Eliza Frank

So Many Blogs, a Reverie

2011-12-01T14:04:00.000-05:00

Because the novel I'm writing now focuses on World War II, I have read a lot of literature and fiction about the period. I have set up another website, which has taken up most of the spare writing time not been devoted to the novel.

You can find it here:

http://www.somuchsomanysofew.wordpress.com/

Because the novel I'm writing now focuses on World War II, I have been living in my own little bubble recently. So when Kirsten Ogden, who I met at Kenyon, announced a participatory Facebook-blogging-prompt-a-thon, I joined in. You can find her blog here:

http://www.eatthepaper.com/blog1/?p=1635

Stay tuned for daily updates! Ho ho ho!

I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive

2011-06-26T21:46:00.000-04:00

Many, many years ago, before there was an internet, before there were cell phones, odd people who became obsessed with factlets (a term I’ve invented for facts that interest only you) would, if they lived in New York City, pick up the phone and call the reference number for the New York Public Library. A librarian, a bona fide human being (businesses did not use voice mail in those days) would answer the phone, repeat your query, put you on hold, trot off to who-knew-where, and return with your answer. “The population of Montana is 800,000, ma’am,” a hushed, respectful voice would say. “Do you have any other questions?”

In that age, known to paleontogists as the early 80’s, I was in college and working at a small publishing company which published a newsletter about publishing. So, yes, plenty of oddballs there – who else would agree to the salary? – with lots of questions for the New York Public Library hotline who responded to answers of both the work-related (population, circulation) and of the who-wrote-the-book-of-love variety.

“I know that Hank Williams died in the back seat of a car,” I told one of these saintly librarians one day thirty years ago, the receiver of the phone cradled in my neck while I typed subscription renewal notices on an IBM Selectric I coveted. “But what I want to know is, what kind of car?”

Please hold.

“It was a robin’s egg-blue ’52 Cadillac with a Continental wheel,” the librarian whispered when he came back on the line, with, I thought, a gratifying level of excitement. That was the thing about those librarians. If you asked them something really odd, because you were odd, and a novelist (“Did Egypt have eggplant in Cleopatra’s time?”) they became information detectives: they wanted to know as much as you did.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the novel II'll Never Get Out of This World Alive by Steve Earle. I read it this weekend. I would have read it in one sitting except that circumstances forced me to leave home, to gather food and drink, and to do all the other things that take one away from the urgency of story.

I have a complex relationship with Earle, further tangled by the fact that this relationship exists only in my head. Suffice to say, after much badgering on the part of my friend Linda, I have come to accept him as my own personal troubadour. I really liked his collection of short stories.

And I really like this novel.

We open the life of Doc, a defrocked hophead physician who stitches up the dealers and the johns and takes care of the whores in the slums of San Antonio in 1963. President Kennedy and his wife Yah-Kee (as she is known among the adoring illegal Catholic Mexican population of Texas) are soon to touch down on their way to Dallas.

Doc feels responsible for the death of Hank Williams – was it Doc’s shot of morphine which pushed Hank over the edge? – and then he comes to feel responsible for Graciela, the teenaged Mexican girl who is brought to him for a back-alley abortion and then abandoned and then … well, I can’t tell you.

This novel is fantastically imaginative, compassionate, engaging and American. I think if you read it, you will know what I mean by that, and appreciate it.

Teardrops on the City

2011-06-19T16:03:00.000-04:00

Some things you just can't write about.

Some things, you spend a lifetime writing around.

RIP, Clarence Clemons. You're one of the reasons I wrote at all.

(P.S. I stole this title from a headline on Salon.com. It was too good not to use.)

The Weird Sisters

2011-06-12T22:42:00.000-04:00

Well, this one was a shoe-in for me, seeing as I’m on the board of directors of a scrappy little Shakespeare Company, but still, I was surprised by how enchanted I was by The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown. Since my own recent novel is narrated by a Shakespeare-spouting heroine, I fell easily into the world of the family Andreas – dominated in a bookish, ethereal way, by the father, a renowned Shakespearean scholar who seldom converses in his own words if a quote from the Bard will suit the situation. (“Oh, Daddy, a Hamlet joke. How lovely. You shouldn’t have.”)

And so the daughters Andreas – Rosamund, Bianca and Cordelia – are all a bit, by any standards, weird. Brainy but passionate, deceitful but decent, peripatetic but a secret nester, respectively, all three women return to the house in the small Ohio town where they were raised to help their father cope with their mother’s sudden dire illness. Rosamund – Rose – like her father, a PhD, although in the far more logical field of mathematics, has never left the sphere of the university town she grew up in. Bianca – Bean – has fled back home from to avoid the consequences of succumbing to the variety of temptations in Manhattan. And Cordy, the baby, who has always been babied, is going to have a baby, without benefit of clergy, partner, money or job.

Narrated by the collective first person voice of the sisters, this book is a delightful, deft, witty read. The intimacy among the sisters is not cloying and the irritation and affection among them is heartfelt. I loved living in this world, and I didn’t want to leave it.

If you are one of the strange folk among us who is not a fan of Shakespeare, I beseech thee to have a go at this novel anyway if you are any of the following: a sister, a daughter, a reader, a sensualist, a baker, a clotheshorse, a mother, a cancer survivor, an academic, a Midwesterner familiar with the smell of ozone in the air just before a thunderstorm, a lover of summer in a small town, a lover of summer, a lunatic, a lover, or a poet.

A Cupboard Full of Coats

2011-06-03T16:07:00.000-04:00

Last week I attended the book bloggers convention, which closed out 2011’s BookExpo, and felt like something of an amateur compared to the hordes of genre-specific young people (mainly YA, middle grade and children’s reviewers) who had half a million followers and sophisticated streams of ARCs (advanced reader’s copies) coming in. As readers of this blog know, I review what I like, with an emphasis on literary fiction, writing about writing, and anything to do with Shakespeare.

One set of galleys I did get my hands on was a first novel, A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards, an accomplished work following Jinx, a woman of West Indian descent living in London as she finally comes to terms with the role she played in the murder of her mother fourteen years earlier. As the novel opens, the murderer has just been released from prison, but it will take Jinx the rest of the novel to similarly liberate herself.

“She was the only child of a poor, uneducated Montserratian land worker and his semi-literate wife,” Jinx writes of her mother. “Everything I know about them I learned from her, and the sum of everything she said was that they could not have worshipped God himself more than they worshipped the ground she walked on. Full stop.

She was too beautiful to make her own way to and from school at a time when every other child in the country was doing it, or to cook or clean or shop or carry, or even to amass a single useful life skill.”

Orphaned at 17, Jinx’s mother is rescued by Mr. Jackson, three times her age, who, “though half-blind from glaucoma . . . still had vision enough to see that my mother was too beautiful to weep broken-hearted, forlorn in her single bed . . . She was too beautiful for anything but the very best, and that was all she had because Mr. Jackson doted on her.”

This vivid passage, laid out early in the novel, encapsulates the complicated blend of anger, envy, love and bereavement that haunts and hampers Jinx. When Mr. Jackson (Jinx's father) dies early in Jinx’s childhood, Jinx has her mother all to herself until she hits her teens and her mother meets up with the jealous, violent Berris. Jinx’s mother abandons her, first figuratively, in the thrall of passion and violence, and then literally, when she is killed. Having inherited neither her mother’s beauty nor her passivity, Jinx’s road to maturity and motherhood has played out far differently, and her coming to terms with what she has done and who she has become resolves itself in a surprisingly tender conclusion.

The Idea of Order in Poetry Month

2011-04-30T09:58:00.000-04:00

Well, that was fun, wasn’t it!

For April is Poetry Month, I posted on my Facebook page one poem a day, for each day in April. Because of the attention-deficit nature of Facebook participants (I include myself), I included only a fragment of the poem, with the idealistic hope that particularly motivated readers would seek out the full poem for savoring. There is this device called Google. And, for now at least, there are still books.

This was the order I imposed on April.

Since April is National Poetry Month, for the nation of the United States, I leaned where possible to American poets -- 26 out of 29. (The final post directed Facebook readers to this blog post.) I count T.S. Eliot as half-American because he was born and raised in St. Louis and didn’t become a British citizen until he was 39. Other British-American hybrids, but in the other direction (grew up there, moved here) are Judith Barrington and Denise Levertov. I included St. Louis poets because St. Louis is a city of poets. Also, I am from there. As are T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Joseph Stanton, Sara Teasdale, and Maya Angelou.

All poems were originally written in English. I favored contemporary poets, and when possible, living poets (who could benefit from your patronage). In the spirit of VIDA, I tried to ensure a gender balance (15 women, 14 men!) I leaned toward poems about poetry, writing or other art forms; I figured that was more user-friendly and conducive to the theme. For special days (e.g., the anniversary of the Civil War, Shakespeare’s birthday, Good Friday), I went with the best pertinent fragment. For birthdays, I let the birthday girl have her pick. And yes, I threw in a few poets because in addition to being gifted, entertaining, generous souls, they are also pals (Judith Barrington, Matthew Olzmann, Joseph Stanton.) The full list follows with the key:
A = American
M = Modern
C = Contemporary
In bold face – alive and writing. Google them! Buy their books, go see them at readings!

Maya Angelou – A, C – Phenomenal Woman
Judith Barrington – ½ A, C – The Musicians’ Seamounts
Charles Bukowski – A, M – So you want to be a writer
Billy Collins – A, C – The Norton Anthology of English Literature
e.e. cummings – A, M – somewhere I have never travelled
Emily Dickinson -- A -- Hope
Stephen Dunn – A, C – Charlotte Bronte in Leeds Point
Lynn Emmanuel – A, C -- The Politics of Narrative: Why I am a Poet
T.S. Eliot – ½ A, M – The Waste Land
Deborah Garrison – A, C – A Working Girl Can’t Win
Jonathan Holden – A, C – How to Play Night Baseball
Marie Howe – A, C – The Moment
Clive James – C, L – Whitman and the Moth
Julia Spicher Kasdorf – A, C – First Gestures
Denise Levertov -- ½ A, C – Come Into Animal Presence
Thomas Lynch – A, C – Refusing at Fifty-Two to Write Sonnets
Heather McHugh – A, C – A Ghazal for the Better-Unbegun
Marianne Moore – A, M – Poetry
Matthew Olzmann – A, C – Previous Theories of the Body
Dorothy Parker – A, M -- Comment
Kay Ryan – A, C -- quote from her interview in the Wall Street Journal, regarding poetry, as the Pulitzer winner this year
Christina Georgina Rossetti – Good Friday
Joseph Stanton – A, C – Vermeer’s “A Woman Weighing Gold”
Mark Strand – A, C – Eating Poetry
Mary Jo Salter – A, C – John Lennon
Sara Teasdale – A, M – Advice to a Girl
William Shakespeare – Sonnet 7
Walt Whitman – A – The Uprising
Paul Zarzyski -- A, C – Matched Pairs

What are your favorites? Let me know. And I'll see you on Facebook next April.

Don't Quit Your Day Job, Redux

2011-04-03T10:39:00.000-04:00

Having quit my day job, I find myself busier than ever, working as a contractor, and finishing the polish on my novel, "Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me." I did chance to read this wonderful compilation, reviewed below. In the meantime, be sure to follow my "April is Poetry Month" parade of daily poems in fragments on Facebook.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit, edited by Sonny Brewer

Jobs have been much on everyone’s mind this year – losing them, finding them, wishing some would be created, while wishing others would succumb to a quiet unlamented death. Lots of us, for better or worse, have had the opportunity to meditate on the difference between making a good living and making a good life and just in time to help us along these meditations comes a collection of essays called "Don't Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit."

He has compiled a book that is “a picture of work in America. Untold sums of people have worked at all the jobs these writers have. And here were the best storytellers in the country giving voice to the dynamics of that work, of trading their time to get coffee and rent and keep a car going.”

These are all Southern writers, and the South has a tradition of storytelling. Wanting to be a writer, writing, becoming a writer -- all these stages of development in a writer’s life are too often regarded as elitist, fancy-pants ambitions and I think the word “Southern” throws a dose of humility into the presentation. Because humility is here aplenty. John Grisham's is the biggest name (other well-known ones are Rick Bragg, Pat Conroy, Winston Groom and Connie May Fowler) and he is the only one to have left behind what is considered a “profession” to become a full-time writer.

Others in the collection served as a high school guidance counselor, a mail carrier, a telemarketer. Many of the jobs are tedious and difficult, but all are recounted with respect. Some jobs involved daily encounters with dung, danger and death: A factory worker is made high and sick by the fumes of the lacquer into which he dips boat paddle oars all through the night shift. A railroad lineman picks bodies of dead animals off the tracks. A Seaman First Class steams across the Pacific towards Vietnam. A pulpwooder wades through the cottonmouth-laden debris left behind by a bulldozer to salvage the remains because “To leave the pulpwood piled on the land would be like burning money on the ground.” Even though, Rick Bragg adds, “I had never met a pulpwooder who had all his fingers and his toes.”

Carpenter Barb Johnson also lost a piece of a finger. But that was perhaps the least of her losses.

"Then Hurricane Katrina ate my carpentry shop and everything in it,” she writes in her piece “For the Good Lies,” “and I got a new story, that's for sure. That new story was almost about how I threw myself into rebuilding my business, working ceaselessly to regain the ground I'd lost. It eventually became clear that would be impossible. So it didn't happen in an instant. Not like you see in the movies, where ta-da! someone has an instantaneous transformation. It was a long, slow, wave goodbye. Letting go of the idea of something is much more difficult than letting go of the thing itself. But once I had cleared out the notion that I was always going to be a carpenter, the new story was perfectly obvious to me. I threw myself into writing ...”

Housewife and mother Janis Owens also threw herself into writing: “From '83 till '96, I wrote at least four hours a day, and sometimes round the clock, if the plot was cooking and [her young daughters] otherwise occupied. My college typewriter had died a natural death and I had no means to replace it, and for the first few years wrote in long hand, on yellow legal pads, from the first page to the cardboard, then flipped it and wrote on the back.”

So unassuming (“from the first page to the cardboard”) and quiet is Owens that throughout her long apprenticeship to the craft, no one in her modest, small-town life understands or cares that she is writing. On the long-awaited day when she finally is able to tell a neighbor that she sold her book, her neighbor’s reply is “You mean, like, at a garage sale?”

Similar to this is Tim Gautreaux’s account of his “short stint as an AM radio announcer on a little south Louisiana 500 watt station back in the mid-1960s.” The loneliness of the “dead stop” Sunday afternoons gnaws at him. For the sake of someone to talk to, he offers a free Beatles album, a gift certificate to a local café, and finally the cash in his own wallet to “the next caller.” No one ever calls.

But, as he writes as the conclusion of his piece “When Nobody Listens,” that job prepared him for the reality of his true calling, the “revising and revising, mailing a story dozens of times, figuring out the art of writing, making what I wanted to say into what people consented to hear, and failing again and again. But I was used to that. Being ignored was like announcing on small-town radio, and I never gave up, because I’d realized on a Sunday afternoon a long time ago that failure is not a problem. Not trying is.”

Agreed.

Treat yourselves to these stories. They are gems of gratitude. They are testimonies to resilience. And as for the difference between making a good living and making a good life, they overwhelming favor life.

Thunderbolt of Lightning, Very Very Frightening!

2011-01-08T20:57:00.001-05:00

So the other night I was watching the Kennedy Center Honors for Outstanding Achievement in American something or other by an American thus-and-so (my high school French teacher used to say "thus and so"; I always found it quaint). I wanted to see the tribute to Bill T. Jones. Because I don't know much about dance but I like Bill T.

I have always found ballet similar to basketball -- impossible to watch on t.v., compelling in person. I can't remember which ballet it was that I last saw performed by the New York City Ballet -- Coppelia? Swan Lake? -- something in which I thought well, for God's sake, if it's that hard to do, and it looks so hard to do when you're doing it, don't do it! It's like the triple-axle, triple-salchow, triple-triple-death-spiral nonsense of the Winter Olympics -- at a certain point, we just want the beauty, not the suffering.

So I haven't seen Black Swan, nor will I. I saw Requiem for a Dream, by the same director, and I am only now getting over it.

But the beauty of the body in motion is not the topic here. It is that I was watching the Kennedy Center Honors for Outstanding Whatever -- there was Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Herman, I think? (musical theater guy), Bill T. Jones, Merle Haggard (sweet!) and Paul McCartney. (Maybe someone else, but I'm proud of myself for remembering Jerry Herman, because I'm not a musical theater type, be gentle in your comments.)

So, was I thinking, but Paul McCartney is not American, so why is he receiving an American honor? (Truth be told, I was.) Was I thinking, why is Oprah acting like she invented Paul McCartney (although, for a little, as she clutched him and beamed, I was?) Was it, as some young woman younger than I am (and I am seriously younger than all of his children, and yet, and yet. He is ever and always a romantic ideal) groping him in proprietary pleasure when the kids on the stage launched into "Let It Be," who the hell is that one, now? Yes, there was some of that.

But I what I was really thinking was, Paul McCartney finally looks like an old man. Not a decrepit old man, or a sad old man, but just, a man, near the age he probably, biologically, is.

"You're just a little old man from Liverpool," various Beatles taunt Wilfrid Brambell, the actor who famously played Paul's grandfather in A Hard Day's Night.

So, I wondered, was Paul now the age of the actor who played his grandfather?

Nope. Paul is 69. Wilfrid Brambell at the time that A Hard Day's Night was filmed was 52.

The Social Worker

2010-12-20T19:11:00.002-05:00

The holiday party held annually in the lobby of my building took place yesterday and provided an excellent opportunity to observe the changing demographic of the building. More young people are moving in, particularly young people starting families. There are two Jennifers, each with a newborn baby and a shy, kind-eyed husband. This is all good, in a bittersweet way. It is desirable to have young people about, and it is best if a co-op is occupied one hundred percent by owners but as I wrote last year, the disappearance of the old people makes me one of the old people.

I went down to the lobby with my neighbor Michael who knows more of the neighbors than I ever will. “That’s ‘cause you work,” he told me, which was, until recently, true. “I’m around all the time.” It is also because Michael, as the saying goes, could charm a dog off a meat truck.

For example, I introduced myself to a neighbor I thought was new to the building and learned she has lived here for two years, that she has a cool job in the music industry, and that she bathes her cat every day with some allergen-killing shampoo. She is a cute, chipper young woman with the sturdy, compact build of a gymnast because, as I later learned, she spent two decades performing gymnastics.

She had vaulted over to the hors d’oeuvres when Michael and I were approached by someone who was new to the building. He told us his apartment number. Michael, who goes to every open house the building holds and has the blueprints of the whole place locked in his memory, informed me, “That’s the old Melman place.”

“Ooooooh.” I turned and tried to get an impression of the new guy: dark hair, dark eyes, dark shirt, black jeans, an unplaceable accent. “Mr. and Mrs. Melman. They died within a day of each other. She died and then he died the next day.”

My new neighbor looked distressed.

“No, it’s romantic,” I assured him. “They were married for like 70 years. They were like Cathy and Heathcliff.”

“If Cathy and Heathcliff were two short old Jewish people,” Michael added. “So, what do you do for a living?”

This was unusually blunt: for the party, for Michael, for the stage of the conversation we were in. But yet, there was something about the new guy that solicited a demand for an explanation. Who was he?

“I’m a social worker,” he said.

“Oh? Where?”

“In a clinic. In New Jersey.”

“Long commute.”

“I have a car.”

Oh, do you? Michael and I nodded and withheld the unasked questions. Among them: How can a social worker afford a car and the old Melman place, a two-bedroom on the top floor? And Do you live there alone? And God, the place must be pristine! The same tenants for 50 years and then newly renovated! And What is your accent? And Why are you pretending to be a social worker? And "in New Jersey"? Could you possibly be less specific? And Why is the aura of intrigue about you as palpable as fog? And Can we go see your apartment? Now?

We are all dying to get into one another’s apartments. The units named after the first dozen letters of the alphabets all have unique layouts: the studios, the compact one-bedrooms, the wastefully large one-bedrooms and the highly coveted two-bedrooms. The units named after the next dozen letters of the alphabet, on the other side of the lobby, follow the same patterns, only flipped. Even if your apartment is exactly the same as that of your neighbor, even, if, oh, say you were to lock yourself out of your apartment when the door slams shut behind you on your way to take out the recycling and you have to cajole the woman downstairs into letting you cross through her apartment and climb out her window onto the fire escape so you can break into your own apartment through the living room window, you would still pause and marvel at what she had done with the space, how she had met the challenges of the literal nooks and crannies that all the apartments have. It is a pre-war building filled with the quirks and perks of the time: built-in bookcases, high archways, deep closets, meandering hallways, foyers, occasionally, a raised dining area just off the kitchen.

The Gymnast bounded back and we introduced her to the Social Worker. I added, after some preliminary chatting, “He bought the old Melman place.”

“Oh! They died within a day of each other!” she told him pertly.

“Did they die in the apartment?” he asked, understandably apprehensive at the party line on his new place.

“No.” I then realized I had no idea. Mrs. Melman had been in the hospital, but who knew about Mr.? Ambulances are a routine sight outside the building. When we ask “Who is it?” of a neighbor watching the EMS workers unload the gurney onto the sidewalk, the answer is usually given by apartment number, as in “Who is it?” “5N.” “At least, I . . . don’t think so.”

“Um, I um . . . cheese . . . right back . . .”

The Social Worker headed toward the refreshment table.

“That guy is not a social worker,” I said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” said the Gymnast. “There’s something just, like -- ”

“He's a spy, obviously.” I've been reading a lot of Alan Furst’s novels recently. “But not a very good one. Because spies should try to blend in more. Like those Russians in New Jersey." (New Jersey!) "There’s nothing about him that says ‘social worker.’ What everything about him says is ‘international man of mystery.’”

As it happened, when I left the party, the international man of mystery joined me in the elevator and carefully asked me to repeat my apartment number.

“I’ve been thinking about having a gathering,” he said. “In my apartment.”

“Oh!” I was pleased that one of the young people would consider inviting me to a gathering, that I was not yet manifestly one of the old people; pleased, also, that I would get to see the old Melman place. “That would be nice.”

Only later did I realize – he never said what kind of "gathering."

How I Will Be Killed

2010-11-22T12:17:00.002-05:00

I will probably be stabbed on the subway because too often I violate the MTA prime directive and I stare at people. One day I will stare at the wrong person and he will stab me; either he will be one of America's Most Wanted, or he will be an impatient paranoid man with a penchant for privacy and a long blade strapped to the side of his left leg, a gangster, perhaps, antsy from a recent release from a halfway house. I say "he" because a woman wouldn't stab me. She would, if obviously beautiful, long ago have learned how to endure a gaze. And if not, she would walk away, scowl, or stare back in an exaggerated manner to demonstrate what an impolite fool I look. I can tell you this with the authority of experience.

I'm not staring because of attraction. Attraction inspires a series of furtive glances. I'm staring either because I've become lost in a series of image associations or because I've fallen into a narrative inspired by the first quick observation but swiftly detached from the reality of the stared-upon person as I cascade through the story in my head. (And before you suggest it, yes, I have mentioned this to my therapist, and she confessed that she did the same thing. She makes up stories about people she sees on the bus. "He has a mean wife," she will silently diagnose. "She hectors him.")

Recently I was staring at a man who looked like a Russian icon. "He looks so Russian," I thought. "Like Ivan the Terrible Russian. No, like a saint, the way they portray their saints. The long, gaunt faces, the dark, otherworldly, suffering eyes." He looked like the depiction of Joseph in the paintings of the Holy Family I saw at the Convent of St. Agnes of Bohemia in Prague.

I was watched as I walked through each room by a different short unsmiling nun. But I couldn't hurry along (I had no idea of what they needed to get back to doing, anyway) because the depiction of the nativity in Eastern Europe art is so different from what I was accustomed to: more brown, less blue, more earthy, less divine. No celestial shafts of light, no halo around the Virgin and child, no magi. Plenty of straw and wood, a large assortment of unimpressed livestock, a slightly more interested cat (the Italians never show a cat) and a weary Joseph. He has the air of a man who most likely has to muck out the stables to pay for their night's lodging and still has that tax thing to figure out.

Any-way. I was staring at this medieval-faced but youngish man on the 7 train. He nodded. I nodded back. The train stopped at Bryant Park. I rose to leave. He spoke to me. I pulled my earbuds off in time to hear him ask, "Russki?"

"Sorry?" I asked.

He shook his head, realizing I was not Russki. But he was. I was right! And I stepped off the subway, still alive.

Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me

2010-11-10T19:23:00.000-05:00

In the time since I last wrote about the vandalized Astoria piano, much has changed.

I was laid off from my "day job" in legal marketing.

My primary and immediate response to this has been to focus almost all of my energy on revising my novel, Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me. The novel takes place in Bermuda during the spring of 1941. During my revision process, I have kept my leisure reading "in period" in order to keep the voice of the novel "yar."

Among the nonfiction: a collection of essays by George Orwell (always a pleasure), Facing Unpleasant Facts, John Steinbeck's so under-crowed-about dispatches from the European theater, in a collection called Once There Was a War, transcriptions of Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts from the London Blitz called (of course) This is London, and a heart-rending accounting of Murrow, Harriman and Gil Wynant by Lynne Olson, entitled Citizens of London.

In addition to the John Lawton "Inspector Troy" series of novels (particularly Second Violin, Blackout and Riptide), I have read and can happily recommend several contemporary novels which are set in the period. A Fine Radiance by Lauren Belfer, The Postmistress by Sarah Blake and The Information Officer by Mark Mills. A Fierce Radiance follows the story of Life magazine photographer Claire Shipley and her involvement with a doctor on a medical team racing to perfect the formula for pencillin with the hope of saving the lives of millions of soldiers (since so many of the wounded died from the infection to their wounds when they might have survived the wound itself). It's a terrific evocation of the New York City of that period, particularly of my old neighborhood on the west side of Greenwich Village.

The Postmistress weaves together the story of three women, two of them residents of a small New England coastal town and the third a radio reporter and Murrow colleague with the wonderfully Dickensian name of Frankie Bard. Her reports from the London Blitz are both frank and bardic, and they reach into the lives of the two stateside characters with poignant and tragic consequences.

The Information Officer details another blitz -- that of the island of Malta. With its fast-paced and (almost unbearably) suspenseful plot and its witty, sexy characters, I wish British television would just hurry up and produce it already. It contains the best exchange of dialogue I have read recently. I can reproduce it here without spoilers since I'm not saying who, to whom, when or in what context:

"You threw him out of a plane?"
"You make it sound easier than it was. He fought me like a tiger all the way."

Looks Like an Inside Job

2010-06-30T16:25:00.002-04:00

"Astoria Piano Vandalized" reads the headline of the Western Queens Gazette which, in case you have mislaid your copy, details the destruction of a piano which was placed in Athens Square Park by the nonprofit group Sing for Hope. As a summertime public art project which has become a kind of New York tradition (the cows, the Gates, the waterfalls), Sing for Hope has placed sixty pianos in public places around the five boroughs. “Play Me, I’m Yours!” the pianos invite.

One piano was placed in Athens Square Park in Astoria, home of the Steinway piano factory, the last active piano factory in New York City, which in the 19th century numbered 171. The last factory to close was the Sohmer factory, on Vernon Boulevard in Astoria, which closed in 1982, spent some time as an office furniture warehouse, and was declared an historic landmark in March, 2007, and has been in the process of being converted into condos for the past couple of years delayed, I can only surmise, by the credit crunch of the recession. If you have visited Socrates Sculpture Park, you have seen the former Sohmer factory with its landmark mansard-roofed clock tower. Sohmers are not Steinways, but they are nothing to sneeze at. When Irving Berlin wrote, “I Love a Piano,” he write it on a Sohmer.

Here is a photo and an excerpt from the fascinating (especially if you are a geek about the history of neighborhoods) report from the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Why do I know all this? A few weeks before that factory was declared an historic landmark, I found a Sohmer piano put out on the street for Saturday large trash pickup. I have written about it here and am also developing it into a larger piece because, how can I put this, I just love pianos. I still have the Sohmer I rescued from the street, even though the soundboard is ruined and several of the keys don’t work at all. I have not come up with the $8,000 I need to have it fully restored to its former glory. But I can’t let go.

“The badly vandalized piano at Athens Square Park, 30th Street and 30th Avenue,” reads the article in the Western Queens Gazette, “had all of its keys and part of its inner gears removed.”

Indeed. The vandalism is quite specific and specialized. The piano was not smashed, axed, beat up, beat in, set on fire or otherwise generally molested. But its keys and part of its inner gears were removed. This particular neighborhood is full of retired tuners and technicians. The violated piano was a Kimball, a Chicago-based manufacturer. The vandal carefully removed the keys from their supporting nails and left the frame. But why, as Keith Morrison on Dateline NBC would ask, why would anyone do that?

Parting, Sweet Sorrow, Etc.

2010-06-26T12:56:00.000-04:00

I just finished our last workshop in Dinty Moore's Literary Nonfiction class at the Kenyon Summer Writers Conference. An exceptionally kind and talented group of us. My new friend Nina and I walked over to get sandwiches from the deli to take on the plane with us and already the vibe in beautiful downtown Gambier and across the campus had modulated from that of a literary conference to that of an Episcopalian retreat. The Episcopalians are everywhere. Specifically, they are down the hall from the computer lab where I am writing this blog post, singing hymns, as good Protestant folk ought.

But where are the mimes? There ought to be mimes. Actually, they are here, but nobody has seen them yet. Or heard them. (OK, that was a cheap shot.) We had heard that a teenage troupe was in the week before, and mourned not seeing them. Then a few days later, we saw a sign "Mime Parking." Photo op! I suspect they are being kept busy in one of the three theaters on the Kenyon campus. That's right. 1600 students. Three theaters.

So, an end to my glorious week without blackberry, cell phone (my choice), television (except for the occasional updates on the World Cup and the marathon tennis match, courtesy of the bar at the Village Inn), newspaper (except again glances at the headlines of the New York Times online)or anything but sitting in workshop, reading work, being sent forth to do new work, and listening to readings. I predict re-entry will be saddening.

Emotionally Draining, Physically Exhausting, Please Don't Let It End

2010-06-23T14:04:00.000-04:00

Kenyon Day 4.

Quite a heady time here in the brutal central Ohio heat. I had planned on using the fantastic-looking pool here, but Kenyon seems to make its money by renting out its lovely dorms and buildings to a variety of groups throughout the summer. Last week was Job's Daughters and a group of teenage mimes. This week it is writers and teenage swim camp. I have not seen the teenage swimmers swim, although I have heard from an eyewitness that they are profiles in endurance. On dry land, they stand in a herds, feeding, eyes glazed either because it is early in the morning (at breakfast) and they are teenagers, or because they have spent all day swimming (at dinner) and are exhausted. I had hoped to use the pool, but there are only slivers of availability.

So yesterday I went on a trail hike. The assignment was to describe myself at a moment in time and my goal here at Kenyon was to generate work that was not about me as a child. "Describe myself at a specific moment in time," and I wanted to be 1) an adult and 2) happy. It took a hell of a lot of trail hiking to come up with something and by the time I got back to Mouse Cottage, as I have dubbed my over-air-conditioned dwelling which I share with two roommates and a noctural rodent, I had time only to shower, change and shuffle slowly, sore-muscled, off to the dining hall, where the teenager swimmers were huddled around the soft serve ice cream machine, silently pumping and nudging each other aside.

In this morning's session, two people cried when they read their pieces. I cry when they cry. I cry at anything. I haven't cried reading my own pieces aloud but I experience a different, marvelous confluence of nervous sensations: my hands shake, my palms sweat, and my voice trembles. Lovely. Can't wait for my public reading Friday night!

Back to Mouse Cottage now, to change into my trail clothes.

Kenyon Summer Writers Conference

2010-06-21T13:33:00.000-04:00

I am here at Day 2 of the Kenyon Summer Writers Conference, which is noteworthy only because I have never been to a writer's conference, even though I have wanted to go for twenty years (and yeah, by the way, where do these recent college grads come up with the $ for this?), because I haven't had a full week off from my job for three years, and because I am happier than I have been in so long that I can't remember.

Our instructor in Literary Nonfiction is Dinty W. Moore, the editor of the online publication Brevity. Our first handout contains this wonderful quote from Reynolds Price:

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo Sapiens -- second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

My Astoria

2010-05-19T23:01:00.015-04:00

I have recently acquired a pen pal in St. Louis, my home town, who was under the mistaken impression that I live in L.A., due probably to my recent interview for the Women and Hollywood blog. He wrote from a gloomy day in St. Louis, grumbling that he didn’t even want to hear about how the weather was where I was (L.A., he presumed) and complaining about the weeds taking over the zoysia grass. I’m sure zoysia is common worldwide, but I don’t hear a lot of talk about it in these parts. This is probably because I live in New York City, where talk of lawn care in general is thin on the ground. But the word “zoysia” immediately evoked my South St. Louis grandparents and their too-perfect lawn.

“I don’t live in L.A.!” I wrote back to him. “I live in Astoria, Queens.”

He wrote back that although he had grown up in Brooklyn (back when there were still Brooklyn Dodgers) he knew little of Astoria except for having traveled through it to visit a relative.

Well, that was Astoria, originally. A place to travel through. F. Scott Fitzgerald describes it thus, in the 20’s, before Astoria was transformed by the great wave of Greek immigrants in the 50’s. Back then, it was just a dismal backstage boneyard feeding the roaring 20’s maw of Manhattan:

This is a valley of ashes-a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

A place, in other words, no decent Princeton grad like the narrator of "The Great Gatsby," would be caught dead stopping in, even for gas, traveling between his “bond business” on Wall Street and the great West Egg of Long Island to Gatsby’s mansion. How awful, to have to witness the "obscure operations" of the working class from your Ivy League gaze.

And popular culture has been no kinder. The people of Queens are depicted in the movies as buffoonish ethnics, the defeated lower middle class, slamming crockery and stepping on their vowels, or a curiously unethnic, untough and un-accented Hollywood baby-faced Spiderman.

What I had been about to tell my pen pal about Astoria was that I chose it, or it chose me, for a variety of practical reasons – its persistent lack of cool keeps the prices down, its proximity to Manhattan repeatedly startles visitors from other boroughs, and primarily, its sense of déjà vu. “It is like South St. Louis,” I would have written him, “except substitute Greeks for Germans, and I don’t know which is more xenophobic.”

Well, I do know which is more xenophobic. For one thing, the Germans are colder towards everyone, even their own kin, while the Greeks are more clannish.

Also, "xenophobia” is their word -- “xenos” from the Greek meaning foreigner and “phobos” from the Greek meaning fear. I have lived in the same neighborhood for 15 years and only recently has the butcher or the tailor at the dry cleaner given me a reluctant nod in response to my “Good morning.” Even my saying it in Greek elicited no kinship: “kalimera” brought nothing but smirks or blank faces. “You Greek?” they ask. “No, actually I’m from –” I start to reply, but already the shades are drawn and the front door lock has clicked.

It would also be helpful to remember here that the word “barbarian”, now understood to mean an uncivilized person, means, in Greek, “one who does not speak Greek.” It was thought, according to noted Classics professor Elizabeth Vandiver, to derive from the Ancient Greeks’ mockery of the languages of other tribes: “Bar bar bar,” they would say to the mongrel tribe leaders, much as we say “blah blah blah” to indicate the speech of those whose interests and patience do not match our own.

What I would have told my St. Louis pen pal is that the pre-war buildings and the tidy gardens of Astoria remind me of South St. Louis. I bought my apartment because I loved the pre-war building, about which I have written here. The building has lovely arch doorways, and beautiful landscaping (though no zoysia) to which several of my neighbors contribute the whole of their weekends. My neighbors and I are not as close as I would like. But I realize that in NewYork City, even in the “ashes” of its glitter, that lack of neighborliness is a luxury problem. My building is diligently tended to, scrupulously clean, generically attractive, as the lobby of an “extended care facility” might be attractive, full of unused couches and artificial flowers. No, my building is not cool. But it is lovely.

But my grandmother would have been pleased. I would say “delighted” but “delighted” was never her style. I was able to buy the apartment in the first place because of a small inheritance from her and her frugal,reserved lifestyle. When I stepped into my then-empty apartment as a prospective buyer, I felt that my grandmother’s dishes would fit into the kitchen. I felt that she would have approved although, had she been there, she would have had no one to talk to, Germans and Greeks being what they are.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal was the latest to "discover" Astoria
as a “gentrifying” and “hip” emerging new nabe. We have been down this road before. Roomy apartments! Young hip filmmakers! Close to Manhattan! Up and coming! Have a baklava!

But on second thought, you know what? Stay away

Women and Hollywood

2010-04-17T13:56:00.001-04:00

I’m not the kind of feminist who says “I’m not a feminist, but …” – thereby disclaiming all the mannish and confrontational aspects of accepting the label “feminist” while embracing all of the legislative equalizers and social freedoms so hard won by those strident, shrill, bluestockings from whom we must keep our distance, lest we … actually, I don’t know the “lest” part. “I’m not a feminist, but …” says a young Hollywood actress … but?

But I’d like to see women portrayed on screen as the complex individuals they are in role life? But I’d like not to have to audition in a bikini? But I’d like not to have to respond to auditions which read “Must have a lean dancer body. Must have real breasts. Do not submit if you have implants.” But I’d like to have economic autonomy over my own life? But I’d like to speak my mind and still wear lipstick?

Yeah, I don’t get the “I’m not a feminist, but …”

I am a feminist.

However, I am the kind of feminist who lets other feminists do my dirty work for me.

One of those feminists who does my dirty work for me is Melissa Silverstein, over at Women and Hollywood.

I’m not just saying this because she recently, graciously gave me a place as a guest blogger on her site to discuss my friend Hilari Scarl’s film "See What I'm Saying"

But that was nice.

If you subscribe to my blog, consider subscribing to hers. Far-reaching, tireless, opinionated, rigorously focused. And feminist.

Stephen King, Stephen King, You're Afraid of Everything

2010-02-24T21:44:00.001-05:00

This made me laugh:

http://kenyonreview.org/blog/?p=7992#more-7992

The Stakes Are High, the World is Bleak

2010-02-21T16:21:00.004-05:00

I may be late to the party here, or maybe early, caught, as I am, between news of the movie and the publication of the book, which came out four years ago.

The film Winter’s Bone was last month screened at Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury prize, and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Skimming the news from Sundance on the internet, I saw that Winter’s Bone is about an intrepid teenage girl who struggles to keep her family together after the disappearance of their father.

Odd, I thought. How did that happen? My script Wildflowers of the West is about an intrepid teenage girl who struggles to keep her family together after the death of her father. And there is no market for such a thing, no, none, none at all. What was I thinking?

During my trip to the Austin Film Festival, I barely could spit out the logline (which I felt I had really, really boiled down, boiled down to caramel) before something shiny apparently moved behind my head and my listener was gone. In one case, we were going around a table telling a producer about our projects, and I followed a guy who said, “My script is like ‘E.T. meets Toy Story.’” “My two favorite movies!” cried the producer. “Send it to me!” She then turned her perfect teeth on me, and I got as far as “an intrepid teenage girl …” before the light went out of her eyes.

“Who is your audience?” snapped another woman at the festival, when we casually exchanged loglines. She sounded quite irritated, as though “intrepid teenage girl” was the most repellent phrase she’d ever heard. We were standing in line to see “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.”

Based on the novel. Aye, there’s the rub. Winter’s Bone was indeed a novel first. I have spent the weekend reading it and it is one hell of a novel.

The heroine, Ree Dolly, is more than intrepid; she is one of the fiercest and bravest young women I’ve ever encountered in fiction. An Ozark teenager, she has been raising her two younger brothers single-handedly since her mother went crazy (“Mom’s morning pills turned her into a cat, a breathing thing that sat near heat and occasionally made a sound.”) and her father’s primary occupation is cooking meth, which is a kind of family tradition. Her father, gone missing yet again, has put up the house and land for his bail bond. Unless Ree finds him, she, her mother and brothers will be “livin’ in the fields like fuckin’ dogs, man.”

This was published as a Young Adult novel. Don’t ask me how, although that explains how I missed it. I never did understand the YA market, not when my novel was published as a YA, and not since. My own novel is indeed Anne of Green Gables compared to Winter’s Bone¸which our old high school librarian wouldn’t have gotten through three pages of before declaring it unsuitable. The language is filthy. Drugs are everywhere. Sex too is everywhere but far less pleasurable. Love is a slap in the face or a good hard pinch that at least shows you care. Ree's "grand hope" for her brothers is that "these boys would not be dead to wonder by age twelve, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean." And then, there are the bad guys.

Apparently Daniel Woodrell, who lives in the Ozarks, coined the phrase, or perhaps invented the genre of “country noir.” He has written eight novels, another one of which,Woe to Live On was made into the film Ride with the Devil. In this, the lead character is an intrepid teenage … boy.

He writes about teenagers for the same reason I do. The stakes are high, the world is bleak.

I am now going to buy everything he has written. And so should you.

Here is his author's page on Amazon. And here is an interview with him in The Southeast Review.

Every Time I See You Falling

2010-02-17T17:40:00.000-05:00

I have to admit, I used to like to watch the Winter Olympics, but now I can barely glance at a television screen without wincing. Speed skating, which was being broadcast in a restaurant where I had dinner Saturday night strikes me, as I remarked to my companion, as “a lot of fun to do, but dull as hell to watch.” Even before the awful luge death, I had planned to avoid the endless coverage, all the slipping and sliding and spills, never mind those overwrought, overproduced mini-documentaries on the gold contender, “Svetlana was born with the blood … of a champion.”

I never wanted to be a figure skater. I have weak ankles and no athletic traits. Also, I hate the cold and hate getting up early, and in those mini-documentaries, stories are always told about the mother of the figure skater getting up at 3:00 to drive Brianna to the skating rink four hours away. It is always the mother of the American women skaters who do this, by the way, partly because Europe is presumably more compact (that is, the rinks are closer and perhaps accessible by train?) but also because Brianna, as an American, has an indefatigable work ethic, while Svetlana was just born that way. (Someone needs to tell the sneering partisans in the broadcast booth that it’s okay to stop hating the Russians now.)

I’m enough of a fogey to state that I liked it better when it was figure skating, before it became a skate-jumping tournament. Also, I can no longer stand to watch some poor kid sacrifice a lifetime of training to the momentary slip in a triple triple lutz thirty seconds into the program. Every time I see them fall, I change the channel.

The Nasty Gidgets, Part II

2010-02-06T11:37:00.003-05:00

My dear friend Linda, a/k/a “the hippest chick in Utah,” has annoyed me greatly. She is, as devoted followers of this blog will remember, a music critic for The Standard-Examiner, and the occasional weekend dj on KRCL (See The Nasty Gidgets, Part I). As I outlined in that earlier post, she also writes and produces a podcasty thing connected with the paper, called “The Beat Beat.” Those brief pensants on musical topics -- the music of Haiti (made me cry), a salute to the late, undersung Ellie Greenwich ("she put the words the to Wall of Sound") -- are knowledgeable, inviting and bite-sized.

These little 'casts hook you, indeed. And herein lies the annoyance. Her most recent Beat Beat outlines songs we would gladly never hear again, one of which, for her, is Led Zeppelin's “Stairway to Heaven.”

Well, it is for me, too. I mean, my God. If you had grown up, as Linda and I did, as the hippest chicks in Kirkwood, Missouri (in an underground, unacknowledged, downtrodden, beleagued, wise before our time, why are we here in the basement listening to records on a Saturday night sort of way) getting high on vinyl and despairing at the garden-variety musical taste of our classmates and neighbors, then you, too, would have hated “Stairway to Heaven.” It had all the ersatz, faux-Renaissance, “we come off as quite deep if you’re stoned” and “wot ya think, guys, a flute might be cool here” crappity-crap of 70’s British rock BUT WAS, TO BOOT, always voted #1 in the best songs round-ups of local FM radio stations. (To which Linda and I would listen, as touchingly anxious as an Oscar contender, as though we had some stake in it, hoping for recognition for our favorites).

So, yes, I agree that “Stairway to Heaven” should be included on my list of music I would gladly never hear again for the rest of my life (along with the entire oeuvre of Aaron Copland, Celine Dion and a certain New Yorker whose initials are BJ).

But did Linda, in her audio report, have to quote the lines:

"If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now, it's just a sprinkling for the May queen ..."

and then play them as sung by Robert Plant, and then question their meaning? Now I have an earworm (from the German Ohrwurm, meaning a goddamn musical phrase -- usually involving a flute -- that you can’t get out of your head)?

The meaning of these innocuous lyrics is not mystical, or Tolkien-like, or a reference to World War II, as some devotees (who need to move on with their lives) have avowed. The infamous “bustle in your hedgerow” mystery means only, “If the wind is rustling the bushes, it doesn't mean something scary is in there, like a possum or a really large possibly rabid raccoon, it just means spring is on the way.” I have this on the greatest authority. My own.

But what I also have is an earworm.

To Harsh the Mellow

2009-12-31T17:13:00.002-05:00

A lot of things have harshed my mellow this holiday season, including a bronchial flu whose tenacity makes me question the purpose of the flu shot I submitted to last month, a demanding workload during the so-called “quiet week” between Christmas and New Year’s, and the fact that the youngest member of my department, a colleague I’ll call Maria, maintains a serene ignorance of the phrase “harsh my mellow.”

“Dude, you are harshing my mellow,” I emailed an associate who had sent me a last-minute, complicated rush request late in the afternoon. I cc’d Maria, who called me.

“What does that mean?” Maria asked.

“This will take hours!”

“No, what’s `harsh mellow’? Is it like `marshmallow’?”

“No,” I said.

“Is it like `man, you’re killing my buzz’?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Old people are so funny,” she laughed and hung up.

Adorable.

I am accustomed to making no sense to Maria; it’s a generational thing and a cultural thing, and by “cultural” I don’t mean that I spout poetry or cite the Triumvirate of Ancient Rome as a viable management stop-gap compromise (although I have done these things) but that I was raised in the suburban (but so recently rural) Midwest by bookish parents who were both only children, and Maria is the product of a thriving ex-pat Cuban community in New Jersey, with dozens of attendant cousins and uncles and aunts, none of whom, apparently, ever declared that it was advisable to “make hay while the sun shines,” recommended that “many hands make light work,” or praised something by saying “you can’t beat that with a stick.” Proclamations such as these tend to cause Maria to tilt her head quizzically, sending her hair into the kind of wavy raven cascade that romance novel cover illustrators can only dream of.

I don’t mean to stereotype, but I have never personally met a Cuban who was not out-of-the-ordinary attractive. Maria is more than that; she has the kind of velvety allure that inspires men from every strata of the law firm caste system to invent reasons to drift by her well-hidden desk. She does not encourage this and would frown at my mentioning it (if she knew that I had a website, which ha! she does not) and has in fact navigated her brief professional life with such aplomb that I soon left off condescending to her for her unfamiliarity with my obscure sayings, in favor of seeking her approval of them. She has become a kind of litmus test. If she doesn't get it, it's probably not easily gotten. While I don’t mind being regarded as an eccentric – I have earned that – I do dislike being thought a freak. Thus, Maria is my freak-o-meter.

But, “dude, you’re harshing my mellow”? Why would she not know that and yet know “man, you’re killing my buzz”?

The latter is a 70's era piece of Cheech-and-Chong nonsense. The former, however, entered our lexicon in Shakespeare’s time, specifically in Act V of Hamlet when Ophelia declares, “Noble prince, whose thunderous countenance/Hath harshed the mellow of so many days.”

Okay, so. Dude, that's not true. I made that up. It's a lie. A complete and utter lie, albeit one in iambic pentameter (for which, yay!) Ophelia is already dead by Act V, as I’m sure you know.

According to Urban Dictionary, to “harsh a mellow” means “to be a killjoy. to ruin someone's happiness, whether they are drunk, or just really happy, with sad news or drama.” The delightful example they use is:

“Dude. Your house is on fire.”
“Damn. You totally harsh my mellow.”

According to World Wide Words, “It’s a development of US campus slang, in which in the 1980s harsh became a verb in the sense of “to mistreat”, “to be very unfair to”.

I think that’s what I like about it; that use of the word harsh, which is very Shakespearean, in that Shakespeare would so often take an adjective and make it a verb. (I would provide examples, but that would mark me as freakish.) Also, mellow is so much milder than buzz. To “kill” someone’s “buzz” is to point out that they have broken all the crockery and blinded the dog, or that their cool new free room and board situation is also known as "jail" or that the beat they're grooving to is the sound of the sheriff pounding a foreclosure notice on the front door.

To harsh someone’s mellow, on the other hand, connotes an unnecessarily brutal intrusion into a mildly productive and soothing activity, like abruptly calling into active military service someone who is peeling vegetables for a stew, or demanding emergency and exacting veterinarian services from someone serenely brushing a cat. Or ordering an up-to-the-minute “client alert” at 5 o’clock during a “quiet week.”

The Dead and the Weakening

2009-12-21T18:41:00.003-05:00

My neighbor Mrs. Melman died on Sunday. My neighbor Mr. Melman died on Tuesday. Mrs. Melman was just a hair short of 90 and Mr. Melman was in his 80s. While I was reading the flyers on the bulletin board next to the mailboxes announcing where the services would be held, the super came over and asked me what the story was. I could only think of E.M. Foerster, "The King died and then the Queen died is a story. The King died and the Queen died of grief is a plot."

“There was an ambulance in front of the building yesterday morning,” I said to the super.

"Oh no, that was the lady in 2W."

"Who?" I asked.

"Old Greek lady with white hair."

Which could describe half the women in the building, on the block, in the borough.

Which, additionally, meant three neighbors dead in the space of four days.

“All the old people in the building are dying,” I said to yet another neighbor, my friend Michael.

“That means we’re the old people now!” he replied cheerfully.

I have certainly let slip away the callousness of youth. The sight of the ambulance in front of the building used to send me to the phone to call one of the board members, “What unit?” in case one of my friends wanted to buy in. Now I ask, “What happened?” And so I found myself attending the building’s holiday party yesterday, an event I historically treated as a drive-by encounter, navigating through the old ladies and pausing only long enough to bestow holiday tips on the super and the porter.

I sat next to Michael, sipping bad red wine from a plastic cup, discussing with the neighbors (three of whom were named Rose, so that made it easy) the sweet tragedy of the Melmans (“he always said he would go when she did”), other impending tragedies (“Juan is in the hospital”), how nice the landscaping was and who was on the gardening committee (I am on no committee) and how superior our building was to all the other buildings in the neighborhood. As the party wound up, Michael, another friend and I were able to bound back up the stairs with relative vitality, but the vitality was only relative; we were only young compared to the old. We had not been engaging in the kind of cutting-edge patois that post-graduates thrive on, and I had been effectively snubbed by the wife of the hipster couple who work in graphic arts and ride a Vespa, while happily welcomed into the fold by the three Roses.

Strangely enough, this did not make me feel melancholy. Rather, it made me feel neighborly.

99% of Scripts Suck

2009-10-23T21:41:00.002-04:00

Here at the Austin Film Festival for a few days, for the Screenwriter's Conference. I was last here ten years ago, and was seriously discouraged enough to focus on putting together a kind of day career that would allow me to get me out of debt. Ten years ago, it seemed that every panelist or presenter said, "99% of the scripts I read suck." It was as though they had had a pre-conference meeting, because no one said, "The majority of the scripts I read are bad," or "Almost everything I read is sub-par." No, everyone said "99%" and everyone said "suck."

The larger problem, this year (although, the first panel I attended? "Suck" was uttered two minutes in) is that no one is buying anything. Producers, managers, agents and executives who have made time to attend can best be described as "cautiously realistic." No one is buying anything, and even if they were, they would be buying only comedies and thrillers. I finally snagged one agent long enough to say, "Talk about drama."

"Drama is tough."

"I know. So please validate this. If I wrote `The Lovely Bones' as an original spec screenplay, it would never get made. The only way it's getting made is because it's a literary property to begin with and they adapted it."

He agreed. I have long played with the idea of returning to my script "Wildflowers of the West" and writing it as a novel. I don't know how I will find time to do this, since I am at work on another novel, and the unfortunate focus I put on my day career has resulted in very limited hours for sleep, let alone living a creative life. I realize this is a luxury problem, when so many people, many of them my friends, are unemployed.

Austin in the meantime is the great city it has always been. I haven't been able to see many films; today, only a series of shorts in lieu of attending yet another panel to hear the advice "Believe in yourself." I was standing in line for "Precious" when I realized that I would be standing in line for another hour and a half for a film which would be opening in New York very soon, and I was better off spending time with an old friend who happened to be in town.

Off now to find some barbecue and attend at 10:15 screening of a film with a promising premise. Stay tuned.

Q 4 U: 2 B or no?

2009-09-18T15:21:00.001-04:00

Speak up or don’t speak up: that is the question.
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The tweets and texts of the woman beside me
Through Acts I, II, III and IV of Hamlet,
Or to remind her of the no-texting rule
Announced at the commencement of the play.
The bright illumination of the screen
Distracts me. What has she to say which is greater
Than one hundred and twenty five dollars,
My ticket’s price; or the words of the Bard?
I should have gone to London to see this
Surely the West End crowd is more polite.
At last, I speak: “Could you please not do that?”
Receiving a mutinous glare, I add:
“It’s distracting!” Lo, cooperation!
In the final act, the drama exists
Only on the stage. The rest is silence.

Bright Star

2009-09-11T10:46:00.001-04:00

In a screenwriting class I took lo these many years ago, the importance of a film’s opening image was brought up. The instructor was male, most of the class was male, and the example he used was male iconography: “A gun in your face.” It was from a Clint Eastwood movie, one of those interchangeable Dirty Harry movies. An opening image, intoned the teacher, should immediately establish the themes and concerns of the movie. I’d have thought the words “Clint Eastwood” and “Dirty Harry” would suffice, but apparently, “a gun in your face” drives it home.

The opening image of Jane Campion’s film “Bright Star” about the love between John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne, is an extreme close-up of a needle piercing a cloth, a close image, very close, so close that you can see the fibers of the cloth furring its surface. This, then, will be a film about intimacy and domesticity, about creativity and limitations. We see half of just one stitch, after all, not a dramatic sweep of a draped skirt, so we know we are in different territory than a typical costume drama, or “frock flick.”

“My stitching has more merit and admirers than both of your two scribblings put together,” Fanny tells John Keats and Charles Brown, as they rudely shoo her from the room so they can work on their poetry. “And I can make money from it.”

That one small scene encapsulates all the conflicting forces of the film: her utilitarian talent and his ethereal one, a woman’s “craft” versus a man’s “high art,” the rivalry among the poets Keats and Brown and the interloper Fanny; the lovers Fanny and Keats and the jealous, carping Brown, who yearns for fulfillment from poetry, Fanny, and Keats all and finds it in none, and all three of them against the fate of fortune. None of them has one.

The nip of poverty is a real wolf at the door in this film: if Keats were to marry Fanny, he would have to get a job and give up his poetry, if he were to marry Fanny as a poet, her family, already scraping by to maintain a respectable bourgeois façade, would have to support him. So instead of making love they yearn and make do. “Making do” is another theme of the film – not only does Fanny design and sew all of her own clothes, but nearly every character in the film is seen creating something, whether something as basic as a meal or as elaborate as an orchestra composed solely of human voices.

Not for the action junkie or even the impatient, “Bright Star” is an exquisite film. Characters leave a kitchen worthy of Vermeer to step into a meadow worthy of Renoir, and all this visual splendor is accompanied by a blessedly muted soundtrack. We don’t need a swell of string section to emphasize that a thing of beauty is a joy forever. Jane Campion has always been a filmmaker sure of her own eye; it’s nice to know she has faith in ours as well.

The Palmer Method

2009-09-08T22:30:00.006-04:00

I had dinner tonight with a friend, who I'll call Lola, which is so not even close to her name. She is highly educated (Ivy League law school, Ivy League college, and a "prep" so exclusive I never actually thought, growing up in Kirkwood, Missouri and reading short stories in The New Yorker, that I would ever actually meet one of that school's graduates). I asked after her son, who has just begun school in what would be called, in the U.S. (they live abroad), the third grade.

"Oh, that's when you learn cursive!" I pointed out happily, remembering the squat, wide, green signs of the alphabet displayed above the chalkboards in grades three and up and my yearning, when I was mere first-grader, to be in a "big kid" class where those swoops and swirls were mandated homework.

"Cursive is so unnecessary," she grumbled, "so obsolete!"

But --

"The whole point of cursive is that it was faster than printing," she went on. "Why, if everyone types now, do kids have to learn it at all?"

Was the whole point of cursive, I wondered, was that it was faster than printing? I hadn't realized that. But - but -- when they had to sharpen quills and dip them in ink -- did they not have to give more thoughtful consideration and craft, to their words, to their compositions? Was there not keener eloquence in their expression? Was there not a specific identity revealed in handwriting? If not, then why do we study original manuscripts? Why do we have handwriting experts to identify various lunatics? Why, in Twelfth Night , does Malvolio, coming across a forged letter, insist that it is the handwriting of his beloved mistress:

By my life, this is my lady's hand: these be her
very C's, her U's and her T's
and thus she makes her great P's.
It is in contempt of question her hand.

Now, I am not suggesting that Lola's young son be compelled to embrace, just now, this bit of dialogue. It is far too raunchy. The innuendo that Malvolio's lady's C, U (fill in the blank) T --makes great a P -- has not changed since Shakespeare's time. But the thought that a "hand" (handwriting) so exciting a lover should be lost? Replaced by texting? Too sad to contemplate. One of the most erotic things ever uttered to me was a boyfriend (a concert pianist) praising a letter I'd written to him, longhand, not even a love letter, but one "so beautifully expressed, so natural, so perfect, flawless! Like Mozart!" He mainly meant that I had crossed nothing out and that perhaps he was enchanted by the flow of my handwriting. Which, sigh. And ... awwww. Anyway, not something you get from an iPhone's XOXO.

"Well, why learn math, when there are calculators?" I countered to Lola. "Why learn anything at all, when there is Wikipedia?"

"I never write cursive," she grumbled, "I print. And my son hates his handwriting homework."

I hated my handwriting homework, too, but that was primarily because I wanted to be writing SOMETHING -- "My dog is white, except where his neck is grey" was my most pressing communication -- and not just making shapes, which shapes -- that is to say, which j's, k's and h's (which in my hand resemble each other) would come back with little red check marks and suggestions -- "make rounder," "close up." (My disinclination to hear criticism of my writing came early, as you can see.)

"And when I write, I like to edit," she continued. "I can't write a sentence without changing it five times. How can you just write?"

I thought of Alice Walker: "The poem that travels down the arm." I believe I even mimed it to her, the brain, the shoulder, the elbow, the hand.

"I just don't see the point," she shrugged. "And his report cards come back with all these comments."

And he could, I agreed, probably understand the concept of an apple from a single-serving container of applesauce from the grocery store, without ever having to venture into an orchard.

Wendy and the Lost Girls

2009-08-29T11:52:00.004-04:00

I wrote some time ago about my short story "Wendy and the Lost Girls," appearing in the anthology Nothing But Red. Recent events in the news compel me to produce it in its entirety here.

WENDY AND THE LOST GIRLS
By Elizabeth Bales Frank

Our number one dream is the one we call “The Milk Carton.” Maya dreamt it first and told us about it the next day in the cafeteria. That night, we all had it. You’re at the quick-store buying milk. Wendy’s photo is on the milk carton -- the famous photo, the one you by now know better than your own face, the one on the flyers you’ve been handing out every weekend. So many weekends now that you can’t remember what you did with your time before finding Wendy was your purpose. The carton provides the numbers on Wendy, what we used to call the “vital stats” and then, as the hope of vitality faded, the cold facts. Five feet, 98 pounds, hair sandy blonde, eyes -- with their cute downward-slanting corners and their amber flecks and their ability to refract prancing shifts of light -- “brown.”

After we had dreamed the dream enough times, we started to have variations: Susannah sees herself on the carton. Kimmy sees Wendy buying the milk, not in the grainy surveillance camera footage, but live, as though she’s hovering somewhere in the store, although even being there doesn’t focus the picture any – Wendy is still dulled and blurry. Tricia sees herself buying the milk, dropping the carton. It explodes, spewing blood.

The dream of the milk carton is the first united dream, silent, like an ancient movie. In it we hear nothing but our heartbeats, nothing but our breathing. Except when Kimmy dreams it. Then we hear a voice calling through a wave of crackle. Through white noise. Through the sound between stations.

Maya was the first, too, to dream “Wendy, Indifferent.”

In that one, you find Wendy, safe and whole. At the sight of her, your back arches like a cat stretching out of a nap. Your relief is electric. It hums like a string on an electric guitar and the reverb burns up your spine and sends hot spidery shivers across your scalp. All those sensations happen at once, as scary as a first kiss. Not the real first kiss, the clumsy pressing, but the one you wait for, the one that will awaken you. The one that will explain to you all the fuss about kisses, that will penetrate your shyness and spiral deep inside you where you never thought a kiss could reach. We’ve heard all about those kisses and in our dreams we feel that sensation, seeing Wendy, safe. In the early dreaming of the dreams, we fell out of bed with the excitement of her sighting, but by now we’ve learned to control the salty currents of relief. Our ability to control the impulse to give way too soon, we think, is what brings us the dreams in the first place. After all, everyone wants to see Wendy. But we’re the ones who do.

We learn to relax. We stay in the dream. There she is. Wendy. In the flesh. And we love her. We love Wendy. Maybe we didn’t before, but we do now. Before the disappearance, she was on the social fringe. New in school, shy, joining us late. Uncertain, with those pity-me eyes and her smile that tried too hard. Her nervous courtesy pricked us, reminded us that our mantle of cool wasn’t there as recently as yesterday and could vanish again as soon as tomorrow. Her bright redundant greetings oh hey hi what’s up good morning Maya Susannah Kimmy, how are you Trish you look great your hair oh my God those earrings are great, only pointed out that our current ease was temporary, something that, at any moment, could be taken away.

But whatever we thought of her before, Wendy is all that anyone thinks of now. We all love Wendy now. We love her because she was so loyal so fast to our stupid rules and traditions. We love her because she admired things about us that everyone else had stopped noticing. We love her because she was such a hungry audience for our puny talents. We love her because she isn’t here.

And we treasure her as you treasure anything you’ve lost. A kitten. A charm bracelet. A grandfather. A dad. Our daydreams about her once she’s gone dress her up so much that if she came back no one would recognize her. Wendy is ideal. Because she isn’t here to prove you wrong, Wendy is everything we need her to be.

So we find Wendy, safe and whole. And we’re ecstatic with relief – now we’ll get attention, too! We’ll be heroes, ‘cause we found her! It’s Wendy’s indifference after we dance around her, after we cover her with hugs – it’s then that we realize we’re in a dream. She doesn’t care that she’s been found. She doesn’t want to come home. She won’t even write a note to her mother (and in the dream, of course, we never have a pen.) In the dream, she’s gone over to some other side, a place where she’s free of our concern. She can barely tolerate the time it takes us to understand that she just doesn’t care.

Her indifference is regal. Wendy is a princess of the land in between the stations.

The sequel to “Wendy, Indifferent” is “Wendy, Rescued” although the rescue is still in progress when the alarm buzzes us awake. If , in a rare but exciting version of “Wendy, Rescued,” we get to drag her along with us, heading for home, hellbent for breakfast, something always prevents us from getting Wendy to her mother. And that’s what we used to want to see. We used to want it so much that it was the first dream that left our bed and nagged at us in waking time – we wanted to see Wendy back with her mother, the kneeling, the hug, the tears.

We’ve shared other dreams: Kimmy’s dreary documentary “Looking for Wendy,” Tricia’s thriller “Looking for Wendy While Being Stalked by Someone Unseen,” Susannah’s existential “Wendy, in a Parallel Universe, Thinks We’re Missing.”

It was Maya who suggested that we unite our dreams deliberately. We keep the visions to ourselves. We call each other at night and agree on the dream that will take us, together, to Wendy. We don’t tell the shrinks they send to the school to help us “deal with it.” We say nothing to our mothers. Comfort would only weaken us. It only takes one mother’s touch, one light on in the hall, one Let’s talk about it, honey to initiate the wave of static that loops around and feeds on itself until the transmission is broken and we’ve all lost Wendy for the rest of the night. And we can’t lose Wendy. She has things to tell us that no one else will admit.

The moment she wins us is the point in “Wendy, Indifferent” when she gives us that weary, grown-up smile, tired of our tirades about searching and worry and curfews. She won’t come back. She can’t. She is beyond our pleading and our dread. It is when realize that that we know that we want to be there, too.

Kimmy went first. She left a note that read: “Dear everyone, I had to go, I couldn’t resist it anymore.” After that, they rounded us up and grilled us for hours, which only proved her power. Who would have listened to us before? Just say “Wendy” now and see what happens. See how just saying her name invokes trembling and action, respect, legislation. No one ever hinted that a girl could have such stature. Nothing we can do can equal that. That’s something we learned together in the white noise.

Maya, steamed that she was not the first to go and exhausted from the official questioning, ordered “Kimmy” for that night’s viewing. It was a risky choice, since we hadn’t yet created “Kimmy” and all we wound up getting was a fog and the sound of two girls laughing. Tricia was found in the park later that night, barefoot in her nightgown, bruised and mute. They took her to the emergency room, then to the psych ward. We weren’t allowed to see her. We knew they gave her drugs because we couldn’t raise her on our frequency. Her voice grew fainter and fainter and eventually disappeared.

Susannah went next and went far, having learned from Tricia’s lesson. She went without a trace, no strand of hair, no fallen button, no idle witness to tell a story of an unmarked van. Susannah dove head first into the white noise. When we found her in the dreams, through the static, she said only, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” forgetting, we realized, Maya’s instructions that the next to go had to give detailed directions. It seems that our rules don’t apply out there.

We’re locked in at night now, kept home from school, questioned like suspects. It’s worse, we imagine, than anything that was done to Wendy before her martyrdom. Why question us so hard? You wouldn’t understand our answers. Even if we confided about our network, you wouldn’t believe us. You never do. Girls, Wendy told us, are prey: skittish, glossy, small. Our strength lies in camouflage or short bursts of speed, our ability to dodge. Our bodies, our lives, are soft, dispensable.

We disappear in your distraction – a glance away, we’re gone. You let it happen all the time. Listen to us? Wendy, lost in silence, is the only one you’ve ever heard.

The Nasty Gidgets, Part 1

2009-08-25T06:44:00.006-04:00

Every once in awhile, you need to get out of your comfort zone, and when that time comes, a good place to start is Eastern Colorado. I was out there last week; I flew into Denver, while my luggage went to Jackson Hole, and then I took a shuttle van up to Greeley, where my best friend Linda’s daughter was enrolling as a freshman at the University of Northern Colorado. She seemed to me a strange creature, long-legged, shy but serene-eyed, with the kind of long hair a romance writer would describe as “chestnut tresses,” when so recently she was a toddler splashing in the bathtub boisterously misquoting Pearl Jam, “Hearts and darts they fade, fade away …”

I tried to quell these thoughts, since Linda was all but drowning in them, and it was my job as aunt to try to distract mother and daughter from the grief of this milestone separation with whimsical pranks like filling the school-supply shopping cart at Target with notebooks depicting pink kittens and Zac Efron. Target, yes. And Sears and J.C. Penney and lunch at The Olive Garden.

“I’m in America now,” I reminded myself, as I walked across the parking lot of Wal-Mart, passing a car with a “Nobama” bumper sticker and then strolling by the weaponry section of that fine store on my way to procure a pair of flip-flops. (I had to buy the bare necessities to sustain myself – panties and pajamas, skin care products and a second pair of shoes since my suitcase was still MIA, not that I’m pointing any fingers, Frontier Airlines.) “Y’all still sell guns at Wal-Mart?” I heard a man ask and nearly pivoted to scold him. “Dude! You’re, like, only 50 miles from Columbine!” But I refrained. One thing I hear with disturbing frequency when I venture into America is, “This isn’t New York.” I hope I don’t conduct myself with the provincialism of the Upper West Sider who thinks fresh fruit and vegetables come from Zabar’s but I must confess I am put off by the long, long drives which apparently are not, when they are challenged, long at all. A thirty minute drive to go to dinner is nothing, and this was confirmed the next day when, with no small amount of sorrow and snuffling, Linda and I headed to her home in Ogden, Utah.

This required driving across the width of southern Wyoming, which took an entire day and can best be summarized in haiku:

Sage, trailers, red rock
Great music with my best friend
Antelope do play

In Ogden, I reacquainted myself with Linda’s twin sons, who in my memory were last seen in a double stroller (I exaggerate) and are now happy, freckled thirteen-year-olds on skateboards. Thirteen was the age Linda and I were when we met; eighteen, like her daughter, when we went our separate ways to college (she to Arizona, and I to New York), so that makes five years of concentrated adolescent anguish, record-playing in the basement, picture-drawing, story-telling and synchronized sulking, on which we have built a lifetime of friendship.

But during that time we developed a rich and idiosyncratic patois, which, when as adults we intermittently reunite, causes outsiders to smile politely and back away slowly. Linda’s children have long since learned to tilt their heads at us, turn to one another, and engage in their own secret dialect, bemused but not confounded by the fact their mother and her friend have launched not into the customary exclusive language of adults (insurance, betrayals, medical procedures) but into a lexicon of silliness we ought to have long ago outgrown. Linda’s husband, an outdoorsman of infinite patience, sits by as long as he can stand it, nodding with recognition at the odd phrase in the startrek/starwars/beatles/Dylan/stones/springsteen/yourmom/
mydad/thatteacher dialect --the way a Parisian might cotton to the general meaning of a Cajun -- eventually gives up and politely remembers a neglected project in the garage, on the roof, or on the other side of town.

It is a truth universally unacknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a fortune of musical knowledge, must be in pursuit of a soul mate. In the buddy-movie, bromance Hollywood culture, women who are longtime friends are either sisters or college roommates (i.e., in either case, no choice was made) and what ties them together is first the pursuit of beauty and a man, and later the burden of aging, caretaking and abandonment. But, that ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby. Girls do, in fact, just want to have fun. We like stuff, too. Reading, writing, music. Running, downhill skiing, skating, orienteering. This kind of indulgence – the pursuit of personal interests -- might be the ultimate pornography, since it is never presented on television or in the movies. On the screen, women don’t bond over activities that merely engage them but do not nurture others. They are together only when cooking, sewing, or keeping a home.

Last Sunday, I was the guest co-host on Linda’s radio show “Sunday Sagebrush” on radio station KRCL, the voice of the Wasatch Front. In addition to being a volunteer dj on this Sunday show, Linda is the music feature writer for the local paper, the Standard-Examiner (http://www.standard.net), and has recently begun producing a weekly podcast called “The Beat Beat.” She yearns to dictate the musical taste of the whole of the free-thinking West, and when I joined her as a guest dj, we chortled in the realization of our lifelong dream (“I hate this song, I hate this song!”) to RULE THE AIRWAVES.

With “Americana, Roots and Blues” as the program’s designated category, we played Dave Alvin (she always opens with Dave Alvin), Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Raul Malo, Loretta Lynn, the Be Good Tanyas, Sam Baker, Clydesdale, Cory Chisel, Cracker, Neko Case, and Steve Earle, Steve Earle, Steve Earle. (You can find the whole playlist here: the whole playlist). We chatted about the song or artist’s significance, told stories of our girlhood and peered at shelves of CDs the way we had pored over what album to play next when we were 13, 14, 15 and on.

“You girls sound like you’re having fun,” one caller told Linda, as he requested Woody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory.”

“You two were hilarious. A pair of 13 year olds!” offered Linda’s friend Dan Weldon, a marvelous locally-based musician (http://danweldon.com/) when he came to Linda’s house later that day to eat barbecued carne asada. “You sounded like Gidget goes on the radio.”

Our jaws dropped in simultaneous indignation. “Gidget! We did not! We spoke intelligently about the music!”

“We expressed opinions,” I pointed out to Dan, who I love. “We critiqued.”

“Well,” he said. “Maybe nasty Gidgets.”

To be continued …

Out on the Ridge Where the West Commences

2009-08-17T17:48:00.001-04:00

I will be away in the wild, wild west for the next week, but should you be glued to your computer on Sunday, August 23, from noon to 4 pm eastern time, tune in to

www.krcl.org

Click on “listen live” in the middle at the top of the page. I will be a guest on my friend Linda's Americana, Roots and Blues show, live from the Wasatch Range.

Have We Met?

2009-08-13T00:07:00.009-04:00

Saw a screening of "The Time Traveler's Wife" tonight.

A romantic drama with gorgeous leads and fabulous set design (I do really love it when people live in homes that looks like homes which people would live in -- let alone the characters in the film would live in, so kudos for that) and lovely cinematography.

But my problems with the film involve major spoilers, so if you object to that, then read no further.

The time traveler, Henry, disappears without rhyme or reason, so abruptly that his clothes crumple to the floor and he arrives at his next spot on the time-space continuum stark naked, at which point hijinks invariably ensue.

In fact, when he first meets his future wife Claire, she is a six year old child playing alone in a meadow and he is a naked grown man speaking to her from the bushes, hardly a promising premise for an epic love story. He repeatedly encounters her as a child, and as a teenager, but he is always an adult. He is always Eric Bana. "You took the heart and mind of a little girl," she says to him in their one serious fight, which elicits from him a puppy-eyed frown of sadness.

One personal frisson of pleasure for me: the song that they dance to at their wedding (on the meadow where they met) is a spooky-sad rendition of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

Pedophilia, and all practicalities aside -- the movie is definitely going for magic realism, so questions about how he could obtain and keep a job, let alone a relationship, will remain questions -- the bottom line is that Henry being a time-traveler is a situation, not a story. His condition needs to have a purpose, a crux, a crisis. Without it, he's just a guy who gets around a lot.

Don't You Forget About Me

2009-08-08T08:45:00.006-04:00

This has been flying around the internet, so you have probably already seen, this nearly perfect tribute to John Hughes by Alison Byrne Fields:

http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html

It's received so many hits I can't get in there to ask permission, so, Alison, hope it's OK.

And yes, soon I'll get that hyperlink thing fixed.

I've had bit of help along the way myself, from pen pals, "mysterious benefactors," and their modern counterpart, cyber-friends, so it's good to see the good guys recognized.

Burn, Baby, Burn!

2009-08-05T22:57:00.004-04:00

It is not the purpose of this blog to solicit donations of any kind.

However.

A week ago, I had a couple of days off, so I wrote and cooked.

I made a tomato soup from scratch, including my own vegetable stock.

I reheated the soup in my microwave. I picked up the bowl with one oven mitt and one dishtowel. The bowl was so hot that I released it immediately.

The searing hot liquid, upon being dropped, splashed up and hit my thumb.

My thumb. Look at your thumb. That space between the first and second knuckle? Scalded. The next day, a blister with the diameter of a dime, and the height of four dimes stacked, was on my thumb.

Pus, blood, scab, peel, pus, scab, peel, blood. Daily events in the past week. "Gross!" cried my work colleagues. "Gross! Eew! Keep it covered!"

Even with an area of injury of less than a square inch, I understood why burn victims are often put to sleep in hospitals. It fucking hurts. My wound, I understand, is nothing. But M****f***r, it's everything.

I made a donation to http://www.nyffburncenter.com/?gclid=CMyQxa-EjpwCFRJM5QodzWdpYg. "cause these guys are the real heroes.

How Not to Act Old

2009-08-05T08:38:00.003-04:00

I was having a very bad day at work (which is itself a trait of the old) when a fleet and kindly messenger arrived in my office and brightened my day with a copy of “How Not to Act Old,” by my new blogger friend Pamela Redmond Satran (she also has a blog, complete with instructional youtube videos, http://www.hownottoactold.com). The book seemed to fall open to the sins of which I am guilty: saying “awesome” (Chapter 2) and “what are you, twelve?” (Chapter 79) and counting out exact change (Chapter 146).

Other ways to camouflage the years? Don’t wear a watch (Chapter 3), dance to “Sexual Healing” (7), or leave voice mails (6). (If you don't say why you called, curiosity will compel a response; besides, you come off as busy and cool, rather than bossy and tiresome.) Talking is the greatest challenge. Don’t talk: too much (58, 177), negatively (75), like a parent (33, 46, 53, 135, 136) about your health (45, 61), to strangers (182), in an Andy Rooney-like rant (177), or, really, at all (77). “Young people use silence to mean all kinds of things … don’t get mad, just get silent.”

Reading is out (96), as is dieting (97), housework (62) (yay!) or being named “Bob or Pat” (95, which shows a progressive timeline of hip names, “Regular Old Name: Judy. 10 Years Younger: Jody. 30 Years Younger: Jolie.” Other examples: “Wayne … Blaine … Zane” and “Carol … Holly … Christmas.”)

Pamela Redmond Satran is seriously funny. And sadly, I can offer a few tips of my own, should she try a chapter on, say, “How Not to Act Old in New York”: Don’t say “Pan Am Building,” “The Triborough Bridge,” or “where Coliseum Books used to be.”

Got all that?

Thaynk Kyeeew (Chapter 172)
No problem (Chapter 65)

Cooking and a Kind Husband Are a Girl's Best Friend

2009-08-03T22:30:00.005-04:00

I saw "Julie and Julia," last night at a screening and was disappointed. Now that I have had time to marinate overnight, my disappointment has soured into annoyance.

Early in the film, and early on her path to becoming the world's most famous instructor of French cuisine, Julia Child laments having to convert metric measurements for an American audience. "Measurements are not important," her future co-author Simone Beck says. Julia Child replies. "I think they're very important."

I have to agree, and this is an ill-measured film. Before the lights go down, we are already more interested in the Julia Child story -- she's an icon, and therefore more interesting than a "cubicle worker" (more on that later), post-war Paris is more interesting than post-9/11 Queens, creating the first and most famous English-language book of French cooking is more interesting than re-creating it because your life bores you, and so on. What this movie needed to do was balance the Julia Child story by attempting to make the Julie Powell story even slightly interesting.

The movie that might have been made is the story of how these two women came into their own through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," but what we have instead are lopsided servings of the sweet and the bitter. Meryl Streep swoops and whoops as Child in Paris, most of the time delivering a typically Streep-brilliant performance but occasionally lapsing into what my friend over at Head Butler http://www.headbutler.com/ calls "Big Bird Goes to Cordon Bleu." There are tantalizing hints of a life as rich as beurre blanc -- the years in the OSS, the investigation by McCarthy, the loud gawky American at soignee embassy parties -- along with long and completely unnecessary sideplots, such as the one involving the sister (although it was nice to see Jane Lynch having so much fun). But Ephron gives us just a taste, makes us want the meal, and then switches us to the microwave.

I have read Child's book and I haven't read Powell's, but Ephron's job, in bringing the stories together, was to find a balance.

So, Powell. The publicity material presents her as a "cubicle drone" looking to find herself as she approaches the milestone of turning 30. The cubicle in which she drones belongs to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, less than a year after September 11, 2001, and her job, fielding calls from survivors in need of health care, housing, and counseling, is presented as one of no meaning or importance, serving mainly to annoy her, to drive her into one of the many "meltdowns" she has throughout the film when things don't go her way. These hissy fits are meant to make her seem endearingly vulnerable but instead make her come across as petty and petulant. Long Island City, the working-class neighborhood in which she scorns to live, was particularly hard hit by the attacks of September 11, and even eleven months later was still bedecked with makeshift shrines to policemen and firemen.

I'm taking it too seriously, you say. It's a comedy. Well, here's my rule: use 9/11 as a plot point very judiciously, and use it as a backdrop at your own peril.

Regardless of how it unfolded in "real life," Ephron could have used the "drone job" to enhance the character of Julie: to show her setting forth on her adventure because life is short and you must make yourself happy, to show her cultivating cooking as a creative, nurturing act in response to the destruction she spends her nine-to-five time trying to mend.

But no, Julie launches a blog because all of her college friends have flashy positions and shiny gadgets and she was the promising one in college; she was going to be a writer; she has "thoughts." She does, in fact, have a lot going for her, which makes her all the more exasperating. She has, for one thing, a bewilderingly loving husband who endures her constant jibes that she has "nothing," her sulking when no one reads her blog and her tantrum over a ruined stew to such an extent that his final breaking point provides the only crisis in the B plot. Even Julie must finally overcome her self-absorption to recognize that her husband is a sweetheart.

That seems to be Powell's "lesson learned" and it's not enough. By that time I had lost the little interest I had in whether or not she succeeded in cooking her way through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in 365 days and waited for the scenes of Child shepherding her cookbook to publication, although that, too, failed to compel because we all know how it turns out.

I had to content myself with trying to figure out where Julie Powell was as she whined her way through Queens. That place where she buys the lobster? That's my fish store.

If I Only Had a Nicholl

2009-07-29T10:44:00.001-04:00

Thanks to the miracle of the internet, rejection no longer comes in slim envelopes, but in tender emails. I just heard yesterday that my script “Wildflowers of the West” did not make the quarterfinals of the Nicholl Fellowship. The Nicholl Fellowship’s form rejection letters grow sweeter every year.

“ … we have to inform too many writers of scripts featuring compelling stories, intriguing characters and excellent craft that they have not advanced into the next round.”

That must indeed be difficult.

But what, my readers ask, is the Nicholl Fellowship?

Their website replies: The Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting is the world’s most esteemed screenwriting competition. Each year up to five $30,000 fellowships are awarded to authors who have previously earned less than $5,000 writing for film or television.

Then, my readers usually ask, does it have anything to do with Mike Nichols?

No. It does not.

Does it really matter?

Well, no. I mean, except in the sense that it is better to advance into the quarterfinals than to not advance. And it is better to ultimately win a $30,000 fellowship than to not. No one regards winning the Nicholl Fellowship as a sure-fire way to advance a screenwriting career. But among contests, it is the queen bee.

“P.S.” concludes the email “your script finished among the top 15% of all entries – one of the top 1000 scripts.”

P.S. Thanks.

Exposure, Redux

2009-07-28T10:50:00.002-04:00

My very good friend Linda East Brady has added another talent to her growing repetoire -- writer, music critic, dj, cartoonist and now podcaster. Take a listen to her debut on a program called "The Beat Beat."

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/krcl/.jukebox?action=featured

Ira Glass, are you listening?

Exposure

2009-07-27T10:53:00.004-04:00

I had breakfast last week with the film director Jane Campion and a group of female bloggers to discuss her new film Bright Star, above the poet John Keats and the love of his life. I have been asked to postpone delivering my (crazily favorable) review but you can watch the trailer here:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810011941/trailer

Jane Campion is thoughtful, gracious, generous and soft-spoken, with the diffident posture often adopted by women of greater-than-average height. Which was why I was surprised at her answer to how she got into film, "Well, I was in art school, but I decided I wanted exposure."

Exposure? Could she elaborate? Exposure is not a word you often hear from women -- actresses, maybe, but not artists, and certainly not women artists in their twenties, who may hunger for validation, acknowledgement, connection, but rarely have the cojones to proclaim that they want their work out there. Exposed.

"Well," she shrugged into our dumbstruck faces, "women pay half the taxes, why shouldn't they get half the grants?"

Without pausing to explain that this is not Australia and artists here do not get grants to make films, the more social-minded blogger among us pursued her women-in-Hollywood take on things while I sat back and mused on my sudden understanding of Campion's characters.

"You create women with a vision, who are implacable," I stated.

"Implacable is a good word," Jane agreed.

The implacable insist that a piano can and must be hauled up a tropical mountainside, that she must and will love who she loves, that she will create what she must and not what she should. That she will blog, even though her blog is not "about" anything.

What is So Rare as a Job in June?

2009-07-19T18:03:00.005-04:00

Most of the people I know either have no job or no time because their jobs are taking up all of their time. I am in the latter category and have been repeatedly exhorted to "be grateful," or, ungrammatically, to "be lucky." (I have always wanted to be lucky; it's just not something you can summon at will.)

"Be lucky you have a job."

I am lucky in that regard, but boy, did I mess up my June. June is really the last month in summer you can be a good friend; after that, no one's schedule matches yours until after Labor Day. So in June I let half a dozen people down, due to work schedules, or the flu I caught. I missed a party, a screening party, a reading, three "networking" events and by the fourth of July weekend, I had missed Kris's birthday. That is to say, I did acknowledge it; I called her voice mail and favored her with my rendition of "Happy Birthday," I had already secured part of the gift, but it was lame and it remains unwrapped and unsent.

A rosy fingered glow of hope on the horizon but until then, a general apology.

Billy Mays is Not My Lover

2009-06-30T21:27:00.002-04:00

The pure products of America go crazy--

***

and we degraded prisoners
destined to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car.

The full poem, by William Carlos Williams, http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/to-elsie.html

We Few, We ... Yeah, No, I Think "Few" Pretty Much Covers It

2009-06-18T21:04:00.004-04:00

I recently saw a production of Henry V which was produced so far downtown that when I left the theater with my friend, I couldn't help but make the "Law and Order" chung chung! sound when I saw the empty streets before us and expected to, if not be tomorrow's headline, at least stumble upon it.

This production of Henry V had another title, to make it ... hipper? More relevant? There was a large video component, which served some scenes (Princess Katherine's "da hand, des fingres") and some speeches and was meant to comment on our contemporary society because it looked like Fox News/Reality TV/CNN/a Ken Burns documentary ... and that might have worked for me as a production of Henry V. As an isn't-it-ironic-how-little-we-have-changed device, for me, it did not work. Nor as a what-the-media-tells-us-is-not-what-really-happens device, either.

But I admire the effort. I do. All six of the actors were terribly hard-working and the Henry (who also played the Dauphin) had a wonderful voice and presence.

My friend C. complained that Henry did not present sufficient emotion, but I do think that is hard to do when you are staging an entire war on a stage half the size of my living room with a cast of six. My test of a MacBeth is the "all my pretty chickens in one fell swoop?" scene and my test of a Henry V is when they read off the English dead and the Duke of York is at the top of the list. If the audience does not know that the Duke of York is Henry's younger brother -- if they have seen no interaction between them -- then Henry's reaction (or lack thereof) to this news means nothing. If we do not see Henry's personal sacrifice, then all his bluster before has been only bluster, and all his subsequent clumsy diplomacy merely blather.

I thought I had achieved the record earlier when I saw MacBeth with a cast of six. One of the Weird Sisters was a plastic doll, manipulated by her wicked sibling in a different voice. Burnam Wood came to Dunsinane via cell phone.

But then last weekend I saw the Battle of Agincourt staged with only three people.

We happy few who still care about Shakespeare being produced robustly, vigorously, on all budgets, applaud the thought; and effort; we many few who understand about budgets and space constraints are sorry to say this, but on the whole this production was just too ... little.

Let Slip the Books of War

2009-06-02T11:04:00.003-04:00

Attended the last day of BookExpo America over the weekend, with my sister, who is a book “shepherd” (will see you through every stage of creation), who attends every year. She had arrived home the day before with an armload of catalogues, and I went off in pursuit of those small publishers who had Shakespeare books soon to be released. Stay tuned on this site! Much riches to come! How beauteous mankind is!

On the children’s floor, I bought a Shakespeare finger puppet to support a New Jersey library. Since it was buy-one-get-one-free, I took a George Orwell as well.

Later on the bus, I tried to entertain a lap dog with engaging canine quotes (“Let slip the dogs of war!”) but he merely sighed and burrowed deeper into the duffel bag he was being carried in. On the subway, my sister and I held an impromptu puppet show of Orwell (“Big Brother is watching you!”) and Shakespeare (“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow!”) until we noticed that tourists were filming us.

Good thing one of the books I snagged was The Birth(and Death)of the Cool by Ted Gioia, which I've starting reading and loving. It covers the history of "cool" as an attitude/lifestyle and asserts that it's being replaced by a new authenticity.

I knew (or is that “hoped”?) cool was on the way out. It’s so much more fun to play with finger puppets of famous authors.

Friend Good, Alone Bad

2009-05-19T21:07:00.003-04:00

“Congratulations!” read the automated email message. “You are now friends with Skyla!”

Well, that IS good news, since I think Skyla is awesome, although I don’t actually know her. She was the art director/majordomo on the Nothing But Red project, to which I was a contributor. This email came from Goodreads, which my sister urged me to join, so that we could see what we were reading. Sadly, I read slowly these days, my commute time clogged by podcasts (This American Life, Planet Money, learnfrenchbypodcast.com, The Moth) and my “leisure reading time” seems to be focused on other people’s blogs, including Head Butler, which always succeeds in making me feel ignorant, out of it, and poorly read.

So, I am slow on Goodreads, although I have rather quickly garnered five friends! My sister, of course, who initially invited me, and my best friend’s teenage daughter (hola, Carmen!) who just graduated from high school (congrats, Carmen!) and her best friend, Malyssa (congrats, Malyssa!) who I have met only once, and my friend Paul, who is a Scot and has a reading list heavily dominated by Scottish writers, and now Skyla Dawn Cameron. Skyla lives in southern Ontario, and as a child I used to visit southern Ontario in the summer, as my grandmother Gigi had a cottage there (in Grand Bend, Skyla) but otherwise, we have little to base our friendship on, except for a love of reading. And vampires.

I am not on Facebook.

Odd. Though I can reveal to you all the painful intimacies of my teenage crush on Alex Logan (not his real name, BTW), I feel that Facebook is an invasion of privacy. And believe me, I have been pressured to join. I think, at least once a week.

I am on linkedin, where I enjoy a dual identity as those I am linkedin to are either law firm employees or actors. I rarely refuse an invitation to “link in” except when I am CONVINCED that they have the wrong Elizabeth Frank. Even then, I would accept their offer of friendship, or “linking in” except that this would lead to confusion and almost certain disappointment. I have been saddened on the few occasions when my invitation to “link” was not accepted – very few, and indeed, why? Once I have been “linked,” I do absolutely nothing about it. My profile is not complete; I am a cyber-schizo, with half my artistic life and half my dayjob life; I don’t know how to recommend people or ask for their recommendations. I just like to see the number go up. Friends!

The Parable of Alex Logan

2009-05-17T23:14:00.004-04:00

A couple of months ago I finished my last screenplay, "Wildflowers of the West."

I wrote to an e-friend that after I put this script "through its paces in the marketplace," I would retire from writing screenplays.

For me -- unrepresented and lightly produced -- the "marketplace" consists of paid readers and contests. So, although I think this is the best script I have ever written, and does in fact represent the best I can do, there is scant chance that "Wildflowers" will ever see the light of day, or of film, even digital.

I wish I could report that this development was unfolding with a Zen-like bow of acceptance (and the concomitant re-direction of my energies to a greater purpose) or even a jaunty Katherine Hepburn shrug-and-stride away from the elusive object of desire, but I am more like the truculent adolescent, kicking at the dirt, wearing sweats and sneakers and attitude, exuding defiance but yearning to be told, "But you are pretty, you are."

Of course, the genuinely pretty are never soothed this way, and it is certainly never followed with brave advice, "Now, if only you'd wear a little more eye makeup ..."

I am reminded of my first serious-ass crush. It took place in junior high and the object of my desire was Alex Logan. Desire is the operative word here -- I had never felt anything like it. I had been enamored of pretty eyes or a graceful swoop of hair, but Alex was the first one I wanted to do things to, specific things, things I could picture and blush about. Olive-skinned, tawny, angry, haughty, Alex was North Kirkwood Junior High School's James Dean.

To say that Alex Logan was unaware of my existence would be such an understatement that I cannot even find a metaphor for it -- I had, at that stage, not even a taxonomy to assign myself to, it was junior high, so we had not yet divided ourselves into our interests -- inept sports (funny how athletes are worshipped without regard to their skill), orchestra, drama.

Anyway, I lusted. And I learned that Alex Logan was going out with Karen Carter.

This was a scandal! Karen Carter was a year older than Alex Logan. She was a freshman in high school! while Alex and I (Alex and I! sigh!) were eighth-graders.

Cut to: the flurry of calendar pages being torn away. High school over, college over, I am back in Kirkwood, engaged in patio cocktails on one of those long midwestern summer evenings in which the shift from day to night doesn't lower the temperature but merely changes the key.

A relative of mine is getting married and these are the bridesmaids and the bridal party flotsam, the chicks who were cheerleaders, or pom pom girls, or anything but brainy like -- honor roll, right? Writer award from the state or whatever? You always were serious. Where do you live now? New York? New York City? In the city? Kimmy Miller's cousin Brad went there, you know, the gay one, wasn't it a shame what happened to him ...

Karen Carter? No, she's not coming. She's away in Illinois at a funeral, I think it was her grandma, or a great aunt ...

"I used to be so jealous of Karen Carter," I voiced, with the courage of much group therapy. "Dating Alex Logan and all."

Pause, then exhalations into the already thick, already damp and laden, air. Despite their junior varsity triumphs, these bridal shower girls were, nearly to the man, chain-smokers and had learned from their mothers the art of the long smoky dragon-like exhalation of disappointment and disapproval.

"He used to beat the shit out of her," one of them said.

"Alex?" I was dumbfounded. "Karen?"

"Remember that trip to Cabo, she was so bruised she had to wear sunglasses the whole time," one bridesmaid said, hissing smoke. "I was up in first class and I went back to say hi and I like saw her all swelled up and everything and I'm, like, God, you're such an asshole."

"Karen?" I repeated. "Alex?"

But the bridesmaids and courtiers had moved on; my concerns were nothing. I was there on sufferance, after all. It was only my indisputable connection with the bride that kept me on that privileged midwestern patio. I had never handled a pom-pom, worse yet, I had forsaken Kirkwood for New York, so who cared about my crush on Alex Logan?

He used to beat the shit out of Karen Carter.

So wow, I thought, on that Missouri lawn, good thing I never got what I wanted.

But couldn't I have gotten it for just a little while?

Star Trek - No Spoilers, Not Really

2009-05-08T16:55:00.005-04:00

I was worried about Spock. The actor, Zachary Quinto, scares me, not only because he plays Sylar on "Heroes" (so convincingly that I'm too nervous to watch week to week and have to wait until the season ends to watch the whole thing on DVD, so that the suspense doesn't damage me) but because he seems a bit chilly himself -- there's his name: Zachary Quinto, which sounds like something out of Nabokov, and the fact that in the photos from the movie's opening in Sydney, London and Los Angeles, he is never smiling.

I need not have worried about Spock: it is his movie. I read a review today that stated the opposite, that the movie was Kirk's. But I say no. Chris Pine is perfectly fine as young Kirk -- cocksure, cocky, impulsive, violent -- but the character is less interesting. He's a show off; he gets the crap beaten out of him; he struts around the campus of Starfleet Academy; he is publicly called out before the class; he gets the crap beaten out of him; he gets the crap beaten out of him; he ... well, there's a pattern here. For all the pow! pow! pow! damage inflicted on him, it takes a lot to "get it through his thick skull" as a certain doctor, not an elevator, might say.

Spock, however, is a revelation. The smallest unfavorable observation bruises him, and as as an actor -- and a character -- he registers the hurt without any demonstrable display of it, in true Vulcan manner. He is conflicted, cautious, wounded, evolving and adjusting. And because of all this, way sexier than Kirk. And very witty.

The whole thing was terrific fun. Most of the younger incarnations worked for me -- dry Bones, excitable, blushing Chekhov, awestruck Scotty. Mr. Sulu, whose original role was to sit on the bridge and be Asian, got to display some grit and valor for a change. An ensign in a red shirt went on an away team, and those in the know can guess his fate.

Lt. Uhura has caused some controversy, but I don't care about the [I cannot reveal it] as much as I was bothered by seeing the character "upgraded" into the "Dr. Babe" phenomenon. That is, where women were once just babes in short skirts (see, Ensign Rand on the original Star Trek), now, due to those nagging nasty feminists, they are babes in short skirts with PhD's and exceptional language skills. We know they are smart not because they demonstrate it but because they announce it. I speak "all three dialects" of Romulan, sir. But they never get a piece of the action, except when they are the action.

Speaking of action, a bit too much of it for my liking -- I mean the video game kind, where spacecraft hurtle through tight spaces while things fire at them, or crash into a larger spacecraft, or SPECIAL EFFECTS, BLARING SOUND, INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC.

Give me a little snogging in the elevator any old time.

Edited 5/11/09 -- because it is Uhura, not Uhuru

How Was the Wedding?

2009-04-19T15:18:00.002-04:00

My older niece was married two weeks ago, in Virginia, in the backyard brick garden of an old Colonial house. The wedding weekend was bookended by hellish rainstorms on the East Coast, canceling my flight down (I ended up on the train, which had been my preferred mode of travel in the first place) and delaying my return on Monday morning by six hours, which I spent in the bar at Dulles airport, watching Opening Day of this new baseball season. The wedding day itself was intermittently overcast with some sun, except for the moment when my niece and her fiancé were pronounced husband and wife, at which point – and I have witnesses to confirm this – the sun came out and shone on us all, and continued to shine through the rest of the day until it set in the evening, at which time I was dancing with my ex-brother-in-law to “Superfreak.”

I love these types of weddings, small, intimate, pretty, and ones where my role is negligible – the weird, arty, spinster aunt from New York who is assigned the occasional odd job, like setting out the guest book, holding cameras and bags so people can pose unencumbered in the wedding photographs, and herding the odd guest who tried to come in through the patio entrance to come in through the house and sign the guest book.

“I am just itching,” I said of these people attracted by the bunting and the flowers to enter immediately, instead of going through the house, “to go say `You have a hell of a lot of nerve, showing up here.'” It would have been amusing, this nighttime t.v. drama line of trite dialogue hurled at the amiable Virginia schoolteachers who composed most of the guest list (as my niece herself is an amiable Virginia schoolteacher).

My sister was appalled. “You said `hell’!” she hissed, gesturing at the minister, who was herself laughing merrily.

“She hears `hell’ all the time, I’m sure,” I protested.

“We’re Unitarians,” proclaimed the Unitarian minister. “We don’t believe in Hell.”

She was a trooper. In my experience, most of them are – the Methodist minister who was roped in to performing the funeral of my father, a complete stranger and reprobate, and the Presbyterian minister who oversaw my grandmother’s funeral service. Unlike my father, my grandmother was a lifelong devout churchgoer and volunteer, but by the time the Reverend Mason met her on his duty-bound visits, she was in her 90’s, in a nursing home, and in the habit of mistaking me with one of her long-deceased sisters, or perhaps a friend from a neighboring farm family who could be trusted to report the truth when she tugged on my sleeve, leaned in and whispered, “Tell me – are my parents still alive?”

Yet the Reverend Mason, who never knew her as she was, delivered a lovely eulogy based on the “dry bones” section of Ezekiel.

Similarly, the Episcopalian who performed my brother’s wedding service, in the garden of a winery in northern California, had to contend -- at the “dearly beloved, we are gathered here,” opening pitch -- with the sudden gearing-up din of a power saw, drilling and hammering from a nearby housing development. “We are here in the presence of a new home being built,” he announced to the wincing congregation. “And how appropriate.”

Nice save, Reverend!

These people are often depicted in movies as fire-and-brimstone lunatics, but I have found them entirely the opposite in my adult life.

“But what was the groom like?” insisted my 30 and 40-something friends back in New York upon my return.

“Well, I only met him once before the wedding,” I said. “But he seems like a really nice guy who loves her.”

This was met with the kind of swooning sighs you would expect had I said “He’s George Clooney/Colin Firth/Dylan McDermott!” or any number of descriptions of the tall, dark and handsome dashing bastards I dated when I was her age.

“Really?” my friends sighed. “He loves her?”

“They knew each other in high school and he found her again on MySpace.”

This sent them right over the edge, these sophisticated educated professional women of New York who are, just like the ministers, so unfairly depicted in the movies.

So occasionally, nice guys do finish first. As do nice girls, and ministers of the faith.

A Thousand Times Better than the Next Best Thing

2009-03-03T21:06:00.005-05:00

Here late at the office, doing something so tedious you would shudder to hear of it. But these are the dues I owe, because last week I was involved in rehearsals and run-throughs of an excerpt of my script, "Wildflowers of the West," which was part of an evening of excerpts put on by New York Women in Film and Television.

And that was the very opposite of tedious. It was electrifying.

I have already smothered my actors and directors in thanks. During the full run-through of the whole script, I brought a spread of snacks which they found far too interesting and later, since my script involves the struggle over control of a health food company after the founder dies, I gave them all herbal tea and gift cards to Whole Foods. They seemed terribly moved. An actor from another reading caught wind of this, and came over and gave me his headshot.

So -- another cliche come to life in my life. Will work for food.

You wonder why they do it. Equity actors, busy, talented -- dare I say beautiful -- donating their time and talent to nights of unpaid rehearsals in preparation for a brief unpaid performance. I'm not an actor, but I've taken classes. And this is what I learned in class: the feeling you have when you're performing is not just wonderful, it's a thousand times better than the next best thing.

The Hours and Times

2009-02-08T16:41:00.003-05:00

It is Sunday afternoon, sunny and rather warm. I am in my office, trying to catch up on work. My law firm, like so many others, underwent a recent “restructuring” and our new motto has become, “We all have to do more with less.” Since the days of the past week have been filled with confusion and lamentation (i.e., people interrupting me a dozen times a day to ask who does what now), I need Sundays to organize myself.

As I look at the calendar, I realize that it is two weeks until the Academy Awards. I have not seen any of the nominated movies. I think this is the first time this has happened since I was a child and my moviegoing was restricted. I was invited to screenings of these films; I could have seen them for free, but I couldn’t get away. And I’m not going to get away before then – I have rehearsals for a reading of my most recent script, Wildflowers of the West, and then on the day of the Awards ceremony I’ll be at BAM seeing The Winter’s Tale.

It’s not that this matters so much as that I feel so out of it. This week I have found myself chatting about the Trojan War and Othello; also Plessy v. Ferguson, Siegfried Sassoon, why that thing that Dr. Who flies in is called a Tardis, and the U.S. Geological Survey. Well, the Survey and Othello come from the fact that I started reading Martha Sandweiss’s wonderful book Passing Strange. I knew the title came from Othello and then I had to look it up:

She swore, in fact, ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange
'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful:
She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd
That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story.
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd,
And I loved her that she did pity them.

And then I had to read Othello again. Because I remembered my high school English teacher, who was a bit of a cold fish, reading this passage with such passion that her eyes glistened. So I read Othello again and then the evening was over. And I still haven't gotten to the movies.

Holiday Shopping

2008-12-15T00:33:00.003-05:00

Haven’t written in such a long time because I’m swamped with work, and lucky to have a job, but of course those who do have jobs are working twice as hard to compensate for the loss of their dismissed colleagues, and who wants to read about that? So I haven’t written.

But today, I had brunch with a friend of a friend (and hopefully, now, my friend). She is soon to publish a book addressing thrift, an informal history of an underrated virtue (I probably misquote, all errors are mine.) She mentioned at brunch that there were many misconceptions about this country and thrift, that we are told again and again that we used to be a country of savers and this debiting is new to our generation, but all of this is mythmaking, and that, like the economy, the embracing of thrift/savings versus that of spending/conspicuous consumption, has always been cyclical.

After the Second World War, for example (she pointed out), the United States had a huge industrial production cycle going, and the only thing to do to avoid a depression was to encourage consumption. Eisenhower, in particular, advocated this.

“Oh, I remember!” I said brightly. “It was mentioned in `On the Road.’”

She looked dumbfounded.

“Yes,” I confirmed vaguely. “At one point, one of the guys, maybe Dean? Buys something and says he’s doing it to stimulate the economy. ‘As the president suggests.’”

That moment (one of the guys buying – or maybe stealing – something, and saying that the president had encouraged the public to stimulate the economy) and the phrase “love is a duel” are my only take-aways from “On the Road.” I missed the joy of most of it, as I consider it a foreboding precursor of the “buddy movie,” where impecunious dropouts sponge off others, especially women, as they discover themselves (oh, yes, I remember one more moment – when they’re all sitting around stoned and decide that something must be done. What must be done is that some hapless girlfriend should scrub the floor.)

Anyway, I can’t find the reference, because “On the Road,” like most of my copies of great books, has gone astray. I imagine that I lent it to someone and never saw it again.

After brunch, I went forth to “stimulate the economy.” I had a few presents left to buy, and headed for The Strand Bookstore. Apart from anything else, I needed something to read. Something good. Something guaranteed good, and for that, I decided, I needed a book of the essays of George Orwell.

I have a “collected essays”, but it is the lack of satisfaction in this that sent me forth. That is, the collection has one piece from “Burmese Days,” one from “Why I Write,” one from “Down and Out in Paris and London,” and so on. But I wanted to read something by him from cover to cover.

By the time I arrived at “Literary Nonfiction” at The Strand, my arms were already full of holiday presents. Most of the recipients on my “list” will receive books.

I have to say that gift-wrapping a book I have specifically chosen for someone I care for is an activity I find enormously pleasant.

I stepped over a college-aged young man who was sitting in the aisle, cross-legged, taking up a lot of room, writing something in felt-tip pen on a sheet of paper he had primed against his backpack. He was absorbed. Oblivious. And in my goddamn way. I had already squeezed by, stepped over, stepped on, been stepped on by, hundreds of shoppers. The Strand was unbearably crowded, even for The Strand.

Prancing around this teenager, and his bulk making my search cursory, I found nothing. I squeezed by, shoved into and stepped on several hundred more New Yorkers, then found a clerk. I asked her where I could find a collection of essays by George Orwell, and was directed back to where I came from.

“I couldn’t find anything there!” I lamented.

“His stuff goes pretty fast,” she admitted. I thought this would have gratified old Eric Blore greatly, so I shoved and stepped and squeezed my way back to find the same young man sitting in the aisle, talking on his cell phone.

“I’m sitting in the aisle,” he said to his cell phone. “Way in the back, on the left.”

I waited until he had concluded his call, and then explained politely, “I’m sorry, but you’re sitting right in front of Orwell.”

“Oh!” He scooched over, like a kid at a campfire.

“Sorry, it’s just that I want something to read.” I said. “Something good.”

“Hey!” His friend arrived and flopped down like a puppy. “I need poetry.”

He said it in the way a boy his age might have said, “I need a beer.”

“This is poetry,” said the scribbler, gesturing at the stacks.

“This is literary nonfiction,” I corrected, in the tone I no longer mind having. “Poetry’s the next aisle.”

The friend scrambled; the scribe kept his eyes on his (now that I focused on it, quite elegant) writing. “You read poetry?” the scribe asked.

“Yes, I’m the one.”

“Who do you like?”

“Well, among the living, I like James Fenton, Mark Strand, Billy Collins, and Julia Kasdorf. She’s from Pennsylvania,” I added for no reason I can fathom, since I hadn’t presented the origins of any one of the other poets. “Billy Collins is good for a beginner,” I went on (a little patronizing, yes), “He’s funny and accessible and was the Poet Laureate.”

“Do you know Robert Hass?” asked the boy on the floor.

“Name sounds familiar.”

“He was the Poet Laureate, too.” He held up a paperback copy of a collection of Hass’s poems. “I’ve written down the people you recommended.” He displayed his sheet of paper, the tiny list he had made in the corner.

“Robert Hass,” I repeated, to let him know that I was listening, as his friend returned, triumphant, with slender volumes in hand. They both beamed up at me. I wanted to adopt them.

I selected a copy of “Why I Write” by George Orwell and added it to the silly and sundry stack of books I will present to myself and others as tokens of the holiday. The line at The Strand was crazy long, but I pointed out aloud, in my George Bailey mode, that it really was a wonderful life, when a bookstore at Christmas time could still be so crowded. The people in line smiled and perused.

It was extremely gratifying.

Back Talk

2008-10-24T08:06:00.003-04:00

Thanks to my talented and dedicated webmistress, comments have now been enabled. So my dedicated readers can now leave a comment by clicking below. I've liked this feature on other blogs and haven't seen it too much abused, so talk back if you wish.

And now off to the job which pays my salary, where I hear phrases tossed around such as "collapse of the credit market" and "the freeze-up of commercial paper." Or, as the famous curse would have it, "May you live in interesting times."

Christiane Amanpour mentioned recently on Bill Maher's show that "credit" shares the same root as "credible," from the Latin credibilis -- worthy of confidence, reliable.

It is one thing to suffer famine based on the failure of crops, due to a drought. It is another to suffer from a famine of trust, based on a drought of good sense. In the first instance, we reap a dessicated acre of soil; in the second, we cope with the crumbled harvest of our bad behavior. That is a much harsher marketplace.

Don't Quit Your Day Job -- It Might Be Gone Soon, Anyway

2008-10-23T20:03:00.001-04:00

Way back in the day (as the kids say), still entertaining the “I’m a writer, so whatever I do for wages is just some sort of exercise” myth—which is, okay, long aside here – scarcely, scarcely addressed – just recently the New York Times published yet another long lamentation from a writer who teaches at the university level and hates his jobs, hates his students, oh, but the health insurance and summers off are great …. Okay, I digress. Because it’s too, too irritating. I was taught screenwriting by men like him, men who would so vehemently and obviously rather be elsewhere … so much so that I never sought teaching as an option. I would never want to teach anything with such contempt.

So – the corporate world. And – law firms. Not just because that’s where the money is – although that was a big lure in the beginning – but because I like working with smart people (albeit insufferably smug ones, sometimes) and I like seeing how the real world out there, as opposed to the one in my head, affects my job.

Except for, well, lately.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote to a few friends to note that I saw a European tourist (in New York these days, almost all the tourists are European – who else can afford to travel?) photographing the sign in front of the Lehman Brothers building. Ha ha. Two weeks later, it was gone.

Artistic Problems Lovingly Worked Out for Themselves

2008-09-17T22:50:00.004-04:00

That quote of Auden's reminded me of the exhibit I saw at the Prado when I visited Madrid last spring. The title was “Velázquez’s Fables.”

My take-away from that exhibit was a note I scribbled down from the placard at the front of one of the rooms. It stated that in the late 1620’s, when Diego Velázquez was in his late 20’s, a married father with a good-paying position as a painter to a duke and in favor with the king, who gave him all sorts of plummy commissions, he decided he needed to go to Rome and borrowed money and permission to do so. Because Velázquez felt he needed to go there, the placard stated, to learn some new tricks. He “sought a formula for depicting convincingly a group of people’s reaction to unexpected news.”

The examples of this put forth by the curator were his The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph’s Bloodied Coat Presented to Jacob. Neither of these paintings did much for me (although I am far from an expert) and in the case of The Forge of Vulcan I thought he failed utterly in his mission statement. I was unfamiliar with the myth and had to look it up. Apparently, the god Apollo appears in, well, the forge of Vulcan, the blacksmith (aka the god of beneficial and hindering fire, creator of volcanic fire and forger of thunderbolts) to alert him to the fact that Vulcan’s wife, Venus, is carrying on with Mars.

Whatevs. Ye gods.

What arrested me was that Velázquez left domesticity, security, prestige and salary to travel to Rome to learn to depict “convincingly a group of people’s reaction to unexpected news.”

What? Why? Home at his well-appointed casa in Madrid, did he wake up in a cold sweat and realize that until then he had only unconvincingly depicted a group of people’s reaction to unexpected news? Or that he had convincingly depicted only one person’s reaction, or a reaction to only expected news? Did he witness such an event – an extended family learning, for example, that the son/ husband/ father they thought drowned at sea was actually okay in Cadiz and limping slowly toward their happy reunion? Did he see that and did he then say “Man! If I only had the talent to depict that!” And why was he so sure that this (questionable) ability of convincingly depicting such a scene could be attained in Rome?

Perhaps you laugh. A painter friend of mine laughed when I asked her. Most likely she was amused at the idea that this sentence on a placard has tormented me for more than seven months. I kept picturing trying to tell my own friends and family that I had to leave all my responsibilities behind to travel to a distant beautiful city so I could to depict (“convincingly”) something most people would never, ever think about or feel was lacking in their lives as consumers of culture.

And then I pictured asking them to give me money to achieve this goal.

And then there’s the question of whether he even succeeded in his goal. To me, no. The Forge of Vulcan (again, no expert) does not demonstrate this ideal. Vulcan and his blacksmith staff do not look like they have received unexpected news, but rather they look the way you or I would look if a clean and rosy half-naked god appeared uninvited in our sweat-drenched workplace. They look, as we would, as though we would rather than he go away -- soon -- so we can bloody well get on with it. His stupid news can wait.

But then a few days ago, I came across Auden's phrase, “artistic problems lovingly worked out for themselves.” And then I saw clearly.

Solace

2008-09-15T21:04:00.006-04:00

“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,” the poet says. So it follows that a writer’s death diminishes me a bit more because I am involved in the futility of the faithful, the craft of writing.

And it follows one step further that a writer’s suicide is all the more anguishing -- J. Anthony Lukas hurt, so did Iris Chang – one of the reasons I did not major in English – this is true – is because of Virginia Woolf and Anne Sexton and Sylvia bloody Plath. I’m not here to condemn suicide, or to condone it; I’ve lived in my own dark places; still, I’m always astonished, although you think I would have toughened up by now, at how hard the unacquainted – in every sense of the word – are on depression. Last night I read forums on David Foster Wallace until I had to stop.

I needed something to read before I went to sleep.

In times like these, you need a really, really good writer, someone who will absorb you in the story the way you were spellbound as a child. Story, story, story and stay out of the way.

I settled on Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare.

Just after World War II, W.H. Auden taught a Shakespeare course at the New School in New York City. Years later, someone thought to seek out the notes of his besotted students (since Auden kept no record!) and compile the lectures into a book, edited and with an introduction by Arthur Kirsch.

“Auden speaks of the mythic power of The Tempest in similar terms,” writes Kirsch, “and he says that The Tempest is Shakespeare’s farewell piece, whether he was conscious of it or not”:

Auden:

I don’t believe people die until they’ve done their work, and when they have, they die. There are surprisingly few incomplete works in art. People, as a rule, die when they wish to. It is not a shame that Mozart, Keats, Shelley died young: they’d finished their work.

“Following a suggestion of Aldous Huxley,” (this is Kirsch again), “he considers all of Shakespeare’s final plays as examples of the genre of the late works of major artists like Beethoven, Goya, and Ibsen, deliberately strange in their vision, unconcerned about the difficulties they may pose for an audience, and enormously interested”

Auden:

-- in particular kinds of artistic problems lovingly worked out for themselves, regardless of the interest of the whole work.

I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude towards his work. There’s something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.

Particular kinds of artistic problems, lovingly worked out.

Lovely.

More on this, anon --

How Are the Mighty Fallen

2008-09-08T18:49:00.004-04:00

So, aside from the new responsibilities at the job, another reason I hadn’t written anything for two months was because my shelves were not up. I ordered this lovely leaning bookcase from Crate and Barrel. “Some assembly required,” it said, but I am a master of Ikea, and so I feared not. Two months later, tired of stepping over the shelves every morning, I finally hunted down my super and begged him to assemble my shelves. He installed, I paid, he left, I gathered all my Shakespeare books, my Shakespeare action figure and arranged everything nicely on the new leaning shelves.

Or so I thought.

This morning I heard a soft noise in the hallway. My Shakespeare action figure had fallen to the floor, pushed over by a copy of “Richard III.” Worse, my Shakespeare action figure had lost his pen.

Having just regained my desire to write by the assembly of the shelves, I feared this portent did not augur well. Shakespeare had fallen and lost his pen! Or had he been pushed? Had the copy of "Richard III" shoved him off his perch, muttering, “And fall thy edgeless sword: despair, and die!”

“There is providence in the fall of a sparrow,” I told the Shakespeare action figure as I picked him up and put him on another shelf, far from Richard III. I could not think of another Shakespearean quote using the word “fall,” although, as all know, the word “fall,” “fallen” or “befall” occurs 494 times in his works.

Instead, I thought: how are the mighty fallen!

Running that down to its source, I found it in the King James Bible:

How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places.

I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!

Jeez. Have the Republicans really read this book?

Chekhov Leaves Me Cold

2008-09-02T10:50:00.006-04:00

First, a word about the summer.

The sun outside doesn’t seem to know it’s September, but everyone else does. Everyone else is BACK, planning meetings, sending messages, getting around to all the things they said they’d get around to after Labor Day. (What did we do, I wonder, before Labor Day – what was the demarcation line from the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer and the back-to-business rolling-up-of-sleeves?) I had big plans for the summer – not just writing plans, but entertainment plans. Theater. Outdoor concerts. Outdoor films, with picnics in the twilight. Indulging myself in the ripe cornucopia of free culture that is New York in the summer.

But instead, I was promoted. At my day job. One picnic, work-related. One trip out west, also work-related. One film in a cinema – “Boy A” – British, bleak, brilliant, and more needful of my $11 than “The Dark Knight.”

No theater. No concerts. Such are the perils of adulthood.

And now we face the Fall! Season! I get fliers fliers fliers in the mail (stop! Save the environment!) One fell from the mailbox to the floor and there was a photo of Kristen Scott Thomas – oh, how nice, what’s she in?

The Seagull.

Oh no.

With Peter Sarsgaard.

No, no, please. Stop.

I promised myself that when I reached a certain age – and I have reached it -- that I wouldn’t have to see Chekhov anymore. As much as Shakespeare fires me up, Chekhov leaves me cold. It was that way at my first job – “job” in the sense that I had to show up and do things but received no salary – I was paid in theater – where I ushered The Cherry Orchard? The Three Sisters? Both? And I thought, wow, if I want to see miserable people moaning about some idealized past and taking no action whatsoever, well, I could have stayed home and listened to my father.

On to college, where the self-enamored, teenager-seducing playwriting teacher (or is all that redundant) took us through The Three Sisters line by bloody line. “And then Irina comes in and declares she has forgotten the Italian word for `window’ – Elizabeth, play attention.” Later, the same teacher took me to a performance of The Seagull at The Public Theater – Christopher Walken, Rosemary Harris, Blythe Danner. I didn't like it. I felt ashamed. Later still, drama major classmates asked me to critique their monologues; inevitably, they were Nina from The Seagull (“I didn’t know what to do with my hands!”) or Sonya from Uncle Vanya (“What a pity she’s so plain!”)

Which is to say, I’ve seen Chekhov performed well and I’ve seen Chekhov performed badly and I just. Don’t. Get it. I feel like Ricky Gervais in the poster for Ghost Town: “He sees dead people … and they annoy him.”

So fine, so don’t go see The Seagull.

Then I received the “Fall Preview” issue of New York magazine (“Summer is over! Back to work!”) and saw that the Nina in the Kristen Scott Thomas/Peter Sarsgaard Seagull (as though Kristen Scott Thomas and Peter Sarsgaard were not enough) is Carey Mulligan.

Who?

Carey Mulligan. A British actress – one of the giggling little sisters in the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice, the heartbreaking Ada Clair in the Gillian Anderson Bleak House, Sally Sparrow in a particularly winning episode of Dr. Who, the sister, the daughter in random BBC things – no, you haven’t heard of her, because you get out more, you actually had a real summer. But she’s one of my pet actresses and the question is, for her sake, must I sit through another Seagull?

Frank III: The Mystery of Elizabeth Frank

2008-06-30T21:11:00.002-04:00

A man in Germany is looking for Elizabeth Frank, a girl he knew way back when, whose smile he remembers as though she is standing right in front of him. He knew her in high school, and remembers her fondly in connection with “cinnamon,” the “Moonlight Sonata,” and “the Oregon Trail.”

I have never been called “cinnamon” (“cynical,” yes, quite often) and I do play a mean and erotic “Moonlight Sonata,” (although not on my current piano, which cannot stand the strain) but alas, I am not the mädchen he seeks.

His internet search for the sweet and beautiful “Beth” of his youth landed in the inbox of the Arizona artist Elizabeth Frank, who sent it to me to see if I was she. I in turn forwarded the query to yet another Elizabeth Frank, who found me because she was handed the wrong prescription at a pharmacy in Manhattan. (We Elizabeth Franks are a tender and helpful bunch). From the date the man provided of his high school life, I must surmise that the Elizabeth Frank he seeks is neither the art critic and Bard professor Elizabeth Frank, nor Elizabeth Frank, the Astoria church organist.

There are more of us out there, then -- perhaps a thousand strong!

Baseball

2008-06-22T10:57:00.005-04:00

Twice in the past week, I have had men from other lands (France, Scotland) tell me that they don’t understand baseball. The Scot said (as the Brits always do) that the game is just “rounders, with arbitrary rules.” The Frenchman was concerned with “the big deal” about the game. Perhaps in each case, the man was displaying the stereotypical characteristics of the natives of his land: the pragmatic Scot curious about how the game is engineered, the philosophical Frenchman wondering how a slow-moving sport can inspire such devotion. To each, displaying good old American hubris, I promised to explain.

Which, of course, I can’t.

For the Scot, nearly anyone other than I would be a better instructor of the rules because I was never taught the rules; I just soaked them in out of the St. Louis ether, as I did pollen, humidity, and an appreciation of rivers and fried ravioli. This method of comprehension was occasionally haphazard and, in the case of innings, outright incorrect. As a child, I assumed that an inning began at the bottom and worked its way to the top; that was, after all, how the rest of the world operated. My Scot friend would be much better off, say, with Wikipedia, which explains: “The visiting team always bats first in each inning, and the visitors' turn at bat is often called the top of the inning, derived from the position of the visiting team at the top line of a baseball line score.”

I might have an easier time with the Frenchman, who is a photographer, and thus understands drama, light, positioning, stance, negative space, flow. All of these things are important in baseball.

For the purposes of this post, I looked up Louis Armstrong’s famous quote about jazz, another indigenous American art form, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” I wasn’t planning to rely on this slogan or to use it to respond to these earnest inquiring Europeans, to do so would be lazy and dismissive, if not rude. But while at the website, I found a host of other Armstrong quotes which apply, oh so well, to baseball players as well as jazz musicians:

“We all do `do, re, mi’ but you have got to find the other notes yourself.”

“What we play is life.”

“If ya ain’t got it in ya, ya can’t blow it out.”

and

“Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.”

So yes, I can get fancy and compare baseball to jazz, to the soul of America, I can harken any number of poets, writers and historians to provide pithy tributes, but all this would be about as effective as expecting a manual on sex education to convey the experience of actual sex.

Michel, Paul – you must watch the game. I will watch it with you; I will be the Virgil to your Dante, and perhaps you will understand the game on some level. But to really get it, I guess, you have to have grown up with it. It’s more than a game, it’s a tradition, it’s a family narrative.

Recently my brother blackberryed play-by-play my brother provided, in real time, to his fellow Little League parents who could not be present at a recent tournament game. It would probably come across as baffling nonsense to the European uninitiated, but to me it is as beautiful as the transcript of Vin Scully's play-by-play of the last inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game.

Frank, II

2008-06-03T15:37:00.010-04:00

I was in line at a clothing store on the Upper East Side, often depicted in the film and t.v. world as a place of glamorous consumers, which is why I don’t belong there, and don’t like it. But it was that or the post office, as I was returning some shirts I’d bought online. I had the shirts in a tote bag and carried a handbag.

“I like your bag,” said the saleswoman.

“My nephew made it.” I displayed the tote bag, its crayon drawing of a misshapen tiger (or yellow cat?) on the grass with the sun and clouds above. “He drew the picture and they transferred it.”

The Upper East Side matron in line in front of me flicked an evaluative glance at it, flicked her gaze away.

“I have three of those,” she said.

“Really.” I am ignorant of handbag prestige; I don’t care. I don’t have a Moschino, a Marc Jacobs, a whatever the heck I’m supposed to spend $5,000 on, so I like to say this: “It’s a Robert Frank.”

“Mine is a Daniel Frank.”

Wherefor this mockery?

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“My grandson’s name is Daniel Frank,” said the Upper East Side matron.

I gave her the same eye-sweep she had given my bag.

“Your name isn’t Frank,” I pronounced.

“My daughter’s name is Frank.” She stepped aside to reveal a grown daughter behind her.

“What Frank.”

She told me her first name, and allowed that she had married a Frank.

“I am Elizabeth Frank,” I declared, with such an air of wounded proprietorship that the matron’s reply was slightly soothing, “Frank is a very common name,” she said.

“No, it isn’t.” First my tote bag, now my name! Common!

There are, granted, two other Elizabeth Franks mentioned on this blog alone. Another, a retired church organist, lives in my neighborhood. I sometimes get calls and refuse gigs on her behalf ("Sorry, busy this Sunday.") A few others have emailed me since this blog went up. But I wouldn’t stand for common.

“It wasn’t common when I was growing up,” I allowed. “I was taunted.”

“My husband was taunted,” said the daughter of the Upper East Side matron.

Quietly pleased, I returned my attention to the saleswoman, who pointed to my handbag.

“I meant that bag.”

“Oh, that. I bought it in Madrid.”

Definitions of Hell

2008-05-27T21:22:00.004-04:00

The Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend. After a rainy, windy, March-like May, the unexpected kiss of a perfect day. Met friends for brunch in the East Village, walked them over to the West Village, to my favorite bookstore in the world, then wandered lazily, contentedly, sun-kissedly, down Sixth Avenue. At the corner of Houston and Sixth, in the playground parking lot, we saw some teenaged girls performing drill team-like dance maneuvers, to the unintelligible urgency of a way-too-loud boom box. They were dressed identically. Some of their brethren, dressed in the same color combo of t-shirt and pants, pressed upon us (I was the one who accepted it) a tract enumerating the different ways HELL is described in the Bible.

“A lake of fire,” read my friend M. as we crossed Houston Street. “A bottomless pit, a horrible tempest.”

On the other side of Houston Street, similarly-clad followers awaited us, with outstretched tracts in Spanish. We smilingly held up our English one, strolled on. We sought a spot in which to sip soothing drinks in the sunlight. Note the alliteration in that sentence, the sibilance similar to the serpent who tempted Eve into sin.

“A place of everlasting burnings,” M. read. “A furnace of fire, a devouring fire.”

I have never been much of a fan of Hell (“a place of torments, of everlasting punishment”). I grew up an itinerant Protestant (depending on who was paying attention in my childhood). I was a Presbyterian (Sunday school), an Episcopalian (confirmed), a Lutheran (baptized) and attended services of the Methodist and the Christian Science churches (just good friends). None of these disciplines required drill team-style dancing in a parking lot, accompanied by the threat of Hell (“a place where people pray, where people cry for mercy, where people wail, where people blaspheme God”). But you know? To each his own.

You ask me, as a marketer, I would gear my religious conversion techniques towards the positive. “Hey, here’s a way to govern ourselves and to treat other creatures, here’s how to work towards spiritual strength, here are some guidelines out of misery” – but if others hope to bring passersby to their own chosen Savior through harsh threats (“a place of no forgiveness, of filthiness, of weeping, of sorrows, of outer darkness”), and military-style dance, that is the right they have been granted by the Constitution, a freedom they have achieved by the sacrifices of others.

The ones we’re supposed to remember on Memorial Day.

Cecily, Mayte, Brian, Leo, Linda, Deborah, Terry, Kevin, Michael and Jody

2008-05-19T13:14:00.005-04:00

The Write-a-Thon took place on May 17 at the library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, which is a cute little library and apparently the best-kept secret in midtown Manhattan. It began at 10:30 but I arrived around noon and immediately began whispering to the nice young women from the New York Writers Coalition. They pointed me to the table of gift bags, refreshments, and the “prompt station” where you could pull phrases like “his mother’s eyes” from an idea jar, or sign up for a workshop.

I did not sign up for a workshop. I came in with my notebooks, one of the few, the very very few, in the library space without a laptop computer. I wrote in my notebook, planning what to write for the day. When I got tired of that, I worked on a short script. When I got tired of that, I worked on a short essay. When I got tired of that, I went back to my notebook to “free write.”

What is a “free write”? I like to think of it as a form of literary throat-clearing, or perhaps vocal exercises. Here is an example from that day:

Everyone has a laptop but me. Is anything else actually “writing”? Wait, she has a pen in her hand, so does he, and so does that woman behind me. But that’s all. Should I get a laptop? Just one more thing to lug around, though, and do I need another keyboard in my life? Look, that woman is surfing Google, she’s not writing, although I wish I had internet access for just a sec, I could look up “illness other than cholera which arises from contaminated water,” although I think I’ll just give her malaria. Can I call her Maritzka? Or is that just ridiculously character-y? Melanie? Is anyone named Melanie anymore?

So you see, that’s why it stays in the free-write notebook.

By the end of the day, I had a first draft of a short script, “Grandparents: The Director’s Cut.” I had made considerable headway on a short essay called “Dear Me,” which is a letter to my 14-year-old self and hence quite tragic. I had a very sore hand.

And thanks to my sponsors -- Cecily, Mayte, Brian, Leo, Linda, Deborah, Terry, Kevin, Michael and Jody -- I had raised $410 for the New York Writers Coalition.

The top fundraiser was this girl

Thanks to all of you!

The Different Words for Wind

2008-05-07T23:18:00.005-04:00

My dear friend Chris (of "Chris and Kris and Hyperhedonism") who works for a certain government agency because of his certain expertise, forwarded me the below correspondence. (BTW, Chris, because of his special government knowledge, tells me that NOAA stands for National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency or something along those lines. When the National Weather Service warning of severe weather crawls across the bottom of your screen while you're trying to watch Jon Stewart? The National Weather Service's dad is NOAA. But don't tell your friends you know this. It's not that it's a secret, it's just one of those things you shouldn't really know if you want to maintain your image as one too hip to know things like this.)

The amusing email:

Dear NOAA Employee,

This week I asked my brother, who is a SCIENTIST, why what happened in Myanmar (formerly Burma) is referred to as a "cyclone" while what happened in New Orleans (formerly New Orleans) is referred to as a "hurricane." My brother, although he is a SCIENTIST, initially gave me a somewhat incorrect answer involving the northern and the southern hemisphere and wind currents going clockwise and counter-clockwise and all that sort of thing that always makes my attention drift away. I thought if it was the same sort of weather pattern and the only difference was hemisphere, there was no need to create a whole new word for it; they could have just said "norricane" and "surricane."

My brother and I then questioned how an Iowa basketball team and a minor-league baseball team based in Brooklyn, New York, could be called the Cyclones when they are in the wrong HEMISPHERE. My brother suggested that the Iowa team be renamed "The Tornados" while I offered the "Race Riots" as an appropriate name for the Brooklyn team, since race riots are the type of disaster that occurs most often in that borough. Despite the reasonable explanation of my suggestion, my brother emailed back, "Nice comment, Don!" which means he thought my comment was racist and is a private family reference to my father, but you don't want to hear about that.

ANYWAY, NOAA Employee, after this bit of sibling banter, my brother changed course (a metaphor you will appreciate!) and thought maybe the hurricane/cyclone issue had something to do with an east/west division of the globe, rather than a north/south one. In other words, even though he is a SCIENTIST, and always harping on accuracy, he did not know for sure! In my hour of need, I turned to the NOAA website, and learned the accurate terminology for all manner of windstorms occurring on coastlines! I promptly cut and pasted this information (I hope the govt doesn't mind!) and sent it not only to my brother, who was grateful for the information, but to all kinds of my friends, who have not yet emailed back yet to tell me if they were. Grateful, I mean.

Some of my friends seem to think I am odd for insisting on knowing why things are called what they are called. Isn't that funny? I would think everyone would want to know that. For example, if you lived in a place called Silver Spring, wouldn't you want to know if there was a spring, and if it was silver? I f you lived in a town that had a street called Steinway, wouldn't you like to know that that was because the street ended at the Steinway Piano Factory, the last remaining piano factory in New York City, which was once home to 86 piano factories?

Maybe you would not.

But I think you would, NOAA Employee.

Yours very truly,

A Devoted Taxpaer

Antony, Cleopatra, and New York’s Most Charming Cabbie

2008-04-07T22:25:00.004-04:00

A day off two weeks ago, and the frenetic crammed-in schedule that a day off can bring, led me to fling myself into a cab on Ninth Avenue after a badly-needed hair appointment. At rush hour. “40th and 7th, please,” I said. The cabbie responded, “40-eth?” “Four oh,” I replied.

The cabbie, who spoke English with the lilting accent of a French-colonized African nation, regaled me with a story about how the difference between “eth” and “ayth” cost him his first shot at the college exams when he first moved to the U.S. and missed his exam date, thinking the date was the 28th when it was the 20th.

I hit the “off” button on that little television screen in the back seat. That screen annoys me, along with that unnecessary screen in the elevators of corporate buildings, delivering news bits and factoids. Thirty seconds of downtime must be filled by news of Paris Hilton and definitions of obscure words we will never remember or use. Can we no longer talk to one another?

“What state are you from?” the cabbie asked.

“I am from Missouri,” I told him carefully. “That is in the middle of the country. By the Mississippi River.”

He was delighted. When he was a child, “in my country” (never named), they learned a song in school about a boy created by a famous writer from that part of the world.

“Mark Twain?” I suggested.

“Mark Twain! The boy was called `Tom Sawyer.’ We learned a song about Tom Sawyer.” He sang the song, in French, to me. Tom Sawyer was a boy, born on the banks of the Mississippi … that was as far as my French took me. It does no good, I have learned, to let French speakers know that you understand them. I have a good accent and know some colloquial phrases, but I have no daily practice, no experience in France and no meaningful vocabulary. Responding to the French only excites them into thinking I understand way more than I do. If I say something like “Are you lost?” or “you’re on the wrong train,” they happily shout “Tu parles francais?” and embrace me with misguided kisses. I have made the mistake of replying, “Je me débrouilles” which means, technically, something like “I get by,” but to a lonely Frenchman means “Mais oui, mon frère, I know clever little slang phrases in your language, please reply rapidly and with much panache.” So now I play dumb.

When we reached 40-eth and 7th, I paid the Tom Sawyer fan and asked, “Could I have 8 back?” “Hate?” he replied. “Huit,” I answered. “Oh, you speak French?” “Un peu, I said Americanly. “Oh, I wish this ride were longer!” he said.

Which is, I have to say, the nicest thing a cabbie has ever said to me.

After a snack on 40-eth and 7th, I went on with my friend to the Theatre for a New Audience’s production of Antony and Cleopatra which received, in my humble opinion, an unjustly harsh review in The New York Times.

For one thing, the Times critic complained about the size of the theatre (200 seats) and the stage (well, whatever, you work with what you have). The majesty of the Egypto-Roman conflict was diminished by the real estate, the critic complained. To which I wanted to say, “well, welcome to New York.” I thought that the staging, space considered, was creative and used the space well. I thought that the minor players (I’m looking at you, Christen Simon, in particular) did a fabulous, scene-stealing job and I thought that Martin Csokas was a very sexy Antony. Sexy as in “oh, can I be Cleopatra tomorrow?” Sexy in a smartest-guy-in-the-room, beleaguered, besotted, weary wary warrior Hugh Laurie in House kind of way.

Moreover, in this production, as in the Julius Caesar production by this same company, all the players were there. A lot of the roles which seemed to be comprised of merely listening (again, you, Christen Simon) came across as characters who were actually present. Jeffrey Carlson put a keen young-Derek-Jacobi-as-fresh-faced-blond-psychopath spin on the role of Octavius.

I recommend this Antony and Cleopatra especially if you, like me (nerd alert!) have a life goal of seeing all of the Bard’s work live while you’re alive. (And there’s no point in seeing them otherwise.)

A bientot.

The Nothing But Red Anthology

2008-04-02T20:02:00.005-04:00

In April of last year, 17-year old Du'a Khalil Aswad was stoned and beaten to death after allegedly being seen with a Sunni Muslim man. The murder was perpetuated in part by her brothers and cousins. Although no one moved to help her, some of the surrounding crowd recorded the fatal attack on their mobile phones. The video is available on youtube, should you care to see it.

In response, Joss Whedon wrote an impassioned essay on a blog about the killing ("her face was nothing but red") and about the worldwide culture of misogyny and violence against women.

To read Joss’s post click http://whedonesque.com/comments/13271

He decided to publish an anthology called "Nothing But Red."

To read more about the anthology, click here.

and solicited submissions regarding the issues he raised in the piece. I submitted a short piece of fiction called "Wendy and the Lost Girls" which I wrote many years ago, inspired by the real-life kidnapping and murder of a young girl in California.

"Wendy and the Lost Girls" will be included in the "Nothing But Red" anthology, and I hope you read and support the book. This was an all-volunteer effort, and proceeds will go to the group Equality Now.

To be notified when “Nothing But Red” is published, click here.

I encourage you to buy a copy. I encourage you to spread the word.

Sorry, but I am unable to provide a link to my individual piece.

I thank you in advance for your support!

The Bar at the Ritz in Madrid

2008-03-01T15:28:00.005-05:00

I was sitting in the bar at the Ritz in Madrid. My friend S. ordered the wine. I was telling S. about some urgent thing – whatever it was, the sound of English alerted two older British ladies at the bar..

They were from the middle of England, they said, near Stratford-upon-Avon.

“Oh, I’ve been there,” I said. “I saw Kenneth Branagh in Hamlet.”

“You saw that?” said the older of the two older women. “What did you think?”

“I thought it was wonderful.”

“Wonderful” was lame, but they were strangers, and who knew what kind of discussion they wanted to be dragged in to. The production in fact was so powerful that it fragmented all my other memories of Stratford-upon-Avon, so that I only retain small snapshot visuals of everything that was not the play – a guy who asked me if I agreed that his British accent would score him chicks when he visited the States, the landlady at my B&B, The Dylan (named after Bob and not, as I had hoped, Thomas), telling me she had never been to the theater but hoped to go one of these days.

These are a Kodak slideshow in my mind. I know that memory behaves that way when cushioning the recollection of a trauma – news of a death, a sudden violent event. But this was merely theater, and I should be better able to recollect what else I did in Stratford-upon-Avon except attend Hamlet. But perhaps it was a trauma, that kind of production, that kind of performance, the immediate connection, the gratifying recognition, the yes! Yes! This is how I always thought it should be!, because so little in life hits you that way, and very rarely theater, for heaven’s sake. Those moments of transcendence should dominated by the province of intimate physical contact --

-- but anyway, I was speaking to an older woman in the bar at the Ritz in Madrid. I said, “It was wonderful” and in response she leaned forward on the bar, supporting her weight with her forearm, her head thrust forward, her face scrunched tight with passionate opinion. I was certain she was about to tell me I was a moron (the British, after all, do hate success), that it was paint-by-numbers Shakespeare, that only a philistine American would be such a simpleton –

Instead, she breathed out one word: “Superb.”

We smiled. Friends! I had never met anyone, ever, who had seen that production and while it was different for her – since she lived in the area -- it was a nice moment of fraternity for both of us.

She and her friend chatted with S. and me – they were on their way to a ten-day tour of Costa Rica. “A special package deal. Because we’re elderly.” The deal included an option to drop off in Madrid for a couple of days for an extra €10. So they did. And why were S. and I in Madrid? It was February; flights were cheap; we’d never been. We all toasted one another – free spirits, culture vultures. Then the younger of the two older women asked, “Are you staying here?” meaning the Ritz.

I shook my head and coughed out an incredulous “No!” They smiled again, conspirators: neither were they. We just wanted to have a glass of wine at the hotel. So that when we came home, we could indulge in an anecdote that began: “I was sitting in a bar at the Ritz in Madrid …”

Tastes Vary

2008-01-21T20:41:00.000-05:00

After close to two decades (yikes!) here, I have tried to come to embrace my neighborhood. Embrace Astoria; it has much to offer. I can’t speak to the rents, since I own, but I believe they’re still competitive. It’s close enough to the city so that I can walk home from Manhattan without fatigue, which would seem to be a dubious benefit, except that I’ve had to do it three times – September 11, the blackout, the transit strike. Ethnically diverse restaurants and food shops, odd pockets of culture like the Museum of the Moving Image and Socrates Sculpture Park, and a sense of neighborhood, particularly during unifying sporting events like a Subway Series or World Cup Soccer.

On the downside – depressing architecture only exacerbated by gentrification, a concept of urban planning no more sophisticated than that of a toddler constructing a Fisher-Price town, the immigration of ancient Balkan grudges, and really hideous music. By which I don’t mean the Greek bouzouki music blasting from cars, or the music coming from the Egyptian hookah bars on Steinway Street -- that music is merely other to me, something my ear was not trained to recognize or appreciate.

No, I’m talking about music that sucks, the Europop with its drum machines and synthetic strings, the crossover leider lite, the “easy listening” which apparently “soothes” millions of adults but which for me conjures memories of elevators, waiting rooms, the radio station my grandparents played in the car while searching for parking at the St. Louis Zoo, and the hopeless plastic furniture of airports. The musical equivalent of bad hotel art.

The local coffee shop is a particularly egregious purveyor of this sound. Of course, there are many “local” coffee shops in Astoria. All of them seem to have been voted the “best in Queens” by the hapless readers of one or another New York periodical, but today, driven from my home by renovations, I encountered the most painful accolade of all. This particular coffee shop is popular because of the incredible convenience of its location. Its coffee is mediocre and its service cliquish (I am in the clique, however, by virtue of my frequent appearances there, notebook in hand, my few demands and my generous tips.) But the music is horrible. Really horrible. In fact, it has driven two of my neighbors three blocks further to another coffee shop, which blares CNN from a television above the counter.

Today, I met this challenge. I came, I wrote, I conquered the music. I asked for the check. It arrived with an advisory written on it, that due to “popular demand,” the music which plays in the coffee shop has been made available as a playlist on iTunes.

Tastes vary. So if you want to evoke the ambience of a Queens coffee shop, if you want to walk around with it plugged into your ears, drop me a line and I’ll send you the link.

The Girl from Dr. No

2008-01-19T12:53:00.000-05:00

The other night the New York branch of the British Academy of Film and Television Artists invited their American cousins to a pub quiz at a bar downtown. I arrived with a pair of friends, ready to face the trivia and was almost immediately daunted by the James Bond category.

I was well into adulthood before I saw a complete James Bond movie. As a child, I saw one flickering on the television and I tuned in long enough to see a scantily-clad beauty being drowned in a tank to prove that the villain was evil. I decided to stick with “The Avengers.” The second James Bond movie I saw, I saw on Christmas. There was a character named Christmas in it, a nuclear physicist played by Denise Richards. I had so much trouble getting my head around that that I could barely follow the story, which had something to do with an oil pipe, a French girl with Stockholm Syndrome and the usual explosions, chases, deceptions, quips, and utterances of the word “plutonium” by Denise Richards.

The first James Bond movie I saw was “Dr. No,” and I think that viewing also took place during Christmas, when my friend Chris (of “Chris and Kris and Hyperhedonism” – hello again!) became so outraged by my assertion that I had never seen a James Bond movie that he got into his car and drove to Blockbuster and came back with “Dr. No.”

Hence, my memory uncluttered by a plethora of Bond girls, I was able to name the first one when the question came up. “Ursula Andress!” I cried, to the surprise of my teammates at Table Ten (“Ocean’s Ten,” we called ourselves). For an extra bonus point, we were asked to name the character. “Pussy Galore?” suggested one of my teammates. “No, no,” I said. “It was ‘Honey’ something.” I remembered that all the characters kept singing, “Under the mango tree/my honey and me …” I remembered remarking to Kris how strange it was that everyone on the island of Jamaica knew only one song.

We were denied the bonus point. We had to supply the full name: Honey Ryder. We appealed. With the penchant for petty intolerance that cost them the Empire, the Brits declined our appeal. Although we were never at any point in the evening in the lead in the trivia quiz, we were somewhat undone by the Honey Ryder injustice and began making dumb mistakes: Leslie Howard instead of Trevor Howard, things of that nature.

After we lost, I went to congratulate the braggarts and geeks at the winning table and to apologize for having thrown napkins at them throughout the evening. I examined their prizes: DVDs of “Torchwood” and the other puzzling entertainment offered on BBC America.

If someone could explain to me what’s going on on “Torchwood,” I would be most grateful. To me, it’s as mystifying as a James Bond movie.

The Beauty of the World, From Her Perch

2007-12-23T15:41:00.000-05:00

I try to be very Zen about Christmas, which I know is a complete contradiction, because there is nothing Zen about Christmas at all. What I mean is, it is what it is, we are where we are, let us be grateful that people do try to make the world pretty and behave with kindness, in general, in theory, at this time of year.

Never mind the ghosts of Christmases past, which would find me rockin’ around the Christmas tree with my relatives from the House of Atreus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atreus. Or the ghosts of the present, which find me staring stupefied at gift certificates which cannot repair my piano, send me to a remote corner of the world just so I can say I’ve been there, or buy me more time.

I left my office Friday evening; my office is in Rockefeller Center, so I have to excuse-me my way each day through hoards of audience members queuing up for the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City. I am used to it; I slither through crowds like an eel; the little girls in their Christmas coats and tights and shiny shoes do not move me at all.

Except for last Friday night, when I encountered Miss Molly. She was perched on her tall father’s shoulders, rosy-cheeked, baby blonde, in a brass-buttoned navy blue coat and a wool stocking cap, imperiously pointing at some imagined destination, a coterie of women – mom, no doubt, some probable aunts, and two strollers containing mewing bundles of sibling or cousin. No matter. Miss Molly was QUEEN. She was at least the heroine of a children’s book – somewhere between the age of two and three, giggling and giggling at the beautiful lit-up world.

“Now, Molly, are you excited about seeing your friend Scott? Are you going to play nicely when you get there?”

Parents, I thought, nimbly stepping in front of the lot of them. They never know when to leave it alone, do they? Friend Scott? Play nicely? Molly was in the delicious now now now – there was no hold my hand, stand up straight, where’s your brother, hold this, don’t touch, wipe your nose, share …

Just then I almost tripped over another little girl, four or five years old, light brown hair in a black velvet bow, dressed in one of those red and black I-was-a-princess-in-Czarist-Russia coats favored by parents of a certain level of income and benevolent neglect. Her father said to her in a voice that was not at all doting but one of surprised, sincere but measured and provisional approval, “You look very pretty.”

For some reason, that hit me. I reared back at the sensation, held my face, gasped, felt a sneeze of unsummoned tears.

I fled across the street, to the nearest ATM. Must get tips for the super and the porter. Enough cash to buy groceries for the Christmas breakfast. And floral arrangements. And scented candles. And if I can find one easily, a CD of sacred songs because that’s what I seem to want to hear these days, not “Winter Wonderland” by the latest hipster but the St. Cecilia’s Boys’ Choir intoning “The Holly and the Ivy.” Ghost of Christmas presents, I suppose.

And here comes Miss Molly, again. I’m in line at an outdoor ATM and Molly and her entourage have just turned the corner, a corner which, as none of us at the long-lined ATM would have noticed, presents gushing fountains and light-bedecked trees. Pretty! So pretty! Molly pointed and emitted a joyful noise: “Eeeeeeeeeeeee!” “What are you screaming about?” her father asked, amiable, a bit embarrassed. “Look, there’s Daddy’s office. Look, Daddy works there. Why are you screaming?”

Well, because every tree she sees is a Christmas tree, she’s traveling so fast and so high without having to feel cold or tired and she’s the center of attention, everyone and everything is Molly Molly Molly and look look look. Because of the beauty of the world, from her perch.

Enjoy it, kid. It’s all downhill from here. I didn’t say it. But I thought it.

Chris and Kris and Hyperhedonism

2007-12-19T17:32:00.000-05:00

Hyperhedonia. Noun. The state of deriving excessive pleasure from that which is intrinsically dull

I found this definition, which I have never been able to find a match for, in a dictionary of amusing and unusual words. The dictionary itself was among the stock of upscale bric-a-brac for sale in a yuppie home furnishings store in Georgetown.

My friend Kris was across the store, pocketing paint chips.

Kris collects paint chips. She takes them home and keeps them in a box and occasionally brings them out to look at them in different kinds of light “to see if I still like the color.” Kris’s husband, Chris, was smirking at a watercolor map of Colonial Virginia, which was neither drawn to scale nor historically accurate. Kris and Chris are hyperhedonists.

They would rather not be written about. Kris expressed this by saying, "Don't write about us. Don't write about us. No, don't. Write. About us."

But they make such interesting copy, with their profusion of masters' degrees, their obsessive interest in cataloguing things, Chris's unnecessary fluency in Swedish, Kris's collection of acetate negatives, their bird-watching, cat-grooming, map-making, mountain-biking, gardening, herb-drying, lawn-game playing idiosyncracies, along with the oddities imposed by their his-and-hers matching masters in library science and their upbringing in Indiana, a state which, if it can be survived and escaped, leaves its natives forever stamped with eccentricity.

Their hyperhedonism makes Chris and Kris very easy to buy Christmas presents for. A book on the history of how wind is measured, or which details everyday Dutch life in Rembrandt's Holland. A desktop croquet set. A pair of earrings shaped like hummingbirds. A CD of a capella Swedish folk carols. Big hits, all.

What did I get them this year? I can’t tell you. Although I can tell you that I received their gift and opened it already.

They gave me a book on the genealogies of characters in Shakespeare’s plays. I am so excited.

It seems that I, too, am a hyperhedonist.

Oh, I have always suspected as much. The warning signs were always there. The ability to stare at a manuscript, or a map, or a musical score, or even a photograph for hours, charmed by details, weaving out scenarios, histories, shadows, nuances. The capacity for self-amusement so common in only children, or lonely children. The ability to discuss at great length a detail that is so cool, so fascinating, did you ever notice that? -- only to notice, eventually, that your audience has wandered away, if not physically, then at least mentally, fixing his eyes on the giant t.v. screen showing the Knicks game behind you.

But that’s alright. We have our pleasures. I am going to start with Henry IV, Parts I and II.

Merry Christmas, Chris and Kris.

It Was Only Rock'N'Roll

2007-12-09T18:46:00.000-05:00

You know you have ticked off one more rite of passage when, while visiting a distant city, you don’t seek to know the hot radio station, but the local real estate prices. Similarly, I think, you reach a point where you attend a movie or a play, especially if you’re in the business, even on the fringes of it, and say not merely, “I don’t like this,” but “is there an audience for this?”

Is there an audience – an American audience -- for Tom Stoppard’s “Rock’n’Roll”? I saw it on Broadway last week. I had been waiting for it to come to Broadway since I learned that it had been staged in London. I considered myself a huge Stoppard fan, but I see now that I was only halfway there, the R & G Are Dead, The Real Thing, Shakespeare in Love, The Invention of Love, Jumpers half, and not the Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, The Coast of Utopia half.

In general, I’m not a political animal. I’m not opposed to political theater, as long as it is actual drama about actual people. And yes I knew that “Rock’n’Roll” was about the Prague Spring and felt that I had all the education I needed to have in order to attend the play. I had been to Prague. I had toured the sites of its tragedies (and, other than beautiful architecture, free music and cheap beer, its tragic past is one of its selling points.) I had even done the requisite homework as requested by the little slip of paper that came with my tickets. (Not the kind of thing that happens, I imagine, when you buy tickets to “Legally Blonde.”)

Rock’n’Roll spans two decades, and begins in August 1968 when the Soviet Tanks rolled down Wenceslas Square and put an end to the experiment in political liberalization that then Czech-leader Dubczek had been testing out for a whole 8 months. Jan, a Czech student played by Rufus Sewell hightails it out of Cambridge to go back home to “save socialism … and my mother,” armed only with his vinyl LPs of the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. His professor, played by Brian Cox, protests with rhetoric. Back and forth for 20 years. Jan suffers real privations, Brian Cox suffers loss of idealism, the Berlin Wall comes down, the Stones play Prague, the end.

Not that there aren’t some terribly moving moments in the play, not that Rufus Sewell doesn’t deliver a character who wears his increasing years of experience and heartache with tender poignancy, not that I wasn’t glad as hell to hear Pink Floyd blasted on a Broadway stage (“I feel old,” muttered the man behind me.) But I just wasn’t engaged. The Brian Cox character, the idealistic Marxist professor -- ok, you lost me at “idealistic Marxist” -- not in the 80’s, pal, not when we knew.

Well, I know, it’s only Tom Stoppard, but I loved him. “Don’t you love him?” I asked a woman at the bar before the show started. A Brit in a decisive hat, she shook her head abruptly and drained her drink as the bells rang, calling us to our seats. “You don’t?” I pressed on, feeling as slighted as a soccer mom. (I had chosen her, by the way, at random.) “He has the autodidact’s need to always show how smart he is,” she sniffed.

You doubt me. Well, I rearranged the words slightly, but she definitely used the term “autodidact” because while she groped for it, so did I – oh, yeah, what’s that word that means self-educated, and why is it so hostile-sounding?

So maybe “Rock’n’Roll” is part of an autodidact’s agitprop education but as for me, sentimental capitalist, I was hoping for the moment of shivering recognition I felt while watching “The Invention of Love” when Robert Sean Leonard (may his tribe increase!) playing A.E. Houseman, confessed his love to the (straight) college colleague who proved to be the love of his life, “Did you really never know?”

That play had the same erudition, autodidactism, idealism – hell, that one came with a 30 page booklet instead of a link to website homework, but at the bottom of it was the beat of human need. ‘Cause that’s really what rock’n’roll is – not a rebel voice that threatens Authority, but the very pulse that keeps you free.

Getting Thanks

2007-11-21T14:03:00.000-05:00

A week or so back, I received an email, from the contact page. (That’s how it works, by the way, if you want to contact me. I have that “comments” thing but it doesn’t work. What you say to eliza, stays with eliza.)

This email reads, redacted for my correspondent’s privacy (and with her permission):

"Hi Elizabeth,

I hope I have the right person, although I don't imagine there are too many writers with the same three names as yours.

I have been searching for an article you wrote … titled "Sultry Like Me." I have one copy that I have saved all these years that is quite old and worn and would like to replace it. I have tried Cosmo's site and they do not appear to have archives. If you have it on file I would greatly appreciate you sending it to me. The information in that piece went miles for me in the way of self esteem and quite frankly, is an integral part of who I am today. Even if it is unavailable, for that I thank you.”

Somebody out there has saved all these years a piece I wrote for Cosmo? Back then I was a smartass just out of college with a just-published novel taking a gamble on the hope that writing success was just around the corner and that I would never have to bury myself in an office. I was busy writing my epic novel and at the behest of my (then) agent, writing what I thought of as “fluff” for women’s magazines.

An editor of one of those women’s magazines took me to lunch (and I was literally so hungry that I relished those lunches) to probe my dry, witty, sarcastic mind for more pieces. She asked what my novel was about. In retrospect, I know what she wanted to hear:

Spunky Everygirl Searches for Mr. Right.

But I wasn’t writing that, so I told her the truth – my novel was about a chaos physicist studying the patterns in the game of baseball, while finding those same patterns in his own relationships. Also, life and loss and love and Shakespeare and stuff.

The editor looked at me hard. “Are you familiar with the term `high concept’?”

I replied, “You mean, like, `Shark terrorizes Long Island community’?”

She asked for the check. I heard my career snap like a breadstick. She killed my next two commissioned pieces through her assistant. (“I honestly don’t know why she’s not calling you back. And I’m not being evasive.”)

The thing is, that editor (not from Cosmo, by the way) has probably forgotten that lunch, just as I had forgotten “Sultry Like Me,” which a gentle reader from cyberspace says it is an integral part of who she is today.

So many morals here that I barely know how to address them:

It is daunting to realize how our every exchange is so fraught with power and tenderness. We never know who we touch or how we touch them.

By Hammer and Hand, All Arts Do Stand

2007-11-13T21:47:00.000-05:00

Went to The General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen tonight (their motto: “By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand!”) to attend a lecture on the piano. A piano technician was supposed to take apart the Society’s Weber piano and compare it to a Steinway. This didn’t quite happen, but it was entertaining nonetheless, and I made the acquaintance of a few researchers who may help me in the quest that began when I found a piano on the street last spring. It is a 1927 Sohmer upright. Sohmer was a good reliable German-made line, beloved by Hoagy Carmichael, Al Jolson, Rudolph Valentino. When Irving Berlin wrote “I Love a Piano,” he wrote it on a Sohmer.

Two weeks after I found (and adopted) the piano, I learned by web-surfing (see how useful web-surfing is?) that the building (ten blocks from my apartment) which had housed the factory in which the piano was born had been declared a historic landmark. My neighborhood is lousy with retired tuners and piano builders; it’s Astoria, home of Steinway. A piano technician, ML, lives just down the street. I called him in to have a look at my Sohmer, daffily optimistic that I just needed a tuning, and was told that the extensive water damage on the soundboard would require $5,000 in repairs. Another $3,000 in cosmetic repairs would restore the creature to its former glory – it’s solid mahoghany, which someone at some point saw fit to cover with black paint.

Oh, but its action, oh, but its tone! I am in love and cannot let it go. And so it has sat in my living room since Groundhog’s Day, occasionally singing “Sheep May Safely Graze” when I ask it to, but refusing the “Moonlight Sonata.”

I had hoped, tonight, that the lecturing technician would cheerfully agree to come and take a look at the old girl, and heartily refute ML’s crazy estimate: “Water damage? What water damage? That green on the felt isn’t mold – it’s just green felt!” But alas. More daffy optimism. But when I mentioned ML to tonight’s piano technician, he all but genuflected. Apparently, I had had the rock star of piano rebuilders in my living room, drinking my coffee, giving me the bad news, petting my ill piano. “No point in my looking at it, if ML’s seen it.”

So what to do. Can’t let go, can’t afford repairs; piece of New York City history, instrument that cannot be duplicated if the same amount of money were spent to buy a new one. (“Maybe a Chinese piano,” spat ML, and this was before the toy recall.) Well, it was a miracle that I found the piano, that morning when I had just been wishing for one, so all I can do is wait for another one. Another miracle, or another piano.

Beauties Playing Plain

2007-11-02T20:05:00.000-04:00

I was recently asked by my friend/director (she has produced and directed two of the shorts I wrote) to make a “special guest appearance” at her scene studies class. The class is one targeted towards directors working in film and traditionally they have worked with assigned actors of assigned genders – two women, two men, a man with a woman. They can use scenes from existing film scripts or ones they are working on. My friend chose a scene from the Billy Wilder film “The Apartment” and I was hauled in to play a third character (a trailblazing event, apparently) -- the bitchy, drunk ex-girlfriend of the heroine’s (married) boyfriend.

I should point out, no typecasting was involved. Or so I tell myself.

Being in one of those commercial rehearsal rooms on the west side in the Garment District evoked many ghosts, but – that’s another story. When our “The Apartment” scene was done (“Oh, you’re not a real actress? But you were so good!”), I watched the other two scenes, which were from original scripts the directors had written.

And God help me, I do love actors (and actresses – I use the term gender-neutrally.) They’re infuriating creatures, but when they’re on, I can forgive them their hi-I-love-you-bye-I-love-you hugs, their massive insecurity, their general (that is, generally-speaking) illiteracy, their solipsism (go look it up, actors). My friend/director sat by my side during these scenes, eager for my opinions, and somewhat surprised by them. “Tell me about Mary,” (name changed) I whispered. “Really?” she hissed back. “Her?”

The thing about Mary was that I couldn’t tell, looking at her, whether she was beautiful or plain. Not ugly – actresses are never ugly (or else I would have been one) – but just ordinarily symmetrically-featured with no glaring exceptions of cheekbones, lips or eyes. During the scene and its many redos, “Mary” was both hard and plain, and hard and beautiful, depending on what she was playing and what the emotions of the scene demanded. The dichotomy kept me watching, and watching intently.

Far more engaging, n’est-ce pas?

And the thing is, for most of us, that is true of the people we love. Are they beautiful? Or is it their smile that makes them beautiful, or their solemnity, or their intensity, or their insouciance? With someone merely pretty – or very, very pretty – one thinks, am I here, am I worthy of being here, or am I merely audience? With a plain/beauty, one thinks, I see you, I see you in me, can you see me? And me in you? I think you might. I hope you will.

I want to do a piece on the beautiful females of film who have played the "drab" one (usually accomplished by putting them in cardigans and dyeing their hair brown) but that is for another time (and maybe for a place that pays $$ :)).

Here We Are -- Now, Entertain Us

2007-10-17T01:05:00.000-04:00

Congratulations must be paid to the Colorado Rockies.

In particular, I must congratulate my friend Brian -- friend in the sense that I don't know him, but he is the host of my favorite podcast, "Coverville" http://www.coverville.com/. Yeah, I'd do that hidden text thing if I knew how.

Okay, so with that endearing talent I have for bringing nearly every topic you can think of back to me, myself and I --

so there I was, home from work about 1:15 (don't ask -- that thing I said about the RSS? And November? Not exaggerating). So when you're somewhere you don't want to be until that hour and you get home, do you scrub things and virtuously hit the hay? Not if you're too wired with outrage, man! So you turn on the t.v. And so it came to pass that I was probably the only woman on the East Coast of the United States independently and willingly watching the Rockies clinch the NLCS, which occured at 1:38 a.m. eastern time.

Funny thing -- my second novel, "Nobody On, Nobody Out" -- remember that one? No, of course you don't. My first one was published. My second one was not. It was the autobiographical one like the kind people wrote before they wrote memoirs instead, was about a night in the life of a teenage girl in an alcoholic, motherless, baseball-obsessed family of men. On the night in question, the longest game in the history of baseball is being played. The game is seen and heard on the radio as various degrees of teenage drama unfold.

This is based on a game large in the legend of my childhood, between the St. Louis Cardinals and (I think?) the New York Mets. It ended around 1:20 -- I remember it being a contest of wills among my stepsiblings and I. We all fought to stay awake and keep company my constantly Cardinal-enraged father, Job-like in his baseball sufferings. The next day, at breakfast, we confessed, shamefully, the exact hour of our capitulation to sleep. Dad, grim-jawed (if you want anything done right, you've got to do it your goddamn self!) , had stayed true to the end, alone in the kitchen, rattling his ice before the quavering dogs, snapping off the radio with his trademarked hand-grenade click of the dial. I don't remember how that game ended, only that the game seemed as though it would never end.

Later I learned that in the American League, it is possible to call a curfew if the game goes past a certain time (typical! pansies!) So in the unpublished novel (editors? agents? Bueller?), I made the game an American League game, and brought back to life the St. Louis Browns and created as their rival a team in Denver. The Rockies. The Denver Rockies.

And a year or so later, the Colorado Rockies. And for that reason, if not for their wholesome image and nice-seeming fans, I'm on their side.

What Ceremony Else?

2007-10-11T20:31:00.000-04:00

I saw Michael Clayton and I haven't meant to post so much about movies, but I liked this one. My first reaction upon seeing the ads was, of course, "Hey, no one who looks like George Clooney works in my law firm." (Apologies to all the men in my law firm, but, hey, you know.) But the film itself explains why that is so. It's a realistic depiction of the life, without reality doing that dull-down thing that reality can do.

These characters don't stroll the corridors of power in Cole-Haans, working out, barking orders and arriving home in time to cook their overachieveing but affectionate teenagers healthy gourmet meals. No, they labor, estranged from all that really matters, in overcrowded conference rooms, pawing through document boxes, snarling at each other and living out the law firm version of the Henry Kissinger-attributed axiom that "the politics in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so small." (I may have misquoted that, but my knowing that quote at all was so novel to my snobbish future boss that it led to my first full-time job in a law firm. And no, I'm not a lawyer, so don't start.)

So the characters sweat and swear and fight for tiny pieces of turf; they are compromised, indebted, immoral, besieged, bitter, and starved for the beauty of life. Real law firm. Nice set design, by the way!

The audience, when I saw it, was full of the kind of people you don't want to be associated with -- the kind the studios don't make movies for, the kind the nightly network news caters to. But they were there. On opening weekend. I'm just sayin'. And there were marketing researchers there as well. As someone who works in marketing (there, I've said it), I believe it is my moral obligation to fill out marketing surveys, but on this one ("you want to see more movies like Michael Clayton made?") I have to admit I lied I little. I portrayed myself as a younger and hipper version of myself. But then, who doesn't?

That same weekend, I saw Hamlet by a dear little repertory company which performs the classics. I (geek alert!) love a good Hamlet. I've been a Hamlet fan since I was thirteen, which, as you might imagine, made me way popular in high school. The problem is, a year after my father died, I treated myself to a trip to England, where I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon, with Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet and gosh, it kind of ruined me for life. That production was perfection. My subsequent Hamlets (six? seven?) have been so forgettable I've forgotten them. This dear little rep's production is at least straightforward, but it lacks the heart and grieving of the RSC production which so spoke to me then.

How are these two entertainments tied together? Hollywood A-list film and tiny little production of a classic?

The nagging, nasty pull to do the right thing when doing so will undo your whole life. Because not to take arms against that sea of troubles will kill you, but so will the alternative. And the importance of honoring the dead -- no, not just the dead, but the lost ones who taught you how to endure.

So, yeah. See Michael Clayton. Support your demographic! And take a look at Hamlet again.

Au Canada

2007-09-19T21:42:00.000-04:00

My friend Ross and I were having a drink the other night, sort of wishing we were Canadian. He’s back from doing a big-ass play in Toronto; we had both just seen “The Drowsy Chaperone,” and my favorite show in the world is “Slings and Arrows.” Having done a play in Toronto, Ross is four degrees of separation (the exchange rate, you know) from every other actor in or from Canada. They give grants to the arts; they make a lot of movies for not much money and let’s not talk about the health care. But we’re here. Cheers.

Then last night I went to a screening of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” in which the role of my home state of Missouri was played by Canada. Alberta, to be precise. I was okay with it until one scene where Brad Pitt and Sam Rockwell walk onto a frozen lake surrounded by the regal jagged-peaked, snow-covered Canadian Rockies. (No such heights exist in Missouri – this parenthetical aside was brought to you by my geologist brother.) The filmmaker did this, it seemed to me, just to show off the landscape. The scene could have just as well been played in the kitchen; in fact, it might have been more dramatic. Not even Jesse James can menace very well with such a backdrop.

So it’s a western and not in an accurate landscape and John Ford (ha! Any relation to Robert?) started this tradition. And it’s a shame that they couldn’t have shot it in Missouri which, while no Alberta, has a lush, bruised, spooky beauty all its own. And it would have been one thing if they’d just mumbled (and there’s plenty of mumbling), “Oh yeah, we’re in Missouri,” and never mentioned it again, but no, but they keep bringing it up. Kansas City. Independence. At one point the Coward Robert Ford mentions that his father was a preacher in Excelsior Springs. An ancestor of mine ran a newspaper in Excelsior Springs. I have been there and for you, Alberta, to play Excelsior Springs is the kind of reprehensible slumming you find in trust fund babies cadging cigarettes at dive bars.

Frank

2007-09-11T20:41:00.000-04:00

My sister sent me the following quote.

From The Cottagers by Marshall Klimasewiski

Laurel said, "It's just that I'm nice. I've always been nice. I hate the words, though, and I've always loved the word 'frank.' " She picked a pretty pink stone from the sand while speaking and showed it to Samina. "MY favorite characters in novels have always been the frank characters who go around setting others straight. But the thing is, now that I've started, I can't stop. Nor just with Greg, I've suddenly found myself being awfully frank with all sorts of poor, unsuspecting people, like our neighbors and the mailman, my mother. You'll be surprised to hear that not everyone takes it well."

I hear that, sister.

I Now Declare This Site Open

2007-09-05T19:35:00.000-04:00

Ah, a web presence. I feel different already. More invigorated, somehow, more adventurous and yet more mainstream and wholesome. Like I've been hiking through the Canadian Rockies.

So this is where to come if you want to see what's going on with my work -- the raindrops of victory, the tsunami of defeat. (Yeah, I checked. The plural form is tsunami.)

My patient and delightful webmaster is still working with me to work out the kinks, so by the time you see this, there will be more to see. But even the tsunami masters find my own original writing a tad more engaging than the words "test test test."

Be seeing you.