Urban Haiku

Winter walk to work, 
listening to a novel.
Death at a stop sign. 

*

Salt on the sidewalk, 
paw raised in the icy air.
Emergent silence.

The Five Best Books I Read This Year*

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahisi Coates
A thrilling extended essay on being black in America and the fallacy of whiteness—the best book I've read in years. The sentences are so beautiful as to be lessons in themselves. Coates's compassionate voice combined with not giving a fig who's made uncomfortable hit me with the same force that Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place did more than 25 years ago. 



Odd Girl Out by Elizabeth Jane Howard
My pal at the Total Femme turned me on to Howard's brilliant Cazalet Chronicles quintet a few years ago, and I've since moved on to several of her other novels about domestic life, class, and sexual dynamics in Britain. This is the best of the non-Cazalets I've read—a gripping, at times shocking story about a selfish young woman crippled by lack of love and about the damage incurred by her and on her after a married couple takes her in. Perfectly, devastatingly calibrated.


Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Not the first writer to interweave alternate paths a life might have taken, but the most accomplished I've seen at attending as much to the subtle psychological shifts as to the differing physical and circumstantial outcomes. A wily, moving tale of that infinitely fertile chemistry: England, war, and the 20th century. 




What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
The somber unspooling of a men's-room hookup between an American teacher in Bulgaria and a manipulative younger Bulgarian. Greenwell nails the pulse-driven momentum of a relationship that begins with sex and that develops into a stumbling two-step of neediness and unknowing. 



In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi

Coming to terms with her anger at her late-in-life trans father over his violence and abandonment when she was a kid is as big a task than accepting her as a woman, though it's often hard to separate Faludi's feelings about each—which ultimately seems to be the story she's telling: of dualities haltingly resolving into something close to wholeness. 


*Note: not all published this year (unlike many best-of lists). Also, I actually listened to all of these on audiobook, my preferred delivery method these days.

Flame

Last night before bed, I picked up a guttering votive candle on the coffee table to blow it out and practically fused my fingertips to it, it was so hot. The remnant of wick, flaming out of proportion to its size, had migrated to the edge of the liquid wax and was leaning against the blackened glass like a hepped-up thug smoking in an alley. 

I'd had no idea how hot it was and spent the next 30 minutes with my fingertips submerged in a bowl of ice water (“You’re soaking in it”). As a result, I wasn’t able to indulge in the nightly bedtime ritual I’ve come to look forward to for practically the entire day: puzzling through a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday New York Times crossword. The day of the week is important because the crosswords get harder as the week progresses and Monday through Wednesday are just too easy to be fun—or relaxing. 

Strangely, I can't think of a more relaxing way to end the day. These are sometimes puzzles I've been working on for a week or two. Staring at the same spot over and over, mentally trying out each letter of the alphabet on an incomplete syllable ("--bow, --cow, --dow, --eow . . . ?), straining to remember the name of an Ingrid Bergman character in a movie I've never actually seen (so much of cultural literacy is hearsay)—these are not frustrating practices for me but meditative.

Anyway, I couldn't do it last night because the fingers of my writing hand were burned. So instead I watched Charlie Rose interview Martin Amis, who as it happens is the stepson of Elizabeth Jane Howard, the author of the book I'm currently listening to, Confusion (the third novel in the Cazelet Chronicles). Both his latest book and the one by Howard are set during World War II—his a Holocaust novel, hers about an upper-class English family whose staid propriety gradually, through each book in the series, succumbs to cracks and reveals turmoil, uncertainty, betrayals and, in the case of one or two characters, unerring goodness. 

I've never read anything by Amis, but maybe I should, if only to honor this minor coincidence triggered by a singeing of my fingers that for one night kept me from digging up words.

One of the Free

Christopher Isherwood

The other day I started listening to an audiobook of Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood. 

Two recent events had put Isherwood at the top of my to-do list (well, three if I go back to last summer when my pal the Total Femme told me of her fondness for his writing; four if I go back to maybe a year and a half ago when D. and I watched Chris & Don: A Love Story, a documentary about Isherwood and his lover Don Bacardi). A couple of months ago, I watched Cabaret for the first time since college and was even more impressed than I was 30 years before (which was a lot). And just last week I finished listening to all nine of Armistead Maupin's terrific Tales of the City books—the original six plus the more recent trilogy he added on in this decade, beginning with 2007's Michael Tolliver Lives. 

I actually read Michael Tolliver a few years ago in book form and enjoyed it. This year when I was recovering from a detached retina and joined Audible.com, the first audiobook I bought was the follow-up to that one: Mary Ann in Autumn (2010). I went on to the final one, The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014), then circled back to the very first of the original six, which I'm embarrassed to say I'd never read. By the time I reached the end of those, I had to buy the audio version of Michael Tolliver and listen to what I'd already read on paper, because I now had all the characters' histories in my head that I didn't have the first time around.

At the end of that audiobook is an interview with Maupin in which he states his reverence for Christopher Isherwood (who of course lived openly as a gay man decades before it was widely acceptable), "a charming man who lived totally in the moment . . . . There's not a day that goes by that he doesn't inspire me in some way."

In Christopher and His Kind—a memoir in which Isherwood refers to his younger self as Christopher and uses "I" when looking back from his later vantage point—Isherwood writes of a German lover, Bubi, when he was first living in Berlin in 1929:

When Christopher left for London, Bubi pulled a cheap gold-plated chain bracelet out of his pocket—probably an unwanted gift from some admirer—and fastened it around Christopher's wrist. This delighted Christopher, not only as a love token but also as a badge of his liberation; he still regarded the wearing of jewelry by men as a daring act, and this would be a constant reminder to him that he was now one of the free.

Today as I type, I wear a rather substantial ring on the middle finger of each hand: on my right, a silver signet with my father's initials, of no great value (he didn't even wear it himself) but one he passed on to me years ago, before any of my fingers was even fat enough to fill it; on my left, a midcentury-style ring (or so it was described in the Provincetown shop where I bought it on New Year's Day 2013, having had my eye on it for five years), also silver, with a disk of green onyx surrounded by a thin gold rim—now nicked up from my bike accident six months ago, making it all the more beautiful to me. Hanging from my neck are two small silver baubles on separate chains. Until the accident, I had the thinnest of silver hoops through my right ear, a shiny parenthesis glancing my lobe; they took it out in the hospital and I never got it back. I have a small drawer full of pinkie rings, pendants, bracelets, chains, and more earrings (none of which I like as well as the one I lost). 

For a few years in the '90s, I wore studs in both my ears. It's incredible to me, looking back, that I could have been so bold—I who never had even one ear pierced till I was in my thirties. A student of mine once wrote a description of the writing workshop I taught; I was the unnamed teacher with "a diamond stud in his ear." (A diamond? I don't think so. Calling it cubic zirconium would have been a compliment.) The fact that that was the detail she seemed to notice most about me—the shorthand that sketched me for the world—was flattering and surprising.

I was always envious of my sisters' charm bracelets, jiggling parades marching around their wrists: trinkets, commemorations, gifts, pretty little things. Today I see men—straight and gay—wearing bracelets and wish I could pull that look off. I have as many of the things as Cleopatra but always give up. The rigid bands clink against the desk as I work and get in the way; the link bracelets fall down my skinny arms and halfway over my hands. 

Last month in Provincetown, I wanted to buy one of the tiniest ear studs I'd ever seen—a mere period without a sentence. It was on display with some other "singles" in a window, but I suspected my hole had closed up—something I confirmed when I got back home and tried to push through one of my old posts. I'd have to get it pierced all over again (which would actually be the third time). Maybe someday. 

In the meantime, I wear my rings, and the necklaces peeking from my collar. Constant reminders.

Just Books

Several years ago, I started a book group. This is remarkable because for years I'd resisted the idea of book groups, scoffed at them even: I'm done with English class. Why would I want to discuss the books I read? I want to read them. And everyone says no one really talks about the books in those clubs, it's just a social hour; if I were to join a book group, I'd at least want to talk about the books! (Wait . . . )

Then I found myself both not getting through as many books as I used to and wanting a little more sociability in my life, so I got, as I like to say when something like this happens, a bee in my bonnet. (I need a cool-looking alarm clock, so I get obsessed with alarm-clock shopping. Or it turns 95 degrees and I suddenly need linen shirts—so within 24 hours I have three linen shirts in my closet. My most recent bee: flannel sheets! I ordered them last night.)

I got the idea of hand-picking the members of the book group: a half dozen or so friends who are gay men, and we'd read gay books. Within a few weeks, we were having a potluck planning meeting at my place.

This turned into a very short-lived group. Here's what I remember reading: Faith for Beginners by Aaron Hamburger (about an American family with a gay son visiting Israel, which I think I liked well enough but don't recall very much about six years later); The Story of the Night by Colm Tóibín (about political intrigue and closetedness in Argentina of the early '80s, which I enjoyed more); The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard (about Edgar Allan Poe; I'd read a couple others of his, including the far superior Mr. Timothy, about Dickens's Tiny Tim as an adult); and the tediously sitcommy My Lucky Star by Joe Keenan (who happens to have been a sitcom writer, on Frasier).

By that time, my enthusiasm was already starting to dissipate. The discussion wasn't of a very high level or even long-lived, and frankly I realized that I wanted to pick all the books, which wasn't fair (I'd chosen only one of the above officially, but I think I exerted more influence, including veto power, than others, who were much more go-with-the-flow-and-pass-the-lasagna). I used the excuse of my parents' seriously failing health as a reason to put the group "on hold," and as excuses go, it was a pretty legitimate one. But I think I realized I'd been right about book groups all along, at least as they pertain to me. They're just not my thing.

I do kind of miss getting together with those guys, though. And I really miss reading as much as I used to, long before the group existed. I don't seem to have the time I once had, and I'm ashamed to admit I don't have the concentration. I lose patience with books quicker than before; now I often don't finish if I'm not into them. (I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing, but I rarely gave up on books when I was younger, so it's definitely a change in sense of responsibility.) I don't do Facebook or Twitter and spend very little of my downtime online, so I can't fully explain the shorter attention span. Perhaps it just pervades the culture and even I'm not immune.

A couple weeks ago, I had brunch with my friend C., an avid reader who I think has always considered me an avid reader (we know each other from an erstwhile gay writing group from the early to mid-'90s) because he's always asking me for book recommendations, and I do "present" like an avid reader, even now. Anyway, when I told him what I consider to be the paltry number of books I finished last year, he said, "Yeah, that's pretty bad." Which wasn't what I wanted to hear.

Part of the problem—and this has been going on since I came out of the closet almost 25 years ago (yay, finally this late bloomer can say a big number like "almost 25 years ago"!)—is that, with occasional exceptions, I have little patience with books that don't at least acknowledge that gay people exist. (That pretty much takes care of catching up with landmarks of world literature that I missed over the years, eh?) They just bore me, particularly of course contemporary literature. This stance of mine has holes all over it, I know—some stories simply have nothing to do with gay life through no deliberate avoidance on the author's part—but that doesn't change how I respond in the moment.

Would I have liked, for instance, Mentor: A Memoir (one of the books I forced myself to finish last year because my boss had lent it to me) better if the self-absorbed Frank Conroy suck-up who wrote it had mentioned a gay fellow writing student at Iowa or something? Probably not. (One thing that kept me reading was my memory of being a Frank Conroy admirer myself back in the day; I even met him and had him sign Stop-Time at a reading. Mentor made me thoroughly loathe him—which is actually fine, as I moved on from him years ago.)

Right about here, I was planning to list the books I finished and liked last year and the ones I didn't finish. (Of the latter group, I'll mention only the most surprising, the award-and-praise-laden Just Kids by Patti Smith, who made life in the East Village with Robert Mapplethorpe in the late '60s and early '70s sound positively Victorian; I became very skeptical very quickly.) But I've already gotten bored with that idea.

I did read a few really good books. Maybe that's all that matters.

Rainbows and Dust

Arthur Rothstein, Texas, 1936

Tonight I decided I didn't need to finish yet another so-so book. What sealed the decision was, of all things, a TV show—a rebroadcast of part 1 of Ken Burns's magisterial documentary The Dust Bowl, of which I'd previously seen most of part 2 when it aired in January. Riveted by the unstoppable tragedy, the dignity of its aged witnesses, the clear-eyed storytelling, with its sense of historical sweep and human consequence, I realized I was no longer interested in the rather inconsequential, padded, and self-involved contemporary memoir I was reading by Frank Bruni, a writer I otherwise admire. 

I expected Bruni to be a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize earlier this month, if not a winner (he was neither . . . this year) for his great New York Times columns in which, among other things, he determinedly hammers away on same-sex marriage and other gay issues. I loved his essay about his father's evolving acceptance of having a gay son:

"In the years before Mom died, I had my first long-term relationship, and I could tell that seeing me coupled, just like my brothers and my sister were, gave [my father] a new, less abstract way to understand me. I just wanted what they wanted. Someone special. 

"He welcomed the man I was with effusively. Took the two of us out to eat.

"Then Mom was gone, and all the parenting fell to Dad. He tapped reserves I’d never imagined in him. When I broke up with the man he’d been so effusive toward, he must have told me six times how sorry he was about that. It was a message—that he was rooting for my happiness, no matter how that happiness came to me."

But Bruni's memoir, Born Round, about his lifelong battles with weight and eating, doesn't have the feel of consequence that that single column has. So, thanks to The Dust Bowl, I'm not going to finish it.

Even the last book I read—courtesy of my old pal the Total Femme—felt more substantial than Bruni's: The Other Side of the Rainbow: With Judy Garland on the Dawn Patrol, an out-of-print sleeper by the surprisingly not bad writer Mel Tormé. The book—about the making, and unmaking, of Judy Garland's one-season-long TV show, which Tormé worked on—illustrates the frustratingly sad fate of an out-of-control addict with mammoth gifts who has not a single person in her life really looking out for her (including Mr. Mel Tormé).

I've been on a bit of a Judy Garland kick of late (which perhaps the Total Femme intuited), having seen the fabulous Broadway show End of the Rainbow last year as well as, more recently, Garland's underrated final film, I Could Go on Singing, in which she plays, wittingly or not, a spot-on version of herself in the last, frayed years of her downward spiral.

What all of this rambling adds up to is this: We all deserve to have someone looking out for us, whether a loving parent, the government, a colleague, or a perceptive friend.

That Sort of Thing

After reading a novel that was very well crafted and ultimately satisfying but not quite as page-turning as I'd hoped, I picked up one by another admired author, Life Class by Pat Barker. 

Having liked Barker's spare but powerful and beautifully rendered Regeneration trilogy, about World War I soldiers and survivors, I was shocked at how pedestrian, clichéd, and almost completely lacking in verisimilitude her more recent Life Class—also a WWI story—was. Honestly, the self-absorbed-artists-in-love first half could be a Lifetime movie set in the mid-1990s with very few alterations. 

                    "For what it's worth, I think he's still very much in love with you."

                        "Then he's got a bloody funny way of showing it."

That sort of thing.

I tried to stick with it once the plot moved to the war front, where the book admittedly improved in just about every way, but the first part had wasted so much of my time—which could have been used making me care about the characters—that I just couldn't muster the interest. Anyway, the Regeneration books covered the exact same territory so much better. Why bother?

What a delicious, chocolaty pleasure to now to turn to an Alan Hollinghurst novel. I've been reading him out of order, most recently his first, The Swimming-Pool Library (which I never blogged about; let's say for the time being that it was clearly the first novel of a great author who hadn't yet come into his own, which isn't to say I didn't like it). I've just started his third, The Spell, which is my fifth and last Hollinghurst until his next one comes out.

Here one of the characters, Alex, visits an ex, who is lying out in the sun wearing a thong:

Alex loitered beside him for a minute, unable not to look, hot-faced and haggard above the sprawl of what he had lost. . . . His eyes took in the blond down on the calves darkened with sun-oil, and the slumbrous weight of the buttocks with the tongue of lycra buried between them, and the arms pointing backwards like flippers . . . . 

Then there's the "hurrying greeny-black surface of the stream." Later, Alex "felt needlessly shy, as if warned at the beginning of a party of some worrying game to be played after tea."

That sort of thing. Each word a joy.

----------

D. and I have simultaneously started watching the BBC adaptation of Holinghurst's The Line of Beauty, starring none other than Dan Stevens, who plays Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey. What's left of an Alan Hollinghurst novel without Hollinghurst's incredible language and observation? A story, some characters, relationships. Perhaps more—we've only watched the first of the three episodes. Kudos to the BBC for tackling such forthrightly gay material, even if Stevens's smiley take on what in the book is a seriously horny sex-in-the-park scene is a little too "jolly good."

All in the Eyes

D. gave me the book The World of Downton Abbey for my birthday in September—which might be funny (see how the literarily mighty have fallen!) if it weren't for the fact that I've never been anywhere near as "literary" as people seem to think I am. (Example: At lunch the other day, a former colleague was telling me about her book group and how much she loved Democracy, the 1880 Washington novel by Henry Adams. "Have you read it?" No. "Oh, I really think you'd love it." Hmm, maybe. But what evidence have I given you that makes you think so? I'm not really drawn to Washington or political fiction, and I read mostly contemporary literature, albeit sometimes set in the past. By the way, did I like the much-lauded movie Lincoln? No, I thought it an endless, wonkish bore, as did D. Perhaps the subject of the future, contrarian post.)

Back to The World of Downton Abbey. The fact that I've read it might also be funny if it weren't such an interesting, gorgeously designed, and skillfully researched and written book (by Jessica Fellowes, niece of the show's creator, Julian Fellowes), about the history and sociology of the era and class divisions as much as about the show itself. Oh, and a book that happens to be about a TV series I'm so addicted to that I've seen most episodes at least three times.

For Christmas I received the book's sequel, The Chronicles of Downton Abbey, which is mostly tied into the third season (the first book covered the first two). It looks equally yummy, but I haven't explored much beyond the photos yet because I'm nervous that it might give too much away. (I already inadvertently heard two spoilers when I was in London in November, where the season had finished its run.)

One of the first book's insights pertains to one of my favorite characters, O'Brien—the lady's maid who is as loathsome as a badly overripe and discolored cheese, yet (in the third season) an increasingly, and strangely, sympathetic character, even as she plots revenge against her former ally, the footman-turned-valet Thomas. We're seeing more of her fear now as well as her sadness. She's becoming, for the first time within her downstairs world, a victim.

Siobhan Finneran and Rob James-Collier ( Carnival Film & Television Limited 2011 for Masterpiece)

"O'Brien moves almost seamlessly between floors; she is very good at her job, proud to be so, and her ease amongst both servants and family is a measure of this. Of all the servants, O'Brien is probably the best actor, showing only the face she wants her colleagues or her employer to see. Lady Grantham, after all, believes they are friends."

As for the actress who plays O'Brien, Siobhan Finneran, I agree with a comment in the same book by Rob James-Collier, who plays Thomas: "Siobhan is a fantastic actress to work with—you really learn from her. She's very measured and it's all in the eyes. In rehearsal you think there's nothing going on and then you see it on screen and you think 'wow—everything's happening.' "

A similar thing occurs when you watch an episode for the first time . . . and then for the third.

Laughter and Silence

Judy Dench as Ophelia, 1957 (Jimmy Sime/Getty Images)

If there's one path not taken that I'd choose if I had the chance, it would be to be involved in theater. I participated in a small way when I was a kid (and very briefly in college), and these days I've been lucky to see a few notable plays a year, but I think I would have enjoyed a career working in theater in some capacity. It seems to have a real sense of community that I sometimes find myself envious of.

This feeling arose again as I read Judi Dench's And Furthermore, which I finished tonight. It's not an autobiography (a point she underscores herself), more a collection of reminiscences and anecdote from her life as an actress. In fact, I read in the New York Times that it was assembled from transcripts of conversations with a friend and biographer, and that's exactly what it seems like: Judi Dench chatting, just talking. If you've heard her interviewed, she sounds exactly, but exactly, that way in this book. It's not great "writing," but it's worth the price just to have the amazing Judi Dench's voice residing in your head for however many days or weeks it takes you to read it.

If you lived in Britain from 1957 to more or less the present day, you could see Judi Dench onstage at least once or twice a year—that's how busy an actress she has been. It's of course partly a function of the difference between English and American theater, but I can't think of a single living American actor you could say that about.

As for the book, here's one passage I liked:

"On a film you have to sit and answer questions about what you think of the part, why you wanted to play the part, and I think that's none of the public's business. Why should you know the ins and outs of everything? You don't say to a dress designer like Betty Jackson, 'Why have you made a dress like that? Why did you cut the dress like that?' Why should the public know everything? The joy of the theatre is not really going and knowing that somebody had terrible difficulty playing this part, or why they did it; it is to go and be told a story, the author's story, through the best means possible. In any case, I never know why I've done something, it's for lots of reasons. I want to keep a quiet portion inside that is my own business and not anybody else's."

And these, the final words, at the end of the last chapter, "What Every Young Actor Needs to Know: Answers to Questions I've Been Asked Over the Years." For some reason, despite their simplicity and directness, they haunt me a little:

"What is the greatest reward of being an actor?

"Laughter if it's a comedy, silence if it's a tragedy."

Perfectly Good

I just finished A Perfectly Good Man, a novel by the gay British writer Patrick Gale, whom I discovered on one of my visits to London.

I’d previously read his book Rough Music, which I liked a lot. That one is a family story involving an adult gay son having an affair with his sister’s husband (revealed pretty early on, so this is only a semi-spoiler); his mother, who has early-stage dementia; a long-ago childhood vacation that became an incubator for parental adultery; a present-day return to the same spot, leading to a sweet and sexy love story between the gay son and a mysterious artist guy; and regular shifts in time.

A Perfectly Good Man moves back and forth even more—not only in time but also among quite a few characters. It’s another family drama, this time hinging in part on questions of faith and loss of faith, and is centered on the life of a minister, a married father of two, on the Cornwall coast, where Gale lives and most of his work seems to be set. It’s not as gay as Rough Music, but a peripheral character is a gay man, and the minister’s daughter, whose sexuality is kind of indeterminate throughout the story, ends up marrying a woman, which is nice and in fact one of the book’s pivotal events.

Gale’s strength is his mastery of structure, time, and perspective. A Perfectly Good Man (his most recent book) felt ever so slightly less compelling to get through than Rough Music, but darned if I didn’t close it pretty amazed at what he’d built and where he’d taken it. He even manages to make a unicorn reference work! (On that note, if you ask me what I thought of Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem, I’ll tell you I found it a moving invocation on a momentous occasion, but I could have done without the rainbows.)

Turning the Page

I’m going to try something to get myself unstuck—a condition that has various reasons but one result: no posts for a very long time. For a while anyway, I’m exclusively going to post comments on something I’ve read—a book, an article, some kind of story. (Maybe I’ll allow a movie or a play; they’re “read,” too, after all.)

I need the focus and (loose) strictures. If I end up veering off track and writing about my life or my family or my travels, so be it. As long as I can get myself back to putting sentences together for their own sake and mine, with no audience or expectations in mind—the original goal of this blog back in 2005—I’ll be satisfied.

It's Going to Take Some Time

King with Gerry Goffin and Paul Simon (right). 
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

I just finished Carole King’s new book, A Natural Woman. Yes, one of my “things” is biographies and memoirs about ’60s and ’70s singer/songwriters. This is among the best—it’s simply and cleanly written, with a friendly sense of humor and no pretension (except for a slight uptick in name-dropping toward the end, which is excusable because in her life she has so successfully resisted the empty trappings of stardom). It’s the story of a real journey, punctuated by both vulnerability (an abusive marriage) and conviction (motherhood, living much of her adult life close to the land, political activism).

And creativity—jeez. Her first big songwriting hit, the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow," came out when she was 18. And she’d already been writing songs for years (often forgotten: she didn’t write the words, even on most of Tapestry, until later in her career). She composed “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” in about a day when a producer asked her and her then-husband, lyricist Gerry Goffin, if they could come up with a song for Aretha Franklin with something like the title “Natural Woman” (this at a time, the late ’60s, when their songwriting star seemed to be on the descent). Her description of how humbling and thrilling it felt to hear Aretha sing it for the first time is a reminder that at some point cultural givens didn’t exist. And then they did—and will forever.

I enjoyed this book so much despite the fact that, I’m embarrassed to admit, I’ve never listened to Tapestry, one of the bestselling albums of all time, in its entirety.

One of the things that most struck me was that King became a star despite her ongoing resistance (for instance, going five years in the 1980s without recording when she was living in rural Idaho), but she became one nevertheless—on her own terms. That’s the element that’s in too short supply today.

In a chapter about her 2005 tour, she writes: “Why have I spent so much of my life pushing away from this thing I do that people seem to enjoy, and that I, too, enjoy, so much? Was it because I wanted to experience other things, other lifestyles, other adventures, other career paths? Are those such bad things to want? . . .

“It’s always been important to me to encourage the best in people, and music has been my principal instrument in doing that. And yet I kept pushing music away because I thought it was keeping me from having a normal life.
 

“At this moment I understand that for me, music is normal life.”

This realization (at least as written) comes when she’s 63 years old.

I go through a lot of handwringing about my own relationship to creativity (including what it’s taken me a long time to realize is my principal instrument—teaching). I’m a writer who spends most of his life not writing. Is that normal for me? Or am I just waiting for the next chapter?

Begin Agin?

If you glance over at my blog roll on the right, you’ll see something called Begin the Vegan, a very short-lived project I started when I went from vegetarian to vegan about two and a half years ago.

Ask me today what’s one of the things I’m most passionate about, among the most fun elements of my life, the subject that’s part of my consciousness pretty much every day, and being vegan—planning dinner, shopping for shoes, buying a rug, picking a shaving cream, and did I mention planning dinner? (I love to cook!)—would be at the top of the list. Yet I haven’t blogged about it since July 2010.

I knew it was perhaps overly ambitious to start a second blog when this one had just come back from a dormancy of 15 months (and has since endured another lapse of almost a year). But I was game to try, and for a few months it helped me articulate my feelings and discoveries about my dietary evolution—which have continued unabated since then (of course they’ve continued—they’re feelings!), though one wouldn’t know it. I just hate to think it appears I’ve lost interest.

What I’ve lost is the impetus, and the courage to start again with the very real possibility that I could stall once more. Then I’d have two sputtering engines in my literary driveway.

In the meantime, I might have written about a get-together with college friends a year and a half ago where I brought a delicious vegan cake I made in honor of our collective 50^th birthdays, and the first thing one friend said when she tasted it was “How many eggs are in this?” Or the next get-together with those friends earlier this year when I made the same cake (because one friend had missed the first gathering), and the cake was an embarrassing, damp-centered dud. But I bit my tongue and remembered Julia Child’s culinary admonishment from her fabulous memoir, My Life in France: Never apologize!

I could write about D., who has been nothing but accommodating as he himself has evolved to a mostly vegetarian diet since knowing me and a vegan-friendly (and appreciative) attitude toward my cooking in the last two to three years.

I could write about the fun (and frustrating—Candle Cafe, I’m talking about you) cookbooks and blogs I’ve discovered. (I’ve added a few of my faves to the roll here.) The things I’m willing to compromise on (ratcheting down to merely vegetarian when dining out with friends or as a guest at someone’s house, afternoon tea with D.) and the things I’m not (meat!). Or the fact that my sister and brother-in-law recently became vegan for reasons of their own and what it’s like to have compatriots in the family even as I try not to let others in the bloodline feel self-conscious about their own cooking, which I can still enjoy (see compromises above).

I could blog about all of this. But I haven’t even looked at Begin the Vegan in nearly two years, until today when I went there to see when my last post was.

So why am I blogging about it here?

New Yorker cartoon from NewYorker.com.

Smoke and Metal

"He was asking for memories, too young to know that memories were only memories of memories. It was diamond-rare to remember something fresh."

These are two typically beautiful and apt sentences from a novel I finished last night, The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (about whom I've written before). It's largely about memory and versions of a life (one life in particular, that of a World War I poet); the mystery of what we can never know about someone because we're at the mercy of what he or she chooses to reveal; and the secrets that the satellites of people around that person keep, which we're often powerless to pry open.

Here's another passage that rang so true to me. This scene takes place in 1967, outdoors in the shadow of a party; Paul has never been with a man before, and Peter has more experience. They're in their early twenties.

"He'd brushed against Peter uncertainly as he giggled; now Peter's hand was round his neck, their faces close together in the spidery light through bushes, their eyes unreadable, a huddle of smiles and sighs, and then they kissed, smoke and metal, a weird mutual tasting, to which Paul gave himself with a shudder of disbelief. Peter pressed against him, with a slight squirming stoop to fit himself to him, the instant and unambiguous fact of his erection more shocking that the taste of his mouth. In the fierce close-up and the near-dark Paul saw only the curve of Peter's head, his hair in silhouette and the ragged crown of bushes beyond, black against the night sky. He took his cue from his movements, tried to mimic him, but the sudden stifling violence of another man's wants, all at once, instinctive and mechanical, was too much for him."

It's been only a little more than four years, but D. and I already have different memories of the night we met, even argue about the date (easily—and often—provable thanks to calendars and journals, but still). What I was wearing, whether we actually danced that night or the next, when we kissed for the first time. I've written about it (not here but in an unpublished essay), and even I discovered—after I finished the essay—that I'd misremembered important details (specifically when D. first met my parents).

I'm not sure I can say how any of it really happened, what's metal and what's smoke.

So Runs the World Away

Thanks to Diablo for sending me the following poem by Mary Oliver, a resident, as it happens of Provincetown, where I recently spent a happy week and a half.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

***

I spent many hours with D. biking the trails in and around Ptown, including the magnificent Cape Cod Rail Trail, which we hope will someday extend all the way up the Cape to Provincetown. I haven't owned a bike of my own since I was a child but am on the verge of buying my first adult bike. This is thanks to D. and the roads we've ridden together over the last nearly three years.

While on the Cape, we had a very nice visit with a former grad school professor/writing teacher of mine and his wife. He retired a few years ago and moved up there about three years ago. I used to see him at least a couple of times a year at various social or literary occasions but hadn't talked with him at length since his move, so it was nice to reconnect. One thing I told him was that he was a big influence on my teaching, as, among many other things, I learned from him that it's okay to teach from notes, that no one will think less of you if you refer to them. In fact, I still write out notes before the first session of every workshop I teach, and later sessions if I'm teaching an essay I haven't taught before, but the interesting thing is that I refer to my notes less and less. It's the writing of them that imprints them.

One of the last times I spent time with my old teacher and his wife was at a Josh Ritter concert at the Birchmere, probably in 2006. Now in his late sixties, he's a huge Josh Ritter fan. As it happened, I had just downloaded Josh Ritter's new CD, So Runs the World Away, onto my iPod before my vacation. I was just listening to it the other day and was struck by its style, so different from his earlier, more classic singer/songwriter mode. It's kind of epic sea shanty meets art song. I need to listen to it more.
I started this post almost two weeks ago (through most of that last paragraph). And just tonight I bought a novel, Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, whose title reminded me of Josh Ritter's and then of this unfinished post.
The book I have to finish before starting that one is Rosanne Cash's memoir, Composed. I just finished a lovely chapter about six months she spent living in London at age 20 and 21, and that chapter ends on a note of wistfulness about friends and mentors she lost touch with over the years, some of whom she reconnected with later in moving and unexpected ways, some of whom died before she had a chance to.
I hope to see my teacher again the next time I'm passing through.

Where the Driveway Ends

Why has it been so hard for me to get back on track? Somehow my eight-week jury duty (with 22 people who, for the most part, I could not stand, hearing cases that were, for the most part, maddeningly repetitive and tedious, not to mention depressing) and my mother's fall (she's now almost fully recovered physically but much changed mentally) threw me off my blogging stride. The only way I'll ever get any words down is not to claim any continuity or structure for them.

I had one of NPR's much-touted "driveway moments" this evening when a story on Shel Silverstein came on All Things Considered just as I pulled up to D's house. I knew Silverstein wrote songs in addition to children's books (which, by the way, I never read as a child), but the only songs I knew he wrote were "The Queen of the Silver Dollar," on Emmylou Harris's great first album, Pieces of the Sky," and "I'm Checking Out," which Meryl Streep sings to amazing, triumphant effect at the end of Postcards From the Edge.

There's a new Shel Silverstein tribute album out, the subject of the NPR story, and who knew he also wrote those Top 40 songs of my youth "Sylvia's Mother" and "The Cover of the Rolling Stone," not to mention Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" and Marianne Faithfull's "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" (which I love and haven't thought about in years)?

I had to sit in the car and hear the whole interview with the album's producers. And who knows -- maybe I'll buy it. See, there's still hope for me after all.

_______

Illustration by Shel Silverstein from Where the Sidewalk Ends.