Election Day 2008

For me, journeys are so often solitary. I like it that way. And while I travel, a lot, most of my journeys, at least the really important ones, are internal. Meaning I do something new, think another way, question myself, try to peel back a world of illusion and deconstruct the public self, the mask.

As Yeats writes,

The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality.

The best way, I imagine, to move beyond the deception and delusion is to face it squarely in oneself head on. That is the reason for the solitary journey.

And yes, I think and talk as the rhetorician, feel as the sentamentalist. I want to think, talk feel, create, purely. But what is true, and what is real?

The poem continues...

For those that love the world serve it in action,
Grow rich, popular and full of influence,
And should they paint or write, still it is action:
The struggle of the fly in marmalade.

And yes, I want to be in the world in a way that means something, however small. Be a fly NOT stuck in marmalade. And maybe, hopefully, not just a fly.

And Yeats keeps on with...

What portion in the world can the artist have
Who has awakened from the common dream
But dissipation and despair?

I try not to get pulled into the shared delusion that exists for all of us, if we buy into it, but I don't always succeed. I don't want to wake into a world of dissipation and despair, but that is easy to do. That is why I am equal part seeker of meaningful relationships, and part hermit, with solitary journeys.

But today is different. Today the public effort and the union of individuals, the coming together of an Election Day, turns our common dream not into something of a delusion, but into something good, something real, something with meaning. Today I did not want to be apart from the world around me, but a part of it.

I was happy to see lines for the voting booths, stretching three corners around the building.


I was thrilled to join the throng, that there was jostling, that a woman called it a zoo.



I was struck by the odd Information Clerk posted amid the crowd, who quietly did his crosswords but let me go in with my dog. (I have voted in every election with her).

I was relieved that the election worker, running her finger down a long list in a spiral bound book, found my name. Spelled right.

I cheered for my Bulgarian friend, Ruslan, who only several months ago became an American citizen and was voting for the first time, arriving early to stand in line. His voting booth, he reported later, was like the portable toilet found strategically placed in Central Park. It was the perfect reflection on our election system as he informed me that even the Bulgarian Parliament votes electronically. How lucky he is, I thought, that he casts his baptismal vote in this historic election.

I was bemused to watch a zealous election volunteer take on the New York Post photographer, asking him for his permit. As Micah said, isn't the First Amendment his permit?

I was happy to take lots of pictures, so many that someone asked me if this was the first time I was voting.

I was excited to see the district 83 booth, my voting booth, topped by a series of four colored bulbs that would indicate to others outside my status during the actual voting process.

I was happy to get the full training on how to man the machine by a jolly, patient man, who told me that to properly operate the lever, one had to push fully, then pull fully, or my vote wouldn't count.

I was happy that my dog joined me behind the curtains.

And then, I stood in front of levers, and for a moment, forgot to breathe. I carefully reread the instructions, and in silence that felt almost solemn, I turned the button and pulled the lever. Fully.

After voting, I went for the traditional diner breakfast to think more about it. An act that is tangibly so small but in reality, the opposite.

This long, sunny morning was the opposite of a solitary journey for me, but held just as much meaning, and revelation. Anticipating this evening where we will all be in front of our TVs and computers, and together imagining the new morning that we will wake to - I am not doing that alone. And this journey feels great.

Maria and Evelyn take a stand

Maria is a friend of mine.  A great friend.  We went through grad school together and came out the other side.  She has a lot of amazing qualities.

And her video for Obama is another one of them.

If you want to know which one she is, she starts off the show, holding her daughter Evelyn.

If you want to know what she thinks, click below for her YouTube video.

Spitzer bumps seal

The unexpected, whiskered visitor was bumped from any news-y visibility yesterday by the tale of the governor and the prostitute.

But that may be just what the lone harbor seal wanted. Or at least it seemed happy enough, lounging on a few rocks of a pier in Red Hook, Brooklyn, after having made its (surprising) way through the New York City Harbor.

I cannot claim to know what it was thinking, but can only put forward what I learned from The Riverhead Foundation that responds to marine mammals in need around New York City, that harbor seals favor one flipper side over another and so you will see them lying to the left or the right, a flipper tucked beneath as they survey the odd, passing tugboat, garbage barge or speeding water taxi.

The hubbub of interest roused about the seal was evident in cellphone pictures taken and conversations struck between unconnected people drawn, for a moment, to something different in their daily landscape.

Seeing the winsome sea-dog was pretty unusual and one "concerned Red Hook resident" (alright, I know him), called 911. That's what happens when a New Yorker sees an animal that is not a pigeon, a dog or a rat. Or, some might argue, anything that moves and has more or less hair than itself.

The seal was quite sociable, but, like any good New Yorker, knew the value of personal space. A natural student of proxemics who can understand that sometimes Two is a Crowd, the seal beat its flipper back forth when approached, but with only a bare whoosh of old fan blades. This, again according to The Riverhead Foundation, is done to remind you that 'I have flippers, and I have claws'.

A posting of the seal video on a popular Brooklyn real estate cum community blog, Brownstoner, had many readers leaving comments that showed another primary concern of New Yorkers: geography. While your reporter was concerned that the seal "would take a wrong turn into the Gowanus Canal", one of New York City's most polluted water ways, Brownstoner commentators were equally concerned about the seal's possible landing spots, and subsequent landing prices, in Cobble Hill, Park Slope and Clinton Hill.

One lesson learned from New York City parties is to not overstay. And so, without much fuss, but an adequate amount of documentation, the seal lumphed its way downwards off the rocks and slipped into the harbor, into a world filled with both silver flashes of herrings and the fast approach of the hulls and motors of boats.

The seal surprised by being as engaging a topic as the disgraced governor and though bumped from the day's news mentions by scandal, proved as longly, and much more warmly, discussed by New Yorkers, when they heard about it, as the about-to-resign governor Elliot Spitzer.

Whether it was an "aspiring urbanite" or lost wanderer, I chose to see the seal's foray into New York City harbor as a marine reflection of my own daily swim through an equally uncertain world of pleasure and danger, survival and adventure, with an occasional rest on an unexpected pier.

And, lest anyone be fooled by seeming differences, keep in mind that it's as equally hard out there for a New York City harbor seal as it is for everyone else.

Harbor Seal swims into New York City Harbor Video
To see a video of your blogger reporting on the seal on CNN's iReporter, click below

When February 2nd is January 1st

I have returned, like a pilgrim, to the MacDowell Colony. MacDowell, a name to me almost like an incantation, is an artist’s retreat in the snowy woods of southern New Hampshire that through its fellowships to writers, composers, filmmakers, sculptors, painters, puppeteers and others offers much more than shelter – secluded cabins in the wood – and food – homemade, natural meals formed for someone who spends time thinking, trying to find the new, writing, but mainly sitting at a desk. (Unusually hungry due to strainings of the mind much more than of the body (but I am not a performance artist) one could easily get both fat and lethargic from the wrong kind of food fed to the sedentary).

It’s a place for the arts, a community of artists, “the only place,” a writer said recently, somewhat tearfully and with terrifying conviction, “where I have ever felt fully that my art mattered. And was totally supported.”

To which I utter a loud, internal Yes.

I’ve come to MacDowell to begin editing a documentary film I shot with Micah in Iraq, and to write.

With every routine and all geography built around one thing - creating a place where the artist can be – MacDowell is still very much what one makes of it.

My favorite MacDowell rule, and the only one (though these things are more a code of conduct), is that you cannot go to anyone’s cabins uninvited. (A total reversal of that revered rural practice of “come on in, anytime.”) Even the lunch basket, delivered daily, is left quietly outside and without a knock, a rare respect for the narrative difficulties and syntaxic struggles going on behind that closed cabin door.

When you work at home, when you are working on something “artistic”, a strange thing happens to the otherwise well-regarded convention of the closed office door. There are phone calls, interruptions, poppings-in. Somehow, it seems, if you are not in a suit and behind a glass with your title stenciled to it, you are not really working. And that’s not the worst of it. The call of the everyday and the world at my fingertips (yes, wireless plus internet) create the best distractions for me if I’ve moved from my bed to my desk (which may be the sofa that morning) in under 20 seconds and am sitting with my computer in my still-warm-from-sleep pajamas. I interrupt myself.

No internet and no phones are in the cabin. You can’t reach anyone, they can’t reach you.

Just me, my computer, my thoughts. And me.

There is no easy avoidance.

Coming to MacDowell is, for me, the beginning, artistically, of the new year, with all of its promises, however grand, and the dogged discipline with which one faces new beginnings and second chances.




In “January First”, an Octavio Paz poem translated by Elizabeth Bishop, Paz writes

Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
Once more,
The reality of this world.

Here, it is clear. The reality of this world is not the madness I create outside – trying to do everything at once (also known as multi-tasking, once a highly regarded skill, now seen as a possible hang-up or a problem with delegating) and please all the people I want to be happy - or the difficulties I always seem to be dealing with – deadlines, bills, a rushed visit to the vet. And in greatest paradox, in life and work efforts that seem to be all about me, I find myself totally effaced, and cannot create. But here - in the silent but for the winds, the ice-cracking and the gentle lope of some searching animal, woods, where I sit, in peace, in quiet, away - in the mirror of solitude, I start to see me.

The day had invented you
But you hadn’t yet accepted
Being invented by the day.
-Nor possibly my being invented either.
You were in another day.

The real mantra for the artist, I have come to think, is not to live in a world created by others, but to create a world for others.

When you open your eyes
We’ll walk, once more,
Among the hours and their inventions.
We’ll walk among appearances
And bear witness to time and its conjugations.

At MacDowell, I realize (and what a heady, active verb that is) that if I can create my world, I can create art. (And what a heady presumption!) At least create.

Perhaps we’ll open the day’s doors.
And then we shall enter the unknown.

To open my cabin door, not because I have to answer a knock or rush out, but open it into a day of my own making - that is what I hope to make of my time at MacDowell.

The day is unknown, but desired; desired to be known, and possibly, tenaciously, created.

Happy (artistic) New Year.

Peterborough, NH, 6 February 2007, 4 days into my fellowship

Decamped

I'm never sure how to answer the simple, making-polite-conversation question "Where are you from?", much to the interlocuter's dismay.

It's a long answer that's a short story, and as I try to spare my listener that still unedited version, I fumble on finding the highlights. Birthplace, identity, kindergarden class, nationality? What do these question-askers want to know? More to the point, what do I want to say?

It's a decamping and rerooting story that starts in Beirut and an apartment across from Palestinian camps, to New York,
and current campings-out in the apartments of patient friends who like dogs.

Summing myself up is no easy task, only because there's so much unknown and no defined boundaries. I'm still walking the path of self-discovery, and claim all the stops along the way, however random. Not just one fits, and they all stick in some way. It makes for some uncomfortably-existential small talk.

More on the messy ponderings later.

An even more common question is "Where do you live?" Though still rooted to New York City by an address and its correspondingly tall, thin, aluminum mailbox with an ill-fitting key, a subletted studio apartment whose awkward confines I've fled, and weekly returns down the autumnal Taconic Parkway for work, the answer is: Upstate. In an old salt-box house with a frog-hosting pond in the back.

More on that new, temporary home later.

I'm not the only one who's decamped recently. Chantal, my sister, has left Bloomington and her teaching duties at the University of Indiana, for Paris, and other, newer teaching duties at La Sorbonne.

Having crossed the larger pond, Chantal is more than yet another American in Paris. First, she's also French. Her journey is defined not only by exile, but also by return to an identity, a French self, perhaps best known until now through its strongly lived reflection in our mother, herself a cosmopolitan and traveler, whose French identity is more strongly lived every year, and whose French accent is more strongly defined, sharp and rolling, like a good vintage, every year, favorites you can't really chose among.

Chantal's a teacher, and a student, writing about exile while being, in part, in exile herself, and teaching a group of French graduate students about exilic literature.

But maybe I'm giving too much away. An introduction should tantalize yet not satiate. In preparation, I've been reading other dispatches, among them Janet Flanner's "Letters from Paris" written for the New Yorker magazine, starting when it was brand new.



Because I always love a backstory, and because I'm always imminently curious about how writers' writing find a home and a platform, (and from there shine a light on my search) I'll include the path for Janet Flanner's "Letters" into the New Yorker.

As readers, we can thank the wife of the New Yorker's editor, and a now obscure, yet not defunct organization that fought for women to preserve their maiden names after marriage. Jane Grant, Harold Ross' (editor of the New Yorker) wife, was friends with Flanner through the Lucy Stone League, of which they were both members.



I bring up Flanner because she is a predecessor, but not a parallel. Not sure whether Chantal's dispatches will be more personal journalism or literary blog, public pronouncement or intimate letter, or a little bit of all, or none of these and something entirely different, I'm eagerly awaiting her dispatches from Paris, of which I've gotten snippets through strangely bad phone connections. She's found a new home in an old arrondissement. Perhaps all you need to know is that her apartment is in an old building, rue Geoffroy St. Hilaire, has a concierge. I know there's a story there, for starters.

Welcome to Paris, Chantal.

In her last letter

I remembered, vaguely, a small pile of Dad’s visiting cards forgotten in the back of the third-down, hard-to-open drawer of his old bureau. The bureau had been evacuated with us from Beirut, in 1975, when “the troubles” began, and arrived by steamship to our new home in Florida. I’d open the drawers late at night, quietly, to try and look into a past that was mine, but unknown.

Last week, by email, I asked Mom for a few of them. She wrote, by mail, enclosing two.

“As you’ve requested, here are two of Dad’s visiting cards. Remark the printing is in relief”.

I ran my finger over the small, block letters. The restrained sentences in her short letter exposed her long, quiet grief over Dad’s death, almost 30 years ago. Her attention to that detail and gentle imperative told me she had admired his vision of things, his aesthetic choices, and rediscovered them on this small piece of thick paper stock.

The simplicity of the design was powerful. I loved the font, and the slightly-raised lettering, black, with a dark-blue sheen. I tried to imagine him standing at a printer’s shop in another country, selecting it, and carrying it about in his jacket pocket, or perhaps even a case just for that purpose. The card was something of his I could hold, but entirely an enigma.

With no idea of how to use visting cards, or even how they were used, I opened (for the first time) a 1922 edition of Emily Post’s “Etiquette”. Chapter X is simply titled “Cards and Visits” and I took a dizzying walk into a labyrinthine, and perhaps thankfully bygone time of complex codes of behavior.




Skimming over “HOW TO ENTER A ROOM”

The way not to enter a drawing-room is to dart forward and then stand awkwardly bewildered and looking about in every direction. A man of the world stops at the entrance of the room for a scarcely perceptible moment, until he perceives the most unencumbered approach to the hostess, and he thereupon walks over to her

(but I sometimes amble in, and certainly often dart; awkward is not unknown to me)

and “HOW TO SIT GRACEFULLY”

…one should not perch stiffly on the edge of a straight chair, nor sprawl at length in an easy one. The perfect position is one that is easy, but dignified. … An arm a-kimbo is not a graceful attitude, nor is a twisted spine!

(but for me, comfort and good conversation are synonymous),

In the next section, I found a resonating tenor with the design of Dad’s card.

A Card's Size and Engraving

The engraving most in use to-day is shaded block. Script is seldom seen, but it is always good form and so is plain block, but with the exception of old English all ornate lettering should be avoided.



The personal card is in a measure an index of one’s character. A fantastic or garish note in the type effect, in the quality or shape of the card, betrays a lack of taste in the owner of the card.

Surely Dad would laugh at all this, and wasn’t following Chapter X, but his own taste and expression of his personal flair. Maybe with inherited, societal, sensibilities. Perhaps the simple style had a distinctly American flavor.

This flavor would be at odds with “Chambers’ Book of Days”, an 1872 book whose subtitle includes the alluring invitation “A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities…and Curiosities and Oddities of Human Life and Character”.



Under “Visiting Cards of the 18th Century” Robert Chambers, social historian, writes that:

From the lady of fashion…to the man of business, and even the postman, who presents his card on Christmas-day morning, these little square bits of card-board have become an established institution of polite society. The last century has, however, left us an example of how to make these trifles matters of taste and art.



The good, quiet, moral society of Vienna, Dresden, and Berlin, in which, according to contemporary historians, it was so pleasant to live, piqued itself upon its delicacy of taste; and instead of our insipid card, with the name and quality of the visitor printed upon it, it distributed real souvenirs, charming vignettes, some of which are models of composition and engraving.

He offers examples of the un-insipid and the charming.

The lost artists of etiquette comment on the lost art of practicing etiquette, and diplomatically refer to contemporary times as an “era of informality”, their kind way of saying we’ve not only trashed, but abandoned, the rules of civilized society.

Almost, but not quite.

I’m not clear on the use of visting cards, today. Or even in the past "era of formality". There are flashes of scenes that include butlers in overstarched waistcoasts proferring silver trays whisked away on silent footsteps to the inner world of a drawing room. Thank PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre for that. Not what Dad would have used them for in hot, dusty streets of Lebanon, not matter how much Beirut was a Paris to its Middle East.

I don’t know yet how he used them, but intend to find out. In part by using them myself.

I drove, with the old visiting card carefully placed in an envelope, to the best printer in town, (well, it is upstate and there is only one within a drivable radius, but I was comforted to see that the Hudson Chamber of Commerce had bestowed on him “Best Business Man of the Year, 2006”) and held out the card. “Same design, exactly, please, but with my name.”

Some analyses later (“…font, looks like century expanded, old-style thermography, unusual size, definitely not American business card size…”) I left the card behind with promises I’d exacted from the father-son printing team it would be handled carefully.

I’m not sure where I’ll use the card, or how useful it will be, with only the naked, bold statement of my name standing out in relief. I’ll let you know. But it will draw out conversation, and memories of Dad.

The card is more than something of his, it is something of him.

Letter to N.Y. by Elizabeth Bishop

For Louise Crane


In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road gose round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so teribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

--Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.