The Super

S. the Super and J. have developed a "special relationship." Sort of.

S. calls himself "The Boss." He likes to strut around the block like he owns the place, but really, we are learning, people laugh at him. He was hired as our Super, but he pays other guys from the block to do his dirty work. Or we think he pays them, it's a little unclear. At any rate, there's a parade of guys who supposedly "work" for S., they're in the building all the time, which is a little... I dunno. One of them leers at me, it's a little creepy.

When we first moved in, S. was calling this place "My Building," and showing off to his friends and wife. The last few months, though, seems like S. is falling down on the job. Things have been sloppy, untended; and he's drunk more and more often. They fired him across the street at the warehouse where he used to pick up hours. The last couple weeks, he's been asking J. for money - "Five-dollars, man, to get some beer." Sometimes when I'm in the basement in the morning - (laundry, watering plants) he emerges, half-naked, from one of the unoccupied spaces down there: his house is down the street, but he seems to have moved in.

Early on, our landlord had him repair the ceiling in our bathroom where we had a leak, and also paint it. He was here every day for 4 days, then disappeared, then came back a week later, then finally finished, left a mess, and the paint job was really terrible. We ended up taking photos, sending it to the landlord, and he was pretty pissed. He had someone else come back and re-do it. Meantime, J. tried to explain to S. what was wrong with the paint job - look at this, man, yellow paint all over the fixtures and the ceiling; you gotta use tape. And you gotta clean your brushes after each coat, man. Gotta take care of your tools. S. didn't really give a shit. He's like a little boy, he doesn't want to be told what to do, he wants the quick and easy way out of everything. And always the victim.

J. can't stand this. J. is a natural coach and nurturer. He's got always-on paternal instincts. He's tough and sympathetic at the same time. He's been there, been on his own most of his life, never had money or attentive adults around to help. He gets S.'s mentality, so he can't leave it alone, he's always trying to engage in some kind of ass-kicking duel. He's given S. his business card and said, If you need money, if you need a job, come to my office. But S. never leaves the block. J. is serious about it, i.e. if S. takes that bit of initiative, if he shows up at his office in Manhattan, makes the effort to see what else is out there in the world and what skill he might be able to acquire, then he'll work with him. But S. won't leave the block. This is his kingdom.

Last night, S. was at it again, asking for five bucks, the two of them dueling it out as always. J. didn't part with his money, and we walked around the block with the pup. When we got back, S. was sending one of his minions off with 10 bucks, to buy beer. "Look a dis," he says to J., gloating about his score. Now S. wants J. to get a job for his daughter-in-law. "Tell her to call me at this number," J. says. But S. won't hear it. "Come here, come talk to her, help her out, you're right here, man, do something," he says, pulling J. down the street. It's 11:30 at night.

It feels kinda hopeless, but S. and J. do have some kind of mutual understanding. S. keeps asking because he knows that J. does actually give a shit. Last month, S. needed to get his scooter fixed, so J. loaded it up onto his truck and drove S. up to his mechanic-friend somewhere up north. S. gets pissed when J. challenges him to "put up" (and lately he's getting more and more pissed, maybe because he's more and more drunk). I foresee a blowout soon, maybe a chilly period. But it's a long road... in general. We keep at it, all of us. In our own ways.

Room for the Weak Ones

You'll never raise that one; her color ain't good. If the good Lord takes her it'll be for the best. There's too many poor children on this earth already; and no room for the weak ones.

Don't say that. It's not better to die; who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating... it gets no sun and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth; and it's strong. Its hard struggle to live is making it strong. -Katie Nolan, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I'm about halfway through the audio book of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - this blog's namesake. There's a relief in listening to it - an earnest, heartfelt tale of a young girl (whose color ain't good) growing up poor in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Nothing ironic or clever about it, no metafictions or cynical self-awareness, no multimedia, no armoured satire. Just a story, about a girl and her family, trying to survive, seeing the world from the bottom up, and finding beauty - hard-earned - wherever she can.

Somerset Maugham's Willie Ashenden said it so well, so painfully well, in the quote from Cakes and Ale (see the sidebar on this page). Sincerity is surely a liability in a world governed and shaped by clever and powerful hustlers. We admire people for their savvy, almost as if savvy were the new good. I find myself, in considering the best man or woman for the Presidency of the United States, worried for my preferred candidate, Barack Obama - that he is too idealistic, not seasoned enough (i.e. can he play the game?). Poor fella, he is awfully, awfully sincere. In a current-day thesaurus (hey, someone should do this, now that would be marketable), it might say SINCERE: antonym ELECTABLE.

A tree grows in Brooklyn. Francie makes her way. Ella the orchid died. The red light just went on on the HEPA air filter in the apartment here in the Bronx; we took it apart and cleaned the filter (filthy!), but the light won't go off. Where is that owner's manual?

Baby Francie's color ain't good, but she survives, against the odds. Francie's mother Katie has her own ambitions: to raise her children for a different life, a life beyond the poor, dead-end life she's known. Katie's mother, a German immigrant and a kind of old-world sage, tells her the secret: books (Shakespeare and the Bible, specifically); learning, cultivating the mind, the imagination. Being able to see through and beyond the material facts of one's circumstances. A mind and a soul for beauty - this is the one thing that can raise a person up and out of circumstances which seem, to the physical eye, insurmountable.

Sincerely, I live this every day. Here in the Bronx, I see garbage, I see hustling and drug-dealing, I see the dirty poor, I see environmental injustice like you wouldn't believe. But what else? What else do I see? The pansies are weak and floppy. Lavendar and butterfly bush are holding on. Some people are recycling, some people are throwing banana peels and dog shit in with the mixed paper. J. from upstairs, who first took in the stray pup who now belongs to G., asked sincerely yesterday how she (the pup) is doing. K. the Bird Man came around the other night, sheepish but seemingly conciliatory. The backyard is taking shape, on the cheap, kind of ugly, but it's something. We are, as of this week, overrun with (small, black) mice.

If I am laughable, if I am absurd and ephemeral and a jest... then along with this struggle, I suppose I must learn to laugh at myself as well. Or else get thick-skinned. But like Francie, and like Ella, my temperament is ultimately more the delicate orchid than the steel magnolia. "Writers are missing a layer of skin," my poet-friend B. says. As many-a- hard-nosed-NewYorker might quip: it's the cost of doing business.

The Claims of Reasonable Gloom (In Refusal of)

Time for a poem, no doubt. Less words, greater beauty, deeper meaning (than all my yadda yadda).

This from Denise Levertov, writing about a place which is a kind of "country city" - Seattle - and where I lived for eight years. (This goes out to Seattle compadres BMD, LN-R, and, if you're reading, TPN.)

Celebration

Brilliant, this day - a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadows cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green -
whether it's ferns or lichen or needles
or impatient points of bud on spindly bushes -
greener than ever before.

And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for blessing,
a festive rite, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.

My Ambition: Part 2

I always know the root state of my mind and soul by how I feel, what runs through my head, that first moment when I wake in the morning. (It has to be the first moment, not the second, not the third... because by that time, the active mind has already taken over, has overridden what lingers in the unconscious.) Lately, I've been waking with a sense of lethargy, mixed with mid-grade anxiety about productivity, and time passing too quickly. The feeling is deceptively benign, could be easily interpreted as a simple, industrious "to-do" mechanism, a daily resolve to counter entropy - like a chipper ‘50’s housewife, exclaiming, "My goodness! So much to do, so little time!"

But that anxiety takes hold at a deeper level for me. I know this, because on the drive out here to the country, it nearly felled me, manifesting in the oh-so-unoriginal phenomenon of road rage. I was a madwoman - literally, fuming mad - and a near-menace (honking, zig-zagging, flashing high-beams, hollering... Why is everyone driving so f&%@#ing slow today?!!! It was not pretty). Poor pup, huddled in the back seat, didn't know what possessed his mom. Luckily, there was someone on the road even madder than me, going 85 instead of 79, and the cop pulled that guy over right in front of me.

The positive spin on my rage is that I just needed to get here, because this is my place of work. In the city, I do what I need to do to earn my keep; this is not, to me, real work, and often feels like busy-work. There are a multitude of distractions - blessings, too, like friends and good entertainment - but things which suck away energy and time for work. Here in the country, I work. I make things with words, I access and exercise my best (hardest-to-access) intelligence and creative focus; things stir all week long, and when I am not able to get in there, into the work, to churn and externalize, get the words on the page... Time in the city can be very constipating in that sense. And so, sometimes, that two-hour drive is like holding it (indulge me in the scatological analogies), near to bursting. I am reminded of one time when I was actually holding it, sitting in the car, stuck in gridlock traffic, no businesses or gas stations in sight, and I've never had to go so badly in my life (probably contends with yesterday for most intense road rage episode; maybe worse, because of the physical pain).

Which brings me to the negative spin: I am a wailing infant, throwing a tantrum, frustrated by my own discomfort and making things worse with my undisciplined anger. Essentially shitting all over the place, and myself, to make a point.

Ahem. Anyway. There is also physical work to be done out here in the country, which nags at me as well, when I am absent from it. I know the lawn needs mowing, the plants need either watering or putting to bed. Things are dying down now, and the mess of deadness calls for my kindness and attention. The furnace needs servicing, time to stock up the fire wood. The leaves and pine needles have begun falling in earnest, so out with the rake. And we need a good plan to keep the pipes from freezing this year, to avoid a bursting situation (C. recommends heated tape).

What else? Oh, yes. That nagging ambition for making beauty here - physical beauty, that is. Since August, I've been dreaming about a legion of non-vegetable plantings. Two lilacs - one tree form, one bush form (maybe one purple and one white), bulbs for early spring (tulips, daffodils, grape hyacinth), hostas and bleeding hearts in the back where it's shady. Yes, indeed: I will make a home, a place of loveliness and living growth; I will do this all by myself.

I am in the midst of reading and digesting (and writing my own response to) an essay by Donald Hall, called "Poetry & Ambition," sent to me by L., who reads OITB regularly. DH has much to say about today's so-called ambition ("petty ambition"), about the state of contemporary poetry (the "McPoem”) and the circus-like pursuit of fame and publication. As the question of ambition, "My Ambition," swims around in my muddied head; and as I begin to unwind from all that angst, the back-up of work, the baby-artist's tantrum; I recognize that ambition, true ambition, which DH describes (quoting the sculptor Henry Moore) as pursuit of the unattainable, an objective which is unreachable, is of course ultimately a good, and a privilege. The opportunity to set one's own goals, and to set them further out than what is easy, what gratifies instantly - this is a gift, something unearned, to be cherished and stewarded and cultivated. "If our goal remains unattainable, then failure must be standard," DH writes. And, "We fail, we all fail, we fail all our lives" (from an earlier essay called "Ballad of the Republic").

There is work to do, and if we are "properly ambitious," the work is impossible. "To pursue the unattainable for eighty-five years, like Henry Moore, may imply a certain temperament," DH admits. More often than I'd prefer, I feel my temperament does not quite suit; despair (along with road-rage-inciting frustration) hovers and looms.

But I suspect despair is not a result of “proper” ambition, but rather ambition which is fatally mis-directed. The goal is not publication, the goal is The Writing Life, i.e. giving oneself fully to the work of crafting, as DH would say, words that last. And for me, right now, pursuing publication is a kind of necessary evil (the pursuit seems to me evil, less so than publication itself) towards achieving a more supported, consistent writing life - central, not peripheral, and significantly less shared with the busy-work.

Publication is also, for better or worse, today's entrée into the proverbial community of writers, the world body of literary voices. For this - this active participation, this platform for ideas and sharing of one's developing and hard-earned vision - I do have ambition. To a degree, I feel this as deeply and truly as - dare I say it - a calling, a vocation. And to the degree that you all who read OITB have encouraged me in pursuit of this vocation, I thank you sincerely; because this work, this Life Work (referring to DH's wonderful book here, of course) is damn impossible.

Now back to the moment of waking: I woke this morning thinking clearly and distinctly about writing this post. I woke in gratitude for the work ahead and the time & space to do it. I woke ready to work, and to make everything I can out of my day. I woke happy about the color of the paint on my walls (a bold red-orange which I inherited and is now growing on me). I woke with some measure of ambition, untormented. I guess you could say it took about 18 hours, but I've cleared out my backed-up system - not completely, of course, but just enough. On arrival yesterday, I went straight for the physical work: the lawn is raked and mowed (and is slowing its growth, nature's grace); the porch plants watered, trimmed back, composted; four loads of laundry done (this is what I mean by backup); bags of cow manure unloaded from the truck and ready for the lilac planting, when it happens. You get into the work, you just dig in (literally, in this case), and the priorities begin to untangle themselves, make themselves clear - what you will do today, what you will do tomorrow, what is likely impossible in both the long and short runs, but will remain, as ever, in your sights. The lilacs and the bulbs can wait until later in the month; the shade plantings until the spring. The appointment for the furnace service has been made, we'll chop and stack firewood next week; today, I wear layers to keep warm.

Onward, then. The hours are before me, the impossible awaits.

Gifts From the Cosmos: A Good Day in the City

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

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

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.