Is That A Novel on the Phone?

This is a phone conversation I wrote for a non-existent novel about people in odd telephone relationships. Nobody was hurt during the exchange, but somebody really should have been. It was also carried out under normal conditions, which may explain the banality of it. I’m making a record of it in case the person on the other end of the phone ever wants to cease and desist at some point.

“Hello, is this God?”

Pause for laugh.

“This is Arthur Lent.”

“I was kidding, sonny. So, Artemis, I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

“I’ll try.”

“Great. I’m from Maryland, the Old Line State where women beg and men give in.”

Pause for laugh.

“I don’t know much about Maryland.”

“Never mind me, I’m as full of the stuff that makes the grass grow green.”

Pause for laugh.

“Are you.”

“I’m also old and forgetful and don’t own a computer or know what to do with it except surf for porn. Hopefully when you get older you won’t loose your marbles.”

Pause for laugh.

“I hope not.”

“So, Artie, I’m trying to find out if Maine has a lobster trap tree? I seem to remember it does, but all my friends think I’m full of the stuff that makes the grass grow green.”

Pause for laugh.

“Yes, there are 2, one in Rockland and another in Kennebunk, I think. I’ll have to check.”

“Great! Can you send me a copy of the tree, kiddo.”

“I thought you said you don’t have a computer.”

“I don’t. I’m as full of the stuff that makes the grass grow green.”

Pause for laugh.

“I’m aware.”

“So, can you send me a copy?”

“Like a photocopy, then?”

“Hell no, I wouldn’t know how to use one.”

Pause for laugh.

“I’m not sure, then, how to send you a copy.”

“How about you send it to my wife’s email address. Do you have a wife, Albert?

“Yes.”

“I’m so forgetful, I forget mine. Worst thing I ever did was marry. I’m so full of the stuff that makes the grass grow green.”

Uncomfortable pause.

“Why don’t you give me your wife’s email address and I’ll send the photo of the tree along.”

“Sure, sure. The old bag will love getting an email. Say, while I have you on the phone. Do you know the address of the Bush compound at Walker Point? I’d like to congratulate the president on another 4 years in the White House.”

“I believe the current president of the U.S. is Obama.”

“In your dreams, Andrew! That SOB don’t live in my White House. Do you know what SOB means, Harold? It means He Of Little Faith.”

“That would be HOLF.”

“Yeah, it’s perfect, isn’t it? I told you I’m full of the stuff that makes the grass grow green.”

Pause for final laugh.

“I’ll send a photo of the lobster trap tree shortly.”

“Thanks, Alice. Maybe some day you and your husband will make it down to Maryland. There’s loads of stuff here that makes the grass grow green. Thanks again for all your help. I’ll show those sons of britches that I haven’t lost my memory.”

“It’s been a pleasure.”

Dead line.

Here’s some Atoms for Peace. That would be Mr. Yorke and Flea in a skirt.

The Very Big. The Very Small.

Yes, persistence is the key to open the locks of possibility. Or at least to wear around your neck like a good luck charm.

Bless Henry Miller and Moominpapa that I have just enough talent to be able to write to keep myself sane on days when things are slower than sludge sucked through a straw. Although there are days when the writing makes me crazy. One day it flows like the River Taff, the next it’s like a dry creek littered with dead frogs. (Note: No frogs were harmed in the writing of that sentence.)

I don’t want much from life besides trying to figure out how to have better control of the ordinary side stuff of life so that I can toss all the wildness and craziness into my writing. The universe can keep its elementary particles a secret to me. I have no need for a Theory of Everything. I just have a strong desire to be loving, gentle, funny, kind, and hopefully wise. And not in that particular order, either.

I love that quiet after supper with no noise except for the sound of the clock. The soft stroke of the mourning doves’ wings. The desperate cry of seagulls, whirling over calm water. And the light fading fast like it has a late-night rendezvous.

There’s nothing to do. The dishes are in the sink. The cats are fed and curled up on their favourite chairs. The kids are playing in a distant room. The neighbours have gone inside. Even the phone finds pleasure in silence.

No interruptions. No one expecting anything. The fridge shivers and the food waits for another meal. There are no emails worth bothering with.

Sometimes a disc seems to whisper your name. Sometimes a dog barks and falls silent. And sometimes, I put on my boots and go for a walk, bugs buzzing, the active birds of dusk nowhere to be seen. If I notice a sailboat, it seems to lazily crawl home to some port.

I just sit and watch the light go.

“55 crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars, big bang, black hole – who gives a shit?” Tom Stoppard.

Here’s some early Police.

Sand in Pocket

At last, the temperatures in Maine are back to a thinking man’s idea of summer. No more groveling in the shade or taking my family to shop at the local Hannafords simply to cool down besides the dairy and cheese.

And my family and I have discovered a sand beach. We had no idea it even existed this close to our house. An idyllic strand hidden in plain view. Crashing waves, warm water, a circling bald eagle, the lazy beat of a passing blue heron, scuttling hermit crabs, and the slow crawl of sea snails, leaving straight lines in the wet sand. The best part, though, is that nobody seems to know about this small sandy beach. The day we went, we were the only ones romping about.

If I worked for a lifestyle magazine that enticed out-of-staters here with the promise of everlasting delight, I’d have to spill the location. But since I don’t, I’m not giving away its whereabouts. I’m keeping its location all to myself. I might even draw a map, stuff it into a peg leg, and forget about it. Or I may get the map tattooed to a spot on my body that hardly sees the light of day.

I’ll most likely continue to write about the sandy beach. It’s such a find. I might write about how I surfed to shore on the last wave of the day. I might write about finding a passport photograph of a young man with a moustache whose portrait gave no hint of the life he lived. I might write about the stone dog that washed ashore and came to life. I might write about the scrap I got into with a feisty hermit crab in a yellow periwinkle shell who almost took pity on me. I might also tell of the hermit crab who gladly offered me his shell in return for my bipedal life among giants.

I’m still pursuing a job the way the Snork Maiden pursues Moomintroll. I’m ready for something now to fall out of the sky and hit me on the head. I promise not to carry an umbrella. I’d also settle for an agent to pick me up in his or her strong arms, swirl me around, and point me in the direction of a publisher for my novel.

Ok, time to get back into my foxhole to write. Then I’m off to that beach for some extra solitude.

Here’s some Mission UK.

Nothing Important Comes With Illustrations

What a scorching couple of days in Maine. The last time I remember it being this hot, I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar….

My family and I have been living a life aquatic by swimming. I haven’t been getting many words down. I can’t write in the heat. I can’t think in the heat. I can only think the air-conditioned nightmare, and we have fans. I actually hate it when it gets hot since I’m only good at lounging and swimming for so long before I get bored.

Due to my highly paid skills of deduction, I’ve noticed that I am not much liked on Facebook.

This whole job seeking pursuit of sweet homilies puts me in mind of Mr. Tumnus, who said, “The capacity for ordinary work is not for me.”

I know I’m spoilt rotten by this gift of so much free time to write because I hold no honest entertainment, but always at the back of the cart I can hear the moans of a Mr. Malcontent, who sings, “I was looking for a job and then I found a job and heaven knows I’m miserable now.”

It seems true that you can never get as much done as you planned to. But, then, even God rested on the seventh day. And if a deity can feast on lotus flowers, I suppose I can as the world wags on and on.

“Why are we weighed upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
All things have rest: why should we toil alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown;
Nor ever fold our wings,
And cease from wanderings,
Nor steep our brows in slumber’s holy balm;
Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,
“There is no joy but calm!” —
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?” Tennyson

All I can say is, I’m glad that “omissions are not accidents.” (Marianne Moore)

I’m also glad I get to write my books, have my family, my friends, my Moleskine notebooks, my records, my penchants, my cup of PG Tips. These things bring me joy — and panic on the mean streets of writing. Cause right now, the novel I’m working on has a proper unlikeable protagonist and I keep wondering how low he can go be before a reader will refuse to turn the page and curse my name. But I also don’t want to change a thing about him.

I suppose it all hangs off the idea that what interests me will also interest others. But can I be sure? Do people read books for the things I do? I know I’m not that much engaged with writers who assuage or comfort but prefer writers who provoke and unsettle. And I’m not that bouncy about characters who are either villains or heroes, I prefer characters whose lives and even their morality change over the length of the novel. I don’t go to book and I don’t get books that set out to confirm my own behaviour, ideas, or feelings. And I also don’t like to read the kind of realist fiction, the low mimetic, as Angela Carter called it, that deals in simulacrums of the world I live in. Why do I want to hear and feel and think more about that? It saturates me every day. I want to discover a world that hasn’t been covered up by the philistines, or else a world that everybody has overlooked for some grand cause with money at its root, or a world nobody has imagined beyond their pedestrian constraints of the imagination.

Here’s some Smiths, lots of them, on bikes.

Never A Bond Girl

Would it kill you, Maine, to surprise us with some sun? What kind of Vacationland is this when there are days of damp and mist and rain? Someone needs to give the state a bit of stick.

I only have two children, but some days it feels like I’m Private Frank Pike in Dad’s Army. I’m just a punching bag of parental jerks and stutters and false starts.

A good friend suggested a book to me. I like suggestions. And this one is especially tasty. It’s Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey. The mansion in the title is a crumbling apartment complex that’s home to the very eccentric Francis Orme (great name!) and other misfits. It can’t come quick enough through inter-library loan for me.

Before going to bed last night, I went out on a limb and decided it was time to watch The House of Cards, the Brit one with Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhart, Chief Whip of the Conservative party just after Thatcher spread her wings for greener pastures. And Richardson is simply brilliant as the vengeful politician with his mix of Macbeth and Machiavelli and the insane touch of the hand of Mephistopheles. Can’t wait to see more episodes.

Sometimes I get the feeling that the world is a disappointing place to the one I can imagine and then I walk out onto my deck and witness an armada of slugs. And sometimes I get sick and tired of staying “positive,” as if all electrons in this huge universe never have a negative charge, or if they do, it’s against the Thermal Dynamic Law of Happiness to ever show some doubt and existential malaise.

Here’s some classic Echo and the Bunnymen.

Palaver

A hot Harmattan wind has passed through Maine. Days and nights of heat have turned to history, remembered in glands and sweat and some one, somewhere, naked on a bed.

Dear Reader, I am writing to you, a Welshman in drab underwear, out of skepticism, sensualism, sentimentalism, hollow Michiavelism.

Dear Reader, who looks earnestly through phantasmagory and a state of frenzy to the courts of wild justice, now is the time to shout, “Temptations in the Wilderness.”

Our life is rounded with necessity and voluntary force of habit. And every last one of us knows the 3 Ds: Disappointment, Denial, Doubt.

Although I have been known to dream of a 36D going from Chichester to Dumfries.

Together now, as in a chorus of paper bags: Disappointment…Denial…Doubt….

And, yet, “the fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator.”

Ask yourself, what’s all this fretting, fuming, lamenting, and self-tormenting about?

No idea.

Think, man, think!

Ah, yes, the everlasting yea! Can you buy it at the corner shop?

It’s my opinion, said Mr. Sartor Resartus, that the “Thou” is not sufficiently honoured, nourished, soft-bedded, and lovingly cared for.

But where will I find such a lovely Thou?

In the stupendous section of Aisle 5 right next to the box of firelighters.

Produce! More Produce!

Nay, I want to Produce a thing of beauty.

Do the duty which lies nearest thee.

Right, I will. Thanks for that. Because I live not on morality, but a cookery of capability and performance.

Ha! Every one needs to learn the folly of that precept Know Thyself is really Know What Thou Canst Work At.

Now, there’s that Thou again. It’s like a damn Ideopraxist: in the idea he lived, moved, and did a jig.

— At this point an Editor would like to make an appearance and advise a principle of caution. And if I were you, Dear Reader, and sometimes I am, when I read other blogs and books, I’d listen to the Editor, he always has the last word.

Here’s some Style Council.

Free Content From My Life

Episode V

When my wife and I got married, we decided to get in a hot-air balloon and see the world in more than 80 days. In short, have a very long honeymoon. We didn’t want to begin this new adventure by ordering the little drummer boy to play the same old tunes of: start a family, own a house, have matching luggage and careers, and vote in elections.

So, with the reckless spirit of Blake’s Flea, we sold all our belongings, raked blueberries in Washington County in Maine to make tons of money, and bought one-way tickets to Ireland.

We tried living in Galway at first, but that inn was full with students and tourists, so we travelled to Yeats Country. Well, the Gateway to Connemara, to live in a one-room apartment above a barn in Oughterard, the Gaelic words meaning in English the “the Upper Lower Place,” which had perfect meaning for us. We were living in the “Upper Place” of what Wordsworth describes as those “spots of time,” which I have always understood as key elements, both psychological and imaginative, in one’s life. It was also the “Lower Place,” too, since we had very little money and no real ambition for anything besides reading lots and living life from the daily visits with the postman to the encounters with frisky bulls and the roaming bands of long-horn Connemara sheep.

The place I’m living now, the one of writing is also the “Upper Place” of imagination and the time to get it done, since I have no immediate temptations of the working kind. But it is also the “Lower Place.” I could explain, but some things are best left to oneself even in the Age of Transparency.

I also remember a funny incident from that time, cooped up in a barn reading Tolstoy and Hamsun, Ursula Le Guin and Moorcock. It happened at night between my wife and I. We had just finished an evening of watching two Bond flicks on RTE. The wonderful couple who rented the barn to us had gone to bed long ago (they were farmers). My wife and I crawled into bed and fell into a deep sleep. We were woken some time later by footsteps in the courtyard below the single window, open to the scent of wild roses. Back and forth went the footsteps. We were still drowsy from dreams of secret agents and so to our active ears it sounded like a couple of crooks were stealing farming implements or hidden treasure in the barn below. We were so scared, neither one of us could move – not even to get closer to each other. We just listened to the footsteps coming and going and hauling off the loot. We stayed awake until a jaunty robin appeared in the roses. With at least some semblance of light, I was now determined to get up and find out what the hell was taking these thieves all night to rob a barn. Like a very early bird, armed with a frying pan and ready to catch the thieves red-handed, I tiptoed out.

There were no night-time burglars.

Trotting back and forth in the early morning courtyard was a horse. A big iron-shod horse who had escaped his field and thought he would spend the night terrifying a young couple of night owls.

I remember my wife and I sat on the steps of our garret among the rafters of an old barn and laughed until the sun came up.

Here’s a Cave named Nick.

Bang!

I view the Fourth with a certain detachment. But then I’m Welsh and not a citizen, although I do now spell in American English and own a blazer. That doesn’t mean I’m still upset about Mad King George losing the colonies. I just wished Old George had spent less time mistaking a large tree for a Prussian king and spent more time making future plans for Dear Old Blighty.

So on this day of fireworks and fired-up grills and stars and stripes, I’ve been thinking about the pursuit of happiness.

And I’ve decided to pursue it like a little cake with red, white, and blue icing. Oh, and with a gun. Hunt that bastard happiness down until I have it in my sights and can unload. In fact, I think more Americans should own guns in order to pursue happiness. Because, what the hell, guns don’t kill people, little cakes with icing do.

I mean, come on, anyone with a half dollar knows that guns are pacifists. Just try holding one of those cowards in your hands. “Please, sir, don’t make me do it! I don’t want to shoot anyone. I’ve got a wife and three kids at home.”

Everywhere I look I see handguns, rifles, semi-automatics, grenade launchers wailing and crying and screaming to stop the madness. Some even get a concealed weapons permit because they’re too shy to show their nozzles. But it does no good because people have turned weapons into killers.

And I haven’t even begun to discuss that wicked beast happiness. It’s such a menace, nuisance, terror, it deserves to be hunted down with a semi.

In fact, let’s arm children as soon as possible, since any day now they are going to discover that there is such a thing as the pursuit of happiness and no Santa Claus. Happiness will be waiting to tear their little hearts out and replace with unhappiness. And this cannot be! We must stalk happiness in its natural surroundings and bring it down before it brings us down.

And what is happiness? Why, it’s a loaded gun, of course. And it’s God in the great Jukebox in the sky spinning the same old 33s like bullets in a chamber. The same God who created Earth and Adam and Eve but forgot all about the dinosaurs. Oh dear me, that was a colossal fuck up, wasn’t it? But I forgive you God since you gave us fast food.

I’m going outside now to sit on my deck with my rifle across my knees. Maybe a few stars will streak like cosmic bullets across the sky. Maybe my terrestrial luck will get a glimpse of happiness tonight and I’ll bring it down with a clean shot.

I can’t imagine what will happen, though, if I simply wound it. All night long happiness will be wailing outside my house and no amount of fireworks will scare it off.

If this happens, I should probably just put it out of its misery and go and join the fun like everyone else.

The Light of Common Day

The sun is back in Maine, like an old lion prowling for meat to burn.

I know frustration. I know the spooling away of the smallest thread of one’s life until it’s all just a pattern. But can frustration help to fuel extravagant and visionary imagination?

“To the depths of the unknown,” wrote Baudelaire.

Some days I wish I just raised chickens, felled trees, broke ice in the bucket, chopped wood for the stove, and went out in the evening in fine threads.

Where are the little dells and corners of paradise?

“We fear all things as mortals, and we desire all things as if we were immortal.”

Life’s not a dream. I can prove it! All you have to do is take the quantum pulse of my atomic level to see that I can be both a particle of hope and a little light of luck.

Reality is nothing but the remainder of our lives.

“The short story is not minimalist, it is rococo.” Angela Carter.

The past is dead but alive in us. The moment is forever vibrating. And the future is knowing where to begin and when to end.

If I didn’t imagine, I might as well elope with an amoeba.

But I’m practical, too. And honest. And hardworking. And I understand the Cocteau Twins’ lyrics.

Here’s “Born of Frustration” by Manchester band James.

Secrets of the Toad

E.B. White wrote: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.”

As a self-addled idler, I say screw the former part of that personal conundrum and let’s fall helplessly into the enjoy part. Mixing hedonistic pastimes with little bursts of languid philosophy, I’ll take a lazy swipe at the idea that so much thinking is now done for us that it’s damn time we indulge in all kinds of idleness until we are all over Descartes “I think therefore I am.”

If I don’t see the sun soon, I’m going to contemplate taking up heliotropism.

Yesterday it was the mercurial swiftness of 3,000 words added to my novel. Today it’s the slow burn of 800. I wonder if lawyers have similar problems? Shit, I got that guy off with a fine. Now my new client is looking at 20 years to life!

Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is a staple in our house in the middle of the Maine woods. And our favourite woodland character?

Why, Mr. Toad, of course. You’ve got to love an animal that gets 20 years for being green. And I don’t like motorcars as much as Mr. Toad, but I just love his obsessive nature.

Here’s me as Mr. Toad explaining the need for a life that is more than just spending, getting, jumping in the first available lifeboat to make it to the other side. “Why, I’d say anything in there, Badger. You’re so eloquent and persuasive in there. But, no, I’m not at all sorry for smashing up life to get to the gems.”

The year I owned a motorcycle and split the air
in southern Spain, and could smell the oranges
in the orange groves as I passed them
outside of Seville, I understood
I’d been riding too long in cars,
probably even should get a horse,
become a high-up, flesh-connected thing
among the bulls and cows. Stephen Dunn

“A battler is someone who struggles forever and will never, ever, really get anywhere. And in Australia that’s a really honorable position.” Peter Carey

“A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” Nelson Algren.

Here are some Scots.