Saul,
I haven't quite recovered from seeing you at the airport yesterday. I think it has been thirty years since I knew that you and Mary had moved to the Continent somewhere, Sicily? Greece? Someplace warm and sunny I remember. The letters stopped a decade before that, didn't they? I kept yours bound carefully by date with a rubber band and stuffed in two shoeboxes. I don't know where they are now, probably in the very back of the mountain of belongings stacked in my second-ex-husband's garage, collecting mold. That's not what I intended to do with them. I truly thought we would both be great writers by now, and those letters would be published by one of the big houses, sitting on the shelf beside the letters of Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer. Did you keep mine? No, don't tell me. I don't want to know. If I had truly believed I would be famous one day I would have kept carbon copies as the great writers did. It just didn't occur to me.

But I poured more of myself into those letters than into any other person or endeavor of my life, and I wish I could see them again. Since that is an unlikely scenario, I want to ask if you and I could take up our correspondence again, restart the conversation we dropped so many years ago. Letters are a forgotten part of our human heritage, what made us human and defined ourselves to ourselves, and to a select group of others, expressing and critiquing each others deepest thoughts and doubts. I have been lonely without them.

So think on it, dear friend. And Mary of course is welcome to chime in. Who would have imagined you two would stay together so long? I was sorry to miss her. You said she was in the bathroom and I had to run to my gate, but I hope you told her about our brief encounter. I want her to feel included, not like the old days when I believe I wanted to keep her separated from our precious philosophical discussions and arguments. It wasn't very nice of me, and I regret it. Tell her that.

Now that I have returned from my ten years in Mexico and you from Europe, and as we enter a new phase of life in our (argh!) seventies, I hope we can dig a new Panama Canal between our two oceans and send our tiny ships back and forth with missals from the other side.

If you say yes, I will celebrate by buying myself a quality fountain pen and some India ink. Remember that I was the only one who could read your handwriting? I hope you have mercy on me now, for my eyes are terrible.

All my love,
X

Saul and Mary

Collected Letters of an Unknown Writer

The Cohens

At the apex of his career

Saul fell like a heavy potato

on the marble floor of the Louvre.

His last words were

“Tell Mary I—”

Mary was in the studio

at home in Pennsylvania

throwing clay pots

worrying about the chemistry

of the new indigo glaze.

The first light of dawn

sliced her shoulder

with a prism of warmth.

At Rouens they’d marveled

at soaring sandstone

the hand-dyed glass

gargoyles slowly dissolving

in a blur of October afternoons.

Whispers gathered like swallows

in the great stone buttresses.

He’d lost his passport

between breakfast and lunch

between cleft cobblestones.

They gave up looking,

took a nap with fishermen

on a moss bank by the river.

Mary never had children

life was too beautiful.

She could stand for hours

in the room of Botticellis

at the Uffizi.

Saul never even had a dog

he could contemplate for days

the fine curves

of a cloisonné snuffbox.

The day Ellington died

Saul was in a small café

overlooking the Danube,

where it curves around

the palace at Wurzburg.

The tears were wet on his cheeks

but he was smiling, smiling.

Mary was in a small shop

around the corner

spending two thousand dollars

on Austrian china

it was gold-leafed with cherubs

it reminded her of something.

When Mary died she was alone

they didn’t find her for three days

dried pastry batter on her hands

blueberry stains around her mouth

the phone bill lay open on the counter

it was astonishing.

The estate went to a mandolin player

they’d met in Corfu.

He kept the piano,

sold the rest

for his daughter’s wedding.

Dipping a toe in Iris

Finished Mailer's 800-page book of letters last night. Moving on to some author's he recommended, Iris Murdoch among them. I remember that I almost went on an Iris Murdoch binge, might have even bought a bunch of her books used in Berkeley years ago, but never got to the first page. Any specific recommendations? Thought I might start with The Sea, The Sea!

Fever can be a muse...hush now, and receive!

5th day of sick. Sore throat and fever, tiredness and blank mind. Slowly getting better. But 2 days ago when the fever was at its highest and I was the most delirious, it happened again. Whole sections of a new book were revealed as if I were listening to a recording of how to do it. So I got up and luckily my cell phone, on the bedside table, has a recording app. So I talked into it, hopefully getting everything I had heard...though the sound of my own voice seemed to wipe out the delicate memory, so I had to talk fast and abbreviate. The only way I can explain it, since it's happened twice now, is that I the conscious day-to-day mind is so crammed full of details having nothing to do with what you are writing that the thoughts you need can't get through. When your mind becomes stupid and empty, as it does during a fever, what you were looking for just floats in.

Today I read that Mailer took mescaline for the first time when he was struggling for the ending to his book Deer Park which had a next-day deadline, and the last 5 sentences came to him through a glittering, golden something or other.

Women out for themselves...about time, you say?

It's Sunday. I've got a sore throat and a fever. In between naps, I read short opinion pieces in the NYT, as you have gathered. The article I respond to, "Hire Women Your Mom's Age," can be found here.

As I suspected, the woman who wrote this opinion piece lost her last "real job" in her fifties and joined the "gig economy." Younger women who might be in a position to hire a woman her age, are no more likely to hire her than a man might be. I read this somewhere. Partly because there is no concept of solidarity now. Everyone is out for themselves, busily sweeping other people's concerns outside their darkly drawn "boundaries." And partly because the women now who might be in a position of power sufficient to be hiring, are young enough to still be running as fast as they can away from "mother figures" who might have more experience to offer...and yet not old enough to see the big iron door in front of them, and hear it slam shut for those a few years ahead of themselves. They will be surprised to know that on the other side of the door, once they play hopscotch across the illusive, false promise of the 3-dot elipses, it's a free fall. You have to be ready to consider this sudden loss of footing. Some find it exhilarating. Others, terrifying.

"The assertion of motherhood as sacrifice comes with a perceived glorification. A woman is expected to sacrifice her time, ambition and sense of self to a higher purpose, one more worthy than her own individual identity. This leaves a vacuum in the place of her value, one that others rush to fill."

You may read the whole article from which this quote is excerpted here.

I was thinking along these lines today, well, not exactly but... That I stopped writing for 25-30 years. That every American male writer in the last 60 or 70 years has had a wife, or a succession of wives, that kept their lives running, proof-read, gave them daily feedback if they wanted it. I thought this a brave and thoughtful article, and will continue pondering upon it, as I turn towards the next book.

Letter writing, a lost art

As I read the letters of other writers, collections that spanned 30 to 60 years, I find myself deeply mourning the loss of the epistolary exercise. I wrote long letters to a small collection of people, and they wrote long letters back. As I have said, I used to collect them in individual shoeboxes. My mother was a letter writer, Oh God, was she a letter writer. When the Post Office virtually closed its doors and its reach, and everyone turned to email, that whole essential way of communicating disappeared. And it was much more than simply "keeping up" with people, it was a chance to work out one's thoughts selectively, to the very person who would be uniquely interested in that conversation, and would respond by expanding it.

Letters were a genre of writing, an entire essential form that has disappeared. Conversation as I knew it between people, no longer exists, except perhaps in the coffee house, among regulars.

I am thinking of a book.

Cable Series and Film: Inspiration for Storytelling

As you can tell, I have wildly diverging tastes when it comes to cable series. They have become the novels of the new age, and movies...well, they have recently begun to lose their way. 

After all, how much plot and character development can be crammed into a 90-minute movie? Not much. 

If you are a novelist, or just trying to learn how to tell a good, clean story, a high-quality cable series can be your best schooling. I have eclectic tastes, but I am always looking for powerful story-telling. Sometimes I find it in unexpected places. I loved Fargo.

I also loved Breaking Bad...

And Justified...

The skill that some of the filmmakers, editors, and directors have developed for cutting to the chafe are instructive for writers. How can you tell a story in a few effective images? You see, it's very much like the challenge we face as writers.

The film "Memento" is a brilliant piece of storytelling. After it was made, reams of discussion about it appeared all over the internet. I thought this video,"18-Minute Analysis By Christopher Nolan On Story & Construction Of Memento," was equally instructive for filmmakers as it is for writers.

What do you think?

Not all of us are visual learners. I am. Film has always informed me more than writing in the art of story telling. It might be worth some exploration on your own writing journey.

Is that me?

Girl in the Mirror, Picasso

Amiri Baraka was the intellectual heir of Malcolm X. Had the pleasure of seeing him read poetry at a festival in Santa Cruz, back in the day when poets seemed to run the town. I'm now reading his letters to Ed Dorn, poet of the Black Mountain School. They were both brilliant, determined to get to the bottom of things, no compromise on that. And that's what we were doing in Santa Cruz at about the same time. Groups of poets in different "schools" debating, arguing, throwing aspersions, but basically admitting we were in the same tribe. I guess. :)

may my mind stroll about hungry

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
e.e. cummings

Integration? The rarest commodity in writing

Truman before the Fall