What I Wish For

I wish I were out taking a walk on a bright, cool day. I took this from the Pfluger Pedestrian bridge last Sunday. I was walking back from Zach Scott theater and I was going to meet FFP at the condo and we were going to a party that promised to be wonderful (and was). The "kids" (my 39-year-old niece and her husband and their three-year-old daughter) were still with my dad so I wasn't worried about him as much. Life felt right.

As I type this I'm sitting at my dad's. Just goofing off on the Internet at the moment. We've been sitting here discussing what help he is going to ultimately need when he finishes recovering from this illness and when/if home health is stopped. There were no big duties when I got here today. I got his paper in and that pleased him. "You get addicted to things," he said. He told the OT evaluator yesterday he didn't read much anymore. He doesn't in the way that I don't read much anymore: he reads papers and magazines but hasn't gotten around to any books lately.

My life hasn't been the way I've wanted it lately. Too much hospital and sick room. Too much worry and unknown stuff with Dad. Heck, with myself as well. Not enough exercise, not enough walks (like the one from the picture), not enough tennis. Not even enough cleaning my own apartment and doing other chores there and computer stuff. (I always long to do that stuff when I don't have the time for it.)

I've gotten away to holiday parties and some adventures with FFP in the evenings and it's been good some nights, great even. Other times I was down a little, feeling sorry for dad, angry at dad, angry at myself, feeling like a failure. Mostly, though, it's been delicious getting away, going to parties and out to eat.

I used to have a little writing exercise I did when I felt my life wasn't going my way. I would write down a perfectly imagined future, what I'd do day in/day out and week in/week out. There would be descriptions of exercise, dining, travel, shopping, creating. Then I would ask myself what parts of the life described I could have in spite of my current situation. In other words, I'd try to find time inside the real life limitations of my existence (work, chores, taking care of others, limited resources like money and time) to do things that I'd do if there were no limitations. This made me really realize how much I enjoyed, say, exercise or playing tennis or even some chores. It made me realize that if limitations were cast aside, I'd still love a fine meal and a glass or two of wine or reading the newspaper with a good cup of coffee.

Digging deeper in your desires will make you realize how much you really have already of your 'perfect' life. And it will make you make a few changes, too, because many times what you want is right there. You just have to do the things you love.

Stories We Tell Ourselves

We only deal in narrative, really. Oh, we think we are about emotions and feelings and such: love, hate, sadness, desire, curiosity, learning, meditating. But we can only think about these things, it seems, in the context of the stories we tell about ourselves and others, about places we moved through and things we've touched and seen and events we attended.

Today's picture is a shop window reflection at Uncommon Objects on South Congress. I've always been curious about the photos for sale in shops like this. Important enough to take and develop in that era before digital cameras and yet somehow leaving a family and its narrative and ending up in a bin for sale by an antique dealer. I've even bought a few in the past, thinking I'd just invent a narrative to go with it. Of course, inventing stories, fiction I think it's called, is something I've always had problems with because of the whole 'making it all up' part.

I've been taking a writing class ("Writing Your Life As A Woman" conducted by Dean Lofton) and what I notice in this class (which is focused on just getting the writing out and seeing where it goes, writing from prompts about real things in your life) is that no one just writes "I am happy" or "I was sad" or "I felt lost." Instead, they tell what they were doing constructing that emotion with details. Sometimes the listeners can't even tell that the scenes in the narrative create the emotion but suddenly there are tears from the reader.

I have my stock stories and the other day I was telling one of them and I started to wonder about some of the details. And then I realized that the detail didn't really matter as much as the reason why I hung on to that particular narrative. There was something I wanted to convey about my life in this world and the story was key to it. The story was neither fact nor fiction. It had an element of truth but the retelling made it important.

I frequently talk about the class I took before that was similar to the one Dean is conducting. I talk about how I enjoyed scribbling to writing prompts, reading and listening to others read and following up with writing 'sessions' with a friend. I tell about the hundreds of scraps of paper and dozens of notebooks of all sizes and shapes that I filled up with scribbles and notes and lists and have trouble tossing. (I'd done this for years before that class and have for years after.) I tell that because I want people to understand that I trust writing as therapy and a path to emotion. I sometimes mention that I didn't particularly care for that other instructor.

When I review those old writings, I sometimes say I'm sad or happy or excited. And that's the dullest thing in the world to read. But sometimes I read about the exact exercises I did, what I weighed, what I ate, what errands I did, where I went shopping and what I bought. I find a word I encountered written down, maybe with the definition, maybe not. I tell people I love words, but I tell them with stories. About trying to 'read' the dictionary. And about how when I was programming I'd be writing something and have to look up a word for some reason. (This was back before spell check, online dictionaries, etc.) And I would actually think: "That's the most fun I had all day long." It tells you something beyond "I love words."

Sometimes, though, we tell ourselves a story about a time in our lives that is not really false exactly but just wrong. If we wrote something down during that time, we might edit that story and make it a little more true to ourselves. Today I read some journal entries (actually a wad of yellow legal pad paper written on one side) from 1985. I remember at the time being sort of a lazy goof. Writing a journal when I should have been working. Stuff like that. But reading about the code I wrote and the thought I put into it and the things I was doing outside work and the thought that was going into my diet and exercise, I thought "Hmmm...maybe I had it together a little bit and had some good ideas. Maybe the fact that no product emerged to take the PC-DOS world by storm was not completely, entirely my fault." And yet, it's just a narrative either way. A way of putting the emotions of that time, and before, and since into a frame that I can relate to and that others can as well.

[Note: I'm determined to hit 'Publish' on this even though it doesn't seem to say much. The reason is that there are four unpublished drafts in Visible Woman before this one. The titles are: Free Ideas, People You Know, Ups and Downs and Exceedingly Random. They have semi-clever pictures attached. They languish. My three readers are disappointed. Just must publish something.]

Looking For Inspiration

I was running through old pictures looking for inspiration and I found this reflection in the window of the (now razed) Las Manitas on Congress Avenue. This was taken in July of 2008. The Austonian across the street was just climbing up to the sky. Oddly there are two fliers in the window that caught my eye. One is for a writing class that my friend Dean Lofton runs. However, I wouldn't meet her until months after this picture. There is also a flier for the Austin Film Festival film camp. AFF is one of my 'causes' and I'm currently drumming up business for a fundraiser for their Young Filmmakers Program. I doubt I noticed these things at the time. Just shooting the reflection of the Austonian construction in the window of a restaurant that was making way for a hotel that has yet to be started.

Why do I need inspiration anyway? I see people every day who have passion for their jobs, causes, projects or art. The work compels them. They don't have to find out what it needs to be. That's the secret to being inspired. it just comes at you and you can't resist the work.

Sigh...it isn't happening. In spite of that I'm going to go read the tiny fragment of a novel I have on my computer. Which will, no doubt, elicit a bigger sigh.

Reflecting on Wasted Time

I find lots of ways to waste time. Yesterday I blogged (yeah, maybe that's a time waster, you think?) Yesterday I outlined the ways I thought I might use (or waste) my hours. I went on that walk I mentioned. It was long and fun. I stopped for a taco and coffee. I wrote the following as the umpteenth potential first sentences of one of my most ambitious unwritten novels (Pogonip) while sitting in front of a fancy convenience store on Barton Springs consuming same.

Pogonip slid out of his seat and flipped open the overhead, grabbing his overcoat and removing a soft-sided briefcase and a day pack and easily hefting them on one shoulder. He wasn't particularly eager to join the jostling crowd in the aisle or even to escape the plane, but the tall, slim woman in the window seat was halfway up, gripping the headrest in front of her, bent uncomfortably in a curve defined by the compartment above her. He edged into the crowd to give her room to slip out and stand nervously beside him, fishing in a shapeless cloth bag she'd had under the seat.

I was actually quite satisfied with this, but it didn't inspire me to continue. Instead I started thinking 'Why fiction? Is it because I know so little that is fact?"

Well, I did take the walk. I did stop for coffee and snack. I never worked out. Instead I went to the storage unit and fished around for some office supplies for FFP, got an AC filter for a friend, emptied the trash can I'd provided for the storage area (which others had filled with discarded things), walked to the Office Supply store nearby with FFP to get the supplies he needed (which, of course, I couldn't find in the storage unit), checked some financial things and read the papers (worked crosswords), showered, went to a political talk at the Headliners Club, drank Manhattans, ate, watched a CSI: New York.

Pogonip will have to wait to walk down the concourse. The woman sitting next to him will have to wait to fumble two cell phones out of that bag. Her place in his novel will pend revelation until another day. When he's walking down the concourse, he will see three newspaper dispensing boxes. Each paper (Austin, Dallas, Houston) will have a different photo from a terrorist attack. He may smell the Iron Works barbecue and hear Marcia Ball music over the loud speakers. Or not. The newspaper box thing relies on something that happened to me. I walked down that concourse and saw those boxes displaying different views of an airline crash. I wish I could remember when that happened. Maybe I should wait to write the novel until I have typed up all my old journals and hope that I wrote something down about it?

And so it goes. It's really no wonder that I can't really write a novel or much of anything else. Today I have wasted most of the day. I spent a lot of it at my club. First I played tennis. Then I ate, did a few exercises, sat through a long meeting where I didn't feel I contributed anything. And now? I'm blogging!

[Picture reflects the photographer in the reflecting balls embedded in the wall at Chuy's on Barton Springs.]

Dizzy Dame

This is a reflection of railings at a modern retail and lofts area on SoCo. I've heard some things about that place kind of being a disaster for tenants. Maybe it's always that way, huh?

I'm actually NOT dizzy this morning. I had a bit to drink last night, all wine actually. I had some interesting dreams, I think, but I've forgotten them.

I have a goal or two today, sort of unformed. We have an early evening event. It's cool and sunny outside so I think I should take a long walk and maybe have coffee and a snack somewhere and think. Then I think I should get a workout. And I think I should read. And write. (Not blog. Write. Really. I'm thinking of actually working on the Pogonip piece. Yeah, though, probably not.)

And so it goes. One day. Another day. The same, yet not. We may grow intellectually, we may get fatter, we definitely grow older. But we can take that first step on a walk. There you go.

My Unwritten Books

One reason I've never written any of my books, leaving them all unwritten is that I have a fear of plagiarism. Will I unwittingly think some sentence or phrase or idea is my own and fail to faithfully attribute it?

Of course, My Unwritten Books is a book by George Steiner so the title of this entry is itself a plagiarism. [How many people, do you think, can spell plagiarism without looking it up? Digression. That's another enemy of my book writing.]

I'm itching to buy Mr. Steiner's book from Amazon. So it could join all the other unread books around here.

Mr. Steiner is a polyglot and polymath, according to Wikipedia. That assertion makes me envious and makes me feel small as the speaker of 1.1 languages (I speak enough French to qualify as a backward toddler) and the master of virtually no field of endeavor.

I was moved to write about what I have not written by a couple of clippings I found in a box of photos that I was sorting. One, from a 2002 New York Times OP-ED page was by Joseph Epstein. Entitled "Think you have a book in you? Think Again" he argues to not, as he puts it "add to the schlock pile." (It should be noted that Mr. Epstein has himself contributed several books to the publishing stream. I have actually read one of them and I think it is somewhere in this condo.)

The other article, from the Book Review in that same paper from the very next day's issue, was a celebration by Bruce McCall of his brother-in-law, John Jerome, who wrote books that never brought him fame, but who celebrated and loved the writing itself. The non-fiction books, their titles at least, speak of mastery and research and care for details. (I haven't read any of them, but On Turing Sixty-Five sounds tempting since I'm now old enough to realize that I'll reach that age without writing a book!)

But, what have I failed to write?

• A novel (or a screenplay...it is such a nascent work it really doesn't matter) about a woman and the effect when this woman dies in a plane crash leaving behind a husband, elderly parents and in-laws and a trusted assistant, all dependent on her for one thing or another. She is a bit autobiographical but neatly avoids most or maybe all of my own failings. Called 'Hole in the Water' the novel refers to the site of the crash (the ocean) and to the woman's absence from a water aerobics class. The entire book (or screenplay) may or may not be set after the event. Or maybe it's a flashback.
• A novel called Pogonip. The eponymous title character has a surname that is actually an obscure word meaning ice fog. He has run from tragedy into wealth until he can maintain multiple homes around the world and spend lots of money sending friends on elaborate 'games' using the map of the earth as the playing board. He doesn't really engage thoroughly with people in person, but his arm's length approach to life is interrupted when several players go to Berlin instead of Paris in the midst of one of the games he has financed and invented and are the unwitting victims of a terrorist bombing. This piece has been hanging over my head, necessitating a trip to Berlin to see in person something that was constructed since I was last there. It has its roots in intentional encounters with friends in faraway places.
  
• A short story which grew into a novel because, you know, if you don't actually write something it keeps growing. It explores the nature of truth beginning with the chance witnessing of a hit and run accident by someone who is somewhere they are not, technically, supposed to be. A serious crime witnessed by someone committing a misdemeanor. This one didn't have a name, I didn't think. It was originally in a collection of unwritten short stories that included one about a stone wall, I knew that. I thought that they were mostly in my head, titles and ideas included. I've considered combining this one with the one above in a giant novel for the purposes of not writing. At some point, the protagonist and the victim of the hit and run were revealed to me as being natives of Odessa. Odessa, Texas that is. And I needed to take a trip there to lend authenticity to a couple of ideas. [It turns out that I'd actually saved a document containing proposed titles and blurbs about the stories in that original, unwritten collection. When I found it on my computer just now, I only vaguely remembered the other story ideas besides the two mentioned. The title of this one that has grown out of control in my head was to be "Behind the Screen." There was another story in there called "Avalanche" based on something that happened to me as a kid. Another called "No Load-Bearing Walls" was vaguely familiar. Another entitled "The Next Apartment" had this blurb: "On relationships and envy of same." Although one (you or I) can imagine the story, I remember not one thing about its potential structure.]
  
• A screenplay that is technically not mine but a friend's (I was just helping or hindering or encouraging with some tasks like organizing a time line and dialog bits). She doesn't want the plot revealed so enough said about that. I think the material is on a WEB page with a logon and password I've forgotten. As you see above, I'm not so squeamish about telling what I remember of unwritten plots and would say even more about the ones above but you would only laugh. Laugh more than you are already laughing. And I would be making stuff up on the fly that I don't really remember committing to in the ephemeral plot in my imagination.
  
• A self-help book about packing, traveling and divesting oneself of unnecessary things. Seriously, I thought I could help others in this regard. Ha.

There must be others. Can this really be a life's collection of unwritten works!? How sad there can't be more when actually writing them, let alone getting them published, isn't required. However, my restraint, it turns out, is admirable. Joseph Epstein says in the above-mentioned article:

Misjudging one's ability to knock out a book can only be a serious and time-consuming mistake. Save the typing, save the trees, save the high tax on your own vanity. Don't write that book, my advice is, don't even think about it. Keep it inside you, where it belongs.

Good advice, I think. I think I'll let my self-help advice be just that and let my characters continue to grow and mature and change inside my head. It'll save me a trip to Berlin not to mention Odessa.

[Today's photo was taken on W. Sixth using a gift shop there as a lens. One wonders how many shops selling what we call 'gee-gaws' will be shuttered in the current economic crisis.]

A Story Worth Telling

This is a popular thing to do in the digital age, I know. Taking pictures of people taking pictures with their little screens just visible. This is another picture from MOMA. I like taking pictures in museums but not just of the art and objects. I like to have people interacting with the art. It makes my story of the museum one alive with the other patrons. I've shown a few others in recent days from the MOMA visit. One of my favorite in this genre is from the Musée d'Orsay and is shown here.

Are my pictures worthwhile? Worth looking at? Is my story worth telling?

This has been a topic I've batted around in the last few days. Here and here. I even had a conversation with one loyal reader on the topic. [Ed. Note: The rest of them are loyal, too. Just, um, respectfully quiet.]

This inspired me to look back at my old journal where I had topics like Who, What, When, Why and Where. The Who is a little bio. It is a place to start with a story that is really sort of boring. [Ed. Note: You had to revise it before you wanted to point people to it. A life story keeps changing until (and perhaps after) death.] My story is a mixture of the true and the false, the well-remembered and distorted and, of course, the completely forgotten. Like every story.

Anyway, it's something to do, pondering a memoir, to distract me from other things. Downsizing has reached a gut-wrenching point that I might discuss tomorrow. And I'm also thinking about writing about how blogs and memoirs in books differ. Writing about writing. The dodge of the blocked writer? Talk among yourselves.

Writers' Negative Space

Occasionally I get comments about my blog's tag line (over there to the right: "Pretending to write but really just blogging."). Or I get comments from people who don't read the blog (because who has the time, really?) but know that I say I blog but I don't write. My lunch companion from yesterday sent me an e-mail in the evening: "...someone "who doesn't write, but only blogs"? Just finished "The Genius of Montaigne" from the 2/14/08 copy of NYRB. It's been decades since I've even glanced at the Essais, but it really sounds like what he was doing was, essentially, blogging!"

Another friend told me that she was reading a book by Scott Adams that he really just collected from his blog entries. (From Publisher's Weekly: " Adams builds his latest book (after 2004's The Religion War) out of entries from his blog, which results in a lot of short chapters and abrupt changes in topic.") She was suggested I make a book therefore from the sea of words washing around the Internet ether.

My point? [Ed. Note: You are a blogger not a writer so a point is not really essential. But do go on.]

What is blogging? What constitutes blogging? Can a sixteenth century essayist be said to be doing it? How about Pepys? And, more importantly, what is writing? When are we doing it? And, of course, when is it worthwhile?

I enjoy my morning typing. I place a picture on Austin Daily Photo. (Ah, the demands of my life. Every day. A darn photo is required from within the rough boundaries of Austin, Texas.) I can't resist adding words to picture. Then I sometimes type here. But is it writing? (Particularly when I have about seven readers.) Would it be better to be published on paper or associated with Montaigne?

People are desperate at times to have their words on paper. Preferably acid-free but anything semi-permanent will do. Memoirs are popular now and blogging is, mostly, writing what is true for the author in the moment. Supposedly. Of course, we have created such a demand for memoirs that people are making them up. James Frey was excoriated for exaggeration and playing loose with the apparently more or less true shape of his life. Now Margaret Seltzer has been exposed for making up a foster child/gang involvement story out of whole cloth. You know, I read the original NY Times story about this book and thought to myself that it sounded false. If I'd read it online I would have sniffed it right out, I think.

I don't think I would ever write a memoir. In fact, an uneasy feeling about what is true has stopped a lot of my unwritten fiction in its tracks. Someone I have read online for years has written a book and is in fact having a book tour event here in Austin on Sunday. I think Rob has had thousands of readers online, off and on. I read the book. I learned a few new things about Rob. But I didn't doubt the truth of any of it. Because keeping up a coherent story for a long time online is nearly impossible. And, of course, I've seen him and his family in person. And thousands of pictures. So the snooty editors and publishers and agents of the world would do well to take note that one way to be a little sure of the truth is to publish a blogger! Not that you can't be online and have secrets. But it's hard to tell a consistent lie over a long period of time. Think how hard it is to make a novel consistent. Then try to add little random bits on the fly without much time for editing.

The photo (of my reflection in mirrors in a the window of Uncommon Objects) is one of the few taken in this location that actually reveals that the shape across the street is a church. I used it because I wanted to show the ephemeral nature of truth and words for this Montaigne-like essay! Just kidding.

Stay tuned because I got another idea for writing an 'essay' here from my lunch date yesterday. A continuation of the title "Writer's Negative Space" we will explore creativity and the lack of senses. Or not. This is just a blog. You can't hold me to anything.

Weather

New York was chilly. (Although after we finally got there it was sunny until we tried to leave.) Here I took advantage of a black backdrop in a shop window to take a pretty straight up (although mirror image) picture of us.

Yesterday in Austin when I got up and after fooling around for a while I went to the gym in shorts and a T-Shirt without a second thought. The winter bulbs have bloomed. The Redbud trees will be pushing off their blossoms and replacing them with leaves before you know it. The Mountain Laurels are starting to cover their limbs with those purple blooms that smell like grape juice.

So that's it. It's Spring! It may freeze again but still.

We had a list yesterday of things to get done. One of them was ordering some furniture for the condo. That we got done. When I was laughing that we only got that done, FFP said he had hired someone to do part of it. And he did go to the bank with some deposits. (Where a teller talking on her cell phone left a zero off the deposit and said, "Well, they would catch it.") So, really, all we didn't do off that list (that didn't run into a snafu) was pick a contractor for some work in the condo and "Continue to toss stuff that isn't going." Downsizing. Ongoing. Must get on that today. I guess watching CBS Sunday Morning in your bathrobe isn't going to get me going on that. Hmm...maybe another cup of coffee.

By Design

Part of a design exhibit up at MOMA when we were there was an Airstream trailer. Airstreams have fed my imagination since I was a teen. (One of my unwritten pieces, either a short story or a memoir, is "Airstream Dreams.") We enjoyed walking around the MOMA, taking pictures, seeing a few pieces we'd seen before and the special exhibits. Lines weren't so long as our last visit which was right after the renovation and move back to 53rd.

More New York thoughts later. Right now it's time to play tennis on a cool Austin almost spring day.

No More Until The Jury is In!

I was thinking that I'd quit blogging about certain topics until I had something more definitive to say. What are they? Downsizing, my Christmas spirit or lack thereof and my dental problems. Doesn't leave me much wiggle room does it? I'm involved in Holidailies and so I have to post every day. Or so I've pledged.

There were bright lights on Congress Avenue last night and I went to "The Nutcracker." Jury is still out on the effect on the Christmas spirit front.

Downsizing. Hrumph.

The less said about dental work the better. The jury is out and deliberating. There are jurors firmly in the various camps. (Guilty, innocent or hung jury.)

So, yeah, more tomorrow. But possibly not on these topics. I have in mind a few different topics. Like:

• My Bellwethers. (A chance to also talk about that interesting word.)
• Remembering Mom.
• Dead People's Money.
• Culture and Conversation
• Drugs, Diet and Denial

Don't those sound interesting? Well, maybe not. But still. No teeth, no holiday depression and no endless recounting of possessions.