Chilly Scenes of Winter

Winter Scene
A.R. Ammons

There is now not a single
leaf on the cherry tree:

except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,

in pure clarity, squalls:
then every branch

quivers and
breaks out in blue leaves.

Red Sky at Morning... (Or: Before the Blizzard)

From Venus and Adonis
William Shakespeare

Like a red morn that ever yet betokened,
Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field,
Sorrow to the shepherds, woe unto the birds,
Gust and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds.

from Matthew XVI: 2-3

When in evening, ye say, it will be fair weather: For the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be foul weather today; for the sky is red and lowering.

I Am Still Here

My last workshop in the morning, and we're opening with D.J. Waldie's Holy Land, which I've never taught before, even though it's one of my favorite books ever. I'm not sure it's possible to capture the essence of the story with just one of its many short sections--its power comes from repetition, accumulation--but I keep going back to this one in my head.

(Above: two early images of Lakewood, California, where the book is set.)

from Holy Land
D.J. Waldie

He could not choose to deny his father, even less his father's beliefs. These have become as material to him as the stucco-over-chicken-wire from which these houses are made.

It is not a question of denying the city in which he lives, though he doubts his father cared much for living in it. He doubts if his father cared for much of anything you would find familiar at all.

"I am still here," he often tells himself. This is how he has resurrected his father's obligations, which he sometimes mistakes for his father's faith.

"I will never go away," he once told the girl he loved, because it suited her desperation and his notion of the absurd.

Loving Christ badly was finally the best he could do.

Slight Dreamy Suffocation

2/3 way through my big day: workshop, craft seminar, reading. The craft seminar couldn't have been livelier, especially the discussion around this Denis Johnson passage, and the system of contrasts holding it all together.

from "The Other Man" in Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson

This man was just basically one of those people on a boat, leaning on the rail like the others, his hands dangling over like bait. The day was sunny, unusual for the Northwest Coast. I'm sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green--in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorous--islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck's seams.

A Dog Like That (Or: Sadie Somebody)

I was just glancing over the worksheet I'd made up for my prose style seminar tomorrow afternoon. In addition to excerpts by Joy Williams, Kathryn Davis, Denis Johnson, and Mary Gaitskill, I picked this paragraph from Yannick Murphy's 2006 novel Here They Come. As for the dog in the passage? I suppose there are sunnier examples of her kind, but I'm thinking about syntax here.

from Here They Come
Yannick Murphy

At home I am Sadie Somebody stripteasing on a tabletop for my sisters, undoing buttons of my rosebud pajamas. They are all laughing, and the dog is barking because I’m up too high and she wants me to get down the same way when we’re out in the water and she bites at our necks to get a hold and tow us back to shore or the way she herds us away from the cars when we walk down the avenue. Fuck, a dog like that and who needs a mother or father? But to her own she was unfit and ate them, leaving blood and fur in the pen after they were born.

Ireland? No, Mystic

Some morning shots of Enders Island, near Mystic, where the Fairfield MFA residency is taking place. The water at the end of the walkway is Mystic Harbor, which leads to Fisher Island Sound. At certain points in the day, I can see Fisher Island in the distance from my third-floor window.

Not One for Understatement

My friend--and former Antioch student--Deborah Lott just sent me a stellar short memoir about a childhood birthday party, in which her father dresses up to entertain (and inadvertently frighten) the children. Here’s an incredible paragraph from the middle of the piece.

From “The Birthday Party”
Deborah Lott

Made originally for our tiny Jewish center’s Purim carnivals, my father had four or five costumes that I remember. In one disguise, he wore a platinum blonde pageboy wig, crimson lipstick, a demure white blouse, and a gargantuan chambray floral printed skirt constructed out of a tablecloth. Under his blouse, my father wore the largest bra I’d ever seen. Of faded tan industrial-strength cotton, it looked like something the military might have issued to a WAC during WW II. He stuffed it with old wadded up nylons that smelled of the sachet that lined my mother’s lingerie drawer. Not one for understatement, he loaded those cups to overflowing, so that his breasts could compete with the girth of his belly. The skirt had four rows of deep pockets that extended all the way around his middle, and for the Purim carnival, he filled the pockets with prizes. For a 5 cent ticket, you could reach down into the capacious pockets of my father’s skirt and get a rubber airplane, or a paper fan, a miniature man with a paper parachute, or a little wooden dog whose limbs were held together by strings, so that if you pushed a button on the bottom, you could make the dog dance, or my preferred find – a Prince Valiant ring with a glittery red stone.

Three Ferries (Or: Stand Back 4 Feet)

I’d probably be feeling somewhat despondent if I weren't taking three ferries this morning. Mark just dropped me off at the terminal, and someone from the Fairfield MFA program is picking me up on the other side. I’m writing from the third boat, the Cross Sound Ferry, which runs from Orient Point, at the tip of Long Island’s North Fork, to New London, Connecticut. There’s no visibility out the window, and the cabin is loud and panicky with Christmas travelers. I’d probably be panicky myself if I were driving from the city through the trail of tears that is the Connecticut Turnpike. Taking this route, I can sort of pretend I’m taking a vacation—sort of. To my left, a woman is sitting between two of the most stately Springer spaniels ever.

The residency’s taking place at a retreat center on an island east of Mystic. I don’t have a good sense of how close it is to town, or whether there’s going to be any opportunity to leave—the schedules are always tight at these things. But at least I’ll have wireless, and all the rooms in which we’re staying have a view of the water.

Above: the view from the first of three boats, the Shelter Island South Ferry, which runs from North Haven to Shelter Island. It’s pretty much a small flat barge with sides. I don't think it holds more than a dozen vehicles at a time.

Click here for the South Ferry website.

Birds of Christmas

Bears of Many Sorts

Luis came out from the city yesterday, and the three of us had the best time together. One shouldn’t go through life expecting your good friend to approve of everything you like, but when that good friend does, you can’t help but be glad for it. It was great to see the house all over again through Luis’ eye, to take in what he loved about its details; I hadn’t really appreciated the kitchen walls and cabinets until he’d pointed them out. Later, when we sat around the table, songs from an old playlist I'd titled "New Favorites" played at low volume in the background. “What’s that?” Luis said. And I hadn’t realized till then that I’d imposed a Grizzly Bear moratorium on the household; I think I must have listened them to death, as is my wont when I first become infatuated with something. Well, enough moratorium. And now I’m passing on three favorites.

Above: The Doty-Lisicky plywood polar bear, which is actually quite large, though you'd never know it from here.

Reprise - Grizzly Bear

On a Neck, On a Spit - Grizzly Bear

Alligator (Choir Version) - Grizzly Bear

Good Ventilation

My psyche gradually seems to be coming around to the fact that I’m leaving for an MFA residency in Connecticut from the 28th to the 1st. Then a few days after that, going to California for three months. We’ll be in Palo Alto no more than four days before flying to London for the T.S. Eliot Prize ceremony. At least that last one's a quick trip.

I’m wondering how and when I became this kind of adult. When I was a kid, I didn’t want to be anywhere but at our family summerhouse at the Jersey Shore. My body literally rebelled when it was asked to be in motion. Trips to Maine, Virginia, Canada: my bouts with carsickness—or more likely, my holding carsickness back—ended up being one of the subjects of those vacations. It probably didn’t help that my father had his own ways of reacting to the loss of control associated with travel. There I was squeezing my eyes shut, operatically holding my stomach in the backseat, while my father inspected and rejected motel after motel, trying to find a room that had “good ventilation.”

The travel sickness finally stopped on our family trip to Southern California, and maybe that's why I still feel immediately at home whenever I see palms, lush vegetation, and anything remotely connected to L.A.-style futurism.

This brings me to the handout I just made for my workshop next week. I’m teaching nonfiction this go-round, and I needed some kind of organizing principle for the excerpts I chose. I decided to go with fathers, in part because travel must have been on my mind. One of the excerpts comes from David Shields’ The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead in which the speaker’s 95-year-old father takes a writing workshop at Woodlake, a senior citizens complex in the Bay Area.

From “Superheroes” in The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead
David Shields

In almost every piece he writes on his antique Remington for his Woodlake-sponsored writing class—a dozen women, a retired dentist, and my father meet with the teacher every other Wednesday—he projects himself as a balanced okaynik, Mr. Bonhomie. He’s held more than fifty jobs in journalism and public relations and social welfare, been fired from many of them, been plagued by manic depression for fifty years, been hospitalized and received electroshock therapy countless times, is a genius at loss. Lily Tomlin was thinking of my father when she said, “Language was invented because of the deep human need to complain.” He’s always thrown a stone at every dog that bites, but in one story he sagely advises his friend, “You can’t throw a stone at every dog that bites.” My father, who is the only person in the world who may have a worse sense of direction than I do, writes about another friend, “Lou can go astray in a carport. He has the worst sense of direction of any male driver in the state of California.” Time after time he lets himself off way too easily. I used to want to urge him out of this macho pose until I realized that it’s a way to cheer himself up, to avoid telling mild good-bye and good-night stories, to convince himself he’s still a tough guy from Brooklyn, not yet ready to die.

Help Me Find My Hat

from "A Christmas Memory"
Truman Capote

"I knew it before I got out of bed," she says, turning away from the window with a purposeful excitement in her eyes. "The courthouse bell sounded so cold and clear. And there were no birds singing; they've gone to warmer country, yes indeed. Oh, Buddy, stop stuffing biscuit and fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat. We've thirty cakes to bake."

It's always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: "It's fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat."

Christmas Day in Pictures

--A walk through the Napeague dunes
--Beach toward Hither Hills
--Dinner
--Tofurkey!

Carols off the Beaten Path

What Is This Lovely Fragrance - Joseph Flummerfelt

Carol Of The Birds - Mannheim Steamroller

Gathering Winter Fuel: Christmas Eve

An Active Woman

from "The Loudest Voice" in The Little Disturbances of Man
Grace Paley

We learned “Deck the Halls” and “Hark! The Herald Angels” ... They weren’t ashamed and we weren’t embarrassed.

Oh, but when my mother heard about it all, she said to my father, “Misha, you don’t know what’s going on there. Cramer is the head of the Tickets Committee.”

“Who?” asked my father. “Cramer? Oh yes, an active woman.”

“Active? Active has to have a reason. Listen,” she said sadly, "I’m surprised to see my neighbors making tra-la-la for Christmas.”

My father couldn’t think of what to say to that. Then he decided: “You’re in America! Clara, you wanted to come here. In Palestine the Arabs would be eating you alive. Europe you had pogroms. Argentina is full of Indians. Here you got Christmas. ... Some joke, ha?”

“Very funny, Misha. What is becoming of you? If we came to a new country a long time ago to run away from tyrants, and instead we fall into a creeping progom, that our children learn a lot of lies, so what’s the joke? Ach, Misha, your idealism is going away.”

“So is your sense of humor.”

“That I never had, but idealism you had a lot of.”

“I’m the same Misha Abramovitch, I didn’t change an iota. Ask anyone.”

“Only ask me,” says my mama, may she rest in peace. “I got the answer.”

Two From Primordial Lovers

My copy of Essra Mohawk’s classic 1970 Primordial Lovers album came in the mail this morning, and I’ve been smitten all day. Here are two remarkable cuts.

Click here for a 2003 interview.

Note: The above photo is from her first album Sandy's Album is Here at Last, which was released under her given name, Sandy Hurvitz.

Lion On The Wing - Essra Mohawk

Image Of YU - Essra Mohawk