Category Archives: Writing

September 17, 2013 · 7:01 pm

Out of My Library

If you don’t like the feeling of book dust on your hands, the sight of new gaps between the volumes on your shelves, the surprise discovery of tomes you missed even though you never knew you missed them – read no further.

I am in the grips of a book-shedding catharsis. I realized today – and this is the way it often happens for me – that I couldn’t let another hour go by without winnowing out my book shelves. I insisted that Gil sort his office, too. (He couldn’t find any to give up, but he tried.) The resulting 100 or so cast-off titles went into an extra-large packing box.

Off to the library.

A mother stood trying to corral her preschooler near the sidewalk. “Donations?” she said cheerfully. “Efficient way to bring them.”

“Is he a neighbor?” said her son.

“Maybe,” said the mom.

Local book sales bring together browsers with only a desultory interest, avid bargain hunters and steely-eyed professionals. Pop selections are only a minor part of the culture.

When we lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, resellers from all over bought Friends of the Library memberships so that they could go to the earlybird presale and scoop up multiple cartons of the most valuable items. That was okay, we managed to find plenty of gems on our own time – including some we had ourselves donated. Yes, it’s true: we turned in books for the sale that we later decided were simply too fascinating to pass by.

But it’s such a relief to weed out the honeys of yesteryear: The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Dava Sobel’s Longitude, The Judgment of Paris by Ross King. All good reads, eye opening, brain teasing. None of them necessary to my life at the moment.

The Croton Free Library has just celebrated its 75^th anniversary. I hope that its patrons will enjoy my books as avidly as I did.

There are people with acres of shelves in their home library. Their libraries. Their nooks and end tables. Their bedside stacks. When we downsized to the Cabin, that life ended for us. We knew we’d have to focus a laser beam on what meant something to us. We carted out dozens of boxes for various libraries, dozens to sell at the Strand, and ended up leaving many freebies at the curb. Even if you mourn the loss of your books, it is worth it for the experience of a transaction at the historic institution of the Strand, which has been in business since 1927 on 12^th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.

The buyer peers down his spectacles and thumbs through your precious collection, calculating all in his head the value of each book before announcing the usually paltry total. Sometimes it is a triumph, enough for dinner in a decent restaurant. Those novels that you thought were brilliant, invaluable, they’re basically worthless at the Strand, while the store covets and compensates well for the scholarly and academic works you thought no one would ever want.

Now the smooth, dust-free spines of the books line up straight on my wooden shelves in the proper order – all of them books I have selected anew, that I want and need.

Some of them seem to have a special kinship even outside their genre. Not exactly subject. More, spirit.

Many, like these, have a story besides the narrative in the book – the story of my relationship with it. My mother-in-law gave me Stalking the Wild Asparagus when I was a newlywed with a house in an apple orchard and a nascent interest in gardening. Ian Frazier’s Great Plains has been a touchstone over the years in thinking about writing nonfiction. Wilderness and the American Mind dates from my college days and still holds my intense interest. Everyone who loves books has these intimacies with individual volumes, the how and why of how your relationship with it came about. Your foundation with it. These begin to make up the essence of a library, the authors that really meant something then and now.

The true reason to get rid of books? Honestly? To collect more books.

I needed space for a working library, all the ones I’m drawing on for my next novel. Any clue as to what the book’s about?

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September 14, 2013 · 7:23 pm

A Catskill Idyll

I really ought to get out more. Even if out means going from a cabin to a cottage with an adjacent bungalow as I did this weekend.

It was the gray, cool weather of late summer, more like fall. The Catskill Mountains. The cottage had a quaint disposition, the pet decorating project of antiquarian friends of friends. Charm bloomed in corners. On side tables, one of which held a seal enraptured with a ball.

Windowsills offered various small collections.

Dramatically tarnished old mirrors lined the walls.

We brought zinnias, butterscotch bars.

Neil, the host, grilled chicken over wood. There was sweet aged bourbon for some. For me, mango lemonade. A funny kind of tea, milky oat tops. Was it restorative in some way or just cut up grass in bags? Hard to say but worth gently debating. What music should we listen to? Everything sounded good.

A fire glowing in the stove, a healthy stack of wood.

Conversation about our kids growing up, finding their feet. About ourselves, still finding our feet. Will we ever find them? Monopoly and pet play.

The shaggy, gloomy, romantic Catskills offered up their forests and creeks.

Girdled, Neil the arborist says is the term for roots that entwine themselves like this. What about those trees, though, that entwine themselves as though in love? No special name, they just are.

Mushrooms gleamed against the mulch.

When the woods were so delightful we couldn’t stand any more, we took a drive through the weathered local community, Livingston Manor. An ancient graveyard, simply marked, appeared on Creamery Road.

Plain, as was the cemetery’s groundskeeping shed.

Something else simple appeared out of nowhere — a staunch old wood covered bridge dating to the late 1800s.

Sometime in the long afternoon I saw my friend Suzanne sitting by the fire, taking a pensive break from all the charm, the activity, the pets and children. The yap of conversation.

I thought of one of my favorite poems, perfect any day but especially for this place, the person, the moment: When You Are Old, by W.B. Yeats.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

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September 6, 2013 · 3:48 pm

Beans and Nothingness

Clomp, clomp, clomp. Down to the garden for the first time in the cool weather with my Frankenstein boot.

What does Nature do when you turn your back? Surprise you.

Six weeks ago when I had foot surgery and disappeared into my couch I had given up on my beans. Runner beans, Blue Lake, which makes them sound more poetic than what they are – just plain old string beans. I had vines galore, yes. But no fruit.

Today… a bumper crop, scaling the brawny sunflower that’s hanging it’s heavy head down, waiting for the birds. Ready for boiling and buttering and serving alongside a pork roast on Sunday, which is just what I plan on doing.

Never give up. I planted those things in mid-May and it’s taken them four months to proclaim their bean-ness.

In the weeds and vines that have overtaken the ground I found other prizes. Dahlias. I planted about two dozen, having never tried before, and here were two lavender beauties with their cupped, pointed petal tips. And a jolly pint-size butternut squash, the first I’ve ever attempted to cultivate.

I asked Gil to cut all the cukes and zucchini that had waited patiently to be harvested all those weeks I was gone.

They’re monsters, of course, as big as my big boot. Good for nothing, culinarily. Only useful for proving what happens when you turn your back on something with the inherent ability to grow. Like the idea for a novel, which expands out of fertile soil when you’re busy doing something else.

Digging

I made a list. The things I’d do if I were going out and about this weekend. The free-of-leg-cast things.

There’s the NYC Unicycle Festival, which kicks off with a 13-mile single-wheeled parade across the Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island and which includes a bout of unicycle sumo wrestling.

Then, the art installlation by Olaf Eliasson, called “Your Waste of Time,” in Long Island City, at MOMA PS1, with chunks of Icelandic ice in a refrigerated room.

I could visit the Wolf Conservation Center north of the Cabin. Sit behind protective glass and watch a pack howl. They even offer overnights in a tent. The Center has babies, like Zephyr, born April 20th.

There’s a tug boat armada on the Hudson, more accurately the Great North River Tugboat Race & Competition, complete with a Popeye-themed contest for spinach eaters.

Jones Beach, its tawny sands burning hot in August, its crashing waves filled with quarter-size quivering jellyfish. We don’t care about jellyfish, though. It’s the last swim before fall. But no room on that crowded strand for a fiberglass leg cast.

The Breaking Bad exhibit at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens that displays the costumes, props and other accoutrements of everyone’s latest streamed addiction, one that has smoothed the way through these mellow weeks post-foot-surgery. The arc of the show was contrived as carefully as Walt crafts his blue rocks, not surprisingly, and “From Mr. Chips to Scarface: Walter White’s Transformation in Breaking Bad.” will show you how. The stuffed animal that splashes down into the Whites’ swimming pool was specially commissioned, it turns out.

Do you care to see the tighty-whities that Walt wore in season one, episode one? For some reason I do, but I don’t know if the terrain is maneuverable for me and my scooter.

I missed the Battle of Brooklyn last weekend – reenactors assembled in what later becamethe famous Green-Wood Cemetery – out of a dread of uneven grass and pebbly stretches.

There was supposed to be cannon fire and I know people were boiling pots over smoky campfires.

I must eschew places that wouldn’t easily accommodate what Gil calls “Jean’s crutches, sons of butches, or the Bloke, no joke.” What the ladies at the nail salon called my “motorcycle.” One was so nice she gave me an upper arm massage. I never knew that crutches kill your triceps.

But it’s all in the name of pampering that tiny metatarsal in my right foot, the one that needs some extra help to mend so that I can go on ever greater adventures. Who knows, next year a pair of hiking boots that actually fit. Kilimanjaro.

I am most definitely emerging today for a time to “help” cart Maud’s things for the year to her new dorm. She makes up in leggy activity, just back from sunny Spain, what I currently lack. Out catching drinks with friends, seeing music, buying notebooks, all new things, looking to the future.

I am also looking to the future, though a ripple of boredom is creeping through me like a sweet rot. Day to day, I dive down into the Revolutionary New York research for my next novel and come up with gorgeous crumbs. And you need crumbs to make the rich loaf that is a historical novel. But that’s just a start.

I’m going to need a new couch after this recuperation, the indentation in the current one might not plump back up.

A walk down to the garden to dig potatoes would be great. Fingers — toes! — in the dirt. I remember the loam of mid-summer fondly.

Oh, forking over potatoes today… would be amazing. The just-deceased Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney’s poem on the subject, “Digging,” is one of the great works of modern literature. Have a seat on my couch. Take a listen.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

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August 30, 2013 · 12:51 pm

Tomb With a View

It’s really nice, sitting here with my leg up, to know that someone is out there having adventures. In this case it is my brother Peter Zimmerman, who is making his way through New England and closely observing as he goes. Pete, a writer and photographer, has a web site and a book about exploring the various Podunks across our sprawling country. If there is a cluster of old grave markers in a small town, he will find it.

YESTERDAY (writes Pete), while driving south through the Connecticut River valley, I stopped at a gas station in Northumberland, New Hampshire, and struck up a conversation with a psychiatrist who lives just across the river in Guildhall, Vermont. He recommended an old cemetery, the Nellie Smart, about five miles south of Guildhall on Route 102.

There’s nothing like visiting an old boneyard when you need to gather your thoughts and get away from people – living ones, that is.

A Mason is buried there.

The oldest grave is that of Phebe [sic] Whipple, who was born in 1749.

Some of the black-slate headstones are less than half an inch thick.

One side of the Nellie Smart graveyard faces a pasture…

… and the other side, the road.

Over the past two weeks, I reckon that I’ve visited some two dozen cemeteries while rambling around Maine, Quebec, and Vermont. Usually there’s a corresponding church next door…

A few churches in Quebec…

Usually Jesus shows up in one form or another.

And the cross.

Some of the graves are quite poignant.

I wonder what kind of accident he died from… in 1916? Automobile? Stampeded by moose?

I conclude with a few of my personal favorites. This foggy scene reminded me of the famous Yorick soliloquy…

Put ’er there, ponder.

Anyone’s guess.

The short and simple annals of the poor…

Tomb with a view in Island Pond, Vermont.

This memorial south of Jackman, Maine marks the site of a former POW camp.

Lots to reflect on.

So you best get your pins in a row!

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August 29, 2013 · 6:31 pm

Blurbs for The Asylum

Blue Rider Press has come out with a book trailer featuring fashion insider Simon Doonan talking about getting blurbs for his his forthcoming book The Asylum.

There is actually a series of very brief videos, including the blurb one but also one about designer Thom Browne and one about Michael Kors and one featuring “career advice for young people,” among others. An original approach to promoting a book through a video, well suited to such an original guy.

The one about blurbs, “those wonderful little comments on the back of the book,” is pretty honest and funny enough, and hits home as I am wading into the waters of asking people to read and comment upon Savage Girl. Publication isn’t until March 2014, but quotes are needed long before that to be printed on the book jacket. And publishing pros say they are critical to getting a book noticed.

Doonan says that when he is asking for blurbs “I am in a permanent pretzel of cringing, shame and self loathing.” Then he reels off some of the glowing comments he got from Marc Jacobs, Alexander Wang and others. “Don’t even think about becoming an author,” he warns, “unless you’re prepared to go through the torture, the torment, the challenges of getting some blurbs.” The Asylum: A collage of couture reminiscences…and hysteria is out Sept. 3.

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August 21, 2013 · 3:59 pm

Maine Woods Ramblin’

My world-rambling brother Peter has sent a bulletin from the northern Maine forest, where he is catching his breath in the middle of a book project and, as always, exploring the local history. Peter published Podunk: Ramblin’ to America’s Small Places in a Delapidated Delta 88, which remains the definitive portrait of locales far off the beaten track, and a perfect reflection of his restless, questing mind.

What you can’t get enough of in Podunk are Pete’s vivid photographs, and his pictures of Moosehead Lake in Maine are definitely worth sharing. He’s been spending time around Mount Kineo.

Mount Kineo’s wild beauty has long been celebrated, but few know it abuts a piece of land called Misery Gore, an “untrampled” place Pete investigated for Podunk. Gores are highly unusual geographical features, Pete’s research shows, limited to Vermont and Maine, “largely forgotten anachronisms that don’t much impact most peoples’ lives in any profound way.”

He says that the source of Misery Gore’s name might be its preponderance of black flies, or it being “a miserable place to survey, log, hunt, and birdwatch,” or that it’s overgrown with briars and brambles, or that “a French-Canadian logger from Miseree once passed through this neck of the woods.” The parcel is wedge-shaped, crisscrossed with nothing but dirt roads.

It is, however, Penobscot country – the tribe has a reservation near Bangor known as Old Town — and on this trip Peter reacquainted himself with some of his Podunk contacts, three generations worth, including 50-year-old Andrew Tomer, his 12- year-old nephew and his father, Penobscot elder Francis.

Penobscot, Peter told me, means “where the stream runs by the mossy rock that is white when dry.”

Mount Kineo’s 800-foot cliffs of rhyolite were carved by the Indians into arrowheads. “Thoreau cut himself on this flint-like rock,” Peter writes, “which he called ‘hornstone.’”

“Some Native Americans believed that the cliffs under water were bottomless” Peter told me. He took a ferry to the Tomers’ dock. “After a dinner of well-grilled steak, corn on the cob, green beans from the garden and small spanish olives with pimentos, Francis took out a cigar box with all the arrowheads, marbles, stone tools, etc., and told me about them,” said Peter. Andrew, he reported, was very quiet. “He wanted to remember the stories for future generations.”

“Basket weaving by the Penobscot can be quite intricate,” says Pete.

“First, pieces of ash are soaked in water. Then each one must be individually sanded down.”

These baskets were made by a woman who lives in Rockwood, Maine, on the shore of Moosehead Lake. There Peter saw mushrooms. Fresh, with a garnish of smooth stones.

And fossilized.

A sculpture of some kind.

A piece of the rhyolite from which arrowheads are carved.

Wampum.

An ancient knife used to carve walking sticks.

An initialed pipe left by an early settler.

A deerskin cap.

A deerskin pouch adorned with a baby snapping turtle shell that Peter plans to bring with him when he leaves.

A celebration of all that is old and new and precious in these cool, mysterious Maine Woods.

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August 20, 2013 · 10:28 am

Crushes on Crutches

At the movies I saw a woman on crutches. A young, pretty woman in a color-block sundress. As I watched, she hopped around the serve-yourself beverage kiosk, assembling her ice, her soda and her straw, putting the whole drink together before her boyfriend politely carried it away for her.

I saw her next swinging her way into the ladies’ room. Into a regular stall! Not the one with the wheelchair icon I was struggling to enter with my kneeling scooter The Bloke. I washed my hands, she washed her hands, the difference being that she was cool as a cuke, graceful and weightless, not perspiring and puffing like me. Probably about 24 years old.

At the film line she was waiting, as was I, to go in. We shared war stories. A motorcyle accident, she said.

A little piece of the bike flew off into her ankle. The doctor had her in her cast for six weeks. It was a little difficult, she told me, because she lives up four floors and the laundry’s in the basement. But she’s making do okay. Her bike? Came out of the accident perfectly fine. She couldn’t wait to get back on it.

By the next morning my conversation with motorcycle girl had begun to percolate. I had been proud of myself for managing The Bloke so well. But now I had crutches envy. How do you make the best of this particular situation, a bum foot, and do it with some measure of equanimity and grace? It helps if you are an athletically gifted person of 24, of course. I wondered, how do you take your lumps and move forward, albeit with a cast on your foot that feels like a stiff leather ice skate with no sock? A little sand drizzled in for good measure.

Recently I asked my brother Peter for blog ideas since I knew I’d be less able than usual to go on gallivants and cover eclectic cultural happenings like I usually do. Why don’t you just catalogue all the stuff in your house, he suggested.

I feel, though, that I have already catalogued some of the things I like best. My vintage cookbook-pamphlet collection, for example.

The heirloom lace created by my foremothers.

I don’t know that I’ve ever indexed the bones that have surfaced from the marsh in front of the Cabin, mainly carried helpfully to us in Oliver’s mouth. We joke that he is trying to assemble to assemble a full deer skeleton.

Or the skins that have been sloughed off by so many snakes just to the south of the house.

But, like motorcycle girl, probably I do get to a few things every day, even now, move my constrained life ahead bit by bit. Take some action, even if I’m not swinging effortlessly on my axilla mobility aids. Thus, a catalogue of 10 actions taken today.

1. A shower bath, my leg encased in a plastic bag, with streaming hot water and a worn-down bar of soap a revelation.

2. A knitted row of angora, hopefully without a slipped stitch.

3. Perused some passages in Travels in North America, a volume published by Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm in the 1760s. In it he expounds on such scientific matters as the way bears kill livestock in Philadelphia: by biting a hole in a cow’s hide and inflating it until it dies.

4. Stumbled upon a recipe for Warm, Cheesy Swiss Chard and Roasted Garlic Dip. As soon as I’m up and around the kitchen again!

5. Checked out the Thanksgiving episode of Orange Is the New Black.

How many programs have a cast that is 99 percent female, let along with a heavy lesbian slant? Mindblowing.

6. Pushed The Bloke to the sushi bar at the back of a Japanese restaurant and had the treat of watching the chef halve a bright pink, yard-long salmon with finesse, season it with rock salt and layer it in a tub with its perfect filet brothers.

7. Scootered through a supermarket I usually despise as being too plastic but which today looked cheerily kaleidoscopic after two weeks of grocery deprivation.

8. Brought home the beer in The Bloke’s handy basket.

9. Visited my garden for the first time since the surgery. The collards were begging for a simmer with a pork hock.

10. Visited with Oliver on his turf, the front yard, for a change, rather than him visiting with me on the couch.

I’m getting back onto that couch now and elevating my aching foot. Ahhhh. But… I wonder what motorcycle girl is up to. On her anime-sparkle-titanium-neon crutches. Rocking the lead vocals with her hip hop crew? Bottle-feeding a new litter of rottweiler-lab pups? Baking a dozen loaves of vegan meatloaf for her closest friends? Or just getting ready to fly down those four flights and go out to the movies again? Because she can do just about anything she wants. As can I.

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August 15, 2013 · 3:43 pm

I Am the Walrus

I’m about a foot shorter and slightly less blubbery, and my tusks have not come in, but my habit of lolling on the couch is pronounced.

I could be lying atop a Greenland ice floe. A tooth-walking seahorse (Odonus rosmarus) through and through, cast-footed variety. Basically sedentary. Shellfish savoring. Laughable? Don’t people sort of snicker at walruses?

My main function these days, when I’m resisting the urge to watch past episodes of Orange Is the New Black, is to absorb information. That and try to knit a mohair bandana with a pair of metal toothpicks, willing Oliver not to drag the tiny wound-up ball of pink fluff under the coffeetable.

(Not successful, and I nearly rebroke the bones in my foot retrieving it.)

Walruses show affection.

There’s more where that one came from, walrus fetishists.

Aside from walrus kiss-bombs, I sourced a few more of life’s interesting details today.

1. A California man named Jerry Gretzinger has spent 50 years drawing an enormous map of a world he invented. Hmnh, you say, don’t people do this every day? Well, maybe brainy 3^rd graders do something similar on a sheet of oaktag. But his is just so much more carefully delineated than others, did I mention 2,000 feet long, and he uses a weird deck of cards he pasted up to determine next steps he will take on the thing. Including which neighborhoods get what he calls “voided,” or just suddenly blasted out of existance.

There is a great mini doc about him, and you might want to bring home some colored pencils when you’re out today. (Note the envy in that: when you’re out today.) For more great stuff on do it yourself cartography (and moving gigantic maps) try Making Maps.

2. I never knew what was in O magazine – lists upon lists of Oprah’s fave books that were going to earn more than my books ever would? But today I checked out the September issue because we got a subscription in error. And it turned out the issue was all about hair. Here is something so inutterably weird I reread it a few times. A timeline of how glamorous hair extensions come to be. It begins with Hindu pilgrims shaving their heads at the temple Tirumala in Tiraputi, India. (I did a little further research. As many as 10,000 pilgrims get their hair shaved by 500 temple barbers every single day.) The hair is fumigated and wrapped in bundles in Bangladore, then shipped by private courier to Rome to be bleached and dyed. Six weeks later it goes to U.S. salons. After 3 to 6 months use the repurposed locks get tossed in the trash. Footnote from the same O: 90 percent of celebrities at the Academy Awards are wearing extensions – everyone except, according to one expert, children and women with pixie cuts. I guess men, too, go unextended. But who knows.

3. A lot of people consider the Hudson to be “my river.” Me too. That’s why I was surprised not to have known before that the actual start of the estuary, the southern terminus that is, is deemed by scientists to occur precisely at Manhattan’s Battery.

I knew it began down there in the Harbor someplace, but everything seemed pretty watery and diffuse to me. Now I realize that you have Hudson River Mile 0 at the Battery, the George Washington Bridge at HRM 12, the Tappan Zee at 28, Bear Mountain at 47, Beacon-Newburgh Bridge at 62, the Mid-Hudson Bridge at 75, the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge at 95, the Rip Van Winkle 114, and the Federal Dam at Troy, the head of tidewater, at 153. The tidal section of the Hudson constitutes a bit less than half the total distance – 315 miles – from Lake Tear of the Clouds to the Battery. I learned this scrap and so many other things from the State Department of Environmental Conservation’s weekly easy–to subscribe to e-newsletter, Hudson River Almanac. If you want to know how many hummingbirds appeared in someone’s yard this May, and how that compared with last year’s count, or the story of a kingfisher riding the back of a hawk, or that Atlantic blue crabs are known to rivermen as “Jimmys,”(mature males) “Sooks,” (mature females) and “Sallys (immature females), this is the place for you. I find I want to know these things.

It’s amazing what you’re ignorant of as a walrus.

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August 14, 2013 · 2:09 pm

Clerihew’s on First

Yet another GOODIE FROM GIL. Thank you Gil, for providing moral support and iced coffee while I sit around with my leg up and my brain a little dialed down.

In a recent interview (writes Gil Reavill) Woody Allen belched forth about his writing process in ways that struck a sympathetic note with me.

Here are a couple excerpts:

“What people who don’t write don’t understand is that they think you make up the line consciously — but you don’t. It proceeds from your unconscious.”

“The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself.”

This comes close to what I’ve experienced about writing.

1) “You,” the ego-locked soul pushing the pen, is not really the author in any credible sense. Instead, it’s what used to be called the Muse, what Mr. Allen calls the unconscious. Sentences and phrases tend to leap out fully-formed and pre-created, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.

The byline is the biggest fiction there is. The greatest authors ever—Homer, Tu Fu, Shakespeare—are ciphers as individuals, to the degree that some people insist they never existed or didn’t even write their works.

2) At best, what you create is nothing more important than a diversion for yourself and others, a distraction from boredom or a way to excuse oneself from facing the howling void of the universe. Forget Art with a capital “A.” Forget literatoor. In other words, don’t take yourself or your work too seriously.

Doggerel fits the bill quite nicely. I indulge in it often and most of it never sees the light of day (thank the Lord, you might respond). Limericks, parodies, couplets, one-offs—and clerihews.

Here’s Wiki on the rules of writing the clerihew:

“A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem’s subject, usually a famous person put in an absurd light. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and meter are irregular. Bentley invented the clerihew in school and then popularized it in books. One of his best known is this (1905):

Sir Christopher Wren

Said, “I am going to dine with some men.

If anyone calls

Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”

A few years back I entered the clerihew contest of the literary society in the village where we lived. I wrote a whole slew of them. (A cleri-slew, says Jean.) One of them won second prize, a gift certificate to a local bookstore that I never cashed in. It was an honor just to be nominated. Plus it was the Muse’s doing, not mine. Blame her. See if you can guess which of these took the silver.

Meeting Charlotte Brontë

I would say, “Enchanté,

“Your hero’s charismatic

“But who’s that in the attic?”

Emily Brontë

Wrote less than Dante

One book to four

Proving less is moor

Brontë, Anne

Youngest of the clan

Wrote ‘til she had blisters

But she’s still not her sisters

Moving on from the Bronte clan…

Charles Dickens

At injustice sickens

His muse quickens

And the plot thickens

Ken Kesey

Makes us uneasy

When he gets on the bus

And leaves without us

Raymond Chandler

Had a wife but he banned her

From reading his books

About killers and crooks

Homer

Told of a sea roamer

The hero Ulysses

Who missed his wife’s kissies

The heretic Tyndale

Saw flames start to kindle

When he translated the Bible

And at the stake was held liable

Victor Hugo

Never drove a Yugo

He preferred a fiacre

In which he met his Maker

Leo Tolstoy

Was a good ol’ boy

Who fled from his wife

At the end of his life

George Eliot

To hear biographers tell it

Wrote as a man

But lived as Mary Ann

James Cain

Waited in vain

For his royalty checks

Now his postman’s an ex

Aeschylus

With comedy can thrill us

But an eagle did hurtle

And he was killed by a turtle

[Snopes.com discounts the tale, saying there is no confirmed factual information regarding the death of Aeschylus]

David Foster Wallace

Was not quite as tall as

The length of the rope

And the loss of his hope

Bentley, Ed Clerihew

Created a merry brew

Of rhymes for the very few

So no one would say “Cleri- who?”

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Filed under Culture, Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Writers, Writing

August 13, 2013 · 2:49 pm

The Mummy’s Bones

The Bloke smokes. The thing you need to know if you get a kneeling scooter is you have to embrace the experience, you have to enjoy it, you have to gliiiide. Even with a cup of iced Starbucks in one hand.

Like a kid. Like all the kids that look at you with envy when they see you and your device, The Bloke, come careening their way. I beat Gil in a race down the drug store aisles.

Gil says, Jean, don’t write about your foot again.

But I say, write what you know. And at this point my foot is pretty central to what I know.

I felt good because I came out of my first week of rehab with a completed book review for NPR – and the book was a hefty one, too: The Daughters of Mars, by Thomas Keneally. It makes it somewhat easier to handle an achy-breaky right foot when you’re reading about World War I soldiers getting their faces “shorn off.” Amputees were the new normal. Who am I to complain? I got a few stitches, that’s all.

But crutches suck. You see those college jocks swinging along on a pair after a football injury, going to History 329 or maybe a crowded party up a flight of frat-house stairs – how do they do that? It’s all I can do to limp across the living room or out to the car. It’s the young guys’ superior upper-body strength, I’m sure, but also the breezy ‘tude, and a strong desire to get back into the swim of beer pong.

Which brings me back to The Bloke. I was going to decline the Pig Mountain barbecue at the end of August, thinking I just couldn’t manage the street fair thing. But how can you turn down a pork-enshrining food fest in a town called Narrowsburg, New York, which started out as a punk rock show in a basement? Fourteen chefs and fourteen pigs. So what if I get some drinks slopped on The Bloke. He can handle a little rust.

This is one way to get through 6 weeks of life in a foot cast: gliiiide through it, sampling pork ribs and other delicacies along the way.

I’ve become a pudding fiend. A bowl of the stuff being the demarcation between early evening on the couch, foot up, and late evening on the couch, foot up.

I’ll tell you a secret about Kozy Shack. It’s no worse than any homemade pudding or gourmet restaurant mousse either, containing just milk, eggs, sugar and real vanilla. It has only one flaw. The chocolate does not have the delectable skin on it you get when it cools after you spoon it out of a hot pan. Yuck, says Gil.

Another avenue to wellness: idolize your doc, and realize you lucked into the Greatest Foot Surgeon in the World. The Greatest. There is something of the Stockholm Syndrome in this, probably, as Dr. Voellmicke is mine for the duration, so he better be good. But in truth, he has a sharp mind and a gentle touch. Not everyone could repair a fifth metatarsal with such delicacy.

We visited with Dr. Voellmicke so that I could get my sutures removed and my plaster cast exchanged for a streamlined fiberglass model. This sterling representative of his profession performs every bit of the work himself, including creating a fiberglass mold of wet strips the way you’d make a kids’ pinata.

I came up with a horror film trope. Bunions: The Movie. Or maybe The Bone Spur. Anyway, my feet have been a nightmare for a long time, and it was thrilling to see the monster bones I was living with transformed into the elegant lines that now lie beneath the mummy bandages, awaiting their closeup.

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Filed under Culture, Film, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Photography, Publishing, Writers, Writing

August 8, 2013 · 2:57 pm

Captive Reader

And another great guest post from Gil Reavill, who between brewing coffee, clearing away dishes and bearing down on his own book has managed to fill in literarily while I’m off my foot.

EVER SINCE JEAN shared a bookstore appearance with novelist Koethi Zan, author of The Never List, the theme of captive women seems like a bad tooth that we can’t help worrying.

The horrific tales of Ariel Castro, the Cleveland kidnapper, rapist and murderer, remain in the news long after his captives took back their hard-won freedom. Recently they leveled Castro’s home, part of a plea deal that spared the predator a death sentence.

I wrote about the phenomenon in my book Aftermath, Inc.

Ed Gein’s Wisconsin farmhouse, destroyed by fire. John Wayne Gacy’s house in Des Plains, Illinois, bulldozed flat, as was O.J. Simpson’s Rockingham estate. Jeffrey Dahmer’s Oxford apartment building, with its infamous apartment 213, demolished. These sites were, in the language of real estate experts, ‘stigmatized’ properties. You know you have transgressed in some basic, Decalogue-violating manner when authorities raze your house and sow your fields with salt.

The theme of captive women crops up with stinging regularity in literature. John Fowles’s great novel The Collector was the first treatment of the theme that I encountered, probably as a too-young adolescent.

In our household, stories of Cynthia Parker and other women taken by Indians have become familiar through research for Jean’s novel, Savage Girl. Captivity is such a popular leitmotif in romance novels that it must form an admitted element in female fantasy. But the difference between rape fantasies and rape, as psychologists reiterate, is that women are in control of their fantasies.

During her research for The Never List, Zan became exhaustively familiar with captive women cases the world over. She tracks the survivors and gives sobering accounts of their inability to adjust to life after captivity. Often such women become recluses, unable to face life after enslavement.

Of course, stories of a lot of these victims never make the news. It might come as a shock to some benighted souls that human slavery did not exactly vanish from the face of the earth with the end of the American Civil War. Read Nicholas Kristoff’s great call to arms, Half the Sky, or David Batstone’s Not for Sale for accounts of sexually enslaved females all over the world (including right here in River City).

So it was with a creeping sense of recognition that I delved into our friend Nelly Reifler’s captivating (ahem) debut novel, Elect H. Mouse State Judge, out this week from Faber and Faber.

H. Mouse is by turns entertaining and disturbing, with Reifler treading a razor’s edge between Wind in the Willows and, say, Chuck Palahnuik, William Vollmann or Andrew Vachss. The innocence here is false innocence, and the topical true-crime reality of captive women leaks through the fairy tale.

H. Mouse is that eminently familiar figure, a compromised politician. His daughters Susie and Margo are taken by a religious nut named Father Sunshine (one Reifler’s best creations). The title character reaches out to a couple of shady political fixers named Barbie and Ken—yes, the very same ragingly popular iconic couple toyed with by children since the doll’s introduction in 1959. Ever wonder how Barbie and Ken do the nasty? Reifler tells us (it involves the removal of limbs). Lawyers from Mattel, Inc. ought to be knocking on Reifler’s door any day now.

The figure of an unreliable narrator is a common one, but with H. Mouse I felt myself put into the position of an unreliable reader. I had the uncanny sense of humming along, enjoying the mice-and-foxes fable, then snapping awake to a nightmare. Reifler’s trap is baited with honey: the tone of faux sweetness is devilish, since one soon learns that it cannot last. Throughout these pages I suffered a quite enjoyable case of literary whiplash, something along the lines one feels with Animal Farm. (There’s a story kicking around, I can’t remember where I encountered it, about a student telling his professor that Orwell’s masterpiece was an excellent tale of the barnyard. The professor told the student to go back and read the novel again.)

Elect H. Mouse State Judge is short, bittersweet and has a kick like a mule. Not since Art Spiegelman’s Maus have rodents been harnessed to so great effect.

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Filed under Culture, Fiction, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Savage Girl, Writers, Writing

August 7, 2013 · 7:03 pm

An ARC and a Boost

There’s type and then there’s type.

After another day of slogging off and onto the couch, I opened the mail. In among the junk, two gems, two volumes I’ve been waiting for. Two Advance Reading Copies of Savage Girl. Two ARCs. The novel will be out in March 2014. But it’s alive and breathing in its beautiful jacket even as we speak. This is the copy that will go out to early commenters and reviewers, bloggers and big mouths, so we want for it to be gorgeous.

And that type. That’s what pops. The image of the girl and the mansion resonate, but the type’s what brings it to life. The title announces itself in a virginal white whose lines also embody the savagery of the title, and the two words are embossed, smooth under your fingertips as I didn’t know they would be when I simply saw the cover proof. Now its typography renders the package dazzling.

Crack it open and you get the prologue, the first outlines of the mystery the narrator Hugo unfolds.

The type popped. Now I’m going to have some pizzazz, too. Gil and I picked up a scooter I’d reserved for rental at the drug store. It waited patiently at the Greek restaurant we like while we downed our sandwiches and skordalia.

Then it came home with us – and boy, do cars stop for pedestrians when they see a scooter.

It’s somewhat easier to get around than crutches and I’ll be freer to exit my couch and have adventures. I think I’ll call it the Bloke. Right now the Bloke is in the back of the Suburu, waiting for me.

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Filed under Cooking, Culture, Fiction, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Savage Girl, Writers, Writing

August 6, 2013 · 2:57 pm

A Haze of Summer Reading

Still embedded in the couch, where I’ll be for the foreseeable future, my leg held slightly less aloft, though… and with less pain in my foot.

The hours go by. The days. So do the pages of the book I’m reading, though the medicine makes me slightly less attentive to the thread of the plot than I’d ordinarily be.

A summer book. A stack of summer books. I recently came across a copy of the syllabus for my honors English class in high school. Forty years ago. The teacher, Chuck Aschmann, was some kind of a genius, and he brought out the genius in his pupils. Just page 1 of the reading list would be enough for more than a single college literature course.

By page 2… I don’t remember it being hard to read most of his selections, just sitting for hours in our sticky leather club chair and dreaming over these amazing books. Spending a lot of time in the humid heat of August, reading and dreaming and reading…

Dos Passos, Woolf, Conrad, James. Fielding, Sterne, Thackeray. Melville. Twain. Sophocles!

I was actually spoiled for college English after this, thought I knew all there was to know about fiction and spent my non-class-time hardly reading at all but scribbling diary entries, page-length prose poems and love letters.

In high school it didn’t take foot surgery to keep me on my rear end reading novels in summer.

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Filed under Culture, Fiction, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Writers, Writing

August 5, 2013 · 11:51 am

A Full-throated Yodel

Today, Gil Reavill guest-posts as I rest:

THAT SOUND YOU HEAR is the yodels echoing down from the Catskill Mountains. Author, provocateur, deejay, beer mystic and worldwide yodeling authority Bart Plantenga recently appeared for a full-throated presentation and book-signing at Woodstock, NY’s great indie bookstore, The Golden Notebook.

The event was held on a tourist-flocked sunny Saturday in Woodstock, aka the People’s Republic of Woodstock. The iconic Aquarian village looked to be thriving and was chock full of public art and cheeky signage.

The Golden Notebook is one of our all-time favorites as both a bookstore and a book: the venue is named after Doris Lessing’s nervous breakdown of a masterpiece.

A feminist touchstone of the Sixties, Notebook turned a lot of minds around and established the author as a leading light in the literature of the day. Margaret Drabble famously called it “inner space fiction.”

We summered in Woodstock once back in the day at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in the hills above town, staying in one of the tiny cabins. The founder of Byrdcliffe believed in the health benefits of bathing, so he furnished each cabin there with immense eight-foot-long clawfoot tubs. Water was delivered to the faucet by a spring-fed system which ran through hoses that snaked through the woods. Bob Dylan’s old place was just down the road, and we snuck in for a nighttime swim or two in his former grotto. That year the Byrdcliffe Playhouse was doing a stage adaptation of the film Casablanca, and during the show a spotlight rigged on the theater’s roof would strobe the darkness and a claxon would sound as Louis and his friends would search for “the usual suspects.”

With the publication of his second book on the subject, Yodel in Hi-Fi: From Kitsch Folk to Contemporary Electronica, our friend Bart has established himself as an unparalleled resource for musicologists, aficionados and just plain yodel-crazy folks. While he does not indulge in the art himself, Plantenga has exhaustively documented yodeling practices all over the globe.

He rounds up the usual suspects—Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia—but gives fascinating insights into unexpected yodeling traditions among the Pygmy people in Africa and the Hmong in Southeast Asia. Yodeling is a method of changing pitch from ordinary chest register to falsetto, long used as a communication method in mountainous countries where the echo is most pleasing to the ears. Of course it also appears as a vocal effect in many different kinds of music, most notably in country and western but also, as Plantenga shows, in classical, electronica, pop and pretty much every other style on the face of the earth. The great country music pioneer Jimmie Rogers rode to fame on the strength of his “blue yodel.”

Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan yodel entered into the modern pop culture in the middle of the last century, and the practice was played for laughs by comic Carol Burnett, who used to open her television show with a suitably loony example. Plantenga’s reach goes much deeper than these popular examples, unearthing gems such as Bollywood actor Kumar, a yodeling sub-genre of German video porn (!), and South Korean faux-Bavarian yodeling groups. Bart spoke about yodeling as an “outburst of joy,” citing the “total Oktoberfest insanity” of alcohol-fueled burghers who bust out in freestyle tavern yodel throwdowns. “I like anomalies that make people re-assess clichés,” he says, and in Yodel in Hi-Fi, he has unearthed dozens of them.

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Filed under Culture, History, Jean Zimmerman, Music, Writers, Writing

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