Sick

“To my progressive friends, I would remind you that for decades the driving force behind reform has been to end insurance company abuses and make coverage affordable to those without it,” he said. “The public option is only a means to that end—and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish that goal.”

President Obama

Oh really, Mr. President? How very telling and explanatory when one stops to consider the current morass of the health reform debate.

President Obama’s characterization of the entire impulse of health care reform as an attempt to merely end insurance company abuses and make coverage affordable preserves the primacy of insurance companies and sees as central the profit motive of those companies…just don’t make the cost too dear, please. It helps explain why single-payer gets scant attention, dismissed as being too disruptive to those already insured. What? This doesn’t square with the President’s own claims about the driving force of the debate. How would a system that would drive down the costs of the insurance companies making insurance overall more affordable be, at the same time, disruptive? This is to say nothing of providing universal coverage.

As far the ideal of universal coverage, I’d like to remind President Obama that it is this ideal—not narrow business interests, not a tweaking of insurance company procedures and practices—that has been the driving force of the health-care reform debate. Furthermore, it is in pursuit of universal health care coverage where the character and morals of our country that Senator Kennedy spoke of reside.

Sunday Scribblings: Keys

Pushed to the back of kitchen drawers, abandoned to empty purpose, are the keys to missing locks.

Perhaps in a stranger’s kitchen a wide-eyed youth discovers a cache' of shiny locks,

And stalking the world, liberated from myth, the mischief of the gods to which keys remain the signifier.

Sunday Scribblings

An excerpt from a co-workers monologue with a post-script of brief commentary

…maybe I shouldn’t have gotten that flu-shot, cause I’m allergic to eggs It asks if you’re allergic to eggs…do you have any aspirin? I have a headache, probably an allergic reaction What are you going to do this weekend I’m going out of town, well if I feel okay Do you feel okay What’s the matter Can I get more aspirin from you Someday I’ll buy you a whole new bottle oh, I owe you seventy-cents don’t I or is it a dollar There were only five people here this morning...

By day's end I feel as if I've been beaten about the head by tiny rubber mallets. AHHHHHHHHHHH

Eureka!

Having recently finished reading Junot Diaz's The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao I've been left to cast about for another book holding language that sizzles. I picked up Driftless by David Rhodes--a fine book, yet I set it down with my itch unscratched. Last night, however, restlessly searching my bookshelves, I found a copy of Barry Hannah's novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan and I was off to the word races! As I am only a few pages into the book I have no summation to offer, but I can offer my enthusiasm for Hannah's craft. As the poet Charles Simic remarks, " Hannah is the only novelist whose sentences I keep underlining and underlining..."

Guess I'll read with pen in hand!

The Past Month

Wow, what have I been doing for the past month that was so compelling as to keep me from posting on this blog? Digging into my recollections I find the events pass my attention like so much sand through a timer.

I've done some reading. Only yesterday I finished reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I'd encourage everyone with an interest in literature, language, and story to study this book. The Pulitzer Prize hardly seems sufficient for this narrative. The language crackles with intensity, with passion, and with the bi-lingual/bi-cultural perspectives of the characters therein. The book is very much an elaboration of the Derek Walcott line "...either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."

I picked up Philip Levine's autobiography The Bread of Time--Toward An Autobiography. Levine first came to my attention when I plucked his volume of poetry entitled What Work Is and read the the title poem:

We stand in the rain in a long line

waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.

You know what work is--if you're

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may no do it.

Forget you. This is about waiting,

Shifting from one foot to another.

Feeling the light rain falling like mist

into your hair, blurring your vision

until you think you see your own brother

ahead of you, maybe ten places.

Your rub your glasses with your fingers,

and of course it's someone else's brother,

narrower across the shoulders than

yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin

that does not hide the stubbornness,

the sad refusal to give in to

rain, to the hours wasted waiting,

to the knowledge that somewhere ahead

a man is waiting who will say, "No,

we're not hiring today," for any

reason he wants. You love your brother,

now suddenly you can hardly stand

the love flooding you for your brother,

who's not beside you or behind or

ahead because he's home trying to

sleep off a miserable night shift

at Cadillac so he can get up

before noon to study his German.

Works eight hours a night so he can sing

Wagner, the opera you hate most,

the worst music ever invented.

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you're too young or too dumb,

not because you're jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,

just because you don't know what work is.

I wondered, then, of the man who could write in such a plain-spoken way and direct way about work, about love. I wondered of his upbringing--Detroit, Michigan, his education--studying with John Berryman and other luminaries, and his homes--Detroit, Spain, California.

I think, probably, the most consuming thing I've done in the past month is to have made the decision to return to school. I've danced around that decision for years now having considered a Master's in Social Work, a Master's in Counseling, a Master's in Psychology and finding the idea of specialization too confining, too narrowing at a time in my life when I am more able to have and hold wider perspectives. The Master's Program in Liberal Studies allows for study across disciplines, allows for the energizing clash of differing viewpoints, and allows for the enriching possibilities of synthesis.

I've otherwise occupied my time enjoying the harvest of our small garden, of meals enhanced with fresh tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers. And how better to enjoy these waning days of summer than in dining on the past efforts of Spring?

Writing and Reading as an Imaginative Act

The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple: they are boring, a consequence of the failure of imagination. To vividly imagine and to vividly render extraordinary human events, or sequences of events, is the hard-lifting, heavy-duty, day-by-day, unending labor of a fiction writer. Tim O’Brien



I have a simple criterion for fiction; it should delight. As a participant in innumerable writing groups, much of what I’ve read falls short of that standard. This isn’t because of the journeymen status of the writer, but of a lack of the writer’s imagination in the story. In the absence of the imagination the reader is confronted with mere words on the page. What can catapult reading from the act of “running eyes over words” to the experience of a “seamless dream” is imagination.

In our current “based-on-a-true-story” preference we evaluate our stories by their adherence to the facts. We frequently read critiques of such pieces singling out a lack of fidelity to “reality” as the damning dismissal of the piece in question. We confuse facts with truth, and in doing so diminish our expectations for fiction to those of mere reportage.

Tim O’ Brien’s essay Telling Tails appearing in the current Atlantic Monthly( and I urge you to follow the link. READ IT) explores imagination as the raison d’erte of a fiction writer. Good fiction is not merely a narrative, a plodding recitation of details that paint a scene in which the merely mundane events of life occur to a character. It is not a presentation of “sincerity” but, as Jim Harrison has argued, a presentation of the quality of the writer’s mind on the page, a presentation capable of engaging the reader.

O’Brien insists this does not rule out realism. Only think of the widely read Hemingway story Hills Like White Elephants and you can see O’Brien’s point. All of the oft touted bromides of writing groups – the telling detail, verisimilitude—have their place in fiction, but they are not enough. As David Byrne of the Talking Heads so aptly put it:

facts all come with points of view/facts don’t do what I want them to.

And what I yearn for in fiction is that dream wherein I'm transported, and in the act of being so moved, am also transformed.

More Thinking Than Doing. A Report From the Land of Good Intentions

In the days since my last post I’ve considered writing on a number of topics. I’ve thought I’d comment on Stephen Kinzer’s book Overthrow America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq as it skillfully places recent U.S. foreign adventures into historical context; I’ve thought about expressing my admiration for Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried. In my opinion this book is tied for 1^st Place with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American for best novel regarding the Vietnam War; Having recently (re)experienced a debilitating bout of back pain I thought I’d write more fully on that experience; I recently applied for a writer’s residency and thought the process worthy of comment; And in the past week, I’ve learned of a “new” approach to the treatment of addiction that looks promising, Integral Recovery and contacted its founder John Dupuy to explore professional opportunities.

All of that is to say I’m still here. Still churning with ideas and intentions. Still coming up short, however, on follow-through!