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CarrollBlog 5.31
The big shopping street is packed with people on a sunny Saturday afternoon. On one corner stand about a dozen Asians holding up large signs protesting the Chinese treatment of Tibet. All of them are dressed in black and wear extremely serious expressions. What's strange is one of these protesters is playing solo saxophone. Very good and jazzy, Stan Getz- sort of music. The rest of the protesters remain silent while holding up angry signs or photographs of people being mistreated. Then the saxophonist starts playing "The Girl from Ipanema."
Uh Oh.

CarrollBlog 5.30
Haiku of the day (thanks JH):

I don't understand.
You love it when I do that--
Wait, no. That's Stephen.

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Favorite line of the week from a reader review of a novel at Amazon.com:

"This book is so slow that the longer you read it, the younger you get."
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Ring the bells that still can ring,
forget the perfect offering.
There's a crack in everything,
that's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2spZ-NDfS4

CarrollBlog 5.29
I'm not into raising alarms, especially concerning subjects I know nothing about, but this one was pretty hair raising so I thought I'd pass it on and you can do with it as you please. Forewarned is forearmed and all that...

I just watched a CNN Larry King special about the physical effects of cellphones on people. They had three renowned brain doctors on and ALL of them said they were certain constant use of cellphones dramatically increases the chances of getting all sorts of brain tumors, particularly the glioma which is particularly deadly. They said you should hold a phone away from your ear when you talk (use the speaker phone feature if your phone has it), or better, a hands free microphone. Another aspect researchers are looking at very closely is sterility in men who are constant cellphone users. So those of you thinking about having a family....
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"While much in this life is beyond our control, all of us hold the power to choose our friends. We can each be a Nobel prize winner at friendship. None of us are perfect friends always, but one way to think about friendship is in terms of carefulness. Be careful with those you love. And surround yourself with people who are careful with you. A good friend of mine devised a rather taxing standard for love and friendship - and a grim one too - "who would you want to become a refugee with?" If your neighborhood were hit by Hurricane Katrina, or Cyclone Nargis, who would have your back? Look around you today. Your parents have your back, your siblings have your back, your closest friends have your back. Keep it that way. And be sure they know you have theirs."

Samantha Power, from her commencement speech at Pitzer College

CarrollBlog 5.28
For the first time in her life, adult Danielle realized it is all of our selves that have lived up until this moment that decide what we do: not only the me who is living right now.
And there is no saying which one of those selves will prevail.
Out of that revelation grew the second one: *all* of our selves-- past and present-- determine what we do every minute of our lives.
Danielle Voyles did not start stealing when she was twelve. She started stealing when her six-year-old self ordered her twelve-year-old self to do it.
Having realized these things, her hands began to shake. She was twenty-nine. She'd had a so-so life. Some of it had been her doing, some not. But how much of her mediocre life had happened the way it did because the wrong Danielles had made the wrong decisions? How many times should the final decider have been younger or older, more cynical or more trusting, than the one who'd had the last say?
Of course six-year-old Danielle was still alive in the twelve- year- old. She was alive in the twenty-nine-year-old too. The six-year-old was part of her history, one of the first rings of the Danielle Voyles "tree." But what the adult had never known until this minute was that child not only continued living inside, but she also played a significant role at least once in determining her later destiny.

from THE GHOST IN LOVE

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Rachid Taha:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DbFYsi9iSg

CarrollBlog 5.27
THE BARBER
by Jay Leeming

The barber is someone who creates
by taking away, like a writer
who owns only an eraser.
He is like a construction company

that begins with a large office building
and ends up with a small wooden house.
On the wall is his license,
showing that he's been to school

and learned of all the varieties
of loss. For this reason
a haircut can make me nervous;
sometimes I close my eyes

and hear only the snip
of the scissors, their two gleaming halves
talking of the balance that is here, the partnership
between this man in a blue smock

and the hairs faithful as rain,
that even before birth and after death
flow tirelessly out of the head
towards the comb and the blade.

CarrollBlog 5.26
Vienna is a city of plaques. All over you see them on the sides of buildings announcing Mozart lived in this one on Blutgasse (Blood Lane), or Beethoven composed the Heiligenstadt symphony here. Of course there is a large one at 19 Berggasse, the office of Sigmund Freud. Further down the fame ladder you have impressive plaques that say the film director Fritz Lang lived in a dark unprepossessing building near an equally anonymous place where Billy Wilder stayed before migrating to the US before WW2. The saddest plaque I know of is in the middle of a beautiful wine vineyard on the edge of the Vienna Woods. It is for the dramatist Ferdinand Raimund and announces he proposed to his fiancee on that very spot. Raimund committed suicide a few years later in his early forties after being bitten by what he believed was a rabid dog. Apparently the writer was more terrified of dying THAT way than by his own hand. But my favorite plaques are for people you've never heard of with names like Egon Wolfclick or Alfred Dingl who lived here too and to someone in this town, rated a permanent commemoration in stone. It's like a treasure hunt to find these announcements-- you're always looking when you're out for a walk. Now and then you spy one for the Socialist politician from the late 1800's, or the brothers who, in their time, were famous graphic artists and who lived in this building until they were both sent to Auschwitz. The wonderful American novelist Stanley Elkin said all he dreamed of as far as artistic success was concerned was to have one on the side of his suburban St. Louis house saying he lived there and the dates. Before he died a few years ago, his wife surprised him on a birthday with just such a plaque. Elkin said all kidding aside, he was surprisingly moved by it.

CarrollBlog 5.25
Fingers are for burning

Marco Pierre White
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I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.

Ingeborg Bachmann

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All happiness depends on courage and work.

Honore de Balzac
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I can't decide if this is interesting or creepy:

http://www.dear-god.net/

CarrollBlog 5.24
I firmly believe in small gestures: pay for their coffee, hold the door for strangers, over tip, smile or try to be kind even when you don't feel like it, pay compliments, chase the kid's runaway ball down the sidewalk and throw it back to him, try to be larger than you are-- particularly when it's difficult. People notice, people appreciate. I appreciate it when they're done to (for) me. Small gestures can be an effort, or actually go against our grain ("I'm not a big one for paying compliments..."), but the irony is that almost every time you make them, you feel better about yourself. For a moment life suddenly feels lighter, a bit more Gene Kelly.

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SS has this to say about it:
Your blog today re: how small gestures make you feel lighter, more Gene Kelly like - Joseph Campbell would say the reason for this is "Thou art that" He discusses it more frequently in context of why we care when someone is distressed and they have no connection to us and we have no apparent stake in their life and what happens to them, yet we can care deeply about a child's hurt. It is because "thou art that" you are talking about the positive potential of it which we should all be more conscious of. "To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts." Thoreau
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Here's an interesting link from GB:
gravestones for mobsters in the Ukraine:

http://www.znalezionewsieci.pl/dziwny-jest-swiat/nagrobki-ukrainskich-mafiozow

CarrollBlog 5.23
There's a beautiful new website about a museum exhibit in Ireland featuring the life and times of the poet William Butler Yeats. Among many intriguing things, they have an original recording of Yeats reading one of his most famous poems, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." What I found fascinating was how weirdly he read it. It is one of my favorite poems ever. I have both read and taught it again and again over the years. So I was really thrilled to see that they had an original recording of the master reading THAT POEM. But a line or two into his reading I was frowning and thinking no, no, no. Wrong-- you've got it all wrong: That's not at all how the poem should be read. I've always said that once I finish writing a book, I become only another of its readers and my opinion of what it is about or how it should be interpreted is no more or less valid than the next guy's. I feel the same applies here-- Yeats may have written that extraordinary poem, but he sure read it wrong (imho).

http://www.nli.ie/yeats/main.html

CarrollBlog 5.22
BORROWED TIME
by David Moreau

I will not die tonight
I will lie in bed with
my wife beside me,
curled on the right
like an animal burrowing.
I will fit myself against her
and we will keep each other warm.

I will not die tonight.
My son who is seven
will not slide beneath the ice
like the boy on the news.
The divers will not have to look
for him in cold water.
He will call, "Daddy, can I get up now?"
in the morning.

I will not die tonight.
I will balance the checkbook,
wash up the dishes
and sit in front of the TV
drinking one beer.

For the moment I hold a winning ticket.
It's my turn to buy cold cuts
at the grocery store.
I fill my basket carefully.

For like the rain that comes now
to the roof and slides down the gutter
I am headed to the earth.
And like the others, all the lost
and all the lovers, I will follow
an old path not marked on any map.

CarrollBlog 5.21
recent conversation:

"I've been reading through your blog. Do you realize most of the observations there are either about love or homeless people?"

Long silence. "Uh no, I didn't."

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In an interview, the actor Alec Baldwin says that the recorded message on his sister's answering machine ends with "Make it a good day."

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A library recently asked me to give them the five books that have mattered most to me. I wrote back saying sorry, but I don't keep books I have already read. In one of those "people are divided into two groups" distinctions, I have a feeling readers are divided into two camps on this matter-- those who keep their books, and those who give them away once they're read. Talking to someone about this, they were horrified I didn't at least own copies of books that were especially important to me. I could only shrug and say again 99% of the books I own I haven't read yet.

CarrollBlog 5.20
The tailor shop is very old and small. Just room enough for the one tailor, his long work bench, and a "dressing room" for clients which is really only a corner of the place sectioned off by a tired looking yellow curtain. He doesn't seem to have many customers although whenever I walk by the place he's hunched over his bench sewing something or other. He is almost always wearing the same clothes-- a white shirt and old brown pants. I've been in there a few times over the years and seen them up close. His work outfit never changes. But what I really like is whenever I see this man on the street, he is wearing a very nice formal black suit and pressed white shirt. You can tell he made the suit for himself because it fits perfectly and the shirt looks just ironed. He's obviously proud of his appearance in public. A natty dresser, as my mother used to say.

CarrollBlog 5.19
Fireflies
by Richard Newman

Tonight my yard is full of fireflies--
a glitterfest of green, blinking by hundreds,
exactly like last year, when she and I
drove out into the Missouri countryside
to talk about our marriage. It was thick
with greenery. The air was hot and thick,
and we had decided to try and stay together,
though by first light she'd changed her mind again,
and, to be honest, our eleventh hour
hope and promise lacked the weight of truth.
We wandered off the rocky dirt road
over weeds and brambles, through branches
and spiderwebs, and pressed into a clearing,
and it was like a pocket in the darkness
that surrounded us--the misty night
backlit with thousands of glittering fireflies
bettering the stars. It was a mating dance,
and we gazed into a sputtering green sea
of desire--such irresistible beckoning.
Ours was, too--a death-dance of mating,
a slower, indecisive tarantella,
and she asked me never to write about this,
but I knew then that I had nothing to lose,
that at that moment there was nothing I wanted
more than to write about the fireflies.
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from ON:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT4Fu-XDygw

CarrollBlog 5.18
At the end of their relationship she asked if they could still remain friends. His face stayed expressionless until he said "No. Because we put friends in boxes. You see them once in a while, or even a lot, but still they have their box in your life, their specific place.Their *category.* That's one of the great things about being someone's love-- you have no box in their life because you're part of all their boxes. You're their friend, their lover, their confidante-- all those things. I don't want to be put in one of your boxes and I don't want to shrink you to fit into one of mine."

CarrollBlog 5.17
By nature a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across--each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip-- is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar and served as a piping-hot tale.

Rabih Alameddine

CarrollBlog 5.16
I was talking with DL about writing and said this. I thought it might be of some help to those of you who are wrestling with your own projects:

Part of creating is letting go. I remember very vividly when writing The Land of Laughs that I reached the part in the story where the dog speaks for the first time. I wrote the passage and stopped. I thought-- the *dog* just spoke-- that's crazy. But a moment later I said okay, let's just see where that goes. In an essential way it was the turning point of all writing I have done since then. My paradigm moment came about because I simply let go, accepted the nutty for fact, and kept moving. The Germans have a nice phrase about trust in romance-- 'fall back and I'll catch you.' The same could be applied to writing or any art, as far as I can see: If you believe you have it in you, write whatever it is you want and stop thinking about approaches or limitations or or or... Just *write* it. Clear your mind of hesitation and everything other than the sentence you are trying to write and do it. Then write the next one. The more you think about it, the less well you do it. Start with a phrase or a character you like or who intrigues you. Then begin to spin a spider's web out from that center point. But don't *think* about it. Very often when I begin a book or story, I only have a single line or image which I put down and then think--who is this? What are they like? 'Haden was in trouble again' is the beginning of GLASS SOUP only because I liked that line. After writing it I thought-- who's this Haden? He's a handsome asshole. Okay, what does he do? Where is he? Etcetera. Don't think about it-- just be a spider and spin the web only you can design.

CarrollBlog 5.15
The PR folks at Farrar, Straus and Giroux asked if I'd do a publicity tour in the US some time this fall for THE GHOST IN LOVE. They said it would (tentatively) be in New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, the San Francisco area, and Boston but there may be more stops and it's all subject to change. I'll keep you posted on things as they happen. This would probably be some time in October. I look forward to spare ribs and a good t-bone steak. And of course YOU.
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For you short fiction fans, I have a new story entitled NOTHING TO DECLARE in the latest issue of CONJUNCTIONS magazine, CONJUNCTIONS:50-- Fifty Contemporary Writers. It's their big fiftieth issue so they made it a good one with writers like John Ashbery, Richard Powers, William H. Gass
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this is wonderful:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=uuGaqLT-gO4

CarrollBlog 5.14
Almost every morning I see him hurrying up the sidewalk to who knows where. He's one of those homeless people who has turned some pivotal psychic corner into surrender or flat out madness. His hair has not been cut for what looks like a year, his clothes are tattered, the sole on one of his shoes is half-detached and flapping, the skin on his face is the color of a book that was once wet and then dried into a strange splotched gray. He never makes eye contact with anyone. He carries a bright yellow and red plastic bag from a supermarket that he uses to store stuff he finds digging in the trash baskets up and down the street. When he's not poking through the trash, he's always rushing somewhere. Every time I see him I wonder where are you always going in such a hurry, and what is in that bag today? What have you found that you think is worth taking home?
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"I do believe that you can never know yourself, let alone the person next to you, let alone the person halfway across the world. Yet at the same time, I believe there is nothing like fiction to fully thrust you into someone else's consciousness."

Nam Le
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interesting one from KW:

www.schoolofeverything.com

CarrollBlog 5.13
eBay is amazing. I have not even seen the finished cover of the American edition of THE GHOST IN LOVE, but I just learned some enterprising soul is already selling a bound galley of my new book on eBay. Come one, come all-- Buy your GHOST for only five dollah! Get it half a year before that masterpiece hits the stores! It's always interesting to see what these bound galleys fetch at auction. Some people collect them religiously-- the Completists. The ones who want every edition of every book by an author. Other people just like to read a favorite writer's new book as soon as it's available and the bound galley is usually the first one out. Aesthetically they're nice to hold and read-- the same size as the hardback, but with a soft cover they're less bulky. Plus how hip you are when seen on a bus reading the cool new novel *months* before anyone else gets to see it.
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Tonight my voice will stare at you forever...

I click on SEND,
And send you this perfumed, magic hour.

Frederick Seidel
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a weird one from BS:

http://colorwar2008.com/submissions/youngnow

CarrollBlog 5.12
Thanks to SS, here's that Thomas Lux poem I mentioned in the blog the other day:

"I Love You Sweatheart"

A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway. And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work...?
His words are not (meant to be) so unique.
Does she recognize his handwriting?
Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before
of "something special, darling, tomorrow"?
And did he call her at work
expecting her to faint with delight
at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?
She will know I love her now,
the world will know my love for her!
A man risked his life to write the words.
Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed-- always,
regardless, no exceptions,
always in blazing matters like these: blessed.

CarrollBlog 5.11
"I wait for you to come for me from everywhere."

Marc Chagall

____________
"You need a danger to be safe in."

Frederick Seidel

CarrollBlog 5.10
I like graffiti that says things like I LOVE LOLA, or LOLA AND TIMMY FOREVER! Since no one has ever written letters three feet tall that say I LOVE JONNY, I wonder what it was like for Lola or whoever to come across that love shout for the first time. Were they thrilled? Embarrassed? Thrilled and embarrassed? And what happens when Lola and Timmy break up but their graffiti lives on that wall till time takes its toll? How do they feel seeing those passionate words after their love is long gone? No matter what, I envy them. Thomas Lux has a wonderful poem about a giant graffiti he sees every day on an autobahn overpass while driving to work. The only problem is one of the words is misspelled so it reads something like LOLA AND TIMMY FOUREVER. The thing Lux admires most is how some idiot would take his life in his hands by dangling upside down over a wall thirty feet in the air to misspell his devotion to his girl for all the world to see.
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MK comments on this one:

The best graffiti like this I've seen so far:

I LOVE MEGAN AND THE DOVES OF HER SOUL

Written on the wall of a small shop in a village in northwestern Poland.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st2mxQusLvA

CarrollBlog 5.9
For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you're lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you're alive."

Ann Patchett
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Everything can be told. It's just a matter of starting, one word follows another.

Javier Marais
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I have very good leather to sell to those who want to make themselves shoes.

George Gurdjieff
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http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/50

CarrollBlog 5.8
At the end of their relationship in one of those last, invariably futile conversations that accomplish nothing other than making things sadder and more bitter, she said "Maybe we just loved each other too much." He fired back "We didn't love too much; we were obsessed with each other and obsession always ends up stinking."
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Where do "we" end and others' perception of us begins?
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Recently someone in their fifties mentioned they're getting married. That reminded me of a conversation I had years ago with a very smart young woman. She believed people should only get married when they're either in their 20's or after 50. You marry early to build a life together. When you marry after 50 you do it for the companionship.
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http://www.lensculture.com/schels.html

CarrollBlog 5.7
After a motorcycle had just roared by us at a really deafening pitch, he turned to me and said, "The louder the bike, the smaller the dick."
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The gym is silent. It's early in the morning and there are only four people in there-- all of us over forty. Eventually a young woman about 20 comes in. The first thing she does is to turn on all the television sets and surf through the channels until she reaches MTV on all of them. Then she puts on earphones and adjusts her MP3 player. Climbing up on a stationary bicycle, she opens the magazine she holds in her other hand and looks at it, then the TV, then the mag...
______________

Ray Ban, the sunglasses maker, has a new campaign in which all of their posters have pictures of cool looking people wearing Ray Bans and the slogan is "DON'T HIDE." When I saw it for the first time I literally stopped and said out loud "Don't Hide? But that's the whole *point* of sunglasses." You wear them to hide from the world. Or to pretend you're an important person instead of just little old you. But maybe that's the aim of the campaign-- to stop people with its contradiction; like an ad for swim wear that says "Don't get wet!"

CarrollBlog 5.6
"In 1948 psychologist B.R. Forer gave a personality test to his students. Regardless of how they answered, Forer gave everyone the exact same personality profile afterward. He then asked the students to evaluate the accuracy of the profile. A score of 5 meant that the recipient felt the profile was excellent.
The class average turned out to be 4.26. So all these unique, individual human beings were told the exact same thing, yet they felt the words fit them almost entirely accurately. The conclusion: People tend to accept vague and general personality descriptions as being completely relevant to themselves. Furthermore, people usually accept
claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be accurate."

Neil Strauss
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KT writes in about this:

James Randi, the renowned magician (and arch-enemy of Uri Geller) did the same thing with an Astrology test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dp2Zqk8vHw

There's something to said about human nature and our desire to be deceived by good news.
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Tom Waits at his best:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=EOrG1r3S6ZA
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I'm sure many of you have already seen this, but for those who haven't:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

CarrollBlog 5.5
Matinee
by Patrick Phillips

After the biopsy,
after the bone scan,
after the consult and the crying,

for a few hours no one could find them,
not even my sister,
because it turns out

they'd gone to the movies.
Something tragic was playing,
something epic,

and so they went to the comedy
with their popcorn
and their Cokes--

the old wife whispering everything twice
the old husband
cupping a palm to his ear,

as the late sun lit up an orchard
behind the strip mall,
and they sat in the dark holding hands.
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"There are actually many females in the world, and some among them are beautiful. But where could I find again a face whose every feature, even every wrinkle, is a reminder of the greatest and sweetest memories of my life?"

Karl Marx writing late in life about his wife
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http://glumbert.com/wii/view.php?name=womenfilm

CarrollBlog 5.4
One evening in the beginning when they were getting to know each other and had written back and forth several times, he asked her to take a digital picture of herself at that moment and email it to him. She asked why? Spontaneity, no posed stuff, I'd just like to know what you look like now, this minute, he answered. But I still don't understand why. What if I asked you to do the same thing? Within ten minutes she had a picture of him unshaven and grinning, wearing a white tee shirt from Canter's Delicatessen in LA. It was a nice picture, sort of cute and funny. Dutifully, she took a bad photograph of herself and sent it to him. She didn't like doing it though but wasn't sure why. It felt like a violation of some sort. As if she were half dressed and he had come up behind without her knowing until he was there.

CarrollBlog 5.3
An interesting letter from a reader this week:

Mid 80' summers were long and hot. I remember being sent to my godfather's house that stood in the middle of painfully flat meadows. Both boredom and heat were slowing me down, making me dizzy and not sure who I am anymore.
And yet...
I remember one lazy afternoon. Laying on the grass in the orchard. Breathing in heavy air and smell of half - rotten fruit. My eyes were closed. I was slowly eating sweet, ripe apples.
And then the wasps came.
I felt the first one landing on my lips. Then the next one and few others. I was petrified. I couldn't breathe.
But the wasps tamed me. The tenderness of their movements hypnotized me. I didn't want them to go. I gave in. I opened my mouth, slowly letting the wasps in. They were feeding on the bits of apple and at the same time they were eating all the primal fears away. They flew away but they left the essence of their presence within me.
I was 8. Since then I'm longing for the feeling of wasps crawling into my mouth. I live my life chasing the wasps.

CarrollBlog 5.2
The writer Arturo Vivante died recently at the age of 84. I vividly remember reading a Vivante story entitled BEPPA in THE NEW YORKER years ago. It's about a young man who spends a weekend in the mountains with a prostitute. The premise doesn't sound promising but at the end of the tale I lowered the magazine to my lap and said a quiet Wow. There was another Vivante story about a blind man in Siena showing a sighted person what they were missing by not paying attention to daily life. Again, the young me who wanted so much to be a writer was bowled over by how powerfully a short story could affect both your heart and mind. The French have a nice saying that fits in well here-- "Mon chapeau." Meaning of course I tip my hat to you for your accomplishment-- whatever it might be. Early on for me, Vivante was one of those writers who both excited and showed me what was possible on a page. For that great gift wherever he is now, mon chapeau.

CarrollBlog 5.1
"I live near the abyss. I hope to stay."

Theodore Roethke

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