Wednesday, December 25, 2013

A Post-Family Christmas

5:00 A.M. awakened from a dream about losing a camera and struggling to figure out how I might get it back. The usual vague surroundings, people who seemed one-dimensional, almost like characters out of Kafka.

I became aware of Judith also tossing and turning and finally pulling the CPAP mask off her face.

“You’re awake, too?” I mumbled

“Lying here awake trying to figure out why I can’t get Dropbox to show all my files I have stored in it.”

We each have a number of computer devices: smart phones, iPad tablets, desktop and laptop computers, and spend a good portion of every day interacting with them. She has just installed a new computer and has been fighting with the Kafka-esque forces of the Internet, both human and digital, for the past couple of weeks, getting it set up to do the things (faster, she hopes) she used to do on her old machine. I have been trying to edit some video made fifteen years ago by both of us on camcorders of the time. Our newest computers do not have the proper connections to transfer the videos from the camcorders, so adaptations must be conjured.

“I’ve been obsessing about how to get those old videos digitized before the cameras become completely useless.” I turned and propped my head with my elbow. “Those pictures are our history. They have to be converted or they will disappear along with us.”

“We might as well get up,” she said, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed.

Christmas morning is our time, just the two of us, with candles and champagne Mimosas and sherried eggs parmesan. We open the few gifts that each of us has thought to buy—often “for the house”—and those received in the mail from relatives. It’s a good time for us, an intimate celebration of our life together. We’ll visit or phone our relatives and friends later in the week.

Judith took her dog Buddy out for his morning walk, and I lay down on the couch for a nap. That was about 8:00 A.M.

My childhood Christmases were filled with people and gifts and excitement. My grandmother’s home was alive with adults and children, loud and gay chaos. At least, that’s how I remember them. My father would load us all into the car, piled with gifts, and drive through the dawn (sometimes well before dawn) trying to be the first of the family to arrive. Home again, exhausted, at the end of the day after having eaten too much turkey and sweet potatoes and candy. I used to get nostalgic about those holidays, but that feeling has faded over the years.

When Judith and I married, our respective children had long before departed for other parts of the country. We managed, once or twice, to collect a reasonable number of them to celebrate a holiday with us, but mostly we’ve been on our own for twenty-five years. Her Jewish childhood didn’t include much recognition of the holiday, and neither of us associates Christmas with religion, except perhaps peripherally, given the culture we live in. She likes to decorate the house with lights and a little tree. I enjoy her enthusiasm, but seldom initiate anything special for the holiday. Probably the exception is champagne for breakfast.

This year was different, of course, since we rose so early and occupied ourselves with computers for a couple of hours before our “Christmas Morning.” We’ll meet a small group of friends later in the day for a movie and dinner at a restaurant.

I read someplace a long time ago that people adjust to old age and inevitable death by gradually losing interest in the world. That seems to be the case for me with holidays, at least. My interests have broadened over the years to things that held no fascination when I was younger, but the intensity has diminished. If I’m nostalgic about anything these days it’s for passion. Oh, to be fifty again!

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Another Novella–Movie Group

Who are we? Who am I?

The stories we read, hear and see provide us with narratives of people’s lives—where they came from and how they lived. They are meaningful to us to the extent that we can relate them to our own experiences.

The stories that affect us the most, however, are the ones we tell about ourselves. Our own narratives become who we are in a very real sense.

Psychologists tell us that our memories—how we remember the past—shape our very perception of ourselves as people. We are more affected by how we remember our experiences than we were by those same experiences at the time.

It’s a truism that we are never finished. Our stories continue, and continue to evolve as narratives.

This is a story about a man who cannot quite remember something that was very important to him.

Movie Group Cover 7-15-2013

The Movie Group is a real group (probably one of many), an informal group that meets regularly to watch a film together and talk about it later. In this story, most of the movies mentioned are real movies, attended by the Movie Group. They were selected only for relevance to the story.

Otherwise, this story is fictional. Characters and events are not intended to represent any real persons or events (including the members of the real Movie Group). Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

Movie Group is available from Amazon.com, either in paperback or Kindle version.

Hallelujah for The City of New Orleans

Music affects me, sometimes unexpectedly. I clearly remember the first time I was aware of the moto perpetuo section of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The familiar work was playing on our stereo and I was doing something I can’t remember now, when that passage just grabbed me. I began to really listen to it and to feel it. I suppose it was partly, at least, the regularity of the tempo, but even after fifty years it still demands my attention when it appears. The wiring of my brain carries its traces as indelibly as my own name.

A couple of decades later, Arlo Guthrie’s “The City of New Orleans” played as a video on the San Francisco public television station, and it grabbed me the same way. Suddenly, I was immersed in the music. A pop music piece by Steve Goodman that went along with all the nouveau-folk music of the Sixties, its lyrics and tune melded into something powerful for me—the rhythm of the train ride, even the mournful sounds suggesting a distant horn/whistle—amounted to a nostalgia for a passing part of American culture. And an emotional hook that has never left me.

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” actually written thirty years ago, didn’t really come to my attention until just a couple of years ago when somehow I got a free copy of K D Lang’s version at the Vancouver Winter Olympics stored into my iTunes library. Her haunting delivery grabbed me the same way—I couldn’t experience anything else while she sang. That led me to a lot of Internet searching for the lyrics and for the stories behind it. Cohen’s emotional depths sometimes leave me scratching my head, but that tune and his equally suggestive “Suzanne” always stop me to listen and feel. And play over and over in my head.

Music bypasses our cognitive apparatus, even as we sometimes analyze what it is that we’re feeling, and perhaps dig out the details so that we can try to understand it. I happened to play Guthrie’s song the other day, and I keep waking up in the morning with it going on of its own accord in my head. Usually more given to analyzing than to feeling, I had to sit down and write about it. In the process, of course, I opened iTunes and listened again to it and to K D Lang, and in a moment will open Beethoven for another fix.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Something I Know

Written Thursday, October 24, 2013 12:18 PM

Generally, I feel that I've lived a pretty full life. I'm aware, of course that there are many things that I've never experienced. I can live (and die) with that.

Of my own experiences, foremost is that I have known the love of a woman.

I wish that for everyone.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Gut Responses and Rational Choices

The outrage this fall perpetrated by members of our Federal Government was for me a lesson: I want to know that my actions do not produce consequences that violate my deeper values. No matter how passionate I am about a particular issue, I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath. I believe in the democratic process, which is often messy. But to risk catastrophe for the sake of an issue seems cynical and just plain stupid.

A recent review in The Atlantic magazine by Robert Wright (“Why We Fight—and Can We Stop?”) looks at the work of people who study why humans seem to drift into tribalism—the feeling of “it’s them or us”—when larger issues and commonly shared values are at stake. Some of it, at least, appears to come from the distant past, when people lived in isolated little groups. Identifying one’s self with one’s neighbors, perhaps threatened by outside groups, was an effective way to survive. In today’s world, we’re all too much mixed together for that to be fruitful any more. We’re all in this together, when it comes to living our lives in peace and pursuing prosperity. When a cell phone call to a friend in Nigeria is as easy as one to our next-door neighbor, our tribe—or religion or color or sexual preference—isn’t so important.

I live in a co-operative community. We in Centennial Farm are very fortunate to have had good, reasonable people on our boards of directors. They do not always agree on how to do things, but underlying their differences there seems always a sense of decency and compassion. They are, of course, elected by the community, and that says a lot for the decency and compassion among our fellow residents. Like them, we can disagree on details, and even make an effort to change things we feel are called for. Still, under those differences I feel a common sense of who we are as a community and the kind of place we want to live in.

In Centennial Farm we have two Phases, two governments, two boards, two political institutions. But we have one Clubhouse Committee, one Social Events Committee, one newsletter. Our Rules and Regulations—through the efforts of joint board meetings—are identical. Our by-laws are practically the same, even though they are legally distinct. There are no border crossings, no little signs to tell us we’re in Phase I or Phase II. (In my high school geography classes I learned that the United States and Canada share “the longest undefended border in the world.” I thought that was remarkable, even at that age.) You can see the border between Phase I and Phase II on a little map in our Directory of Residents, but there are no stakes in the ground. The Farm is one community. We all know it. And that knowledge makes a big difference in how we feel about the little problems that come up from time to time.

The big problem, Wright says, comes from the fact that we decide things more from the urges of our guts than we do from our rational minds, whether we know it at the time or not—and sometimes in spite of our knowing. I know that that second Grey Goose martini will make me loggy and unresponsive to people (I drink to feel good about being with others), but sometimes “more” seems “better.” Alas.

The problem goes from there all the way to whether or not we try to make other countries conform to our ideas of justice and compassion and cooperation and mercy. Winning is sometimes more satisfying than being at ease with differences. The old Peter Sellers movie, Dr. Strangelove portrays the problem well.

It’s tempting to wish that our federal governing representatives could think the same way. Yes, the desire for larger values is harder to hold onto with the huge difference in scale between my little community and the United States government. But human beings have that inborn urge to cooperate as well as the inborn urge to defend against “the others.” Whatever made us that way might be sitting and watching right now, waiting for us to choose.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Poetry

I’ve never delved much into poetry. I have a few favorite poems, such as T.S.Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” that somehow speak to me, but I’ve never studied poetry or poems enough to understand the language. I accept that this is a shortcoming in my grasp of the deeper aspects of life, in much the same way as my lack of musical ability. I tend to rely on my left brain for what I consider knowledge. “Tis a pity,” as they say.

So I would probably not pick up a book of poetry to browse. But I do find myself reading other people’s reviews of books having to do with poetry. Last week, for example, I was reading Tamsin Shaw’s “Nietzsche: ‘The Lightning Fire’,” a review of a book by Krzysztof Michalski, The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thought, when I came across this paragraph:

Michalski follows Heidegger in holding that concepts, which we ordinarily employ to make sense of our world, in fact provide us with a very limited form of understanding, one that not only fails to capture the inexhaustible richness of experience and meaning but also shuts down our potential receptiveness to it.

It stopped me, for some reason. I’ve never read Heidegger, nor more than scattered bits of Nietzsche. Something (in my right brain?) told me to think more about this. I know that concepts and words often get in the way of understanding. To really know the world, one has to absorb knowledge in ways that words often cannot directly indicate. We constantly depend upon metaphor in trying to communicate with each other. It’s often said that language is nothing but metaphor. Everything stands for something else.

The concept “tree” for example, extracts similarities from numerous examples. It’s an abstraction. The word represents a concept, and according to Tamsin Shaw a concept necessarily has limits to which it can apply. We might modify the concept by adding more words, such as in “green tree,” and bring our audience a little closer to knowing what we are talking about. We’d never reach the end, with mere words, where they would know exactly what we know.

Farther down, Shaw gets me closer to what he is thinking:

Michalski aims to enlist Nietzsche in altering our sensibilities not through philosophical arguments but through something more like poetry, directing our attention to "the unknowable," employing metaphors bearing cultural and emotional meanings that cannot be reduced to analyzable abstractions.

And in the rest of the review, Shaw expands on this leaning toward what I understand as right-brain thinking. Some things in life are simply beyond concepts. Poetry can side-step conceptual limitations by suggesting rather than declaring.

If you hear someone telling you about a profound experience and can truthfully reply, “Yes, I know what you mean!” then you are taking from your own experiences some feelings and understandings and comparing them with hers—understandings far beyond the simple words passed from her to you.

In his book, Michalski takes 231 pages of words in an attempt to make us understand something about Nietzsche. I was frequently lost in trying to understand the words of Shaw, trying to make me understand what Michalski was getting at. But in that one paragraph, I saw a glimmer of something I could hold onto long enough to write some more words to myself.

I’ve downloaded an e-book of Thus Spake Zarathustra, one of Nietzsche’s more poetic works, and I’ll try to understand it using both my left and right brain, with the hope that I can begin to “capture the inexhaustible richness of experience and meaning” without shutting down my potential receptiveness to it.

Re: Tamsin Shaw, “Nietzsche: ‘The Lightning Fire’”, The New York Review, October 24, 2013

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Communicating Feelings

I no longer consider myself “a photographer,” in spite of the many thousands of hours I’ve spent working in the craft, and in spite of the intensity with which I’ve felt connected to the process and its subjects. I guess it’s just too much for me.

I recently read a piece in The New York Review by Peter Galassi about a touring retrospective of photographer Garry Winogrand, in which Galassi said:

“Photography inescapably but surreptitiously transforms what it describes. If you want your picture to look the way the scene in front of you feels, you are likely to be disappointed, and no matter how the picture turns out everyone else is likely to assume that the camera simply copied what was there. But along with probable failure there is the rare chance of backdoor success: a fortuitous scene that never existed but carries the authority of reality copied by the camera.”

It’s that way, too, in writing. Maybe it’s that way in any creative enterprise. We are impelled to put something down that—we hope—feels the way we feel. Often, we can’t even articulate clearly what it is that we feel or why we have the need to express it. We are simply moved to do it. In a photograph, we try to capture a scene or an expression or a form that says something we want to say. If we could say it in words, we probably wouldn’t need to say it with the photograph. Sometimes it works, and we get a measure of satisfaction.

You see, I can’t even say that last paragraph and have it feel to me the way the idea feels. What Galassi is saying is that this is normal: there is but a rare chance of backdoor success. We’ve all responded in some way to the Mona Lisa, but is that what da Vinci felt? Once it’s expressed, it’s no longer ours, but the property of the viewer or the reader. Who cares what da Vinci felt? Perhaps out of curiosity, yes, but what we feel upon gazing at it may or may not be what he felt. It doesn’t change the value of it for us.

As I write my stories, I am telling them to myself. What others may get from them is almost beside the point as I write. I always hope that others will get something from them. If I have a practiced hand and eye, it’s more likely that others will be affected, but that’s simply because I’m using words and semantics that are common in my culture. If I don’t push past the boundaries of the usual, people will dismiss my work as “boring,” or “clichéd.” If I stray too far beyond them people will dismiss it as “unintelligible.”

But that’s not really art. Maybe art is really surprise. Maybe it’s like Galassi says: it’s that rare chance of backdoor success, the thing that affects others the way it affects the creator, even when he or she can’t say why it works.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Cats’ Dreams

Cats live in the moment, they say. They say it because of how cats act around us. But how can we really know, when we can't really know what's in another person's mind? In fact, I don't know much of what goes on in my own mind. This morning I woke from a dream in which I was trying to figure out what to do with a big pile of junk that I didn't want to throw away (it's not only in dreams that I have that problem). That dream was just after a dream in which Judith and I had just moved into a house that was cluttered with stuff and strangers and the toilets and water faucets didn't work right. How could I know what a cat dreams?

A cat sleeps a lot, twice as much as people do. Researchers say that all the evidence points to the idea that cats dream, much like humans, about their waking experiences—jumbled, of course, since their awareness and their motor mechanisms are suppressed and there’s no “reality” to keep their minds focused. Their sleep patterns are also like ours (and most mammals), with deep sleep and REM cycles in which they exhibit signs that they might be dreaming. Eyes move under their lids, paws twitch, and sometimes they make little noises.

We don’t remember much of our dreams, at least after a short time when we awaken. The exceptions that I experience come after dreams that I wake directly from, and remember vividly. If I then think about the experiences in the dream, I remember longer, because I’ve incorporated them into my conscious mind trying to make sense of them. I’m seldom successful about that (making sense), except for overall themes that suggest to me intense processes and conflicts that I’ve been going through lately. Like the dream of wondering what to do with all my junk. Maybe my dreams will get better if I actually throw all that stuff away.

My dreams about making love, I’m probably stuck with. At my age, there’s little I can do about that.

It’s unlikely that our cats dream about stuff. That’s a human condition. They might dream about sex, of course—our cats have been “fixed,” so that they don’t have such experiences in their waking lives. But it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that they dream about it. Sad, when you think about it. We assume that our animals are perfectly all right without such experiences.

They might dream about hunting small animals (which ours have never seen, that we know of), but how would it be to dream about something you have urges about but have never experienced? Maybe I do. Maybe a lot of what I dream are just such unknown experiences. That woman I’ve dreamed about never seems to have a face. It’s mostly feelings—maybe the images that become part of the dream are just random concoctions my brain fills in the empty places with to explain the feelings—euphoria, lust, disappointment, depression, fear.

Maybe I dream like a cat. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything except for the feelings. I can’t explain the feelings except by analogy. One of our cats loves to be brushed (she’s a long-haired rag-doll breed) and purrs like crazy when we do it. But she doesn’t like to be handled much otherwise. Only when she’s parked herself on my desk while I work and snoozes peacefully, I think she might have special feelings for me. Naturally, I return the favor.

But I have no idea what goes on in her head. When she purrs while I brush her, maybe it’s something erotic to her. Maybe it eases her dreams. Least I can do, I guess.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

My Women

I’ve been writing fiction for a number of years now, and lately I’ve thought about the themes and the people I’ve been “creating” in my stories. I’m aware that they all come out of someplace in my very cluttered and mostly hidden mind, and I got curious about them all and whether they might have some meaning.

I’ve noticed that I write a lot about women and relationships with women. In Waking Up, the young narrator of “The Class” resembled me from sixty years ago, beginning to break free of the world my family had established for me. He was curious and skeptical, and somewhat dependent emotionally on his sister, who was a kind of surrogate mother to him. The girl he connected with saw him as more powerful than she, and more knowledgeable, the traditional male role. I recognized that relationship as similar to my own at that age, even though the details of the story were different from mine. Eventually in that book, their relationship developed and matured, but as his wife became more in touch with her own needs, the marriage became difficult. He reacted to his wife’s growth with panic at first, then (more or less) acceptance.

Osmosis was an entirely different kind of story. The main character was a woman, near middle age, struggling with feelings about her own history and relationships. But she is strong, and her relationship with the principle man in the story was one of equal strength, although she was much more emotional in her responses to him (emotion not necessarily being a sign of weakness). She even discovers the confusion between her maternal reactions to another young man and her recognition of unacceptable desire. In the end, she learns to accept these conflicting feelings and begins to will her own future path.

The short stories in the collection Lovers, Past and Never and the novellas The Guitar and Movie Group reflect differing kinds of women. Most, it seems, possess power in their relationships with others. Most are sensitive, intelligent and compassionate. One or two tend to be impulsive and intuitive. I haven’t begun any of these stories with a clear idea of who might populate them. I’ve described an initial situation and let the story tell itself, being myself entertained by events. Occasionally, I’ve felt some illumination on the processes of my own mind as those events unfolded.

Looking back, as it were, on these stories as illustrations of my personal relationships with women in general, I feel pretty comfortable. Particular cases sometimes have not been so comforting to me, and I have mostly passed over them in reviewing my writing. Perhaps at some time in the future I will have the courage to face those stories and figure out what they mean.

The truth is, women are crucial to my life as well as to my stories. Very few of my eighty-four years have been spent without a strong connection to a woman. Yet rarely have those relationships appeared in my stories, except for occasional literary fragments and, of course, memoirs. My use of first-person narration in some of my stories does not mean that those stories are any closer to autobiographical than the third-person narrations. It’s just the way they came out. Some people who know me well may recognize aspects of me in some of the stories. In retrospect, I sure do. But I haven’t tried to include or exclude such aspects. As I said, it’s just the way they came out. On the other hand, if anyone who knows me thinks they recognize other real people in my stories, I can only repeat from the copyright page, “The names and events portrayed in these stories are fictional, and any similarity to real persons or events is entirely coincidental.”

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Along for the Ride

Riding in the back seat of a car recently, I was enjoying the ride and the lack of responsibility. My daughter, Shirley, was driving and involved in a lively conversation with my wife, Judith. Not driving used to be a luxury for me, but in recent years it has become pretty much the norm. Younger people have taken over many aspects of my life. Where we go and when, what we eat and where we will have dinner, which movie we’ll see—all these decisions are often made by others, leaving me free to be simply along for the ride.

My age has a lot to do with that. I no longer have to be the one in charge, the one who takes responsibility for everyone else, the one who deals with the frequent little crises of life. More importantly, it’s because I don’t hear much of the conversations around me. Hearing aids help only in the best of circumstances when the ambient noise level is low and people are near me and speaking clearly. When I have to, I can ask people to speak up or “say that again” or otherwise consider my limitations when they are speaking. But when I’m in a group, I often find that I can’t keep up with the conversation and I’m reluctant to interfere with the flow.

Lately I’m aware that my capacity to integrate experiences is declining. I’m told that at my age I should expect the failure of synapses in my brain—my mind is functioning less, in spite of all my efforts to keep it active. I don’t understand as quickly. Listening to others as they talk, especially young people, I simply can’t as easily follow them. I cannot multi-task; my mind cannot accommodate multiple tasks and events. I’m much more easily distracted by outside noise, for example, especially other conversations in the environment. More and more, I find I’m simply dropping out of participating and understanding what’s going on around me.

Neurologists tell us that the vast proportion of activity of our minds is unconscious. We’ve always known this to some extent: “Why did I say that?” is a common observation. Experiments show that, for example, when we decide to move our hand from here to there, before we’re conscious of the intention, our bodies have already begun the movement. Conscious awareness seems to be merely one effect of processes going on in our minds, rather than the stimulus of behavior. It’s like we’re watching a delayed display on a monitor of what we do.

And that doesn’t even consider the automatic processes at work in our bodies—our digestive system, our very heart beat, the healing of minor skin damage or bone fractures. There’s no director at work handling all those processes, no little man pushing buttons and pulling levers to make our bodies do what they do. We have an erroneous idea that we’re in charge. Our conscious control of what our bodies do is mostly illusion. Perhaps it’s an exaggeration to say we’re only “along for the ride” of our lives, but it’s way less exaggeration than we tend to think.

In the past century (about), our society has become aware of our part in some of the changes in our climate. The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is contributing to the warming of our planet. We can certainly spoil our environment for ourselves and other living creatures. But it’s the height of hubris to think that we can destroy Earth. It was here millions of years before we appeared, and no doubt it will be here millions of years after we humans are gone. To think that humanity will at some point in the future simply not exist is disconcerting, but it’s likely. We’re along for the ride on this planet.

Just as true is the inevitability that I will at some moment soon no longer exist. Death has always been difficult for people in some cultures to think about. The closer I get to that darkness, the simpler it seems. But it means that I have to learn to let go of desire. I need to get used to being only “along for the ride.” The “ride of a lifetime” is literally true.

In some ways I’m getting used to being with people and hearing their voices without understanding much of what they are saying. I wish sometimes, though, that I could participate more in conversations and decision-making that involve me. I also wish I had the resources to participate more in the world around me. I think of Beethoven, for example, who determinedly kept going in spite of his deafness, and kept giving what he had to the world. Being simply along for the ride, when I have a choice, seems like dropping out. I’m not ready to do that yet.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Science Fiction and Fantasy

According to Wikipedia, science fiction is a genre of fiction “… largely based on writing rationally about alternative possible worlds or futures. It is similar to, but differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically established  or … postulated laws of nature.”

When I wrote my novel Osmosis a few years ago, I wasn’t thinking of what genre it fit into. I chose to posit a world just like ours, in today’s time frame, an ordinary American story—with one exception: What would it be like if some people could actually “hear”—even imperfectly—what was in other people’s minds?

Osmosis Front Cover for Bowker

In the course of the story, that one anomaly, initially limited in scope to a few main characters, insisted on expanding to potentially change just about everything.

That’s how it is in the “Worlds of If.” A lot of authors have used the technique—change one little thing in reality and see what happens—to explore history and philosophy from slightly different angles. The one I can remember offhand is James Thurber’s hilarious story, “If Grant had been Drinking at Appomatttox,” which was first published in The New Yorker in 1930.

That little bit of fantasy for the sake of a story got me thinking a lot about how we communicate with each other. I found John Searle’s book The Mystery of Consciousness, containing references to “mirror neurons”—a portion of the brain that seems to mirror the behavior of other people near us. According to those researchers who have been studying this phenomenon, we (along with some other species) register the actions of people with the same neural circuits that are activated when we perform the same actions. This, they contend, helps explain the fact that we know how others are apt to behave, and even possibly explain such social attributes as empathy. We communicate more—some times much more—than we’re aware of.

This is not the same as “mind reading,” as it is usually understood and as played with in my novel, but it suggests a lot of possible explanations for how we get along with others.

There’s a very good summary of the study of mirror neurons and their functions by Ben Thomas in “What’s So Special about Mirror Neurons” in a Scientific American Guest Blog of November 6, 2012.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

A Novella

A number of my books have been published on Amazon.com, either as Kindle books or paperbacks, since 2004. The early ones were collections of essays, most of which had appeared on my Web site donskiff.com. More recently, I’ve been writing fiction, which gives me a sense of discovery (where do the stories come from?) and satisfaction in producing something that is uniquely my own.

Front Cover DSC_5913-2 sharp

The latest of these stories is a novella, The Guitar, about a relationship. The following is the back-cover blurb:

In the twilight of his life, a man discovers a mysterious connection to a young musician. Their developing relationship gives both of them a wider view of life and how we touch each other. Matthew, still grieving the recent loss of his wife, attends a local bistro “just to get out of the house” and finds Laura, a young woman, playing a guitar. The depth of feeling he perceives in her music touches him, and they begin a hesitant relationship. She is moved by his attention and by a feeling that he truly hears what she puts into her music. The connection they feel for each other is complicated by the difference in their ages and by the fact that she is in a committed relationship with another woman. They struggle to find ways that they can be with each other realistically yet meaningfully.

An early reader of the manuscript, unknown to me at the time, wrote about the story:

“… a tender, moving tale plumbing  the powerful and indefinable reach of attraction, chemistry and love in a most unexpected combination. Using music as a metaphor is especially powerful to anyone who has lived that era and loved its music. It was like a rope swing dangling there and inviting you to let the music swing through the story. Don is a skillful writer who moved me to tears and proved that his character development comes alive.”

I’d love to hear other comments on the story. Better yet, write a review (be honest, please!) on Amazon.com at the listing for the book.