March 2009 Archives

First impressions are lasting but not nearly as lasting as last impressions, when you think about it.

• Mozart piano sonatas on the car stereo, conjuring a perfect world of charm and delight.
• Wild turkeys browsing about by the side of a highway in New Jersey. Once rare, they've made a comeback. Things you see by the side of the highway in New Jersey typically aren't very rare. This increases the chance that someday I will sit down at a table with a roasted wild turkey on it. That pleased me.
• A toll booth staffed by a big smiling lady with a handcrafted cross and long straggly blond hair and furry earmuffs.
  
• Finding new friends along the way, just like in Lord of the Rings.
• Coming home to the Miracle Cat Who Might Have Died But Didn't.
• Waking up at 2 a.m. to the sound of rain on the roof and loving that sound and wondering why.*
  

* This morning I think I know: When you hear that sound you have a palpable sense that no matter how modest it may be, your home shelters you. Watching a windy snowstorm through your windows with a glass of port in your hand has roughly the same effect.

In 1956, Jules Feiffer started doing a weekly cartoon in the Village Voice titled "Sick, Sick, Sick." Feiffer is still alive today, and so is the work he did back then. The drawing is deceptively casual; he was able to take a type of person and create a highly distilled, vivid caricature with a minimum of ink. And the writing is just as timeless as the art—the subjects may in some cases have changed, and the mores of the culture have changed as well, but the human situation is what Feiffer addresses.

The title "Sick, Sick, Sick" was a reference to the culture he found himself in, and he scrutinizes everyone: government officials, business leaders, artists, swingers, parents and children, everyday people. Today, much of what passes for satire is actually just snark: it ridicules other people. Feiffer's work still resonates because it ridicules us; it ridicules the less admirable traits and attitudes in everyone. One cartoon shows a guy angrily despairing over the successful launch into orbit of Russia's Sputnik satellite. "What's the use?" he says. "We have committed the worst of all possible sins—" he says, walking out of the frame, diminishing before our eyes. "We were second," he says in the last frame. It's about Sputnik. But it's also about the tendency in every Olympics, say, for American broadcasters to act as though a failure for some media-darling athlete to get a gold medal is a crushing defeat, as if winning a silver medal in the Olympics is a bad thing, an ignobly diminishing sad event in one's life. We still think that dominating everyone else is the only worthwhile thing. This attitude is, of course, insane—it's sick. And that's why Feiffer is timeless and relevant when people who merely mock others they don't like without seeing the big picture rarely find an audience fifty years after their brief time on the scene.

Feiffer's cartoons from the Fifties aren't just relevant today, they're funny (sometimes grimly so) and aglow with a warming humanity. They're also still available here and here; and check out Feiffer's website. Just one more example of why I do this "Those Conformist Fifties" category: The Fifties were not the boring, bland decade they've been pilloried as, that's just plain wrong, and just plain wrongness is, well, just plain wrong.

Years ago, under the influence of Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the Car Talk guys, I started holding on to my cars. If the car broke, I would fix it, because Tom and Ray said it's a misconception that car-repair costs go up geometrically as the car ages. In fact, the costs level off, and the plateau is far lower than what you'd spend on new car payments. Over your life, the Magliozzis point out, this can add up to more than $100,000. You can pay for a lot of trips to Hawaii, they said, with a chunk of money like that.

I'd like to propose a corollary to that. I think we should indulge ourselves with small expenses that make life happier and better. I don't have a car payment right now, which saves me whatever it would cost to pay monthly for a new Camry. With a small part of that savings, I get name-brand plastic wrap. Cheap plastic wrap seems to have an affinity for itself: The instant you tear a piece off the roll, it bunches up like a filmy little fist. Then you spend many seconds of the only life you'll have (that we know of) unsticking the damn thing.

Name-brand wrap is either heavier or there's some engineering miracle going on, but at any rate, you tear it and it seems much tamer. It hangs there in your hand, open and flat, ready to start wrapping things right away. If you can avoid frustration and save time by making a small extra expense, you get real improvement in your life. It's difficult to measure with numbers, but it matters. I don't do extra work to pay for a new car every couple of years, and I don't spend extra time unbunching cheap plastic wrap. And as it happens, I just got back from Hawaii. It was nice there. But hey, get a new car if you want—I'm just sayin'. : )

Just sittin' round, thinking about how things go, and for some reason the story of Joni Mitchell and her daughter drifted into my mind. Mitchell gave her daughter up for adoption in her own youth, and when you know that, her 1971 song "Little Green" is quite simply heartrending. "There'll be icicles, and birthday clothes," the song goes, "and sometimes, there'll be sorrow."

But they were reunited, by sheer chance, in 1997. Mother and daughter reunited. We know about it because Mitchell is an artist and a celebrity. There are other stories, just as moving, that we don't know because they happened to regular folks. But could anything be more profoundly right, more heartening, than for a mother and child to find each other after being swept apart by time and chance? Could there possibly be? I don't think so.

Time and chance. It's a smaller story, absurdly smaller, perhaps, but in late 1999 time and chance brought together a man and a cat, both of whom needed a friend, and when I think about the randomness of it—well. The little guy is curled up beside me, dozing peacefully. He's not a child, of course. But I wonder if anyone in this world would value him, care about him, as much as I do? Time and chance. Wild, wild stuff.

So it's early morning and I'm sitting with coffee in the darkened office, scrounging for nuggets of gratifying information on the Intertubes, and I click and I get the page that says Firefox can't find the server. The more I click all the open tabs, the more I get the message. Only cached stuff is available. I check the e-mail. Nothing. I check the modem, that's OK. Hmm.

I go to an old computer that can still access a dial-up account. I know, only the Amish use dial-up any more but I just happen to have this option available. It says it can't get a dial tone. Preposterous! I pick up the phone. No dial tone.

Damn.

See, I happen to have Verizon's FIOS optical line powering all the communication stuff in my house except for the cell, obviously. I feel a certain dismay. Running your life this way is like using a parachute—you need to be able to trust it because if it doesn't work, you have a problem. And the last thing I want to do is try to call a large corporation on a cell phone and try to get a human being to solve my problem. I'm a rational person who believes in setting achievable goals, and that—well, hoping for that to happen is nuts.

So I got a flashlight and went out in the dark to my shed, where the big box they installed when they put the fiber in is located. It's about the size of a briefcase, and as I peered at it I saw there were about 15 indicator lights, and one of them was blinking red. "Fail," it said. Gotcha. I wasn't sure what to do next. It was like all those scenes in the Bond films where a reactor is heading for a blowup or the missiles are about to launch or something pretty dire will happen soon if Bond doesn't figure out the control panel. He keeps his head, of course—his jaw is clenched because it's a dicey situation but he figures the deal out because the story would end the wrong way otherwise. Me, stuck in real life where we don't know how the story ends, me, I just stared glumly at the box, there in the gloom. Unless there was a big red button that said "Reset" or "Make Everything Good Again" I wasn't sure what to do. But as I watched, the "fail" light went from blinking red to steady green. Hmm.

Picked up the phone in the kitchen. Dial tone. Went up to the office. The Intertubes were back.

This time, anyway.

I've been much too lugubrious lately, so today we're going to talk about—the global recession! And how you can have a good life no matter how much money you have, assuming you're at least, like, surviving. This is part of a series I'm dabbling with called "Budget Bon Vivant."

And today we're going to talk about coffee. Everybody likes coffee, and when the good times were rolling they were willing to pay a few bucks for a cup. But you can have excellent coffee every day, made exactly the way you like it, for much, much less. Here's how:

1.) Buy a coffee grinder. A name brand will cost about 20 bucks (American dollars, that is) and last for an equal number of years. This is not a big capital outlay when amortized over the years.
2.) Get a pour-over coffee maker, basically a plastic cone that sits on the cup. It works with filters. They're made by Melitta, and they sell for a few bucks in high-end kitchenware stores or online.
3.) Grind the beans just before you make the coffee. Experiment with the type of beans you buy, the amount of ginding (count the seconds) and amount of coffee to use until you get it the way you like.
4.) Start with cold water of good quality.
5.) Enjoy the coffee. Sit down, have a nice calm moment to start your day, and really enjoy it. It's excellent coffee, and it's made exactly the way you like it, because it was made exactly by you.

Here are some tips, including a recommendation to use a French press as one option. Tips with more background here.

And if you're wondering, this is how I make my own coffee. I have a cup made exactly that way in front of me at this very moment. I've been making it that way for about 20 years, and I have no idea how much money I've saved, but the money I did save is money I didn't have to bother to earn. That means I've had more time to enjoy my life over the years. Time is the stuff of life, and life should be savored like coffee. That's what Budget Bon Vivant is all about, folks. Now I'm going to press "save" and have my first sip.

UPDATE: Looks like Starbucks is freaking out. Whattaya know?

That's not some sort of metaphor; it's really just after three in the morning. Unless a zoologist came along with one of those hypo guns and darted me like a rhino, I wasn't going to sleep, and I knew it, so I got up to do some writing.

I haven't been terribly content for the last few years, which is no secret, and lately I've been striving to shove my life back on track. At such junctures you ask yourself a lot of questions. And the questions come not just from yourself, but from your demons. At 3 a.m. they're holding court, it's the middle of their working day. My particular demon is a civilized little fellow, overly so, really, like one of those waspish little people in a Noel Coward play whose role in life is to belittle their dearest friends. My demon fixes me with a sarcastic little sidelong grin, runs a thumb along his lower lip, and asks me what I ought to have done, and exactly what I think I'm going to do now.

An old, familiar question, and one I'm coming to know the answer to more and more. So I ignored the demon for a while, and just mused. I thought of a novel I'm working on, about a family of old stock in a county very much like the one I've lived in all my life. Their roots go back centuries. And like most of these families, their ancestral home is made of stone culled from the fields. I thought of one of my characters musing on that stone, running a hand over it, thinking how it shed the snows of three hundred winters and the soft afternoon rains of three hundred summers. But porous, too, the stone—it somehow absorbed the life lived around it. People went in and out of the house every day for all those years, old people and babies, adolescents and the middle-aged. Some days glad, others sorrowing. They would go to a funeral, and come home, and their shoes would sound on the floorboards, and they would think about how the person buried would never be in the house again.

There would have been parties, with people laughing and drinking on the lawn, surely. Young couples by the wall, talking to each other, fascinated with the magic of their attraction. And middle-aged couples, too, smiling at each other, and a young girl wondering if her beau would smile at her that way, decades from this warm summer night.

The solidity of stone, and the evanescence of human life, somehow interfused over the centuries. I got to thinking about that, at 3 a.m., and wanted to jot down some notes about it. Now I have. And as to your questions, demon, I have an answer. What should I have done? I should have compromised less, over the years. I was wrong to split the difference, to try to give the world what I thought it wanted. I was wrong to be a reporter, to write magazine articles about trends in lawn furniture, to write and edit in a way that furthered the goals of international nonprofit associations and so forth. I should have been a damn writer, demon. What will I do? I'll be a damn writer. I'll write the most beautiful things I can think of. I'll give it my all, while I still can, win or lose.

See, even with civilized demons, you can't fight on their terms. You put a thumb right in their damned eye and let them shriek. Then you wipe your thumb on your pants and dust yourself off generally. I should have been a writer, you sorry-ass little shrieking pathetic demon. And from now on, that's what I'll be, if you really want to know. It's 3:58 a.m., and I have to get some sleep. If you have demons of your own, I recommend a thumb in the eye. Wipes the smirk right off their faces, I assure you.

The last fourteen months or so have been fairly turbulent for me, and lately I've taken a few days off to quiet a mind in which thoughts and feelings were whirling like a stirred-up snow globe.

I was thinking last night about the myth of Pandora's Box, and how the ancients saw the world's evils and hope as bundled together. But it's only natural, after all, when you think about it. I've heard that harmful plants like nettles and plants that heal that particular harm are often found growing in the same area.

Hope. It's an interesting thing, hope. I once did a story about a therapeutic high school in Montana. When you met the kids there, they seemed fine: happy, smart, rich. But that was an illusion, a mask they could put on briefly for strangers. In reality they were one step away from an institution, and it would become apparent in lots of different ways, and it wrung your heart.

The tension of all that misery was something I could use in the story to get the reader's attention. But how to resolve the tension? The solution came in the office of the psychiatrist who was one of the school's founders. He had photos pinned to his desk, photos of kids who had gone on to have successsful, happy lives, and sent him letters with pictures in them so he would know and be glad. It allowed me to join the beginning and the end of the article: I began with kids who only seemed smart, rich, and happy, but I ended with the kids who had graduated, in every sense, and finally had become what they once only seemed. The story was a success itself; a number of people told me they'd cried reading it, and one commenter pointed out particularly that it had hope in it.

So here I am, in a bit of a trough, a bit of a valley myself. But hoping, more than I've done in years when things were more or less stable but I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I know now: I want to do the same thing I've always done, just more and better all the time—I want to help other people feel hopeful. I honestly can't think of a better thing to do with my time. I know people are losing their jobs and their cars and their houses. Aid workers are being ejected from Darfur. There's a lot wrong with the world, a lot wrong with my own life, a lot wrong all the time.

But the planet sails with stately grace toward its rendezvous with the equinox; winter ends in a matter of days. The birds are singing, and the music is sweet. I actually think it's a little sweeter because I don't have everything I might wish for. Like Emily Dickinson's thing with feathers, the singing birds ask not a crumb of me. All I have to do is notice, and stop, and listen.

I've got a roof, and food, and my health. And despite the dark, whispering forest of doubts through which most creative people pick their hesitant way, I've got reason to suspect that I have a modicum of talent. So I'm going to keep on striving to be my best self, keep on pointing out the singing birds, the brittle delicacy of bare tree branches against the thin light of a winter evening, all the stuff I find interesting and beautiful. So many things to love! The utterly charming sweetness of Shirley MacLaine's expression at the end of The Apartment when she tells Jack Lemmon to shut up and deal. And the way the art director arranged for there to be a color change in the wall that made a direct line between the two soon-to-be-lovers' eyes. So many things! Snowdrops blooming, and the Waldstein Sonata! I tell you, once you start noticing the wonderful things in life, it becomes a habit and you can't stop.

The photographer, writer, and painter Jacques-Henri Lartigue once said, "I'm not a photographer, writer, or painter: I'm a packager of things that life offers me in passing." That's pretty much how I feel. The events of the past year or so have got me more down than usual, but by God I am by no means out, folks. I'm getting up, dusting myself off, and ready to start the packaging process with a renewed focus and commitment. Have you been down too? I'm sorry to hear it. But being down can sometimes help you figure out what's important, the way you grab certain things and not others when running out of your burning house.

I've got a cat sitting next to me who might have died but didn't. I've got a cup of coffee ready that I made just the way I like. My purse is light? Could be, but so is my conscience. Birds are singing. A little down. By no means out. That's just the deal, with life. And now I need to get back to work, if you'll excuse me. I have a lot of things to package, and the day is already well begun.

There's this site called Shelfari for people who read, and just now I saw a review of Hamlet by a certain David, and I got curious about what this David might have to say. Here it is, unedited:

Typical Shakespearean tragedy,he's not happy enough that the main character has to die, he has to always over do it and massacre the whole set. Not only that, but we have to listen to Hamlets never ending "whoe is me" and "I'm just so misrable I want to die" speach. I'll admit he's got a lot of witty lines, but enough with the self-pity. As for his alleged revenge, he is so wishy-washy. Like usual, Shakespeare may be entertaining to watch, but not to read.

In his defense, David has read a fair bit of serious stuff, and rated it highly for the most part. I'm glad about that, of course. But he obviously has nothing useful to say about any of it. That's the problem with social networking. Most people, quite frankly, don't have anything useful to say about anything. So I have to go along with that one friend of mine I mentioned a while back. He's a really smart guy, and one way he shows it is by not speaking negatively about people most of the time. But we were talking about energy policy, I think it was, and in regard to people's opinions he coolly said, "I'm really not very interested in what most people think about things." And that's why I'm dubious about social networking.

There's a couple of fairly important things I could do today, but I could also just as well do them on Monday the 16th instead of—you know—today.

Not that I'm superstitious or anything!

I don't actively believe in the supernatural in any form. But I also think there are limits to our knowledge, and there may well be things happening that we can't explain. A couple of thousand years ago, nobody could explain lightning in rational terms, so they invented supernatural reasons for its existence. But lightning was always there, always the same, right? And maybe luck is the same way—it's a family of viruses, say, some benevolent, some harmful. Catch a good one, and suddenly money and love are working out just fine. A bad one makes your dog bite you and your car break down. And maybe in 2037 some future Pasteur will come along and prove this.

Science has limits, is the thing. I knew this professor of education who fancied himself a rigorously scientific guy. He would rage and storm at any mention of so-called "learning styles," which is the idea that some people learn better by hearing or seeing or whatever. Studies hadn't been able to show any such effect, so the guy assumed it was poppycock. But just because a study can't prove the existence of a thing doesn't prove the thing doesn't exist. Until 1930, nobody could see the dwarf planet Pluto, but you know what? Pluto was there all along.

OK, so anyway, we've established that there's no rational basis for superstitions—no rational basis, that is, that we know of. The thing is that lately, I can't afford to take any chances, can't afford not to give myself every advantage and avoid every pitfall. And I don't know that there's no risk associated with a certain day and date. So guided by a rational concern, a wise and sensible prudence and caution, I'm just sort of avoiding doing new stuff or starting projects today. Nope, just staying home with my black cat Panther and not taking any chances. It's simple common sense, really.

I didn't get around to doing a couple daily chores yesterday, and I regret not doing one of them. The one I don't regret is blogging—I don't think my blogging holds the world in the sky, like Atlas.

What I do regret is that I did not once yesterday touch a finger to any of the keys on my piano. Meant to—I've been practicing regularly for some time now, and the jazz piano side is coming along and following after is the sight reading of classical music. I've been good about doing it for a short period every day, and it's improving. But yesterday I missed out on that widow's mite of improvement.

The day before, I was running out of the house, but I stopped in my headlong course and sat at the piano. I pulled out one of my baby books and played just the first phrase, the first eight bars, from a sonata by Domenico Scarlatti. I played it slowly, haltingly, making mistakes and starting over. But despite my clumsiness, the music conjured up that sense you get from Baroque music, the idea often attributed to Asian philosophy that life is beautiful despite, and because of, its transience. Even played by a virtual beginner on a piano badly out of tune, the melody was tender, sweet, and sad in a comforting way—if you've ever been to what people afterward called a "good funeral" you may know what I mean.

That was thirty seconds or so of my life, the day before yesterday. Yesterday, no piano. Nothing happy, nothing sad, nothing fresh and youthful, nothing stately and profound, nothing that swung, nothing that moved me in any way. No piano yesterday.

Today, even though I plan to do and accomplish more with my day, I'll play some piano. Life is busy these days, but on a deeper level it's always been too short not to somehow acknowledge the lovely, sad, profound transience of things. Music, real music, is one of the best ways to acknowledge that, and I'm going to play today.

I notice that I've blogged too! Well, good for me. Have a nice day, gang.

Well, good morning! Since my little essay on Robinson Crusoe and the lessons the famous story can teach us in troubled times went over pretty well, I thought I'd speak to another topic: picking yourself up off the ground after getting your heart broken. In good times and bad, that happens—Hamlet listed "the pangs of despiséd love" as one of the things that can make you wonder whether it's better to be or not be—and if it's never happened to you, you're either extremely lucky or should get out more.

Anyway, yes, heartbreak. I've had my own experiences with it, and there's not much that's worse. You give your heart to someone and they play with it for a while, then toss it aside like a bored child. Everyone has hurt someone, I suppose—it's an eggs and omelets thing—but some people go around doing this habitually. You can't always spot them readily—the ones who are really good at it come off as sincere people, or they wouldn't be so successful. We won't attempt to discern their motivations or plumb their souls here, above my pay grade and all, but they're out there, as you probably sadly know.

But it's funny—I used to get called "cynical" all the time, but lately I'm considered at least by some people to be somewhat knowledgeable in the theory and practice of hope. And what I think the heartbroken folks need to keep in mind is that not everyone is a user or a taker or a superficial person. You can find some good and true hearts out there.

Last December, for instance, I went to a memorial service for a friend, and her husband went up and talked about her. He told how they had met when they were very young, at a Guy Fawkes' Day party in London. As the years went on, they celebrated the day every year as a special day in their lives. "We had forty-eight of those," the poor man said, smiling. He looked happy, and proud; he looked like he considered himself lucky. It broke your heart, but in a good way. There really are people in this world who will love you through the years. Don't ever think there aren't.

Many works of fiction are more wish-fulfillment than anything, and they don't have a lot of useful stuff to say about actually living in the world, but many do. I got thinking about Billy Wilder's The Apartment. Like most Wilder films, it's a pretty chilling exposé of human nature, and Fred MacMurray's portrayal of the philandering Jeff Sheldrake is as good an illustration of the banality of evil as you're likely to see outside the Third Reich. He just doesn't care—the pain he inflicts on human hearts is simply beyond his capacity to know or understand.

On the opposite end of the true-false heart continuum is C.C. "Bud" Baxter. (It just occurred to me that a bud is a new, fresh thing: I'll bet that's not a coincidence.) He's got to get by in the world, and to do so he does things that he's ashamed of, but he's very much smitten with an elevator operator named Fran Kubelik, and that love is about as pure as it gets. You can hardly blame him—in this film, Shirley MacLaine is preternaturally appealing. I wish I could explain it well: It isn't just beauty or youth, it isn't just good spirits and optimism, balanced with a certain tartness, like a well-made wine that's got the balance of fruit and acid one seeks. You have to say that whatever it is that one person sees in another, some sort of light, a good soul, an inner world that glows with beauty—whatever that thing is that inspires one person to love another, it's just ablaze in her in this film.

Miss Kubelik is the conundrum, the source of tension in the story—she's in love with Sheldrake, and carries on with him even after a suicide attempt. But of course, in the end she runs to be with Bud. The final scene is famous: They're sitting together in his apartment, and he's looking at her, utterly enraptured, as they deal out a hand of gin rummy. He tells her he loves her. She cuts the cards for the deal, sees that he's won, and hands him the deck. He asks her if she heard what he said, and tells her that he absolutely adores her. She tells him, "Shut up and deal." But she's smiling at him.

It's an enchanting scene, and although it's fiction, it reflects the reality that people do love each other through good times and bad, they sustain their love past the inevitable doubts and fears. Sometimes they have forty-eight years together, sometimes less, sometimes more. Love is like money—we need it, and we need to keep working to get it, because you do yourself no favor by giving up and becoming hopeless. Not everyone will treat you well, but there are good hearts in the world—I've seen the empirical evidence to prove it. So if you want to, take The Apartment as the romantic equivalent to the Robinson Crusoe story. There's someone out there who will value you as you deserve, and treat you well, and love you to the end. Just do your part—get out of the house now and then, and keep hoping.

Here's a nice little interview in which Billy Wilder flies a box kite and tells people once and for all that creative writing is goddamned hard work like any other kind of work. I was talking to a new friend, a scientist, about writing fiction last week and he said it must be liberating, his implication being that you're limited only by your imagination. The problem is that being limited only by your imagination is quite sufficient to make fiction writing a long day at the office. You imagine all kinds of things, and most of them are crap that won't ring true to anyone. (And let's not forget that you have to vividly describe the things that will ring true.) Writing and revising fiction is bastardly hard work. Period.

And that's mostly what's on tap today—got an introductory chapter to do a fourth revision on and a critiquing group session tonight. Anyway, here's Wilder and his writing partner I.A.L. Diamond:

This was the first full day home. Such times can be a letdown, certainly—you're doing exciting vacation stuff and the mundane problems of your daily life are far away, and you come down from all that with a bump when you get home.

But that's not how it was, really.

The problems are there, don't get me wrong. Not "issues," not "challenges," these are problems. But I sat out on my back porch today and felt the sun on my face. It's late winter, but spring is filtering in, like grass through the cracks in the concrete, gently irresistible. This morning, sitting in my office, I saw the snow melting in the back yard, and I heard birds singing.

Where I was, in the tropics, there were beautiful birds—there were always frigatebirds gliding about, and once I saw a dozen of them in the evening sky, with the crescent moon and a blazing Venus among them. Magnificent, they were. But the problem is that it's always summer in the tropics. The world is always brassily alive. Back home, in the good old temperate zone, we have seasons. Nature dies, and comes back to life. I once made an innocent reference to the magic of spring, and a deeply cynical young woman I worked with thought it was funny. But if there's a more profound magic than life returning to something that was dead, I don't know what it might be.

Some 700 years ago, Chaucer listed the things that happen in the spring that encourage people to go on pilgrimages, and one of them was "smale fowles maken melodye." Is it obvious and trite to notice that the birds are singing, and the world is renewing itself? Chaucer didn't think it so. And neither do I. And that's one reason I was glad to be home today.