Prep for Doomsday

Tomorrow, Part 2 of Making You Feel.  Much more upbeat, I promise.  But in the meantime, in honor of our wonderful Wyoming State Legislature, who is keeping us protected from all sorts of eventualities, including Doomsday, I offer this helful graphic.

Methland, by Nick Reding

Sorry for the two supremely dark posts in a row.  I promise to lighten up in the future!

For this month’s book club, we’re reading the nonfiction book Methland: The Death and Life and an American Small Town, by Nick Reding.  It’s about the meth epidemic in small-town America.  So fascinating and so well-written.  (I’m now a huge Nick Reding fan and want to go read everything he’s ever written.) 

It’s full of well-told stories and all kinds of interesting information.  Did you know that Hitler was a meth addict, which might account for his erratic behavior and Parkinson’s-like symptoms at the end?  Did you know that meth was invented in 1898 and was proscribed by doctors for everything from weight gain to a pick-me-upper into ~ what was it? ~ the 50s or 60s?  And did you know that Tom Arnold’s sister Lori was a meth drug kingpin in the Midwest for years?

Meth’s high apparently lasts six or seven hours ~ the long shoulder, as they call it ~ as opposed to crack which only lasts about a half hour.  Apparently, the drug takes over the basic reward system in your brain, and everything that used to feel good (food, sex, etc.) no longer does and the only way to feel good is with increasing amounts of the drug.

The personal and nationwide impact of the drug is horrendous (more on this in a minute).  I was looking at the meth statistics for Wyoming, and apparently there’s reason to be optimistic. Meth use among high school students is down, the number of meth labs went from 60 to 6, and the state did a huge billboard and awareness campaign that seems to be helping.  Above is an example of a billboard (though from Montana). 

Nick tells the story of one particular long-time meth addict who accidentally lights his mother’s house on fire, runs out, but then keeps going back in.  His flesh is burning on his body, and he stands in the yard and tries to peel long strips of flesh from his arms only he can’t because his fingers are burned off.

Nick’s hypothesis is that meth is the only drug that goes hand-in-hand with small-town working-class America. 1) The drug was legal and proscribed for a long time.  2) It helps people work harder.  3) Jobs and opportunities in small-town America have recently been severely reduced, and the only way for people either to work harder or to escape the life they’ve been reduced to is to take meth.  4) It’s cheap and easy to produce in small labs.

A very well-written eye-opening book about a horrible situation.

Making You Feel, Part 1

Burned Shoes put up a link on Pinterest yesterday to Buzzfeed’s posting of every World Press Photo winner from 1955-2011. What amazing photos.  My stomach was in a knot and my chest hurt by the time I had viewed them all.  Here are a few.

Isn’t that what you want you want your fiction to do?  Rip your heart out of your chest and hold it pulsing in front of you?

Windsday

The wind has just been out of hand these last couple of days.  When you go outside, it’s like a bully pushing you down.  At night, it howls and shakes the house, and even after living in that house for 20 years, I’m afraid we’ll end up in Kansas.  Or Oz.  My husband has used the snowblower on the driveway four times in the last three days, and our vehicles have been stuck in the driveway at least twice.  Once a car wouldn’t start due to battery issues.

As a kid, I had a very romantic notion of the wind from children’s books.  Winnie the Pooh and The Wind the Willows.  Such beautiful illustrations. Funny and touching. 

But southern Wyoming has the highest sustained winds in the continental United States.  That’s why we have such a burgeoning industry of wind farms.  It’s due the venturi effect, where the mountains squeeze toward each other like a garden hose and shoot the air through. 

But this morning is calm and sunny and people are out shoveling their walks.  A wonderful calm after the storm.  So in honor of our frequent visitor, here’s Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "Ode to the West Wind."

Ode to the West Wind

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I

O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being

Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill;

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning! there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lull'd by the coil of his crystàlline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seem'd a vision—I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd

One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own?

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,

Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Authenticity

I’ve been thinking about authenticity lately, so I thought today I would cogitate a bit on it. Bear with me.

As a teenager, I did what all teenagers do, which is to try on personalities.  I didn’t know “who I was,” perhaps more than most, so I would see a TV show or read a book and think, that’s really cool, and I would try on whatever characteristics I liked.  Did I want to be cool and witty and sophisticated, or did I want to be brainy and sincere, or did I want to be a cowgirl (pronounced “cah-gerl”)?

I couldn’t be my authentic self because I didn’t know what that authentic self was.  I say that I was perhaps worse than most because I secretly believed I was invisible until I was in my mid-twenties.  I wasn’t good at much, though I was smart, and when I was young I didn’t take a lot of baths or wear cool clothes or anything.  I was also painfully needy and sincere.  It felt like I was always the uncool person, the one on the outside looking in.

So it came as a revelation to me in my mid-twenties that just by being somewhat confident ~ or even acting confident ~ and asserting myself, I made myself cool.  It had more to do with my attitude than my clothes or what I thought I was or wasn’t.

Authenticity in this context is figuring out your tendencies and proclivities and likes and dislikes and being true to them.  It sounds sort of nebulous, and when you’re a teen it’s hard to hold onto, but I really think that’s true.

Because if you spend your life trying to be someone else, you’ll never get to know the person you really all, which is a real waste.  You are the only you in the world. Seriously.  You have so much to offer. 

But even beyond that, denying something you basically are is really corrosive and can eat you up from the inside.  Being gay and hiding it and playing straight is certainly an example, but also other things.  When I was young, I wanted to be male, but only because being female had little worth.  That’s much like being gay ~ you don’t associate with others of your kind and you try really hard to play the opposite and you hate yourself for it all.

Being authentic in your writing is much the same thing.  Readers can tell.  I think your work is so much better when you write “the real you.”  Oh, it can be science fiction or magical realism or whatever, but the emotions and thoughts have to be real.  It has to have an internal logic.  Not only that, but I think the best writing comes from writing about what embarrasses you, what is painful, what really gets to you.  Maybe that’s because those pinch points, those denials, that shameful self, is in some ways the most authentic self, the self that has been denied.

I think our development as writers follow the same path.  We imitate and that’s how we learn who we really are as a writer.

Authenticity in writing takes huge amounts of courage.  You have to lay yourself bare to the world.   But they will love you for it, and your writing will shine because of it.  As Steve Almond says, “Run screaming toward the shame.”

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Lolita is another book that I love and hate at the same time, much like Portnoy's Complaint. Humbert Humbert is so skeezy, but it’s such lovely prose you are seduced by him.

But, yesterday, I came across a video of Nabokov talking about his favorite cover of Lolita.  It’s the first time I’ve seen a video of him.  But what I love is that you can hear the lovely pronunciation of the name “Lolita” as he says it.  The description so matches his voice.

For your viewing pleasure.

Thank you, Open Culture!

PS I am reminded of the end of "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolf: "They is, They is, They is."

Pembroke Sinclair Reading at Second Story, Wed, Feb 22, at 7 p.m.

This is in Laramie, Wyoming.