Ten, a complete number

Is anybody out there as happy as I am that it’s October. The desert is most beautiful this time of year; if fall ever arrives.  Today it’s 100 degrees. Even so, I am hopeful. The lantanas are in full bloom, and the color orange is everywhere.  Soon a vibrant red will hit overtaking flat shades of brown. It’s my birthday in two and a half weeks and I celebrate the entire month. I started today.  My husband bought me a new pair of sneakers, not the kind you wear to the Gym, but the fashionable slender kind you wear to walk in. We’re seeing the performance of the Broadway musical Wicked this week-end and going to the opening night gala celebration of the Las Vegas Philharmonic playing Mussorgsky on the 20^th.  The fridge is stocked with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne to ring in the occasion.  And I found just the right recipe to bake myself a Tres Leches cake. Best of all, with two occasions to dress up and attend the Smith Center I will feel a remnant of my former cultural life—in my element again—being social with culture, art and refinement all around me. Alive again!

So to all you October gals and guys and I know plenty of them, including my favorites—my (departed) creative muse and maternal Grandmother, my lovely sister-in-law and my gem of a niece—here’s to this month being a charm. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztoSUhbNntQ

In another zone

For a period of time, my husband attended real estate seminars.  The slideshow would begin with copies of checks shown, and the preliminary talk of riches without concrete methods cited, coupled with the boisterous rah-rah’s was such a turn-off; I’d leave the room.  I also can’t sit all day.  As a result I spent a lot of time standing, pacing or seated in the hotel lobby.  We traveled to Mississippi, Massachusetts, California, Florida and Texas.  Up until then my only time in the Lone Star state had been in Houston 20 years prior.  Dallas with so many big-shots garbed in their suits and cowboy boots, was so different from the rest, that it left the biggest impression.  At that time I was working on a novel, which didn’t sell, but from which I took the character, which went into a short story that I did sell. I felt my main character would have a high- moral background and be a force in the fight for human rights and racial equality.  And so while my husband and his buddies listened to real estate tycoons, I read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, which was very long, but interesting. I can safely say I was the only person at the seminar, reading material not related to real estate, but people were friendly and, when they came up to me, seeing the length of the book, they would say, WAR AND PEACE? That always struck me funny. As though there was only one long book in this world.  

These seminars took place before the recession.  I would watch the attendees (the majority were men) as they spoke of a strong economy and the great country we were living in, of guns and hunting, and I knew I was around Republicans.  Although my liberal sensibilities were ruffled, I felt they were worthwhile conversations.  Some of them were also idealistic and poetic. The luxurious hotels smelled strongly of marble, wood and leather and one of the men looked at me once and said, “Money smells better than candy.”

I was thinking what a blessing it was to be forced out of my comfort zone. My natural habitat consists of my office, classrooms, libraries, book stores, zumba class, Starbucks, parks, hiking trails, art galleries, museums, theatres, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Anthropologie, and Trader Joe’s.  I love those places. But for a period of time, it was seminars at upscale hotels, and I think I’m a better writer for it. How about you? Have you ever wound up anywhere unexpected and enjoyed it?

The love you take

When I was young, my over-burdened mother arranged to send me to finishing school at John Robert Powers http://www.johnrobertpowers.net/ in Pasadena.  I was not a grateful girl.  Although I wanted to go, I was a rebel and didn’t want to be classified. To make matters worse, I was thrown out because I was always late to class and when we put together a script, I failed the class on story endings. We were given subjects and told to come up with one happy and one sad ending; I simply could not come up with a happy one. To this day, I can picture the former model and instructor, a tall Russian woman with bulging eyes, saying, “Linda, can’t you think of one?” (I suspect it’s an especially bad sign when a Russian tells you you’re depressed.)

A few years later, my mother chose to send me again; this time to Barbizon charm school http://www.barbizonmodeling.com/ in Los Angeles.  (The odd thing is after her divorce, we had no money, so I don’t know why she was sending me at all, though now that I think about it, she probably needed relief from my unladylike ways.) At this charm school, I thrived. In fact, the summer was so transformative that at the end of class I was awarded a prize for congeniality, signed by all the girls, and proclaimed “Class Best Friend.” I still have it, and consider it one of the happiest moments of my life.     

Now that’s a happy ending, I think, unless you consider what happened the following summer.

Even as I write this, I see that a new issue of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is coming out, with all 40 or so endings. I can’t wait for the endings.  Have you ever struggled with an ending? 

The Beatles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a_8F6gflxQ

The Lost Generation

I’ve spent the last year reading the Modernist literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_literature of Paris in the 1920s. This pared-down, often Cubist style of writing is inviting and it’s easy to appreciate the works of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Djuna Barnes and Henry Miller; they affirm the connection between art and writing and inspiration.

After reading the Sun Also Rises again I followed it with The Paris Wife http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/features/paula_mclain/index.php  a recently published novel set in the same time period.  Being visual I wondered why the cover depicts the 1950s when the time period is actually the 1920s. But loving time period pieces, I dug in.   

Writer Paula McLain follows Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson’s life in its real dimensions, yet it is not an authentic biography.  The characters or should I say people who move through her pages are real and not fictional.  Still there is much imagined in regard to conversations, emotions, interrelationships and feelings. McLain herself described the work as a novel “in conversation” with Hemingway.

However, its’ biggest flaw was our main character—she’s a whiny pushover. Now that I think about it I don't know if she was just a product of the times— old fashioned and hell bent on staying married even though her husband was a complete louse — or was she really just pathetic? Ernest was a little boy; self absorbed, vain, inept as a husband, so I didn't get a warm feeling about either of them.  I kept waiting for Hadley to find her voice and stick up for herself or to lose her temper.  But she doesn’t and it disappoints, particularly when she finds out her best friend is sleeping with her husband. The betrayal is the crux of the story although it only occupies a few pages.  It was obvious that McLain invented the dialogue and has never lived through the emotional experience. Because it’s a wound and rage that doesn’t get forgotten.  

So The Paris Wife is actually a portrait of the rise and fall of a marriage but in my opinion, made a flat read. 

What it did offer were rich glimpses into the cacophony of 1920s Paris—a city rife with ex-patriot notables such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound at a time filled with experimentation in the arts and a sketch of the Lost Generation’s dissonant world.

Inquisitive Breed

Sometimes it’s fun to think about the beginnings of stories, without figuring out where they’ll end. Of course, if I can figure out where it will end and who the characters will be, that’s all the better. But a lot of times I only have a start, and I chew over that for a while, and then it disappears. So I’m passing along this start to you and maybe you can make something out of it.

I was at the doggie park.  It was early evening and after my dog didn’t want to play fetch with me I purposely sat down on a bench.  I chose a seat in front of a woman who stood along the fence who looked quiet. She wore a shabby outfit, was hunched over, and looked like she had a hard life and a long day at work. Just as I nestled in and began to look around me, another woman burst on the scene, a loud, tall Soccer Mom type who lit a cigarette and stood next to my quiet lady. I figured she would do what I would do, which was close my eyes and hope she went away. Soccer Mom asked the quiet lady about her dog, and lo and behold, they both had the same breed. The quiet lady began talking to her. They were both involved in divorce and custody battles, they loved their children, and were frustrated by various things. I was touched as I listened at what a surprising turn the whole thing had taken. These were two women who never in the world would have connected, and here they were.

A week later, I’m standing under a shady tree at the doggie park and three big bruiser types come in.  They’re smoking and talking about some guy who was getting out from jail and I wasn’t sure if they were felons or police officers. All of a sudden a voice pipes up, and I’m darned if it isn’t my quiet lady wearing the same outfit.  She begins talking to them about the last of the great heavy-weights, Mike Tyson and various other boxers and they begin a conversation. 

John Cheever the short-story writer called the Chekhov of the Suburbs wrote a story about a woman who keeps showing up to visit people who are dying, and I began to get a spooky feeling about this lady. What if she was a figment of my imagination? What if she was a killer purposely looking for loud smoking types? What if she was just a really lonely woman who could only connect with people at the doggie park? What if I should just read a book and stop listening to other people’s chatter?

What do you think?

Run Wild!

I’ve never been to a yard sale since I am not the least bit interested in other people’s junk. Not being in the habit of rummaging through anyone else’s trash, however, currently in my neighborhood there have been temptations placed before me such as; office furniture, bicycles, and lawn chairs.  This morning while walking Coco, I passed a great temptation: a thing, covered in a faded floral sheet, with a huge sign pinned to it that read, “Do Not Take.”  

Why not? I immediately asked myself. I don’t know what’s under the sheet, though I thought I glimpsed a bit of wood. I’d like to say I snuck a peak, but I didn’t. There was something about the scrawl of the sign that made me think its writer may have anger management issues. Also, it’s way more fun to think about the endless possibilities.

What could possibly make anyone put up a sign like that? What in the world is it? A broken piece of furniture and the owner is afraid someone will sue them over it. But there must be a legal assumption that trash is broken. Perhaps the owner is dead and in their absence the caretaker has a phobia about other people using their things.  Perhaps the item has a secret or nuclear code of some kind.  Perhaps it’s a broken mirror?  Whoever touches or glimpses at it will have seven years of bad luck.  Perhaps the item is possessed, but then why let the garbage people pick it up. Aren’t they as fallible as everyone else? Perhaps the owner loved that item so much that they can’t bear to think of anyone else using it.  

Whatever it is, I feel confident there’s a juicy story behind it. And isn’t this how stories begin, so often—with something that’s just not quite right and you allow your imagination to run with it.  Have you ever started a story that way?  

Unfinished business

June 19^th – or Juneteenth has a poignant meaning as Emancipation Day. It was and continues to be a day for celebrating the end of slavery and the beginning of a new chance at life.  It was on this day that the Union Army in 1865 brought news of emancipation to African-Americans in one of the farthest corners of the Confederate States—Texas, effectively marking the death of slavery in the United States.

But the date makes me think of something else, of the late author Ralph Ellison http://newsreel.org/video/RALPH-ELLISON and of his career.  His book, Invisible Man, published in 1952, is one of the great debuts in contemporary literature. It delved into the black and white corners of the American psyche and quickly attained the status of legend, exploring the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society as seen from the perspective of an unnamed black man in the New York City of the 1930’s. Ellison's follow-up, Juneteenth, however, seemed truly bedeviled—not only by its monumental predecessor but by fate itself.  First, a large section of the novel went up in flames when the author's house burned.  Then he spent decades reconstructing, revising and expanding his initial vision. When he died, he left behind some 2,000 pages of manuscript. Yet this mythical mountain of prose was unfinished, far too disjointed to publish. It seemed as if Ellison's second novel would never appear.

Or would it? Ellison's literary executor, John Callahan, compiled a smaller, more coherent work from all that raw material. Juneteenth revolves around just two characters: Adam Sunraider, a white, race-baiting New England senator, and Alonzo "Daddy" Hickman, a black Baptist minister who turns out to have a paradoxical and paternal relationship to his opposite number. As the book opens, Sunraider is delivering a typically bigoted speech on the Senate floor when he's peppered by an assassin's bullets. Mortally wounded, he summons the elderly Hickman to his bedside. There the two commence a journey into their shared past, which unlike the rest of 1950s America, represents a true model of racial integration.

I like to think of the book as a monumental testament to the power of friendship and editorship.  It must have taken courage and dedication for Callahan to sort through notes, and passages of dialogue, and sections of narrative told in the bits and pieces that Ellison left behind, and then to dare to somehow put it all together in some sort of coherent form. And he was left with making authorial decisions about the narrative structure and character development. 

But unfortunately the final result is messy, incomplete, and largely unsatisfying. While there are scenes in Juneteenth that hint at Ellison's lyrical brilliance, the jigsaw puzzle effect of the storyline is sketchy, leaving me with a mixture of emotions—sadness over the destruction of the original manuscript and that Ellison never lived to finish his great life work, and disappointment that Juneteenth, as we have it, missed the mark and is a novel that maybe never should have been published.

Death be not proud

One of the things I first discovered about blogging is that it made me feel connected to the rest of the world in a way that I hadn’t felt for a long time.  Not since the days I trotted the globe, made new friends and they became pen pals. Call it ego or a humanitarian gene but I have always wanted to be a part of something much, much bigger, and I believed blogging to be that missing component.

I also found another benefit—the feeling of connectedness. I would surf the Internet and other blogs, find things to write about, and link to that blogger. They in turn would find out about me and we would exchange a link.  Not always but generally that’s the way it works.

In my blogging classes, I tried to communicate to my students—the unlimited potential of connections to be made—starting in the classroom, across the city, across the country, and across the ocean.  I couldn’t take credit for it, it’s a universal law that I apply to this day in my meditation practice.  Even if topics are on different subjects, there is an inherent power in numbers.  Bloggers then would have something in common. They are sharing their lives and interests, a part of themselves with their readers, the difficulties of getting and maintaining active readers, the frustration with getting their blog designs just right, and the joys of certain posts —all, in my opinion, powerful similarities. 

Funeral Procession

But there was apathy and I often felt my message went unheard.  And without connecting, not everyone could see the value in what I was teaching. The same holds true for my blog posts. When I send out to my list and there is no reaction, no comment it's a dead silence...similar to tapping into your own funeral and seeing those who would attend. Thanks for your many comments Roberta! And for also listing their comments —John, Carole, Annie, and Michael. 

I’ll be looking for a blogging group once I move into a new community. And if I can’t find “my group,” I will take responsibility and form my own.  

Algonquin Round Table

Summer Vacation

I’ve been on summer vacation and until my next post I’ll offer some amusement through these old images.

Transforming readers to other dimensions

Ray Bradbury, author of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, died yesterday. Known for his futuristic tales — he never used a computer, or even drove a car.

French film director Francois Truffaut introduced movie audiences to Fahrenheit 451; a bizarre society Bradbury created: one in which firemen burned books to keep the masses completely ignorant but couldn't extinguish their curiosity.

Here’s an excerpt from the novel, Fahrenheit 451.

The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked, and the infinitely small sound now, the white stir of her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting.

The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain. The girl stopped and looked as if she might pull back in surprise, but instead stood regarding Montag with eyes so dark and shining and alive that he felt he had said something quite wonderful. But he knew his mouth had only moved to say hello, and then when she seemed hypnotized by the salamander on his arm and the phoenix disc on his chest, he spoke again.

“Of course,” he said, “you’re our new neighbor, aren’t you?”
“And you must be”—she raised her eyes from his professional symbols “—the fireman.” Her voice trailed off.
“How oddly you say that.”
“I’d—I’d have known it with my eyes shut,” she said, slowly.
“What—the smell of kerosene? My wife always complains,” he laughed. “You never wash it off completely.”
“No, you don’t,” she said, in awe.

Bradbury in my opinion was a true writer—he took us into a journey to the core of the human heart glorifying the potential of humankind.  I would say his work was more social commentary than science fiction. And he found innovative ways to express his take on the world.

Best of all, he continued to dream. He was so certain mankind would land on Mars; he asked to be buried there. And although it didn’t happen in his lifetime, I’d like to think it didn't stop him from believing it was possible.