Finally, the rain and the cool are here. A wet blanket, yes, but autumn, at last. We will grow accustomed to the constant hiss and ping of apartment radiators for the next six months - and hollering at each other to be heard.
Still here in the city, awaiting the arrival of furnace parts in the country so that we can have heat there. The propane guys came and dismantled the thing two weeks ago, slapped a big red sticker on it - DANGER! DO NOT OPERATE! Apparently the burners are cracked, we'd probably been inhaling carbon monoxide. Terrific. We may head out for the weekend anyway, make the best of the wood-burning stove and a space heater.
With the rain and the cool comes a drop in air pressure; which means out come the mice. The other day I saw SIX in a span of an hour. Caught three of 'em in glue traps (ew, I know, very inhumane), the others continue to scurry behind the walls. Are you grossed out? Yeah, me too. But I seem to be calming down a bit. We live with mice, this is the reality. They're so small that plugging up holes won't do much good, there will always be a nook or a cranny to squeeze through. And I remind myself that they come because this is a hoppin' place to be... we cook a lot, the smells are yummy, surely the little guys pick us over the bachelor across the hall whose kitchen is spotless, barely used. Look, as long as they stay out of my bed, my food cabinets, and my shoes, they can scurry at will; we are reasonable people...
Too bad the pup isn't much of a mouse-catcher. Poor guy is ill the last couple days, probably something nasty he ate off the street. Woke us up in the middle o' the night last night wimpering like I've not heard in years. Didn't make it out fast enough, unfortunately (good thing the carpet is brown). Between this and his recent Lyme Disease diagnosis (no symptoms, though, thankfully), my kid is weathering the tough stuff of city and country life.
And speaking of tough stuff... my plants have been victims of vandelism. Someone - who? why? - decided to come along and violate the pansies and lavendar on the stoop. What I mean is, they were found completely dug up and left for dead, as if someone had actually grabbed them by their tops, yanked them out of their soil, then turned the pots on their heads. This was no accidental knocking over. What for? is all I can think. Rage against attempts at beauty? Rage against us outsider-newcomers? Nothin' better to do? Anyway, I brought them upstairs and put them back together, put the pansies back out (I dare you, try it again). Getting chilly for the lavendar, so I'll keep her inside for now. J. the Super was indignant, too; he says, "We need a camera out here, man," meaning a security camera, which is ridiculous of course, though I appreciate the sentiment.
This country mouse is looking forward to some time in the country soon; there's a guy down the street selling "I HEART BX" t-shirts; maybe we'll buy them on our way out.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
The Wire
"The Wire" is the sort of show that draws die-hards or none at all. It's hard to be luke-warm about it. It's also (in my experience) a bit of a slow burn; you give it the whole season or likely you move on. As creator David Simon has said, it's conceived as a novel - a near-epic one, I'd say - not a short story. (Reasonable comparisons: Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, THE GODFATHER.)
There's probably little I can say that hasn't already been said. There is a budding "scholarship" developing about the show's evolution (and now denouement, as the final season, Season Five, has wrapped and will air in 2008). You know the phenomenon has fully "broken," arrived on the arts and culture scene, when The Profile shows up in The New Yorker (and lo and behold, see the Oct. 22 issue).
I've never in my life paid for cable, so I've seen "The Wire" - Seasons One, Two, and Three (eagerly awaiting the release of Season Four next month) - on DVD. I've watched each season three times. This may sound obsessive, but really, it's more a testament to the nature of the beast; it's a novel, remember (or a series of novels, really), conceived with the idea of depicting the life of an inner city, in all its complexity. From its inception, five seasons were envisioned, each delving into a different aspect of city life (though not as compartmentalized as that sounds). "We were always planning to move further and further out, to build a whole city," Simon says. Academic courses can (and will) surely be designed around it - sociology, criminology, anthropology, urban planning, media arts, screenwriting (the dialogue!), literature - you name it, and TV dramas will forever struggle to measure up to its standards.
What makes it different from a novel, though, is its hyper-realism. Simon has said that he writes/directs for the people who appear in the show, not the "general reader" (the show is apparently very popular in poor black neighborhoods of West Baltimore, circulated on bootleg DVDs). Simon is my hero in this way; he has stayed true to the audience he cares about, but has succeeded in sucking in viewers far beyond that, like myself (viewership is appropriately modest, by HBO "hit" standards; the show has been vulnerable to cancellation at the end of each season, but will survive through the end). He is also a phenomenon and an inspiration of local-ness, in a world of increasing global "flattening" (Thomas Friedman, etc.): a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, Simon has created and evolved "The Wire" without ever leaving Baltimore - physically, psychically, intellectually, morally. Everything that appears in the show, including many of the minor actors and extras, are Baltimore-based and Baltimore-grown - sometimes as composites of multiple issues or characters, but always based in actualities (his writing partner and co-creator, Ed Burns, is a former Baltimore homicide detective).
"The Wire" is, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit, a significant part of my life. I see my own city differently as a result, I trust it as a semi-comprehensive urban education. Following "The Wire" is like learning a new language and culture, it's immersive. It's also a kind of true music - the language of the streets, the drug trade, police culture - melodic and dissonant at once, perhaps even more "authentic" than rap or hip-hop, because it lacks the posturing, the glam, the beat-box stylization. It's people talking and hustling and living; and it really gets under your skin the way music does. It's also high literature in its deft weaving of irony, comedy, tragedy, plot convergences, and complexity of character - its insistence on a universal humanity, our motivations and survival mechanisms uncannily parallel, whether we are a cop or a drug dealer or a politician or a mother.
I am not easily drawn to violence-oriented media, but there is really nothing gratuitous in "The Wire" (save just a bit of nudity and sex that struck me as cheap eye candy; but hey, life is sex is life, and at the end of the day, "The Wire" is on HBO, not PBS). The thing is equally serious about its form as its content, and not a word or a character or a storyline is wasted.
At the risk of sounding overly didactic... my feeling is that the difference between art and mere entertainment (something can achieve both, surely) is that art changes you, your engagement with it evolves you in some way. So I'm trying to think about how "The Wire" has changed me. Its brilliance is that it is somehow both hopeful and despairing - not sequentially, i.e. a despairing story is told but then in the end there is hope (a conventional arc); but simultaneously. Artistically, Simon is like a Cubist, showing the forces in motion all at the same time, on a single plane, mirroring and refracting one another (the "business" of drug-dealing like the "business" of politics like the "business" of law enforcement like the "business" of media). The ways in which the ugliness of city life - its corrupt leaders and mercenary criminals, the repeating loop of corruption-breeding-crime and 'round she goes - is pretty hopeless, and Simon and Burns soften not the message. People with consciences usually lose; an impersonal system, i.e. institutions which have replaced/displaced any humanism that may have birthed the institutions in the first place, prevail. There is no one person or institution to blame, which is in itself a kind of hopelessness, because without demons and enemies, how to fix the problem?
So where's the hope? I suppose it's something like this: each character is driven by a powerful instinct to survive and, in their own (compromised) ways, flourish. How they go about it is of course questionable on all levels, but with negative forces bearing down on just about everyone, any moral judgment you might be tempted to make becomes dizzyingly complicated. It's that instinct to survive that persists across the board - black, white, poor, rich, old, young, powerful, powerless, gay, straight - and the show's writers and actors and directors do an amazing job of "teaching" the viewer to admire and root for that instinct. Horrible horrible things happen to these characters, and they do horrible horrible things to one another; and yet there is no one whose demise you really want to see (perhaps there are a few minor characters who are portrayed flatly, in order to advance plot; this we forgive). And so, I suppose "The Wire" is indeed teaching me, growing in me, a new impulse: to root for people, and to see people, divorced from the institutions which shape and confine and bear down. And to recognize that, while following your conscience may very well get you nowhere in terms of results, the instinct to fight the losing battle (a la Chris McCandless!) is one you can - you must - preserve. It's a spiritual message, really, worthy of Dr. King. And in that sense, watching "The Wire" is empowering in the face of a city life that feels paralyzing in its complexity and incomprehensibility.
Boy, it sounds kind of cheesy as I read over what I've written. I guess you have to have experienced the grit of the show to appreciate the incongruousness of the above analysis relative to what you're actually watching. Let me just say that when a certain heartless drug-dealer (who has betrayed his best friend/partner in one too many ways), for whom I have no natural or logical reason to care, gets his in an episode at the end of Season Three, I was physically wrecked by the time the credits rolled. I was completely outside myself - devastated, appalled, incredulous - looking around the room for...for... something to hit, and a shoulder to cry on, at the same time. Changed. Man, that's good TV. Will I weep for every drug dealer who gets his from now on? 'Course not. But I think I have slightly different eyes now...
And, to the degree that I continue to grapple with how one lives a life worth living as a participating citizen of the world's leading (though waning) capitalist power, "The Wire," which Simon has said is about how "raw, unencumbered capitalism" devalues human beings, is a pretty solid and unflinching education, a useful touchstone, in what that looks like in everyday urban life - for the powerful and powerless alike.
There's probably little I can say that hasn't already been said. There is a budding "scholarship" developing about the show's evolution (and now denouement, as the final season, Season Five, has wrapped and will air in 2008). You know the phenomenon has fully "broken," arrived on the arts and culture scene, when The Profile shows up in The New Yorker (and lo and behold, see the Oct. 22 issue).
I've never in my life paid for cable, so I've seen "The Wire" - Seasons One, Two, and Three (eagerly awaiting the release of Season Four next month) - on DVD. I've watched each season three times. This may sound obsessive, but really, it's more a testament to the nature of the beast; it's a novel, remember (or a series of novels, really), conceived with the idea of depicting the life of an inner city, in all its complexity. From its inception, five seasons were envisioned, each delving into a different aspect of city life (though not as compartmentalized as that sounds). "We were always planning to move further and further out, to build a whole city," Simon says. Academic courses can (and will) surely be designed around it - sociology, criminology, anthropology, urban planning, media arts, screenwriting (the dialogue!), literature - you name it, and TV dramas will forever struggle to measure up to its standards.
What makes it different from a novel, though, is its hyper-realism. Simon has said that he writes/directs for the people who appear in the show, not the "general reader" (the show is apparently very popular in poor black neighborhoods of West Baltimore, circulated on bootleg DVDs). Simon is my hero in this way; he has stayed true to the audience he cares about, but has succeeded in sucking in viewers far beyond that, like myself (viewership is appropriately modest, by HBO "hit" standards; the show has been vulnerable to cancellation at the end of each season, but will survive through the end). He is also a phenomenon and an inspiration of local-ness, in a world of increasing global "flattening" (Thomas Friedman, etc.): a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, Simon has created and evolved "The Wire" without ever leaving Baltimore - physically, psychically, intellectually, morally. Everything that appears in the show, including many of the minor actors and extras, are Baltimore-based and Baltimore-grown - sometimes as composites of multiple issues or characters, but always based in actualities (his writing partner and co-creator, Ed Burns, is a former Baltimore homicide detective).
"The Wire" is, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit, a significant part of my life. I see my own city differently as a result, I trust it as a semi-comprehensive urban education. Following "The Wire" is like learning a new language and culture, it's immersive. It's also a kind of true music - the language of the streets, the drug trade, police culture - melodic and dissonant at once, perhaps even more "authentic" than rap or hip-hop, because it lacks the posturing, the glam, the beat-box stylization. It's people talking and hustling and living; and it really gets under your skin the way music does. It's also high literature in its deft weaving of irony, comedy, tragedy, plot convergences, and complexity of character - its insistence on a universal humanity, our motivations and survival mechanisms uncannily parallel, whether we are a cop or a drug dealer or a politician or a mother.
I am not easily drawn to violence-oriented media, but there is really nothing gratuitous in "The Wire" (save just a bit of nudity and sex that struck me as cheap eye candy; but hey, life is sex is life, and at the end of the day, "The Wire" is on HBO, not PBS). The thing is equally serious about its form as its content, and not a word or a character or a storyline is wasted.
At the risk of sounding overly didactic... my feeling is that the difference between art and mere entertainment (something can achieve both, surely) is that art changes you, your engagement with it evolves you in some way. So I'm trying to think about how "The Wire" has changed me. Its brilliance is that it is somehow both hopeful and despairing - not sequentially, i.e. a despairing story is told but then in the end there is hope (a conventional arc); but simultaneously. Artistically, Simon is like a Cubist, showing the forces in motion all at the same time, on a single plane, mirroring and refracting one another (the "business" of drug-dealing like the "business" of politics like the "business" of law enforcement like the "business" of media). The ways in which the ugliness of city life - its corrupt leaders and mercenary criminals, the repeating loop of corruption-breeding-crime and 'round she goes - is pretty hopeless, and Simon and Burns soften not the message. People with consciences usually lose; an impersonal system, i.e. institutions which have replaced/displaced any humanism that may have birthed the institutions in the first place, prevail. There is no one person or institution to blame, which is in itself a kind of hopelessness, because without demons and enemies, how to fix the problem?
So where's the hope? I suppose it's something like this: each character is driven by a powerful instinct to survive and, in their own (compromised) ways, flourish. How they go about it is of course questionable on all levels, but with negative forces bearing down on just about everyone, any moral judgment you might be tempted to make becomes dizzyingly complicated. It's that instinct to survive that persists across the board - black, white, poor, rich, old, young, powerful, powerless, gay, straight - and the show's writers and actors and directors do an amazing job of "teaching" the viewer to admire and root for that instinct. Horrible horrible things happen to these characters, and they do horrible horrible things to one another; and yet there is no one whose demise you really want to see (perhaps there are a few minor characters who are portrayed flatly, in order to advance plot; this we forgive). And so, I suppose "The Wire" is indeed teaching me, growing in me, a new impulse: to root for people, and to see people, divorced from the institutions which shape and confine and bear down. And to recognize that, while following your conscience may very well get you nowhere in terms of results, the instinct to fight the losing battle (a la Chris McCandless!) is one you can - you must - preserve. It's a spiritual message, really, worthy of Dr. King. And in that sense, watching "The Wire" is empowering in the face of a city life that feels paralyzing in its complexity and incomprehensibility.
Boy, it sounds kind of cheesy as I read over what I've written. I guess you have to have experienced the grit of the show to appreciate the incongruousness of the above analysis relative to what you're actually watching. Let me just say that when a certain heartless drug-dealer (who has betrayed his best friend/partner in one too many ways), for whom I have no natural or logical reason to care, gets his in an episode at the end of Season Three, I was physically wrecked by the time the credits rolled. I was completely outside myself - devastated, appalled, incredulous - looking around the room for...for... something to hit, and a shoulder to cry on, at the same time. Changed. Man, that's good TV. Will I weep for every drug dealer who gets his from now on? 'Course not. But I think I have slightly different eyes now...
And, to the degree that I continue to grapple with how one lives a life worth living as a participating citizen of the world's leading (though waning) capitalist power, "The Wire," which Simon has said is about how "raw, unencumbered capitalism" devalues human beings, is a pretty solid and unflinching education, a useful touchstone, in what that looks like in everyday urban life - for the powerful and powerless alike.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Into the Wire
Yesterday's post about the complexity of city life, and the trappings of living in a market-driven capitalist society, has me thinking about two very different works of media - both, I think, worth your while.
INTO THE WILD, Sean Penn's film adaptation of Jon Krakauer's book, seems to be doing well. It opened wide in NYC and features an impressive cast (Hal Holbrook, Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden) - led by a relatively unknown youngin, Emile Hirsch (well-known if you're a 16 year-old girl, I suppose). The popularity of it in the city reminds me of another film, INTO GREAT SILENCE - a 162-minute documentary featuring nothing much more than continuous footage of life in a Carthusian monastery, hushed and minimal - which played at Film Forum for an extended run. (Get me out of here, we city folk seem to be saying with our movie choices.)
I've not read Krakauer's book, but I understand the film stays fairly close to it. Armed with Tolstoy, Thoreau, Jack London, a field guide to plants and berries, a hunting rifle, and a bag of rice, the real-life kid in question (who's just graduated from college and is filled with anger towards his stern and business-oriented father) eschews materialism, careerism, the "false self" - and lights out for the road. Eventually, the Alaskan wild calls, and he answers. He survives nearly four months, and then, two years after his initial flight from mainstream comforts, Chris's corpse is found by moose hunters in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness.
I knew I wanted to see this movie; I knew it would resonate somehow. The urge to get out, and away, is something I suppose many of us can relate to. The call of solitude, of freedom, of the inner search for a true self and a true vocation via the outward journey (which starts out away but evolves into towards)... it's a narrative as familiar to the American soul as, well, bootstraps capitalism. It's what prompted regular ole me (about whom Sean Penn will not be making a film) to light out for the country.
I haven't read any of the reviews or commentaries, but my initial response to the film (and Chris McCandless's story, as it's portrayed) is that it's both a celebration and a cautionary tale of youthful conceptions of freedom - glory and limitations. Not unlike (ironically) the founding American promise of economic freedom via unbridled market competition, the vision is intoxicating in its pure individualism. Ultimately, though, what young McCandless discovers is that his complete abandonment of community and connectedness - the human experiences of love, fidelity, and even forgiveness - limit both his joy and his ability to survive.
"Youthful" and "young" are interesting terms for me here. In another era, my 35 years would be considered fairly advanced; these days, 35 (especially in the city, especially if you are childless) seems to be the new 25. And my partner-in-life is a generation older than I, so I often get accused of "youthful naivete." Yet: 1) when I look around, I recognize (somewhat alarmingly) that my peers have begun running the world, and 2) even I could see what was coming, as Chris M. rejected offer after offer of love and community along his path. We are not islands, we are not that strong; nature showed Chris McCandless, tragically, who was boss in the battle between one man and the universe. But his burning need/determination to find out first-hand, without mediators, without authorial interpretation (i.e. distortion), without fear - is perhaps what defines his "youth," and what we (romantics) celebrate as the life we ought to preserve and cultivate, no matter our chronological age or experience. When we light out for solitude, when we create space between ourselves and society, we are claiming the truth of present aliveness, of direct communion of our very own souls with every miracle of existence (a la Emerson) - other people's opinions and layers of interpretation and pre-canned analyses be damned. Maybe this is the fundamental truth of the romantic temperament: to rather be foolish than half-living.
A story like INTO THE WILD also, I think, gets under the skin of middle class city-dwellers, in that it pokes and prods at our soft spots, the places where we are not sure of our fundamental resourcefulness, our ability to survive - having accustomed ourselves to the life of 24-hour convenience. Without money, food, or shelter (or Amazon.com), how would we fare? Have we lost touch completely with that most basic human trait, i.e. instinct? What does a person really need, and how far are we from knowing the difference between need and want? Asceticism is, remember, a practice which cultivates (ultimately) spiritual bloom - not, as we often think, a holy emptiness. Who is really suffering - the man with many goods, or the man with none - is the question Chris McCandless posed to himself and the world; and he did so, I think, purely and effectively (sacrificing his own life for the sake of the question). It's a question that is not so abstract, and anything but irrelevant at this cultural moment.
It's true that courage comes easier to the young, because the young have less to lose. But many a 21 year-old in 1990 were buying in to corporate jobs and predictability, so Chris McCandless still certainly emerges as a young man of great courage. Kudos, too, to Mr. Penn for honoring Chris McCandless's remarkableness, and for enlarging his life's burning question for the big screen.
I didn't get to my second media-of-note - "The Wire"(the title of this post is not a typo) - in this post; so stay tuned.
INTO THE WILD, Sean Penn's film adaptation of Jon Krakauer's book, seems to be doing well. It opened wide in NYC and features an impressive cast (Hal Holbrook, Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden) - led by a relatively unknown youngin, Emile Hirsch (well-known if you're a 16 year-old girl, I suppose). The popularity of it in the city reminds me of another film, INTO GREAT SILENCE - a 162-minute documentary featuring nothing much more than continuous footage of life in a Carthusian monastery, hushed and minimal - which played at Film Forum for an extended run. (Get me out of here, we city folk seem to be saying with our movie choices.)
I've not read Krakauer's book, but I understand the film stays fairly close to it. Armed with Tolstoy, Thoreau, Jack London, a field guide to plants and berries, a hunting rifle, and a bag of rice, the real-life kid in question (who's just graduated from college and is filled with anger towards his stern and business-oriented father) eschews materialism, careerism, the "false self" - and lights out for the road. Eventually, the Alaskan wild calls, and he answers. He survives nearly four months, and then, two years after his initial flight from mainstream comforts, Chris's corpse is found by moose hunters in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness.
I knew I wanted to see this movie; I knew it would resonate somehow. The urge to get out, and away, is something I suppose many of us can relate to. The call of solitude, of freedom, of the inner search for a true self and a true vocation via the outward journey (which starts out away but evolves into towards)... it's a narrative as familiar to the American soul as, well, bootstraps capitalism. It's what prompted regular ole me (about whom Sean Penn will not be making a film) to light out for the country.
I haven't read any of the reviews or commentaries, but my initial response to the film (and Chris McCandless's story, as it's portrayed) is that it's both a celebration and a cautionary tale of youthful conceptions of freedom - glory and limitations. Not unlike (ironically) the founding American promise of economic freedom via unbridled market competition, the vision is intoxicating in its pure individualism. Ultimately, though, what young McCandless discovers is that his complete abandonment of community and connectedness - the human experiences of love, fidelity, and even forgiveness - limit both his joy and his ability to survive.
"Youthful" and "young" are interesting terms for me here. In another era, my 35 years would be considered fairly advanced; these days, 35 (especially in the city, especially if you are childless) seems to be the new 25. And my partner-in-life is a generation older than I, so I often get accused of "youthful naivete." Yet: 1) when I look around, I recognize (somewhat alarmingly) that my peers have begun running the world, and 2) even I could see what was coming, as Chris M. rejected offer after offer of love and community along his path. We are not islands, we are not that strong; nature showed Chris McCandless, tragically, who was boss in the battle between one man and the universe. But his burning need/determination to find out first-hand, without mediators, without authorial interpretation (i.e. distortion), without fear - is perhaps what defines his "youth," and what we (romantics) celebrate as the life we ought to preserve and cultivate, no matter our chronological age or experience. When we light out for solitude, when we create space between ourselves and society, we are claiming the truth of present aliveness, of direct communion of our very own souls with every miracle of existence (a la Emerson) - other people's opinions and layers of interpretation and pre-canned analyses be damned. Maybe this is the fundamental truth of the romantic temperament: to rather be foolish than half-living.
A story like INTO THE WILD also, I think, gets under the skin of middle class city-dwellers, in that it pokes and prods at our soft spots, the places where we are not sure of our fundamental resourcefulness, our ability to survive - having accustomed ourselves to the life of 24-hour convenience. Without money, food, or shelter (or Amazon.com), how would we fare? Have we lost touch completely with that most basic human trait, i.e. instinct? What does a person really need, and how far are we from knowing the difference between need and want? Asceticism is, remember, a practice which cultivates (ultimately) spiritual bloom - not, as we often think, a holy emptiness. Who is really suffering - the man with many goods, or the man with none - is the question Chris McCandless posed to himself and the world; and he did so, I think, purely and effectively (sacrificing his own life for the sake of the question). It's a question that is not so abstract, and anything but irrelevant at this cultural moment.
It's true that courage comes easier to the young, because the young have less to lose. But many a 21 year-old in 1990 were buying in to corporate jobs and predictability, so Chris McCandless still certainly emerges as a young man of great courage. Kudos, too, to Mr. Penn for honoring Chris McCandless's remarkableness, and for enlarging his life's burning question for the big screen.
I didn't get to my second media-of-note - "The Wire"(the title of this post is not a typo) - in this post; so stay tuned.
Monday, October 22, 2007
That Thing We Don't Talk About (Here I Go Again)...
(I am realizing that this blog is, on some level, a repository for daily hand-wringing over the trappings of capitalism and how not to self-destruct as an individual in its wake. See here for an earlier post on "that thing we don't talk about.")
77 degrees today. Disturbing. Clipped an article yesterday from the NY Times about CRAG - Carbon Rationing Action Group - in England. Folks coming together as a cooperative to mind their carbon footprints, calculating auto emissions and heat usage, etc. The focus is lifestyle adjustment, as opposed to fancy new technology or carbon credits. Use less, plain and simple. A few pages later, however, Thomas Friedman used his column to tell us that what you do as an individual in your own daily life makes little difference; you have to get involved in policy. He cited NYC's en masse shift from Crown Victoria taxis to hybrids - and Mayor Bloomberg's requirement that all taxis be hybrids or other low-emission vehicles, minimum 30 mpgs, within five years. This is how real change happens, Friedman argues. Elect the right folk who will lead the charge and push for standards.
Of course, we know that we need both/and.
One thing for certain about city living is that the density and diversity of the population creates so many layers of complexity, so many moving parts and concealed corners, that getting involved - in anything - becomes a very serious research project. The world is globalized, and everything is interconnected, yes, no matter where you live, city or country; but those webs become so much more tangled, tendrils exponentially multiplied, in the day-to-day of urban life. The bigger the city, the more complex, and the harder to tease out the "facts" you need to act responsibly. The simple reality of hyper-pluralism in the media - information overload - is a great challenge in itself.
This is starting to sound like an excuse, I know - for doing nothing. I'm just saying that I empathize with any city-dwellers who struggle with paralysis in the face of the world-on-fire. And can see how the CRAG movement and others like it are catching on, how people would be attracted to the micro-level of social change; because it is comprehensible, there is a reasonable linearity to the cause and effect of the action. There is a longing for a recovery of that direct relationship - the tangible impact of one's actions on the world in which one lives and, beyond that, a return to some semblance of a two-way relationship with the natural world. (Tomorrow I'll post about Into the Wild, which I saw last night - speaking of the trappings of capitalism.)
When I lived in a smaller city, I felt the difference palpably. There were two major newspapers, and two culture weeklies, which everyone read; people knew the names of all the city council members and what areas they focused on. Friends who worked in city government actually did make a difference, i.e. what they did from 9 to 5 on a daily basis moved forward progressive changes in city policies, and they felt very good about their work. The flow chart from citizen to politician to policy change to policy implementation was comprehensible to the average person. Here in NYC, you must be a municipal government expert to understand the inner workings; for instance, it is customary (and pretty much necessary) for a nonprofit to engage a city lobbyist in order to successfuly navigate the labrynthine grants process and receive city funding (and the little guys who can't afford such assistance lose out).
If you are someone who thinks and cares about such things - and I think most people do - it is not an easy time to live in the world and do no harm. When I go to the polls, Iraq and causes for war around the globe will certainly be on my mind. But in the day to day, having been born an American and (so far) maintaining that identity, it does seem to me that, like it or not, our primary role in the global community (if we are not, say Nobel Laureates or UN Assemblymembers), or at least the role with the largest ripple effects, is as consumers. We are what we buy (which of course includes what we eat). Insofar as wars are related to oil, other natural resources, the hegemony of American media & entertainment values; and insofar as we are in the position to choose what/how much we use, which corporations we keep in business, which economic and cultural values we actively or passively propagate... we are responsible.
And so, contrary to Mr. Friedman, I think that there is nothing more directly linear in cause & effect, no more powerful act... than to mind our consumer footprints. The good news about this is that it's not complicated, meaning it's daily and it's right in front of our noses. The bad news is that it's effortful and often inconvenient (but is that really bad news?). You can vote for whomever you like, but then proceed to work against the values that individual represents by continuing to support the economic interests which drive the ugliness. I think many liberals do this. Let's, um, quit that. Let's at least try.
Go CRAGs!
--------------------------------------
The Reading List: There are so many these days. The ones that come to mind are Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver) and The Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan). If anyone can recall the article/blog that was in the NY Times maybe a year ago by a guy who put his NYC family on a radically green program for a year, let me know.
Also, I've been subscribing to this e-list but don't know a whole lot about it: www.smallplanetinstitute.org. What intrigues me is one of their values - "Evolve capitalism to support the social good" - and their notion of "Thin Democracy -- the dangerous idea that elections plus a market economy are enough."
77 degrees today. Disturbing. Clipped an article yesterday from the NY Times about CRAG - Carbon Rationing Action Group - in England. Folks coming together as a cooperative to mind their carbon footprints, calculating auto emissions and heat usage, etc. The focus is lifestyle adjustment, as opposed to fancy new technology or carbon credits. Use less, plain and simple. A few pages later, however, Thomas Friedman used his column to tell us that what you do as an individual in your own daily life makes little difference; you have to get involved in policy. He cited NYC's en masse shift from Crown Victoria taxis to hybrids - and Mayor Bloomberg's requirement that all taxis be hybrids or other low-emission vehicles, minimum 30 mpgs, within five years. This is how real change happens, Friedman argues. Elect the right folk who will lead the charge and push for standards.
Of course, we know that we need both/and.
One thing for certain about city living is that the density and diversity of the population creates so many layers of complexity, so many moving parts and concealed corners, that getting involved - in anything - becomes a very serious research project. The world is globalized, and everything is interconnected, yes, no matter where you live, city or country; but those webs become so much more tangled, tendrils exponentially multiplied, in the day-to-day of urban life. The bigger the city, the more complex, and the harder to tease out the "facts" you need to act responsibly. The simple reality of hyper-pluralism in the media - information overload - is a great challenge in itself.
This is starting to sound like an excuse, I know - for doing nothing. I'm just saying that I empathize with any city-dwellers who struggle with paralysis in the face of the world-on-fire. And can see how the CRAG movement and others like it are catching on, how people would be attracted to the micro-level of social change; because it is comprehensible, there is a reasonable linearity to the cause and effect of the action. There is a longing for a recovery of that direct relationship - the tangible impact of one's actions on the world in which one lives and, beyond that, a return to some semblance of a two-way relationship with the natural world. (Tomorrow I'll post about Into the Wild, which I saw last night - speaking of the trappings of capitalism.)
When I lived in a smaller city, I felt the difference palpably. There were two major newspapers, and two culture weeklies, which everyone read; people knew the names of all the city council members and what areas they focused on. Friends who worked in city government actually did make a difference, i.e. what they did from 9 to 5 on a daily basis moved forward progressive changes in city policies, and they felt very good about their work. The flow chart from citizen to politician to policy change to policy implementation was comprehensible to the average person. Here in NYC, you must be a municipal government expert to understand the inner workings; for instance, it is customary (and pretty much necessary) for a nonprofit to engage a city lobbyist in order to successfuly navigate the labrynthine grants process and receive city funding (and the little guys who can't afford such assistance lose out).
If you are someone who thinks and cares about such things - and I think most people do - it is not an easy time to live in the world and do no harm. When I go to the polls, Iraq and causes for war around the globe will certainly be on my mind. But in the day to day, having been born an American and (so far) maintaining that identity, it does seem to me that, like it or not, our primary role in the global community (if we are not, say Nobel Laureates or UN Assemblymembers), or at least the role with the largest ripple effects, is as consumers. We are what we buy (which of course includes what we eat). Insofar as wars are related to oil, other natural resources, the hegemony of American media & entertainment values; and insofar as we are in the position to choose what/how much we use, which corporations we keep in business, which economic and cultural values we actively or passively propagate... we are responsible.
And so, contrary to Mr. Friedman, I think that there is nothing more directly linear in cause & effect, no more powerful act... than to mind our consumer footprints. The good news about this is that it's not complicated, meaning it's daily and it's right in front of our noses. The bad news is that it's effortful and often inconvenient (but is that really bad news?). You can vote for whomever you like, but then proceed to work against the values that individual represents by continuing to support the economic interests which drive the ugliness. I think many liberals do this. Let's, um, quit that. Let's at least try.
Go CRAGs!
--------------------------------------
The Reading List: There are so many these days. The ones that come to mind are Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver) and The Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan). If anyone can recall the article/blog that was in the NY Times maybe a year ago by a guy who put his NYC family on a radically green program for a year, let me know.
Also, I've been subscribing to this e-list but don't know a whole lot about it: www.smallplanetinstitute.org. What intrigues me is one of their values - "Evolve capitalism to support the social good" - and their notion of "Thin Democracy -- the dangerous idea that elections plus a market economy are enough."
Friday, October 19, 2007
The Little Ones (& Their Moms)
Back in the city, and it's sweltering. Well, it's 75 degrees anyway, and it looks like it will stay this way through next week. This is the time of year when NYC landlords are obliged to turn on the heat (and usually, we need it). Ours was turned on yesterday (for those of you who've never lived here, NYC apartment bulding heating systems are rarely controllable from apartment-to-apartment; when it's on, it's ON; when it's off, it's OFF), and when I came home in the late afternoon, the place was steaming hot, even with the windows open and ceiling fan going. Our neighbor H. said he had his A/C running. I climbed out onto the fire escape and people-watched for a little while, just to get some air and check on the little ones (i.e. the plants). It's past mid-October, and the arugula plants are stunted because it's too warm. Bizarre.
Keep at it, Al G. Nobel Prize well-deserved.
Here's something I can't quite figure: the herbs are going like gangbusters. I guess the warmth does them good, but still, here they are, way too big and overcrowded for their pots, often under-watered, no plant food, and sitting in a tiny west-facing windowsill in a room with little air circulation. But they just keep growing.
I got them from a nice little farm stand at Union Square, which begs the question of what Mr. NJ Orchid Guy had claimed, i.e. it's all about the original grower, the plant's journey from seed to seedling. You teachers and parents out there may agree, something along the lines of "the importance of early childhood development." Although my mother, Queen of Long-Living, Flourishing Orchids, picks hers up on sale at the Home Depot - usually the dregs, the half-dead throwaways.
Speaking of mom, it's inevitable, I suppose, that this blog would drift into the topic of parenting and family. Nurture and growth, environment, what it means to flourish (oneself) and to help other living things along. I am, after all, une femme d'une certaine age.
Urban motherhood is truly its own Olympic sport these days. The modern moms that I know well are urban or suburban (or both, i.e. living suburban and working urban). Some work full-time outside the home, some work part-time; I can't say that I know very many (under the age of 45) who stay home full-time. Even the majority of the moms of these moms have worked most of their lives outside the home at least part-time.
Career and fertility are prime urban mom issues for the educated/upper-middle class. All springing from the basic generational shift to "family planning," a.k.a when-you-want-it/how-you-want-it baby making. Child-bearing age stretches further and further out toward and beyond 40 (even despite the medical warnings); in the country and the middle states - the reddish/pinkish states - moms are younger (though probably not by much these days). Moms of color all around are younger, too, across social classes. I remember observing (with some discomfort) the prevalence of twins in my former Brooklyn neighborhood (a white/affluent one): older moms, multiple births, good bet of course that these were in-vitro.
Lots of stories to tell and observations to be made about city and country when it comes to family. For me, it's mostly observational, not being a mom myself. I'm keeping an eye particularly on C. & T., whom I've known since we were all in our twenties (I was present when T. proposed to C., got down on one knee - mostly as a joke - at a coffee shop late one night after we'd all gone to a music concert). T. grew up in the midwest and spent all his summers farming. He's also lived in remote parts of the Southwest, as a bachelor. He's definitely an outdoors sort of guy, and has lived in the city now (came in the 80's as a professional musician) about 20 years. With three small children, lower-middle class incomes and a lot of debt, C. & T. are now seriously considering moving back to the midwest, buying a farm, settling out there. But they're pretty torn, they've been living a culture-rich city life for so long now. And they have an adopted son, who is Puerto Rican (they are white), so they are concerned about racial and cultural homogeneity, and overwhelming political conservatism. It will be interesting to witness their process; they'll go out to see a farm for sale over Thanksgiving.
Man, it's hot. Pup's tongue is hanging out and everything. Wonder how the local farmers are doing, whose livelihoods in fact depend on the weather. The arugula and spinach this season perhaps a little wilty, the tomatoes and peppers still coming.
Keep at it, Al G. Nobel Prize well-deserved.
Here's something I can't quite figure: the herbs are going like gangbusters. I guess the warmth does them good, but still, here they are, way too big and overcrowded for their pots, often under-watered, no plant food, and sitting in a tiny west-facing windowsill in a room with little air circulation. But they just keep growing.
I got them from a nice little farm stand at Union Square, which begs the question of what Mr. NJ Orchid Guy had claimed, i.e. it's all about the original grower, the plant's journey from seed to seedling. You teachers and parents out there may agree, something along the lines of "the importance of early childhood development." Although my mother, Queen of Long-Living, Flourishing Orchids, picks hers up on sale at the Home Depot - usually the dregs, the half-dead throwaways.
Speaking of mom, it's inevitable, I suppose, that this blog would drift into the topic of parenting and family. Nurture and growth, environment, what it means to flourish (oneself) and to help other living things along. I am, after all, une femme d'une certaine age.
Urban motherhood is truly its own Olympic sport these days. The modern moms that I know well are urban or suburban (or both, i.e. living suburban and working urban). Some work full-time outside the home, some work part-time; I can't say that I know very many (under the age of 45) who stay home full-time. Even the majority of the moms of these moms have worked most of their lives outside the home at least part-time.
Career and fertility are prime urban mom issues for the educated/upper-middle class. All springing from the basic generational shift to "family planning," a.k.a when-you-want-it/how-you-want-it baby making. Child-bearing age stretches further and further out toward and beyond 40 (even despite the medical warnings); in the country and the middle states - the reddish/pinkish states - moms are younger (though probably not by much these days). Moms of color all around are younger, too, across social classes. I remember observing (with some discomfort) the prevalence of twins in my former Brooklyn neighborhood (a white/affluent one): older moms, multiple births, good bet of course that these were in-vitro.
Lots of stories to tell and observations to be made about city and country when it comes to family. For me, it's mostly observational, not being a mom myself. I'm keeping an eye particularly on C. & T., whom I've known since we were all in our twenties (I was present when T. proposed to C., got down on one knee - mostly as a joke - at a coffee shop late one night after we'd all gone to a music concert). T. grew up in the midwest and spent all his summers farming. He's also lived in remote parts of the Southwest, as a bachelor. He's definitely an outdoors sort of guy, and has lived in the city now (came in the 80's as a professional musician) about 20 years. With three small children, lower-middle class incomes and a lot of debt, C. & T. are now seriously considering moving back to the midwest, buying a farm, settling out there. But they're pretty torn, they've been living a culture-rich city life for so long now. And they have an adopted son, who is Puerto Rican (they are white), so they are concerned about racial and cultural homogeneity, and overwhelming political conservatism. It will be interesting to witness their process; they'll go out to see a farm for sale over Thanksgiving.
Man, it's hot. Pup's tongue is hanging out and everything. Wonder how the local farmers are doing, whose livelihoods in fact depend on the weather. The arugula and spinach this season perhaps a little wilty, the tomatoes and peppers still coming.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Aurevoir, Merci or "Tous Les Deux"
Forget re-entry shock, I am having exit shock. It took a full three hours – including four very unpleasant airport personnel, a complete re-packing of one bag and partial repacking of another (who knew mustard was a liquid?), the obligatory purchase of a Ziploc bag for dix centimes to protect the planet from my toothpaste and face cream – to get from the first security check-point to the flight gate at aeroport Charles de Gaulle. International travel these days can really suck, man. There’s no other way to say it.
One of the unpleasant four made some comment about “You may do whatever you like in your country, but here…”, as I tried to explain that my ticket was an e-ticket, and thus I was not required to present anything but my passport. Or so I was told. That single your-country-sucks comment set my mood for the entire rest-of-check-in experience, which was doomed, really, once this homme mechant blackballed me, i.e. marked my boarding pass so that at every checkpoint I was singled out for a full bag-and-person search.
I am pooped. I hate the French, and they hate me. We used to be so close, like this. What happened?
“We don’t hate Americans, not at all,” our new friend Pierre assures us. It’s our last night in Paris, and we start talking to Pierre at a sidewalk café, over whiskey and chocolate cake. He is here alone, in town visiting family. He lives in LA, he tells us, with his American wife and daughter. “This time, now, between America and France, it is too bad. But it is just a short time compared to so many years of love affair between these two countries. George Bush has made war against everybody and offended his friends, especially the French. But most French people, they love the Americans, they do not hate them, not at all. We hope that after George Bush, we can repair again our friendship with America.”
We believe Pierre, he seems like an earnest fellow. He tells us that life as a French American, an American Frenchman, is an interesting one. He feels he is able to see the strengths and weaknesses of both nations, both cultures. Somewhat apologetically, he offers his opinions on American weakness, including the fact that only 8% of Americans have passports. Often, he says, he feels unwelcome by Americans he meets who have never left the country, who know little of the world outside the U.S. – especially during travels in the middle states and the South, far from large cities. He concedes that the French can be the same way, especially in rural areas and the South of France.
We are city people, the three of us, sitting here on rue T. in Paris, eating and drinking and talking. We are exchanging stories of travel and mixed cultures (Pierre’s wife is Korean American) and business. We are the fortunate homeless – without a single place to call home, a place where we feel at home. On this night in Paris, sitting at these café tables and sharing our tales, we are, in fact, home. We are privileged in this way, we have chosen it mostly, and we are not complaining; Pierre seems especially happy to be living a life of constant “interest,” as he puts it.
I would guess that the majority of the passported 8% are city-dwellers. Many of them are perhaps immigrants to start. Pierre’s viewpoint is a particular one, and one that I might easily share, given my own life experiences. But: are those of us who move about the world necessarily more broad-minded, more sympathique, in any way wiser than those who stay put?
I was so hoppin-mad at those four airport personnel this morning. Something about that kind of petulance, that staunch soldierly-ness in all of them… indeed, I judge it as a kind of ignorance – a lack of diplomatic ability, of connection-making as opposed to enemy-making, of a penchant for effectiveness coupled with humane-ness. These folk were working strictly by principle.
How does one learn this kind of diplomacy, this wisdom of both/and on the planet? I recall now one of the first pieces of presidential biography that alerted me to George W. Bush’s ineptness for the job: he had limited exposure to foreign countries before taking the office of the Presidency of the United States. We also hear from close advisors and his current biographer Robert Draper that he is the sort of man of surrounds himself with a Circle of the Like-Minded, people who agree with him (or at least pretend to).
At any rate, despite passport demographics, I doubt this is a city-country issue; in the same way that the Blue State/Red State divide is not so simple as it appears. Certainly, you can move about as a sophisticate in a big city like New York completely cloistered and provincial, and you can open your mind and spirit to the multiplicity of the universe as a shopkeeper in Springfield (pick your state) or a Kentucky farmer.
Both/And is, I think, a kind of disposition. Some people got it and some people don’t, and I don’t know that there’s a formula for how you get it or develop it or lose it. It’s related to comfort zones and fear and opportunity and education and marginal-ness; I think on some level it is related to experiences of difficulty or suffering, which spawn empathy, along with the nurturing of the imagination (my plug for arts in education). And yes, travel is good, too. These days, it seems to me, in a world of violent face-off sectarianism, a gifted Both/And kind of leadership (and citizenry) is the only peaceful, progressive, healthful way forward. We need our friends and our love affairs, our "interest," our wisdom, our humane-ness.
(And now, I relinquish my butter knife.)
One of the unpleasant four made some comment about “You may do whatever you like in your country, but here…”, as I tried to explain that my ticket was an e-ticket, and thus I was not required to present anything but my passport. Or so I was told. That single your-country-sucks comment set my mood for the entire rest-of-check-in experience, which was doomed, really, once this homme mechant blackballed me, i.e. marked my boarding pass so that at every checkpoint I was singled out for a full bag-and-person search.
I am pooped. I hate the French, and they hate me. We used to be so close, like this. What happened?
“We don’t hate Americans, not at all,” our new friend Pierre assures us. It’s our last night in Paris, and we start talking to Pierre at a sidewalk café, over whiskey and chocolate cake. He is here alone, in town visiting family. He lives in LA, he tells us, with his American wife and daughter. “This time, now, between America and France, it is too bad. But it is just a short time compared to so many years of love affair between these two countries. George Bush has made war against everybody and offended his friends, especially the French. But most French people, they love the Americans, they do not hate them, not at all. We hope that after George Bush, we can repair again our friendship with America.”
We believe Pierre, he seems like an earnest fellow. He tells us that life as a French American, an American Frenchman, is an interesting one. He feels he is able to see the strengths and weaknesses of both nations, both cultures. Somewhat apologetically, he offers his opinions on American weakness, including the fact that only 8% of Americans have passports. Often, he says, he feels unwelcome by Americans he meets who have never left the country, who know little of the world outside the U.S. – especially during travels in the middle states and the South, far from large cities. He concedes that the French can be the same way, especially in rural areas and the South of France.
We are city people, the three of us, sitting here on rue T. in Paris, eating and drinking and talking. We are exchanging stories of travel and mixed cultures (Pierre’s wife is Korean American) and business. We are the fortunate homeless – without a single place to call home, a place where we feel at home. On this night in Paris, sitting at these café tables and sharing our tales, we are, in fact, home. We are privileged in this way, we have chosen it mostly, and we are not complaining; Pierre seems especially happy to be living a life of constant “interest,” as he puts it.
I would guess that the majority of the passported 8% are city-dwellers. Many of them are perhaps immigrants to start. Pierre’s viewpoint is a particular one, and one that I might easily share, given my own life experiences. But: are those of us who move about the world necessarily more broad-minded, more sympathique, in any way wiser than those who stay put?
I was so hoppin-mad at those four airport personnel this morning. Something about that kind of petulance, that staunch soldierly-ness in all of them… indeed, I judge it as a kind of ignorance – a lack of diplomatic ability, of connection-making as opposed to enemy-making, of a penchant for effectiveness coupled with humane-ness. These folk were working strictly by principle.
How does one learn this kind of diplomacy, this wisdom of both/and on the planet? I recall now one of the first pieces of presidential biography that alerted me to George W. Bush’s ineptness for the job: he had limited exposure to foreign countries before taking the office of the Presidency of the United States. We also hear from close advisors and his current biographer Robert Draper that he is the sort of man of surrounds himself with a Circle of the Like-Minded, people who agree with him (or at least pretend to).
At any rate, despite passport demographics, I doubt this is a city-country issue; in the same way that the Blue State/Red State divide is not so simple as it appears. Certainly, you can move about as a sophisticate in a big city like New York completely cloistered and provincial, and you can open your mind and spirit to the multiplicity of the universe as a shopkeeper in Springfield (pick your state) or a Kentucky farmer.
Both/And is, I think, a kind of disposition. Some people got it and some people don’t, and I don’t know that there’s a formula for how you get it or develop it or lose it. It’s related to comfort zones and fear and opportunity and education and marginal-ness; I think on some level it is related to experiences of difficulty or suffering, which spawn empathy, along with the nurturing of the imagination (my plug for arts in education). And yes, travel is good, too. These days, it seems to me, in a world of violent face-off sectarianism, a gifted Both/And kind of leadership (and citizenry) is the only peaceful, progressive, healthful way forward. We need our friends and our love affairs, our "interest," our wisdom, our humane-ness.
(And now, I relinquish my butter knife.)
Sunday, October 14, 2007
An Orchid Grows in Beaune (Part 2)
So last night, it all sort of caught up to us. You can’t really escape your life, the realities of your how’s and why’s – not even on vacation. Over dinner (Thai food, a decided break from the rich cuisine Bourgignone), we got into a bit of a melee over matters of money, personal and global. Being in France, we of course notice a different attitude toward the world and one’s place in it, toward values which we Americans take for granted, toward globalism and capitalism and international politics, and the notions of profit and progress in general. A Tunisian shopkeeper in Paris – well-spoken in English – had engaged us in a late-night discussion about French complacency v. Chinese industriousness. The Chinese, he argued, are willing to do what is necessary to progress, to move forward economically. More and more, they are being brought in to foreign countries to build and produce; they are seen as the best bang for the buck, they are willing to move and adjust to a new culture. The French, on the other hand, are staid, aloof, nostalgic. They love all things of the past, they are not interested in participating in the future, the way the future is going. They will – they are – falling behind.
At dinner, J. argues for free-market capitalism and globalism. It’s what there is, it’s the only path of innovation and progress. Competition is the driving force of humanity; laziness looms as our downfall. I am here, he argues, enjoying this vacation, these experiences, because a multi-national corporation has offered me credit, at an interest rate I couldn’t refuse. Company X competed for my business and got it. The credit market makes the world go ‘round.
Yes, yes, we are all complicit… but still…it’s predatory, I argue. I have been snookered by credit card companies before. With this particular card, I made three different phone calls to three different customer service agents, documenting the terms over and over, presenting each one with different scenarios, to make sure I fully understood the terms. This, after receiving in the mail a 10-page document (tiny print) describing, supposedly, terms and changes in terms and disclosures. “You need a f*&%ing PhD in economics to understand all this,” I said at the time. I was mad then, and I’m mad now, talking about it. (I am gesticulating and spitting and the madame Thailandaise keeps coming over and smiling and asking if we are all right, as if I am going to murder J. in cold blood with a butter knife at any moment.) I am an educated, middle-class, fairly critical thinker, and there’s no WAY I am going to understand the terms of a credit card document. And the folks defaulting in the sub-prime mortgage market, they also got snookered; their lenders knew damn well that a critical mass would default, that they were borrowing beyond their means and it would catch up to them. The structures of the lending packages were designed with that percentage of default built in, part of the business plan; or else they never would have offered them so freely. Health insurance terms are similar: people profiting off of other people’s vulnerability and limited means – not incidentally, but by design. (At this moment especially, as a foreigner in a land where I speak the language not-quite-fluently, I recognize how vulnerable to fine print are those in the US without fluent English-language skills.) This is progress? This is the American ideal? Capitalism in all its glory? Corporate profit momentum and get-up-n-go towards what exactly?
(Grotesquely, it occurs to me sometimes that George W. Bush does in fact intend for us all to put food on our families.)
Ok, so what’re you gonna do about it? J. challenges (holding his own butter knife). This is his way. If you don’t like something, fix it.
No, I think. It’s too big, and I’m too tired. Corporate message and consumer hegemony honestly wear me out. (I once had something like a panic attack – short of breath, dizziness, emotional surge – standing at the foot of the Great Wall of Utensils at Bed, Bath & Beyond. What was I looking for? A spatula maybe? Whatever it was, there was a Great Wall of them, all over-priced, and none of which really fit what I needed). Maybe I can get up the gumption to holler at customer service people on the phone now and again (poor Indian souls, earning their wage, they don’t know what's got me all riled up), but then what? Class action suit? Economic literacy courses? Nah. I’m moving to France, like John Berger and R. Crumb. Or Canada. I’m leaving the city, the States, the whole damn thing. Am I just lazy? Well…
No, I don’t think that’s it, quite. Generational malaise? Likely. Too old to be a Deanie Baby, too young for a Baby Boomer. I want to make a difference, but a real one, which somehow to me means a small one. It’s all I can really envision, in the face of so much I cannot get a grip on.
The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims.
--Emerson
I’ll keep up with the news. I’ll go to the polls. I’m donating. I will live a minimal-footprint life in the country. I will recycle and drive a gas-efficient car and grow droopy plants in the Bronx. I will always aim to be kind. Boy, it’s not much to speak of, is it.
At dinner, J. argues for free-market capitalism and globalism. It’s what there is, it’s the only path of innovation and progress. Competition is the driving force of humanity; laziness looms as our downfall. I am here, he argues, enjoying this vacation, these experiences, because a multi-national corporation has offered me credit, at an interest rate I couldn’t refuse. Company X competed for my business and got it. The credit market makes the world go ‘round.
Yes, yes, we are all complicit… but still…it’s predatory, I argue. I have been snookered by credit card companies before. With this particular card, I made three different phone calls to three different customer service agents, documenting the terms over and over, presenting each one with different scenarios, to make sure I fully understood the terms. This, after receiving in the mail a 10-page document (tiny print) describing, supposedly, terms and changes in terms and disclosures. “You need a f*&%ing PhD in economics to understand all this,” I said at the time. I was mad then, and I’m mad now, talking about it. (I am gesticulating and spitting and the madame Thailandaise keeps coming over and smiling and asking if we are all right, as if I am going to murder J. in cold blood with a butter knife at any moment.) I am an educated, middle-class, fairly critical thinker, and there’s no WAY I am going to understand the terms of a credit card document. And the folks defaulting in the sub-prime mortgage market, they also got snookered; their lenders knew damn well that a critical mass would default, that they were borrowing beyond their means and it would catch up to them. The structures of the lending packages were designed with that percentage of default built in, part of the business plan; or else they never would have offered them so freely. Health insurance terms are similar: people profiting off of other people’s vulnerability and limited means – not incidentally, but by design. (At this moment especially, as a foreigner in a land where I speak the language not-quite-fluently, I recognize how vulnerable to fine print are those in the US without fluent English-language skills.) This is progress? This is the American ideal? Capitalism in all its glory? Corporate profit momentum and get-up-n-go towards what exactly?
(Grotesquely, it occurs to me sometimes that George W. Bush does in fact intend for us all to put food on our families.)
Ok, so what’re you gonna do about it? J. challenges (holding his own butter knife). This is his way. If you don’t like something, fix it.
No, I think. It’s too big, and I’m too tired. Corporate message and consumer hegemony honestly wear me out. (I once had something like a panic attack – short of breath, dizziness, emotional surge – standing at the foot of the Great Wall of Utensils at Bed, Bath & Beyond. What was I looking for? A spatula maybe? Whatever it was, there was a Great Wall of them, all over-priced, and none of which really fit what I needed). Maybe I can get up the gumption to holler at customer service people on the phone now and again (poor Indian souls, earning their wage, they don’t know what's got me all riled up), but then what? Class action suit? Economic literacy courses? Nah. I’m moving to France, like John Berger and R. Crumb. Or Canada. I’m leaving the city, the States, the whole damn thing. Am I just lazy? Well…
No, I don’t think that’s it, quite. Generational malaise? Likely. Too old to be a Deanie Baby, too young for a Baby Boomer. I want to make a difference, but a real one, which somehow to me means a small one. It’s all I can really envision, in the face of so much I cannot get a grip on.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
--Annie Dillard
--Annie Dillard
The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims.
--Emerson
I’ll keep up with the news. I’ll go to the polls. I’m donating. I will live a minimal-footprint life in the country. I will recycle and drive a gas-efficient car and grow droopy plants in the Bronx. I will always aim to be kind. Boy, it’s not much to speak of, is it.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
An Orchid Grows in Beaune (Part 1)
Four or five of them, actually. The moth orchid has plentiful blossoms, the others have gone dormant. I look up from the breakfast table and notice them only after I’ve had my croissant et café noir. Prior to that there has been much else to observe here in the 200 year-old breakfast room of Mme. Rousseau.
I found Mme. Rousseau and her hotel bon marché in a couple of different guide books. Beaune is an expensive tourist town, and hers is the best bargain around. For 40E a night, you (and your traveling partner) get a lovely country room, spacious and furnished with family antiques (sans douche – if you’d like a shower, it’s 3E extra), which opens onto a courtyard jardin; along with le petit dejeuner – a homemade croissant, a large carafe du café, une tartine avec beurre et confiture – served cheerfully each morning by Mme herself, who I would guess has somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 years behind her. Mme is cheerful, yes, but taciturn. She’s got a definite twinkle in her eye; you can tell she’s got a story.
Of course I scope out all of her plants. In the courtyard she is growing mostly potted flowers, and I marvel at the mixture of sun-and-shade-lovers: hollyhock and begonias, dahlias and a number of foliage plants. She’s also growing a lemon tree – incroyable! – in the center, out of an old tin pale.
We are here in Burgundy – wine country – for two days, after three days in Paris. City and country, country and city. I was so happy to see the orchids; travel fatigue had begun to set in, I’d been away from my writing brain for too long. Seeing those plants made me perk up and reminded me of something… something basic about living things and their environments, their ability to adapt (or not), the work of nurture and health, seasons of bloom and dormancy. Modern life seems to crowd out these basic ideas, squeezes them out of one’s bloodstream in favor of always-on entertainment and ambition and consumption. It’s a daily endeavor to dwell in a different kind of space.
I don’t know why we’re here exactly. No good reason, really, unless you believe in travel for travel’s sake (which I do less and less). We made the plans a while back, not very well-considered, and beyond our means (i.e. borrowed credit). At this moment, seeing the world from a non-American perspective, I can think of a hundred better reasons for spending this money – Presidential underdogs, Burma, family needs. Somehow, though, it seemed worthwhile at the time.
Alors... we are here, we are pilgrims of the planet, we are drinking it in, so to speak. We are ingesting and processing the gifts of exploration, of stimuli etrangers; and we are eating quite well, of course...
(This post to be continued...)
I found Mme. Rousseau and her hotel bon marché in a couple of different guide books. Beaune is an expensive tourist town, and hers is the best bargain around. For 40E a night, you (and your traveling partner) get a lovely country room, spacious and furnished with family antiques (sans douche – if you’d like a shower, it’s 3E extra), which opens onto a courtyard jardin; along with le petit dejeuner – a homemade croissant, a large carafe du café, une tartine avec beurre et confiture – served cheerfully each morning by Mme herself, who I would guess has somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 years behind her. Mme is cheerful, yes, but taciturn. She’s got a definite twinkle in her eye; you can tell she’s got a story.
The house may be older than 200 years, but it’s been in la famille Rousseau for that long. Mme’s parents started up the hotel 50 years ago, and she’s continued it, along with a large garden, voluminous houseplants, at least two cats, and beaucoup des oiseaux – cooing and chirping upstairs. The paint and wallpaper are peeling here and there, but all the appliances are new and top-notch. And Mme seems quite adept with technology; I made my reservation by email and found directions on her Web site.
Of course I scope out all of her plants. In the courtyard she is growing mostly potted flowers, and I marvel at the mixture of sun-and-shade-lovers: hollyhock and begonias, dahlias and a number of foliage plants. She’s also growing a lemon tree – incroyable! – in the center, out of an old tin pale.
We are here in Burgundy – wine country – for two days, after three days in Paris. City and country, country and city. I was so happy to see the orchids; travel fatigue had begun to set in, I’d been away from my writing brain for too long. Seeing those plants made me perk up and reminded me of something… something basic about living things and their environments, their ability to adapt (or not), the work of nurture and health, seasons of bloom and dormancy. Modern life seems to crowd out these basic ideas, squeezes them out of one’s bloodstream in favor of always-on entertainment and ambition and consumption. It’s a daily endeavor to dwell in a different kind of space.
I don’t know why we’re here exactly. No good reason, really, unless you believe in travel for travel’s sake (which I do less and less). We made the plans a while back, not very well-considered, and beyond our means (i.e. borrowed credit). At this moment, seeing the world from a non-American perspective, I can think of a hundred better reasons for spending this money – Presidential underdogs, Burma, family needs. Somehow, though, it seemed worthwhile at the time.
Alors... we are here, we are pilgrims of the planet, we are drinking it in, so to speak. We are ingesting and processing the gifts of exploration, of stimuli etrangers; and we are eating quite well, of course...
Friday, October 5, 2007
The Super
S. the Super and J. have developed a "special relationship." Sort of.
S. calls himself "The Boss." He likes to strut around the block like he owns the place, but really, we are learning, people laugh at him. He was hired as our Super, but he pays other guys from the block to do his dirty work. Or we think he pays them, it's a little unclear. At any rate, there's a parade of guys who supposedly "work" for S., they're in the building all the time, which is a little... I dunno. One of them leers at me, it's a little creepy.
When we first moved in, S. was calling this place "My Building," and showing off to his friends and wife. The last few months, though, seems like S. is falling down on the job. Things have been sloppy, untended; and he's drunk more and more often. They fired him across the street at the warehouse where he used to pick up hours. The last couple weeks, he's been asking J. for money - "Five-dollars, man, to get some beer." Sometimes when I'm in the basement in the morning - (laundry, watering plants) he emerges, half-naked, from one of the unoccupied spaces down there: his house is down the street, but he seems to have moved in.
Early on, our landlord had him repair the ceiling in our bathroom where we had a leak, and also paint it. He was here every day for 4 days, then disappeared, then came back a week later, then finally finished, left a mess, and the paint job was really terrible. We ended up taking photos, sending it to the landlord, and he was pretty pissed. He had someone else come back and re-do it. Meantime, J. tried to explain to S. what was wrong with the paint job - look at this, man, yellow paint all over the fixtures and the ceiling; you gotta use tape. And you gotta clean your brushes after each coat, man. Gotta take care of your tools. S. didn't really give a shit. He's like a little boy, he doesn't want to be told what to do, he wants the quick and easy way out of everything. And always the victim.
J. can't stand this. J. is a natural coach and nurturer. He's got always-on paternal instincts. He's tough and sympathetic at the same time. He's been there, been on his own most of his life, never had money or attentive adults around to help. He gets S.'s mentality, so he can't leave it alone, he's always trying to engage in some kind of ass-kicking duel. He's given S. his business card and said, If you need money, if you need a job, come to my office. But S. never leaves the block. J. is serious about it, i.e. if S. takes that bit of initiative, if he shows up at his office in Manhattan, makes the effort to see what else is out there in the world and what skill he might be able to acquire, then he'll work with him. But S. won't leave the block. This is his kingdom.
Last night, S. was at it again, asking for five bucks, the two of them dueling it out as always. J. didn't part with his money, and we walked around the block with the pup. When we got back, S. was sending one of his minions off with 10 bucks, to buy beer. "Look a dis," he says to J., gloating about his score. Now S. wants J. to get a job for his daughter-in-law. "Tell her to call me at this number," J. says. But S. won't hear it. "Come here, come talk to her, help her out, you're right here, man, do something," he says, pulling J. down the street. It's 11:30 at night.
It feels kinda hopeless, but S. and J. do have some kind of mutual understanding. S. keeps asking because he knows that J. does actually give a shit. Last month, S. needed to get his scooter fixed, so J. loaded it up onto his truck and drove S. up to his mechanic-friend somewhere up north. S. gets pissed when J. challenges him to "put up" (and lately he's getting more and more pissed, maybe because he's more and more drunk). I foresee a blowout soon, maybe a chilly period. But it's a long road... in general. We keep at it, all of us. In our own ways.
S. calls himself "The Boss." He likes to strut around the block like he owns the place, but really, we are learning, people laugh at him. He was hired as our Super, but he pays other guys from the block to do his dirty work. Or we think he pays them, it's a little unclear. At any rate, there's a parade of guys who supposedly "work" for S., they're in the building all the time, which is a little... I dunno. One of them leers at me, it's a little creepy.
When we first moved in, S. was calling this place "My Building," and showing off to his friends and wife. The last few months, though, seems like S. is falling down on the job. Things have been sloppy, untended; and he's drunk more and more often. They fired him across the street at the warehouse where he used to pick up hours. The last couple weeks, he's been asking J. for money - "Five-dollars, man, to get some beer." Sometimes when I'm in the basement in the morning - (laundry, watering plants) he emerges, half-naked, from one of the unoccupied spaces down there: his house is down the street, but he seems to have moved in.
Early on, our landlord had him repair the ceiling in our bathroom where we had a leak, and also paint it. He was here every day for 4 days, then disappeared, then came back a week later, then finally finished, left a mess, and the paint job was really terrible. We ended up taking photos, sending it to the landlord, and he was pretty pissed. He had someone else come back and re-do it. Meantime, J. tried to explain to S. what was wrong with the paint job - look at this, man, yellow paint all over the fixtures and the ceiling; you gotta use tape. And you gotta clean your brushes after each coat, man. Gotta take care of your tools. S. didn't really give a shit. He's like a little boy, he doesn't want to be told what to do, he wants the quick and easy way out of everything. And always the victim.
J. can't stand this. J. is a natural coach and nurturer. He's got always-on paternal instincts. He's tough and sympathetic at the same time. He's been there, been on his own most of his life, never had money or attentive adults around to help. He gets S.'s mentality, so he can't leave it alone, he's always trying to engage in some kind of ass-kicking duel. He's given S. his business card and said, If you need money, if you need a job, come to my office. But S. never leaves the block. J. is serious about it, i.e. if S. takes that bit of initiative, if he shows up at his office in Manhattan, makes the effort to see what else is out there in the world and what skill he might be able to acquire, then he'll work with him. But S. won't leave the block. This is his kingdom.
Last night, S. was at it again, asking for five bucks, the two of them dueling it out as always. J. didn't part with his money, and we walked around the block with the pup. When we got back, S. was sending one of his minions off with 10 bucks, to buy beer. "Look a dis," he says to J., gloating about his score. Now S. wants J. to get a job for his daughter-in-law. "Tell her to call me at this number," J. says. But S. won't hear it. "Come here, come talk to her, help her out, you're right here, man, do something," he says, pulling J. down the street. It's 11:30 at night.
It feels kinda hopeless, but S. and J. do have some kind of mutual understanding. S. keeps asking because he knows that J. does actually give a shit. Last month, S. needed to get his scooter fixed, so J. loaded it up onto his truck and drove S. up to his mechanic-friend somewhere up north. S. gets pissed when J. challenges him to "put up" (and lately he's getting more and more pissed, maybe because he's more and more drunk). I foresee a blowout soon, maybe a chilly period. But it's a long road... in general. We keep at it, all of us. In our own ways.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Room for the Weak Ones
You'll never raise that one; her color ain't good. If the good Lord takes her it'll be for the best. There's too many poor children on this earth already; and no room for the weak ones.
Don't say that. It's not better to die; who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating... it gets no sun and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth; and it's strong. Its hard struggle to live is making it strong. -Katie Nolan, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I'm about halfway through the audio book of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - this blog's namesake. There's a relief in listening to it - an earnest, heartfelt tale of a young girl (whose color ain't good) growing up poor in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Nothing ironic or clever about it, no metafictions or cynical self-awareness, no multimedia, no armoured satire. Just a story, about a girl and her family, trying to survive, seeing the world from the bottom up, and finding beauty - hard-earned - wherever she can.
Somerset Maugham's Willie Ashenden said it so well, so painfully well, in the quote from Cakes and Ale (see the sidebar on this page). Sincerity is surely a liability in a world governed and shaped by clever and powerful hustlers. We admire people for their savvy, almost as if savvy were the new good. I find myself, in considering the best man or woman for the Presidency of the United States, worried for my preferred candidate, Barack Obama - that he is too idealistic, not seasoned enough (i.e. can he play the game?). Poor fella, he is awfully, awfully sincere. In a current-day thesaurus (hey, someone should do this, now that would be marketable), it might say SINCERE: antonym ELECTABLE.
A tree grows in Brooklyn. Francie makes her way. Ella the orchid died. The red light just went on on the HEPA air filter in the apartment here in the Bronx; we took it apart and cleaned the filter (filthy!), but the light won't go off. Where is that owner's manual?
Baby Francie's color ain't good, but she survives, against the odds. Francie's mother Katie has her own ambitions: to raise her children for a different life, a life beyond the poor, dead-end life she's known. Katie's mother, a German immigrant and a kind of old-world sage, tells her the secret: books (Shakespeare and the Bible, specifically); learning, cultivating the mind, the imagination. Being able to see through and beyond the material facts of one's circumstances. A mind and a soul for beauty - this is the one thing that can raise a person up and out of circumstances which seem, to the physical eye, insurmountable.
Sincerely, I live this every day. Here in the Bronx, I see garbage, I see hustling and drug-dealing, I see the dirty poor, I see environmental injustice like you wouldn't believe. But what else? What else do I see? The pansies are weak and floppy. Lavendar and butterfly bush are holding on. Some people are recycling, some people are throwing banana peels and dog shit in with the mixed paper. J. from upstairs, who first took in the stray pup who now belongs to G., asked sincerely yesterday how she (the pup) is doing. K. the Bird Man came around the other night, sheepish but seemingly conciliatory. The backyard is taking shape, on the cheap, kind of ugly, but it's something. We are, as of this week, overrun with (small, black) mice.
If I am laughable, if I am absurd and ephemeral and a jest... then along with this struggle, I suppose I must learn to laugh at myself as well. Or else get thick-skinned. But like Francie, and like Ella, my temperament is ultimately more the delicate orchid than the steel magnolia. "Writers are missing a layer of skin," my poet-friend B. says. As many-a- hard-nosed-NewYorker might quip: it's the cost of doing business.
Don't say that. It's not better to die; who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating... it gets no sun and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth; and it's strong. Its hard struggle to live is making it strong. -Katie Nolan, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I'm about halfway through the audio book of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - this blog's namesake. There's a relief in listening to it - an earnest, heartfelt tale of a young girl (whose color ain't good) growing up poor in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Nothing ironic or clever about it, no metafictions or cynical self-awareness, no multimedia, no armoured satire. Just a story, about a girl and her family, trying to survive, seeing the world from the bottom up, and finding beauty - hard-earned - wherever she can.
Somerset Maugham's Willie Ashenden said it so well, so painfully well, in the quote from Cakes and Ale (see the sidebar on this page). Sincerity is surely a liability in a world governed and shaped by clever and powerful hustlers. We admire people for their savvy, almost as if savvy were the new good. I find myself, in considering the best man or woman for the Presidency of the United States, worried for my preferred candidate, Barack Obama - that he is too idealistic, not seasoned enough (i.e. can he play the game?). Poor fella, he is awfully, awfully sincere. In a current-day thesaurus (hey, someone should do this, now that would be marketable), it might say SINCERE: antonym ELECTABLE.
A tree grows in Brooklyn. Francie makes her way. Ella the orchid died. The red light just went on on the HEPA air filter in the apartment here in the Bronx; we took it apart and cleaned the filter (filthy!), but the light won't go off. Where is that owner's manual?
Baby Francie's color ain't good, but she survives, against the odds. Francie's mother Katie has her own ambitions: to raise her children for a different life, a life beyond the poor, dead-end life she's known. Katie's mother, a German immigrant and a kind of old-world sage, tells her the secret: books (Shakespeare and the Bible, specifically); learning, cultivating the mind, the imagination. Being able to see through and beyond the material facts of one's circumstances. A mind and a soul for beauty - this is the one thing that can raise a person up and out of circumstances which seem, to the physical eye, insurmountable.
Sincerely, I live this every day. Here in the Bronx, I see garbage, I see hustling and drug-dealing, I see the dirty poor, I see environmental injustice like you wouldn't believe. But what else? What else do I see? The pansies are weak and floppy. Lavendar and butterfly bush are holding on. Some people are recycling, some people are throwing banana peels and dog shit in with the mixed paper. J. from upstairs, who first took in the stray pup who now belongs to G., asked sincerely yesterday how she (the pup) is doing. K. the Bird Man came around the other night, sheepish but seemingly conciliatory. The backyard is taking shape, on the cheap, kind of ugly, but it's something. We are, as of this week, overrun with (small, black) mice.
If I am laughable, if I am absurd and ephemeral and a jest... then along with this struggle, I suppose I must learn to laugh at myself as well. Or else get thick-skinned. But like Francie, and like Ella, my temperament is ultimately more the delicate orchid than the steel magnolia. "Writers are missing a layer of skin," my poet-friend B. says. As many-a- hard-nosed-NewYorker might quip: it's the cost of doing business.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
The Claims of Reasonable Gloom (In Refusal of)
Time for a poem, no doubt. Less words, greater beauty, deeper meaning (than all my yadda yadda).
This from Denise Levertov, writing about a place which is a kind of "country city" - Seattle - and where I lived for eight years. (This goes out to Seattle compadres BMD, LN-R, and, if you're reading, TPN.)
Celebration
Brilliant, this day - a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadows cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green -
whether it's ferns or lichen or needles
or impatient points of bud on spindly bushes -
greener than ever before.
And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for blessing,
a festive rite, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.
This from Denise Levertov, writing about a place which is a kind of "country city" - Seattle - and where I lived for eight years. (This goes out to Seattle compadres BMD, LN-R, and, if you're reading, TPN.)
Celebration
Brilliant, this day - a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadows cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green -
whether it's ferns or lichen or needles
or impatient points of bud on spindly bushes -
greener than ever before.
And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for blessing,
a festive rite, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.
Monday, October 1, 2007
My Ambition: Part 2
I always know the root state of my mind and soul by how I feel, what runs through my head, that first moment when I wake in the morning. (It has to be the first moment, not the second, not the third... because by that time, the active mind has already taken over, has overridden what lingers in the unconscious.) Lately, I've been waking with a sense of lethargy, mixed with mid-grade anxiety about productivity, and time passing too quickly. The feeling is deceptively benign, could be easily interpreted as a simple, industrious "to-do" mechanism, a daily resolve to counter entropy - like a chipper ‘50’s housewife, exclaiming, "My goodness! So much to do, so little time!"
But that anxiety takes hold at a deeper level for me. I know this, because on the drive out here to the country, it nearly felled me, manifesting in the oh-so-unoriginal phenomenon of road rage. I was a madwoman - literally, fuming mad - and a near-menace (honking, zig-zagging, flashing high-beams, hollering... Why is everyone driving so f&%@#ing slow today?!!! It was not pretty). Poor pup, huddled in the back seat, didn't know what possessed his mom. Luckily, there was someone on the road even madder than me, going 85 instead of 79, and the cop pulled that guy over right in front of me.
The positive spin on my rage is that I just needed to get here, because this is my place of work. In the city, I do what I need to do to earn my keep; this is not, to me, real work, and often feels like busy-work. There are a multitude of distractions - blessings, too, like friends and good entertainment - but things which suck away energy and time for work. Here in the country, I work. I make things with words, I access and exercise my best (hardest-to-access) intelligence and creative focus; things stir all week long, and when I am not able to get in there, into the work, to churn and externalize, get the words on the page... Time in the city can be very constipating in that sense. And so, sometimes, that two-hour drive is like holding it (indulge me in the scatological analogies), near to bursting. I am reminded of one time when I was actually holding it, sitting in the car, stuck in gridlock traffic, no businesses or gas stations in sight, and I've never had to go so badly in my life (probably contends with yesterday for most intense road rage episode; maybe worse, because of the physical pain).
Which brings me to the negative spin: I am a wailing infant, throwing a tantrum, frustrated by my own discomfort and making things worse with my undisciplined anger. Essentially shitting all over the place, and myself, to make a point.
Ahem. Anyway. There is also physical work to be done out here in the country, which nags at me as well, when I am absent from it. I know the lawn needs mowing, the plants need either watering or putting to bed. Things are dying down now, and the mess of deadness calls for my kindness and attention. The furnace needs servicing, time to stock up the fire wood. The leaves and pine needles have begun falling in earnest, so out with the rake. And we need a good plan to keep the pipes from freezing this year, to avoid a bursting situation (C. recommends heated tape).
What else? Oh, yes. That nagging ambition for making beauty here - physical beauty, that is. Since August, I've been dreaming about a legion of non-vegetable plantings. Two lilacs - one tree form, one bush form (maybe one purple and one white), bulbs for early spring (tulips, daffodils, grape hyacinth), hostas and bleeding hearts in the back where it's shady. Yes, indeed: I will make a home, a place of loveliness and living growth; I will do this all by myself.
I am in the midst of reading and digesting (and writing my own response to) an essay by Donald Hall, called "Poetry & Ambition," sent to me by L., who reads OITB regularly. DH has much to say about today's so-called ambition ("petty ambition"), about the state of contemporary poetry (the "McPoem”) and the circus-like pursuit of fame and publication. As the question of ambition, "My Ambition," swims around in my muddied head; and as I begin to unwind from all that angst, the back-up of work, the baby-artist's tantrum; I recognize that ambition, true ambition, which DH describes (quoting the sculptor Henry Moore) as pursuit of the unattainable, an objective which is unreachable, is of course ultimately a good, and a privilege. The opportunity to set one's own goals, and to set them further out than what is easy, what gratifies instantly - this is a gift, something unearned, to be cherished and stewarded and cultivated. "If our goal remains unattainable, then failure must be standard," DH writes. And, "We fail, we all fail, we fail all our lives" (from an earlier essay called "Ballad of the Republic").
There is work to do, and if we are "properly ambitious," the work is impossible. "To pursue the unattainable for eighty-five years, like Henry Moore, may imply a certain temperament," DH admits. More often than I'd prefer, I feel my temperament does not quite suit; despair (along with road-rage-inciting frustration) hovers and looms.
But I suspect despair is not a result of “proper” ambition, but rather ambition which is fatally mis-directed. The goal is not publication, the goal is The Writing Life, i.e. giving oneself fully to the work of crafting, as DH would say, words that last. And for me, right now, pursuing publication is a kind of necessary evil (the pursuit seems to me evil, less so than publication itself) towards achieving a more supported, consistent writing life - central, not peripheral, and significantly less shared with the busy-work.
Publication is also, for better or worse, today's entrée into the proverbial community of writers, the world body of literary voices. For this - this active participation, this platform for ideas and sharing of one's developing and hard-earned vision - I do have ambition. To a degree, I feel this as deeply and truly as - dare I say it - a calling, a vocation. And to the degree that you all who read OITB have encouraged me in pursuit of this vocation, I thank you sincerely; because this work, this Life Work (referring to DH's wonderful book here, of course) is damn impossible.
Now back to the moment of waking: I woke this morning thinking clearly and distinctly about writing this post. I woke in gratitude for the work ahead and the time & space to do it. I woke ready to work, and to make everything I can out of my day. I woke happy about the color of the paint on my walls (a bold red-orange which I inherited and is now growing on me). I woke with some measure of ambition, untormented. I guess you could say it took about 18 hours, but I've cleared out my backed-up system - not completely, of course, but just enough. On arrival yesterday, I went straight for the physical work: the lawn is raked and mowed (and is slowing its growth, nature's grace); the porch plants watered, trimmed back, composted; four loads of laundry done (this is what I mean by backup); bags of cow manure unloaded from the truck and ready for the lilac planting, when it happens. You get into the work, you just dig in (literally, in this case), and the priorities begin to untangle themselves, make themselves clear - what you will do today, what you will do tomorrow, what is likely impossible in both the long and short runs, but will remain, as ever, in your sights. The lilacs and the bulbs can wait until later in the month; the shade plantings until the spring. The appointment for the furnace service has been made, we'll chop and stack firewood next week; today, I wear layers to keep warm.
Onward, then. The hours are before me, the impossible awaits.
But that anxiety takes hold at a deeper level for me. I know this, because on the drive out here to the country, it nearly felled me, manifesting in the oh-so-unoriginal phenomenon of road rage. I was a madwoman - literally, fuming mad - and a near-menace (honking, zig-zagging, flashing high-beams, hollering... Why is everyone driving so f&%@#ing slow today?!!! It was not pretty). Poor pup, huddled in the back seat, didn't know what possessed his mom. Luckily, there was someone on the road even madder than me, going 85 instead of 79, and the cop pulled that guy over right in front of me.
The positive spin on my rage is that I just needed to get here, because this is my place of work. In the city, I do what I need to do to earn my keep; this is not, to me, real work, and often feels like busy-work. There are a multitude of distractions - blessings, too, like friends and good entertainment - but things which suck away energy and time for work. Here in the country, I work. I make things with words, I access and exercise my best (hardest-to-access) intelligence and creative focus; things stir all week long, and when I am not able to get in there, into the work, to churn and externalize, get the words on the page... Time in the city can be very constipating in that sense. And so, sometimes, that two-hour drive is like holding it (indulge me in the scatological analogies), near to bursting. I am reminded of one time when I was actually holding it, sitting in the car, stuck in gridlock traffic, no businesses or gas stations in sight, and I've never had to go so badly in my life (probably contends with yesterday for most intense road rage episode; maybe worse, because of the physical pain).
Which brings me to the negative spin: I am a wailing infant, throwing a tantrum, frustrated by my own discomfort and making things worse with my undisciplined anger. Essentially shitting all over the place, and myself, to make a point.
Ahem. Anyway. There is also physical work to be done out here in the country, which nags at me as well, when I am absent from it. I know the lawn needs mowing, the plants need either watering or putting to bed. Things are dying down now, and the mess of deadness calls for my kindness and attention. The furnace needs servicing, time to stock up the fire wood. The leaves and pine needles have begun falling in earnest, so out with the rake. And we need a good plan to keep the pipes from freezing this year, to avoid a bursting situation (C. recommends heated tape).
What else? Oh, yes. That nagging ambition for making beauty here - physical beauty, that is. Since August, I've been dreaming about a legion of non-vegetable plantings. Two lilacs - one tree form, one bush form (maybe one purple and one white), bulbs for early spring (tulips, daffodils, grape hyacinth), hostas and bleeding hearts in the back where it's shady. Yes, indeed: I will make a home, a place of loveliness and living growth; I will do this all by myself.
I am in the midst of reading and digesting (and writing my own response to) an essay by Donald Hall, called "Poetry & Ambition," sent to me by L., who reads OITB regularly. DH has much to say about today's so-called ambition ("petty ambition"), about the state of contemporary poetry (the "McPoem”) and the circus-like pursuit of fame and publication. As the question of ambition, "My Ambition," swims around in my muddied head; and as I begin to unwind from all that angst, the back-up of work, the baby-artist's tantrum; I recognize that ambition, true ambition, which DH describes (quoting the sculptor Henry Moore) as pursuit of the unattainable, an objective which is unreachable, is of course ultimately a good, and a privilege. The opportunity to set one's own goals, and to set them further out than what is easy, what gratifies instantly - this is a gift, something unearned, to be cherished and stewarded and cultivated. "If our goal remains unattainable, then failure must be standard," DH writes. And, "We fail, we all fail, we fail all our lives" (from an earlier essay called "Ballad of the Republic").
There is work to do, and if we are "properly ambitious," the work is impossible. "To pursue the unattainable for eighty-five years, like Henry Moore, may imply a certain temperament," DH admits. More often than I'd prefer, I feel my temperament does not quite suit; despair (along with road-rage-inciting frustration) hovers and looms.
But I suspect despair is not a result of “proper” ambition, but rather ambition which is fatally mis-directed. The goal is not publication, the goal is The Writing Life, i.e. giving oneself fully to the work of crafting, as DH would say, words that last. And for me, right now, pursuing publication is a kind of necessary evil (the pursuit seems to me evil, less so than publication itself) towards achieving a more supported, consistent writing life - central, not peripheral, and significantly less shared with the busy-work.
Publication is also, for better or worse, today's entrée into the proverbial community of writers, the world body of literary voices. For this - this active participation, this platform for ideas and sharing of one's developing and hard-earned vision - I do have ambition. To a degree, I feel this as deeply and truly as - dare I say it - a calling, a vocation. And to the degree that you all who read OITB have encouraged me in pursuit of this vocation, I thank you sincerely; because this work, this Life Work (referring to DH's wonderful book here, of course) is damn impossible.
Now back to the moment of waking: I woke this morning thinking clearly and distinctly about writing this post. I woke in gratitude for the work ahead and the time & space to do it. I woke ready to work, and to make everything I can out of my day. I woke happy about the color of the paint on my walls (a bold red-orange which I inherited and is now growing on me). I woke with some measure of ambition, untormented. I guess you could say it took about 18 hours, but I've cleared out my backed-up system - not completely, of course, but just enough. On arrival yesterday, I went straight for the physical work: the lawn is raked and mowed (and is slowing its growth, nature's grace); the porch plants watered, trimmed back, composted; four loads of laundry done (this is what I mean by backup); bags of cow manure unloaded from the truck and ready for the lilac planting, when it happens. You get into the work, you just dig in (literally, in this case), and the priorities begin to untangle themselves, make themselves clear - what you will do today, what you will do tomorrow, what is likely impossible in both the long and short runs, but will remain, as ever, in your sights. The lilacs and the bulbs can wait until later in the month; the shade plantings until the spring. The appointment for the furnace service has been made, we'll chop and stack firewood next week; today, I wear layers to keep warm.
Onward, then. The hours are before me, the impossible awaits.
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