Book and Music, By...

As I write this today I am listening to a collection of music that I own but haven't heard yet.  Every Tuesday I lengthen this listen:  my Starbucks Rewards app on my phone holds up a red-circled "1" like an auction bidder, and I go in to check the notification and find a free iTunes song waiting for my redeem, and every Tuesday iTunes itself features a free song for downloading from the home page.  The current playlist of new stuff looks like this:

• "Amsterdam" by Imagine Dragons
• "If Only" by Dave Matthews Band
• "My Dear" by Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics
• "How Do You Ruin Me?" by Black Prairie
• "Trouble" by Jose James

I don't know if any of these songs or the artists singing them are the latest "in" thing.  It's free music.  It's not likely I'll remember the songs or the artists in the morning.  Music is my one-night stand.  That explains why I probably knew who Amy Winehouse was but couldn't remember who she was when her death was announced.  Unless your name is Bruce Springsteen or Mary Chapin Carpenter, I probably love you, but not enough to marry your music.

It's free.  I'm no judge, going either way.

*****

I am reading a LOT of library books this year.  More than I ever have since I was a kid.  When I was a kid, all the way up to when my mother passed away, I hoarded books.  At one point in Missouri I had over 500 books, most of them literature (technically, I still have them--they're in storage in Missouri with a collection of other things), and I organized them by color.  I expected to live out my life in Missouri, even though my life of nomad behavior pointed to moving again at least once more in my life.  When my mother died, though, something no longer connected there.  I read books and donated them to the library.  I packed up the unread ones when I moved to California, and when I read most books in California I donated them to the library, sold them in my last weeks in San Francisco, or "set them free" through an application called BookCrossing.  I still considered books precious and requiring a physical care, but I could let them go when I read them, with few exceptions.

This year I've evolved again...books, through reading them, are starting to morph into the vehicles that I am sure they have been all along.  Don't get me wrong--I would not arbitrarily deface or destroy a book, but I am learning of ways where it is acceptable to do so:

• If you have decided to journey a substantial length of a mountain range on foot, and your backpack starts out too heavy; read Cheryl Strayed's "Wild" for particulars on burning your books along the trail for fire starters;
• If you want to write in a book but you don't want others reading what you have written, tuck your secrets in the negative spaces of others' books; read "The English Patient" by Michael Ondaatje;
• If you want to pack a fat novel that you've always wanted to read but it won't fit in your bicycle's handlebar pack, slice up the book and pack it in your backpack, deep in the gaps...but don't toss the wrong section; ask Willie Weir in his blog of his experience of reading "Atlas Shrugged" in cycling through South America.

Or just borrow a book from the library and return it after.  Whichever is lighter and fits the journey.  Borrowing a book from the library preserves it, yes, but...someday (I write this smacking my lips in some sort of lust) I want to be on a journey where a book becomes that one-night stand, that song that I remember but can't name, either by title or artist.

Onward, dear reader.

That Song by Brandi Carlile, or, Plotlines

Tell me a story, riddle me this.


Tell me a story with a happy ending.


Tell me a story I'll believe.


Tell me a story I'll want to listen to.


Tell me a compelling lie.

*****

I follow a lot of stories lately.  On Twitter I follow the stories of baseball games, usually involving the casts of men from San Francisco, Oakland, Tampa Bay, D.C., and Texas.  I follow the journey of a young gay poet from Harlem who recently sold his possessions and is traveling the world.  I follow the success of a Oregonian who walked for three months straight in 1995 and lived to write about it.

On Google Reader I follow the continued adventures of a baseball fan who has found a delightful amount of fantasy in the California flora.

On Facebook I follow the uplifting adventures of a fellow artist from way back as she bench-presses.  Dead-lift?  She brings it to life.  I follow the continuing story of one of my favorite authors as he leaves the City we both love and lets go, goes on.  I follow a friend I met twice who lives on the other side of the world, the land of this year's Olympians, and takes photos of rings without color, giving them clarity.  I follow a former teacher as he writes the final sentence in a chapter of his life.

I'm from Missouri.  You've got to "Show Me."

And they do.  Stories like this are my lifeline, the bubbles back into what is at times my own flat soda.  I follow them for so many reasons the character motivation becomes murky, at best, but primarily they keep me afloat.  They are not stories with happy endings.  They have no ending at all, bless 'em.  As to happy...bittersweet.  Bittersweet is better, bittersweet is easier to believe, bittersweet shows me that they are human instead of "perfect."  I am wary of "perfect."  Bittersweet has a rounded flavor, a richness..."Your cat exploded?  Make good art," says Neil Gaiman, a bittersweet statement if there ever was one.  Every one of these people has a setback or challenge to get past, whether it takes up an hour, a day, or years.  The poet from Twitter is afraid of the Phoenix airport.  The Giants have two struggling pitchers.  The Nats have a nark.  The hiker wants us to be brave, regardless.

The triffids may get us all someday, but wouldn't it be better to walk on the wild side?

Ah, sweet friends...tell me a story.

Tell it well.  Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - This song is the inspiration by today's installment of Life For Rent.  "Lines across my face," lines across my palm, same thing.

For Your Consideration...

Open Letter to the Patrons of the Carlsbad City Library Wednesday Evening "Movie Nights"

Dear Gents and Ladies:

Please be open-minded and patient with the art before you.  You may be older, but I don't watch movies from your youth and deconstruct them.  To me, "Casablanca" is just as rich as "Midnight In Paris."

History works both ways, folks.

God bless you in your continued quest for great cinema,

The Patron in the Fourth Row, On the Left

Out Loud

Back in the early sixties, my mother tried on college with the intent of going to medical school.  She thought that she would complete her general education requirement at Defiance College in Northwest Ohio.

When I started college based on a dare (my manager at the time dared me to audit a literature class by a teacher she had loved), my mother informed me on the phone one Saturday night, much to my heartbreak, that she hated her literature class in college.  This was difficult for a writer to hear, but I was patient.  “Why’s that, Mom?”

“The professor always read out loud to us.  As though we couldn’t read for ourselves.”

Since my mother was the only one in our immediate family without a degree (my father went to a community college to obtain his boiler operator’s certification, my brother has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio State University, and I have an Associate of Arts from Ozarks Tech and a Bachelor of Arts from Missouri State University), I won’t be disclosing a spoiler here by saying that my mother grew increasingly disillusioned with college and quit.  I’m not sure if it was just the literature class; she heard of JFK’s assassination during a class, and there were other issues with group projects.  College isn’t for everyone, and her leaving it didn’t set her apart from the rest of us.

When they married my father asked my mother to quit her job--he was traditional.  She stayed home, took care of him, and nearly three years after their wedding I came along.  Almost two years after that my brother arrived.  My most prominent childhood memory was of my father coming home from work, and, while my mother cooked dinner (and she cooked it, too; my father didn’t allow us to have a microwave because he thought it would give us cancer.  Ironic, given my mother’s fate), he would read to her from the Reader’s Digest or from one of Patrick McManus’s outdoor adventures.  When my mother revealed to me that she hated to have people read out loud to her, I reminded her of Dad’s ritual.  “Yeah, well, that made him happy,” she said.

She lied.

In the last two weeks of my mother’s life, she would drift in and out of consciousness.  Some moments she would be weak but perfectly lucid, others, completely out and eyes half-closed.  She ended up in the last week in the second phase, but the first week I would still have time with her.

“What’s happening?”

What do you mean, Mom?  You want the radio?  TV?

“No.  Tell me with your voice.”

Well, Dad and Mike went for a walk out to the pond, Mom.  The sun’s out.  It’s cold.

“Let me hear your voice.”

You want me to sing to you, Mom?  (I won vocal choir contests in high school.  I could make her cry with my singing.)

“No.”

What would you like me to say?

“Read to me.”

What?  I had graduated from both schools by that point--the distaste she had for reading was tattooed in my memory.

“Read to me.”

I stared at her.  She blinked.  “Please.”

What would you like me to read, Mom?  A book?  A newspaper?

“Twain.”

Oh, great.  Dialect Man.  Which Twain, Mom?

“Any of them.”

How about “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”?

“Yes.”

So I read, out loud, to my mother, who either no longer had the means to argue me reading out loud, or who finally had found someone who could read out loud well.  It’s comforting to think I could share my love of literature, somehow, when it was most needed.

*****

My mother hated literature classes and loved literature.  She sheltered me from a lot of fiction growing up, but when I got to college it was my mind to corrupt, my heart to burst open...  

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free...  

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years...  

Either it was drizzling or there was a lot of dust in the air.…

I loved to hear and read and taste good writing.  I drank it, got drunk on it, all through community college and university.  For five years (six if you count the year off between degrees in Ohio) I overdosed on literature, showed up, listened to people argue language and plot and characterization around me, listened to people read well out loud, and eventually had to graduate.  I went to college for two reasons.  The first was sort of the same reason people who are native speakers of another language speak to each other in that language, even if they can speak English--it’s a relief for me to speak literature with others.  The other reason was to make me a better writer.  

Well, Jo, you ask, why didn’t you go to school for writing?  Because then I wouldn’t have gotten to read as much...

*****

Years later and miles from those classrooms, I still read passages out loud.  I listen to others read as well.  Once a month my writing group sets their pens aside, we meet in a clean, well-lit cafe in the Mission, and we read our works to each other.  If we get too nervous, other people read our work for us.  Last time someone read my poetry for me.  I was touched.

The need to speak and hear a passage still drives me to all kinds of megaphones.  I sit by the window that faces west in my apartment, reading by the winter sun... 

The tides came upon San Francisco four times per day, lifting and lowering the city’s skirt with impunity...

I read that slowly, once, in a voice well-traveled, tasting consonants, vowels, and pauses in the punctuation.  Then I can’t help it; the world must know, the world needs to taste this too, and I post it on GoodReads, which in turn posts to Facebook and Twitter.  Messages curl up in virtual bottles, closer to the size of test tubes, just the smallest and sweetest slices of kumquat, thinly sliced beef, a delicate sheet of cheese.  I have to no spouse to read this to, so here you are, dear reader...can you hear the music of it, can you taste the language?

Oh, listen to this one...

P.S. - Passages above, in order from top to bottom, can be attributed to the following works of literature:

• “Araby” - James Joyce
• “A Rose For Emily” - William Faulkner
• “What I Have Been Doing Lately” - Jamaica Kincaid
• “Going To See the Elephant” - Rodes Fishburne

That Song by Barbra Streisand, or, The M.R.S. Degree

When I went to college, there were two practical expectations from the world of what I would gain from it:  a practical degree that would put me into a job right after graduation, or, an MRS degree.

An MRS degree, in case you can't figure it out by lowering the case on the last two letters, is the equivalent of a husband.  "I met my husband in college."  Congratulations.  I didn't even belong to clubs, events, or ANYTHING extra-cirricular in college; I went to school in the morning, full-time, and taught call center agents in the afternoon and evening.  I fed my soul in the morning and burnished it into pure gold in my love of mentorship in the latter parts of the day.

My first lover in California was right when he said, "It was just bad timing for a relationship."  I wouldn't have called it bad timing.  I would have called it "do what you love and the rest will follow."

*****

Natalie Goldberg, in her memoir "Long Quiet Highway," talks about the daughter of one of her writing students in one particular passage:

It was April, but unusually cold.  My student's daughter was a [horse] trainer.  She was twenty-nine years old.  She'd fallen the year before.  She was hurt badly, recovered, and was back on the horses.
"Do you worry about her?" I asked...
"There's nothing I can do.  Once you're in this life, it's the only life.  She just lives horses," my student told me and shrugged.
"Does she go out, have relationships?" I asked.  I was trying to understand this life.
She smiled.  "Nope.  She doesn't have time, doesn't care.  This is her life."

This is my life.

*****

I bring this up because of two things that occurred at Litquake last weekend.  The first thing that happened was getting the opportunity to see writers married/partnered with other writers.  The second thing that happened was that two different men hit on me.
Clarification:  they hit on me between the short story and novel panels, within minutes of each other.  I'll come back to them.
I was struck by the husband/wife, wife/husband partnerships in the panel members because the partners had such widely varying approaches to writing, and still were respected by their partners.  I have never had the pleasure to be in a romantic relationship where my method of approach was just as valued as the other and completely different approach.  But, then, I've never been in a romantic relationship with a writer.  Hell, I've never been in a romantic relationship with a reader.  So you can imagine how exotic (and desirable) these partnerships looked to me.
As to the men who hit on me...somewhere, in another lifetime when I was a college student, I could imagine hearing older friends and aunts hoping that I would give both of these men some sort of access to my soul, since I so would love to find another writer to love.  But that kind of behavior looks hungry.  Mind you, I didn't cut either man off--I asked about them and their writing just as much as they did of me--but I didn't suggest that we form an alliance for dinner or the Litcrawl event later.  For a brief moment talking with first one, then later, the other (whom I ended up sitting next to--he looked vaguely like Nathan Fillion, so you would have thought I would have tossed writing out the window) I had a sense that I might get asked for my plans for the evening, but I didn't prepare an answer.  See, I live the horses.  If either of these gentlemen really wanted a writing partner, or if that was the paramount of my purpose, we would have made it so.
But my purpose was the horses, the words.  I live the words.  If someone comes along, YAY, but goodness, I'm good without the MRS degree now.

Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - This song is the inspiration for today's title of Life For Rent.  "May I be worthy.  Amen."

That Song By OneRepublic, or, What There Is To Complain About

I've been trying a little experiment lately.

I've been shutting up while I read the internet, when I get around to reading it.  I just read with an open heart, take it in, and move on.  I used to converse with it.  Now I'm trying to be quieter.

I'm also enjoying other things besides the internet.  I am reading much more.  I'm finding new ways to make my resume better.  I'm writing a novel that I can't wait to read myself.  I'm reading others' good books, too.  I'm walking in the sunshine until there is none, until the Pacific rains come.  And I am still enjoying baseball...I'm finding more boys to fall in love with.

"It's hard not to be romantic about baseball." ~ "Moneyball"

I know, I've been quieter.  But there's really not much to say this week; I've been too busy living.

Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - This song is the inspiration for the title of this week's post.  I would love to say that I'm rooting for the Brewers, but I just liked the look of pure joy on Fielder's and Betancourt's faces here.  I really haven't picked a team to win it...all four teams are underdogs and I'm just enjoying the game.  I.  LOVE.  THIS.  GAME.

That Song by Rod Stewart, or, Status Update

I'm writing this post on Tuesday because I have a hot date with nine guys in orange and black before my writing group on Wednesday, so this is another drop-and-go piece.

It occurs to me that there has been a lot of philosophy lately here and not much of an update from the first month I ventured out into this journey of unconventional employment, so here is an update, in so many bullet points...

Current writing projects:

• Four blogs - One on writing, this one, one that goes out with my resume to prospective employers, and the Examiner pieces. The writing and Notes blogs are daily four times a week, the resume one is once a week, and I'm trying to find a way to write the Examiner one without sounding dry. That's my challenge right now
• Short fiction rough draft cranked out daily four days a week. Next challenge is to be strong enough in the existing process to move into in-depth editing

Other projects:

• Getting in shape. I'm climbing seven flights of stairs every weekday morning and trying to get to the ocean once a week. The stairs are called my Pablo stairs after being inspired by him in "The Franchise." So far I am very, VERY sore and tight. My next challenge is learning how to stretch again
• Job searching. Yes, children, the money is dwindling down. Current irons in the fire are to a couple of temp agencies, Yelp, and, as always, the birthplace of my Kindle--Amazon
• Writing groups. I average about three of these a week, and lead all three. It's still fun, but I wish I had other leaders to follow. Just keeping my mind open and my heart full. (I sound like "Friday Night Lights.") I don't think I'll ever get tired of meeting other writers--I just hope they don't think I am the only one who can lead them. Not getting too close--that's my challenge here
• Staying balanced. I have the tendency to cling, so I don't want to wear out my welcome with people, but I don't want to abandon them. So I just get frustrated. I'm challenging myself to remove that frustration and let people reach out to me if they need me

That's where I am. And, oh, yes, I read too. I'm three books ahead of my goal of 50 for the year. I love my City, I love the Bay Area, and I go explore.

Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - This song is where today's inspiration for this post of Life for Rent comes from. I didn't put in the Spanish...but, you're welcome. :)