Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
Another Outtake (Or: Summerhouses)
One more outtake from The Burning House, from one of the earliest drafts, in Joan's voice. It goes without saying that this voice is radically different from the voice and style of the finished book. Happy Memorial Day night.
*****
But why leap ahead when the story starts earlier in time?
Before the New York Times’ cover story about the revitalization of Lumina; before Jersey Central Power and Light persuaded the officials of Ingles Township to approve a nuclear plant on the banks of Oyster Creek on the promise of tax benefits to its residents and businesses, the U.S. launched a satellite, Explorer I, which confirmed what astronomers had long suspected: the earth was not perfectly round. The first submarine passed beneath the mentholated icecap of the North Pole. The American economy was in slowdown after years of unprecedented expansion, while the situation in the south was as volatile as a parched forest struck by lightning: resistance to school desegregation couldn’t have been more impassioned. On the western edge of Ocean Ridge, an honor student, an African American six-grader named Mona Strong, walked into Hyatt’s Drug Store to buy a Milky Way and was turned down by the behind the counter. “We don’t sell to Negroes,” he told her, with the same affable detachment with which he might have said, “White pelicans don’t roost at Island Beach State Park.”
June, 1958.
Thirty miles down Route 9, Boris Letzky leaned his forearms onto the pitted rail of the Oyster Creek Bridge. Looking east, he saw a 300-foot-wide stream, two duck hunting lodges built of scrap lumber, and an impossibly broad marsh crosshatched with mosquito ditching. The cordgrass flexed, a field of green, undulant knives. Though he was undeniably taken with the curve of the stream, and its equal parts combination of salt and cedar water, his real concern was channel depth: was it deep enough to accomodate a 14-foot powerboat? Why even consider digging lagoons off the creek if the main channel at low tide was as shallow as a baking pan? All along the Ocean County shoreline, developers were building canalfront ranchers at the rate of four per day in places like Beach Haven West, Barnegat Lagoons, and Mystic Islands, and Boris had ideas of his own. He was tired of feeling overshadowed by his brother, Roman, the apple of his mother’s eye, who at 25, had already performed the cello before several of the world’s major symphonies. He was tired of feeling he hadn’t quite moved into his life. The channel markers tilted this way and that, red triangles and green squares nailed to saplings stuck in the mucky bottom. A Chris Craft moved almost soundlessly through the staked path, with no signs of its engine blades churning up the mud behind the stern., and that was that: Boris made up his mind. Inside a thicket of common reeds a redwing blackbird trilled. A station wagon flled with produce approached from the north. He instinctively half-shielded his hornrims with his left arm, expecting one of the teenagers in the backseat to throw a peach at his forehead, but when he looked closer he was unnerved to see that they were grinning, as if inviting him, if only figuratively, to share in their abundance.
Boris bought the initial land that was to become Plat I of Lumina directly from Ingles Township, later renamed the more euphonious “Lumina” Township by citizens voting to cash in on the prestige of the Lumina name. He assembled the tract through tax foreclosure. From what I’ve pieced together from local newspapers, permits were quick to come by in those days, swift as water through an opened inlet: no dredge and fill applications necessary to the Army Corps of Engineers or any federal agency. Instead, approvals were granted by the state alone, and the riparian right included in the purchase price assured the possibility of development to the existing pierhead line—no matter that the land was submerged 90 percent of the year. It certainly didn’t hurt that the mayor, Harold Sadkin, had been conveniently related to Boris through marriage. (The uncle of Roman’s wife, Goldie, it turned out that Harold owed Boris a favor for towing his car after he’d run it off the road following a particularly unsatisfying tryst, and one cocktail too many, into a Coppertone billboard off Atlantic City’s White Horse Pike back in 1947.) But if Boris had lain awake at night, worrying about the fate of his project, he needn’t have done so. In 1958, “soil stabilization” and “land reclamation” were imbued with genuine social merit, if not quite as laudable as space exploration, then certainly high up on the list. And the land itself had long been deemed a certifiable nuisance, 2000 acres of cordgrass that the citizens of Ingles Township associated with the mosquito and greenhead welts they scratched at on their insteps and upper backs on breezeless summer nights. Only the duck hunters raised a stink once the project was discussed outside Blacky’s Clams—wasn’t that land the prime source of good table food between Toms River and Tuckerton? What kept them from rallying was the thought that there was still so much open marsh to be tromped through in those days, as well as their belief that no one would be flat-out foolish enough to buy a house on land that was guaranteed to flood during the new moon tide.
Two months after the initial approvals were signed and signed, Boris’ high school friend, Jack Despirito, stood behind the controls of a rusting, twenty-year-old red dredge that Boris had paid to tow up the coast from Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The smell in the air was worse than anything you could imagine. It was a musty, eggy, gassy kind of smell, the smell of rotting salt hay laced with oyster, barnacle, sea lettuce, sour weed. It was a smell that clung to Jack’s hands and his hair, a smell that no amount of hand washing, or special cleaning solvent, could take away. He’d later come to associate that complicated smell with the smell of trauma itself, not only with the perspiration that soaked his shirts when he was on the job (in addition to working the dredge during the day, he fielded phone calls from prospective homebuyers from the evening hours of 6 to 8 PM) but with the plight of the sea life he’d seen torn to little pieces as it joined the pumped up sand, first brown as good chocolate, then wet and gray once it dried, the color an of elephant hide.
But whatever Jack had come to think of his job, Boris couldn’t have been more dedicated to the making of the summerhouses he sold to middle class workers from Towamencin to Blackwood to Manalapan. These weren’t the houses of Beach Haven West or Forked River Beach—little four-room bungalows with flat roofs and jalousie windows and asbestos siding in turquoise and pink and pale yellow—but houses with tongue-and-groove mahogany ceilings; long thin windows that cranked open to let in the breezes, half-baths off the larger bedroom, and a range of custom options including extra picture windows; hooded, free-standing fireplaces; extra picture windows; and a landscaping package—no pallid imitations of inland suburban lawns here, but a range of seaside plantings including pitch pine, dusty miller, Russian olive, and prickly pear. Not a single structure faced the street. Instead each one was staggered at a 45-degree angle, to avoid the depressingly straight rows you saw upon driving down, say, Jennifer Lane in Beach Haven West. A single exhibit home opened on Panorama Drive, followed by a full-scale model on the 7th floor of Bambergers’ Department Store in Newark through which potential purchasers could actually pick up the plates, towels, and toothbrushes included in the basic purchase price. The basic purchase price? $10,990. Designed by Andrew Geller, the architect later acclaimed for his designs of angular beach in The Hamptons, “The Seaspray,” as it was called, was featured in House Beautiful magazine as an archetype of sophisticated, populist style. It was also featured in the American Life exhibit in Marseilles, at which the French cultural minister was overheard to say, after expressing the predictably aloof appreciation, “The higher the satellite, the lower the culture.”
Though sales surpassed all expectations, with contracts numbering well over a hundred in the first year, Boris’s competitors took bets among themselves to determine the precise date on which he’d lock the front door of the exhibit home for good. They were certain that he was underselling his houses by at least two thousand dollars apiece (who in their right mind would offer custom options for free in some cases?) and it would only be a matter of time before he couldn’t pay his subcontractors, and he’d default on loans to his creditors, and their three separate corporations would come in to divvy up the remaining lots, bought directly from Ingles Township, at tax sale, whereupon they’d build their exceedingly dreary, if practical, asbestos-shingled bungalows.
*****
But why leap ahead when the story starts earlier in time?
Before the New York Times’ cover story about the revitalization of Lumina; before Jersey Central Power and Light persuaded the officials of Ingles Township to approve a nuclear plant on the banks of Oyster Creek on the promise of tax benefits to its residents and businesses, the U.S. launched a satellite, Explorer I, which confirmed what astronomers had long suspected: the earth was not perfectly round. The first submarine passed beneath the mentholated icecap of the North Pole. The American economy was in slowdown after years of unprecedented expansion, while the situation in the south was as volatile as a parched forest struck by lightning: resistance to school desegregation couldn’t have been more impassioned. On the western edge of Ocean Ridge, an honor student, an African American six-grader named Mona Strong, walked into Hyatt’s Drug Store to buy a Milky Way and was turned down by the behind the counter. “We don’t sell to Negroes,” he told her, with the same affable detachment with which he might have said, “White pelicans don’t roost at Island Beach State Park.”
June, 1958.
Thirty miles down Route 9, Boris Letzky leaned his forearms onto the pitted rail of the Oyster Creek Bridge. Looking east, he saw a 300-foot-wide stream, two duck hunting lodges built of scrap lumber, and an impossibly broad marsh crosshatched with mosquito ditching. The cordgrass flexed, a field of green, undulant knives. Though he was undeniably taken with the curve of the stream, and its equal parts combination of salt and cedar water, his real concern was channel depth: was it deep enough to accomodate a 14-foot powerboat? Why even consider digging lagoons off the creek if the main channel at low tide was as shallow as a baking pan? All along the Ocean County shoreline, developers were building canalfront ranchers at the rate of four per day in places like Beach Haven West, Barnegat Lagoons, and Mystic Islands, and Boris had ideas of his own. He was tired of feeling overshadowed by his brother, Roman, the apple of his mother’s eye, who at 25, had already performed the cello before several of the world’s major symphonies. He was tired of feeling he hadn’t quite moved into his life. The channel markers tilted this way and that, red triangles and green squares nailed to saplings stuck in the mucky bottom. A Chris Craft moved almost soundlessly through the staked path, with no signs of its engine blades churning up the mud behind the stern., and that was that: Boris made up his mind. Inside a thicket of common reeds a redwing blackbird trilled. A station wagon flled with produce approached from the north. He instinctively half-shielded his hornrims with his left arm, expecting one of the teenagers in the backseat to throw a peach at his forehead, but when he looked closer he was unnerved to see that they were grinning, as if inviting him, if only figuratively, to share in their abundance.
Boris bought the initial land that was to become Plat I of Lumina directly from Ingles Township, later renamed the more euphonious “Lumina” Township by citizens voting to cash in on the prestige of the Lumina name. He assembled the tract through tax foreclosure. From what I’ve pieced together from local newspapers, permits were quick to come by in those days, swift as water through an opened inlet: no dredge and fill applications necessary to the Army Corps of Engineers or any federal agency. Instead, approvals were granted by the state alone, and the riparian right included in the purchase price assured the possibility of development to the existing pierhead line—no matter that the land was submerged 90 percent of the year. It certainly didn’t hurt that the mayor, Harold Sadkin, had been conveniently related to Boris through marriage. (The uncle of Roman’s wife, Goldie, it turned out that Harold owed Boris a favor for towing his car after he’d run it off the road following a particularly unsatisfying tryst, and one cocktail too many, into a Coppertone billboard off Atlantic City’s White Horse Pike back in 1947.) But if Boris had lain awake at night, worrying about the fate of his project, he needn’t have done so. In 1958, “soil stabilization” and “land reclamation” were imbued with genuine social merit, if not quite as laudable as space exploration, then certainly high up on the list. And the land itself had long been deemed a certifiable nuisance, 2000 acres of cordgrass that the citizens of Ingles Township associated with the mosquito and greenhead welts they scratched at on their insteps and upper backs on breezeless summer nights. Only the duck hunters raised a stink once the project was discussed outside Blacky’s Clams—wasn’t that land the prime source of good table food between Toms River and Tuckerton? What kept them from rallying was the thought that there was still so much open marsh to be tromped through in those days, as well as their belief that no one would be flat-out foolish enough to buy a house on land that was guaranteed to flood during the new moon tide.
Two months after the initial approvals were signed and signed, Boris’ high school friend, Jack Despirito, stood behind the controls of a rusting, twenty-year-old red dredge that Boris had paid to tow up the coast from Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The smell in the air was worse than anything you could imagine. It was a musty, eggy, gassy kind of smell, the smell of rotting salt hay laced with oyster, barnacle, sea lettuce, sour weed. It was a smell that clung to Jack’s hands and his hair, a smell that no amount of hand washing, or special cleaning solvent, could take away. He’d later come to associate that complicated smell with the smell of trauma itself, not only with the perspiration that soaked his shirts when he was on the job (in addition to working the dredge during the day, he fielded phone calls from prospective homebuyers from the evening hours of 6 to 8 PM) but with the plight of the sea life he’d seen torn to little pieces as it joined the pumped up sand, first brown as good chocolate, then wet and gray once it dried, the color an of elephant hide.
But whatever Jack had come to think of his job, Boris couldn’t have been more dedicated to the making of the summerhouses he sold to middle class workers from Towamencin to Blackwood to Manalapan. These weren’t the houses of Beach Haven West or Forked River Beach—little four-room bungalows with flat roofs and jalousie windows and asbestos siding in turquoise and pink and pale yellow—but houses with tongue-and-groove mahogany ceilings; long thin windows that cranked open to let in the breezes, half-baths off the larger bedroom, and a range of custom options including extra picture windows; hooded, free-standing fireplaces; extra picture windows; and a landscaping package—no pallid imitations of inland suburban lawns here, but a range of seaside plantings including pitch pine, dusty miller, Russian olive, and prickly pear. Not a single structure faced the street. Instead each one was staggered at a 45-degree angle, to avoid the depressingly straight rows you saw upon driving down, say, Jennifer Lane in Beach Haven West. A single exhibit home opened on Panorama Drive, followed by a full-scale model on the 7th floor of Bambergers’ Department Store in Newark through which potential purchasers could actually pick up the plates, towels, and toothbrushes included in the basic purchase price. The basic purchase price? $10,990. Designed by Andrew Geller, the architect later acclaimed for his designs of angular beach in The Hamptons, “The Seaspray,” as it was called, was featured in House Beautiful magazine as an archetype of sophisticated, populist style. It was also featured in the American Life exhibit in Marseilles, at which the French cultural minister was overheard to say, after expressing the predictably aloof appreciation, “The higher the satellite, the lower the culture.”
Though sales surpassed all expectations, with contracts numbering well over a hundred in the first year, Boris’s competitors took bets among themselves to determine the precise date on which he’d lock the front door of the exhibit home for good. They were certain that he was underselling his houses by at least two thousand dollars apiece (who in their right mind would offer custom options for free in some cases?) and it would only be a matter of time before he couldn’t pay his subcontractors, and he’d default on loans to his creditors, and their three separate corporations would come in to divvy up the remaining lots, bought directly from Ingles Township, at tax sale, whereupon they’d build their exceedingly dreary, if practical, asbestos-shingled bungalows.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Up Came a Fish
In some recent Q&A's, I've often spoken to the fact that The Burning House was originally a much longer book, almost three times as long as the published version. Isidore was one of but four narrators, who included Joan, who actually had more stage-time than any of the others; her mother; and--this probably sounds cracked-- a stray dog who looks back at the Earth from the afterlife. After working with these characters for years, it became clear that the story was Isidore's. It was always his, whether I knew it or not. That didn't mean it was easy to set aside all those pages, but the concentrated essence lay in his music and perceptions. I can only hope that the other voices help to energize his voice and his story. I think of it as a painting. In a painting, we're not aware of all the versions that lay beneath the final canvas, but we know their energy stirs up the surface. Here's just a little bit of an old prologue set aside, in Joan's voice.
*****
Shoulder presses to shoulder. Heat passes from body to body. The three of us lie awake on the living room floor, the remnants of the evening beside us: a bottle of wine, a nutcracker, a bowl of walnuts, shells strewn across the table. Next door, the new house with the overhang crowds in on us. Spotlights shine into our windows. Somebody calls, coffee? And we crash and bang into each other, thinking we have a guest. Sometimes we hold hands just to reassure ourselves that they haven’t moved in. And the dead? Well—the dead haven’t exactly gone away, but we can’t escape them either. Just last week someone dug a hole in his crawlspace, and up came a fish, mummified, perfectly preserved.
*****
Shoulder presses to shoulder. Heat passes from body to body. The three of us lie awake on the living room floor, the remnants of the evening beside us: a bottle of wine, a nutcracker, a bowl of walnuts, shells strewn across the table. Next door, the new house with the overhang crowds in on us. Spotlights shine into our windows. Somebody calls, coffee? And we crash and bang into each other, thinking we have a guest. Sometimes we hold hands just to reassure ourselves that they haven’t moved in. And the dead? Well—the dead haven’t exactly gone away, but we can’t escape them either. Just last week someone dug a hole in his crawlspace, and up came a fish, mummified, perfectly preserved.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Underfoot
I was reading The Long Goodbye, Meghan O'Rourke's excellent memoir of mourning her late mother, when it occurred to me that the second anniversary of my own mother's death had passed the week before, on May 15th, a Sunday. The fact that that date hadn't been uppermost in my mind stunned me, and not in the way you might think. I sat there for a while, the book in my hands, the light on my hands, looking out at the sprawl of leaves through the window. The living room smelled of sand-- wet. For a minute, I wondered whether she was touching the top of my head through the realm of the book. It would be wrong to think I had a clue as to what any of this meant.
from The Long Goodbye
Meghan O'Rourke
It's been fifteen months and one week since my mother died. A year, three months, a week.
Tomorrow, it will be a year, three months, a week, a day.
And so forth. What can I say? There is nothing "fixed" about my grief. I don't have the same sense that I'm sinking into the ground with every step I take. But there aren't any "conclusions" I can come to, other than personal ones. The irony is, my restored calm is itself the delusion. I'm more at peace because that old false sense of the continuity of life has returned.
I have learned a lot about how humans think about death. But it hasn't necessarily taught me more about my dead, where she is, what she is. When I held her body in my hands and it was just black ash, I felt no connection to it, but I tell myself perhaps it is enough to still be matter, to go into the ground and be "remixed" into some new part of the living culture, a new organic matter. Perhaps there is some solace in this continued existence.
When I was talking to my father about my mother's decision to be cremated, one spring night after dinner, sitting at the kitchen island, drinking wine together, he said, "She just kept saying, 'I don't want to be buried in the ground,' and she said, 'I want to be everywhere.' And I brought up the fact that you kids might want to have a place to visit, to be with her--I thought of that. But 'I don't want to be buried in the ground' is all she would say." He paused and drank some wine. Every time I looked at him I had the impression of a streak of white paint disappearing into a colorfully painted wall. It was almost as if he couldn't focus on us, or I couldn't focus on him. His eyes were walled and melting at once, circles dripping down under them into his face. "Knowing your mother, I would think she thought there was something sad about cemeteries. Sure, a grave is a place where we can go remember the dead when we want to, and that is important. But the rest of the time the grave just stands there unlooked after, segregated from the living, and you're there alone with all the other dead." He stroked his beard, like the professor that he is. "She would have thought that was sad," he said.
"I can see that," I said. "I can see that she would've wanted to be like the Whitman version of the dead, all underfoot." I was thinking of the lines from the end of "Song of Myself": "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles." One never has the impression that Whitman means look for him under your boot-soles in the cemetery; he means in the living world.
from The Long Goodbye
Meghan O'Rourke
It's been fifteen months and one week since my mother died. A year, three months, a week.
Tomorrow, it will be a year, three months, a week, a day.
And so forth. What can I say? There is nothing "fixed" about my grief. I don't have the same sense that I'm sinking into the ground with every step I take. But there aren't any "conclusions" I can come to, other than personal ones. The irony is, my restored calm is itself the delusion. I'm more at peace because that old false sense of the continuity of life has returned.
I have learned a lot about how humans think about death. But it hasn't necessarily taught me more about my dead, where she is, what she is. When I held her body in my hands and it was just black ash, I felt no connection to it, but I tell myself perhaps it is enough to still be matter, to go into the ground and be "remixed" into some new part of the living culture, a new organic matter. Perhaps there is some solace in this continued existence.
When I was talking to my father about my mother's decision to be cremated, one spring night after dinner, sitting at the kitchen island, drinking wine together, he said, "She just kept saying, 'I don't want to be buried in the ground,' and she said, 'I want to be everywhere.' And I brought up the fact that you kids might want to have a place to visit, to be with her--I thought of that. But 'I don't want to be buried in the ground' is all she would say." He paused and drank some wine. Every time I looked at him I had the impression of a streak of white paint disappearing into a colorfully painted wall. It was almost as if he couldn't focus on us, or I couldn't focus on him. His eyes were walled and melting at once, circles dripping down under them into his face. "Knowing your mother, I would think she thought there was something sad about cemeteries. Sure, a grave is a place where we can go remember the dead when we want to, and that is important. But the rest of the time the grave just stands there unlooked after, segregated from the living, and you're there alone with all the other dead." He stroked his beard, like the professor that he is. "She would have thought that was sad," he said.
"I can see that," I said. "I can see that she would've wanted to be like the Whitman version of the dead, all underfoot." I was thinking of the lines from the end of "Song of Myself": "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles." One never has the impression that Whitman means look for him under your boot-soles in the cemetery; he means in the living world.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Academy Awards
Some shots of the American Academy of Arts and Letters ceremony this afternoon, where Mark, Alice Fulton, John Koethe, Colum McCann, Suzan-Lori Parks, Alex Ross, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Joseph Stround won Academy Awards in Literature.
Old School Elegance on 155th St.
Mark on 155th St.
The Academy Stage
The Members of the Academy (Well, Many of Them)
Mark accepts his Academy Award in Literature from Phil Levine
Alice Fulton accepts her Academy Award in Literature from Phil Levine
Joy Williams
Karen Russell Accepts Her Award from Joy
Thomas Mallon Accepts His Award from Lorrie Moore
Edward Albee
Old School Elegance on 155th St.
Mark on 155th St.
The Academy Stage
The Members of the Academy (Well, Many of Them)
Mark accepts his Academy Award in Literature from Phil Levine
Alice Fulton accepts her Academy Award in Literature from Phil Levine
Joy Williams
Karen Russell Accepts Her Award from Joy
Thomas Mallon Accepts His Award from Lorrie Moore
Edward Albee
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Chords of Inquiry
A few weeks ago, Adam Day asked me to write a short essay for Memoriousmag Blog's Think Music feature. Here's the text, which just went up yesterday, along with three videos of the influencers in question.
CHORDS OF INQUIRY
I could hear a song, say a pop song on the radio, go home and play my version of it on the piano. This was when I was in second grade, before I started taking piano lessons. I couldn’t read music yet, but I had the ability to transcribe what I heard, in the original key, with the same harmonic structure. Michael, my youngest brother, a symphony musician, calls this absolute pitch. Others might call it perfect pitch. Whatever you want to call it, he has it. He says I have it, too. We wonder if our middle brother, who doesn’t play music, has it. Apparently, bats, wolves, gerbils, and birds can have it. I don’t think it’s a learned thing. Absolute pitch is probably written into your genetic code. Some people, for instance, can curl their tongues and make a little wet flute of them, while others can’t.
I couldn’t curl my tongue if you held a gun to my head, but I can certainly listen to a note and say: G. That made it next to impossible to listen to music while writing. There I’d be, trying to lose myself in the woods, and there was the music, and I couldn’t help from graphing out the structure in my head, making a map of what I heard. I had to work in silence. Sometimes I pressed my palms over my ears, but I dislike silence, as it puts too much pressure on the words. At least some sound from outside–whether its taxi horns or laughing gulls–can help me focus, and maybe those sounds can be pulled onto the page in ways that are beyond my ability to know.
I had a realization not so long ago. If I listened to music that was written and performed in an open guitar tuning, I couldn’t graph the music in my head. By open guitar tuning, I mean tuning the strings to non-standard pitches. In other words: EADGBE retuned to CGDFCE. Think: Joni Mitchell, Sonic Youth, Nick Drake. Plenty of examples exist, but those are the ones I like best. Why would anyone retune his guitar, possibly stressing the neck of the instrument? Maybe because you have a hunger for harmonic difference, dissonance; you don’t want things to be too resolved; and you want to sound just like your inner life, which is no small feat. You never get it exactly right, especially as your sense of weather might be changing all the time. Joni calls them her “chords of inquiry.” That seems to be an accurate description by a musician who’s been taken to task for not using the root of the chord.
So– a long way of saying that I can listen to the music of Joni Mitchell, Sonic Youth, and Nick Drake when I write. When I hear them, I’m lost, but it’s a lostness that feels like home. I can’t map it. It’s as if the map has been tilted off the NSEW directional and I don’t know where the ocean is, I don’t know where the sun sets. If it were possible, I’d retune the strings of language to a harmonic structure that might make you sit up and say, what the hell’s that? But you’d like it, too. I guess that’s what I’m trying for in my own loopy way, even though I know I’ll never get it exactly right.
*****
CHORDS OF INQUIRY
I could hear a song, say a pop song on the radio, go home and play my version of it on the piano. This was when I was in second grade, before I started taking piano lessons. I couldn’t read music yet, but I had the ability to transcribe what I heard, in the original key, with the same harmonic structure. Michael, my youngest brother, a symphony musician, calls this absolute pitch. Others might call it perfect pitch. Whatever you want to call it, he has it. He says I have it, too. We wonder if our middle brother, who doesn’t play music, has it. Apparently, bats, wolves, gerbils, and birds can have it. I don’t think it’s a learned thing. Absolute pitch is probably written into your genetic code. Some people, for instance, can curl their tongues and make a little wet flute of them, while others can’t.
I couldn’t curl my tongue if you held a gun to my head, but I can certainly listen to a note and say: G. That made it next to impossible to listen to music while writing. There I’d be, trying to lose myself in the woods, and there was the music, and I couldn’t help from graphing out the structure in my head, making a map of what I heard. I had to work in silence. Sometimes I pressed my palms over my ears, but I dislike silence, as it puts too much pressure on the words. At least some sound from outside–whether its taxi horns or laughing gulls–can help me focus, and maybe those sounds can be pulled onto the page in ways that are beyond my ability to know.
I had a realization not so long ago. If I listened to music that was written and performed in an open guitar tuning, I couldn’t graph the music in my head. By open guitar tuning, I mean tuning the strings to non-standard pitches. In other words: EADGBE retuned to CGDFCE. Think: Joni Mitchell, Sonic Youth, Nick Drake. Plenty of examples exist, but those are the ones I like best. Why would anyone retune his guitar, possibly stressing the neck of the instrument? Maybe because you have a hunger for harmonic difference, dissonance; you don’t want things to be too resolved; and you want to sound just like your inner life, which is no small feat. You never get it exactly right, especially as your sense of weather might be changing all the time. Joni calls them her “chords of inquiry.” That seems to be an accurate description by a musician who’s been taken to task for not using the root of the chord.
So– a long way of saying that I can listen to the music of Joni Mitchell, Sonic Youth, and Nick Drake when I write. When I hear them, I’m lost, but it’s a lostness that feels like home. I can’t map it. It’s as if the map has been tilted off the NSEW directional and I don’t know where the ocean is, I don’t know where the sun sets. If it were possible, I’d retune the strings of language to a harmonic structure that might make you sit up and say, what the hell’s that? But you’d like it, too. I guess that’s what I’m trying for in my own loopy way, even though I know I’ll never get it exactly right.
*****
Saturday, May 14, 2011
What I Did in San Francisco, in 40 Hours
1) Read with the excellent Ryan Van Meter at Booksmith on Haight Street.
2) Took a long walk up Haight Street, all the way from Union Square to the bookstore.
3) Looked at various plants and trees.
4) Had a happy lunch with my friend Algis Sodonis at Cafe Flore. (Not his outfit at the time.)
5) Read with Ryan and Tracy Seeley on Thursday night. Here, Ryan in foreground, Tracy in background, to the right, before things got underway.
7) Hung out with my former students Cascade Wilhelm and Morgan Levy after the reading.
6) Ate breakfast at Daily Grill, the San Francisco branch of Joni's (one-time?) favorite restaurant.
7) Went to Glen Park with my friend Genine Lentine, where we stopped by an old gym.
8) Was mesmerized by a half-circle of rocking horses near Glen Park Canyon.
9) Met a wonderful St. Bernard I wanted to take home with me. A sister for Ned?
2) Took a long walk up Haight Street, all the way from Union Square to the bookstore.
3) Looked at various plants and trees.
4) Had a happy lunch with my friend Algis Sodonis at Cafe Flore. (Not his outfit at the time.)
5) Read with Ryan and Tracy Seeley on Thursday night. Here, Ryan in foreground, Tracy in background, to the right, before things got underway.
7) Hung out with my former students Cascade Wilhelm and Morgan Levy after the reading.
6) Ate breakfast at Daily Grill, the San Francisco branch of Joni's (one-time?) favorite restaurant.
7) Went to Glen Park with my friend Genine Lentine, where we stopped by an old gym.
8) Was mesmerized by a half-circle of rocking horses near Glen Park Canyon.
9) Met a wonderful St. Bernard I wanted to take home with me. A sister for Ned?
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Why I'd Never Been to the Garden
In the midst of much movement, I had two hours to look at plants and trees. This was Tuesday, at the Bronx Botanical Garden, which I'd once passed hundreds of times on the train to Sarah Lawrence. For seven years, that stretch between Grand Central and Bronxvilke seemed to be all about getting to work, which might explain why I'd never been to the Garden. That track was Conduit, with Capital C, so it felt like good to be sent there, to smell wet leaf, woodchip, and lavender; to feel earth beneath my shoes; to be present in space and time, especially at a hectic time. (I think I finally processed all that twenty four hours later, as I wrote this from the plane over Tonopah, Nevada, on the way to San Francisco.) I've been invited by the National Book foundation to write a short text about a portion of the garden--or a particular tree or flower or plant. A part of the text will be posted on a sign beside the plant--indefinitely--including a number to access a recording of the text. Here, a few pictures of the walk I shared with the lovely Emma Straub, who's also writing a piece. An hour later, Camille Rankine joined us, and soon the three of us were bumping around the garden on an electrically undernourished golf cart, wondering what to write, what to write.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Tour
Three readings in three days. That might sound like an exhaustion, but Book Three is different from Book One. Back in 1999 (1999!), I was much more consumed with what to read for each event, what to wear, how many people would show up--or not. An endless rehearsal in the mind, which never came close to matching the event as it played out. Now I'm even managing to write in the midst of all this. I pretty much finished a new piece on the bus out to the reading at Canio's in Sag Harbor last night. I have a few days off ahead (and in book time a few days off feels spacious to the point of infinite) then off to San Francisco Wednesday for a reading at Booksmith with Ryan Van Meter, and another with Ryan and Tracy Seeley at the Hotel Rex on Thursday. Below are a few pictures of the past few nights of my co-readers, Ann Hood, Alix Kates Shulman, and Nick Ripatrazone, along with Angelo Nikolopoulos who gave me one of the smartest, wittiest introductions ever.
Angelo Nikolopoulos (at NYU)
Ann Hood (at NYU)
Alix Kates Shulman (at NYU)
Nick Ripatrazone (at Watchung Booksellers)
Angelo Nikolopoulos (at NYU)
Ann Hood (at NYU)
Alix Kates Shulman (at NYU)
Nick Ripatrazone (at Watchung Booksellers)
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
The Builder
From Anthony Carelli's new book Carnations, which I am loving tonight...
The Builder
If I were called in to construct a religion
I would make use of lumber, and naturally
I would find the best lumber in the land.
There's no shame in wanting your religion
to last. If I'm building to accommodate the gods,
I figure the platform should be nice
and sturdy; the gods might be really heavy.
Besides, all kinds of people are sure to come
and climb all over it, wear the thing out.
Therefore, if I build in Wisconsin, I'll use oak;
in New England, ironwood. And in Parguay
I hear there's a flowering tree called lapacho
with wood so rigid and heavy it outlives men.
I'd like to get my hands on some of that.
The Builder
If I were called in to construct a religion
I would make use of lumber, and naturally
I would find the best lumber in the land.
There's no shame in wanting your religion
to last. If I'm building to accommodate the gods,
I figure the platform should be nice
and sturdy; the gods might be really heavy.
Besides, all kinds of people are sure to come
and climb all over it, wear the thing out.
Therefore, if I build in Wisconsin, I'll use oak;
in New England, ironwood. And in Parguay
I hear there's a flowering tree called lapacho
with wood so rigid and heavy it outlives men.
I'd like to get my hands on some of that.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Do Not Feed, Tease, or Harass!
Below, my contribution to the May 1st Aboutaword blog. Click here to see the text formatted with images.
1. There’s an alligator two long blocks away. He’s not in some preserve or a visitor in some urban park with a wild streak, but in a retention basin behind Sam’s Club in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I’ve been a visiting writer at the UNCW MFA program. I’ve been going out there every day, since I read about the alligator in the local paper. I never see him, though. I’ve been looking for alligators since I’ve been here: at the lagoon around the Battleship North Carolina, in the turtle pond at Greenfield Lake, just south of downtown. I bet I’d see one if I weren’t looking for one. I’d be walking by some pond, and there he’d be, shy, resting beneath some plants.
2. In a matter of days, I’ll have a new book out. A novel this time, though I think of it as a long poem. It uses all the techniques of a poem–ellipses, disjunction, compression–and I think poets will get what it’s up to. One Tuesday night, when I feel especially restless, I head over to the Barnes and Noble at Mayfaire Town Center on the east side of town. It’s after nine, and this shopping area feels especially ghosty and deserted because the place is meant to resemble a real town, with shops on the ground floor, apartments overhead. City planners call it New Urbanism. Somehow Mayfaire feels less like a town tonight, and more like the usual shopping center pretending to be something else. I walk in the store, one of the few places still open, and head into the fiction section, which is, as predicted, buried deep in the store. Will The Burning House find its way here? Most of the covers feel bright and needy, not what the writers would really want for their books. I pick up two books, head over to the cashier, and when I leave the store, I have the feeling I’ve done something completely out of sync with the moment. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like that upon buying a book: fastened, printed, built of sturdy paper. Maybe that’s because all the other people inside are hanging around the coffee bar, looking at their screens. Luckily the book will also be out in eBook form, just a few days after its print release.
3. Alligators have a mythic status here, maybe because we’re at the northernmost end of their habitat. People talk about them more than they do a few hundred miles south. Sightings are big news, which would make sense given that there are only thousands of alligators in the region. If there are so few, why have several been spotted in the ocean nearby over the last year or so? Alligators aren’t meant for saltwater; they’re fresh (or brackish) water creatures. And yet they’ve chosen to put themselves out in the least protected places, in Topsail Beach, in Carolina Beach, in Myrtle Beach.
4. I take a drive to North Myrtle Beach, an hour south, hoping to get a kick out of the place. If a 13-year old boy were given the chance to plan a beach resort, I bet he’d come up with something like North Myrtle Beach. Pancake houses, an alligator attraction, miniature golf courses with elaborate fixtures. In one, a three-story volcano spews water the color of grape Gatorade. I drive and drive, expecting to feel: exuberance! humor! Instead it feels like a manifestation of human desire out of control. In other words, need, need, need, need, need.
5. Desire gets the characters in The Burning House in trouble. There’s a funny thing about desire: it feeds us–we know that–but it can also get us into big trouble. The book is interested in that big trouble, the damage that one man might do unconsciously in order to see his wife once again, as she is right now. He must sense that he has fallen for a romanticized notion of her, and held fast to that notion at his own peril. He wants to be in sync with her again, whether he knows that or not, and maybe that’s why he falls so hard for his wife’s sister.
6. I walk through the long campus house on College Acres Drive, where the creative writing program has put me up for the month. The house would not be too big for a family, but for one person, it feels spacious, empty, a little ghosty. There are bedrooms I never walk into. How could one person fill it? The space couldn’t be further from the one-bedroom Manhattan apartment I share with my partner, Mark, and our retriever Ned. Three big lives packed into 480 square feet. I’ve wonder if I’ve lost my ability to live well in a space with room. I try to let myself sprawl, then take inordinate interest in picking up the cups and papers, and keeping it fanatically neat.
7. My work has always been interested in houses. The search for them feels primal and animal, especially in a world that often feels like it’s coming undone around us. In The Burning House, the narrator’s sister-in-law has joined a group that’s trying to stop a townhouse project on a nearby island, home to a colony of endangered shore birds. That’s the only way she knows how to protect the community around her, which is being torn up (teardown after teardown) by greed. The characters in the book love wildness; if given the chance, they’d probably chose living outside over inside, but they also know that homes, of whatever sort, are meant to be protected.
8. After I finish my last workshop, I reward myself with an overnight trip to Charleston, South Carolina. I am only here one more week, and I figure I’ll never get to Charleston again. I spend the evening out at Isle of Palms, stirred up by what’s left of the maritime forest. Why have we allowed our beaches to be scraped all up down the east coast? I walk by a pond with the sign Warning Alligator and walk out to the beach. I fear that I’m indulging my love for the beach at evening, when a smart person would be across the river, walking up and down the city streets. I save that for the next day, and once I’m in the 18th century city, I’m entranced. Colonial houses up against palms and jasmine, pelicans and gulls overhead. The kind of hybridized place that stirs up my imagination. I walk up and down through one residential zone, aware that these houses were built on the backs of slaves; aware too that it feels loved, like few places are these days.
9. Why would a crocodile venture as far north as the Isle of Palms fishing pier, hundreds of miles north of South Florida, their usual zone? But that’s exactly what I find out in the archives of the Charleston Post and Courier. A crocodile did that back in 2008, and after a trapper caught him, he was trucked back down to the Everglades, where he might still be lurking in some creek, among the mangroves.
10. Tomorrow morning I’ll be flying back to New York. My stint here is done. My book is out, and I’ve been productive here, writing-wise, a very good feeling. Maybe I’ll delay my packing and head out to Wrightsville Beach just one more time. I am looking forward to being home, but there’s that part of me that will miss sitting out on the back porch, miss the humid air on my arms, the squeak toy sound of laughing gulls overhead, the thunderheads, the hum of the university’s physical plant, the fifty foot-tall pines. I will probably even miss the University’s water tower, which has pretty much commanded my view for the past thirty days. It has helped me keep my head up.
1. There’s an alligator two long blocks away. He’s not in some preserve or a visitor in some urban park with a wild streak, but in a retention basin behind Sam’s Club in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I’ve been a visiting writer at the UNCW MFA program. I’ve been going out there every day, since I read about the alligator in the local paper. I never see him, though. I’ve been looking for alligators since I’ve been here: at the lagoon around the Battleship North Carolina, in the turtle pond at Greenfield Lake, just south of downtown. I bet I’d see one if I weren’t looking for one. I’d be walking by some pond, and there he’d be, shy, resting beneath some plants.
2. In a matter of days, I’ll have a new book out. A novel this time, though I think of it as a long poem. It uses all the techniques of a poem–ellipses, disjunction, compression–and I think poets will get what it’s up to. One Tuesday night, when I feel especially restless, I head over to the Barnes and Noble at Mayfaire Town Center on the east side of town. It’s after nine, and this shopping area feels especially ghosty and deserted because the place is meant to resemble a real town, with shops on the ground floor, apartments overhead. City planners call it New Urbanism. Somehow Mayfaire feels less like a town tonight, and more like the usual shopping center pretending to be something else. I walk in the store, one of the few places still open, and head into the fiction section, which is, as predicted, buried deep in the store. Will The Burning House find its way here? Most of the covers feel bright and needy, not what the writers would really want for their books. I pick up two books, head over to the cashier, and when I leave the store, I have the feeling I’ve done something completely out of sync with the moment. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like that upon buying a book: fastened, printed, built of sturdy paper. Maybe that’s because all the other people inside are hanging around the coffee bar, looking at their screens. Luckily the book will also be out in eBook form, just a few days after its print release.
3. Alligators have a mythic status here, maybe because we’re at the northernmost end of their habitat. People talk about them more than they do a few hundred miles south. Sightings are big news, which would make sense given that there are only thousands of alligators in the region. If there are so few, why have several been spotted in the ocean nearby over the last year or so? Alligators aren’t meant for saltwater; they’re fresh (or brackish) water creatures. And yet they’ve chosen to put themselves out in the least protected places, in Topsail Beach, in Carolina Beach, in Myrtle Beach.
4. I take a drive to North Myrtle Beach, an hour south, hoping to get a kick out of the place. If a 13-year old boy were given the chance to plan a beach resort, I bet he’d come up with something like North Myrtle Beach. Pancake houses, an alligator attraction, miniature golf courses with elaborate fixtures. In one, a three-story volcano spews water the color of grape Gatorade. I drive and drive, expecting to feel: exuberance! humor! Instead it feels like a manifestation of human desire out of control. In other words, need, need, need, need, need.
5. Desire gets the characters in The Burning House in trouble. There’s a funny thing about desire: it feeds us–we know that–but it can also get us into big trouble. The book is interested in that big trouble, the damage that one man might do unconsciously in order to see his wife once again, as she is right now. He must sense that he has fallen for a romanticized notion of her, and held fast to that notion at his own peril. He wants to be in sync with her again, whether he knows that or not, and maybe that’s why he falls so hard for his wife’s sister.
6. I walk through the long campus house on College Acres Drive, where the creative writing program has put me up for the month. The house would not be too big for a family, but for one person, it feels spacious, empty, a little ghosty. There are bedrooms I never walk into. How could one person fill it? The space couldn’t be further from the one-bedroom Manhattan apartment I share with my partner, Mark, and our retriever Ned. Three big lives packed into 480 square feet. I’ve wonder if I’ve lost my ability to live well in a space with room. I try to let myself sprawl, then take inordinate interest in picking up the cups and papers, and keeping it fanatically neat.
7. My work has always been interested in houses. The search for them feels primal and animal, especially in a world that often feels like it’s coming undone around us. In The Burning House, the narrator’s sister-in-law has joined a group that’s trying to stop a townhouse project on a nearby island, home to a colony of endangered shore birds. That’s the only way she knows how to protect the community around her, which is being torn up (teardown after teardown) by greed. The characters in the book love wildness; if given the chance, they’d probably chose living outside over inside, but they also know that homes, of whatever sort, are meant to be protected.
8. After I finish my last workshop, I reward myself with an overnight trip to Charleston, South Carolina. I am only here one more week, and I figure I’ll never get to Charleston again. I spend the evening out at Isle of Palms, stirred up by what’s left of the maritime forest. Why have we allowed our beaches to be scraped all up down the east coast? I walk by a pond with the sign Warning Alligator and walk out to the beach. I fear that I’m indulging my love for the beach at evening, when a smart person would be across the river, walking up and down the city streets. I save that for the next day, and once I’m in the 18th century city, I’m entranced. Colonial houses up against palms and jasmine, pelicans and gulls overhead. The kind of hybridized place that stirs up my imagination. I walk up and down through one residential zone, aware that these houses were built on the backs of slaves; aware too that it feels loved, like few places are these days.
9. Why would a crocodile venture as far north as the Isle of Palms fishing pier, hundreds of miles north of South Florida, their usual zone? But that’s exactly what I find out in the archives of the Charleston Post and Courier. A crocodile did that back in 2008, and after a trapper caught him, he was trucked back down to the Everglades, where he might still be lurking in some creek, among the mangroves.
10. Tomorrow morning I’ll be flying back to New York. My stint here is done. My book is out, and I’ve been productive here, writing-wise, a very good feeling. Maybe I’ll delay my packing and head out to Wrightsville Beach just one more time. I am looking forward to being home, but there’s that part of me that will miss sitting out on the back porch, miss the humid air on my arms, the squeak toy sound of laughing gulls overhead, the thunderheads, the hum of the university’s physical plant, the fifty foot-tall pines. I will probably even miss the University’s water tower, which has pretty much commanded my view for the past thirty days. It has helped me keep my head up.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Small Pond
1. It would make sense that we'd end up soaking in a small pond, a hot spring actually, 61 miles northeast of Fairbanks, at Chena Hot Springs, after having spent a month of looking at small bodies of water for alligators in the Carolinas. The water was almost too hot for me--I started to feel like boiled shrimp--so I climbed onto a rock and lay out in the sun in my swimsuit, while Mark and our good friend and host Derick Burleson talked about poetry. There I was, lying out in the sun in my Fred Meyer-bought swimsuit, not too far south of the Arctic Circle. I could have lain there all day, though I'm not sure what "all day" could mean when the sun rises at four AM and sets at 10 PM right now.
Later that night I slept better than I'd slept in month. We could all use a hot spring every now and then.
2. When we weren't giving readings or craft talks at UAF, we were looking for moose. We saw impeccably neat clusters moose droppings along the Chena River, right in town, no more than an hour after we landed on Monday, but you probably already know that the trip was moose-less. That didn't so much matter, as the looking was the interesting part. I couldn't take my eyes off those woods as we streamed out of town and back again.
3. The morning of our departure, Amber Flora Thomas, Derick's colleague at UAF, took us for a ride to Murphy's Dome, about twenty miles out of town. It's the highest point near Fairbanks, and if you look south, you can see mountains, startling snow-coated mountains, higher than anything you've seen in North America. The air felt completely unfiltered up there, nothing between the sun and our foreheads. And all around us, hints of the tundra before it was seeded with evergreen decades ago. Was it by plane? I think that's what I heard.
4. In the thick of things, I forgot to say we saw a reindeer giving birth! It happened so quietly, so effortlessly, no other humans in sight, that we'd convinced ourselves we weren't seeing what we were seeing. Certainly, that dark-haired calf wasn't really half inside her mother as she (he?) wiggled her ears and lifted her head to take a look at the world. Sure enough, though, when we drove back from Murphy's Dome, we stopped at the UAF's reindeer pen, and there was mother again, calm now, busy, chewing what was left of the umbilical cord.
5. The students were wonderful. The people we met after the reading were wonderful. But on the last day we couldn't stop thinking of the duties that awaited us on the other end. We left at 5 on Thursday to arrive in NYC at 9 the next morning. Two quickish layovers--Seattle and Detroit. Somehow my luggage made it through, and we made it too. Mark got to his lecture in Princeton at five o'clock Friday, and I got to the One Story Ball in Brooklyn, in Boerum Hill, where I escorted the wonderful Jerry Gabriel through the throng. I got back to the apartment at 1 AM Saturday. I slept till 1 PM Saturday. I've never slept that late--or that long--in my life.
Some photos of the event. In the first, the One Story debutantes: Jerry, Robin Black, Seth Fried, Susanna Daniel, and Jim Hanas. (Some people I talked to: Hannah Tinti, Josh Henkin, Elliott Holt, Jennifer Gilmore, Jordana Rosenberg, Larry Dark, and so many others.)
6. The Burning House is out this week. Officially. Many readings! Come to one! Watchung Booksellers in Montclair Thursday, NYU Friday, Canio's Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday.
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