Amy and Me (reposted)

I wrote this on January 5, 2013. An update to it is that Ms. Tan has a new novel titled The Valley of Amazement, published last month. Didn't have time to write today, so I chose this one to give you. Hope you enjoy it, and the video!
 

OK—confession time. I have—sort of—a Twitter account.

“Nonsense,” you say. “You do or you don’t. How can you ‘sort of’ have a Twitter account?”

Well, I was willing—actually compelled—to write a book. I also vowed to start a blog to promote it. And I spend an hour or two trying to promote my work—asking people to write reviews, calling people who may be interested in the book.

What did I refuse to do?

The social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus.

I’m not stupid. I could do it if I wanted to. But that’s the crux—I have no interest that you ate a six-pound hamburger accompanied by a quart of diet Coke AND you have photographed the monstrosity and put it on your wall. Perhaps it was one too many dead sheep that dulled the senses to it all….

So I gave the thing over to doña Taí, who is capable and also interested. And, periodically, I get messages from people who are “following” me. These I happily ignore—the messages, not the people. OK—both.

Until yesterday, when I got an email notification from Twitter that Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club is now following me.

Yeah? 

A fake, I decided. So I checked it out, going first to her official website, which is quite beautifully done, by the way. From there I clicked on her Twitter page, which looked identical to the page I had received in the email Twitter had sent to me. There was a tweet about her new phone number, with the lucky “88” that’s spurring bill collectors to call daily. (Hmmm, and that’s lucky?) There’s the tweet about Joyce Carol Oates being over at her house.

Well, it’s real or it’s not. At any rate, it seemed a thing to do—find out the real, or at least the presented, dope on Amy Tan.

Born in America, of Chinese immigrants. Her father was an electrical engineer as well as a Baptist minister. But as anyone who has read The Joy Luck Club can tell you, it’s the mother that counts. So much so that the first line in her Wikipedia article runs something like “Amy Tan is an American writer of Chinese descent whose work explores mother / daughter relationships.”  When her brother and father die of brain tumors six months apart, her mother decides logically that there’s a curse—the fifteen-year old Amy is next. So they pack her off to Switzerland, to see the world before Amy leaves it.

In Switzerland, Amy hangs out with the counter-culture—remember that?—and gets arrested for drugs. But then she pulls it together and gets a scholarship to go to Linfield College in Oregon. She does graduate work in linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later at Berkeley.

She worked as a freelance business writer for a bunch of telecommunication companies, until she wearied of it, and began to write in her spare time. The Joy Luck Club was her first novel—or rather, in her words, a collection of stories.

She’s written five or six other novels, a memoir, a couple of children’s books, and the libretto for an opera based on her novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

An impressive body of work, for which she has received numerous awards. She’s also been translated into 35 languages.

Wow—the lady is major!

Well, well—it was all a hoax, I decided. The world is not always a nice place—sorry you had to read it here, but somebody should tell you—and things are not always what they seem. A hacker, or maybe spoofster, has decided his day would be better off by playing tricks on an aged, unknown writer. It was a mistweet, or maybe a faux tweet.

But it now seems it’s real. Doña Taí writes that she too has gotten a notification from Twitter of a follow from Ms. Tan, and that she had Twitter-messaged Amy some time ago to say how much she—sorry, that’s Taí—had liked her—and that would be Amy’s—work. Especially her love of her dog Bombo. Taí had come across Amy’s blog looking for something, and read through it and saw the videos of Bombo and read Amy’s bio, stories and bloggies, as she calls them. Perhaps Ms. Tan stumbled across my blog through Taí’s tweets reposting links to its posts....

“Compare and contrast” started every essay question on every test I took in high school. (Right, not the math classes, but just about everything else…..) And some forty years later, I’m still doing it. The contrasts are easy—fame, fortune, sex, culture. But the comparisons are interesting—two writers with distinctive mothers, both of whom had Alzheimer’s. A strong love of classical music—she played the piano, I the cello. A total love of animals.

Most, I suppose, the fact that we sit down each day in our varying worlds before a screen of primordial whiteness, and conjure how we are going to cook up other worlds. The cat wags its tail and moves its head when I proclaim him “ridiculous.” Bombo thumps his tail. Somewhere, perhaps, Amy Tan is reading my blog.

I’m totally honored.   

Notes From a Non-Creative Person

I’m a bear of little brain so I listened to it twice and if I still don’t get it, well, I probably won’t.

It all started when I read an article by a model who gave a TED talk about the fact that she didn’t deserve her luck. She makes zillions of dollars because of genetics: she’s tall and willowy and white. Oh, and also symmetrical. So everybody has decided, “wow, she’s hot,” and that’s very useful because you can sell things with sex and that’s important because, well, that’s how the world works.

So now the video has been seen by more than a million people and people are approaching her with book deals and TV shows and she’ll probably end up the Mistress of the Universe and we’ll all have to bow down six times a day to her Loveliness, as well as cede all our property to her and half of our sons.

Sense annoyance?

Dammit—I had a message I wanted to give through TED, and it was a hell of a lot more important than that. And guess what? They turned me down, in order to give a supremely entitled person a chance to be even MORE entitled. Of course beautiful people get everything, of course it’s the handsome guy who becomes the CEO or the senator or the whatever-he-wants-to-be. Remember high school? That’s what you learned there.

Now—thanks for asking—my message was this: you can organize your death just as my mother did. You don’t need to rot away from Alzheimer’s or cancer or just plain boredom. When the time comes, you stop eating and drinking. And no, it’s not a bad death—quite the opposite, really.

Well, I was storming or steaming my way through the article of Her Absolute and Obnoxious Loveliness who has, by the way, just graduated magna cum laude from Columbia (presumably Harvard and all the other Ivy League colleges were lusting to have her; she chose Columbia to be in New York, the center of the modeling world….) and watching my fists ball and hearing my nose snort when I came to a little link: Ted.com, Amy Tan on Where Creativity Hides.

Well, I have a particular debt to Amy Tan because in theory she follows me on Twitter—still think the whole thing had to have been a mistake—and I’ve never read any of her books and I feel badly about that. Come clean—I have read half of one of her books, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and loved it, absolutely loved it. So why didn’t I finish it? Because the second part is set in a foreign place and I can’t read about foreign places. But aren’t you living in a foreign place, you ask?

It’s just a thing about me and you know what? OK, I’ll stop being defensive.

OK, so I can live in a foreign place but not read about them, would my debt to Amy be cancelled if I watched her talk about creativity? And what, by the way, is the word that defines your relationship with someone following you on Twitter? A twitterite? A fellow bird? Twitty?

So here she is talking about creativity, and I am understanding only a third of it, although I’m totally enjoying the humor of the slides and also the creative elements in them and I’m in trouble because whatever Amy says about not understanding quantum mechanics is exactly what I’m feeling about her talk.

I’m lost.

Which is totally not good because (sorry about that jump there—I was screwing around with those little callouts, in case you hadn’t noticed, although really shouldn’t there be a person attached? Just a sec—let me run over to the Internet…..)

Right—what I was saying before these damn dogs walked into the post was that I didn’t get any of what Amy was saying about creativity and that’s terrible because I want to be creative and think I should be creative but guess what?

I’m not.

(Though I have discovered where the dogs live on the computer and fiddled around for ten minutes with the callouts—every time I moved the callouts, the dog moved. Oh, and also discovered the spelling of “jejune”—thought it was jejeune….)

And there’s this thing lurking in my head—I have to write a novel.

Which is absolutely awful because it will take a million years and I’ll have to figure out about character development and structure and stuff I don’t even know that I should know.

The only thing I know about creativity is that I was compelled to do it and

WHAT! Shit, that’s my father, dead these two decades, come from the grave to tell me to write a novel?

She had more of a gift than I, and when I died, I stood by her side and watched her write, and then in the evenings and nights I went into the back bedroom where she wrote and cleared away the coffee cups and put her glasses where she could find them and then I read what she had written that day. Just the way you do, at five o’clock every day. And then she died and it fell to you and your gift is greater and she knew it and who kept you from throwing yourself in the traffic that day.

Domine.

Yes.

Thank you…and I’m fucked.

Amy and Me

OK—confession time. I have—sort of—a Twitter account.

“Nonsense,” you say. “You do or you don’t. How can you ‘sort of’ have a Twitter account?”

Well, I was willing—actually compelled—to write a book. I also vowed to start a blog to promote it. And I spend an hour or two trying to promote my work—asking people to write reviews, calling people who may be interested in the book.

What did I refuse to do?

The social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus.

I’m not stupid. I could do it if I wanted to. But that’s the crux—I have no interest that you ate a six-pound hamburger accompanied by a quart of diet Coke AND you have photographed the monstrosity and put it on your wall. Perhaps it was one too many dead sheep that dulled the senses to it all….

So I gave the thing over to doña Taí, who is capable and also interested. And, periodically, I get messages from people who are “following” me. These I happily ignore—the messages, not the people. OK—both.

Until yesterday, when I got an email notification from Twitter that Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club is now following me.

Yeah? 

A fake, I decided. So I checked it out, going first to her official website, which is quite beautifully done, by the way. From there I clicked on her Twitter page, which looked identical to the page I had received in the email Twitter had sent to me. There was a tweet about her new phone number, with the lucky “88” that’s spurring bill collectors to call daily. (Hmmm, and that’s lucky?) There’s the tweet about Joyce Carol Oates being over at her house.

Well, it’s real or it’s not. At any rate, it seemed a thing to do—find out the real, or at least the presented, dope on Amy Tan.

Born in America, of Chinese immigrants. Her father was an electrical engineer as well as a Baptist minister. But as anyone who has read The Joy Luck Club can tell you, it’s the mother that counts. So much so that the first line in her Wikipedia article runs something like “Amy Tan is an American writer of Chinese descent whose work explores mother / daughter relationships.”  When her brother and father die of brain tumors six months apart, her mother decides logically that there’s a curse—the fifteen-year old Amy is next. So they pack her off to Switzerland, to see the world before Amy leaves it.

In Switzerland, Amy hangs out with the counter-culture—remember that?—and gets arrested for drugs. But then she pulls it together and gets a scholarship to go to Linfield College in Oregon. She does graduate work in linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later at Berkeley.

She worked as a freelance business writer for a bunch of telecommunication companies, until she wearied of it, and began to write in her spare time. The Joy Luck Club was her first novel—or rather, in her words, a collection of stories.

She’s written five or six other novels, a memoir, a couple of children’s books, and the libretto for an opera based on her novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

An impressive body of work, for which she has received numerous awards. She’s also been translated into 35 languages.

Wow—the lady is major!

Well, well—it was all a hoax, I decided. The world is not always a nice place—sorry you had to read it here, but somebody should tell you—and things are not always what they seem. A hacker, or maybe spoofster, has decided his day would be better off by playing tricks on an aged, unknown writer. It was a mistweet, or maybe a faux tweet.

But it now seems it’s real. Doña Taí writes that she too has gotten a notification from Twitter of a follow from Ms. Tan, and that she had Twitter-messaged Amy some time ago to say how much she—sorry, that’s Taí—had liked her—and that would be Amy’s—work. Especially her love of her dog Bombo. Taí had come across Amy’s blog looking for something, and read through it and saw the videos of Bombo and read Amy’s bio, stories and bloggies, as she calls them. Perhaps Ms. Tan stumbled across my blog through Taí’s tweets reposting links to its posts....

“Compare and contrast” started every essay question on every test I took in high school. (Right, not the math classes, but just about everything else…..) And some forty years later, I’m still doing it. The contrasts are easy—fame, fortune, sex, culture. But the comparisons are interesting—two writers with distinctive mothers, both of whom had Alzheimer’s. A strong love of classical music—she played the piano, I the cello. A total love of animals.

Most, I suppose, the fact that we sit down each day in our varying worlds before a screen of primordial whiteness, and conjure how we are going to cook up other worlds. The cat wags its tail and moves its head when I proclaim him “ridiculous.” Bombo thumps his tail. Somewhere, perhaps, Amy Tan is reading my blog.

I’m totally honored.