“After lunch, I went back to my library novel on the living room sofa, glancing every now and then at the telephone. What were we supposed to understand about each other in ten minutes? What can two people understand about each other in ten minutes?
Category Archives: Blog
Dad Worked The Railroad
Really listen to people’s stories. Get the hell out of your own way and listen. Take down every word, everything that’s “messed up” or “doesn’t sound right”. Let there be awkward silence and open spaces. Let the person speak. You just write. Then step back. You’ll have something amazing and the piece will have, more or less, written itself. It’s the Shake-n-Bake of writing exercises and I stand by it every time. Tonight I interviewed my Dad.
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Gogol and the “Credible Nose”
Yesterday was Nikolai Gogol’s birthday, born 1809. When he was about 20, the Russian writer spent his time running around St. Petersburg trying to land a civil service job. But he dreamed of writing poems and stories. So he self-published a piece he had worked on for years.
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To Have and To Hold
To Die Alone
I went walking down the street on Friday afternoon with a friend who was lamenting his love life, or the dim prospect of the demise of his love life. This makes no sense because his love life is in tiptop shape. The one he has can’t imagine life without him. I have this on very good information. But in the vein of “anything can happen” he added: “I look at you and I’m like, oh my god, am I going to die alone too?”
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Yes, The Bejeweled Shower Shoe
Ooooh I love a truly ridiculous purchase. Nothing staves off work– real work– which can include defrosting the freezer or removing crud from the gutters or re-grouting the kitchen sink or lesson planning or just putting paid to the dirt of a new poem, yes, real work, nothing staves it off like a ludicrous purchase.
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Mouthing an Anguished “BUTTER”
After careful consideration and no small amount of research—four biographies read, the collected letters, her later and lesser works—I have purchased a hardcover copy of Julia Child et al’s seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
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Taking a Wee Trip to Booneville
Meaning to do some work today to really do some work: writing, a few things on Kafka who died at 40 from a thing we now can and all should (speaking from experience) survive, TB.
Followed by a submission, even, for a friend whose poetry publishing business is getting well and truly off the ground in admirable fashion, and then a good deal of progress to be made on a new novel, seeing as the last and the last and the one before that, ach, they have all amounted to sawdust and spit even as we know such things, too, are necessary and must be celebrated in their own way but not here, not here. No.
Well. No matter! It is the birthday, you see, of once and former frontiersman Daniel Boone, born on the 2nd of November in 1734 near Reading, Pennsylvania and the following gets my vote, at least for today, for the time being, for the best quote of all time, for it is seeing me through and helping to assuage assorted noxious notions of guilt and pause for wandering, however necessary all wandering is and always will be:
“I have never been lost,” Boone once said, “but I will admit to being confused for several weeks.”
Viva Le Franklin!
Thrilling to find ourselves square on the 26th of October once more, a crisp autumn day indeed and the 238th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s departure for France. He took two grandsons with him and left behind a nation in the throes of revolution. Once ashore, the former first Postmaster General became the first US Ambassador to France.
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A Propensity to Fight
Tonight I heard an early music concert at St. Mary’s Church in the center of Manhattan. It was all polyphony and exquisite arrangements, the pulpit lit only by candles and whatever light managed to stream through the towering stained glass windows. As a hush fell over the crowd and we waited for the first lofty notes, I swear a small fistfight broke out in front of me. Why? People of New York—why? The hell is going on here?
And don’t be fooled by gender assumptions, these were two women. The first vaulted across the dim, now shattered, silence a stern “Get your HANDS off my BAG”. The second screeched something back that I did not catch. The exchange, however indecipherable, continued, heightened, escalated, rolled to a breaking point, resulted in removal. It was tense, hardcore, and frankly nonsense. Here we are, about to listen to some of the most extraordinary music of the 17th century, and people can’t hold it down for even a minute.
I love this town but I hate this stuff, each and every angry interaction that is so much a part of living cheek to jowl, day after day, week after week. I sat down alone tonight in the center of a beautiful space, utterly hungry to be transfixed by the power of the human voice and the haunting reverie of its arrangement. Before 20 seconds were up, I was returned to the worst of our lives—the propensity for petty exchange, the readiness to be wronged. Damn.
But you know, I’m no different. The pressure and pound of this place has been bleeding into my veins of late. I see fistfights in my job now, either in my classroom or elsewhere in the school. Last night I went out with a bunch of close friends from my days in Jakarta, not a city known for its light touch. I remembered thinking as I left Jakarta for New York several years ago that my new city would be a cakewalk because, you know, Jakarta.
Not so. New York, for all its impossibility of housing and trenchant kill when it comes to getting around, is harder. Everything is twenty times more expensive and there’s twenty times less of it. My friends laughed when I told them that my first utterance the other morning had been to a person on the subway and is unpublishable. Who is that? Who have I become?
They shook their heads. Yeah, they said. It’s just what this place does to you.
Maybe what this place does to me is not what I want to do to me. I’m running more, escaping more, going away more, listening more, disappearing more. I am feeling my heart beat in my one thin chest more. I see fistfights more and, despite the fact that I’m the daughter of a man with two detached retinas—the product of his own fighting days—I am shirking away.
I like a light touch. I prefer peace to war. I am grateful for night and the heavy weight of blankets, the silence of an empty street. When I dream, I see the ocean. But when I wake, I can hardly remember.
Caroline M Cooper 