Mallory's Camera

I’ve been so anxious this past week.

This past month if I’m honest about it.

Without understanding why.

###

Yes, yes, of course: the upcoming trip. Will I get my flight dates mixed up and miss the flight to Guatemala? Will the plane disappear in the Bermuda Triangle? Crash in the approach to Guatemala City when Pacaya decides to spew a real live ash column for the first time since 2010? Will Mara Salvatrucha decide to storm La Aurora airport and take all elderly gringo ladies with purple hair hostage? Will the shuttle I’m taking from Guate to Antigua blow a tire, killing all aboard?

The usual pre-trip anxieties, in other words.

###

But I was also thinking there was more to the omnipresent jitteriness than the pre-trip wobblies, and at last, I admitted to myself: It may have to do with nervousness about ongoing revenue streams.

So a couple of days ago, I took the bull by the horns and contacted my three most regular clients: Do you foresee the rise of AI tools having a marked influence on our professional relationship?

Best to know, right? So I can start putting in those job applications at McDonalds.

My retirement income pays all my basic bills, but anything I do beyond paying basic bills is subsidized by Remunerative Projects.

###

By yesterday, I’d heard back from all three clients.

No, said one.

No! said another.

NO, NO, NO! said the third—and confided they’d recently had to terminate the contract of another writer when they’d detected the unmistakable ChatGPT fingerprint. All AI does is spin existing content, the client told me. We want original insights.

So, that's a relief.

Though, of course, I am still anxious.

Because anxiety is what my body is used to.

It will take it a couple of days (at least) to get used to something else.

###

To that end, I have decided to do absolutely nothing today but read, watch TV, ablute (I have a new fabulous body wash,) and play with the cat.

Decompress.

I may tromp—but only because the sun is out and the sky is blue. Not because I want to exercise.

###

I’m reading The Ink Black Heart, J.K. Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike detective procedural.

I admire Rowling for many reasons, but her writing ability is not among them.

Rowling seems never to have heard of Chekhov's gun. At least 250 pages of every 1,000-page tome she writes is filled with unnecessary details that add absolutely nada to plot or characterization.

I will say that degree of imagination micromanagement leads to a very dense parallel world in which it is oddly comforting to lose oneself in certain moods—like the one I’m in presently.

Also, she is dead right about the toxic nature of the Internet. Twitter, in particular. But really, all social media. I get that mileage varies on this one, but personally, I think fandom is a creepy phenomenon because it collectivizes what really ought to be a one-to-one relationship with a piece of art that moves you personally. And fandom is the engine that drives social media.

###

I was a very early social media adopter. I joined the Well—the great grand-daddy of all social media—in 1988.

I’d have to say that, yes, there was a sense of “community,” the like of which I hadn’t encountered before, and that sense of community was intoxicating. Many, many people I liked. A few I still consider friends.

But the Well was also a cesspool of bullies.

Just before I joined, these bullies had actually shamed and abused one prominent Well member so thoroughly that he committed suicide.

It was very obvious to me, a newcomer, not bound through fear or misguided loyalty to dissemble, that Blair would not have committed suicide had he not been pushed.

So, I said something. I am ever Joan of Arc into the fray!

And then I was bullied.

I was bullied pretty consistently by the same group of creepy people throughout the five or six years I remained an active Well member. But as I say, there were also people I had real bonds with.

Still. I roll my eyes whenever I read the private Well group on FB and read the nostalgia for old times.

And whenever—as happens from time to time—an old Wellie asks me, Why don’t you come back? I think, For the same reason, I don’t put Drano into my morning coffee.

The deer were back again this morning. Santa's helpers checkin' out the nabe?

Sunday was a lot like Friday. Monday was even worst. Plus there was fog, thick, grey, impenetrable. B and I had a huge fight over money. I spent the day writing sprightly barbecue sauce copy for the website and pondering the question: what if you try and try and try and try just as hard as you possibly can and it's still not good enough?

Not a rhetorical question, sadly.

Took the dogs to the beach. Thought about Anne Rice, Joanne Rowling, Edith Bland, my own Annie.

What do these four women have in common?

Well, they were all writers.

And they all turned it around.

Anne Rice reportedly wrote Interview With the Vampire in five weeks. Her seven-year-old daughter had just died of leukemia. Certainly no one would ever dream that this hitherto unpublished MFA candidate from a second-rate university was about to score a literary bank shot. I use the word "literary" advisedly here – Interview With the Vampire works as literature, for me at least; it is infused with that "formal feeling" that Emily Dickinson writes about so brilliantly in the poem, After Great Pain.

But what were her reasons for writing it?

I can't imagine any desolation greater than that of loosing a child. With that one small attrition, the world becomes a crazy place, malign, jumbled, hopelessly chaotic. I picture Anne Rice then – a pudgy woman with a heart-shaped face; long, lank, lusterless hair, parted down the middle – sitting cross-legged on a mattress someone had pushed into the corner of a dark room, scribbling furiously away on a yellow legal pad. There's a cheap muslin Indian bedspread blocking the light from the room's one window, another Indian thing on the mattress.

Why was she writing? She had nothing left to lose – quite literally. But everything to gain as it turned out except the one thing a grieving parent would want most.

I thought Interview was very powerful. But had no inclination to read anything else by her ever again. As a pop culture icon though – she invented Goths, after all – Rice interests me greatly, and so I read about her recent conversion to born-again Christianity with some fascination. Does she view the fabulous success of Interview now as some kind of deal with the Devil? Did that pudgy young woman with the heart-shaped face stare at herself in the mirror one morning and whisper, "I'd give anything… anything…"

Magic always extracts a price.

The Joanne Rowling creation myth is a more happy-making story. A welfare mother! For some reason taking the train from Manchester to London one afternoon. The train gets stuck! They spend hours on the track. While the people around her are mumbling and cursing, Joanne whips out a stenographer's pad from her shoulder bag – I picture its handles coming loose, one of its zippers won't zip – and begins (here it comes again) scribbling furiously.

Of course it took her more than five weeks to finish Harry Potter (a book, by the way, I don't care for much.) But the seed moment was on that train. And again I wonder, why was she writing? When a train I was on last summer stalled for two hours between Marseille and Berne, writing was the last thing on my mind. I was hot, sweaty, peevish. My traveling companion was an infantile boor. Writing requires focus, concentration. An interrupted journey encourages neither.

Edith Bland is my favorite children's book writer. She wrote under the name E. Nesbit. There's not a whole lot of biographical material available on her – one biography by Noel Streatfield, the author of the "Shoes" books, and one essay by (of all people!) Gore Vidal, a rare example of Vidal-ian hagiography. The Streatfield book is mostly a deconstruction of Nesbit's books but it does provide a little background: Edith was a Fabian, had a crush on H.G. Wells, married – disastrously – a feckless journalist named Herbert Bland, bore five children in rapid succession. Had no money. Could not pay the rent.

The moment must be inferred. There's no record of it. Yet I have no doubt it happened. An afternoon, perhaps, when the housekeeper returned from the fishmonger's – no matter how cash-poor you were, if you spoke the King's English back then instead of some East End dialect, you had servants! – curtsied nervously, and told Edith, "I'm sorry m'am. 'e won't gib us no more till the bill is reckoned with."

It wouldn't be the first time the children had had to make do with bread, milk and weak tea for supper, of course. When Edith had been a child, secretly she'd preferred such meals. Possibly they did too. It would give them the opportunity to discuss their adventures without adult supervision…

I picture her sitting at an old roll-top oaken desk, falling into a reverie. Abruptly she snaps out of it, reaches for a pen, some foolscap. Begins (altogether now!) scribbling furiously…

I actually used to sit next to Annie when she scribbled furiously. I remember feeling miffed: how can she ignore me like this? I was 17, in college. I had problems, lots of problems. She was supposed to solve them.

Every few days I would show up at the apartment Annie shared with her husband Rik and their daughter Alicia. She'd smile weakly. "Oh hi, Patty! Let's go to the playground."

We'd walk to Live Oak Park. Little Alicia – who'd inherited Rik's butterscotch coloring but Annie's strangely slanted Mongol eyes – would dash between swings and slide. After a few feeble, "That's too bad, dear"s and "Yes, that does sound hard"s, Annie would frown. "Patty, I'm sorry, but I have to…" And she'd reach into her purse, pull out a pencil and a notebook. Soon she'd be deep into the writing, chewing her lower lip, occasionally mouthing silent words.

You look like a homeless person, I'd sneer to myself. You look like an idiot.

But I'd never leave because the process – then as now – was endlessly fascinating to me.

As it turned out, Annie was writing a novel, her first. But I don't think she knew that as we sat there together in Live Oak Park. Rik had fallen in love with another woman. He and Annie had an open marriage – this was the late sixties after all, they lived in Berkeley – but falling in love broke all the rules. She was scribbling furiously as a way to channel the pain.

The novel ended up being called The Healthy Season by the way. Every once in a while a copy turns up on Amazon. It's slight but charming and very, very moving in parts – I'd say that even if I wasn't related to its author.

Scribbling furiously, I thought yesterday on that cold, dead beach, would seem to be the answer.

But what question would the universe have to ask to get me to make that response?