Douglas Arvidson: Writer in Search of Everything

A Double-Yoked Egg and a New Yorker Short Story: Time to Daydream

2012-02-11T07:05:00.000-08:00

Now here's something you don't see much anymore: a double yoked egg. When I was a boy on the farm, I used to raise chickens for their eggs and sometimes you got a double yoker--or even a triple. Nowadays, the big, commercial eggs farms screen for such anomalies.

In any event, they are supposed to bring good luck, if not to the chicken, at least to the egg eater. Add to that the arrival of a my next New Yorker magazine with its short story, and I was set up for writing something.

I love stories set in Europe, stories of an American guy meeting a European woman. So, here I go, daydreaming on paper, pretending I'm noodling around with the plot of a story on an old Smith-Corona in a garret in Paris:

He is not old but neither is he young. He is world weary and cynical. Her name is Catina and she speaks English with an Old World accent of some sort and lives in a small, walk-up flat in, say, the 9th Arrondissment in Paris, not far from Montmartre and the Seine. He is between jobs and romantically depressed and out of sorts; she is a professor who teaches something improbable like Physics.

She wears slightly frumpy clothes that are, nonetheless, sexy and they spend much time walking through the Jardin du Luxembourg and drinking red wine. They are each tragic in their own literary way. She split with her lover--you don't yet know why--and she has thrown herself into her work. He is divorced and was fired from his job as an English teacher at a community college in some sad place like New Jersey.

Eventually they travel by train--leaving the Gare du Nord with a baguette and a hard smoked sausage and a bottle of wine--and head off to visit her parents who live in some sad place like Romania. Yes, two sad places like New Jersey and Romania to balance things out and, yes, that's it--she's a brilliant Romanian scientist whose family was repressed by the old Romanian government. Her brother was killed by Romanian secret police and her parents are old and poor and live in a cold-water flat in dreary, rainy Bucharest.

At her parents, you are supposed to sleep in her brother's old room (you have heard the story about the brother being killed by the secret police) but,( mais oui!) you end up sleeping together in her old bedroom. It's very cold and there is very nice love making under thick quilts punctuated by long, softly-spoken conversations under the covers, the whispered words echoing softly off the walls, the sound of traffic and horses hooves clomping along the streets reach their ears.

What do her parents think of him? She has told them he is professor, too. But they don't speak English, even with an accent, so you can only measure their judgement by their eyes.

You take a long walk, ostensibly to buy groceries, and of course, you chance to meet one of her old lovers on the street. His name is Dragos and he is darkly handsome in that special Romanian way. They kiss each other on both cheeks the way Europeans friends do when they meet and while he speaks to her in rapid Romanian, he is staring at you, seizing you up.

You imagine he says, "An American, hey? That's nice. They are all rich."

You shake hands. He has a cigarette hanging from his lips. He smiles at you through the cigarette with yellow Romanian teeth.

You sense longing and regret in their voices, in the words you can't understand. After he leaves, walking away pulling deeply on the cigarette and exhaling with a great sigh, you don't ask her what he has said because you know she can't tell you the truth. Later, that night, back under the covers in her cold bedroom she tearfully tells you that not only was he her lover, but he was her brother's best friend and had been tortured by the police into revealing her brother's secrets--and so he is responsible for her brother's death.

Next, they are back in Paris. He is alone in his flat and his concierge had given him a cable from someone in the States. His face darkens as he reads it. He sets it down on the table and walks to the window. He looks out over the city. The phone rings--It is her, Catina. She is crying......it's Dragos, she says, sobbing....

Watch this space for the next installment wherein we will learn what Dragos, the unforgiven, has on Catina, our tragic heroine and does our depressed, tragic American have the courage to help her?

I.Q. and Creativity: Are You Smart Enough to Be a Writer?

2012-02-01T17:34:00.000-08:00

The Brain: Shakespeare's didn't look any different than yours.

So, you wrote the best book/short story you've ever read. You polished it up, had your wife/mother/best friend/old English teacher read it and they were, well, they said, "Yeah, really, I liked it." Then you sent it out to ten publishers/magazines and waited.

Six weeks later, the responses started to trickle in. Reactions from the acquisitions editors varied from polite, mass produced rejection slips to nasty comments written in crabbed, tiny script on the bottom of the SASE you mailed out with your manuscript. Each one carried with it a sharp knife stab of pain and embarrassment followed by a week of despair and gnashing of teeth. Anger, too. Let's not forget that. Anger is important.

When the last rejection is received you are left stunned and voiceless, whimpering, maybe. Certainly you are sleepless during the darkest hours of the night. Your spouse/best friend/mother/English teacher are sympathetic but you wonder, did they tell me how they really felt about the book/story?Does my English teacher know the truth and won't tell me?

After say ten years of this, you began to ask yourself the ultimate question: Am I smart enough to be a good writer? Put the another, more painful way, am I too stupid to ever write publishable prose?

This is a good news/bad news blog. It seems that if your I.Q., that single number that is supposed to tell you how smart you really are, is below 120, you don't stand much of a chance of being brilliantly creative. As the average I.Q. is somewhere between 85 and 115, it would seem that most of us are indeed not capable of higher-level creative abstractions. That's the bad news.

The good news is that, according an article I found on the Internet (Reprinted from Lucid Vol. VIII, No. 4/5 (#42/43), Aug./Oct. 1988, Lucid being the newsletter of the Mensa “Truth SIG.”) if your I.Q. is say, 120, you can be just as creative as a person with an I.Q. of say, 130 or 140.

Yes, it seems there is a threshold I.Q. for creativity. So the giant brain who got a 1600 on his college boards is not necessarily more creative than you. Yeah, he/she might be able to solve puzzles more quickly than you and understand higher math, and get accepted at a top college, but his/her short stories might be just as bad as yours.

There is a caveat to this threshold though. It's only true when considering individuals. In fact, when you look at large groups of people over the course of history, we find that most of the truly big, huge, earth-shattering creative ideas are thought up by people with big, huge, earth-shattering I.Q.s. Like, of course, Einstein or Bill Gates, or yes, Shakespeare. The bitter if obvious truth is that if your I.Q. is in the average range, you don't come up with E=MC squared or Hamlet's soliloquy.

Here it is, the infamous Bell Curve

Before I retired from my day job as a speech-language pathologist to write full time, I was often called upon to test student I.Q.s. Thirty two years of this has led me to believe that this is all true. But there is another aspect to intelligence that is not covered by this rule.

It's this: Intelligence is a multi-faceted phenomena--like a diamond, say. While some lucky people are gifted in all cognitive domains, there are some whose ability in, for example, math, are in the average range, but their verbal abilities are much higher. While there poor math abilities might bring their I.Q.s down below 120, their verbal skills could exceed that number.

I remember reading that when the Army tested J.D. Salinger's I.Q, it was reported to have been 110, surely not high enough to write The Catcher in the Rye. On the other hand, Marilyn Vos Savant is supposed to have one of the highest I.Q.s ever tested-- somewhere between 186 and 230--and she has not, to my knowledge, made any significant contributions to either literature or science.

The bottom line to all this is that the proof is in the prose pudding. People who do well on I.Q. tests and college board exams may or may not be creative and may suffer the same rejections you do. If your I.Q. is below 120 you may still write a brilliant book like Mr. Salinger did.

So, steel yourself to the slings and arrows of rejections and keep writing. Or, take the easier road and bypass those pesky, snobby, know-it-all editors and publishers and self publish.

The Writer as Presenter: Use Your Skills to Promote Your Books

2012-01-18T07:05:00.000-08:00

I spent months preparing a lecture on traditional navigation for a high-end group of sailors and intellectuals: A sword of Damocles, indeed.

The legend goes that the sword was hung by order of Dionysus over Damocles head by a mere horse hair to teach him that happiness is fragile no matter how rich and powerful you are. Well, even folks like myself, whose wealth and power resides only in his attitude toward life, not in vast tangible assets, the moral of the story is not lost.

There I was, happily wandering about, when I was approached by an extremely nice person who asked me to, please sir, present something interesting to her science/philosophy group that meets weekly at the local college. Perhaps something on my presumed area of expertise, say, speech and language pathology?

I hesitated, scanning about for a reasonable way out. I had retired from that profession a number of years ago and found it a nice field to be retired from. However, I quickly recovered; a light went on: I had lived for ten years on a sailboat on the island of Guam where I had studied the ancient method of ocean navigation. I had, in fact, just finished writing an adventure novel for adults, young and old, whose central theme was the survival of two teen aged boys among the islands of the tropical Pacific, that survival depending on their ability to learn those ancient secrets of navigating across hundreds of miles of open ocean without instruments.

She smiled, nodded, and said, "That sounds fine. How about January 13th?"

And so, just that easily, the sword was positioned over me by its horse hair. Just how would I go about lecturing on anything to a group of mostly retired Ph.D.s/college professors of various stripes/engineers/medical doctors/school teachers, etc, whose expectations must necessarily be pretty high.

Mixed emotions: my heart sank even as it beat faster with excitement. Being a bit of a blabber mouth/entertainer/former college lecturer myself, I figure I might actually be able to pull it off with the requisite preparation. I got to work. I found that over the years, I had learned how to put together a PowerPoint presentation and that, stored away in photo albums and Internet/computer storage devices, I had lots of pretty neat photographs to choose from. I had a few very fine books on traditional navigation, and a friend on Guam who would love to be a primary resource.

Two months later, I was pleased with my progress. I had reacquainted myself with PowerPoint, had selected and programed over fifty slides, had reread the literature, and communicated via email with my friend on Guam, himself a retired college professor. I was ready.

The proof of a presentation, though, is all mixed up in the pudding of audience, preventing technical snafus, and keeping a tight lid on personal anxieties. I figured I knew my stuff and could beg off on questions I couldn't answer. I can also do a passing good tap dance and play a mean harmonica. I'd get through this.

In the event, all went well---more than well, actually--splendid, as one audience member later commented. The PowerPoint part of the deal came off without a hitch--the college lecture theater was nicely equipped with the latest equipment to include a red-beamed laser pointer and overhead projector. The audience was large and enthusiastic and included local sailors who asked knowledgeable, insightful questions that I was able to answer. My stage fright/brain freeze tendencies took a hike and, after a minute or two, I

was in high gear and enjoying myself immensely.

I also learned something valuable that every writer needs to know: If he/she has skills/knowledge that he/she can relate to a book--in my case a novel--he/she can use a well-put-together presentation to promote that book. You can even take it on the road.

The day after the presentation, in fact, I received an invitation to repeat my show as part of a program to celebrate the bicentennial of the War of 1812 here on the Eastern Shore. Someone else suggested that I could present this material at boat shows around the country, selling books as I go.

So, damn that sword, full speed ahead, to mix historical metaphors. You have nothing to lose but your horse hair. But bring your tap dancing shoes and harmonica just in case.

Am I tap dancing?

Blogging in for the New Year: Politics, Dolphins, Studying Spanish, Preparing a Lecture

2012-01-08T05:20:00.000-08:00

Ah, Small Town Innocence--Or is It?

I'm into 2012 up to my eyeballs already. No break, it seems.

What with the ongoing GOP Primary/Debate circus to regale my political sense of the ridiculous, baby sitting dolphins in the Florida Keys, wrapping my brain tightly around my new Rosetta Stone Spanish course (loving it--I know a woman who doesn't think I should study Spanish because she doesn't like Mexicans--yeah, a Tea Partier), and preparing a lecture on traditional navigation by the indigenous peoples of the western Pacific, I'm lacking down time. I'm also playing guitar until my fingers are screaming at me and keeping up my end of the deal as regards being a good husband, father, and grandfather.

No writing. That's right. Nothing. Nothing on paper; its all happening in my head at this point. That is, a novel forming from the swirling nebula that is my brain. Its fun, actually, this anticipation of writing. Literary foreplay?

So first, the GOP. I'm no pundit--though that might have been a fun career choice--but the desperation on the Right is evidenced by the gleeful comedians on the left. John Stewart, Steven Colbert---damn, are they funny. The funnier they are, the more you can bet the narrow-thinking, intolerant ones (the ones against using condoms, for crying out loud) are struggling with their message. Does this Santorum guy REALLY think American should and can be forced to stop using condoms? And he's for SMALL government?

I've been at the Dolphin Research Center on Grassy Key, in Florida, for the past week. My job? Caretaker. Read: Be here at night in case of emergencies, like cranky animal right activists breaking in and trying to release the dolphins into the ocean. Sounds reasonable until you learn that these animals were mostly born and raised here, have never been out in the wild, and would quickly die of starvation. People are crazy on the Left, too, I guess. Here's a picture of the place: one version of paradise?

The Rosetta Stone Spanish course is fun, fun, fun. I think I'm learning Spanish, too. Of course, not having a day job leaves me plenty of time to dig into it. It's like a game with plenty of pictures and good computerized voice-recognition stuff that checks your pronunciation and gently scolds you should you screw up. The designers have a good grip on how we learn. After a month, I'm already getting a pretty good accent. I sound a little like Cochita Banana.

And as for the lecture, I've put together a Power Point presentation and have been studying hard for a few months now. It's about how the native people of Pacific used to--and in some cases still do--navigate across hundreds of miles of open sea without instruments. No compasses, sextants, GPS's, whatever. Fascinating stuff. Followers of this blog know that I've studied traditional navigation under a master navigator and just finished writing a novel concerning this dying art.

At sea in a canoe: It's a big ocean. You can't afford to make mistakes.

At sea in the Pacific in my boat about ten years ago. That's Manny, the master navigator, on the right and me on the left.

The outlook for the year? I'm off to a good start. My behavior is already disgustingly close to perfection. Have stopped drinking, mostly; don't smoke--anything--well, maybe a cigar once a year with a good friend; and usually keep myself relatively fit by walking and doing upper body workouts. I'm generally nice to people, or at least try hard to be sweet and friendly, though sometimes, in an attempt to be funny, I make comments I later regret. I do have some hangups, mostly modest ones, one or two immodest, but I'll keep them to myself. If I weren't a free thinking secular humanist, I'd put myself up for sainthood. Wonder what I'd look like with a halo? Would it interfere with my using Rograine?

Drinking Liberally: Can This Be Good for Liberal Livers?

2011-12-14T08:44:00.000-08:00

Tonight's the night we kick it off: Fighting for democracy one pint at a time.

Such tavern politics have a blue-blood history in this country. The Spirit of '76, our very own Revolution, was distilled in the road houses of the Colonies with Patriots raising a glass to the call for King George's head.

So, it's a nice feeling that this barroom venue of old still rings true with many of us; though I suspect more so with left-leaning sorts. Most Right wingers I know lack the requisite sense of the ridiculous and the playful nature necessary to mix politics with light-heartedness, never mind mixing politics with alcohol. Why, I don't know. It's anger that fuels extremism, I suppose, and the Right Wing is angry. I wouldn't want to be in a bar with a bunch of drunken Republican/Libertarians.

When I came to this town, I vowed to keep my politics to myself; to stay out of the small-town intrigue, to avoid committing to one cause against another. But I don't see how this gathering of like-minded, easy-going Liberals can be harmful. Or can it? Will the citizens who take a strong, uncompromising Right-wing position seek to disrupt our bingeing? Perhaps a drive-by tomato attack? (There are a whole lot of half-rotten tomatoes around here this time of year, too.)

Being interested in semiotics--the signs of the times--I'm intrigued by this idea that, while not exactly sweeping the country, seems to be at least causing a small movement. There are over 200 chapters around the nation; imagine that.

To tell you the truth, I visited the Occupy D.C. encampment in McPherson Park in October and witnessed first hand the cold and relative squalor of that noble cause. The idea of meeting in a warm, wood-paneled Irish-style pub and knocking back a few whilst decrying greed and corruption is much more palatable to this senior citizen.

And therein, I think, I have found the raison d'etre for this Drinking Liberally thing: This is the middle-agers/senior citizens answer to the Occupy movement. We have good jobs or are comfortably retired and can afford to pay a bar tab; we have nice cars and nice homes to drive them to afterwards; and, because of age and wisdom and various medications, we can't drink very much anyway. As for me, the tavern in question is just around the corner from my house and I can walk home.

Today's Thoughts: There Are No Excuses for Not Writing

2011-11-28T07:16:00.000-08:00

An man from the atoll of Polowat setting off on a voyage: The stuff of adventure novels.

The world is so full of such wonderful things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

So, apparently, said Robert Louis Stevenson while losing his long-term, painful, debilitating battle with TB while sailing the Pacific while writing great literature. Do any of us have any excuses for not enjoying life and writing well while we do it?

Today, just a couple of days after my sixty-fifth birthday, I find myself enjoying life while being pleasantly overwhelmed with its rich confusion. To wit:

I just finished writing an adventure novel about traditional navigation in the remote atolls of the western Pacific and it's off courting a publisher.

I was just asked to present a lecture to a science/philosophy group at a local college about that incredible skill of navigating across hundreds of miles of open ocean using only stars, wave patterns, and marine life. Those skills were developed by the seafaring peoples of the Pacific thousands of years ago and is still in use.

I've started writing another novel, this one to be the better-than-anything-I've-written-so-far novel I'm convinced I have lurking in me somewhere. It's set in New England, in the Berkshire hills where I grew up, and my head is abuzz with plot schemes and profound/multi-faceted characters.

I just got my sailboat back in the water after some pre-winter maintenance--bottom paint, new zinc, lazy jacks installed--and my wife, Terry, and I brought her home last week on a perfect, breezy day on the Chesapeake. Now I'll get going winterizing her.

For my birthday I asked for and received the Rosetta Stone Spanish program and I'm looking forward to making learning Spanish a long-term, regular part of my life. When Terry retires, we'll spend winters exploring Latin America. Good for my aging brain, too, adding what will no doubt be bad Spanish to my lousy German and my worse French.

Speaking of things that are good for aging brains, I've downloaded the WORDS WITH FRIENDS app--it's a form of SCRABBLE--on my Droid, and I've got four games going at once. I lose, mostly, but I'm getting better. A good addiction.

I'm working on a new finger picking riffs on my guitar. I keep it next to me all day and when I need to take a break from writing/reading/studying, I pick it up and play for a while. It feels way too good, like having a pleasant companion to engage in conversation whenever needed.

So, if Robert Louis Stevenson can do it while dying of a terrible disease, I can too. As December approaches, I'm ready to settle in here for the winter. Looking forward to it, actually--the long, cold, dark nights, the frosty days hunkered down here in my study in my fat recliner reading, writing, studying, playing music and taking naps, PRN. It's the way I've always wanted to live. Self-actualizing, you know?

Terry at the helm bringing Seawind home for the winter.

Art and Intellect: Is There an Ability Threshold for Good Writing?

2011-11-18T07:01:00.000-08:00

Stephen King: Enough Intellect in His Art?

No art form puts more demands on that critical bonding of intellect and talent than writing. Real writing, I mean--great writing, ideas put on paper by writers who took the time to dip far back into their deep well of learning, sort it out, process it, shake it up, jerk it around, look at it this way and that way, and turn it upside down, and only then weave what's left into great literature.

There are millions of "writers" out there, lots and lots of us, but out of those millions, there may arise three, maybe four--who knows--great ones. This digital age of self-publishing has allowed the literary world to be flooded with junk, or as was said in the documentary film, "Press, Pause, Play," the world is being covered by the gray goo of mediocrity and consumers have lost their sense of what is good or not good.

What separates the mediocre--or even downright crap--from greatness? Here's my list:

     1. Ability--Like it or not, producing art is an elitist endeavor. The great democratization of writing allowed by the digital age, by everyone having access to self-publishing--is a great lie. There are only a few who have the talent to write well.

     2. Intellect--Great writing is, initially, an exercise of the intellect. There is a threshold of cognitive ability below which great writing cannot occur. When I was studying psychology in college, they told us that threshold was an I.Q. of 115. Below that, forget being creative, above that, it doesn't matter; a person with an I.Q. of 130 is not necessarily more creative than a person with an I.Q. of 120. But then, I.Q. is such a multi-faceted phenomenon, who can tell? The only proof will be in the product. For example, J.D. Salinger's I.Q. (according to Army records) was 110. John Kennedy's was 124. I suspect the range of those I.Q.s was large; that is, I.Q. is not a single number. Your ability in math might be 115, while your verbal abilities could be significantly higher.

     3. Intent--Great writers intend to write great literature. It is their purpose, their one desire. Imagine Hemingway intentionally sitting down at his Smith-Corona with his day's goal to write a cheap romance novel or get-rich-quick sci-fi? To the great writers, writing is an all-or-nothing deal; I write my best or I don't write. If I realized that what I have written is garbage, it goes in the fire.

     4. Learning the craft: Great writers spend years learning the craft of writing. You don't learn to play the piano in a week. I suspect many of today's self-publishing writers have spent little time at the hard task of learning how to write and have little patience for having their work reviewed and critiqued by legitimate editors. Rejection is painful and by self-publishing, we by-pass this inconvenient truth.

Of course, there is nothing to be done about the brave new world of digital-age self-publishing. It will continue unabated. In the end, I suspect it will all sort itself out and the great ones that are now drowning in that sea of gray goo will somehow be recognized. I think may well be the discriminating consumer of literature who devises a way to winnow out the wheat from the chaff, maybe by taking the time to look at who is publishing a writer before buying.

Sons and Other Strangers: A Photo Essay of a Cross-Country Journey

2011-11-13T08:04:00.000-08:00

The author on the Kansas prairie at sunset: Sweet Breezes from a Far Horizon

Where does a son go when he grows up? It's a different place, beyond that sweet, far horizon. He packs up his junk, the stuff that's been lying around on the floor of his bedroom, and moves out and you will never seen him again. Sweet sadness, the end of a process.

Son, all grown up and visiting Dad from his far, far place. First night on the road: "Dad, you're snoring": Tone of voice in the dark motel room was threatening, despairing. All the way across with this?

On Loneliest Highway in the U.S. I leave my DNA in a dry lake bed. When I was young, I left it elsewhere.

Feeling small in America

U.S. 70 in Nevada: Loneliest Highway in the U.S., it is said.

Over the Rockies by going through them.

I loved the old western, gold-rush-era towns, hoped to see Hoss and Little Joe.

We started the trip amongst the red woods near Sonoma: Moist and Ancient, like son and father.

We found, in an expansive and rocky graveyard in Sonoma, the place that holds the crumbling bones of the only known American Revolutionary War veteran buried in California. And he was a Virginian who sailed the Chesapeake. Must have been a good, thin-water sailor in the days of big, wooden, square-rigged boat without engines.

In Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, we encountered King Cotton

The purely ornamental bike on the roof gave us street cred in my son's world. We obvioiusly knew the way it is.

In Salt Lake City: The Mormon Temple, fountain of moderate Republicans

We put our fates in the hands of the GPS Lady

Final approach to St. Louis: Was this St. Louis? One nation connected by really, really bad fast road food.

Yes, we made it to Florida after driving over 4,000 miles. From here, via William Faulkner's house in Oxford, Mississippi, the Suwanee River, Tallahassee, and Ft. Lauderdale. When it was all over, finished, we were both glad to get back to our own places in the world, me with my wife on the Chesapeake, him with his own lady on the yacht he captains. We had visited, seen, and experienced each others perspectives, each demonstrating an admirable tolerance for our differences. But had we connected? That will take another trip, I think. More time on the road.

Occupy Wall Street: While the Oakland, CA protests Errupts, I Visit the (thus far) Peaceful Occupy D.C. Camp to Find Out the Truth

2011-10-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

Welcome to McPherson Park, home of the Occupy D.C. Movement

Readers of this blog know by now that I love our nation's capitol and go there a few times a year. I hang out, wander the galleries and museums, argue with the political nuts in front of the White House, join in demonstrations, eat at good restaurants, and take in a show or two at the National or Warner Theaters.

I like it that the streets are filled with smart, 30-something professionals dressed in suits, that there are lots of college students doing college students things, that profound thoughts are chiseled in the ubiquitous marble facades, and especially the feeling one gets that you are where the action is. For a political junkie like me, that's important. Look, see that pretty woman leaving the White House? I see her on CNN every night. Golly!

So, after driving across the country with my son (I'll start that travel log in the next blog entry), I flew from Ft. Lauderdale to D.C. to meet my wife who was there for the week on business. That's how I got to see and meet the Occupy D.C. movement.

First impressions are ever so important, so here's mine: I don't know what caused the fracas in Oakland, but the nation's capitol need not yet call up the National Guard to deal with their protesters. No worries. This is a rag-tag band, for certain, and while they decry the greed of the Wall Street robber barons and long for the District of Columbia to have representation in Congress, peaceful demonstration is their bottom line.

Indeed, having lived through the 1960's as a college student and having been at the student draft card burnings in Boston, and having been on the snarling end of attacking police dogs on the Boston Public Garden (the dogs were leashed, but effective), I can testify to the peaceful intentions of these neo-hippies.

The food tent area.

One thing about the 60's that was not present and that I missed, was the folk music. No budding Peter, Paul, and Marys here, just young people sitting around talking. Every night they hold a general membership meeting at which anyone can say their piece and receive either accolades or dissing from the crowd. If their ideas are deemed good and acceptable, hands are raised and fingers waggled in the air. If the ideas are not so good, hands go down and fingers are waggled toward the ground. No one gets shouted down. I'd love to see Congress adopt this method. Imagine.

Civil War General James Birdseye McPherson watches over the Occupy D.C. camp.

So, exactly what is the gripe? It was hard to pin it down. According to a young man named Joe who I interviewed in the headquarters tent, the Occupy movements in different cities have no central leader and have different motivations layered on top of the basic anti-greed, anti-Wall Street-Congress collusion problem. D.C. as I mentioned, is taxed but has no representation in Congress. Other places have other issues.

Joe and I discuss the meaning of the Occupy D.C. movement. He was sitting at tent labeled, "Information."

But now it seems the patience of city officials is wearing thin. At least in Oakland, CA where it was rumored that some protesters chucked stones at police and police responded with tear gas. A few people were injured. See below.

What's the meaning of it all? I guess it's all part of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Our spirits have been brought low by the misery of the economy and the economy is a global phenomena of nearly infinite complexity so no one has any real solutions. What results is like a brain surgeon using an axe while politicians and corporations stand around yelling instructions and making accusations. Now we, the common man-as-patient are trying to come out of our anesthesia and do something--anything.

The Other Aspects of a Writer's Life: Clinging to the Irrational Belief that My Sailboat Has a Soul

2011-09-30T06:05:00.000-07:00

Seawind, our Alberg 30, on the hard

I'm a sailor; been one for a long time. Can't imagine a life without boats and my sweet 30-footer makes me sigh every time I look at her. We bought her up in Long Island two summers ago and my brother and I sailed her down here to the lower Chesapeake. She lives at a nice little marina just a short drive from our house and just at the edge of the Bay.

This brings me to the tao of sailing which is the boat itself. A beautiful sailboat is an essence, a distillation of complex things. It's a phenomena, a cause of contemplation. It causes a certain madness brought down to a fine point. In short, I have this irrational feeling that my boat is alive. It seems so obvious; she breathes, feels, desires, responds to love as well as to neglect.

Yes, I believe it because I'm projecting my living self onto the boat and so, of course, reductio ad absurdum, she lives, too. She absorbs my projections like a house--and we all know houses live and breath. It's a hangup we can enjoy like so few of our other hangups.

In any event, it's nearly winter, a bad time for northern sailors. It's a time of guilt and regret at not having paid more attention to the boat's needs, not having sailed more or finished the woodwork project started in the spring. So, I decided to haul her out and give her a little bottom paint and change the zinc before putting her back in for the winter.

Glad I did. The modified ablative paint the marina in Long Island put on her had some strange things happening to it. Little blisters had formed, with water getting in under the paint but the gel coat/barrier coat look okay. The zinc still had a lot of life left in it.

My friend and fellow sailor, Denny, helped me bring her up to the boat yard, a three-hour trip--no wind, motoring the whole way.

When we got there, the lift was ready. I drove her into the slings and out she came.

A good, long, hard, high-pressure shower took off most of the barnacles and slime.

I'm going to let her dry out for two or three weeks before sanding and painting. In the meantime, I'm off to San Francisco tomorrow and will drive back across the country with my son, the yacht captain, whose 112' Westport is being loaded on a container ship and moved to the East Coast where they will cruise the Bahamas and the Caribbean for a while.

Looking forward to some father-son time and the adventure of a long road trip. I'll be reporting here.

Writing Down the Angst: A Chicken's Great Escape

2011-09-23T05:36:00.000-07:00

Yes, this is a dead chicken.

I love my little Nikon Coolpix camera. It slips into my pocket and I can carry it everywhere with barely a bother. This allows me to take quick snapshots of life as it is lived and later I find the images instructive when I'm ruminating about how things are going, generally.

Take this dead chicken. Where I live on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, they raise a lot of chickens. Tyson and Perdue have big chicken processing plants here and there are lots of chicken farmers to supply them with fresh, young chicken, as the advertisement goes.

You often pass one of their trucks, loaded with cages of chickens, going to the slaughter. Or worse, you get stuck behind one and get to watch the poor creatures stuffed into their small spaces, eyes glaring, their dirty feathers fluttering in the wind. It always reminds me of the day forty-five years ago, when I was shipped off to Army basic training at the height of the Viet Nam War. Oh, the sorrow, the remorse, the feeling of helplessness, the sense of doom. Every time I see one of those trucks, I consider the merits of both pacifisim and vegetarianism.

And then, every so often, you see this. One of them, somehow, escapes. But how? The cages are stacked up, chockablock, the space between the bars must be too small for them to slip through or they'd all be out. Imagine that.

No, how this one gained it's freedom will remain a mystery. Did it see an opportunity and seize it in the best tradition of escapees? Did it bribe a guard? Did it peck off the lock and then try to convince its cell mates to make a break with him and finally have go it alone? Was this one of those extremely rare chickens gifted with brains and daring?

In any event, chickens can't fly and the heady, desperate feeling of freedom did not last long for this fryer leaving me to spend the next few miles wallowing in existential angst and contemplating the true meaning of freedom, life, and death, etc.

But let's leave this on a positive note. Here, to counteract that sense of doom, are a couple a pure white Morning Glory moon blossoms that were growing in my garden the same morning that I encountered the chicken. Come to think of it, these lovely blooms only last for a short time, too. Oh, the angst, the angst.

Dylexia: The Common Wisdom is Wrong

2011-09-07T08:03:00.000-07:00

Dyslexia is used by some people as a convenient excuse for failure: Why is the common wisdom of the disorder so wrong?

A family member of middle age recently announced at a gathering that she now knew what her problem has been all these years: She has dyslexia. No wonder she wasn't a good student. No wonder.

I bit my tongue and kept quiet so as not to burst the sparkling, hopeful bubble of her excuse for what was apparently a mediocre academic performance back in her student years. As a speech-language pathologist, I spent thirty-two years of my life diagnosing and treating language and learning disabilities and the "symptoms" she used to describe her dyslexia fit nicely with the received common wisdom about the disorder: seeing things "backwards," her eyes jumping around on the page.

And this morning on NPR online, there it was again. In an interview with a business school professor about why an inordinate number of successful business people have the disorder, Steve Inskeep, the host, defined dyslexia as "seeing things backwards." No so, Mr. Inskeep, not so.

Here's the definition of dyslexia I used when describing the disorder to parents:

Dyslexia is difficulty learning to read given normal intelligence and adequate instruction.

So, say a child reaches third grade, has had good, consistent teaching, and testing indicates at least average intellectual abilities, and that child still has great difficulty reading, he or she, by definition has dyslexia. But is that child just seeing words "backwards?" Unfortunately no; that might be an easy fix.

No, true dyslexia almost always is not problem with vision or your eyes not able to "track" words on a page. Dyslexia is a problem processing and associating sounds with symbols. It is primarily an auditory processing disorder. Here's a good description of the symptoms. I found it on line at PubMed:

A person with [dyslexia] may have trouble rhyming and separating sounds that make up spoken words. These abilities appear to be critical in the process of learning to read. A child's initial reading skills are based on word recognition, which involves being able to separate out the sounds in words and match them with letters and groups of letters.

Because people with [dyslexia] have difficulty connecting the sounds of language to the letters of words, they may have difficulty understanding sentences.

True dyslexia is much broader than simply confusing or transposing letters, for example mistaking ”b” and “d.".

In general, symptoms of [dyslexia] may include:

•Difficulty determining the meaning (idea content) of a simple sentence

•Difficulty learning to recognize written words

•Difficulty rhyming

[Dyslexia] may occur in combination with writing or math learning problems.

You notice that rhyming is mentioned twice here and that can be a first indicator of looming dyslexia. When a kindergartner seems to be having trouble learning those critical sound-symbol associations and also seems to have trouble rhyming, alarms should go off (gently but insistently).

It is critical with dyslexic children to get a diagnosis early and to get help sooner rather than later. When a young student falls behind in the acquisition of reading skills that delay will quickly widen as his or her peers move forward. The critical skill to learn in school is how to read and when a child's reading skills lag, the results can be disastrous.

But as for adults using "dyslexia" as an excuse for failure in life, remember this: a diagnosis of dyslexia should only be based on tests administered by professionals in the field. If you had a terrible time leaning to read as a young student, yeah, maybe your disorder was missed and you are a dyslexic. However, if you were an unremarkable student who nonetheless progressed normally through school and learned to read for meaning by the end of third grade, you may just have, heaven forbid, "average" intelligence. And that might be the only thing worse than dyslexia as we try to compete in this high tech world that worships those with gifted minds.

Hurricanes and Quakes: What Doesn't Hurt There, Kills Here

2011-08-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

Irene bears down on us here on the Eastern Shore of Virginia

Comparisons can be useful. I got an email from a friend on the island of Guam, where I lived on a sailboat for eleven years and went through three super typoons (Cat. 5's) and some earthquakes that were up there around 6 to 7 or even a 9 on the Richter Scale. On that far-off speck in the western Pacific, our piddling little earthquake last week and our relatively meek and mild hurricane of this week would have been non-events. Scant notice would have been taken of the earth moving and Irene would have fallen in the "banana" storm catagory; that is, just strong enough to take the bananas off the trees.

But of course, comparisons like this are misleading. Guam has evolved to take this kind of punishment. The houses are mostly made of reinforced concrete and there are no big trees to mention (and that's because they can't grow big due to the frequency of the typhoons that blow them over). Huge storms and major quakes are a fact of life on Guam and the people have adapted. In 1997, when Typhoon Paka hit the island with 200+ mph winds, there was not a single storm-related death.

Here on the eastern seaboard of the U.S., though, things are very different.

While hurricanes occur every year, they mostly affect Florida and the Caribean islands. A direct hit along the length of the east coast is rare. And so, we have big trees, forests of them, and houses made of wood and lots of trailer parks with cockleshell mobile homes sitting on cinder blocks with those big trees hanging over them. And there are lots of mountains with rivers and streams pouring out of them and lots of people with little experience dealing with big storms.

The end result: When Irene's 40 to 80 mph winds and 12 inches of rain had finished passing through, 40 people had died due to the terrible flooding (Vermont and Massachusetts are in real trouble and the death toll keeps rising) and houses and cars being crushed by falling timber, and I'm certain that the final bill will be in the billions of dollars.

We got lucky. Big trees surround our house on the Eastern Shore of Virginia but only one came down and by raw luck, missed the house and the TV satellite dish. Better than that, before the storm I made a last-minute decision to move my powerboat; it was parked right there. And my wife had always wanted that tree removed, so that project was taken care of for me.

An ode to inovation: We went up to my mother-in-law's house to ride out the storm with her. This is the generator that my father-in-law (who died last December) had cobbled together from wood and spare parts. It ran perfectly.

The World in Financial Toil, Boil, and Trouble: Are We Literary Looters?

2011-08-12T07:11:00.000-07:00

The Fire This Time: Looting for the Loot in London

It's all about the money, honey. Making it, spending it, and worrying about it, mostly. As the world markets continue to plunge down deep into black-hole depths led by the imploding confidence of America's financial Masters of the Universe, we here on the literary blogosphere continue to fiddle while London burns.

And what are we fiddling around about? Tell me it's not about just money and fame, fame and money. It's about writing good--maybe great--prose, isn't it? Still, just look at the re-tweet I was tempted to send this morning. It essentially gave advice on How to stalk your potential client without them thinking they're being stalked.

It's not possible that we writers, we high priests of the moral intellect, we wise seers of the human condition, are really looking only at the bottom line, but just in case it is, here are some slang terms for money from Len Penzo.com so when we writers hit it big, viz a viz J.K. Rowling, we can diversify our lingo a bit:

1. chips
2. bread
3. dough
4. roll
5. cabbage
6. lettuce
7. kale
8. bacon
9. clams
10. coconuts
11. beans
12. fish
13. potatoes
14. bananas
15. buckaroos
16. bucks
17. fins ($5-bills)
18. sawbucks ($10-bills)
19. C-notes ($100-bills)
20. hundies
21. Benjamins
22. Jacksons
23. grand
24. Gs
25. K
26. smack
27. smackers
28. wampum
29. bills
30. moolah
31. means
32. checks
33. drafts
34. shrapnel
35. wad
36. plaster
37. bankroll
38. capital
39. finances
40. currency
41. funds
42. gold
43. stash
44. cash
45. bundle
46. fortune
47. lucre
48. chump change
49. pin money
50. shekels
51. resources
52. boffo
53. spending money
54. doubloons
55. wherewithal
56. treasure
57. dibs
58. bits
59. dollars
60. dinero
61. pesos
62. bullets
63. coin
64. simoleons
65. silver
66. pelf
67. tender
68. scrip
69. pittance
70. guineas
71. gelt
72. bones
73. stake
74. pap
75. spondulicks
76. quid
77. pocket money
78. specie
79. jack
80. change
81. scratch
82. mite
83. king’s ransom
84. mint
85. paper
86. loonies
87. mazuma
88. pieces of eight
89. frogskins
90. long green
91. folding green
92. green
93. greenbacks
94. riches
95. rivets
96. big ones
97. banknotes
98. dead presidents
99. chits
100. scrilla
101. loot

I Finish the TAO OF TRAVEL: In Search of the Life-Altering Epiphany

2011-08-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

Me in Vladivostok in 1995: Theroux hated this "clammy-cold harbor city": We found it clean and the people friendly.

I would have loved to have been a roach climbing along the wall of Paul Theroux's cabin as he traveled by train across the world's third-world. I would have been privy to a balding, past-middle-age American man as he ate his rice and beans from a tin cup and scribbled in his notebooks occasionally looking out the window at the passing corruption and endless poverty. He probably had not changed his clothes or shaved or showered in a couple of days and the tropical heat must have rendered him full ripe by then. It is, of course, the only authentic way to travel or to be a travel writer: fully ripened.

I've spent the past twenty-five years traveling around the United States, around Asia, around Europe, and then in one memorable summer, around the world via the Trans-Siberian railroad, that most storied of rail lines. So when Theroux took the time to put together what amounts to a primer on the travel writing experience, it was the first book I read on my new Nook.

I say "primer" because during my pleasant and nostalgic passage through The Tao of Travel it became obvious that that is what one may consider this book to be. It's a how-to book, it's inspirational, and, maybe most helpful, it provides a list of great/famous/infamous travel writers along with not only a sample of their writing, but the low down on their often strange and/or wonderful personality quirks.

Theroux likes those travel writers who do it the hard way. Like Sir Richard Burton, the 18th century skeptic and hard-core traveler/explorer who was obsessed enough with experiencing Mecca first hand that he had himself circumcised, learned Arabic, and boned up on the Koran so he could pass himself off as a real Muslim. Finally, when faced with the great stone monolith that is the heart of Islam and the milling throngs of pilgrims, Burton had a life-changing, mystical experience that he lived to tell about--the only non-Muslim to do so. For Theroux, this is the ultimate tao of travel--travel as hard-won, heartbreaking epiphany.

Sometimes, when Theroux and I have been to the same place, we disagree on its merits or drawbacks. Take Vladivostok, that forbidding, far-eastern outpost of Mother Russia. Theroux warns against going there, describing it as a "clammy-cold harbor city of vandalized buildings, scrawled-upon walls, underpaid sailors, and confrontational drunks and skinheads."

It may well be as he describes it, if you look for it. But when my wife and spent three days there prior to boarding the Trans-Siberian, it was June and the weather bright, sunny, and cool. The sailors were there, certainly, but they were mostly interested in ogling the bikini-clad young women who were sunning themselves near the harbor than in causing trouble.

We walked, unmolested, throughout the town, along the attractive shopping area, ate well at local restaurants, and observed the rusting Russian Pacific fleet tied up in the harbor. We happened to arrive on the weekend they were celebrating the Russian fishing fleet and there was music and dancing and feasting with families strolling about enjoying the sunshine.

We did encounter young men who could be described as skinheads, but even they were in fine, non-aggressive moods. Better than that and just as indicative of the sense of the place, we saw lots of young women strutting their stuff in super high heels, short skirts, and stockings, apparently the fashion statement of the year.

On the down side, and to give Theroux his due, we flew in from Korea in a decrepit Russian airliner with graffiti scrawled on the back of the seats, arriving on a cloudy day and the Stalin-era buildings on the outskirts of the city were grim and oppressive. In fact, we learned later that there had been no hot water in the city all winter. We stayed in a gray and forbidding looking hotel but, in true Russian form, our room was on a floor that was reserved for foreign tourists, military officers, and high ranking government officials and so was sexed up with new plumbing and carpeting and had a good bar/restaurant. The other floors of the hotel were off limits and we were not allowed to explore.

My wife with our lunch of blinis with caviar in Vladivostok: No roaches on the walls.

In any event, it's not just foreign places that Theroux advises avoiding. He points out that certain cities in the United States hardly qualify as safe and delightful travel destinations. He describes East St. Louis, Illinois as one of the most "menacing-looking" cities in the U.S. and adds Newark and Camden, N.J. to that list of awful places to be avoided because they are among the most dangerous places in the world.

So, back to our train ride with Mr. Theroux: In the form of a roach, Kafka like, I crawl up to Mr. Theroux's tin cup and nosh on a piece of leftover rice while he nods off, his head down on his open notebook. I'd love to read a bit of what he has written but I'm a roach and so, of course, I can't. Instead I eat and listen to his steady, light snoring and watch out the window as the third world passes and our writer dreams perhaps of hot showers, cold beer, a good clean shirt, and that elusive goal of all great travelers: the epiphany around which one can write a book.

The Naked Arrogance of Traveling: A Short Review of Paul Theroux's New Book or It's True--Solvitur Ambulando

2011-07-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

Salvitur Ambulando--It is solved by walking.

Walking to ease the mind is also an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk is a part of a process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing.

The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux

I'm reading The Tao of Travel and so these are the things I thought about today on my four-mile walk on this, the hottest day of the year:

I thought about these objects that sit on my book shelves and when I got back home, I took this picture of them: The snake, the feather, the famous monkeys (They have names: from left to right they are Kikazaru, Fuazaru, and Mizaru.), and of course, the Buddha in one of his many representations. They are spiritual objects of course, all of them, sitting up there collecting dust from the cool, shadowy air--spiritual even to this nonthiest.

But I considered the Buddha the most today as I wandered, heat baked and dripping, because Buddhism runs through Theroux's books, The Tao of Travel being no exception. Maybe that's because the Buddha was a great walker, maybe it's because Theroux philosophical inclinations tend toward Buddhism. The Buddha walked, probably barefoot, in the dirt and disease and sacred cow dung and sweltering heat of the Indian subcontinent, and this appeals to Theroux's basic values.

In The Tao of Travel Theroux has collected quotes and anecdotes from other travel writers as well as from his own works, and comments on them with a mind toward establishing a single message, and the message is clear: traveling at its best, by train or by foot, is a way of getting down deep into the tao or essence of things--of our lives, the lives of others, the collective life of the world's peoples.

To that end, hard traveling, preferably alone, is de rigueur as opposed to comfortable, all-inclusive traveling as a tourist which is shameful, shallow, and pointless. Theroux prefers difficult, solitary travel punctuated by sleeplessness, illness, dangerous encounters, and semi-starvation. Critical to the traveler's tao is the realization that the journey itself becomes the destination, that being the eternal outsider is essential, and paradoxically, coming home after such a journey is really what it's all about. Home is bliss.

Theroux is a favorite of mine. We are fellow writers and fellow travelers. I like his complexity, his self-assured crankiness, his arrogance, his courage, his willingness to tolerate the intolerable muck and mess of being out there. And, above all I admire his ability to keep a journal while doing it. Remember, he's rich and famous and need not submit himself to such misery.

And so, I understood his reaction when an interviewer suggested that this book is "blog-like." He bristled at the suggestion and I understand why. Most blogs are like tourist travel: shallow and pointless. The Tao of Travel though, is well thought out and has as its great central theme the idea that all humanity is one, but that to witness that one-ness, to truly understand it, one must have the arrogance and courage to strip down to one's own naked being and go out there and put yourself at humanity's mercy.

That, I think now, is what traveling is all about--an arrogant, naked love for the world.

Post Script

While on my sweating, dripping walk today, I stopped at the post office and mailed out the manuscript of my next novel. This is naked arrogance, this assumption that a publisher would appreciate receiving such a thing---something I wrote, boxed up with studied professionalism, carefully addressed, lovingly handled. And it is an exercise in Buddhism, being mindful as the postal clerk stamps and seals and chats and takes my money and drops the box into one of those big canvas mail bags.

The Summer Writing Blues: Losing the Battle with Glorious Distractions

2011-07-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

Ignore an empty beach at your peril: Go forth, writer, and reflect on the sand twixt your toes.

Yeah, I know, all you serious writers are still at it, even though a hot and glorious summer beckons from beyond the nearest window. Maybe you sigh, grimace, close your eyes for a moment, you try to close your ears to the sounds filtering in through the invisible cracks in your airtight bastion of creativity: the siren call of birds chirping, the summery drone of a lawn mower, the shrieks of the kids next door splashing in their pool. Oh yes, and that most famous of summer sounds, the slamming of a screen door.

I say, give it up. I decided to make the summer, with all the irresistible distractions of summer guests, boating, beaching, traveling, a time of renewal. If you are in a rust belt climate, the dregs of winter will come oozing back all too soon carrying the lovely dark and dreary motivations toward self expression. I'm going to rationalize these hot months into an excuse to do no more writing than scribbling an occasional blog or jotting down any stray profound insights into a small pocket notebook. Then, come November with its gray rain and leafless and heartless trees scratching against the windows of my writing room, I'll retrieve them and weave them into something satisfying.

Besides, I wrote for the past seven months and now my editor is busy scanning my winter manuscript for missteps and passive voices, wooden prose, and cardboard characters. As for me, I'll spend some long days in guilt-free beach walking or some rail-down sailing on the Chesapeake, or hot dog-eating family gatherings. It's time to catch up on myself, to see what I've become, what's left of me now, after so long hovering in the cold.

How to Stop Students Horrid, Horrific, Hatred of Writing: An Idea

2011-07-09T07:42:00.000-07:00

Encouraging young people to love writing: A enthusiastic "celebrity" can make a difference.

That's me up there, in the hot seat in front of a school media center filled with middle schoolers. I was a visiting "celebrity" author and my intentions were good: get these kids to see writing as a wonderful adventure rather than a hideous, boring, and despicable chore.

An insane expectation? First, I had try to get into the mind of the average 6th grader (OMG). What was going on inside that brain, overstimulated as it was by the infinite digital excitements of gaming and Internet social networks? Why did they love reading Harry Potter and love texting and emailing, but hate classroom writing assignments?

I took stock of my prior knowledge. As a professional who spent thirty-two years working in the public schools as a speech-language pathologist, I knew a few critical facts:

While human speech--talking--is a hugely complex but natural process generally mastered by the age of three or so, writing is not.
No, writing is a hugely complex language skill that is not acquired without intense, long-term instruction in the correct use of its seemingly endless, persnickety, idiotic, and stupid conventions; it is, in fact, an unnatural or "overlayed" skill.
Humans are gregarious, social creatures and anything that feeds into and supports that social gregariousness will tend to develop rapidly and even joyfully, e.g. talking to friends, or exchanging blips of friendly chatter on FaceBook or Twitter. And, better yet, when writing on these social networks, those persnickety, idiotic, and dumb grammatical rules can be officially ignored thus making the experience even more joyful.
Classroom room writing assignments that are not related to socializing and which require the exacting use of grammar and spelling rules will be seen as boring, difficult, rotten, dumb, and despicable.

How then, to approach the problem?

Break up the bad attitudes, confound the resistance, make them drop their guards by bringing in a "real" published author. It will be helpful if this author has had lots of experience presenting dog-and-pony shows in front of large groups of middle schoolers and is loud and enthusiastic and has had some (bad) acting experience.
This author will then read a little from his books and answer questions about being a writer. Surprisingly for kids who hate writing, there will be a lot of very good questions and then he will have the students write a very short beginning of a story and give them the opportunity to come up and read it aloud in front of their classmates and....
....teachers will suddenly realize that students actually love writing, they just hate writing assignments that have nothing to do with the excitement of socializing with their friends or making up wild stories, and so....
....after the visiting author finishes an entire day of talking to class after class of students and has no voice left and leaves the school dazed and very much in need of a beverage, the teacher can capitalize on the short-lived enthusiasm for writing he has left behind.
How to do this? Give even the most mundane writing exercise the thrill of the social network by relating it to important things in their lives and then encourage them to come up into the "author's chair" in front of the class, and read part of what they have written.
Do this on a regular, weekly basis, and with luck and skillful, underhanded, sneaky, pedagogical manipulations, the enjoyment of this type of writing will generalize to other more academic writing assignments.
And that is the key to this process: If students have an enjoyable writing experience once a week, the skills aquired and the improved attitude will impact other writing assignments and they won't even notice it.

I've done this quite a few times and it does seem to work. As you can imagine, the onus then falls on the poor language arts teacher to keep the enthusiasm going. Writing an essay on, say, Benjamin Franklin, is not seen as quite as enticing a project as emailing a friend. But why not? In fact, why not have them email a friend about Benjamin Franklin. He was not exactly a boring guy and having students find the fun and funny or even scary things he did and let them write report it in prose that uses words in a creative, off-beat way can help keep the enthusiasm for writing alive.

In the end, as they mature, students must learn that some writing assigments are just going to be boring. There is no way around it. It's life. Get the job done and get over it. Still, I have found that in most writing assignments, there is room for a little creative fun with words and language and if we can pass this along to our students, it can have a big impact on their education and, eventually, on their careers.

What I Learned About Writing Whilst in Chicago: The Penny Dreadfuls are Back in Style

2011-07-05T08:22:00.000-07:00

Playing the Blues at Buddy Guy's Lounge: What does this great Chicago Blues musician have in common with a great writer?

I'm just back from Chicago where I was a writer/tourist. One doesn't mind being a writer in Chicago--or any place else for that matter--but one hates being a tourist because of the bad reputation tourists have for wearing funny clothes, and being sweaty, cheap, shallow, and ignorant.

Picture your classic thirty-something couple. They are wearing shorts and flowered shirts which, by 1:00 in the afternoon, they have sweated through. He is swinging his big camera around like a bazooka while their three children are dragging along and complaining loudly because their bellys are full of greasy fries and ketchup and they really need naps or to be in front of a television set.

Observed on the promenade along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago last week:

Mother to her 4-year-old son: "David, stop doing that and come here. David, I'm going to count to three. David, one (long, hopeful pause), two (longer pause), three. "DAVID! STOPPING DOING THAT AND COME HERE!"

There was relief from the Great American Summer Vacationers, however. I found it in Legend, Chicago Blues great Buddy Guy's restaurant, lounge, and blues heaven. It happened to be right across the street from my hotel and you can go there for lunch and hear great blues or go there at night, eat dinner, and hear great blues. This is no dangerous dive, either. It's clean (very clean), well stocked, and well ordered. Cajun-style food is mostly served, and the patrons are respectful and serious about their music.

I don't carry a bazooka camera. I use a Nikon CoolPix that slides in and out of my pocket, no bigger than a fat credit card, and I got this picture of a musician playing great that night and that got me to wondering. How did he get so damned good?

The guitar was, quite literally, an extention of his body and so an extention of his mind, and so an extention of the very soul of his music. He never had to look down to find a chord. His fingers danced along the fret board jitter-bug fast, finding the precise place on the right string without any apparent effort. And he did this in perfect harmony with the guitarist who was playing next to him and in perfect rhythm with the drummer.

And that's what got me worried. Watching him got me thinking about something in the brave new world of fiction writing: Internet self publishing. Could this muscian have possibly decided to become a blues guitarist six months ago and get up and do what he was now doing? This wonderful muscial magic?

Of course not. What this guy was doing took years and years and years and years of persistent, daily, grinding hard work. And then before he was allowed get up on that stage, he had to audition before a very, very choosy, persnikkety, and judgemental expert in blues music that was not his mother.

My take on it is this: writing that is worth reading is just as difficult to produce as music that is worth listening to. But what is happening today in fiction writing is that people can--by the millions--publish whatever they write without having practiced and without having auditioned in front of anyone at all, even their mothers. Amazon.com is filled with such stuff and the selective reader must sort it all out by looking at the publisher before he buys. Published by CreateSpace? Be suspicious. Anyone can do that. 99-cent ebooks on Kindle? Buyer beware. The old Britsh Penny Dreadfuls are back.

So it worries me. If you would be a serious writer, you must be like a serious musician--pay your dues and learn to play. It takes many years to acquire the skills to make wonderful music with words. I suppose the great reading Internet public will sift through it all and in the end, the great writers will float to the top of that infinite slush pile. But until then, how are you to know that what you sent your 99 cents for is worth even a penny--and that's dreadful.

Now that my rant is over, here are some fun and/or instructive quotes by writers who made wonderul music with words.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I’d type a little faster.
                                                         Isaac Asimov

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
                                                         Walter Bagehot

There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed.
                                                           Sophy Burnham

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
                                                           Lord Byron

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
                                                          Truman Capote

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
                                                          Truman Capote

Practice, practice, practice writing. Writing is a craft that requires both talent and acquired skills. You learn by doing, by making mistakes and then seeing where you went wrong.
                                                          Jeffrey A. Carver

Write from the soul, not from some notion what you think the marketplace wants. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.
                                                          Jeffrey A. Carver

The pen is the tongue of the mind.
                                                          Miguel de Cervantes

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
                                                          Winston Churchill

When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
                          Cicero Roman author, orator, & politician (106 BC - 43 BC)

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.
                                             Hart Crane, American Poet (1899-1932)

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
                                             John Dos Passos

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
                                            Annie Dillard

In good writing, words become one with things.
                                            Ralph Waldo Emerson

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
                                           William Faulkner

Writers aren't exactly people.... they're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
                                           F. Scott Fitzgerald

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
                                           F. Scott Fitzgerald

Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity. (Translation from French)
                                           Gustave Flaubert

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
                                           Benjamin Franklin

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.
                                           Kahlil Gibran

To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.
                                           Allen Ginsberg

If any man wishes to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
                                          Goethe

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power . . .
                                          Louise Gluck

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.
                                         Anthony Hope Hawkins

Easy reading is damned hard writing.
                                        Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man."
                                        Heidegger (from "Building Dwelling Thinking", 1951)

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.
                                        Ernest Hemingway

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.
                                        Ernest Hemingway

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.
                                        Ernest Hemingway

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.
                                        Ernest Hemingway

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
                                       Doris Lessing

I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire.
                                       Gordon Lish

I'm in Oz. No, Really, I'm in Oz.

2011-06-29T08:03:00.000-07:00

Chicago skyline from Chicago River: a truly magnificent "smelly onion"

“Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.”

                                                                                Frank Lloyd Wright

“I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.”
                                                                              Henry Louis Mencken

"...if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."
    Edgar Rice Burroughs, Chicago native, on deciding to become a writer

I used to worship at the alter of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Tarzan books got me swinging on backyard vines and wrestling with imaginary gorillas before I was eight years old. Edgar was born in Chicago and he would probably be considered the least of the famous writers produced by this city, writers that include Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, and Saul Bellow.

So, her I am, too, a writer wallowing in one of the world's great cities, trying hard not to feel like a golly-whiz bumpkin just off the farm amidst this grand skyline. But, golly whiz, one does get a crick in the neck the first few days here from looking up--up, up, up, up, and all around. It does stagger the faculties, this Oz of glass and steel that seem to emerge directly from the blue water of ocean-lake Michigan.

So, I figured, this fascination with the improbable constructions of man (and a woman architect, too) will pass. Give it time. Take your rubber-neck pictures, wander the streets gawking, take the Chicago River architecture tour (the poor docent was going hoarse trying to tell us everything as the boat steamed along). After a day or two, you'll be like Saul Bellow want to go and die in Vermont.

It's now day three and I'm about to finish this blog entry and head out again. Maybe today as I cross Michigan Ave. to the Art Institute of Chicago for another few hours of enthusiastic shuffling and staring, shuffling and staring, I'll be able to stifle the thus-far irrepressible urge to look up. Tomorrow I'll be able be like travel writer Paul Theroux and be hard and cynical and grumpy and write about the actual writers who came from this town. Or maybe about the food, or the wonderful, conversation-stopping rattle and roar of the elevated railway, or the lovely young women dressed so fetchingly in their summer-in-the-city minimals.

Multitasking Can Ruin Your Writing: Frankie say Relax, Don't Do It

2011-06-22T06:41:00.000-07:00

What distractions plagued Shakespeare while he penned Hamlet?

Multitasking allows you to screw up several things at once.

Internet wisdom

Every morning, at my own choosing, I enter a multitasking hell scape.

To wit: I get up, make a cup of coffee, grab a breakfast bar, head into my cave, sit back in my recliner, and get the day going. It isn't hard to multitask eating, drinking coffee, and reading/writing; my mistake is turning on the television.

See, I'm a news junkie; I can't help myself. Those are my friends up there on that 47-inch, High Def, flat screen and they need me as much as I need them. I've been visiting with them for years and for some reason the political prattle they stuff into my brain satisfies an insatiable hunger to know everything and know it now.

And it's not helpful that while Morning Joe and his cronies are chuckling and yelling, accusing and revealing, that across the bottom of the screen runs a continuous stream of yet more information about politics, entertainment, the economy, and sports. And I have a new camera I use on these blogs that I'm trying to figure out this morning and still follow Twitter protocol and what was that first, all-important line of the story I was going to start? Oh, and my editor--what about her? She's had the manuscript for my new novel for two weeks and I haven't heart a thing. Is that the cat crying in the kitchen?

So here I go: My pulse begins to race as my overheating brain follows my twitching, blinking eyes as they dart back and forth, up and down, among the irresistible choices. A bigger-than-life pretty woman towers over me imploring, the stock market took a hit yesterday (Damn, I should have moved those funds.), some drunk, jackass t.v. star killed himself in a traffic accident, all the while, my laptop--on my lap-- beckons with its own images and news that I just can't afford to miss......

Long ago when I was a college student studying human cognition and linguistics and psychology and stuff like that, I was taught that our brains cannot--simply cannot--focus on more than one task at a time. You have one consciousness, one awareness, one you, and that you is very jealous of its grip on your attention.

So, when you multitask, you are in fact forcing your conscious self to flit, with more less efficiency, among the many siren choices. Some of us are good at it, I guess. We can focus, however briefly, on one stimulus, process it, assess it, store in in our long-term retrieval memory banks, and then move ever so quickly on to the next, do the same, move on again. Let's call it flash processing.

But even the best of us, those of us with great flash processing gifts, suffer the consequences of TMI coming at us too fast. Picture Shakespeare, on the other hand, hard at work on Hamlet. What distractions did he have to deal with? A rooster crowing in the court yard? A bucket of slops being poured onto the street from a second floor window? A cockroach nibbling at his breakfast cheese? A bothersome louse picking at his scalp? Minor stuff, I think, compared to the modern misery of this screeching, pounding, flickering digital age. No wonder he produced the most wonderful literature, and with a quill pen and a pot of ink at that.

So, summoning all my resources and having given the pundits their due, I gratefully, guiltily, hit the off button on the remote. I feed the insistent cat, get a third cup of coffee, retrieve my second breakfast bar from between the arm of the recliner and the seat cushion, and settle in to--write this blog.

Blogs, Bloogs, Bleegs: How to Avoid Chatty, Hasty, Illiterate Blogging Babble

2011-06-20T09:06:00.000-07:00

....I think "blog-like" is a disparaging term. I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look to me illiterate, they look hasty, like someone babbling. To me writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn't seem to have any literary merit at all. It's a chatty account of things that have happened to that particular person.

Writer Paul Theroux

Whew, it seems poor, famously cranky Mr. Theroux got upset when an interviewer said his latest book The Tao of Travel, seemed "blog-like." His book is, of course, anything but hasty and illiterate. All his books are well-considered acts and he has become justly famous (and rich) because of his carefully constructed, thoughtful prose. As a fellow traveler and a fellow writer, he is one of my favorite reads. Paul Theroux is the real deal. Read his many published works and weep, ye struggling scribblers.

And his criticism of blogs and blogging is spot on, too. Just scan through a couple. In fact, I'll do that now. Here is a snippet from a blog by a hopeful writer named Lucy Ann:

It has been a while since I've actually written something. I have done lots of planning, lots of rewriting, but not a lot of the 'creating' recently. So that's something I am trying to get my head back into. I think Matti and Dorcas are my main priorities right now, though I do need to write a new short story too. I have a lot of work to do, but I'm trying not to let that feeling of being under pressure and needing to rush consume me again. Trying to take it one piece at a time.

Yes, this is chatty, hasty babbling from a young mother who is, sadly, too preoccupied by her children to get any real writing done. That's the purpose, the goal of her blog--to chat about her writing, but we readers of blogs really don't care about her. Not yet. Of course, if we had found this babbling in an old yellowed journal in some musty attic in England and discovered it belonged to, say, George Eliot, we wouldn't be so eager to dismiss it.

Here is another snippet from another blog chosen at random:

Finishing The Ale Boy’s Feast was a moment of disappointment, not for the fact that I didn’t like the ending, quite the contrary. I enjoyed the ending, and loved the balance of both mystery and resolution. But it was a disappointment that the story has come to its end, in a sense. The story obviously, goes on. But our reading of it has reached its end....

This is blatantly babbly. The writer perhaps should have spend a little more time tightening it up his review of this book and trying to dig a little deeper into things so the reader could learn something, maybe enjoy some pithy or humorous insight into reading and/or writing. A little more thought, perhaps? A lot more thought, actually.

And here, just the next click away on the next blog, I found this by a blogger who describes herself as an atheist, lefty, mother, and someone who writes about whatever comes into her mind:

I was thinking about the things (memories/tastes) that a person can give you in life, some of them are small and some of them are large. Some of it good and some of it not so much.

Someone important in my early life died recently and I have a sort of collage in my head of what he meant to me. The trivial and upbeat of which I will be sharing.

A minor interest in keeping coldwater fish, a repulsion from eating fish (or indeed any seafood ever), a love of the 'World's Strongest Man' and the music of Johnny Cash.

And finally a rainbow. On the evening I drove away from the hospital there was this fantastic, vivid, perfect semi-circular rainbow. The best I've ever seen. I drove away wondering if it was the last time I'd see him and if I'd always now think about him in connection to rainbows. I don't know whether the latter is true, but the former was, it was the last time.

So, I guess Mr. Theroux annoyance was justified. If this random sampling of blogs is any indication of the state of the blogosphere, to have one's new book compared to it would be enough to make a serious writer of prose turn purple and maybe get up and kick something, perhaps the interviewer: "You man now leave. This interview is over and don't let the door...."

As for this blogger, and that would be me, who is also a writer of novels and short stories, I hope I am holding my own somewhere up above the chattering, babbling, illiterate class. I do this by:

1. Spending time on my blogs, sometimes hours. I write, re-write, reconsider, re-write, consider yet again, and re-write.

2. I publish the blog because knowing it is out there traveling around the world makes me anxious about it's quality and that makes me reconsider what I wrote yet again.

3. I think about it for the next day or two, sometimes dream about it, sometimes waking up with a start: "Good grief, what the hell was I thinking." Or maybe, and better, a brilliant epiphany: "Ha! That's wonderful. Why didn't I think of that sooner?"

4. Armed with such nocturnal insight, I get up, log on, log in, re-write.

5. I feel free to return to the last blog, or any previous blog written during the past six years, any time at all, and revising, re-writing, or even deleting stuff that suddenly seems silly, shallow, blabbing, illiterate, or shallow.

In the end, then, we can show the great Mr. Theroux that blogging can be literate, thoughtful, well written,or dare I say, even profound. We need only take our time and think and write and think and re-write and think again and re-write again and yet again and again until the babbling and chatter is transformed into something worth reading.

Why Being a Writer is Being Like the Buddha and/or Donald Trump

2011-06-16T14:39:00.000-07:00

Anyone who goes into travel writing in order to become rich or famous or feted is courting disappointment; anyone in search of huge inner wealth (and challenge and stimulation) should be richly rewarded. Pico Iyer, travel writer, novelist

I think Pico Iyer is probably richer than you and I. He says he doesn't travel anymore, spends lots of time in meditation, and doesn't care about having lots of cash, so it might be piling up around him. He is certainly more famous. And he's a writer. So what gives, Pico, with the advise do to something else if you want to be either rich or famous? Why do some people who have become rich and famous at something tell the rest of us not to think we'll get rich and famous doing what they are doing?

I'm considering writers as travelers and travelers as writers, as interchangeable persons here, from a philosophical viewpoint, though Iyer is specifically referring to people who write about traveling. And in that context, I think the point of Mr. Iyer's advise, as I understand he has, as do I, an affection for Buddhism, is why the hell would you want to be rich or famous anyway? Maybe his point is that to be rich is to be spoiled and to be famous is to lose the precious invisibility that is the writer/traveler's entre into the real world. To be rich and famous is to miss the purpose of life, which is to attain true understanding; that is to say, enlightenment.

So Iyer says to write out of love. It is the inner wealth that is important. I can understand that. Most writers make precious little money by way of their scribbling and equal amounts of fame. But if you are passionate about writing, and dedicated to it, and devoted, and love doing it very much, you are living the life you should be living regardless of your financial gains or ego rewards.

I embrace this philosophy. It's such a comfort, so reasonable and rational an approach. Still, I'm afraid I can't deny that at the first smell of possible financial gain and the announcement that the literary prize was mine and mine alone, not his, not hers, ha! how the blood is fired, how the heart smashes itself against the ribs, how the body swoons, and the skin erupts in goose bumps and the call to Mother is made immediately.

So, the lovely truth about writing seems to be this: If we write and write and write and fail to become rich and famous, we were still writing and so we were building up great inner wealth and were actually successful. If we write and write and write and indeed become famous and commensurately rich, we will have accomplished both material gains and inner riches. You can take them to the bank and then take the rest of the day off. I think I'll go and do that now.

Question: Should Budding Writers Start by Writing Genre Fiction?

2011-06-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules — and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.
Kurt Vonnegut

Thinking I was a person who could provide an answer, a college-age creative writing student asked me this question: Should I try writing genre fiction to break into publishing?

After many years of rejections, my first published fiction was a short story in a small, "literary" magazine, and we know how difficult it is to impress those snooty, dressed-in-black, literary editors. When you get an acceptance letter from the Prague Review that says, "We love your work," you can dance around the kitchen and pour yourself a small dram of an expensive beverage. When you win an international short story competition in Paris, you can dance all around the whole damned house, make the cats and your wife think you're bonkers, and refill your glass several times. I did this, oh yes indeed.

So, I was already a published "literary" writer when I went the "genre" route in getting my first three novels published by a "traditional" publisher--that is, not a vanity press or another self-publishing deal like CreateSpace. I still don't know if it has opened any doors for me in the market place of "literary" fiction. This because I spent the last six years writing those "fantasy" books and have just now finished an adventure novel aimed at the YA market.

So, should we consider that time spent writing genre fiction wasted? Let's think about it: I got lots and lots of practice in scribbling prose with the freedom to experiment with plot lines and character development and prose style because I felt writing less "serious" fiction allowed me the latitude to do that. I had a wonderful time, I grew as a writer, and, of course, yes, I got published, legitimately.

The real lesson here, I think, is that word, "wonderful." I had a wonderful time writing and I tried to write as well as I could. I tried to grow as a writer, to expand and deepen my skills. Even though we might think of genre fiction as plot driven rather than character driven--that is, the development of multi-dimensional, fully-realized characters is less important in genre writing--I had a grand time developing memorable characters who in turn drove the plot, albeit along fantasy genre lines.

This has been done before and I was keeping good company. Take Kurt Vonnegut, for example. He's the alleged science fiction writer who really wrote good fiction, and who gave us such classics as Slaughter House Five and Cat's Cradle. Good stuff, yep, but was it genre or was it literary? Does it break the barrier between genres?

This from TOR.COM, May 11, 2011:

And what about the writing itself? Surely that’s all that’s needed to settle the matter. If enough of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels have science fiction in them, then Kurt Vonnegut is a science fiction writer. Right? Slaughterhouse-Five contains time travel and aliens. The Sirens of Titan features a Martian invasion made up of humans, mind control, and a robot alien. Cat’s Cradle depicts a fictional substance known as ice-9, which has incredibly destructive capabilities. Galapagos tells the story of how human beings eventually evolve into a furry kind of quasi-aquatic creature. However, there’s science fiction and then there’s science fiction. Muppets in Space may have a space ship in it, but no one is super concerned about what genre it belongs in. The test ought to be that if the science fiction elements are removed and the story ceases to function, it’s probably science fiction. With Vonnegut, this works for nearly all of his books except, oddly, for the most famous novel.

Bottom line with Vonnegut seems to be that well-written prose and fully realized characters are essential to "literary" literary fiction whether it's science fiction or romance or mystery. Trash is trash is trash is trash while good writing requires no apologies.

And so,after mulling it over here on the page, my answer to my young questioner seems to be, "Yes, it is easier to break into writing--that is get that first story or novel published--by aiming it at a certain genre market, but will a "literary" publisher take you more seriously if you are a published writer of "genre" fiction? Unless you are among the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, I think not.

Best to practice the stuff you want to ultimately write, whether it be "genre" or literary, but write, for crying out loud--write, write, write, write, write. Rather than immediately going the self-publishing route (any idiot can do that), take the time to learn to weave words into good prose and great characters. Man up, as they say, and take the pain of rejection. When you're good enough to get published by publishers who get to select from thousands of manuscripts a year, you're good enough to call yourself a published writer. Not before.

The Music of Language: A Writer Needs to Understand the Innate Human Joy in Prosody

2011-06-01T18:35:00.000-07:00

"It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception." (When asked about his theory of relativity) - Albert Einstein

"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art." - Charlie "YardBird" Parker

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another." -Frank Zappa

I'm a former speech-language pathologist who dealt with children who had great difficulty learning the subtleties of language, something most of us do effortlessly by the time we are four years old. In my practice, I quickly realized that it was the music of language many of them were missing, that sense. That is, the feel for the rhythms and intonations--the prosody--of speech on which the real intent, the meaning of the strings of words is carried.

What is true for spoken language is true for the written word. The world's great literature is a great song that carries on the rhythms of its syllables the profound emotional messages of the ages. We writers need to remember that.

One of my favorite stories is The Bear, by William Faulkner. In the opening pages of this great, long short story--or novella--Faulkner sets a magical beat of words that carries the narrative forward into haunted emotional territory. You can feel the rawness of the air, smell the woodsmoke, taste the whisky, hear the horses hooves on the earth as the men's voices quietly penetrate the silence of the deep forest. Most of all, these mental pictures wrapped in the music of the writing set the stage for the eventual appearance of the bear itself, the huge, forbidding, wild spirit of the wilderness. It's great and wonderful stuff.

So, I was not surprised to read this from NPR's Blog of the Nation:

Science now all but confirms what many suspected for decades — humans are hard-wired, to some degree, to respond to music. In recent years, new technology and research provided scientific evidence that music affects our brains and moods. Studies suggest that someday music may even help patients heal from Parkinson's or stroke. In her new book, [The Power of Music], Elena Mannes tackles many questions about the science of music: How do different sounds affect different groups of people? What parts of the brain are activated by music? What role can music play in therapy and health care?

Of course, we all knew that and the lesson for us scribblers is that we are really singers, songsters whose message is best communicated by rhythms that touch that "hard-wired" human capacity to respond to the music of our sentences.

Enjoy When You Can, Endure When You Must: A Small Wisdom

2011-05-29T19:30:00.000-07:00

.This is Johann Wolfgang von Goether, a prime genius, a polymath, a man who must have been filled to the brim with small wisdoms

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I guess the great genius of German literature got that about right. My goodness, how we do all endure. It's all about endurance. You see it everywhere, world wide. Life, the endurance contest.

Why, I remember once, in China during the Viet Nam war when I was a soldier there, seeing a man with no legs scrabbling along the filthy street, sliding along on a piece of cardboard, picking up scraps of discarded food with a pair of chopsticks--a pair of chopsticks! I was just a kid then, really, and the image has stayed with me. How dirty he was.

And last month, going into WalMart, I saw a similar phenomena, a man who walked, boldly as a king, through the automatically opening doors, on his knuckles. He had no legs and no torso to speak of either. He swung along smartly, too, and knuckle walked right up onto one of the electric shopping carts they have there for shoppers who can't walk, and hopped on. I was gratified and horrified and sufficiently mystified at the gift humans have for enduring when we have the capacity to end our existence. How much pain and hopelessness can a person endure?

Lots of it. And so, I've come to the conclusion that the filthy and hopeless and downtrodden, the legless and the sightless, and brutalized and abused, those of us who seem to have good reason to be utterly devoid any reason to want to go on living--go on living anyway.

There must be a small light in there some where. A small point of hope or love or something, that keeps them going. They ought to share it, this infinite resilience. Let us, who have so much more, see it and maybe we will understand ourselves better.

It's Crazy Outside, But Angst in Here: Stream-of-Consciouness Blogging Whilst Watching a Woody Allen Movie

2011-05-28T19:45:00.000-07:00

Blogging and Watching a Movie: Angst and Buttered Popcorn

I have a very good life, so I have nothing to complain about. Sometimes, I just have existential angst.

Meg Ryan

It's much easier to write when you're sad. But you can end up isolated and depressed because you almost need to put yourself in that situation to have that angst to write from.

Natalie Imbruglia

I'm watching Woody Allen movies tonight and writing down whatever comes out. Woody Allen once said, when asked where he got his ideas, "I smash myself on the occipital lobe with a mallet and write down whatever comes out."

Love the guy. Just got through You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger after reading about his new one, Miracle in Paris, which I know I'm going to be wild about because it has Hemingway and Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald and the old 20's gang who were real enough to build a career on and lots of English professors did. Sure.

Now, God help me, I'm watching Manhattan and Gershwin is loud with Rhapsody in Blue and, there she is, Mariel Hemingway, the writer's pretty grand daughter, the one who didn't commit suicide, and she is Woody's girl friend and she is seventeen and he's forty-two (in the movie and then he played it out in real life).

The thing about Woody Allen is, he has one shtick and shticks with it. And this is good. And he's crazy, of course. All his characters are neurotic writers. Struggling neurotic writers who have maybe written one great book and now are batting their bleeding egos against the next one and it just won't come out, and all their friends, these struggling writers, are artists and shallow, quacking, self-absorbed intellectuals muddling through marriages and affairs.

Actually, all the quacking is all about angst. Angst, the hard stuff. Angst, straight, no water, no ice. Angst mainlined, direct into the heart. All of us, then, especially writers and anyone with a pulse, suffers from angst. It's the particular hell of life as it is lived, and would be soooo boring without, even if you have enough money and food and a good education and so know better than to have angst, and no one is hunting you down and trying to kill you.

Now tonight, tonight I sent the new novel out to my editor, a smart, Stanford-type woman who I've never met who lives in California. She edited my last two novels. She does a good line edit and makes comments, too and its the comment you live for, to tell the truth. Comments are the heart of it all. The truth lies in the comments.

This is Memorial Day Weekend--the Saturday of it, 2011. We spent the day working on the house, cleaning, blasting with the high pressure water blaster. Great for green mold on vinyl siding and brick walk ways. The weather was wonderful and my flowers, my morning glorys, are starting to vine up the trellis. Anticipating a summer of grandson and daughter and Chicago and the Chesapeake. Ice cream on the town common on an impossibly hot and humid August day. A thunder storm, maybe. A real rocker.

I'm drifting off. My stream of consiousness just went over a waterfall. Guess I'll go to bed.

The World Spins Awry as Summer Approaches: Tornados, Floods, and a Botched Rapture

2011-05-24T18:07:00.000-07:00

Where did you go, you rank old profit of doom? Scurrilous preyer upon the emotionally deficient, rheumy eyed, withered fanatic, bully, viper....what was his name? Camping? Harold Camping. That ancient flim-flam man, who, twice now in that last twenty years, bamboozled the hopelessly gullible with black-hearted, right-up-to-heaven savior dreams?

I understand he is in hiding. Let's hope the old adage you can run but you cannot hide pulls the covers from his spider hole. Or, maybe, he was the only one to be raptured? Is that possible? OMG. Here's a blurb from his website: This web site serves as an introduction and portal to four faithful ministries which are teaching that WE CAN KNOW from the Bible alone that the date of the rapture of believers will take place on May 21, 2011 and that God will destroy this world on October 21, 2011. Please take your time and browse through the teachings of Harold Camping, President of Family Radio.

The Reverend Camping now says that May 21st was an "invisible judgement day" and that the world will still end--very quickly--on October 21st. The entertainment value of Mr. Camping's rantings is right up there with Jersey Shore.

But there is more in the news than old, crazy, cranky bad jokes. Real horror, in fact. The G in OMG saw fit to allow the destruction of 75% of Joplin, MO. Death estimates started out at 89, now up to 1,500. We can assume children, lots of them. And then there were those people who huddled against the wall at that Home Depot store thinking they were safe. The winds were 198 m.p.h. The suction from negative air pressure must have been horrific. The roof was pulled off, the wall caved in. Imagine dying at Home Depot when you just went there to pick up a gallon of paint and a light bulb and maybe a few planters and a ladder. And a weed wacker. And your kid was with you, your son, say, and he was carrying the light bulbs for you and then everything went to hell in that grand old handbasket and people were yelling and the retirees who work the isles started gathering you all up and telling you to get against that wall. And you did and your son was in your arms, huddled there, against your chest.....

Then there is the Great Flood rising, rising, rising down the middle of the nation's big river, inundating, displacing, making mucky-muck of millions of lives. Darling flood, your slow-going, over-the-top waters have been upstaged by dud raptures and high winds. Too bad. You need to be fast and violent to make it in today's media.

And other things, too, distress the average, clean-living, righteous, middle-aged American as he tries to make sense of his lazy, happy, ain't-it-a-glorious-spring, ice cream eating, scotch sipping, the bad-economy-hasn't-affected-me-even-a-little-bit life. To wit: The stock market plunged on the financial mess in Greece and concerns over the economies of those Latin, Mediterranean, olive oil and wonderful-climate countries. They need to take a tip from us and get the Chinese to bail them out. And the price of gas, and the lousy (silly) Republican field of presidential hopefuls, and the housing market, and Glenn Beck is still around, and so is Qaddafi and that ham-faced fool named Trump.

But the Red Sox are pulling themselves up by their red sox and if Pedroia isn't too badly wounded they could get a grip on that waving Pennant early on. And it's nearly summer, that most glorious and patriotic of American seasons. It's only May but the heat is building, classic thunderstorms are splitting apart big tulip poplars on Market Street, and happy sailors are sliding up to the docks in our perfect harbor just four miles in from the Chesapeake. I'm looking forward to the sultry, sulky, insolent heat and the nasty, biting green head flies, and more ice cream, some fishing and beach time, and some fine sailing on the Bay.

Life Punctuated by Death Punctuated by Love

2011-05-18T18:21:00.000-07:00

Patricia Herborg Knutsen Arvidson April 17, 1921 - May 4, 2011

“Love the whole world as a mother lovers her only child.” The Buddha

“My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.” Mark Twain

“The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.” Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Indian Spiritual leader, 1931-1990)

I'm thinking now that I'm not ready to write this--this about my mother's death. What's more profound than your mother's death? Only the combined agony of when your mother births you, your agony and hers. Beyond that, nothing.

So, there she is, up there, beautiful and powerful. She was that way in the beginning and she was that way at the very end. At the end, that morning last week in the Intensive Care Unit of a local hospital, she wore her warrior's mask to greet her death. It was the mask I had seen so many times in my life when she was challenged or angry or determined and she was very often determined.

She was ninety and not well and had fallen and broken her hip and now the desperate attempt to fix her bones had overcome her last resources. Her lungs gave out but, for a long time, her great heart did not. When my father, her husband of sixty-eight years, leaned over and put his forehead against hers and whispered that he loved her, oh, how he loved her, she seemed to rally. Or was the jump in her vital signs only our wishful thinking, a romantic notion?

Poor Dad. Leaning over her bed, over her body, his mind absorbed the truth, but his heart, like hers, could not accept it. They had been famous lovers until their last day together. In their final years at the nursing home, they had taken to spending their time sitting on the edge of their conjoined beds holding hands and looking out the window. The staff called them the honeymooners. They kissed often, real kisses, mouth to mouth, and then laughed at themselves. They insisted they were happy and it would have been unwise to argue. Could anyone have been that happy after all they had seen? All the wars fought, the illnesses over come, the children raised, the grandchildren supported, the impossible amount of work accomplished?

I feel both diminished and enlarged by her passing. Watching her die, I can claim another small wisdom: I have witnessed the death of the woman who gave me life. I have kissed the moist forehead of the person who is half of me as her fierce spirit left her. I like to think she gave a last gift at that moment, that something entered me that will carry me along until it's my turn to leave. A final understanding of the ineffability of life, of death, and the paradox that love triumphs though life is defeated.

We love you so much, Mom.

May 1st We Got Him and We Celebrate: Now the Existential Agonizing Begins

2011-05-02T04:25:00.000-07:00

I want to remember this day, the day we "got him" and the day we celebrated death and then the next day some of us woke up with an existential hangover.

Who do we kill and feel happy about the killing? What type of person fits into that catagory of human being whose demise brings joy to most of the world? Yeah, this guy, I guess would fit the bill.

My inital take on his killing feels like this: You are free to kill--and indeed, stupid if you don't kill--someone who is actively trying to kill you--someone who has a gun pointed at your head and you're pretty certain is about to pull the trigger. The existential angst and second guessing in a case like this should be left to those among us who have strong "turn-the-other-cheek" leanings and would rather die themselves rather than take a life. They are an enlightened and very small minority and are always oppressed and victimized.

The world, it seems, pretty much agrees with the action our Navy SEALS took today and that should be judge and jury enough. We didn't put the entire population of Hiroshima in trial before we knowingly and willingly wiped them out.

So, let's accept it that the human animal as it has evolved must necessarily kill or be killed and be pleased with the outcome, so far. There will be more hell to pay, for certain, but paying hell is the terribly odd way human nature works. We will leave it to the better angels of our natures to make apologies.

Slowly and Then, All at Once: A Pause in My Writing Life to Say Goodbye

2011-04-26T05:46:00.000-07:00

Snow on the Spring Blossoms: A Pervasive Cold Sadness

Flowers are without hope. Because hope is tomorrow and flowers have no tomorrow. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943,

Spring, the time of life and rebirth, comes slowly and then all at once. The winter lingers, pretends to slip away, sneaks back. The snow turns to rain, the rain to snow, the snow comes hard and then melts. You go to sleep with the wind hard and dark against the windows and wake up with the sun on your face. Leaves are there, of a sudden, and huge blossoms come from nowhere, and the smells of spring nearly overwhelm. A screen door slams, a lawn mower drones, the perfume of fresh cut grass drifts in from across street.

How come then the motorcycle can't stop in time? Can't swerve quickly enough? How come the man driving the SUV, who stops at the stop sign, then can't see the motorcycle and so pulls out far enough so the motorcycle can't miss it? And then, in the middle of the rush of spring life, after the endless winter, there is brain death, instant and final? Brother, where art thou? And where for, and therefor, gone forever?

That's all you can say about it, really. At this time. One must think for a while before one says anything else. It takes time to process sudden death, to decide , yes, you are a survivor through all this, that your life, at least, goes on, despite the odds against snow flakes, and flower petals, and insects struggling free from long-buried cocoons. And you can't believe this simple fact because when you get to be your age you are looking over your shoulder at the shadows that seem to be following you as stealthily and certainly as one season stalks the one before it.

So, you enjoy the smell of the new-mown grass and the new flowers in their glorious and flagrant fertility, their spread-eagle eagerness, and the rising sap, and the insect larvae crawling from the new-warmed earth and slipping from their crusts and taking wing. It's okay to do that, to enjoy it all because you waited so long for it and who waits with such longing for death? Who sits at the window for dreary months on end watching for the merest glimmer of doom?

Goodbye, Chris Voit, my wife's loved and admired brother. You were a hard man, a challenging son, tough, a contrarian, oppositional, defiant, a loving father, a faithful husband, hardworking, skilled and smart.

Before the Master I Learn the Secrets of Traditional Navigation: The Sea, the Universe, and Humankind are One but the Universe Doesn't Care.

2011-04-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

( Photos by Maria)

"There is a lurking fear that some things are 'not meant' to be known, that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make." Carl Sagan

Here I am last week on the island of Guam asking questions. That's me on the left. On the right is a man I admire very much. His name is Manny Sikau and he's a seventh generation master navigator from the tiny atoll of Puluwat. He can, and has, steered small, marvelous, fragile outrigger canoes across hundreds of miles of open ocean using only the stars, the waves, clouds, and sea life to navigate; no compass, no sextant, no radio, nothing but his bone-deep knowledge of the sea and its relationship with the rest of the universe.

I admire him because I've been out there with him on the open sea. And there are few experiences that can match the feeling it gives a sailor than to be on the ocean, at night, in a small boat, alone on watch with the utter loneliness of deep space arcing above you. Even in the tropics, the stars, the very things you are depending upon to guide you, seem cold and unfathonable because you know they are, in fact, profoundly uncaring.

And so the sailor inevitably gets the answer to this, the ultimate question: Does it matter to the stars if I continue to live or if the sea chooses to swallow me up and cause me to disappear? It quickly becomes obvious: No, it doesn't. The life of the sailor matters only to the sailor himself and to those who love him.After that, there are no other questions worth asking.

In this picture, though, I'm not asking Manny about such impractical, existential nonsense. Each of us has to find those answers for himself or herself. Don't bother the master with such things. Ask instead, which star path do I follow to get from, say, the nearly invisible atoll of Pikelot to tiny island of Saipan when there's a big sea running? Ask instead, what oceanic swell does one learn to feel as it passes under the hull of the canoe to steer this course? Inquire as to which of the sea birds will not spend the night at sea and can be relied upon to lead the navigator to land as the sun goes down.

I'm asking because I have before us the loose leaf-bound draft of my next novel, a book I'm calling, Brothers of the Fire Star, and I'm picking at the master's brain. I have too many questions, it seems, for one afternoon. I've finished writing the book--the story as been told, the characters have met their fates--but in this case, the details matter very much; I want to get them right and I must have answers before I can truly be finished.

We sat in the dark shade of the sacred canoe house, among the hulls and spars of at least five equally sacred proas and as I probed, Manny smiled and answered in his soft voice: Yes, there is fresh water on those small islands, but one has to dig for it. Yes, the first thing an island sailor does upon landing on an atoll, is search for sea turtles on the beach. He then flips them over on their backs so they can't escape. Later he will eat them, cooking them in their shells over an open fire. Yes, there are maybe five ocean swells one must be able to understand simultaneously to be truly a good navigator, and some swells are nearly impossible to see or to feel yet one must feel them or die.

For men such as Manny Sikau, this knowledge was learned as a boy and he was steeped in it as a man; it is second nature. For me, a farm boy from Massachusetts, other things are second nature, but not this. I understand its significance but struggle to grasp the technique itself. Only more time at sea will reveal that to me and I don't have much time left.

Instead, I will write my books and remain awestruck by the courage and skills of these islanders. And that may be enough. I guess it will have to be enough.

What Happened to All the Great Russian Writers? What Have I Been Missing?

2011-04-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out. Anto Chekov (1860-1904)

Ah, Dr. Chekov (he was a medical doctor), I'm sure you were well worn out by your patients, your writing, your tuberculosis. Tuberculosis? Yeah, it was the AIDS of his times, killing untold millions, and he contracted it early and died young. More about that later.

First though, now that I'm 64, I feel mature enough to deal with great writers and I'm finding Chekov to be accessible and--how to I say this?--Charming? No, but there is a fine touch of innocence to his writing. I doubt if The New Yorker would pay him for his art these days, modern readers having been steeped in such great vats of violence, deceit, and cynicism for so long, but his lessons are universal and were original for his day. According to my Google research, he was the first to pioneer what has become 'stream-of-consciousness' writing. He is famous for what has been called his lack of a dramatic instinct and his stories tend not to have the usual arc of rising to a dramatic climax and a denouement. Instead, he gives of poignant, slice-of-life portraits of Russian life in the 1880's and from these portraits emerge those universal truths written in a simple, straightforward prose. What is most fascinating is the view of Russian life as it was lived--fully human and affecting.

Now, as for the tuberculosis, I was intrigued by the number of great artists that died of tuberculosis, even in the 20th Century after the introduction of antibiotics. When I Googled it, expecting a short list, I was supplied with pages of names. Chekov, Kafka, Modigliani, Washington Irving, John Keats, Samuel Johnson, Stephen Crane--the list goes on and on. Even Gone with the Wind star Vivien Leigh died of it in the 1960s. Tuberculosis was the AIDS of the time. Interesting.

Anyway, here are some Anton Chekov quotes. I love quotes. They're small wisdoms boiled down from the big ones. Bumper stickers you can believe in.

Man is what he believes.

Only entropy comes easy. (Oh, so true. Things will fall apart all by themselves if neglected long enough. Anyone who has owned a sailboat knows this.)

To advise is not to compel.

It's a long time since I drank champagne.

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

Advertising is the very essence of democracy.

If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.

When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.

People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.

I'm off to Guam. I hope real spring is here when I get back.

A Snowy Spring Morning: A cold, damp, starving artist and cold, damp, starving birds

2011-03-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

(Credit: Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker Magazine, March 7, 2011)

"Starving artist" is acceptable at age 20, suspect at age 40, and problematical at age 60. Robert Genn

It is through... Art and Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence. Oscar Wilde

I'm an ambitious self-publicist out of necessity. I've never been one to miss an opportunity because I've never had any illusions about how hard it is to survive as a painter... It's been an extra driving force to be able to prove the sceptics wrong. Stuart Pearson Wright

This is one of those crucial moments: It's Sunday morning, it's snowing, the birds are ravenous, and I found just the thing to make this early spring experience memorable: in a recent edition of The New Yorker is an article on the perfect starving artist: This guy had consumption, died after a brief, romantically dysfunctional life, and actually had a wonderful talent.

Modigliani! Ah, yes, you're the one we think of when we think of Paris, cold garrets with troubled plumbing, tuberculosis, much alcohol, many lovers, illegitimate children, and early death, but not before, finally, at the very last moment, being recognized as a great artist. In fact, when I was visiting the National Gallery of Art in D.C. last week, I found myself face-to-breast with this very same nude--let's call her the ur-woman--and was self-conscious of my desire to stare at it for longer than my wife would have thought appropriate. What would people think? Everyone else seemed to glance at it, avert their eyes, and move quickly on to something else lest they be thought lascivious--or worse. This is America, after all, land of a lingering, tragic, trickle-down Puritanism.

Never mind. Something about this era in the history of art resonates with me at some deeply satisfying level. So, stare I did, up close and personal. The wonderful thing is that, up close--very close--it not only does not lose its appeal, but it's attractions increase. The brush strokes look like they were made yesterday, the texture left by the artist's technique allow the viewer to imagine Modigliani just stepped back to allow you to take close peeks, first at the model, then at the painting, then the model, then the painting..... Maybe you'll go out and have a drink or ten drinks with him later and you can witness him throwing glasses around the cafe and having a public battle with the mistress who you just watched pose for him. Wouldn't that be a fine thing? But I don't know, I could always go to some city right now and find an artist who is starving and get drunk with him and watch him make a fool of himself and abuse his girlfriend. But it just wouldn't be the same unless someone had already paid a couple of million bucks for one of his paintings and written an article about him in The New Yorker.

Is the foolish dog, barks at the flying bird. Bob Marley

As for the birds, I'm glad I'm in my toasty house and not in some cold, damp attic in Paris slowly drinking. whoring, and coughing myself to death. I might not appreciate them as much as I do. As it is, I'm drinking my coffee confident that this snow is an extremely temporary interruption in the inevitable arrival of real warm weather and the birds know this, too. As for specifics on the birds, we have juncos, brown-headed cowbirds, red winged blackbirds, grackles, robins, tufted titmouses, sparrows of some variety, and cardinals, all crowding around the feeders and where I spread the seed on the ground. I can't let them starve on this cold, dark, damp day. As Modigliani had his benefactors, I shall be theirs.

I Find Solace in Art and Sunshine, Kids and Comraderie

2011-03-22T07:32:00.000-07:00

Here's my quote for the week from none other than President Lincoln. When you hang out in Washington, you are unavoidably steeped in the perennial--and perennially ignored--wisdoms of history. And when you are steeped in history it's hard to avoid that feeling that no matter how bad the world is, we have been here before. In other words, we have all learned the lesson that we never learn the lesson. Pity Mr. Lincoln, pity Mr. Obama.

As Lincoln said, "We are now engaged in a great civil war....." and yesterday, Obama entered into one of his own, this one in Lybia. Any easy answers? When very smart people can't agree on what to do, what are we, the common people, to think? Is there really any wisdom in the "common wisdom"? Where would we all be now if the 16th President had simply said to the South in 1860, "See ya'll later. Good luck with your Confederacy" and thus saved 618,000 lives? But we engaged in that civil war for the lofty purpose of holding the Union together. We are engaged in this civil war to keep the oil flowing--oh, yes, and to save the common people of Lybia from genocide.

Never mind. I turned away yet again from the madness and found some solace in a peaceful place: the sculpture garden at the National Art Gallery. It was a beautiful day, weather wise, and I found a seat in the sun on a bench and watched troops of middle schoolers out on their spring field trips pass by. I chatted up a couple of middle-aged guys (one in German, which was fun and nice see that I can still speak that language as badly as I used to). The other said he worked in one of those big marble buildings next to the garden and why not come out and get some sun and bring his work with him? He took my picture and I took his. The combined innocence of art, warm sunlight, a cool breeze, easy comraderie, and the chatter of the young people, had the sought after magical effect: I was able to become mindful and this allowed me to stick my head in the sand and pretend everything is okay. And maybe it is.

The writer being mindful in the National Gallery of Art sculpture garden on a spring day. Just like in high school sports, I'm still riding the bench, but now it feels very nice. Or maby I'm part of the exhibit--Title: Man Being Mindful in the Sun

In Washington This Week: I seek refuge from world events in waxy celebrities.

2011-03-15T08:54:00.000-07:00

Bill Clinton Waxes Strong in Spirit at Madame Tussaud's

My week in Washington is going something like this: trying to integrate what greets me every morning on the news. You know, the on-going horror in Japan, and the unspeakable cruelty in Lybia, and a stupid presidential candidate wanna-be who thinks the Battle of Lexington, one of the most important events in American history, was fought in New Hampshire.

I'm struggling to mix all that in with my take on what a generally fine world we live in and how pleased I am with things and come to grips with the rotten luck of some of my fellow sentient Earthlings.

What to do? Yesterday, as I was making my meandering way along the busy sidewalks and through the statued parks and squares down to Union Station (seventy pounds of 22-carat gold leaf in the ceiling!), I happened by Madame Tussaud's wax works. I stopped by expecting the worst and the worst would be people who looked like they were made out of wax. Like Bill Clinton. They got him about right, though, but not Hillary. They nailed Jimmy Carter--perfect,

but made a hash of Lincoln, thus:

They had Brittany Spears hanging upside down with her breasts heaving (Really, they pump air into them. Oops, I got her all turned around. But, she's got her hang ups as we all know).

and they put Opra on a diet, removing at least 100 pounds of the famous flab, so:

Johnny Depp, well, he was okay, and he did catch me off guard with his eyes. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, spun around, and just for an instant thought he was--well, not made of wax.

Nearby to Mr. Depp was Madonna, sprawled on a couch. Wait, is that Madonna or just some woman who doesn't really look very much like Madonna?

And maybe, even if you were drunk enough, would you think this looks like Bob Dylan? Really? What about the hair?

The eeriest of all, though, were the old presidents, the ones we never saw on television and didn't know what to expect. Like this one here--but I can't remember who it was now--oh, yeah, James Buchanan, I think. He spooked me, though. The eyes again, I guess.

But I did get to chat up Barack and Michelle. Boy, are they tall. An impressive couple.

As Spring Struggles to Get In the Door, the Writer Comtemplates the Wisdom of Mindfulness

2011-03-07T07:52:00.000-08:00

Mindfulness is the cultivation of open-hearted awareness of one's present-moment experience.The practice of mindfulness is beneficial for people experiencing anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and physical symptoms related to stress or disease. Through mindfulness we can see clearly, accept, and gain freedom from the suffering brought on by our automatic thoughts and assumptions. We can experience the joy of being fully present in our lives, learn from difficult times, and be open to compassion for ourselves and others. Vickie Fine

Yes, yes, yes, I'm a skeptic. In fact, let me write that with a capital S--Skeptic. But there is this thing I have about Buddhism. After spending a lifetime scouring the world for religions that make sense, and finding none, another look at this ancient philosophy reveals some common ground--some, just some.

While Buddhism does not embrace the irrational beliefs of other religions (holy ghosts, devils, spirits, etc.) Buddhism does include the notion of reincarnation. There is no rational evidence to believe in ghosts or spirits or reincarnation either, period, and I challenge you to provide it. And the other unfortunate irrationality that Buddhism shares with other religions is their negative take on sex.

Yesterday, I was listening to an NPR radio program on which a woman, who had spent years traveling the world's exotic places studying Zen Buddhism, described her adventures. She said that while spending a year meditating, she was instructed to forgo the following: stealing, cheating, lying, and sex. Seems to me it's counterproductive to vilify the reason we are all here, but most religions seem to do it.

Back to the point at hand: Where Buddhism gets it right--really right--is with the theory and practice of mindfulness. No spirit-ghost-afterlife mumbo jumbo here. No worshiping of some fearful, vengeful god, no praying for forgiveness for sins (lying, cheating, stealing, and sex, mostly). No, mindfulness is something real you can wrap your brain around.

There are lots of books out on this topic, all offering relief from your particular neurosis via mindfulness, but the wonderful thing about mindfulness is you don't have to be a bull goose looney or a Woody Allen-type neurotic to benefit from it. Even the emotionally fit among us will experience a pleasant rush of relief in taking your mind off autopilot for a while and focusing on your awareness of your awareness of your awareness--of the moment, that is. Your breathing, the feelings in your body, the sounds around you, your heart beating, your....It's a huge relief, in any event, to slow down and become, if only briefly, a part of your own life, a life that is screaming by at warp speed and will be over way to soon

Move slowly, smile, breath.

It's March 1st: The World Burns (nothing new there) but Spring Beckons and the Writer Re-Writes

2011-03-01T07:43:00.000-08:00

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Oscar Wilde

“I wrote a script for a guy, and he said he liked it but he thought that I needed to rewrite it. I said, Screw that, I'll just make a copy.” Mitch Hedberg

There's another Oscar Wilde quote about writing that goes something like this: "Yesterday I spent four hours taking out a comma and today I spent four hours putting it back in." That's the idea anyway. I'll bet he was talking about the final stages of re-writing something. It could be a term paper or a poem or a short story. In my case it's a novel.

I'm right there at the point where I'm about to tell myself, "Okay, it's done already. Now you're spending entire days putting in and taking out commas. Screw it, let's make a copy." Still, it seems whatever place I open up the manuscript to, I find something egregious that needs changing. Not just commas, but idiotic, clumsy, over-written phrasing. And what about that new scene I'm thinking about inserting right in the middle of the book? Should I or shouldn't I? I've learned to trust my instincts when I write, but now, with the manuscript nearing its final form, my instincts are all muddled.

The good news is that yesterday, whilst raking up the winter detritus of our front yard, my wife found the wonderful flower pictured above, a very fine crocus. And then I went out to my sailboat and she posed for this lovely photo--kinda of an old, retired guys Playboy foldout with no staples in the middle. Ah!

So, mad dictators, savage politicians, and commas, and clumsy phrasing be damned, it's been a long, cold winter and these first harbingers of Spring will be enjoyed--celebrated, even. I've done all I can for humanity this week and I'm going to enjoy the spoils.

Murdered Yachties and Genocide: The Fires of Hell Continue to Blaze in the Dark Heart of Humanity

2011-02-25T07:59:00.000-08:00

The ageless, ever-present, dark heart of humanity has yet another a face and this guy sets a new standard.

“Our strength lies in our intensive attacks and our barbarity...After all, who today remembers the genocide of the Armenians?”  Adolf Hitler

“But with dogs, we do have “bad dog.” Bad dog exists. “Bad dog! Bad dog! Stole a biscuit, bad dog!” The dog is saying, “Who are you to judge me? You human beings who’ve had genocide, war against people of different creeds, colors, religions, and I stole a biscuit?! Is that a crime? People of the world!”

“Well, if you put it that way, I think you’ve got a point. Have another biscuit, sorry.””  Eddie Izzard

“What connects two thousand years of genocide? Too much power in too few hands.”
                                                                            Simon Wiesenthal

The horror of it all. The unspeakable dark heart of humanity has been recently running more amok than usual. Of course it's been running amok for a while. I'd say, since evolution completed the rudimentary genetics that made it uncomfortable for those ape-like creatures to stay up in the trees. Minus our prehensile feet and tails, we thus became "human"-- you, me, Jesus, the Pope, Buddha, the Queen of England, John Lennon, Vladimir Lenin, and Groucho and Karl Marx--all of us. We came down from those branches, starting walking around and started looking for trouble--or, more likely, brought the trouble down with us.

But we're all still up there, really, up in those trees howling our savage song; we all carry dark-heart genes in us. They are bone deep and indelible and unexpungable. On good days, in good times, most of us keep them barely suppressed by the need to be civil enough to each other to live together. And you don't have to be the citizen of a third-world country to display the murderous heart. Push us a little too hard and even we comfortable American suburbanites can do things like shoot the other comfortable suburbanites that cut us off in traffic.

That's child play, though--bush league stuff. To get truly world class, we need muddle-brained dictators who hire assassins to slaughter their own people. Or how about skinny, semi-naked, child-pirates launching a grenade at an American warship and then shooting innocent Bible-slinging yachties at point-blank range? How about mass graves revealing the bulldozed remains of thousands of slaughtered innocents. And that's just this week.

Don't ask me for answers. I'm one of you. I have my own well-disguised, nicely suppressed, simmering rages working down deep in me somewhere, too. I can feel them sometimes and it's scary--very scary.

Well, all right, I'll try a suggestion because just complaining doesn't solve anything, and I'll keep it short. Obviously religion doesn't work, nor does the absence of religion help us control our murderous hearts. Here's what I think will work and it's a simple enough rule:

Parents must raise their children in a home free of racism, sexism, religous intolerance, violence, anger, and hostility, where thinking and questioning are encouraged, and where mutual respect and a gentle love for one another is expressed often and sincerely.

That's it. No big news. And it would seem to be not much to ask. Such a simple way to fix the worst of the humanity's ills, and yet.....

All four Americans on this lovely yacht were murdered this week. Staggering amounts of cold blood were needed to complete the task, this 'banality of evil."

Words, Big Words, Little Words, Funky Words: Writers Live and Die by Them and, for Some, Words are Part of the Infinite Jest

2011-02-18T06:42:00.000-08:00

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

When I wear high heels I have a great vocabulary and I speak in paragraphs. I'm more eloquent. I plan to wear them more often. Meg Ryan

I'm a writer, so it follows that I love words. But, for cryin' out loud, give me a break already. I mean, mesocrat? Ukase? Apocope? Rutilant?

These are just a few of the rare lexicological gems I've been running across in my reading lately. If I were tucking into a text on some odd philosophical branch of inquisition, I could understand not knowing the vocabulary. But these book are novels, supposedly for consumption by the general reading public. Specifically, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (more on this five pound, literary version of a joy-filled hell in a later blog), and Aunt Julia and the Script Writer by the recent Nobel prize winner, the Peruvian, Mario Vargas Llosa. (And this is a translation, apparently done by a person who, when he or she is translating, changes little Spanish words into big English words, and a brilliant writer's original prose into American cliches.)

So what's the problem then? I ought to be glad for the opportunity to improve my knowledge base, right? However, the reading process, in the particular case of this reader and these writers, involves reading a few paragraphs and then stumbling and fumbling on an unfamiliar word, writing it down on a scrap of paper (see photo, above), going to my Droid, opening the dictionary app, and looking it up. In the case of Wallace, he sometimes uses words that my Droid dictionary could not find because of one misplaced letter and I suspect that the infinitely depressed Wallace, rest his pitiful soul, made up these words, or misspelled them as part of the endless jest.

In any event, stopping to look words up every few minute adds hours to the time it takes to get from page 1 to the THE END of the stack of books I have at me bedside. Here's another one, for example, from Infinite Jest: majisculed. Now, my Droid tells me that majisculed simply means "capitalized" as in capitalizing a word, so unless you are indeed sharing a practical joke with your reader, why would a writer use it instead of "capitalized?" Is it foolish for me to question the motives of a purported literary genius like Wallace? Of course it is.

Now, I've told you the meaning of majiscule but your on your own with rutilant, ukase, apocope, and mesocrat. Hey, I can't keep spoon feeding you this stuff or you'll grow up with a stunted drive to learn.

Note: HA! I just hit the spell check feature on this blog and it couldn't fine these words either. Good luck.

Headlines: Woman Dies In PA Hotel After Buttocks Injection; Egyption Revolution Continues to Smolder (Yawn?); Why Would We Even Want to Behave Without God?

2011-02-11T07:19:00.000-08:00

The Framers [of the Constitution] knew that free speech is the friend of change and revolution. But they also knew that it is always the deadliest enemy of tyranny. Hugo Black

Those who hate most fervently must have once loved deeply; those who want to deny the world must have once embraced what they now set on fire. Kurt Tucholsky

(Note: As I write this, I'm twelve floors up in a hotel on Washington D.C. listening to the desperate Doppler of sirens rushing past down below signaling the constant flood of human bad behavior/bad luck.)

As a one-time news reporter and broadcast journalist, I love weird headlines as much as the rest of you. After all, someone had to write them and writing involves contemplation, consideration, editing, and second guessing and I used to love all that.

So, it was easy for me to imagine the folks in the news room trying to decide how to phrase this poor young woman's tragedy. Seems she came all the way from England to a hotel at the Philadelphia airport to get her presumably unattractive, unlovable, flat bottom "enhanced" via injections of liquid silicone. Problem was, the risky procedure was performed by an allegedly unlicensed buttocks enhancing practitioner. End result? Doctors speculate that the liquid silicone got into her blood stream via the huge needle required for the injections, and thence to her heart, which did not need enhancement, just someone to love it more, hence the attempt at acquiring poochier glutes. It's all terribly sad, to be truthful, as is all extreme vanity and extreme greed.

This, of course, begs the question: if this is how people behave with God, can you imagine how they would behave without Him? Or why would we even both to try to behave unless we have the Big Hammer up there waiting to slam on us if we dare step out of the prescribed behavioral line?

For an answer to the eternal question of whether or not to have my butt enhanced on the cheap, so to speak, we turn to an interview with social scientist Carol Tavris on eSkeptic: Here's her answer to the question the religious are always asking the non-religious:

Skeptic: Without God, what would be the reason to be a moral person, or to try to improve the world?

Tavris: Helping people. Humanity in general. Bettering the world, if not in time for you, then for your kids. Justice. Kindness. Those are pretty good reasons. My parents believed that if you are working only for yourself it is not enough.

Good thinking, Carol. You hit the nail on the head with the Big Hammer of Reason, the nail being the assumption of Christian doctrine that people are, at bottom line, just awful. And that's no doubt due to Original Sin, but in any event, she implies that free thinkers and nonthiests have a more upbeat view of humanity than our religious brethren. My own take on this issue? Yes, people can be just awful and/or simply wonderful. But Big Hammers (in the hands of governments or gods), inevitably result in the awful bright fires of revolution. Best to proceed gently and trust in the better angels of our natures.

Meanwhile, is it possible for revolutions to get boring? It's been what, two weeks now since thousands of Egyptians gathered in the streets of Cairo demanding Hosni (another bad behavior poster boy) leave and real democracy be implemented? (Resulting in a sewage problem, one would assume, of magnificent proportions) I can see those poor news folks in their news rooms trying to figure out when the great American public will grow weary of Arabic demonstrations and stop watching/reading about how, "today will be the day of decision" only to have it pass without any certifiable climax. What to do? Look for buttock injection tragedies and give them top billing.

(Another note: Not ten minutes after I finished writing this, wouldn't you know it, Hosni resigned and the massive protest was instantly transformed into a massive celebration. Bully for the people of Egypt--and bully for Facebook, Google, and Twitter, without which, it is said, the revolution would have been impossible.)

Ground Hog Day: Blood on the Streets, Snow on the Roads

2011-02-02T04:37:00.000-08:00

Photo Credit: MSNBC

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.
Che Guevara
This is insane. This cannot continue. The weather, the protests, the denials, the insidious rumors, the malicious insinuations the Mubarak-must-go implications and innuendos. And Toy Story 3 was way too violent, that's what gets me. The head-cracking violence in football, too. I can see it in computer-generated cartoon extravaganzas, but in football? And governor Moonbeam is back and he's kickin' ass and takin' names.

It's early here on the mid-Atlantic coast, early A.M. on Ground Hog Day, and I couldn't sleep, so I got up in the dark and came down here to my cave and turned on the news/talk/innuendo flat screen and put my laptop on my lap and my little digital camera next to me so I can take pictures from the comfort of my fat recliner and made a cup of tea and ate two Zone bars to juice me up. Morning Joe (photo credit! Thanks!) and his cohorts/thugs are up and on, on time, a blizzard is ripping a new one for the middle-part of our great country and Punxsutawney Phil is shivering his tail off in that fake stump. No, wait! This just in: he, Phil, did not see his shadow. Early Spring!

So, what's a writer to do to keep himself distracted from the distractions? Focus. Keep your head down and your feet moving. Collect all those wild thoughts and put them to good use. Organize them, incorporate them, sprinkle them in your prose like herbs and spices. Never thought of putting a a good bloody riot into that book? Maybe nows the time, while it's fresh and topical. How about a snow storm? It's been done? Do it again but better.

And try not to lose your traction on the slippery slope of lost routines. I just did and it doesn't feel good. Writers need routines to be productive and I broke mine this morning. A conference call with my webdesigner and in the middle of that, a call from an elderly family member with a medical emergency got me going out the wrong door, so to speak.

But, I'm back at it now. Here in my recliner, re-writing, yet again (10th time?) The Brothers of the Fire Star, my novel in progress. And my new website is almosts ready to "go live." I'll work for a couple of hours more. Maybe a nap?

Photo Credit: MSNBC

Lost at Sea, Found at Sea

2011-01-25T06:05:00.000-08:00

A man is never lost at sea.

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Yeah, well. Romantically said, not so romantically done. Just ask the families and loved ones of the crew of the "Pineapple," a 38-ft. catamaran that went missing at sea for more than ten days. I am one of those "friends and loved ones" and you could have cut my poor heart out with a spoon while all this lost-at-sea drama was coming down.

You may have been following their adventures on the news the last couple of weeks. It was all over the place: CNN, NBC, ABC, etc. They left Guam with all intentions of reaching Cebu in the Philippines in maybe ten days or so. Were confident enough to have already made their flight reservations back home. Then they seemed to fallk off the planet. Went missing. Gone without a trace.

Or so it seemed to anxious families and friends. Seems though, they were doing okay but had rudder problems and couldn't steer, but how were we to know? They had decided not to bring a way to communicate long distance--HF radio, SAT phone. What the hell, hey? We'll be fine. The voyage from Guam to the P.I. is a downhill cakewalk and the weather looks great.

Did they capsize and go down? Any boat can do that, but catamarans have a reputation. Did the boat break up and sink? That happens, too. Were they attacked by pirates? Someone asked me that. The answer is, not probable. Not many pirates have set up shop between Guam and the P.I.

A huge search and rescue operation was launched. C-130s from Hawaii joined planes from the P.I. Coast Guard vessels followed their assumed track, commercial shipping in the area were notified. Back home, on Guam and in the States, we held our breaths and crossed our fingers and shared hopeful messages with one another. Then, the husband of the lone woman on board, receive a phone call: "Hi, honey, it's me!"

And so, the drama ended. They were 150 miles from their destination, sailing again after making repairs. For some reason, her cell phone coverage extended out that far. (Go figure. Whose her carrier?).

All's well that ends well, but they got some 'splaining to do.

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! (And get your belly buttons ready for contemplation!)

2011-01-18T04:55:00.000-08:00

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment. Dogen

And as long as you're subject to birth and death, you'll never attain enlightenment.
Bodhidharma

Do you remember that book? No, not The Moor's Last Sigh. That's my book shelf back there. I mean If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him which is not on my book shelf but will be soon. It was written by psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp and published back in the 1970s when we hippies were all examining our navels for the profound meaning of life, i.e. enlightenment. (I found it just behind a piece of dark cotton lint.)

At the time, I was too busy being a hippie and then serving in the Army and then being a hippie again (a college student with two kids) so I didn't read the book. But it's reputed to be a classic so I just ordered it this morning. Better late than never and I'm looking forward to some old, hippie, meaning-of-life-type life words of advice. When I went to Amazon to buy it, I found the list I copied below. It's billed as an eschatological list, and eschatology is the study of the end of the world. Lovely stuff. Nevertheless, I love this common sense approach to psychotherapy and to life which basically says, "The way you think life is really pretty much the way it really is, so get over it. Here it is, so stare into your belly button and get thinking (that's called omphaloskepsis by the way):

1. This is it!
2. There are no hidden meanings
3. You can't get there from here, and besides, there's no place else to go
4. We are all already dying and we'll be dead for a long time.
5. Nothing lasts!
6. There is no way of getting all you want.
7. You can't have anything unless you let go of it.
8. You only get to keep what you give away.
9. There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things.
10. The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there is no compensation for misfortune.
11. You have the responsibility to do your best nonetheless.
12. It is a random universe to which we bring meaning.
13. You don't really control anything.
14. You can't make someone love you.
And I want to add a number 15 to this list apropos of number 14:
15. You CAN make people hate you.

Afterthoughts: Apparently, according to the Buddhist chatter on the Internet, killing the Buddha if you meet him on the road is not to be taken literally. It's all symbolic stuff, you see. The "road" is the path to enlightenment, and meeting the Buddha on that road would mean that you thought you found the illusive goal of reaching enlightenment, but hold on now, if you think you achieved enlightenment, it means you DID NOT! Get it? It's like, just searching for enlightenment IS enlightenment but if you are searching for enlightenment and think that makes you enlightened, you're not. Now do you get it? Really, it's pretty easy.

Next, we writer's usually feel that we know something other people don't. That is, compared to the average schmo, we are enlightened. But, my dear fellow scribblers, we don't know shat, and so, KILL THAT THOUGHT. There, now you are enlightened. You're welcome.

Clean and Well Lighted, The Writer And His Winter

2011-01-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

"I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."
- "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Ernest Hemingway

Ah, Hemingway. He gets it just right for a winter's struggle against the bitter, terrifying fading of the light. And here I am in this somewhat blurry picture, sitting out a winter evening with a glass of wine in my home space, a clean, well-lighted place where a man can feel easy about things that are cold and frozen and dark.

Yet, another way to get through the profound depths of winter, wherein we now find ourselves, is to dedicate oneself to work, to production, to focused effort. And I am. My work days recently look something like this:

Up at dawn (this is not difficult as dawn comes blessedly late this time of year).

Coffee (decaf--too bad; how I used to love a caffeine buzz), some kind of quick breakfast while I read an article from one of my magazines: The New Yorker, Skeptic, Scientific American, Newsweek or whatever grabs my eye at the bookstore.

A quick scan of the world and national news (murder most foul most days, and deceit and buggery and tomfoolery galore, too.).

Into my cave where books and the Internet await. This morning I had business emails from my website designer who is busy getting something spiffy ready for me by way of completely revamping my site (douglasarvidson.com) and turning me on to some schemes for selling books which I'll investigate.

I also had an email from my publisher who is getting Book III of the Eye of the Stallion fantasy series ready for publication as well as a new edition of Book I with a new cover and some editorial changes. We are also going to enter Book II in an alleged "Book-of-the-Year" contest that costs 75 bucks--Both of these deals are put together by nice, thoughtful folks who make money giving you advice on how to make money.

This afternoon, I'm going to read for a couple of hours (David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest), and then out into the cold for a four-mile walk. (I crave exercise, always have. Yesterday was YMCA workout day.) After that, a glass of something strong, another news summary, dinner with wife and wine, an hour making love to my guitar, and then up to bed to read myself to sleep.

Note: Hemingway had his demons, as do we all, and his short story quoted above is one of his best. An old man comes into a cafe and just hangs out until all hours while the waiters talk about him behind his back. Seems he's seen too much of war and life and death and is afraid of the darkness of his own thoughts. As we all know, though, you gotta face them eventually. Preferably, and if you're very lucky, you can face them with a glass of wine and someone you love nearby.

The image below I took a the Green Parrot Bar in Key West. The Green Parrot is not necessarily a clean or well-lighted place, but one can certainly get well lit there.

A Winter Death

2010-12-31T08:06:00.000-08:00

End of the Road, Beginning of the Sea: Onancock Harbor in Winter

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show. ~Andrew Wyeth

Winter has been, since the days when writers scratched symbols with berry ink on papyrus scrolls, a great symbol of dying and death. Nature collapses on herself, retreats, sinks away and leaves us poor contemplative creatures to stare out windows into bitterness.

Our family lost a patriarch this month. As the winter descended, it took with it Albin J. Voit, my father-in-law, who passed away after a brief struggle with an aggressive cancer. Al was, of course, a member of what we are now calling the greatest generation. During WWII, as an 18-year-old sailor, (Mine Man, 2nd Class, Underwater Demolition), he fought on Guam and Okinawa, and Iwo Jima, too. And survived. He was a physics major in college but the war interfered and he never went back. Instead, he managed an auto parts warehouse in Philadelphia and settled in to raise six kids. I thank him for that.

I'll bet he was a damned good UDT guy. He was a quiet man, smart and steady and fearless, and a strict disciplinarian who worked hard at a job he did not necessarily relish. When he was sixty-two, he did what many men only dream of doing: he bought a sailboat and, for the next ten years or so, spent as much time as he could sailing the Caribbean. Being married to one of his four daughters, I was lucky enough to sail with him for three summers and I became a better man and a better sailor for it. I thank him for that, too.

It was a horrific thing, a terrible and sad thing, to watch a man you knew well and liked and admired a lot take his last breaths. But it was winter, after all, and things were descending, cold and dark, into that frigid abyss, an abyss we shall all someday slip away into.

We loved you, Al, and now we must deal with the rest of it, a long winter of mourning. But, as Andrew Wyeth said, something waits down deep beneath the lonely, dead feeling of this season. We all know that. It is a certainty. The whole story doesn't show.

Attack of the Cowardly Anonymite: "Mommy! He called me a schmuck!"

2010-12-15T07:06:00.000-08:00

I've just coined a term I hope will catch on: anonymite.

Anonymites are infesting the Internet with their vileness. They're every where! They're every where! But what is one? An anonymite person who makes ugly, thoughtless, hurtful, nasty, non-productive comments or attacks on people on the Internet while hiding behind the security of the signature, "Anonymous." This is definitely a breakdown in the civil discourse. Batman would not put up with it, and neither will I.

I just had it happen to me. I was called a schmuck (me!!! Mr. Nice Guy! a schmuck!!!) because I goofed in a previous blog and referred to a 1,000-hour rule (the time necessary to become good at something difficult--like writing) when it is actually referred to as the 10,000-hour rule.

Now, schmuck is a pretty strong stuff for something like that. I mean, for a mere 9,000 hours I get called a schmuck? If I had done something intentionally hurtful like say, called someone a schmuck for no real reason, then, sure, call me a schmuck (Schmuck, by the way, is a Yiddish word with meanings that run from the relatively mild "stupid," to more damaging connotations like "jerk" or "bastard." At its worst, it implies intentionally mean, thoughtless, hurtful behavior.).

But, you know what I mean. The real reason I'm addressing this is to voice a grievance. Being called a schmuck by someone who doesn't know that you're really an okay guy who just made a mistake isn't all that tough to take if you possess normal, healthy ego strength. But you see these cowardly anonymites really dishing it out in Comment sections on the Internet. Some schmuckly, cowardly anonymite calls another person something foul--really foul--just, I think, for the thrill of getting away with it. An small act of cruelty that must give a small, perverse thrill to the true schmuck who writes them. In this case, it's writing something you wouldn't have the courage to say to the person face to face. Or even to write it and sign your real name. Go figure.

So, there it is--a new word: anonymite. I hope it gets to be paired in general usage with the word cowardly. They're all big bunch of schmucks.

The Never-Ending, Skull-Crunching Search for Brain Candy: Scanning the Internet and Reading, Reading, Reading

2010-11-30T07:29:00.000-08:00

Where I now read and surf, looking for the elusive cognitive jolt that will inform what I write. I feed on the offerings of both good books and the infinite--if ofttimes sketchy--resources of the Internet. How did I ever have time for a day job? Anyway, here are this morning's gleanings with some personal thoughts attached:

There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.- - - H. L. Mencken

Ah, the Sage of Baltimore, the acerbic journalist and critic of American life (don't worry, he's dead as of 1956) peeled back a filmy coating and revealed a pithy truth: Some people are so well read they are idiots. Avoiding the dirty, desperate real world--they fancy themselves above it all--by keeping the up-turned schnoz in a book, they then lean out and peer down at the rest of filthy humanity and pass unctuous judgement. Still, there's something unsettling about the dark, slithery habits of bookworms. Could they be right?

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.- - - Denton Welch

Who the hell is Denton Welch? A nearly forgotten English literary genius (there are a few of these left, apparently, whose reputations hang in closets in dusty bedrooms in drafty English country homes) who died at age 33 in 1948 (yeah, he's dead, too). In this quote, he gets the human longing for love just about right. He was born into one of those "privileged" lives wherein the attempt was made my mummsy and daddy to curmudgeon him into shape to fit upper-class British sensibilities. He rebelled against it with all his poor soul, and was miserable and desperate and tragic before the auto accident that damaged him irreparably.

Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart.
- - - Fred Allen, CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter, 1977

Fred Allen was an ol' time radio comedian back in the '30s. You know, you've heard them--the scratchy quality, the nasal voices, the live band in the studio. He was famous, and is now dead. But he was funny and saw the truth and told us about it and got us through the depression and then some. And he saw the scurrilous bread-and-circus effect of television on the public mind. What the hell would he have thought of the Internet? I shudder to think.

But, O Sarah! if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; In the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.- - - Major Sullivan Ballou, to his wife, a week before his death in 1861, during the Civil War

Major Ballou was one of the 700,000 soldiers, on both sides, killed during the American Civil War. That figure is, again, 700 freakin' thousand. All Americans, too. T'was ever thus, and when will we ever learn?If you've never had to leave anyone you loved very much to go to war, you'll never understand Major Ballou's romantic agony.

I have a most peaceable disposition. My desires are for a modest hut, a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, very fresh milk and butter, flowers in front of my window and a few pretty trees by my door. And should the good Lord wish to make me really happy, he will allow me the pleasure of seeing about six or seven of my enemies hanged upon those trees.- - - Heinrich Heine

This from Wikipedia about Heinrich: Among the thousands of books burned on Berlin's Opernplatz in 1933, following the Nazi raid on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, were works by Heinrich Heine. To commemorate the terrible event, one of the most famous lines of Heine's 1821 play Almansor was engraved in the ground at the site: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." ("That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.") This long-dead German poet had the sublime and perfect poet's understanding of human nature. A little bitter brain candy, anyone?

A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home-ground, home-made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a coffee is a match for twenty blue devils, and will exorcise them all.
- - - Henry Ward Beecher "Eyes and Ears"

Henry was a liberal clergyman and abolitionist back when the good people of our South still thought slavery was a damned good idea and nothing less than God's will. They were willing to die by the hundreds of thousands rather then let it go. Apparently Reverend Beecher fueled his abolitionist rhetoric--and was able to even take on the great slavery-loving Christian God of the South himself--by drinking enough really good coffee.

Existentialism and the Daily Struggle for Mindfullness: Right Brain, Left Brain, a Tragic Writer's Brain

2010-11-23T06:57:00.000-08:00

Discovery in my backyard: A pine needle fell from on high and managed to go through a hole that an insect had made in this leaf.

The world/universe/time/space continuum is filled, chuck full of the improbable--miracles, if you will. But I won't. A closer look, a thoughtful examination, will reveal that improbable events are, given enough time, certainties--absolutely. The royal flush, the existence of life, the pine needle dropping perfectly through a hole in a leaf--all are going to happen, eventually--no intervention or Grand Plan necessary. So, you hawkers of the miraculous, be careful as you sell your snake -oil nostrums to the gullibles on their travels. You are accountable to yourselves.

Take David Foster Wallace for example. I've really just discovered this brilliant, infinitely jesting, tragic, philosopher-writer. It's a very fine thing to discover such improbable people because they have much to teach us. Wallace was bonafide brilliant. The real thing. He graduated from Amherst summa cum laude, received a McArthur Foundation genius award, wrote stuff that no one else had ever thought of, and so changed the world--at least a little bit. And that's what geniuses do. It's part of the genius package. You gotta change the world. He thought and wrote and taught and loved and celebrated and then he hanged himself. He was forty six.

My take on David Foster Wallace goes like this: His whole deal, all that long-shot, creative-cognitive hyper-power, was attempting to do one thing: Boil things down to some small, hard, indivisible kernel that we could get a grip on and so live better, happier lives. Here's a quote:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.

Pity us in our daily struggle to maintain that illusive state of mindfulness. If you are very lucky and discover what mindfulness is all about and how wonderful it is, you are many steps ahead of the most of humanity. If you can employ mindfulness in your daily life, and if it makes you happy and relieves much of the mad burden of being alive, you are light years ahead of most people.

I think the bottom line for Wallace, as he battled the hellish demon of the depression that finally killed him, was that mindfulness helped him and he figured it could help all of us. He was trying to understand what mindfulness really was and how to get a handle on it; how to keep it right there, up front in your mind, so that you didn't have to stop what you were doing and take the time to get a grip on it every time you needed it.

Existentialism proposes that we are all responsible for giving our own lives meaning as we navigate the anguish and accumulating miseries of existence. And we should not forget the joyous stuff in life, too, I suppose. That pesky joy stuff. We have to fit that in somewhere and you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to choose, in other words, to be happy or unhappy. It's up to you. So, practice mindfulness by moving slowly, breathing deeply, and smiling ("Look, there he goes again, moving slowly, breathing deeply, and--worst of all--smiling. He must be a serial killer).

In the end, though, none of that cognitive therapy could fix the biological imbalance that set David Foster Wallace off on his tortured path to self destruction. But it was his search for a cure for his own existential terror that gave us such a wonderful gift--an improbable gift that, nonetheless, was bound to happen--and, like the pine needle and the leaf, had to happen--eventually.

OMG! The Writer's End Game: Smarmy Hollywood or Cold, Calculated Tear Jerking?

2010-11-19T07:46:00.000-08:00

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end. Alexis de Tocqueville

Monsieur de Tocqueville lived from 1805 to 1859 (they tended reach their own end game young in those days--infections, mostly), and wrote a famous book about the American experiment with democracy. He was not, as far as I know, a novelist, however, he did, apparently, understand both the agony of the American revolution end game and the agony of the writer trying to put a close to things on a literary level.

So now, here I am, trying to end my own personal little revolution/novel by inventing a good ending. Many questions arise as the writer smells the denouement approaching while the climax roars in his head. How do I avoid ruining a perfectly good novel that I've labored over with mighty love for two years? Is it possible to scotch a perfectly good idea by screwing up the ending?

You can hear your readers talking it over with their mothers on the phone, or at the bar, or in the hair salon, or on lying on a beach towel, or chatting on FaceBook:

"Yeah, I thought it was great, too, but the ending sucked."

Or:

"I hated the ending. I can't believe he killed her off. What was that all about?"

Or:

"It would have been a fine book, but he blew it with the smarmy Hollywood ending."

Or:

"OMG! I couldn't believe the ending! It blew me away!"

Or:

OMG! Wait until you get to the ending. I cried and cried!"

Cliches of failure due to indecisivness come to mind: You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself. Better them crying than me, I say. If Hollywood ever makes a movie out of this book, I'll let them put in whatever ending they want, but for now, I'm in charge and I say, cry baby, cry.

Still, I struggle. How to put this whole 80,000-word deal to bed and get it just right. In an earlier blog, I quoted Mark Twain lecturing that the difference between using the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. The answer, I know intuitively, is right there in the book, hidden in arc of the plot, intertwined in the dialog. There is only one way to do it. Arrrgh. The pressure.

I've now re-written the ending five times. Sometimes I leave them stretched out there, bullet riddled and dying; sometimes they get up and walk away into the sunset; sometimes they desanguinate into the sand, sometimes all those bullets miss them by a hair. Sometimes I give up and go for a long walk.

But, what the hell and OMG, I've finished writing another novel. The angony of the ending is joyful one and sweating to get it just right is a deeply satisfying anguish.

Sunset over Onancock Creek from the cockpit of our sailboat: Mother Nature never gets criticized for her Hollywood endings.

Writer in Search of Self--No! Wait! I Found Me!

2010-11-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

Here I am. This is me. I'm standing on the dock of the Bay. What next?

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. ~George Moore

All men should strive
to learn before they die
what they are running from, and to, and why.
~James Thurber

Dear Mr. Thurber:

This is what I'm running from and to in stream-of-consciousness, no-rational-sequence format:

Look at me. I'm sixty-four. I'm grizzled. I've got an incipient paunch. I can still run three miles. I work out regularly. I'm retired. I can play the guitar. I can play the harmonica. I'm in love with my wife. We've been together for almost thirty-one years. Today I finished writing another novel--maybe my ninth or tenth, I can't remember. Today I'm very happy. My goal is to come to terms with death so that when my own approaches, I'm not afraid. That's what I'm running to, Mr. Thurber.

I believe life is all about accumulating wisdoms, great and small. I've learned a lot since I turned sixty. I believe many old people have not bothered doing this. With old age comes wisdom, but in most cases old age comes all by itself.

I embrace a Buddhist philosophy up to the point of reincarnation. There's not a shred of rational evidence to support a belief in reincarnation. I think cynical people live stunted lives. I'm a humor junkie. I have often embarrassed myself telling dirty jokes in wrong venue. I'm embarrassed by my loud voice.

I flunked algebra in high school. I've written a short story that won an international prize in Paris. I wrote another story that was published in Prague. I've written three fantasy-adventure novels. Two have been published, number three is "upcoming" as my publisher says. As a senior in high school, I lost my position on the basketball team to a freshman. Our team seldom won a game.

I didn't die in Viet Nam like two of my friends did because I played the game of staying out of Viet Nam and still serve in the Army and I won. I just visited their graves. They were both twenty years old. I was once an enlisted man in the Army and an officer in the Air Force. I started flying jet planes in the Air Force and then quit pilot training. Sometimes I regret this because I wanted to be a hero. I graduated with as a Distinguished Graduate from School, Military Science, Officer in San Antonio, Texas in 1974.

I graduated from college with high honors. I have two beautiful, successful children. I'm a good sailor. I have two boats. I love the old house and small town I live in. I love good scotch and I love good bourbon. I love good wine. I don't drink much anymore because of the below described problems:

I have a cardiac arrhythmia called atrial flutter. I've had it operated on twice. I have high blood pressure, controlled by medication. I have high cholesterol, controlled by medication. I have high hopes, controlled by reality.

I have a Masters degree in speech-language pathology and worked at the profession for thirty-two years. I'm proud of that. I should have started writing as younger man. I never had a job I loved until I found writing. I hate crawling down in the bilge and working on boat problems. I hate being hot and sweaty. I need a hot shower and a cool, clean sheets. I crave adventure but hate being uncomfortable. I've sailed my own boat to uninhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes I am afraid. The loneliest I've been was at sea, as the captain of a small boat, at night, alone, on watch, looking up at the stars. That kind of loneliness manifests itself as a feeling of being permeated by cold.

I have spent twenty-eight years of my life living overseas. I love being back home. I lived in the Republic of China for two and a half years. I live in Iceland for two years and Germany for twelve. I lived on the island of Guam for eleven years. Does that add up? I've been around the world. I took the Trans-Siberian Railroad across Russia and we drank good vodka and I lost at chess to a pretty Russian woman. I drank water from Lake Baikal.

When I was in the Army in China, I earned a black belt in karate (Wado). I'm advanced open-water SCUBA diver. I once sat in the cockpit of WWII Japanese plane 110 feet below the Pacific.

I would like to have twenty additional I.Q. points. I would like be taller and wiser and lose twenty-five pounds--but only one of those things might happen. I would not like to be young again. I have a bridge I wanna sell you.

I am a nonthiest/sceptic because there's not a shred of rational evidence to think any other way. Really. Think about it. No, really think about it.

What I Googled myself, I found a website that published some things I wrote. Here's the most important thing I found on that website that I said. It's about writing. I love writing:

One rule of good writing is anything goes if it works. Stories are supposed to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. An arc, like a word rainbow, like fireworks, like a love affair. Maybe. I've read a few good ones that didn't.

Whatever else it is that makes a story unforgettable, there are two real necessities: compelling characters and some alchemy in the process of weaving of ideas into words that gives the reader a distinct feeling of intellectual pleasure--that boy-that-was-great feeling. Who was the fairy tale character who could weave straw into gold? That's how to write.

So, Mr. Thurber, it's been a pleasure taking your advice. I'm now off to have a glass of good red wine and eat my supper.

Sincerely,

Doug Arvidson

The Difference Between Good Work and Bad Work: Writing Next to the Ditch Digger

2010-11-08T11:37:00.000-08:00

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." -- Samuel Johnson.

Pity the poor ditch digger, laboring in the dirt, filthy, exhausted and probably broke. Shall we also pity the poor writer, laboring at his desk (or kitchen table)?

I decided that there is good work and there is bad work. Writing is work, but it's good work. We can stop and have coffee or take a nap. We can go for a walk, mow the lawn, chat up a friend, or just stop and stare at that interesting stain on the wall--or even write a blog entry. For your average ditch digger, though, your options for spontaneous bursts of goofing off are limited.

This occurred to me while I was Googling around looking for quotes about writing. The Great Search Engine brought me to a blog entitled, "Quotes About Writing." I don't know this blogger but he and I agree on one thing, so far. That is, writing is work. And unless you work at it, and work at it hard, it will be "read without pleasure," if at all. The odd/ironic thing (we writers love irony) about this guy's blog was that he quit writing it a few years back, saying he was starting to repeat himself and no one seemed to be paying attention anyway. Yep, writing is hard work.

And here I am, pictured above, at work and it was about time I got back to it. I took some time off to drive to New England to fulfill some family obligations and then to travel to Washington D.C. to be a part of the Rally for the Return to Sanity/Keep Fear Alive (scroll down to my earlier blog entries see some great pictures of the that great scene). But now, as the autumn quickly ages toward winter and the weather outside turns windy and cold, I'm making a writerly dash to finish this next novel before we leave for Guam in December.

I thought I was finished, in fact. Thought the book's plot had run its course and had put it aside to let it "cook" as Hemingway used to say. Let it marinate, let it age so that when I go back to it, I can see it with fresh eyes. And that's what happened and my fresh eyes--and the fresh eyes of my wife--said, let's reconsider the ending because it is no longer working for me. It's not there, you're not there. Your characters still have some obligations to attend to.

So, putting on another, well, what looks to be say, 10,000 words--at least. And that will bring the word count up to a respectable 80,000+ and I'm into it and it's working and I'm working. I can see where the ditch of this novel will end and when I'm finished, I'm climbing out of it and I'll buy the other ditch digger a drink and we'll celebrate.

More Signs from the Rally to Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive

2010-11-06T07:10:00.000-07:00

These last two blogs are all about you liberal/independant-minded people out there. You sign-carrying, spell-checking, non-racist, bleeding-heart types who thronged to Washington D.C. last week and took the place over without any angry, ill-natured bones in your collective bodies.

You (we) had a marvelous time in the grand Fall weather and the ones who know D.C. and the Mall and the National Gallery of Art, know that right there, next to Mall, right next to where John Stewart and Steven Colbert where doing their thing, is a cafeteria down in the lower level of the Gallery. Here a weary liberal can find surcease from the madding crowd and knock back a few glasses of pinot grigio and knosh on some stuffed flounder. Thus refreshed, you can rejoin the throngs, as we did, and absorb more of the wonderful energy and take some more pix of the great signs. To wit, see below:

That's me, on the left, keeping fear alive.

There was a very pretty young woman behind this sign. Alas, we were not the dudes she came for.

These guys were my favorite sign bearers. They got it just right.

The Rally for the Return to Sanity/Keep Fear Alive: Your Writer Was There

2010-11-02T09:19:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday morning, I joined a few friends and we drove up the Nation's Capitol to witness the Rally to Return to Sanity/Keep Fear Alive. The weather was perfect and the huge energy of the crowd was way, way up on the postive index. No rage here, no anger, no racism---and no misspelled signs. And, speaking of signs, I'll be posting my favorites here for the next few blogs. They speak for themselves, so, no comments. Watch this space:

Writing the Bright October: The Siren Song of Surrender is Carried on the Chilling Breeze

2010-10-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

The wake of our skiff leaves a glimmering trail on the October Chesapeake Bay.

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.Thomas Wolfe

Who can say they don't love a bright October, the great month of our rueful, cyclical surrender to the Winter's furies?,

This Sunday morning, with Terry just gone off for two weeks and me home alone, the autumnal season became more poignant than usual. Nothing to do about it but roll up my latest New Yorker and walk around the corner to Janet's Cafe, a pleasant, clean, well-lighted place if there ever was one, and have a large, heart-threatening, seasonal-affective-disorder-fighting breakfast.

Once there, I sat, toasty-warm, in a chair by a sun-blasted window and drank coffee and read The Talk of the Town, this installment by Adam Gopnik, one of my favorite New Yorker writers. It was all about the Nobel Prize, which I rambled on about in my last blog entry, and why writers write and why the world is impulsed to give them prizes. Mr.Gopnik reminded us that, "From birds to bards, the urge to outdo the other singer is what makes us sing. Since the first strum on the oldest lyre, literature has been about competition and the possibility of recognition."

Cynical stuff, Mr. Gopnik. Perhaps you projecteth a bit too much? He also points out that Dr. Samuel Johnson famously said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." But then he gets into the idea that "poetic passion" might be a real reason for compulsive scribbling. Yep. There's passion in them there writerly motivations and seeing how precious few writers make much money at the trade, unbridled passion may be the only real reason to keep at it.

The schedule for my own poetic passion looks something like this: October: Do nothing. Let the passion simmer whilst I go to New England and take care of family stuff (the cellar in my parent's house is full of black mold that must be gotten rid of. Ah! I smell a metaphor!) and then I'm driving with friends up to D.C. to be a part of the great March for the Return to Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive. That leaves November: Put the finishing touches on my latest novel--Brothers of the Fire Star--and send it out to expert readers on Guam for review/suggestions. With the remaining November time, I fancy I'll indulge my passion for writing short stories and keep making notes/sketches for the next novel which I hope to embrace passionately in January.

Speaking of transitions--and getting away from the tedium of profound thinking in the process--Beaver's iconic television mother died today. Barbara Billingsly was 94, a good run for sure, and all done up in heels and a party dress while she baked her cookies for us on a 17 inch, black-and-white screen. Good for you, June Cleaver, October was a good choice for leaving us.

Freshman Philosophers and Sophmore Sages, You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Humanity

2010-10-08T08:13:00.000-07:00

“The lies in novels are not gratuitous — they fill in the insufficiencies of life,” he wrote. “Thus, when life seems full and absolute, and men, out of an all-consuming faith, are resigned to their destinies, novels perform no service at all. Religious cultures produce poetry and theater, not novels. Fiction is an art of societies in which faith is undergoing some sort of crisis, in which it’s necessary to believe in something, in which the unitarian, trusting and absolute vision has been supplanted by a shattered one and an uncertainty about the world we inhabit and the afterworld.” --Mario Vargas Llosa

I'm thinking as I write here, so bear with me:

It was announced yesterday that Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian writer, won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature. I wish I could say that I was erudite and well-read enough to have expected it--that he had been short-listed for the Prize for a while and it's about time the Nobel committee got on with it. But, no, I'd never heard of him.

I loved Gabriel Garcia Marquez, another South American Nobel laureate. Love in the Time of Cholera has stuck with me lo these many years. But Vargas Llosa? Today I'm going to order one of his reputed masterpieces, Aunt Julia and the Script Writer. What intrigues me about Llosa is that they say he writes about many things and does it well, but that the pervasive, central theme in all his writing is about art and writing itself. The article on him I'm reading here on the Internet says, Varga's themes are "....a fascination with the human craving for freedom (be it political, social or creative) and the liberation conferred by art and imagination." Ah, that rings a pure-toned bell in the very middle of my soul.

Bottom line here is that artists/writers must always be questing and questioning; that writing novels is always about the dark-happy and glorious battle to expose and fill in the "insufficiencies" of life." A personal belief system that eliminates uncertainties through an absolute and "all-consuming" blind faith will not produce--will actually forbid the production of--great literature for the simple and tragic reason that it sees no need for it and will destroy those who seek to address those insufficiencies.

Of course, absolute certainty is a horrific notion. I'm thinking of tyrannical governments and fundamentalist religion here, the cause for so much suffering through the millenia and, of course, such are what Llosa and all other true artists have always been thinking about.

It is ironic, isn't it, that art and science, those two human endeavors that seem so opposite in mindset, purpose, and methodologies, are seeking the same goal--the elimination of human misery and so the inculcation of human happiness? But it is, of course, true. Both art and science seek truth through experimentation and revision. Both art and science are never finished, never absolute, must always be willing to admit that they might be wrong. Is it any wonder, then, that religion and tyranny have always sought to suppress, through terror and violence if necessary, the free expression of art and the free investigations of science?

There. I'm done thinking for the day. I'm worn out, brain afire. And, of course, all these thoughts have been thought before, endlessly, by freshman philosophers and sophmore sages. But every generation must think them anew or suffer the consequences of losing wisdom won at a great price by the generations that came before.

Talking About Writing With 6th Graders and Putting My Words Where My Mouth Is

2010-10-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. -- Author Unknown

Every writer I know has trouble writing. -- Joseph Heller

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.-- Sylvia Plath

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. -- Mark Twain

So, here I am last week down in Georgia talking to kids--6th graders--about writing. You'll notice that I didn't say I'm teaching them how to write. That's a whole 'nother thing altogether. There are those of us "writers" who hold fast to the notion that you can't teach people how to write and I believe that's true up to a point. Once you have a pretty good idea of how to successfully and legally sequence words on a page, the rest is up to you--trial and error, error and trial. Lot's of them, errors and trials all lined up year after year. It's hard to find the right word to make lightning strike on the page--unless you're actually writing about lightning bugs and then I guess it's okay to use an almost-right word.

When you're in 6th grade, you've been writing for a while, maybe five years if you count the crayon phase (the crying/screaming phase will last all your writing life), but you're still in the process of learning the mechanics of the trade: When to use a semicolon, when to paragraph, where's the best place for this comma--that sort of thing. I let their teachers deal with that. I want stay popular.

No, what I do when I talk to elementary school kids about writing is just to entertain them and nothing is more entertaining to a group of grade schoolers than answering their questions about writing. This is because they see you as something you might not be--a famous and rich--and they are thrilled to be able to actually talk to you, a rich writer. And you are careful not to correct that misunderstanding, believe me. What do you care? They're just kids and what harm is there in pretending to be something your not, just for a few hours. That's what we writers do--we pretend.

The quotes above are from famous writers, the most famous being "Author Unknown." The advise gathered up in them is pretty representative of the questions the students asked me that day:

Do you re-write and proof read? A hundred times, a thousand times, a million times and there are still mistakes. It drives me crazy, bonkers, looney toons. I want to bite down on a lemon and swallow the rind but instead I go and buy a quart of ice cream and eat it all by myself.

Where do you get your ideas? I steal them from people who are more creative than I am---No, no! Just kidding! I steal them from people who are less creative than I am.

Is it hard to get published? Heck no. In this day and age you can get published tomorrow if you have enough money to pay someone to publish you. Oh, you mean is it hard to really get published, you know, by a real publisher? Yep. Damned near impossible. That's why make believe writers are making make believe publishers rich and real writers have to work so hard at it for so long and put up with years of rejection and dreams constantly turning to ashes in their mouths.

How many books have you written? About a thousand. Maybe a million, I can't remember. Really. I have a stinking pile of unpublished stuff as high as my ceiling. The neighbors are complaining and my wife is encouraging them.

Are you a millionaire? Yes, but don't tell my wife. Someday I'm going to surpise her and tell her she doesn't have to get up and go to work at the chicken processing plant anymore.

But it was not all work and no play while I was in Georgia. I also spent a week with my grandson and his mom and dad celebrating his 2nd B'day. Here he is in the expensive new garbage can I got him as part of his college fund investment because his grandad is so rich and famous.

The Autumn Equinox: The Wiccas and Pagans Know What It's All About

2010-09-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

We practice rites to attune ourselves with the natural rhythm of life forces marked by the phases of the Moon and the seasonal Quarters and Cross Quarters.--One of the 13 Principals of Wiccan Belief

"I love the fall. I love it because of the smells that you speak of; and also because things are dying, things that you don't have to take care of anymore, and the grass stops growing."- Mark Van Doren

"O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe;
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruit and flowers.- William Blake, To Autumn, 1783

The name "equinox" comes from the Latin aequus (equal) and nox (night), because around the equinox, the night and day are approximately equally long as the sun crosses the Equator. And we have two of them, autumn and spring and the poets, being irrepressable, wax lovely and eloquent about both. And the Wiccas and Pagans? They get a bad rap. Equinoxes are pretty big part of their agenda and they are probably more in touch with nature than any of the other "religions." The few that I know are fine people. Gentle, loving, and earthy-crunchy to a fault.

In any event, I love the last quote above--"With the blood of grape..." is pretty cool and the "Sing now the lusty song of fruit and flowers" ending is wonderful. I also like Mark Van Doren's idea's about not having to mow the lawn anymore. Of course, he forgot to mention the leaf-raking-and-bagging labor that lies ahead of us now. And the big yellow pines around my house drop many pounds of needles on my brick walkway while managing to stay green. Wonder how they do that?

We here on the Eastern Shore of VA, right on the edge of the Messr's Mason and Dixon's line, are feeling the slow departure of the sun, but, after the heat of summer it's nice. It's why I left the tropics. This morning the outside air was 56 degrees and it was too cool to stand outside in my pajamas and drink my coffee and discuss the day with Simon, the Ancient Cat, as is our habit (Ah, there he is now, at the glass door, looking in. Where are you, old man? he wants to know).

So, for me, it was an early dose of politics on the wide-screen in HD, and then here at my computer checking my Amazon books sales (yes, we all do that, though some writers pretend to scoff at such things) and wondering how I forgot that yesterday was the 20th and my grandson's 2nd B'day. I'm flying down there tomorrow to celebrate and lost track of the date. Chalk it up to retirement.

I'm waiting for my publisher to bring out the 3rd printing/edition of Book I of the Eye of the Stallion series, The Face in Amber. Then I'll get going on some book promotion stuff on Google and Facebook. Meanwhile, I finished painting the front of the garage and now I'm going to enjoy the autumn, the cooling air, the rising, drifting perfumes, the daylight's new luminosity. Such wonderful stuff.

And, because it's autumn and I've been stretching my brain and perceptions by reading about quantum mechanics and the reasons why the universe(s) exists and why there is something instead of nothing, I'll end this blog with a quote from the greatest mind of the late century:

“There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” — Albert Einstein

The Writer Leans Toward Autumn: Cool Temps Mean Consuming Brain Candy in the Back Yard

2010-09-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

I guess there can never be enough books. -- John Steinbeck

I have all sorts of books to read. Piles of them that I accumulated over the past year as I browsed through book stores. But, with all the writing I've been doing, I never seemed to find the time to tuck into them. Then, as the universe turned slowly toward to the autumn soltice, it carried with it two events that left me with little choice but to stick my nose in those books and keep it there.

First, I finished both the first and second draft of The Brothers of the Fire Star, the novel I've been writing for the past two years. Then I had a health issue that made it necessary for me to lay low for a week (doctor's orders) and, wouldn't you know it, but at that very moment, the weather took a sudden and welcomed dip toward the coming cool of winter. It was now tolerable (no, not tolerable--wonderful) to lie out on a chaise lounge in the back yard and read. The grass is green, the flowers unspeakably lovely, the birds are singing their relief that egg-bearing and chick-raising days of summer are over, and our big old cat is glad to have someone to share the backyard with.

The books in question are pictured above. I've always been an admirer of Joseph Campbell but it was an admiration based on sound bites rather than hard reading. This book, Myths to Live By, is an exploration of the universal myths that inspired religions, great and small, since humans achieved self-consciousness. Cambell was a lapsed Catholic and nonthiest and an extremely bright and accomplished man. His writing is fresh and accessable and makes my heart jump with his revelations.

Next is the next work of the famous physicist, Stephen Hawking. While he is writing for the non-scientist, it's a pretty difficult task to illuminate the great new theories of quantum mechanics for the layman. The notion that we--us, you, me, your mother-in-law--are products of "quantum fluctuations in the very early universe and that our universe is just one of many universes that appeared spontaneously out of nothing...." is counter intuitive and tough to grasp--even for the physicists. But, as he points out, the fundamentals of quantum physics are the most tested theories in science and have passed every one of them.

That third book lying there, of couse, is my lastest published novel that came out this summer. You can read it as an adventure story, or move up to the next level and read it as kind of a fantasy world application of both Joseph Campbell and Stephen Hawking, in that it involves both ancient myths and the effects of quantum time warps.

As a final thought, the image below is a rose of sharon (hybiscus syriacus) that came visiting through the fence from the neighbor's yard and never went back home. Its blossom is a lovely, mysterious, unexpected thing, kind of like a good book. It is eye candy to match the brain candy I've been consuming.

Love to Read Fantasy? THE MIRRORS OF CASTAWAY TIME is a Deep Fantasy Adventure

2010-08-27T06:09:00.000-07:00

So, what do I mean by "Deep Fantasy?" Here's an excerpt, but first, let me set the background.

Our heroine, Sonoria, a brillant warrior, skilled horsewoman, and young queen of the Stratus Valley, has dared defy the workings of the Universe itself. She is now a prisoner of the Oracule, the man-monster created by her own denial of eternal love:

A eunuch swung this door open and Sonoria squinted into the brilliant light. When her eyes had adjusted, she found she was looking into a room filled with gold: gold cushions, gold lamps, gold statues. The floor was covered with carpets woven from gold thread; the walls were covered with mirrors in gilded frames. Rather than the heavy musk of dung-fire smoke and incense, a delicate perfume of flowers reached her nose.

The Oracule watched her. “Go in, go in. This is now yours. Look around. Touch things. Try on some new clothes. Lie on the bed—our bed, my love. Our bed!”

Sonoria stepped through the door. In the mirrors, she saw herself everywhere, that same tall young woman with the great mane of yellow hair, dressed in the rough wool and deerskin and still clutching the bloody sword in one hand.

“And you know what is best of all?” The Oracule said. “This little palace of ours moves. It is on wheels. It takes no fewer than fifty horses to haul it along with us across the prairie.

“Ah, I can see you are pleased. Pleased in your quiet, warrior way. Good! Now, your eunuch will help you prepare for the evening...."

The Mirrors of Castawy Time is now available at Amazon.com and I'll be signing books at the Harbor Festival in Onancock, VA on Sept. 11 from 9:00 to 2:00.

Advertisements for Myself: The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Writing Life

2010-08-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

Selling Well on Amazon: It's a fast-paced, complex, fantasy/adventure love story for good high school-level and adult readers. And you don't have to have read Book I.

Praise for the Eye of the Stallion Series: "....Arvidson has crafted a wonderful tale for any age...where the forces unleashed are primal, and the science suggestive. The reader is urged by compelling and deft plot twists...and sense of precision story telling. Readers familiar with the EarthSea Trilogy by Ursula le Guin will find familiar moral territory...." V. Santos, Former Features Editor/News Editor, Pacific Daily News (a Gannett Newspaper)

Here we go into the "selling" phase of the writing life. It's the worst part, believe me. Worse even than slogging through a long re-write. Worse than banging your shins on a table leg. Worse than the flu because it lasts longer. Worse than a Congressman's morals. It's like selling snake oil. It's embarrassing. It exhausts the ego and leaves it flat and deflated and smelling vaguely of spoiled dreams and rancid discouragement.

What's the secret, then, to success in this miserable phase of the writing life? Here's what Martha Stewart, who knows something about selling, had to say about it: I think it's very important that whatever you're trying to make or sell, or teach has to be basically good. A bad product and you know what? You won't be here in ten years.

Ah, so that's the key--it has to be good.

But what is good? Art is so subjective. Truth is, there are 1,000,000 good books produced in the U.S. every year. That's ONE MILLION. And that doesn't count the self-published ones. There are probably 30,000,000 of those. And every one of those books is some writer's special baby, a labor of love and determination, a cause for personal and family pride ("My mother loves it!). In short, at least one person thinks that book is good.

How then to sell your good book when the world is awash in masterpieces? Things have changed since Hemingway was pushing his books. His publisher did it for him. As far as I know, he never did a book tour or sat in a mall signing copies of A Farewell to Arms. My publisher does some promotion, but I'm expected to do most of it. I've tried booksignings at bookstores and there are county fairs, local art shows, and muskrat-skinning contests (seriously, there is one of those every year here on the Eastern Shore). The Internet is, of course, the advertising platform-of-choice in this brave new world of huckstering and opportunities to sell there are manifold: FaceBook, Twitter, GoogleAdsense, on and on. Some free, some cost. And author beware--there are lots of clever shysters out there who will take your money in exchange for "advertising" your book.

The bottom line for a writer, though, is this: Word of mouth. That's how Hemingway and Martha Stewart got going. And, that of course, is where the good part comes in. It's is what Martha was talking about in the quote above. People gotta like it. If it's a good product, they will buy it and they will tell others about it. It's the consumers who have the final say in what is good.

So, here I go. Here's my pitch: You will love this deep-fantasy-adventure-love story. You will love the characters and the plot twists and the fast-paced action.

It would be fine and wonderful if you would buy a copy. And, after reading it, if you bought it on Amazon, you can write a review and post it there. That's kinda cool. And send me your comments right here on this blog. I'll publish them, good or bad (maybe).

The Writer Back Home: Dark Rain, Green Grass, A Wet Old Cat

2010-08-18T08:20:00.000-07:00

Blessed rain. Profound rain. Wet-cat rain.

I come back to this: wet and lush where once was brown, dessicated crab grass and thirsty birds. After two weeks in the eye-searing, brilliant-white, tropical light of the Florida Keys, this morning's sodden Virginia is a balm to the eyes and soul. At Noon, the sky is dark and hounded by thunder, the rain heavy and pounding, the world outside happily drenched after so many months of drought. I leave the door open so I can hear the wet happen.

My intentions for this day were good. I was going to take a break from writing and get cracking on scraping and painting the garage (I feel vaguely guilty. Terry has painted half of the inside of the house already). Can't do that now. I was going to pay a conjugal visit to my masted mistress, the lovely sloop, Seawind. Better stay away from her with all the lightening around. I was going to get a haircut. Think I'll put that off. No one who matters will see this old head today.

So, what then, to do with a rain day? When I was teaching, on such a day as this, the principal would announce a "rainy day recess." It meant kids stayed in their classrooms instead of going out to play. The teachers would groan and roll their eyes while the kids started climbing the walls. But I'm retired from all that and have better things to do. I think I'll play some music (Speaking of conjugal visits, I haven't touched my Martin guitar in two weeks. In the Keys I was playing a Yamaha classical).

And now, I'm going to get back to the re-write. Moody, dark, and damp are good for writing. As for the wet cat, his timing could be better. He doesn't decide to come bounding into the house through the cat door until he has gotten doused. I spoke to him about it but he's twenty-one years old and too old to learn new tricks. Then again, maybe there's a certain wisdom in letting the rain get you wet once in a while.

Two Days Off from the Happy Grind of Camp Re-Write: At Play in the Fields of the Florida Keys

2010-08-14T07:14:00.000-07:00

Sloppy Joe's Bar, Key West--(left to right--Me; my son, Eli; his significant other, Bailey)

"I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week." Mario Cuomo, former governor of N.Y.

Punked out Bailey

Eli. Should this profile be in a coin?

We commandeered a hat shop on Duval St.

Bras hang from the rafters at Captain Tony's Saloon

"For rarely are sons similar to their fathers: most are worse, and a few are better than their fathers." Homer (Playing pool at the Green Parrot Bar, Key West)

Walking the Mean Streets of Key West: Mugged by Love

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: Did the human race start like this, all snakes, sweat, and mosquitos?

Pondering a Diminishing Perspective to Nowhere: A Walk on The Old 7-Mile Bridge

"A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma." Marlene Dietrich

A Perfect Morning in the Florida Keys: Love in the Sunshine and Carpe Diem to You, Too

2010-08-12T06:53:00.000-07:00

This morning, the Dolphin Research Center glows, somehow, under a cerulean sky.

The greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.
- Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lamat

Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it. - Groucho Marx

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?- Charles Schulz

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.- Bertrand Russell

This day has broken open clear and warm and splendid. The sky has shaken off the dark, wet misery of yesterday, the breeze comes down the water carrying the blue with it, skittering on the waves. I'm up early and happy. I read and drink my coffee on the balcony overlooking this scene. Eli and Bailey arrived yesterday after a red-eye flight from San Francisco to Ft. Lauderdale and a three-hour drive down the Keys. Last night we drank wine and ate good food and laughed.They are sleeping in and I'm being quiet like an old monk stealing away from his prayers.

Today is ours. We shall own it, from moment to moment. Use it up, wear it out. Drive down the Keys, maybe to Key West. Walk the heat-heavy streets, drink the bars dry, eat up all the conch fritters, let our ears suck on the sounds of the town's crazy music. It's all very fine, as they say. They do say that when they are happy. I hope they say that. I hope it's something I can count on.

Writing as a Tropical Storm Forms Over the Keys: How Many Crazies Can Fit on the Head of a Pin?

2010-08-10T06:35:00.000-07:00

My work space this morning at the Dolphin Research Center

“I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic -- in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself."

"The only abnormality is the inability to love."

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

These are quotes by the wonderfully odd French writer, Anais Nin. Look her up. She is an original and we like originals. She was a famous diarist and set the standard for writing erotica. Kinda got things going. Her relationship with Henry Miller was legendary--and we all know about Henry Miller.

Writer's have been called odd, strange, alchoholic, obsessive, manic, depressive--the list goes on. And it's true. But, we are in good company. The rest of the world is nuts, too.

Like the news I woke up to this morning: A JetBlue flight attendant pulled the emergency door open and jumped out. Before doing so, he fought with a passenger, grabbed a couple of beers, and bid farewell to both the passengers and his career. The plane was sitting on the tarmac and he slid down an escape shute, so he was fine--and arrested. And so his fifteen minutes of fame begins. Enjoy, my friend.

Next, a lady who wanted chicken MacNuggets instead of the breakfast being offered by a McDonalds restaurant (it was still breakfast time, dear), attacked the server right through the drive-through window. Tried to climb in it, presumably whilst yelled expletives. She eventually broke the window and was arrested and charged with vandalism. Love to see the rap sheet on her. But, then again, I can guess.

So, as I start day 9 at my dolphin-enhanced re-writer's refuge in the Florida Keys , I'm protected from neurotics and contemplating the continuing work on the book through the morning vale of the tropical depression that is forming over me at this very moment. Continued black clouds and thunder and lightening and rain greeted me through the fine big windows that look out over the Florida Bay and the dolphin pens. I fear the dolphins will be lonely today as it's hard to imagine many tourists showing up in the rain and booming slop.

I, though, will continue with the task at hand. I've read the manuscript aloud into my hand-held digital recorder to find the pot holes in my prose, made comments and corrections on the manuscript, and now must go though it and make the actual changes to the text on the computer. The hard part, and the fun part, will be expanding or creating more scenes and developing characters. Let me get to work.

Writing Through the Thunder: Day 8 at Camp Re-Write; Will Lightening Strike?

2010-08-09T06:38:00.000-07:00

The view from where I sit all day. This was yesterday.

The view from where I sit. This is this morning.

Good morning! This is Day 8 at Camp Re-Write. I look out here (as I write this) and see not the clear skies and blue water of yesterday, but rather a heavens filled with great, gray thunder storms heading my way. The ozone alarm just sounded, meaning it is unsafe to be out and about the facility, sheets of rain slash at the surface of Florida Bay, booming huge sparks shoot across the near horizon. It's kinda nice. Good for a writer contemplating his navel (omphaloskepsis) and hoping a for a cognitive lightening strike.

Camp Re-Write schedule for August 9th? Up at 7:00, breakfast with politics (TV), time for blogging (here! now!), and, when the ozone alarm blasts out the ALL CLEAR signal, all campers must get back to the purpose of the camp: re-writing the novel, Brothers of the Fire Star. You're making good progress campers! We're proud of you (now that the homesick phase of summer camp has passed).

Later, campers will be encouraged to talk a long walk off a short pier (the old 7 Mile Bridge which is now 2 miles long so I walk it both ways) and on the way home, they will be given the opportunity to pick out their own supper menu at a popular local super market. Sounds like a grand day, everyone! Well, there goes the ALL CLEAR alarm! Let's get going, shall we?

To encourage campers' flagging determination, here are a few quotes about re-writing:

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." Richard North Patterson

"This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again." Oscar Wilde

"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile." Robert Cormier

"The great thing about revision is that it's your opportunity to fake being brilliant." Will Shetterly

"Books aren't written- they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it." Michael Crichton

Days 2 & 3 at Camp Re-Write: I Watch Dolphins Play, Sunsets Set, and Work, Work, Work

2010-08-07T05:56:00.000-07:00

I volunteered to fly to the Florida Keys and be the after-hours caretaker at the Dolphin Research Center for a couple of weeks. I figured it would be a good place to work on the re-write of my next novel. I was ever so correct. I'm supposed to keep an eye on things around here after hours, like after 5:30. I like just strolling around the dolphin pens. Everyone is gone--except the dolphins--and it's quiet and the dolphins are relaxing after a long, hard day entertaining tourists. They play quietly and when they see me, come up to the edge of their pens and look at me and flap their flippers and whistle through their blow holes. It's the language they share with each other and with their human trainers. Triligual stuff that I don't understand, so I say hello and move on. I wonder what they are thinking--obviously something. Food maybe, but I like to think it's something Zen like. Whistling and flapping with the Universe. What is the sound of one flipper flapping?

But they are instructive.They can talk and paint pictures if you put a brush in their mouths and do huge back flips straight out of the water for a fish dinner. It begs the question though: what are they reincarnated as if they are already enlightened and one with the Universe?

And the sunsets are spectacular. Everyone loves a good sunset beacause their simply beautiful. No wants to admit they love taking pictures of sunsets because they are simply cliches. I took a few. Happy cliche-ing.

This one is from the porch outside my third-floor living quarters. It lingered and lingered, calling to me, pick me! pick me! you cliche mongerer! I finally relented. It is the Univserse, after all.

So, this morning I find myself with a Saturday to kill. I promised myself a day off. I've been working hard (?) and it would be fun to drive up the Keys and look at the water and have lunch somewhere. I think I'll do that. Still, I can't help working a little this morning before I leave. I'm making good progress on the re-write, reading the manuscript aloud into a digital recorder and fixing the hidden lumps and bumps in my prose. I'm excited about the results, and can't let it go while I'm in the swing of it. Writing is play, really. Just like the dolphins. Very Zen. Maybe I'll be reincarnated as a dolphin. Back flips, anyone?