EyeScorpion

2009-02-09T07:55:00.001-08:00

THE REVOLVING DOOR

I phoned F_____ in New York the night of the Inauguration. I was thinking a lot that day of my elders and the changes they've seen, and of course we were all thinking about other cathartic and historic marking moments. F______ told me that she had witnessed the March on Washington, Black Panther Rallies, Woodstock, and now this. She told me, "Black people didn't do this, Karen; white people didn't do this: AMERICANS did this." We talked for a while about the Presidential Family. F______ thought the children looked so nicely dressed, she thinks Michelle is a strong woman and a classy lady, and she hopes that Barack isn't "getting groomed, like they did with Dinkins."

Before we got off the phone, F______ added, "I liked Laura, but her husband had to go. It was past due for him. I have to admit, I did like seeing that man get evicted from his apartment."

2008-11-26T09:46:00.001-08:00

COUNTDOWN TO TURKEY DAY

I recently found myself face to face with a young student's hand-print turkey on a nursery wall, and his top five gratitudes were listed, one for each finger. How old were we when we made turkey's out of finger-paint hand prints? Kindergarten? First grade? Maybe Second grade? The list of five was as follows: youtube, ipod, facebook, video games, laptop.

2008-11-09T16:07:00.000-08:00

YET ANOTHER GLASS CEILING OBAMA CRACKED

In 1989 I was in college and dating a guy who was African-American (I'm white). When my mother was informed of this, she was worried for me. I asked her to explain. "It's not that I think it's wrong," she said, "but I think it's really hard on the children. I think they grow up not knowing who they belong to." Never mind that I was 18, not planning to breed, and many dates away from choosing a life-long partner; in any case my mother may have been talking about herself: In her Massachusetts of the 1950s, she grew up with the nuns telling her that her Protestant father would go to hell, but she should pray for him just the same.

2008-09-14T15:40:00.000-07:00

IT REMINDED ME OF SARAH PALIN

Sign hanging in the Giant Eagle grocery store up the hill:
LOST! PIT BULL, 2 YEARS OLD.
/// NAME: MENACE \\\
VERY FRIENDLY.
REWARD! (412) 421-xxxx.

2008-06-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

PARADOX

I used to live above a funeral home; now I live across the street from one. Each place gets only the rare business, but last night I came home and their parking lot was full. On the sidewalk, I saw a sign advertising valet parking--A popular fellow, I thought.

But I was wrong about the funeral. The event was taking place across the street from the home, and as I entered my building, a group of dressed-up people were in the midst of "3-2-1-CHEEEEEEEER!" The ribbon was cut, the corks popped, the cameras flashed, and purple balloons were released into the sky. They were celebrating the grand opening of the Grief Center.

2008-05-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

PENS, 3; RED WINGS, 2

Glancing at the television for a few moments Wednesday night had my heart unexpectedly flying and catching, soaring and breaking. Not for Pittsburgh, whose fans were 4000 deep at the tailgate party outside Mellon Arena, but for the hockey players themselves. Not only hockey, but hockey far more than other sports, does this to me: I watch the game from the eyes of a former big sister. A big sister who watched devastated 9 year olds shaking hands (“good game - good game - good game”) with the winning team in Little League, who saw the sophomore soccer goalie’s eyes reveal a split second of terror before performing scowling acts of heroism, hurling the ball safely to midfield.

Do I watch sports like this because I was once a big sister? No, I already watched sports like this AS a big sister, so the roots are deeper. I watch sports like this because I once held my brothers crying in pain and in sorrow, once watched them giggle and need help and entertain a room with unfettered silliness. And then I watched them move into scowling and aggressive and stoic and walled off and monotone years. I watched them mock the weak links and the girls and the mothers and each other; I watched them choose allegiances and move in packs. And all of these years of morphing were tangled up in soccer and baseball and basketball, and me in the bleachers. In these years when my brothers turned from creatures “like me” into “men,” I watched helplessly from the sidelines; the morphing was its own spectator sport.

Hockey (which wasn’t part of my youth) moves me more than the others because its shifts are so contrasted and so constant: The shifts from hopeful heroic offense to angry, edgy defense, with a barely-perceptible note of personal fear, individual sadness, and bottomless loss in-between. But this between moment is perceptible, and to me, palpable, searing, all-pervasive. On the ice the people see this: The home team has the puck, they’re gliding with speed to their goal, the opposing team intercepts, the home team slams the player into the wall, the game is moving again, there’s a near score, there’s a pile up. The only time I saw the game live (once in Madison Square Garden), this same rhythm and flow struck me as a dual-gendered performance. One moment, it was as elegant and feminine as a ballet on ice--the next second, as territorial as a street fight, with sticks and blades threatening to cut, to wound.

Territorial: The player with the puck is all powerful, he’s a legend in his mind, he’s alone but he’s gonna do it for the team, for the fans, for the city; he’s gonna make up for the lousy economy, for the last lousy forty years, man. But when he loses the puck, when he misses the goal, the fleeting sorrow I can read in his face is very young and it’s all his own. Like it’s the fear of ceasing to matter for the team, the fans, perhaps ceasing to exist for himself because he’s lost all heroic purpose. Next it’s a quick shift into pack mode, as his team works to defend the goal, and sometimes to swoop in and surround the opposing player, pin him to the wall, let him know whose town it is. Together they can protect, instill fear, together they can maim and kill.

I turn away from the TV set and remember my small brothers, and wonder if they remember me, watching.

2008-05-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

My head gets crowded; I feel I am continually trying to clear my head. These days, it's a matter of competing goals, projects, desires of my own vs. the demands of others. There's my dayjob, my schoolwork, my writing life, and my publishing life, to name a few. My weekends prove too short to finish any given to-do list.

When I was a photographer, I used to complain that my head was too full of images. Modern critical theorists spend a lot of time telling us that we live in an image-driven, image-crowded world, and I believe them. The first time I moved to New York City, I found myself feeling worn out by the proliferation of billboards, magazines, and the population that imitated them: I used to say that living in New York was like living in a magazine. When I left New York that first time, I moved to Texas, saying good riddance to density, billboards, and other visual littering: I wanted a blank sky and darkness at night. I had grown up, after all, in a county that made billboards illegal.

All this was still years before the internet was a factor in my world, let alone a daily one. At the time, the only computer I owned was a Brother typewriter/word processor with a 5-line screen. It was unevenly heavy, and it had a flip-out handle on one side for carrying. I carried it, in fact, all the way to Texas (via Amtrak), wrapped in a blanket and thrown into a large black trash bag.

Today's computer is my desktop at my work office; its weight is irrelevant since it's a fixed object. It has an 18-inch screen but the size, too, is irrelevant: it manages to fit my whole life into it, 40 hours a week. The lit-up computer screen with its hypertexts, its icons, its graphics, and other illusions of coding--this space may as well BE my office. As long as I'm there, navigating among the emails and the spreadsheets, the directory lists and the downloadable forms, the websites and the Ads by Google, there is no blank blue sky, there is no gentle night darkness. The computer IS my city inhabited, crowded with visual demands and competing requests, competing desires, repeating values, and billboards at every turn.

2008-05-15T06:59:00.000-07:00

I LURK IN DARKNESS, or, ACCIDENTAL EVENINGS

There was the time that S_____ asked me to the Homecoming dance during the first week of Life Drawing class. Looking back, there was never even the feel of an attraction between us, besides the excitement of meeting a new friend; but S_____ was clearly very handsome, and I was eager to put the nail in the coffin of my awkward and lonely years. Somehow I knew to show up to his friend C_____'s room for cocktails before the dance; once there, I learned that S______ had asked another girl to the dance. It's long enough ago that I don't remember how explicit this revelation was. Did the others in the room know that I was the forgotten date? Did S_____ blurt out an apology for asking two girls to the dance? Did anyone know what I was doing there at all? Not only did I not know the other people in the room (except one or two by sight), I didn't know anything about their milieu. I was a public school veteran from down the road; they were prep school graduates from up North. Their vodka-gimlet conversation tossed nuances, references, and attitudes far over my head. No one was exactly nasty to me, I simply didn’t exist in their world. I remember I was busy trying to plot my way out of the room, out of the evening; I remember I was wearing a short black and white dress with huge shoulder pads; I remember that I was anchored in an armchair at one end of the room, with the couples sitting in two rows before me.

It was a small party in a small chamber; I didn't have the language (literally, the right phrase or two) that would allow me to leave the room with what I would have called dignity. I had to wait it out. My chance came when we all rose to walk across the foot-bridge to the dance. I faded into the night's darkness in the other direction, virtually without a sound.

This last image reminds me of a party I attended in high school, a "field party" as we called them. Field parties were less about wide open fields in the middle of nowhere and more about someone whose house had a large acreage of yard. This particular party was being held at a small house out in the rural, western end of the county (the county lines being the parameters of our world); the house sat at the bottom of a steep hill. The steep hill was flood-lit by a single light which guarded the front door like an evil eye; the light was so bright that it had the effect, in fact, of hiding the house from sight. Sharp shadows formed the edges of the party.

Sharp edges were drawn also around the "camp" that was holding the affair. This was a jock's party, and I wasn't. (In fact, I did play one sport, but was not part of the jock faction.) Some childhood friends of mine had taken me out this night--graduation night for the class ahead of us--and this was their scene, not mine. I was anxious and curious how the evening would play out. Here I was with old friends who knew me and cared about me, but they had brought me to the viper's nest of this crowd. I was anxious because of my past with these people, but curious because my present social situation was much different than it once had been. My life now included new friends and shared affinities. My interests had diverged so completely from those of this crowd tonight; what could we possibly have to say to each other? Did we exist for each other at all?

Before I could wonder too long and hard about it, the ground slid out from under me. I slipped far down the hill, which was long of uncut grass and slick of keg beer. I slipped so far that I fell out of the light that shone on the people, until I was inhabiting the darkness outside of the party. Once there, I couldn’t think of a good reason to reenter: the light, the party, the throngs. So I stood and watched. I waited, with relief, for the party to pass.

2008-05-13T07:29:00.000-07:00

NOT UNLIKE THE DAY I FIRST READ ABOUT 'THE POTATO EATERS'

My friend Jude, who grew up in small-town Louisiana and small-city Texas, has often said that there are two kinds of towns in the South. One is the kind where everyone is as nice as your sweetest grandmother, offering genuine and pleasant banter at the counter, thinking nothing of helping the neighbor in need, always giving folks the benefit of the doubt. And the other is the kind of town where there is a meanness in everyone; the people wear hard faces, they brandish guns, they take pride in their bigotry, and they're always looking for a fight. Jude talks about how these two kinds of towns can be situated right next to each other, but still be night and day.

I wonder if whole towns can be infected with the same mysterious but undeniable poison that some families are. Do you remember? There were the friends' houses where everyone was always breaking into giggles, the meals were like banquets, and the family willingly spent time in the same room together, inventing games or doing nothing in particular. And there were the homes where each person was louder and meaner than the next, the father was a glassy-eyed terror and the mother's voice had no soft edges left; homes where each family member was ranked by the effectiveness of their insults; homes where sharp laughter always filled the air, and no one seemed to share it.

2008-05-09T09:50:00.000-07:00

SMALL TOWN (IDENTITY) POLITICS

I grew up in a small town; a small town is a panopticon. A small town is a panopticon where all views leads to one identity—the identity the town decides you have. For some, this may feel, I suppose, holistic and integrating. Or perhaps just normal. For me it was clausterphobic, and I’ve spent my life since then climbing out of every identity box I (or others) have put me in.

One question, twenty odd years into this experiment, is: What is it that actually evolves one’s identity? My boyfriend—who knew me at age 19, then didn’t know me for many years--sometimes says to me (teasing but serious), “You’re just a doctor’s daughter from the suburbs.” This usually sounds to my ear like someone saying to me, “You haven’t changed an ounce from what you were, and you never will.” But now that I’ve lived with him long enough to hear him differently, I wonder if he means--not that I haven’t changed at all--but that I have rebelled in the way that a doctor’s daughter from the suburbs would, revolved my life (identity) around THAT particular axis. Indeed, when he met me all those years ago at the southern university we both attended, he had a name for ‘my kind’ at our school: “Undergrad Type II.” He said, when pressed, that ‘Type I’ was the kind that came to school hopelessly preppie and left preppie, and rebelled by drinking copious amounts of keg beer and playing rowdy matches of rugby and turning up Zeppelin way too loud. Type IIs were the English majors who dressed in black, revered Hermann Hesse in high school and French criticism in college, listened to Robyn Hitchcock and Public Enemy and preferred scotch to beer; they thought they were rebelling philosophically. I’ll admit that back then the latter was indeed close to my definition of evolving my identity: reading things my parents had not, going places my classmates might never, opening my own mind as far as I could stretch it; part of the goal—or the method—being not to live with loose morals but to approach life without morals or prejudgements at all. But the ultimate goal being to outgrow the fearful and sheltered identity-cage I was once asked to stand in, once willingly stood in.

What are the uses of a stable identity, of an evolved identity? What is the ‘ideal’ identity generically- or specifically-speaking? If identity is achieved, what is desirable in a “final” identity? To my definition, an identity should always allow for growth and fluidity, but then, is it still called an identity? What makes the difference between growing up and growing older? Is it possible to ‘become different’? Is it possible to NOT become different?

Something that strikes me now, as I look back on what’s behind me, is that I constantly flipped everything over, everything that might stabilize an identity. (Nor did I change things out of indecision or fickleness, more out of post-passion exhaustion, the feeling that I’d used something up--mostly, my own identification with it.) I’ve inhabited 18 apartments in 20 years; I shared them with 41 roommates. I switched neighborhoods, jobs, lifestyles, lovers, whole sets of tight friends, artistic media, and sometimes cities. But as quickly as I was able to squirm out of each identity, I see a trend from the other end of the spectrum: in certain relationships, especially at work or in romance, I'd get stuck in the smallest pigeon holes. All it took was knowing that someone wanted me to be something I wasn't, and knowing that I could appear to be it, and suddenly I was stuck playing that role, weighed down with sorrow that the person wouldn’t accept me more freely. And I was good at this—this pretending, this mask-wearing, I could sustain it for a long time. Oddly, it was staying in an identity I ENJOYED that seemed to pose the challenge.

I woke today with a Carole King line in my head, but I had the wording wrong for a few hours before I noticed: My line was “Way over yonder, that’s where I’m found.” (Really it’s ‘bound.’) For I’ve noticed before this writing that I have a penchant for motion, for migration, for longing to be where I’m not. I take busses and trains to get places, rather than airplanes, which are too quick; I like the getting-there part; I like the being-not-here-nor-there part. I like the you-can’t-locate-me part.

I used to have the fear, the ultimate feminist nightmare, that to live with a man would mean that he’d always see me as inherently subordinate, or only as a sexual object. I no longer dwell on the male opinion of me so much, but I am aware that sharing a life and a home with one person means you are bound, to an extent, by his view of you. But that’s if the other person is merely a mirror to reflect you; and while I believe we are all that for each other, we are also people, which means we are dynamic. We are fluid in minute and grand ways, whether we want to be or not, and even when we are mirrors we are also kaleidoscopes, so the mirror, too, is changeable and changing. Sometimes it is not the mirror across from us that is so unbending but our own mind that is made rigid by fear and anxiety, fear of the reflection that once came back to us.

Maybe fear is the only identity cage.

2008-05-05T11:56:00.001-07:00

EXPERIMENT

I tried to live without writing for a time, and happily, it failed miserably:

I had no relationship to myself, therefore none to anyone else. I had no reason for eyesight, nor much reason for insight. I became afraid of my physical voice. I lost my laugh. Time had no meaning, nor seasons, and I no longer had any way to gauge my growth. It didn’t matter whether I was in Peoria or Astoria, whether I was at work or I wasn’t, whether I was naked or clothed. I had no perspective. I had no body, because it didn’t have an interior. I no longer had emotions; also, I had emotions I had no idea what to do with. I couldn't stop useless thoughts or feelings like wanting, every morning, to kill the person who'd designed the city busses with the aisle too skinny for even one Pittsburgh-sized body, let alone another trying to pass it. I couldn’t love, because I couldn’t communicate; or perhaps because I no longer understood myself as separate from anything or anyone else around me. There was no “I.” Every day that I didn’t write, I hated instead. In time, I forgot why I hated.

It was like I had tried to forget what I knew, and this you cannot do. You can expand your point of view, you can change your mind completely, but you can’t wipe your mind clean for the sake of it. “What I knew” was that I had to write in order to live, or at least, to live as I would like to live.

I’m reminded of the Groucho Marx joke a friend told me, “I used to live in Pittsburgh once…if you call that living.” Which leads me to the W.C. Fields joke the same friend told me, “I spent a week in Philadelphia…one weekend.”

2008-04-25T11:31:00.000-07:00

THE LAST LINE IS THE PART I WOKE UP THINKING ABOUT

When I first met G______, we went out for a secret rendez-vous, even though we weren’t aiming (or headed) for a romantic relationship. There was undoubtedly an attraction of some sort, and even a certain urgency to tête a tête, either of which would have surely had our respective girlfriends jealous. But perhaps more to the point, there was already an unfettered joy between us, one that was lacking in our very fettered home relationships, neither of which lasted overmuch longer. G_____ and I were both lovers of meetings, secret or otherwise, we both believed in friendships, and we both liked strangers, the stranger the better.

I knew G______’s face from the bookshop, just one of the many regular customers I’d seen over the years. Then suddenly I saw him twice one week: once before--and once after—I’d shorn all but a quarter inch of my very-long dark hair. He stopped short on his way out the door. “Wait, didn’t you used to---?” “Yeah,” I said.

The third time that week was the time we actually met. I was in yet another hairdo—a tall red wig, part of a costume in which I was reading from my first novel. G______ had innocently come into a bookshop to browse (a different bookshop now; Brooklyn, not Manhattan) and felt “caught” upon finding himself at a modestly-attended reading. He stayed, then liked what he heard. But as the reading ended and the Q and A began, he started to take his first chance to bolt. “Wait!” I called. “Don’t you recognize me?” (My costume consisted of details like 4-inch heels, a gold-lame mini-dress, pancake makeup and redrawn eyebrows; in my normal life I tended to wear Levi’s and soccer shoes.) “Yeeee…not exactly,” G_____ replied. “I work at _________, I’m the girl who just cut all her hair off.” “Oh!” he said very convincingly, though months later he would admit that he'd had no idea what I was talking about.

G_______ was a recovering alcoholic at least a decade older than me; he was a poet who’d been writing a few decades longer than me. For our rendez-vous he took me to a bar he knew in Brooklyn and we walked straight through to the backyard, one of those unexpected urban spaces with quiet, flowers, pebbles, and privacy. We sat on wrought iron benches and were prepared to order seltzer waters should a waitress come around; none did. We talked and talked, about writing mostly, and life, and the city; we laughed easily; we forgot our home troubles.

After a few undisturbed hours, we left the backyard sanctuary and G_________ walked me most of the way home, one neighborhood over.

When we parted on a corner near my house, G________ told me definitively, “You should keep writing.” Then as he started to walk down Manhattan Avenue the way we'd just come, he paused and turned around again; added, “If I don’t write every day, I just feel bad.”

2008-03-06T14:05:00.000-08:00

TODAY'S CHINESE FORTUNE

The internet makes everyone into a speed addict.

2008-01-31T11:35:00.000-08:00

I GUESS YOU'D SAY HE WASN'T MY CANDIDATE

A friend asked me Do I ever dance with my cat? Of course, I answered without hesitation. But then I had to think. The only time I could recall concretely was New Year's Eve 2001. I had succumbed to the flu that was going around New York that depressed-psyche, depressed-immunity winter, and I was home alone in flannel pajamas. When midnight struck I celebrated by singing about the happiest thing I could think of: waltzing with the cat on her hind paws, I danced around the living room chanting, "No more Giuliani! No more Giuliani!"

2007-12-07T10:01:00.000-08:00

DARK MONDAYS

On this white Friday in Pittsburgh, I’m thinking about the dark Mondays I spent working at a certain New York playhouse, attending its phones on the box office manager’s one day off. I’m remembering how unbelievable it was that this space, on Mondays so dim, so silent and empty, had—just 12 hours before—housed such noise, such laughter, such crowds, such egos, such antics, such conflicts, such commerce, such fanfare, such dazzling lights.

2007-12-02T13:28:00.000-08:00

WEDDING AS STAGE SHOW

When the bride and groom are having their first dance, and there's a room full of their nearest and dearest standing around watching them, I always wonder--what are the bride and groom thinking most about? Is the fact of each other and their recent leap of faith the most compelling thought? Or are they too aware of the hundreds of eyes on them, the spectacle of their waltz, the image of black and white perfection into which they now congeal, in the minds' eyes of their audience?

2007-10-25T09:31:00.000-07:00

MULTI-TASKING IS A WAY OF DEATH

For professional reasons, I recently attended a lecture by a fellow who traveled to Kazakhstan to introduce a group of librarians there to Web 2.0, i.e., "Open Source" web.

I was struck by his excited statement early on in the lecture, "Multi-Tasking is now a way of life!" I was struck by how happy he was about this. Me, I associate multi-tasking with unrealistic bosses, with the overlapping customer demands of retail at Christmastime, with the disturbing effect of the internet on my 21st Century A.D.D. I associate multi-tasking with forces outside of me that I must obey in order to pay my rent, and with a resulting rhythm I internalize and don’t want to; when I waitressed for a living, I'd have to come home and lay on my back for a few hours to try and calm the swirling inside of me. I would argue that waitresses and mothers, to name just two, have been multi-tasking for centuries, that it is nothing new. I would argue that multi-tasking is not a life to celebrate but a life degraded.

To me, writing is life, because it is the thing which connects me to my inner self, the thing which brings my interior realization in tune with my exterior interactions. To write at all, I must concentrate, and if I am writing well, I am nearly meditating. Have these words all but lost their meaning in a multi-tasking world? A friend of mine, a fellow writer (who is not a fellow), is finishing up her book on deadline from her publisher. She tells me that for several months she has been sitting in bed with her laptop, surrounded by stacks of books and boxes of dry food. She has ignored everything but her writing. Her credit cards have cancelled themselves, her car has parking tickets, her email mailbox has 2000 unread messages, and her friends are angry. But she says she knows of no other way. "Writing is like a stone sinking to the bottom of the lake, and everything going dead quiet. But you're the stone."

To me, writing is not only the absence of multi-tasking, but sometimes it is the inverse of multi-tasking: Other activities collapse into it. When I am really IN the writing of a novel, I am in a zone of concentration where the words I'm looking for come to me (or through me), the story is writing itself somewhere deep inside of me, and it's more like I'm making time and space to listen for it than like I'm making it up. Certain repetitive tasks, if there is some quiet involved, jog the story to the surface, to my inner ears: washing dishes becomes writing, taking a shower becomes writing, taking a walk becomes writing.

The poet, Martin Espada, in a Pittsburgh lecture last March pointed out that poetry never pays the bills, and that the bills must be paid, if you’re most of us. He said that he has to “steal time from [his] own life” to write his poems, often on trains or in airports on the way to teaching poetry, which is how his bills get paid. Multi-tasking IS the demands of others, the demands of economics; no one will ever ask you to concentrate, to meditate, to write—the onus is on you entirely.

The other night I went to see the Whirling Dervishes at Carnegie Music Hall (here in Pittsburgh). I had seen them at New York’s City Center in 1999, and back then, the two hours or so of deep song and white-draped whirling transfixed (even transported) me. From the sanctuary of my seat, I could concentrate, I could lose myself in the movement and the sound; because of the silence I was allowed, I was able to experience a bit of the ecstasy of the Dervishes’ ritual.

By contrast, this recent performance was preceded by a whole lineup of distraction: a video promotion for the sponsoring foundation, a professor’s lecture on Rumi, a radio announcer introducing each upcoming segment, a brief performance of the singers separate from the dancers, an intermission, and a staged dialogue explaining the symbolic meanings of the Dervishes’ ceremony. Finally, the whirling. But even that was backdropped by an ever-moving Power Point slide show of the kind of explanatory text that used to be contained in printed programs.

Still, I am reminded by the Dervishes’ ceremony what writing offers me: The Dervishes whirl to bring themselves into harmony with the spinning earth, the revolving planets, and the revolving inside everything around us, at atomic level. I write to bring myself into harmony, to make sense connections between inner world and outer, I write to remind myself what feels good and to purge myself of what feels bad. I write because feeling without writing about feeling usually un-balances me.

The Dervishes, before they begin their ritual of spinning (with one palm up open to the universe, the other palm facing their heart), begin by walking slowly in the form of a circle. At one end of the circle, it is someone’s turn to revolve and face the man behind him; then they greet each other by bowing. This symbolizes a recognition, specifically an acknowledgement of seeing the soul of the other from your own soul, though your souls are clothed in (separated by) bodies.

There are at least two basic activities that multi-tasking has nothing to do with, that multi-tasking can’t make faster, because it can’t accomplish them at all. One is (real) Writing, and the other is Recognition of other people. To my mind, the defining quality of true recognition between two people is a full attention, a whole-heart-edness. How can I have a heart to heart with you, if the message that you receive from my body language is that I am doing 12 things at once? How can I see you truly, hear what you are feeling, listen to you fully, face you honestly, be moved or even transformed by your life, if I am doing everything to distract myself from you?

Multi-tasking is a ways from Life.

2007-09-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

LETTER TO AMERICA FROM AMERICA: SEPTEMBER 11, 2007

“I opened my eyes but couldn’t see anything. Everything was completely black. My eyes were burning. I couldn’t breathe, and I wondered for a second if this was what death was like.” Ruth Fremson, New York Times, September 16, 2001

Reading a photojournalist’s memory of September 11th this morning reminded me that there was a BEFORE. Before this endless war against phantoms, before the Patriot Act, before the Bush regime bullied their way into the space left by the American passivity to politics, to participatory democracy.

Make no mistake, the American scorecard before 2001 wasn’t great, wasn’t anything like stellar. From Reagan’s “little wars” to Clinton’s glad-handing of corporations, there was much to be ashamed of at the top echelons. But I believe it is significant when darkness comes out into the open as it has during W.’s term: pre-emptive war set down as a foreign policy, legislation in the name of bald greed, untruths of great consequence proclaimed from the highest pulpits, international laws ignored, human rights stripped from “suspects” not convicted of any crime, people detained for months and years in the name of Our Fear, freedoms removed from every citizen—the very freedoms this country built its ambitious vision on.

A sentimental part of me wishes to be back in New York today, seeing people I spent time with in those most strange weeks that followed 9/11. But here I am, out in the provinces of America, wanting change for this country, and I am not the only one. I am reporting from out in America to say, I am by far not the only one who sees with naked eyes. I have met teachers, janitors, waitresses, librarians, nurses, retirees, accountants, McDonald’s cooks, video editors, technical writers, administrative assistants, recovering alcoholics, grocery-chain meat-slicers, switchboard operators, health-clinic volunteers, mothers of eight, and countless others who know, Mr. Bush, what goes on.

And yet there is still a collective silence, a depression, a sense of being crushed.

When I remember the feeling of BEFORE, it is relative to the feeling of SINCE, and I remember that I still feel like someone has been standing on my chest for six years. Is this the grieving I haven’t done, that we haven’t done? Or is it the feeling of living with the aggression that the Bush Administration released, the lies they perpetuated, the twisted reality they began to implement, and the uphill battle it has been to speak past that, the uphill battle to breathe past that? Or are these one and the same? Aggressive stance-taking as denial, as refusal to grieve?

Is the SINCE feeling I speak of only perceptual? Not without origin, but perceptual because I have held on to it, paid too much heed to the feeling itself? What is a country (a democracy) made of? Is it the leaders we elect, is it a sum of our votes, is it the shape of our voting districts, is it the victims of our bombs, is it the collection of our stories, is it the fact of our daily good deeds, is it the acknowledgement of the many people who have not gone blind or mute or deaf or dumb in the face of insanity at the top?

America, I am crying for you today. But I am in you, I am one of you. I am not flying a flag today. But I am waking up and remembering that we can’t move backwards—I can’t reach the BEFORE by wishing in that direction. I can only move forward. We can only move from this point, forward. We can only work with what we’ve made, what they’ve set into motion, I can only respond and write and keep responding and writing, speaking, making room to imagine new ways to respond, new ideas to set into motion.

2007-08-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

CHIMNEYS WITHOUT FIRE*

Dream: T_____ and I were going to Cleveland to witness that city’s pride: A folk dancing festival that centered around one dance in particular: Burly construction men from Northeastern Ohio, backpedaling atop stacks of bricks. Like log-rolling for brick-layers, the dance had been born spontaneously when Cleveland’s economy collapsed. For, at the very moment of Cleveland’s financial fall, a building-in-progress had literally collapsed. The men working on it fell two stories with the bricks that tumbled violently beneath their feet. In the middle of the unexpected avalanche, some men saved their own lives by intuitively inventing the Dance of the Stack of Bricks, while others broke their legs from the incident; some even died.

The “dance floor” was arranged like so: There was a long ditch in which were placed numerous five foot-high rectangular structures that looked like chimneys. The loose bricks were stacked on top of the “chimneys” of fixed brick. The dancers were then to "dance" on top of this brick-on-brick arrangement. The various stages of the competition entailed more loose bricks being added to the pile of each contestant still left standing at the end of each round.

In a less popular “Cleveland folk dance,” called “The Three Legged Race,” the outer leg of each of two adjacent men was strapped together to the other's AND a third man (facing backwards) was strapped with BOTH his legs into the same bind. Once strapped as such, the new “leg” took on a life of its own, and would only move with coaxing and guidance, or flogging. The man with both legs bound held a whip; only he was allowed to use it on the stubborn limb.

2007-07-26T10:22:00.000-07:00

FAMILIES THAT VANISH

I have been told, infrequently but for years, that I have a distant cousin named Demosthenes who lives in St. Louis. I have been told that his nickname is Demo. I have been told that he has been in the fetal position for decades, ever since hearing the news that his wife and daughters burned and died in a housefire. I have been told that my cousin, M_______, whom I have met, has visited him.

M_______, now the oldest living on my father's side, is known as the Matriarch of the Family. M_______ lost her husband early on in their marriage and has never remarried. M_______ had a promising professional career but "got her life back" when she went to work for Mary Kay Cosmetics. She was never happier, they said. It was under the auspices of Mary Kay that she met success, confidence, and life-long friends.

I have often pictured their meeting--Demo and M_______. M_______ the spit-spot, efficient, effective one who had already pulled herself back up from devastation, talking to the near-lifeless body of Demo, and not bothering about it when he doesn't answer back. I even like picturing M_______ driving West to Missouri for this sole mission. A gentle mission. Just to talk to him, just because he is family.

I suppose I have seen Demo as a sort of cartoon version of himself, willfully deflated in mere self-pity instead of what must truly be a mental illness. I have never known how to wrap my mind around this story.

It's been years since anyone mentioned Demo, in fact. Probably by now he has passed away, but no one has told me. As I write this, it seems it must be fiction.

2007-06-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

HEAVY METAL HAIR

My long hair usually responds to humidity by growing longer and curly, not unlike kudzu vine. I've lived in more humid places than Pittsburgh, it's true--Virginia; New York City; Austin, Texas; and Oregon--but my hair seems flat, considering that it's at least humid enough here for everyone to complain of it all summer.

Right after the report came out naming Pittsburgh the most liveable American city, another report came out naming Pittsburgh as one of the worst air-quality cities, still, even after all the working mills are gone, except one, and a modest one at that.

Am I vain? The first thing it made me think was, Maybe that's what's been weighing down my hair.

2007-04-17T10:50:00.000-07:00

SOME THINGS THAT OCCUR TO ME FOLLOWING THE VIRGINIA TECH SHOOTING
(April 17, 2007)

Walter must be sad.

Tony must be sad.

Brian must be sad.

There was the picture of all of us, Math Award winners in eighth grade. We had practically the same oversized glasses and short frumpy haircuts. I was the only girl. The rest went to Virginia Tech.

It is sad, thirty-three dead is awful.

The students must be scared.

Living with fear is awful. Living with grief is a challenge.

Some days there are more than thirty-three dead in Iraq and some days, less. Sometimes they report the numbers and sometimes they don’t. It’s been so many days in a row now.

People are wondering why. Why does a student kill students.

We've sent so many students to Iraq. ROTC is a great way to go through college if you don’t have money for college. My first love went ROTC, narrowly missing the call for the Gulf War.

Right now, students are killing Iraqis in order to save their own lives.

Right now, students are killing we-don’t-know-how-many-or-who Iraqis: armed or unarmed, school children or uneducated, old or young. We don’t report these murders, we report suicide bombers. We report sectarian conflict.

Right now, veterans you sent to war are living with themselves in this country, with your question Why?

Tax season had just ended when the shooting occurred.

This year I paid $68 in federal taxes. Some percentage of which goes to fund students killing Iraqis.

The road to Blacksburg is dangerous. Your car is hugging mountain curves, and the tractor trailers are right up there with you, above the ravines and the quarries.

But when you get to Blacksburg, the air is thin and clear. The sky is beautiful. The hills around you are a comfort.

Elizabeth says her uncle in Danville, Virginia has an arsenal in his basement. Untold numbers of guns.

Elizabeth says that Danville’s National Guard is on the top of the list of units to be called, because they are known for being so adept with guns.

The gunman at Virginia Tech, this student, was armed to the teeth. He wore a vest for ammunition, he had two automatic weapons, he had back up bullets. He scraped off serial numbers. He knew his way around a gun.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute is a former military academy which still has its own corps of cadets.

Killeen, Texas, site of the second-biggest shooting in America, is home of a U.S. Army base.

San Diego, site of the third-biggest shooting in America, is a well-known military city.

It’s only been in the latter half of the war that they started reporting Iraqi deaths.

The American press is still banned from running photographs of the American coffins.

Last year at this time, I was at an estate sale where the bereaved family had price-tagged rifles next to paper clips and armchairs and twenty-year-old bottles of anise.

Nineteen years ago at this time, I was on a tennis court in Blacksburg, losing the Virginia state tennis championship. I cried to lose the last match for my high school team.

A few months after that, I was in Blacksburg to rendezvous with my first love, who was forbidden to visit me in Charlottesville.

We were staying in the dorm room with Tony and Brian, and we visited Walter and Angela.

In Blacksburg, I lost some of my virginity to my first love.

We had already broken up, and we broke up again afterward.

It was sad.

Tony must be sad.

Angela probably cried.

Walter must be sad.

Brian must be very sad.

2007-04-05T05:51:00.000-07:00

A STORY R______ TOLD ME

R______, who has worked at the bookstore since 8:25 AM on ___ __, 1966, R_______ started his book career in the book department at the National Record Mart, a now-defunct Pittsburgh record-store chain. The National Record Mart, a family-owned company, one year got to pulling its weight to bring musical acts through the city. In the early 60s, they brought in The Beatles.

Well, the big day had arrived, The Beatles were coming to Pittsburgh, and here they were, on their way to the National Record Mart to play some songs and sign some autographs. R______ is out on 5th Avenue with everyone else, lining the sidewalks, and here come The Beatles, driving down the street. The Beatles are making it very slowly down the street, with the crowd attaching itself to the car like a many-armed octopus.

And who does R______ also see, also crawling down the street, one car behind The Beatles, but his father. Cursing, shaking his fist behind his windshield, red-faced, cursing, cursing.

2007-04-04T05:31:00.000-07:00

A REAL HEAD CASE
Excerpt from Joseph Mitchell, "My Ears are Bent," orginally published 1938

Describing Dick's Bar and Grill, a reporter's bar near the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan:

"There are two steady waiters, and they also hate the customers. One is named Horace. He is an Italian who suffers from adenoids and never shuts his mouth. He has a delusion about his head. He was in the Italian Army during the war, and he believes his head was shot off and that the doctors got the head of an Austrian and sewed it on his neck. He claims that the new head is not satisfactory because it is the head of a young man and often urges him into adventures in which the rest of his body is not particularly interested.

" 'My other head had a big mustache,' he said one night."

2007-04-03T14:27:00.000-07:00

A CRANK A DAY KEEPS THE DOCTOR AWAY
And everyone else

"Nobody goes there anymore," complained Yogi Berra: "It's too crowded."

2007-04-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

AND I HAVEN’T EVEN READ HARVEY PEKAR IN SEVERAL MONTHS
But I was a clerk in a filing room when I did

Dream: Harvey Pekar kept calling me and leaving me messages, or getting me on the phone and getting the brush off. I was busy, I’d tell him. He was calling me the way a customer would get my attention; he wasn’t calling because we were familiar, but because he needed me to retrieve something from a shelf. However, we lived several cities away from each other. I kept brushing him off like even the snidest clerk in me wouldn’t, because he wasn’t really my customer--I was no longer working a customer service job, and he wasn’t really calling a store. It was as if (after 11 restaurant jobs and almost a decade in retail) I’d turned into the Everyclerk; if you called me, I’d get you something from a shelf. Harvey Pekar knew it, and I didn’t yet.

As I said, I was brushing him off constantly. I would delete his messages before I listened to them and I would self-righteously slam-hang up the phone if he reached me. Some guilt started to eat at me. What was he trying to tell me? His calls were increasingly angry as of late. Was he threatening me, now that I was treating him so?

I was busy. In my mind, I was very busy and I couldn’t believe that yet someone else needed me and demanded of my time and energy.

The space I existed in was like a long warehouse, sectioned off by suggestions of different rooms but not by walls. The floors and walls were concrete; there were no windows. It was hard to say whether this was specifically my place of work, or whether it was some nuclear-bomb-shelter future society; whether it was just where everyone existed. For one thing, I was doing various tasks there. In the fathest back section, I was shopping for records from some snotty twenty-year old guys. Slightly closer than that, I was folding the Sunday paper sections as they came in. Even closer to the front, I was visiting Morgan, who had returned to Brooklyn with his family, left his house in Italy behind and had to get a job in a pet store. Our heads were surrounded by bird cages and hanging plants as we talked about his disappointment in this turn of events. At the front end of this windowless space (why it seemed the front I can’t say) there were stacks of the complete Sunday paper, with a thin version of Harvey’s latest book stuffed inside as this week’s supplement. At this end of the place, people were starting to gather, for a variety show to celebrate Bryan’s wedding. I turned around and saw Bryan, Phillippe, and my brothers, all in plastic bowler hats and various other costume accessories, looking like they were dressed for St. Patrick’s Day. I shook hands to congratulate Bryan.

Parallel to the pet store, there was a room-sized bird cage of sorts. It was like a tiny studio apartment with walls of black-metal piping. I seemed to work for the person who lived there; I had come to water her. On one side of the cage walls, the metal piping was interrupted by a row of what looked like black hot-air balloons, or dry-cleaning bags for Abbot and Costello, hanging from the ceiling. These were supposed to be all the rage now. I was fluffing these balloons up for the resident, when I saw Harvey Pekar charge around the corner. “I’m Harvey Pekar!” he yelled in my direction when he saw me. I was stricken by fear at the sight of him, because my anxiety at having ignored his calls, and my confusion as to whether he was somehow inherently my customer, had grown so high. He looked terrible, his skin looked that transparent-elderly-Irish, plus liver spots. One of his eyes was bandaged. He got closer to me and was still yelling at me. Now I was fearing what threats I had erased off my answering machine, as if I wanted to know his plans. As if I somehow deserved them more because I had ignored their build-up. Then Harvey lit a match and set me on fire, and ignited the hot-air balloons, yelling that he told me he would do this if I didn’t take his next call.

I woke up.

*

Last Sunday night’s dream: Harvey Pekar was being held hostage by terrorists, and the City of Cleveland was being asked for the money. Harvey had his own demands for the terrorists: He told them that his plans were to finish eating his meal now, a whole roasted chicken, and then to defecate the following morning.

2007-03-23T14:36:00.000-07:00

FRIEND-PORN:

Hey, M____, wish we could turn back time and sit at the Second Avenue deli with a bowl of matzoh ball and something hot on rye toast with a knish for dessert and discuss the semiotics of Boston Red Socks fans and our grandfathers.

Dear H_____, what I wouldn’t give to talk out the state of the novella with you in a diner booth in Austin, Brooklyn, or L.E.S. The next milkshake is on me.

J______! Meet me at the batting cage at Coney Island. Loser pays for skeeball til it closes.

My dear P_______, Save me a seat at the nearest café. You’ll find your love someday, I swear. I’ll get published to my heart’s content. We’ll finally make that video about the wolves and the sheep. Meanwhile we have each other, and a four hour meal if we want it, and bitching about everything that isn’t right yet.

2007-03-23T06:22:00.000-07:00

SLEEP/WAKING

Dream image: A man walks into a revolving door with eight chambers. A woman walks into the chamber behind him, to spy on him. A man follows in the chamber behind her, to spy on her. Etc., until the last chamber is also occupied by a spy, and everyone’s cover is suddenly blown.

Not-a-dream image: At the Arab restaurant, a woman at the table next to us excuses herself to answer a cell phone call. Over Thomas' shoulder, I catch sight of the woman talking on her cell phone on a bench near the dessert case. Her left hand is holding her cell phone to her ear, in an unusual way, her hand straight up and almost flat, her phone hidden by her blonde hair. Her right hand is guarding her ear against the room’s noise, and also rests straight and flat against her head. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is hanging open. Dressed in a bright green vee-neck sweater and black swing skirt, she looks like a 1950s sock-hop version of “The Scream.”

Wednesday night’s dream: I am on a Greyhound bus, writing a story in oil stick on the pages of a fashion magazine. In the front of the bus, I see the emerging author, N______ C______. He knows me but not by sight; I keep my anonymity. The bus has a long rest stop at a library in the Midwest. We are sitting at the same table, with the 12 year old who is his travelling companion; still I don’t introduce myself. I lose time, it is sometime later, and it is the Danville bus station I am departing from. I know it will take me at least 13 hours to get to D.C.

Thursday, waking life: Emerging author N_____ C______, with whom I have mutual friends but with whom I have never communicated, emails me to ask me for a ride to Cleveland. I tell him, Sorry, but, I haven't had a driver’s license in nine years.

2007-03-21T06:44:00.000-07:00

GENTRIFICATION POEM
This is not a poetry blog. But this poem is a story.

Greenpoint

Jason and I like to
argue who found that
apartment first—no, not like you
think, he always gives me the credit.
I remember it was him because
when he told me: You take the L train
to ________ and then walk fifteen or
twenty minutes out, across a four lane
road until you hit a little park and luncheonette,
I told him: Jason! Walking fifteen minutes away
from the subway is code for Dangerous Place to Be
and don’t you know?: Parks are where muggers hide
and contemplate their prey. It was 1996 when we
moved to Sutton Street, at $825 for seven rooms
shared by two people who were never a couple.
The neighbors would have keeled over at what
we were paying: Polish and Dominican immigrants
and the American family across the street with a nine
year old named Elvis.

After us, Patrick and Anne moved in around
the corner, across from the laundromat and
above the hardware store; then Chantal below them.
There was one conspicuous hipster in our part
of the neighborhood, a fellow we didn’t know; and some artists
who’d lived closer to the River for a long time, but I’d find out about
them much later.

Now it’s 2007, I’m in Pittsburgh a year. I’m further from a subway
than I’ve been in over a decade, and paying what I paid
to rent a room in Fort Greene in 1992. I get reports from afar
that Williamsburg is buying and selling in the million$, that Busta
Rhymes calls it home, and according to Christina on Java Street,
the rooftops of Greenpoint are crowded with a skyline of drummers
and latchkey trustfunders paying $1800 for their railroad floor-throughs.

From seven stories above the Pittsburgh pavement, I wonder
about the infamous pyramid of urban renewal: first the artists
move in to the depressed area, then the students, then
the gay couples, and finally the wider breed of yuppy. I wonder
how much responsibility is whose to take, and what kind of damage
I did to myself and my neighbors when I paid 70%
of my income in rent, subsisting on canned beans
with chopped onions, and $1.25 slices, mostly in the name
of outgrowing my parents' wishes for me.

Jason would come home from a long day
at school and play some Bobby Dylan in a fury
on his acoustic guitar. I wrote a novel while
sitting in bed under piles of wool the winter
before the landlord changed the windows from glass
to vinyl; Jason felt lonely on the living room couch
we’d jointly purchased from Sidney the junk dealer
on Driggs Avenue. When we left the house together,
our street framed the Citibank skyscraper in L.I.C.
and he’d always say, “Tallest building in Queens!,”
after which I’d launch into the theme of “All in the Family.”

I didn’t get mugged until ’98,
and it wasn’t quite in Greenpoint but
a little ways East. By then the streets
around Graham Avenue and Frost were looking towards
a quiet war of Midwestern library students vs. Italian
home-owners and diaspora-Africa in Section Eight.
Sitting in the precinct on Meserole, I waited
through a Brooklyn brown-out before I identified
the guy in the 800th digital photograph in the database.
One officer offered me Chinese takeout, and
eventually my case would get thrown out of court,
while my mugger went to prison anyhow, for second
degree arson, recent and local.

These days I’m betrothed to someone I knew before I ever knew New
York City, and Jason, who’s since married and divorced, stops for
visits from Flint, on his way through to see his mother
in Reston, Virginia.

2007-03-06T10:22:00.000-08:00

SIX DREAMS FOR SEVEN STORIES
Some of this Morning's Dreams

Tiger Woods returned my phone call, months after I had tried to call him for an interview. He spoke as if we were familiar: “What’s up?”

*

I saw Jonathan Ames climbing a tree outside the library window. I was in a hushed computer lab, and there he was, this middle aged writer, wrestling with the trunk of a sycamore. He was based in New York, but when I saw him, I knew that he was now on a performance art tour, and that for the next few weeks, he would be in Pittsburgh climbing trees. Without moving from my seat, I emailed V____ to tell him what I was seeing.

*

I was downloading Jpeg after Jpeg. The files had something to do with the Pittsburgh strip club “Cricket” and their star, “Joey.” I was sad for her. I wondered who named her Joey, which brand of pervs she brought in, and how lonely she was.

*

It was M_____’s turn to lead the weekly meeting, therefore hardly anyone came. We sat at cafeteria tables and orange plastic chairs, but in a smallish room. M_____ sat up front with Lord of the Rings stuffed animals around her. She looked self-satisfied verging on smug.

I decided I was getting out of this, and excused myself to go to the bathroom down the hall. This public ladies’ room was quite old and elaborate, decorated to the hilt in the _________ style, which was very flowery. I was admiring the tub, which was like a closed chamber, and wondering if anyone ever used it, when I looked closer and saw the feet of a young woman. I startled her greatly by saying something out loud; she hadn’t heard me enter the room. She was a ballerina. We talked for a bit while she was still behind the closed chamber.

*

The dream was shot in panorama. We were driving to, then from, an odd job we’d gotten—construction or gardening, something out of doors. The drive was along a river, with beautiful vistas of hills lining one bank. On our side of the river, there was a long chain link fence that surrounded a sculpture and lawn ornament business. It stretched for a long time—in the light I could see it clearly, the Madonnas, the Romanesque columns and Greek women, even theatre masks and mimes were represented in concrete. In the evening, on our return drive, the shadows of twilight played tricks with my eyes, and the statues looked like families huddled around fading fires.

“We” was a number of my old high school friends with whom I’d lost touch. They all laughed and teased each other, they had in jokes, they shared stories and histories; for they had remained close friends. I was silent and stiff. We were in the back of a pickup truck, except for the ones who were riding in the cab. Someone lifted the barrier between the cab and bed at one point, effortlessly. They showed each other how the owner of the truck was planning to put a nice dining room set in the back seat.

*

Driving through my home county (perhaps a continuation of the pick up truck dream, perhaps not), I was seeing things that I never knew were there. A summer camp I’d never heard of. Hills and trees in between odd businesses housed in log cabins. Finally I was on foot, though still with a group of people. Maybe we had just been working as camp counselors. We ran into a band of eleven year old boys and their Boy Scout leader, who was angry with me instantly. I suddenly realized that I wasn’t wearing a shirt OR I suddenly realized that I was a woman. Shame overtook me and I covered myself with my arms. Then I found an old purple teeshirt and finally put it on. It was summer, I was enjoying the humidity and the lack of decorum in general.

In the end I found myself at a dinner party with my parents, who looked unspeakably glum as they moved from table to table, filling their plates with American food—cold cuts, cranberry sauce, pot roast, scalloped potatoes.

2007-03-01T06:07:00.000-08:00

LETTER FROM BERKELEY
Excerpts from a June Jordan essay, “Do You Do Well to Be Angry?” (September 25, 2001):

“More than three thousand have perished here. And, in turn, tens of thousands will perish elsewhere. And, in turn, there will be more and more thousands perishing from the universal arrogance of our universal propensities to judge, and to identify, other human beings as the ones to be ‘eradicated.’
“I am an American.”

*

“I do not believe I am good. Or that we share a national legacy of innocence to protect and perpetuate.
“Who is more violent than we?”

*

“Who is not a terrorist?”

*

“We, Americans, must not allow ourselves to become what we abhor: a terrorist force, furiously striking out at the known and the unknown poor peoples of Central Asia and the Middle East.
“We must not permit ourselves to act as a terrorist people!”

*

“As of September 11, 2001, the world we thought we knew went down.
“And how shall we rebuild?
“And should we reconstruct, or should we dare ourselves into an unforseen millennial recovery, a millennial upholding of our best ambitions, a millennial declaration of a slow kiss dedication to equality and justice?”

*

“It is not bin Laden’s jihad but the greater jihad that we should embrace: the interior struggle against egotism and supremacist notions of every kind.
“Ours is a struggle to fathom and assume responsibility--for justice, and for the rapid demise of double standards of all degrees, all forms.”

*

“Sometimes I am the terrorist I must disarm.”

2007-02-27T09:42:00.000-08:00

SCENES FROM A BOSTON MARRIAGE
Excerpts from May Sarton’s 1982 novel, “Anger”:

“ ‘I can’t understand,’ he said after a moment. ‘One minute you’re in a fury and the next you are telling me you love me. I can’t move that fast from one mood to another, Anna.’
" ‘People in love are vulnerable, Ned, and easily hurt. And,’ she went on very quietly, ‘people react differently to being hurt. I react with anger. You withdraw.’ “

*

“ ‘Everyone told me how powerful you are in your world…and that was reassuring. But now I have the feeling that in your mind there is no equality. You make me feel inferior. It’s like living with a governess. I can never be myself with you.’
" ‘What I don’t understand is why being a screaming hysteric is ‘being yourself.’ I am alienated by your tantrums. I can’t help it.’ ”

*

“ ‘I sometimes think you are an addict—as some people take to the bottle, you take to anger.’
" ‘But why should I?’
" ‘…How many times you come back from a concert furious at someone or something! I suppose it breaks all that tension you talk about, but it never occurs to you apparently, that other people bear the brunt of it….’ ”

*

" '...I thought I saw that for him deep feeling comes clothed in anger.'"

*

" 'I'm half Italian as you know and the Boston ethos gives me the creeps. It's so cramped, so the opposite of life-enhancing....But on the other hand the volubility, the quick changes of mood, the spontanaety just strike Ned as somehow faked or superficial.' "

*

“One thing was becoming clear. That anger was not one solid block or rock but several blocks that had little or no relation to each other. When Ned said, ‘You were always angry, even as a small child,’ he had been right. And that anger, those sudden explosions that broke out, seemingly about nothing, were what troubled her the most. They caused guilt and remorse. With Teresa she could laugh and say ‘I should be shot at dawn,’ but under the laughter there was real shame.”

*

“…she was becoming aware lately that it was not as much a question of taking blame as of understanding that below an extreme tempermental rift there was a less accessible war going on, and that was the crux of the matter. And what was that war all about?
"The masculine in each of them at war with the feminine in each of them?”

*

“ ‘I know it will sound crazy…but I think that way down deep, personal relations may have in them the roots of war and peace. I don’t know how to say this…but Ned, there’s so much anger and frustration everywhere. I think every time two people achieve communion, it helps.’ ”

2007-02-20T05:55:00.000-08:00

GREEK TRAGEDY IN ASTORIA
A letter found on the staircase of the 30th Ave. station (ca. March 2005)

Page One: “You are everywhere and nowhere. I constantly see you in front of me and I can’t touch you. That kills me. I’m tired of accidentally calling your siblings E____ and having to give excuses why. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you enter my thoughts. You don’t know how much and how long I just want to hold you, kiss you on the dimple your cheek makes when you smile, and fall asleep in your arms. Imagine what my pillow must go through every night.”

Page One (Back): “My friends can’t understand why when we go out and drink, I’m out of it. They ask me where is my kefi they know and love. But I have to lie about the truth.”

Page Two: “I see myself, and I can’t believe how much I’ve changed. I can’t understand how a woman can have that much power over me. (But you are worth it.) I feel so weak that I don’t have the strength to tell you I Love You in person or on the phone. You might laugh at what I am writing in this letter or believe that I am pitiful. I DON’T CARE. At least I’ll know that I tried. Every night I pray to Panagiatsa and Christouli to bring us together. I am afraid that my Love for you will be too much for your”

Page Three: “heart to bear, because mine is ready to burst. But one piece of my heart I know I can never give. That piece belongs to your Matakia, Trifera heilakia, kai to lakakisto magoulaki pou me treleni. I am sorry honey, I met them first. My whole body is shaking, just like that night we exchanged that passionate kiss. An innocent kiss as the song says. I wake up every day with a picture of you in my eyes, the sound of your laughter in my ears, and the vision of us together in my future. My lips form a smile and I”

Page Four: “feel like a young child that has been left to run and play at the park. Suddenly, my smile morphs into a frown and I feel a tear form at the corner of my eye, slowly coming to the realization that this is only a vision, and not reality.”

2007-02-13T06:06:00.000-08:00

NIGHT FISHING IN PITTSBURGH

Dream: I was on a trek through the woods with some comrades. We were going by stream--I was wading through a winding stream. At one moment, I was startled to notice that the thick green algae had disappeared from the surface of the water; I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what the water contained. Preferred blindness. But I dared to look down. In the clear water, a number of huge, beautiful salmon were swimming around my ankles. I was heartened by their color and their health, until I realized that I was going to have to kill one of them, to feed my comrades. The salmon wasn’t even going to mind, but I didn’t want to do it. Still, it was a responsibility I had; there wasn’t a question. I was to use a knife to cut off the head, and then filet the fish and cook it over a fire. This is what women did who wanted to provide for themselves and their friends.

Dream: I was screaming at the top of my lungs, standing in a kitchen with a huge convection oven, near a batch of freshly baked somethings, possibly bagels.

Dream: Something about the date 1833, and a man’s last name. He was a Mexican whose name was from Spain, and suggested Spanish nobility.

Dream: I was rushing off to _______ with my cat, the female one. I had to stop by the grocery store first, because we needed food for the journey. My cat was in my arms, wrapped in a plaid wool blanket. The grocery store we approached was one of the huge, multi-purpose ones like I first saw in Texas; in the front this particular store had a veterinary clinic. A long line of desperate people (many of them older women in kerchiefs) waited for their animals to be released or seen. I hurried past them, as if I was going to be asked to leave my cat in this area. I approached the entrance to the grocery store proper, and I pulled the blanket up over my cat’s head, to cover her completely. At the same time that I was disguising her as my baby, I could feel her against and in my heart. She seemed very vulnerable to me, and very precious. I was touched that she was not struggling to get away from me; it was uncharacteristic. Her blanket was soft and her body was warm; I held her tightly against my breast bone. It was very important that I protect her. By the time I got to the checkout (we were buying andouille sausage), she was switching her tail for all to see, but the kerchiefed women near me fawned over her with knowing smiles.

Dream: Thomas and I were vacationing in Manhattan. But we were in an altered part of Tribeca--south of White Street, there was a bay or an inlet. Really it was a lake or a spring, because it didn’t connect to the Hudson nor the East River. But it was made of salt water. Towards the west end of this body of water, around West Broadway and Chambers Street, there were some barrier reef islands, and then north of that, a large peninsula. We spent some time trying to barter with the natives (who had street tables full of _____ ) on the islands, and then we ended up on the much quieter peninsula, where there were long, empty beaches of pale sand. At the end of the peninsula (which had a clean, geometric shape) was a modest lighthouse that had been turned into a motel. Rooms, we heard, were nineteen dollars a night. We couldn’t decide whether this was a great bargain to be taken advantage of, or whether it just meant it was a flophouse.

2007-02-06T05:41:00.000-08:00

ECRITS FOUX

I am almost too angry to write.

"Writing," when writing is happening (I regard it as “happening”), is not begrudging like anger is, writing is a yearning to give something of me, a yearning to communicate, from where do I communicate but the heart. Even writing that seems much more cerebral or superficial than “heartfelt,” the flow, the wish to make writing happen, the wish to write--to a reader, unknown as she may be—those impulses come from an openness, a generosity.

Anger is a block to that openness. Anger is a staccato interuption in the usual flow, is a spike in the usual energy level. But no, how can I forget, anger fueled so much of my writing. I was angry at so many things. Political anger, abandonment anger, employment anger; anger at city planning, at architectural eyesores, at women who bullied, at men who stopped calling, at laziness that took credit, at form that didn’t follow function, at mayoral and employeral and presidental sins of omission or comission. Anger at injustices near and far.

Anger is energy, I had so much anger, I had so much energy. Salman Rushdie wrote the novel, Fury, in three weeks, burning with anger. I understood that story the first time I heard it. Anger in me wanted to shoot out of my body, as quickly and as accurately-aimed as possible. Writing saved me from picking up a different weapon. Mostly I shot at politics and exboyfriends, in order to spare anyone I wasn’t willing to harm.

Finally, getting engaged made me run out of exboyfriends: It suddenly seemed like so many cheap shots. My fiance told me recently, he doesn’t hold resentments against any of his ex’es except the one. I was incredulous. I’d say I am resentful of all of them. (And there were many, because I didn’t have the stamina.) Sometimes I picture my backed-up feelings for all the people in my life, unexpressed love and anger both, as filling me up to the middle of my eyeballs, and I think, “This poison must be expelled.” Another image: Resentment becomes habitual, then a magnet attracting more of itself, then a density in the body’s matter, then disease.

Resentment is perhaps what I mean when I say I am too angry to write--I am too RESENTFUL to write. Resentment is anger that has outlived its usefulness. Re-sent-ment. Latin, “feeling-again.” I am feeling my anger over and over again, I am holding on to anger instead of letting it do what it will, run through me and pick up a pen and generously tell its story on its way out of my system. Resentment: I am reliving the hurt or offense again and again, becoming its repeated victim, gathering shame for this action; for it is an action and a choice to hold on, to feel again.

Today, “I am too resentful to write.” I am not feeling generous, I am hording this anger, it is winter, I am keeping my anger close to the vest. I am closely allied with my anger, I am scared to give it away, scared because it fills my cavity entirely, scared because I am identifying with the anger. I wonder if there will be anything left of me, if I let it become liquid and pass through me, this venom, this anger.

2007-01-31T09:49:00.000-08:00

I’M NOT IN THE ARMY, BUT--
Some things I did before 9AM today

Dreamt that someone unearthed photographs of me from 20 years ago and published them in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Dreamt about a woman who learned that her mother was being beaten regularly.

Tried in vain to get back to sleep.

Tried in vain to meditate.

Noticed that there was no heat in the apartment.

Wondered if I could spoon my boyfriend without disturbing his sleep.

Noticed that my sinuses were stuffed up.

Brushed my teeth.

Chopped and juiced 5 vegetables with some seaweed.

Washed most of the dishes.

Kissed my boyfriend goodbye on his way out the door.

Checked my voicemail.

Played the answering machine.

Accused the boy cat of wanting to pee on the rug.

Quarrantined the boy cat in the bathroom.

Consumed a bowl of cereal.

Marveled at the morning sky, some tall sycamores, and the smoke coming out of three chimneys on the hill out my window.

Watered the cats.

Put on Side One of Carole King's Tapestry.

Put an outfit together from two closets and a pile on the bedroom floor.

Played “laser light” with the girl cat.

Put some postcard stamps in my bag.

Hunted for my eyeglasses.

Hunted for my scarf.

Brushed my teeth again.

Caught the elevator on its way down from the eighth floor.

Watched my bus drive past the building as I walked through the lobby.

Was heartened by the luminosity of the sky, and the perceptible motion of the passing clouds, as I stood at the busstop.

Got a seat on the 61C.

Noted the sight of my favorite cobblestone sidestreet.

Enjoyed the silhouettes of the trees against the pale sky.

Read a chapter on sugar addiction.

Picked up the new issue of the weekly paper.

Enjoyed the quality of the light again.

Wondered why Virginia had such flat skies.

Realized I'd always thought the sky was boring.

Opened the _________ office for business.

Said hello to the plant.

Said hello to the secretary down the hall.

Booted up the computer.

Checked two email accounts for work.

Made a cup of tea with the Hot spigot on the water cooler.

Read about a city council scandal.

Read about Pittsburgh’s international residents.

Read an email from my mother-in-law.

Made some calls for work.

Learned that my boss’ office is reportedly haunted.

Answered some questions and asked some questions by email.

Mailed some invitations.

2007-01-27T12:17:00.000-08:00

BUSRIDE WITH A BUSKER

Thursday we ran into my favorite Pittsburgh street musician on the 61A. Thomas asked me later did I see her violin case or did I actually recognize her, because he doesn’t think he would have, out of context. I realized that I had recognized her largely because of the recognition I saw on HER face when she saw ME, because otherwise her long hair was tucked into her coat, and I’d never seen her in winter clothes before.

She’s usually wearing, when I see her playing on Murray Avenue, an ankle-length patchwork skirt and a cotton peasant blouse; her very long hair tied into a braid or sometimes pulled off her face in part, the rest loose. The way she looks, and in fact everything about this woman, is a flashback for me, to the post-hippies I observed as a child in the 70s and their lives as I imagined them. Her kindness, her openness to striking up conversation on the street, her dedication to busking, her youthful energy, even her face itself, with its lack of makeup and its wide-eyed curiosity, yes, even its willingness to RECOGNIZE and to meet that recognition with vitality and enthusiasm.

In the 70s, our young family was still moving around the country, as we looked for a place that was amenable to my father setting up a practice, and one that would please my mother and have good public schools; the usual. I often describe these years as a struggle between my father’s fantasy of being a West Coast-Free Spirit and my mother’s strong desire that her children should know their (East Coast) grandparents, and I’m making it up, but I don’t think I’m way off, either.

The homes that were my earliest memories were set in the liberal college towns of central Massachusetts and then central Orgeon--Chickopee and Corvallis. There, hippies existed everywhere in the fringes of my world--the wood-shelved health food stores, the local mountains we hiked, the farmer’s markets, the restaurants we went to for soup or whole-wheat pizza, the dilapidated bookshops that always had a dog or a cat haunting the back of the store, even the church choir with its acoustic-guitar interpretations of the hymns.

The busker had just been to the Carnegie Art Museum, she said. She’d spent the day looking at the Impressionists and the Old Masters, on a free pass because she’d been invited to play an event. She told me my coat and scarf reminded her of a certain Bonnard with greens and lavenders, and a brown dog. I complemented her on her scarf, whose pattern looked like a series of God’s Eyes (another memory from the 70s, grade-school art classes and camp activities) and the three of us recalled the story of Isadora Duncan’s death. The busker said Yes, she often thinks about the scarf snapping the dancer’s neck, whenever she catches her hair in a car door or against some other snag. I asked her had her hair ever caught fire, and she said no, but a shirt did, once. She told us of a long-ago boyfriend, and how she found it a very romantic and exciting idea to cook dinner for him and his friend. She was at the gas stove in his apartment, cooking Mexican in a blousy Mexican shirt when the shirt caught fire, the flames travelling quickly up near her face. She was able to put out the fire, but another flame was extinguished when her boyfriend came in and asked what was taking dinner so long. “That was it for me.” She walked out right then and there.

What was a Hippie in my imagination as a child? They wore loose clothes, and flowing hair, they didn’t spend their time in malls or their money on beauty and hygeine products. They made whatever they could, they learned crafts and skills to make items for practical home use (like soap or saurkraut) or to make a living (like jewelry or musical instruments), they grew their own vegetables, they often built their own houses, even our family raised pigs for a time, and ate them for the rest of that Massachusetts winter. No, Hippies in my observation were not always vegetarian but were always anti-consumer. Nor in my mind were they fascists or evangelists about their beliefs, they just lived like this. They were easy going, they smiled easily, they liked whole foods, they liked music, which was mostly played by themselves or their wives or their friends, with whom they would gather and cook and sing. I had heard my parents’ mentions of Vietnam protests, but I didn’t pay attention to the political anger that the Hippie might have, or anything else beneath those smiles. For that matter, my parents looked blissful and easy in their snapshots from Vietnam protests.

I asked my busker did she paint, and she said Yes, that she had recently taken it up again. She’d put up fliers hocking her skills as a portrait artist, hoping it would make some money and get her back into the habit. She’d gotten some requests from families, she said, and what she learned was that children were very difficult to paint. You should definitely paint them first, she told us. Still, she prefers painting from life to painting from a photograph. We asked her was her street music out for the season, and she said Yes, she won’t play again until it’s mild. Even if she was up to it, the violin was not, she told us. “It can’t take extreme heat or cold.” The violin she was carrying was a borrowed one, because hers had cracked with the sudden drop in temperature. She was planning on bartering with a guy who runs a shop in the Strip District to get it repaired.

I think I imagine that Easy-Going Hippies is what my parents were whenever they weren’t acting shackled by their Catholic dogma, or regressing to the prejudices and fears of their own parents. But their hippie selves slowly seemed to become relegated to the past so that I still associate THOSE parents with those places--Massachusetts and Oregon. For our final move as a family was to Virginia, to a suburban housing development far from any college campus or liberal urban environs, to a neighborhood of folks who seemed pretty content to turn into their parents, with more money. The 70s became the 80s and malls were the thing, money was the thing, sports cars and power ties were the thing. The anti-Reagan counter-culture I grew up with was vocal, visible, and real, even in my small suburban town, but it always seemed so much more angry and desperate than those serene hippies of my youth. This didn’t keep me from being involved with it, but it did seem to relegate those hippies, once again, to a specific place and time.

At Forbes and Murray, we parted ways. Thomas and I excused ourselves down the aisle and flashed our bus passes at the driver as we descended to the sidewalk; and the busker kept riding East.

2007-01-24T14:04:00.000-08:00

STASIS OF THE UNION

Last night I dreamt the phrase, "Angry Hezbollah Ringtones."

2007-01-22T07:33:00.000-08:00

MIGRAINES, TORNADOS, FIRE-EATERS, AND OTHER MYSTERIES OF WESTERN MEDICINE

I am prone to migraine headaches. They are often very dramatic, involving incredible pain, sometimes unbearable psychological pain (half the time, Catholic guilt) and usually end in furious vomiting. Some of the headaches over the years make better stories than others.

One came up after I’d gone to visit my brother and stood in the summer sun (on the banks of the James River) for two hours while helping him deliberate over the potential purchase of a mini-kayak. (Sunburn or the intense light can bring on the headaches, I’m not sure which.) After leaving my brother, I was due to drive back to my hometown, where my mother was waiting for me, as well as plans with my ex-boyfriend from high school. But now I was running very late, and might not get to do both. My plans with the ex were for after dinner; my plans with my parents were for dinner; I was going to hear it from my mother if I skipped her part of the evening on a short visit “home” from New York.

“Home” was a pretty straight shot on just two sparsely-travelled highways. Now the sun had ducked behind some clouds; I put on the radio, put the pedal to the metal and hoped to make good time. Not long into my drive, however, a radio announcement cut into my music to say that a tornado was making its way across central Virginia. I thought I heard something about Culpeper before the station went static, or was it Fredericksburg, and which way was it headed? I kept hitting the search button on the radio dial, but I could pick up nothing--all the radio stations were out or barely audible--this wasn’t the message I wanted to hear.

I didn’t know which path to follow--that is, should I pull over somewhere and get out of harm’s way? Or should I speed even faster towards home, because my mother was going to kill me if I didn’t get there in time for dinner? There didn’t seem room to make a correct decision. I kept speeding on and wondering, letting the fifth-gear driving be my non-answer. I really didn’t know what was the best idea. I was terrified of getting smashed by a tornado and equally terrified of causing my mother’s disappointment. My temples pounded.

I reached my parents’ house before the tornado sent me to Oz, but once there, I was good for nothing. The migraine was full-force, I had to cancel with the ex, I went to bed instead of dinner. My mother was furious, saying, “You always get sick when you come home.”
*
Another time, I was living in Brooklyn. A friend, L____, was coming to the city from Philadelphia to see the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus perform in Williamsburg; we were to meet up there and she would come home and sleep on my couch for the night. I was excited to see the Cirkus because I never had. Also, a friend was one of the founders: my friend Stephanie had worked with me on the Paper Floor at Pearl Paint, back when she had spiky short hair and I had a bob. Stephanie worked in the Roll aisle and I had moved from the Paper Sheet Mezzanine over to Stationery. I remember Alam always called Stephanie, “Stevanie,” or just, “Steve.” I think I even
vaguely recall Stephanie meeting Keith and telling me that he was teaching her to eat fire and that it was incredible; this while we were having seltzer water and Little Debbies in the Afghani luncheonette below my apartment. And then one day at least a few years after that, because Stephanie had very long hair, I ran into her on the Williamsburg Bridge, and she told me about Bindlestiff, and that they were making their living entirely on it. That was in the mid-90s, and they have been ever since.

So I was eagerly anticipating the Cirkus. L____ had mentioned that if you came to the show dressed as a clown you could get in for free, or for three dollars, I don’t remember, but it was appealing to me. This would have been when I was making a living as a freelance shelver at the bookstore; the success of this lifestyle was contingent on keeping a tight budget, to say the least.

I was dressing up a lot in those days, mostly for Rocky Horror but also for my literary readings; I was comfortable experimenting with makeup and loved excuses to go out in costume. But I ran into the problem that I really couldn’t picture a good clown face and didn’t have any books illustrating one. The thing with pancake makeup is that it is not subtle. You really have to come up with a design and commit to it. And once you’ve done something dramatic it can really transform the look of your face, and even how you feel; what is drawn out of you. It’s why I liked doing readings in costume: I could feel the transformation from neurotic book clerk to confident female creature, at least for a time.

I landed on a harlequin clown image in my head, maybe from Picasso’s Blue Period. Diamonds over my eyes--just keep it simple, I thought. Sometimes less is more when it comes to covering your whole face in stage makeup. The result, though, came out looking far more like the fifth member of KISS. In addition, immediately after seeing my face in the mirror in this persona, I got a raging headache. I sat around my apartment for a while like this, wondering about what to do. Worrying about what my friend would have to resort to if I didn’t show up at the Cirkus. Worrying that even if she reached me on the phone, she’d never find me way out in the sticks of
Greenpoint by herself. This was in 2000, when Greenpoint seemed like a relative wilderness and still well before everyone in New York had a cell phone.

Well, I finally had to admit that I was too ill to do anything, that Ace Frehley had stolen my evening and my good health, and I took that damn makeup off. I never heard from L_____ until the next day. She said she got to the show late, went in and yelled my whole name at the top of her lungs a few times, and got it that I wasn’t there. Then she ran into some other friends and crashed with them.

I still haven’t had the pleasure of watching “Stevanie” eat fire.
*
Yet another time, also in Brooklyn, I was resting on my bed with a migraine, wishing it away and despairing because migraines won’t be wished away. Despairing at how many hours of my life migraines have whittled away. When suddenly, an idea for a poem started to form in my head. Something that was concerning me turned into a poem about where the concern originated. Way back when, I mean. The past root of the present irritation.

A long time ago, when my doctor-father was saying that he didn’t know what to do for my headaches, and my mother was suggesting clinical tests at Children’s Hospital, I came down on the side of, Don’t test me. I came down on the side of, Don’t lobotomize me, don’t send me to the hospital, don’t name me, don’t try to guess what’s wrong with me, don’t guinea pig me. I came up with the theory that I was "different", I had this creativity that I loved, and I had these headaches that I hated. I came up with the idea that the creative flashes and the headaches were probably linked. And I came up with, Don’t take ME away from me. I came up with the bargain that I’d take the headaches if I could keep the creative inspiration.

Now, to honor the bargain, I dragged myself off my little bed in Brooklyn into the next room and sat down at my desk. I wrote and wrote until the poem formed itself, mostly the way it would end up, and the poem made sense. It was a bad poem, but it was a poem. It was fully-formed, it knew what it wanted to say, it didn’t beat around the bush although it did spend some time painting a full picture. It was a terrible poem, because it told a terrible truth, one that I didn’t want to tell anyone, because it wasn’t the version of the story that anyone outside of me told. It was a shameful poem, because it outed someone else’s shame. And it was a powerful poem, because it took away my headache. Completely.

And I’ve never known what to think since. About these headaches. Have I always had the power to take them away, with the stroke of a pen? With a willingness to face the truth? What other truths am I hiding from, what other twisted truths are in me, causing me unbearable head pain, unless I will unravel them, set them free from my body, work them through on paper? And will they always emerge in such unpublishable verse?

2007-01-19T13:30:00.000-08:00

THE BUSY BEE IS A GROCERY STORE IN GREENPOINT

What is “busy”? Is it anything more than trying to avoid feelings, or people, or the quiet inside?

What isn’t busy? When was the last time you had a job where you weren’t “too busy”? Busy used to be a negative adjective. Then it became “multi-tasking,” a positive attribute, a supposed skill.

Thomas says that people with money no longer have time. That somehow, money never buys time, and the illusion that it does eats time when you’re not looking. When you’re too busy to pay attention, there is no longer time. Time expands with the attention you pay to life, life is in the attention-given moments. I’m not saying it right, it’s like a zen paradox that can’t be written, only meditated upon.

My mother has just called me at the office, and I have gotten her off the phone because I’m at work, and I’m “busy.” She thinks that because I now have my own office, and am the only one who picks up the phone, that I should be able to talk to her here, as if I am now a Lady of Leisure. My Mother Guilt Paradox: I can never seem to get enough time away from my mother, or with her.

Outside there is a furious snow shower (huge flakes) and the sun is shining. I’m feeling a little sheepish because I know the snow gets a good laugh when it hears me say “I’m busy.”

2007-01-17T09:53:00.000-08:00

I WAS CURIOUS

Where does writing come from, and where does it go when I am too busy to write it down? Is it an expression of an entity that already exists, or is it an invention of something that wouldn't otherwise exist if I was too busy the rest of my life to set pen to paper?

2007-01-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

DREAMING THE WORD

In the dream we were in Woodstock, Virginia, at the bottom of a mountain. An inhabited mountain, there were paved streets and shallow wooden houses, two stories; homes leaning with the curve of the mountain, which is to say all different directions, none of them plumb with any other. There were people around, families, but not well-behaved ones. Not mother walking down the sidewalk with two little ones cooing instructions, not father pitching a baseball to the son in a yard. No, just big-boned families milling around the streets, taking up space. Fathers with bushy, unkempt beards and no good ideas. Dark hair, dark eyes, an unlikely ethnicity for the region: maybe Portuguese or French Canadian. Large litters of children. Some mothers, but more fathers. Perhaps the mothers were inside houses indulging in naps.

“The region”: Woodstock is in the Shennandoah Valley, in between the Blue Ridge mountains and the Appalachians. It really wasn’t a mountain, but a steep hill on one side, and a steep hill on the other. We were at the bottom of a hollow, a crowded hollow.

Suddenly the landscape was a map. Suddenly the other half of we was no longer my beau but my father. I often dream of maps. We grew up with all kinds of maps: National Geographic books with maps of the continental U.S. or of the world, Triple-A maps for family visits or vacations, maps my father would bring out to illustrate a story, brochure maps that were free at rest stops on interstates, treasure maps in children’s books, and three-dimensional topographical maps that hung on the wall. Above the old schooldesk where the gerbil cage sat, back when we had gerbils. A topographical map of a section of Virginia. Maybe that map was indeed of Woodstock and the Blue Ridge.

My father was showing me that right behind us, where I wasn’t looking (now we were above everything, looking down at the map) was a lake. I was trying to wrap my mind around what the scale of this map was, since I realized that I had been existing in a very limited space for quite some time. My father wasn’t answering my (silent) questions directly, but the things he was saying started filling in some gaps. The map was two-dimensional. The lake was huge, I thought I heard my father say it was thirty miles across. I realized that I had no idea what were the measurements of the Great Lakes. My father was interested in the mountains. He was translating the map’s language for me, showing me that there were mountains of a much higher altitude surrounding the lake, he could tell by the closeness of the lines.

The dream ended with the word SHELDRAKE. I repeated the word over and over all morning, the whole bus ride to work, whispering it inside my cranium. I was so proud of myself. I was sure that it had to do with my parents’ life in Woodstock, the year my brother was born. It’s very hard to remember language from dreams. If you’ve ever tried it, you know. It’s next to impossible to lure something that concrete from one realm to the other. From dream life through waking. Usually it washes down the drain right then.

By the time I thought of writing it down, it was mid-day at work. And my mind blanked. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I’d been so proud of myself, and then gambled with my lucky word by not recording it. It was the triumph of the trickster dream gods: “You can recall it, but not long enough to write it down!....” The closest I could get to it was the word SHALIMAR, and I knew that wasn’t it. I sat in my office, alone and dejected. The plant, the slant of the light outside, the possibility of seeing the wild turkeys again, they meant nothing to me.

Later it came back to me when I wasn’t looking for it. SHELDRAKE. I haven’t asked my parents yet what it means to them, but I did hear that there’s a “Loch Sheldrake” in Upstate New York.

2007-01-04T13:37:00.000-08:00

WHICH ONE IS THE DREAM

Those damn mail carts again. It was a very Pittsburgh setting: A steep hill, I was crossing in the middle at a crosswalk about which I am always dubious. Trust repressed rage-aholics behind the wheel of a car talking on a cell phone without a stop light? No thanks. But there was no one in sight. I ventured. When out the blue, two empty mail carts came careening down the hill, heading right for me. We all crashed together on the sidewalk and tumbled into the grass.

Bea at the luncheonette handed me a boysenberry ice in a pleated paper cup, moments later.

This morning it was honking black birds crossing the sky in the bright dark blue and the remnants of a full moon shining like an usher's flashlight they weren't heeding. I got up before getting up just to push the curtain aside and see. The moon, I noticed, was many feet higher above Squirrel Hill than it had been at the same time the previous morning.

2006-12-22T15:57:00.000-08:00

EAST END ANIMAL REPORT

Dead ladybugs keep showing up in unlikely places in my office; bookshelves I didn't think they could get to. I always find them upside down.

The squirrels were undaunted by the steady drizzle today. I would run into them under naked bushes, feasting away on an acorn held in two hands. Another one was digging furiously. They didn't get scared off when I walked by; two even met my eyes directly.

A flattened dead pigeon on the sidewalk had the 2-D appearance of a flamingo's neck with a turkey's body. The flamingo pink was the skin of a wing whose feathers had been trampled by steady pedestrians. This was in front of the Mellon Center, one of the ugliest and most oppressive buildings I've ever seen.

Speaking of turkeys, the wild turkeys have not been spotted for a few months now, by me anyhow. There was the time in September that the sight of them scared me, they looked so much like dinosaurs. Just pecking around the grounds of M_____ Hall, right there on Bouquet Street when I was coming back from the Post Office. I stopped dead in my tracks. I don't think I've seen anything that surprising since I watched the second tower go down on live television, that old black and white set my roommate found on Manhattan Avenue.

The two brick apartment buildings on the Murray Avenue end of Hobart Street birthed another litter of feral kittens recently. The old ones were black and white and stand-offish; they'd sit on the highest steps and run away or stare at you through slitted eyes if you dared to call or move closer. The new litter is white-calico and needy: They came running from every direction to me, from the steps and from various hiding places in the flora and fauna.

Back at home, Spooky peed the rug for the fivehundredth time, then slept soundly in front of the radiator. Weetzie Bat looked dissatisfied, but raised her ass high when her flanks were patted.

2006-12-20T08:57:00.000-08:00

WEDNESDAY MORNING: OFFICE AS CAMERA

In my office, I work with my back to the window. Just now I turned around and saw something I’ve never seen in life before, only in the darkroom: the light was trying to take over the picture.

The sky has been hazy all day, though “hazy” doesn’t describe the mood. I woke this morning to find a pink fog had settled into the gorge below my seventh story window, distinct and barely perceptible at the same time. But just now the white sky above Squirrel Hill (the hill not the neighborhood)--a sky of diffuse, post-foggy-morning light--is trying to eat the whole view. The light is hiding things rather than revealing them: I can’t see the tree branches on the top ridge of the hill where they meet the sky, the reflection coming off one rowhouse roof is brilliant-white, blinding me. The tiniest tree branches closer to me have become light, as have the electric lines. The newest and ugliest buildings are lower contrast, less noticeable than usual.

I’m reminded of my earliest days in photography, working with hopelessly overexposed shots I nonetheless was determined to print to my liking, because I had been there, on that day, because I liked that composition, because I wanted that record of my angle of witness. But those skies never budged, not without minutes of exposure under the enlarger, sending the rest of the scene into blackened oblivion; those skies over train tracks, over low mountains, over four-story brick buildings; those skies of silver, dense and stubborn on the negative.

2006-12-18T14:17:00.000-08:00

THIS MORNING'S DREAM

I’m in one of those canvas mail carts: a kind of dolly with four sides, an open top, a wooden floor, and four wheels. I’m sitting on a package and I can barely see over the side. Someone is pushing me; we’re going under an elevated highway, the BQE or 279 over Sandusky Street. He’s male but I can’t make out his face. Suddenly he’s not there anymore. I wonder how I’m going to propel myself; I imagine that if I had a paddle I’d be alright. But next thing I know I’m traveling west on 42nd street among a fleet of yellow cabs. The cabs push me along at just the right speed. I fail to wonder what will happen when we get closer to the Hudson, but anyway 42nd Street lasts forever, or until I wake up.

2006-12-15T06:01:00.000-08:00

WEST MIFFLIN IN THE SKY

Saturday I headed to a Christmas party in West Mifflin, by way of Munhall. I knew I’d never been to West Mifflin, but I thought I’d been to Munhall before, and technically I had. My favorite donut shop is on 8th Avenue in Munhall; if you follow 8th Avenue from Homestead, the road makes a curve and somewhere after the curve you look up at the street signs and they say Borough of Munhall. The donut shop is pristine and many decades old, with display cases of glass and wood, a tiled floor, and a formica counter. It’s not big enough to have a U-shaped penisular counter like the donut shop on 8th Avenue and 23rd Street (Manhattan, not Homestead) or the one on Manhattan Avenue (Brooklyn, not Manhattan), although they’ll serve you coffee or Lipton tea in the same type of coffee cup, the two-piece kind with one paper cup inside a plastic holder complete with handle. No, Munhall has only two slabs of counter, at a right angle to each other. They have three kinds of cinnamon rolls, chocolate or coconut or blueberry cake or jelly-filled or any number of other kinds of donuts, nutrolls for which they are known, and pies for only $4.69 though at the holidays please order early. Day old goods are half price.

But I’d never been to the Munhall around the corner. At McClure Street, before you reach the bakery, the 53F turns up the hill and then turns parallel to 8th Avenue but turns up again at West Street and just keeps going up and up. Is it a small mountain or a big hill? I wouldn’t have predicted such a height from what I could see from the flats of 8th Avenue. The bus went up West Street and then turned onto Main, up past the gas station, up past the huge cemetery I didn’t know was there, up past Fran’s School of Dance, up past the Munhall Boro Fire Department, up past the Hair Cottage and Carmine’s Barber Shop, up past the pharmacy, up past the funeral home, up past the corner bars, up past lawns decorated with signs for Steelers Country or vinyl Santas or lights in the shape of Reindeer, up and up into the Western Pennsylvania sky which was cold and clear and blue.

I got off at the corner of C___ and M________ Avenues, now in West Mifflin and firmly inside a residential neighborhood of compact brick and cinder-block post-war homes. They were not at all identical, but the further I walked up the hill (for the end of the bus line was still a good ten minute walk from my destination), the more identical they felt. They had varying details, mostly in terms of the front porches--a porch or no porch, a porch that covered the whole width of the facade or half, if half which direction did it extend from the front door, right or left, was the porch glassed in or open.

There were no sidewalks here but there was no traffic, either. For a moment I noticed the emptiness of people and the complete silence. Then behind the silence I heard the noisy chatter of the birds, gathered in a laughing party in a tree in some backyard. I followed the noise, and peeked behind a house to see could I see them, but the birds eluded my view. I became briefly mesmerized trying to decide whether a backyard deer was real or a convincing statue, when a brown-haired lady came out onto her porch and said, “Did you want to cut through?” Her tone sounded kind of stern, but then she seemed really lonely to me. And I thought, if I saw a pedestrian in such a quiet neighborhood, I’d talk to them from my porch, too.

A few more houses up the hill and the vista beyond started to command my attention. I realized that in between the houses I could see to rolling blue mountains stretching out wide when I looked either to the south or north. I felt like I was on the highest peak for miles around. Far below, I could see the hospital complexes of Oakland and U.S. Steel headquarters downtown, but from this height anything manmade looked very small and a little silly.

2006-12-13T14:37:00.000-08:00

THE QUALITY OF LIGHT IN STEEL CITY IN DECEMBER WHEN YOU’RE WATCHING FROM BEHIND OFFICE WINDOWS THAT DON’T OPEN

Pittsburgh precipitation doesn’t fall subject to the laws of gravity. No, as Thomas likes to say, we’re in sort of a weather bowl up here, something to do with being a valley of hills among mountains, and we catch all sorts of air currents that look nothing like life at sea level.

Friday there was a snow squall in late morning, and the view out my office window looked like a glittery snow globe. The fine, dry snow flakes flying every direction, in nonsensical circles more than any one line, catching glints of the soft-bright sunlight as they did so.

I found myself marveling at the quality of the light shining through the clouds—the clouds soft white, edged with hints of pale blue, yellow, and pink. A three dimensional sky--no, three dimensional clouds, there was no “sky” behind them to contrast, only this soft, beatific pink-yellow light passing through them, bathing the street below. I wondered about such a light, as I have a few times these past months, is it so bright because Pittsburgh is closer to the sun? I remember my childhood with the humid Virginia haze, the flat white sky; even sickly blue with some cirrus clouds seemed unusual back then. We concerned ourselves with creeks and basements and cul-de-sacs instead.

In Texas, I walked around in awe. The wide, wide, Technicolor blue sky! Puffy white white clouds against 2-D blue like only Hollywood could offer. Something about that clear blue sky and the word Texas and the number of navy blue Cadillacs on Guadalupe made me laugh, made me walk back from some job-training seminar (north of my usual haunts) the Airport Boulevard way wearing a flannel shirt and my leather jacket in the summer sun, because the sky was so very clear and the cotton flannel was so clean and there were no sidewalks only gravel and no pedestrians only me, so I laughed and I didn’t mind sweating. But I also knew that sky had capricious powers: the power to blast me with a sunburn in the space of a fifteen minute walk. Or the power of an August thunderstorm, which could blow through with little warning, rattle the wooden houses to their shingles, and leave huge trees felled in the Austin streets.

2006-12-10T13:06:00.000-08:00

Guide to Understanding the Pittsburgh Bus System:

You pay when you get on if the bus is going TOWARD downtown. You pay when you get off if the bus is going AWAY from downtown. You pay when you get on if the bus is not going through downtown at all like the 64A, or if the bus has a U in the title like the 59U. You pay when you get on any bus if it is after 7:00 pm. If you need a transfer, get it when you pay your fare.

You pay for the bus if you are a temp worker or a food worker or a sex worker or a zoo keeper or a bookkeeper or a barkeep or a docent or self employed. You don’t pay if you work for the University of Pittsburgh or Carnegie Mellon or can prove you are on your way to public school or that you are over 65 years old except between 4:30 and 5:30pm. Your parents pay for your bus fare if you are a student of these schools and it’s called an Activity Fee. If you are paying for the bus, a transfer will cost you fifty cents extra or half that if you are between the ages of six and eleven.

Each bus route has a pamphlet with a map and a timetable, and most pamphlets contain two or three overlapping bus routes. Stand in the cold wind and unfurl your pamphlet if you have the right one on your person, check and see if it tells you when the next bus is coming; if it’s a weekend and your destination is less than an hour’s walk, don’t bother waiting in the frigid air. Be your own bus: the body circulates better when it’s in motion, and you’ll get there at about the same time.

When on a sardine-sandwich packed bus at 5:15 after a long work day after an ice storm in December in crawling stop-go traffic and the bus driver has lost her wits and keeps letting on more bodies, and a passenger in back has become vociferous and keeps yelling at the driver, and they start going back and forth, the bus driver with There’s no more busses, the passenger with There’s no more room (Miss), the bus driver with Move it to the back!, the passenger with Someone just fell out the back door, Miss! the bus driver with I’m the last bus, the passenger with I’m serious there’s no room, Miss, the bus driver who has lost her wits and lets on more and more until there are more bodies than you think you can hold your temper against, when on this bus consider whether it is possible to let go of your pride and your so-called principles, whether it is possible to let yourself out the back door of the prison that your own rigid body has become, and sway and laugh in the crush of your fellow riders.

2006-12-05T06:01:00.000-08:00

WEEKEND BIRD REPORT

Saturday the birds on Murray Avenue were all a-twitter, as I stood waiting at the five-way light on the corner of Forward. A whole flock of them were buzzing inside the naked branches of a small tree, a poplar or a young oak, in the courtyard of the three-story stucco box that calls itself the Squirrel Hill Professional Building. It made the tree look alive--it didn’t seem like the birds were landing, just flying into the contours of the tree and remaining in motion. There were other birds waiting on one edge of the building’s roof, and still others on a telephone wire just next to that--but there seemed to be a certain momentum. That is, some birds (the largest flock) choosing what was THE place to be, and then capriciously choosing again, and then a group of birds filling the space they’d just left, and then another flock following them, like the domino effect if dominoes were more like magnets. So, first it was the tree, the tree in this tiny courtyard of this ugly building that I always wonder if it’s still in business, first because I’ve never noticed any activity there, and second because it seems like a precarious spot to get to from the very beginning of the parkway, considering the especial graciousness of Pittsburgh drivers. (Everyone likes to say that Pittsburgh is very nice until it gets behind the wheel of a car, and then it is an angry driver. Maybe this is how the city negotiates being part East Coast and part Midwest.)

So, first the place to be was this courtyard tree and next it was the bush in front of the Verizon Building, across Pocusset Street, which is the only sane little residential side street in this five-street pedestrian-hell light. Although I don’t want to give the wrong impression that Pocusset Street would be the place to stand at this light, no only if you lived on that street and were heading towards the movie theatre up Forward or the Korean grocer, otherwise the BP gas station corner is a better vantage point, because you’ll want to stay far away from the mouth of the parkway, and from the Pittsburgh Left. The Pittsburgh Left here will be from Murray Avenue to the parkway; thePittsburgh Left in general, I was only recently told, is a phenomenon of the city’s streets being so old and narrow. The Pittsburgh Left is this: If you have a major street like Murray that runs two lanes two ways, then it has been the agreed upon thing, if you are at the head of the line and turning left, that you should gun your car and take the unprotected left turn before the opposing line of traffic can cross your path going straight, because otherwise you will be holding up an entire line of cars behind you waiting for your left opportunity.

After the Verizon bush, the pioneer birds went back to the telephone line, now made vacant by the birds that had taken the roof edge made vacant by the birds who took the courtyard tree. But the telephone line didn’t suffice for long, and next it was on to a tree on Pocusset, and then to a tree up the hill on Phillips Avenue.

Sunday it was the same drill, but this time in the parking lot of the Giant Eagle in Greenfield. There it was the edge of a pitched roof, then a telephone wire on the north side of the parking lot, then the horizontal structure atop the telephone pole, then on the telephone lines across Lilac Street.

The pigeons that hang out on the lines in front of (east side of) Giant Eagle, the ones who shit up the sidewalk below, were not to be outdone. Though not practicing for migrating, they showed off some impressive Blue Angel formations, over the parking lot as we headed north toward home carrying plastic bags heavy with eggs, apples, bananas, juice, and a new toothbrush.

2006-11-28T14:02:00.000-08:00

FROM THE TOP ROW OF THE BLEACHERS

“T.F.” was the name he went by.

I remember him from gym class, Freshman year. He was a senior, not actually in my class which was all ninth graders but in the class that met in the same gym at the same time. The image I retain is of him and some friend next to him sitting in the top row of the bleachers, and T.F. grinning away. At me, or at everyone? I took it to be at me. It was a mischievous grin, and I think teasing came with it, the teasing was definitely specific to me, and it was of the affectionate and sexually flirtatious kind, not to be confused with the pernicious, mean-spirited, and/or psychosexual kind.

I know almost nothing about T.F. Bishop or his family. As I lived in a small town, this is significant, yet if I scratch my head, I can learn things by deduction. That I know little about T.F. Bishop means that he didn’t go to my church (Catholic, the only one in town), he didn’t live in my neighborhood (a large subdivision on what was once the outskirts of town), and he didn’t have younger siblings. It means he probably wasn’t in my class--he was either wealthy and possibly lived out in the country in some big old estate, or perhaps he was less well off than my family, and lived out in the country in some big old farmhouse.

That I know little about him likely means that his family was old Virginia or old Loudoun County--because we seemed to know most of the transplants, the newcomers to town. When we moved there in 1978, we moved into the newest neighborhood in town, whose quarter-acre lots and aluminum-siding homes were only a few years into existence, replacing a sprawling old farm. Most of the inhabitants, our neighbors, were just in from Ohio, New Jersey, or New England. Any number of new neighborhoods cropped up in town between our arrival and my entrance into high school, but still it always seemed easier for out of towners to co-mingle.

(Nor is this formula cut and dry. I remember homes before this one, in Oregon and Massachusetts; so, I was an out of towner. My younger brothers don’t remember anything before Virginia; they befriended Virginians; consequently they have a Virginia drawl that I lack. I identified with my parents’ relatives from Massachusetts and New Jersey, and in college was always mistaken for a New Yorker.)

T.F. was a brave one if it’s true he was publicly giving me the eye. In ninth grade, I was not out of the awkward years: I had braces, bones that stuck out everywhere, a nose too big for my face, a height I wasn’t yet proud of, a bad short haircut I didn’t know what to do with. (I had managed to ditch my glasses and was pretending to wear contact lenses but in reality was letting my right eye slide into near-uselessness so that I’m now a bespectacled cyclops.) More to the point, I had a stigma on me, I had the picked-on nerd curse, and in that gym class in particular I was always the last left standing when kids chose teams.

These memories seem to exist in parallel, in fact. Ninth grade was like the waning of my victim-nerd career. Everyone who was going to traumatize me probably already had; now we were just going through the motions, numbly playing our roles. I was there in gym class, in high school, steeling myself to the social environs over which I had no choice, and alternatively hoping for the best.

Meanwhile, T.F. Bishop, smiling sexual approval down on me from his bleacher heights was the first dude in school to do so. And so his smile exists in parallel--it had nothing to do with “me.” There was nothing to do with it. Somehow, I couldn’t take that affection into me and let it touch me--”I” was an Untouchable. I had to store T.F.’s smile somewhere in my brain for understanding later. T.F. was left smiling at the sexual girl I wasn’t yet ready to be, at a face I couldn’t bear to look at (I would brush my teeth in the dark for a few more years), at a person in a body I hadn’t yet begun to inhabit.

T.F., who had never known me before that year, was looking at 14 year old me--while a big chunk of me was stuck in time, busy protecting my 11-12-13 year old selves from my vicious classmates who were also stuck in time. We were all so stuck in time that I never dated anyone who knew me “before”--my boyfriends in high school were the newest of newcomers, who would meet me at 16, 17.

Time is funny. T.F.’s smiling face now gets crosswired in my brain with Thomas’ high school face as I’ve seen it in pictures--the same handsome jaw, the same curious blue eyes, the same high-bridged nose, but especially the same boyish grin. Thomas who I wouldn’t meet for six more years, then a fourteen year gap, then an unforeseen reunion. Thomas who is sitting next to me on the train as I write this, on a together-train trip which I have been dreaming of for sixteen years.

Time is funny. I was driving back home from Beverly’s house, two summers after high school. Beverly lived on North 15 and I lived off South 15, with our town in between us; at night this was an 8-minute drive. But this particular night, a tractor trailer plowed into me, just in front of Safeway, making a wide right turn; and my life flashed before my eyes. “My life flashed before my eyes”--I always thought this was a turn of phrase, but that’s what happened. For a moment, I was still driving my mother’s car forward towards my own death, except that I happened to brake just in time for the truck to crunch my hood and fender and not my door and me behind it; and something in arresting that momentum (in coming that close to the draw of death) made scenes that I knew to be “my life” blur past my mind’s eye. Regret was in there, too, somewhere in that short moment I felt deep regret for the life I hadn’t yet lived, and the greediest part of me screamed out “I WANT TO KEEP GOING!” Was that the very moment that I applied the brakes?

This occurred at midnight, which soon turned into my next thought. I had dutifully limped my car into the Safeway parking lot after the offending tractor trailer, but suddenly remembered I was a young woman alone and didn’t trust this driver a whit. I was scared to leave my car. I probably said a Hail Mary.

Five minutes hadn’t passed when a police car pulled up. The officer got out, walked over to my window, and calmly and professionally explained that someone across the street had phoned in an accident.

The policeman didn’t recognize me, but I was never happier to see him. It was T.F. Bishop.

2006-11-25T05:05:00.000-08:00

BLUEGRASS JAM IN NORTHWESTERN VIRGINIA 11/24/06

We started out in new Loudoun: Vietnamese dinner in a strip mall next to a Latino Mercado.

But soon we were driving (under a crisp crescent moon) west on Route 7, to the bluegrass jamboree now held on last Fridays in the Round Hill art studios. Based on the famous Friday night jam in Floyd, Virginia, this affair bore a close resemblance to its Blue Ridge Mountain predecessor. The Round Hill studios are housed in a building that is recognizably an old general store: a wide, two-story structure with dark, unpainted wood and a small overhang (but definitely not a porch) above some doubledoors which face the two lane highway. Downstairs there were three jam sessions going, one in the gallery room and two tucked amongst the printing presses in opposite corners of the biggest room; the latter space was also serving cold beer and hot dogs, soda, pulled pork, chili, and baked desserts. Upstairs there was Irish traditional music in the pottery studio, and in the farthest room, we found our favorite group of the evening.

At its largest I counted thirteen musicians, two dancers, and about eleven or so revolving onlookers in this tiny, second-floor painting studio. One older man brought his own portable "chair" (seating was scarce), which consisted of vinyl padding stretched across the mouth of a paint bucket, itself covered with bumper stickers from bluegrass music stores.

Most musicians stuck to their one instrument, but ocassionally there was some switching up or swapping around. The instruments represented: acoustic guitar, dobro, mandolin, fiddle, banjo, stand-up bass, spoons. This room I more strictly considered Old Time Music (closer to Texas swing or hillbilly blues as opposed to simply banjo-based riffs), and the songs were mournful ones of lost love, heartbreak, and displacement; the singer was lamenting being kept apart from his lover or his home state or his mother or all three.

A certain fiddler showed up and pretty much took over the room. He was a good player but dominating, which is against the spirit of the jam and also quite common, as far as I could see. Once he showed up, the singing duo got quiter, and the songs were more instrumental, uptempo, and closer to bluegrass again. This did bring out two impromptu dancers, a fabulous middle-aged woman with bleach blond hair, crocheted purple shawl, swinging cotton purple skirt, and chunk heels (like old Loudoun art hippie meets Spanish gypsy), and a man whose wrinkled face and thinning white hair betrayed his age (70s or 80s), but whose fit, muscular frame packed into Levis and rolled up shirt sleeves still seemed designed to woo the ladies. They made an unexpectedly-sensual pair of partner dancers, but again, I think not so uncommon; as with the music, anyone who knows the moves is invited to the dance.

Back downstairs, a young group had formed in one corner; a number of teenagers who surrounded a young singer on autoharp and a tall fellow whose very first beard was an Abe Lincoln hipster masterpice. Mary, my father's secretary, is a regular at this jam and never misses a one; I asked her, "Who is here? Is this still old Loudoun County?" (I suppose I was incredulous that the self-taught farmers and hippie artisans of my youthful imagination might still exist, in this rapidly developing county whose private toll road has brought it dangerously close to DC.) Mary said it was true, these people were indeed Old Loudoun County, but that the event is getting a reputation; musicians and bluegrass lovers are travelling now from Winchester, Front Royal, rural Maryland, and West Virginia. She pointed out a towering guitar player who was the local Chamber of Commerce President for the last decade; she said that the place is wall-to-wall in the summers; and she told me she follows some of the musicians elsewhere when she can, like the ones who play at the old folks home in Leesburg on Tuesdays.

Eastern Loudoun again: Earlier in the day, we had seen the aging writer, Russell Baker, mowing his backyard; we had walked past the Laurel Brigade Inn, which after 220 years of serving tired travellers has become office space; and we'd run into Mrs. McGorry volunteering at the thrift shop that raises money for a battered women's shelter. She met my beau for the first time and as we were leaving, she whispered directly into my ear, "Don't forget this: Do something for him every single day."

2006-11-17T15:31:00.000-08:00

UNION SQUARE OF THE HEART
[This is the feeling version]

September 11-14, 2001. Brooklyn. I remember feeling helpless. I remember walking around with Susannah, then Kyp, then Trey, trying to give blood and getting turned away everywhere. I remember feeling exhausted. I remember crashing into sleep after hours spent in front of the neighbors’ TV, speechless; after hours of being at home glued to my radio, my new lifeline. I remember feeling cut off. I remember picturing my friends in Manhattan and wondering how they were and what their days were like. I remember feeling useless. I remember making trips to the 99 cent store to buy socks and gatorade for the emergency workers, then making signs informing others where to drop off supplies for the workers, then yet another trip to the 99 cent store.

I remember thinking of people like Gerry, who’d lived on Cedar Street since before the World Trade Center was built, was his family alright; or Katie, who got me my first paying work in New York, was she still in that office on the 17th floor of the South Tower; or Gary, was he rushing against the tide towards the disaster because his job was to faithfully record. I remember guessing which one of my good friends would have lost someone close, and I remember being sad when my guess was right.

I remember feeling relieved. I remember my heart flying open for humanity especially in my city. I remember the relief of letting go of petty anger towards my awful roommates. I remember the control freak in me losing all steam, I remember the calm of knowing there was nothing I could control.

September 15, 2001. I remember Noel luring me out to Manhattan. I remember us looking on the streets for people to talk to; I remember finding them. I remember everyone’s openness. I remember Noel and I arguing patiently with a small group of people in Tompkins Square Park. I remember my conviction that war was not a sound solution to two buildings’ worth of people disappearing; I remember my lack of anger. I remember the urgent anger of some people we encountered. I remember the willingness to speak of most people we encountered.

I remember tripping over Union Square later that night, with Noel, and finding my body surrounded by others, hundreds of others, who were again willing, open, speaking, listening; who were not interested in rushing towards revenge; who were prepared to articulate why not. I remember their articulation included inhabiting an entire park. I remember Union Square, transformed by the people in it, and I don’t have a memory (from these weeks) of its surrounding corporate box-stores: Toys R Us, Barnes and Noble, Bradlee’s, Nobody Beats the Wiz, Circuit City, Virgin Records, Walgreen’s, and right next to the statue of Gandhi, Staples Office Supply. I remember this night, Gandhi was in his glory.

I remember the great pile of flowers, poems, votive candles, photographs, mementos of those believed dead, all laying at the feet of George Washington on horseback. I remember chalk grafitti, I remember heartbreaking posters in search of family members, I remember heartwarming posters speaking my feelings, I remember incessant drumbeats, I remember softly and loudly sung songs, I remember being surrounded by people whose openness I had never felt in such numbers. I remember wanting to spend part of every day, from now on, in this Union Square.

I remember hope opening in me. I remember feeling safe because there was such engagement in that public place. I remember feeling alive because people looked into each other’s faces. I remember feeling heard because I had listened to sane voices. I remember sleeping soundly that night. I remember being surprised that I hadn’t believed such a coming-together was possible.

I remember my hope being shared by others. I remember that hope growing into an energy, that energy growing into an urgency, that urgency finding a voice, our voices forming a community. I remember that community wanting to speak outside of itself, that energy wanting to reach outward. I remember three solid years of artists speaking out without stopping to catch their breath.

I remember all of this, in my mind, growing out of Union Square after September 11th. I remember Mayor Guiliani shutting this park down, two weeks after it began, and I remember this energy living on in the city anyhow.

2006-11-16T06:19:00.000-08:00

UNION SQUARE OF THE MIND
[This is the essay version]

2001: It was September 15 before I came into Manhattan again, after the Towers fell. Noel and I met up that evening and walked around looking to see who was on the streets of downtown, meaning the (mostly East) Village. We talked to folks in Tompkins Square Park and near St. Mark’s Church, but Union Square was the largest gathering; that must have been the night that I realized that Union Square had transformed into a sort of peace park. What may have started as a place to burn candles to the memory of the dead and post signs in search of the missing had either simultaneously or subsequently evolved into a place for New Yorkers to go and be together, be peaceful, be vocal, be outraged, be bewildered, be wounded, be informed.

Union Square right after 9/11 was signs covering every inch of fencing, was signs looking for loved ones, was signs expressing great sadness, was signs pleading against war, was hundreds of people making full use of available public space, was photographs and poems and prayers and flowers and votive candles and melted wax covering the area around the statue on the 14th Street side, was groups singing peace songs peacefully, was people having discussions, was people asking questions, was people hashing things out, was people staying up all night, was people sleeping on the grass so as not to be alone.

In the same way that 9/11 was ambiguous enough not to have earned a more descriptive name, Union Square after 9/11 was a collage-in-progress at a moment when no one was quite sure what had just happened, when the next thing might happen, what our government was going to do or not do about it, and how much more vulnerable any aggressive action might make all of us. It was also a moment when New York had been officially invited into America, in an extreme way. Heartland church-goers were offering us prayers and tears from afar, claiming us as their own; the news kept saying ATTACK ON AMERICA; the hijakers had clearly targeted the U.S.; and the City’s cab drivers and immigrant businesses were suddenly displaying huge American flags. It was an uneasy moment in the City, from several directions, to say the least.

(One particularly memorable sign [which later became the name of a poetry journal] said “USA OUT OF NYC.” Another with a similar sentiment used the metaphor of America as the bullying high school friend who always gets you into trouble you didn’t ask for.)

September 15, 2001: My return to Manhattan, and to my job, began a week in which I saw my customers open up with concern and well-wishing for me and for each other. It was the week I put away a long-standing love-hate relationship with New York City. It was the week I realized that New Yorkers had hearts and knew how to use them; that people had hearts and knew how to use them; that strangers had hearts and knew how to use them. It was the week I decided to stop second guessing the city that had been my home for almost eight years, and get on with the business of living and creating there instead.

It was the week that I began to dissolve several months of artistic stagnation: for the next three years I wrote prolificly, a fact which I attribute in large part to the chance to work with New York Nights and Theaters Against the War (THAW). Each of these entities, like Union Square, was a collage-in-progress, and a forum for creative folks of an anti-war mindset to come together and share and voice ideas. New York Nights is a newspaper of anti-war discussion and poetry that was first published in October 2001, in response to the U.S. decision to bomb Afghanistan. The paper was run monthly for the first few years and is less frequent more recently, now that many more voices have joined the anti-war conversation. In 2002, Theaters Against the War started a monthly variety show called “Freedom Follies” which featured everything from comedy to singer-songwriters to scene readings to performance art to poetry. I had many a cathartic laugh at the Freedom Follies, which were free of charge and often played in buildings that were slated to be soon-demolished.

I wonder why Union Square became THE catch-all place for such a gathering as this? Was it the first place people dared to stop and catch their breath when they were walking north from the World Trade Center? (Was it a place to breathe because it was the first park north of, free of, the acrid smell of barbequed metal that hung over lower Manhattan for months afterwards?) Was it because it was the psychological border point between downtown and no-longer-downtown? Or was this spot inevitable because it was the meeting place of so many train lines? The L, the N/R, the B/D/Q, the 4/5/6, bringing people together from Astoria, the Bronx, Sunset Park, Queens Plaza, Coney Island, Williamsburg, the Upper East Side, Fort Greene.

Mayor Guiliani chose to close down this fertile use of public space, exactly two weeks after September 11th, and in no uncertain terms. First it was finding the candle wax meticulously scraped away each morning by City Parks workers, then it was keeping the people out completely (by police or by heavier fencing, I can’t recall now). And when the Christmas-shopping flea market appeared in Union Square as scheduled in November, it was as if Peace Park had never even happened at all.

But Peace Park did happen. From what I observed in New York, a Union Square of the mind (heart, and vocal cords) was alive and particularly well between September 11, 2001 and November 3, 2004.

New York Nights: http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/orders_periodicals.html

THAW: http://www.thawaction.org/

2006-11-12T13:39:00.000-08:00

THE POLITICAL BODY

February 15, 2003: By this date I had heard the word Orange Alert one too many times. Fear had crept in where it never had before. I had pictured the possibility of the (huge, upcoming) Anti-War protest--for which New Yorkers were not being granted a marching permit--getting bombed by our government while we gathered conveniently in one mass. I didn’t believe in Homeland Security’s Code Yellow Orange Purple Blue, I was sure they were made up by the government to scare us in the first place. So why not take it one step farther and forewarn us about the fear we should have of the people doing the warning? (Warning: Paranoia is a progressive disease. Further: 1010 WINS news radio is addictive to no good end.)

February 15, 2003: Brooklyn: I am down for the count with the flu. I am scared for my friends who are headed by subway for East Midtown (like I was scared for my mother gardening under heat lightning in the Virginia summers). I am being evicted from my apartment in 16 days but I don’t yet have a new home. I am sick in bed but I don’t have a bed; the boy-cat, who doesn’t like the idea of being evicted, has nervously peed two hand-me-down futons and a box spring. I have dragged them to the curb methodically, dramatically; stubbornly, I have not replaced them. I am laying sick in a “bed” which is a large cardboard box split open and spread across my futon frame. It is surprisingly comfortable yet condusive to abundant self-pity nonetheless.

February 15, 2003: It is sunny and bitterly cold in New York City. I turn on WBAI’s all-day coverage of the protest and I am renewed in my love of my comrades, and in my anger at the blind anger of war. I furiously take notes from the broadcast. Fear dissipates. My enthusiasm returns.

February 15, 2003: (From my notes of the WBAI coverage, much abridged but in chronological order):

“An Afghani woman just testified that the Northern Alliance is scarcely less misogynist or fundamentalist than the Taliban.”

“The September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows visited families that were victims of U.S.bombing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“Police on horseback trying to disperse the crowd at 2nd Avenue and 53rd Street--the correspondent says that 3rd Avenue is solid with people for 10-13 blocks. The main rally is on 1st Avenue--from 49th Street to at least 58th Street.”

“Israeli officer who refuses--along with 500 others--to serve in the occupied territories.”

“Al Sharpton--'[Bush] is not pursuing SECURITY but a Manifest Destiny that will put the whole world at risk.’ ”

“52nd--to 72nd--1st Avenue is filled for a whole mile!”

“(Richard?) Perez, police brutality activist: ‘When Guiliani took office, the juvenile arrest rate went up by 100,000 a year....In Vietnam they said, ‘We have to destroy a village to save it.’ Now they say, ‘We have to take away your Constitutional rights to make you safe.’...Many of those in Riker’s Island are there because they can’t pay bail--because they’re poor....”

“Ossie Davis, introducing Desmond Tutu: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ "

“Desmond Tutu: ‘You’re all just WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL people!...God is proud of you,God is smiling!...God says, Hey, aren’t they neat!...for coming out when it’s not-so-warm (laughter from the crowd).”

“(Leslie?) (Cagan?), organizer of the event: ‘Shame on the City of New York! Shame on the police department! Shame on the court! The people WILL be heard!’ ”

“Arhundati Roy--’The U.S. government’s war to PROMOTE terrorism has launched two assaults: a military assault on the Middle East, and an assault on the inetlligence of the human race....Let us turn every bomb that has been dropped onto Iraq into an opportunity to expose the criminals behind them because they are baby-killers, water-poisoners.’ ”

“1st Avenue filled to 87th Street! It’s 2:30pm.”

“Comments from the crowd keep reaching us that ‘this feels more like fascism than democracy.’ ”

“2nd Avenue--packed from 49th Street to 69th Street!”

“One woman was pushed by the police until she was pushed to the ground--police driving their horses onto the sidewalk, into the crowd, pushing people up against police vehicles with the horses.”

“Afghani woman--‘If you want to end terrorism, stop all funding to fundamentalists and terrorist groups worldwide.’ ”

“anti-war demonstrations in 600+ cities in 60 countries, every continent but Anarctica.”

“500,000+ people!! 59 blocks of people! Some estimate 700,000-1 million! I feel much better than I did even this morning (very sick yesterday), I have an inkling to go, even for an hour, to witness it, but I still feel quite weak.”

“Angela Davis: ‘New York City’s refusal to grant a march permit is a TRAVESTY to democracy. ... We oppose the Patriot Act and other legislation that targets our immigrants...The Bush administration tries to generate fear and hysteria--Tom Delay tried to start a national march to the hardware store to buy plastic tarp and duct tape...This administration’s discourse is fundamentalist in its impulse and designed to stop critical thinking....Our voices, our hearts DO make a difference...when we UNITE for peace and justice.’ ”

“Danny Glover: ‘[we have] an administration of liars and murderers whose villany and greed is insatiable and who curse us for standing here against their tyranny....Paul Robeson would be proud of us for standing here, and he would tell us that we are climbing Jacob’s Ladder.’ ”

“London had 1 million demonstrators, then 500,000 stayed for a sit-in through the evening.”

“Police keep using the horses to push people when there’s no place to go--people are trying to get to the side streets to prevent being hurt by the horses. ‘Horses for peace! Not for war!’ “

“The police surrounded a youth march from Union Square--they started letting them go 2, 3, 4, 5 at a time--so they get separated from each other.”

“Report from 47th and 7th Ave--people can’t get to 42nd where there’s a bigger rally--police in riot gear.”

“Barbara Stokely (union rep): ‘We have the power to stop this war, to remove that fraudulent President Bush....The transit workers were on the verge of shutting this city down.’ ”

“Vietnam vet (A.C. Byrd? Barrett?)--in interview--‘At least 25% of Vietnam vets are homeless--we don’t even know yet what’s happened to Gulf War vets...Here we prepare to send more of our country’s sons and daughters [to war].’ ”

“4pm--Police using pepper spray, handcuffing people VERY tightly--6 vanloads of people who’ve been arrested--30-40 arrests as she speaks.”

“Same Vietnam vet--’The police exist to protect us, not to defend the status quo.’ “

“cops still rushing people on horses--arrested a photographer who was taking pictures of what the police were doing”

“they’re pushing people against the building--the correspondent is talking to us on her cell phone--a woman was just hit in the mouth and she’s crying--the woman on the phone can’t breathe for a second”

“E & V train not stopping at 53rd and Lex”

“police have a man pinned down on the sidewalk--they’ve punched him--caucasian--being held by 4 officers”

“2000 Israelis and Palestinians marched together in Tel Aviv today!”

“Peace signs carried by New York Jewish contingents, writen in Hebrew, walked next to shawled Arab women”

“under Guiliani--$150-200 million collected from cases of police brutality in his first 5 years--according to the Village Voice”

“Later--Exhausted.”

2006-11-09T12:49:00.000-08:00

CRYING UNEXPECTEDLY AT 7:30 AM
On hearing the election results from WDUQ

First it was the background cheering and clapping, and then came the news report, “Last night the Democrats took the House….” Immediately, my heart leapt behind my ribcage, and a sob rose in my throat. Surprised, I started to push it back down, but I remembered I was alone, so I let myself cry. (I hate watching this same impulse in my mother—the way she is ashamed of crying in front of us. But then, we were so mean to her in our teenage years.)

Crying: It wasn’t from sadness, nor simply shock. It was more like a surge of motion inside me after a huge weight had been lifted off my chest. When it left, it reminded me of the moment it had landed, like having a sense memory of how long it had been with me (this weight) as opposed to living with it while forgetting that it was there at all. This weight; a depression of sorts, a sadness without tears, a desolation without words.

(One way I know that the inner fog has lifted is I can hear music again; one day, it’s all drudge and distraction and mucking through, the next day I’m craving music, remembering who my favorite voices are, humming at the bus stop. Another way I know is I start seeing in terms of patterns or colors, like photographs arranging themselves in front of me. Last winter it was coming up from underground, where the subway becomes the elevated, and looking up from my reading to see a dusky blue coloring every building in Queens Plaza the same hue, and being convinced for one moment that we were underwater. Later that night I looked above and the apartment windows on a street were a beautiful pattern jumping to my eye long before I recognized them for what they were.)

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not in love with the modern-day Democratic Party, with its centrism and gladhanding and corporate pandering. But when Americans voted in a bullying regime far to the right of that in 2004, I was crushed. We were crushed. Our spirits were completely crushed. You couldn’t hear an utterance on the New York subways. They were practically empty. They were silent of voices. One image I retain of that Bleak Wednesday is of a lone passenger (as the 6 train pulled into Astor Place in late morning), folded over on herself at the belly.

The night before Election Day, 2004, I was working late at the bookstore on the corner of Third Avenue and Ninth Street. Suddenly, a large black man covered in Kerry stickers opened the door and shouted inside in a booming vibrato, “YOU GOTTA VOTE, PEOPLE! THIS IS IT, NOW!” and then left as quickly as he came.

It was his voice of hope and courage and willingness to work WITH what we had, or even against it, together, that had left me for two years.

2006-11-08T09:08:00.000-08:00

CABBAGE PIEROGIS AT EIGHT AM
What it's like to vote Democratic in Squirrel Hill

Yesterday, Pittsburgh and I helped vote Rick Santorum out of the U.S. Senate. We also helped reelect Representative Mike Doyle, who was one of the very few Congressmen to vote against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

My polling place was at a Pittsburgh Housing Authority high rise for old folks and the disabled. Voting took place in what I think was the rec room on the third floor. While I was waiting for the elevator, I couldn’t help but notice the evidence of my neighborhood’s heavily Eastern European, especially Russian Jewish, population. Some of the great old-world surnames on the residence roster: Barbalat, Chesakov, Katsman, Kaufman, Klaynberg, Lampkin, Schetyn, Vasserman, Yerosh, Zak.

On the third floor, there was no line to vote, but I waited for my signature to be verified and my passport inspected by three ladies seated at a long table. From a little old man, I got a brief tutorial on the new touch-screen computer voting machines, which were no longer enclosed in a booth but had little blinders next to them, like you place on carriage horses so they don’t scare so easily. Voting was uncomplicated but I scare easily; I walked away very skeptical about the cyber-collection of the ballots. (Last time I voted was in the 2004 Presidential Election, and I was actually shaking while waiting in a long line at the Catholic school in Greenpoint. Some combination of thinking that George Bush might actually win, and that me screwing up the mechanics of my vote might be the deciding factor.)

The residents of the building used the opportunity to have a bake sale in between the elevator and the polling room. “A captive audience!” one resident explained. For fifty cents, you could get a frosted cupcake (chocolate OR vanilla), a piece of rugelach, a cabbage pierogi, or a cup of coffee. For a dollar you could get a kosher meat pastry (“cheicken”) or a ziplock bag with two homemade devil dogs. It seems the idea was that everyone in the building was to contribute: As I boarded the elevator to head back to the ground floor and my bus stop, an old man (moving slowly) handed off a still-hot pan of brownies, complete with pot holders, to one of the ladies who was setting plates out on the oil-cloth table covers.

2006-11-07T06:54:00.000-08:00

ST. VALENTINE’S DAY, 2001

I remember KGB Christopher, my flatmate at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the only one I could stand because he wasn’t trying to make me or not-make me and he wasn’t in his 20s, he was up for intelligent chatter and going out to tea. That was mostly what I wanted out of people in Paris, in between my writing days (hours)-—chatter and going out to tea or sunset walks or sometimes omelettes, though tea alone was sometimes an extravagance.

Living upstairs at Shakespeare and Company there were no writing days for me, because I’m not a cafe writer but a home-in-bed writer, and that was frowned upon, by George who owned the bookstore and by the roaches who shared my bed. In the early days at Shakespeare and Company, I was lonely and wondering which cliff I had just jumped off, the right one or the wrong one, and so there was KGB Christopher (who arrived the day after I did) and tea.

I remember KGB Christopher because he had a specific story that was impossible to believe and yet he stuck to it pretty closely every time I heard him repeat it. Him: In his late 30s/ early 40s, slight British accent maybe even mixed with American, also stuttered and mumbled, and looked down into his tea a lot. He had a shaggy sort of goatee-beard and wire-rimmed spectacles, he dressed in wrinkled brown courduroy blazers. His story: He was married to a woman in Japan where he was an Art History (?) professor; he’d left her and the (two?) children for what ostensible reason I can’t recall; he grew up in London but his father whom he’d never met was American; after Japan he was headed for Copenhagen, where he was going to give a talk on Historiography; he was to stop by Estonia where he was helping design a new high-end cell phone with two prominent Industrial Designers; he needed to sojourn in Moscow where he had an office and co-headed a non-profit institute with a business partner; before Paris he had naturally stayed awhile with his mistress, a Greek stewardess who had a farm with goats in Tuscany; in Paris he was just passing through, looking for a place where he could pause and write his speech (maybe tomorrow); perhaps he was going to see his mother in London or seek his father in Kansas before even thinking about returning to Japan; last I heard he was in Paris for months or years.

I remember the day I decided to leave the flat above Shakespeare and Company, with its student lodgers lining the walls of the second floor library and George in his studio full of blue cheese and first editions and me and Christopher on the fourth floor, Christopher in the bunk bed and me and the cat in the double bed where Henry Miller spent some honeymoon. Only, the gods of Paris or my body had different plans, and the fries from the Greek place on the crowded street of restaurants I called “little New York” gave me a food poisoning that cleaned me out from every angle. I stayed in that flat with Christopher one more day, which now I remember was Valentine’s Day. I remember that in between losing my Greek fries from the upright position and the seated one (thank George for the American toilet installed into that flat, the second floor kids had to use the Turkish one in the hallway), and KGB Christopher making sure to spray everything with Lysol, and KGB Christopher acting even more nervous than usual around the sick girl, and KGB Christopher asking politely would I like anything, and me telling him Yes could he please get me some Orangina and handing him a Franc, and KGB Christopher not getting me anything until after he had come and gone from the building four separate times, and KGB Christopher asking me every time politely would you like anything, and me repeating every time Yes could you get me some Orangina please, and me getting notions that KGB Christopher had perhaps poisoned me, and me taking note of the fact that I was in the farthest room in the bookstore and that no one would pass me by, and me getting paranoid that KGB Christopher was not remotely capable of ‘commnication’ in the sense of the word that mattered in these hours, and me getting quite thoroughly paranoid that KGB Christopher and whether he got me the Orangina or not was the difference between whether I lived or died....in between all of this, I staggered once to the front of the flat and looked out at the Seine, which was crowded with kissing couples, three to every bench.

A few days later the Seine flooded above the level of those benches, and remained so for two months of rain, and it was only as I was leaving the city for the last time that I saw those banks again.

2006-11-07T06:26:00.000-08:00

HALLOWEEN, CONTINUED [A MEMORY]

There was the year that Paola had heard of the party at the Clock Tower Gallery on one of those East-West streets in Tribeca. Emily (whose birthday is Oct 31), Drew, Paola, Poppy, and I think Deegan were all dressed for Halloween as the Vibrator Repair Unit, complete with workmen’s twill jackets that said as much, with oval name tags sewn by Paola (who is like a dark Martha Stewart in the realm of felt and fema clay). I was out as Deirdre of the Sorrows, the Irish mythical figure who was fated to marry a certain king and bring murderous death upon his entire family. My costume consisted of two or three layers of floor-length pale-blue nightgowns from the Salvation Army smeared with glitter glue, a black velvet cape that Paola lent then gave me, and blue and silver tears drawn down my cheeks.

After a brief stay at a crowded loft party somewhere in warehouse Brooklyn (maybe 52 Hope Street), we headed off on the J train to downtown. Found ourselves in front of the stately old building, which was perhaps once a sweatshop, or maybe always some kind of office building, maybe even the kind Bartleby would have worked in. This was in 1998, and the streets of Tribeca were utterly deserted. Nor, now, could we find anyone in the building “home” to buzz us in. We imagined the loud party and how they wouldn’t be able to hear the bell by this hour of the night.

Finally, a bored night watchman. Let us in to the building. Naturally, we headed for the clock tower.

Which we reached by elevator and then staircase, then found a space full of rubble and darkness, rats and two by fours, plaster piles and plastic buckets, a loft apartment waiting to happen, a space that had not been used in decades except as utility, as storage. This was the clock tower.

We slipped from there onto the exposed roof, laughed into the New York sky, waved hello to the Twin Towers, hello to the Empire State. Ran back and forth through the starry, chilly night, through the dark void of the clock tower, through the well lit corridor of the building’s inside proper. Someone, I think Emily, squatted and peed the floor in sight of the security camera (she waved to that, too), her body carefully hidden beneath the folds of her long skirt.

We laughed and laughed. Our astonishment made us lighter than we were before, made us leap like lords, skid like vaudeville, giggle like teenagers.

Afterwards we were ravenous. We hiked up to the Cozy Diner on Broadway and I made Emily gasp in horror and delight like I always did when I ordered and devoured what in New York is called a Texas Burger, what most places is called a One-Eye, and in Charlottesville is called a Gusburger--a hamburger with a fried egg on top. I didn’t like it as much as I let on, but I loved making Emily proud of me.

Paola found out days later that the Clock Tower Gallery party was in Brooklyn, not far from where we’d started our evening.

http://www.geekroar.com/gallery/clocktower

2006-11-03T13:53:00.000-08:00

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO SEE FALL FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FIFTEEN YEARS

Hugging the window/seat on the 61C, early morning, late for work but earlier than I ever saw life in Brooklyn on anything like a daily basis, even counting the time I was treating myself like an old lady and getting up to go sit on a bench and expose my arms to the earliest possible morning sunlight in McGorlick Park or my fire escape, hoping the indications of poor liver functioning (spots on my hands, spots across my eyesight, mild depression) would disappear.

This morning, peering sleep-eyed out of the window of the 61C bus, lumbering down Forbes Avenue, I woke to a golden sidewalk and a tree who couldn’t wait to get rid of his leaves, with no help from any windstorm. Not like the SIDEWAYS rain on Saturday, I’m on the seventh floor and can vouch, it rained horizontally and then the clouds blew away just as quickly as they came, with the same wind, and what was black and grey and ominous as far as the eye could see was sudden blue and white, puffy white, sunny blue, Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm blue, Jewish jazz hotel in the sky above Murray Avenue blue. The sideways rain on Saturday blew away, Thomas says, SOME of the beauty of Frick Park in the fall, Thomas who walked through that silent sanctuary alone on Saturday morning bearing the weight of a birthday offering for me, and the shop keeper on Braddock Ave wouldn’t believe him that he was walking all the way home with such a weight. Frick Park, gorgeous gorge which still, though, offered us an autumn ceiling of gold leaf with some wet-black branches thrown across the scene like calligraphy strokes, on Sunday Frick Park was still there and even though we weren’t totally alone in my lover’s Saturday sanctuary, the sky was a ceiling for us walking through; the sky was gold.

Tree on Forbes Avenue this morning which wasn’t waiting for the wind, was just saying ENOUGH!, it’s a time to lose parts of me, it’s a time to pour leaves straight down like tears, like dead skin, like hair that looses invisibly as I walk, like visible gravity, raining bright not post-ripe yellow until sidewalk and yard are covered. Not post-ripe yellow nor like Brooklyn trees just crumbling dry brown and falling dead, this tree was saying, I am alive and still it is time to pour leaves like tears, it is time to shed clothing like armour that keeps me from knowing you, it is time to shed yellow like a color I used to horde, it’s time to rain golden five points and carpet your walk past me, beneath me, up to me reaching me.

2006-11-03T06:07:00.000-08:00

ADA LIMÓN WILL READ TONIGHT AT GIST STREET IN PITTSBURGH
Author of a new Autumn House poetry book, Lucky Wreck

Thursday, November 2nd: Ada Limón and Ellen McGrath Smith read to a modest-sized but alive and attentive crowd, at lunchtime in University of Pittsburgh’s Book Center. Limón was (is) visiting from Brooklyn and Smith is a local writer; the poets were hosted by the South Side publisher, Autumn House Press.

Each poet had a talent for marrying outer observations with an inner life both lived and image-ined, and translating the resulting fusion into writing that wants to be read and heard. In each writer I enjoyed witnessing a similar struggle-—the struggle to illuminate the (necessarily-dark) inner world, and the struggle to articulate the negotiations of moving through the world in a (dynamic, fragile, female, thinking, feeling) body.

Smith made me laugh out loud when she read a poem about the 1960s, when (she claims) everyone but everyone smoked cigarettes. She gave us a list of smoking types, the usual suspects and the unlikely (like dancers), and read it in a sort of jaded, motherly, what-we-didn’t-know-then way, but after she ended the poem commented, “I still haven’t quit.”

In another set of poems she read (these will be included in an Autumn House anthology on poetry and prayer), “I wrote about [yoga] positions that reminded me of different alcoholic beverages,” she said. She took both of these themes to another place entirely, combining in one work the images of Rolling Rock’s brew-factory in (nearby) Ligonier, drinkers imbibing the green pastures of Western Pennsylvania, and her body’s position releasing her energy like a stampede of wild horses inside her.

Some other lines of Smith’s I particluarly liked: “Crush the weak/ The Hum-Vee’s on the street declare.” Speaking to a stranger (“like Jesus, he didn’t look respectable”) who would help her after her car died (“a white corpse on the side of the road”), she asks, “Can I trust you?” While they drove, “He told me August Wilson’s real name.”

Limón was a warm and generous reader, who started by thanking Smith and expressing her delight in discovering her as a writer, and in being in Pittsburgh for the first time.

Limón’s poems often circled back on themselves with a drunken, dream kind of logic. (Indeed, one set of poems actually was a set of sonnets linked by the first and last lines, a seven sonnet “crown.”)

In one work, she “dreamt the word ‘Philadelphia,’ ” and she wonders aloud what that dream-word could mean. “...you want to cry or pray but because you’re no good at either, you tell everyone to leave you alone...., maybe she could call that feeling, ‘Philadelphia.’ ”

In a poem to her lover: “I want to know some things for certain, and other things for vague.” She tells him that she doesn’t want to know his zip code, his state bird, or anything that could helpher pinpoint his whereabouts, because when she finds him, she knows “for certain” what she’ll want to do with him.

Yet another poem spoke of the pleasures of longing to be somewhere else vs. the luxury of wanting to be where you are, which she did once when swimming in a particular river: “But how do you hold a river in your head/ before it turns straight and black/ like some mean road rolled out before you.”

You should keep your eye out for Ellen McGrath Smith, who’s sure to read in town again, and you should go see Ada Limón, who is “unsure if I am jealous of the web or the fly,” read tonight at Gist Street. And if you go, you should go early. I’ve heard this reading series is getting so popular that they sometimes have to lock the doors a half an hour before start time.

Ada Limón reads with Richard Jackson: 8pm Friday, November 3rd, at the Gist Street Reading Series, 305 Gist Street, Uptown, Pittsburgh, PA
http://www.giststreet.org/

2006-11-01T11:33:00.000-08:00

I AM WRITING ON DAY of the DEAD
A short report from George Romero’s Pittsburgh

Which false face did you take off for Halloween this year? Here’re some costumes I saw or heard about:

One of my best friends works as a cook for a runaway shelter in Minneapolis. I asked her what her three year old was dressing up as, and she said, “He wears a moustache to pre-school almost every day. He said he wasn’t interested in doing Halloween.” When pressed further, she said that he wears a drawn-on moustache, usually French, except sometimes he draws on kitten whiskers and a goatee instead. He often wears a polyester leisure suit, presumably in imitation of his father who wears suits. My friend herself dressed up as one of the sisters from the movie “Grey Gardens,” Little Edith Bouvier Beale, and served the kids tuna casserole.

A local friend went as a Magic 8 Ball to a party over the weekend. He’d originally conceived it as a costume for his teenage daughter, who’d rejected it as too square. But he had good luck with it at the party, “people asked me questions all night,” so his son was borrowing the idea (and the costume) by Halloween night.

On the bus from Fifth and Wood Street Saturday night, some students from the Uptown girls’ college filed on: Bumble Bee in an obscenely short mini skirt, Lady Cop in an obscenely short mini skirt, Alice in Wonderland in an obscenely short mini skirt, goth school girl in obscenely short mini skirt. Further up the route, some Carnegie Mellon students as axe-murder victims, complete with art-school blood-carnage on half their faces.

My IT guy’s kids were going as a witch (the boy) and a bride (the girl). He said, “It’s only once a year, we let ‘em do what they want.”

One colleague’s four year old went as a Care Bear. One woman’s three year old was a Ninja Turtle.

An old friend in New York went as a dog.

A new friend in Pittsburgh showed up at a non-Halloween function with battery-operated Devil ears. A number of Women’s Studies’ students came to class wearing cat ears.

A Pittsburgh transplant from the West Coast went as “New Age,” with Birkenstocks, cut-off jeans, and a fanny pack full of Nag Champa incense cones.

One University of Pittsburgh student walked around as Waldo. Another stood in line for bagels as a banana.

When I was very young, farther than my memory goes back, I went around as a witch in a costume my mother sewed me. Later I went as a ballerina for many years, and another time wore my mother’s torn yellow prom dress. I thought of this somewhere in my brain as going out for Halloween as “pretty” because that was different than real life. And I think I probably was pretty, and I felt pretty in those costumes, in the dark of the evening, but afterwards I went back to being “regular,” and despairing about being “ugly.” It seems funny to me now, that I could conjure up feeling good for one night of the year, but assumed that schoolyard taunts must be “true” the rest of the time.

2006-10-31T05:57:00.000-08:00

MATRICIDE, BLASPHEMY, and CHERUBIM
Observations on The Tiger Lillies

Saturday, October 28th, Pittsburgh fans gave an enthusiastic welcome to the London-based cabaret trio, The Tiger Lillies, in their debut performance in the city. The show was held at the
Byham Theater downtown, reportedly Pittsburgh’s oldest standing performing arts facility. The Byham was built in 1903 and served as a vaudeville theater for a few decades, then was converted
into a movie theater in the 1930s; I loved the old details of the place, the gold moldings, the cherubim reliefs holding strings of lights, the murals of nymphs against a Maxfield Parrish sky on
the ceiling, and the (probably 1950s) black-and-chrome glamour bathroom. The tickets were pretty damn affordable, for downtown theater. Twenty bucks for floor seats and only ten for the
balcony.

The Tiger Lillies are a macabre musical ensemble who give a riveting, impeccable, theatrical performance to their morbid, comic, erotic songs. Martyn Jacques is the creative driver as
singer/songwriter for the group, with Adrian Stout on bass (mostly) and Adrian Huge on a whacked-out drum set, complete with rubber chicken.

Jacques plays the Brecht-ian character to a T with bowler hat, white-face and sinister black eyebrows, white shirt and trousers, and a very long braid down his back. But as compelling as his movements can be, it is his voice which steals the show. Like Sinead O’Connor and Diamanda Galas, Jacques trained in opera; he most often sings in a gender-bending castrati range. But other times he croaks in a Tom Waits-gravel-voice and displays an abject irreverence towards his vocal cords. (Waits had to have surgery on his vocal cords for the damage he rendered them by singing in his “low falsetto.”)

The storyline I’ve heard is that Jacques at one point resided in Soho (London’s red light district), lived on the dole, and took opera classes on the cheap at some London community college. His writing is said to have come from observing the prostitutes and drug addicts of those Soho days, which is clearly true, except that when I hear that description, it makes him sound like a cultural anthropologist instead of another city dweller who may or may not have any number of things in common with his “subjects.”

Jacques’ voice is startling and impressive. During the evening, I found myself thinking about the combination of his writing--these stark and simple lyrics of archetypal skid-row characters--and the particular performance he gives his words. In a stanza about a “broken-backed beggar,” his artfully screeching voice made the words “GREEED and FAME!” into two more characters, familiar as they are in cities of high capitalism (or the art world). It was the gravel voice to an extreme when he sang the words slowly, “The fire - it warms – the Matchgirl - and she - is free - to dream....,” making the matchgirl’s unspoken story seem ominous, or perhaps just lending an ephemeral moment weight enough to pass into legend. His gleefully rolling R’s added an extra level of disgust when he sang the chorus about everyone’s favorite city dwellers, “RatsRRatsRRatsRRatsRats!”

As a writer, Jacques loves blasphemy best, and offers it with gusto and gallows humor, singing about killing his mother and God in two separate songs. “Mary’s going down on the Lord” was about Mary Magdalene, and yet another ditty featured a diseased prostitute: “One More Trick Before She Dies.” I’d say at least a good third of the audience were fans of the trio, cackling in delight at the most scandalous lyrics, and immediately shouting titles when Jacques asked in his Monte-Python falsetto, “Any requests?”

Adrian Stout played a violin bow on the saw to great effect during “The Violin Plays Your Life Away,” in keeping with The Tiger Lillies push-pull aesthetics of mixing sweet and jarring, nostalgaic and violent. I hadn’t thought about the saw as a musical instrument for many months, and it sent me back to images of a subway busquer in New York (who also played the saw), a rather serious young man in his 20s. I saw him a number of times in the Bedford Avenue station and also in Union Square. I remember him as quite tall and lanky, with a boyish energy but also deeply serene, with a strong air of self-possession. He was very quiet, I never heard him speak. He was dark skinned brown-black but since I never heard his accent I don’t know if he was American or African or from the islands.

A delicate amount of smoke-effect (do they still use dry ice?) wafted across the stage at the Byham Theatre, high above The Tiger Lillies’ heads, and was visible in the stage lights. This recalled something I learned only recently, that downtown Pittsburgh in the
steel days was dark in the middle of the day, because of all the smoke from the mills filling the sky. Pictures I had seen and thought were fabulous city-scapes at night, turned out to have been examples of this phenomenon. It is hard for this newcomer to fathom, as Pittsburgh now is overgrown with trees and flora.

The Pittsburgh fans’ applause earned them one encore, and in return they gave The Tiger Lillies a standing ovation after the final curtain.
http://www.tigerlillies.com/