Miscellany – Page 265

A scrap of meaning

Thursday, November 10, 2016

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“In my experience signs are usually a lot more subtle.”
—Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

I had to fly to a gig the afternoon after the election, so my wife and I took the boys to lunch. As we were leaving the house, I looked down at the floor and saw this scrap of paper. I knew immediately what it was — it was a word from the introduction to my own book, which I’d cut up and collaged. This scrap hadn’t made it. I wasn’t sure how it got there, since I’d done the cutting in my studio. (I figured it had stuck to my shoe and I had tracked it into the house.) But however it got there, there it was, on the floor of my laundry room. A single word. “Embrace.” I took a picture of it and put it in my pocket.

At lunch, a waiter asked a woman how she was and what she’d like to drink. “Well, I’m depressed,” she said. “So I’ll have a margarita with salt.” Soon, the woman’s friend arrived. She got up from her chair and they gave each other the longest hug.

I had not cried yet, but then and there, I almost lost it.

It’s been a sad couple of days. For now, I wish you margaritas and hugs… or their equivalent.

The Pram in the Hall

Thursday, October 27, 2016

happy i made the team

“I have not been a good father,” admitted John Banville in a recent interview. “I don’t think any writer is.” He went on to talk about how hard his profession had been on his family, and how hard he imagined it had been to live with him as a husband and father. Of writers, as if we are all one homogenous tribe, he said, “we are cannibals. We’d always sell our children for a phrase…. we are ruthless. We’re not nice people.”

“Speak for yourself, fucknuts,” David Simon tweeted. “Family is family. The job is the job.”

My twitter pal Julian Gough, who brought it all to my attention, summed it up nicely: “When a famous writer says ‘all writers are bad parents,’ he is giving young writers permission to behave like assholes.” (Julian has since published his own piece on the subject.)

My oldest son turned four this week, so I’ve been taking stock, and thinking about how lucky I was early on in my life to find examples of good writers who also seemed to be good dads. (And yes, early on, I was looking for men as role models, even though today I get more inspiration from mothers.)

When I was 24, I asked George Saunders at the Texas Book Festival how he managed to be a good family man and a good writer. I drew his response in my notebook:

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Saunders later wrote about this revelation in “My Writing Education”:

I watch Toby, with his family. He clearly adores them, takes visible pleasure in them, dotes on them. I have always thought great writers had to be dysfunctional and difficult, incapable of truly loving anything, too insane and unpredictable and tortured to cherish anyone, or honor them, or find them beloved.

Wow, I think, huh.

And elsewhere:

“Toby was the first great writer I ever met and what the meeting did for me was disabuse me of the idea that a writer had to be a dysfunctional crazy person… Toby was loving, gentle, funny, kind, wise — yet he was producing these works of great (sometimes dark) genius. It was invigorating to be reminded that great writing was (1) mysterious and (2) not linked, in any reductive, linear way, to the way one lived: wild writing could come from a life that was beautifully under control. Watching him, I felt: O.K., nurture the positive human parts of yourself and hope they get into your work, eventually.”

Tobias Wolff himself talked about the subject in The Paris Review:

The self-pity of being a writer or an artist has been a sovereign excuse for all kinds of baloney. You know, All the sufferings I endure and the terrible things I do to my wife and children are because I’m an artist in this philistine America… I find that all the best things in my life have come about precisely through the things that hold me in place: family, work, routine, everything that contradicts my old idea of the good life…. it seems as time goes on that the deepest good for me as man and writer is to be found in ordinary life. It’s the gravity of daily obligations and habit, the connections you have to your friends and your work, your family, your place— even the compromises that are required of you to get through this life. The compromises don’t diminish us, they humanize us—it’s the people who won’t, or who think they don’t, who end up monsters in this world.

Wendell Berry said something very similar in the documentary Look & See — that art is elevated by interruption, that it gains meaning from interruption.

And interruption is the very true constant of the parent’s life, as this Tillie Olsen epigraph from Sarah Ruhl’s great book on parenting and writing explains:

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For those of us who have or are thinking about having kids, it’s so very important to find solid role models we can look to — people who have managed to raise children and make their art. I’m not the greatest dad, but any success I’ve had in the past four years as a parent is due to the good examples I found before I became one.

It’s also important for us to be role models: to show that it can be done.

I’ll give the last word to JG Ballard, who raised his three children as a single widower:

Cyril Connolly, the 50s critic and writer, said that the greatest enemy of creativity is the pram in the hall, but I think that was completely wrong. It was the enemy of a certain kind of dilettante life that he aspired to, the man of letters, but for the real novelist the pram in the hall is the greatest ally – it brings you up sharp and you realise what reality is all about. My children were a huge inspiration for me. Watching three young minds creating their separate worlds was a very enriching experience.

Art is for life, not the other way around.

Talking to strangers

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

“When you interact with a stranger, you’re not in your own head, you’re not on autopilot from here to there. You are present in the moment. And to be present is to feel alive.” I underlined those sentences while reading Kio Stark’s When Strangers Meet on a recent flight home. As an experiment, I decided when the plane landed I would try to talk to as many strangers as I could. I wound up talking to three.

* * *

The first stranger was a man in a suit who moved over so I could pass him on the escalator. Once I saw what he was doing, I stopped.

“But I was clearing a path for you!” he said.

“I know,” I said, “and I suddenly wondered why I was in such a hurry.”

“I always have to think about what country I’m in to know which side I’m supposed to move over to.”

“Do people get over to different sides in different countries?” I asked.

He said they did. We got off the escalator and walked outside together.

“So, like, in Japan, do they get over to the left, like how they drive on the left-hand side?”

“They do. They’re very orderly there, you know. Nice talking to you.”

* * *

The second stranger was driving the parking lot shuttle. He noticed my Ramones t-shirt.

“I saw the Ramones at the Armadillo World Headquarters in 1979,” he said. “Front row. Johnny Ramone spit on me.”

“That’s awesome,” I said. “You want to know where I got this shirt?”

“Where?”

“My wife bought it for me at Target.”

He looked horrified. “Somewhere Johnny Ramone is rolling in his grave.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He was a good capitalist. He might be okay with it.”

He conceded the point. I sat in the special handicap seat at the front of the shuttle and we talked while he drove and dropped off the other passengers. He told me he’d been a professional musician in Austin his whole life, that he’d played his first gig onstage in 1959, and that driving the shuttle was his first real job. “The way I survived all those years was: I always treated it like a business. My friends and I got this guide to the music business and we studied that book religiously. Started our own publishing company and everything. But things change. I just feel blessed that I got to be there at that time.” He said that the clubs don’t pay anymore because “weekend warriors” — amateur bands who never rehearse — will play for free. “Everybody sounds good after about eight beers.”

He asked me what I did and I told him. He said he was working on a book, trying to figure out publishing. “I know you need a literary agent,” he said. I told him that was true, that publishing was like music: a tough industry to crack.

I asked him if he ever spoke to young musicians about his experiences. “Nah,” he said. “These younger musicians today don’t want to learn anything. They don’t study, so they don’t make anything that’s going to last. There’s a reason the radio only plays stuff from the 70s and the 80s. When I was young, I used to sit front row, you know, sit at the feet of the masters and just watch them, trying to learn. Nobody works on their craft anymore.”

We stopped at my car. I tipped him and he blessed me. “So what’s your book about?”

“Well, it’s about how nothing comes from nowhere, and how the way to be truly great is to study what came before you.”

He smiled and said it sounded pretty good.

* * *

The third and final stranger was running the exit booth in the parking lot. She looked like she’d smoked too many cigarettes in too much sunshine. She was alarmed by the filthy state of my vehicle.

“Boy, they sure didn’t detail this car,” she said.

“No, they didn’t,” I said. “My wife said I should sign up for the wash this time, but I’m too cheap. I suppose I should be embarrassed.”

“Where on earth did they park you?”

“Oh, this is from my driveway,” I said. “I have one of those crepe myrtles next to the garage.”

She nodded and rang me up. “$19.45, purdy.”

I handed her my card.

“You know,” she said, “you drive towards Travis down there, there’s a Shell with a car wash, they’ll fix you up. And if they don’t do a good job, you just come back here and I’ll give you another ticket.”

She didn’t wink, but I think she wanted to.

“You want a water, baby?”

“Yes I do,” I said.

“Here you go, purdy.”

I put the car in gear.

“I’ll try to have it looking better for you next time,” I said.

She laughed, and I felt a little more alive as I drove home to people who aren’t strangers.

The Bliss Station

Thursday, July 21, 2016

It’s felt impossible lately not to be distracted and despondent. I’m trying to spend as much time at my bliss station as I can.

What’s a bliss station? Here’s Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth:

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

My wife pointed out to me that Campbell says you must have a room OR a certain hour — whether Campbell really meant this or not, she suggested that maybe it’s possible that a bliss station can be not just a where, but a when. Not just a sacred space, but also a sacred time.

The deluxe package would be having both a special room and a special hour that you go to it, but we started wondering whether one would make up for not having the other.

For example, say you have a tiny apartment that you share with small children. There’s no room for your bliss station, there’s only time: When the kids are asleep or at school or day care, even a kitchen table can be turned into a bliss station.

Or, say your schedule is totally unpredictable, and a certain time of day can’t be relied upon — that’s when a dedicated space that’s ready for you at any time will come in handy.

What’s clear is that it’s healthiest if we make a daily appointment to disconnect from the world so that we can connect with ourselves.

“Choose the time that’s good for you,” says Francis Ford Coppola. “For me, it’s early morning because I wake up, and I’m fresh, and I sit in my place. I look out the window, and I have coffee, and no one’s gotten up yet or called me or hurt my feelings.”

The easiest way I get my feelings hurt by turning on my phone first thing in the morning. And even on the rare occasion I don’t get my feelings hurt, my time is gone and my brains are scrambled.

“Do not start your day with addictive time vampires such as The New York Times, email, Twitter,” says Edward Tufte. “All scatter eye and mind, produce diverting vague anxiety, clutter short term memory.”

Every morning I try to fight the urge, but every morning my addiction compels me.

“The new heroin addiction is connectivity,” says V. Vale. “The only solution is not one that most people want to face, which is to become lovers of solitude and silence… I love to spend time alone in my room, and in my ideal world the first hour of every day would be in bed, writing down thoughts, harvesting dreams, before anyone phones or you have any internet access.”

Kids, jobs, sleep, and a thousand other things will get in the way, but we have to find our own sacred space, our own sacred time.

“Where is your bliss station?” Campbell asked. “You have to try to find it.”

* * *

This post became a part of my book, Keep Going.