Ennio's drawings

[This was originally posted on my Tumblr blog, Sticking Around, last August. Tomorrow, Ennio is turning five. So why not a birthday hello here on TSB? The other day, he showed me his latest drawing: two smiling stick figures with tiny flapping capes. Each figure floats upright, raising both arms to lift an airplane. Each plane has a window with a passenger looking sad or terrified. The scene is from one of those Superman movies in which the Man of Steel flies just in time to prevent a crash. Ennio and I watched that on TV last year. With more of his drawings and stories and smiles, my little hero continues to save my day.]

I have been drawing pictures for Ennio, my four-year-old nephew, for more than half his life. Now that I’m way past half my life, I think I need these sketching gigs more than he does. Last night, he burst into my room once again and pulled out sheets from my paper rack. He had his crayons, pencils, and ballpens ready. He began to draw another one of his tree-and-house combos. As usual, he grabbed my hand away from my busy tapping on the laptop and pulled me to the canvas he had spread on my bed. “Color that one,” he said, like a master artist gently but firmly ordering one of his draftsmen.

I’m familiar with this drill. It started as my way of compromising. A few days ago, he got overwhelmed by the bulging curly canopy he had outlined to serve as treetop for a sturdy brown trunk. Holding out his green crayon, he asked me to color in all that treetop space. I mock-protested: “But you’re the boy!” That’s my shorthand for: “But you’re the one who started it. You’re the one who needs to learn to do things on your own and leave grown-ups like me to our busy, boring tasks. It’s your work, why don’t you finish it?” Then he begged: “Please, please. Color it. Please.” And how could I resist all that cute desperation, his stubborn plea for attention? But first I had to devise some meet-you-halfway deal. Here was my chance to push for so-called self-reliance or at least (that good ol’ Sesame Street battlecry) “cooperation!” So “okay,” I told him. “I’ll draw a line down the middle of the treetop. I’ll color this side. You color the other.” He smiled and said, “Okay,” as if it were the most refreshingly fair agreement ever struck in the name of collaborative art.

The partnership, of course, wasn’t forged overnight. What would you expect from a toddler ill-equipped with the motor skills required to hold crayons or maneuver pencils? So initially I was the prime mover, though most of the orders would come from him. “Sha!” he would say. Yeah, shark. And his wish would be my command — to draw yet another sleek shark with sharp teeth. It was my pleasure to watch him watch my hand glide or fumble on blank space and, with the magic of line and shape, bring squiggly, blurry life to the page. Our first doodles were born on little notepads or scraps of paper. But in 2009 I began buying large sketch pads (each with 50 sheets, spiral-bound) for my two-year-old master. To keep him (and me) preoccupied, I continued to draw whatever I thought he’d find worth looking at.

Over the years, I’ve filled four or five sketch pads with my amateurish renditions of dinosaurs, chickens, cats, whales, trains, airplanes, and helicopters. But it all started with cows. “Cow” was Ennio’s first word. We had been reading to him a book about farm animals with photographs of real cows. Then one morning in September 2009, he finally spoke: Cow! So the next few weeks, I fulfilled my sole artistic mandate: i.e., to draw as many versions of fat happy cows as I could. Who knew I could be the Kandinsky of Cows? That’s one great thing about drawing. It’s like writing (or blogging): most of the time I have no idea what I’m going to do — or what I can do — until I do it. These days I flip through the sketch pads and savor flashbacks from my glorious “cow period” and think: What a privilege to draw for a child. I recall the scene in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince where the prince asks the pilot to “draw me a sheep.” The man gets exasperated, not knowing how to satisfy the precise requirements of his little client — until the pilot draws a box with the sheep in it. Essentially, the animal becomes invisible to the jaded viewer but not to the child’s heart. So that’s how you make the little prince happy, whether he’s four years old or middle-aged.

I don’t draw cows anymore for Ennio. Turning five soon, he has gained enough confidence to make his own pictures using various media — crayons, pencils, ballpens, watercolors on paper, and even my laptop and mouse to manipulate shapes and click colors and shadings on Microsoft Paint. He and I have graduated from farm animals and basic transport modes to more complicated tableaus. We’re now into seascapes à la Finding Nemo and skies studded with pointy stars and fluffy clouds. And, of course, trees. The treetop with one vertical line in the middle to indicate the equal distribution of labor — left side mine, right half his. Who says life isn’t fair?

To keep expanding his horizons, I recently told Ennio: “Ooh, I really love this tree! It’s getting taller like you. But, hmm … What if we put apples and oranges on top?” His eyes lit up, his smile brighter than the yellow sun shining on his latest landscape. He said, “Yes! I want to put mangoes!” And I thought about our last visit to my brother’s house. We had gazed up at a huge tree looming over the neighbor’s backyard. That one had fat little green mangoes hanging from the branches. “Look! Mangoes!” I pointed out to Ennio. Perhaps that’s what he had in mind when he got excited about fruit-bearing trees. Or perhaps not. I often wonder: Where does he get these ideas? Surely from what he hears or sees at home and outside. But I’d like to think there’s a lot coming from within as well. Instinct? Mimicry? Awe? The boy pays attention, remembers details, then creates his own stuff regardless of what others say or see. Hmm . . . can’t his middle-aged uncle learn from him more often?

These days, Ennio uses separate sheets of paper that I later compile in “clear books,” those folders with transparent page-holders. (I’ve been promoted from humble secretary to efficient archivist.) Piled temporarily on my table is the drawing he made in my room last night. This one (see photo above) has a healthy-looking tree with a roundish crown laden with seven fruits hanging like Christmas balls. The first perhaps is a purple grape; the next one must be an orange. Then come the red apple, something brown, and three more fruits — yellow, blue, and black. Varying shades of ripeness, promise, shadow? What a privilege to see a child’s world of possibilities. What a joy to draw for — or with — him.

And what a thrill to listen to him blurt out his titles. Yes, we do that, too. When I began collecting his drawings, he noticed me jotting down letters and numbers on the lower righthand corner of each page. I told him, “That’s the title of the drawing. And this one’s the date.” He hasn’t grasped the concept of date or time, but he knows what a title is for. Now I no longer label his pictures using my words. Before filing away each work, I ask him: “So what’s the title of this one?” And from his mouth tumbles out a wonderland of word-strings. Phrases he hears at preschool or those he has known from fairy tales, alphabet books, YouTube videos, iPad games, Barney, Pocoyo, Thomas the Train, Elmo’s World, and, uh-oh, my three sisters’ horror DVDs (True Blood, The Walking Dead, you name it). Words he connects with pictures. He dictates the title; I gladly write down every syllable. Oh, we’re so beyond cow now.

In one folder, for example, I have Ennio’s drawings last year with titles that are often both accurate and imaginative. “This Is an Elephant.” “Astronaut.” “King Kong.” “Big Zombie with the Big Teeth.” “This Is You When You’re Going to School.” “Mommy Getting a Flower.” “Aladar, the Dinosaur, with Mr. Sun, So Bright, His Friend.” “Mommy Spider and Baby Spider.”

And now I have this drawing from last night, the one he calls “The Tree, the Love, the Clouds Want to Be a Circle.” I’d like to think that some of that “love” comes from half the treetop I colored for him.

[Drawing by Ennio. Photograph by dabacahin.]

Charles M. Schulz: How I lost (and miss) my Charlie Browns

Many people I admire have shared their Charlie Brown stories in print or online. For example, Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, wrote a balanced review of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis. Watterson says Charles M. Schulz's cartoons have remained “terrifically funny and edgy, even after all these years.” But even more, they had “real heart” despite Schulz’s “failings as a person.” Jonathan Franzen is another Charlie Brown fan. In “Two Ponies” (from his memoir, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History), Franzen asks, “Was Schulz’s comic genius the product of his psychic wounds?” He concedes that Schulz as a middle-aged artist must have tapped from childhood traumas and adolescent insecurities to produce Peanuts. As the artist got older (and his comics got more famous), Schulz became more vulnerable to depression.

Franzen writes:

Schulz wasn’t an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life — to grind out a strip every day for fifty years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this — is the opposite of damaged. It’s the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make. The reason that Schulz’s early sorrows look like “sources” of his later brilliance is that he had the talent and resilience to find humor in them.

That’s a great trio of gifts that any artist — or anybody — can have. Talent + resilience + humor. I’m not sure if my own Charlie Brown story exemplifies any of those three. Let’s just say the middle-aged adolescent in me has often panicked about the prospects of getting stuck in a ten-year-old’s library of lost books. How’s that again? Here’s how.

When I was ten years old, I had two Charlie Brown pocketbooks. They were displayed in a glass-fronted bookcase in our guest room, which, oddly, also served as “study room” and maid’s quarter. I don’t remember the titles anymore. All I know is that they were slim full-color volumes featuring the famous Peanuts characters created by Charles M. Schulz. One day relatives came to visit, and my cousin Lily (not her real name) and I played in the guest room. I must have been showing off my Charlie Browns or just playing the gracious host, so I couldn’t say no to her request to borrow my books. (Or had I volunteered to lend?) So by the time my cousin was gone, I had sent her off with souvenirs from my little library.

As Lily and her family waved goodbye, their car speeding off, I told my mom that I had lent my Charlie Brown books. She snapped at me like I had committed some atrocious blunder: “Why did you do that? Do you think you’re ever going to get your books back?” I was shocked by her rage. I felt guilty and confused that I could cause her such dismay. I didn’t know which was more difficult to comprehend — her fury (her disdain at how stupid I was) or the idea that there were people who’d borrow your books and not return them. I had let my mother down. She had bought those books for me. She was infuriated that her oldest child could be so gullible, so eager to please. And I felt betrayed. I lost my Charlie Browns to people I had trusted.

My mother was right. I never got those books back. But why didn’t she or I do or say anything to retrieve them? Because it was not polite to do so? Because the cultural expectation or the tacit family rule was that the owner should be generous or gallant enough to let go of what he had entrusted to others? It wasn’t proper to demand to have your possessions returned to you? Perhaps we didn’t want to seem petty. Or perhaps time passed and we just forgot — or chose to ignore — the issue. Besides, who knows what my cousin would have done to those books? Assuming she'd even recall where she had dumped my CBs, imagine the extra grievance I would have borne at the sight of books returned but smudged, crumpled, mangled.

And so I learned to be very hesitant about lending my books. Unless I was certain that the borrower would be kind or decent enough to return them. Unless I knew I would not have any compunction about reminding a negligent loaner that I’d need the book back for some official (or made-up) reason. As an adult, I’ve bought four Charlie Brown/Peanuts books: The Gospel According to Peanuts, A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition, Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, and The Charlie Brown Dictionary, Vol. 1. They’re all shelved in the same glass-fronted bookcase, which now stands right outside my room. Now I can buy any other CB, and I’ve found other comic pals and alter egos, such as Calvin and Hobbes. But once in a while I still think of those two Charlie Brown pocketbooks I have lent and lost.

I don’t resent my mother anymore for the way she reacted to my book-loaning shortcomings. I understand now that she wasn’t being harsh or selfish. She just knew more than I did about how things worked outside the pages of comic strips. A few years ago, she told me that Lily had died of cancer. I hadn’t seen my cousin in decades. Her family and mine hadn’t kept in touch. She and I had never been close, yet I was deeply saddened about the news. Once again, I was shocked, guilty, confused — and scared. I was that ten-year-old again rudely awakened to something that wasn’t quite right with the world. Time passed, people passed away. If it could happen to them, it could happen to me or anyone I loved. Of course, one way or another, it certainly would. In the end, no one gets to keep anything. I used to think that Lily had taken my two Charlie Browns, the only ones I had when I was a kid. These days I’d rather think I had freely given them away.

[Photograph by Earl Seubert, 1958. Thank you, Washington Post.]

Jonah Lehrer: How plagiarism works, how angels fall

I have a problem finishing this book. No, not because it’s long or difficult or boring. My problem is that its author has fallen from grace. Yeah, like an angel. Jonah Lehrer’s evangelical voice of authority and coolness has been tarnished (and silenced — temporarily, I guess) by scandal and doubt. Who can trust him now after it has been proven that in his latest bestseller, Imagine: How Creativity Works, he “fabricated” quotes by Bob Dylan and that he “self-plagiarized” several blog posts he had submitted to The New Yorker.” (So I don’t get pilloried for stealing other people’s ideas or making up quotes, let me cite my sources now. Wikipedia, as always, has the details, but be sure to double-check. And, of course, there are goodies galore in The New York Times, Salon, and The Huffington Post. More will be revealed in a while.)

1. The imaginations foretold

So what’s my problem? Last May, I bought my copy of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer’s first book (2007), and was duly impressed with its first chapter on Walt Whitman. Two months later, I almost grabbed Imagine (2012) from the mountains of copies displayed at my favorite bookstore. But I thought I shouldn’t be so greedy. I already had Lehrer’s Proust and, on my hard drive, a PDF of his second book, How We Decide (2009). Plus, I had his blog Frontal Cortex (on Wired.com) bookmarked (“Favorites”) on my laptop. And when he moved his Cortex to The New Yorker, I promptly followed. And then boom. The final days of July saw my famous geeky angel crash and burn. Julie Bosman (The New York Times) reports that “the 31-year-old author” has “executed one of the most bewildering recent journalistic frauds.” Lehrer resigned from “his prestigious post” at The New Yorker. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Imagine’s publisher, withdrew copies from bookstores. Bosman adds: “All of its retail and wholesale accounts, the publisher said, would be asked to stop selling [the book] and return unsold copies for a full refund.”

But what about my book? How much of Proust can be trusted? How many of the quotes in Lehrer’s two other books and in his numerous magazine articles and blog posts have been, well, merely imagined? Shouldn’t I ask for a refund, too? Or should I stop acting like some spurned matron in a maudlin telenovela and just read? I know I’m overreacting. But really that’s how it feels. Like you’ve been in this steamy (but brainy) love affair and one day you find out that your lover is not who you think he is. He’s not original and honest enough about delivering the lines you have fallen for. You’ve been duped. Sure, he apologized, “saying it wouldn’t happen again.” (The quotes are from Roxane Gay of Salon.com. I’m not inventing or stealing them, so don’t sue me.) But would that apology be enough to repair all the damage to your reading soul, your bleeding heart, your frontal cortex?

Ah, just shut up and read. That’s what I told myself this morning as I opened Lehrer’s Proust one more time and risked being exposed to (or betrayed by) whatever my disgraced angel had to say in his chapter about, uh-oh, Virginia Woolf. In his “Prelude,” Lehrer explains: “This book is about artists who anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience. It is about writers and painters and composers who discovered truths about the human mind — real, tangible truths — that science is only now rediscovering. The imaginations foretold the facts of the future.” There’s a creepy ironic undertone as I read that last sentence in light of what, five years after he published this 2007 book, would get him in trouble. Imagine: How Creativity Works. Imaginations foretelling — divulging? — facts in 2012. Imaginations. Fabrications. Tangible truths. Veritable betrayals of trust. Oh, Jonah, how could you? How dare you!

Shut up and keep reading, the saner side of me barked at the telenovela diva. And so I soldiered on — a task that, I’m happy to report, turned out to be a breeze. I finished all 22 pages of Lehrer on Woolf in one gulp. It was a smooth ride. It felt like I had my smart, patient pal telling me about stuff like NCC (neural correlate of consciousness) and the literary significance (and historical accuracy) of the shell-shocked poet Septimus, the character who commits suicide in Mrs. Dalloway. Reading Lehrer, I don’t feel like I’m being lectured. He makes things simple without dumbing them down. He sprinkles the page with phrases like “experimental paradigm” and “transcendental theory,” yet I don’t see some wunderkind showing off. It’s not like I’m just being taken for a ride. This is the real deal. Or is it?

2. The raucous parliament of cells

It helps that I’m a sucker for seamless interweavings of literature and psychology. (Disclosure: I was a Psych major before I shifted to Lit.) And it helps that Lehrer is confirming what I’ve been learning these past few years. His main thesis in the chapter is that in the 1920s Virginia Woolf was already writing about what neuroscience has been figuring out only in the last few decades. He asserts that the self (or mind or consciousness) is not a unified entity with definable or detectable mechanisms of control over an individual’s behavior or thinking. Thus, there are “multiple selves” residing in each person. It’s not necessarily a psychiatric illness. It’s how the brain works. It’s how we “process” or adapt (and adapt to) reality.

Lehrer reflects on Woolf’s “stream of consciousness” prose, especially To the Lighthouse, and the series of short-term memories (some might call them distractions) that often fuel the brain. He says, “As the modernists [including Woolf] anticipated, the permanent-seeing self is actually an endless procession of disjointed moments.” He adds:

Even more disconcerting is the absence of any single location in the brain — a Cartesian theater, so to speak — where these severed moments get reconciled. [...] Instead, the head holds a raucous parliament of cells that endlessly debate what sensations and feelings should become conscious. These neurons are distributed all across the brain, and their firing unfolds over time. This means that the mind is not a place; it is a process. As the influential philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote, our mind is made up “of multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go.” What we call reality is merely the final draft. (Of course, the very next moment requires a whole new manuscript.)

I really like that phrase “raucous parliament of cells.” But I also really would like to check if that’s a Lehrer original or someone else has fabricated it — or if Lehrer has rehashed it from one of his blogs. Moreover, I want to verify the accuracy of that Daniel Dennett quote. Could there have been a typo, an honest mistake? Or could Lehrer have conjured up the whole Dennett Delusion?

Okay, enough. Paranoia afflicts my neurons and circuits. I have to stop suspecting that every page of his (or other authors’) books is now contaminated, each publication out there driven by his evil plot to brainwash the reading public. I can give him this much. In Proust Was a Neuroscientist, based on the two chapters I’ve read, Lehrer’s breadth of knowledge is incontestable. He quotes everyone from James Joyce to Michael Gazzaniga, from Chomsky to Nietzsche and Rimbaud. He ties up concepts and insights without making the package look too tidy or forced. And aside from breadth (any term-paper-savvy undergrad can sound profound with a bunch of quotes), Lehrer has depth. I can’t think of anything I’ve read recently that is as well-argued and penetrating as his chapter linking Virginia Woolf’s modernist style and subjects with 21st-century neuroscientists’ findings.

3. Googling goodies galore

Perhaps my Jonah Lehrer problem began even before Jonah Lehrer. Many years ago, I edited an anthology of scholarly essays about women and spirituality. Using Google, I found out that one of the contributors, a nun, had lifted paragraphs from a published work. In a detailed letter (my “editor’s notes”), I reported this to the publisher. I don’t recall exactly what happened, but the plagiarized portions were eventually deleted from the final draft. I don’t know how the publisher told the nun about my snooping (or if she told the culprit at all), but I was so disappointed. If even a nun, a scholar-nun, could do it, who’d be immune from this vice?

Recently, one of my students confessed to me that he had deliberately plagiarized parts of his History report just to find out if he could get away with it. He took pride in the fact that he got an A for his paper and that the teacher never caught him — or perhaps never bothered to Google him out. A few weeks after the Lehrer exposé, there was the Fareed Zakaria shocker. I had admired Zakaria’s work in Newsweek, and I wasn’t disappointed when he moved to Time. But again I was stunned when I read that Time and CNN had suspended him for plagiarizing someone’s essay in The New Yorker. According to ABC News (August 17, 2012), Zakaria’s suspension has been lifted (yeah, after he has lifted): “CNN and Time said . . . that each had conducted a thorough review and found Zakaria's recent ‘journalistic lapse’ to be an isolated incident.”

I will now quote something from a movie and perhaps out of context, but please don’t suspend me. A line from the ending of Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning film Ordinary People has popped into my frontal cortex. Timothy Hutton, the suicidal teenager, tells his father, Donald Sutherland, how much he admires the man for the way he has handled the family conflicts. (Oh, don’t get me started on the mom, Mary Tyler Moore.) The father chides his son: “Don’t admire people too much. They’ll disappoint you sometimes.”

I don’t know how long my disappointment or paranoia (or sense of fanboy betrayal) will last. But I think of big-time writers like Lehrer and Zakaria, those who have built lucrative brands only to find themselves humiliated in the eyes of those, such as readers, publishers, and the media, who have helped (or conspired) to sustain those brands. As a writer, I dread being accused of lifting phrases from other publications or of “self-plagiarizing” (whatever that means).

So let me just Google “goodies galore” from my first paragraph above to check if I’m not culpable of any “journalistic lapse.” Oops. There you go. Mea culpa. My Google search yielded (to plagiarize Daniel Dennett’s quaint phrase) “parallel pandemoniums” of doppelgangers such as goodiesgalore (the title of a WordPress blog), goodiesgalore.multiply.com (“Shop Home Garden — MJ’s Goodies Galore!”), a Goodies Galore bakery, a Goodies Galore store for Betty Boop collectibles, and . . . Oh, I give up. I’m not the creative writer that I have deluded myself to be. I have no right to proclaim myself Holier-Than-Lehrer. Who knows which parts of this essay have been recycled by my stream of consciousness from other essays I have mishmashed before. Like my fallen angel with his Bob Dylan blunder, I am bound to be discredited for my unoriginal phrases and made-up lines.

4. Doing the necessary due diligence

How do I prevent my multiple selves from robbing one another’s catchphrases and mindsets? For consolation, I turn to John McQuaid’s essay at Forbes.com, “Where Jonah Lehrer Went Astray.” His assessment is one of the most acute and least hysterical pieces on the matter. He offers a concise, sober wake-up call to writers and readers alike: “One key to Lehrer’s success is he offers big ideas to explain big questions that everybody wonders about. Everyone is looking for an explanation. Not just an explanation, but an entertaining, catchy explanation that appears to make sense of a complex world in flux.”

What’s wrong with that? McQuaid believes that such catchy explanations can turn into “fungible commodities” that can be sold as “ideas” to “media and corporate audiences.” Still, so what? If rights to a novel can be peddled to Hollywood and the use of intellectual property is often paid for, what’s so bad about writers selling their ideas to anyone? In his conclusion, McQuaid alludes to that other demigod of the “big ideas, catchy explanations” genre, Malcolm Gladwell:

Call it “Gladwellization.” It’s not just lucrative, but powerful: your ideas (or rather, the ideas you’ve turned into compelling anecdotes for a popular audience) can influence everything from editorial choices across the publishing world to corporate management and branding strategies.

But with this comes mounting demands to produce, and to recycle. You have to be prolific, churning out longer pieces that give your insights some ballast, and brilliant, bite-sized items. And yet you can’t be too new either: people want to hear what you’re already famous for. In this cauldron of congratulation and pressure for more and more, it’s not hard to see how standards might erode, how the “ideas” might become more important than doing the necessary due diligence to make sure they sync with reality. Book publishers don’t do fact-checks, so there’s no fail-safe, just the conscience of the writer. Reach that point, and all is lost.

I agree, Mr. McQuaid. To do “the necessary due diligence to make sure [those ideas] sync with reality” — that is something worth doing whether you’re Virginia Woolf, a neuroscientist, a scholarly nun, a high school student, a fallen angel, or a paranoid blogger. Yes, there are “mounting demands to produce,” to keep writing — and writing well. And to cite your sources. To not invent quotes. And to keep reading. To actively engage the text. To ask where this writer’s ideas are coming from and how far you want to go with them. To remember that not everything catchy is worth getting caught up in.

I’ve got six more chapters to go with Proust Was a Neuroscientist — plus a “Coda” and Lehrer’s diligently compiled (let’s hope he wasn’t just making these up) footnotes and bibliography. I want to give his Proust the benefit of the doubt. I want to keep flying, ruminating, with my angel. But first, Michael Moynihan has some words of caution. He’s the journalist who tracked down Lehrer’s “deceptions” in Imagine. He says he checked “a few other chapters” there and in Lehrer’s earlier book, How We Decide, and “found fake interviews, quotes that can't be located, and plagiarism.” Uh-oh, the ride goes on.

Meanwhile, there are many related issues (yeah, goodies galore) to nourish my raucous parliament of brain cells. For instance, it’s time to be more wary of media-hyped “ideas.” Time to ask — why all the fuss to find the next big brand, the next record-breaking trilogy? My Lehrer problem may just be one symptom of a more pervasive malady. The question remains: why he and others — why we — plagiarize lines, fabricate quotes, or tolerate (even reward) the unoriginal. Is it the need to succeed or to get by or get along? Is it the pressure to keep performing well and producing more? Is it because we forget or choose to ignore what journalism and scholarship are all about? Or is it because sometimes we, as writers and readers, just get lazy and lack imagination?

[Photo: Thank you, mrbsemporium.com.]

Juliette Binoche: The mere memory of Hana

I began collecting photographs — portraits — of famous people in 1990. Before my obsession with authors’ photos, there was my fanboy phase with movie stars. I clipped pages from Premiere, Entertainment Weekly, and LIFE. It was not just the pretty face or the perfect body that I favored, although that helped, of course. It was something in the gaze of the subject, whether looking at the camera or turning sideways to pay attention (or pretend to pay attention) to something beyond the frame. I had one “clear book,” the inexpensive kind with transparent page-pockets, in which I filed some of my favorite images.

I had multiple takes of Tina Turner in a tight miniskirt gyrating in the street. I had a beaming Richard Gere sitting in a chair in the middle of a vast field, looking regal, calm, and (yeah) sexy. I had Ellen DeGeneres with a beatific smile, triumphant after coming out via that “Yep, I’m Gay” cover in Time. I had Meryl Streep in somber period costume as The French Lieutenant’s Woman perched on a gigantic tree. I had Woody Allen, Jessica Tandy, Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Shue, Johnny Depp, Diane Keaton, Ralph Fiennes, Drew Barrymore, River Phoenix, Whoopi Goldberg, Matthew Fox, even posters of Bette Midler movies and When Harry Met Sally. And I had Juliette Binoche.

This afternoon I searched all over the house for that photo album, but I couldn’t find it. That happens. You need something desperately now and then it disappears forever. Oh well, I’m sure it’s somewhere. For now, this is what I remember. Juliette Binoche in a house dress, sitting on a bench, taking a break from shooting, smiling tentatively. She is "made up" as the nurse Hana, her Oscar-winning role in The English Patient (written and directed by Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje). It was obviously not a scene from the movie. It was the actress resting, obliging to have her picture taken. Perhaps there was a cigarette visibly lit, sticking out from her fingers, though I would prefer a smoke-free version of that moment. She looked tired, a bit frumpy, and her hair was a mess — that was Hana, of course. But somehow she managed to look fresh and alluring. That was — that is — Juliette Binoche.

Years ago I wondered how she could do that. How in a photograph she could look both the character she was playing and the real person who was taking a break from her work. Of course, that’s what great actors do. She was aware of a camera in her midst. She might have even been instructed to achieve that look. Or it could just be me. I was associating this woman in the picture with what I hoped or feared she might actually be. I was projecting my fantasies and hang-ups into the image. From what I had recalled from the novel or from my own life’s narratives, I could read anything or anyone into the picture.

Now even the mere memory of that photograph can help me recreate Hana. She has witnessed the horrors of war and refuses to see more violence and suffering. She chooses to stay amid the ruins of a villa. She commits herself to taking care of the bedridden patient with the burned skin and blurred identity. She washes his wounds. She reads books to him. She listens to his stories. She takes refuge in the little she can ever know about him. But even the most tenacious attachments, the ways one seeks solace in the bodies and souls of others, have limits. So, in a scene I cannot forget, Hana, with help from ampoules of morphine, finally lets go of her patient. She cannot keep reinventing this man and his past for herself. She can no longer stay “in love with ghosts.”

I tried Google Images, but even the Internet seems to have lost that photograph. Instead, there are all these stills from The English Patient and the actress' other films as well as other photos that are too Hollywood for me. For this blog, I chose to post an image that I thought was the least “actressy” — not too much cleavage, not too much hair drama, not too much Lancôme. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if this one turned out to be yet another glamour promo for the cosmetics giant. Unfortunately, there’s no photo credit on the website. Could this be another Richard Avedon stunner? Or a distilled-to-the-essence beauty by Brigitte Lacombe? [Author's note, Dec. 8, 2014: The photo is by Brigitte Lacombe. Thank you, Ms. Lacombe.] My search continues. I grope for scraps of certainty, for origins of what I see or recall, for comfort in stray thoughts.

A famous line from The English Patient echoes Stendhal: “A novel is a mirror walking down a road.” I follow that thought for a while, then I go back to wondering where or how my favorite photograph of Juliette Binoche, of Hana, could have wandered off. My mind drifts in images, reflections, reconstructions. Time diffuses in the morphine of memory.

[Photo: Thank you, cinemaandpopcorn.blogspot.com.]

John Updike: Love it now, love it now

I learned a new word today, thanks to John Updike. Or thanks to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who wrote the excellent 2009 New York Times obit on him. The word is burgherly.

As a small-town businessman of limited scope, Rabbit [Angstrom, the hero of four of Updike’s most famous novels] is obviously very different from his creator. Yet the two of them share a middle-American view of the world, with the difference that Mr. Updike was exquisitely self-conscious. Against the grain of his calling and temperament, he strove, like the German writer Thomas Mann, for a burgherly life.

At first I thought Mr. Lehmann-Haupt was referring to a life of recklessness or illegal activities. But (duh!) that’s burglary. Thank you, Merriam-Webster Online, for straightening me out: “burgherly = of or relating to a prosperous solid citizen.” Oh, so that’s what Updike tried to be. Here’s how he apparently strove for that:

He took up golf, which he played with passionate enthusiasm and also a writer’s eye, noting the grace notes in others’ swings and tiny variations in the landscape. He was a tall, handsome man with a prominent nose and a head of hair that Tom Wolfe once compared to “monkish thatch.” It eventually turned white, as did his bushy eyebrows, giving him a senatorial appearance. And though as a youth he suffered from both a stutter and psoriasis, he became a person of immense charm, unfailingly polite and gracious in public.

I don’t know much about golf or Updike’s golf-playing, though I read about his stuttering in his memoir Self-Consciousness. Looking at photos available online, I see how that nose and that hair do add to his appeal. And yes, young or old, the Updike I gaze at is undeniably “a person of immense charm.” Whether or not he fulfilled his burgherly aspirations, he certainly enlivened — and continues to spark — my bookish years.

Each time I think of John Updike, I deal with an onslaught of guilt. As a teenager and in my early twenties, I bought and read his books. None of these were part of my required reading as a Lit major. (We had the standard big stars like Faulkner, Ionesco, Rilke, and, of course, Shakespeare, but no Updike.) So the fact that no one was forcing me to do it must have meant a lot. I read Updike because I wanted to do. I kept buying and reading him because I wasn’t turned off by my first or second or third try. And yet, searching through every nook and cranny of my bookshelves today, I can’t find a single Updike. Where have they all gone?

Confession time. At least once in a decade I unburden myself of books that I no longer want or have to read. There simply isn't enough room anymore for all the volumes I have acquired since childhood. Now I concede to one advantage of e-books. I see how Amazon and other online booksellers have killed the traditional bookstores saddled with dwindling physical space and rising overheads. Yet I wonder if any of that will ever be a valid excuse for the kind of purging I have occasionally inflicted on my personal collections. I remain steadfast in my love — my fetish — for books with pages I can touch and smell. But have I wavered in my faith in Updike?

Funny, I still have a few of my Saul Bellows and Philip Roths. And I haven’t let go of any of my J. D. Salingers. Again, none of those three were required reading (what the heck was wrong with my college curriculum?), and yet I read them and kept them. I know for sure I had at least two of Updike’s novels (Rabbit Run and Roger’s Version), and one collection of short stories (Pigeon Feathers), his memoir Self-Consciousness, and two copies (yes, two) of his book of (mostly light) verse, Seventy Poems. But they’re all gone. No, I didn’t lend them. I gave them away.

I remember hunching over a huge box in late 2009. It was unloading time once more. My version of spring cleaning, although mine was more tedious and painful. A relative had offered to take away my old books, perhaps to keep some, the others to sell. At certain points in my life, the baggage (physical and emotional) would become too much to bear. And I'd give in to the urge to purge. So that morning I was frantically dropping books into a box, certain that if I had lingered a minute longer, if I had delayed making choices about which ones to keep and which to let go, mournfully caressing each reject like a soon-to-be-orphaned puppy, I would never have finished the job. So quickly I condemned my darlings one by one into the gas chamber. It was my Meryl Streep moment. My Sophie’s Choice. Except that in this scenario, I was both Holocaust victim and perpetrator. I had no choice but to make a choice. Choices. And that’s how I sacrificed my John Updikes to the gods of exigency. For commiting such atrocities, I know there’s no way I can aspire now to a burgherly life.

The best I can do is give myself a little credit here. (Yeah, that’s how desperate I am for validation.) Sentimenal sappy hoarder that I am, I can still be counted on to be ruthlessly practical when the need arises. So what if I've lost those Updikes? I can still buy new ones, new editions with better cover designs and sturdier, untarnished pages. But, you know, it’s not the same. Those won’t have the history and the character of the books I bought with my paltry college allowance and read with my youthful mentality.

Today my middle-age mentality offers me all sorts of reasons for my getting rid of those Updikes. Aside from lack of space, it can be lack of maturity. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for him then (in the same way that if I had read James Salter when I was a teenager, his brilliance would have been lost on me). I don’t recall any passage, character, or epiphany from any of the Updike prose works I read. I know admitting this is sacrilege, but my most memorable Updike was Seventy Poems. I love especially the one about a father who, after his divorce is finalized, stops by a dump site with his children. As I recall the context, the kids stay with their mom so this is precious time for the dad. (I Googled the poem but couldn't find it. So forgive me if I'm messing up the details here.) Surveying the trash, the kids find a broken doll or some discarded toy to admire. The father knows it won't be long till their time together is over. In the poem’s final lines, he tells his children it's okay to show affection for the abandoned toy: “Love it now, love it now, but we can’t take it home.”

That’s the Updike I love. And now, as I survey all these great photographs of him on Google Images, I am reassured that I’ll never run out of reasons to grow fonder of him. I am most grateful to the photographer and author Jill Krementz, who shares her “Fond Farewell to John Updike” on the website New York Social Diary. Look at the man smile. Look how he scratches his ear or ruminates with a finger on his lips. Look at him about to kiss his wife. Or shaving in front of the mirror. Or jumping-rope. Or looking out the window. I have been warmed and tickled by so many of these Updike images online, I sometimes forget what a serious and acclaimed writer he was. I’m so glad that journalists like Sarah Crown keep his memory and magnificence alive. In The Guardian (May 15, 2012), she asks, “Have We Fallen Out of Love with John Updike?”

I look at John Updike in the photograph I have chosen for this blog, and I know I haven’t gotten rid of him. I’m not done with my guilt, either, for having once thought I could do without his books. But seeing him smile in this picture, I feel like I have been forgiven. And morose, dopey me can’t help smiling back. At midlife, I can’t say I'm totally at ease carrying on this affair with books I no longer have. But you see, Mr. Updike, I haven’t fallen out of love with writing about those books. So I need you now. I want to read you now.

Dear Mr. Updike, it’s a good thing I have hung on to my old copy of The Paris Review Interviews, the Fourth Series, in which you come last in a line-up of fellow literary giants (Auden, Steinbeck, Nabokov, Borges, Welty — whew). The last question of the interview is: “As a technician, how unconventional would you say you were?” You begin to reply: “As unconventional as I need be. An absolute freedom exists on the blank page, so let’s use it.” Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.

[Photograph by Joanne Rathe. Source: Boston Globe.]

Susan Sontag: The pleasures of mental pollution

I have been rereading the essays in On Photography by Susan Sontag. Here’s one of her prescient observations:

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their societies into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world — all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Sontag’s book was first published in 1977, before Facebook, Photoshop, and Instagram. In 2008 I bought my digital camera, a Canon PowerShot A590 IS. Nothing fancy. So far I’ve been using perhaps only 20% of this tool’s capabilities, its so-called powerful features. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles. All I need is to press this and click that. The thing is, just like any normal human clicker, I can’t get enough of these images, especially those I’ve taken of my four-year-old nephew, Ennio. Other people take endless shots of restaurant food, family reunions, birthday parties, office events, trips abroad, or weekend sports. Others photograph their hamsters or orchids to death. I like watching Ennio grow up in pictures. Sontag mentions the “compulsion to photograph.” Yes, it’s always something or someone. And it’s never enough of this or that.

It’s also the compulsion to collect photographs, including those taken by others. To me, Sontag’s “mental pollution” is too strong an indictment of the image-junkies culture many of us have succumbed to. I can be defensive here, of course, because this blog is an offshoot of my other blog on Tumblr, which is ideal for photo-hoarding albums and bite-sized quotations. Part of Tumblr’s appeal is the ease with which anyone can assemble or “curate” a gallery of pictures, quotes, videos, and audio clips just by clicking “like” and “reblog.” My reason for getting on the Tumblr wagon is such a cliché — I needed distraction, activity, consolation, therapy. A medical condition got me stranded in the house. I wanted to escape boredom, pain, depression. I needed some time away from the ugliness that the world peddles as "news" or "reality." I needed to heal in a parallel universe where aging bodies don't disintegrate piece by piece, don't require costly, tedious no-guaranteed-results maintenance. I found comfort in losing myself and my days in the art of Googling images and posting my distractions for all the world to see.

I’m one of those people who used to sneer at Facebook. Even now, I can see why some continue to dismiss Twitter and Tumblr as sites for attention-hungry, depth-deprived users. When I began my Tumblr Therapy, I constantly pestered myself with doubts. Am I selling out? Am I merely adding to the noise and clutter out there? And because all I could do then was stay home, sit in my room with my laptop, and manipulate (or be manipulated by) these visual distractions and bookish fragments, I wondered whether I was posting and collecting photographs as a substitute for living. Was I, in Sontag’s words, merely “looking at” instead of actively “participating in” life?

Part of me wants to shrug off all these questions. After all, I’m still here trawling the Internet for more photographs and posting them on my blogs. Besides, as T. S. Eliot writes in “Burnt Norton” (from Four Quartets), “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” We all need our fantasies and distractions, our fictions and rabbit holes, our magical thinking. We all need to feed “the hungry eye,” as the title of the book on Walker Evans puts it. Overfeeding that eye doesn't always have to be such a bad thing. Escape isn't always a dirty word. In my darkest moods I’ve found relief, even glimmers of joy, by looking at the archives of other Tumblr bloggers. Their archives shimmer like mosaics of the most exquisite black-and-white photographs by Atget and Stieglitz and Doisneau; or technicolor gardens, skyscapes, and knick-knacks of good vibes; or a sublime fusion of poetry, painting, and photography (litverve); or scrapbooks pulsating with Marilyn Monroe's va-va-voom or "showcasing the beauty of John Lennon’s thighs." All these attempts to assuage what Sontag calls the “poignant longings for beauty.” But is it art? Is art therapy (or vice versa)? Or does photography (or blogging) always have to perform a noble task, spring from purely artistic motives, embody the loftiest aspirations of the human spirit?

I can see Ms. Sontag frowning on me now and saying, “But that’s not the point, my dear defensive amateur-blogger/photograph-hoarder.” Oh, Ms. Sontag, but sometimes it is. It’s precisely what draws me to a photograph or into writing. I want to be engaged in — or by — the ambiguity of these pictures, the urgency of these words. These imaginary conversations with people who challenge and seduce me into their ways of thinking and seeing. These people I will never have the chance to meet but can have the pleasure to read. Perhaps getting addicted to reading other people’s faces and thoughts — in photographs and books, via Google Images and Instagram, on blogs and social-networking sites — is part of that “irresistible” mental pollution. Call it art, therapy, selling out, or just passing time. These days, everything and everyone can exist in, or subsist on, a photograph.

[Photograph by dabacahin. That thing sticking out is the receipt for this copy I bought in 1985.]

Mark Strand: Wherever I am in the continuous life

In high school (it was the late 1970s, kids), I found my first Mark Strand poem, “Keeping Things Whole.” Seventeen lines with some of the simplest words ever put together to convey the most elusive meanings. Three slender stanzas, starting with:

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

I got hooked. I was haunted. It was perhaps the “who am I?” moper in me that clung to that "I am what is missing" link. Or just the angry young man howling: I’m not who you think I am. I’m here but I’m somewhere else. Yet I sensed that the power of the poem was beyond what I was going through (or how I was acting up) at the time. The power and beauty lay in the poem itself. But I still had a long way to go before realizing that.

In the early 1980s, I graduated from college. (Who knew this Lit major would be able to finish something?) My first full-time job: high school English teacher (surprise, surprise). One of the subjects I was asked to teach was poetry writing. And I had to compile a series of handouts for the class. I needed samples of poetry from various historical periods, in different styles, but none of the staid, predictable choices, please. I needed teachable poems (i.e., short and sweet, so none of T. S. Eliot’s epic brain-twisters). But I also wanted quirky, edgy types (so I tossed in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s "Underwear") and visual innovations (e. e. cummings’ “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” — that’s “grasshopper,” kids, with the letters mixed up and stanzas cut up to make you feel the insect on the page doing its hop, hop, hop). And I wanted poems that spoke about what’s weird and wonderful about poems — e.g., “Eating Poetry” by Mark Strand. Says my buddy, my bard:

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s. (Be patient, kids. We’re getting there.) I am this “yuppie” assistant editor at an international trade magazine, sitting in a cubicle, facing the computer monitor that flashed nothing but tiny rows of pale-white letters on a black or dark-greenish (Matrix-y) background. The pay was okay, and I had friends in that place. But the hours to fill and the paragraphs to clean up and my restless brain’s “I’m here but I’m somewhere else” refrains went on and on and on. (Kids, in those days we had no Internet in the office, there were no cellphones anywhere, I didn’t even have a mouse for my computer — and Keanu’s Matrix had not yet been shown. Yeah, what the...!) So I needed poetry more than ever. I needed my buddy-bard back.

And he was there, with “The Continuous Life.” This Mark Strand poem was first published in The New Yorker in 1989. I photocopied it, pasted the cut-out on black cardboard, and pinned the frame on the corkboard lining my venerable cubicle. So there. One of my Top 10 Favorite Poems of All Time hanging around as I tried holding down a job and keeping my sanity intact. It’s been with me ever since (the poem, I mean; the sanity, I'm not sure). This poem speaks to me and hears me when even I refuse to listen to myself anymore. It tells parents to talk to their children:

Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost — a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

Which brings me to this moment. It’s been 20 years since I first read “The Continuous Life.” More than 30 years since I started “Keeping Things Whole.” Four months ago I bought a copy of Mark Strand’s New Selected Poems, which puts together his greatest hits — no, I’d rather say, his greatest gifts — from 43 years of poetry writing. Oddly enough, this is the first and only Mark Strand book I have ever bought. I am looking now at the poet in the Timothy Greenfield-Sanders photograph that appears on the back cover (see above). The face looks weather-beaten. There's a Clint Eastwood-ish stoicism about it. I keep staring and find myself lingering between the poet’s grin and grimace. As though the lines on his face were hinting at the crossroads (his? mine?) where years of reluctance and determination finally meet.

Yes, weather-beaten. Which makes me think of yet another word, this one from a Mark Strand poem I recently read: “moonhandled.” It sounds like “manhandled.” (Look it up, kids. It means “to be handled roughly.” A manner that’s the opposite of tender.) The poem speaks of anxiety, a dreaded unknown. So perhaps a moonhandled scenario goes well with a mind in disarray. Still, I tinker with other possibilities, no matter how far-fetched. Couldn't the poet mean “moon-caressed”? Or how about drenched in shadows? Shrouded in faint light? I would love to put up another blog just so I could use that word as the title, to find out where those three syllables could take me or what it would be like to be moonhandled. The word is from the poem "Sleeping with One Eye Open":

My room is clammy and cold,
Moonhandled
And weird. The shivers
Wash over
Me, shaking my bones, my loose ends
Loosen,
And I lie sleeping with one eye open,
Hoping
That nothing, nothing will happen.

Something inevitably happens when I look at a photograph like the one I’ve chosen for this post. Somewhere in my head there’s a word or a poem that seizes the moment. Suddenly I’m dumbfounded, moonhandled. I’m eating poetry again as my thoughts meander over years that contract and stretch and dim. My buddy (from way back in high school) is now 78 years old. This year he published his 18th poetry collection, Almost Invisible. The poet who wrote "Wherever I am / I am what is missing" continues to write about feeling or being almost invisible. Kids, it’s time to see this man and read his poems.

[Photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders for Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc. Source: The Austin Chronicle.]

Notes on the title of this blog

The phrase “tender small blank” comes from a poem by Mark Strand, “What It Was.” Four months ago, I bought New Selected Poems, which includes the finest from ten of Strand’s poetry collections published between 1963 and 2006. It’s nice to know that I am as old as Strand’s earliest book (or earliest published poem). Well, Wikipedia lists Sleeping with One Eye Open as his first book, published in 1964. But the copyright page of New Selected Poems cites this: “Reasons for Moving © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968.” So there. I might as well begin with 1963. Forty-nine years of filling in the blanks. Or just letting all that white space float.

I like the idea that there are blanks small enough not to engulf the mind. I like the word tender because the world out there can be harsh or indifferent. And I like the diversity, the possibilities, of tenderness. Doctors know that “tender” means sensitive to touch. Freedictionary.com offers “easily crushed or bruised; fragile.” Yes, there is that offer, too. Lawyers know that a tender is “an unconditional offer made by one to another to enter into the contract of goods or services at certain specified cost” (legal-explanations.com). Stockbrokers know that a tender is “an offer to purchase some or all of shareholders' shares in a corporation” at a price “premium to the market price” (investopedia.com).

And what do I know? That this blog is an offer to make sense of the fragile, often daunting, blank. That this blog grew out of my attempts on my other blog, Sticking Around, to connect words and pictures. Tender Small Blank is a space for notes on the art of staying sane, the business of moving on and keeping still. It’s not a space for book reviews (many bloggers are already doing those much better than I can). It's for book reminiscences and other detours in nostalgia and wishful thinking. Tender Small Blank is where I gush and whine, geek out and mope around, resist and cherish distractions. This is where I read faces in photographs, stare at wounds, look out windows. This is where I gather things and people worth sticking around for.

To borrow Mark Strand’s words in “What It Was,” perhaps this blog is nothing but—

. . . a something, a smallness,
A dot, a speck, a speck within a speck, an endless depth
Of smallness; a song, but less than a song, something drowning
Into itself, something going, a flood of sound, but less
Than a sound; the last of it, the blank of it,
The tender small blank of it filling its echo, and falling,
And rising unnoticed, and falling again, and always thus,
And always because, and only because, once having been, it was . . .

On this blog, I will keep listening to that flood of sound. I will keep filling echoes and pages and hours. Feeding doubts. Rambling on. Breathing through the tender small blank. Always because. Only because.

[Illustration by dabacahin. Excerpt from “What It Was”: New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), page 235.]