CarrollBlog 7.1

I've been reading a lot recently about the 2 growing "Doulas" movements in the United States. Interestingly, they were created to help at the opposite ends of life. The word "Doulas" is Greek and traditionally means women who assist mothers at birth. Not midwives so much as companions through the experience. That is one of the Doulas movements. The other kind is the doula who assists someone as death approaches. Essentially a person who accompanies the dying right up to their final moment. Someone to talk to, hold your hand and reassure you that a friend who cares very much is near. What wonderful things to volunteer for-- to help people both in and out of life.
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A number of people who like the suggested reading list on this website have written in asking for a list of terrific short stories. Here are some at random that have stayed with me a long time:

The Schreuderspitze-- by Mark Helprin
Letter From an Unknown Woman, The Invisible Collection, Buchmendel-- Stefan Zweig
Dr. Jack O'Lantern, Fun With a Friend-- Richard Yates
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities-- Delmore Schwartz
Silent Snow, Secret Snow-- Conrad Aiken
Circus at Dawn-- Thomas Wolfe
Verona, A Young Woman Speaks-- Harold Brodkey
The Conversion of the Jews-- Philip Roth
Twenty Minutes-- James Salter
The Old Chevalier-- Isak Dinesen
The Palace of the Moorish Kings-- Evan S. Connell
Beppa-- Arturo Vivante
The Circular Ruins-- Jorge Luis Borges
Axolotl-- Julio Cortazar
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Enormous Radio, The Swimmer-- John Cheever
The Playground-- Ray Bradbury
The Conventional Wisdom, A Poetics for Bullies-- Stanley Elkin
Cathedral-- Raymond Carver
Superman, My Son-- Thom Jones
The Laughing Man--JD Salinger
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The two bearded Goth guys standing on the street corner looking smug are so completely covered with
tattoos that between them, there's enough ink under their skins to write a whole book.

CarrollBlog 6.30

But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It is very difficult to find. It is like money. It comes only once. If you are lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there is nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready. And nothing happens. It happens to all the others. Yes, you think, it will happen to me. And every year you have more to give, nothing is spent, nothing is taken away, you are richer, you are laden, and every year the same: nothing. Until finally there are almost no others, you are left alone like one flower in a great meadow, and it is autumn, yes, the days are growing shorter, the grass bends beneath the wind. And the sun comes and shines on you still, alone in that great field, the last flower, beautiful, yes, because of that, and there you are in the long, endless afternoons, waiting, waiting

CarrollBlog 6.29

In life there are great loves and great mistakes. How many of us have confused one for the other?

CarrollBlog 6.28

What's with those mothers who take their young children out in the rain but cover large parts of the stroller in transparent plastic to keep the rain off Junior? Inside, the child looks either like they're in an oxygen tent, or a chicken breast wrapped in plastic at the supermarket. Obviously the kid can't see much through all that wrinkled plastic and the air in there must be worse than the recycled air inside an airplane.
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Cleaning my room (or desk, or closet...) often ends up with coming across an object that makes me stop and think, Jesus, why did I buy that? It can be any number of things-- a hat, a pen, a book, a pair of shoes I haven't seen since I bought them, brought them home and put them deep in the closet. But the reaction is almost always the same-- why did I buy that? The answer of course is YOU didn't buy it-- THEY did. The guy you were that day back in history who saw the hat and thought for whatever reason it needed to be added to his life. Maybe what we're really asking is How could I ever have been the kind of person who would want something like this?

CarrollBlog 6.27

from a friend's letter:

CarrollBlog 6.26

Both young women and old often put on too much perfume. Why them and not the women in the middle?
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The drunk is lying on the grass shouting at the top of his lungs at anyone and everyone. Of course no one is paying attention. Just another drunk screaming at the world. I watch for a while thinking how much human energy he's using up. So many sick or dying people would give anything to have that energy in their failing bodies. I once considered writing a short story about a man who walks up to a drunk or a bum in the park and says "I'm a very rich man but I'm dying. I will give you a million dollars if you give me your health. I have a way of making the trade that will work-- I've spent half my fortune inventing it. I'll give you a million if you will give me your health.Obviously the way you live, you don't care much about it. What do you say?"
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I love meeting people who are obsessed, or reading books about obsession. Sometimes I think it is the only thing to work or hope for in life. To become so caught up in someone or something that we become blind to rules or limitations. A little like Kierkegaard's "leap of faith" but it's not a religious thing. You're just so obsessed by whatever that you make the leap toward it without caring what happens if and when you land. To some people, that never happens. To others, they make sure they are never in that position. I feel sorry for both of them.

CarrollBlog 6.25

We were sitting in a park watching her dog jump in and out of a fountain with a bunch of other happy dogs, cooling off on a hot summer day. For no reason I found myself staring at a building nearby. It was old, turn of the century probably, and not in good shape. But apartments in Viennese buildings that old are often wonderful-- spacious, with beautiful parquet floors, giant windows with intricate brass fittings, and lots of light. I wondered if that were true about this place too. She saw me staring and said offhandedly, "The novelist Stephan Zweig was raised in that building." My eyes widened hearing that because I remembered much of Zweig's great autobiography, "The World of Yesterday," took place in that very spot. Then it clicked-- he mentioned several times in his book that the family apartment was in this district. Wow. Zweig. One of my heroes. Coming over here on the bus earlier, I noticed for the first time on the side of a building I had passed many times a plaque announcing that the film director Fritz Lang had lived there when he was in Vienna. It is things like these that have kept me in this city most of my life.

CarrollBlog 6.24

Sometimes you read about formal studies that have cost people or governments a lot of time and money but the results are so ridiculously obvious that you think two things: 1. Well duh! 2. Who the hell put up the $$$ for this crap? My friend K is a scientist and constantly sends me examples of this nonsense in her business. You read the description, shake your head, and frequently get pissed off because someone's money is being spent here and more often than not it's yours in some roundabout way. Today I read:
"New U.S. research finds that job loss doubles the risk of heart attack or stroke for workers in their 50s and 60s." Now get this-- the study included 12,600 participants and took over a decade to compile.

CarrollBlog 6.23

One of the discomforting things about finding/buying music on the internet relates back to something I said here a while ago about re-reading one-time favorite books. Generally speaking, I have had bad luck doing that. As a result, I proposed that like sleeping dogs, we allow our old favorite books (and movies) to lie content where they are in our memory, undisturbed by our curiosity to see whether or not they stand the test of time and are any good these many years later. Peacefully snoozing in history, untroubled and unaffected by the passing of years, trends, or our growing older and having developed different tastes and sensibilities. Maybe we should add old favorite pop music to that important list too. "Walk Away Renee" by The Left Bank, "She's Not There," or "Dirty Water" were easy to find and download. Initially I was happy about that because they are a few of the songs I loved and listened to several million times back in my Pleistocene Era. Seeing they were available to download the other day, I couldn't resist. Wrong move. Despite listening with both mature historical perspective and a grateful heart that remembers how important they were to me once upon a time, these songs (for example) sounded tinny, thin and not very good. So no more of that for me. Let the rest of those old favorite tunes lie undisturbed in the yearning mind and heart of 13 year old me. Do Not Disturb.

CarrollBlog 6.22

After Love
by Maxine Kumin

CarrollBlog 6.21

President Bush arrived in Vienna this afternoon for an EU conference tomorrow. Newscasters have been talking about this trip for weeks. The last few days the TV, radio, and newspapers have been obsessed both with him and his arrival. Generally speaking, Europeans don't like Bush for a variety of reasons, but when the President of the United States comes to town, people get excited no matter who it is. The interesting thing is the way the downtown area will be virtually shut down all tomorrow by the security forces, especially around the Hapsburg Palace where the conference will be held. A police state in force for the leader of the free world. We're told by the media don't go here, don't go there. No parking on these thousand streets, and don't even think about trying to drive or visit that part of town. There will be a number of anti-Bush/anti-Iraq war demonstrations while he is here which only adds to the police's worries about this visit. There are whispers that they may turn violent and outside agitators are on their way to stir things up. It's ironic to hear that the President is coming because he will land here, be whisked to where he is staying, whisked to the conference, whisked back to the airport and goodbye. Maybe a state dinner in between, but really the only Vienna he will see will be through windows on his 48 hour stay. Not very gemutlich.
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CarrollBlog 6.20

Our right now is so boring and forgettable most of the time. Sit at your desk. Walk to the kitchen. Take a pee. Take a walk. Take a nap. Take your time because it is so uninteresting that nobody else wants to take it. We remember so few details about how we lived our days because most of them are like air with no fragrance. We breathe them in, we breathe them out without thinking. What did you eat for dinner two days ago? When was the last time you laughed out loud? Or ate something that made you close your eyes and sigh with pleasure? Naturally we remember the perfume times because there are so few of them.

CarrollBlog 6.19

More stories from my pal the paramedic:

CarrollBlog 6.18

"We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our pay checks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and dental flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind numbing repetitions of THE CAT IN THE HAT so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps... In fact, just about any time we want something-- a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger-- we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us..."

CarrollBlog 6.17

Yesterday was very sunny and hot here. As usual in Vienna in early June, a national holiday. They have more Catholic holidays in Austria than at the Vatican. I think yesterday's holiday marked the day Christ discovered HBO... Anyway, sick of staring at a computer screen, I took the subway downtown determined to do some serious rambling. Drank a coffee in an empty 1st district cafe while standing next to a one time mayor of Vienna. Then a walk along the Kohlmarkt looking in the windows of the obscenely expensive stores there. Across Michaelerplatz and through the gates of the Hapsburg Winter Palace. Three bearded street musicians who all looked like Rasputin were playing Hungarian music on exotic looking Eastern Euro instruments like the balalaika and what appeared to be a huge laptop zither. All music echoes beautifully against the flying arch of the entrance to the palace. There are almost always musicians playing there with instrument cases open in front of them for donations from the passersby. My favorite is when a capella singers are plying their trade. Their beautiful voices sound haunting and vaguely unearthly in those surroundings. Through the arch to the Heldenplatz. Horsedrawn carriages lined up there waiting for people to rent them out for a leisurely half hour clip clop ride around that neighborhood. All the "fiaker" drivers (including women) are wearing the traditional bowler hats and chatting to each other in heavy Viennese dialect. Across the busy Ringstrasse to the formal gardens between the Kunsthistorisches museum on one side, and the Natural History museum on the other. In the gardens, university students dressed in Baroque costumes try hard to sell wandering tourists tickets to Mozart concerts being held all over town in this important Mozart year. On to the new Museum Quarter, which once held the royal stables but was transformed a few years ago and is now one of my favorite places in the city. There's a huge open square between the two new museums there. It always reminds me of Italy in the summer: People sitting and chatting, packed outdoor restaurants and cafes, etcetera. Very sexy, social and alive. Women in their summer dresses, kids playing in the fountain, dogs in panting happy lumps at the feet of their owners. Ice cream bonanzas, bare skin, sunglasses, movimenti. Take a left across the square to Mariahilferstrasse. Up that huge, always busy shopping street past numerous outdoor cafes brimming with people enjoying their summery free day, then home.

CarrollBlog 6.16

I read in an interview with Tom Waits that this is his favorite poem. Curious, I tracked it down because I have always loved Charles Bukowski's poetry and fiction.

CarrollBlog 6.15

Whenever there is a performance at the children's theater, as crowds of kids and their parents are flocking to get in, a man stands in front of the building handing out flyers. He is the epitome of what you would envisage a child molester to look like: strangely shaped overweight body, thin hair, bulging eyes that dart nervously back and forth, shorts. He seems to always wear shorts when he does this. I have not seen him there in the middle of winter but I could easily imagine him wearing shorts then too. He has a handful of flyers and tries hard to give them to every kid that passes by. He tries to stick them in their hands. He walks quickly after them as they walk away, trying to press one of his papers on them. Many of the kids don't understand what he is doing and won't take it. Many of the parents look at this guy suspiciously and jerk their kids out of his way. For years I have seen him and always wondered what was on the paper he gave out. The other day a child in front of me took one of the flyers, looked at it a second, then dropped it on the ground. I picked it up. It advertised a nearby toy store. Absolutely appropriate and innocuous. I wondered if he owns the store, or someone hires him to stand here and hand these things out. If it's that, why on earth would you hire someone who looks as spooky as him to advertise your store to kids?

CarrollBlog 6.14

What if every person in the world made love the same way? Men way A, women way B. No matter who you looked at: pretty or ugly, old or young, tall or short, Mexican or Mauretanian, you knew exactly what they would be like in bed because all men did it Way A, women Way B. How would that affect human relationships/sexuality/monogamy, etcetera? When this thought crossed my mind this morning, I immediately asked someone's opinion. They said knowing all people were the same in bed wouldn't change things. Because everyone has a different smell, personality, feel to their body... the desire to experience a variety of others sexually would remain. But I don't know.
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check this out (thanks KW):

CarrollBlog 6.13

The fat guy walking down the street is sporting a pair of those huge sunglasses that are all the rage these days and make everyone, particularly fashionista women, look either like insects or fighter pilots. He's eating a double scoop strawberry ice cream cone and smiling when not licking. He's wearing a jet black T-shirt with "PRINCE OF DARKNESS" spelled across the front in metallic gold flames. Wouldn't it be great if Satan turned out to be a guy like that? Jolly, hip sunglasses, and strawberry ice cream cone.
Welcome to Hell.
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There's a nice young family I often meet in the park when walking the dog. Mom and Pop, two kids, and two small yappy dogs. We smile while their kids pet the dogs and make neighborly small talk about nothing much. Nice people. The only really distinctive thing about them is both parents have lots and lots of tattoos. I can't tell who has more-- Mom or Dad. Anyway, I was talking about them to someone in the neighborhood today. This other person said, "Oh yes, I know that family. The father is HIV positive." Since hearing that I cannot stop thinking about them.

CarrollBlog 6.12

While walking past a large department store very early in the morning, I hear loud music coming from inside: Rick James's "Superfreak." The music is *very* loud and stops me. Is it really coming from in there? Squinting to try and peer through the gloom inside, I think I see someone way way in the back of the store... dancing? What the hell are they doing at six in the morning with no lights on, Rick James blasting, alone in that huge place? Suddenly I don't want to know. Don't want to know if it's one of the cleaning people having fun while doing their job. Or some other scenario. I walk quickly away smiling, knowing I'll never learn the answer to this small but satisfying mystery.
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CarrollBlog 6.11

The stepfather of a woman I know used to abuse her repeatedly when she was a child. As soon as she was old enough, she moved out of the house. Before leaving she told her mother what had happened. But to her shock and horror, the mother was indifferent. She told her daughter to live with it. Years passed. Eventually my friend confronted her stepfather about what he had done to her again and again as a child. He showed no remorse. When she told me about all this recently (and gave me permission to write about it here), she said the thing that hurts most is her mother persists in trying to reconcile the daughter with the stepfather. Now that so much time has passed, she said everyone should "let bygones be bygones and work to be a happy family again." Among other insults, whenever she and her husband go on vacation, the woman writes these "wish you were here" postcards to her daughter and signs them "Mom and Daddy." That signature is what my friend hates most after all this time and pain. The fact that despite knowing in detail what her husband did to her child, Mom still wants her daughter to call this man Daddy.

CarrollBlog 6.10

Two young men are dancing in the middle of the sidewalk. At first glance they look like Vienna's version of Homeboy wannabes-- shaved "Gulag-look" heads, unibrows, hard faces, ubiquitous prison-chic denim clothes and expensive sneakers. But together they are performing clearly choreographed, intricate steps that look like some kind of formal folk dance; Greek or Russian perhaps. Stuff you see done on TV by performers in colorful ornate native dress, or when you're in those countries on holiday. These men slap their thighs in unison, jump, turn, and touch their feet in the air in a difficult, wonderfully balletic move. But why are they doing it in the middle of a busy sidewalk? Do they want to be seen by passersby, or are they just dancing here and now because they feel like it? They are very good but neither of their expressions change. They could just as easily be in your face about to start a fight as doing their skilled dance together.
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CarrollBlog 6.9

"Assuming that our energies are sufficient, love is interminable."

CarrollBlog 6.8

The American actor Rod Steiger was asked by Esquire magazine what he had learned in life:

CarrollBlog 6.7

I have never understood why police cars, fire trucks or ambulances need to turn their sirens on at three o'clock in the morning. Streets then are empty, everyone is asleep, so what's the point? Have they been ordered to do it by headquarters, or are they just asserting their right to shout at a silent world? HERE I COME, CLEAR THE WAY. There are people like this as well. Siren people. You see them frequently in restaurants screeching with laughter or talking at such a pitch that you cannot *not* hear them. Or in stores ordering salespeople around, or walking down the street talking into cellphones so loudly that you hear every word they're saying. Are they always like this? What is it like to live with someone who feels compelled to turn on their siren every chance they get?
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CarrollBlog 6.6

My father had a thing about turning off lights. When we were kids he was always telling us to turn them off whenever we left a room so as to save electricity. He was an enormously generous man but for some reason was goofy about the miniscule amount of money saved when a couple of sixty watt bulbs were switched off for an hour. However that childhood lesson/mantra has stuck with me down the years.To this day I am a consummate light turner-offer whenever the opportunity arises. But how many of our adult habits are a result of the lessons learned in childhood, and how many result from our own conscious choices and eccentricities? How many can we honestly attribute to the parents or our upbringing, and how many rest solely in the lap of our adult choices? My grandmother used to say "He's the kind of person who trips on the street but then blames the sidewalk instead of admitting he's a clod." Another way of saying "He's the kind of person who has these weird character traits but blames them all on his childhood."
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And for all you fans of the occult, remember that the date today is 6-6-6. Be sure to wear a helmet when you go outside...

CarrollBlog 6.5

He was standing in an elevator riding up. Facing him was a wall sized mirror so he looked at his reflection. There was a small digital camera in his pocket. He took it out, turned it on and bringing it up to eye level, shot pictures of his reflection. After each picture, he looked at the result. The unnerving thing was not one of them looked like the face he saw in the mirror. They were him all right, nothing strange or weird about that, no Twilight Zone stuff. But what he saw in the mirror and thought he was photographing was not the same in any of the pictures. The shadows, lighting, lines and angles of the face he saw in the reflection were not at all the same in the photos he took. Every single one of them was different from what his eyes saw. Which made him wonder which is the real me here-- what I see in the mirror, or the image the camera captures?

CarrollBlog 6.4

"Listen. Are you listening? You're not listening. I am talking to those of you in this class who might be interested in writing.
"Every moment of your life, you're writing. Even in your dreams you're writing. When you walk the halls in this school you meet various people and you write furiously in your head. There's the principal. You have to make a decision, a greeting decision. Will you nod? Will you smile? Will you say, Good morning, Mr. Baumel? or will you simply say, Hi? You see someone you dislike. Furious writing again in your head. Decisions to be made. Turn your head away? Stare as you pass? Nod? Hiss a Hi? You see someone you like and you say, Hi, in a warm melting way, a Hi that conjures up a splash of oars, soaring violins, eyes shining in the moonlight. There are so many ways of saying Hi, Hiss it, trill it, bark it, bellow it, laugh it, cough it. A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head, decisions galore."

CarrollBlog 6.3

in a letter from DT:

CarrollBlog 6.2

Chinese Art and Greek Art
by Rumi

CarrollBlog 6.1

The Italians, like the Spanish, like to eat late. We sat down to dinner the other night at eleven. It had been a really long day. The novelist Dennis Cooper leaned over to me and said under his breath, "I'm usually in bed by eleven." I could only smile. On all the walls around us were reproductions of drawings and photographs of members of the Italian Futurist movement of the 1920's. Someone sitting nearby explained that this restaurant was where the Futurists had hung out and discussed their philosophy and manifestos. I spent a lot of time reading about the Futurists while writing OUTSIDE THE DOG MUSEUM so I knew something about them. As always when you hear that where you are has real historical resonance, part of you snaps to attention(no matter how late it is) and looks ten times more closely at everything around you. On one of my first days in Vienna, I was taken on a walk through Heldenplatz ("heroes' square"), one of the city's most famous sites. My guide pointed to a balcony at one end that overlooked the whole area. "After the Germans invaded Austria in WW2 and Hitler made his triumphant entry into the city, he stood up there and spoke to a million people who had gathered here where we're standing to see him." To this day whenever I walk through Heldenplatz I cannot stop from looking at that balcony and imagining what it must have been like to stand here surrounded by a million people, all of us looking in one direction.