Author: Kelley

A Monday giggle with Eddie

I think Eddie Izzard is fantastic. He’s a great film and television actor, and a brilliant stand-up comic. He’s an English Catholic Jesuit-educated cross-dressing straight man who speaks three languages (at least) and is blindingly smart about many things. His comedy shows are full of historical references and stories, musings on language, and wry observations of pop culture, human nature and the vagaries of the universe.

An added spice for me in watching his work is that he does a thing that I learned to call “role shifting” when I studied American Sign Language. ASL grammar includes role shifting as part of storytelling. If I’m telling you in English about going to the movies with three friends, I will generally use pronouns (he said, she said) or name them (then Jane punched Susan) when I report something about them. But ASL uses role shift instead, which includes locating multiple characters in space (Jane is here, Susan is there, Tom is at the end), and taking on characteristics of whomever is speaking (he said, she said) or acting (then Jane punched Susan). It’s a really cool part of ASL grammar, and I’ve never seen a hearing performer do it like Izzard. I believe it makes the experience that much richer for everyone.

I had the great good fortune to see him live in Seattle last year, a wonderful evening which included a completely ad-libbed conversation with a moth… a funny, smart man who clearly loves his work.

I couldn’t decide between these two clips (both from his show Dressed to Kill). The first takes on historical mass-murderers like Hitler and Pol Pot and why they get away with it. Like much good comedy, it is based in hard and uncomfortable truth. Then we move to imperialism and flags. The clip ends with the famous Cake or Death sequence. The second clip is a take on British versus American films.

And because the clips are from the same show, if you watch them both, you’ll see how Izzard’s themes keep re-emerging so that the show becomes a sort of tapestry.

These are absolutely positively not safe for work!

Have a giggle. Happy Monday.

A nice day

It turns out that I do not have a single interesting thing to say today about changing paradigms or the state of publishing or the power of story, or anything else. I am just living life right now, doing things that are of great value to me but perhaps not so fascinating to the rest of the world. Yesterday I made banana bread because Nicola loves it. And then I went dancing — not a work evening, just a night to dance on the floor. There was a baseball game, and parking downtown was hopeless. Then a homeless man helped me find a parking place, and I gave him some money, and we talked to each other like people about the heat and driving, and we wished each other a good evening. And we both knew that our definitions of “good” were pretty different in our personal contexts. It was hot in the club, and they brought two enormous box fans (almost as tall as me) that blew a cool wind through us, and the women danced, danced, danced. And the men who worked at the club, who brought out the fans, tried hard not to look at the dancing women, and I wondered briefly what it is like for (presumably straight) men to be in a place where looking at women is wrong. DJ Stacey played “Relax” for me (thanks, Stacey), and as it came up I bowed to her and she smiled. I talked to a 50-year-old woman who just came out a year ago and is being brave about everything, including coming to these dances and talking to strangers and maybe even thinking about putting her essay collection out there into the world for publishers to consider… you go, Rebecca. And when it was time to leave, I went out into the street and said no, thank you, I think I’ll be fine to the nice bouncer guy who offered to escort me to my car, and I walked in the custard light of a city sunset past bars and pizza palaces and people sleeping in corners, through the smell of urine and phad thai, through the sounds of the baseball game on someone’s radio, past the watchful gaze of other bouncers in their red-roped doorways and the impassive visual sweep of a cop on patrol. And I got in my car and came home to Nicola with a great big cheeseburger and fries and a chocolate shake that I drank on the way home. And then we had a beer and I told her everything I’ve just told you, and she told me about her evening full of Anglo-Saxon rings and Indian food and the frustration of regionalized DVDs (c’mon, world, can we all just get together on the DVD format if nothing else?) and all the things she was thinking in the quiet peace of our house while I was moving inside the bass beat of music.

It was a nice day.

Low Spark

My parents read this blog, so if the rest of you will just give us a second…

Hi, Mum! Hi, Dad! (blows kisses to parents). I know you’ve heard lots of my bad girl stories from high school and beyond, but I’m not sure whether you’ve heard this one, so let’s go over here into this little corner of the internet while I tell you that I took some drugs in high school you might not know about yet. I’m sure you assumed (correctly) that I occasionally drank liquor and maybe smoked some pot. And I’ve still never snorted cocaine or taken speed or been to one of those parties with a punchbowl full of pills. But I did (okay, here it comes now) drop acid about half a dozen times or so.

Okay, whew, there’s nothing like a little public confession to really put a Saturday in a whole new light. And in front of all these other people!

Hi, everyone, thanks for waiting, I’m back now and I’m pretty sure my folks survived (blows more kisses to parents).

So, yeah, when I was a junior in high school I discovered blotter acid, courtesy of the So Cool girl next door in the dorm who decided that I needed to expand my horizons. I never had a bad time at all. It was always pretty easy for me to yank my mind back from wherever it had wandered off to, if it was necessary.

One necessary time was out in the woods one Sunday afternoon with a group of about eight or so. One of the girls began to unravel around the edges — she couldn’t remember her own name, she was convinced her identity was melting away. She didn’t know who she was. So I blinked and the shiny edges around things dimmed a bit, and I gave her a hug, and took her for a walk, and told her everything I knew about her.

And then at some point she was okay (time gets pretty funny on acid), and I was okay too, but she had, as we sometimes say in our house, harshed my mellow. So my friend Matt and I wandered back to campus and went to the cafeteria for dinner.

But we were too early (that time thing…), so we sat in the common room where, sadly for those around us, there was a piano. Matt and I commandeered it.

What’s your favorite song? he asked.

The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, I said.

Holy shit, me too! he said, eyes bright. And without further discussion, we launched into a duet of Low Spark. I played the actual piano line and he played the melody. I was hugely impressed that he knew it.

And we sang. I’m sorry, but we did.

And we played.

For 45 minutes.

Until finally, another kid came over to us and said, in the tone of someone on her last nerve, Could you guys PLEASE STOP PLAYING THAT SONG?!

So we did. But I’ve never forgotten that time in the common room on a spring afternoon. And Low Spark is still my favorite song. It still delights me, moves me, describes me. Still takes me right into myself.

So I thought maybe you’d enjoy it too. I’m off now to make banana bread for my sweetie, and I feel a long (good) way from my baby acid-queen days, but it’s nice to remember the time when I was discovering what music was for — that songs could be about me, could make me see more clearly who I am and who I’d like to be.

Happy Saturday.

And enjoy The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. (Traffic, 1971)

Kelley in the low spark days

Gone from the game

In case anyone was wondering, this is why I love her. One of the many reasons. I love that we feel the same way about what we do: this urge to tell a story so well that it takes you, heart and mind and body, so that you are inside the story and it’s inside you, and you become each other for a while. And perhaps when you put the words away, some small scrap of the story lives on inside you.

I love that Nicola speaks so fiercely of her work, and I love that I am feeling so fierce about mine these days. That I have given myself to it in a whole new way. And even so, even with all that re-found passion and the tidal wave of change it has brought into my life, I have still been struggling with a thing….

Here’s a story. Last year, when Dangerous Space was released, I had occasion to spend time in a bar with one of SF’s pre-eminent critics, someone whose conversation I’ve enjoyed over the years and whose professional skills I have always respected. This person told me they were reading the collection and considering it for review, but had noticed that most of the stories had been published previously. That’s right, I said.

Well, said the critic, that’s not much to show for 20 years, is it?

I answered politely that I hoped quality counted for more than quantity. But I was hurt, and I was rattled. And ultimately there was no review from this critic, so perhaps I gave the wrong answer.

And since then I have been chewing on this, trying to understand the helplessness and the anger and defensiveness that I felt. Who cares what this person thinks? Well, clearly I cared. And what I have come to believe is that it’s not about this person specifically — it’s about my certain knowledge that a lot of people feel this way about writing, or any other creative and/or professional pursuit. Many people will believe that the worth of my collection is diminished by the ratio of old to new work, and that my worth as a writer is best measured by my churn rate. That quality is only important in concert with quantity.

This is a game that I can never win. Many writers can — they produce good work very quickly, and all props and happiness to them. I think it’s a good thing they can do that. But why does this have to be a zero-sum game? If it’s good they do that, why must it therefore be bad that I do not?

Eleanor Roosevelt said No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. And she was right. But withdrawing that consent is not as easy as stamping one’s foot and saying Stop diminishing me right now! It is a process, and I have been processing.

And today I read Nicola’s post, and I felt the cumulative rush of all the moments of good work I have done in 20 years. Every time I wrote a sentence and felt it ring true. Every time I felt a character come a little more to life within me and on the page. Every time I’ve read the stories or the novel and bam, I’m back in worlds and characters that I love, fictions that vibrate with some of the deepest real things within me, things that I’ve managed to transmute into stories that make other people vibrate in turn.

And you know what? This is where I want to play. Consider me gone from the other fucking game. I will do my best to write everything I want to write, as best I can, and I hope I make a boatload of money. But none of that is the measure of my worth. My worth as a writer is measured by what I write. End of story.

As I’ve said recently, it’s huge for me to be a writer, and I am in charge of how I feel about that. And here’s how I feel: in 20 years, I have said things that only I can say, and other people have heard them, felt them, shared them. I have burned, and I still do. I have done well, and I still do. I have found my own way here, in my own time, and it’s been a marvel. I’m looking forward to doing better and burning harder the next 20 years. I intend, as Nicola does, to reach so far inside you that you’ll have to dig me out with a spoon.

And anyone who doesn’t think that’s much to show for 20 years can go fuck themselves.

If you were invisible

Invisibility has always been a powerful metaphor for what happens when we step outside — or are forced outside — our own group. When someone becomes “other.” It’s such a common experience of adolescence, and it lingers into adulthood. It’s everywhere in fiction and memoir, television and film. Someone is not like us anymore, or she never was, and we ostracize her and she becomes invisible to us, dead to us. She’s simply not there, even though someone who looks just like her is trying to fumble her locker open with tears in her eyes.

And we become invisible when we are not “real” in other ways. Minority people are invisible as individual human beings to the mainstream culture. Information that the systems of power don’t want revealed stays hidden. And go read How to Suppress Women’s Writing for a cogent look at all the ways to make art “disappear.”

And then there are the invisible monsters. What we can’t see frightens us — the ghost, the seemingly-supernatural serial killer, the shark in dark water. Invisibility is powerful when it’s used to hurt. One way to make a human monster in fiction is to make them literally invisible, and then watch — they get up to all kinds of evil nasty stuff, because they can. They spy. They sneak. They learn things about us that they aren’t supposed to know. We are vulnerable.

And of course invisibility can be cool, too. Harry Potter’s cloak, using the Force to pass undetected, the good guys slipping through the cracks in order to confound evil and carry the day. Because in fiction, the invisibility that is such a weapon against outsiders in the real world becomes the way the outsiders win in the end.

Invisibility is a complex notion for humans, like telepathy and magic. Lots of fodder for story.

But what if you could really be invisible?

What would you do?

I know, I know — if this were available to folks, there would be a whole new list of ways for evil to play out in the world. I’m not interested in hearing how being invisible would improve the effectiveness of murderers and rapists and creepy stalkers, okay? But I am interested in your ideas about what ordinary folks might do if they thought no one could see them. Would they run naked through the streets at lunch hour? Would they have public sex? Would they sneak out of high school past the security guard and then have to sneak back into class later and convince the teacher they were there all the time? Maybe celebrities would use it to get in and out of clubs and courthouses.

What would you do if you could be invisible? What do you think other people would do? And would it always be like it is in fiction, dehumanizing, turning us into uncaring soulless monster creepy folk? Or would there be some good?

I think invisible public sex is the most interesting personal use I can think of right now, in terms of pure fun that hurts no one (or maybe it just shows my lack of imagination, who knows?). And the creepiest personal use I can think of came to me the other night… Nicola and I were sitting on the back deck as the sun went down, drinking beer and talking about being invisible. It’s very private back there, no one can see us. And then I imagined an invisible neighbor or a stranger leaning against the deck railing, just listening to us, feeling the particular power of invasion and secret knowledge. And even though we weren’t saying anything particularly personal, I suddenly felt so vulnerable.

If we could all be invisible, would any of us ever be able to trust again that we are alone? That we are unobserved? Will we ever have a moment that we truly trust is private?

I’m good at purposely forgetting the spy satellites and the systems that monitor all our phone calls and emails and that is probably scanning this innocuous little blog post right now. Those systems are out there — I can’t touch them, I can’t control them, and they aren’t really about me. But someone standing on my deck, watching me — that’s personal.

So invisibility is a cultural weapon, as long as it’s metaphorical, emotional, psychological. When it becomes real — well, then the invisible become very powerful indeed. I have to say that it gives me pause.

Werewolf glee!

Okay, okay, so I’m 13 in Tampa in the spring of 1974. It’s a hard time in a dozen different ways, and I am often escaping into solitude, into a book, into hours of music on the radio in the middle of the night when I cannot sleep. And there’s this song that I just fucking fall in love with. In. Love. Why? I don’t know. It was a story about a boy whose brother was a werewolf until their daddy got down the shotgun one night… So maybe it was just my SF-storytelling self beginning to come to the fore.

And the song went out of rotation, as they do. And I went off to boarding school and discovered vinyl. Traffic, Steppenwolf, Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult. And the Boston radio station I listened to intermittently was much more hip and urban than my little Tampa station, and they never played my werewolf song.

I thought about the song again about 20 years ago or so. I called a local oldies station and described it to the DJ (a song about a werewolf, I said somewhat helplessly, not being able to remember the band or the title). The DJ was polite but skeptical. And I’ve never met anyone since who, upon hearing the story, lit up and said Oh, sure, I remember that song!

Well, here it is.

Canada’s own Five Man Electrical Band with “Werewolf.” I listened to it just a few minutes ago for the first time since 1974. Isn’t the internet cool?!

And I’m pretty sure I can peg now what appealed to my young self so much. It’s actually a pretty complex mix: there’s the almost-sexual intimacy of the narrator’s voice, and the way it moves in and out of the gender-neutral zone; there’s the story itself, simple on the surface but all about family dynamics, about being different, about desires that must not be acted on. And then there’s this moment:

Then we heard a shot
And I said Papa got him.
Then we heard a scream…
And Mama smiled and said
Bet you Billy got him.

Seriously, is that a moment, or what?

Glee glee glee glee glee. Makes me want to run out and tell a story or something.

I want to see a bunny too

Opus by Berkeley Breathed, 10 August 2008

Click on the image to see it full size.

This cartoon makes me nostalgic for the kind of summer I never really had. I had great times as a kid, but they were urban times (well, as urban as Tampa, Florida got in the 60’s… you may imagine that we weren’t exactly Manhattan South). I didn’t have a tire swing or a lake or a sunny field to ride my bike to. I did have a completely deserted school playground, a series of alleys that wound through some beautiful neighborhoods, a 5-mile stretch of sidewalk that ran beside a bay, although one had to jaywalk (it was jay-running, really, while pushing the bicycle) across a heart-pounding four lanes of fast traffic to reach it. I had movie theatres six miles away. I had a peculiar little stone tower on a nearby street corner — I think it used to be a planter, or something — just big enough to crawl up into and sit and read a book.

And I went to summer camp for several years. Day camp, not sleepaway camp. One of my parents would pack my lunch and my bathing suit in a paper bag and drive me every morning to the pick-up point, where dozens of kids would pile onto buses and off we’d go to the camp — a human-made lake, arts and crafts buildings, stables, a cafeteria, a fire pit, all surrounded by hundreds of acres of Florida scrubland. That meant southern live oaks shoulder-to-shoulder with royal palms, spanish moss, lots of dirt, sawgrass, blue jays and mockingbirds, buzzards, mosquitos, snakes, and the possibility of alligators.

Did I like it? Sometimes. I liked finally getting brave enough to run off the high dock over the lake, grab the rope attached to one of the oak trees, swiiiiing out and drop into deep water. I liked sitting around a campfire singing the “Once there were three fishermen” song because we all got shriek DAMN!! at the top of our lungs, which pleased our eight-year-old conventional selves mightily and never got old. The horses terrified me, and so did most of the other kids. But I always liked lunch.

I still miss the live oaks dripping with spanish moss under the biggest hot blue sky I’ve ever known, but Florida was never my land. It wasn’t until I got to New Hampshire that I discovered the real pleasure possible in wandering around outside with no particular destination. But in the summer, I always went home.

I live a busy life. I have a mind always full of ideas and internal conversation and lists of things to do, a noisy mind. But you know, one summer day before I die, I hope someone drags me out of the house still shrieking about all the things I have to do, and takes me to a tire swing and a lake and a grassy field and maybe for a hamburger and an ice cream cone. And there will be no talk of obligations. We will only talk about bunnies.

And a poet for Sunday

To follow on from Saturday’s poetry, here’s a poet for Sunday.

Kay Ryan is the new poet laureate of the United States. I’ve read some of her work, and I think I like it best when I hear her read it; poems, like play scripts and song lyrics, are sometimes impenetrable to me on the page. I think they are less like fiction and more like music for me, that I rely on the human engine behind them to build the bridge between us.

I like Ryan for poet laureate. She’s plain-spoken and real. She makes poetry that teases out complicated human truths from simple things. She writes about the beauty of the natural world and that’s something I think we need right now. Her poems are often very compact, with just a few syllables on each line so that it looks like the poem is sliding down the page… about which Ryan says:

I like it because it is the most dangerous shape. If your line is about three words long, nearly every word is on one edge or the other. You can’t hide anything. Any crap is going to show.
 
— Kay Ryan, talking about writing her poetry

That quote is part of this article on Ryan’s personal history and career, and here’s an extensive analysis of her poetry.

I’ve been writing this post about poetry while drinking a cup of tea and listening to Nine Inch Nails, which seems somehow exactly right. The brain likes to play… I hope your day brings you some similar small pleasures.

Two poems for a Saturday

My favorite poem is probably T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But it’s much too long for a Saturday morning… and I woke in the middle of the night with these two poems whispering Choose me, choose me in my ears.

Happy Saturday.

Do Not Be Ashamed
by Wendell Berry

You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.

Lost
by David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.