What's the Story?

When I grow up I still want to be a novelist.  And a playwright.  But the kind of storytelling I've mostly done--journalistic storytelling-- remains a satisfying form.  I've realized that in a few ways recently.

One of the primary ways we think we know things is through the findings of science.  While much of that is accurate in a practical sense, a lot of it pretends to be sure of more than it actually can be sure of.  This is most evident in the lesser sciences such as economics and psychology, at least as they are practiced today.  Through narrow and dubiously designed experiments, psychologists pretend to be able to say all sorts of things about human behavior, human nature and how brains work.  These assertions get these folks tenured positions, books and TV interviews in which they purport to know a lot more than they do.  Their arrogance is amazing.  Especially since they must ignore the limitations of their experiments that have been defined repeatedly, most recently in a book I've just started reading by Jerome Kagan, called Psychology's Ghosts.

But I don't need to refer to this thoughtful and eminent authority--these limitations are maddeningly clear to me.  For one thing, they purport to say universal things based on "experiments" involving the behaviors and responses of mostly North American university undergraduates who volunteer to be subjects, perhaps for small amounts of money.  But there are broader objections.  I think especially of a panel discussion in Seattle I believe, but carried on C-Span, involving Jane Jacobs, who to my mind was one of the great minds of the 20th century, upon the publication of her final and prophetic book, Dark Age Ahead.  The friendly host made an offhand comment, saying something to the effect that although much of her evidence was "anecdotal," it was nevertheless intriguing.  It was not long before he was sorry he'd said it.  She honed in on this point with great precision.

Because it's a common charge: the only true evidence is scientific observation, especially from experiment, or statistical.  Other sources such as "anecdotal" or self-reporting (introspective) is less reliable.  Jane Jacobs strongly disagreed, and she was so eloquent that I went back and transcribed what she said:

“Our science began comparing two things to each other, [to find things like] the temperature needed to melt water. That was science for centuries. It’s easy to compare two things, it’s much more difficult to compare 3 or more. It’s “bivariant comparison”—it's very reductive, you have to leave out everything but 2 things, and real life is not like that. Real life attaches anything to everything else. We have begun to learn that in biology...In due course along came ‘disorganized complexity,’ like insurance actuarial tables, or marks a child gets in school—anything that is explained in a graph with a bell shape, or seems to be explained by statistics. Things belonging in this class are based on the law of averages. So many important things are left out in these comparisons, too. They are not really very clarifying in most cases, and are actually counterproductive in a good many others.

How has the human race been getting along all these centuries and millennia, sufficiently well with such bad inputs from the real world? I think we have been doing it with stories. Stories are a means of showing how everything is attached to everything else. Our stories on based on these multiple attachments, and what they mean. We love stories, as human beings. It’s the way we understand the world, very largely. One trouble is, instead of respecting our own intuitions about these things and our own abilities to analyze them and appreciate them, we have only? as some kind of second class intellectual operation. Scientists themselves despise anecdotal evidence, and everything that is a story is called anecdotal evidence, and not valued, and yet you can’t understand the world without anecdotal evidence.  Scientists may think a.e. is not important enough to occupy their time, but I think a.e. is important enough to occupy anybody’s time, beginning with very ancient poetry and up to film documentaries, which we’re learning to value more than we used to.”

Novels and other forms of fiction employ storytelling often without reference to facts derived from science (experiment, statistics, etc.), those these may be implied (and in some genres, like science fiction, employed directly though perhaps extended beyond the current science.)  But these "scientific" forms disdain story (although not in explaining themselves, when they most often employ metaphor.)  Journalistic storytelling combines "scientific" fact and anecdotal information. 

Further, journalistic storytelling depends on testing both kinds of information.  For instance I might ask experts (and often, different kinds of experts) the same question and see how many sets of facts I get.  When the facts--the numbers, the interpretations--start to converge, or at least the disagreement among them sharpens--then I know how to evaluate and use these facts.  The facts are also tested by what people say, by anecdotal and introspective evidence, which in turn are tested by the facts.  The interplay of all of them is part of the story, and sometimes the story itself.

From the experience of high school debate as much as the anticipation of being caught out in print, I learned to be skeptical of facts and how they were ascertained.  From reading and writing fiction and plays, I learned elements of storytelling.  These combinations make this a form that is somehow more comprehensive.  Journalistic storytelling may not have the depth or resonance or provide the aesthetic pleasure of great novels or great drama.  But it does have an aesthetic that I've found pleasing to work with.

Write to Life

Reviewing a biography of Kurt Vonnegut has prompted more thinking about the difficulties if not impossibility of writing to the highest standards while being a decent human being who is fair to others.  Vonnegut's biography is one of several literary exposes recently (of Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger, and Hemingway again) that emphasize how bad they were at life.  Hemingway as a phony macho, a self-promoting liar, etc.  Heller as a bad father, and Vonnegut as a sad and bitter man, who betrayed friends, abused one wife (and was abused by another), and scared children.  He, like the others, was not like his public image.  That's the big revelation supposedly.

(I should say immediately that there is plenty of counterevidence in this biography of Vonnegut's kindnesses, loyalty, etc.  But on the whole it seems to emphasize the flaws.)

Vonnegut brings this topic to me in a peculiarly personal way.  I was in precisely the generation of young readers in the late 60s that made him famous, and my admiration was as a writer as well as a reader.  Vonnegut had taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop just a few years before I entered there.  My fiction teacher in my senior year of college had been one of his students.  So the evocation of that place and that time in this biography has particular resonance.

Those years turned out to be the tail end of an era--roughly Hemingway to Vonnegut and Heller--in which the novelist was an important and influential figure.  This was also a time that people drank a lot, especially writers.  And they smoked a lot, especially writers.  It was during the sexual revolution so-called, and before the consciousness-raising--and that's what it was--prompted by the womens movement.  But even within the context where drinking, smoking and philandering was common--and even more expected among writers-- there was behavior that stood out as troubling, awful, even scary.  So even before Iowa (at a few writing conferences, or on campus during writers visits) I had seen professional writers behaving badly.  I saw writers who were abusive drinkers, sexual predators, liars and cowards. What I didn't see I heard, because writers could also be vicious gossips.

So even as I saw some of these writers as role models, I was troubled.  The drinking and smoking was just exhausting and debilitating,  though it was a long time before I gave it up, as it could occasionally lead to some memorably wild evenings, as when I found myself playing blues piano with novelist Vance Bourjaily on slide trombone. But patterns of deceit bothered me, and cruelty repulsed me, and frightened me.  I didn't want to become that.  Then there were the questions of irresponsibility.

Some of this behavior made me lose respect for these writers, and question the validity of their work.  I think that's inevitable, even at a distance-- when you read that writers were cruel, it casts a  pall over the writing.  But as a reader, it's ultimately the words on the page that make the difference in our lives.  As a writer, a beginning writer, it raises questions of identity, and what kind of a life is possible.

For even though character flaws are involved, the necessities of writing itself come into play.  I also learned from writing how hard it is to maintain a balance. The world being created on the page is a very different world from the one populated by real people, in which actions have actual consequences that can't be corrected in the next draft. I know a writer now, with several very well-respected novels, who said he gave up writing novels because it was too hard on his family and his relationships. The sensitivity required of a writer writing leaves a painful vulnerability to reality, while the discipline and standards of writing so intensely can feed a monstrous impatience with the world, for its imperfections and shoddy standards, as well as its conspiracy designed to destroy your concentration.

Despite my call-me-irresponsible bravado, that question of responsibility, and doubts that I could be a writer and also responsible, was a major reason I never married.  Mostly it was my inability to be financially responsible while still pursuing a vocation as a writer, but that alone was so hard that it became overwhelming to consider adding house and children.  (Vonnegut knew this--he used to say that one reason there are so many gay men in the arts is that it takes so long to establish a career, marriage and family is unaffordable.)  But there was also the doubt that I could be emotionally and personally responsible to relationships and to my writing.  So this is in part why I fell into that statistically insignificant class of hetero men who never married.

I saw what the costs to a family might be.  In being reminded of those days, I realized that I was in that particular career track, which through a combination of my own actions and the actions of women who saw all this more clearly than I did, I left.

In the end I suppose the joke was on me, for I didn't have much success, especially success on the page, especially in my most cherished forms of fiction and plays.  I'll never know what my refusal to sacrifice others to my writing struggles contributed to that, but less than a fierce and selfish dedication to that writing above all may well have contributed.  I expect it still does.

It's not that I've been the height of responsibility, far from it. And as a factor in my failures this may be a self-serving delusion. But when I look back on what the writer's life was supposed to be and sometimes was, I'm glad I dodged that bullet.  Like a lot of my accomplishments, this one is of what I didn't do, of pain not caused.

 To some extent that was a road deliberately not taken.  And to perhaps a greater extent, it remains so.  I suppose if I still felt my gift was so great I'd make different choices.  And I don't presume to judge those whose accomplishments are greater.  Even at a distance, I found the Vonnegut biography shockingly reductive.  What's in it (if its proportionately true) may be another side of the story, but it isn't the whole story.  He may have been different in life than he was in interviews and books, but the interviews and books are a big part of the story.  Maybe no writer can live up to the ideals in the work, in the wit and inspiration of the words.  But we can share those ideals and aspirations.

This is an early demonstration of a graph of storytelling that Vonnegut refined--but not a lot--over the years.  It's about four minutes long.

R.I.P. Sam, Bill and Fred

Three college teachers who were important to me have passed away in the past few months.  The most recent was Sam Moon, the professor who sought me out and first talked to me as I was registering for classes at Knox College.  I was there on the Scholastic Magazines Writing Awards Scholarship, and he was head of the writing program (which he pretty much invented.)  I can see his face across the table right now.

He wanted to talk to me before I registered in case I thought I had to take writing courses because of my writing scholarship.  He said I didn't, and probably would have gotten a scholarship anyway.  I had read and re-read the brochure on the writing program the previous spring, and then all summer.  It was one of the main reasons I chose Knox (I had a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh as well.)  So I told him I actually wanted to take writing courses.  He seemed very pleased.

I did take several writing courses from him, and he was always willing to read and discuss a manuscript even when it wasn't part of a course.  He listened well, asked questions, tried to get inside your thinking.  But he also let you know what he thought, in certain terms.  I don't remember much that's specific, just odd moments of classes or in his office.  I believe--and this applies to other teachers--that a lot of what we learn from teachers that turns out to be most important is what we absorbed without realizing it, or at least without realizing and remembering where we learned it.   

What I do associate the most with Sam Moon however is the bounty of writers and others who spent time at Knox while I was there.  Many of those specific individuals were there because of Sam Moon.  He was himself a poet who published regularly in Chicago's prestigous Poetry Magazine and elsewhere.  He had the respect of writers and he was connected to their world.

So in my time I saw and heard poets from Mark Van Doren to David Ignatov.  I had lunch with W.H. Auden!  Gary Snyder came pretty much directly from Japan for a week one spring, and read for hours every day.  We waited for him in Old Main, listening for the bells in his boots jingling down the stone hallway.  Nobody who was there will ever forget the week that Robert Creeley visited, or (for other reasons) James Dickey. Robert Bly came to read at least twice. These poets changed us.  John Cage came to campus several times, as did dancer Merce Cunningham--and once they were there at the same time, as the Cunningham group performed a piece by Cage.  Grace Paley read her stories. They are part of my college memories--bringing tea to Denise Levertov, talking about the New York Worlds Fair on the Gizmo patio with John Cage ("I liked the lines," he said.)  Others probably had something to do with bringing these people to Knox, but it was pretty much Sam. 

He was also possibly the last Knox teacher I talked to in his Old Main office, when I visited campus in the 1980s. I'd been out of school 15 years or so by then, but he recognized me standing uncertainly at his office door, as a group of undergrad writers surrounded him at his desk. We had a coffee in the Gizmo.

He retired soon after that (I remember I wrote something for a book to be presented to him at his farewell dinner), and I was surprised to see that he left Galesburg soon afterwards.  He had another life, another quarter century somewhere else, in New York state.  He's buried in Ontario.  Our teachers are always something of a mystery to us, as young as we were, but I'll bet Sam was more of a mystery than most.

William Matthews was pretty much the entire Religion department when I was at Knox.  I don't think I ever had a class with him, but for some reason he liked things I wrote, for the newspaper and the campus magazines.  People would tell me that he quoted them enthusiastically in his classes.  I was embarrassed, since it seemed to compromise my lapsed Catholic dogmatic anti-religion.  I did talk with him from time to time, but again, I couldn't feel comfortable, thanks to 12 years of priests and nuns.  I do wonder if he had anything to do with bringing another speaker to campus, who had a profound effect on me.  I don't remember what he was actually talking about, there in the Commons Room of Old Main, but he made one offhand comment that reoriented me completely: he noted that after killing an animal, a Native American hunter would say a prayer thanking the animal.  Eventually this moment would send me on a different road, spiritual and otherwise.

I recently learned from a fellow student who got back in touch after a very long time that Fred Newman died several months ago.  Fred was a philosophy professor who changed more than my life in his time at Knox.  I had only one class with him, and knew him for no more than a year or so.  I could write pages on that spring of my freshman year, and its impact on me for years following.

But I lost complete track of him after Knox, and though I had seen his name from time to time--not usually in flattering contexts, as a kind of New York political eccentric--I was unaware of the extent, nature and influence of his work over the years.  Which is kind of astonishing, since I used to spend a fair amount of time in New York in worlds that touched upon his.  He was political, a "public philosopher", a playwright and songwriter with dozens of productions, etc.  I learned most of this from his website.  It even has sound files of him lecturing--talk about a blast from the past!

I'm sorry that I wasn't aware of this while he was alive. He remained a charismatic figure well beyond Knox, so on the other hand it's unlikely I would have wanted to go through that exhausting experience again.  From his obits I learned something else: that he lost his college teaching jobs after Knox because he insisted on giving all his male students As because of the draft.  I wish I'd known that.  I'd probably need pages more to explain that to those who weren't young men then, but it's something else I will always admire about Fred Newman.

May they rest in peace--Sam, Bill, Fred, if I may call them that.  I probably can.  

Hillman on the Author's Battlefield

I was never in any military, and although I played at war endlessly for a few years as a boy, I never developed a lot of interest in the military vocabulary.  But James Hillman was in the U.S. Navy during World War II, tending to amputees and other severely injured in hospitals.  His last book (so far) was A Terrible Love of War, which according to the paperback back cover, somebody in the San Francisco Chronicle called "A skillfully constructed tour de force."  Oh yeah, that was me.  And yes, it was a pun, kind of.

Anyway, that's a long way to get to this slyly revealing passage in that book in which Hillman talks about writing using military terms and concepts--not something I've ever thought about, or how I approached writing, but worth considering. 

"Writing books for me is anyway much like a military campaign.  I  confess to fighting my way through with military metaphors.  There is a strategy, an overall concept, and there are tactics along the way.  When stuck, don't dig in; keep moving forward.  Don't obsess trying to reduce a strongpoint by sheer force or laying seige.  Isolate it and in time it will fall by itself.  No pitched battles with the interior voices of saboteurs, critics, adversaries.  A light skirmish, a show of arrows, and disappear into the next paragraph.  Camouflage your own vulnerability, your lack of reserves with showy parades and bugles---remember everyone else is equally vulnerable.  Pillage the storehouses of thought, refurbish old material and use it to reinforce your lines.  Abandon ground you can't exploit, but when you've got an issue on the run, take all the territory you can."

"Music's not for stopping.  You go till you drop...For me, it ends when it ends.  Johnny Cash did his best work in the last two years of his life.  That's what musicians should aim to do."

Roger Daltrey, lead singer of the Who, interview
in August 2011 "Uncut"

For Ralph Waldo Emerson (that's his Concord house in the photo), the crucial unit of living time was the day.  He was inspired by what could be accomplished or revealed in each new day, and frustrated by the lost hours, the plod of seemingly wasted days.

"Days" is probably his most famous poem:

Daughters of Time, the hypocrite Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent.  I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

So in some real sense, the struggle to fulfill the potential of the day is the essential creative struggle. And it is renewed...every day. Elsewhere he wrote: "The days are gods.  That is, everything is divine."   In his great biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, Robert D. Richardson virtually outdoes the eloquence of his subject, on this subject:

"The personal consequences of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise.  Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken.  Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every time the clock says six in the morning.  On a day no different from the one now breaking, Shakespeare sat down to begin Hamlet and [Margaret] Fuller began her history of the Roman revolution of 1848.  Each of us has all the time there is; each accepts those invitations he can discern.  By the same token, each evening brings a reckoning of infinite regret for the paths refused, openings not seen, and actions not taken."

But the essence of it is "Each of us has all the time there is," but "each accepts those invitations he can discern."  This is beyond the irksome questions of "time management," or the conflicting demands, needs, temptations as well as falsely promising dead ends.  On good days, one may forgive the lapses, knowing that even apparently wasted time may contribute to something that arrives unexplained and redeems the day in a flash.  On bad days, the temptation of course is to wallow in that possibility.  The "divine dissatisfaction" jockeys with receptivity and acceptance, as the questions narrow with the numbered days. 

"All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within; their source was a fatal compulsion.  What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself.  I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.  I have never counted upon any strong response, any powerful resonance, to my writings.  They represent a compensation for our times, and I have been impelled to say what no one wants to hear.  For that reason, and especially at the beginning, I often felt utterly forlorn.  I knew that what I said would be unwelcome, for it is difficult for people of our times to accept the counterweight to the conscious world.  Today I can say that it is truly astonishing that I have had as much success as has been accorded me--far more than I ever could have expected.  I have the feeling that I have done all that it was possible for me to do.  Without a doubt that life work could have been larger, and could have been done better; but more was not within my power."

"A book of mine is always a matter of fate.  There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course."

"My life has been in a sense the quintessence of what I have written, not the other way around.  The way I am and the way I write are a unity.  All my ideas and all my endeavors are myself.  Thus the 'autobiography' is merely the dot on the i."

"In Bollingen, silence surrounds me almost audibly, and I live 'in modest harmony with nature.'  Thoughts rise to the surface which reach back into the centuries, and accordingly anticipate a remote future.  Here the torment of creation is lessened; creativity and play are close together."

Carl Jung, who died on June 6, 1961, 50 years ago today. [See also this post and its links.]

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould
White Pine Pictures

Nearly 30 years after his death, pianist Glenn Gould remains an icon. He’s one of the few classical musicians revered by peers who also has awestruck fans without expertise in that area of music. I’m one of those. I’ve collected his recordings, read two biographies, and have listened to few pieces of music—and none of classical music—more than I have of Gould’s 1981 version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

There are a number of videos about Gould that are limited, bathetic or complete rip-offs.  Also a fine fictional film based on Gould's life, Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould by Francois Girard (it took me years to catch on to the fact that the number corresponds to the number of variations in "Goldberg": this film had to have been called The Glenn Gould Variations at some point.)  And a 2006 film I haven't yet seen called Hereafter by Gould confidant Bruno Monsaingeon that adds dramatizations and encounters with Gould fanatics to archival video and audio. But this film, Genius Within by Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont is a satisfying biographical treatment with a fair amount of music. It's been on the festival circuit, but the DVD extra interviews really contribute.

I happened to rent this along with the docu DVD on 1970s popular singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, and they have provocative similarities. So instead of recapping the Gould story, I’ll suggest some of their commonalities as artists.

Artistic success is often a matter of being ready with the right skills at the right time and place. It also tends to be circumscribed in time, between the damage or obsessions that motivate, and the time when their effects accumulate.

Nilsson had a troubled childhood, Gould perhaps a lonely one. They both were successful in their 20s with a clear path to an artistic career, and they both violated career rules, to their benefit and at a cost. (Both notoriously avoided live performance for the recording studio.  Gould felt touring drained imagination, causing him to "grow old very quickly.  It's a dreadful life.")  Drugs (alcohol and 70s recreationals for Nilsson, prescription drugs for Gould) arguably fueled their work and arguably hastened their demise.

Both men mesmerized their friends, and demanded much of them. Both explored other creative areas but returned to culminating works—Gould especially, with his second Goldberg Variations in the last year of his life. They were both hyperactive and intuited an early death, and both died in their early 50s.

But their legends can lead to distortions. One woman on this DVD reveals a romantic relationship and implies a sexual one with the reputedly virginal Gould. Nilsson’s life also became more balanced with a happy family life in his later years.

Yet crucially they each followed internal guides, and apart from personal failings their unorthodox career decisions turned out to be artistically right.  Perhaps this sentence from Thoreau, from the journal passage quoted in the previous post, applies not only to individual works but to the arc of a career: “We must walk consciously only part way to our goal,” Thoreau wrote, “and then leap in the dark to our success.”

"Find out as soon as possible what are the best things in your composition, and then shape the rest to fit them.  The former will be the midrib and veins of the leaf.

There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds.  The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours.  The thought came to use because we were in a fit mood; also we were unconscious and did not know that we had said or done a good thing.  We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.  What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree.  It is the last time we shall do it,--our unconscious leavings."

H.D. Thoreau--Journal  March 11, 1859

So here's the dream: I'm in the driver's seat of a car, coming up to a huge truck.  It is so big that my car could fit under its carriage with plenty of room on both sides.  And that is what starts to happen--my car is moving slowly forward under this dark truck.  You might expect I'd put a stop to this, but I then realize that I have no steering wheel in front of me.  Instead I have a typewriter.  Not a computer keyboard: a typewriter.  And I'm typing as I observe the dark underside of the truck and feel it all around me.    

“The function of an artist is to work for a)himself b) to leave something memorable, for the future, to shore up the ruins.”

Bruce Chatwin
painting: Self-Portrait by Gino Severini

“Writing is always my metre of health—writing, which a sane philosopher would probably say was the surest symptom of a diseased mind.”
Emerson

Among the many things my mother didn't live to see was me, making pizzelles for Christmas, dancing around the kitchen to Glenn Miller. At this distance from family members and old friends, much of my Christmas is imaginary anyway. But as the years go on, my imagination is peopled by an increasing proportion of those who aren't around at all.

"The difference in the intelligence world between very clever and very stupid is often very small. It's the same in writing."

John Le Carre

Update: In the comments, Robert Z notes that November 11 is Kurt Vonnegut's birthday, and that a Vonnegut Museum is opening this week. Here's the hotlink.

Second Update: Here's the New York Times story on the opening.

Why I thought of Kurt Vonnegut when I was in the U. library looking for something else entirely I don't know. But I did, and I found two fairly obscure books which contain interviews with him. One is a very slim volume called Like Shaking Hands With God (Seven Stories Press), which is actually two dialogues with another writer, Lee Stringer, who wrote about his experience as a homeless man in New York and earlier in his life in his book, Grand Central Winter. Vonnegut championed his work, and the two did a public conversation in 1998 and continued it privately, though recorded and again with a questioner named Ross.

A couple of statements struck me, which I'd like to record here. The first was from Stringer actually, who was talking about our fast-paced and results-oriented culture. "I guess in that kind of environment it is difficult for what we call literature to exist because a book is not all that practical a thing in the short term. It's probably infinitely practical in the long term."

Several times the discussion turned to Stringer's efforts to write his second book. Stringer was working through knowing too much about the book business that he didn't know the first time, and it was getting in the way. In the private conversation, Vonnegut insisted that he didn't really have to write another book. "All a writer has to do is write one book, and you did that."

This might seem odd from a writer who wrote so much, but Vonnegut was sincere (backed by statements he made on other occasions, which I'll get to eventually in this--let's dub it now--Vonnegut on writing thread.) And as someone who has been trying to get that second book together (numerous second books of course) for way too long, it's a comfort. In a sense, I know what he means. It's quite a trick to pull off, and the book exists as the evidence. So I'm not sure I'll stop feeling bad that I haven't published more, but I'll take some solace in Vonnegut's statement. Or maybe I could even call it a blessing.

This is Amy Tan's talk on creativity that is posted at the TED site. One of our local cable access channels runs a package of TED talks probably every day, and I really enjoy seeing them on my TV rather than going directly to particular ones on my computer. Probably a result of being a TV kid.

Although the audience laughs a lot during at least the first part of this talk, she is really talking about creativity, especially in her writing. Like most TED talks, it is creatively illustrated so it's a visual experience, too.

When this came on TV I took some notes, which are unlikely to be accurate. They're my thoughts inspired by hers. So for that very reason I will reproduce them here:

Facing death you become creative in a survival sense.

You create a cosmology for your narrative world.

meaning=what matters

the essential question of every story: WHY AM I HERE?

Moral ambiguity is where the story begins.

Serendipity signals your focus.
The more you are aware of serendipity, the more that it happens.

We create by asking questions.

I believe in specifics, especially of the past.

"I have to become the story." Feeling becomes the story. Compassion.

“We measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort we can put forth...He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero.”
William James

"He is a poor writer who does not teach courage of treatment."
Emerson

Painting: Heroic Roses by Paul Klee

"I lose days determining how hours should be spent."
Emerson

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.

Mankind's Greatest Invention

"Surely mankind's greatest invention is the sentence." So begins John Banville's essay on Robert C. Richardson's books on Emerson, in what has to be my favorite quote of recent years, perhaps of all time.

When you're a writer, no matter how famous or obscure, whether you're one of the handful anointed by income or crowned by royalties to bear the title of writer, or you're a wretch like me, insultingly underpaid for squeezing into dubious forms, sooner or later, what gives you the buzz and the meaning, is a sentence you see and hear that you've written.

Oh sure, some get off on paragraphs, and there's the lucky few that get to play with chapters or scenes, and whole books, plays, sagas. But even they share the secret (and often secretive) gleam of a shining sentence, appearing under their fingers.

I wrote a review of a book about a writer who made very good sentences: Jane Austen. And in it I wrote a pretty nifty sentence, at least I like it. And for once I will violate the code and call your attention to it. It is mere cleverness maybe, but it is musical and funny, with a touch of cultural wit at the center. Or maybe it's just cute, I don't care. These days I must take my pleasure where I can. And pointing out a really elegant sentence is forbidden. That's up to readers to discover, and if they don't, well, everybody loses.

So in connection with Jane Austen's journey from obscurity in life to Jane-mania in the 21st century, I wrote this: She has the fame of the single name: absent Tarzan, she is our only Jane.

Good. Now I can put the clipping away with all the other forgotten sentences, and make some more.

Purpose




For ten years, between 1984 and 1994, Jeremy Brett played Sherlock Holmes in a series of 41 stories for Granada TV in the UK. His performances earned him the reputation as the definitive screen Holmes for his time, perhaps for all time. Any starring role in a long-running television series tends to absorb the life of the actor, as well as define these actors for their careers, and beyond. Often as well, these roles change the personalities of the actors, sometimes thoroughly and permanently. Jeremy Brett exemplifies all of these possibilities, except perhaps for one. The role of Sherlock Holmes did not change his subsequent career, for he had none. A year after he completed the Holmes series, Jeremy Brett was dead.

In the Granada episodes, now available in restored condition on DVD, Brett created a more intense and mercurial Holmes, his sudden stillness exploding in quick motion and flamboyant gestures. Brett was a close student of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories and felt his interpretation was accurate, but it also reflected his own personality, as such long-running roles often do. But in his case, it's difficult to find the line between character and actor.

Biographical sketches as well as DVD commentaries and interviews emphasize how deeply Brett delved into the stories and the character, and how relentless were his efforts to use the TV medium and make the best possible films to serve them. It became his obsession.

In contrast to other Holmes incarnations on film which eventually invented new stories for the Holmes character (including the classic Basil Rathbone movies, and certainly the recent Robert Downey feature), the Granada series based its stories closely and exclusively on the original Conan Doyle stories. His first series of stories ended with Holmes apparent death, though popular demand would cause Conan Doyle to revive the character and write many more stories about him. Brett had just finished filming that death of Holmes episode when his own wife died of cancer.

Soon after, due to popular demand, the second Granada series was commissioned, and Brett's identification with Holmes grew even stronger. The qualities that he had already perceived as similar in Holmes and himself became overwhelming--especially that contrast of periods of fierce energy with periods of lassitude-- until Brett was forced to seek treatment for manic depression. (The symptoms apparently became pronounced during the "Return of Sherlock Holmes" series, and treatment had begun just before he started the "Casebook of Sherlock Holmes" final series.)

But Brett kept up his concentration and his exhausting schedule, playing Holmes on screen and on stage. Yet the lithium he took for his illness began to change him physically, as became apparent on screen. The later episodes chronicle these physical changes--such as weight gain, especially in his face, gaunt and spare at first, then puffier, wan and haunting.

Though overwork and his overwrought obsession as well as effects of lithium and the manic depression itself probably contributed to physical deterioration, in the end it was his enlarged heart and scarred heart valves, basically from a childhood bout of rheumatic fever, that led to his death in his early 60s.

I first saw Brett's portrayal of Holmes when the A&E cable network--back when it actually was an Arts and Entertainment network--ran the Granada series late at night (around the time that it also ran the UK Lovejoy series.) I was lost in the wilderness of western PA then, and the Holmes series was an oasis. Brett's portrayal was riveting, and inspiring.

Now I'm somewhat obsessed with watching episodes on DVD, particularly the second, Return of Sherlock Holmes series. The clarity of the DVD--much better than the prints of cable--show Brett as even more of a revelation, as well as showcasing the visual splendor of the series. In this age of CSI and NCIS forensics, the detection aspect is of little interest--except for Holmes insistence that his method is imagination. No--the interest is Holmes, and Brett.

So I ponder the question of whether Brett's obsession was wholly tragic, or perhaps a little to be envied. In various ways, he gave his life to being Sherlock Holmes for millions of people, including me. He'd been a fairly successful stage, TV and film actor for years, but the chance to star in an iconic TV series comes to few. He made the most of it. He made the best of it, at least as his work. He undoubtedly sacrificed something, including probably years of his life.

On the other hand, in pouring himself into Holmes, he also made the best of his own personality, and eventually of his illness. We can speculate that identifying so completely with Holmes exaggerated these tendencies into a true illness, or the opposite, that he turned the illness into something incredibly creative.

In the end, it seems to me that his tragedy is not so bad as more ordinary tragedies, of lives unfulfilled. An excellent, iconic series of 41 televised stories--of intriguing and entertaining but hardly profound popular art-- may not be the greatest accomplishment, but it is a great one. Is it worth a life? I think so--that is: I think I'd take that bargain.

Postscript: I wanted to add a note about an absurd feature of the Brett/ Holmes DVDs--namely their English subtitles. Here we have the most faithful adaptations of stories by one of the most popular English authors, and the English subtitles for the DVDs seem to have been done by someone for whom English is a distant second language. They are so sloppy and inaccurate that they seem to have been done with careless haste. An example from a DVD of one of the Granada movies (I've seen two--both disappointments: they were padded one hour episodes), Dr. Watson refers to a book of poems by Tennyson. The English subtitle says "Henison," which requires not only mishearing (surely the point of English subtitles to spoken English is to compensate for exactly that) but ignorance--even more, carelessness. Unforgivable.

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."

"Those lines on your palm they can be read
for a hidden part of your life that only
those links can say--nobody's voice
can find so tiny a message as comes
across your hand. Forbidden to complain,
you have tried to be like somebody else,
and only this fine record you examine
sometimes like this can remember where
you were going before that long
silent evasion that your life became."
William Stafford

My mother was born in Italy, and her family and the community of their friends who came over together were all a major part of my young life. Plus, when I was growing up in the 50s, there were prominent Italians in Hollywood, in music and sports: the era of Sinatra and DiMaggio. There were even songs on the hit parade in the Italian language.

But it's been downhill since then. For years now, Italian Americans have been defined by the pop culture version of the Mafia. A collection of Italian language songs was advertised on TV as "Mob Hits." I found it all so insulting and demeaning that I don't care how "well done" the Sopranos was, I was never going to watch it. And I'm sure not going to watch "Jersey Shore," yet another stereotype that has nothing to do with my experience.

What I did watch however was a wonderful film story, made in Italy, about a group of characters who were adolescents or young adults in the 60s, and following them into the 21st century. The English title is The Best of Youth. It was made for television, but was also released in theatres, usually shown in two parts, each 3 hours long. (Available from netflix, etc.) But it is worth the time. It's one of the best written, best acted, most beautifully photographed stories I've ever seen. It was very special to me because I understood the common expressions in Italian--I think the dialect was close to the one I heard mostly as a child, but for much of my life. Even the body language was familiar--I've never felt so attuned to the people in a film before, not even an American film. Everyone should see this, but especially Italian Americans who feel like they have to be fugitives from the prevailing insulting stereotypes.

“Chaplin’s great virtue, aside from his comedic gifts, was his emotional readiness. Those who don’t respond to it will be quick to deny that emotion, or to call him saccharine—and indeed, Chaplin did have a tendency to pull out all the emotional stops and risk bathos. But it always felt real. His was not false sentiment but rather a naked display of raw sentiment. And that’s more than forgivable. It’s who he was. It’s what he had to risk to make his art, and the transcendent emotion of his best work shows that he was right to trust his heart.”
Mick LaSalle

San Francisco Chronicle

"The contrast between the wisdom of our literature and the folly of our rulers and voters is a melancholy proof that people get nothing out of books except what they bring to them, and that even when the books explode their prejudices and rebuke their villainies they will read their own dispositions into the books in spite of the authors, and hang up their instruments of torture and their bullet-riddled banners in the very temples of Mercy and Peace."

G.B. Shaw

"The riddle of the age has for each a private solution."
--Emerson

"Fate"

"He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice
Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony."
--Wallace Stevens
Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction

Woody Guthrie, bard of the Great Depression, who wrote so many great 30s tunes like "Hard Travelin'" and sang others like "The Hobo's Lullaby." That's one way I learned about the Great Depression, and another way quite recently was through letters to my father, as I write about in the post below.

Talking Great Depression Blues

I posted this on my Stage Matters blog, in connection with a Dell'Arte School original production here on the North Coast about the Great Depression. But since it's about family and history, and what I learned on my summer vacation, it seems to me it also belongs here...

I saw the Dell'Arte original show about the Great Depression, called The Body Remembers, shortly after returning from a visit back home to western Pennsylvania. While I was there, my sisters and I sorted through several boxes of photos and documents, some unopened since each of my parents died (my mother in 1974, my father in 1990.) There were some photos from the 1940s and 30s, and also three letters my father received at his CCC Camp in 1940--one from a hometown buddy who was in another CCC camp, and two from his mother--my paternal grandmother, who died several years before I was born.

My father rarely talked about his past, but whenever there was an economic recession or other economic problem in the news, I could pretty much count on him saying that what they ought to do is revive the CCCs. I've since read about the CCC and other New Deal programs, but those letters provided something more specific: the role they played in my father's life, part of which led to me.

The Civil Conservation Corps was a program that employed young men (starting at 17 or 18) in conservation projects all over America. The projects were developed by the Interior Department, but the Corps was run by the Army. Young men lived in Army-style camps, were provided with food, clothing and shelter, and paid a small wage, most of which was automatically sent back to their families. Between 1934 and 1943, some 3 million men cumulatively worked in more than 4,000 camps.

From the letters we learned that my father was in a camp in Blain, Pennsylvania, a few hundred miles from his home in United, PA. Some guys got sent thousands of miles away, often to the West, but that may have mostly been earlier in the program. His friend was in a camp even closer to home, in the Laurel Highlands, not far from where one of my sisters now lives. There were apparently about 150 guys at my father's camp (though 300 was the norm), and they were building Big Spring state park. The camp was very isolated, probably as far into the woods as he'd ever been (or ever would be again). But besides a military schedule and discipline, they had activities--sports teams that competed with other camps, for example. His friend was closer to a town (Somerset) and so seemed to have a lively social life. (Here's another good source on the CCCs in this region.)

My father's hometown was built by the United Coal and Coke Company, and his father and grandfathers were (or had been) coal miners. Mines were closing in the 30s, and there were big and violent strikes in the 20s and 30s, that got the miners essentially nothing. There were few jobs, no money and no future there.

The plight of the miners in the area was so severe that the FDR administration built one of a few experimental communities there. They built new houses (with a novelty in the area: indoor plumping) and started cooperative farms and eventually a small garment factory. It came to be called "Norvelt," the last syllables of Eleanor Roosevelt's name, after she came to visit it. Locals apparently just called it the homestead.

The homestead is mentioned in my grandmother's letters, though they didn't get to live there. They were still in United. By 1940 Norvelt was changing, and people who lived there were being asked to buy their houses rather than rent them. But I also learned about Norvelt on this trip because there was an article in the local newspaper while I was there: this summer was Norvelt's 75th anniversary. And as it happens, one of my sisters now works for a small business that's housed in the very building that used to be the Norvelt coop garment factory.

At issue in the letters in 1940 was what my father was going to do next. Apparently his hitch was up, and there was anxiety about losing the money he was bringing in. The family was saving to buy their house. The letters left the matter unresolved, but they fit with something else I saw many years before. It was a mimeographed, stapled newspaper, and inside it was my father's name, as editor-in-chief. Probably my mother dug it out and gave it to me, when I started my string of editors jobs in junior high. My father never mentioned it. I've examined it since, though at the moment I've lost track of it again.

It was the publication of the "self-governing community" called Armor City, a National Youth Administration work experience project in South Charleston, West Virginia. It was another federal project under the umbrella of the Works Project Administration. It seemed to be very much like the CCCs, except this was for slightly older young men, and it's purpose was to train them for jobs in industry, not the woods. Eventually it was training them for jobs in national defense, and judging from other information about South Charleston at the time, that's what my father was probably doing. There was a big naval munitions plant in South Charleston, which FDR visited.

My father was at Armor City in 1941 and apparently still there in 1943, when he was called home for his mother's last illness. (He was found physically unfit for the draft. As children we were told it was because of color-blindness, but it may actually have been because of a deformation in his back, perhaps the result of a fall in infancy.) Soon after, he got a good paying job in industry, in a plant in Youngwood, PA that made military instruments. That's also where he met the young woman who would become his wife and my mother.

I grew up with some tales from the Depression, on both sides of the family, as well as from the lives of parents and grandparents of school friends, and total strangers. I got more interested in it all in the 60s, thanks in part to Bob Dylan being so interested in Woody Guthrie. And of course, Arlo. I've heard stories since--Steve Allen told me a few--and read many more. It's important in terms of what individuals and families went through, though I would stop short of calling those who lived through it and are still alive "Depression survivors," as some of the Dell'Arte publicity did. It sounds too much like "Holocaust survivors," which is a different order of experience.

It also tends to distance us from it. Books like the Stud Terkel volume that inspired this production are one way to get close to it, or even recollections in memoirs--I was especially interested in Malcolm Cowley's, with his Pittsburgh connections. But of course the best of all is family memories, and letters like these.

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.

In the "day time" I am what others expect, seem to want and need me to be.

At night, I am what I need to be.

Who you are includes who you've been, and that includes who you've imagined being.




Woke up thinking--I've been here over 12 years, and I've not attended a single wedding or funeral.

I went to bed thinking--the complacency etc. of my parents and their generation drove me nuts when I was young. But the future disasters I saw for my lifetime are mostly still in the future. They'll shape the lives of the next generation or the generation after that.

[These are from old, undated scraps. They could be months old, or years.]

From Synedcoche, New York, an unusual film I just saw on video, described in the post below.

Synecdoche, Synecdoche

I just saw a video of the film Synedoche, New York, written and directed by Charles Kaufman (who wrote Being John Malkovich, which I didn't much like, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I did kind of like.) This is an unusual film in form and content, which covers in dreamlike fashion some forty years in the life of Caden Cotard, a theater director in Schenectady with a messy life, who wins a MacArthur Grant and goes to New York City to create a massive theatre work as his ultimate expression.

There are layers, time jumps, reality and fantasy intermixed, visual and word puns (like the title), probable references to various mental disorders and possible elements of Jungian psychology, in this movie about life, purpose, love and especially death. The story begins with Cotard at about 40, in more or less the present, and leaves him at about 90 in an apocalyptic future. Throughout the often brutal, tragic and absurd events, Cotard (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) keeps getting new and often ridiculous ideas about his increasingly sprawling play, which involves hundreds of actors in residence for decades, but never a finished play for an audience. His dying words are something like, "I think I know how to do this play. I have an idea."

The DVD includes a discussion among a group of young film bloggers, all of whom have astute comments. They talked about the personal impact of this film, how it required something from them, and how they feel this is missing from movies. It reminded me of movies and their impact on me in the 1970s (though some of the movies I saw then and was affected by so strongly were made years before.) They also all found the movie initially depressing.

I can see why, but even though I am older than Kaufman, his view of the point of view of someone my age or older seems right. Though the presence of death, the brevity of life, the telescoping of time, the ongoing stubborn and probably futile search for a summary expression, are not just implied but hammered on, I felt the ending was fairly positive. Cotard finds an illusory but fulfilling final moment of love, and his last thought is a further idea on his never-ended project. I can see why younger people find this depressing. But I don't exactly, and it turns out that Kaufman (in an interview on the DVD) agrees with me: the all-encompassing work is never finished. Trying to create it is just life.

Perhaps it also is a product of age that I found so much of the movie, while painful, was also funny. Maybe this movie for the young is a tragedy. For the old, a comedy.