on a wheel, you make it round, and then you put it in the fire and it gets hard? It was the same with English, and the fire was Shakespeare.
The Lounge: Crazy Cat Lady Update
Imagine two cats curled up near the warmth of that blazing fireplace.
Now imagine three.
* * *
I walked into the laundromat and one of the Mexican guys who works there started meowing loudly.
As I walked towards the back to get quarters for the machines, he said to me, “You want cat? Free for you!”
The laundromat owner, who is Chinese or Korean (the same guy who owned the place when I left more than five years ago—greeted me in May as if no time had passed), confirmed that he has an employee who is probably allergic and a wife who is maybe not too crazy about taking care of two rambunctious kittens at home. A month ago already I had fallen in love with the white one with the Ash Wednesday smudge, when she was tiny, strutting across the counter looking wildly around for comical protrusions of the world that could be played with, pausing to rub against my arm as if we were old best buds. I had gotten as far as telling the laundromat owner, “If you decide you don’t want that cat, talk to me!”
Now the kittens have come home to roost. (I can really only take one. The other, whom I haven’t met close up, is black with white trim. Anyone?)
I told him I’m going away next week (to Chapel Hill) and wouldn’t be back till the 21st. Could he keep the cat till then? Sure.
Then? I’ll have to take her straight to the vet, at flamboyant expense, to get deflea’d, wormed, and checked out for nasty viruses before I combine her with my cats. I’ll need to find someplace for her to stay the night until she’s cleared. I’ll need to face the higher tower of cat carriers and the tonally enriched symphony of wretched yowls on my forthcoming drive down to Florida. Oy vey. What am I getting myself into?
Life. Life is trouble.
The Lounge: Invasion! and other atrocities [updated]
My heart nearly stopped when I saw a single mama roach with a big shiny egg case skulk across the kitchen counter. It was as horrifying as finding a pod in the cellar in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Because she was logy, probably from the ex-man’s gel, I was able to pounce, crush the egg case and flush her and it down the john. Close call. And not a good sign: word is finally out that there’s cat food here. What will happen when I’m away in Chapel Hill for almost a week??
Meanwhile, here are a couple of topics du jour I would rather talk about here than on Facebook.
According to a friend, and to this story http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/story/2011-11-06/joe-frazier-dead-liver-cancer/51118056/1, Joe Frazier was a much kinder-hearted guy than Muhammad Ali, and was the victim of racism—Ali’s own black-on-black racism and pandering to white preference for a light-skinned pretty boy, even though Frazier had made sacrifices to defend him. (I don’t know how J, my beloved b.s. detector, felt about Frazier, but he sure didn’t care for Ali.)
* * *
Why the Cain flap is nothing but entertainment: he wasn’t a serious contender for the nomination anyway.
(Since I haven’t sought permission to reprint others’ excellent comments, I’ll just copy some of mine. If you spend any time in the airport, take a look at theirs.)
The high polls at this point are just for entertainment value, too. Polling pro Herman Cain expresses people’s impractical frustration, rather as does OWS.
(Here Jaltcoh asks me whether I didn’t think he could have won Iowa)
Maybe; but I think he would have flamed out and would not have won the nomination, and I think that’s pretty obvious to all. On the other hand, I have the impression Gingrich might have been courting him for the bottom of a ticket.
It just seems as if the process is intolerant of colorful (no pun intended), offbeat candidates.
There seems a weary inevitability about Romney.
I don’t know a lot about Cain, I’m mostly commenting on the media’s and the culture’s love of a flap, especially one with sex mixed in. I don’t really think it’s politically substantive, I think it’s a sideshow. Pretending it’s politically substantive enables people to enjoy the sideshow with a clearer conscience.
A friend who voted today reports a strikingly dour and unenthusiastic mood at the polls, and isn’t sure whether her own political mood is coloring what she saw, or just matching it.
UPDATE: More foofaraw fodder:
“In some ways, entrepreneurial individuality and heterodoxy IS the new orthodoxy.” ~ “Steve Jobs: The Capitalist-as-Romantic” http://www.quotesaboutpeople.com/2011/11/05/steve-jobs-the-capitalist-as-romantic/
The Lounge: Feelings About the Time Change
It’s always a big deal when Daylight Saving ends—a kind of artificial, ritual kick in the pants accelerating the season change. Our unheralded modern version of the Day of the Dead. Naturally, I’m ambivalent about it. :) Part of me wishes they’d never started with this Daylight Saving crap in the first place. Part of me dreads and enjoys the jolt. I’m surprised to discover that in a way I like “fall back” better than “spring forward.” I like the cushy extra hour, and I like the prod to withdraw indoors and get convivial and contemplative earlier, the warning to bar the door because here comes the dark and cold. In the spring, you get robbed of an hour, robbed of the early mornings, and you (or I) generally feel rousted out of hibernation too rudely.
Yesterday evening when dusk fell between 4:30 and 5 I was walking into the midtown city from the river with a friend. The sky behind the buildings turned dove color, stone buildings were a bloodless pale red, and glass buildings catching the western sky were silver or pale silk green. (For the initiated, kind of like those evenings on Fort Myers Beach when the Gulf of Mexico is pale green and the sky is deep purple.) Japanese robe colors. Stray marathon survivors hobbled here and there in bare legs and Thinsulate blankets; only the one with a completion medal, a woman, wasn’t limping. I looked up at the glass towers—luxury river view condos, no doubt—and part of my mind went “I wonder if they’re fully occupied in this economy” and another part went, “I need to feel awe.”
The Lounge: Blogger’s Remorse
I heard from Randy! I will let him tell you whatever he wishes about how things are going, but what’s most important, he sounds good in himself.
In my answer to him I found myself expressing regret and remorse at abandoning my “innkeeper” role at this blog:
I haven’t been blogging hardly at all, and realize vaguely that this is like being “a bad hostess” — a blog can be a sort of gathering place. I’ve been posting little odds and ends on Facebook only because they don’t seem to make it to the blog post threshold in length or substance; but I think this is . . . inhospitable. I feel like an innkeeper who just walked away one day. I suppose I could post these little dribs and drabs on Ambiance just to form the nucleus of/excuse for a conversation. I don’t seem to have it in me to provoke serious discussions, so much. But Facebook is about as cozy a place for a conversation as an airport gate area. Still, I’m becoming very in-turned. I’m getting ready to write something about life with Jacques, I think, and this is preceded by a very long inhale in preparation for sinking down into the depths where such things come from.
I wonder whether, instead of writing those little conversational things on Facebook, I should just write them here in a kind of running post—call it “The Lounge.” We need a place to meet and hang out, to come in out of the cold November rain and dark. I would like it to look like the cozy, classy bar I passed last night on the way to nearby friends’ place. The lights were low, candles and tiny white Christmas bulbs; the polished oak wood glowed golden. I think it was called “One If By Land, Two If By Sea.” It just made you want to turn aside and go in. I don’t know if it had a fireplace but it felt as if it did.
By comparison, Facebook is a fluorescent-lit airport concourse. Every time I go over there I smell synthetic carpeting. It seems public, exposed, impersonal, and ugly. It’s partly the bad (nonexistent, airport-concourse-like) design, partly the boring, trivial nature of so many of the posts (including my own). Yet, as I told Randy, I don’t feel up to starting substantive conversations any more.
Sit down by the fire and make small talk with me.
The Best Book I’ve Read in Years
and I’m serious, Is this little book of “flash fiction” by Sippican Cottage: The Devil’s In the Cows. Yes, Sippican (Gregory Sullivan) is an old-time blogfriend but I am not being influenced by that. This is not hyperbole. The book, quiet, modest, sly, insidious, packs a wallop. It’ll blindside you and punch a laugh out of you in a public place, and only sometimes because it’s funny, which it often is. Sometimes it’s just startling — so apt and so unexpected.
It took me a long time to finish reading it and write about it, not so much because I’m busy (though I am), but because each one- to three-page story, and there are 37 of them, feels like a whole novel. A character falls into you like a stone into a well and the reverberations go on and on. A glimpse of, a momentary overhearing of a life somehow implies the whole life. How does he do that? It’s the compression of poetry with the witness of fiction.
The stories are responses to archival photographs from the Library of Congress. Their “narrators” are mostly farm people, laborers and craftspeople, who worked with their hands on things that had real substance; that is, they are voices of a nearly gone world and they transmit the wisdom obtained by wrestling with things that are tangible and heavy and unhurried, that have their own textures and dangers, that require respect and give back an inalienable self-respect, no matter what the world thinks.
I had to put “narrator” in quotes because Sipp doesn’t channel these people’s “voices,” exactly, although the stories are written in the first person and they sound natural, they have particularity, they would make great dramatic monologues in a one-actor show. (Dorothea Lange as Anna Deavere Smith?) But what they say is not exactly what these people would SAY, even to themselves; it’s what their being would say if given a voice.
Let me just quote you a couple of paragraphs at random.
The dentist Yankees drift by on the dance floor and you can see them eying the real woman you got, pushing the limits of her dress every which place — Bam! Boop! Bap! — and he’s got the skinny sorority girl who moves around like a giraffe in a straightjacket and you know right off that she moves like that everywhere. That’s why he can’t stop robbing a peek at the missus when he can; they always sneak out of the house in their mind in here, the white bread. They couldn’t handle a woman like I got anyway. They should stick to the ingenues who reach for the diazepam instead of the kitchen knives when you piss them off.
In other words, please be true. In other words, I love you.
* * *
He’s wearing the wrong clothes and toing a comical box of the wrong tools, and not enough of them, either, and his hands are like his momma’s, or more likely his daddy’s if he’s an ink-stained wretch. He’s wrong, all wrong, and in every aspect and from every vantage point — asleep or awake; in action or repose; drunk or sober — but he’s smart enough to look you straight in the eye and say, “I don’t know nothing but I’m willing to learn, if you’ll show me.”
A boy like that knows everything.
* * *
You can read a whole story here.
If you buy this book, see if you don’t end up buying a bunch more of them to give to certain friends, the ones who know what these people are talking about. My only regret is that some of the people I most want to give this book to are dead.
An Experiment, Live, at The End of Work
An “idea party” over there all day today. Barbara Sher, whom I assisted many years ago in writing her first wildly popular book Wishcraft, discovered that people could actually reach their impossible dreams by crowdsourcing them (a word that didn’t exist yet then)—putting them out there where other people, who don’t have our own personal negativity and blind spots, could rather easily come up with ideas we’d never have thought of, and contacts we’d never have found on our own, that added up to a doable new enterprise.
We’re trying to adapt that strategy for the post-work era, when the impossible dream often seems to be simply generating an income. Many of us are going to have to figure out how to do that outside the shrinking “job” structure (we freelancers have a head start, of course, because we’ve been doing it most of our lives). The End of Work is one place to refine the strategy. The blog host, Ron, is the guinea pig. We’ll do more. It’s actually fun and surprisingly easy to come up with ideas for someone else, because you yourself have nothing to lose. So have at it. Ron has posted his “ingredients list” — skills and interests — so let’s see what we can hypothetically cook up. Comments will be open all day. Nutty ideas are welcome (they often lead to less nutty ones), and the only censorship is of cynicism and “this’ll never work” negativity. By all means feel that way if you must — just don’t express it at the idea party, because it turns the beer to vinegar. If you need to vent, do it here.
Posting. For Karen. [UPDATED]
OK. I’m feeling a weird combination of introverted and extroverted lately that sort of jumps right over the blog. I’m either completely alone (save for cats, a significant exception) at home, or running around with friends. The proportion of days doing each has lately been about 1:3 or 1:4. It’s always struck me that when the weather starts to get cold a lot of traveling, visiting, and socializing goes on, as if we had an instinct to connect with each other before winter isolates us and freezes us in place. I wonder whether another ice age is trying to start, what the sun is up to, and whether anthropogenic global warming is just confusing the issue, making the transition more turbulent.
Also, now that “the party’s over” (and I have not crashed; if anything I feel launched), I’m more aware than ever before of the growing dark and cold. This period last year was J’s dying time. Strangely, I didn’t even think about that last spring when I set the date for the party—all I thought about was that enough but not too much time would have passed, the weather would still be good for travel, and September 19 was a significant date for him, the date of the Jack Dempsey tournament in Toronto in probably 1949. And I didn’t think about the aftermath of the party except to anticipate that I would feel released into my new life. (Which I do, but with a difference: being at the party with so many people who never really knew J sick brought back his healthy vitality to me, and the blank-slate feeling of unfamiliarity about being back in New York, as if starting from scratch, is gone; I feel reconnected to the past.) Somehow I missed the obvious point that the party was September 19 and J got shingles and started to die September 30. Funny how we know what we’re doing even when we don’t.
So I’ll copy what I just wrote in my notebook, and then I have to do one of my wee-hours workouts—”kicking the devil’s ass,” a friend calls it; if you don’t, he kicks yours. This penance for ever-beguiling sloth is the beginning of my Yom Kippur. I was all ambitious to learn and say Kaddish for Jacques, the honorary Heeb as Brian Abrams of the late lamented funny magazine (but still website) Heeb called him, and then I couldn’t make head or tail of either the sound files or the transliterations, couldn’t match up the fluent familiar mumbling with the nonsense syllables on the page, most of which seemed skipped or slurred by the pray-ers. Oh well, it’s more than a little late to start trying to do any of that right.
It’s been striking me a lot how weird and broken-and-mended ALL people are, improbable survivors of improvisation, dodging illness and madness with our daredevil entropy-defying bodies and half-finished minds. Everyone seems to me very exposed, very vulnerable, crossing the brief battlefield of life, dodging bullets for as long as your luck holds. An awful lot of cancer, autism, depression. What are we doing wrong? Or has it always been this way or worse?
I realized with a start this morning that J was only just getting home from the hospital at this time last year. That his dying period, and therefore its anniversary, was really excruciatingly drawn-out. For some reason that’s hard to endure, that twilight anniversary. I want it to be either-or, both-and: I want him dead and whole, and instead, for the next five or six weeks, I must live with him alive and dying.
UPDATE: On second thought, think I’ll let the devil kick my ass into bed, and kick his in the morning.
UPDATE 2: Saying Kaddish, in a large Reform synagogue, was comforting but somehow deemphasized in the midst of guided imagery and therapeutic insertions (“I am grateful that I’ve learned to honor my sister-in-law as she divorces my brother”). Like some Catholics, I also feel that religious language loses most of its mojo in translation. J had his own very private, idiosyncratic relationship with his Creator (and very Jewish-like in that he had an intimate beef with Him), but all I could think of yesterday was him saying, “Let’s get the fuck out of here and have a hot dog.”
Ambiance 