Caught

In a maelstrom, that is. Ten more days until comprehensive exams. Forty-one more days til a Master's degree. Thirty-eight more days until my mother arrives for two weeks. She'll probably bring me fluffy socks and try to iron everything in my closet. But that's a whole other story.

I fell asleep on my books today. Didn't get home last night until midnight, after a 30-inch story on deadline. This kind of exhaustion like nothing I've ever known. It's been my life for a year and a half.

I remember when I started this journey. Now I'm about to end it. And the once taken-for-granted gifts of sleep and time will be mine again.

Waiting

"Look," he says, "how the night follows us home."

In the mirror, I see it: fierce fading light in the moving distance. Our fingers thread like Christmas lights and so the day ends. And another will begin. Some tomorrows you cannot escape.

Good hair

Posting a little late--we ran this Oct. 20--but here's my Accent advance on Chris Rock's documentary, Good Hair, which launched nationwide Oct. 23.

What Is 'Good' Hair?
Black community debates controversial, expensive topic

I first heard about "good hair" in college. And apparently I had it.

Frizzy curls that I paid little attention to. I'd wake up, fluff and run. Or roll a bun and be done. But the "good" hair thing? That was new.

I grew up in Trinidad, where cultural and ethnic blending is a fine, taken-for-granted art. My curls came from an East Indian mother and a black father, mostly.

My concept of hair was that it was beautiful regardless of shade, texture or style.

But being at a historically black college in the heart of a thriving black community taught me that not everyone felt the same way.

In his man-on-the-street documentary "Good Hair" -- which snagged a special jury prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival -- comedian Chris Rock takes on what many in the black community see as a taboo topic.

He visits beauty salons, hair shows and even science labs in an irreverent yet socially conscious exploration of how hair affects the community's self-esteem, finances and relationships.

His impromptu interview subjects talk about everything from touching a black woman's hair to "creamy crack," as often-pricey hair relaxers are called in jest.

Rock's motivation for the Jeff Stilson-directed flick? An off-handed question from his daughter on why she didn't have "good" hair.

Read the rest.

Photo of yours truly from The News-Journal by Sean McNeil

Only a thing

"You could compare a certain kind of love affair to a car wreck. You don't expect it, and yet when it does happen it seems somehow inevitable—even overdue. There is the status quo, and then its interruption; a pattern, then variation."
- Antonya Nelson in Only a Thing


If you read nothing else this weekend, read Nelson's Only a Thing.



Photo by Monalyn Garcia from Corbis

All the words

To be read on a bench.

I can never not stumble upon and wander into used bookstores. On street corners. Under buildings. Off snow-slicked sidewalks.

Here: wooden spice bottles for sale amid the cookbooks; a $3 decorative, glittering pear; stained bottles one would expect to find with messages in the salt spray; tiny tea sets; old children's desks; amber-handled, greening copper tea pots with the architecture books.

Books, books, books. Books everywhere. Books and mermaids. The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké.

Ella. Ella and the Duke. A bookstore with a soundtrack. The Very Thought of You: How I know all the words.

Pastiche

In the past three months, I've read more than I've read in a year. Not the feet-high stacks of research articles: communication theories and qualitative studies and advertising (those don't count). And not because I don't love to read--I do--simply that time for things that once brought me pleasure (other than CSI) is almost non-existent.

And so, between the meetings and deadlines and few-hundred-miles-on-the-roads days, I've been reading novels and writing guides. I lug them around in the car in case the day grants me a spare moment. In carry-on luggage to pass the time in airports and in planes not spent sleeping. Half a novel a week--sometimes a whole book (it depends on the length)--and a few essays. Not the two or three chapters of research articles (those don't count).

Baxter and Root and McCullers and Krauss and Calvino and Auster and Covington and Kincaid.

Funny that I've learned more about writing from reading their prose and Baxter and Root's essays--thrown on the side like fries--than in a workshop. Like I learned to write like a journalist as an undergraduate PR student by reading the newspapers and pretending I knew what I was doing. (The first story I ever did: it was about a roving Vietnam Wall exhibit (I think I was 20) ran in the Orlando Sentinel. You cannot imagine the pressure; I cannot imagine the editor's grief, working through my words, crafting a too-long piece into something suitable for print. She later said the writing base was there; the craft I'd come to learn on my own reading newspapers and finally knowing what I was doing.)

And so I read half a novel a week--sometimes a whole book (it depends on the length)--and I wonder if I'm teaching myself to write in other ways again. I read with a yellow highlighter and a blue pen, mark the passages and turns-of-phrase that make me pause (White: "And in the east beyond the lilac and beyond the barn and beyond the bay and behind the deepening hills, in slow and splendid surprise, rise the bomber's moon.") Also, highlight mentions of books that probably should be read.

And sometimes I'll read something that, when the passage is past, I'll exhale and realize I'd stopped breathing.

Anne Dillard in Holy the Firm. The narrator is camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains, reading the poet Rimbaud's biography, when she sees the death of a moth in the candle by which she's reading.

"She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning--only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet."

Exhale.


Photo by Doug Landreth from Corbis

Solitude

"If there is a voice of truth--assuming there is such a thing as truth, and assuming this truth can speak--it comes from the mouth of a woman."- Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude

In the long tunnel of endless night

I cannot be without you,
and will always be beside you,
in body, in mind, in spirit, in love.
Undeniable love.
Even in the middle of the night.

Late at night, only two lamps burn. Sometimes the TV, for sleep's sake.

My space has become a Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment. A living cumulative essay.

The kitchen in boxes in the living room; disorder defining management's futile attempt to rid us of tiny roaches. (No time yet to unpack.) Research articles: assigned and printed for the coming week's Advertising class; found and printed for the final paper. Book stacks. Water bill. A food-stained syllabus. Sample graduation invitations. Police reports.

A traffic citation. A copy of a story that ran last week reminds me that a critical e-mail or two still haven't been answered. Maybe the 12-page essay due in prose can be about another story that ran a few months ago, can juxtapose the chase, the development, my involvement, the source's ultimate insult and betrayal?

Nothing is linear anymore. Everything flows into the next.

I move the heavy lion from the shelf against the red wall to the book shelf on the opposite end of the couch. And smell it along the way. It smells like nothing. And then the phone rings.


Photo of the lioness on a hummock from Corbis

Indelible tics

"When I first started, I thought it would come spontaneously, in a trance-like outpouring. So great was my need to write that I thought the story would be written by itself. But the words have come very slowly so far. Even on the best days I have not been able to write more than a page or two. I seem to be afflicted, cursed by some failure of mind to concentrate on what I am doing. Again and again I have watched my thoughts trail off from the thing in front of me. No sooner have I thought one thing than it evokes another thing, until there is an accumulation of detail so dense that I feel I am going to suffocate. Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing. For the past few days, in fact, I have begun to feel like the story I am trying to tell is somehow incompatible with language, that the degree to which it resists language is an exact measure of how close I have come to saying something important, and that when the moment arrives for me to say the one truly important thing (assuming it exists), I will not be able to say it."
- Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude

Photo by Robert Essel NYC from Corbis

Speak easy

He appears from behind the bar, grey waistcoat and scruffy beard. Like a jazz musician whose real work isn't here.

"I heard you're trying to go Upstairs," he says. We nod.

"There are two seats waiting for you at the bar if you go now," he says. "Just call first."

We saunter over to the vault-like door, schoolgirls with a secret. She picks up the phone. Where it rings we cannot hear. In five seconds, the door unclicks and we're in.

The wooden stairs and walls are rustic, the hallways lined with nude black and whites. Upstairs, static tunes tumble from an invisible phonograph.

Another waistcoated bartender says our wish is his command. Anything my lady has a thirst for? Yes. He mixes a frothy Armaretto concoction and watches as I sip, walks away only when I nod in appreciation.

She and I spend the evening curled on bar stools, staring at antique liquor bottles. People come and go, talking of Michaelangelo. Friends stay.

We move to big, straight-backed chairs in the corner, sip each other's drinks and talk about journalism and sexuality.

When we leave, the patrons downstairs watch with curiosity as we emerge from the metal door. Outside, Seattle is cold, but the ginger keeps me warm.

Salvation

"There are moments when you stand on the brink of a new experience and understand that you have no choice about it. Either you walk into the experience or you turn away from it, but you know that no matter what you choose, you will have altered your life in a permanent way. Either way, there will be consequences."
- Dennis Covington in Salvation on Sand Mountain


Photo by Angelo Cavalli from Corbis

Shoe fetish

"The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it."
- Neal Stephenson

Wordsmith memorials

"I'm done with journalism," she says. And just like that, a chapter in a prolific book is closed.

Just like that, journalism has lost another True Writer. A victim of the Anti-Industry-Revolutionists, the Wait-And-Sees, the Changing Ad Platform and Lack of Response, the Economy. The Excuses. Politics. Bad Decisions.

She gives me her boxes of plastic forks and spoons, a package of patterned paper napkins. To another reporter, The Oversized Bottle of Ketchup. We used to laugh at that ketchup. Today, no one laughs. The writer passes the bottle onto me.

"I have something for you," I tell her editor.

He takes The Oversized Bottle of Ketchup wordlessly with a sad, wry smile and finds a clear spot on his semi-cluttered desk. Like a roadside memorial. Like a trophy.

We will not forget the souls of the True Writers who suffered in The Storm.


Photo by Bernd Vogel from Corbis

Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life

The days fall away in words and books and minutes and lies. A neighbor makes his leaden way up the wooden stairs.

Slowly and, sometimes, not so slowly, the things begin to gather in piles around this living space: unopened mail and ambitious syllabi, groceries still bagged, a carboard toolbox, bracelets, sour fruit. A whole lot of Been-Meaning-To's.

And so the days fall away in words and books. A blink: Thirty minutes gone in their reading. The newsroom, a black hole. Hours go by whipping through e-mails and messages and stories and interviews and pictures and deadlines. A meeting at 9 a.m. A meeting in 45 minutes. Reminders to remember the next. The open road, a fearful, exhilerating, weighty place. Conquered, night after night.

Always seeking. Still ticking. Tomorrow, another day to finish today's unfinished. Another day to let your voice, your memory, guide me through the moments we forget to stop to breathe.

We do enough so that chosen freedom, carefully crafted, selected, is devoid of guilt. Inactivity's productivity. We remember to stop to breathe.


Photo of Maasai Warrior with Spear by Hugh Sitton from Corbis

Entry title from Grace Paley's Conversation with My Father

Truths miscalled lies

“The morning after, you can say, “Mistakes were made,” but with the people I’ve known, a phrase like “Mistakes were made” won’t even buy you a cup of coffee. There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, “Mistakes were made,” you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel. When you say, “I fucked up,” the action retains its meaning, its sordid origin, its obscenity, and its poetry. Poetry is quite compatible with obscenity.”
- Charles Baxter in Dysfunctional Narratives


The disorder of pots and dishes in the cupboards was covered in a thin film of dust, sticky to the touch, poorly washed and hastily stacked away.

Sometimes the church women came and fried fish and he’d freeze the leftovers in the ice box, he said. It’d been six years since his wife passed, he said, six years. His mama taught him to cook so he could eat when his wife got angry, he said. She seldom cooked and cleaned after the wedding, he said. Sometimes it got lonely, he said.

The girl fumbled her way around the unfamiliar kitchen, improvising bowls and containers, seldom used, now carefully washed. When she ran the water, the smell of the sewer rose. His speech was garbled and when she didn’t understand, she smiled anyway. He did most of the talking. You should be one of those fashion models, he said.

He hadn't eaten rice in more than 50 years and couldn't tell her why. But he ate hers. When the food was done, she cleaned the countertops and stacked the spices away. Her mama raised her right, he said. She arranged the food on his plate and handed him the meal with a fork and Diet Coke. Diet Coke was all he drank, he said. That and water and Gatorade.

In the dining room, she sat across from him, though he left the head of the table empty. She finished first and took her plate to the kitchen. Leave the dishes, he said. She had to leave, she said. Put the food in the fridge when it cools and don’t forget to share, she said.

She grabbed her bag of spices and a bottle of ketchup; he grabbed two bags. And then he said her name.

She turned to face him and the air in the dusty kitchen changed. What she saw was no longer a man of God, just a man, a tired, old one, lonely and desperate, laden with grocery bags.

At the car, when they leaned forward to touch collarbones, she was careful not to press her body against his. He’d lost his right to an embrace.

On the way home, she thought about that moment in the kitchen again and again. Anger balanced with pity. Now everything she thought she knew and everything she’d written about him had become lies.


Photo by Jack Delano, circa 1941, from Corbis