Storm Story 1

You know there's a hurricane to worry about if Mark Doty is worried about a hurricane. I've usually been the storm anticipator of the two of us, and while I'm just as tuned to the news right now, it's startling to be on the same wave with him on that. (As in, Hey, shouldn't you be making fun of me right now?) It doesn't help that the Fire Island house hasn't sold after two years on the market. The Fire Island house: a block from the bay, a block from the sea, six miles out from the mainland, if Long Island could rightfully be called a mainland. The Fire Island house, occupied by renters for the past two summers, but can the rentals be expected to take in lawn furniture, pots, planters? Will they tape up all that sliding glass? We know the answer to that. They'll be already back in Manhattan, huddled in their one-bedroom apartments, bemoaning the loss of their Labor Day holiday. But all of the above feels more rational than what I'm really feeling. The fear and allure of a storm is a lot more primal than that--and can we say there's a thread of wonder in it, a bit of joy, even if we're aware of what went on in New Orleans five years ago--and still goes on? Why else would there be hurricane parties, people drinking and smoking weed through the night while pieces of the roof break off? But New Orleans is different from a seasonal, provisional summer colony on a sandbar that was never meant to last. Maybe what we really want is be chastened sometimes--but not too chastened. We want to go back. And what of the birds, the deer, the turtles in the pond out by the Meatrack? What do they know that we don't? Are they already getting their hiding places in order?


Pond Referred to above. And a house in Cherry Grove.

Time and Tide

One of the things I love most about Frank Conroy's Time and Tide, aside from the companionable voice, the rich description, the invitation into private jokes, is its willingness to admit to the frustrations of loving a place, in this case, Nantucket. What beautiful place was not better once?--think about it. Quieter beaches, humbler houses, kinder, gentler people, and whether those things are objectively true or not, long term attachment often insists that the perfected is not in front of us, but behind us. I know I think that about New York, I know I think that about Provincetown. I know my brother thinks that about South Beach, a place he'd lived for twenty years before he couldn't take the tourists and the tidiness anymore, and bought a house just last week across the bay in Belle Meade. Frank, of course, stayed with Nantucket for the rest of his life, at least in the summer months, and it's a relief to read and finish a book that still believes in the crucial wonder of a place in spite of all the ways it might have gone wrong. But of course it is never wrong to those who first come upon it. Someone is falling under the spell of South Beach right at this minute, as he strolls down Lincoln Road, past the shops and the glittering restaurants, while across the bay, my brother holds a paint brush in his hand, spreading a coat of light gray over his living room wall.

Stranded (Or: ACK, as They Say)

I don't want to be stranded anywhere, even if it's a place I took to instantly, with its moors, Japanese black pines, and scrubby plants. I'm talking about our trip to Nantucket this past weekend, where stranded takes on a different dimension than it does in most places in the U.S.. "Thirty miles out at sea"--you certainly can't swim that distance, though there have been reports of deer doing just that. It was Sunday night. The trees started to whip, a raw rain started to pelt, and there was Mark, Ned, and me walking down a dark road with our friend Joy Williams, who had accompanied us to a lovely dinner party. We couldn't have known then that the winds were only getting going, that it's common to be stranded "thirty miles out at sea" for a day, sometimes days on end, which is why one should bring sweatshirts, extra underwear and thick socks to such a place, instead of wearing Diesel loafers with soles that crumble like old Nerf after being left wet overnight. Nantucket is not the West Village, and you learn that soon enough.

But no sooner had we found out that all Monday ferries and flights were cancelled when rescue came, in the person of Maggie Conroy, the actor and playwright, the wife of my late teacher, Frank. I've known Maggie for years, always adored Maggie, but who would have expected her to open her house to us? To lend us her car, to be fun company, to put up with Ned, who was engaged in some sort of protracted Alpha struggle with Neville, her ten-month-old puppy. And there was Joy over for dinner Monday night--a delight to see Joy for the third night in a row and to drink two Joy Williams martinis. And go for rides to 'Sconset and Tom Nevers and to the highest point on the island where there's an otherworldly aviation-guiding device that looks like something out of a science fiction movie. At one point yesterday, as Maggie led us on a dog walk by Nantucket Harbor, I had a strong sensation that there was a profound reason behind our staying one more day, and I'm using the word profound with extra consideration, as it's not a word I believe in throwing around carelessly. I had on my late teacher's car coat, but that's only the smallest part of the story. I knew it would take me years to figure it all out.

(Pictures to come.)

Nantucket? Nantucket.

Hi from the Nantucket, where Mark and I read together at the Atheneum tonight. We're staying on the island for another full day and night, so I'm sure I'll have many more pictures and a fuller report soon, but for tonight, three shots: Ned on the grass outside the Atheneum, the inside of the Atheneum, and Maggie Conroy, Joy Williams, and me after the reading. I opened with "The Little Songs" tonight, and I'm passing on a link to a short essay Steve Fellner posted about the piece on his blog yesterday.





*****

Ned and his friend Swegen on the beach this morning:

Blog Post Written Standing Up on A Train!

One of the things I like about going to my therapist's office is visiting a part of the city I'd never go to if I didn't have to. In truth, I very much like that part of the city, because it's still the New York City of my childhood, gritty and probably just slightly unnerving at night, far from the prettied neighborhoods to the north and west. It's a part of the city that invites imagination, and every time I'm wandering down there, I can't help thinking that the disruptive, though very real quality of those blocks has something to do with growth.

The Other New York: The High Line (and The Chelsea Hotel) last night, after the thunderstorm.

Casual: Two Versions

I've been immersed in a new memoir--I'm about 25 pages from the end of this draft--I'm tentatively calling I'd Sure Like to See You, which I'm describing to myself as a nonfiction book about friendship. Thus, everyday life is more interior than exterior these days, which doesn't make for mesmerizing blog fodder. (I write my book; I go to the store to buy twine; I go back home to work on my book again; I go out to buy dinner.) But it occurred to me I haven't talked about music here in a long time, so I thought I'd put up two performances--one recorded, one live--of Here We Go Magic's "Casual," a song I've listened to a dozen times in the last three days. The musicianship is obviously more solid on the recorded version; there's a trippy, guitar/keyboard-driven soundscape--heavy on the treble--that doesn't quite sound like anyone else. Then there's the live version where the playing isn't as tight but made up for by the interplay between band members. The pointed bewilderment on lead singer Luke Temple's face as he finishes the first phrase of the song. The keyboardist's jumpy moves as the song moves closer and closer toward the final chord. The drummer's zoned-out stupor as he lays down precise rhythm. Several stories being told simultaneously: how are we to read them? What do they want us to see (or not, as the case may be)? Musical performance and acting: whoever said the two weren't of a piece?

Updates and Retrievals

At some point last week, Earthlink released an email update, and for just a second I lost my usual skepticism of updates, which is that updates are not so much about making life simpler for the customer, but more cost-effective for the business that's selling its service. So what I did was say yes to some question, and in effect, I think I lost five years of emails, not just emails between Mark and me, but emails between friends, editors, family members, students--not to mention many dead people, including all the correspondence between my late friend Denise and me. She will have been gone a year next week, and I guess she must be on my mind more than usual tonight.

It is probably the case that I can somehow retrieve these messages, but I am trying to get used to living with an email account whose messages don't extend past July 31, 2010. Does that kind of archive give us resonance and depth, or is it merely more stuff, more accumulation, more leaden weight, the cyber equivalent of those horribly packed living rooms you see on Hoarders? What if we were able to live with just a fine few shirts, a fine pair of pants, good jeans, good shoes, a nice T-shirt or two--I certainly know of people, stylish people, in Manhattan who live like that. Wear each piece for three months tops, then send it off to Housing Works before you shop for something else and start all over again. There is certainly value to that. We all know we'd probably be better off if we were living with less, wanting less, holding less. Then I think about what an old friend might have written on the morning of Denise's death, and when I go to look for a copy of that email, it's not there.

*****

Speaking of retrievals from the past, here are some refurbished pinball machines which I played last Sunday at Asbury Park's Silverball Museum Arcade, which my brother had wanted to visit. You pay a single fee and can play as many games as you want in a given time. Who knew that pinball was so crucial?

Cover Design: The Burning House: A Novel (Forthcoming Spring 2011)

And here it is: thing of beauty. With thanks to Kapo Ng.

The Little Songs and Two Pianos: Two Unbuilt Projects

Two of the pieces from Unbuilt Projects have come out in the last two days and I thought I'd pass them along:

1) "The Little Songs," up on Today's Verse Daily. This piece first appeared earlier this year as a nonfiction piece in Knockout Literary Magazine. Interesting to see it presented as a poem.

2) And "Two Pianos," from the current issue of The Seattle Review, titled Issues with Death #2, guest edited by David Shields. It features work by Geoff Dyer, Carl Dennis, Dean Young, Debra Spark, Scott Russell Sanders, Albert Goldbarth, Dinty W. Moore, David Guterson and many others. The Seattle Review doesn't have a strong web presence yet, but be on lookout for the issue the next time you're in a good bookstore.

In other news, I'll soon be able to pass on the final cover of The Burning House, a great design by the great Kapo Ng. The official pub date has been pushed up a few months and we should have copies by--March? April?

***

Two Pianos
from The Seattle Review, Issues of Death #2, guest edited by David Shields
forthcoming in the collection Unbuilt Projects, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2012.

Though they were old now, and hadn’t had a piano in the house they’d left behind, the man’s mother and father knew their lives were poorer without music, and they’d found a baby grand, used, a little out of tune. So what if neither of them could play? The man would be along to visit and they knew he couldn’t stop. Which was true. The first night he saw it, he put down his suitcase by the front door, walked past the China closet, and slid back the bench. If an outsider had come in, he’d have heard the pedal buzzing beneath the man’s foot; he’d have seen the parents move more nimbly above the saucepan or the checkbook. And it didn’t matter to them that all he played were fragments, one rhythm shifting into the next. A beginning implied an ending. No one in that house wanted an ending, not with night coming closer. Better to be suspended in the present, like a fern frozen at the bottom of a lake.

The second piano was central to a second house. Another baby grand, also used, this of better make and model. The front entryway demanded Schubert, Liszt, for who knew who would walk in the door? This was the house of adulthood. These were the rooms he shared with his lover, and as such, there was no time for scraps or fragments. This life called for order, artifact, a narrative with an arc and a shape. But an arc and a shape wanted an ending, and an ending implied evaluation—if not someone else’s then his own. All the lures of achievement, and was that beyond the range of the man’s wishes? Still, he’d never forget the way he’d been surprised that Christmas. And the look on his lover’s face when he pulled off the bedspread and was told he could open his eyes. Every time he thought of that face, the gladness around the mouth and the chin, the man wanted to play a song that equaled it, though he didn’t know what.

But the fact was he didn’t. The fact was he played both pianos less and less, and passed them by on the way to what was next.

Was it that he didn’t want to acknowledge that practice was in order, and his high school piano teacher was onto something when she pointed out the way his hands had fallen on the keys? Maybe he simply didn’t want to admit that he’d been a little too easy on himself and he had more work to do. Art is hard, and he didn’t want to be reminded of that old saw.

But that’s crap.

He didn’t want to know that the air you once thrived in could be loved a little less. He didn’t want to know that something else would come to bear him aloft, high above the tar and the waste. The world would go on without it--and him. The next thing would be beautiful. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?

Then again it wasn’t.

Once it became clear that music wouldn’t fill the rooms again, the pollen settled on the keys; the wires went out of tune. And it wasn’t the end of the world when decisions were made, in calm, reasonable voices, to let the pianos go. A piano takes up space. A piano makes it harder to move on, and it was better, the man agreed, for the pianos to be where they were wanted, which is where they ended up, one with an old lady who played hers facing the bromeliads in the trees, the other with a five-year-old who wouldn’t be pried from the bench, even when he was summoned for ice cream.

And time, as it always was, is the champion of youth.

And he still didn’t want an ending.

Ned (aka Son)

When Mark told me he was going to adopt a new dog on Sunday, my unspoken reaction was, excuse me? I was in the city, he was out in Springs, and I thought, and this is how we do things around here? YOU'RE going to adopt a dog? After all, we've spent the last six dogless years talking about what the next dog might be, maybe an English bull, maybe a pit bull, maybe a Bernese mountain dog, maybe-- But a Golden Retriever? Hadn't I just said, French bulldog, with unexpected authority, not two days before? And on and on Mark went, and he couldn't of course see my forehead pressing hard, harder into my right hand as he told me he wanted, needed this. And my mind started drifting to the lesbian couple in Lisa Choldenko's film The Kids Are All Right, which we'd seen just a few nights before, with its funny, sweet, and very grave exploration of marriage over the long term, and I instantly experienced myself as the landscaping Julianne Moore character, shoving her hands in the dirt, planting things that wanted to leaf and lengthen and bloom over time. And maybe I, just like the landscaping Julianne Moore character, needed to be having hot sex with the Mark Ruffalo character for just a little while. (Or the actual Mark Ruffalo. Mark Ruffalo: what do you think, buddy?)

To make a long story short, as they say, I heard rustling at 6:30 this morning, got up out of bed, and there he was--Ned, all of three weeks old, tail slapping the flagstone as I walked out to see him. And there I was, running around the backyard, after praising him for making a big steamy poop. And I had to have been out there for a full ten minutes before I realized I was running around in my jockey shorts, the American Apparel jockey shorts with the words LEGALIZE GAY printed over the back of the butt, the very underwear that I used to snort and roll my eyes at whenever I passed the window display on Eighth Avenue, which had somehow ended up in my shopping cart, because I'd mistaken them for PLAIN underpants, damn it. And just now I'm looking out my study window to see the smart, pensive, curious, tricky, very self-possessed little one nosing through sedum in the garden. He could start pulling up plants in the garden, for all I care. I am home.






Click here for some more shots of Ned.

Paradox

The faces look animated and bright on my walk down Seventh Avenue. Their brightness has nothing to do with me, as it can in New York when you’re feeling hurt or heartsick or desolate. In those instances, the tailored shirts, the practiced laughter in your ears can feel like a sting. But I am far past myself tonight, maybe because I’m tired of being sad; maybe because I’ve been reading a little Whitman, who suddenly is mine, just mine, in a whole different way. This listing, this habit of naming what he sees, high and low, grand and not grand—isn’t Whitman in fact inscribing boundaries in language? Isn’t he saying you’re not me, and you’re not me, and finding nourishment in that? Melancholy, of course, but nourishment too. The exquisite loneliness of the poet moving down the sidewalk, over the expansion joints between slabs, stepping down onto the asphalt from the minor heights of the curb. How else could intimacy happen if we didn’t carve boundaries between us? It's the great paradox of love, and we are love as we name the bearded young man zigzagging on his skateboard through stopped cars; we are love as we say: old woman dragging her walker outside the drug store. The blonde falling off high shoes, the homeless man banked up against the building, picking at the sores on his arms and hands and chest--these were never figments of the One Holy Self, but real souls, moving in and out of time, cherished by someone, hated by someone, morphing, active, irreplaceable.


First photo taken with my new iPhone, Thursday, July 29, Hudson River Park toward Jersey City