Memory and Mirrors

Catching Breath

2012-01-01T18:25:00.000-08:00

In the last month of the last year, ill health forced me to take a long absence from my writing projects—except for journal writing, the only kind that didn't require too much in the way of editing or paying attention.

For three entire weeks in December, I was breathless; not the emotional-intellectual kind like in Godard's namesake film, but the literal, asthmatic kind.

One of my favorite memoirists, Louise DeSalvo, wrote a book called "Breathless", a wonderful diary-cum-intellectual analysis of what it means to have asthma (and what it meant to other writers who suffered from the disease, such as Proust, Bishop, Barnes).
I cannot add much to her thorough insights, but I will state the obvious anyway: breathing is a gift we take too much for granted. Like the many everyday, common place things we fail to see, it is so banal yet so profound.

We only pay attention to breath if we are seriously into yoga, or meditation, and maybe sports (though I would argue that too many athletes perhaps misuse and abuse their lung capacity). But most of us are not serious students, observers, practitioners of breath. We just breathe as we go about our life: carelessly, unthinkingly, often in either too shallow or too labored a way, but we don't really pay attention to breath. As part of our Western culture collective delusion about the reality of death, we just think it's always going to be there.

And then one day you find yourself out of breath. The reality of it is overwhelming. No matter what fine tricks you try, the tricks you learned from your scant and scattered forays into the practice of yoga or meditation, you simply cannot push more air into your lungs—or out of them for that matter. The airways are constricted, the lungs just refuse to open up. The phrase "take a deep breath" is now only a metaphor, not something that can be taken literally anymore.

The lack of sufficient oxygen in your body translates into a lack of energy. You are utterly fatigued by the simplest everyday chores: getting in and out of bed, pulling on your clothes, fetching a glass of water; doing laundry, emptying the dishwasher, cleaning the cats' litter box become grand enterprises totally out of your reach. Taking a shower is an almost impossible goal, and you go days without washing yourself. You can barely eat or drink water. You can do nothing without panting, without having to double over a counter trying to catch your breath back. You, usually so independent, need your husband's hand to get the morning cereal or a bowl out of the cupboard, and that makes you feel tired, irritable, and ever so helpless—helpless like a very young child that cannot do anything by itself.
Any action that before this condition would have been performed without a second thought, any insignificant movement now requires slow motion, concentration, unbearable effort. And more doubling over a counter to catch breath, for entire minutes that seem to last forever.
Precious minutes, hours, days of your life are wasted in the constant effort to recover your breath—a shallow, labored breath that will allow you to survive. Your nights are spent hovering between shorts bouts of restless sleep and longer bouts of insomnia, while you toss turn in the bed trying to figure out which position can allow to maximize that tiny amount of air you can summon in and out of your body.
The rasp, sibilant noise of wheezing has become the soundtrack to your days.

Breath is energy: you now understand—no longer just philosophically or intellectually, but factually and literally—why in Eastern cultures the word for energy would also be equated with breath: Chinese Qi, Japanese Ki, Sanskrit Prana.

Three entire weeks of this ordeal, while I try all the natural remedies that have so far worked so well, in my nearly twenty years of having been diagnosed. And on day five of suffering I try the inhaler that has previously always helped to restore my breath during violent but infrequent asthma attacks. And finally I have to surrender, for the first time ever, to the poison of corticosteroids.

And the day before Christmas, I am able to breathe again. I've hated Christmas all my life, but this is probably my best Christmas ever: I am able to go out of the house, take a long walk, catch the bus, shop for food and a present for my husband—all without wheezing and panting and having to stop every few minutes in the street.
Back home, I am also able to vacuum, do laundry, cuddle the cats, and to cook again. I make a traditional Christmas Eve dinner of seafood: penne with shrimp marinated in wine and saffron and then cooked with cherry tomatoes, Portuguese-style salt cod with potatoes and black olives.

And now that I've been able to breathe for days and days without giving it so much as a fleeting thought, I'm in danger of taking this for granted once again. Of forgetting to be grateful for the gift of breath, of energy, of vital force, of creative energy.
There was a lesson in all this suffering, and I must not relinquish it, I must keep it always present within me.

Yes, my new year's resolution is a very simple one: do not forget to breathe.

Have We Lost the Capacity to Observe?

2011-10-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

This (now past) summer I was going to go to a Vipassana retreat.
I was all booked up for August, but then my darling cat Billie got cancer and I didn't know how much time she had left, but I knew for sure I wasn't going away even for a day while she was still around.
It was probably for the best as I'm not sure I would have been able to go through the experience of the retreat without freaking out: for a week, there would have been no privacy (you'd share a room and bathroom with another woman), no conversation (absolute silence except when asking a question of your teacher), hours and hours of meditation a day, and total contemplation even when not meditating: books and writing (and, needless to say, any other more technological medium) were forbidden.
I think this latter clause would have been the one to really freak me out: I can tolerate sharing a room for a week though it would not make me happy; I could tolerate the loneliness of silence because a lot of the time I spend many of my days like that; but no reading and no writing? I am not sure.

And then I think of all the people I see in the streets, at the supermarket, on the bus; people who shop and talk on the phone and text at the same time, people who sit on the bus thumbing their iPhone while listening to their iPod while maybe reading on their iPad or Kindle, people who nearly get killed crossing the street or driving because they are on text or cellphone, people who can barely pay attention while having a conversation with someone because they are also "talking" to (many a) someone else via Facebook...

What would all these people do at a Vipassana retreat? Die, go berserk, or maybe, finally, let go and allow the silence and the contemplation to penetrate into the innermost folds of their being?

I have often been a critic of these contemporary mores of ours, the excessive reliance on technology or "social media": the turning what should be a face-to-face into a Facebook conversation; the replacing of a letter with a text message, of a phone call with an email—and the misplaced idea that these media all equal each other, are all one and the same.
Not true.

But that is not what I want to write about, not again. I want to reflect on the very fact that reflection, observation, and contemplation, may be lost or in-danger-of-extinction art forms, ways of being.

This is not news or an original though by any means—it just came to me more urgently and deeply a few days ago as I was shortcut-walking through the campus of Reed College here in Portland, to get somewhere for a job training.
I walked across a bridge that spanned a beautiful pond, the trees all around turning into their Autumn color palette, the reflections in the pond water in many shades of green, gray-blue, azure.
As the photographer that I once was, I mused on how difficult it would be for me to capture those hues, those reflections, and especially the peaceful, slightly eerie feel and look of the pond on film; I remembered the technical steps I may have to take in order to approximate on film, and then on photographic paper, what my eyes were seeing so quickly and easily.
And then I thought, but today a photographer would not even need to actually see this, they would just make it up on the computer, in Photoshop. Or they would digitally combine several images into one, whereas I once had to spend hours in the darkroom to make a double exposure under the enlarger.
And I thought how much has been lost because of this.
It is not just that I bemoan (I do!) the replacing of film with video, of analog with digital. (And, on this subject, take a look at the British artist Tacita Dean's elegy for 16mm film. She has vowed never to use digital in her art, but what will she make films with in the future?)

My musings on Reed College's footbridge were more about a deeper sense of loss: the loss of our capacity, as a Western culture at large, and as humans in general perhaps, to observe, to contemplate, without distraction, without hurry, and with our utmost attention and focus.
Everywhere I look, everybody (including me, you could say, even now that I'm writing this, because I'm also half-listening to the Classical radio station) is "multi-tasking"; no one is deeply, intently, concentrating on one thing, and one thing alone.

Why?

Are we afraid of what we would discover about ourselves if we were to train our gaze and mind on one thing and one thing alone for a prolonged period of time, if we were to let go of all the distractions around us? Or are we afraid of what we would discover in the thing observed?
Are we afraid to find only emptiness at the bottom of it, or are we afraid to find too much, too many murky depths there instead?

Why can we never just sit and sit still and do nothing?

Why the hurry, why the constant chattering, the constant noise, the constant multiple engagements of our mind?
Do we need to demonstrate to ourselves that we can, that we are better than animals who apparently can only focus on one task at a time? Has it really come to this?

I think about those photography students today who may never have to develop a roll of film, may never have to mix chemicals, may never have to spend many patient hours cooped up in a darkroom like some art vampires, to then emerge with the gift of a beautiful print...
Most of all, they'll never even have to hunt for that Cartier-Bressonian "decisive moment", or that Ansel Adams-like obsession with the right light, the right composition in the viewfinder. They'll never stand in front of that pond for minutes, contemplating the eerie reflections, pondering the vermillion, ochre and russet in the tree leaves, and then take out their camera and aim for a picture.
All this would require too much of their attention, too much of their introspection, perhaps.
It would require them to switch off their cellphones, to disregard the urgent beep of a text or Facebook message, and surrender to the two worlds at hand: the one inside them, the one immediately in front of their eyes.

I'm happy that writers still have to go deep inside themselves to find the world they aim to convey; they still need those capacities of observation and introspection and they still need the solitude (at least inner—though I can never understand those who can write in a coffee shop, I need my own house and silence all around me, preferably at night) to be able to write.

But I worry that all of us as humans are losing the capacity to observe and contemplate; and that, as artists in any medium, we are also at risk of losing our imagination.
Imagination is born partly of observation and contemplation, and also of limitations. As a photographer, I knew that not all images were possible to me as they are in painting, so I endeavored to recreate those that came into my mind within the confines of my chosen medium. In that process, new images and ideas were born.
Limitations are as nourishing to the imaginative mind as possibilities are, and I do not believe that the endless possibilities offered by Photoshop result in better, more imaginative, artistic creations.

I stood on that bridge for minutes, contemplating the eerie pond, the lovely hues in the trees and the water, while streams of students rushed to classes behind me, not one of them stopping even for one moment, not one of them even shooting a glance at the pond, because they (thought they had) seen it a million times before. But each time it was a different pond, with a different light. But what did it matter to them? They didn't need to observe those changes in light, they could just sit in front of a Mac in the art lab and create their own shade of light in a digital image. Yes, that is creative too, I am absolutely not discounting that.

But can we see how much we lose when we do not watch?

Publication

2011-10-05T00:15:00.000-07:00

A brief post to announce my first (for a while) publication, an excerpt from my memoir in progress in the October issue of Hippocampus Magazine.

Gentle readers, I hope you will read it and share it and leave me a comment if you please...

A Bee, Today...

2011-09-09T19:10:00.000-07:00

My blog lately came to a halt, first because of the aftermath of my beloved cat Billie's death (at the end of July); and then because of the weather. It's been so hot here (and long overdue!) that I've been wanting to do nothing other than sitting in my garden, in the shade, and admire the progressive blooming of my vegetables. Red and orange tomatoes, green and purple basil, yellow round cucumbers, white eggplants, deep violet chili peppers, and a multitude of fuchsias in all shades of pink and mauve are the colors in my otherwise very, very green garden.
Today, as I sat under the carport that has been set aside as our seating and BBQ area, I saw a bee alight on the pink and lilac flowers of a blouse that was hanging on my washing line.

So, a bee's memory can be fooled by bright colors that mimic real flowers; and our memory can also trick us with a sudden spark of color, a sudden burst of sound, a sudden issue of scent that bring us back to another place, another time.

In these days of summer heat, when scents are particularly salient in the air, and I've been living off the bounty of tomatoes and basil off my garden (all manners of pasta sauces hot and cold, cooked and raw; gazpacho; pesto galore) I've experienced food as memory in deep and powerful ways.

Gentle readers, you all know, of course, the oft-quoted proustian passage about the madeleine, which recounts the tricks that memory can play on our mind: one morsel of a taste long lost, and we are suddenly precipitated back into the past, a past we'd believed gone forever.

Indeed, since leaving Italy in 1984 I have been experiencing the almost obsessive recall of three distinct smells, that for me have always represented the quintessence of Naples (yes, I know, the cynics out there will want to add the smell of burning garbage to my proustian list, but I must assure you that what you read in the news is never the complete story).

Firstly, there is the smell of basil: the particular kind that here is in fact called Napoletano, and has tough, large, crinkly leaves of an emerald shade. This variety is not the most suitable for pesto (though it will do), being rather fibrous and a touch bitter if eaten raw.
But it is heavenly if a few shreds (ie. juliennes for all you culinary purists) are tossed into a caprese salad (if possible, made with the best mozzarella di bufala, and the ripest summer tomatoes); and it is wonderful to add to a tomato sauce because its big leaves do not disintegrate and retain some flavor even with the long cooking.
In Italy, you could buy this basil in large bunches at the greengrocer's, but if all you needed it for was your sauce or salad, they'd give it to you for free, together with some parsley and a celery stalk; these are called gli odori, the scents, and most greengrocers will just slip them into your bag of fruit and vegetables without you needing to ask.

And then, there is my second proustian smell: coffee.

Oh, sure, there's plenty of coffee alright in the Northwest (too much, I think, used as an addictive pick-me-up against the depression derived from a constantly grey sky—but that's another story); but that is most definitely not the coffee of my heritage.
In Italy, there are no "varieties" of coffee, no fancily named concoctions of syrups and foam and milk and chocolate, in different shapes of cups; there is only espresso, and espresso doesn't come in "one shot or two?" (a question that here always makes me chuckle internally), you order it simply as un caffé, a coffee, because it's the only coffee there is (yes, there is also cappuccino, but no one in Italy would drink it in the middle of the afternoon as tourists do, only in the morning for breakfast with a cornetto—a particular type of Italian croissant—or a brioche to go with it).

The smell of coffee, or espresso, has accompanied me all my life in Italy: if Naples is the Italian capital of pizza, it is also the capital of espresso. You can use Naples as a departure point on the scale of espresso strength and move upward along the boot, with the strength of coffee decreasing as you go. Espresso in Milan resembles more the kind of coffee you get in Paris (also simply called coffee, not espresso), with the unlikely yet nice twist of a lemon rind draped along the rim of the cup like the scarves that Parisian women do so well.

But, in Naples, coffee is dark, black with a brownish tinge, strong, very strong: as we say in Italy, ristretto (literally, tightened, or short, to indicate a small amount of coffee). It is served very hot, in a very hot cup (at the bar—which in Italy is not a drinking hole but a place where you drink your coffee or other drinks standing up at the counter—they keep the coffee cups immersed in boiling hot water).

And the smell, the smell is everywhere, the sharp and slightly acidic and nose-tingling smell of coffee wafting out of every window in every apartment block in the city, at most hours of the day (and, sometimes, night).

And I miss that smell, and when I make myself a coffee at home, it brings my city back to me—my crazy city with its over-the-top behavior, its over-ripe smells, its all-around sensory overload...

And then, there is the smell of jasmine; a jasmine that may not rival its Indian, or Persian varieties, but it is certainly much more fragrant than anything I've ever smelled in non-Mediterranean countries. In the summer nights, when the intense heat of the day slowly dissipates but lingers on just enough that you can sit bare-armed on a terrace under a jasmine/entwined pergola and converse with your friends into the wee hours while sipping some cold white wine, the smell of jasmine emanating from above your head can be deeply intoxicating.

Maybe I'm bitter because my own memoir might never get published, and it will certainly never sell for a six-figure sum, but I just don't get the appeal of books like "Eat Pray Love". She didn't have to go to three different countries for these activities, she could have found them all in Italy. And the foods to accompany each one of them.

Yes, basil for eating, coffee for praying, and the jasmine most definitely for loving.

Can You Write It While You Live It?

2011-07-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

Can you write death while you're living it, however vicariously?

The answer is no, not so much; because if you try to write it, it will distract you from living it. And if you write it while you're living it, afterwards you'll have perhaps more exact details put down on paper, but less of the mysterious and twisted workings of memory.

For over a month I've been living with the imminent death of a cat so dear to me that should I ever hear anybody utter any of those off-handed remarks about this being "just" an animal I'd be ready to pounce and kill. But I know that there will be many who think it, as there will be those who shake their heads and comment "Well, this is just because she doesn't have any real children".
People who think that way for me are superficial, crude, are rendering banal the ineffable thing that is grief. Because, it doesn't matter who—or indeed what—is dying; grief is not commensurate with the nature of the person, creature or thing lost, mourned for, but rather with the weight of our attachment to, and bond with, that person, creature, thing.
Grief can only be measured by the weight of its hold on us; the depths it can reach sinking into our skin and bones; the size of the festering wound it leaves behind.

My beloved cat Billie, who I watched come to life, come out of her mother's belly on an early morning of November 4th 1991, in London, England, will die tomorrow of a fatal injection, after for nearly two months we tried all we could to abate the horrible cancer that suddenly attacked her jawbone. She will die just a few months short of her twentieth birthday.

This is all I can bring myself to write for now, but I intend to write about her afterwards, of her eventful life—she has been quite the jet-setter, moving with me from England to America to Canada and then to America again—because, if we can write memoirs of people, who says we shouldn't write memoirs of animals too?

Meditating on Meditation and Meditating on Writing

2011-06-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

As you can see, gentle readers, my blog has been desolate and neglected for a while, and so has been my writing life in general. There are reasons for this, though they may not be good ones: firstly it is hard to keep up the motivation when you experience only rejections for a long time. Secondly, my personal life has been a twist in the wind, what with the house renovation still looming large and causing marital strife, stress, ill health, and financial loss. It is a burden I have had to bear whether I liked it or not—the product of bad decisions, or perhaps it was just a karmic baggage I brought into this life with me.

This last explanation wouldn't have occurred to me until recently: to be sure, I was never the "new age" or spiritual type. As a lapsed Catholic (very devout until the age of 13) I was suspicious of all things religious and even spiritual; in my teens, I'd toyed with the hippie culture of the times (as hippie as you could get in Italy, of course), but I was always the rebel who refused to read Castaneda and take acid on a "vision quest just because everybody else was doing it. I was always the skeptic, the questioner, the non-joiner, and, for the longest time, cynical about all manners of spiritual practices and communities.

And yet, fate had other plans for me: at the end of March, finding myself emotionally and physically at the end of my tether, I decided to take a trip to the Expanding Light, a spiritual retreat in Northern California. Their website told me this was the Ananda Village, home of the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda (a yogi from India who came to America in the 1920s), and his disciple Swami Kriyananda, an American man who founded the Ananda Village where I took my retreat. Yes, I'd read all that, but I was ignorant of what any of it meant, and probably all the better for it, as I was able to approach the situation with an open mind.

When I booked into the retreat, I had no idea what I was getting into; I was just seeking a quite place where I could rest, recharge, read, eat healthy foods, and maybe do some yoga. Meditation wasn't even on the cards for me at that point: I'd always believed myself incapable of sitting still for any amount of time without doing anything. Indeed, judging from the million people restlessly thumbing through their iPhones at any given moment on the bus, in the streets, at the restaurant, even at concerts or the movies, this must be the disease of our epoch.

I was at the retreat for nine days, with no television and no cellphone reception up there, at least not for my cellphone, though the folks at Ananda have decided to bow down to the pressure of modernity and the place did have wireless internet everwhere.
For nine days, I ate healthy vegetarian meals, I slept, waking up to the sound of birds and nothing else, and participated in the daily yoga and meditation practice. After just a couple of days, I began to feel a calm and peace inside I'd never experienced before in my life.

I have always considered myself a lazy person, yet I am also deeply neurotic (a very common combination in my hometown of Naples); meditation did something to me that nothing else—no drugs or lovemaking or other nearly-ecstatic experience—had ever done: it helped me quieten (sometimes even completely silence!) that little voice inside that has kept chatting for as long as I've been a sentient being.

Most neuroscientists today have finally come to the conclusion (millennia after non-Western cultures, and even Christian religious practices, had already discovered this) that meditation can be a great help for a host of diseases, mental and physical, and is generally a good thing to do even if you're in perfect health (but who is these days?). There are many articles and books out there that talk about this—one I've found particularly good is Buddha's Brain.

One sentence the Ananda people were very fond of repeating was a quote from Yogananda: "Environment is stronger than will power", and after returning from the retreat, I could see why as I struggled to maintain that sense of inner peace and bliss. There was a slow waning of that peace starting from the moment I came "down the mountain", literally in this case as the retreat was in the Sierra Nevada, and had to regain my place in normal, everyday life again.
As I felt that bliss slip away little by little every day, I had to face a deep crisis of loss—a similar sensation to having experienced a great passionate love and then seeing it wane through the unavoidability of everydayness. You know it's out there, you know it does exist, you know you felt it, but now you don't feel it anymore.
Thus with the intensity of spiritual practice: I don't know how other people who don't live in a spiritual community approach it, but for me it's been a struggle to find the time and place and mental space and willingness to meditate every day.
And yet, I've tried, and even the trying alone has made me feel better at times.

And I have come to see that meditation is very much like writing: you know it's inside you, but it often doesn't want to come out, yet you still have to sit and meditate everyday, whether it will "work" or not, just as you must sit and write every day, and the discipline of doing it will make you write better and more, eventually.

Writing is also like meditation in that it requires a pulling away from the trappings of modern life: the blogging, emailing, the online chatting, facebooking and twittering that seem to waste so much of our writing energy and capacity these days. Despite constant advice that I should, I have chosen not to participate in the "social" networks, but I do use email, far too much because all my friends are far away; and I also blog, though of late I have felt that I needed to take a break from this, to follow the inner lead of silence and contemplation without action that the meditation gave me.

We live in a society that doesn't support "non action", the practices of "just sitting", meditating, contemplating—anything that doesn't appear to have a sense of purpose and a visible, practical outcome; anything that doesn't yield a "product".

This is also true about writing, and perhaps our greatest crisis as writers occurs when we feel reluctant to give ourselves permission to say "I am a writer" because we haven't been published or received public recognition yet. And yet, we may have been writing away for years, silently and quietly and lonely, just like one does with meditation...

I'm still a novice at meditation, and a reluctant self-disciplinarian at both meditation and writing, but I am learning, exploring new meditation techniques and schools as I have explored poetry and fiction before getting into writing non-fiction. This is as much an anthropological curiosity with me as a way of perfecting a tool that I can use for the rest of my life.

Meditation and writing seem to go hand in hand, and I'm sure the meditation I am practicing now could eventually make the writing better and different, by taking me it into writerly directions I may not have been open to before.

Most of all, meditation takes me inside myself in a non-judgmental, non-active way, allowing all thoughts to flow and pass me by, without the need to arrest them.
There is a mind cleansing aspect to this that cannot but be beneficial to creativity.

And so, I will continue to meditate (or try to), despite the house renovation still going on, the fights with the husband, the lack of a job and publication, and the neighbors' barking dogs...

A Suitable Job for a Writer (or any other kind of artist)

2011-03-11T17:50:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I took a job in a supermarket deli. Out of sheer desperation, because in a year of living in this town where employment was never easy at the best of times, I could find nothing.
Or rather, yes, I did find a job: once a week I teach creative writing at the PHAME Academy, a wonderful organization that runs creative classes for adults with learning and developmental disabilities. As gratifying as this job is, however, it only pays for a few bus tickets a week.

So, the supermarket job: I lasted all of three weeks, before quitting. During that time, my back ached like hell from standing on a concrete floor (something apparently the union rules don't consider a health hazard); I kept getting strong headaches from the fluorescent lights and the cleaning chemicals; and I was shocked, and aggravated, by the petty attitudes of some of my co-workers (yes, as the adage goes, power corrupts; but nothing is more contemptible than the sight of powerless people yielding a power they don't really have).
Furthermore, it was utterly disparaging for me, a food lover, to sell people the kind of junk food I would not even give to my worst enemy's dog.

So, I quit. And this got me thinking: it seem that all the artists I've ever known are divided into two camps: those who would rather not "compromise" their art, and take up soul-deadening jobs that have nothing to do with anything remotely creative, just for the money, while working on their art in their spare time. And those who would rather take a job that is as close as possible to their artistic vocation: like teaching, if there's still anybody lucky enough to get that kind of gig; or practicing some kind of commercial art.
Both positions, in my mind, have their pros and cons; in the first instance, you may have more mental and creative space to do your own work if you are not absorbed in, or by, a job that doesn't require any expenditure of creative energy; but, on the other hand, you may end up so dried up at the end of your work day, or week, that the only thing you feel like doing with your time off is curl up on the couch and watch some mindless TV.
If, however, you have a somewhat creative yet commercial job, you will be immersed in your chosen craft and given talent every day of your life; yet you may end up completely burnt out by the demands of your job, and maybe jaded by the fact of having to use your talents in a commercial way, turning out artwork that you yourself may judge harshly.

What kind of artist are you? I am curious to know...

Me, after being somewhat a purist in my young age, I've decided that anything is better than a crappy, and badly paid at that, job.
I'll gladly "sell my soul" (though I doubt there's anyone out there who's buying) as long as I can make money doing something that requires me to utilize my brain rather than my "talent" for slicing ham and cheese, or scooping cooked food into a container...

"Getting Over It" and Writing Memoir

2011-01-30T22:09:00.000-08:00

Both my parents' deaths were very much an "unfinished business", without any real closure, and I am writing a memoir about my mother; this has left me, for the last two years of working on this book, to meditate almost daily on the nature of "getting over it"—that common place and common sense phrase that resonates as absurd, false and grotesque in my mind.

Being from a different language, I always find it interesting how unspecific English can be when dealing with feelings and actions—and this from a language that has so many different words to describe vaguely similar objects and their possible uses.

A generic verb like "to get" is used to cover a multitude of sins, or possibilities; in Italian, as in French, or Spanish, or any other language I know a little about, there are very precise verbs, or elaborate turns of phrases, that describe the same actions or feelings covered by the English "to get" + various prepositions, adjectives or nouns.

To get off, out, by, down, up, at, away, hot, cold, thirsty, hungry, even, into, on, it, over, real, somewhere, through, ahead, after, a life, a move on, away with, together, wind of, with it... The list is almost infinite.

When my mother died, I was living in Vancouver, BC, and had just started the first year of a PhD that I subsequently had to abandon for various reasons. One of these (not a reason any academic department would ever take into consideration) was the fact that I had not been allowed any real space and time to grieve.

After spending a couple of traumatic weeks in Italy sorting through (now here's another "get-like" verb) legal documents and my mother's messy and filthy apartment and trying to sort out my own messy and not altogether pure feelings, I got (ha ha) back to university, where I was supposed to have had my allocated time to "deal with it" and was expected to get back to my work. Which I did, but not with the same degree of success, or enthusiasm, I had had in the first half of the year. And thereafter, the tormenting ghost of my mother, and the specter of my own guilt, have been a feature of my life.

In our contemporary Western cultures, death has so little room, we are not supposed to think about it, dwell on it, be absorbed in it. We are supposed to take a few days, a couple of weeks at the most, off work or school, and then "get right back to it" and "get on with it".
In novelist Howard Norman's beautiful book "The Northern Ligths", one character says:
"I never could stand that saying, Time Heals...It heals some thing, but makes the rest worse just because they've gone on longer."
When I read this sentence, it stopped me in my tracks. As simply worded as it was, it was also absolutely, utterly true. And also runs contrary to the received notion that we can just "get over" anything and everything in time; that pain will disappear; that all manners of longings and yearnings and losses will simply fall away like dead leaves from an autumnal tree.
It ain't necessarily so, as the song used to go. Not for all of us, at least. So what do you do with those resistant longings and pains? You can turn them into art, of course, if you are so inclined. You can write about them. An artist whose name escapes me now, once said something like this: what's the use of pain if you can't sublimate it into art?

In writing about my mother's death (she died alone and was found dead a long time after the fact), I was forced to delve into topics that are, to many contemporary people, distasteful at best, horrific at worst: the decomposition of the flesh; how to dispose of a dead body; funeral rites and the aftermath of whatever kind of disposal we choose—be it cremation or burial. One way I found to deal with these unimaginable horrors was to resort to my intellectual curiosity and find out as much as I could about the physiology of death and decomposition, and also to research various rituals of death in different cultures.
We all have our methods for making sense of pain, and the cerebral way is my way—lest I should go crazy otherwise; and because I don't believe in any religion or form of spirituality taking the pain away.
Some of the research I undertook for my memoir will make its way into the book, in different forms; some will not. But I always find it a useful underpinning to support an edifice that might otherwise crumble at any time under the weight of unbearable personal grief. Research puts everything into perspective—the perspective of realizing that we are not the center of everything (we are of our own small universes, but not of the universe); that a story needs to have some wider appeal and value to function.

But, going back to the "getting over" the grief: what I also find interesting, in the writing of memoir, is the commonplace idea that in order to write about something very painful, you have to have "processed" it first; yet it is never very clear what that processing would entail—because, not withstanding the "How To" psychobabble that is so fashionable in American discourse, no one really knows; and because a different kind of processing is required for each and every person.
I have my own personal take on this "processing": I do believe that a certain amount of emotional distance is required to write about something personal and painful. However, too much distance can render the experience generic, the writing bland, the voice obfuscated. There is a hard balance between writing as a kind of therapy (I'd always advise to go through a lot of therapy first, and then start writing), and a kind of writing that incorporates the visceral aspect of a pain that is still present and raw, that makes it palpable for the reader, even to the point of discomfort—and who says that we always have to make our readers comfortable? Only the more commercial blandness that passes for art today.
The artist of the past knew how to make waves, and how to turn those waves into tsunamis. I don't claim to have found that perfect balance yet, but it's something I'm grappling and working with, and that's the kind of writing I aim for. It's not for everybody, not for the faint of heart, it will never be a commercial success if it makes it into print, but it's the kind of stuff I myself like to read (call me a masochist), and I, too, am a reader— a part of the audience that one is supposed to think about when writing.

And, at the end of the day, if you are writing about it, you are not really "getting over" it: you are getting into it instead.

Television: A Black Hole or a Useful Tool?

2010-12-28T19:44:00.000-08:00

I must confess that (like most "modern" people, I guess) I have developed a keen interest (should I call it an addiction? I don't think it's quite that serious) in the watching of television.
I don't want to call it an addiction because I know that, as with any other "drugs" in my life (which in my old age have pitifully, though perhaps healthily, reduced to just red wine, and sleeping a little too much sometimes), I am capable of taking or leaving them, depending on circumstances. I have been known to go on a detox and quit wine, cheese and rich foods for months; I have in my past lived for years without a TV set; I have been capable of getting up at dawn if my job at the time required it.
Winter, though, is invariably one of those times when I am particularly depressed, for reasons both personal and weather-related (I probably suffer from the most-appropriately named S.A.D.), and therefore more prone to reach out for "the three great stimulants of the exhausted ones", as the Joni Mitchell song would have it.
In her case, she called them "artifice, brutality and innocence"—and though I'm not sure what she referred to (all poetry requiring a certain degree of hermetism), I know all of these terms could apply to the TV shows I watch. I am not fond of cops, yet I do watch Criminal Minds and even CSI NY; since reading Dracula as a teenager, I have had a literary fascinations with vampires yet I am spiteful and weary of all the spin-offs that feature these wondrous creatures today (haven't vampires been done to death yet—if you'll forgive me the cheesy pun?). This weariness, and even my intolerance for any plot featuring the lives of American college students and of blond cheerleaders in particular, didn't prevent me from getting totally hooked on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

Of CSI NY I admire the fabulous acting (let's not forget Gary Sinise's past as a founding member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater), but I dislike the extreme reliance on scientific proof and hi-tech instruments to solve crimes; I also abhor its all-too-facile implication that good and evil can be so easily separated.
Such an implication is instead dissected and constantly pulled at the (frayed) seams by both Buffy and Criminal Minds, which makes them a rewarding and worthwhile use of my mental time. Well, here you have one intellectual excuse for escapism—but at least I'm not pretending, like some theories of the media that used to be fashionable, that all mindless TV is instead an exercise in critical viewing, that viewers "negotiate" their own meanings instead of taking everything at face value, etc. The sad reality is, more and more people are hooked on mindless television shows and Internet sites; all the more important, then, to extol the virtues of those programs that manage to instill some shred of doubt (I doubt, therefore I think) into the viewers.
In Criminal Minds, for instance, almost not one episode goes past (at least in the old series; I have yet to catch up with this year's) without the discovery that some form of family abuse and/or social, religious and moral rigidness and intolerance are the root causes pushing the "unsub" (=unidentified subject) over the threshold of the basic life traumas we all inherited at birth into the murky territory of violent psychotic behavior.
Yes, the psychological analyses the members of the BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) come up with to explain the criminal of the week's behavior may be simplistic at times (but this is television after all, not a conference of the psychoanalytical society), yet the message is more than a touch subversive: that threshold between good and bad, normal and abnormal, Criminal Minds tell us, is a lot thinner and more easily crossed into than we care to believe...
The underlying implication, which flies in the face of "commonsense" American stories about good and evil and the rewards of a life spent doing good deeds as opposed to the "wages of sin", is that, given the right (=wrong) circumstances, we could all be the unsub...
Also, the lives of the members composing the FBI team investigating and solving the crime (though on occasion arriving too late to save the latest victim of the unsub, a fact which also flies in the face of American conventions of "happy ending" storytelling) are anything but neat and tidy, or rigorous and full of morality as Anglo-saxon puritanism childishly expects of its public figures—forgetting that they, too, are human beings: their lives are messy, full of heartaches, break-ups, drug addictions, controlled rage, unfulfilled desires, and dark family histories. In other words, the stuff of life...

Buffy, though, in my mind went more than a notch better: by positioning itself in the world of the impossible, or rather of the anything is possible, the script gave itself room to breathe, the freedom to expand, grow, change, be in turns utterly dark and painful or terribly churlish and funny (and, often, both in the same episode).
With Buffy, it took me a lot of viewing to get into the story, and this wasn't because I was required to suspend belief about a world filled with new monsters constantly surfacing and vampires prowling cemeteries at night the way raccoons prowl the less frequented areas of some American towns. All storytelling, whether visual or verbal, whether "factual" or fantastic, requires that we suspend belief (and, I would argue, the more "realistic" the story the more we should probably be suspicious of it).
No, the reason it took me so long to get into the series is because the characters are written in skillful, careful and complex strokes that bimboesque Cordelia, the impossibly goody-goody Riley—and even the Buffy character herself (and Sarah Michelle Gellar's work on her).

Just think about any other TV series featuring the same characters, week in week out (Raymond, Friends, even the much wittier Frasier): mostly, what changes is what happens to the characters, it is the external events, but their reactions remain similar and predictable, because they are predictable and unchanging. Yet this is not really the way we experience people in reality; in real life, we are in constant flux, and over time, while our most inherent make-up may not change much, we reveal aspects of ourselves we didn't even think we had, or others who knew us didn't think we possessed. So one could say that, although being about something completely outlandish and fantastical and implausible, Buffy was much more about real life, real human experience, than some "factual" documentaries could ever engage with (think of the complexities of a character like Spike, for instance—and James Marsters' masterful rendition of them).

But what I most like about Buffy is that it was not afraid to court controversy, by promoting the character of a highly-sexed, vulnerable-yet-amazingly-strong, not-too-intellectually-deep-yet-profoundly-philosophical, aspiring-to-goodness-yet-ridden-with-a-dark-side young woman; by daring to present us with homosexual as well as heterosexual love as both being perfectly acceptable and normal; by insinuating several messages about the real evils in our lives: capitalism and consumerism, regimented school learning, the military machine, even, god forbid (!) religion (in one episode, after hearing about the significance of a reliquary from Giles, Buffy utters: "Note to self: religion—freaky").
The ultimate message in Buffy (as exemplified in one of the most sublimely-written episode, Lie to Me) being that our facile vision of the world as neatly divided along the lines of good vs. evil is a convenient but totally untrue story we tell ourselves because we are, surprise surprise, afraid of, and in denial about, the darkness within...

I think there's a lesson in there for writers too, especially those of us who work with non-fiction, and particularly in the genre of memoir—a territory that is inherently hybrid and murky, unstable and unreliable, like quicksand in the bayou; yet always threatening to cave in to the absurd demands of those who clamor for "just the facts, ma'am"...

Life Gets in the Way...and the Ghost of Christmases Past and Present

2010-12-12T16:41:00.000-08:00

It's been so long since my last post, as the overwhelming burden of life just got in the way: putting together an MFA application, gathering transcripts, filling in forms, choosing writing samples, and having to condense all the mistakes and triumphs of my life and my future goals in a 500 word statement (who thought of that? It's more like journalism or business memos than creative writing); dealing with a perpetual house renovation that has been going on for over a year, that started to go wrong the minute after the house was bought and has left me marooned in a 40% finished house without a "room of my own" to write in, without even a shelf to house my books—a totally stressful situation; squabbling endlessly with the husband, for reasons stupid or serious but always hurtful; being stranded in a new city where, a year on, I have yet to find any footing, any true friends, any real sense of community; finding a job—after looking for work for a year—I'm totally overqualified and totally underpaid for—not great for my self-esteem. And finally, the icing on the cake: the onset of the winter blues that always weigh me down (on top of my everyday underlying depression)...

All the stuff of life one has to contend with, day in day out; many writers out there would tell me to get over it and get off my ass (or rather get it down on a chair) and "just write"; but sometimes that isn't the feasible or possible way. So after much agonizing and guilting myself (as if I needed any more guilt in my life) about not getting my book done, I've decided to give myself a break, a holiday, a respite.
I will continue to think about my book, to breathe it, dream it, write little notes to myself about it, to send out submissions, to revise the already written parts; but I'm not doing any serious writing for a while.
I've decided that, right now, I need the distance; and that I especially need a break at this particular time of the year when many are celebrating their being part of a family, a community, and I find myself instead totally alone and so far away from the few people in the world I hold dear.

I have always hated the holidays, and I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel that way; but I'd become the Grinch if I told people that, so I shut up and smile politely when people tell me how much they are going to enjoy their Christmas dinner, and complain to me about how little time they have for their Christmas shopping.
Inside, I feel like screaming. I have no great Christmas stories to tell anyone; all I can think of is the myriad Christmases that my mother ruined for me because she would always provoke a fight with my father on our way to dinner at his family's, whom she hated; I remember one particular Christmas when my mother was carrying on and must have insulted my uncle so badly that he threw a plate of tortellini in brodo at her, which missed and went on to smash itself on the wall behind our table, splattering chicken broth and filled pasta all over the black leather sofa underneath.

As if all these bad memories were not enough, my mother ruined Christmas once more, and forever, for me by dying during this holiday period—sometime between Christmas day, and the month of February when she was found dead. So celebrating Christmas or even pretending to find any joy in these winter months is just not an option for me.
I have always dreamed of a Christmas far away from Christmas, in a place where it is summer in winter, where, ideally, the population is not even Christian; every year, I dream of Christmas on the beach, basking in the sun, forgetting that it is Christmas, away from the glitter, tinsel, wrapping paper, decorations, religion.

So my probably very bad, unprofessional advice to all the writers who are feeling like me right now is: when you can't write because your life just gets in the way, not in the normal everyday manner that life always has of getting in the way of creativity, but in a huge, insurmountable way that gives you physical pains and heartache, just give yourself a break; take a holiday from your writing; dedicate yourself to healing the mind and the body for a while, and then get back to the work with a fresh eye.

That's what I have promised myself to do in the new year; in the meantime, I will keep updating this blog (hopefully at a faster rate than I have lately) and this will be my writing task for the holidays.

A Snippet from the Non Fiction NOW Conference: Truth, that Old Chestnut Again

2010-11-08T19:52:00.000-08:00

I just came back from the Iowa NonFiction NOW conference—a rather exhilarating experience—and found a post on the lovely blog "Sixth in Line" with a UTube video by Dinty Moore that rehashes that old contentious chestnut, truth or non-truth in non-fiction, in a hilarious manner. That chestnut was of course one of the dominant themes at the conference, so my immediate instinct was to post this reply on Elisabeth's blog. I will post conference notes and reflections on this blog in due course.

[at the conference] Dinty Moore was "debating" David Shields exactly on these points. In my mind, they were both right and wrong.

Writing may be a contract with the reader, but it's not a legal document where you swear you'll tell the truth, and nothing but.

Conversely, I cannot abide Shields' dislike of anything that has a personal narrative that's not disjointed and fragmentary.

I read many memoirs that are structured like linear narratives and still wonderful; I read others that are more lyrical, more experimental, more fragmented, and still wonderful.

The writer's contract is with his/her own conscience: it is the obligation to turn out a book that, as Kafka said (and Shields himself seems to like that quote) strives to be the "axe for the frozen sea within us"

Anything else is just idle intellectual discussion.

The Scorn About Memoir, Again

2010-10-28T17:26:00.000-07:00

What is it about memoir that prompts many intelligent and learned people (who should know better) to poo-poo it? Yes, it's true that memoir has become somewhat of a literary trend lately and often for the wrong reasons (the proliferation of not-really-indispensable remembrances by the rich and famous is my pet-peeve example); but as a genre, memoir has a legitimate place in the pantheon of literature and should not be treated with the scorn that it is subjected to by many writers and readers alike.
I saw just one more example of this when I attended a public interview with Leslie Marmon-Silko , the wonderful Native American author. She has recently published a new book, The Turquoise Ledge, whose subtitle is "a memoir". It is, as her interviewer Molly Gloss pointed out, a memoir in the style of Annie Dillard's meditative essays on nature and the environment: Marmon-Silko lives on the edge of the Sonora desert in Arizona and, when not writing, loves to take long walk; the book is a collection of the thoughts inspired by and the incidents witnessed during, these walks—interspersed with personal recollections.
Molly Gloss is an author herself, of historical novels set in the American West and fantasy books; during the interview, she displayed a considerable scorn against memoir, implying that perhaps the new Marmon-Silko book should not have been labeled such (too good, or too serious to be a memoir?)
At one point she said that when one thinks of memoir, usually this conjures images of famous people writing about their achievements, or people with "dysfunctional f". The latter was uttered with a considerable smirk on Gloss' face—the implication being that only self-indulgent, self-centered people write memoir (and especially so when it is about "dysfunctional families"): the rest, the enlightened and "serious" writers, concentrate on either the more conventional end of non-fiction (ie. the politically-worthy, such as exposé journalism, or socially relevant essays); or, better still, they just write fiction.
Now, I am the greatest lover of fiction around; and I must confess that I read a great deal more fiction than I do non-fiction; and yet, apart from the occasional short story and poem, the thought of writing anything other than non-fiction, and then again other than personal non-fiction stories, has never occurred to me.
Why? Because, as an old and old-fashioned feminist, I believe in that little dictum, "the personal is political"; and I believe that, by writing memoir, we can both satisfy our "reality hunger" (with apologies to David Shields —someone who certainly doesn't have a narrow idea of what non-fiction is) and communicate something that will be socially and culturally relevant and of interest to readers other than our family or friends. In fact, let's explode once and for all the myth that the only people who will be interested in reading our memoir are our next of kin or our closest friends: oftentimes, these are in fact the people who end up being our worst critics and least enthusiastic readers, because of the personal investment they too have in our life story—and the fact that their perception of the "facts", the "truth" may not exactly coincide with ours. Many memoir writers talk about this problem—see for instance Louise DeSalvo and Mark Doty .
As a rebuttal to all those who scorn memoir: all good writers, even when they are writing about themselves, are capable of separating their real life from their real life as it exists on the page, where it ceases to belong to them alone and becomes an artistic product, becomes public domain.
I had just one of those "dysfunctional families", but the reason I came to believe I ought to write about my mother's madness and terrible life was not therapy; I have never confused art with therapy: when I want therapy I go to the therapist, when I want to write, I go to my desk. It was instead because I realized that there was a story there, potentially interesting to other women (and men, too); a story about madness as it related to gender, as it related to a specific culture. And that I could tell that story in a voice that was both poetic and critical.
Yes, it is possible to write memoir that is utterly solipsistic and narcissistic, and indeed there are many books like that out there; but there are also many crappy works of fiction, so would this latter fact be enough to disqualify the entire genre of fiction? Should we look at books as entities within a labeled box, as part of a genre—or should we look at books as we ought to look at human beings: each one unique, each one the product of a particular culture, historical moment, the product of a creative mind inflamed with a timeless yearning: the desire to tell a story?

A Haunting of Gloves: The Things I Lost

2010-10-16T15:42:00.000-07:00

In writing the memoir of my mother, I've been thinking a lot about material things—things she gave me, things I gave her, things that were in her apartment in Naples and I lost when I got rid of them in a haste. At the time, I had such an urge to get the place cleaned up and could not deal with it myself: my mother had died there. She had been found dead. After quite a while. Not the kind of scenario anybody wants to deal with when it's time to "clean out the closets". Just being a couple of hours alone in the apartment was agony for me, so I took a perhaps too-swift decision and called for the local equivalent of "1-800-Got Junk"—a couple of guys with a rickety truck who came and took everything away.

Later, I realized not only that I'd given away things that were potentially precious from the monetary standpoint, but also things that I really should have kept as mementos.

One entire fragment (I prefer to call them that, rather than chapters) of my memoir deals with the "biography" of these lost things. Objects are such potent repositories of memory, of memories; and often the things we miss the most are not those that ought to be most valuable or important to us, either in financial or emotional terms.

Instead of bemoaning the loss of the Persian rug that I could have probably sold; or the wall clock that chimed Big Ben's tune (though my father had long stopped its mechanism, claiming he couldn't sleep; and after his death my mother had never restored the clock to its song); or the 1960s and 1970s furniture that I personally found horrid but in America sells as "vintage modern"—instead of missing any of these things, today, nearly five years after my mother's death, I still find myself obsessing about a pair of gloves.

A pair of gloves I'd bought for her in London, where I lived for 15 years prior to moving to North America. They were, as English fashion often is—a compensation for, as that Pink Floyd song had it, "hanging on in quiet desperation"?—a little eccentric, a little baroque (Vivienne Westwood's lesson): in a fake velvety material that was in fact synthetic yet still plush to the touch; of a color there are no exact words for, best described as a sort of burnt amber with a deep golden glow.

My mother, not usually given to eccentric outfits even in the throws of her most manic and absurd behaviors, fell in love with these gloves, and took to wearing them even around the house sometimes, to cover her mildly arthritic hands, their skin chapped by too many years of dishwashing.

She loved those gloves.

And I got rid of them.

Afraid that keeping anything too personal of hers would jinx me with some evil eye; my scarlet letter of guilt, the guilt of having abandoned her because there was nothing else I could do, nothing I could do for her, short of allowing myself to slowly die next to her.

Or, in a more rational version of this story, afraid of contamination because the gloves were in the room where she died and was found.

I kept them separate from all the stuff I had the Sri Lankan house cleaner who worked for one of my best friends stuff in big black trash bags; this was in the first few days of my stay in Naples, when I still believed some manner of sorting out of my mother's apartment was possible.

Later, having learned from my mother's nosy neighbors how she had died, the cleaner was spooked and disappeared, leaving all the trash bags sitting in the room. He would not come back to help any longer, didn't even ask for his wages, would not meet me; I ended up giving the money I owed him to my friend to give to him.

I was alone, help-less in the most literal sense, overwhelmed by the dirt in the apartment, the mess of useless things my mother had accumulated in the nearly 20 years since my father's death. She was not exactly a hoarder—rather, had always been a reluctant housewife; my father's stern military command had forced her into a housekeeping duty she did not embrace, a daily requirement that she cook, clean, be a dutiful wife. When he died, she saw no reason to maintain the place tidy, or even clean. She let it go, let herself go.

I stayed in Naples for a while, sleeping at a friend's house and going to the apartment every day, trying to sort things out, always leaving without having accomplished anything much other than feeling miserable, overpowered, wrecked, haunted.

All this time, the gloves sat on a green metal trunk covered with a mauve cloth bearing a design of nineteenth-century ladies on horseback, in the room where my mother had died. I meant to keep them; yet, on my last day of visiting the apartment, I did not take them with me, and did not leave them in what had been my teenager room, the contents of which were the only things I decided to salvage and have shipped over to North America.

Instead, I threw the gloves onto the pile of trash bags still filling the room, walking out on them, consigning them to the fate of all the other things in the apartment.

I recently came across a lovely post on writer/teacher Paul Lisicky's blog . You know that old, over-abused dictum —(that many theoretical essays on photography have sought to disprove)—"a photograph is worth a thousand words"? Well, the title alone of this post was worth a million photographs: "The Museum of My Mother" .

Lisicky's post was not dark; rather, it was a lyrical, nostalgic remembrance of his mother through the odd objects she left behind in the vacation house he inherited from her.

In his post, Lisicky says that the house is "ghosted with her presence"; my mind is ghosted with my mother's presence, and at the same time her absence. In my urgency to run away from her place of unhappy life and horrible death, I lost a great deal of objects, mementos; but their vivid images are forever burnt into the retina of my mind, haunting me all the same.

You can take your life out of the place of memories, but you can't take the place of memories out of your life.

On Being From Another Language

2010-10-08T17:12:00.000-07:00

This post was stimulated by another, on Maria Clara Paulino's blog which is full of wonderful reflections on estrangement and being "in-between" two languages, two places, two cultures. She is Portuguese and I am Italian, but I can relate to her musings in a familiar way. In the post, she writes on the use and abuse of the word "love" across cultures—how in her native Portuguese language it is taken very seriously and it means a very specific kind of affection (as it does in my native Italian); while in America, it is often just thrown there at the end of a letter just to mean a slightly more intimate form of salutation.
I have often wondered how it felt for Joseph Conrad (with whom I curiously share a last name, though mine was acquired through marriage) to write in a language other than his native Polish. According to the Wikipedia entry for him, Conrad "brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature." I think there is something to be said for being a bilingual, bicultural writer; it certainly gives us a different perspective on the language we write in, and also on ourselves. When I was living in Canada, the linguistic slippage between the English and French that were the official languages, and the Italian in the back of my mind, often created some interesting occurrences. Below are some musings written during one of those occurrences, one day that I was listening to the French CBC radio channel:

'... a sudden jolt to my system: words in Italian coming out of the radio, like an alien lingo, dissociated from any source, context, culture, discourse, dialectic, amorous or hateful speech; the politeness of formal encounters or the cutting language of intimate insults; words in Italian coming out of the blue, like sobriquets inserted into a strange electronic music part-psychedelic part-contemporary/classical—words foreign to anybody else listening to this Espace Musique station I often put on because the Quebecois accent, when it's not too gratingly nasal, is soothing to my ears and I don't have to pay too much attention to a language I don't understand very well, I can let it wash over me like ripples in a calm sea, it doesn't jump at me with the same heavy burden of meanings, associations, memories and images like English...

But today, it was Italian, oh, the incongrousness of it! All of a sudden a strange string of Dove posso trovare un albergo? Mi puo' indicare la direzione del museo? Come si chiama questo? — conventional phrases from travel books, those that never really help you because you always invariably misuse or mispronunce them or they are hopelessly out of date in the continuously evolving universe that is a living language shared and spoken by millions; silly phrases for tourists, made even more ridiculous by the strong Anglo accent, and in the suddeness of it I was moved and shocked and surprised by the intensity with which it moved and it shocked me, that such words all of a sudden should come out of my radio, and fall there in the otherwise silence of my morning alone preparing breakfast, feeding my cats; words so foreign and exotic to others in their incomprehensibleness, but to me, all too familiar, arresting...

Like the Surrealist list recounted by Michael Foucault at the beginning of "The Order of Things", these words belong to a taxonomy strange, almost disquieting, exotic in its foreigness, remote, incomprehensible to most listeners, who can be amused by them, irritated by them, pleased by them, but not find them normal. And yet, and this is the mark of my displacement, my permanent damnation to stranger status, I cannot find them normal either, because they are transplanted away from their context, deracinated from any meaning I can recognise, any soil I could walk on, any speech I could utter or hear uttered by others.

Words. Just words. Foreign. Exotic.

I am exotic to myself, for a moment, and yet at the same moment my brain, my heart recognize these words: they are part of the milk imbued at my mother's breasts, part of the sounds heard when I was growing up; they are the sounds and tastes and feelings and smells I was socialized into as a child. They are part of my landscape, but my landscape at some point suffered an earthquake and collapsed and went under the ground. My landscape is all interior and nothing in these mountains, these trees, this sea, these smells and voices and colours and sounds and clothes and demeanours and vibrations surrounding me here, today, call up any tree, any mountain, any sea, any sounds, any smells any voices any clothes any demeanours and vibrations I can recognise from my interior landscape.

To live in the crack where my landscape fell into; to inhabit an Atlantis of the memory, swimming in its amniotic waters day after day, and no one, no one knows where I really live when I say I live "just around the corner", nobody really knows where I am when I smile to them, when I talk to them in their language, when I reply with or without attention, when I shop and pay in the exact change and I make a joke at the checkout counter and I am more often than not misunderstood not because of my imprecise use of English but because of the slippage between my English and their English - a slippage not linguistic but cultural.

Some weeks ago an acquaintance told me, eyes ablaze and amused with the discovery she had just made: "I've just realised why your way of talking is so lively, so distinct, so wonderful! You use English as if it was Italian—it's not the grammar, it's something else. Your intonation, an inflection, certain peculiar words you use, you make it come so much more alive!"

She is a storyteller and translator from the Yiddish, speaks three languages and grew up in a Jewish area of Montreal in the 1950s. She understands the mystery of languages. Even though her passport says "Canadian", even though English appears to most to be her first tongue, she, like me, lives in several different linguistic universes at once, making comparisons and shifting from one to the other restlessly. It's a good but hard exercise for the mind, and sometimes you can get stuck, you can become confused, caught in the limbo between languages, and then you don't quite know where you are anymore.

Which language is this now? What am I speaking now? Which language am I supposed to use now?

Even today, after 24 years of having made English my daily language, 24 years of no longer speaking my mother tongue from rising to bedtime, I can become caught in that gap. Sometimes, a little shortcircuit in the brain, some crossing of wires, and an Italian word or even a whole, brief sentence may slip into my English conversation, and suddenly the gap opens up into a deep and almost threatening abyss, the abyss of my mother's madness I have tried to keep at bay all my life.

Her madness had nothing to do with language, her madness had all to do with language. In different cultural contexts, my mother's frequent ranting and raving, apparently without any sense or order, some of her speech patterns, could have been those of glossolalia, the phenomenon of "speaking in tongues" praised and encouraged within some Christian practices. And, in yet other cultural or historical places, her delusions could have been seen, praised or feared but never ridiculed, as manifestations of the power of witchcraft or shamanism...

I come from a culture that still believes in the power of the evil eye, and the evil eye is not really much to do with a gaze but rather with an incantation that needs to be verbalized, requires an utterance to come alive, to become effective, powerful and dangerous. But I have come to see that there is another form of the evil eye: it is that question I have learned to recognize as not necessarily innocent, not always just the sign of a curiosity about others:

"Where are you from?"

Language as the marker of identity and otherness, and once you open your mouth, even if your facial traits, your body language, your clothing style, had not already given you away as a foreign, anOther, your accent does.

Where are you from?

From another language, one far, far away, eons removed from this one."

The "Expert" Proliferation: Should We Be Worried?

2010-09-29T18:25:00.000-07:00

There is a worrying (at least to me) phenomenon out there, and it's growing: the proliferation of the "experts".

For a fee or (rarely) for free, they will let you use their services to find a job, find a publisher, find an agent, find a contractor, find a house, find love—find whatever it is that you were looking for, and even what you didn't know you were. As I recall it from my anthropological studies, this phenomenon would be embodied by a person, or group of people, granting or denying access to a particular culture to the outsider/anthropologist who is in the field to study, live with, collect information about that culture. This person of group of people are called in anthropological speak "gatekeepers", and it seems that today we have more and more of them holding the keys to the gates we need to walk through in order to reach our goal.

As if it were not enough that agents have become the almost exclusive gatekeepers to publishers—these days, even most of the small, "avant-garde" presses don't take direct submissions from authors any longer—now writers also have to go through the services of multiple agencies that purport to help with the bothersome process of steering the writing in the right direction. These services will not only give you editing and proofreading help, they will also create a database of magazines and contests and journals and agents for you; will customize your resume and your book proposal; and will keep these files running for you.

Now, I say to those of you fellow writers who have no time to manage these things on your own, by all means use these services if you can afford them. But let me play devil's advocate a little: apart perhaps from the fresh and expert pair of eyes offered by editors and proofreaders—and you could still get this kind of help without the whole package, or even for free from well-read, trusted friends or fellow writers—none of the things these services can do for you are things you could not do for yourself.

Anybody with Internet capability can research literary journals and magazines; I have a list of over a hundred of them, American and Canadian (yes, I'll gladly share it with anybody who asks): I bookmarked their sites on my computer, and also cut and pasted their link and submission information into a Word document that I keep in a "Writing Submissions" folder on my desktop. In the same folder, I also have a separate Word file with upcoming deadlines for competitions and/or general submissions; and I have yet another file where I track the results of my submissions.
Likewise with agents: once I'd done my homework—which you must as it will be a waste of time to send your proposal to an agent who is not interested in your genre—it was easy to build up a file of suitable agents to whom I plan to submit. Again, there are plenty of free resources on the Internet to help you research agents and write a proper query letter.
Yes, to get all of the above started did cost me a lot of time; but once you do the preliminary work, to keep it updated doesn't take too long—a few minutes a day, an hour a week. And of course you could use an Excel file to order all this data more efficiently, but I'm the technologically inept person who just happens to hate spreadsheets and prefers to do it the hard way.
Just think of all the paperwork the writers of old had to write and keep on file to remember where and when they sent off their stories or manuscript... With our computers and cut-and-paste capabilities, we have it really, really easy today.

I'm not trying to take work away from all the under-published or unemployed writers who are running these services for other writers: I'm just trying to point out that they are offering us a valuable service on the one hand, and perhaps a minor disservice on the other, by contributing to the ever-growing field of "experts" who ensure that the gates between us, the artists, and those who might be willing to look at/read and buy/publish our work become more and more impenetrable.

It's not just about writing, or art in general: these days, there are all kinds of special schools that teach you how to do all those jobs that once upon a time were obtained through the time-honored craft of apprenticeship. Today, this proliferation of gatekeepers and experts means that people with lifelong experience of any given things will probably never get the recognition they deserve because they do not happen to possess the "right" credentials.
In a field other than writing but equally dear to my heart, food, I have for years been troubled by the claim to "expertise" on "Italian" food staked by so many chefs or food critics only by virtue of their having mastered a few recipes at culinary school; or having taken a cooking class in Tuscany; or having spent a couple of months in Italy.

Now, I've been cooking for 21 years but I never went to cooking school and if a chef saw me in the kitchen he'd probably be horrified by my knife skills or the mistakes I occasionally make. And yet, my knowledge of "Italian" food is an insider's knowledge: it is the knowledge that comes from having been born and bred in the country; from a heritage that is Italian generation upon generation going back thousands of years; and also from the self-education about food I obtained from living, eating and cooking outside of my country for the second half of my life.
These days it is almost common place to say that there is no such thing as "Italian" food but only regional and local food; outside of Italy, this knowledge did not exist until a decade or so ago, but it has always existed for me as innate cultural knowledge. From my studies of food history, though, I have also learned that many of the recipes Italians now think of as "traditional" have only existed for a couple of hundred years; and yet, most Italians today think of them as eternal and are loathe to tamper with them—which is exactly how the concept of tradition is understood in most cultures.
This double-sided knowledge—the insider who instinctively knows which shape of pasta goes with which sauce and the intellectual who knows that tomato sauce is a product of the colonial invasion of the Americas—cannot be learned at school or acquired so quickly or easily. Yet this knowledge of mine counts for nothing in today's world: I have no certification, no CV of cooking experience and no appearance on the Food Channel to validate it—only my daily, quiet and quietly enjoyable, work in the kitchen.

I may have a personal axe to grind because I'm too old to jump on the "expert" bandwagon and therefore I might remain forever unemployable, but I'm worried about the phenomenon of "expert" proliferation—it makes for a culture financially broke as people attempt to buy the means of expertise for themselves; for a culture of constant dissatisfaction because the phenomenon of expertise makes the things we desire more difficult to obtain and prompts us to envy those who obtain the status of experts.
It also makes for a spiritually empty culture as we devalue the irreplaceable preciousness and uniqueness of life experience in favor of the quick fix of an experience validated by a piece of paper, and glorified by public appearances.

The proliferation of "reality" shows today might seem to belie my claims; yet if we look at them, what matters is not the real life experience that the participants come with, but rather the set of skills they will acquire and the changes they will go through in order to become "better", different people. For a while, when I lived in Canada, I watched "Style by Jury" on TV in fascinated horror, as scores of people whose appearance, for better or for worse, was quite unique and outstanding were transformed all into the same samey bland brand of "attractive" by a team of experts who gave them a fashion, beauty and psychological makeover (dig getting over a major childhood trauma in just one week of therapy!)

Back to writing, I nostalgically long for the "good ole days" (I'm not romanticizing them—I know that it was difficult for writers back then too) when you could just write, and then send your stuff off to an editor who would eventually send you a personal letter back, with not too many middlemen involved.

I would love to hear from you, fellow writers, gentle readers, to know what you think about all this: too many experts out there? Does it bother you? Or do you feel you have to read and listen to all of them?

Creation Is The Best Revenge

2010-09-23T22:00:00.000-07:00

From desire and regrets, revenge will sometimes follow. Here, I need to share a bit of personal experience, albeit reluctantly (yes, I'm writing a memoir and I'd have no problem publishing it, but I find the abundance of personal information displayed on blogs and other Internet sites somewhat excessive). It, is once again, a personal story about love—or a distorted semblance of it.

Once upon a time I had a relationship with a man from an "exotic" country, the one where Vikings originated from. Though in its current, rather Euro-centric connotation this word is most often used to describe "oriental", "Eastern", or "non-white" (I must use quotation marks because all of these terms bear scrutiny and re-definition), in its original etymology "exotic" simply means "introduced from another country: not native to the place where found"; the word is derived from the Greek exō, meaning "outer". I was a 5-foot-short Southern Italian girl with dark curly hair; he was a 6-foot-4", russet-haired, blue-eyed man. We lived in England, where his ethnicity and the odd visual impression our couple produced were somewhat exotic. Our relationship, however, was anything but exotic—it was instead that all-too-common blend of neurotic, sometimes violent, often destructive "love" where one person's most awful traits play (or rather, grate) off the other's most awful traits.
The boyfriend was narcissistic, selfish and self-absorbed beyond belief; he felt an almost constant need to flirt with women, to threaten an imminent betrayal; and I, from the intelligent, educated, feminist woman I had been before meeting him, was reduced by his behavior to a petty, nagging, jealous shrew.
In the end, this man left me, after we were engaged to marry—a few days, in fact, after he'd given me an engagement ring, and only weeks after we'd started the paperwork necessary to get married. It happened out of the blue, after a drunken night in which he kissed, right in front of my eyes, a woman who was our neighbor, who lived with her husband on the top floor of the Victorian house where I owned the basement apartment. This couple had been our constant companion of dinners and evening drinks for many months, during which I had noticed a steady progression of my boyfriend's flirting with her, and of her reciprocating.

For a few months after he left me, I was a wreck, in the throes of desperate depression. Then one day I realized that his leaving me was the absolute best point in our fucked-up relationship, pulled myself together and started writing a short story. In it, I wrote almost the entire truth about our relationship, except that, as the protagonist of the story, in the ending I exacted my own little revenge against the cheating, lying and womanizing boyfriend.
The story got published in a feminist collection of women's tales of revenge; following the fate of many other similar small press outputs, this book eventually got remaindered, though it is possible from time to time to find a copy on Amazon.

These days, I don't often think about my short story—for me, it was primarily a way of getting rid of my pain by exorcising the past: not just by turning it into a creative product, but by re-writing it altogether.
I am not (at least not in the present) a writer of fiction, but I know that—even though one must be careful with the re-writing act—in memoir and personal essay writing there are equivalent ways to exorcise the pain of the past: by elevating it to the kind of experience that speaks about more than just one person's life; that speaks to more people than just me and my close friends.

Eight years ago, out of the blue, the exotic boyfriend started emailing me; I'm not sure how he tracked me down, but against my better judgement I wrote back, even cordially because I had no more feelings for or against him, apart from amazement at his resurfacing. Then for four more years we fell out of touch again, and I had forgotten all about it when he reappeared again, this time with a cryptic email that talked about all the things "left unsaid" in our relationship. I replied that there was nothing left to say, really: we'd had one of the most fucked-up relationships; at the time, we were both wrong, headstrong, immature; and I hoped we'd both learned from the past. His ego must not have liked this answer because he disappeared again, only to reappear a few months later, when he tried to push my buttons and I reacted badly, writing a curt email saying "no more correspondence". He replied but I refused to read it and it all seemed to end there. But, oh no. Apparently this man who is now in his late forties still needs... what is it exactly? The validation, the distraction, the escapism produced by an Internet liaison with an ex-lover of over a decade past?
At any rate, a few weeks ago here he was again, in my junk mail box, with the unrequited, 18-years-too-late confession about something I'd always suspected and he'd always denied: at the time we broke up, he had been having a "torrid" (his word) affair with the neighbor.

All this is not terribly interesting in itself, because only Woody Allen and a few other male artists are capable of describing their own shallow, banal, conceited, selfish immaturity and get away with it—and with a wonderful artistic product.
I am confident that a good writer (perhaps à la Philip Roth?) could still turn this story into a great novel, but I'm not the one to do it (to you writers of fiction out there: feel free to use this plot—I won't sue you, just give me an acknowledgment in your book if you get published).

The only reason I'm telling this story, is because I know myself—and I know that, despite all my protestations to the contrary, I would have been hurt by this sudden revelation had I not been in possession of one more ammunition against the willful cruelty of my ex: the knowledge that I had exacted my revenge in a story; that I had exorcised him, his memory, the memory of our relationship with all its pain, absurdity, fucked-upness, in my writing.
And, while out there in his frozen country the ex-boyfriend is probably wringing his hands in the petty satisfaction of the very idle and the very bored, thinking he has caused me to suffer—or even to pause from my present life for a moment—here in my rainy city I can smile mischievously, knowing he doesn't know that I took my revenge against him 14 years ago.

"Creation is the best revenge": I said that, or at least I think so.

Is Regret the Salt of Creation? Or Is It Desire?

2010-09-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

In February of this year, the UK newspaper The Guardian interviewed a bunch of writers and asked each of them for a "decalogue" of personal writing rules. (This article was brought to my attention when I read Christina Baker Kline's selection of her favorite among these "rules".) My feeling about such "lists" is that one ought to be deeply suspicious of them, since articles such as this are so banal and so recurring—the stuff of journalistic stocking-filler. Also, the need to know what famous writers consider their personal decalogue is in a way part and parcel of that all-American obsession for celebrities—what they do, what they say, what they eat, etc.

And yet, there was one of these "rules" that touched me deeply and is still haunting me, for altogether personal reasons, so I want to pass it on.

British author Geoff Dyer's rule no. six was "Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire."

A decade ago I had a lover who said to me, in one of his most bitter and self-deprecating moments (something he used to do a lot, and that I initially mistook for literary inclination, then came to understand as deep mental instability) "Regrets are what I live for."
But in his case, this posture of poet maudit was deeply pernicious, because all the regrets he had so willfully cultivated, not finding any other creative outlet, ended up festering in his soul, creating cancerous poison in his mind.
Yet, my experience—of a life full of regrets that constantly threaten to turn into festering wounds—has been that, if you use your regrets instead of letting them take over your life; if you turn them into creative products, they can be like manure—maybe a bit stinky at first, but in time penetrating into the soil to feed it, so that it will grow beautifully strong plants...

There is a phrase by Willa Cather that I treasure (oh no, not another quote—oh yes!) and each time I start a new diary (I have never liked the word "journal") I transcribe in the first page, together with any other quotes "du jour" that more fit my mood at that time:
"Desire is creation. It is the magical element in that process"

So is it desire or regret that fuel creation?
But this is a false question, only valid if we buy our Western cultural bias towards diametrically fixed opposites. Desire (unless you are of an extremely austere and moralistic religious persuasion) is seen as a good thing in our cultures—the motor that pushes us forward to want things, to perform, to achieve.
However, the inescapable by-product of desire is regrets: a certain accumulation of them, like dust over furniture, throughout the years of our lives when our desires fell flat; or when we did not even allow ourselves to entertain them.
Regret can turn into poison and generate envy, anger, even violence. The best cure for regrets, then, is to take them and use them creatively.
If you're writing fiction, you may give your characters all the desires and regrets you wish and play around with them, without anybody getting hurt except maybe for your reader's feelings from time to time (but what is the pleasure of reading if it doesn't elicit a strong emotional response?)
If you're writing a memoir, you can be both confessor and witness to your desires and regrets; flesh them out on the page and relive them, this time around, with a sense of their contemporaneity instead of their cause-and-effect timing.
This counterpoint of desire and regrets is what gives a memoir, in my opinion, a sense of the author's passion, vitality, strength—even more than the sometimes wishy-washy optimistic moral message ("I survived and I'm all the stronger for it") that seems to be the requisite ending for memoirs these days.

Yes, that play of desire and regret, so similar to the play of life and death...

Is Memoir Still a Dirty Word?

2010-09-10T17:54:00.000-07:00

This needs to be an on-going conversation, so my post here is just a quick pebble thrown into the pond, hoping to stimulate some discussion around this issue.

The scorn against memoir that some writers and critics seem to feel, in spite of the growing—(perhaps too much?)—trend for memoir publication, puzzles me; but it also reminds me of a similar scorn, that vis-à-vis the medium of photography when it emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century as a new artistic form. Indeed, the whole debate that raged at the time (and, significantly, has not quite died today) was on whether photography could be called an art form at all, given its heavily technological basis and its infinitely reproducible output.

Leaving aside the fact that the definition itself of "technology" is in the eye of the beholder—(by the standards of its own time context, the iron age was high technology)—and the whiff of elitist preciousness intrinsic to the idea that photography should be of lesser value because it can be reproduced, what is interesting is that the debate about photography back then, as the one on memoir today, hinged on similar fears held by the artistic élites of the time.

A fear to become displaced from their creative ivory tower by the new medium/genre; and a fear of not being easily able to categorize the rather "hybrid" nature of the new medium/genre (and, by default, of "diluting" the classification status of their practiced medium).

Back then, it was the painters who vilified photography (while at the same time they started using it widely as a tool, recognizing its ease when compared with painting on location or with live models); today, it is the fiction writers who vilify memoir, regarding it as a "lesser" and at the same time "tainted" enterprise.

Lesser, because in their mind it requires no feat of imagination to write something factual; tainted, because they cannot accept that even the "truth" (yet another moniker requiring socio-cultural contextualization) could be somewhat constructed and fictionalized. (On this somewhat endless debate, one wonderful text that collects a wide range of opinions by some of the strongest voices in the field of non-fiction writing is "Truth in Non-Fiction ", edited by David Lazar).

I could go on but I will stop here, hoping to stimulate discussion around these issues. I am here reproducing parts of a text (the underlining is mine) by Brent Staples found on fiction and non-fiction writer Kathryn Harrison's website. He writes about Harrison's controversial memoir "The Kiss" (in which she recounted her incestuous love affair with her father), but only by default; most of the piece is about the scorn against memoir.

Editorial Notebook; Hating It Because It Is True By BRENT STAPLES

"Autobiography was once dominated by famous people who summed up their lives near the end... Younger novelists have joined the memoir trend. But hard-core traditionalists have denounced it as a blight on literature and a turn toward self-indulgence and exhibitionism. This is curious indeed, given that novels and memoirs are often so closely related as to be interchangeable. First novels in particular are often no more than thinly veiled personal histories. In addition, the best memoirs use fictional techniques -- and could easily pass for novels if the writers wanted to call them that...
... the historical novelist Thomas Mallon said that novels were inherently about "larger truths," while memoirs were about personal ones. But what's obvious is that the devilish little girl in "The Liars' Club" is every little girl. That she bears the author's name makes her no less compelling or universal...
It has become popular to dismiss memoir as a way of peddling misery to a voyeuristic public. But what's at play here is a prejudice that regards fiction as more literary than nonfiction narrative writing... given the stylistic kinship that now links novels and memoirs, that prejudice is no longer supportable."

On "Social Media" and "Internet Presence", and How to Write (practically)

2010-09-08T18:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to a meeting of the Willamette Writers Group. Karen Karbo , a multi-published writer with whom I took a memoir-writing workshop at the beginning of the year, was giving the talk.

It was about her concerns regarding emailing, blogging, facebooking, twittering, and all the myriad other "social networking" tools that have appeared in our lives and everybody feels obliged to use.

Karen was both encouraging and disparaging about the whole thing, but the gist of the talk was (I'm not quoting verbatim, just summarizing) that these things can, and often will, suck you dry: as a writer, you need as wide as possible a mental space made of peace, reflection, solitude, deep thinking; now, these technological tools do not encourage the creation of such a space—rather, they are too quick and too fleeting, like ripples on the surface of water.

So it would be best for us, as writers, to use them in moderation; even better, try and get someone else to do it for you if you can.

Remember that, in a good day's work, you still don't have an unlimited bounty but only a certain number of words at your disposal—use them wisely, don't waste too many on things you will regret later, or things that will not last long.

Karen's final suggestion was to do your real writing on a computer that has no internet on it, or even write by hand.

This resonated with me, as I do know that my writing by hand always yields a completely different product from my typing at any manner of keys: something more immediate, more gutsy, more personal, from deeper within my psyche. So I'm glad I never got rid of my old MacBook, and intend from now on to use it as a more modern typewriter. I

would still rather write by hand all the time, but the thing is that I'm a very fast hand-writer yet a lousy typist, so it takes me too long to transcribe what I write by hand. I have several notebooks full of insights, thoughts, germs of ideas for stories and essays, phrases, paragraphs or even entire pages I meant to use in my writing, yet I have not managed to transcribe many of these into my computer so that I can expand on them, or just keep them archived.

On another level, though, the talk made me feel quite depressed because it encapsulated my misgivings about this technology: I may be too old, but I still hanker after a time when we could just call each other up, or meet, instead of forging connections via email and other sites. Of course I'm very grateful for email because without it, I'd still be waiting for the elusive letter from my many friends scattered around the globe (though there was a certain, irreplaceable thrill about that—not to mention the loss of the tactile and sensual experience given by the choice of writing paper, the envelope, the specific handwriting of each person, etcetera). And of course, without the internet, I would have probably never met some of the interesting people I've made connections with, nor would I be writing this blog.

Still, what gives me pause is the fact that, as Karen mentioned, today it may not be the best writers/books that get attention, but rather the ones that are better at self-promotion. A sad thought indeed for those of us who still want a real depth of feeling and experience to be encapsulated in a book, or movie, or other artistic production.

As Kafka said, "a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us". A tall order indeed, in these days of quick and cheap thrills, when a book is more likely to serve as diversion on the daily commute and become recycled after only one reader...

Another worrying aspect of this phenomenon is that even authors with multiple publications to their name are now required to get on this "social media" bandwagon by their agents, publicists or editors; yet in their case, thanks to their relative fame, they will have an already-built-in audience once they are on the internet; fans and followers will google their names and find their websites or blogs or Facebook page.

But where does this leave the rest of us who haven't published, aren't famous, and yet still need to have a "presence on the internet"?

What kind of presence do you really have if no one reads your blog anyway? How is that different from sitting alone in your room writing?

Gentle Readers, I would love to hear your voices on these issues.

Simultaneity—can it be written?

2010-09-05T00:56:00.000-07:00

Today I was watching one of my two cats—something I do often, as I find it both soothing and extremely instructive.

I've had my elder cat for nearly 19 years, and the younger one for five. In-between, there were two others who are no longer.
When I was still living in London, my Aikido instructor once told me he had learned everything he knew not from his master but from his cats. I understood what he meant: if you want to know how to relax deeply while also being constantly alert, watch a cat. If you want to know how to look always elegant and purposeful even as you pick yourself up because you aimed wrong and fell off the highest shelf, watch a cat. To be a squeaky beggar for food who walks repeatedly all over her human hostess in the morning until she sleepily throws off the covers and follows you into the kitchen, where you then reserve the right to turn up your pretty snub nose at the impossibly plebeian food that's been put in front of you—well, you can only pull this off if you are a cat.

Cats naturally possess the ability of simultaneity—of being both nasty and wonderful, clumsy and elegant, dependent and independent, sweet, cuddly kittens and wild, dangerous hunters. They have made an art out of embodying these dualities we inferior humans are still struggling with after centuries of philosophizing about them—and the best we seem to have come up with, is to either pretend that they can be sliced apart with a knife like Siamese twins, or to acknowledge their co-existence in a Zen manner but without really dealing with them.

As I was watching my still very beautiful, almost kittenish at times yet geriatric cat, Billie (named after Miss Holiday), who is a half-Persian of blackish mantle and yellow-green eyes that scrutinize me harder than my bigoted Catholic spinster aunt used to do when I was young, a thought struck me: if only we could embody this simultaneity in our writing! And not just in the way of keeping these alleged opposites in tension in the written work; to problematize and show that they are not after all really opposed; but also to go a step further, to show all the facets, the different aspects of a person, all the moments of their life as if simultaneously happening...

As I watched Billie lay at the foot of my bed, fluffy and relaxed yet still alert enough to shoot me a seductive glance now and then with her half-closed eyes, I remembered her as that baby kitten who emerged out of her mother's belly, the first of a litter of five, and the only black one (the rest were all tabbies). I could also visualize her as a grown-up, slim and sleek, aloof, not very affectionate, very feline, very independent. And in the same glance, the same moment, I also saw Billie as she later became—a little chunkier, more furry, looking more and more like her disappeared mother, Cassandra, the love of my life whose loss still haunts me after 15 years. As she grew older, Billie became so much like her mother that today, when I look at pictures of my Cassandra and I then look at Billie in front of my eyes, the two cats are almost alike: only the fur color is slightly different (Cassandra was a smoke Persian, and her lovely dark grey color would take an almost burnt amber tinge in the sun).
Is it possible that Billie has been pervaded by her mother's spirit to the point that not only has she assumed her features but also her character (as an elderly cat, she is now incredibly affectionate and demonstrative)?
Or is it that she is capable to be simultaneously herself and her mother, but I only see her embodiment of the latter because of my own incapacity to view more than one thing at once?

This would be a good philosophical discussion if I knew anything at all about philosophy. But sadly I do not; what I do know, is that for all the academic postmodern talk of the "breakage of boundaries", of the "interplay" of opposites, of "third spaces" and the like, we are still very much living in a culture that finds it difficult to deal with the non-linear , the fragmentary, the multiple.

Gentle Readers, do you remember that old Police song, "Synchronicity"? Maybe that's exactly what those once obscure lyrics were about, were after (but we did not care at the time, because the music was danceable and Sting was cute).

Wikipedia gives this definition of "musical simultaneity: "In music, a simultaneity is more than one complete musical texture occurring at the same time, rather than in succession."
Indeed, it is much easier to find simultaneity in music and almost any other art form than writing. In painting, for example, I think of Marc Chagall's visualizations of village life in Russia, where he was able to blend Jewish and Russian sensibilities and folk stories with contemporary French painting styles, and depict simultaneous happenings in a village; or even more, I think of Chinese and Japanese scrolls where time flows horizontally rather than vertically, and events occurring at different historical moments can be depicted in the same frame (as in the "west" we used to do in the Middle Ages, before the constricting "invention" of Renaissance perspective).
But in writing? Can we really represent this without risking being labeled as "experimental" and relegated to the ranks of the unread?
It is difficult to use words in a way that will not be misinterpreted, because we are not accustomed to seeing words as abstractions, as mere sounds; we can only see them as either pointers to physical objects, or as elucidations of feelings that the words will help become more defined and "real".
But is an epigraph on a tombstone really "real", or isn't it just a spur-of-the-moment opinion on a particular person, now dead—opinion which becomes, by the same nature of language, set in stone and immortalized?
I am no expert on Virginia Woolf and would probably be chastised by those who are, but it seems to me that she was after a notion of simultaneity when she experimented with language and interior monologue. And Michael Cunningham's The Hours (with its subsequent cinematic rendition) tried to capture that spirit.

The idea of simultaneity in writing seems to me all the more important for the genre of memoir, because of the way that memory itself works in our minds.
I realize that these are very unformulated and rough thoughts and that I have no conclusion, hypothesis or formula for anything; but I have been wondering lately how I could possibly simulate a version of the simultaneity of memory in my memoir writing without alienating the reader by the use of some impossibly chaotic or experimental style...

Gentle Readers, if you have any thoughts about this, I would love to know.

More Thoughts on "Uplifting" Messages

2010-08-30T05:43:00.000-07:00

Life during Wartime, the new movie by Todd Solondz, opens with an absurd scene worthy of Ionesco or Beckett, a sparse dialogue told in close-ups between the inappropriately named Joy (Scottish actress Shirley Henderson), and Allen (Michael K. Williams), her husband. They are "celebrating" their anniversary at a restaurant—a bad idea that ends with Allen being called a pervert and spat on by the waitress, and Joy in full tears.
Later, we learn that Joy works with ex-convicts and that by marrying Allen she has brought her work home—so to speak. Allen was incarcerated for an unnamed "perversion", but not all perversions remain unnamed in Solondz's film, as the pedophilia of Bill (played with his usual understated dignity by Ciaran Hinds) is the centerpiece of the movie—or so it would appear.
In another scene, Trish (the wonderful yet woefully underrated Allison Janney), Bill's ex-wife, tries to explain to Timmy, the younger of her two sons, why she has lied to him about his father being dead (he was in jail instead). Unbeknownst to her, Bill has been released from prison and is on his way from New Jersey to Florida, where his wife has relocated with their three kids. For a while, Bill hides, spying on his former family, and finally appears only to his eldest son, Billy, for a very brief meeting.

As was the case with Solondz's previous movie, "Happiness", where the characters of the Jordan sisters Joy, Trish and Helen first appeared (played by different actresses), many will find the director's inclination to make pedophiles into sympathetic characters disturbing.
But only a superficial reading would infer that Solondz condones pedophilia: instead, what he finds really disturbing is the unquestioning conflation of pedophilia with homosexuality (despite the fact that this has been proven flawed by statistics).
This is shown in the attitude of Trish, who allows her son to become obsessed with "faggots" as potential rapists; and even Bill, in his brief encounter with his son, seems to worry that his son might have inherited his pedophilia if he is by any chance gay: when Billy tells him how he is majoring in anthropology and writing a paper on homosexuality in the animal kingdom, Bill harshly enquires "Are you gay? No? You like women? Are you sure?"
Even the "perverts", it seems, hanker after an illusory ideal of "normality"; and indeed this wonderful apple pie normality is the attribute that Trish finds most endearing about her new suitor, Harvey.

Solondz masterly exploits all the clichés and stereotypes that pervade American culture, and explodes the American obsession for drawing impossibly neat lines down the middle of what are perceived as opposing discourses, thus creating abstract dichotomies of "good" and "evil"; the director's leanings are obviously to the left, yet he does not shy away from poking bitter fun at abstract liberal guilt about the war in the character of Helen (played with neurotic relish by Ally Sheedy), who used to be a poet but has found success in writing scripts for commercial Hollywood movies and sleeps with "Keanu" (!).

Solondz's aim is to show the stupidity of any black-and-white thought about "good" and "evil", whereby societal trends dictate what the scapegoat of choice will be: once it was "Japs" or Nazis; today it is immigrants, terrorists and child molesters; thus, pedophiles are often referred to in the movie as "terrorists". The title says it all: life during wartime is pretty much like life as usual—just worse.

At the end of the movie, a traumatized and neurotic Timmy, who's been frantically searching for answers he cannot find, blurts out "I don't care about freedom and democracy. I want my father!"
Yes, the father in a real and symbolic sense is what has been missing from American society—the real fathers are too busy earning enough money so that they can afford family health insurance, or have gone off to fight a useless war that will not protect anybody from "evil"; the metaphorical fathers, be they the founding ones or the "commanders in chief", have abdicated their responsibility to the people. And the mothers are left, as usual, to mop and pick up the pieces—but these are no Rosie the Riveter characters, these are women whose PTSD is no less acute than those of the men who fought the real war; and who medicate their pain with sleeping pills and sugarcoated pills of empty reassurance that "everything will be allright"

There are many things to savor in this elegant and understated movie, not least the fact that even in dealing with strong and unsavory subject matter the movie remains indeed elegant and understated. One must also laude the film's brevity: even though the pace of many scenes is quite slow, the movie itself goes by quickly and stops at the absolutely right moment—an ability, this, not always possessed by artists in our self-indulgent times.

What does all this have to do with writing? Nothing and everything. It ties in with my previous musings about "happy endings" and "uplifting messages".
The message in Solondz's movie is not at all uplifting, and his moral is a bitter one to swallow, but his vision is not clouded by a one-sided, facile version of "the truth"—and that is the mark of a true artist.
I leave you with a comment by the director himself:

"If you want sympathetic characters it's easy enough to do, you just give someone cancer and of course we'll all feel horribly sad and sorry. You make anyone a victim and people feel that way. But that's not of interest to me as a filmmaker or as a writer. I may be accused of a certain kind of misanthropy but I think I could argue the opposite. I think that it's only by acknowledging the flaws, the foibles, the failings and so forth of who we are that we can in fact fully embrace the all of who we are. People say I'm cruel or that the film's cruel, but I think rather it exposes the cruelty and I think that certainly the capacity for cruelty is the most difficult, the most painful thing for any of us to acknowledge. That we are at all capable. And yet I think that it exists as much as the capacity for kindness and it's only the best of us that are able to suppress, sublimate, re-channel and so forth these baser instincts, but I see them to some degree at play as a regular part of life in very subtle ways and not so subtle ways."

What is an "Uplifting" Message, and Do We Need One?

2010-08-26T20:08:00.000-07:00

Gentle readers,
I am a member of She Writes , an online forum for women writers and others in the publishing industry. A post by Erin Hosier , a literary agent, recently captured my attention. Titled "The Great Competition for the Saddest Story Ever Told", it was her response/commentary to a query she received from a woman who described her life story as an autobiographical project—a story so unredeemingly harrowing as to be almost unbelievable (incest, pedophilia, mental illness and drug addiction were only some of the "highlights" int this story).
This post got me thinking again about my favorite subjects—success, memoir, publication, cultural differences.

Below is the comment I posted on Erin's page. As always, I invite your opinions, Gentle Readers. You can go and read the whole thing here:
http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/the-great-competition-for-the?xg_source=activity

"Publishers are looking for stories that can inspire. That's just human nature and the American way. We don't mind if you were forced to bear your father's child in poverty, just as long as you eventually star in your own tv show, or at least work with other tortured children to try and make things better."

Dear Erin, I am a European who now lives in the States, and I would like to "problematize" (as they love to say in academic theory) your statements above.

Firstly, "human nature" and the "American way" are not the same thing. Audiences in Europe do not seem to mind reading books, or watching movies, without a specifically "uplifting" or "inspiring" message (two attributes that, in themselves, bear defining—what's "inspiring" for someone may be hopelessly dull for someone else). European audiences are also more used to types of writing, film-making, or creativity in general that are more "experimental" and less "linear" in the way of narration, voice, subject matter, etc.

Secondly, starring in your own tv show is perhaps a crass objective for some serious writers/artists. Adam Lambert is not Bob Dylan, or Joni Mitchell, or Leonard Cohen, and I suspect that none of these musicians would have ever made it to the final of American Idol today.

I am not naive and I do understand that, in America, publishing is a business and that even those few remaining small, "avantgarde" presses need money to survive (in Canada and Europe, a lot of these enterprises receive government money or are privately funded).
However, there is often a fine line between the crass commercialism of a stereotypical "happy ending" message and what you define as an "uplifting" and "inspiring" one. Even a relentlessly bleak ending can be inspiring in its own way—if nothing else, to remind us that life is immensely more complicated and nuanced than TV and Hollywood movies and novels depict it to be.

Yes, a book and a movie both need a beginning, a middle and an end, we agree on that. However these bits need not be in a linear fashion, and the ending need not be a clear-cut, happy, or even uplifting one to make the experience meaningful and profound and even life-changing for the audience.

I recently saw a French movie horribly titled in the English version "Making Plans for Lena" (the original French title was "Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser", which roughly translates as "No, my daughter, you will not dance", and this "mistitling" alone tells a lot about the cultural difference between American and French audiences.)
If I had to give you a "hook" for this movie, it would roughly be: "A neurotic, dissatisfied married woman and mother of two kids in her late thirties, in the middle of divorce proceedings from her husband, quits job, moves to her parents' country home to house-sit while they vacation in Rome, all the while pondering the meaning of her life and of life in general—without coming up with any precise answer in the end."

I much suspect that an American agent or publisher would not give this hook the time of day—were it a film or book synopsis. And it would be a pity, because the movie instead was beautifully poignant, deeply truthful and realistic about the human condition everywhere—not just France. As a middle-aged woman who feels she has made many mistakes in life and perhaps wasted a good half of it, I was deeply affected by this film and it left me thinking about it for a long time. And isn't that what art is supposed to do?

Franz Kafka said "the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us." Lest you shrug and say "Yeah, Kafka, that damn depressed, sickly writer", let us remember that Kafka, as well as casting an unflinching eye on human despair, was also capable of great irony and humor in his writing.

And an all-American author, William Styron, also said that "A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end." That "exhaustion" need not be pessimistic or awful; it could instead be akin to the pleasant, fulfilling exhaustion one feels at the end of a particularly wonderful love-making session.

When did such lofty goals for literature, and art in general, go out of the window?

Have they?

In our times of ephemeral and easy consumption of creative endeavors, has that feeling of "slight exhaustion" as response to the end of a book, or movie, or concert, or theatrical performance or art exhibit, been permanently replaced by a yawn of mild satisfaction, an off-I-go-now-onto-other-business reaction?

I hope not.

Call me old(-fashioned), but as a member of the audience I still want to be surprised, shaken to the core, left exhausted by art. And I know I'm not the only one out there.

I do however agree with many things in your post: the distance, the voice, the ability to communicate your experience to others must all be there to make the writing of a memoir worthwhile.
I'm completing a book on my mother's mental illness and unsavory death, and it took me over three years from her departure to be able to start writing about it. By the time I was ready to workshop the pieces in my book, I was also able not to take any comments made by my fellow writers personally and to consider them instead as being just about the writing.

My memoir is for me a creative product, not an act of therapy or a wishful thinking money-making spin, and I want to communicate (if not "inspire" or "uplift") and share the experiences in it with a wider audience, not just express myself.

And I agree that the tone of this query was grating, narcissistic, and for me it made the experiences described sound almost unbelievable.
Above all, it was relentless—there was no moral of any kind.

There: my take on all this is that, instead of a "message", what a work of art needs, if it wishes to be of any real import, is some kind of moral—whether this is shared by many or few, whether it is part of the current social mores or antithetical to them.

Willamette Writers Conference — Some Thoughts on "Making It" as a Writer

2010-08-20T18:40:00.000-07:00

On August 6th, 7th and 8th I schlepped to a middle-of-nowhere location (the Sheraton at PDX airport, inconveniently located right between two Max train stops) to attend the Willamette Writers Conference. This organization has been around for 25 years and has chapters in various parts of Oregon. If you live in the state (and even if you don't), check out their website http://www.willamettewriters.com

In my previous incarnation as a doctoral student I had attended academic conferences before but never a writers one; at the Willamette's, the atmosphere was relaxed, informal, the people cordial and open. I attended some interesting workshops, made a few connections with fellow writers, and pitched to five industry professionals, three agents and two editors. Two of them were even interested in my book!
The pitching process was quite an experience in itself: scores of us hopeful writers nervously waiting outside the banquet room to be called inside when the time of our pitches came. The professional you had signed up to pitch to (a list was available well in advance, at the time of registration for the conference) was waiting for you at a table with their name tag on; you had fifteen minutes to find this person and proceed to convince her/him that your idea would be a worthy investment of their future time.
Some of us (the old-fashioned "purists" — do you still exist out there? If so, drop me a line) would maybe contend that this is a terrible process, a sort of literary "speed-dating". It was indeed like speed-dating, but not terrible at all. I enjoyed it; learned a lot about presentation, communication and persuasion skills; and ended up slightly revising my pitch each time according to how the person in front of me presented themselves. Most of the agents/editors I talked to were kind, responsive, friendly.
It is true, though, that in the tough publishing business of today the more commercial your idea, the more chances of your pitch being accepted. But hasn't this always been the case?
I am uneasy with glorifications of a mythical past when art was a commerce-free zone and "true genius" would eventually be recognized and triumph. Years of graduate studies in art history have taught me that this is indeed a myth. Many artists who enjoyed commercial success in their time have today been forgotten by history; many artists we today put on a pedestal did not have that great an acclaim in their lifetime.

What's that recipe again? 30% Perspiration, 20% Inspiration and 50% Sheer Luck? Whatever percentages you believe to be true, these seem to be the ingredients that combine to make a "successful" writer.
But what's the definition of "success"? What is yours?

I have a little tag from a fortune cookie that I keep in my wallet:
   "Success is being at peace with yourself."
My definition of being at peace with myself is to fulfill what I, perhaps arrogantly, believe to be my calling in life: Art (I use this word in its widest possible acception, to include all creative human endeavors).
At times in my life I've strayed away from that path, and always eventually come to regret it. Now that I'm not young anymore, I feel the acrid breath of finality on my neck, and this both terrifies me and pushes me to try harder for that elusive "success" and its attendant gift — peace of mind. Of course we know how scores of successful artists have been mentally ill, have succumbed to real or invented despair through drugs, alcohol, suicide. That is also another cliché, isn't it? The mad genius. Though some contend that there is a correlation between manic depression and creativity. Psychology professor (and herself bipolar, as she bravely confessed in her memoir "An Unquiet Mind") Kay Redfield Jamison researched this widely in a provocative and beautifully written book, "Touched With Fire".

Again, that 30% perspiration. But when you have to struggle with depression even to get out of bed and try to make sense (let alone meaning) of your day, it becomes harder to keep perspiring.
One strategy could be not to demand too much from ourselves in order to avoid setting us up for the spiraling depths of disappointment, disillusion and despair.
If you try to impose too much discipline on yourself, you will fail and then the blame game will begin, leaving you with even more negativity as a residue.
But if you take it only one day at a time, though, you won't achieve much of anything and time will slip through your hands like sand.
It's a difficult balance, one I'm still working on today.
A tightrope walk with no safety net below.

I'd love to hear from you, Gentle Readers. What's your recipe for success? What's your balance? How do you cope with depression or any other debilitating illness and still find the energy and time to be creative?

I leave you with another recipe, a quote (yes, you've gathered it by now: I'm the Queen of Quotes — they, like certain songs, have accompanied me through life — different ones according to the phases I find myself in) by Willa Cather, from her wonderful novel "The Professor's House":

   "Desire is creation. It is the magical element in that process"

Gentle Reader...

2010-08-19T22:22:00.000-07:00

...I hope you will read me and share your comments, wherever you are. I hope you will chime in with your ideas on what memoir-writing, writing in general, writing within a specific culture (not necessarily the North American one — I'm multicultural and fully bilingual), and culture in general, are about.

I hope there will be gentle readers to this blog.

The thought of having a blog had entered my mind many times and I'd always rejected it as "unnatural". Finally, a couple of weeks ago I went to the Willamette Writers Conference and pitched my book to an editor who advised me to have a blog. His was a gentle but decisive push, enough to march me over the threshold of my indecision. An indecision of a cultural nature — as most things with me are, as most things with most humans are.
I'm an Italian woman of a middle age and of the old school — the one that teaches that you will meet people if you just make yourself visible and available. This may still happen (or not) to a degree in the old country, but in the new world it's a whole other story. Scores of lonely people sit in coffee shops scouting their laptops for new friends to add to their Facebook page.
A vision that still seems odd to me.
And here we move already from writing to culture (my anthropologically-bent mind won't let me go any other way): in my country of birth, people go to coffee shops to socialize and chat with friends, and they stay home if they need privacy. Here in North America, it seems that the opposite is true: people share houses more often than not, more often than not with others they have (or have ceased to have) not much in common with, so the only way to be alone and in peace is to sit in a public place.

And so, gentle reader, I've already told you a bit about me, and here's more:

I am a writer of non-fiction currently working on a memoir project based on my mother's life and her death. She was mentally ill and though this kind of memoir is a dime a dozen these days, my mother was nothing like the glamorous, eccentric mad woman that most books or movies on this subject depict. It is a challenge to write about an "invisible woman" whose life would otherwise disappear, but it's a challenge I welcome as a needed antidote to the incessant and inane chatter of "celebrity" lives that permeates contemporary culture.
I was conflicted about my mother all throughout her life. After she died, the pain of guilt (the guilt of not having been able to "save" her from her madness and from her horrible death) took over for a while. In the end, working through my grief, I came to the conclusion I needed to write this memoir as a memento, a tribute to a life that never amounted to much.
My mother made my life hell with her madness but she was also a mirror held up to my own struggles with "normality", my rebellion against the life that Southern Italian culture required I live: to become a wife, mother, guardian of the house. So I ran away from my mother and from my own culture and I find myself today stranded as far away from my Mediterranean roots as I could possibly be — in Portland, Oregon (it feels a bit like being one of those medieval explorers who believed they'd fall off the edge of the world if they navigated too far).
Before alighting on these western shores, I lived in another North West, the Canadian one, in Vancouver BC. And before that, I made my home in the frozen wasteland of Buffalo, NY. And before that, I lived in England (mostly London) for fifteen years. Oh, and I forgot to mention five months spent in Munich between my hometown of Naples and moving to England...

The word "home" means so little to me. And yet it means so much...

So now I'm trying to find my own home in writing, in my heart, and in my mind.

Memory is like a shattered mirror that reflects back the past in fragments, in shards.

I'm writing this memoir as a collection of such fragments, of shards of the shattered mirror that was my mother's life, and her life with me, and my life with her.

Each of these stories is a different one, requiring a different view mirror.

There are poems in this story, there are tales about history and religion and politics in Italy, and in Naples. My city, for those who know it, is an unknowable entity. Many have tried to scrutinize it, analyze it, tell her story, but she remains mysterious and unyielding. There are fantastic tales about her, there are tall tales and there are nasty stories. The truth is a amalgam of all these nuances, and cannot be told in simple, black-and-white strokes.

And so is with the story of my mother's history.

An aside: one of my favorite writers, Italo Calvino, talks in one of his essays about language and culture that Italian is profoundly at odds with English, and uses the example of the word storia, which in Italian has a multiplicity of meanings: story; history; tale; dealings; romantic or sexual affair.

Gentle reader, qual' è la tua storia — what is your storia?

How do you relate to the workings of memory; the writing of memoir; the writing life in general; the mirror that is mother; the loneliness of the long-distance life (with apologies to Alan Sillitoe)?

I'm curious to know. Curiosity may kill the cat, but it seems to benefit humans immensely. I've always liked to adopt literary quotes as life mottos, and this Dorothy Parker phrase has become my current motto:

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity"