December 26

 

It's the day after Christmas-- and I'm reading Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister on a Kindle 3!

 

 

And we had a huge blizzard snow storm!

 

 

December 24

 

Whatever Your Holiday,
Celebrate the Light
The Love the Warmth

 

 

 

 

 

Ellen and Greg on their way, Joel and Sarah flying from Puerto Vallarta in a few hours.

 

 

 

 

 

December 22

 

Big news: I'm doing this page on the new Dreamweaver (CS5 pack, but really just Dreamweaver 11) and I've already fouled up one thing, not being able to see the codes at the bottom, but I'll work on that and more. Mainly I'm just happy to have a functioning Dreamweaver on my desktop computer again.

December 17

Well, this day I woke all cozy with things I wanted to journal about, and then had to move the Christmas tree, and bring it in the house, and now we’ve got the Petro guy in the basement. Sigh.

Saw the Jan Gossart (Gossaret, Mabuse, etc.) exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum yesterday. Until I started to get tired, I had such a lovely sense of being right where all the power lines come together, which is to say I was having a really good time. The painter a new one for me, old Dutch master, moving from Medieval to Renaissance, contemporary (and mutual influence with) Durer. He went to Rome as a young man and then gradually participated in the invention of the more fully molded Renaissance humanist painting style in which the three-dimensional forms come into the viewer’s space, as the curators say.

There was a nice video at the end about cleaning the pictures, and I almost missed the portraits at the end that were most thoroughly Renaissance in their particularity and penetration into my space. Also lots of mildly scholarly observations in the documentation about the specific statues and images and possibly pieces of statues used for models for images. Especially something called the Spinario, or "Boy With Thorn," a kid a thorn out of his foot. Funny drawing of the back of a statue at a strange angle. I loved Gossart/Mabuse's monkey-blunt-faced Jesuses (two versions of "Christ on the Cold Stone"), one twisted in pain, one looking up at spiritual ease in spite of torture. Anyhow, a wonderful exhibition, leaving me with the ususal awareness of gaps in my knowledge but great delight that I can be in the same space with all that human history and accomplishment.

 

December 5, 2010

 

 

Two December Haiku

 

Sillver lining clouds,

Early December ev'ning.

Suddenly-- huge sky!

 

 

Saturate my hues--

Sharpen each newly bare twig

Breathe in deeply-- Me!

 

 

November 26, 2010

 

Thanksgiving over, just back from Ellen's with my mother, Joel and Sarah, Andy and me, Ellen, Jon, Bethany, Greg, David, Ann, Leah, Nathan and Ellen's neighbors Jan and Dan across the street. Ellen says it was too few people! I'm ready for a nap, enjoying J & S, made lunch, ready to go with dinner soon.

Here are my Thanksgiving images:

 

 

 

 

 

November 24, 2010

 

To a Young Woman Wearing Flip Flops on the PATH train in Late Fall
I grant you this train is too warm
That we all have seats
But soon you’ll be on the street.
Okay, feet are tough--
The parakeet’s scaly
Gray and pink claws
Hardly feel the cold
As far as I can tell,
But what about spike heeled boots
Dr. Martens and wooden soled clogs?
What about huge basketball sneakers?
How do your blue-nailed toes
Dance safely among them?
Do you trust those other feet?
Are you so confident that
You simply stride
Or glide or slip and slide
On congealed spit
and concrete?
Oh mysteries of the Young Woman
Wearing flip flops
On the PATH train.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Dark and silver sky
Backdrops maroon, red, peach-gold–
November’s last leaves...

 

 

11-15-10

 

I'm just back from the 2010 Kentucky Book Fair in Frankfort, Kentucky. A tremendous amount of driving-- four days straight, stopping in Shinnston and picking up my mother to come back for the winter. So it was strenuous, but lots of fun.

Kentucky, beyond the eastern mountains, where I've been before, was more beautiful than I realized-- in my general and extensive ignorance, I hadn't known that Frankfort is in the center of the blue grass, with horse paddocks and horses, deep cuts through crumbly gray limestone in low hills covered mostly with bare trees but lovely blasts of deep red probably some kind of maples.

The book fair itself had a couple hundred authors at tables, and it had that quality I like of all the people together, self-publishers (juried, so nothing really amateurish) but also pros like Bobbie Ann Mason sitting at a table with Frank X. Walker, the poet inventor of Affrilachian writing. They were busier than I was, but everyone was accessible. Nice equality among the writers-- lots of civil war and other history, art books at my table. Headliners included Kitty Kelly (who canceled at the last minute) and David Baldacci. I saw Connie and George Brosi, Marianne Worthington and George Ella Lyon, Alice Hale Adams. Others. One man came up to me and bought a copy of Out of the Mountains, but also had a stack of my old books he wanted signed! That was so nice.

Previous night, a reception for the authors with Kentucky bourbon, and I met some new people, collected a lot of calling cards-- I didn't have high expectations, but it was very nice, always good and stimulating to be in new places with new people.

 

 

 

 

10-25-10

 

 


Yellow, blue, green, gray--
Banners seen between branches:
Oak tree in autumn.

 

 

 

 

October 18, 2010

 

 

(photo by Dory Adams)

I was in Charleston, WV this week-end at the tenth annual West Virginia Book Festival. They do a beautiful job-- Pam May from the main library runs it, and runs its splendidly. Half the vast hall is a used book sale, the other half has tables for publishers and many other vendors including a barbecue seller, the ACLU, the Kanawha County Book mobile, games for kids (and trick or treat candy) and even a woman giving information about Islam. To see the headliners (the big one was Nicholas Sparks) click here. I signed books at the Ohio University Press table and gave a workshop on "Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel," and saw a ton of people, of whom I won't remember all: Cat Pleska, Belinda Anderson, George and Connie Brosi, Marc Harshman, Anna Smucker, Carter Seaton, Dory Adams and Kevin Scanlon, Phyllis Moore, Kathy Manley, the staff at WVU Press, and of course my new friends at OUP. It's a really good event-- people seem to enjoy themselves (a LOT of people), and as Belinda Anderson says, "There's nothing to perk you up like the smell of books!"

 

 

 

 

October 9, 2010

 

Photos of Taxi with a nice pepper from my garden here.

 

 

October 1, 2010

 

Yes, it’s all good, as I wrote to Carole Rosenthal about our coffee and then writers' group last night. We trying to convince Edith to start blogging, and Carol Emshwiller is back from her place in the mountains of California, and Joel called and I'm writing a lot of emails and trying to communicate in my own way.

And thinking about this Buddhist concept of No Stable Self, which means me in this place with rain diagonal on the windows, at this moment, and then the rain stops, turns to drops, all twinkles and shades into something else. Why is that concept so helpful to me?

 

 

September 28, 2010

 

Friday night I had such fun with friends coming to hear me read and buy books at Words bookstore in Maplewood, NJ. Below I'm signing for Mira Stillman, herself a wonderful memoirist and Ethical Culture friend. Photo by Ellen Kahaner for Maplewood Patch.

 

 

 

Lots of good news this morning, for individuals, if not for the world:Joel's PHd advisor Dawn Song got a Macarthur grant for heavens' sake!

 

 

 

September 6, 2010

Just back from the lake and taking Joel to the plane. Photos below of the usual great times at Lake Buel-- First, on a cold night, Joel with college sophomore cousin Nathan and age-mate Leah, in front of the fire. Andy's brother David in the background with his Kindle. Below are Joel and Nathan; Leah with Xander the sharpei; a white pine as seen from the hammock; and finally, Taxicab enjoying the lake too. The main thing missing was Sarah!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

September 5

 

At the lake. Joel and I just got back from Richard III at Shakespeare & Company, my special second version. It’s been a nice day, conversations three or four times of the old sort I like so well, about Feminism and women changing their names when they marry, about proselytizing religious groups.

John Douglas Thompson is still super as Richard-- the whole production, seen on closing night after seeing the earlier preview, seemed less pell-mell and less surprising, but that of course had a lot to do with me not knowing the play then. Now the production seems magisterial, but certainly not slow: it's as if JDT had first been wildly wonderfully alive and dancing around the stage, and now, in this final performance, had taken complete charge of the stage, deeply and fully.

Costumes seemed more finished and richer, and all the performances more polished, I guess, which meant that the big parts didn’t stand out as much because the level of all was higher (thus Clarence and Elizabeth were more of a piece with the rest and less tour de forces). Margaret was more playful and nuanced. Mostly it was Richard though. And all of them just owning the stage and the colors. I was tired a few times, some of the scenes a little long, but that’s Shakespeare not Shakespeare & Company. Satisfaction and joy. I'm so happy we found S&C so many years ago.

Love that speech at the end when Richard is alone after his dream, everything falling apart, himself broken in pieces-- can Richard hate himself, flee himself, etc. Related to the wandering selfless with the slippery center.

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 25, 2010

 

 

It’s almost eleven p.m. and I’ve been reading the Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns book from Teachers & Writers. Some time ago someone told me I’d like it, and I bought it– no memory of who or when, but I am liking it. It’s like that Camille Paglia’s book Break, Blow, Burn in that it talks about poems, gives, poems, talks some more. Like a good lecture, except I can stop when I want. Space & prose between the poems.

One of the poems, not a new one to me, but one I hadn't thought of in a while that came whamming back, was Elizabeth Bishop’s

 

 

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
– the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly–
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
– It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
– if you could call it a lip–
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

 

 

 

August 21

At the Lake

 

All excited-- the Mom's group coming today, less one couple, which is a disappointment, but there are special circumstances. KIt is beautiful today, and the lake is glassy. Andy oujt ofr a bike ride, and I have some preparations to do, but not as much as you'd think, thanks to the intrepid Ellen, Andy's sister, who was here last week and cleaned (and also painted a cabinet and some shelves etc. etc.

Yesterday, Carol Barry-Austin and I once again welcomed new district teachers to the town, talking about the community and the integration work of the Coalition and the Schools Committee. In the picture below, I appear to be singing Ave Maria, and I have absolutely no memory of what I was saying.

 

 

 

 

August 13, 2010

 

We have had so much of the really dense nineties, mid-nineties, even 100's with thick yellow air, then finally yesterday cloudy and some light showers, and today the clean, clear air with sun but with a caress on the skin. For some reason, this summer it has all felt good to me-- or at least it has all felt and feeling is good. It's been a light year for mosquitoes, relatively speaking, because of dryness, but there'll be the wonderful sharp air and colors and outlines of fall, and winter is great too-- that cool air coming into you while your limbs are wrapped in cloth.

 

 

The dappled, trembling shade of trees,

The crystal cool of midday breeze,

Airs that waken skin and tease,

The missing have-tos: summer ease.

 

 

 

August 10, 2010

 

I'm back from lake vacation, five days in West Virginia, and another week-end at the lake. All the traveling has been more fun than stressful (do most people think traveling is actually relaxing?), especially once I finished my teaching responsibilities. Things look pretty good in WV: My mother is 91 and still on her own, although she complains about her balance and uses a cane when she goes out for a walk to give biscuits to all her canine friends. We shopped at wal-mart and ate at a chinese buffet and looked at wedding pictures and visited Margie and Edith and went to church and had a tour of Charlie Cowger's art in Marion County.

First picture is Charlie with my mom in front of an unfinished mural of Italy he's doing for a private individual, and below that is me with Charlie in front of his Vietnam Mural at the Marion County Vietnam Memorial. It was hot and sticky, and Mom and I were dressed for church.

 

 

 

July 23

 

Andy, Ann, David and I went to the Sterling Clark Museum today, in heavy rain!, and saw the "Picasso Looks at Degas" exhibit, much of which was excellent-- "beautifully curated," as I overheard someone say. Fascinating stuff: P when first in Paris had a studio near D, admired, but never met, apparently. D. the same age as P's father, P. collected a photo of D. and made it look very much like an early portrait P. did of his father. Degas's late whorehouse monotypes directly used by Picasso in a series of strange, ugly, disconcerting very busy images of whorehouses with Degas himself as voyeur. P's paintings done in reponse to Dega's bronze Little Dancer (one like an outtake from the Demoiselle d'Avignon, one a vaudeville dwarf done up in dancing clothes). All wonderful-- but as so often, I am drawn to what I am less "supposed" to admire, and this time it was their other big exhibit, Juan Munoz's sculptures which are in resin and bronze, a giant train wreck, fifty gray guys about four foot tall with the same smiling Asian face in groups and singly. A whole room of them. No feet-- pant legs columns. Some found sculptures: a banister rail with a knife attached. A group I liked even more-- bronze figures with round bottoms like a cross between balloon skirts and one of those punching bag clowns from my childhood. Wonderful stuff. Beautiful rain on Berkshire Hills.

 

 

 

 

July 22

 

Just past midnight, so still the 22nd to me: Andy and I went to The Winter’s Tale at Shakespeare & Company with Jonathan Epstein as Leontes, Johnny Lee Davenport ast Polynixes, Elizabeth Aspenlieder as Hermione and an excellent Corrinna May who made Paulina work-- lots of others-- Jason Asprey as Autolycus, Ryan Winkles, who gets better, as Florizel. Malcolm Ingram in a few parts, such a trouper, Wolf Colemen as the young shepherd/clown. His dad directed, but he is a good clown anyhow. We had spitting seats, second row, and I really liked this production-- it’s to me a tough play because of its totally un-modern psychology-- the blast of evil jealousy that just overwhelms everything, whoosh, and the 16 years later introduced by a character called Time, the crazy living statue, the “Exit pursued by a bear” which was my only disappointment as there was no bear, only a horrified Antigonus. Overall, I could hear the lines, I was convinced by Jonny of real feelings in the king sick with jealousy-- the Apollo’s revenge was nicely done and truly moving when the king denies the truth of the oracle and gets blasted with death-- the Shepherd’s festival full of Shakespeare & Company hijinks-- but mostly, it was just that once again, somehow, they made the play work.

It helped that I had seen it in the past and not gotten it, and I could hear better up close, that they always make sense of more lines than not, and especially, Corrinna May’s active Paulina made a lot of sense of what was going on-- and Epstein’s Leontes was masterfully sympathetic. Anyhow, I was glad read the Marjorie Garber essay, and glad I’d heard the lecture on the tape, but mostly glad that S&C do their thing so well, that they exist and have given me Shakespeare. Altoghter uplifted and happy and looking forward to doing it again soon.

 

 

 

July 20, 2010


I'm not as tired as Andy, but we're both tired: he biked 100 miles today, Connecticut to Vermont again, but this time back almost to West Stockbridge to make an even hundred. Pretty amazing for someone on Medicare. I had to hang out in West Stockbridge, which is fun, ideas for restaurants, waiting for him to finish so I could pick him up-- and then the muffler fell off the Subaru! AARRGHH! Tomorrow’s activity. I no longer feel guilty about bringing two cars.

He says he had burning in his muscles, and his wrists hurt (he was biking for something like seven hours!). Meanwhile, I went to the Norman Rockwell museum-- I like Rockwell, and this time especially enjoyed some movie posters (he did STAGECOACH!) And some Saturday evening post covers with movie stars and other entertainers (bob Hope, Jack Benny), but overall, his paintings lack what I love most about great art, which is that you can look repeatedly and for ever. For Rockwell, I find once is -- further examination doesn't take you any farther. It's all right there at first glance.

They also had a show of William Steig's work that was fun-- his early New Yorker cartoons of the NYC street kids, one funny series called “Dreams of Glory” in which boys save their parents from a burglar by throwing knives etc. Very funny, as is much of his stuff. His children's books included SHREK!

I also went to the Berkshire Botanical garden for a half hour right before they closed, and that is a place I definitely want to go back to-- just a delight the lawns and then the little patches of flowers, a rose garden, a culinary herb garden, a dyeing herb garden, etc.

 

 

July 5, 2010

 

 

We hit a hundred degrees Farenheit today. We drove down from the lake where it was probably only mid-nineties, Taxi in the back seat. My home office is miserable, and I’m working on the delicate process of exchanging air– that is, hot as it was, when we got home, the closed up house was slightly cooler. Tonight, I’m led to believe by Accuweather, it’ll be slightly cooler outside. This is going to go on for a while, too–we can sleep in air conditioning, and Andy’s office at work has a.c., but I have to figure out how to be at least a little productive in this kind of heat.

We saw John Douglas Thompson at Shakespeare & wore more clothes than in the publicity phote to the left, but he is something else– yes, even with a hump and a built up shoe and a withered arm, such charm, such physical energy, such beautiful speeches. Such enthusiasm for evil! My current favorite actor. We saw him first as Edmund in King Lear with Jonny Epstein, but his Othello a year or so ago was superb, and also the modern play where he’s a painter.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Richard– what a strange melodrama of a play, but it doesn’t stop for a moment. I especially liked all the parts for older women, and Duke Clarence’s bad dream:

 

 

 

 

 

What dreadful noise of waters in my ears!
What sights of ugly death within my eyes!
Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks;
A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvaluèd jewels,
All scatt'red in the bottom of the sea:
Some lay in dead men's skulls, and in the holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept
(As 'twere in scorn of eyes) reflecting gems,
That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep
And mocked the dead bones that lay scatt'red by.
                                        Act I scene iv, in small part.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Fourth of July!

 

 

 

June 23, 2010

 

 

I belong to a listserv of people who were at Columbia University during the anti-war, anti-racist student strikes and sit-ins of 1968. This group has huge debates about current policies, and recently, there's be a discussion of Barack Obama and his policies. Arnim Johnson Jr. takes the position that people who generally agree with Obama should be giving at least measured support for the things he has done, that we should certainly critique and disagree, but not expect Obama to be something he's not-- he's not, for example, a left-wing radical. He's a middle of the road democrat who has done some concrete positive things.

I personally have been working for nearly fifteen years in my very small suburban New Jersey community to create stable and continuing racial integration. I want to say two things I have learned: (1) it is amazing how difficult it has been, even in generally liberal community, first to create housing demand in all neighborhoods for all races and (2) it is an enormous ongoing struggle to de-track our schools and thus combat the racial segregation that has developed between the levels and the related academic achievement gap. When I think how much work it has taken, and how unfinished is even this little business in two tiny towns-- bedroom communities for NYC-- I can only be amazed that anything progressive ever gets done.

I am thankful for the federal judges with brains that the present administrations is appointing. I'm thankful for the glimmerings of health care, and an actual (or at least apparent) concession from Bibi Netanyahu. Obama's politics are 'way to the right of mine, and I have no idea if anything this administration has done is going to change the world. But I do know that standing on the sidelines howling will do less

I also have a deep and perhaps quixotic faith that somehow those who are out organizing demonstrations in favor of immigrants, and those who are working the pro-Peace tables at street fairs, and the Obama administration in many ways, and me in my town with our minuscule moves toward true integration-- are actually all on the same side.

 

Joel and Sarah are in Los Angeles, back from Italy, where they ate their way down the Boot. They go home to San Francisco tomorrow.

 

 

 

June 7, 2010

 

According to today’s New York Times, our brains are being reformatted (our vocabularies too) by our devices, gadgets and, especially, our propensity for multi-tasking: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?ref=todayspaper .  For the record, I read this on large sheets of dead tree material at my kitchen table over coffee and Crispix.

 

 

 

June 4, 2010

 

First photos of the wedding! Thank you, Mary Sciaino, photographer extrordinaire! Andy and I are barely functioning after the red-eye from L.A., and Joel and Sarah on the way to Italy for their honeymoon.

 

More photos on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mswccr/

 

 


Sarah and Joel under the chuppah

 

 

 

Joel, Granny Lou, and Sarah                                 Walking Joel down the aisle...

 

 


Joel and Sarah, married and so happy.....

 

 

 


MSW & Andy before the wedding

 

 

May 25

 

We are coming up fast on The Wedding. Oh My Goodness. People are emailing, calling, coming up in person with kind, kind wishes for Joel and Sarah-- and us. And I'm all over the place nervous and excited instead of relaxing and enjoying!

 

 

 

May 15

 

 

Well this is fun! Andy's new issue of PC Magazine came with an article about great stuff on the web, and I tried two photo editing sites, both free. Citrify.com is super simple but as far as I can see, you can't even crop-- but it does let you fix your photos quickly, and the people who run it seem nice young starteruppers. I liked better Photoshop.com which requires a sign in name, email address etc. (but still free), and some learning curve, probably things you can't do on their (Adobe's) latest, but very usable, and I can see I'll be able to do what I want to do quickly. It saved full size, "websize" as below, or thumbnail. Writing text was super easy, once I figured out that you made it smaller by resizing the box.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 13

 

Well, my experimental ebook is now available via Barnesandnoble.com (just go there and search for "Trespassers by Meredith Sue Willis"). I’ve been waiting for that for a while, to see the ebook edition go up somewhere besides Smashwords.com itself.

Even more cool: a rose breasted grosbeak on the feeder this morning.   I don’t think we had one of those guys before, not at least a flashy male that I could recognize. It turns out that Jersey is indeed part of their breeding region, according to the bird books and the computer.
    Meanwhile, we’re still watching Phoebe Allen's webcam  with her two ugly little naked blue-black balls of baby bird with yellow beaks, not hummingbird shaped at all, and a few yellowish pinfeathers on their blue-black body balls. Phoebe looks happy as a clam when she sits on them.

Andy is in Woodbridge running his Rheumatology Association conference today. His second one as president of the organization, and this year's has had much less angst for him in getting speakers etc. than last year's.

I’ve got the Silver Scribes today and then writers group tonight.

 

 

Famous people seem to be increasingly nearby: I think this is largely about aging, the multiplicity of connections, living in a large metropolitan region. There has been no doubt a geometric increase in names we’ve heard, children of people we once knew. Obama’s new nominee for the Supremes, for example, turns out to be the daughter of a teacher at Hunter College Elementary School in the seventies when I did a writer-in-the-school gig there for T&W. She seemed like a very serious, ace teacher, probably less than thrilled to have to turn her class over to an upstart twenty-something writer.

Also, I’ve been seeing reviews (in the Times AND The Star-Ledger??) for a new musical called “The Kid,” I think, with book by Michael Zam, playwriting teacher at NYU’s School of Prof and Cont Studies with me– he used to be my boss, too, but they reorganized, and he did a side step back to teaching.

 

 

May 10

Fresh-green branches whip bright skies
Strike back and forth in a powerful breeze.
But she will not anthropomorphize trees:
No dancing, no gestures, not from these
Self-contained things of the earth she sees–
Blue sky, a woman, green leaves.

 

May 8, 2010

 

My friend Ingrid Hughes, who is active in the New York City University Adjunct Teachers union, sent this link to a speech by United Mine Workers president Cecil E. Roberts speaking on the recent mine deaths and on the need for unions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKQEMX-vkUA&feature=related

 

 

 

May 3, 2010

 

 

I’ve got a headache, not really improved by the jerk and rush of my first segment of “24" in a couple of months (I've been teaching on Monday nights). I got to see the Dana Walsh get shot point blank by poor suffering testosterone fascist Jack Hero. It was so dependably fast paced that it lifted my spirits a little, which have been really low-- like many people's-- over the beyond-horrible Gulf oil spill. This is a real doomsday gusher, infinitely worse, it seems, than they are saying, and no real movement apparently in sealing it off. The amount of destruction and death is going to be beyond what we can imagine. I haven't felt this sense of helplessness since watching the buildings go down on 9/11. All our little joys and sorrows and accomplishments and publications and mastery so tiny in the face of this.

And meanwhile, endless car ads during “24”-- all these young men and sexy women feeling powerful as they whoosh through pristine countryside, along ocean vistas. And we too, keep two cars, heat with oil. Our big rambly old house burning oil, all winter long. Are we really going to end the world this time? One’s one individual end almost imaginable, but this. How does the ocean survive this?

Meanwhile: green grass, azaleas, rhododendron coming on. My tiny tomato plants trembling under lights, cabbages outside, New Red Fire lettuce, Simpsons, black seeded and Elite, arugula and radishes. Everything tiny and flourishing.

I’m thinking of Cormac McCarthy’s little post apocalyptic book The Road. I’m thinking of the Jews of Europe whose entire world was destroyed, and the native peoples on this continent. The Arawaks who would not work as slaves, and so the Spanish simply slaughtered the ones that disease didn't get first. What strange beasts we are, really, to have built so much and destroyed so much.

We should be thanking the creatures and plants around us for their forbearance.

 
April 26
Montcoal
By Victor Depta

such an old grief
coming to us in the evening news
as if, across a gulf, an emptiness
in a place called West Virginia
was death again
where no roots are so deep
or mechanical or liable to maiming
as men are
delicately limbed‹
that old grief again
predictable almost, in the newscasts
as a comfort of repetition
as ballads are
wherein women weep and wipe their tears
men mumble the inexpressible
and choke and look away
and everyone
old-fashioned as a quatrain
prays
in that old refrain
for men who grime themselves
underground
for a wife or a child
exposed there
in the stony chambers
to the explosion
bruised and burnt beyond breath
in the sudden yellow and orange blast
in Appalachia, in that age-old song
as if it were a ballad
about death


 

 

 

April 12

 

 

 

 

 

 

I write occasionally about how I began life as a book maker: how I loved to cut little pages and staple them together, color the covers, invent  trademarks, and even, if I didn’t lose interest, writing an actual story to fill the pages.

It would appear that I am ending the same way, as a full service book maker.  Yes, I have a book coming out from a university press in a couple of months, published in the conventional way, and yes, my book on writing novels is about to be published by a smaller press, and yes, I intend to continue to get attention (and cash) from large commercial presses.

But this digital age is allowing me to have a wonderful time making books again.  I am formatting some of our Hamilton Stone Editions books for e-readers; I keep web sites with information and reviews for Hamilton Stone and for myself.  I am learning how to do a (hard copy) book cover using templates provided by printers, and how to make a book block that is readable and attractive.

One of the most wonderful things about childhood has always been that healthy human young are generalists: they dance and sing and throw balls and cook and run and pick flowers and pretend and make art and act and tell stories.  Growing up is, from one angle, all about specializing.  By the teen years,  some of us are athletes, some are Brains, some are artsy, some are musical, some already making money.

So I feel that this digital world is  enlarging my scope again.

 

 

 

April 10, 2010

 

Some responses to nature from my recent walks-- the first one at the very beginning of April, the second a few days later, as dominant colors changed:

 

It is the tender time,
The empire of yellow
Netting the middle ranges
With forsythia and daffodils–
Lower, the sudden shock of green
Doubling in density,
Still short still livid,
Above, branches are craze lines
Against the white of the sky.

 

 

 

 
Trembling irregularity of colors above
(Whites, pinks, oxblood, rudimentary green)
Fuzzed and scumbled, save for the
Irreducibly precise magnolia
And bursts of breeze
And waves of odors: spring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 3, 2010

 

I’ve been up a while, Andy made cornmeal and butter pancakes with maple syrup. I read the newspaper, Andy talks, the parakeet flips here and there, shouts “Taxi!” to the world. A Dr. Edward Roberts has died. He was the inventor of the Altair 8800 microcomputer, hired Gates and Allen, who wrote something called “Microsoft Basic” for the little machine, and then it was off from microcomputers for hobbyists to personal computers for consumers and the world. So this guy Roberts sold his business for a tidy sum, went to medical school in the late 80's and became a family practitioner! Still tinkering in his spare time, making stuff. Reminds me in his interests and approach to life (moving on) of my dad, my people, really. Tinkerers and jettisoners of the past. A real American of the male persuasion.

 

 

 

March 29, 2010

 

Well, Joel's Sarah-- our Sarah-- got into the Haas School of Business special program in business and public health. Only 12 students a year, so it's a big honor to get into this. They are in L.A. for Passover-- and Happy Passover to all who celebrate! We're doing a small second night Seder tomorrow, and this time, 33 and a third per cent of our attendees (including Andy) will actually be Jewish!

News:Hamilton Stone Edition has its first book available in various e-reader formats-- it's my book Trespassers. Take a look! It may be the future of books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March 21, 2010

 

The Dell is just as perky as can be after a grim 24 hours of no browser on it. I checked out the Verison FiOS connection first: fine. Other computers? Internet access beaming out around the house just fine also. Andy of course convinced it was a computer virus, and I had vague memories of having let Firefox download a new version, which had caused a problem in the past. We r an the virus checker a few times, we tried and seemed almost to get online. Internet Explorer didn’t work either, but it hadn’t been working for a while.

Andy ran various cleaners and checkers and got rid of tons of minor malware (which accounts for the computer’s present perkiness). And finally, together, with our separate approaches to problem solving, we began to get there: I woke from a drowsy moment thinking ZONE ALARM! That was the free firewall that I was sure had been a problem in the past. Turned it off, no change. Andy began to believe it wasn’t a virus, but kept methodically cleaning up the computer. The registry, etc. I googled Firefox problems on the Toshiba, and meanwhile discovered that while the browsers weren’t working, the little FTP program I use to upload web pages was fine. I could upload from the Dell and see the changes made on the Toshiba.

And finally found found a site that suggested various things, and another that said Zone Alarm was the problem. At which point, I realized that it was the other computer that I'd had a similar problem on and had to get rid of Zone Alarm.

So first we uninstalled Firefox (probably not necessary) and turned off and uninstalled Zone Alarm and turned on the Windows firewall instead, and lo and behold, Internet Explorer worked again, and Andy downloaded Firefox, installed it and it’s over! For the moment. These machines, hostage to the wonderful but ridiculously addictive and difficult machines.

 

 

 

 

March 17
Guess Who's Day

 

 

We were all looking at the Hummingbird webcam yesterday.  Andy told me about seeing it on his brother David’s blog, and then I passed it on to my sister and mother.  It’s a tiny camera aimed at hummingbird nest in a rosebush in Orange County, California.

What is  more real and engaging than a real time image of a California hummingbird sitting on her nest, chasing off a marauding gecko, spearing and disposing of a non-viable egg?  Real reality, happening now, and a crowd of chat commenting on the hummingbird’s little life.

Of course the production values aren’t all they could be with the shaking rosebush making the nest waver, and suspense isn’t built up very well: suddenly there’s the lizard, in the corner of the screen, and then the hummer’s shadow, then the lizard’s gone.  The hummer’s needle nose appears, and the bad egg is gone.

But thousands of us are following this real reality show.  It’s lots of fun, and a healthy use of technology, of course.

So what’s the connection to novels and stories?  Personally, I’ve always read at least partly to learn about living.  What can a writer offer that the Phoebe webcam doesn’t? What do written stories do that Phoebe the hummingbird’s webcam doesn’t do?

Writers shape reality of course– not that the webcam by its very choice of angle and subject doesn’t shape reality too.   But stories , in my opinion, have a richer context and more connections– a web of relationships in many dimensions.  We have, by telling the story in that bland concatenation of symbols that is the written word, the advantage of igniting the reader’s imagination, we hope, so that the reader, not overwhelmed by the realness of the experience (as we often are with visual media like the movies) is allowed to make even more connections.

Clearly the people watching the hummingbird are identifying with it–anthropomorphizing and giving personality as if it were a Disney character.  This is probably a mistake.  In novels and stories, we are required to participate in the building of the work.  The hummingbird doesn’t need watchers;  the story needs its reader.

 

 
March 1

Saturday, a solid Jump-Start Your Novel workshop at NYU. We did a go-round on books people admire, and I was pleased by how many books they mentioned that I had actually read – everything from Jane Eyre to Harry P. and Ender’s Game. New idea: someone was a big fan of Bukowski, and I ordered one of his. This conversation pleased me because I have been feeling like a non-reader lately, I suppose because there are so many papers to go over and books to review, and also maybe because it is harder for me to get slurped up into someone else's world nowadays. I have for a couple of years been using students and colleagues as sources for reading lately, part of how I interact with people, I guess.

So it was a busy, busy week-end: Sunday, Alice Robinson-Gilman and I did the Mountain Top Removal Platform at Ethical Culture, and we had a big group of youth from Morrow Memorial church in Maplewood – well-integrated, articulate, and with powerful stories of having been to WV (somewhere around Charleston) where they saw an MTR site, met a woman who opposed it, and someone shot her dog. The violence and politics of it really spooked them, rightfully so. Alice and I did well, and they sold all but maybe two of the We All Live Downstream books that Molly brought over from WORDS. Also, my music from the Coal Miners songs was excellent, came over the speakers better than I’d ever heard it before, and several people had heard Jeff Biggers on NPR. The kids are going to WV again to do some house building on their spring break, and Elaine is working on a platform for them to report out after they come back. So that was really nice.

And finally, grinding the gears of transition– to the Literary Lounge reading up in Orange at Luna Stage’s temporary home. This series is curated by Dania Ramos, and once I settled in, I enjoyed it a lot, especially being with Oradell for a little while again. The dialogue afterward was fun, partly because one reader had brought a big family group who were smart and engaged.


MSW & Alice Robinson-Gilman at Ethical Culture Society 2-28-10
 

Dania Ramos and MSW at The Literary Lounge 2-28-10

 

 

February 28

The end of another month-- and of a really busy week-end! I had my Jump-Start Your Novel Class yesterday at NYU (Jump Start), and today I had both the Ethical Culture platform on Mountaintop Removal with Alice Robinson Gilman AND a reading at Luna Stage up in Orange. Both events today went extremely well (see photos above) and I'm exhausted!

 

 
 

February 19, 2010

 

I have such a good Writers' Group! Last night we had an interesting discussion about an excellent short story of Carol E.’s– time travel (people from a nearly-destroyed future version of our world come back to feed their children real food.) Anyhow, Shelley objected to a scene where the local cops beat up the “rich” people (who are only rich because of devalued currency). Shelley loved the story, as did I, but didn't believe cops would support local thugs beating up rich people. I said something about small towns being different, which I don’t think was expressed very well, because no one seemed to get it.

Anyhow, in an email this morning Carol E said that she figured out that those "rich" people from the future didn't have any connections here at all. And wondered if she should add that to the story. Which sharpened my thought, and I wrote back to All: “That was sort of what I was trying to say last night about class distinctions in a small town-- they have a very different quality from class distinctions in cities. In a small town, the rich guy who gave the library and owns the one business in town that hires is definitely a power, but a group of Big Spender Aliens is more comparable to the summer people in some working class vacation communities (‘Summer People, Some 'r Not’).”

I love the discussions we have there. More from last night: Edith’s journal: a wonderful insight about how when someone dies, also dying is who we were in that other person ’s eyes: she spoke of how her mother’s face lit up when she saw her. The eyes lighting up for me were my father’s: that is gone, me as an amazing phenomenon for having simply stood up and taken a step. Each of my accomplishments, small or large, totally delightful to him. No strings attached.

 
 
February 16, 2010

I'm having fun on my new Literature and the Web blog, writing today about how writer's temporary block has morphed into Internet distraction: snow again, but not a huge amount, and the roads are clear. Working on wedding travel plans, and Joel and Sarah are now designing their invitations! Deeply into this event.

February 5, 2010

I'm exhausted: took a train and two subways to go to Red Hook, Brooklyn, to do an author visit in a new charter school-- so far all sixth graders: the Summit Academy Charter School. Look at the website to see some of the kids I taught!

It was a good experience but wore me out. Just twenty or thirty blocks from where we used to live-- I crossed Court Street and Clinton and Henry and Hicks. Neat to be down there, briefly in Carroll Gardens, then under the BQE and over to the school. The kids were lots of fun-- a teacher founded school, and my connection via Teachers & Writers has written them (successfully) some grants. Lots of emphasis on colleges-- they have signs saying the year their class will graduate from high school and college!

 
January 30, 2010

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sad the book is done, also relieved, looking out at a still and extremely cold day. The book was Baltasar and Blimunda, so far my favorite of Saramago's, along with Blindness, but B & B is so much younger a.k.a. hopeful in its attitudes. Historical, magical realistic, politically astute, with working class characters.

 

We went out last night to the new restaurant just opening, Hat City Kitchen. The food was really good, the menu limited so far, but it's home style and Louisiana, full bar, very attractive, and last night anyhow mostly patronized by people from South Orange and Maplewood! There's to be music often, and here's the part that is unusual and really interesting: it is not owned by individuals, but rather by HANDS (Housing and Neighborhood Development Services) in Orange.

The concept is that HANDS has been buying properties and investing in "The Valley" in Orange, the small working class and formerly industrial (hat factories, for example) town north of South Orange and south of West Orange. They are renting spaces to artists, and now opening this moderately upscale or at least, meant-to-be trendy restaurant with music in the bar. I wonder if it will work out?

I’ve got an invitation to participate in a literary reading in another of the HANDS locations, the Luna theater. It seems to me that this is at least possibly part of the spilloover work of our South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race : that we may see white people re-integrating 75% African-American Orange-- for arts and entertainment, but perhaps also the good but cheap housing stock. Regional integration strategy? And what about super-white Millburn? When does that become a location of choice for People of Color?

 

 

 
 
Close Harmonies: Reading, Music, and Dancing: 1983 in New York City.
MSW on left, then Maggie Anderson, and on far right, Marc Harshman.     

 

 

 

January 22, 2010

 

Well, a day away from the computer, and it takes me over an hour to do the various tasks associated with email. I did a little more than that-- a homework from the online class, but mostly email.

I got so behind because I spent yesterday in New York, including a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. I hadn’t been there since it reopened, which I now learn was in fall 2004-- a little over five years! I've been going a lot to the Metropolitan, where I have a membership, and also doing more museum visits when I'm away from home, like the Sterling Clark in Williamstown, and of course San Francisco Museums, the winter the MOMA reopened, we went to Italy. The truth is, I don't go to museums nearly as much as I think of the art there.

Anyhow, at the MOMA, I especially like the way everything circles around the central space. Right now, there's a huge whale skeleton, real but with paint on it, hanging on the second floor and you see it from below and later from above. This is by Gabriel Orozco, along with a lot of other things. I liked his work (but I still can’t get clear his family line– was the great contemporary of Siquieros and Rivera and all of them his grandfather? My lazy-- emphasis on the lazy-- google search isn't answering my question. Anyhow, he does a lot of different things, worth looking at more.

I was less enamored of the very crowded Tim Burton exhibit– I like his movie work pretty well, but didn’t find the sketches particularly exciting, or maybe just didn’t like the crowds.

Also just wandered around enjoying the space and visiting old friends– Matisse’s big red room and Chagall’s floating goatheads and lovers and oh all the incredible stuff there in MOMA. Blows you away, really. When I first went, they still have Guernica in your face.

Monet’s water lilies are in a not-huge gallery on the second or third floor next to a café-- almost perfunctory, as if the new curators are saying, Okay, tourists, you came to see the water lilies, here they are now get over it.

Even less pride of place to Christina’s World, also on a lower floor in a hall–easy to find, but dimly lit and just there. A message-- disdain for the tourists? A statement about how rapidly modern art isn't modern anymore?

The water lilies seemed smaller than they used to be. Partly the old room was hushed, and I remember it as spacious and lavender or blue, with a small peek out to the street, and they so enormous just two of the big paneled paintings. Partly I was so much younger and so much one of the breathless ones: Oh! The actual Water lilies! Themselves! Here they are!

Otherwise yesterday was bright cold New York, Ingrid down at a café on Second Avenue and tenth, then to Carol’s for writers’ group, and we had a really animated discussion (centered on Joan’s story) about couples and sex after seventy.

 
January 19, 2008

Bad news for health care and a progressive legislative agenda: the Republicans took the special Senate election in Massachusetts. Americans express their frustration almost always by Throwing The Bums out. Some comfort: a beautiful old photo by Charlie Cowger of a snowy day on Palmer's hill in Shinnston.

 

 

January 8, 2010
Tonight is my third (!) fund raiser Appalachian Coal Miner's dinner-- this one a fund raiser for the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race-- and I've got eight people coming, plus Andy and me and my mother, who won't sit at the table. It's legal moonshine and a miniature coal car on the coffee table, Songs of the Coalfields in the cd player, lots of Appalachian books on the side tables. I know what I'm going to wear, and the cooking is pretty much under control. All pig, mostly: pork chops, mustard greens cooked in bacon, beans cooked with bacon, cole slaw, potatoes (fake fried), cornbread, and biscuits. Oh, and pies! apple from Costco, berry pie, and vinegar pie!

 

 

Happy 2010!

 

1-2-2010

 

On not being articulate


People assume that if you are a writer, you are articulate, but I have never been very fluent with words– that is, with precise words, long words, vocabulary words. I have always tended to expressive language, word pictures, a surprising word that, if I'm lucky, conveys what I want it to. People I think of as British-trained in universities and high style will write pages and fluent pages with the the perfect word, the great word, the most precise word. I love it when I know those words, and there was a time in my life when I kept elaborate lists of words as I learned them, but when I am precise and especially when I use big words, I am almost always wandering exuberantly in what feels like someone else’s arena.

I also have odd losses, of fairly common words, possibly psychological blanks as once a few years back I lost AUTISM for a week or two.

Technology is exacerbating the problem because I'm developing some new means of expression-- I can make web pages with pictures, for example, and I think some of my struggles with computers and html and now desk top publishing are cutting into my vocabulary developing spaces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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