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ical for help

I've never been happy with the ical to do lists: the type is too small, you can't do a secondary sort, the whole field is too small compared to the calendar.  I keep my events calendar on ical and track my time online on harvest, so why not go analog? What is served by a computerized to do list? Rewriting my to-dos every day seems like a nice memory jog  Why not go? 

E's New Blog

Click here.  And I return to my position as the second best blogger in the household. Third as soon as Al figures out twitter. 

Notes On Control and Ian Curtis

“I think maybe he wasn’t quite narcissistic enough to be a rock star.” That’s what E said, as we watched Control, the bio pic about Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division.  The “maybe” is what makes the slowly accreting film worth watching.  Unlike a lot of the things I’ve been interested in lately–novels about the Rolling Stones, I’m Not There, Bob Dylan’s own Chronicle—Control doesn’t presume any access to the private creative process that leads to art or, in this case, the private destructive process that leads to suicide.  Maybe it’s the business of art to always make such leaps and to fail to do so is to not pick up the only gauntlet that matters.  Yet, to me, the film felt properly humble.  E’s comment was sparked by one of the possibilities the film suggests:  that Curtis was just aware enough of what an asshole he was being. Curtis's epilepsy certainly had something to do with his despair.  But the movie also allows for the possibility that forces that can’t be known at a quarter century remove–or ever filmed, under any circumstances– congealed in Curtis's death. Its humility here feels like a virtue, because that tentativeness allows for its apparent accuracy and mystery. 

Thoughts Of A Middle-Aged, Middle-Class Man In A Transitional Neighborhood In A Recession

I see bikes, Vespas, and motorcycles everywhere.

I regularly get together with people who have lost their jobs or whose businesses have slowed.  I notice how much things cost–produce prices surprise me, checks from the pricier restaurants startle me, and the cost of airplane tickets make us think twice about a planned  trip.

And yet we are lucky. We have plenty of work. But even the busyness frightens us a little because to be busy is to be overwhelmed and to be overwhelmed is to invite sloppiness and to invite sloppiness is to risk losing business. I see a prosperous business as the first item in a sequence that ends in homelessness. This is called “catastrophising.” I’ve been told to cut it out. 

I am especially solicitous of our neighborhood, which was not always prosperous. At least one local building is on Selby but uses a Western Avenue address because people associated Selby with riots.  Ever since we moved here, a certain amount of panhandling came with the territory, but the pitch has changed. At first, people I’d never met told me implausibly specific stories, as if they had all read Strunk and White. Then, a few regulars simply asked the patrons leaving the restaurants for money. This angered me, because the neighborhood depends on its businesses and our businesses depend on people from outside the neighborhood.  A fellow resident said, “I’ve lived in New York. I’ve seen neighborhoods go bad.”    Now I see the restaurants have beefier valets and Blair Arcade advertises its security cameras. The beggars appear to have moved on.

I sometimes speculate about the panhandler we saw the most. He was generally polite, but could become violent. He pounded the trunk and screamed as a mother and daughter drove off. He may have been like my friend C-----, a Vietnam Vet on general assistance and half-assed psychological disability payments whose money tends to run out near end of the month. But C---- doesn’t beg. Whenever I think this, I vow to send him some money, but so far I haven’t.   

The closings of local businesses disturb me. Our video store was not a victim of the economy—I’d assume slow economies help video rentals as people search out cheaper entertainment options–but of Netflix. Yet we could feel the failure in that store–the way they would not open on time, the way they could never get enough copies of movies, the sudden laxness in filing.  I’ve worked for doomed businesses. In such places, the depression isn’t simply economic; it’s the other kind, a spiritual sluggishness which says to itself: “I’m about to be hit by a truck. Why brush my teeth?”

The story of that storefront ended as well as could be expected. Their space is being taken over by Roots, the thriving salon next door with the great German Shepard named Tud.  I’m glad that the space is being filled with a salon. You can’t get a haircut on the internet. I am made happy by our prospering coffee house and restaurants and book store.  I have reached that stage in life where property rights become an emotion.

But I don’t want this place to become one of those neighborhoods where poverty itself is looked upon suspiciously.   

Damages: The Plot Quickens

Damages–the cable series about a law suit against a CEO who bankrupted his company while enriching himself–shows just how much of a pleasure plot can be.  The action unfolds in steps that are both satisfying and surprising.

That said, the series doesn’t bear a second viewing the way Weeds or Twin Peaks does. The characters just aren’t sympathetic enough, whatever that means.  Character development is almost an afterthought.  First, Ted Danson emerges as a nuanced monster who steals every scene he’s in. Later, Glenn Close and her adversary Zeljko Ivanek take on their own complexities. The younger cast members, quite possibly remarkable actors in other productions, appear to have been cast by Pottery Barn. A part of the problem is the show’s perspective, which relies too much on these glossier characters. 

And yet “lacks character development” is one of those reviewer phrases–useful as a judgement, but not quite satisfactory as diagnosis. What really makes an engaging character? I don’t know, for sure. This is an essay, an assay, in the original sense: an attempt. But I do have two data points: Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks, Nancy in Weeds. Some sense of flawed struggle and vulnerability seem to be at the core of their appeal.  Cheri Johnson once wrote on a story of mine that I had created a character she loved; now I just had to make him do something she hated—or something that put him into danger. That suggests something more essential than nuance, complexity, contradiction, blemishes.  Maybe the answer I am looking for, the thing that explains the lack I feel in Damages is this: a character is a quest.  Despite some of our best actors doing some of their best work, Damages remains a case.

The Feed Store: Twitter and Flickr

A friend asked me to join twitter a few months ago, and I reluctantly did, while mumbling about the overpublished life and the overextended web.  Then my enthusiasm picked up when I learned that an entire softball team, the infamous Weaselhawk nine, was "following" me. Really? So I thought I'd put the feed on the blog. It's the opposite of my usual posts, which are digressive to a fault.   At 140 characters, twitter's like haiku. As a form so instant there isn't an edit feature--note the typos--it's not like haiku at all. In the spirit of allowing for a variety of updates,  I've also added a Flickr feed.

Build Your Own Canon: Thoughts On Updike

Updike has written so many books you can carve several writerly careers out of them. The Updike I hate is pretty much the Updike everybody hates. He is decimated beautifully by David Foster Wallace in Consider The Lobster and I don’t need to add to that. The Updike I love is the Updike David Foster Wallace loves: the writer of the early non-Rabbit works: of The Farm, the Centaur, The Poorhouse Fair, Assorted Prose, and what are now called The Early Stories.   I do have a couple of things to say about this Updike, who keeps being eclipsed.

It feels like there is some committee conducting interviews for a post called Great American Writer and that the Rabbit novels are Updike’s submission to this committee. What’s more depressing is that the committee seems impressed.   If you assigned Time magazine to write a novel, they would have come up with something like the Rabbit series.  The problem is that this kind of writing requires empathy and humor, neither of which Updike has in abundance.

The emotions he was put on earth to capture were not the robust emotions of Augie March but something else. Updike is the great writer of American nostalgia. I think of nostalgia as a kind of character defect, a choice to live in an idealized past rather than the real present.  But for Updike nostalgia is an exalted, complex emotion: it is the wistfulness which departing high school seniors feel for their home town; it is the tenderness which the dying feel for the world. I would suggest that, as the poignant underside of all our moving around, nostalgia is also a central emotion to most Americans. Although it is very worldly, Updike’s nostalgia is spiritual in that it is radiant and unconflicted, at least in the normal sense of conflict in fiction: the dissonance of our warped wants. I think the last two stories in Pigeon Feathers are his greatest realization of this vision of fiction, but I will quote Of The Farm:

At my mother’s insistence, we went to the shopping center. The garish abundance, the ubiquitous music, the surrealistic centrality of automobiles made me feel, emerging from my father’s dusty car, like a visitor from the dead. I remembered these acres as a city dump adorned with pungent low fires and rust-colored weeds. In the supermarket nothing smelled, because even the turnips were bagged in cellophane, and the air had the faintly sour coolness of plastic. The greed my mother exercised in the aisles with my money exasperated me. I burned to return to Peggy, fearing that by some cruel rerouting of time she would have aged or vanished and I would be left with nothing but this present, this grim echo of my mother and this lonely child impersonating me–how eager to please we are, setting out in life! –amid this acreage of brightly shoddy goods.

And what this means to me, as a writer, is that every writer is the cartographer of a particular place—partly geographic, partly emotional. It is the job of the writer to intuit this place and to realize that publishers, critics, and canonizers might not quite understand it.   

      

Free to Be Desultory, Ambivalent, and Kind of Half-Assed

I am always a little dissatisfied with this blog, because it always feels like it is neither spontaneous enough to be spontaneous nor considered enough to be good.  But I am sitting here on a beautiful holiday morning thinking:  blogs get to be desultory, that is their essence or that is one possible essence; they are free form ledgers that reveal purposes rather than serve purposes; they are notes to ones' friends and ones' self. 

That is all. I am back to reading Team of Rivals on the couch in our sunny living room and maybe giving Al a longer than usual walk and maybe watching Wimbledon or "some men in identical clothing running around" as E describes sports. I have felt overcommitted and twitching with deadlines pretty much since February.  On my vacation, I had a full week of billable hours. 

On Updike's Of the Farm

Even people who don’t like him give Updike a blue ribbon for his prose. Even people who like Updike acknowledge that he is not the most empathetic of authors. (Pity the characters who are not horny, divorced, hyperverbal white males for whom spirituality is a way of becoming more self-centered, not less.)

Of The Farm is so interesting because some of the prose is, in my unaccomplished opinion,  bad and the some of the characters are vivid.

I encounter sentences that work so hard to be precise they feel distended and a tone that can be almost comically reverent yet also unempathetic. And the two sharpest characters are an old woman and a young boy.  Examples to follow.

Proust V

I have some thoughts on Updike, Dylan, and have "discovered" the whole Law and Order meets literature charm of Richard Price. But too busy to write. 

What is your favorite color?

That’s like asking what your favorite vowel is--you need them all. (“Y,” by the way.) I like those early sixties modernism a-go-go colors, though, and those blue filters they shoot some TV commercials through. Plus the John Deere logo colors and Coke bottle green and the milky green of Vespas.

What is your favorite flower?
Lilacs. They grew on our farm.

What is your favorite bird?
Foghorn Leghorn.

What are your favorite names?

Winona, for towns.  Albert or Shatner for dogs. Engelbert Humperdinck, for sixties singers. Wile E. Coyote for phoenix-like obsessives. The names of the people I love.