The Literary Swirl

Many influences swirling in my brain just now.  As November approaches, so does NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).  I’m planning to write a draft novel, just as I did last year.  Meanwhile, an article of mine is on the verge of appearing on a fairly high-traffic website, and I’m excited about that.  Then there’s the slow formation of a South Bay Writers group focused on “underground” writing—whatever that means!  And my own exploration of such writing—watching a documentary about Charles Bukowski; attending our South Bay Writers October meeting in costume as Geoffrey Firmin, the main character in Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, publicly reading an excerpt from William Burroughs’ Queer.  And we’re starting a third Open Mic, exact schedule to be determined, to be held in downtown Los Altos.  The next month should be full of literary events!

Images of Halloween/Samhain 2013

Some unstructured impressions of this last week or so:  Samhain.  Halloween.

 

Remembering Paula dying, I think it was 2005; looking like she was dying as I sat with her sleeping body on Samhain evening, as my daughter was out “trick or treating.”

Sitting and handing out treats, while inside my stereo plays its standard Halloween fare:  “Danse Macabre,” Carmina Burana, Ruddigore, Symphonie Fantastique, “Night on Bald Mountain.”

Wondering once again whether to put my costume on at work.

The Unitarian Day of the Dead service, and the South Bay Circles Samhain ritual.

My costume this year:  “Rent-A-Beatnik.”  I wore it to the South Bay Writers annual Literary Costume Contest; to the South Bay Circles Samhain; to coffee hour after the Unitarian Day of the Dead service.

Listening to the audio book of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Lots of drugs in that book, and hallucinations.  Listening to the audio book of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, by Jack 

Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.  A fairly straightforward book.  Sometime in the last year, Kerouac’s Tristessa, a very drug kind of book.  Also heard One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Kerouac, Kesey, Burroughs, Thompson.  So odd leading up to Samhain/Halloween.

Then the “gay” books:  Stuff by Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano.  Drugs…Sex…and Childhood. 

Thinking of my childhood, and how I feel now:  Old.  Thinking of my older sister who died earlier this year, and the older sister who is still alive, but a continent away.  Thinking about how we come to terms (or not) with our environment as we are growing up.

Yes, a time for reflection.  I’ve thought about old friends and old girlfriends and an old boyfriend; and about places I’ve lived.  Time flows on, winter approaches.

Well, and so we move towards winter and the winter holidays…Season of Reflection, “Season (perhaps) of Melancholy”…

Folk Dancing

On a whim last night, I went folk dancing after the South Bay Writers Open Mic in south San Jose.  I jumped into my car after tossing my books and papers into the trunk, calculated briefly (it was already a quarter to ten) and drove twenty-five miles up the highway to Palo Alto to find the Stanford International Folkdancers.  I was there by 10:20.  I had forty minutes to dance.
 

And not forty, really.  Because when I arrived the group was doing its announcements, not dancing.  For a moment I was afraid they were preparing to end early.  To one side of the entry a table lay spread with refreshments:  Someone’s birthday.  To the other side of the door lay musical instruments:  an accordion, a double-bass, some kind of mandolin.  People described upcoming events, chatted, and snacked.  Perhaps I’d be heading home soon after all.

But the music started up again; not from the live band and musicians, but from the recordings made decades ago in eastern Europe; which, after all, is what lured me into folk dancing in 1974—almost forty years ago!—when I was in graduate school in Virginia.

My big dancing era ended around 1990, when I began to suffer back problems.  Since then I have danced only occasionally.  Yet I still remember the dances that were burnt into my feet and soul in earlier days.  So when the Stanford Dancers announced they were doing “Orijent,” I joined right in with this fairly straight-forward dance from Serbia, one of the first dances I ever learned.  Later came “Šestorka,” a more spirited Serbian dance; and “Jovano Jovanke,” slower and more lyrical; Macedonian.  Then “Ali Pasha,” just a bit faster but still lovely to sing, from Turkey.

I hadn’t done any of these dances for some time—in the case of “Šestorka,” probably not for five or ten years.  Yet I remembered them.  They were truly etched into my brain.  In my first few years of folk dancing, I learned hundreds of dances, mostly from eastern Europe.

But that is another story, to be told more fully at another time.  But it is fair to say that folk dancing is a constant that has followed me most of my life.  Whatever dancing I do in the time remaining, the music will never leave me.  The music and I have been together since around when I was ten—another story indeed, since my family has no eastern European roots.  I first heard Balkan music in a recording from Columbia Records.  Why it attracted me…certainly has something to do with my own childhood and family.  To be told another time.

"Where Has He Been?"

With writers there is a question, always of “Writers’ Block.”  Everyone knows about that.  But there’s another, related, question:  What does the writer write about?  In order to write, a writer has to first experience—unless s/he’s going to simply write about the inability to write.

I admit it:  I’ve just been busy these last few months.  For some reason, starting in April, everything seemed to be happening for me all at once:  My day job, the writing club, my family—one thing after another.

What I can’t quite figure out, looking back, is how I ever managed things ten years ago.  At that point, I was facilitating four different groups:  South Bay Writers, Amnesty International Group 35, the South Bay Poly discussion group, and South Bay Circles (the local pagan ritual group).  How on earth did I ever manage to come up with agendas, recruit people to help out, and simply stay sane with all that activity?  I can remember earlier times when I also served on Unitarian church committees in Virginia or here in California; when I helped out with CUUPS (the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans), when I was a regional coordinator for Amnesty.  How did I ever sort everything out?  And I continue to be a legal minister/priest for the Covenant of the Goddess (although I’m not responsible for facilitating any meetings).

At this point I’m down to running the poly group—which involves just one meeting a month—and South Bay Writers.  But in two days—on July 1^st—my term as president of South Bay Writers ends.  And presumably I will have more time to…write?

But my point is, a writer shouldn’t really just sit around writing.  A writer should be doing something worth writing about.   A writer ought to be involved.  True, a writer can sit by her/himself all the time and write about the world around him/her—but is that interesting enough to be worthwhile?

I’m glad I’ve been involved in social groups.  I’m also glad to be reaching the point where I don’t feel obligated to run them all myself.  I’m looking forward to thinking a little more about…my writing.

Book Review: The Beauty of Men (Andrew Holleran)

As I’ve read The Beauty of Men over the past several months, I’ve been reading sections at our South Bay Writers Open Mic and commenting that “this book ought to be horribly depressing; but it’s so beautifully written that I keep reading.”
 

True—although it did take me awhile to finish.  I realized, after I got about halfway, that “nothing was happening.”  That’s a cliché, of course.  Peeved readers love to complain about how “nothing happens” in books like Kerouac’s On The Road.  But it seems to me, if writers are supposed to “show not tell,” then it isn’t a question of whether something “happens” or not.  It’s a question of whether the reader is being given an experience.  

I felt I was experiencing something in Holleran’s book.  With him, I always feel I’m experiencing something.  I may or may not like it—but that’s a separate question.

Lark, the protagonist in The Beauty of Men, has moved to Florida to care for his quadriplegic mother.  Behind him lies New York and the gay life of the late 1970s (portrayed in Holleran’s book Dancer from the Dance).

We share the experience of visiting the nursing home, and imagine what it must be like for his mother to have spent the last twelve years there.  And we experience what it is like for Lark to make his regular visits and to live now in Florida, after his endless partying in New York and the onset of the AIDS epidemic.  We’re carried back to those earlier times and we experience the deepening epidemic, which leads one to believe that “everyone is dying.”

Yet life goes on.  Lark hangs out by a boat ramp at an out-of-the-way lake, hoping to pick up men.  He does—and falls in love with a man who after one night refuses to have anything more to do with him.  Lark pines, Lark drives past the man’s home.  This goes on for a year.  Finally—around page 200 (spoiler!)—the man confronts him.

I love Holleran’s writing style.  This is what keeps me reading.  If you can read this without becoming depressed—and without insisting that something “happens,” this might be a good book for you.