Sentences

I'm working on my next attempt at a novel and I have just written the two best sentences I have ever produced.  Here, let me share them with you.

"PING," the strange sound of metal bat on ball filled Nate with pride as he watched his third attempt sail lazily toward Amy, who looked in wonder as the ball carved its path toward her open glove.  Most of the team stopped what they were doing when they heard the ball being hit and watched as Amy moved into position under the fly, punched her fist into the glove, and fell in a heap to the ground as the ball hit her in the chest and settled on the outfield grass next to her empty glove."

Victimhood

This is probably going to make me sound like a real asshole, but I want to get it off my chest.

I feel awful for the unfortunate souls who were victimized in the Aurora theater shooting, just like I felt awful for the Columbine victims and the Oklahoma City victims and the Virginia Tech victims and any other victims in a list of crimes too numerous to mention, but I've never understood the idea that these people have special rights by virtue of their victimhood.

I just read in the POST that the Aurora victims are getting frustrated because all the money that has been raised and donated for victim relief is not going expeditiously to their pockets.  I'm sorry, but I don't see why they should get compensated for their loss, or their trauma.  What exactly do they need the money for?  Their sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles and the rest were murdered.  How much cash is that worth?

I'm sounding a little like Paul Ryan here, but why are they entitled to anything more than our sympathy and resolve to put an end to rampages like the one in the theater?  I don't think tragedy should be remunerative.  That's one of the reasons it's a tragedy.

I'm not going to share this on Facebook.  If you think I am being particularly insensitive here, well maybe I am.

The Art of Retiring

Katherine here.

It's been a long time.  I've been a busy girl.  I work and travel and garden and cook and knit and watch TV mindlessly and go to restaurants and read and hike and do stuff.  I've been doing so much stuff that I classified my thoughts into four posts as we drove back home from Santa Fe so I could write about all the stuff I've been doing.  I can remember three of my ideas at the moment.  I miss my steel-trap mind.

Losing one's steel-trap mind seems to be part of retirement.  I like to think that my brain is so full of shit that it makes arbitrary decisions about what to keep on file and what to delete.  My brain seems to save a lot of junk about my past that I really am ok with losing.  Important future posts on the blog don't get the kind of prioritizing I really want.  I want to be more in charge of my brain.

That's why I'm writing--I'm feeling a bit in charge of retirement even though it's getting hard to keep up with it and my ability to juggle the multiple facets of it in my brain is also dwindling.  We are doing retirement nicely I think.  A former student, I'll call him Karl because that's his name, suggested Jim write something about that.  Jim just finished his book and is in the neurotic agony stage of trying to seek a literary agent.  Not good timing.  I decided to take Karl up (hope it's not a disappointment) and explain our take-charge happy retirement life.

I'm thinking the following elements have made retirement a really cool way of life for J and I.

1.  Mobility.  Being able to walk and move is everything.  We can hike and kayak our way around the Tetons, walk from downtown Manhattan to where Nate lives in the East Village, climb up and down ruins in Belize.  We've been going to the gym for years.  It makes a difference.

2.  Friends.  We have amazing friends.  Bud and Janet have taught us so much about traveling and staying busy.  We wouldn't have passports without them pushing us.  I wouldn't be thinking about organizing travel plans years in advance without Janet.  Jim wouldn't be comfortable building decks and fixing stuff around the house with being a handyman with Bud.  Cindy taught me to knit and so much more.  Jerry and J can sit and talk politics happily on the same side of things.  Barb is my history and truth teller.  I could go on and on.  Retirement isn't the time you find your friends--I don't think so anyway.

3.  Common Interests.  Jim and I have been building layers of interests together for close to 40 years now.  We started with tennis and watching sports, and then added cooking, then bridge, then hiking, then kayaking, then fancier cooking--you get the idea.  We're working on opera now.  New goal--see an opera at the Met in NYC and one in San Francisco.  We have differences, but they seem so small.  I avoid movies that make me cry sometimes.  J does not.  He reads a lot more non-fiction than I do.  I read more fiction than he does.  He likes tomatoes more than I do, but I'm really working on it of late.

4.  Stupid Decisions.  We have poured money into the wrong things.  We need new flooring and air conditioning would be nice someday.  There's a large list of things the house could use.  We travel instead.  I watched my Dad lose all of his life when his lung disease and oxygen machine pretty much imprisoned him at home.  I've had cancer twice.  I don't know how long I have.  I'm making the fiscally stupid decision to enjoy time while I am here and while I can move.

5.  Food.  Cook your own food and go out to good places when you can.  My mom lives on trips to awful restaurants and the leftovers she brings home.  She won't cook and hates the food at the independent living place where she lives.  Living on awful leftovers is not something we do.  We buy good food and cook it up and enjoy reading recipes and the whole process involved with food.  We eat at wonderful places at home and on the road.  Food is not just fuel.

6. The Gym.    Belong to one.  Go with as much regularity as you can muster.  See number 1.

7.  The Doctor.  See the doc.  The docs catch things like cancer.  See number 1.

8.  Work.  Do something.  It doesn't have to be for money.  I work for money because I need to fund my travel plans and shopping desires.  I found a good and flexible job in my field.  This was very hard. I applied for over thirty jobs and I got one interview.  I managed to get that job.  I'd be okay doing other things--I'd really like to be a part time concierges for The Four Seasons downtown for instance.  They weren't interested though.  Jim alternates between doing handyman jobs with Bud Simmons, doing home projects, and writing.  The book he finished in the last year is wonderful.  Our friends are busy.  We are busy.  Our kids are busy.  It's hard to find time for stuff.  That's good.

9.  Family.  We were very lucky.  We have three great kids--all have wonderful spouses.  It is fun to be with them.  We will visit Nate in the spring.  We see Chris and Franny and their families regularly.  We have oodles of grandkids who are fun and their own people too.  We have family dinners at our house about twice a month.  My mom comes (our only surviving parent), sometimes my brother and wife, all the kids, Barb (she's family), and sometimes some dear neighbors too.  This is costly, but it's been a really good thing.

10. Technology.  We try to embrace and use it.  We learned how to upload part of J's book to an agency submission thing today.  We can play games on our phones and we text too much I think.  I do the bills online and we only write checks when required.  No point in not keeping up, but it's frustrating because things change so quickly.  I recently did the Mountain Lion upgrade for the Mac and the Mail part of the computer looked totally different after the process and now my Mobile Me is an iCloud.  It's hard to understand why constant upgrading is important, but we do it and we survive.  

11.  Sense of humor.  Your body fails in lots of ways that pisses you off.  Technology gets ahead of you too quickly (see number 10).  You learn your preferences all too well and edge toward inflexibility (I know I'm in trouble when my mom starts a conversation with, "You know how flexible I am Katherine and...").  You have to laugh.  No matter who is elected, no matter who quarterbacks the Broncos, no matter what weird things CDE or DPS or the feds do to teachers--it just doesn't matter.  Bill Murray had it right in Meatballs--it really just doesn't matter.  That's the best advice of all.

Thanks for listening.

P.S.  An ironic post script:  I tried to add a photo, but the computer wouldn't let me because iPhoto needed to be upgraded.  I'll do that next.

A Few Things

Developing a Sense of Community in a Dystopia

First:  An Apologia

It has been five weeks since I've written anything in here, but I have a good excuse.  After some forty years of trying to write a novel in fits and starts and mostly abject failures, I have finally produced one.  It is 72,000 words long give or take a few hundred, as I am still polishing.  If you want to talk genres, it is a combination of magical realism, coming of age, and comedy of manners.    

Let me tell you about it.  A few years ago, I noticed that knitters always have these little slips of paper with grids of numbers and letters to help them keep track of where they are on their project.  They're called lace patterns, Katherine tells me.  I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if a gung-ho newspaper type--a sophomore because sophomores are always either gung-ho or comatose--came across a series of these mysterious notes.  He would probably concoct some kind of conspiracy, or some kind of visitors from outer space narrative around the little papers.  I had been brooding about that idea for a number of years and even had some failed first attempts at the story.  Finally, almost exactly one year ago, I hit upon the point of view and the voice I wanted to use in this narrative.  Against my better instincts, I decided on third person omniscient because I was uncomfortable with it and I figured it would force me to work harder and concentrate.  I don't want to sound too egomaniacal, but writing in first person comes too easily for me.  My concentration lapses, and I end up being way too breezy.  I also wanted to let dialogue dominate because I want to grow up to write like Richard Price.  That was another decision that forced me to concentrate.  I suck at dialogue, so to make it work I had to figure out how to make it work.  I'm pleased with the results.

It is called MONDAY NIGHT AT THE BLUE GUITAR.  It focuses on a sophomore boy reporter named Nate Merced and his journalism teacher, Charley Sanger.  Nate spends the book investigating a long time legend about runaways and blues music down at an old acoustic music purveyor based roughly on the Denver Folklore Center, one of my haunts when I was a college kid.  Meanwhile, Mr. Sanger watches Nate's progress fondly while also contending with parents who are complaining about his insistence on teaching CATCHER IN THE RYE, and his idiot principal, Dr. Trish.  Sound familiar?  They both undergo mild initiations.  Not earth shattering, but definitely noticeable.  I've noticed over the past 60 years that life lessons are rarely accompanied by lightning strokes.

Now comes the hard part.  I'm looking for an agent and working on a query letter that will hook some unwitting publisher into buying the thing.  I'll let you know what happens.  Whether it gets published or not, I loved the act of writing it.  It did an admirable job of keeping me off the streets.  In fact, I liked the experience so much that I am already 4000 words into my next book.


What's All This About Community?

We were in Arizona with Bud and Janet Simmons for Rockies' spring training.  We had just finished watching a game and stopped off at a new ultra-modern mall close by for pizza at Grimaldi's, an awesome pizza transplant from Brooklyn.  The pizza was great.  I was walking with Janet on our way back to the car when we noticed looming in front of us the biggest Apple store either one of us had ever seen.  It was all tinted glass like the windows on a stretch limo and four stories high.  Through the gray windows on each floor we could see the shadows of hundreds of shoppers queueing up to check out the newest IPads.  Janet and I both looked at each other with the same thing on our minds:  The scene reminded us both of disquieting moments in movie versions of dystopian novels like BRAVE NEW WORLD  or 1984 where the citizenry has been reduced to emotionless automatons mindlessly buying and selling their way through a long, dreary life.

This feeling was, of course, exacerbated by the fact that I was in Arizona with its tough immigration laws and sand blasted neighborhoods with golf carts in every driveway and gates in front of every community.

Important people are always extolling the virtue of patriotism, community, shared responsibility.  But the only time that feeling of community ever happens is when some lunatic or lunatics strike out with automatic weapons, groin guards, and tear gas.  Everybody in Aurora is focused on the theater shooting, just like everybody in Littleton was focused on Columbine.  This is the first day the newspapers have not been exclusively about the crime and the victims and the shooter, busily looking for reasons and explanations that will never adequately explain anything.  Tomorrow, there will be even less coverage and pretty soon we will all forget and that sense of community that comes with  communal sorrow will be history.

You see, I don't think there is any sense of community or country anymore.  We aren't about the good old USA, or our fellow citizens.  We're about Apple, Exxon-Mobile, Microsoft, GM, Dell, investment bankers, and dividends.  Where is patriotism when our first allegiance is to the bottom line?

I know what some of you might be saying.  "He doesn't understand business."  "What's good for GM is good for the country."

Bullshit.  I understand business perfectly.  That's the source of my malaise.  What's good for GM is good for GM.  It has nothing to do with country.

Beach Reads @ Puerto Vallarta

We just got back from two weeks in Puerto Vallarta with the Simmons.  To the right is the stack of books read between the two of us.

I'll talk about mine and then K. can tackle the rest.

The Breaks - Richard Price

I started this on the plane and finished it the first day at the pool at Villa del PalMar, just a short bus ride from the Malecon and downtown PV.  Price is one of my favorite authors, the best writer of dialogue I have ever seen.  This, I think, was his first book and you can tell.  Clockers, Freedomland, Lush Life, The Samaritan (to name a few) are worlds better, but this is still a fun read and you can see the beginnings of his mastery of telling a story primarily through dialogue.  It is a coming of age novel told in first person.  It doesn't have the gritty focus of Price's later works and very little of the tragic potential, but the speaker is a more street-wise Holden Caulfield who is MUCH more willing to talk about and engage in semi-graphic sex.

11/22/63 - Stephen King

I'm not a huge horror fan, but I certainly appreciate King's sentence crafting and mind boggling imagination, even though it ends up being a little too violent for my tastes.  This is his most recent novel and only the third one I've read by him.  To make a long story short, the main character is led to a portal that will transport him back from 2011 to 1958.  No matter how long one stays in the past, he discovers, only two minutes elapse upon returning to the present.  He decides to go back in order to stop Oswald from killing Kennedy and in the five years he spends waiting to intercede, we are given a nostalgic view of the late fifties/early sixties.  Some of the views have us longing for the past; others are too horrible to contemplate.  It is one of the most compelling books I've read in a long time.  It is nearly 900 pages long and I finished it in three long sessions under the scorching PV sun.

They Eat Puppies Don't They - Christopher Buckley

A hilarious satire of life in Washington.  Buckley is an equal-opportunity excoriator and no one escapes his scorn.  I don't think this is as funny as Supreme Courtship, another one well worth reading, but it does leave you with the conclusion that there is nothing in our nation's capital worth saving.

Founding Brothers - Joseph Ellis

This book was written twelve years ago, but has lost none of its immediacy.  Ellis, who wrote The American Sphynx (a great Jefferson bio) takes a look at the eight most prominent figures at the nation's founding (Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr, Madison, Franklin) and by focusing on six seminal moments (e.g. Hamilton and Burr's duel, Washington's farewell letter, the changing relationship of Adams and Jefferson) shows how these remarkable people managed to start a country founded on two paradoxical beliefs:  Federalism and Republicanism.  This is a great essay.

Unholy Night - Seth Grahame-Smith

I started this on the plane trip back and am currently three fourths into it; therefore, I'll let K. take over from here.

Katherine here.

I'm struggling a bit.  I stepped on what I believe were sea urchin spines, heroically cleaned out by my right thumb nail.  The scrubbing in a subsequent shower shoved those spines under my thumbnail.  I've been soaking it in salt water and watching spines crawl up towards the end of my nail from the holes they've dug lower down.  My once lovely (truly) right thumb nail is bruised and throbbing and swollen.  I won't discuss the three toes in similar situations (bottom of toes rather than top though and surprisingly far less painful).  The toes do not interfere with typing.  I'm letting you'll know I'll be pretty brief with my book stuff when I have so much more to say.  I'm not sure if this is good luck or bad luck.  You never know close up.

Here's what I read in PV.  It was great.  No tech.  Only books.

Back of Beyond and Force of Nature -   C. J. Box

C.J. Box is what I read instead of the Twilight Series.  He writes western semi-mysteries, semi-nature, books set in Wyoming.  Wyoming (specifically the Tetons and Yellowstone to a certain degree) are bliss, health, love, romance, friendship, nature, Zen and the godness of everything, and an island that is just J. and I and other special friends who understand this--they know who they are).  C. J. Box writes stuff that talks about Wyoming and sometimes the very places I've been in Wyoming (Tetons or otherwise) and it fills me with love and anticipation.  I have a stupid video about Grand Teton National Park where they show the cabins we stay at.  It's about time to get that puppy out.  Anyway, I read C.J Box with an open heart.  Here's a bit on each:

Back of Beyond was kind of a remake of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians only this time the elimination of the characters (or campers) takes place in the wilds of Yellowstone.  Cody Hoyt is a borderline alcoholic who solves the mystery and works to save his very cool son from death's door.  Not C. J.'s best stuff.  You have to love Wyoming for this one.

Force of Nature is a Joe Pickett book.  Pickett is a game warden who always figures out the crime while at the same time championing a wide range of outdoor values, showing that living in Wyoming means living a life of contradictions.  Joe usually destroys a government vehicle, pisses off authority figures, figures out the crime while seeking and getting help from a wonderful cast of characters made up of family and honest friends.  This book details the background of long-time friend Nate Romanowki, a former military killer, now semi-native drop-out from society who happens to be one of the best falconers in the world.  Good looking too.   I love Nate.  The book is about him and all our imperfections and perfections and finding the bad guy.  9/11 too.  I loved the term "yarak"-- a falconry term meaning ready for a kill, for sex, for something primeval and natural.  Great escape book.

Sacre Blue - Christopher Moore

Magical Realism.  Ahhhhh.  A blue muse (a slave to man who makes the color blue in a way I shouldn't reveal here, but is quite erotic) inspires Impressionist artists as she inhabits and loves the models they paint.  She teaches them to see, to learn, to focus and oddly cannot create herself.  There's lots on the the history of the color blue, many Impressionist artists and the Paris of their time, and baking bread (always test the appropriate crunchiness of a loaf of French bread by whacking across the side of a young man's face).  Smart and funny.  Loved it.

Unholy Night - Seth Grahame-Smith

This is what might happen if the three Magi  in the new Testament were thieves and liars instead of kings.  Balthasar is our head thief  and we follow his history as the infamous outlaw--The Ghost of Antioch.  Balthasar is fixated on revenge and the search for a pendant, a pendant that defined him.  His encounter with his brother theives/kings Mary and Joseph, Herod, and Pontius Pilate are wonderful.  The book oddly made me believe in all sorts of things.  Don't want to say more.  Jim's in the middle.

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick deWitt

This is a grisly "picaresque" novel detailing the wanderings of two hired killers who finally go home to Mom.  They kill somebody about every five or six pages.  Wore me out.  The cover says it would be by Cormac McCarthy if Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor.  Not quite.  There is no poetrty here.  No myth of space and quest against the gods.  No gathering of powers or friends or equipment (unless you count the toothbrush and minty tooth powder the narrator picks up early on).   I appreciate this book.  Not my current cup of tea.

The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco

I mean to write a whole post about this.  Not today.  This is an allegory lining up what an evil forger, Simonini, in the late 1800's in Paris did to history with his lies.  He created documents (from personal wills to documents that undermined governments and led men to deaths) and the documents were total lies.  The most important, the story about rabbis gathering in the Prague Cemetery and creating a plan to take over the world was based on bad storylines Simonini had read in books by Alexander Dumas and someone named Sue (lost his first name--sorry).  Conservative politicians buy the lies and start wars and spread the myth.  Liberal freedom fighters who championed Jewish rights ignored the myth of the Prague Cemetery because there were no facts.  The whole story lines up beautifully with how the lies on the internet become myth and no facts can deter some folks.  Consider how Congressman Mike Coffman questioned President Obama's citizenship and heart just last week.

It's important to note Eco is a history teacher and the stories he tells are real.  Only his narrator was fictional.  The timelines and sources are included in the appendix.  Hitler used the real Prague Cemetery documents to spur his Final Solution for the Jewish Population.  The parallels were frightening.

The book had two lines that I've thought about a lot.  The first came after a discussion of Descartes where the narrator changed the philosopher's famous lines to this: "I hate, therefore I am."  I've thought about that a lot.  I see it in a lot of people.  It is an interesting way to look at things for a bit.  The other echoing line is: "Hatred warms the heart."

Gods without Men - Hari Kunsru

Halfway done--I'll let you know.

On Vacations

Everywhere Katherine goes she makes new friends. She just can't help herself.  Here she is making the sand coated chessmen on the Malecon in Puerto Vallarta break character.  We walked into restaurants we hadn't been in for over a year and the waiters remembered her and were happy to see her.  We walked into Cassandra Shaw's jewelry store on Basilia Badilla (sp?) and Ms. Shaw remembered her from the one and only other time we had set foot in the store.  I'm not exaggerating.  It's true.

We stopped at a street vendor's stand to check out a hand beaded dress and as we were walking away a local artist came up behind us, placed both palms on either side of his face and looked at Katherine and exclaimed, "My God, do you know how beautiful you are?"  She was nonplussed.  I have been saying that to her for years, but I never added the hands to both sides of my face touch.  I'll bet next time we go back that same artist will spy her walking down the street and run up and give her a hug.

What I'm saying is that our two weeks in PV with the Simmons was a lovely time.  The weather could not have been more perfect, although now that I'm back in Colorado I do have to worry constantly that I'm losing my tan.  The restaurants ranged from deplorable to spectacular (Las Palapas).  We spent one day on a food tour of the best street food in old town and I encourage anyone traveling to PV to do the same (check out Vallarta Eats).  Mostly, we got into a daily pattern and followed it.  Up at seven and to the gym by 7:30.  Workout till 8:45.  Walk the beach till 9:45.  Have coffee and scrounge a little breakfast and then out to the pool by 11.  Read until 3.  Shower, cool down, and hang out until time to grab a bus downtown or to some local village (Ixapa, Punta de Mita) for dinner.  Back home and in bed by ten.

Here's the rub.  I have mixed feelings about the whole vacation thing.  Usually the first thing I think when the plane touches down for a two week stay is that "In just thirteen more days I get to go home!"  I know that sounds grouchy, but I can't help it.  Jenny Lake is the only place where I don't end up counting the days, hours, and minutes until I get to leave.  It just seems a little silly to spend all that money to basically do the same things I do at home:  read, eat, workout.  All the things I love most in the world (Katherine, hiking, kayaking, reading, writing, going to great restaurants, cooking) are within a half hour of my front door.  Why do I need anything more.

But then I feel the sun turning my body brown, hear the waves (being careful to watch out for the undertow) lapping against the beach, smell the carnitas wafting over old town, and see my wife loving it all and I end up having the time of my life.