A Sea Change

My WIP is drafted. For those of you close enough to appreciate the reference, this book is the one I refer to as “Rain” (because the word rain is in the title). Rain is one of a few must-write novels I had to write. You could argue “all novels should be must-write novels” (as opposed to “all novels must be should-write novels”), and I would agree. So let me clarify: Rain is one of those I-was-put-on-the-Earth-to-write-this-novel novels. And it’s done.

Life is good.

I told my 150-year-old neighbor Eleanor I’d finished a book. She was on her knees in her garden, assaulting weeds. I’d say she was in her garden “weeding,” except the animosity Eleanor feels toward harmless, if unwelcome, botanicals is so evident, “assaulting” is the more appropriate term. If you’re hell-bent on becoming a weed, don’t apply for an apprenticeship in Eleanor’s garden.

“Is it fiction again?” she asked.

“Well, yes. Fiction is what I write.”

“Ah.”

Chalk up one more non-sale.

I’d been avoiding a scene in Rain. I should have drafted it months ago. But I didn’t know how to end it. One night last week, tired, eager to go to bed and read—to make other authors work for me—I said, “I’m going to write that scene, even if it sucks.”

Everything was fine until I got to the end. I sat there, faced with the necessity of typing something, anything. And it came to me. What I needed to happen happened. The idea, the twist, the connection, the integration, the oomph—the words that had been incubating and hatching in my subconscious—channeled down from my brain through my neck, along my arms, all the way to my sprightly, dancing fingers, and clickety-clacked themselves onto a reluctantly accommodating page.

Writing is research. We tend to think of writing as making a record of what we’ve created, or what we’ve witnessed, experienced, learned, and discovered. But the act of writing is itself a research tool. Because by forcing yourself to clickety-clack, to put the words down, you force yourself to be enlightened.

*
What else.

This will be my last blog post for a while. I want to devote myself to The Lascaux Review. I’d like to end this phase of my social media career with a message to writer friends who are struggling to break through or climb out of a slump. It’s a quote from Winston Churchill. It’s the only quote you’ll ever need. Tape it to the wall above your computer:

Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense.

But wait! There’s one more. I recently watched the movie “Cloud Atlas.” It took two viewings to understand what was going on, because of the many characters. After the second viewing I decided it was a movie that deserved to be seen twice.

One character says to his son-in-law, who intends to join the abolitionist movement, “No matter what you do, it will never amount to anything more than a single drop in a limitless ocean.”

To which the son-in-law replies, “What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?”

Tell your stories. Record what you’ve witnessed, experienced, learned, and discovered. Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never.

Happie Mother's Day

Untitled, Lillian Parrish, oil on panel, 1967
My maternal grandmother Lillie painted this in 1967, the same year she gave me my first oil painting lesson. I grew up with it hanging on the walls of our various homes, and became its custodian when my mother died.

There are two ways to appreciate motherhood, I guess: to be one and to have one. The latter was such a rich experience for me, it's hard to imagine how wonderful it must be to qualify under the former.

I don't have a mom anymore, but I do have many friends who are moms, and I'd like to dedicate this painting to them.

Summer Spoils the Spring

In The Feasts of Lesser Men I describe a park where protagonist-narrator Jimmy Fisher goes to honor the departure, via casket, of his best friend Chuck Cybulski. At the same time, Patrick Parnell, a recently discovered WWII casualty, is buried with full military honors in a nearby cemetery. Parnell is based on a real person; I merely changed his name. The park, likewise, is real. Last weekend I needed to say goodbye to someone, much as Jimmy did. I took my camera along.



The violets were already gone from the banks of the pond; summer spoils the spring. I took off my boots and walked in the grass. Dandelions, cool beneath my feet, speckled the green lawn. The park was empty of people but for two women pushing baby strollers, and they were merely part of a greater fertility scene. I felt alone. By contrast, the cemetery would be crowded and buzzing with human voices.

The pond was still, a sheet of foiled glass. It reflected the clouds and swamp cypresses until ducks crossed it, disturbing the reflections with ripples like footprints in fresh snow. A pair of black swans followed me around the circumference. They swam silently, efficiently, elegantly, and the only evidence of their passing were the fractured, marquise-shaped ripples of hue left in their wake.

There was something about the “wild”—constantly churning with Darwinian battles, of consequence in proportion to the size of the creatures engaged in them—that was peaceful. The only civilized places that gave me the same sense of peace were graveyards. It seemed that the more death was present, the more peaceful the location.



They’d had a brief Catholic service for Cybulski before shipping his body to the airport. The chaplain didn’t know him. But he knew how he died. The chaplain read, dispassionately, from a book.

Now as I sat on a bench in the Schlosspark watching the swans, a squadron of F16 fighter jets from Spangdahlem Air Force Base screamed over the town in a salute to Patrick Parnell. At the same time, in Frankfurt, a Boeing 747 was lifting off with Cybulski’s casket aboard. As the turbine engines of the F16s roared over the park I came to attention and gave Cybulski a proper military salute.

“Goodbye, Chuck,” I said. “Don’t worry about the laboratory animals, I’ll take responsibility for rescuing them. I’ll save them all.”

The noise of the jets sent the swans running for cover, which in turn upset the surface of the pond with a myriad interfering ripples.

One more thing: it was good, Chuck. It was real good. I look forward to next time. With any luck, next time will be even better.



*
I don't want to get into the habit of dropping names, but in high school I fell in love with Janis Ian when her hit "At Seventeen" climbed the charts. The song is autobiographical: Ian felt she was ugly, especially when compared to the "standard" cheerleader look. I thought she was gorjus. One unexpected perk of being the editor of a literary magazine is that I get to correspond with people who are otherwise out of reach to guys like me. Imagine my quiet joy when, after all these years, I exchanged emails the other day with Janis Ian.

Frogs do, indeed, become princes. If only for a day.

I'll drop just one more name while I'm here. George Takei, "Sulu" on Star Trek, responded to an email from me. But Wendy Russ, managing editor of the same literary magazine I work for, one-upped me by meeting him in person a couple of weeks ago. I'm struggling to forgive her, and my anger management counselor tells me I'm making progress.

Here's Janis, back in the day, singing "At Seventeen" live:


*
What else.

Debra Ginsberg has a new blog about writing and baking: The True Confections of a Writer.

Steve Belanger’s book came out (the cover is a link). He was very kind to put my name in the acknowledgements, although I didn't deserve it. Debra Ginsberg (see above), Natasha Fondren, and Wendy Russ are also acknowledged, and deservedly; my writing community is taking over the world.

Finally, our very own A.S. (Amy) King has won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize with Ask the Passengers (the cover is a link). Click here to watch a video of her answering questions about it.


Friend of mine? With something to announce or promote? Lemme know and I'll shower you with glory.

A Nihilistic Slab of Stone

First of all, the devolution of this year’s snowman:



Explanations are in order. How I did it: I filled a collapsible leaf bag with snow, packed it down, then turned it upside down and emptied it to create the base of the snowman. Then I repeated the action to increase its height. I switched to flower pots of successively decreasing diameter to give the snowman a “neck” and a “head.”

Why I did it: It seemed like a good idea at the time. I confess I did not project my creative vision far enough into the future to predict my snowman would look like a beer bottle. Write it off as artistic spontaneity.

Why the decorated snowman in the second picture already looks like death warmed over: By the time I could recruit my daughter to help me decorate, global warming had encroached upon our back yard. Guess you could say my snowman suffered from a bad case of sunburn.

*


This painting has gone viral. I don’t know who the artist is. I found it on Facebook. (Sarah Laurenson has since informed me that the painting, titled "Reflections," is by Lee Teter.)

I've made several trips to Washington, D.C. I’ve seen Arlington, and watched the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Don’t miss that, if you ever get a chance. I’ve seen the Wright Flyer and the other spectacular exhibits at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. Don’t miss those, either. One time I checked out the Vietnam Memorial.

It’s a v-shaped wall made of gabbro, basically the same stuff as basalt, an igneous rock as old as rock gets. This particular material was chosen because when polished it’s highly reflective; the architect wanted visitors to see reflections of themselves superimposed on the names carved in the surface. The architect, a Chinese-American from Athens, Ohio, was a student at Yale at the time she submitted the design.

James Webb called the memorial “a nihilistic slab of stone.” Ross Perot, upon learning the architect, Maya Lin, was of Asian ancestry, referred to her as an egg roll.

The names on the wall include three sets of fathers and sons and thirty-one sets of brothers. Twelve of the casualties were seventeen when they were killed. Five were sixteen. One was fifteen.

997 military members died on their first day in theater. 1448 died on their last scheduled day.

A girl in my grade school (I’ll call her GD) was waiting for her father to come home from the war. She spoke of it to her classmates, of whom my older brother was one: “Daddy’s coming home in three months.” “Daddy’s coming home in a month.”

Finally, “Daddy’s coming home in two weeks.” Which is when he was killed.

I found his name on the wall. The park service provides printed indexes so you can look up individuals, alphabetical by name, and get their panel number, etc. GD’s dad was an 18-year veteran, a sergeant first class. He was killed on 11 March 1969. His body was recovered. His name is etched into panel 29W.



I hadn’t expected the experience to be emotional. It is, after all, just a wall. But there’s something about the design, something about the polished surface, something about 58,000 names carved in ancient volcanic rock. The massive slabs humble you. The stillness tranquilizes you. The experience exceeds the expectation. It’s the oddest shaped church ever built.



And then there are the teddy bears. I don’t know what it’s like today, but when I visited, the memorial was still relatively new, and mementos left by family members covered the ground before it. If you’re not already choked up, this will push you over the line.

As I left I passed a group of young men arriving. I was wearing my Army jacket, and although I’m not old enough to have served in Vietnam, I’m old enough to look like I might have. These young men, seeing my jacket and the tears in my eyes, quickly parted for me and went silent. For a minute I thought they might even salute.

Which would have been okay. The jacket deserves it.

*
I periodically receive emails from soldiers and veterans formerly stationed at Rose Barracks, Bad Kreuznach, asking me about the present condition of facilities; apparently this blog turns up in Google searches because I sometimes mention my affiliation with HHC 8ID. I always answer that one of these days I’ll head out with my camera and produce an update. I’m happy to report the project is underway. Here’s a taste:


The commissary, soon after the American withdrawal.


The site today, from a different angle.

*
What else.

Oh yes. On a lighter note, the Louisville Cardinals won the NCAA men’s basketball title. As a proud Louisville alumnus I’m not satisfied merely to celebrate my team’s victory. No, I’m compelled to enhance the experience by noting that a certain Lascaux board member’s second-seeded Georgetown Hoyas got mangled in the first round by 15th-seeded Florida Gulf Coast University. I am further compelled to rub her face in it by posing, in trochaic meter, an age-old question:

Boy oh boya
Don’t be coya
Just answer this:
What’s a Hoya?

Sorry to annoya
But it would bring me joya
To be so enlightened:
What’s a Hoya?

Please don’t employa
Yet another decoya
Out with it, now:
What’s a Hoya?

I’m onto your ploya
You seek to destroya!
Have mercy, for once:
What’s a Hoya?

The real McCoya
Would eschew hoi polloia
And give it to me, straight:
What’s a Hoya?

Empty Classrooms, Filled Beds

I have a recurring nightmare. I’ve dreamed it several times a year for thirty years or so. Readers who find meaning in dreams are welcome to interpret it.

My high school had a pair of original wings—erected at a time when “Advanced Arrowhead Design” was part of the curriculum—as well as a modern addition, a wing with a roof and glass windows and other newfangled stuff. Oddly I can’t recall ever having a class in the old building during my four years at the school.

In my dream I’m assigned classes there, but don’t attend.

As the semester progresses, and I fall further behind, it becomes more and more difficult to begin attending—to enter the rooms and face stares from the teachers and students. To say nothing of catching up on all the work I’ve missed. Instead I pace the hallway outside the classroom doors, catching glimpses of shadows through frosted windows, overhearing occasional laughter. Eventually it becomes so late in the semester, failure is a foregone conclusion.

I feel awful about it as I pace the hallway. I’m filled with an ever-increasing sense of dread. Finally the semester ends and I have Fs in all my courses.

That’s when I enter the classrooms, now empty. They’re dusky and dreary. The ancient desks are carved with initials and graffiti static. The tile floors are dull and chipped. The blackboards are hard to erase because of accrued abrasions; some of the chalk marks are permanent: wispy remnants of lectures long forgotten, evidence for which is nevertheless impossible to obliterate.

In my dream I wander from one empty classroom to another, and the void seems to speak to some unknown tragedy, something more than merely flunking out of school. I pass through the rooms one by one. They never end. They never, ever end. The emptiness itself has sentience, a purpose, a plan.

I awake in a panic, and don’t know why. In real life I attended all my classes and earned good grades.

*
An Australian friend, call him Tom, described a trip he took with his 80-year-old mother, and I want to share one small part of it.

Tom’s father had died some years earlier, and he’d arranged a tour of Australia with his mother primarily to get her out of the house; she wouldn’t stop grieving, wouldn’t stop visiting the cemetery twice a day.

At a stopover in a small, remote town in the Outback the hotel couldn’t provide the two rooms Tom had reserved, because a guest was ill and unable to leave. Tom and his mother were thus forced to share a room, and it had only one bed.

No problem, Tom decided. They’d sleep together in the same bed. It was a little awkward, but hey, it was his mother. What the hell.

After they’d settled in and Tom turned out the light, he heard his mother weeping softly in the dark. He turned the light back on and asked what was the matter.

“I just realized, this is the first time since your father died that a man has shared a bed with me.”

Tom took his mother in his arms and held her until she fell asleep. From then on, for the remainder of the trip, he reserved only one room at the hotels.

*
What else.

I joined Fictionaut recently. Wendy and Jennifer have farmed some writers there, so I thought I’d give it a shot. So far, nothing for Lascaux, although a couple of pieces have come close. (Stop The Presses: between writing this post and posting it, I found two gems at Fictionaut and made offers on both.)

This attack upon the Girl Scouts just makes me want to buy more cookies (pinched from Sarah Laurenson):

Can’t resist sharing this (yoinked from Mark Van Aken Williams):

I have to run now. My seventy-eleven-year-old neighbor Eleanor just called. She wants the boxes I carried from the attic to the basement last week carried back up to the attic. When, in an admittedly irritated voice, I asked why, there was a long silence, then she said, “Does it not occur to you that perhaps I changed my mind?”

“It also occurs to me that you merely enjoy watching me huff up and down three flights of stairs while you swill your vodka.”

“You know what to do with that thought, Stefan.”

Right. Parrish it.

Ochre & Umber

I’m happie to announce a new satellite of The Lascaux Review:

www.ochreumber.com
Ochre & Umber is Lascaux’s micropoetry arm. We’ll consider poems of any form or genre, as long as they contain no more than 140 characters, including spaces. Obviously the character limit comes from Twitter, which is where I cut my teeth on micropoetry.

I’d long wanted to write poetry, mostly for practice, mostly to improve my prose; yet felt intimidated tackling long poems. Micropoetry was the answer. I got to dip my toe in with three- and four-line stanzas and put them on public display—exposure being a necessary habit for a writer, to my way of thinking. Eventually I began writing longer poems, and I presently have several in submission.

I don’t want to leave micropoems behind. There’s an underground community devoted to them, a community to which I now belong. Yet it’s a niche market if ever there was one. I don’t expect we’ll be swamped with submissions at Ochre, but that’s fine with me. Like Gauss’s personal motto—pauca sed matura (few but ripe)—I’ll be thrilled to publish a rare gem now and then.

The original name of the venture was Ochre and Umber (using “and” rather than &) and the url was ochreandumber dot com.

Do you see it? No?

ochreanDUMBer dot com
Now do you see it? Wendy and I decided to ignore the anomaly at first, but eventually we began affectionately calling the site “Dumber,” which isn’t good, so the domain name had to change.

Ochres and umbers are of course pigments, and in fact they’re my favorites. Plain iron oxides, they’re the most stable and lightfast compounds on an artist’s palette. They’re also what prehistoric cave dwellers used to paint the walls of their caves—thus the connection to The Lascaux Review.

Tomás de Sabina, who contributes to #micropoetry at Twitter, has supplied the first micropoem. (I have one up as well, to keep his company, but I’ll take it down as soon as a few more have been published.)

Wendy Russ designed the site’s header. Wendy also designs book covers, logos, and other cool stuff.

Lascaux’s first satellite was Lascaux Flash (Wendy designed that header too). Flash fiction contestants should watch the countdown meter in the sidebar: we’re just 50 days from opening the next contest.

*
I was having coffee with my neighbor Eleanor (she having invited me to carry some boxes from the attic to the basement, payment for which was a cup of coffee) when André Rieu came on TV.

André Rieu, a Dutchman, conducts the Johann Strauss Orchestra. He’s a household name in Europe. His orchestra performs waltzes, mostly, and he and his musicians have fun doing it. The fun part earns Rieu quite a lot of criticism, from people who think classical music must be listened to with a frown on one’s face. I happen to belong to the other club; Rieu is one of my heroes.

If only I could pronounce his name. It’s like a French word that’s been dunked in Sauce au Roquefort and topped with truffles. Hell, it’s so French even the French can’t pronounce it. However, apparently Eleanor can.

“Not ‘rerw,’” she said. “You’re doing it all wrong.”

“Lemme try again,” I said. “Reauer.”

“No, not that, more like ‘reaur.’”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

“No, you said ‘reauer,’ one vowel too many.”

“But it’s a one-syllable word.”

“Right. So don’t add more.”

“Yet when you say it, it sounds like 17 syllables. Except, you know, all at once.”

“Exactly! Now you understand. It’s French.”

I’ll never get it. I’ve had my share of training in difficult European pronunciations. Try the German R—the way the Germans do it, not the way they teach you in school. The word for female teacher is Lehrerin, a villainous sequence of letters with two Rs, separated by an E—a national conspiracy to trip foreigners, then kick them while they're down. After decades of practice I still fall flat on my face.

Try the German Ö without resorting to a simple “er.” Even though it is, in fact, pronounced like “er.” Except . . . not.

Don’t get me started on Ü. In German class they tell you to just say “E,” and Germans will understand you.

And they’re right. They’ll understand you. They’ll also treat you like a semi-articulate rhubarb.

Anyway, here’s my boy André Reiaour at Radio City Music Hall:


Now I’ve done gone and made myself homesick.

*
What else.

Oh yes. This is pretty much how I do it:

RIP Snyrgydd

I’ll get to Snyrgydd in a minute. First, the fiscal cliff deal.

Most of my friends know me as a social liberal. Indeed, I can’t comprehend how the “other side” adopts its positions on social issues. We had to have a big debate (and war) about slavery, an equal rights issue. We had to have one about suffrage, another equal rights issue. Then we had to go to the mat over rights for descendants of slaves. And now we need to do it again over same-sex marriage? Can’t we apply Occam’s Razor and grant equal rights to everyone, without requiring each oppressed social group to fight a separate battle?

Maryland just made same-sex marriages legal, with 52% of the vote in favor. On one hand that’s great news. On the other hand, isn’t it a bit scary to think that 48% of the state’s voters declared, with their ballots, that they should have more rights than other people? It’s incomprehensible to me.

But so is spending more money than you have, which brings me to the fiscal cliff deal.

I understand why the Republicans in the House were so frustrated last week. The debt ceiling is too high already. We need to cut spending. Obama’s counterargument is that we need to raise the debt ceiling in order to pay bills to which we are already committed. Fair enough, but then let’s stop committing to expenses that, in order to cover them, we have to raise the debt ceiling.

You wouldn’t run your household that way. If you made $50,000 a year you wouldn’t spend $88,000 and thus add $38,000 to a credit card debt that was already $332,000. Yet that’s what Washington is doing. You can’t borrow your way out of debt. The question, of course, is where to tighten the belt.

The U.S. spends more on its military than it does on Medicare or Social Security. Or anything else. Take at look at these maps. I’m not going to bother trying to count the number of domestic military bases. But what I really want you to look at is the number of foreign countries in which we have military bases: 26. And wherever we are not, we can get to, by air or by sea. We occupy the world.

During WWII the Japanese introduced a new carrier-based fighter, the Mitsubishi A6M, which became known as the “Zero.” Its long-range capability and superior maneuverability earned it a 12-1 kill ratio during its first year of combat. We quickly responded with the Grumman F6F Hellcat, which became known as the “Zero Killer.” We kept up with the Joneses. We had to: Japan, an ally of Germany, was bent on conquering us. In the decades that followed we sustained our commitment to military research and testing. And spending. During the Cold War we strove to become the mightiest country on the planet.

We succeeded. We are so ahead of the Joneses, the disparity is staggering.

Shelby Foote argued the North won the Civil War with one arm, the other being used to conduct separate business, for example the Indian wars. I argue we won Desert Storm with one hand, defeating a powerful country, halfway around the world, in just 100 days, utilizing only a fraction of our resources. The disparity is staggering.

Maybe, just maybe, we can forego a new supersonic fighter jet, or the toppling of another regime, to make sure Americans who contribute to Social Security will be able to draw from it when they retire?

I asked my German neighbor, Eleanor, what she thought about all this, and her answer was interesting: “Thanks to the American presence, European countries maintain militaries that are skeletons of what they would otherwise be. The Americans keep the peace, so we don’t have to. Thank you! That’s how we afford universal health care.”

“And what about my Social Security, my retirement, my lifestyle?”

She gave me one of her stop-acting-like-a-turnip looks and said, “Write better novels, Stefan. Over that, you have control. Over the Next-Generation Bomber, you have none.”

*
The game company Zynga shut down Petville on Facebook. My pet Snyrgydd, who I adopted in order to play along with my daughter, died 1 January:

In lieu of flowers, the family requests you make a donation in Snyrgydd’s name to your local animal shelter.

*
What else.

Hugh Hefner got married again, to a gerl 60 years his junior. I don’t really have anything to say about that, except to observe that in order to follow his footsteps I’d have to wait six more years just for my own personal bimbo to enter the world. Her parents are probably still in high school.

Wendy sent me a bag of Taco-Flavored Doritos for Christmas. I ate them. It was a transcendental experience.

Finally, millions of Twitter followers were stunned when I backed away from the popular social media platform, and I think it’s only fair that I provide an explanation.

I know what you’re saying: I have only 1500 or so followers, how can millions be stunned? I don’t know, I just know that saying “1500 people were stunned” doesn’t have the same impact. To tell the truth, I think only about 15 of the 1500 akshully knew me.

Twitter wasn’t for me. I felt like a wallflower. I’ve backed away from Facebook too, from a cocktail party at which I was running out of things to say. Although Blogger is dead, it’s home. I’m going to sit at the bar like Lola at the Copacabana, faded feathers in my hair, and hope someone buys me a drink. I brought my micropoetry over from Twitter.

Perhaps, on the other hand, leaving Twitter is a mistake. Perhaps the trend to ever-shorter posts, to ever-smaller drams of contact and communion, serves the evolution of social media. Perhaps Blogger is merely a victim of natural selection, and Twitter is the result of speciation, a creature borne of the happy tryst between mutation and adaptation, the kind of which gave rise to the Octopus, the Proboscis Monkey, and the Tea Party. Perhaps writing “are” as “r” and “you” as “u” and “to” as “2” represent literary progress, the ascension to a higher plateau of compositional purity and elegance.

Parrish the thought!

January’s featured author at Drey’s Library is Wendy Russ.
Malala is out of the hospitable!