Author: Kelley

What if…

There are the big crossroads moments, of course, when a doorway blasts open between the life you’re in and another that will inevitably be very different, and the universe does everything short of hanging up pink neon arrows that flash “PAY ATTENTION NOW.” When I saw my first pictures of St. Paul’s and realized I had to have it, even if it meant going a thousand miles from home at age 13. When I was accepted at Clarion and had to decide whether to quit my job and take out a loan. When I met Nicola. When I said yes to the big job at Wizards of the Coast because I knew it was my shot at someday being able to write full time, even if I had to stop writing while I did the job. When I asked the executive producer to give me the screenplay work, and found myself suddenly, passionately in love with writing again. Those were doors.

It’s easy to play the game with those big moments: Oh my god, what if we’d never met, what if I hadn’t made it work, what if I’d been too scared or too sensible or too damn stupid to (any number of things)? But writer/columnist/yoga guy Mark Morford plays a more subtle game in this post over at SF Gate: not Monday-morning-quarterbacking the life you have now, but rather trying on a life that you see walk past you on the corner, or at another table in the restaurant, or in a parking garage… shrugging yourself into it for a second not because it’s so different from yours, but because somewhere inside is that tiny voice of recognition, of connection, of There I am again.

And he’s right: it’s a good feeling. It was nice to be reminded of it; and to imagine, for a moment, what it was like to be Morford standing there watching that guy and his dogs, seeing all those other ways that he — that any of us — might have lived this life.

(Thanks to Jeremy for the link.)

True Blood

Nicola and I are currently re-watching season 1 of True Blood on DVD. I love this show. Great writing, acting, direction; a strong story line; a lot of attention to detail; and a real sense of Southern rhythms and mores (you might be surprised how many people get this wrong). The South of this show is televisualized, and in many ways idealized, but I’ve never seen anything on television that better captures the layered essence of Southern culture as I experienced it growing up. The open acknowledgment and subtle systemic practices of racism between individual people, whether they are friends or not. The ways the local bar serves as the commons. The complicated rules of gender in which women can be strong without gaining power and men can be weak without losing it — that strength and weakness are part of what keeps the power imbalance from blowing up all over the boys, and it’s beautifully played out over and over again in great examples of “show, don’t tell.”

I’m a fan of good series TV because of the longer-term, deeper storytelling that is possible; the novelistic qualities of taking more time to explore characters and relationship, establish backstory, wander through the physical and psychological terrain. True Blood does all this and more: it’s emotionally complex, socially true, a huge amount of fun and occasionally very shocking and icky, and the people of Bon Temps are fantastic — I haven’t met a TB character I didn’t want to know more about, even the unpleasant ones. Sookie and Bill; lonely, loyal Sam; Jason, the world’s most cheerful horndog; Tara and her terrible tragic mother; Terry, the sad war veteran; Pam, the vampire bouncer; and the fabulous Lafayette….

Well, see Lafayette for yourself. This is one of my favorite scenes in the season (and is absolutely Not Safe For Work):

And here’s the scene that sets up the romantic relationship between the show’s protagonist, Sookie Stackhouse, and the vampire Bill Compton. Here’s what you need to know: Sookie can hear people’s thoughts, although she mostly works hard not to. Vampires now move more or less openly in society (one of the underlying themes of the show are various explorations of “being out”). But Bill is the first vampire Sookie’s ever met: he has just come into the bar where she works, and she’s overheard some people thinking Bad Thoughts about him. When they leave, she follows them outside, and finds them draining Bill of his blood (which has become a popular street drug called “V”). (And this clip is also NSFW.)

Enjoy! And if you like what you see, I can highly recommend season 1 on DVD.

When something’s broken

Earlier this year, our beloved Seattle Post-Intelligencer shut down, and since then we have been taking the Seattle Times, which I find much less interesting as a newspaper. Although I appreciate very much how hard they are working to make PI-orphan readers feel welcome; they even added many of the PI comics to their comics page, which is exactly the kind of thing that matters, you know? Any measure of control and input and respect that we can give one another during times of change makes a difference.

The Times, like every other newspaper in the US, has cut back on its arts coverage in general and its book reviews in particular, and so I have taken less pleasure of late in my Sunday paper reading. But I enjoyed last Sunday, not so much because of the specific content as because of the internal conversational trails it led me down. Perhaps I’m just in a mood to personally connect with ideas. Hmm, which one might simply read as a less obnoxious way of saying It’s all about me!, but perhaps you will make the kinder assumption. These days I tend to be both harder on myself, by which I mean more truthful in my self-analysis, and also more accepting of those truths. I’m guessing that acceptance is necessary to stay relatively coherent even as I become more and more aware of my own fractures.

And so I was struck by this review of a book called Shop Class as Soulcraft. The reviewer didn’t like the book, and it sounds as though I might not either; but I was struck by the truth (in my perception) of the pull quote:

What ordinary people once made, they buy: and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed.
 
— from Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford

And it occurred to me this is one more way in which we have contrived as a culture to give ourselves less control of change, and to… how do I put this? To deify expertise to the point that in order to be “special” by the standards of our culture, we have to be experts at something. We achieve standing in our communities by having something specific to contribute; but within my lifetime the standard for being a fully active member of a community was that we all pitched in with whatever was needed, because to some extent we all could.

Recently, members of my high school class have been talking about taking on a community construction project (building a free dental clinic) as a way of giving back to the town where our school is based. I think it’s a great idea; and I am struck by the number of people who want to participate but “don’t know one end of a power tool from the other” or “can pull nails with the best of them!” Et cetera. No disrespect intended to those folks: what I’m pointing at is not Oh, they can’t build stuff, but rather the readiness with which they downplay the general knowledge they may have, and/or the lack of assumption that if they turn up and someone shows them how, they can probably do a lot of what is needed. These are smart people: so why the apparent lack of confidence in their ability to become successful students once again?

I myself do know one end of a table saw from another. I’m no master carpenter or electrician or plumber, but when something breaks in my house, I try to fix it; and often I’m happy to find that I can. I was going to say happily surprised, but that wouldn’t be true: I go into these situations with the expectation that I can learn enough to decide fairly quickly whether I can fix it or not; and if I think I can, then I try. I’ve made a complete mess of a few things (let’s not talk about the time I tried to replace the motherboard in Nicola’s computer, thank god she’s a forgiving person), and a complete success of others (I fixed a Horrible Grinding Sound in the dishwasher just last week).

The internet is an enormous blessing in this regard; you can find out how to do just about anything if you’re willing to spend a little time with Google. But I grew up with an engineer father and an artisan mother; they fixed things, assembled stuff, made things from scratch, and taught me enough theories to make me feel confident that I could do it too. And so when I was offered a job in a theatre shop one summer, I took it; when the furniture comes all in pieces in a box, I put it together; and when my WordPress upgrade completely breaks the back end of my website to the point that I cannot access a single administrative function (that was yesterday’s fun), I figure out how to get in the side door and fix the problem.

This is not because I’m so special; in fact, the point is that I’m not. Mine is the attitude of the generalist and the student. I don’t try to fix stuff because I think it’s nobler or more authentic, I do it because I want to manage my own changes if I can. I want to know that I can control my own environment if I choose to. Sometimes that’s a fool’s game, for sure; and some of it comes from insecurity on my part, my knee-jerk response in crisis that no one else is going to take care of me, so I’d better be able to do it myself.

But I can’t do everything myself. And I’m part of a community, finally, of family and friends and neighbors for whom pooling skills, pitching in, doing what we can, is just part of the deal. We don’t have to all do everything well; but it’s not enough to just do “what we’re best at.” If that were the case, I guess I’d be writing everyone’s term papers for them, or something. But I cook for people when they are sick; I collect their mail and put out their trash when they are on vacation. I drive them and their dying cat to the emergency hospital. I paint trim, I weed, I run errands. I give communication process advice. I do what I can to help people manage their changes. And they do that for me.

And I think that if I didn’t have the attitude that it’s worth a try to fix things myself, maybe I wouldn’t have the impetus to try to help other people when their things need fixing. Maybe I’d learn to be helpless, to depend always on expertise as opposed to intelligence, or kindness, or community. Maybe I’d stop trying to fix myself too; maybe I’d assume that I couldn’t, or that having parts of myself be broken was the opposite of being whole. I don’t know: I am who I am, and so the rest is just guessing. But it’s something I’m thinking about.

Human politics

From The White House website, here is a slideshow of President Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East and Europe. If you take the time to look at the photos, you’ll see both public and behind-the-scenes moments. You’ll see the President of the United States out in the world with the sun on his face, looking calm and confident. It makes such a change from watching GWB carry his fear around him like a toxic cloud.

I think White House Chief Photographer Pete Souza and his staff are doing an amazing job. I enjoy visiting the White House photostream sometimes. I enjoy the idea that I have a window — even a controlled one — through which I may see glimpses of the people of my government doing their jobs.

I am happy that the administration is doing so much to be transparent, and to provide as much of this kind of access as possible. If you haven’t visited the White House website and blog, I encourage you to check them out. Great resources. The government is busy: and even if you don’t like everything (or anything) they are doing, when did you ever before have a nearly-real-time clue about the process, the input, the decisions and the people responsible?

I’m thinking about writing a letter to the President. Not about what he should do with health care or federal marriage rights for everyone or the environment (although I certainly have opinions) — but rather to tell him what being American feels like for me right now, and what my hopes are for my country and the people who live here, and all the people who are affected by what we do (which is pretty much everyone in some way, no?). I have never been moved to communicate with a President in this particular way — as if he were an actual human being with whom I feel much in common: someone who is as smart as me, as committed as I am to being the best people we can, who takes as much joy from parts of his life as I do from mine and would like other people to have that experience too.

I don’t know — it sounds arrogant, put like that, as if my standards for myself are somehow relevant to the political leadership of a world superpower. People don’t have to be like me in order to run a country well: there are a zillion reasons why I’d be a crap president. And yet, it’s extraordinary for me to believe that the person in that role might actually have some of the same standards for himself that I do. It makes him real to me in a way that no politician has ever been for me; and it makes the politics more real, too.

The Obama administration is working overtime to humanize themselves to us and the rest of the world. Imagine if politics could become a human thing again. Imagine what we could all do.

With Malice Toward Some

Today I want to introduce an old friend of mine — the book, not the writer, whom sadly I never met. Margaret Halsey published With Malice Toward Some in 1938, based on letters that Halsey (an American) wrote to her family when she and her husband lived in England.

The book is a fond, acerbic, bemused and sometimes who-are-these-people look at the English of the late 1930’s. I’ve probably read this book a dozen times, and I still laugh out loud. I like that it is often pointed but never mean-spirited: I hate the irony of our current days in which something must be hurtful in order to establish the writer as a person of “wit.” There’s enough real contempt and diminishment of others in the world, why should anyone make a career out of it?

And Halsey’s a good writer: concise, observant, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and the ability (that I especially prize in writers) to be particular; to create moments that feel alive and immediate seventy years later. She fell in love with the English countryside and many of the people. She hated the food, marveled at the social customs, and found herself constantly surprised by the reality of a culture whose differences were far greater than she had expected. The Peg Halsey of this book is a vibrant, funny woman, curious and open and adventurous. She’s alive in her world, and it’s fun to be there with her.

My plan over the next little while is to occasionally share some of Halsey’s pithier moments with you, just because I like them and hope they will please you. It’s no bad thing to start a Monday with a smile.

June 7th
While Henry has gone to buy chocolate bars and reading matter, I am sitting in the waiting room of the Southampton station of the Southern Railway. My eyes, I am afraid, are going to fall right out of their sockets before the end of the day — I have been looking at everything so strenuously. It took a long while to get off the boat, and involved a great deal of standing in line and filling out cards and blanks. There is something about filling out printed forms which arouses lawless impulses in me and makes me want to do things that will have the file clerks sitting up with a jerk, like putting in
 
RELIGION……Druid…..
 
Today, when one of my blanks said OCCUPATION, I wrote down none, though I suspected this would not do. A severe but courteous official confirmed this impression. So I crossed it out and wrote parasite, which, not to be too delicate about it, is what I am. This made the official relax a little and he himself put housewife in what space there was left. “Be a prince,” I said, “Make it typhoid carrier.” But he only smiled and blotted out parasite so that it would not show.
 
— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

And this one’s for Nicola, who had remarkably similar experiences from the other direction when she first visited America. Ask her sometime about the salad dressing. Or the vinegar.

June 8th
Today Henry and I and some of the faculty from the college lunched at an Exeter restaurant. It was a bad lunch, half cold and wholly watery, and in order to keep body and soul together, I asked for a glass of milk. The waitress was staggered.
 
“Milk?” she said incredulously.
 
“Why, yes,” I replied, almost equally incredulously. “A glass of milk.”
 
She wheeled off in the direction of the kitchen. In three minutes she was back again.
 
“Please,” she asked, “do you want this milk hot or cold?”
 
I blinked a little and said I wanted it cold. The Englishmen who were with us looked amused. “You Americans,” one of them said, with a spacious tolerance. We resumed our conversation, and in a short space the waitress made a third appearance. She had a hounded expression.
 
“Do you,” she inquired desperately, “want this milk in a cup or a glass?”
 
“Just roll it up in a napkin,” I answered thoughtlessly, and then was sorry, seeing how embarrassed and confused she was. I started to make amends, but she suddenly bolted and I never saw her again. Another waitress came to take the dessert order, and the milk project was tacitly abandoned.
 
— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

Enjoy your day.

Box of bees

Which is what I am busier than today… so I aologize that you have wandered all the way over here only to be told that there’s nothing to see.

But I’ll be back tomorrow. And coming soon, posts on a delicious 1938 book, my Sunday-paper reading, how the playground never truly leaves us, and quite possibly some Frank Sinatra music…

I hope you’re enjoying your weekend.

Jukebox

Today’s theme is:

emo kid

I am sorry to say that I don’t remember who sent me this image, but it’s just perfect. I was that emo kid sometimes (sadly, sometimes I still am. So much for being a grownup). Today it’s possible to do a cheerful post about All Things Emo because I’m not feeling like painting my room black and then crawling under the bed with my headphones turned up to 11. But I’ve had those days. Haven’t you?

I don’t do this music every day: I prefer my angst a little rougher and in full howl (can you say Nine Inch Nails? I knew you could). But today’s songs get into the part of me that still sometimes goes off into the corner to be a weepy emo kid; and that’s very useful for particular kinds of writing. Much of what I do is about big feelings, and often I use emo to encourage those feelings to come out and play.

Because big feelings aren’t nearly as sophisticated as we like to pretend when we put on our Grownup Boots. I know so many people who intellectualize their feelings, codify and categorize and parse them to their molecular levels, trace the psychology, and consider them “solved” because they have been explained. And meanwhile all those wild inconsistent inexplicable messy feelings are still running and tugging and clawing those rational brains, those controlled bodies, sometimes trashing the joint just because they can. Making us ecstatic, or bitter, crushed or gutted or overcome by any number of desires that roll over us like waves. Sometimes we are simply a big hungry mouth that just wants to be filled. And you want to explain that? Don’t talk to me about rational.

When I write, the irrational hungry space is where I often need to go. Music always helps me with that; it’s my native guide to the I-can’t-breathe-now misery of rejection; the adrenaline rush when someone you’re hot for looks right at you; the moment when we want to hurt someone bad because they don’t love us back, when they become a thing to be broken so that they can’t fuck with us anymore. And you know, at least so far, those things feel pretty much the same at 48 as they did at 14. I have more reference points: I can say oh, it’s you again, and sigh, and sit with it until it’s ready to move on. But recognizing it, knowing it inside out, never makes it stop coming back around.

So if you’re feeling like the big drama of big sad find-yourself-a-corner feelings, here’s a playlist for you.

“The Secret’s in the Telling” by Dashboard Confessional is iconic emo. I listened to this about seven million times when I was writing the middle eight of Dangerous Space, the sadness and rage between Mars and Duncan.

“Think Twice…” by Groove Armada is a song that caught me completely off guard when I first really listened to it — I was standing at the sink in our old house, washing dishes, and I began to cry. There was a window over the sink that faced directly into the kitchen window of the house next door, and I’m sure our neighbor thought I was experiencing some particular personal grief: and it was grief, but without a particular source. Just… well, I don’t know, that’s emo for you. Sometimes feeling just is.

“In a Lifetime” is from the Irish group Clannad. Beautiful stuff, and this song is my favorite of theirs for its passion and its edge of desperation; the wildness within us.

And then there is the spiritual mother of emo, Suzanne Vega, singing “Some Journey” in her delicate voice that gets right to the heart of the road not taken. Surely we’ve all met someone in our life about whom we’ve wondered What if?

Have a great weekend, with no sadness except the musical kind.

Edited to add: I’m sorry to say that I don’t have enough server space for all my audio, so most jukebox playlists become inactive after a few months. This is one. Very sorry. But the music is worth seeking out, it’s great!

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