Category Archives: writing

Anger and “The Insula”

Last word.

I will keep this simple.  I’ve heard (granted from a historian Bill Moyers interviewed) that there’s a specific part of the human brain, located in the primitive, survival-oriented region that’s sometimes referred to as the lizard or reptile brain, where anger is experienced.  Let’s call it the insula (or insular cortex), and assume, for our purposes here, that feeling anger is one of its primary functions.  

When the insula is engaged for anger, all bodily engines are mobilized for fight or flight.   Cortisol and adrenaline, already coursing through the system, are ready to be released in a flood, as soon as the insula gives the command.  The ability to see nuance and make distinctions disappears, along with the ability to compromise.  All the person with the glowing insula can see is rage and the enemy in the upcoming battle.  There is a clear evolutionary survival advantage to this hyper-focus.

It explains why it seems impossible for an angry person to acknowledge certain things that may seem easily seen.  An angry person, told that his ignoring three requests for a comment was hurtful, cannot process that information.   You would think anybody who had been ignored several consecutive times would feel hurt, at least slighted.  You’d think it would be an easy matter to put yourself in the other person’s place and feel and express regret for not doing the decent, human thing for a friend.  If your insula is glowing, and you never learned how to calm it, it is actually biologically impossible to do any of those things.

First of all, you will say, I don’t remember ever having ignored you, so I couldn’t have done it on purpose and you’re the aggressor for blaming me.  Second, you say I ignored you but it’s quite possible I responded to you, I think I did, and you just, for whatever reason, maybe to feel justified in your irrational rage, blocked it out.  Third, I don’t even remember if I even read the thing you asked me to comment on, it made no lasting impression in any case, so what’s the fuss about?  Fourth, you’re a fucking hypocrite, I sent you something you never responded to, even though I realize now I must have somehow sent it to an address where it never reached you.  Fifth, I will need your unconditional surrender before any peace negotiations can begin. Blah blah blah.

The effective thing to say, if you meant to have a sincere and lasting peace, and friendship, with the other, would be more like:  

Of course I’d be hurt if you did that to me, anyone would.  A friend should not have to beg another friend for feedback on a project they had a long, animated conversation about.  This is especially true between two writers who have discussed one of their projects. Three separate requests should have been enough.  It’s not necessary to send me the email string to prove I never uttered a peep in response.  It was wrong of me to question your veracity on that, I was angry and feeling desperate.   I was an asshole not to get back to you, a jerk to insist you should have contacted me for feedback a fourth time, and a fifth if necessary, and I apologize.   It’s not as though I’m working two full-time jobs and am overwhelmed by work, I’m semi-retired.  I understand it was hurtful, I didn’t mean to do it and I hope you will forgive me. Would it help if I read it now and gave you some notes you might be able to work with?  

The insula, glowing, knows only how to continue the do-or-die fight for survival.  God bless the reptile brain, when fight is needed.  Hard to be friends with an angry reptile, though.  I speak from long experience.

 

NOTE:

The frontal insula is where people sense love and hate, gratitude and resentment, self-confidence and embarrassment, trust and distrust, empathy and contempt, approval and disdain, pride and humiliation, truthfulness and deception, atonement and guilt.

The NY Times printed this, on June 2, 2007.  (source)

 

Getting to the Heart of Things

We live in a largely superficial society, sadly enough.  Authentic emotion is often suppressed in favor of putting on the smiling face of the winner.  The only emotions everyone in America is free to express are happiness and rage, which is a fucking shame. We are warned not to advertise that you feel sad, unless the provocation is extreme and obvious.  In the case of a death, or mass murder, nobody could blame you for feeling sadness.  In fact, you’d be a monster not to be sad in the aftermath of a tragedy.  

But sadness for no real cause?  They have medications for that.  Only a loser is sad for no reason.    That all this is clearly bullshit designed to foster the inauthentic, unexaminable life of the acquisitive consumer has nothing to do with it.   Drive a winner car and you’ll feel better about yourself.  Pretending you’re not a loser is half the battle, the constant commercial assures us.  

I have a friend who’s an excellent writer.  He was a professional writer for many years, a deep thinker and a man of deep feelings.  It seems to be part of his professional credo that the deepest feelings do not belong in writing one does for pay.    He advised me to keep it light when I was sending things to his friend, the gatekeeper for an online publisher, for $250 a pop.   He writes a 1,000 word anecdote in an hour, eats lunch, gives the piece a final polish and by dinnertime he gets the thumbs up and a check for $250.  Of the fifty or so he’s sent in, only one has ever been rejected and none has ever needed to be revised in any way.

I scored on the first two I sent in, and it was great, even if my pieces were a bit darker than most of the others posted on the on-line magazine. Even as a few of my thoughts were muddled by a clumsy editor trying to earn his keep.  Then the hoop I had to jump through for my $250 was made smaller and smaller.  

The third piece I sent was accepted for publication, and I smiled as I tallied another $250 score in my notebook.  Weeks went by and I didn’t see it on-line, nor was there any check.  I inquired.  “Oh, I could have sworn I emailed you that I reconsidered, we’re not using it. Beautifully written and powerful, but, oddly, too personal for a personal anecdote.”

My writer friend told me over dinner to shrug it off, keep ’em light.  He keeps ’em light, but I wonder how easily he’d shrug off having the $250 snatched back after the piece was accepted.   He doesn’t need the money, so there’s that, but, still, it didn’t sit right with me that he’d feel nothing about having $250 plucked out of his pocket.

Later the two of us had dinner and I described the Book of Irv to him.  He’d had family traumas aplenty, but his father was apparently a good and gentle soul who always treated him well.  He told me it was a fascinating project, trying to conjure the complicated wonderful, monstrous Dreaded Unit father I had described to him over the years.  

As we said goodbye he told me he was looking forward to reading some of the manuscript.  I told him I’d send him the link to several selections, which I did when I got home.  I sent the earliest incarnation of the Book of Irv site (link) and told him how much I looked forward to his take on it.  I thought this piece (link) in particular, about my father asking me hopelessly for Detroit Tiger scores all through my childhood, would resonate with him.  He is a huge sports fan, currently writing a book on college basketball.

The next email I had from him read: 

from the late, great New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton, speaking of his novels and screenplays:”Although I have not exactly been published or produced, I have had some things professionally typed.”

Outside of that zen koan, I never heard a word back about the pages I’d sent him.

In fairness to him, he is famous for being an affable space cadet. Once, in a restaurant, his wife’s chair fell backwards, she almost fell with it, and he didn’t seem to notice, absorbed as he was finishing his anecdote.  Good natured obliviousness is one of his known characteristics.  I figured he was just being himself and I later sent him a few other Irv pieces, asking what he thought.  I  never heard a peep.  

Our email conversation petered out after he wrote, of my comparing my frustration trying to get a reply from a promising business contact who was not responding to root canal:

“Have to disagree — based on 30 yrs of extreme periodontistry, molars and their double roots are worse.”

We’d had a good laugh over dinner last April recalling Mel Brooks’ genius definition of tragedy and comedy.  “Tragedy is when I break my fingernail, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die.”

I was truly at a loss to account for his silence about my work.  Since we rarely talk more than once or twice a year, I put it out of my head and kept writing.

Yesterday I wrote a piece about sports and sent it to him, hoping the note found him well and telling him the piece made me think of him, a one time competitive tennis player and a seasoned teller of tales I have always enjoyed swapping yarns with.

To my surprise, he wrote back instantly, telling me he assumed I was angry with him since I’d never written back to his several emails.  I checked and the last emails I had from him were things he forwarded, months ago.  I wrote telling him this and he replied that he must have sent the personal emails I’d ignored to the wrong address.

I don’t often write poems, but sometimes they seem the most direct way to process and express a specific thing.  On the subway an hour later I found myself writing:

Funny as my broken fingernail,
your fatal manhole, 
me mad at you
because silent?
Huh?
The silence started here, 
when I last wrote you in April,
not to be thin-skinned
about it.
I just figured
you were by far
the tougher guy.

Besides, I’m in deep
conversation
with the dead
while you,
disinclined for the dark stuff,
pursue real-world business,
things that can be put cleanly on a ledger.

ii  
I am drawn
as by the earth’s powerful magnet
to the darker core
of the thing itself.  
Pretentious, perhaps, to say
to those who enjoy light,
simplicity,
a bracing lack of confusion.  

Odd, how unlike the
nightmare some seem to fear,
this probing in the darkness
feels to me,
when it is going well.  

Others, I am assured,
resist this
sort of thing
with all their strength.  

Me, I yield
to a greater curiosity
pulling my thoughts like gravity,
pushing inside of the thing,
the thing that struggles, wild,
never to reveal
its entire mystery.

The Price for Getting Paid

I’ve been paid for an infinitesimal percentage of the many words I’ve written over the last forty-five years.  I need to up the percentage in the coming months.  It is imperative, especially now that I’ve had a taste of getting paid for writing .  And because my money is running out possibly faster than the time I hopefully have left to spend it.

The theoretically easy gig, writing short, 1,000 word memoir type anecdotes for $250 a pop, was presented to me about a year ago.  I sent the guy two pieces that he loved and published immediately.   $500, not bad.   My friends were happy to see me finally getting paid for work I’d been doing for decades.   I had the impression I could send him one or two a week, but the arrangement quickly became hard to bear.  

It seems incredibly petty to blame my father for the sourness that quickly crept in, especially at my ridiculously advanced age of sixty.  Maybe I should blame this editorial fellow’s father for it.  I know that my arbitrarily adversarial father did not make it any easier for me to cheerfully abide the whimsy of arbitrary assholes.

The editor, if he can be called that, had grown up with a major problem with his own father, who had been a felon, a man of great superficial charm, adored by his wife, and who had hidden his criminality and long prison sentence from his sons.  The son wrote thousands and thousands of words about the trauma of his father’s treachery and published it on the site.    The piece could have been tightened up by a decent editor, but it made its point, at great, if not always elegant, length.

I wrote a piece about my father’s deathbed confession, which started off at about 2,500 words.  I managed to cut an almost fifty year anecdote down, somehow, to about 1,500 words, and sent it off to him.  He told me he loved it, but that the “sweet spot” for the website was around 1,000-1,100 words.   I exerted myself to send him a draft, cut to the bone like a haiku, that came in at a little under 1,100 words.  He loved it and told me he’d publish it in the next on-line issue.

Although challenged to edit his own story, he was fearless taking the red pen to my carefully chosen words.  I’d worked to tell exactly what I meant to in as few words as possible.   I read the piece he published on-line while waiting for my paycheck and noted that he’d swapped a precise phrase of mine for a cliche, inserted a fairly stupid parenthetical, changed a few other minor things.  Sure, I thought, why not?  

Then I read a line that stopped me, since it completely changed the sense of the entire paragraph that followed and made me appear to be as hapless a writer, and clueless a person, as this fellow himself.

I’d written:  

It made no sense to me that a man with all the qualities he possessed could be such an intractable asshole.

His version had me write:

It never made any sense to me that a man who my mother absolutely adored could be such an intractable asshole.

I never had any confusion about why my mother adored my father, or how anybody can adore anybody else.  That was more his issue, you dig, since his mother had absolutely adored such a despicable lying, murdering weasel and helped him lie to his sons.  

My point was that my father had every quality to be a wonderful father, and a great friend, that I saw each of those qualities and it mystified me that he was so rarely capable of living up to that great potential.  That’s what didn’t make sense to me, that is the contradiction I found impossible to reconcile throughout the senseless, trackless wars of my childhood.

 There was no mystery whatsoever about my mother adoring him, nor did that have anything to do with what I said next.

“But you got paid $250,” a practical friend pointed out, quite sensibly.  

That’s one part of it, and the good part.  If it had ended with that small handful of his stupid edits, I could have kept sending him things, letting him lift his leg over my words as he saw fit, and cashing the checks.  But it appeared he may have had some feelings about how quickly I sent him finished 1,000 word pieces whenever he asked.  

Each one I sent him, he said, was beautifully written, although this one was, funny to say, a bit too personal, that one, surprisingly, a tad impersonal, that one too private, this one too public– and this one, while absolutely harrowing, he’d found oddly unmoving.  

In the end, I decided there was no point to tell this hack to go fuck himself, take a writing course or anything else that might have hurt his sensitive feelings.  I just stopped sending him my work.  I am looking for other places to send my writing.  If you will excuse me, I have to crack that directory now.

Aside

 
I had the idea yesterday, out of a kind of madness, that the other bone heads in the First Hebrew Cemetery, fed up with the hard time I’m giving Irv’s skeleton, would start witlessly piping up, creating an unbearable chorus of bitter, opinionated bastards.  
 
“Oh, you think you’re hot shit because you’re alive, you arrogant fuck?  I was alive, much more alive than you, shit for brains.  You talk to your fucking father that way, you hateful pile of dreck?  Who made you the prosecutor, judge, jury, bailiff, corrections officer, prison administrator?  Huh?  FUCK YOU!”  and I wind up dashing from the graveyard, pelted by their shit bombs.
 
I had the thought yesterday that I still expect something remarkable from myself.  I realize this is probably because I was always treated, even as the treatment was often rather rough, as a boy of unlimited potential, an extraordinary talent who could do anything I wanted– provided my father got to shit on it first, of course.  This idea of my extraordinariness was no doubt, in part, my talented, frustrated grandmother’s hopped up over-compensation for losing her entire family, all her brothers and sisters and their kids.  No worries, you got this genius grandson who will take up where they all left off in that ravine.
 
“Your grandmother was very good for you, and very bad for you,” the famous, now immortal, sculptor George Segal, my grandmother’s first cousin Georgik, told me, not without a bit of profundity, during one of our three or four meetings over the decades.  It would be our last meeting– he wrote me a short, tightly worded furious letter immediately after about what an ungrateful bastard I was, how generous and wonderful the rich art collectors I hated were (they’d been so to him, after all) and how, while clearly quite intelligent and capable, I was poisoning my life with anger and hatred.  
 
His son, after all (and this he did not need to add), was severely retarded, living in a home for adults who couldn’t care for themselves.  As a boy I’d seen the son, a few years older than me and a big kid, gorge himself on potato salad and, running with his sister in a wheat colored field exactly like the one in Wyeth’s Christina’s World, vomit a fountain of half digested potato salad over his shoulder as he went, one leg kicked up behind as he paused for just a second to make like a geyser.  My sister and I watched from above, at the wall-sized picture window, and neither of us ever so much as tasted potato salad after that.
 
And so it goes, eh?

What’s up with the constant fucking writing, anyway?

I can’t get away from it, however quietly these words fall in the woods.  It makes no sense to write, in a sense, if the writing is not read by readers.  We write by imagining the reader when there is no actual reader.  Writing is part of that oldest human longing: to connect with another.   I suppose that’s what most posting on the internet is driven by — the seeking of connection, the desire to have a conversation.   

Kurt Vonnegut always wrote to his perfect reader, I think it was his sister.  He always imagined her intelligent face reading the words he was writing and he wrote in a way that would tickle and provoke her.  If he knew she’d be happy with it, it was ready to send out to those who sometimes buy such things to publish.

Not saying it was any easier then than it is today for someone like the hardworking Mr. Vonnegut to find readers who would pay for his writing.  To be sure, it was very hard.  We know his work only because he persisted, kept writing, being rejected, rewriting, waking early to write, writing after a long day as a hack in some public relations department, making connections and gaining the support of people in the publishing world who championed his writing, what today would be called “his brand”.  I’m not saying there was anything easy or inevitable about Kurt Vonnegut’s great success, or anything unmerited about it.

I’m just imagining living in an era where there are dozens of popular magazines that millions of people read every month.  Actual paper periodicals that tens of thousands of people would pick up periodically, buy and read.  These magazines published all kinds of writing for every imaginable audience.  When a writer (and not everyone felt entitled to be a writer back then) found an audience, that magazine would apparently pay enough, buying four or five pieces a year, for the writer to pay all his bills and spend as much time as possible writing.  

The publishing world of a few decades ago was more diverse, not quite as uniformly bottom-line focused and demographically-driven as it is today.  There was seemingly a bit more variety out there being put into print, as far as I can tell.

I clearly need to focus my research and outreach techniques and come up with a platform-based, metric-driven targeted and leveraged five to seven pronged marketing plan, if I intend to be able to call myself a writer rather than another of the twenty million pretentious clones with a blahg.  If I can’t sell these words, most people would not blame anyone for saying I’m largely wasting my time on a hobby, day after day, year after year.

But for now, a brief exercise in pettiness:

I found one guy who pays $250 a pop for easy-reading 1,000 word real-life based Baby Boomer pieces he puts on a corporately owned website he curates.  He bought the first couple I sent him, then started behaving like a petty, quibbling gatekeeper hack.   One was very moving, and beautifully written, he wrote, but, ironically, a bit too personal; the next one, while undeniably harrowing, oddly did not move him, was somehow too impersonal.   One he accepted for publication and later wrote that he could have sworn he’d told me he’d changed his mind about publishing.  His prerogative, really, as the man with the checkbook.

Left a bad taste, that particular jerk-off and his shoddy practices and mercurial tastes, I told a friend.

“You mean the guy who paid you for your writing,” my friend said.

“Yeah, that arbitrary, language-challenged, assbiting assbiter,” I remember thinking.

 

 

Putting a bow on the story

The art of persuasion, selling,  winning over, converting, is the art of great storytelling.  We love good stories, live by ’em, we need stories to make sense of a largely incomprehensible universe.   I heard a master storytelling salesman at work the other night at the Democratic Convention, weaving a long, compelling story about his wife.   Former president William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton, considered by many our first black president until one with 50% African blood was elected.

“Also considered the finest Republican president of the twentieth century,” said the skeleton.  

“To hear him tell the story, he and his brilliant wife have always been humble servants of the People, selflessly doing everything they could to make sure the tide kept rising and that the rising tide lifted all boats.  He has that down home Elvis charm, calls people ‘man’ and has a deft touch with humor and pathos.  Blacks loved him when he was their president, he spoke their language to them, played the saxophone.  Shucks, he was a charming southern white boy who was completely comfortable with blacks, clearly liked and even admired ’em.

“Meantime, in the name of compromise (and in the worst sense of the word) he did the bidding of some rabidly bad people, over and over again.   Welfare ‘reform’, his 1994 crime bill*, with three strikes and mandatory sentencing, and NAFTA did more to make things harder for blacks than anything Reagan, a president who clucked at racism, had done.  Not to mention the farcical and emblematic “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell”.

“I recall we had a chat about then governor Bill Clinton’s return to Arkansas, during his first presidential campaign, to oversee the execution of some brain damaged killer on death row, a shooter who’d turned his gun on himself and blown most of his brains out without actually dying,” said the skeleton.  “Show them the Times article to refresh their recollection, to tell it to those too young to remember.”

Well, we’ve talked about the psychopath test for president.  You don’t qualify to run for the office unless you demonstrate that, among other things, like lying convincingly, you can kill when needed, for the good of the country, of course. Plus, you have many Americans who believe in an eye for an eye, literally, death for those who kill, and they need to be satisfied that their president will unflinchingly see justice done. 

“Kill whoever you like, if you’re the president, as long as you tell the story properly, or keep the killing properly secret like your current president’s kill list.  Admittedly, sometimes the president has to be willing to kill, but much of the time it hurts more than it helps.  Framing the story of the killing is the most important part, if you do that, kill away, man.  

“You remember on TV we used to see those numbers like insanely lopsided basketball scores, the kill numbers they’d show every night during dinner?   US: 19  Viet Cong: 345.   Low score meant you won.  So piles of dead Vietnamese would be added up, and if any of the dead were males between the ages of 15 and 50, you had dead Viet Cong for the tally.  William Westmoreland and Robert MacNamara’s people came up with that body count system.  Great for morale, it told the story, every night, of our irresistibly mounting victory.  What did you guys yell when unfair teams were chosen: slaughter sides!!!

“How about Agent Orange?  You remember that amazing stuff, defoliant, highly concentrated herbicide, I think it was also called Dioxin.  They called the destruction of jungle and crops ‘Operation Ranch Hand’ — how cool is that?  Spray it from a bunch of airplanes and it dissolves all plant life underneath.  Neat.  Except that it may have killed almost half a million civilians and caused birth defects in probably many more than that, plus what it did to many American boys.   Luckily for us, about half of those Vietnamese killed were males between the age of 15 and 50, like the many terrorists we’re secretly killing today in the president’s brilliant and legally complex drone war.  

“These are the hard calls a president has to make, Elie.  Would Clinton have won that election if he couldn’t go back to Arkansas and sign the death warrant for a severely brain-damaged person’s lethal injection?  He probably would have lost his own state, like Gore would eight years later.”  The skeleton looked around, weary.  

“But, look, you started off talking about telling a story and now we’re talking about psychopath presidents.  You know what telling a good story involves?  Seeing the whole story before you start to tell it and not getting lost in digressions that detract from the story you want to tell.  

“You need to have a good beginning, to hook your listener, an interesting story-line that’s easy to follow and a satisfying pay-off at the end.   The story has to hang together as an organic whole.   People have to know why you told the story and everything you need for people to grasp and digest the story should be explained as you go.  

“You should never have to go back and add something you belatedly realize you’ll need for the punchline.   You need to see the whole picture you want to paint before you lift your brush to start painting.

“Which places you in an unenviable position here, telling my story.  What is my story even about?  I was born in poverty, had certain ideals, worked my ass off, had a certain amount of luck, accumulated enough money that when I died my son could take a year off to write my biography.  What kind of story is that?  

“Hey, I got it, here’s your story: the loser’s son, at the end of the final withered branch of a family tree rather crudely pruned by hate-filled Ukrainians, anti-Semitic Poles, Nazis and Belarusians, in his mad hubris, thinking anyone in the world actually gives a shit about another anonymous loser.  The story could actually be about you, you know, the meta-story, with the story of me kind of floating by in the background, like a hallucination.  

“We see the author sitting in an unbelievably depressing rented one-bedroom apartment, with decaying walls, etc. cracked ceiling, bathroom floor disintegrated.  All around are papers, some beautiful, most not, but a colorful jumble that defies description.  Why is he in his underwear in front of a fan at 2 pm? Is this a mental patient, tapping away as he stares at the computer screen with no expression?”

Point taken, I should put on some pants, although it’s 88.3 degrees in here at the moment.   Here’s the story in a nutshell for you, then.

The cards dealt to you were a daunting hand.  You were born poor, Jewish, at the dawn of the Great Depression, less than twenty years before the organized mass-murder of poor Jews.   The human helplessness that is the birthright of every human being who does not get help was laid heavily on you, over and over.  The small town you grew up in was anti-Semitic.  You wore a jacket with a Jewish star on it because your mother insisted, as only a few years later Hitler would insist all Jews do.  Drafted into the army’s air force in 1942…

“Blah, blah, blah, I don’t see a story here.  No hook.  Next!” said the skeleton in the manner of a distracted record company executive forced to listen to his mother’s friend’s son’s demo.

 “Ha! You remember that, don’t you, you rascal, Robbie’s big break, when Caroline got the A & R guy son of her friend to listen to his cassette.  It was like your letter from that nice girl at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux way back when:  I don’t see the hook.  Robbie learned, eventually, to put the hook way up front.  He told you about the ‘elevator pitch’, right, you’ve got to be able to put the hook into them within a short elevator ride, you have maybe fifteen seconds.”

Yep, yep.  And in fairness to the gatekeepers, everyone thinks they have a book in them, that their life should be a book.  Most books, like most lives, and particularly the imagined but unwritten books of most lives, are dull, stupid, vain, too predictably depressing to be bought and sold.   I have to package you and sell you, simple as that.

“What’s your fucking story?  Give me the angle.  What’s your fucking elevator pitch, bitch?”

I was raised by a brilliant, funny father who was full of self-hatred.   He fought me from the time I was a baby and the fight continued up until the last night of his life.  On that night he told me, for the first time, that he was sorry he’d been….

“Time’s up, bitch, we’re at my floor.  Nice meeting you.  If you want to blow me some time, set it up with my secretary.  Otherwise, have a nice day and most excellent life,” said the skeleton, his face as vacant, inscrutable and mad-looking as Andy’s.

 

NOTES

* Again, we’re dealing in a story element, a passing example of how Clinton was the best Republican president in recent history.  For those purposes the 1994 Crime Bill works nicely, it contains some heinous provisions that played a part in increasing American’s off-the-hook, disproportionately poor and black prison population.  But fairness dictates telling the rest of the story, a snippet of which follows, more of which can be read here:

The trend toward increased incarceration began in the early 1970s, and quadrupled in the ensuing four decades. A two-year study by the National Research Council concluded that the increase was historically unprecedented, that the U.S. far outpaced the incarceration rates elsewhere in the world, and that high incarceration rates have disproportionately affected Hispanic and black communities. The report cited policies enacted by officials at all levels that expanded the use of incarceration, largely in response to decades of rising crime.

“In the 1970s, the numbers of arrests and court caseloads increased, and prosecutors and judges became harsher in their charging and sentencing,” the report states. “In the 1980s, convicted defendants became more likely to serve prison time.”

Indeed, this trend continued with tough-on-crime policies through the 1990s as well, but to lay the blame for the incarceration trend entirely, or even mostly, at the feet of the 1994 crime bill ignores the historical trend…

…So while it may go too far to blame the 1994 crime bill for mass incarceration, it did create incentives for states to build prisons and increase sentences, and thereby contributed to increased incarceration.

 

Reading

Reading a well-written page is like having a delicious snack.  I noticed this as I read Jon Katz’s “Saving Simon” just now, as I do whenever I read a bit of Umberto Eco’s masterfully hateful “The Prague Cemetery”.   Reading a good sentence is just a pleasure.

Vibrato, dynamics, the attack of a string, playing in and out of time, laying in a succulent part, leaving space– incomprehensible abstractions to most people, unless they play guitar and have the sensitivity to notice such things.

A well-written sentence?  Even a cat will nod, when the words are set out just right.

The Hardest Trick of All

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 1:00 AM, bitemyass@gmail.com wrote:

The Hardest Trick of All

“You’ve been giving serious thought to the best way to live this third chapter of your life since mom died,” said the skeleton.  “I know one large feature is that you’ve turned aside from fighting, to a surprising extent, I have to say, even though your mate, a natural born wrangler, can’t seem to resist testing your resolve regularly. 
 

“Of course, since you’re going to read this to Sekhnet, let me define ‘wrangler’ precisely, so you can possibly avoid an ass-whipping.  A wrangler wrestles unruly steers and horses into the corral.  Sure they can be quarrelsome, but the main qualities a wrangler needs are strength, fearlessness, toughness and a stubbornness equal to a bull’s.  Heh, maybe you get your ass whupped anyway,” said the skeleton with a grunted laugh.

 “I get that you’re taking to heart Erik Erikson’s insight about this third chapter in life being about regrets or some kind of fulfillment, I believe he calls it Generativity vs. Bitterness.  You wrote about it, you could throw a footnote in here for the reader,” he said.  

(He didn’t know about hyperlinks, though he may have clicked a few toward the end of his days)

 

“Look, you’re trying to do the hardest thing in the world, the hardest trick of all.  I salute you in this noble quest, even as I recognize the idiotic hubris of the attempt.  You want to critically examine our lives and come away with some kind of insight to move you toward a productive last chapter of your life.  I applaud it, dead man though I also am.  

“Here’s the trap, as I see it, you’re trying to view life through the lens of critical history, a lens that, certainly when used to look at, say, the descendants of African hostages long experience here,  gives ample reason for pessimism.  Your challenge is maintaining some vital force that will allow for action.  At your age, at 60 now, it’s harder to have the energy, of course, but it’s psychic energy I’m talking about, which you need to see as a renewable resource.  

 “And that, my boy, is the trickiest trick of all, continually renewing your faith in a world that has become more and more about a system of domination that does not want the wrong kind of faith.  You had a good idea, working creatively with doomed kids.  Didn’t work out too well for you, you are up against billionaires with megaphones, after all and those hard-charging opinionated winners always dominate any discussion they get into.  No matter.  You have to keep moving forward.  I see what you’re hoping to do with this book, and I hope you succeed, for both of our sakes, but here’s the trap I hope you don’t fall into.  The rabbit hole that turns out to be a worm hole, or black hole.

“Don’t let your ambition blind you.  Your plan for this book is super ambitious, you want it to be a game changer, for you, for your program, for anyone who reads it. You want to tell the story of my life, set in historical and political context brought forward into today, told by a narrator I influenced greatly, if often perniciously, even as my once illuminating idealism turned to darkness and bile.  The narrator is determined to not suffer the same fate as the abusive father was doomed to by the father’s abusive mother.  

 

“It’s possible that for all the narrator’s seeming insight, the tragic missing insight is that the narrator has already been, and remains, long fucked.  By not competing against his peers all along he is a no-name flash in the pan who writes a fine book too late, published by an obscure outfit with no money to publicize it, it sinks like a stone a week after publication, and the writer is worse off for having written, discounting the princely $7,000 he was paid for the work.  

 

“Until, of course, five years after your death, when the book is exhumed by an influential person, reissued, suddenly celebrated as the important work it was all along,” the skeleton paused, seemingly to take a whiff of the stink of a decomposing animal dead somewhere nearby.

 

Still Looking for Feedback, you poor bastard

The breeze carried the smell of blossoms over the graves at the First Hebrew Congregation Cemetery off that lazy country road in a lush, sleepy corner of Westchester.  

“Yep, the place looks exactly the same as it did fifty years ago when my brother and I used to visit our parents’ graves,” said the skeleton, “except that there are a lot more of us here now, of course.”   My father and mother’s grave is almost at the top of the grassy hill, my aunt and uncle’s a few steps below.  

“Your mother would be cursing the Jews around now,” observed the skeleton.  

Rules in Jewish cemeteries vary, this particular one doesn’t allow the burial of ashes.   The Jewish cemetery by the Van Wyck in Queens where her parents are buried has no problem with the burial of an urn, or box of ashes.  Since my mother was cremated her gravestone in Cortlandt, saluting in Hebrew her “heart of a poet”, marks merely her life, rather than the final resting place of her mortal remains.  We plan to scatter her ashes over the Long Island Sound at Wading River, where she spent some of her happiest summers, but it was six years since she died the other day, and we are still planning.  Meanwhile her remains are sitting in a box in a very fancy paper shopping bag that is brown paper on the outside, slate grey on the inside.  

“She’d appreciate the fancy bag,” the skeleton said, “and she’s not in any hurry to go anywhere.  Though I know she’d spare a couple of harsh words for the arbitrary pricks who didn’t allow her to be interred here next to my bones in the burial plot we bought and paid for fifty times over.”  

The breeze continued to waft the smell of blooms and there was a faint buzz of insects beginning their chorus.  

“What are you waiting for?” asked the skeleton.  

Pardon?  

“At last count you have 340 something pages, 120,000 words written in this Book of Irv,” said the skeleton.  “What are you waiting for?  Do you think you are going to live forever, Elie?  You want to get my story into the hands of the public, right?  Your friends who read a snippet or two might sometimes give you a bit of nice feedback, but that’s like Bear Bryant’s moral victory, it’s like kissing your sister, you dig.  I know you still want feedback, right?  It’s long past time you had some success as a writer, recognition.  Important for you to get paid for it, too.”  

I confess.  Yes, feedback is important, so is success and getting paid for this. Picasso had a great quote about success being important to an artist not just for making a living but also to continue to work as an artist.  The appreciation one gets fuels further creativity, is confirmation of success, the external reward for working hard to build a bridge from your heart to the heart of another.  After a while an artist can’t keep creating good work in a silent vacuum.

“But you don’t believe in ‘artists’ anymore, do you?” said the skeleton.  

Well, it’s true I see them more as brands or products than as members of some lofty pantheon I aspire to belong to, the way I used to see them.  The only indisputable genius I know works as a waiter, spends a lot of time depressed and, I suspect, continues to duke it out with the bottle.   The term ‘artist’ is kind of pretentious, too.  The ‘artists’ I like best are not too fucking arty, if you know what I’m saying.  

“You are preaching to the choir, my friend.  I always found artists annoying as hell. They are people whose egos drive them to advertise themselves and the successful ones, the ones who sell themselves to the wealthy art collectors, a prissy and despicably arbitrary bunch of arbiters of taste in their own right, elevate their supposed ‘sensitivity’ to a level the rest of us mere mortals cannot even aspire to.  It’s a myth, and a pernicious one, if you ask me,” said the skeleton.  

“Of course, opinions are like assholes, everybody has one, right?” he added.  

But, at the same time, there are works that move you, books that make you see something from a perspective you didn’t have, actors who convince you of the emotional truth of their characters.  There are people out there, like Meryl Streep, who use their talents to create things that are not pure vanity, right?  

“Meryl Streep is brilliant.  You go into the cinema ready to be skeptical when she plays someone like Margaret Thatcher and within a minute or two she has you, she’s sucked you in, in spite of your determination not to be sucked in, makes you forget your hesitation to believe her.  Yeah, I’d call someone like her a great artist, that’s fair,” said the skeleton.  

A big raptor rode a thermal in a long lazy arc, high above the grave stones.  

“You’re wasting time, my man,” said the skeleton.  

The sound of a car motoring on the winding road came and went.  

“I didn’t give you and your sister what you needed when you were little.  Kids need someone to listen to them, tell them what they’re talking about is interesting.  Being listened to instills a sense of possibility in the child.  I couldn’t do that, never had it myself, had no idea how important it was to learn to do that for my kids.  I was busy holding off ten demons at any given time.  I was overworked, stressed out, living an American Dream that was only really possible during my lifetime.  A lucky break, to get out of the army after a uniquely necessary and just war, at a time of unprecedented, never to be repeated, economic growth and opportunity.  Moving toward a better world, ending poverty.  Then that fucking cheerful marionette Reagan cuts funding to social programs and chirps: ‘we fought a long war against poverty and poverty won.’  In between I took my eye off what was most important, giving love and real emotional support to you guys.”

The light spring breeze seemed to sigh.  

“You’ll lose these embarrassing flourishes in the rewrite, of course, along with the meta-narrating skeleton, right?” said the meta-narrating skeleton.  

Of course, dad, but please continue.  

“Magic words I almost never spoke at home: ‘please continue’.  The bitch of it is, I knew exactly how important that phrase was.  Those words were so useful in the workshops we did with gang leaders.  ‘Go ahead, Jose,’ would let the kid hold the floor to finish whatever point he was trying to make.  I never let you or your sister finish making a point, really.  I was always too afraid of being challenged about any of the things you had every right to challenge me about.”

“You know, on one level I understand I forced you and her to become your own parents.  How do you do that?  It takes decades, literally, and insight, which comes, largely, through luck.  Do you have someone else to bounce these things off of?  Someone in a similar struggle to compare notes with?  If not– hoo, you’re fucked. I’m not proud of doing that to my kids, you know that.  I guess that’s why you both are so much in need of positive feedback.”

“I told you during that last conversation that I’d told your sister a hundred times what a superb teacher she was.  You questioned the number a hundred.  I assured you it was at least a hundred.  Actually, it was twice.  I remember both times, and I remember how the sincere comment just rolled off her.  She was, and is, a superb teacher, any idiot who watches her with kids for two minutes can see that.  I was a huge jackass, there’s no question about that.  It took her twelve years to get the confidence to make the move she easily and successfully made just last week.  Makes my donkey ears twitch just thinking about it,” the skeleton said.  

Far be it from me to interrupt while you’re giving yourself such a good whipping, but I should interject something here.   Not that it’s a complete explanation, or defense, but you and mom never experienced anything like emotional support either.  Like the affection you said you were hard-pressed to express because you’d never seen it done, how would you have any clue about being emotionally supportive?  To you it was great progress that you weren’t whipping us in the face, instead of merely cursing at us all the time.  

“Well, I take that compliment, though, as you say, it doesn’t let me off the hook.  You’re supposed to have some fucking insight if you’re going to be a father,” the skeleton said.  

Look around, though.  How often does that really happen?  

“Well, you’re being generous.  There are many people who have the sensitivity, who just understand that sometimes you just put your arm around your kid when they’re angry, or dejected.  Those things don’t take sophistication or any kind of great insight, just basic humanity.  You’re suffering, I let you know you’re not in it alone, I’m present and suffering to see you unhappy, I’ll do what I can to help you.  Instead you and your sister always had my shoe on your necks, I was always blaming you for having an angry asshole as a father.  I can cop to that now, I only wish I’d had the sense to see it, and stop it, while it still could have made a difference,” he said.  

We all do, man, but, as you always said of your parents whenever you mentioned them: may you rest in peace.  

“That’s how we roll up here,” said the skeleton, as birds sang their seeming agreement.  

“I just want to remind you that nobody could really understand me without knowing a lot more about mom, she was the other half of me for most of my life.  You need to describe her in this Book of Irv,” said the skeleton.  

Understood.  

“She’d be very proud of you, reading these pages.  She always loved your writing, your ability to express yourself in words.  Me, I always read your words with mounting paranoia, waiting for a lurking terrible truth.  I’d go along cautiously and then, bam! from the undergrowth —  a pair of fangs right into my ankle.  Your mother was much more appreciative of your actual skill, and that’s probably a factor in your ability to write, your willingness to do it without much feedback from anybody,” said the skeleton.

Fuckin’ A, pops.  True dat.  I can see her smile to this day when she was handing me back some pages and saying “oh, that was wonderful!”  

“I rest my case,” said the skeleton, “goodnight ladies and gentle weasels of the jury.”  

A bird cackled, it sounded like a maniac’s laugh.

 

A Note on Writing

I am a mostly unpublished writer so please feel free to ignore my opinions on the matter of writing.  I have acquaintances who’ve written for a living, and are much more qualified to opine about the profession of writing, even though I predictably dismiss their mercantile views.   They tend to be skittish about going near the deeper truth that is at the heart of the writing I love most. Their primary interest is in being good craftsmen and getting paid to write what the market demands.  

We have different ambitions when we write, different approaches to the truth, where it is, how we feel it, express it.  

That’s probably just the bitterness talking, of course.  Here’s the point.  Pat Conroy, days after he died, told me in a sound bite the reason that I write:  to explain my life to myself.  

If one is lucky enough to do this in a way others are interested in enough to read, buy, publish and sell, you are truly blessed.  If all you get is some peace and understanding for yourself from digging and writing this way, that’s better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick too, as my father used to say.

From Conroy’s marvelous A Reading Life.  He describes a brilliant, demanding lover of books, a man who made his life about good writing and great books.   Conroy was a young writer when he first came into contact with publisher’s sales rep Norman Berg, a hard man who would become a lifelong friend, and he listened carefully to this older genius:

“You claim to be writing your first novel,” Norm said it in a voice that let me know he didn’t believe me.  

“I have,” I said, having written the first pages to the book that would become The Great Santini.  

“Does it tell me everything I need to know about leading a good life?” he asked.  “and I mean everything?”  

“No.”  

“Then throw it away.  It’s not worth writing.”  

“I’m twenty-six years old, Norman.  I don’t know everything in the world yet.”  

“That is good,” he said, softening.  “At least you know that much.  Keep writing.  If you’re lucky you’ll have one or two important things to say before you die.”  

“Here is one of them,” I said.   “Fuck you, Norman.”

(then, after describing the uncompromising older man’s eternal certainty, and fondness for Conroy’s spirited resistance to his implacable pronouncements, he comes to the beating heart of the matter)

“Always know which phase the moon is in,” he would say.  “Keep up with the transit of planets.  Know everything.  Feel everything. That’s your job as a writer.”  

“What’s your job, Norman?”  

“To suffer.  To feel everything in the world.  But it dies inside me.  I have no gift.  I can’t write.  That’s why I’m driving you crazy.”

Which makes such sense, it stopped me in my tracks, literally, there on Sixth Avenue where I paused in my listening to Conroy’s incantatory reading of his book on writing and reading.  I went to the library, to have the written words in front of me, to ponder and copy out for others to read.  This moment explained so much about the ungenerous side of the life of a supremely critical thinker, it almost made me laugh.

It happens that even gifted writers can also sometimes have this ungenerous gift for other writers, surprising as that may also sound.