On the New Orleans Fringe Part 1: The Limiting Factor

Exhaustion prevented me from making plans and so I followed. Steph made all the arrangements and so, at the far end of the weekend, here I am and Cafe Envie with a semi-beginning. I just saw five shows at the New Orleans Fringe Festival and I picked none of them myself. It has been a remarkable experience, surrendering to the surprise.

But, I'll get into that later. On Friday one of my coworkers remarked that I look perpetually hung over. Apparently I'm exhibiting the signs of a rock star life with none of the benefits. All the edges seemed to have frayed. I told someone the other day that my fingertips are my favorite part of my body and I was as surprised as her. But it was my fingertips that said it, embracing a pen.

Addressing the Grievance

Law taught me about nonconformity. "If you want to fight a corrupt, patriarchal, capitalist system based on privilege, you have to remove yourself from it," he explained when I asked him why he was asking for change on Frenchmen. "I'm from Chicago. I dropped out of school and with the last of the money my bourgeoisie parents gave me I got a ticket here. Now I'm free."

"How does it feel?" I asked.

"I feel like a rock star," he said. "But not a sellout. Can I have some change?"

I asked him down the street Cafe Negril and bought us both quesadillas. We ate outside among the passersby. It was unusually quiet on Frenchmen that night. The air was spicy and, whenever the wind picked up, brass music and the scent of whiskey and beer hit us from the direction of the Spotted Cat.

"Why 'Law?'" I asked

"It's ironic," he said. "My last name is French. 'Droit.' I decided to embrace my name to emphasize my living outside the System."

"Did you just say that with a capital 'S?'"

"Only unintentionally. Capitalization is hierarchical."

This was August, just after I arrived in New Orleans. He said it was good that I work to rebuild homes, but that AmeriCorps was essentially just a part of the larger, unjust, inhuman machine. My clothes were a particular problem. Working in the office, I have to wear business casual.

"You're dressing like a classist," he said. "You can't even afford those clothes on your stipend."

"Yes."

"So tell them to go fuck themselves."

"Then I couldn't eat."

"So. I don't have job or a stipend and I eat."

"If I got fired then you wouldn't eat either."

"That's not the point."

We made a compromise. I would continue to wear my bourgeoisie clothes, but I would find other ways to undermine the System. I stopped using credit cards and shopped locally. When the election came up, I didn't vote and let everyone know that I wasn't participating. I decided I would only shit at Walmart.

The last part of my lifestyle change presented the greatest challenge. I don't live near any Walmarts. There is one on my way to work, though, and so I devised a system of detours. I never bought anything. I just used their paper and water, chipping away at their profit margin, and issuing an indirect, albeit not terribly subtle, protest.

Once I got into the rhythm, things got easier. Usually I would take my lunch break, walk to Walmart, defecate, and be back in plenty of time to actually eat and go back to the job. The only time I had a serious difficulty was during Tropical Storm Lee.

I biked through wind and rain all the way to St. Bernard Parish and by the time I arrived I was drenched and shivering. The greeter began to say, "Hello!" and stopped short. "Oh, honey," she said. "Why are you out in Lee?"

"I have business to attend to," I said and then carried out my social duty.

On the way out, the greeter waved to me grimly, looking pointedly out at the catastrophic rain. "You be safe."

When I got home I collapsed in bed and slept for the rest of the day. It was a long weekend, thankfully, because of Memorial Day. My throat was swollen and I could barely move when I woke up on Sunday afternoon. Law was there. He sat next to my bed with a cup of chamomile tea and honey. The storm hadn't let up at all and I could hear the cacophony on the roof and see water dripping down from the ceiling into a pan to a perfect rhythm. The lights were off.

"Are you awake?" he asked.

"Yeah..."

"I'm proud of you," he said.

"Thanks."

The tea was hot, sweet and had a rich, herbal flavor. Sitting up was agony. I fell back on my pillow and felt a wave of nausea pass through my whole body.

"By now in Chicago it would be a lot colder. It would be jacket weather," Law told me. "You know, that's why things move at their own pace down here. The weather. It has a twelve month growing season. Why do things now when you can plant your crops any time of the year and be all right for food. In the north, you have to worry about starving if you don't plan ahead. "

He was quiet for a long time. Just as I drifted off, I thought I heard him murmur, "The cold weather makes me hungry."

Book Review: William Zinsser's On Writing Well

I’ve tried to write this review a few times now and I think that the problem is that On Writing Well so thoroughly covers vast territory that it’s impossible to write anything that does the book justice. On Writing Well is William Zinsser’s opus after a lifetime of teaching and writing. All of my thoughts end up looking like introductory paragraphs and don’t really follow one another. I’m not giving up, but I’d rather just write this post and have done with it for the time being and come back to On Writing Well some other time.

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I participated in ten writing workshops as an undergraduate and now have read a few books on the craft of writing. Every teacher and writer seems compelled, whether anyone asks or not, to answer the question, “Can writing be taught?” The reply is almost always some variant on, “No… but there’s a lot that can be learned.”

What I appreciate about On Writing Well is that Zinsser makes no apology. This is a book about craft and if you’re reading it you’re probably of the opinion that reading a thesis on writing as a learned skill will help you become a better writer. I have more Thoughts and Opinions on this subject, but I’ll leave that for another post.

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What is immediately obvious about Zinsser, even after reading the first page or two, is that he is a phenomenal writer and teacher. I read a copy of the fourth edition, which I believe is the last, and his introduction is as cogent and thoughtful as the rest of the book. He explains that On Writing Well is a collection of essays dealing with subjects and themes he taught as a professor of nonfiction writing. With each later edition, he added more essays on innovations and changes he saw in the field of professional writing. Primarily, he used later editions to update the reading recommendations so that they were still relevant and to alter the text of the original to be less sexist. On Writing Well was first written in 1976 and so he often referred to the Reader and Writer with male pronouns. In subsequent revisions, Zinsser removed much of the presuming language as possible and in a later chapter discusses sexism in expository writing in depth.

Another major alteration was a chapter on the Word Processor. As a bibliophile and writing geek I thought this chapter was like an archeological treasure. I have never been compelled to use a typewriter and so I can’t empathize with his description of the former “slave labor” of writing. The work of writing, Zinsser explains, was revolutionized with the word processor. The chapter on the word processor is long and thoughtful, but basically Zinsser argues that now technology has given writers the greatest gift ever: the ability to endlessly and freely revise.

Zinsser’s favorite catchphrase is, “The essence of writing is revision.”  Writing is work and a craft and the only way a writer can really achieve a fine product is through careful, thoughtful revision. All writers and teachers eventually make the same point, but I think Zinsser’s lesson is a little more noble, that writing is work worth the payoff. This could just be my puritan-American sensibilities giving me a bias, but I think that his emphasizing the act and labor of writing legitimizes the profession.

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In the chapter on business writing, Zinsser talks about a workshop he led with a group of school administrators. Their writing was muddled because it was too abstract, filled with sweeping passive and entirely conceptual statements. They were writing newsletters to parents that were filled with jargon and catchphrases that didn’t mean anything. He didn’t bother with a drawn out lesson how to use a comma and instead gave this simple instruction: find the humanity in your writing and use the first and second person as often as you can.

In my first nonfiction class, my teacher told us on the first day, “Use ‘I’ a lot. For some reason people are always afraid to say ‘I’ and so I want to be perfectly clear that you have permission to use the first person.” Her point was essentially the same as Zinsser’s, that abstract writing is eerie because no person is doing anything. We all crave a human connection.

One of Zinsser’s central points is that good writing has great humanity. Good writing is the effort of the writer to convey his or her particular point of view to another person. It’s about sharing and generosity.

Last August I had the pleasure of seeing Ibtisam Barakat give a lecture at the University of Iowa on teaching writing. She is a Palestinian woman who moved to America as a young woman. She says that her whole life has been spent, literally and figuratively, in exile. Then she said that she believes, “Most human beings are in exile.” We are in exile from one another, and by being an individual, living is essentially lonely. Writing, she says, is the attempt to fight against loneliness for your own sake and for benefit of your fellow human beings. I like that sentiment, and I think that Zinsser would agree with her.

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There isn’t much about On Writing Well that I don’t like. Even his lamentation about the degeneration of writing was interesting because he makes such an eloquent argument. I distrust any talk about the “good old days” followed by “kids these days.” But Zinsser argues that there is a tendency in education to teach that certain subjects are appropriate and others are inappropriate subjects for an essay. The result is that people feel they must write what someone else (a teacher, an editor, a critic) wants.

His point is that you should write what you love, which is a lesson I’ve seen in many books on writing, but I think it’s interesting how he frames the problem with Audience. It’s not enough to just write what you want, you have to write without consideration for what someone else will think. Of course he’s not excusing bad writing, he’s just advocating self-confidence.

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While I read this book I sent my dad an email asking him if he’d ever read On Writing Well because one of Zinsser’s mantra’s is that good writing is clear and concise. When I wrote essays in high school, my dad would proof read them and, more often than not, he’d circle a sentence or a paragraph and ask, “What are you trying to say here?” I’d tell him my point and then he’d say, “Good. Now write that.”

Writing clearly and concisely is a never-ending battle. Even though my dad gave me my first lesson on the aesthetic and utility of clean prose with as few frills as possible, I still appreciate Zinsser’s thoughts and tricks. Don’t be arrogant. Don’t try to show off. Just say what you mean to say and get out as soon as possible.

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I could – and probably should – write much more about On Writing Well, but everything I write feels inadequate by comparison. If you believe, as I do, that good writing can be taught and learned, I think you will get a lot out of this book. Someday, if I’m ever permitted to teach a class on writing, I know that I will reference On Writing Well liberally.

In the meantime, I’m putting this one on the shelf. I know that I will come back to it soon.

Meaning....?

To get anywhere in New Orleans you have to make an absurd number of U-turns. A few days ago, I thought this might Mean something and so I tell everyone, "You know, you have to make a lot of U-turns here." Most people agree with me, but few speculate.

There's not enough time to figure this out.

Season Shift

Two days ago, the weather broke. That afternoon was hot and humid and a sudden downpour caused the temperature to plummet 30 degrees and there it's stayed ever since. This is a bit ironic since I was thinking the other day how it did not feel at all like fall. I was losing days, weeks, a season because I wasn't cold. New Orleans decided to oblige.

I think that this city functions on serendipity. The other day I tried biking from the Center Business District to the Marigny so I could settle down in a little coffee shop to write application essays. Everything was going well until I hit the bent elbow of St. Claude and became hopelessly lost for an hour. With these labyrinthine one-way streets, you can circle around your destination for hours and never find it. What's worse is that everything now is familiar to me, the landmarks and street names, but I cannot understand how they fit together. It's like a puzzle that makes a picture but the pieces are cut wrong. When I was on the verge of giving up I just happened to glance over my shoulder and see the sign I was looking for, "Who Dat Cafe."

Everyone is stuck in a malaise. My roommates, my coworkers, my friends are all suffering from a bad cold that's lasted weeks. It's as if the weather crawled under everyone's skin before finding its way into the wind.

The other day I went to another coffee shop on Magazine with my roommates, L and J. We drove down the interstate and I said, "Someone last night said that the interstate looks like a matchbox set. I think it looks more like waterslides."

"I can see that," L said.

"All New Orleans is a toy."

L looked out across the lights of the Central Business District and the illuminated crown of the Superdome. "You know, New Orleans does look beautiful at night."

I laughed. "That's like a party insult. New Orleans, you're beautiful in the dark."

"Sam, you should write that down," J said.

After we parked we walked through a residential area that looked very Midwestern. There were Halloween decorations everywhere. I forgot Halloween is coming.

Like Kafka, Man

About a month before I came back to America from my year abroad in Germany I the most Kafkaesque mugging I've ever heard of. It was about three in the morning and the evening should have been winding down, but the streets of Freiburg were unusually crowded because of a techno festival. I was feeling ambitious because I was wearing a suit jacket and my Venetian hat. M joined me outside the bar where our friends had taken up residence for the remainder of the evening and, in the spirit of things, I invited him to a friendly fight.

To anyone else, it probably looked like a real fight, but we were having a good time. Once upon a time it would have been considered noble. If only we could have had sabres, then there would have been a very traditional duel in the street over whose honor neither of us could have said.

Two large men, on the other hand, took it the wrong way. They shoved Max and I apart and cornered us.

"Why are you fighting?" said one. We'll call him A.

"Why are you fighting?" said the other. We'll call him B.

"We're just messing around," M said.

"Yeah, come on. He's my friend. Let's have a drink," I said, gesturing to the nearest bar.

"Why were you fighting?" said A.

"He asked you why you were fighting," B insisted, turning on me.

"He's my friend..." I said slowly.

"And you fight your friends?" A said.

"Occasionally," I said.

"Is that the way to treat a friend?" B asked and looked at A for help.

"That's no way to treat a friend," A replied, sagely.

"I thought not."

"Uh, guys...?" M said.

Their attention turned away from me for a moment and the three spoke in rapid German. M looked worried. Briefly, we managed to stand side by side and he muttered, "We should go, now."

It was about that moment when I noticed that A and B were both wearing navy blue, three-piece business suits. They looked like they had walked out of a conference. Their cufflinks shone like stars and they both wore scarlet neckties.

A snatched my hat away and put it on his head. It had a comical effect since his head was much larger than mine, but he still looked very proud of himself.

"Do I look good in the hat?" A asked.

"You look very good in the hat," B said.

A struck a Humphrey Bogart pose.

"Uh, can I have my hat back?" I asked.

"I like the hat," A said and turned away. He contemplated the crowd and the world, like a movie star.

"He says he likes the hat," B explained.

I was beginning to suspect that A and B were, in fact the same person. One ego complimenting the other. After M tried in vane to snatch the hat back we began to settle on terms.

"Two euros," said B, finally taking initiative.

"Fine," I said.

He looked at me for a moment, startled. I had spoken out of script. "Five euros," he said.

"You said two."

"I said five."

"Three."

"Five."

"Two?"

"Five."

"Damn."

A turned around, gave me a pitying look and slapped me across the face. Obviously I had missed the point.

"What did I say?" I asked.

"You can't bid down," he said.

"Why not?"

"You're supposed to lose," A said.

"You're supposed to lose," B assured me.

I handed over five euros in coins and they counted them carefully. A handed my hat back and said, "It was a pleasure doing business with you." Then he and B disappeared into the crowd.

"Did that just happen?" I asked.

About a week later, still shaken, I related this story to my friend, S. We were sitting at a cafe and when I said, "He said, 'I like the hat,' and the other says, 'He says he likes the hat.'" S started laughing uncontrollably.

When S finally composed himself, he said, "It's just so ridiculous Like Kafka, man."

I agreed and laughed. We sat around for hours nursing the cheapest cups of coffee available. I budgeted enough to leave a tip.

Scars

There's a scar on my head from where my sister hit me with a rock. When I was three and she was five we were camping and she decided that she wanted to throw a rock just as I was running in front of her. I've never seen this scar, but people Tell me it's there.

Two years ago I got "remember" tattooed to my left wrist and the first "r" healed into a tiny, raised scar like braille. I can read "r" by touch.

A few months ago, Reflex made me catch a broken pint glass. If I open my hand wide I can see a thin white line, like a Smile. It arcs upward to the first joint of my thumb where I can still see a raised scar from when my sister closed the metal joint of a reclining chair on it. That's the first time I can remember Bleeding.

In a creative writing class I sat between two women and we were on friendly terms. They were good writers. It wasn't until spring warmed up and both started wearing t-shirts that I saw the woman on my right had scars all along her left wrist "the right way." The woman on my left had raised, horizontal scars all up and down each arm.

After that day in class I went and met K at Aspekt Cafe. I told her about creative writing. She nodded and said, "Sometimes those last your whole life."

Today C drove me to deliver a grant to the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans. The text was well over a hundred pages long and I spent 10AM to 11AM  meticulously putting together all three copies from about twenty individual documents. My heart raced so badly I was afraid someone might hear. After we delivered the grant we drove back over the industrial canal, left Orleans and entered St. Bernard.  C indicated a scar on her right hand that she got in Haiti.

"I hope it doesn't fade," she said. "I'm proud of my scars."

"I have one on the back of my head," I said.

"How'd you get that?" she asked.

"My sister tried to kill me."

"Oh?"

"It's a joke. We were camping and she threw a rock and it hit my head. I nearly died that trip. Not from the rock, but from drowning." I said, "I've nearly drowned a lot and that's probably why I don't like to swim."