Mallory's Camera

Dreamed I was a game-maker in some remote future moment. The best way I can describe the games I made is that they were the aural equivalent of jigsaw puzzles, this bewildering set of sounds and notes that the person who played the game had to assemble into a cohesive melody.

I’d traveled to the 21st century to capture the sounds of a rare bird called the Shrewksbury Tewk.

(After I woke up, I immediately looked up “Shrewksbury” and “Tewk.” There are Shrewsburys in Massachusetts and New Jersey, but no Shrewksburys. And what the hell is a Tewk?)



I ventured forth to deepest, darkest Newburgh to get my fingers printed and my identifying documentation checked.

Newburgh is the epitome of urban blight! Not so very long ago, it was the murder capital of the U.S.

So, naturally, I ❤️ doing my little economic geography walking tours there!

Yesterday’s tour got cut short, though, on account of I was feeling kinda shaky: To catch the right exit to the fingerprinting place, I’d had to cut across four lanes of 70 mph cars in about 100 yards, which terrified me. Plus getting fingerprinted always terrifies me. What if I’d gone on some kind of murder and mayhem spree in a fugue state??? Would the police appear to drag me away by my hair?

Newburgh is actually one of the most architecturally and historically significant cities in the U.S. although you would not necessarily see that if you weren't specifically looking for it.



It was here that Washington and the Continental Army camped out for a year and a half, while England took its time signing the armistice. And in the 19th century, Newburgh was a boomtown, a manufacturing and transportation hub. The gambrel-roofed mansions of its robber barons were all designed by Calvin Vaux and homeboy Andrew Jackson Downing.

Alas! In the 1960s, Newburgh tried to deal with the decline of its manufacturing base with massive urban renewal projects that knocked down a lot of the beautiful, historic buildings. That and proximity to the great crack cocaine superhighway, Interstate 87, sealed the city’s doom.

Downing Park is still very pretty. And, of course, there’s Washington’s headquarters, completely deserted now that schools are closed so reluctant schoolchildren can’t be dragged there.



Came home. Finished rereading River Under the Road—which is a good book that suffered from covering much the same territory as Fates and Furies, a better book, published in the same year.

River is structured as a series of parties, given and attended over a span of maybe 25 years. For the most part, Scott Spencer pulls it off—no mean feat ‘cause lemme tell you: Parties are very hard to write; you have to capture the buzz but, at the same time, advance the storyline, so the weird little incidents that capture your authorial imagination must be tailored to supply fresh info about the protagonists. You’re writing on two levels at the same time, in other words.

Started reading Christopher Priest’s The Separation. Christopher Priest is one of my favorite writers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, The Prestige, which has the best unreliable narrator ev-ah! and is so, so brilliant! But also The Glamour, an early novel that’s deeply strange and perturbing, and that hardly anyone has ever heard of.

The Glamour deals with invisibility. In something of the same way that The City and the City deals with invisibility, though in The Glamour, that invisibility is far more… nightmarish.

Anyway, I stayed up reading far too late, so must devote today to revenue generation ‘cause those cat toys and turmeric supplements? They don't pay for themselves!

This photo reminds me of An Infinite Summer, a beautiful, beautiful short story by the Brit novelist Christopher Priest in which – for no apparent reason - characters are frozen into tableaux, which only some of the characters can see.

Look at the three of us! Aren’t we beautiful? And we will remain preserved inside this timeless moment for always, the older woman, the two beautiful faun-like children, the sun setting at just the right angle to enhalo the girl and the boy in unearthly radiance. Us. Forever.

###

Also in T-burg, I passed a sign on a back country road crudely lettered, Colonial Encampment.

Naturally, I had to investigate.

I drove three miles along this deeply rutted dirt road (extremely grateful for my new tires and new suspension system) and found myself in this camp where between 50 and a hundred men, women and children dressed in 18th century clothing were running around on top of this hillside pretending to be European settlers. It was pretty cool! They were having some kind of musket fire-off in the nearby forest. The fog swirled; the woods echoed. Neat!



Then I sped off to Ithaca where I watched a simulcast of the National Theater’s newish production of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

The real Peter Pan has naught to do with the bowdlerized Disney version but instead is a deeply weird piece of fancy filled with archetypes and profound anthropological insights into the land of childhood imagination – although now that harried parents are thrusting iPads into their two-year-olds’ hands, I suppose children no longer have imaginations: They’re just one more demographic to market to.

I first read Barrie’s novelization of the play – Peter Pan and Wendy – when I was five years old or so, and the book has stayed with me:

Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

This, my friends, is a deeply, deeply creepy image.

… and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

Which means the cycle stops tomorrow since children whose parents let electronic devices tell them stories are merely consumers-in-training who will grow up to be deeply dull little conformists.

Which I suppose is good for collective intelligence.

But not for art.

The casting in this production was especially interesting. In nearly every production ever performed of this play, Captain Hook is essayed by the same actor who plays George Darling, the children’s father. (This tradition harkens back to Gerald du Maurier who starred in the very first production of Peter Pan. Du Maurier was the father of the novelist Daphne – herself no stranger to deeply weird fiction – as well as the uncle of the boys who inspired Barrie to write the play.)

In this production, Captain Hook is played by the woman who plays Mary Darling, the children’s mother.

In full pirate drag, she is ghoulish:



On the drive home, I finished listening to the audio book of Fates and Furies. Yes, yes – I read the book. But I wanted to figure out exactly how Lauren Groff managed to achieve the effects she achieved, and listening to the words somehow gives me a better handle on that.

###

Got home, went off and tutored Samir.

When I got home from tutoring Samir, Max called from Alaska.

“It must be getting darker there earlier now,” I said.

“Yeah,” Max said. “Gets dark around midnight.”

“Wow!” I said.

“When I first got here” – June – “it was light pretty near 24 hours a day,” Max said. “I mean, yeah. Degrees of light. Dusk. Twilight. But light.”

Max will be returning from Anchorage to Berkeley in 10 days. Nathan asked Max to be his best man, so that means Max will be returning to the East Coast for the wedding – which I think is supposed to take place in New Haven some time around Christmas. (Yay!)

“You should come!” he said.

“I think most properly that invitation is supposed to come from Nathan,” I said.

Also Max is considering applying to UCB’s public policy school when he graduates from law school. My alma mater!

“Since public policy in the criminal sector is what I’m specifically interested in,” he said.

“It’s the second best public policy school in the nation!” I cried.

“Nope. It’s the best,” he told me.

So. Past week has been snow. And work. And snow. And work. And snow.

Did I mention snow?

Snow.

As recently as Thanksgiving it was still in the fifties, but then in the mid-December the Big Freeze hit. White outs on the highways. Roads slick with black ice. “I’m not driving in this,” I told Ben flatly.
He got pissed because it means he has to chauffer me to work and on trips into town, but hey! he’s not working right now, he has the time.

I’m going to have to get over myself sometime during the next month since he leaves for Kelly Miller around the 14th of February, but that’s still a good five weeks off and who knows? Maybe this new-fangled global warming thang I keep reading about will kick in.

I think this summer I move into town. Ithaca’s good about keeping its streets ploughed and brined. An interesting thing about Ithaca is that it has none of those satellite rings of suburban development circling the town that similarly sized population centers elsewhere have. One mile outside the city limits and boom! you’re in rural America. Where the snowplough only operates on alternate Thursdays of months that end in W. Yes, yes, the recession has hit those tiny municipal budgets hard…

Anyway, I have been writing a lot although not here, and sadly not on the Book either, picking up tiny copywriting jobs which are woefully underpaying but again, hey! money is money. I figure if I can earn enough through it to make sure Robin has his walking around money – $150/month – and pay for all the dentistry work I need, that will be a major accomplishment. Although right now I am working on paying actual bills: the Cornell job is hourly, not salaried, and Cornell was closed most of the month of December.

Ah, the exciting theme park that is poverty!

Things will get better.

Or they won’t get better.

It’s bad for my ego to realize that I am among the 25% of the population that the United States of America is going to have to shed if it really wants to make an economic recovery, there being no real prospects ahead for heavy tank warfare to oil up the machines of commerce the way there were back in the last Depression. I’m expendable. I’m disposable. As a statistic I don’t matter. Ouch.

On the other hand a good case could be made – both in the Buddhist and geo-political senses – that no one person ever matters.

Anyway, I have cabin fever and I’m a bit lonesome. But I’m not depressed particularly.

Read Christopher Priest’s The Extreme – he is my favorite sci fi writer. I suppose there was nothing particularly original about this book from a speculative fiction point of view, but it’s so well written who cares? Book is a meditation on the old National Enquirer conundrum – Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy! Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln! What does it mean? – staged against a virtual reality shooting gallery backdrop.

Also finished a book of Jay McInerney short stories. Some day I’m going to have to investigate the mystical connections between Jay McInerney and F. Scott Fitzgerald – Fitzgerald was married to a woman named Zelda! McInerney played a video game called Zelda! – because I must say they have almost identical styles which is to say they write like angels about the stupidest, most banal, superficial things imaginable.

When I read this passage from McInerney’s story Philomena, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as they do whenever I hear a particularly beautiful and compelling piece of music:

This was the metropolis as it was meant to be seen, in the flattering aphrodisiac light of eminence, a brilliant republic compounded of wealth, power, accomplishment and beauty. The atmosphere of festive mutual regard extended even to tourists, like Collin, on the happy assumption that their applications for citizenship were pending.

I mean that is just an incredibly wonderful bit of figurative writing.