The days fly by here in Yelapa. I blink, and the time between getting up in the morning and going to bed at night is gone. So it goes in this tropical paradise.
The weather, though, has been mixed until recently, warm and sunny when we first got here at the end of December, the water warm, then cool and overcast and cold water into January, with occasional rain, and through much of February. But March has brought clear skies again, while it remains rather cool for this late in the season.
What we're experiencing, no doubt, is a little of the wintry weather up north -- along with the planet's climate change in general.
No complaints, however. The days tick by quite pleasantly enough, and we still have more than a month to go before we leave here. ETD: April 15. We'll go back to BC to see the damage to our house from trees that fell on it during a windstorm in early February. Temporary repairs have been made by friends and family; we'll do the final repairs when we get back.
Have a nasty cold at the moment. April had it before me. Colds, in fact, have been going around the village all winter and perhaps have something to do with the coolish weather. Still . . . no complaints.
Friday, March 8, 2019
Friday, November 30, 2018
Breaking News
Been away from here a long time, as usual. Our smoky summer is long gone and winter has started with a couple of snowfalls that have since melted. Temperatures hovering at freezing so far, but real cold is coming, the weather folks say.
April and I set to leave for our 14th winter stay in Mexico December 29th, my 84th birthday, though she's been hobbling around with rheumatoid arthritis lately. She's had a touch of it for years, but it's gotten especially bad since this spring. Been trying to beat it holistically, but she's ready to try conventional medicine finally.
Me, I've had a bad back and stiff knees since our encounter with a big Pacific wave on the way in a water taxi to Yelapa two years ago. Both of us suffered spinal compression fractures that day, or have I mentioned this already?
My novel is out to several publishers (three, or is four, rejections so far), and I think of putting together a couple collections of my stories, probably to be self-published before I quit the game. Perhaps I will have to self-publish my novel too, eventually. So be it.
Meanwhile, I read every day or evening. Just finished Don DeLillo's Zero K. Before that (my introduction to him) read Mao II. DeLillo's pretty dark and deep, rather difficult but brilliant. He looks at what's happening in the world around him and mulls on it in his fiction. Not for everybody, I guess, but he makes you think.
Otherwise I'm reading Paulette Jiles, a marvelous writer my wife and I used to know when she lived in our area up here in Canada. She now lives, and writes about, Texas, particularly about mid-19th-century Texas and the conflict between white settlers and Native Americans, notably the Comanche and Kiowa, who raided white settlements and captured those they didn't kill. In The News of the World and The Color of Lightning Jiles manages to be empathetic to both sides, and recreates, in a wonderfully readable style, a lot of what that conflict must have been like. What's especially interesting is her take on the experience of white captives among Native Americans. That many after rescue, particularly those taken as children, preferred to stay with their captives, and suffered from being torn from them, is documented in such books as The Captured, by Scott Zesch, a book I have and have read, as Jiles no doubt has too.
Check her out online. There's a very good interview with from the Texas Monthly, and her blog, despite her disparagement of it, is always interesting.
That's all the news from here, as I root for Trump's fall and all his minions and all he stands for in my native country.
April and I set to leave for our 14th winter stay in Mexico December 29th, my 84th birthday, though she's been hobbling around with rheumatoid arthritis lately. She's had a touch of it for years, but it's gotten especially bad since this spring. Been trying to beat it holistically, but she's ready to try conventional medicine finally.
Me, I've had a bad back and stiff knees since our encounter with a big Pacific wave on the way in a water taxi to Yelapa two years ago. Both of us suffered spinal compression fractures that day, or have I mentioned this already?
My novel is out to several publishers (three, or is four, rejections so far), and I think of putting together a couple collections of my stories, probably to be self-published before I quit the game. Perhaps I will have to self-publish my novel too, eventually. So be it.
Meanwhile, I read every day or evening. Just finished Don DeLillo's Zero K. Before that (my introduction to him) read Mao II. DeLillo's pretty dark and deep, rather difficult but brilliant. He looks at what's happening in the world around him and mulls on it in his fiction. Not for everybody, I guess, but he makes you think.
Otherwise I'm reading Paulette Jiles, a marvelous writer my wife and I used to know when she lived in our area up here in Canada. She now lives, and writes about, Texas, particularly about mid-19th-century Texas and the conflict between white settlers and Native Americans, notably the Comanche and Kiowa, who raided white settlements and captured those they didn't kill. In The News of the World and The Color of Lightning Jiles manages to be empathetic to both sides, and recreates, in a wonderfully readable style, a lot of what that conflict must have been like. What's especially interesting is her take on the experience of white captives among Native Americans. That many after rescue, particularly those taken as children, preferred to stay with their captives, and suffered from being torn from them, is documented in such books as The Captured, by Scott Zesch, a book I have and have read, as Jiles no doubt has too.
Check her out online. There's a very good interview with from the Texas Monthly, and her blog, despite her disparagement of it, is always interesting.
That's all the news from here, as I root for Trump's fall and all his minions and all he stands for in my native country.
Tuesday, August 7, 2018
Unfinished Novel
Looking for a new project this morning, I dug through my files and pulled out the yellowed typescript of the first draft of a novel I started in Mexico almost fifty years ago and never finished.
Inspired by Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn it was to tell, in the first person, the story of a runaway farm boy. I called it The Adventures of Carl Miller. On the upper left corner of the title page is a notation telling me where and when I began the novel: Oaxaca, 12 January 1970. At the bottom of the page is the notation of when I stopped working on it: Halted 13 February 1970. That was because, after producing just short of a hundred pages in a month, I stalled. I stalled after writing a hundred pages of my first two attempts at a novel as well. Eventually, with my memoir, Leaving the Farm, I learned patience, perseverance, and trust. I learned to keep at it until you complete a first draft, a form, however rough and unrealized, you can then begin to cut and expand and shape into a second draft, and a third, into as many drafts as it takes to finally "finish" the thing. Of course it's never finished. Only, if you're lucky, it's accepted by a publisher and you go into a final process with an editor.
Anyway, I exhumed this old attempt this morning with the idea of maybe taking it up again, of perhaps making of it a novel for juveniles. The writing isn't bad, actually, and I have nothing else on my plate at the moment. What's more, to write a novel of youth, for youths, kind of appeals to this old man.
.
Inspired by Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn it was to tell, in the first person, the story of a runaway farm boy. I called it The Adventures of Carl Miller. On the upper left corner of the title page is a notation telling me where and when I began the novel: Oaxaca, 12 January 1970. At the bottom of the page is the notation of when I stopped working on it: Halted 13 February 1970. That was because, after producing just short of a hundred pages in a month, I stalled. I stalled after writing a hundred pages of my first two attempts at a novel as well. Eventually, with my memoir, Leaving the Farm, I learned patience, perseverance, and trust. I learned to keep at it until you complete a first draft, a form, however rough and unrealized, you can then begin to cut and expand and shape into a second draft, and a third, into as many drafts as it takes to finally "finish" the thing. Of course it's never finished. Only, if you're lucky, it's accepted by a publisher and you go into a final process with an editor.
Anyway, I exhumed this old attempt this morning with the idea of maybe taking it up again, of perhaps making of it a novel for juveniles. The writing isn't bad, actually, and I have nothing else on my plate at the moment. What's more, to write a novel of youth, for youths, kind of appeals to this old man.
.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
News Junkie
Virtually the first thing I do every morning is turn on the TV and click to MSNBC, then CNN, switching back and forth between the two. Then I turn on the radio and listen to Democracy Now! or, since I'm hooked on images, I fire up my computer to watch it online. Finally, having received my morning dose of Trump's latest outrage, the only news worth reporting, it seems, by the US networks these days (Democracy Now! always covers some of what else is happening in the world), I turn at last to my writing.
Later I'll hear or watch the news on the CBC and maybe the BBC, but as a dual citizen of the US and Canada, and though I've been living in Canada now for more years than I lived in the United States -- and though I definitely feel something of a foreigner in the States now -- in my deepest self, I remain an American.
I was born in Minneapolis and raised on a family farm in south-central Minnesota, and the lakes and marshes, the woods and fields in that part of the state around the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, (though mostly given now to "hobby" farms, to wooded "estates"), remain the country of my heart.
Still, I'm no patriot, though I served a hitch in the US Navy in the last half of the 1950s. In the fall of 1970 my wife and I moved to Canada, specifically to the West Kootenay region of British Columbia, as American "refugees," as back-to-the-land dissidents. We became official landed immigrants in June 1971, and Canadian citizens in 1976. Our politics haven't changed. and in fact mine have become more radical. So I'm perhaps a little more interested in the news from south of our border than the average Canadian. In fact, I'm downright obsessed with it.
My practical wife, on the other hand, finds the TV news too upsetting to watch. She'll switch to the Weather Channel when my back is turned, which is more interesting to her than the news, not to say less depressing. She's a gardener, after all, lives happily in the here and now, and likes to know what she can expect from nature in the next day or so.
Truth to tell, I'm getting rather tired myself of hearing about Trump to the exclusion of most other news. But he's the outlandish head of the most powerful (though possibly declining) nation in the world, and the dangerous, perhaps demented embodiment of all that's going down in the States right now, and I mean down. Something's gotta give, and that's some hope in what appears to be the worst of times in America's history -- and the world's.
Let me count the ways. His administration's Mexican border policy: treating Latin American refugees like criminals, separating innocent children from their parents, confining them in internment camps in a criminal return to the treatment of Japanese-Americans (and Japanese-Canadians; Canada was complicit) during World War II. Trump's dismissal of climate change, his pulling the US out of the Paris Accord. His and his hand-picked cabinet's intended dismantlement of progressive government programs in the interest of privatization, of profit. His and his ultra-rightwing enablers' apparent dream of a kind of Eden for the super rich, for the winners in this corporate world. Forget the rest of humankind. They're life's losers.
There's a lot of outrage now, a lot of protest, a lot of recognition of what's happening. Therein lies some hope, I tell myself.
Later I'll hear or watch the news on the CBC and maybe the BBC, but as a dual citizen of the US and Canada, and though I've been living in Canada now for more years than I lived in the United States -- and though I definitely feel something of a foreigner in the States now -- in my deepest self, I remain an American.
I was born in Minneapolis and raised on a family farm in south-central Minnesota, and the lakes and marshes, the woods and fields in that part of the state around the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, (though mostly given now to "hobby" farms, to wooded "estates"), remain the country of my heart.
Still, I'm no patriot, though I served a hitch in the US Navy in the last half of the 1950s. In the fall of 1970 my wife and I moved to Canada, specifically to the West Kootenay region of British Columbia, as American "refugees," as back-to-the-land dissidents. We became official landed immigrants in June 1971, and Canadian citizens in 1976. Our politics haven't changed. and in fact mine have become more radical. So I'm perhaps a little more interested in the news from south of our border than the average Canadian. In fact, I'm downright obsessed with it.
My practical wife, on the other hand, finds the TV news too upsetting to watch. She'll switch to the Weather Channel when my back is turned, which is more interesting to her than the news, not to say less depressing. She's a gardener, after all, lives happily in the here and now, and likes to know what she can expect from nature in the next day or so.
Truth to tell, I'm getting rather tired myself of hearing about Trump to the exclusion of most other news. But he's the outlandish head of the most powerful (though possibly declining) nation in the world, and the dangerous, perhaps demented embodiment of all that's going down in the States right now, and I mean down. Something's gotta give, and that's some hope in what appears to be the worst of times in America's history -- and the world's.
Let me count the ways. His administration's Mexican border policy: treating Latin American refugees like criminals, separating innocent children from their parents, confining them in internment camps in a criminal return to the treatment of Japanese-Americans (and Japanese-Canadians; Canada was complicit) during World War II. Trump's dismissal of climate change, his pulling the US out of the Paris Accord. His and his hand-picked cabinet's intended dismantlement of progressive government programs in the interest of privatization, of profit. His and his ultra-rightwing enablers' apparent dream of a kind of Eden for the super rich, for the winners in this corporate world. Forget the rest of humankind. They're life's losers.
There's a lot of outrage now, a lot of protest, a lot of recognition of what's happening. Therein lies some hope, I tell myself.
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
The View From 100
My father-in-law, George Luchtan, will be a hundred years old tomorrow. My wife and I have been looking after him this past month in Detroit, and I've wondered what it must be like for him at his very advanced old age.
I think of a book by the literary historian Malcolm Cowley, written when he was in his 80s, called The View From 80. In it Cowley quoted a fellow octogenarian as saying, "I feel like a young man who has something the matter with him." I'm 83 myself now, and can relate. My father-in-law, on the other hand, at age 100, has a lot the matter with him, and I doubt he feels like a young man anymore.
Still, he's amazingly alert, though physically and mentally, of course, not the man he once was. He was a fixer, a problem solver, as a young radio repairman in Yakima, Washington, and later as a Ford general foreman in the company's River Rouge plant in metropolitan Detroit. But he isn't able to fix much anymore.
Yet he still reads, mostly technical stuff, stuff he's read before and now comes to as if for the first time. Watches closed-captioned television (factory work damaged his hearing early on, and he's all but deaf now). Still likes the challenge of puzzles, but he seldom figures them out anymore, even those he invented.
He lives now one day at a time, as don't we all, really. When you ask him how he is in the morning, he replies, I'm alive."
Sleep, I think, is his great pleasure now. He's asleep more than he's awake these days, having dreams (sometimes what he calls nightmares). He sometimes talks in his sleep. He sometimes confuses a particularly vivid dream with reality.
And he doesn't get around much anymore. Except for trips to see his doctor, or whenever we can get out to a restaurant meal, he's confined to the house. Doesn't get much exercise other than the walk from his bedroom to his chair in front of the television, or into a back room where he sits and watches the birds in his back yard. We throw bird seed on the ground to attract the birds.
So how much "quality" does my father-in-law have left in his life? Enough, it seems. He soldiers on. Still sings snatches of old songs, recites poems he memorized as a young man and still remembers. Still notices things, still laughs at some of them. Tells stories out his past, stories of personal triumphs, of problems solved.
He's looked forward to his 100th birthday. There'll be some 20 well-wishers in his house tomorrow, relatives mostly, some old friends who happen still to be alive. It'll be an exciting, tiring day for him, and he'll perhaps be unable to sleep tomorrow night and instead sleep all the next day.
What's next for him, besides the inevitable? We all hope it'll be a return to his house in the Florida Keys, which was severely damaged by Hurricane Irma last September, from which he and his youngest daughter Kathleen, his chief caregiver, had to evacuate, and where she's been this month seeing to the repair of the place. There on Long Key he can sit out on his veranda above a canal, in Florida's warm sun, and watch the birds and the boats going by. Long may he still live. Happy Birthday, George.
Postscript, May 15, 2018. George Luchtan, my father-in-law, passed away today, just two weeks after his 100th birthday. After achieving his goal of reaching 100, he seemed to let go. The evidence is he had a "small" heart attack either just before or just after his birthday; his heart, near the end, was barely functioning. He died at home, in a room from which he could watch the birds in his back yard feeding on the seed his youngest daughter threw on the ground to attract them. Before he lapsed into his final sleep, he said, "I didn't know it would take this long to die." He had a good long life. Rest in peace, George, as I add this picture of you with your daughter, April, my wife of 53 years, on your birthday.
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Waiting for Spring
We're in Detroit, looking after my wife's aged father (soon to turn 100) and waiting for spring. Today is dark and rainy here. Earlier the rain was creating icicles. The weather is crazy, everywhere on the planet, and the evidence is of climate change caused by global warming (that the arctic is warming is most alarming). Yet there are people -- self-serving most of them -- who are climate change deniers.
These are crazy times, and knowing that history itself is more or less a record of crazy times holds little comfort. Still, we beat on, though this planet, our one and only home in the universe, seems sick and we've doubtless had something, probably a lot, to do with it.
We flew here on Easter Sunday from Puerto Vallarta, leaving warm weather and our winter home in Yelapa behind (actually, it had just started to warm up around the Bay of Banderas after an abnormally cool season) but expecting to enjoy, as April unfolded, the start of spring in Detroit. Instead, we've been suffering an extended winter.
It's still cold and snowy in southeast British Columbia, where we live, and yesterday there was a "spring" blizzard blowing around Minneapolis, where my sister lives.
We fly for home on the 27th of this month, the day after my father-in-law's birthday. Maybe it'll be spring by then.
These are crazy times, and knowing that history itself is more or less a record of crazy times holds little comfort. Still, we beat on, though this planet, our one and only home in the universe, seems sick and we've doubtless had something, probably a lot, to do with it.
We flew here on Easter Sunday from Puerto Vallarta, leaving warm weather and our winter home in Yelapa behind (actually, it had just started to warm up around the Bay of Banderas after an abnormally cool season) but expecting to enjoy, as April unfolded, the start of spring in Detroit. Instead, we've been suffering an extended winter.
It's still cold and snowy in southeast British Columbia, where we live, and yesterday there was a "spring" blizzard blowing around Minneapolis, where my sister lives.
We fly for home on the 27th of this month, the day after my father-in-law's birthday. Maybe it'll be spring by then.
Sunday, March 25, 2018
Semana Santa in Yelapa
It's Palm Sunday and the start of Holy Week here. It's also the start
of our last week in Yelapa this year. I say "this year" because our
hope, our intention, is always to return next year. God willing. If
we should live so long.
I'm sitting at my laptop on the front balcony of Casa Emilio at the start of another beautiful day here. I'm surrounded by jungle. Below, mostly obscured by the trees, is the central village, and beyond, across Yelapa's cove, is the main beach. There's a spinytail iguana -- the locals call them garobos -- in a tree in front of me. We have a resident population of these black lizards, some of which, the males, I think, sport streaks of scarlet on their bodies. They live under our roof tiles, come down the steep little stairway from the flat rooftop above our guest room (where we sunbathe, hang our wash to dry) to waddle past me at my computer, cross the balcony, slip between the wooden bars of the railing, and crawl out into the sun on our landlord's tiled roof to warm their cold reptilian blood before hopping into a tree to eat some leaves. They grow quite tame as they get used to us each year, often stopping within a foot or so of your foot to look up and cock their heads as if waiting for you to say something. I often do say something, like "How you doin', buddy?" or "Aren't you looking ugly today?"
Actually, they're kind of cute, and lately they've been chasing each other around in a reptilian mating dance.
We have other visitors on occasion. One night I was awakened by what sounded like crockery being moved around on the front balcony outside our bedroom. Got up, shined my light through the bars of our open window, heard a scurrying. Cranked open the door to the balcony and pointed my light across the balcony to see the back end of a raccoon and the face of another, its eyes reflecting my light back to me from between the bars of the railing. I had to charge out at it to get it to scramble across the roof tiles and jump into a tree.
Then just yesterday my wife April, while sweeping our bedroom floor, pulled our empty luggage bags away from the wall, where they'd been stored since January, and there was the curled-up length of a snake. She yelled. Norma, our landlady, at her lavadero just below us, came up, grabbed our broom and clapped it down on the snake as it tried to crawl away. I came down from our front balcony, Norma handed me the broom, and I managed to sweep the snake outside of the bedroom, onto our back (kitchen) balcony, and down the stone steps of our entrance.
This was the second snake we've had to eject from our house, the first found in our bathroom about three weeks ago. That one I prodded from where it was curled behind the toilet into the shower stall, where it escaped through one of the two holes in the concrete wall where the water pipes come through. Both were long and skinny, dark and speckled. We have a field guide to the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals of western Mexico, but I'm not sure it shows the kind of snake we've seen. Norma calls them house snakes, which tells us something. In any case, they're harmless, she says, and they're probably good for ridding the house of other creepy-crawlies.
Oops! My wife says I must stop now. She wants us to go down to the village for the Palm Sunday procession. The church bell has been tolling.
P.S. We missed it. Took too long writing this post. Next year!
I'm sitting at my laptop on the front balcony of Casa Emilio at the start of another beautiful day here. I'm surrounded by jungle. Below, mostly obscured by the trees, is the central village, and beyond, across Yelapa's cove, is the main beach. There's a spinytail iguana -- the locals call them garobos -- in a tree in front of me. We have a resident population of these black lizards, some of which, the males, I think, sport streaks of scarlet on their bodies. They live under our roof tiles, come down the steep little stairway from the flat rooftop above our guest room (where we sunbathe, hang our wash to dry) to waddle past me at my computer, cross the balcony, slip between the wooden bars of the railing, and crawl out into the sun on our landlord's tiled roof to warm their cold reptilian blood before hopping into a tree to eat some leaves. They grow quite tame as they get used to us each year, often stopping within a foot or so of your foot to look up and cock their heads as if waiting for you to say something. I often do say something, like "How you doin', buddy?" or "Aren't you looking ugly today?"
Actually, they're kind of cute, and lately they've been chasing each other around in a reptilian mating dance.
We have other visitors on occasion. One night I was awakened by what sounded like crockery being moved around on the front balcony outside our bedroom. Got up, shined my light through the bars of our open window, heard a scurrying. Cranked open the door to the balcony and pointed my light across the balcony to see the back end of a raccoon and the face of another, its eyes reflecting my light back to me from between the bars of the railing. I had to charge out at it to get it to scramble across the roof tiles and jump into a tree.
Then just yesterday my wife April, while sweeping our bedroom floor, pulled our empty luggage bags away from the wall, where they'd been stored since January, and there was the curled-up length of a snake. She yelled. Norma, our landlady, at her lavadero just below us, came up, grabbed our broom and clapped it down on the snake as it tried to crawl away. I came down from our front balcony, Norma handed me the broom, and I managed to sweep the snake outside of the bedroom, onto our back (kitchen) balcony, and down the stone steps of our entrance.
This was the second snake we've had to eject from our house, the first found in our bathroom about three weeks ago. That one I prodded from where it was curled behind the toilet into the shower stall, where it escaped through one of the two holes in the concrete wall where the water pipes come through. Both were long and skinny, dark and speckled. We have a field guide to the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals of western Mexico, but I'm not sure it shows the kind of snake we've seen. Norma calls them house snakes, which tells us something. In any case, they're harmless, she says, and they're probably good for ridding the house of other creepy-crawlies.
Oops! My wife says I must stop now. She wants us to go down to the village for the Palm Sunday procession. The church bell has been tolling.
P.S. We missed it. Took too long writing this post. Next year!
Saturday, February 10, 2018
Old Guy Writes First Novel
Odd weather here on the Bay of Banderas lately, overcast, misty, even a little rainy accompanied by lightening and thunder. But definitely warmer than it was when we arrived in Yelapa at the end of December. Then we had cool days and downright chilly nights through much of January. We feel the humidity now, if not always see the sun. The leaves are falling. Spring is coming.
Sent off a revised and largely rewritten draft of my novel to the editor I've hired for a professional critique. I've actually had two editors look at it, and both more or less liked what I'd done on my own while offering much-needed and much-appreciated suggestions. Dammit, I'm determined to find a trade publisher for the thing but, at last resort, will publish it myself just to be done with it.
I call it Waiting for the Revolution. It's set at the beginning of the 1970s in a back-to-the-land commune in British Columbia. The characters are mostly American "refugees" of the period. The title, apart from the idea of a cultural and political revolution, I hope suggests the longing for some all-inclusive change for the better, something like a "final solution" to the human condition. In that sense, the title can be taken as ironic.
It's basically a love story, a story of relationships, my main characters a man and wife who break up, tentatively rejoin in the free-love atmosphere of a sixties-era commune, and finally struggle to make it together as a couple. The struggle won't end, I want the reader to infer. Life itself is a struggle. The human condition goes on.
Gees, I see the last two paragraphs above as something like the dust jacket copy for my novel. Should I wind up self-publishing, I might use it.
Sent off a revised and largely rewritten draft of my novel to the editor I've hired for a professional critique. I've actually had two editors look at it, and both more or less liked what I'd done on my own while offering much-needed and much-appreciated suggestions. Dammit, I'm determined to find a trade publisher for the thing but, at last resort, will publish it myself just to be done with it.
I call it Waiting for the Revolution. It's set at the beginning of the 1970s in a back-to-the-land commune in British Columbia. The characters are mostly American "refugees" of the period. The title, apart from the idea of a cultural and political revolution, I hope suggests the longing for some all-inclusive change for the better, something like a "final solution" to the human condition. In that sense, the title can be taken as ironic.
It's basically a love story, a story of relationships, my main characters a man and wife who break up, tentatively rejoin in the free-love atmosphere of a sixties-era commune, and finally struggle to make it together as a couple. The struggle won't end, I want the reader to infer. Life itself is a struggle. The human condition goes on.
Gees, I see the last two paragraphs above as something like the dust jacket copy for my novel. Should I wind up self-publishing, I might use it.
Sunday, January 28, 2018
28 January 2018
Here we are, my wife April and I, back in Yelapa for our 13th stay in this village just down the coast from Puerto Vallarta. Arrived here at the end of December, the day after my 83rd birthday, and plan to remain until around the 20th of April when we'll go to Detroit for April's father's 100th birthday before returning to our home outside Nelson, BC.
I doubt very much I'll make it to my father-in-law's very advanced age; not sure I even want to, though his abiding alertness is amazing. He sleeps a lot, his short-term memory grows ever shorter, but he's still reading, still thinking, still acquiring knowledge, still content to be alive.
I recently read an interview with Philip Roth, who in his mid-80s claims to have retired from writing. He hasn't, of course, retired from reading, nor from thinking, and what he says about his old age and the approach of the inevitable that awaits us all certainly resonates with me. He goes to bed at night, he says, grateful to have had the day, and wakes up the next morning thankful to be starting another. That's basically it for us folks who have made it beyond the biblical three score and ten.
Unlike Roth, I'm still writing in my mid-80s, though also unlike him I have virtually nothing to show for all the years I've been writing -- some 60 years, starting in 1956 when as a Navy sailor I started sending out stories and within a couple of years actually published a few in obscure and now vanished magazines.
How time has gotten away from me. How much time I've wasted in my long life. Still . . .
Hope springs eternal.
I doubt very much I'll make it to my father-in-law's very advanced age; not sure I even want to, though his abiding alertness is amazing. He sleeps a lot, his short-term memory grows ever shorter, but he's still reading, still thinking, still acquiring knowledge, still content to be alive.
I recently read an interview with Philip Roth, who in his mid-80s claims to have retired from writing. He hasn't, of course, retired from reading, nor from thinking, and what he says about his old age and the approach of the inevitable that awaits us all certainly resonates with me. He goes to bed at night, he says, grateful to have had the day, and wakes up the next morning thankful to be starting another. That's basically it for us folks who have made it beyond the biblical three score and ten.
Unlike Roth, I'm still writing in my mid-80s, though also unlike him I have virtually nothing to show for all the years I've been writing -- some 60 years, starting in 1956 when as a Navy sailor I started sending out stories and within a couple of years actually published a few in obscure and now vanished magazines.
How time has gotten away from me. How much time I've wasted in my long life. Still . . .
Hope springs eternal.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
It's been over a year since I posted here, don't know what I want to say, but I guess I'll just ramble on for whatever it's worth.
I turn 80 at the end of this year. Hard to believe -- until I think back to all the years I've been alive in this world, all the lives I've lived, all the jobs I've had, farm boy, college student, Navy journalist, university student on the GI Bill, then newspaper reporter, magazine editor, high school janitor, urban mail carrier, golf course groundskeeper, back-to-the-lander, husband, father, grandfather. And writer, always a writer, beginning when I was still in high school and never stopping, though only on a part-time basis, through most of the years of my working life (until I was able to retire in 1998. Sixteen years ago! Since then I've been writing full time -- that is two to four hours every day except when interrupted (my wife and I hike with a group one day each week, sometimes take a trip, and occasionally I have to stop writing to do some housework or work in the garden or chop and stack firewood).
So what have I got to show for all my years as a writer, would-be and otherwise? Not much: a lot of unpublished and some published short stories, quite a few published book and movie reviews (in the 1980s and '90s), a memoir I took years to write and was finally published in 2007 (mentioned a number of times in this blog), and a novel I took years to write and for which I'm now looking, without much hope, for a publisher.
I may have to publish it myself, finally.
I turn 80 at the end of this year. Hard to believe -- until I think back to all the years I've been alive in this world, all the lives I've lived, all the jobs I've had, farm boy, college student, Navy journalist, university student on the GI Bill, then newspaper reporter, magazine editor, high school janitor, urban mail carrier, golf course groundskeeper, back-to-the-lander, husband, father, grandfather. And writer, always a writer, beginning when I was still in high school and never stopping, though only on a part-time basis, through most of the years of my working life (until I was able to retire in 1998. Sixteen years ago! Since then I've been writing full time -- that is two to four hours every day except when interrupted (my wife and I hike with a group one day each week, sometimes take a trip, and occasionally I have to stop writing to do some housework or work in the garden or chop and stack firewood).
So what have I got to show for all my years as a writer, would-be and otherwise? Not much: a lot of unpublished and some published short stories, quite a few published book and movie reviews (in the 1980s and '90s), a memoir I took years to write and was finally published in 2007 (mentioned a number of times in this blog), and a novel I took years to write and for which I'm now looking, without much hope, for a publisher.
I may have to publish it myself, finally.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Yelapa countdown
We leave this tropical paradise just a week from today, just when it's turned most paradisal. That is, we wake each morning now to the cool start of another hot day (to take from a favorite description from a favorite writer of mine: you may guess who) after sleeping with only a sheet to cover us and our bedroom's overhead fan going at a steady clip. In the cool of the morning we might take a walk, before or after breakfast, and in the hot afternoon enjoy a swim at Isabel's beach. The Pacific water in the Bay of Banderas is finally warm enough, as it wasn't (for me, anyway) through most of January, February, and quite a bit of March.
In the cool of the evening we might take a second walk, if only to go down to the village to visit one of Yelapa's three main tiendas for some groceries. Otherwise we might go out for our evening meal, our cena, at one of village's outside or semi-outside restaurants, El Pollo Bollo or Tacos y Mas or Los Abuelos. Or we might walk the short distance upriver to the Oasis to see a Tuesday or Wednesday night movie. Or stop by Gloria's or El Cerito to hear some good blues or rock and roll by Yelapa's resident musicians. Or walk the longer distance upriver and across the bridge over the Rio Tuito to eat at El Manguito or order only a beer in order to listen to the good music you often can hear there.
Then home by flashlight, down the upriver path to the village, through the village and finally up the rocky trail, feeling the tiredness by this time in our legs (one acquires "Yelapa legs" here) to our rented apartment above our landlords' house in the jungle.
Of course we have only a week left to squeeze all this in -- so I doubt we'll even try. We are, though, going tomorrow up to Chacala, the mountain village above Yelapa from which its founding families came from many years ago. Though Yelapa has no road, per se, to it, and is mainly reached by panga, water taxi, from Puerto Vallarta, there is a dirt road, more a bulldozed track that has to be repaired every year after the rainy season, that starts outside El Tuito, a town on the highway some thousands of feet above Vallarta, angles more or less level to Chacala, then plunges down toward Yelapa to end on the ridge above the village. Our landlords' son, Emi, keeps a truck up there, in an area called "the parking lot," and tomorrow morning we'll walk up with him and his mother, Norma, and perhaps his younger brother, Omar, for the drive up to Chacala, to spend the day.
Among other pleasures, we'll visit Emi's beautiful younger sister, Nora, who's married now and has a child.
Our landlord, Emilio, will remain in Yelapa tomorrow to work at his trade. He's a builder in the village.
"Our family," we call our landlords and their children, whom we've gotten to know and care for after eight winters with them.
We'll be among the last of Yelapa's norteamericanos to leave this year. Hasta ano proximo is what you say to people, gringos and Mexicans alike, as you leave: See you next year.
We hope. At our age it's one year at a time.
In the cool of the evening we might take a second walk, if only to go down to the village to visit one of Yelapa's three main tiendas for some groceries. Otherwise we might go out for our evening meal, our cena, at one of village's outside or semi-outside restaurants, El Pollo Bollo or Tacos y Mas or Los Abuelos. Or we might walk the short distance upriver to the Oasis to see a Tuesday or Wednesday night movie. Or stop by Gloria's or El Cerito to hear some good blues or rock and roll by Yelapa's resident musicians. Or walk the longer distance upriver and across the bridge over the Rio Tuito to eat at El Manguito or order only a beer in order to listen to the good music you often can hear there.
Then home by flashlight, down the upriver path to the village, through the village and finally up the rocky trail, feeling the tiredness by this time in our legs (one acquires "Yelapa legs" here) to our rented apartment above our landlords' house in the jungle.
Of course we have only a week left to squeeze all this in -- so I doubt we'll even try. We are, though, going tomorrow up to Chacala, the mountain village above Yelapa from which its founding families came from many years ago. Though Yelapa has no road, per se, to it, and is mainly reached by panga, water taxi, from Puerto Vallarta, there is a dirt road, more a bulldozed track that has to be repaired every year after the rainy season, that starts outside El Tuito, a town on the highway some thousands of feet above Vallarta, angles more or less level to Chacala, then plunges down toward Yelapa to end on the ridge above the village. Our landlords' son, Emi, keeps a truck up there, in an area called "the parking lot," and tomorrow morning we'll walk up with him and his mother, Norma, and perhaps his younger brother, Omar, for the drive up to Chacala, to spend the day.
Among other pleasures, we'll visit Emi's beautiful younger sister, Nora, who's married now and has a child.
Our landlord, Emilio, will remain in Yelapa tomorrow to work at his trade. He's a builder in the village.
"Our family," we call our landlords and their children, whom we've gotten to know and care for after eight winters with them.
We'll be among the last of Yelapa's norteamericanos to leave this year. Hasta ano proximo is what you say to people, gringos and Mexicans alike, as you leave: See you next year.
We hope. At our age it's one year at a time.
Friday, March 22, 2013
Yelapa, Jalisco, Mexico. Our eighth winter here, and it's almost over. Today, which began cool and overcast, turned sunny and hot, and is now cool and overcast again, finds us with only three weeks left here. We came down for three months and our stay has now dwindled to three weeks. Soon, as time flies, we'll be looking at only three days left before our departure.
So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, were he still alive. I'm reading a good biography of Vonnegut by Charles J Shields, one his subject might not have approved of, given that we're shown the author who was a 1960s icon and the idol of the hippie generation, warts and all. Like most writers, Vonnegut's writing showed his best side. Some of the people who knew him saw his worst.
And so it goes . . . which happens to be the title of Shields's biography.
So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, were he still alive. I'm reading a good biography of Vonnegut by Charles J Shields, one his subject might not have approved of, given that we're shown the author who was a 1960s icon and the idol of the hippie generation, warts and all. Like most writers, Vonnegut's writing showed his best side. Some of the people who knew him saw his worst.
And so it goes . . . which happens to be the title of Shields's biography.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Enjoying a lovely fall day here as I reenter this blog after a long absence. Since last writing have completed my back-to-the-land novel begun some four years ago (its sixth draft, anyhow) and am starting to look for an agent or publisher. Don't hold out much hope for an agent. As for finding a publisher? There I have a some little hope, though I gather it's getting harder and harder for even published writers, well known as well as obscure (yours truly among the latter), to locate one these days, even among the smaller houses. Self-publishing, though becoming more prevalent and no longer lumped as "vanity," isn't an option for me. Not yet. Don't have the money, for one thing.
I was, since my last posting, shortlisted for the 2011 Journey Prize (one of several given by the Writers' Trust of Canada), for a story published the year before in The New Orphic Review, a Canadian literary magazine. That won me an all-expense-paid trip to Toronto for the awards ceremony (it was a little like Oscar night in Hollywood, without the glitz) and $1,000. The big prize of $10,000 eluded me, but I'm not complaining. Being one of three finalists for the prize was an encouragement, along with my story being included in the 2011 Journey Prize anthology.
I'm sort of working now on putting together a collection of my stories and continuing to fuss with the text of my novel. I intend to write more stories and possibly start working on another book-length project while in Mexico this winter.
I turn 78 at the end of this year. That serves as a goad.
I was, since my last posting, shortlisted for the 2011 Journey Prize (one of several given by the Writers' Trust of Canada), for a story published the year before in The New Orphic Review, a Canadian literary magazine. That won me an all-expense-paid trip to Toronto for the awards ceremony (it was a little like Oscar night in Hollywood, without the glitz) and $1,000. The big prize of $10,000 eluded me, but I'm not complaining. Being one of three finalists for the prize was an encouragement, along with my story being included in the 2011 Journey Prize anthology.
I'm sort of working now on putting together a collection of my stories and continuing to fuss with the text of my novel. I intend to write more stories and possibly start working on another book-length project while in Mexico this winter.
I turn 78 at the end of this year. That serves as a goad.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer
As a young, would-be writer back in the early 1960s, I read quite a bit of the once notorious Henry Miller -- his book on Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi; his study of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins; his essays in The Wisdom of the Heart; his book on America, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare; the collection of letters between him and Lawrence Durrell -- but his first book, the infamous Tropic of Cancer, first published in France in 1934 and, until 1961, banned from publication in the U.S., I'd somehow missed until this past winter in Mexico.
This despite that my copy of the book, a paperback edition of the original Grove Press hardback, was purchased in 1962, the year the paperback came out in the States.
Tropic of Cancer is a kind of memoir in the form of a kind of novel, I've now discovered -- an anarchist's rant, a cry of despair, a shout of rage and crazy hope. It's racist (particularly anti-Semitic), misogynist, profane, crudely sexual, provocative. It's deliberately raw in parts, lyrical in others. It's also funny, and contains whole swaths of brilliant, sometimes surreal, even profound writing. I'm reminded of a later writer's all-out, last-ditch expression of himself, Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, published in 1968. Exley, despite his acute alcoholism, managed to write two more fictionalized memoirs before he died, early, of alcoholism. But with Notes he'd shot his wad. Miller, on the other hand, went on to write many more books, mostly of reminiscence, and was famous, rather than infamous, by the 1960s as a voice of free expression, sexual and otherwise. Playboy took him up! He lived to be 89, a kind of sage, before his death in 1980.
One wonders now why his first book was banned for so long as too sexually explicit. The sex in it is the least of its content.
Here is Miller stating his case at the beginning of Tropic of Cancer, after three warm-up paragraphs:
"It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.
"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
"This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing . . . "
This despite that my copy of the book, a paperback edition of the original Grove Press hardback, was purchased in 1962, the year the paperback came out in the States.
Tropic of Cancer is a kind of memoir in the form of a kind of novel, I've now discovered -- an anarchist's rant, a cry of despair, a shout of rage and crazy hope. It's racist (particularly anti-Semitic), misogynist, profane, crudely sexual, provocative. It's deliberately raw in parts, lyrical in others. It's also funny, and contains whole swaths of brilliant, sometimes surreal, even profound writing. I'm reminded of a later writer's all-out, last-ditch expression of himself, Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, published in 1968. Exley, despite his acute alcoholism, managed to write two more fictionalized memoirs before he died, early, of alcoholism. But with Notes he'd shot his wad. Miller, on the other hand, went on to write many more books, mostly of reminiscence, and was famous, rather than infamous, by the 1960s as a voice of free expression, sexual and otherwise. Playboy took him up! He lived to be 89, a kind of sage, before his death in 1980.
One wonders now why his first book was banned for so long as too sexually explicit. The sex in it is the least of its content.
Here is Miller stating his case at the beginning of Tropic of Cancer, after three warm-up paragraphs:
"It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.
"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
"This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing . . . "
Friday, August 6, 2010
Well, it's been a while since my last post. I've been just off stage all along, however, too busy working on a novel, currently in its fourth draft, that I hope eventually to hew into some semblance of shape and substance. And then there has been helping my wife plant and then tend our garden, weekly jaunts into the mountains with members of our hiking club, nighttime reading and/or movie watching while helplessly, hopelessly becoming a political junkie via the Internet and Democracy Now!. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I get a dose of concern or outrage every weekday morning by listening to Democracy Now! over Kootenay Co-op Radio while sometimes having to choke down my breakfast.
But heck, life is still good, still worth the struggle. At age 75, I still have my faculties and reasonable physical health. I have a loved and loving wife and family, and live in one of the beautiful places in the world. There's a Spanish saying that Malcolm Lowry put in Under the Volcano, his great novel set in Mexico, and that I've taken to heart: No se puede vivir sin amar. One cannot live without loving (or without love, as some translate it). Yes. I recite that to myself almost every day. And live on in the teeth of climate change, perpetual war, and political, economic, and environmental disaster. What can you tell us about life? William Faulkner was asked after he'd emerged from obscurity by winning the Nobel Prize for literature.
"It goes on," he said.
But heck, life is still good, still worth the struggle. At age 75, I still have my faculties and reasonable physical health. I have a loved and loving wife and family, and live in one of the beautiful places in the world. There's a Spanish saying that Malcolm Lowry put in Under the Volcano, his great novel set in Mexico, and that I've taken to heart: No se puede vivir sin amar. One cannot live without loving (or without love, as some translate it). Yes. I recite that to myself almost every day. And live on in the teeth of climate change, perpetual war, and political, economic, and environmental disaster. What can you tell us about life? William Faulkner was asked after he'd emerged from obscurity by winning the Nobel Prize for literature.
"It goes on," he said.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Distractions
I can't be the only writer (permit me to call myself one, though I'm an obscure, one-book author hopefully working on a second) who finds himself inordinately distracted these days by the sorry state of the world and the inept, not to say criminal, way it's being run.
Every morning I wake with a fresh resolve to eat a quick breakfast and then start writing. Instead I can't abstain from listening to Democracy Now! over my oatmeal and coffee for its reports of this or that national or international outrage. Afterwards, fed and suitably inflamed, I go to my computer, not immediately to resume working on the second draft of my novel, but first to check my email. Then, helplessly, I go into Salon and The Nation and various other vehicles of the Left, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times for their takes on the news, the Globe & Mail, The Guardian, and maybe a blog or two of the Left and sometimes of the Right. I even, now and then, check out Fox News for its poisonous slant on things. Usually, though, I save that entertainment for later.
Eventually I get to my writing.
What I'm writing now, as mentioned in the previous post, is a novel about back-to-the-land hippies (mostly Americans) in Canada, circa 1971, and so perhaps my procrastination every morning to catch up on the world's (notably the United States' and Canada's) bad news isn't entirely a waste of time. The Sixties, to borrow once again from Dickens, were both the best and the worst of times. These times seem only the worst. In the 1960s we in the counterculture lived, as some acknowledged, off the fat of the land. Now, at the start of the 21st century, most of the fat's been rendered except for the obscenely rich one percent.
In the Sixties we more or less played at making a revolution. We can't play at it anymore. We have to work for it. In any case, change is coming, whether we work for it or not, and whether we like it or not. You don't have to read James Howard Kunstler or Jeff Rubin to get an inkling of that.
Now back to my novel.
Every morning I wake with a fresh resolve to eat a quick breakfast and then start writing. Instead I can't abstain from listening to Democracy Now! over my oatmeal and coffee for its reports of this or that national or international outrage. Afterwards, fed and suitably inflamed, I go to my computer, not immediately to resume working on the second draft of my novel, but first to check my email. Then, helplessly, I go into Salon and The Nation and various other vehicles of the Left, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times for their takes on the news, the Globe & Mail, The Guardian, and maybe a blog or two of the Left and sometimes of the Right. I even, now and then, check out Fox News for its poisonous slant on things. Usually, though, I save that entertainment for later.
Eventually I get to my writing.
What I'm writing now, as mentioned in the previous post, is a novel about back-to-the-land hippies (mostly Americans) in Canada, circa 1971, and so perhaps my procrastination every morning to catch up on the world's (notably the United States' and Canada's) bad news isn't entirely a waste of time. The Sixties, to borrow once again from Dickens, were both the best and the worst of times. These times seem only the worst. In the 1960s we in the counterculture lived, as some acknowledged, off the fat of the land. Now, at the start of the 21st century, most of the fat's been rendered except for the obscenely rich one percent.
In the Sixties we more or less played at making a revolution. We can't play at it anymore. We have to work for it. In any case, change is coming, whether we work for it or not, and whether we like it or not. You don't have to read James Howard Kunstler or Jeff Rubin to get an inkling of that.
Now back to my novel.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Step One in the Writing of a Novel
Two days ago I completed the first draft of a novel I made notes and an outline for ten years ago and have worked on, sporadically and for the last year exclusively, ever since.
It's a kind of love story I'm calling Waiting for the Revolution that starts in Mexico at the end of the 1960s but is mainly played out in a back-to-the-land hippie commune in British Columbia.
I started it in 1998, shortly after completing the first draft of my memoir, Leaving the Farm, only to abandon it after thirty pages to concentrate on subsequent drafts of the memoir. Resumed work on the novel in December 2000 and completed six chapters of it before again abandoning it. Picked it up again in August 2005, after sending out the thirteenth draft of Leaving to Oolichan Books, and worked on it until my wife and I left for Mexico in January 2006. Laid it aside at the end of that month to work on yet another draft, the fourteenth and final one, of the memoir, which was accepted by Oolichan in June 2006.
I gave the rest of that year to the editing process. Returned to Mexico in January 2007 and made little progress on the novel, chiefly working at revising what I'd already written while waiting, with some eagerness, for the publication of my memoir, which happened right after we got home from Mexico at the end of March 2007.
The rest of that year was given to the book launch, to subsequent readings, to my little "tour" in Minnesota, and other promotions of the book.
Got back to the novel the winter of 2007-08 in Mexico, again mostly revising what I'd written before, but from July of 2008 until this past Saturday -- exactly a year -- I wrote nearly every day on the book to complete this first draft.
Length: 287 printout pages. Count: 74,390 words. I see a final draft of no more than 75,000 words.
So now I'll let this draft sit for awhile and work on something else. Then try to read "objectively" what I've written before going at the second draft wth the hope of finishing it by the end of this year or, at the outside, by the end of another winter in Mexico.
I won't approach any publishers until I've completed a second draft, and maybe not then if what I've written still seems too rough or unrealized.
Like any other writer with a first draft, established or otherwise, I'll have my work cut out for me. First, I'll have to see what I've got so far, if anything, to work with. Then there'll be stuff to cut, stuff to expand upon, characters to flesh out, characters, perhaps, to drop or to introduce. A first draft is just a lump, after all, waiting to be hewn into some form; a negative not yet developed; a slapped-together frame one might have to tear apart and start over; at best a hazy picture in need of focusing.
A confusion right now, a mess. Oh yeah, I've got some work ahead of me. The first draft is only the first step, a crude suggestion, after all, of what might -- that is, might -- become a finished thing.
Have I mentioned my excitement?
It's a kind of love story I'm calling Waiting for the Revolution that starts in Mexico at the end of the 1960s but is mainly played out in a back-to-the-land hippie commune in British Columbia.
I started it in 1998, shortly after completing the first draft of my memoir, Leaving the Farm, only to abandon it after thirty pages to concentrate on subsequent drafts of the memoir. Resumed work on the novel in December 2000 and completed six chapters of it before again abandoning it. Picked it up again in August 2005, after sending out the thirteenth draft of Leaving to Oolichan Books, and worked on it until my wife and I left for Mexico in January 2006. Laid it aside at the end of that month to work on yet another draft, the fourteenth and final one, of the memoir, which was accepted by Oolichan in June 2006.
I gave the rest of that year to the editing process. Returned to Mexico in January 2007 and made little progress on the novel, chiefly working at revising what I'd already written while waiting, with some eagerness, for the publication of my memoir, which happened right after we got home from Mexico at the end of March 2007.
The rest of that year was given to the book launch, to subsequent readings, to my little "tour" in Minnesota, and other promotions of the book.
Got back to the novel the winter of 2007-08 in Mexico, again mostly revising what I'd written before, but from July of 2008 until this past Saturday -- exactly a year -- I wrote nearly every day on the book to complete this first draft.
Length: 287 printout pages. Count: 74,390 words. I see a final draft of no more than 75,000 words.
So now I'll let this draft sit for awhile and work on something else. Then try to read "objectively" what I've written before going at the second draft wth the hope of finishing it by the end of this year or, at the outside, by the end of another winter in Mexico.
I won't approach any publishers until I've completed a second draft, and maybe not then if what I've written still seems too rough or unrealized.
Like any other writer with a first draft, established or otherwise, I'll have my work cut out for me. First, I'll have to see what I've got so far, if anything, to work with. Then there'll be stuff to cut, stuff to expand upon, characters to flesh out, characters, perhaps, to drop or to introduce. A first draft is just a lump, after all, waiting to be hewn into some form; a negative not yet developed; a slapped-together frame one might have to tear apart and start over; at best a hazy picture in need of focusing.
A confusion right now, a mess. Oh yeah, I've got some work ahead of me. The first draft is only the first step, a crude suggestion, after all, of what might -- that is, might -- become a finished thing.
Have I mentioned my excitement?
Sunday, June 28, 2009
A Morning in Yelapa
For what it's worth (if anything), here is a video taken one morning last winter in Yelapa as April was preparing our breakfast and we were surrounded by the raucous calls of chachalacas, a pheasant-like tropical and sub-tropical bird that lives almost entirely in the trees. In Yelapa they compete every morning with the crowing of roosters in the village.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Back to the Land
My wife April and I came to Canada as Back-to-the-Landers at the end of the Sixties. Recently we were asked to reminisce about those thrilling days of yesteryear almost forty years ago, and I'm now moved to offer the following little piece, written initially for a reading in Nelson and later published online in The Tyee as "Note from an American Refugee." I should note here, as I did for The Tyee, that I was not a draft dodger at the time, having served in the U.S. Navy before Vietnam, but was certainly against the war and a supporter of those resisting it. This is the original (revised) version of the piece:
BACK TO THE LAND
November 13, 1970. Friday the 13th. We arrive in British Columbia after a three-day drive from my native Minnesota.
The first day we’d traveled northwest from Hamel, Minn., to Minot, N.D. The next day we drove straight north to the border, reached the Trans-Canada Highway, and drove west across the prairies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan to Medicine Hat, Alta. The third day we drove through the Rockies and down the valley of the Kootenay River, then over the Salmo-Creston Skyway and, after dark, along that empty stretch between Salmo and Nelson wondering where in the boondocks we were getting to. Finally, about 9:30 in the evening, after the 25-mile drive up the West Arm of Kootenay Lake to Queens Bay (and noting with some relief the pleasant-looking cottages along the lake, reminding us of the shore of Lake Minnetonka, near where I grew up), we found the rented house in which we would live communally with April's sister and her husband and her two children by a previous marriage, and which, by the following summer, would include, in and around it, some ten of us Back-to-the-Land expatriates.
At the little border station on the cold prairie north of Minot, the Canadian guard had peered into our '64 Ford piled high with virtually everything we owned — including April's sewing machine on the back seat; the trunk was weighed down to the car's axles with my books — and said with the suggestion of a wink, "Just visiting, eh? Well, you're entitled to look around, but if you decide to settle, I'd advise you to see Immigration." And waved us through.
We felt like refugees from eastern Europe after having passed successfully through the Iron Curtain.
It was the worst of times; it was the best of times (to borrow from the start of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities). There'd been the Kennedy assassinations — both of them; the Detroit race riot of 1967 (I was a Detroit mail carrier that summer, walking streets strewn with broken glass and discarded loot to deliver to addresses that no longer existed because they’d turned to rubble overnight, while gangs of young blacks went by in cars with police cars following them, shotguns sticking out of the windows, and Army trucks carrying National Guardsmen trundled by, and police helicopters hovered overhead); Martin Luther King's assassination; the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention; the much-protested Vietnam War . . . this in the face of self-indulgent prosperity.
As we crossed the border, we were only dimly aware of Canada's own brush with the tumultuous times — it had been in the news just a couple of weeks before: the October Crisis. What was that? Something about Quebec, a late battle in the war between the French and English that was supposed to have ended in 1763, just as the American Civil War, a hundred years later, was supposed to have settled the differences between the North and the South, between blacks and whites.
Certainly it was, or had been, the worst of times for my wife and me after breaking up in Mexico the winter before and since then struggling to reconcile our differences. This trip to B.C., this escape from our troubled past and the troubled U.S., this final remove from "the city" (though we'd lived the last two years in the country, outside Minneapolis, on my parents' golf course — once part of our family farm), was, besides a last-ditch effort to save our marriage, our enlistment in a movement. Somewhere in the boxes of books we'd hauled with us to British Columbia was a copy of Helen and Scott Nearing's Living the Good Life. It would be our bible.
A week or so after our arrival in Nelson, I was reporting my first impressions to friends back in Minneapolis:
Here we are homesteading in the Kootenays of British Columbia.
We're living in an old farmhouse with April's sister and her husband, on a slope above Kootenay Lake, 90 miles long and two to three miles wide, like a Norwegian fiord with its mountainous shores and the play of light and cloud on the forested, frosted slopes. With the house are a couple of outbuildings, shacks, and a little orchard of apple trees.
My first job on arriving here was to help Al trim the apple trees, then drag the branches to the garden where we burned them for fertilizer. Worked one day for an old lady up the road and got paid for it. Cut wood with a chainsaw and threw the furnace-sized chunks into the basement. Dug up the septic tank and drainage tile, bucketing out the former and spreading it in the garden, lifting out the latter and re-laying it. A good job done, as the mess in the septic tank was like a great biscuit ready to take out of the oven. We put yeast in the tank after emptying it, so in about ten years (hopefully no sooner) there'll be another biscuit all nicely formed for us. Got the tank and tile work done just prior to the freeze-up.
Our life here is generally comfortable, if at a subsistence level. We exist, right now, almost entirely on the $300 a month Dianne receives for child support. Al, who has a definite talent for organization and a good bargain, sees that we buy in bulk: five-gallon drums of peanut butter, for instance, cans of honey, sacks of brown rice and powdered milk. Of necessity we're vegetarian — except for the odd windfall: last week someone brought us a side of venison; he'd chanced on the animal, still warm, a roadkill. I wish I'd brought my shotgun for grouse.
This is country where Vikings, you imagine, could come rowing out of the mist on the lake, or Valkeries ride down out of the dramatically clouded sky to fetch some hero to Valhalla. It’s a landscape, in short, out of the Romantic School of painting, the light streaming down on the mountains like God's grace in a holy picture.
I think I like it here.
BACK TO THE LAND
November 13, 1970. Friday the 13th. We arrive in British Columbia after a three-day drive from my native Minnesota.
The first day we’d traveled northwest from Hamel, Minn., to Minot, N.D. The next day we drove straight north to the border, reached the Trans-Canada Highway, and drove west across the prairies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan to Medicine Hat, Alta. The third day we drove through the Rockies and down the valley of the Kootenay River, then over the Salmo-Creston Skyway and, after dark, along that empty stretch between Salmo and Nelson wondering where in the boondocks we were getting to. Finally, about 9:30 in the evening, after the 25-mile drive up the West Arm of Kootenay Lake to Queens Bay (and noting with some relief the pleasant-looking cottages along the lake, reminding us of the shore of Lake Minnetonka, near where I grew up), we found the rented house in which we would live communally with April's sister and her husband and her two children by a previous marriage, and which, by the following summer, would include, in and around it, some ten of us Back-to-the-Land expatriates.
At the little border station on the cold prairie north of Minot, the Canadian guard had peered into our '64 Ford piled high with virtually everything we owned — including April's sewing machine on the back seat; the trunk was weighed down to the car's axles with my books — and said with the suggestion of a wink, "Just visiting, eh? Well, you're entitled to look around, but if you decide to settle, I'd advise you to see Immigration." And waved us through.
We felt like refugees from eastern Europe after having passed successfully through the Iron Curtain.
It was the worst of times; it was the best of times (to borrow from the start of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities). There'd been the Kennedy assassinations — both of them; the Detroit race riot of 1967 (I was a Detroit mail carrier that summer, walking streets strewn with broken glass and discarded loot to deliver to addresses that no longer existed because they’d turned to rubble overnight, while gangs of young blacks went by in cars with police cars following them, shotguns sticking out of the windows, and Army trucks carrying National Guardsmen trundled by, and police helicopters hovered overhead); Martin Luther King's assassination; the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention; the much-protested Vietnam War . . . this in the face of self-indulgent prosperity.
As we crossed the border, we were only dimly aware of Canada's own brush with the tumultuous times — it had been in the news just a couple of weeks before: the October Crisis. What was that? Something about Quebec, a late battle in the war between the French and English that was supposed to have ended in 1763, just as the American Civil War, a hundred years later, was supposed to have settled the differences between the North and the South, between blacks and whites.
Certainly it was, or had been, the worst of times for my wife and me after breaking up in Mexico the winter before and since then struggling to reconcile our differences. This trip to B.C., this escape from our troubled past and the troubled U.S., this final remove from "the city" (though we'd lived the last two years in the country, outside Minneapolis, on my parents' golf course — once part of our family farm), was, besides a last-ditch effort to save our marriage, our enlistment in a movement. Somewhere in the boxes of books we'd hauled with us to British Columbia was a copy of Helen and Scott Nearing's Living the Good Life. It would be our bible.
A week or so after our arrival in Nelson, I was reporting my first impressions to friends back in Minneapolis:
Here we are homesteading in the Kootenays of British Columbia.
We're living in an old farmhouse with April's sister and her husband, on a slope above Kootenay Lake, 90 miles long and two to three miles wide, like a Norwegian fiord with its mountainous shores and the play of light and cloud on the forested, frosted slopes. With the house are a couple of outbuildings, shacks, and a little orchard of apple trees.
My first job on arriving here was to help Al trim the apple trees, then drag the branches to the garden where we burned them for fertilizer. Worked one day for an old lady up the road and got paid for it. Cut wood with a chainsaw and threw the furnace-sized chunks into the basement. Dug up the septic tank and drainage tile, bucketing out the former and spreading it in the garden, lifting out the latter and re-laying it. A good job done, as the mess in the septic tank was like a great biscuit ready to take out of the oven. We put yeast in the tank after emptying it, so in about ten years (hopefully no sooner) there'll be another biscuit all nicely formed for us. Got the tank and tile work done just prior to the freeze-up.
Our life here is generally comfortable, if at a subsistence level. We exist, right now, almost entirely on the $300 a month Dianne receives for child support. Al, who has a definite talent for organization and a good bargain, sees that we buy in bulk: five-gallon drums of peanut butter, for instance, cans of honey, sacks of brown rice and powdered milk. Of necessity we're vegetarian — except for the odd windfall: last week someone brought us a side of venison; he'd chanced on the animal, still warm, a roadkill. I wish I'd brought my shotgun for grouse.
This is country where Vikings, you imagine, could come rowing out of the mist on the lake, or Valkeries ride down out of the dramatically clouded sky to fetch some hero to Valhalla. It’s a landscape, in short, out of the Romantic School of painting, the light streaming down on the mountains like God's grace in a holy picture.
I think I like it here.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Those Great Old Classic Comics
Who, among those of my generation, didn’t read, and thoroughly enjoy, comic books when they were a kid? And who, particularly those who otherwise read books, didn’t read, and thoroughly enjoy, Classic Comics (later called Classics Illustrated)?
I went to Google recently and was happy to find, in Wikipedia, a listing of all the Classic Comics and Classics Illustrated titles ever published. The series ran, according to Wikie, from 1941 to 1971. Since then there have been revivals of the series, I gather, in North America and England, but the original, the “classic,” series will remain, for old nostalgia buffs like me, the one worth remembering.
My introduction to the series, unless memory fails, came on Christmas Eve of 1942. I was five days away from my eighth birthday, living with my parents and my two younger sisters on our dairy farm in Minnesota, and because of regular chores on Christmas Day morning and mass at the nearest Catholic church afterwards, the folks had arranged for Santa Claus to visit early on Christmas Eve, early enough for us kids to receive and open our presents from the old elf — and from the folks — before bedtime.
I forget what Santa brought me that year, but I remember vividly the boxed set given to me by my parents of the first four numbers of Classic Comics. They were: The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Last of the Mohicans, and I read them all, one after the other, sitting hunched before the heat register in the dining room of our old farmhouse (the heat coming up from the coal furnace in the cellar) far into the night, long after the folks and my sisters had gone to bed. That I’d been allowed to stay up, I suppose says something about my parents’ leniency or neglect. Anyway, I was perfectly absorbed, that long-ago night, till about 2 a.m.
After that, I started collecting Classic Comics, and eventually Classics Illustrated, until I had piles of them in a drawer in my room: Numbers 1 to about 105, I think, after going down Wikie’s list and recalling with pleasure the many titles. Moby Dick, Westward Ho!, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Deerslayer, Huckleberry Finn, Two Years Before the Mast, The Moonstone . . . Title after title, engrossing story after engrossing story (the series went to 169 titles), all wonderfully filled with vivid, if rather slapdash, illustrations. Those comics led me to many of the books themselves as I was growing up. I’m sure they’ve led others.
And oh, if only I’d kept them — they’d be worth thousands now, I imagine, on eBay. Instead, as I was about to leave for Navy boot camp in January 1955, or a couple of months later, as I was heading for San Francisco to wait for assignment to my first duty station, I gave them to my twin younger brothers, who in turn, I guess, gave them to our kid brother, who may have passed them on to friends . . . until, one by one or in bunches, they disappeared.
Alas.
I went to Google recently and was happy to find, in Wikipedia, a listing of all the Classic Comics and Classics Illustrated titles ever published. The series ran, according to Wikie, from 1941 to 1971. Since then there have been revivals of the series, I gather, in North America and England, but the original, the “classic,” series will remain, for old nostalgia buffs like me, the one worth remembering.
My introduction to the series, unless memory fails, came on Christmas Eve of 1942. I was five days away from my eighth birthday, living with my parents and my two younger sisters on our dairy farm in Minnesota, and because of regular chores on Christmas Day morning and mass at the nearest Catholic church afterwards, the folks had arranged for Santa Claus to visit early on Christmas Eve, early enough for us kids to receive and open our presents from the old elf — and from the folks — before bedtime.
I forget what Santa brought me that year, but I remember vividly the boxed set given to me by my parents of the first four numbers of Classic Comics. They were: The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Last of the Mohicans, and I read them all, one after the other, sitting hunched before the heat register in the dining room of our old farmhouse (the heat coming up from the coal furnace in the cellar) far into the night, long after the folks and my sisters had gone to bed. That I’d been allowed to stay up, I suppose says something about my parents’ leniency or neglect. Anyway, I was perfectly absorbed, that long-ago night, till about 2 a.m.
After that, I started collecting Classic Comics, and eventually Classics Illustrated, until I had piles of them in a drawer in my room: Numbers 1 to about 105, I think, after going down Wikie’s list and recalling with pleasure the many titles. Moby Dick, Westward Ho!, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Deerslayer, Huckleberry Finn, Two Years Before the Mast, The Moonstone . . . Title after title, engrossing story after engrossing story (the series went to 169 titles), all wonderfully filled with vivid, if rather slapdash, illustrations. Those comics led me to many of the books themselves as I was growing up. I’m sure they’ve led others.
And oh, if only I’d kept them — they’d be worth thousands now, I imagine, on eBay. Instead, as I was about to leave for Navy boot camp in January 1955, or a couple of months later, as I was heading for San Francisco to wait for assignment to my first duty station, I gave them to my twin younger brothers, who in turn, I guess, gave them to our kid brother, who may have passed them on to friends . . . until, one by one or in bunches, they disappeared.
Alas.
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