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.   

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.   

Schubert revisited

Well, I’ve heard of impaired doctors, impaired drivers, but impaired bloggers?

Which is to say you might read this post with the Morton saltbox near to hand. 

I’m loopy.

Legally loopy, I’m happy to say. Nope, not writing from Amsterdam—I’m here at my familiar desk, with the wearingly constant sound truck of the guagüita de los dulces iterating mechanically its jingle for the gazillionth time.

I spent the morning doing the second part of the dental implant surgery. And any snippy thoughts I ever had about Michael Jackson’s craving for IV hypnotics I now retract, and with shame.

The stuff is wonderful.

It’s a bit like the old television sets that slowly, in the space of just ten seconds, go from whatever inanity you’ve grown tired of to just a small white dot in the center of the screen. And then….

…nothing.

Well, who wouldn’t crave the stuff?

Right. So, I lurched home in a taxi, stood wonderingly about in CVS until a white lab-coated lady put bottles of pills in my hands, and told me to go home. I dimly realized that home was up, so I started, well—up.

Did recognize the corner jewelry store, and took a chance on a left….

Worked.

Well, an old nurse knows what to with pills in bottles, and soon I was medicated and in bed. Of course I took the Percoset—hey, anything guys pay good money for up at the punto has gotta be good, right? And is it sane to wait for the pain to arrive? Would you stand around watching until the A-bomb mushrooms, just to see how bad the radiation was?

Right—so that was the plan. Spend the afternoon in bed. Justifiable—surgery is surgery. I have a friend who spends one entire SUNDAY each month in bed, and ardently—defensively?—defends the practice.

Made it to 1:30….

Right, so what to do. I cannot do Sudoku until Raf climbs the hallway stairs in five hours. The house is a mess, but any slight mismovement (dammit, computer, I’ve just been through SURGERY—gimme a break!) of my hands might imperil the achingly tender sutures in my mouth. (And I challenge any Impudent Reader to dispute THAT!)

So I set myself to consider Raf. It was he, you remember, who diagnosed the disjointed mishmash (hah! got away with that, so what’s the deal with mismovement?) I had produced in Iguanas as a blook. Then I went on to ponder Jaime, who had pointed out that reading on an iPad becomes a different experience. Sure, there had always been illustration in books, but in a blook, there can be music.

And there is. Handel, twice; Samuel Barber; some other stuff, I think.

Well, I’m sure somebody has gotten in before me, pitched his stake, done it better. I come late to most things.

Then I got to worry about Toney, a young nephew who adopted us several years ago on the strength of Raf’s bacalao. We raised him gently, delicately, we did—the anxious gay uncles, and then sent this quite beautiful youth out to combat the wicked world. We watched, our hands clutching lace handkerchiefs pressed to our swollen eyes, as the taxi took him away.

Feeling the need for home, or perhaps just hungry, he appeared two weeks ago. We put the codfish in the water.

And set him to work. Look, I need reviews for Iguanas. No reviews, no listing in Amazon, no visibility, whaddya got? A book that goes down—hello cliché!—like that preacher’s daughter into the electronic graveyard of cache.

So we put him to read Iguanas. OK—review for bacalao. Questionably ethically—but hungry men sink low.

Right, so he liked it. And made insightful comments. And decided I really should crank out a novel. And told me what the theme would be, and provided as well the name of the main character.

What didn’t he do?

Toney, honey?

bacalao = review.

I don’t know a thing about fiction. I don’t know a thing—I think—about writing. 

Well, I feel bad about that. Anybody who has a Facebook page called “Marc Newhouse—writer” (I nixed the word “author”—after all, writing describes a discrete, simple task—author felt like a stretch, somehow….) should really try to figure what he’s doing.

The problem? Writers writing about writing write wrong. (Sorry, just sort of feel into that…onomatopoeia? Alliteration? Hyperbole? ¿Bíjte?)

It’s a form of sadism. “Don’t come whining to me,” snarls Toni Morrison. She teaches full time and writes in the summer and fall, and only Trollope beats her for fecundity.

Oh, except for Joyce Carol Oates, often described as “the word machine”, who has written over 100 books for the world to nibble upon. “If I waited for inspiration, I wouldn’t be much of a writer!” she growls.

Why do I feel that dumping 100 plus books onto the world’s bookshelves is at least grandiose if not frankly—blatantly —narcissistic?

Well, to a brain swimming in narcotics, all this hectoring, this thrashing of the pedagogical riding crop seemed to much for me. Easier just to go to the damn computer and write.

And then I realized!  

I had screwed around with creative writing! Back in the days when I was just crawling out of the pantoja or morass of depression and agititation (oh anybody can see that that’s agitation / irritation! Really!) of job and Franny loss. Reaching into the very farthest galaxies of my imagination, it was about a agonized, near catatonic, sardonic guy into classical music confronting a nincompoop psychiatrist.

I justify this as following the old line—write what you know!

But it was—following Jaime’s insight—an interesting experiment. Was it any good? Did it work?

Be gentle, Good Reader. I wasn’t at my best….

(PS—my own psychiatrist, whose single diploma in his office is from Harvard, is excellent and insightful. His predecessor, who put me on massive Klonopin and disappeared—enjoying those festive navidades we do so well? Sin comentario….)

Session Two

The patient appeared less hostile on the second visit—no doubt the therapeutic effects of the Haldol were starting. I tried to put him at ease.

“And how are we feeling today?”

“We don’t know, do we? How could we? I barely know what I am feeling, and cannot, of course, speak for you. How are you?”

“ Is your preoccupation with Schubert, the…err….Viennese composer continuing?”

“I’m hardly preoccupied,” he said. “Deeply interested, of course. Well, who wouldn’t be? Everybody should be interested in Schubert.”

“I don’t know the composer,” I said. “Perhaps you could fill me in?”

“Certainly I could fill you in. Would you like the Wikipedia version or my version? Or perhaps,” this said with a sneer, “for a doctor who is only schooled, the Wikipedia version might be the only one possible….”

I had forgotten his dislike of the word perhaps. 

“A bit of hostility still remains,” I said, deciding to confront him at last.

“I am not hostile. I admit to acerbic. Rebarbative as well. Prickly, should the previous words be too advanced for a Harvard graduate. But hardly hostile.”

I let this pass….

“Schubert?” I say.   

“Ah, Schubert,” he says, his face relaxing. “Viennese, as we know. His father, a school teacher. The mother, the daughter of a locksmith. Dates: 1797 to 1828, he died at age 31—having two years less than Mozart. Cause of death: typhoid fever, though he was also afflicted with syphilis. A terrible businessman, who barely got anything published, and that on unfavorable terms—unfavorable for him, not his publisher. Known perhaps best for his lieder—art songs, in German. Prolific—600 plus songs, nine symphonies, 15 quartets, a string quintet that is assuredly one of the greatest chamber works in the whole canon of Western music. Six masses, and 21 piano sonatas. He dies in virtual obscurity, broke, but surrounded by friends who deeply admired him. Oh, and just incidentally, he composes the two greatest song cycles in the world. That enough?”

“It seems a bit manic,” I venture.

“Your word, doctor. Mine would be possessed, a genius that may never come again….”

“Thank you,” I said. “So now I know Schubert.”

He jumps to his feet. 

“You know NOTHING about Schubert!” he roars. “I’ve been giving you the briefest sketch of his life. People spend their LIVES trying to understand Schubert, and there are mysteries that will, I believe, ever remain locked. What have you ever heard of Schubert’s music, my good philistine doctor?”

“Not much,” I say. “Didn’t he write the Unfinished Symphony?”

“Of course,” says X. “Dismissed by some, beloved by the masses. I personally like it….” 

Ahh—perhaps the basis for a clinical bond!

“So perhaps we could have your version of Schubert?”

“Mine is of little interest,” he responds. “My good doctor, have you no curiosity? Wouldn’t you like, for once in your life, to enter into a masterpiece? To experience something that is greater, truer than anything you or I will ever do? I could play you one song—ONE song—that had he written nothing else would have established him as one of the greatest composers of all time.”

“I’d like to hear it,” I say, though really, I don’t much like classical music.

“Nothing easier,” says X, and pulls his iPhone from his pocket. He fiddles with it, and then shows me the following clip from YouTube. We listen, and blessedly, it’s short.

“So,” says X. “You now have been initiated. You have heard one of over a thousand compositions of Schubert. Your impression, please?”

“Well,” I say, “speaking clinically, it sounds deeply sad. Depressive, I would say.”

“You know, doctor, I am far less interested in your clinical impressions than in your reaction as a man, a person. But I am perhaps being unfair. No one can grasp the song without knowing the lyrics. Let’s listen again, this time with the lyrics, German and English.”

He hands me the liner notes.

Heil’ge Nacht, du sinkest nieder; Nieder wallen auch die Träume Wie dein Mondlicht durch die Räume, Durch der Menschen stille Brust. Die belauschen sie mit Lust; Rufen, wenn der Tag erwacht: Kehre wieder, heil’ge Nacht! Holde Träume, kehret wieder!

“And now,” he says, let’s turn to another singer, with the lyrics in English. Much slower, and a bit more operatic. Well, it would be—Fleming, of course. But here, she does a fine job
.

We listen again. And I am still more mystified. 

“The title of the song, by the way, is Nacht und Traume—Night and Dreams. Tell me, my good psychiatrist, isn’t that rather up your alley? You do do stuff with dreams, don’t you?”

“I’m feeling a little out of my league,” I say.

“I’m delighted to know that,” says X. “It’s a poem that is seemingly simple, and yet Schubert brings out the most amazing depths in it…. Consider it just as a poem.”

Holy night, you sink down; Dreams, too, drift down Like your moonlight through space, Through the quiet hearts of men; They listen with delight Calling out when day awakens: Return, holy night! Fair dreams, return!

“Really, not much to it. But I listen to it often, on those many nights when Holy night does not  drift down. I suffer insomnia, you see….”

“Ahh,”  I say, “a sedative may be called for. Something more than the Dalmane. But tell me, what does this song, this poem, mean to you?”

Again, as he had in the first session, X dissolves in tears.

“Dreams,” he says, weeping. “Have you never had dreams? And had them die? And wish, more than anything else for their return? This is Schubert, in his moment of darkest sorrow—lost and yearning—imploring God to return him to his path, and restore his dreams. And filled with despair, he manages to suggest the possibility of hope, of redemption. A feeling I, frankly, do not share”

Clinical note: Will add halcyon 2 mg. for sleep.