Trusting the Wellspring

No definitions today, no argument or debate. A couple of very personal thoughts.

First thought has to do with self-publishing. Everyone, it seems, is doing it. A few hold themselves to the highest standards of research, writing, editing, design, etc. Over the years I’ve seen a handful of excellent self-published books. At the other end of the spectrum are poorly written, in-need-of-editing, cheaply packaged vanity offerings, the bane of any bookseller’s existence. And of course there is a wide range in between.

Well, I’m self-publishing my stories, and (as is the case with my blogs) without benefit of an editor, but my stories are not on paper, not between covers, and you don’t have to pay to read them. I’ve been putting them here on my blog (most recent on previous post), tossing them out into the world like messages in bottles cast out upon the waves. They may sink, or they may swim, but anyone can read them or not, like them or not, all without spending a cent or taking home another book to crowded shelves. If I had a publisher, I’d also have an editor and a publicist and a book designer and more, working on my behalf to make my book worth its cover price. Don’t have that. Am not asking for money. Am not competing with writers who have given their lives to the hard work of writing. (I have given my last 19 years to the hard work of bookselling, and I’ve learned a lot about writers’ lives in that time.) For now, my primary identity is as a bookseller.

Second thought occurred to me years ago in another context and was reinforced by my recent reading of William Stafford’s Writing the Australian Crawl. That is, the quickest way to kill one’s inner creative spirit is to be afraid that “It will never happen again!” I could hold onto these ten stories and nurse the dream that someday they might be published between covers under the aegis of a real publishing house, keeping them in a drawer until then, out of fear that these stories might be all I’ll ever write, but I need to have more faith in myself than that. I need to trust whatever mystery gave them to me in the first place. 

I don’t know where these stories came from. All I know is that the first morning I woke up in Florida two years ago, the character of the first story was already in my head. I got up and started writing, and in two months I had all ten stories. They were not planned. Even the final story, the one that brings the rest together, was not something I saw ahead of time. So what I have to trust is that when my life is once again, for however long a stretch of time, free of scheduled obligations, more characters and stories will emerge from the mysterious deep. 

Letting go of these, letting them out in the world without expecting a return from them, is my leap of faith.

Rocket's Burger Shack, Story #6

[This is the sixth of ten stories set in an easily imaginable fast food restaurant I called Rocket's Burger Shack. For the five preceding stories, search "burger shack" on this blog, and they should turn up. Thanks for reading. For events coming up in and around Northport, scroll to the end of this post.]

A Man’s Potential©

      “For God’s sake, get the owners out of the house--for the whole day, if you can,” the man across the table reminded me over the files spread out between our paper cups of morning coffee. He was nervous, I could tell. “It’s deadly if they hang around!”

I wasn’t fazed by the implication that I needed him to tell me how to do my job because I’d already spotted him as a total loser. A man who used a “burger shack,” of all places, for his office? He needed a haircut, and I glanced out at the parking lot to see if I could spot which car was his. The ’99 Mercury Marquis, without a doubt, and he probably thought the hubcap he’d had to replace matched closely enough that no one would notice. Well, he was wrong. People notice things even when they don’t consciously register what they’re seeing. I’m successful because I know this, and he’s a loser because he doesn’t. Details are that important.

 I would have walked out right then except for Patricia, but she and I have been in business together for five years, and that’s longer than it sounds. For her, in fact, it’s a significant portion of her life. You have to understand, she’s only twenty-eight, very young to be a partner in a real estate firm. We met when we were both working for the firm that’s now our chief competition. Ours is the high-end market. When I started out in the business forty years ago, that was always where I wanted to be, and I make it a point to get what I want.

Knowing what you want is the first step. For instance, knowing I wanted Patricia as a partner didn’t take long at all. She’s young, she’s smart, she’s on the quiet side, very different from me in personality, and carrying just those few extra pounds that say “maternal,” whatever a woman’s age. She has soft edges where I glitter. We’re a great team. I knew we would be. We’re a little like good cop, bad cop, except it’s gentle cop, pushy cop or something. “You smoke ‘em out, and I’ll bear down on ‘em,” I say to her, and she laughs. I love to make her laugh. Her sounds, like her edges, are all soft and confidential in tone.

Frank Hayes. I remember I was wearing orange and red that day, an orange linen sheath and red silk jacket. I was dressed for the rest of my day, not coffee at the Burger Shack. Orange and red, mustard and red—if I do it, you can bet it works. Red is my signature color. Red dress or jacket or scarf—always something red. Even for funerals I add a subtle splash of crimson somewhere—earrings or a bracelet. It keeps people from relaxing around me. They’re always wondering what’s going to happen next. I like that.

      I was young like Patricia when I first got into real estate. I’d started out working sales in a downtown department store, part-time on the cosmetics counter in high school and then working up to manager of women’s wear two years after graduation. In case you don’t know the retail world, that was a meteoric rise. I got out, though, when chain discount stores came along. I could see that old-style department stores were doomed.

Here’s how I switched over. First I made a little personal inspection tour of the new discount place on the edge of town. What a nightmare! Acres of cheap merchandise, clerks and stock employees in ugly pastel smocks--even the managers wore dull black and white uniforms with stupid little black and white nametags. Not my world! I was driving back downtown that same day when I saw a billboard featuring the portrait of an attractive local female realtor. I signed up an hour later for night classes and made a complete transition in two years. I was twenty-two years old when I got my license.

That’s the way I like to live. Given any situation, I look at it from all the angles, assess it, and investigate all the alternatives. No hit and miss. I mean, who wants to miss, anyway? What’s the point of that?

One brief marriage. It didn’t take.

How do other women know they want to marry someone? What do they feel? After they’re married, do they feel the same as before or different? I felt so different, so alien, it was as if I’d put on someone else’s skin. I was the proverbial stranger in a strange land. But I thought the strangeness was only to be expected. Why wouldn’t it take time to get used to a strange new country? I kept thinking I would get used to the smell of his skin and the feel of his limbs and torso and that we would gradually blend together into something inevitable. My parents’ marriage had been pretty happy, from all I could ever tell, and they hadn’t known each other until they were in their late twenties.

I don’t know how it works for other people, though. I can’t even imagine it, and I’ve given up trying, because it didn’t work at all for me. Every day of my marriage, my life felt more alien to me than it had the day before. I felt lonelier with my husband, in our home, than I’d ever felt in my life alone in a room. And he was a perfectly nice man, too, not a monster. I can’t explain it.

Thank God I had work, and I was on every other weekend, working the office on Saturdays and office or open houses on Sundays. I got a lot of calls and a lot of referrals. So in that part of my life I was still myself and still on track.

There was one Saturday morning that stands out as my clearest married memory. I was leaving for work. I was going out the front door, and I stopped to take a deep breath and put on sunglasses. The sky was so clear and bright! Going out into the morning, I felt clear and bright myself. The alien skin dropped off at the doorway. Birds were singing, and the singing of those birds felt as if it was shivering forth from my own singing heart. I mean, I was flooded with happiness, and the sensation was overwhelming. I remember feeling that I was setting myself free, that I could almost fly! You don’t stop to doubt that kind of clarity. Obviously I had to get out of the marriage. I didn’t blame my husband or myself. He blamed me, but that was his problem. It was over.

Since then I’ve kept my relationships with men on either a professional or a recreational basis, one or the other. By “recreational,” I don’t mean so much the sex as the contest. So, professional or recreational, two separate realms, both are contests, as far as I’m concerned. What can I say? It works for me. I love it!

      Now this man this morning, this Frank Hayes—thank God, I thought, I only had to deal with him on a professional basis, and that was bad enough! For some unknown reason Patricia had set up the meeting, and I had enough trust in her to give him a few more minutes to redeem the terrible first impression he’d made. He wouldn’t have had a second chance otherwise, and it wasn’t really a second chance, in the true sense, since it was Patricia, not Frank Hayes, who had earned it.

“How many years have I been doing this?” I queried rhetorically when Frank Hayes the loser tried telling me how to run the open house that I hadn’t yet agreed to have. I tapped out a rhythm on the shiny chrome napkin holder with a perfectly manicured fingernail.

      He looked away, annoyed and embarrassed. He combed his fingers nervously through the hair over his ear. Feeling cornered, he attacked. “How the hell do I know? I don’t know what you know! We just met! Don’t take it personally!”

      A rank amateur move. Exactly what I expected from him.

      “Don’t you take me personally,” I replied, emphasizing the pronouns without raising my voice. “And don’t get huffy when I remind you that I don’t need to be told the elementary basics of how to run an open house. You know my reputation, and that’s why you came to my office with your buyer. That’s what you told my partner. You told her what your buyer was looking for. I showed you the house. So, now...?”

      It’s far easier to let a man like Frank Hayes trip over whatever vague, secret guilt he’s accumulated over a life of awkward interactions with women--and they all have something that fits that general bill--than to accuse him openly of having a sexist attitude.

Hayes would have told the story like this: I was the listing agent, and he, Frank Hayes (who badly needed a haircut), said he had a potential buyer. He said the buyer (he didn’t say “potential”) needed to be moved off the dime, and he thought an open house, if it only brought in one other mildly interested party, might make the slowpoke realize he didn’t have a lifetime to make his decision. That would be his story. Naturally, I had other concerns. Was his so-called buyer qualified? Would this so-called buyer be acceptable to the neighbors? That is to say, had Frank Hayes done his homework, or was I pouring my valuable time down a rathole? Why would Patricia waste a minute of her time on Frank Hayes in the first place? It was that last question that kept me from walking out.

Patricia had talked to Hayes first before passing him along to me. She and I often pass clients and agents back and forth, depending on what I think of as their wattage requirements, since some people are more comfortable with her low-key approach, while others demand my high intensity. We trust each other enough not to have to spell out the reasons. But I couldn’t see yet why Patricia hadn’t just blown Frank Hayes off and sent him elsewhere.

“I need to check some numbers,” I told him briskly, “so let’s put this on the back burner for another week, shall we?”

He looked instantly more rumpled and scattered, both in clothes and manner.  “Patty thought,” he began and stopped. “Patty told me--.”

Oh, boy! Well, now it made sense! I would have been a great poker player, I’m not kidding, because when he said “Patty” the whole situation became clear, but I kept my expression neutral while mentally replaying a brief exchange Patricia and I had had in the office one Monday morning a few weeks back. I’d asked her the formula “How was your weekend?” question.

“Oh, you know, the usual,” she replied with a blush, turning her head aside.

“I don’t think so! No, you look....”

I moved closer to her, closed my eyes and inhaled slowly, deeply. “Ah!” Despite her morning shower freshness, I detected the smell of a man on her.

“Eva!” she protested, embarrassed.

I just told her not to lose her focus and turned away, dismissing the topic, because what else can you say? It was none of my business. If I minded at all, it was only because, first, she was going to be distracted, her mind not one hundred percent on work, and second, I had no idea who the man was, but she’d already slept with him, so it was too late for me to veto the arrangement if he was unacceptable.

 Patricia started changing in subtle ways. She didn’t lose the twelve pounds she’d obsessed about for so long, but she stopped obsessing about her weight. She was simultaneously more on edge and more relaxed, which doesn’t even make sense, but I don’t know any other way to express it. Maybe “on edge” isn’t the right expression. She seemed happier in her body and more aware of it and constantly alert mentally, regardless of how little sleep she’d had the night before. Never that concerned with her appearance before, she was dressing better and paying more attention to her hair and makeup.

I couldn’t fault her for looking better or for being happy. I had no problem with that. No, all that bothered me was my sense that her mind was somewhere else too much of the time. We were used to reading each other’s minds, sharing all our impressions and concerns, and that wasn’t happening now. The bottom line was that she didn’t feel like my partner any more.

And now, here was the reason, sitting across the table from me. Unbelievable! He hadn’t had much experience in real estate, I’d bet any money, and whatever he’d been doing before hadn’t worked out. Patricia, however, was in deep enough with him that she wanted to help his career so they could build a future together. I read it all in an instant, in the way he looked when he referred to her as “Patty.”

What to do? He was going to be bad for business, and that meant he was bad for Patricia--or “Patty,” as he called her. I tried the name out that way in my mind. It sounded like her, soft and sweet and dear. It made you want to smile and reach out to touch her neck or brush back a wisp of her hair. Oh, this was bad! How bad, I couldn’t be sure, but bad enough and maybe worse.

Whether he had an incurably lazy streak or secretly hated women or was the kind to ingratiate himself and then take advantage—I didn’t know yet. He could be a con man or an embezzler or just what he seemed, a pathetic guy with flop sweat, bringing up the rear of the wannabe brigade, but whatever he turned out to be, I saw heartbreak down the road for Patricia, and heartbreak in the office would not be good for business. Let me clarify. Heartbreak and divorce may account for half the new listings we get, but that’s not heartbreak in the office. Big difference.

My big advantage was that Frank Hayes had to try to impress me. That’s what this meeting was all about. The question was, how far would he go? That is, could I lead him so far there would be no turning back? Better for Patricia’s heart to break now than a year from now, I reasoned. Let it break now, and a year from now it will be like Frank Hayes never happened.

“Frank!” I said suddenly, interrupting him before he could embarrass himself further. I knew my tone was right when I saw hope light his face. “I know, Frank,” I went on sympathetically. “You want to move your prospect to sign a sales agreement. We all want that, if he’s good for the price.” Forestalling an objection I went on, borrowing Patricia’s motherly, encouraging tone. “It’s just a matter of when to push and when to step back. If he thinks you’re too eager, he gets suspicious, worried, and we don’t want that.”

I gave him my best imitation-Patricia smile, and Frank Hayes smiled back, confident that he’d gotten his foot in the door. Now he thought we were on the same side. First battle won.

      It was like being married, I thought, but without the promises and the life sentence. Once I slipped into the skin of the role, I didn’t even have to think about what to do next. Instinctively I looked down at the table, as if I were suddenly shy. Then I looked up, caught my bottom lip between my teeth, and smiled again, more tentatively.

      “Frank? Do you have time for another cup of coffee? If we’re going to work together, don’t you think it would help to get to know each other?”

      He stood up and reached for my coffee cup, and I touched the back of his hand lightly but firmly and left my fingertips there for the count of three, looking up at him the whole time, then pulled back with feigned reluctance, trailing my fingers the length of his. Yes, I saw the sudden alarm in his eyes. I was old enough to be his mother, after all, besides being the partner of the woman whose bed he was sharing. But we both knew he wouldn’t say no. Desire had nothing to do with it. The man was fighting for his survival, and he was too desperate to weigh one danger against another.

      What can I say? It’s a hard world. I have a good thing going, and who knows how much better it can get, if no one messes it up? I can give Patricia more than Frank Hayes could ever hope to give her. Someday she’ll thank me.

*** *** *** *** *** ***

 Leelanau Notes and Reminders

Here are a few events coming up in northern Leelanau County:

“Branching Out – Exploring Off-Broadway”

Concert by the Leelanau Children’s Choir and Youth Ensemble, Friday, June 15, 7:30 p.m. Tickets available in Northport at Dog Ears Books, 106 Waukazoo St.

“Around the Lake” (North Lake Leelanau) Garden Tour. Wednesday, June 27, 11-5. I have four tickets available at Dog Ears Books. Price goes up from $10 to $12 on the day of the tour.

Northport Women’s Club Home Tour. Wednesday, July 11, 9:30-4:30. Tickets available in Northport at Dolls and More, 102 Nagonaba St.

Annual Fly-In, Woolsey Airport, will be earlier this year, so note the date: Saturday, July 28. Northport Promise Barn Sale will be the same day, across the road.

Northport Dog Parade will be on Saturday, August 11. Dog Ears Books will be doing registration again this year, but don’t ask me for forms yet, and I don’t yet know this year’s theme, either. When I know, you’ll see it on the calendar (right-hand column) of this blog.

Obviously, this list hardly exhausts summer offerings, but besides my bookstore events, these are some of the big dates on my calendar.

"Where the Road Ends, the Fun Begins!"

Did you come to Northport on Saturday, or are you coming soon?



If you arrived early on Saturday morning, you might have noticed this building and a sign on the door that said "Open June 9." If you looked up from the sidewalk, you could have read the banner:





WINE TASTING ROOM
SPECIALTY FOODS
MOTORCYCLISTS WELCOME

Later that morning an OPEN sign appeared in the door, and this sandwich board announced some of what was to be found inside.

Deirdre and Eric welcome customers

The selection of specialty foods will be growing weekly.

Isn't this pasta beautiful? Friends of theirs make it.

Wine and cheese. Handmade pasta. Put out dishes of fresh local strawberries and cream for dessert, and you've hardly had to work at all to produce a vacation dinner worthy of Tuscany.



***

Blog note: This is August 11, and this is my 1,111th post. What were the odds?

Interview with Myself: I LOVE This Book!

Freshly Mown Hayfield (June 2010)

The book is Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation, by William Stafford (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1978).

Why did you pick up this book?

Out of curiosity, because it promised to be about writing and writers.

Were you already familiar with the author?

Sadly, no. Happily, now I am.

How far into the book did you have to read before you were hooked?

Two sentences: “Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. You can be too well prepared for poetry.”

In the first eight chapters (that is, as far as you’ve read this evening), have you learned anything new or encountered an idea that had not previously occurred to you?

No.

Then why go on reading?

For the joy of it. For having my own approach to reading and writing validated by someone whose expression is so clear and sure. Because reading this book makes me happy.

An example, please?

For example, Stafford writes that “...no act of writing when considered from the inside is ever anything but natural, for the writer, the person who writes, who is led by the end of whatever golden string he happens to pick up, and sustained by the self—his own appreciative self—which judges him.”

Do the ideas in this book relate to anything specific that has been on your mind recently?

Yes. In the chapter “The End of a Golden String,” Stafford takes up the question of literary traditions and influences. He says that critics, teachers, students, and scholars work out of what he calls the “relay-race assumption,” that is, the idea that every serious writer works with an eye consciously or unconsciously cast back on his predecessors, using “elements” available from a literary canon. No! S. says. Rather, every work of literature arises from a writer’s present involvement, a present encounter with life, and “...the artist is not so much a person endowed with the luck of vivid, eventful days, as a person for whom any immediate encounter leads by little degrees to the implications always present for anyone anywhere.” Note that Stafford's concern is primarily about the writing of poetry but that much of what he says applies to any original, creative work.

And this was on your mind because--?

Thinking about Russian novels. See previous post.

Can you calm down enough to give your readers one more example, perhaps something general enough for writers and nonwriters alike?

Yes, of course. Here—

Somewhere, each life has its validation, not in a sequence of ciphers influencing each other down through time, but in immediate encounters that have their own individual worths, no matter how small.

Is this book available at Dog Ears Books?

Not the copy I’m reading. I have marked it up to an unforgivable degree, having forgiven myself in advance, but I will be glad to order copies for anyone interested.

Thank you.

You’re entirely welcome. I've had a ball!


***


Northport note: Today is the scheduled opening of Motovino on Waukazoo Street.


Racing note: I'll Have Another has been pulled from today's Belmont Stakes. Who's your favorite now?

"Make hay" rain or shine--live, love, laugh, read!

Visions of Russia

Is Doctor Zhivago—more accurately, was Doctor Zhivago, when it appeared in English translation in 1958, a “new kind of novel”? So claimed Alfred Kazin in a 1959 essay entitled “Saints for Our Time,” commenting on how “peculiarly difficult” it was to judge the literary merits of a novel that was

...not anything like the great nineteenth-century Russian novels. It lacks the old-fashioned fullness of detail, the self-dramatizing “big” characters who struggle against an utterly provincial background to realize their freedom.

What [other] critics and literary intellectuals fail to realize about this novel, Kazin argues, is that Pasternak has undertaken something entirely new:

...to describe a hero who has to make a world, to be the spirit of life itself to people fatalistically sunk in tyranny and subjection.

The realization, however, does not do away with the difficult of the task, because

...we are now so likely to be in sympathy with Pasternak, to identify ourselves with his motive in writing the book, that we can be almost too eager to praise the novel and to overlook those sides of it that are merely doctrinaire, theoretical, and sentimental.

I want to say something about Kazin’s assessment of Doctor Zhivago as “a new kind of novel,” and to then say something more about Russian generals and, finally, about novels in general.

Kazin’s working definition of a “problem” (or “problematical” or “existential”) novel is that it will make its readers see “our own world” as “entirely problematical.” Perhaps by this definition any “problem novel” of a half-century ago is bound to fail, for don’t most of us in the 21^st century already feel our world to be problematical before we pick up any particular novel? And then, if Kazin is correct that Pasternak’s is a “problem novel,” must it necessarily fail any literary test of our time? In other words, must we understand and evaluate it only as an anachronism? More directly focusing on Kazin's claim, I ask myself these questions:

Ø  Does Doctor Zhivago lack fullness of detail?

Ø  Were 19^th-century Russian fictional characters “big,” and are Pasternak’s “small” by comparison?

I might have taken Kazin’s word on Pasternak except that he inspired me to read the novel, and in it I found a wealth of descriptive detail, very much in the Russian style—unnecessary (to the moving forward of the plot, that is), intoxicating, overflowing. In the following example, Yurii is on a crowded train, sitting on his luggage in the corridor. I want to quote a lengthy passage, precisely because of its “fullness of detail.”

The stormy sky had cleared. In the hot, sunny fields, crickets chirped loudly, muffling the clatter of the train. 

... All around people wre shouting, bawling songs, quarrelling, and playing cards. Whenever the train stopped, the noise of the besieging crowds outside was added to the turmoil. ...  

Then, like a telegram delivered on the train, or like greetings from Meliuzeievo addressed to Yurii Andreievich, there drifted in through the windows a familiar fragrance. It came from somewhere to one side and higher than the level or either garden or wild flowers, and it quietly asserted its excellence over everything else.

Kept from the windows by the crowd, the doctor could not see the trees, but he imagined them growing somewhere very near, calmly stretching out their heavy branches to the carriage roofs, and their foliage, covered with dust from the passing trains and thick as night, was sprinkled with constellations of small, glittering waxen flowers. 

This happened time and again throughout the trip. There were roaring crowds at every station. And everywhere the linden trees were in blossom. 

This ubiquitous fragrance seemed to be preceding the train on its journey north as if it were some sort of rumor that had reached even the smallest, local stations, and which the passengers always found waiting for them on arrival, heard and confirmed by everyone.

I love this passage, and it is typical of many pages of the novel, rich and full with details that make every scene come alive, “old-fashioned” in a very good way. I might also note that this kind of passage, as well as those indicating characters’ states of mind, is precisely what film can never show. (If the fragrance of linden blossoms could be piped into the movie theatre simultaneous with the appropriate scenes, would this give the effect of the written passage? What do you think?) And so I have to disagree with Kazin on this point.

What about the “size” of characters? How do Konstantin Levin, Anna herself, and Anna’s lover, Count Vronsky, compare with Yurii Zhivago, Komarovsky, Lara et al.? Kazin writes of 19^th-century Russian fiction as offering “self-dramatizing ‘big’ characters,” struggling against a provincial background to find freedom, while he says Pasternak gives us characters who must make a whole world, “to be the spirit of life itself to people fatalistically sunk in tyranny and subjection.”

I pluck a copy of Anna Karenina from my bookstore shelves. It is the Penguin Classics Deluxe paperback edition of 2002, with an introduction by one of the translators, Richard Pevear, and there in his introduction comes the first surprise, for according to Pevear

...none of the great Russian prose writers of the nineteenth century, with the possible exception of Turgenev, was on easy terms with the novel as a genre. Gogol called Dead Souls, his only novel-length work [my note: and unfinished, at that], a poem.

The traditional form of the Russian novel, you see, was “the form for portraying ordinary domestic life,” according to Pevear, and Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy all had other and bigger fish to fry. So, “great” as these writers were, they hardly saw themselves as “old-fashioned” novelists. With Anna Karenina, Tolstoy claimed for the first time in his career to be writing a traditional Russian novel, focusing precisely on domestic life, but also turning the “old-fashioned” genre on its head, by giving readers a “heroine” who was a fallen woman, one deserving of—and here the author seemed conflicted within himself—pity if not outright censure. I am not going to argue for or against Anna’s suicide as a judgment against her. My question here is on the stature of the main characters and how Pasternak’s characters, especially Lara and Doctor Zhivago, measure up against them.

(There are so many minor and incidental characters in Doctor Zhivago, some of them appearing only for a page, a brief passage, others reappearing at different points in the story, that their sheer number alone contributes to the “fullness of detail” in this work of fiction. The movie cannot begin to do justice to the cast of characters. No film-goer would be able to keep them straight. Reading, however, is more like life: we don’t expect that everyone we meet will become a permanent part of our lives.)

In both novels, the lives of the characters play out against the backdrop of a huge, sprawling country, in a time of social change, with pressures on individuals to make critical decisions and to choose among radically different possible lives. For Kitty and for Anna, marriage and family were givens, women’s goals as handed down by tradition, but even within this prescribed domain there were social changes afoot and thus uncertainty. How was Kitty to find a husband, with arranged marriages now considered “old-fashioned”? As for flirtation and infidelity, society was prepared to smile and look the other way so as not to see a married woman engaging in an affair, but the price of this was that the woman not take the affair seriously. Both in the case of marriage and in that of adultery, love, the wild card, presented problems. The same cause of personal anguish and contravention of social norms comes into the life of Yurii Andreievich when he falls in love with Lara. Revolutionary Russian life had no place for the concerns of Yurii and Lara’s love affair--but the earlier Russia had not been able to make a place for Anna and Vronsky’s love, either.

Of course there is more at stake than love, and the stature of the main characters must be considered against larger issues, social and historical. For Levin, the question of how he should live is paramount. How to regulate his family life, how to manage his farm, what relationship he is to have with the peasants who work his land—all these questions torment Levin, and he must find his own answers as an individual, whatever tradition or the church or his neighbors have decided for themselves. Zhivago’s questions have more to do with art—primarily, his own creative work as a poet and his place as a poet in the society of his time--but again, no one else can give him answers.

I may not be coming at Kazin’s question from the perspective of his concerns, and perhaps I am missing something essential, but for me a red flag went up when I encountered this phrase: “his motive in writing the book.” A single motive? Could either Tolstoy or Pasternak give one all-embracing reason? Could Tolstoy say, “I wrote Anna Karenina to show x” or Pasternak say, “I wrote Doctor Zhivago to illustrate y”? 

When I think about it like this, the whole idea of a “problem novel” becomes problematic to me. There may be mediocre (or better) novels written to highlight a particular social problem at a particular time, but they will not have the breadth or depth or richness or staying power of either Anna Karenina or Doctor Zhivago. We come back to these novels not because we necessarily have the same personal questions or social problems but because these characters live for us on the pages of their respective books. We enter their lives. We live with them. No, more--while reading, we become the characters and live their lives.

Every novel raises problems for its characters. Without conflict, there is no story. There are different problems at different times in history, but always, in every age, there are individuals looking for their own answers, and any serious novel is an exploration of specific individuals doing just that. In my opinion--what do you think?

Guest Blogger: Bona on Haiku Form

Haiku Lesson and Thoughts

by Al Bona

Haiku is a shortening of Haiku no ku, which literally means “not serious verse.” It is always an expression of a present sensual experience. It is never historic, analytic, or didactic. This might be called the First Law of Haiku, or, as I call it, the Zen part. Haiku is always composed of three lines in the syllable sequence 5, 7, 5, which I call the Second Law of Haiku, or structure part.

Haiku is an ancient form of Japanese poetry. The earliest known haiku is alleged to have been written by the Emperor Horikawa (1087-1107), and the form continued into the twentieth century. Haiku was not invented de novo; rather, it evolved, or, more accurately, devolved from earlier forms.

A very ancient form, the tanka, preceded haiku. Tanka’s structure is five lines of 5,7,5 and 7, 7 syllables. This form underwent an interesting metamorphosis into the renga, in which the first three lines were written by one poet and the last two lines by another poet after having read the first three—a cooperation between artists rarely seen in our age of individualism. The final stage, as we know, was a kind of devolvement or disintegration, in which the last two lines were dropped, leaving the first three lines of 5,7,5—the simple haiku. Is it possible that the last two lines fell by the wayside when the second poet decided it would be best not to perfect the emperor’s poem by placing his own lines and/or his head on the block?

In A History of Haiku, Volume I (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press), R. H. Blyth says (page 40):

The alternation of five and seven syllables had its appeal to the ancient Japanese partly perhaps the repetition of 5 and the repetition of 7 expressed the regularity of nature, and the alternation of 5 and 7 its irregularity.

American poets have too often written “haiku.” For example, Gary Gay gave us this “haiku”:

Family reunion 

again explaining

what a haiku is

I would like to have heard that explanation...or maybe not. This kite might fly over San Francisco, but never over Kyoto. The Japanese are a very tradition-oriented people. They made the rules of haiku. If one decides to write a short poem of three lines that is good enough to stand on its own but which ignores the structural rules of haiku, why call it “haiku”?

I call my own such short poems “unZen haiku” to avoid being accused of “not knowing what a haiku is.” Mine adhere strictly to the second law of haiku (structure) but depart entirely from the first law, the Zen part—hence, unZen haiku.

I suspect that it is impossible to translate a haiku from Japanese to English. The constraint is not on the first law but on the second. It is quite possible to carry the sense of the poem into English but not while retaining the 5,7,5 syllable structure. The languages are too different. The syllable is the quantum of Japanese. The quanta of English are metric feet. There is no translation equation. Consider Blyth’s translations of hundreds (thousands?) of ancient haiku. They are in perfect 5,7,5 order in the originals, but not in his translations. In other words, his translations are not haiku, and Blyth does not claim that they are. They are English translations of the sense, the present sensual experience, of the original Japanese haiku.

So why do I make unZen haiku? Ask Debussy why he composed etudes. I’m sure that at least part of his answer would be, “For the challenge.”

One rainy day I tried, just for the heck of it, and found it to be confoundedly difficult. Thinking English in syllables is hard enough, but try forcing a coherent idea into the straitjacket of the 5,7,5 structure, and you have a challenge worthy of Houdini. But I also found that the pressure of structure forces one to extract ideas which otherwise one might never obtain. Beginning with one idea, one sometimes watches it metaphorphose as one bends it to fit the 5,7,5 structure. Sometimes the result is a surprise.

Extract is the right word. The process is like panning for gold. It takes a lot of sifting of sand to extract just a little bit of gold.

Painter David Grath with Poet Al Bona

Al Bona’s first book of poetry, Sand, is available at Dog Ears Books. The preceding statement will stand as the prologue to his second volume of verse. Bona thinks deeply on a variety of subjects, so you can read his thoughts on bank financing here. More to the point, here and here are two earlier visits with Bona the poet. We hope for many more to come.

Rocket's Burger Shack, Story #5

[This is the fifth story I've posted of my ten-story cycle. To read others, use the search bar and ask for "burger shack," and they should turn up. I've revised this story considerably, so if there are contradictions in it, please let me know. Thank you.]

How Bob Became Tiny©

      Unlike other breakfast customers at Rocket’s Burger Shack, the regulars or those stopping for the first and possibly only time, Bob never pretended that eating was a casual, secondary activity in his life. Invariably he sat with his back to the television, carried no book or laptop computer, and walked right by the racks of free newspapers without a glance. He was at the Burger Shack to eat. One look at him was enough to tell anyone that, so why pretend otherwise. He was hardly noisy or aggressive—quite diffident, really—but some facts were too big to be gotten around, and his size was one of those facts.

      He usually came near the end of the morning rush, since all his life, even as a toddler of no more than the usual toddler chubbiness, he had hated getting out of bed, extricating himself from the cocoon of sheets and blankets to expose his sleep-warm body to cooler air. To have to stand up when he so much preferred lying down (or, later in the day on the sofa, leaning into the cushion of his mother’s arms) was torture, and his mother found her child’s passion for sleep natural. “He’s just a baby,” she replied when her husband asked if the boy was going to spend his life in bed. She added, “Where does he have to go?”

It was Bob’s father’s idea to bribe little his son out of bed with cookies. Chunky chocolate chip worked best, but the child would wander sleepily out to the kitchen, trailing his blanket, for peanut butter cookies if peanut butter were what the morning had to offer.

His father in those days was an active young man, a “man’s man,” as his mother fondly phrased it. She addressed him “Butch” or “Spike.” His body was lean and hard, his short hair spiked into a crew cut, and he wore t-shirts that showed off every muscle. His wife, by contrast, was pillowy. Not a mountain of a woman, just a “short stack.” That was one of her husband’s pet names for her, a nod to her love of pancakes, though no one had ever known her to be content with less than a full order.

They were mysteriously, even comically unalike, his parents. The longer Bob was in the world, the deeper grew this mystery. What had brought his mother and father together? What kept them together? When they were young, and he was very little, he remembered the two of them laughing and tickling and pinching and mock-wrestling, a little movie of a memory he saw in his mind through crib slats and an open bedroom door. He couldn’t say when the laughter had died away and his childhood became quiet.

From the beginning, he took after his mother. Sedentary, from the sofa or the backseat of the car, he looked over her doughy forearm at pictures in her magazines, holding his breath over and over to see what would be revealed next, in the moment when she moistened her fingertip on her tongue and slowly, languorously, almost reluctantly, turned the page. Hers were magazines devoted to recipes, often picturing chocolate layer cakes or plates of cookies on the cover. Inside were more and more mouth-watering images. Bob learned to point eagerly to pictures he wanted her to clip out. “We’re planning menus,” his mother told his father, who laughed the first few times and later shrugged and turned away. Besides magazines, Bob enjoyed watched television with his mother. He would burrow into the sofa cushions and his mother’s pillowy side and lose himself in the moving images on the screen that demanded nothing of him. His mother liked game shows best. The abstraction of monetary prizes was lost on the boy, but he could appreciate the shout, “A brand-new refrigerator!” and he had a hazy respect for the idea of winning, which always went with the prizes. His father played softball and was happiest when his team won. Bob grasped the vague notion of winning as something good.

He began to put on extra weight before grade school, but his mother, a large woman herself, saw nothing unnatural in having a “chunky” son, and she liked having a child who was her “best friend.” When his father’s softball team from work had a game, Bob and his mother rode along to the field to watch, but Bob’s dad parked their car at the end of the bleachers—they had special permission, his wife’s size making it impossible for her to sit on the bleachers--where they could watch from the car. Bob cuddled close to her in the backseat, and they made up for what they missed of the game itself with bags of popcorn, large containers of soft drinks, candy bars, and hot dogs. Gradually, without articulating the knowledge out loud or even to himself, Bob realized that winning, for him, would always be vicarious.

      Then came the hell of school. His torment started when he had to walk from home to the bus stop. His father left for work an hour earlier than the school bus came by, and even if she’d had a car his mother wouldn’t have gotten dressed and out the door herself to drive him to the corner. “Growing boys need their exercise,” she said complacently, putting another couple slices of bread in the toaster for herself as Bob shuffled unhappily out the back door. The bus stop corner was only three doors down from their house, but Bob had never been a walker, and then there was standing at the corner, which was boring and uncomfortable, with nowhere to sit and nothing to eat. Climbing onto the bus when it finally came was a slow, puffing affair for him, too. On his lucky days the other kids were too busy screaming and laughing at each other to pay attention to him; on his unlucky days he was center stage, an unwilling entertainer.

      “It’s the zoo stop! The hippo is getting on! Look out—the bus is tipping over!”

      He learned that if he grinned back the faces lost some of their viciousness. They, the normal ones, still made fun of him but only in passing, not circling for the kill as if he were the main event in a primitive blood sport. Without his resistance, in other words, the cruelty remained casual and bearable. Once inside his grade school classroom, with a mother-like teacher in charge, he was safe from the worst indignities.

      Middle school brought new agonies, with noisy, rowdy, jostling hallways to be navigated between classes. Worse, he no longer fit behind the standard desk with its attached seat and had to sit instead at a special separate table in the back of the room. These tables were not in the rooms initially but had to be brought in just for him. “Tiny,” the kids started calling him about that time. Oddly, Bob didn’t mind the nickname. He had never had a nickname before and had always envied boys called Buzz or Shorty, the way his mother called his father Butch or Spike. “The kids at school call me Tiny,” he would say modestly when meeting someone who asked his name. It made him feel like “one of the kids,” someone who belonged rather than a freak set apart by nature and society.

      The school system had a good music program in those days, and he started learning the tuba in seventh grade. Finding all that breath and pushing it through the big horn wasn’t easy, but he persevered, and by high school he had a place in the concert band, along with the status conferred by a band uniform. It was a big high school, but everyone knew Tiny. He had finally arrived. He was somebody. There was still hell to pay, of course. Concert band members were automatically members of marching band, also, and marching was torture. Red-faced and sweating in the handsome blue of his enormous uniform, thighs chafed, feet sore, shoulders aching, Tiny willingly submitted and paid the price. It was worth it to be a teenager in a uniform, belonging to an elite group.

      “Hey, party tonight!”

      The buzz went around in the band room before the game, heightening the sense of anticipation that made the air taut and singing.

First chair of the clarinet section was Gloria, a shining golden girl with cornsilk hair and a laugh like a bell. Serious now, she sounded the tuning note for the others. We follow her, Tiny thought. She gives the note, and it’s up to us to match it. She puts us together for Mr. Stone, and all he has to do is keep us together. Keep us together. The words in his head wanted to take him down another mental path, but he dared not follow. Instead he concentrated on adjusting the strap that made holding his horn possible at all, grateful as always that Mr. Stone insisted on memorization so the players didn’t have to worry about sheet music holders.

      Now as Gloria was pushing past him with her quick smile and her “Sorry!” she stopped suddenly. “Tiny, did you hear about the party? You should come. It’s at Steve’s house.” She whirled away to take her place farther up in the formation. Tiny Bob caught his breath for a moment before letting it out again, raggedly.

      Somehow he got through the half-time performance and called his mother to tell her not to pick him up after the game, assuring her that he would get a ride home after the band party. (It took a while for her to understand such a novel situation.) Then he nerved himself up to ask one of the other band members with a car for a ride to the party. Mel cocked a dubious eyebrow but shrugged and said, “Sure. My bus has big seats.” Mel’s “bus” was an aged Cadillac, and Tiny had the back all to himself, with Mel and Ted, a couple of trumpet players, in front.

      The basement at Steve’s house was dark, lit only by candles and lava lamps. Records played rock music. A commercial-size cooler with cans of cold pop yawned invitingly open at the bottom of the stairs, and at intervals big bowls of popcorn appeared at the top, passed down by a brigade of willing hands.

      “Hey, Tiny! You made it!” He made his way through the crowd with ponderous determination, his heart beating like the band’s big bass drum. “Wasn’t that the coolest game?” Gloria trilled. “Did you see Charlie’s touchdown? I could not believe it!”

      Tiny Bob nodded eagerly. “It was great!” he agreed. “Wouldn’t be a game without the band, though,” he added, giving her a nod of appreciation at the same time he was complimenting himself, signaling that the two of them shared a common cause.

      “Tiny, you know Marilyn and Pauline? We call Pauline ‘Pooh-bah.’ You know, I don’t know your real name?”

      “Tiny’s fine. That’s what people call me.” He felt beads of sweat gathering into streams and rolling down the side of his face, and he tried not to notice the way the other two girls were staring at him, curiosity fighting repulsion on their faces. Instead he focused on Gloria, whose smile seemed genuine.

      Marilyn and Pooh-bah soon drifted away (“I need another pop,” Marilyn said by way of explanation, and Pooh-bah flicked her hand casually as if to say “Bye!”), and Gloria leaned forward to say earnestly to Tiny, “Can you sort of stick by me tonight? There’s this guy I don’t want to be alone with, but he’s been coming after me all week. Do you mind?”

      No, he didn’t mind at all. It felt a little bit like a demotion, given his earlier interpretation of the unbelievable invitation, but wasn’t he still in line? She had taken notice of him, for whatever reason. Now she was asking a favor, a favor that necessitated his remaining in her presence. Things could be worse. Hell, things always had been worse, his whole life!

      “Who is it? Someone in the band?”

     

      “No, it’s Steve’s cousin. He’s like some hoodlum from Chicago or something.” She rolled her eyes and laughed her bell-like laugh. “You can be my knight in shining armor and protect me from the villain!”

      He knew she was only teasing, but his skin prickled in excitement and anxiety. Remembering a roll of Lifesavers in his pocket, he pulled it out and offered her one. She pried loose the cherry red ring from the end of the paper roll and popped it into her mouth with a smile. A minute later the candy smell of her breath mingled sweetly with the fresh shampoo odor of her hair, and Tiny was in heaven.

Mel and Ted wandered over and asked, a bit sarcastically, if they were interrupting a “private party,” and Gloria said no, they were welcome to hang out but that she was with Tiny tonight, so “Don’t get your hopes up!”

      That, it turned out, was as exciting as the evening ever got, but it was more to dream about than he had ever dreamed of dreaming, and he lived on the dreams for months. One time, in the spring of the following year, he found a pink rosebud on the ground by the school door, fallen from who-knows-what corsage or bouquet, and with great effort he managed to bend down and pick it up. During band hour, he offered it to Gloria with a shy smile. “Why, thank you, Tiny!” she exclaimed in surprise, adding solemnly but with a little flirtatious hint, “I’ll treasure it.” When he saw her later in the day, she still had the rosebud, its stem pinched between her fingers so that the bud rode atop her hand like the stone on a ring. But the next day Mel had his arm around her in a corner of the band room, and Tiny knew he’d never had a chance.

      How long ago was all that? Forty years or so? He wondered where she was now and if she had a happy life.

      After high school, thanks largely to the little attentions from Gloria, Tiny entered the world with just enough confidence to smile and speak to strangers, and that, along with his high school diploma, decent though not outstanding grades and a couple of lukewarm letters of recommendation from teachers (the band leader noted Tiny’s loyalty and “esprit de corps”), landed him a low-paying, entry-level job at a local radio station. He was the after-midnight host. He took telephone requests and played music for callers. If no one called in requests, he made them up. Sometimes, heart pounding at his own audacity, he would say something like, “And this next song goes out to Gloria, the sweetest girl in the world, from the guy who will never forget her.” The sky didn’t fall. There was no urgent ringing of the station phone with a distraught female voice on the other end, shrieking at him to desist. Nothing. His heart stopped pounding, and his dedications to Gloria—not that anyone else noticed--became a weekly feature of the show. There were other callers who made regular requests, and the Gloria dedications sounded no different from the others. The job was made to order for Tiny. It involved no walking or exertion, and it didn’t matter how he looked. He was a disembodied voice in the night, a soothing voice, an auditory lighthouse for ships lost at sea. It was a solitary existence, true, but he was used to being alone, and by imagining other solitary people awake at night, unable to sleep, suffering from countless anxieties and unfulfilled dreams, each of them tuning in from a lonely room to the comfort of his voice, he found meaning in what he did. The station was happy with him, too. He received small but regular raises in pay, and once again, as in high school band, he belonged to something larger than himself.

He could have happily held that job for the rest of his life, but after he’d been there five or six years the station wanted all its on-air “personalities” to start making public appearances, and at a little over 400 pounds now, Tiny couldn’t see riding to shopping mall parking lots in the station’s gaudy little trailer. He tried to talk to the station manager, citing his years of service. The manager shook his head sadly and agreed that Tiny had been good in the job and that the station would be sorry to lose him. There wasn’t anything much after that. He tried the other radio station in town without success. Driving to another town was out of the question: he couldn’t sit behind the wheel that long.

He did a couple stints of telemarketing. People hiring were eager to have his radio voice on their side, but it never worked out for long. Tiny was too inclined to let his calls be taken over by the people he was calling. Lonely and desperate for a listener himself, he empathized with them and let them talk on and on about their pets, their missing social security checks, the price of their prescription medicine, problems with taxes, arthritis, sleeplessness and in-laws. He made vague, comforting murmurs in reply, and sometimes, in gratitude, they would buy what he was supposed to be selling, but that didn’t happen often enough, and his calls lasted too long for him to rack up good sales numbers. His last phone sales job, three years before, had lasted less than two weeks. It was ages now since he’d qualified for unemployment benefits. Fortunately, living with his parents meant he had no expenses, and his mother gave him a secret allowance (secret from his father) so he wasn’t a complete prisoner.

He often dreamed of his radio days and woke surprised, after each such dream, to remember that that life was over.

He came to Rocket’s for breakfast every morning he could cook up some excuse to take his father’s car. His mother colluded with him, telling his father that Tiny needed to pick up things for her at the pharmacy or grocery store. He’d had to sell his own car after losing the radio job and had lost his health insurance at the same time. Now, with one failed stomach-stapling surgery behind him, he couldn’t afford another operation, couldn’t seem to lose weight without surgery, couldn’t find work and could no longer do much of anything, anyway. His only hope was to qualify for disability before he landed in the emergency room. Meanwhile he came to Rocket’s for their biggest breakfast, the Galactica, and then drove across town to a different Rocket’s for another Galactica before returning home to have lunch with his mother. Most of his day was spent eating. He couldn’t give reasons for it. The urgency that drove him was nothing he could explain.

      Once he went to a weight loss clinic and sat around a circle with other overweight and obese men and women. They were all supposed to tell the stories of why they ate so much and how they suffered because of the eating and because they couldn’t stop. Several cried when it was their turn to speak. Tiny couldn’t put together a story. “I don’t know,” he kept saying. “I’ve always been like this. My mom’s like this, too.” Various group members wanted to hear more about his mother and his relationship with her, while others asked if his father had loved him. At one point Tiny had to choke back a powerful impulse to say, “There was this girl once--.” He managed to keep the words stuffed inside. In the end he lost twenty-seven pounds at the clinic and regained over thirty during his first month back home.

      He could have ordered two or three breakfasts at once rather than driving from one fast food restaurant to another, but he had reasons for not doing that. It was true he had to sit at one of the special booths with handicap access, and even behind the table there was no hiding his size, but still, eating a single breakfast (albeit the largest one on the menu) seemed like something a normal person would do, and he wanted to seem as normal as possible. Every time the door opened and someone new came in, he looked up quickly before lowering his head again to the food in front of him. He kept his head down until the door opened again, but he couldn’t help looking up whenever he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Because you never knew who might walk in.

      He knew the odds of ever seeing her again were slim. She probably lived hundreds of miles away, in a different state. Still, she might come home to visit her parents if they still lived in town. He didn’t know if they did or not. He could have looked in the phone book but held back: if that door was closed, he didn’t want to know. She could be the one to look in the phone book for him, he reasoned. Not many kids from high school still lived with their parents, he knew, but still, she might call his folks just to find out where he was. A girl that nice was sure to remember her old friends.

Wherever They’re Going, They’re On Their Way

Northport Class of 2012

The class motto of Northport’s 2012 graduating seniors was “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way,” a quote from American poet Carl Sandburg, and a more refreshing group of well-spoken young people would be hard to imagine. They were serious and funny by turn, but their every word was honest. “We didn’t always love each other every minute,” they admitted, referring to historic feuds and fights along the path from kindergarten to graduation, “but here we are.” Still together. Setting off into the world.

Salutatorian John Petoskey

Valedictorian Nina Muller

Commencement speaker Steve Wetherbee

Is graduation anywhere else like this? A commencement address that includes a banjo? A little “flower girl” (Olivia Craker) giving out, from a basket on her arm, flowers (white orchids) to all the seniors on the stage? Seniors producing flowers (white lilies) from under their chairs to take down into the audience and present to parents and guardians? After diplomas have been handed out, the slide show (that's what the big screen in the top photo was all about), with pictures of each graduate, from baby photos to senior portraits?

Every year I, like many others in the audience, have more grey in my hair and am further in time from my own graduation. This year’s class was not yet born the first summer of my bookstore in Northport. The connection I had to the school during the years I tutored there has weakened, more a feeling in my heart now than an item on my daily agenda. And yet, Northport graduation never loses its magic for me. I wonder if these young people know how many people are made happy just by the sight of them on the sidewalk? They are our future.

So congratulations to the Class of 2012:

Megan Elaine Henderson

Austin Glen Miller

Anina Lee Punahele Naegeli Müller

John Minodeé Petoskey

Forrest Alexander Rogers

Chelsea Renee Wack

Francis Mitchell Wanageshik

Best wishes to you all as you go out into the world. May you work hard, do well and do good, and may all your dreams come true.