Dearly Beloveds

Your Bloguero notes that it's been 3 long months since he tickled the ivories at The Dream Antilles.

That calls for an update. Here it is now.

Your Bloguero is busy writing haikus. He is posting them regularly on Facebook. He has posted more than 400 of them. You can see what he's writing if you click the link.

Why haiku? As John Lennon wrote, funny you should arsk. Haiku because most of what your Bloguero sees on the Internet is so dehumanizing. And ironic. Cat videos, photos of brunch, selfies, political screeds, verbal barking. Ooof. All this when Social Media are so perfect for evanescent poetry. Like Haiku. Of which there is not a ton. Your Bloguero cannot imagine an Internet inundated with poetry.

Your Bloguero laments that he is no Basho. He regrets that he will never write a haiku as perfect as this:

Blossoms on the pear

a woman in the moonlight

reads a letter there.

It is perfect, isn't it.

But he will try again and again to write a good one. If practice truly makes perfect, a proposition about which your Bloguero nurtures significant doubt, your Bloguero is practicing. And trying.

Kitchen Disaster

It began simply enough. It was a weekly, late night, vegetarian cooking show. It was aimed primarily at men. Most of the studio audience were men. He joked that if they were watching him cook at home or in the studio, they weren’t getting any. If it mattered, he said, he hoped they’d have better luck in the future. And they should try cooking like him and eating this food, because that would definitely help in this regard.

First the loud theme music. Was it Talkin’ Heads? He’d come on to wild applause in his totally black clothing, smiling. He’d describe with his Gringo accent what he was making. And he’d demonstrate to the overhead camera. The food was nutritious and simple and clean, and he touted how healthy and virile and lovable it made him. Just look at me, he said with a smile. You can see how this kind of food has made me irresistible, deliciously macho, delectable. Brother, I do very well with this food. You will do well with it, too. Of course, it helped grow his audience that his smiling young assistants were beautiful, barely clothed and frequently revealed cleavage to the overhead camera. The show was a complete success of sorts. It was growing a loyal audience.

In the middle of its first season, he was going to make some Nutella flavored crème brulee. He said a desert like this was an aphrodesiac. He would test it on the staff after the show and report back. The tall, blonde assistant with the green eyes brought him an already lit blowtorch. And then something unexpected happened. There was an explosion and a fire broke out. Apparently, the blowtorch ignited gas that was silently leaking from the stove. There was a bright flash and a loud boom, and ingredients flew all over the room. The cameras shook but kept on shooting. Miguel, that was the host’s name, got cream and Nutella and eggs and ashes all over him. Plates sailed across the room; pots crashed from the sky. The brunette assistant’s blouse fell open and she screamed. Fire began to engulf the set. The producers and camera operators and technicians all rushed to put out the fire. The cameras continued to roll. The show came to an end in chaos.

The next day the crème brulee, the explosion, the assistant’s breasts, Miguel, the entire calamity were all over the news. He was going at last to receive his 15 minutes. He had apparently arrived. “Well,” he told one of the many interviewers, “The show will continue. Of course, it will. And I’m sure we’ll have more surprises this week. Be sure to join us, tune in.” He looked in the camera, winked and smiled.

More surprises indeed. It was obvious. The show had been transformed. Its title remained the same. But everyone began to call it “Kitchen Disaster.” And its audience mushroomed. Every show began as before, Miguel with his Gringo accent, the beautiful assistants smiling and handing him things, a healthy recipe that would render the cook irresistible, a magnet for love. Irresistible like Miguel. And then in every show a different surprise, a different disaster, an unanticipated, new calamity. Fires, explosions, floods. Loss of power and darkness. Sprinklers turning on without warning. Smoke alarms. Leaking pipes. The police. Burning food. Flaming frying pans. The fire department. Alcohol fires. Grease splattering. The seven plagues. Clothing falling off. Screaming assistants. Every show with the same, iconic ending, the cameras rolling, the staff trying to quell the emergency. And Miguel’s laughter.

The show had a long, successful run. The number of possible disasters was enormous, and the staff was inspired in creating new ones. But then one Saturday evening in summer, Miguel just didn’t show up. Nobody knew where he was. And the show had to be canceled. They showed a Julia Child rerun in its place. But nobody could find Miguel. How could the show continue tonight or next week without its star? The station put out a statement that Miguel was gone and the show would not return. Again, the show was in the news. Some people said it was another publicity stunt and that, of course, Miguel would reappear to benefit from the free publicity. But he never returned. And he was never found. Eventually the show and Miguel passed into obscurity.


n/t to Ian for the prompt

A Distant Tree And An eBook Solution

Of sorts.

When somebody buys my magical novella, Tulum, in soft cover, I am always thrilled to sign the title page and to write a dedication on it. To the reader, or to anyone else they choose. That makes the book more personal. And it marks my physical connection with the reader. That’s what is typically done at readings. Maybe it even helps sell books. Maybe the books are more prized if they're signed.

But if you buy my book or read it on Kindle or Nook or on your iPad or some other device as an eBook, you’re not going to get it signed. And you’re not going to be able to have it dedicated. Why? Because it’s not a physical book, and there’s nothing for me to scrawl on. Maybe there should be such an app (developers, are you reading this and thinking about it?) but as far as I know, there isn’t. Yet. So if you buy my book as an eBook, you potentially get shorted. I can't sign it for you. I cannot scrawl a quote from Shakespeare in the book and sign my name. I’m unhappy about that. And I know other writers are also.

So I have a solution. Of sorts. I can have some postcards made up, and if you want a dedication or a signed copy and you bought Tulum as an eBook, I can send you a postcard. Not by email. Nope. That doesn’t solve a thing. No, I will send you an actual, analog postcard via the US Postal Service. With a real postage stamp on it. And best of all, with the horrible handwriting I developed because of in spite of the feared Mrs. Reynolds, my first grade teacher at Hillside Avenue School in New Jersey. Maybe the postcard should be of the cover of the book. Maybe of some other scene from Tulum. I will consider the options.

Meanwhile, speaking of Hillside Avenue School. It’s now called, believe it or not, Walter Krumbiegel School in memory of the tall, deep voiced, mustached principal who was there long ago. Anyway, I was thinking today (I don’t know what may have prompted the thought) about climbing a tree on the front lawn of the school near the entrance. When I was small, when I was an 8-year old, it was so very easy to climb. It was, in fact, the easiest tree in the neighborhood. I imagined that by now, more than 50 years later, it would be gigantic. Majestic. It would be as tall as the school. No, taller. It would have a round, thick base. It would have tremendous, long branches. By now, no 8-year old could easily pull himself into its wide branches. A worry: maybe it had to be taken down because it grew so very large and was so close to the school building. Wrong. Completely wrong. It’s still there. The joke's on me. It appears that it was a dwarf or miniature flowering tree of some kind. Crabapple? Maybe.

How do I know it's still standing there with open limbs inviting children to climb it? You can see it standing where it always was, still flowering on the school’s lawn, just to the right of the stairs, up close to the building.

He's Baaaack!

He’s baaack.

Yes, he is. Your Bloguero has returned. He’s back. Apparently, the phrase has something to do with Poltergeist II. Evidently, it’s really “They’re back!" ("Han vuelto") At least that’s what it says on the jacket of the book derived from the movie. Or the DVD cover released in Mexico that mimics the US cover. But never mind all the attribution and repeated Google-izing, it’s close enough. Close enough to spur a brief, New Year’s Day inquiry into general gullibility.

Your Bloguero bets that you don't remember the 1986 film. You've probably forgotten this part:

One night, Steven lets his guard down and gets drunk, swallowing a Mezcal worm that is possessed by Kane, a demon disguised as a preacher, who temporarily possesses him. He attacks and tries to rape Diane, who cries out that she loves him. Steven then vomits up the worm possessed by Kane, which grows into a huge, tentacled monstrosity.

Your Bloguero, who is now back from his brief hiatus and wearing his relaxation in the middle of his face, wonders how this Mezcal worm nonsense passes an “Are You F*cking Kidding Me?” (AYFKM) Plot Salience Test. Maybe it's aimed at Gringos. After all, most Mezcal, your Bloguero notes, doesn’t have a “worm” in it, thank Mayahuel, and when it does, it’s not really a worm. No, senores, it’s a weevil larva. An insect, not a worm. So passing AYFKM relies on the particular viewer’s ignorance. Passing AYFKM requires a viewer who is already up to the eyeballs in false agave legends. Stories from the Border States. Jalisco Apocrypha. Dis-information (see, Paco Taibo II, Four Hands). Untrue stories about Oligochaeta. Perhaps in naked gullibility.

And, and this is a big and important and, when this yarn passes AYFKM, the viewer will of course have been taken in by something that is, wait for it, demonstrably false. My goodness. That’s nothing. I heard you say that. I agree. This is hardly surprising. This is an everyday event. An event that happens repeatedly. It's like WMD. Or yellow cake. Or the "debt crisis". And a million others. You can insert your favorite ones right here. Your Bloguero is, of course, amused at finding this in Poltergeist II. At the very least, he thinks, thank goodness, this particular falsehood didn’t cause any injury to anyone. Unless, of course, mind numbing credulity and stupidity promoted by gullibility are injuries. Maybe these are self inflicted (cue Ron Paul or Rick Goodhair). Anyway, it’s nothing new: it’s de rigueur. Hell, it's expected. You expect it. So does your Bloguero.

Your Bloguero originally speculated that the instantaneous transformation of the puked larva (believed to be a worm) into a “huge, tentacled monstrosity” was the place AYFKM Fail would be harshly activated and the plot would be reduced to his and other viewers' guffaws. Wrong. Your Bloguero notes without citation that if the viewer willingly and uncritically accepts the

(possessed worm=larva) < Mezcal

formula, the film’s startling, spontaneous generation of a giant monster from a Pukevalanche including a dead insect is hardly problematic. It’s entirely credible. It follows almost logically, if you're of that mind.

Your Bloguero loves to generalize from such thoughts. And to terrorize himself with them. But he cannot top H.L. Mencken, who said “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Your Bloguero knows how scary that is. It makes Poltergeist II seem bland.

Have a wonderfilled, joyful, Happy New Year! Your Bloguero is delighted to be back.

An Extremely Brief Hiatus

Punta Bahia Soliman, Tulum

Today's local paper reports about Sonny Rollins, one of my favorite musicians, and his recent presidential honor at Kennedy Center. The important part of Rollins's story to this post is that from 1959 to 1961, he took a famous "sabbatical," a hiatus from performing and recording, and he worked on his music by himself. Privately. And he didn't play for listeners. It's told that he practiced in this period on the Williamsburg Bridge. And it's told that he was "frustrated with what he perceived as his own musical limitations."

Asked about this hiatus by the local paper some fifty years later, Rollins said:

“I took a break because I felt I wasn’t playing as well as I could. I had a lot of people praising me and I felt I wasn’t able to live up to it. I have pride in what I do. You have to have strength with your convictions. When I came back from hiatus, people said I didn’t sound any different. That did not matter to me because I did learn something whether or not they heard it. I listened to my inner voice and that was the main thing,” said Rollins.

Put another way, Rollins took some time-- for him it was about 3 years-- to recharge, reorient, resuscitate, restore his edge.

Which brings this post to me, your humble Bloguero. My present judgment, that I'm not writing as well as I can, that my writing is getting stale, formulaic, tired, seems to have been coming out lately in my projections, specifically, that not enough people are reading me, that not enough comments are made, that not enough clicks are received. Habla bla bla bla. This feels like whining. Or whinging (thank you, Xanthe) as one astute reader recently pointed out. The most recent example is here (a special thanks to Diane). The problem, of course, as usual with projection is that it's not the readers' problems. Not at all. Never is. It's not you. It's not outside of me. It's me. So I have decided to ask myself, "You talkin to me? You talking to me?" Well, yeah.

There are two parts of this. First, after a five year slog, Tulum has finally been published. I can write post after post after attempted cleaver post asking people to buy it online at Barnes and Noble, Amazon and iUniverse. I can tell you what a great gift and stocking stuffer it is. But let's face it, I don't like being stuck on that topic for long and using my keyboard as a blunt instrument of book marketing. No fun. Stale. Second, and maybe this is part of the first thing, the space that launching the book into the world might have created in my inner world, space to think about new things, space to dream up new ideas, space that is empty, space that is fresh, seems to be cluttered. With commerce. And work. And fatigue. And cobwebs. Again, no fun. Not for me, and definitely not for you.

And so, I've decided to take some time, a very little time, just from here to the end of the year, benignly to neglect this blog. To assume blog silence for a couple of weeks. To travel into the darkest, shortest day of the year in silence. To be quiet. To be still. To rest. To see, whether with some silence and soon the lengthening of the days, my edge is burnished. And my fatigue is banished. And there is more light and heat and creativity. So I can come back in 2012 restored, rested, renewed.

That makes this, as I walk away, a great time to post this blog's annual greeting:

Felices Fiestas! Queremos tomar esta tiempo para ofrecerle nuestros mejores deseos a usted y sus seres queridos. Esperamos que su hogar este lleno de gozo, cordialidad y buena voluntad durante esta temporada de fiestas. Que usted y su familia gozen de paz, felicidad y buena salud durante el nuevo ano.

Seasons Greetings! We'd like to take this time to extend our very best wishes to you and your loved ones. We hope your home will be filled with joy, warmth and goodwill during this holiday season. May you and your family enjoy peace, happiness, and good health throughout the coming year.

Hasta pronto.

Completion

The journey began in earnest in Ireland at Sliabh na Caillí, or Loughcrew in Co. Meath, Ireland. Yes, before I went there I was "working" on the book. But it was a sporadic effort: sometimes writing, sometimes letting the manuscript sit in a drawer gathering dust. Truth be told, much more of the latter. But in April, 2009, the situation changed. As I wrote at the time:

Sliabh na Caillí... is a sacred site with cairns dedicated to or occupied by the Crone, or the Hag, or Garavogue. It is far more than 4000 years old. There are, of course, many details. But the important part is the personal, the intuitive, the spiritual.

When I visited Sliabh na Caillí with an international band of Shamanic friends... I made an offering to the Crone in her cairn, and I asked her whether she had anything to tell me. And she did. I am to finish the draft of my novel in process before the end of the coming September. No excuses. No extensions of time. No dogs eating my homework. I take this seriously. I do not wish to run afoul of the Crone's wishes. I do not wish to incite her to anger. I do not wish to taste her wrath.

To make sure I wouldn't let the time slip by, to make sure that my vow to follow this message and to complete the task would be kept, I told my friends what the Crone had to say. They are my witnesses. And today, a couple weeks later, I am writing it down. Forgetfulness, unconsciousness, being busy, lack of mindfulness, other seeming necessities, all forms of practiced sloth, are not to deter me. Nor rain, nor gloom, nor dread of night, stops this courier from the prompt completion of his appointed rounds. And you, dear readers, are witnesses also.

The working title of my book is "Tulum," which is a Mayan town in Quintana Roo, Mexico. I won't tell you about the book, except to say that it is about the friendship of a US expat with a shady background and a Mayan curandero. There are 30,000 +/- words on my key drive as I write this.

And so, I have a task, a quest, an imramma, a journey to perform. I am honored to carry this out.

That was 2009. That was more than a year and 50,000 words ago.

I finished a very rough draft in that September. And after many revisions and changes and editing and rewriting and far too much staring at the ceiling and making excuses and worrying about it, on February 13, 2011, I uploaded the manuscript to the publisher. And today I uploaded the other required materials. And now I am finished. The rest of the task is merely mechanical. Or proofreading.

Well, not really. It's not that simple. There remains something else. Something else that's extremely important. Something that I don't want to leave out. It's the real conclusion of the imramma.

Even when the book is in your hands or on your Kindle, even then, even when you've read it, even when you've passed it on to others, or maybe even forgotten it, my task won't be completed. I realize that. There is something else that has to be done. My journey won't really be completed until I have taken this book in digital form, placed it on a key drive, and personally delivered the drive to the Crone by placing it discreetly in the rocks in her cairn. Only then will all of the assigned tasks have been completed. Only when one returns after the quest to the very beginning is the journey completed.

When one accepts a challenge or inspiration or advice and chooses to embark on a quest, and then carries out one's assigned tasks, there remains one more, final step. It remains important afterwards to return to the very beginning, to the very person who inspired or commissioned the effort and to stand before him or her. And upon returning, it's important to say aloud to that person, "I have done it, I have completed it, and I have returned to tell you this." It is then important to offer one's gratitude for a journey so remarkable it qualifies to be called a quest. It seems to me that it's this mythic return and the expression of gratitude that really completes the journey.

I will now look for airfare for April, 2011. It's been two years, and I am at last ready to return.

Coming Soon To A Kindle or iPad Near You

I'm tired. And I'm paying the cost of being a pre-computer typist. And my shoulders hurt. I am completely fried.

Today I spent about 6 hours getting the manuscript for the above book ready. That's the cover. Beautiful, right?

Guess what? When I took typing in the 7th grade (some prescience by mi padres, who somehow anticipated the keyboard age), I was told that after a period, after a question mark, after an exclamation, you always hit the space bar. Not once, but twice. Always. So it's reflex now, a habit. A habit of decades' reinforcement. Something I cannot stop doing.

So what, you say? So what? Hardly. It is not a "so what" kind of thing. This idiotic habit, this non-information age fetish, this throw back to the era of manual typewriting of the two space bar hits, cost me 6 hours today. Why? Because I had to remove all of the extra spaces after the periods, question marks, and exclamations. All of them. So the manuscript could be published.

The manuscript is about 81,000 words. Have you got any idea how many sentences that entails? Well,I do. 6,855 sentences. So, if I were consistent (I was in this because I cannot break the habit), I had to remove at least 6,855 spaces. Manually. Using a delete key. And this labor of love (what else on earth could it possibly be?) took 6 hours. And now as I write to tell you about today's thrilling but quite mind numbing activities, I find that after each period, I still hit the space bar twice. And then I have to go back and delete one of the spaces because that space is utterly unnecessary. That space is the typewriter atavism, the sign that I am of the past century, that word processing came after my typing, that I am wasteful of pixels.

Can I shed this horrible habit? In this post, no. I've failed in every sentence so far, and don't expect to be able to save myself right now.

There is good news, though. Having completed this exercise in deletion, the manuscript is about finished. I even cut three paragraphs that have grown out of favor. So sometime this coming week, away it goes. And soon, Tulum, the novella, will be in paperback and a Kindle or an iPad or other electronic reader near you. After all of this, I pray that every human being who can read will buy a copy of it.

Meanwhile, I have been in the hot tub three times today because of soreness in my shoulders. And as I write to tell you this, I am conscious that after I hit the period key, there is still an overwhelming, overpowering, assertive, undeniable urge to hit the spacebar. Twice.

There are some other minor tasks that need doing before Tulum is gone, but I see no reason why those cannot be completed in the next three days.

It's about time. This is a project that's been about six years in the making.

Earthquack And Irene, Part Deux

Irene remains the big, big, big story in and around Gotham. You’d think there had never been a hurricane on the East Coast before, let alone a Category 3 one, let alone one that was (horror beyond belief) coming this way!!! You’d think a storm was unheard of, some kind of novel, freakish accident. Indeed. MSNBC has even reminded New Yorkers that Long Island is after all, wait for it, an actual island:

"You have to recognize that you're living here on an island, and island living represents certain risks," said Edward Mangano, county executive in Long Island's Nassau County, where school buses were being moved to higher ground in case they're needed to evacuate residents to storm shelters. "And those risks appear now, at least, to be tracking toward us."

“Tracking toward us” is apparently bureaucratic disaster speak for “arriving.” Personally, I’ve never heard of such a thing. An island? I thought Long Island, a corner of the Gothamsfero I avoid at all cost, was a traffic jam.

And they’ve already trotted out that wonderful pre-disaster reporting cliché, “Preparing For The Worst!” Cue the scary music. The storm isn’t supposed to get to New York for a couple of days. So the nadir of disaster reporting has probably not yet arrived. Stay tuned for pictures of empty supermarket shelves, people hammering plywood over windows, and finally some guy in a parka standing in the wind while things that are not tied down blow around.

This is just not getting it for me. I need something like this:

Bonsai

Alejandro Zambra’s novella “Bonsai” won the Chilean Critics Award for best novel of the year in 2006. And Mercurio wrote, "The publication of Bonsai ... marked a kind of bloodletting in Chilean literature. It was said (or argued) that it represented the end of an era, or the beginning of another, in the nation's letters." That is quite a metaphor for a first, small novella. It deserves praise.

“Bonsai” (this will not surprise) is very small. 90 pages. And when digressions begin to grow, they are immediately pruned. Characters are marked as irrelevant and quickly dropped. Curves in the plot are truncated. The result is spare and beautiful. You can read it all in an afternoon. But it continues to grow afterward.

There is no spoiler here. Just a wonderful part of the story for you to savor.

At one point, Emilio and Julio, begin to read Macedonio Fernandez’s story “Tantalia" together. Zambra writes:

”Tantalia” is the story of a couple that decides to buy a small plant and keep it as a symbol of the love that unites them. They realize too late that if the plant dies, the love that unites them will die with it. And as the love that unites them is immense and they are not willing to scacrifice it for any reason, they decide to lose the little plant in a multitude of identical little plants. Later comes the despair, the misfortune of knowing they will never be able to find it.

She and he, Macedonio’s characters, had and lost a little plant of love. Emilia and Julio – who are not exactly characters, though maybe it’s convenient to think of them as characters – have been reading before shagging for months, it is very pleasant, they think, and sometimes they think it at the same time: it is very pleasant, it is beautiful to read and talk about the reading just before tangling legs. It’s like doing exercise.

It isn’t always easy to find, in the texts, some impetus, however small, to shag, but in the end they manage to locate a paragraph or verse that, when whimsically stretched or perverted works for them, gets them hot. (They liked that expression, to get hot, that’s why I use it. They liked it almost enough to get hot from it.)

But this time it was different.

I don’t like Macedonio Fernandez anymore, Emilia said, shaping her sentences with inexplicable timidity, a she caressed Julio’s chin and mouth.

And Julio: Me neither. I enjoyed it, I liked him a lot, but not anymore. Not Macedonio.

Bonsai, Zambrano tells us, is the tree with its container. If the container is removed, the plant is no longer Bonsai. So with this beautiful story: its confinement makes it all the more startling, all the more alive, all the more unusual.

Insults

According to Flavorwire, here are the thirty harshest author-on-author insults in history. Truth is they are incredibly clever. But I cannot believe that this is all. I'm sure there are others that are even more devastating. Even more witty.

An quick example from the list:

15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

Enjoy. At least they're not saying those things about you. Or, on the other hand, maybe it's too bad that they're not.

Binyavanga Wainaina

is the name of this consummate Kenyan writer, and "“One Day I Will Write About This Place" is the new book. The New York Times Book Review by Alwxandra Fuller gets right to the point:

Harried reader, I’ll save you precious time: skip this review and head directly to the bookstore for Binyavanga Wainaina’s stand-up-and-cheer coming-of-age memoir, “One Day I Will Write About This Place.” Although written by an East African and set in East and Southern Africa, Wainaina’s book is not just for Afrophiles or lovers of post­colonial literature. This is a book for anyone who still finds the nourishment of a well-­written tale preferable to the empty-­calorie jolt of a celebrity confessional or Swedish mystery.

Wainaina's real life thing is reading. And writing. And this is his memoir. A sample after he drops out of the university to read:

“Over the past year,” he writes, “as I fell away from everything and everybody, I moved out of the campus dorms and into a one-room outhouse. . . . My mattress has sunk in the middle. Books, cigarettes, dirty cups, empty chocolate wrappers and magazines are piled around my horizontal torso, on the floor, all within arm’s reach. If I put my mattress back on the bunk I am too close to the light that streams in from the window, so I use the chipboard bunk as a sort of scribble pad of options: butter, a knife, peanut butter and chutney, empty tins of pilchards, bread, a small television set, many books, matches and a sprawl of candles, all in various stages of undress and disintegration.”

And so the book chronicles Wainaina's unwillingness, which he apparently treats not as his choice, but as his inability to do anything except read. Pause at that point. I did. What, I wonder, would have happened to me all those decades ago if I had made the same choice? And look at the enormous array of reasons, real and imagined, theoretical and economic that arose and made it a "bad choice" to do so. Wainaina apparently didn't have the same issues. And he certainly didn't cave in to them. And the results have been remarkable. Fuller explains:

Wainaina was catapulted into the literary spotlight when his autobiographical novella “Discovering Home” was awarded the 2002 Caine Prize, sometimes called “the African Booker.” The work arose from a long, late-night e-mail to a friend, and it retains an unedited familiarity. “There is a problem,” it begins. “Somebody has locked themselves in the toilet. The upstairs bathroom is locked and Frank has disappeared with the keys. There is a small riot at the door, as drunk women with smudged lipstick and crooked wigs bang on the door."

Wainaina followed up that success with “How to Write About Africa,” a provocative essay that appeared in Granta in 2005. “In your text,” he wrote, “treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: 54 countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book.”

That's enough for me. Time to head for Barnes and Noble and get reading.

The She-Devil In The Mirror

Horacio Castellanos Moya

Partly because my new novel, Tulum, is told by a fictional, first person narrator, I’m particularly interested in fiction with similar narrators. I didn’t initially know that Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 2000 novel The She-Devil In The Mirror (La Diabola En La Espejo) was in this category. I was reading it because of my enjoyment of another book by Moya, Senselessness. I wrote about Senselessness in May.

Imagine my delight. The novel’s narrator is female, privileged, Salvadoran ruling class, obsessive, garrulous, intuitive, and ultimately not reliable. Prompted by excitement and panic, she talks faster and faster, a mile a minute. She babbles on and on. But, alas, she’s headed for a crash. In post-civil war Salvador, her friend is killed, the hit man is arrested, but then the real search begins: who is the "mastermind," who put out the contract. Why was her friend murdered? There will be no spoiler here. The book is short, fast paced, very funny, very dark, and ultimately, quite frightening.

As Francisco Goldman notes in a blurb, the narrator “reveals more about intractable corruption, impunity and pure eveil in her country than the usual narrators of such stories – terse, noirish, knowing detectives or journalists, for example -- ever could.” That's a surprise. Ordinarily, the reader expects corruption, impunity, and abuse to be exposed by the victims. Or the investigators. But it turns out surprisingly that Moya's narrator is uniquely situated to reveal all of it. It becomes immediately clear why so many people have fled the country.

Highly recommended.

Italics, Be Gone! Scram! Beat It!

There is a convention in literature that when you’re using words or phrases in a language other than the one you are speaking or writing in, you put those words or phrases in italics. Why? So that the reader will know that it’s not English, instead it’s French. Well, if you look at the words and you see they are not in the language you were reading in, I guess you know they are, wait for it, in another language. Isn’t that astounding? Isn’t that pasmoso?

So we have things like this that beautifully illustrate the convention:

”You understand beautifully. Ca va, ca va. You can’t imagine how little I care.”

The speaker, Oliveira in Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (Rayuela in Spanish) is speaking Spanish (in the translation he’s speaking English and not Spanish, but it doesn’t matter) and the author (or the editor or translator or somebody else important) wants us to know that the phrase "Ca va, Ca va" isn’t in the same language as the first part of the statement. That, lo and behold, for emphasis or some other reason, he’s changed languages. Like we would have thought that "Ca va, Ca va" was a phrase in English that we didn’t know, and we wanted to know what it meant, so without the italics we would have run to an English dictionary and been horrified to discover that, ah hah! "Ca va, Ca va", was not an English phrase. And because it is spoken in France, maybe we would figure out that it was French. And go to a French dictionary instead.

So if the reader is easily misled (Note for O: this word is for you alone), you need italics to create a gap between the language that is being spoken and the speaker’s unannounced foray into some other language. The speaker almost never says, “And as they say in France, ca va, ca va…”

This italics convention is particularly used when Latin names are used. So we always see things like this:

Green turtle (chelonia mydas)

C’mon now. The green turtle is an animal, so if there are words that come after it in a language that looks like Latin, then it’s almost definitely Latin. It's its Latin, scientific name. But as if the reader has never been around the block before, the reader is treated to italics, to suggest that, oh, yes, it’s a Latin name, amigo. Similarly, pot (cannabis sativa l.). This is for people who have never been around the block and are impaired by a vegetable substance. Who else would have trouble figuring out that cannabis sativa is Latin. Hence, the “l” inquires idiotically whether the reader is so impaired by a green vegetable substance that s/he thinks it’s English and needs a reminder that, ut oh, it's Latin.

So by now you’ve realized that I think this is a stupid, unnecessary convention. And for what it’s worth, I also think it does something that is extremely undesirable: it keeps one language from infiltrating and cross-polinating another. It’s designed, I think, to prevent people who are using English, Spanish, Italian and Portugese from saying at the end of a conversation, “Ciao,” as a regular usage. Ciao apparently is ok. Ciao, which implies that the word or phrase is in the same language, is not ok. Similarly, in Spanish, German, and Portugese (and a host of other languages) OK is not ok, but OK is. This is enough to make the reader and the writer even crazier: it’s like trying to keep male and female rabbits from producing offspring from their being together in the same cage. It’s that impossible. And it reeks of a kind of language purity that the world has apparently abandoned (except in France, but that’s another story). And if the world hasn't abandoned it, I confess: I have.

Why am I raving about this here? Does it matter to anyone? Well, it’s simple. And it matters to me. My manuscript for my new novel, Tulum, is written in English, and it has words in it that are Spanish. Do I want to put the Spanish words, each and every single one of them, in italics? No, I do not. The narrator uses Spanish words when he talks. He just uses them. He does not say them in italics. He just says them. Other people in the book use Spanish words when they talk. They do not italicize. I like the idea that both English and Spanish words are used by the characters. Sometimes, they explain what the word means, sometimes not. No matter. It is how they speak. It's what they say. And they do not make a gesture or a signal or a prompt that they are now, get ready for it, switching languages. They just say what they say. So. Entonces. I have decided that the italics convention stops right here. It is not getting into my book. No matter what. Italics, you are history to me.

I assure you. This will not make the book any harder to read. It will end a practice that has outlived its usefulness.

The Memoir Genre Takes Another Beating

Last night, 60 Minutes ran a piece about inaccuracies in Greg Mortensen's book, Three Cups of Tea. Today, the New York Times reported on the controversy. The memoir genre is taking yet another beating.

What emerges is that those inspiring, charming stories people always tell when they are at a cocktail party or sitting around drinking beer, telling anecdotes and stories from the past, exaggerating, making stuff up, having a great time, making themselves bigger or smaller than they really are, those products of the raconteur's art, they don't work when they are written down and called "memoirs" and are alleged to be 100% factual. There's a big problem. A memoir is supposed to be 100% factual. And the genre absolutely depends on this. If you want to inflate or deflate a story, or make something up, or spin it around, your book should be in the fiction aisle. It shouldn't be called a memoir. This is not a radical proposition.

“It really is the responsibility of the author to write the truth,” said David Black, a literary agent. “If a publisher were to establish a fact-checking department the way a magazine fact checks, given the length of the works and the number of books they are dealing with, it would become very difficult to publish a lot of nonfiction.”

William Zinsser, who is the author of “Writing About Your Life: A Journey Into the Past,” said on Sunday that publishers have had a “slippery” standard for accuracy in memoirs.

“I don’t think they much care whether it’s true or not,” Mr. Zinsser said. “To me, the essence of memoir writing is absolute truth because I think everybody gains that way.”

One has to assume that the writer, in this case Greg Mortensen, knows whether what he is saying is completely accurate. There are, of course, people who can't pass this entry level threshold, but I don't think Mortensen is one of them. People who don't know the difference between truth and falsehood definitely should not quit their day jobs to become memoirists. The rest of us presumably know an inaccuracy (a lie, if you will) when we write it down. Supposedly we know it when we tell it, we know when we're being inaccurate.

There is, of course, nothing the matter with making up stories, creating simulacra, telling outrageous lies. I do it all the time in my stories. And so do my characters. They do that because like most humans they tell lies, to themselves, to others, to everyone. Anybody who can write, though, knows whether s/he is writing facts or fiction.

If it's fiction, it should be labeled fiction. That grand dame, memoir, shouldn't have to put up with another beating by somebody whose understanding of the rules is impaired.

Writing At Its Very Best

Every once in a while I come across some writing, usually a paragraph or just a few sentences, that is so remarkable, so breathtaking, so brilliant I have to copy it down and reprint it here. Today I found a paragraph. It's by Eduardo Galeano :

"Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them - will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms. The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them."

– Eduardo Galeano, "The Nobodies"

Just unbelievably good.

Sorry, Ariana and Markos, No More Free Content For You

I know all too much about writing for free. I do it here all the time. It's a labor of love. I've been at it for more than 900 blog posts and more than 5 years. I know about writing without being paid for it. Despite that, and despite my understanding that when I post at group blogs I know I won't get paid, I am absolutely furious about the AOL-Huffington Post Deal. Why? Because the writers are getting screwed, and they're not going to get a cent out of the deal. Not a sou.

The news this morning-- I'm sure you haven't missed it-- was that that beleaguered, dinosaur of dial up AOL has bought Huffington Post and made that doyenne of self promotion and faux progressive politics, Arianna, an AOL executive. Here's the essence of the story from the New York Times:

The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company's largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.
The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL's editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL's national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company's other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.

Meanwhile, the bloggers at HuffPo, the ones who provide the "original content creation", that was just sold for $315,000,000.00 get, wait for it, nothing. Zilch. Nada. Zero. And in an email this morning to bloggers, Ariana told them not to worry, no te preocupes, they could still churn out "original content creation", just like before, and well, continue to get the same nothing for it:

The HuffPost blog team will continue to operate as it always has. Arianna will become editor-in-chief not only of HuffPost but of the newly formed Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all of AOL's content sites, including Patch, Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, PopEater, MapQuest, Black Voices, and Moviefone.

Together, our companies will have a combined base of 117 million unique U.S. visitors a month -- and 250 million around the world -- so your posts will have an even bigger impact on the national and global conversation. That's the only real change you'll notice -- more people reading what you wrote.

Far from changing the Huffington Post's editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, it will be like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We're still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we're now going to get there much, much faster.

When I first read this, I was furious. I quickly penned an essay, which I published at dailyKos in which I argued that the bloggers, the writers at HuffPo were being screwed because they weren't getting a cent out of the $315 million dollar deal.

To my amazement, many of the comments to that essay told me that I was off base. Did I write for free and publish my writing at daily Kos? Yes. Didn't I do that because it would expose me to a wide audience? Yes. Didn't I write it all for free, without hope of money? Yes. Didn't I? I did. What kind of loon (I'm paraphrasing here) would think that he should write hundreds of diaries for free and that when the platform was sold, he should receive something? You've already received something, it was argued, you got the exposure and a larger audience for your writing. You don't, it was argued, deserve anything more. You get bupkis from the $315 million deal; you don't deserve more than that.

That just may be so. I never posted an essay or a comment at HuffPo. So I don't deserve any of the $315,000,000 Ariana and her investors are being paid. I figure that if Ariana put 1% of the deal up and gave it to the writers, there would be $3.15 million to distribute. How many writers could there be? If there were 1,000, they could each be given $3,150. They could be told, "Thank you for writing for free. Because your writing helped me make a bundle, I've decided to send you this small check as a token of my appreciation. Your writing is worth far more than this amount, but this is something I want you to have as a token of my gratitude. It's not pay. It's a gift. You helped me make a big score, and I want to thank you for that."

MSNBC is reporting that HuffPo had 6,000 free bloggers writing for it (last sentence of linked article). If that's so, the 1% gratuity would come to about $500 per person. And the number of people who wrote so that Ariana could be well paid would be enormouse.

At any rate, you'd expect some acknowledgment of the bloggers and writers. You wouldn't expect anything less from a progressive. When somebody at the race track gives you a tip, and you bet the horse, and it wins, you always give the tipper some of the winning. When a football quarterback wins a big game, he takes the linemen out to dinner and drinks. You have gratitude for those who make it possible to win. When someone in business helps you out and you have gratitude, you send flowers or wine or a fruit basket. Or you pay for a meal. These are expressions of gratitude for help. They are always appreciated, especially if your original deal was that you wouldn't be paid.

Is Ariana going to get out her check book and write a check, or is she going to sit on it? Probably the latter. So I won't be signing up to write at HuffPo at any time soon. And I'll support Al Giordano and others who have decided to take down their writing from the site.

Which brings me to Markos and dailyKos. I have loved writing for dailyKos over the years. But if today's events tell me anything, it's that dailyKos might well be the next group web site to be sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's the same as HuffPo in this: there are many, many talented people writing diaries there. There is some brilliant writing. That writing is the value of the site. And that writing is being given to the site and its readership for free. And when the site is ultimately acquired by the capitalists with the big check books and they write Markos a gigantic check, what then? Same story, different day. I'll be told that I agreed to write for free, that I had a large audience, and that is all. I got what I deserve; I will get nothing more. Things will be the same with the new corporate master. Why, I wonder, should I or anyone else contribute our writing, increase the value of the site, and then, poof, have it be sold while we receive nothing?

As America's former poet laureate tried to say, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." So, no, I'm done. I will not be moving to DK4 when the site changes over this week. I will not be publishing any further diaries at dailyKos. I am not willing to continue to provide value to dailyKos that will eventually be sold without any payment of any kind to me. No. I'm done. I'll stick to my blog and to the Writers Port Alliance. You can join me there or at the other Writers Port Alliance sites (all listed at the top of this blog)

HuffPo Bought By AOL

This morning's news says that beleaguered, dinosaur of dial up AOL has bought Huffington Post and made the doyenne of digital, Arianna, an executive. Here's the news from the New York Times:

The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.

The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.

Meanwhile, the bloggers at HuffPo, I'm told, the ones who provide the "original content creation" that was just sold, don't get paid. Correct me if I'm wrong. And in an email to the bloggers this morning, Arianna told them that things would remain the same:

The HuffPost blog team will continue to operate as it always has. Arianna will become editor-in-chief not only of HuffPost but of the newly formed Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all of AOL’s content sites, including Patch, Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, PopEater, MapQuest, Black Voices, and Moviefone.

Together, our companies will have a combined base of 117 million unique U.S. visitors a month -- and 250 million around the world -- so your posts will have an even bigger impact on the national and global conversation. That’s the only real change you’ll notice -- more people reading what you wrote.

Far from changing the Huffington Post’s editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, it will be like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.

So my initial impression-- I'm sure we'll all have time to think about this today-- is that once again the writers, the bloguer@s like you and me get to continue to tickle their keyboards and bang their heads on their monitors for free, while they create all of the "content" and the money, and it is huge money this time, will not find its way into their pockets. Not a sou.

The other point has to do with consolidation of media and control of content. The more consolidation the fewer outlets with potentially different points of view. Consolidation of media is the opposite of creating a free, multiplicity of views.

Alejo Carpentier: Reasons of State

Virgen del Cobre


I love this book, so I just finished re-reading it. Very near the end, I found a treasure, which I print here for you to enjoy.

The dictator, now an Ex, is in Paris, and he's dying in a house near the Arc d'Triomphe. He's between sleep and awake, death and being alive. Carpentier writes:

...Ofelia ande Elmirita have filled my room with pictures of Virgins. There they are, in rows on the wall, surrounding me, watching over mmy sleep, present as soon as I open my eyes, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin del Cobre, the Virgin of Chquinquira, the Virgin of Regla, the Virgin of the Coromotos, the Virgin of the Valle, the Virgin of Altagracia, the Paraguayan Virgin of Caacupe, and three of four different pictures of the Divine Shepherdess of my own country, and naval Virgins and military Virgins, Virgins with White faces, Indian Virgins, Black Virgins, virgins of all of us, Ineffable Intercessos, Senoras of help in all trouble, disaster, plague, helplessness or misfortune-- all are here with me, covered in gold, silver and sequins, beneath flights of doves, the brightness of the Milky Way and the Music of the Spheres.

"God with me and I with Him," I murmer, remembering a simple prayer I learned as a child...

Utterly excellent. Enjoy.

Starting Over: Pontifications From A Nobody

Yesterday, I put up a diary at GOS decrying how our writing had become so completely predictable, so formulaic, so prosaic. It was derivative, and it was funny. But it was also extremely sad. In many ways it was a commentary on the powerlessness of progressive bloggers: we can yell louder, we can scream, we can write explosive rants. But you know what? It isn't changing anything. And frankly, I'm tired of our dogged, persistent pursuit of something that's not working. And, I suspect, isn't going to work.

Maybe you're lucky and can write face blistering essays on this site and you can have readers tell you how right on you are. How smart, how important, how clear. But if you're poor and without a job, or if you're sick and you don't have insurance, or if you're running out of unemployment benefits and the next job isn't in sight, or if your kids are in trouble and you don't know how to help them out, or if you are overdue to retire and you don't have the funds and have to work, or your wage slave pay isn't going to bail you out unless you win Megamillions and you're not too big to fail, or your kids are in the military, these essays aren't going to help you. Not at all. They're just going to highlight how you have somebody's boot on your neck. And you cannot get it off. And they're bound to inform you, if you don't know it already, about how very weak you are and how very powerless we as a group (I'm talking about progressives) remain.

Look. I'm just a writer. I'm mostly anonymous (though I have a web presence). I have my opinions. I have some ideas. I have my private life. I have my work. I wish, I really do wish, we could all be free from suffering and illness and hatred. I wish progressives had some real power. I wish we had influence. I wish we'd all wake up tomorrow morning and be covered by Medicare. I wish the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan would be over. I wish unemployment would be extended until the economy turns around. I wish foreclosures would be stayed. I wish we'd all have enough to eat, adequate shelter, first rate health care, decent education, a whole shopping basket of safety net programs. I wish we would have something that resembled a moderate, socialist European government. But we don't. And despite the electoral win this past November, we're not going to get those things. Ever.

We may have thought, in our desperation and gullibility, that our lives would change. But here we are, October, 2009, and if your life is better than it was in October, 2008, I'll be amazed. In other words, it's the same old same old and it's now time to see it for what it really is. It's the same if not worse than it was a year ago. The fantasy of structural, fundamental change was just that, a fantasy. The illusion that the Government would help is was just that, an illusion. There are still homeless people. Sick people without insurance. Unemployed people in foreclosure. And the prospect of a change for them, a change they can believe in, well, it just doesn't exist. It's not happening this year. Or next year. It's probably just not happening.

Strange as it may seem, I'm not discouraged. To me all of this means that I was making a mistake in what I thought was happening, so now I need to revise my thinking. I'm a writer. I revise all the time. I'm good at editing. I'm good at rewriting. I've spent far more time at that than writing first drafts. So I suggest to my friends who are writers, blogger@s, that we forget about starting to write chapter 2 and go back immediately to rewrite chapter 1. Put another way, we need to rethink all of our expectations, our hopes, our dreams, our demands. We need to remember that the change we can believe in was something we could be believe in, but, alas, it was just another dream. It was not real. And when we woke up, poof!, it was gone.

So I suggest that we retrench slightly, that we retreat, that we pull back. Only for a few moments. I suggest that we stop acting like the Government gives a hoot about what we think or say or write. It clearly doesn't. And I suggest that we go back to basic, modest, local things we can actually improve. That we stop being all puffed up and making believe we're powerful, and recognize that all of that, that dream, that illusion, that hope, wasn't real. No, it wasn't. We need to recognize that the struggle for a progressive America is still ahead of us in the future.

For me this means no more money to politicians or political parties. None. Nada. Zilch. I'm giving the money to local programs that help people who need help (the local co-op, the food bank, e.g.). I'm going to try directly to help people whose suffering is not being addressed.

For me this means no more acting like the national Government is influenced by what I say as opposed to those people who can and have written fat checks to the incumbents and the PACs and the political interest groups. Just look at the health care debate. I want a single payer plan. And I have insurance and in a few years I'll have medicare. It's not my personal battle, as if I would battle for a 5% "public option" anyway. I want all of us to be safe and to have appropriate care. But this debate isn't even about health care any more. Now the Administration refers to it as "Health Insurance Reform." Jeebus. But I digress.

For me this means no more acting like people read what I write on blogs and just by reading it, it changes their views. Only the trolls disagree with what I write, and we all know they suck. The rest of us, those who agree with me, are great and wonderful people. But I'm just preaching to my own choir. I like the choir, really I do. But our singing doesn't matter. Here's an example. I've been writing about Honduras. People who are for democracy agree with me. Golpistas and Republicans don't. There are lots of "Democrats" who don't understand and are so anti-Chavez that they support the golpistas. Who are these people and why are they tormenting me in the comments? If they're not being paid by the Golpe de Estado or Republicans to troll what I write, they need to get a life. And by the way, so do I. Another digression.

For me, what I'm saying means that it is time to get down to basics. Does our writing change anything? I suspect it might if we were talking about something modest, something smaller. If we had good ideas. If we had action steps that were simple. If we had a real plan. If we had command of what was wrong and what had to be done, and it didn't involve enormous, structural changes of the national legislature.

Does what we write have an effect on national or international stories? I doubt it.

What about our fame as writers? Certainly, it's not about the money (which for me has been nonexistent). What about our being recommended, making the recc lists, being "up" for days on end, being famous, being named as famous, being cited? Yeah, that's all really, really nice. And maybe some of us are in it for that, but to be frank, I'm not. I like all of that, don't get me wrong, but that's not what it's about. It's about something else. It's about being heard and having that make some changes in thinking and actions. Does that happen? I doubt it.

For me this means I'm now going to get back to basics. I've taken down the hit counters on my blog. I'm going to stop posting at Naranja. I'll continue here and at my blog and at the other small blogs that I like.

I'm going to try to break out of the formulaic box. I'm going to try to find ways we can actually make a difference. I do hope you'll all join me in that. Our present way of "doing business" is a road to persistent irrelevance.

If it's true that the keyboard is mightier than the sword, and sometimes I have my doubts about that, we need to use it for what it can do rather than as a paperweight.

Where Do Stories Come From?

A Social Flycatcher

One possibility is that I make up stories. I dream them up, I fantasize them up, I just make them up. They come from me, from my brain or my mind or my heart. If that's where the come from, that's ok with me. I'm convinced that dreams, fantasies, stories are really important, often more important than physical objects and things you can see, so if they spontaneously arise from somewhere inside me, and I write them down, that's fine with me.

But there's another possibility. One that's more exciting. I like this other possibility a lot better.

I spent two weeks in Mexico, north of Tulum, Quintana Roo, writing every day. I was trying to finish the first draft of my second novel, working title "Tulum." Where did the ideas in that draft come from? Did they come from me? Or did they come from somewhere else?

When I first arrived at Bahia Soliman, where I was going to write, I noticed a particular kind of bird that was very pretty, very unusual for me. It's unusual for me because it only lives in Mexico, Central America, and northern South America. It's called a "social flycatcher." I don't know why it's called that. Its Wiki explains all kinds of things but not its name.

I think it's called "social" because it doesn't immediately fly away when it's near people. Or other birds and animals. That's just what I think. Anyway, I was wondering about this beautiful bird, and whether it might be near me because it was carrying stories for me and wanted to give some of them to me.

Whenever I got to the point in writing when I couldn't sit at the computer any longer, whenever I got stuck, whenever I had to figure something out about what I was writing, whenever I needed new ideas, whenever I needed inspiration or endurance, I'd go out for a walk. And maybe I'd see one of the social flycatchers.

I liked looking at this very pretty bird. Maybe, I thought, it was carrying the information, the story I needed to write down. And sure enough, after I went for my walk, I would find that I was able to continue to write, that I was able to go on with my writing, that I knew what to type.

This process went on for about two weeks. For about 15,000 words (I had a lot of words before I got to Mexico). And then one day, I thought, "Ah hah. That is the finish line, that is the end of this book, that is how it ends. I will finish this up tomorrow or the next day or the day after. I can see the conclusion, the last paragraph. Finally it has appeared. That's where and how this book ends."

After that I didn't see any of these birds again. No more social flycatchers. Not a one.

There are a lot of possibilities here. Maybe it was time for them to move on to another place to feed. Maybe it was time for them to move west or north on their migration. Maybe they ate all of the bugs where I was. Maybe having passed on whatever information they had for me, they decided to go and help somebody else, somebody else who was dreaming something up. Maybe somebody who was writing, or painting, or writing songs, or making something.

I prefer that they went on to help somebody else.

Wherever they might now be, I want to thank them for all of their help. But, I'm sorry to say, I don't know how to thank them except to write about what a wonderful assistance they were to me and to acknowledge their help.