Tennessee 1

Our steps down to the the Little Pigeon River

Eastern Tennessee, near a village called Townsend.  Special trip, friend’s 70th birthday.  The idea was to escape the city, any city, all cities.  Total success.

The dirt road to our spectacular two-story log “cabin” is barely wide enough for one car and you have to drive through a creek.  We were warned that the black bears are emerging from hibernation and that one, probably a two-year-old, has been seen in the woods surrounding the cabin.  “Just don’t walk around in the woods with a bucket of fried chicken,” we were told.  Well, okay.

(Two hours after writing the above we’re back from town, I sit down at my laptop on the table facing the deck and there he is!  On the deck, not fifteen feet away, a young black bear!  Friend is cooking something with a lot of onions and the scent was apparently irresistible.  I grabbed my camera, but he took off into the woods before I could snap a shot.  We’d been leaving the deck doors open, but they happened to be closed right then or he would have come on in.  Black bears (except moms with cubs) aren’t ferocious and this one’s just a hungry kid, but still… what does one do with a bear in the house?  Probably better keep those deck doors closed.

We’re in the Smoky Mountains; the national park boundary is about 200 yards from the door, which means wi-fi access is almost nonexistent since no towers are permitted on national park grounds.  I’ll have to drive into Gatlinburg or someplace to post these blogs, but that’s the trade-off for limitless natural beauty, quiet and a bear.

Also for a cultural experience I’m still trying to figure out.  Scots, English, Welsh and Irish settlers made their way through

Melungeon boys

these mountains centuries ago, and their descendants are still here.  But another group, mysterious as the song that is their anthem, also struggled to survive in secret valleys and hollows, until they were driven out and moved to different valleys and hollows.  They were the Melungeons, mixed-race people of European, Native American and African genetic stock, whose name some linguists consider a bastardization of the French word melange (mixed).  However, my favorite among the theories is that the term reflects a now obsolete Elizabethan word, “malengin,” that meant guile, deceit or ill-intent.  Spenser, in The Faerie Queen, named an evil sprite character “Malengin,” and those early English settlers would have known and used the word.

In any event, the Melungeons were often shunned in primitive mountain settlements where survival might depend on mutual effort.  Dark-skinned and “different-looking,” they seemed demonic to the predominately white and culturally British mountain settlers.

I’d never heard of Melungeons until yesterday when I bought a CD of local bluegrass songs at Cade’s Cove, an old settlement the last descendant of which died in 1999.  One of the songs, “Wayfaring Stranger,”  I’ve heard many times but never thought about.  This version, with its haunting Dobro guitar, auto harp and mandolin, was so compelling that of course I had to research it to death and discovered that its origins are simply unknown.  Here’s a link with an orchestral version – http://www.manhattanbeachmusic.com/html/wayfaring_stranger.html.  There are countless lyrics to “Wayfaring Stranger,” which sounds as if it should be an old negro spiritual, except it isn’t.  Its origins are lost in the weary footsteps of long-dead Europeans who moved westward into the Appalachians, only later to become associated with the even more weary, outcast Melungeons.

Later I will conclude that the Melungeon thing has some current resonance.  Around here, I and literally everyone I know would qualify, at least insofar as seeming demonic!

To be continued….

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Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye… Well, Maybe Later

When I walked out of my dance class yesterday, Bart was as usual sitting at one of the tables the Y puts out there.  Bart, a very recently retired Professor of English, always has something interesting to say.  I was betting on a quip about Margaret Thatcher, the news of whose death was all over the place that morning.

“Bad news,” Bart said, looking oddly doleful for someone I was sure had been no fan of Margaret Thatcher.  “Annette Funicello died.”

My heart sank.  The shock was real and scarcely related to the actual person of Annette Funicello, whom of course I’d never met and hadn’t thought of in over fifty years. I didn’t have to think about Annette because she existed perpetually, never changing, in my own history.

I’m in Jr. high and my first boyfriend David has walked me home from school, carrying my books and my Conn cornet in its clunky case.  David is not allowed to come inside, since my parents are still at work, and that’s fine with me.  Adolescence is a slow and patchwork affair in the 1950’s; I’m not really clear about why he insists on walking me home but understand that it’s expected of both of us.  When he leaves I can go inside and turn on the TV (which has to warm up), and what’s on both of the two stations available?  The Mickey Mouse Club!

And I watch.  Annette, the most popular Mouseketeer, is twelve and so am I.  By current standards we’re way too old for this juvenile stuff, but I don’t know that then.  In my late-afternoon living room, surrounded by my mother’s collection of Wedgwood miniatures (green, not blue), it’s okay to be a child, or at least childish, again, and I revel in it.  When the show is over I sing the closing song with Annette and the cast, alone in the final moments of both childhood and an era.  I will never forget the song.

Bart and I analyzed the source of our reaction to Annette’s death.  She was an icon in our history, a remembered symbol of something akin to innocence.  Bart said he, like every other American boy, fell in love with her even before she got the famous boobs.  He said she always seemed deeply wholesome in some way far surpassing the corny All-American Girl Next Door image.  I remembered wanting to look like her, not realizing that I’d have to become Italian. It didn’t matter; she was us.  Annette was an ideal, somehow embodying a goodness peculiar to that time, outgrown long ago but cherished in memory.

Bea, Bart’s wife and retired teacher, and Bonnie, an about-to-retire grade school teacher, straggled out of our class.  Bart gave them the news; their reaction was the same.  We stood around in the sun talking about Annette for a few minutes and then wandered toward our cars in the parking lot beneath a small shopping center.  It’s all slab cement and girders in there, dim and echoey.  Then somebody started the song and we all joined in, belting it out, the words bouncing off cars and cement, filling our world for one last time.  M-I-C…K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E…  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWH9HGS7SvQ

I won’t forget that, either.

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Boomers and Amour

Amour, a French movie directed by Austrian Michael Haneke, is nonetheless a French movie.  These are traditionally so understated and filled with lingering shots that have no known relevance to the story that American viewers may be forgiven for thinking, “Tell me I didn’t just pay ten dollars to watch a parked car for two hours!”  Amour, despite its adherence to this protocol, has either won or been nominated for nearly every film award on the planet.  Among the many, it won the 2012 New York Film Critics Best Foreign Film Award and the Palme D’Or in Cannes and has been nominated for five Academy Awards.  And deservedly so.

The film unsparingly documents the realistic, humiliating and frighteningly tender end of a cultured, articulate and elegant life.  Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant, whom we remember from A Man and a Woman) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva, whom we remember from Hiroshima Mon Amour) are an elderly, middle-class Parisian couple, music teachers living quietly with books and a grand piano.  Anne has a stroke, then a failed off-screen surgery, then another stroke.  Her decline and Georges’ determination to care for her in their home until she dies comprise the story, and it is told with subtle mastery.

However, Georges and Anne have a daughter, Eva, played by Isabelle Huppert.  Viewers learn in a few (easy to miss if you don’t read the subtitles quickly) lines of dialogue that Eva, also a musician, travels professionally with a group that is still shaken after the suicide attempt of one of its members.  The suicidal woman was inconsolable after the end of her affair with Eva’s husband, Geoff.  Eva is also the mother of a young son.  Clearly, Eva is up to her teeth in the concerns of adult life – career and financial issues, children, marriage difficulties.  There is also a vague, never-explained breach between Eva and her parents, but she does intrude (she has to intrude, as her presence is not wanted) to offer support and is clearly concerned about her father’s decision to assume the complete burden of care for the partially paralyzed and increasingly incoherent Anne.

And this is where Eva’s Boomer identity assumes significance, although more within critical reaction to the movie than in the movie itself.  Eva is routinely maligned in reviews. Two examples:  New York Times critic Manohla Dargis calls Eva, “…wildly self-centered,” and feels that her offers of help “sound hollow.”  The Guardian states that Eva’s advice is “shaped by her own needs,” as if her suggestion that professional care for Anne is necessary somehow embodies a distasteful selfishness.

Amour is not about an adult child’s response to the decline into death of a parent, and most reviews merely mention that the part of Eva is played by Huppert.  However, the vitriol regarding Eva in reviews that do address her role in the story is so skewed as to demand attention.  Eva tries to establish involvement in her parents’ life with phone calls that are never answered and visits in which she is treated as an unwelcome guest.  This is a tangential dimension of the film, highlighting the natural isolation of the dying, but is overlooked in analyses of Eva’s behavior.

She’s nervous and frightened by her mother’s pitiful condition, and in one scene chatters on and on about the sale of a house and the difficulty in finding another one, as bedridden and cognitively lost, Anne struggles to respond, managing to pronounce only two words – grand mère and maison.  Grandmother, house.  It is a last communication between adult child and dying mother, incomprehensible but not empty.  Eva has offered news of her life, however superficial it may seem in comparison to Anne’s condition; Anne has made a bridge of understanding – she is the grandmother, and she understands that the conversation is about houses.  The scene struck me as powerful and touching; critics saw it as evidence of Eva’s self-absorption.

There are a number of these events throughout the movie, involving potential for wildly divergent interpretations of the adult child’s (the Boomer’s) role in the lives of aged parents.

After her first stroke, when both are aware that she will decline and die, Anne forces Georges to promise that he will not hospitalize her, that he will allow her to remain at home.  Georges acquiesces to her demand.  The request is almost universal and haunts both spouses and adult children who, in the end, may not be able to keep the promise.  But is the request realistic, or is it a version of “selfishness” that no one who is not dying dare name?

The journey of death is by definition “selfish,” as it must be traveled alone.  Those facing that journey are frightened and cannot be blamed for wanting familiar surroundings.  And we all live proximate to a communal “memory” of earlier times when people did die wherever they were when the time came, ideally at home amid supportive extended family, pets, livestock and neighbors.  But those days are no longer the norm.  Adult children often live thousands of miles from aging parents, often have (and need) work that cannot be abandoned, and children.  Eva’s urging her father to place Anne in hospice care is met with flat rejection, which is Georges’ right.  He has chosen to keep a terrible promise and no one, not even his daughter, may violate it.  But is Eva’s suggestion merely the self-absorbed cop-out of a superficial and cowardly Boomer, or does it reflect a current, and not necessarily unkind, strategy for death?

At the end, Eva is shown silently contemplating her parents’ now-empty apartment (Georges having also vanished after Anne’s death under magical/hallucinatory circumstances that, again, may not satisfy the narrative expectations of American viewers), presumably awed, confounded or horrified by the drama that has transpired there.  She may not know, may suspect, may not want to know the details from which she has been excluded all along.  What she does know, as we all do at this time, is that her parents are gone.  Orphaned, nothing now stands between her and the inevitable moment when she will undertake the same journey that has led them away.

Her philandering husband seems an unlikely candidate for the depth of devotion that gives the movie its name, Georges’ not-always-lovely devotion to Anne, itself an ambivalent ideal experienced by few.  Eva is alone on an empty stage where a drama unavailable to her, and to most, has transpired and is gone.  We know that her parents’ story is not hers.  That she is aware of another, different, contemporary story does not make her “selfish.”  It makes her an adult in her own time.

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Traveling for Stories 3

Okay, this is the weird Alaska story.  I started in grad school in St. Louis University’s English Department, but

Thomas Aquinas

almost immediately realized the extent to which I didn’t care about Thomas Aquinas.  St. Louis U. is a Jesuit school, but they apparently failed to realize that Thomas was a Dominican and went right on inserting his theology into every single class.  I switched to another grad program at another university, but not before seeing, and thus remembering, St. Louis U.’s oddly hideous mascot/logo, the billiken.

The school’s athletic teams are called The Billikens, and there is a billiken statue on campus.  The image always struck me as creepy, a little demonic, exuding some unwholesome sadness despite its vapid grin.  To say that I didn’t like it is a generous understatement.  It did, and does, have an effect similar to that of turning over a rock.  I’d really rather not see what’s there.

Billiken Statue at St. Louis U.

Fast forward many years.  I’m in Juneau, Alaska, on the last leg of a delightful trip.  And suddenly I’m surrounded by billikens.  At the Alaska State Museum I rounded a corner and was confronted by a pinlit case of 59 of them, carved in ivory.  There were billikens in every shop, and an entire shop devoted to nothing butbillikens.  Supposedly they were a “mystical” figure native to Alaska, traditionally carved in ivory by “Eskimos” during ancient winters.  But the billikens bore none of the traditional native designs and looked more like an evil twin of the Buddha, a twin who somehow escaped the notice of an entire history.  And how did the strange little image wind up on the stationery of Jesuit academics 3,000 miles away?

59 Billikens at Alaska State Museum

Nobody knew anything about the origins of the creature.  The staff at the museum didn’t know.  The Tlingit teenager at the billiken shop was clueless, as were five other shopkeepers.  So I dashed off to the Juneau library, where the librarians also didn’t know but were delighted to fire up two laptops and find out.  (I love librarians!)  Their research and later my more extensive efforts together reveal a strange story.

One night during the very early years of the 20^th century a young St. Louis art teacher named Florence Pretz supposedly had a dream.  (It may or may not be significant that the date of this dream falls securely within the spiritualism craze that would only fade away in the 1920’s, but the connection did occur to me.)  Florence dreamed of the figure that would be named “billiken,” and upon awakening, drew it.  (It is also similar to a pixie figure illustrating popular doggerel poems by a Canadian poet of the time.)  She said, or billiken marketers later said she said, that the creature was, “The God of Things As They Ought to Be.”

Florence patented billiken in 1908, becoming the first to patent a god, and the thing became a national craze.  Women gave each other little ceramic billikens for luck, men wore them as watch fobs.  There were billiken teacups, jigsaw puzzles, buttons, coin banks and keychains.  And in the middle of all this, a St.Louis merchant happened to travel to Nome, Alaska, where he contracted with a native carver named Angokwazhuk for a shipment of hand-carved ivory billikens.  Eager for work, many native carvers jumped on the bandwagon, cranking out thousands of a figure with which they had no connection whatever.  Thus was born the wholly erroneous story of billiken as an “Eskimo” deity, a story alive and well in the shops of Juneau to this minute!

At some point a St. Louis jokester pointed out that the Jesuit university’s coach, John Bender, looked like a billiken.  Cartoons were penned, and the fond decision to name the school’s athletic teams “Billikens” was made.

Then around 1920 the billiken craze evaporated overnight.  Popular billiken songs were forgotten and a million little statues and charms vanished into boxes of junk that would later be buried in landfills.  Billiken was a symbol of the prodromal “pop therapy” spun from vague counter-Freudian ideas just taking root in the mass mind of the time.  “Think positive and things will be as they should be.”  Positive thinking is notoriously unreliable, and time obliterated billiken, leaving only a Midwestern university athletic department and a groundless Alaskan myth no one in Alaska can explain.

And one tourist with St. Louis roots wondering where that disturbing little image really came from.

 

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Traveling for Stories 1

Travel is all about stories and you really don’t have to leave town to travel, but there’s something about being elsewhere that brings up stories like images on silver halide paper in a darkroom emulsion.  To mix metaphors, the familiar is a thick crust; get out of the familiar, the crust cracks and falls away and there in front of you is… a story.  It will not be the one you expected, wanted or longed for.  It will be different, something lovely, unsettling, curious or revelatory.  And unlike snapshots or souvenir t-shirts, once it’s in your mind it’s yours forever.

I travel for stories and assume all writers do, although overgeneralizations like that are egregious.  To further overgeneralize, doesn’t everybody travel for stories?

Skipping Fodor’s, Frommers, Lonely Planet and Rick Steves, before leaving I scroll through twenty or so pages of (whatever is my destination) titles on Amazon and pick only the odd, intriguing ones.  (Many old, out-of-print travel books are fabulous and free on Kindle, Google Books, Gutenberg et al.)  No detail in these will help me find a decent veggie restaurant or an all-night optometrist, but will create an almost eerie conceptual field in which I’m linked to and present in a place where otherwise I would have been a ghost.  (See The Art of Travel by Alain De Botton for a broader perspective on this.)

Just back from a wonderful and complex Alaskan journey, I still haven’t finished (and will probably never finish)  Ella Higginson’s Alaska The Great Country.  Published in 1910, it has to be the most detailed, exhaustive and beautifully written Alaska travel guide available, even now. And I send psychic cheers to long-dead Ella for saying over and over what I would, a century later, think.  IE: Alaska’s natural beauty surpasses description, and the naming of its thousand faces demands the skill of poets.  And it had something akin to that skill in its original, sonorous names.  “Petersburg” was Seet Ká, “Seward” was Qutellaq, etc.  These were names derived from the world, names of the movements of fish, the shelter of trees.  Now every single fjord, bay, inlet, island and river bears the name of some (frequently British) European male who either was the first European male to explore the area or, having already used his own name, selected the names of other European males from his address book.  His barber back in Leeds, an uncle who might leave him that Georgian mansion near Haworth.   Some of these names, – Winstanley, Moore, Anderson, Bonner – appear above and beside me on genealogical charts.  But doesn’t “the place of swarming mists” sound better than “Winstanley Island”?

But I did read  The Alaska Native Reader (Maria Sháa Tláa Williams, 2009) in its entirety on my Kindle before and during the trip.  A folklore fanatic, anything about other cultures/crafts/costumes/customs/cults will draw me like a moth to flame.  This book turned out to be a compendium of essays about the anger and resentment felt by members of Alaska’s 229 native tribes (speaking 20 different languages and having 11 distinct cultures) at what has been done to them since the first Russian invaders in the 1700’s.

We all know the story; it’s horrible; but no matter how fiercely wished, “decolonization” will never work.  Even the gods cannot reverse time.  Still, a focus on nearly-extinct languages, cultures and skills can at least lead to somebody writing it all down so it doesn’t vanish completely.  That’s the best that can be hoped and I’m all for it even if it means that I, personally, will be hated by a native person because I have blue eyes.  The native person and I do not matter.  What matters is that the organized rage of native people will compel the documentation of native realities before they’re lost forever in the soup of time.

Totem at Saxman Native Village

So there I was in Ketchican, having tramped out to see Saxman (named not for any native who actually lived there, but for S.A. Saxman, a Pennsylvania teacher sent by the U.S. Government to establish Indian schools – he drowned on a winter canoe trip within a year of arrival and his body was never found) “Native Village.” Saxman is a collection of reproduction totem poles and a “clan house” where people from cruise ships pay a great deal to see a video and some costumed children dancing.  Only cruise ship passengers are allowed in the “clan house,” although everyone else can, for five dollars, look at the repro totem poles and shop in the gift shop.  A glowering Tlingit man in t-shirt and jeans stood on the road collecting five dollar bills.  He was gruff, hostile and seemed to be contemplating the slaughter of every tourist snapping photos of the totem poles.  Parents from the Disney cruise were careful to keep their children far from him.  He made everyone edgy.

Including me, even though I’d read The Alaska Native Reader.  Not every angry Native American is expressing resentment about the smallpox, syphilis and slavery, lies, exploitation and ruin brought by Europeans.  Some Native Americans probably just have sinus headaches, bad marriages or defective cable boxes that can make anyone crabby.  Nonetheless, I had a foot in his world and for a time chose to imagine myself a contemporary Tlingit like him, watching myself and a horde of other tourists from all over the world.

The real totem poles fell and rotted over a century ago as the Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian and Yup’ik abandoned millennia-old villages and flocked to work in European enclaves.  In my book-fed mind I saw the ghost-villages, Raven and Eagle, bear and frog toppled and half-buried in snow.  And I saw the Made-In-Taiwan replicas of artistic, complex and highly-evolved cultural artifacts sold to people (including me) who may admire but cannot begin to understand or honor them.  I felt the sharp edge of a sorrow-filled shadow that makes Alaska’s native people yearn for “decolonization,” an impossible return to the past.   The book made a bridge, however tenuous and fleeting, between me and a Tlingit man collecting five dollar bills on a road that leads to brightly colored emptiness.

But my other foot was a tourist’s, and I bought a pair of pewter earrings depicting Raven stealing the moon.  I like the Raven legends, am drawn to Raven and ravens here as in all other contexts.  And so I have a writer’s story that will only die when I do, and a pair of earrings one of which I will eventually lose in a dressing room, leaving the other one to haunt me.  Both are good, but the story is better.

And that’s only one.

To be continued.

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A Real Hunger Game II

The next Game was The Personal Interview, in which a single judge (mine a tired, pink woman in cloisonne bracelets with matching earrings and a crocheted vest) asked a single candidate telling questions, carefully documenting the answers.  Highlights from mine:

Judge  (eagerly) – “How do you feel about a class size of 27 or more?”

Me – “Even if the students’ first language weren’t Spanish, which it is, fifteen is tops for a writing class. Trying to teach English Comp to twenty-seven people whose only English has been learned from old Law and Order re-runs would be cruel and unusual.  Like the death penalty.”

Judge scowls, writes.

Judge – “You know you are expected to be available to students by phone, eight hours a day, seven days a week.”  She smiles proudly.  “I like to be available by six a.m.!”

Me (joking) – “You’ve got to be kidding.  Call me at six in the morning and I’ll have a contract out on you by noon.”

Judge’s smile is not amused as she writes.  I’ve just committed suicide and feel expansive and righteous, wondering if this was the experience of all those biblical martyrs.  But the judge isn’t Caligula, probably just a morning type who goes to bed at eight-thirty and will get up at five even if nobody ever calls to discuss citation formats. I’m dead meat, but we chat animatedly about the charm of small desert towns for a few more minutes until she can dismiss me in time to edge my interview form in black.

Back in home room (large corporate cafeteria) I grab a tuna sandwich and a Coke and join four total strangers at one of the round tables where the fifty people who are not off being individually interviewed are pretending to talk to each other.  It’s already eight o’clock at night and many have driven hours in brutal traffic to get here, but all conversation is bright, intense and focused exclusively on education.  We are communally deranged in our fascination with all things educational even though we have no idea what we’re talking about.

We are enthusiastic in our agreement that there’s confusing duplication in spreadsheet software applications, whatever they are, and all have passionate opinions about the role of autonomous learning in the digital classroom, whatever that is.  I confabulate along with my strangers, but have no idea why we’re doing this until I notice that ten or twelve judges are moving languidly among the tables.  One sits, smiles and listens for five minutes, then stands, smiles and vanishes.  I watch as one after another listens to talk, then drifts to a long table at the back to makes notes.  Aha.  We aren’t merely casually waiting for the next game; this is the next game, and I wonder how many fatal wounds I incurred by speaking ill of programmed curricula.

The Stealth Conversation Game goes on for a half hour and suddenly it’s over.  A yellowish electric charge surges through the room as the Head Judge, a businessy but seemingly intelligent woman whose scarf I envy, announces the Final Game.  In groups of twelve we’re ushered to conference tables in more cold, neon rooms.  We’re given a list of fifteen items – all aspects of “teaching” – that we must communally rank order.  A quick perusal of the list reveals its nature, a split between systemic conformity and more gooily worded inclinations toward “helping” behavior.  There are no items indicating that a fondness for the subject matter we’ve presumably spent years studying has any merit at all.

This Game has an unusual rule; anyone may veto any of the group’s decisions, item by item, throwing everyone back into chaos since a change in any rank-ordered item of necessity changes all of them.  When I’m not teaching English I teach Social Psychology, so I’m vaguely aware that this is some terribly significant aspect of some highly predictive “group dynamic” test, although I can’t imagine what it predicts.  “Vetoers are strong, independent thinkers destined for leadership,” or “Vetoers are troublemaking misfits who should be taken to the parking lot and shot.”

The Ranking Game drags on and on as I wait to see if anybody will veto anything.  Nobody does.  We are growing pale and dizzy with the effort to pretend interest in the equivalent of a bread label.  “Rank the following in order of importance: wheat gluten, calcium sulfate, ascorbic acid, etc.”  So as a lifesaving gesture I do it; I veto something.  And the spell is broken.

The judges, three men and a woman this time, take palpable note.  The other candidates are transparently torn between pitying censure, ambivalent envy and the desire to end this farce any way possible because it’s late and they still have a two-hour drive to get home.  A man says of me, “She’s little but she’s tough,” announcing the group’s hope that I may have done whatever was necessary to get this over with.  And apparently I did.

The judges beam.  We stagger back to “home room” for a last speech in which we are told that there are many more of us than there are jobs, and that a failure to be selected does not mean we’re not great.  It just means that we’re not “a good fit” with the corporation.  A crescendo of cognitive dissonance swells through the crowd.  Not one soul in that room wants to be “a good fit” with a corporation.  But everyone in that room except me needs a job.

In the parking lot I fight the urge to curl up in the back seat and go to sleep.  I am  exhausted from acting for four solid hours, but also from the stress of being in that context, among those beleaguered people.  They are all teachers, even the judges, and thus dear to me.  And what has just been done to them isn’t okay.   My mother was a teacher, her friends were all teachers.  I grew up with teachers and became one, thus indefinitely extending my connection to teachers.  I know and like the sorts of people who teach.

They are a ragtag bunch, not pretty unless you look past the taped glasses frames and chalk-stained sleeves, the ponderous jargon and propensity to hold forth on topics from a dissertation written before there were cell phones.  They fume over trivia, drink too much at parties and understand the world with brilliance and eccentricity.  They are the lodestone of every culture, the magnetic center of all constructed reality.  They cannot be forced into corporate cubicles.  It won’t work; it can’t be done.

I drive away from the place secure in that belief.  Away from a place where there was no chalk, no teacher’s lounge, no coffee machine.  No messy bulletin boards with flyers about a balalaika concert in protest against, or in solidarity with, anything.  The place with no students.  A place where there was not a single book.

But I know some of those sixty-five people will have faked their way through the Hunger Games and gotten jobs.  They’ll wind up in classrooms far from corporate headquarters.  And because they’re teachers, they’ll teach.  Every word, every idea, every example and quotation they offer will erode the profit-based structure in which both teacher and taught are trapped.  The Hunger Game cannot kill ideas; its system, rational and avaricious, is incompatible with ideas.  In the end, those who distribute ideas like seeds flung from a basket, will win.

 

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A Real Hunger Game

I read The Hunger Games several years ago when a member of my writer’s group, Carolyn Marsden, said, “Read it.”  Carolyn writes very sophisticated and evocative YA novels and tracks hot spots in the publishing world like a blue tick hound after possum in a bayou.  So we all read The Hunger Games and I thought, “Okay, this is the cri de Coeur of the young, the perennial outrage at whatever system happens to be in control.”  In this case it’s the diseased corporate “government” currently in power.  All systems relentlessly crush autonomy, even spirit.  It isn’t necessary to be young to recognize and hate that, although railing against it is the province of the young.  The rest of us realized long ago that survival lies in a combination of deft camouflage and feigned disinterest while quietly sabotaging what we can.

Recently I also saw The Hunger Games movie just because everybody else did.  It was so faithful to the book that there was nothing to complain about and I shelved the whole Hunger Game thing with “interesting but fleeting literary/cultural artifacts.”  It didn’t touch me, I thought.  But that was all about to change.

It was all about to change because at some point in there it dawned on me that I’m not dead.  I’d always assumed I would be by now, gone in a flaming car crash with Bach blasting from the radio a la Anthony Perkins in Phaedra.  I really, honestly thought some dramatic event with a terrific soundtrack would occur whenever it was supposed to, transporting me to whatever comes next.  My only concern has always been the music.  But a few months into The Hunger Games frenzy, I realized that my Bach-filled car crash not only hadn’t happened but probably wouldn’t.  I mean, surely it would have happened by now, right?  Rats.  If I was going to live indefinitely I was going to need a job.  Enter The Hunger Games.

I applied for two famously underpaid adjunct professor-type positions and was hired by one. When the second scheduled its “interview and candidate assessment” I already knew I couldn’t take the job even if they offered it.  I was employed elsewhere with the job that is now devouring my life so that I have no time to write.  But I’d already provided enough documentation for Job 2 to qualify for top secret clearance with the CIA, an effort I saw no point in wasting.  I’d go to their assessment.  Why not?  Facing an unanticipated future in which the price of haircuts and Kettle Corn will rise inexorably, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have Job 2 as a backup for later.  So I dressed up in my famously underpaid adjunct professor costume (turtleneck, long skirt, artsy scarf and earrings) and went, although I wasn’t serious about it.  I didn’t care, and from that perspective I would be able to see what no one else could.  I would see that I had become a participant in a hunger game.

And here I have to admit that I have been warned not to write about this. Friends have hinted at dire consequences.  “Even if you don’t use the name, everybody will know what you’re talking about.  What if ‘they’ see your blog?  They’re huge.  They can hurt you professionally!”  “Oh for God’s sake, this isn’t a spy novel,” I thought.  At least it isn’t a novel.  It’s reality.  And who’s going to rat me out?  Nobody likely to read my blog, for sure!

So I showed up in a room of sixty or seventy people dressed in interview drag, all warily sipping water from plastic bottles.  I was, I think, the third oldest candidate there, depending on the real age of the guy in dyed hair, pancake makeup and a bright peacock blue dress shirt that strobed in the neon overhead lights.  I remembered Clue and named him Mr. Peacock (in the large corporate cafeteria, with the plastic water bottle).  He was the only interesting character in sight and I hoped he’d get a job so he could stop living in his van in beach parking lots.  There were mountains of shrink-wrapped sandwiches, tiny bags of potato chips, soft-baked cookies, water, soda, coffee and tea.  It was going to be a long night.

Everybody had to stand and introduce themselves, a nightmare of pointless discomfort.  We were there to destroy each other, not to socialize.  In a room full of out-of-work college instructors during an economic recession, the twin odors of desperation and boredom snaked amid scents of tuna salad and Earl Grey tea.  Teachers are not skilled in peer combat and are thus incapable of masking the reluctant but inevitable homicidal ideation that is natural among primates in competition for scarce resources.  As each person stood to fake warmly intelligent quips about their fascination with stateless protocols in web design or a breakthrough in the teaching of English As An Alternative Language, over sixty others smiled brightly while their eyes beamed murderous hope that  the speaker would collapse and die on the spot, freeing a job.  It was then that I realized what was going on.  We were all contestants in a hunger game!

But I wasn’t going to play Katniss because the survival of no fragile little sister, depressive mother or entire starving village awaited my triumph.  Disengaged, I could not be killed. I was going to be the Participant Observer/Stealth Investigative Journalist.  It’s a fun mindset and I was ready for the first Game.

It was The Teaching Demo.  Imagine an empty corporate classroom at dusk.  It’s chilly and the politically correct compact fluorescent lights have just been turned on and are still dim, casting the room in insecure shadows.  At a round table in the back, the shadows hover around three women in those little primary-color business suits with fitted jackets that button all the way up and have a wool ruffle at the neck.  These are the judges of the first game, representatives of the corporation, holding checklists on clipboards.  As they tell the aggregate four of us to begin, I am aware that something’s wrong.

In The Hunger Games, the corporate functionaries are decadent, dressed in bizarre haute couture.  They are a Grand Guignol cast swilling moss green, arugula-flavored vodka between agonizing murders displayed on big screens.  But our judges are not refugees from antique European drama; not one wears theatrical mascara or harlequin gloves.  There is no flavored vodka.  There is only the chill, the weak light and a pervasive exhaustion animated by a soundless whine I recognize as fear.  The candidates are afraid, but so are the judges.  Their eyes are flat as dying ponds and I keep thinking, “This isn’t right; they’re supposed to be shallow and gleeful and evil, but they’re not.  They’re just regular people, half dead in a cold grey space full of shadows.”

I did my demo (Framing in Expository Writing – yawn) with faked gusto to a room of slivery unease.  The other candidates did theirs (Prepositional Phrases,  How To Fill Out a Job Application, and Avoiding Plagiarism).  The judges scratched things on their checklists and told us to go back to “home room” and wait for the next “assessment activity.”  We didn’t talk as we walked back, sworn enemies in a fight to the death.  We wondered which of us had just died.

To Be Continued…

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The Last Bo Bradley Mystery

The last Bo Bradley mystery, The Dollmaker’s Daughters, is finally available on Amazon for Kindle!  Noting that this little event has not been a walk in the park is like saying Pilgrim’s Progress is the tiniest bit prosaic. To wit: I thought I would never get this book up on Amazon.

I mean, it’s Bo’s last adventure (although two more have been sitting around in outline form for nearly a decade – should I write them?) and I really wanted the whole series to be available.  Thousands of people, one of them very close to me, live hard with psychiatric disorders that are grossly misunderstood, distorted and demonized in popular fiction and the media.  The “lunatic killer” is a stigmatizing staple; I wrote the Bo Bradley novels to diminish the stigma and I wanted them all out there.

And now they are, thanks to the following people who helped hack a path through the at-times impenetrable briar patch of digital publishing.

Thanks to Andrea Cavallaro, Rights Manager for literary agent Sandra Dijkstra.  Andrea spent nearly an entire year chasing down the necessary rights reversion for this book through the tangled maze of French-owned Hachette, which ages ago bought my publisher, Warner Books, and with it the rights to my last three books – The Dollmaker’s Daughters, Blue and The Last Blue Plate Special.  (My sainted editor, Sara Ann Freed, had with incredible foresight arranged for the legal rights reversion to the first four to me shortly before her death.  At the time I had no idea why she’d done that.  Now I know.  Thanks, Sara Ann!)  (And the last two books, featuring social psychologist Blue McCarron, can never be re-published by me.  Those rights are eternally in the hands of Hachette.)

Thanks to Michèle Magnin, who while I paced holes in the carpet, fed the converted manuscript of The Dollmaker’s Daughters through the necessary additional conversions – to Web, through Calibre, to Mobi, then Kindle – countless times over a period of weeks, only to join me in breathtaking realms of despair every time it didn’t work.

Thanks to writer Consuelo Baehr (http://setthiswriterfree.blogspot.com) for immediate responses to anguished middle-of-the-night emails about this, even offering to do it for me!  (Consuelo lives on the East Coast, so imagine what time those middle-of-the-night emails from California got there.)

Thanks to my cover artist (DeronLeeAssociates@gmail.com) for several versions culminating in the terrific one you see.

And final thanks to writer Mary Lou Locke (http://mlouisalocke.com) who, on the last day of the year as I sank one more time into the Slough of Publishing Despond, just took the whole bloody, messed-up converted file and fixed it!  The guy who did the original conversion from the printed book apparently overlooked several thousand teensy, toxic, imbedded codes that, had they not jammed Amazon’s system, would have turned the text into a sequence of dashes.  Lou found the bugs, killed them and briskly sent me an attachment that is now… an eBook!

So on the last day of 2011 the last Bo Bradley tale is launched, completing once again a series I hope will help.

Happy New Year!

 

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Ageism Amid Wheels

I hate it when I miss an opportunity for brilliant riposte, and today I missed the opportunity of a lifetime.  I didn’t see it coming, but then you never do.  The situation was mundane, a car dealership.  Boring.  I’ve been taking sequential cars to be serviced at this dealership for over twenty years because I buy cars at this dealership.  In a quarter-century no one there has been anything but polite and professional, creating a sort of comfortable stupor in which I anticipated no need to be alert, incisive or poised to kill.

The “service engine” light on my impenetrably techie dash had been illuminated by whatever computer system does that sort of thing.  So I dutifully made an appointment and took the car in, where I was escorted to a high desk and a young man I will, for obvious reasons, call Flynt.

There was nothing unusual about Flynt, at first.  All the service attendants are compelled to dress in business attire, creating the impression that the car dealership is actually a bank into which your money will be siphoned with elegance.  I told Flynt about the service light, expecting the usual incomprehensible murmurs about cracked hydraulic power assist hoses or leaky valve housings.  Instead, Flynt asked, “You drive in the city?”

We were standing in the middle of a city.  I live in the city, a fact documented on Flynt’s computer screen.  I was alone and hence could be assumed to have driven my car there.

“Um, I live here,” I said, clueless.

His look was a meld of distaste and outrage.  “You drive in traffic?”

It was morning, not my best time, but the accumulation of non-sequiturs was beginning to capture my attention.  Flynt’s questions were devoid of sense and yet oddly pointed, reminiscent of a frantic conversation I had in Budapest with a man whose grasp of English perfectly matched my grasp of Hungarian.  Neither of us could understand a single word spoken by the other, but there we were.  In such circumstances, one makes the effort.

“Yes, there’s traffic,” I said, glancing knowledgably through the plate glass windows at the street, where there was actually no traffic.  Flynt regarded me in the way that I imagine the Salem magistrates observed Bridget Bishop before sentencing her to be hanged as a witch.  Clearly, agreement as to the existence of traffic in a city was an egregious affront to Flynt.  Sensing a no-win impasse, I opted for a courteous exit.  Flynt could explore this topic further with somebody else.

“About what time will you be able to call with a report on the car?”  I said.  “I’ll be available until two.”

A smile that I can only describe as snide curled his upper lip.  “When was the last time you drove a stick shift before this one?” he asked.

And that’s when it finally hit me.  My car, which looks like every other little black 4-door sedan on the road, has a sports suspension and a stick shift.  Among its peers, it’s the racy version, introduced in an attempt to lure a younger demographic to a brand known mainly for its sensible roles in foreign movies.  Flynt, I realized, did not approve.  I was too old for my car and nonetheless had the audacity to shift gears in a city where there’s traffic.  The horror.

But insight does not bring an instant ability at snappy riposte.  In its first moments, insight is a kind of shock.  Despite the bifocals I’m never going to mature beyond 18, and while I’ve read about ageism along with all the other isms, I never thought about it as a problem for me. 

“Um, that would be the Fiat Spider; it was a stick,” I told Flynt, remembering hair-raising drives on the bluff roads above the Mississippi River three decades in the past.  The first thing that comes to my mind is always just the truth. “Please have the service manager call before two.”

My ride was there and I left.  Later the service manager called and exhaustively explained something or other about a glitch in fuel line pressure.  They had the part; the car would be ready tomorrow.  Fine.  But Flynt’s barely suppressed sneer followed me like the scent of skunk that hangs around for hours after the striped one has waddled away to sleep under somebody’s garage.  I don’t mind insults, bigotry and mindless bias as long as I know they’re insults, bigotry and mindless bias.  If I know, I can respond.  I like a good fight.  But being blindsided?  Unacceptable.

So tomorrow when I go to pick up the car …

Me:  Hey, Flynt, how about this city traffic!  Brutal, huh?

Flynt:  What?

Me:  Yeah, traffic, like you said. I rode my old man’s hog up to the detention center and couldn’t believe the traffic.

Flynt:  You rode a motorcycle?  Come on.  Who do you think you’re kidding?  Where’s your helmet?

Me:  Left it with the hog.  He gets released today, y’know?  Needs his wheels.  So I walked on over here to get the car.

Flynt:  But that’s five miles!

Me:  Beats driving in this traffic, right?   Hey, listen, I love chatting about traffic, but I have to pick up the truck in fifteen minutes.  Load of pea gravel and nitroglycerin.  Has to be at a mine in Lump Gulch by tomorrow afternoon.  Is my car ready?

Flynt:  Lump Gulch?

Me:  It’s in Montana.  My car?

Flynt:  Your husband’s in jail, but you’re getting a truck he has to drive a thousand miles to Montana the minute he gets out?

Me:  What husband?  And Wolf’s no trucker, trust me.  He’s the sous chef at Chez Bastille.  And the truck’s mine.  A classic Benz flatnose I got in Bratislava the day after the curtain went down.  Fifteen gears, two splitters and a butterfly thumb I salvaged from a wrecked Peterbilt in Nome.  Sweet.  I’ll swing by and show you my rig when I get back from Lump Gulch, let you take it for a spin.

Flynt:  No, that’s all right.  Here’s your paperwork and we appreciate your business.

Me:  Hey, an automotive guy like you!  No way you’d pass up a chance to mesh all those gears, and in city traffic, too.  I’ll be by day after tomorrow.

Flynt:  No, really, fifteen gears?  I don’t drive trucks.  You pay at the cashier’s counter.

Me:  Gee, you think I can walk all the way over there without assistance?  It’s at least five yards.

Flynt:  What in hell is a butterfly thumb?

Me:  You’ll never know, baby.  You’ll just never know.

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Darkness, Silence and a Dearth of Stories

From 3:40 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 8, to varying times in the wee hours of Sept. 9, four million people, including me, in Southern California and parts of Arizona and Mexico were scrounging around in kitchen drawers looking for candles.  A blackout, it was no big deal compared to other, bigger blackouts, tropical storms and wildfires in Texas.  Traffic on surface streets was barely moving since the lights weren’t functioning, but people were assiduously polite and careful.  Nothing on the car radio but two Mexican stations and the local generator-powered disaster station reassuring the 7^th largest city in the country that all disaster-preparedness measures were in place and functional.  Although if we were dependent on life-support systems anywhere but in a hospital, we should call a number and somebody would come around with batteries or a generator.  Stuck in traffic, I worried about those people trapped in 90-degree-hot apartments in wheelchairs with car-battery-operated lung ventilators, and how the emergency personnel would ever get to them in time without driving on sidewalks.  I hoped they would drive on sidewalks.

And apparently they did, because nobody died.  In fact, nobody did anything.  All news reports the next day, after power was partially restored, indicated that in all of Southern California absolutely nothing happened.  Nor was there any evidence of concern that anything untoward would happen.  At midnight we went out to sit in a car and listen to the disaster station for updates.  We heard the mayor urging parents not to leave candles burning in children’s bedrooms even though the children might demand candles.  The mayor was tough, pointing out that being afraid of the dark is preferable to the dangers inherent in candles.

Somebody from the water department then took the mike and calmly mentioned that a couple of sewage-processing plants had crashed and were spilling raw sewage into the water supply in certain areas.  Boiling tap water for twenty minutes before drinking was mandatory.  Since almost all houses and apartment buildings in SoCal were and are built with electric kitchen appliances, and you can only have gas if you pay to customize your kitchen, I wondered how those with contaminated water were supposed to boil it.

San Diego has many, many high-rise hotels, apartment and office buildings.  Hundreds of them.  And in every single one, the elevators stopped dead at 3:40 on Thursday afternoon.  The lights went out, the air-conditioning off.  People were trapped on elevators everywhere, deftly calling 911 on cell phones and then waiting in airless darkness for rescue teams to fight their way through log-jammed traffic.  And yet there are no stories.

All businesses immediately closed, colleges shut down, transportation ground to a halt.  Cars ran out of gas and were abandoned on streets and freeways.  In a city where nobody ever walks, the sidewalks were crowded.  But by eight o’clock, when the last of the sun was gone, the place was a ghost town.  Nobody on the streets but an occasional car, bright lights trying to penetrate a darkness solid as granite.  San Diego sits on a terrain of hills and canyons, and a few solar yard lights could be seen twinkling on nearby hills.  But they looked exactly like stars, with that sense of impossible distance and thus, irrelevance.

I knew the darkness was throbbing with stories.  How could it be otherwise?  Throw ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances.  That’s the formula, right?  So I was antsy all night, eager to hear about something that had happened.  When morning came and with it enough power for radio and tv, and I was officially told that nothing had happened, it was like being slammed into a wall.  By a lie.

None of us is unfamiliar with the tsunami of prevarication and informational pablum that oozes through our culture.  Public figures and institutions lie incessantly about everything, and enormous numbers of people find it more convenient to accept the lies than to question them.  What, after all, is the point, as long as we have some idea about what’s really going on?

Last week, flying from Houston to Baton Rouge on a little Continental commuter jet, I was told, along with the 35 or 40 other passengers, that we would not be able to land in Baton Rouge.  A previous flight had experienced “mechanical problems” and was stalled on the airport’s only usable runway.  We would have to land in Jackson, Mississippi. Halfway to Jackson, the plane made a graceful turn and we were told that we’d be landing in Lafayette, LA, instead.  Okay, whatever, these things happen.

Except that once on the ground in Lafayette, we all got on cell phones and learned that the stalled flight’s “mechanical problem” had involved jammed gear and a crash landing!  With no right-side landing gear, the plane had skidded across the runway on the front and left wheels, the (presumably empty) fuselage and the right wing, now in shreds.  No one was hurt; the pilot must have known what he or she was doing.  But I was imagining what that must have been like, the flight crew repeating those “fasten your set belt low and tight, then lean over and cover your head with your arms” crash instructions, and knowing the plane was actually going to crash.  And then that first bump, the spoilers kicking in to hold the plane on the ground as the braking began, followed by the frightening tip to the right, the scream of metal scraping tarmac, a firestorm of sparks and flying rivets.  That’s a story.  Just imagining it is a story.  And diminishing it to a vague and boring “mechanical problem” obliterates the story!

There is an assumption that we are pampered, hysterical children who must be protected from anything that is not Disneyland.  In lieu of that assumption, we are venal, litigious whiners who will sue our own furniture for stubbing our toes if we can get a free tv tray out of the deal.  We must at all times be reassured that nothing has happened, is happening or ever will happen.  That way we will neither engage in earsplitting wails nor file lawsuits.  But the unforeseen secondary effect of this near-empty information flow is the creation of a vacuum where once a swarm of stories flourished.  I don’t sit around imagining plane crashes, but if the plane before mine on a runway does crash, then by virtue of my proximity to it, I have an intellectual, emotional and spiritual right to an awareness that it has happened.  What I do with that awareness is up to me, as long as I don’t infringe on the awarenesses of others.

But that’s not the way it’s done, and so I’ll never hear any of the stories born in my darkened, silent city.  Did a bad boy in a bad neighborhood loot a pitch-dark dollar store and come away with a flimsy plastic colander and enough green apple-scented dish soap to last a decade? How about the nun on a sweltering elevator who, rather than faint, pulled off her medieval head covering and never put it back on?  Or the two old guys who’d lived in the same apartment building for thirty years without ever seeing each other, realizing as they stood outside in the dark for some air because the windows wouldn’t open, that they’ve both always dreamed of moving to Montana and opening a diner?  And that they’re going to!  And ah, the boy and girl who’ve spent time together for weeks, texting other people on their cell phones, but now their cell phones are dead and they have no choice but to talk to each other.  What did they see, what did they learn?

Those of us old enough to remember phones without dials have a sufficient backlog of stories to survive indefinitely, and can cannibalize them at will to create new ones.  But the current practice of obliterating stories in the interest of suffocating reaction to them cannot but produce a peculiar, and monstrously boring, population.  If anybody wants to start a campaign demanding our right to stories, let me know.  I’ll join!

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