Reflections, Pool
Art vs. commerce is one of the themes of my work-in-progress and also the theme of this week and the next, where the job where I participate in commerce is subsidizing the job where I participate in art in what is known as a “staycation.” In plainer terms, I took two weeks off to work on my book and stayed home to do it. After two experiments with cute little towns upstate where an enterprising artist type offers a room in a garret, I realized I needed to be with my books. (“Can’t you just bring them?” asked a friend. No. They fill an entire case.) I also needed research libraries and I write to you from the Rose Reading Room at NYPL, having been earlier to the Frick Art Research Library where the book I wanted was offsite but did you know you could just register for a card with the Frick Art Research Library? I mean, it’s a research library, meaning, you can’t roam the stacks, and you have to put your belongings in a locker and write with a pencil and all the other restrictions but also . . . a quiet room in which to write in a mansion on 71st Street, somehow free.
But to take a little break, yesterday I visited Clinamen, an installation currently on view at the Park Avenue Armory. The artist is Céleste Boursier-Mougenot who, according to the flyer provided by the Armory, creates dispositifs – orchestrated environments that expand the notion of the musical score . . . using a wide variety of situations and objects to reveal their sonic potential and generate spontaneous, live, acoustic forms.”
This installation features “circular basins filled with water in which ordinary porcelain bowls, selected for their distinct timbre, drift freely and gently collide to produce chiming sounds.”
I entered the vast, echoey hall (this is why theater is bad here, in my opinion) of the Armory and waited quite a long time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and my ears to adjust to the sound. There are three deep pools in which the water is propelled by gentle motors and the bowls clang into one another. I thought, perhaps foolishly, that most people would be elsewhere on a pleasant Wednesday afternoon, but the large venue was quite crowded. Most people understood that what they were witnessing was an acoustical installation, which required oh, I don’t know, less gossiping about your daughter-in-law’s baby shower logistics and more listening. I stood up from my first pool position and walked to the second pool where at least the distracting conversation was too low for me to hear the details of it. But the third pool was just right.
I was reminded of the wind chimes that used to pong pong pong in Socrates Sculpture Park, stirred by breezes from the river. I also thought of the phrase found music. After settling in by the third people, where certain attendees had chosen to embrace the sound to the point of lying on the floor with their eyes closed, I could hear the echoes of the clangs from the bowls in the other pools. Because of the high ceiling in the Armory and the way the sound carried, it sounded like the church bells of a neighboring town. The soft collisions in the pools nearest me produced a noise that sounded more like chimes.
When the bowls reached an intense congregation, the sounds they produced most resembled a melody.
“Congregation” is a concept I came up with recently when asked to describe my work in progress. “A meditative history of one block in my neighborhood,” didn’t seem to be cutting it, even when I added, “The block functions as a microcosm of American history – the Puritans, the rise of the merchant class, the rise of public art.” (“But why that block?” someone asked. “Why not a block in, say, Ohio?” Some people like to dispute, I have realized.)
When the Halletts arrived at Hallett’s Cove, which forms the north end of the block, they were Puritans. By the time they died, they had become Quakers, a faith which has an entirely different concept of what constitutes a “congregation” – more along the lines of where Jesus says in the Book of Matthew “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” rather than being scolded from a pulpit by a minister telling you that you were born in sin and will probably spend eternity in Hell but better live a pinched, dour existence in the meantime, just in case.
The piano factory, which is in the middle of the block, produced pianos for the home, rather than the concert grands produced by the Steinway factory around the curve of the Hellgate. “Made by our family for yours,” was one of the mottos of the Sohmer piano factory, in the days when families would congregate around the piano after a meal to sing together.
And Mark di Suvero (whose studios are on north end of the block) and Isamu Noguchi (whose studios, on south end, are now a museum) designed the Socrates Sculpture Park, across the street from the former piano factory. Both of these contemporary sculptors were driven by the concept that art should be available to everyone, not sequestered, and that it should encourage congregation. Both men designed both playgrounds and sculptures for children to climb on.
Finally, the dog café, housed on the ground floor of the former factory, is where people came to congregate during the pandemic, when one of the many difficult aspects of life was that we were not supposed to breathe the same air.
I was reminded of this when I reluctantly left the pools of the Armory to return to the bright, shrill Upper East Side. The “please stand six feet apart” stickers were still visible on the sidewalk wrapping around the Armory. But inside, one was reminded that close proximity could sometimes produce a sound resembling a melody.
A letter to my Canadian publisher about last night’s World Series game
First of all, no. No, games do not usually last that long. In fact, they never last that long. An 18-inning game is in fact two games. This is unprecedented — a word sadly overused in our beleaguered times — but it is. I am sure you didn’t stay up to watch. At 11:24 my time, you texted to me: “These innings take forever. I am not even watching, but it is hard to go to sleep when it is tied.” I was already asleep, and the ding on my phone woke me up. It is impossible to watch the game in the U.S. without a subscription to Fox Sports, and I do not have one, for various reasons.
Later in the night, I woke up. Not at three — “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald — so say it was two o’clock in the morning, when I checked my phone (sleep experts say you should not do this, but perhaps this is why I am so very very tired) and the game was still tied.
“Nobody on, nobody out,” I mumbled to nobody. I rolled over and went back to sleep. Perhaps the empty room appreciated the literary reference to my long-unpublished novel, Nobody On, Nobody Out, my second novel, and the first novel for which I had a literary agent.
So my second novel was what should have been my first novel, an autobiographical coming-of-age. (Instead, my first novel, Cooder Cutlas, was a rock and roll on the Jersey Shore story, which I believe if I’m not mistaken is a story quite in vogue this week?). So, Nobody On, Nobody Out follows a weekend in the life of a teenaged girl in a motherless, baseball-obsessed family. Our heroine, Alison, an aspiring sportswriter, is playing Helena in her school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream while also following the progress of her team, the St. Louis Browns, in the American League Championship Series playoffs. (The St. Louis Browns were a real team who moved to Baltimore in 1953 and became the Baltimore Orioles. Similarly, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958. You do not need to know this, except that it is something that can be known.)
At the time, the American League had a rule that a game must end at midnight. Because of that, and various rain delays, the game in the novel lasts an entire weekend. I wrote this novel on a typewriter in my sister’s spare bedroom in Philadelphia and when it was finished I mailed the paper manuscript to an agent at the William Morris Agency who had expressed interest in my writing career. He did this by placing his hand on the manuscript for Cooder Cutlas and intoning, like a bailiff in a courtroom, “I think this is a good book.” (Dramatic pause.) “I don’t think this is the best book you will ever write.”
He said the same thing about Nobody On, Nobody Out, eerily predicting the long and thankless road my writing career would take. I did get an another agent for that novel, however, and over the course of a year gathered a soft, leafy pile of rejection letters, full of praise but ultimately rejecting the work as “too YA.” (This was well before YA became a desirable thing — it was still something of a publishing ghetto at the time.)
Nobody On, Nobody Out, anyway, Netta, was inspired by a 1974 game between the New York Mets and my beloved St. Louis Cardinals which lasted 25 innings and lasted seven hours and four minutes (don’t be impressed — I had to google this.) It set records in various ways. I did not stay up to listen to it; it was a school night. But my father did. Of course my father did. We were awakened from time to time by the sound of his hand slamming against the counter when a play did not go as he wished. This was the soundtrack to my childhood.
So no, Netta, games do not always go on that long. But yes, they are always that slow. When I say “slow,” I mean leisurely. This is why baseball is the preferred sport of poets. Baseball allows you time to think. Not the kick-kick-run-run of soccer (or “football”) or the war-game-meets-planning-committee bluster of American football. It is a strategic. It is a duel. It is bucolic, going back to agrarian roots.
“It is summer,” wrote William Carlos Williams. “It is the solstice/the crowd is/cheering, the crowd is laughing/in detail/permanently, seriously/without thought.”
Another poet, Robert Frost, wrote “Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.”
The intervals are the tough things, don’t you think? We are in a tough interval as a national here down south, and I think those of us who are not enamored by the frenzy of other sports find solace in the leisurely pace. It reminds me of Jordan Baker’s line in The Great Gatsby: “I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” Similarly, baseball is intimate, and the busy sports don’t afford you any privacy, any time at all to spend with your thoughts.
And there is nothing more beautiful in the sporting world than Dodger Stadium as the sun goes down.
Pentimento, Palimpsest, can I have a word?
“Palimpsest” (according to the American Heritage dictionary I received for Christmas when I was 12 years old) means the following:
“A written document, typically on vellum or parchment, that has been written upon several times, often with remnants of earlier, imperfectly erased writing still visible, remnants of this kind being a major source for the recovery of lost literary works of classical antiquity.”
The same dictionary has no definition for “pentimento”, so I went to the internet, which told me it is defined as “the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over.”
Both words sort of mean the intrusion of an earlier work into the current one. Sort of. But is there a similar word for theater?
I have reflected on this recently as I have watched two performances of Shakespeare – the Ralph Fiennes/Indira Varma production of MACBETH in Washington, D.C. last month, and a performance of TWELFTH NIGHT by the Axis Theater Company earlier this weekend. I’ve wondered if there was a word for the theatrical déjà vu one experiences during a new production of a play you have seen numerous times before. I went to TWELFTH NIGHT knowing I had seen the play several times, most notably the “star-studded” production at Shakespeare in the Park (Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum, Gregory Hines, John Amos) decades ago, but, as often happens now, during the performance, glimpses of other productions emerged from my memory.
There was a production where all the characters were dressed in swinging 60’s attire, and the “hey nonny nonny” had a British Invasion feel; another one at one of those mildewy Village theaters – maybe the Pearl Rep? — which long ago lost its lease but which featured a particularly fine “make me a willow cabin at your gate” speech by an actress I’ve otherwise entirely forgotten.
So is there a word for this?
And never mind MACBETH. Save one prominent Lincoln Center production which I did not complete, most of the productions of MACBETH I’ve seen have been cobbled-together second-floor or church basement productions, all overshadowed by the first MACBETH I ever saw. I saw it six times because I was working at my first job in the outside world, as an usher in the local repertory theater when I was fifteen years old. We were also reading MACBETH in my Shakespeare: Tragedy class (yes, there was also Shakespeare: Comedy) and MacBeth himself was kind enough to visit our class and tell us that the curse of the Scottish Play was real, that there had been a fire at the theater that had destroyed all the costumes.
MACBETH is a good play for high school; it has themes and witches and birds, a tragic flaw and an inevitability. And it is short – too short, some say. Earlier this spring, I saw MACBETH: AN UNDOING at Theater for a New Audience, which presents (sort of) MACBETH from Lady M’s point of view, gender-flips the madness and produces so much blood (and I was sitting so close) that I could at one point hear it dripping from a slain character onto the stage floor.
At the talkback afterwards, the playwright and the Lady M floated out the concept that the MACBETH we know is a heavily edited one. So much occurs offstage. Lady M scolds MacBeth “had I so sworn as you have” when we have never seen him swear to anything.
In the production I saw in D.C., Ralph Fiennes was excellent, as excellent as Kenneth Branagh when I saw him in HAMLET in Stratford-upon-Avon. I am floating out MY theory that these two, roughly contemporaries, were raised on Monty Python and FAWLTY TOWERS and found a weird, cruel humor in their dark stories that made their characters seem strangely familiar.
HAMLET, now. It is for that play that I need the word – the word like palimpsest or pentimento. I have seen so many productions of it that I can only reproach myself for not keeping better records. My obsession with HAMLET is a subject for another time. But in the meantime, I would like a word.
Basic Grandeur
In 2023, my New Year’s resolution was to take my lifelong flirtation with poetry, which I have written about elsewhere, into the next step. I needed to take a poetry writing class. I must have found my first class on Facebook. It was run by a nice woman who used to run a writing group in St. Louis, and much of the group were her St. Louis former cohorts. The class got me over the first hurdle, which was to write poems and share them with strangers. But it was too easy, so my next class was with the 92nd St. Y with an instructor who I won’t name because I found both her and her approach very chilly.
By now I was Goldilocks – too easy, too hard – so I submitted a few poems again to the 92nd St Y, to Advanced Poetry with Maya C. Popa because I wanted to work with her. I never expected to be accepted. But I was. And she was just right. I typed “write” the first time – Freudian, perhaps, but not a slip.
Then I went to podcasts. The Slowdown is a podcast hosted currently by Major Jackson, formerly by Ada Limon, which begins with a rumination from the host on anything going on in his/her/their life, followed by a poem. These podcasts are pleasant, but I need to hear a poem more than once. Which is what happens on Poetry Unbound, hosted by Padraig O Tuama, who reads the poem, reflects on it at length, and then reads it again. The New Yorker Poetry podcast hosted by Kevin Young is also on heavy rotation in my podcast feed. (Do people still say “heavy rotation”?)
Back to classes: I’ve had several more with Maya C. Popa, but I am a flawed student. I am conflicted about sharing my poetic work (“work”!), I don’t know how to revise, I don’t know some of the terminology my classmates are throwing around , sometimes I freak out and bail, and this is a run-on sentence. But now I’m hooked.
Many years ago, for April is Poetry Month, I posted a fragment of a poem, along with the title and name of the poet, on my Facebook page. I decided this year to do this again, with the proviso that I only highlight work by living poets. (Someone forgot to tell me that Eavon Boland had died.)
I front-loaded this endeavor by stockpiling two weeks’ worth of snippets of poems. I started with poets I “knew,” in the sense that I had met them at a writer’s conference, or heard them read, or generally been in a place where for a pulse of a moment (poetic?), we breathed the same air. So this included Patricia Smith, Kathleen Graber, A. Van Jordan and Jon Riccio, all of whom I encountered at Vermont College of Fine Arts. They were followed by Poets of Queens – Jared Harel, Jared Beloff and Oleana Jennings. And then people I’d encountered in magazines, or whose books I’d purchased.
The selection of the day was not dictated by any circumstances of the day. For example, in the past , I have chosen a poem reflecting my sister’s interests on for her April birthday. And many worthy poems were not included simply because I could not find an engaging snippet that could be easily extracted from the larger work.
As they say in baseball (also an April event), there’s always next year.
The Parks Department Removed the Errant Trees
This morning, as I set the breakfast eggs to boil, I heard the chatter of men outside my kitchen window. My kitchen window faces on to the stem of the “H” of the building in which I live, a kind of courtyard-cum-shrubbery landscape lovingly tended by my neighbor Rose and the various women she gently persuades into to help her, a group I call the “gardening brigade,” a group to whom I do not add my skills, but I have none in that regard.
These men were no friends of Rose’s. They shuffled against the cold with the air of aimless purpose of men brought together to do A JOB. In this case, the JOB was to undo a rather stupid earlier job, namely, to remove a series of four trees planted in the middle of the sidewalk on 29th Street.
You may have read about these trees here or here or here.
I saw them last Thursday, when I ventured out to the drug store upon feeling the swelling of my glands. I knew a cold was coming on and I wanted to get provisioned before I was confined by it. I stopped to take a photo of this sapling planted in the middle of the concrete sidewalk, a location of doom, and then set off to get medication, thinking no more of it until I ran into my neighbor Hannah, who asked me about the trees. I knew nothing more about the trees than any other hapless resident but pointed out that in a few years when the trees grew (if they were permitted to grow), their roots would begin to disrupt the sidewalk, as has already happened on 31st Avenue, in particular the sidewalks abutting the Trinity Lutheran Church.
Then I went home to sniffle into the New Year.
From my laptop on my couch, I typed out my year in reading list for 2023. It struck me as scant. There were many, many books I did not finish last year. I did not finish several poetry books — a few by friends — because it takes me forever to read a book of poetry. I managed the two by Ada Limon only because I was in a wonderful class held by Soapstone where I was easily the least poetry-literate and had to cram to keep up.
I don’t see how a book of poetry can be a page-turner. I’ve never understood the Sealey Challenge — a book of poetry a day for an entire month. A single poem a day would be a lot for me. I am a very slow reader of a poem, and books taken even longer, because I need to think about how the poems are in conversation with one another. Or maybe I am still a novice. Or maybe there is no maybe about that.
Other reasons I did not finish — I was reading the book for research and did not need to know all the particulars of, say, the life of John Winthrop, or the entire history of the coffee industry. Or at least I could skim it, for my purposes. And sometimes I didn’t finish a book because the book did not compel me to finish. There are more books out there awaiting attention.
So without further ado — the list for 2023. Italics means I reviewed it somewhere, and bold means it was a favorite.
Nonfiction
Crying in H Mart – Michelle Zauner
What Are You Looking At – Will Gompertz
Jersey Breaks – Robert Pinsky
Cary Grant’s Suit – Todd McEwen
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
Voice First – Sonya Huber
Love and Industry – Sonya Huber
How to Kill a City – Peter Moskowitz
Women We Buried, Women We Burned – Rachel Louise Snyder
Old in Art School – Nell Painter
The Third Rainbow Girl – Emma Copley Eisenberg
The Slip – Prudence Peiffer
Fires in the Dark – Kay Redfield Jamison
Is There God After Prince – Peter Coviello
The Red Parts – Maggie Nelson
St. Marks is Dead – Ada Calhoun
Fiction
The Girls in Queens – Christina Kandic Torres
Babel – R.F. Kuang
Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion – Bushra Rehman
The Cloisters – Katy Hays
Boundless as the Sky – Dawn Raffel
Forbidden Notebook – Alba de Cespedes
The Only Woman in the Room – Marie Benedict
Take What You Need – Indra Novey
Yellowface – R.F. Kuang
Anatomy of a Blackbird – Claire McMillan
All Among the Barley – Melissa Harrison
Normal Rules Don’t Apply – Kate Atkinson
I Have Some Questions for You – Rebecca Makkai
One Woman Show – Christine Coulson
Now is Not the Time to Panic – Kevin Wilson
The Wren, The Wren – Anne Enright
Mysteries
A Time to Kill – Anthony Horowitz
The Twelfth Night Murder – Anne Rutherford
The Bandit Queens – Parini Shraff
The Locked Room – Elly Griffiths
The Stranger Diaries — Elly Griffiths
Poetry
The Gospel According to Wild Indigo – Cyril Cassells
The Hurting Kind – Ada Limon
The Carrying – Ada Limon
I hope when I repeat this post in 2024 that I will report that I have read more entire books of poetry, cleared some of my research shelf, and banged out a draft of dog cafe. Until then, maybe all your trees remain where you plant them!
Kicking and Giving
I have now completed the second week of my fully-remote life. My previous job had a one-day-a-week-in-the-office policy for those of us in IT. For some reason, although I was in the research library, I was umbrellaed under IT. (My inability to master layout in the upgraded version of WordPress tells you allyou need to know about me working in an IT department.) When I asked my boss why the library was IT, his reply was “Gotta put us somewhere,” which effectively sums up what led me to leave that job — the lack of engagement, the listless dismissal of legitimate inquiry. The loneliness. In my new role, I am back to research umbrellaed under business development, which sets the world right again, but it is fully remote. Although this is only the difference of one day a week, it is a mindset which sets the mind reeling. To ward off the loneliness, I have committed myself to Pilates and knitting, two things at which I will be terrible for the foreseeable future, but both of which are within walking distance (there are two knitting groups that meet at different bars. I know one stitch.)
And then daily, I take long walks and write in a coffee shop. There is Chateau le Woof, of course, but nearer to home, so that I can get a walk-and-write in before logging on to work, there are three cafes: Under Pressure, Madame Sou Sou and Astoria Coffee. Under Pressure has a high-tech, sleek European vibe, a business-district-transformed-from-its-industrial-past-near-a-branch-of-the-Guggenheim-and-a-W-hotel kind of Europe. Madame Sou Sou has an Old Town European vibe, a cafe-on-a-narrow-street-full-of-quaint-shops-that-are-always-closed-recommended-by-the-landlady-at-your-AirBnB kind of Europe. Astoria Coffee has no European vibe at all. Extremely small even by NYC standards, it is resolutely Astorian, patriotically displaying on its limited wall space art photos of Astoria taken by local photographers.
But it is at Under Pressure where I set my first scene.
Despite its only-in-town-for-fashion-week interior, its clientele is mainly Greek and mainly working class. There is outdoor seating where you can watch the elevated train go by, or watch people line up to order gyros from the Greek on the Street food cart, or watch a traffic cop strolling down the avenue looking for victims. Under Pressure’s employees are Greek,and if their highly amused reactions at my attempts to greet them in their native tongue are any indication, no amount of living in Astoria will help my accent. I was sitting outside with my coffee and my notebook, earbuds in but podcast off. Three men were seated behind me, Queens natives by their accent, contractors by their conversation.
Guy on phone: “Look, I told you I needed you to have the bathroom done by the end of the week . . . that ain’t my problem. . . do what you gotta do. Come in early, stay late, get it done.”
I returned my focus to my to-do list, writing a list of what needed to be written, which is about all the writing I’ve done during the job transition. I heard a voice say “She’s not friendly,” and a moment later a man walked by, his Shiba Inu on a leash trotting alongside him.
Warning: the language below is foul but accurately recorded.
The first man said, “What the fuck! Not friendly!”
The second man said, “The fuck bring it out in public for if it’s not friendly.”
The third man said, “I’ll kick that fucking dog.”
At this point, I pulled out my earbuds and turned around.
The first man at least looked abashed. “Didn’t think you could hear with those things in.”
I explained that the Shiba Inu is a loyal-owner breed, until a few exchanges compelled me to stop. The second man muttered “Shiba Inu,” like it was a new obscenity to welcome into his lexicon. The dog kicker said “I got a pit bull. He don’t like people, I don’t take him outside.”
I held up my palm in the universarl signal for “I will now exit this conversation” that in this case meant “I have no wish to play the extra in a community theater production of Goodfellas.”
Later in the week, I sat at Madame Sou Sou with my coffee and notebook writing about the Under Pressure encounter when I found myself within earshot of a coffee date, a young American man, a young European woman, awkward (“I like your shoes”) and endearing. He explained that he would spend the next day at a “Friendsgiving” and I happened to lift my head in time to see her tumble the phrase in her mind, extrapolating from her familiarity with “Thanksgiving” as a North American holiday to ask “What is a ‘giving’?” .
As he explained, I entertained the idea of a “giving,” a celebration where people gather out of choice, not obligation, not freighted with travel rushes and mandatory dishes, expectations, disappointments, grudges, too much stuffing, stuffing of everything.
So, my friends, I wish you a good giving. (But no kicking.)
Is there a place that means a lot to you?
Yesterday I conducted the second of my readings/workshop at Chateau le Woof. It was, New York-famously, the seventh consecutive Saturday of rain, so my expectations of attendance were low. Who would venture through more sogginess to attend a reading of a work-in-progress advertised by an admittedly cute but somewhat vague flyer?
Yet, people came. One was my friend Tess, who I met at the VCFA conference last August, her friend Hannah, two kind neighbors, and a woman who I met in the most interesting manner. This work-in-progress has been a work-in-progress, as I shift and distill its focus from so many tantalizing possibilities. Initially, I began visiting the Chateau le Woof (aka “the dog cafe”) just after the vaccines were rolling out, in the late spring of 2021. I was privileged enough to be able to work from home, but also stir-crazy enough to need to be somewhere other than my home, with other people, yet not indoors. The dog cafe, an indoor-outdoor space, was perfect. I reflected on how we had quarantined ourselves during this pandemic, but during previous epidemics, New York City had quarantined the sick on the islands surrounding Astoria — Roosevelt Island, previously known as Welfare Island and before that Blackwell’s Island, had been home to hospitals, jails, poorhouses and a notorious lunatic asylum. North Brother Island had been home to a tuberculosis hospital. Hart Island was a potter’s field begun after the Civil War and in active use during the height of the pandemic, where graves were dug for the unclaimed dead by the unhappy residents of Riker’s Island.
I still have a draft of that chapter — “Exiles of the Smaller Isles” — but realized I could not use the background research I’d done on Typhoid Mary. She was sentenced to life on North Brother Island, not in the tuberculosis hospital (where she worked as a lab assistant) but in her own small cottage from which, in the imagination of novelist Mary Beth Keane in her novel FEVER, Mary falls asleep to the sound of the rushing currents of the Hellgate, a rapid, still-dangerous stretch of the East River between Ward Island and Astoria. FEVER is an excellent if bleak novel detailing the options of an unmarried immigrant woman at the end of the 19th century. At one point, the caretaker on North Brother Island points out to Mary that her life in her tiny cottage with her little dog, however lonely and powerless, is still much better than some have it.
My favorite of these books was TYPHOID MARY: AN URBAN HISTORICAL which was surprisingly hard to get a hold of, considering its author, Anthony Bourdain. It is top-of-the-game Bourdain, scathing and snappy, but I had to get it on Kindle, because it may be out of print. So it was not among the stack of books I took to the closest Little Free Library. I deposited them and at the same time was delighted to see that the small wooden box held a copy of UNCOMMON GROUNDS, a history of coffee, which was on my list of books I needed for research.
Another woman browsing the Little Free Library eagerly grabbed ALL the Typhoid Mary books, with such enthusiasm that I tilted my head at her. She explained that she was an epidemiologist with the New York City Department of Health.
“So . . . how was your pandemic?” I asked.
She attended the reading, along with her friend, another epidemiologist.
I started keeping this blog such a long time ago that I forget my own logline sometimes, which ends with “champion of the chance encounter.” This was one, if ever there was one.
Maybe for the dog days, a collage, a prose poem
I find the last month of the summer a hard one, I find all holidays are hard when everyone has others. “We always go to my cousins at the lake house,” a woman sighs in my office elevator. “It gets bigger every year, with all the babies, And Aunt Barb.”
The same woman just wept in the Weight Watchers meeting. “It won’t be Thanksgiving without Aunt Barb’s blackberry pie!”
My therapist reminds me, “Don’t say ‘everyone.’ You don’t know ‘everyone.’” She also says “make plans.” Even though all those others at the lake house just go. They are not here to make plans; they will be back after two weeks, say their out of office emails. They don’t plan, they didn’t plan to lose their family so young, they do not need to seek gatherings. They bang pots and pans to keep the deer away from the plumpening blackberry bushes. Aunt Barb prefers to quilt on the screened porch; it is too hot to knit.
Make plans. Like the other doctors say ‘lose weight, don’t eat carbs.’The professor born in Hollywood told me that to succeed in Los Angeles “You have to look a certain way.” Her hand, ringed but not lacquered, rested on my screenplay, unread, un-even-so-much-as-ruffled, why bother? since its author was so very ruffled.
Her eyes sweeping me from head to foot in case I miss her meaning, sweeping from my forehead scars to my feet which can’t bear stilettos.
Make plans. No carbs. You don’t know ‘everyone.’ Or, in that regard, ‘anyone.’
In England they say “the summer hols” to indicate this time when everyone is away and if they have made plans, well . . . looks like you were not included. Even though I don’t know everyone, even though I’m exiled from the California beauty fray. Even though stilettos can’t bear the weight of me, even though I lack an Aunt Barb, the last month is as tart-tough as a blackberry pie with those seeds, those seeds that stick in your teeth forever.
Make My Heart Come All Undone
I was in San Sebastian when I took this photo.
I was in San Sebastian, with its endless beauty and tranquil charm, its plentiful pintxos and varying skies, its cute little shops that are closed for so many hours of the working day that you wonder how they stay in business until, after a day or two, you stop wondering that, you stop thinking like an American, focused on profit and how to maximize it, and start thinking more than a San Sebastian, focused on how to enjoy the life you have been given.
A few days ago, I walked across the bridge from the Old Town into Gros. Once of the first things I saw, beyond the vast and unbeautiful performing arts center, was a surf shop. “Surf San Sebastian!” encouraged a t-shirt adorned with little fishes. Sweet. Then a surfer walked past me, clad in a wet suit, carrying a surfboard. Then another surf shop. Then another surfer. I crossed the boulevard and sat on the wall by the beach, and watched the whole bay of them, out on the waves, whatever the collective noun for surfers is. Communion? A communion of surfers, paddling, leaping and falling for just a few possible moments of transcendence.
I watched them for a long time, my heart a precious thrashing thing. I have always loved surfers, which is strange for a stout ungraceful girl from the land-locked midwest. And I have always loved surf music. Dick Dale and Jan and Dean, yes, but especially the Beach Boys. Even I found this odd, in my odd adolescence. My stepsister, captain of the pompon squad, fashioned a sprightly dance routine to “Be True to Your School” for the halftime entertainment of the Kirkwood Pioneers, but I preferred the slower darkness of “In My Room” and “Surfer Girl,” which is neither a tribute nor a love song, since it mentions no actual qualities of the girl in question, but masks a darkness beneath its kind melody, like a bloodthirsty cradle-will-fall kind of lullabye: “Little surfer, little one/make my heart come all undone . . .”
Sometimes in my teenage years I would select this album, “Endless Summer” (even its title a blend of promise and threat), from my collection of Springsteen and Costello, La Traviata and Beethoven’s Ninth, and weep into the false sunshine of the hideous yellow shag carpet my stepmother had chosen to adorn the girls’ bedroom. I heard the shadow in the sunshine before Brian Wilson’s mental problems became public knowledge, before I came to terms with the fact that I would have to reckon with my own on my own, since my parents considered them little more than adolescent indulgence.
And this is as far as I got in my musings before I returned to my budget pension on the boulevard above the little glove shop that was never open, so I couldn’t buy my sister the pair of driving gloves I saw in the window. I returned to my stark room and saw the stark news.
I have been in Spain for ten days now and there have in that time been two mass shootings in the United States. This most recent slaughter of children is covered differently here. There is no braying about the right to bear arms, no hypocritical clucking over “mental health,” no admonishments not to “politicize this tragedy” for those whose politics help these tragedies to occur, but no weepy hand-wringing, either. The latest news from the Estados Unidos is presented at most with a raised eyebrow, but in a straightforward manner, the footage shown between footage of the war in Ukraine and some incident in Brazil, the latest development from another country of violence.
System of a Poet
by guest blogger Hattie Jean Hayes
Hattie Jean Hayes is writer and performer of many things, as well as a poet, but I asked her to write a guest post about her submission strategy, since she has such a successful method, far from the “dreamy, impractical” stereotype. Although I am behind on my posts for April is Poetry Month, Hattie was gracious enough to share some of her tips with my readers,
I didn’t begin submitting my work “in earnest” until February of 2021 when I set a goal of submitting a piece of writing every day. By the end of that month, I’d logged 32 submissions on the calendar. That “sprint” broke me of my anxieties or reservations around submissions, and I continued submitting through the rest of the year. My year-long goal was to see 12 pieces of writing accepted for publication; a total of 21 were accepted. I’m on track to surpass that number in 2022. If you’re trying to challenge yourself for a single month or grind on submissions all year, you can use these practices.
1. Inventory
I use two tools to inventory all my creative projects: Google Sheets and Notion. I use a spreadsheet titled Creative Project Dashboard to log my in-progress and completed projects, including short stories, novels, essays, scripts, parody songs, original musicals, and poems. Once I begin working on something, it’s allowed to be recorded here – if something is just an idea, it stays in Notion.
Every category of project gets a different sheet, and every sheet has different columns. My stories and essays, for example, get these columns: title, status (in progress, complete, awaiting feedback, editing), synopsis, length, and where I’ve submitted it. The poems get a similar treatment, with the synopsis column replaced with a “spawn point” signifier, so I can remember if something was first drafted during NaPoWriMo, a workshop, etc.
Inventorying my work allows me to track where I’ve sent things, and it means no project is forgotten. There are hundreds of items listed in my document, and when I’m putting together a submission for a journal that will review five or six pieces, it’s helpful to have a list of all my work, so I can say “Wait! I haven’t sent that one out in forever and it totally fits this theme!”
I log all my projects in Notion, a note-taking app/website similar to Evernote. Just use whichever productivity app you’re likely to actually use. I like Notion because I can easily create and move different “pages” in that dashboard. I keep a list of ideas for each category of project, and I put early drafts of the projects themselves in Notion. I really like the flexibility to use dashboards in Notion to track where I am with revisions, or record a bunch of feedback from a workshop and see it at a glance. This is not an ad for Notion, I just like it!
My Notion also has lists of all my accepted and published work, so when these pieces go live, it’s easy to copy and paste the live links onto my website. I have a page in Notion where I record third-person biographies of various lengths since this is something you need to have on hand for submissions.
2. Research
I don’t rely on Submission Grinder or Duotrope to find and record submissions, only because I find it overwhelming. Sometimes I use the aggregators on ChillSubs.com or in Submittable to look for open journals, but that’s usually when I have a specific piece that hasn’t found the right home, and I need to expand my view a little.
My primary means of finding places to submit are social media. I’m in a submission group on Facebook that introduces me to a lot of new journals, and I use Twitter’s bookmarks feature to flag journals I want to read and submit to.
I have a bookmarks folder on my browser for lit journals, and when I make a new bookmark, I name it “SUBMIT XYZ TO [JOURNAL NAME]” so I’m not confused about the bookmark later. If there’s a journal I’m eager about, and the submission window isn’t open, I set a calendar reminder – with the name of the piece I want to submit – for the day submissions open.
I don’t think you need to be a devoted fan of a literary journal to submit to it, but I do think you should get a feel of the tone and some of the published work. I think I’m most successful when I’m mindful of how my writing will fit a particular journal’s readership. My “best” writing isn’t always the best for the job.
3. Submit
This is probably the most customizable part of the process. When it comes to actually submitting, YMMV! Do you like month-long “sprints” where you send work out every day, or even shorter, day-long marathons? Do you want to fill your calendar with reminders of submission windows, and submit as they open up? Or are you going to focus on one piece of writing, and shop it around until it’s snapped up?
Whatever works for you is good! Make sure that you follow guidelines about submission formatting, and respect any rules around simultaneous submissions. Consider creating a document like mine for short bios/publishing history.
4. Index
Indexing your writing is just inventorying, again. Once you’ve submitted a piece, index the places you submitted to. There was one poem I submitted to 40 different journals in 2021. By the time it got accepted, I had 9 journals still considering it, and it was so handy to have a list of journals that needed to receive that sweet, sweet withdrawal email.
Log your kudos: were you nominated for a prize? Did your mentor say something complimentary about the piece? Put it in there! If you decide to stop submitting a piece while you revise it, make a note about your different drafts. Once you place it, you’ll want to remember the “before” and “after” so you can see what changed. And if you decide to axe any pieces, consider indexing them into a “graveyard” where they can be cannibalized into new writing later on. I began logging my projects this way in 2016, so I have six years’ worth of ideas (good and bad), drafts (good and bad), and completed pieces (mostly good! some bad) on record. That makes me a hell of a lot more confident when it comes to getting published, and when I get rejected, it’s another data point.
Hattie Jean Hayes is a writer and comedian, originally from Missouri, who now lives in New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, HAD, Janus Literary, Sledgehammer Literary and the Hell is Real Anthology. She is working on a novel and several much sillier projects.
Elizabeth Bales Frank 
Recent Comments