Bathsheba Monk's Blog, page 10

Everywhere I look I see accordions.....

To make a long story short, ever since I inherited the family accordion 10 years ago and attempted to learn how to play it, it seems like I see accordions everywhere.  Are accordions making a comeback?   Are they now cool?  Well, no.  And probably not.   It's so easy to think that a higher power is somewhere guiding my interests and ideas and making sure that the right information comes my way, but dang if it doesn't seem that way sometimes!  When I was working for a big corporation--which shall remain nameless--and doing process re-engineering--and does anything sound more dreary?--my daily dose of Dilbert convinced me that Dilbert was on my team and reporting on our/Elbonia's fun with fishbone diagrams.  And now that I have become an entrepreneurial publisher, my daily dose of Seth Godin seems to speak to my current--and by current, I mean up to the minute--concerns.  I'm okay with this coincidence as long as he doesn't write a column about playing the accordion.
Picture from the Western New York Accordion Club--visit the website here.

Jealous...Yeh Shen definition found under the front tire of our Volvo

Sex and Video

At some point, every person who is celebrity-twitter-ignorant will ask the question:  why Kim Kardashian?  Yesterday, I realized I've been asking the question aloud and probably everywhere because when I was at a stop light, the women in the next car shouted over: 
"She made a sex tape , you ninny."
Oh.
Making a sex tape while you're young and beautiful is one of the many pieces of advice my high school guidance counselor forgot to give me and now it's too late.  People don't want to see anyone over 30 even KISSING so doing the dirty is in its own special category.  I suppose I could hire a surrogate, but then...am I pimp?  And what kind of surreal lalaland am I entering?  I do enough questionable things under the umbrella of "I'm a fiction writer:  reality is a moving target."
Sex seems altogether too important and not important enough.  And why would you just want to film one time?  If you're so great at it--and you gotta be great at or who would want to look at it--wouldn't someone like Ken Burns want to get involved and do a series--"Boudoir"--to capture your artistic nuance?  It's not as if Ms. Kardashian invented sex and so while it may be well done--I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt here--with billions of people in the world it HAS been done before.
"It's porn, you ninny!"
Oh.

ehhhhhh...then again ehhhhhhh

Today's answer for what ails man and woman is our abhorrence of ambiguity.  Spoiler alert:  the answer changes daily, but hey, really I think I'm on to something here!  I'm capable of raging against the dying light, while at the same time I can sit under a pine tree in my back yard and think: this would be a fine place to die.  I'm capable of castigating my most headstrong relatives who don't talk to our other relatives and at the same time I'm not talking to some OTHERS of them either.  I am ALL FOR social nets, while resenting those people who are falling into them when my income for the month is less than enough.  My husband thinks we are all capable of the most unspeakable goodness as well as the most unspeakable horrors pretty much IN THE SAME DAY.  He mentions a heinous crime and I really can't see the circumstance in which I would be driven to commit it, but maybe given the right soil I would.  I haven't been tested.  So what are we then--good or evil?  Or both?  And can I live with that not knowing?

Thinking Small

I stopped looking at Facebook fifty times a day--mostly because the enormity of the earth's problems--that my FB friends harp on/are concerned about/are not really doing anything about except signing an endless round of petitions which are destined for the delete button--is crushing when I'm trying to do the nearly impossible optimistic feat of creating alternate realities in fiction.  And now that I've said that, I wonder why leaders don't ask fiction writers to help them design a better world.  After all, that's what we excel at.  Almost of all the futuristic fantasies and doomsday warnings in earlier fiction have come true, so maybe we're not as inventive as prescient.  We can see the logical progression of where things are going, because that's what we do all day. We follow plot lines to their inevitable conclusions. You say you didn't see THAT coming!  We did!  So we should be at least sitting on well-paid panels telling the powers-that-be where things are going and perhaps--if the outlook doesn't look good--how we can steer the ship away from the rocks.  But there is that darned enormity of things--girls being abducted in Nigeria and sold into slavery for example.  We're all getting into a lather about that, but the fact is that right here in Allentown Pa--or your town anywhere--are sex slaves.  Maybe some of those girls will land up here.   I read after the last superbowl right here in the good ole USA that the high rollers in the mile high boxes were enjoying the services of underage sex slaves.  I don't see a lot of continued outrage about that.  Maybe it's because we would recognize some names.  It's easier to think of those distasters over there--where ever there is--perpetuated by foreign men with dark skin and dark religions.So, I'm downsizing my expectations of what I can reasonably do to make the earth a less foul place.  Number 1: I stopped getting my nails done at big mani-pedi factories when I realized, after asking several manicurists where they came from--that I was getting the same, obviously made-up, story.  You can't fool a storyteller with a tricked up story.cool tiny house pictured is called the Mica.  Go to link  Tumbleweed Tiny House Company


  

Guns and Prozac

This article in a libertarian blog proves what I've always suspected:  crazy people with guns kill people.  Of course the article wants the reader to believe that it's psychotropic drugs or anti-depressant drugs that make people crazy....BUT isn't that why they're taking them?  To fix the craziness which was there before the drugs?  Not that I'm a cheerleader for anti-depressants--I think they're way over prescribed personally.  But the libertarians and the gun lobby have got to recognize that denying their culpability in the problem doesn't help find a solution.  And isn't that we're trying to do?  Oh wait!  No it's not!  The gun lobby is trying to sell guns and the libertarians are unevolved trolls who can't play well with others.

UPDATE: How Long do You Keep a Friend Alive on FB?

It was one of those weird events in life, the kind that makes me a little more sensitive to the alternate realities that exist concurrent to this one or at least to the consequences that our actions have--you decide how to interpret....I wrote about my friend, Nancy Festinger, in a blog a month ago.  It was her birthday, as FB reminded me not knowing she had died and the birthday reminder made me think of her.  What I didn't put in the blog--because it seemed apropos of nothing, is that the last time I saw Nancy was at a friend's memorial service seven years ago in Boston.  She told me then she loved my first book and that, as a translator, it was just the kind of book that translators love because it had a kind of humor that didn't translate word for word and translators love that kind of challenge:  how to make the right shade of humor come across in the new language.  She told me she gave it to some translator friends and they were all loving it--which I am telling you because last week I got an email from a  young man in a translation class in th e Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada, and he wanted to know about the translation rights because he wanted to translate it then find a French publisher.  There are a lot of good fiction books out there and that my books got into this person's hands is thanks to Nancy.  I'm sure of it.  A very very very belated thank you.

Manadala by Clarence H. Carter

I Dreamed I Killed the Earth Last Night

I dreamed I killed the earth last night, no easy tasks for me
What sets in slowly finally fails spasmodicallyFor years she feigned indifference, she really had it comingHaven’t I the right to keep my enterprises humming?
Like a Bavarian clinician I accumulate the dataTo put in place a foolproof case on why it doesn’t matterIf I peel away her mantle like I’d peel an orange rindAnd give my host a legal dose fresh out of my behindHer surface harbors treasures that I need for my convenience
I invented reign of terror mutilation is my genius
And though she tries to plague me to make my numbers plummetBy perversity and will I’ve somehow clambered to a summitWhere I can dodge her poisoned arrows and stay a step aheadAnd barricade myself away from everything I dreadWhile I choke the air around me and vomit in the seaAnd multiply until there’s room for nothing else but me
A side effect of dirty work’s a nagging guilty conscienceMy yogi reassures me that it’s just a lot of nonsenseI’m banking that I’ll beat the odds and stay alive foreverSome projects on the drawing board are devilishly cleverIf I only keep my focus all my efforts are prodigiousAnd anyhow to hedge my bets I’ve gotten quite religious
I dreamed I killed the earth last nightIn final agonyShe checked out with a flourishCatastrophicallyBut as I tampered with the evidence what I didn’t seeWas that before I’d finished killing her I’d finished killing me
COPYRIGHT 2013 PAUL FUHRMAN
PASTEL DRAWING BY CLARENCE H. CARTER

Leaving NYC...

For most of my life, the world I cared about revolved around NYC  As an artist/writer I was required to live there and I spent a lot of my life explaining why I didn't.  Because even when I had the chance--which was basically right up until 2009 or so when it became prohibitively expensive--I never made the move.  I visited, sure.  I made long stopovers on my way from Boston to Philly but never brought a potted plant with me.  I just didn't like the noise, the dirt, the inability to hear myself think amidst distraction and see anything that moved me--besides the human condition of course, but you can see that anywhere even in solitary confinement--especially in solitary confinement..  NYC is majestic, empirical, monumental.  Isn't that part of its mystique? Yes.  But I am not a monumental writer.  My settings are small, the better to see you with, my dear.  I am better at building towns in the sandbox than recreating monumental NYC in literature.  But don't you miss the culture? my friends ask.  No.  How can I miss culture when I produce it?  And yes, I know what my peers are doing.  It's impossible not to.

 Still, I always knew, still know, that things would have happened faster if I lived there and had drinks with the folks who ran my world.  The gatekeepers.  I probably would have turned into a gatekeeper if I lived there.  It was only recently that I realized that the gatekeepers have deserted their posts.  And then I realized--much like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz--that the power to create, to make things happen for other artists resided inside of me all along.   Click those ruby slippers, baby, and get out there and promote. I started my own publishing company.

And then I noticed that little by little, I was dropping NYC as a reference point.  If my books were set elsewhere--and they were--I didn't have to explain that in Pennsylvania, as in probably the rest of the country, we do things slightly differently than NYC and that doesn't make us either less sophisticated or a freak show.  When I read other ethnic writers (and I am included in this lot like it or not) I always get mad that they spend half the book defining themselves against the dominant culture.  Their characters don't live in their own world as much as apologize for their difference.  If there is a little arrogance in their perceived superiority, it's always with a bow to the king.  I believe academics would call this colonial writing , The first book my publishing company produced was Last Call by Paul Heller which is a politically incorrect, brutally honest account of a man taking care of his mother in the hell of Alzheimer's in PA, after leaving the inhospitable world of NYC to do so.  The second book on the starting block is a thigh-slappingly funny account--if you can imagine--of an ex-steelworkers days in that dimly remembered world of heavy industry. Neither of these books need a metropolis to exist.

And then I dropped my subscription to the New Yorker.  I have nothing against the New Yorker.  They mentioned my first book favorably.  I like the cartoons. Good fiction.  As I say, I always know what my peers are doing.  The rest of the stuff, increasingly less.  The world of the New Yorker doesn't include the joy of having a cup of coffee on your back porch even in the worst winter morning possible.  You always have to go somewhere to have an experience in NYC.  With other people.  Shelling out money.  Lots of Starbuck coffee cup gazing in the New Yorker.  Okay, I drink Peet's French roast coffee in a french press at home, but I can walk outside in my slippers and robe and drink it without fear of  being not cool.  Definitely  being not cool.  Because I am not a cool person by NYC standards.  I'm not saying I'm a a good person or a better person than New Yorker people, but their interests aren't mine.  I really don't care who is running the New York Ballet or if it is defunct.  I'm mighty interested in how the morning light looks on my fifty year old pine trees and if my cat is terrorizing the rabid skunk because we'll both have to live with the consequences if he is...

TO BE CONTINUED....

Creativity and the Art of Seeing

Many people express a desire for a creative life thinking that a creative life entails doing everything in an original way instead living a life that you are truly present in.  It’s an important distinction because people get unhappy with the life they are living, the work they are doing, or the food they are eating but get overwhelmed with the prospect of chucking everything and inventing a whole new way of being.  It isn’t that hard.  Open your eyes.  Just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz whose power to return home resided inside herself, not in her ruby slippers, the power to live a creative life is already inside you.   
The word creativity is fraught with expectations and judgment—most people think either you have “the gift” for creation or you don’t—and has come to mean building something out of nothing when really creativity is recognizing the materials you have at hand and rearranging them into something pleasing to yourself.  There isn’t a work of art or a brilliant solution to a problem that hasn’t stood on the shoulders of the work of others. 
And so it is with a creative life.  Achieving a creative life doesn’t mean starting from scratch, for example growing your own fiber for the socks you knit.  It could just mean paying more attention to where your buy your non-toxic knitting materials and adding a twist to a design to make it your own.   It could mean starting with a cold frame to grown your own lettuce before you commit to a yard full of raised beds and a compost heap.  And if you always thought you would love to live the life of an artist, the perfect first step is doing a little of that art every day.  Fifteen minutes before your official day begins even.  Pay no attention to the critics but pay strict attention to the joy you feel the rest of the day for being what you are. 
When I was in grad school, one woman in the program was so worried about whether she was “good enough” to be a writer, she badgered the instructors to give her feedback, give her the imprimatur authorizing her do what she wanted until finally one instructor said, “If you want to write, I can’t stop you.”  No matter what you want to do, if you decide to do it, no one can stop you. And don’t be afraid to rename yourself:  artist, gardener, seamstress, yogi, writer.  You are the story you tell about yourself and if you see your story clearly, so will others.  When others see it, it reinforces the truth of your story.
Envision the perfect life for you and then making subtle shifts in that direction. It doesn’t take the strength of Atlas to move the world to your liking, but it does take crystal clear vision to see what your building blocks are and strategize how to move them around.  If you’re a painter you don’t have to invent new ways to paint a nude, for example, but you do have to see the nude in front of you—his colors, form, light, composition, dimension—and perhaps concentrate on one of those elements before you incorporate others.  Recognize the tune in your head before you attempt a symphony.  If you want to grow your own food and process it for the winter, see what’s possible, doable, right now.  Perhaps it’s planning a cold frame or reading up on how to start a compost pile.  Planning is the second step to achieving the creative life you envision.

The power to see is in you right now and the best way to find your way through the tangle of too much input is to meditate.  And here, too, if you’re not used to meditating, don’t start with an hour long meditation on the mat which will make your feet fall asleep and cramp up and leave you anxious to solve all the problems you unearthed during the hour.  Start with a breath.  Index and middle finger on your nose.   Thumb on one nostril and inhale through the other.  Ring finger on the other nostril then release your thumb and exhale.  And close your eyes.  You’ll see better.