touched by a minimalist

I made a new friend yesterday.

As with another close friend I've made in recent months, he lives very far away indeed.

All the way in Warsaw.

He (I have proof that he's a he) is a gentle soul whose cybername is afp763389.

My guess is that was randomly assigned, and suits his purposes--whatever they may be--perfectly.

I don't think his purposes can be articulated, exactly, but he comes in peace.

He seems to slip through the rank and file on our mutual blogging host, Blogger, and whether he stops with a purpose, at random, or sequentially is not to be known.

What he does, though, generally, is leave a little tiny greeting.

Like this.

Or this.

To which he gets a range of responses on his own blog [note: the 2005 blog is not extant but here is a new link].

From this:

ahhh.. you annoy me!

And this:

Hey, what ´s this? when I click on any number always appears the same map and when I click on map I am back on letters. You are weird!

To this:

seems to me from the look of all of these comments that this blogger must be a guru, because all I'm readin is a reflection of the people who left the comments. some selfish (write because i want you to) some adventurous and open, and others simply confused! haha. then there are those of us that are amused! write on! or don't! i think this might be the blog of a zen master. ;^)

And this:

i smell genius.

Sometimes he leaves slightly longer messages, as he did the first time he came to see me:

theres no truth since the secret is not a lie
besides he pain is not objectively bad
resumed: no harm from death :)

enjoy

[post entitled "Guys Named Lance"]

I could tell the speaker was a non-native, and when I went to his site I didn't know precisely what to do.

So I did nothing.

I neither responded to nor deleted the comment.

I felt a little edgy, though.

This morning I was having a look at the stats. You can't see much from these--nothing very personal--but you can see how many computers have been used to visit you, where they are, what time the visit was made, and how the visitor found you. The latter is what interests me, especially the Google and Yahoo and MSN and other searches.

This visitor, it turns out, was searching for afp763389. And the search originated in Poland.

I looked at the pattern--a poster "named" afp763389 making curious brief visits to other blogs, and for some reason I remembered my mystery visitor.

This time when I went to his blog, I did look around.[The new one is similar to the old. Go ahead. Do some clicking.]

You'll be nervous. I know I have been. That imposing black screen, the lack of answers. Surely this was--what? A hacker? An evil-doing cyberbusiness? A surveillance operation?

Nothing good.

Then I began to read comment after comment after comment. As usual, community opinion swayed me.

I am after all human.

But is afp763389?

I invited him to stop by again, and his most recent comment indicates he is.

Human. Like us.

And maybe he just likes this particular black-background design for a blog, because he seems to reserve his most human answers for those of us who chose this template. Here's what he posted on sister site My Weird Philosophical Moments:

as for 'human nature' I think that we are the most advanced dominant specie on planet earth

so not know much of evolution but every overpopulation gets its fall because of losing stability of ecosystem thus the value most importrant for Us is to look for more space to live

instead of fighting against each other if the agression and fear would win than we may allways say that we made as much as possible to live with self esteem or minimum human dignity

so often being not within swarm fight looking for peace and nice place to work or spent the time I find myself lonely or some bunker shelter the net makes me know and feel like we are on the concert of darkness each one keeps the shining little flame of the lighter not long not much bright but without any here we soon will join the spiritual space of OverSoul or something like that :)

I might just have to post some of afp763389's wisdom on my next Poetry Thursday. He's brilliant:

"we are on the concert

of darkness each one

keeps the shining little flame

of the lighter not long

not much bright"

nice, huh?

Great Films for Kids

Though I'm a newcomer to the audacious work of Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki, that doesn't make me a total know-nothing, does it? C'mon, at least now I know he's all partnered up with Disney on gorgeous, edgy kidflicks like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and the just-released-in-the-States Howl's Moving Castle.

The conduit for all this 411? My six-year-old. Thank goodness I bred.

We totally bonded watching Spirited Away about three hundred times this past week. I'm not being sarcastic either. That's my point here. A Miyazaki is a thing of beauty: a family film you can watch. And watch. And watch. She finally got over it before I did. And the tie-in merchandise is mercifully scarce. Not a peep at the toystore.

I haven't been this happy eating popcorn next to a small person since Wayne Wang's sleeper family movie Because of Winn-Dixie (get the excellent indie-folk soundtrack available here).

Really Stacked

Remember what Italo Calvino said about going to bookstores?

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered....Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: 

the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,

the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,

the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

And so on. If you want to read the rest, you can always go here. Or here.

I was pondering Calvino's words during a brief interlude of clarity at Broadside Books in Northampton, Massachusetts the other day. I managed to escape the store's awesome, Calvino-inspired selection with only three books this time, a mere $70 poorer (richer, I'd say).

One new acquisition was Refusing Heaven, the new volume of poetry by Jack Gilbert, who now lives in Northampton, as it happens. I saw him read at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC last spring after I read a wonderful profile in Poets and Writers. Here's a sample:

Maybe Very Happy, by Jack Gilbert 

After she died he was seized
by a great curiosity about what
it was like for her. Not that he
doubted how much she loved him.
But he knew there must have been
some things she had not liked.
So he went to her closest friend
and asked what she complained of.
“It’s all right,” he had to keep
saying. “I really won’t mind.”
Until the friend finally gave in.
“She said sometimes you made a noise
drinking your tea if it was very hot.”

Counting Gargoyles

Local literati Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole launched the unbelievable 50th issue of Gargoyle magazine a couple of weeks ago, with a gorgeous cover by Colin Winterbottom (who coincidentally did the cover for my novel Borrowed Light).

The important thing to know, for me anyway, was that this issue of the magazine contains what I consider to be the best story ever written by R. Gilad Schamess, my first husband (how I hate that phrase, and all the history that attends to it). The story is called "Lucky," and it is also readable online here:

Lucky
by R. Gilad Schamess

1965-2000

They kept the luck they found in ledgers. Making it their business, their noses into everything.

There was the car that wouldn't start that kept a family safe from black ice on the highway and twenty-eight deaths, so much twisted metal.

There was the drycleaner's number misprinted in an advertisement that brought together two strangers who fell in love and married.

There was the clumsy painter who knocked a hole in the plaster of the baby's new room, revealing a wasps' nest built in the wall.

There were lottery tickets and gambling sprees and answers to important questions guessed out of the blue and old coins found in attics; they were entered in columns and dated and totaled and covered by the turning of a page.

She kept no food in the house except spices, and she brought home every day what they needed and they ate it all as if there were no dog begging or as if they were preparing to be gone for a long time.

He came home with the papers folded under his arm and more stuffed into his briefcase and some days with magazines in a bag.

They finished the meal and he looked for stories of luck, reading aloud when he found them, and she kept the books.

There were coins in the attic and lottery tickets and lightning striking out of a clear sky the exact spot a man had stood just one second before; he had moved when another man called his name. The other man did not know him but a man with the same name who looked like him.

There were the brothers adopted by different families who married and moved from their homes to the same town to the same neighborhood to meet when their children became friends.

There were hunches to stay in and hunches to go out and to not board that plane and to buy or sell that stock and to look under that cabinet and to try a new route home.

They went out on weekends, driving past where they had left off the last time, with clipboards and the forms they had made and favorite pens, and they found luck that way among houses showing nothing from the outside.

They kept track in ledgers.

She was home earlier and had the dinner ready. He brought the papers and, when they were new, the magazines. When they climbed into bed there were only spices left and the fresh page covering the old.

"We are lucky," they whispered at night. Not remembering how they met, they whispered.

"Lucky. Lucky." Huddled in the dark, only spices in the kitchen, the papers outside in the trash with the clean bones.

-fin-

(with gratitude to Stuart for putting up with my gargoyles, as I put up with his).

Love and Memory

I've been tearing my hair out trying to write my first real syllabus for my first college teaching gig. English 101 of course. See, I placed out of that. Which means I am so smart that I actually still don't know basic composition. Now I'll have to learn. I think it will be good for me. My poor students...

Anyway. I was looking for my favorite quote about writing, to inspire my students or at least make them laugh:

“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

I found out it was written by the eminently quotable newsman Gene Fowler. And I also found this resonant loveliness:

"Love and memory last and will so endure till the game is called because of darkness."

Hard to believe the same hardboiled journalist wrote that. The beauty of that sentence stopped me cold. Almost made me want to run to my journal and rub together two of my own sentences.

Almost.