The nightly snooze...

Used to be, around six or so, my parents would fix themselves big stiff drinks and settle in front of our unreliable TV set for the fuzzy black and white news. This was a ritual set in stone. Generally there were two newscasters, serious grown-ups both. They each held a sheaf of papers and for half an hour they would trade off back and forth, giving the news and introducing the news clips if there were any. Back then, watching the news stacked up as one of those bewildering and dull grown-up activities, like reading books with no pictures or hitting a bucket of golf balls.

My sister and I knew enough to make ourselves scarce. This was a chunk of sacred Adult Time, not to be screwed with by a couple of whiny kids. It was also paralyzingly dull and incomprehensible. I couldn't imagine when I'd ever watch the news. When I thought about grown-up life at all, it was in sharply divided terms. On one side, I saw myself wearing a tight black sheath, pearls, and high black stilettos. But mostly I pictured myself at a desk, writing. And I didn't know what I'd wear for that.

Then, when I married mistakenly and too young, it was during the Vietnam war and I was riveted to the nightly news. I always wondered what flagrant lies our gray-faced president LBJ would tell, or what outright falsities the generals would try out. Their whoppers were always unmasked by the war footage that followed. Even today, I don't know how we saw what we saw, but somehow we saw everything: napalmed villagers, firestorms, carpet-bombing, our troops blasted and wounded, the exhausted and angry war correspondents. Odd as it seems now, back then, while living in a country that was hostile to someone like me, I trusted the evening news, part of it at least.

Today, you'd be nuts to put your faith in the crap that's on TV. Yesterday, while we sat outside at a Starbucks, my friend remarked, "I just don't keep up with the news. And I'm a lot happier." I believed her and I also understood what she meant. I do keep up with the news, and it's a day's work. I'm not any happier for it, but it seems important to keep my ear to the ground. No doubt it's my DC upbringing coupled with an apocalyptic outlook acquired during the last eight years.

During year one of the Current Occupant, I had a crawlie sense of unease, and tried to read my city newspaper to get a grip on was happening. It was then I discovered I'd happened upon My Weekly Reader in all its childish glory. And so, once again I went adventuring in the blogosphere. But like my own blog, the political blogs were highly subjective. Even those that ripped news articles off factual sources, only printed select portions. For a while I volunteered for an anti-Current Occupant blog, covering the news from Pakistan, just to figure out how blogs worked.

Today, my sense of the news is that there's been an explosion in a pillow factory. Information (in the IT sense of the word...that is, stuff) abounds, some of it okay, some of it crazy, not all that much in between. It's taken me years of surfing in uncharted waters to paste together my own version of the evening news. But perhaps my parents did the same thing, using 1950's resources. They weren't much for being dictated to by culturally-anointed grown-ups. That's why we took a minimum of three daily newspapers and a flood of magazines. It's probably also why they were so solemn during the evening snooze, watching reports of the McCarthy hearings, Batista's overthrow, A and H bomb tests, U-2 spy planes, or missiles in Cuba.

My mom and dad knew the news wasn't fit for kids.
And they were dead right.

I don't buy it...

Even before the Clinton era, I thought that the American obsession with buying things was stupid. Still, I was puzzled by my own grumpiness. Everyone around me loved to buy things, felt deprived when they couldn't. I knew whenever I bought something, I generally felt guilty and rarely felt good, but I was used to feeling out of whack with the times anyway.

Don't get me wrong. I spent plenty of money back in the day, on clothes, on things for the house, on lots of books, on flowers and meals for my clients. I didn't particularly like spending money. I liked some of the things it bought, but gradually, feeling childish and stubborn both, I began to rebel against buying stuff.

Now living in Texas, I wondered if my midwest hippie-art-school past had risen from the graveyard, and was hunting me down like some kind of 60's zombie. It wasn't that I'd liked being poor back then. I hated it. But those years had ingrained certain habits: making the best of old clothes, cheap cuts of meat, and bad apartments. I still knew how to make great meals out of not much, I was happy with my house and preferred jeans anyway. Or maybe it was just my 1000% Scots ancestry breathing down my neck.

I remember a particular day, not really so long ago, when I agreed to meet a friend at the mall. I groaned inwardly, because I've never understood the whole point of malls. I didn't have much money either, so I didn't look forward to staring at stuff. Whatever stuff we saw would all be stuff I couldn't afford. Stuff I didn't want in the first place. But my friend loved this particular mall, and it was kind of her to think of me, so I went.

After our lunch and iced tea, we trudged with the rest of the crowds, past glittery shops where everything looked tempting. Past interesting windows where she, I, and the rest of the crowd had to pause and look. Every so often we'd dodge into a place my friend especially liked. She especially loved Sephora, the cosmetic store, adored by lipstick lizards everywhere and infested with frightening cosmeticians dressed in black. We wandered into a department store. My friend paused by the perfume counter, chatted with the salesladies, tried a few experimental squirts of something, and made an appointment for a make-over.

I remember watching her in awe. She was enjoying herself. It would never have occurred to me to do any of the things she did that day. I wouldn't have known how.
We took the escalator up to the shoe department, where a sale was on. I hissed involuntarily at the prices, even the sale prices. I worked in retail long enough to know the mark-up on shoes. Since my twenties, I've confined all shoe-buying to cold, echoing warehouses.

But these shoes were displayed so seductively: like jewels, tiny hats, or fancy desserts.

My friend gave a little laugh of delight and flitted from shoe to shoe before pausing at a pair of red leather wedges. "I've got to try these on!" she said, and did. She looked down at her feet as women do, trying them on, turning her foot this way and that. Her legs were very tanned, I remember now, and the red was a rich burgundy wine color. They looked very pretty on her and I said so. "I'm going to buy them," she confided. "I don't have a job, but I'm going to anyway." And she did.

Later that summer, she took a photograph of her feet in those shoes. Shooting downwards, she captured her tanned legs and feet, polished nails, and the way the leather wrapped cunningly around her feet. It was a good photograph and I still remember it.

I wish I could tell her that.

Several months later, she was diagnosed with a terrible cancer. She fought it much longer than anyone believed possible. It was an awful disease, with mutilating surgeries and drugs that made her thin and yellowish. Even so, she battled so hard, at times I almost believed she'd lick it. She didn't, of course. No one could have.

Still, she remains alive enough to me that I've never scratched out her address in my book. I see no reason to. And when I think of her, I like to think of that day in the mall, of her finding those shoes, and the pure sunlit joy on her face when she did.

I didn't buy anything that day, but I'm glad Barb did.

Slip sliding away...

I bought my week's groceries this Tuesday afternoon. As I've said, it's a nice time. The store isn't too full and it's empty of ambitious types--folks with fistfuls of coupons, ready to elbow you in the gut for the weekend's loss-leader. During the week, it's full of distracted people like me--freelancers and contractors jabbering on their cell phones--plus a few ancient souls musing in the soup aisle with their caregivers.

As usual I had my list, together with my coupons, so I prowled the aisles hissing, exclaiming, and muttering at the prices. The carton of cat food I get for my five cats had shot up $3 in price--about a third more. Milk was close to $5 a gallon, while eggs ranged from $3.69 a carton to $2.59. The price of nearly everything on my list had increased since last week. Today is late Wednesday, the following day, and I bet prices have jumped again.

Recently, a friend of mine called from Phoenix and remarked, "They're having food riots in Haiti."
"Well, they're about to have one in Albertson's," I said testily. "That whole store can line up and kiss my ass before I'll pay $2.50 for a bell pepper."

While shopping yesterday, I thought about my writing teacher, Theresa deKerpely, and the time she told about the fall of Pest (now Budapest) during WWII. She said, "We would run out during the day and buy anything--shoes and onions, or combs and bread--it didn't matter, because we knew the price would double by the next day."

And then, I remembered my father's WWII story, the one about his being in Beijing just before that city fell too. "People were pushing wheelbarrows full of money, dollface," he told me. "That's how little it was worth."

Instantly, I was flooded with images of Albertson's shoppers pushing wheelbarrows brimming with devalued US dollars, attempting to buy onions and combs before prices skyrocket. In my rational mind, I don't think it'll happen, but I don't think it's impossible. A couple of years ago, the very notion would have seemed crazy. It doesn't now.

And a couple of years ago, I was lurking in blogs, busily outraged at national and world events, although nothing in my own life had altered much. My grocery bills stayed about the same month to month, and gas increased a bit, then fell. It was harder for me to charge my hourly free-lance rate but, overall, my life was unremarkable.

Lately I have the sense of events moving quickly, dipping down, and touching us. All of us. It's one of those times. After I'd published an article about the sixties, a reader told me, "None of that political stuff ever happened to me. I mean I was aware of certain things, but it didn't have anything to do with me."

Me, I think history is a big bird soaring high above us, noticed by very few. But there are times when the bird dips down, allows a wing to brush us, and sends our collective fate sailing in new directions.

I think the big bird is flying low right now.
I feel a feather touching my cheek, oh so softly.

I wonder if you do too.

Reality show...

Sometime back, I read an article about leaners, young people employed to virally market booze or beer campaigns. A leaner would go to a bar, order a dirty Gray Goose martini or maybe a Bud light, say, and strike up a conversation with someone near by. At some point, she or he might order a second drink and one for their new-found friend, smack their lips over the frosty goodness of a particular brand, then say, "I don't know what makes Bud so yummilicious. Maybe it's the special hops."

Reading this I reflexively thought, leaners really suck, without quite understanding the particular underlying eeeewww. Then I remembered a copywriting workshop I'd taken. The instructor had brought in a direct mail piece, with a yellow sticky note attached that read, Thought you'd be interested in this. He asked if we like the piece and none of us did; in fact, we actively disliked it.

"Know why you hate it?" the instructor asked us, then answered himself. "Because nobody likes to be fooled. This looks personal and it's not. It's a fraud."

Same thing with leaners. There you are, thinking you've made contact, only to discover you're in a budding relationship with a billboard.

Today I was reading a review in The New Yorker on The Hills, a reality show I've never seen. I steer clear of reality shows, since the people in them seem vaguely despicable and uniformly dull. On the other hand, as I've mentioned, I'm a glutton for true crime television, so what's the difference? The reviewer notes that people watch The Hills, in order to figure out why they're watching it. True crime, on the other hand, illustrates the huge difference between real criminals and cops and TV shows about cops and criminals. The reality is very clear and not particularly intriguing.

But perceiving reality is becoming a rare ability. Year by year, I note how easily the general public is fooled, or is willing to be fooled. It's not that we're dumber or more uneducated--it's that much of our world is bald trickery.

One of my fantasies is that someday there will be classes in reality. In my imaginings, people will sit in school, and be taught the difference between wild honey and sheepshit. Certain events have given my notion a real urgency. I wonder, would the Current Occupant of the White House be squatting there, if we knew the difference between an empty poseur and a true leader?

I think we elected a leaner.

A path with heart...

I skimmed over a post today that dealt with the young and their lack of work ethic. This led into a discussion about crap jobs, the applicability of college degrees, and the futility of majoring in theatre or...(insert any fine arts field here). Uncharitable responses to all the whining ranged from Suck it up, kid to Why do you think they call it work?

It's awfully easy to snarl at the young, with their clear complexions and lousy work habits, but I think we should refrain. The world of work can be its own little hell, and the first glimpse of it is heart-stoppingly traumatic. You mean they expect me to spend eight hours a day doing that? Jesus.

Anyway, as an ex-hippie, I'm the last person on the planet who should point fingers, even though I was a very hard-working hippie back in the day. Besides, kids today do have it rough, burdened as they are with mountains of college debt and not much to look forward to--for a while at least--except for long stints of cube farming.

My family, going back generations, has always been in the teaching, doctoring, judging or lawyerly professions. Every so often, someone like me crops up and announces--to everyone's consternation at dinner--that we plan to go into the arts. I haven't met all my actor, musician, and painting cousins, but I bet they faced the same blizzard of arguments I did. It doesn't pay. You'll never make it. You need to marry a gynecologist. You better get a teaching certificate.

But what if you just are what you are? When I was eight years old, I knew I was some type of artist. And that knowledge was as deeply embedded as my genetic code. As my parents slowly realized this, they were both predictably aghast and immediately enrolled me in typing and ballroom dance classes. Their thinking was that if I made an unfortunate marriage (and didn't land the dermatologist or tort attorney), I could at least scrape out a meager salary as an office worker. Hence the schooling in airs and graces, coupled with brain-deadening bouts of business skills.

Marrying for money always struck me as a deceptive brand of hookerdom. So I got the teaching degree and tried out the corporate gulag, but mostly I've been a freelancer, living by my wits. It's risky. I've had periods of complete self-doubt and raw terror. Sometimes I've hated myself for not settling into some comfortable corporate fiefdom. One thing I've always done though, is to keep writing, and writing, and writing.

And so, whatever happens, this is the path I've chosen--one I was trained in and one I practice daily. Now that I'm older, I'm not sorry I've followed my nose. It's won me my tiny kingdom: a skill that unfailingly supports me, a profession that never grows stale, and something worth doing even in the worst of times.

It's a path with heart.

Reflections off the flat screen...

One blogsite I check pretty frequently is www.jezebel.com. Jezebel, part of the Gawker blog family, advertises itself as celebrity, sex, and fashion without the airbrushing and draws about an 85% female readership. The writing is smart, the posters are all very bright, and although the subject matter could be seen as shallow, the reactions to it aren't.

I like it because I'm an interested rubber-necker (although not a participant) of current fashion. I used to buy one fashion mag a year, and then even that became too onerous. I began to see all women's publications as little handbooks entitled Here's How To Go Nuts. It occurred to me that Elle, Vogue, Cosmo and Marie Claire could publish one archetypal issue a year, and that would be plenty. Diet advice, sex advice, make-up and hair tips, and the latest in fashions are not as changeable as you might think.

Jezebel has caught onto this too, and weighs in snarkily with a regular feature called Mag Hags. When so much of popular female culture is seductive, maddening, and nonsensical, I can start to feel a bit unsteady. Reading Jezebel's posts, I see I'm not the only one.

So today there was this posting: What Do Bradshaw, Plath, And De Beauvoir Have In Common? An Addiction To Egotistical Men. And one thread of the discussion dealt with Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City.

The debate was over whether Carrie Bradshaw should be considered a feminist icon on par with Sylvia Plath and Simone DeBouvoir. The original post observed that major feminists like Plath and DeBeauvoir had latched onto rotten guys. And since Carrie loved mean old Mr. Big, did this mean she was a feminist front-runner too? Here, I had to stop reading and take a very deep breath.

Here's the thing. Only one poster pointed out that the whole discussion was idiotic, since Carrie Bradshaw is a made-up TV character.

These long commentaries between intelligent women were like arguments I had in the fourth grade. If Superman fought The Hulk in an alligator pit, who would win? If Marilyn Monroe was a jet plane, could she drop an Atom Bomb on Russia?

And that truly depressed me.

Or maybe I just need more sleep.

Are you talkin' to me?...

Today I got a long email from AdGoogle saying this blogsite had been approved to run ads. It was a nice email as emails go, and I read it happily. Two minutes later it occurred to me that a computer-generated letter had cheered me up considerably. On the other hand, if AdGoogle had turned me down, I realized I'd be very depressed. This is like thinking junk mail is meant for your eyes alone.

So I went to meet a friend at Starbucks and decided to wait for her outside, since the day was beautiful. As I stood there, leaning up against a Handicapped Parking sign, I watched a young man who seemed entranced with his cell phone. Studying him, I wondered how many times a day I communicate with something completely inhuman and respond with a full range of emotions: joy, rage, irritation and delight. Am I conscious of doing this? What is it doing to me? Interesting questions, since more and more of us are getting our strings yanked by machines.

Are you talkin' to me? Never an easy question to answer, especially if you're a clearly lunatic character played by Robert DeNiro. On Actors Studio, DeNiro refused to "do" that character for James Lipton, on the grounds that he's been asked to repeat Are you talkin' to me? four billion times in his career. He didn't add that Travis is not a real person and that Taxi Driver is a made-up story, but maybe he should have. We've all become kind of blurry about what's real and what isn't.

This is on my mind since hearing an interview with the author of Kluge, a book about our less than perfect brains. The interview led into a discussion of evolutionary biology, with the author confessing sadly that he didn't think our brains had progressed much at all. I beg to differ, since I hope what lies ahead is a big jump ::splat:: into a puddle of reality. I think we've evolved a bit from experiencing consciousness as a mass hallucination, in which we thought the gods were speaking to us from (variously) burning bushes, statues, and rain clouds.

In the not-too-distant future, perhaps we'll progress to understanding that voice mail, computer generated characters, and special effects aren't worth our spiked adrenal reactions. Maybe spam won't make me happy anymore, but it's a small price to pay.

Hey, I'm ready.

Murder most foul...

A confession. I'm addicted to true crime shows, also true crime books...preferably with eight pages of exciting, never-before published photographs. And, in the way of all hard-core junkies, I've gotten my husband hooked too. Lately, after dinner, we've been sitting in front of the tube, stuffing our cookie-jar heads with Forensics, 48 Hours, and The Investigators. When those shows aren't on, like an addict tapering off, I make do with the far weaker stuff of CSI, Miami, but my husband won't go there. For him it's the real deal or nothing at all. But in all fairness, he doesn't log the true crime hours I do. A couple of shows and he's done, while I'll sit there entranced, glomming the wide-screen into the wee small hours.

Recently I mentioned my proclivities apologetically to an old friend. I say apologetically, because I never know how people are going to react, even those who know me well. But when I talked about my love of Forensics etc., I could hear his voice palpably change. He said that his wife and he were both nuts about true crime TV. One of their faves was Snapped!, a show about female murderers. This impressed me no end because I'd never heard of the series, and there's not much that escapes me in the true crime world.

Actually I'm utterly typical. Once, in a Borders Bookstore, I was buying a Jack Olson book. I think it may have been Son (one of his best). When I brought it to the counter, the clerk lit up like a juke box. Turns out she'd read it, and she started raving about it, then asked me if I'd read his earlier ones. Of course I had. We fell on each other like lost sisters, and began talking back and forth about all the other true crime authors and books we'd read. We were overheard, and other women gradually crept closer, then joined us. By the time I broke away, there were seven or eight women gathered together, all chattering like magpies about their personal favorites.

I have nothing but anecdotal evidence to go on, but if I were a betting woman, I'd bet 85% of the true-crime readers in America are women. As I told my husband, I think it's because women are at such risk of becoming victims themselves. We become drawn to these books, hoping to game a rather hideous status quo. When I first started picking up true crime paperbacks, I always read while second-guessing accounts of the victims' actions and reactions. Would I have done that? Would I have believed that? Would I have fallen in love with him? Sometimes my answer was Yes, absolutely. Sometimes it was, Jeez, lady, get a clue. Did I think all my reading and cogitating gave me an advantage in this dangerous world? Maybe I did.

When the chips were down, all my research was no help at all in sparing me from violence. If there's one thing many true crime shows reveal convincingly, it's that there's nothing intriguing or clever about most of the evil done. Murder most foul, assaults and rapes are generally committed by the dull, the impatient, and the greedy...most often upon the overly-sympathetic, the weak, the credulous, and the unguarded. And it's in this last category where I belonged one late spring afternoon. I walked to my car, enjoying the day, not noticing a car circling the parking lot, not seeing the boy who jumped out of it.

Who came running at me like a demon. Who came like hell itself.

The pep squad...

Okay. I think I've got this right: six girls in Florida attacked a fellow pep-squad member, while two boys acted as look-outs. The victim was badly hurt. All six girls and the two boys have been arrested. The prosecution wants all eight to be tried as adults which means they could be given life sentences.

The point of this to begin with? To make a really popular YouTube video.

There's been much consternation around the Internet on the fairness or unfairness of prosecutorial intentions, the viciousness of girls, the general lousiness of parents, and our obsession with celebrity, and those are just the meta-concerns. It gets more granulated as you travel around site to site and blog to blog. There are discussions about the rising cult of the mean girl, the contention that girls have always been this nasty, and musings on the attack as a natural outcropping of feminism.

During the Reagan administration, I decided I didn't like the general heartlessness of our culture. Seeing there wasn't much I could do about the large brushstrokes delineating society's direction, I checked out. I lived my life, went to work, tried not to read the papers too often, and did art. However, I did keep an eye cocked on the goings-on, and noted that untrammeled capitalism didn't seem to be doing us much good. I also observed the popular culture of the time: high concept movies replete with violence, the spreading delight in cocaine, and the admiration of wealth for its own sake. Not much ever changed. You might say our country's unhappy situation is the logical outgrowth of snaky tendencies given free rein. You might indeed say that. I sure would.

It seems to me that if girls are allowed unopposed access to violent imagery, see movies in which beautiful women kick ass, are continually exposed to the rewards of empty celebrity, and are never taught how to recognize crap as crap, we shouldn't be too surprised at any outcome.

Richard Price has a new novel out on the gentrification of a dicey neighborhood once the hipsters move in. In his book, one such hipstery guy is walking down the street when he's confronted by two guys, one of whom has a gun. They ask him for his wallet and the guy smiles and says, "Not tonight." Whereupon they shoot him dead and take his billfold. The muggers just needed some bucks for Chinese takeout, while the hipster thought he was in a movie.

It's very dangerous to think you're in a movie. I'm amazed by how many people actually think they're on the big screen, the tiny screen or any screen at all. As I mentioned earlier in this blog, I was mugged and wound up with a smashed hip and a bunch of other injuries. Afterwards, numbers of people asked me if I fought back. When I said I hadn't, I got a lot of You candy-ass looks in return. Sometimes I was asked bluntly, Why not?

There are many answers to this question. Here they are.

Any guy can beat-up any woman.The exceptions are rare. It does not help to take self-defense classes and learn how to smash a guy's instep, unless you practice smashing his instep on a consistent basis. Even if you take self-defense classes and learn to kick him in the balls, smash his instep, and ram your car-keys in his eyeballs, this will not help if he attacks you from behind. If you are grabbed and resist ineffectively, he will likely shoot you rather than jack around.

And, those women you see punching out guys in TV shows and movies? All that ultra-violence is faked. Don't try it.

Luckily I knew I wasn't in a movie. The pep squad obviously believes they're in one, but however much they lawyer up, real-life consequences will surely be theirs. By the time they emerge from prison or juvie, their YouTube video won't be worth a half-cup of warm spit.

Life trumps show-biz every damn time.

Containment

General Petraeus is on Capitol Hill today, testifying about the success or non of "The Surge", which has proved to be indistinguishable from "More Troops, Please". I have no public opinion about Petraeus, except that I'm sure he's like the military brass I grew up around: clear-sighted, personally tidy, in good shape, given to plain speech, and not big on irony. As to the congressmen questioning him, I'll just say there are more people besides Doug Feith with a shot at the title of The Stupidest Fucking Man On Earth, and leave it there.

After years of trembling rage at the White House's Current Occupant and his foul playmates, I am now Switzerland. I neither invite nor disbar others' thoughts and opinions. When the going gets rough and the company too loony, I simply retreat into my personal hinged-door Alp and wait out the carnage.

It's taken a while to achieve that state of mind. Like a lot of people I suspect, I wandered into blogland looking for opinions besides those of my Republican neighbors, my Republican city, and my Republican state. This was more than a few years back, and even then my disquiet was so great that I seriously considered flying the flag upside down as a May Day signal. Only the knowledge that I'd be fire-bombed kept me from doing it, even as the right-side up flags began to sprout up around me like crocuses.

So I stayed hunched in my house, reading The Daily Kos, working on an anti-Current Occupant website, and wondering if I should let my opinions fly via blogging. In the end, I decided nope. With so many others now joining the fray, the world didn't need my two cents and besides, I was too furious.

Keats famously remarked, Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility. Because he wasn't that kind of guy, he didn't add that there are writers who work best when they're completely nuts, like Celine, say, or Hunter Thompson. And there are those who don't need a lot of tsuris around--and I number myself among them.

What did occur to me during my rage-filled days was how baffled we'd become as a people, how gullible, and how afraid. And this seemed to have something to do with language, and something to do with advertising. So my first blog had to do with my loose thoughts on advertising, on the white-noise that fills all our heads, and the verbal and visual crud surrounding us. But knowing that my hither and yon thoughts weren't Significant Enough, I abandoned it.

Actually, as I venture around in the blogosphere, I've observed most blogs don't have much, if anything to do with politics. I don't think that has to do with escapism either. The bloggers I've stumbled across are normal-enough people who garden, have dogs, raise their children, knit, listen to music and involve themselves in all the chores and pleasures of humanity.

I visit these blogs regularly, since I need to be reminded of the necessary marriage between politics and life. When the news is bad, I want to know there is a place outside the the political arena, and in that place are generous, creative, and funny people. And I wonder when the political world split itself from ordinary life and became something else.

It's on days like today when I remember much darker political failures--and how, for a long time afterwards, everything was politics. Politics and fear.

Fear of flying...

I also considered "Another reason to live..." as a title for this post. It's my way of announcing unusually disheartening news to my husband: as in, "Another reason to live, sweetheart, John McCain is considering Condoleeza Rice as his running mate." But "Fear of flying..." as a title is more likely to keep me on topic.

Celebrating Fear of Flying as something or other, Columbia has acquired Erica Jong's papers. During her lecture on the 35th anniversary of F of F, a woman who looked quite a lot like Erica Jong, stood up in the middle of the proceedings to announce, "Fear of Flying has been a thorn in my side for 35 years..." Turns out she was Erica's sister and brimming with resentment over Erica's libelous use of certain family facts. Later, Erica calmly pronounced her sis "...insane". You can read all about it in the current issue of the The New Yorker.

For my part, I'm down with sis here. Fear of Flying has been a thorn in my side too, but not for Jong's-sister-type reasons. I hate it because it's a dirty, calculating, and unforgiveably dull book. Even worse, it familiarized some readers with Erica Jong's unspeakable poetry. I remember when it was first published and how it quickly collected a bunch of overblown quotations, some by reviewers dumb enough to think F of F was a feminist tract. A factual note to those reviewers and to Columbia University: it wasn't.

I remember I tried and tried and tried to read it and like it, but the job was beyond me. There weren't that many successful female authors around, the second-wave feminist movement was just getting cranked up, and hell, I wanted to read something terrific by a woman who wasn't Mary McCarthy. I hoped against hope it was misjudged the way Portnoy's Complaint had been (that is, considered to be a Filthy Book, but wuddya know, it was A Serious Book). Sadly, Fear of Flying was all old news: a woman who had lots of irresponsible sex and liked it, then doubled back and ruminated in angsty-fashion on what it all meant.

Those of us who had dipped into Jack Kerouac already knew there were women like that--had been for quite a while--and without all the ruminating. I think Erica Jong was well aware of certain cultural currents (feminism, the sexual revolution, the lifting of censorship laws) and took full advantage of them. She wrote a book full of cardboard characters who participated in cardboardy events, emerging no-wiser than before. And what's wrong with that? Jong says Fear of Flying freed a lot of women, and made them happier.

There's nothing wrong with getting happier. There are woman made vastly jollier by comic books and Harlequin Romances. Whatever blows your dress up, I say as long as real history doesn't get tied in double knots. By Columbia's acknowledging Jong's elderly best-seller as a A Serious Thing, still another layer of opacity is laid over that very misunderstood period.

Did F of F free women in any way? I doubt it--women were up against some cast-iron biases, for one thing. This was a period when women were asked what birth control they used during job interviews. It was a period when, in many states, women could not sell their own land without their husband's permission. It was a period when Maine allowed women to be beaten with impunity under the guise of "home correction". This was a period when women had to be married or engaged to get birth control information. In short, it was a time when there were serious obstacles ahead if you happened to be female.

And, during that period, having experienced a bit of that crap, I was looking for anything to help me know what to do, how to live, and how to get free of the cultural strangleholds pinning me down. In that regard, Female Eunich proved to be a godsend.

Fear of Flying was a waste of my time when I didn't have it to waste. Looking back, I bet I wasn't the only one.

A thin red line...

On this date, in 1968, I was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey while my then-husband attended grad school at Rutgers. I don't know what the city is like now, but in 1968 it was a terrible place: so polluted by factory waste that I never saw the sun in a year's time, so crime-ridden I was afraid to leave my apartment, and with such filthy air that even children had acne. I was very young and, try as I might, I couldn't see the least possibility of happiness there, and sank into a self-centered misery.

At first, I was treated for a variety of ailments, until I was diagnosed with clinical depression. Thanks to drug therapy, then a spanking-new treatment, I got better until I felt something I could name as hope. With my dopomines nicely adjusted, I imagined a better future far away from New Brunswick, and, in doing that, I began to write once more.

That same year, living on my husband's student grant, we were horribly poor. We didn't have a refrigerator, a television, or even a phone, but we did have a radio, and that was how we heard Martin Luther King was killed, assassinated in Memphis. I remember I groaned, Oh, noooooooo! And I remember how my legs gave way, and I dropped to the floor in a sorrowful heap.

An hour or so after the announcement, we heard gunfire. Riots started in the city that day; later we would discover the entire East Coast had erupted. Looking out my tiny kitchen window, I saw a thin red line on the horizon, one that grew in length as the fires spread.

I think the entire world went mad that day.

Five years earlier, in 1963, while visiting my father in DC, I had happened to switch on the TV. It was the day King delivered his I Have A Dream speech to the enormous crowd massed around the reflecting pool. I had never heard of Martin Luther King until that day. I'd spent my life in southern suburbs and the evening news never included reports of racial unrest. I didn't know about dogs set on unarmed people, fire hoses turned on school children, or voting rights workers who were murdered.

As I listened to King, I felt sickened by my own ignorance and at my own complacency. Dimly, I understood that I was watching the raw stuff of history. And I realized that I was sitting in a comfortable living room, in suburban Virginia where I had always sat, self-satisfied and indifferent. That day, I promised myself I would find out about the times I lived in. And I promised that when action presented itself, I would act.

I would like to report that I became a tireless activist for any good cause. As it turned out, I wasn't that sort of person at all. I was only ordinary, not a hero, just someone who performed small actions, wrote letters, and spoke out when it was possible.

Still, after hearing King, I knew I could never again say, But I didn't know. I didn't know what what happening. And I never have.

On the seacoast of bohemia....

Saw Erykah Badu and her kid last week at Albertson's. She was paying for groceries at the automatic check-out stand, while showing her son how to scan stuff. At first I didn't recognize her. I was gawking only because the child was so exquisitely beautiful, like a pale brown Caravaggio street urchin, complete with an angel's face and crowned with dull gold curls. Then I glanced over at her, admiring the sleek shape of her skull wrapped in a plain cotton scarf, and her lovely narrow face.

Like me, her clothes weren't look-worthy, she wore no make-up, and even more like me, she was just going about her day. For some odd reason, spying on Erykah Bahu's ordinary few minutes got me thinking about what I do.

I trained for many years to be a New York-style gallery painter. Then, for about seven more years, I worked as an independent artist, occasionally living in my studio and chilling yogurt on the window sill, when I couldn't afford either an apartment or a refrigerator. Then two seminal events, a head-on car collision and a reception at Jack's Gallery in NY, eventually shoved me into the work-a-daddy world. The car crash busted up any notions of my invincibility, while the gallery reception wiped-out my illusions of happy anonymity.

A few years ago, I phoned my old studio partner, a talented and brilliant man, one whom I have always loved without reservation.

In the middle of our chitchat, he asked abruptly, "So how does it feel to be a corporate sell-out?"

I was shocked into silence before mumbling some truism about how I designed and wrote stuff for broadcast rather than what I'd done for a narrowcast world. He listened politely and we both hung up fast: two old friends who had skidded dangerously close to our first quarrel. But my sense of hurt, of being unfairly misjudged lingered for a long, long time.

Finally I remembered something. Selling-out is one of the cherished myths shared by most residents on the seacoast of bohemia--the idea that all you need to do is lay down your brushes and show up in the IBM lobby as the hipster you are, to be rewarded with a $200K job. As an ex-hipster artist who transferred into the corporate world, I didn't disabuse my old friend. With rare exception, the last thing a corporation wants is an artist: sell-out or not. My slide into big bad business--accompanied by mocking haw-haws all the way--was one of the hardest things I've ever done.

Now, a free-lancer, my clients are still large corporations, for whom I write all sorts of things: broadcast scripts, advertising, brochures, campaigns, press-releases, just name it. Am I a fine-arts whore? A fallen angel? Some poor slob who couldn't hack it in the art world? I've never once felt that way. What I feel like is a good craftsman, up to my ankles in fresh wood shavings.

At night I write my own fiction, but it doesn't seem any more worthy than my daytime gigs. It's just different. For me, writing advertising is trickier than writing a sonnet. Somehow I have to connect with a mega-audience whose only connection to me is a shared-humanity. And I have to do it in the very first sentence. Thanks to my years in art, I've learned some things about capturing audience attention, creating a sense of belief, and triggering imaginative thought. It's served me well.

To my way of thinking, I never sold out. I just got curious about the world beyond bohemia. I kept wondering what people actually did in those skyscrapers and shining glass buildings. And so I went adventuring.

Not everyone who wanders is lost.

Revisionist history...

This last Saturday, hoping this meant it had run out of Hitler footage, I watched the History Channel's special called Hippies, smoothly narrated by Peter Coyote.

Every so often, some documentary-pimper like PBS, the History, or Discovery channels, reacting to the Iraq war, current civilian disquiet, and our shriveling civil rights, will try to revive part of the rotting 60's corpse. Vietnam! It was just like Iraq! Hippies! They weren't anything like us! Like a sap, I'll watch whatever gummed-together program is offered, and I'm usually left scratchy-eyed and sorry I did.

Peter Coyote should have turned down the narrator gig. Several years back he published a well-received book called Sleeping Where I Fall, that chronicled his time in the West Coast counter-culture. It's an interesting account, since he was involved in several scenes out there--the Diggers, street theater, and communes--and knew a number of the big players. More interestingly though, his book doesn't hew to the current narrative: buncha crazy kids in San Francisco, LSD, free love, bad trips, fried brains, Charles Manson, dead Kennedys, dead Janis + Hendricks, ::pop:: goes The Dream. Sadly, this documentary repeated the same old, same old.

I'm glad my parents aren't alive now to be annoyingly patronized as The Greatest Generation, instead of the complicated people they actually were. I have a pretty good idea idea of how they would have viewed revisionist sludge like Band of Brothers, et. al. My mother gave up nylons and wore leg make-up, knitted up ski-masks and made orange peel candy for the troops. Sometimes too, she took to her bed in a depressive funk, terrified my father was dead, somewhere in the Pacific. My father floated around on a troop-transport ship, eye-balled spy photographs, got stung by jelly fish, went to Peiping (Beijing) when the city fell, ate monkey brains, saw no action, had a terrific time, and sailed home two years after the war was over. Other than a delight in Big Band sounds, my parents didn't indulge in nostalgia.

Hippies gave us several good squirts of nostalgia though: shots of body painting, daisies being poked into gun barrels, naked people in the mud, fervent blasts from White Rabbit, before it concluded with the expected thud. Woodstock died, man, a 30 year-old post-doc in sociology announced to us couch potatoes at home. I've heard this crap before, and I always want to ask, Did you think we'd all stay in our Vermont geodesic domes forever, weaving hammocks and playing flutes?

Fact is, we grew up, like people do.

There was a lot more to the counter-culture than a bunch of West Coast hippies, but, like all complexities, it doesn't film well. Doubts, nuances, and ambiguities rarely do.

Me, I'm glad I can still tell wild honey from sheep-shit. Lots of folks can't.