The Keen Stars Were Twinkling

I’m still reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.

It is very difficult to know all that he was attempting to accomplish in this work. Certainly there is meditation on houses as structures, and houses as homes. That I was expecting. There is a chapter on daydreams. There is writing about the process of creating. Bachelard quotes French writers I didn’t read in college.

“An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates.” Jean Lescure

Interestingly Proust, whom I have read, is also quoted. The reason this is significant to me is that in describing this book briefly to a friend in the gym, he said, “sounds a little like Proust.”

Poetry is the thread that unites the chapters. Though not on every page, Bachelard has sprinkled verse throughout the text, and when he does, he gives the poem in French followed by a translation in English.

Mainly Bachelard attempts to deconstruct poetry.

Bachelard considers the imagery of doors and forests: “On May nights, when so many doors are closed, there is one that is just barely ajar. We have only to give it a very slight push! The hinges have been well oiled. And our fate becomes visible.”

The forest represents a “limitless world.”

I made use of a forest setting in two chapters of “Acoustic Memory”—one where the lovers are together and one where Raven longs for Gray. The glass walls of the Chapel Hill Public Library allow a view of a forest and facilitate work on pastoral scenes.

But back to Bachelard, in deconstructing poetry, he considers imagery and also sound, but not rhythm (at least not that I have seen yet—I confess I am not reading this book sequentially). He writes pages about Baudelaire’s use of the word vast and the phonation of the word vast. In the middle of this long rant, there is a gem of a metaphor for the human voice. The voice is a “delicate little Aeolian harp that nature has set at the entrance to our breathing” and it “is really a sixth sense, which followed and surpassed the others.”

More about Bachelard another day.

I look out the window of my airplane and see darkness penetrated by a strobe-like, red light that momentarily illuminates the wing—flicker, flicker, flicker. I’ve just flown over Chicago.

And here I will leave you with one of my favorite excerpts from a Shelley poem with a much more romantic take on the voice of a beloved:

"Though the sound overpowers, sing again, with your dear voice revealing a tone of some world far from ours, where music and moonlight and feeling are one."

Silence and Space

Somewhere above Montana and surrounded by the snow.

Somewhere above Montana there's places you oughta go.

Somewhere above Montana the snow mutes all the sound.

Somewhere above Montana with only memories around.

I'm back in a mountain fortress, the place in my manuscript where Raven came to a turning point in the early drafts.  The weakness in your plot, said a trusted friend, is that Raven never decides.  True.  She was weak.  No more.  I'm at this fortress strong and Raven is going to emerge, like the knight down the hall, with armor, ready to fight for her honor.

The stark terrain of the Rockies is the truth, as it was established over a hundred million years ago.  The truth, like the mountains, is all that can emerge with time.  

In the mountains, by herself, Raven looks inward and knows her truth.  Then, fearlessly, she acts. The other ending was too cliche.  This one is going to be true.

Oh, the Noise, Noise, Noise

I’ve been reading how the memories of our first home come to bear on our writing.

My first home was a brick ranch with hardwood floors, a garden, a collie and traditional parents. It strikes me that our house was very quiet. There were places you could go in our house and not hear anyone else. My favorite place was the basement.

We had a finished basement, replete with faux fireplace, a sitting area, a bar with swiveling turquoise pleather barstools, and a large desk with a manual typewriter. Did I say it was quiet?

I have to have quiet to write. It is a curse.

My current home is a smaller ranch with Pergo, a garden, a Labrador and traditional parents. (Well, I didn’t used to be traditional when I worked at the med school, but now that I work less than fifteen hours a week from home I am more or less June Cleaver without the pumps.) Our house is very noisy. There is no place you can go in my house and not hear anyone else. I wish I had a basement.

GRRRRRRRR. Did you say something? Good, I need quiet!

Right now I can hear someone rattling around in the kitchen. I wish they would stop. My son just clomped down the hall. He’s going out to play. Now the dog is tap, tap, tapping as she walks. Her nails need to be trimmed. I could get up and remind someone he said he would trim her nails today, or I can try to keep writing.

There is a clinking of a spoon in a bowl. My teenager is already into the mint chocolate chip ice cream that I bought less than three hours ago.

Someone just walked down the hall and into the garage. Our garage is no destination place, so just as I thought, that person is now trekking back in from the garage.

Now someone is opening the kitchen cabinet to tear paper towels. What is being done with paper towels? Now the water at the kitchen sink is running. Was there a spill? Do I need to see if the cleanup is going to be sufficient or should I stay here and try to write?

Now someone is opening my bedroom door.

GRRRRRRRRRR. I turn around to behold my teenager, who is holding a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. As she swirls the eggs to mix them with the salt that she has no doubt poured in the bowl, she tells me someone at her school got into UT-Austin yesterday.

I put on a motherly face and make a motherly comment.

She closes the door and leaves.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRR. Should I stay here and try to write? Hell no! Now my room smells like hard-boiled eggs.

Yes, I realize the irony of my last post now.

Keeping My Ears Open

My muse and my memory: They both come to me pretty much on demand through my ears.

If you had to choose between your vision and your hearing, which one would you keep?

Paintings in museums would be hard to forego. Wegner’s Christina’s World in the MoMA, Manet’s Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe in the Musee D’Orsay, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red Hills in the Phillips Collection. I used to say I was either going to be an art historian or a pathologist. Where would I personally be today if I had not memorized a bunch of visual patterns and applied them at the microscope in my practice of medicine?

But when I think about my happiest hours, they are spent sitting at live music shows deciding just when to close my eyes and give in to the pull of the sound. As sight is sacrificed, the aural experience is heightened.

The slam of a door, the lilt of a child’s voice, the morning business of the birds, the sounds of a lover, the calliope of the Belle of Louisville. Are these more worthy than the yellow light in the sky of a Turner masterpiece?

As a child I favored sight to sound. I think it was a childish fear of the dark. Now that I’ve seen some of the world’s wonders and have laid eyes on my own babes, I’m inclined to value my hearing more. And while it may be true that eyes are much prettier to behold, what enters my ears stirs my soul.

Could I go on writing “Acoustic Memory” without sight? With difficulty, I could.

Could I go on writing it if I were deaf? Nothing would unmoor me more. My inspiration derives from the bass note that warns, the melody that welcomes and the voice that woos.

In the coming weeks I’ll be taking dictation from Richard Thompson’s guitar and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. I’ll be floating on the sound waves like that Wagnerian twig on its way to a distant lover.

“A word is a bud attempting to become a twig.”
-Gaston Bachelard

Rodeo Religion

It's that time of year. Time for the Houston Rodeo.

The trail rides leading up to the actual festivities have already begun.  No telling what tales, new and old, will be shared by the "pilgrims."  Once they get to Houston, there will be plenty more oral storytelling at the concerts that have become such a staple of the celebration.

If I were going this year, I'd want to see Gladys Knight.  Did you know that "Midnight Train to Georgia" was originally going to be a song about a plane to Houston?

Rodeo 1995 I was still in Kentucky. I'd sit facing the Southwest on my back porch and listen to this song coming out of the speakers. I fell in love with Lyle and Texas before I ever set foot in the state.

I paid an obscene amount of money to see Lyle sing with Shawn Colvin my first summer in Texas.

Over the next year I developed a taste for sad songs and very intimate venues. That means Townes Van Zandt, of course.

I hung out in my neighborhood bar, and that's where I met Scrappy Jud Newcomb and Troy Campbell. Thought it was cool that Troy spent time in Appalachia, and I told him about Susan's summer work in the hollers.

Before long I was making the drive to Austin to see shows.  A modern day pilgrim of sorts.

Not all the songs in Texas are sad. Every once in a while a crazy guy from California comes around and sings a sad song in a happy way. But for rodeo, you need a sad one.

Soft Seduction

In 2000 I moved from 77019 (featured in National Geographic a few years back) to the Museum District in Houston. I knew I was moving to Carolina, eventually, and wanted to garner top dollar for my house, which I sold to a Rice English professor from New York. The professor's real estate agent was Wes Anderson's mom, Texas Anderson.

My new digs were walking distance to the Museum of Fine Arts, the Glassell School, the Italian Cultural Center, and the Jung Center.

A neighbor was a professor at the Glassell, and he used to have garden parties to show off his art.

After moving to Carolina and starting my novel manuscript, I figured out that I was going to have to write some short stories to show off my art. Sigh.

So I set my first story in my museum district neighborhood, and John Pence was nice enough to print this in The Blotter about five years ago.

The Art of Kissin and Stealin

Come inside my air conditioned room and have a whiskey. I've been drinking whiskey for some twenty years. Had my gums rubbed with the amber liquor when I was teething. Whiskey is entwined with the history of my state—the oak barrels near Getsemanee and the mint julep that’s served at Churchill Downs. But personal history has taken me far from that land that DeSoto roamed in the 1500’s to this land that is larger and hotter.

Have a seat. In spite of the heat, it’s a beautiful day to sit at the window and watch the leaves blow from the trees. A noncommittal sun is making intermittent cameos. The gray sky is a blank slate for the ruby, orange and banana yellow leaves that flutter and spin on their way to stillness and decay. In other parts of the country, the air conditioners have long been silenced. In Texas, their noise will have to compete with the blare of the leaf blowers and lawn mowers for a few more months. In the summer, the lawn companies make their rounds early in the day so that the work can be finished before the heat of the afternoon. But in the fall, they come later and later each week.

Pedro wasn’t any different. His men started to interfere with my open-air sessions in mid-October. I had an art class at the Glassell School in the early afternoon. No sooner than I would get home and set up that I would I hear the Latino music that blared from his van. This gave me roughly three minutes to haul my palette and canvas inside, but the easel would stay on the driveway. Later I would dust the flecks of freshly cut grass off of its unstained wood.

Eventually I accepted their late arrival as another source of domestic annoyance. One of the many necessary digressions that an artist faces, like paying bills and cleaning the bathroom. Nonetheless, the new schedule was really starting to get my goat. I’d been feeling out of sorts lately. I was growing sick of the portraiture work that kept food on the table and allowed me to live in the tony museum district of Houston, if only in a garage apartment. What I really wanted to do was get my hands back into clay. I hadn’t actually bought any yet, because of my impulse control problem. I knew that once I bought the clay, there’d be no more heads on the canvas, no more fat checks to cash, and eventually, no electricity for that much-needed air conditioning. Then I’d be hot and grumpy.

I was painting topless one day, something I did when I was feeling uninspired or just couldn’t get the creative juices flowing. I had broken into the bottle a little early too, in fact, two hours before my five o’clock special of whiskey on the rocks.

This time there was no loud Latino music to announce the truck, no sudden cacophony of voices, no cranking of the mower. Just Pedro. “Seniorita,” he called out as he rounded the corner of the house and entered the backyard.

I turned and looked at him just before I realized that my breasts were out of a shirt.

“Santa Maria!” he exclaimed, as he made the sign of the cross.

I dropped the palette. Splat, the green liquid made a stellate pattern on the ground where the board landed near my bare feet, which were speckled with paint. I backed up to get out of the paint, upsetting my Styrofoam cup of whiskey and nearly toppling the easel.

Simultaneously, a river of whiskey and Pedro ran toward me, Pedro with his hand over his eyes as if my breasts would blind him. Sensing that he had somehow played a part in this man-made disaster, he was evidently going to help me restore harmony despite my partial nudity.

“No Pedro, no necessito.” I didn’t know how to speak Spanish, but it worked because he stopped mid-sprint and turned around, and even though he was facing the other way, he kept his hand shield over his eyes.

I grabbed my shirt from the branch of the tree and fumbled with the buttons. When I had covered myself and righted the easel, I turned to find Pedro still as stone. A light brown sculpture in my corner of the yard, draped in worker’s clothes. That’s when I knew what I had to have.

I thought about Pedro and the family that I knew he must have. I could almost be certain of where they lived, the apartments in the part of town near the Fiesta market. The area where gang graffiti had first appeared tentatively on dumpsters, then on the sides of buildings before boldly defacing road signs. The graffiti was not in words. Not ones that I could decipher. It looked more like hieroglyphics. The broadly curving lines conjured thoughts of sinuous calves and orb-like buttocks. I was sure that these were not the images the graffiti artist had intended to confer. To those in the know, the messages probably screamed, “Shitbags, this is our gang’s turf. Stay away, or I’ll smash your face and rape your sister.” Yes, Pedro’s wife probably shopped at this Fiesta, and she could probably use some extra money to buy food for the family.

But no, it was cerveza. That’s what Pedro asked me for the first time that he sat for me. I racked my brain, which was wired to understand English first, French second, and Italian third. “No say,” I improvised.

“Cerveza,” he repeated, and tilted his head back and took a swig from his hand that evidently represented a bottle, his thumb, the neck of the bottle.

Something to drink. Oh. I had whiskey.

When I returned from my apartment, Styrofoam cup of whiskey in hand, he was sitting on a stone bench near the yellow lantana, taking off his T-shirt. That’s when I first saw Santa Maria. I saw her hanging from a gold chain on his hairy, burly chest, just above his Buddha belly. So this is where East meets West. “No Pedro, no necessito.”

He stopped. This line was coming in handy. His black eyes looked at me imploringly, all forty-five years of his pride on the line. Yes, I have noticed your biceps, and yes I have dreamed of your pecs, but I want to sculpt you the way you looked the day that you stood stock still because I was half-naked.

Some sittings and a few whiskeys later, I had a sculpture. I felt bad about my Pedro’s outcome. He ended up under a tree in a man’s front yard, just two blocks north of my street. Sure, the proximity suited me fine. It’s just that this was the home of the man who paid two Hispanic men to hand wash his Hummer and his wife’s H2 in his driveway every Saturday morning. He had help at his house every day. Last Halloween, the help carved pumpkins on the front porch with his children. This ostentation was despicable, and I had to rescue Pedro’s form from its new lawn jockey status.

Before I even masterminded the plot to have Pedro’s brother underbid a job at the house so that he could dismantle the motion sensor lights, wait for a new moon, and bribe Pedro with beer (which I now know is cerveza) to carry out my heist, I considered the bottom line of stealing my Pedro. I would never be able to exhibit the statue. It could never stand in grace next to the other sculptures in the garden across from the Museum of Fine Arts. If I suddenly had the sculpture again, wouldn’t it be proof that I was a thief? Circumstantial evidence, or something like that? My apartment was small. Not only would I have to stow my big Pedro in a small apartment, I would have to hide him under a sheet.

We carried it off, all right. And I was the driver of the black Toyota truck. Pedro and his brother narrowly outran the insomniac au pair who screamed for the police at the top of her lungs. They shared a ride in the bed of the truck with my Pedro as I drove to Fiesta for more cerveza. Just in time to watch the graffiti artist wielding a can of green spray paint.

You’d like to see my Pedro? Come into my bedroom; he’s in the back corner. Oh, no need to turn on the light. Santa Maria, you taste like whiskey.

The Meet Cute

It’s Oscar weekend and I’m attending Jerry Bruckheimer’s aunt’s Oscar party. I met her four years ago at the Chapel Hill Whole Foods. It was a meet cute.

My parents had a meet cute; they met at the soda fountain at F.W. Woolworth’s in Louisville. My mom, the working girl, waited on my dad, the grandson of the owner of the Broadway Department Store.

Back to my meet cute, one sunny day at the window counter in Whole Foods, Dorothy Moore turned and complimented me on my wide-brim hat. Five minutes later we agreed that cell phones bring out the worst in people and that Louisville is a great city. Ten minutes later we were laughing because I met my first husband and she met her ex-husband in Danville, Kentucky (at the Pioneer Playhouse, no less). Next, she was recounting her days of riding down Brownsboro Road in Warren Oates’ roadster in my hometown of Louisville.

Dorothy is passionate, spunky, and charming. She pulled me right in. Dorothy became my connection to the English Department at UNC (she was the former secretary) and the person that brought me back to my love of theater. One of my more memorable Dorothy dates was a lunch with the director Davis McCallum at Playmakers Repertory Theater in Chapel Hill.

Meet cute's sometimes turn into long-term relationships. Hollywood tells us that. Witness the contemporary movie The Holiday.

As much as I’m a sucker for a meet cute, I’m actually more into remeet cute's. Think Richard Linklater’s film (my favorite) Before Sunset.

My novel manuscript gives a couple a second chance in a remeet cute.

A few years into the writing, I set off for my biannual trip to Austin, Texas. One night in Austin I asked my mother-in-law (I’ll call her my MIL, herein) to drive us to Marble Falls to hear John Greenberg play guitar. “Who’s that?” she asked in her West Texas drawl, drawing out the word that to two syllables (at least).

“You know, you sent me his CD.”

“Oh,” she said in a resigned fashion, “I thought I sent you John Michael Murphy’s CD.”

So already you see the hand of fate at play.

My MIL drove me fifty minutes west of Austin, past Dripping Springs, to the River City Grille in Marble Falls, Texas.

Have you ever happened upon a splendid acoustic guitar show by sheer happenstance? Not much can compare.

At the break, I approached John Greenberg at the bar. I believe he was drinking tequila. I introduced myself as one of North Carolina’s demoiselles and rather humbly implored him to play his song, “Amy Walker.”

I told him I was writing a novel and that the song “Amy Walker” was really at the heart of the matter for me: Guitarist meets woman; he hides his attraction; she walks away; he writes song that says the next time I see you I’ll do better.

John was rather impressed that a Carolina girl had followed him down to the River City Grille. He said he'd play “Amy Walker” for me, but after the show. Then he explained that he would have to work up to that fine acoustic picking since he had just gotten back from Italy that day.

So my MIL and I enjoyed the second set, and as requested, stayed past the end of the show. John and his sidekick, the then president of the Western Writers of America, Mike Blakely, a man with a handlebar mustache (or should I say a handlebar mustache with a man), wowed us with their stage presence and then, after the show, cozied up to us at a coffee table just a foot beneath the stage. A few pleasantries were exchanged. How could she be my MIL? She looked so young.

They played a few songs. It was almost 1:00 a.m.--Central Time, folks. My MIL, in her best Ms. Runnels County 1965 Miss Congeniality voice, turns to John and says, “Now are you gonna play that Amy Walker song?”

First he played a bit of an intro that I recognized, and then he played his heart out. I was sitting directly to his right, and his right knee rested on my left knee while he played the song that completely captures the mood of my novel, the one with all the damn conflict and the remeet cute.

So I was gonna stop blogging here and did for a while because my cell phone rang. I recognized the caller immediately--an acoustic memory. It was the man I had the meet cute with at A Southern Season in Chapel Hill a few weeks back. He’s writing a story about GI’s in Paris that don’t want to go directly home after Vietnam. Tonight he spoke of meeting Jason Robards, Jr. in New York.

As for my cute meet with John Carden: I think it’s charming when a man orders a Campari at noon and tells me that it’s my fault. That’s what John Carden did the day we met. He began drinking early and blamed it on me. He also regaled me with a story of being in a café in Paris and having his female companion point out that Jean-Paul Sartre was sitting at the table next to theirs. “Say something to him,” his companion implored.

Before John could think of anything, Sartre said, in perfect English, “Do you have the time?”

John gave him the time of day and then Sartre said, “Time for me to go.”

And now, it is time for me to go.

I’ll leave you with the words of Robert Mitchum (remember, he was in the movie that scared the piss out of us in 1991), as uttered on the Johnny Carson Show, as told to me by John Carden, tonight on the phone, just before he invited me to his house in Ireland this summer: “There’s no one around that knows how to make movies anymore.”