Sign here ...

Waiting at a Delta gate last week to board a return flight from Salt Lake City to Philadelphia, I saw a middle-aged passenger with an interesting approach to words as tattoos. Both of his forearms were covered with autographs in tattoo form. I couldn’t make out any of the signatures – they were the typical scrawls and clumps of cursive letters that people use to sign their name. The effect was powerful and striking. Although that autograph book of the flesh was not what I have in mind for myself, it still got me to thinking. What if the passenger in the bowler hat was a writer and all of the signatures were of authors he admired? I saw a different sort of signature today on a tour of the Pearl S. Buck house, courtesy of Linda Wisniewski, a friend and writer who recently became a docent there. Buck’s signature was in Chinese – Chinese was her first language – and displayed in golden stained glass lit by a fall afternoon’s sun. It was hard to miss, just like the passenger’s armful of names.

The Ants Go Marching …

I love tattoos, at least, the creative, artful ones: I’m not a fan of the skull-with-the-eyeballs-popping-out motif. If I were twenty-something again, I’d probably get a sleeve – or two – of a jungle scene, full of tigers and pythons and macaws. But given how far from 20 I am, I’m content with the shoulder and upper arm ink I have. Or am I? After each tattoo, I’ve sworn I’ve had the last. But a year or two ticks by, and I see another intriguing design - and there I go again. Ever since the last one – a line of ants marching around my ankle – I’ve been pondering a tattoo of just words, a significant phrase, a meaningful sentence. But what? At a recent writers retreat, I met Jess Cooper, who has a striking tat in Middle Earth script: Not all who wander are lost. It was exactly the kind of tattoo I had in mind. Short and pithy, and from a literary classic. But Jess already has it. My mission then is to find some other phrase that resonates with me. Thus I reactivate my blog after several years on hiatus, and I explore tattoos and words until I’ve settled on just the right maxim. If you’ve got words in a tattoo, what are they?

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

I’m in mid-river and the only sounds are a cupping and a splash as my paddles scoop the dark water and lift, the slight creak of my life vest and the evening bird calls along the wooded banks. My paddle mates are much closer to land, mostly silent with their own thoughts or conversing quietly. Ahead, the blunt end of an island cuts the current in two. The night mist is rising off the water surface. The air smells of fish and an unknown flower in fragrant bloom. I am alone and loving it, just me and my kayak and the night, the shortest of the year.

I haven’t paddled my Loon since last summer, but in the past week, I have already been in a kayak twice. This evening, in a solstice celebration, marks my third time on the water. I never tire of watching the play of light and shadow, or the swirls and eddies that punctuate each journey. Two days before, I watched the sun come up while skirting the edge of Trout Lake, a spring-fed gem in upstate New York, in a borrowed Otter. Now I’m watching the sun set over the west bank of the Delaware River.

No real otters here or there, but up north a loon warbled his call several evenings in a row. Tonight, I settle for the raspy cry of the Fowler’s toads and pull my boat up the bank at the take-out.

Goth(ic) horror

Bram Stoker's Dracula was published in 1897, and reading it more than a century later, I wish I could step back in time to experience the story fresh and unique, as it was then. I struggle to keep an objective reader’s eye when images of Bela Lugosi or the Count from Sesame Street pop into my head.

Vampires existed in legend before Stoker brought them to life in his book, but the details today no longer have quite the power to impress: driving a stake through the vampire’s heart to “kill” it; holding a crucifix as a protective shield; watching a bat transform into a human form. All these things are part of everyday knowledge in a culture that has made Buffy a household name.

I am fascinated by the way that Stoker chose to tell his tale, in diaries and letters. I just finished the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a much lighter and more contemporary story, also told in letters. Writing in the epistolary form gives you the ability to shift POV without having to set the scene for your readers – the salutation or the diary entry is enough to clue readers to the switch. But it also requires careful consideration of how much each character should reveal in order to move the plot forward. Whatever happens must be told after the fact, so the drawback is a certain distancing from the action. But perhaps that was Stoker’s intent. The circumstances of the vampire story in the 1890s were so diabolical and gruesome that they needed the perspective of distance.

It's evident where J.K. Rowling drew some of the inspiration for her series. Dracula De Ville reminds me an awful lot of Harry Potter's arch nemesis, Voldemort, with his red eyes and soul of evil. His ability to shape-shift into animals – a bat, a dog – is similar to the Animagus transformations that some of Rowling’s wizards can effect. And Mina’s link to Dracula – that she can, under hypnosis, sense what the vampire is hearing or seeing – is quite like Potter’s uncanny link to the One Who Must Not Be Named. Not to mention, Voldemort hung out in the woods of Romania for a while after the Sorcerer's Stone (can you tell I've read Rowling's books a few times?).

Next up, I hope to reread Interview with a Vampire, a book I haven’t touched in 20 years. I’m curious to see how much vampire lore in that tale is linked to Stoker’s story and how much Anne Rice created.

(The image this with post is courtesy of Harry Boardman and his blog, 365 Monsters. Thanks, Harry!)

Carried away

War, sang Edwin Starr all those years ago, what is it good for? The song's answer: Absolutely nothing. And Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried makes that absolutely clear. How I missed O'Brien's book for so long – he wrote it in 1990 – I don't know, but it is astonishing.

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. ...
Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't,
because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe
the truly incredible craziness.

The crystal clear images continue to reverberate days after I finished the last page. The young VC he killed. The pieces of a fellow soldier he had to remove from a tree after a land mine exploded. The death of his best buddy in a field of human waste. Chapter after chapter, incident after incident, O'Brien drew me – a person who has never been closer to battle than riding on a training flight with a KC-135 refueling plane – into the paddies and jungle paths of Vietnam. I was there with him as he tried to stay calm on a pitch-black patrol shift or waited impatiently for the medic to treat him after he was shot in the buttocks. Today's soldiers are all volunteers, people who choose to enlist. O'Brien almost left for Canada when he got his draft notice – he fled north to within a canoe ride from the border – but ultimately he obeyed the summons from Uncle Sam, then spent the next 20 years trying to exorcise the painful memories by writing about them.

Purely by chance, two days after I finished O'Brien's book I saw the film The Beautiful Country, which begins in Vietnam. It is a postwar tale about a young Vietnamese man's quest to find his father, who had been an American soldier stationed there. I marveled at the contrast between the grim reality of the war depicted in O'Brien's book and the serene beauty of the land itself. Binh's mixed-race background makes him a pariah in his home country, but the journey he sets out on seems one he can't possibly complete.

Skin deep

No pain, no gain. Philosophically, I guess that's true. You hold dear what you've had to work for, struggle for. Things that are given to you without effort (or money) are easy come, easy go. I spent a total of four hours – two hours each session – enduring an odd discomfort verging on pain so that I could gain a gorgeous, full-color feather wrapped around my right arm. The buzzy whine of the ink applicator morphed from background noise to grating annoyance by the end, and my arm burned, as though branded. One wall of Sink the Ink studio is covered with a giant National Geographic map of the world; after spending all that time staring at the South Pacific – the area of the globe nearest where I was seated - I think I have memorized the name of every island in Polynesia. Rikitea? Suwarrow? Serendipity led me to gentle Ben Harris, the ink artist who loves nature. He liked the challenge of creating a peacock feather armband even though his true passion is insects: He has a centipede crawling around one shoulder and a black widow spider on one arm, plus a gnarly raven and a kneecap skull, among other, visible tattoos. When I was vocal about the discomfort, Ben was amused. Yes, he acknowledged, the inner arm is a tender place, but the chest, he said, "hurts like hell." I can think of other body parts that would also make me wince when the needles dig in. For my next bit of ink, I just might go with an insect. How about a scarab beetle? I'm thinking of the bug in the Poe tale, the golden beetle that looked remarkably like a human skull...

Something to crow about

The faux rooster caught my eye – a bantam with coppery feathers and a tail that curved in a long arc toward his head. But he was the lure not the merchandise; he was NFS outside the Tinicum Arts Festival's White Elephant tent. I wasn't the only one smitten with him. Adults and kids alike stopped to stare at this lifelike bird before sauntering past tables laden with used curling irons, out-of-season ornaments, glass candle holders – and my favorite in tackiness, a 16x24 cross stitch of a paint-by-number rural landscape. Framed, even! But that rooster ... I wanted to take him home. I don't have any chickens, not even fake ones, although for about a year, I contemplated getting a flock of Rhode Island Reds for the back yard. Fresh eggs, I promised my husband. Too much work, he countered, adding that the red tail hawks and foxes would help themselves to chicken dinners and we would be out of eggs. During that year of fowl arguments, I met a Nockamixon woman who kept chickens and was also a talented nature photographer. A close-up Natalie took of a fuzzy-feathered hen won a ribbon at the arts festival this year. I don't have her eye for form and color and composition; my photographs are snapshots. But if I'd brought my camera to the festival I could have taken home that rooster – the NFS rooster – in pixels even if I couldn’t have him to hold.

O'er the ramparts ...

It is twilight on the flat expanse of grass at Tinicum Park in Erwinna. I am listening to a July 4 pops concert that would otherwise put me to sleep, but I'm having too much fun watching the crowd: the kids wearing glow sticks ... around their heads, their arms, their legs, or waving them for a strobe-like effect. The red-white-and-blue-ness in shirts, dresses, hats, and hair. The energy of the families spread out on this vast lawn is building, in anticipation of the 1812 Overture and the salute of fireworks that will provide the accompaniment.

Wispy clouds are stretched against a sky of deepening blue after days – weeks – of rain. The evening is just about perfect. (The cigar smoke is a minor dampener.) I am remembering that two years ago on this day I watched fireworks while perched on a curb in suburban Detroit, oohing and aahing as the starbursts rose above a golf course. It was three days before my best friend got married. Three years before that, I saw the bursts of flaming color in the distance, from a camp nestled in the Four Corners area of Colorado, where the night chilled to the upper 30s and I could see my breath. In July!

Growing up, I watched a much more modest display from a parking lot laid down over a former farm field once owned by Harry Truman. My father never liked fireworks – the crackles and blasts were reminders of a war he was lucky enough to return from. This year, I am celebrating a moment of peace amid the economic turmoil that is 2009.

Broad appeal

I just finished reading Broad Street by Christine Weiser. It left me nostalgic for Philadelphia – the endless rowhouses, the funky shops, the great restaurants. Not that I don't still visit, but I moved away in 1994, the same fateful year that wraps up Weiser's novel, the year of birth and death; the year my son was born and the year Kurt Cobain killed himself.

Weiser sets her novel in that time period of the early 1990s, when grunge and grrrl bands ruled. I loved her insider's look at indie rock, where talent is honed on the whetstone of weekly band practice and occasional bar gig. The insular world of local rock bands is no different from corporate business or Washington: Hard work can pay off, but it's who you know that gives you a boost up the ladder to power or fame. Weiser's Kit Greene keeps pushing toward her goal, despite bad boyfriends, disloyal drummers, and way too many hangovers.

I appreciated that Weiser used Cobain's death as a pivotal moment in her story. His passion spoke to me as few other musicians' have. He could inspire as much by his wall of sound as the intense beauty of his ballads. I reveled in the word play of his lyrics. He taught me that ugly can be much more profound than pretty and that shocking is sometimes the best way to get a point across.

It's been 15 years since Cobain died. The world has changed, and so has my life; my son will be a sophomore in high school and, although I still hold the pipe dream of starting a band – how about an all-girl Nirvana tribune band called Contagious? – it's probably not going to happen.

Weiser still plays in a band in Philadelphia, but she has moved on, as well, to co-publish the literary journal Philadelphia Stories.

Writing away

Trout Lake is spring-fed, dotted with tree-covered islands of granite, and thick with one of my favorite songbirds, the veery. It's also the summer home of a friend who opened her cabin for a four-day writers' retreat last week. No phones ringing, no dogs barking, no parakeets chirping. No work, no errands, no responsibilities. It was paradise.

My only task for those four days was to write, but when I needed to recharge or think through a challenging scene in my novel-in-progress, I hiked through the dense Adirondack woods or paddled around the islands in a borrowed kayak. Kathryn led the retreat, but she also did the cooking and cleanup, as well as putting in time on her own novel. The meals were delicious and healthy – but with a candy dish of Hershey chocolate always on hand for my sweet fix. My bed was on the sleeping porch, a wonderful, second-story room overlooking the endlessly moving water of the lake. The sunrise was my alarm clock.

I made some good friends last week – all splendid writers pursuing their own creative goals. We laughed and cried at each other's work during our evening sharing time. And I made some real progress on my manuscript.

Kings and metal

The choral group I'm in is singing three coronation anthems by baroque master Georg Handel. He wrote them to honor another George, King George II, and one of the pieces, Zadok the Priest, has been the must-have anthem for all coronations in England since then.

I pondered the meaning of "baroque," which comes from the Italian word for "bizarre." That definition seems the perfect tie-in to another piece of music I am studying: Be Quick or Be Dead by Iron Maiden.

The differences are obvious—mood, tempo (I will never be able to play lead guitar that fast), complexity. The similarities are more subtle. Handel wrote about king and God; Iron Maiden about sin and punishment (I think). Handel repeats lyrics over and over (I dare you to count the hallelujahs), so does Iron Maiden. Let's see, both have abundant hair, although Handel's was a wig. Handel had adoring fans, ditto Iron Maiden.

Different time, same message

I am in the middle of rereading Agamemnon by Aeschylus. I was inspired by The People's Light & Theatre's production of The Persians, which I saw last week. That play, a look at the losers in the bloody conflict between the Greeks and Persians, was a powerful statement against war written by a former soldier (and astonishing poet). Serendipitously, looking online for details of Taft's presidency, I found a snippet of audio, a speech that Taft gave a century ago, calling for the worldwide abolishment of war. Nearly 2,400 years separate Aeschylus and Taft, yet both men shared the same passion. How far have we advanced?

Empowered

I interviewed an electrician friend for research I'm doing on a novel. He said that most people don't understand just how unforgiving electricity is. The common question he gets on a job is "How soon will the lights be back on?" Although that's ultimately what he is aiming for, his priorities are different. "My first goal is that I don't get myself killed," he says. "Second, that I don't get anyone else killed. Third, that I don't start any fires." Fourth on the list are the lights.

Hard rock

I am imagining panning for gold, my garden trowel digging into the pebbled streambed. I fill my old kitchen sieve with sand and then swirl it repeatedly in the water of Poricy Creek until the sand has drained away. I am left with a small pile of rocks, small chips of stone, an occasional shard of glass, and bits of shell. The gold I am seeking has the burnish of prehistory, mollusks that inhabited this area when Monmouth County was a shallow sea more than 65 million years ago.

The fossils are embedded in the rock, but the work of water slowly earns their release. I can see the line of demarcation easily, the dark marl that holds the shells stretching from the waterline to a point at least a dozen feet above my head, where the reddish top soil takes over and soars to the cliff edge 30 feet up. At the water's edge, though, I can see the fossils peeking out and the impressions they made all those eons ago.

I follow the streambed for several hundred yards, careful where I step. The sand is so dense in places that it sucks off boots and shoes.

Later, after a quick sandwich and a several-mile drive to another fossil bed at Big Brook, I search in vain for fossilized shark teeth. Instead, I find only orange-colored pencils of stone—the remains of belmnites, squid-like creatures that had 10 arms.

Something new

The first artificial hearts were made of girdle elastic. Dialysis tubing was first fashioned from sausage casing, and breast implants were once padded with mattress stuffing. All of these were novel, homemade solutions to a medical need, according to Robert Langer, an MIT professor and chemical engineer who spoke Thursday evening at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. It was that kind of thinking—using materials on hand because technology was lagging—that inspired much of Langer's work on drug delivery systems. Drugs that couldn't effectively be given by injection or by mouth could be imbedded in a polymer from which they would ebb slowly, over days, weeks, months, or even years. His latest research uses polymers as a framework on which to place specific types of cell to grow cartilage. Picture a kind of topiary frame on which nose cells can multiply, but the topiary mesh melts away once the nose is formed. Exciting stuff; work that helped win him the 2008 Millennium Technology Prize.

I look at my own writing life, in which to create characters and scenes and stories I draw on what I have on hand—my own experiences—but take them to the next level. Like the topiary for noses, my experiences become the framework on which to build, to create, something new.

Is it time?

Time, that fourth dimension, is a fluid thing. Length, height, width—those are concrete parameters. I can run my hands along the picture frame and feel its length. The ruler gives me a precise calculation of the height. If I multiply those two measurements together, I get square inches. Add in a bit of depth, and I get volume. These things won't change.

But time is squishy and ephemeral outside the confines of the calendar. It stretches and shrinks. When is my trip to Vermont? Four weeks seem like half a year. When did my father pass away? Sixteen months seem like a fortnight. The last of his modest estate is settled, and the only remnants of his long life are the flotsam that has collected at my house and at my sister's.

Family legend has it that the intricate wooden mosaic of an Old World street was a garage sale bargain. It hung on his wall for so many years that the real story has vanished like the perspective points on the scene's horizon. I am drawn to the picture even though it has a sterile quality. The alley is narrow ... and empty. Where are the townspeople? Where is the debris of life—the dirt, the scraps of garbage, the broken crockery thrown from an upstairs window? I expect to see a handful of chickens in the shadows, doves along the eaves, and passersby giving way to an ox and cart.

The scene never changes; time does not exist there. Here, I feel my own past slipping away, as the family members who gave it context and structure die. What I am left with are memories, yesterdays steeped in elastic time that emerge or fade, depending on my mental tides.

Movement of thought

Welcome to my blog! I launch it with a poem by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert: Mr. Cogito and the Movement of Thought.

Thoughts cross the mind
a common idiom has it

the common idiom
overestimates thoughts' mobility

a majority of them
stand motionless
in a dull landscape
of dull hillocks
and withered trees

sometimes they reach
the rushing water of someone else's thoughts
they stand on the bank
on one leg
like hungry herons

mournfully
they recall dried-up springs

they circle around
looking for grains

they don't cross
because they won't get anywhere
they don't cross
because there's nowhere to get to

they sit on the rocks
wringing their hands

under the low
overcast
firmament
of the skull