July 1!

 

A new month! Have you ever felt like the lady to the left? Computers and the new world of technology are in so many ways just like old ways of doing things, and fascinating, and helpful-- and also totally foreign and frustrating. Anyhow, when I'm not obsessed with a new software program (I'm teaching myself some Desktop Publishing right now) , or delighted to hear from a stranger (a French webmaster has asked to translate some of my exercises for writers into French-- no money, but quite flattering)-- I am furious at the machine for its stupidities and demands for attention to things I never meant to pay attention to! (The image, by the way, is from Fotolia, where you can buy for a buck or two royalty free images of things like children that you have to be very careful about putting up on the 'net without heavy-duty permissions. Anyhow, the lady-biting-laptop cost a dollar, for a low resolution version. I didn't really need her, but I was experimenting.

 

June 30

We’ve had so much rain, and now unsettled, as they like to say. I sat through one storm on the back porch, so perfectly, thrillingly, green. How the branches moved their shoulders to the wind and how a bird just swooped by looking for night shelter in the lilac bush, and how lightning unzipped the thunder and made its brilliant narrow crack through the sky.

Andy picks black and red raspberries and some blueberries every morning for our cereal. The tiger lilies are blazing up their patches.

I read an article in the New York Review of Books by Timothy Snyder called “Holocaust: The Ignored Legacy.” (The New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 12 , July 16, 2009. P.14 - 16) . I'm reading old issues-- letting my subscription go again, I never read it much—but figuring of course I'll get a deal in a few months and start it up again. It is always such a high for me when I finally do read it– the riches of culture and thought spread out like a great world covering spread on my lap, out to the horizon.

Anyhow, this article talks about how the real center of the Holocaust was not Auschwitz and the Western European Jews but farther east, where the killings were not only in camps, but also by less industrialized means: hundreds of thousands of simple mass shootings on the rim of pits and also (this was the newest part to me) planned starvation and famines. And in some places, notably Belarus and Ukraine, these things were done in the thirties by Stalin’s minions and then in the forties by the Nazis. Belarus: a third of the population killed.
I also read Irving Howe’s LEON TROTSKY, which was fascinating. He admires Trotsky, but also sees that Trotsky and certainly Bolshevism did do enough– perhaps even encouraged– the conditions that led to the ravages of Stalin.

 

 

June 24

I've been spending a lot of time on the back porch working on the hand go-through of Ten Strategies. Joel and Sarah were here over the week-end for a wedding in Cape May (yes, they fly across the country for a week-end), and at some point all four of us were out there watching the rain come in again, and I said the porch is one of my two favorite places, the porch at the lake being the other. Joel was surprised: "Your favorite place in the world?" So then I had to rethink it, and the thought was that those two screened porches, the one with Lake Buel and the white pines, the other with the complete domination of New Jersey green, are the most relaxing places to me. I'm usually reading or now checking something on the little Acer netbook, and this summer, maybe because it's been so cool so far, and I've got these manuscripts and papers to do, I've been working out there. Even had a meeting with Carol B-A about Schools Committee business. Anyhow, it's a pleasure in my life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 18

 

Rain again!  Drippy splashing wet air wet feet wet grocery bags wet garden soggy soggy drip drip. Everything pulled down, like gravity turned to gray droplets beating us down instead of dragging.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 17, 2009

 

 

 

I am back to keeping my journal pretty intensely, and therefore less interested in this vaguely public maundering.Or I think that's what's going on. Shall I turn this into my photo pages? Make it less personal? When I want to write public-personal stuff, put it on the blogger blog?

The photo above is from "Celebrate South Orange" Saturday, in the rain: This was the Coaltion's table with trustees Alice Baldwin-Jones, Abby Cotler, Mark Mucci, and me-- it was raining, but still fun. Chatted at length with Abby and her friend Gloria. Nancy Heins-Glaser took the photo. I'm not sure what I was doing!

 

 

May 28, 2009

 

Back from the lake, where the weather was stunning, cool, sunny, just gorgeous. We had the usual brouhaha of people, Ellen and Andy and David cleaning and fixing, Ann and Nathan celebrating the Sabbath, Lean and Greg there too. Me up in my room working on the manuscript of Ten Strategies to Start Your Novel, parakeet to deal with, boat and dock to put in, futon covers, Andy and I went out to dinner with Harvey and Adrianne in Lee. Movies Sunday night (new Star Trek).  Many pleasures.

Then back to enormous piles of email, preparations for a Coalition working session on the Academic Achievement Gap last night (see Two Towns) . Tonight, last Writers' Group of the season. Summer class at NYU starts next week.

From Memorial Day weekend 2009: Andy, Taxi, and me taking Taxi's picture.

 

 

May 16, 2009

 

It’s foggy and to rain later, and Andy off on a bike trip, me planning and plotting the next few weeks, going to Bill Higginson’s memorial this afternoon, Joel and Sarah flying to L.A. again-- how can they fly so much. Just back from Atlanta, planning this week-end in L.A., to come to the East Coast for a wedding in June.

I’m feeling low from, I think, the long hours I’ve been putting in reading the last book of Robin Hobbs’s Farseer Trilogy. I am totally caught up in this, although in spite of its solid writing, it seems to be longer than necessary. I just want to know what happens at page 575 or wherever I am with 200 pages left to go. It really is good, and I feel like I’ve been overindulging.

I put tomatoes in yesterday and a couple of them swooned with that silly loss of turgor that some tomato plants have faced with breezes and handling, but this morning, all of them, including the swooner were up and shaking their bright green heads happily. The cabbages don’t seem any bigger, but I feel them reaching down and getting themselves situated deep below before they solidify above. And last fall’s winter density lettuces have developed big soft heads the size of softballs, lovely things to know I grew.

 

 

 

 

5-10-09

 

 

Mother's Day evening and I'm writing in the back yard on a spectacular clear cool evening, the velvety green (for the moment) grass that I cut this afternoon. A surprisingly good Mother's day, given that I worked all day: the back grass, the lot, some weeding and thinking about where to place some of the vegetables: it's time almost for beans and setting out tomatoes. I've already set out peppers that came by mail. I love the slow, nudging necessity of the growing:

I also did some papers, getting started for Tuesday night, and there's a Hamilton Stone meeting tomorrow. I led a carding at Ethical Culture today with the Social action committee on the INSIDE OUT business.Joel called twice and I talked to him once. He's in Atlanta for Sarah's sister Esther's graduation, along with all the Zakowskis and the Weinbergs. I called my mother, who heads back to Shinnston on Tuesday

And yesterday was our anniversary-- We went to Bobby's Burger Palace (That's Bobby Flay's little burger chain), up in Paramus, and we ate what were really good and reasonably priced burgers, I had one with goat cheese and watercress, and we had two kinds of fries, sweet potato and regular, and Andy had a chocolate malted with his. Then we actually shopped a little, Nordstrom Rack, Filene's, Marshalls,, then drove home, watched the rest of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice.

All lazy and vacation indulgent.

 

 

 

 

May Day

 

International Workers' Day? Pagan Dance of the Maypole? Commemoration of the Haymarket Martyrs?
A Holiday Worth Researching, because of its amazingly different celebrattions. A good place to start is with Wikipedia, but if you already know you are commemorating the Haymarket Martyrs, take a look at Shelley Ettinger's blog and her list of books about Haymarket. One way of looking at the holiday is to distinguish between "green root" celebrations relating to the ancient rites of spring and the "red root" celebrations that relate to labor and the struggle for the eight hour working day.

Shelley is off marching today, but I'm home enjoying my first actual writing day in about three weeks--that is to say, I've been writing on a book for the Newark Museum Arts Catalyst project, but today I could actually take a look at my own private, on spec, no one is expecting it, no deadline writing.

Or, just play with the parakeet.... (photo taken with the built-in web cam on the little bitty Acer).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andy, MSW, Joel, Sarah, and Sarah's parents Jan and Phil Zakowski on Passover at Sarah's grandparents' ranch near Los Angeles

Joel and Sarah got engaged!

 

April 22

 

 

In Honor of National Poetry Month and Just Spring.....

 

 

 

Spring Scumble

Commercial buildings' sharp edges
Climb the low hill above
Flat roofs, one church steeple
And then the soft explosion--
Blur of trees awash in filmy lime.
No question now it's leaves,
That pastel tinted mist and spray.
The sky just clearing:
Pale clouds pale sky
Then the sheer curtain of color--
Inexorable, spreading, new.

 

 

 

April 17

 

More Family Birthdays! Lucille Willis turns 90!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 15, 2009

 

 

For the rest of the world, it's Tax Day:
For us, it's Joel's 24th birthday!
Happy Birthday, Joel!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSW & Andy Weinberger 4-9-09 Southern California

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 12, 2009

Easter, and we're back from L.A.

 

Andy and I just got back from L.A. on the red eye, came home, slept a few hours, and now it’s evening East Coast time on a bright cool day with jonquils and forsythia below and blue sky, bare branches above with just the faint tease of a few green leaves coming on. So it’s good to be home.

 

And what a five days! Fun, Sarah’s family and– and engagement! Joel did it the old fashioned way, even designing a ring for her himself, and she was ecstatic, both of them as happy as they can be. Andy and I are deeply happy also, but not surprised (how could we be?). Their romantic old-fashionedness is so different from Andy and me living together 12 years and then sort of sidling into the whole thing. This took place at her birthday dinner, on one knee, the whole shebang! No wedding date set..

 

Sarah feeding Joel a loquat

 

The night we arrived, Sarah’s parents Phil and Jan took us with their exhuberant generosity to dine at Spago, which was super! The famous Wolfgang Puck restaurant, with great creative food (salmon pizza scattered with little red jewels of roe!) and a sort of post modern art nouveau decor that I liked a lot. The next day, it was the Weinberg ranch, which is absolutely the most wonderful place, created for family, and the happiest home of all the children– swimming, bunnies ponies a great pack of Labrador retrievers who love people and lie on the porch welcoming visitors. Mr. And Mrs. Weinberg were so open and welcoming to have us at their family Seder, and we met Sarah’s uncles and aunts on that side, plus many many cousins, and little first cousins once removed so that you had the feeling of the generations, and then, if you added in the actual Seder, which emphasizes discussion rather than ritual, you get a sense of a family that consciously and lovingly situates itself in history and love as well as in the beauty of Southern California.

Various family members led discussions at different points, and Sarah had invited me and Andy to come up with readings relating the struggle for freedom to those beyond the Jews, appropriate since I am rather by definition beyond the Jews, and I found a favorite passage from the Autobiography of Frederick Douglass where he learns the power of education, plus a passage in Leaves of Grass where Walt Whitman imagines being a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

The second day we spent walking around and meeting ponies and bunnies and swans (on their nest, and the male swan put on a pretty terrific display of expanding feathers and hissing when one of the chocolate lab puppies approached). We swam, we ate lunch and dinner, we got to know the family members a little more.

 

 

 

Friday, Sarah worked long distance and Joel drove us to L.A. for the Getty museum and a little tourist stuff– Hollywood, which is wonderfully commercialized, and it seems just right. We had dinner back in Westlake Village, near our hotel (the really lovely Westlake Village Inn) and a powerful discussion with Joel about his thoughts for the future, his Judaism, my recent readings of the Cecil Roth and Abram Leon Sachar histories of the Jews.

Saturday we had Sarah for our sightseeing, too, and went back to Los Angeles and met my nephew (graduate student in piano at USC) Alex Kato-Willis and his girlfriend (USC undergraduate in vocal music) Kiry for lunch.

 

 

Kiry, Sarah, Joel, Alex, MSW, Andy at Cafe 29 near USC

 

 

 

This was a lot of fun, photos of Joel and Sarah and Alex and Kiry and me and Andy, sitting on the porch of a café with South Central nonsense happening outside– some USC cops arresting an old drunk on a bicycle. About 5 cop cars to do this! We really enjoyed talking with them, then walking around USC a little, and then driving the Venice Beach, which is, as Andy said, like the Lower East Side thirty years ago with a beach– surfers, jewelry vendors, neat street theater types– a gold painted black man with a fake dog who holds still like a statue. A stilt walker dressed like a tree god, and the really quite wonderful Calypso Tumblers who were part break dance and part circus tumblers and part gymnasts– a couple of whiteboys did the gymnastics style floor work. A big troop, begging money, occasionally shouting out that drugs are bad. Something quite special about live acts like that-- guys flying through the air over cement with just their own muscles and skill. And, as Joel pointed out, all the people hoping they'd crack open their heads!

And then– the pleasures of LAX, and a crowded plane home next to a Lady with a Lapdog in a box. Mostly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting piece to think about by one of this spring's speakers at Ethical Culture, Dean Sluyter.

 

 

 

 

Taxi Contemplating a Stone                                                     MSW with glasses April 2009

April 4

 

Just had lunch after my walk, and I'm writing this in the kitchen to give Taxi some extra liberty. I've been working on my desk work and checks, dong odds 'n ends before the Big Trip to Los Angeles, going over the “stories” for the Coalition's April 28 Forum, which I have to miss. Sigh. We have at least 25 stories, really good contribution from the community.

I had a dream about Taxi-- someone wasn't taking good care of him. The bird was sick or somehow damaged, but I was not going to be allowed to see him. I was told this by a very serious and abrupt woman, slim, in charge and very cool. Somehow, I wasn't allowed to make demands. I was so sorry I'd left him with her.

Windy and cold today, but I pulled up some turnip greens and cilantro in the garden and overturned the soil there, getting ready for the next sowing, which should be around April 15.

Today, since we're travelling and not teaching next week, I am not overwhelmed with absolute-right-now have-to's.

What I've been observing about my fear of flying, is that, if I can lay it aside for a few minutes, I'll immediately start thinking about some other awful way to die: pancreatic cancer or Alzheimer's are my current favorites.

A moving poem by some guy my age with Alzheimer's in the T&W magazine.

 

 

April 3

 

Last night, walking across 23rd Street, I looked up and saw the mist topped buildings in NYC-- that incredible color of mist-concrete-lights, straight edges softened magically, the burnished glow, the simultaneous hard/soft. Something so unique to New York. I didn’t mind at all being at the bottom of that canyon. Nature moves us, but so do the monuments of our own construction.

 

 

April Morning

April 1, 2009

 

Is it All Computers Crash Day? Is it my late grandmother's birthday? Or is it Daffodils Are Out in Force Day??

 

 

 

 

March 26, 2009

 

 

Why I Love Third Graders

 

I pretend I am a skullface ninja.
I pretend I fight crime and eat sushi.
I also give people hugs and toys.

3rd grader from Butler New Jersey

 

 

 

 

 

Books for Readers #118

March 24,2009

(for the full version with lots of recommendations and news
about people and books, click here.)

 

 

 

 

                  Jeanette Winterson                                   Kasuo  Ishiguro

 

I sometimes think of myself as not reading very much anymore– and this is partly true, or at least psychologically true, because when I was a kid and teenager I lived much of my life in books. Truly, much of my experience came from books. Today, a larger portion of my experience comes from life, and I find people recommending books to me, and I get a panicked feeling that I will never catch up. I still read a lot, but I’m no longer the one who reads the mostest and the fastest. And where did I ever get the idea it was a contest?

These last weeks, between a lot of teaching (and student writing to go over), a lot of meetings of our local integration organization, traveling, and personal business, I’ve read three children’s chapter books that are part of the curriculum in the middle schools of Jersey City (this is related to one of my jobs). These are SWEETGRASS (Jan Hudson), A SINGLE SHARD (Linda Sue Parks), and SILENT THUNDER (Andrea Davis Pinkney). These are well done historical reconstructions that ought to give kids some insight into things they’re studying in school. SWEETGRASS is the story of a young Blackfoot Indian girl’s life at a time when enormous changes are happening to her people. It shows the heroism of daily survival. A SINGLE SHARD is about a thirteenth century Korean boy who wants to make celadon pots, and this book too honors the value of labor and craft. SILENT THUNDER is a solid escape-from-slavery novel.

Also a quick read was a Dennis Lehane novel, A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR. I like Lehane except for the portentousness of his tone. And I read the first two Robin Hobbs sword and sorcery novels, but I want to write about them later, as do I want to write about two histories of the Jews– not quick reads!

Let me say a little more here about one nonfiction book and two novels. The nonfiction book was very personal to me: WILL YOU MISS ME WHEN I’M GONE: THE CARTER FAMILY & THEIR LEGACY IN AMERICAN MUSIC by Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg. It isn’t that I am such a huge fan, although I like their music, it's more like I've always felt the Carters were part of my family. The book is full of stories about the sources of Carter family (and other country) songs: borrowed from 19th century sheet music, from traditional ballads from Britain, new words to old hymn tunes, a little Mexican mariachi music mixed in by Mother Maybelle when the group was singing down around the border on a high power radio station. The music was all about community and tradition and borrowing and sharing– and then about broadcasting and big business. The Carters themselves are a wonderful example of people who both loved music and loved to perform, and then grabbed the opportunity to make money for their families.

For me, though, along with the innate interest and Americana of the story, there is the background of life in the Appalachians at the time of my grandparents. The Carters’ homeplace is just a couple of ridges over from Lee County, Virginia, where my father’s parents grew up, and over another couple of mountains from Wise County where my father was born. So this book, good in itself, had personal meaning for me.

Less personally meaningful, but a great favorite of mine is the work of the contemporary British novelist, Kasuo Ishiguro.  I read his first novel, A PALE VIEW OF HILLS , set in Nagasaki and England. These are places from his real life, but the story is indirect and delicately moving. It is suffused with the sadness of the pale view of hills, of lost daughters, of family members who died off-stage in the American bombing of Nagasaki. There is a hint that someone may have done something regrettable before the war; there is the unanswered question of why Etsuko the narrator leaves her husband and father-in-law, and then why her children leave her. Things at the outer edges of consciousness taint the lives of the multiple parent-child pairs. There is one interesting technical/structural anomaly near the end in which for one passage the point of view switches from Etsuko to her friend Sachiko, and there is a hint that the two women are the same woman. I prefer things like this to be made clear, but Ishiguro is so good, I’m willing to go where he goes.

Finally, I had a rousing good time with another first novel, Jeanette Winterson’s ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT. This is an excellent combination of British Lower Middle Class realism with Winterson’s off-kilter literary experimentalism (although I don’t know if Winterson experiments so much as writes just exactly the way she sees the world). As the novel progresses, there are long passages of story telling in the voice of the main character, “Jeanette.” There is a retelling of a King Arthur tale and a story of a character called Winnet StoneJar, and lots of dream narratives. The more representational part was my greatest delight, however, as the narrator discovers first her religious calling in a woman-centric Pentecostal church, and then her sexuality, wildly unacceptable to the church family. The girl is feisty and smart and loving, and her mother is a terrifically colorful and engaging monster. Everyone eats oranges in the novel, but at the end, the missionary mother decides that the “coloured heathen” might prefer pineapples.

 

Who recommended this to me? I’m pretty sure the recommendation appeared in this newsletter– maybe it was Evelyn Codd who recommended it. I’ve also read SEXING THE CHERRY (the 1600's London story) and WRITTEN ON THE BODY.

 

 

 

March 22, 2009

There's a depth, an intensification of green,
Crocuses, pansies, bud velvet are seen
In the cold air while the sun is warm:
An itch in my foot, a rejoice in my arm–

 

 

 

March 21

 

Yesterday was the first day of spring, and it was snowing when I headed off for Glen Rock, my last day up there with the Third Graders and one class of Fourth Graders. BIg soft flakes that floated for a while, touched down on the tops of the grass, but never even whitened the streets. It was mostly gone long before I made my way up the Garden State.

Today was sunny, cold, and dry, and I started tomatoes and basil and a couple of other nightshades in egg cartons. My clever idea this year was to tear the egg cartons crossways in the middle, overlap them and thus form ten cells instead of twelve, which fits in my under-the-lights trays. I planted fewer tomatoes than usual this year: it's like I've narrowed what I'm going to plant, but I'm seeing it much more sharply. With less terror over the deer (and I sure hope I'm right, because I tore down my bird nets that had covered the entire garden for two years), I feel resigned and calm and looking forward to the garden.

Less attached to it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March 15

 

I dug in the garden today, getting a place ready for the pease on St. Patrick's Day, should it not be frozen and snowy. Also a patch next to them composed with old compost, black and wormy, for the cabbage plants, presently under lights without even true leaves yet. A good time of year, and no one invited the crocuses, but here they are again.

 

March 14, 2009

 

This is Saturday, but another work day for me with a workshop for teachers run by the Newark Teachers' Union.

I've been thinking about how I use the blog, which is still spotty, and not very consistent. I admire the political and bookish blogs (or both-- like my friend Shelley Ettinger's ). There's also my brother-in-law David Weinberger's all purpose but-mostly-about-the-web blog that is followed by lots of techy people. I think my blog is mostly read by friends and family, although like all blogs is out there in public, and I occasionally, on the Blogger version, get comments back from strangers and more often people I have some past connection with. I also keep a personal and private journal, and have for a long time, which often drifts off into writing material that sometimes gets turned into anything from a novel to a poem.

I definitely don't blog my poetry almost ever!

think thIS blog is more comparable to my old "To Joels" that I wrote when he was a baby mostly for my mother, although now that I'm grandmother age myself, looking at them is a happy sunny glimpse of the good side of motherhood back in the day. Mostly my relationship with Baby Joel and Toddler Joel and Boy Joel was all sunny anyhow-- he was a definite light in our lives, and continues to be with his phone calls full of enthusiasms (rock climbing, restaurants in San Francisco and East Bay, skiing, personalities of people he knows, and now Judaism).

But I didn't put my down moments into those documents, and I don't blog about those either-- I'm generally fairly evenly good spirited these days. But private, in my own somewhat exhibitionist way.

 

 

 

 

March 9, 2009

 

I'm coming out of a long period of tons of teaching (which continues) but also my mother and that brutal drive to and from West Virginia to take her home. Actually, the only brutal part was the return drive with three hours stuck on Route 78. Anyhow, I have three pretty clear days right now, and plans for some career work, reading. Starting seeds, maybe.

I got a notice from the Columbia '68-'08 listserv that Mark Rudd's book is coming out soon, and he has a website with some very nice FAQ's that answer clearly and directly a lot of the questions people have about what was going on back then-- and he of course has a lot to explain and regret, having gone crazy underground with Weatherman. I guess Mark's great strength has always been his ability to be direct and clear--you find yourself liking him and listening. Do take a look at his website, especially his FAQ.

 

February 22, 2009

 

Andy and I went out last night with our good friends from Booklyn and the Berkshires, Harvey and Adrianne Robins (seen below with Joel at graduation). We haven't seen them in a year and a half--usually get together at least once in the summer when we're at the lake and they're in Otis, or meet in the city or somewhere, so it was a great pleasure to see them. We asked Harvey how he's been, and he said, "Great-- since November 4." He is a lifetime public servant, having been part of the Koch and Dinkins administrations and now working wtih nonprofits, and Adrianne is a retired principal of a high school for the deaf-- now doing consulting work. Anyhow, we go back to Brooklyn, and it was a lovely evening, just being with them and catching up-- we ate at North Square, New American cooking, Zagat approved. They let you visit, and it has actually become a kind of favorite restaurant of mine in New York: I'd had lunch there once with Ingrid, then took Andy and Joel when we couldn't get into the place we were looking for, then the Mom's group. A sign of maturity I guess, to have an actually dependable restaurant?

 

 

                                                                 February 20, 2009

I'm heading into an overbooked condition, as we say-- Newark Museum on Monday, new class at NYU on Tuesday (at the dread Norman Thomas Center in midtown....) followed by continuing class at NYU. then more teaching, including a new little-kid school and, I think a Jump Start Your Novel on Saturday followed by a run to and from WV to take my mom home. She's been doing any
chores I can give her-- went through the plants watering and trimming, and now she's working on my wrapping paper closet, organizing it pretty well, something it would have taken me months even to get to, especially now. Now meaning with the onset of heavy teaching.

Yesterday I finished a draft of Ten Strategies and got it in to Ed at Montemayor Press for first reactions. A pleasure to dash it off, and even these lesson plans from the Arts Catalyst Program at the Museum are fun, but they don't take me to the deep place that the writing of stories and novels does.

The deep place is something unnamable that we call the sources of creativity, or the unconscious or the muse or maybe even meditation. The nonfiction, especially this nonfiction about how to do something, is sunnier and closer to being with other people-- some of fiction writing is like that too, but it's a second or third stage, revision, not the Deep Place.  I'm feeling good and productive, but I miss the deep place.

On the other hand-- during this productive gregarious period, I've been remembering more dreams at night....

 

 

                                                                                                        February 15, 2009

 

My mother is here, already in bed. She was exhausted with getting up early and traveling and no naps. Usually she takes one after her religious exercises, then another in the afternoon. So she crashed at seven fifteen, only 4:15 California time. Alex and Kiry with Chrissie and Goro till tomorrow, and I’m pretty tired myself. Yesterday I finished a couple of books, have been doing web site work, eager to see how far I can get on preparing a draft of the novel writing book for Ed to look at before I feel I have to work on the draft for the Newark Museum.

Andy and I had a nice Valentine's evening last night. We went to see Frost/Nixon, which was excellent, then ate at the new Village Trattoria in South Orange (which I just discovered has a branch in Summit as well as in Maplewood), then came home, and I finished the Abram Leon Sachar book A History of the Jews. This was an important accomplishment for me, this big book. Amazing thing, this history over such a span of time of one group of related people-- perhaps the most unique thing that there is a history you can trace-- the political and religious history, the horrors of pogroms. Other people have certainly suffered-- but we don't have such a sustained record. Which native American nation has a five thousand year written history? Where are the lists and photgraphs of those who came on the Middle Passage?

                                                     

                                                        

                                                                                                         

 

                                                                                                                                                               February 14, 2009

 

 

                                                                                        Friday night, February 13, 2009

Lots going on, bloodwork today for my doctor check up, electricty off for an hour and a half following the high winds yesterday, but my Acer Aspire came through and I kept working on my 10 Strategies to Write a Novel book. Also deaths of people I know, and my mother returning on Sunday. Rogan Josh (from a Tasty Bite Simmer Sauce ) for dinner. Reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson's first. She has a touching blog entry on her website about the death of her father just after Christmas,

 

 

January 28

 

I just finished reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde, another Berkman fellow like Andy's brother David Weinberger. I'm just now beginning to get the importance of this institution, which we knew was an honor to David (author of Everything is Miscellaneous as well as co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and more). But this book, one of your real public intellectual books like a book length article from The New York Review of Books is really helpful in figuring out about art and the market. Hyde writes in a new epilogue for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the book: “.....to begin by restating two of THE GIFT’s motivating assumptions....The first is simply that there are categories of human enterprise that are not well organized or supported by market forces. Family life, religious life, public service, pure science, and of course much artistic practice: none of these operates very well when framed simply in terms of exchange value. The second assumption follows: any community that values these things will find non market ways to organized them. It will develop gift-exchange institutions dedicated to their support.“

I guess I wanted reading it to be more fun than it was, but I read so often now when I'm tired, too much work of my own and also t. v. with the quick cut action and interactive internet.. But having said this, the book makes a really important distinction between what we do for money and what we don’t. It begins with folk tales and narratives about hunter gatherer and other societies with strong emphasis on gift exchange and the circulation of valuable things rather than private ownership, and goes on to long essays on Walt Whitman and one on Ezra Pound (who had lots of cockamamie economic schemes plus the brutally ugly anti semitism). Allen Ginsberg figures importantly (especially his late visit to Pound in Italy)

 

 

 

January 26

 

I had a lovely visit last evening with the South Mountain Monkeys, a local mother-daughter reading group that chose my Billie of Fish House Lane as their January book. The kids are fourth graders, and they were charming, everyone bouncy and full of life force and questions, and I signed books, and the mothers asked serious questions of the kids and me, and we ate cookies. There is nothing quite like being face to face with readers-- and kids are especially gratifying because (after a couple of initial Official Questions) they say pretty much what they really think: "Why was Eutreece so mean to Celia?" "I was reading in bed and I cried when Billie's father was so sick."

I said, "Oh I'm so glad!" and every one laughed-- at the idea I was glad the poor kid had cried -- but that's what we all want, isn't it? Writers? To touch someone with what touched us? Anyhow, it was a lot of fun-- lovely to be in a lovely home, wood fire, feeling appreciated, to know I'd conveyed something important and good.

 

 

January 24

Andy and I went to South Orange to the movies and the one we wanted to see was sold out, so we came home, talked to Joel on the phone, and watched Edward Scissorshands from 1990. Very charming, touching, all that. Edward and his naivety and snip snip evergreen art and hair cutting and dog grooming is the real normal, and the appalling tropical fruit colored ticky tacky suburban community is the freak show. Those houses and those people were exactly what I had a horror of finding if we moved to the suburbs-- identical houses, bored housewives, false good cheer.

Johnny Depp is an absolute heart throb in this, an artist, a lover, a suffering outsider who tries to do good. His character is punk in style, the hair, the leather and studs, but the stance and general look is the same as Slovenly Peter of the old Der Struwwelpeter (1845) cautionary tales for kids. A related (?) images in the book is of a horrible man with enormous scissors cutting off a boy's fingers-- anyhow, these have got to have played into the imagery, in my mind, if not in Tim Burton's.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

January 20, 2009

 

George Bush puttered way in a helicopter and
We Have A NEW PRESIDENT!

 

 

 

January 19

 

Yesterday we watched the concert at the Lincoln Memorial, and well, yes, I know we are going to be disappointed in Obama, and yes, he is progressive but not left wing, but --- BY GOLLY at the big concert today Sunday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, along with songs from everyone from Stevie Wonder to Beyonce to Bono, they had Pete Seeger up there leading the crowd and Bruce Springsteen in the full version of This Land is Your Land, including the anti-landlord lyrics (The No Trespassing sign with nothing wirtten on the back--"This side was meant for you and me!" ) Pete Freaking The Weavers commy pinko Seeger! So all I can say is GOBAMA!!

 

 

 

January 16

 

Me and two favorites: Taxicab the parakeet, photgraphed by the webcam on my new ASus Aspired One itty bitty tiny camera.

 

 

Ron P., who has his own self-publishing company, is biased, but this little piece from his newsletter/blog is interesting nonetheless. The bottom line is that IUniverse and Xlibris and Authorhouse and all of them are becoming more and more vanity presses. Other businesses are helping self-publishers in what appear to be much more satisfactory ways. See Marion Cuba's recommendation.

 

January 10

Friday night: Andy and I went to Jayne Anne Phillips’s book party for LARK AND TERMITE. She read, not long, a passage following each of her characters, and the section following Termite, the crucial brilliant consciousness of a developmentally disable boy, had a poetry that I hadn’t caught in reading by eye, with a mind to writing about the book. A ton of people came– her fans, and maybe more than might have come after the terrific review of the book by Michiko Kakutani. Among the folks there– local friends Dawn Williams and James Van Oosting, and, more of a surprise– Wesley Brown! He had come down from upstate to hear Jayne Anne, and said that a novel is such a long hard effort, it deserves to be celebrated– which is such a typical Wesley comment, wise and kind and appropriate.

 

And then I ran into Dawn again today, at the funeral for Rev. Roy A. Butler Sr. The funeral was a wonderful mixture of heavy hitters from the area churches, mostly American Baptist churches (Roy was active in the American Baptist Churches organization-- latest name of the Baptists I grew up among))– there must have been 20 or more ministers in attendance, along with his many, many friends and his large family, including one sister, a minister herself, who sang and got the crowd up and singing with her and generally roused. People talked about his preaching style and musical abilities and his passion, and of course how he is happy now that he’s gone home. It was also mentioned how he walked the walk as well as talked the talk about welcoming women into the ministry– his wife Marsha is now ordained, and she was an assistant pastor along with Sandra Pendleton-Rock who I’ve know from the earliest days of FAN when I first moved to this area and began to get involved in stable integration work.

I of course knew Roy as a founding trustee of the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race. He was an essential member– creating what became the Interfaith Outreach Committee, and participating in some of the deepest, most impassioned discussions of our early days. After he moved on to focus on building his church, he continued to be supportive to us in all ways he could, and I remember one of the last times I saw him, I had called to ask about distributing some of the Coalition’s flyers to his church, and he said, as he always did, Anything he and his church could do, anytime, please ask. You felt like your request was a compliment

So I drove the flyers over and put them in the mailbox as he'd said, and then drove around the building– and there on the other side was Roy, on his hands and knees, wearing a beautiful colorful short sleeved sports shirt and one of his elegant hats– planting flowers. I rolled down my window to speak, and he got up, brushing himself off, looking just a little rueful, then said, indicating the trowel and flowers, “It’s part of the ministry of service.”

We really do miss people when they go. Just speaking yesterday of Andy’s mom, Sherry, who my mother reminded us has been dead for sixteen years. Actually sixteen and a half. They live on, time goes fast, some cultures say the dead one is happier now, has transitioned to the other side! Some howl their mourning. Anyway you slice it, we miss them, and willy nilly carry them with us. And when we go? Do they go too? It would be nice to believe otherwise, but also helps to realize how many there have been, how many loved, how many sterling personalities, how many more precious ones yet living, yet to come.

 

 

 

January 3, 2009

What a week! Joel and Sarah leave tomorrow, and it has felt like nonstop parties and socializing, the house rocking for almost two weeks. New Year's locally, a neat Prospect Street reunion with Mary and Tony and Anne and Gordon and Katherine and Ed and Joan and, oh, a ton of other people.

Yesterday, Mom, Andy, Joel, Sarah, and I went to Liberty Science Center . It was a mad house– Friday after New Year’s, the whole world off from work and school, and apparently everyone with children under ten at LSC! My mother loved looking at the kids and interacting with them when she could. We hadn't been there since long before their expansion. It’s enormous, with lots of things to see and do, and I could have used more time actually to explore some of the learning sections, but it was super crowded. Many artifacts, of course: a great folded beam from the World Trade Center; activities for kids: Suspended I-beams to walk on in the Skyscraper exhibit; Gila monsters, a Gaboon viper (Venom to kill 30 grown men!), a room full of interactive stuff that Joel remembered fondly from childhood. But the sensory deprivation tunnel has been gone for a long time.

Black widows, a floor map of the Hudson estuary so you can walk up to the Berkshires in four steps. Fifty foot tall wave-ladder; views of the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. My mother reverential about Our Lady of the Harbo. Driving over, we had a long discussion about Judaism and the Jewish man’s morning prayer, which Joel, like Andy, thought said Thank you God I wasn’t born a woman but is actually mroe like “Thank you God King of the Universe who didn’t make me a woman.” So according to Sarah and Joel, this puts the emphasis on the thank you for everything including what You made me. And to Joel, this also was maybe also about someone writing the prayer and meaning a sexist world view but God Himself directing the man’s hand so that the words came out in a way subject to interpretation by future generations. Interesting hair splitting or profound Meaning?

 

 

January 2, 2009

 

2009 is here!

 

 

December 28

 

My new toy: An Acer Aspire One. Two pounds and it takes pictures!

A nice long walk in the windy, rainy-but-not-yet-raining sixties. Color is leached out, and it is dark enough in this Sunday mid-afternoon, for lights to be on in people's houses, and that wonderful transparency into windowed golden lives of other people. Families out for walks, kids on Daddy’s back, golden retrievers, boys with action figures on the floor of their porch.

Today’s Times Magazine has articles about people we lost this year, and I was especially touched by Mildred Loving, a long time widow and church woman in rural Virginia whose marriage to a white man back more than forty years became the suit that struck down miscegenation laws in the US. And especially touching, that she came out for gay marriage after long refusing interviews and public life at all.

Whether or not we want to live in public-- whether we hide from it, as she did, or want it, as I do, we are all about the same size.

At Ethical today: a discussion on health care, and I finally got straight the difference between socialized medicine (govt. owns hospitals, pays doctors– like the VA system) versus single payer (govt pays but money goes to various place: private or public). Duh.

 

 

 

 

December 26

 

‘Twas the day after Christmas, and gray in the sky,
Snow on the ground and hangovers from pie....

We spent two hours opening presents yesterday-- Joel insisting that each present be unwrapped and watched and enjoyed by all of us. This year, though, I had cleverly planned my cooking tasks so that I wasn’t anxious doing this: the ham was roasting and a bread was in the bread maker and the vegetables for roasting were already prepared.

I got my best Christmas present in years– the tiny Acer Aspire "netbook" computer . It is just 2 pounds and under $300 (barely under of course), and it is so cute ! I've wanted one of these subnotebooks for almost a year, since I started reading about them: solid state and with a Linux operating system. I wanted it for its true portability (I have a laptop but it's heavy and the battery has died). Anyhow this little job does email and word processing and is all I need for traveling.

Also for looking cool in Starbucks.

The keyboard is small, but I’d tried it at J&R and compared to my first “netbook” crush, an Asus eee (screen 7 inches diagonal), this one (screen 8.9) is downright roomy. Thinner and lighter than a hardcover book.

We had eight for Christmas dinner-- Mom, Andy and me, Sarah and Joel, and Howard and Alice and daughter Molly. A lot of cooking, and everyone helped (Joel and Sarah made some amazing garlic mashed with pre-roasted garlic) , ditto with clean-up. The work has already this morning faded into a general haze of warmth. Joel, Sarah, and Molly went to Sciainos’ after dinner, where Joel ate sausage and manicotti and cookies. Groan.

After Christmas dinner, we did Hanukkah candles, and no Christmas songs– but we were 3 to 1 Jewish to gentile. We tend to have Jews for Christmas and gentiles for Pesach. Seriously.

 

 

 

 

 

December 24

It's the day before Christmas, rain on snow, icy, slushy, Joel and Sarah's plane last night was two hours late, but they're here, and my mom, Sarah working on her computer, long distance; I made my plan (what to cook, when) and talked to Alice, talked to Christy, everything under control as we say.

 

 

 

December 22

 

Yesterday started with snow and sleet, eventually lightened, and today is just deep cold, barely made double digits. There is that special short day pale orange light with the trees dark with brass highlights, the sky pale, shadows on snow. The speaker cancelled at Ethical yesterday, and we hung around awhile and then went and picked up mom at Prospect Presbyterian and went back to Prospect in late afternoon to hear their chancel choir do “The Messiah Part I.”

This was at Adrienne Bolden’s invitation, as she had the first alto solo, and she sounded tremendous, a long rounded sound to her voice, not low at all, but rich and muscular in a restrainted way. I had forgotten who all sings in their choir: solosalso by John Pearson and David Huemer and Ellie Winslow the librarian.

I always forget how much I like music, sitting and listening to it, watching singers and performers (small string group too, and their choir director played a harpsichord). I don’t like ambient music, but I like focusing on it, going where it is.

Much of the text of that part of “The Messiah” is from the Book of Isaiah.

 

And now, for the first time ever-- we are proudly flying the flag of a country
where the a majority of the voters chose hope over business as usual.  We sincerely hope!

 

 

 

December 18

 

A quick two day drive to and from Shinnston to pick up Mom for Chirstmas. And today, my last class (tomorrow's is being rescheduled!) before the holidays and getting to concentrate on family, food, tree, etc.!

Meanwhile in the news--the continued Splat! of the greed bubble bursting. Bernie Madoff now is being called perpetrator of a Ponzi scheme. Oh the Wall Streeters! What were they thinking? It has all been so wrong, so very wrong, and now everyone is beginning to get it, to see, that the greed was insane. For me and my Aged Radicals, it is a major vindication. Crooked finger shaking: You see? You see?

What lessons to learn of course? The lesson for my parents' Great Depression was to keep your nose to the grindstone, take care of your own frugally, save, plan for retirement. Too narrow for my generation, spendthrift in resources and extreme in choices: We need a new system top to bottom!  Socialism is too timid! Change everything!

Followed by the ones who came of age with Reagan and Greed is Good. Who, along with the rapacious ones who surround W., have caused immense harm.

And greed is not good, nor is narrowness out of fear.   We need to be expansive in caring for the common good.  

Will Obama’s administration be able to manage it? Will they make enough structural change? Will they keep Obama alive?

 

 

 

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