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Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Fifteen Minutes
I'm here, in the morrow. Pushed it to the last fifteen minutes of the day, which being the morrow, is Wednesday's share of Tuesday. Except the morrow is actually Thursday now. So I guess I missed the train to Morrow. As the Kingston Trio noted in part of the soundtrack of my boyhood, "Morrow is the hardest place I've ever tried to go." That song was a little exasperating to me in a just-kidding way. I often tried to figure it out, which was probably a fool's game. Yesterday, aka today, wasn't bad, but if I don't put the concertina back in its box, I'll be none too fit for today, aka tomorrow.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Staring in the mirror
Not quite sure what I intend with that title. Probably a statement of contemplation: visiting this blank white space for the first time in more than two months. It often starts out with staring in a mirror, writing does, but pausing at it now, the phrase seems a little disturbing. Staring. Not looking, gazing, or even peering. A fixed look, a bit nonplussed, discovering something, perhaps. It reminds me of one of my son Matt's early films, which he co-directed with a friend, called Solitude. Partners were given a stock script often used as an acting exercise, and asked to interpret it any way they chose to. He thought of staring in a mirror.
But as Lewis Carroll demonstrated, a looking-glass can be an opportunity, a portal, a conveyance, The white space, it turns out, may start out as a mirror, but often becomes a screen, alive with pictures that are conjured with the concatenations of words. It can also go back to being a mirror.
I will leave this mirror/monitor for now because it's nearly one, my butt hurts, and I haven't stacked the dishes. But I will return on the morrow, also known as Tuesday, and see where this goes.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Adventures in Writing!
Time to tune into an old radio program from a bygone era...
Jonas!
Aye, Captain?
Fill up my Loomis, lad; I've a tale to log!
Aye-aye, Captain!
Loomis Fountain Pens, the leak-proof, smooth-flowing pen preferred by more explorers for making entries in their journals — presents Adventures in Writing!
Then the real program begins with young Tommy Pinkus sitting at his kitchen table, the clock ticking, an open notebook in front of him, trying to come up with an idea for a story. Occasionally, his cat, Falconflick, leaps up on the table, knocking over the ink and sparking an inspiration. But however it happens, the boy writer always gets an idea, his pen begins to scratch, the narrative unfurls in an authoritative voice-over by the narrator, Philip McAdoo, and tonight's adventure is underway.
Of course, before that could happen the real scriptwriters labored that week in a painful, drawn-out, hit-and-miss, process having more to do with deadlines and desperation than magic. Or else a distinctly manual kind of magic.
Sorry to say, you won't find any evidence of that radio show if you search for it, except perhaps in this blog. (But wouldn't that be a cool thing if I'd conjured it into existence, in a Twilight Zoney manner. Take note, Tommy Pinkus.)
Obviously I'm trying to conjure a little ironic magic for myself, as if the title Adventures in Writing, declaimed by a sterling-voiced announcer, could make words flow spontaneously through the nib of my own version of a Loomis fountain pen:
...whilst rounding Cape August, in the fog-chilled valleys of West Marin, California, at the hidden beginnings of the Perseids meteor shower...
You gotta work with what you got, what matters, which may be too boring and everyday for Tommy Pinkus, but constitutes an adventure nonetheless, just as the meanderings of an ant on a sidewalk constitute a journey.
I thought about the meadow we had cultivated by benign neglect, in front of our house. More public than the unmown grass bordering the driveway and the unmown, weed-choked, jungle of a backyard, it took over the house-wide strip of grass with the sidewalk on one side, Allen Street on the other. At first it was just tall grass, then clover, then it got interesting. A meadow's-worth of Queen Anne's Lace. And a companion weed, unknown but standing at attention like the Queen's Own Guard, three feet tall. Bees and wasps and butterflies visited.
Opinion was divided in 32-34 Allen as to whether it was beautiful or an eyesore (that wasn't how eyesore it); a wildlife preserve or an unkempt embarrassment.
The neighbors shuddered. The neighbors admired. The neighbors didn't even notice, much less care.
It wasn't our responsibility, it was the Town's. Not so, or true in theory, but not ever in practice.
Pay Matt to mow it and the side strip. Let it stay till the summer's end.
Finally, it came down to what Charlie thought—Carol's dad, who lived on the ground floor and was our gardener-in-residence emeritus. And Carol maintained that he didn't care for this opportunistic weed patch. Not even the Queen Anne's Lace? I tried to see it through objective eyes. One minute it was a sweet oasis, a caravansary for travel-weary meadow seeds, a habitat where once lay a featureless, anonymous, border that had supported our noble maple tree, felled in the great microburst of 2012. The next minute it was a tattered remnant of a household that didn't shower, ate out of cans and left them lying around, let the newspapers pile up and tumble down the front steps, and whose doorbell the neighborhood children dared each other to ring before running away.
Fine, I said to Matt. But you have to take a photo of it before you do the deed.
The meadow lives!
Jonas!
Aye, Captain?
Fill up my Loomis, lad; I've a tale to log!
Aye-aye, Captain!
Loomis Fountain Pens, the leak-proof, smooth-flowing pen preferred by more explorers for making entries in their journals — presents Adventures in Writing!
Then the real program begins with young Tommy Pinkus sitting at his kitchen table, the clock ticking, an open notebook in front of him, trying to come up with an idea for a story. Occasionally, his cat, Falconflick, leaps up on the table, knocking over the ink and sparking an inspiration. But however it happens, the boy writer always gets an idea, his pen begins to scratch, the narrative unfurls in an authoritative voice-over by the narrator, Philip McAdoo, and tonight's adventure is underway.
Of course, before that could happen the real scriptwriters labored that week in a painful, drawn-out, hit-and-miss, process having more to do with deadlines and desperation than magic. Or else a distinctly manual kind of magic.
Sorry to say, you won't find any evidence of that radio show if you search for it, except perhaps in this blog. (But wouldn't that be a cool thing if I'd conjured it into existence, in a Twilight Zoney manner. Take note, Tommy Pinkus.)
Obviously I'm trying to conjure a little ironic magic for myself, as if the title Adventures in Writing, declaimed by a sterling-voiced announcer, could make words flow spontaneously through the nib of my own version of a Loomis fountain pen:
...whilst rounding Cape August, in the fog-chilled valleys of West Marin, California, at the hidden beginnings of the Perseids meteor shower...
You gotta work with what you got, what matters, which may be too boring and everyday for Tommy Pinkus, but constitutes an adventure nonetheless, just as the meanderings of an ant on a sidewalk constitute a journey.
I thought about the meadow we had cultivated by benign neglect, in front of our house. More public than the unmown grass bordering the driveway and the unmown, weed-choked, jungle of a backyard, it took over the house-wide strip of grass with the sidewalk on one side, Allen Street on the other. At first it was just tall grass, then clover, then it got interesting. A meadow's-worth of Queen Anne's Lace. And a companion weed, unknown but standing at attention like the Queen's Own Guard, three feet tall. Bees and wasps and butterflies visited.
Opinion was divided in 32-34 Allen as to whether it was beautiful or an eyesore (that wasn't how eyesore it); a wildlife preserve or an unkempt embarrassment.
The neighbors shuddered. The neighbors admired. The neighbors didn't even notice, much less care.
It wasn't our responsibility, it was the Town's. Not so, or true in theory, but not ever in practice.
Pay Matt to mow it and the side strip. Let it stay till the summer's end.
Finally, it came down to what Charlie thought—Carol's dad, who lived on the ground floor and was our gardener-in-residence emeritus. And Carol maintained that he didn't care for this opportunistic weed patch. Not even the Queen Anne's Lace? I tried to see it through objective eyes. One minute it was a sweet oasis, a caravansary for travel-weary meadow seeds, a habitat where once lay a featureless, anonymous, border that had supported our noble maple tree, felled in the great microburst of 2012. The next minute it was a tattered remnant of a household that didn't shower, ate out of cans and left them lying around, let the newspapers pile up and tumble down the front steps, and whose doorbell the neighborhood children dared each other to ring before running away.
Fine, I said to Matt. But you have to take a photo of it before you do the deed.
The meadow lives!
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Trawling
There have been a few doorways I've stood in since my last post. Not sure where they would have led, maybe to a familiar vestibule, maybe to somewhere else.
One was during the early stages of the World Cup. The field of colors and emblems, order unraveling into momentary chaos and raveling back to order, reminded me of stamp collecting, back when I was a bedroom globetrotter, making colorful rows of peasants from Osterreich, King Leopolds from Belgie/Belgique, and musicians from Magyarorszag. That was when the world was mainly a map, with the British Commonwealth countries in pink, the French countries in green, and Greenland was by far the biggest land mass in the world. Geography forgave history. World War II had happened, but it had retreated to playing army in the Kligermans' back yard. Now we had the Good Neighbor Policy, Japan made our Crackerjack prizes, and the news was a mix of stories with faraway villainy, like the Iron Curtain, balanced by reassuring happy tales, like singing Israeli children.
A week or two ago I lingered over another portal, a product ad in the mail with the hook, Hearing Loss or Just Earwax? which turned out to be a promo for a diagnostic tool called the Video Otoscope. Something about the intrusive familiarity of the word Earwax appealed to me. Good name for a lowly character in a crime novel, or one of Dick Tracy's foes, like Pruneface. Good rainy-day time-waster: check out the list of Dick Tracy villains on Wikipedia. There must be hundreds, from 1931 through 2014. And if you're also a fan of old-time radio and have 46 more minutes, I recall a Dick Tracy radio broadcast from 1945 featuring a cast including Bing Crosby (as Tracy), Dinah Shore (as Tess Trueheart), Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, etc. etc. It's amazing what a little earwax will lead to.
Most recently, a phrase floated by. I caught it in my butterfly net. Here it is: creative hope. I'm not sure what it means, but I like the way it teeters its wings back and forth. I think it can stand up to some pondering.
There's regular hope, which was the last thing in Pandora' box after all the evils had escaped. It's a good thing, regular hope, but it seems kind of overmatched, pitted against all those scourges bent on sowing terror and suffering. (Though it must have driven the evils crazy when they were all living in the box together.) Practically speaking, it seems to me most effective as an attitude. To remain hopeful. A hedge against defeatism. Hope springs. Fingers crossed. Hoping against hope--which sounds contradictory, but maybe it means like pressing hope against itself, doubling it. As ardently as it's invoked, it still strikes me that hope is kind of passive, if hardy. Emily Dickinson called it "the thing with feathers" and marveled that it never stops at all, nor asks anything in return for its willingness to sing in the storm, as it were.
But what about creative hope? What would that be? As I fill this white space with letters, words, sentences, perhaps I am employing hope creatively. Hoping not for something, which may be an investment in disappointment. Investing, instead, in possibility. With creation as your part of the bargain. I create, therefore I hope? No, dude, the other way around. This is delicate. I could be mistaken.
Maybe it could be hoping for something--change, a non-specific pleasant turn of events--but not just waiting for it. Doing something. Making something.
I'll ponder on it some more.
One was during the early stages of the World Cup. The field of colors and emblems, order unraveling into momentary chaos and raveling back to order, reminded me of stamp collecting, back when I was a bedroom globetrotter, making colorful rows of peasants from Osterreich, King Leopolds from Belgie/Belgique, and musicians from Magyarorszag. That was when the world was mainly a map, with the British Commonwealth countries in pink, the French countries in green, and Greenland was by far the biggest land mass in the world. Geography forgave history. World War II had happened, but it had retreated to playing army in the Kligermans' back yard. Now we had the Good Neighbor Policy, Japan made our Crackerjack prizes, and the news was a mix of stories with faraway villainy, like the Iron Curtain, balanced by reassuring happy tales, like singing Israeli children.
A week or two ago I lingered over another portal, a product ad in the mail with the hook, Hearing Loss or Just Earwax? which turned out to be a promo for a diagnostic tool called the Video Otoscope. Something about the intrusive familiarity of the word Earwax appealed to me. Good name for a lowly character in a crime novel, or one of Dick Tracy's foes, like Pruneface. Good rainy-day time-waster: check out the list of Dick Tracy villains on Wikipedia. There must be hundreds, from 1931 through 2014. And if you're also a fan of old-time radio and have 46 more minutes, I recall a Dick Tracy radio broadcast from 1945 featuring a cast including Bing Crosby (as Tracy), Dinah Shore (as Tess Trueheart), Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, etc. etc. It's amazing what a little earwax will lead to.
Most recently, a phrase floated by. I caught it in my butterfly net. Here it is: creative hope. I'm not sure what it means, but I like the way it teeters its wings back and forth. I think it can stand up to some pondering.
There's regular hope, which was the last thing in Pandora' box after all the evils had escaped. It's a good thing, regular hope, but it seems kind of overmatched, pitted against all those scourges bent on sowing terror and suffering. (Though it must have driven the evils crazy when they were all living in the box together.) Practically speaking, it seems to me most effective as an attitude. To remain hopeful. A hedge against defeatism. Hope springs. Fingers crossed. Hoping against hope--which sounds contradictory, but maybe it means like pressing hope against itself, doubling it. As ardently as it's invoked, it still strikes me that hope is kind of passive, if hardy. Emily Dickinson called it "the thing with feathers" and marveled that it never stops at all, nor asks anything in return for its willingness to sing in the storm, as it were.
But what about creative hope? What would that be? As I fill this white space with letters, words, sentences, perhaps I am employing hope creatively. Hoping not for something, which may be an investment in disappointment. Investing, instead, in possibility. With creation as your part of the bargain. I create, therefore I hope? No, dude, the other way around. This is delicate. I could be mistaken.
Maybe it could be hoping for something--change, a non-specific pleasant turn of events--but not just waiting for it. Doing something. Making something.
I'll ponder on it some more.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Three Birds
So I went back, looking for bird truth, whether in the form of elusive birds, capricious birds, theoretical birds, vocal birds, no birds, too many birds, not enough birds, cautious birds, hidden birds, bird coalitions, independent birds, beautiful and drab birds, mellifluous and strident birds.
—Henry David Thoreau (not really)
May, that spring concoction with a pinch of winter and a sprig of summer, is a matter of record now. For me it was mostly defined, as usual, by the influx of migrating birds and the success or failure of my attempts to see them, whether in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge or in the woods of the Brooks Estate in Medford.
I began a post two weeks ago representing three stages of that event. First, whetted by my frustration with not being able to match the bird movement in a given spot with the same spot seen through my binoculars—I looked instead for the elusive "truth of birds": the reality that birds inhabit as birds, as distinct from the celebrity spotting that is the birder's game, fueled by the lure of, say, the throat flame of a Blackburnian warbler in a treetop or the sweet sweet chew chew of an all-blue indigo bunting.
Bird truth is an ascetic pursuit, the equivalent of munching Essene bread. It requires a broad consideration of the bird's environment or a deep consideration of the bird's behaviour—with a u—the impulse driving the catbird's beatnik colloquy, for example, or the nuthatch's nervous but dogged energy (even though you'd trade a Talmud of catbird truth for a momentary gander at an indigo bunting turning from turquoise to ultramarine in changing light).
But then there is the parable of the three birds—on a morning when I went to Brooks, third week of May, the bushes and trees still lousy with warblers. And I saw one, and it was good!— a common yellowthroat. Little bandit with the black mask, skulking in a bush, olive and yellow, being furtive but allowing itself to be seen. So I continued to the pocket meadow and along the trail through a copse of trees and shrubs called Warbler Walk and lo! I beheld a magnolia warbler in good light, among the leaves, and it was very good—brilliant yellow, etched with black streaks and marshmallow white. High definition, sufficing for a treeful of barely glimpsed rarities. So, emboldened by the good yellowthroat and very good magnolia, I betook me to the Lounge, a clearing where two trails T and many species of passing passerines are known to hang out, and behold! there was a black-throated blue warbler at the end of a twig, inky head tipped back, singing its arcane rising zoo zoo zoo zee, not any competition for a thrush, but giving its all. And it was enough. Three good birds can a merry May make.
There wasn't really a third stage to my Birder's Progress, except maybe a reconciliation of bird truth and celebrity spotting: See what you can see. Which may be what a lot of those warblers are singing. See...see? (Get it? Got it?)
Good.
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—Henry David Thoreau (not really)
May, that spring concoction with a pinch of winter and a sprig of summer, is a matter of record now. For me it was mostly defined, as usual, by the influx of migrating birds and the success or failure of my attempts to see them, whether in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge or in the woods of the Brooks Estate in Medford.
I began a post two weeks ago representing three stages of that event. First, whetted by my frustration with not being able to match the bird movement in a given spot with the same spot seen through my binoculars—I looked instead for the elusive "truth of birds": the reality that birds inhabit as birds, as distinct from the celebrity spotting that is the birder's game, fueled by the lure of, say, the throat flame of a Blackburnian warbler in a treetop or the sweet sweet chew chew of an all-blue indigo bunting.
Bird truth is an ascetic pursuit, the equivalent of munching Essene bread. It requires a broad consideration of the bird's environment or a deep consideration of the bird's behaviour—with a u—the impulse driving the catbird's beatnik colloquy, for example, or the nuthatch's nervous but dogged energy (even though you'd trade a Talmud of catbird truth for a momentary gander at an indigo bunting turning from turquoise to ultramarine in changing light).
But then there is the parable of the three birds—on a morning when I went to Brooks, third week of May, the bushes and trees still lousy with warblers. And I saw one, and it was good!— a common yellowthroat. Little bandit with the black mask, skulking in a bush, olive and yellow, being furtive but allowing itself to be seen. So I continued to the pocket meadow and along the trail through a copse of trees and shrubs called Warbler Walk and lo! I beheld a magnolia warbler in good light, among the leaves, and it was very good—brilliant yellow, etched with black streaks and marshmallow white. High definition, sufficing for a treeful of barely glimpsed rarities. So, emboldened by the good yellowthroat and very good magnolia, I betook me to the Lounge, a clearing where two trails T and many species of passing passerines are known to hang out, and behold! there was a black-throated blue warbler at the end of a twig, inky head tipped back, singing its arcane rising zoo zoo zoo zee, not any competition for a thrush, but giving its all. And it was enough. Three good birds can a merry May make.
There wasn't really a third stage to my Birder's Progress, except maybe a reconciliation of bird truth and celebrity spotting: See what you can see. Which may be what a lot of those warblers are singing. See...see? (Get it? Got it?)
Good.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Mais oui!
Here it is May. Already the eighth day, a fast week since Mayday, which somehow became ship-to-shore code for "Help!" One might have legitimately radioed it that way this past winter—"Mayday!" as in,"Get me the hell to Mayday!" or "There's no place like May...There's no place like May!" But I'm pretty sure Mayday is a respelling of its French homophone, "M'aidez!" or "Help me!"
May we? ask the yielding landscape, the spring migrants, the testing flora. And the reply, hesitant in April, is finally a welcoming "Mais oui!" Dare to change your wardrobe; pump up your bike tires; guillotine your storm windows, dare to go sashaying along Spy Pond in shorts and T-shirt, and acknowledge those airborne stirrings of puppy love, poodle kanoodles, boxers-in-briefs.
Mais oui! But of course! And in the Truth of the bird, this run of days is when it's time to fly a long distance, from here to the other here, also known as northern America, which is very exciting to us terrestrials, who have a kind of album of living experience with spaces for each FOY (first o' year) kind: Baltimore oriole flashing orange on a treetop, wood thrush singing the Song of the Forest that Pan taught its oldest ancestor, dipped-in-blue indigo bunting, and twenty-odd kinds of warblers teasing us with colors and peewee cadenzas from the trees, especially the Blackburnian, Canada, Prothonotary, Hooded, and Chestnut-sided I will once again fail to see. But then again, I may. And if I don't, I won't dis May. Much. And dat's all I got to say.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Loose Change
Thirty days hath...that Aprille with his shoures soote....in England now that April's... the cruelest month...come she will...and she did, and now she's leaving, the bard of months, Shakespeare's month, taking her poems with her? Maybe not.
It's a rainy night, even rained out the Red Sox, and I'm looking back at the calendar page like a five-story building, about to exit through the lobby door marked 30, with a polite doorman in a rabbit suit or maybe it's a white rabbit in a doorman's uniform, ready to let me out.
I should have chronicled the transformations of this blue-gray civil war of a month, but its spring cavalcade lacked momentum, seemed like a street magician running rapidly through her repertoire of tricks, the uprising of green happening accidentally through cold days, raw days, days of crocus, days of matzo, days of wind, rain, and sun, of brillig daffodils and mimsy florets in the maples and blossoms in the magnolia trees, and another night of cold and wet authored by the same April.
I've been saving the title phrase, loose change, for too long. It refers both to the dilatory timetable of spring and in particular to the bright proclamation of the song sparrow, melospiza melodia, delivered from a singing perch and resembling the dispensing of new-minted coins from one of those silver coin dispensers the Good Humor man wore on his waist, a unique piping cadenza: dime! dime! dime! centime, ha'penny, nickel nickel nickel nickel, centavo, franc.
I've missed the rest of the avril aviaty—the tail-wagging palm warblers, phoebes packing a species vocabulary into their repeated names, maybe a brown thrasher, no telling who else. Maybe May...she will stay, but I must away!
It's a rainy night, even rained out the Red Sox, and I'm looking back at the calendar page like a five-story building, about to exit through the lobby door marked 30, with a polite doorman in a rabbit suit or maybe it's a white rabbit in a doorman's uniform, ready to let me out.
I should have chronicled the transformations of this blue-gray civil war of a month, but its spring cavalcade lacked momentum, seemed like a street magician running rapidly through her repertoire of tricks, the uprising of green happening accidentally through cold days, raw days, days of crocus, days of matzo, days of wind, rain, and sun, of brillig daffodils and mimsy florets in the maples and blossoms in the magnolia trees, and another night of cold and wet authored by the same April.
I've been saving the title phrase, loose change, for too long. It refers both to the dilatory timetable of spring and in particular to the bright proclamation of the song sparrow, melospiza melodia, delivered from a singing perch and resembling the dispensing of new-minted coins from one of those silver coin dispensers the Good Humor man wore on his waist, a unique piping cadenza: dime! dime! dime! centime, ha'penny, nickel nickel nickel nickel, centavo, franc.
I've missed the rest of the avril aviaty—the tail-wagging palm warblers, phoebes packing a species vocabulary into their repeated names, maybe a brown thrasher, no telling who else. Maybe May...she will stay, but I must away!
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