Focus

JoJo, you could teach a class in “Focus.”

_______________

Between the blogs, the dogs, the jogs — oh, and that memoir I’m trying to finish — it’s time I escape these inter-webs.  I’ve got exactly 3 months before I head back to New Haven for my next writing conference, and I’m set on finishing this fucker and arriving there with a completed manuscript.

Unlike Kimmy here, I know just what to do with myself — thank god it doesn’t involve a sweater set, a rowdy crowd, or a microphone.

Happy reading and writing everybody.  I’m outta here!

We All Play The Game

.

1.  Today my mother has been gone 11 years.

2.  I went to bed last night reading this book, one of those books I swore I wouldn’t read because I hate the title and, as often happens, I’ve found is pretty good.

3.  I woke up with a stiff neck.  The acupuncturist would say, “Oh, your neck is stiff?  Don’t lose your head!”

4.  Today is Aunt Mary’s 69th birthday.  Eleven years ago, my mother died on her birthday.  Aunt Mary had a heart attack this week and is in the hospital.  Yesterday she said, ” I don’t want to be 70.”

5.  Janis Ian will be in Santa Cruz on March 31, Easter night.  I’ll be in the audience, listening to this song.

Here, Outside the Vatican

A house is being built across the street.  They’ve been at it since last May, and to say it’s loud here for 8 hours a day, including some weekends, would be an understatement.  This morning they’re sawing stone.  They’ve been sawing stone for weeks now, months maybe, for my entire life!, and while the workmanship of said stone is spectacular and the dozens of workers are certainly skilled artisans, the noise is wearing me down.  Until recently, all of the stone has been attached to the house in some way (front walkway, chimney, etc…) but now a massive wall is going up and, as I’m determined to keep my sense of humor, I’ve taken to referring to my house as Rome, and to calling it — this giant house with it’s giant stone wall — The Vatican.

In this morning’s news, I see all the Cardinals from around the world have finally arrived at the real Vatican to get ready for the conclave.  Since the Pope decided to retire, the Vatican and its goings-on have been top of the news everyday, its even front page news at The New York Times.  I wonder what other religions think of this, of all this press, of the constant photos of the gathering Cardinals in their red caps, because certainly none of those other religions garner this kind of press coverage.

As for me, I keep wondering why they can’t vote from afar, of the cost of flying in all those Cardinals, of the untold amount of work and particular preparations, of the special stove they’ve installed just for this one event, for smoke signals, of the complex apparatus they’re building inside the chapel to keep from being eavesdropped on, of the abuse cases in the wings, of tradition and majesty and men in power.  Of the Vatican wall.

They’re building a giant stone wall across the street.  I hope they’re finished soon.  I don’t know how much longer I can take the noise.  When it’s finished I know I’ll forget about what’s been bugging me, that even though I’m on the outside of the wall I’ll admire the beauty of the stone and remember the workers who built it.  If you look closely at the right side of the photo, you can see a stovepipe rising.  I hope it’s for more than blowing smoke.  I hope it’s a pizza oven.

On Being Stalked

When I was 21, I moved into an apartment in a St. Louis suburb with an acquaintance.  Julie and I had left our our small, southeast Missouri town to try and make it in the big city, and a mutual friend had introduced us.  We were both poor, both looking for a roommate, both looking to hold hands to make the jump.  We hit it off enough to rent a place together in the safe suburbs of that big city.

We’d only been in the apartment a few months when the phone calls started.

______________________

I’m halfway through this book by James Lasdun, a teacher who has been stalked and cyber-stalked.  Landun’s story is so chilling I can hardly put it down.  His former student, Nasreen, seeming to look for support, a mentor to read her manuscript and be introduced to an agent, is not who she seems.  She starts small, but soon sends dozens of emails, sometimes threatening, per day.  Mr. Lasdun admits to points where he could have, should have, might have seen something, done something, but it’s no use.  He is no match for this woman who has set out to ruin him.  Early on, he writes, “My point here is to illustrate my continued feeling of affinity with Nasreen, my sense of being on her wavelength, sometimes uncannily so; but also to introduce the idea of a certain porousness in her sense of who she actually was.  Harmlessly manifested here, but foreshadowing a more troubling, and then threatening, amorphousness of identity that began emerging not long after.”

Mr. Lasdun’s book is a tedious read, as he combs over every fine detail, but as a reader you are forgiving in this because it’s the adding up of these small details that foreshadow the monster to come.  Of how Mr. Lasdun’s communication with Nasreen, even the most benign-seeming chatter, spiraled out of reality, and of how Mr. Lasdun and his family barely survived her.

_________________________

For Julie and me, the phone calls always came in the middle of the night, until they didn’t.  From the start he was looking for Julie and he seemed to recognize her voice because if I would answer, he’d say, “Where’s your friend?”  At first he didn’t say much to her, but over some weeks he got more talkative, more sexually graphic and cruel.  We assumed it was some guy she’d rebuffed in a bar.  No big deal.  He would go away eventually, right?  We didn’t panic until one evening he called the minute I walked in the door from work.  I was the first one home and the phone was ringing when I opened the door and for the first time he didn’t ask for my friend.  He said, “I like that blue dress on you.”

That’s how we learned he was watching us.

We called the police, and within the hour two uniformed men showed up.  They sat on our couch and looked bored as hell.  He wasn’t overtly threatening us, they said, but, well, depending, they might tap our phone, blah blah blah.  We got the message.  They thought we were just young girls looking for attention.  The caller’s attention.  The (male) policemen’s attention.  Attention.

The policemen took our statement and left.  From our 2nd floor window, we watched them get in their squad car, and we could imagine them laughing and rolling their eyes at us as they drove out of the parking lot.

Our stalker kept calling.  Julie started having the most horrific nightmares and would run into my room, screaming, in the wee hours of the mornings.  We were terrified.

We finally moved and changed our phone number.  The calls stopped.

Have you ever been stalked?

The Sunday 100

Would you drive a hundred miles to spend your morning at City Lights Bookstore and to have lunch at L’Osteria, your favorite pizza place just up the street from said bookstore?

I would.

In the alley behind City Lights, you step around words like these:

And while you wait for them to open, you stare longingly through the window:

A couple of hours later, you’ve bagged your swag:

And after the best sausage and mushroom pizza on the planet, you head back to where you parked your car in Chinatown and spot this under your bumper.

___________

What’s your idea of the perfect Sunday?

Don’t you worry none, we’ll just take it like it comes, one day at a time.

From the time I was 9 to about 13, my mother worked shifts at the hosiery factory and couldn’t afford a sitter.  When she was on days — or when she was sleeping days because she was on nights — my babysitters were the TV and books checked out of the library.  Sometimes the books were inappropriate, and the librarian would give me the eye at the check out counter.  If she pressed me, I’d lie and say my mother had asked me bring them home for her.  That’s how I found the Harlequin romances and Danielle Steele and Sidney Sheldon.  The TV shows that kept me company weren’t always that appropriate either — remember Love, American Style? — but that’s what happens when nobody’s home.

My afternoons were filled with kid stuff: Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family.  But during my summers alone, morning TV played reruns of adult-themed shows like All In The Family.  My favorite, by far, was One Day at a Time.  Bonnie Franklin played Ann Romano, a spunky, single, working mom in a rundown apartment  raising willful daughters, one of whom was a brown-haired, basketball playing, tomboy just like me.  Or so it seemed at the time.  I never missed an episode and watched the reruns for years afterward.

Looking back I can see how much I was comforted by the show’s premise.  I didn’t know any other girls with a single mom, and I identified completely with their circumstances and their problems, with their underlying love for each other even with all the yelling, with the lessons they were constantly learning as an all-female house in a world dominated by men.  I held tight to the story of their constant, if fictional, survival.

I read today that Bonnie Franklin has died.  Pancreatic cancer.  Age 69.  Rest in peace, Bonnie — and thank you for your Ann Romano.  Somewhere there’s music playing.

Oh, the glamour of it all ….

While there were many things to fuss-bucket about regarding The Oscars on Sunday night  —- that strange boobs song with a 9 yr old nominee in the front row, the First Lady giving an award to a movie about hostages in Iran, the interminable length —- there’s one clip I remember most fondly:  the tape of the late Nora Ephron saying, The hardest thing about writing is writing.

There also appeared, on the same Sunday, this NYT essay on movies about writers:  Wonder Boys, Misery, Adaptation, The Shining, Stranger than Fiction, etc….  My favorite writerly movie is, by far, MISERY.  I could watch it a bazillion times even if I still have to turn away and press the mute button when Annie ax/hammers Paul’s ankles.  My least favorite, the one where I worship Johnny Depp on the screen for 2 hours while wondering what in the hell the story is about, is THE SECRET WINDOW.  And wait a minute, I have another one I swoon over, SIDEWAYS, though I admit I love it far less for the writer-character than for his hapless travel companion, the brilliant Thomas Hayden Church.

What struck me most in the NYT essay was this:  What [writers] are not shown doing in movies is writing. Composers are shown composing because we can listen to their flights of fancy on the soundtrack. Painters are shown painting, because one can actually see art in progress ….  I suppose there’s nothing visually dramatic in what we do, though we can get quite worked up about crumpling little balls of paper, tossing them on the floor ….

I can promise you this holds true as I sit here in a far-flung corner of a far-flung bedroom trying to tackle a far-flung idea that I’m sure resides somewhere in my own head, at a tiny table barely big enough to hold my laptop, twirling the same six ridiculous paragraphs ’round and ’round, do si do, when those six ridiculous paragraphs will likely, in the end, get the Annie Wilkes ax.  At least if I were painting, I’d have an impressive, colorful mess to show for it.

____________________

What’s your favorite movie about a writer?  Or better yet, tell us about your oh-so-very glamorous writing life.