Tom Robbins, author of such books as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume, has a unique style of building books and storylines. He adds subplots that seem to be unrelated to the main story, or tangential to the theme as diversions and comic relief. Readers familiar with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues will recognize his absurdist chapter breaks, but those who aren’t fans of his work find it off-putting that he doesn’t keep his stories on track.

In Still Life With Woodpecker, he developed at least two subplots that seemed totally unrelated to the story. One subplot, the illustrations on a pack of filterless Camel cigarettes, found its way into the main plot towards the end of the book and gave the main character a revelation that was necessary for the plot’s resolution. The other subplot, that of his difficulties with using an electric typewriter while writing the book, he used to illustrate what I think is an important development in the evolution of modern English writing style.

English has become mechanistic. Various composition teachers have coached me that, in order for my readers to engage in my points, I must follow a trend towards simplification and reduce my use of flowery and poetic language. I remember discussing the work of William Styron in his books Sophie’s Choice and The Confession of Nat Turner and how I love the way that his language flows so that the reader is enveloped in the story. The person with whom I was discussing it complained that Styron has tendency to show off his vocabulary, to “use a fifty-cent word when a ten-cent word will do.”

I was puzzled by this response, frankly. My goal has always been to stretch my vocabulary when both reading and writing. I love the use of words and the play of sentence structure, and I find that my favorite writers have the ability to clarify complex concepts both fictional and factual by pulling in words and phrases that are not in the common vernacular of everyday English. Styron is one of those writers who drives me occasionally to the dictionary but more often teaches me new vocabulary using context.

This is where reading is fun for me, and writing for you is more challenging.

The tools of writing have changed rapidly since the middle of the 19th century and the development of keyboards to convey thoughts. We use a keyboard layout designed specifically to inhibit the speed of typing. Early typewriter designers found that skilled typists were typing faster than the strikers could handle, so keys frequently jammed. The layout that we have on the QWERTY keyboard places the most commonly used letters in English on the left, so that right-handed typists are slightly shackled.

Tickling a Writer's Muse

Prior to the development of typewriters, people wrote by hand. The process of writing was directly connected to the person and the paper. Yes, it was tedious. Yes, people with poor penmanship (I’m looking at you, Andrew Jackson!) were often handicapped in communicating. It seems to me, though, that because writers were more closely connecting their thoughts to the paper, they were more expressive. They had a “feel” for what they were writing, and it seems to me that quill pens had something to do with that.

Classical literature reads as though the words and language had been “tickled” from the writer by the feather of the quill. When I read “The Lady of Shalott,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, I imagine him at a writing desk with a goose quill pen in hand deliberating to come up with these two stanzas:

Only reapers, reaping early,
In among the bearded barley
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly;
Down to tower’d Camelot;
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers, ” ‘Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.”

There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.

In my observation, modern writing has lost that tickle and tease in the effort to push writing into a crammed little box of clarity for the most common reader.  In the mix of journalistic and business writing, we are taught to reduce our verbiage and to let the reader skim the works while still getting the full gist of our themes and plots.  Cut back! Clarify!  Stop with the flowery phrases!

I have found that this has had an effect on my own writing.  Not only in the essays and posts I write here, but in the poems I write.  I struggle to make them romantic, or to convey the depth of my meaning.  I write with a keyboard, and I have instant feedback and I can backspace as I need to but I am afraid that the “teasing” is remote and I am dragging the muse along pissing and moaning as I use Blunt Force English.

I have a hard time shifting writing styles between what is needed for work and what is needed for creating more interesting pieces, such as those I write for Quiche Moraine, or even the poetry I write.  My vocabulary has shrunk as I seek similes.  Perhaps I need to go back to writing by hand.

Towards the conclusion of Still Life With Woodpecker, Robbins the writer has added Robbins the writer as a character who has gotten fed up with using a fancy new electric typewriter because it doesn’t give him the language that he needs. He had already discarded his manual typewriter, and so he finishes the book with handwriting.  He is satisfied with the way he has become a writer again.

My birthday is a the end of August.  A quill pen is on my wishlist, as are writing tablets.

Page’s first feature-length film was the comedy Newton’s Disease, in which Ana has a role, incidentally. Both Newton’s Disease and God Rocked, which are very different films, have received critical acclaim.

Even more recently, I received from Analiese a review copy of Page’s latest film, White Man’s World (trailer). This is a mockumentary staring Jason Page as his own altered ego, a filmmaker with an opinion of himself high enough to pass out from lack of oxygen. In the film, Page is stunned by the utter failure of his previous movie and comes on the idea that the way to become famous is to make a film about blacks. Or gays. Or somebody. Eventually, Page settles on Native Americans of the Duluth area, but encounters problem after problem, mainly owning to his own abysmal lack of understanding of native culture and society. He seeks teepees and finds condos. He wants to film loincloth-wearing red men spearing salmon in the wild but gets a guy with a PhD in conservation biology who fishes with a really nice graphite fishing rod when he’s not in the lab analyzing data. And so on.

So, Ana and I got talking and decided it would be a good idea if I interviewed Jason as part of my blogging about the film, and Jason, on hearing this, suggested that if I wanted to, I might interview him in character, as the Jason Page of White Man’s World. So I did. We met in a hotel room in Saint Paul. Ana was there. I intended to film the interview with my Flip, but the batteries ran out and I only got 23 seconds. My questions for Jason roughly followed the film’s plot. Where he could, he acted as a pompous ass. Where I could, I asked him leading questions. Where she could, Ana avoided LOLing from her nearby seat.

The result of the interview is this essay at Greg Laden’s Blog on Scienceblogs.com. If you read the essay, I’d like you to know that almost exactly fifty percent of what is stated or implied is accurate. The other fifty percent is not. For instance, there really were several police cars, lights flashing, driving across the median of Highway 100 at the Excelsior Ave exit, causing all the cars on the on-ramp to pull over (even though the cops were not driving down the on-ramp; they were going cross-country). However, it is NOT true that I drove my Humvee past all the cars that had pulled over. I’m not saying whether there were donuts involved in this police action or not. Someone really did kill the koi but the details and the implication of who did it are made up. And so on.

A few elements of the essay will be fully understood only by a reader who has seen God Rocked (that is the “singer” link) or White Man’s World, or who have been a fly on the wall at one time or another when Ana and I have been hanging out. So, watch both films and then buy Ana or me a beer at our favorite place on Eat Street to get all the details.

Jason’s biography and information about his films can be found here.

By the way, God Rocked is now available on Netflix. So watch it. I also strongly recommend getting anyone two, or three, of these films as a Christmas Gift!

The music was interesting and a dozen or more models moved a couple at a time out onto the open stage area, walked around and sometimes did things to make the crowd laugh or scream, and then walked into the back room to change and return a few minutes later. Nine clothing designers designed about 90 accessorized sets of clothing in the Sabbath Fashion Event on Friday Night at the Bedlam.

I am something of a fashion expert myself, which is why I was there.

Well, okay, I hope you were not drinking hot coffee for that last sentence. I am nothing like a fashion expert, and I had never been to a fashion show in my life. Indeed, I made note that I was going to a fashion show earlier in the day when I was with Ana (who, as you know, is an actress and model) and mentioned my plans for the evening.

“Oh, I’m going to that fashion show tonight.”

“I’m sorry I can’t make it. I’ve got this thing at First Avenue.”

“Right. I’ve never been to a fashion show before.”

“It’s a bunch of girls in clothes,” she said, saying it as though it was an aphorism from the industry, like this is what models call the thing.

“Hmmm….. I’m totally out of my league here, aren’t I?”

I had had a long day. To bed late the night before, up before the sun in the morning, building shelving for a few hours, a lot of writing, a grueling interview, and there I was in Saint Paul, emotionally drained physically tired and with nothing to do for three and a half hours, I decided to go home before heading back into town to see the fashion show.

One of the nine women in the show is my friend, Lizzie. Without that important fact being true I would not have known about the show, and I would have had little inclination to go to it. I remember when Lizzie told me that this was going to happen, back when she first found out. She was both excited and unsure. There was not a lot of time. The designers seemed intent on setting a very high standard for themselves, artistically and in terms of number of items to produce. About ten designers would produce about one hundred items. Dark Dark Dark, the band, one of Lizzie’s favorites, would do the music. It would be at The Bedlam, a popular local place that started out as a punk venue and has evolved into a…well, a post-punk venue.

Lizzie has a full-time job and had made a lot of other commitments recently. In fact, she told me about the show with a little bit of reticence. She knew that I knew that she was already overextended, and suddenly she was adding in a major commitment like this. At first it was almost like she didn’t want to tell me, but of course she did. We have a tacit deal with each other, Lizzie and I. There is never a cost paid between us for anything either of us says, thinks, or does. In other words, no judging. Just listening and anything else the other person needs. No owing. So I listened, and figured things would work out however they worked out, but mostly, I sensed right away that this was something that she really, really, really wanted to do, and in some really important way, needed to do.

“I trust my own ability to garner enormous bursts of energy after days of procrastination,” Lizzie had once said to me. And it turns out that those are words you can take to the bank.

So weeks went by. I’d check in now and then, and there was always progress, always excitement, always some consternation that it not be done in time, always an expression of belief that it would be possible.

So on my way home on Friday, exhausted after this long day and all that, I gave Amanda a call to let her know I was coming home and what my plans were.

“So, I’m on my way home.”

“Oh, okay, I’m at Dad’s. Getting free food and avoiding the rush hour.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a few hours, so I figured I’d go home before Lizzie’s thing tonight.”

“Okay.”

“And, to be honest, that probably means I won’t go. By ten o’clock, I’ll be ready for bed. I don’t know who I’m fooling, thinking I’m going back into town tonight,” being very realistic, almost responsibly realistic.

“Well, okay, either way is fine with me.”

And by the time I folded up the phone, one part of me was already whacking the other part of me upside the head.

“WTF, man? Are you seriously thinking about NOT going to this? ” Whack.

“Huh? Well, I’m kinda tired…”

Whack. “Tired? Do you think Lizzie would let being tired stop her from going to YOUR thing?”

“Well, no, actually, she’d go to my thing. Maybe I’ll have a cup of coffee and–”

“Maybe?” …whack… “Maybe have a cup of coffee? Seriously?????”

“No, I will. I will have a cup of coffee, and I’ll go back into town.”

“You better go back into town. Don’t make me whack you up side the head again, man.”

Whack.

“Okay, okay, I get it. Leave me alone….”

And so, of course, we went, I mean, I went back into town, to The Bedlam. On my first pass there was no place to park nearby, and a line halfway around the block to get in. Holy crap, that’s a good sign. On my second pass, I failed to find a place to put the car within three blocks of the place. Finally, on my third pass, I put the car in a pay lot and walked on over to the show.

I never did see much. I could barely see the fashions themselves, but I was able to enjoy the music. I especially enjoyed the reaction of the crowd. Instead of seeing the girls in clothes displaying the ninety products of the nine designers, I watched the faces of about fifteen people who were seated across the stage area with an excellent view of the show. From their expressions I could judge what was happening, imagine the antics of the models, and overall understand that this thing was being a great success. All nine of the designers seem to have hit their mark.

During a break, I chatted with Tom, a mutual friend of Lizzie’s. Just as I was starting to assume that Lizzie was unlikely to appear in the public arena (she must have been very busy backstage) there she was. Hmm. New color hair. Dressed like one of her models in her own design. Brightly glowing. Grinning from ear to ear. Beautiful.

This is what she said:

“I’m so happy.”

She said that about a thousand times. The months, the worry, the work, the concern that it would not work out, the caring, the creativity, the trouble. It was nothing. It was just happiness.

I guess it would not have mattered if the bartenders were standing on the bar or not and if there was a line around the block or not as long as Lizzie felt this way at the end. It was obviously worth whatever it took. The fact that the show was a spectacular success was icing, because I know that Lizzie’s happiness was about what she did, not what everyone thought of what she did. Well, maybe her happiness was from that too. And her happiness is my happiness, so I was kind of grinning a lot all weekend.

I am currently reading a book called The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them, edited by Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen. As the title explains, this slender book is compiled of (short) essays by well-known writers about one (or more) life-altering books. This is precisely my kind of book. A book with a list of books. As in Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust and More Book Lust, well-known authors like Dorothy Allison, Dominck Dunne, Frank McCourt, Anne Perry, and many more write in The Book That Changed My Life and tell us of times in their lives when they were in deepest despair and a book literally saved them from their own sense of isolation, loneliness. They also write about the pleasure of reading, of discovery, of learning, of the “come to Jesus moment” a particular book might offer the reader. Literally and figuratively.

In her essay “Saved by Ida-Ida” Harriet Scott Chessman writes of Gertrude Stein’s Ida, “I had never read a novel like Ida, so experimental, such a surprisingly giddy ride. Ida’s life capitulated me back to my own childhood, when I’d known books really could change the world through the sheer force of imagination.” I know what she means. When I first began to study Gertrude Stein in college, I was euphoric in my discovery.

I had read a poem here and there, “Very fine is my valentine,” but then I read everything she wrote, and I learned about her life, and I was star struck over this dead, squat, somewhat egomaniacal, Jewish, lesbian, ex-pat, friend to Picasso and Matisse, friend to Alfred Steiglitz. I was hooked. Forever. Stein is what I read if I am stuck in my own writing, I keep her anthology close by and I just pick a page and read and the repetition of her words often (not always) acts as some sort of stimulant. There are recordings of her reading her work. Old, scratchy, and just fine. Stein remains an enigma to me, even though I know a lot about her. It’s her writing. Her genius writing keeps me in awe-inspired.

There are so many books that changed me and my life for better or worse. I wish I could write long, slavering love letters to all of their authors. I guess I am already, in a way. But, for the sake of space, I will stick with just one: Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.

Oh, this book! This was the book that inspired me to be a writer and a girl spy. Both things I have achieved with aplomb. Blogging is very useful this way. It kills two birds with one stone. Harriet, as a character, was brilliant. She wore her orange hoodie and her canvas sneakers and carried her notebook everywhere and was sassy and smarter than her parents, her teachers, and, she thought, her friends. Harriet, hiding in the dumbwaiter is an image indelibly implanted in my brain. I have written all these years because of Fitzhugh’s Harriet. And have sometimes gotten myself in a spot of trouble just like Harriet for not having the ability to know who should see what. Lots and lots of people have written on this book, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful for me. (See the entire interwebs.)

Harriet was an antithesis to the social convention that girls should aspire to only be ladies and never spies. The illustrations are fantastic and add to Harriet’s adventures in New York’s Upper East Side. Heartbreakingly, Louise Fitzhugh died of a brain aneurysm at age 46 and thus has a very small oeuvre to offer as her legacy.

Harriet speaks to girls and boys who need to be themselves, who have unintentionally (or on purpose) hurt their friends and need forgiveness, and those who are misunderstood by their family and their classmates.

Harriet reminds us that it is never easy to just be yourself. Like Stein’s Ida, Fitzhugh’s Harriet, in her own way, liked to “talk, to sing, and she liked to change places.” Harriet says to Ole Golly, “I want to remember everything. And I want to know everything!” I know how she feels.

I have misplaced my copy of Harriet the Spy, but as my birthday is weeks away, I have faith that someone will know what to do.

To me, reading, whether for pleasure or pain, is like breathing. As cliché as it is, it is like breathing. The sensory experience of the book, especially a library book, with that smell, the heft of the paper, maybe cream or eggshell in color, the feel of the type on the page, the history of the typesetting, the plastic cover protector, is real-life magic.

Monica Wittstock lives in Minneapolis and writes about food, family and feminism.

I haven’t been doing that. Not because Hughes’ death didn’t bring back memories for me, but because it did. I was a suburban teenager who didn’t fit the mold. I should have been his target audience. I just didn’t like his movies much.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s still too soon to talk about them, but I’m going to do it anyway.

John Hughes put together great soundtracks. Pretty in Pink has one of the two best soundtracks from the Eighties and the best title song. “This Woman’s Work,” from She’s Having a Baby is just a great song. And as far as I can tell, all the music was commissioned for the films.

He didn’t flinch from geekdom. It wasn’t prettied up, Hollywood geekdom in his movies, or at least, not all of it. Hughes’s geekdom was awkward and painful. It was played for laughs, but they were always at least half-sympathetic laughs, which was rare at the time.

He didn’t do issue films or bright, fluffy teen romances. He captured the pain of trivialities and the lack of perspective of teenagers. His parents weren’t monsters, just caught up in their own lives. Still and all, I never watched a John Hughes film that didn’t make me uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons.

What reasons? There are the stereotypes, of course. Kids don’t fit neatly into Breakfast Club types, and no, they never broke out of their types in the movie, either. They just talked to each other. And then there is that inexplicable blues bar scene in Weird Science. Huh?

The rewards were all screwed up, too, particularly in the romances. Hughes made some good points in his movies about popularity and wealth, but he almost never followed through (Some Kind of Wonderful being an exception, but by the time that came out, I was so distrustful of Hughes that I didn’t watch it). If you’re a poor or awkward or abused kid, what’s your happy ending? Romance with a rich or popular kid. Whee.

I knew better. I knew it wasn’t going to happen to me, and more than that, I knew I didn’t want it to. The rich, popular kids around me were dull, and frankly, they weren’t very nice even when their friends weren’t around egging them on. Oh, there were popular kids who were nice and funny, but they never ran with the popular crowd. They were popular because everybody liked them, not because they went to the right parties and hung with the right people.

Characters were rewarded for being popular, too. In what kind of screwed-up world does Ferris Bueller create problems for all the decent people around him and still get them to not just cover for him at their own expense but stay friendly toward him too? In what ugly universe is it good for Cameron to have his spinelessness taken advantage of? But hey, Bueller’s everybody’s hero, so whatever it takes for him to have fun must be right. Right? After all, he’s a rebel.

Of course, everybody was a rebel. Not for any particular reason beyond “The adults don’t understand,” but a rebel nonetheless. Better than that, a rebel without consequences.

Now, I was all for rebellion. Rebellion pretty much saved my life, because conformity was impossible. But my rebellion found reasons and issues to shape itself around, and it cost me. None of the kids in John Hughes movies ever stood up for something instead of merely against it, and they barely stood up at all. For all their strikes against the authoritarian adults around them, they didn’t confront them, only avoided them.

And that is why, for all that I own a couple of John Hughes movies, for all that Jon Cryer will always be Duckie to me, I’m always going to be disappointed by his work as a whole.

Romeo and Juliet, of course. Or is this West Side Story? Sung in Shadow? Or Pyramus and Thisbe? Perhaps even Ha-Buah?

Earlier this week, Mike posted about feeling that his writing wasn’t original enough. Bah. I hate it when I see someone denigrating their own work this way. It’s silly and pointless and keeps people from contributing to the world. And may I point out, I’m hardly the first to say so.

TWO hundred years ago, Dr Johnson surmised that fiction was limited to a few plots “with very little variation”. Now a major study has worked out that there have been just seven since storytelling began.

In addition to hating to see writers going to waste, part of my passion about this topic comes from writing science fiction. I love science fiction, but I hate its obsession with not repeating itself. Science fiction is the only genre I know of in which someone will look at a story and say, “Oh. I saw XX do that in a short story in 1977. Never mind.”

What? Yes, science fiction the genre of ideas. Got that. But it’s the story that puts the idea across. That’s why you can’t copyright ideas. And frankly, the idea is not nearly as important as the characters and civilizations that interact with it. “What if?” is answered differently depending on who answers.

Telling the same story in multiple ways communicates the idea to different audiences: different generations, different cultural backgrounds, different stylistic preferences, different experiences reading in the genre. If we’re not willing to occasionally retell a story a bit differently, we run the risk of alienating all these different audiences, and we run the risk of running out of things to say.

For the record, Spider Robinson wrote that story. (Huh. I’d forgotten he used the same example. So much for originality.) So why am I bothering to write this post? Because while the story made quite an impression on me in my early teens, Mike hasn’t read it. Or maybe he has, but he forgot about it. The point, of course, being that some things are worth saying again.

All of this is true for nonfiction too. How many biographies of Shakespeare do we need? Well, how many audiences do we have? A biography written for children isn’t going to be the same as one written for poetry geeks isn’t going to be the same as one written for historians of the theater. One written a hundred years after his death is not going to be the same as one written today. It isn’t so much new historical information that makes a new book worthwhile as it is a new perspective on the underlying facts. The facts don’t change, but the people looking at them do.

Almost any writer out there will tell you that ideas are cheap and plentiful. It’s the execution that matters. It’s figuring out how your idea connects to your characters and to your readers. It’s finding the little details that resonate with you and bringing them to the forefront so they can’t be overlooked, or fixing the things that always bother you when you read. It’s taking your voice and your opinions and your observations and your obsessions and stamping the idea with them so that it becomes unmistakably yours, wherever it came from.

And for all our veneration of originality, a heavy dose isn’t what most of us want as readers. There’s a reason, aside from snobbery, that sophisticated readers sneer at so many best sellers as hackneyed. Yes, we want some surprises from what we read, but not too many. Very few people read James Joyce for pleasure; fewer still read Marx for fun. We want to read works that build directly off what we already know and understand. We’re much less comfortable with anything that upsets our views of how the world behaves. Rearranging one’s world view is a lot of work, and we get tired if we do too much of it at once.

How much work do you want your readers to have to do to read you? Enough, of course, that they don’t get bored. Enough that they walk away with something they didn’t have before, whether it be a deeper understanding, a fresh perspective or just a turn of phrase that will make them smile or be useful in an argument. But beyond that? If a subject is worth the work of writing, isn’t it worth the work to give your readers something familiar to which they can connect? And the stranger or more threatening the topic, the more the reader needs that comfort.

Despite our society’s romantic, individualistic notions, ideas don’t spring fully formed from the aether. There is no cosmic fountain of creativity. The muses, just like all the other gods, are relics of superstition. Ideas build on other ideas, both as we conceive our own and as we understand others’. Originality comes from combining ideas or approaching an idea from a different angle or presenting it in a way that makes your readers do more or less or different work than they have before.

Accepting that may not be very romantic, but it’s far better than thinking you can’t be creative unless you have access to some mystical source of original ideas. And that is a concept that always bears repeating.

As a fourth-grader, I was often praised and rewarded for the essays I turned in, and I started to get the grandiose idea that I would someday grow up to be a novelist or an essay writer.  I read constantly, not only to gather information, but to learn about style, phrasing and voice.

My teachers throughout grade school and high school were excellent guides in the process of my development.  Many took a personal interest in giving me extra assignments and resources.  I should probably add that these extra assignments were never given to me as punishments, but as rewards.  They were singling me out as someone who had a potential talent to write as a professional, and the extra assignments gave me the opportunity to use tools that they were giving me beyond those they presented in the classroom.

My own insecurities took effect as I became an adolescent, and I started wondering whether in fact I was not so much “special” in regards to writing as I was demonstrating to them that I was paying attention to what they were teaching on the basics of spelling and grammar.  As I read other writers, I became envious that they seemed to have original ideas while I was practicing regurgitation but within the bounds of the rules.

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. (Eccl 12:8)

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun. (Eccl 1:9)

As I tried to write poetry and songs, most of what I wrote was derivative of my favorite songwriters.  I was taking their ideas and trying to make them my own.  Sure, I was able to occasionally sneak in some original turns of phrase.  Sure, there were times I came up with an original rhyme.  For the most part, I was unhappy with the results.  But because of those few originalities I created, I tried to save everything in notebooks in case I needed to return to them at some future date for reference or reuse.  I envisioned that at such time it would be in the context of an original thought.

I tried my hand at fiction but again ran into the sad fact that most of my plot lines were mere variations of what I had read from other writers.  I also had a problem writing dialogue because I lack the gift of gab.  In my own conversations, I am more frequently a listener than a talker.  This is okay, because I don’t like to run on, but it causes a problem when I try to write multiple characters and imagine their conversations.

I eventually decided none of these limitations should deter me from writing just to practice writing.  I decided to work on putting sentences together, to write poetry when it struck me.  So I did, and I wrote just to write.  I did it for me, and it became a sort of release.

Our culture is based on deception.  In the majority of our social situations, we are expected to put on a good front.  Our moods are not allowed to be honestly expressed; our doubts and fears are to be kept to ourselves.  This is true in the workplace, in our politics, in our casual social settings and in our interactions with all but those in whom we place our most intimate trust.  This expectation of dishonesty, of telling people we are doing well when we aren’t, causes us to suppress emotions.  We place walls with brightly painted murals between ourselves and our society.

Nobody is perfectly happy all of the time.  Without some sort of release from the pressure of having to pretend that we are always all right and that life couldn’t be better, I would never be able to make it through some days.

[Note: This segment has been removed. MH]

That’s me on fire.
My second wife one day decided that the poems were a problem for our relationship, and she made the assumption that I was hanging onto the pain of the first relationship through the poems.  After a particularly difficult relationship talk, she waited until I had gone to sleep and destroyed the poems.  All of them.  I woke up in the middle of the night, hoping for some makeup sex, only to find that she was gone. So were the poems.

Of course, I was angry and, when she returned, explained once again why I had been saving them.  She would have none of it.  As far as she was concerned, keeping those poems that I had written were equivalent to hanging on to old keepsakes and photographs of past lovers.

The poems were part of me, and I wish that I had access to them now.  They were me, exercising my voice and practicing the phrases that I needed to use to express my emotions towards one person.  Like pictures and keepsakes, they are more permanent than any relationships that I have had. I have a poor track record when it comes to lifelong commitments.  I wanted the poems for when I was older, so that I could occasionally pull them back out and look at them, to review my life.  Should I marry again, the internet is not so easily destroyed as a batch of notebook papers. (Hah. Even with that, Google’s cache has a long memory!)

The second wife asked me one day why I never wrote poems like that for her, and she was mostly right.  I rarely did. I didn’t want to tell her that she was such a critical reader I didn’t feel free to experiment and take risks with my poetry. More importantly, performing on demand for such a critical audience would have felt like a chore. I didn’t think that she would appreciate it if I didn’t have it “just right” and original. (Writing love poems as a metaphor for marital sex?)

I didn’t have an explanation for her, but I do for the readers  of Quiche Moraine.

When we were first dating, she was still good friends with one of her old boyfriends. She had reconciled to being “just friends” over a year before I had met her. Tim was a music snob and had made many mix tapes for her.  She was living in Monroe, Louisiana. I was living in Dallas, Texas and driving to Monroe to be with her on the weekends, but I had time to spare on the weeknights.  I was often bored, so I made many mix tapes for myself and decided that with all of the CDs and LPs that I had available, I could make a killer mix tape for her.  And I did.  I thought it was a great mix tape.

The next weekend we went to a party in Monroe, and her old boyfriend was there.  They started talking about music, and she mentioned that I had made a mix tape for her but that the music was lame and that she wanted him to make her another tape.  I didn’t show that it hurt in front of her ex.  Who knows, she may have been testing me.  I just didn’t want to give him any sort of satisfaction, because I didn’t like him.  I carried this hurt with me, hidden behind a “positive attitude” front.  I finished my beer rather quickly.

I realized that if she could dismiss my mix tape, I would be risking much greater hurt if I put myself into a poem for her, only to have her compare it to something that someone else had written for her.  I never was able to put my trust in her after that, and it hurt our relationship. It was a wall between us that I could never tear down.  She blamed it on the first wife, and she was partly right.  Number one had indeed betrayed me deeply, and I had let my guard down for her.  It is a guard that I’ve always had trouble releasing since then.  But the tape didn’t help.

So now, when I write for blogs or for myself, I still see it as a release.  It is in writing that I express my experiences in ways that never feel comfortable in casual conversation.  This process still helps me practice writing, even though I no longer harbor the illusion that I will ever be a famous writer.

(Today I was at a coffee shop, and one of the customers mentioned the name Michele Bachmann in a derogatory manner.  I told him he should take a look at the “Replace Michele Bachmann” carnival at Quiche Moraine.  The barista said “Quiche Moraine?  I’ve heard of that.  It’s kind of a collaboration, isn’t it?  I read about it somewhere.”  Hello, barista, if you are reading this.)

It is sometimes a chore, because I have a deadline here at Quiche Moraine. I agreed with Greg and Stephanie that I would have a post ready on Sundays for publishing on Mondays.  Every Frickin’ Week!  I had intended for today to reuse a post I had originally written for Tangled Up in Blue Guy.

I changed my mind because I needed some release from the pressures I have been feeling lately.  The post largely wrote itself, as I started with a title and let it flow from there. I hope that you have found something original in this.

Writing this helped me.

Rest in peace! Uncovered by dust
Eternity shall bloom for you.
Rest in peace! In eternal harmonies
Your spirit now is dissolved.
He expressed himself in enchanting notes,
Now he is floating to everlasting beauty.

(Josef Weigl, for Salieri’s tomb.)

F. Murray Abraham as Salieri

I was newly divorced and 25, wandering through the streets of San Francisco looking for a new social circle. I chose to start in North Beach because of all the poets and artists who hang around in that area. This was a Saturday night and I expected Vesuvio Saloon to be overly crowded. I peeked in the window, and the crowd was for some reason sparse. There were plenty of empty stools at the bar, so I headed inside.

Vesuvio was a regular hangout for Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy (Dean Moriarty of On the Road,) back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This would have been before Cassidy and Kerouac died, of course.

It was here that Jack Kerouac once spent a long night in 1960 when he should have been on his way to Big Sur to meet with Henry Miller. Miller had written Kerouac that he enjoyed reading The Dharma Bums and would enjoy a visit from the emerging writer. Kerouac, however, had other plans. He continued to hoist drinks and called Miller every hour telling him that he was just a bit delayed in leaving the city. The two would never meet that night.

I found an empty stool and sat down next to an older gentleman. He was wearing a gray beret. We chatted a bit about the weather, then I asked his name. “Vincenzo,” he told me.

“Were you born in Italy then?” I asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I was born in Legnano. Does that mean anything to you?” I had to admit that it did not, since I am not an expert on Italy. I know where Siena is, I know were Tuscany is, I know where Rome is. But I had never heard of Legnano.

“Have you seen the movie or the play Amadeus?”

In fact, I had. I had thought that Tom Hulce made the character of Mozart come alive. I said that F. Murray Abraham had also done a convincing portrayal of Salieri. I just wondered to him whether or not Salieri had been too hard on himself. Vincenzo’s expression was pained. He told me that the play and the movie portrayed Salieri very poorly. Salieri was a magnificent composer and well-respected. He told me that Legnano, his hometown, was also Salieri’s hometown, and the people there had great pride in Salieri’s music and his influence on Austria’s musical history.

So, I asked Vincenzo whether Salieri had killed Mozart, and he told me it was a lie. The play, he said, took dramatic license to add to a biography of Mozart some deep conflict (even broader than Mozart’s conflicts with his own father). He said they should make a movie that tells the true story of Salieri.

I wonder whether there are a great number of people whose only knowledge of Salieri is based in the movie Amadeus.  How many people think that he was a hack who was jealous of the attention paid to Mozart?  If I hadn’t met Vincenzo at Vesuvio, I probably would never have looked into the story of his life.  Salieri was in fact recognized as a composer  of wonderful music.  He was a teacher  to Ludwig Von Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert and Mozart’s son, Franz Xaver.

The whole idea that Salieri hated or despised Mozart while loving his music may have started because of some political maneuvering by Leopold Mozart.  Leopold believed that Salieri was interfering with his son’s career in Vienna.  Composers survived by teaching music and through patronage by the royalty.  Securing good positions through the church and through the court often meant the difference between survival and starvation. If Leopold Mozart was indeed spreading this rumor, it is perhaps understandable, in that he would be protecting his son’s career and livelihood.

The confession of Salieri forms the backdrop and the narration of the movie Amadeus. Salieri confesses his hatred for both God and Mozart.  He hates God for giving Mozart such a gift for composing, yet allowing him to be a spoiled brat.  Salieri has been the good and honorable servant, while Mozart is an uncouth party-boy, loud and vulgar.  But the music…oh, the music is gorgeous and the feelings so moving that they can only have been placed in Mozart’s pen by the angels of the muse.

Salieri was no slouch and had no reason to be jealous on that score.  His were not the simplistic ploddings that the character Wolfgang mocks. His opera Tarare was well-received and loved in France and presaged the French Revolution.

The question remains as to whether or not he actually confessed to the murder.  I have read several articles on the confession, and they generally conclude that Salieri did no such thing.  The people who were with him declaimed the supposed confession.  Reading of this “confession” reminded me of the Lady Hope story that Darwin had made a deathbed conversion to Christianity.

Mozart’s final cause of death has been debated for many years.  Some claim that it was kidney failure, others claim a parasite.  These diagnoses are based reading descriptions of his symptoms through the backward glance of biographers, without the benefit of an autopsy.  Some of his symptoms are consistent with the idea that he was poisoned, but the weakness of this evidence should lead us to be more charitable towards Salieri.  The play is not slander; it is speculation with dramatic license.

I sat in the bar with the old man from Italy and thought about how much of our common knowledge of historical events is based on the plots of movies.  Talking to Vincenzo forced me to step back and question these assumptions that I myself make.  If I learn something from a movie, before I convict someone in my own mind, fairness dictates that I research a bit more.

I left Vesuvio that night, even with Kerouac’s ghost beckoning me to stay all night.  I had a cat to feed and care for and some reading to do on Salieri.

Vesuvio is at 255 Columbus in San Francisco, CA.  The menu includes exotic drinks, martinis and Anchor Steam Beer.

Perfectionism is only one behavior that’s encouraged in art but needs to be set aside if the artist wants to be fully accepted in “polite society.” Artists need the obsessiveness to see a project through with little feedback (or despite feedback). They need enough pride to believe that their ideas are worth executing. They need to be mercurial enough to suit their thinking to a new and very different project from their last. They need to ask uncomfortable questions and set aside polite fictions. They need to be willing to upset people. They need to be willing to manipulate their audience.

In many ways, art is antisocial behavior.

That last sentence isn’t anything like a new thought. For centuries, going on the stage has been something respectable people ran away to do. Being able to dabble in drawing has been an accomplishment, but taking it seriously has been suspect. Singing has been acceptable only in a church or as part of another community festival. Dancing…well, just ask the Methodists. Acting, painting, dancing and writing have all been associated with “alternate” sexuality and drug use–acting and dancing with prostitution. Art students and musicians have long had a reputation for licentiousness that is only slightly exaggerated (they have to practice some time, after all).

What I think has been missed is that this isn’t a function of the poverty of artists. It isn’t a reflection of the undependable nature of their income or the seductiveness of their work. It isn’t a question of the neighborhoods in which they can afford studio or stage space.

Art is fundamentally antisocial. That’s one thing the Methodists did get right. You can’t create art without stepping back just a little bit and seeing glimpses, here and there, of the things that societies agree to pretend don’t exist. Ironies, hypocrisies, inequalities, lies, elided truths, all of them are made manifest by the artist.

Selling out, that widely recognized death of artistic integrity, doesn’t have nearly as much to do with work for money as the name might suggest. In this case, taking money is a proxy for failing to piss off the people the money comes from. It’s an accusation, right or wrong, that the artist has stopped making people uncomfortable.

Here lies one of the great paradoxes of our culture, the one that was on the tip of Lynn’s tongue after the lecture. Civilization needs its artists. They are its mirror, its conscience, its goad. Art provides the glimpse into the heart of the “other” that keeps us all from being strangers to one another. Nothing but education, perhaps, signals a healthy neighborhood, city or country better than its population of artists.

However, at the same time, civilization also believes that it needs all those politenesses that keep us from bumping up against each other too closely. It needs everything that the artists strip away.

So society pushes artists to the margins. It accepts the work produced, but the artist is left with fewer protections than the more polite members of society. Income is uneven and rarely guaranteed, since the satisfaction of a contract is a much harder thing to define in art. Insurance is often unobtainable. Housing comes without amenities like privacy. Privacy is, in general, nonexistent, since the artist is considered to be part of the product. Ask anyone who’s suddenly found themselves a celebrity.

Then there is the vilification. Even those who support art often don’t understand why artists can be so…difficult, why art isn’t just a job that’s left in the studio or theater at the end of the day. And there are plenty of people who are terrified of art’s role in civilization. They are, shall we say, less kind in their assessment of why artists aren’t like “normal” folks. To them, artists are parasites at best, demons at worst and insane somewhere in the middle.

And so we sit, we artists, and feed civilization from its edges. We sing and dance and paint and draw and write and act and toot our own horns out here in the margins, pushed here by the very things that make us indispensable. Our flexible brains have been shaped by what we do in ways that make us strangers in the core of the culture we support.

Ultimately, though, that’s just fine. Margins aren’t such a bad place to be. There’s so much more white space for us to fill up out here.

Charles Darwin didn’t. He was, in fact, pretty uncomfortable with the idea of changing the world.

Darwin was actually a lot like the people I do like to write about. He had his pet obsessions that he pursued at length, but his real work started when the world intruded on those obsessions in a way he couldn’t ignore. And it was work—no single moment of brilliant insight that solved everything, but years of doggedness.

I doubt that Darwin would be comfortable with the idea of Darwin Day, either, but I think it’s a great idea. I particularly like the way I’ll be spending it. An evening of science and art seems like just the right way to celebrate Darwin’s achievements.

Why? Well, the science part is obvious, I think, particularly considering that all the speakers at the event will be talking about how understanding evolution helps us to understand our world. Art is harder to explain but just as important. This particular art is meant to communicate the understanding of evolution, but I think it also communicates something important about what science is.

In some ways, art and science scratch the same itch. We appear to have a need, we humans, to break off little chunks of the world and illuminate them to the best of our ability. We need to dissect, to ruminate and to share what we’ve discovered. We can do that in art, with line and color, with myth and metaphor. We can do it in science, teasing apart reality from perception and uncovering the hidden.

The tools are different, but the impulse is the same. So is the fact that it’s never satisfied. Satisfying, yes. Satisfied, no. People may stop trying to make a living at art or science, but they don’t really stop doing either. Stopping would require learning entirely new ways to relate to the world.

A few weeks ago, ScienceBlogs and Seed asked people about the rightful place of science. I could talk about its place in the public square, but I think much of that will take care of itself if we recognize the true place of science.

The true place of science is sitting on top of that little human itch, scratching, providing relief, but always uncovering new questions to be answered, generating a new itch.

As much as anything else, Darwin’s legacy is the example of a life lived scratching that itch. Others could have discovered the same things he did. He didn’t do it by heroics but by work. He did what anyone could have done. He did what we all can do.

And that’s worth celebrating.