entertaining place to be. Not that we don’t work hard, excessively hard. There I am, writing end-user notes for Real Property and Mortgages when I’ve never had a home of my own. Most of the time I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. One of these days I’m going to be found out, and it will be worse than any infraction related to the study of English literature.
One day, on a business trip, a prospective banking client asks, is your background in mortgages and notes? I practically weep, no, Shakespeare! Oh, Shakespeare: Hamlet would know what to do with a question like that. It helps to set the alarm for five every morning, pull out my legal pad, prop the legal pad on my bent legs, and write in bed for an hour. Sometimes I can’t even read the sloppy penmanship when I get home that night. It looks like the penmanship of someone with a personality disorder. Still, the act of writing gives me permission to do that eight-hour day. It is a ritual, an act of stillness, of saying here I am to myself. No, I haven’t joined the ranks of former artists, though my coworkers might not exactly be aware of that. By the end of the year I have put together two stories I’m reasonably proud of, stories about an intense, expressive mother and the disoriented son who wants to take care of her and doesn’t know how to begin. One of these stories centers upon a broken Tilt-A-Whirl ride. The story itself is divided into twelve pieces. By that I mean individual moments in time are separated by white space, and by stumbling on that form, I have found a way to sound a little like me.
But one day, I’ve had enough. Enough of waiting in stalled traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway. Enough of behaving myself during a regime change at work, where the new CEO tells us that flextime will soon be a way of the past. No more funny postcards on our cubicle walls, no more torn T-shirts worn on the job. Dress code, work on weekends, abrupt layoffs to keep everyone on their feet. The stock market crash has knocked the company off its feet, and we’ve been made to think we’ve contributed to the mess. At least I have another place to go. At least I’ve already been accepted to two residencies, one in the Berkshires, the other over the border in Upstate New York. When I go in to tell Jean, my cool, sweet boss, she completely understands why I have to leave. She doesn’t make me feel as if I’m letting her or anyone else down. She looks at me as if she’d even like to go along with me. No one wants the ship when the captain is already taking it down.
2010 | At some point in the tsunami coverage, I know that the disaster is not going to transpire. Perhaps it has to do with the intensity of the vocabulary: receding, discoloration. Or the tone of it, which is a shade too portentous. Rick Sanchez, for one, is so pissed off with the affable manner of the scientist he’s interviewing that he yells at him. Sanchez waves his hands, demanding his guest not sound so nonchalant. Sanchez has a story he’s responsible for, and he must think he’ll look like a fool if there’s no story to tell.
I’m simply bothered that I’ve organized the afternoon around the event, which has been given an estimated time of arrival, as if a jetliner is coming in to the Hilo Airport. The speed of the wave has been compared to the speed of a jetliner, and perhaps that’s what I find compelling about the phenomenon. But there is that impulse in us that says, come on, wave. Come on. Slop over car and grass and shrub: come on. The inevitable, this thing that wants to do us in: we can’t watch the spectacle of it with any distance or detachment. We can’t see that this wave is not about us.
Artist Colony
1988 | I don’t yet see that living in an unheated chicken coop in the Berkshires might not be the best way to spend a late winter month. Nor do I see that cleaning the bathrooms—including the toilets, with their scum and mysterious splashes—might be fairly
One day, on a business trip, a prospective banking client asks, is your background in mortgages and notes? I practically weep, no, Shakespeare! Oh, Shakespeare: Hamlet would know what to do with a question like that. It helps to set the alarm for five every morning, pull out my legal pad, prop the legal pad on my bent legs, and write in bed for an hour. Sometimes I can’t even read the sloppy penmanship when I get home that night. It looks like the penmanship of someone with a personality disorder. Still, the act of writing gives me permission to do that eight-hour day. It is a ritual, an act of stillness, of saying here I am to myself. No, I haven’t joined the ranks of former artists, though my coworkers might not exactly be aware of that. By the end of the year I have put together two stories I’m reasonably proud of, stories about an intense, expressive mother and the disoriented son who wants to take care of her and doesn’t know how to begin. One of these stories centers upon a broken Tilt-A-Whirl ride. The story itself is divided into twelve pieces. By that I mean individual moments in time are separated by white space, and by stumbling on that form, I have found a way to sound a little like me.
But one day, I’ve had enough. Enough of waiting in stalled traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway. Enough of behaving myself during a regime change at work, where the new CEO tells us that flextime will soon be a way of the past. No more funny postcards on our cubicle walls, no more torn T-shirts worn on the job. Dress code, work on weekends, abrupt layoffs to keep everyone on their feet. The stock market crash has knocked the company off its feet, and we’ve been made to think we’ve contributed to the mess. At least I have another place to go. At least I’ve already been accepted to two residencies, one in the Berkshires, the other over the border in Upstate New York. When I go in to tell Jean, my cool, sweet boss, she completely understands why I have to leave. She doesn’t make me feel as if I’m letting her or anyone else down. She looks at me as if she’d even like to go along with me. No one wants the ship when the captain is already taking it down.
2010 | At some point in the tsunami coverage, I know that the disaster is not going to transpire. Perhaps it has to do with the intensity of the vocabulary: receding, discoloration. Or the tone of it, which is a shade too portentous. Rick Sanchez, for one, is so pissed off with the affable manner of the scientist he’s interviewing that he yells at him. Sanchez waves his hands, demanding his guest not sound so nonchalant. Sanchez has a story he’s responsible for, and he must think he’ll look like a fool if there’s no story to tell.
I’m simply bothered that I’ve organized the afternoon around the event, which has been given an estimated time of arrival, as if a jetliner is coming in to the Hilo Airport. The speed of the wave has been compared to the speed of a jetliner, and perhaps that’s what I find compelling about the phenomenon. But there is that impulse in us that says, come on, wave. Come on. Slop over car and grass and shrub: come on. The inevitable, this thing that wants to do us in: we can’t watch the spectacle of it with any distance or detachment. We can’t see that this wave is not about us.
Artist Colony
1988 | I don’t yet see that living in an unheated chicken coop in the Berkshires might not be the best way to spend a late winter month. Nor do I see that cleaning the bathrooms—including the toilets, with their scum and mysterious splashes—might be fairly
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