What Are They Reading in 1960?

The contents of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books for Winter 1961, when Eisenhower gave way to Kennedy:

A. The Light in the Piazza, by Elizabeth Spencer (1921- ), a literary bestseller by a genteel Southern quarterly doyenne, author of 38 books, five-time O. Henry Award recipient.

The Reader's Digest intro says, “This is a story of how the sensual beauty and warm summer sun of Florence worked their strange alchemy in the life of a lovely American girl – a story to which each reader will imagine his own sequel.”

I love the “his own sequel.” Ninety percent of the audience must have been female.

The opening sentence:

“On a June afternoon at sunset, an American woman and her daughter fended their way along a crowded street in Florence and entered with relief the spacious Piazza del Signoria.”

In other words, the nth dilution of Henry James’ Daisy Miller.

“This little book is a gem…one of the four best novels of 1960.” Orville Prescott, New York Time

But scoffers beware! This book was made into a 1962 movie (Olivia de Havilland-Rossano Brazzi-Yvette Mimieux-George Hamilton) and a well-received, innovative 2005 musical that ran for 504 performances at Lincoln Center and is regularly performed around the world, sometimes in opera houses.

B. Half Angel, by Barbara Jefferis. Lonely young Australian boy finds a mysterious cat with a jeweled collar. Problems arise! I never heard of it, though this was the height of my passion for the New York Times Book Review: I was eight.

C. A Sense of Values, by Sloan Wilson, author of the iconic 1950's executive-suite novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (reprinted in 2002 with a foreword by Jonathan Franzen)and A Summer Place, both hit movies (Gregory Peck-Jennifer Jones, Ricard Egan-Dorothy McGuire), the latter the provenance of the great song "Theme from A Summer Place." A well-known cartoonist (good choice!) grapples with the problems of success, a cold wife, a troubled son, inherited “melancholia” (a much better word for it than what we use now), and alcoholism. Flashbacks to noncombat WWII. Readably written in an intelligent middlebrow style that appeals to Connecticut residents who wish Salinger were more prolific, and which, lamentably, isn’t seen much anymore on the bestseller lists. Contains a lecture by the protagonist’s wise mentor on the dangers of success -– not original but a knowledgeable summary. Undoubtedly Wilson needed to write this after his big bestseller.

Random sentence: “Before going to New Haven that fall, I stopped at the sanitarium and visited my mother.”

D. "Warpath" “A crucial episode from Kenneth Roberts' monumental novel of Colonial history, Northwest Passage….Kenneth Roberts brings alive a little-known incident from the American past in a manner that makes it vital and exciting reading for today.”

This was an oldie even then, first published 1937, source for the 1940 movie with Spencer Tracy and for...yes, the 1958-1959 Buddy Ebsen NBC series (the latter must be why they republished it in 1960). During his lifetime Roberts (“for some time after graduating from Cornell in 1903…not until 1928 did he begin to write the great historical novels which won him a lasting fame…”) received five honorary doctorates and a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize committee “for his historical novels which have long contributed to the creation of greater interest in our early American history.”

Sample sentence: “’I’ve often seen you,’ the man said, swallowing.”

C. Marnie, by Winston Graham: source for the 1964 Hitchcock movie, by the author of forty novels including the Poldark series, which was made into a hit BBC series. When you’ve got the touch, you’ve got the touch.

From the intro:

“What were the compelling forces that drove twenty-three-year-old Marnie Elmer from job to job, changing her identity each time….From the first moment his saw this strange and beautiful girl, Mark Rutland was intrigued. When her secret burst upon him with the impact of a thunderbolt, he could not follow the dictates of reason…. How Mark leads Marnie to find the key to the inner prison in which she has locked herself makes a taut, exciting story, full of suspense and sharp compassion.”

Sorry, you’re still not hitting the male audience. But to your credit, you don’t use “impact” as a verb. Today they’d write, “When her secret impacted him like a thunderbolt…” And that’s the sum total of the development of American literacy in forty-nine years.

This volume of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, one of ten on the café shelves, contains by far the most enduring novels in the group.

A Lifetime's Reading

I'm entering the time of life when you want to spend more time with your loved ones. And so I want to reread Resurrection, Crime and Punishment, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, Orlando, Emma, Tom Jones, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Dombey and Son...and I'll get to Shakespeare's histories and Bartholomew Fair, and I'll go further in Chaucer...and when I reread A Moveable Feast I'll kiss the pages, and then I'll read Chekhov's "The Peasants" and "In the Ravine" continually, as we're told to pray continually.

That's What the Simple Folk Do

This rain reminds me of the Northeast, an old-fashioned all-day soak with no lightning-and-thunder drama, no floods, no power outages. I’m letting cars pass me –- this is new –- and somehow through ignorance I end up in the thick traffic to the Austin City Limits Music Festival. But I smile, it’s a Saturday of no plans. Wet couples and small groups, mostly in their twenties and thirties, walk straggly-haired across the bridge over the Colorado, and it surprises me how many of the young women are wearing skirts or dresses; it reminds me of when we went back to Ann Arbor in 1976 and found that, during the three-year interval since graduation, coeds had started putting on makeup and wearing skirts again.

I’m going shopping –- strange. So this is how people spend their Saturdays! I’m buying gifts for my hosts for my forthcoming foreign stay: two children’s Texas Longhorns T-shirts in burnt orange, and two gospel CDs, one of black music and one of white. (That’s America.) Do they have a CD player at their home? I’m betting yes; after all, they’re not in the bush. Then I drive from bookstore to bookstore looking for a copy of the Constance Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment -– the Roman Polanski uproar has made me want to reread it, but I doubt if Roman’s going to find redemption in the arms of a saintly whore in the end –- and the third store I try has one used copy, with decent-size print no less.

Four o’clock and I haven’t eaten since breakfast -– this is new too -- so I swing by the Cajun saloon-restaurant, imagining fried oysters. The small parking lot is full as always but a space opens right at the front door, and I start toward it, but by the time I begin guiding my slow turn there’s a big beer-bellied man standing in the way, slurping from a 32-ounce Styrofoam of soda pop. I wait for him to see me -– he doesn’t move –- he’s standing smack between the white lines -- I extend my arm to show I want to get through -- he slurps, doesn’t move. He’s wearing a purple LSU T-shirt: this bar’s the Louisiana sports headquarters of Austin and today’s game day, the place is packed with his type. I wait, he slurps. Shaking my head, I go into reverse and, before pulling away, draw up beside him and roll down my window and say with a smile, “Thanks, you’re a prince.” How I’ve mellowed! As I’m driving away it dawns on me he’s not absolutely being a prick, he’s saving the space for a friend. I can identify, which makes it -- does it? -- all right.

To the fancy supermarket in the heavy rain -– plastic bags today, not paper! –- and I nosh on free samples to tide me over till home. I skip the pears and the avocados, they’re hard as rocks despite the loyal service workers slicing them into quarter-moons and the customers accepting them without a qualm -– I pick up a container of the house gumbo which is really good, and German bread to dip in it. And a large coconut macaroon half-draped in chocolate: “I think this is the best thing in the store!” the cashier says to me. One must remember they’re not flirting, they’re just being friendly.

After the gumbo I have coffee and take a nap, the perfect wakeup routine because when the nap’s over the coffee’s just taking effect, and start Philip K. Dick’s In Milton Lumky Territory -– how is it I’ve been reading him for thirty-five years and haven’t gotten to all his books yet? I’ve got two rental movies for this evening, and best of all, I’ve had time to write something of my own, even if it’s only this.

Thirteen Ways to Kill a Mockingbird

Agent 97 began seventh grade recently, and I asked him whether his English class was reading anything good. Yes, he told me, there was a poem he liked:

“’Thirteen Ways –- ‘” He twists his mouth to remember. “’Thirteen Ways to Kill a Mockingbird.’”

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is the highest-brow poem middle-schoolers can enjoy, and To Kill a Mockingbird is good-tasting cherry-flavored medicine, but “Thirteen Ways to Kill a Mockingbird” –- now there’s some practical reading.

men, men, men!

1. I’m reading a suspense novel whose front cover is a photo of a naked young male. I’m afraid someone will see.

2. Which reminds me, I want to rent Brokeback Mountain – but only for Heath Ledger’s performance, you understand.

3. I read an article somewhere about the show Mad Men, in which the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, talked about having to compromise on casting. In the case of one important role, after much painful discussion they decided to go with “the beautiful one” rather than the better actor. I leaped to the conclusion that “the beautiful one” was a woman, undoubtedly either January Jones or Christina Hendricks, but now I think it was Jon Hamm, who plays the lead role, Don Draper. They can't possibly have hired him for his acting.

heavy bag, big word, O incomparable Shade

1. I bring the whole equipage to the café: laptop with power cord and mouse, notebook for observations, notebook for The Work of Byron Katie, two pens, three books to read during computer breaks (The Divine Invasion, by Philip K. Dick; You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For: Bringing Courageous Love to Intimate Relationships, by Richard C. Schwartz; The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, by Addison and Steele. Oh, and the alternative weekly, for the movie schedules. Now which the hell do I open first?

2. I want to say that my carrying bag is edematous, but I won’t. Leave that to the literary types.

3. I got the last shady parking space in the lot!

Ender, What Do You Present As?, Bargain

1. An Asian-American guy in his twenties, lime-green preppie shirt, shorts, black-rimmed glasses, is at the last twenty pages or so of Ender's Game*, avidly turning pages while his girlfriend, across the table, works at her laptop. He's shaking his head to himself as he nears the last page. He's at the part where the generals are cheering and weeping and Ender doesn't understand why. I'm waiting for him to get up and go to the bathroom after he finishes, so I can say as he passes, "That's a hell of a book."

*Plot summary at this link contains spoiler.

2. I'm thinking of using the medical "presents as..." locution when I talk about people I encounter. "She presents as cropped blond hair, a pink thrift-shop blouse with a white lace collar, and the beginning of a pot belly." "He presents as three-day whiskers, microbrewed beer, and flipflops."

3. The guy standing at the highway intersection presents as a cardboard sign saying, "ON THE ROAD -- HUNGRY." He's about sixty, collarbone-length gray beard, dusty broken-in backpack, black baseball cap that, when he takes it off to thank me for for my dollar, reveals a bald head. "How long do you stand out here on a day like this?" I ask. It's ten-thirty in the morning and well into the 90s. He says, "I can only take it for about thirty minutes, then I go inside somewhere, get some water and something to eat. I try to get three meals a day. I go to Wendy's and get one of those dollar burgers." "A double stack! That's the best!" I say from considerable experience. Two dollars for a satisfying lunch if you're on the go and starting to shake from low blood sugar.

In writerly fashion, I imagine inviting him for a meal and paying him for his life story. My stream of consciousness rolls on as I drive away: I'm asking him how well he does in his line of work, and a bystander is asking, "What do you mean line of work?" "He works as hard as me," I say. Bystander: "But he doesn't make anything. He doesn't create wealth, he just takes." As so often happens in my fantasies, I correct an ignoramus' misconception: "He makes you feel good when you give him something. You'll go about your day in a better mood and treat people kinder. It's a bargain at one dollar. He's a teacher."

You Asked, "What's on the Clearance Rack at Half-Price Books?"

• This Book Will Get You Laid –- why aren't readers rushing to show this title at the cashier’s stand?

• Medical Abbreviations: 24,000 Conveniences at the Expense of Communications and Safety, 11th edition -– including such dread ailments as:

DWW – dynamic wall walk
RTS –- raised toilet seat
MPO -– male-pattern obesity
PMZ -– postmenopausal zest

• Business Polish Glossary -- so I’m making an ethic joke, so sue me! It's not even on Amazon -- do you realize how hard that is to achieve?

• Ultimate Tailgater’s Big 12 Handbook -- all the potential readers bought six-packs instead

• C. C. Pyle’s Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America -– the saga of the "bunion derby" -- what the publishers forgot was that their customers are people who spend most of their lives sitting comfortably in chairs

• Enola Gay: The Bombing of Hiroshima –- this book will get you laid by a sociopathic World War II veteran

• Read Between My Lines: The Musical and Life Journey of Stevie Nicks –- words fail me; and they consistently fail Stevie Nicks, too

• The Art of the Band T-Shirt -– would make a great twofer with the Stevie Nicks -- rock on!

• Ferrets for Dummies –- indispensable for “For Dummies” completists

and my favorite...I can't believe it isn't a bestseller...

• How to Tell If Your Boyfriend is the Antichrist (And If He Is, Should You Break Up with Him?) –- how to tell if your girlfriend is bad news: she’s reading this book

...but seriously, folks...

• Shakespeare's sonnets (you don't need a link for this, I hope)
• Virgil's Aeneid the high-tone new Robert Fagles translation -- however... Virgil ≠ Homer. I'd like to know how much of a bath Viking took on this one. It's the #60 seller among epic poems -- I didn't even know there were 60 epic poems.
• Pushkin: A Biography -- British of course, an award-winner by an Oxford don, it rightly sank in mid-Atlantic, for what true American cares about the greatest Russian poet?

...and one I'd really buy, if my tigers were still cubs:

• Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild

It's a Wise Child

Whenever possible I pour drops of paternal wisdom into my children’s ear canals. This time I bought Agent 97 a copy of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Teens. Skimming it, I thought that many of its lessons would be useful for adults too, one of the good ones in the series rather than the useless pablum.

97 reads down the table of contents and responds to the chapter titles:

“’Don’t Throw Up on Your Friends!’ I wasn’t going to.

“’Don’t Sweat the Breakups’ I don’t have a girlfriend.

“’Practice Mental Aikido.’” (Snorts, doesn’t deign to reply.)

“’Avoid the Words “I Know” When Someone Is Talking”’ I already know that.

“’Check Out These Odds! (The Likelihood that Everyone Will Like You)’. Everyone does like me.

“’Get Out of the Emergency Lane.’ I don’t drive.

“’Be OK With Your Bad Hair Day.’ Every day is a bad hair day for me.”

I think he’s got it!

“I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.”

I have loved this man since I was twelve, and I always will.

Contrast with another aged idol of my teens, who has a different set of values.

It's Okay to Read Stories

I'm sitting on a bench in an empty outdoor amphitheater, reading my current favorite novelist, J. G. Farrell, when from behind me comes an exclamation:

"No, that's a bad choice!"

I turn around: it's a boy of about eleven or twelve reading a paperback of Brave New World. "Oh, God!" he calls out in dismay to the characters.

I'm reassured that there's a point in reading fiction other than to study the craft or keep reality at bay.

Sunday in Alfheim

The twenty-four-hour coffeehouse dominates the little strip mall in a funky old neighborhood that was a suburb eons ago. On Sunday night it’s a yellow-lit oasis of table lamps and overheads. The parking lot’s crammed full and it isn’t even a night when the AA group next door is meeting; nor are the Earth Art store or the vintage clothing boutique still open.

The outside terrace is full: a spring night, temperature eighty degrees. Rickety unmatched tables filled with students, would-be artists, lefto activists, nonprofit staffers, fringe entrepreneurs. There’s a U-shaped wooden communal table where talkers-to-themselves sometimes congregate. A gray-haired bohemian walks up trailing two yellow mongrels who are connected by two separate chains to the same skateboard. They sit patiently outside the door, skateboard-tied, while he goes in to order coffee. Inside, one of the bathrooms is decorated with a wall-high mural of a red devil and graffiti quotations about hell, while the other contains a mural of an angel and quotations about heaven. Either gender can take its pick. Out here on the terrace, a bumper sticker pasted to the newspaper vending machine says, “Austin women don’t pee on the seat.” Is it a boast? An admonition? A regret?

I’ve wandered into Alfheim, the abode of the light elves in Norse mythology, yet another place that is not my true home. A table of them in black-yellow-red spandex outfits are chatting about their transcontinental bicycle tours: eighty-five miles a day, finishing in mid-afternoon so you can shower, relax, fix your bike. They speak with awe of people who do more challenging tours than that, people who do a hundred and twenty miles a day for thirty days and hallucinate Martians on the road. This summer my table-neighbors are planning a Britain-and-Ireland tour, and when they get a layover day in London, what wild outrageous thing are they planning to do? They’re going to see the changing of the guard.

A sixtyish guy comes up to me and starts a conversation because I’m reading Auden; he asks if I know a certain quotation that was used in a movie. Yes, I’m so knowledgeable, it’s from "Funeral Blues," the poem that begins, “Stop all the clocks.” I look it up, he’s tickled, he writes it down: “He was my North, my South, my East, my West,/ My working week and my Sunday rest/…./Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;/ For nothing now can ever come to any good.” Asks me the titles of my favorite Auden poems and writes them down too, on the top margin of the local newspaper. He comes here two or three times a week, he says.

Like everyone, he has an extraordinary life story, and I know how to extract his without giving much of mine. His has washed him up on the shores of a twenty-four-hour coffeehouse on a Sunday night, dreaming of meeting someone who reads great poetry. And wonder of wonders he’s done so, and I can’t do him any good.

Update on Old Friends

Back in the old days of 2004-2007, I happily made the acquaintance of some very good serious writers who were blogging as well as writing longer, more ambitious works. Two of them were Matt Bell and Josh Maday, young guys from Saginaw, Michigan, whose blog, Dancing on Fly Ash, offered readers a new 100-word story every day. It was an impressive exercise in fortitude, and a surprising percentage of the stories were gems. They crystallized moments of anxiety, fear, or unsettling comedy in the lives of people who were sometimes apparently like the people across the street and sometimes apparently other.

I've checked them out recently and both are still writing prolifically and well. Matt and Josh separately have been widely published in online fiction magazines and have won or been shortlisted or nominated for a number of prizes, including the Pushcart Prize for the best literature from small presses. Both have websites/blogs that are excellent portals for readers who'd like to find out what's hip in contemporary American fiction -- a subject I know little about, being innocently stuck in the premodern age. I feel like I'm taking a course in Contemporary Am Lit, when I click to Josh's or Matt's pages -- and in the good sense. On those sites you'll find reviews, excerpts, and interviews from the current literary scene, an arena filed with gifted, energetic writers you (and I) never heard of before.

On both Matt and Josh's sites you can find links to their published works and their colleagues'. Of particular interest are Matt's long story based on a 1940s news story, The Collectors, about two grown brothers in Manhattan whose obsessive hoarding -- disposophobia -- is a metaphor for the Beckettian despair at the core of many lives. On Josh's blog, Disseminating Josh Maday, you can find links to Kindle and pdf versions of Dancing on Fly Ash: One Hundred Word Stories, a best-of volume. These works deserve lots of readers.

That's one more reason I'm glad I'm back.

Guest Blogger: Chuang Tzu

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m taking a little breather today so I’ve invited one of my favorite bloggers, a beautiful guy all the way from China in 300 BC, to sit in my chair instead. I’m talking about Chuang Tzu, that awesome parable-speaker and explicator of the Tao, and if he doesn’t mind me saying so, let’s face it, he’s a lot more fun than the Old Man himself. So Chuang –- or should I call you Tzu? -– what have you got for us today? Don’t tell me it’s the one about how you dreamed you were a butterfly and then when you woke up you didn’t know if you were Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

“No, young man, I – “

Because I have to tell you, that’s like a fantastic story but we’ve all heard –

“I know. I’m sick of it myself. Been telling it for 2300 years, time to take it off the set list. No, today I’ve got ‘Owl and Phoenix.’”

Owl and Phoenix? Sounds profound. Very oriental, if you know what I mean. So the owl and the phoenix – I can do plots, listen to this – the owl and the phoenix are like hot for each other, and –

“No, this is a spiritual tale.”

Okay, we’ll give it a shot anyway. How long does it –

“It’s two tiny pages in those little Shambhala editions that you can stick into your phone pocket with room for a three-pack of Magnum Ecstasies to spare. Don’t worry, it won’t tax your attention span. The book is The Way of Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton (yeah, him). Here goes:

“Hui Tzu was Prime Minister of Liang province. He had what he believed to be inside information that Chuang Tzu coveted his post and was intriguing to supplant him. In fact, when Chuang Tzu visited Liang, the Prime Minister sent out the police to arrest him. The police searched for Chuang Tzu for three days and nights, but meanwhile he presented himself before Hui Tzu of his own accord, and said:

Have you heard about the bird
That lives in the south,
The Phoenix that never grows old?

This undying Phoenix
Rises out of the South Sea
And flies to the Sea of the North,
Never alighting

Except on certain sacred trees.
He will touch no food
But the most exquisite
Rare fruit,
Drinks only
From clearest springs.

Once an owl,
Chewing a dead rat
Already half-decayed,
Saw the Phoenix fly over,
Looked up,
And screeched with alarm,
clutching the rat to himself
In fear and dismay.

Why are you so frantic
Clinging to your ministry
And screeching at me
In dismay?”

Wow, Chuang Tzu, man, amazing. That phoenix. He’s up there, and the owl thinks he’s after his half-decayed chewed-up rat. Dude, that’s the story of my life. How did you know?

[confused] “Which one did you think you were?”

Translation

The kids –- should I keep calling them Agents 95 and 97? yes –- watered the lawn this morning, the older one wearing his favorite pants, black and peg-bottomed, with an allover print of white swords. He wears them almost every day. Their mom’s going to pick them up for Mother’s Day, and they did the lawn to pay me for paying for her present. Now they’re watching a disc of the TV series Smallville, and I’m reading Book 5 of the Iliad in a translation-in-progress by a friend of mine, who’s already sold it for big bucks to a major publisher. It’s so good and he’s so painstaking, I can only send him a few little corrections per book. For me, it’s like watching an Olympian being born from the sea.

Carlos, the Honduran guy who mows my lawn, weeded my wildflower plot and mulched my trees without my asking. I thought he was overcharging me for mowing but I see he wasn’t. We each have about twenty words of the other’s language, and we understand fine.

Everything we perceive or communicate is a translation. My eyes, optic nerves, and brain translate the lawn when I examine it to see if the Agents gave it enough water. My linear, one-dimensional words translate the multiform thoughts and physical impulses, far beyond what I can perceive, that come to life when I review the lawn-watering, which is already in the past. This written message translates my "soul," a word which is an awkward, inaccurate translation of something I barely glimpse through a distorting mirror. Translation is all we have, and it’s why Plato was right in thinking we live in a cave watching shadows on the wall. Whether there’s an ideal world or not, that’s necessarily true.

William Blake’s neighborhood, Texas radio, Indian blanket, spilled tea

While the service guys were installing the air conditioner coil, I was in the study writing a lesson on Romantic poetry for high school seniors. Blake’s neighborhood in London, Lambeth, during his ten years there “was already acquiring the characteristics of a peculiarly repellent urban slum with wretchedly built and undrained houses,” according to his biography, and with Industrial Revolution encroachments: “a stone manufactory and a wine factory, potteries and dye-works, lime kilns and blacking factories.”

Finishing a long day in the eighteenth century, I sank onto the couch to bathe deep in one of my customized radio stations, the one with Texas music. Lucinda Williams “Blue,” Tracy Chapman “Never Yours,” Neil Young “Star of Bethlehem,” Carrie Rodriguez “Never Gonna Be Your Bride” which is about Austin musicians, Eliza Gilkyson another Austinite, James McMurtry “Choctaw Bingo,” whose lyrics have the most knowing details of Oklahoma redneck life you could possibly imagine. John Prine “Angel from Montgomery,” which is one of the possibilities I might have mentioned if God had ever offered me the chance to write one song in the whole world. But there are a lot of songs in that group.

Out back, the wildflowers can’t stop blooming. For weeks it’s been deep in magenta flax, and now tall stalks of orange and red Indian blanket stand above them. In the past when I’d tried to sow wildflower seeds nothing happened, but this time I sprinkled one packet of seeds over the little plot and kept the soil moist like the directions said and the sun did the rest. Across the yard, the antique rose bush sprawls untrimmed like a teenager, pink blossoms on every twig, branches spilling over the old raw wood deck almost to the bur oak. Looking at it through the window while typing this and getting up to check the quote about Blake, I knock over the half-full mug of rooibos tea that’s on the coffee table. Fortunately the tea stain is more or less the same color as the jute rug.

That’s at least four beautiful things but I can’t help it.

How to Be Ubiquitous

The gym I go to is quite noticeably owned by Lance Armstrong. The guy is everywhere. Against one wall is one of his bicycles inside a glass case. Flanking it are blown-up news clippings, from his first childhood foot races to his cancer to his Tour de France victories, and four big signs covered with text narrating his career, their titles ranging from “In the Beginning” to “The Road Ahead.” In the men’s locker room, the first locker you see is covered not by the usual rattly metal door but by thick glass plate through which you can see a pair of Lance’s racing shoes and one of his spandex outfits. On the rear wall a huge picture of Lance in his familiar crewcut challenges you with an unflinching but not actively friendly stare, and a quote from him:

“I don’t have bad days. I have great days and good days.”

It goes on about how he’s on his ass (his word) riding his bike six hours a day: “What are you on?”

Everyone who goes to the gym is supposed to read that and be inspired to do much more than they dreamed they could, and put in their place by knowing they could never do as much as Lance.

As I write this, I’m listening to Pandora Radio on my computer, and what do you think just came up on the screen? An ad with Lance sitting in shorts and T-shirt (same crewcut, same direct quiet don’t-call-me-arrogant look), recommending that I buy an energy supplement.

I am not going to buy it.

However, I have bought a noncommercial part of his message. I don’t have bad days, I have great days and good days. I suppose it isn’t as true of me as of Lance, but I’m not going to spoil my day worrying about it.

It’s amazing that I’ve come to this. By various means, most of which I’ve discussed in this blog, I seem to have boosted my mood curve so that whereas its peaks used to be slightly above average and its troughs well below average, its peaks are now well above average and its troughs slightly below. A simple uplift, maybe a regrooving of some neural paths. I’m the same and not.

Today looks like a good day. (It’s just before noon.) I have no idea what will happen. Maybe it will be a bad day after all. I’m open to it.

Some days I recognize familiar symptoms: waking up with a sweaty sense of dread; feeling dependent on people I’m no longer in a position to be dependent on; playing movies of grievance and hostility in my head. I recognize them at the moment, and being recognized, they leave. I thank them for stopping by, and I thank them for leaving.

I think I’ll go to the gym. I usually tread the elliptical trainer, but when I want to read a book I pedal the exercise bike. Today I’m going to bring—you can’t guess, it’s too weird—the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. The new seventh edition just came out last month, with lots of changes to include electronic media, such as how to cite web pages in your bibliography. It’s for my freelance work, and I’m, yes, I’m excited to read it.

I feel wide and open. The whole visible realm is available to me. I’m here, and to be here is to be ubiquitous.

It Didn't Have to Happen This Way But It Did

I drive by a field where a painful incident in my past occurred, and I feel only a mild wistfulness as I keep going forward, the strands of myself separating and recombining, mutating and adapting. These quiet days, even my metabolism feels new: a craving for fruit has come over me: pineapple, cherries, blueberries, blackberries, mangos, plums, any fruits you can name, and once a day is barely enough, as if I’ve regressed into some kind of tropical forest ape.

I lull myself to sleep with scary movies. I cherish the unnerved feeling after it’s over, when you feel you’re still in it, the monsters coming at you, the cave getting pitch dark. Sitting in your easy chair you’re in a deep-breathing, slow-lifting trance that’s almost postcoital. I recommend The Descent, about a group of six adventurous women -– all, coincidentally enough, raving beauties – who get trapped in a deep cave. Never before in my adult life have I been tempted to sleep with the lights on.

Change works through the drifting days as well as the dramatic ones. This is how you make your trail, your worldline, the unique squiggle in spacetime that represents how you danced and ran and squirmed from birth to death. You take one step, then another, none of them necessary until it’s already taken, and at the end you can read your whole life’s unplanned choreography, the curlicued signature you left on the page of eighty years, and it looks just right.

My worldline has led me back to reading science fiction, as I did in adolescence. Currently it’s Stephen Baxter’s panorama novel Evolution, which covers all of primate history from 65 million years ago to the present -– in fact the future. It’s like an exceptionally readable textbook in human paleontology, with imagination added where the fossil record is sketchy. There’s a wonderful set piece about a handful of anthropoid apes set adrift on the ocean on a downed tree after a flash flood: it’s a lifeboat survival tale, complete with long-delayed cannibalism, and reads like Life of Pi except with all the characters as animals. Baxter renders the full stink and slime and gore of animal life; it’s shocking to think of my ancestors defecating on each other to assert dominance or obsessively picking bugs out of each other’s pubic hair to establish social bonds. But that’s us, dear readers: we’re “bipedal, tool wielding, meat eating, xenophobic, hierarchical, combative, competitive” and possessed of “doggedness, exuberance, courage, and vision.” Chance and opportunism, smart or foolish or arbitrary choice, pre-adaptation or blind leap, guiding us through an unexplored cave so that we miraculously chose the right passageways and crawled through into the light. We’ve still got the dust on our clothes.

Some of us back then lived among sabertooth cats who were specialized to prey on hominids. No need for scary movies. No luxury of splitting the monogamous pair.

I look back gratefully at my four-foot-high, stone-axe-chipping, fireless, garmentless forebears of a million years ago and wonder at the courage of the primitive. It’s still all we have.

An Experiment in Anger

In a wonderful book I just read, Stephen Mitchell’s philosophical comedy Meetings with the Archangel, there’s an anecdote about an exceptionally gifted young Zen student who achieves ultimate enlightenment in only a handful of years. Seeking to deepen his practice, he continues without a teacher, only to feel intense rage welling up from some unknown source when he meditates. Wrathfully he rejects his beloved teacher and concludes that he has gotten nowhere.

That person isn’t me. Feeling rage is no surprise in my life. I’ve known about it from Day One, and possibly before, in the womb. It’s been my worst enemy, and having your worst enemy living inside you is confusing.

I’ve spent a great deal of my time trying to squash this enemy, and the results have been encouraging. Living alone after my marriage, I’ve felt amazingly calm and optimistic. Perhaps I was made to live this way even though I’ve always yearned to live within a contented, stable family. Whether or not the term “made to live this way” has any meaning, I’m living this way now and liking it, learning from it.

I’ve only had one outburst of rage in almost a year and a half, and that one was enough for the rest of my life.

But something feels hazardous about all this calm and confidence. How long is it going to last? Is it going to suddenly collapse? I can rely on today’s good mood only for today, and if some would reply that today is all we can ever know – if I myself would make that reply – then I’d like the thing I know today to be more solid than a passing mood.

Avoiding anger is not going to work forever. So what will work? They say one needs to make friends with one’s shadow, embrace one’s demonic side and welcome it, retrained for a healthier function. I’ve never understood that kind of talk. It seems too metaphorical; I have trouble connecting it to a concrete action one could take. How do you embrace your demons, really; what specific acts do you perform aside from sending an interior telepathic message: “Hi, there, demons, I’d like to embrace you now.”

These thoughts came to me this evening as I drove my car in the warm Austin sunset, an almost full moon above the hills and a pale sun setting behind gilded clouds across the river. A charmed evening, driving in the breeze past the scent of wildflower gardens, the humic aroma of the soul simmering up from the earth. The very simple thought came that in order to embrace and integrate my rage, I would have to feel it. I would have to show it – the thing I have most feared showing, the thing I have been running away from for a good deal longer than a year and a half.

I’m going to perform an experiment. I’m going to open myself to opportunities for rage. I’ll do it in situations I judge safe, probably when so one is around, certainly when my wife and children aren’t. Alone in my house, alone in my car (perhaps giving a hostile glower to a driver here or there). Some shouting, some cursing. It will have to be a real emotion with a real stimulus, not a dutiful, “I will rage for the next two minutes.” But it will be a controlled reality and it will stop comfortably and it won’t echo and blast through my life. Maybe I’ll have to do it one time, maybe two or ten. At some point, I will know my anger as something other than a terrifying monster, and it will learn that I am not out to eradicate it. Since we have to live in here together, we will finally learn how not to destroy each other.

So if you’re driving in the Austin area and you pass a small white sedan with a man screaming in it, wave hello.

Offspring of the Famous

Here's a really nice article about a famous writer's son who achieved literary success on his own, practicing his craft for years, suffering the rejections that come with the territory, even changing his name in order not to use it for advantage -- because he understood that it would hurt him as a writer to do so. I admire this young man, and I'm eager to read his book.

In contrast...

PS: An agent or publisher would be crazy not to let Joe Hill's cat out of the bag, and the Times article hints that that may have happened. But based on the information presented, I believe that Hill tried his best not to capitalize on his father's fame. And I don't even think he would have been wrong to capitalize on it -- I would have, in his place. That makes him stronger than most of us.