A Severini Saga

I haven't been posting so often on this blog recently, partly because I've been engaged in another project: researching and writing a narrative of my extended family, from what origins I could find to my memories of the 1950s.

I expected this to be of interest only to my family, including (I hope) its younger members when they get older and curious.  Like a lot of my retirement projects, it's been something I've pursued off and on, over decades. It's been fascinating for many reasons, and often frustrating, especially because I never asked a lot of these questions of those who could have answered while they were alive.  My grandmother Severini was the exception--she shared her stories in conversations in the 1970s and 80s.  And I did talk to my Aunt Toni in the 90s about her memories and her life.

  Fortunately, an uncle on each side of the family was able to help with their recollections and confirmations as I worked on this for the past few months.  But it is a sobering lesson in how we change over time, and how self-absorbed we tend to be for much of our lives, while the people who can tell us so much about the past that is the ground of our own being, fade away unasked.

I mention all this here because I did not do the standard sort of family history.  I included the contexts of place and the times.  So there may be some common ground of interest, particularly in what turns out to be a history of the first half of the 20th century that surrounds one family.  

So if you are interested, here it is: the blog I created to tell A Severini Saga, which I hope will be extended by information and memories from other members of my family, particular for the years after 1960.  (If for some reason the link doesn't work, the blog address is: severinisaga.blogspot.com.)

The Way It Is

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among

 things that change. But it doesn’t change.

 People wonder about what you are pursuing.

 You have to explain about the thread.

 But it is hard for others to see.

 While you hold it you can’t get lost. 

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

 or die; and you suffer and get old.

 Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

 You don’t ever let go of the thread.

 --William Stafford 

 Just after my 75th seems a good time to post this poem (together with this scene from my  childhood), which expresses a guiding principle of my life and (as it turns out) my lifetime.

How It Happens

How It Happens

 The sky said I am watching

 to see what you

 can make out of nothing

 I was looking up and I said

 I thought you 

were supposed to be doing that

 the sky said Many

 are clinging to that 

I am giving you a chance

 I was looking up and I said

 I am the only chance I have 

then the sky did not answer

 and here we are 

with our names for the days

 the vast days that do not listen to us

— W. S. Merwin

 “In Blake, we recover our original state, not by returning to it, but by re-creating it. The act of creation is not producing something out of nothing, but the act of setting free what we already possess.” --Northrup Frye

Photo: Trinidad Head June 30, 2021

Children of Truffaut: Call My Agent!

 

The TV series “Lupin” has been getting most of the media attention, but another series from France is also a streaming hit: the human comedy “Call My Agent!”  Made for French TV beginning in 2015 and broadcast as “Dix Pour Cent” (Ten Percent), it was soon picked up worldwide, including by Netflix in the U.S.

 Originally conceived to run four seasons (all now available for streaming, with the fourth season this year), it was recently announced that there will be a fifth season, following a 90 minute TV movie.  Meanwhile, other nations are making their own copies, including an English language version shot in the UK.

 “Call My Agent” is about a struggling Paris talent agency with star movie actors and directors for clients.  The series follows the agents interactions with usually one or two French film stars in each episode, as well as depicting the drama and comedy in their own lives.  

 Netflix made a key decision in not dubbing “Call My Agent!” (as it does most other foreign-made series.) It relies instead on subtitles.  It was a daring but brilliant move, because the sound of the French language—even for those of us who don’t understand it—is essential (as well as a subtle reminder that most Americans who have seen French films, saw them with subtitles.)  The reason is simple: this series is very, very French.  Or more specifically, it is the French as we have seen them in exported French films.

 So I find it strange that the U.S. media I’ve seen never seems to acknowledge this essential quality.  Even the creators and producers of the series only mention American television programs, the “workplace” dramas and comedies like “The West Wing” (or they do when talking to American media.)  

Truffaut in a dream sequence in Day for Night

Yet the most obvious progenitor of this series is the French director Francois Truffaut.  Specifically it is the child in subject and spirit of Truffaut’s 1973 film “Day for Night” (“La Nuit Americaine), which is about the making of a movie, the personalities and relationships on the set, and the interactions with the movie business, the outside world and non-movie people. The peculiarities and complexities of actors and others in the theatrical and moviemaking world, and their shared love of their art, are at the heart of "Day for Night" and ultimately of "Call My Agent!"

 There are echoes of other French directors as well (including Claude Lelouch, who appears in the series) but to me Truffaut’s influence is the clearest. Several times I’ve thought while watching, “this is a Truffaut moment.”  I was feeling that strongly in the third season episode in which a baby was born in the agency office—and then suddenly the unmistakable Baroque theme from “Day for Night” played on the screen.

 It also doesn’t hurt that at least a couple of the French film stars who appear in the series previously worked with Truffaut and often are identified with him: Isabelle Adjani and Nathalie Baye (who appeared in three Truffaut films, including “Day for Night.”)   

J-P Leaud with Jacqueline Bisset and Truffaut in
Day for Night

The series character, the agent Gabriel, is highly reminiscent of the characters Antoine Doinel (in several Truffaut movies, starting with his first, “The 400 Blows”) and the actor Alphonse in “Day for Night,” both played by Jean-Pierre Leaud: placid and charming, who suddenly explodes with impetuous passions, yet is basically good-hearted.  When Gabriel tells an outrageous lie in order to deny financing to a film because he’s jealous of his actor girlfriend’s relationship with the film’s director/star, it’s exactly the kind of move Doinel/Leaud would make.

 The character of the young Camille (who we follow first in season one, but who unfortunately often fades into the background thereafter) has that Truffaut mixture of intelligence and innocence.  It’s a part Nathalie Baye might have played in a Truffaut film.

 At the same time, this series is a descendant, not a copy.  The cast is multicultural, the relationships are not all heterosexual, the visual style is contemporary. The acting is first rate.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see several win acting awards in the U.S.: Camille Cottin (as Andrea), the fearless Laura Calamy (Noemie), Gregory Mantel as Gabriel, and perhaps more.

 Still, the overall affect of the series—intelligent, ironic, yet sincere, with moments of exhilarating humanity—is very French, and goes with the language, the gestures, and the style. (Even the older male agent Mathias dresses with understated French elegance.)  In terms of narrative style, the characters may be at time excessive, but are never cartoons.  This perhaps most of all is what viewers of the best French films expect.

 In a fourth season episode, Gabriel and his ravishing, now ex-girlfriend Sofia, are talking at a party.  He tells her a tall tale which she is believing, until he admits he’s making it up.  But he says that her wide-eyed belief “is very moving.”  Those are words, and this is a moment, that in my experience can only occur in a French film.

  Maybe a British series about a talent agency based on these characters can work.  But it will be very, very different.

Ingenuity

 

It was a little more than a week ago, very early in the morning on the East Coast and even earlier here in the Western US, and not many people were watching.  The eyes of the news were on mass shootings, police killings of black Americans and the Chauvin trial.  But I happened across a link just as the NASA live feed was starting, so I got to see evidence of the first successful flight of a powered vehicle on another planet (or at least the first initiated by humans, that we know of) at the same time the people at NASA did.

 They were a dozen or so people around hotel convention tables arranged in a horseshow, all of them masked up, most of them wearing NASA orange smocks or golf shirts, peering at their own laptops and glancing up at the big screen at the end of the room.  Many of them had been working on this specific project for 6 years or more. 

 They were waiting to learn whether the flight of Ingenuity, a tiny Kleenix box of instruments attached to very long and ungainly shaped rotors, had actually flown a little earlier, since it takes hours for signals to traverse the distance between Mars and Earth.  Nobody really knew if flying would work in an atmosphere less than a percent of Earth's.

 The NASA channel—which, when I had it on our cable TV system and the Shuttles and Space Station had cameras always pointed towards Earth, I sometimes let just run with this portrait of our planet in real time, in the background—did a fine job of covering this Ingenuity flight story.  A brightly smiling interviewer elicited the pertinent information from various participants in the room, though the answers got less and less coherent as the big moment got closer and closer. 

 Then she did something pretty striking: she shut up, so we could just witness what went on in that room. As I watched the screen full of people watching their screens, I reflected on the deceptive amount of computer power in those laptops and inside that interplanetary tissue box on Mars, and the fact that the Apollo missions that landed humans on the moon had at their disposal much less computer power than a smartphone.      

 We who were watching (and some were: they had sent in questions through various social media) were primed on what to watch for.  So we got the quiet excitement when the initial data package came in, and it looked “nominal” (NASAspeak for A-OK.) The data went from one analyst to another, each adding more information until we all together got the first visual confirmation: a simple diagram, sent by Ingenuity via several links, that mapped its flight: it went straight up, flew sideways, stopped and came straight down, and landed.  That diagram was as exciting as HD video.  It meant it happened.  The first cheer went up in the room.

 A few seconds later we saw the first photo: a black and white snapshot taken by Ingenuity’s camera pointed straight down from the air, looking like a film photography negative, in which the shadow is Ingenuity itself.  There would be other photos and other flights this week, but this will remain the historic one. More cheers in the room, though social distancing meant no hugs.  But the project manager did jump up and down, in place.

 So it meant something to me to be watching this in real time, a memory to set beside seeing in real time the first human step onto the surface of another world When Neil Armstrong touched the Moon, we all did, in a way.  It was the same with Ingenuity’s flight.

 Ingenuity has flown farther and for a longer time, and will probably be pushed beyond its limits.  It’s a proof of concept device, and is unlikely to have a life even as long as the Martian rovers.  None of them are coming back.  It won’t be resting in the Smithsonian—at least, not anytime soon.

 This event, set against the others making news, like those irrational killings, and the raging flames of white supremacy, and within the complicated context of the pandemic, all the madness about masks and vaccines, reminded me again of a conversation I had several Christmases ago with young tech people in Menlo Park, about prospects for the future.  Though we had different intuitions of the outcome, we shared the basic idea of it being like a race—that is, a foot race or vehicle race—between the positive and negative, the creative and the destructive.

 Because it seems clear that as a society we are rushing furiously in two opposite directions at once (with many wiggling lines within the main ones going off slightly in other directions.)  Moreover, the race is timed.  Though we don’t know exactly when the game will be over, there may come such a moment that if destruction is winning, then self-destruction it will be.  And in terms of Earth as environment, that time is fast approaching.

 Who knows if flying a helicopter on Mars is going to contribute to saving the Earth.  (Not if it encourages the Elon Musks of this world to believe they can just leave this planet behind and start this madness all over again elsewhere.)  But those nerdy people in the orange shirts—Asian, black, and immigrant prominently among them—worked hard on this one problem for a long time, and they did something wonderful.  And they know it—they attached a shred of the first manned aircraft from Kitty Hawk to Ingenuity for its first flight.  Maybe future generations won’t care, but seeing something like this we call historic is at least a special experience for the now living.

Once Later

 It is not until later
 that you have to be young

 it is one of those things
you meant to do later

 but by then there is
 someone else living there

 with the shades rolled down
 how could you have been young there

 at that time
with all that was expected

 then what happened to
 the expectations

 there is no sign of them there
a shadow passes across the window shade

 what do they know in there
 whoever they are

  W.S. Merwin

The top image is a recent real estate photo taken in the back of the house where I grew up just outside Greensburg, PA.  The window to the left is to the room that had been my bedroom.  While I was in college, my parents took this window out, installed a door, and turned the room into a den.  At some point--probably not long ago-- a new owner took out the door and replaced the window, returning the room to being a bedroom.  You can see how the bricks are newer under the window.  So in this way, it is more as it was when I grew up there than it has been since. The wood deck is new as well--it had been a brick patio-- and judging from the wood and bricks piled in the photo, all this was done recently when the photo was taken several years ago. The real estate photos of the inside are interesting.  They show what has survived and what hasn't.  They also suggest that no children have lived here recently.  I don't think it has been a family home anymore.

I see that I've posted this poem here before, but it means even more to me when paired with this picture.

Another Blue Voice

Trinidad Ca 2008 BK Photo

This poem happens to contain this blog's name within in.  I'm not aware of having read the poem before I named the blog, which was a very long time ago in Internet years.  That's even though it happens to be by probably my favorite poet, William Stafford. I present it here now as a way to rededicate this blog, which I've neglected.  But it's always been my favorite blog, though I am apparently its only faithful reader. Here's the poem.

Sky

I like you with nothing.  Are you
what I was?  What I will be?
I look out there by the hour,
so clear, so sure, I could
smile, or frown--still nothing.

Be my father, be my mother,
great sleep of blue; reach
far within me; open doors,
find whatever is hiding; invite it
for many clear days in the sun.

When I turn away I know
you are there.  We won't forget
each other: every look is a promise.
Others can't tell what you say
when it's the blue voice, when
you come to the window and look for me.

Your word arches over
the roof of all day.  I know it
within my bowed head, where
the other sky listens.
You will bring me
everything when the time comes.

---William Stafford

Now Is Later

Once Later

It is not until later
that you have to be young

it is one of those things
you meant to do later

but by then there is
someone else living there

with the shades rolled down
how could you have been young there

at that time
with all that was expected

then what happened to
the expectations

there is no sign of them there
a shadow passes across the window shade

what do they know in there
whoever they are

W.S. Merwin
published in New York Review of Books
May 7,2015

Gone But Not Forgotten.1

Ceramic bowl bought at a thrift store.  This is the only photo I can find, though it doesn't show its unique slightly askew shape very well.  I had to rescue it once, but couldn't save it from being broken: RIP March 2018.  This photo is from 2011, so it had probably a decade of sitting around (in recent years, holding bananas) and giving me pleasure.

Secret Progress Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beginner's Mind

Finding a very nice hardback copy of Bruce Chatwin's last book in a bargain bin, a kind of miscellany of previously uncollected pieces called What Am I Doing Here, got me reading him for the first time in maybe two decades.  I read him in the 1980s mostly, into the early 90s.  He died in 1989.

Reading the first pieces in this book in conjunction with at least the wikipedia version of his biography prompted a few loose thoughts about writing.  Chatwin had problems establishing himself as a writer in the 1970s.  He was a very good looking man and a bisexual, which apparently helped with influential relationships.  Some things he tried failed, some combinations of contacts and happenstance paid off--he made the best of some bad situations and some good opportunities.

His travels seems to begin almost accidentally, as did his reputation as a travel writer.  His first big success was In Patagonia in 1977.  He later published novels and articles before the book he is most known for, The Songlines in 1989.

I read in the wikipedia entry that one of his early models for prose was Hemingway, and I could certainly see that influence, particularly in his dialogue, in a couple of early pieces in What Am I Doing Here, like "A Coup, A Story," which is his account of being held captive for three days in Benin during a coup, and "Until My Blood Is Pure, A Story."  The Coup story includes descriptions of memorable meals he'd eaten, recollected while in captivity without food.  It's very Hemingwayesque in style and subject, and the episode is itself reminiscent of Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."

Writers learn by imitating others, and even stealing from them.  Chatwin had other models and how he handles the combination is part of what turns out to be his style.  Even these pieces in which the Hemingway influence is overt, the writing is pleasing and effective whether you see it that way or not.  If only because the subject and the diction are more recent, they are in some ways more pleasing than Hemingway, who can seem now to be quite wordy, with a vocabulary a little arcane by this time.

Chatwin liked to experiment with the form of a book.  That was very 20th century, especially in Hemingway's time, but also in those decades of the 70s and 80s.  The times sometime insist on new forms, if only because writers find it very difficult to write using the old forms.  They don't see and hear the world that way.

Chatwin experimented with the form of The Songlines and in a formal sense he failed.  It starts out as an account of Australian Aboriginal beliefs about the songlines that link them as a people and as individuals to the land, for songlines are both topographical lines of passage and song stories about their origins and relationships, linked by the rhythm of walking.

But the story broadens out to considerations of human origins and the nomadic impulse (about which he'd tried to write a book previously, and some chapters in What Am I Doing Here seem to come from that uncompleted project), until it abruptly shifts to a selection of quotations and notes taken from his notebooks and other sources.  So while this book has a beginning, it doesn't have an ending.

On that basis it should have failed.  Instead The Songlines was a best seller throughout much of 1987, and then again as a paperback.  I was completely enthralled by it.  I remember wanting to read it out in the open, so I found a spot on a sparsely traveled road between Seton Hill College and other buildings on its isolated hill.  I sat reading under a tree, and recall a car driving by with an older woman driving who saw me and smiled to herself.

It was partly the times--little was known about Indigenous cultures, but there was great interest that would blossom in the early 90s.  Certainly it was a revelation to me, but as a reading experience it was exciting as well.

What makes a successful piece of writing, whether or not it becomes a best-seller? It's in a way a happy accident, though it is a deliberate accident.  We like to think we're in control and following some prescription, or perhaps we feel that our powers are such that anything we apply ourselves to will succeed.  Usually we are forcibly disabused of such notions.

There are always times in a project that the writing is hard, or the research is overwhelming a sense of what to select from it, or there are conceptual roadblocks and--worst of all--dead ends.  Everyone who writes was seduced by what some others have written.  We want to do the same thing, so we try something similar, but try to be different, too.  Here the first level of talent is discernible.  Lots of people can write a good beginning.  But where does it go?  That's frequently the first problem: the dead end.

Chatwin had a lifelong obsession with nomads, with the impulse to wander he shared and which he believed was intrinsic to humans, and that became the center of The Songlines.  That center and that beginning was good enough to make up for the lack of an ending.  It may have worked because it left the reader wanting more.  It also allowed the reader to participate, to consider the questions, to expand on the thoughts and quotations.  To wonder, along with Chatwin, what this is all about.

There are other possible reasons for why The Songlines worked--such as the reader being seduced to identify with the first person narrator, a necessity when the first person is used.  How thought out this way, how intentional, I don't know.  There's also the question of how ill he was, how close to the end he felt.  But my experience as a writer suggests that something about the process caught him and carried him along.  Some rhythm in the words, in the pages.  Something that might not mean anything to anyone else.

What is front and center in that book to me is the Beginner's Mind. It's difficult to find it again after so much writing, so many trials.  But if you're a writer, or if you've ever started to write, you've generally started with that Beginner's Mind.

 Things are exciting the first time, which is why we remember events of our first 20 years more clearly than later experiences.  Similarly, the approach to writing of the Beginner's Mind can--when it works--transmit that excitement, that engagement, to the reader.

I've come to believe that, despite those who say all writing is just hard work, the really good work comes most often from the Beginner's Mind, the feeling that the formal problems you have set for yourself or encounter, the approach you are taking, the material you are working with, are in ways important to you, utterly new.  Isn't that the definition of "creating" anyway?  Making something new.

It's hard to hold onto the Beginner's Mind, and it's hard to find it again.  When you've never had a response to your work, you write with innocence.  When you have, and when that response makes you self-conscious, or the lack of subsequent and present response fills you with a sense of futility, the innocence of the Beginner's Mind is gone.

When writing becomes work for pay only, and has no play in it anymore, Beginner's Mind may go off somewhere else, maybe playing with the aps on the iphone.

I've come to believe that finding the project that so fascinates and involves you that these are not considerations, that your Beginner's Mind and heart are fully engaged, is completely the key.  Maybe it happens only partially, and maybe you get lucky like Chatwin did with The Songlines and you more or less stumble onto something new, like the way he ended it.  But it's what you need.

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.