Category Archives: writing

mille grazie, Shirley de Lucia.

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I know it’a been forever since I posted here. I’ve been way too busy not finishing the book, AND completely recreating my other shop, from a blog into an actual online magazine. For which I wrote the “news item” below:

Grazie, Shirley de Lucia.

civicassociationThat’s what I kept thinking last night as I watched TV reports about the Hero of Binghamton — the woman in the small city of Binghamton, New York. She worked as a volunteer, in a center that helped legal immigrants study English and study for their citizenship exams, until one sociopath walked in and shot her in the abdomen on his way to killing more. As Ben Sherwood summarizes in the Huffington Post:

Shirley DeLucia was the 61-year-old receptionist on Friday morning when Jiverly Wong walked through the door. “Hello, how can I help you,” DeLucia asked. The killer pulled his weapon and opened fire, hitting DeLucia in the abdomen. She dropped to the ground while Wong shot the other receptionist. DeLucia played dead while the attacker shot his way through the building. At 10:31 a.m., DeLucia somehow managed to call 911. Police responded within two minutes and found 13 people dead, including the other receptionist. The Binghamton police chief believes DeLucia’s quick thinking and action made a big difference. “She’s a heroine and I believe she saved some lives,” says Chief Joseph Zikusky.

Full disclosure: I spent seven years living in Binghamton, arriving as an undergraduate and staying through most of my first marriage. I spent much of that Friday afternoon glued to TV reports of the standoff. Still-familiar streets, now flooded with SWAT teams: how could this be? I didn’t yet know that those teams had been called in by a daughter of immigrant, perhaps those same Italians that landed in Binghamton straight from Ellis Island in the 1910s, holding flyers handed out at Ellis Island that advertised jobs at Endicott Johnson’s shoe factories. (They said “Which way EJ?”, or so the story goes.) But I wasn’t surprised when I learned that so many lives had been saved by a 61-year-old woman. As de Lucia described Jiverly Wong and his weapons to the 911 operator, she enacted Ernest Hemingway’s maxim about “grace under pressure.” We all wonder if we could do that: I don’t know if she’s proof that we all could, or that it takes a post-menopausal daughter of immigrants to take care of such business.

bingomensclubLearning about de Lucia, I thought of the way my grandmother, Christine Solanto, told me stories of struggling with English when growing up in Connecticut; about the way my immigrant students at La Guardia Community College described their own journeys, as I tried to browbeat them into writing correctly. The Ellis Island experience may have been as distant to de Lucia as to me, but that distance is not very much in one’s heart.It was that immigrant,”which way EJ?” spirit she was honoring as she said hello to people from Russia, from Vietnam, from Haiti who sat in those classrooms and struggled with this weird old-new language called English.

The news also reported last night that de Lucia rolls her eyes when told in the hospital that she’s a hero. But I want her to tell her own story, now. Captain Sullenberger got invited to the White House when he landed that plane safely; President Obama can do no less for a woman, exactly the age of his Secretary of State/former primary opponent, who taught us all this week what courage is really made of.

I wrote thia having cried all Friday afternoon,watching the small town of my college years struck by tragedy. I still don’t know if I was also crying for my youth, or for my tough immigrant grandmother now lost to dementia. But I know I’ll try to live out the rest of my life with a tenth as much grace.

poetry friday a day early

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cause that’s how it feels sometimes.




The Author to her Book

Thou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth did'st by my side remain,
Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad expos'd to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight,
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I wash'd thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet.
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun Cloth, i' th' house I find.
In this array, 'mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam.
In Critics' hands, beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known.
If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none;
And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,
Which caus'd her thus to send thee out of door.

call it love or call it reason

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More flotsam from my life-on-Mars phase:

I didn’t know this video existed, until now. I wish I had a clip of Ochs’ performance at the first Winter Soldier (two years later than this TV appearance) but this is good enough  for now. Knowing that the vets in Detroit heard Ochs’ anthem, just before four days of hearings on war crimes, makes me feel more certain than ever that I chose the right title for the book.

can you hear me major tom?

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So I’ve been of late calling myself “Billy Pilgrim,” when people ask me how I am; digging tenaciously through those mad years we call “the Vietnam era,” which I subtitle as “When Everything Blew Up and Everything Grew.” What, she’s not done yet? Not yet, not when I spent thompsonnearly three weeks with the likes of Hugh Thompson (left) Ron Ridenhour (right) ron5 and the ubiquitous Tod Ensign,  as well a the guy below (hidden three rows behind Jane Fonda) who hasn’t yet talked to me about what I still think of as his proudest hour. (Also buds like Steve Morse, Bill Perry, and Susan Schnall, who’ve given me so much of their time…)  The whole thing makes me weirder than usual. I’m boring to be around: scattered, listening constantly to Hanoi Hannah on Pandora.com to get in the mood, etc. etc.

kerryfonda1

But this week, I realized that Vonnegut is far too noble an antecedent to call on here: better that  TV show “Life on Mars,” (thus the David Bowie above). So now, when people ask me “How’s the book??” I won’t say I’m Billy Pilgrim. This week, at least, I’m Sam Tyler – a 21st-century creature who keeps thinking they’ve moved on, only to be dragged right back to 1973, one more time.

don’t know much bout eco-nomics

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My bankruptcy lawyer, among others, is quite aware of my financial illiteracy (something I’m not proud of). Which has likely made it amusing, for the five to ten regular readers of this blog, as I worried about having to get an MBA in order to understand NYC’s then-peaking real estate market. I wanted to simultaneously get a Ph.D. in philosophy, so that I could find a way to articulate that whatever allowed these guys to get away with what they were doing,  it was wrong.

Now, thanks to the invaluable Sullivan, I learn that the degree I was really missing? I could have written their kind of lucrative fictions – but I needed to use advanced mathematics.

I can’t wait for the episode of the show above entitled The Gaussian Copula.

my only valentine’s day poem

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cummingsI loved this poem long before the author became one of my book’s guys (“i sing of olaf,” The Enormous Room et al.). I once asked my students, as their midterm, to explain to me how someone can write a love poem without ever using the word. Can you tell me?

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

hearting Keith Olbermann one more time

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Before it gets too old:  Paul Schindler at Gay City News (one of the hardest-working and most brilliant journos I know) sends this report from the weekend’s Human Rights Campaign dinner, where Keith Olbermann (above) schooled the lawmakers in the room:

In an evening when the governor of New Jersey made his most forceful statement to date in support of marriage equality, the new Senate majority leader in New York State pledged to make gay marriage a reality here, and New York City’s mayor once again promised to lobby the Legislature in Albany to help get that done, the crowd’s heart at the February 7 Human Rights Campaign gala in Manhattan’s Hilton Hotel, it seemed, belonged to a cable television political commentator.

In honoring Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC’s nightly “Countdown,” with its Ally for Equality Award, HRC took particular note of a “Special Comment” he made about California’s Proposition 8 six days after the election. As Olbermann was poised to take the stage Saturday evening, a clip from that “Special Comment” was replayed to a hearty standing ovation.

The rest of the piece is a must-read: Schindler explains the complexities of gay and progressive  politics with his usual elegance. He also includes video of Majority Leader Malcolm Smith wading into those complexities.

waiting for the blessed break.

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So I’m reading excerpts of Norman Mailer’s testimony in the trial of the Chicago Eight, trying to get a sense of the WWII-vet cabal that was supporting the protesters at the  Convention, when I get to this line: ” I was in my hotel room with Robert Lowell and David Dellinger and Rennie Davis.”  And no, I didn’t immediately jump to Mailer’s Armies of the Night, to search for signs of dialogue betweenDellinger, who co-edited pacifist magazines with Bayard Rustin before putting his energies to stopping the Vietnam War, and Army-vet Mailer. No, it was Lowell’s name that jumped out at me, because I’d just last night told a friend that he should revisit Lowell’s For the Union Dead. And yes, there’s a sign of the Lowell who got arrested with Mailer at the Pentagon and roomed with him in Chicago:

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statutes for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

But  my mind was blown already, suddenly understanding with all my reading of the past year or so:

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”

rgshaw1Shaw is Col. Robert Gould Shaw of the Massachusetts 54th (yes, the one played by Matthew Broderick in that movie.) Shaw’s “niggers” included lewisdouglassthe remarkable Lewis H. Douglass (left), and he likely knew another of my characters, poor Charles Garrison of the 55th. All of it placing Lowell, with his meditation on Shaw, and I in funhouse parallel universes.

Below is a clip from that film that envisions the night before the assault on Fort Wagner of which Lewis wrote to his girlfriend,”I escaped unhurt from amidst that perfect hail of shot and shell. It was terrible….”

But  I raise my virtual wineglass to Lowell, and savor how he envisions the hero in afterlife, quietly counting on justice’s long arc:
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.


studying with truman

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Sometimes things happen in the right order. If I had been a conscientious student at Hunter High School, I’d have read this book under Jack McNeil, my very first Creative Writing instructor. At the very least, you might think I’d have taken it 20 years later, as a narrative-obsessed journalist. But the true-crime genre it spawned had persuaded me I didn’t need to; who needed to read about a grisly murder? I care about trauma, but didn’t I already admire, and praise in my teaching,  My Dark Places, James Ellroy’s account of the murder of his mother and his search for their killer? And I certainly never saw the 1976 film made from the book.

Even seeing the two recent “Capote movies” back to back didn’t drive me to the book. The more famous of the two, Capote, was most interesting for its portrayal of Capote’s erotic attachment to accused killer Perry Smith (played above by Robert Blake in the 1967 flick). And seeing Infamous (trailer below) I was taken by Capote’s close partnership with Harper Lee, who did a lot of the reporting Capote ultimately claimed was his own.

It wasn’t till I came across the book here in Philadelphia that I decided it was time to read it — that would be a good lesson in the writing of narrative nonfiction. Now, I’m kind of stunned.

Six years it took for Capote to combine it all — to dream the dream properly till it was, as my old sensei John Gardner  demands of fiction, both vivid and continuous. And I’m thankful that I went in with *exactly* the amount of information I had.  I was simultaneously swept up in the dream and, on every page, nodding admiringly at how the story of that Kansas morning was woven from soft conversations with farm folk and stubborn cops.

I sit here persuaded of two things:

  1. That the story it tells is both profound and rather slight, as I’d long suspected.
  2. That I have to find the scholars who’ve looked at Capote’s summary of the psychiatric testimony, and see those psychiatrists ooked at Smith’s military experiences in detail.
  3. That as long as I live as a writer, I can study all I like, but it’s unlikely that I’ll ever write any prose that comes ten percent within Capote’s.

None of which stops me from writing: and it’s dourly appropriate to read this as I construct snapshots from the tales told by veterans.  I’ll just hope that some of the fairy dust clings to my fingers, so that the ten percent range is still achievable.

hanoi hannah in philadelphia

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Still CRAZY deadlined. Spent much of the weekend in 1968, when — as Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan put it in their 1984 Who Spoke Up?: American Protest Against the War in Vietnam — “events happened so quickly, hammer blow after hammer blow, that in retrospect it seems astonishing that the national psyche survived intact. Perhaps it did not. ”  I didn’t even make it to the NYC re-release of the film above, though I’m being told about it by enough others who were there when it was first filmed. I’ll write more about them later, but in the meantime, here’s a glimpse of why I started my journey into this book in the first place. (Hanoi Hannah is a Pandora radio station that I didn’t start, but is giving me a soundtrack right now).