Month: November 2018

NaNo & GIVING IN

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

 

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Not our beach.

All this month, I have been writing for National Novel Writing Month (NaNo). My early goal, before November began, was to complete a science fiction novel. I had written 15 k in April, and hoped about 7k of it was worthwhile. But as November approached I lost confidence. I have written several novels—seriously. The first, in 1996, was Love Interest. That one was particularly bad. Then Clean Away, A Single Fact, Living in Snake Land, and recently Everybody’s Mother Dies. I queried the most recent novel all this year. Sixty-six agents, and some liked it, some did not bother to respond. I was trying to do something unconventional. I wanted the terrible thing to happen early in the book, and the majority of the novel would reveal how she recovered from catastrophic loss.

That didn’t play. A very kind reader, who read to the end, said this:

“I’m disappointed but we won’t be able to go further with this. Myself and other readers here talked about this through the week, but still the hesitancy is that ‘Everybody’s Mother Dies’ loses impetus through the middle and the great story potential in the familicide (if that’s the correct term) comes too soon and the tension in the book is weighted too much to the front end. Then we have a quiet novel, which is engaging, but would benefit from some of this tension to pick up and drive through to its end.”

This is somewhat ironic since my original structure for this story held the climax back from the read until near the end. I was thoroughly thrashed for that “withholding.” Yet I have read two novels recently that mange to pull off what that original impulse. The terrible event is hinted at and the reader is teased. My conclusion is that there might not be anything wrong with my story, only I wrote it badly.

I might even go back to it some day, but my confidence wobbled. Maybe am just not capable of structuring a novel. Maybe later?

I thought, instead, I would develop short story ideas for NaNo, even including stories I had started or even “finished” a long time ago. This made me a “rebel” according to NaNo, but I was okay with that. I have over 70k today, and technically, I won a couple of weeks ago when I hit 50k. My concern was ensuring that at least 50k of my finished words are brand new. In the last two days I have written 5k new, and—here’s the cool thing—when I tried to transfer over two more full pages from that April science fiction draft, I cut all but two and a half lines! It’s what I have been doing all month. Paste in a 3k story, cut, rewrite, and expand to a 6k story. A story published years almost doubled in length, even after I cut out stuff.

The long and short of it is that I felt like a cheater at the start and now I am feeling like I earned my “win.”

It’s important to me to play fair, even when no one else cares.

In a blog post at Brevity, Zoë Bossier writes about perspective in “The Art Versus the Artist: On Authenticity in Creative Writing.”

“To preface, historically, writers—and especially white writers—of fiction and poetry have appropriated other cultures, classes, and perspectives in their own writing without much thought to the ethics of this practice. And for a long time, they were highly successful in doing so. Many of these works were (and still are) hailed as masterpieces, taught in high school curricula around the world. The place of these works in western literary canon has never been called into question before.”

There are several issues here for all writers. Accuracy and honesty in detail and perspective are essential to verisimilitude.

ver·i·si·mil·i·tude

/ˌvərəsəˈmiləˌt(y)o͞od/
noun
  1. the appearance of being true or real.
    “the detail gives the novel some verisimilitude”
    synonyms: realism, believability, plausibility, authenticity, credibility, lifelikeness

    “the verisimilitude of her performance is gripping”

How to get it right? How to be believed?

Am I limited to writing only my own identity? Few would argue that I am.

Writing fiction limited only to writing one’s own personal identity means, for affluent white male authors, that the story is limited to affluent white male characters. There was a time during my lifetime when most stories were written by and about affluent white men. Other than Anne Frank, I was never assigned a book in school not written by a man and focussing on men. More recently, most of the stories I was urged to read during my MFA program were written by affluent white men about their own experiences. Needless to say, it was annoying.

On my own, I searched for stories from other perspectives. I reread Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Tillie Olsen who each wrote and write well beyond personal experience. Sandra Cisneros, for example, in her first book of prose writes about a poverty she did not experience with admirable authenticity. Others have not done so well, and some miss the mark entirely.

The classic Chinese poet Li Bai wrote as she. What to say about translations by Amy Lowell?

Even writing memoir, authenticity is at the mercy of perspective. I distrust the male view of Sherman Alexie when he complains about his mother and the affluent white perspective of an adult Vance writing about his “hillbilly” childhood. A few years ago I read a mother’s memoir that was completely lacking in objectivity. I didn’t feel the author lied about her experiences and pain, but that she left her life unexamined. She utterly failed to take any responsibility for her part in the events she describes so beautifully. These are “true” stories, but biased and self-righteous. I recognize this as a mother, as a teacher, as a writer, and as a human reader because I examine the truth of narrative based on broad experience. As a writer myself, I recognize how painful it would be for her, but I want her to do that work anyway.

Like my novel’s weaknesses. I know I need to print it off and find a way to rearrange scenes to make it work. And maybe like that memoirist, it is just more slogging self-recrimination and pain than I can manage. It might be easier to give in and move on. Well, it always is easier to give up, isn’t it?

Fiction or factual, we must tread carefully, finding out way toward truth, accepting that how we present our stories must reflect a greater wisdom earned through close examination, hard-won and painful though that sometimes is.

In the mean time, we must honor authentic experiences in all writing—memoir, fiction, and poetry—from those who expand their view (and ours) beyond the mere self. We can also strive to write from a broader perspective than our immediate self. We do our best to be honest with ourselves and our readers. We can examine our stories, whether memoir or fiction or poetry, from outside our selfish selves.

It is not easy, but it never is.

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THE ODYSSEY

/ janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

51INarXj18L._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgTranslations are a bitch.

If readers—especially those with no great interest in other cultures or mythology—want a fast-moving, understandable fantasy tale, this might be just the ticket.

I want history and truth and anthropology. I want art. This translation is modestly literate and probably relatively accurate. Despite imposition of semi-iambic pentameter and use of modern expressions, it does nothing fancy or self-promoting. It is easy to read. Is it an accurate translation of this ancient poem?

I used to explain the challenge of translating poetry to my students this way: You have the form (the structure of a poem in rhythm and rhyme), the meaning, and the music. In translation, there may not be a simple word meaning exactly in English what it means in the original. Wilson is concerned that prose versions become longer. She’s right about that, prose does tend to become wordier. However, making the lines shorter than the original defies my understanding. When is it ever possible to consistently and accurately translate in fewer words than the original language? Thus, reading back and forth between translations, I found information missing from Wilson. To maintain her line-by-line translation she was forced to leave things out.

Plus all words gather baggage through cultural connection and acquired connotation. (The young woman in the beautiful long white dress—is she a bride, an unmarried young woman, or in mourning for her father? Is the story American, Vietnamese, or Chinese?) If something must be sacrificed, do you choose form, meaning, or music?

I would give 2 stars for music (maybe only 1), 3 stars for meaning (maybe 4, maybe only 2), and 2 stars for form. Also mostly 4 stars for her introduction, though even there . . .

I wanted to love this translation—I expected to love it. It is the first translation by a woman. I prepared and took notes. I read the introductions to several translations in preparation, beginning last year. Once I had Wilson’s translation in hand, and began reading I felt I was missing details and worked back and forth between her translation and Penguin’s Rieu translation, which is wordier prose but includes line numbers on the side. Each has its flaws.

What I liked about the new one: Wilson provides a lengthy introduction that includes how the poem has been viewed in the past, when and how it might have been composed and first written down, and how other translators have approached the work. In this introduction she points out specific misunderstandings and provides critical cultural context. References to dogs, for example, especially in relation to the actions and appearance of women, do not have the same connotation they would in modern English. A dog-like face is not ugly, but suggests something else (perhaps devotion, or a need for attention). Wilson has her doubts that anyone named Homer existed. She provides some evidence that the epic is much older than usually assumed. She works hard to provide a poem-like translation. Wilson points out that prose translations inevitably become longer than the original. This attempt to provide a straight-forward translation in iambic pentameter cuts length and makes for fast reading.

What I did not like: The attempted iambic pentameter. Most of this translation is in 10-beat lines but some is not, and much of it is not in iams at all. The challenge of fully conveying meaning in fewer syllables than the original was beyond this translator. (Homer’s dactylic hexameter, which I do not claim to understand, has a longer beat line.) With the aid of an actual poet, she might have managed it, but I am convinced meaning would have been distorted in the effort. Wilson also claims, and so do other introductions (I read four) that no one person could have composed and memorized twelve thousand lines. That is a foolish assumption since many oral societies, even within historical times, have managed just that. And her effort to use terms familiar to modern audiences includes “scot-free” among other colloquialisms that seemed out of place in such a setting, not to mention I would guess many young readers would not understand them all, thus undermining the attempt to make the text more “relatable”. In her introduction, she also dismisses the possibility of the composer having been a woman.

While she is likely correct that the composer was a man, I found part of her argument against a female bard short-sighted. A woman, she asserts, would not have adequate knowledge of the battlefield to support the detail found in the poem. But I find nothing in her translation (or any other) of battle scenes that could not have been pieced together from post-battle remains, guesswork, and survivors’ accounts or tradition, by a woman or a blind man. She also fails to note the ordinary household details, meticulously described, which would have been equally inaccessible to a male poet and far less likely to have been preserved by men. In the end, I argued with her assumptions about gender. She inadvertently, reopened the question for me. Would any man go on and on about household textiles spun, dyed, woven, and cared for exclusively by women? [NOTE: Robert Graves assumed the epics were written by two people, The Odyssey by a woman. His novel Homer’s Daughter, based on this assumption, was not particularly successful, imo, but there you are. A woman should have written it. He missed most of the more convoking details that would have convinced me.]

No introduction I read focussed adequately on how several “inconsistencies” support the elite quality of the actors in this story. The men eat only meat and drink mostly wine except under severe hardship. Though there is frequent mention of gardens and orchards, the characters do not eat fruits and vegetables. The faces of significant characters, men and women and even including some suiters, are described as “god-like.” Men are bathed and their skin oiled, their clothing is wool, fine-spun, and frequently purple. In fact, though many dyes would have been available, purple is the only color mentioned. Men may wear mantels of purple, sleep under blankets of purple, and women spin purple-dyed fleece. If that last is accurate, that the fleece was dyed before spinning, then it was first washed before dying. It would have been oiled before it could be spun and there is a passage that references oil dripping from a weaving, a detail translated differently in each version I checked. Some translations specify olive oil, others do not. Use of precious olive oil to spin the wool is unlikely, but intended, perhaps, to convey the elite status of the characters. Failure to appreciate how people lived and spent their time results in shallow understanding and translation. The purple dye comes from a Mediterranean shellfish, tyrex, the “royal purple” first discovered during the Bronze Age when this story is set. The displays of wealth in use of meat and oil and purple dye and descriptors using the term god-like all promote the stature of the cast. These are not ordinary people, but people of rank.

A swineherd is addressed directly by the narrator, “You, Eumaeus” and he becomes one of Odysseus’ three supporters in the slaying of the suitors, a rare character who is named, but not an aristocrat or of immortal family. More important, I suspect, he first greets Odysseus on his return, treating him with the proper care and respect, though he does not recognize his master. He does what is right and proper and due to a stranger. The Penguin translation claims the composer so loved his creation, he honored him in this way. I would argue that here is a commoner, a slave and swineherd, who is important to the story. The rare use of direct address acknowledges this.

Every introduction I have read has emphasized the oral roots of the poem. Wilson writes that The Odyssey may have been composed from an oral tradition, how and when it came to be written, and how the text version might have altered any previous spoken version. Yet, not enough is said about the nature of the oral tradition. Every high school English teacher will tell you that iambic pentameter aids the actor in memorization. I have heard actors in Ashland, Oregon, describe how memorization was much more challenging when they worked on a modern play after Shakespeare.

But poetic rhythm is also an aid to the listener. Just as the form aids the performer, so form and repetition aid the listener who can predict and appreciate sound when it is held in a poetic form. While the reader might reread, turn back a page, as I frequently did while studying these translations, the listener must grasp the story in the moment it is told. Homer (whoever that person or persons might be) tells and then reviews the telling, caps each character with a descriptor of his or her heroic trait. Penelope is prudent, Odysseus is cunning, for example. These words preface their names over and over again regardless of how the characters behave in the scene. Most translators vary these words but also frequently leave them out entirely. On the page, they seem redundant. To the ear, they are a formal reminder of the characters we are hearing about: ultimately, even if he is foolish in leaving his starving men with the cattle, Odysseus is a cunning hero.

The Penguin edition also speaks of how the story was composed, assuming it is fiction. Even Wilson likes to comment on characters as creations. From a modern perspective, this is sensible, but tradition is always based in fact. Everyone assumes these are very ancient stories, likely already old before The Odyssey was first spoken or written. Yet many details remain in question, despite what seems to me to be obvious. Penelope, for example, is the subject of a great deal of speculation. When does she recognize her husband returned after 20 years? Does she recognize him early on and keep this to herself? Even Wilson describes her actions as confusing. Telemachus is frequently described as immature.

Here is my teasing out of the story from a broader (Penelope’s) perspective: Odysseus was about to go to war. Before he leaves, he tells his wife he hopes to see her again, but if he dies, she must raise their infant son to manhood and then remarry. This backstory is a part of what we find in The Odyssey. After 17 years, suitors for perhaps-widowed Penelope begin to arrive, her son is not yet a man, and she concocts the deception involving weaving a shroud for her husband’s aging father. She weaves by day, unweaves by torchlight in the night. After three years, she is caught out, betrayed by a slave. Over a hundred suitors arrive and would like to have her and the kingdom she has managed through this long absence. Telemachus as an unprotected minor is at risk. The disguised goddess Athene sends the boy off to visit other survivors of Troy, and this accomplishes two things: it introduces the young man to his peers who are then in a position to support his claims, and it keeps him out of the clutches of men who would kill him and take his inheritance. Their avaricious intentions are clear because, we are told repeatedly, taking his wealth is what they are already doing by eating and drinking the wealth of the household. They plan to murder Telemachus. Though she is described as beautiful, marrying Penelope is primarily a political tactic.

Penelope hides herself from the men when she can, but also keeps each one dangling with messages when she cannot hide. Her position is precarious. Eventually she must either choose a new husband or abandon her son to the ambitions of these men. Either way, stalling remains her best option. When Telemachus returns from his travels, she announces she will marry the man who can do what her husband once did, string his massive bow and thread an arrow through the handles of a dozen axes. None is able to string Odysseus’ bow, much less use it, though his own son comes closest to accomplishing the feat. Does she hope all will fail and thus she will buy more time for the son who is stronger than her suiters, nearly as strong as he will ever be? Or does she recognize Odysseus? It is worth noting that when men lie in this story, this deception is immediately called out in the poem. If Penelope were lying, the poet would have told us. Instead, Penelope has been stalling from the beginning as she protects her son in his childhood, but now she must fulfill the second part of her obligation to her presumed-dead husband. There is no mystery here. Penelope is a dutiful wife. As a widow, she must remarry. Does she love her absent husband and mourn for him? Absolutely. Everyone, everyone cries in this story. Men cry from fear and loneliness and loss. Penelope cries for her absent husband. Her sincerity in grief is never in question. She has done her best to fulfill her husband’s directions.

I have not found any gloss or introduction that deals with these issues.

A recent The New York Times review of Robert Alter’s 3-volume translation of the Hebrew Bible by Avi Steinberg, describes how Alter manages to both respect the poetry of the original and honor the meaning of the original as none has done before. In part, he does this by breaking convention:

Alter told me about his decision to reject one of the oldest traditions in English translation and remove the word “soul” from the text. That word, which translates the Hebrew word nefesh, has been a favorite in English-language Bibles since the 1611 King James Version. But consider the Book of Jonah 2:6 in which Jonah, caught in the depths of a giant fish’s gut, sings about the terror of near-death by water. According to the King James Version, Jonah says that the Mediterranean waters “compassed me about, even to the soul” — or nefesh. The problem with this “soul,” for Alter, is its Christian connotations of an incorporeal and immortal being, the dualism of the soul apart from the body. Nefesh, to the contrary, suggests the material, mortal parts, the things that make us alive on this earth. The body.

“Well,” Alter said, speaking in the unrushed, amused tone of a veteran footnoter. “That Hebrew word, nefesh, can mean many things. It can be ‘breath’ or ‘life-breath.’ It can mean ‘throat’ or ‘neck’ or ‘gullet.’ Sometimes it can suggest ‘blood.’ It can mean ‘person’ or even a ‘dead person,’ ‘corpse.’ Or it can be ‘appetite’ or something more general: ‘life’ or even ‘the essential self.’ But it’s not quite ‘soul.’ ”

But, I asked Alter, doesn’t “soul” help dramatize the scene’s intense emotion? I mentioned another instance of the word nefesh, the terrifyingly evocative line from the King James’ translation of Psalm 69: “For the waters are come in unto my soul.”

“Oh, yes,” Alter said, with a smile. “That one does have a certain emotional resonance to it. But it’s not what the poet had in mind. And, I would add that the line ‘for the waters have come up to my neck’ … is also rather dramatic.”

. . .

Alter regularly composes phrases that sound strange in English, in part because they carry hints of ancient Hebrew within them. The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, whom Alter has cited, describes translations that “foreignize,” or openly signal that a translated text was originally written in another language, and those that “domesticate,” or render invisible the original language. According to Venuti, a “foreignized” translation “seeks to register linguistic and cultural differences.” Alter maintains that his translation of the Bible borrows from the idea of “foreignizing,” and this approach generates unexpected and even radical urgency, particularly in passages that might seem familiar.

It is this sense of an ancient text that I miss in Wilson’s translation. She has so thoroughly domesticated Homer that he is entirely lost.

What did I want? What do I want? Perhaps a three-part text: the original Greek, a translation, and footnotes on the side, on the same double-page spread. This modern nonsense of endnotes where I must flip to the back to find comments and then not find an explanation of a term of history when I do look is exasperating. I want literal translation as well as poetic translation. I want consistency. If names have literal meaning, either choose to translate or footnote (Wilson endnotes one time, translates another—give me both but in parallel). If “his face drained of color” makes more sense to readers because it is the conventional phrase used today, I still want a side note explaining that the literal translation of the Greek means his skin turns “yellowish green” because I have seen that. I have seen death.

Or perhaps I want something more straight forward and difficult: I want art. I want poetry.

Someone, please, do for Homer what has been done for Shakespeare or, more precisely, what Robert Alter has done for his Bible. It is a lot to ask. I know.

The cover art is gorgeous—one of my favorite Minoan mural paintings, but from a period and culture completely unrelated to the story. Like this translation itself, it is an attractive choice and it is wrong.

HERE! ROVER! THANKSGIVING!

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This morning Gary and I walked the length of the beach to the north. We were out for two hours. A little more. We started early, but it is a holiday weekend, and there were many people on the beach we didn’t know. Most of them had loose dogs with them. Several of the dogs were Golden Retrievers. Some of the retrievers were well-mannered. One barked and growled and ran at everyone. Like the rest of them, this dog failed to respond when called and, like most, was not on leash. The owners apologized for their dog’s aggression (genuine dog people would recognize his behavior as that spoken of as a “spook” and fear-biter) but the young couple did not have a leash with them, so they continued down the beach apologizing to the people their dog harassed and the dog continued to not come when called. It is why there is a leash law, for dogs like this Golden Retriever, whose behavior was not at all characteristic of that breed. Most of the dogs we met were perfectly behaved. The little King Charles Spaniel greeted me like a friend. I have pet her before.

I found some peculiar rocks and each of us found a small piece of glass. Last week, on an island, I found a half dozen pieces of glass, all thin and nicely frosted, none of which would have survived long on our coast. I found lovely pebbles there, a nearly spherical rock, and we will be talking about that trip forever. It felt like a secret place, that island, a magical, liminal space. I feel not quite comfortable about naming it. The grass is very green, thin over stoney ground. The sheep are entirely wild, and the world is silent and still. The view was so quiet that I stared for many minutes at a time to convince myself I was not looking at a brilliant photograph.

Here, our view is forever moving, the waves close enough to hear, sometimes, each tipping breaker. Mostly, however, it is a roar. Ruby once asked us to turn it off, that sound.

We spent Thanksgiving in an entertaining hotel. It was a good night, but there were quibbles. The homeless man in the sitting room where I was grafting Ruby’s birthday sweater together. He had recently been in one of the rooms, delighted with his shower. He rubbed his head with a white towel and rubbed his elbows with lotion from a tiny bottle just like the lotion bottle in our room’s bathroom. Harmless and cheerful, but he may have caused some guests to leave the room. Several hotel blunders made us laugh. Nothing terrible—two little spiders in the bathroom, litter under the bed—but enough that we thought I must write about it when we got home. Gary should be beside me, helping me to remember all the funny things I am forgetting here.

Instead, Gary is downstairs sorting through the folders, pamphlets, papers, and other items I have already sorted. A week or so ago, Gary moved 16 “bankers’ boxes” into the living room for me to sort. Yesterday I finished going through them. Student work and lesson plans, papers from 20 and 30 and 40 years ago. I reduced the pile of boxes by 75%, which Gary declares a success. He is going through my discards to be sure I don’t throw something away that I might regret. He insists I keep my horse scrapbook from 1962—racing results from Longacres and articles with horses clipped from The Seattle Times. I remember each clipping.

When Gary began resorting, I organized Christmas gifts, labeling them with post-its, identifying the intended recipients. That did not take long. I need to attach the sleeves to Ruby’s sweater and address holiday cards. My NaNo count is at 63,256 words, including a just-begun new story. I should be working on that.

We took a break and checked our Visa bill. Yikes! And they said our account “may have been compromised” and they are sending a new card. I thought we might buy some organic cotton washcloths and sheets online, but I’d best wait. I made a frittata for breakfast using leftover curry and put butter to chill in the freezer to make pie crust. Then I came upstairs to my grandmother’s desk to write an overdue blog post.

A moment ago, as I typed, two youngsters were playing in the ocean, barefoot, in November and in an outgoing tide. People worry me sometimes. Our ocean is not a tame beast. Those little girls were just outside my window, but thankfully they have returned to the rental house next door and a youngish man is playing frisbee with a slightly older boy on the sand.

Just now Gary laughed while sorting downstairs. “What?” I said. “Oh nothing. I love you!” he called up the stairs. He has found something ridiculous, something I did.

That butter has been in the freezer too long now, and I will have to take it back out to warm slightly before I can make pie crust. Gary asks for only one thing at Thanksgiving: pumpkin pie. The filling is begun. It will be dinner tomorrow, only a few days late.

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Above is a photo of “Alan’s room” which we are using to stage the holidays. Gary insisted I take a photograph because the entire room is thrashed at the moment. Nearly all the boxes in the photo are now empty including those way at the back and the one visible on the left. The paper shopping bag at the left, the one on the chair, and others on the floor are empty too. (The 4 original Thonet bentwood chairs—middle, back—are over a hundred years old, still sturdy, and free to a new home. Anyone?) Everything on the bed is a gift and labeled. I could be wrapping them just now, but no, not just yet.

 

 

TIME OFF

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IMG_3640We went away for the weekend.

Such a simple thing to do though rare for us because for all of our marriage until recently, we had the animals to consider. There were dogs, usually five or six of them. There were the cats, only one at a time. Zora bit. Leakey pined. This recent trip was easy too because the friends we stayed with took us to an island without internet, a quiet place. And they spoiled us completely. Fed us and entertained us and managed our travel. The silence was dream-like and I dreamt so clearly and with such authenticity that that I was certain it was real.

Perhaps that was because the silence and beauty overwhelmed imagination.

Backing up, late afternoon on Thursday my new computer arrived. I can never get Apple to accept a password or change it or manage it at all, but my Time Machine transferred all data. The next challenge was passwords because my old computer knew them all and this new one does not, but must be taught. [Eventually Apple allowed me to change my password, after at least nine years of receiving the message “This action cannot be completed at this time”, but then I had to reteach the new computer website passwords again.] I opened the newer version of Pages and searched for features hidden in different places. But already this new Pages is old, and I have been prompted to download the newest version, free, but another adjustment.

I was perfectly content with how things worked with my old version. On the plus side, this new laptop weighs two and a half pounds less that my last. The trade-off is that it is smaller and no quicker, but the battery is spry. As I type this, I have been on the internet, Pages, and email for over two hours and used 13% of the battery. I did not even remember to turn down the backlighting of keys.

In any event, I left my new laptop at home and we have only a flip-phone, nothing smart at all, so for three days we avoided news and I was spared word-processing. I walked beaches with such a foreign assortment of pebbles and gravel and stones that I hardly knew what to look for. On our beach, the rocks lining the beach are basalt with occasional sandstone or agates, shells, feathers, and trash. We gather trash. I confess I gathered trash on the beaches in the San Juans too. Impossible to ignore the habit. Plastic and styrofoam, but no beach toys.

I am overwhelmed by the hospitality we received over the weekend.

I brought back a fistful of what I term “pinkies”—tiny pinkish pebbles. I found as many as I already had found, though what I already had was collected over months and years in a narrow stretch of beach. On the island, I found agates the size of a five-year-old’s fist and one in the shape of a heart. I found a beautiful granite egg.

Monday morning I completed my NaNo officially, but I was not done at 52k words. I wanted at least 8k more, preferably 70k, which has been my minimal goal with novels in the past two years.

Today and for the foreseeable future I will be struggling with Apple. Everything was fine on this new laptop, at first. There were the normal struggles to locate information and actions that I was used to finding in another place, but I could access my files, the internet, and email. Now I cannot access my email—the old messages show, but I cannot send or receive new messages. This has something to do with the iCloud and two-part authentication, a level of security I do not even want.

I am near throwing this little laptop through a window. Of course we have double panes . . .

BURNING

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This is “managed forest” in the Coast Range. There is an abundance of fuel for fire.

The West is burning.

In 1975, Canadian friends picked me up in Seattle to ride with them to Colorado. The driver was Jeff, and Jeff smoked cigarettes. At one point, he tossed the lit butt of a cigarette out his window. It was early September, the end of a long, hot, dry summer. We were in eastern Montana and there was nothing, absolutely nothing to stop a fire in those grasslands.

This was something I knew was dangerous. I had been raised with respect for forest, and by a father who never tossed his cigarette butts. I said something from the back seat of the van. Maybe I said it was dangerous to throw a lit cigarette out the window, maybe I merely yelped and said he shouldn’t do that. I don’t remember what I said. I was thinking at the time about what I knew about fire, and cannot recall my words, What I remember is his irritated response.

“What do you care? You don’t live here,” he said.

Maybe we argued after that. Reasons lined up: I did live there. It is my country, my nation. My father was born in Montana. This sort of reasoning that because it would not be my field that burned I should not care was immoral. I should care. He should care.

The West is burning. The human body count continues the rise.

Pundits, politicians, and ordinary people would like someone or something to blame—errors in forest management, a camp fire, climate change, an unusually dry summer. All of the above? Answers are rarely simple.

Someone always points out that Native peoples set fires (every time, I see it). This doesn’t make setting fires a good practice. Humans in every culture have done foolish and cruel things.

Europeans drove entire herds off cliff faces. The BaMbuti pigmies roast songbirds alive because it makes their flesh more tender. Londoners drank water contaminated with typhus. Stupid.

My point is that what a small population can get away with is not necessarily the answer to our troubles today. One post I read claimed that Fewer trees/acre does not signify. I know from walking in the coast range that trees were once further apart. This was first, pre-logging, “old growth” trees with stumps six feet across. Most Americans will never see old growth trees that massive. And even so, there were forests so dense, a horse and rider could not pass between them. Most forest fires used to be started by lightening strike. Today, most are begun by humans.

The West is burning because we have more forest remaining in the West compared to the East; because climate change is causing forested, moist places to become drier; and because we start fires with cigarettes and electrical sparks and camp fires and good intentions.

“California’s fire record dates back to 1932; of the 10 largest fires since then, nine have occurred since 2000, five since 2010 and two this year alone, including the Mendocino Complex Fire, the largest in state history.” Undergrowth, including the low growth after an area has been logged and replanted, allows for a fast-moving fire. The Tillamook Burn of 1933 destroyed 390,000 acres in western Oregon. The next three Tillamook Burns would take over 400,000 additional acres. It was so huge my mother and her sister swam in a warm ocean, and came out covered in soot. That one started from a spark from logging operations. A couple of years ago there was a fire a half mile east of our home in the coast range. That one started from a slash burn that went out of control in high winds.

Fire suppression, which worked for most places, played a part, but climate change, weather, and human beings played critical roles. Well, human beings mostly.

Even “controlled burns” get out of hand, and the research does not entirely support any method currently used to prevent fires, other than not starting them to begin with.

The West is burning and we are looking for someone or something to blame.

THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS HAVE VIOLENT ENDS by Caitlin Gildrien

I don’t want to write
about California. I don’t want to look.
Did you know there were two new litters
of mountain lions in the Santa Monica mountains?
A mama can only carry one at a time. I don’t know
why that’s the thing that breaks me. It’s the world
that breaks me. We’ve broken the world.
Just past the tweet that tells me about the kittens
is a thread about Romeo and Juliet,
the Claire and Leo movie version,
and that is what I click through. How I loved that movie,
the fish tank, the kissing. I wanted to live
in a world like that, a world like this world
except slant. Better lighting, better language.
How you can understand it best
by not listening too closely. I think too much.
All the fish in that tank scooped probably from the sea;
how the sea is failing. I wanted to love someone
until they would die for me. I wanted to be the one
they would choose to carry out of the burning world.
When the fish stocks fail, when the Amazon tips
past the point for which it can compensate
with the meager reforestation it is allowed—
there should be nicer language for this in a poem,
I’m sorry. I just keep thinking of Juliet, who thought the sea
was infinite and so a good metaphor for love.
But we’re determined to find the bottom
of any bounty. They thought this continent
was boundless, too, and scraped it clean
to prove themselves its better. They.
Did you see that storm of smoke,
utterly apocalyptic, over the highway?
It makes a person say God. God, lift me
by the scruff. Or the throat, maybe.
All of us, maybe. Shake hard.
Be rough with love.

—from Poets Respond
November 15, 2018

__________

Caitlin Gildrien: “A friend who is a science writer tweeted about the mountain lion kittens, and though of course the costs of these fires are deep and broad for humans and for the rest of the environment, that fact really shook me—as did the way that Twitter shoves the somber and heartbreaking up against the trivial as though they are equally weighted. I was born in California, though I live across the country now, and it’s been increasingly painful each year to watch the fires become more uncontrollable. It’s one of the many reasons I fear for our future.”

Reprinted without permission. It made me cry.

CAT & SHREW

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IMG_3595We found this shrew on the beach the other day. A sad little creature. We find fish sometimes, but also this tiny rodent which had no business a hundred feet out on the sand.

Every morning as we head out on our walk, I write essays in my head. They are usually the same essay about what treasures we find, about petting Roxxie, and about the trash we pick up. Sometimes write in my head about our nicer neighbors and sometimes I plan bitter exposés concerning the selfish, mean so-and-so who likes to lie to tourists.

Mostly, I do something else when I get home. This month, I go back to work on my computer. I was awake buy 5am and writing for National Novel Writing Month, thirty days of November to write 50,000 words of fiction.

I thought this month that I would write a science fiction novel. I had done the research, I had the characters and some of the action. In April I whizzed right through 15k words during NaNo Camp. I planned to restart this story from scratch. I thought it would be my novel for the year. I had questions I would answer as I wrote. I even had a list of chapters, an outline of plot. I would work on a five-thousand word section at a time. I had it figured out.

Theoretically, I was in good shape at the start, but my confidence almost immediately went to ground. My story about all animals—birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals—dying and only a handful of human survivors scattered across the planet did not need the 70k words I’d planned to write in November. I read a news story about loss of insects on isolated tropical islands and my story about seven women alone on a planet with only insects collapsed. Could I kill off the insects too? I abandoned hope oh me who entered here! This was not going to fly. I was unprepared to make the necessary changes. This was obvious by the third or fourth day of NaNo. What I felt prepared to write did not need even the 50k words that NaNo demanded. The story today is 37 pages and 11k words and has ended. True, I have a couple of places still marked “place scene here”, but these will add a couple of thousand words, no more and possibly only a page. There is no novel here. No possibility for a novel. There is not even a novella. My eventual 12 or 14 thousand words will make a novelette, and that’s before I go back to butchering. It’s an 8k story pretending to be something longer. Maybe it’s only a 6k story. Maybe, in the end, it will not be anything at all.

In the mean time, I have dug into my files and found fragments and even stories I thought were complete (they aren’t) to work on. I have a file with 49k already, but the last seven thousand words are a very old story that will have to be torn apart and rewritten from scratch. I pasted it into my NaNo packet because I hope that a single line will get me going. A woman thinks she sees a dead kangaroo in the grass beside the freeway, and her daughter thinks she imagining things. There are 141 words of dialogue and a good title. That’s what I hope will lead to a story of about five thousand words.

It’s like that poor little shrew on the sand. I don’t know how he got there. Or she. She probably thought she was on her way somewhere else. Sure this was not where she planned to end.

I called this post “cat and shrew” because when I was a little girl, my cat Mica was an enthusiastic hunter of shrews. I thought I might tell that story, but instead, as with NaNo, I went somewhere else/

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Anyone recognize this bird?

There was this hawk the other day perched in a snag on top of the cliff north of our home. Sometimes there are crows there or one of the ravens. Most often we see an eagle. We have seen a Cooper’s hawk because our tenant means to feed birds, but also feeds chipmunks and rats, which then feed the hawk. The doves too.

All of us are just muddling along I suppose.

 

VETERAN’S DAY

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We watched birds on the beach this morning, but it is Veteran’s Day, so Gary and I talked about our dads’ military service.

Gary’s dad joined the Army during World War 2, but was mustered out as a result of a hernia. He joined again, this time the Army Air Force and spent the war in Texas working on planes.

My dad joined the Army too. He served in France and Germany, was present at liberation of a concentration camp in Germany, and met the King of England while on leave. He was injured and earned a Purple Heart. He almost never spoke of the war other than to joke about rations, about how the men used their gas masks to carry things and he hung his on the back of a Jeep and laughed watching them away.

He contended that men who bragged about their wartime experiences had not seen what he saw.

What is most memorable to me was asking my dad about how he got into the service. Was I an adolescent when I asked? Older?

He said he joined because he would have been drafted anyway. Everyone had to go, he said from his corner of the sofa in the living room.

My mother was in the kitchen, wiping counters, but she stopped and moved to the edge of the room. “Art, that is not true. You wouldn’t have been drafted,” she said. There was anger, bitterness in her voice. “No. You worked in a sheltered industry. You did not have to serve.” He’d been at McDonald-Douglas, building planes my father-in-law took care of a thousand miles away. My mother went on muttering about his disastrous first marriage, the damage his wartime experiences had done him. She did not mean the leg injury and hospitalization. She did not know about his addiction to pain killers, a detail he revealed to me and warned me not to tell my mother. “She doesn’t know.”

On that day, I stood in the dining room where I could see them both. I looked from one to the other, knowing each was telling their truth. My father was beginning his long debilitation RA. Perhaps I was already a teenager at the cusp of my political awareness when I would march against the current war in Vietnam. The war was a problem for many people because the reasons for our involvement were clearly excuses, with no end in sight.

My father was proud of his service in the Second World War. My mother’s sister joined the Marines right out of high school, even though they arrested her best friend simply for having parents born in Japan. People did what they had to.

Another thing my father said about his war was that people who criticized the capitulation of France in the Second World War did not understand how that country had suffered a couple of decades before. I studied history, so I thought I knew, but it would be many years before I fully understood what he meant. It was a novel, a French historical novel, that revealed the incredible suffering of the French during the Great War.

The United States came late into each of the wars, late into the Great War, the Second, and Vietnam. We were spared the worst of things in those World Wars, entered the next ones thinking we would again be the great rescuers we had been before. We were wrong about that.

We had entered into war with Spain under false pretenses. Mark Twain wrote as much in his bitter satire, “The War Prayer” which was so critical of the paradox of any war that it could not be published in his lifetime. American entry helped to end two World Wars, and but our interference has been making trouble for self-determination around the world before and since.

I feel no happiness on Veteran’s Day. It is not a day to be happy. I honor those who risked their lives in the belief that they were helping to preserve a safe place in the world. They did their best, and sometimes they died. Sometimes they even achieved peace. These days, I find it hard to see how that goal is being served.

I would like the world to be safe for everyone.

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Today, he would have been diagnosed with PTSD. My mother always insisted that his experiences in the war “destroyed” my father. Here he is just after the Second World War.

RELATIVE

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This young seagull was peeping for its parent, but that adult flew away.

When my husband was young, sometimes he would sit on the back steps in a parched Arizona payday waiting for his dad to get home with groceries. Another family of four children was left alone for the weekend that turned into a week or maybe two. The woman who told me about her childhood was not sure, only that even the mustard was scraped out of the jar by the time Child Services showed up.

My own childhood was not so deprived. I went without dental care and my mother mixed powdered milk and when I first tasted a real butter pat, it was like candy to me. In kindergarten, I had two skirts and three short-sleeved Orlon sweaters. For Easter, I had a new cotton dress. It is odd the things you remember. But we were never hungry, and my father’s mother and aunt had enough money put by that it was safe to assume we could borrow money if things got desperate, which they did on occasion.

This is to say, I was not raised poor. Raised poor is hunger and no one to turn to who is better off. “Poor” is so bad that we make up euphemisms like “economically challenged” or my students say a person is “not very rich.” No, poor is not having enough money to pay bills even though you live cheap. Poor is embarrassed because even when everyone in the household is working hard to earn money, money is still “tight” and bills are sometimes late. Poor is being blamed in our country.

And that isn’t fair. Innumerable studies show the sort of income necessary to pay for housing in different parts of the country. Recent studies are equally clear that poor children almost never receive the quality of education wealthier parents give their children. Their health care isn’t as good. What they suffer damage in childhood that their ability to improve their lives, quite permanently.

The truth is that wages have not kept up with inflation—they have been falling behind for decades. Telling someone that if they want to earn money, they should get a better job is like telling a person waiting in a wheelchair to run to the head of the line, like telling the five year old to reach something down from the top shelf, like asking someone who is starving in a third world country: “Well, for heaven’s sake, go to the store and buy some food!”

Sometimes we simply fail to pay attention.

Poverty is lousy circumstance, not a character defect.

I am reading Adrienne Rich’s essays in her new collection, Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert. Rich was a force of nature, a woman who found compassion for others when she granted it to herself. She reminds me that compassion is necessary, that affluence is not a free pass to righteousness, that everyone faces difficulties in life and it’s a good thing to remember that sorrow and trouble come to each of us.

Here is the first poem I ever read of hers:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/39836802?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.

Thoughts from Adrienne Rich

I believe that poetry is asking us to consider the quality of life. And it is reflecting on what makes it possible for us to continue as human. Under the barrage of brute violence, numbing indifference, trivialization, shallowness, that we endure.

Even when I was very young, I was reading poetry, looking for what it could tell me about how to live. For me, poetry has never, ever been just an escape from the world, an escape from history.

I think in this poem, what I am talking about is the choice that we can make, to move deeper into things, or simply to live worthily, maintain your attitudes, hold your position, even die bravely, but not to see what might have been seen. Not to grasp what might have been grasped. And that is a choice, for us all, whether in poetry or in life.

Our country has many truths, but certainly one of them has to be that this was never a democracy. That this was a hope of democracy, an enormous, an enormous hope for true democracy, and that it failed many people from the outset and it’s failing more people now.

I think that more and more people feel uncared for, feel that their lives are not only unvalued, but meaningless. Feel that though they may care for their lives, no one else will. Feel that the only way that they can protect their survival and their interests is by the gun. I’m afraid that many people feel an enormous desperation which plays into the propaganda of hate.

I think that poetry speaks beyond that, to something different. And that’s why it can bring those parts of us together, that are both in dread, and which have the surviving sense of a possible happiness, and a possible collectivity, a possible community, a loss of isolation.

These reflections are excerpted from an interview Bill Moyers did with Adrienne Rich in 1995 as part of The Language of Life series. Rich died in 2012 at the age of 82. You can read the transcript of her entire interview with Bill in our archive and read more of her poems at Poetry Foundation website.

FOOD for the HOLIDAYS

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IMG_3574When Gary and I were in college at the University of Washington, Starbucks was a brand new store at the old Public Market, Pike Place. We did not drink coffee, but I shopped in Starbucks for spices and chocolate at the original store, and then later at University Village, at their second store. Spice and herbs were put up in little sealed plastic packets kept in gallon jars. Those jars filled a wall of shelves. The chocolate was broken into fist-sized chunks from ten kilo blocks imported from Europe. All the coffee was roasted locally.

Italian delis in the Market stored candied citron, lemon, and orange peel in enormous glass jars. These fruits were nothing like the gumdrop candied fruit found then and now in chain grocery stores. The lemons were the peel of half a lemon, with a bittersweet bite of lemon. I used these candied fruits and others when I baked our wedding cake in 1974 from a traditional 100-year-old fruitcake wedding cake recipe (white cakes were called “Bride’s Cake” back in the day). I found all the ingredients I needed at the Market.

By the time we’d moved to Oregon (a return home for me), we began drinking coffee, starting with instant. However, once we tried Starbucks, we could not drink anything else. For a time, we received coffee each Friday that had been roasted the day before in Seattle. Then the new CEO took over the company, and everything changed. Coffee was roasted not in NW Seattle but some other part of the country and we never enjoyed fresh-roasted beans in quite the same way again. For a time our coffee orders were the envy of our neighbors.

We also used to order from an Oakland, California deli-style food store when our boys were young. I ordered, actually, it was on me. In the late fall I went through their lengthy catalogue, searching for unusual food items like pappadams and pomegranate molasses. It was a holiday tradition, at least in my mind, to place a big order of unfamiliar foods,  spices and sauces and lovely pasta. The large box would arrive and I would unpack all those wonderful and strange foods. Food for Christmas.

The import food store I ordered from in the 80s was established in 1897, but these days all they deliver is sandwiches. I don’t remember when it became impossible to order foods from Ratto’s (the 90s, or later?) but somewhere along the way, we lost that habit.

Everything is available on Amazon now. And that is not the same somehow.

This year I found a small company selling the brand of imported tarragon mustard we like best and a lot of other good things. Yesterday, a big box arrived.

Some of the items from that box will be gifts—the tiny marzipan fruits are something I would have loved as a child—but two bottles of the mustard went straight onto my pantry shelf. Pasta went into my cracker and bread drawer, because even though I like making pasta from scratch, the striped bow ties were just too sweet not to order. Orange flower and rose water put up in glass bottles. The sweet olive oil Ines Rosales Tortas are crispy wafers that make a luscious breakfast with goat cheese and fresh raspberries—my favorite since I discovered the combination in Ashland when I was there for a Shakespeare workshop.

It might have been Thoreau or Emerson who said the only proper gifts were food and flowers—items that were useful and consumable, implying no obligation other than being edible and beautiful. We do not need things, but these packages of food are marvelous and entertaining. We will eat them and they will be gone.

[A nice detail is that everything was packed in paper, ruffle-cut waste kraft paper—you can see it off to the right in the photo above.]

 

LETTING THINGS GO

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My grandmother’s desk.

My step grandmother gave a mandolin to Gary many years ago. He had the instrument cleaned and repaired but then nearly sold it after she died because somehow an essential family connection had slipped by him unnoticed. When I explained it had belonged to Genevieve’s father, he took it out again and held it. “Then it stays.” He also has a guitar made the year I was born. I like to think that is one reason he treasures it, but it’s the tone. I know it’s the pure, lovely tone that earns it a place in our home.

A friend chided me on Facebook: “NEVER get rid of musical instruments.”

The note was in response to my post of Gary with his Guy Fawkes bonfire and my words: “Gary is on the phone lamenting every single splendid guitar he ever let get away (not to mention the awful ones he laughs over), in his entire life. It is a painful litany and one I have listened to too many times.” The bonfire was of attic refuse from ten and twenty years. I told him about never getting rid of instruments. Gary says, “I get that.” Books, too, I was told should never be allowed to go.

There is a part of me that completely agrees. Books and music and art are essential and precious. Ridding oneself of such things suggests we do not want them, and that is almost never the case. We want it all.

We never want to “get rid of” musical instruments or books.

Sometimes we choose to let go.

Over recent years, I have given away or sold hundreds, perhaps even a thousand books. I just counted twenty-eight bookcases in our home, some as wide as six feet, others just two. Some are six feet high, some just three. There are thousands of books in our house. None are kept in the attic anymore, and only a few dozen are stacked on the floor behind the couch upstairs. I am not allowed to discuss Gary’s instruments in details, but he has “several.” I have books I walked down to the bookshop in Aurora Village to buy when I was twelve, and books I finished reading last month. We have no free local library, so most of the books I read were purchased used, often from Powell’s Book Store in Portland. I no longer keep books if I do not love them.

My husband and I, as I have explained in earlier posts, are engaged in Swedish Death Cleansing, a pragmatic approach to discarding and giving possessions we do not need.

I sort through my clothing. I love clothes, always have, and I know I have too many hanging in my closet, not to mention the tub of genuinely vintage things I have held onto since high school and college. I give things away to charity. I cannot keep it all.

Recently, I went through my jewelry box. I pulled out family pieces for my daughters-in-law. I set aside pieces for my granddaughters. And I gave a box of jewelry to my son to sell on Ebay. We offered many things to family first. People, in case you have not noticed, no one wants the family furniture or china or sterling either. You jewelry is costume or old fashioned or both and no one wants it. If he or anyone liked something, I said to keep it. The money will pay for a new roof next year, or at least a tiny corner of a roof.

Sometimes possessions accomplish more negative than merely taking up space. I gave away my enameling kiln, sold boxes of yarn for a fraction of what they cost me. I was not using them, and their existence in our home felt like a reproach, a lack of industry. And honestly, industrious is pretty much my middle name. I let things go to relieve guilt for not having made more of them.

And sometimes we have had no choice but to sell.

Decades ago, Gary sold his amp because his dad was out of work and could not afford to pay bills. In college we sold our entire collection of Maxfield Parrish prints. We did not mean to “get rid” of them, we needed money to buy bread and pay tuition.

Sometimes by choice, but always the result of some sort of need.

These days, stacks of books everywhere in our house meant I could not find the one I wanted amidst the dozens or hundreds I would never open again. I still have thousands of books on shelves.

Guitars and books have left us because we were not using or reading them. Sometimes Gary traded up for a better guitar. He could not afford to keep every one he ever owned, and we would not have had space to store them. And there is no one to love them when we are gone. If we are not enjoying them, they simply take up space.

Not everyone is experiencing this, I understand that. We could have left our attic stuffed, and I could expand my clothing to fill every closet in the house. But we have sorted attics for others who passed and did not want to leave that task for our family. Our family does not have room for even the stuff we love best, much less the stuff we are indifferent to.

There is an entire social network, an industry of sorts, devoted to reminding us again and again that we are not our possessions, that this gathering of objects is an inadequate substitute for gathering of the self, for questioning and self-awareness. Humility.

My husband and I took stock after dealing with the deaths and possessions of relatives. Our lives were cluttered and if the clutter was not useful to us nor interesting to our family and friends, I still believe it is for the best to let it go to someone who cares.

We do not rid ourselves, we let go.