Fragments of Franzen

15 November 2011

“The solitary I as a writer is forever trying to reach the solitary I of the reader.” — Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen was in town the other week to give a talk at the Egyptian Theatre. The Deco-era venue was filled to capacity and the excitement in the air was only faintly dampend by Franzen, who, after bounding on stage with a ruffian's flair, informed us rather stiffly that he couldn't, “for contractual reasons,” discuss his recent novel Freedom. There was a collective pause, and I swore I heard the crowd collectively wonder: then WTF are we here for?

But Franzen soon warmed up. He began reading from a “lecture” regarding the four pestering questions authors must answer “as payment for the privilege of speaking in public”:

1. Is your fiction just “thinly-veiled autobiography”?

2. When and where do you work?

3. Who are your influences?

4. An author interview I read said when writing, the characters take over. Does this happen to you?

Before we get to his reply, it's helpful (as a visual aid, if nothing else) to note how interesting Franzen is to watch on stage, both for how intensely he considers a question, and for his own self-aware position within the question's setting. He seems to be as frankly, and at times as nakedly and uncomfortably, self-conscious as some of the characters in his novels are. But he's equally, on the strength of his capable intellectual probing, as confident. You see him vacillating between the two states, talking through his thoughts, examining the air above the audience and then the floor at his feet, taking an apple from his leather valise and considering it too before taking a bite, pacing slightly as he hems and haws over a question, moving by degrees from doubt and dark humor to a revelation that is only occasionally ironic. The man seems a mix of impulses: wry and irreverent one moment, then good-hearted, even perhaps guilt-addled, the next. Is that what happens to good Midwestern boys when they go to live in Manhattan?

As for Franzen's influences (question number three, for those still hanging in there), he doesn't consider Tolstoy or Kafka or Roth to have any more sway over him than the bands or music (a mention of Stravinsky) or the movies he loves, though clearly these writers are dear to him. We are, I hazard to paraphrase, a product of a mosaic of cultural influences, and whether the effect is shattering — Elliot's The Wasteland comes to mind — or a constructive harmony, is for us to materialize through our art, and not stunt by fixating on the sources of inspiration. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't be aware of, or well-versed in, those sources. But Franzen, like Richard Katz in Freedom, seems to harbor an embarrassed revulsion of all things fetishized, of all things obvious. One's modesty must be equal to one's capabilities. “Sure,” he or Katz might say to the fawning questioner, “I like those (insert favorite writers/bands). What of it?”

For those kinds of details — where and when one writes, what music one listens to while sharpening their pencil — are not only fixations, but distractions from the spirit of a thing. According to Franzen, a writer doesn't so much take from the particulars of their exterior life as they receive from the current of their subconscious. Writing is a “deliberate dream”, flowing from one's nocturnal self. Kafka never experienced metamorphosing into a beetle; his story is an extension of states of consciousness explored by the author. For a novel to be worth anything to writer or reader, the writer must grapple with the conditions of the soul — particularly the follies and weakness therein — and bare some truth through one's investigation. And if an author achieves this, completes the exploration, then the geography has been mapped, the mission completed, and therefore in order to write a new novel the author must — and these are Franzen's words — become a new person, for they need new terrain to write about.

Here I thought Franzen might be stretching it. What if one's soul is vast and contains multitudes, as Whitman's does? Surely a soul with hordes of dilemmas and weaknesses and passions and loves and derangements could provide a hard-working author with enough sustenance for more than one book. We do grow and change and come to know more of ourselves over time. And that, I think, is what Franzen is requiring of the writer: to know your vast self and its many, sometimes contradictory, states; to write with your eyes wide to your dreaming soul.

(Which, I must insert, all sounds a bit more romantic than I find Franzen's work to be.)

But this is a question all writers must ask themselves (and these are my ideas here): are they revealing truths in their work? Or at the very least, are they exposing insights into the struggle to do so? Fiction writers face a particular dichotomy: they are at once writing truthfully about stuff of the imagination. And through the artifices of fiction. As Steinbeck said, “A novel is a true story that didn't happen.” To a degree, of course, fiction must be artful. But across that line lies artificiality. And shy of that line, the work becomes autobiography. Which isn't to say it's no longer meaningful, but the genre changes. Or if it doesn't — if the novel stays a novel and that novel stays a good one — the more you suspect the plot to be the experiences of the author, the more a mystique grows around the author. The novelist becomes a kind of hero in the Hemingway model. And maybe it's this role, this mystique, this obviousness, that Franzen is uncomfortable with; one he wishes to dispel with a claim that only thirty or so pages of all his fiction is directly relate-able to his life.

The strength of what I took from Franzen's lecture is this question of truths revealed and wrestled with in a novel. Truths that issue from your spirit's innards, and not necessarily from the trimwork of your day. Speaking of innards, the last book I read before Freedom was Yonder Stands Your Orphan, and the two books couldn't have been more different. While I savored Barry Hannah's swamp-rich, perverse and lovely writing — characters who could “sodomize and puke on [each other's] back, and still respect [each other]” — by the last page I had to ask myself what the point of Yonder was. A thrill-ride, a gorgeous pulp fiction verging on mystery? Being a fan of Cain and Thompson, I'm all for those qualities, but in the end I need some sustenance, some structure built on insights, to make the nastiness go down less cheaply. (Even the roughest moonshine still has some moon it, right?)

On the other hand, while I sometimes feel Franzen's characters to be over-intellectualized, too thoughtful, I at least trust that he's working through his scenes to get at some revelation, deep or quotidian. Hannah's tweaked characters, by contrast, at best exude a drop of truth only after some sick or euphoric contortion: a murder or molestation or barge wreck often larger than the capacity of the author to divine through. Which isn't to say I don't like Hannah. The fucker is funny. And it could even be argued that he rides his subconscious more freely than Franzen does or prescribes. But I need those revelations. For these days, being the pious family man that I am, there isn't much room to wedge in reading, and the book that gets pried open each night before sleepfall had better be good, had better shoot some truths into my slipping soul, or else it's stealing from my dream time. And Kafka wouldn't like that. Nor would Franzen.

An Inch Away

15 September 2011

“And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin. And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning.”

Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”

In Chekhov's stories there's always that wisp of happiness just out of reach, sensed, experienced in flushes, but unsustainable, as though by nature true happiness is incompatible with everyday life. And Chekhov's poor lovers, to have any chance at such happiness with each other, must reveal their affair and upend their marriages, which they cannot bear to do. Or can they? Is there a surge of courage, a will to take on “the complicated part” in that last sentence? Or is the complicated part a matter between the two of them? Each time I read that final passage I see it in a different way. I'm left in as much limbo as Anna and Dmitri are. Where is the beautiful life only an inch away?

This early morning, still dark, another shrill bird call woke me – something between an owl's pulsing hoot and a cranes shriek. I've heard it before, always before dawn, and still can't name the mystery bird who's call is as witchy as a coyote's. Anyhow, I couldn't get back to sleep and got up quietly and went to the kitchen to make coffee before sitting down at the lamp beside the window to read. The calm of the early hours was never so serene and vital as it is now with little Ada tearing up the house. All the same, as the trees start to silohet against the greying sky, I get excited for her to wake, to be pulled out of my solitude by the sound of her soft footfalls charging down the hall, her drowsy call for daddy, her tousled hair and the downy smell of sleep on her neck as she lifts her arms around mine. We're never so alone as when we sleep. And never so alive as when the family rustles up together for breakfast at the table, the door open to the cool morning. Am I being too sentimental? Is this a rebuttle to Chekhov? Either way, it's his fault: he put me in this mood.

Some find Chekhov cold, but I think they don't understand him. Or maybe they don't read him at the right time of day. There are certain writers who are not just a reading but a state of mind. When they describe a tree in March coming into leaf against the brown hills you see it precisely. You see it like the leaf was in your hand, the branch bent to you, a current of warmth moving over the hills through the brisk air. All good writers get their voice into your head, of course. But some clear your head. Some are like meditation, settling you and opening your perceptions from within. Chekhov is one of those, as is Hemingway on his good days, Tolstoy. And of the contemporary writers I know, Per Petterson goes on that list. His Out Stealing Horses is one of the best books I've read, ever. I can still smell the pine sap on the boy's hands after a day of felling trees with his father in the summery Norwegian woods.

Maybe I should end on that note, that image. But another comes to mind out of nowhere:

On the radio the other day was an interview with an American journalist who had spent six months in solitary confinement in Libya during the ongoing revolution. He said solitary was the most agonizing, maddening experience, and that what kept him sane were his dreams. When he dreamt, his cell dissapeared and he was no longer alone – and so his dreams became a deeper reality to him. I imagine that his waking hours in the cell became a kind of dead slumber, a grey interlude to pass through, before the meadows and family get-togethers and cocktale parties and seaside hikes and love-reunions and rowdy football games of his dreams.

And I imagine the coldness of waking into that cell. The waking from your family and from the strange lush bird calls outside your window, from your child singing out for you to get up, to the nothingness of a prison cell. And I can't imagine much worse for a person to go through. I don't know why that tangent came to me. I don't want to be dreary. But sometimes it's the sorrows and vulnerabilities of the human experience that come to you when you're thinking of your child. You could cry for heart-joy thinking of them, and from heart-sickness, because they connect you through their big souls to all the human race. You cannot dream or hope or worry for your child without dreaming or hoping or worrying for all the peoples of the world.

Or even for a couple of fictional characters in a story written a hundred and forty years ago. Good literarture connects us; as do our early mornings alone to the lifting darkness; and the sound of our kid's pattering steps down the hall.

Our Times are Everywhere

5 July 2011, Boise

In early morning the first light stirs the birds and their various calls – lush, clattering, whistling, begging – wake me with the dream-sensation I'm somewhere in Brazil, in a dripping rain forest and not the high desert of Idaho. After a few thunderstorms to bring in the solstice, summer is finally here. We leave the windows open to the cool air until mid-morning when the sun flashes off the trees and makes you glad for their shade. In the afternoon it's best to be down by the river or in the hammock on the north side of the house, where you can see through the leaves to the hills in the sun losing their wild-flower mauves to that sandy beige that is the color of heat in this town. Stegner called the West a semi-desert with a desert heart. It's in summer here that that heart starts to beat robustly, pumping salt from your slick limbs and buzzing a dry heat in your ears if you're not lucky enough to be under trees or in water. You've got to do like the birds do around here: sing in the mornings and wait till sundown to dive after your dinner.

Do we Americans tend to be less satisfied with our stations in life than those of other societies? And are we Far-Westerners still less satisfied when it comes to where we live? How much of that insatiability is human nature – our evolved tendencies to roam, to chase the horizon – and how much of it is a product of our consumer culture? Humans are a restless, curious, imaginative bunch: dreamers of distant lands, greener meadows, better-protected mountain passes. And the constant advertising and materialism thrown at us only adds fuel to that fire. So it's sometimes hard to know what's a genuine urge of the spirit and what's a whim blown your way from an ad while you weren't paying attention.

Anna and I wonder a lot about this restlessness, especially because we're in a constant state of it. We're fairly happy here in Boise, what with a good house on the edge of the hills under the trees. We've good friends and a great active community of artists and parents and outdoorsy types around us. And vitally, Ada is happy here. There are all the parks and trails and kid friends in the neighborhood she could want. If we were having more success in our fields of writing and painting would we be more content? We might be a bit happier, or filled with a larger sense of purpose, but I doubt we'd feel more content. We might then merely want more. I don't mean a larger house or better car. Not that kind of stuff. But more of the success that acts as an inlet to relevance in the world – more relevance and more importance. I won't kid myself: I'm no genius who deserves to be canonized. I'd just like to be better involved in, and pertinent to, our times.

So how do we do that? Where are our times and when is the next direct flight there? Jump over to the Middle East and report directly from the Arab Spring? Get down to New Orleans to see the transformation of the city after Katrina? Hurry over to Montana to moniter the Exxon pipeline spill into the Yellowstone River? Sell everything and move to Berlin and join the amazing scene there? I envy journalists for their always being on the front edge of history, reporting from the first page of the next big story.

But our times are everywhere; our times are what we make of them, are the significance we create in the place we're living. It's not a question of moving geographically but conceptually within the moment of the age. When you get into step with a great idea or solution or movement of the day you're suddenly whisked ahead at the speed of the present, in touch with the horizons of the zeitgeist, and there's no need to go anywhere else but more deeply into where you are.

Progress Report: Telluride and MountainFilm

5 June 2011, Telluride, CO

In Telluride the aspen are just coming into leaf. The broad table-topped foothills are as green as the hills in Switzerland, and the deep groves of leafing aspen shimmer beneath the white peaks of the glaciated valley. The winter was a dry one, but spring made up for it with a series of snow storms that blanketed the hills and bevelled the San Juan summits to diamond points. So now it is that lovely perfect season of halves: half winter and half summer: half excitement and half wistfulness: warm breezes in the valley smelling of drying earth and lilacs and the San Miguel river coursing under budding willows; yet the mountains still in snow, the high ivory peaks holding winter like a last sip of wine against the sun-blue sky; the snowpack melting from the ridges so that each day, watching the lines where good skiing is still to be had, you see cliff bands exposed and sloughs of avalanche darkening the white bowls; and the feeling is one of watching the last locust blossoms wilt from the branch.

We're here for vacation, visiting family, and for MountainFilm, a festival of documentaries that focus on environmental and social issues from around the world. The festival is amazing, but something of a roller coaster ride emotionally. Just when you think the world is doomed, that we've completely doomed ourselves and the planet along the way — perhaps after watching a documentary about mountain-top removal mining practices (On Coal River) — you're filled with hope after watching another film on how the mere introduction of a bicycle has transformed and empowered the lives of people in developing countries (With My Own Two Wheels). You swing back and forth like this: between despair and indignation on one side, and hope and determination on the other. The theme of this year's festival is “awareness into action”. It's a perfectly good theme, an energizing one. Personally, internally, I find the real challenge when dealing with these matters is to avoid fatalism.

For if you believe we're fucked, we are. Or rather, if you believe we're fucked and do nothing about it, then our fatalism becomes nihilism and we truly are finished. And maybe in the end we are goners – we've pushed and overpopulated and pried open the earth to no end — but we can't ever quit fighting. We can't give up the struggle for what is right and good in this world, even if the fight comes to nothing. But it never comes to nothing. Even if that fight does no more than spare a watershed from mercury pollution for another season, or keep a kid healthy and a factory worker safely employed for a few more years or less — that less is always something more than nothing. It's the powers who want us to sit back and let them do as they please who would have us believe otherwise, who would foster our fatalism while they extract the last precious somethings of the world from under our dozing spirits.

It's not enough not to sleep; we must get up off the mat and fight, in whatever large or small ways we can.

Yesterday we went for a walk on the valley floor. Budding pussywillows, pink ground flowers and dandelions speckling the grass; three cow elk grazing by the river. (And the evening before a coyote out stalking the prairie dogs). The San Miguel River is charging with snow melt, fast and translucent with sediments as it cuts S-curves into the valley. The morning had started out dim and sweet-smelling with smoke from three fires to the south: one in New Mexico, one near Durango, and another in SE Colorado. But by mid-day the haze was clearing and the white peaks emerged against a slate-blue sky. Craig and his very pregnant wife Melanie joined us for the hike. As we walked Craig told me the details of how Telluride came together to buy the valley floor, just west of town, for 50 million from the developer who wanted to put condos and a golf course on the sprawling verdant open space. There was some division within the community, but now that the floor is not just public domain but open wild space for the rest of the critters living here, nobody can imagine a different outcome. We stopped beside a bend in the river to rest and snap a few photos. A favorite is of Ada touching Melanie's protruding belly as she declares “baby in dere.” A good chance one or two of those elk cows by the river have a baby in there, too. The valley provided important grazing during the spring snow storms. And in these days of over-development and crowding, the open space offers a lush and dreamy sustenance to our harried spirits. We're all “babies in dere,” aren't we?

Our idea of progress can't only be about development; it must also include non-development: leaving places alone. What the Telluride community did to protect this area is huge. The valley is a great example of what can be achieved when we come together and give what we can, big or small, in a larger effort to do the right thing. I know “right” can be relative, but walk this valley gazing up at the chiseled peaks, fish the river for rainbow and brown trout, laze in the flowers with your kid or sweetie or both, and you'll know this right in your gut.

National Security: One Hen Coop at a Time

7 March 2011, Boise

“Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?” -- Thoreau, Walden, “Economy”

Winter is nearing its end, but like an old man intent on showing the world he still has some kick left in him, the season gave us a four-day storm of snowfall and near-zero lows — all of it more flurry than force. Days before that a warm front had pushed up from the coast, bringing with it Oregon juncos and chickadees riding the soft wave north. I had just returned from three days of back-country skiing in the Sawtooths with my good friend Dave M. from Sonoma County, and it felt like we'd stepped out of central Idaho into balmy Northern California. But now the chilled air is back and the juncos are chittering in the bare trees, perhaps feeling cheated somehow, perhaps looking on the bright side as the sun melts away at the snow patches on the ground. That's February for you: a warm caress from the south, then an icy suckerpunch from the north. But you can't feel too badly for being duped when you see how many migrating song birds have been fooled just the same.

Yesterday we went to dinner at the home of our friends A.W. and J.B. For a year now I'd been hearing about their famous “compound” over in the southeast-end of town, and I was anxious to see it for myself. A is an artist, and her husband J is a craftsman; and with their sweet two-year old daughter, and A's sisters living next door, the whole fam-damnily has put together a big shared property that is about as village-utopian as you could hope for. The sprawling backyard is a combination of neighboring yards with the fences taken down. There are garden plots and cherry trees, solar panels on the rooftops, landscaped fire pits and picnic tables, a ditch canal that runs water from the Boise River (which they have a share of), and a big yurt on a platform that serves as A's studio and houses her glass kiln.

But what takes the cake is the chicken coop. Down the spine of the block runs the canal through an easement between the backyards. At first they had put a coop back there and set a few chickens adrift, and then the neighbors got curious. Soon everybody on both sides of the canal wanted in. And now you push through the wire gate to a menagerie of hens of every kind: dozens of them, skirting underfoot, cawing, amazing in their variety and brilliance, soothing in their murmuring calls. The deep warm straw smell of the coop brought me back to my grandparents' place in Italy: an Old World feeling of home and security and coziness. We collected a few eggs and gave them to Ada to carry in her basket. She was delighted out of her mind by the birds. And as if that wasn't enough, she went silly over the plump lazy rabbit that has taken up home with the birds.

Back in the house, toasty warm with the stove burning, we drank beer and ate dinner and talked while the girls ran about the place. Or rather, J and I ran our mouths. We were glad to have sympathetic ears and so we got things running pretty hot: why are so many American's so damn ignorant? Ignorant of their own working past and traditions of craft and self-sufficiency? In part because this present manifestation of the American Dream is fundamentally a suburban one, conceived in the Fifties and perpetuated by corporate interests, which would rather keep us as children forever wanting trinkets instead of providing for ourselves; forever fatuous and fattened up, cut off from the wisdom of the land and our grandparents, believing that if you use your hands you deserve to scrape along, and that if you want to get somewhere in life, it's got to be upwards into the digital heavens of finance and technology. We talked about Thoreau's economics of self-sufficiency; we talked about the Confucian Code of Fealty: family first, then your block, then your village, then your countryside, and somewhere past the concentric rings of the horizon, your “country”.

All of this at a time when the state of Wisconsin (and other states, including Idaho) are vying to strip public workers of their right to collective bargaining. What will it take for us to remember, to relearn, our working class history and common strength. Common people fighting the excesses and advantages of the wealthy few who both pull the levers of the machine and draw the drapes of media which hide the machine. All of this while the people in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya are rallying to the precipice of revolution. If they have the courage, why don't we? I'm not arguing for revolution in this country, not on a national level. Americans are not quite uncomfortable enough for that to happen yet. So long as TV dinners come twenty to a cheap-pack at Costco, the revolution will never pry itself from its Lazyboy.

Except on a local level. We've all heard the rallying cry. But it's a timeless refrain, going all the way back to Confucius' days, back to the German and British Romantics, the American Transcendentalists, even the Arts and Crafts movement: quality over quantity; craft over consumption; local over diesel-driven shipping containers. Your first devotion, your first revolution, must be to and at home, and from there the effort ripples out to your block, your town, and long long down the line, if ever, to your so-called country.

Life's Economy

7 Feb 2011, Boise

Five am: a grey horizon at the bottom of an otherwise black western sky, light from the sunken sun carrying somehow from under the earth, reflecting off the flanks of the atmosphere to glint off that low distant bottom of the night.

There's never enough time in life. Or rather, there's always too much ambition. How can there not be enough time? It's like saying there's not enough life. And there is all the life around you that you can dive into, if you want it. But still, I suppose, one always craves more. It's the craving that skews our estimate. Craving doesn't quit even after you've topped your twentieth peak, but looks out on the twenty others unclimbed and hanging from the sky.

What I crave is more time, more life, with my family, my wife and daughter. The need to work is a cruel one in this modern age. Outside of going off together to gather berries and set traps, what kind of economics might we invent that allows us to be and work and live together more? We all need our personal time. But that's something different. I do feel a tad guilty over writing when I've been off at the job site for most of the day. I pit my vital personal time against our vital family time. But that's not the right standoff. It's job time that must compromise. If I give up, even a little, the things which sustain me, which inspire and distinguish my spirit, then I give up, by the same amount, what I have of myself to offer my daughter and wife. If I don't write, I don't live; I love life less and thus myself less and thus everyone around me, even my dearest, feels less of the soul that suffers in me.

I don't mean this as a narcissistic excuse for writing all hours of the day, but as an examination of the day's economics.

It's five in the morning, a soft darkness extending from beyond the glow of my little desk lamp, night's shadow like a cape over the rooftops and the valley below, scattered with a few neighborhood lights like morning stars. I came home from work last night and popped a beer and maybe it was the cold raw blue February breeze that had nipped at me all day as I hung siding, but I was in a testy mood and I took a testy nip out of Anna. She had made a comment that morning about my writing late into the morning (while she herself hadn't been able to paint for days, as she was watching Ada), and now I gave her my rebuttal. It was a mean argument, or I felt mean making it. To say, I work all day so I've got the right to an hour or two to write, is to oversimplify my day and to overlook hers. She watches Ada most of the day, has precious little time to herself, and rarely any studio time. At the very least, I get a break to myself when I'm off pounding nails and gazing out at the torn whitecaps of an ocean blue sky. The fundamental need here is for both of us to have a creative corner to ourselves each day. And when it doesn't happen, we both get cranky, depressed, and the world loses a shade of its vividness. To say nothing of romance.

So that is why I'm back on my old pre-dawn schedule. I had dropped off of it because we were training Ada to sleep without her mama, that is, without her breasts. She sleeps with me and it's a dear sweet thing to have that baby girl tenderness curled against you, until of course the kitty's claws come out and she bawls you awake out of your dreams. Meanwhile Anna tries to catch up on nineteen month's of dream deficit. The training had me sleeping pretty badly and hence I'd taken to sleeping in till seven. But by the time breakfast is over, and Ada is dressed, it's nearly mid-morning when I get to typing. So our day gets cramped.

But last night, after our tussle, I resolved to get up at five again, regardless. There is a sharpness, a keenness of mind that comes to you once you're up, had a couple cups of coffee, and the rest of the world around you floats in darkness. But this keenness can't for the life of me can't figure out what to do about the quandry of work. I'm not yet smart or rich enough for that. I know how to work, I've been a good mule that way since I had my first job at fourteen. And right now, other than carpentry, I know only one thing that truly drives me: writing. I also know what puts food on the table, and what doesn't.

There's alway enough time in life, if you get up early enough.

Cool Blue

29 Dec 2010, Boise

An inch of snow before dawn. The yards and rooftops and forks of trees piled white as clouds, and through them from the cabin window of my study I can see a robin's egg blue sky stretching out over the ruddy bare trees to the white hills across the plain. A frigid pale blue sky scrolled with thin clouds that look like they've just breezed off the sea. That springtime urge to travel, to move out into the land, to gain a ridge or walk a hillside in the sun, comes in winter too. Days like this ignite a spring inside you, especially after so many hibernating weeks of snow and sleet and cold. If I didn't have to work I'd haul the family up to Bogus and ski the trails up there. But work I must, and sharpen my daydreaming mind to the task ahead.

The novel has been finished for days now and I feel both liberated and desultory. The weight on my shoulders is also an engine of purpose at my back driving me forward, the engine and the rudder with my hand at the wheel as I scan ahead over the lake and study the ridges against the sky. I find myself seeking another project, when I know now is the perfect, rather the natural, time to take it easy, to sleep in and play with Ada and to go off to work after breakfast has been had (instead of sitting down for another session of writing). But it isn't easy. I wonder if until I get this novel published and get some kind of break if I'll ever rest over the matter. I recall what Steinbeck wrote to a friend about how it never got easier — he was on his fourth or fifth novel and by then he'd figured it should've been easier but it wasn't. Each book is it's own new and different ball game.

4 Jan 2011

Well, Obama came out of the scrum smelling like a rose. Just when it looked like he was in real trouble after the mid-term “shellacking”, he changed costume and stepped onto a new stage of politics: that of the centrist. Stage left you have the folks like me, progressive and pissed and feeling abandoned by our great white-black hope. Stage right are the Tea-party-ers, snorting and dagger wielding, ready to tear the theatre down to its Constitutional foundation once they assume power in the House. They now have the “hope” the left once had, and they'll soon have our disillusionment too. For center stage is where the action is. There, doing an even better impersonation of Clinton then Clinton ever did, is Obama, dancing to a two-base hit of Start Treaty ratification and the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. The opening number which started the dance – and the ill tempers on the left – was the full extension of Bush's tax cuts, particularly those to the super rich. Nobody but the wealthiest in the country – and the poor saps who believe in the wealth-myth, and Obama's strategists – thought the tax deal was a good idea. For the rest of us it's an infuriating social injustice, especially in tough times like these for schools and families and social services. A typical tax refund for the upper bracket is more than an average American family earns in a year. Must capitalism be as corrupt as the Soviets portrayed it be?

But I'm getting off target. Nobody wants to see that sideshow, the desperate ventriloquism act so far to stage left we're bumping up against the curtains. What Americans want to believe is the same old show right down the middle, the one we know so well: The Play of the American Dream, in which everything turns out all right in the end if we just work together and don't rock the boat, don't over-regulate or over-tax the system that pours billions of dollars upwards into the hands of the few and the wise, the investors and the inventors of this great economic vessel, who, in due time, always right the ship and distribute it's surplus bounty fairly and evenly over the sea of bent backs below. There at center stage is the massive gleaming paper mache craft, Obama and Bernanke at the helm. Somewhere at the back of the cockpit Clinton is orating directions and Bush Jr. is strutting around in his aviator suit. Murdock has written the script and is working the lights. Stay true to the course, steady down the middle of a wake already carved for us. And merely because we can't see the mast-tops of the last boat to go before us shouldn't arouse doubt or suspicion that that long parade has dropped over the lip of a cascade we can't see. No, we're to keep our eyes on stage, on the dream and on the actors playing it out. And when finally we step outside the theatre into the streets of our lives we'll have the warm afterglow of their performance to sustain us. And should those memories tatter there'll always be another “reality” show on Fox to keep us believing, enamored of the myth instead of angered by its makers.

Winter Notes - Towards Solstice

13 November 2010, Boise

Bicycling to work into the foothills, climbing into the sun layer pouring across the ridges, the amber light in the yellow and ruddy and still-green treetops of the North End; various flocks of birds streaming like confetti over the valley across the pale turquoise sky. This new job couldn't have come at a better time for us. It involves renovating a house in the hills not far from our place. What was once quite a modern Eighties home is now in need of contemporary upscaling: new kitchen layout, new energy efficient windows, all the heavy oak trim and baseboard pulled for clear flat stock moulding. It's a fun project and the owner has a great eye for design. In fact he built the place in the Eighties and still has piles of period Architectural Digests to prove it. Now those mags are replaced with Dwell and Wallpaper, and perhaps in another twenty years the whole cycle will start over again. But like I said, it's a fun process.

Last week Republicans stormed back into congressional power, taking around 60 seats in the House on their way to controlling it (and halting just a seat short of commanding the Senate). Perhaps Obama did exchange hope for pragmatism, but how practical is missing your opportunity for real change by playing moderate, thereby losing your progressive base, and then getting reamed anyway by the far right for being a 'radical'? He should have played Bush-Cheney hardball from the start, rammed through genuine health care legislation, and then lost the landslide of seats in the House. The real loss the Dems suffered was not of seats, but of opportunity. And that was lost for taking half-steps. If you're going to go down in flames, at least take out a target on your way down.

4 December

It's snowing. Plump wet flakes that slide down the windows and paste the bare limbs of the trees and heap white the yards. This is our fourth or fifth snowfall in two weeks, and the neighborhood is piled high, the streets crested, and the hills are downy sheets billowing out of sight into the low sky. The strange thing is how content I am to watch it come down without the old need to go into it and ski. I'm waiting, or my body is. It's been a decade since I lived in winter and didn't have to drive three hours to it, and my body needs a little more time to absorb the season. But as I light the fire and romp about the living room with Ada and have breakfast with sleepy Anna, a certain spark is lit and starts to grow, a long-waiting pilot light turns up its flame and you can hear the old furnace grumble into action. Diving out into the snow is a little like first jumping into a river: after the cold shock of it, you're warm as you want to be, that is, as warm as your spirit is alive.

That's why kids hardly feel the cold. We bundle up Ada tight as a tick but her engine's so warm already she could go out naked and melt a path across the yard. It's hard to say she loves the snow – any more than she loves everything else about being outside. “Walk” is her word for going out, and it's now her favorite word after ball (and mamma and daddoo, of course.) After a big snow the other day I walked her down the hill to the park where a hundred or more kids were sledding the steep ridge known as Camel's Back. It was a carnival of cruising sleds, scarfs flying. Wisely the park ties hay bails to all the nearby trees to limit knockouts. When I was a kid they skipped the ounce of prevention and just had an ambulance sitting in the parking lot on weekends.

It didn't take Ada long to want to join in the fun. I picked up one of the busted jalopies in the brush and sat Ada in it and tugged her a short ways up slope. Gave her a push and she slid wobbling down a dozen yards to relative safety. Relative because all the while kids were kamikazeing down around her. When I rejoined the girl she had a serious look on her face like she'd either had a fright or was demanding to know what the hell I'd put her through. Then she put her mittened fists together, tapping them in the sign for more. (Anna taught her that small bit of sign language — and I guess that's her other favorite word after ball.) So I pulled her up the hill and gave her a push and she skidded down with great concentration. Seems she took the whole affair quite seriously, like she had some future in it which she wasn't going to derail with any frivolous shouts or peels of laughter. After an hour of riding I finally pulled her out of the sled and she protested with tears. Of course that caved in my resolve to get home and I put her in the flapping plastic sleigh for another couple runs. Still that didn't sate her. On what I thought would be the last of the last rides she saw me coming for her with what must've been a poorly disguised look in my eyes because she got out of the sled and began pulling it herself by the chord up the hill. The tiny puffed critter wobbling and slipping up the ant hill tugging an oversized snowbuggy behind her was too cute of a sight. The girl has spunk, that's for sure. And maybe not a shabby future on skis. We sledded a few more runs and wetted the snow with tears on the way home.

27 December

Christmas was a sweet one. The neighborhood strung with lights and edged with snow. We were invited to a couple parties, Christmas Eve and day, and it was a fine feeling to bundle up and stroll over under the arching maple trees to a warm house full of cheer and beer and new friends greeting you like family. At the Christmas Eve party there were other kids around Ada's age and the youngsters roamed underfoot and played about the house as the rest of us made dinner (paella cooked outside over an open fire) and drank sangria. It was a Spanish-themed party and a good one. Certainly Ada didn't know anything about Christmas but she did sense something was up, the holiday-glow of yet another late night out at a party with kids and toys and music streaming about the place. She was in good spirits, played nice most of the time, and didn't seem to tire, even on the way home, insisting to walk.

But the next day she came down with a fever. Her illness made the experience of opening presents a kind of lurid color dream of slow-motion puff explosions. (Or that was my slightly hung-over interpretation.) Which is to say she liked the present opening sensations more than the toys that issued from them. The grandparents were more than generous and if it wasn't for them we would've had a pond instead of a sea of wrapping paper on the floor.

Anna made blueberry pancakes and fluffy scrambled eggs while I got the fire crackling and put on Christmas records: Loretta Lynn, Bing, even a Kitty Wells Christmas that Anna found at the thrift store. After all the excitement we lay down on the bed together to rest. Poor fevered Ada was as docile as a wounded bird. She's never like that, so when her engine idles you know something's amiss. Later though, after some napping, she popped back with enough convincing pep that we decided to make a go of another friend's party in the neighborhood. We bundled up and walked down the hill and across the park and west a few more blocks to the home of our new dear friends T. and J. They had a fire going — oak that J. had split from one of his downed trees — and T. was baking away in the kitchen. She is a wonderful cook, a wonderful Italian cook, and to show up at her house is to be offered fresh coffee and treats of all kinds from her oven. This day she had delicate pastries, ham quiche, sizzling wursts, and rich cheeses set out on the kitchen bar, where we sat and drank flutes of prosecco. Other friends of theirs arrived and Ada ran about flirting with the teenage boys of the house. Already she's got a thing for older men. It was a lovely afternoon and we were sad to go.

Sadder still for that despair that always skulks in towards the end of Christmas day. The neighborhood looked a little grey and the house lights beginning to glow did so cheerlessly. There's always a hangover to good times, isn't there? Physical, spiritual or otherwise? Even the sweetest times leave a bittersweet nostalgia in the wake of their passing. But that's life, right? Still, we couldn't help but envy our families in Germany and Italy, where the Christmas season isn't a couple day pause in the work week, but a season of celebrating that lasts almost as long as winter does. Ada slept well that night. We watched a little of A Christmas Story and pretended for an hour that the world was still plump with magic and swirling martinis. And the next morning it was: Ada's illness was somehow gone, I got the records and the fire roaring again, and Anna made another delicious breakfast.