CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE SUCCUMBS TO A SILENT'S SKILLS

After five grueling hours today the penultimate chapter of Angie's Choice succumbed to a rewrite.

"Bent at the waist, her hands pressed against the deeply creviced, sticky bark of a Ponderosa, Angie looked down at her feet and gasped for air. Her legs wobbled unsteadily beneath her. For the moment, she could think of nothing but the painful sensation of her laboring lungs and the burning rip of air dragged into her windpipe. After a time, as her breathing came easier, she heard both her captors also gasping for breath. She knew she could run no farther. 

"She'd lost a shoe miles back and reached down to feel the bottom of her bare foot, but its skin was so numb she couldn't tell what the damage was. Jake had been shoving and dragging Angie along for hours through the darkness, both stumbling over rocky ground and carpets of pine needles, scrambling up hills and sliding down steeper slopes. Twice, they splashed ankle-deep through cold, rushing streams. Occasionally, from the vantage of higher elevations, they caught the gleam of flashlights flickering between trees. A helicopter had thumped its way overhead a couple of times, but it’s searchlight couldn’t penetrate the thick forest canopy shielding their movements. Lately they’d heard hounds baying in the distance. Once or twice, a human voice shouted loudly enough to be heard."

Writing at my age is filled with difficulties. For the scene I worked on today with three characters on the run in a forest, I had to keep going back to remember who was sitting down or leaning against a tree or on his or her feet. Those are continuity details important to the veracity of a scene. An old writer, in a hurry as I was this morning, can make distracting errors if his inner eye forgets those details. A man is on his feet who just a moment before was lying on his back. "When did he get to his feet," the reader will ask, and who can blame her?

IT'S A GOOD NEWS MONDAY!

Torque Coffee, tea on a mon(sun)day, bay door thrown up to let Kerouac sunbeams fly and flies in. Framed in bay door of never-ending same dimension—a Hilton's tan plainness on a square of canvass, hint of blue sky and white clouds thin as harem pantaloons in the left corner of a Rene Magritte kind-of painting. Happiness of vision!

YESTERDAY, rewriting at Black Rock Coffee, I was tired in the afternoon (aged man two o'clock nap). Nothing came of the pitiful attempt except drowsiness and drooping spirit...but...

LAST EVE, AN EMAIL: 
George:
Can we use the article you sent recently on 50plusnorthwest.com?  We will include a link to your website.
Greg Johnson
50plusnorthwest

Of course you can, I chirped. Of course, gladly, happily, publish my pathetic, funny essay.... Of course, also, no money. What's new in the current writers' domains? For the barest of moments, I think of Vonnegut. In 1950s, two short stories earned him 1,500 dollars, enough to keep his family afloat for six months. A writer dare not hang at the end of that clothesline. He'll fade in sunlight. Anyhow, damn it, I'm appreciative, and Editor Greg Johnson's acceptance keeps me hyped to my goal, my item on a bucket list—to wit—to get someone other than myself to publish one of my four novels before I die.   

AND TODAY...Happy day, my Chapter Twenty rewrite of Angie's Choice flew by, done before noon. Two chapters remain (and that touch-up in Chapter One to make it more appealing), then I won't look at it again. I'll send it around and around, ceaselessly, until it begs to be let die...or I die...whichever comes next.

SILENT BOOMER AS BAIT FOR ZOMBIE ATTACKS

the open bay (trap) door

I sit in the spacious concrete cavern of Torque Coffee in downtown Vancouver, Washington (not B.C., Canada). We await the next  attack of the undead. The bay door is thrown open to a sunny day, inviting wandering zombies to enter. I sit in plain sight of the bay door as bait. It's an ambush. Across the street, the shell of the local Hilton stands empty, all its personnel zombieized by earlier forays. Bellhops in their bellhop caps make comical zombies, if you can imagine. Remember that bellhop who used to call for "Phillip Morris"? Imagine him as a zombie.

Before I slipped from my home office this morning, I put one last spit and polish to yesterday's rewrite of Chapter Nineteen of Angie's Choice. I planned to begin rewrite of Chapter Twenty at Torque, but (stupid me) I forgot to download that ms with its alterations onto my thumb drive. I can't get more work done today. Oh, I suppose I could work on Chapter Twenty here and save the ms under a different file name, then interweave the two versions by cutting and pasting to the latest ms that sits on the desktop of my desktop computer at home. Trouble is I'd risk erasing valuable changes I made this morning. 

This old Silent Boomer is not immune from making mistakes while transferring data from thumb drive to computers, ms to ms, and vice versa. It's too risky for a hard of hearing old man with poop-stained underwear (an easy target even for stumbling zombies with poop-stained underwear themselves) to accomplish without an occasional error or four. So I'll wait. I've made sufficient progress the past two weeks. Time to relax and enjoy a zombie attack or two.

SILENT BOOMER FINDS HIMSELF WITH CRACKED POTS

Laura Dufala ceramic

Rewrite of Sophie's Choice went so well this morning that I drove to McMennamen's in Troutdale, Oregon to take in the "Cracked Pots Art Show". The day was humid and hot for Oregon. Signage at show offered statistics about America's trash production from which the recyclers work. 

Beautiful crafts. I bought earrings for Mertie and an inexpensive piece of ceramic wall art by Laura Dufala of Gresham, Oregon. A couple of young women offered skirts made of men's ties. Thought of Mertie, but they required hand washing. Domesticated me, asked. The work that most intrigued me was Kelly Phipps Metalworks. Click the link and take a look. She's damn good, but the best pieces were out of our price range.

A mere two pages left in Chapter Nineteen. Rewrite lifted my spirits. I caught an inconsistency in the original ms that was a chapter apart. Some days my attention to detail is better than others. The violent ending has begun from which Angie Davis will emerge a transformed woman. 

McMennamen hotel from pitch and putt golf course

Strangely (atheist that I am), I heard myself think "coming in on a wing and a prayer" as I contemplated the final landing of Angie's Choice. How many remember that old WWII song?

BLOOD DRAWN—EIGHTEEN BOOMS BY IN A HEART BEAT

First thing this morning, in preparation for regular office visit next week, I hiked six miles round trip in chill mid-60s temps to the doctor's office for a blood draw. As usual, the phlebotomist had a hell of a time finding my tiny, deep veins. The phlebotomist looked for hidden veins of romanticism in the poet's bloody work. Two phlebotomists consulted and, after unsuccessful probing elsewhere, settled for taking the sample from the back of my right hand. 

Currently at Black Rock Coffee Bar where I rewrote Chapter Eighteen of Angie's Choice in less than two hours. I'm extremely encouraged. Puts me far ahead of the chapter-a-week schedule I set two weeks back. I'm completely recovered from last month's physical and psychological malaise. I do like the sound of that word, just as I enjoy hearing the word bureau in French, and the English pronunciation of schedule. 

Last night I attended open mic at the Tiger Lily Restaurant in Vancouver to hear Michael G. proclaim his work. You haven't lived until you've experienced Mike G. declaiming a poem. The spit flies, the tears flow. You find yourself carried along. Sometimes, he sings.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN REWRITE? PIECE OF CAKE. FIVE TO GO.

Don't understand what goes on in an aging writer's body. Friday, I rewrote entire seventeenth chapter of Angie's Choice in a couple of hours at Black Rock Coffee. Suddenly, I've rewritten three chapters in two weeks. I'm ahead of schedule again. Five chapters to go. Later took a brisk springy-stepped hour and fifteen minute walk on the tree-lined back streets of East Vancouver. I'd been so rundown, I felt reborn from a month long battle with psychic death. Hard to believe a summer cold can precipitate such a steep decline in energy and imagination. 

In Chapter Seventeen, I rediscovered the significant value of Angie's Choice. I'd forgotten the story's dynamic center, and the chapter brought it back to me. Makes me happy to have written the book. Not only that, I saw how I might improve the first chapter to make writing samples more appealing to agents and editors. Hope the novel can be made available to everyone...if (you know the big if, if you've been following this blog) IF someone other than myself will publish it. I know. There's always Amazon, but that's a last resort for the time being.

writer on the protest line

Still reading the Vonnegut bio and toying with Asimov's Second Foundation. Vonnegut was one of the first writer's to understand the loss of the story reading public to TV. He foresaw the end of consumer magazines that would publish fiction...like Collier's that published as many as five stories an issue. Just before his novels burst on the scene, he tried to write television dramas. Daunting to think how much writing is being supported solely by the college world. Judging by the pressure to downsize university departments that aren't immediately job related, even that resource will soon dwindle. Nowadays, everyone knows, instead of being paid for their work, writers pay contest fees to get their work looked at. What a freaking fictional world!

BEAT BOOMER SILENTLY THINKS HE'S OLDER THAN CERVANTES

Chapter Sixteen rewrite of Angie's Choice still not finished. By Friday, I'll be back to one chapter a week schedule. Truth is I'm flailing the air. Mornings I awake groggy, and words are snakes that slither across the page without rhyme or reason. I rearrange them on the page and desperately try to make them hold still. The haze doesn't leave till afternoon when I take my walk. It's an old age thing...or allergies. Can't distinguish between them and that discourages me also. Wife Mertie suggests I take my walk first thing in the morning. I'm considering that.

I'm filled with second and third thoughts these days. They go like this: "Seventy-five. Christ, man, it's time to let go this madness called writing." Of course, I've always thought that way. Long ago, I surpassed Lampedusa who finished The Leopard at age 60 in 1956 and Cervantes whose Don Quixote was published in 1605 when he was 68. Of course, I'm stupidly comparing myself to legendary writers whereas my humble goal is to get one novel published by someone other than myself before I die. Even a Harlequin romance if I could see how to write one. A 95 year old, one-handed, one-eyed masturbator ought to be able to achieve that. [Why doesn't blogspot's spell check recognize the word masturbator or masturbater, I wonder.] 

My immediate goal remains to get Angie's Choice finally polished so I'll have one thing to send around (as finished as I can make it) while I think what next to do. My state of mind wasn't helped when I received the following over the past weekend:

Dear Author,
Thanks for writing me.  I apologize for the form letter, but the volume of query letters I receive makes it impossible to send personal responses to every writer. Unfortunately, I must pass on your material.  I realize it is difficult to judge your potential from a query alone, but please know that I give serious attention to every letter and writing sample I receive.
Best of luck with your agent search,
Cameron McClure     Donald Maass Literary Agency

And so it goes. And, yes, I'm currently reading a Vonnegut bio. 

FOR POETS ONLY: THE POWER OF THE SYMBOL

The following is a long entry, but writers won't mind and poets may get a boost out of this way of looking at the symbolic language of the poet. Tomorrow, I'm back to the rewrite of Angie's Choice with a vengeance and blog entries will return to normal length.

The information flows out of a discussion of religious symbolism by Joseph Campbell. I copied the information into another blog of mine 8 years ago, and I thought I'd bring it over to share with fellow writers today. It's me quoting Campbell quoting Thomas Merton. I took a course in the Bible as literature at EWU. We used the Dartmouth Bible. I love the passage just below. 

"... the language of religion, including most of the Bible, is necessarily figurative or symbolic and therefore the literalist, who by definition, lacks imagination or poetic insights, is the least religious of men."  (from THE DARTMOUTH BIBLE, 2nd Edition, p. xl)

I'm always troubled when I discuss atheism or religion with fundamentalists because they're so sadly dead and plodding and unpoetic. They don't know what they're missing. Oh, they're emotional enough, drunk in the clutch of their Jesus experience, but they are also like frothing pit bulls who won't let go the seat of his toga. As for a larger feel for the majestic Cosmos, they have none. Their god is a mere sculptor who shaped humans from mud and who never left earth. Their god has no imagination. He's a petty choirmaster who punishes them or the choirmaster's wife who gives them milk and cookies.
 
In every encounter with the details of science, fundamentalists have, throughout history, lost in the courts of time. You would think that they might embrace a less literal interpretation of their big book and take up a more majestic poetic and symbolic interpretation.

Christian and Muslim fundamentalists are more alike than they are different when it comes to a contrast with most rational Americans. They are ever people of the law rather than people of the spirit. As Thomas Merton writes, "One cannot apprehend a symbol unless one is able to awaken, in one's own being, the spiritual resonances which respond to the symbol not only as sign but as 'sacrament' and 'presence.'"

I've lost much of my own poetic intensity with the ravages of time, but I recall how spiritual and painful is the poet's way of experiencing reality. The poetic and symbolic way challenges the petty view of the literal-minded. In the Dartmouth passage I quoted above, I found for myself an explanation of the literalist's problem which I have never forgotten, and then, recently, Joseph Campbell explained further. Enjoy!

"The symbols of the higher religions may at first sight seem to have little in common," wrote a Roman Catholic monk, the late Father Thomas Merton, in a brief but perspicacious article entitled 'Symbolism: Communication or Communion?' But when one comes to a better understanding of those religions, and when one sees that the experiences which are the fulfillment of religious belief and practice are most clearly expressed in symbols, one may come to recognize that often the symbols of different religions may have more in common than have the abstractly formulated official doctrines.

"'The true symbol,' [Merton] states in another place, 'does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself. A true symbol takes us to the center of the circle, not to another point on the circumference. It is by symbolism that man enters affectively and consciously into contact with his own deepest self, with other men, and with God. God is dead . . . means, in fact, that symbols are dead.'

"The poet and the mystic regard the imagery of a revelation as a fiction through which an insight into the depths of being—one's own being and being generally—is conveyed anagogically. Sectarian theologians, on the other hand, hold hard to the literal readings of their narratives, and these hold traditions apart. The lives of three incarnations, Jesus, Krishna, and Shakyamuni, will not be the same, yet as symbols pointing not to themselves, or to each other, but to the life beholding them, they are equivalent. To quote the monk Thomas Merton again: 'The symbol is an object pointing to a subject. We are summoned to a deeper spiritual awareness, far beyond the level of subject and object.'

"Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions, are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a 'presence' or 'eternity' that is whole and entire in each. In this function all mythologies, all great poetries, and all mystic traditions are in accord; and where any such inspiriting vision remains effective in a civilization, everything and every creature within its range is alive. The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill, if it is to render life to modern lives, is that of cleansing the doors of perception to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind. Whereas theologians, reading their revelations counterclockwise, so to say, point to references in the past (in Merton's words: 'to another point on the circumference') and Utopians offer revelations only promissory of some desired future, mythologies, having sprung from the psyche, point back to the psyche ('the center'): and anyone seriously turning within will, in fact, rediscover their references in himself."  (from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, Joe Campbell, pp. 265-266)

SILENT BOOMER AND WIFE BEAT FEET ON MISSISSIPPI STREET

Did absolutely no writing today—except the limping poem below. Had I written, I'd certainly have dispatched Chapter Sixteen of Angie's Choice. I feel the thrill of the hunt as the end draws near for that rewrite with only 6 more chapters to go, but today is my wife's birthday. We've been having fun together, swapping spit and partying on Mississippi Street. We went to the Mississippi Street Fair and found another vegan place to eat, the Homegrown Smoker Food Cart at 4233 N. Mississippi Street. 
 
She munched down 
on a Macnocheeto Burrito 
while I chomped on
a Tempeh Rib Sammich very neeto.
Great sauce and greens,
that rhyme with yum,
and a side of BBQ beans
so good for the tumtum. 

The sea of people in the video was awesome. Mississippi Street slopes down toward downtown Portland. At first that river of people was a mirage. I didn't realize it was a river of people, then I got it, and my wife and I swam from one end to the other. A good two hour walk in the afternoon sunshine.

Back to the task on Monday. Humanists of Greater Portland tomorrow. 

SILENT BOOMER CAUGHT RACING ALONG

Yesterday I shot through the rewrite of Chapter Fifteen in a couple of hours. That pace, I'll be done with Angie's Choice next week—a goal achieved! Today my attention wanders among the words in my head, waiting for them to make a combination that will explain to me who I am today and what I'm supposed to be doing as a 75 year old man at ten-thirty am on a Thursday in July morning, living in America in the early 21st Century of the Year of Our Atheism, CE. 

Me, in the time of writing this....

In brief... should I go walk beside the Columbia River and dream away my remaining hours or should I sit my ass down before a computer screen and peck away at the keyboard until my little fingers burn with arthritic pain?  

Jung said the first half of a man's life should be filled with DOING—establishing a career, making a living, supporting self and a family, all those time-consuming, attention-diverting tasks. (Women can make their own lists.) The second half is to be used for THINKING—philosophy and wisdom. I got it backward. I was a flop in the roles of husband, father, bread winner, son, responsible male animal. Writing never became a bread-winning career. I was diverted by poetry, art, movies, novels, alcohol and my lovely pain. I did all my philosophical suffering early. I frittered away my youth, eating cake and drinking life—both it's frothy top and its seedy dregs. A life of feeling, of dreaming, of thinking.

To this day, almost daily, I write whichever words in my thoughts yell the loudest to be let out (like now), but I do know that some of the most awakened moments in my life arrive when insistent words jar me from a dream and drive me to set them down fast as possible before they escape back into unconsciousness, or when words come alive with their own intelligence as I wrestle with them over the shape of human reality and my fingers are forced to fly over the keyboard to fill the emptiness of a blank screen to get reality down before it disappears back into the silence that is NOW. Hum....

Guess this old ape will keep pecking away, see what's next. These days, love fills up a lot of time. How long it took for that sweet flower to blossom in my stony philosopher's heart. How much failure it took to learn how to nourish it!

BEAT BOOMERS HIS WAY THROUGH CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Just completed rewrite of Chapter Fourteen. Eight chapters of rewrite to go on Angie's Choice. If I set a pace of one chapter minimum per week, I'll be done in two months.

It's not all peaches and cream in Portland

For no reason at all that I could at first discover, I included this photo from downtown Portland on Labor Day two years past. As I uploaded it, I thought it ought to be titled: IT'S NOT ALL PEACHES AND CREAM IN PORTLAND, then I realized this photo actually refers to the previous post in which I mention the unmentioned reasons for the time lapse between my first novel under the tutelage of Britain's Kenneth Hopkins in 1965 and my appearance in the writing program at Eastern Washington University ten years later in 1975.

In my drinking years and in my struggle to imagine myself as a writer, that image of people sleeping in a doorway, and others like it, have always burned in my imagination. I literally felt I was one misstep from sleeping in doorways myself. The photo on the right is a picture of me in a Cheney, Washington alley not too long after my arrival in Washington to attend Eastern Washington University. I'm in full blue collar, drifter regalia except for the book bag slung over my shoulder—denim jacket, denim shirt, Levis and steel toed boots. I took several pictures of alleys that first summer and fall in Cheney.

This alley photo is aptly dark and mysterious, I thought at the time. You can see the snow on the ground and the winter light explains the murky quality of the photo...a technical detail I still don't know how to fix, but, hey, I was a murky sort of individual at the time, and I have managed to tone that up a bit. Everything an individual does always psychologically fits, if you think about it. I like to know the personal histories of the writers I enjoy. It makes sense that most of the writers I was drawn to were alcoholics, doesn't it? Oh yeah!

KENNETH HOPKINS...A GOOD WAY TO LEARN TO WRITE

Rewriting on Angie's Choice continues, and my wife has begun to read the yellowing, typewritten pages of a novel I wrote in 1965 while I was a candidate for a Masters in English at Southern Illinois University. She tells me without a trace of irony that she likes The Man In the Mirror.

Kenneth Hopkins and anonymous lady

British writer, Kenneth Hopkins, created the excellent opportunity to write that novel. He'd been a humor writer for Punch after WWII until a round of economizing cost him his position. He decided he had enough money to last two years and, with his wife's agreement, he took that time to write and sell a mystery. 

Hopkins was the first visiting writer I ever encountered at a university. SIU brought Hopkins over to teach one section in creative writing. First day of class, Hopkins announced there'd be only two grades in his course—A or F. If you completed a long project—poetry ms, novel or play—you earned an A. If you didn't complete a long project, you got the F. He never held another class but said he'd be available in his office if we gave him a call first. I sat my ass down and typed an 11 chapter novel in 11 weeks to earn my A. (The boundless energy of youth, eh?) Mr. Hopkins liked the novel so well he took it too England to show his editors. They said, "Have Mr. Thomas write a couple more novels, and he'll be able to rewrite and sell this." The story about what came between me and those "couple more novels" would fill a biographical chapter. Or two.

SNAKES IN THE GRASS BITE THE SILENT BOOMER

No writing today. Independence Day, 2013. Instead, my wife and I went hiking along the Clackamas River in the Mount Hood National Forest. It's been a rough 4 weeks of not getting much writing done what with cold, ennui and depleted energy supplies, and various psychological snakes-in-the-grass like we encountered on our hike today, but tomorrow have plans to do more rewriting on Angie's Choice in the morning. My wife has a 4 day weekend so we'll be doing a few more fun things together also. Hope to take in a movie at Fox Tower or Living Room Theater and eat at the Vegan Red and Black Cafe again.

ADDENDUM TO JULY 1: BEAT BOOMER BUMBLING ALONG

Eventually, in the cool of Black Rock Coffee, after a slow 75 minute walk along the Columbia, my spirits did revive today, and I began the rewrite of Chapter Thirteen of Angie's Choice. What I mistook for ennui was diminished energy due to the cold. It's difficult to distinguish a physical from a psychological condition since both are the same sensation. A feeling is no more than a comfortable to uncomfortable physiological excitation as we have learned to label it by our brains' language functions.

More importantly, I came upon this pair of osprey by the Columbia. (I carry my camera on my belt now at all times.) Osprey mate for life and go South in the winter and often return to the same nest year after year. Years ago I wrote a haiku based on that information:

the osprey couple—
busily tidying up
their summer timeshare

PS: This pair's timeshare is not visible in the photo. Years ago when I wrote the haiku, the female was on her nest, and the male was nearby, picking out suitable fish for supper.

BEAT BOOMER BUMBLING ALONG

I'm experiencing an extended period of ennui that began with a cold and has continued unabated into my (almost) recovery from it. All of me (why not take all of me) screams to drive over to Portland and walk the sunny streets and sit in coffee shops to read a book, but my goal to get Angie's Choice into shape quickly so I can circulate it to potential publishers would nag my every step down the sunny Portland streets. Damn it, I do sometimes envy painters who can stand and walk around the room as they work on a canvass (if they want to). Sitting before this shiny screen on my ass for hours is what feels like a marathon run.

Back to the grind.... 

Put sandals on...ready to walk.

Late news flash: writer George Thomas decided today to forgo writing, ignore his guilt and go out and enjoy the day. Dadblast it!