My mental circus, inside and out.

the book signing

At the book signing yesterday, at Books-A-Million, Emma sat at the small cafe table they'd arranged for her, with a linen tablecloth and cut roses from the manager's garden.  She told Emma  that one of these roses, a small pink flower with dense petals, was the original inspiration for French perfume.  Some of Emma's family members came, and they had a small party, with her brother handing out complimentary bookmarks to everyone who wandered in.  Emma felt bright and loved.  A man came into the store with his twin sons, both in wheelchairs.  They had unusually bright orange hair that made them even more noticeable.   The man, who looked like a typical Midwestern dad,   wheeled one of his sons up to Emma's  table, and introduced him.  Harrison.   This was no Harry, but Harrison.  The man told Emma  that his son loved history and was always writing stories.   Harrison gazed at Emma.  He had light orange eyebrows, blue eyes, and pale skin that made his lips look as pink as the roses on the table.   His face and fingers were as thin as an aesthete's.  Emma found him as interesting as an Anne Rice vampire.  She asked him, "how old are you?"   He said, "Fifteen."  He was shy, but he could speak.  Emma wanted him to talk more to her, she intuitively felt that this was a boy with a fascinating and mysterious brain, that he lived the life of the mind, and so she wrote her email on the corner of a piece of paper.  She said, "If you ever want to talk about writing, I would love to hear from you."  They bought one of her books. Will he write?  Emma hopes he will.

Posted by: EmmaPele at August 29, 2005 07:40 | link | comments (2)

not writing

I am reading Enrique Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co, which is rather like a novel and rather not.  In some ways, it's a scholarly meditation on famous writers who end up refusing to write after their great successes.  That's a long list, longer than I ever imagined, and includes Salinger, Rimbaud,  Hart Crane, Kafka, Wilde,  Melville, even Duchamp who "abandoned painting for over fifty years because he preferred to play chess."   And a  whole host of brilliant but obscure figures.  The novel takes the conceit that these writers engage in  the Writing of the No, and has some lovely observations, such as that there's a substrata of  "phantom books," all the writing ideas that strike us, all the books we've thought of, but have never written.  "These phantom books, invisible texts, are the ones that knock on our door one day and, when we go to receive them, for what is often a trivial reason, they disappear; we open the door and they are no longer there, they have gone. It was undoubtedly a great book that was inside us, the one we were really destined to write, our book,  the very book we shall never be able to write or read now. But that book, let it be clear, exists, it is held in suspension in the history of the art of the No."

Posted by: EmmaPele at August 27, 2005 20:03 | link | comments (5)

ice

Here is a dream.  Emma needs to cross deep water, frozen over by ice.   Unsure whether the ice is solid, she scoots over the log, sitting, because she's afraid to stand.  (Emma's balancing skills are not the best.)  At the midway point, the log begins to sink.  The ice is only a thin layer.  Emma plummets down into the water, which is surprisingly clear and blue, the way water appears in movies.  But when she attempts to swim, she finds her limbs paralyzed.  "Hypothermia!," she thinks.   She struggles and struggles to get her arms and legs moving and finally begins to rise very slowly towards the light on the surface.  She wakes up before she knows whether she has survived.

Posted by: EmmaPele at August 26, 2005 20:25 | link | comments (1)

school

Cyclical events are sedimented with memories.  Like the first day of school.   Emma has had a first day of school every year for forty three years.  Every year, this song comes from some recess of the brain: "School days, school days, good old golden rule days."  It sounds like a scratchy 45 recording, which her own students now won't remember.  And she has no idea where it comes from.    At the other end of the year is Alice Cooper's "School's out for forever. . .school's been blown to pieces."  Every year is an entire lifetime between those two songs.

Posted by: EmmaPele at August 25, 2005 18:50 | link | comments

power

Emma confesses.   She is a coward about public speaking.  Recently, however, events have transpired to force her into the spotlight.   Now she has learned an odd secret about academe.  For many years, she has been under the impression that grandstanding was the favored mode of discourse, by which people (men, mostly) rose to power.   She has spent endless hours listening to some man pontificating, sometimes even pounding on the conference table, until her head felt like a colander ful of spaghetti.  Now she just imagines them urinating on each other, secretly, in their private lives, because who knows really, anymore, what secrets any of them have.  This can be entertaining at meetings.   Or perhaps even better, to imagine them as silverbacks, in the manner of Will Self's brilliant novel, Great Apes, scratching their armpits and sniffing each other's butts   What happens then when Emma herself is put at the head of the shiny table of the great conference room, where the chairs are actually leather and the power mongers meet, the kind who decide on the budget?  Does she scratch her private parts and display? 

Well, no.  Shyness about grandstanding has given Emma a different leadership style.  Innate shyness, a shrinking from certain kinds of self-aggrandizing behavior, has meant that Emma lets other people speak.  And because she is leading, she must listen carefully because at any moment, all eyes might turn to her for a response.  How terrifying!  Emma has often felt, as the debates swirled around her and she used every last effort just to listen, that she was failing miserably.   But to her absolute amazement, on the two recent occasions she has led such groups, they have applauded her at the end of the last meeting.  The Provost recently told her that her report would go down in institutional history as The Pele Report.   Wondering what she could possibly have done right, Emma now speculates that academics appreciate leaders who facilitate rather than impose their voices.   Poor old academics like her, who have been pummeled with rhetoric for years,  breathe relief when leaders step back and listen.  And suddenly, Emma notices that the really powerful people have exactly this knack of making everyone feel heard and valued.   They wait, really listen, and then come up with some brilliant response that gives a new perspective.   Maybe they were shy once, too.  Maybe shy people are the ones really running the damn place.

This does not relieve Emma of the pressure of extended public speaking events coming soon to a brewery near you.  Becoming a Silverback may still be in her future, and so she has joined Toastmaster's.

Posted by: EmmaPele at August 24, 2005 09:12 | link | comments