He's Part of Me

There is no getting past it.  He is an indelible part of who I am.  He is undeniably in my core, and I can feel his influence just about every day - both the bad parts I resent him for and the good parts I'm starting to appreciate.  He'll never go away, though he is gone forever.

What I don't get, after more than fifty years of life, and coming up on the tenth anniversary of his death, is why I am still working out what it all means; what lessons I am supposed to have learned from my turbulent, icy relationship with him; what I could possibly hope to gain from the years - DECADES - of all the talks we never had, you know: those fabled father-son talks.  Shouldn't I have processed all of it?  Shouldn't I know by now?  He was my father, for God's sake.  What is there to figure out?

What I am starting to get, however, is that an awful lot of this processing is going on all around me.  In fact, I'm starting to think it might be a universal thing.  Not that every man has a difficult relationship with his father (at least, I hope not).  Universal in the same way that knowing glances are exchanged about mother-daughter relationships.

I recently returned from my second Taos Summer Writers' Conference, and the story that I workshopped was not the only one with a missing father element.  In fact, the absent father's influence was the main point of another writer's story, even taking place the day of the funeral.  Two out of the three readings assigned by Wally Lamb, the workshop's facilitator, had at their central core the relationship (tender and loving in one, difficult and tension-filled in the other) between the narrator and his father.  And the Wally Lamb novel I was reading at the time portrayed a very stormy stepfather relationship.

Part of this Great Working Out has simply to do with the fact that the most influential people in our lives are those who raised us, for better or worse.  When a man's mother dies, there is naturally (I imagine) a similar review of their shared history and what it means; however, women who were mothers of baby boomers had clearly-defined roles, both domestically and emotionally, so the mother-son relationship was pretty stable (Oedipal complexes aside).

Men, on the other hand, were struggling to figure out their place in the family as women's expectations began changing.  And older fathers were hands-off when it came to child-rearing.  With their traditional roles limited to breadwinner and disciplinarian, they didn't have to concern themselves with relating to their children if they weren't punishing them for something.  Either way, it's no wonder they didn't know how to be fathers, or even know there was a way to be.  Many believed that being a father meant providing for one's family, simple as that.

This left a whole lot of men to glean fatherly lessons by osmosis, I guess.

But it's also why I view my own paternal relationship through a softer lens now.  My dad just didn't know any other way to be.  He sure didn't struggle with it.  There were no books about it back then, and men of his generation didn't seek help, anyway.  When I consider how little about life I myself really know or understand, even after half a century, I can't really fault him for the job he did as a father to me.

I'm not done yet.  There could be more re-hashing ahead (though, thankfully, it seems to be dwindling).  More revising of previous conclusions.  More letting go.  The Great Working Out continues, and it's all good.  There is no deadline.

      

I Can Die Now

I used to think that if Carlos Nakai - father of the resurrection of Native American Flute music - came to a Potomac Native American Flute Festival, that that would be the pinnacle of my NAF life.  But while he did grace us with his presence several years ago, I realized soon after that the true climax would be if Mary Youngblood, a Grammy winner and my favorite NAF artist, ever accepted our invitation.  And while I hoped it might happen, I doubted it would; she was on the West Coast, and would our festival really ever be able to afford her?

Well, I am here to remind you never to give up hope!  Mary Youngblood was our featured performer at the 9th Potomac Native American Flute Festival's Saturday concert last night and conducted a fun workshop this afternoon on flute embellishments.  She is known for her embellishments, especially her trademark "bark."  She was warm, enthusiastic, and quite personal, and everyone loved her.

Before and after the concert I had the privilege of selling her CDs and music books, and since I am a huge fan, I could assist attendees with their purchases when they needed a recommendation.  It was a blast!  She stood next to me, signing CDs and meeting people.

Mary Youngblood has been here, and another PNAFF is over already.  I can die now.

Less Is More

I'm so tired of the old saw that says no one aspires to be a great short story writer, or its corollary, "No one wants to write the Great American Short Story Collection."  Um, excuse me, over here... ?

The idea is that money/fame/"success" comes from writing novels, not short stories, so who would want to just write stories instead?  Somehow there is the notion that one eventually "graduates" to writing novels and in the process becomes a serious writer.

That may be the view of the publishing industry, and it may be the conventional wisdom among writers that, currently, one can only truly make a living by writing novels.  But it has long been understood by the writing community that the short story is not a dumbed-down, beginner version of the novel, but a completely different form.  Even if one considers writing short stories as training for writing novels, mastery of the short form does not guarantee success with the long.  Many MFA graduates, having gained considerable experience workshopping stories, find themselves at a loss when attempting to write their first novel - because it's not the same thing.

Good coaches put their athletes in the right events, based on their ratio of fast-twitch versus slow-twitch muscles.  Not everyone is built to run a marathon; some are more suited to the 100-yard dash or the 440.  And it may not have much to do with what a runner wants to do. 

Of course, in writing physical limitation is not an issue; one can learn to write novels.  But some writers feel they are built to work in one form more than another, and why should anyone write novels just because they think they have to?

As I've asserted previously, some writers write primarily for the art.  Sure, we'd all like to make a living doing it, but commercial success is a secondary motivation.  I want to write what I want to write, whether or not it gets me any financial gain.

Speaking of which, there are people who are known primarily as short story writers:

Tobias Wolff - my lifelong idol.  He's written one short novel, Old School, and the brilliant memoir This Boy's Life, but otherwise, he has only (meant in the exclusive sense, not as a diminuitive term) story collections to his credit.  If anyone compared me to him, I would consider myself undeniably successful.
 
Alice Munro - long known as a master of the short form, a staple in fiction syllabi.  Highly recommended: her recent collection Too Much Happiness.
 
Amy Hempel - distinctive, spare, startling, deceptively intelligent writing.

William Trevor - while also a novelist, Wikipedia calls him "widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language."  Jaw-dropping and deep.

Dave Housley - all right, this one is more of a personal prediction, and I don't know what his aspirations are, but his collection Ryan Seacrest is Famous is certainly an auspicious start.  The stories in this book vary widely in characterization and circumstance, and are full of compassion without being sentimental.  You'll see more of this guy, trust me. 

Writing short stories is not a consolation prize, a lesser skill I'm reluctantly settling for as my lot in life, a cute little hobby - it's a passion.  Have some respect.

Acceptable Racism

The other day one of my employees came into my office laughing so hard she could hardly speak.  She related that a woman who was a student in the class I recently helped teach referred to me as "that little Chinese guy."  Why did she think that was so hilarious?  Because it was such a ludicrous thing to say that it made the speaker into a fool and that the woman was so oblivious to it?  And why did my co-worker think I would laugh with her?

"Little" is most often a pejorative qualifier.  "Still working on your little novel?"  "Heard you bought a little condo."  "How's your little analyst job?"  If one means small in size, one tends to use literal descriptors: short, thin, slender.  "She's somewhat short."  "The kitchen is rather small."  "He's a slender guy."  It's highly unlikely that "that little Chinese guy" was meant as a helpful description.

And what made it obvious in her mind that I was Chinese, just because I was Asian in appearance?  If she hadn't meant to assert that in her mind I was ethnically Chinese, why was it so inconsequential to her to use the term Chinese as a catch-all for any Asian?

Years ago, in a different job, I went to someone's office building to interview him for a newsletter article over lunch.  I'd brought mine in a paper bag.  When I told the receptionist who I'd come to see, she muttered something about "you delivery people."

And finally, the man coordinating speakers for Equal Employment Opportunity programs celebrating various ethnic heritage months came to me one day, excited that he had found a speaker for Asian American Heritage Month.  

 "Guess who it is," he said, eager to tell me.  I couldn't figure out who would get him so excited.  "Jhoon Rhee!"  

When I didn't react, he said, "The father of tae kwon do!"

Jhoon Rhee may have been a successful figure in his own right, but choosing someone in the martial arts to represent Asian American achievement, in my mind, only perpetuated stereotypes and communicated limitations for Asian Americans.  Why not choose Elaine Chao, Secretary of Labor?  General Eric Shinseiki, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?  Any number of Asian American members of Congress or local broadcast journalists?

Stereotyping Asians has always been more acceptable than doing the same with other races.  Social change comes slowly, but it will come eventually.

What surprised me about each of these incidents, however, was that all the people involved were black.  How any African American person could be so careless and clueless throws me.  I would have expected each of them to be more, rather than less, sensitive than most people to the power of language and perception.  

Maybe that's expecting too much.  Maybe we are all the same, regardless of personal experience that one would expect might shape our subsequent behavior.  Maybe it simply points out the human nature of being guilty of the very things of which we find fault in others.  

Text and Image, Right in Front of Me

I never thought when I registered for a photography workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, MA, this year, forgoing my usual fiction workshop, that it would so seamlessly and wonderfully weave writing into our week of shooting pictures.  My first clue that it would be interesting, though, was the pre-workshop assignment, which called for presenting a photograph or a piece of writing (essay/poem) depicting an everyday object or scene in an intriguing way.  Little did I know that our Instructor, Joanne Dugan, was not just open to writing but fully invested in it.

Click on photos for full-size images

"On Seeing What's in Front of You: Photographing Your Own Life with New Eyes," August 5-10, 2012, was meant to show us that projects full of potential were present not just in exotic locales but in our everyday lives, and that transforming ordinary pictures into extraordinary images was accomplished through changing the way we think about and thus see what's right in front of us.  Writing was a tool to both chronicle and discover just how we thought about what we were shooting and to uncover what held the most meaning for us.  (I am only just now fully understanding that purpose!)

Art consists of limitation.  The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.  (G.K. Chesterton)

Most of our daily assignments incorporated writing into the experience, either recording our thoughts or feelings while shooting or writing something to accompany the pictures.  Patti, a fellow student, was already well-versed in marrying text and image, something fully realized in most of her presentations.  This gave me the freedom to do the same, liberating me to write at FAWC again - and in a visual arts workshop!




I was amazed when Joanne used a simple questionnaire to show us how just words (our answers) could inspire new projects.  (Likewise, painting, dance, or even music could unleash ideas to explore.)

You have to milk the cow a lot to get a little cheese.  - Henri Cartier-Bresson

And once a day Joanne offered us her popcorn box, into which we reached and pulled out a strip of folded paper with a quotation on it.  What was quirky on Monday had by midweek become an anticipated little gem of a daily gift; she suggested that the one we pulled out was perhaps meant for us at this specific time.





Reflecting on the week after it ended, I had the idea that it could be promoted to writers as "Pen and Shutter: Photography for Writers."  As my classmate Andrea noted, writing and photography are stronger together.  And I can see how not only the end products, but also the processes can influence and benefit each other. 

Life is once, forever. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

Joanne Dugan has completely changed the way I photograph in giving me both new techniques and a totally different way of thinking.  The ultimate challenge, one we only had time to touch on over the course of four days of shooting, is to take not the documentary "I was there" postcard shot but instead the descriptive picture of how we felt, one that shows the viewer what holds meaning for us.  This is the entire key to understanding why some of my pictures make me go "Yes!" (as Henri Cartier-Bresson would say) and why others seem technically high in quality but lacking in soul.  It is the key to becoming a better photographer.

www.joannedugan.com - little movies, photographs, projects, books, etc.
JOANNE DUGAN Fine Art - photo galleries, information
Joanne Dugan's Photography and Writing Blog - with an entry about this workshop and a photo with yours truly in it :)


Photo credits: Mark Abe

Building Great Sentences? Zzzzzz....

"Building Great Sentences" is an audio course offered by Great Courses, a "lifelong learning" catalog company which sells CD/DVD recorded lectures on a wide variety of topics by esteemed professors.  Even though I am a writer, when I've seen it in the catalog, I've had a hard time thinking of a more boring subject.  I couldn't believe their pitch that it was one of their most popular courses.  All I could see in my mind's eye was diagramming sentences in tenth grade English class and trying to learn all those tenses.


In college I hated English Comp.  I had a TA named Gordon who was boring, and the class was boring.  (Gordon himself was probably not boring - maybe just bored; he may actually have just been another MFA student gutting out a Teaching Assistantship required for tuition remission.)  The writing we did in that class was not what I called creative, and I just saw it as getting my card punched.


Then I happened to remember my writer friend Dianne telling me that revision was her favorite part of writing.  And what is revision but taking sentences apart and putting them back together?  It's rearranging ideas, finding just the right words, and building great sentences to create exactly the meaning you want to impart to the reader.  As we writers already know, and as it is explained in the first lesson of the course, sentences are more than just their content; the way they are constructed carries their meaning.


The idea of listening to twenty-four lectures about it might not have excited me initially, but since I was already constantly striving to build great sentences, how dull could the course actually be?  (It also helped that it was on sale at five percent of the regular price.  That was the sale price, not the discount!)


I'm finally reading Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert*.  Just today I read this great sentence, in which Emma Bovary and Monsieur Leon find themselves discovering an intimacy they each privately acknowledge yet cannot discuss:

Future joys, like tropical shores, project over the immensity that lies before them their native softness, a fragrant breeze, and one grows drowsy in that intoxication without even worrying about the horizon one cannot see.

Could I ever HOPE to write such a gorgeous, evocative sentence that so wonderfully captures the emotion of the characters using so rich and relatable a metaphor?


Or consider this sentence from The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich (the context of which is not needed to appreciate the beauty of its language):

Then he stilled his heart, his breath, his thoughts, and leaned into her until his heart knocked hard and his breath tore through his lungs and thoughts turned into shifting colors that ripped softly into many pieces and rained down all around them as ordinary light.

Sometimes the writer in me gets in the way of the flow of a story, as I am compelled when coming to a sentence like this to stop and read it over and over, marveling at its beauty, deconstructing it to demystify its creation, and wondering if I could attain the vision necessary to emulate this level of writing.

Clearly, this course is just right for me, and if the first lesson is any indication, it will most definitely not be boring.

 * From a new translation by Lydia Davis, 2010

Let's Dance - PLEASE

Last month I went to the Kennedy Center to see the Broadway musical "Come Fly Away," a dance revue choreographed by Twila Tharp and set to the accompaniment of Frank Sinatra's recorded voice and a live big band on stage.  I went with my good friend Phil (reason enough to enjoy the evening), and while it was a good show, we were both somewhat underwhelmed.  The rest of the audience felt the same, as evidenced by the rather reluctant, slow and gradual standing ovation - the kind in which the applause is sustained and everyone looks at everyone else for a cue to stand.  As we walked out into the night, neither one of us had much to say.


I wondered why; it was a brilliantly performed, perfectly executed show, packed with nonstop, amazing dancing and a whole company that made it look effortless.  The dancers were good-looking, the costumes were attractive, and the set was wonderful.  The music was - well, Frank - come on!  The band played flawlessly, as if Sinatra were live and on stage with them.  So why was the audience so restrained in its enthusiasm?


Today it finally hit me, after my workout, in the shower (where I have thought of short story plot lines, solved Lotus Notes application development coding problems, and composed music).  Yes, there is strength, power, and flexibility in dance.  Yes, dancers' feet do leave the floor.  Yes, people want to see excitement and come away wowed.  But for this dance lover, anyway, the dancing in the show was too - athletic.


Just like in figure skating, dancing has been becoming more and more athletic over many years.  Tuxes and floor-length gowns are out, and now dancers leap, throw each other, spin both vertically and horizontally, flip in the air, whip each other around violently, and do things that make you go "ouch" and feel imaginary back pain.  But whereas figure skating is actually an Olympic sport (which Scott Hamilton tried to emphasize by wearing only athletic stretch wear), dancing is arguably not.  Which is not to say it is not athletic - because it certainly can be - just that it is not a sport in the sense of competing and winning against an opposing player(s), reality/competition shows notwithstanding.  Why, then, does it have to continually increase in technical difficulty, at the expense of artistic expression?


Of course the same debate rages on in the figure skating world and probably always will.  Triple this and triple that are ho-hum, and now at least one quad jump is required to win.  Those on the sport side argue that scoring for artistic impression should count less; after all, no other Olympic sport has musical accompaniment (except the floor exercise in gymnastics) or has an artistic component at all.  Those on the artistic side recall the classical roots of figure skating and lament the fading of Tchaikovsky and sequins on the ice.


So it goes.


Fast forward to the 21st century and the glut of competition shows on TV, such as "So You Think You Can Dance."  The more outrageous the physicality, the greater the displays of strength and speed, the more violent the movement - the more excited the judges get, screaming their approval louder the more the sweat flies under the lights and the more revealing the lycra.


Maybe it's just that appetite thing: the more you get of something, the less satisfying it becomes and the more you need it to be more.  Everything has to be increasingly extreme, because anything less is ordinary.


I guess I've always been old school.  Give me Fred and Ginger any day over anyone else you can see today.  Now there was style.  There was grace.  There was humanity.  With dancers today, you get excited at their physical prowess and feats of strength.  With Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly you were stirred emotionally.


Maybe I'm a slow adopter.  Maybe I don't like change.  Maybe I'm too nostalgic.  Or maybe I just like dancing the way I saw it on "The Carol Burnett Show," back when I wanted to grow up to be the next Fred Astaire.


Photo Credit: Broadway.com