Mallory's Camera

Problem with not writing every day is that I forget how to write. Words no longer flow. I struggle with syntax and word choices. Simple things.

In that sense, writing here is very much like practicing scales might be for a musician.

Although in some larger sense, I’m associating my disinclination to write with Lucius’s death.

Lucius was a very good writer, and moreover a writer with an oeuvre of sorts. And a following.

“They’re not going to publish Lucius’s Central America book,” Ben told me mournfully when we did our road trip together at the beginning of August.

“Does Lucius’s Central America book even exist?” I chuckled.

“Oh, yes, it exists,” Ben said. “There are galleys. They even printed and distributed a few review copies. But then the publisher pulled the plug.”

“I suppose they thought that now that he’s dead, he doesn’t have an audience,” I said. “Or at least that his non-fiction doesn’t have an audience.”

I had thought that after he was dead, Lucius might turn into Phil K. Dick. That Hollywood would leap to film his stories – the charming, allegorical world of the Dragon Griaule; the futuristic battle zone of Life During Wartime.

But that hasn’t proven to be the case. The present tense has swallowed up all vestiges of Lucius like quicksand. Relics remain – dusty volumes on the sci fi/fantasy bookshelves of a few secondhand bookstores on seedy boulevards scattered across the country.

When those bookstores finally go under – which they will very soon – poof! Lucius will have vanished.

I confess that Lucius’s own fictional style was often not to my liking. I didn’t like it when he dressed up flimsy plotlines in ponderous, 19th century, elegiac prose.

But when he was good, he was very, very good. Life During Wartime – very, very good. The closing lines of The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter –

From that point on little is known of her other than the fact that she bore two sons and confined her writing to a journal that has gone unpublished. However, it is said of her—as is said of all those who perform similar acts of faith in the shadows of other dragons yet unearthed from beneath their hills of ordinary-seeming earth and grass, believing that their bond serves through gentle constancy to enhance and not further delimit the boundaries of this prison world—from that day forward she lived happily ever after. Except for the dying at the end. And the heartbreak in between.

– very, very good.

I never read any of Lucius’s nonfiction. Ben tells me that it is also very, very good – although, of course, since Lucius and facts had an interesting relationship, his nonfiction can’t strictly be called investigative reporting any more than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or A Journal of the Plague Year can be called investigative reporting.

I’m told Lucius dedicated Two Trains Running to me. And I’ve never read it. Never even seen it – he didn’t think to give me a copy.

The Lucius rationale for not writing goes something like this: If nobody really cared about Lucius’s work, why would anyone would care about yours, which isn’t a microspeck as good?

Which is, of course, ridiculous. This is a journal. I write for myself. Or maybe for a great-great-grandchild, as yet unborn, who will stumble across these ramblings and take some sort of interest because they were once attached to a genetic code that – with certain artful manipulations and permutations – produced her.




Lucius was my teacher at Clarion, the celebrated writing workshop that quite literally changed my life because it was there that I met and fell in love with Ben.

He was a brilliant writing teacher. I’ve always had a flair for words, but Lucius helped me break any number of annoying habits and see that writing for an audience involves more than self-expression. It’s a message in a bottle. The trick is to communicate while remaining true to oneself

Lucius was a fun guy to get drunk with and hang out in sceazy bars, and as he thought I had genuine talent and a real shot at producing what he considered good work, we kept in touch. Lucius’s standards for many things were low, but his standards for writing were high.

In 2000, Lucius ran into Big Problemos with the IRS. He’d been making a comfortable amount of money from book sales, film options, and such, but he hadn’t paid federal income taxes in 20-odd years and the IRS had attached all his accounts.

So Ben and I talked it over, and came up with a plan: We would buy an old battered RV. We would park it in our driveway. And Lucius would live in it until he got himself together – which we figured would take about three months.

The RV turned out to be an impractical solution for many reasons – there are stories there, but I don’t have time to write them now – so Lucius ended up living in our house. For a year and a half.

I didn’t charge him rent. What the hell. I was gonna end up paying what I had to pay towards the house regardless of whether Lucius was living there or not, and he was clearly destitute. Such things balance themselves out over the long run, in this lifetime or the next.

It took Lucius a year and a half to write Valentine, his take on The Bridges of Madison County. Diana and Jeannie loved it; I thought it was a self-indulgent mess. Lucius himself was ambivalent. Diana and Jeannie were probably the target audience.

The Valentine advance got him out of debt, gave him the wherewithal to move back to Seattle.

Gulliver came to the wake Ellen Datlow threw for Lucius at the KGB bar.

Gulliver is Lucius’s son, raised by the wife who ditched Lucius shortly before he became a write. One might call Gulliver the anti-Lucius. He’s a handsome, personable man with a successful career in a profession about as far away from writing as one can get. He’s clearly very responsible. Which is not to say that Lucius had no effect on him. Clearly, Gulliver has expended a lot of energy on not being Lucius.

After we’d all had our turn at the mike telling funny Lucius stories, Gulliver stood up to say a few words.

“I’m blown away at the sheer number of you who took on the job of taking care of my father over the years,” said Gulliver. “He was obviously very bad at taking care of himself. Thank you for that. I guess.”

###

Nothing much has happened in the week that I haven’t been writing. I played high school English teacher with Summer who’s been reading Robert Frost –

“The darkest evening of the year… That’s a very specific date. What date do you think it is?”

Summer looked confused.

"Well, how are the seasons measured?”

Summer shook her head.

On a piece of notebook paper I wrote: Solstice. Equinox.

These were completely unfamiliar concepts to Summer even after I explained them. Is the Chinese calendar really so different?

“So you see 'the darkest evening of the year' is very specifically referencing December 21, the Winter Solstice!”

“Oh-h-h-h!” said Summer. I couldn’t tell whether she found this little anthropological digression amusing or boring.

“Bronze Age civilizations, of course, could never be sure that the days would get longer again. So the Winter Solstice is associated with death. It’s also the reason why there are so many Western holidays in the time around the Winter Solstice – originally these were ceremonies designed to lure the sun back.”

“Oh!” said Summer.

“So you see, the poem is really about death. The unnamed narrator is thinking about dying.”

“He is suicidal?” asked Summer, concerned.

“No! No. He says he has ‘miles to go before I sleep.’ He knows that. But the thought of dying is attractive to him.”

“He is depressed?” Summer asked.

“Not exactly,” I said.

I wasn’t sure whether it was Chinese cultural norms or millennial pragmatism I was up against here. But I don't think she got the poem at all.

###

The full moon shone so brightly that night that around two in the morning, I woke up. Looked out my window. Saw something I must have seen before but that I can’t ever remember seeing before:

Shadows.

The full moon casts shadows.

Ghastly shadows.

They made a riveting sight.

###

The next day Oliver Sacks – one of my favorite human beings on the planet – died.



I love this picture of Oliver Sacks more than I can say. Standing motionless, recording your thoughts, in the midst of a rapidly moving universe. Ah, yes, that’s what it means to bear testimony.

I can’t say I’ve read everything that Oliver Sacks published, but I’ve read a fair amount.

RTT turns out to have a talent for public policy, an ability to extrapolate from statistics and scattered research, figure out from that how best to protect and serve the interests of a mostly ignorant body public. Who woulda thought that? Not his mother.

His first semester policy project involved designing an Open Campus policy for New Roots so that qualified seniors could escape school premises and the nauseatingly wholesome Farm To School lunch menu, eat cheap pizza and find back alleys where they could smoke.

His second semester project involves an investigation into a substance sold in local headshops under the name “Spice.” Spice is a designer drug, a synthetic cannabinoid. There are something like six head shops on the Ithaca Commons; it’s the one business model in the economic downturn that seems to be thriving as more and more people give up on the future, resign themselves to a life where “ambition” means finding the best way to get high. Spice is sold as incense. But RTT has been marching into these shops, asking the store clerks, “So, like if I smoke this, will I get high?” and recording the results.

Yes, in New York State, you can legally record conversations without both parties’ consent.

Synthetic cannabinoids apparently have been linked to blindness and incurable lung diseases. RTT is now thinking along the lines of drafting actual legislation that would make it illegal – a difficult thing, actually, because a fair amount of specificity is involved in the prohibition of pharmaceuticals: Change one molecular bond and Spice will not longer be Spice, it will become something else, requiring its own legal definition.

The Director of Syracuse University’s public policy program dropped on by RTT’s classroom Tuesday while RTT was presenting his project, and was so impressed that he personally invited RTT to apply to the program – which presumably means RTT would get in, though I don’t know how much money they’d throw at him. Syracuse University is expensive.

“Plus, you know, it’s too close to Ithaca,” RTT fretted as we drove home.

“Too close to your parents, you mean?” I asked. “Well, I won’t be living in Ithaca anymore. Your Dad will be, but I think he remembers enough about what it was like to be a young male living away from home for the first time not to fret and fuss over you too much –“

“Oh, it’s not that,” RTT said. “It’s that if I’m within driving distance of my friends, I’ll just come back here and get drunk all the time.”

“Not if you decide not to,” I said carefully.

“I’ll decide not to and I’ll do it anyway,” he said. “No, I have to go to college some place far away from my friends.”

There’s that Prince Hal flash moment again.

It’s exhilarating but also daunting the first time you realize your kid is probably smarter and more capable than you are.

###

Since RTT has come out of the closet on the issue of his own intelligence, I’ve decided to stop mollycoddling him generally on the issue of substandard writing. He’s applying to the SUNY Purchase creative writing program. One of the pieces of the portfolio supporting his application is a 500-word essay on My Strengths and Weaknesses As a Writer:

If I had to put my strengths and weaknesses in a t-graph, each one on a parallel size, I’d feel a bit embarrassed. I think most authors would, the rich and wonderfully successful included; with as many different styles and ways of writing out there, it’s almost impossible to be perfect. But when I stop to think how much influence one person’s voice can be, I suddenly look past the negatives, towards the positives. The art of being a word smith is no trek in the park, and in retrospect, I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life writing.


I read this part aloud to him. Then stopped. Looked at him.

He looked back.

“Well?” I asked.

“It’s a college entrance essay, Mom.”

“But what do you hear when I read it to you?”

“I heard a college entrance essay.”

“It’s horrible,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” he said.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s worse than horrible. It’s boring.”

He made a face.

“For instance: a walk in the park is not only a cliché but a cliché derived from playing golf, which makes it particularly insipid.”

“How do you know it derived from playing golf?”

“I read the Oxford English Dictionary for fun." (Sadly, this is true.) “But not content to leave the insipid cliché alone, you feel the need to tweak it, much as Milo in the forest, coming upon an unexpected nest of turds that did not originate from within his own bowels, feels the need to pee in a preemptive semicircle around them –“

Robin glares at me. Okay, I'm pretty over the top by this point. But hey, I gotta amuse myself somehow.

“— No walk in the park for you! You must trek through the park, but see, that gives the cliché exactly the opposite meaning you intended –“

“What are you talking about?”

“A walk is something effortless,” I explain. “A trek is an arduous journey, often involving steep uphills and narrow chasms."

“Trek: to journey on foot!” RTT snaps. Shows me the definition he looked up in MS Word.

“Was it Simon Winchester who said the Microsoft spellchecker was the beginning of the end for the English language? I can't remember.”

RTT is definitely peeved now. “Now you're just showing off. Look, I wrote this in like maybe 20 minutes –“

“And what I'm trying to tell you is that it shows. You don't have the craft yet to jot off something good in 20 minutes. Look, Robin, you probably think I’m picking on you. I’m not. Actually I’m paying you the huge compliment of critiquing you as rigerously as I would critique myself. You write really well when you write fiction. There’s no reason why you can't write equally when you write essays. I want to read you something else now out loud now –“

I read him the first few paragraphs of Christopher Buckley’s beautifully written remembrance of Christopher Hitchens from The New Yorker. Prose with very specific allusions designed to tell a specific story, and though the ripple of subtext is there from the very first paragraph – It occurs to me that “benison” is a word I first learned from Christopher, along with so much else – the prose never slips into sentimentality or self-referential pretentiousness.

“Can you tell that’s good writing?”

“I guess."

“What did you hear when I read that to you?”

“He varies the length of his sentences. He uses contrasts – Obama supporter versus Bush supporter. He builds up a portrait with little dabs of information.”

“Okay then,” I say. “Okay. So let’s get started critiquing your essay sentence by sentence. Since the middle of my third grade year, writing played a huge reoccurring role in my life. What’s right with that sentence? What’s wrong with that sentence?”

He makes that face again. “Well, I write a lot. So it’s accurate.”

“You’re still writing, in other words?”

“Obviously.”

“Then the use of the past tense is incorrect. You want to use the continuous past tense: has played. What else?”

“Nothing else. God, you're annoying.”

“Adjectives? You know, Hemingway thought adjectives were effeminate --”

“Would you just stop? Just cross out huge and reoccurring --”

"Well, I don't necessarily agree with Hemingway. He shot his mouth off about a whole lot of things. Reoccurring is actually an interesting adjective --"

“You know what? I’ll just rewrite the whole fucking thing!” he snaps. Which, of course, is what I’ve been angling for all along.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll take more than 20 minutes?”

“Oh, at least 21,” he says.

But sarcasm is lost on single-minded maternal units.

“Well, okay then,” I say. “Okay. I will send you that link to the New Yorker piece. Read it through before you start writing. I think you might actually like Christopher Hitchens.”

This, of course, is why our four months of home schooling while we traveled on the circus was such a disaster. The Tibetans and our Monopoly games notwithstanding, I’m really a bad teacher and no one should let me near anyone who seriously needs to learn something.

###



I woke up this morning and it was snowing. First real snow of the season, meaning first sticky snow.

Can’t really complain: it’s been a long fall. Just yesterday I’d taken Milo on a five mile hike, over the defunct railroad route and through the woods, and noted the eerie wrongness of the landscape. Grey trees. Swamp like a lusterless mirror. Sinister, dead stalks of that final invasion of thistle and golden rod. It needed some other element to make it look right. It needed... snow.

The singing birds have left for warmer climes, so this hike is generally silent. But yesterday I heard the sounds of traffic from a road half a mile away, and it seemed to me that crammed into the upper registers of those sounds was an entire choir of terrified angels singing a Christmas carol by Elvis Costello:

And the whole family tree you neglected to bury,
Are feeding their faces until they explode.

I heard it most clearly.

Of course, I’ve been reading Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks beautifully written and endlessly fascinating exploration of the neurological origins of earworms, musical hallucinations and the like. So that probably accounts for it.