Writing as Citizenship: A New Voice (Part 1)

NSP Meditations, Writing

For months I had struggled with how to write about the homeless issue. I had written pieces here and there but they felt scattered and lacking purpose. This frustrated me. I was hoping a voice would emerge because my interactions with the homeless seemed to be ratcheting up and I didn’t want the writing to be aimless. Sometimes writing an aimless piece of writing or even a book is a good thing. But not on this issue, at least to me.

I felt an urgency to define this voice.

Then…

I was sitting on the couch waiting for a friend to finish her remote work. As soon as she finished, we were going to walk in rain during and get a meal from a food cart. We would pass homeless people on our walk, a sight on almost every walk in Portland, and thus the homeless would be part of our experience.

I asked if she had some reading material around and then remembered the book about William Faulkner’s views on the Civil War and segregation that I had given her for Christmas. Critics had lauded the book for its unique investigation into Faulkner’s racial ideas as expressed through his novels and private and public statements. Many of these ideas were outright bigotry and disgusting, and he basically approved a segregation, but it wasn’t as simple as that in his life and books. For whatever his faults, Faulkner knew that slavery and the legacy of slavery were the great evil in American society and that it was never going to become merely history.

Look where we are today and some elected officials in the South saying the 3/5 compromise to Constitution was a good thing.

My friend retrieved the book for me and I started reading the preface. In it, the author, an academic, described his writing about this subject as an “act of citizenship.” He made that claim because he felt a duty to try and make sense of Faulkner and his writing because of their relevance to racial matters today and why real progress seems so slow and so many Americans, including politicians and law enforcement officials, are so obviously racist.

As I read the preface, I asked my friend for some paper and a pen to take notes. A light bulb had come on. No, it was a ballroom chandelier that lit up.

I finally had figured out how I wanted to approach the writing about the homeless: make it an act of citizenship.

In Praise of Street Libraries

NSP Meditations

I’d like to say a few words in praise of free street libraries and the magically random books they deliver to me and, presumably, many others.

Almost all of my current reading material originates from street libraries. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that random discoveries of this nature can never be replicated by an algorithm. It’s called browsing with your eyes, not by AI.

Some of my recent finds: a terrible novel by late-stage Milan Kundera, Norman Mailer in hardback, Jules Verne, the incredible novel The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock, Kurt Vonnegut, Shirley Hazzard, and the collected poems of Alan Ginsberg (complete with his ode to Kerouac or Neal Cassady’s great ass).

Some of these discoveries exploded tiny epiphanies or sluiced nuggets of literary gold into whatever writing project I was working on. For example, An excerpt from Ginsberg’s poem appears in my forthcoming thriller, which is about the most unlikeliest place you could ever find an Alan Ginsberg poem, but which is precisely why it’s there.

One of my astonishing finds occurred several years ago. It was a collection of tankas, the ancient form of Japanese love poetry, five lines, thirty-one syllables, written by two female Japanese poets from the eleventh century. The Ink Dark Room was truly a revelation, one of the most incredible reads of my life. Reading the tankas provided me with a timeless clarity into matters of the human heart. These two women knew love and the loss of love like no other writers I have ever read and certainly better than any loveless therapist you might hire. One woman wrote 240 tankas to her departed lover and he perhaps never read them, let alone knew they existed. The book blew my mind and soul. I had known nothing of this poetic form until finding the book and not long thereafter, I composed a few myself, and of course, the subjects would never know I had written them. There is some wild power in knowing that.

I play my part in the unique and anonymous cultural exchange of street libraries by stocking them with my authored books and ones I keep culling from my collection. As for giving away my own books that I’ve paid to print, I’ve found some of my best readers this way. More authors should try it.

This summer, I plan on producing a publication exclusively distributed in street libraries.

Drain. Oregon City. Canby. Portland. Sisters. Bend. Astoria. Klamath Falls. I’ve hit these towns and many more around Oregon and stocked books in their street libraries.

Never underestimate the power of a book found in a street library.

I urge everyone reading this to make a donation this week. Or erect one outside your home.

Oregon Tavern Age: A Man in Crisis

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

I sat at a table in front of a Portland OTA joint. I was drinking a craft malt liquor, reading some dark and obscure writing by Mark Twain about how corrupt American society was (in 1896), and watching Saturday afternoon traffic roll past me. A young woman a few tables away drank a bloody mary and fiddled on her phone.

Something stirred across the street. I looked up toward a bus shelter. A young white man was becoming visibly unglued. I kept looking. He gesticulated, talked to himself, talked to the power pole, made bizarre facial gestures, waved, circled, took off a shoe. Then he began walking into the street, then back, then across it, then back to the bus shelter. Vehicles waited, eased around him. No one honked.

All of this went down in less than five minutes and I drank half my beer and took notes as I watched.

I thought: should I get up and try to render aid? I don’t how to render aid in a situation like this. What is aid in a situation like this?

Taking notes is not rendering aid. Neither is filming the incident, although a visual and audio record might come in useful later, as we are finding out in America.

I turned toward the woman. She was watching like I was. Our eyes met.

“Should I call it in?” she said.

“Yes, he’s going to get killed.”

“Okay.”

“Use the 211 number.”

“Got it.”

She placed the call. She got through but was put on hold.

We waited and watched the man for another five minutes. He was still moving in and out of the street.

“Should I go out there?” I said.

“No.”

I didn’t argue with her, but I did with myself.

Was this moment I failed a human being so obviously in distress beyond his immediate control?

Someone came on the crisis line. The woman relayed all the pertinent information.

A bus pulled up in front of the shelter. The man got on the bus.

The woman told the operator and provided the relevant bus and route information. The operator said they would call the bus and take it from there, which was what in our current state of affairs.

The bus vanished down the street. The woman and I discussed the episode for 15 minutes, wondering if we’d done enough, and acknowledging to one another that we observe a similar episode at least every other day, but sometimes three in one day.

I finished my beer, gathered up my things, and left.

Oregon Tavern Age: Shit Detector

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

“I don’t want you to know exactly what you’re getting,” said a Portland bartender as quoted by a weekly rag with writers who like to cuss up a fucking storm in print to make them seem fucking edgy.

The bartender was referring to the fancy drinks he serves in his fancy bar to his fancy customers who pay $13 for what is undoubtedly a mostly liquorless cocktail.

First rule of OTA country: bartenders never talk about the drinks he or she mixes and neither do the customers. We talk about interesting things, such as burn piles and barbecuing eels that ospreys drop from the sky.

I was reading this nonsense at an outdoor table in front of an OTA joint.

It was the day the Governor ordered the county into another Pandemic lockdown and thus my local OTA joint was closed for indoor drinking, depression jags and creative writing for at least three weeks.

Luckily, the new owners had installed outdoor seating when they opened the joint a month ago. They were trying to survive.

I ordered a craft malt liquor and tipped big to do my part to save OTA life. Previous lockdowns had put a dagger in the liver of these dives and many died silent deaths across the state, including the greatest OTA tavern of them all, Turkey’s in Gold Beach. I’m still mourning that incalculable loss.

Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the Pandemic is that you can drink, and drink a lot to support a struggling small business, and feel really good about drinking, and drinking a lot.

I kept reading the article because I was so desperate for reading material I would have read a Jonathan Franzen novel.

“I’ve always used Asian ingredients—bitter melon…toasted rice powder, galangal, and pandan are always flavors I’ve gravitated toward.”

Sure. They must go well with Old Crow.

One of this sorcerer’s signature concoctions includes noir and jasmine. He also infuses his gin with turmeric and makes one drink with chamomile syrup.

I somehow finished the article, in very similar fashion to how you have to finish a dump or pretend something exotic is something better than something simple.

Ernest Hemingway once said: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.”

He could have said the same for bartenders.

Emma on the Best Length of Love Letters

NSP Meditations

I was reading Jane Austen’s Emma the other day and came across statements by the protagonist that the longer the love letter, the more genuine (effective?) it is.

So in other words, if you write a 271-word love letter, the same length of “The Gettysburg Address,” you are less in love or more inarticulate in love, than if you write a 1000-word love letter.

Since I am discussing Austen in her historical context, I am obviously referring to a love letter written by hand, if there is such a thing anymore, although I have written a few in recent years. I’ve also sent a couple love postcards, too.

This begs an interesting question related to contemporary communication: does an email or social media message expressing love qualify as a love letter? Jane Austen’s novels are still widely read and enjoyed today because she had her characters espouse universal truths about matters of the heart that to me hold up a lot better than many of John Updike’s or Milan Kundera’s characters’ statements on the same subject. But do Emma’s declarations about a lengthier word count for a more genuine (effective?) expression of love hold up as well today in the age of instant digital communication as some of her other statements?

Do word counts truly matter in expressions of love no matter what form they take, tweets or real letters?

Can a scientist conduct a study into this question?

Or how about this question: can a haiku written with a Keno pencil on a napkin in a dive bar win the love of someone? I’d sure as hell like someone to try with me!

Let us return to the handwritten letter of today, not the era when it was the only form of written communication (no telegraph or typewriters in Austen’s novels). A letter in longhand is vastly different than an email or social media message as a form of communication. For one thing, it is held in one’s hands when read as opposed to a screen. Then there is the handwriting itself and what a script might reveal to a reader. Paper might matter, too.

(Another question: is cursive better for a love letter or ball and stick penmanship?)

As I write this I recall the greatest love letter I ever received, and the interesting fact that the writer read it to me sitting across the table from me in a dive bar and I was not expecting any sort of love letter from her. It was handwritten and about a page in length. (I still have it.)

This little musing prompted by reading Emma certainly has me meandering in memory and analysis.

Back to the main point. Brevity. Brevity. Brevity. Two hundred words.

Or?

Exposition. More exposition. Even more exposition. Three thousand words.

Or?

Somewhere in between.

Maybe it depends on the love and not so much the writer.

Do most people today have attention spans to read long handwritten love letters anymore? Maybe you don’t need more than a postcard to convey genuine love. Or shouldn’t need more space.

I don’t know.

A Homeless Man Reading Jean Auel

NSP Meditations

I walked to the post office to mail three copies of my latest book, Of Dogs and Meaning.

It was a fine weekday morning and the last of the cherry blossoms fell like so many poems about falling cherry blossoms.

I looked across the street and saw a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk surrounded by his worldly possessions. Cherry blossoms fell on him, too. Didn’t Jesus say something about that? Or was it about rain or mercy or justice? No, that was Portia in Merchant of Venice, who gave the greatest soliloquy in the history of literature.

The man was reading a very large hardback book, a real door stopper. I was elated to see this.

I said to myself: if he’s still reading that book when I return from the post office, I will engage with him and ask him what he’s reading. I just can’t be that person who always walks by this kind of human being and says nothing if something distinctly human is going on with that person, such as reading a fat book while sitting on a sidewalk as cherry blossoms fall on him. Something like this is a human poem in motion and cries out to be observed.

I’d seen the man before. He was a regular on this sidewalk with two other homeless men. From time to time, I’d eavesdropped on their conversations as I passed them and chuckled at the outrageous profanity that accompanied their stories and insults. They were more like a comedy troupe than a trio of vagrants.

“What are you reading?” I said.

He looked up at me with an expression of joy. He pushed the book toward me.

“It’s by Jean Auel, who wrote the The Clan and the Cave Bear. This is the sixth in the series. I’ve checked them out from the library.”

I didn’t catch the title but knew the series and that each volume ran to almost 1000 pages!

“I know the books. I’ve read The Clan and the Cave Bear and loved it.”

This was true. I’d found a paperback edition in a dive bar library six months ago and read it over three-day stretch.

I said goodbye and wished him a good day. As I walked away, I overheard him explain the series to another homeless man who had been standing nearby and edged closer after I left. The last thing I heard was the sound of enthusiasm in a man’s voice.

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