28 November 04
Whither American Fiction?
One of the things my mother does when we meet up, here or in Bodega Bay, is that she (messily) unloads a pile of things she wants me to see that she’s been saving up since last time. One of these latest unpackings was some excerpts from the current issue of the Antioch Review, a piece called “The Writing Life: Envy and Editing” by Daniel Harris. In this he wrings his hands about the state of American letters, where creative writing programs mass-produce out-of-work MFAs, all of whom are first in line to nab spots at prestigious art colonies and write stuff that is read only by others like them. Whom they envy and take delight when some small failure or other befalls them. It’s a shrinking pool, he says, one that despises the mass-market authors but secretly envies them more than anyone else.
I’m not sure I follow the entire drift, not having the article to hand, but this section (as quoted by my mother) caught my eye: “The five best books I’ve read in the last couple of years have been Harry Mulisch’s Siegried, Amin Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time... Not a single American author alive today … is capable of writing a novel like one of these. Because they dare to take on the big issues of life and death (because they’re presented without chilling effects), knowledge and meaning, learning and forgetting, without shame, without fear, without self-doubt…”
Is this because American writers are too geared toward publication, or getting on Oprah, or receiving kind notice by the New York Review of Books? (Or that they are too weighed down by Hemingway or even Faulkner?) What would happen if someone quietly writing away in the backwaters, away from writing groups and even bookstores, produced something like G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer LePage, the most quirky novel I’ve read in over a decade? Is it just not now culturally possible for this to happen in the United States? Or to write a highbrow novel that doesn’t, somewhere deep within, have an unpunctuated stream of consciousness that mimics the Hot Thing passage in Toni Morisson’s Beloved?
To all of you who’ve been working hard on your fifty thousand words for the month of November (and even those who haven’t), I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Me, I’d settle for an American version of Terry Pratchett. We’re ripe for some serious satire.
27 November 04
La Casita del Cielo
We went on a downtown bookstore outing today, and wandered for the first time into La Casita del Cielo, which is a new Spanish children’s bookstore hidden between D and E streets. Pica was looking for a grammar to send her sister, who is helping teach Spanish in her primary school back in Maine. She found a perfect book, and talked a lot to the owner about bilingual education here. One of the reasons the owner, who is from Peru, started the store is because of concern over Spanish literacy here. Most bilingual teachers in the schools have very little command of Spanish, and Spanish-speaking students do not end up learning much in the way of Spanish grammar or writing skills. On top of all that, American culture as a whole is not one where most people read much. Anyway, he was happy to hear about Pica’s sister’s efforts, and gladly gave Pica several free books to send along to her school. As for myself, Spanish children’s books make for good reading practice at my level, and I settled in this evening to a copy of Helico y el pjaro, by Andr Dahan. Fun little story about a bird being taught to fly.
26 November 04
A Day of Birds and Salmon
Rock wren barn owl burrowing owl bus driver who got out of the bus (to the airport) to see the burrowing owls glaucous-winged gull thousands of chinook salmon breaking themselves apart to get upstream merlin nailing a white-throated swift over the rapids and hauling it off for lunch, when most people were there to see the salmon ferruginous hawk ALBINO red-tailed hawk (this was the magic bird today) Lewis’s woodpecker western bluebird phainopepla FERRUGINOUS HAWK sandhill crane greater yellowlegs lesser yellowlegs snow goose eastern phoebe sunset behind Mt. Diablo sandhill cranes white-fronted geese, v’s in opposite directions veggie lasagne and some central heating, washed down with a pinot gris far above our means donated by someone who’s moving back east…
25 November 04
Mughlia Saag Thali
Pica’s Mum came up to see us today from Bodega Bay. After a walk in the Arboretum, we set out to find a lunch place, thinking at the very least the restaurant Great Wall of China would be open despite the holiday.
We did better than that, ending up at Kathmandu Kitchen, a Nepali place on G Street here in town. I had the thali plate mentioned in the title, Pica had beighan bharta, and Mum had palak tikka paneer. We all drank mango lassis too.
That meal was so much more tasty and wonderful than the traditional Thanksgiving turkey I can hardly believe it. No sticking one’s head in the oven staring at the fat-spitting giant fowl either. I think we’ve started a new tradition here.
24 November 04
Thanksgiving
We do not do Thanksgiving Dinner. People around me ask, jokingly yet accusingly, whether I’m not thankful. Yes, I say, every day, but I’m a vegetarian, and it’s all about turkey, and I just don’t understand what connection there is between being thankful and stuffing my face over the course of hours at the expense of my mother’s back and tranquility and overall mental health, which is how I recall this from the time when we DID do Thanksgiving Dinner, in Spain, when nobody else was, a little island of American tradition where most of the people at the table were more English than American, a tradition we then repeated a month later, only this time with presents.
Once we were invited by some friends—he was in the US Air Force—to Thanksgiving Dinner at the Base southeast of Madrid. (This was the Torrejn Air Force Base, but it was just called “The Base” by all non-base English speakers, a place which, during the height of the Cold War which this was, would be the launching point for an airborne nuclear attack in the European theatre, which we never thought about at all being only nine or ten. To us the Base was a place where you could get American candy and American comics and where there were lots and lots of people who never emerged at all, never saw Spain, never learned even a word of Spanish, carried on their own little version of military life that would have been identical in Germany, or Japan, or the Philippines but which always included lots of liquor. There were exceptions, such as the friends who had invited us. They seemed very, very rare.
What struck me about this dinner at the Base was how formulaic it was. Our Thanksgiving dinners at home were similar—similar ingredients—but were special, probably because we were the only family within three miles to have the oven on at 5:00 am; I enjoyed making the crosses on the stems of the brussels sprouts like some minor benediction, waiting for the inevitable o’clock when my mother would cut herself badly with one knife or another. (Blood everywhere. Every time.) At the Base, by contrast, there were literally hundreds of people getting the same mashed potatoes, the same turkey, the same gravy—the uniformity, the sheer number of slices of turkey, made it so much less and at the same time so much more. It was excess, my first real inkling of it on this scale. The food was good. It was just that there was so MUCH of it.
The past few days I’ve been pondering on the emptiness of this culture. The paradoxes abound: there’s way too much of everything, of food, of STUFF. Obesity is an epidemic linked to poverty, of all things; antidepressants are now the number one class of drug prescribed in the U.S. When will we say, as a culture, enough? Enough stuff? Enough of this emptiness? We have so much now, can’t we just be thankful for THIS? Can’t we share? Can’t we just be?
So I will get up tomorrow morning and be grateful for the white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows that sing and scratch at our back door, for the rock wren hiding in the bee boxes, for the color of the dawn, for the mist that glides over the levee, for my health, for my friends, for my family, for my love. Then I will go and BE in this instead of eating for hours followed by slouching comatose in a chair watching a game of American football.
And on Friday, I will not shop till I drop. It’s Buy Nothing Day. You’re invited.
23 November 04
Almond Butter and Flying Cars
Tucked away on a court in Davis that I pass by twice a week when I go to my Spanish class lies the research facilities of Moller International. Paul Moller, the inventor behind this company, has been developing a flying car called the Skycar. This vehicle is planned to be the size of a large automobile, will have a top speed of 350 mph, will have a maximum range of 750 miles, and will get better than 20 mpg. The list price for the first Skycars to roll off the line is set at a mere $995,000, dropping to $500,000 once 200 are produced. Let’s hope the Skycar fares better than the Flying Pinto.
For those of you who are looking for foods with life extension attributes so as to reach the day when Skycars are commonplace, Mr. Moller also sells organic almond butter from his ranch near Dixon.
22 November 04
Blogging About Place
I was having a conversation this evening with another blogger about why we write about place. It was interesting to rethink this whole question after yesterday’s SketchCrawl.
Blogging is about audience, ultimately, for me, and when you spend a whole day wandering around where you live making sketches of railway crossing warnings and gloves abandoned by the side of the road, of the Tabasco bottle at your breakfast table, of the tall pyrex glass where your Ti Kwan Yin sits steeping, of the people you’re trying to draw surreptitiously but they always KNOW, it’s a different manifestation of this audience thing. Here’s where I live. Here was my day, Sunday November 21, in Davis, California. It was bright but very windy and chilly. We looked for salmon in the creek but didn’t see any. We saw instead the abandoned nests of cliff swallows under the bridge and the floats attached to nylon monofilament line that got caught in the willow, not just any willow but THIS one. We saw the valley oaks and the interior live oaks they planted last year along the road braving the fierce north wind. We saw the sun setting and the high-priority freight train rushing in front of it, eastward.
Look, I say. This was here. This was then.
21 November 04
Davis SketchCrawl
We spent part of the day today participating in the worldwide SketchCrawl. After warming up with a few kitty sketches, we went out to breakfast at Caf Bernardo, where we sketched the pancakes, waffles, other patrons, and the condiments, as in Pica’s sketch at left.
We then went back home, walked to the creek, hoping to see salmon but no luck, and then walked on to Pica’s office, where we sketched horses and ground squirrels: my sketch is at right.
We finished up our sketching outings at Mishka’s, where we enjoyed hot chocolate and tea.
20 November 04
Instruments of Peace
So: how do we change a culture? How do we change the hearts—not the minds—of people who say “I voted for Bush because he’s a Christian and I think he’d provide a more moral response to our problems”? (Never mind that Kerry is a devout Catholic, or that Bush when governor of Texas presided over a huge number of executions for which he granted no pardons, not even for a woman who converted to Evangelical Christianity, similar to his—he mocked her—and has subsequently presided over the deaths of well over 100,000 Iraqis and well over 1,000 Americans? This seems not to register with a large number of folks who voted for Bush. Gandhi once said that the only people who don’t understand Christianity is a religion of nonviolence are the Christians).
Michael Nagler is worried that the majority of Americans will only wake up when they realize we are no longer a democracy, at which time it will be too late to do much about it without risking our lives. According to his schema, nonviolent response goes in three phases: the first, where you are in a position to try and interact with your opponent rationally; the second, where you are in a position to win over their hearts, since they won’t listen to your arguments (the example he gave was of a Gestapo agent finding two Jews in hiding and letting them go after their small son played with his buttons, he having a son of similar age); the third, where you’re prepared to die for what you believe in. And sometimes do, like the “Saint of Auschwitz” Kolbe who volunteered to die for someone else, yet thousands of people subsequently claim he saved their lives, because the only thing keeping you alive there was your will to live, or like the Hindu women in a village who hid their Muslim sisters under threat of a pogrom and who declared to the rabble at the door that they’d have to kill them first before they got inside—and everyone lived.
Nagler thinks that for us, the first phase is long past: when 12 million people worldwide march in protest of the Iraq war and it gets termed a “focus group,” it’s clear we have no way rationally to alter the mind of this president or his cronies. But we are still in a place where we can appeal to the hearts of those who profess Christianity and voted for Bush. Our march into the third phase will be bloody and difficult, which is why there is urgency now in the second.
Nagler’s spiritual teacher was Sri Eknath Easwaran whose meditation practice was termed, under pressure, “passage meditation.” The idea is to take a passage written by someone in a state of heightened consciousness and memorize it, absorbing the words into our being until they touch and merge with our person. It was an interesting morning, with the half hour devoted to this practice punctuated by the drums over at the Farmer’s Market across the street. (I tried, and failed, to bring to mind the complete prayer of St. Francis, so I fell back on the Lord’s Prayer, which I must have started about twenty-five times over the course of the half hour.) We emerged to find ourselves in front of the Labrador Rescue Society. Keep walking, I told Numenius…
19 November 04
Search For A Non-Violent Future
We just heard Michael Nagler, non-violence scholar and founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at UC Berkeley, speak and participate in a panel discussion at the Davis Community Church. The church hall was packed, though I was a bit disappointed there were relatively few young people there. He was a little hoarse; he says he has an allergy which came on starting November 2nd. A few quotes:
“If you lose, don’t lose the lesson” — the Dalai Lama
Nagler says that the lesson of the election is that we’re not going to solve the fix we’re in through the efforts of standard liberal and left-wing politics. Rather, we have to go much deeper than that, to the cultural and spiritual levels.
“Do not agitate the minds of ignorant people” — the Bhagavad-Gita
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world” — Gandhi
Nagler is naturally enough a Gandhian, as am I. But how does one, in the face of this tsunami of negativity we’re in a) keep hope up and b) avoid mirroring back our opponent’s hatreds?
Part 2 of Nagler’s visit is tomorrow morning, a closer look at spiritual practice and peace.