Boy

'Twixt and 'Tween

Shop Window in Old Hong Kong

So far, no one has offered to buy me the M9. I am a little disappointed, but I'll wait. The holiday spirit may kick in yet.

Or will it? I wonder if there is so much of that as in years gone by. Things do change. It is not always maudlin nostalgia that makes us think so. Have students read "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" by Wallace Stevens and see if they get it. Nobody goes to bed at ten o'clock, they will tell you, except the old, so the poem makes very little sense to them. And e.e. cummings will baffle them, not because of the weirdness of his diction, but because of his adoration of whimsy and naturalness and his deprication of materialism. Their lives are already random. They are living 'twixt and 'tween. They want things.

I'm reading Pico Iyer's "The Global Soul." I'm thinking of becoming one, a citizen of the vast nowhere monocultural world without distinction. No time. No place. A value free space beyond ethics and aesthetics. A post-cultural heaven. You come, too.

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

BY WALLACE STEVENS

The houses are haunted

By white night-gowns.

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,

Or green with yellow rings,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches tigers

In red weather.

Vanity, Desire, and a Horrible, Horrible Man

This is what I want for Christmas. Get it for me.

Of course, you can't get it in time for Christmas. Leica is finding it impossible to fill the orders they have. I was told at the local dealer that if they order one now, they will receive it in July.

The camera body costs $7,000. Don't worry, I already have the lenses.

It is extravagant, I know. But it truly is a wonderful camera according to the specs and all the reports I have read. And Leica's are works of art. They are truly a joy to hold. I shot with my M7 this weekend, and people came up to ask me about it. It is true. I'm not kidding you. And it always happens. People who have never even heard of a Leica come up to ask. When I tell them about the camera, they want to know, "Why is it so expensive?"

Because it makes you look so good, I want to tell them.

It is a vanity, too. I can make wonderful images with my Holga. It won't do everything, but it costs $20. It is lightweight, and it is black. And people always come up to ask me about the camera when I am using it. I wouldn't do without one. I love the Holga. But that doesn't mean I can't love the Leica, too.

Every celebrity will have one. When you see Brad and Angelina in Africa, they will be wearing it around their necks. It will be the camera of the very rich. It is handsome. It is beautiful.

And for me, it is the perfect digital camera just now. I like my Nikon D700. It makes good images. But it is not pretty at all and it weighs three thousand pounds. I'm getting too old to carry it all day. I can carry a Leica forever.

So PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE get me one. I can give you two cars for it, both made in 1985, a Volvo 240 and a Jeep CJ7. That is DEAL. Classics. You see my problem? I can't BUY this camera and not put the money toward an automobile. I MUST put the money toward a car. I keep telling myself that. Overandoverandover. I will work for you. I will do any project you like as long as it entails the camera and not a shovel or a hammer. Maybe even that. But camera projects preferred.

OK. Now you know.

On another front, the Mamiya 6 I bought a few months ago is toast. I was told to buy another one rather than having it fixed. So I did. Then I called HOLGAMODS to see if a Holga lens could be mounted on the broken Mamiya. I am sending it to them as soon as it comes back from KEH. The prognosis is good. If this works, I will have one hell of a Holga camera, one with some exposure control and no light leaks but all the joy of that single plastic lens.

As good as that is. . . . Dear Santa. . . .

Here and There

Ice skating in the park. I took cameras, photos. I couldn't capture it. I am pretty sure I just can't photograph in my own hometown. I need to be away and have that awayness anonymity, that cloak of invisibility. Here I have a self. There, not so much. Away is foreign and exotic. Home is oppressive sameness.

There is so much written in academia about such things. There are visual anthropologist who hold strong ideas about the nature of photographing others. If you are not familiar and are interested in that, take a look here, for instance. If you are even more interested, read the comments. For examples of what the author is not talking about, go here and browse awhile. Then, if you are still interested, click on the links of her recommended photographers.

You should not think I do not like these photographs or photographers. It is not that. It is that I want to explore and obviate their ideologies in some of my projects. I want to enter the visual conversation, if you will, and to challenge some of the assumptions. Some days. Others, I just want to be left alone.

Everything is like that, though, wanting to be one thing and another.

Neutral and Wrong

The rain continues. Gray rain. The Christmas tree lighting was cancelled last night in Central Park. Again, mine, not the famous one. Today's parade is cancelled as well. Qu'elle damage. I wanted to add to my photo collection.

Last night, I went to an obligatory party. Annual event. Work related. I was tired, which was good because I wasn't tempted to talk much. I sat back with what I thought was bad wine until I figured out that I had been served in a dusty glass that had not been rinsed out after sitting in a cabinet for who knows how long. The chatter went on around me, the chatter of educated people speaking in slightly educated voices. There are cliques where I work as everywhere else, and I listened to their dialogs compete for privilege, one side then another, inside jokes being the trump card as the group turned their eyes to one another and laughed.

This morning I was perusing some web sites of photographers and photographer/critics who opine on one another's works and the work of others with an assured decisiveness, using the same certain language.

There is something wrong with me, I know. I can't help but piss people off. I can only resist, even when people want to agree with me. I can't abide the clique.

All I know is that everything is wrong. There is no right, only things that are neutral and things that are wrong. Given the choice. . . .

If there is anything close to being right, though, it is children laughing. Damn the rain. There should be a Christmas parade.

Ethnography

I went to the Holiday (not Christmas) Celebration in Central Park last night. Not THE Central Park, but the one on our little boulevard. The Bach Choir sang Christmas carols and the orchestra played and they had the Tiffany windows from the museum displayed around the park. They look better there, lit up outside in the dark, than they do in the museum. I should have taken a photo for you. The town turned out. Later we ambled down to Gamble Rogers' old house that the city bought and moved to its present location. Oh, you should have seen that, moving the huge brick two story house an inch a minute without destroying it. That was a wonder. Now it is nestled next to the gold course and surrounded by lawn and garden. It was nice right here in my own home town.

But I must go to work now, far too early today. I have duties to meet. I have wearied of apple picking. And miles to go before I rest. To scare myself with my own desert places. Or something like that.

Tornado Moon

The moon was hidden behind the storm clouds last night. No view. But the night was an odd one with rain and tornados all about. Such strange weather now. I hope it presages nothing. Why read into that? Weather is weather and fate is fate. It must be the iron and the salts in the blood that compels one so rapidly toward a sympathetic fallacy. Scientific methods would urge us in another direction. But still, on a windy, dangerous night, my own impulse is to hunker down and hope for the best. That is what I'm doing now, for another storm is raging around me and I have little shelter there. Potions, amalgams, and unguents seem appealing just now. I hope not to meet the snake oil salesman today.

Full Cold Moon

The sky shifted from flamingo pinks to deep reds, from cerulean to indigo last night as I drove through the too quick sunset. Tonight is the first full moon of December, but not the last. Full Cold Moon. But on the thirtieth, there will be a second, the rare Blue Moon, the last of the year. I'm not sure I can stand two full moons in a month, though it is still the same time between. Year's End.

The Beatings

The beatings! Oh my god, the beatings never end. Please, one pleads on supplicants knees reaching out to some wildly distant star, please let there be a respite. But what delusional creatures we are. Everything is luck, and always, the luck runs out. In the end, there is no luck at all, only the delusions and the ability to take some more. One day, I suspect, hope runs out, and the delusions begin to disappear. And then what? "The Iceman Cometh."

I haven't time for a decent post today. I must scurry. I must dash.

Idle, Idyl

Thanksgiving break over, there is a return to routine. How much do I mind? I spent five days mostly alone doing much of nothing. It was not a restful nothing but a tortuous, gnawing nothing against which I knew I should be doing something. I should have gone somewhere, I'd say, should have seen new things. Or old. It is increasingly more difficult to do. Harder to travel. Harder to go forward, go backward. Even if I had spent time outdoors, I thought. . . but didn't, and I saw nothing.

Just before the break, though, I was sitting outside with a colleague on a bench talking about nothing, really, when suddenly I watched a bird fly straight into a palm tree trunk knocking itself silly. I couldn't believe what I saw. I've seen birds fly into glass before, but never anything opaque. I got up and walked over to see the bird just rising from the dirt, wobbly, beginning to hop uncertainly. I shook my head. It was like a cartoon, I thought. Heckyl and Jeckyll.

My catatonia these last few days was almost complete, though I did manage to work some in the studio, but even there I only managed to bungle some pieces. The bungling, I tried to tell myself, is positive. It is learning. I know now what to avoid. I tried telling myself this, but in the end, there was nothing to show.

I thought to get out, to go somewhere and talk to somebody with the idea of stealing stories, rhythms, images. It excited me for a moment. Then I thought, "How? How?" You cannot just go out to meet characters, can't simply roll up on someone, sit down and say, "Hey bud, tell me a story." It takes more time than that. And that is what was getting to me, the amount of time everything takes. There is sacrifice involved in all creative endeavors, and much, if not most of it, comes to nothing.

And so I sat and made up scenarios in my mind, sat watching them play out on the internal movie screen. Hours passed. Then days. I had barely moved.

Now the sun is rising in a grayish dawn without distinction. I have not done what I told myself I would do, and now I have deadlines and hours of chores to accomplish. It happens often this way now, especially holidays, those times alloted for relaxation and fun. I cannot celebrate by the calendar nor the clock. All that is special lies in the unexpected moments when everyone else is going about their usual routines, when time opens up, slows down, is swallowed by the experience of a moment, eternal and self-contained.

Routine won't help with that, so I've promised myself I will wander more. I will break with the routine that I have accepted, the one that squanders my life and spend more time in productive idling. If not, I'll be like that bird, I think, banging my head on the obvious.

Uncle Charlie, pt. 2

"When I got downstairs, I helped set the table and get all the food put out so we could eat, and then everyone came and sat down, but Charlie was still upstairs so Aunt Patti called for him saying we were all waiting on him. He came down the stairs all slow and sullen-like and didn't say anything and people moved over to make space for him. Nobody bothered with saying grace in our family except form my cousin Sally who'd lost a baby a few months after it was born, and she made us all hold hands while she said some words. It felt odd and artificial but we did it and she kept it real short so it wasn't anything much to object to. Then everybody started passing food. And suddenly it was like Charlie woke up, and he was passing food too and laughing and picking on the kids good naturedly so as you'd think it was his party. Everybody was eating and having a good time telling stories, but when I would look at Charlie, he'd look back like we knew something the others didn't, like we were special, and it felt like we were looking too long, though I know we weren't. So I tried not looking at him much which seemed odd, too, like I was avoiding him.

"Then Charlie reached for something over the table and caught his arm on somebody's full drink and it spilled so that people were jumping up trying not to get wet and somebody's knee must have caught under the table and all the plates jumped and made a clatter and then there were a couple shouts of surprise. Then my aunt said goddamnit Charlie, be careful, and he looked like he'd been stabbed. He kind of threw his head back a couple of inches real quick and and turned around and walked out the door. He had his mom's keys, I guess, and then we heard the car start up and he was gone.

"We got a bunch of paper towels and sopped up the mess with a lot of here let me get that sort of thing, everyone trying to be helpful and polite as we all thought about Charlie's leaving like that. And when everyone had sat back down, my aunt said Charlie had been having some rough times. Is he smokin' the crack again my mom asked and everyone looked over to my aunt who said she didn't know but she thought so. Charlie had that problem in the past which got him in trouble with the family 'cause they didn't think it was right him living at his mom's and doing drugs and not working. Where's he get the money, my mom asked and everyone started hemming and hawing but then it was told how some things had gone missing and they figured Charlie had taken them to get drugs. Don't leave anything laying about when Charlie comes over, my uncle said and there was a bunch of head shaking around the table. Eventually the conversation turned toward other things and everyone was saying the food was good and Charlie and the incident were just some ghost hanging around the house.

"After dinner, my mom and aunt brought out the pumpkin pie and everyone said just a little piece with whipped cream and then everyone said it was good and people started getting up for seconds. It wasn't long then before people began going to the living room while I helped my mom and aunt clean up which was awful 'cause I was sleepy with the turkey and the hangover from the beer and the pot and all the excitement that Charlie had caused, but I helped anyway and finally we got everything put away. By then there were people scattered all over the house sleepy or sleeping, the t.v. playing some reality show that my uncle liked. And in a while people started saying goodbye and leaving and there were hugs and kisses and people saying that I ought to come over more than once or twice a year and me saying I know, and then everybody was gone except those of us staying at my aunt's house. My uncle had turned the carport into a little apartment and that was where I was sleeping for the night. My mother was staying upstairs in the spare bedroom. And finally I said I was tired and said goodnight and got ready for bed. It was a long day and I don't even remember falling asleep.

"It was real dark when I woke up. Charlie had turned on a little lamp that didn't give off much light and he was saying hello. I sat up and looked at him and he said can I stay here tonight and I said what and he said it again. What the fuck, Charlie, I said but he was already coming toward the bed saying shhh, shhh, and I could tell he was crashing. He'd gone out and got fucked up, that was for sure, and now it was all wearing off and all that was left was the tired, glassy eyes. I didn't know what to do. He sure as hell couldn't stay here or I couldn't one but he slipped off his shoes and crawled right under the covers and fell asleep. I said Charlie and shoved him once or twice but it didn't do any good, so I laid back against the headboard sitting up and looked through the dim yellow light in the room and started thinking and thinking and I must have fallen asleep 'cause when I woke up, Charlie was wrapped all around me. I didn't know what was going on and was kind of snuggling up wiggling into the crevices of Charlie's arms and legs for warmth and comfort and he was doing the same when I realized where I was. Charlie still had his clothes on and the little lamp was still shining feebly so nothing had happened except we had fallen asleep but Charlie was sort of waking up I could tell, not awake but waking, and his nose and mouth were on my neck not doing anything but snuggling and his left hand was resting on my breast. Charlie, I thought. Poor fucking Charlie. I was thinking that and laying there and not really moving but planning to in a minute, but I was still laying there thinking how weird it was, too tired to move, and it felt good laying there for the minute anyway sort of in a trance like a dream where you can't tell if your dreaming or thinking, knowing I was going to get up in a minute, that I had to before somebody else did but still not moving, not yet. Then Charlie shifted his hips a bit, sort of pushing into me, and I could feel he had a big ol' boner, and then the adrenaline or something kind of shot through my body as I felt Charlie kind of moving back and forth minutely, not really but sort of, and I was pretty sure he was still asleep and just moving like a dog does when its dreaming, and that's when I knew it was time to get up so I rolled slowly out from under Charlie's arm and he didn't move, and I rolled on over and out of bed and stood over him. He was asleep alright, dead out, and I just stood looking down at him and thinking about all the trouble a man could have and thought that's just what Charlie had and thought that maybe it was his fault and maybe it wasn't, but he sure wasn't doing anything to help out. He'd just been spoiled too long, I thought, and it made him into a hideously attractive monster like Jeckyll and Hyde. But there was nothing I could do to help him, I knew.

"So I opened the door that connected the little apartment to the house and went to the living room and lay down with the throw pillows and the comforter and tried to go to sleep. It wasn't long, though, before my uncle got up to put on a pot of coffee and have a cigarette and when he saw me on the couch he said what are you doing, and I said Charlie came over last night and I let him sleep in the bed. I hope you didn't leave any of your stuff laying around in there, he said and he went on into the kitchen where I could hear him gently banging around. I would get up in a few minutes and have a cup of coffee with him, I thought, and we would talk about things in low voices not to wake anybody up and we'd say things about Charlie. Then my mother would get up and walk in in her nightgown and in a little while the sun would come up and we'd start thinking about heading home. Charlie would go out the way he'd come in not saying goodbye to anyone and I wouldn't see him again for a year maybe or more if I saw him again at all. And laying there in the dark, I couldn't wait for all that to happen. I couldn't wait to get home. "

Uncle Charlie

"So I went to my aunt's house for Thanksgiving dinner with all the relatives. There were about twenty people there, and we're all sitting around and eating shit before dinner, just snacks, big bowls of M&Ms and Cheetos and stuff, and my uncle comes in drinking a beer. Not my aunt's husband, the one who's house we were at, but her brother who's like my age, a little older. He's not married or anything. He doesn't even have a job. He lives with his mother who is like a hundred and uses her car and stays out all night. He tells everybody he takes care of her, but that's all horse shit. It's like the other way around. She's old, but she's still got all her marbles. But she's got a soft spot for Charlie, my uncle, 'cause he came late in life just before she would have gone through menopause which she should have probably gone through already when he was born. But she was happy as she could be, and she always spoiled him not like the way she treated the other kids yanking them around and yelling. That's what I heard, anyway, 'cause I wasn't there yet, of course.

"So Charlie comes over and starts talking with me and asks me if I want a beer, and I say sure, why not, so it's the two of us drinking and talking and he starts asking me what I've been doing since I don't see him but at Thanksgiving or Christmas or some relative's wedding or something, and I tell him nothing, and he gives me a sly sort of look like he knows that can't be right, and I laugh and put the beer can up in the air and take a big swig like I know I'm not telling the truth, too. Charlie ain't that bad looking, and he gets all kinds of girls, not just rednecks either, though he gets lots of them, too, but some with money you just wouldn't expect. So he starts telling me about what he's been doing, and I can tell he's kind of bragging which I don't find attractive at all, but there is something charming about the way he tells it sort of because he just sounds so goddamned naive, and suddenly I'm laughing and he's handing me another beer. My mother looks over when I take it and gives me that look like I'm not supposed to be doing that, so Charlie says let's go outside and get some air.

"We go into the back yard and sit on some lawn chairs and Charlie pulls out a joint and asks me if I want some, and I think no but I take a hit anyway 'cause the day is so fucking boring, and Charlie starts laughing and I say what and he says he never thought he'd be doing this with me 'cause he always thought I was such a prude, and that makes me laugh out loud. Why you think that, I say, and he just laughs and shakes his head and says I sure have grown up a lot 'cause he always thinks of me as a little girl, and I say you ain't so old yourself. Then the kids come out and Charlie puts away what's left of the joint and of course they want to know what we're doing and I tell them talking and they say what about and Charlie just starts laughing out loud and picks one of them up and starts swinging 'em around and around over his head until everybody's laughing and screaming and the kids are like a bunch of puppies running around and jumping up and down. Then my aunt comes out and says what's going on and I ask her how long until we eat and she says about an hour and I ask her if she wants me to do anything hoping she'll say no because I'm feeling a little fucked up, and she says no, so Charlie says lets watch t.v. or something and I say I'd rather look at the old photo albums my aunt keeps upstairs and he says OK and grabs another beer as we pass through the kitchen. My mom yells where're you going, and I tell her upstairs to look at the photo albums and she says you better not be drinking more beer we're gonna eat soon and I just give her a look.

"Upstairs I pull out one of the big albums and start flipping through the pages and Charlie's looking over my shoulder and I'm pointing at some of the old relatives when they were young, some of them dead now, and I say it sure looks like fun then, but Charlie doesn't want to live then. He likes living now, he says, it's good times. I keep turning the pages and then I see a photo of my mother when she was my age and she has a good figure and looks all sexy in a pretty dress that shows off her small waist and good tits and I say look at mom and Charlie says she doesn't look like that any more sounding like that's too bad and the way he's leaning I can feel a little bit of his breath on my neck, nothing really, just a tickle, and I move a little. You look like that now, Charlie says, you better watch it and not get fat the way all the women in our family do and I turn around a little and say I'm not getting fat and he pinches my middle a little feeling for a roll so I straighten up to make sure he doesn't get hold of much and he says well, you ain't fat yet and I pull my shirt up to show my belly. You'd just better watch out yourself, I say, but Charlie's skinny and so he laughs and says he won't get fat, running keeps him thin. Of course, he wasn't talking about jogging. And then its quiet and I listen downstairs and hear the t.v. and the talking and its just quiet in the room and Charlie's looking at me like he's kind of bored with the pictures and I hear myself say whatever and he's just looking at me and I'm trying to stare back but I can feel the blood rising up in me and my head's spinning maybe from the beer and the pot but maybe something else, too. I don't know. Then all of a sudden, I hear my mother yell out from the bottom of the stairs to come help her set the table, that dinner's almost ready. Then she yells my name again, so I say, OK, I'm coming, but Charlie just keeps on staring. So I shake my head and roll my eyes and start to get up but I'm unbalanced somehow and I fall over on my butt and I start to laugh, but Charlie isn't laughing and he comes over to help me up. Then I'm up and we're just standing there like something not right, so I look at him and say thanks Uncle Charlie letting him know. And then Charlie laughs like everything's a joke and he's just standing there smiling, too."

Sentinel

(Photographer unknown. I have no pictures of my own today.)

I'm stuck in god damned place, going nowhere, growing catatonic. It is mental, it is physical. It is like a walking coma. I can't sleep, am tired, want to do things then can't. Clinical? When it happens, things go wrong. Somehow I managed to update the operating system on the old computer I use to scan, and now the scanner won't work. Not compatible. I must go back to the old system but don't know how. It took me hours to realize what had happened, sitting, pulling cables, restarting, shutting down, etc. I need to travel. I need a trip.

* * * * *

Last night after leaving my mother's, I drove to my studio thinking to do a little something. The roads were almost empty, the lights of Christmas shining on the little boulevard, white lights on an empty road. As I crossed a street, I saw a car that looked like mine passing through the intersection. It was white, it was a Volvo, it had surf racks. The fellow driving honked his horn. I would have honked back, but my horn no longer functions. I pulled into the back lot of my studio and got out of the car. I saw lights swinging off the street, then heard the tires coming up the drive. It was the fellow in the white Volvo. He pulled up grinning from ear to ear.

"Hey," he said, "Cool car. What year is that?"

"'85."

"Wow! Mine's an '89."

I stood on the driver's side running board and talked to him over the roof there in the darkness of the big parking lot outside the building under the fluorescent glow of the security lights. On the passenger side beside him was a shadowed figure, a woman. I wondered what she thought of this, but I couldn't see her face. He asked me some more questions. I told him I bought the car in 1996 for $4,600, but that it was falling apart now piece by piece. He sat there for a while with a big grin on his face saying nothing, not even looking at me or my car beside him but staring ahead with the strained grin. I listened to the echoed quiet of the night.

"She says you took a picture of her once."

"Really?" I found this odd, so I got down from the running board and went over to his car to look inside. It was a woman I had met with a friend on Christmas Eve at a cafe on the boutique boulevard. It was the day I bought the Nikon D-700 and I was taking photos of everything.

"Yea, yea, sure," I said, "I remember."

Then she mentioned my friend's name who she was with that night and the grin on the fellow driving the '89 Volvo began to harden with a growing artificialness. He asked me about my work in order to tell me he had a buddy who was a photographer.

"Oh, I don't do anything like that, no fashion or glamor or anything commercial. I'm just fooling around with some processes. . . ." I made a quick explanation. They wanted to come in and see. I had big boards scattered about the room and big prints. I've been waxing them and coloring them, making encaustics. We stood there and stared. I liked them, the prints, big, serious.

"Do you have a card?" he asked.

"No."

"Do you have a website?"

I thought a minute. I don't tell people about this one. I never know. They might be normal.

"No," I said, shaking my head as if I was trying to sell the idea. The girl looked very pretty in the light and I wanted to photograph her, but I could still feel the strain in the fellow over the last thing. She looked around at the accumulation of stuff and her gaze landed on the stuffed hawk that sits in the corner of the room.

"Do you know the bird rescue lady?" she asked me. "She just died, but she was famous for taking care of injured birds."

"No, but did she work with the Audubon Society. They have a facility. . . ."

"No, they rehabilitate big birds, birds of prey. She took care of little birds. I took her a chimney sweep one time. There is another lady who does it, too, but she is not as famous. I took her a baby squirrel once."

"Hmm. There seem to be a lot of squirrels."

"I knew a guy who kept a freezer full of squirrels," the fellow said cheerily. "He said he kept them in case of hard times."

I laughed and looked at the girl. "The lady probably put the baby squirrel in the freezer."

The fellow laughed and nodded his head in wild agreement. I looked at the girl and waited for her to show resistance, watched for her face to harden and turn.

"Probably," she said.

Suddenly the fellow introduced himself. We shook hands. And then they turned for the door. There is a rhythm to things that can't be explained. I walked them back out into the parking lot. They got into the Volvo and sat for a minute. Nobody said anything. The fellow's grin had come back just as it was when he pulled in. He sat staring and grinning. Then the car started and they were gone.

How odd, I thought, and weirdly enjoyable on a Thanksgiving night when no one is about, when people are in their homes with family and friends, or so one thinks when one is not. I stood outside awhile looking up at the sky. I am alone, I thought, as I so often am, a sentinel of nothing. Such things as this never happen when you are with someone. You never get to glimpse so much into the weirdness of life. Alone, though, you see traces of the spare strangeness of the thing we try to smooth over with narrative and meaning. But one never knows, really, what goes on, even on a day like Thanksgiving when everyone is with someone eating and drinking and watching football. Or so the story goes.

Happy Thanksgiving

(photo by Jindrich Styrisky)

Poor Beast

It is taking me a long time to read Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence" because of work. It has been crushing my bones and leaving me to lay. Then there are birthweeks to attend to and friends to argue with, so in the twenty or so minutes left me before I collapse into my bed, I've crept along with the novel. I didn't think I would finish it for the writing wasn't hitting me anywhere. The language was not significant and there was little image making. But then--BAM! Blanche, the wife of Dick Stroeve, the technical painter who suffers Strickland's constant lambasts in order to be around genius, tells him she is leaving him, that she has fallen in love with Strickland. It is too painfully good at this point, for Stroeve tells her that he has worshipped her and that no one will ever treat her as well again. And it is true.

I was taught as a child that kindness and good deeds and stalwartness and generosity would be rewarded. All the children's books said so. I think I believed it more than many. That was the trouble with being a good reader, I guess. The dumber kids didn't seem to learn any of the lessons in those books. Most of them are now successful, I assume, having become brutal competitors in the market place. They failed to read the ethics books. But fed the moral lessons we were taught at school and on television in shows like "Superman" and "The Lone Ranger," I felt compelled to stand up for the small and the weak and the timid. And I awaited my reward.

It came in the form of the beatings I took being a "hero." I took them from my teachers, the very ones who had me read those wondrous books, when I tried to stand as the classroom lawyer. "You shouldn't do that," I would say. "It isn't right."

And there were the beatings from bullies, too, the physical ones when I would stand up for the kid getting picked on. "You can't do that," I would say. "It isn't right."

And later on, I learned the lesson that Stroeve is learning just now in the chapter I am reading as he finds that all his good deeds have left him where he lies. Good old Stroeve, such bumbling good will and love for everyone. I want to hold his hand, buy him a drink, succor him awhile.

Then I want to get away. For I've learned one thing. Those mopey eyes won't disappear. They will follow you on and on until you can't take it any longer and you feel you will go mad.

Blanche is leaving him, and she knows it is disastrous, but what is there to do?

I will finish the novel this week. I have a few hours over the holidays. I am too tired, though, to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to walk and rest. My mother and I will have a dinner together tomorrow, but she does not want to cook just for the two of us. "I'll just pick up a roasted chicken at Costco," she reported yesterday on the phone. She must want me to take her someplace nice for dinner, otherwise, it could be terrible. It is one of those damp, warm, gray Thanksgivings we have here every few years that makes you wish to be someplace else. It is too cool for the air conditioner and too warm for the heater and too damp to do nothing about it. It is hard to feel pretty in this weather.

I have not written my narrative for a while now, and I don't know that I can pick up where I left off. It seems too artificial, too contrived. I may jump ahead and write about the big fall, the lesson, the thing that makes me laugh at Stroeve. I am going to look through my journals of that time and perhaps begin to make something of them. Poor Stroeve, the beast. I'll show you what I mean.

"You Know What You Should Do?"

(I don't know who took this image. I think the photographer is unknown.)

(OK. I'm an idiot. The photo is by Jindřich Štyrský. He died in 1942, so I can't ask permission. But oh how I wish to take photos like this. The only one I know who could do it is Jan Bernhardtz.)

I've been getting a lot of advice and criticism lately. It is what happens, I am finding, when people actually look at what you are doing.

"I don't know if you want to hear this, but I think that if you really want to help your blog, you shouldn't post every day. You should only post when you REALLY have something to say."

That was the advice of someone I know. It is good advice, really. I have said so myself. But hearing it from someone else just when the blog's visitor count has doubled is. . . well, something difficult.

I've gotten lots of help lately, from everywhere. I've gotten criticism from the people with whom I'm in an art show.

"You can take my stuff down. I don't care. I was happy just to be included in the show. Take my work and tape it to the sidewalk. I don't care. After we're done with mine, though, let's talk about yours."

Me. That is my M.O. The people in the show, though, don't want to talk about that.

"That woman who comments on your blog really doesn't like nipples."

Yea, but my blog has recently had a lot more hits.

"Sure, now that you're showing tits."

I don't think about it. Everybody loves titties. They are the stuff of life. Penises are dangerous.

"Yea, you've said that three times on your blog."

CC is to blame. He told me to post what I wanted. The work would find an audience.

"You got me to do this," I said. "You told me. . . but you didn't tell me about the other."

"What!? The critics? You wouldn't have posted if I had."

I guess you can't have one thing without the other.

But some of it is a surprise.

Crime and Punishment

A friend writes:

there are times when i hold things sacred, or at least precious. i feel like raskolnikov, on the verge of being vacant. i feel capable of noble sentiments but lack noble actions. modern life is empty. why does the past seem so rich? the present mundane and the future impossibly empty?

It is a rhetorical questioning, I am certain. Art and artifice are the answers, of course. We are all memory artists if nothing else. Everyone can remember something better than this.

We had a birthday party for a ten year old this weekend. It was a dinner party for kids. They had to solve a mystery (and they did). Then they watched Sherlock Holmes in "The Hounds of the Baskervilles" starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. I entertained the parents with wine and whiskey and other sorts of mysteries. I tried to make memories on the one hand and obliterate memories on the other. It worked out well, I think. We all stayed up too late and felt like hell the next morning. But the kids had a time. What remains? I think they will remember the scented candles and the yellow light and the tinkling of glasses, of being close and watching something black and white with fog and danger and of parent hugs that smelled lightly of merlot and scotch and drunken goat cheese. There were presents, but those will be forgotten. They'll remember, though, that their parents' voices changed when they came into the room, that there are some things that are not for kids, mysteries that are eternal. And they will be glad that they were kids and that they were cared for and that there were safe places they could count on, especially a bedroom with pillows and blankets and an old t.v.

My friend also told me:

i am too lazy to read your blog, and too selfish. if you would only write more favorably about me then you would have one more reader than you currently do, etc.

He is reading Dostoievski's "Crime and Punishment." What can I tell you about a fellow like that?

Go figure.

The Approach

I wrote one thing but cut it thinking to save it for another day. Now I've not much energy for another. I write and delete another piece, then the start of another. The holidays begin. They have put up the Christmas lights in my boutique city's downtown main street and surrounding environs. There is an outdoor ice skating rink in the city park, a novelty for this southern hamlet. We went two nights ago and sat awhile with glasses of wine and olives and bread at the sidewalk tables of a small cafe. I saw old friends. That is what I wish to do this year, sit and talk and have some wine and watch the happy people skate and laugh while carols play and lovers kiss beneath the mistletoe. Or, perhaps, to go to an island where the water is the deepest blue and the sky is clear and clean, where I can eat seafood and drink rum and swim away the day. Old dilemmas, old dangers. The Holidays are here, and you know what that can mean.

Beware the Jabberwock

Just the photo today. My brain has shut down. I can not string words together in any way. Perhaps some quotations from Lewis Carroll would be apropos.

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' said Alice. 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the cat. 'We're all mad here.'

Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today.

Slava, Anna, and Alex

I linked Slava Pirsky to this site about a year ago. A couple days ago, he posted this photograph of his daughter Alex, part of an ongoing project that is both a family album and a creative endeavor. His site is in Russian, so I can't make heads nor tails of much, but he and Anna Hayat, the mother of Alex, are photographers. When I asked if I could post this photo, I also asked if he could write a bit about the project. He wrote back:

Hi, Bill

You can post our photos, sure. But we don't know what can we say about. This project doesn't have any super idea, it's only try to fix our daughter growing-)))

I love the project. It is beautiful and heartbreaking to watch this girl grow up. Sort of. All we know of her are the images, light falling from a window in some obscure room. She becomes archetype onto which we project our own visions of childhood. What will become of her, we wonder? What glories and devastations will befall her? Of course, some of you already know, but it is a tale played out again and again. Only so few take the time to make such a beautiful record.

Slava, Anna, and Alex.