For the last two weeks, I have been haunted by Leo London's latest song, "Waiting for my Ship to Come In," a rough recording of which can be found through this link.
Since I met Leo London, I have admired his songwriting and phrasing. He has the ability to capture, through understatement and the simple repetition of simple phrase, the ways the mundane and expected sorrows aggregate and become, finally profoundly large. In his best work, there is scene and narrative, but each line and event becomes metaphor, too, making more of the small gesture than any contemporary songwriter I know. There is an effortlessness to the work that belies the considerable craft of its creation. His best songs have an integrity, an inexplicable gravity. His life is not mine, but I am indeed waiting for my ship to come in, literally and metaphorically, and I know full well that the waiting is laden with small regrets, just as there is no ship, no fucking harbor, no passage at all. No escape.
So it is here. "I bought a pair of sunglasses at Cash Kings/ waiting for my ship to come in.... we made plans to leave together/watching the buses leave the bay/ but our old lives won't get better/living in our old ways."
So the shipping out is actually the bus-stop, the grayhound of getting away, the matches have all run out for the last cigarette in the last pack, and you can't count on the weather or the flight not being delayed. Again and again, the refrain, "waiting for my ship to come in," repeats and takes on force. So it is that we will always be waiting for the opportunity that isn't coming, wearing cheap sunglasses to hide our faces, wishing for a brighter, easier life. And so it is Leo captures that duration, the long endurance, the greater longing.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Sunday
Today, I walked with tongue out and my face turned to the whited sky, catching snowflakes, watching the sheet of single crystals falling all at a different speed for a different place, trying to pick out the descent of a single flake that might be caught given a generally forward trajectory. This pursuit looked as stupid as it sounds. It was lovely.
Finally, the snow failed to stick; now, with the cold of night come down, the sky is mostly clear, an occasional sprinkling fall of white like thrown glitter here and there and then gone, and I do not think it will be a white morning tomorrow. Black ice will suffice, anyway, as far as hazards go-- people will think, no snow, and cars will skid through intersections into lamposts, water mains, unlucky pedestrians.
I believe I will rise late.
I woke to my cold apartment at eleven, Saturday night a blur of pool with friends, the dance club with the ballerinas and my friend who is dating one of them, me dancing badly to hip-hop, not so good with the 4/4, and finally the final cold walk home through the long unlit alley that is a shortcut that I often take but that unsettles me with a couple drinks in me late at night, my white breath before me in the dark, the overhanging trees and the fences and unwindowed walls a long queue of shadows.
My apartment was cold-- I had forgotten to turn up the heat. Out my 11th floor window the Coburg hills were dusted white and the falling flakes fell the length of the window in their greater fall, and I stood and watched for a long time the snow in downward path and the cars crawling the square streets and my own dim reflection in the glass, a man looking down and past and over and through, and after a time a feeling came over me, and then a phrase, intolerable clarity, and I grinned at the overwrought narration of my own life and went to shower.
I have become a poor observer of my own habits. Too much navel-gazing and liminal space. Too much of the bar and of the sorrowful nature of longing.
Tonight, I had dinner with my parents and my brother's family and my sister-in-law's grandparents, an affair that as usual involved hours of entertainment from my nephews of four and six who remind me an awful lot of my brother and myself. Watching them in their madcap capers and mayhem, hamming it up, banging knives to glasses to announce their next trick, turning cartwheels and flips and shooting toy guns with lasers, requiring endless management and in their energy too filling my brother's living room, I thought of the morning, of my still cold apartment, of the life I have now which speaks as much to absence as anything else. I would not make my brother's choices, to have started a family at twenty-two, but I would not make my own choices either, to have stayed too long in one place enacting endless circles. I need-- more.
And to find it, I will have to seek. In my dreams the shadows too often close, the child cannot be saved, the clock ticks toward some dreadful imminence.
But I am writing this story, and so can change how it ends.
Finally, the snow failed to stick; now, with the cold of night come down, the sky is mostly clear, an occasional sprinkling fall of white like thrown glitter here and there and then gone, and I do not think it will be a white morning tomorrow. Black ice will suffice, anyway, as far as hazards go-- people will think, no snow, and cars will skid through intersections into lamposts, water mains, unlucky pedestrians.
I believe I will rise late.
I woke to my cold apartment at eleven, Saturday night a blur of pool with friends, the dance club with the ballerinas and my friend who is dating one of them, me dancing badly to hip-hop, not so good with the 4/4, and finally the final cold walk home through the long unlit alley that is a shortcut that I often take but that unsettles me with a couple drinks in me late at night, my white breath before me in the dark, the overhanging trees and the fences and unwindowed walls a long queue of shadows.
My apartment was cold-- I had forgotten to turn up the heat. Out my 11th floor window the Coburg hills were dusted white and the falling flakes fell the length of the window in their greater fall, and I stood and watched for a long time the snow in downward path and the cars crawling the square streets and my own dim reflection in the glass, a man looking down and past and over and through, and after a time a feeling came over me, and then a phrase, intolerable clarity, and I grinned at the overwrought narration of my own life and went to shower.
I have become a poor observer of my own habits. Too much navel-gazing and liminal space. Too much of the bar and of the sorrowful nature of longing.
Tonight, I had dinner with my parents and my brother's family and my sister-in-law's grandparents, an affair that as usual involved hours of entertainment from my nephews of four and six who remind me an awful lot of my brother and myself. Watching them in their madcap capers and mayhem, hamming it up, banging knives to glasses to announce their next trick, turning cartwheels and flips and shooting toy guns with lasers, requiring endless management and in their energy too filling my brother's living room, I thought of the morning, of my still cold apartment, of the life I have now which speaks as much to absence as anything else. I would not make my brother's choices, to have started a family at twenty-two, but I would not make my own choices either, to have stayed too long in one place enacting endless circles. I need-- more.
And to find it, I will have to seek. In my dreams the shadows too often close, the child cannot be saved, the clock ticks toward some dreadful imminence.
But I am writing this story, and so can change how it ends.
Friday, January 06, 2012
The winter has settled in, finally-- for most of December, it was clear and cold, New England weather displaced onto this valley of rain and constant cloud-cover. Now, the weather is back in form, drizzle and an unbroken ceiling of gray, and with the unrelenting drear comes too the stir-crazy wanting, the need to break loose and light up, to get beyond. I have felt it some days, waking early and pacing, or scrolling cable late at night, watching reruns of Iron Chef on unending queue as if in culinary battle there was something to be found. On my facebook page today, a local bartender posted the status "Isn't it about time for a good old fashioned make-out session," I nearly posted "Yes," before realizing that might be taken as an offer. Offers are out there at the bars, that much is sure-- last night, in town for an evening, a Hawaiian lass named "Baby girl," a given name in fact, seemed ready to go anywhere. The tall, likely crazy Barbie who has been pursuing me for months but who never remembers my name because she only sees me when drunk approached yet again, told me yet again how she likes mixed-asian men as a result of the time she spent in Hawaii, and it is too bad that she works retail and is clearly not too smart; there is some justice, at least, in the tall, hot blonde having a thing for stocky Asian men. Because it is in the air, last night I literally lost my glasses, and if there ever was a metaphor, losing for the looking, there it is. I fled Baby Girl to go by John Henry's, the best dive in town, and ran into a fellow who works the bagel shop who I sometimes play pool with, and he introduced me to his girlfriend, blonde and cute, a sophomore English major whose whole face lit up when she heard I was a writer and taught in the English Department. She told me she wanted to blow her adviser. She professed an interest in 16th and 17th century poetry, and though I could think only of names including John and somehow came out with John Locke when I meant of course John Donne, she was convinced of my authority as a writer of prose and nodded enthusiastically concerning the philosopher. She suggested that we "Get out of here right now, together," and when I protested about her boyfriend, she said, "He's not my boyfriend. I just wake up on his bed now and then on nights I need a fuck," and the coldness of the young debutante terrified me-- the bagel shop guy is awfully nice. The best line I could come up with to leave on was, "The world needs more English majors." Really, it needs more of everything, right now: more light and heat, more heart, perhaps even more poetry. More to find and be found, and less hapless seeking.
Thursday, January 05, 2012
New Work In Progress
This is exposition-heavy for now... but it is going, quite literally, down a canyon and nearly off a cliff.
The Summer I graduated high school, my brother and I took our parent’s Toyota minivan on a camping trip through British Columbia. Newly eighteen, Stanford-bound, convinced for what seemed like sound enough reasons of my own invincible merit, I had spent my high school years working hard and staying out of trouble. Only as graduation came on did I finally loosen up a little, drinking at parties and kissing an occasional girl, taking chances here and there.
My brother Jeremy was already the reckless rebel, his entire identity predicated on not being me: he insisted on attending a different high school, didn’t care about his grades or what our parent’s thought, had already dropped out of competitive sports, took up surfing, BMX racing and smoking weed. His friends were the bad boys of the school, hoodied and perpetually slouched to walls, cutting class to smoke cigarettes behind the gym, most headed nowhere good. But we were tight and had no secrets and never fought, had been that way since I was ten and he was eight and the two of us, talking between bunks in the dark, had decided that it made no sense to fight each other when we could buck our strict parents by presenting a united front. We could meet eyes as our parents laid down some mandate or rule or schedule and know not just what the other was thinking, but how we could collude to make things tilt our way. When we were young, that was as simple as a shared protest or agreement, numbers at the ballot. Later, I would note that a family trip we didn’t want to go on would interfere with my wrestling schedule or study session, when really I didn’t care, but knew Jeremy had a party he wanted to be at; for his part, knowing me, he’d take the rap those rare times I fucked up, like when our parents noticed that the liquor cabinet had been raided-- I’d taken the Cutty Sark for graduation night, but when they assumed it was him, he didn’t set them straight even as they yelled and carried on. The favored older son, my accommodation to the hand I’d been dealt was to perform perfection and so avoid censure, while Jeremy, stuck with inevitable comparison, refused judgment entirely.
Yet the truth was that we were pretty much the same, nice quiet kids, half-Japanese and so never belonging in white suburban Oregon, short and bookish and overbright, sensitive and a little awkward. If Jeremy admired my dedication and achievement, I admired his willingness to defy the expectations of the known world. As August’s heat came on and plans were set for me to leave for college, it was clear that our partnership was coming to an end. This trip was to be our last hurrah. I convinced my parents to let us take the car on the basis of my long record of responsibility—I would watch after the kid and stay safe, I promised. I thought I was breaking us both free into the heady independence that I thought of as adulthood.
We strapped my brother’s mountain bike to the back of the van, took removed the rear seats for room, filled a cooler with sausage, hot-dogs, eggs and marshmallows, borrowed the down sleeping bags and campstove, stowed in kindling and wood for campfires, took a couple old newspapers for tinder, made sure we had the rainsleeve. We took the inflatable two-man kayak, a pump, lifejackets, and two paddles, imagining wild rivers up there and still giddy with our skill: we’d run the wild and scenic portion of the Rogue that July in the two-man without flipping once. I hid a fifth of Absolut in the bottom of my clothes bag. We could do anything at all in the deep Canadian woods, British Columbia beckoning like a tundra Mardi Gras, sure to allow us to become more than boys.
We left early on a Monday morning through a cold dawn, taking turns driving, rock overloud from the tinny speakers, I-5 a long fast flat run through Portland and past Seattle, the land the long flat fields and a tunnel forest, familiar, an automatic green blur. We gassed up just before we hit the border in Washington, pass the Canadian guards with a grin and a wave, only to have the guard wave us back to tell us we had no gas cap, that we’d left it back in the States. The US Border guards detained us for a full hour questioning us and looking for contraband, unsympathetic to our explanation we’d been in Canada for five minutes, leaving me sweating about the Absolut. They were looking for drugs, fortunately, and didn’t find the vodka. By the time we’d retrieved the cap and come back across the border again, our enthusiasm was undulled, but our confidence had been a bit shaken. The highrises of Vancouver ahead, however, sparkling in the high sun of afternoon braced us and renewed us. We were at any moment going to find our future, or at least, see something we had never seen before. We made for the cheapest hostel of Watertown.
The Summer I graduated high school, my brother and I took our parent’s Toyota minivan on a camping trip through British Columbia. Newly eighteen, Stanford-bound, convinced for what seemed like sound enough reasons of my own invincible merit, I had spent my high school years working hard and staying out of trouble. Only as graduation came on did I finally loosen up a little, drinking at parties and kissing an occasional girl, taking chances here and there.
My brother Jeremy was already the reckless rebel, his entire identity predicated on not being me: he insisted on attending a different high school, didn’t care about his grades or what our parent’s thought, had already dropped out of competitive sports, took up surfing, BMX racing and smoking weed. His friends were the bad boys of the school, hoodied and perpetually slouched to walls, cutting class to smoke cigarettes behind the gym, most headed nowhere good. But we were tight and had no secrets and never fought, had been that way since I was ten and he was eight and the two of us, talking between bunks in the dark, had decided that it made no sense to fight each other when we could buck our strict parents by presenting a united front. We could meet eyes as our parents laid down some mandate or rule or schedule and know not just what the other was thinking, but how we could collude to make things tilt our way. When we were young, that was as simple as a shared protest or agreement, numbers at the ballot. Later, I would note that a family trip we didn’t want to go on would interfere with my wrestling schedule or study session, when really I didn’t care, but knew Jeremy had a party he wanted to be at; for his part, knowing me, he’d take the rap those rare times I fucked up, like when our parents noticed that the liquor cabinet had been raided-- I’d taken the Cutty Sark for graduation night, but when they assumed it was him, he didn’t set them straight even as they yelled and carried on. The favored older son, my accommodation to the hand I’d been dealt was to perform perfection and so avoid censure, while Jeremy, stuck with inevitable comparison, refused judgment entirely.
Yet the truth was that we were pretty much the same, nice quiet kids, half-Japanese and so never belonging in white suburban Oregon, short and bookish and overbright, sensitive and a little awkward. If Jeremy admired my dedication and achievement, I admired his willingness to defy the expectations of the known world. As August’s heat came on and plans were set for me to leave for college, it was clear that our partnership was coming to an end. This trip was to be our last hurrah. I convinced my parents to let us take the car on the basis of my long record of responsibility—I would watch after the kid and stay safe, I promised. I thought I was breaking us both free into the heady independence that I thought of as adulthood.
We strapped my brother’s mountain bike to the back of the van, took removed the rear seats for room, filled a cooler with sausage, hot-dogs, eggs and marshmallows, borrowed the down sleeping bags and campstove, stowed in kindling and wood for campfires, took a couple old newspapers for tinder, made sure we had the rainsleeve. We took the inflatable two-man kayak, a pump, lifejackets, and two paddles, imagining wild rivers up there and still giddy with our skill: we’d run the wild and scenic portion of the Rogue that July in the two-man without flipping once. I hid a fifth of Absolut in the bottom of my clothes bag. We could do anything at all in the deep Canadian woods, British Columbia beckoning like a tundra Mardi Gras, sure to allow us to become more than boys.
We left early on a Monday morning through a cold dawn, taking turns driving, rock overloud from the tinny speakers, I-5 a long fast flat run through Portland and past Seattle, the land the long flat fields and a tunnel forest, familiar, an automatic green blur. We gassed up just before we hit the border in Washington, pass the Canadian guards with a grin and a wave, only to have the guard wave us back to tell us we had no gas cap, that we’d left it back in the States. The US Border guards detained us for a full hour questioning us and looking for contraband, unsympathetic to our explanation we’d been in Canada for five minutes, leaving me sweating about the Absolut. They were looking for drugs, fortunately, and didn’t find the vodka. By the time we’d retrieved the cap and come back across the border again, our enthusiasm was undulled, but our confidence had been a bit shaken. The highrises of Vancouver ahead, however, sparkling in the high sun of afternoon braced us and renewed us. We were at any moment going to find our future, or at least, see something we had never seen before. We made for the cheapest hostel of Watertown.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Who They Imagine I Am
Short of stature, small in talent, reserved and reticent, over-dressed in blazer and black sweater, ambiguously ethnic and generally without flourish or flair, I somehow have a strange way of causing others to admire and imitate my habits. A barback asked after my brand of white v-neck, and the next week turned up in Polo, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was because I have no money that I buy discount three-packs to get by for the summer—they go easily with my one threadbare blazer. The German PhD students I sometimes play pool with, who I call the Germans, have taken to ordering my drink, which they call “the Copperman,” and I gather that they don’t understand that I drink Monolopowa and soda with a lime because the potato vodka is the best I can afford, cheap here by some accident of tariff or supply, not because there is some magic in the drink—it is simple and clean and tastes like citrus, and it isn’t sweet, but they would do better to buy microbrew or any of a dozen better drinks than the one I fall back on to keep from drinking myself broke. The old, bright, solitary machinist who once was a regular at the bar I went to when I was a graduate student regularly writes me cryptic Facebook messages at late hours, asking me odd questions about William Blake and punctuation and the inevitability of despair. The Contractor I often hang out with at the bars, loudspoken and brazenly skirtchasing, for some bizarre reason asked after the make and material of my one scarf, as if there was anything stylish in burgundy and cotton blend, and as he makes a lot of money and buys only designer I cannot really conceive of what it is he seeks to know. The best bar pool player in town insisted I was his first choice in forming a pool league team, and that too makes no sense: he is far, far better than I am, both accurate and possessing of cue control, while I dally with a little English and play best the less hard I try. All of them seem to think that I possess some quality they wish to acquire by proximity or imitation. And though I am more self-aware than Singer, the mute of Carson McCuller’s great novel “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” whose attentive silence was construed as comprehension of and compassion concerning the secret longing of others, I have the sense that my own odd accommodations to this town I don’t belong in has caused some similar misconceptions.
People mistake my constant standing as a sign of vigor and energy, not understanding that sitting for more than an hour like a normal person makes my back hurt. They mistake my solitary habits in this town my close friends have all moved from for self-possession, a fundamentally insular confidence they wish to acquire, when in fact I am mostly lonely, and encounter those people out in public venues I have come to in order to be near to others. They mistake my reluctance to try to take home young girls from the bar for decency and honor, not understanding that I am as lustful as the next fellow, but stay away from hot and 21 in the spirit of self-preservation: experience has taught me that I will apparently forego all sense for a beautiful woman, and surely I don’t need to deal with such immaturity all over again. They mistake my general kindness for some larger virtue I surely do not possess at all—I have my weaknesses, and god knows, my regrets. I have my shameful secrets, no worse than those that all of us harbor, but surely no better. Yet despite the truth, it seems that others require me to possess some ineffable merit, to be inhumanely excellent, and that expectation has become a burden also: more people I may finally disappoint. I do not want to be the end of their faith anymore than I want to be the repository of their hopes and secret longings, but I fear I am both—for they seek me out, too, to reveal what they want and need, and because it is my nature to find the flat bottom of narrative, so it is that I know that the contractor takes home the young girls with the platinum hair and fake breasts because his heart was broken by a woman he made a house for, and so now he looks for sex where there is no risk of falling in love. I know that the barback was cheated on by his last girlfriend, and that now he lacks the courage to really go after the women he wants, so that he spends his late nights perusing the internet’s endless queue of porn until he passes out and wakes feeling sad and ashamed. I know that one German is secretly OCD and will not come to the bar on weekends when he might actually meet a woman because the bar does not have a bathroom that locks and he cannot piss when anyone else is in the room, and so he has gone a year single. I know that the other German is secretly a little in love with a friend who has a boyfriend, that once years ago they kissed and he is filled with guilt and lust every time he sees the girl and her boyfriend, just as he is filled with guilt and dread every time the young girl he dated in Germany texts him about their love, which is not love but devotion, which he knows is unreciprocal but allows to persist because it is comforting to think that there is at least one person in the world who holds him dear. I know that the pool player has never really thrown off his origins in trailer park and small stature, at the bottom of it finally still a scared boy who was endlessly backed into corners, and much of what he struggles with is his tendency to self-sabotage, him willfully forcing out more proof of his inadequacy when in fact he is a good man. I know that the machinist, who is in his forties and looks older from hard living, went to Reed for a year, where he took up mastery of pool at the college bar and failed out in a year despite having a genius level IQ, and I know that he falls in love with every female bartender who is kind to him, knowing full well that they are nice only because it is in their interest but unable to keep himself from wishing, from wanting to be touched by a woman, which he hasn’t been in years. What I know is—too much. Or too little, and not enough, to misparaphrase Vallejo.
Bearing all those stories, and having all of these sad men look to me for inspiration and answers, I do not know what to do, and so I say only what I can.
“Have another Copperman,” I tell the Germans. “And go talk to that girl.”
“Buy cashmere, and for fuck’s sake, call a cab,” I tell the Contractor.
“Talk to my friend the ballerina, and be your best self,” I tell the pool player.
“Blake has no answers, but asks the right questions,” I tell the bar regular, knowing that there is little else I can say.
One day soon, I will leave these people, and they will all be alright. That is what I tell myself, anyway--- that they will be fine.
That we all will.
People mistake my constant standing as a sign of vigor and energy, not understanding that sitting for more than an hour like a normal person makes my back hurt. They mistake my solitary habits in this town my close friends have all moved from for self-possession, a fundamentally insular confidence they wish to acquire, when in fact I am mostly lonely, and encounter those people out in public venues I have come to in order to be near to others. They mistake my reluctance to try to take home young girls from the bar for decency and honor, not understanding that I am as lustful as the next fellow, but stay away from hot and 21 in the spirit of self-preservation: experience has taught me that I will apparently forego all sense for a beautiful woman, and surely I don’t need to deal with such immaturity all over again. They mistake my general kindness for some larger virtue I surely do not possess at all—I have my weaknesses, and god knows, my regrets. I have my shameful secrets, no worse than those that all of us harbor, but surely no better. Yet despite the truth, it seems that others require me to possess some ineffable merit, to be inhumanely excellent, and that expectation has become a burden also: more people I may finally disappoint. I do not want to be the end of their faith anymore than I want to be the repository of their hopes and secret longings, but I fear I am both—for they seek me out, too, to reveal what they want and need, and because it is my nature to find the flat bottom of narrative, so it is that I know that the contractor takes home the young girls with the platinum hair and fake breasts because his heart was broken by a woman he made a house for, and so now he looks for sex where there is no risk of falling in love. I know that the barback was cheated on by his last girlfriend, and that now he lacks the courage to really go after the women he wants, so that he spends his late nights perusing the internet’s endless queue of porn until he passes out and wakes feeling sad and ashamed. I know that one German is secretly OCD and will not come to the bar on weekends when he might actually meet a woman because the bar does not have a bathroom that locks and he cannot piss when anyone else is in the room, and so he has gone a year single. I know that the other German is secretly a little in love with a friend who has a boyfriend, that once years ago they kissed and he is filled with guilt and lust every time he sees the girl and her boyfriend, just as he is filled with guilt and dread every time the young girl he dated in Germany texts him about their love, which is not love but devotion, which he knows is unreciprocal but allows to persist because it is comforting to think that there is at least one person in the world who holds him dear. I know that the pool player has never really thrown off his origins in trailer park and small stature, at the bottom of it finally still a scared boy who was endlessly backed into corners, and much of what he struggles with is his tendency to self-sabotage, him willfully forcing out more proof of his inadequacy when in fact he is a good man. I know that the machinist, who is in his forties and looks older from hard living, went to Reed for a year, where he took up mastery of pool at the college bar and failed out in a year despite having a genius level IQ, and I know that he falls in love with every female bartender who is kind to him, knowing full well that they are nice only because it is in their interest but unable to keep himself from wishing, from wanting to be touched by a woman, which he hasn’t been in years. What I know is—too much. Or too little, and not enough, to misparaphrase Vallejo.
Bearing all those stories, and having all of these sad men look to me for inspiration and answers, I do not know what to do, and so I say only what I can.
“Have another Copperman,” I tell the Germans. “And go talk to that girl.”
“Buy cashmere, and for fuck’s sake, call a cab,” I tell the Contractor.
“Talk to my friend the ballerina, and be your best self,” I tell the pool player.
“Blake has no answers, but asks the right questions,” I tell the bar regular, knowing that there is little else I can say.
One day soon, I will leave these people, and they will all be alright. That is what I tell myself, anyway--- that they will be fine.
That we all will.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Barry Hannah, Willa Cather
I told myself, last night, that I would write even if the result is only self-indulgence and absurdity, empty poetic language and redundant melancholy longing. I have been stuck museless and mute for the last month, except for the occasional bout of satire, reading Barry Hannah and Willa Cather and wishing for more inspiration and certainly more talent. Hannah is loud, explosive, transgressive, pitiless, and often brilliant in an entirely original and unreplicable way. Cather’s prose is lyric and graceful and precise, weighted with the authority that retrospection can bring, and her narrators face what time has made of memory—what was important and beautiful, what we cannot have back.
Both I admire an awful lot, but I find myself finally more taken with Cather than with Hannah—I am never bored in reading Hannah, but I am only moved in his occasional quiet work that has a feel of looking back through time (“Testimony of Pilot,” for example, and his fishing story about a boy dragged into the surf by what took for a moment his line, and how he held onto that story and that time in his youth). I look to Hannah and his talent with awe; I aspire to the clarity and size of Cather’s work at her best, which has—resonance? Heart? – a sort of purity of gaze, as if what she wrote and kept was only what was at the bottom of something she cared deeply about. Hannah is punch-drunk with language and the intensity and acceleration of what mad and absurd collision he has imagined and realized, and so I am endlessly entertained. Cather is singing quietly to herself in the dark with the voice she has, which she doesn’t herself think of as beautiful but which is better still for that lack of self-regard, and hearing her, I want to write.
Both I admire an awful lot, but I find myself finally more taken with Cather than with Hannah—I am never bored in reading Hannah, but I am only moved in his occasional quiet work that has a feel of looking back through time (“Testimony of Pilot,” for example, and his fishing story about a boy dragged into the surf by what took for a moment his line, and how he held onto that story and that time in his youth). I look to Hannah and his talent with awe; I aspire to the clarity and size of Cather’s work at her best, which has—resonance? Heart? – a sort of purity of gaze, as if what she wrote and kept was only what was at the bottom of something she cared deeply about. Hannah is punch-drunk with language and the intensity and acceleration of what mad and absurd collision he has imagined and realized, and so I am endlessly entertained. Cather is singing quietly to herself in the dark with the voice she has, which she doesn’t herself think of as beautiful but which is better still for that lack of self-regard, and hearing her, I want to write.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Christmas has come, and gone, and now it is the day after, all artifice stripped from that most commodified of holidays in the frantic aftermath of exchange and supersale, the malls teeming, the only imminent change now the onset of temporary hopefulness proferred by the night of greatest inebriation, which will be followed by the morning of greatest hangover. And so perhaps I can be forgiven for a lack of holiday enthusiasm at the moment, though my Christmas was merry enough, a day of parents and nephews and needed winter coats, and then finally the sort of feast that oversates and ensures the need for New Year's resolutions regarding waistline. Not a bad day, but I couldn't shake the sense that the world is moving while I stand still. In the morning, before I went to my parent's house, I went by Starbucks, the only open coffee vendor, and ran into an old friend from high school who lives now in Oakland, a loudspoken and assertive Jew who's the daughter of the local Rabbi.
"Are you visiting?" she asked. "What are you doing? What's new?"
Because I have come past the point where I can use the line about doing the same things the same ways and expecting different results, one of many definitions of insanity, I shrugged.
She went on to offer some good advice concerning single-minded pursuit of success, perhaps not really realizing that single-minded pursuit is the one thing I do well. She meant well. She was right to suggest I move South to sunnier climes. What I most took away, in the pre-coffee blur, was her energy and conviction and the sense that she, at least, was away doing while I stay, sustaining. Not her fault or intention, but the way I feel nonetheless. When I went out last night with my brother, the one open bar was full of people he went to high school with who'd come back for the holidays, but there was not a single person from my high school years-- people in their thirties have begun to establish their own families and to have other obligations beyond the town they were born in.
"Come to the Bay," my friend said, "and I'll set you up with all my single friends."
I smiled and thanked her. Not an offer I'm likely to take up, but she had one thing undeniably right: the need to move, the inevitability now. There is only so long I can afford to stay still, to walk the same streets bound the same places, knowing already the way the hours will pass. As my friend Leo London asks in his saddest song, how long? How far?
"Are you visiting?" she asked. "What are you doing? What's new?"
Because I have come past the point where I can use the line about doing the same things the same ways and expecting different results, one of many definitions of insanity, I shrugged.
She went on to offer some good advice concerning single-minded pursuit of success, perhaps not really realizing that single-minded pursuit is the one thing I do well. She meant well. She was right to suggest I move South to sunnier climes. What I most took away, in the pre-coffee blur, was her energy and conviction and the sense that she, at least, was away doing while I stay, sustaining. Not her fault or intention, but the way I feel nonetheless. When I went out last night with my brother, the one open bar was full of people he went to high school with who'd come back for the holidays, but there was not a single person from my high school years-- people in their thirties have begun to establish their own families and to have other obligations beyond the town they were born in.
"Come to the Bay," my friend said, "and I'll set you up with all my single friends."
I smiled and thanked her. Not an offer I'm likely to take up, but she had one thing undeniably right: the need to move, the inevitability now. There is only so long I can afford to stay still, to walk the same streets bound the same places, knowing already the way the hours will pass. As my friend Leo London asks in his saddest song, how long? How far?
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