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Meeting with fame

I did a reading at Newtonville Books last week and had the delightful experience of meeting a reader of this blog. Someone I’m not related to. Someone I didn’t even know. I always wonder if anyone reads it, aside from the near-and-dear group that e-mails me comments.  So having this person introduce herself was a gift. But then I was wondering what it would be like to have A Following–some unknown number of readers Out There.
And then I was wondering about fame, how people find it, whether it’s something to be sought.
And THEN I was thinking about my own reactions to people who are famous. You know those classic “what writer would you most want to meet” questions. My reaction was, “Yikes.”
I really don’t yearn to meet my literary heroes and heroines. No desert-island companions. No fantasy dinner parties either.  (I get a little ferklempt just picturing it–Shakespeare’s coming? Along with Jane Austen, maybe a few others? Forget the logistics–allergies? anyone vegan? You’d really want to sit there and try to make conversation while wondering why Vaclav hasn’t touched his salmon or noticing that Emily’s wine needs topping up? Or even follow the conversation they make among themselves. What was that Gerard just said–spring rhythm? sprung rhythm?) 
Maybe I’m thinking that writers are at their most comfortable on the page rather than in the flesh. Maybe I’m picturing how intimidated I would be in their presence, my admiration an awkward hedge between us.  The people who imagine these cosmic meet-ups may just be way more assertive than I am. But maybe, too, I’m wondering what it is I would want from the encounter, especially after their written words had already given me perhaps the best of their minds and hearts. 
I’ve read of writers who dropped notes of appreciation to those whose work they admired, and that seems fitting.  I’ve done it, too. I don’t need a closer brush with fame.To respond with the written word to one who lives in the written word, to say thank you for the pleasure of reading, that, to me, would be enough.
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“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” part 2

Hearing now about yet another shooting incident made me think about a scene in the book that I didn’t write about earlier. It takes place in the Dallas Cowboys locker room. The Bravo soldiers are being taken through, introduced to the players. Billy, through whose eyes we experience the book’s action, sees the players as so massive that they appear to be almost another species.  In fact, he thinks the war in Iraq could be won quickly and easily if only the NFL players were sent to fight there.
But what I was thinking about this afternoon was the moment when the players begin asking about the guns Bravo uses in Iraq. They want to know in detail about the guns and the injuries each type of weapon could cause. The Bravo guys, more familiar with this information than they want to be, are taken aback, don’t know what to make of this intense interest, and finally, just edge away.
Like so many moments in the book this rings true as piece of Americana. There are people in this country who don’t want to live around easily-available, easily used weapons and those who are think guns should be even more widely available.  The problem is that the two groups live intermingled.  
I’m sure that around dinner tables tonight are people who firmly believe that if only they had been at the Washington Naval Yard today with a gun, things would have gone differently. I am in the camp of those who believe that if only no one at the Washington Naval Yard had had a gun today, more people would be sitting around their dinner tables tonight. 
There’s an old theater adage that if there a gun appears in the first act, it will go off by the end of the play. 
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Reading “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”

“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” has elements I tend to avoid in a book. Football–a sport I despise. War–something which I, apparently like most Americans, try to not think about. Texas–a long way from where I live, geographically, culturally, politically.  When football, war, and every over-the-top stereotype about Texas and Texans are brought together, the resulting stew of strangely compatible ingredients  does not make for the first book I’d grab off the shelf.
But, all of you for whom the same is true, listen: read this book. You will thank me. Well, you will more appropriately thank Ben Fountain for the beautifully nuanced writing that won him a National Book Award for this.  The premise of the book is that an Army unit engaged in a brutal fire-fight that was recorded by an “embedded” Fox reporter and played often enough on American television that the surviving soldiers become national heroes. They are on a two-week “victory” tour, though, in the spirit of the premature “mission accomplished,” they must return to Iraq for another eight months to finish out their deployment. 
The culminating event is their appearance in the halftime show at a Thanksgiving Day Cowboys-Bears game. Billy Lynn, the 19-year-old hero in battle and on the page, is a Texas boy, but not one of the tanned and tucked uber-privileged who gush over Bravo company in the owner’s lounge. We witness the spectacle through his eyes and ears, which filter a soup of references to “nina leven, terrR, currj,” the wheelings and dealings of a movie producer trying to get Bravo’s story on film (“They love it”…”They want to move it to World War II.”), and the halftime spectacular’s special effects that threaten to trigger  the soldiers’ PTSD symptoms. Billy, the book’s heart and its conscience, finds himself puzzled by how things start and grow–football teams, shopping malls, wars. 
This book transcends football and Texas and even war. It is thought-provoking at several levels, ambitious in its scope, and written with a pitch-perfect sense of dialogue and an ability to make language twist and bend and jump through hoops to say exactly what Fountain wants. Yes, I’ll say it again: read this book!
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Good work!

We’re in the fix-up-the-house mode–painting, patio repair, garden plans, floor refinishing. And I’m in redo-the-website mode, making room for the new book, pruning the outdated reading dates, changing the pictures. And nothing is easy. Well, the painting was easy for us, since Steve, painter and cabinetmaker extraordinaire, does it all so meticulously. And although the web site is still not glitch-free, Adde is on the case.
And I’m thinking, with gratitude, about how what they’re doing is not only the task at hand but, in a very real sense, making my life better. Steve, Adde, Flor, Andy who delivers the mail with noticeable kindness and professionalism, Kathy whose garden expertise brings us great pleasure–everyone whose work creates something larger around them.  
The demonstrations of the fast-food workers for better pay is a reminder of how the benefits of work can’t be all in one direction.  And the Poetry Foundation has a group of wonderful poems up about work. Just now, at the moment between the anniversary of the March on Washington and Labor Day I am cognizant of the beauty of work, how, done well, each job adds to the world around us. 
Isn’t that what “a day’s work” mean? A chance to to notice the dignity of work well done. A chance to notice how the work of each of us can make someone else’s life better. A chance to notice. 
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The art instinct, part 2

A day or two after I wrote my last blog post about 40,000-year-old evidence of art as a basic human instinct, I read a wonderful article in the New York Times on pretty much the same subject. 
The reporter, Anand Giridharadas, saw a young woman sitting in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum. It was a hot day, it was a cool lobby. The article described how 16-year-old Chanel Baldwin, sat out the doggiest days of summer in the cool air of the lobby, though venturing no further because of the “suggested $8” price of admission. But on the free side of that lobby was a painting, “Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps,” by Kehinde Wiley. And day after day Chanel looked at that painting, looked more deeply, perhaps, than most of the museum-goers inside who graze past one work after another. She noticed things about the painting, thought about it, formed an opinion. In short, she responded to the art.
And when Giridharadas pointed Chanel to the part of the admission sign that said “suggested” next to the $8, she went inside and looked some more.  
The article had several important points to make, about exclusion, perceived and real; about the cost of keeping art and the public separated from each other. Not to mention–in this week that marks the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s march on Washington–about white privilege and who feels entitled to what in the public arena. 
Yes, the big draw for Chanel might have been the air conditioning. But, from the description of her careful attention and response to the works in front of her, it sounds as if it was the art. 
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The art instinct

I recently bought a book I’m finding fascinating.  It’s called “Ice Age Art” and it was  written by Jill Cook as a companion to a British Museum exhibit I wish I could have seen.  It’s filled with photos and discussions of art works made as much as 40,000 years ago.  Not, for the most part, cave paintings, these works are primarily sculptures small enough to be carried in the hand. There are heads and figures of people, animals, and imagined creatures like lion-men. Their beauty, which could be at home in a 21st-century museum or gallery, astonishes. As does the sure knowledge that, behind them, was a mind capable of imagining. But what I find most amazing is how they clearly point to the existence of a basic human need for art.
The works have no utilitarian purpose. They can’t hold anything or cut anything; they’re useless for cooking or making fire. It’s been shown by recreating the work in similar material with similar tools that it might have taken as long as 400 hours to finish a small sculpture. Four hundred hours of painstaking work,  of time taken–and given–to the creation of an object whose only use was to be looked at. 
I am knocked out by the thought that people we can only think of as “primitive,” who lived lives that revolved around the most basic needs included art as one of their necessities. The need for art, the need to raise our eyes from the hunting and gathering, from our plates and our bellies, to see ourselves and our world in a different way: this is an ingrained part of who we are. 
Have we spent the past 40,000 trying to deny that? Certainly we modern and evolved humans often manage to marginalize art. We’ve pushed the making and enjoying of art into the confined spaces far not always near the center of our world. I’m thinking of how hard our arts institutions have to work for their existence. And I’m thinking of how our schools have decreased their arts programming at the same time that sports programming has ballooned. Imagine this–a generation of children growing up with not only sports, but also arts as the focus of their recreational time. You want competition? Teams of painters and writers and musicians. Team Picasso up against Team Leonardo. The Oils against the Charcoals. Go Sonnets! Go Odes! 
Maybe we just need to have enough faith in instinct to believe that someday, when soccer practice is in the distant past, that art impetus will kick in and all those former athletes will discover the life-enlarging possibilities that the arts can give them. It could happen. After all, it’s in our genes.
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The Occasional Recipe: Panzanella

In mid-summer it’s hard to avoid coming home from the farm markets without too much of something that looked delicious. My downfall is tomatoes. Off-season I don’t buy fresh tomatoes: the world is too filled with heartbreak as it is. So during the summer I tend to go a little overboard. Ok, a lot overboard.
On this particular day I had beautiful ripe tomatoes and was thinking of panzanella, that summery Italian bread salad. It seemed easy enough…some tomatoes…some bread…olive oil…..let’s see.  I looked through my three shelves of cookbooks: nothing. (Really, “Nigellissima”?? Really, “VB6”??) I looked online: too much. Too many ingredients, serving too many people. Maybe in the summer you’re always suppose to be cooking for a crowd. Tonight I’m cooking for two. So, as often happens (admittedly, not always with marvelous results) I made up a recipe. And I’m sharing it with you as I made it. No specific amounts, no specific proportions–you’re in charge. I’m just telling you there are ripe tomatoes out there–go make panzanella.
What you need:
tomatoes
red onion
basil
cucumbers
dried cubes of French bread
olive oil
salt/pepper
I cut the tomatoes, bread, and cucumber in nice-size chunks; you can do the same depending on your idea of nice size. I cut some red onion in smaller pieces, because that’s what I prefer. I added a little olive oil and salt and pepper. I tore a bunch of basil leaves. Not “a bunch” as in what Whole Foods puts in a rubber band, but a “bunch” as in what my plants were offering and what I thought looked like a good amount.  I tossed it all and took a moment to enjoy how it reminded me of the Italian flag. And then I set it aside in a (non-metallic) bowl for a few hours. Do not refrigerate it. Refrigeration does terrible things to tomatoes.
At this very moment it is still in progress, the tomatoes’ juices and the olive oil doing their magic on the bread cubes. I plan to taste a little throughout the afternoon because the one amount I was unsure of was the olive oil. But I’m thinking this is going to be very good. And I’m hoping that if you find something that could make it better, you’ll let me know.
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The week that was

In this morning’s Boston Globe is full page, bordered in orangey-red, is an open letter from the Chicago’s Blackhawks’ president and CEO and the chairman of its parent corporation. The letter thanks the Boston Bruins for an outstanding playoff series and goes on to thank the city for its hospitality. Extraordinary. I don’t remember ever seeing a letter like that before. And it capped a week in which every day the news was extraordinary.
Looking back over the week I’m picturing a collage of images: The joy over the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage equality, greeted with exuberant embraces…the somber face of Congressman John Lewis hearing about the court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act…the end-of-session rush to enact legislation, including the Senate’s immigration reform bill and the House’s majority leadership’s promise to reign it in…the Texas legislature’s attempt to close almost all the state’s clinics providing legal abortions….the pink-sneakered filibuster of that attempt by state senator Wendy Davis. I picture a photograph that left me in tears, of President Obama framed by what’s known as the Door of No Return in Senegal, from which the shackled slaves were led to waiting ships. I’m thinking of an e-mail I got from my cousin in Rio about the protests taking place there, sparked first by a rise in public transit fares and then growing to demand better schools and hospitals and an end to corruption in government.
The Blackhawks letter in the Globe said in part, “As impressed as we were by the strength, talent, and competitive spirit of the Boston Bruins on the ice, we were deeply touched by what happened off the ice. Rarely have we experienced the hospitality you afforded us throughout the playoff series between two incredibly gifted teams…(W)e tip our hat to your city’s big heart and gracious spirit. You lead by example and have set the bar very high for others to follow.” 
And then I thought about how so many significant moments–the ones I witnessed and those I know nothing about–come about because someone decided to do something. 

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Credentials

I went with Dr. D. this weekend to a reunion of the prestigious graduating class of a prestigious university. There was good-natured catching-up and reminiscence. There was also one astounding bit of credentialia. I made up that word, but the credential in question was real. It’s called a Hirsch number, something I have lived these many years in total ignorance of.  It’s mainly for scientists, an index that quantifies one’s “impact” based on how many journal articles you’ve published and how many of those have been cited by other articles. That’s an over-simplification, but you get the idea.
And just as I was thinking “thank heavens there’s nothing like that in poetry,” what should I see yesterday on Facebook but a mention of a web site that judges whether a poem is “professional” or “amateur” and awards a numerical score to back up the pronouncement.  The site references an article –presumably cited by other articles–submitted to the journal “Literary and Linguistic Computing.” The idea is that professional poets have “grasped the basic skills associated with writing poetry and have therefore been able to produce poems of lasting quality.”  There’s an app for that? Who knew?  If only. The instructions for submitting your poem to be scored indicates that Sylvia Plath’s, “Crossing the Water” scores 2.53, while an “amateur” poem was -2.50, “closer to the amateur end of the spectrum.” I am happy to report that my poem, “Birthday for Jim,” scored 2.52432967033.
But the two experiences made me wonder where does our satisfaction in our work come from? 
The objective judgments have a definite appeal. Who wouldn’t want to be recognized for outstanding work by gaining public recognition–winning an award or, yes, having a high Hirsch number? But for most of us that isn’t going to happen, or it isn’t going to happen all the time. Even performers who end each day’s work with applause must have moments of needing to figure it out on their own. 
This is something I’ve thought about.  I have had minor successes in poetry to measure my “impact” by. But I have also had the major pleasure of having people tell me that my work was important to them, that they were touched by it, that they turned to my poems at times of deep need. I am not saying that the larger recognition feels unimportant beside that. I’m greedy–I’d like both. But maybe we each have to find for ourselves the part of our work that makes us feel that we’ve accomplished something, that makes us feel proud. And maybe the process of doing the work has to count, too. Our “impact” may well be judged by what goes on in the world after the work leaves our hands. But maybe it is also how the work, including doing it, affects us and changes us and helps us grow toward what we aspire to. And maybe only we can judge that.
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Two Gatsbys but not THAT one

No, I have not seen the movie. The fact that it’s a box office cash-a-thon neck in neck with “Iron Man 3” is warning enough that maybe it’s not the masterpiece in its purest form.  That suspicion was confirmed at dinner last night when our friends Terry and Todd told us they had seen a terrible movie over the weekend. (We thought at first they meant the vapid mess we saw, “Something in the Air.”) So maybe I won’t see this Gatsby incarnation.  No matter. I’ve got two great Gatsbys.
 First and last and always is the book. How many times have I read it? Who knows. From the first time racing through to see “what happens” to reading at a smartish pace for an exam….I’m certainly read it just for itself at some point, but not in a long time. 
Gentle readers, this is The Book. Stunning in the beauty, economy, and power of its language and in its deft sounding of the human heart, this remains a satisfying gem.  I am nowhere near finishing because this time through I am savoring each word, swirling it in my mouth like the fine vintage it is. I am hoping to talk Dr. D. into reading it with me, both for the pleasure of sharing it and to puzzle together through some of the delicate layers. What sad irony that F. Scott Fitzgerald died thinking this story he wrote in 1925 was a failure. 
In addition to reading the book, on Sunday Dr. D. and I saw Emmanuel Music’s concert production of “The Great Gatsby,” John Harbison’s stunning opera. The opera is faithful to the book, using Fitzgerald’s perfect words. And then there is this other dimension. From jagged undercurrents to smooth oiling over of hollowness, the music provides a new way to take in the story. Although I’m not at all knowledgable about music, this gave me the sense of not hearing the story retold so much as told in a fuller voice. Does that make sense? 
You know how you read about a fictional character and try to picture him or her. Unlike the transformation of Daniel Day Lewis into Lincoln–it takes place totally in your imagination. What does Mr. Darcy look like? (Well, ok, we’re fine with Colin Firth there.) Anna Karenina? And the crowd from Gatsby–do you picture Daisy looking and sounding like Carey Mulligan? Mia Farrow? What would a voice “full of money” sound like? And Gatsby’s voice?
Like that kind of mental filling-in, Harbison’s “Gatsby,” adds something you might not have thought was missing from the story. Another layer of color to the green light, the blue (!) lawn. The story and more. What a pleasure to have had the chance to hear the opera just when I was reading the book. 
Harbison’s opera will be presented this summer at Tanglewood. You’ve got time to order tickets and, in the time it takes to watch the movie, you can read the book again.