Far Sighted

A few weeks ago, my eyes hurt every time I looked at anything within three feet of my face. They ached and burned and generally felt awful. I had to put in eyedrops every fifteen minutes just to function at work, and even then I had to figure out things to do away from my desk so that I could look at things from a further distance. I wanted to take time off from work to rest my eyes but it occurred to me that almost all of my leisure activities involve doing things close-up. My idea of a good time looks something like this: - Run intervals on the treadmill (while watching TV)

- Read for fun & work

- Write in journal

- Blog

- Edit essays

- Update music on my ipod

- Organize online photos

- Do a puzzle or crossword

- Talk to people at close range

.... and on and on. And this particular week, the weather was still bad, so there wasn't really the option of taking these activities outside.

Now, it will probably surprise no one, but around this same time I developed a constant, tickling level of anxiety. Partially fueled by the frustration of eye strain, I was worried about my ability to finish what I had started and to live up to the very high expectations I have for my life. I really shouldn't even put that in the past tense-- I am worried about those things.

I have been badly near sighted since I was ten years old. My first memoir was a six-page work about the truly dramatic and tragic topic of getting glasses. Chapter 1 was entitled "My Eyes Hurt" and I believe the opening was "Mom, my eyes hurt." I recall the excitement of those words printing out on a junky dot-matrix printer on the top floor of my elementary school, and I remember tearing off the strips of hole-punched ladders from each side. As always, I made a little accordion out of those useless paper ribbons, and played an imaginary tune to kick off my literary career, and got back to the computer.

Since then, glasses and the rabid pursuit of short-term goals have been two lenses through which I see my life. I have no idea what I want to be doing in ten years, but I do know that within twenty minutes I hope to be done with this blog post. I want to finish reading a book this weekend and send back my Netflix movie tonight. I want to finish up some essays and send them out by Friday. I want to do a good job at work today.

I used to be dreamier. I used to swim in the ocean and look out and try to figure out how far away that boat was. I used to look at a lot of horizons. I used to love large things, things that were hard to see all at once, like planetariums and arboretums and used bookstores.  I used to count up (this is the fifth time I've jumped a horse) instead of down (twenty push-ups to go).

To deal with the eye strain, there were two things I had to do. First: I had to look at things farther away, like the things outside of windows, or people across the room, or the idea that if I did not finish these things today it would be better for my eyes later.

Second: I took my glasses off. I cannot see more than eight inches in front of my face without my surroundings looking unclear. I had to remind myself that without the glasses, I'm not blind-- things are just a lot fuzzier. They are still there, and I still trust the world. I sat in silence and unclarity, and occasionally closed my unsleepy eyes, unleashing my unfixable gaze on the backs of my eyelids, remembering how I used to imagine them as outer space.

The Girls Who Made Me

Tonight I am working on an essay about girls from literature that shaped my personality. Not influenced: shaped. Constructed. Without these girls in my life I would not be Julia. Their names are: Charlotte Doyle, Meg, Matilda, Turtle, Elizabeth Wakefield, Samantha, Mary, Anne of Green Gables, Anne Frank, Belle, Ariel, Margaret, Velvet, Clara, and Lyra. And, being entirely honest, half the members of the babysitters club. And, lord, DJ Tanner, too. Sorry, arbiters of taste.

There are also the ur-girls, the ones that even I knew were ur-girls at the time: Alice, Jo, and Dorothy. And the girls I recognize like cool cousins now, but are too late for personal impact: Hermione and Katniss.

I will write this essay because in some ways, I realize, this is the essay, the self that was created (I can't even bring myself to write "the self that I created" because the person that is "I" now is really the industrious work of these fictional hands; the "my" in myself feels collective) when I was busy making a person of myself. I am excited about it and somewhat scared by it. The adult version of this girl, these girls, is walking through adult looking glasses and accidentally stumbling onto tornados, chopping off hair, making the best of strange mansions. And this adult girl needs to go back to her younger self; but sadly, that younger self is fluidly swishing around in memories and ideas and doubt.

Luckily there are fragments of self dutifully recorded and mass-published. I will revisit and report back.

What do you think? Sound interesting?

Ten Real Twain Quotes

I spent quite a lot of my morning fighting the internet about a misattributed Twain quote. More on that experience in an upcoming Writers' Houses post, but I thought we should hang out with some better quotes that are actually real.

1. There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice. - Following the Equator

2. I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts. I don't know anything that mars good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature. I love all literature, and as long as I am a doctor of literature--I have suggested to you for twenty years I have been diligently trying to improve my own literature, and now, by virtue of the University of Oxford, I mean to doctor everybody else's. - Speech to the Savage Club, London, 7/6/1907

3.  Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about. - More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927

4. Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved. - Pudd'nhead Wilson

5. Wit and Humor--if any difference it is in duration--lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, brief, and can do damage--the other fools along and enjoys the elaboration. - Mark Twain's Notebook

6. I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. ... There are subtleties which I cannot master at all,--the confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me,--and this adverb plague is one of them. ... Yes, there are things which we cannot learn, and there is no use in fretting about it. I cannot learn adverbs; and what is more I won't. - "Reply to a Boston Girl," Atlantic Monthly, June 1880

7. Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered--either by themselves or by others. - Autobiography of Mark Twain

8. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it--namely, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

9. Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person. - Notebook, 1898

10. Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink- under any circumstances. - Mark Twain's Notebook

Hi, new visitors!

Hello, visitors from Writers' Houses! Thanks for coming to my website. You'll notice it's not too crazy. Have a look around, and if you'd like to contact me, feel free to email me at julia.pistell@gmail.com (or, if it's a Twain thing, julia.pistell@marktwainhouse.org).

Welcome!

Writers' Houses

I'm pleased to announce that I am guest blogging over at Writers' Houses, a website that has been recognized by the New Yorker, The LA Times, and, most importantly, the dork community.  Check it out when you have a chance-- it's a behind-the-scenes look at my job at the Twain House. Fun to live, fun to write. Writers' Houses!

The Lottery, Part 2

Last week I performed in the Upright Citizens Brigade’s Lottery show.  In the Lottery, students in the UCB’s education program are randomly selected to perform alongside members of the theater’s house improv teams. When you’re selected, they call a few days before (see previous post) and then you simply show up the day of the show. Perhaps the best way to describe the experience is to break it down hour by hour.

3:00  I leave work, in Hartford, early.

3:30 I meet Greg, my boyfriend and the only person I know who will witness this lucky performance, at the Megabus stop.

4:00-ish: Bus leaves, commence fretting about the show.

6:45: Gobble down a sandwich in midtown.

7:00: Arrive at rehearsal studio, meet other students selected. There are students from all four levels here; I’m in the highest so at least I have an idea of what’s going on. One of the 101 students is in a 101 intensive so he literally just started doing improv a week ago. My good friend Vlad was also selected and we keep grinning at each other.

7:10: During warmups we, the eight selected, learn that one person has just gotten off a flight from LA, two of us came in from Connecticut, and we’ve got marketers, teachers, and the usual hodgepodge of occupations with us tonight.

7:20: Porter Mason, our instructor, is boiling down all of the Upright Citizens Brigade’s sixteen-week curriculum into a three hour workshop.  “This is what a Harold is,” he says, “Someone will do a monologue. Then three scenes. Try to find a pattern. Then a group scene. Then revisit the first three scenes. Then another group scene. Then short scenes where you can tie things together.”

7:30 – 10:00: Rehearse, bond, try to develop group mind in this very short time.

10:05: Walk over to the theater. We pick up iced coffees along the way and chatter nervously about the show. I feel very close to these folks already.

10:30: Enter the theater. Harold Night (an evening of five back-to back house team improvisations) has one Harold to go—up on stage they’re playing with  a pattern of famous Italians.  I’m too nervous to watch and slip back through the crowds to the green room, which, in my nervousness, I can’t find for a minute. There are something like 200 people int the audience.

At this point time falls aside because I’m sitting backstage with improvisers I have long admired. I can’t bring myself to be witty enough to break into their banter so instead I turn to comforting the 101 guy.

Just before we go on, we stand in a closet to warm up. Trying to be bold, I request a specific warmup. In my group are Kevin Hines from the Curfew, Andy from Sandino, and Ellena from CAPTCHA.  Kevin’s the model of professionalism, Ellena is warmer than warm, Andy is being silly. All three points of view are a relief.

We’re the first of two Lottery teams to perform. We are standing behind the curtain. For the UCB experts, this is an ordinary night. Porter Mason goes out and explains what’s about to happen, and selects an Advanced Study student right then and there to perform with us. Although the rest of us have only been together for four hours, and we’ve only been with the experts for thirty minutes, the Advanced Study student feels like an intruder. How could I possibly come to trust this person? I didn’t even hear his name. But now I’m coming through the curtain, clapping (I have a problem—I almost always clap if I hear clapping, even if other people are clapping for me and I’m supposed to be acting cool about it).

We start. The suggestion is Metallica. Three quick monologues happen, and I hear an idea from the first monologue that I love (“I worked security but I was small so I just was just mean to people”), and within three incredible seconds I know I have a great scene initiation and I start to smile. In my head I’m thinking “Keep listening, keep listening, you need to hear it all and have many ideas and at the very least be able to work with other people who were listening better” but now the nervousness has vanished and I just want to knock this one out of the park.

The second the third monologue is over, I step forward to indicate I am ready, here we go and another student steps out, too. I initiate my scene about a high school mean girl who works security in an airport, and just when I think I haven’t planned any further than the initiation, I have no idea where this will go, Kevin Hines is in the security line, too, supporting us and making the scene about emotional relationships. The scene is happening under my feet and it is easy, it is gliding along, and maybe it’s funny; all I know is that it feels good.

The other two scenes happen—a shitty band and an addictive tag-sale—and in the group games, I’m along for the ride but don’t contribute anything worthwhile. I’m just a part of the blob. Again, feels good. We do our scenes again and now it’s going by fast. I don’t feel the ideas pinging around in my brain, but in a way that’s good; it forces me to listen and respond to my scene partners, some of whom have better ideas than I do, and I’m grateful.

And then it’s over, the lights are killed, I immediately think of ten better moves I could have made, but I’m smiling and I don’t care. There’s a little high fiving and tripping backstage. I come out into the audience and watch Vlad work a scene about fasting, and I realize that they don’t tell the audience who are the teachers and who are the students. They’re all just out there, together, finding patterns and games and hanging out in groups. For this night they are one group, levels be damned.   The best scenes are the ones where the students are the stars and the instructors make all of the support moves.

Conclusion: the most advanced form of improvisation is support.

And then it’s really over, and we get notes that are really just compliments, and we walk outside and I find that two friends I haven’t seen since high school showed up, and we giggle and catch up, and we all walk down to McManus and have a beer with the leftover performers from Harold night, and revel in our glory. Vlad and I pump Greg for audience perspective.  We keep saying, “This is awesome.” Simple and dumb, but who cares. It was.

12:50: “Oh god, it’s 12:50, we better get going.”

1:15: Metro North train to New Haven. We try to sleep but we’re too excited and rehash both Harolds and the workshop ad nauseum.

3:00: Off the train in New Haven, jump in Vlad’s car. Greg demands food (nobody has eaten since 6:30).

3:30 AM: McDonald’s fries and gas station milkshakes for all.

4:15 AM: Arrive home, full of milkshake and improvisation joy.

4:20 AM: Asleep.

8:30 AM: Working away in my cubicle, preparing for another ordinary day.

The Lottery (Prelude)

The following is a self-indulgent look at how I ended up in the Lottery Show at the Upright Citizens Brigade this week. In subsequent posts I will talk about how it actually went. Only read this if you're a super geek like me. Less than a week ago, Greg and I were having a lovely dinner of couscous and something else (it was good, so I don't think I'd personally made it), without phones, without radio or music, without a rush to something afterwards, without anything but each other. It was nice and, sadly, an unusual event. So when I got up and saw this chat from my dear friend John/Vlad the Improv-er...

6:31 PM John: guess who just got selected to perform at the UCB lottery show!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6:34 PM HELLO!!!!!
... I cursed the ill timing of my romantic interlude. I had a feeling. I just had a feeling. I looked at my phone.
 9 minutes
6:44 PM me: AHHHHHHHHHH!
  WHOA!
  THAT IS AMAZING
6:45 PM oh SHIT I JUST MISSED A CALL FROM UCB
 John: shut the fuck up!!!!!!
  thats what it was!!!!!!
..... I'm not normally a big caps lock user, but I was really upset. I think you should know at this point what the Lottery is. The Lottery is a show at the Upright Citizens Brigade (founded by Amy Poehler, one of my idols) where I am currently a level-4 (of five) student. About every six months they have a show in which they draw students from each level of their classes and have them put on a show with members of the UCB House teams. It's an opportunity to play on their stage, to have their superstars get to know you; it's an opportunity, in short, to feel like you won the actual lottery.  The chances of getting selected are slim, and the chances of John and I, good friends and members of the same team in Connecticut, were pretty much nothing. But it happened. But I missed it.
 me: but i MISSED IT
  FUCK FUCK
 John: call back
6:46 PM me: I did
 John: and?
 me: voicemail
 John: how did we both get called
  they leave a message?
 me: no
  I think they just call the next person
  I missed it
 John: oh no
6:48 PM they call a bunch of people
 me: I totally missed it
...At this point, you can obviously tell, I was extremely sad. Greg was finishing his couscous and watching me pace around. I called the number back twice. Generic UCB voicemail.
 John: what was the number?
 me: it's the ucb number, I called it right bak
6:49 PM WAIT
Thinking about my recent "If You Don't Ask" post, I called back one more time. No harm in being obsessive. No harm in listening to voicemail and self-flagellating for a while. This time, someone picked up. Greg got on my computer.
 me: It's Greg. She called again and got someone.
  They're talking...
 John: cool
  that would be cool to do it with someone i know
6:50 PM me: She's pumping her fist in the air victoriously
Here's the conversation I had:
Confused girl: Hello?
Me: Hello?  Is this... who is this? (an actual voice picking up completely disoriented me)
Confused girl: Who is THIS?
Me: This is.... this is Julia. I got a call from this number. I just called it back. (Good time for nonchalance, me. Slick.)
Confused girl: Um... do you do improv? (I hope that the UCB voicemail just forwarded straight to her phone and that the UCB line is not actually this awkward.)
Me: Yes! Yes I do. I'm in 401 with Eric Tanouye.
Confused girl: (shuffling around and long pause) Oh, ok... yeah... you've been selected to be a part of the lottery show on Tuesday. Would you be interested in that?
 me: It's Julia again!!!!
 John: whats up???
 me: i'M IN MOTHERFUCKER
 John: WTF
 John: im calling u in a min
 me: dude
6:51 PM this is fucking crazy
END GCHAT, commence excited phone call with John, which I don't really remember.
Why do I copy and paste this chat here? Well, I was very excited to be in the show, of course. But I was even more excited that my persistance paid off. Had I not called back three times, I would not have been in the show. Opportunities come but when they do you have to use every part of the buffalo, and not feel sorry for yourself until it is truly, truly too late. I'm often in denial about that part so I'll take things just one step further, ask one more question, call back one more time.
Next post will be a reckoning of the show itself. Spoiler alert: one of the top ten experiences of my life.
You out there: keep calling. Keep asking.

The Artful Interview

I've been interviewing my fellow improvisers for our Sea Tea Improv podcast (not yet launched-- I'll keep you posted!), and today, I attempted to record a short introduction to those interviews. Let me tell you, talking to yourself, even for three minutes, is not easy. There's no eye contact. There's no give and take. The only voice besides your voice is the voice in your head.  Here's me talking to myself in the podcast: Me: Welcome to the Sea Tea Improv Podcast! I'm Julia Pistell and I'm, uh, going to...

Voice in head: You sound so unnatural. You sound like you're reading the sponsors at the end of something.

Me:... (pause)

Voice: TALK GODDAMN IT! 

Me: tell you all about the short history of Sea Tea!

Voice: Too peppy. Tone it down, stupid.

.... And on and on.

I've never thought too much about interviewing until lately; I've always loved to talk and ask questions. I'm curious about people and I also don't have an excessive amount of dignity, so that makes for some pretty direct questioning.

But now I have t0 learn how to do it right-- I'll be interviewing the amazing Fran Gordon for my work at The Mark Twain House about the early days of the House's restoration, and I'd love for these Podcasts to be high-quality, too. In my panic I decided to get away from the podcasts and hang out and read today.

So of course I'm reading Everyone Loves You When You're Dead by Neil Strauss, a collection of unused interview scraps from Rolling Stone. This book is incredibly well-edited-- the reader gets between a paragraph and a few pages of each interview, then Strauss swerves to someone else whose interview is thematically linked, and then possibly back to someone you'd already met before. He's an artist of the interview, it seems. His primary skill seems to be asking direct questions, and because of that, he gets some unexpected results (sometimes very self-aware, sometimes hilariously unaware) from people.

Example:

Strauss: I notice a lot of times you seem to be zoning out.

Aguilera: I'm never zoning out. I told you I was a deep thinker. My mind is always thinking...My life just revolves around putting myself out there for people, and giving and giving. So whenever I get those five minutes in a van or limo or whatever, those are special moments to just zone out and think and dream. I just love being about to do that. It's funny that you notice that.

Another fantastic interview-based book is The Conversations by Michael Ondaatje and Walter Murch (thanks for the recommendation, Tom Bissell!). This is an entire book of one conversation about film editing and, consequently, book editing. Example:

M: And as I was removing that scene, at two in the morning, it began to speak to me, as if it were Job, saying: Why are you removing me, me of all scenes who has been so faithful to you, who has tried so hard to accomodate your every wish? And I said, I know what you're talking about, and believe me, I've spent many hundreds of hours on you and yet I'm willing to throw all that work away for the benefit of the whole.

O: It's so similar to editing a book, in those final stages of trying to find the right balance.. It's like pruning trees and you take out numbers 3 and 7 and 9, and once they're gone you realize that--

M: You see a whole different thing.

O: You can see a different possible form and you discover that a whole new set of trees can go, or should at least be moved to a new place.

So, my challenge to myself is to become a good interviewer. A great interviewer. If I'm going to write nonfiction, this is an essential skill. It's not about just taking down what people say. It's about asking the right questions and following up with an even better one.

What do you think, readers? What makes a great interview?

If You Don't Ask

This week I am gathering together my final report on my 2010 Solo Writers Fellowship (thank you, Greater Hartford Arts Council).  I've also recently submitted an application for more funds for my writing, so I've had to both reflect on my past couple of years as a writer and plan for the next five. I do, however, have one nagging thought: there are many people who want to be professional writers, and most of them don't go through the rigmarole of applying for fellowships and grants and residencies. Who am I to take this money? I argue why I want it, why I need it, but I continue to feel guilty even for asking for it. It feels too audacious, too immodest to say, "Hey, give me money, Hartford! I'm awesome. Hand it over."

I have had an incredibly lucky and privileged life so far, graced with opportunities knocking and doors I've busted down without waiting for knocking at all. It all comes down to basically two things that have stuck in my head since I was about eighteen years old.

The first is a story from college-- second semester freshman year, I signed up for a bunch of courses and for some reason started switching them all around during the first week of school. (Typical Julia.) I dropped out of a Child Development course and, a day later, returned to the professor's office to beg my way back in. Full of regret and very flustered, I made my case. He did not let me back in.  He wasn't angry; he'd already filled the spot I left vacant. I thanked him and spiraled into apologies and he said, "Don't apologize. If you don't ask, you don't get."

That phrase has stuck in my head for almost a decade. I use it to combat the shyness with which I am naturally beset (it's true, ask my mother). Asking, ultimately, demonstrates knowledge (that you know who to ask and the appropriate things to ask for), confidence, and proactivity-- probably the three qualities of self that I am constantly trying to improve.

But here's the important thing: asking for something does not and should not imply that you are entitled to it just because you asked. I try to ask humbly and accept rejection when it comes. That's hard, but I think not getting what I asked for has taught me more in the long run than getting it. But if I don't ask at all, I learn nothing. I never would have anticipated that "if you don't ask you don't get" would be my big takeaway from child development, without even taking the class.

Philosophy #2 is much simpler-- I aim to never assume I won't like anything before I try it. That has gone for food, boyfriends, jobs, friends, improv games, places I've lived, all kinds of media, really anything. I want written on my grave "Game for anything."

The results of these two modes of thought are that I am surrounded by things I love: things I have asked for and things that have asked for my open mind. My life is sometimes overwhelming because there are so many amazing people and adventures in it and I don't want to waste a second. It is the best kind of anxiety to have.

So, to have the writing life I want, I must do both: I have to ask for what I need and be prepared when I hear no. And I have to try whatever opportunities come along.  There is an opportunity for support, and I'm asking for it.

Three Journals

Oct. 22, 1837 "What are you doing now?" he asked. "Do you keep a journal?" So I make my first entry to-day.

-- Henry David Thoreau (first entry)

June 1897

"I am a realist bothered by reality."

-- Jules Renard

"If you'd told me last Monday that my weekend would end eating the best rhubarb pie ever at an off-season ski lodge on top of a mountain in Arizona, discussing a paranoid schizophrenic's comments on Chernoble during the chanting at a Buddhist funeral, I'd say: glad life is so surprising."

-- My facebook page, August 30, 2010

 

This morning I woke up and read other people's journals. The New York Review of Books has recently abridged and published Thoreau's day-to-day record of nature's minutiae; I also have with me The Journal of Jules Renard, a French fin-de-siecle diary of the inner life of one now-forgotten writer. Both journals can be read almost like reference tomes; open to a single page and find something out of context that somehow provides context for the moment you are in right now. Here, I'll do it. (No cheating, I promise):

"I find some advantage in describing the experience of a day on the day following. At this distance it is more ideal, like the landscape seen with the head inverted, or reflections in water." -- Thoreau, April 20th 1854

I used to shelve books in the reference section of the library at Skidmore College, and I took a rich pleasure in opening the works at random and learning something strange. One book was a taxonomy of sea creatures, one the DSM-IV full of psychiatric diagnoses. Sometimes I would steal a second to discover the population of Guatemala. Reading other people's diaries replicates that experience. When you shut the book, or turn the page, most of the time the information vanishes right out of your head, but you had a glimpse of something true. These things feel beautiful to me when I see them isolated on the page and they feel beautiful when, mid-conversation, I try to chase them down in my memory. What was that thing I read somewhere?

Journals, as a habit, have morphed so completely that we do not recognize them. I'm of the opinion that we are seeing a resurgence of journals, diaries, and note-passing in the form of facebook and twitter. And yet we largely hate these things, see them as dumb and a waste of time (even those of us who are engaged with them every day). I have heard people say so many times, "I don't care about every little thought you have." Well, I do. I love John Smith's diaries, and Thoreau's, and Anne Frank's, and slave narratives, and Mark Twain's letters. I love my facebook page, which I just clicked back through as far as it would let me go (June 3, 2010-- "I just got recognized in CVS!").

What we are not seeing right now is that we're living in the middle of the greatest documentation of daily life in history. The problem is, we don't think of it that way, and our digital journals smack of carelessness. I want to say to everyone: observe better. Reflect better. Conclude better. Write better.

But of course that isn't fair, or in any way effective. Because what Thoreau's random April quote reminds me  is that our digital journals are too immediate for us to really reflect on them. When I was a serious diary-writer (I went through a few very intense spurts in childhood and then a blowout recording of about 1,000 handwritten pages from age 17-18) I just about always leafed through the previous pages. I thought about what I'd promised myself before, what I had seen that I had forgotten. I heard my voice speaking seriously about a past I knew had become this present. When I wrote again, I had a larger sense of self and world in mind. I was in conversation with my sense of self. I do not do that any longer. I wish I could see my first few facebook statuses, see myself learning to use the technology, see myself choosing the online voice that now feels so ingrained. I wish I could see it all at once and edit it down to a story of myself, as paper diaries have been in the past.

I have an urge to conclude, but, this digital slice is also just one tiny entry in a reference book. So I will not. I will open up Jules Renard, at random:

"I am not content with intermittent life. I must have life at each instant."

I said hey! What's going on?

Dear readers, I hope you've been enjoying my periodic whimsical rants about whales, radio, books, and the like. I think it's about time for a real update on what's going on, don't you?

1) Sea Tea Improv continues to grow at a breakneck pace. We just did a great show at ESPN's campus, our 2nd birthday is today, we're on the lookout for new places both to perform and to teach. All very good! If you're at all interested in improv, comedy, theater, Hartford, or small businesses, I encourage you to keep up with us. I never thought I'd be a part of something so grassroots and satisfying. Oh, and I completed the 3rd level (of 4) of education at the Upright Citizens Brigade. So much fun.

1a) I've started recording a Sea Tea podcast. 5 episodes recorded but not posted yet-- stay tuned for that. I'm trying to learn how to edit audio and interview people well and then when I have a decent product ready I'll post a few to get started.

2) The Mark Twain House & Museum is, as always, a daily dose of random. I'm coordinating a Tom Sawyer Pirate Day, a Victorian Tea Party, events related to a Steampunk Exhibit, an Oktoberfest, a traveling Mark Twain Game Show, the silliest twitter feed, a booth at the CT Book festival... I could go on forever.  Someday I will write about this.

2a) I'm also about to start another radio project relating to the history of the Twain House as a historic property. It will involve inspirational women. I'm thrilled to pieces, especially to be working with Catie Talarski, quite an inspirational lady herself.

3) I picked up another little job teaching a combination of theater and Twain History to a gaggle of kids at the Hartford Children's Theatre. Kids! It's been a while. Can't wait.

3a) Speaking of theater, I'm in a top secret puppetteering production for Real Art Ways' Odd Ball (out of towners: that's an indie cinema & art house in Hartford).

4) I'm still writing and submitting things here and there, but it's slow going because of all my other commitments and projects. The Writers Fellowship I won last year is almost up and I've used much of the time to research an essay on Ghanaian Fantasy caskets, brainstorm a new piece about technology and my relatives, and write short pieces intended for radio. The writer's life is a slog sometimes and I wish I could create more time out of thin air.

4a) I was in Washington for the AWP conference and won a little short fiction contest via the Coachella Review. That was fun! For more writing news poke around this whole site.

5) I'm trying to shave an hour off my half marathon time. Ha ha ha. Really.

5a) I'm also trying to get back down to fighting weight so I can go on some  scuba and rock-climbing weekends with my wonderful and athletic siblings.

6) I'm about to launch a reading series at La Paloma Sabanera (a local coffeehouse) because, frankly, there should be one, and if I've learned one thing about Hartford it's that you should just do it yourself and stop complaining. Right? I'm VERY excited about this project.

6a) My reading life has been spotty lately. I need someone to recommend a great book I will tear through in a week or less.

7) Finally, this blog is going to get a revamp. I've played around, I've posted here and there-- it's time to knock this sucker up to twice a week and get some actual subscribers. Therefore: please subscribe, tell me what you like and don't like, and come along for the rest of my year of new projects.

Moby Dick

I can't stop thinking about Moby Dick. I read Melville's novel on a beach in China in 2005, loved it, and now feel an almost magnetic pull towards re-reading. Perhaps it's because I listened to this Peabody Award-Winning Podcast on all things Moby-Dick-related, or perhaps it's because I've been reading Philip Hoare's The Whale-- a truly great work of nonfiction that goes over much of the same territory as Moby Dick, and includes great commentary on the book. If you're into whales but afraid of Melville it's a good place to start.

Or maybe I can't stop thinking about Moby Dick because he is the greatest symbol in American literature. At least one of the greatest. Any better ones you can think of? (I mean that genuinely, I'm curious.) Anything better than a huge, white, simultaneously evil and innocent animal, something ancient and yet a source of energy and modernization, one of the largest creatures to have ever been on the planet and yet impossible to find? I love that guy.

A month or so ago I was sitting in my cubicle and, horrified that no one in my workplace had read or loved Moby Dick, I read only the first paragraph aloud to everyone. I threatened to read a paragraph a day until we all appreciated it but I don't think anyone liked that idea.  I reproduce the first paragraph here for your enjoyment. (I used to have this memorized.) May it not be a damp drizzly November in your soul today.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

Listening

Since it is finally springtime, yesterday morning I decided to be traditional and listen to music with the windows rolled down on my way to work. Of course, the one day I don't listen to our local NPR station is the day that the House votes to cut off its funding. My last few posts have been related to some very simple things I love that are under threat of going away. They are ordinary loves-- books and cameras aren't exactly some secrets I've been keeping to myself-- and they certainly won't disappear during my lifetime. I'm not worried. What I am worried about is that thoughtful and beautiful things for the public will become the interests of the eccentric.

It should never be weird to love NPR. NPR, particularly on the weekdays, has been for me-- and this is not hyperbole-- like being able to tune into a college course at any moment of the day. It is thoughtful, well-rounded, and challenging. It has high expectations of its listeners without being snobby. It reassures me that yes, it is good to be interested in a huge variety of things in this world-- politics and humor and narrative and sheer facts.  When the rest of the world feels too compartmentalized, too stylized, NPR is there, giving us both breadth and depth. That is not an easy thing to do.

Maybe I'm this passionate about NPR because, for the past five years, I've lived in listening range of two incredible affiliates. During my WNYC days I had an unsurmountable crush on both Brian Lehrer and Leonard Lopate (I will never apologize for either). These days I have a personal relationship with Hartford's WNPR, which broadcasts down the street from my office. I just appeared on WNPR for the fifth time and, as they all know, I am madly in love with their programming and their staff.

WNPR has given me-- again, not hyperbole-- a sense of community that nothing else in Connecticut has. This small group of people is dedicated to untangling the local, regional and national issues that Connecticut needs to address. I'm always on to talk about something relatively silly, like anagrams or comedy, but they select their shows thoughtfully, research them thoroughly, and treat their guests with respect. It all comes through in the programming. I have just as much fun listening as talking, and have been known to take a scenic route just to hear five more minutes of a show.

Most of the news and stories I hear on NPR I never discuss with anyone-- it is enough to hear it, to think about it, and to let it become a part of my knowledge and understanding of the world.

WNPR's strength is bringing together voices from our community and giving them the opportunity to interact with the larger national and global network. I am honored to be one of those voices, but I am more honored to listen in on the conversation.

Buried

Today I am in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, working my way through a writer's fellowship I was awarded last year. I have two essays I'm working on-- one a repurposing of my last blog post about cameras, the other a repurposing of an essay about funerals in Ghana.  Here's an excerpt of what I am editing: This room was the Fantasy Casket workshop, where a local man had made a fortune for himself carving coffins. At my feet were commissioned tombs, pine sarcophagi with carefully carved beer bottle caps or chicken feet. They were painted with cheap paint, the words GHANA AIRWAYS or THE HOLY BIBLE singing citizens to their rest. This thirsty carpenter over in the corner might be buried in the likeness of that coke bottle, which stood behind me, almost dry from its final coat of shellac. Some of the caskets were open, so you could see how one might place a body under the snail shell, or into the tail of a fish.

Originally I had this section about fantasy caskets as an introduction to a completely different story, but a publication that I love asked me to lop off 90% of the essay and continue working on the Fantasy Casket aspect. Therefore, I am spending my afternoon wondering what object or animal I might want to be buried in, if forced to pick. Book? Blue whale? What does it mean that my top two totems are currently considered endangered species?

The idea of a more mundane object-- a cup of coffee, a cell phone, a computer, a pen or a coin or a toothbrush or even a cat-- these seem embarrassing, and yet these are the objects that preoccupy me day to day. It feels like having your ashes scattered in your driveway rather than at the ocean.

I'm going to save the rest of my thoughts for the essay, but please-- use this strange idea to meditate on materialism. Then, if you're feeling like I am at the moment, vow to live your life today with grander themes. Bury yourself in something you'd be proud of.

Camera

Recently I was cleaning out my supply closet (there have been a lot of snow days) and found an undeveloped disposable camera. This discovery was particularly mysterious because I can't actually remember the last time I used one of those things. I normally have intense, long-term monogamous relationships with fancy cameras, playing with lens and light and composition as my mother and grandfather taught me to do. The only period of my life where I used disposables with any regularity was in high school to take hundreds of upon hundreds of photographs of my friends and I goofing around making cupcakes, or taking our first train to New York, or headed to the shore on senior cut day. In my mind, disposables are associated with both recklessness and babysitting money, which I would lay out on the CVS counter while picking up my prints (with doubles, of course, to dole out to whatever friend I'd slung my arm around while holding the camera in front of us). Disposables also, almost always, took on a distinct sense of mystery as you worked your way down through the roll. Anyone who has carried a disposable camera around in their bag must remember looking down at those tiny, descending numbers thinking what in god's name is on the beginning of this roll? or, at a wedding, who grabbed this off the table before me? At weddings I always liked picking up the cameras and taking pictures of people I didn't even know, thereby injecting a little extra mystery into the proceedings (who took this? the couple would say to each other as they went through the endless shots of centerpieces and bad dancing).  In short, the disposable camera was antithetical to the general advancement of technology-- less instant than Polaroids, lower quality than pretty much any other camera on the market, and not valuable in any way outside of its brief life recording things not important enough for a real camera.

So, as you can imagine, I was quite curious to see what was on this camera. I was fairly certain I'd taken it home from a wedding. For this reason, I dawdled on getting it developed-- because last year I knew a few couples who'd gotten divorced. The pictures might have been a portal to happier times.  If that was true, then it would be a new moment, a new memory, to reconsider, a brand new expression of love that would be immediately shattered. No thank you.

But lately I have been on a mission to accomplish everything within my home-- to finish everything unfinished, to confront everything I have delayed. I have been dashing through half-finished books and repairing broken jewelry; I have recycled receipts and hung pictures; I have returned letters and put things up for auction on ebay. The camera had to be developed if my project was to be complete.

I took it down to the local camera shop a block away (how did it take me three years to find the best local business in Hartford?) and one day later, at the end of a very bad day, I had this:

Greg and I went on a camping trip in 2004-- yes, seven years ago-- and apparently, due to what I can only guess was a practical protection of our real cameras-- brought a disposable. You, dear reader, do not have to be polite. The pictures are absolutely awful.  And I love them. Here's why.

Everything has changed since we took these pictures. They are dingy, the light is awful. We only took one picture of each thing, and half of them are of nondescript bodies of water or bushes or views. We took a few photos of each other, looking tired and drenched (it rained the entire time), and not a single photo together. Clearly we pulled out the camera randomly. It appears there is no more than a photo or two per day. Clearly I forgot about the pictures altogether. It also looks like Greg took the camera home and finished off the last six pictures at various intervals over the course of several months, based on the scenes and the tans of his subjects. Almost every single picture has the stunning lighting and compositional elements of this one:

I love these pictures because I've forgotten that pictures didn't always look like an advertisement for my own life. They used to look like my actual memories, sloppy and weird and halfway done. I also love that one of us carried it around for the past seven years as the two of us traveled around the world separately, meaning to get it developed.

And with this disposable I have remembered the ecstasy of delay. Had I developed these right away, I probably would have thrown half of them out. Had I taken these photos with a digital camera, I more than likely would have deleted most of them within twenty seconds of taking them. I would have tossed out the imperfections of my own life.

I should say here that this camping trip is, was, will always be one of the highlights of my partnership with Greg. We were drenched and scared of woodsy noises. We were exhausted the entire time. I vacillated between complaint and bullying. Greg got a tick that I had to pull out. I couldn't sleep because the inside of the tent got wet, including my sleeping bag, pajamas, and shoes. And we both found all of this hilarious. I couldn't be happier that these pictures are as random as that trip, and have reminded me, in both form and content, of that ordinary little vacation just as we were falling in love.

I hope the rest of my home yields such funny mysteries.

My books

Earlier this week my closest friend from high school put this on my facebook wall, and I felt relieved as soon as I read it. I have, these past few years, found it oddly impossible to articulate the importance of physical books in my life. Their impact is far, far more than simply the impact of a story or a set of facts on the human mind. Frenemy's post jogged many memories of my life with the paper book. I don't like to be more than an arm's reach from one; they are talismanic to me, magical, life saving. To imagine my life without physical books is an impossibility. I would be  a completely different person. I don't think I love anything in the world as much as a great book, except possibly a great swim. Go back and forth between the two and you have a perfect day. I do not read while I am waiting to do other things. I do other things while I am waiting to read.

As a child I used to lie on my parents' bed to read picture books with my father; as he'd fall asleep the pages we'd already read together would flutter haphazardly in the wrong direction, and I didn't have to turn to his face to know he had fallen asleep.  My mother used to take us to bookstores and libraries on any free afternoon (actually, she still does, even though we are all in our twenties) and I specifically remember the moment I moved from looking at Sweet Valley Twins covers to Sweet Valley High covers. I knew, even then, that those books were trashy, but they signified something about adulthood to me, with their sheer thickness and pink and purple spines running down the shelves to an infinite point in the distance.  I read so many of those books, largely on the floor of bookstores themselves. And in libraries I found subjects I didn't know existed, or allowed myself to drift back to the books I had loved as a child, or see with a jolt that someone else I knew in our small town had checked this book out before or-- even better-- that I was the first one to take this one home in ten years.  I had a teacher who required us to write papers on ten different French impressionists, and going through those Matisse and Seurat prints all spread out in a library was one of the great intellectual thrills of my life, to be replicated in college with French revolution political cartoons and original editions of The Yellow Book. I worked at that college library, checking in brand-new books and wedging them Dewey-decimal in with books that had been at Skidmore for many decades. To shelve a book was to immediately place it in a historical context.

I love stories, yes- I love movies and improvisation and a good old tall tale told at a dinner table. But I love books more. For most books that I've read since I was a teenager (and that's a lot, trust me) I could tell you where I read some or all of that book. With that kind of tactile memory, I can place these books within the context of myself. It is important to me that I read Anna Karenina on the beach in Wells, Maine, sitting in a chair because it was just too exciting to read belly-down on a towel.  Or that I turned the last page of the huge The Executioner's Song sobbing, in my first apartment in Hartford as my boyfriend walked in the door. I have thrown scary books across the room in terror, I have passed many paperbacks back and forth with friends who have all signed the inside covers. Every Christmas, my family has more book-sized shapes piled up than any other kind of present by far. I learned how to nurture kids when I was a teenaged babysitter by reading to them in bed. I read the same four books over and over in Ghana because that was all I could carry. I read them on buses, in cities, by a lantern in a village with no electricity. In China I read anything I could find in English just for the pure sweet understanding, and I would hold those books in my hands and think Thank God. And speaking of God- I turned thin pages of Bibles and hymnals with more reverence for the beautiful binding and paper than the text itself.  I used to read many books about books- The Neverending Story and Farenheit 451 and Fun Home-- and in all of them books have a transformative power that nothing else in the world does. They are more than story. They are to be interacted with, to be saved from burning, to be discovered. The book I am reading now I found randomly on a shelf in New York last Sunday, and I love its font, its thickness, the person who sold it to me, the way I have read it at lunch tables, and the people who have commented when they have seen it in my hands.

These things are meaningful. Books are not just books; they are art; they are artifact. My shelves tell me what I have tried to know and what I have promised myself to know someday. They have weight and they take up space, but that is what they are supposed to do. They are not just a transfer of one human mind to another. They are a physical part of the world, and I will never forget that. Before they are in my memory they are in my hands.

Expertise

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received on writing nonfiction was this: become an expert on something. A good nonfiction writer is really just a very serious editor; the world is spread out before him and he sculpts away all the negative space until he is left with a tiny nugget of information or interpretation. And we, the readers, love having someone point to the great things under our very noses. That's why books like Salt and Blink and Stiff and Better and Cod and Andrew Jackson strike the public so hard. Someone is pointing to this thing and saying hey, look at this! Cool, interesting, and important! Add this grain of sand to your ever-expanding information age knowledge!

Fiction writers, lucky ducks, are experts on the worlds and characters of their own invention (I happen to be reading Ender's Game and it's shocking how the world, like all good fictional worlds, feels not only real but inevitable, obvious).

I say all of this because today I am reassessing my expertise. My life thus far has been devoted to learning in a disorganized way. I made a study of studying for a while, and then of having adventures, and then of reading and writing (which is cheating because I read and wrote about zillions of different things), and of getting and quitting jobs, of course, and then of friendship and laziness and all sort of things.

So I am left, these days, with a fact that many memoirists know: the only thing I am an expert on is myself. And not a terribly interesting version of myself, either, but still, there I am, putzing around waiting to be investigated. Montaigne changed the writing world with his observations about himself and thousands of others have not shied away from the self as subject. But today, I hesitate. I'm tired of myself. I want to look outward to this very interesting world.

And so I search for new expertise...

Writing at Home

Tonight I am at home. Also in my home are, as I can see from a random look around, a cactus, a kitten, an overdue and crooked tree, a book on human anatomy, a recently completed puzzle on top of a table with too many chairs around it, and a stack of written but unsent letters. This will all become important later. Tomorrow at the Twain House we are having a writer, Anne Trubek, come to discuss her book A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses. I am currently midway through the book (as well as, as we discussed back in September, three or four other works) and find Trubek's skepticism interesting. She harshly posits that our cultural interest in authors' homes is little more than a mundane, cloying interest in irrelevant aspects of a writer's life. Trubek says that the books are all that matter.

At first glance, and as a happy employee of The Mark Twain House, I rolled my eyes. Come on. We visit writers' homes because we want to see that they, too, were human, a part of history, and could emerge from their historical moments to create something enduring and emotional. The way we create heroes out of our writers is the same way we create heroes out of any historic figure, and although of course we can never really know a complete person once the myths are made, no one would say a person who's changed history or literature isn't worth considering. And writers have the special benefit of handing over a voice. Often it feels as though they are speaking directly into our ears, saying this is who I am, this is who I am. That's what makes reading feel magical: the brain-to-brain transfer over vast swaths of time. It's amazing, really.

On the other hand, the devil's in the details. The fact that I listed two plants and a puzzle in my earlier selection makes me sound a lot homier than I am. Now I'll tell you that the plants are all dead or near dying and that should your perception. Or what if I had told you that in my house I had a completed puzzle, a completed Rubik's cube, a huge amount of IKEA furniture, and a hand-built computer? Makes me sound like I have good spacial reasoning. But I don't. Greg built all that stuff for me. (I helped with the puzzle. Along with twelve other people.) Or I could mention in some letter that I am drinking a glass of lemonade and, a hundred years down the line, somebody might be throwing an annual lemonade-themed birthday party because that's the only drink I ever mentioned in a letter.

It's just so easy to find evidence of any trait here in the middle of the room. Lazy: unsent letters, tons of beer bottles in the recycling, unmade bed, deployed recliner. Compassionate: rescued kittens, sympathy cards, pullout couch, open digital picture of a wounded friend. Dumb: seltzer next to computer, cheap stupid novels, misspelled words, pathetic bank account and receipts for unnecessary items. Smart: books and diplomas and whatnot. Socializer: texts and notes and missed calls and thousands of emails. Lonely: well, I'm the only one here right now, aren't I?

The point is, our objects can never fully represent us unless we fully represent them. And that would be exhausting. I can't point to everything I have, remember everything I once had, or describe everything I want. And yet these may be the things that someone uses to create a memory or a myth about me.

Faced, as I often am, with the impulse to list things, I will try and keep in mind that it is all part of one story. A story of myself, and my life, which I cannot completely control, but which I can edit carefully before I invite the skeptics in.

Julia