Away and all…

Yes, I’ve not been blogging for a while.  I’ve been in Pittsburgh for the past week, taking a very cool Pittsburgh Field Seminar.  The classes are every day, and long, but I’ve quickly gotten to know my way around the place because of all the traveling and touring we’re doing, and not just getting to know its layout, but its history and an understanding of the various neighborhoods, of which there are many.  It’s a cool city, but even cooler knowing it better than on the surface.  I’m developing a bit of a crush on it, actually, and already predict that I’ll be making a somewhat long-distance relationship with it because of all this.  Monthly or perhaps bi-monthly visits in the future.  It’s got far too many good things to offer.

Not much more to report for now.  Except that this past Friday, I went down to Kentuck Knob, a Frank Lloyd Wright house south of Pittsburgh.  Here’s the Wikipedia entry, which has some good info on it.  And here’s a little something I wrote after coming home from seeing it:

 

     A house that fits into the side of a mountain like a key fits into a lock, or maybe more a house that grows out of the side of a mountain the way a leaf grows out of a tree.  Stone and wood that will never rot, hauled up from the swamps of Tidewater.  Octagons of light slowly drifting along the floors, keeping time.  The kitchen is the woman, the woman is the kitchen, so says a far too practiced and perhaps overused tour guide, Dolores.  We are at Kentuck Knob, where Frank Lloyd Wright meant to never visit, but did, just once, and was showed up by a seventy-one year old building contractor who had initially refused to build a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and then did it anyway.

     It’s not a space in which a person keeps house, it is a space one exists in, the way the blade of grass exists in the wind, bending with it.  Windows are walls looking out on an old forest, groomed to some extent, enough to make it look as if it is not groomed at all, simply naturally tidy.  A triptych of boulders here, for instance, a pond round back of the master bedroom’s window so that one falls asleep to and wakes to the sound of a stream gurgling nearby.  If it weren’t for the vintage stovetops that pull down from the walls of the kitchen to be cooked upon, and the matching oven, remnant of my parents’ childhoods, though certainly a product their families never would have afforded, and if it weren’t for the art—Native American bridles and bits, a desk with a stone Buddha, placed down next to the owner’s picture alongside Princess Diana—you would think it, the house itself, a natural product of its environment.  Which is the point, of course.

    Who were the people who had such a place built, and on such a piece of land as that, high up on a mountain, so that when you walk through the lane round back and pass under a thin stretch of trees onto a hill that looks out and down upon a vista of rolling hills and mountainsides folding into one another for miles and miles?  Dairy famers, apparently.  Though it must have been quite a dairy to have placed them in such circumstances. 

     Lord Peter Palumbo is the current owner, International Somebody.  Collector of eclectic sculpture.  So much sculpture that he’s made the meadow just down the side of the mountain into an open-air museum.  A red army of cut-outs, tribal in posture and lined up like good soldiers, own one corner of the meadow, which is groomed lovingly to look, like the house and the land above, as if it has not been groomed so thoroughly.  A piece of the Berlin Wall, tattooed with graffiti.  A church steeple.  An Andy Goldsworthy cairn.  Edwardian mailboxes and telephone booths lined up here and there.  A touch of England on a mostly untouched Pennsylvania mountainside, a hidden shrine in the woods.  Lord Palumbo will soon be coming to enjoy all of this for the next two months, according to Dolores.

     What is it about such places that they are able to inspire and to awe, but to also feel, to many, too remote, too artificial in their desire to be organic and natural, too different from what is considered normal to finally seal the deal?  None of this my feelings but that of fellow travelers, who crave the civilized world and society enough to mention missing it during a tour.

     If only the strange sculpture of the eaten apple weren’t so absurd, its core remaindered on the back lawn among the antique plows, the sort you would need to hitch to a horse, like the one my grandfather kept in his front yard for a long period of my childhood, propped next to a gigantic maple tree, unused, unable to get rid of it even though he has a practical, utilitarian nature, and it had not been used for decades.  Is that art?  Not really.  Maybe it is actually an extreme form of practicality.  One never knows when one may have need of it.  Depression-era syndrome:  refusal to cast anything aside, to waste.

     On the drive back to Pittsburgh, I watch the mountains and their thick canopies of trees rising and falling across the horizon.  There is so much green here, which is something with which I am familiar, but not in these shapes and sizes, the land holding you within its folds of green the further down the mountain you drive, making you feel smaller and ant-like. 

     Back up on the ridge, on Kentuck Knob, in the Frank Lloyd Wright house, the feeling of being ant-like, a creature, is in the details of the inside-out house, but you are given perspective, a way of seeing everything at once, not feeling enclosed.  Are his houses art?  They must be, not because they provide perspective, as almost any house will do almost by default of the form of making something to live within, but because the perspective is so consciously planned to lift you outside of the ordinary.

Stonewall at 40

Rick Bowes writes a guest blog over at Matt Cheney’s blog The Mumpsimus, on Stonewall forty years later.  Read it.  It’s not only good, it’s a great perspective.

“Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture”

Duh!

C’est Moi

I rarely post pics like I did all the time in Japan, since it was like, you know, another country and all that.  But my friend Jan took a pic of me tonight at a board meeting for the Oakland Center for the Arts, and I didn’t realize it.

I always like the candid photos better than the ones I actually know people are taking.  Somehow, as soon as I know a photo is being shot, I turn into ice.  But I like this one.  It’s in the artist’s gallery in the Oakland, one of my “places” here in Youngstown, where I give my time and energy and thought and all that good stuff.  If you’re around this weekend (as in tomorrow, Friday, as well as Saturday) you should come down to see Robert Dennick Joki’s show, I’m Not that Girl, at 7PM.  I’ll be there Friday evening.  And since Rob’s doing it, it promises to be a good show.

Charlie Brooker on the American News Media. Funny

Seriously funny, seriously pathetic, seriously.  Thanks to my friend James in Manchester for sending me this.

One resolution accomplished

Back around New Year’s, I made one writerly resolution.  From that blog post:

“One of my goals for the year is to write something joyful instead of melancholy, extroverted instead of introverted, playful instead of serious.  I suspect I will have to change some of the ways I perceive things to do so.  But that could be a good thing.  Fingers crossed and intentions set.  Full steam ahead.”

And finally, in May and June of this spring and summer, I think I’ve done it, in a short story.  It’s a more irregular way of writing for me, but it was definitely fun.  My only worry about writing a playful, joyful, less serious story is that there is less heft to such a story.  But then I wonder why play and joy may equate with less importance.  I think it may be more difficult to write this sort of story and also make it feel like the sort of story that lingers with a reader afterward for a long time, because the emotions aren’t the sort that pin a person down to something heavy.  Or this may not be a general issue at all, but simply one of my own issues.

That said, it was fun, and now it’s time to look it over one last time before sending it out into the world.  

One resolution down.  Now, back to trying to finish this third novel by end of 2009 at latest.  Puh-lease, Writing Gods, shine your benevolent light upon me (for an extended period of time). Thanks!

Out of this furnace

I’ve been reading a novel called “Out of this Furnace” for one of my summer courses.  It’s by Thomas Bell, an author from Braddock, Pennsylvania who grew up in a steel mill family.  The novel is semi-autobiographical, following three generations of a Slovak immigrant family from the turn of the century through the thirties.  The novel was published in 1941, not long after the last decade Bell writes about in the book, the 30s.  The book works more like a very well-done historical narrative more than it does as a novel, at least in terms of what expectations for novelistic writing looks like these days.  It provides many more insights than a typical historical narrative, too, because of the personal relationship the reader builds with its characters, rather than the distanced tone of an actual historical narrative.  In any case, I learned a lot reading it, about a time and a place and a particular kind of people, and also a lot about how things looked during the first thirty years of the Twentieth century around places like the one I grew up in, which isn’t very far from the novel’s setting.  Just outside of Pittsburgh.

In any case, a couple of quotes leaped out at me while I was reading today.  The leaped out because even though they were written seventy years ago or thereabouts, they felt like they could have been written today:

“The depression deepened to the sound of voices chanting that prosperity was just around the corner, the country was fundamentally sound.  In the face of unparalleled catastrophe the rich and powerful lacked even the decency to keep silent.  Blind, ignorant, obsessed with the myth of their own infallibility–they had been obeyed longer than was good for an human being–they drooled their obscene mumbo-jumbo, witch doctors without faith in their own magic imploring the betrayed to have confidence, the penniless to put their money into circulation, the despoiled to take pride in an America plundered, gutted and laid waste.  Silence would have become them more and proved wiser, for there must have been many like Dobie whom their stupidities shook out of bewilderment, goaded to anger.”

And another:

“What did they ever do for the working people?  All through the depression they haven’t done anything to help anybody except the big banks and corporations.  What good did voting Republican do John when he was getting dollar-fifty pays and taking money down to the mill on paydays to keep his insurance in force because they weren’t even giving him enough work to pay for his insurance?  He had to take from our few dollars in the bank and pay it to the mill on paydays instead of them paying him.   I owe four months’ rent and I’ve got a store bill that scares me when I think of it.  Do they think we’re all greenhorns and they can rub our faces in the dirt forever?”

And there’s more where that came from.

Commentary or Fan Fic?

Apparently there’s this book that’s been self-published in England and due to be published in the U.S. that is a “sequel” to Catcher in the Rye, making use of many of Salinger’s original characters, aged appropriately.  The author of the book says it’s not a sequel, and that, ”The book explores the famously reclusive Salinger’s efforts to control both his own persona and the persona of the character he created,” according to the brief. “It also scrutinizes and criticizes the iconic stature of Salinger and his creation by comparing the precocious and self-satisfied 16-year-old Holden with a 76-year-old version of himself fraught with indecision and insecurity.”

According to the NYT’s, “Mr. Colting acknowledges that three original characters from “Catcher in the Rye” appear in his novel: Mr. C, his sister Phoebe and Stradlater, Holden Caulfield’s prep school roommate. He also provides a list of more than two dozen original characters he has created for his novel, including Mary, Mr. C’s deceased wife, and Daniel, his son.”

Hmm, sounds like a sequel, Mr. Colting, despite the new characters.  Also sounds not so much like metafiction, as a Case Western professor has declared, so much as it does fan fiction, where a writer takes characters  and situations from a copyrighted book and spins their own versions on a favored author’s original tale.  If it were a story that was in the public domain, it wouldn’t be a problem.  Salinger, however, is very much alive at 90 and fighting this.  

The author says the novel is a commentary on Catcher in the Rye.  That sounds nice, but it also seems, at least from the reportage (and it may turn out to be incorrect reportage, we’ll have to wait and see), that the author really has infringed on Salinger’s copyright by including actual identifiable characters from the original novel.  Saying it’s commentary on Catcher in the Rye seems like a good defense, but I have a feeling it won’t hold up in court.

My first novel, One for Sorrow, was a partial commentary on Catcher in the Rye, but made no use of any of Salinger’s characters or plot in order to do so.  I simply wrote a coming of age story from the point of view of a working class boy growing up in the Rust Belt, who sees ghosts–something that would never happen in a Salinger book, ha!–and runs away from home the way Caulfield goes off the grid once he’s kicked out of Prep School.  My narrator doesn’t have the means to go anywhere fancy like New York City, where Caulfield runs to, rents a hotel room, hangs out with a girlfriend in ritzy restaurants, buying drinks, and where he tries to purchase a prostitute, among other things.  My narrator isn’t really able to afford that sort of running away; he hides instead in his girlfriend’s closet, then in an old lean-to in the woods near his house, and finally gets as far as Youngstown, Ohio, where he squats in an abandoned church.  No alcohol, no restaurant binges, no prostitutes, just crappy desperate turning from one place to another until the reality that he’s unable to run away from his problems sets in.  At one point he reads a book at his girlfriend’s house which is untitled but is obviously a summarized version of the plot of Catcher in the Rye, and he comments on that book, trying to show the differences in how that book looks to a kid from a closed-down ex-manufacturing/ex-steel region who isn’t anywhere near the middle or upper classes, and a much more Midwestern perspective versus Catcher’s East Coast.  I consider that sort of thing commentary on another book.  Taking another author’s characters whole-cloth, though?  That sounds like fan fiction to me, not commentary, though I’m sure commentary does arise out of the fan fiction.  The author probably should have tried to find a different way to do this than to appropriate actual characters.

I’ll be interested to know what comes of it.   Mainly because, even though I wrinkle my nose a little at Holden Caulfield and his drama, I like the kid nonetheless, and the book remains one of my favorites.

Wherefore art thou, Juliet

Today we bring you an awesome interview with the editor of my first two books, Juliet Ulman.  Okay, so “we” don’t bring it to you, Jeff Vandermeer does, over at Amazon.com’s blog, Omnivoracious.  Here’s a connecting pass to it.  And if you like reading Juliet’s really smart and insightful perspective on editing, publishing, and the future of publishing, you can hop over to Jeff V’s personal blog, where there is some more Ulman love going on, including a little ditty from moi.

The Odds

Looking for a good suspense/mystery novel for the summer?  You should check out Kathleen George’s newest novel, The Odds.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have to make a qualification on this recommendation.  I haven’t read the book yet.  I know Kathleen as a mentor in the MFA program at Chatham University, and over the past year she’s been reading the novel I’ve been writing and giving me wonderful advice as I push onwards in it.  She has a keen eye for drama and moving a story forward, and I expect those aspects will be plentiful in this book as well.  I just ordered my copy, as it just came out today.  Looking forward to it.  Hope those of you who check it out enjoy it.