Escaping the Cycle

As I work to come into my own for the future, I have been forced to build from the past. But thus far I’ve only looked at the recent past – my recent mistakes, shortcomings, and insecurities. I need to go farther back than that – to why I might be the way I am. Because then I will have a better idea of how to move forward and build my life around strength, confidence, happiness, and integrity.

I am, in no way, disappointed with how I was raised. My parents were wonderful: they gave me everything I could ever need and want, opened my heart and mind to new experiences, and made sure I knew how to take the high road and choose integrity over what was easy or convenient. There are so many things about my mother and my father that I want to emulate, like my mother’s bottomless cup of kindness and empathy and my father’s ability to take on adversity like a knight defeating a dragon. But there are other things I saw in my parents, especially my mom, that I vowed I would never become.

I watched my mom take bad news with tears, watched her take great joy with tears, and watched her cry in desperation, sometimes being set off for days at a time. When I was younger I vowed not to let myself cry at such seemingly insignificant worries, problems that clearly had some sort of a solution, or sappy movies. I kept this vow for a long time, but as I’ve gotten older the tears come in frustration, fear, worry, anxiety, great joy and yes, sappy movies. I let worries carry me away when I am alone and unoccupied. And even, sometimes, when I am occupied. Sometimes worries follow me to times that should be happy and healing, and they shadow the good time I should be having and the relationships I should be building with the people I am with. And sometimes those people see my melancholy as a detriment to our relationship, which makes me fall deeper into worry. It is a vicious cycle, and even though I have watched my mother go through it again and again, I have fallen into the trap myself.

I’ve gotten a lot better with therapy. But now that my life seems to be changing possibly more quickly than I can plan for, worries and anxieties are overshadowing more and more experiences that should raise me up. Knowing that I am floundering is the first step. The next step is to see possibly solutions and work toward them. I wish I could live in a vacuum and shy off everyone else’s opinions of me (or what I worry is everyone else’s opinion of me), but the time I spent being raised by my mother sets me back from the start. Realistically, I will always have worries, I will sometimes be sad, sometimes melancholy, and sometimes cry at sappy movies. It is the recognition of these times and the ability to pull myself out of them that I have been and will continue to work on. And most importantly, I need support and patience of those around me – and faith that I can and will turn around. Because I have come pretty far already, and can see no reason I should ever back down now.

Change

Life is change. There is no escaping it. You can either fight it and tire yourself out, no better than you were before, or you can look it in the eye and nod and say, "Okay." Sometimes change is for the better, sometimes it is for the worse, but to know for sure either way is rare. It is a lucky man indeed that knows exactly how change will affect him and those around him.

Yes, it is true that sometimes you have to make your own changes occur. And there will be ripples, sometimes waves, when you do. Uncertainty is inevitable, whether it be over your decision to have Corn Flakes vs. Frosted Flakes or over a change that is much more life-altering than that. Remorse is possible. Mistakes are probable.

Recovering from change takes time. In that time more changes occur and your feelings shift and alter. You reach a peak, and then you even out. The change becomes the commonplace, ready to be blasted with a change again. This is life.

I hope I never regret any of the changes I make to my life. I hope that throughout it all, I can still look back and see that I became happier, or wiser, after it all. But it is the nature of change to blind you to all but hindsight, no matter how much you plan for it. And I cannot say how any of it will turn out.

Thus is life, thus is change. There is no escaping it.

American Literary Snobbery: Business as Usual

In attempting to broaden my knowledge of the literary/publishing world, I began what will be a weekly endeavor of curling up with the New York Times every Sunday. And, beginner's luck, I found something very interesting that brought up some memories of discussions I had in my Senior Seminar class in undergrad. In this article about the Nobel Prize in Literature, Charles McGrath explores the seemingly biased opinion of the judges against Americans - and why they might just have a point. Makes me want to read more translations.

Lost in Translation? A Swede’s Snub of U.S. Lit

By CHARLES McGRATH

If you’re John Updike, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo or Joyce Carol Oates, you don’t have to worry about whether the phone bill has been paid. You won’t be getting the call from Stockholm next week.

On Tuesday, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the organization that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, gave an interview to The Associated Press and, while not dropping hints about this year’s winner, seemed to rule out, pretty much, the chances of any American writer. “Europe is still the center of the literary world,” he said, not the United States, and he suggested that American writers were “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” He added: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

The next day, in an interview with the British paper The Guardian, Mr. Engdahl appeared to backtrack a bit. He insisted that the academy strictly followed Alfred Nobel’s rule that in awarding the prize no consideration should be given to an author’s nationality, and added: “It is of no importance, when we judge American candidates, how any of us views American literature as a whole in comparison with other literatures.”

All the same, any American foolhardy enough to bet on this year’s prize — the announcement comes on Thursday — would be well advised to put his money on a writer whom nobody in this country has ever heard of and who is out of print here or, ideally, has never been published at all. For example, Ladbrokes, the British betting shop, has as the frontrunner, at 3 to 1 odds, the Italian essayist and novelist Claudio Magris, followed, at 4-1, by the Syrian poet Adonis. Were either to win, he would follow in the great tradition of the Italian satirist Dario Fo, who won in 1997; the Chinese novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian (2000); and the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek (2004); all of whom caused Americans to scratch their heads and say “Huh?”

Another good betting strategy is to look for a writer with a record of America-bashing. His criticisms of American capitalism and the fact that he was once banned from entering this country didn’t hurt Signor Fo, a playwright and performer whom even some Italians considered a little lightweight; and Harold Pinter, the Briton who won in 2005, surely appealed as much because of his outspoken opposition to America’s involvement in Iraq as for his plays, the best of which were written 40 years ago or more.

If you add all-purpose political correctness or opposition to an unpopular regime, your odds get even better. You would have lost your bet in 2001, when the prickly V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad but transplanted to England, neither a lefty nor anyone’s idea of politically correct, won the Nobel. But you would have collected in 2003 and 2006 with the novelist and critic J. M. Coetzee, born in South Africa but now an Australian citizen, and the Turkish novelist and memoirist Orhan Pamuk. That Mr. Coetzee and Mr. Pamuk happen to be terrific writers is just gravy, though if you want to try that card again — someone politically sound who can also write — then a good long-shot pick for this year might be the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare.

In other words, the Nobel selection process is hardly the lofty and purely literary exercise — the “big dialogue” — that Mr. Engdahl suggests, and it never has been. Whatever else the prize may be, it is not a guarantee of literary excellence. Critics are always pointing out that the list of writers who never won, which includes Tolstoy, Proust, Borges, Joyce, Nabokov and Auden, is far more impressive than the roster of those who did. The duds include Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905), author of “Quo Vadis,” and Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), whose supposed masterpiece, “And Quiet Flows the Don,” was probably plagiarized (at least according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won five years later).

There are 18 Nobel judges, of whom Mr. Engdahl is one. They’re all Swedes, they serve for life, and in the early years of the prize they tended to vote for — surprise! — other Scandinavians, writers like Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Selma Lagerlof and Henrik Pontoppidan, who were not exactly household names even back then. There used to be a weakness for middlebrow writers like Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck, who championed the downtrodden. But ever since the last American to win, Toni Morrison, took the prize in 1993, there has been a drift not just to the left but away from the conventions of narrative realism. This may be what Mr. Engdahl, himself a post-structuralist literary critic, was referring to when he complained about “trends in mass culture” dragging down American literature: we tend to write, for the most part, about the world we live in, without resort to the devices of myth or fable or allegory, all of which are popular in Stockholm these days.

This is not to say that the Swedish Academy is a united front or that when it sits down for the “big dialogue” there is no conflict of interest. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda didn’t win the Nobel until his Swedish translator, Artur Lundkvist, was elected to the academy and lobbied for him. (Mr. Lundkvist also blackballed Graham Greene, whose politics were almost as left as Mr. Neruda’s. Go figure.) Mr. Gao’s Swedish translator, Goran Malmqvist, a China scholar at the University of Stockholm and, conveniently, an academy member, similarly pressed his case. On the other hand, a member named Knut Ahnlund quit in 2004 over the award to Ms. Jelinek, a feminist, whose work he called a “mass of text shoveled together without artistic structure.” There was also an internal squabble over whether the body as a whole should denounce the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989.

The Swedes read, you have to give them that — they buy more books per capita than the citizens of just about any other country — and they probably care more than anyone else does about their prize. In the United States, a Nobel usually doesn’t produce even the modest uptick in sales that a Pulitzer or a National Book Award does. That fact may underlie Mr. Engdahl’s comments, and especially his observation that we don’t translate enough foreign literature. It’s true. We don’t. Publishers are always claiming that translations just don’t sell here, and they no longer even try anymore. Meanwhile we flood the rest of the world with our schlock, and the rest of the world doesn’t complain much. If you browse in an airport bookshop anywhere in Europe or Asia, you quickly discover that translated Danielle Steele sells almost as well there as back home.

It’s possible, in other words, that Mr. Engdahl has it in for American writers, the Updikes and Roths, not because of their own failings, real or imagined, but because of the rest of us, the American readers, who in truth don’t even read our own Nobel candidates in the numbers we used to, and whose poor mass-culture taste is infecting the rest of the world, even Sweden. Mr. Engdahl has to keep up standards, and probably from his point of view, the more we complain about the Nobel Prize, the more we prove his point.

Published in the New York Times. October 5, 2008

Getting Around

Lately, I’ve been thinking about a serious choice I would have to make if I ever moved to a metropolitan area: car or no car? In the Midwest, it’s not a question many people ever ask themselves. Not having a car in Saginaw, for example, is extremely debilitating – it can even cost you a job. Out here, however, where car insurance is skyrocketing and parking places are few and far between, having a car can break the bank. It all depends on where you live.

Living where I am now, in Newton, a city mostly made up of large homes, schools, and upscale dining and shopping, would probably require a car – the public transportation around here doesn’t span as widely as it does in cities like Cambridge, Allston, or Boston proper. However, if I lived in Cambridge or closer to downtown Boston, having a car would be a nuisance.

I like my car. It suits me well, and once I learned how to get around, it gave me a sense of freedom. Learning your way around somewhere new is one of the steps you must undertake to becoming comfortable and settled, and though it is a necessary one it is also sometimes the most frustrating. But now that I am not constantly turning around, I enjoy driving here. It’s an adventure to be sure: no one uses a turn signal, bikes pass from every direction and don’t follow traffic laws, and pedestrians (myself included) cross the street with little regard for crosswalks or stoplights. But even the traffic, like everything else in life, gets easier to manage with time and experience.

This newfound confidence in driving around here makes me wonder if I could get rid of my little Bug. Would I feel as unfettered exploring the area if I had to rely on bus and train schedules only? Sure I would probably live in an area with more options for transportation, but having my car everywhere I go in the Midwest is comforting. Sure, I’m not going to drive up to Maine this weekend, but if the inspiration struck me I could. But having the ability to pop off to Maine for the weekend (keeping in mind that I could always rent a car for a day or two if I needed one) is overshadowed by how much cheaper and environmentally friendly public transport seems to be: $59.00 a month for unlimited local bus and train service versus up to $750-$1000 a month for a car payment, gas, and insurance? Cute bug aside, the numbers speak for themselves.

I’m traveling home in a few weeks for the weekend, and during the two weekdays I’m there I won’t have a car. It will be strange to be both car-less and unable to catch public transportation, and the time will probably make me realize how nice that option is. People who have only ever lived where public transportation is dirty, dangerous, and totally unreliable don’t see how much a wide-reaching system could benefit the community and the environment, and that’s sad. Because they don’t have a choice, they don’t see that there could be a choice, and therefore our dependence on the automobile and oil continues. I’m glad that I have had the opportunity to experience using public transportation out here so that I am reminded that even though I love my car, I could live without it.

Dawn of the Deadbolt

I've officially decided to abandon my writing aspirations and am working on a new movie set to come out this Halloween. I know, that's not very much time to get backers, cast, shoot, and edit a whole movie. But the idea is so rich there's no way I won't end up the same.

And because you're my faithful readers, I thought I'd give you a sneak peak:

"In a world where flesh-eating zombies rule the streets, one woman will dare to fight back the only way she can: by locking the door."

Cut to little old lady in a rocker, sewing, a zombie through the window about to open her door, and she nonchalantly reaches up and locks the door without missing a stitch. The zombie shakes its head and walks away.

"She's kind of slow, but they're slower."

Cut to old lady doing a crossword puzzle in an easy chair, while behind her, out the window, a man with a baseball bat is chasing a zombie around.

"They might have an incurable thirst for blood, but she has an incurable thirst for soup."

Cut to old lady eating tomato soup at her kitchen table while behind her, out the window, a zombie is feasting on a leg.

"This Halloween, they won't die. They won't be sated. But they will shy away from a lock. If you only see one movie this Halloween season, see Dawn of the Deadbolt. This film is not yet rated."

Asking Directions

This morning as I walked down to the coffee shop in Newtonville, I was queried twice by people who actually stopped their vehicles in the middle of intersections to get directions from me. Do I really look that knowledgeable? They probably thought I was a seasoned student - in my Keens, big green backpack and quirky t-shirt, listening to my iPod and walking purposefully toward my destination. I was confident enough with the first request but, as I usually do when looking back upon all the bad directions I've been given in my life, worried for the next three blocks whether or not I was correct.

I distrusted myself so much, in fact, that merely five minutes later I shrugged at the next woman who stopped her car in the middle of the intersection to ask me directions to Boston College. But even this time, as I had let myself off to hook from giving bad directions by giving no directions, I realized I knew exactly where Boston College was, that she was on the right road, and all I had to do was tell her to keep going and look out for it on her right. I hoped that perhaps she would find it anyway - she wasn't that far away - and not curse me for all eternity for being so ignorant.

How is it that lost out-of-towners always end up asking ask other lost out-of-towners for
directions? I do it too: when I'm somewhere I don't know, I manage to ask the only other visitor where to go, and am never surprised when they turn to me, their deer-in-the-headlights eyes mirroring mine, and shrug. "I'm so sorry," they say, "I don't live here." And I understand and look for the next sucker, who, half the time, doesn't live there either.

I suppose I should feel relieved that I no longer look lost, at least not on the streets close to home. That means I'm becoming more confident and familiar with my area. Has it really only been three weeks since Kristi and I rolled into town? I feel I've been here much longer. And, obviously, I look it too - I doubt drivers risk mid-intersection pileups to query just anyone. Although this is Boston. Risking mid-intersection pileups seems to be par for the course.

Another reason I choose to walk.

The Wheels on the Bus

I remember riding the city bus with my mom when I was a kid. That’s what we called it, the “city bus.” I’m sure Springfield, Illinois had some sort of mass transit acronym, but if they did I never knew it. The bus mostly took us downtown, into the city, so the name stuck. I don’t think we rode the city bus for any other reason than it was fun; we had a perfectly good car (okay we had a perfectly running car), but my parents have so many funny memories of me as a child on that bus that it must have been partially upon my insisting.

After riding buses and trains as my main mode of transportation for two weeks now, I think back to these memories of the city bus and realize, with a comforting relief, they’re all the same. I think one of the reasons I felt so at ease the first time I stepped on an MBTA bus here was that it smelled the same as the busses from my childhood. I’m not talking about a foul smell, like urine or anything, but bus exhaust mixed with plastic seats and the compounded history of an endless stream of people sleepily gripping the metal bar on their way to work every weekday morning. And I’m comfortable with that smell. To me, it says productivity, motivation, and life, even when it’s rush hour and I’m stuck sitting next to the girl who finds it necessary to gossip at high volume on the phone with her girlfriend.

I like almost everyone on the bus, even the blabbermouth with the pink sparkly Razr. I like to wonder where they’re going, what they do for a living, and if there’s someone waiting at home for them who has gotten off his or her own bus. I like to see what they’re reading, hear what music they’re listening to (even though I cringe at the thought of how loud that must be in their ears) and take count of the items they carry. Some sleep, some study, some stare at their iPods, and some eat, even though the sign says not to. I got on the bus one morning with a girl carrying a Chihuahua in a handbag and realized I’d never thought of dogs on buses. How else would you take your animal to the vet if you didn’t have a car?

Sometimes, in the mornings, I ride with a man on crutches and his young son. I like to imagine what it would have been like to ride the city bus to school. It would have lost its charm, I’m sure. I quickly would have wished for a warm car or at least a school bus filled with my classmates, just as it is possible, in December, I will wish for my own car despite the traffic and outrageous parking. But I feel it is part of my experience here to get used to it: the delays, the rainy days, the girl blabbering on her phone, and the long trek up the hill from the bus stop at night. By January I will probably shrug off the hill, learn to read in the midst of chaos, and ignore each and every other passenger. Until that time, I’m just the curious passenger in someone else’s story about their bus ride to work.