Soul of the Future: Secret Progress Report II

 

More than three years ago now I reported on my plan to post a Soul of the Future series (over at Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily) as a way to complete this writing project, which had already gone on for some 20 years and counting.

 I recently posted the last chapter in this series.  It’s been a long road, but this experiment was successful in that I completed a “draft” that could stand as a whole.  The question now is what if anything to do next on this project.

 As I noted in the earlier report, this project goes back to when I was living in Pittsburgh in the mid-1990s.  It started with my observation that there were plenty of scenarios about an apocalyptic future, especially in popular culture forms (movies, TV.)  But I could think of only one scenario of a better future, and that was Star Trek—which happened at that time to be the most popular story about the future just about everywhere in the world.  Star Trek: The Next Generation was still making new episodes, though it was probably coming to an end. 

 The other scenario for a better and much different future was, in a strange way, the Ghost Dance.  Native American ideas were in the air in 1992 because it was the 500^th anniversary of Columbus “discovering America.”  I’d done an article on American Indians in Pittsburgh, and started becoming familiar with contemporary Native literature.  Two scholars at the University of Pittsburgh had a public forum where one of them read the chapter of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead, in which there were a few sentences about the Ghost Dance coming true—the West emptying out of people, the buffalo returning, etc.  That idea caught my imagination as a larger metaphor. 

 I did a piece for the Smithsonian Magazine on two contemporary Native artists in Canada, and a few other pieces, while reading a lot of American Indian writing. I saw a way of being in the world that added spiritual dimension to contemporary ecology and related concerns.

 So for awhile the working title of my project was “Star Trek/Ghost Dance.”  I’d been interested in the future through popular science fiction in my boyhood, and as a subject through articles I’d researched on the futures studies and related movements of the 1970s. And I’d written on Star Trek before, seen it all and knew it well.  So I had a good grasp of that end of it.

 In the fall of 1996, I moved with my partner Margaret to far northern California.  I worked for awhile for a Native grassroots organization called the Seventh Generation Fund, and I wrote the script for a video on forest issues.  All of that was contributing, but the idea was still growing.

 One of the major perks of being the partner of a tenure track professor was access to the university library, and the ability to take out lots of books.  I don’t recall why I focused in on H.G. Wells for this project, but the library had a couple of shelves of books by and about him, and as I worked through these, Wells became a bigger part of this project. His focus on the future, his apocalyptic and utopian writings, and as a forerunner of many ideas physically realized in Star Trek, all became relevant.

 For awhile the parallels between Wells and Star Trek's Gene Roddenberry fascinated me, to the extent that I tried to write a double biography.  But both of them led to other science fiction writers and movies, relevant to my project.

 Wells led into other areas as well.  He was a student of T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s friend and defender, and Darwinian evolution was central to his approach to the future, especially in his first novel, The Time Machine. So I read more deeply into contemporary thought on evolution and Darwin.  At this point I was also reviewing books for the San Francisco Chronicle and the North Coast Journal, and so I got access to new books on the subject.

 At the same time as all this started in Pittsburgh, I began reading the American Jungian psychologist James Hillman.  In Arcata I added Jung himself, beginning with the library’s shelves, and ending up with a few shelves of my own, thanks mostly to used bookstores.   

One day I was musing about combining these two obsessions of Wells and Jung, and mused about writing a play in which they meet, only to find that they had known each other.  This led me to writing a play about a conversation they could have had in the U.S., which also involved the Ghost Dance.  But I also realized that a number of Jungian concepts were useful in my futures project.

 That’s partly because, by this time, I’d broadened the idea to “soul of the future.” (Jung pointed out that a translation of "psyche" is "soul.") I read Hillman and other contemporaries on soul, when that was a hot subject in the 1990s and early 2000s.  The subject of soul involved the subject of imagination, and the emphasis on scenario or story in futures studies also involved reading in these areas.

 Running parallel in time was the growing crisis of climate disruption.  I’d been reading and writing about it since 1990.  I wrote about it incessantly online, in book reviews and essays in the SF Chronicle and elsewhere.  So I was well informed on the nature and extent of this crisis that threatened civilization and the planet’s life as we know it.

In Pittsburgh I had acquainted myself with the work of pioneer ecologist--and human ecologist-- Paul Shepard, whose first book I'd known since college.  He had taught at my college until the year I arrived, but we had a mutual friend, and we exchanged letters before his untimely death.  When I got to Arcata his widow Florence Shepard contacted me about writing something for a special issue of an environmental magazine about Paul, and after that, at Flo Shepard's request and with her participation, I wrote and gathered material and created a Paul Shepard website.  His work was a profound influence, including on the futures project.

 I’d begun drafts for this future project in the late 90s, and continued through the decade of 2000 and into the next decade.  I created separate files for drafts of each year.  Some of those files are fat, and some are thin.  I started each draft with enthusiasm but wound up exhausted and discouraged.  There was too much stuff.  I had lots of problems with scale.  Chapters that were exhausting to write were also exhausting to read. They didn’t lead anywhere.

 I was writing a lot of other stuff, of course.  Some elements of this project got into essays I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, for example.  And I did a New York Times article on Star Trek.  Then I found myself writing about local plays and (for the university departments), press releases about university plays and music events, that wound up in local papers which pretty shamelessly printed press releases verbatim.  There were weeks when I was writing most of the performing arts articles that appeared in the 4 local papers (three weeklies and the weekly arts section of the daily, or briefly, the dailies.)  There wasn’t a lot of time to pursue other projects—and I had more than this one.  

But I managed to read a lot that helped shape the futures project, including books by W.I. Thompson, Lynn Margulis, Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Le Guin.

 Since my “retirement” and the collapse of the freelance market, I’ve concentrated on my own work, including these projects.  My last progress report was about my realization that “serializing” this futures project as blog essays might center it.  Perhaps from habit, I found it easier to write in this form than in facing all the white space on the digital page. I’d found something like a voice (a blue voice?) and that’s essential.

 Getting past individual topics led to finding themes to unify the series, which alone is a good guide to another draft.

 But by the time I completed the series in 2021, something else had happened—not so much to me as to the future.  The future had contracted. Largely because not nearly enough had been done to address the climate crisis, it was now all but certain that it was going to dominate the future, as it already had begun to dominate the present, along with the parallel eco-crisis expressed in mass extinction.  It had become highly probable that humanity no longer could make choices that would ensure a smooth path to a better future And the deteriorating political consensus especially in the US made the outlook especially bleak.  There is probably going to be an apocalyptic period to some meaningful degree.  And suddenly all my words seemed beside the point.

 Yet in my last posts I found reasons why centering on the future was still important, was in fact crucial.  This project was always meant to be a book, and while the chances of my book being at all influential seem to have diminished, it still might be worthwhile.

  I would still need to work up the faith that it might, and though I was fairly pleased with what I had written in the past three years on this subject, I didn’t ever get much positive comment.  It was seldom the feature of my blog that anyone mentioned.  If I wasn’t connecting, what is the point?

 When I was completing the last posts, realizing I’d left so much out from my original plan, I considered that at best these posts constituted a decent first draft.  But that was their purpose.  A complete first draft is what I never had.  And now I do.

 Still, by the time I finished, I thought I was really finished with it, that this would be the end of this project. Especially after the massive silence that greeted the end of it.  And it may well be.

 On the other hand…Over the years, especially before the Internet was the chief repository of information, I compiled file cabinet drawers full of files. Recently I began looking to get rid of those files, but in leafing through them, I’ve found things that could enhance the material I have as organized in my blog posts.  So I may make digital notes from those files before they end up in the recycling bin.  And that in turn could lead to a second draft. 

 So maybe the project isn’t over.  Maybe there’s a book called Soul of the Future with my name on it, sometime, in the future… 

Secret Progress Report

Back when I was writing book proposals, I even
created my own book cover. Now it's a blog series logo.

I've been working on several writing projects for at least twenty years.  Not all the time--lots of words have poured out, been published or sent out into cyberspace, including a lot of sentences I wrote to earn some money.  Nevertheless, these big projects have been difficult to complete.

One of them has been called Soul of the Future for a big chunk of that time.   The idea of this approach to writing about the future first came to me while walking down Murray Avenue to my apartment in Pittsburgh in the mid 1990s.  By then, a decade or more after my book The Malling of America was published, I'd realized that I could probably not depend on a decent book advance or even expenses for articles, to finance travel and so on for another book.  As I had no institutional support (university, foundation, etc.) and was unlikely to be offered any, and I still wanted to write a book, I would have to figure out how to do it without the expense of travel.

That certainly meant a different kind of book from The Malling of America.  Or pretty much any of the articles I'd published over the prior 20 years.  It took some thinking to come up with ideas I was interested in exploring, within those limitations.

So when I was idly wondering why so many movies about the future were apocalyptic, and that I could think of only one widely known utopian story from the recent past, a number of  questions and ideas came together, and I realized I had the makings of a book.

I did considerable research, and piled up drafts that didn't quite work.  I would stop at the point of exhaustion which accompanied discouragement, especially when the need to pay attention to paying work became acute.

  Meanwhile, we'd moved to Arcata and life went this way and that.  I kept computer files of my work on this project by year: some folders had lots of chapter drafts, some had little more than new outlines and notes.  I had a file cabinet full of notes from the old days of paper, and piles of notebooks. I did in fact publish essays and reviews related to this project, but I could not really get going on the project itself. There was so much to tell, and I couldn't find a way to tell it all.

Lately I realized that if I was going to write an entire book, especially at my age, it would have to be, not a daily battle, but a daily joy, or at least obsession. It had to be something I was eager to do every day.

To do that, it would have to establish a narrative momentum that carried me along, before I could carry along any readers.

Recently I think I've got the momentum to go ahead with it.  And it came partly from a similar source that propelled me to write the final draft of The Malling of America.

The key that time was Moby Dick. My editor was demanding a first person narrator, and I could not figure out how to do it.  Finally reading Melville's actual prose, I realized that I could create a first person narrator who was based on me, but wasn't me.  He was a somewhat more naive and focused observer. (More like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby than Ismael or Leopold Bloom, but they were in the mix.)  Plus I lumped a lot of trips to see malls into one voyage. Melville probably did something similar, though I'm sure he made up more stuff than I did.

From that point the writing went quickly and well.  Of course, I had a long magazine piece, pieces of other magazine articles, lots of notes and tapes and several years of writing multiple drafts behind me.

This time the key was a biography of Charles Dickens by Michael Slater. I paused in reading Dickens' novels (my first post-retirement reading project)  to read this long biography that meticulously linked his activities with his writing.

  In addition to novels, Dickens was doing a lot of journalism.  I also knew that he'd published the novels in serial form, in magazines.  But the biography made it clear how thoroughly he did it that way.  He wrote literally to deadline.  His early novels hardly even had a plan--he was winging it.  But even later when he worked them out in advance, he was writing chunks of the novel, and seeing them published in a monthly or weekly magazine (usually the one he was editing) before he wrote the next chunk.

I don't edit a magazine but I do have full control over my blogs.  Recently I'd found that it was easier for me to write for my blogs than otherwise.  I improvised, things came together, the process and the prose flowed.  I revised, of course, though that's apparently not a bloggy thing to do.  But my blogs are pretty much unique anyway.

Another longstanding project--related to this one--was Soul of Star Trek, which is one of my blogs but which was always supposed to mainly become a book.  So in Star Trek's 50th anniversary year, I experimented in writing chapters for what might be a book, but as blog entries.  It seemed to work.  I'm sure I would change things when it comes time to actually make it a book, but the basics are there.

So I applied this idea of writing for periodical publication by blog to Soul of the Future.  I've written three posts, one of them quite long, so far.  The latest one, on 70s futurists, was the most satisfying.  I know it's basically about the best I can do, and except for minor revisions, it's finally done.  Because a lot of it derived from articles and drafts that go back to the 70s themselves, that was more like a 40 year journey.

Simply conceptualizing this as a series of posts gave me a voice, and I came up with a narrative strategy.  Just for the first several chapters, but hopefully one thing would keep leading to another.

So I have a narrative working, at least in the sense of one thing leads to another, or one answer leads to another question.  Tom Stoppard has said on several occasions that the basic task of the writer is to manage the flow of information received by the audience.  That's the secret difficulty a lot of writers have.  Jo Rowling once said she had a hard time with her first Harry Potter draft--she had so much of the story in her head, she was trying to tell it all in the first chapter of the first book.

I don't like to talk about works in progress, and I do believe they can be jinxed. But I'm not too worried about being thrown off by responses, or lack of them.  No one reads my blog.  I mean, literally no one reads this one, and very few people read my Dreaming Up Daily blog, where these posts are appearing.  As discouraging as that can be at times, I know in this case it's for the best.  It's why I resist drawing attention to myself through Facebook or twittering away or instanagramming.  I don't need a lot of noise.  I don't need to please anyone, or a lot of anyones.  At my age, this isn't going to be the start of a great career.

Still, I need to publish, to see what it looks like, to experience that feeling I remember: the words are out there, written for those phantom readers you can only imagine, and written with the likely criticisms of other writers and editors in mind: flagging sloppy research, bad diction, unjustified claims, misspelling.

No, at this point I just want to record this progress report for myself.  I'm doing it here because it looks better on the blog than on the word processing page.  (I love adding photos to the drafts, even if I couldn't afford to publish them in a resulting book.)

The reader(s) in my head, that's something else.  This blog's for you, too.

Nobody Blogs Anymore (But Me)

"Nobody blogs anymore," I was told, by someone who is in a position to know about trends in techworld.  I wasn't surprised, even when I said instinctively, "I do."

I suspect there are far fewer people blogging, at least in the old sense of writing often for an autonomous site, with the goal of inducing as many readers as possible to follow each consecutive post.

And that's because of course there are far fewer readers who follow specific blogs.  While some bloggers have gone on by affiliating with media sites, most I suspect have transitioned to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  Social media is The Thing, and it drive out everything else.

I sometimes try to make myself care.  I suppose it is possible to enhance reader access by using social media to alert readers to posts, or maybe I could get over my extreme distaste for the aesthetics of the Facebook page and post there.  Assuming I could get used to the ever-changing nature of the site, and it's chaotic and privacy-threatening features.

It seems like a lot of trouble that takes a lot of time, especially time away from writing the blog entries/essays.  Avoiding all that trouble was pretty much why I started in the first place.  I had spent far too much time and energy on trying to make publication possible.  Blogs were (and are) instant publication.

Somehow I've taken to writing in this format.  I've been working for years on book projects, and have recently found I can complete chapters for a projected Soul of Star Trek book by preparing them as posts for my blog, Soul of Star Trek.

So I'm basically not going to mess with that.  Maybe later I'll do something different in addition.  If there is a later.

But for now, I'm content to work within existing parameters.  As a writer you learn not to mess with what's working.

I have a small cadre of known regular readers for my Dreaming Up Daily blog, and at least until the election I'm content to sound off for them.  There are many more hits registered for Soul of Star Trek but I don't know about actual readers.  I suspect my recent posts aren't being read, but that's okay.  I'm doing them to do them, finally, and let them go.  (Although the goal is still a book, even if  I wind up publishing it through google or whatever, and once again cast something to the wind.)

But there aren't many hits registered for this blog, which I think I started first or maybe second of still-going blogs, all those blogging centuries ago.  But I've known for several years that this blog gets few hits, so my occasional posts here are in the nature of a kind of diary, plus a kind of file cabinet of ideas, for easy access.  As much as I counsel against becoming dependent on "the cloud" and cyberspace in general for storing things, I've done it through my blogs.  A lot of my writing exists on them, and nowhere else.  They could truly be gone with the wind.

So...here it is, here am I, September 2016.  I'm needing to fill the hummingbird feeders more frequently now, though I'm seeing only one hummer, a delicate slim small green one.  In past years there's been at least two, usually three, and sometimes four.  There are hummers around all year now (and may always have been) but they come to the feeders in late summer through mid February.  Other times I see them in the front yard more than in the back.  Plenty of flowers they like in both places.

Today is fog covered but it has again seemed to be sunnier more often this summer than say ten years ago, though that's been the trend for several summers now.  Knowing what it portends adds a strange dimension to the general perception that it is pretty damn nice--warm to hot sun, blue skies and warm to cool temps.  After some spikes early in the season, we got no real hot and humid days this summer.  The variation day to day seemed larger, but within a comfortable range.

Now it's getting cooler, especially at night.  This year we had a good crop of tomatoes--cherry tomato size though different varieties--and blueberries on several bushes back and front, and some but not many strawberries.

I can see Toby's pear trees next door are bearing a lot of fruit, so far unpicked. I don't think the people who live there now are relatives, but it seems the family still owns the place. Toby's trees have outlived him, and so his memory stays alive, at least here. We got some pears from our little tree, but the little apple tree, while it yields full sized apples, doesn't produce many edible ones.  Never has.

Pema the cat is hanging out next to me now as I write this.  We've spent a lot of time and attention on her health for several months now, but that's another post in itself.  At the moment she's good, sort of.

Okay, I'm going to throw in a few random photos I've taken this summer into this post.  With the rise of Instagram and the phone cameras, people are altering their photos with filters etc. until reality is unrecognizable.  I don't know what I think about that, except for two things: (1) once again I'm not taking the time, trouble and expense of doing such, and (2) I tend not to look at photos that appear to be excessively manipulated.  Because, what am I looking at? I've noticed this especially with photos taken during eclipses, Super Moons and meteor showers, etc.  They're often unbelievable. So what's the point?

Nothing But the Dream

Two interesting quotes from an essay on a writer I doubt I'd enjoy reading.

In the New Yorker (Aug. 25, 3014) James Wood is writing about James Kelman, a Scottish writer who writes fiction mostly about the working class in a particular part of Scotland.  Woods writes that Kelman's characters, while not engaging in flights of imagination or even deep thought, insist on "the play and the liberty...of the mind."  "More desperately, it's that they see privacy as the last unmortgaged, unindebted, unsold space, always on the verge of being invaded by the materialism of survival that tyrannizes the rest of life."

Well, as a kid in a working class culture, and then as a student being groomed for the middle class, I felt very much the same.  The privacy of thought, the resistance to its violation.  And this is linked to Woods' other fine phrase, about a story "in which hope and fatalism are evenly weighted, and only fantasy retains any dignity."

Yes.  There's a thread in my non-non-fiction writing fits for the past forty-plus years that plays with the various notions of "nothing," and with pluses and minuses that cancel out somehow.  It is finally only the writing, the fantasy, that has any certainty about it, though only in those moments of creation or initial inhabiting.  Or as I put it in a song that I wrote and have been singing (secretly most of the time) since the early 1970s...well, I keep them secret awhile long.

Leave-Taking

Tonight there's an orange half moon.  I suspect the color is related to the big fires burning to our north and east.

The piece of fiction writing I accomplished this summer was based on the day I left for college and the day I arrived.  Even since then I keep finding earlier versions of dealing with these days, in boxes, file cabinets and trunks.  Clearly it seemed important near the time (the first version written within months) and subsequently, and now, which I suddenly realize is pretty close to exactly a half century ago.

Apart from the language, there's the perspective of time, and the decisions of what to include (relevant information and memories, for example) that sheds light on that person--even if not deliberately fictionalized, now so remote in time as not to be exactly me as I am--and the meaning of those two days.

In going through the version I happened upon most recently and making some additions and changes to the "chapter" I wrote this summer, I realized that, even with the changes I may make in the future, this is basically the last version.  And the best.

Summer Set

    photos by Kowinski 2014

Another summer gone, sort of.  Humboldt State starts very early by my standards, so my work--intermittent though it may be--begins again.  But the theatre season is mercifully at an end, so my series of columns--mostly reviews, one preview--is done for now.

I did more than I wanted to for Stage Matters, to add at least some income to balance higher expenses, principally a whopping dental bill for one lonely tooth.  At least whopping for me.  It will take me writing 12 columns to pay for it.  Which means that all of my summer income goes there, and it will require more.

Otherwise, I went nowhere, stayed home in June and July to deal with necessary household matters.  I got some writing of my own done, not a lot but some.  I revised plans for several projects, which I hope make them more doable.  In the fiction based on my life and times, I decided to center it in the most dramatic period (which in fact was the original plan!) and what is now the most historic period, the mid-60s to the early 70s.  It would start with leaving for college.

So I dug out what I'd saved, and it was quite a lot.  I had the first piece of writing I did at college, a cliche-ridden piece that nevertheless preserved a few details about the car trip from burg to burg (Greens to Gales.)  I had occasion to marvel again at what has survived over time--in this case, a postcard from the motel outside Moline where we stayed overnight before driving on into Galesburg in September 1964.

As for freshman year, I have letters (letters!), bound copies of the student newspaper, some academic work, and evidently I'd decided before to focus on orientation week because there are drafts with lots of information.  More than I remember in fact, so there are items in those pages that I can't identify as fact or my own fictioning.  Not that it matters.  But over the years, even when it wasn't going right or I had to abandon drafts,  I've always felt that I was preparing raw material for some ultimate draft.

After completing the introductory story of those couple of days, it struck me that I could frame the college years by starting with a moment at my draft physical, the second one, at Fort Des Moines.  So I found what files remain on that.  I found something like a narration (in something like verse), and there might be more writing I did about it near that time that I haven't found.  But I have the official letters back and forth.  I was amazed to see how compacted in time it was, between my pre-induction physical in Chicago and the appeal physical in Iowa.  The reality of all this leaves me a little dazed, still.

So in short, as usual I didn't do nearly the amount of writing I had hoped, and summer was not nearly as different in terms of demands on my time as the rest of the year.  Time of course is running out on realizing projects, but as there is no demand for them from outside myself,  it's harder to concentrate, to work through the emotions, the effort, the psychological exhaustions, etc.  And the prospect of that enormous silence at the end.  I feel that when I complete smaller projects, even columns (if I hear from any 'readers' at all it's too long after, and I've already disconnected) and it takes awhile to get back the required energy and focus on my world of illusions.  Finishing a big project, what would that be like?

As for the outside world around me, despite the drought we've had roses all summer, and a self-transplanted gaggle of yellow flowers in the back yard (previously known as Toby's flowers).  The grass is browner than it has ever been in front, and the ferns there are wilting.  On the side however, the shaded ferns are doing better.

Our hummers are returning to the feeders more regularly.  I saw two and so I got the second feeder out of storage since early spring. I see them around occasionally in the spring and summer but they seem to range pretty far for the flowering flowers, and the one year-round feeder is very slow to empty.  August is about the time they rediscover the ready supply of the feeder. Sitting on the back porch, listening to a Doctor Who audiobook read by David Tennant, I saw three together, with one hovering in front of me as I said hello.  I've read they know the face of the person who stocks the feeders.  They sure seem to.

It's an odd time--the changing climate resulting in noticeably dryer, sunnier and warmer summers is disquieting for what it portends, though it is pleasant enough in itself.  A hot day here is still under 80F.  Now that I'm acclimated to the North Coast, I find I relax more when it's foggy, the way it is supposed to be.  The persistent sunshine is almost shocking.  And we do have some foggy days and nights, though they seem like afterthoughts.  They say the redwoods could be gone in a century.  But then, I'll be gone long before.  How many more summers, still pretty strong and capable?

It's comforting to know from the blogger stats that almost no one reads this particular blog.  I have some readers for a couple of blogs, and virtually none for others.  So I do them for my pleasure and to keep a record.  I don't know why it is easier to do it this way than simply by keeping a digital journal.  But it somehow is.  

It's Not Even Past

I've noted before the serendipity and the coincidences that I've noticed when I've been engaged in writing about my childhood in a necessarily fictional way.  One of these was a specific episode of a TV show I remembered, that turned out to be broadcast on the date I had already selected to write about myself as a child watching these Saturday morning shows.

Something like that happened again.  I had returned for a few weeks to this project, writing mostly about fifth grade (when a number of things started to change in my life and family), but also revising some previous chapters, especially fourth grade stuff.

I had finished all that, more or less forced back to job work, but also feeling mostly depleted with a bit of juice left for starting again (I did sketch out the opening for 6th grade.)  It was weeks afterwards that I found myself on YouTube and, possibly inspired by the Ovaltine I've been spooning into my espresso and milk to make a kind of fortified mocha,  I looked up the Captain Midnight tv show from 1950s Saturday mornings.

There used to be several entire shows posted, and a few years ago I watched at least one.  Those are gone, but there is a new one posted, in HD (it says): a 1955 episode called "The Arctic Avalanche."

So I watched it, not recalling anything about it until near the end.  At that point in the plot, Captain Midnight has been captured by a spy who has strapped him to a dogsled, intending to take him to a waiting submarine.  But Captain Midnight manages to get on his Secret Squadron communicator to Icky flying above, and orders him to backfire the engines to create an avalanche, to trap the spy.  But he would also been snowed under.

When the avalanche starts he tips the sleigh on its side.  Icky contacts him--he's still alive.  He's created an air pocket inside the snow.  Later he explains that in survival training you learn to create an air pocket with your arms, and this was a way to make an even larger one.

Now this I do remember, and it touched on some forgotten aspects of childhood.  I remember noting this technique, because I was interested in general in ways to deal with unforeseen and dangerous situations, to protect myself and others.  That it was a "neat trick" was also appealing.

Yes, it was part of that desire to be competent in the face of danger.  It made me think of those duck and cover drills we had especially in the early grades, which were never very convincing as a way to survive atomic bombs.  This made more sense, though I had no idea how it worked (or now, even if it does.)  So I was thinking about what to do in unusual but threatening circumstances, and so, about avoiding injury and death.

There was also the more specific matter of snow. We had some big snows in those 1950s years, and throngs of kids on sleds went careening down nearby hills, a course that crossed two streets and in its last and steepest section, meant crossing a wooden bridge over a creek.  I was 8 going on 9 when this show was broadcast--I'm not sure I was sled-riding yet, but I was certainly playing in the snow.  I'm sure I was warned to be careful.  So danger was on my mind, though I reveled in being out in the stuff.

After I saw this show, I went back to what I'd written (not in this iteration) about the winter of 1954-55, and I had written about that sled-riding course.  I even mentioned a pilot-style leather cap I had with a visor, which reminded me of Captain Midnight (though possibly an earlier version.  This one wore a fairly silly looking football helmet.)  So it was easy to refer to this episode as part of my thinking then.

What's most interesting to me is how seeing this episode opened another window to how I viewed the world as a child, when I was looking for clues on what the world was like and how to deal with it.  Looking to heroes like Captain Midnight.

Returns

The school year is starting and my paying work is taking more time. So the writing I've been doing on my own is likely to slow even more. But it's been interesting and rewarding in its way. I don't know that this writing will ever be published, so it needs to be its own reward, especially the process of it. And it has been, in unexpected ways.

There's the intellectual/artistic challenge of what is in a sense simply following my instincts and predilections on how I want to proceed. In writing about my own childhood, I start with memories but test them against what facts can be determined. I may depart occasionally and only slightly from when certain personal or family events occurred--but not the public chronologies, the verifiable history. And this is what has been liberating in a way--I'm not even considering pushing things to extremes or creating drama or quirkiness or whatever one imagines would make this either a more commercial story or writing that attempts to fulfill any number of literary expectations. In the decisions I've made so far, simply to satisfy my own curiosity or to follow my own instincts, it's developed a life of its own.

In part I'm approaching this as anthropology--in fact, I have had for years a set of questions that an anthropologist investigates in an unfamiliar culture, on the first page of the master notebook I've kept for decades on this project. That sense of an approach has become more pertinent now, as the world of my childhood is largely gone, a vanished culture.

The investigations often begin by testing the accuracy of my memories--usually very specific if scattered moments-- especially in terms of where I place them in my life. For example, I recall being a Cub Scout in fourth grade, and a few things about it. So I researched a bit about Cub Scouts, and first learned that by today's standards, I would have been a bit old for starting. But researching further, I learned that in the 1950s, Cub Scouts did begin at an older age, at 9.

Especially in confronting that fourth grade year, I am astonished at how much I was doing, how much I was required to learn in many domains. Carving a narrative out of all that is challenging. Placing my memories in context also of family history as I know it--or with the help of others, can at least approximately figure out--is both a challenge and a reward.

There's also been the reward of remembering more in the process of writing. The memories newly revived that mean the most to me are probably the details. For example, I suddenly remembered a certain kind of coffee cup my mother (and father) used--it was a set that looked pretty much like the one in the photo above. And I remembered this: although to get from the kitchen to my room meant walking through the dining room, living room and in the hall hanging a hard right facing the bathroom, the back of the kitchen closet was also the back of the closet in my room--that is, they were back to back. It was a quirk of the layout. But it meant that when I was in my room and my mother called me to dinner, she opened the kitchen closet door and called me from there. I was just on the other side.

Patterns

I've been writing a little about my grade school years. In the 1990s I researched and wrote about my family at the time of my birth (and well before.) I have revised those chapters many times, especially using the Internet and information shared by relatives. Then my early childhood, using what artifacts and information survived from those years. (Prime example here.) This summer, the early grades, using books and photos and stuff I've saved or accumulated, plus what I could find online. And especially guided by my own memories--of general impressions, focused around specific memories.

I'd like to note two aspects of this endeavor here: the educational, and the coincidental. And how each led to the other. There are especially three instances I'd like to record. I don't know if they are significant to anyone else, but their very occurrence seems striking to me.

I started the first grade at Sacred Heart School in 1952. Among my clearest specific memories of that year are of fantasies about Superman, and a crush I had on a second grade girl named Judy. Researching the 1950s context, including the specific circumstances in Greensburg, PA, was interesting--how the local Catholic schools and churches responded to the beginning of the baby boom and expansion of housing beyond the town limits, for example. But as the first generation to start out with television, that medium's early history also pertained. As it turns out, my memory of seeing the opening episode of the George Reeves Superman (the origin), was of seeing the actual Pittsburgh premiere of that series. It started being broadcast that school year. (That research in turn led me to Superman's own previous and subsequent history, as reflected here.)

But that's not one of the three examples. The first pertains to second grade, when the most important event was my First Communion. First grade introduced me to the indoctrination (and I recall specific stories the nun told, or at least I recalled and recorded them several decades ago.) Dealing with second grade got me online to research catechisms. (There are basically three types. A somewhat simplified version for second grade. The one I re-acquired is evidently used in fifth grade, before Confirmation.) I also have a photograph of myself in my First Communion outfit, taken that day with my grandfather. But when I came to write about it, I couldn't remember when in the school year it would be. It seemed like it would be spring. The Internet gave me dates for some in recent years. So I initially set mine around Easter. But then I noticed a piece of paper on the floor. It had evidently fallen out of something--an old book, scrapbook, photo album. But on it was the precise date of MY First Communion.

The two other instances are from third grade. Another element of research involved the books we used, particular the school readers. I learned online that the Scott, Foresman readers that almost everyone used had specific Catholic editions, and they involved the family of John and Jean. As pupils we didn't own our readers--the school did, and they were passed down over the years. But we did have workbooks, and I have one that belonged to my youngest sister Debbie, and it was a John and Jean book. But I remember the Dick and Jane books. A little more research and yes, there was an earlier Catholic edition of the Dick and Jane series.

At used bookstores or yard sales I did acquire a few of those old readers, but probably not the ones I used. There were new editions of the Cathedral readers published between 1954 and 1956, so for the first few grades I was probably using books published in the 1940s. Still, at least some if not most of the content was the same, because I vaguely remember a few specific stories, and more vividly a few specific illustrations in one of these books (More Friends and Neighbors.) With a little effort, the Internet yielded up the secrets of the grade each reader would be used. Unfortunately, the readers I have are for the second and the fourth grades. Yet I had a specific memory that I thought happened in third grade.

Though I don't have a third grade reader, I have my younger sister Kathy's Think-and-Do Book for her third grade. I thought I would use it to illustrate how Catholic doctrine was integrated into our learning to read, but then I came upon a page of questions that I was suddenly certain was about the story I remembered as significant if not life-changing, and moreover the exercise was applied to exactly that feature: the sensory images. It was the story about Whizzer the mouse, and I remember that when we read it out loud in turn that I was amazed and excited by the language, especially the kinetic verbs. The characters didn't just walk or run like Dick and Jane--they zoomed, scurried, sprang, scrambled, scampered, bounced. It was a revelation about what reading (and writing) could do. So there it was--confirmation of that memory, in a workbook that happened to survive, about a story that evidently made it into the later edition my sister used.

This would relate to the main event of this third grade chapter, which is the writing of my first play, performed by my third grade class. But the major sequence leading up to this was about watching a Saturday morning of television, then playing with neighbor friends that afternoon and re-creating stories from those programs. So at last the reason for the illustrations up there. Thanks to the Internet, I found the actual TV test pattern I stared at, so impatient for programs to begin on Saturday morning--for WDTV, a station that didn't exist much longer, though it was transformed into the still-running KDKA. I knew I wanted to memorialize the space adventure shows I loved, and various researches revealed that all of them were on at the same time only in one year: 1954.

However, the play I wrote had a Christmas theme (it was about a Christmas it didn't snow, called A Summer Christmas, inspired by...well, that's another story) so it would have been written and performed that December. So this Saturday morning--with the test pattern, the early cartoons, the snack food we ate--like those graham crackers above--would have to be earlier. But it couldn't be too close to Halloween or Thanksgiving. So I checked the 1954 calendar, and chose October 23. Then I discovered that if I looked hard enough on the Internet, I could find episode lists with original air dates for several of those old shows. Since I was going to describe this experience of watching these shows, I decided to use specific real episodes.

I had to improvise on a few. Rocky Jones, Space Ranger was syndicated and shown on different stations at different times, so I used an episode I've got on a budget DVD, which plausibly could have been shown then. Tom Corbett, Space Cadet was actually switching from one network to another, so new programs weren't broadcast in October. So I decided that the station that was going to carry it might go back and air old episodes (on kinescope, in those days), so I was able to use one I had on an old VHS tape, which was one of the first in that long-running series. But my favorite of the Saturday morning space adventures had been Space Patrol. And of all of these, and the entire Saturday morning experience, I had one specific memory.

It concerned Space Patrol. I wrote about all those shows elsewhere, and specifically recorded this memory: I have one strong memory in connection with this show. It was one Saturday morning when my mother heard the announcer or someone on the show refer to it being set in the thirtieth century. (I have the vague recollection it was another time travel plot.) She asked me if I knew what century it is now. I wasn't sure. She told me the twentieth, and then said that she used to listen to Buck Rodgers on the radio--his space adventures were in the 25th century. I remember this partly because I hadn't imagined my mother listening to space adventures, but also because I began to sense the extent of time, and of the future.
So here is the plot for the Space Patrol that aired on October 23, 1954:

#192 "MYSTERY OF THE STOLEN ROCKET SHIP"
The top-secret Terra 5, experimental model for a fleet of sensational new space ships ticketed for Space Patrol service, falls into the hands of interplanetary gangsters. Using Carol as a hostage, ruthless Gart Stanger forces Cadet Happy to take him aboard the Terra 5 and pilot him back through space and time to the planet Earth in the year 1954. At his destination Stanger intends to construct duplicates of the Terra 5 with which he will equip his henchmen when he returns to the 30th Century. Unfortunately for both he and Happy, the pair arrive on Earth to find themselves imminent targets for an atomic bomb test.

I have no doubt, more than a half century later, that this was the episode that prompted that exchange with my mother that I remember, on the exact date I had chosen for my fictional enactment. (The atomic bomb test is a bonus--it's surprising how many of these shows dealt with atom bombs and radiation.) I don't know what if anything such a coincidence means, or the significance of those earlier two examples of what might also be described as serendipity. Especially since this entire enterprise may be meaningless to anyone but me. But for me, it's some kind of affirmation, and connection. To what, I couldn't precisely say.

The Proposal Driven Life

I wasted what probably amounted to a decade or more of my writing life on the futile efforts involved in creating book proposals. An agent I knew, a kind and intelligent man, was a particular advocate of writing elaborate proposals, which he gently insisted be written to his own formula, derived from his experience, and detailed in a couple of books he'd written. In an earlier era when I in fact got a book commissioned, proposals were a necessary but somehow pro forma part of the process. But things had changed. Publishers were more tense, bureaucratic (especially as subsidiaries of larger corporations), and I was out of the old loop--if such still existed--of periodical editors in touch with book editors and agents. It was me confronted with the Borg. So I was persuaded that these detailed proposals were necessary.

But I had a lot of problems with them. First, they weren't proposals. They were supposed to be detailed descriptions of a book--the one you hadn't yet researched or written. Such proposals worked if you had the funding to do research--travel, interviews, etc.--paid for by a newspaper or foundation or the university where you teach. I had none of those sources of support, nor any other sources.

After struggling with proposals for the kind of book I had published (The Malling of America) which required travel and interviews so I could write about what and who I discovered, I learned how to fashion book ideas more dependent on the kind of research I could do more cheaply--library and media research, personal experience, etc. It took awhile but I reoriented myself and got excited about a number of ideas. But I was still left with the need to do a great deal of the work just to do the proposal that I would normally do for the book itself. It was solely my investment and my risk. Perhaps that's as it should be, but clearly I was at a disadvantage, compared to well-funded journalists and academics (not to mention celebrities, of course.)

But these proposals, I was told, required even more. They required that I tell the publisher who would buy this book and why. Backed up by statistics, comparisons to other books, etc. A marketing study of sorts. In fact, this was much more important than the content or the idea. As an author who spoke about my book all over North America, and who got letters about it, I knew that my "market" was entirely self-selected, and my readers had little predictable in common. But such realities didn't matter.

I struggled with these requirements, did the best I could without becoming a total hypocrite. And I failed. Over and over. I not only couldn't please editors, I barely ever got to them. Agents were usually the impenetrable barrier. And then I woke up, and realized that I had hundreds of pages of book proposals, and no books.

I also realized that I had no real evidence that books were actually commissioned on the basis of such proposals. I began to doubt that they were. It seemed more likely that editors selected projects the same ways they always had--because the author was a friend, a friend of a friend, or famous, or hot, or someone told them the author was about to become hot, or as the spur of the moment result of any number of whims. I can't even tell you how much evidence I'd gathered that the whole business was built on gossip and whim.

So I stopped writing proposals. I ended my proposal-driven life. But then very recently I fell off the wagon. I noticed a book series from a good publisher that seemed perfect for several subjects I had already been writing about. I found one of the editors by email, and he invited me to submit a proposal. So once again I thought carefully for weeks about how to frame the two topics I had in mind, and spent weeks crafting brief summaries, this time with the benefit of adding Internet links to my writings on these subjects. I stressed in both emails that I was gauging their interest in these topics, and would create more detailed proposals if they were interested. I was hoping for a dialogue--at least that much, if only in recognition of what I'd already invested in the effort.

I emailed these summaries and got an email back in less than 12 hours saying they'd been considered and rejected. The only reason given was that the series is primarily historical, and my approach didn't seem historical. The reason is specious. I not only referred to the history, but I linked to the substantial history I'd already written.

I don't know the real reasons for the rejection, if indeed there were any other than whim. I do suspect that the topics were of interest but I wasn't, for some reason. So if you happen to see a new book on Star Trek or shopping malls in the American Icons series published by Yale University Press, you will know that these ideas were stolen from me.

In any case, I won't get fooled again. As deluded and self-destructive as devoting so much of my time to the proposal-driven life has been, the way agents and editors operate is probably also self-destructive and deluded, or at least obsolete. Book publishing is changing fast and those folks are getting left behind. I'm not sure the changes are any better for me than the old system, but I've learned again the truth of what one of my old writing teachers said in a throwaway line to a relatively inattentive group of high-test competitors in a small college writing workshop. "Great writers all had one thing in common," William Eastlake said softly. "They all wrote their books."

Little Coincidence

Within the past few days:

I was about to go back to some writing about H.G. Wells and The Time Machine for about the hundredth time. I turned on the TV, which was on the Turner Movie Channel. What was on? The Time Machine.

I was towards the end of reading The Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson, which includes stories about characters who appear in his Mars trilogy of novels (which I finished reading early last month.) I was reading a chapter called "Sax Moments" about a character named Sax, while listening to music on my new (and first) Mp3 player. A couple of pages later was "The Soundtrack" which named music that the author evidently listened to while writing the trilogy, and music he associated with various characters. For example, the music for the character Sax is Beethoven's late string quartets.

Which is what I'd been listening to as I read the Sax chapter.

The Year Ends

The year ends in winter, in the time of sleep and stories. What will be the stories of 2004?

I pause to look back at a pretty full year of my stories, beginning in the San Francisco Chronicle with "Buddha by the Bay" in January and the Wiyot vigil story in February. Then two highly contrasting multi-book review essays (one on a series based on dialogues between the Dalai Lama and scientists, the other on several books on war and terrorism) and 3 or 4 other reviews in the Chronicle Sunday Book Review in '04 (after 10 or so in 2003 and 7 or 8 in '02) and a couple of Sunday Insight pieces (not as many as in 03 but more than '02). The year also included an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times and was capped this late summer with a feature in the New York Times, page 1 of the Arts section. A long piece in News from Native California, and a pretty interesting interview article in the Humbolt State University alumni magazine in the fall, with a short piece in Native Peoples and for a British magazine on Buddhism awaiting publication shortly.

So together with lots of blogwords and unpublished pieces, a short play, revision of a long one, some fiction and even a poem or two, and of course the perennial book proposals, it was a year of some volume. I'm basically proud of the work, happy to have gotten compliments on some of it, particularly by those directly involved in the stories (you know, like Michael McClure on the Buddhism story, and Leonard Nimoy on the Star Trek piece in the Times.)

Yet so far all my published jabber hasn't materially changed how '05 begins. I had hoped that my run of work in five separate sections of the SF Chronicle might get me an invitation to draw a salary, but none was forthcoming---even when I asked. Word from inside was that the Chron is chronically overextended financially and saddled with some contracts they wish they could drop (sort of like the 49ers) and the morale among even those who are salaried is low. (The joke was, I'm told, that when a meeting was called to discuss the low morale, most people were too depressed to show up.) Last week I was told there is no freelance budget at all, except I guess for book reviews and maybe Insight. So no more Chronicling. I still have some hopes involving the NY Times and (separately) Star Trek.

I'm finding that blogging is a lot of fun but way too time consuming, so I may have to lower the volume there if I'm going to get projects accomplished that may wind up being legacies of a kind. The only kind I'll leave, I suppose. I will be working this month and for several months forward on launching and maintaining the This North Coast Place blog, my Cultural Trust project. But like most January firsts, the new year is entirely free of recognizable income-generators.

As for the stories we share, not many good ones, eh? The Tragedy of November, the tsunami of December. And hereabouts the loss this summer of our beloved Tess the cat, who I still think about and miss every day, usually at bedtime. Sometimes when I got into bed, she would sit on my chest to be petted into such a state of bliss that she didn't want to move when I was ready to turn over on my stomach to sleep, so if I turned very slowly and carefully, she just sort of rode the move, and wound up on the other side, on my back, where she would sleep.

Prior to the Tragedy of November, I got involved in politics again this year in a haphazard way. A couple of speeches on behalf of Kerry, one to the county Democrats, one where I found myself debating an actual presidential candidate, the Green Party's David Cobb (who lives nearby in Eureka.) Elected as a Kerry delegate to the national convention, but couldn't afford to go. Then there's the "Fresh Start" saga, which still lacks definitive information. Still, it was a weird rush to see the Democratic candidate speaking behind the words I pleaded that his campaign adopt as their slogan. I read that one of Kerry's official consultants made $5 million in the campaign. That's about $5 million and fifty dollars more than I made.

Then at the very end of August, my first Star Trek convention since 1975. I met Gene Roddenberry at the first one, and at this one, Nichelle Nichols introduced me to Neil Armstrong, and I shook hands with the first human to set foot on another world. So now I've shaken hands with JFK, Roberto Clemente and Neil Armstrong. Not bad.

I worked on several projects for Humboldt State University this year, which felt like a good match of my skills and interests with their needs and purpose. I can imagine myself on the right university campus.

Margaret had a busy but pretty good year, becoming Ombudsperson at HSU, seeing a couple of her plays performed, adding to her skills and knowledge in various ways. Her children are healthy, as are my sisters and their children and grandchild, and so are we. Whatever else '05 brings, we hope that much stays the same.

When Elsewhere is Nowhere

Somewhere on the East Coast a woman I've never met is getting phone calls today prompted by something I wrote. At least this is what I imagine and expect, based on past experience. A substantial positive review in the Sunday review section of the San Francisco Chronicle, the big cheese in a book-buying town, can be a fairly big deal for an author, especially of serious nonfiction, even one as already celebrated as Kay Redfield Jamison.

Friends probably called her, and if her agent or editor hasn't, they will likely mention it in their next conversation. (I did hear of another best-selling author who happened to be in San Francisco when my review came out, and he called his editor and read the complete short review to him over the phone.) I got an email from Leonard Nimoy on my New York Times Star Trek piece which he said was "a fun read for me" and "I've had a lot excited calls from folks who enjoyed it." Needless to say, I got no excited calls myself.

A quote might be taken from today's review for an ad or a blurb on the paperback edition, but more likely than not, it will be attributed only to "San Francisco Chronicle." That's happened before, and it's how this game is played---I've done it myself: if the reviewer isn't a national name, the name of the paper is more impressive on a blurb. An article or review might get reproduced on web sites and be a cause for a blog comment here and there, but unless I write something else on exactly that subject covered by the site, it won't happen again.

These are ways in which some of what I write becomes consequential in the world. It happens elsewhere. Hereabouts, just silence. I got no calls today, and never do; even though I got some nice emails from people I interviewed or were otherwise involved in the Star Trek story, I got no calls from anyone else about it.

Nor are there usually any other consequences to my life, apart from getting paid, and that's seldom very much. The jury is still out on the further adventures the Star Trek piece might lead me on, but most everything else has had no direct or discernable effect here. Today's review didn't, and won't.

Even though I should be used to this, and probably would be undone if I did get calls, I still find this a bit alienating. You know, feeling alien to this place. A familiar feeling.

Musing on this is prompted by something else. In reading my own review I noticed something I didn't like. Though on balance it's solid and has some music to it, I detect some slackness here and there in the writing. Especially things I should have caught, and probably would have if I had gone through it once more, a day or so after I finished it. And I realize that my state of mind at the time I wrote it had some effect. For one thing, I've concluded I have no immediate future and probably no future at all with the Chronicle, beyond writing for minimal payment. I've contacted other papers who pay better for reviews, but haven't gotten a response. What I have now taken note of is that my feelings regarding this have affected my work, although so far only in small matters of style that few others are likely to detect.

So the motivation of building something isn't there to compensate for the lack of motivation from my immediate environment, or let's say my life. There's not much motivation anywhere for the quality of the writing. Even where this review or that article might be consequential, it's not because of the sentences. It's whether it is a positive or negative review, and whether it has a selling line in it or not. For an article it's whether it is good press or bad press for the subject. (In fact it seems that the reviewers who themselves get attention get it for writing biting negative reviews.)

I am exaggerating a bit---I know that when people say they enjoy a piece that they are in part feeling the effect of the writing. Just as I'm exaggerating about lack of response: I've had subjects of reviews and articles contact me and express gratitude for the attention, the quality of it, and for being "understood." I sometimes even get phone calls and emails from readers,usually no more than one per piece, often from a stranger with a strange story to tell; I am usually discomfited by these calls though I hold them in awe as well. A complete stranger going to all that trouble means some chord was struck, something important to that person. I value all those responses very much.

But most of the motivation for writing as well as I can, comes from an inner compulsion, an inner dialogue (I write things I hope to enjoy reading), and principle. Maybe even some writerly fear and/or superstition, that if you abuse the gift you lose it.

I also wonder if my new-found equanimity about editing that detracts from my work (subject of an earlier entry on 9/09) is the other side of this. I had a piece recently that was essentially strip-mined for a newsier and stylistically blunt and forgettable collection of information. It didn't bother me, at least not as it would have in the past.

Standing on principle seldom gets approval from others when it means offending somebody with power, or cutting off a source of income. I see pretty clearly that caring so much about the integrity of the final product has done me and my "career" far more harm than good. And I take note that the work I feel closest to, that I consider my best, is not generally so approved. So the worth of what I defend is questionable, especially to others. So what do I do?

As the editor of a Japanese art magazine once said to me when I asked him when I would be paid, "good question!" Certainly attending more rigorously to the writing that I am commissioned to do, at whatever price, is an obvious lesson and not that hard to heed. Being able to publish my work myself on the Internet helps enormously. I get more feedback from doing that, especially from the people on my email lists, than from anything else. But for the larger questions, it's hard to say.

There is a sense in which I've always felt it is out of my hands. We are servants of the gifts we're given, and whatever value they have (or are supposed to have) is probably more to the whole than to us. Whatever the "whole" might be. I suspect it includes other times and other places.

Just as the ants probably don't suffer from angst about searching out sugar and not finding much, we just do what we are compelled to do, regardless.

Summer Preview

What's this?---Half of Arcata's population has suddenly disappeared!

Taken by aliens? The rapture? Health care and cheap gasoline in Canada?

Not exactly. School is out.

The university students who comprise half of Arcata's population are mostly gone for summer vacation. As are the ones who won't be back, the graduates. Last weekend their families gladdened the hearts of the local restaurants with their traditional biggest weekend. Now some of the local eating establishments will shut down completely for weeks or months, while others shrink their hours.

This was as close to an alien invasion as we get, though. I remember several years ago sitting in a local establishment called Los Bagels (yes, it is a Mexican bagel bakery and café) near a table of invaders from the Planet New York. Having spent some time there, I recognized the accent. But then, so would everyone else here. I've learned that here in far northern California, "the East" (which begins just past Las Vegas) is essentially defined as "New York," and everyone who lives there is Jewish. But the provincialism of the cultural capital of New York is also justifiably famous. From that table I heard one older woman exclaim, "I can't believe we're eating bagels here, on the edge of the oith!"

So now summer begins. Despite the increased quiet, the decreased traffic on the streets, it's shaping up to be a busy one. I'm doing three, maybe four writing jobs for the university, plus an article for a magazine. All of them will be due in July. As an elected Kerry delegate alternate, I could attend the Democratic National Convention in Boston in late July, if I scrape up the money to do so.

Counting the reviews and articles I just finished, I haven't had so much paying work at the same time in several years. Last summer's highlight though was the time I spent writing a play. As regular readers may recall, my goal was to finish it in time to enter it in a contest, which I did. It turned out to be a strange sort of contest. I didn't win, and I didn't lose. As far as I know, no one did. The theatre involved seems to have run into financial problems, and never chose a winner, perhaps because they were obligated to mount two productions of the winning play in two different cities, and pay out some prize money.

This spring I entered this play, a full length called "Dance of Souls," in another competition. Though it is for a festival to be held locally, the judging is "blind" (no names on the scripts), and the final choices are made by judges far away. The theme is ecological theatre. This spring I also wrote another play for this contest, a one-act comedy called "That Human Comedy." I suppose I could find out, but at the moment I have no idea whether either or both of these plays made the final cut and got sent to the distinguished outside judges.

Writing and entering the comedy may have been a mistake, since it's easier to like comedies and I'm more interested in the success of the full length. Still, even if they didn't make the cut and/or don't win, I have high hopes for future productions or at least readings.

Writing these plays was a blissful experience both times. Follow my bliss? I'm tempted. I do have the itch to do another this summer. I've had a basic idea for one for at least a decade but every time I wrote a little dialogue for it, it didn't work. If I get enough good dialogue to get started, I may have to. There are other projects of my own that it would be smarter to work on, after this blitz of paying work. The chapters I wrote (also this spring) for the nonfiction "Soul of the Future" finally worked, after several attempts over way too many years. I have a really good plan for the rest of the book, and I'm confident that I can write it, and that I will write it, eventually, and publish it, even if I have to self-publish. And there's my young adult novel, which an agent in the field encouraged me to rewrite. After many false starts, I think I've come up with a way to do it. It would make more sense to work on either or both of those.

I enjoy writing on both of these projects. But plays somehow are the best. Realistically, what I should be concentrating on is getting productions or readings of the ones I've already written-the abovementioned two, plus my antismoking musical for middle school age. But realistic is a relative word when you are my age, without credits or credentials in the field, up here at the edge of the oith.

What is Success?

I seem to be in the rather odd position of not being famous enough to get a book contract, but too famous to get a job.

I don’t have a sufficient “platform” nor am I a prominent enough “brand”, but any job I am qualified for, I am apparently overqualified for. Or something.

When I mentioned this to someone on the phone, she suggested that I was “between trapezes.” Sounds about how I feel.




There's a chapter in The Malling of America called "Kids in the Mall: Growing Up Controlled." It's just five pages long in the hard cover edition, out of 400. (the chapter is longer in the paperback, with new material.) But it's been far and away the chapter reprinted most often. It's in literally dozens of anthologies and readers, mostly for college and high school students. It started getting reprinted right after the book was published in 1985, and has been in a couple of new volumes every year since. It will be in new anthologies through 2005.

It didn't occur to me when I wrote it that a chapter on kids in the mall would be a natural for classroom use. But I get a few hundred dollars a year because it is (one publisher called it one of the most teachable essays of the past 50 years), making it easily the most lucrative five pages I've ever written.

And it's why my name appears in anthologies that include Shakespeare, Chekhov, Thoreau and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the collection I'm looking at, called "Legacies," it follows a poem by Margaret Atwood, and is a few pages in front of a story by William Faulkner.

Is it the best thing I ever wrote? I doubt it. Is it truly in a class with the work of those literary greats? Not really. Do I like it? Sure. It's flawed, but it's fun. And I remember being in a good mood when I wrote it---this draft of it anyway. I was on a roll then. I wrote several of the chapters in that section in just a few days, once I had the first one.

That chapter also happens to be one that my editor really hated. She thought it wasn't an accurate reflection of kids' experience, at least according to her resident expert, a young intern in her office. (To be fair, this was an earlier draft, but there's little substantive change.) If I had heeded her, I would have dropped it completely. Only my stubbornness kept me working on that book, after that particular set of meetings.

The Malling of America is the only book I've written---that is, that's been commissioned and/or published. It's a good book. I still like it. Now that Amazon has a new goggle-like system which, when you type in a name, gives you not only the author's book(s) but any references in other books, it occurred to me to look myself up. There are about 58 books in the amazon search that mention mine, and this doesn't include several more I know about. When I interviewed Michael McClure for my feature on Buddhism and the arts in San Francisco, I mentioned my book for some reason. "That's a famous book!" he said. "Well, it's a famous title," I heard myself replying. And that's true. More people know the title than the book. But I still get fan mail occasionally, from people who enjoyed reading it.

So why am I not more excited about this? For two reasons, that by the end of this bit of comment will be related. The first is a point that many people find difficult to understand. I like the writing in that book very much. But I feel exactly the same way about other pieces of my writing that have gotten far less praise, and some that have never gotten so much as a single word of praise. In a few cases, I feel the work that has been ignored (sometimes politely, by people who clearly don't like it) is better.

In a way this relates to the larger phenomenon of outsized praise, which is usually soon followed by outsized blame. This has been a feature of my work for clients in particular. The first work I do is not just satisfactory, it's genius. That very word has been used, more than once. These days when I hear it, I feel like running for the door. Because it is inevitably followed at some time by a piece of work that they don't like as much. And that is often enough the last job I get from them. The example I recall most vividly was one of the times the word "genius" was used, in conjunction with the words "perfect" and "just what I hoped for." This was a rewrite on a grant application for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was followed by similar praise for work on a grant for a couple of million dollars. Then I was called in to help on another project already in progress. There was a multi-national conference call involved. Unfortunately, the person who hired me left the room for part of the call, and when what I wrote responded in part to what he had not heard, he wasn't happy with it. And I was no longer a genius, and no longer called for other projects.

I do the best I can on every job I do, for clients or for naught. I don't let anything leave that I don't feel is good. I usually put far more work into what I write than is warranted by the money I make from it, on those occasions I make any.

Then there is work I feel pushes the envelope in more interesting ways, or expresses more, more than I had expressed before, more than I knew.
I have a special fondness for this work. I am often alone in this fondness. It's more often true of my non non-fiction (including music) but there's nonfiction, published and not, that qualifies.

So if I'm not going to jump off a cliff in despair because nobody is excited or inspired by something I really like---and I always want what I like to excite and inspire others (is there any greater bliss than having a melody you wrote hummed by children, and even to have it outlive you? A play performed by strangers? Not to my fantasy knowledge.) It's disappointing, I'm not happy about it, but finally it's my standards that count, in terms of my own feelings, and my own sense of my work, and my play. And so it's difficult to get too carried away by the responses I do get to other work.

I don't want to become like Conan Doyle, who hated Sherlock Holmes and valued most his metaphysical writing, which even in his own time was considered largely gibberish. Or like TV actors whose small screen success drives them to believe they should be movie stars. On the other hand, we aren't talking about living with the lavish rewards of success, but maybe living a little too deluded.

That's the other point. My mall book is known around the world. It's how I am identified, and probably will be in the first line of my obit wherever it happens to appear, if anywhere. But in commercial terms, in career terms, it was a failure. It was not enough of a success to propel me into a career writing books. I made plenty of naïve mistakes, mind you, leading up to publication and in the years immediately afterwards. But it is also true that one rather large factor in my ideas and proposals for books being all turned down after that, is that the mall book was perceived as a failure. It never even got a paperback edition, until I paid for one.

Had it been a big commercial success, I could have proposed a book on the influence of moonshine on white wall tires, and it would have been immediately hailed as a stroke of genius, and money thrown at it. Had it been perceived as at least a moderate commercial success, and especially a critical success, I would have had another couple of books to make a career. A success would have meant my screenplay would be looked at favorably, and I could add other forms to my legitimate repertoire.

But it wasn't. So it's a famous title. It's a semi-famous book. In paperback now, it sells a few copies each month. Around Christmas shopping season, I get emails from reporters (Hamilton, Ontario this year) and a phone call from NBC News with Tom Brokaw, asking me questions. Sometimes they are even questions I can reasonably answer.

Now when I propose a book idea, I'm told (by an agent) I don't have a "big enough platform." I'm not a star, a brand name. I'm not an expert, with a constituency. Of course, the only thing that made me a shopping mall expert was publishing the book. I keep getting called a sociologist. I've had exactly two sociology courses in my life. I may not be an expert on the skills of peace, or the soul of the future, but I am also no expert on sociology or retail, architecture or business. So what? What about what I actually wrote, and people read? That may matter to you and me (it certainly matters to me) but not to anybody I've met in publishing. (At least they aren't in publishing any more.)

But I have to factor this in, when I evaluate my work. Not what it's worth to me, not even what it might be worth to readers (or listeners), but what it's worth in money. Which ultimately becomes what I'm worth in money, and that's what I have to deal with now. For in this society, the ultimate measure of all things is money. There's no getting around it. Probably even monks are expected to do some telemarketing for the monastery these days.

Over the course of a lifetime, you realize all too well that your virtues and your flaws are the same. The stubbornness that kept me working on the mall book, that keeps me following my enthusiasms, has led me through decades in which I wrote a lot, published a good deal less, and missed a lot. Like having a family, a house, a nest-egg, or a real career. I got ridiculed the other night for not having money in a mutual fund. Instead I have had a series of assignments, a series of articles, a series of unpublished drafts of fictions, plays, screenplays, and songs that not very many voices shared. Maybe that's why I insist on re-publishing my old work, even if only on the Internet. So it adds up to something, something whole, and in the world now.

Now I am trying to be realistic about where I fit, not by my standards, but by the standards of those who control livelihoods. But as flawed as my judgment must be, I still find it difficult to believe that my rightful place is rote work for minimum wage with a few hours a week of dubious focus on writing unproduced plays. That may in fact be the scenario, although if that's the direction it goes, it could be a lot uglier than that peaceful sounding little scene suggests. And who knows, maybe it's for the best---to give up any pretense of a public role, of even a middle class life, and write in the literary forms I always wanted to the most, if I am so able.

But even in that case, I will still be stuck with my own evaluations of my work, as delusional as they might be. There are still going to be things that mean a lot to me and to no one else. And other things that mean something to a few others, some of which will mean less to me. And I'm still going to pine for the response of excitement and inspiration, and in the end when I don't get it, it won't change my opinion. I still like what I like. I see what I see around me, I have my evaluations about the work of others, and my opinion where I fit in (somewhere in the second tier, just below the quite thin top tier, if you must know.) And as long as I can, I will remain stubbornly involved in what I care about. For example, even after I sent out a few CDs of my accumulated music this Christmas, I listened to the selection, liked a lot of it, but decided there were a couple of vocals I could do better, so I re-recorded them. I will probably work on this CD off and on for years. In the final analysis, though I care if others like it, it doesn't really change how I feel about it, how I evaluate it. Or put it this way. The ideal situation would be if my work happened to be making me a living, and people---maybe even lots of people-liked it, were stimulated by it, got joy from it, and I liked it. The joy of others would definitely add to my joy in my work. If my work were making me a living and I liked it, but what I created didn't make much difference to anyone, I could accept that and go on, hoping to do better work that might catch on, or just hope that someone might discover it later on. The much harder cases would be if my work were making me a living and I didn't like it, or my current case, in which my work is not making me a living but I like it and some others do as well. In those cases it's difficult to know what to feel.

The trick is going to be to accept the consequences of how I am evaluated by others in the context of whatever present is current. Especially the others with power. I've been avoiding that while I've been fighting it. A lot of my self-image is internal, but a lot of it is also based on a fantasy of my relationship to the external world. I don't know how I will handle the violent separation of the internal and external. I've never felt equal to being able to compartmentalize enough to give eight or ten hours a day of energy and attention falsely, and then come home and be energetic and true. And these days, simply your body and your brain aren't enough. Employers want your heart and soul. And the worse job it is, the more they demand it.

That's if there is such a job. I am the right age to be at the apex of my writing career, and the wrong age to be looking for a job. I am also in the wrong region of the wrong state. With the wrong job history. And introverts don't cold call well, as a rule.

I've had something in the Sunday SF Chronicle four out of the last five weeks. Two book reviews, one a cover; the cover story in Sunday Datebook, and tomorrow, a long Insight piece. This writing has cost more than it pays, and so it can't go on this way. It only works if it leads to something else. So far, it hasn't. No interested book editor or agent on the phone. It still could happen, of course. This is a weird game, and getting stranger all the time, but the odds are also getting longer. It's getting to be more of a lottery.

I alternate panic and not panic. At the moment I’m feeling okay. There was a certain “closure” in finding out that, as I suspected, a particular door was definitely closed to me. There was an aha moment in the shower when the intro line I’ve been looking for to begin “Soul of the Future” came to me, and ideas starting falling into place. So I may be at the starting point of a familiar cycle, of generating a proposal that I hope will liberate me from this angst without requiring me to move my life again… all such hopes have been dashed in the recent past, and even in the not so recent past, but for the moment the creative excitement carries me forward into another day.

So what is success? There's mine, there's yours, and there's the big old world's. If we all aren't on the same page, it's very hard to say. Maybe there is honest work I'm suited for, that I can't even imagine. Maybe I will find it, or it will find me. And maybe my fate will be the same as so many before me, after me, and all around me: a fate that would be regarded as tragic were it not played by unknown actors on so small a stage, in the midst of so much noise, in the dark. We do the best we can, with as much grace as honors us.