Michael Vick

I’m wrestling with evil. Not literally – my soul is fine, thank you. But in my work. I find it difficult to create believable evil characters. When I try to touch evil, I fall into caricature. Ugh.

It’s only recently that I’ve recognized that my “bad guys” are lacking evil. So I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a person or an act evil.

Today, I’ve been listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR. The subject was Michael Vick. The guest was making a persuasive argument for Vick’s rehabilitation. But it was missing a key element in the way it defined Vick’s crimes.

I have heard people argue that men can beat their wives and girlfriends and suffer less hatred than Vick has. I have heard people, like this guest, say that murderers are more easily forgiven. I say yes to both, and I’m okay with that.

Here’s why. I am a dog lover, but I am offended when a woman is compared to a dog. No, what Michael Vick did was akin to killing a child. Dogs and children are helpless; we are their masters, their caretakers. It is particularly heinous to kill that which looks to you as God.

That is evil. I don’t know if Michael Vick is reformed or not. I cannot see into his heart. But his actions were motivated by a different kind of evil than that which propels a person to kill another person who is an equal.

On Writing Like a Crab

Approaching the computer to put in some time on my fiction should get its own special on National Geographic. I feel I must look like a crab going to war - coming at the thing sideways and quickly, then stopping and posturing aggressively before settling into hand to claw combat with the keyboard. I enjoy it when I get going, and it makes me a better person. But damn, it's hard.

I am lucky to have two on-going freelance jobs right now that I love, that do some good in the world, and that almost pay the bills. So why do I keep writing fiction? I seem to only be able to snatch an hour during the week for it and a few hours on the weekends. And I feel like I am always working.

While in this doubting frame of mind, I came across a few sentences I wrote a while back on why I write. It helped me to read them:

"I’m interested in how people become who they are. How their choices and reactions to events over which they have no control affect their next choices and next reactions. How their mistakes and successes and other people’s mistakes and success form them. And if we are really trapped by our childhoods."

That doesn't sound too shabby. I better get back to it.

I think for work to work, it needs to have a purpose. Otherwise, it just feels like business. It's easy to lose sight of the purpose as we go through the motions of life.

Art's Time and Place

When we used to live in Atlanta, Rob had to regularly go out of town for work. Often when he was gone, I would perform radical surgery on something in the yard. Once I climbed up the evergreen in the sloped front yard and started hacking at branches with a saw. I only got a few bruises when I fell.

Now we live in Charlottesville and while the yard still needs plenty of work, I am older and less prone to spontaneous tree pruning. And the saw is a little dull. So the next best thing to occupy my restless self is moving art around. We have so many nail holes in the walls of this house, we probably will have to hang new drywall if we ever want to sell.

Of course, this new habit may be due to the fact we owned an art gallery for three years (the image above is from our gallery) - but wherever it comes from, I like the results. You need to look at different work at different times. Your mood affects what your eyes see. And with winter coming on, I want to be able to see our pieces that reflect the natural world. In the summer, when the natural world is all around, I want artifice, surrealism, weirdness. What I want to see from my couch simply varies with the seasons. Some people are probably more constant (and boring), but I am not.

I think this principle applies in a way to reading as well. Justin Cronin's new book The Passage has been sitting on my bedside table as I have gone through three other books. It's not the right time to tackle his huge adventure story. I've been in the throws of revising my own book, and I want to read books that I can analyze. I want to read The Passage when I can lose myself in it totally and completely, not when I am reading to make my own work better.

Think about where you are pick the art you need to soothe or enliven your soul as the case my be. In other words, it may not be a bad book, just a bad time.

So True

From Michael Chabon: "[F]ailure instructs the writer. Every novel, in the moments before we begin to write it, is potentially the greatest, the most beautiful or thrilling ever written … Our greatest duty as artists and as humans is to pay attention to our failures, to break them down, study the tapes, conduct the postmortem, pore over the findings; to learn from our mistakes."

Reporting for duty!

72 Words About 72 Hours in So Cal

Relentless sunshine
Flat
Ocean swimming. Brrr.
Free
Friends who are happy
New
1967 light blue Corvette
Desert
Kelp and sharks look alike
Lifeguards
Surfers make me feel so uncool.
Fish tacos and beer in a dark bar on a sunny day
“Another beautiful day in San Diego”
Family
Borders on everything and nothing
So Cal is action. No Cal is thought.
The soul knows what it wants, but what does it need?

(The photo is from Manhattan Beach)

An Integrated Life is Worth Living

I bet many or even most of you already know about the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Apparently, there was some buzz that he was in the running for the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, but it went to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. I’m sure he deserved it too. But as for Murakami. Wow. With spare, clean writing, he tells stories of deep imagination and sensitivity. I was introduced to his writing by Meredith Cole, a writer and the wife of Peter Krebs, an artist Rob and I represented when we had our gallery. I will be forever grateful for that gift.

It would be impossible, I thought after reading his novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, to ever have anything in common with Murakami. Then I heard he was a long distance runner and published a book of his reflections on his sport and his writing: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I was going to buy it, but I forgot about it in the crush of life. Then I saw this book one night when I was working the closing shift at Barnes and Noble. My job that night was to straighten the right side of the store. And Murakami’s book was all akimbo in the Sports section on the right side of the store. I read the first page while no one was looking, reshelved it properly and bought it the next day. I would have bought it that night, but we had already closed the registers. I felt like I had discovered chocolate or beer or something equally as wonderful and sustaining and decadent.

Here is the first page:

“There is a wise saying that goes like this: A real gentleman never discusses women he’s broken up with or how much tax he’s paid. Actually this is a total lie. I just made it up. Sorry. But if there really were such a saying, I think one more condition for being a gentleman would be keeping quiet about what you do to stay healthy. A gentleman shouldn’t go on and on about what he does to stay fit. At least that’s how I see it.
As everybody knows, I’m no gentleman, so maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about this to begin with, but still I am a little hesitant about writing this book. This might come off sounding like a dodge, but this is a book about running, not a treatise on how to be healthy. I’m not trying to give advice like, “Okay everybody, let’s run everyday to stay healthy!” Instead this is a book in which I have gathered my thoughts about what running has meant to me as a person. Just a book in which I ponder various things and think out loud.”

Why did this capture me so? Well, three reasons: 1) the prose is magical - pointed and simple and effective, and it has a rhythm to it that you can feel, 2) I’m a runner (and a swimmer and a biker) and 3) I dislike people who obsess over their exercise routines and make it the focus of their conversations with you. So, I guess, Mr. Murakami had me at hello.

The book so far (I'm only at page 55 - but I was impatient to share) has lived up to its promise in my eyes. Murakami writes about running and writing and weaves the two together beautifully. It’s part biography - he introduces you to the journey of his life and the major changes in it - but mostly he explores himself and his art and what it means to be the kind of person he is. It’s not a memoir in the current style, where you had to have something awful happen to you so people who slow down at car wrecks will read it. No, it’s a quiet book. He writes about the solitude of running, the void. This, of course, is where a writer has to go if he or she wants to do anything real. It can be lonely, but for those of us suited to it (and by saying us, I am in no way whatsoever implying that I am the same caliber of writer with Mr. Murakami) it is rich with rewards and strange kinds of relationships. He says it best, of course:

“I can’t see my readers’ faces, so in a sense it’s a conceptual type of human relationship, but I’ve consistently considered this invisible, conceptual relationship to be the most important thing in my life.”

This is why art is important; I felt a weight lifted off my chest when I read that. My mother always said that a person’s deepest emotional need is to be understood. Reading this book had affected me profoundly; I found understanding in it. He has helped tie the disparate strange parts of my solitary self into something. I am a writer. And a runner, too.

I hope desperately to make someone else feel understood by something I write, because I think these conceptual relationshsips (or virtual relationships, or even brief eye contact with a stranger over a shared experience) are incredibly valuable in a world where we have to interact so frequently with people we do not like or who do not understand us. I think it is possible for me to succeed, probably not on a level like Murakami, but not being able to be the best is never a reason to quit. So I’ll keep writing, keep running, keep swimming and biking. Keep trying to be a good friend to the people I care about. Keep trying to manage the demons. Keep trying to grow up. I think that is what everybody is doing if you stop and think about it. Some are just better at it than others.

You may feel differently. You may think running is stupid, or that conceptual relationships are stupid. You may be a flesh and blood person. And there is a writer out there who will make you feel understood. I know it.

Cooking and Writing

God, I love to cook. Wait, that’s not exactly true. I like to cook, but I love to eat. And I especially love to eat what I want when I want, made with ingredients I have selected. To get that, I have to cook. And as I said, I like cooking. It takes a lot of time and is tiring on the legs, but it is often a good way to rescue the day from wherever it went off course.

Two nights ago, I cooked my first meal from Molto Gusto, a cookbook by Mario Batali. Batali is a man with confidence, with the courage of his convictions. His recipes are easy to follow and none takes up more than a page of this small-ish cookbook. He assumes some intelligence and skill on the part of his reader. What some people call simple, I call good editing. He mixes flavor profiles I wouldn’t have thought of. Lemon marmalade and olive oil?

The meal (mushroom and tallegio pizza with homemade crust, anchovies and fried bread with spring onions, and misticanza – a salad of arugula with radishes and fennel in a lemon vinaigrette) was amazing. Why? Because: 1) I gave myself enough time to do it all and 2) the recipes were excellent. They embodied the principle that less is more if you counted the number of ingredients. If you considered the flavors, the guiding principle was more is more.

When I think about my writing, I realize that is what I want to do: be minimal with the number of words but also maximize the power of each one.

Cooking and writing are both creative processes but the end result of both often involves sharing. I know you can write for yourself but not if you want to make a living at it. You can also cook for yourself, but really when it’s just me, I have an egg or a bowl of cereal. Writing and cooking are generous activities. I want whoever reads my words to enjoy them like I’m sure Batali wants people to enjoy his recipes. I write for my readers, whoever they are.