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Letters From Little Rock |
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a semi-regular column
Letters From Little Rock is my column on whatever topic strikes my fancy at the time. Check in as often as you like, but I make no promise as to when new columns will appear. I hope to add a column on a weekly basis, but honesty compels me to admit that I might not even maintain a monthly schedule. January 11, 2004 I stayed in all day , feeling low and mean. My day-job, which is actually a night-job, went a little crazy towards the holiday season last year. I work for a corporate aircraft completions center (the planes fly to us plain-Jane and are supposed to leave as luxury jets) and our schedule was pretty much ten hours per day during the week and eights on Saturdays and Sundays for the last two months of the year. Needless to say, I’m not the sort that likes having his routine affected in that way. One of the reasons I quit my warehouse job several years back was to get away from nonsensical working conditions. Corporate jets just seemed like they couldn't’t help but be built in a more professional environment, and by and large it is, but the last two months have been pretty basic business 101 affairs. You know what I mean; “If one man can do a job in 40 hours, can forty men do the same job in one hour?” The answer is pretty obvious, but we kept running the experiment just to make sure. Luckily, I work in one of the few industries where there is still some competition for employees. It’s our custom to shut down for two weeks at Christmas. There was some danger of not getting that break this year. I must say I’m just as spoiled as the rest of my co-workers because I felt pretty much entitled to it and pretty hacked-off that we might not get it. I did remind myself from time to time that when I worked my warehouse job I had to work Thanksgiving and Christmas day more than once. Luckily, the magic number was reached and we did in fact get our time off for the holidays. But I still don’t feel like I’ve had a day off since about last November. I can’t say that the work is so stressful or that my life is either, but sometimes the creative bug begins to grow and metamorphose and you become somewhat anxious about the end result; begin to wonder whether there is a butterfly or a hopeful monster lurking in your future. I’ve been going through some slow process of evolution as a writer and I know I’m on the cusp of something substantially different than what I’ve written before. Of course, we all grow and change—that’s not unique to those of us who have a creative streak—but sometimes a change in style or voice can be a little trying while you’re still finding your way. The endless days of overtime held me in a painful state of suspended animation, certain I had new wings but unable to test them. Even during shut-down I couldn't’t seems to get back on schedule and only half-heartedly made the attempt to write. It’s difficult for me to adapt to fluctuations in my schedule and it’s only with difficulty that I even sat down to edit what I hope will be my next collection of poetry, a sequence of some five-hundred or so haiku forming a loose narrative. It will be more-or-less the diary of a year with a strong taste of the seasons as is customary with haiku. I hope to have more news about that soon. I spent several days during shut-down trying to find a better deal than 1stBooks.Com currently offers and it looks like I might self-publish through Lightning Source next time. I’m not sure when I will have a definite announcement to make on that account as during the editing of my book I discovered that there was some imbalance in the final structure and to correct this I really should write another twenty-five or so haiku just to flesh out certain ideas I want to give proper exposure. That is the crux of yesterday’s miserable feeling. Most of the haiku—practically all of them—were written last year and prompted what I feel is the current change of direction in my poetry. But I’m not certain I won’t be strangling the changeling in its crib if I stop myself from exploring the bounds of these new rhythms and voicings to go back and complete last years thought. Still, this sequence of haiku is important to me for a number of reasons I won’t go into, and if I don’t bring it to its full realization, I’m quite certain I will regret it one day. Of course, I’m going to try to finish off the thing with as much grace and panache as I can, and no small amount of affection, but the difficulty is real though surmountable. It reminds me of when I was in school and quite certain I would one day make my living as a cartoonist. Every summer I would see my skills grow and change and then have to endure the nine months of stagnation and atrophy we call high school. It used to take me a couple of weeks at the beginning of every summer to get back to where I was the previous fall when school interrupted. Compounding my frustration, then and now, is the fact that October through December is my most fertile period. Don’t ask me why, I don’t really know, but just like there are morning-people and night-people, I’ve always been at my best in the fall. I like everything about it, from autumn leaves to Halloween to peace and goodwill to my fellow man. Actually, I think it’s my life-long curse of procrastination that makes me feel fall is so productive. In my early twenties I always added up the total number of poems I wrote every year as though it somehow mattered and inevitably somewhere along about September I would go into a state of deep depression about my lack of production for the year and somehow or another turn out most of my work for the year during those last few months. I know it’s silly to add up poems like so many bushels of peas, but at the time I was trying to prove something to myself (showing off in front of god, I think they call it) and having something to show for my effort was a vital part of living with myself. I guess that is the reason the timing of the current change of style has been so stressful to me. Thinking about it, it occurs to me that there have been many watershed years for me as a writer. In fact, every few years I find myself looking back and saying, “You know, that is the year I really started to get the hang of it.” I’m sure I’ll look back one day and realize I didn't’t get the hang of it until someday that’s still a long ways off. Now there’s a comforting thought for a winter’s night. January 12, 2004 Well, I spent a night tossing and turning and wishing I’d had the foresight to forego my last cup of coffee. Sometimes I’m not that bright. Last night, however, I was practically incandescent. That’s because of the chain reaction that some high-octane java got rolling along about midnight. Needless to say, at six am I was still quietly glowing. I don’t know why I tell myself I’m going to bed early on a night like that and then proceed to shoot myself in the foot. It turned out okay. Work was pretty slow today so I managed to function on five hours sleep without any noticeable ill-effect. The only stress of the day came from the rumor mill. It looks like the same company that worked me seven days a week for two months, now wants to put my department on thirty-two hour work weeks. I’m personally not so well off that I’m not affected by that, but I am greedy enough for time to myself that I’m kind of looking forward to it. We did it a couple of weeks late in 2002, but this year we’ll actually be eligible for some kind of unemployment compensation, so there is a good possibility my pay won’t be affected too much at all. Years ago I worked a part-time job that was originally supposed to be a four day week, and for a little while it was. I guess I got greedy, because pretty soon I was volunteering to work a fifth day just to get close to a forty hour work week. Today there’s no way I’d give anybody five days of my week for part-time pay, but at the time I was only making about $6.35 an hour, and it seemed like a good tradeoff even though I didn't’t have any benefits. The kicker for me was the day my supervisor suggested working me six days per week but only six hours per day. I learned how to say no pretty quick that day. I’ve never been able to go back to working a four day week, but as I recall I wasted a lot of that time anyway and I really hadn’t learned enough of the nuts and bolts of poetry to maximize my efforts. I suppose, and I could be wrong, that my poetry would have been better served if I’d had the strength of character to forego the security of a full-time job. There’s an argument to be made either way and I don’t really regret having the financial security that allows me to own a home and have a little privacy to write and read without interruption, but the temptation to romanticize the starving artist is strong. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my tastes aren't’t expensive and I’m common enough to rationalize my choices with the best of them. I’m sure I could reverse-snob my way through a life of poverty without too much trouble. January 18, 2004 It was a beautiful grey rainy day, and except for one brief excursion to buy groceries, I stayed in all day. I’ve got a big burn pile I need to take care of, but it was too damp and drizzly to expect it to light without a massive amount of gasoline and I don’t intend to do that. Instead I read In Flanders Fields by Leon Wolff. War may be hell, but it makes for darn fine reading—providing it lies far enough in the past. I can read through Civil War memoirs with a pleasure similar to that I find in reading a picaresque novel. I can read any amount of untold millions of dead in the ludicrous blundering campaigns of the Western Front without much more than a brief identification with the soldiers slaughtered in the bloom of youth. And I’m not even sure that identification isn't more due to the body of poetry the British left attesting to the futility of Eighteenth Century tactics being brought to bear against machine age weapons. To say nothing of the romanticism with which I still view the fighter pilots. But when you move the narrative just fifty years down the line and throw around names like Tet and Da Nang suddenly I can’t stomach it. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that I know any number of people who fought in Vietnam, and I find scarcely any entertainment value in their sacrifice. In reality though, there never has been a great novel of Vietnam to tempt me. The closest thing is probably Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. The fact that it was written well in advance of direct American intervention sort of renders it moot in the face of the mass of memoirs and diaries the Vietnam War produced, to say nothing of the indelible news images. In a sense World War One was the intellectual property of the Lost Generation and they filled reams with it’s bitter fruits. World War Two left a legacy of a handful of fine novels—Mailer’s The naked and the Dead, Clavell’s King Rat, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited—none of which was of much relevance to the realities of the post-war period. The Vietnam war has been almost the exclusive property of the movie and television media. All of the classic expressions of the zeitgeist of the time are from this area—Apocalypse Now, The Deerhunter, M*A*S*H. Despite the appearance of a number of deeply affecting memoirs and several collections of contemporary news correspondents’ dispatches, there is practically no literary legacy left by the Vietnam War. It is tempting to say that this is because in the early part of the Twentieth Century book publishing was still in many ways a timely media. Then as now news reports from war zones was heavily censored if not blatantly false at times. The first uncensored reports of the First World War were by and large memoirs published by junior officers. Even though many of the most highly regarded weren't’t published until years later, in the immediate post-war period it was something of a cottage industry for many publishers, and the competition for manuscripts was at times fierce. By the time of World War Two radio had rendered the book obsolete insofar as timeliness was concerned. By the time of the Vietnam War even color television reports could be aired within hours of filming. Seemingly coming full circle, we now live in the age of the instant book, when a weeks old scandal may easily produce multiple volumes of memoirs and ideological rants before responsible journalists have even had time to adequately familiarize themselves with the principals, let alone take sides. I don’t know what sort of legacy our current wars will leave, but it seems likely it will be not only post-literate, but post-cultural. The Vietnam war left a meagre handful of important cultural artifacts despite being the emblematic event of a period of great upheaval, equal in its impact on society to the Great Depression; the current world wide conflict threatens to leave none. Certainly the Gulf War is culturally invisible; no novels of note, no compelling cinema, not even one memorable poem to remind us of our shared experiences. The Gulf War and the current conflict seem to belong entirely to the land of the pundit and the blog. Shrill opinions unsupported by a single tangible fact are the hallmark of the “debate” on the current conflict. When art ceases to reflect life it ceases to be relevant. When life ceases to value art, it ceases to be. This artless time we live in is a thousand times more frightening to me than the dumb machinery of war. There are a thousand things we can blame it all upon, from MTV to XTC, and it all seems pointless to ponder. The fact is simple enough to relate; The whole country is too quick to embrace a cynical comment, too eager to turn a blind eye to vice, too egocentric to give an inch to merging traffic. We’re ready to kill over the slightest and the strangest provocations. From bad calls in little league baseball games to the failure of fast food restaurants to deliver fries in a timely manner, we find enough motive for murder. It is no great surprise to see reality programming dominating television. More and more we ask of our culture that it render introspection useless; we ask of it nothing less than that it deliver us unto the everlasting now, the eternal present tense of the beasts of the field. We don’t want to see a movie that asks us to put the pieces together or rely upon us to do more than experience the kaleidoscope of flashing lights and sound without actually drooling. We no longer seem to have or desire an interior monologue. It is important to remember that the voice that sustains the interior monologue is the same voice that engages in dialogue with the arts, is the same small voice that whispers “no” when convenience says “yes”. The post-cultural world we seem to be creating will surely be a world devoid of conscience as well.
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