2008-08-22T00:26:29Z http://blog.stevenwingate.com/atom.aspx Quick Blog tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-06-04:2c737a75-a550-4bed-98d9-9b7362f50431 Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-06-04T14:39:15Z 2008-06-04T14:29:00Z How It Feels to Be to stevenwingate.wordpress.com which offers RSS (and therefore better access to others in the writing community) as well as the opportunity to connect some information permanently to the blog. I hope you'll sign up there--you have both email and RSS feed options--and that you'll contact me if you have any trouble getting there. My email is on the main website (www.stevenwingate.com).

Thanks for sticking with me through my initial get-the-feet-wet blogging experience. The next version of this blog is going to be significantly more literature-based--less about my own personal musings and more about the questions writers (and other creatives) face as we develop our own work and bring it out to the world. Hope you'll join me at WordPress!

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As of June 3 I'm moving <a href="http://stevenwingate.wordpress.com">How It Feels to Be</a> to <a href="http://stevenwingate.wordpress.com,">stevenwingate.wordpress.com,</a> which offers RSS (and therefore better access to others in the writing community) as well as the opportunity to connect some information permanently to the blog. I hope you'll sign up there--you have both email and RSS feed options--and that you'll contact me if you have any trouble getting there. My email is on the main website (www.stevenwingate.com). <br> <br> Thanks for sticking with me through my initial get-the-feet-wet blogging experience. The next version of this blog is going to be significantly more literature-based--less about my own ...

tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-05-18:7850f234-354c-45c7-a044-0007ebeccd60 Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-05-18T11:23:15Z 2008-05-18T11:13:00Z     I’m not much of a TV-head; most of my exposure to the medium comes from watching sports events (yes, I do that—see my posting How it Feels to Be an Artsy/Intellectual Type who Actually Loves Sports) or from passing glances that occur elsewhere than my home. The other day, for instance, I saw the news and heard all three of our presidential candidates talking in the space of two minutes. Blah! Blather! Undignified, like teenagers in a junior high popularity contest. I’m already sick of the voice of our next president, even if it’s Obama. Yes, I just said that. Sure, I want him to win; sure I’ll be trying to get every lefty I know to vote for him; sure, I’ll be full of hope on election eve, like so many other lefties like me, that he will be a sane voice of change in America and kick the damn moneychangers out of the temple.
    Whoops, mixing religion and politics here. I mean “kick the damn lobbyists out of the White House and the Capitol.” How’s that? Better?
    But the comparison worked, didn’t it?
    And if Obama wins, I’ll be jumping for joy at the prospect of a relative outsider cleaning the accumulated years of muck that encrust the Augean stables of our national government. But really, I’m sick even of his voice. Maybe it’s the things he has to say on the campaign trail that turn me off, and if/when he becomes president I’ll actually be able to listen to him. Maybe I’m tuning him out to not get my hopes up. Maybe eight years of turning off the radio or TV upon hearing the voice of our current president has just got me trained like a Pavlovian dog to not listen to the voice of anyone who strives for the office.
    You’ve heard this all before from people far more informed about politics than I am. But you haven’t heard this poem before, set in a future America after the moneychangers have been kicked out of the temple. (Oops! I did it again!) I ask that you read it aloud so that you can be the first kid on your block to hear it.

HERO OF THE FAILED REBELLION
           
In the new city he sits on a park bench
and traces with his toes in wet soil
his former plans to shake our moribund nation
    of its false patriotism
    of its complacencies
    of is shameless love of self masquerading as concern
        for the fate of the earth
        and the fate of the poor
        and the fate of each indivisible soul.

Women in this new city can tell he has a past
and ask him about that past
before they dare to touch the visage
    that knows so much more
    and feels so much more deeply
    than they.

“I had dreams,” he tells them, shrugging.
Because to describe the breaking of his dreams
would only break them again
    before they gain enough form
    to galvanize the new city
    with a glandular lust for revolution

that only his voice can inspire. Alone at night
the friends who hide him watch the TV news.
The latest demagogue enters the room:
    His loyal subjects rise to applaud him;
    his detractors’ intestines moan with rage
    and the hero’s eyes shy away to a corner of the room.

“Look at that clown on his throne,” the friends say.
“A fool, a nobody, a dolt, a disgrace.
You could have given us hope. You
    could have taken this blandness,
    this un-congealed mass of sorrow and pride,
    this pit of civic self-abortion and suicide by decree
        and given us all
        what we have been cheated out of
        by ourselves.”
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<font size="3"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I’m not much of a TV-head; most of my exposure to the medium comes from watching sports events (yes, I do that—see my posting <a href="http://blog.stevenwingate.com/2008/01/11/an-artsyintellectual-type-who-actually-loves-sports.aspx">How it Feels to Be an Artsy/Intellectual Type who Actually Loves Sports</a>) or from passing glances that occur elsewhere than my home. The other day, for instance, I saw the news and heard all three of our presidential candidates talking in the space of two minutes. Blah! Blather! Undignified, like teenagers in a junior high popularity contest. I’m already sick of the voice of our next president, even if it’s Obama. ...</span></font>

tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-04-09:5e9bc83c-5472-4658-8baf-2bc3c6015128 Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-04-09T09:06:22Z 2008-04-09T09:02:00Z     This will be a quick one, almost epigrammatic in its efficiency, because I’m tired and grouchy and grading too much and miserable about it.
    I was heading for my place of employment the other day and thought to myself I need to get all my stupid busy-work done so I can do some exercise and get my flabby carcass back into shape.
    Then I thought to myself No, you idiot. You need to do some exercise and get your flabby carcass back into shape so you can get your stupid busy-work done without feeling so grouchy about it.
    And that’s when I learned the meaning of the phrase “putting your cart before your horse.”
    Perhaps I have learned this meaning before, and will learn it again. It seems to be my way lately. I require several iterations, like Pavlov's dog or a lab rat. And even then it's uncertain whether the message will stick.
    Were I a more efficient writer—a poet instead of a logorrheic scribbler of self-entwining, self-defeating sentences—I would be able to express this sentiment in a single sentence. Maybe even in a single phrase.
    O Muse! Will you leave me to my own devices on this one, or will you inspire me with the nine words required—or the seven, or the twelve—so I can compact this lesson and write it on the inside of my skin, where it will never be forgotten?
    O Reader! Will you, too, leave me in the lurch? Or will you give me these words I seek?
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<font size="3"><span style="font-family: Georgia;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This will be a quick one, almost epigrammatic in its efficiency, because I’m tired and grouchy and grading too much and miserable about it.</span><br style="font-family: Georgia;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I was heading for my place of employment the other day and thought to myself <span style="font-style: italic;">I need to get all my stupid busy-work done so I can do some exercise and get my flabby carcass back into shape</span>.</span><br style="font-family: Georgia;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Then I thought to myself <span style="font-style: italic;">No, you idiot. You need to do some exercise and get your flabby carcass back ...</span></span></font>

tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-03-26:c2816f44-7834-4f6e-a9c5-43978db11c3a Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-03-26T00:30:33Z 2008-03-26T00:19:00Z     Those of you who know me—heck, probably 90% of the people who are going to read this—know that (a) it’s my birthday today! and (b) I’m not much of a Mr. Fix-It guy because I’m not a very patient kind of guy. Apparently this is a genetic trait; I learned to swear by being near my dad while he worked on cars and did household repairs, and no doubt my sons are doing the same.
    As well they should, dammit! Shouldn’t boys learn to swear from their fathers? There are two kinds of boys in the world—those who learn to swear from their fathers and those who learn to swear from strangers, and I bet that any scientific study worth its salt would reveal that those boys who learn from their fathers grow up far better adjusted. Better citizens, less likely to beat their own wives and kids, etc.
    Geez, that would be an expensive study. Somebody out there have the bucks to commission it? A tobacco company, something like that?
    Anyway, the point of this blog posting is that I’m finally learning patience after 43 years on this planet, thanks mostly to an electric piano (Yamaha P-60, 2003 model) that came into my hands through some odd kismet about six months ago. I had just told my mother-in-law that I wanted to get back into playing music, the piano specifically, and it just so happened that the next day she found one. Joanne G. is an avid aficionado of the thrift store Savers, and scouts it out around closing time on the night before her senior discount will apply. Then she shows up in the morning, uses that senior discount, and goes home overjoyed at her bargain-hunting abilities.
    Well it just so happened that she found the Yamaha P-60 at Savers, called us, and said she wanted to buy it as a gift. The next day we cleared a little space and had a piano. Woo hoo! For the first week I played it every day, sometimes every few hours, until I got super-busy and ignored it for a week. Then, when I played it again, I found that twenty-one keys clustered around middle C stuck dreadfully, and showed little sign of improvement when I cleaned them with alcohol as the piano store suggested. 
    The keys never unstuck, and eventually I stopped playing. I guess that while the piano was at Savers (and while I played it every day) its stickiness was held in abeyance (ooh, I love that word) by regular use. Once I stopped being obsessed with it, the problem came back. Eventually I just couldn’t press the keys down at all and decided that I had to either (a) take the damn thing apart and see what was wrong, or (b) ditch it altogether.
    Well….
    Nine days ago  I was in church, singing along to a song in the missal I had never heard before and having, for the briefest of moments, the impression that I could read music like I used to. My mouth followed the notes exactly, and I didn’t even have to wait for the musicians to sing it first the way I usually do when I try to follow along.
    For a bar and a half, I actually was reading music. Then my brain got involved—obtrusive jerk that he/she/it is—and the feeling crashed down on me. But when I got home I decided Dammit, I’m cleaning that damn piano today regardless of how long it takes or how many hours it deprives me of my family’s presence. So I took the thing apart, utterly ignoring all the instructions in the owner’s manual, and discovered the problem. Somebody had spilled a can of soda through the keyboard, which had not only gunked up the keys but completely destroyed a swath of the foam padding against which the metal hammers of the weighted keys struck.
    Now you can’t take apart the key mechanisms on your average junky synth, but this was not a junky synth by any means. The more I took it apart, the more I respected it. The more I cleaned the soda and foam off with alcohol swabs and cotton baby wipes, the more I realized that cleaning the piano would open not only the door of music for me, but the door of patience, the door…....
    Ah, what bullshit! Patience! I’m not even patient enough to write this damn blog. Every time I try to work on it, I want to turn off the computer and go play the piano. So play the piano, Steve! It’s just a blog! No one will think worse of you if you just go play the piano like you want to, and no one will think better of you if you stick it out to the end of this posting and try to create a nice, neat narrative arc.
    So to heck with this posting. Who cares if it’s full of typos, too. I’m going to play my piano, dammit! It’s my damn birthday! All I ask of you is that you imagine me playing that piano so well that you have no choice but to get up and shake your ass. And I don’t mean just a little shimmy. I mean shake it, as God, the Caesars of Rome, and the United States Constitution intended. Yeah!

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<font style="font-family: Georgia;" size="3">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Those of you who know me—heck, probably 90% of the people who are going to read this—know that (a) it’s my birthday today! and (b) I’m not much of a Mr. Fix-It guy because I’m not a very patient kind of guy. Apparently this is a genetic trait; I learned to swear by being near my dad while he worked on cars and did household repairs, and no doubt my sons are doing the same.<br> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; As well they should, dammit! Shouldn’t boys learn to swear from their fathers? There are two kinds of boys in ...</font>

tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-03-17:126c05a7-d948-4f21-889e-cb508ba68bfa Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-03-17T22:44:09Z 2008-03-17T22:26:00Z     Jenny always said I had it, and after tonight I’m starting to believe her. Although maybe I don’t have sleep apnea at all, and am writing this at 3:57 a.m. because Landon, sleeping on the big bed because he has yet another ear infection, spent a full hour head-butting me in the back approximately every three minutes. I have felt a few little gaps in my breathing over the years, usually after I’ve quaffed one sip too many of my favorite beers such as Pacifico, New Belgium’s 1554 Black Ale Stella Artois, or Stone’s Arrogant Bastard.
    “Why the commercial references, Steve?” I can hear you asking. “Selling out on us before you really have anything to sell? How gross and tacky.” But give me a break. Maybe by mentioning real products in this blog, I’ll get some magical product placement honorarium that can help defray the expensive surgery I no doubt have to endure because of my sleep apnea.
    I’m pretty convinced now that I have it, even though it’s quite situational, because I had two dreams tonight about dying and/or being reborn; this makes sense if your body skips a breath or two and you wake up in a panic, wondering whether you had a dream about dying/being reborn because your breath actually stopped for awhile, and you died and were reborn.
    Such things happen in dreams, and you're a liar if you say they've never happened to you.
    Anyway, the dreams were weird. In one, I had just died and arrived in an afterlife that reminded me of Newark Airport, except that it took less than an hour and a frickin’ half to get out of there by taxi. (Honk if you know what I’m talking about, people! Bang your desk in frustration!) But I didn’t need a cab because my mom picked me up—a 40-ish version of my mom, the way I remember her best. I popped into her big ol’ late 60s American station wagon and she greeted me like she was picking me up from school. She then started pointing out old hangouts of my father’s, where I could theoretically find him.
    But I couldn’t see my dad, who according to my mother was at several bars at once. Apparently in the afterlife, all times and places exist simultaneously; but your mother’s rules about where you can go and when still apply, which meant that I couldn't go into bars to look for my father even though I could drink enough to earn a seat beside him.
    The more exiting dream happened twice, sandwiched around the one with my mom. In this one, I vexed and annoyed my family (my dream-family, not my real one) by waking up at night and running down to the TV room to start writing a book of poetry called _________________ that I absolutely had to write, and right now. My new life and identity depended 100% on me dedicating myself to this book of poetry above all else. Apparently I had died in some fishing accident, then been reborn—which led to me waking up in the morning and running down to the TV room to start writing this book of poetry with the fabulous, earth-shattering name I can’t remember to save my life.
    My dream-father, who had a lot of money if the ultra-cool lamp and white chair I worked under were any indication, tried to talk sense into me. He asked me my name, and I told him, and he said that wasn’t my name at all. He said that I was a completely different person than I was pretending to be, and that he and everyone else in the family wanted me to seek counseling because I hadn't died in the rive at all, and I hadn't been reborn. I simply woke up in the middle of every night, loudly stumbled down to the TV room, turned on the TV with the sound off, sat in the white chair, and tried to write  _________________ .
    But I never wrote a line of it, and that drove everybody crazy. This person I claimed to be, who had died in the fishing accident and come back to life, and now had to write his poems—this person whose name I gave to my dream-father every night, supplemented by details ranging from his junior high school friends to things he had on his bookshelves—had never existed in any earthly realm. Fearing some kind of demonic possession, my family  had hired investigators and genealogists (why genealogists?) to track this person down, but no trace of him turned up.
    Please, they said to me. Get help. Get us all help.
    Other weird things happened in this dream that I can’t fully recall, and can’t place sequentially either before or after the Afterlife = Newark Airport Dream. I got married to a woman twenty years my elder who looked like a more exotic and dark-skinned version of the hotel magnate Leona Helmsley; I got involved in a nasty hockey fight in the hallway to my team’s locker room that involved several broken bottles and the casual, curious drinking of blood; I unsuccessfully tried to stop a guy from trying to put out a fire (one I think may have started) by rolling him in a pile of snow, which somehow caused his death; a military tribunal convened and beheaded somebody with a sword.
    So I stumbled in the dark down to the white chair and urgently tried to write the book of poetry called _________________. Even though I never did anything more than stare at the blank lines on my legal pad.
    What does it mean? Nothing or everything. The detritus of my day or the key to the puzzle of my soul. Maybe both simultaneously. But who has the time to dig inside the self like that, and are we even meant to? Are we better off letting the dreams live inside us and pushing us from one pole of being to the other?
    I don't know. But one thing I do know:
    If I ever find out the name of the book of poetry that my dream-self was supposed to write—then watch out, world., because it will change everything. So honest in its beauty, so savage in its order, that the rest of the world will not be able to stand still.


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<font style="font-family: Georgia;" size="3">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Jenny always said I had it, and after tonight I’m starting to believe her. Although maybe I don’t have <a href= "http://www.sleepapnea.org/info/index.html" target="_blank">sleep apnea</a> at all, and am writing this at 3:57 a.m. because Landon, sleeping on the big bed because he has yet another ear infection, spent a full hour head-butting me in the back approximately every three minutes. I have felt a few little gaps in my breathing over the years, usually after I’ve quaffed one sip too many of my favorite beers such as Pacifico, <a href="http://www.newbelgium.com/beers_bk.php" target="_blank">New Belgium’s 1554 Black Ale</a> Stella Artois, ...</font>

tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-03-07:2840f23a-b032-4845-993e-479ff3763542 Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-03-07T11:10:10Z 2008-03-07T11:00:00Z TO: Dear Agent and/or Editor
FROM: Dorian McClaslow (age 9 1/2)

re: many entertaining possible false memoirs available to you

Whether you already have the moniker “soon to be fired” attached to you, or it has yet to settle upon your glorious person, you have no doubt noticed recent opportunities in the exciting new genre of “false memoirs.” I have a number of works in this genre available to you for immediate granting of obscene advances, and they are sure to generate much publicity for you and/or their ultimate publishing house. Samples include:

My Game was Called Surviving: My Three Mommies from Hell
Memoirs about surviving the archetypal mommy from hell are a dime a dozen, but who can claim to have lived through three? Here I describe life with the three hellions my father married: (1) my bio-mom, who forced me to recite the 97 Fundamental Errors of Liberalism before each meal; (2) the punk-rock heiress who introduced me to the joys of the mosh pit at age three; (3) a seductive high school student whose constant humiliation of my sexual organs delayed my puberty.  Note: a companion memoir of happy American family life is ready for publication after news of this one’s falsehood is leaked.

Me & Uncle Jihadi: On the Road with Mr. b
Follows my three youthful years evading capture in the high mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan with my uncle, Mr. bin Laden—better known to me as Mr. b, which he insisted on being called. Documents his frequent binges of self-invented role-playing games, most involving characters from the novels of P.G. Wodehouse (not everyone knew he was a fan!). True to its subtitle, it possesses a rollicking Kerouacian tone imbued with the smoky flavors of Senegalese Muslim reggae. Original manuscript, once final edits are settled, can be typed out on a highly auctionable scroll of hand-made paper for authenticity.

One Year of Silence: On a Rock with a Renegade Monk
After my first mommy from hell abandoned me, I fell under the spell of a Rasputin-esque monk who founded his own brotherhood based on complete silence. This beach vacation page-turner recounts how we survived on the coast of Nova Scotia eating only the detritus of human civilization that washed ashore, learning the language of sea birds and inventing entire hieroglyphic languages each low tide, only to have them washed away by the ocean. “The fleetingness of language has never been rendered so deftly!”—as a famous writer might say in a blurb.

Two for the Head: Reinventing Myself Through Music
Growing up on the mean streets of Killadephia wasn’t easy—especially when, at age six, I got shot in the head by two bullets meant for another gang’s top assassin. But immediately upon waking from my eighteen-month coma, I discovered a new reason for living: music, particularly that which I could suddenly perform on the baritone saxophone. Though barely tall enough to reach the mouthpiece, I somehow managed to muster enough air to play this instrument that I had never even heard of before my tragic accident. And what music! Transformative not only for me but for all those who heard it, including my fellow gang-bangers—who joined me in pursuing my newfound love for music and became ambassadors of peace in the hood.

I reiterate that these are only a few of my current/possible projects. I am flexible and can write to meet perceived demand. Looking forward to your decision,

Dorian
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<font style="font-family: Georgia;" size="4">TO: Dear Agent and/or Editor<br> FROM: Dorian McClaslow (age 9 1/2)<br> <br> re: many entertaining possible false memoirs available to you<br> <br> Whether you already have the moniker “soon to be fired” attached to you, or it has yet to settle upon your glorious person, you have no doubt noticed recent opportunities in the exciting new genre of “false memoirs.” I have a number of works in this genre available to you for immediate granting of obscene advances, and they are sure to generate much publicity for you and/or their ultimate publishing house. Samples include:<br> <br> <span style="text-decoration: underline;">My Game was Called Surviving: My ...</span></font>

tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-02-28:5ae298f6-d541-432a-8c34-4a80806aa57a Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-02-28T06:14:34Z 2008-02-28T05:51:00Z     Mea culpa, my darling masses out there in the internet ether who have been wondering where I’ve been for the past month. Mea maxima culpa. But it has been dreadfully hard for me to write this blog, and not because of the usual excuses like being busy preparing to market myself when the book comes out, grading too much, having sick kids, etc.
    No. It’s because a while after my posting on January 17, “...the Idiot who Faints at his Own Wedding,” I got an email from my ex-wife that began a sweet, let-bygones-be-bygones conversation that I hope will continue.
    So you might see, dear reader, how this would blow my mind more than a little bit. My ex had been at the top of my “Do not speak to under any circumstances” list, my “person who shall not be named unless X amount of alcohol is consumed” list, for seventeen years. But all she had to do was say I’m sorry for how it ended and pretty soon we’re sending each other pictures of our respective kids. Pretty soon we’re making plans to see each other in southern Vermont when my family and I pass through this summer on the way to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
    This new development is really quite wonderful when I consider how much energy I’ve wasted over the aforementioned seventeen years in being angry at her. If I hadn’t been angry, what could I have done with all that energy? Advanced the cause of world peace, written more productively, smiled more, invented something that would eradicate a disease and/or make me perverse amounts of money, etc.
    Obviously it’s too late to think about what I might have done, since that energy is gone—wasted long ago. But how nice it is to feel like that energy doesn’t need to keep reproducing itself! To let it go and be able to wish happiness on someone I loved!
    Thus explains my absence from the blogosphere. I knew I couldn’t blog another line without getting this off my chest. I shall now commence to again regularly regale you with tales so improbable and/or true-to-life that, while reading them, you will briefly feel the firmament of heaven open before you click away to another page.
   
]]> tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-01-29:4648d9b7-799b-4e10-9a69-925ab4d3138d Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-01-29T19:07:01Z 2008-01-29T18:57:00Z     I’ve just finished reading Sascha Feinstein’s Ask Me Now: Conversations of Jazz and Literature, a full review of which will appear soon in Rain Taxi. In it I ran across the names of two writers I met long ago, both of whom have since died—which I didn’t know until I read about it. The mention of these names got me thinking about the old days when I wanted to be a gypsy/bohemian/troubadour, living footloose off the opportunities my traveling, Beatnik-y life gave me. And it got me thinking about why I never tried that kind of life, or at least not with full gusto, and what I’ve missed by not doing so.
    First stop: 1992 or so. I found myself in Los Angeles, working grunt jobs in film production or accounts payable (which was worse?) while trying to sell my screenplays. My social life centered on the poetry reading scene, and I read my stuff all over town three or four nights a week. My closest buddies were part of a great bohemian party scene centered at the sadly-deceased Onyx Cafe in Los Feliz and a house at 1428 Nadeau Street, where lived a dynamic poet named Eric Brown with his manic energy and endless well of poems. Shit, this guy could write. Totally freely, too. Anyway I hung around with them, trying unsuccessfully to pick up on the bohemian girls who thought I was way too square (and were probably right, since I had an MFA by then and was trying to sell screenplays, after all). We read at laundromats and on the train to Long Beach once, two poets to a car. We put on a pageant to celebrate the end of the Year of the Monkey in an ex-factory downtown that had been abandoned after the Rodney King riots of 1991, and exulted when the fire department shut it down.
    Absolute heaven for Bukowski-wannabes, which we all were to some extent. I thought I could make it with that crowd, thought I could suppress the MFA and he desire for stability and the desire for a girlfriend who only did drugs occasionally for fun, rather than constantly out of an unquenchable emotional need she didn’t understand. 
    But then came the day that Jack Micheline (1929-1998) showed up at 1428 Nadeau Street, crashing at the house en route from one place to another. He apparently lived out of a small, ancient-looking suitcase—which I remember quite vividly (though probably wrongly) as yellowish-beige with small red and black stripes on either side. It contained a few clothes and a many manuscripts. He had bad teeth and gums and looked like he drank too much. Hey, just being honest here. No need to sugar-coat the fact that the gypsy/bohemian/troubadour life is hard on the body. I remember watching him move, sitting next to him on the couch and chatting with him (drunkenly—no memory left of actual details), and realizing THERE IS NO WAY I CAN LIVE THIS LIFE WHAT AM I DOING HERE GET ME OUT OF MY FANTASY NOW.
    At a certain point in the evening Jack Micheline read from those manuscripts in the suitcase, and he was dynamite. He put everything into his words in a way I only dreamed of. I asked myself if I had the balls to live the life he did, to sacrifice my teeth and my stability for my art, and the answer was definitely no.
    The boho girls were right. Too square. Within a few months I had moved back to Colorado and started looking for a real job.

    Next stop: 1996 or so. I found myself in Paris with a night to kill before my flight left from DeGaulle in the morning. I’d heard from an older writer friend, Ronald Sukenick (1932-2004), about a weekly gathering at the 14th Arrondisement (I think) home of a man whose name I can’t remember now. If you paid his cover charge, you got to hang out with a bunch of literary types and eat as much food drink as much red wine as you could handle. A salon of sorts. So I showed up, introduced myself to the host, and went looking for the only other frequenter of the salon that Ron told me about whose name I recognized: the poet, musician, painter, and former Charlie Parker roommate Ted Joans (1928-2003). Ted wasn’t hard to find because he was one of only three black men at the party, and the only one over fifty. I laid in wait for him until he went back to the buffet table to get some more food, then introduced myself and said Ron Sukenick sent me.
    “Did he say I was the Black Surrealist?” asked Ted.
    “Yup.”
    We shook hands, and I had officially met Ted Joans. One of the last surviving Surrealists, one of the last surviving Beats. Definitely the very last survivor of his own unique kind.
    We talked for awhile, until it’s somebody else’s turn with him, about his writings (which I just barely knew, thanks to a last-minute cram in anticipation of meeting him in Paris) and his travels. He’d been all over the world, it seemed, and moved around it with a casualness that I, as one who had aspired to the bohemian life for so long, envied. He had met everyone. He lived his art, breathed his art. He wanted me to tell Ron that he’d be glad to come out to Colorado and do a reading the next time he was in the States, provided we could pay him well enough.
    It should have been a disillusioning moment for me—not about Ted, since I had no illusions about him whatsoever, but about myself and my bohemian dreams. By that time, though, I had already lost some of my yen for the bohemian life. My pangs for lure of the road felt more like an echo to me, and left me slowly (just as did my desire to live in Manhattan after growing up in its shadow). I knew by the time I met Ted Joans that I simply didn’t have the balls to live the way he did, so it wasn’t quite the same shocking self-realization as I experienced when I met Micheline. It was more a sensation of Yup, those LA boho girls were right.
    And they still are, I guess. I like knowing where my next paycheck is coming from, like having an institution to be part of so that people can more easily pigeonhole me when we meet. Maybe my life is all the worse for never having tried to give up my fears and follow my art the way Micheline and Joans did. Maybe my art is all the worse, too. Every once in awhile I get a vision of who I might have been had given bohemianism a serious try: poet rather then fictionist, less domesticated, less lured by the trappings of stability. I like being able to see that other self, and fear for the day when I can’t see it any longer.
    So thanks, Jack and Ted, for reminding me of it. Rest in peace, or however you’d like to rest.
]]> tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-01-17:defd885b-74bf-4a8d-b654-3fd881bf38a5 Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-01-17T21:13:08Z 2008-01-17T21:02:00Z     I stood by the inner entrance of the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in North Easton, Massachusetts, wearing the first-ever tux of my life. It was what they call an Indian Summer day in the south suburbs of Boston—mid-October, 80 degrees outside—and when I saw the minister closing the back doors to the church my entire body clamped up and said That’s not good. Then I walked up the aisle, past the four people representing my portion of the guest and the hundred-plus representing my betrothed’s, and stood by the altar waiting for her.
    The woman I speak of, by the way, is not the woman I am married to now—not the mother of my two irascible, maniacal sons. My fainting doomed my first marriage to an early end. Maybe someday I’ll write about the very juicy tales that surrounded the end of that marriage, including heavy petting with my then-wife’s girlfriend in the spacious font seat of a 1973 Buick Centurion.
    Piqued your interest, didn’t it? Like I said, maybe someday…
    At any rate I stood at the altar, waiting for my betrothed to walk past her family and friends and all the people she grew up with. And I sweated like a pig in my wool  tux, tugged at the collar for air, air. Couldn’t get any, because the church was full and the doors were closed and Why was I marrying this woman anyway? And on top of that I had made the mistake of sleeping the previous night—after flying up from Florida, where I attended grad school—in my future in-law’s house, which was home to a 13-year-old dog and a 17-year-old cat. That’s a lot of animal dander, to which I am quite allergic, and in preparation for it I had brought along a wide variety of antihistamines.
    I took several of them the night before but still woke up sniffling. And hell if I was going to sniffle my way through my own wedding! I took a bunch more in the morning, then a bunch more before the ceremony. One of them—given me by my best and oldest friend, M________, who had flown in from Colorado to see me get hitched—was called Seldane, and the FDA eventually pulled it from the market as unsafe for the liver or heart or some other important bodily organ.
     (M_______, I hope as you read this that you realize I bear you no ill will for what happened. We’ve discussed this before, right? Laughed about it? You and the Seldane you gave me were part of the infernal machinery of fate, just one piece of the perfect storm of heat, antihistamine overdose, and unadulterated anxiety about marrying my betrothed that ended in my wedding-day unconsciousness. To this day I thank you for your small contribution to it. Think how much happier I am now than I might have been with her!)
    So my betrothed reached the altar and our ceremony began in earnest. My older brother Tom, my best man, gave me funny looks as I started to sway a little—maybe rock would be the better word, because my weight shifted back and forth from my heels to my toes. People told me, later on, that I looked like I was moving to the rhythm of the minister’s voice. I kept rocking, too stupid to grab Tom’s elbow, and right before the vows began I fell backward, straight as a tree falling in a forest.
    And I even remember thinking about that question: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” Of course it does, I knew as I hit the floor. What a stupid question! Months later I heard a tape of the wedding, and the fall sounded absolutely thunderous. You could actually distinguish the found of my body hitting the floor from that of my head hitting the floor.
    Even more impressive were the gasps from the pews. Talk about shock and awe!
    Seconds later I regained consciousness, pulled of my tux jacket, stood, and shoved my arms in the air like I had just scored a game-winning touchdown. The guests who had been gasping began to cheer (which was also great to hear on the tape, and quite vindicating). Tom took hold of my elbow to keep me steady, the minister opened the doors as I asked him to, and we went on with the ceremony as if nothing had happened. Afterwards, in the receiving line and at the reception, people from my betrothed’s family who had never met me hugged me and slapped my back. “What an icebreaker!” a few of them said, or words to that effect. They thought I had spunk, though it was clear that my then-wife would never, ever forgive me. I put my best face forward, laughed more than I had to, drank too much, and put on a less-than-stellar performance in bed on my first night as a married man.
    A few days later we moved to Florida and everything started to unravel. My then-wife sometimes dreamed that we weren’t really married, that the marriage “didn’t take,” and it’s hard for me to imagine that my fainting didn’t have something to do with it. In truth, we weren’t supposed to be with each other in the first place. We’d gotten together too young, given up our virginity to each other, and stupidly believed that we could go to the afterlife having slept with only one person in our entire lives. At least I believed that—you’ll have to check with my ex for her side of the story.
    I must have learned some lessons from my fainting experience, but I’ve also forgotten them. Such is the beauty of life, no? Wouldn’t it be terrible if we had to remember all the lessons we’ve learned? Then we’d never have the pleasure of making the same mistakes all over again, or the equal pleasure of being able to flog ourselves over them. I, for one, couldn’t handle a life like that at all.
    Vive the river Lethe. All hail.
]]> tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-01-12:ca6b5861-f2f5-49af-93b7-cd459d1fe94c Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-01-12T20:42:00Z 2008-01-12T20:37:00Z     “Cut me some slack,” I wanted to tell my wife as she chastised me for waking up at 4:00 a.m. and angrily eating half a box of cereal. “My father died again today.”
    But she never came downstairs to give me a hard time, so I had to yell at myself instead. It’s this way every year, even thirty-three years after the act, though there’s no earthly reason why. It ruins Christmas, ruins New Year’s Eve and Day. Ruins my vacation from teaching. The whole holiday season is basically a run-up to January 10, when I wake up feeling like crap and re-live the creation of the gaping, stupefying hole in my life created by my dad’s death when I was ten.
    I should be over it by now, right? I’ve lived three times longer without a father than I ever did with one, so it shouldn’t be such a big deal. But once the hole is there, it’s always there; it will always seek ways to remind you of itself, and you will always seek ways to remind yourself of it.
    So I guess that’s what’s different about the 33rd deathiversary as opposed to the 32nd, and other previous ones. Every year I get grumpy starting about January 7—my father’s death took awhile, as he had a stroke and lay in a coma for about three days while his family waited for him to miraculously recover or die—and don’t really notice until the 9th or so, when I realize that “Oh yeah, tomorrow’s the day.” Then I’ll get sullen and quiet and extra-grouchy, sitting around and thinking a lot. Wondering why the feeling still hits me [italics important] this time of year.
    But deathiversary #33 is different. It’s shaping up to be the one that helps me recognize and embrace my own agency in letting this feeling return, even encouraging it on a subconscious, lizard-brain level. Because it’s not as if that feeling of missing my father exists in the external world like some kind of asteroid that periodically rotates around the sun of my consciousness and hits me [italics important]; clearly that feeling exists in my synapses, in the linguistic and habitual constructs that make up my psyche. I have to own the fact that I invite the feeling into my heart every year and embrace it, despite the fact that it makes me feel like crap for a few weeks.
    And apparently doesn’t do much good for the people around me, either.
    So the question becomes: why am I clinging to this misery and what is it supposed to be going for me? Is it simply habit? Have I been mourning for so long that I don’t know anything else to do this time of year? Mere self-pity? A routine that I’ve gone through so many times that the pain and sadness actually bring me comfort?
    Hard to say. It may all be working itself out right now in the novel I’m working on, which I won’t say the name of because I might jinx it (and because I might change it). But I suspect that I don’t really want to know my reasonings for this ritual remembering, this ritual misery, because I don’t want to get too greedy about trying to solve the mystery of myself. I like a little mystery in myself the way I used to like mystery in lovers, and not like some mystery in my family.
    But even as I write this down, it feels pathological—an excuse to keep clinging to the particular misery which defines me because I know that if I stopped clinging to the misery I would either (a) have nothing to define me, or (b) have to find completely new things to define me that would require an absolute change in my being.
    And who really wants to go through that?
    Sometimes I think that January 10 is my opportunity to molt, to go through that absolute change. And yet I cling to the old self, the sad, perpetually mourning self, despite whatever opportunity I have. Maybe January 10 really is an asteroid that comes around every year, and I’m just too scared to jump onto it.
    Round and round I go. Spinning in circles. Making new knots as I finally develop a strategy to un-knot the old ones.
    The mysteries of the cavernous human mind/soul/spirit. Best left unfathomed because the fathomers might get lost. Might enjoy all that digging, poking, and wondering so much that they never come up to see the light of day again. Like spelunkers who willingly lose themselves to the immensity of the earth’s one giant cave.
    There. Confession done. For another year, at least.

P.S.— I’ll write about my dad some more, I think. Fill in some of the blanks in this story as it now stands, such as why it really wasn’t such a bad thing that he died. But I’ll only do it when I really have to , when I’ve run out of interesting or quasi-interesting things to write about in the rest of my life. Because in all honesty, writing about my dad is like opening up the oldest, most dried-up latrine in the world, adding a ton of water, and stirring it until the stink is all-pervasive.
]]> tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-01-12:0ab7edb8-84fd-4494-b3c2-7feb7f669f34 Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-01-12T20:41:46Z 2008-01-12T20:35:00Z     The hiker from Georgia, found dead this week in the woods: decapitated.
    Another woman found last month in Florida: decapitated, possibly by the same man.
    The Detroit man found dead in Detroit last November: decapitated, apparently by two teenagers seeking a thrill-kill.
    Someone who can’t sleep at 3:00 a.m.—particularly someone who has always been described as having an “overactive imagination,” and one who seeks to make sense of a nonsensical world simply to feel more at ease with it, might ask the question: what does this say about us? Americans? The human species? 
    Maybe some astologer/alchemist/Freudian literary critic type can clarify this for me, but it seems that there’s got to be some symbology at work in the decapitation of another human being. It means something in life, the way it would mean something in literature or film. But I wonder if symbolism is even necessary. The separation of the head from the body doesn’t need to symbolize anything more than the separation of the head from the body in order to make sense in our present human culture.
    Because there’s an awful lot of separation of the head from the body going on these days. Me, for instance, right now, stewing about decapitation and clicking little buttons on a computer keyboard when I could be doing tai chi and firming up the connection between my mind and my body. You, wherever you are and whenever you are, reading this instead of kissing the person you love, pulling the weeds, doing the laundry—whatever it is that I’m helping you to avoid doing.
    It’s all over the place, this separation, and the nut jobs who are doing it in actual reality to other human bodies are simply our warning sign that the separation has reached a crisis point. The decapitators are lashing out, foisting upon others the grim sensation that they feel in their own beings. They are the canaries in the coal mine, unwittingly crying out that This has gone far enough.
    If they could decapitate themselves, I bet they probably would. It would be the ultimate statement about what ails them, and us.
    Us, I say. The world, the species, the Zeitgeist.
]]> tag:blog.stevenwingate.com,2008-01-11:74d93524-4582-445e-a2f1-4c54b2535f78 Steven Wingate stevenwingate@mac.com 2008-01-12T00:08:29Z 2008-01-11T22:13:00Z “We should go to the theatre as we go to watch football, boxing, or tennis. Indeed, a sporting match gives us the most exact idea of what the theatre is in its purest state: live antagonism, conflict, the motiveless clash of opposing wills.”
               Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes

Ionesco was right, and here’s how I know for certain. Last Saturday I got some bad news: I had failed to get the job at R_______________ in C__________, a gig I really wanted in a city I much desire to live in. I sat at the computer, checking email obsessively as I had been for the past week, when a new one came from my prospective future boss. Jen (that’s my wife) looked over my shoulder, carrying Landon (that’s baby #2) as I pumped my fist and clicked it open. Despite your qualifications we are sorry that... sure a candidate like you will have other offers….

What’s a guy to do after that? Ten years ago I might have gotten shitfaced at a bar with the guys, but ten years ago I never would have gotten a whiff of a job like this. And now the guys, with a few exceptions, have kids like me and are unlikely to rush out to a bar under any but the most carefully planned circumstances. Fortunately for me it was NFL Wild Card Weekend, and I managed to catch the second half of the Steelers/Jaguars game with a couple beers in my fridge. A great game. Comebacks. Counter-comebacks. Great plays galore. Scintillating moments of elemental human drama in which individuals transcended their circumstance, established their true identity, justified all the effort they put into becoming themselves, and stepped forward as leaders.

Sounds like Schindler’s List, doesn’t it? Or even Shrek the Third? But it was real, and it unfolded with a drama that would have felt forced coming from even our finest dramatists. I won’t go so far as to say that there’s a lot for writers/artists to learn from sports, but I will say that they both speak to the same elemental energies within us. I get the same visceral thrill from reading the great passage in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary where Charles Bovary botches an amputation as I do when I watch a tight end make a one-handed grab in the end zone. A beautifully executed two-on-one in hockey (my sport for almost thirty years, until my body broke down) can fill me with the same breathless sense of beauty as the arias from Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3.

Do I exaggerate? Maybe a tad. But the same emotional organs—and yes, I’m intentionally referencing the Homeric thumos and phrenes here—that allow us to receive and appreciate a well-turned artistic narrative are at work when we appreciate a competitive athletic event. This is because a good game is a well-turned narrative—it just happens to be a narrative turned live, as we watch it, by those participating in it, whereas the artistic narrative is turned by the force of someone one who, we hope, has assimilated many great narratives over the course of his or her life.

So why, in the face of this fundamental similarity, did my sports buddies never want to go see art films? Why couldn’t I get my artsy buddies over to watch the Super Bowl? Somewhere along the line, Homo sapiens has created a division between these spheres: all the jocks keep away from the weirdo, over-sensitive artsy types, and all the artsy types keep away from the Neanderthal-ish, unimaginative jocks. And I give credit to the species, rather than to that bogeyman known as Western Culture, because I can’t imagine the situation being any different in ancient Greece or Phoenicia or Sumer than it is today.

But if we think about the nature of the narrative experience in both art and sports—especially in the way that we perceive them as spectators—we’ll see that this distinction is useless and counterproductive. When you watch a movie and nothing happens for half an hour, you pop it out of the DVD player. After you give a novel a hundred or so pages and decide that you’re bored with it, you put it away. If you watch your favorite team on TV and they’re losing—or winning—43-0 halfway through the game, you quickly find other things to do. That’s because in each case the conflict, the will, and the antagonism that Ionesco talks about have been drained from the narrative, rendering it ineffectual. I would go so far as to say that narrative’s function is to work our thumos and phrenes, our emotional organs, and that if it does not do so then it will never succeed as narrative.

Surely some scholar has dug into this, and written about it with great erudition. Where are you, scholar? Can you tell me why I’m feeling the way I’m feeling? Are there others like me out there?

P.S. — In all my years of being into art and sports, I’ve only met one person who could see the elemental connection between them the way I do: Mark McNulty, my old hockey buddy from Boulder, Colorado, who once saw a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea in my hockey bag and started a conversation about it. He read two of my early novels and wrote notes on them. He could talk Camus. He could talk Kafka. Last I heard, Mark was in Iraq. Hey Mark, if you’re out there in the desert Googling yourself and come upon this, email me so I know you’re alive. I call your folks’ house every once in a while to check, you know.
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