Look for "something spatial" in another place

Too many sites, too many places to keep track of!  Find new editions of this blog at my website, where all my writing projects can have a home, and where I hope to be writing weekly rather than quarterly entries of "something spatial," once I get settled in.  Check it out at https://ripariapublications.squarespace.com.  Thanks for your kind attention in this strangely fragmented world of writing we now live in, and all the best, from Kate

"Berkeley, Ha!"

It was sometime last fall, back in College Station, when I happened to mention to a repair guy where I'd been all summer, namely Berkeley, CA, and his reaction was priceless:  "Berkeley?" he jeered in disbelief, "Ha!" Meaning roughly:  "Ber-ZERK-ley?  Why would ANYONE want to go there?  What a complete waste of time, and how revolting to be wallowing in Liberals, on top of that?" Brought me up short, let me tell you, and I have been mulling it over, ever since.

This comes up today because I am back in the land of the Golden Bears and back at the library where I did some good work last year, and the whole thing is playing out again in my mind.

I ask myself, "Why would I want to go to a place where all the students you overhear are talking zillions of interesting things, and not just whether to get drunk this weekend?  Why get some good work done in one of twenty or more libraries on campus, filled first-floor-to-third-floor-ceiling with students studying hard, but where no-one is speaking or eating, and where the wall as you come in is lined with covers of all the publications originating from its department?  Why have any respect for an institution where there are enough Nobel laureates on faculty to rate their own (free) parking lot?  And what's so great about having a local music venue where I can listen to Ruthie Foster one night of the week and another night to a Koto ensemble, or go across the street from there to see plays in one of three or four theaters, each one doing some new thing?  And let's not talk about the places to eat, or we'll be here all night, and definitely not about all the stuff to do in San Francisco, a mere BART-ride away, because that's not really fair; it's half an hour away!

"Why live someplace you can walk every day and see some cool new neighborhood, yard, park or gorgeous old bungalow, or hike around on the mysterious pedestrian paths that connect the steep and winding streets, 1000 feet above the Bay?  A place where the weather is so mild and the soil is so good that your garden will bloom all year and there are so few bugs that you can leave your windows unscreened and open all afternoon, and not get smothered in them?  Where the college athletics are great but not the main thing?  Where everyone's consciousnesses were raised so long ago that it is old hat to be inclusive of people in wheelchairs -- for starters -- instead of something amazingly new?"

"Berkeley?  Ha!"

Where Death Came for the Archbishop

If you have been to Santa Fe, New Mexico lately, the incredible expense of the things in the shops near the Plaza may possibly have put you off as it did me.  It has become the playground of the filthy rich, who seemingly have nothing better to do with their money than to clothe themselves from head to toe in haute couture, eye-popping jewelry and (of course) Lucchese boots and fill their palatial homes with gorgeous sofas upholstered in rare Chinese robes.  Further from the Plaza, we find affordable baskets, designed by local folk but made in India. 

            But only another half-block of walking brings you to real places:  a real house, the oldest in North America, part of a pueblo established long before Columbus.  Across the street from that house is Mission San Miguel, the oldest surviving church in North America, where the stuff you buy (if you must buy stuff) goes to fund a bell-tower strong enough to hang a massive bell, cast four hundred years ago in Spain.  They say that the sweet, true tone of the bell (which you can ring for yourself) can be traced to the silver and gold jewelry and plate that was put into the metal at the time of casting, offerings of Spanish villagers who threw their prayers in along with them.  It is a fine use for silver and gold jewelry and plate, don’t you agree?

            If you have read Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, you already know that bell:  it is the one striking the Angelus when Bishop Latour returns from Durango, the bell with a sound of the east to it.  And if you read the book as you visit Santa Fe, suddenly the whole landscape of the region springs to life in your imagination, or the book comes to life before your eyes.  Because the reason for all that expensive stuff, of course, is that Santa Fe is full of art.  Georgia O’Keeffe worked not far from here, in the gorgeous hills of Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, not the first artist to discover the area and by no means – all those studios on Canyon Road! – the last.  Finery has been made for thousands of years, for that matter:  the mountain of turquoise near Madrid, NM that fueled continental trade for feathers from Central America and seashells from the Gulf has been whittled down to mere tailings, but still inspires local artists to make what they can with what they have.  The Santa Fe trail took stuff back and forth for much longer than just pioneer times.

            Along that trail, at “the other Las Vegas,” we explored a town where the church shrank into the background, where the lawless gringos had their way for a decade or so on a street lined with dives with names like The Toe Jam Saloon.  Their Plaza once held a handy platform used for lynching drunken cowboys or anyone else whom the people of Las Vegas, NM were too impatient to bring to trial.  But some others of those cowboys became Rough Riders, and one of them saved the life of Teddy Roosevelt, as he rushed up Kettle Hill and then San Juan Hill, that great lover of national parks and the great outdoors… Today the Plaza is graced with a bandstand and a stand of trees, a great old hotel, and a cool café with live music, where folks make plans to go for a soak in the local hot-springs.

            But better than any and all hot-springs, art, six-guns or stuff is an hour in the company of a young father from the Santa Clara (not its real name) Pueblo named Elijah. His other name translates to White Eagle Tail, and he is the best possible guide to the Puya Cliff Dwellings, not far from Black Mesa, and just across the valley of the Rio Grande from Santa Fe.  His gentle, unironic way of speaking, his fond references to his elders and his pride in the ancestors whose ingenuity formed these dwellings in these cliffs and protected them from raiders since time immemorial, all were worth the long wait in wind and snow to hear.  Ask him about arrowheads, and he will tell you exactly how each arrow was made and why, therefore, each one was shot with such care.  Each stripe on those sherds of pottery has a story of dye-making plants and firing, and the whole landscape around furnishes both food and stories.

            It is a harsh, beautiful part of the earth, which the long-suffering meek have nevertheless inherited.

Getting Real in Paris

February 7, 2014

People are always fussing about Paris, about going there, and then hating other people for going there, for the very good reason that it is at the very heart of the core of the center of the culture of the West, with all that that means.  Because people also go there and are bitterly disappointed: tourists from Japan experience this so frequently that it is a recognized category of nervous breakdown, the opposite of Stendhal’s Syndrome.  Paris has a large measure of humanity, both literal and figurative, and we all know what humanity is capable of.  Breathtaking vistas and grinding squalor abide right across town from one another.  Even its recent history has been marked by bursts of mayhem on a large scale, while providing endless series of small episodes giving delight.  One weekend spent well there can nourish a starved soul over long stretches of quotidian ugliness and thoughtlessness, but it is what happens on the weekdays that really make you think. 

            There was the weekend we arrived, when the last hurrah of Christmas was going up from the Champs-Élysées, between Place de la Concorde and the Rond-Point:  chalets full of choucroute and mulled wine or crêpes or gifts of all sorts, roller-coasters, ever-changing lights up everywhere, from here to the Arc de Triomphe.  By the next weekend, most of that was gone, but Friday night there was a gorgeous Vivaldi opera (who knew he wrote so many, gathering dust in a dark library until now?), and on a Saturday compounded of alternate sun and mist, a stroll along the Iles des Cygnes and through a neighborhood marketplace, full of the fresh and fragrant makings for many a Sunday-afternoon family feast.  There was also a visit to the first thing built in the International Style – just a simple house – surrounded by other houses unique in their various ways, and un-famous streets lined with liveable shops.  Then a dash by Metro to the gritty Marché aux Puces to search for some little ceramic favors baked into galettes de rois.  In the failing light we found our missing kings and shepherd at last, while the keepers of the few shops still open chatted together in the open air, arms crossed against the cold.

            On the next day, dull, cold, and dark, we found a genteel park where everyone not cooking that Sunday feast had been sent to get an appetite and haul the family sapin to a monumental heap of Christmas Trees Past.  Scouts were trying out wilderness maneuvers among the artificial ruins, or tracking down clues to a scavenger hunt, and runners were circling, circling, circling the perimeter. Next door in a private palais an enormous bronze Buddha and lively figures of people and animals were pointed out to eager children by fond parents.  Down the street, we sipped thé Marco Polo in a corner café, watching the bundled-up families skip and stroller by with their spent arbres de Noël, the steam-punk cupola of Saint-Augustin church looming behind them in the beige sky:  heart-warming and memorable, memorable, all memorable.

            But under the ground, in a vast and grimy transportation nexus, on a pedestrian weekday, came the real lesson in humanity.  Every morning we descended into the Metro to catch the 1 line, that runs like an arrow from La Défense to the Château de Vincennes.  Every morning we changed at Châtelet - Les Halles for the suburban RER-B line that would take us out to Orsay, and the Université-Paris-Sud.  There is a long, long connection under the ground between these two points, linked by a sloping, moving pedestrian walkway and then a broad concourse edged in shops and interrupted by massive cylindrical pylons.  Suddenly we noticed that while just the usual number of people were going our direction, the walkway coming towards us was filled to capacity, people using even the unsavory overflow walkway beside it. 

            As we neared the end of our ramp we could see a wall of humanity into we would debouch at any moment.  There were mercifully many fewer of us than of them; we were one lane of traffic, sidling along the wall and into the little shops to squeeze past an oncoming flood twenty abreast or more, all silent, all moving grimly where we needed to go.  It was a long, long moment before we were rushing for the “B” train, and by then we had deciphered the announcement on the intercom:

            “Due to a fatal accident, the “A” line has been closed between Nation and L’Etoile.”  Someone had chosen that morning to throw themselves in front of a train, and the world’s largest funeral procession was moving in solemn, silent order, to take the 1 line to work.

The Last Curse in the Box

February 1, 2014

You know the bitter little Greek story:  Pandora opens the box she shouldn’t (of course it is a woman; Greek writers didn’t care much for women, and Greek women couldn’t write about themselves, mostly, not being of enough value to bother educating) and all the woes that afflict human kind escape to torment folk, far and wide, but there is one curse left when she quickly shuts it again: Hope.  Ouch!

            Yet hope is the anchor, right?  The thing that keeps us going, and trying, and working?  A good thing?  Faith, Love and Hope are triad of belief.  Nothing that takes a long time to accomplish would happen without it – that is the simple truth.

            One of the literary agents in one of my useless writer’s guides says, “Never give up!”  But why do they say this, when they refuse to read any fiction that is not like all fiction already published, that is not another story of another son separated at birth from his father, or someone discovering how to make curry and love at the same time, or discovering themselves through travel?  Better yet, there is a funeral, and the family all meets at the funeral, and we discover… Or someone studies renaissance Florence and so creates a very unpleasant character to pavane through the streets of that carefully-constructed video-game town and do things that are not very important or even ethical…

            Non-fiction is much easier to sell, but why?  Surely the world of imagination should be at least as broad as reality.  Truth surely is stranger than fiction, but fiction tries to keep up, doesn’t it?  Why are the gatekeepers wailing that there are no blockbusters anymore when it is the unusual stories that catch the jaundiced public eye, that are the refreshing change from all the usual let’s-all-write-for-one-another literary conceits?  Sorry, that was a self-answering question.

            People are afraid to take chances, people figure nothing succeeds like success.  It’s fear of the Other, in its many shapes and forms.  Fear of looking stupid.  Ha!  How stupid is that?  Yet the Public knows a good story, a witty story, a true story, a kind story when it reads it, and then buys it over and over again.

            Hope is painful, hope is maddening, hope is like a weed: it just keeps springing up after being mown down.  Like a weed, we really have to root it out to kill it, and we don’t really want to do that, do we?  What is a weed, really, but a plant growing where it’s not wanted, so let’s transplant it, say Pandora was the savior of mankind, and stop being so darned smart.

            It is the first day of spring, Old Style; the cardinals are caroling from the trees and there is the smell of buds in the air.  *Sigh*  Let’s all be filled with hope, and the energy to make something fine come of it! 

Back at the Desk

A month or two has gone by since I revealed myself to be a mambu.  It is time to take stock of my tank-mates, once again.

Tuttle Publishing’s faint show of interest in my book on the Keicho Expedition – a book proposal I had sent to them ten months earlier with not a peep of reply in the meantime – in the first week of March sent me scurrying to produce something on this project.  I left off work on my promising Big Novel (on which I had two chapters done), typed up and edited two lengthy translations I had made for the Keicho book nearly four years ago, and the began upon the text itself, sending all I did, as I finished it, to Tuttle.  A truly nasty virus in March and weeks of substitute-teaching in April slowed me down, but I have made steady progress, and now, back at my California desk for two months of good, hard work, I am ready to finish it off.

Ironic, then, isn’t it, that when I pushed Tuttle for a decision today, they told me they were not interested after all, especially when all I brought with me to work on from TX was material for this one book?

Yet I have meant to write this book since I first learned of the expedition while living in Sendai in 2006, and swore in the spring of 2010 to bring the story to a greater audience, just before setting it aside to be Head of School at Saint Michael’s.  I have worked for nearly a year with my friend Seiko Sato to have a major sourcebook about the expedition – Distant Voyage to Rome -- translated into English, and she has submitted a grant to Suntory Corporation with the help of Sendai academics to see it done.  She has bravely rented a hall in Sendai to inform the public about the proposal, on this July 19^th.  Distant Voyage’s author, in frail health and unable to make the trip to Sendai from Tokyo, will be sending her a powerpoint presentation on his book.  I will also be sending her one on mine, so I had better be sure she has something to talk about.

It is time it was written, whoever does or does not publish it.  The Big Novel will have to continue to wait.

Mambu and the Tuna

The world needs more fables!  There are so many goofy things happening in the world today that a simple fable could have prevented, if only someone had read one or told them to that person as a child or if they had read or sought them out themselves!  On our long drive back home, Robin and I read the biography A. Lincoln aloud to each other to keep awake, and learned that the self-taught Lincoln memorized (among many other things) all of Aesop’s Fables, in which are crystallized (as those of you who have read them will know) most of the social and political truths of humankind.  Arnold Lobel, the great writer of children’s books (Frog and Toad, and Mouse Tails to name but two) has mastered the art of the modern fable, as in his masterpiece, Fables, from which the great fables of “The Kangaroo’s Parents” and “The Crab and the Lobster” derive. Perhaps that is what I should be doing, rather than trying to publish long novels, as the publishing world seems utterly uninterested in long novels.  The world needs short, pithy things like the poems of Billy Collins or Tomas Transtromer, my two current favorites.  So here I will offer you the fable of the Mambu and the Tuna, which perfectly encapsulates my recent experience.

I am a rather unusual person.  Yes, yes, I know:  everyone thinks she or he is unusual, but really, I rarely find another human being who has studied at the Intercollegiate Center of Classical Studies in Rome, missed being shot by terrorists in Beirut before the age of four, been an exchange student to Japan, is trying to make a living as a writer and can’t even get someone to consider her work, has been spat on by counter-racists and is a classicist/geographer who thinks donkeys are really cool.  I am sure they are out there somewhere, mind you – kind of like the mambu.

“Mambu” is the tidy Japanese term for the Ocean Sunfish, the most God-awful big fish you have ever seen.  Ah!  You recognize it!  (And there is a photo with this blog, from a Monterey Aquarium postcard).  The Ocean Sunfish has many names and nick-names:  “All-Head” being one of them, in German, and “Millwheel” being another, in Latin (mola).  They can get up to a metric ton in weight, but have no real structure behind their gills except for a sort of ruffle-and-flourish of cartilage, and their pair of fins stick straight up and down, and yet must row them successfully in all directions.  They are the sole members of their own genus (Mola mola)  – and family, too, as far as I’ve learned – and so it is hard to make up rules about them or any sorts of generalization.  They are tasty all over, apparently, so parasites have colonized them extensively, requiring much grooming by other fish glad of a parasite meal, and they like to bask flat on the top of the ocean for birds to help them out, likewise, giving them their name…but they also look rather like a sunken light-source, being almost round.

We became intrigued with these creatures after Robin brought home another postcard, from a seafood restaurant near Stanford called (inventively) The Fish Market, which showed a photograph from the early 1900’s of a family of fishermen, posing beside an ENORMOUS Sunfish they had (probably accidentally) caught.  The thing must have been ten feet long/wide!  So we commenced on some wiki-research, and learned the above and more.  Naturally, when the family wanted to visit the Monterey Aquarium in December, and we learned that they are one of the very few aquaria to own such a creature, we made a bee-line for it, as soon as we paid our zillion-dollar entry fee.

“Sorry” – we were told by the helpful Information lady, when we asked “Where is the Ocean Sunfish?” – “the Sunfish has been removed from the Open Sea tank, for re-training.”  “Retraining???” “Yes, it is much slower than the other fish, so we train each fish to come to the top of the tank to be fed with a special signal, so that the others won’t crowd it out, and when it went up to be fed recently, two Yellowfin Tunas crashed into it, and it was so upset that it went to the bottom of the tank and refused to come up again, so we put it in its own tank for awhile, and will train it to respond to a new signal – it won’t come to the other signal any more.”  Who knew?  I mean WHO KNEW that funny-looking slow clunker-fish could have their feelings hurt by the guys driving the Maseratis?  Who knew that a fish could die of embarrassment? 

Right away, I knew that fish was for me!  I have so often embarrassed myself with my impulsive, unusual, bizarre notions, not suited to the world of tunas, that I am subject to fits of bottom-sitting.  Just this past week, faced with another week of not knowing whether the editor who promised back in August to take a look at my first-born novel “sometime in September, at the earliest,” will accept it and thus validate efforts of long years and what I hope will someday be “what I do,” should I live long enough and stop volunteering to do helpful things for everyone else, as well as “what I have done,” namely the second novel in the series and three follow-up novellas, not to mention the first two finished chapters of the Big Historical Novel (at last)… I went to the bottom of my tank and just got gloomy. 

Maybe I should just write another novel about what life was like in high school or a screenplay for a blockbuster movie where a really buff guy runs around and escapes from/kills a bunch of other buff guys in many new and unpleasant ways… maybe, in other words, I should transform myself into a tuna!

I have just designed myself an unemployed-writer “business” card that I like very much, using a beautiful pair of kanji (Japanese-style Chinese characters) meaning “riverbank” and the Latin word Riparia meaning “things to do with riverbanks,” as I do love places with rivers running through them, and like to sit on the bank and consider the passing parade, as it were, but was tempted this week to change it to the image of a Mambu.  If the kanji lettering for mambu (the Japanese only use their katakana to write it, in a friendly, familiar but not graphically satisfying way, and the Chinese characters expressing Ocean Sunfish are many and fiendishly difficult) had been uncomplicated or attractive, I would have used them.  Ah, but nothing about the mambu is uncomplicated or attractive, so it doesn’t translate well into graphic design… Okay, I will come back up to the top of the tank if someone promises to keep those tunas off my back!