History

The three most unlikely sentences of my life:

My father in law fought at Guadalcanal.
Fresh out of high school, my husband's uncle worked on the Manhattan Project.
As a child my mother in law used to play with Shirley Temple.

History isn't history - it's close and palpable.

By contrast my own history seems bleached, leached, and empty.

Is it the massive documentation of the Americans in WW2, the doccos, the movies, the books and doccos and movies about the development and invention of the atomic bomb (which is the final image of that war, not the bombing of London or Dresden, nor the piled and walking skeletons of the camps)?

Is this bleach of memory another facet of empire, anything local overwritten by the Cold War and its genesis at Almagordo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the vivid nuclear nightmare of forty years - my own nightmare since the Korean War?

Is it the goddam silver screen, and our theatres bought and closed and replaced by chains and contracts for American films, American tv product dumped overseas, another massive cultural overwriting...

Or is this fading into white created by being far away, on the southern edge of the Pacific, never a major actor in the world's great events (disasters though they be), a colony of another, previous empire of dominant images, with a colonial past we don't dare remember?

Arundhati Roy Speaks of Our Fridge

The fridge died sometime Sunday afternoon. Stuff in the freezer was melting. There was no running sound.

This had happened several times over the life of this particular fridge. It was 8 years old when it died on January 15.

The life-span of a refrigerator used to be between 20 and 30 years. (Remember The Secret Life of Machines?)

Since this was Sunday afternoon and Green Bin Day wasn't till Tuesday, we had to throw out anything that might have been damaged wholly or partially by defrosting or wholly or partially by de-cooling. Between $200 and $400 dollars' worth of groceries. Between one and two thirds of a week's net income for the household. This had happened at least twice a year for 8 years, and after the 3rd year Amana refused to reimburse us for the losses.

We emptied the freezer first.

Frozen tacos, chicken-legs, ice-cream, ice-cream bonbons (for my birthday the night before); buffalo burgers, chicken legs, frozen sections of Italian loaves, & French baguettes (for toasting later), the ice-packs for strains & muscular treatments.

Then the fridge. Half and half, non-dairy hazelnut vanilla, butter, olives, artichoke hearts, salami, brie, cheddar jack, pancetta, bread, English muffins, tortillas, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, chili sauce, vinaigrette, balsamic vinegar, peanut butter, almond butter, cranberry spread, pumpkin butter spread, English muffins, corn tortillas, flour tortillas, As the contents went down the sink or into the Green Bin I almost began to cry.

Greek olives, Italian salami and pancetta — all that work, growing them pickling them pimento-ing them transporting them, unpacking them stocking them storing them — all those ships across all those seas, all those trucks across all those mountains, along all those valleys — all that history and effort. The whole world was going down that drain.

The Amana: $1600. Around two weeks' gross income for the household.
The new Frigidaire: $1500. Around two weeks' gross income for the household.

Between them a month's gross income. This year we will donate a twelfth of our income to large corporations for products which have, in the first case, already proven to be — what, glossy rubbish? A waste of time, energy, steel, and oil, of the ships and the lives of all who made & moved the food, and all who bought it to prepare and cook it to eat.

And in order to enable the continuing production this glossy rubbish, civil wars are being fought in India, warlords are running slave-mines in Africa... And the question — whether corporations will permit any mindset but their own to survive — goes on walking through the Adivati resistance movements of India, and the loss of habitat everywhere.

Walking with the Comrades, Arundhati Roy, Penguin Books, New York, 2012

How to Measure Inflation

Around 2006, on payday, I'd write the cheques & pay the bills. I'd feel accomplished and relaxed for about a week. Then I'd feel in need of another payday, get more and more anxious as the bank-account approached zero. Don't spend any more, I'd say to the other half of the household. Just. Don't.

We still eat cheaply, go nowhere, drive our old clunkers to the same job and the same supermarkets.

But now, on payday, when I write the cheques & pay the bills, I relax for - well, I can't. I look at the bankbook and the distance from now till the next red dot on the calendar, and just go into constant, quiet, low-level alarm.

Lyric Prose

Lyric prose is supple, nuanced, accurate, exact; it is grounded, it illuminates.

This is lyric prose:

From the Fosseway westward to Isca Dumnoniorum the road was simply a British trackway, broadened and roughly metalled, strengthened by corduroys of logs in the softest places, but otherwise unchanged from its old estate, as it wound among the hills, thrusting farther and farther into the wilderness.

This is lyric prose:

With the coming of dusk the rain had stopped, but a mist had risen, creeping knee-high through the trees so that they stood like ghosts, and the grazing horse floated like a swan. It was a grey, and more than ever ghostly because it grazed so quietly; he had torn up a scarf and wound fragments of cloth around the bit so that no jingle should betray him. The bit was gilded, and the torn strips were of silk, for he was a king's son. If they caught him they would have killed him. He was just eighteen.

Lyric prose is a horse.

This:

Ellie gawked like a child, unironic. She remembered something from schooldays: Janus, with his two faces, is the god of bridges, since bridges look both ways and are always double. There was the limpid memory of her schoolteacher, Miss Morrison, drawing Janus on a blackboard, her inexpert, freckled hand trailing the chalk line of two profiles. With her back to the class there was a kind of pathos to her form. She had thickset calves and a curvature of the spine and the class would have snickered in derision, had it not been for her storytelling, which made any image so much less than the words it referred to. Roman God: underlined. The Janus profiles not matching. A simple image on a blackboard snagged at her feelings and Ellie had loved it because it failed, because there was no mirror and no symmetry. And because the sight of Miss Morrison's firm calves always soothed and reassured her.

is a hippopotamus.

---------------------

1 - Sutcliff, Rosemary, The Eagle of the Ninth, 1954, the first paragraph. There is the startling and exact "corduroys". The last clause "thrusting farther and farther into the wilderness" lays out the first half of the main action of the novel. The repeated "farther" plants the motion of "far" strongly in the mind of the reader, giving a sense of depth to the landscape and the reality of the setting.

2 - Stewart, Mary, The Crystal Cave, 1970, from the Prologue. "Betray" introduces the notions not only of danger but also, literally, betrayal. This is leads directly into "would have killed him".

3 - Jones, Gail, Five Bells, 2011, from chapter 1.The paragraph is 9 sentences long and contains 3 framing devices for the central image of Miss Morrison at the blackboard. ("She gawked" "She remembered" "There was the limpid memory".) They alone account for a lot of this paragraph's herkey-jerkyness. The phrasing of "And because the sight of Miss Morrison's firm calves always soothed and reassured her" is imitation middle-period White; it draws attention to itself as an imitation because there is nothing else to counter-balance or be seen or weighed against it. The answer to the question (of why Miss Morrison's calves reassured) is simultaneously raised and suppressed; nothing is either resolved or deliberately left hanging. Every sentence whipsaws between the abstract and the concrete, with no link to what comes next except the bluntly explicit.

"There was the limpid memory of her schoolteacher..." We had been lead to believe that we were in Ellie's mind, and yet "limpid" in that position reminds us that we are not; Ellie's limpidity is more limpid than ours - the memory is over there, not here. "... made any image so much less than the words it referred to" is a stunningly awkward construction.

---------------------

This wouldn't irritate me nearly so much if Five Bells weren't being universally touted for its lyric prose, when its prose isn't lyric.

A Strange Case of Truth in Advertising

As we were unloading the car for the Gobshite launch, I happened to look up and see a - drop-down, vinyl? - banner on the building at the end of the street. Two sports heroes, one black, one white. The banner was huge, so the faces were larger, even, than the heads of statues of Lenin in the Central Asian provinces of the Soviet Union. The further from Moscow, the larger the statues: in Central Asia and Mongolia Lenin was, iconographically, a god.

I was surprised, but I haven't been downtown for a long time. The images might have been there quite a while.

The festivities finished. We left in full dark. And there they were, lit by streetlights: the gods of the night and the city. 

Night so much bigger than the other gods.

In the playback screen there was a white streak in the centre of a dark area, where I wasn't expecting one. I looked at the banner again, to see exactly what had happened to the camera I can't afford to repair.

There were strips of white light at intervals through the length of the black man's face - neon night-lights on the ceilings of the various floors the banner covers; under the banner - beneath the face, in terms of the photo - the lights continued on their way, obeying the laws of perspective.

Two brooding gods of the city. Both their tenures will be brief: sports careers are. But the godhead of the young black man is revealed as hollow, even while it's still his.

Tell the FAA

Well, yeah: but every one of these petitions

1) assumes & reinforces the idea of American exceptionalism
2) is written at a low middle-school reading-level
3) is couched, verbally & emotionally, as protecting small children from potential owies

I've signed it. I always do. But then I puke.

The Myth of Balance

It’s been clear to me for a very long time that my body and mind move in very long cycles of writing, not writing, or writing first muddles and drafts of complex things and then refining them, also over a long time. It is even more clear to me now that I've moved into another one of these periods of assembling the basic material for something new.

At work we have an employee program run by fellow-employee volunteers, called the work / life balance program. My HMO also recommends work / life balance and runs, sometimes, free classes for those of us having difficulty finding time for our actual lives.

It has escaped their notice however that jobs – such as are left to us – are not structured to accommodate this kind of cycle. And as long as the economy uses the employment / income model of roughly the last hundred years, they won't be.

There is no balance possible when I need a month or two to concentrate on what I’m doing – not because I'm a poncy pretentious artist, but because my mind cannot be in two modes at once. When I'm in this phase and totally preoccupied I can barely do arithmetic, let alone the myriad things I need to do to stay competent at my job.

This complete mind-fog is part of my fundamental cycle.

There is no balance possible. The job takes precedence: I have to earn our livings, housing, food, clothing, medical care.

It's very likely that most of what I feel ready to produce will never be completed, or maybe even begun.

Just don't tell me it's because I lack time-management skills.

The notion that work of originality or depth can be done without something close to total immersion – that promulgated, amplified, prettified, zen-veneered, pietistic, blame-shifting, money- and interest-laden notion – is false from top to toe.

It's (another piece of) industrial propaganda.