Against the Dying of the Light

Yesterday, Liz Kuball sent me a url with an attached urging to see the referenced site. Following the lead of the url, I came upon Zoe Strauss' memorable:

Thanks for nothing, Guggenheim!
I did NOT get the Guggenheim and I was MISERABLE when I received the letter. Right, FUCK YOU! Then I realized that I was out of my mind. As I was cleaning earlier this week, I found the paperwork for the 2004 discontinuation of my welfare benefits. So if I'm not getting the Guggenheim 3 years from getting off the dole, I should be ok with that. Within the time frame of the 95 project, I've done pretty well, I need to simmer down. But then... I just sit and stare straight ahead...why wouldn't I get it this year? What the hell? And then I've moved into, did I think I deserved the Guggenheim based on my recent accolades, or based on my work? Well, of course based on my work, I'm totally full of myself! But did think I had a better chance based on my sudden entrance into the commercial and academic art corridors. Now, that's yes. It's embarrassing but true. And I think that's fairly dangerous, considering that I judge my work to my standards without taking any institutional input into account. Also, I don't take rejection well AT ALL and I feel things deeply, good and bad, which means I've got to pay attention to expectations based on product and not on laurels.

It's now brought me to "what are my expectations?" Guess what? I'm shooting for the motherfucking stars like I'm riding Voyager 1 bareback! I will risk endless disappointment, with great ambition and hope. Unstoppable, baby!

which is simply one of the best blog posts I have ever seen, a bright, furious star burst in the heavens. It wrenched me over to another furious star burst, this one from Dylan Thomas, who on the occasion of his father's impending death wrote the now iconic poem, Do Not Go Gentle. Thomas urged his father--and us--to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Some years back, the informed preoccupation was making a dignified exit, having a "good death." Thomas puts paid to that notion for those of us who chose to light our way along the paths of artistry. And in her remarkable blog, so did Zoe Strauss, for whom, apparently, any dimming of the light of potential for her own art is so unthinkable as to cause rage. 

I vote for that. I'm for the vision quest, the seeker who will not quit in her search, who is angry at all the Fates and accidents that get in the way of, ta da, The Discovery, mindful that today's Discovery may eventually devolve into a mere discovery. But it may also remain a Discovery.

A few years back, I published a short story in which an academic whose specialty was Nathaniel Hawthorne, had occasion to recall a favored passage of his [and mine] from a short story ("The Intelligence Office") by Hawthorne. A character with the kind of reach I associate with Zoe Strauss (whom I know only through that remarkable blog), says in a state of exasperation:

"I want my place, my own place,my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my lifetime."

To hell with a good death or leaving the impression of understanding. In the class room, I make a point of trying to dehumanize rejection, which is indeed inevitable but not something to ignore. It is surely gratifying to get the letters of acceptance or, indeed, the letters inviting submissions. The sting is somewhat removed with a near-miss rejection, but sting there is, and I am happy to note the flare or outright rage with a generic rejection or a "Sorry." or a "Please try us again."

When we come to the part of class in which I hold up a batch of rejection slips and ask with a kind of professorial feigned innocence, "Does anyone know what these are?" I will have Zoe Strauss' response to rejection, her raging against the dying of the light, because in that rage I recognize my own and the sense of the thing we all of us bring to our work when we put it out there.

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," Dylan Thomas also wrote, "Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/ Is my destroyer. / And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose / My youth is bent by the same wintry fever."

It is the lovely accident of convenience that Zoe Strauss is a photographer and that the dying of the light is such a powerful metaphor. "It's all about light," Lizzie said after an afternoon of shooting images. To which I add: "The rage doesn't hurt, either, kid."

"You purchase pain," Alexander Pope wrote, "and all the joys it has to give/ And die of nothing but a rage to live."

Through a Glass, Dorkly

βλεπομεν γαρ αρτι δι εσοπτρου εν αινιγματι is rendered in the King James Version of the Bible as: "For now we see through a glass, darkly."

There is no getting around it: As we age, our individual point of view shifts. We look upon a person, place, or thing differently than we may have earlier. Even our wish list undergoes a sea change. At one time in my life, the top items on my wish list were atlases, comic books, licorice cigarettes, and tops (spinning tops). That was then.

It is a fact that as we age, our eyes have more difficulty adjusting to shifts in light; things take longer than they once did; we may be creatures of the night in an interior sense, but we did not evolve to become night predators (except perhaps in the interior sense).

What we once did as mere performance we now tend to disclose, to elaborate, even to argue. This is a part of what the scholar/critic Edward W. Said referred to as late style. You would see a splendid example of late style in operation were the motion picture version of To Kill a Mocking Bird be remade using the same script, with the character of Boo Radley being portrayed by a 2007 version of Robert Duval rather than the Robert Duval of the original.

Have I a late style? The question is the writer's equivalent of checking one's physical body for lumps--you know; cancer. I may not have a late style, but I have had cancer and that experience alone has had some effect on such style as I may have; it affects the way I see, feel, and write about things.

Many persons of my age are well advanced into a vision of things best described as curmudgeonly. Although no stranger to such visions, I see my curmudgeonly self being deposed by enthusiasm, which carries with it hope, charity, wild-ass optimism, even forgiveness. 

 Accordingly, as it increasingly behooves one of my age to exercise, it also argues forcefully that I keep at my chosen work, not so much for the result of the work as for the ambiance of it. In The Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna: "To the work you are entitled, but not the fruits thereof." I take that to mean, among other delicious things, that if you go into your work with enthusiasm, you will meet the loveliest people, starting with yourself. You find your un-dorky self in that ambient landscape, and although the things you see may, from time to time sadden or sicken you, you will have found a late style that is evocative, elaborative, and in the best sense of the word, argumentative.

The best way to portray a character in a history, a biography, or a narrative entirely fictional in nature is to show that character in action, his or her attitudes toward the action at hand revealing more than any attempt at description.

The best way to have a MRI scan of one's own psyche is to compile a body of work, which may then be traced during off moments for clues relating to the health and life expectancy of that psyche.

"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us," Robert Burns suggested, "To see oursels as others see us/ 'Twould from many a blunder free us/ And foolish notion..."

Seeing our multiple selves--for we are indeed many--as other individuals as well as our multifarious self sees us is best accomplished through the work we do, not the work we do in order not to work. If we are ever to remove the cataracts forming over the lenses of self, we must experience the primal, drunken joy of laughter at our own human condition.

A Frank Discussion of Hot Dogs and Hot Dogging

It would be difficult to think of much less find a poet or writer who did not love language. This would be of a piece with finding a dancer who did not like music, a fine arts painter or photographer who did not care much for images, an actor who hated story.

A discussion about the love of language is most likely to be brought up in an atmosphere of self-justification (I love words and all the language.) and is never so present as when an editor wants us to cut some words from something we have written. Cuts are painful, a writer will tell you.

I was engaged some time back by a man I'd more or less grown up with. He was the great big band and small combo leader, Artie Shaw, who had graduated from an excellence in music to a self-imposed auto-didacticism, to an expertise in, of all things, marksmanship with a rifle. It was in his later quest, with words, that I was engaged, given an enormous box filled with manuscript pages, literally thousands of them, and told, "I need you to help. I've lost my objectivity."

Proceeding on my own personal belief that a novel could use as few as fifty thousand words to a maximum of about two hundred thousand, I began to cut. Shaw was soon outraged. "You can't cut that," he literally expostulated. "I love that."

The engagement was soon aborted and I returned to my memories of Shaw as a man who had achieved numerous goals and stature through his uncompromising vision of how reality should look--and sound, as opposed to his being an unrelenting curmudgeon.

Guillaume Doane, Managing Editor at the Montecito Journal, where I contribute a weekly book review, once emailed me with an observation that a sentence seventy-six words long may have worked for William Faulkner but it did not seem appropriate for a community newspaper, even a community as sophisticated and multifarious as Montecito.

Mark Collins, whom I occasionally see in the warp and woof of my life about the outer reaches of Santa Barbara and Summerland, has embarked on a "project" to have words such as very, and many removed from the language.

I once caused great mischief by the fact of having written to the editor of a literary journal I subscribe to, asking if he would please not bother to send me the forthcoming edition, featuring work of and commentary on a major minor American writer whose work, I allowed, played faster and looser with the language than the Bush administration played with the United States Constitution.

It all devolves to words, the use of them, the effect of them. In the beginning, as I noted recently, was "the word." That particular word was made from the welding together of the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet; variously translated, variously stretched to fit the one-size-fits-all standards of a particular culture at a particular time.

Many of us "love" the written and spoken words of Abraham Lincoln, who learned to read and write under the influence of The King James Bible and Noah Webster's Reader, a combination of influences that produced remarkable, memorable, poignant examples of narrative.

At the time of my employment with the Associated Press (thinking toward a career as a journalist), that organization had spent big bucks on a study related to the use of language in newspapers. One of the findings spoke of the need to limit the number of words in a newspaper story sentence to seventeen.

"What do you read, my lord," Polonius asks Hamlet in the eponymous play. "Words, words, words," comes the rejoinder. A severe editor would have found that reply superfluous, the poet's need for meter notwithstanding.

Words.

True enough, we use them because we love them and their potential, but we also learn, or hope to learn how to treat them more as an embarrassment of riches and more as a successful parent treats a child, which is to say we have to learn to let them go, allow them to have a life of their own.

Welcome to the twenty-first century, where it is no longer the cultural heritage, the duty, or expectation of words to perform tricks of the sort some dog and cat owners teach their pets. Words describe, words evoke. Sometimes they combine forces and do both at the same time, a lovely two-fer.

I am immediately made suspicious when a student or new writer offers me something to look at, hoping to enlist my enthusiasm early on by telling me of their love for the language and for words. When I see that they are not dressing up their words in costumes, rolling over, sitting, or playing dead, I am half way to a sense of relief that allows me to move on into their narrative with the expectation of a reader.

When I set to review my own words, my first search-and-destroy mission is to find the examples of hot-doggery so resident within me, so willing to sit up and bark to prove something I already know.

Going through magazines at doctor's offices, at barber shops, drivers' license renewal facilities, and the like, I am amazed and appalled by the photos of the interior of apartments, lofts, offices, sensing an immediate vibration of comfort or discomfort, reminding me to keep the interior decorator out of my own prose. Clean lines and functionality are worthwhile desiderata, but they are not to die for. Better to trip over the adjective or adverb of my own style than the dictate of an interior decorator.

A Tale of Two Sidneys

I've been fortunate to have had two mentors, one the writer, Rachel Maddux, the other an actor, Virginia Gilmore.

Many of the things I learned from Rachel had to do with discovering ways to make a character come to life on the page by demonstrating--not describing--what that character wanted, then relating that agenda to the story at hand.

Virginia, an Actor's Studio alumna, showed me the same basic thing: how to focus on the core image of a character in relationship to the thematic and situational pressures of a given story. It was fascinating to hear Virginia speak of her acting class assignments, shared with her close friends, Lee Remick, and Marilyn Monroe. Boarding a Fifth-Avenue bus at five in the afternoon, with nothing smaller than a fifty-dollar bill. Being imperious and haughty to a saleslady at Bergdorf. All calculated to teach the actor how to overcome humiliation, inflict it, empathize with others and, specifically, to project the deliberate avoidance of empathy, which is to say denial.

I have for some time tended to feel a community in which the actor and writer overlap, relying on, among other things, timing. It is no accident that the community has expanded in my view to include the musician and the photographer, each dealing with the way time is spent/employed/manipulated.

Although I have been a music buff from about pre-teen to the present, it was not until I interviewed Leonard Slatkin, Conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, that I even thought of the orchestral policy of manipulating time in music through the simple raising or lowering of the vibrations per second of the note A. The standard A is 440 vibrations per second. Each time you go to a live performance of a n orchestral or chamber group, you see/hear the players tuning their instrument to the A 440. Some European conductors like the results when they tune to an A at 338; some American conductors apparently like the possibilities from an A at 442. Such tweakings can contribute to an orchestra sounding faster or slower. It is not an obvious effect, merely a contributory one, a part of the conductor's personal "take" or point of view on tempo--how time is enlisted for an effect.

A photographer I was watching, particularly after she downloaded her afternoon's digital images the better to discard the ones she hated, file and perhaps Photo Shop those she saw fit to keep, announced with that lovely certainty of understanding and familiarity, "It's [photography is] all about light." A predetermined amount of light, entering a predetermined aperature in order to record an image.

Writer, actor, musician, photographer, using time to inform a desired result. In setting forth on a venture of writing, acting, performing, photographing, each uses time as a part of an element that transcends technique and delivers on the reader, viewer, hearer, audience an emotional impression. Thus does time become a part of a vital technique of narration.

All the user needs is that lovely portmanteau word, the narrator; or that even lovlier portmanteau phrase, point of view. What am I looking for when I expose an image? I heard the photographer ask. She was talking aloud, to herself, working it out--a link in its way to a pair of questions I ask students in my writing classes: Who's telling the story? And why?

On some basic level, I think we come through middle school understanding the persons, first, second, third. At some later point, we find out about multiple and omniscient.

It may take some of us--me included--longer to arrive at what comes next, just as it took me so long to consider what I learned from Leonard Slatkin about the manipulated A. Is the narrator reliable? Is the narrator like, say, Billy Budd, a naive, innocent, giuleless sort? Is the narrator a naif such as Don Quixote? And from that we have the even greater sophistication: Is Forrest Gump really thick in the head or merely (emphasis on irony here) Quixotic?

Do we believe the anchor who reads the evening news? Do we, accordingly, even watch the evening news?

What degree of acceptance do we give a work on, say Reconstruction (as in the United States Civil War), when we know the author is a Southerner or, conversely, a New Englander? Do we want the reader to accept, reject, or question? Relative to the effect we hope to evoke, what steps do we take to provide it--at what aperture do we set the lens, and how long do we allow the light to enter?

Most Homo sapiens appear to be hard-wired with Pairs of Opposites, polar clashes of conscience, emotion, moral gravity. We are at the very least prone to conflicting visions on the same topic. I am at this very moment seeing and feeling the to me dire consequences of Hillary's win of the Democratic nomination for 2008, vowing to write in Ralph Nader, thus not only making a choice but "making a statement" as well.
With the actual ballot before me in this nightmare scenario, will I hold to my resolve or be yanked off course by the voice of compromise.

Who is the narrator or narrators in a given story? This person, these people, need to have enough light allowed to enter the aperture of their personality to provide a vision of the complexity that lives and thrives within each of us.

Sidney Carlton is enough in appearance like Charles Darnay to pass for him in A Tale of Two Cities. Paris and London, the two venues of the novel, are made similar and polar; as well man's nature may be one of self-aggrandizement or nobility of a sort that is a sarcastic footnote to the broader concept of nobility so abundant in England and France at the time.

In order to know our narrator, you need to, as Virginia Gilmore did, put on her fur coat, and board the Fifth Avenue bus with a fifty-dollar bill. It helps that she told me of another story that came when she wore that fur coat--and nothing, absolutely nothing else. Reeled precariously, trying to stay on top of her drunken state, but losing out and tumbling down the long, circular staircase, into the lobby of a posh Swiss hotel.

Who is telling the story and why? For whom do we root? And why?
How much light do we let in? And through what aperture?
What is the key, the tone, the tempo?
Are we as transparent as, say Morgan Freeman or are we caught in the slipstream of some agenda as, say, Jack Nicholson?

Do we try to lull our characters into a false sense of security so that we can verbally capture them on paper when they are no longer posing? Or do we tell them up front?

There are no right answers, but the wrong answers emerge if we fail to take these issues into the crucible of our own creative urges, the better to determine our own motives.

Paper Failibility

Any serious list of candidates for The Great American Novel would have to include:

1. Huckleberry Finn

2. The Great Gatsby

3. Moby-Dick

4. The Grapes of Wrath

To which I, who lean heavily toward Huckleberry Finn, would add:

5. My Antonia

6. A Light in August, and either

7. The House of Mirth,or

8. The Age of Innocence

With sufficient quantities of the right pinot noir, I could even be tempted to add Nathaniel West's trenchant,ironic The Day of the Locust.

One trait all nine narratives share is some notable and apparent flaw. The Twain novel was going along splendidly until Tom Sawyer appeared, took over, and led the charge to perform a cruel and demeaning trick on the runaway slave, Jim. Gatsby's ascension from poor-at-the-heels Jay Gatz to a preeminent position of wealth and power was in many ways too rapid to be believed--we more or less had to take Fitzgerald's word for it. Melville and his only-survivor amanuensis, Ishmael, tell us more about whales than we want to know. Steinbeck fell increasingly more in love with the Oakies in general and the Joads in particular, to the point where he was blinded by sentimentality. Willa Cather romanticized and idealized her Nebraskan farmers to the point where they became stereotypes rather than individuals. Joe Christmas, however ambiguous he may be racially is nevertheless too good to be true. Edith Wharton was too repressed and Nathaniel West too bitter to be trusted in recording their chosen landscapes for investigation.

Those are not, by the way, my critical points (although I think Melville did go on a bit about whaling);they are the critical points raised against these remarkable works of high art. These critical points either directly or indirectly insist that we should settle for nothing less than perfection. I think this also intends the comparison to works from Russia, England, France--well, you know, Europe and things European, which takes us back on the delicious return to The Innocents Abroad,Twain's leading the charge against things European. We want what we cannot have--the appearance of Culture. But ours is never good enough. See Jack London's Martin Eden.We want perfection, which is easier to equate with Greatness because it has no blemish. So in this kind of algebra, perfect symmetry is equal Greatness.

Forget Navajo rugs, into which the weaver deliberately includes a glitch; such imperfections keep the object out of the museum of Culture. Forget Miles Davis, on whose recordings we can sometimes hear sharps or flats that don't appear to belong.

Such lofty qualities as Greatness, Resonance, Artistic Splendor all have their genesis for us in much more mundane characteristics, those of risk and transportation. Our first risk is to our own nature when we set down work: We risk the consequences of shattering our carefully acquired technique in order to be plunged beyond it. If we win, we are taken somewhere, to a terrain called Happiness. If we lose, the big HOLLYWOODLAND sign on our psyche reads Despair.

And so, to paraphrase Henry James, we work in and with the mundane, risking banishment to the Van Nuys of Despair, seeking the momentary Happiness of knowing the job is done--until the next time. Our enemies, our axis of evil, become self-doubt, hubris, relying on the solution we evolved for the last job.

The Word on Words

I come from a cultural background in which the book plays a significant role, and so when I think with one side of my brain to write, or with the other side of my brain to edit, I am in some sense responding to hard wiring. This is a factor I try to remember when I am awakened in the early morning hours by the sound of Sally, barking furiously.

Sally is responding to her wiring, I tell myself. She is barking to alert the other dogs in the pack of an intrusion.

Raccoons? Quite possible.

Coyotes? Also a possibility; they do gad about the neighborhood.

Squirrels? Less likely. Although they abound, I believe they are not nocturnal.

Sally's position, I have come to believe, is that these nocturnal trespassers are dragons, and like Republicans in control of the presidency and both houses, they are up to mischief. She is doing her all to protect me from these dragons and I must put up with her nocturnal alarms as a part of my general health plan.

The culture from which I descend (and link) is a volatile, argumentative one, divided roughly into three ethnic sources, the Ashkenazi, the Mizrahi, and the Sephardim. But already this opens the door to argument. Schmuck, some critic would inveigh, you have forgotten the Galitzianer. Not schmuck, schlemozzle, another critic would suggest; in his ignorance, he does not know of those from Galicia.

Well, it gets worse. In addition to the ethnic sources, there are philosophical gradations, as in orthodox, reformed, conservative. Schmuck, you forgot the liberals.

All of these, ethnic and philosophical, follow laws of ritual and behavior with the same perfervidity espoused by conservative and liberal interpretations of the Constitution of the United States. Or a dog, affirming her right to ward off dragons.

The Law, as I heard it referred to way back in the dim reaches of my youth, meant the laws that came first from scrolls and then from the evolved scroll, the book. (Did you know that the word shamus, now actually the name of a mystery-writers' award, and frequently thought to be a slangy variation of cop or PI, or 'tec, originally meant a synagogue functionary whose job it is to protect a scroll [Torah]?)

In about 200 of the Common Era, there were enough laws and interpretations of them that the oral tradition of displaying and dealing with them had to go. Although the metaphor is both a reach and an anomaly, it is still effective to think of the result of this informational log jam as being analogous to the shift from handwriting to typewriter or, indeed, from typewriter to computer.

The Law was set forth in a series of books called The Talmud. As is indeed the case with some of our civil and criminal law treatises forged from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, The Talmud sets forth such minutiae as what constitutes acceptable household behavior on the sabbath. The Talmud also contains--and here comes my point--commentary from rabbis (Did you know a rabbi is, in a real sense, a lawyer, a professional who has studied The Law, who counsels its use, and discourses on ways to live It? ). Thus The Talmud may be considered not only as legal commentary but as an on-going legal argument.

Reading through most available Talmud editions, you can actually eavesdrop on a multi-generational discussion (argument). To those of us who grew up in America and appear to have some of our hard wiring diluted by Diet Coke and saccharin and Lean Cuisine (pizza doesn't count; we can eat pizza with a clear conscience), and other distractions of this American culture, the mere mention of Talmud evokes a sense of family gathering. And what do families in our culture do? They argue. So the book becomes the generational argument, which may be one reason why few from our culture are likely to answer a question with a simple yes or no, but instead with an "But on the other hand--"

My point here is that Talmud in addition to an on-going gloss on moral order and behavior, including prayers and some recipes, is an enormous, multi-generational blog.

I got to thinking about this aspect of discussion and argument when Liz Kuball, of an excellent blog on photography, directed me to the site of a talented and respected photographer, Alec Soth, who was discussing/arguing issues inherent in the portraits of Marilyn Monroe rendered by Richard Avedon. Soth and his companions were seriously into such concepts as responsibility, complicity, and integrity in photography. As I regarded the text of the arguments, I could not help thinking, why this--this gloss, this discussion, this argument--is Talmud in its purest form, and we who chose to follow the word are linked to it by electronics, by our mutual and varied interests.

In my culture, whether Ashkenazi, Galititzianer, Mizrahi, or Sephardic, is another concept that glorifies Talmud and extends to what I now call Talmud of the Blog. We are all of us familiar with that glorious opening, even more sonorous than Call me Ishmael: In the beginning was the word. Well, guess what, that's a rather linear translation. In its original, the word "word" is rendered with the Hebrew aleph for the first word of the alphabet and the tav, for the last word.
In the beginning was the atav, the whole bloody, wonderful alphabet. The word from In the beginning was not merely one word but all possibilities of words to come from a given alphabet, all possible meanings to be attached to a law, a photograph, a short story, or a blog.

When I am interrupted from the Talmud of the Blog or my more secular writing by the sound of Sally, fending off dragons, I am linked in yet another way to a creature of my choice, each of us doing what we are hard wired to do.

What, Indeed, Is in a URL?

In times past, your name was the then equivalent of an embedded chip, containing information related to birth, status, occupation. Status was multifarious in its implications, it could be anything from religion to clan or moiety, guardian spirit, family. Giving your name was the equivalent of handing your driver's license to a cop when you were pulled over on suspicion of DUI.

Your name was your curriculum vitae when dealing with the Dean of your college (and yes, the family name Dean still contains a residue of the academic association), your resume when applying for a job outside the academy, and your credits, should you be trying to interest an editor or agent in your writerly career.

There are still some vestigial remnants of birth and status in a person's name. I was taken more than a little aback one afternoon at the doorway to the studio of my longtime friend, writer, painter, teacher, raconteur, and former saloon owner, Barnaby Conrad. A huge brass plaque rested against the side of the building, bearing the name Barnaby Conrad. Clearly the plaque had funerary implications. All I could think to say as I entered and saw BC, intent over his easel, was "Are you feeling okay?" It quickly developed that the plaque was for his late father's monument in the Santa Barbara Cemetery. Using a straightforward calculus, I realized for the first time that my friend of some twenty-five years duration was either BC, Jr., or BC the 2nd, and from that moment forth, his oldest son was transmogrified into BC3.

In the world of the academy, we have another nomenclature appendage. (See what the merest hint of writing about the academy does to one's language!) Brian Fagan, recently retired from the UCSB Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, is entitled to add the designation emeritus to his professorial clan status, and I could always tell when Lloyd W. Garrison, my old boss at ABC-Clio, was irked with me if he signed a memo, LWG, USN (ret).

Leonard Tourney, with whom I cohosted writers' workshops for some years, is too modest and plain spoken to rely on the Doctor signifier he is entitled to use before his name; to his even greater credit, he has artfully contrived that most people he deals with refer to him simply enough by his first name.

Somewhere within our name, we carry an image of self that conveys who we are and who we are not. Sans Ph.d., I am not a doctor. I neither mind nor encourage the designation of professor because, when you sort it out, I am a professor, although adjunct, which is further to say non-tenure track, because I am a writer.

A writer. Ah, I like the sound and feel of it, somewhat like settling the self into a custom-made pair of Peel shoes. The designation of writer has been there lo these many years, coming at a distinct moment when, as a miserable (emotionally, physically, and practically) student in the fourth grade in P.S. Number 10, Perth Amboy, New Jersey, fresh from having read Tom Sawyer, and newly embarked on Huckleberry Finn, I asked the teacher who had introduced the former to me what this Mark Twain fellow did as a profession to allow him the leisure to write such things. She told me that he was a writer and that he did not need to have a profession. And I, callow youth, pressed the issue by asking if it were possible then for people to make a living by writing and not needing to have another profession. Mrs. DeAngelo replied that most people could not be a writer without having another profession, but in Mr. Twain's case, yes; it was possible. (I was later to learn that Mr. Twain had had a profession he very much admired but, as Huck Finn said later on, "that aint no matter.")

Thus was I borne away from being callow to being hubristic: I, too, wished to make my living as a writer. I am not stretching things too far out of context at all to bring in at this point she who would become my mentor, Rachel Maddux, who showed me a document she had written, "Communication," that was her operating statement as a writer. If your writings were not published, she said in effect, if they did not bring you in the means for a living, why, never mind, you did it anyway because that was who you were.

I signed on to that, as well, and although it has brought me to two remarkable forks in the road--editing and teaching--why, never mind, I do it anyway because that is who I am.

Unlike some of those I have mentioned above with honorifics or titular equivalents of campaign ribbons to wear on my chest or lapel, I go forth into the world with the most important knowledge of all, the knowledge of being this writer who is me.

Sometimes I find myself wondering what it is about this choice that has held me. And sometimes, particularly on those six late Saturday afternoons a year when I am driving on Route 280, south out of Woodside, CA, having just finished hosting my Woodside Writers' Workshop, I pass the Stanford University linear accelerator. It comes to me then. The accelerator speeds up atoms, enhances and redirects their path until there is a collision and a reaction. Writers do that; writers accelerate what ifs and other ideas until they collide and form something else with other qualities and properties.

Don't misread me; sexual activity feels glorious on a physical and emotional level; eating a splendid meal feels as though the universe were expanding about me; music causes me to realize that there are as yet unnamed dimensions and planets; reading allows me the exquisite exercise of empathy and wonderment; arguing politics is, for all its frustration, a ratification of the human condition; merely looking at the ocean is a high, but seeing a sea otter in said ocean is worth an extra hooray; eating a greasy breakfast on the Second Mesa in the Southwest is an indescribable sense of being connected with a living, breathing earth.

I carry all these with me, scurrying like a puppy inside me, eager to get out and sniff. The container I carry them in is the container of me the writer.