Long May You Run

It's been several months now since I gave up El Volvo.  Born in 1986, the same year as one of my nieces (married, a mother), El Volvo came into my life in 1999 and served me well for 16 plus years.

Not much to look at, El Volvo had an engine that wouldn't quit.  But circumstances brought another car into our possession, and we can hardly justify two, let alone three.  Still, I held on to the Volvo for a lot longer than I should have.

It took me months to understand why.  Then I realized that on my many drives to local theatres to review plays, I was almost always alone.  I went alone, sat alone and returned alone.  I had to get myself together to go, especially when they were plays I didn't particularly want to see, on nights or afternoons I would rather have stayed home.  And then I had to figure out what to say about them.

At several theatres, the management people were nice to me, but by and large actors and others involved in the production weren't especially friendly.  Why should they be--I was outside the process, judging them.  Pretty much a buzzkill.  Most often these weren't comfortable evenings.

But I did have one companion--El Volvo.  My car got me there safely and most importantly, got me home.  That applies to other situations as well.  That was a relationship, and it turned out to be hard to end.

There was a lot I liked about that old car.  It pre-dated a lot of fancy technologies that are mostly confusing and are little more than something else that can break.  The windows actually wound down.  At the same time, there were some very nice Volvo features.  Headlights that go off when I turn off the engine.  A visor that swivels to catch sunglare to the sides.  I liked the dark blue upholstered seats.  And all the confidence of being in a Volvo out there with the crazies.

El Volvo gave me very little trouble over the years, mostly electrical from that old wiring.  It was missing rear brake lights and the headlights never were very strong.  But I do believe there was some good karma attached to the car because of how I bought it.

I answered an ad in the Times Standard.  The car was being sold by a young woman in Eureka.  She and her boyfriend bought it used--she told me the price they paid--and now she was selling it so she could go visit him in Mexico, prior to their wedding.  He was working there.  She was living with her father.

I had it looked at before I bought and it needed some work.  She and her father listened to me say so in the dimly lit living room.  But when I made my offer they were both surprised.  Essentially I offered about $100 more than she'd paid for it, pretty obviously as a wedding present.  She was overjoyed.  Her father was so pleased he almost hugged me.

When it came time to part ways, I thought I would donate it to a public radio station.  But that turned out to be complicated and pretty impersonal.  I was supposed to talk to somebody in Colorado.  Then a local guy offered to buy it--he likes fixing up old cars.  I figured El Volvo would have a better chance at a longer life that way.  With your chrome heart shining in the sun, long may you run.

Tangled Up

Bob Dylan has won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.

 When I saw this I immediately recalled a moment in my senior year of college--1967/8--when I railed to a lit professor that the literature of our times was being written by Dylan, the Beatles etc. in the form of a few minutes of song.

 It wasn't an original idea. I recall reading an interview with Donovan who referred to "Eleanor Rigby" as a three minute novel.

 But as important as Dylan's songs have been to me and to our times, this news didn't arrive as a vindication. I'm actually disappointed.

The truth is Bob Dylan doesn't need any more awards. I'm pretty sure he'd tell you that himself.  He's a pop star, and has been recognized for his contribution to American culture many times, including at the White House.

 But there are a lot of writers who aren't pop stars who have only a few shots at recognition. Yes, they can get medals from their nation for cultural contributions. But this is the big international prize for their art.

I think of Ursula LeGuin who is 87. She is only one of several I can think of who deserve this prize, which is given only to the living.

Giving Dylan this prize does nothing but muddy the waters. Does this make Sting and James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen eligible? I guess so. But why? They don't need it. The world doesn't need it.

 Giving this prize to, say, Kim Stanley Robinson on the other hand could actually change the world. It would recognize a form of literature and give him a platform for expressing ideas and focusing a dialogue the world needs to survive.

 Hey, even a National Book Award or a Pulitzer would go a long way. But writers in the sci-fi ghetto don't get those awards, despite their contributions to literature and literary culture, not to mention the world. They have a better shot at the Nobel.

 So it's another occasion to celebrate Dylan's work (though eventually somebody is going to point out that his borrowings remain controversial) and that's fine. But we know about Dylan's work. We've been swimming in it for more than fifty years.  Is this more of an award for us?

Sure, I recognize that songs like "The Times They Are A Changin" and "Tangled Up in Blue" and a few dozen more have had more lasting and layered effects on me, including deep visceral effects, and may even say more about life in these times than almost any novel or poem.  But their power is in their nature as songs.

Without the music, Dylan might be--as Allen Ginsberg came to believe--a good minor poet.  That's not faint praise.  There aren't that many good minor poets. But that's not really relevant.  This is a different form.  Dylan would probably tell you that.  (And come to that, where is Allen Ginsberg's prize?)

 This prize is for literature, and the work of literature gets no greater recognition. Think of all that Margaret Atwood (for one) has written and done, and the example she sets for a literary culture. Or Gary Snyder (age 86.)  Or is that over now? That's not good.

It's possible to argue that songs of the kind that Dylan wrote aren't being written or at least heard as much anymore because popular music has changed. But that's a different argument. The fact is that the popular music forms are not threatened. They still bring in big bucks. Literary culture around the world is endangered. And this prize does nothing to support it.

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?

The Internet of Remembering

My unfiltered photo, Trinidad Head June 30, 2016, now past, but now your present, and here to stay.

In the New Yorker this week, Casey Johnston wrote about various social media platforms that wipe away photos and text after a brief period, like 24 hours. Now you see it, now you won't. This is much prized, Johnston writes, especially by younger posters whose identity is formed in the moment, and may be obsolete and even embarrassing before long. This "satisfies a craving for immediacy and ephemerality, one that has lately grown to encompass all of social media." Johnston calls this the Internet of Forgetting.

 Well, I am not young and that is not my Internet. Time and its contents helplessly obsess me. I crave scope, so I can maybe make some sense of it. The past has a different reality now that I have more of it myself. Rediscovering elements of the past and reflecting on them, connecting and reconciling, all add something necessary to my present. Besides, these discoveries as well as re-discoveries in both their original context and in mine now, also constitute much of my entertainment. 

So fortunately for me, there is also an Internet of Remembering. There are search functions to vast data, various Wikis and especially YouTube. On YouTube I can access (as I have recently) radio broadcasts from the 1940s, particular baseball or basketball games from--well, I haven't even explored how far back. Interviews from the 50s, movies from the 30s (ever heard of the Torchy Blane series? Neither had I. It's pretty good. Besides which, it may have been an inspiration for Lois Lane.)

Reading about past events in historical context, I can find documents and publications of the time online. I can even see the faces and hear the voices, from at least FDR on. There are surprising snippets of performances by legendary actors, though unfortunately not so many whole plays. Can't find in any library an obscure treatise on ethics and psychology by one of the greatest classic science fiction authors (and least known outside the s/f community), Olaf Stapledon? Search online, and ye shall find the entire text. And so on.

A recent instance of personal memory...I remember one Saturday morning when I was 8. I was watching "Space Patrol"--an episode in which Buzz Corey and crew used their "time drive" to travel to 1956. They mentioned that they were traveling from the 30th century, when "Space Patrol" takes place.

 My mother caught some of this. She asked me if I knew what century we were living in. I don't think I did, exactly. She said it was the 20th century, and the Space Patrol people were coming from the 30th. She mentioned that she used to listen to Buck Rogers on the radio, and he had traveled to the 25th century. I probably remember this because I learned something about time.

 I recall Saturday mornings when there was one outer space show after another--"Tom Corbett, Space Cadet," "Rocky Jones, Space Ranger," "Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers" and "Space Patrol." I researched these shows on the Internet in 2010 and discovered enough to figure out that they were probably all on during only one year: 1954.

 I was writing fiction based on my childhood, and for reasons having to do with other events in the chapter, I selected a certain October Saturday to revisit these shows, and how my friends and I used them in play. Then I found a "Space Patrol" episode guide that described the show scheduled on the Saturday I had selected. From the description it seemed very likely it was the very one I remember, when my mother and I had that conversation. (I blogged about all this right here at the time.)

 Well, it's 2016 and many "Space Patrol" episodes are now on YouTube, though not always under their original titles. Also YouTube can be difficult to search systematically. But the other night, I happened upon and saw this episode--the one I last saw with my mother in our living room in 1954.

 But the Internet of remembering has more functions than revisiting personal memories. Here's another YouTube show I watched recently. I've been reading Arthur Miller lately--this latest Miller jag started when I read a roundtable discussion of contemporary playwrights, and one of them quoted Miller. I then found on the Internet the interview with Miller that contained that quote, and more along that line. That started me reading some of his nonfiction and lesser known plays, and re-reading his autobiography. So on a whim I went back and searched YouTube for television interviews.

I immediately found an interview he did with Charlie Rose in 1992. When the conversation veered to that now historical moment--the 1992 election campaign and the rise of Ross Perot, a purported billionaire businessman outsider--I got chills, especially when Miller said: "When a leadership arises in a country that believes it can lead by using the darkness in men, it's probably unstoppable at a certain point." He'd grown up watching Hitler's rise in Germany. 

Does anybody--even those who lived through it, as I did-- remember what it felt like with Ross Perot in 1992? I didn't. From 2016, Perot now looks like an early and milder version of Trump, thanks to this interview. There's precedent, a continuum of sorts perhaps. And people were worried then. (Miller thought America was too diverse to fall completely for a dictator of darkness, which of course may be our salvation now.)

 And to add to all this co-incidence (which means things happening at the same time, like the past in the present), Miller once described the function of playwriting as "remembering."

About many things, it doesn't pay to forget. The Internet of Remembering is important to our survival, as well as the lives of "the olds" as Johnston says that tech folks call anybody over 30. So in my case I guess it's "the ancients."

Fiesta

My parents were married in August 1945. Among their wedding presents was a set of Fiestaware: cups and saucers, plates of various sizes, salt and pepper shakers, a gravy boat, a pitcher, bowls, sugar bowl and creamer, a lazy susan and possibly other items. They were the mix of colors typical of what's officially called just Fiesta, made by a West Virginia outfit and originally introduced at a pottery fair in Pittsburgh in 1936. I believe they were a gift from my mother's younger sister.

 Many of these pieces were ubiquitous in my childhood and beyond. The dishes were perhaps the "good dishes" for awhile, but some pieces in enough use that some bit the dust (the bowls, the cups and saucers.) Some pieces (the salt and pepper shakers) were in common use forty years later. The sugar bowl just quietly disappeared. But at a certain point in the 60s or 70s, they were replaced by a new, more formal looking set, and the remaining Fiestaware consigned to the back of a kitchen cabinet.

So imagine my shock when I was walking through a huge exhibit called The Machine Age in the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1985 or so, when I came upon a collection of Fiestaware that might have been taken from that cabinet, but it was in a glass case and labeled.

 When my childhood home was sold, I got most of the surviving Fiestaware, and perhaps all of it. I brought it with me out here to California. There wasn't really much of it left, and though one of the rarer pieces is in excellent condition, some of the plates are chipped. But one piece survived with only minor abrasions, all the more surprising because it was one of the most used pieces.

 That, it will come as no surprise by now, was the yellow pitcher. As a representative piece it is quite striking for the Art Deco design is most evident of all the pieces. But it also carries the memories of a lot of Kool-Aid and ice cubes on hot summer days through the 1950s and beyond.

 This past October of 2015, my niece Sarah got married. Her wedding was almost exactly 70 years after my parents wedding. So it seemed especially fitting that this Fiestaware pitcher be passed down to her on this occasion. And that's what I did. 

Though it has value on the collectors market, she is honoring its family history by using it.

On Book Publishing

A long New Yorker piece on Amazon and books from earlier this year is disquieting to say the least.  It seems that Amazon has become the Wal-Mart of book publishing, making demands that publishers can't afford not to accept.  It's not a pretty picture.

On the other hand, at least since the 1980s, New York publishers adopted self-defeating business practices, aping inappropriate business models, in which books became "product," etc.  It bred arrogance and (among real editors and authors) disillusion, so there weren't a lot of people left to feel sorry for them.

And the condition in this quote has been going on for quite some time:

Writing is being outsourced, because the only people who can afford to write books make money elsewhere—academics, rich people, celebrities,” Colin Robinson, a veteran publisher, said. “The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”

This became obvious to me as an author more than a decade ago.

As for the book business, the article cites one example of a counter-approach, which essentially has publishing going smaller and selling direct to readers.  Whether or not this would work, I believe Andrew Wylie is largely right in his quoted statement: "The [publishing] industry thinks of itself as Procter & Gamble*. What gave publishers the idea that this was some big goddam business? It’s not—it’s a tiny little business, selling to a bunch of odd people who read.”

Standards

I confess that among many other such thoughts, I worry that I'm slipping when I find typographical errors in my writing that I missed after reading the sentence a time or two.  Sometimes those errors find their way into my Internet posts, or in drafts meant for publication.  And sometimes I don't catch those errors in posts for a long time.

I suppose it should reassure me, or at least make me feel better, that I spot such errors in published books and especially online.  Just now I've read two articles on the New Yorker site.  I spotted two obvious errors in one, and one in the other. I recognize how they were made--a sentence is rewritten or a thought is redirected but an errant word remains, usually a small one: an "in" or an "a" or an "a the." These are byproducts of how word processing works--all this deleting and inserting.   Or a word is just misspelled--the kind of misspelling that eludes the spell-checker. Those sorts of things.

But for many year when it was a magazine and nothing else, the New Yorker was the standard for copy editing and perfectly proofread prose.  I personally never found a typo in any issue I read from the 1960s to the late 1980s, when they began appearing after the magazine changed ownership and editor.  They soon stopped, but the typos that I saw in at least a few issues seemed utterly unnatural in that distinctive New Yorker typeface.

But typos as well as bad grammar and other copy writing errors are depressingly frequent in heavily monetized online publications.  But the New Yorker?  The New Yorker!

So while I am a little reassured about myself, I am at the same time depressed by a different sign that perhaps this is no longer my time.  

II

It occurs to me there is a possible reason for these typos appearing on the New Yorker site and other sites that post writing by professional writers, besides just slipping standards or sloth, or even the usual excuse of the need to feed the beast with copy at a fast pace.

That possible reason is that the standard, or even the ethic, of online posts is that once posted, nothing in them is changed.  If changes are made, they must be indicated at the end, with a catalog of the revisions.

Apparently there is something unethical about correcting mistakes once the publish button is pushed.   I'm not sure why, except perhaps that this is just the Internet tradition.  Maybe it began with dated web logs, which also are apparently sacrosanct.

To which I say, sorry, but it seems like nonsense to me. Isn't the capability of changing what's published online a major advantage?  I'm pretty sure any of us who saw our mistakes permanently preserved in print would have appreciated the chance to correct them, then and there.  Changes in substance online (correcting facts, etc.) might merit an appended note, especially if in response to a comment or correction from outside.  But style matters?  I don't get it.  Maybe it's part of the aura?  Internet posts are supposed to be so spontaneous? And nothing provides the aura of spontaneity like sloppy writing. Maybe the lack of copy editing isn't just an economy, but an ethic.

In any case, I routinely change what I've written after I've posted it, to correct errors, to rewrite sentences and paragraphs in the effort to make things clearer or just better written.  I may do so several times until I am satisfied.  I've made revisions on this post, for example, at least six times so far.

The ethics of this seem clear to me.  If I have annoyed readers with typos and misspellings, or confused them with awkward writing, I don't see the point of continuing to annoy or confuse future readers if I can correct the errors or improve the writing.

In the end, I suppose both parts of this post refer to the same set of standards.  And that they are part of my identity as a writer, because I make corrections even when believing that it's unlikely many or any readers will know or care.  I'll know, and I care.

Super Moon Memory

It's hard to believe a lot of the Super Moon photos on the web are real.  The full moon at a time when the Earth is closest to it happened the last weekend of August. I didn't anticipate it really--it was so hazy (thin marine layer, depressing smoke from distant forest fires) during the Perseid meteor shower that I didn't dare.

Then it rained--wind, a distant rumble, then a misty rain, then real rain for some time, during the night.  This was Friday going into Saturday, I think.  Rare enough in a regular August, really strange (and welcome) in another droughtful summer.

Then in the wee hours, after the rain stopped, the clouds began to move, to break up in strange patterns.  The full Super Moon was not especially big, so high in the sky, but it was bright.  Very bright.  It illuminated large clouds of extravagant, unusual shapes and textures with feverish brightness, and bathed these scalloped, spread-tailed, slowly swimming clouds in an indescribable blue.

For awhile there were thin clouds passing over the moon, which was so bright that it appeared that the moon was passing in front of the clouds--I could see them through the surreal luminance, as if the moon were brightly transparent.

I have no camera capable of capturing this, and even if I did, I'm not sure even I would believe it.  I've never seen clouds like that, in sky like that.  I've seen the moon that bright, but the combination was unique.  Super, I guess.

Why I Don't Have a Smartphone

I don't have a smartphone.  I don't watch new television programs, seldom see new movies, though a few on DVD.  I don't know who the celebrities are that the supermarket tabloids and their internet counterparts get all exercised about.  I don't listen to new pop music.  And so on.

This fits the profile for my age, and a lot of it surely is about age. But it's not mindless.  Some of it is about exploring past music etc. I missed, or in more depth, and some about revisiting books, tv shows etc. for what they now say that's different from the first times around. Or reminding me who I was then, and maybe who I forgot I was since.

Of course, that I don't like a lot of new TV, music and movies does make it easier to ignore.

 Apart from the comfort level, there's the tendency to want to have a deeper experience and find more meaning in what flashed by in the past.  That seems like the natural work, play and purpose of being this age, and in sound enough mind to try feeling the breadth and depth of my whole life while I've got it.

 (And in fact I use some new technology in these activities.  But why should I give up the advantages of the desktop computer just because they aren't fashionable anymore? Or the stereo, the record player?  Or the physical book off the physical shelf ?)

Though I take a certain amount of elder abuse for skepticism of new technologies and so on (which, by the way, I also exhibited when younger), I have my additional reasons. There's expense v. utility, for example. As interesting or enhancing as they might be, smartphones and multimedia packages are too expensive for what I need.  Besides, nobody calls me on the home phone or the flip phone now, so why would that be different? And the screen is too small and the sound too poor for much of anything else.

 So it's partly aesthetics, too: one of the major reasons that so far I haven't been able to bring myself to do Facebook is that it is so ugly.

Bad design, inferior materials also turn me off.  Some new tech is so obviously designed for younger eyes and fingers that it's the height of effrontery to expect I'd shamefacedly accept it.

The other element that is related to age is that the smartphone and related technologies are largely about marketing and selling things, and I'm not interested in that, nor are the marketers and sellers likely to be much interested in me.  In my demographic, and especially my income level.

 But there is a larger sense in which this is a choice, and I know what I'm doing.  What I am doing is concentrating on the past and the future.  The present makes its demands anyway, I don't have to cater to it.  People in youth and middle age, people with children or even actively involved with grandchildren, have reasons to keep up with the fast-changing present.  I don't, not nearly as much.

If I don't need to, I don't want to waste the time.  I am engaged in experiencing the past in more depth, and learning from it.  I apply that to concerns about the future.  Big concerns, about the big picture future.

That's my choice, my concentration, and it's meant to be my contribution.  It may well be futile.  Still, chances are a little better on something good coming of this, than from the distractions of the smartphone.

69th Birthday Thoughts

On and around my 69th birthday recently, I had three birthday thoughts.

 The first was on the day, when I hiked up Trinidad Head. Unless you know the Head (in Trinidad Bay, far northern California), the thought may not mean anything, so I've included some photos from a subsequent walk, on a sunnier day. On my birthday there was considerable fog blowing in from the sea. Still, I wish I'd taken my camera that day.

 The thought was simple: my birthday present was that I hiked Trinidad Head--the experience itself (I even got quite close to a young rabbit on the trail) and the fact that at 69, I could still hike up Trinidad Head. That's the best gift.

It's not a climb in any mountain-climbing sense, it doesn't require equipment or training--it's not that kind of accomplishment. It's an ordinary climb--rigorous enough especially at the start, and a workout as the trail winds up. I've been hiking it for about 19 years, though not often enough. And I still can.

 It overlooks the Pacific on one side, and Trinidad Bay on the other. It's quiet and beautiful, and for now, it's available to me.

 That was first thought. The second thought, which came the next day or so, was more complicated. It had to do with success and failure.

 "One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake," Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter. Maybe, but for an American man the basic criteria for success are pretty clear.

You're a success if in your life you make a sufficient living to raise a family, or if you produce work that receives honors and earns you a recognized place among peers as well as some more general community, or preferably both. You can be a success in your life, or a success in your work, or both. You are failure if you accomplish neither.

 I have accomplished neither. The failure is not absolute, I did accomplish something in each area. But not enough really to count me a success by these criteria.

Yet looking back, I have some satisfactions. So the second thought was: if I failed, at least I failed big. That is, the failure (however complete) was not spectacular, but my aspirations were big.

 I was remembering an acquaintance I'd once worked with who I last saw a long time ago in southern California. He showed me a script he'd written for a sitcom then on TV. I never saw him again. Though it appears he had some achievements in the movies and TV, it wasn't as a writer. There are other similar cases I know.

 I made compromises in my working life. But at least I did not try to write scripts for sad sitcoms or pathetic or loathsome movies, and failed. I failed trying to write the most ambitious works, the best works I could dream up, in whatever form. What I failed at was big.


The third thought is perhaps a corollary. If I were to describe, as simply as possible, what I did all my life, I might say, "I made sentences." (Nobody has asked me that question, nor any like it for quite awhile, but at least I have the answer ready.) I also made music, and dreamed up images, wrote dialogue and so on. But basically, in the range of work I did for love, a larger duty and for hire, I made sentences.

 John Banville began his review of books on Emerson this way:"Surely mankind's greatest invention is the sentence." Of course in addition to sentences, I made paragraphs and pages and so on. I thought about and worked at all these forms, but they are basically built with sentences. So I'll make my stand with the sentence.

 And if it is indeed humankind's greatest invention, it matters less what those sentences were about than the fact that I worked at making them the best sentences I could. While trying to lead an honorable life. It was not a bad way to use a life. So I think I'll keep doing it.

Music

"You don't have to sell a hundred million records, you don't need thousands of platinum disks, you don't need to sing to millions and millions of people for music to nourish your soul.  You can sing and play to the cat, it will still mend your life.  My mantra is five simple words: Music is its own reward."

Sting

Memory Day (Spring to Summer Flower Edition)

Every Memorial Day weekend, my grandfather would change the winter glass storm doors for screen doors, bring the window screens up from the cellar, and remove the dark cover from the glider on the front porch. It was the signal for summer.

 Hereabouts there's something blooming at all times of year, but the spring flowers are into their summer. We've got varieties of roses (yellow in front, red in back), Iris (though they tend to bloom earlier in the spring) and California poppies. We've even got purple sage (that's it above, along with the two flowers I'm about to mention.)

 But two kinds are dominant, and in our walks in the neighborhood, I don't see them as profuse (or even as present) as around our house. Nasturtiums (proper name Tropaeolum) are orange or orange and yellow striped flowers, with roundish green leaves. The stems are attached to vines which grow at an incredible rate that accelerated in April. They threaten to cover the back porch, and I confess to enjoy being surrounded by them in my usual chair.

 Nasturtium flowers are edible with a kind of peppery taste, and contain high amounts of vitamin C. We use them in salads from time to time.

The other kind is the Calla Lily. Before I came here, all I knew about calla lilies was what Katherine Hepburn said in Stage Door--it became one of the standard lines for Hepburn imitators. I first noticed them growing in the narrow strip between the north side of the house and the fence with the neighbor house. There's only one small door on that side of the house, from the garage, and access from the front through a small garden gate. This area has always been dense with bushes and, close to the house, with ferns. Back in the far western corner is where I first noticed a few calla lilies.

 They stayed pretty much on that side until recent years, then migrated to the front (also accompanying ferns) and now we have them in the back bordering the porch and near the small fruit trees (fernless however), as well as in the front under the picture window. They are strange and strangely beautiful white flowers on long stalks that can get quite tall. (The books say three feet, but several in the front this year were at least four feet.) I'm fascinated by their large leaves with their curves and folds. We seem to have the most callas in the vicinity. I don't know why. They are quite hardy and bloom for a lot of the year.

 Nasturtiums came from South America, calla lilies from Africa (though some species have been in northern parts of the US for a long time.) So I don't know where you draw the line on native plants. They probably do compete successfully with other flowers, though there are varieties scattered in our yards that I can't name that seem more like California flowers-- very complex, with bands and spots of colors, bell-like parts and other complexities, all so different. Even the wild iris are remarkable in their stripes and patterns, the subtle blend of colors.

 By contrast, I remember the flowers of my western Pennsylvania childhood as simpler: violets, daisies, profusions of dandelions considered weeds, the purple flowers I never knew the name of because they too were "weeds," flower beds of gladiolas and roses.

I was musing on this topic while out on the porch in April, on one of the rare occasions that I took my laptop out there (it doesn't do well in bright light.) What I was thinking of when I was out there watching and listening to what goes on around the flowers and trees was the profusion I recall--accurately or not I don't know, but I think pretty accurately.

 Here I watched a single wasp, and three bumble bees who are working the same territory but seemed to stay together at a respectful distance from the larger pollinator. I heard crickets, a fairly uncommon sound. The sight of a butterfly is rare, and the sight of more than one of any appreciable size is rarer still. In my childhood backyard and the adjoining field there were lots of bumble bees to watch and be wary of, and wasps and hornets were regular residents around the outside of the house. Lots of butterflies, large and patterned, all summer. Our neighborhood lore included the difference between Monarchs and butterflies that looked just like them. My favorites were the patterned butterflies in shades of blue.  (On the other hand, there were an awful lot of houseflies.)

 We've made things as bird friendly as possible here. I have a makeshift birdbath on an old picnic table and have watched birds splashing in it, though its been dry lately. I needed to find a smaller dish I can refill every day without drought guilt.

 But the birds who visit us mostly chirp--songs are rare. There were a lot more songbirds in the east, particularly where I lived in Pittsburgh. There were also cardinals and goldfinches we don't have here at all. (On the other hand, I can watch hawks circling above the community forest almost any day.) In spring however we do get species of bird visitors we may never see the rest of the summer, or rarely. And in April on the HSU campus I saw a pair of stellar jays--large jays, blue feathers--and heard what sounded like a macaw, or some bird call I remembered only from movies set in jungles or swamps. That was weird.

Failure and Imagination with Jo Rowling

 This is Jo Rowling's 2008 Commencement Address at Harvard.  Her subjects are failure and the imagination.  (Here is a link to the transcript, although the responses of the audience is important.)  The central graph:

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

But not everyone has that certainty, or that big idea.  But there are other more general lessons:

"The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned."

As for imagination, she wasn't only talking about dreaming up Hogwarts:

"Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared."

She talked about her experiences working for Amnesty International in her early 20s--a moving and real account that never gets mentioned in her bios.  And how it informed her as a person and a writer.  For everyone, denying imagination is dangerous: "I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy."

Empathy and compassion change our relationship to the world, and may change at least little parts of the world. "One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing."

This is turn can inform the imagination in its action in the world. "We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."

In this brief speech she does not overtly make the connection between her two topics, failure and the imagination.  Failure can drive you inward, and depression drags you down into uselessness.  There are other products of failure that are likewise overrated.  But empathy is the classic benefit of failure, if it results in something like humility.  She did mention humility as a possible product of failure: "Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes."

Perhaps my failures didn't impact my life enough, or perhaps what it revealed was an insufficiently focused and disciplined person.  Anyway I don't think I've dealt with failure all that well.  I still deal with the effects of it on myself every day. But in terms of acting from it, perhaps I have not felt urgently enough, or really faced, that so much of my life has been wasted.  Of course there may still be time for remedy, and if there isn't, soon enough none of it will matter.    

Obviously Jo Rowling has made a huge difference in a huge number of lives through her Harry Potter books.  I expect my writing has made some difference to some people, perhaps fewer than I hope but more than I know. And I suppose that I personally have made some positive difference, more than negative.  I may have to be content with that.  And with imagining better.

Update: It turns out that JK has adapted this speech into a book, with proceeds going to her charity for children, Lumos.

My Updike

John Updike was a particularly important author to me in my last year or so of high school and first few years of college.  I identified to some extent--another small town Pennsylvania boy (the subject of these early stories as well as a biographical fact), and he was writing for outlets I aspired to: the New Yorker magazine, and Knopf book publisher.

Though our enthusiasms may fade, it's interesting to note their lasting effects.  Since I've been thinking and writing about those years, I've revisited some of the early Updike short stories I first read, and I noted particularly a couple of his comments in his Paris Review interview.  aI'm sure I came upon the first of them for the first time in this interview, and it became formative.  The second is more in the nature of consolation, a retroactive justification for a different personal history than I was looking for.

"When I write, I aim my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.  I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.  The reviews, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf."

"No, I always wanted to draw or write for a living...I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to...The distinction between a thing well done and a thing done ill obtains everywhere..."

A Critical Need

From an essay by  Leon Wieseltier in the New York Times Book Review (emphases added):

"Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind.

"... What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability.

As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

 Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be.

 It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past. Beyond its impact upon culture, the new technology penetrates even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and to consciousness..."

Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything.

 "Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life. All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different. We are still in the middle of the great transformation, but it is not too early to begin to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out the continuities from the discontinuities. The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof..."

" Every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose."

Age of Change

Change is neither good nor bad in itself.  Sometimes change is another word for waste.  These days it is often thoughtless, though it has its own momentum.

Humans are built for change.  Dealing with change--sizing up and seizing opportunities, foreseeing and responding to danger--is what our species does best. When the environment changes, we adapt.  It's why we're still around.

This ability is so much a part of our natures that we seek change.  As a species we spread out all over the world, sometimes compelled by circumstances but apparently very often because we like to wander.  We change our environment voluntarily. We are intensely curious, both mentally and emotionally.  We imagine a better place, a better future.

That and a superficial evaluation of technological change has tended to privilege change itself.  You can't fight "progress."  That may be true to some extent, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Change that is danger to some is opportunity to others, and it is in their interest to augment the natural excitement that change inspires. Capitalism needs and fears change.  Large-scale change for the past couple of centuries has largely occurred when corporations could engineer it for profit.

As you get older, you have more experience with the vagaries of change.  So older people are perhaps more skeptical of change that sweeps society with the frenzy of fashion, the pressure of conformity and the opportunities to make a move, make money, make a name, move up in the world.  Maybe it takes older people to see the potential pitfalls, the costs of waste, the possible and probable consequences. And to have the security to say, no thanks.

On a larger scale these are attributes that are among those that make elders pretty good futurists.  It may seem ironic but evaluating change, keeping eyes open to consequences, is oriented towards the future.

This is not an argument for stasis.  Change involves risk, but benefits as well as drawbacks are possible, and no one can foresee everything.  Even in daily life, novelty perks us up, change can refresh, and it gives us another place to stand, another perspective, to appreciate and evaluate our world, both old and new.

Change is energizing, and can be intoxicating.  But it is not always better.  We need skeptics as well as risk-takers.  Slow absorbers and synthesizers as well as enthusiasts and early adopters.  People willing to resist the stampede.

Vision does not always mean a vision of changes to come.  Vision is also about evaluating consequences and interactions.  We need look no further than the spreading dead zones and huge floating islands of plastic garbage in our oceans, or to the climate we have irrevocably deformed, to realize this.

A Larger Reality

Ursula LeGuin made two different but related points, both vital, in accepting an award.

The first has to do with the literary legitimacy of science fiction and fantasy writers, and the importance of future visions to the future itself:

 "And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

 I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality."

The second point is the restraint on the freedom to write and on true authorship that's been growing a long while and has now reached nearly impossible proportions, not because of some fascist or even national security state, but because of the takeover by the institutionalized greed of capitalism:

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

 Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. 

 Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words."

This is almost her complete speech--it's under six minutes in the video above, and the complete transcript is here.

R.I.P. The Editor: Ben Bradlee

For a short time in the post-Watergate '70s, Ben Bradlee and I had something in common: we were both editors of a Washington newspaper.  Of course, fledgling alternative weekly Washington Newsworks was not exactly the giant, swaggering Washington Post.  We were the "Washington Outsiders" (as our promo said--I wrote it) in direct contrast to the insiders at the Post.  Though there was also another daily in town (the solid, well-edited Washington Star) the Post was the measure of all journalism in Washington.  They were all over the glamorous federal Washington, but their Metro section was weak.  So we looked for our stories there, as well as in the youth culture that the Post saw chiefly with bemusement.

Though I never met Bradlee, he was already an icon.  I'd been in Boston when the Pentagon Papers and Watergate were happening--my own stories on the 1972 Nixon campaign cited the Post's reporting before it permeated the political consciousness.

  Then when I was Newsworks editor, Bradlee's boldness was an unadmitted model.  My first news decision was reviving a story that had been held back because it might offend an advertiser.  Bradlee wouldn't be intimidated! I worked with the writer to make sure the story was solid, and we gave the advertisers a heads-up on its publication (They shrugged--they knew newspapers reported stories when they bought the ads.)

  Later I went after a national story which involved facing down some very important people, channeling Bradlee without realizing it.  My proudest moment now was how Newsworks covered the assassination of Chilean activist Orlando Letelier in a car bombing by Pinochet's secret police on the streets of Washington that also killed American Ronni Karpen Moffitt.  Jeff Stein did all the reporting (he's now a columnist at the Washington Post) all on his own, so except for a little text editing my role was as Newswork's Bradlee.  I put the story on the cover and gave it major play inside.  I worked with Jeff, with the art and production department.  The result was the best and most thorough coverage in the city.  Better than yours, Ben.  I'll bet you noticed.

Those who knew him are marking his death with their remembrances.  (For good example, David Remnick at the New Yorker.)  For everybody else, there's an apparently dead-on portrayal of Bradlee by Jason Robards in the classic film of All the President's Men.  For me, there was and is the example of a editor with courage and panache who stood for--and stood up for--a kind of journalism I believed in, and tried to do.  Sure, he had lots of faults and some lapses.  So did and do I.  But as a model, he was it.  May he rest in peace, but his restless spirit ever pervade American journalism.

Beginning of a Long Thought

"Recently, while moving my CD collection to new shelving, I struggled with feelings of obsolescence and futility...The tide has turned against the collector of recordings, not to mention the collector of books: what was once known as building a library is now considered hoarding."
Alex Ross
"The Classical Cloud"
New Yorker September 8, 2014

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.