The ocean is my place. It’s where I go to revive, invigorate, find peace. At the shore I feel connected to all that underlies our everyday lives.
I love the way the shorebirds run out as the surf recedes, run back as it returns. They are so in tune with the pattern of the waves and the movements of the other birds. And it often feels like they are playing as well as eating.
Ventura Beach, California, 2008
(In response to this Weekly Photo Challenge.)
Daily Prompt Instructions: Take the third line of the last song you heard, make it your post title, and write for a maximum of 15 minutes. GO!
I don’t know him but I’m worried about him. Crowded room buzzing with hubbub and attitude, he’s in that far corner, slouched tilted because his chair has a broken leg. He could have moved – there are empty chairs on either side of him – but there he tilts.
I don’t have kids. Watching him tweaks a maternal streak I didn’t know I possessed. His hair looks like it was wet when he went to sleep with a hat on. It frames an eternally baby face, with a nose that’s been broken more than once. His eyes are decades older than his face, and when there’s a motion into his corner, they dart like the eyes of an animal who’s lived all its life in a cage.
Some girl talks to him and waits for an answer. He stares at the air between them like her words are written there. He shakes his head in reply, about two seconds after the girl turns away with a huff of a shrug.
Maybe he’s high, but that explanation’s too simple. He’s checking out, he’s had enough, he’s done. I won’t see him again anyway but I fear no one will ever see him again, come tomorrow.
The song lyric of the title is from “No Name #1” by Elliott Smith. Click here to watch a cover version to which I am addicted.
Dear Family Cats (and also the dog),
Thanks for giving me an unforgettable experience. A night of induced insomnia and – okay – a couple laughs.
The perpetrators, Bop and Luna.
It all started about 130 am. The dog woke me up, walking in and out of my room, flopping down in the hallway, jumping up again to tick tick tick tick another circuit of my room. When she walks at a certain pace, her nails on the floor sound like the Sixty Minutes clock. At 130 pm, I find this charming.
After a moment of consciousness, I heard what had made the dog restless. Cat fight, a couple houses away. I recognized the voice of my beloved Luna, whom I had failed to lock inside. I keep the cats in at night (coyotes), but on hot summer nights Luna often evades capture.
Luna is 10 years old and I had never heard him fight before. He is a peaceable fellow who gets along with most other cats. The part of my brain that was awake decided it was a good idea to break up the fight. I filled a glass with water and headed down the street. No noise, no cats. Okay. I dumped the water and returned to bed.
Turn out my light, cue the fight, which resumed a few feet outside my window. Refill the water glass, take it outside, toss water at the cats. The other cat ran north. Luna headed west, stopped, stared at me, then sprinted after the other cat. Jerk.
The really!-I’m-mean-and-I’m-going-to-hurt-you! howling resumed in the backyard. By now I was too invested to shrug and lie in the dark listening to fake loud cat aggression. In the backyard, I decided to turn the hose on them. I turned the hose on full bore and I blasted them —
— with a dribble of water. Oh. The hose had kinked.
While I worked on unkinking the hose, from the house behind ours came brutal THUNK-thunk-THUNKs as the pit bull tried to slam his way outside through a closed dog door. He wanted in on the cat fight.
Suddenly I realized that what I needed was to be asleep. I left the hose and returned to bed. Where I lay, very very awake, for 3 hours. As many of you know, time expands at night and those 3 hours lasted for days.
I finally drifted off to sleep shortly before dawn. Not long afterwards, I jolted awake to shrill cat screeches. For the first time, our cat Bop had ambushed the kittens during the night, which is usually a time of truce. Perhaps Luna had inspired her.
There we were, stumbling into the hall, squinting at the lights we each turned on: my daughter and I, armed with water bottles, looking to spray Bop for messing with a kitten.
A peacekeeper.
Actually the “kittens” are now 11 months old and two of them are bigger than Bop, but she knows how to bully and they will always consider her enormous.
Recent runt kitten Leo stands outside window and watches his hero Luna snooze. Leo doesn’t realize he has grown up to be the biggest cat in the neighborhood.
Now the dog was energized. With two humans out of bed, it must be breakfast time.
Have you ever gone for a walk just after dawn? It is such a peaceful time of day.
P.S. As I write this, Bop has knocked the DSL modem to the floor. Twice. So we’ll see whether this exposé ever gets posted.
(This post responds to today’s Daily Prompt, “I’d Like to Thank My Cats”.)
On my evening walk, I passed a mom and her young daughter headed the opposite way.
“Mom, it’s oKAY!” The girl waves her arms and bounces as they walk.
“No, it was not okay that you did that.” The mom hunches forward, pushing an infant in a stroller.
“It was okay.” With no uncertainty.
“No, I really didn’t like it when you – did that.” Mom edits for my benefit. Her lips press together. She is not pleased.
“I wish,” the girl begins. By now they are past me and her voice carries back to where I have stopped walking, the better to eavesdrop. She continues slowly, as though choosing her words, “that I had a mom like you except somebody who didn’t care that I did that.”
I decided against openly stalking them, so missed the mom’s reply.
First, the cartwheels. I have just finished a very rough first draft of the first book in my fantasy detective series, Frames. Now I set it aside for a week, and remind myself to savor the sense of accomplishment. Then the real work begins, as I read through it, make notes, then revise.
This is my fourth novel.
Having completed this draft of Frames, I see some encouraging trends:
Longest time: first novel – 7 years!! I had issues with writer’s block. Eventually forbid myself from rewriting or rereading the prior day’s work.
Shortest time: fourth novel – 8 months – aided by time in bed recovering from surgery, where I wrote the second half in 7 weeks.
Longest first drafts: novels 1 and 2. Editing required deletions.
Shortest first drafts: novels 3 and 4. Editing required additions.
Frames, Book 1: Nica of Los Angeles. First book in a fantasy detective series that is a missing person case in this dimension, a battle between good and evil elsewhere. Available probably by the end of this year.
Scar Jewelry. A coming-of-age drama about a family with secrets, set in the present and in the 1970s punk scene in Los Angeles. Now available as an ebook and trade paperback.
?Was It A Rat I Saw?, a psychological thriller involving a series of murders, real-life split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle. Now available as a serial, soon available as an ebook and trade paperback. A few hardcover copies from the first edition are still findable on-line but I hope you buy one of the new editions instead!
Headliners, a character study about rock fans who travel the country to follow the tour of a life-altering opening band. Coming next year as an ebook.
I also wrote a detective novella, which I cannot add to these trends because I remember nothing about the writing of it, except that at the time I was the mother of toddler twins:
C.R.I.M.E. Science, Book 1: The Beginning follows a misfit group of scientists and techies who investigate the death of a volcanologist. Set in Eugene, Oregon circa 1999. Available as an ebook and trade paperback. Next book in the series will be in Los Angeles in 2014.
I continue to limp deeper into the retype* of ?Was It A Rat I Saw?, my psychological thriller involving real-life split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle. I haven’t read the book in years and retyping also means rereading, which holds surprises for me:
I had a plan to publish each of the four sections of ?Rat?, chapter by chapter, to this blog during the four weeks in August. There are several chapters in each section. This week, I published one chapter. Not one section. One chapter.
I call it a sign of psychological health that I no longer calculate how behind I am.
I believe the retype should now pick up speed. First, I have adapted to being back at my day job and getting All Else done in scattered shards of time. When I started the re-type, I was home lounging around after hip replacement surgery, with nothing but time. Second, I have just finished a first draft (yahoo!) of my latest novel, the fantasy detective series opener Frames. That is written in a different style than ?Rat? and I backed off from retyping when I realized it was influencing the style of the new book.
Good excuses for the slowdown, eh wot? No doubt next week I will have occasion to manufacture yet others.
*?Was It A Rat I Saw? was previously published in hardcover by Bantam-Doubleday-Dell. Now I’m publishing it electronically, first as a serial and then as an e-book.
Here are some ?Rat? Reviews on Goodreads.
I’m a writer and I love words. I savor the well-strung phrase wherever I find it – a book, stage patter, a movie, an ad, a blog. Song lyrics shape and define me. Early Springsteen’s meandering stage monologues could be my version of a religious experience.
Given all that, you’d think I’d be crazy for singer-songwriters, but I’m usually not. I typically prefer their songs when covered by others. As Noam Pikelny said, introducing a Gillian Welch cover at a Punch Brothers show, “We can’t play it better but we can play it faster.”
I knew Elliott Smith would be an exception. I knew I would love him but despite years of this awareness I still don’t really know his music. A couple people who serve as music gurus to me have long been Smith fanatics. They told me. I heard them but didn’t act. It can take me a long time to get around to what matters. And I confess I was intimidated by the manner of his suicide, ten years ago. He stabbed himself in the heart. Or anyway that was the way I heard the story.
Couple weeks ago, I went to one of four U.S. concerts, organized by his sister and many musicians who knew and loved him. The concerts were in Portland, Los Angeles, Austin, and Manhattan. I attended the show in LA on August 6. It would have been his 44th birthday. The show occurred at my favorite ever venue, the Largo at the Coronet. Smith was a regular performer at an earlier incarnation of the Largo (which I completely missed: I was not in LA and anyway not going out to hear music at that dark time in my life).
The four No Name Celebration shows have already sprouted lots of YouTube clips. Each show had maybe a dozen performers who each sang a couple of Smith’s songs. There were anecdotes about Smith, lots of laughs. It was an intensely emotional night. I like intense emotions, so that was okay for me. And I didn’t even know the songs. I went to learn some Smith. Most of the people in the room knew every song on the first chord. For my son, a Smith fanatic, hearing the songs in that setting was one of those life-altering events that only live music can give us.
Turns out the shows were called No Name #1 because the organizers hope to make this a recurring event, and because Elliott Smith used to name his songs like that. In fact, the first Smith song to become permanently stuck in my head is called No Name #1. To publicize the Austin show, David Garza performed the song at a radio station. It breaks my heart. Amazing how great music can do that and still be uplifting.
If you want to check out Smith performing this instead of Garza, there is an audio-only clip on YouTube, just released by the Largo owner right after this show. It’s from one of Elliott’s old Largo performances.
Garza performed at the LA show also. He was one of the highlights for me. Another standout was Aaron Espinoza, who turns out to be in a band called Earlimart which cites Elliott Smith as one of its major influences. Most of the LA performers were Largo regulars, including Jon Brion and Sean Watkins. (Over the last couple years I have come to love those guys by attending Largo shows. Most Largo shows feature Largo regulars. It’s a place where certain musicians hang out.)
There are beaucoup Elliott Smith clips on YouTube. Here is an oddball one, his performance at the Academy Awards the year Miss Misery was nominated from “Good Will Hunting”. (Director Gus van Sant was the emcee of the Portland No Name Celebration.) We live in a peculiar world where competitions try to compare Elliott Smith with Celine Dion, whose song from “Titanic” won the Oscar that year.
At the Largo No Name Celebration, initially I thought Jack Black (with his partner in Tenacious D) was out of place when he closed the show. But my kids explained it to me. His goofiness returned us to the world in just the right mood.
On the one hand, I wish you all could have been there; on the other hand that would have made it frigging impossible to get tickets.
4 STARS
Written with insight, grace, and truth, this evocative novel does a wonderful job capturing the workings of this family, its time and place (Northern Ireland, deep in the midst of “The Troubles”, 1960s-later), and the past that haunts them. The change of pace at the end was unnecessarily dragging, in my opinion, and some of the secrets did not entirely convince me. But this is a fine and well-crafted book; well worth a read. I am happy I received this book free in exchange for review.
Recommended.
I got this book for free in exchange for an honest review.
P.S. Here is a synopsis of the book with adjectives by the publisher.
One of my least favorite traits: when I get overloaded and face an upcoming crazy day at work, sometimes I can’t sleep.
So here I am, 2:42 a.m., alarm set for 7.
Full moon tonight on a warm and bright night. These photos are shadows of tree leaves, cast by moonlight on my car hood. Reflection of the moon also appears.
I tweaked the B&W contrast in Photoshop, with a bigger tweak in the second photo (hence my car hood looks like a poorly paved road).
And now, to bed. Perchance to sleep.
P.S. While we’re at it – impromptu Rorschach test! What do you see in these images? I see a cave painting of a chicken in the bottom photo.
2 STARS
If I had not received a free copy in exchange for a LibraryThing review, I would not have finished this book, which frustrated and ultimately bored me. Kushner has the chops to be a spectacular writer and does much stylistic muscle-flexing but all the disparate components of this book remained just that. Maybe I’m old-fashioned. I wanted a fusion of pieces that would make the whole hang together. Instead, every time that story momentum started to build, or I started to get into a character or relationship, I got thrown out and had to slog through exposition for its own sake, and too many pontificating characters.
So much of the treatment is superficial. Kushner conveys the pompous narcissism of the Manhattan art scene, but not the charisma that draws us to the artists despite that. Her descriptions are very detailed – from motorcycle racing to student rebellions – but she never got me to care about any of it. I kept falling out of the narrative to wonder Why is she telling me all this now? Or at all?
Perhaps my negative reaction would have been less pronounced if the cover quote had not proclaimed her “one of the most brilliant writers of the new century.” That quote raised expectations that this book never remotely came close to meeting.
P.S. Here is a synopsis of the book, heavily embellished by the publisher.
Required Writing 