Time to Reflect–Resolutions

I have decided, in the past few years, to simplify matters and make only three resolutions. Here they are:

1. Finish my novel-in-progress, titled, At the Ha’Penny Bridge. Thus far, I’ve written 194 pages. The average novel, from my understanding, is 280-320 so I am well on my way.
2. Learn Italian, at least intermediate fluency. I’ve already started through Preply dot com with an individual tutor.
3. Lose some weight. I can get more specific about this, but am choosing not to at this time.

That’s all for now. I will edit and and add details later, probably.

When They Go Silent

Although I’m not entirely certain who invented the author book tour (I’ve heard rumors, from the author herself, that it might have been Jane Friedman), I know that it changed the way fiction and nonfiction are marketed. One thing I was told, as an emerging writer, was not to actively disparage another writer’s work. It’s becomes a question, really, of not shooting yourself in the proverbial foot.

Quite often, I would love to offer my salient opinion on various works of both fiction and nonfiction–let’s face facts, fiction predominantly–but as a writer myself, I am not certain I can afford to alienate fellow writers. Cormac McCarthy, who recently died, skirted the issue entirely and wrote for himself. Presumably, he had a wider audience in mind, but for many years, his editor had to support him because he refused to do the “what had become standard practice” book tour. He wrote for the sheer pleasure of writing, a luxury I myself aspire to.

I would love to be as erudite as Harold Bloom and offer insightful, cogent commentary on contemporary writing without fearing acerbic verbal recriminations if I didn’t absolutely love every piece of writing that I pick up. In fact, I offered five stars on Amazon to someone whose best work might be behind her because I personally knew her. If you cannot say what you mean, how on earth are you supposed to mean what you say.

There’s a dread, as a writer, in no one commenting at all on your work. The real danger, I’ve found, is when other writers go silent, when they stop commenting on your work altogether. Truly, silence can be deadly.

So, I’ll be the first to admit it. . .

So, I’ll be the first to admit it: writing involves just a tad more than crafting one perfect sentence, yet, having said that, I have major “sentence envy” in regard to James Joyce’s flawless ending to his long short story, his novella, The Dead. My copy reads, “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all of the living and the dead” (196, ed. Seamus Deane, 1992).

I happen to have Seamus Deane’s Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Widely admired in its time, Deane’s anthology has since been roundly criticized for its decided preference for male authors. I admit I have not read it yet; I beg forgiveness. I have been in university for most of my adult life and, only now, have I had time to delve into some of the many books I’ve intended to read, had I only time.

But, back to my topic: the brilliance of James Joyce. I first read Joyce’s collection, Dubliners, a few years before I studied abroad and earned a Master of Philosophy in Irish Writing from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, TCD, for short. To this day, it remains, in my mind, the perfect short story collection. Its brilliance is masked in carefully observed details culminating in the now-legendary, The Dead. Hollywood made a fine film of the story, yet nothing touches the aching, indescribable beauty of the original written word.

I do not have penis envy, but I certainly, with certain authors, have sentence envy.

A Truly Helpful Mantra

Some mantras are merely worn out clichés; others can inform and inspire you to be your best self. One of the latter, in my mind, is found in Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way, a transformative twelve-week program designed to inspire heightened creativity and more creative living. It reads, “Leap and the net will appear.” Deceptively simple, perhaps, yet profound in its own way.

I’m currently working my way through the November Nanowrimo program that asks that participants write 50,000 words in the month of November. Intellectuals tend to sneer at this regimented approach to writing, yet for so many it’s been a lifesaver. When I started this mini-blog, by the way, I felt completely blocked. More a case of perception, not reality!

In the past, I’ve been one of those haughty intellectuals, but now that I’ve at last graduated with my third master’s degree, this time a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Northwestern University with a 3.84/4 GPA, I myself endorse the idea that whatever gets you to the finish line, gets you to the finish line, period.

As one of my dearest creative writing teachers is fond of saying, “Onward!” Now to continue reading Joyce Carol Oates very fine, Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life.

The Trump Effect

Shortly after Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States, my mother died. I’m not going to say that Trump killed her, but. . .I will hint that she didn’t really want to live in the kind of world that would elect someone like Trump as President.

I myself sought a different solution. I left the country in September 2017 to study abroad and earn a Master of Philosophy in Irish Writing from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. The two of us each had our own solution to the conundrum of someone being so obviously unqualified for the position to which he had been elected; in some ways, she took the easier, cleaner way out.

My mother went to Georgetown University’s prestigious School of Foreign Service, yet at the end of her life, she stared blearily at the television in disbelief at the state of the world. I myself sought a completely different escape, no less valid, though certainly less permanent. I cannot say, in good faith, that my mother committed suicide; rather, it was more the case that depression got the best of her. I was so so very proud of her, but at the end, she had become a mere shadow of herself.

She had Rachel Maddow on MSNBC for company and not many other local allies. I made many friends abroad who thought much more deeply than most Americans about international issues. Donald Trump was, and remains, an international joke, an orange clown, and yet a large swath of Americans buy into his lie that he is a self-made man,

As we face another election cycle, I find myself wondering, am I going to have to move abroad again, this time to Italy? Now that I’ve graduated with my third master’s degree, this time from Northwestern University, I am learning Italian in earnest, perhaps with due cause.

We will see how the electorate votes!

The Great Believers

I wrote one review of which I am particularly proud. It is copied and pasted below and came out when the novel was first released, just a few years ago.

The best and most influential book I’ve read this year, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai chronicles the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 1980’s juxtaposed by the story of Fiona, merely a girl in the early 80’s who is not only witness to the devastation, but also carries emotional scar tissue that informs her life as she searches for her daughter in Paris in 2015.

At first, I wondered whether Fiona’s story would prove a distraction to Yale Tishman’s story as art curator on Northwestern’s campus museum, but her story becomes fundamentally essentially to understanding how AIDS and the crisis damaged the survivors and caregivers as well.

I also loved art muse Nora’s story, a third perspective, and point of view, as she survived the ravages of death in World War I and the aftermath of the survivors in Paris in the 1920’s.  All three points of view drive the narrative.

At one point, on page 252, author Rebecca Makkai writes, “Nora said, ‘Every time I’ve gone to a gallery, the rest of my life, I’ve thought about the works that weren’t there.  Shadow-Paintings, you know, that no one can see but you.  But there are all these happy young people around you and you realize no, they’re not bereft.  They don’t see the empty spaces.'”

As a gay man in Chicago in the early 1990’s, I saw firsthand the empty spaces.  Someone would be at Sidetrack’s or Roscoe’s one week, and then suddenly disappear forever.  Braver still were those who, determined to be seen and witnessed, showed up publicly with KS lesions (Karposi’s Sarcoma), or with a cane or walker, hobbling around the bar, living in the moment, despite outing themselves as untouchables.

One character, on 196, says poignantly, “‘This disease has magnified all our mistakes.”

I was afraid of reading this book, afraid of what I might see about myself and my own past prejudices against my own community.  Makkai writes about the internalized homophobia gay men felt as they swallowed Jesse Helm’s pronouncements that gay men deserved this disease, that it was a judgment by God.  It reinforced notions that all gay men were sluts, far from the truth.  I, for one, retreated into celibacy for many years as a response to the AIDS crisis and the sexual shame of being a gay man is clearly portrayed in the narrative.

When one of the characters muses about a possible impending HIV diagnosis, he writes about all the things he will miss in a chapter titled July 15, 1986, pages 334-337.

“Lake Michigan, impossibly blue, the morning light bouncing toward the city.”

“Lake Michigan, frozen in sheets you could walk on but wouldn’t dare.”

“Lake Michigan, gray out a high-rise window, indistinguishable from the sky.”

“Bread, hot from the oven.  Or even stale in the restaurant basket, rescued by salty butter.”

“The Cubs winning the pennant someday.  The Cubs winning the Series.

The Cubs continuing to lose.

“His favorite song, not yet written.  His favorite movie, not yet made. . .

“All of them growing old together on the Yacht for Old Queers that Asher always joked about.  Right off the Belmont Rocks, he said, with binoculars for everyone.” (334-337).

It continues in a way certain people did not.

All of it poignant and painful to read, yet so essential and healing.

“To Sleep, Perchance to Dream. . .”

In Act III, Scene 1, Hamlet muses about the possibility of death when he delivers a soliloquy on the subject. I hope, in a lighter vein, to take the quote, “To sleep, perchance to dream,” more at face value.

Since being diagnosed with manic-depressive illness, I find I do not dream nearly as regularly, and that I cannot, usually remember my dreams. What used to give me great pleasure, dreaming while asleep, has become almost obligatory. I either dream, or I do not, more often not, as the case may be. This saddens me.

Or rather, I probably do dream, but one of my medications has a heavy sedative effect, and I no longer get the same pleasure from my sleeping hours. Recently, however, I dreamed about my mother. After nine and a half years sober, I drank the day before my mother died–perhaps a premonition, certainly a way of grieving (although there are other, healthier ways to process grief). It saddened me greatly that I was unable, even though I gave her eulogy, to cry at my mother’s funeral.

But, at least, she came to me in my dreams.

I tried to look up what causes a person to dream, and strangely enough, despite all we know about the world around us, that aspect remains unclear to this day. I do know, though, that I felt comforted and less alone in the world after the dream where my mother visited and stayed for a long time.

To Drink or Not to Drink

I have been reading Andrew Shaffer’s entertaining work, Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors, and I found myself envying, just a bit, the excesses of the writers. Not perhaps, the utterly abhorrent vile nature of the Marquis de Sade, but maybe some of the peccadilloes of the lesser personnages that didn’t, in fact, result in death or imprisonment. On page 12 of this highly entertaining work, Shaffer quotes the much-reviled Marquis de Sade: “Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.”

One uncomfortable modern reality is that well behaved writers tend to be rewarded whereas the outliers, more often than not, are simply cast aside. Again, Shaffer notes in his preface, “Nowadays, unrepentant boozers in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker are conspicuously absent from bestseller lists, where the courteous and sober rule the day” (xv).

I find myself treading the line between the socially acceptable and the freedom of the mind that often accompanies a slight tipsiness. To drink, or not to drink, that has become the pressing question of the day as I forge ahead and attempt to finish my first novel. I’ve written approximately 182 pages of the work, set primarily in Dublin, Ireland, titled, At the Ha’Penny Bridge, by Michael Anson. I use my middle name as my writer’s name in the hope that I will land on the bookshelf next to the illustrious Jane Austen.

Creatively Stumped

A long time ago, I began The Artist’s Way, a twelve-week program for enhanced creativity by Julia Cameron. Two guiding principles are that participants should write three longhand pages in the morning, called Morning Pages, and, once a week, each individual should take him or herself on a an Artist’s Date. Although I was stymied in terms of artistic output (I was doing absolutely no creative writing), I faithfully wrote my Morning Pages Journal until, that is, someone I was dating read my journal and began holding my private anxieties against me in an increasing number of fights.

I was so trusting that it took several weeks for me to glom onto the real problem, namely that he had read my journal. I’ve had a terrible time freeing myself up on paper to put me everyday thoughts down, lest someone read them (not that that would happen right now because I live alone), but, as the cliché goes, “Once bitten, twice shy.”

I’ve decided to use this forum as a way of more formally journaling in blog form. Many have proclaimed the blog dead, but I myself still find value in it.

Weighed Down (#4)

My apologies for the gap in my posts, particularly between Entry #3 and Entry #4. I’ve been overwhelmed, but I think I’m finally on the proverbial “other side of things.”

My father, a few weeks back, called 911, complaining that he couldn’t breathe. They took him to the local hospital, Delnor, and ran a battery of tests, then discharged him for three weeks to a rehab nursing home. Just a few days ago, he was finally sent home. With that stressor, I gained a lb, but I tried not to obsess about the number on the scale.

Over the past month, I’ve lost 8.6lbs and an additional lb when I weighed myself Sunday morning. I try to weigh myself on the same day of the week, Sunday, around the same time, in the morning, so that I get a more accurate picture of true weight loss.

Also during this period, I was initially diagnosed by a primary care physician as having leukoplakia of the tongue (translation: cancer of the tongue). After meeting with an Ear, Nose, Throat Specialist, that doctor declared that I did not, in fact, have cancer, only a severe infection. Luckily, it has almost completely cleared up since then.

I’m a very extraverted person by nature, and I unfortunately began to imagine worst-case scenarios about not being able to speak and it was a terror filled couple of weeks. Now I’m back to a more regular routine.

One habit I have kept up is to walk 3.5 miles every day, the distance to my local library and back. I love walking my dog and luckily my psychiatrist wrote a letter certifying Lena as an Emotional Support Animal so I am able to bring her into the library study rooms. It really makes a big difference. I’ve averaged between 8,000 and 10,000 steps per day, nonnegotiable.

Two other goals for this week: to brush my teeth every day (something I do infrequently) and to get to the gym for yoga and weight lifting.