Belated...very belated...poetry month

OK, it passed by without me noticing, much.  Last Sunday I was daydreaming my way through the announcements at church (for some reason we do announcements at the end of the service, when people are already half-out of their seats, ready to leave) when I heard someone say they needed people to recite poetry for the talent show the youth is putting on.  Well, I had kind of thought poetry recitals went out with the hoop skirt, but I said, yes, I can do that.

So find a poem you like and let me know.

I have the kind of mind that goes completely blank if asked to name a favorite writer, poem, color, or flavor of ice cream.  I run to enthusiams.  Everything changes, month to month, year to year, and going back along the trail to find what I have liked in the past is difficult.  And there's the audience to think of, mostly parishoners and parents.  Can't be anything really old, with words people can't catch or don't understand.  One of my recent favorite poems, Thomas Gray's "On a Favorite Cat ,Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes", fell into the this category.   Eventually, after working through Gerard Manley Hopkins "Spring" and Edwin Muir's "The Horses", I chose two poems.

The first is "Late Fragment" by Raymond Carver.

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
The second is a selection from "East Coker" by T.S. Eliot.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again,
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
  You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
  You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

(Coincidently, perhaps, I recently re-read Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, which is partly based on this poem.)

Hello again

Didn't really mean to be gone so long, but it's a sign that I'm working a lot.  Two more or less simultaneous projects, a half-written short story, stuff I've sent out.  And you know how thinking up blog posts goes...something happens, or you have an interesting thought, yeah, I can work up something about that, but then a day or two passes, and the thought as well, it doesn't seem worth the bother any more.
Blogging has turned out differently than I expected -- but then, what doesn't in life?  In the beginning, there was something charged about it, for me, a sense of meeting people, making connections, learning about markets, a frantic sense that we were all about to break through to success -- getting an agent, being published.  Then there was the question of what sort of blog yours was going to be.  Many of us started out trying to focus on writing -- mechanics, progress, insights.  Well, it turns out that not only is it hard to write continually about writing, it's even a little boring.  And mendacious.  If in July you bragged that you finished 20,000 words, in September you might not want to admit that you ended up scrapping 19,000 of them and starting over.  Some people went in the direction of book reviews.  I could never do that -- ugh, life's too short, and besides, it turns out that while I can say exactly in exquisite detail why I don't like a book, when I do like a book all I can think of are bland statements like "It was great!"  Some wrote about personal things, but in this, as in a diary, a lot tends to get left out and you have to be comfortable with that.  And finally, a lot of people just drifted away.  When I look at my blog roll, which I've never really bothered to update, I think there are more inactive blogs than not.  As for the the success we all anticipated -- well, yes, that has happened.  Livia Blackburne got an agent and has a book coming out.  So does Loretta of Get Back, Loretta.  A bunch of others have self-published.  Of those who dropped off, well, I still cherish the hope that some of them are writing, just not blogging about it.   
This blog has gone all over the place -- sometimes about books, sometimes about writing, sometimes a lot more vague.  I don't worry much about it because for me blogging has it's place, and it's way down there, after writing and family and reading.  You know what you're good at and what you're not and I've never felt that blogging was the best use of my time.
This doesn't mean that I intend to quit doing it.  In fact, I think the decision I made to get into blogging was one of the best of my life.  Essentially, all my life, I'd been writing in a cave.  When I first started writing, as a child, it wasn't even writing, it was thinking.  I spun out stories in my head, never writing anything down, out of fear.  This became a fixed habit, for years, even when I did start writing.  Never show it to anyone who might be objective, never ask for criticism.  I had no problem sending stuff out, and dealing with the subsequent rejection.  (After all, everyone gets rejected, Emily Dickinson, etc, etc.)  I had a problem with communicating or sharing with other writers or people who might know something about writing.  I was missing a crucial step and never knew it.
Blogging was the beginning of coming out of the cave.  However long I go without blogging, I have never regretted the people I've gotten to know through this blog and never ceased to follow what they post.  So expect more posts about rain and writing and the occasional passing thought.  And if a month or so passes in between them, just figure it means I'm writing.

Real Life Dystopias

Imagine a world where a high school student expresses an opinion to a friend.  A few days later the student disappears.  Family and friends question and search, receive no answers.  The student has become one of the "disappeared" -- thousands of people, whose arrests as enemies of the state are never acknowledged, whose fates are never known.

Sounds likea dystopian novel, right?  But this actually happened, in the 1970s, in Argentina.  It happened in a lot of other places, too.  And it still happens today.  A large part of the world's population lives through its own variation on the theme -- omnipresent police, personality cults, corruption, weird rules, fear. 

YA dystopian fiction often tends toward the vague and the shadowy.  Evil omnipresent governments, brutal police, states based on scarcity or overly advanced technology.  But governments are composed of human beings and human beings are complicated.  They collaborate, but they also resist.  They love their country, they may fight for it and die for it, and yet believe the whole time that their government is wrong.  Reading about the lives of people in Poland, Nazi Germany, Argentina, Iran, China I am struck by the terrible choices they had to make.  It feels like there is a huge difference between their world and the comparatively safe, sane democratic world I grew up in. 

I think it's this gulf that drives YA dystopian fiction, this fear of "what if it happened here?" But I wish YA fiction derived more of its details from the real-life experiences of totalitarian societies, that it weren't so stuck on the single-freedom-fighter-leads-a-revolution theme.  Because in real life, that doesn't happen very often.  Go back to the example of Argentina for a minute.  The Argentine junta that ruled in the 1970s was replaced -- through not so much a revolution as a collapse -- by a democratic government in the 1980s.  Argentina has since struggled with corruption, economic problems and a disinclination to deal with the ugliness of the past.  But it's basically a free country.  In real life, totalitarian governments are often not quite as powerful as they appear to be.  People resist in thousands of little ways, people push towards freedom.  And that complexity, the gritty reality of daily life, is a great story.

I spent much of yesterday checking the live updates on The New York Times website, as well as Facebook, trying to keep up with friends and relatives in the city.  Two of the families I know there have small children and at first they were mainly just trying to keep everyone entertained.  Yesterday an evacuation took place, from Stuyvesant Town (a huge post-war Manhattan housing project), which had lost power, to somewhere in Long Island where they still had power.  Still wondering about a lot of places...Staten Island, Breezy Point (where some of my husband's relatives had a summer house.)

I'm really not here to go into mourning, or to offer doom and gloom, though.  I mean, look at the New Yorkers on tv, listen to them.  Three of the subway tunnels are already pumped out.  People are walking to work.  There will probably be partial subway service tomorrow.  I remember one year, when I was at NYU when it was suddenly discovered that the Williamsburg Bridge was in imminent danger of collapse, something everyone seemed to take in stride.  The bridge was closed for a year and subway service was rerouted.  For weeks after 9/11 there was no subway service to lower Manhattan.  Somehow lines were rerouted, bus service filled in.  At my first job in Mahattan one of the other employees reminisced one day about the great transit strike in the 1970s, and how everyone walked over the Brooklyn Bridge.  "You got the feeling," he said, "that if you could survive that, you could survive anything."

It's very fashionable, particularly in dystopian scenarios, to see huge cites as vulnerable.  No doubt, because of quirks of geography and history, they are.  But huge cities are also very flexible.  They have the will, the ability (and the financial incentives) to get things done, quickly.

The localest of my local libraries, the Henderson branches, which already were closed on Sundays, are now closed Mondays as well, due to budget constraints.  This makes me feel sort of like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, when he needs money for booze but he can't hock his typewriter because it's a Jewish holiday and all the pawnshops are closed and you see him dragging himself desperate, slowly, up Second Avenue in the gray light of dawn.  There's a measure on the ballot this year to support Henderson's libraries, offset by a tiny increase in property taxes ($7/year.)  I voted for it, but unfortunately there's another measure on the ballot to support schools, which asks for a much larger property tax increase, and I'm afraid people will just vote no on both.  My voter's guide, which came in the mail, included a "for" and "against" on the library issue, followed by a rebuttal and a rebuttal to the rebuttal.  The rebuttal to the rebuttal, I have to say, was a little ranty and broke out a couple of times into capital letters, including the phrase WHERE WILL IT END?  (Books, they want money for!  Books!)
I think anyone voting on this issue should first go to the Paseo Verde library on a Saturday morning.  The conference rooms are booked up, the computers are occupied, there are kids everywhere, teens in the teen section.  It's a place for study but it's also a public space.
I am ashamed, as a writer, that I take for granted my use of the library.  Of course they have the book.  Of course they'll get the book.  Of course I can get anything I want, right at my fingertips, never thinking where it comes from, never thinking who pays for it.
So I'll say it now:  my greatest thanks, to the Henderson and Las Vegas-Clark County libraries, and by extension to the voters and taxpayers who fund them.  We're all in this together.

Writer's Block, or not

I don't really like the term.  I often say I have Writer's Panic instead -- which is what I call the feeling that you're swamped and drowning and never going to get anywhere with your project.  And in fact, over the past few months, I have written some 20,000 words of a brand new project and made some huge but very freeing changes on my WIP, which has caused that to take off in a new direction.  So it's not that I don't have ideas.  The ideas are there, while I'm driving or sweeping or working.  The problem is putting the ideas down on paper.  The fear when I sat down to write was so strong, that even when I made myself do it, after a little while I would think, "well, maybe I better stop now, while things are still good.  After all [insert here anecdote about famous writer who only wrote two pages a day.]" 

This fear was something new.  I'd never really felt it before, writing.  And the odd thing was it kept coming back.  I could have a really good day writing and the next day, sitting down, the same old procrastination and hesitation.  In other words, success had no effect on the fear, which seemed to be contrary to the conventional wisdom that doing something you fear makes the fear go away.  I thought it was maybe more like stage fright.  I'd heard stories -- we all have -- of well-known actors who suffered from stage fright every night, at least until the curtain came up.  I looked for books on stage fright, but everything I found was aimed at children.  So I looked for more general books on fear.  These were, of course, self-help books.  Oy. Brain chemistry for dummies.  Vignettes about high-powered executives at Fortune 500 companies who were freed to follow their dreams of entrepreneurship.  (There are no creative types in self-help books; I believe the authors think that creative people float around with little wings on their backs, drawing rainbows and hearts in the air.)  However, I did learn some useful stuff from these books, in the end.  I had an insight, reading one in particular -- this was not something that actually appeared in the book, but a thought that came to me while reading it:
You will always feel anxiety when you are doing something important.
You will always feel it in proportion to what you are trying to do.

I don't know why, but this was comforting.  I suppose the self-help books would say I gave myself permission to have anxiety.  I'm working, I'm working hard, I will have anxiety, I'll be OK. 
I also began to set daily goals for writing, which is something I never felt the need to do before.  Not word count goals, but lists of scenes I need to work on.  I look at the goals, say, this is what I'm going to do today, and I focus on that. 

The upshot of this is that stuff gets done.  Do I still have the fear?  Yes.  This post?  Total procrastination. All I can say is that the fight goes on.

Two scenes...or how I spent my summer vacation

Hanksville, Utah, is in the middle of a country of reefs, buttes and sand dunes. We stopped at the store there for sodas.  Inside, eating pizza, were two teenage girls.  Makeup:  lots of blush, lots of eye makeup, like people used to wear to go clubbing in the 80s.  One of them had large sunglasses on, the other had perched a pair of rabbit ears on her head.  She wore a tank top over a shirt, then a kind of stomacher and under that a polka-dot skirt.  Mismatched stocking socks, one red, one blue.  The other one was more or less the same:  sort of a parody of high style, or fashion.  I nodded at them (in places like Hanksville, you say hi to everybody) and they looked up but didn't say anything.  It was the middle of the week, the end of the day, quarter to five, cloudy, in a place that doesn't get much rain.  The girl behind the counter was dressed in a Hollister t-shirt.  When we left the store we saw them walking along the main street.  One of them stuck out her thumb, as if she wanted to hitch a ride from the pickup truck behind us.

It had once been an roadside cafe, back in the 50s or 60s.  There was still a sign, Ben's Cafe * Steaks * Dining Room, and above the sign was a three-dimensional star, with some of the bulbs missing.  Now it was La Veracruzana.  It still had the long luncheonette counter and green vinyl stools, although the new owners had put up fake wooden shutters on the walls, to imply Mexico.  We were the only customers for a few minutes, and then another group came in, a man in a cowboy hat, some middle-aged women.  They began to talk to the waitress.  She was going back to college in a few weeks, right?  And was she still thinking about law school?  Did she still want to specialize in immigration?  A younger man and woman joined the group, and the topic shifted to cattle rustling.  Someone last spring had lost 26 calves.  Those calves would be worth $60,000 now.