Bests (Reprise)

I didn't want to say bye to 2010 without mentioning these other beautiful books. Too much going on here to say anything specific, but I hope you'll remember them the next time you're at your bookstore. Happy New Year!

The Feast of the Slaughtered Innocents

I've been wanting to put up these pictures for the last two days. This is the front of our building in the blizzard: those white streaks not comets but snowflakes at 50 mph. I showed them to Mark, who said, that looks like what my eye's doing right now. They're also a pretty good representation of my inner life these past few weeks.

Blizzard and Mark's eye: those two things are linked for good from the here-on-out. Those who have been following the story of his failing eyesight know that his retina detached a second time in a month on Christmas night. Story compressed: He spends Christmas night in the ER only to find out that they can't do surgery till Monday morning. Monday morning rolls around; Mark manages to flag down one of the few cabs around to take him to the hospital. He gets to the hospital; hospital closed due to blizzard. Surgery rescheduled for this morning. He's examined by the doctor only to find out that the surgery is going to be more extensive and complicated than thought. The doctor needs his "whole team"--hard to assemble with all the operations postponed due to the storm. The surgery's rescheduled for later this week or early Monday. For the first time in a month he doesn't have to keep his head down. He might not remember how not to keep his head down. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well?

Meanwhile, Mark's vision has degenerated to the point where he can barely see out of that eye.

In the landscape of this crisis, I've been prepping to teach at the low residency MFA program I've been associated with for the last two years. I've been part queasy, part panicky about leaving home for five days and nights--especially given the initial recovery, which required Mark to be absolutely still for months. At the very least, how the hell was Ned going to be taken down three flights of stairs to the street? These are the kinds of things you plan for when you know you're going to be alone and immobilized. A different matter when your crisis takes place without warning, during the holidays, when most people are away. But we had all day yesterday to take care of what we could take care of.

My task today: Get to a certain New England state in time to teach my 9:30 nonfiction workshop. Two and a half-hour drive. 6 AM, still dark. The car refuses to move out of what's left of its snowbank, though I spent hours shoveling yesterday. The blood hammers in the jaw. I need to find another way. Amtrak--but I can't get in to Mystic till 1:43. I can get there in time to teach my seminar, but I'll have to miss my first workshop. I write to tell the Director of the program. Story compressed again: Director angry; I am angered by the Director's scolding tone and refusal to take in the matter at home. So here I am--home. Mark in the living room, Ned on the bedroom floor. (A lot elided between those sentences. Mark wants me to name the program, but I'll just say Jesuit university. I'm not sure why I'm not interested in naming the program, even as Mark reminds me I am certainly dropping the clues. Maybe the particulars matter less to me than the larger picture. The larger picture seems to be what's gotten lost in all this.)

The irony is that I was supposed to be teaching Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Revelation" this afternoon. I've been thinking about Flannery for weeks: The relationship between disruption and growth in her work, the deep respect for confrontation, even anarchic confrontation. Confrontation does bring about grace in O'Connor, even if it is sometimes accompanied by a gunshot to the head. I was going to start off today's seminar by saying that today is the Feast of the Slaughtered Innocents; I think O'Connor, as a Catholic, would have loved that. But there are never any Innocents in O'Connor's stories, which is why the stories are so hard and animated every time you come back to them. Mary Grace is no more an Innocent than Ruby Turpin is an Innocent. "It's no real pleasure in life," says The Misfit in the final sentence of "A Good Man is Hard to Find." I'm not sure that's always the case, but it's impossible not to feel strengthened, in the toughest times, by her cold, nourishing vision.

Six For the Six That Never Got Fixed

At Midnight Mass last night, a particular song stood out among the carols and the Marty Haugen and the Daniel Pinkham Christmas cantata. It wasn't a song that I would have expected to stand out. If anything, there was every reason for the song to fall flat, to be a well-meaning embarrassment, given the context of its performance: an urban Catholic parish in New York City, far from its rural origins. But the song's sweetness, humor, playfulness, and visionary weirdness could not be tamed. It took the night to another place, and the performers and assembly went somewhere else for a while. It was impossible not to smile, and suddenly reverence wasn't very far from laughter and play.

Here's Johnny Cash and The Carter Family singing the song in question. Merry Christmas to all.

Bests (The Song Version)

Not a book list this time, but a song list, my favorites of 2010. I'm not exactly sure every and every one came out within the calendar year, but I think so. Just a handful of tracks embedded for now. I'll probably get to more throughout the week, so check back.


Midlake, "Acts of Man"
Sufjan Stevens, "Heirloom"
Of Montreal, "Sex Karma"
Karkwa, "L'Aurore"
Rangers, "Deerfield Village"

RANGERS - "DEERFIELD VILLAGE" from OLDE ENGLISH SPELLING BEE on Vimeo.

Puro Instinct, "California Shakedown"
Bombay Bicycle Club, "My God"
Avey Tare, "Oliver Twist"

Olof Arnalds and Bjork, "Surrender"
Ariel Pink, "Round and Round"
Deerhunter, "Earthquake"
Twin Shadow, "Slow"

Blue Water White Death, "Song for the Greater Jihad"
Joanna Newsom, "Kingfisher"
the morning benders, "Cold War"

Here We Go Magic, "Casual"
Levek, "Shift"
Twin Sister, "Meet The Frownies"

Headless Horseman, "KISSD HM"
Games, "Strawberry Skies"
Linda Perhacs, "Chimicum Rain" (re-release)
Holiday Shores, "Edge of Our Lives"
Owen Pallett, "Lewis Takes Off His Shirt"

Ariel Pink, "Round and Round"
Department of Eagles, "Deadly Disclosure"
Laura Veirs, "The Sleeper in the Valley"
Neil Young, "Rumblin'"
Blitzen Trapper, "Heaven and Earth"
Dirty Projectors and Bjork, "All We Are"

Bests

Usually, just around Christmas, I post a list of Books I Read during that calendar year. I'm going to forgo that this year just to mention two books, a memoir and a novel, that deserve to be on every Best of list. I'm not sure why I haven't seen them on those lists. Maybe they're too much themselves. Too idiosyncratic, too stubborn, too complex to shovel into any predetermined category, and hence their brilliance might be hard to see.

Anyway.

1) Nick Flynn's THE TICKING IS THE BOMB. "Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point." That's half this book's opening sentence. Those words not only say something about the speaker's predicament, but also describe what this book wants to do structurally. Inquiry without the usual linear map, but not without patterns. Addiction, a difficult father, difficult relationships, a culture's political crimes, the joy and fear of becoming a father--these issues sit by side, inviting us to make links--or not, as the case may be. How does one live in the age of terror? That's the troubling question that prods this speaker along.

2) Sigrid Nunez's SALVATION CITY. "The best way to remember people after they've passed is to remember the good about them." Instantly that opening sentence, spoken by an evangelical pastor, is held up for examination by Cole, the 13-year-old protagonist. ("Passed?" he thinks. Why not "died.") Here's a world in which a pandemic has killed great numbers of people worldwide. The country is unmanageable; children are in orphanages. Some of those children, including Cole, end up in situations profoundly different from the homes they've left behind. How do we remember? That's the question around which this amazing and involving novel turns.

On Having One's Picture Taken

Does anyone like being photographed? I'm not talking about a casual photograph, but having one's portrait done, which always ends up being more work than you expect. Sometimes it's worse than work. Many years ago, a photographer required me to hold an expression for minutes at a time. He dusted my face with powder until my skin was three shades too light. I could feel my expression hardening, while he made remarks about the size of my nose and who knows what else. Then, as the session wound down, he walked up to me, looked me in my eye, expecting me to what? Punch him? Kiss him? The incident seems almost funny and completely absurd from this distance, but it was a good example of how strange things can get when power makes a seemingly casual, passing relationship go messy.

So it was a huge relief to know that I was going to be photographed by my friend Star Black. She'd taken my picture before--not a portrait, but casually, and I'd loved her portraits of Mark, Louise Gluck, and others. I went to her apartment. She made me coffee, strong coffee. I stood by the window, she held up her camera, and soon we weren't exactly in clock time anymore--no other way to put it. I thought we'd be done in--a half hour? Forty five minutes? Over two hours later the two of us were sitting before her laptop, pressing the delete key over and over, until our eyes were stitchy and we were a little sick with our looking. I learned this: a good portrait is not just a collaboration between photographer and subject, but also a collaboration between light, posture, and thought, all of which are never still. It takes a lot of work to make it look easy--300 tries in this case--and then you come across a shot and you think, ah, so there it is. The life in motion, but fixed at the same time.

Anyway, this was taken for Unbuilt Projects, but it's likely going to go on The Burning House too.

Deletion

It might be apparent that the surface of this blog looks different today. I'm not even sure how things got that far. A desire to lift the black of the background led me to alternate templates. One change to another change, and here we are. I'm not even sure it's going to look this way in a week, or less, but in the meantime I'm going to try to live with what I've done. It feels like walking through the world with new glasses, except that the face with new glasses is looking back at me--and you, of course, too.

One supreme effect of the change is the emphasis placed on the text. The previous format gave me an odd permission in that words-images-videos were of equal value. In other words, I didn't have to be so responsible to the text as it was all of a piece, a very big deal to a writer who once had the tendency to pick too much at his language, who could stay all day with a single paragraph in his other writing. A desire for a certain artlessness--or at least the illusion of artlessness--has crept into that other writing, most certainly as a result of this blog. As a matter of fact, a few passages from both Unbuilt Projects and my book-in-progress had their origins here.

But the effect of the tablet behind the text? Well, yesterday, I deleted an entry for the first time in the history of 500-some entries. The post was a paragraph about my closet, the frustration of organizing my closet. I knew there was a metaphor inside my trying to cram too much life into the smallest space, but the entry felt forced. It might have even been enacting its subject: a page-worth pushed into a single paragraph. At certain points all day I kept picking at it and picking at it. I wanted it to work. I wanted it to look back at me, to see as I saw, as it shriveled under the action of my needle, scalpel, and laser. And oh can you tell what I must be thinking about? (Hint: previous post.) Who knew? Mark's eye. The writing escaped me, or it knew more than I did. I am humbled, and a little bewildered by what it did. And that's my little lesson to myself--and to you, of course--today.

Retina, Detached

A hostile red circle. Particles of snow. Petroleum jelly and smoke. A swarm of blood, and light trying to push through that blood. Crumbling around the edges. Retinal hemorrhage? No, detached retina. Alarming if a good eye doctor lived a mile way. More alarming when it tears away close to midnight, and you're out in your second home by yourself, on a weekend, with a seven-month-old puppy on your hands, two hours from a decent hospital. And there you are, driving west on a winding two-lane road, as your vision gets cloudier and grainier. This is the story of Mark's last 24 hours. Luckily, texts helped to keep us in touch through the night. And luckily, the preliminary surgery, conducted while Ned slept in the backseat of the car, looks promising. I'm on the bus, passing through Syosset as I write; I'll be out at the house in few hours. Still, Mark's in no way out of the woods. The recovery for the next two weeks? The head must be kept forward at all times, or the work of surgery is undone. Take lots of Advil, the doctors say. Merry Christmas.