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.