Recovering Nicely, Thanks
I turn 81 today. Given the state of the union, and the world, I find myself in reasonably good spirits. And, while I’m recovering from a chest cold, I’d have to say that I find myself in reasonably good health.
I’m up to date on all my shots, so I don’t think this is (or was) Covid, flu, or RSV. I understand there are several bad cold infections going around, which is what I suspect.
Whatever it was, all three members of our household — myself, wife Anna, and stepson Jacky — had variants of it. Knocked all of us out completely for 2-3 days. It’s been so long since I’ve been sick that I actually can’t remember the last time I spent a day in bed.
Aside from rest and keeping warm, we took an assortment of OTC remedies — generic DayQuil/NyQuil, Boiron homeopathic meds — plus a TCM infusion we call “ugly tea” (tastes like it sounds) and a new admixture Anna learned about online, steamed onion and honey (tastes better than it sounds). These helped us manage the symptoms.
We’re all mostly better now, but I have a lingering cough — much milder and more infrequent than at its worst — and some mild fatigue. Fortunately these don’t keep me from working, though these effects may linger for a bit. I assume the body will gradually clean itself out.
I Heard the News Today, Oh Boy …
I don’t know that the election of Mango Mussolini contributed to this bout of ill health, but I did sink into the slough of despond on the evening of November 5 and have just begun to emerge therefrom.
Dragging myself back onto solid ground required several sick days of bed rest, binge-watching some TV series (Somebody Somewhere, Little Fires Everywhere, The Diplomat, Black Doves), and stints of reading while sitting by our fireplace. To preserve my mental health I also decided to reduce drastically my consumption of news — not to the point of becoming uninformed, just turning it down to a once-a-day exposure while having my morning coffee.
Between the fecklessness and active complicity of the legacy media and the over-the-top aggression of the MAGA machine, we will have unremitting bad news for the next four years. They have begun flooding the zone with shit, and the firehose of idiocracy already blasts non-stop. I can opt in to my capacity for outrage anytime. But that doesn’t do my blood pressure, or my spirit, any good. I’ve re-read Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, and while he offers excellent advice on many aspects of the onslaught he has nothing to say about the overconsumption of misinformation and disinformation. So, on my own initiative, I’ve decided to diet.
•
Works In Progress
Presently I’m working on two books, and preparing to start working on a third.
The ones already in progress include a second edition of spine, my collaboration with Finnish photographer and educator Nina Sederholm (originally published in 2000), and Photocriticus Interruptus, a collaboration with photographer and conceptual artist Alex Harsley. Both will get published in 2025. Meanwhile I’m gearing up to get started on the Capa D-Day book.
I have two commissioned project introductions on the front burner, with end-of-the-month deadlines. So, unusually, I have a full plate right now, professionally speaking.
•
On a related matter: As an early birthday gift, I received a contributor’s copy of Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue, a hefty anthology subtitled “The Best of Thirty Years of Creative Nonfiction,” and edited by Lee Gutkind and Leslie Rubinkowski.
For those of you not au courant re forms of contemporary literature, “creative nonfiction” constitutes a relatively new category of literary production, and the journal Creative Nonfiction pioneered its emergence and acceptance as a legitimate genre. Controversial when this lit mag began publishing in 1994, the form has long since achieved mainstream acceptance, as evidenced by the fact that it now gets studied and taught in post-secondary creative writing programs.
Because it intertwines the two main threads of my writing life, what we used to call “personal journalism” and creative writing, some of my own output fits comfortably under this umbrella. As a rule, my sense of professional obligation to the work I engage with as a critic delimits the stylistic options at my disposal. However, in some situations — most frequently commissioned introductions to monographs and other completed projects — the photographers have invited me to provide a more free-form and idiosyncratic accompaniment, and I’ve gladly obliged.
The essay that appears in this new anthology originated as the text accompanying a portfolio of images made on the Staten Island Ferry by photographer Julio Mitchel that appeared in a large-format, short-lived periodical, A Critique of America, in April 1988. Re-reading it some ten years after its original publication in that form, I realized that it could stand alone, and submitted it to Creative Nonfiction. It appeared there in the journal’s issue 9 under the title “Sea Changes: Traveling the Staten Island Ferry.” You’ll find it online here, at the journal’s website.
(This was the second piece of mine the journal would publish. A piece written later, “Hypothetical History of an Actual Photograph,” appeared in issue 5.)
From the introduction to this anthology by Lee Gutkind, the journal’s founder and editor:
… When Creative Nonfiction debuted in 1994, the literary genre it championed was largely the target of skepticism or downright ridicule. But at a time when few editors were interested in the personal essay, the magazine doggedly explored new ideas and fresh modes of expression, and over the next three decades, its contributors pioneered what would come to be known as the “fourth genre.”
The thirty-two essays collected here bring together some of the finest work Creative Nonfiction published over its seventy-eight issues. Read Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic’s boyhood remembrances of the bombing of Belgrade, Carolyn Forche’s haunting, lyric catalog of her daily life as she faced down a cancer diagnosis, and John Edgar Wideman’s meditation on the photo of a murdered boy his same age — Emmett Till — and how the image haunted him forever. Here, you’ll find work by such luminaries as Adrienne Rich and John McPhee, but also essays from more contemporary voices like Brian Broome, Elizabeth Fortescue, and Anne McGrath. …
This is the third and, presumably, the last anthology of material from Creative Nonfiction. I feel honored to find an example of my work among its 32 entries.
•
Teaching and Preaching
When I was 15 or so I had no clear aspirations for my future, aside from graduating from high school and going to college. So my parents signed me up for vocational aptitude testing (as distinct from the scholastic aptitude tests, or SATs, that I took in my junior year in high school).
I don’t recall much about the tests, save that the results suggested I might excel as either a teacher or a preacher. At the time I found that ridiculous. Yet in my professional life I became deeply involved in education and consideration of the ethics of my field and my own practice.
Helen Weaver, The Awakener (2009), cover
Jump ahead 65 years and I find myself reading Helen Weaver’s The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties (City Lights, 2009). Weaver, best known as both a muse to the Beats and a translator of French literature, had a serious interest in astrology, a system of thought I’ve never taken seriously. Aside from gathering that this methodology defines me as a Sagittarius I’ve delved no deeper, and give it about as much weigh as I do the advice I find in Chinese fortune cookies.
In an appendix to her book, Weaver analyzes astrological charts she’d drawn up of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, herself, and her Greenwich Village roommate, the last of whom shared many of her adventures in the Fifties and Sixties:
In the language of astrology the mutable signs are characterized by changeability, adaptability, and service. The mutable quality has been compared to wave motion in physics, or to information. Taking them in order around the zodiac: Gemini with writing and speaking; Virgo with precision and detail; Sagittarius with publishing and preaching; and Pisces with poetry and dreams. When planets in all four of the mutable signs form a Grand Cross in the chart [as they do in the cases of Kerouac and Ginsberg], the result is a major configuration that implies a life of service that is often devoted to some form of communication.
I’ve no idea how my main sign aligns with the others, but I’ve arguably spent my adult life in “publishing and preaching.”
What should I make of the fact that these two predictive techniques, to neither of which I lend much credence, overlap, corroborate each other, and hit the nail on the head?
•
Happy Birthday to Me
My thanks to those readers who have emailed or called or posted on LinkedIn to offer birthday salutations.
•
This post sponsored by a donation from Carlyle T.
SPJ Research Award 2014
Birthday Musings 12/19/24
I turn 81 today. Given the state of the union, and the world, I find myself in reasonably good spirits. And, while I’m recovering from a chest cold, I’d have to say that I find myself in reasonably good health.
I’m up to date on all my shots, so I don’t think this is (or was) Covid, flu, or RSV. I understand there are several bad cold infections going around, which is what I suspect.
Whatever it was, all three members of our household — myself, wife Anna, and stepson Jacky — had variants of it. Knocked all of us out completely for 2-3 days. It’s been so long since I’ve been sick that I actually can’t remember the last time I spent a day in bed.
Aside from rest and keeping warm, we took an assortment of OTC remedies — generic DayQuil/NyQuil, Boiron homeopathic meds — plus a TCM infusion we call “ugly tea” (tastes like it sounds) and a new admixture Anna learned about online, steamed onion and honey (tastes better than it sounds). These helped us manage the symptoms.
We’re all mostly better now, but I have a lingering cough — much milder and more infrequent than at its worst — and some mild fatigue. Fortunately these don’t keep me from working, though these effects may linger for a bit. I assume the body will gradually clean itself out.
I Heard the News Today, Oh Boy …
I don’t know that the election of Mango Mussolini contributed to this bout of ill health, but I did sink into the slough of despond on the evening of November 5 and have just begun to emerge therefrom.
Dragging myself back onto solid ground required several sick days of bed rest, binge-watching some TV series (Somebody Somewhere, Little Fires Everywhere, The Diplomat, Black Doves), and stints of reading while sitting by our fireplace. To preserve my mental health I also decided to reduce drastically my consumption of news — not to the point of becoming uninformed, just turning it down to a once-a-day exposure while having my morning coffee.
Between the fecklessness and active complicity of the legacy media and the over-the-top aggression of the MAGA machine, we will have unremitting bad news for the next four years. They have begun flooding the zone with shit, and the firehose of idiocracy already blasts non-stop. I can opt in to my capacity for outrage anytime. But that doesn’t do my blood pressure, or my spirit, any good. I’ve re-read Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, and while he offers excellent advice on many aspects of the onslaught he has nothing to say about the overconsumption of misinformation and disinformation. So, on my own initiative, I’ve decided to diet.
•
Works In Progress
Presently I’m working on two books, and preparing to start working on a third.
The ones already in progress include a second edition of spine, my collaboration with Finnish photographer and educator Nina Sederholm (originally published in 2000), and Photocriticus Interruptus, a collaboration with photographer and conceptual artist Alex Harsley. Both will get published in 2025. Meanwhile I’m gearing up to get started on the Capa D-Day book.
I have two commissioned project introductions on the front burner, with end-of-the-month deadlines. So, unusually, I have a full plate right now, professionally speaking.
•
On a related matter: As an early birthday gift, I received a contributor’s copy of Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue, a hefty anthology subtitled “The Best of Thirty Years of Creative Nonfiction,” and edited by Lee Gutkind and Leslie Rubinkowski.
Because it intertwines the two main threads of my writing life, what we used to call “personal journalism” and creative writing, some of my own output fits comfortably under this umbrella. As a rule, my sense of professional obligation to the work I engage with as a critic delimits the stylistic options at my disposal. However, in some situations — most frequently commissioned introductions to monographs and other completed projects — the photographers have invited me to provide a more free-form and idiosyncratic accompaniment, and I’ve gladly obliged.
The essay that appears in this new anthology originated as the text accompanying a portfolio of images made on the Staten Island Ferry by photographer Julio Mitchel that appeared in a large-format, short-lived periodical, A Critique of America, in April 1988. Re-reading it some ten years after its original publication in that form, I realized that it could stand alone, and submitted it to Creative Nonfiction. It appeared there in the journal’s issue 9 under the title “Sea Changes: Traveling the Staten Island Ferry.” You’ll find it online here, at the journal’s website.
(This was the second piece of mine the journal would publish. A piece written later, “Hypothetical History of an Actual Photograph,” appeared in issue 5.)
From the introduction to this anthology by Lee Gutkind, the journal’s founder and editor:
… When Creative Nonfiction debuted in 1994, the literary genre it championed was largely the target of skepticism or downright ridicule. But at a time when few editors were interested in the personal essay, the magazine doggedly explored new ideas and fresh modes of expression, and over the next three decades, its contributors pioneered what would come to be known as the “fourth genre.”
The thirty-two essays collected here bring together some of the finest work Creative Nonfiction published over its seventy-eight issues. Read Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic’s boyhood remembrances of the bombing of Belgrade, Carolyn Forche’s haunting, lyric catalog of her daily life as she faced down a cancer diagnosis, and John Edgar Wideman’s meditation on the photo of a murdered boy his same age — Emmett Till — and how the image haunted him forever. Here, you’ll find work by such luminaries as Adrienne Rich and John McPhee, but also essays from more contemporary voices like Brian Broome, Elizabeth Fortescue, and Anne McGrath. …
This is the third and, presumably, the last anthology of material from Creative Nonfiction. I feel honored to find an example of my work among its 32 entries.
•
Teaching and Preaching
When I was 15 or so I had no clear aspirations for my future, aside from graduating from high school and going to college. So my parents signed me up for vocational aptitude testing (as distinct from the scholastic aptitude tests, or SATs, that I took in my junior year in high school).
I don’t recall much about the tests, save that the results suggested I might excel as either a teacher or a preacher. At the time I found that ridiculous. Yet in my professional life I became deeply involved in education and consideration of the ethics of my field and my own practice.
Helen Weaver, The Awakener (2009), cover
Jump ahead 65 years and I find myself reading Helen Weaver’s The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties (City Lights, 2009). Weaver, best known as both a muse to the Beats and a translator of French literature, had a serious interest in astrology, a system of thought I’ve never taken seriously. Aside from gathering that this methodology defines me as a Sagittarius I’ve delved no deeper, and give it about as much weigh as I do the advice I find in Chinese fortune cookies.
In an appendix to her book, Weaver analyzes astrological charts she’d drawn up of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, herself, and her Greenwich Village roommate, the last of whom shared many of her adventures in the Fifties and Sixties:
In the language of astrology the mutable signs are characterized by changeability, adaptability, and service. The mutable quality has been compared to wave motion in physics, or to information. Taking them in order around the zodiac: Gemini with writing and speaking; Virgo with precision and detail; Sagittarius with publishing and preaching; and Pisces with poetry and dreams. When planets in all four of the mutable signs form a Grand Cross in the chart [as they do in the cases of Kerouac and Ginsberg], the result is a major configuration that implies a life of service that is often devoted to some form of communication.
I’ve no idea how my main sign aligns with the others, but I’ve arguably spent my adult life in “publishing and preaching.”
What should I make of the fact that these two predictive techniques, to neither of which I lend much credence, overlap, corroborate each other, and hit the nail on the head?
•
Happy Birthday to Me
My thanks to those readers who have emailed or called or posted on LinkedIn to offer birthday salutations.
•
This post sponsored by a donation from Carlyle T.