2009

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Beyond wishes for good health and wonderful living to all, my overriding personal aspiration for 2009 is to publish more fiction, essays, and poems. In that spirit, here's a timely and wild page devoted to some work of mine at Yareah. This new zine, based in Madrid, Spain, publishes work in both Spanish and English.

Both poems as well as the short essay originally appeared here at mainbrace. I'm very glad Yareah found me, especially as I have very dear friends in Spain.

If you fancy a hard copy of this new zine, you can order it here.

2008

JM, fracturedself portrait/Virgil & Santa Monica, 12.29.08

Dreaming of Scipio

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I think families feud at the holidays because the holildays are, as we practice them, largely boring to the point of exasperation. Santa is for children and Jesus has been kidnapped by hillbillies and retailers, leaving little room for actual adults to negotiate their lives in a festive way. Generals look at the holidays as opportune times for bombing.

The dull and genderless drama of the family gatherings we know as "the holidays" is the precise opposite of the classical world's idea about what we should be doing when the daylight of the year wanes and wanes and then magically turns the corner and begins to wax again. The Romans had a predictably great festival culminating on December 25. It was called Saturnalia, and "[i]t was marked by tomfoolery and reversal of social roles, in which slaves and masters ostensibly switched places." The great Saturnalia of Macrobius, a learned fifth-century scribe whose name should be held with the same esteem as Augustine's but is not because of the consequence of religious history, is the book to read.

The Next One

JM, Deliciosos Tamales, La Fama, 12.24.08

Better. These are better days, hopeful in fact. We had a wonderful crowd yesterday afternoon and evening. I had fun driving around town with a duck in the trunk on Wednesday. We were gifted not one but two sets of tamales from two different neighbors. And there were even more tamales; we learned that we agree with Jonathan Gold: Juanita's tamals are the best in town, at least as far as we know. Though I will retain a soft spot in my heart for La Fama's, because of the pigeon that bolted out the door when I went inside, and because of the pigeon that remained inside, flapping with such insistence around the woman with the tray while I consulted the menu. The pigeon reminded me of a woman we knew who used to flap her arms as though trying but failing to get off the ground when she got angry. It will certainly be a grand thing, to discharge 2008 forever, won't it?

The Novel Now

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Sure. Having finished another, now I am also looking to start yet another novel. But I have to take a few weeks' pause.

I am hopeful to start another the same way I did the last one: with another safe-as-houses, safely removed, literate co-pilot on the other end. With someone who can comb 3,000 word documents for my ceaseless mental lapses. With someone who can set a true course for emotional living with her wicked sextant.

I have not mapped the course, only the territory, for the next one. I will confess that I am greatly surprised at feeling obliged to send this one I just finished to the mill. That urge probably has something to do with being north of fifty, and perhaps also with having entered this would-be "joyless living" chapter of life: the chapter of life in which friends are few, looks a battle, and love a memory. I did not have this feeling with my last two novels, but I do with this one.

Alors, I am wandering through life trying to kick up the magic dust that will help locate a safe-as-houses correspondent who cares a little and reads a lot; very difficult for me, for anyone to find, always. I recognize at least as much: we are blessed to have them with us when we do.

The Overnighter

JM, Taqueria on Virgil, 12.02.08

I've been away. I've been away in almost every way except in body. And even the body is barely here; it feels unusually good considering the copious amount of damage I have attempted on it of late, and I know it is merely the adrenal numbness that precedes the collapse after a marathon.

Here's why I've been away: I have been editing a novel, the second edit. Now it is ready to send somewhere, and I have chosen the first and second somewheres. No congratulations please; nothing has been accomplished. You do it for the process. You do it as a vocation, a calling, the way doctors occasionally are called to healing people.

Admittedly, a writer editing a novel is a condition very tough on humanity. For even a halfway decent job to be done, there can be nothing else that matters.

Writing a novel requires story, conflict, characters, a modestly bad habit or two, a willingness to make time to read, some self-absorbtion, and patience. Those may sound formidable, but at least they are familiar territory to most. You could do it at work; you could do it on a cruise; you could even do it sober.

Editing a novel, however, involves precision, anger, seclusion, money, outrage, gin, coffee, tequila, ransacked interiors, pianos, guitars, blocking out the sun, fasting, taquerias, emergency wards, insolent librarians, sturdy beer, six-mile walks, hours spent under the watch of sneering baristas who look like a sex change to a linebacker went bad, and enough amaretto sours, impersonating recreational activity, to satisfy the thirst of Miami Beach in winter.

Because: usually when editing a novel the proper way, you must edit it from some state of personal ruin. The reason for this is that you must be able to understand it, to comprehend it while ruined; for the only real reason your reader needs to read a book is to learn how to live in some new way. Your reader, perchance, is ruined herself; your novel, a recreational dose of useful things, offers understanding, a new path, even redemption, or, its postmodern equivalent: consolation. Though artistry and suffering may be involved, people read novels for the same reason they read fashion and seed catalogs: to see if anything is available that may fit smartly into their gardens or on their backs.

Fortunately surrendering to ruin feeds more ruin, and your downward spiral is accompanied by a frenzy of willful potlatch. Your willingness to destroy whatever it was you were trying to create is nearly total; it speeds the plow. A novel that ends up holding together is not so much edited as it is immolated. It is more phoenix than haircut.

This cannot be overstated; and those of us who have written them on two different kinds of machines know why. (This knowledge will be lost soon, maybe even in a generation, as people forget what is is to write a novel on a typewriter). To make a novel coherent and even meaningful to another intelligent unit of biomass on the planet is now no mean feat after torturing a manuscript with cut-paste-italics-bold and all the other falsely breezy items they put on these awful machines.

[Yes: when the earth was run by typewriters, a first draft was something meaningful; but it is no longer so. Now that you can swoop far ahead of your own thoughts, and even of common sense itself, first drafts are relatively meaningless. Pharmacists, coeds, strawberry pickers can now finish a first draft; even politicians can do them. But first drafts are not novels; in fact, they are usually little more than diaries that in the very best case are wistfully hoping to reach mere roman a clef status. With first drafts no longer bashed out as on a typewriter but swooped out on these too-clever-by-half machines (the terms bashed and swooped are Vonnegut's, the rare writer who was a first rate writing teacher as well), making a draft true and tight and applicable to humanity is not even on the horizon after a certain word count---it is way over there, in the far away kingdom of editing.]

So I have been away for a while, editing a novel. But now, spent, ruined, untethered, a black hole at the heart of my consciousness---I am back.

Line

JM, Gaviota, 10.17.08

Backyard

JM, Backyard, mid-Autumn, 11.03.08

A woman, a creator

JM, Lynn, 9.6.08

October 4, 2007 was a sunny day. As Lynn and I were driving down Beverly to Cedars, she said, "Look at all these people on the street just going about their ordinary day." That it would become not just the most exceptional but also the worst day of both of our lives was a possibility, and we were very tense.

We were very tense by the time the nurse called her for her surgery. Her doctor came out moments before the surgery and said, "I'm going to start it now."

It was supposed to last an hour and a half, but it lasted over four. There was no communication about how it was going. It seemed certain as each minute wore on that they had discovered cancer, and they did.

When the surgeon finally came out and informed us about what the oncologist had found and what the likely path was to be, the news simply crushed me. I felt like there was an elephant standing on my chest.

Lynn wasn't scheduled to be coherent for hours, but by the time I went in post-op, just minutes after she had been sewn up, she had already spoken to her surgeon and also learned all the recovery room names (she masters names; she never forgets one). She had already had a discussion with her surgeon about her condition; and, remarkably, she was smiling. Tired beyond anyone I had ever seen exhausted before, but smiling.

"I have cancer," she said to me, still smiling.

"It hasn't spread," I said. "Your surgeon told me all about it. You're in a good position to fight it."

"Will you get the nurse?" she asked.

I only had two minutes, and I got the nurse. I imagined she was in pain, that something felt wrong---how could it not?

But when the nurse came, Lynn simply said, "Maria, this is Joseph, my partner."

That was all she wanted; to do the right thing, to introduce me to someone she had just met. Flat on her back and amidst a tangle of tubes. As you would expect from Lynn, even when nobody else could see into any future, she was already working the room, making the connection---managing a path towards healing.

~~~

The next four days were mostly as dramatic as the time in surgery. I spent four days by her bed; Cedars gives you a cot to stay in the room. There was an emergency catscan. Blood counts were a constant worry. Dealing with Lynn's family was never more difficult.

Lynn would be obliged to enter chemotherapy as soon as possible. It would last up to six months.

~~~

We decided early on that while we aren't crusaders, we wouldn't be reticent about this malady either. We would simply talk about Lynn's ovarian cancer as another part of life; not the all controlling part, but not a trivial part either. We wouldn't dwell on it; we would give it its natural due. It seemed especially important to say things because even so few doctors have good and current information on ovarian cancer, let alone women.

One thing we've learned over the past year is that when a woman, who has been conditioned all her early life to be caring and nurturing, suddenly loses all the organs that generate life, the obvious challenge is to fight the illness; but the less obvious yet equally critical challenge is to remain fruitful, remain fertile.

Lynn baked for others when she couldn't work. She managed her friendships as though they were a great responsibility.

And she wanted to get back to work as soon as possible, especially because her work is an extension of her creative self.

She had six months of agony, attendant hair loss, and the merciless stripping away of the whole feminine side of her. Undergoing such things made her all the more determined to retain her womanhood; if it took two hours instead of half of one to make herself presentable to her own standards, two hours was what she took.

If it were raining and her blood counts were dangerously low, she went out in the rain anyway. As one friend said, "Well, you can keep worrying, but with Lynn, it's when she doesn't do things like that that you should worry."

~~~

Now, on the anniversary of her surgery date, we can't find a way to commemorate the date by doing anything other than leading an ordinary day. We'll see a friend, have pizza, maybe go to a club tonight if the weather isn't bad.

But we have also had a year to consider the one key element of her condition, and that is that many of the things that made her a woman have been taken from her.

We used to label women who could not have children things like barren or childless, implying a lack. But when everything that controls childbearing is taken away suddenly, you are obliged to live life in refutation of such arbitrary verbal stigma. She believes you need to stay fruitful; you need to stay fertile; you need to stay what you have been since ever you were a first coupling of chromosomes: a woman, to wit, a creator.

October Karma

JM, Instant Karma, San Fernando, 10.1.08

click image to enlarge
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