Side Eye

I understand cat. People often make me feel that way too.

A Brief Wondrous Read – Oscar Wao

Since I started hanging out with writers, I’ve discovered that I don’t read the Right Sort of Books. Even though I read all the time, and don’t spend too much time in the genre ghettos, I never seem to have read the authors that everyone is buzzing about, or the ones that get included in MFA curricula, or the ones that authors cite as influences in interviews, or any of the books in those online “how well-read are you” quizzes. Sometimes I’m left wondering, “Well, what have I read?”

Once I took an online quiz about modern Japanese authors, and got a whopping six out of ten – a record for me in online book quizzes. I mentioned it to another writer friend, “I guess what I have been reading is modern Japanese fiction,” I said with some relief (after all, what an impressive niche, right?)

“Ooh,” she responded excitedly, “What did you think about the new Ishiguro?”

“I haven’t read it.”

Sheepdog

An old border collie watches his flock.

April Word Count Showers

I managed to keep up a deluge of freelance output in April despite a big deadline at my county gig. If you’re interested in what I wrote last month, grab an umbrella and prepare for the wordfall.

Independent Bookstore Day

Some people think I’m awful because I never remember birthdays, and holidays like Mother’s Day register more as minor annoyances than celebrations. But I’m not completely unsentimental. Sometimes I get quite excited over minor holidays. Like Independent Bookstore Day. Of course, I can never remember when it’s coming up, but even caught by surprise, I try to make the day special.

What a pretty fire

In the Hayao Miyazaki movie Howl’s Moving Castle, Lauren Bacall voices the English version of the Witch of the Waste. Even as an animated old hag, the fabulous Bacall steals the show. My favorite line of hers is, “What a pretty fire,” as she stares at the fire demon that powers the castle.

Wagner Ladles Crazysauce in The Flying Dutchman

Alfred Walker (The Dutchman) photo by Philip Newton c/o Seattle Opera

Opera is about so much more than the story – it’s the entire theatrical experience: sets, costumes, voices, music, emotion. But me, I’m about the story. And the story of The Flying Dutchman is pure Smart Bitches F+ crazysauce. In other words, delightful.

If you are, as I was before attending Seattle Opera’s production of The Flying Dutchman, unfamiliar with the story, let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

British Panto

Panto is a British Christmas tradition. We watch it every year at the British-style pub, Hales Ales. It’s tons of silly fun that balances slapstick for kids and double entendre for adults. And it’s completely irrelevant to spring. Enjoy.

The Artist’s Struggle Picks My Brain

I really like the Brain Pickings newsletter that shows up in my inbox every Sunday. I like the way you can’t just skim it but have to settle in for a slow Sunday long-read. I love the fact that it’s never about what’s happening, but always about what people – interesting, intelligent people – think, and how their thoughts connect with the thoughts of other interesting, intelligent people. And usually I like that there is often the underlying assumption that you, the reader, are also an interesting, intelligent person, a creative person. Probably a writer.

I don’t always have time to settle in for that slow Sunday read. I certainly didn’t this week, but I had been working – writing – all day and needed a break from the pressure of deadlines. So I started to read this essay,

James Baldwin on the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity and How It Illuminates the Universal Experience of What It Means to Be Human (See what I mean? Even the titles are wonderfully ponderous.)

At first I enjoyed it. I even tweeted out a particularly toothsome quote. But further in, I started to be uncomfortable. Right about here (almost at the end, just like my five-year-old daughter wailing to leave the theater during the scary final fight with the snow leopard in Kung Fu Panda literally seconds before the scene got funny again) right about here, the weight of the artist’s struggle became too much for me.

Most people live in almost total darkness… people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which —if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define — you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn’t ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility.

I am a writer. I take my work seriously and I believe it to be creative work. But “that funny terrible thing”? I don’t think I have it. I don’t think I have light to shine on the almost total darkness in which most of mankind lives. I don’t think that I understand better than anyone else “what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad.”

I think that I have a degree of facility with words that many people lack. When I get out of my own way, I string words together effectively, sometimes rather prettily. Most of the time, I make it easier for people to grasp information because I have ordered my words well.

I don’t think that I am even better than a great many other word stringers. Maybe in the pool of workers with words, there are a great many who do have that funny terrible thing that Baldwin describes (in fact I’m sure of it and I read their work with an awe that can only be held by one who knows exactly how hard it is to do what they accomplish). It’s simply that I am better at stringing words than I am at most other things. So that is where I continue to put my energy. I may not have the function of a crab, or sand, but my work serves some less weighty purpose. It deserves a room of its own and I will call it art, with or without that funny terrible thing.

But then I read something like Ursula K. Le Guin on Being a Man: a journey where the semicolon meets the soul. I’m not sure about my soul; but I love a good semicolon; I even love a half-assed one. Editors are always turning my semicolons into commas. So I read an essay like that, and I feel like a little light switches on in my almost total darkness, and I desperately want whatever that funny terrible thing is.

Ólafur Arnalds in Seattle

Ólafur Arnalds played Benaroya Hall with Nils Frahm at the Decibel Festival in 2013. He was well received.