Feast or Famine

It occurs to me that so many of my blogs include complaints. Apologies. Yet I notice that so often I'm either feeling as blank as an empty bowl or else my brain is swarming with so many notions I can't start fast enough to make notes so I won't forget them in the dry times.

A friend recently commented to me that life is always cyclic. He wasn't speaking only of seasons, but of broader repetitions.  Not a new idea, I know, but one about which I hadn't thought in a long time. My suggestion to anyone who might be looking for a spur to invention would be to consider that apparent fact of life.

Remember the prehistoric ages running from flood through gradual drying out, from tropical to ice and back; and seasons, naturally; el nino and la nina years; that odd repeat of perception of spans of time--from childhood when a year is a long time to maturity when ten years isn't much, to old age when a year is a long time again; from one generation to the next and the next; from fashion of one sort or another to a repetition or at least a reference recurring years afterward...you could go on at length. For me, each possibility of comment as one circumstance leads to another to be eventually repeated (in one form or another) suggests so much...I'd like to live long enough to develop every example that springs to mind.

From nothing or a barren planet to whatever will make that planet barren again, it looks as if there might be something finite in the universe, after all. In between, there's only a temporary famine of ideas that will burgeon into a feast again--if we can make ourselves wait patiently enough.

Popularity vs. Excellence

I just read an incredible headline: "Is ______ more popular than Jesus?" Popular?! It blows what little mind remaining to me to consider where our so-called civilization would be if popularity were the deciding factor in religion, governance, intellectual development, any science, or any art.

What does popularity have to do with anything?

In an election year in a democracy, it's perhaps the biggest problem the country has to face. If only voters could be dependably influenced by factors other than popularity!

I wonder if the headline writer was kidding.

Assignments

Everybody remembers the days of having a paper due. How do you deal with that task now? Do you set out to produce an essay, a story, a poem on a topic, a person, an experience that seems to ask to be put on paper? Do you ever consider accepting an assignment from out of left field, so to speak? No problem when it has suggested itself; when someone else pushes it on you, that's a different kettle of fish!

I've just taken on something like that. It's not my cup of tea in general, and many of the specifics being included in the proposal would never have entered my head. Yes, I've always wished I could address a writing problem like the one being proposed, and I've always felt there was no way I might achieve an acceptable result. It's turning out to be a challenge (and I do mean challenge) to try to write something that would be right up someone else's alley. I can't resist trying, even against my more realistic instincts.

With an eye to the comfortable closing in of winter, I'm trying to get some kind of start into a tale that could possibly take off, and if not run with me, at least begin to point a direction. Maybe I should have entitled this post "No Fool Like an Old Fool."

None the Wiser

Nothing to say on the writing front today, but maybe I should follow up on that last post. Six days and three ladies later, I doubt there's a taker in the lot. The principle viewer of our superior community, after finding minor faults with some things that can't be changed (like dining room hours) and some that can (like artificial leaves as part of the mantel decoration) seemed unlikely to be content in any residence that doesn't have unlimited variations in routine and policies. In other words, no place I know of. Then just before departure she surprised me by saying she was favorably impressed, and will consider us--in a few years. After almost a week of lodging and a meal a day (if she and her friends were here to partake), I was not pleased.  Imagine how our Marketing Director feels. A while back, we had a couple who actually spent two full weeks here, demanding a lot of special attention and information, and not just one meal a day, only to depart after letting everyone know that they intended to go to Florida--from day one. They were just "checking" other possibilities. In a store that would amount to shoplifting, wouldn't it?

The older I get, the more amazed I am at what I grew up calling chutzpah. (Sometimes Yiddish has no English equivalent.) It's the kind of nerve that an observer knows immediately is fully understood by the perpetrator as dishonest at worst, and doubtful ethically at best.

So now we go back to the ordinary business of preparing for a winter that seems likely never to materialize. Yes, cool nights, but daytimes at temperatures associated with June or July. If I ever get fall pansies to put in, I don't know if I'll be fighting the dratted hose every other day to keep them watered so they'll still be here in December! Climate change? After fewer than fifteen years here, I don't know yet.

So the next chore is to email my publisher to get at least a statement on royalties (?) I'm scared I've heard nothing because there aren't any to report.

It's another perfect autumn day, though with high cloud beginning to show. Carpe diem is the order of the day--as it's apt to be when you're my age!

Perennial Complaint

Waiting to be picked up for an hour-plus drive to the airport to meet a prospective resident of the community where I live. I don't have to drive,  just be available as a kind of welcoming one-man (woman) committee. The whole enterprise will take between four and five hours if there's no flight delay. The difficulty is that I can't get those hours back.

Is there a non-professional (definition of one who writes without getting paid for it) out there who doesn't feel bothered by these thefts of precious hours? The individual mentioned in my last blog has bullied me into admitting that hours I could be writing but am not, verge on the sinful. Even if he's wrong, that idea is gaining more and more traction in my head along with predictable intimations of mortality (thank you,  Mr. Wordsworth).

I seem often to be asking my readers, if any, for advice. This is another of those times. Wednesday I incurred the barely concealed anger of the president of our residents' association when I refused to undertake a task I've done before. The question is, should I apologize? I've served on that board as an officer, and twice as a representative, and on several committees, some of which entailed months of work (think revision of By-Laws as one example).

I'm actually saying out loud (as my excuse for the things I no longer am doing), "I'm a writer, and I don't have the time." What if I'm deluding myself? Maybe that doesn't make any difference. I'm a writer anyway!

A Blast from the Past

I find myself with a mentor. Suddenly an old schoolmate (from the graduating class behind mine in high school) phoned. I remembered his name, but not another thing about him. He was looking for some old yearbooks for a book he's writing. I had some of them. As they say, One thing led to another, and I found myself in long, intense, fascinating conversation with a man who is unable to talk without mentioning several famous (not just well-known) show business names in every sentence. This goes with the territory because he's the son of a famous actress and writer and stepson of a Broadway producer everyone has heard of.

Because he's working on a memoir, he asked me what I knew about a number of people from our school, many of whom I lost track of the minute I graduated, some of whom are no longer alive, and some of whom I happened to know about. In the latter group is a woman older than I whose life has repeatedly intersected with mine. She has led a remarkable life as basically a servant of humane causes--as a teacher. First in California, then in Nigeria, and finally in China. Her parents and mine were close friends. When I answered his question about her, I told him what I know, and he immediately said, "She became a saint. You have to write a poem about her."

After the phone call, I decided in an offhand, this-will-come-to nothing way, to try. I sent him the result. [He mistrusts the Internet, is a bit of a conspiracy nut, and has almost total recall. Hence all communication is via phone or snail  mail.] He called me the night he got the poem to demand I send him a signed copy.

He calls two or three times a week with advice, lists of required reading, and guidelines about what to do about writing. (He's reading Peripheral Vision now.) He insists on discussing the novel I'm trying so hard to find some entree for into the traditional publishing world. His behavior is like that of someone who has made me a protegee. It's a stimulating experience, and sends me to bed after a couple of hours (sic.) on the phone so wired I can hardly wait for another day to get started working in the light of the previous evening's talk.

We are diametric opposites politically (beginning with the fact that I'm not at all political and he is). Our artistic tastes are apparently not similar except in a few cases, but this man is unalterably opinionated, so I listen and glean. The point to all this is that I've discovered--or rediscovered--how stimulating it can be to have reaction to your work, but also how invigorating to have someone determined to direct you whose opinion you respect. I don't have to agree with everything he says, and the freedom to choose is liberating beyond anything I've experienced since graduate school days.

Would you believe I'm looking forward to the closing-in sense winter brings?

A Light at the End of the Tunnel?

I've been reading a Pulitzer Prize winner. Without Mr. P's name on the cover, I'd have stopped after 30 pages. I persevered, and have come almost to the end. The characters that in the beginning made me grind my teeth have matured or died. From the beginning, the writing was vivid, original, attractive, but the situations and people in them made me want to drop them as quickly as I could. Even now, with only a few pages to go, and filled as I am with admiration for the creativity evident in A Visit from the Goon Squad, I'm shaken.

I'm not a prude, and the Anglo Saxon epithets were realistic, suited to the mouths uttering them. I simply wondered why I should care about people who were not only crude (though sometimes sensitive), but self-absorbed and amoral. Their world seemed to offer nothing on its surface to suggest they might need to become observant, other-directed, or altruistic, but their lack of imagination on their own behalf astonished me as the material that had won such a prestigious prize. I think that was the point, and satire was evident, but I felt cheated by seeing nothing else for so long.

It got me thinking about fashion. We all know that it comes and goes. We all know it applies to a lot more in our lives than clothes. It appears to be omnipresent in either the persons or the perceived rankings of judges--of all the arts. Where (outside of that enclave known as "Inspirational") are critics who are willing to look to the effects of their judgments on viewers and readers? What has happened to contemporary art? Why is the public so ready to immerse itself (if I may refer to it as a monolith for the sake of this argument) in the down sides of life? Happiness is so often as easy as understanding Rabbi Schachtel's aphorism: Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.

It's clear that nothing is quite that simple, but it's also clear that too many young people, especially those who have almost everything they could ever want, are the most dissatisfied and depressed and at a loss. Even today there are plenty of anecdotes about triumph over adversity, and too few of humility and gratitude. It's disheartening to see how much adult literature is devoted not just to showing the abstracted, drugged gyrations of musicians and those who look to the noise in their headphones to define themselves, but also to those who glamorize mindless sex as being as uncomplicated as the next drink at a bar, who give not a thought to how their actions may cause others to suffer, or even to the harm they do to themselves.

These days, you almost have to venture backwards in time to find pictures of life redeemed in spite of or because of depravity, dishonesty, error. The ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Hardy, Austen, even Sinclair Lewis or Harper Lee...make your own list. Writing and painting and music hardly dare to be beautiful these days except for some poets. The cachet is in being gritty, hip, up on the latest fashionable illegality.

Being human should not be made to appear like a sentence to misery to be lifted only by discouraged compromise.