Paragraph

Your early dealings with the paragraph were neutral.  You could take it or leave it.  The paragraph surely had no claim on you.  Then came that time in middle school where the paragraph was presented to you the way your contemporaries who were children of your mother’s friends were presented to you—nice, or perhaps even interesting.  Trouble was, the paragraph was presented to you as requiring a topic sentence.  You cannot recall how many hours you spent, going through paragraphs with the notion of searching out topic sentences.  As if this were not bad enough, you had to write paragraphs, then identify your topic sentence; yet another reason why middle school was so insufferably awful to the point where you for the longest time thereafter, did not want anything to do with paragraphs.  How fortunate for you that the sting of middle school and topic sentences wore off.  How fortunate that paragraphs seemed to trail after you like puppies, sniffing at your pant leg, wanting to jump up into your lap.  Sometimes, when you try to imagine what your life would be like were you not so devoted to paragraphs, you can feel your heart rate increase, your breath come with more effort.  Your relationship with paragraphs has grown into a long-term relationship. You might, in moments of frivolity, say you were joined at the topic sentence.  Some days running, you produce two, perhaps even three paragraphs that stand on their own, requiring no chiropractic adjustments or drastic revisions.  Such days, like the paragraphs produced during them, are keepers.  Through a process you have come to regard with affection and respect, you are able to use paragraphs as platforms to build larger works.  In such a culture, your dealings are no longer neutral, neither yours with it or its with you.  You have met in some no-person’s land, recognized the potential for friendship, experienced the give-and-take of a relationship headed for the long ride.

Sounds in the Night

You were seated on a bench under the afternoon shade—five o’clock shadow—of the university campus when the carillon bells tolled the hour.

Before the toll had ended, you were yanked back in time—way back in time—to a campus a hundred miles south and a place when you were in many of your ways of the same sensitivities and demeanor as the students you’d meet in room 143 of the College of Creative Studies.

In the duration of a quick audio cue, you accomplished time travel, being sent back to what you were, given the opportunity to see yourself as what you were, then have the chance to compare that self with approximate equivalents.  You have some sense of what you have become, a good portion of that sense arriving from the fact of you listening for clues ever so much more than you did back then, when the carillon at Royce Hall, UCLA, tolled the hours.

Sound has become an important sensual trigger.  As you sat on the bench just off Ucen (for university center) Road, UCSB, 93106, you also had the pleasant snore of Sally, asleep on the lawn beside you, evoking the nostalgia of the give and take of a man and his canine companion over a span of fifteen years.

Sally is not the only dog companion who snores, a sound that conflates some late nights and precariously early mornings with another canine companion who, you must note, also had a double-l in her name.  Sally was not, at least in any deliberate sense, named to remind you of Molly, but this intent lacks some cohesion in the late, dark hours, similar to the logic of you being yanked from 93106 to 90024 at the sound of campus bells.  Senses do convey you on auditory journeys.

The senses speak their own language.  Although she did not have Molly’s near on to twenty years, nor Sally’s reach for sixteen, there was yet another companion between them.  What odds favoring the double-l in her name?  You might guess a considerable likelihood.  You’d be correct.  You were every bit as comfortable with the presence of Nell in your life.  Had she lived longer, she may have added snoring to the mysteries of how the equation of sounds of snoring plus love equals nostalgia and companionability rather than irritation.

For the longest time after your move from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, you were aware of the sounds of the hurry and bustle of trains as they pass through, their nasal horns honking interruptions into the night to the point where you were aware of these noises, waited for them, became as used to them as the mysterious rushes and movements within your own body.

Sometimes, when you are not in Santa Barbara, you are awakened by the absence of train sounds.  The years of you being here, with trains, have left a mark.  Sometimes you awaken to the unlikely counterpoint of Sally and a freight train or passenger train.  The awareness of either is a comfort, the awareness of the two becomes a validation that you have, in some degree, learned to listen to the universe of which you are a part, simultaneously taking comfort and making distinctive connections.

The small moment of sense defines the small moment of reality with aching clarity.  A conventional observation holds the devil being in the details.  The better observation is of the essence of reality being in the details.  If the details are of sound, the essence of reality is evoked with sharp clarity when some of the details are sounds of music:  the music of a remarkable animal companion snoring nearby, the clink of your drinking glass against the glass of a dear companion, the here-I-come; there-I-go sound of a train moving through, a neighbor’s awful taste in music coming across an alleyway, the bluesy breath of your own excellent taste in slow blues or Maurice Ravel or the Bach Inventions you must take great care never to play when you are attempting to work because of their absolute power to pull your interest from the feelings you are trying to get down on the page and into sounds first heard and noted down hundreds of years ago.

Sounds can enhance, distract, disrupt, divert; they add some unanticipated dimension to a narrative you are in literally or as a writer trying to bumble your way along to some point of safety after having indulged yourself into a cosmic tangle from which you now attempt to provide some resolution.  You knew there was a here-I-come; there-I-go effect here, too, as there was with the train and its flirtation with the Doppler effect.  You also know there is no such safety net with story, and so you cast about for sounds to make the drama appear all the more real.  You begin with the sounds of failure, which are always real enough.

You remember with one form of nostalgia or another the sounds of voices so dear to you, and if you think the matter through, you hear the sounds of men and women dead long before you appeared on this scene, speaking to you through their written words which, you come to realize, are channeled through you to produce that even closer sense of communication than the mere reading of the words.

ALL in a DAY's work

Much as you are fond of trying to launch into a first draft of anything with as little thought as possible, earlier concerns about using cliché and being derivative have left their mark on your starting-out process.  You spend some moments essaying the place to jump in, then you begin to examine the project for the tell tale traces.

You know perfectly well what traces; cliché traces.

Such traces as, “All in a day’s work,” because that, in fact, is the rudder if not the pole star of this piece.  What, in fact, is the ALL in “All in a day’s work?”  If the day’s work relates to teaching, the ALL can be the number of classes on a particular day, or the number of classes on another particular day for which you need to prepare lecture/discussion-oriented notes.  Further, ALL can mean student assignments to be read and commented upon.

If the DAY involves editing, the ALL can refer to a given number of pages to be read, then commented upon, or the number of pages to be line edited, were that part of the chore.

But if the ALL were related to a writing DAY, quantitative bets, once a major source of pride and concern to you, are, well, since you’ve come this far, quantitative bets such as number of pages or words are OFF.  The ALL could be settling on the name for a character.  You would consider such a DAY’s work a good DAY.  Anything, no, make that ANYTHING worth keeping is a good workday.

You recall a conversation with Elmore Leonard about the matter of getting a character’s name right.  In one of his Westerns, he had a jailer whose name seemed to elude him, causing mischief with the story.  The character did not want to step out of the shadows. One day, while reading through some early 1900’s newspapers from the Arizona Territory, where the story in question was set, Leonard came upon the name of a lawman, Bob Isham.  He gave his jailer the name of Isham.  “After that,” Leonard told you, “I couldn’t get the character to shut up.  The name gave the character the stature and reality he required.

For you, any number of times, a GOOD DAY’s WORK has been the mere act of finding that one element.  Such details enhance the possibility of drafting away, sketching away without thinking, allowing that sure process of your own vision of the circumstances to interact with the vision you have breathed into your characters.  Thus the time spent writing may indeed involve getting yourself into the story and out of yourself.

At one stage in your life, you were of a mindset where your approach was to divide the week into segments, where days would be given over to preparation for teaching and the actual teaching itself, a day or two reserved for editing chores, and the balance hoarded for writing.  Problem was, the teaching and editing always took longer than you’d anticipated, which was easy enough to understand because when you gave writing the top priority, it took longer than you anticipated, not only because of the length of time you needed to discover the characters’ names, but because once you started, the focus was too difficult to turnoff, resulting in miffed students and clients.

The DAY’s WORK has morphed—transmogrified sounds better—into the writing coming first to the point where some must be done every day. No fair thinking sentences and paragraphs; they are too easy to slip away.  Sentences must be written either for your hard drive or a note pad.  ALL in a DAY’s WORK may mean writing, editing, and teaching-related activities.  ALL in a DAY’s work, if it does mean all three, also means a particular clutter on and about the desk.

Lupe comes to clean and tidy on Monday’s.  Given the relative size of the studio, you often repair to Café Luna or the nearby Renaud’s Patisserie for breakfast and enough coffee to insure you will propel with ease into the rest of the day.

When you come home at about noon, trying to think in terms of a simple lunch rather than some elaborate pasta with broccolini or rappini, or even anchovy and olive, 409 E. Sola is as tidy and fresh as it will be for the balance of the week.  Seeing this tidiness, inhaling its freshness, luxuriating in the smells of pine and flowers, you are disabused of anything beyond simple fare:  fruity olive oil, a splash of thick balsamic vinegar, some cibiatta and ricotta or Romano. Perhaps a sardine or two.  A fresh orange.

 Things are arranged according to logic and Lupe’s appreciated sense of order as opposed to your sense of whim.  The Jane Austen goes on the floor adjacent the wastebasket because the other items related to your lecture on Jane Austen are near by, and don’t bother asking why these things can’t go on the desk; the desk is already crowded with notepads, reading glasses, and fountain pens.  You suppose you could take the fluffy sprig of purple stattis and its vase from the desk, but that would not leave a large enough footprint to matter.

Whatever the ALL, thus lunched, perhaps indulging yourself another coffee, you are back at the DAY’s work, whatever it is.  Whatever indeed it is, soon it will begin its inexorable spread outward, drawing you along in its wake.  

Writing and Airplanes: A Common Bond

Somewhere in the dim reaches of the past, you learned to fold sheets of foolscap paper in a way that produced a triangular hat.  Big deal. Once or twice was enough.  Your sister taught you a more origami-like technique for producing a novelty that looked like four pyramids.  By clever manipulation, it became a “Cootie Catcher,” a device for “determining” which of your victims had head lice.

Also boring.

But the folding and pasting were building toward something.  All the while, you were too focused on the present moment and overcoming such present moment boredom as might occur to think about future developments.

The next step was your discovering you could fold sheets of paper into boat-like structures that were perfect for floating in gutters, puddles, and even such larger targets as what was then called Westlake Park (Wilshire at Alvarado, midtown Los Angeles) and is now known as MacArthur (after I shall return Doug) Park.

Boats didn’t quite do it, either, but paper airplanes did.  You were, in your time, a veritable Boeing or Douglas; your repertoire included at least six different versions of paper planes.  With stubs of Number 2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, you began to draw idealized airplanes, filling Big Chief note pads with sketches, already eager for the time when you could make your way to Pasadena, whereupon to enroll at the California Institute of Technology.

After a serious discussion with your sister, you realized a bachelor’s degree would not be enough of a platform from which to be trusted with the design of aircraft.  At the least, your sister suggested, a master’s degree in engineering.  Better still, a doctoral degree.

While some of your chums were beginning to investigate the potentials of pin-ups and what at the time would have made the grade as soft pornography, you were collecting pictures of small, medium, and large aircraft.  Your future was a certainty, even though, after a time, you became interested as well in pin-up photos and, of course, the real thing—girls in person.

There could, you reasoned, be room in your life for both girls and airplanes.  You had it on good authority from your sister that many—not all, but many—women would not find it objectionable to marry a man who designed airplanes.

For the next five years, an extraordinary number of model airplanes passed through your hands as you cut, fit, glued, and shepherded various airborne vehicles from box to completed form, their power sources ranging from hand-launched gliders to propeller-driven-by-twisted-rubber band to the ultimate, the gas-propelled metal engine.  There were experiments with rockets, and a few imaginative models propelled by carbon dioxide cylinders originally intended to carbonate water.

You replaced your number two Dixon Ticonderoga pencils with books of paper matches, sheets of tinfoil, and a cork, which made a convenient carrying case for a straight pin.  With these implements, you could, on the spot, create a mini-rocket that would arc across the room with a gratifying sizzle.

Those days were remarkable in the way they drew you to contemplate the ways of flight, of the qualities of force and power required to propel a vehicle through the air.  Shapes and such qualities as lift and drag fascinated you.  What did streamlined mean?  Where did the power source go for best delivery of energy?  Why did some craft stall when others glided with such elegant grace?

You watched birds land and take off.  You spent hours at the Santa Monica airport, watching student pilots executing touch-and-go landings and takeoffs.

Of course you were reading, in over your head at such concepts as laminar flow, torque, vector.  Such aspects of your reading stalled, could not maintain lift.

You find it difficult to remember when the shift began.

Ah-ha moments are more rare in real life than in dramatic narrative.

Now you still launch vehicles of your own expansive and relatively uninformed design, at least uninformed in the more formal, academic, critical sense.  Even though you have been in a sense reviewing books for your entire editorial career and continue to do so now, your awareness of why a particular story flies and others do not is often as idiosyncratic as your own narrative.

Your hands are no longer marked by the telltale blotches of dried Tester’s model airplane cement that used to lurk like skin, peeling away after sunburn.  They are often stained by brown ink, and thus a shift in technology and discipline.  You’d given no thought whatsoever about the help and focus your interest in flying vehicles might have imparted to your interest in dramatic vehicles, not until this moment of writing about the two of them.

There are similarities in launching a model airplane and an advanced draft of a story.  Will it fly? Will it stall?  What corrections are needed and where are they to be applied?
There are separate beauties to be experienced upon seeing an aircraft fly and reading a moving story, yet the beauties are rooted in feelings of freedom from various gravitational forces.

We write and read to free ourselves of the restraints of gravity.  Even works of drama we may categorize as nihilistic are nevertheless free from the everyday weightedness of reality; they find soaring height in their own depiction of failure.  They give us artistic failure, tragic failure made all the more lofty by the expressions of determination given by the characters.  They give us the uplifting sense of there being nobility and grace in a sincere, well-executed failure.

We read to ingest the diet of failure served to us as a species.  Failure is nothing to us if we have tried, if we have launched ourselves forth.  Living, flying, writing:  all are about takeoff, hoping for graceful glide and lift.  All are about reach.  

Idea

What shape does the energy of an idea take when you are first aware of it?  Is it a blob, or perhaps a cloud?  Is it transparent, translucent, a tad opaque?  After all, how many ideas come to you formed?  Not even in your dreams.  But it is beginning to talk to you, a tiny form of the sort the Right-to-Lifers want us to look at before the fetus is sent back to the drawing board.

You listen to the idea speaking, wanting to explain itself to you, eager to emerge from the collision of emotions forming it, excited with itself for having caused the micro-Big Bang in your creative cavity.  Soon, there is a semblance of a dialogue, it trying to explain itself to you, while you begin completing sentences for it, urging it to add more details.

But, it pleads in your direction, I am not a writer.  I look to you for that.  My department provides form.  You describe it.  You fucking dramatize it.  How, then, can you ignore it?

You are captured in focus now, absorbed by it.  Even though you have other quotidian and developmental chores, you have been, once again, yanked into collaboration with your own research and development department.  This arrangement has worked to your advantage on many occasions.  You may have had moments of despair and doubt about your own range of ability, but you have never consider outsourcing your own R & D department.

As more or less of a precaution, you remind yourself of any number of publishing ventures where the editorial department is the metaphorical dog, being wagged by its metaphorical tail, the sales department.  One of the oldest such ventures in America is still alive, publishing wave after wave of titles.

At one time in your life, you thought nothing about sales; editorial was magical to you.  Then you tipped over toward sales.  Then you returned to the state where you saw your senses as a thing separate from you.  Your metaphorical dog is back on track, wagging his tail as opposed to being wagged by it.

We need to find out what you are, you tell this idea.  You can see it wink at you.

For the past several months, ideas that say they are short stories have been paid heed to the point where you have taken copious notes.  In one case, you have even launched far enough into a draft to know the idea will stay in place for some time.

On the surface, you may appear to be calm, even at ease with himself.  More than once, you have even experienced the luxury of what you call “a working nap,” in which you are less than asleep but by no means alert and awake, toying with a particular project, chipping away at some chore related to the revision of your nonfiction book, playing with the editor’s suggestions on the novel, expanding the tentative visions of projects attempting to arm wrestle your attention down on some sheet of paper or some computer file.

There are so many conversations you are having, with yourself, with friends, with those you think to call associates, with those who are students, and of course there are clients.  At the best of times, you are in a conversation with the Cosmos, excited by the small, explosive possibilities around you.

Leaving the building of your university college earlier this week to wander across a swale of lawn separating you from the parking lot where your car had things you needed to retrieve, you came upon a squirrel, sunning itself in the late afternoon warmth.  The squirrel allowed you to take its picture, as if in recognition that it was a souvenir of some cosmic awareness that had a potential for meaning.

This will hardly have been the first time you were aware of a squirrel on a campus, nor will it have been the first time you have seen some small, living thing, eking its purpose with scant awareness or regard for you.

The numbers don’t matter, do they?  What matters:  the impulse to stop, investigate the squirrel or the appearance of a flower in an unexpected place or the way a particular flower in a particular bed calls itself to your attention because of its beauty or tenacity or radiant color or shape.  What matters:  the flower is unaware of you; it is doing its beauty to attract a bee or bird or some other flying being, perhaps as remarkable a concoction as a hummingbird or as mischievous as a mocking bird.  In a way, it is all about sexuality, pollination, fertilization.  But that works pretty well for ideas, doesn’t it?

Waiting

Waiting is the active observation of anticipation or dread.  You wait for a thing to begin or to be over.  You are waiting for consequences of things done and yet to be done and things left undone.

You are waiting for things outside your range of activity to be done and for the opportunities to do things on your to-do list.

You are eager for a dental appointment to be over, you are sorry when a massage comes to the moments of alcohol splash and a friendly pat, goodbye.

You wait for ideas to get through the introductory phase, wanting them to lurch into the parts where you feel as though some of your insides have disconnected and are now working the inner room of your body.

You wait for the next sentence after your agent tells you, “Okay, now what?”

And what about when your editor tells you, “I’m sending you some notes.”

Waiting is the thing your characters do to a worse degree than you do them.

Readers wait for characters to get into more trouble, then wait for these same individuals to work their ways out of these difficulties.

You would rather be in and bored than not engaged, waiting for something, say an idea or a decision or a note from a publisher,

In any given time span, you are awaiting responses, someone else’s and your own.  You are waiting for defining moments to occur and for moments of decision to arrive. You are waiting to understand things you have read and written.

You are waiting to hear from individuals to whom you have sent communications or addressed remarks.  You are waiting to hear from publishers, from readers, from students.

You are waiting for plans to help you move out of and beyond situations where you feel as though you are caught between misaligned emotions, conundrums for which there is no answer, situations not likely to grow better or suddenly learn how to speak.

If Reality has a use-by date, you are waiting to find what it is, hopeful then of discovering what it wants from you in return for what it seems willing to give you.  Sometimes you ask yourself if Reality’s job is to provide event or mere anticipation of event, which may come forth or not, depending on something no one likes to speak or write about, which is whim. Other times, you find yourself wondering if the GNP of Reality is waiting.

You were having a dream this morning that, as you were coming out of it into wakefulness, you recognized as pleasant. The dream may well have had a sexual undertone because you were aware of its nuanced quality of tension, excitement, giddy anticipation.  You may have been out working the room so to speak because your dream editors would not let you see who your partner was, a lovely clue you were thinking of someone you ought not.  You woke from the dream, then lay there, your thoughts as companions, for the better part of two hours before you could recapture sleep, even then the topic was the dream equivalent of a PG rating, and so, from an easygoing pleasing dream, you moved into a waiting period, in a real sense casting the next session of sleep, wondering all the while how you could persuade a similar dream level to heave into port, experiencing the kinds of tension that sometimes come on a movie or TV set during shooting sessions, misty, dour, bone chilling.

Waiting for a dream in hopes it will have a restricted rating is at the height of folly, giving you time to fight off thoughts of being practical or prudent, allowing moments in which your wait has you afloat on a bed of self-awareness of being silly.  You wait for the silliness to pass, encouraging it to drift into some scenario of action rather than mere patience or hope.

As a person who writes for publication, you wait for events you orchestrated for others when you performed executive publishing activities, feeling the frustration of not being able to set certain activities into motion that would be inappropriate for you to do as a writer but which, given the evolving nature of publishing, formatting, promotion, and campaign launching, are growing more appropriate.

At present, you have six classroom sessions a week, which have attendant out-of-classroom care required for them.  This schedule applies on top of writing chores, including the book-length project, The Dramatic Genome.  This has put you in a position you enjoy, where you may be waiting for the classes to be in session, but you are scarcely in the suspended state of simple waiting for event.

You have literally and in figurative ways, put yourself on an even keel or par with waiting.   To the best of your belief, the thing you are best at waiting on relates to writing. This is not to say you are patient nor resigned, rather you have negotiated a sense of accommodation with it, a sort of pact between two longtime associates, each of whom recognizes the strangeness of the relationship, and has allowed an atmosphere of respect to settle in.

Nevertheless, waiting is a consequence of being alive.  

The La Brea Tar Pits, The Catskills Resorts, and Story

Tonight, as you led the discussion of one of your favorite modern short stories, Tobias Wolff’s “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” you got one of the best group responses to it from any group yet.  There is always a risk in beginning a class with it because of your belief that it takes students of both genders to places where they are separated from their comfort zones the way a tourist is relieved of his wallet by a pickpocket.

First came suspicion, then outright discomfort.

Of course, Tobias Wolff having the writer’s chops he has, the discomfort is the penultimate sensation before the remarkable payoff of feeling in the form of justice being done, in this case, emotional justice being done.

As an avid reader and fond writer of the short story, you enjoy the notion of success in these fictional ventures being measured by the way the more lasting, enduring ones take you places you did not particularly wish to visit, then, for some reason or combination of reasons, made you glad you’d gone.

After experiencing such an effect more than once, you began to realize what a good thing this was, how it in effect became a mantra to recite as you struggled to catch the narrative in some grip from which it could not stray.  In time you realized this meant you had to make the journey into those inner territories of your inner self where you had the least understanding and quite possibly the greatest fears.

Fear and lack of understanding thus provide fertile terrain for investigation.  Of course you approach them tentatively, all the while aware that you have to let go as completely as possible in order to get any good, solid foundation from which to launch forth.

After a time, you begin to get the picture of yourself as some sort of romanticized big game hunter, off on safari, going after precisely the wrong target.  The real game is you, showing off with your safari jacket, your weaponry, your ability to hire some guide who, were Hemingway to write of him, would demonstrate his disdain for you.  The moment you can see the advantages of taking off after yourself in your Abercrombie and Fitch garments and your writing group leader guide, the more you maybe on the scent of story that will turn into a trophy worth keeping.

You have come to believe that the writer, you included in this calculus, do not come close to understanding the enormity of the craft until the time when immersion is more or less complete.  You are in essence as “in” the doing as those poor, benighted animals of eons past who became trapped in the tar pools and dragged into their destiny.
Those tar pits seemed entirely navigable at first or you’d not have ventured so close, and by the time you’d got some of the tar on your shoes or trousers and saw the near impossibility of getting it off, you’d nevertheless go back, of course thinking the next time you’d be more careful, of course thinking you’d be able to get away with the venture.  You recall a vexed mother wondering to you why you continued playing near the tar pits and you found yourself bewildered that she could not see the reasons:  because the tar pits were there and you lived nearby, and because these places where animals once came to live dangerously.

There must be some kind of risk.  Why would you visit a riskless venue in the first place?  Why would you return to a place where there was no chance you might get tar on the bottom of your shoe—unless, of course, there was a risk abroad of greater significance wherein you might tarry, perhaps for the rest of your life.

How good to be able to plan ventures where you are more or less a tour guide to risky places, either through the medium of a story you have or will have written.  You come from a cultural and, thus, story-telling tradition often associated with the resorts in some of the hotels in the Catskills Mountains.  These storytellers worked days as social stewards, leading organized forms of entertainment.  At night, they performed as comics, comedians whose voices ranged from the heavy physicality of exaggeration and burlesque to the more thoughtful by comparison narrators of long, outrageous shaggy-dog stories.  They were called by a Yiddish name, “Tumler,” a person who tumbled and turned things from serious to funny, and conversely, from funny to tragic.

These young men and women took you to landscapes and circumstances so absurd, so filled with the risk of calling down on their heads the clamor of outrage that you could never again accept the possibility of an errand being merely an errand, rather a splendid opportunity for risk and mixed messages.

You have come back from class with the equivalent of tar on your shoes, which is a humbling reminder to wonder if, to glimpse the other side of the equation, any of them, being directed on this evening’s trip with you, also noticed anything black and sticky on their shoes.