Three Coasts

Even readers who don't like science fiction loved Octavia Butler's work. It was beautifully written, serious in its themes and politics, and bold in its imagination. Butler, 58, died Friday after falling on the walkway outside her house in a North Seattle suburb. She is irreplacable.

I quit watching TV last fall.

I'm not talking about merely slipping a kente cloth over the console and banishing it to the far corner of the living room; neither am I talking about sticking it behind a tasteful media cabinet with doors that hide the black box. We sold the TV. We canceled the cable. We have not watched TV since Halloween weekend, 2005.

Let me be very clear about something up front: I am not one of those liberals who blames TV for the Iraq War (as does one woman I met recently) or for teen violence or for voting apathy. One of my pet peeves has always been people who brag about not watching TV. Those people really got on my nerves before I sold my TV. Maybe it's because they were too sanctimonious. Maybe it's because I knew they were right.

We had to get rid of the TV when we realized it did us more harm than good. We're both inveterate media consumers, like most Americans, and we wanted very much for TV to entertain us -- especially and because it was free and came right into our living room where we did not have to get dressed up to experience it. We kept trying. We watched even when we were bored, dismayed, disgusted and even felt abused by what we watched. And that's why the TV had to go. If it's here, we will turn it on -- more often than we care to admit.

I do not miss TV, but sometimes I jones for it, the way I guess an ex-smoker gets hit with the craving for a cigarette. Oh, the comforting hum of a million voices saying nothing; the flash of skin and bling; the promise that I could be as beautiful and witty as those people on the screen. I crave both the worst and the best of television: the soap operas that offered escape from the crushing disappointments of teaching in America today, the Seinfeld jokes that never grow old.

Despite itself, TV endures. There are not many people like me, people without one, not even in less-industrialized countries. In Cuba, where there is plenty of real skin but few of the airbrushed kind and very little bling, they enshrine their sets: http://www.polarinertia.com/jan06/cuba01.htm

What does this say about art, and freedom, and the human spirit?

I sit on my neighborhood board. The neighborhood is hard to describe briefly. We have a business district, mostly restaurants and boutiques, a public high school, a grade school, numerous churches, and a smattering of city buildings. Our housing stock is old, mostly from before 1910. Some houses are large and beautiful, but most are dilapidated and full of lead paint. Mine, for instance, falls between those two extremes: large, at one time beautiful, and until recently, full of lead paint. I think I could describe the porch as dilapidated.

I’m the secretary on this board. I thought this meant keeping some notes, toting around my husband’s laptop, and sending email messages to other board members, signing off, “respectfully submitted.” But no. It is all that, but it has turned out to be much more. There’s a monthly meeting, another monthly general meeting, decisions to be made, votes about development, extra “emergency” board meetings to attend, and the mail. I have to get the mail. Actually, I don’t get the mail. I don’t have a key to the box. Larry has the key. Larry lives down the street and sits on the board as a representative from a housing corporation. He was bequeathed the key during some past administration, and now it is tradition that Larry goes to the post office, picks up the mail, and gives it to the secretary. Then it is my job to figure out who should get what. Urgent notices from the state, addressed to former presidents from 3 or 4 years ago, are mixed in with junk and bills and payments for ads in our newsletter. Some mail is left in mailboxes—but only after the US Mail has been delivered. Our treasurer wants me to slip his mail between his screen door and front door. The charitable outreach committee head, a Catholic nun who goes by the moniker “Carla Mae,” has me put the mail in a plastic grocery sack and hang it on the door of an apartment building 5 blocks from my house. I don’t even know exactly if that’s where she lives or if that’s just where she picks up her mail.

I’ve been on the board for several months. Nothing spectacular has happened, really. We had a spirit-crushing holiday party. We voted down a snow cone stand that wanted to open in an empty lot near the busiest street in our area. We actually say no quite a bit. No to developers, no to changes in liquor licenses or permits. I’m not even certain if our vote matters to the bureaucratically named Board of Adjustment, but some matters seem to go our way. Others are pet projects of the aldermen and we essentially are silenced.

One of these aldermen—our neighborhood is at the crossroads of 4 wards--asked our board to hold one of those emergency meetings this week, to debate and present a letter to him, either for or against, a health clinic that wants to move to our neighborhood.

This health clinic is expanding. They are currently in a strip mall north of us, on a very busy street with high rise apartment buildings and hospitals nearby. They don’t have any residential neighbors to speak of. They are successful, according to their business director who spoke to our regular board meeting for far too long last month. Financially sound, wanting to expand. Tricky thing is, they want to move to an old glass factory at the eastern edge of our neighborhood. The building sits on a corner on a street that is in transition from boarded up houses and rentals to developments of condos and storefronts. In a few years, if the housing bubble doesn’t totally burst here, it should be a nice residential area with corner stores. It’s not on a bus line and it’s not on a way to anywhere except to people’s homes.

It’s a pediatric health clinic and dental clinic. It is a “free” clinic, with the clientele primarily uninsured or carrying Medicaid cards. Medicaid dental clinics, we are told, are so rare that they draw from all the way out to Sullivan, Missouri. Sullivan is out near where my family camps, it’s that far away.

After the extensive presentation by the business director last month, during which questions like “how many dental chairs will you have?” were answered with lectures on the history of iron smelting and its link to modern dental practice, the board went on to other business. It wasn’t technically in our neighborhood, and we didn’t know if we even needed to say anything about it. We went on to decline to support the local grocery store’s desire to sell 40-ounce beer. Then last week the alderman told us he’d really like our input.

Emails started to fly fast. Lots of “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) feelings mixed with guilt because, frankly, we’re an upper middle class board, and this clinic would definitely be on the edge of our neighborhood with the old housing stock, mostly rentals, some board-ups, more poverty than we’d like to admit. Our zip code has one of the highest rates of childhood lead poisoning in the nation, and except briefly at my house, it isn’t happening on my street. It’s happening in the area around where this clinic wants to move. It is likely that people in my area go to the current location and would be served by the new one.

The more emails I read, the more I felt like we were making decisions in the dark, out of fear of the “other”—whether that other be poor, uninsured, black, not from our street, not from our child’s classroom. Surely we couldn’t make our decision on whether to support this clinic based on either racism (or classism) or guilt about appearing racist. So when my husband got home that afternoon, I took off for the current clinic.

Growing up, I spent a fair amount of time in county health clinics. I had a regular pediatrician, but immunizations often happened at this or that clinic. I’d recently taken my sick older daughter to a clinic down in Houston while staying with my brother. All of my experiences rolled up into on amalgam went like this: institutional, rude, smelling of bleach or urine, and sick people resting in molded plastic chairs despairing of the hope of ever being seen by a doctor.

The clinic I walked into was, frankly, as nice as my daughters’ pediatrician’s office. In fact, when I was pregnant with my first, I had vetoed offices that weren’t as nice as this. The staff was friendly. They introduced me to the nursing director, who told me during our tour that she brings her own children there. She took me around and gave me good answers to my questions. Perhaps it was all propaganda. I left there, though, with the conviction that I would support this clinic’s expansion to our neighborhood, that even if I had to stand alone and write my own letter as an individual, I would do it.

I arrived early to the emergency meeting. We chatted pleasantly, the 7 of us, and then got down to business. I showed my hand early: “I’ve been to the clinic and it’s a nice place.” I expected to get the kind of dismissive comments I’d read earlier in emails: “Would you take your kids there?” or “What if it moved in down the street from you?” I was ready for hand-to-hand combat on these issues.

Instead, another board member had also visited the clinic. Someone had printed out a report about the lack of good dental care for Medicaid recipients in our area. Another member had done some detective work about the clinic’s not-for-profit status and found them to be on the up and up. It became clear that many of the anti-clinic voices from the neighborhood came from developers and investors, not from residents. A free clinic across the street from their projects would be detrimental. Or so they thought.

In the end, after almost 2 hours of presenting our gifts of facts and clarifications, we voted to support the clinic. We did have reservations—traffic, noise, lighting, signage, and other details needed to be addressed. But I had to laugh at myself as I left. I’d come ready for a fight, ready to resign in protest if the opportunity presented itself, and instead got board member stone soup. I think we were all afraid to support it alone, but we each came ready to make that leap armed with information.

Coming soon: yet more meetings. Too many meetings. I can’t keep getting this worked up about them. Unfortunately, I find that this is the only way I can manage to engage in society. I spent 4 years as a new mom, a self-indulgent hermit withdrawn from community life, and now I’m in danger of becoming the topic of a self-help book. Alas.

This past weekend I watched Rushmore again. I enjoyed the movie and think the director, Wes Anderson (he also directed the Royal Tannenbaums), very talented. In addition to his quirky style, he has great comic timing. Not buffonish. His comedy relies on timing and presenting the unexpected. He also has a great ear for music.

However, at many points during the movie, when characters were going through a particularly emotional moment, the soundtrack would erupt at the point when the character would express him or herself and then cut away, leaving the viewer to experience the character's emotions via the music. Although the first few times were effective, I later found myself wanting more from the otherwise emotionally stagnant characters because it was an excellent cast, and when they were allowed to express their characters' feelings, they created wonderful scenes.

My favorite example was when Bill Murray's character shows up at the door of the main love interest. Having fallen for her, he makes up a silly excuse as to why he's appeared that both know is a lie. But the love interest doesn't react negatively. She stares down at her plate of carrots, smiling, and then looks up to him and offers him one. Bill Murray deadpans yes, he would, and then takes a step forward to take one off of her plate. It's a great scene imbued with the kind of nervous energy that makes falling in love so fantastic and memorable. I wish Wes Anderson had given us more of those scenes and less cutaways to effective but easy music segways because after awhile it felt like I was watching MTV (back when they showed music videos). In other words, a little less Wes Anderson and a little more acting from his cast.

Greetings from the East Coast! As you can probably deduce, I am the symbolic third coast of our blog. I hope you've enjoyed the previous posts because they indicate the variety of thought and expression we present. In future posts I intend to branch out on many topics, including pop culture, sports, politics, and food and wine. But for my inaugural post, I'd like to traverse a familiar path for me.

My fiancé remarked the other day that when she reads, she acutely visualizes the scenes in her head. It's no wonder that she prefers plot-driven stories, particularly horror and fantasy, for her mind can vividly depict the epic battles or bloody murders as well as, and if not better than, the movies.

I am not this way. What strikes me more than the visual scenes is the emotive effect of the prose. For example, I think the genius of Proust's Swann's Way lie not in the author's assiduous recreation of his boyhood summer home, Combray. In fact I feel this section attains the pinnacle of boredom. Midway through it I wished the narrator hadn’t eaten that damn madeleine at all!

Rather, I think Proust's genius lies in his microscopic examination of Swann's psyche as he falls in love with Odette. This dissection of Swann's anxiety, jealousy, elation, and despair are like none other that I have read, and so closely matches my experiences that it is the epitome of verisimilitude in fiction. For this section alone I would recommend "Swann's Way" to anyone, no matter the tedium that awaits in "Combray."

My point, however, is not to criticize a classic French novel. It is to address the different ways we interact with text. Different readers can have different experiences with the same piece of work, and I think that's a good thing. This difference will be one of the strengths of this blog. Together with my co-contributors, we can offer a variety of views on what it is to be a person interacting with our diverse American culture. And you, the reader, will hopefully leave our blog at the bare minimum intrigued, and at best, like Swann in love.

Of course he duped those of you who bought his book and believed him. Of course Oprah was wrong to at first defend him. Of course his detractors should be angry. What’s most interesting to me about the Frey controversy is what it reveals about the contemporary fetish for tell-all nonfiction. According to the Smoking Gun Web site’s expose, Frey had originally tried to publish his manuscript as fiction and failed. It wasn’t until he "recrafted" it as a memoir that he was able to get it published, and undoubtedly, its nonfiction status clinched Oprah’s endorsement. It’s possible that he could not publish it as fiction because its strengths as a story and his skill as a writer were both lacking. Which means that publishers rather sell and readers rather consume a badly written "true" account than a well-written fiction. What a shame.

It’s interesting, too, to see Frey’s loyal readers say they do not care that he lied. And oh, how he lied. We’re not talking about mere writerly embellishments here; we’re talking about a privileged, inebriated frat boy passing himself off as a True Criminal and Bad Boy. He does a disservice to those who really have lived as criminals. But his readers put blinders on, and that is because they want to believe the story is true. For them, the book exhibited the verisimilitude that makes fiction the enduring art that it is. Of course, in an ironic example of art-becomes-life, Frey is now known to the world as a Criminal -- albeit a literary one.

As a teacher, I often observed in my students this same need to believe that the stories we read were true. My students almost always assumed that whatever events they were reading about had actually happened to the writer, no matter that what they read was fiction. When I gave them author interviews that attested to the difference between the story in the book and the real life of the author, students would often reject the facts; they would insist that the author was lying or downplaying the autobiographical nature of his or her text. The fact that so many cannot or will not grasp the distinction between life an art, to me, reveals a certain hostility toward imagination and creativity. Somehow, it’s a relief to readers if the events really happened. That they can handle. But to think that a human being can create an entire world on paper using mere symbols is too much for them. They reject it. They want to think the writer simply described events that had occurred. They don’t want to think that an individual imagination can conjure wholly believable worlds peopled with realistic characters.

All writers draw upon life experiences – hence the cliché, ‘write what you know.’ But life doesn’t translate to the page day-for-day, hour-for-hour. Otherwise, the great works of literature would read more like too many of the 'what I did today after brushing my teeth' blog entries on the Web. That would indeed be a shame.

When my grandfather died and my mother gave me all that grief about not attending the funeral, my mother-in-law gave me a bracelet with a single charm that read “One Day at a Time.” I didn’t have a good reason not to go to the funeral, except for the fact that my husband’s grandmother had died the very same day and we had a rented cabin for the weekend reserved months in advance, and, most of all, my father, whose father was the one who had died, gave me his blessing to make up my own mind. “There’s going to be a memorial service in May.” That cinched it. My husband and daughter went down to Cairo for his grandmother’s funeral and I went to the Ozarks with friends.

That bracelet, with its simple little motto, is still on my wrist. My grandfather, and my surviving grandmother, were at one time quite active in Al Anon, a branch of sorts of Alcoholics Anonymous. My dad’s older brother dried out periodically with AA, and I knew growing up what their motto was. My mother-in-law couldn’t have known all that ingrained memory, but still, this is the bracelet she gave me.

It makes me wonder about what Maria, my post-partum counselor, referred to as the “Milieu.” What she seemed to mean was something akin to Jung’s collective unconscious with its symbols and universal meanings. Only Maria’s version was colored by our experiences and reflected back out into our world, where it was subtly inserted into other people’s views of who we were and what we meant. I’m not even sure if my mother-in-law knows the basic vocabulary and aphorisms of twelve step groups. But she couldn’t have picked a more relevant motto to give me on the occasion of my grandfather’s death, and, well, my mother’s freak out.

When my daughter Sophia was born via c-section, face up and looking at the surgeon, every bouquet I received had a stargazer lily in it.

Supposedly, when you pray a certain St. Theresa the Little Flower novena, your prayer will be answered, and roses will be involved. I haven’t tried it, because I feel like I would be tempting something. But I wonder.

When my childhood friend was giving birth, without my knowing, I was wearing a necklace she’d given me for graduation.

Amusingly, I noted months afterwards, when I parted on bad terms with a casual friend once, never to speak to her again, we each had a book in our possession belonging to the other. She left my social crowd and eventually her husband and daughter. The book she loaned me was Circle of Friends. The one I had given her was One Hundred Years of Solitude.

It makes me wonder at the power of words, the subconscious way we take what’s around us and incorporate it into our beings. It makes me cautious about what names I give my pets (Blaze has caught on fire several times, for instance, and don’t get me started on Wiz). My children even more so. Sophia--I wonder if she will be wise. When I dropped my first name, Sarah, and moved my middle name, Bridgett, to the front position when I got married, was that a shift from princess to strength? When I look at my life now, I certainly think it was.

That bracelet was a talisman for me during my second pregnancy. Maeve was born in October 2004. All my bouquets had mums.

So I’m still taking it one day at a time. Easy does it.