An Orchid Grows in the Bronx

The Walk

2009-01-02T06:59:00.000-08:00

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance--

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind on our faces.

Rainier Maria Rilke (Robert Bly, trans.)
"The Walk"

The daily walk with the pup does involve a sunny hill in the distance; and it would not be stretching too far to say it has an inner light. Our time, the walk. "What we feel" is so often not what is, or only a surface layer; this seems to me the truth of the poem.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

2008-12-21T09:04:00.000-08:00

Winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Snow coming down steadily. Yesterday's 30 inches or so now joined by today's one-inch-per-hour. We'll be close to four feet by afternoon. So much for yesterday's back-breaking driveway shoveling/car clearing. I'll be out again once it tapers off, using my ka-nees as much as possible; then likely drawing a very hot bath. The plow trucks do not work on Sundays--so we're likely in for the day.

The reading list this month--as I've cleared away some things and given myself license to make a "community" of the books and authors drawing me in, silencing (or at least quieting) the concerned voices crying misanthrope!--has been long and various. It is a time for simultaneity, apparently--partly because a few in the mix are 500 pages-plus, and I want to move through them steadily while also connecting elsewhere. Something like deeply enjoying an intense, needy friend, but not wanting to allow that friend the sole short-term domination she might require--life is short, there is much to read. Your commitment to that friend is life-long, anyway--which is ultimately really what she needs.

Proust--Swann's Way--is one of those hefty, long-term commitments. We're about four weeks and 300 pages in. It's evening reading, somehow. The Brothers Karamazov is another in this category. I started over a year ago, put it away, and am back into it with FMD. An essay on Dostoevsky by the late David Foster Wallace, from his essay collection Consider the Lobster, adds fuel to the resolve to finish. Balzac's Pere Goriot (inspired by Proust) is one I'm listening to on DVD, during commutes to and from the city and on my ipod (while shoveling, walking the dog, etc.). Moments of Being, a collection of memoir-essays by Virginia Woolf, given to me as a gift and awful lovely and sad. As yet uncracked--and due back to the library in two weeks--is Rose Tremain's novel The Road Home.

In poetry, over coffee in the morning, sometimes just before sleep: Rilke (the Galway Kinnell translation), Kinnell (his first three collections collected together, along with The Book of Nightmares), Denise Levertov's This Great Unknowing, and Jane Kenyon's Otherwise.

Somewhat "central" in all this readingabout is Paul Elie's The Life You Safe May Be Your Own, a kind of quadrography of the lives of Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy--ardent Catholics and artists all. Each living a kind of monastic existence, even if not literally (except for Merton). The title of Day's autobiography--The Long Loneliness--rather than that of O'Connor's short story, may have been an equally apt title for the book. The book pushes 500 pages, I wasn't sure (during the first 100 pages) that Elie's style or his vision for the thematic/personal web among these four would keep me engaged; at p. 280, I'm hooked the way one is hooked by a good novel. Here are four writers who, you could say, gave themselves license to make a community of the books and authors that drew them in, silencing (or at least quieting), the concerned voices crying misanthrope!--with compelling results, i.e. an honest and deep and, yes, often painful, life in letters.

Of Self-Blessing

2008-12-19T15:50:00.000-08:00

A spring (ish) poem for the middle of winter. In some ways, most appropriate for a dark, snowy night such as this.

"Saint Francis and the Sow"

by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Zen and the Art of Valve-Control

2008-12-09T12:38:00.000-08:00

Too many days in the city, and I am restless, hungry for quiet. My head is filled with "stuff." The greatest temptation of city life, when you are working on a book or your own art work, is to allow "what other people are doing" to fill your head. And numerically speaking, there are just so many "other people" here.

It is the difference between being the subject, or the object, of your own life. Here in the city, information and activity come tumbling over you, whether you like it or not. Someone has the radio on, or the TV on, people are talking talking talking, all the news--gossip especially--fills every space in which you move. You want to walk down the street and pick up a carton of milk, or take the subway to the library or post office, and all of it--in the space of four, five, ten blocks--assaults you. Suddenly, your head is full.

The battle of the city--I am finding, I am recognizing recently--is a battle of valve-control. You are trying to write something, to think something, to make something; your brain must be active, alert, clear, able to move in multiple directions as you work. Once city noise has cluttered the space--if the valve is wide open, information overload has already tumbled in--your mind, your imagination, are boxed in--like alternate side of the street parking days, when people double park and trap you in your space.

If you love city life, you don't experience it as noise or clutter or a trap, but as energy. Wondrous diversity. The world alive and vibrant in one city block, one subway car. Yes. True. But valve-control may be the secret here, too. Or maybe it's more like a Rorschach inkblot test, beauty and chaos moving in and out of relief. There is a zen to this, regardless. It takes work.

Today, it takes a lot of work. Between Mumbai, industry bail outs, and close-out sales on Senate seats... I'm struggling to get out of my parking spot.

Guerrilla Poetry and Fawning Over Fauns

2008-12-02T10:16:00.001-08:00

It's hard to know what to make of the upcoming reading/performance which will be taking place at my local library here in the country. Alix Olson, described as a queer-artist-activist-spoken word-revolutionary, will be appearing at the Tusten-Cochecton Branch Library. Is this city and country colliding in full glory?

I suppose not. We are but 15 miles from the site of Woodstock, after all. But I wonder what Norma, the octagenarian librarian with whom I've recently become friendly, will think of Alix.

At any rate, I am glad to have renewed my library membership, which I let lapse into delinquency over the last six months. It's good to be back. Wi-fi has also come to Tusten-Cochecton (no cell service still--No Towers! they cry).

The hunters are out. Yesterday, I believe, was the opening of deer hunting season. I assume this because trucks full of men in camouflage and orange vests drove up and down my road all day. The pup and I walked sheepishly along, and every time I saw a deer--they're everywhere, travelling in families--I'd psst, psst and whisper-shout Run for your lives. Shoot anything, I say--but the deer? Innocence incarnate.

Heading back to the Bx today after a productive two weeks here. Rumor has it a new bookstore has opened in the 'hood.

First Big Snow

2008-11-25T16:48:00.000-08:00

Snow falling like buckets today. Hard to capture with a layperson's digi-camera. But here's the scene. Below, bright sky as it gives over to early sunset.

I Don't Want an Office

2008-11-23T13:17:00.000-08:00

"I am doing what seems to me the simplest--I have done with all that is not simple; I don't want the city any longer, I want the country; I don't want an office, I want to paint."

-letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo

These words from Van Gogh were meant as a test for Theo, who was considering whether to give up his work as an art dealer and become a painter himself. Vincent gave the above quote as an example of what the painter must feel, must think, in order to commit to the artist's life--the life as he had come to understand it through years of struggle.

Two years now in the country, and I am nearing this sentiment. I don't want an office; I want to write. My second novel is coming along, coming alive. The possibility of life in the country--a full-fledged life in the country--seems less daunting than it did when I first started coming out here. Here is where I work, and where, ironically, I am least lonely.

Today, I split wood for the first time. Learning how to wield an ax without falling over.

But like Vincent, there are concerns, there are worries. Of money, specifically. In this I suppose I am in the same boat as all Americans at this particular moment in history.

On another note, here is an interesting article in today's Sunday Times about a supposed movement called Slow Blogging. A small comfort for those of us who still don't really know what Twitter is.

Autumn Into Winter

2008-11-19T06:33:00.000-08:00

We're almost at the end of autumn, but this one still hits home. Autumn into winter...

"Autumn Day"
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Lord: it is time. The summer was so immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials,
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

On the Other Side of Nov 4

2008-11-18T07:37:00.000-08:00

It's been a while.

Gardening and election season took over, for the most part. (And of course various and sundry personal travails.) We ended the summer with about 3 dozen mason jars-full of canned tomatoes, pickled everything (cucumbers, green tomatoes, green beans), some frozen string beans, and homemade chili oil.

The election brought the city-country contrasts to a head. Our country county has typically gone almost 3 to 1 Republican--this is guns and Bibles country. This year of course it was different. Between my house and the county seat, you'd see yard signs like proclamations, house by house. The Obama-Biden supporters staked out their intentions as an act of courage. In the end, the county went 53% to 44% Republican--a tremendous "win" for the Democrats. And, of course, Obama won PA by 10+ points.

I voted absentee in the Bronx and spent three days, including election day, canvassing in PA. Pax put on his Obama-Biden outfit ( a yard sign fitted to his hunting vest) and was a hit. One day I went out with three local women--white women in their 50's, who started out as Hillary supporters but eventually got on board with Barack. One of them was defying her very Republican husband. I learned that this was a common pattern. "You never know how they'll vote," she said, meaning, wives go with their husbands publicly, but once they're in that voting booth...

It was eye-opening, and a privilege, really, to talk to people face to face about their choices and opinions. People were definitely engaged and paying attention (sometimes too much attention--disinformation definitely seeped in); and I appreciated more than I ever have the distances--cultural, social, political--that many people in this country had to cross in order to ultimately embrace Barack as their candidate.

Anyhoo. Here we are.

Snow flurries this morning in the city. Forgot to drain the pipes in the country. Hoping, hoping I won't go back to a pipe-bursting disaster. Winter is here.

The American Dream / You Get What You Pay For

2008-07-07T05:56:00.001-07:00

Spending longer stretches in the country has been a good thing. The back and forth between city and country becomes disorienting, a feeling of rootlessness, and always catching up from behind. Here I can tend to what needs tending, pay attention, keep up. Feel like I'm sowing and reaping a little, so to speak, as opposed to having my ass kicked by entropy all the time.

Amazing how much work it takes to own/maintain a home. Not complaining - well, maybe a little - but I see the value of renting, of leaving the maintenance to someone else. It's different of course - you get what you pay for, a sense of groundedness and stability when it's your own. And with so many Americans these days losing their homes to foreclosure, I am grateful for the privilege.

Still, there are only so many hours in the day, so many days in your life. How do you want to spend them?

We spent a good part of ours this weekend painting. Just one room - the kitchen - and it was a ton of work. Kitchens, with all their grease and grime and hidden corners behind the appliances, are the hardest rooms to paint. Dirty windows, dirty baseboards and trim. The previous owners slapped primer and flat paint on everything for a quick sell, which has been icky especially in the kitchen. Anyway, it's done. Sigh. Proportional investment makes sense, given how much our our lives we spend in the kitchen.

The lawn continues to be my nemesis. Kicks my ass every time, and I only did about two-thirds of it. It's been humid, so the grass and weeds have been growing fast.

Hosted some friends and their two pitbulls for a couple of days. The pup is pooped, so much doggie comaraderie as of late. Us, too. Pooped, that is. We're used to being loners, I guess. Only so many hours and days... back to the quiet now, back to work.

High Summer is Perfection

2008-06-30T16:51:00.000-07:00

Sitting on the porch just now, at dusk. The "sun garden" (redundant, for a smarter gardener than me, I know) is growing nicely - tomatoes, peppers, two kinds of squash, cucumbers, mustards. Everything is potential right now, the hope of a bountiful harvest. Nothing to do but wait and watch.

The lawn is mowed, and growing more slowly, now that the weather is warmer and we're well into summer. I feel less anxious, less overwhelmed by the rigor of growth.

Caterpillar season, finally, is over. Meaning, we don't have piles of caterpillars everywhere, caterpillars eating the vege foliage, caterpillars in our hair and sometimes, yes, crawling in our pants (ick!).

All is quiet, all in balance. The hard work of spring paying off. The "shade garden" was mostly a failure--everything spindly and sun-starved--but I'm eating what I can. Next year we'll problem-solve, either move the whole thing or let it be. No point in working against nature, setting ourselves up for disappointment.

I see below a typo - "Easter medicine" instead of "Eastern medicine." What would "Easter medicine" be? Something hopeful, I think, something which infuses hope after darkness.

Silence and slowness are settling in. Welcome, welcome, peace of summer.

Back From Vacation, Discombobulated

2008-06-25T09:20:00.000-07:00

Just back from the Pacific Northwest, a family trip. J.'s family, that is. Part of the time spent in the city, part of it on a small island. We all (the fam) fantasized about jointly buying island land and building a family "compound" - artist colony, healing retreat center (accupuncture, Easter medicine, etc), marijuana farm (I know, how groovy), organic gardens, the whole ridiculous healthy-hippie-yuppie shabang. There was a simple and wonderful wood-burning-stove-heated sauna and hot tub at the rustic resort where we stayed, which also got our wheels turning.

Straight from the airport to the kennel (well, just about) to pick up the pup, who didn't seem thrilled about his stay. You can just tell. More of a people dog than a dog dog, I guess. That's my doing, I know. They're looking for extra help, business is booming. Hmm... Krista says it's mostly clean-up work, dirty stuff.

The sun garden plants seem to be thriving, the shade garden plants are spindly and sad. The greens are edible, that's what's important I guess. G. and F. the pup (formerly Brownie) came out for a few days, was fun to share the beauty of the place with city friends; hopefully we can do more of that. F. seemed a little confused, like "Where are all the cars?"

On the drive back, a tiny little faun galloped in front of us in the middle of the highway. I breaked hard and prayed; miraculously, I didn't hit it and no one hit me. But then I braced myself to witness the little gal's violent end - this was a six-lane highway, people driving 65-70 mph. Again, miraculously, she weaved her way across, lightning fast and weightless, and galloped into the trees. I'll never forget seeing that.

Jimmy, Mildred, and Grey Rabbit

2008-05-31T12:30:00.000-07:00

First harvest, some thinnings from the spinach and beet rows. Baby spinach and baby beet greens for dinner tonight.

I over-mulched the tomato plants, they seem a little suffocated, leaves wilty and yellowing. I knew I wouldn't be here to water for a week, and the weather called for full sun, so I was worried about moisture loss. Sigh. At this stage, when first transplanted, they really do need careful attention, more than once weekly. They are infants, after all. Hopefully they'll bounce back, I've given them a little more air.

The back and forth between city and country is wearing on me in a new way. Can't quite identify it, but something is shifting, something is pressing. I think more and more about laying roots somewhere, about committing to a place; no more this life of halvsies. Every so often I read a biography of a rural life (right now, Jimmy Carter's "An Hour Before Daylight") and I ache for a life rooted in place. Even if the place is not native, even if it means fabricating home, consciously locating and dropping the anchor.

This article from the NYT a few days ago also I think got under my skin. Ms. Puett's Mildred's Lane must be a stone's throw from here. The hippie communal quality doesn't so much appeal to me as the simple longevity, the life work of several years, making home and art in a place. Making art of home, making home of art.

Man From Plains

2008-05-29T15:33:00.000-07:00

In fact, the name of the tiny rural place in Georgia where Jimmy Carter grew up, where his family farmed, was Archery. The town - it wasn't even quite a town - no longer exists. Jimmy was born in Plains, and he and Rosslyn returned there after his presidential term and still live there.

Just watched the Jonathan Demme bio-documentary on Carter. It's a good one, I recommend. Demme is a fan, of the man and the President, which comes through. Talk about a country boy making his way to the big city; and yet never losing the country in him. Carter is nothing if not a man of place and land, which of course explains his tireless and unapologetic compassion (which has gotten him into trouble) for the Palestinian cause.

It occurs to me that, in this modern world, either you are a person of place, or you aren't. The dividing line between those two ways of existing on the planet is stark. We city people are nomadic, our fidelity is to things abstract. Seems to me Carter's relationship to place and land might be the most defining and driving force of his character, and thus his leadership and legacy.

I'm reading one of his memoirs now and looking forward to Peter Bourne's biography.

Dorothy, Getting Her Bearings

2008-05-28T16:00:00.000-07:00

Back in the Bronx, the fire escape lettuces have "bolted," meaning they got too hot too fast and flowered; they're past eating now. Phooey. How did that happen? I go away for a week, and all hell breaks loose... Living things (sigh) do need constant attention.

Where am I? Not in Kansas anymore. The pup and I went for a short run, partway across the Triboro and down to Randall's Island. Our normal park route is blocked off, the whole area dug up. We're told it's being developed into a giant, privately-owned tennis center. We like tennis, but...no more community baseball, no more public access. There goes the neighborhood.

We've been exploring other areas of the Bronx, looking at real estate. In particular, areas near large parks. Pickings are slim. As we venture north, it starts to feel like another planet - 50, 60, 70 minutes by subway to downtown Manhattan. We've been told apartments in the Bronx rarely allow dogs. How odd. I find myself pining for Manhattan, which surprises me. It's a momentary lapse, irrational. Longing for something that feels like "home" or vaguely "comfortable" - but really, there's no such thing (no place called home, my own Dorothy-esque chant), not in the form of real estate anyway.

The Beginning of Summer

2008-05-26T12:54:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day weekend in the country, the summer people have all descended. Folks are out walking, bicycling, boating. We went for a motorcycle ride and saw all the young city families with their well-groomed, apartment-bound kids running around, doing cartwheels (literally), splashing in the river. The most beautiful river-side homes seem to belong to city people. I felt something - not sure what exactly - as we sped by. Something akin to what you feel when you read a John Cheever story, or a James Salter novel. The elegance and sadness of privilege. The fleeting nature of joy, like a weekend.

We stopped by the nursery and J. picked out three trees: a weeping cherry, a Japanese maple, and a crab apple. He planted them all, hard work, digging into that red clay; and it makes me happy to look at them... our investment in the future, in the beauty of this piece of earth.

I planted tomato seedlings, cucumber seeds (green and yellow), zucchini and squash seeds (green and yellow), sweet basil seedlings, and the last of the lettuce and bok choy seeds. I also built the pole bean teepee. We've got a lot growing now, a lot to tend to. I should try to be here as much as possible while the plants are just budding and require lots of regular water and weeding; but the city pulls me back each week. I'll be doing a rain dance from the Bronx.

Waste Not, Want Not

2008-05-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

Energy and food crises are finally turning attention toward waste (see Sunday NY Times article on food waste). It takes talent, I’ve realized, to be a good steward of resources, to be creative and smart about recycling and repurposing so that nothing goes to waste. And vigilance, too. We Americans, as a whole, seem to be lacking this talent, mostly because we’ve not been forced to develop it. Once we are forced to, though, it will hopefully become habit.

I’m working on it. Food waste makes me crazy, so I’m paying more attention to quantities – what we buy, what we cook, what we consume, what goes straight to the freezer. Your freezer is your best friend when it comes to food conservation. In the country, we have a compost pile—which also takes talent. Been trying to master the fine art/science of composting, including turning the thing regularly (and banning J. from it, with his manly insistence on throwing hunks of meat and all manner of protein on the pile).

We used to collect kitchen scraps in the city and bring them out with us to the country. But that got sort of icky. In San Francisco, an innovative city-run composting program is getting some attention. How to make it happen in NYC? Garbage disposal is very expensive in NYC, so any financial incentives for people to compost would work, I think. Plus, the city can then sell the compost to small-scale farms and gardeners.

It Takes a Village

2008-05-19T08:26:00.000-07:00

Making our rounds this weekend, it occurs to me that we've covered our bases in terms of finding suppliers of basic needs out here.

First stop, the saw mill. A reasonable $30/hr rate to plane down some very specialized planks of walnut (eight years old, J. rescued the trunk after the whole tree fell in a hurricane). J. is excited about making furniture.

Second stop, the kennel. Preparing for a week-long trip in June, we found what seems to be a terrific dog-loving place nearby where P. the pup will be well cared for. Everything built for doggie comfort and health (my favorite: a doggie "dry sauna," with very low heat, where they dry off and nap after baths or rainy walks), and also very green (wind power, geothermal wells, etc). D. and K. opened their doors in January, after a long fight with the town council (they've been coming out here for 25 years while working in Manhattan, but there's some animosity about them not being natives). Anyway, a bargain at $20/night.

Third stop, the bakery, currently housed in a little out-building behind someone's house, but moving soon to a larger space in town. Breads, pies, morning pastries, all fresh daily.

Fourth stop, Alice's farm stand, where we get local grass-fed meats (ever had a mutton-burger? YUM) and veges in season. A little pricey for the veges, so it's motivation to work harder at the garden. Also carries eggs and chickens, and cheeses and yogurts from a nearby dairy farm.

Fifth stop, the general store, to pick up mail and browse movie rentals. In the parking lot, J.'s walnut in the back of the pick-up gets a lot of attention, and he gets a rec from T., a local plumber, for someone who might be selling a used table saw. B. and D. are holding back their sweet but high-strung German Shepherd "pup" (he's huge) and mention that they'll be taking him to a week of doggie training. When I ask where, it turns out they're sending him to doggie camp at D. and K.'s kennel.

Last stop, the tennis courts by the river. We hit some balls around then head home, ready to take on chores.

Food

2008-05-12T09:47:00.000-07:00

What's happening with food right now is the lynchpin that links city people and country people, all around the world.

As city consumers, we can help set the parameters for what food is grown, and how. Food is something we all consume, our universal connector. Health and a thriving environment are the by-products of how we consume food. The more demand we make for real, healthful food - as opposed to processed, soy-and-corn-syrup based foods - the more of it will be grown. Theoretically.

"Increasingly we can see the wisdom of diversified farming operations, where there are built-in relationships among plants and animals. A dairy farm can provide manure for a neighboring potato farm, for example, which can in turn offer potato scraps as extra feed for the herd...To encourage small, diversified farms is not to make a nostalgic bid to revert to the agrarian ways of our ancestors. It is to look toward the future, leapfrogging past the age of heavy machinery and pollution, to farms that take advantage of the sun's free energy and use the waste of one species as food for another." (Dan Barber, NY Times Op-Ed 5/11/08)

Nature is genius, Nature understands how energy recycles itself symbiotically. Greed, impatience, excessively indulged appetites - these are what threw us off, worldwide. I don't know what's in the mind of farmers, perhaps they felt it was their due to cash in on ethanol as fast as they could; regardless, gigantic subsidized corn-farming is wreaking havoc on both food supply and prices.

City people eat. A lot. Join movements for more small-farm foods, make the consumer demand. Sign petitions to your elected officials when the farm bill comes up, voice against inefficient subsidies which support farming practices that do not benefit health or the environment in the short or long run. Buy real food and cook it. The more diversified farms that can thrive, the more likely you can buy local foods which do not require cross country trucking or international transport (more fuel).

I'm not sure what the right balance is between eating locally and international free trade. If our importing of South American bananas and mangos is helping to keep those countries' economies afloat. The economics of it I find hard to grasp. But at the least, it seems we can buy and eat the foods which grow naturally in our regions from local sources, and learn about the growing practices of the West coast farms from where our oranges come.

It has to get bad enough, I suppose, for the movement towards diversified farms to take a serious turn, and for Americans to change the way we eat and buy food. How bad, I wonder.

What's Growing These Days in the Bronx

2008-05-05T10:09:00.001-07:00

On the fire escape, Asian greens are coming up nicely - bok choy, Japanese mustards, gai laan. I'm also sprouting snapdragons for the first time; they're a bit sluggish, but they seem to be reaching for the sun and growing little by little.

Our new super, Z., is well-meaning but apparently not very experienced with plants. He's bought marigolds and something that looks like a mini evergreen for each floor and has set them on the stairwell windowsills with no dishes underneath to catch the water (assuming he will be watering them). Also, the marigolds are mostly sitting in the dark (the stairwells don't catch much light).

I feel sorry for the plants, but not sure how much I can take on to assist; we're still unsure about our future here. An incident involving a chase and a handgun on our block (about 11pm) was recently reported to us by a floor-mate. This neighbor has decided to break his lease as a result--leaving us and one other couple as the only ones remaining from among the original group who moved in when the building was first completed.

Options are slim, though. We're seeking but not finding. And who wants to move. Even with all the hoopla, we kind of like it here. I guess I'll look after the marigold here on floor 3.

We Make Progress

2008-05-05T09:46:00.000-07:00

We now have about 80 square feet of vegetable gardens. The new raised beds - three 2'x6'x1' boxes - are ready for planting. We'll wait about two weeks until all danger of frost has passed before we put the tomatoes, zucchini, beans, and cucumbers in the ground.

Last year we built one large plot, 8'x12', using railroad ties to contain the dirt; the railroad ties are incredibly heavy, so we really broke our backs. We also didn't have enough top soil to fill the thing, so we ended up making mounded rows, which are a little unstable and don't quite optimize the space. Finally, the whole plot is situated in partial shade. DUH.

The new beds are in full sun, they are smaller so we can reach all sides; they are full to the top one inch; and they are made out of lightweight 2-by-12's. J. also banged together a sifter, so we've gotten most of the rocks out of the top soil. If things go all right, we'll be able to grow the majority of our vegetables for 5 months out of the year. We're thinking about setting up a germinating system (in the basement?) next year to increase that to maybe 6 or 7 months.

So, we learn and we improve. Also: I had written last year about not being able to change my water filter without J.'s help. I am happy to report that I have done it! With a little creative bracing (my feet up on the wall and my back against the opposite wall), I was able twist the old filter loose and tighten up a new one.

We make progress.

Not Fitting In

2008-04-30T15:15:00.000-07:00

Every car that drives by my house is a kind of test. Some wave and smile, some stare coldly. These days we're out in the yard for most of the daylight hours, raking or digging or chopping or mowing or resting. Don't know what the talk is, exactly, about the ORIENTALS from the city up on M. Road, but you can bet there's talk.

At the General Store, J. is friendly with R., the patriarch whose son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren are usually around working the register or preparing food. J. is good at that -- acting as if and putting people at ease. Me, I'm sensitive and thin-skinned, I notice how people stop chatting familiar-like when I walk in, especially the guys-with-guns. Roc's daughter-in-law V. is thin and pretty and a firm disciplinarian with her boys and bakes cookies for sale; I've tried to be friendly, but something doesn't quite click, and I think I probably come off like I'm trying too hard. I'm there for a transaction, after all, not to hang out, that much is clear.

I put my hope and faith in time. Hard edges smooth out, people become familiar, one interaction at a time. Maybe we're being watched suspiciously for now, but that's ok, we'll just keep doing what we're doing and hope one of these days they'll just keep on chatting, or that R. will call J. by name, or that we will feel like hanging out.

Country Report, Late April

2008-04-27T08:42:00.000-07:00

If there is a dominant partner in this love triangle with city and country, it is definitely city. Country struggles for her place, her time, her priority. City is where we make money. And so, and thus...

But spring is here, and so country elbows her way in. The roads are dry, everything is covered (us included) with the red dust kicked up by trucks as they drive by. We're sneezy and watery-eyed, our backs sore from garden prep. The leafy veges are beginning to sprout: this year we're going Asian - gailaan, bak choy, pak choy, Japanese mustards. Some American spinach and beets, as well. Today, we work on a second garden plot, breaking hard red earth again (get out the ibuprofen), a hot sunny spot for tomatoes, eggplant, green beans, zucchini, cucumbers.

With the price of food (and everything else) rising, we're getting a little more serious about growing food. Hoping to do some canning as well, which will be new for me, old hat for J. (his late father's specialty).

I think about finding a way to spend the summer here, give country her due. But I worry, too, about the reality of it--isolation (physical and mental), especially. But maybe it's time to give it a go. Maybe the country wants to be wife this summer, instead of mistress.

Gentrification in the Bx

2008-04-08T06:55:00.000-07:00

With the latest incidents here in the Bx - vandalism, theft, etc. - I've been feeling on edge. The situation with our super J. is also a bit shaky; he tends to be drunk a lot, has been letting various characters into the building (the basement has become a kind of "clubhouse" for whomever, and many of us feel uncomfortable when we go down to do our laundry), and doesn't really do his job. But if/once our landlord lets him go, I would not put it past him to become embittered and do who-knows-what. All the locks would have to be changed, etc. And he lives down the block and won't be going anywhere.

Lately when I walk the pup around the 'hood, I feel conspicuous and nervous. More so than before. I am more aware of the men's shelter around the corner. I was told by one of our neighbors in the building that a former sex offender lives two doors down (did you know that you can find out by going to sexoffenders.com? Jeez.). I am waiting for the next incident, the other shoe to drop.

On Saturday we decided to be pro-active, spend some time out in the neighborhood. We walked up to St. Mary's Park, which is a nice hill-top park about 10 blocks north. We've been looking for free public tennis courts and found them there. The gates were locked with a padlock, but the Parks attendant told us that they did that to keep the kids from stealing the nets, and that we could use the courts if we wanted to squeeze through the gap in the gates (so much for "security"). So we did that, and we all (the pup fetched balls for us) got some exercise.

On Sunday, I walked the 15 blocks west to find the nearest NY Times. On the way back, I ran into a woman who was opening up the doors at a new art gallery in Mott Haven. She let me and the pup in, and I learned that she lives on a brownstone block nearby, where there are a number of historic brownstones for sale. She owns two of them - lives in one, rents the other to her daughter. The buildings have been in her family for 80 years, she said, from back when the neighborhood was mostly European immigrants (she's White). She told me about a group of historic-building owners who have been getting together, forming a little community; and that a curator from the Metropolitan Museum just bought one of the brownstones.

Is this good news? She thinks so. I didn't get a sense of racial awareness, though. She seemed to imply that White gentrification is good, no matter what. White = safe. Most of the people who run the gallery are White - Brooklyn and Manhattan refugees, or, like her, old Bronx families returning after a generation away. Hmm...

J. and I are going to check out the brownstones for sale. Just to see what's up. I find it all a little troubling, though.

The Voter in My Head

2008-04-04T08:34:00.000-07:00

There's been so much in the media about "that white male working class voter" lately. Will he go for Hillary, or will he go for Barack? Will he go for McCain over Hillary, or Barack over McCain, or not show up to the polls at all depending on who is on the ballot?

More importantly, who IS he, and is he real? Meaning, is he truly a group of he's that can be categorized in a block?

We're all being categorized and chopped up into voter blocs like never before (or, perhaps, like always before, but much more evident now) based on income, education, location, consumer habits, race, gender, age, etc. I even find myself trying to guess, based on some combination of appearance and observed behavior, who someone is going to vote for -- strangers, friends, acquaintances alike.

What is hopeful about this year's Democratic race is that people seem more open and fluid in their voting decisions. If democracy is about having an informed and active voting public - as opposed to a predictably self-serving / not-in-my-backyard voting public - then the voting patterns themselves will be interesting to observe. I will certainly be disappointed if Obama is not the Democratic nominee; but I will be exponentially more disappointed if he loses as a result of predictable voting patterns, i.e. people voting out of a kind of pre-determined fear and self-preservation factor (which I believe Hillary is exploiting to the utmost). If Hillary wins, I at least hope to be surprised by the how and why of it; I doubt it, though.

I will be interested to see how Wayne County, PA districts vote on April 22. We have a moderate Democrat as Congressional Rep. -- Chris Carney. Wikipedia says the following:

Carney is a somewhat conservative Democrat, which is not surprising given the nature of the district. For example, while opposing proposals to privatize Social Security, he said he is open to the idea of adding private accounts in addition to (not at the expense of) traditional defined benefits. He supports federal investment in stem cell research, and is an advocate of universal healthcare. He supports gun rights, does not favor abortion (but supports family planning and "comprehensive reproductive healthcare"), and opposes gay marriage. He supports estate tax reduction.

During the campaign, Carney raised money with a wide-variety of supporters including Sen. Barack Obama, Sen Joe Biden, Rep. Jay Inslee, Rep. Jack Murtha, and Richard Perle, a leading Bush Administration advocate of war with Iraq who more recently has criticized the decision to go to war Douglas Feith, another Pentagon hawk, congratulated Carney on Election Night.

Rumbles in the Bronx

2008-03-31T16:11:00.001-07:00

It's been forever.

Well, I guess it's been a month. I've been thinking about the reality of blogging, and my unsuitability for it. It requires a certain talent for current-ness, for keeping up, for "freshness." Me, I'm all about the old, the outdated, the slow. It takes me a long time to chew on last week's news. It takes me a long time to do just about everything.

But city (keeping up) and country (slow) are still on my mind, still the extreme realities of life. These days, we're thinking about our life in the Bronx, about whether or not/how long we'll stay. It's weird to be a gentrifyer, and difficult in many ways; the double challenge of "should we" (participate in pricing out people who've lived here a long time) and "do we want to" (confront the daily challenges of living in a poor, under-serviced, crime-ridden neighborhood) is where we find ourselves.

The latest: you already know that my car was stolen from the block last summer (at least I got to write off the $400 tow-yard cost on my Schedule A this year as a theft loss). J. has had a number of things stolen from his truck as well. My flower pots have been vandalized, and recently someone (who?? why??) tossed our plastic lawn chairs off the roof. There are currently angry/hysterical warning signs throughout the building posted by one of our neighbors, whose bicycle was stolen from the basement. But the biggie: the other night, someone went around puncturing tires on the block, including all four of mine.

J. and I were out on the street pumping up the tires the next morning, not yet aware that they'd been punctured (the holes were super-tiny), hoping that possibly the vandals just let the air out, for pranks. A guy who works in the neighborhood stopped to chat and asked us what happened. His take was basically this: "Well, you got two ways of looking at it. Since it was a whole bunch of cars, at least you can think, 'It wasn't just me,' and you don't have to feel like you've been targeted or anything, like it's personal. And at least it's just kids playing pranks, you know. Once I had both my mirrors stolen, and when I found out it was a bunch of people lost their mirrors, I felt better. Even though it cost me 500 bucks to replace them. A few years back, one of the tire repair shops was paying kids to slash tires in the neighborhood; that guy's been closed down, though. So consider yourselves lucky, you know. It could always be worse."

Well, seeing as the tires were indeed punctured, we're thinking that old scam may have been revived; and we're not feeling so lucky. How long will my new tires last? Maybe my mirrors are next?

I feel lucky that J. was with me to help pump up the tires and get the car to Maria's Tire Shop. I feel lucky that someone stopped to try and encourage me that I'm lucky. I feel lucky that the car is still running (and that it was recovered by the police last summer). And I feel lucky for my three days in the country after all that, which was good rest & recovery time (it's amazing how porch and sky can heal the soul).

The window boxes are out on the fire escape, I planted bok choy, gai laan, and Japanese mustard seeds. Trying snapdragons for the first time, too. Not sure if I'll put in the time for roof or stoop or backyard plants here; doesn't feel safe.

Chekhov's Humanity... City and Country

2008-02-25T06:48:00.000-08:00

Chekhov generally refrained from passing judgment on his characters, playing more the role of objective "witness." Well, sort of. "Man will become better when you show him what he is like," he wrote in one of his notebooks. Often his moral pronouncements are put into the mouths of characters with a deceptive simplicity; as readers, we recognize that the speaker is often both impassioned and hypocritical, sincere and ignorant. And because Chekhov always approached and drew his characters humanely, we can never look at a character and say, "What a hypocrite" or "How ignorant" - because they are too recognizable, too much like ourselves.

Anyway. A couple of stories I recently read with bits of this layered commentary, on city and country life. In Russia, of course, city and country have always been code words for social class - peasants, landed gentry, sophisticated intelligentsia, etc. Many of Chekhov's characters, however, are often in fluid social positions, which allows him to comment on class positions in a more dynamic way.

From "Gooseberries": The narrator is speaking about his brother. Their father was a military man who rose to the rank of officer and came to own a small country estate. As children the two brothers thus lived in the country; after their father's death, all property was lost to creditors, and so they became white-collar professionals.

He was a kind and gentle soul and I loved him, but I never sympathized with his desire to shut himself up for the rest of his life on a little property of his own. It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. It is also asserted that if our educated class is drawn to the land and seeks to settle on farms, that's a good thing. But these farms amount to the same six feet of earth. To retire from the city, from the struggle, from the hubbub, to go off and hide on one's own farm - that's not life, it is selfishness, sloth, it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without works. Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit.

From "On Official Business": The main character here is a magistrate, young and ambitious for a career and lifestyle in Moscow but paying his dues in the provinces.

The fatherland, the real Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg; but these were the provinces, the colonies. When you dream of playing a part, of becoming known, of being, for instance, examining magistrate in important cases or prosecutor in a circuit court, of being a social lion, you inevitably think of Moscow. If you are to live, then it must be in Moscow; here, nothing matters to you; you get reconciled readily to your insignificant role, and only look for one thing in life - to get away, to get away as quickly as possible... and he kept thinking that all about him was not life but scraps of life, fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no conclusion from it... It occurred to him that since the life about him here in the wilds was unintelligible to him, and since he did not see it, it meant that it was nonexistent.

Both passages express the superiority of city life; and yet both characters are limited in their experiences and understanding. Each bring their prejudices. Chekhov himself summered in the country and eventually settled down on a rural estate; but seemed throughout his life to be dogged by a consciousness of the poor upon whose backs the wealthy and comfortable lived. "As though someone were knocking with a little hammer on his temples," he writes of the young magistrate, who ultimately has nightmares about how the poor "shouldered all that was darkest and most burdensome in life" and how "to wish for oneself a bright and active life among happy, contented people, and constantly to dream of such a life, that meant dreaming of new suicides of men crushed by toil and care..."

As for the man who criticizes his brother for "escaping" to the country, he has similar thoughts as the magistrate after seeing the life of comfort and satiation his brother made for himself (Chekhov even repeats the use of the phrase "a little hammer" in reference to one's conscience), that "obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence." But in this story, Chekhov bears "witness" to something perhaps even more implicating: the man's audience, the two other men who listen to him speak of his brother and the revelations he had with regard to happiness and the poor, don't care to hear him speak of it. "...it was tedious to listen to the story of the poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries. One felt like talking about elegant people, about women."

Bronx Skies

2008-02-18T13:31:00.000-08:00

"We all suffered from the same shortage of vocabulary, as if language itself had fled the Bronx, and curiosity had been bleached out of us. School was of little help. Our teachers had succumbed to the neighborhood’s affliction, a kind of constant, sluggish sleep." From an article in the City section of The NY Times this Sunday, by Jerome Charyn, novelist and Bronx native.

On quiet days when I work at home, I sometimes take a few minutes to sit by the window that looks out onto the street in front of our building. The view is a waterproofing company's warehouse, Bruckner Blvd., the on-ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, billboards billboards billboards... and quite a lot of sky. I can see what kind of traffic day it is; and it always seems that people are driving away from here, as fast as they can.

Sometimes I really have no idea what I'm doing here. Lately I've begun to imagine living somewhere else - a different borough, a smaller city, perhaps even a small town. This morning the pup and I walked under the bridge (a spooky underpass) to the handball courts, where I sometimes take him to toss the tennis ball around; but a shady-looking guy was sitting on the curb there, with no one else in sight, and I didn't feel safe. Ho hum.

This is where I am, for now. Half the time, anyway. When I sit by the window, I think about this: this is where I am. Somehow, I got here. And this is where I am.

It's not much of a pedestrian's neighborhood (shady-looking guys, etc.), so when I'm here, I'm mostly inside. Grocery shopping, miscellaneous errands, these things are accomplished mostly by driving to somewhere else. The other night we stopped in at a Puerto Rican restaurant a few blocks away and flumoxed the two women at the counter with our non-Spanish. I do find delight in seeing the Korean dry cleaners' and the Chinese takeout owners' faces light up when we walk in.

So I learn about my borough in tiny tidbits. It's a huge borough, its history of people groups diverse. But when it comes to writers, the Bronx is very much the un-Brooklyn: writers flock to Brooklyn as the new literary enclave, while they overcome obstacles and flee the Bronx for brighter skies (Delillo, Doctorow, etc. - Mr. Charyn now lives in Manhattan, I believe, and Paris.)

Here's another one, which I ran across I don't remember where. A self-published memoir by James McSherry called A Clean Street's a Happy Street. "A well-crafted and poignant memoir about a chaotic childhood in the Bronx," the review says. The title struck me, because of the garbagey-ness around here. I'll see if I can get my hands on the book.

Pilgrim in Provincetown

2008-02-16T10:37:00.000-08:00

Boston or New York embodies our condition in one aspect: We are strangers among millions living in cubes like Anasazi in a world we fashioned. And Provincetown shows, by contrast, that we live on a strand between sea and sky. Here are protoplasmic, peeled people in wind against crystal skies. Our soft tissues are outside, like unearthed and drying worms'. The people in cities are like Mexican jumping beans, like larvae in tequila bottles, soft bits in hard boxes. And so forth. The length to which we as people go to hide our nakedness by blocking sky!

There was a fatal problem. There always is. Provincetown people too, and all people worldwide who could swing it, were also bare tissues living under roofs. An honest way through, all but changing the whole idea, would be a set of interleaved narratives, Boston people and desert villagers. -from The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard

It's been a while. City and country somehow receding as main characters in this day-to-day. But I've just finished The Maytrees, Annie Dillard's new novel (and her last book, she says: "This one just about killed me... I want to change and grow."), and made note of the above for OITB (that's Orchid in the Bronx): Toby Maytree, a Provincetown poet, is thinking about a book-length poem which he will start writing shortly.

Anasazi: "The ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians, about 20 separate tribes living in New Mexico and Arizona. There never was an 'Anasazi' tribe, nor did any group of people call themselves by that name. Anasazi is a descriptive term of Navajo origin. Archaeologists applied the term to villagers who lived and farmed in the Four Corners between the years 1 and 1300 AD." One of many things/words I had to look up throughout the reading of The Maytrees. Along with hoyden, folderol, lagniappe, albedo, howitzer, Algreba, skeg, chert. (Any idea? You are much smarter than I.)

AD's story of love found, lost, found, pondered upon, redefined, undefined is as dense as it is earthy, heady as it is moving. Like everything of hers, it hurt my head to read; she's so damn smart, it actually grinds the brain. But in this one, you can feel her heart fighting for space next to - or at least somewhere near - her mind. As a reader, it's a unique experience - feeling something in your chest swell and tighten as you reach for the dictionary. Bare tissues living under roofs.

And it's definitely a country story. AD has come home to Tinker Creek in a way; this time it's the dunes and the starry skies of Cape Cod. The wind, the sand, the "green sea," "black cordgrass, " "parabolic dunes," "low swale," and "shack gulls" - all constantly in motion, ebbing and flowing like the tide throughout the story. On the one hand, I'm sad AD says she's "done." On the other hand, she's earned it, and I've barely understood everything she's written to date, so it's not like I won't have her work to re-read for many years to come.

V-Day 2008

2008-02-14T22:32:00.000-08:00

J. brought me orchids, I brought him roses. Earlier in the day, we had poo-pooed the silly holiday, planned to have no special plans. "Boy, are we suckers," we said, exchanging flora.

A funny pairing, but oh well. I do love flowers.

Transition

2008-01-24T04:54:00.000-08:00

Maybe, like they say, P. is just picking up on my emotions and reflecting them back to me. He's not the smartest pup in the litter, but he's definitely a sensitive one. You should see his sad puppy face, hang-down ears, deflated posture, when we load up to head back to the city. He is so bummed.

It's hard to describe/express the extreme-ness of the two places. I am less aware during the cold winter months, because of how much time I spend hunkered down inside. But it occurred to me this morning, when we were on our walk in the 'hood. I took a different route, down towards the water, which is also towards the power and sewage plants. Light industry turns to heavy industry the closer you get to the shore. Closer to our building, there are residents, buildings of modest size (and a tree!). Over there, in industrial land, things become mammoth and scary. Let's just say it's the land of emissions. And in the early morning hours, lots and lots of huge trucks, speeding by, delivering and dumping and hauling. Then there's me and P., trotting along - me scolding him for picking up sidewalk french fries like a psycho-mom.

Three days ago, P. and J. were wading in the river, watching eagles and fly-fishing.

This gal Majora Carter, Hunt's Point native, has been getting a lot of press lately. She founded an org called Sustainable South Bronx. Apparently they are trying to create a greenway - a jogger's and biker's path, along the water, which would come down near us. Boy, that would change everything.

The Campaign Trail (2)

2008-01-20T11:07:00.000-08:00

No TV here in the country, so we check in periodically to CNN and NY Times online for election results. A victory/non-victory for Hillary Clinton last night in Nevada, attendant media spin about which victory – Clinton’s popular victory, or Obama’s delegate victory – counts more.

Last week, a Times Week in Review article about the “firsts” of this Democratic race – first woman, first black man. It’s weird to be a woman of color at this particular moment in history; identity politics are interestingly, disorientingly scrambled. An article speaking to this on today’s op-ed page: Whitney Terrell writes about living on the fault line between blacks and whites in his Kansas City, MO district, where the white senator endorses Obama and the black Congressman endorses Hillary Clinton. Terrell writes: “With bad times brewing, black voters seem worried they can’t afford to vote for Mr. Obama’s optimism and lose. ‘I like him,’ said one of my longtime neighbors. ‘I just don’t think anybody’s going to let him be president.’”

I have been frustrated (though not surprised, really) in finding the prevalence of this sentiment among fellow people of color. My two most intense and ongoing conversations about Democratic politics right now are with two close friends, one a black woman, one an Asian American woman. F. is black, born and bred in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, loved/loves Bubba, and has been a Hillary supporter all along. She is cautiously glad to see Obama’s ascent as a viable candidate, but isn’t a supporter (yet). She’s expressed a conviction that he will be “eaten alive” by the white political establishment on the political level, along with worry for his basic safety, on the physical survival level. “It ain’t gonna happen,” she has said. “There’s just no way a white country is going to let a black man be president.” And if they do, (she implies), it ain’t gonna be pretty. She says it in a you silly girl kind of way, in a you don’t know what I know kind of way. I respect that – that I don’t know what she knows about being black in America; but I’m frustrated still, because who are “they” if not “us”? We are voters, and black people are voters, not to mention participants in a democracy that, it seems to me, is desperately trying to revive itself, make itself real again, via the Obama candidacy. Of course Obama won’t get elected if skeptical/fearful black people vote for the elite/perceived-powerful white woman! But this feeling, that Obama – that hope in an optimistic black candidacy cannot be “afforded” – this is what I think is hugely at stake in this election.

S. was the most radical idealist I knew back in our college days. And she wasn’t just talk either – she has worked in Palestinian refugee camps, Mother Teresa’s home in India, and has done death penalty defense work in Alabama (she’s an attorney). For years, she rejected the institution of marriage. Until… she met her current husband. They now have two little boys, and she’s frantic with child care and financial responsibility and sleep deprivation. I was shocked (and yet sort of not, because I now have so many friends with small children, I am learning the all-consumingness of it) – to hear her say that she was voting Hillary, and for this reason: “I don’t want any idealism or ideology, I just want someone who can manage the office, do the job.” In her voice, I could hear her exhaustion, her I’m-just-trying-to-get-through-the-day exasperation with “ideas” and “hope.” Again, Obama seemed an expensive luxury to her.

[Interesting that no one is worried about Hillary, as a woman, getting eaten alive. I suspect that having Bubba by her side as her bouncer is no small factor.]

Youthful idealism specialist Dave Eggers (author of (mark the ironic but not ironic youth-inspired title) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) writes, on that same op-ed page:

How can hope be false? the young idealist might ask. Hope is the only horse these young people have in the race. And wasn’t it the other Clinton who liked to quote from “The Cure at Troy,” Seamus Heaney’s version of Sophocles’ “Philoctetes,” which seems ludicrously apt right about now?

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

Both tactically and substantively speaking, I think Obama would do well to invoke Dr. King, emphatically and often. There was nothing that seemed more unaffordable to black Americans in the ‘60’s than non-violence, forgiveness, conciliation; but, as only an effective leader can, he sold those impossible luxuries to his movement as both ideal and strategy: do this because your dignity and humanity are at stake; do this because it will work. Dr. King wasn’t perfect, but he was more right – and more leader – than any major American public figure in the last 40 years. He made world-changing activists out of raging, downtrodden citizens, made them to understand that what seemed most unaffordable was exactly what they could not afford to reject.

Full

2008-01-13T11:09:00.000-08:00

The thaw came last week, so we can turn into the driveway without switching into 4-wheel drive in J.’s truck or backing up for a running start. I could pay for snowplowing, buy a snow blower, or subject my back to shoveling, sure. But where’s the adventure in that?

But seriously, folks. I find that country survival (on a budget) becomes a game of chicken: how far can I push it, what is really necessary, how can I get by, within the limits of safety and prudence? So far I haven’t hired someone to mow my lawn (except once, in April, when it was getting out of hand and my lawnmower was in the shop) and have managed the snow without a trip to Home Depot. Instead of spending money on insulation, I drain my pipes and turn off the water when I leave for the city, which seems to work fine in avoiding a freezing-bursting pipes situation. I did pay for firewood delivery and a new furnace (still making payments, actually). As we drove in the other day, I noticed cracking paint and areas of wood rot in the siding. Hmm… You pick and choose your battles. Like life, kinda. Tonight we expect 7 new inches of the white stuff (although Rocky at the general store says bah!, probably no more than 3 or 4). The pantry, and the wood pile, are stocked.

Depletion and replenishment.

Laundry day today, I love a clean, warm batch of socks and undies, towels and t-shirts; like a new beginning. Or vegetables filling the crisper drawer. A full tank of gas, or the wood pile freshly stacked by the stove. Enough and not too much. The little things. Had to replace my laptop battery this week, the spunky gal at The Apple Store reminded me that the best thing for battery life is to fully charge, fully deplete, fully charge, fully deplete; none of this half-use/half-charge business. Spend it; spend it all.

I have enough of everything, there is no need for need. God, look at that coat rack, vests and jackets and parkas falling off the hooks. 10 pairs of socks, the same for underwear. Four pairs of jeans/cords. A quart and a half of milk in the fridge, three kinds of sausages in the freezer. What else do I need?

Fire is dying down, white embers burning red. No, not all. Of course don’t spend it all. But almost. Almost all. While they’re still burning, while the heat is still burning red. Time to throw on another log.

Green, green, and more green

2008-01-07T06:17:00.000-08:00

Another sign of capitalism going green, i.e. an article in The Times about Clorox's acquisition of Burt's Bee's. A pretty amazing, and illustrative, story - the journey from hippie Maine beekeeper & hitchhiker, to corporate millionaires. The question, of course, is which force will win out - corporate environmental responsibility, or corporate profit-motive. The hope, and the argument, of course, is that they work hand in hand, and increasingly so as today's consumer becomes more environmentally and globally conscious. (Again, we "vote" with our dollars.) We'll see.

Also a sign of the ways in which city and country converge. Burt's is wildly popular here in NYC. The guy on the label is Burt (Shavitz) himself, who still lives in Maine in a turkey coop with no running water or electricity. City-dwellers love this -- they (we) love the vicarious live-off-the-land Thoreauvian experience. They want a "natural" life in the most man-made environment on the planet. A little beeswax lip balm goes a long way here in the concrete jungle.

This may seem like a superficial convergence, but in my (momentary) optimism, I'm curious to see where this goes; how the powerful forces of business/consumerism can get under the skin of a society, for good. "Social entrepreneurs" have been preaching this for decades. I am still a great skeptic about big business, about the catastrophic human and environmental casualties; which is why this presidential election is such a defining moment, I think. Obama is a capitalist, without apology; the question is about attention to the costs of economic growth and concrete measures to address them. Who is winning, who is losing, and how do we as a democratic nation, supposedly engaged and empowered to participate in our country's policy-making via our representatives - how do we mitigate the negative affects of largescale economic growth and design bottom-up infusions (financial, educational, spiritual, etc.), to build a world that is as healthy as it is prosperous (i.e. likely less prosperous but more healthy)?

Change Is A-Comin' / Change Done Already Came

2008-01-06T08:32:00.000-08:00

"So does that make the father in the ad less an agent of change, or even more of a revolutionary by saying that hybrids and the environment are now no longer something we even need to talk about?" --Kirk Johnson, The New York Times, 1/6/08

The article is about the new buzzword in the race for the Democratic presidential nominee: change. Kirk Johnson describes a new TV ad for the Ford Escape Hybrid: a young girl and her father, presumably in a typical Midwestern conservative town, are getting into their Ford Escape, and the girl is complaining that she's embarrassed to be seen in a gas-guzzling SUV. Where they're going (a metaphor for progressive communities), people drive hybrids and care about the environment, she says. The father tells the daughter that the Escape is in fact a hybrid. Well why didn't you say that, she asks. "I never thought I needed to," the father replies.

Something strange is happening. Obama won Iowa, a mostly white state. People are talking about his racial identity, but not that much - it's not "the main thing." People are talking about Hillary's gender, but it's also not "the main thing." (Change vs experience has become the main thing.) These two individuals are vying for the most powerful political office in the world. The tipping point (a la Malcolm Gladwell) has come and gone.

The father is not grandstanding about the fact that the Escape is a hybrid, it's sort of just a given.

Change is funny that way. There are certainly moments of drastic upheaval and event: the Civil Rights Movement, Rodney King, OJ Simpson, Clarence Thomas. Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O'Connor, Nancy Pelosi. The release of scientific reports substantiating global warming. Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize. But now, here we are. Barack Obama may become the President of the United States. Hillary Clinton may become the President of the Unites States. Bill Richardson may become the next Vice President of the United States. Homosexuality is further and further from "deviant" for the majority of Americans. Organic foods are now sold at Walmart, and "carbon footprint" and "global warming" are part of the vernacular. In the process, change feels excruciatingly slow and uphill and costly; but then, weirdly, all of a sudden, there it is. Here we are. How about that. And we barely need to talk about it.

Could it be that capitalism is in fact now in check? That corporate decisions are truly being influenced by greater social values, as expressed through political rhetoric, actual policymaking, grassroots activism, and the media? You are what you buy, you are who you vote for - meaning, the trickle down of cultural values in a democratic capitalist society becomes most clearly manifest via your checkbook/credit card bill, and your ballot.

It's early, but look, people came out in Iowa (the way people were supposed to come out for Howard Dean, but didn't). The numbers themselves are a huge indication of change. Is democracy back??!!

Some people might say that this is what you'd call "self-correction." The American Empire is either going to crash and burn, or pull itself back together. The average society has an intuition about itself and acts accordingly when things get way off track.

I buy that. But I also think that this pulling back together requires leadership and commitment and grit in every sector at every level. Perhaps now's the moment to humbly thank the generations of grassroots warriors, the ground-up soldiers, the visionaries - who've understood all along that change is both slow and fast, and who've persisted on behalf of the greater good - at great cost, and with patience. Here we are. This moment may not last long (and who knows which way the election will turn), but I'm going to enjoy it - a moment of optimism, of feeling proud and grateful for my country and its commitment to real progress. And I'll be showing my gratitude, at the very least, via my checkbook/credit card bill and my ballot.

The Ladies of the House

2008-01-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

For a while I've been meaning to learn more about ladybugs. People always say that it's "good" to have ladybugs around, especially in the garden. But I have them in my house - all over the house - tons of them. Usually around the windows. And often dead in big groups, like some kind of bizarre Jim Jones mass suicide. (Yeah, that's pretty dark.)

So I should find out what's going on, right? Why do they come to my house to die?

First of all, whoa there, let's not be so dramatic. Here's what I learned from ladybuglady.com.

Q. Why do ladybugs come into my house in the winter time?
A. Ladybugs are attracted to the light colored houses. Especially, homes that have a clear southwestern sun exposure. Older homes tend to experience more problem with aggregations due to lack of adequate insulation. The ladybugs come in through small cracks around windows, door ways and under clap boards. They want to hibernate in a warm, comfortable spot over the cold months of winter. Ladybugs gather in groups when they hibernate, so if you see one, you can be sure more will follow. The best way to keep them out is to repair damaged clap boards, window and door trim and to caulk small cracks.

Q. Once the ladybugs are in my house, will they eat anything?
A. No. Ladybugs don't eat fabric, plants, paper or any other household items. They like to eat APHIDS. Aphids are very small, but very destructive pest that feed on plants. (If you have rose bushes, you have probably seen aphids.) Ladybugs, while trying to hibernate in your house, live off of their own body fats. They, also, prefer a little humidity. But our homes are usually not very humid during the winter. In fact, they are rather dry causing most of your ladybug guests to die from dehydration. Occasionally, you might witness a ladybug in your bathroom getting a drink of water. Now, that's a smart lady!

So they're dehydrating, poor gals. I also learned that when ladybugs are "stressed," i.e. when they sense danger, they play dead, releasing a bit of blood so that predators will leave them alone. A ladybug's blood is yellow and has an unpleasant odor, so, in other words, best to just let them be. Or, if I want to save them, collect them up and then release them... where? They need warmth and moisture. Basement ladybug colony?

It's 18-degrees F in the country today. Hang in there, ladies; believe it or not, spring really is just around the corner.

Christmas 2007

2007-12-23T20:31:00.000-08:00

I had grander ideas for holiday greenery, but ah well... she'll have to do. Somehow I'm not much for pomp and circumstance this year - not in a bah-humbug way, more in a spare and quiet sort of way.

Happy holidays to you and yours... peace on earth. No joke.

A Tree Grows in the Bronx

2007-12-20T08:29:00.000-08:00

Regarding the previous post, I should say that metaphor is metaphor, and life is life. A metaphor is not, strictly speaking, an equation. There are ways in which sitting with a dying friend is very much like and in no way like writing a book. I won't weigh the difficulties of each, it's too much apples and oranges...

J. is on the West Coast for two weeks, sitting with his post-octogenarian father who's just had a heart attack and stroke (recovering slowly, but yes, recovering), and also visiting with an old friend who is in the late stages of liver cancer. Both men are weighing in at less than 130 lbs. J. calls every night, and I sit with him - my friend - as he sits with his father and his friend.

I've stayed in the city, for work reasons and also because of stormy/wintry weather. In lighting out for the country, there are both the challenge of getting there through snow & sleet, and, once there, getting out (have not yet invested in the snow-blower). I am not proud of my damsel-in-distress anxieties, but for now, this is me.

Some news: we have a tree! A lone tree, dormant of course, planted a week ago just outside the building. D. the landlord asked the city for it - part of Mayor Bloomberg's MillionTreesNYC initiative. Go, Mike!

I should say, though, that it took, oh, about a year from the time of the initial request. In an earlier post, I wrote about city time vs. country time, i.e. fast vs. slow, especially when it comes to change. But here in the Bronx, at least, change takes its sweet time. One year for a tree! And literally, it's the only tree on the street. I just made an online request for another one, a few blocks down. This is going to be fun - let's start counting the days until it arrives...

In other good/slow news: there is a stretch of hilly "grass" around the corner, the slope underneath the highway. The "grass" there is 5-feet high, and it's become a thriving garbage dump. The pup and I walk by there every day, twice a day, plug our noses and whince (wait, what am I saying, the pup loves it of course, chicken bones and cat poop galore). For the first time in a year, there is a crew out there today weed-whacking, raking, and cleaning. Huzzah!

The little things, my friends. It's Christmas time, and we who celebrate in the Judeo-Christian tradition await the miraculous arrival of Emmanuel, God with us. This tree - I swear, you have to know this block and this part of the city I suppose to not think I'm a loon - is, feels like, (heck, in child-like wonder I'm claiming it as) something very close to a miracle.

Me in The Lion's Den

2007-12-18T07:52:00.000-08:00

A long stretch in the city, and an even longer stretch away from this blog (and draft 3 of my novel as well). I'm not sure what other writers mean - really mean - when they refer to "writer's block," and I'm not sure if that's what I have. I do know that what Annie Dillard said about being master of your work - you are either master or slave - is true. Here is a quote I come back to, over and over:

I do not so much write a book as sit with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender process can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the doors to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, 'Simba!'

That fear and dread are a regular part of the writing life is something people don't like to talk about so much. A dying friend, indeed. But it's that sympathy, along with a trance-like drive, pushing forth from deeper levels of consciousness and intellect than what you engage in your regular life - your life of society (urban, suburban, rural) and problem-solving and grocery shopping and bill-paying - it's that concoction of positive (and dare I say mystical) forces that completes the brew. It's a ridiculously impossible balance to maintain, let alone deepen and fortify. And when fear and dread win the day, paralysis ensues.

But enough of that. We get up off the mat. Things are not looking good in draft 3, the disorders seem awfully terminal. Fear and dread. But here is Dillard again, on writing as process, on the work of writing as life:

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all of your intelligence. It is life at its most free.

And a good word from Melanie Rae Thon:

The blank page is a mysterious place where we learn through joy to pay attention.

In a recent interview, artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel was asked which he would choose, painting or filmmaking, if he could only do one. He answered (I paraphrase): "Painting. I paint outside most of the time. I paint alone. Painting is pure freedom."

Ultimately, I am in there with the lion by my own doing. The blank page is the artist's privilege - a glorious, terrible gift.

Campaign Trail - Part One

2007-12-02T08:39:00.000-08:00

The political report from the city: we went to see Obama speak at The Apollo in Harlem. A packed house of very enthusiastic supporters; and a pretty mixed crowd (meaning black and white; we were among very few Asians). The production side of things was a bit bizarre - but maybe that's because everything about campaigning and PR is bizarre to me.

You could see and feel the complexity of Obama's positioning in "the black community" (which in itself is a complex and slippery grouping). The first half of the program was heavy on "traditional black community" figures, including the Harlem Gospel Choir (a serious mis-step, I think. The holy-rolling pentecostal evangelism - basically 30 mins of church - was not appreciated by the majority of this audience, black or white or miscellaneous). You could feel how this part of the program - entirely too long - was intended to make a kind of "traditional Harlem" community happy; but it was clear that a much more heterogeneous/ecumenical spirit had filled the room, and so it all felt awkward. It wasn't until after 9pm that things started to really warm up...

...which was when surprise guest Cornel West showed up! As always, West was eloquent and convincing. If you were on the fence before hearing him, you were knocked flat by the time he was done. In particular, he spoke to Obama's character and passion and judgment (West is no dummy, he knows the key words for the next 11 months), his place in history, and the bogus "rhetoric of experience" that's getting tossed around in favor of Hillary. I wish the campaign would bring West on the road everywhere: he's brilliant and inspiring, and he's a terrific showman - he knows how to talk to people and entertain them without dumbing down. I think he knew that he needed to be an antidote to the anti-intellectualism of the Harlem Gospel Choir; and he was.

Just when we thought we'd come to the end of the line - the energy was high, this was surely the moment of Obama's arrival - one more surprise guest took the stage: Chris Rock, who was hilarious as always. His line (speaking to black folk in particular) about "If Obama does win and you weren't down with it, won't you be embarrassed? What was I thinking voting for that white lady?" has gotten lots of media play. It was a good move: West got our blood pumping, Chris Rock deflated the tension and got us relaxed.

Obama himself was predictably impressive. Calm, confident, clear (and very tall). He has a way of conveying intense passion and easy-goingness all at once. When he raises his voice to make a point, he does so with control, and a kind of gravity (an anti-Howard Dean). He also allows humor in to the mix. This is no small feat - in fact, it's no feat at all, I sense it's his real character/personality. Overall, he seemed to me both determined and exhausted - and very serious about this campaign.

The climax of his message (for me), was when he spoke about why he's running. "I never expected to be here," he said, which is another way of saying, "This isn't a long-calculated career move for me," which is another way of saying, "Hillary Clinton is running because she's a politician, and this is what's next for her." This is all campaign lingo, over-simplification to some degree, but I think it's going to be a strong message from the Obama campaign. He's running because of the "fierce urgency of now" (MLK), because he wants to serve/lead and sees a pressing need to serve/lead. "The only way we can win is if we stop worrying primarily about losing." Another jab at Hillary's disingenuous political maneuverings - another way of looking at her supposed "experience," i.e. that her primary strength is in campaigning, obfuscating, deal-making, winning; not leading.

The (Heart is a Lonely) Hunter

2007-11-26T09:57:00.000-08:00

I'm writing about hunting here, but it seemed a good excuse to plug Carson McCullers' novel - which, besides being a great work, has one of the best titles for a literary work ever. It (the title) somehow captures the feel of a pop-song and very dark poetry all at once.

It's hunting season in the country. PA hunters are serious about their guns, and serious about their game. It's survival of the fittest, in absolute terms. I'm scrambling to make sure my pup is protected: C. the Postmistress tells me that the hunters in our area are notorious for shooting dogs. They will shoot whatever moves in their line of sight, and they won't feel bad about it. Apparently, if your dog does not have the wilderness savvy to protect himself, he doesn't deserve to live. Many have been shot, and they pretty much just get left for dead. There is also a legendary story about an old woman who got shot while hanging her clothes outside. She was wearing white gloves, and the hunter mistook her hands for a deer's tail.

Eek.

So the pup will be wearing a reflective orange safety vest from now on.

The law prohibits hunting on Sundays (because of God, I guess). And the immediate acreage around my house is "Posted," meaning it's private property where hunting is prohibited. Still, you hear the gunshots as if they are right there. I think one of the neighbors set up a shooting range for target practice.

I don't know what to say. Is hunting cruel? Barbaric? Or is it - as one of the Republican candidates said in the YouTube debates last night (was it Ron Paul?), boasting about getting his first hunting license at age 9 - "an important American family tradition." The right to bear arms. Interesting that John McCain, the candidate with the most direct experience with horrific violence, is the only one who does not own a gun (but don't get me started about what an asinine question that was).

It seems to me a classic example of "A Divided America," i.e. the challenges of a society which is both democratic and highly-diverse. For some, guns may well represent a cherished family tradition; for others, it's nothing but death and destruction. Not surprisingly, I'd come down on the side of gun control laws; if the tradition is really that cherished, then having to get a license or take an exam or go through some other qualification process is a small inconvenience to incur - especially when the larger benefit is enjoying a truly free, democratic, and safe society. For gun-lovers to make a claim on full license to do whatever and whenever with their guns is just plain anachronistic - what they want is secession, what they want is not to have to participate in a complex, pluralistic society. Do libertarians really not see the chaos that would ensue if government did disappear?

At any rate, gun control is not likely to go over any time soon in this neck o' the woods. It reminds me that I am a visitor here - for now, anyway - definitely not a true resident. (I in fact still vote in NY.) The same goes for the Bronx, really. Not quite at home in either place. A woman with no country...

The heart is a lonely hunter. Yup.

The Case For Obama Is The Case For Everything

2007-11-25T12:07:00.000-08:00

I’m all wound up about the race for the Democratic presidential nominee and am going to have to detour from city-country musings for a moment or two.

I’ve kept a distance from most media in the last few months, sorting out some things in my head and via observation/experience. Catching up on a few periodicals today, it’s weird to read analyses which articulate almost exactly what I’ve been thinking and saying ever since Obama joined the race. This is not to say that I am prescient or of particular high intelligence in any way; but rather to throw an “Amen” into the ring, affirming that something is happening in world politics and American leadership – that this is indeed a critical moment in history, of which we post baby-boomer, liberal-leaners in particular are a part – whether we like it, or acknowledge it, or not.

My draw to Obama, from the beginning, has been directly related to his biography. Meaning, my judgment of his leadership ability has everything to do with his person – how is this person shaped, what makes this person tick, what does this person most hate and most respect, with what inner capacities and outer strengths will this person approach the world’s greatest challenges and assets. In other words, HOW does this person think, not strictly WHAT does he think; and how does he understand his job vis-à-vis the individuals and groups over which he has power and influence. What a person thinks and does changes over time, in shifting circumstances – more so than ever in an increasingly complex world. But how a person thinks and acts is more deeply ingrained - a more fixed measure of character, effectiveness, and potential pitfalls as a leader.

All this is apparently getting some air time in the media now. Two recent articles about Obama – one in the New Yorker, and one in the NY Times Mag – speak to the strength of his experience as a human being. (“Experience” is the key word here, since Hillary is touting it as her advantage.) “[Obama] presents himself in all his cultural hybridity – African and American and Asian, black and white, infused with all-American hopefulness and with the reserve that comes of living on the receiving end of power.” Says Anthony Lake, one of Obama’s foreign policy advisors and former national-security adviser to Bill Clinton: “He has the kind of mind that works its way through complexities by listening and giving some edge of legitimacy to various points of view before he comes down on his, and that point of view embraces complexity.” Lake was first impressed “not so much by Obama’s policy prescriptions as by his temperament and intellectual habits.”

Complexities. Hybridity. Hopefulness and reserve. Something is happening. We are being asked to choose the long view over the short view. We are being asked to rediscover both our wild idealism and our belief in honest-to-goodness front-door problem-solving. “The security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people,” i.e. “what’s good for others is good for us, there is no contradiction between idealism and realism” (this, incidentally, is a traditional African belief – ubuntu).

Obama is committed to truthfulness, but he’s not stupid. He may be a little naïve, but not completely naïve; and a little naïve is I think exactly what a visionary leader must be. I think that Obama is savvy enough to know the difference between truth and self-sabotage; he is in for sustainability, not suicide, but he wants to do it with substantive conviction at the core. [See an earlier post which references Obama and sincerity.]

Here’s a thought that will surely get me lynched among traditional feminists and grassroots activists: when it comes to distribution of power, I have always believed in a democratic republic, as opposed to a pure democracy: some are fit to rule, some are fit to empower. I am not in favor of tyranny of the masses. This opinion is directly related to the above notion that biography is everything, that what drives us and shapes us as individuals is everything about how we lead (and you can be a perfectly admirable human without being the right person for broad-based leadership at a particular moment). Obama’s edge, I think, is that he stands on firmer personal ground than Hillary does; he has less to lose. As a woman, Hillary has to be reactive. She has to play to and against certain expectations. Her supposed “tough-mindedness” is more about crafting perceptions than it is about true leadership. Obama is less trapped in this way. He is freer to speak candidly, to lead transparently.

This is not to say that there is no woman out there who could lead in this candid, free, transparent way; but Hillary, I feel, is not that woman. She is the sort of powerful woman who has had to play the accomplished-woman game throughout her entire career in order to get to where she is; she is shaped and driven by these experiences and will approach a presidency in the same way, with “inspired cynicism.” She will cover her ass, she will look over her shoulder, she will rule her staff with an iron fist, she will act the part she must act in order to maintain her power base, she will manipulate and revise truth and position hubby Bill and do everything she has always had to do – with supreme skill and discipline – in order to keep what she’s got and continue building her “career” in politics. (Let me say here that I would not lay blame on Hillary for her path or her tactics; she has done something remarkable in a world wholly unfriendly to her success. I just don’t think her particular psyche vis-a-vis power management is the best thing for the world right now, not from the seat of the presidency.) Obama, on the other hand, for better or for worse, has more latitude to approach his presidency with an attitude and an ambition of true public service, fundamental changes for the greater good – and I believe that he does. He can use “soft power” without being accused of weak femininity. Simply put, I believe that Obama is strategizing his campaign, doggedly pursuing election, in order to pursue his public service vision; Hillary, on the other hand, is strategizing her campaign in order to get elected. To quote the character Josh Liman from my favorite prime-time drama, The West Wing (who is about to jump ship from the [Senator John] Hoynes campaign for the Jed Bartlet campaign): "Senator, I don't know what we're for. I don't know what we're for, I don't know what we're against. Except that we seem to be for winning, and against anyone else winning."

All this to say that there are some who will be more effective and fearless at the level of the US Presidency – who have less to lose, fewer personal agendas, less social baggage (Obama for his part has plenty of social baggage, but, as he’s demonstrated through his two memoirs, he’s pretty darn self-aware about all of it and has effectively channeled lessons learned into public service passions). NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg – the epitome of the unpolitical politician, who approaches his job with a genuine interest in effectiveness and change and public good, because he’s really got nothing much at stake personally – is a good example.

These presidential primaries are posing to us Democrats a fundamental question about what we fear and what we hope for. More than terrorism itself, what I fear is the voting public’s giving in to (short-term) fear: “This is Obama’s problem in a nutshell. Democratic voters seem to be torn between the hope of reshaping a frightening world and the fear of being terribly vulnerable to that world.”

Friends, there is much to be afraid of. Some threats are more obvious, more in our faces – and much of this has to do with media manipulation by a regime which has effectively used their version of the world order – scare tactics – to control us and push forward a childishly categorical and boys’ club-based, narrow-minded agenda. Let’s be more afraid of a world in which deception is the norm for the American presidency; where we expect little from our leaders as far as courage and vision; where fear and self-preservation translate into bullying force which ultimately only intensifies the threat of catastrophic violence. Obama is trying to do something new, something different; he is the post baby-boomer voice – finally – who is saying, Ok, time to get up off the mat, enough post-Vietnam cynicism. We can go that route – Iraq being our Vietnam, we are halfway there – or we can try something different. The fact that Obama is also friendly with corporate leaders, believes in free-market capitalism, raises money from the wealthy, is a student of history and an admirer of select “old guard” American and world political figures – all this should serve as reassurance that he’s not just some over-idealistic arrogant kid, throwing the baby out with the bath water. He’s shaped by no one thing, and he’s shaping something real, something truly contemporary; something based in deeply-held values and heterogeneous experience, working its way out via the political realm, expressing itself through power structures. C’mon, folks. Being brave and being self-interested truly are one in the same here.

Obama '08. Yeah.

Thanksgiving 2007

2007-11-24T10:22:00.001-08:00

I looked at my pup the other day and saw a kind of melancholy in his eyes. He'd been sleeping an awful lot, too - more than usual. I confess that I generally speak to my dog in complete sentences, not in puppy-baby-talk or single-word commands. So I cocked my head inquisitively and looked him in the eye and asked, pretty seriously: "Holidays gettin' to ya?"

I was talking to my mother a few days ago, as we were all (my family, that is) settling into whatever plans we'd decided on (this year, it was every man/woman/child for itself - each of us not up to traveling or hosting, for various reasons), and she said to me, "I can't understand why people get so anxious around holiday times. I don't see what the big deal is, whether you get together or don't get together." I think this may be a generational/cultural sort of thing, and I tried to explain to her that her family is the kind that always gets together, their sense of family is so strong, so unquestioned, that she always knows there's somewhere to go. Her problem is that she's often pulled in so many directions that she'd just assume stay home by herself and not be troubled by all the hooplah. In contrast, there are people (many of whom I know personally) whose families are so fragmented and estranged, that holidays are a time when you become acutely aware of how disconnected you are, of the absence of that unquestioned together-ness that once characterized the majority of families... but no longer.

As for me, I seem to be somewhere in the middle. My family would have me, certainly, if I had nowhere else to go. And while we do manage to maintain our relations and semi-regular correspondences - as best we can through some rocky times - we are ourselves rather fragmented these days, and it would be a forced sort of thing for all of us. I have a couple of friends in the city who fall into the category of disconnected-from-family, and who reach out for a casual non-family/urban-type anti-Thanksgiving. For them, I am thankful, and I try to make sure to spend time with them at some point around the holidays; they are and have been my crucial pseudo-family over the years. And then there are the close friends who have large family/extended family gatherings and who always offer me a place at their table (it's a toss-up whether these would be more or less awkward than Thanksgiving with my own family - depends on the specific circumstances from year to year, I guess).

This year, J. and I and the pup are in the country (J.'s family is similar to mine in its semi-together-fragmentedness, and so the forces saw fit to give us time together). We spent our Thursday more or less how we always spend our time here - cooking, eating, working, studying, playing, resting. I am thankful. Yes, I am thankful. The stripping away of typical traditions is, on the one hand, a little sad; but then again, in their stead is a kind of bare-bones gratitude that is perhaps even closer to the original spirit of the holiday than the holiday traditions themselves: for shelter and warmth, for love and friendship, for work and rest, for freedom and choice... I am thankful.

And, of course, for all of you, too - dear friends and fellow pilgrims in this strange and ever-challenging modern world of brokenness, evolution, art, commerce, loneliness, and love. Hope you had a good one.

Thanksgiving Anti-Turkey Meal: Suckling Pig, Sauteed Swiss Chard, Beans n Rice

First Snow, and Rilke on Ambition

2007-11-19T05:54:00.000-08:00

The snow is falling fast here this morning - it's lovely. About a foot I'd say. Should taper off this afternoon. The wood pile is almost all stacked in the shed (yesterday's labor), and the new furnace is humming along. We discovered a mystery electrical cord emerging from the crawl space in the basement and realized that it's heating tape for the kitchen and bathroom pipes - the ones that froze last winter. C. the Postmistress told me about heating tape - you attach it to your pipes, plug it in, and it (safely) heats the pipes when temps fall below freezing. I was planning on researching and trying to install, so what a relief - one of those gifts from above - that it's already done. My second winter, and I'm just a little more prepared, which is a good thing.

So winter is officially here, and in the quiet of the world going dormant, laying itself down to sleep, I have been reading Rilke's early poems and some biography. The poet's realm was that of the soul, the deep inner life. In Robert Bly's intro to his translations of selected poems, he writes:

When I first read Rilke in my twenties, I felt a deep shock upon realizing the amount of introversion he had achieved, and the adult attention he paid to inner states. From the pragmatist or objectivist point of view, Rilke goes too far in this attention; he goes over the line. The American, in Latin America or North America, is willing to accept some introversion, but when it goes this far, he may dismiss the whole thing as solipsism, or as an evasion of political responsibility... Rilke knows what Tolstoy knows in The Death of Ivan Ilych: that our day-to-day life, with its patterns and familiar objects, can become a husk that blocks anything fresh from coming in. Before the industrial revolution brought its various creature comforts, it is conceivable that the shocks of winter cold, sudden poverties, plague, brutal invasions, abrupt unexplainable deaths, regularly broke the husk. In our time the husk is strong, and Rilke turns to look at it.

Here in the country, in solitude, I find that the husk falls away. The soul, the spirit, unfolds:

I want to unfold.
I don't want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

The spareness and the stillness of a country road, farmlands minding their own seasons and work in good time, big sky, snow falling... the slow, deep work of fruitfulness that is born of nature, as opposed to human-driven competition or ambition. And yet Rilke, like Donald Hall, has a very clear idea of his ambition:

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing,
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst....

You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

Calmly. As Denise Levertov reminded us, "Much happens when we're not there." And much happens when we do nothing. We unfold... and we hear things. We may even hear the snow falling.

Recoiling & Progress

2007-11-13T06:52:00.000-08:00

“I pray that my progress has been more than recoiling with satiation and disgust from one style to another, a series of rebuffs." -Robert Lowell

There's a certain soggy, cold, autumn-turning-winter sort of day in the country which reminds me of rural New England in November. Which is a funny/odd reminder of what drove me to the city in the first place.

I went to boarding school in New England from 9th through 12th grades. My parents had this grand idea - somewhat typical immigrant dream - about their elite-educated children, ivy league and would-be Supreme Court Justices or renowned scholars. I was a morose pre-teen of the suburbs, so they figured it could only do me good to send me off. So off I went. They were strange and lonely years, my introduction to class-and race-consciousness and social alienation on a whole new level. I am grateful for the education, a real love of learning got under my skin during those years; and it is ultimately unbecoming, I realize, to complain about an expensive education. At any rate, when those four years were up, I was more than game for something different - for the big city, for a place where there were many more people in general, and many more people who looked more like me.

So this funny/odd reminder makes me wonder if something else got under my skin during those years, despite my abrupt flight to the city: a certain comfort in solitude, the building up of inner resources in the face of an unwelcoming external world; the beginnings - or perhaps the second bloom (the first being a mostly lonely childhood) - of some breed of vocation for quiet and apartness. It's a simplistic but not wholly untrue paradigm for artistic evolution, I suppose - turning one's basic sense of alienation into a creative state. I learned a preference for quiet over noise, for intimacy over crowds, during those years - as a way of survival.

In my memories, both childhood and boarding school are perpetual autumn. When I conjure up those times, I see and feel only a soggy cold, or a crisp cool; silence or the barely audible rustle of the wind, the crunch of leaves under my feet; gray-ness, muted greens and browns, or rays of light shooting through tops of towering trees in a private forest. I try to recall spring and summer, and I see images, but I see them from without, as if observing another body, another being. For many years during my young adulthood I remember thinking and feeling a kind of animosity toward spring and summer; as if thaw, germination, bloom, brightness, and warmth had nothing whatever to do with me, and I bore them, awaited their passing, like a shrill marching band blasting through. Over the last decade or so, this has slowly begun to change, especially as I've taken up gardening in earnest and learned to love spring and summer on their own terms - for their work of fruitfulness, for their own warm stillness, for the ways in which they open their arms for all manner of living creature to emerge and get busy and propagate (yes, even the BUGS).

In two weeks, it will be one full year, a cycle of seasons, since this city-country journey began (since I closed the deal on the house and spent my first night). Ironically, I will be spending that anniversary weekend with my family in the suburbs. I'm sure it will be an interesting and useful "pause" as I launch into the next four seasons of city-country life, and city-country tales.

Poem for a Quiet Morning / a Quiet Life

2007-11-12T06:42:00.000-08:00

Much happens when we're not there.
Many trees, not only that famous one, over and over,
fall in the forest. We don't see, but something sees,
or someone, a different kind of someone,
a different molecular model, or entities
not made of molecules anyway; or nothing, no one:
but something has taken place, taken space,
been present, absent,*
returned. Much moves in and out of open windows
when our attention is somewhere else,
just as our souls move in and out of our bodies sometimes.
Everyone used to know this,
but for a hundred years or more
we've been losing our memories, moulting, shedding,
like animals or plants that are not well...
And though it may have nothing at all to do with us,
and though we can't fathom its designs,
nevertheless our condition thereby changes:
cells shift, a rustling barely audible as of tarlatan
flickers through closed books, one or two leaves
fall, and when we read them we can perceive,
if we are truthful, that we are not dreaming,
not dreaming but once more witnessing.

-Denise Levertov, from "Window-Blind"

*This line should be indented, blogger's formatting not cooperating.

Only Let Me Be...

2007-11-11T16:56:00.000-08:00

Dear God,

Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.
Let me be gay
Let me be sad
Let me be cold
Let me be warm
Let me be hungry, have too much to eat
Let me be ragged or well dressed
Let me be sincere, be deceitful
Let me be truthful
Let me be a liar
Let me be honorable and let me sin
Only let me be something every blessed minute.
And when I sleep, let me dream all the time,
so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.

-Francie Nolan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Listening to the last of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on my way out to the country today, the above passage struck me. It reminded me, I think, of why this crazy life of extremes – often disorienting (and very inefficient) – of city and country.

By the time of the above passage, it’s 1917, and Francie is 15 years old. She has been forced to quit school – her only joy – to work a full-time office job (pretending to be 17) and be the primary bread-winner for her family. She’s known poverty and hunger her whole life, her beloved father died a drunkard, and her proud mother loves her brother better than her. So much day-to-day struggle, and yet still, she says: Let me be hungry, have too much to eat / Let me be ragged or well dressed. Not: Let me be stable, let me be secure, let me be middle-of-the-road. Let me be something.

War has just been declared, and upon learning this, Francie is having a kind of visionary moment – of seeing herself in history, of recognizing the profundity of her existence in that moment. She is a young woman, hungry for life and love and beauty, reading for the first time that the world is officially on fire. She consciously seizes the moment, tries to capture it – by taking the time to notice every detail about herself and her environment, and then sealing some things in an envelope (a lock of hair, a penny, a Whitman poem, the news clipping about the war). She writes her name, her age, and the date on the envelope and imagines herself opening it in 50 years. I don’t want to remember, she says. I want to live. I don’t want to reminisce, I want to re-live.

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man
Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine...

(from "Leaves of Grass")

Francie’s spirit is clearly that of a romantic – Emersonian, Whitmanesque, Proustian. At such a young age, she understands something that only a young person who has had a very short youth could understand: that the passage of time is an utter tragedy. And that every moment we are alive on this earth is a miracle worth bottling for eternity (in Francie’s case, sealing in an envelope) - a living phenomenon bursting with beauty and possibility. On some level, Francie, who at 15 is both still a child and more adult than most adults, understands her mortality.

Let me be something.
Let me share the silence of first snow with no one but the doe
Let me wake to the sound of city garbage trucks and car alarms
Let me burn the wood I’ve chopped and stacked, and warm my hands by the fire
Let me rebel against urban radiators, strip naked and open all the windows in January
Let me see and hear no one but God for days
Let me see and hear all the peoples of the world in a subway car
Let me smell the sweetness of grass and damp tree bark
Let me smell the smells of the street - fancy downtown bakeries, Puerto Rican oxtails, urine, and all
Let the stars show me how black is the night sky
Let the city lights own the skyline and the heavens
Let me till the earth and bring forth fruits
Let an orchid grow in the Bronx.
Let me be something.

The Rustle of Autumn

2007-11-07T14:25:00.000-08:00

More richly and more recklessly,
Leaves, leaves, give tongue and whirl away,
Fill yesterday's cup of bitterness
With the sadness of today.

Impulse, enchantment, beauty!
Let's dissolve in September wind
And enter the rustle of autumn.
Be still, or go out of your mind!

-From "Autumn," by Boris Pasternak

I spent part of the country weekend with the Russians - Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova. Random? Even more so: after a day of Russian poetry, I sat down to watch OLD SCHOOL - an adult(ish) frat movie starring Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, and Luke Wilson.

A strange stretch in the country. Quiet and unbothered, yet work-ful. Not particularly restful. If I were to oversimplify the city-country dichotomy, I would say city=intellect, country=body. Lawn & yard, cooking, cleaning, laundry, hauling fire wood, climbing the hill with the dog, car maintenance... in the country, I mysteriously turn into a farm woman. The Russians were I guess a mini-antidote to all that. (OLD SCHOOL a mini-antidote to the Russians.)

The physical work is how we get ready for the change of seasons, I suppose. Putting away summer things, getting out sweaters and wool socks and space heaters, the last mowing of the season, the final harvest of lettuce and spinach, raking the leaves and covering the garden with them...and changing the clocks, of course. We enter the dark of winter. Everything smells of burning wood (hair, clothes, dog).

I am not sure if I have quite yet entered the rustle of autumn. Be still, or go out of your mind! We are facing translation issues here, I would imagine. And yet, the sentiment speaks to me - be still, be still. The chores will always be there. More richly, and more recklessly...

Homecoming

2007-11-02T06:29:00.000-07:00

Nighttime temps dipped into the high 20’s last night here in the country. The furnace installers were here all day yesterday, back again today to finish up. Had to make do with space heaters and the wood-burning stove. I’ve got enough wood in the shed for a couple weeks but will need to stock up soon. To chop, or to buy: that is the question.

Between October travel and awaiting furnace parts, it’s been a month since I’ve been here. Driving out, I noticed both the slowness and steadiness of change. Two of the boats that were for sale along the roadside all summer are still there, the third is gone – sold or carted in for the winter. Pretty much every real estate for sale sign is still up. The “Cuban Sandwiches” billboard is still there, though no Cuban sandwiches have been sighted in at least a year. There is a new traffic light by the Citgo, where once there was a blinking yellow light. The deer are out, too close to the road, in groups of three and four. There is a new soup self-service area at the General Store, and the coffee shop in S-burg has expanded to include some organic groceries. C. the Postmistress has put her garden to bed with piles of grass clippings, and across the way are about six cows new to the neighborhood.

(In the city, after a month's passing, 1/3 of the apartments in the building would have turned over, advertisements at every bus station and in every subway car would be different, people you know would be now divorced, pregnant, and/or dead, stores would be filled with product lines for the next nearest holiday (chocolate Easter eggs in early-February)).

I arrive at my house - every time, but especially this time - braced for whatever calamity may have befallen. This time, most everything (thankfully) in its place. The wheelbarrow knocked over, a small tree fallen into the backyard, the grass long but not too long, medusa-like sugar snap peas (no actual peas) toppling over their supports, unidentified feces in the front yard. Inside, a few fly carcasses on the windowsills, spider webs and cobwebs of course (Happy Halloween). Leftovers in the fridge grown fuzzy as newborn chicks. No phone messages.

The transition from city to country is always something – something to be undergone. Energy ringing, mind racing as mental space is created, and thoughts – real ones and garbagey ones – migrate from crowded spaces into more open ones, look around the metaphorical room to see if there’s anyone to talk to or good food at the buffet table; then either plant themselves somewhere strategic or go along their merry way. It takes some time to settle in. This time, even more intense after the long absence. During the summer, a long sit on the porch, or ceiling-staring from the couch will do it. But in the cold, sans furnace, the ringing turns in on itself, seeps into the skin and blood and fat, becomes, I think, physiological.

Somewhat defenselessly, I made a fire and ate. And ate. And ate some more. The pup stared accusingly, but oh well. The body needed something, and I gave it. It would take more time for the mind to find its breath and air, but time – here in the country – I got. There is the generosity of slowness, of knowing inaction and waiting not as laziness, not as poor productivity, but as tending to the aliveness of body and soul. Paying attention. Letting. The pup rolled around in the front yard feces, his greatest indulgent joy (qua pup), and I thought: Let him. Just let him.

Let's Try This...

2007-11-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

Yes, there need to be orchids in the Bronx, one way or another. I'll think of these as distant cousins to Ella (RIP)- the lovely phalaenopsis who inspired this blog (for those of you just joining).

City Mouse, Country Mouse

2007-10-26T07:39:00.000-07:00

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.

The Wire

2007-10-24T00:33:00.000-07:00

"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.

Into the Wire

2007-10-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

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.

That Thing We Don't Talk About (Here I Go Again)...

2007-10-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

(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."

The Little Ones (& Their Moms)

2007-10-19T06:06:00.000-07:00

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.

Aurevoir, Merci or "Tous Les Deux"

2007-10-15T15:00:00.000-07:00

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.)

Les Orchidees

2007-10-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

An orchid shop on rue T. in Paris (by night).

An Orchid Grows in Beaune (Part 2)

2007-10-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

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.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
--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.

An Orchid Grows in Beaune (Part 1)

2007-10-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

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.

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...

(This post to be continued...)

The Super

2007-10-05T06:57:00.000-07:00

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.

Room for the Weak Ones

2007-10-04T12:31:00.000-07:00

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.

The Claims of Reasonable Gloom (In Refusal of)

2007-10-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

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.

My Ambition: Part 2

2007-10-01T06:19:00.001-07:00

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.

Gifts From the Cosmos: A Good Day in the City

2007-09-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

Saturday in the city, a rarity for me these days. I'm here to help staff a giant sidewalk book sale, produced by and benefiting a charity org, for which I work part-time.

It's a perfect fall day, crisp and sunny. The sale is taking place on a cobblestone street in SoHo, a long city block, and it's packed. People lined up a good hour before the cash registers opened, and (amusingly) at the stroke of ten a.m., it was like an Olympic track & field relay: on your mark, get set, go! The crowds descended upon hundreds of boxes-full of used books & CDs in a graceful, synchronized swarm.

Urbanites, cultural materials, dirt-cheap bargains (everything for a dollah). This event epitomizes the adage, One man's garbage is another man's treasure. I am reminded today, here in the affluent and/or educated sector of the urban jungle, of a different kind of commerce: the commerce of old things, rare things - high-culture recycled junk. The event was in fact conceived as a way to get rid of the dregs, the books that do not sell in the store, nor on the Internet - the books that, literally, are stored in the sub-basement. Now in its third year, the event has developed a reputation as a place to discover gems. People mark it on their calendars, arrive early, psyche themselves up - this is not shopping in the passive, mind-numbing, guilty-pleasure sense. This is renegade urban exploration, a Saturday journey to nether-worlds - and an opportunity to be surprised and blessed by the cosmos. One does not arrive with a particular item in mind; rather, this is where the book you didn't even know you were looking for finds you.

And indeed, I was amazed by the seriousness of the endeavor, particularly with the morning crowd, before the food vendors started grilling and the jazz-blasting speakers came out. The tent areas were crowded with bodies, but there was no pushing or shoving; all were civilized, and focused. It was church-like - no kidding - a kind of religious hush prevailing. In planning meetings, the staff had talked about categorizing and labeling the book bins more specifically; but observing the scene this morning, I thought, No, let the people search, let them peruse and explore. This is what they came for.

I found some early editions of Rilke's letters, Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, and Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief (I hovered mostly around the classic hard covers). Ultimately I left them for other pilgrims, remembering the teetering tower of books-on-the-night-table (in both PA and the Bronx); but I did snag Gombrich's The Story of Art, which has been on my list for a couple years now.

And, at the end of the street, the bookstore's sister business, a popular thrift store, set up giant bins of second-hand clothing and shoes, filled with fashionable discards from the wealthy (oh fashion, I cannot escape thee!). It works like this: buy a paper shopping bag for $20, fill it with all you can stuff, and off you go. Holy moly! This is Extreme Street-Shopping at its most intense. I found a bin filled with things around my size, waited and watched as a tiny woman picked through (nearly dove in, full body, I swear) every last item, then stepped up and stuffed away. The booty: an Italian-made stretchy black cocktail dress, 5 sweaters, a CK silk blazer, a leather purse, 3 pairs of pants, two tank tops, and a fun stretchy-red blouse (I have no idea if any of this will fit me, so some of you gals out there may receive a care package). Likely $500+ worth of apparel for twenty freaking bucks.

It's a rather bizarre carousel of exhanges, but somehow it works: rich people giving their things away so that people from all walks can buy them cheaply and benefit - materially, intellectually, spiritually - so that a charity organization which serves homeless people can raise income, so that the poor can receive the ultimate benefits. It's win-win-win, trickle-down and entrepreneurialism in action; it's how the city, with its vastly rich and abjectly poor, makes peace with itself - at least for a day.

My Ambition

2007-09-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

Ambition interests me because it's such a surefire indicator of damage.
- Paul Morgan, screenwriter (THE QUEEN) & playwright ("Frost/Nixon")

I'm a little bit country. I'm a little bit rock 'n' roll.
-Donny & Marie

City=ambition. Country=retreat (I'm thinking here of the verb form, as in, to withdraw, to recede...an implication of ceding defeat).

The notion of ambition as an expression of damage - wow, that's something. That would make a place like New York City a kind of vat-full of ruined souls, manifesting their pain in high achievement, in fierce competition and freakish single-mindedness.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

In her gazillion-weeks-on-the-bestseller-list memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes of her experience in Bali:

Everywhere in this town, you see the same kind of character: Westerners who have been so ill-treated and badly worn by life, that they've dropped the whole struggle and decided to camp out here in Bali indefinitely....where they can drink before noon without getting any static about it... but generally all they are doing here is seeing to it that nothing serious will ever be asked of them again... This is a very high grade of people - multi-national, talented, and clever. But it seems to me that everyone I meet here used to be something once (generally married or employed) and now they are all united by the absence of the one thing they seem to have surrendered completely and forever: ambition. Needless to say there's a lot of drinking... When I am around this scene, I feel somewhat like Dorothy in the poppy fields of Oz: be careful, don't fall asleep in this narcotic meadow, or you could doze away the rest of your life."

Ambition. There is something about it that is driven by brokenness, and a burning need to right something. Contentment of the happy-happy variety and ambition do not often go hand-in-hand, do they. And the city feeds off of it, this ambition, this energy, this urge to ascend, perhaps transcend, whatever demons plague us; and if you do not partake, you feel the sting. Are you someone? Are you no one? What do you have to show for yourself? For what are you striving? What creds can you flash, what contacts in your rolodex? What are you selling, and who's buying? It sounds so hackneyed, so trite, a caricature. But my experience is that it's real. Everyone's got an angle, people are out for themselves, they want to be someone, go somewhere. And they will do what needs to be done.

I was telling a friend recently about my experiences in seeking a literary agent, how frustrating and demoralizing it's been, how distracting from the work (and joy) of writing. How I feel caught in the middle, between wanting to publish a novel, and wanting to "doze away the rest of my life" in quiet contentment, in the country. How miserable I am when I am in ambition mode. In ambition mode, you must contend with The Market. As an artist in The Market, you must have more than creative talent, more than serious ideas or lyric genius; you must have something to sell, something that people will buy. And you must be willing to play the game. You must be willing to cede the power to determine the worth of art to people like agents, and editors, and publishing executives - people whose primary skill is not spiritual wisdom, or aesthetic vision, or crafting language. Their skill is understanding the mass market and centering all things around the behavior, the intelligence, the cravings of that market. I'm not one to think that the market is always bad, or that popular equals shoddy. But the market is the market; the market is where people are, it is anathema to reach, or vision, or difficult pleasure.

And the market is unforgiving. You cannot be a little ambitious; in fact, ambivalence about ambition is the worst place to be. If you want it, you must to be prepared to do whatever it takes to get it. If you wobble, if you waver, if you hem and haw, you will fail. And if you're going to fail, it's better to let it go completely, rather than torment yourself with your little bit of ambition, your mousy hope in partaking in The Arena of Recognition & Success.

Of course country life, in my (limited) experience, is not dozing. There is hard work to be done, living in retreat - physical, creative, intellectual, spiritual. But you are, more or less, working for the sake of beauty, for joy, for the light of day; you are a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear, to see, to affirm. There is a kind of purity to this life, yes; and a deep loneliness. A life in full-time retreat is, I think, a kind of calling. A vocation. Perhaps even a different breed of ambition, one focused solely on the inner life. I have always been interested in, drawn to, this vocation. But you can't really be a little monastic either.

Tales from the city and country. Tales of ambition and retreat. Maybe Donny & Marie could do it - a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n' roll - but then again, there were two of them. I wonder and worry that my promiscuity, my bigamy, will be my downfall.

Fashion Again: Appropriation and the Morality of the Artificial

2007-09-26T08:11:00.000-07:00

Back in the city, catching up on piles of periodicals, and thinking again about fashion. In the NY Times Mag Men's Fall Fashion issue, a Tommy Hilfiger ad speaks mountains (or oceans, as the case may be): two handsome young fellas with perfectly-wavy-perfectly-mussed-perfectly gelled hair (one fair/blonde, one dark/brunette), wearing tailored suits over preppy collar-shirts and thick-striped ties, on a rugged (New England) beach, the tide coming in, white water breaking, Hans and Giovanni (I'll call them) each in action stance, reeling in a catch on their tensed fishing rods (yes, fishing rods), and wearing, pulled up over their (wet) Italian-wool pant legs.... Wellies. Kelly green.

My observant friend L., reading my recent post on fashion, wrote to me: "My grandmother wouldn't have been caught dead in Wellies, however colorful. Those are for slopping hogs, child."

Of course, how could I miss it: the appropriation of country function for city fashion. Urban sophistication on a rugged coast, painstakingly styled by Mr. Hilfiger. Wellies and fishing rods as this year's fall fashion statement. Next year, what - orange reflective hunting vests? Bring back overalls? Re-purpose the quaintness of the rube for the urban sophisticate, et voila! High style. (Try the reciprocal, and you will only further rube-ify).

It's all artifice, of course. Not to get too pedantic here, but there is artifice which is art - the crafting of a fiction which is driven by idea, by moral vision, by spiritual truth, radiating out and resonating to depths - and there is artifice which is no more than its own referent. I am not trying (nor am I smart enough or qualified) to be the authenticity police here, but fashion does ring hollow on many counts. Something happens when you take all the function out of something. Function is integral to beauty, I think. In many cases, the function is the beauty. When you take something which was designed for a purpose - and well-designed for that purpose - and remove it from that purpose completely - for what? for commerce, for lifestyle - you've done something perhaps in the realm of homicide. You've killed the thing, its function, its beauty. Mr. Hilfiger (his ad designers anyway) even seems to be toying with the idea of fashion as God: "HILFIGER" in large, ghostly block letters across the background, stamping the skies.

Again, what's the relationship here? Do Hans and Giovanni have any real connection to fishing on a misty coastline, to hog-slopping, to the heritage of plaid or pinstripes even? I doubt it. I'm pretty sure neither of them is even holding the fishing rod correctly.

I'm sounding grouchy, I know. But while I'm on this rant: SUV's. Do soccer mom and dad really need that gigantic four-by-four to get little Johhny and Susie to the playfield? (Let's not even get started on drug-dealer Joe.) Have they ever in their lives gone off-road or into seriously inclement weather on steep inclines in that thing? Their Ford Excessive is clean & shiny; the planet, on the other hand... design and purpose go hand in hand, I think. Some things are, of course, designed purely for pleasure, for observance, for beholding (useless beauty, a la Kant, etc). Some things are created for work, not pleasure alone, and something really terrible - insidious and violating - begins to happen when you remove from a thing completely its best, intended purpose. Perhaps it's the difference between appropriation (mercenary, impersonal, profit-driven) and adaptation (innovative, humanist, purposeful).

It's 85-degrees and humid today, the urban hot-house indeed. My goal is to seek out the good today, or at least be receptive. I need some.

Let Evening Come

2007-09-25T09:04:00.000-07:00

I'm in the city today, but it's one of those days... when I'm hating being here.

"Let Evening Come," fall poem, a country poem, by Jane Kenyon... about letting go of summer, letting go of daylight; fearing not the cold nor the dark, knowing that we are never without comfort.

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes us her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

I Make Friends With the Postmistress

2007-09-21T17:13:00.001-07:00

C. is a God-send. I think how it could have been different. I think how I may never have met C., how she may have never become a regular source of comfort, wisdom, practical help. I think how thankful I am it turned out this way.

When I bought the house in the country and was figuring out what to do for mail delivery, there was some confusion: all the residences in the county had just been re-addressed for emergency purposes, i.e. some homes previously had no numbers assigned to them, but now they all did, so that the 911 system could map every residence (I still don't think my house shows up on googlemaps, though). As a result, postal delivery was also re-assigned, but somehow I got lost in the shuffle. There are three post offices within a couple miles of my house, and I was told to "pick one." No matter which I chose, I would have to request special mail delivery, i.e. my house is on no particular postal route, the mail carrier would have to make a special trip; and I would have to install a mail box. I called around, and C. was the first postmistress to answer my call and be helpful; so I picked her post office. I decided not to install a mailbox but to keep a PO Box instead. I thought, it would not be a bad thing to have to make a trip out once in a while, to have a regular errand to run, regular human contact. Plus, C.'s post office shares space with the local general store, where we get the paper and other household staples.

C. has been the postmistress in M.town for about 6 years. Prior to that, she lived in the city. She went back and forth as a weekender for a year, then decided to make the move. She lives alone, in an old farm house with a lovely brook running right through her property. She has three dogs. She's about a half a mile from me and drives by my house on her way to the post office every day. On her lunch hour, she drives home to let the dogs run loose, and I'm often out for a walk at that time, so me and the pup will get out the way and wave as our friend drives by.

C. has been my go-to on everything from gardening tips (she dug her own large garden - no easy task for one person - and amended her soil every year with manure wheelbarrowed down from the farm up the hill, and now grows almost all her own produce), to snow-shoveling, to animal care, to river wisdom. She leaves her canoe out on her front lawn and has offered it for our use "whenever" (we've taken her up on it once). Last winter, when I was snowed in, she delivered my mail to my house for me and kept calling Mike the Snowplower until he actually did show up. She tells me that you can enclose your porch with heavy plastic and turn it into an instant February-March greenhouse. She made the city-to-country transition all alone, she taught herself everything she knows about house and yard maintenance, what do for frozen pipes, you name it. She tells me that her first year here, her staircase caved in and she literally googled "How to Replace a Staircase," went to Home Depot, and did it herself. She has also felled trees with a hand saw (and a friend). C. is my hero.

Today, I pick up my mail, and we chat about how quickly the summer goes, and all the chores facing us as fall and winter loom. We commiserate about how difficult it is, dealing with the relentless repair and maintenance work on a house, when you don't have the money to hire out, the weather is harsh and unforgiving, and you're alone. I am alone only part of the time, she is alone full-time. Did I mention that C. is my hero? "It's really hard," she says. "I love my house, I love my garden, my dogs are happy, but sometimes, don't you just think, What am I DOING here? One thing I realized is that you really have to rely on yourself; because no one else will do it for you."

Hard-earned words of wisdom from kind and generous C.

And then, of course, there's P. the Librarian. Last week she called, because one of the books I'd requested for reserve had arrived and had been waiting for me for over a week (I hadn't had a chance to get over there, I was marooned in the city because of some work appointments). The reserve request was about to expire, but she wanted to make sure I got it if I still wanted it. So she left a message saying she'd hold it another few days for me. And now, I have my Balthasar & Blimunda. Thanks, P. What would I do without you.

It can be harsh and lonely out here, but these one or two people looking out for you - it really just makes all the difference. Yes, we are alone and have to rely on ourselves, but we are relying on ourselves together.

Bronx Fresh

2007-09-21T09:08:00.001-07:00

A few pix, Round 2 of the Bronx garden project:

A little bit o' cullah - pansies and begonia

Arugula and a few wild greens from Round 1

For the neighbors - all gobbled up

The Question Remains...

2007-09-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

Green Market Day at Union Square today. It's a perfect autumn day, clear and cool, that quality of early autumn light... I can't do it justice (and I call myself a writer... pshhah). It's that bursting-with-the-wondrousness-of- health-and-life feeling that fills Union Square Park (and one's soul as you walk through) on market day in mid-September. I couldn't even find a good picture or description on the Web. Here's the best I could find (there's a panorama).

This is the time of full bounty. It's harvest time, the (literal) fruits of the summer's labor are all here to be enjoyed. This is commerce at its beautiful, local, environmentally-sound best. Warm-weather veges are at the tail end of peak (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, zucchini), and cool-weather veges and root crops are starting to show up too (lettuces and all kinds of greens, peas, potatoes, spinach, squash in a few weeks...). Plums and peaches are finishing up, apples are back. The bakers are the year-round soldiers (amazing breads, pies, cookies, muffins, scones - mostly organic), and today I bought rainbow trout from "The Trout Guy" (I'm going to have to get his info next time) - the scruffy guy with the pickup truck and beer coolers who raises fish up near Oneonta, and who tells me he's there every Wednesday, all year-round, except for a couple of weeks in February. "Love your city, but just once a week," he says. "Takes me 'til Saturday to recover."

I was there mostly for the plants, though. I've got the go-ahead to do a second round of container planting for the backyard up here in the Bronx. The first round of lettuces did great, and I'm getting ready to harvest and make plastic baggies-full for the tenants here.

(D. the landlord is taking the cheap route on fencing and ground cover in the back, which is unfortunate; hopefully it will turn out all right.) I picked up some arugula (spinach didn't look so good), pansies, and a begonia.

I also stopped to chat with the (sniffle sniffle) orchid folks. I told them about Ella (no, I did not actually admit that I had named her), and their diagnosis was (perhaps not surprisingly) that the vendor was not reputable (hey, those are my people!). Many florists sell orchids but don't grow them, the fella explained. So who knows who grew the orchid, how old it was when I got it, what climate it was most suited for (maybe it was grown in Hawaii and shipped over, for instance). This guys grows his in NJ and insists that all his customers are happy. I guess I felt a little better - that maybe it wasn't me, or, my other fear, the Bronx pollution (he seemed to think that the air couldn't be that bad... but then again, what does he know, he lives in NJ). I had also started to worry that maybe Ella wasn't really dead and I shouldn't have tossed her away; but the guy assured me that, when all the leaves are gone, the orchid is done for.

So maybe I'll try again. Maybe this is a lesson in "you get what you pay for." But NJ guy sells his for a pret-ty penny... I'll think on it. In the meantime, the question remains: does an orchid grow in the Bronx?

Roses, Late Summer

2007-09-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

Here's one - a poem about the coming of autumn, that is. Which is a poem about many things, big and small, arrival and departure, the coming of going. By Mary Oliver, one of my favorites.

What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens

to the singing birds
when they can't sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?

Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children

to live in the valley,
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of light
that stands up every morning

in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.

Autumn, How I Love Thee...

2007-09-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

Autumn has arrived in the country. Temps are down to the low 40's/high 30's at night, the leaves are starting to turn. We fired up the wood-burning stove to usher in the new season (and burn piles of newspaper). Summer clothes have been put away, long underwear and sweaters and thick socks are all out. The last tomato has turned orangish, the last green beans have been picked, and no luck with either the eggplants or the red peppers this year. I pulled up the zucchini and squash plants - sprawling and sagging all over the place like a series of Andy Warhol medusas - and threw them on the compost pile. A new batch of lettuce and snap peas is coming up. Am going to go hunting the neighborhood for piles of manure to dig in for next spring - no, really: me, the truck, and a shovel - so I don't have to buy it in bags from Home Depot. I'm already thinking about what to do differently next year.

Speaking of orangish, hunting season will start up again. Men with guns in orange vests. Ahh, life in a red state (or I guess now PA is more in the pink). And speaking of guns, it has been suggested to me that I learn how to shoot. Not to kill poor Bambi or her mama, but to have some line of self-defense when the barn-burning ATV boys come hooting and hollering and I'm all by my lonesome. This may not be such a crazy idea. I'll think on it.

Spring and fall are the heavy-duty chore seasons in the country. In the next few weeks, we'll need to chop wood and rake leaves and plant any shrubs or trees we want to start blooming in the spring (lilac is my priority this year - although I'm gun shy, so to speak, after Ella's sad passing). Need to get the chimney cleaned out, the furnace serviced, and probably take a look at insulating the pipes that froze last winter. Maybe consider purchasing a snow-blower - not that I have any godly idea what a snow-blower IS or how it WORKS, but it's on my list-of-things-to-research. I also need a good pair of winter boots and probably a heavy-duty winter coat (my city-girl leather coat is not quite what the doctor ordered). Sigh. All the things I put off last winter because I wanted to get a better sense of what I really needed; and now I have to figure out how to afford all of it.

But it's all good. I love autumn so much, it's impossible to express in plain words. No wonder there are so many poems about autumn. Think I'll go dig some up - stay tuned.

On the Subway: The City's Magnificent Undoing

2007-09-15T12:32:00.000-07:00

There's always one: someone on the subway who's shameless about loud-talking, happy for anyone and everyone to hear. Often it's tourists, but not always (local loud-talkers are often young women in pairs, venting about a boss or a boyfriend). Sometimes it's unbearable, this violation of public space, of one's right to a peaceful commute. But there are other times when it's irresistable - eavesdropping, that is.

I'm on the platform at Union Square boarding an uptown 6 train. There is a group of four standing next to me - an older couple, a young guy, and a young gal. The couple and the guy get on the train, the gal is heading off somewhere else. The older woman sits next to me, and the two men stand, forming a triangular conversation - although, it becomes clear that the older man is of few (if any) words.

The woman is the loud-talker. She is a cheerful out-of-towner, probably mid-Western based on the accent, probably from a small town or rural area, based on the dress. The guy is scruffy and skinny, wearing a ratty t-shirt, expensive-looking hipster jeans, and cool thrift store sneakers. I think these are his parents, but it's not clear; they speak to each other more like distant relatives than immediate ones. I learn that the gal and the guy used to work in the same restaurant, but the guy now works in a different restaurant, and the gal quit her job and is leaving the city, back to her hometown, because she was dating the chef and they broke up. The guy's new job is a better job than the one before, perhaps he was a waiter before; now he is something in the realm of a cook. The next part of the conversation goes something like this:

"Why don't you hire her at your restaurant? Poor thing."
"Well, it's not really my restaurant. I mean, if the head chef died or something, I wouldn't like be next in line or anything."
"Aren't you #3? I thought you said you were #3."
"Um, yeah, maybe. I don't know."
"Do you have paid vacation now?"
"Yeah."
"Well that must feel good. Do you know what you'll have off around Christmas?"
"Nah, we won't know until just before."

They go on to talk about an upcoming wedding in the family, which I think is the guy's brother, the couple's other son.

"So are you bringing a date?"
"Nah."
"There will be a lot of single girls there. [Fiancee whose name I didn't catch] has a lot of cousins."
"That would be weird. We'd be, like, related."
"No, not exactly."

The whole conversation was pretty upbeat, but something about it was squirmingly fascinating; I couldn't stop listening. This mother was so eager, so cheerfully eager for her son to be... fixed. #3? #2? #1?* Dating? Married? Planned vacation? The strain of their conversational tone was killing me - so close, and yet so far away. The guy was pleasant and a good city host, but I could just imagine him later, after they left, after their visit was over, lighting up a cigarette, breathing a sigh of relief, calling up a friend (or a therapist) to unload.

People come to the city, and stay, not to be fixed - in any sense of that word. People come, in a sense, for the wild ride of breaking everything open, milling about untethered, so that anything can happen always. It must be awful for all these mothers of lost children, after 18 or 20 years of doing everything to hold these kids together...watching them undo it all.

*I understand that in Bali, there are only four first names. They are not gender-specific, and translated, they are First, Second, Third, Fourth, referring to your birth order.

Fashion Week in the City

2007-09-11T18:33:00.001-07:00

A headline yesterday in the Times read: Sept. 11, as a public occasion, has shrunk to life-size. In other words, the general public - distinct from those most directly affected - are beginning to move on. Case in point: this week is Fashion Week in NYC, and there seems to be no particular hesitancy or sense of incongruity about delving into fashion news and activities - something that may have seemed frivolous or offensive a few years ago.

The force of consumerism in the city is one of the most stark contrasts I experience going back and forth to the country. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the particular variety of consumerism which is the consumerism of urbanity (and urbaneness) is a far cry from what you might see in the country - a true cultural divide. My neighbor down the road on the dairy farm may have cable TV and browse InStyle at the grocery store. She may be well aware of what Kelly Clarkson is wearing these days and what sort of purse Angelina Jolie carries. But there is no way in heck she's actually going to attempt to buy or wear those items - unlike her big-city rising-professional counterpart.

I feel my alien-ness in this sense when I'm in the city. Maybe it's my nature, a certain tomboy-ness I inherited from my mother; maybe it's the boarding school influence; maybe it was those years in Seattle; maybe country life is actually starting to shape me. (Or, maybe I just can't afford it!) I wouldn't say I'm a slob or a crunchola; or that I don't have a very specific sense of what I like, or an aesthetic interest in appearances. But fashionista, in the NYC urban-girl sense, I am not.

Let me back up: a little over a year ago, my sister re-gifted to me a wedding present - a Calvin Klein linen throw pillow. She said: "Thought you might like the color, but if you don't want it, take it back to Bloomies." So take it back I did (not that I didn't like it, but hey, did I really need a Calvin Klein throw pillow?). I had an inkling that the exchange value would be pretty high for the little 15-inch-square sucker; and I was right. I pocketed the credit on a gift card and put it away for a rainy day.

So last week, the handbag that I left in the country was recovered. But before it was turned in, it was selectively combed through - they took the cash, my cell phone, two out of three credit cards, and my ATM card. My wallet was still in there, but torn. They left the Bloomies gift card.

So yesterday, I thought: That was close. I should use up this credit before I lose it again or it expires. I was in SoHo for work, a few blocks from the downtown Bloomies, so I made a mission out of it. Which turned out to be a truly other-worldy experience. First of all, I was wearing, ahem, clogs (what do you think this is, lady, Berkeley?). Second of all, do you know how much a pair of blue jeans costs these days? Third, apparently, I have the ugliest, most untended skin (blemishes, crow's feet, you name it) for 10 blocks square South of Houston. Fourth, what am I thinking walking around on a rainy day in anything but a fun pair of knee-high Welly boots (pink, polk-a-dot, animal patterns are good) and a short skirt?

Ok, clearly, I doth protest too much. Clearly, I was not one of the popular girls in high school.

The headline of Guy Trebay's Sunday Styles article, kicking off Fashion Week, reads: Admit It. You Love It. It Matters. "Depending on who is doing the talking, fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual and a cultural stepchild barely worth the attention paid to even the most minor arts." He goes on to describe how nay-sayers dismiss fashion as "not an art form or a cultural form but a form of vanity & consumerism." And then of course goes on to make the case for fashion as substantive, as mattering.

Sure, ok, I buy it. Fashion as beauty, fashion as art, fashion as craft, fashion as the extravagance which is often the heart of pleasure. But let's make the distinction here, between clothing design and the fashion industry. Not unlike the distinction between art and the art world, literature and the publishing world, etc. Art is about making, art is about beauty, and innovation, the application of talent and passion and vision. What we wear is no more or less frivolous or useless than what we read, what we behold, what we listen to. Fashion can be experience, can take us away or break open our consciousness just as the other arts can. My personal take is that clothing matters when you, as its wearer, have some kind of authentic relationship with it. When there's a story, or an experience, or something true to you about the thing, its wearing, your attraction and connection with it; as opposed to just filling your closet with what everyone else is wearing, the more expensive the better. (In this conception of fashion, probably way liberal for Mr. Trebay, we could be talking about your Manolos or your Yankees t-shirt or your traditional sari or head wrap or Aloha shirt.)

It's when we get into the realm of commerce that all bets are off. Sales and profit are governed and driven by a completely different set of values. It's in the world of commerce and market competition that fashion (and any art form) can get particularly ugly, can devolve into appropriation and exploitation and vanity vanity vanity. And because fashion, as opposed to say, literature, is so fundamentally intertwined with appearances, bodies, vulgar wealth, it is probably the most susceptible. But then again, not necessarily. Every art industry has its dirt, its surfaces, its vanity.

Anyway, I was quite the rube yesterday at Bloomies. I ended up using the credit for a new wallet, my annual vow to be more organized and responsible with my essentials. It's a nice one, but as I inspected the tag and price, I saw that it was Made In China, and it was a bit less expensive than comparable wallets on the shelf. I asked the young salesgirl if it was real leather. "Oh, yes," she said. "This company is great, they're really good at keeping their prices low," she added enthusiastically. Yes, I thought. I'm sure they are.

Elegy for Ella

2007-09-11T13:41:00.000-07:00

Ok, friends, it's official: Ella the Orchid is, sadly, expired. I hung on to her - cut down to the stubs of her stems - for probably much longer than any realistic person would. And I've waited to write about it, because, well, I suppose I've been mourning her loss. It pains me, it really does - in a way that makes me feel like I may be a serious freak.

Anyway, today is as good a day as any to write about mourning and loss. I'm in the city but haven't noticed anything particularly different or strange other than the "official" memorials and ceremonials. But then again, I've been inside for much of the day. My connection to the events of 9/11 are pretty abstract: I was living in Seattle at the time, and I didn't know anyone personally who died in the attacks. I called my friend S. and miraculously got through to her cell phone; she was walking uptown from the Federal Court Building, describing the scene to me in real time. But it definitely did not feel real.

I do not, generally, feel worried or unsafe in New York City. I do, on the other hand, feel nervous when I am in the country by myself, when there's nothing but me and a dirt road and 30 acres of farm land surrounding and two guys on ATVs driving by, slowly, eyeing my house. I wonder how many people actually, in their guts, walk around feeling afraid after 9/11. I wonder if there is a difference between the fear levels of city people and country people. People vote and take passionate political stances based on this, and so I wonder how conscious this fear really is, if at all. I wonder how much (and the nature of any) unconscious fear I myself carry with me when I'm in the city.

But back to mourning... I have thought about trying again, with a new orchid plant. But I think maybe I'm not ready yet. Not just yet.

On Vulnerability: Two Night Rides

2007-09-06T05:51:00.000-07:00

I.
It is 9:30 in the evening, and I have just realized that I (stupidly) left my bag in a town 20 miles from home. 30 hours have elapsed since the leaving, and yet, I (stupidly) have it in my head that I should drive out there and see if it's still there, in the park where I left it. Wallet, phone, keys, checkbook, everything is in there. You're driving, J. says.

9:30 in the evening in farm country is late. If you are waking up at 3:30 or 4am, bedtime has long passed. 9:30 in the evening in farm country is also dark. Living in the city, you forget about dark. You forget about deserted. The roads are windy and narrow, I am worried about wildlife. I drive like an old lady (without a license, which is in the lost bag), leaning forward, hands on 3 and 9. Dark, windy roads, no docs, no money. J. is dozing off. You think: God, we are really wolf-bait out here in the universe. We are alone, it is dark, we are essentially unknown. I am an "undocumented" Oriental girl out here in the pitch black, I have no identity, nothing to verify my existence.

And then, running out into the middle of the road... a wolf. No, sorry, no, not a wolf. A fox. Shit. I break hard and swerve and semi-close my eyes. "Did I hit it? Did I hit it?" "No, he made it," J. says. Phew. My heart is beating hard. Then, "Wait, are you just saying that?" "Did you hear a thump under the tires?" No. No, I did not hear a thump under the tires.

In town, no bag. (No flashlight, either. Stupidly.) No one is around, nothing is open. The state trooper knows nothing about local police matters. We drive back.

II.
It is 9:30 in the evening, and we are coming out of the movie theatre downtown. We've just seen THE FRENCH CONNECTION, which I've never seen, and I'm a sucker for a good late '60's car chase (although this one made me, literally, nauseous). It's been a while since I've been "out" in the city at night, among the urban throng, the young and viviacious and stylish. It is anything but dark out, it is bright and busy and noisy. Feels sort of weird.

We get on the bike. The motorbike, that is. Forgetting that we'd be commuting back this way, I am wearing (stupidly) slip-on sandals and a skirt. Oh, well. I put on my helmet, hike it up and get on. It's crazy out for a Wednesday night, we think it's because of the cabbies strike; they're protesting the installation of GPS in all NYC taxis - invasion of privacy, etc., they want to be able to be off the books, off the charts. The streets are full of taxis with fares, they're taking people (off the books) and likely charging high flat rates. Everyone's ornery. It's a little scary.

We speed up 6th Ave then head east at Columbus Circle to Central Park West. I'm holding on tight, tighter than usual. I wonder if J. will cut across the park at 96th, or go through Harlem. He decides on the latter.

The phone rings. I reach into the backpack pocket and pull it out, I see that it's the # of the local PA police I've been calling about my lost bag. J. asks do I want to answer it (do I want him to pull over). We're in East Harlem, on a side street, so I'm thinking nah, um, that's ok.

"Nah, that's ok."

Back in the Bronx, the phone rings again, same number. Kindly Officer P. informs me that they've recovered my bag, the cash is gone but everything else seems to be there. Could he fed-ex it to me, I can't really drive out there without a driver's license, and I'm kind of marooned here without any docs? Yes, he says, he can fed-ex it, it's not standard procedure, but it seems clear it's my bag, and he's got a friend who can do the fed-exing off the books, so yeah, no problem m'am, you have a good night now.

I sleep better tonight, not realizing until morning how poorly I've been sleeping the last few.

Monday with the Sunday Times

2007-09-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

Kind of like Tuesdays With Morrie?

There is no delivery on my road (mail, newspaper, etc.), so the acquisition of print media requires a 3-mile excursion to the general store. During the summer months, we are advised to call ahead on Saturday (weekenders buy 'em up fast) and reserve one. Rocky kindly obliges.

It's the quintessential city-people ritual out here, no one else is buying it (no City section, however; we get the Westchester Edition up here). What can I say. I have pangs about it, especially as it takes me a good 2-3 days to get through it, and it's my primary source of news; surely I am missing something, missing everything, in terms of the gamut of valid media perspectives. I have the sort of brain that has a small hard-drive, i.e. I cannot, like some I know, accumulate mounds upon tons of information (J. reads a million different newspapers and periodicals, plus TV news and morning shows and news blogs and Charlie Rose and...). I just can't. Media stresses me out, frankly, the sheer volume. I used to read 3-4 different print sources (plus a couple online sources), but it all just piled up and I couldn't keep up. So now: the Sunday Times it is (and radio; radio I can do).

Anyway, here's a gem from the Book Review: Jim Lewis reviewed Denis Johnson's new novel, Tree of Smoke. I will be reading Tree of Smoke, without a doubt, as I have been a DJ fan since his early books of poetry. But read the review: it's one of the most compelling, invested book reviews I've read in a long time. It tells us as much about the reviewer as the reviewed, but not in a solipsistic way, not in that I'm-writing-about-someone-else-but-really-I-want-to-point-the- attention-on-myself kind of way. Lewis's enthusiasm is an enthusiasm for the deep pleasure, the wonder, of strange, original, "inescapable" writing - major works that matter.

Race, Racism, & Racialism

2007-09-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

I recently made a confession of a racist attitude to some folks at a gathering. Korean D. and Cuban R. (married couple), and Chinese C. and Filipino S. (another married couple) and I were talking about a raucous sidewalk BBQ that occurred outside D. and R.'s apartment building in a Dominican neighborhood uptown. They were pissed, because it was floor-shaking, head-banging loud (salsa music and sub-woofers) and it was clearly not a permit-ted event. R. called the PO-lice, who came and broke it up.

We were talking about racial groups, and racial-group habits. Loudness is something we often attribute, consciously or unconsciously, to certain racial groups. Of course, there are generalizations and there are specifics, and the damage is most severe when we lapse into generalizations-only thinking, which then manifests in our behavior; and depending on the context and our reach of influence (if you are, say, the Presidenet of the United States, or a Supreme Court Justice; or even a corporate executive or a community leader), these behaviors can be globally catastrophic.

(There is no talking or thinking about city and country and suburb without talking about race. The lens of race is second-nature to most people of color, I dare say; typically a more conscious effort for White folk. This is what I mean by racialism. In this country, you know that you are not White, and that White is a category of power (or at least "centrality"), before you know your ABCs.)

I had had a couple of drinks by this time in the evening, so my discretion was apparently compromised. I guess I'd been thinking about my dirty life, and I confessed that I was most bothered by people who throw their garbage around. And, I added, I am convinced that this is not a social class thing - poor does not equal dirty - this is a cultural thing.

I recently read that there are steep fines in Singapore for littering (and chewing gum).* Japan is of course known for its immaculate subway system and urban sanitation in general. I have also been very struck by my experiences in Korea over the years.

The local Korean bath house is one of my favorite outings when I visit. There are hot spring mineral baths and saunas and steam rooms and jet therapy and shower areas where men and women and children of all ages (grandparents and grandchildren together are a common sight) take the time to relax and thoroughly self-care. The shower areas include stools for sitting, abrasive washcloths, and hand-held shower heads (showering is a sit-down affair for Koreans, time to scrub and rinse and massage with care). The bath house ritual is good for the skin, the circulation, the heart, and the soul. There is also, at the end of your wet-and-moist therapy, an opportunity to visit the sleep rooms - big, dry open spaces with heated floors, pillows, and complementary cotton pajamas (the bath areas are single-sex, and all are naked).

A day at the bath house costs about six American dollars and is a once or twice weekly habit for many Koreans. The sleep rooms are open all night, and the poor and homeless will sometimes sleep here (men with night jobs, for example, will come for a few hours rest). They do not take advantage, i.e. somehow it is understood that one night of recuperation at a time is the limit. But it's also understood that everyone is entitled to be clean - deeply, thoroughly clean and rested. The old women who clean the subways and station areas do so with incredible industriousness; there is no question about whether the working-class and poor who rely on public transportation "deserve" a clean ride or not.

It's an opinion I seem to hold pretty firmly in my mind somewhere - that black and brown people have messier, dirtier cultural habits. It's a half-baked, un-evolved thought, of which I am partially ashamed and yet partially feel is a reasonable question to pose - i.e. why this seems to be the case, how the perception is formed in the first place, and how it might be corrected; because I don't think I am the only one to think it (my passionately anti-racist black pastor back in Seattle told the story of his father referring to Mexicans as Messi-kins), and perhaps current immigration controversies would look differently if these perceptions did not exist.

I think about my lack of exposure to the home countries of Latin and Central Americans, my sketchy understanding of immigration patterns and the way racism eats away at people, generation-by-generation (I think of K., an African American matriarch who keeps an immaculate household and herself complains about young black people's lack of self-respect and sense of civic duty), the overall limitations of a middle-class viewpoint. In the Philippines, poor children forage in garbage dumps regularly. In India, lack of sewage and clean water systems is a persistent national crisis. This morning, an article in The NY Times about Palestinian children trolling trash piles for items they can sell in order to eke out "a living," and an article in the Times Mag about environmental injustice, i.e. high pollution levels in poor communities: "...disproportionately high pollution levels continue to plague poor communities, and race often correlates with which populations are hit the hardest: African-Americans, for instance, are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in areas where air-pollution levels pose health risks..." These are clearly not "cultural" habits. And yet even with these bits of knowledge, my under-the-skin reaction to garbagy streets is still there, i.e. my people would never live like this.

Clean and dirty are complicated. Don't elect me to office (maybe don't even be my friend), at least until I can get my head on right about this. Ironic, isn't it, that a large portion of the house-cleaning workforce in the tidy suburbs are Latin and Central American immigrants. Maybe some cultures simply do have different standards when it comes to cleanliness, maybe they simply have different priorities, perfectly valid ones, which other people need to understand and accept. J. is Chinese American; my mother seems to think that the Chinese (among the East Asians) are kinda "dirty." J. gives me a hard time about showering every day. "Why d'ya gotta shower every day? What's wrong with smelling your own smell once in a while, letting the body's natural oils do their job. Soap is not even good for your skin, and shampoo will make your hair fall out eventually. Shower when you're actually dirty." Hmm...how European.

*an article today about Singapore reveals a complex social-economic history and environment which led to the no-littering policies. There are some cultures, or sub-cultures, which seem to embrace the notion of "look the part," i.e. if you want to be lifted out of poverty and third-class citizen status, then look like you do, clean up. Very Booker T. Washington, I guess.

Dancing Egg Whites

2007-08-30T06:45:00.000-07:00

Reading over a previous post about the 4th of July in the Bronx, I noticed an embarrassing spelling error: I meant to refer to merengue (Latin dance music) and instead wrote meringue (fluffy, peaked egg whites).

Funny, because both play auspicious roles in city and country life, respectively.

The history and origins of merengue are interesting; there are controversies about the dance's origins and evolution, directly related to the geopolitical histories of and relationships among the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba (and the colonial powers of Spain & France). Merengue is a type of music that I may never have encountered if it weren't for Latin immigration patterns and my living in urban areas populated by Dominicans. However, ironically, it appears that authentic merengue currently exists only in rural areas of the Dominican Republic.

Meringue has a kind of international (and debated) history as well. We know it is a French dessert, but, according to Wikipedia: "It is believed that meringue was invented in the Swiss town of Meiringen by an Italian chef named Gasparini (legend varies in regard to the date of invention, between 1600 and 1720)."

As I think of it, merengue and meringue connect for me in the universe of pleasure. That is, pleasure as opposed to entertainment, which is a kind of city-country theme I've stumbled upon in these posts. There is a sense - loosely, over-generalized - in which I associate suburban culture with American culture, and, I admit, the worst of stereotypical American culture: fast food, TV-addiction, processed/packaged/fabricated everything, and passive experiences of entertainment (American Idol, etc.). One of the things you encounter when you travel or meet people from other countries is a very different - healthier and more natural, I think - relationship with the body: the natural, untormented ability to experience physical pleasures which are neither addictions nor guilt-ridden; a more intuitive sense of what the body wants and needs; how to engage and address those needs deeply; and when it's enough.

I've always admired cultures in which dance is a regular, organic activity. In the (white) suburbs, little girls go to dance class, but rarely do folks go out dancing. (Maybe more so in the suburbs of the '60's and '70's?) I loved this about the American South; in New Orleans, in a regular ole family restaurant, people are eating crawfish etouffee, the Zydeco band is playing (France again! Haiti!), and couples, young and old, just get up to dance. Men just know how to dance, they grew up in it. You can see how far Americans have fallen away from the mind/soul/body connection when you look at the popularity of yoga these days. (I see yoga centers in many of the small towns in the country as often as I do throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.) I do yoga myself, and yes I find it pleasurable; but yoga is a very individual-focused practice, and for Americans at this particular cultural moment, I think it's a kind of corrective (managing stress, realigning from too much desk-sitting, etc.), as opposed to a pleasure. It doesn't get to this pleasure principle, i.e. movement as relationship and sensuality and community.

I'm not a big fan of meringue, frankly. I'll pick chocolate mud cake over key lime pie anyday. But here's an interesting exchange, from a Web page titled "Making Perfect Meringue":

QUESTION: I have tried many times over many years to make meringue. When I lived in Northern PA. I use [sic] to bake as a teenager and my meringues were beautiful and big. I now live in southern Pa. and my meringue stinks. It comes out of the oven, huge and nice, but give it 5 minutes out of the oven and its [sic] flat as a pancake. I've tried under beating, and over beating, and all types of recipes, but it's always th[e] same. I know it's always humid down here, but this is ridiculous. I've lived down here for 30 years now and it never changes. HELP.

ANSWER: Humidity affects a meringue's texture. Damp, humid days may cause it to be limp and sticky. Check the weather outside before you start. You can not make crisp meringue on a humid day. Meringue should be made on dry days. The cornstarch mixture helps them hold up under humid conditions, but to ensure success, plan to bake when it is less humid.

Sultry merengue, arid meringue. This "southern" baker should try some merengue.

How Is My Driving?

2007-08-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

I have a flip-floppy relationship with cars. Growing up in the suburbs, yes, all car all the time. Mom chauffered us faithfully, in a series of Chevy station wagons (our family also has terrible luck with cars; due to thefts and accidents, we've gone through cars like most people go through shoes). But then, in the 9th grade, I was off to boarding school; so no car for me, no teenage joy rides or tailgate parties (in fact, although I grew up in the Washington, DC area, I know my way around about 5 other cities, including Paris and Joahnnesburg, better than DC, because I never lived there as a driving or adult being).

College and a few years extra in New York City. Again no car. Then, a move to Seattle, and I learned, at the ripe old age of 23, how to drive. I mean, I knew how to drive; but I really became a driving person, a person who finds her way around a place by car (and parallel parks in a stick-shift on steep inclines). And also learned about cars themselves, about repair costs and insurance, about all-wheel drive, and about gas prices and oil consumption.

Back to NYC. Back to the glorious bargain that is the NYC MTA unlimited metro pass, back to wonderful, dense, environmentally-friendly pedestrian life.

Then, the big life bust-up, i.e. city-country commuting. So now, me and my car, my '95 Saturn with manual everything and 177k miles on it, worth well-less than the insurance premium I pay and certainly much less than the repair work that's gone into it; we are like this.

Today, day two in the country, a quick overnighter, arrived yesterday about noon, heading back later this evening. I don't often do this - zip out for less than 48 hours - but my family trip displaced my normal stay, and it's hot and dry, and things need tending to out here. Plus, the truth is, the driving is not taxing, it is the opposite; long-distance driving is very restorative, it is peace time, it is quiet and thinking time, it is book-on-tape and music-fill-my-head (chasing out stressful and tangled thoughts and replacing them with rhythm and beat and movement) time. Weirdly - and I suppose this says something about me - I am never more at rest than when I am in transit.

And sometimes, like yesterday, the drive is particularly fruitful. I conducted some business by cell phone. I listened to the news to catch up on current events, and then to several chapters of a book I am enjoying. And then, because for whatever reason my mind felt open and rested and fertile, a feast - a veritable cornucopia of ideas related to the novel I am writing and another book which is germinating - came pouring forth. And now this is where the driving gets a little scary. These thoughts and words and gems needed to be jotted down. I am on the highway, I am reaching over to my bag and fishing for a piece of paper (WHY don't I carry a small notebook with me?), I fish and rummage and find a pen but no paper, I start writing cryptic acronyms on my hand, trusting that I will remember what they stand for; but my hand is kind of warm and sweaty, so this isn't really working. I reach over and fish around some more, I find a receipt which I flip over, to write on the back. I am also having to downshift, because now I am in a construction zone, and the lanes have narrowed, there are orange cones to one side of me and a concrete construction wall to the other, I am shifting and writing and breaking and this is really not such a good idea, but oh well... you do what you gotta do.

I am of course ambivalent about all this driving, all this fuel. But my Saturn gets 35 miles per gallon, which makes me quite happy; and a full tank costs me about $25 these days, gets me to the country and back just about twice. It could be worse. And, once I'm here, I'm here. The car pretty much sits, except for the occasional run to the General Store for sundries or the paper. At any rate, I drive now. And if my car were a person, I think it (she?) would be a pretty happy person, someone who feels stretched to her limits and fulfilling her purpose - responsibly, and with gusto.

It's a Dirty Life

2007-08-26T15:54:00.000-07:00

Today was cleaning/organization day in the Bronx. J. came home last night with a truck-full of Ikea storage units. The piles of clutter had gotten out of hand, to the point where the pile-areas were beginning to outnumber the actual functional areas (bed, table, couch), and the place was beginning to resemble the sorting warehouse for a Salvation Army Thrift Store. It was one of those days where once you get started, you just keep going: we washed windows, scrubbed countertops, wiped down bookshelves, rearranged the contents of cabinets, vacuumed...

It's funny, this sudden dose of Northern European orderliness, especially on the heels of my suburban excursion. I wouldn't say that I am a particularly clean person, or adept at housekeeping - I am not one of those a-place-for-everything type of people (and have been known to grow hot with envy when I enter the abode, work space, or automobile, of someone who is - how do they do it?). But as a result of my suburban upbringing, a certain immaculate newness is more familiar to me than not - new homes, brightly-lit supermarkets with strictly-organized aisles of perfect produce, clean streets and well-manicured lawns, shiny new cars. The suburban life is rooted in this culture of well-maintainedness, and people spend their time and money to uphold it; it's second nature, and a kind of communal contract.

City life and country life, on the other hand, are both pretty dirty. In the Bronx especially, but also in Manhattan and Brooklyn where I've lived in the past, visitors from other places notice it immediately: the air is dirty, your hands are always dirty (the other reason I feel bad about my hands: I probably wash them four or five times/day), the subway stations, the streets, your apartment windowsill and pretty much every exposed surface. At some point, you relent, you accept the dirt, your relationship with it becomes more about health than appearance, i.e. you clean because you don't want to get sick, not because you want your wine glasses to sparkle.

In the country of course, dirt is where you are. We're in red shale land where I am, and the dust is everywhere. In warmer weather, you're in and out of the house constantly, tending to the yard or walking the dog, so dirt tracks in and out with you (I have become a dirt-under-your-fingernails kind of gal, and I've just sort of given in). And of course, there are the spiderwebs and insect carcasses. My pup came down out of the woods once with a deer hoof in his jaws.

Wow, you should see the place: we are orderly, we rock! The clutter is out of sight, things are folded and placed neatly on shelves. We can see the surface of the dining table! Who knew it was such nice wood. It's like something out of Real Simple, a before and after story.

Speaking of which, a friend of mine bought me a gift subscription last year. It's regular bathroom reading in the country (J. even reads it, cover to cover). I'd say it's one of those guilty pleasures, but in fact it's more like a guilty torture: it occurred to me one day that all those "helpful hints" and "problem solvers" are really more like reminders of things that I guess I am supposed to be worried about but that I would never think of in the first place. Oh my God, is that how you get stains out of the sink? Oh my God, am I supposed to be getting all the stains out of my sink?

Cleaning has always felt to me like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill. The minute you clean it, it's dirty again. Life is always unraveling, and we're always working to reorder it. Dirt accrues. Entropy. Glorious nature. I try to remember that dust is really my own skin. But cleaning is also in nature, I guess - cats, birds, etc. I wonder what the "standard" for cleanliness really should be, if there is a should? What would the cats and the birds tell us if they could? I sometimes think we should just do the best we can do with a broom, a dustpan, a rag, and a bucket of sudsy water - and leave it at that. If it's good enough for the farm wife or the pioneer woman, it's good enough for me (dysentery and cholera notwithstanding).

In the end, it's really about vantage point, isn't it? Up close vs. far away? From where I'm sitting, this place looks pretty clean; but if I get up into the nooks and crevices with my magnifying glass...

I am reminded now of a particularly affecting story of Mary Gordon's called "City Life," about a woman living in filth in her NYC apartment, a kind of exploration of the existential state of dirty-ness. Well worth the read.

The Suburbs & I Make Peace

2007-08-25T16:14:00.000-07:00

Now that's an orchid. My mother has a knack for them, it seems.

We go on a mission to Target, to pick up a trunk-full of diapers for my sister. Most all the commerical areas nearby are different, but the same, from what I remember. "Did this used to be Wheaton Plaza?" I ask my mother. The answer is yes, now it goes by some other name, a corporate conglomerate that has bought and renamed most of the shopping malls in the area. The Target is new - newish. I guess it's all old now, I haven't lived here for over 20 years.

My mother tells me that this shopping mall is now a little "scary." Asian and Latino gangs, apparently. I am reminded about the other side of suburban communities: the immigrants, the poor. My mother has just told me that "anywhere there are still rental apartments" (everything has turned condo), you have new immigrants and the poor - and a prevalence of violence and crime. At least the sort of crime you hear about on the evening news. She lists off a few isolated neighborhoods here and there to illustrate, and a few recent incidents. I ask my mother why these groups settle in the area, especially given the increasing unavailability of affordable housing. "Jobs," she says. Right. There are so many amenities here for the wealthy, someone has to fill out the service sector: housekeepers and nannies, grocery stockers and baggers, landscapers, waiters and busboys and dishwashers. They come for the jobs, but there's nowhere for them to live.

My father is a physician. He came, too, as an immigrant, having pulled himself up by some pretty tattered bootstraps (in fact, as a child, his family sometimes did not have money for shoes), but he came with professional skills, at a time when doctors were in great need, so it was easy to get the necessary work visa. Because of some psychological and social skill issues, my father could never work well with others, so he set up a private practice (managed by mom, who has super-duper social skills). These same issues, along with an inherent racism (stronger back then than now) towards a foreign doctor with a thick accent, landed him practicing in one of these poor, apartment-full areas, almost exlusively African American (the immigrants came in waves later).

I share all this mostly to remind myself that the suburbs are a complicated environment, despite the neat-and-tidy surfaces, the sheen of perfection that sometimes suffocates me when I visit. The time I spend with my family - every few months, a few days at a time - is usually tense, fraught with the discomfort of my having made life decisions so far outside their scope of understanding, their world. To them, suburban life - the neatness, the put-togetherness, the stability and path-of-least-resistanceness - are everything a solid adult person should strive for. Why would anyone pursue - or claim to thrive in - difficulty, or messiness, of any kind? It troubles them. More and more, as I get older, and as my life evolves in a less and less conventional way. My father, I think, is even a little afraid of me. They are not sure how to speak to me, what to talk about, who this strange woman is who once was their comprehensible (if a bit moody) daughter; and I am not very good anymore at keeping smooth surfaces intact, at smiling pretty for the sake of it.

But something occurs to me as I am driving back to New York. The drive back is usually a time of decompression for me, a great relief, easier breathing, a kind of deep and wide happiness unfolding. I am returning now to my life. It's not that I dislike my family; on the contrary, I love them, and ultimately respect them, deeply. Still, there are people you love better from a distance, and for now, this is the case with me and my family. What I think about is how easy it would be to assume that what they want from me is capitulation and conformity; that they want me to be neat and tidy, stable and "normal," just for the sake of appearances. It would be easy to underestimate them in this way, and to grow defensive and angry.

But really, what they want, what I know in my heart they want, is for me to be truly, deeply well, in every way (and what I want for them, too, by the way). And because I want this too, because I know in my gut that I am pursuing deep wellness in the way that makes the most sense for me, for the way I'm wired; I take comfort. The tension may always be there, and the sense of dissonance may only increase when we spend time together. But in the end, we all really do recognize and desire health and beauty: we want the orchid to live, to bloom, to flourish.

That Thing We Don't Talk About

2007-08-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

That would be money.

I am thinking about money more than ever these days; mostly because I have less of it than I've ever had. This is not a complaint, as my financial status is mostly a choice: I work freelance, and I work less than full-time, so that I can write and live part-time in the country and grow vegetables and be the mistress of my own hours. I consider thoroughly the distinction between need and want on an almost hourly basis, every time an urge or desire (which involves financial expense) arises. On a tight budget, the process by which an appetite or inclination churns through the need-or-want litmus test machinery becomes thorough, layered, and verging on existential. Why do I want this thing, and what is really essential to wellness, health, and goodness in this life?

[Case in point: I am here in the tidy, affluent suburbs visiting my sister (who has just had a baby). I am making coffee using her deluxe multi-function sleek black gold filter coffeemaker. I am thinking, This is cool, wow, this is a fun gadget. And then, I am thinking, Would I spend money on this? Would this make my life better than a $12 bare bones automatic? And the answer comes back clear and swift: nah.]

This may give the impression of an austere and white-knuckling existence of deprivation. Quite the contrary. In fact, I'd venture to say that while this is the least financially-bountiful time of my life, it is also the richest time of my life - in pleasure, challenge, and experience.

The draw to the city and the country for me I think are related to this - a particular relationship to material things, to the material world, which is different from the suburbs of my upbringing. Of course materialism is a global phenomonenon, not limited to any particular cultural environment these days. But in the city and the country, one is called upon to flex resourcefulness muscles in particularly intense ways: the farmer is the original DIY guy; and on a small income in a city like New York, you become a genius of creative survival and DIY pleasures.

In the country, we grow food from seed, we chop wood, we cut grass with used equipment, we do as much of our own house projects as possible (although as I've written, I am only slowly growing into all this), we walk, we swim, we browse yard sales, I bake, he grills, we hunt mushrooms, we sit on the porch and read or talk, I write, he thinks, we shovel snow and jog in the rain, we breathe into the backs of our lungs. Sometimes, we smoke a good cigar. We delve deeply into pleasure - a joy which comes from a certain measure of exertion - and minimally call upon entertainment, the sort of pleasure-like experience which is primarily passive (don't get me wrong, though; we do enjoy a good movie on DVD.) And we do it mostly without opening our wallets.

In the city, bargain-hunting and minimal living is truly life-as-art. Dumpster-diving (or "curbside recycling") is no joke, it is extreme interior design for the most ambitious beauty-lovers. Chinatown and the farmers' markets are complementary subsistence staples. Eating out on a regular basis is the middle-class NYer's financial Achilles Heel; we commit to the life of home-cooking, become intimate with the contents of the fridge (timely "repurposers" of that which is about to go south), and make serious use of the freezer (an $8 Puerto Rican breakfast out, thus, becomes an event, and a savored one). For the daily commuter, the unlimited 30-day metro pass is the World's Best Urban Bargain, and eco-friendly to boot.

I can't remember the last time I bought an article of clothing. And I can't remember the last time I missed it.

The rewards of the light footprint on the planet are indeed deep and wide; with less to spend, there is much to be gained. I realize that all this can smack of yuppie-crunchy hobby-tourism; with any luck, it's more than that, it's a real evolving life.

Yesterday, just before leaving the city for this visit to the suburbs, I found myself power-browsing the $1 book carts outside The Strand - that mecca of discount literature - on a somewhat strange mission. My sister had requested I bring a book or two, "something light" - literally, something she could hold in one hand while breastfeeding. The $1 book carts (throughout the city, not just Strand - let me recommend Housing Works Bookstore as well) are a beautiful, glorious thing. Some of my deepest, most lasting pleasures have been found on these carts - EL Doctorow's Ragtime, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses is a recent purchase awaiting me), and I left there with two promising, less-than-one-inch-wide paperbacks (Amy Bloom and Laurie Colwin), a $2.16 investment. The pleasure is in the exertion (if you are familiar with the claustrophobic chaos which is the Strand, you know my meaning) and in the discovery.

My sister and her husband are stressed about money. Between the two of them, they make what seems to me a goodly income. Sis and I do a pretty good job of letting one another live and let live, without judgment; although I suspect we each consider at times the impossibility of the other's true happiness. I can only say that this is my life now, waist-deep in the worlds of difficult pleasures, city and country, and thanks to any of you who take the time to read about it.

Cased in Clean Bark You Drift

2007-08-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are - cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love,

the key is turned. Extend yourself -
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.

-Louis Gluck, "The Undertaking"

It was only a matter of time before I began invoking poetry into these posts. Hence, a new blog category. It was only a matter of time before I began invoking Louise Gluck. I am told she is the most popular poet among New Yorker magazine readers, young and old. Hmm... The excerpt in my last post was published recently in the New Yorker; "The Undertaking" is from her collection The House on Marshland, published in 1975. Her later poems are very much death/mortality-focused, (emotionally) spare to the point of near-desolation (it is the "near" that is significant here...). The above is brimming with the warm hope of a woman 30 years less worn, less lived.

Autumn is in the air here in the farm lands. It was chilly last night, and windy. Today, the chill remains. The second crop of cool-weather greens is starting to sprout (lettuce, spinach, snap peas). The tomatoes and squash are struggling to turn color. J. has gone fishin', I am here with my words.

Autumn and Louise Gluck - they go together for me. Perhaps because the first poem of hers which struck me, from her recent collection Averno, is called "October." These are the lines that somehow stopped me in my tracks:

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

Something about the artist's deep sense of uselessness, of ultimate incompetence, at the end of the day, amidst all the world's troubles. And yet, wanting to be useful, seeking those tiny opportunities, to make offerings. And now/all fear gives way... It's not much, it's not much. But it's something.

Gardener in da House

2007-08-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

So here they are, urban greenery. In a couple of weeks I'll plant some fall-flowering annuals for color and cheer, along with arugula and spinach. The butterfly bush and lavendar are for year-round effects (scent and butterflies - are there butterflies in the Bronx? I guess we'll see).

I'm a little worried about the pots getting stolen from the stoop. J., the super, knows I've planted them and so hopefully he'll keep an eye out.

lettuces, lettuces

First signs of life on our stoop

lavendar "Grappenhall"

butterfly bush

Lettuces, Lettuces

2007-08-15T13:54:00.000-07:00

K. from down the block (aka "The Bird Man") came by to look over the back yard here in the Bronx. Initially he was all "volunteer" about it; yesterday, it was clear he was hustling for paid work (and being skeazy about it). How silly of me - to think that someone would actually do something for nothing. But seriously, I understand, we all need to make ends meet, we all need to do what we need to do. It's the misleading part that bugs me.

So the backyard project may go slower than we thought. Which is fine... "slow and steady wins the race," as they say. In the meantime, I've gone ahead, with our landlord's approval (and funding) on a few plants for the stoop and fire escape: two butterfly bushes, a couple of lavenders (hardy Grappenhall), and wild lettuces. We did the supplies shopping last night (pots, trowel, potting soil) and picked up the plants from Trina at Union Square Market today. Trina's nursery is the one out in the country; my butterfly bushes were labeled and ready for me.

Lettuces, lettuces. From Louise Gluck's poem "A Village Life," recently published in The New Yorker:

I move through the dark as though it were natural to me,
as though I were already a factor in it.
Tranquil and still, the day dawns.
On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.

Yard Day Again: First-Year Harvest & Lessons Learned

2007-08-13T17:44:00.000-07:00

It's a huge job - the lawn, that is - and J. and I are working together. If we had a weed whacker, it might go more quickly; but something in me resists. The noise pollution, the gas-power (I'm looking into cordless electric ones), it feels like high impact where lo-impact might be do-able. I pulled a lot of the taller weeds out by the roots; it will take the entire fall season probably to get them all.

It's late season now, so most of the veges have done all the work they're going to do. I harvested a row of beets - tiny 2-inch guys that were supposed to get to more like 3-4 inches - and made a yummy beet & goat cheese salad (boy, lots of investment for ONE salad). Am looking forward to sauteeing the greens. Also have a couple of tomatoes just about ready to drop, and a yellow squash that should be sizable by next week. No luck at all with eggplant. The green beans have done reasonably well, but not abundant by any means; the chili peppers don't seem to be turning red. The lettuces are finishing up, and I've planted a new crop of greens for fall, along with snap peas and spinach. Mostly, it's clear that my garden does not get enough sun, and that a lot of the plants needed to be staked or supported in some way. I'm scoping out alternate/additional sites for next year, and I guess I should get smarter about supports. (Structural engineer I am not.)

Driving around the area, I am amazed by the size and scope of people's gardens. Many of these are summer homes, and I can't help but wonder who does all the work, how they manage to plant and maintain so much. It can really be a full-time job. Do they have hired gardeners do it for them? Or, more likely, they've been building their gardens for many many years. Gardening is nothing if not a supreme exercise in patience, learning, and persistence.

Speaking of huge gardens, we stopped at a local CSA farm / nursery on the way back to the city. I had actually learned of it at the farmer's market, in Manhattan. So strange, meeting the woman who runs the nursery in the middle of an urban park, then visiting her farm in the country, then asking her to label two butterfly bushes to bring with her to the city so I can pick them up during the week. City and country are forging ties like this more and more, it seems.

The butterfly bushes are for the Bronx. Our landlord is working on the backyard fencing, and hopefully will clear out the concrete and lay down some mulch. K. from next door is going to have a look and make some recommendations, maybe even donate some end-of-year inventory from the garden center nearby where he works. In the meantime, I'm working on gathering up a few plants that might survive the industrial climate... better than Ella did.

Her roots seem to have dried out a bit (they were soggy and a little moldy), but I'm not sure if there's life left in there. I'll keep tending to her, though; you just never know.

An Orchid May Not Grow in the Bronx

2007-08-09T06:40:00.000-07:00

I’m sad to report that Ella has really taken a turn for the worse. All her blooms and all her leaves have fallen. I found her in this state after a few days in the country. Her leaves were yellow and soggy, her branches dead at the tops.

I am not sure if she’ll come back. I cut back her branches and set her back on the window sill. I don’t think it’s either light or water – she seems to be getting the required amount of both. I do think it may be air circulation. It’s been so hot, so the windows are often closed and the a/c running. I also think that the air quality here in the Bronx may be poisonous to her.

If her roots have rotted, then that’s it for her. I can see that they are looking a little sodden but am not yet convinced she’s done for. We’ll see. Our windowsill herbs - basil, oregano, thyme - are doing great, as are The Little Men. The Cuban oregano is thriving as well.

Meantime, our landlord is going forth with fencing and groundcover in the back “yard.” So I’m hoping to do some container gardening back there. It’s late in the season, so maybe I can try a last crop of lettuce from seed, some hardy herbs, a shrub or two... I suppose it might seem strange, a little obsessive, all this micro-focus on the plants. I've thought about why it's so important, and I guess it's not so mysterious - the inquiry, that is: can living things thrive and blossom in this environment? Can beauty flourish? What does beauty and health look like in a community primarily characterized by poverty, blight, and neglect - or maybe I should say a community built around industry, not living beings?

We have a neighbor, K., who lives two doors down. We call him The Bird Man, because he walks around (always) with a parrot on his shoulder. (Last we heard, he was awaiting a second parrot, to keep the first one company.) K. works at a garden center down under the Third Avenue Bridge - Dmitri's, in a parking lot, kiddie corner to the Bar & Grill and the motorcycle shop. I've been meaning to check it out, will be sure to do so if/when the backyard garden comes to fruition.

It’s 100 degrees and all the subways are down from last night’s torrential rain. I look around at this city of crazies, sweating it out and late for our meetings – so many of us transplants, “paying the price” for urban living, culture, energy, whatever it is we came here for. The gloss definitely wears off, and you decide, at some point, whether to “naturalize” – to make your life here, a real life, a native-like life, regardless of ambition, shine, “juice.” Ambition is a funny thing – sure, it drives you for periods of time, but it also eats away at your soul, bit by bit. Ambition is often about comparison, at its root – it’s about competition, which means your success relative to the next guy. One of the most difficult things, in this city of lights and buzz, is to find one’s core motivations – what it is that makes you tick, makes you strive, cultivates real and deep creativity and intelligence and meaning and satisfaction – regardless of what other people are doing.

Me, I'm doing plants. Oh, and writing a novel.

Update on G. and the puppy: they're doing great, really bonding. The puppy, Fiona, is starting to get that G. is boss. Unfortunately, she doesn't quite get that the dog obedience teacher is boss, so she bit her last week in class; which prompted a phone call to G., recommending she detach emotionally and give the pup away - claiming that the pup will eventually bite someone for real and then it will be big trouble. Well, G. is not going to be so easily discouraged (on my last visit, I could see the two of them were really becoming family); she is going to try another obedience class, get a second opinion. G. didn't much like this teacher anyway, so maybe the pup picked up on that. It's tough out there, you know; maybe it's not such a bad thing to have a defender.

Ella, Meet Francie

2007-08-02T09:19:00.000-07:00

It's sad, watching Ella suffer like this. Especially when the cause is likely too much of this, or too much of that (as opposed to too little of this, or too little of that) - which means there is nothing to do but wait and hope that her new location is a better one.

Other members of the "family" are doing better. J. re-potted the basil to make room for the rosemary and oregano - they were all squished in together. The cuban oregano is next for re-potting. One of the "Little Men" is now installed in the bathroom, which J. says is "so gay." I have no experience with this, so I have no comment.

So with nothing to do but wait and hope - with regards to Ella - I'm thinking about this blog's namesake, i.e. Betty Smith's 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I read it as a child - maybe 4th or 5th grade - so I remember it little, except that it's about a young girl growing up in Brooklyn facing hard times, coming of age as a romantic in lonely and difficult circumstances. I read that there is an excellent audio version, read by Bernadette Dunne. I'm all over it.

Ella & I Are Both Ill

2007-07-30T18:03:00.000-07:00

I'm worried about her, she's losing blossoms left and right, and her leaves are turning yellow. Some orchid care Web sites tell me that these are signs of either over-watering, or too much sun. I haven't been watering more than once weekly, so I'm thinking it may be the sun. I've moved her away from the window again and hope this helps; because you're really not supposed to move them around too much.

As for me, something upset my stomach yesterday, and I'm still a little queasy. The Bronx can get stifling sometimes, there is a feeling of no-air, especially on muggy days. I went up to the roof, hoping to clear my head, but as I breathed deeply I could just feel all that air pollution filling my lungs. Perhaps that's what did me in...

I left Ella and drove out to the country today. I don't feel great about leaving her in that state. But then, there are plants that need caring for out here, too. There are days when it feels overwhelming like this - too much extremity, two lives pulling. The minute I arrived here I whipped out my laptop, had to get to work on my freelance projects, the ones that earn me money. It's evening now, and it's almost like I'm not really in the country, I've barely gotten outside.

Think good thoughts for Ella - that we'll find the right spot for her, and that she'll revive soon.

They Bloom, Then They Fall

2007-07-27T08:52:00.001-07:00

I feel sad every time it happens and start to think "something's wrong." But J. says, "They bloom, then they fall." I dunno. Ella is looking a little bare now.

Little Man, the rubber tree, is now Little Men, which is sort of creepy as a name, so we'll have to come up with something different for the group:

They are much happier now, as a family. Spawning is good. Room to grow is good. But I admit that I was little help in the process. J. spread out a garbage bag in the middle of the room and went to work. I stood there, watching, holding up a branch here and there and refilling the water pitcher while he moved dirt around in bare handfuls. I somehow just couldn't "dig in" to this dirt-scooping effort in the middle of a Bronx living room, the incongruity was a kind of short-circuiting overload for me. We cultivate green growing things here in the asphalt jungle; we read Don Delillo on the porch in the country.

There is a kind of psychic discontent at the root of this behavior, I sense this; I note it not so much as a self-condemnation, because what's the point of that, but more as an observation about two-ness. About what it means and looks like to live in a state of straddle and tension, to seek that state and to devote much of one's life energy to holding that tension, to keeping the extremes alive and dynamic in a single experience, to exploring and cultivating the ways in which the far ends of a spectrum nurture and deepen one another. City and country, yes; and everything else, so much more...

Moths Again, and Junk Shopping

2007-07-25T17:54:00.000-07:00

This scared the heck outta me; it was perched on the side of the inner window sill, and it looked like something straight out of Lord of the Rings - like a chunk of animated bark.

This is not an actual photo, but one I found on a bug site, as I was digging around for what manner of creature this thing could possibly be. After the initial siting, I saw it again later in the evening, on the floor by the bathroom. I stomped my foot next to it, but it didn't move. I was convinced it was not a living thing at all; but then, how to explain its original sideways perch, and how did it get from the window sill to the other room?

According to this rather amazing site, whatsthatbug.com, it is a blind sphinx moth, calasymbolus exaecatus. Says the very knowledgeable author of the site: The caterpillar feeds on willow, Hazel and other similar plants. The moth is relatively common in Pennsylvania, and ranges from southern Canada to Florida, and west to the Mississippi River. Sphinx Moths, also called Hawk Moths, are very strong fliers... Bugs seem to come to my house to die; I wonder what I will find when I return next week...

It's been raining buckets in the country. We picked the squash blossoms and will probably deep fry them in a light batter. No actual squash yet, but any day now. The lettuce is wilty but tasty, not too bitter, which is surprising; this is not at all the time of year for lettuce, it's usually best in early spring when the weather is cool. J. says it's had time to "develop personality," without being stressed. I can't help wonder if we're talking about lettuce or something else.

J. changed the water filter; I just couldn't do it. Not this time, anyway. Maybe next time.

At the Salvation Army, we looked for clay pots for Little Man, the rubber tree. No luck (we found them later at Home Depot, alas), but J. found a motorcycle touring book from the '70's and a Tom Wolfe novel; I found a Polaroid Land Camera 104, circa 1965. It appears they still make film packs for it, and I saw a manual for it on ebay. Maybe I'll actually figure the thing out.

Urban Hounds

2007-07-22T12:02:00.001-07:00

I'm happy to report that Brownie the pup is doing great with her new mom. She's a whole new dog, now that someone is there for her. A big improvement from the lonely concrete basement here, minimal exercise, and no training. G. and I walked her around the park near her new Upper West Side home, and people were constantly stopping to pet her or smile at her. It's a happy story for both G. and Brownie, a veritable ABC After-School Special: G. says she thinks she sees evidence of cigarette burns on her body, which is too sad.

I'm sorry to see her go, though. She and my own pup P. were getting to be buds. My guy is seven years old, so he was playing big brother, it was real sweet.

P. is a real city-country dog, he's kinda seen it all. Originally he was a farm dog, but the farm went bankrupt and the family shot all the dogs... except for P. and his sister J. (who was adopted by someone else, and who I had the pleasure of meeting). The two of them, the legend goes, escaped and were found wandering in the woods. They were taken to a canine rescue org, which is how I found him. He lived in Brooklyn with me for a while, and now he's in the Bronx and PA. He seems to make the transition back-and-forth pretty well. I was surprised by how anxious he was in the country at first, it was a bit too much for him - too much space, too much freedom (maybe reminders of his traumatic past). He'll often just curl up inside on his bed and sleep, even on a nice day when the doors are open. Sometimes we hear the gun shots of hunters, and that completely does him in.

In the country, P. gets beef rib bones after dinner and vegetable scraps, and whatever he can swipe off the compost pile when we're not looking. In the city, he gets chicken bones and other icky stuff off the streets (he's often too fast for me to catch him). Of course it's all the same to him. He's a dog, leftovers are leftovers. But I wonder what he thinks about when we're en route from one place to the other. Does he anticipate the country (grass! hiking in the woods! none of that salsa music!)? Does he look forward to getting back to the city (man, I'm beat, I just want to lie around in that small box of a room in peace)?

Good news: D. the landlord backed down on the rent increases. Hopefully he did the math, i.e. a month or two loss on rent for folks who move out, vs. whatever he would have gained by the increase. There's still a hike, but a reasonable one. I hope this means the same for us when our renewal comes up. Also, a new cafe just opened up, it's the only one anywhere around here (it's probably a mile, maybe more, from here). I haven't tried it yet, I think they're Greeks who own it; will post a report soon.

Ella's doing good these days. I saw a mini-orchid at Trader Joe's the other day for 7 bucks and almost bought it, so Ella could have a companion; but I had my hands full (literally), so maybe next time. We're taking the rubber tree to the country so we can re-pot. He has a name now - "Little Man" - after a minor character from Season One of "The Wire." Not such a nice character, but we figure at least he'll be tough.

Tenants Rise Up?

2007-07-20T11:40:00.001-07:00

It's been stormy the last couple of days here in the city. Last night we came home to casualties, i.e. the Cuban oregano and the cactus both did nose dives off the window sill because of strong winds through open windows. The oregano lost a goodly chunk of foliage (Mojitos!), and the cactus lost a blossom. Poor guys; such is the rough and tumble of city life.

This morning I went down to visit Brownie the Puppy (G. comes back from vacation tomorrow, when we'll do the official transfer/adoption). There was a guy down there hauling out garbage from the yard next door. This is good, I think. He said that D., our landlord, hired him to clean it up. These signs of landlord concern do seem encouraging.

However, there's a stir among the natives here (or the non-natives, I should say). A number of the tenants who moved in early on when the building was first renting are up for lease renewals, and they received very significant rent increases. They are not happy. We all pay a little too much in the first place, considering the location. Our landlord may be spiffying things up, but he's doing so with the idea that he's making a Manhattan-type community here. And yet... the fact remains that we live out on the frontier, and there's nothing out here but us and the fumes.

There was some talk of a petition. These are good tenants, it makes no sense to price them out, not after the first year, not when things are still unstable around here. Come on, D. - you need to see the long view.

Ella's Man

2007-07-19T04:37:00.000-07:00

Mr. Rubber Tree. Poor guy, we haven't gotten to repotting him, he's all crowded in there.

I Am Afraid of the Bronx

2007-07-18T19:16:00.000-07:00

I admit that I feel a little targeted. That someone has been watching - the auto glass guys, the waterproofing guys, the teenage sons of the family two doors down - looking to pounce, an opportunity to steal, pillage, or otherwise disorient (so to speak) the Asian girl, the one who's out of her bounds.

They're not wrong. That I don't exactly belong here. But paranoia probably isn't going to help the situation.

We're talking mostly about clash of the classes here anyway, not the races. A little of both, of course. Our building was renovated in a particular way, by a particular developer, to attract urbanites of a certain ilk. We're mostly professional, a number of artists and teachers, racially all over the map. The Puerto Rican families who live on the block (mostly rowhouses, some rent out their basements) and the guys who work on the block regard us with interest, amusement, suspicion - the whole gamut. It's gentrification in action, I suppose. Our presence brings a new energy, a different energy, people on the block in the evenings, lots of dogs on leashes. I think someone in the building has contacted the city about planting street trees. We take up all the parking spaces.

I suppose a central distinction of classes in neighborhoods is choice, i.e. many of us could live in a number of places, but we've chosen this building on this block, for whatever reasons. The families who've been here a while may not have chosen to live here per se, they more likely just ended up here; and if they had a wider variety of choices, they might choose something else.

Since the weather warmed up in spring, there are always people out on their stoops. The matron of the house three doors down watched me struggle with parallel parking one day, seemed to enjoy it, and has been an enthusiastic greeter (overhead hand-waving) ever since.

But the adage that where there are families, things are safe, is of course not true. Hello? The Sopranos?

I don't go out alone at night. I have lived in "edgy" neighborhoods before, but never so far off the map. If I walk just a block in any direction, there's nothing but factories and warehouses, shady underpasses, the occasional lurker-with-cigarette in a dark doorway. Teenagers with teeth-baring, spiky-collared pitbulls. My mother would be so pleased. We have an agreement, that J. walks the dog after dark, or we go together. There are no women-living-alone in the building as far as I know. There was one (white) woman who tried it out, but left after a month, citing S., the super, as cause: something about drunken untoward behavior, and food missing from her refrigerator.

J. encourages me to walk more "confidently" down the street, that my body language "invites" anyone who can smell fear. A self-defense course might be in order, but I've put this off for years. I am somehow ambivalent about how empowered I really want to be; it feels too far outside my core self, more like taking an acting class than anything else. But you can't have it both ways, I guess...

Every day is an adventure. The city apparently wised-up to the Thursday Only street-cleaning sign in front of the building and this morning switched the sign to Mondays & Thursdays, then promptly doled out tickets to anyone who happened to, you know, go off to work. "@()*$#*(%#()*(%)" was my greeting when I answered the call from J. "I got a ticket!" It must be his fifth or sixth on the block.

Ella has lost some blossoms, but I also see new buds. And we now have a new addition to our green family: Mr. Rubber Tree, who hails from a Korean deli in Chelsea and is in desperate need of re-potting. He and Ella make a funny pair, and yet somehow... it works.

I Am Afraid of My House

2007-07-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

We hardly know each other, really. I mean, she's mine, I've got the mortgage papers to prove it; but we're near strangers for the most part. And I'm afraid of her.

I've occupied this house for over seven months now. The winter was cold and harsh, it felt like a season of survival mostly, learning the ropes of country life - of emergency kits and snow plowing and frozen pipes and wood-hauling and propane delivery. Come spring, yard work called, the grass growing tall all around, and bugs bugs bugs. Plus the dust - red dirt - which kicks up like crazy every time a car drives by.

So I'm learning how to exist in the house, how to exist here on this piece of earth, on this dirt road, in these woods, on this farmland. But I can't say I've yet begun to know the place. It's both the unknown, and the larger-than-me, that frighten me. When it comes to tackling house chores and maintenance, I feel more like a lion-tamer than a caretaker (Back, Simba!). Today, I wrestle with the water-filter, which makes the well-water here safe for drinking. It's about a month older than it should be, and it's started to leak, which tells me it's probably saturated. I can't unscrew the cannister, it's too tight, even as I'm using all my strength, my whole body. I give up, demoralized. I am too weak, too alone, in over my head. I am now afraid to use the washing machine, because I see from this morning's load that there's been a lot of leakage. All I need right now is a burst filter.

There are other things: vents that don't quite reach outside, slanty floors that seem to get slantier (or is it just my imagination?), wobbly bannister, a furnace on its last legs (18 years), wood-rot in the siding, kitchen sink pipes that freeze in winter but are housed in an unreachable crawl space. Just that phrase, crawl space, makes my heart sink. Will I really have to crawl in there to remedy my problem?

I wonder what it would feel like to really be at home. To see your home as your ward, your child, maybe even something like a spouse or partner. To know your home, and to love her. To approach her ailments as you would tending to a sick friend.

I guess for now I am still a city person, or even a suburban person, at heart - a renter, a vacationer, an occupier: I live here, but someone else takes care of things. We grew up in a new home, completed just before we moved in, and anything related to the house's care or maintenance was pretty much invisible to us; mom called The Guy (dad is not only not handy, but not even handy enough to call The Guy). Here, sometimes the nearest Guy is sometimes 60 miles away (I learned this when the refrigerator gave out), so this is not really an option.

And besides, I'm here with the idea of place in mind, after thirty-something years of a lot of placelessness, of moving around, and packing and unpacking, and never really knowing a place, a home, a landscape. It feels at this moment - embarrassingly - like an impossibility that I will ever be able to change that water filter; but hope springs eternal. A month ago, getting the lawnmower repaired (I actually have a phobia of repair guys, who I am certain lick their chops when the little Asian girl arrives, ignorant and oh-so-easily swindled) felt like a gargantuan task, but it got done, and now I know where to go; and a few months ago, I thought I was trapped here, snowed in, but I got on out there with the garden shovel (hadn't yet bought a snow shovel) and dug myself the heck out. So maybe, over time, I won't become Bob Villa or anything, but I'll learn a thing or two, I'll settle in to this place, which is - miraculously, a little randomly, and somewhat inexplicably - my house. Maybe, like Annie Dillard, I may even get to know my bugs ("There is a spider in the bathroom with whom I keep a sort of company..."), and I'll hold off on the obsessive vacuuming of spiderwebs, and of the fly and moth and mosquito carcasses which pile up in the corners of every room.

So we are not yet friends, me and this house. It's going to take some time.

Like Any Immolating Monk

2007-07-16T13:28:00.000-07:00

Here is the moth passage, from Holy the Firm. I think perhaps it deserves its own post.

Two years ago, I was camping alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia...I read every night by candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest and pale moths massed round my head in the clearing, where my light made a ring.

Moths kept flying into the candle. They hissed and recoiled, lost upside down in the shadows among my cooking pans. Or they singed their wings and fell, and their hot wings, as if melted, stuck to the first thing they touched - a pan, a lid, a spoon - so that the snagged moths could flutter only in tiny arcs, unable to struggle free. These I could release by a quick flip with a stick; in the morning I would find my cooking stuff gilded with torn flecks of moth wings, triangles of shiny dust held here and there on the aluminum. So I read, and boiled water, and replenished candles, and read on.

One night, a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burned dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once, the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away, and her heaving parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax - a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.

And then this moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.