Your Life an Open Book

From time to time you become aware of another drenching wave, hitting the shoreline, wreaking its damage.  Unlike many an aggressive tide from the ocean, this particular wave is one of metaphor wherein the shoreline represents sanity and the attacking surge is paranoia related to the government knowing too much about "us," using this information to play on our fears, weaknesses, and potential for behavior.

Starting at about the time you were responsible for some satirical materials in the then UCLA campus humor magazine, extending to the time when you'd acquired a title from a former FBI agent who'd been hounded out of the FBI because of his religion, you more or less acquired a reputation and a dossier.  In more than one instance, you'd been informed that the FBI had been "In," asking questions about you  and your political beliefs.

Your overall impression is that you'd been noted rather than any serious surveillance, with the probable result of your dossier saying of you, "known to be a smartass, openly associating with English majors and Theater Arts majors," rather than any serious political rabble rouser designation.

In your way, you were quite political, your attitudes toward government attitudes and witch hunts well on the scale toward the virulent.  Watching the televised hearings on Anita Hill and her allegations of intimidation and misconduct from Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas, your distaste surged once again to the point where, although you effectively voted for him twice, you've never forgiven the current Vice President of the United States who, at the time, was Chairman of the Senate Judicial Committee.

To put the matter in as simple terms as possible, you regard government as an instrument to be used to enact positive legislation in keeping with the expressed intent of the United States Constitution.  You are capable of mistrusting both sides of the aisle.  Although by no means a centrist, you mistrust in particular the conservatives on both sides of the aisle.

That said, you are not nearly so suspicious of government as you are of  what has become Big Business, in particular their manipulation of information in general and as the information has effect on you in specific.  It is no secret that you are a recipient of Social Security benefits, which are deposited directly into your bank account.  Either the bank or the Social Security Agency, or both, have allowed this information to circulate, no doubt to some financial benefit.  

In consequence, you are not surprised to receive mail offerings for free cremations, burials at sea, inducements to buy walk-in bath tubs, powered scooters, hearing aids, erection stimulators, powered wheelchairs, and invitations to investigate potential retirement living facilities.


Not long ago, for reasons adjunct to your Social Security status, you also heard from your mother.  Well, you Latin mother.  Well, your alma mater, UCLA.  They called to see how you were doing, which in context is creepy.  In fact, they were disappointed to learn you were formidable, flourishing, because in fact, they wanted to remind you that after your long and distinguished career, you might wish to leave them a token of your appreciation for the education you received there and for the many connections you made there that led you to the distinctions you've undoubtedly earned.

They were a bit tricky about this latter, diplomatic in the way they asked me to provide a list of my honors and achievements to blend with those they had on file for you.

By this time, you've become cynical.  "Read me what you have,"  I said.  "No sense duplicating things."

Long moment of silence.  This was not on the script.

"We have you graduating in--"

"And nothing since then?"  This is you, being snarky.


"Well, we have here that you were once--"

"Aha,"  you said.  "You heard about that little legal business.  Nothing serious.  Charges dropped."

More silence.  Delicious silence.

"We wish to remind you of those formative years when you ran the student humor magazine."

"And brought down the FBI."

More silence.  Then, "And your rears on The Daily Bruin.  News editor.  Feature editor.  Desk editor.  Night Editor."

"Anything in there about my career with a traveling carnival?  Or cleaning out dead chicken remains from a chicken-processing plant?  Or what about--"

More silence.  This was not going the way they wanted.

You are also of an age where, in grocery and drug stores, individuals ask you if you've found everything you're looking for.  The questions are based in what you have come to think of as corporate sincerity, meant to convey their genuine pleasure to see you there, shopping.  Never mind that since you've got your new Garmin Vivio step counter, you also use market and drugstore aisles to help you achieve your ten thousand steps a day minimum.  You can see the subtext of their question of you finding things to your satisfaction meaning, Do you in fact remember what you came here to purchase?

Every time you sign on to the Internet, Zappos wishes to know why you've not bought any shoes from them since January.  Ralphs' Market wonders why you haven't bought any cat food there since early April, and why haven't you used any of their discount tickets to claim your discounts on bathroom disinfectants.

You order a book from Amazon and you are confronted with a list of previous purchases, and when you think to watch a streaming video, you are offered special discount rates in motels along California's historical Route 49, the so-called Gold Rush Country.

Sly's, a favored restaurant of yours, only last night informed you that whenever you call in for a reservation, Table 70 will be considered your table.  When you go for Sunday breakfast at Renaud's Patisserie, the person taking your order asks, "The usual?" and Bill, the feisty proprietor of The Surf Dog, assures you the sauerkraut is fresh.  Katie at Cafe Luna knows you take a pitcher of steamed milk with your oatmeal, and Carlos, the night chef, tells you in Spanish that yes, there is indeed carino en esa casa.

Even on your evening walk, you cannot go gentle or unnoticed in that goodnight because the owner of the Riviera Market greets you with a booming hello and tells you the neighborhood is better when you are out on your walk.

Complete strangers greet you on the phone by asking you how you are today, meaning they want money from you for some reason or another, which they invariably do.

Netflix and Amazon Streaming video know what you've watched and, without hesitation offer you things based on what they suppose you will like next.

If the government know as much about you as businesses large and small,  the IRS would telephone you each April.  When you answered, they would say, "Mr. Lowenkopf?"

"Yes."

"How are you feeling this afternoon?"

And you would say, "How much do you want?"

The Man Who Mistook Himself for an Acorn

Apologies to Oliver Sacks

All along the way, you had clues.  These snippets of information were like spilled pieces of the jigsaw puzzle you at one time enjoyed putting together.  You soon tired of such puzzles, opting instead for attempts at putting models of airplanes together, then building small, simple radios in cigar boxes.

The clues persisted to the point where you became compulsive about reading.  Omnivore.  Omnibus.  Omniscient.  Three conditions, perhaps standing in your way of putting the clues together.  But perhaps not.  Once you had enough clues to make the declaration to yourself, you encountered the most daunting task of all.

You've managed to trace your clues back to rituals you initiated when you were still at ages where supervising adults could tell you it was your bedtime.  The rituals arose when you found yourself not at all ready for sleep when bedtime arrived, thus simple enough devices to occupy yourself.  Books, stored on the floor under the bed, near the wall side, to avoid detection.  Books, flashlights.  

If you managed to read through your stash without experiencing the slightest tendency toward sleep, then you could try your hand at inventing adventures.  You did not think to call them stories, not then.  They were adventures, thus all first person narration.  This lasted until you reached a point of wondering what it would be like to be dead, then discovered by another person.  

Once you'd discovered your parents and sister would be truly sad were you to die, you began trying the discovery out on various teachers, salespersons you dealt with while on shopping errands, and one nurse whom you came to realize you had a crush on.

This was quite difficult, since there were any number of romance-related things where you were innocent to the point of ignorant, such as, for instance, you telling her in one such adventure narrative, "I suppose you'll want to start having babies," and her responding, "Wouldn't you like to know?"

That "conversation" led you to the awareness that you were aware of a tendency to blush in her presence in real life, leading her to tell your mother, "He [you] is a shy boy."  You were not shy.  You simply didn't want to discuss having babies quite yet, having heard your father expressing his belief to your mother that a friend of theirs was not certain the friend was ready to start a family.  

Of course you and the nurse went on to embark on a family, in which your version of fatherly support was to volunteer to "take them [the children]out for walks every day" and her response that you were likely to let one or more of them get lost.

You were living in what seemed to be the other side of the world when you asked a teacher if there were individuals who could actually make a living from telling stories.  She told you there were indeed such persons and that you had at least two of the qualities they had, which is to say a big vocabulary and a big mouth.  When you asked her about some of the other necessary qualities, she told you that you had a great deal of learning to do, and that if you were serious, you'd better pay closer attention to it than you were paying to the ability to produce accurate results in long division.

Some years later, three or four, a teacher of typing told you how unlikely it was for you to think of being a writer because your typing was so riddled with spelling mistakes.  She told you that touch typists of any worth could type over a hundred error-free words a minute, all without needing to look at the keyboard.

That was pretty much the time when you suffered a pang of doubt because you had no goal in mind of being able to type one hundred error-free words in a minute.  You in fact were becoming aware not only of your lack of skill as a typist but as a composer.

You were aware of another thing, an acorn had the built-in potential to become an oak tree.  You could have become farther along today than you have become.  You could have become something altogether unforeseen and other than what you have become.  But the thing is, the more you look back, you saw signs of how you were moving along the path of growth.  You've seen many oak trees in your time, some stately, well formed, radiating the sense an oak tree radiates when it is no longer a scraggly bush.  

From time to time, you do the equivalent of rustling your leaves, generating a hint of shade or a graceful limb, reaching out to grab at some unoccupied bit of space, taking in sunlight and oxygen, planning for more adventurous reaches, growing toward the point where you no longer mistake yourself for a shrub.

A Matter of Taste

Even though your career as a writer, editor, and teacher was fashioned on the lathe of chance, you did not come by your own preferences in reading material by happenstance.  To the contrary, you spent many hours in libraries, used book stores, and that near magical all-night newsstand in Hollywood, frustration mounting as you skimmed one title after another before you were at last able to take something home.

If you got the material home, chances of you finishing it were high, although finishing did not of necessity mean you'd appreciate it.  The "material" involved genres of great interest to you, as well as your attempts to make up for things you'd wished to have studied while at the University--but did not.  

Your genres of interest were science fiction, hardboiled/noir mystery, general literature, nineteenth century American literature, and twentieth century American, English, and some French literature.  Much of your frustrations in finding things you considered suitable came from your belief that you could not plot, at least not in the sense you wished, which would have allowed you to write more mysteries.

Add to this idiosyncratic approach your need as a beginning editor to read great truckloads of submissions, many from previously unpublished authors, but as well, many from authors with some street cred.  Such reading was a necessary aspect of moving along the editorial track.

If becoming an editor was the equivalent of Accident Number One, then becoming a book reviewer for metropolitan dailies became Accident Number Two.  In the early stages of your reviewing, you had no say in what was assigned to you.  The Los Angeles Times, in fact, took the position that if you asked for a particular book, you either wanted to do a hatchet job or pay off a debt to a writer you admired.

To keep reviewing for the Times, you took what they assigned.  In one case, Christopher Isherwood suggested you as an appropriate reviewer for one of his titles (and you indeed were), bringing upon you the observation, "We had no idea you were gay."  You weren't but you knew Isherwood through your mutual connection with the Vedanta Society.

Accident Number Three was becoming a teacher, which meant among many other things that you had to read manuscripts all the way through, then offer constructive suggestions for enhancing the work.  This also meant you got to read some things you might not otherwise have seen.

While it is true you have written books and essays in which you have attempted to define such things as story, concept, plot, theme, and the like, there is equal truth to support your statement that you may still be unable to describe the standards to which you subscribe and those you adjure where your personal reading tastes are concerned.

This condition was a pigeon returned home to roost earlier this afternoon, when you took some time to begin reading the submissions of a student fiction/essay/poetry contest of which you are one of the judges.  One of the pieces, a six- or seven-page short story, written by an anonymous student, was so much the sort of appealing material that your personal evaluation was a 9 on a one-to-ten scale, while the next two things were scant 5s.

Best you get to work trying to write your reasons for finding this work so compelling, satisfying, illuminating.  For certain, you know this much:  Reading the story ratifies the accident that got you into teaching in the first place, the accident that brought you to College of Creative Studies, UCSB, in the second place.  

There is without doubt a huge generational gap between you and the writer of this lovely story.  You are impressed with the writer's sense of Reality and how she--the writer must surely be a young woman--compresses it without explaining the compression or in any way apologizing for the holes within the tissue connecting the character's inner narrative.  You must find a way to articulate this so that the result will add itself to the hard drive you call your taste for literature, its writing and its reading.

Left to Your Own Devices

The device on your wrist could be mistaken for an inexpensive digital watch.  It does in fact give the time and, with the push of a button, the month and date.  Moments ago, it seemed eager to let you know it is 5-4.

If you let it do so, the device will also monitor your bone density, your sleep patterns, your heart rate, and the number of calories you burn during the course of a day,

You did not acquire the device for such things, rather for the track it keeps of the number of steps you take during the course of a day, reporting in at fifteen-minute increments.  The device takes on a tyrannical view of the times you spend seated, raising alarms when you remain at your desk for more than an hour without standing up.

On the surface, these things have practical value, a fact you remind yourself of from time to time in light of the fact that your investments tend toward the more impractical things, whim-related things, gadgets, devices to store and reproduce music or filmed dramas.  The practicality you have in mind is the need to keep yourself in some state  of fitness to allow you to work your way into and, you hope, through the list of books and stories you wish to engage.

To a certain extent, the philosophy behind the Garmin Vivio on your wrist runs parallel to the philosophy of structuring your day so that the top priority is for composition, then reading, these to come at the expense of any other leisure time you might have after editorial or teaching duties, which in their way contribute to living expenses.

The Garmin Vivio and composition are like cat and dog; some accord may be possible, but in a sense they are like the two hemispheres of your brain.  When you are engaged in writing or reading, a tyrant of a tracking device, flashing red bars at you to get you to stand up, seems an absurdity, counter to the years you've spent being able to get into and remain focused on composition or reading.  You don't want to get up because a device tells you it's time to stand for a few minutes.  You want to keep writing.  Or reading.

When you are composing first or early draft, the last thing you want is some form of practical reminder, much less your interior editor questioning your choice of words or wondering if you, with all your harsh words about the use of -ly adverbs, really meant to use really instead of some non-adverbial trope such as "in reality."

In retrospect, you had the equivalent of such a device when you were a paid employee of one publisher, where, in your rise through the editorial ranks, you were expected to provide charts and reports showing the progress your staff was making in the editorial and production stages of book manuscripts acquired for publication.  Your then publisher was quite serious when he told you there was no place on your progress reports for authors who had a bad writing day or who were late getting their pages in.  He was in effect equating the number of steps necessary to write a manuscript, edit it, design the printed format, then arrange with a manufacturer to produce this new product to tangibles which were anomalous to the human condition.

Your device has factored your age, weight, and relative physical condition to an ideal which, if met, sends your computer a merit certificate.  To your great satisfaction, you figured out how to forestall these merit certificates.  Although they are meant to be positive reinforcement, they remind you of the meme wherein the number of steps trumps the pleasure of being out and about in your own choices of times, taking in the world about you.

The number of words written or the amount of time necessary to get at the right words is, at least for you, a hopeless variable.  One day, you might have it in a draft or two.  The next day, with nothing but time and space before you, you might be lucky to produce one keepable page.

The device on your wrist is a counter, a keeper of records, which it sends to your computer, now, mercifully without merit certificates.  It has taken you years to turn off the internal editor, and you are not about to begin paying it heed again by listening to a damned record keeper.

At a Moment's Notice

Earlier this afternoon, when you were beset by a swarm of agenda flies buzzing about your afternoon, you did two things you ordinarily do.  You made a time-sensitive list of your priorities, You indulged a few moments of rebellion.

How comforting it would be for you to say the implications of these two acts provided you a dazzling moment of insight, but truth to tell, you already knew.

You've come to think of such moments of revisiting priorities as Wordsworth Moments, thanks more than anything to William Wordsworth's sonnet that begins with the memorable line:

"The World is too much with us, late and soon,"

then goes on to trump itself:

"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."

So your Wordsworth moments meant having more for the moment on your plate than you could expect to get done by times for class next week, and your moments of rebellion involved making a pot of coffee, then settling down to read a review by Francine Prose, whom you admire, of an author whose most recent novel you've used several times already as a text to demonstrate a convincing and compelling narrative from the point of view of a five-year-old.

Sipping coffee and reading, you as well savored your moments of rebellion, knowing there would be some negative consequences--you'd have somehow to make up for the hour or so if indulgence--and quite a few positive ones such as the energy derived from your rebellious self-affirmation.  

Translation:  You felt pressured by your to-do list, which you had the good sense to rearrange in your favor.  You allowed yourself moments of rebellion, took consequences into account.  All in all, a splendid calculus.  All in all a reminder that you as well as characters are in a timeline narrative--a set pf priorities against the background of a fuse having been lit.  Too many details and the priorities are occluded, the vector of need watered down.  Too many details and the result is anticlimax, which is another way of saying distraction from the intended effect.

You're still not sure how much of this you have learned well, or if at all. There were times in the past when you were so fond of details that they weighed down what little story you had.  In consequence, you told yourself you were a detail-oriented writer, after all, weren;t there the so-called Realist Writers, who seemed to luxuriate in detail.  You told yourself that detail was your strength.

Of course, you had once told yourself dialogue was your strength until you discovered you were working to capture conversation rather than dialogue.

On some levels, you know this much:  Story is a condition involving characters who have more on their plates than they can handle.  They are aware of the pressures and implications.  They are forced to rearrange priorities, shifting orders of tasks and responses, sometimes painfully aware of the downstream consequences.  Things continue to pile up.  One or more of the characters has, among his or her moments of accelerated awareness, a moment or two of rebellion.

How well do these things line up for you, in Reality and in Composition?

The story, as your weekend, now begins.

The Australian Syndrome

  You first became aware of what you've begun to think of as The Australian Syndrome during a collaboration with your great chum, Digby Wolfe.  Somehow, during a pitching session with a television producer, where you'd gone in with a carefully rehearsed plan for a project you both liked, you got the sense early on that the producer was flat out not interested in your crown jewel.  As the conversation was winding down to the thanks, we;ll get back to you stage, you threw out a spark of an idea that had come to you while listening to the producer.

His ears could be seen to perk.  His expression changed.  "Wait a minute,"  he said.  "Why haven't we been talking about that?  Tell me what you plan to substitute for the whale.  It is, you know, all about the whale."

The whale was, of course The Great White Whale of Melville, Moby-Dick.  And your substitute for it was a mass of atomic waste that had been rocketed out toward a distant asteroid, where it could dispel its radioactivity at a safe reach from earth.  Trouble was, it refused to settle into the retirement that had been planned for it, and began attacking space probes, at first unmanned, then one or two of the manned variety, wherein the equivalent of Ahab lost his leg.

The producer, for a time intrigued, urged you and Wolfe to supply believable contemporary crew members, one of whom Wolfe turned into a mysterious Englishman who, after some time, was revealed to be an Australian.

The project came to the equivalent of grocery money for you and Wolfe, not so much because of the Australian as because the idea of taking Moby-Dick out into the reaches of space was not as substantial as a vehicle.  In the weeks you met to wrap story around the conceptual armature, you began recalling similar ventures in which moodily Englishmen appeared, were on the verge of scoring some political, romantic, or financial coup, possibly a combination of the three,  only to be revealed at the last moment as an impostor, actually an Australian.

Wolfe had nothing but admiration for Australians.  For their part, they seemed to adore him.  Life went well for him there as a performer, among other things having the host role in the Australian versions of This Is Your Life, and  What's My Line.

"The main problem Australians have,"  Wolfe explained to me, "is their having bought the English propaganda.  They would all rather be English."

This led you to suggest a reversal on the theme, with an Englishman, "such as you," you said, pointing at Wolfe, "pretending to be an Australian."

There was only one other time when you'd seen him respond with so much enthusiasm, your casual mention of the possibility of a Dramatic Genome.  Unfortunately for your friendship and the world, Wolfe died before you could finish the work.  Now, you have to imagining him taking you on at every turn as you make good on your promise to him to finish the book for the two of you.  You may even have him confess to you that he so preferred Australia to Felixstowe on the Devon coast, which he claimed as his birth place, because his true place of birth was Sydney, or Adelaide, where he enjoyed being visiting professor.

You were reminded of much of this one recent afternoon while you waited outside a coffee shop for a friend to arrive.  At length, you were joined by a tall, neatly barbed man of about sixty, wearing well-laundered working clothes and a black duckbill cap with ornate lettering.

He came right to the point by telling you how difficult it was for a man of his experience and abilities to find meaningful work these days.  In rapid succession, he cited some of the things at which he acknowledged expertise, which became a lead-in for his major complaint:  the Australians.  To his knowledge, he'd never said or done anything to offend any Australian, but they seemed to have it in for him, causing him to be fired from jobs related to cement, reinforced concrete, tree trimming, orchard management.

Moments before your friend arrived, the man asked you about your accent.  "West coast,"  you said, all the while sitting on the temptation to say, "Perth.  West coast of Australia."

Two disparate events, reminding you of a remark you made last night about the clues all about you.  This clue is to look for the Australian Syndrome in the characters and places you create, the quirks, notions, mysterious pole stars and talismans they carry.  If you cast a cold eye, you will come away with a better sense of why they called themselves to your attention in the first place. 

Clues

On a recent afternoon, when you sat to compose work on the new project, you experienced the feeling of impatience  similar to when you are forced to wait in line for anything.

The materials to work on were close at hand, the window of time fell in leisurely plenitude.  You had in fact arranged this time with a sense of cunning and mischief.  There were other things you needed to do, but you'd agreed to place the work at the top of the priority pyramid.

The beauty of your plan for work you'd thought to engage resided in the fact that at most, you'd get the wording for about one percent of the entire work.  There were other potential beauties, hovering about, waiting to pounce.  Such as, you might stumble upon a discovery, either in your writing or your reading.  Such as, you might make some connection between a portion of your project and another work, where you'd not been conscious of the relationship before.

The greatest beauty of all is the more idiosyncratic one yet; such working sessions have come to be the most enjoyable part of the process.  You are neither launching forth, uncertain of your destination, or paddling furiously because now the shore is in sight and you have been a sea, away from the shore line for a long time.  This was to have been another day in paradise, another day at work on a project.

Why, then, were you seeing reruns of your old nemesis, impatience?  Under most circumstances, you come to work with a phrase, a sentence, a vision in mind, ready to start your way in.  Why impatience?  Why the need to indulge those diversions many writers you know speak of in such unkindly terms as futzing around, sharpening pencils, cleaning imaginary spots from the screen of the computer, or, worse yet, checking emails against the possibility you'll have missed some life-changing opportunity from some publisher who has never contacted you before, but on this day in recent history, might have opted to break silence.

You cast about for clues.  Another time waster.  There are clues everywhere.  At a conservative estimate, you can see two hundred fifty clues on the desktop home of your computer screen.  At least three books, one an introduction to the philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, arguably one of the most profound philosophical influences on the last century and this one.  A splendid if stodgy investigation, The Historical Novel, by one of your favorite literary critics, Georg Lukacs, and a new favorite, the fire-brand Slavoj Zizeck.

At least twenty notebooks, only one of them completely blank, stacks of index cards with your own, funny scribblings on them, date books, wind-up toys, and the on-going challenge of a favored fountain pen whose cap you cannot manage to unscrew, providing you with hours of inventive frustration.  All these are clues to be weighted, balanced, assessed for answers.

Nice try.

How good of you to have worked your way to the habit of looking about for clues, of seeking and finding valuable information and the literary equivalent of such tape in small details which radiate or, as the need arises, betray useful traits.

The clue to your impatience was there, all the time, waiting for you to discover it.  You did not have beginning words for the material you'd hoped to engage.  You did not have them because you had no taste for the material.

Now answers present themselves.  (1) Go to a place where you do have the taste (2) ask probing questions about why you had no taste for the material for which you had no taste. (3) Material may, on subsequent rereading, seem lackluster, but you made the effort to get it down, where you could examine it in its unrefined state for clues.  (4) Material that is down in readable form is always more preferable to the material you write in your dreams. (5) Material in readable form can be revised, edited. (6) Good luck trying to revise or edit dreams.