Free Fall

Beware anyone bearing gifts

2012-02-16T12:00:00.000-08:00

Be careful who you open your door to.

When I watched “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” I learned that a vampire could not gain entrance to your home unless you invited him or her — or is it “it” — in.

Years before that, I learned a similar lesson. I was nine months pregnant, had just quit my job and was waiting for my daughter to be born. What I didn’t realize at the time was that she was going to be three weeks late.

I was restless and unused to holding still, so I found a temporary job inputting data. I worked in a small, hot office in Londonderry NH for a man who was enormously obese, unkempt and crude. Mostly, he wasn’t there. The worst part was the cheap office chair I had to sit in — really bad when you’re expecting any day.

This man collected, processed and sold people’s personal data. This was in 1973. Londonderry was a thriving bedroom community full of Boston-bound commuters (I was one myself). New housing developments were eating up all the apple orchards. Just a few months later, however, the economy ground to a hard stop.

So here’s what happened in June 1973:

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Welcome Wagon.

Come on in!

Anticipating free coupons for discount meals and a cheap basket of worthless trinkets, newcomers opened their doors and invited Welcome Wagon representatives in for coffee. Over and over again.

People did not know what was really going on. Welcome Wagon was, perhaps still is, a spy network cloaked as an organization of upbeat greeters working to give you info about your new community.

The affable Welcome Wagon visitors note everything they can find out about you — the kind of car you drive, the estimated value of your home, the type of furniture you own, your estimated annual income, the number of kids you have, where you work, years left on your car payment. The more talkative you are, the more successful they are.

They then input this info into a database and sell it to anyone who wants to pay for it. You get a Happy Meal at half price or a free screening at the local dentist’s office and any company in the world willing to pay for it gets your entire personal profile. I know this because I typed in hundreds and hundreds of Welcome Wagon forms that were filled out, no doubt, in the secrecy of the car after the friendly visit and the coupon for a free Coke at McDonald’s.

Something like this is happening on a much larger and more insidious level. You don’t have to own a home to be violated. All you need is a smart phone and a few of the wrong apps.

Certain apps (up to 11 percent of the free apps) that you use on your phones collect the information from your address book without your knowledge and store it in their own databases. Until today I had no idea that this was happening.

Here is a link to the NY Times article explaining how people’s address books are taken without their knowledge: http://nyti.ms/z2Wbtf

Do you use Hipster, Locale, Uber, Yelp, Taxi Magic, Picplz, Scrabble and Waze, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Gowalla or Foodspotting? If so, contact them to find out what they are doing with your address book.

I store a lot of my and my friends’ personal info in my address book. While I doubt that Instagram cares what medications I’m allergic to, when my best friend was born or the name of my neighbor’s dog, the idea that this information could be transmitted when I decide to play Scrabble at midnight because I can’t sleep is enough to cause permanent insomnia.

The rule of thumb in journalism is: nothing is private once it’s written down. This rule is true way beyond the reporter’s notebook.

When you accept an app into your iPhone or iPad, it’s the same thing. Once you select “install app,” beware what you are letting in. It could be the Cookie Monster or it could be Welcome Wagon, selling your info to a clothing catalog, or it could be Yelp waiting to glom on to your most treasured of all possessions — your personal contacts.

Water Muse

2012-01-15T06:16:00.000-08:00

The Fourth Connecticut Lake — a marshy pond on the U.S. border
with Canada in New Hampshire —
is the source of the Connecticut River.

Note: I just read Gloucester author Gregory Gibson’s Christmas booklet about his John Ledyard-inspired walks abutting the upper Connecticut River. He reminded me of my own hikes to the source of the Connecticut River at Fourth Lake on the Canadian border. This is farther north of where Gibson's own adventures began. I’m re-posting this, from my guest blog on Write on the Water. Fourth Lake is inaccessible to me right now. It's January and the hike would be icy and treacherous. And snowmobiles are not allowed up there. Such inaccessibility makes the fantasy of being there that much more desperate. Gardeners with seed catalogs on their laps, when it's 5 degrees outside as it is today, must feel much the same way.

It’s called Fourth Lake, though by Connecticut Lake standards, it’s more puddle than lake.

Fourth Lake is a sludgy tannin-stained bog inhabited by frogs, dragonflies, Canada Jays and red-winged blackbirds. You have to climb vertically for about 45 minutes to get there, every once in a while catching pungent, sour whiffs of moose or a deer’s abrupt snort of alarm. Some hikers’ feet fit inside the hoof prints of the bull moose that have churned the trail into muck.

Once at Fourth Lake, you can walk its perimeter in an hour. You’ll need boots that are water-treated because you are treading on a grand and fertile sponge.

Fourth Lake is sacred the way mothers and muses are sacred. This spittoon of a bog is the source of the Connecticut River and the Connecticut Lakes. Unlike the other lakes, you don’t boat here and your dogs aren’t allowed anywhere near it. Relatively speaking, it’s pristine and rarely, if ever, will you encounter another human though you see their prints, too.

Fourth Lake sits on our border with Canada. The area just to the north has been ruthlessly clear-cut post 9/11 to give reconnaissance planes better border views. The trees, felled in a tantrum, are angled in all directions and take on the look of ten thousand booby traps.

To get to the trailhead, you have to drive to the terminus of Route 3 in New Hampshire, past the U.S. border guards, and, then, right before the Canadian border guards, you pull into a small lot. They no longer make you sign in and explain why you want to see Fourth Lake. The hike up to the lake includes several unsecured border crossings marked only by small brass plates embedded in the granite. What this means is that sometimes you’ve got one foot in Canada and one foot in the United States. As an aside, if you drove another few feet, you’d be on the Magnetic Hill in Canada. There, you can experience your car being dragged backward up a steep hill in some kind of astonishing and ever-amusing optical illusion.

I make an annual pilgrimage to Fourth Lake. When I go, I bring a lunch so I can prolong my visit. I sit on one of the felled tree trunks and stare across the bog. You never know what you are going to see on that busy surface forever a-roil in splashes. This is where life takes hold. Ripples radiate in circles everywhere across this buoyant breast.

One year, while crouched and savoring my ritual meal at the shore, I happened to glance at a small underground den capped by a pile of boulders — no doubt a glacial deposit. Inside that dark hole I thought I saw a flash of pink. Yes. I pulled out a small journal and a pen, wrapped in layers of plastic. It was covered in peat and had overwintered a couple of times.

Someone had begun a conversation about this place, and others had joined in. My daughter and I did the same, though by then the small pen skipped. No waxing effusively, then. The talk was about beginnings, about a tiny puddle that, at its southernmost spot, dribbled into something like a rivulet. One toddler’s baby step could traverse the Connecticut River here! From Fourth Lake the 407-mile Connecticut River took hold and passed through New Hampshire and Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut before emptying into Long Island Sound in Old Saybrook.

What could be more reassuring to a writer than a dribble that works itself into something majestic? If nature says it, it must be so. Be persistent, then.

To get to Fourth Lake one year, my daughter and I needed to break the ice that had crusted on the granite with our fists in order to secure footholds. We had to get there.

The late Don Murray, my nonfiction writing teacher at the University of New Hampshire, gave us a piece of paper on the first day of class with the message: Nulla dies sine linea.

Never a day without a line. And no river of words without first one word, then another.

The Mexican Drug Wars: How Far Away Are They?

2011-11-29T07:12:00.000-08:00

Of the 45,000 deaths
thus far, says Grillo,
“each involves a real family,
a real story, real history.”

Ioan Grillo, author of the new book about the Mexican drug wars — “El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency” — has been covering Mexico for over 10 years for magazines and newspapers. He talked about his experiences covering Mexico Monday night at the Half King in Chelsea.

It was such a good talk and people asked such good questions that I decided to make use of the notes I always take at these things and write a bit about Grillo’s presentation. Though Half King is a pub/restaurant, things quiet down considerably when someone like Grillo steps up to the microphone. And because the mike didn’t work last night, people listened more attentively and more quietly than usual.

In 2004/05 when the violence in Mexicao started to get bad, the Houston Chronicle told Grillo he should “cover it like a war.” He began by getting to know addicts and he started to see the horrific transformation of Mexico through their eyes. “When I first got to Mexico in 2000,” he said, “it was a time of burgeoning democracy.” In a few years time, he said, tragic changes resulted in what he now calls a “low-intensity war.”

A single massacre in Mexico resulted in the deaths of 72 people. And killings take place every day. By comparison, the most Al Capone ever killed was 7 people — in the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Of the 45,000 deaths thus far, says Grillo, “each involves a real family, a real story, real history.” The implications remain bad for most of the country. “Society operates quasi-normally, with electricity and schools running and yet you have this extraordinary thing running through all of it.” Franchises entrench themselves within a community and grow from there, enlisting locals and corrupting ongoing events.

Grillo says this kind of thing could happen in any number of countries with similar conditions, such as a weak government amid powerful organized crime. Brazil, parts of Africa and Jamaica are a few of the vulnerable places he mentioned.

The people of Mexico, says Grillo, are used by the drug cartels’ “machines of murder.” For payment of 1,000 pesos, or $85, they’ll take a human life. The head of the police in Mexico City used his own key to get into his home, where he encountered assassins who shot him dead. Police from his own force had been co-opted by the cartel and gave the assassins access. “Your best defense as a journalist,” he says, “is not to piss anybody off.” Five people who contributed information for the book have been murdered. Even the elite and the political class feel scared, but they are divided among themselves and cannot find common ground from which to attack the problem. The cartels now run massive kidnapping schemes as well.

At the end of his talk, Grillo listed three major areas of reform:

1. Realistically assess current policy and be realistic about future policy. The war on drugs isn’t working. The ludicrous UN motto: “A drug-free world. We can make it happen.” There is now a considerable drug trade within Mexico. As for the United States, both the US and Mexico have a role in this. 90% of the cocaine in this country comes from Mexico, for example. And, says Grillo, “It’s impossible to shut down the border.”

2. Rehabilitate communities within Mexico. Nothing comes into the impoverished communities. Imagine what good 1,000 social workers could do, says Grillo. “We’ve found that kids just doing art in class discover a worth in themselves and want to make a choice about how their life goes.”

3. Build a unified police force throughout all of Mexico. Right now police operate independently from town to town.

Life lessons from a senior sexpert

2011-11-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

'It takes intention to keep
movement and sexuality in our lives.'

Happy Birthday to Joan Price, author of Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex and Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty. You are like a sister. And, sister, you make me proud.

It’s your birthday on Nov. 10 and you are at the top of your game. You work it like no one else I know. At 68 you live more in a day than most people do in a week.

How is that? How can someone who once was in such a serious automobile accident she shocked doctors merely by surviving, who suffered injuries that plague her still, how can that person go on to teach aerobics six days a week and, later in life, teach line dancing three and four nights a week for hours at a time, walk for one or two hours a couple of times a week, lift weights when time allows and do advanced Pilates with a personal trainer every week? That was a long sentence with few pauses because that is the kind of life you lead. Then there are the speaking engagements, the workshops and television appearances, the writing of books, the social media updates and maintenance — you have 774 friends on Facebook, the blog, the testing of sex toys for their makers and for the readers who buy them. What have I forgotten? You review books, you’re compiling a book of erotica for Seal Press, you respond to emails in a timely fashion. I’m sure there’s more.

Your answer is that you exercise so that you can exercise, if that makes sense. You move to stay mobile is another way to put it. You are a vegan and you eat delicious, nutritional foods. You say you don’t want to be bored so you commit to doing what you are passionate about. And because nothing beats boredom like acquiring knowledge, you’ve made learning a priority. And you teach others what you’ve learned. Because of you, because you talk out loud about senior sex, we know how to maintain our vaginas to keep them in good working order. That’s just for starters. Recently one of your readers said you helped save her marriage.

When you had a reading in early July at a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan, you were a guest in the NYC apartment where I spend time with Jim. We gave you the couch, a blanket and a space at the table for computing. In the mornings Jim made you strong hot coffee the way you like it, without cream or sugar. The only time you weren’t working or making connections with others throughout the city was when I was talking or when you were sleeping. You are a marvel. You model the way it should be done.

You had a profound loving relationship later in life. Robert Rice, your husband, died just as you had begun working on Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex. How hard that must have been but you got through it, found ways to grieve, work and carry on. Because of you and your book Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty, we got to see for ourselves how true love and sexual intimacy are bound by no rules and heed no expectations.

Here, for those who are interested, are excerpts from a conversation I had with Joan over the telephone in mid-October. I wanted to present the woman behind her two most recent books.

The “ick factor”

“I found that people didn’t want to look at senior sexuality, face it or address the problems in a positive way. It isn’t just the youth-oriented culture that has stereotypes about sex. We seniors have them about ourselves. We think we lose enjoyment, we lose function, we lose our appeal. For every problem, there is a solution.”

Work

“I think of myself as a hard worker. I thrive on challenges and sometimes on confrontation. Ninety percent of the people I speak with say thank you for the information. Ten percent say, ‘Tell me no more’ or they make fun of it. That just spurs me on even more. Bring it on, I say.”

People are shy

“I spoke at my 50^th high school reunion recently. People listened attentively but no one asked me a single question. I know why. The last time we saw each other was when we were 17. So I told them if they had any questions, I’d consult with them in the corner of the room. People came up to me throughout the reunion saying, ‘I want my consultation in the corner.’ Every time I speak, I learn something.”

Being physical

“With regard to enjoying the pleasures of our bodies, it’s not just line dancing or having sex or walking in the sun. We need to be in relationship with our bodies.”

“People ask me: What’s the best exercise? I tell them: The one that you’ll do!”

“Exercise should be a treat, not a treatment.”

Senior foreplay

“One way to get started is to do something physical together like dancing in the living room. Walk or bike ride together. This lets you enjoy your bodies together and lets the blood flow. By the time you begin making love together, you’ve already started. Part of what makes us pull away from sex is the depletion of blood flow to our muscles, our brains and our genitals. Exercise reverses that.”

Aging

“People aren’t aware that it’s happening little by little, week by week, year by year. Athletic people I knew at 17 are now 75 pounds overweight.”

“It takes intention to keep movement and sexuality in our lives.”

Solo Sex

“Make a date with yourself.”

Joan Price’s contact information
website: http://www.joanprice.com/
Blog: http://www.NakedAtOurAge.com <http://www.nakedatourage.com/>
YouTube: http://youtu.be/MN6_HVD-Jdg <http://youtu.be/MN6_HVD-Jdg>
Naked At Our Age Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/JoanPriceAuthor <http://www.facebook.com/JoanPriceAuthor>
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JoanPrice <http://twitter.com/JoanPrice>

You can contact me at rae.francoeur@verizon.net. Read my book, “Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair,” available online or in bookstores.

Passion as art

2011-09-25T15:05:00.000-07:00

Israel Galván interacts
with a guitarist and singer
in his intense and stylized
flamenco dance.

Flamenco dance is a glorious departure from normal.

Hence, this must be an American speaking. Someone with the romantic languages in her blood and popular culture fatigue in her bones. Car chases. Faces pummeled. Guns exploding. Women raped. Enough. Give me Andalusian soul music. Show me your beating heart.

Today I had the great fortune to see flamenco dancer Israel Galván in one of his last performances in NYC this fall. It’s a 10-minute walk from when I’m staying and despite this week’s rave review in the NY Times, I managed to get the best seat in the house.

Here’s what today’s flamenco performance was like. And though the performance, titled “La Edad de Oro,” is avant-garde by traditional standards, what I describe here is pure flamenco:

Three men on a stage — one dancer (Israel Galván), one singer (David Lagos) and one guitarist (David’s brother Alfredo). They’re all dressed in black, though at one point Galván changes to white shoes. The stage is bare except for their chairs and a speaker for the guitarist. The backdrop is black. Lighting is often from above and it’s minimal. Everything that happens happens between the men and the music and the audience.

It’s intimate. Us and them.

The performance feels like a long story that Galván starts off by stepping into the solitary beam of light and beginning a percussive dance with, at first, no accompaniment. Sometimes the only sounds are his vocalizations. Sometimes he is completely still and there is only silence. David begins to sing and Alfredo plays his guitar. They trade off, Galván sitting while David or Alfredo continues. It’s a conversation, told in music and dance, that lasts for an hour and a half. Exuberant, plaintive, funny in parts, the dance and music portray us, in conflict, in love, in loss. And when Galvan stomps his feet and arcs his entire body with arms straining toward the ends of the universe, it is unbearably intense.

Olé! Sí! Bravo! I found I was amid a Spanish-speaking audience, used to joining in, at times, with expressions of appreciation and exclamations of joy. It felt as if we were at a juerga — a spontaneous gathering, perhaps in Spain at some small pub — drinking wine, reflecting on our lot in life. The dancer or singer begins a lament and soon everyone joins in.

This art comes from the heart and is transformed by skill and training and generations of dancers and singers and guitarists evolving to this, where Galván is on the edge of something old and new.

What I describe is passion and I express tremendous gratitude to know passion and to recognize it in others who take it whole and shape it into beautiful art.

As we left the theater, I heard one man say to his group of friends: “I feel so lucky to have witnessed this.”

Perhaps he's also saying is that he feels fortunate to be understood. That his passions have a place in his life.

The bullied pulp

2011-09-01T13:41:00.000-07:00

Obama comes in last at the
Iowa State Fair pie-eating contest.

Dr Rae psychoanalyzes Barack Obama

Dr Rae does not want to come back from vacation mode, where she has been happily rewriting a novel. Dr Rae has been at play in the fictional world, a fun fantasy land where people live and die as the mood strikes her.

Zap. There goes another one.

Imagine, then, the horror upon returning from summer vacation to find the world unchanged. Men still acting badly.

Let us not waste time, then. There are a lot of men acting very badly. I’ve watched the reruns of Mad Men on Roku this summer. I know how bad men can be.

The man with me on my couch today, the man awaiting psychoanalysis, needs no introduction. Few will be surprised to see that Barack Obama, our president, is heaped here like a tired-out whoopee cushion. He has just fled the Republicans, the Vineyard and Hurricane Irene, and way too many sticks of fried butter hurled by cranky farmers while he was scoping out the Midwest from his hulking black Skulk-o-Van.

Mr. President, with all those state fair fried butter sticks and clumps of fried dough you’ve encountered the last few days, dare I ask, why are you so scary skinny?

Dr Rae, I confess, I ate sparingly as a youngster. The habit has stayed with me.

Sorry, sir, but did you just refer to yourself as a youngster?

As a boy, then.

That’s better. And as said boy, did you take lunch money to school with you?

That I did. Folks back then carried quarters to school for cafeteria lunches. Fish sticks. Tater tots. Michele says potatoes have potassium. I’m not opposed to tater tots. For that matter, I am not opposed to veterans. Gays, well, that’s another story.

So you enjoy a tater tot on occasion?

I never had the pleasure of a tater tot, Dr Rae.

Just as I expected. Tell me, commander in chief, if the scenario I describe sounds familiar:

You are walking to school. A bit of a distance ahead on the sidewalk, you see another human being coming toward you. You reach into your pocket, take hold of your small treasure, and you exclaim, “Please! It’s all yours.” You hurl your quarter, your precious lunch money, gift wrapped, polished, worth 20 times what it’s worth now, toward the approaching person. But before you can ask that toddler on the tricycle for her vote in return, off she trikes, marveling at her good fortune and practically smelling the five Snicker’s bars in her immediate future.

Dr Rae, you are so smart. How do you do it?

I took one look at you and said to myself, “You only get that skinny by giving away your milk money in kindergarten.”

Diagnosis. Sadly, our president has weak bones, particularly in the area of the spine. This is from a dearth of milk and its all important component, calcium, in his formative years. Without a family hawk to teach him bully-bashing maneuvers, he gave it up. Every day he gave it up. And, fellow citizens, as you can see nothing has changed.

What happened to passion?

2011-07-14T07:18:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while someone says something so open and honest that it brings my world to a momentary stop. Most of us would agree: The earnest voice rings loud and clear. It cuts through the rest of the life’s din and penetrates our defenses.

At a recent reading in Babeland — SoHo, such a voice spoke out. A man introduced himself by saying he’d been married for 28 years. He said, I want to find ways to bring renewed sexual passion into my relationship with my wife. We have been together a very long time.

He, like another man in our small circle, had come alone — without their sexual partners — to seek advice. I was there with author Joan Price, whose new book, “Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex,” has just come out. Both of us published our books with Seal Press and we thought it would be fun to do a couple of events together.

. . . . .

Many would prefer to shop for private items like sex toys online. The great thing about shopping in person at a store like Babeland, in particular, is how great the staff is and how little embarrassment you feel as you look at the toys and find out what's recommended.

. . . . .

All I could say to the man was congratulations. Congratulations for coming all the way into SoHo, for walking into Babeland, a pretty store painted pink and run by women who sell “sex toys for a passionate world,” for sitting through this reading and presentation, but most of all, congratulations for taking your wife and your sex life seriously. I applaud you and the other couples in this room who are here for this same reason.

I would have done almost anything — short of a threesome — to help out these people.

I did read erotic passages from my book “Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair.” I would like to think it helped, not as a measuring stick by which to size up one’s own sexual life but simply as titillation.

Erotica, and here I’m talking about literary erotica like the kind found in “Free Fall” — is the sex toy you never have to lubricate. It doesn’t make any noise, you can’t turn it on by mistake, and you can pack it in your carryon luggage without fear of discovery. Download it onto your Kindle, for example, and save yourself the embarrassment of displaying its cover to other travelers.

Erotica can be downright devastating, in a good way. From the woman’s point of view, erotica can turn that major sex organ you have — your brain — into a single-minded lust organ that begs immediate and relentless indulgence.

So what I should have said to that earnest and searching man was: Buy my book or others like it. I was sad to see that he left empty-handed with no books, no toys of any kind, no lift to his shoulders. Perhaps he already has these things and was looking for more. He was on a mission, in search of some idea, some tip he hadn’t heard before.

Joan’s tried-and-true advice: Reserve some time for yourself and your lover, then begin the dance…whatever it is. Take it slowly. In time, your desire will catch up. This is what works. It’s an act of faith. It’s a little like Gestalt or cognitive therapy. You fake it till you make it, as the saying goes.

A couple of people did buy my book, and they bought Joan’s groundbreaking self-help book, too. They mentioned that they had a hard time finding erotica that wasn’t vulgar and crude and idiotic. There is good erotica but it’s not mainstream; it’s hard to find. Erotica doesn’t have to be explicit. In a book titled “The Literary Lover” published by Viking in 1993 (in time for a Valentine’s Day many years ago), William Kotzwinkle wrote a short story called “Jewel of the Moon,” about the entire delicious year a young groom spent very slowly seducing his new bride. Kotzwinkle, it may surprise you to learn, is also author of “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.”

. . . . .

Joan Price was my house guest for a few nights. Though Joan was busy promoting her new book, we had time for a walk along the High Line in Chelsea.

. . . . .

There you have it, an erotic story to bring some fun to date night. A good vibrator that isn’t going to conk out on you or burn delicate tissue can cost more than $100. A stimulator for the brain costs less. It’s hard to find but well worth the search.

And it doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition.

You Don’t Say: Dr. Rae Psychoanalyzes V.S. Naipaul

2011-06-21T17:02:00.000-07:00

V.S. requires treatment
for a serious word disorder.
To be blunt,
he doesn't know when
to shut up.

Welcome, Mr. V.S. Naipaul. Please make yourself comfortable. I see that you are in the habit of removing your shoes. This is good.

You have the right idea. Just sit back and relax on my virtual Word Couch. Here is where I muck around in my client’s gibberish, looking for telltale psychology.

One wouldn’t think so, with your Nobel Prize for literature and what we assume is a talent with words, but you are up to your neck in a very funky word hole.

Do you remember saying these things about women writers last week?

“I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

Ah ha! You, too, use words as a way into a person’s psychology.

Women’s writing, you say, reveals “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world.” And you don’t stop there, Mr. Naipaul. “Inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.”

Hold everything! Do you have a license to practice? Or perhaps you think the Nobel Prize gives you liberties?

About your publisher, Mr. Naipaul, you say this: “My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

We are all at the mercy of our words and you have blathered yourself silly. Thank god for Dr. Rae.

Permit me one digression: When is “feminine tosh” not unkind?

“Tosh” means “nonsense,” you know, and could easily be construed here as synonymous with “female.” Not good.

Preliminary diagnosis: Muddle brain.

No problema! Dr. Rae to the rescue of V.S. Naipaul because Nobel laureates get sick sometimes, too.

Let us get on with your evaluation. Please answer the following questions with a yes or no:

Do you and Arnold Schwarzenegger share any forebears?
Do you identify with Popeye the Sailor Man?
Do you dress in a phone booth?
Do you covet John Edwards’s barber?
Are you wearing a crown as we speak?
What are your thoughts on virgins?

Stop it, Mr. Naipual. You may not channel Schwarzenegger’s swagger. Look what you’ve done. You’ve made an unholy mess of my Word Couch.

You suffer from a form of dementia called I am Man, Hear Me Roar. And you’ve roared yourself hoarse, I’m afraid. You are in extremis.

Treatment Options:

Lobotomy: A procedure that involves a sharp instrument and a malfunctioning frontal lobe. This pretty much neutralizes that roar of yours. Don’t give me that look, Mr. Naipaul. You’ve brought this on yourself.

Electroconvulsive Therapy (a k a Shock Treatments or ECT): There’s some loss of memory but Paul Theroux has offered to refresh you on the past. He’s written a book, in fact, that gives the details of how you used to be.

Since I’m handier with electrodes than I am with an ice pick, ECT it is.

Bite down on this tongue depressor, please.

You Don’t Say: Intervention required with Anthony Weiner

2011-06-12T11:17:00.000-07:00

The Weiner Intervention . . .

. . . we can help Weiner get well and it won't cost him a dime.

So much for my day of rest. I must call an emergency session to perform an intervention with Congressman Anthony Weiner.

A NY Times news bulletin tells us that Rep. Weiner has decided to go silent. No more tweets or salacious admissions. He has entered into a treatment program.

No way! Mr. Weiner, come back! Do not throw yourself on the sword of tedious group therapy sessions, communal meals of stovetop macaroni and cheese, weeks of wearing that unpleasant hangdog face and those rounded shoulders of contrition — just so you can escape the wrath of Pelosi et al.

Come to Dr. Rae.

I won’t charge you a dime, you can still have your power protein smoothies, and my psychoanalysis will only take another two minutes. Here’s what we know about the developments thus far from the NY Times:

“Congressman Weiner departed this morning to seek professional treatment to focus on becoming a better husband and healthier person,” said his spokeswoman, Risa Heller. “In light of that, he will request a short leave of absence from the House of Representatives so that he can get evaluated and map out a course of treatment to make himself well.”

Dr. Rae to Rep. Weiner:

There’s no need to pay good money to get evaluated. Just call your wife and ask her what’s wrong with you. This is free and fast and you will be surprised at just how right on she is.

If you don’t want to do that, and who would blame you, simply ask her to hand the phone to Hillary Clinton, with whom your wife is traveling right now. Hillary knows a good deal about such matters. She is, in fact, the all-time expert on the over-exposure of the married male penis. I am sure she will have some very fine thoughts to share.

As for the goal of becoming a better husband, the solution is again short and simple. Reread your marriage vows and do what they say.

Note to universe:

I must at this point congratulate the universe for once again surprising us with an amazing coincidence. That Hillary Clinton and Weiner’s wife are traveling together at this time would seem unbelievable. Yet there we have it — two of our culture's most "betrayed" women setting aside personal issues to serve their country. Meanwhile many of the rest of us suck in breaths of astonishment and on the exhale, whistle the refrain from “Twilight Zone.”

Session over.

You Don’t Say: Psychoanalyzing Alec Baldwin

2011-06-11T10:12:00.000-07:00

Reclining on my virtual Word Couch

today is Alec Baldwin, a celebrity blogger

on Huffington Post. He wrote a piece

about Anthony Weiner, whom he says is

a very busy modern man employing tools

that make instant gratification easier

than trying to get your out-of-sorts wife to have sex.

Alec, welcome to my couch. I’ll tell you right now that I see your column as defensively positioned, asking us to see things from Weiner’s point of view.

Why, for god’s sake? Haven’t we seen enough from his POV?

Let’s get started.

Alec says:

“Weiner is the modern, high functioning man. The fact that he is married is just one, albeit a huge, factor. I know many people who divorce over such issues of online betrayal. Appointment sex with your spouse doesn’t always arrive when you need it most. A modern cell phone, loaded with contacts of willing fellow players, has a table with a red checkered table cloth ready for you at virtually any time.”

Dr. Rae says:

Aye. This dated male point of view — I need sex and I need it now or else I’ll implode — is right out of Mad Men. Back then, men used this dire possibility as a threat to get women to have sex. Sadly, I’ve heard it myself as a young teenager. I envisioned an exploding penis and seminal debris mixed with body parts splattered all over my miniskirt.

Alec, are you in silverback mode here — attempting to resurrect and re-deploy this old canard and link it to the “modern man”? And since when was Weiner desperately looking for sexual relief? What he was doing was showing off and flirting.

As for modern and high-functioning, try putting yourself in the heels of a working mom with a breast pump. Now, that’s high functioning.

Alec says:

“We tell ourselves that these devices help us communicate more effectively. What they actually do is allow us to bypass the person lying right next to us, across the room from us or at an airport heading home to us, in order to meet our immediate, even inconvenient, needs. To bypass their moods, their current view of us and their own desires, or lack thereof.

“Weiner is a modern human being. So he ensnared himself in things that modern humans do. When I first heard about his problems, I snickered and made jokes, too. Now, I'm sad for him, his family, his district and his colleagues.

Let he who is without sin.....”

Dr Rae says:

Alec! Besides the fact that I’m hearing some licking of old wounds here (and, really, it’s actual slurping I’m hearing), whether we, those in a position to judge, have sinned or not is beside the point. Do you want your mate behaving like this, Alec? How about your legislator? How about your mayor? I’m guessing the answer is no. And the reason the answer is no is because seeing your mate’s naked parts texted to others behind your back is not going to help those sour moods and rejections you rued earlier.

In conclusion, Alec, you’ve misplaced your loyalties. And that says something about your own psychology right now. I suggest a follow-up visit before you attempt a run for mayor of NYC.

End of session.

You Don’t Say! Psychoanalyzing Eliot Spitzer

2011-06-10T17:44:00.000-07:00

In virtual repose on my Word Couch this morning is Eliot Spitzer, former NY attorney general and employer of expensive prostitutes. He’s just spoken with Dan Abrams about Anthony Weiner, the NY congressman whose sexual Tweets have gone viral. Spitzer made a few revelatory remarks that, like the Tweets that started all this, are symptomatic of a psychology begging for analysis.

So let us begin!

Eliot Spitzer says

“I sympathize with Anthony Weiner. I know he is going through torment like virtually no other, but his greatest sin from the perspective of the public was not being truthful at the moment of crisis.”

Here we go….

“I sympathize with Anthony Weiner.”

That’s easy. Spitzer identifies with Anthony Weiner. He feels the man’s pain. It’s nice that somebody does, I suppose. But we must not languish in the foggy aromatics of sympathy. Sympathy is (1) all about you, (2) a way to bask in soothing feel-good sounds, (3) a tactic to appear sympathetic yourself, (4) sleight of hand to divert attention from the real issue. If Spitzer weren’t sympathetic, he might simply have said: “Look! That man has gone and tweeted his penis! What’s wrong with him?”

“I know he is going through torment …”

What Spitzer ‘knows’ is the torment he himself endured. He’s referencing his own pain of loss — loss of job, loss of trust, loss of face. He must stop enabling torment and urge Weiner to move on. Weiner has work to do. He must quit his post and find a job, for starters.

…like virtually no other….

It’s probably true — there is no torment like having to see tweets of your penis in virtually every nook and cranny of daily life.

“but his greatest sin from the perspective of the public was not being truthful at the moment of crisis.”

Now we’re getting to the good stuff. Why does Spitzer reference the ‘public perspective’ unless he agrees? But here, at last, is mention of the ‘greatest sin’ and Spitzer does not take the opportunity to state the true nature of the sin.

Here’s what an enlightened Spitzer might have said:

Weiner’s ‘greatest sin’ was agreeing to marry and becoming a congressman when he knew he was incapable of behaving responsibly. He broadened his sin by impregnating his wife while flirting online. To do this he photographed his impregnation device and tweeted it. The lies that followed are beside the point. Lying is what happens when you suddenly get a sense of your deed and realize it’s way too ugly to contemplate much less articulate.

Dr. Rae says: Between the words are the spaces where the self leaks through.

Session over!

How to make good video clips, the biting woman and bad air — all at this year’s BookExpo

2011-06-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

If you love books, then imagine being at the annual BookExpo at the Javits Center where books are hauled in by the truckload, where a nonstop lineup of authors speak and sign their new books, where fascinating panel discussions run in several conference rooms concurrently throughout all four days, where editors and publishers and publicists stand by displays of their books and try to maintain a brave smile hour after noisy hour.

On the down side, it’s pretty overwhelming. Attendance this year (the end of May) was 21,664 people. And…it’s at the Javits Center in NYC, a seedy, dysfunctional building that feels like a subterranean bunker.

As an author and book reviewer, I get the most from the panel discussions and educational sessions that run throughout the annual BookExpo. Leaders in the book business, like Otis Chandler, founder of GoodReads, serve on these panels.

And sometimes it’s uplifting to spend time with others who are passionate about books and who work, in one way or another, on behalf of books. The mantra these days: There will always be books!

But passion has its perils. I heard about one woman who bit the woman in line ahead of her when she saw there was only one free book left on the table. I believe this story because I find the most dangerous place to be in New York City is a line. Line abuse happens all the time and can involve more than verbal haranguing.

At the educational sessions, however, things were a lot less combative. Topics included everything from advanced Twitter and Facebook practices to the latest data on who’s buying e-books.

We learned that the top e-book readers are female fans of romance novels who average 44 years of age. Teenagers and young adults are the least likely to purchase e-books because they are so wired they have e-fatigue. Textbooks, therefore, are among the least purchased type of e-books.

And GoodReads’ founder Otis Chandler spoke about what gets the most attention at GoodReads. Note to authors and publicists: Giveaways are very popular among Chandler’s website users.

Good advice about making video

Another speaker was Hollywood filmmaker Steve Stockman. Stockman has a new book (published by Workman) about making video titled “Shoot Video that Doesn’t Suck.” Everyone who has a video recorder (nowadays, that’s almost anyone with a cell phone) can — and probably should — pay attention to what Stockman has to say. His argument is this: We all know what makes good video because most of us watch TV and see movies. However almost no one makes good video, so that means most of what’s posted never gets seen. Close to 100 percent of the top-viewed videos on YouTube were made by professionals.

Here are a few easy tips that will make a big difference in the quality of your video:

Humans, says Stockman, are like animals. We key into motion and emotion.
Think in shots. Instead of running the camera nonstop, break the shots into 20-second segments. Point, pause, frame your subject matter and shoot, then move on to the next shot.
Don’t start shooting till you see the whites of your subject’s eyes.
Use an external microphone. They cost as little as $25 at BestBuy.
Your videos should be short. Promotional videos, such as book trailers, should run about 2.5 minutes. Ten minutes is a tedious lifetime.
Video is a language that all of us have grown up with and understand. We know good video but most of us don’t speak it well. Pay experts, train yourself or ask for help rather than make something bad. People don’t watch bad video.
Take your video work seriously but have fun with it.
Tell a story with your video piece. Video doesn’t do facts well. Take a series of deliberately aimed shots. Keep them short and dramatic. Miss the eyes and you miss the story.
For more info and a 3-minute how-to video, visit www.stevestockman.com.

Now, for the rant...

I mentioned that the BookExpo was at the Javits Center in NYC. The center bucks the expectation that business will be conducted within its confines. For instance, conference rooms are so deadly drab that they make better sleeping potions than they do arenas for heady discussion. But there are more serious failings:

The center is no incubator of the kind of break-through interactions and discussions you want to see happening at an expensive trade conference. The air is poor and the lighting is bad and the noise from abutting speakers and construction work combine to thwart discussion and sap the energy. There are times when you can’t even hear the speaker.
After a certain point in the afternoons, coffee is unavailable.
Food lines are long. Expect waits of 15 or 20 minutes and do not expect to find a single empty chair in the dining area when you finally do have food in hand.
Food is expensive. Vitamin Water costs $4.50 and it’s hard to find anything to eat under $10 or $12. Forget healthy eating.
There seemed to be an arctic wind blowing.
WiFi costs $30 a day. And don’t expect to be able to receive phone calls or email even if you have a smartphone.
At a book expo, where attendance is predominately female, there are few women’s restrooms.
Many people complained of feeling sick and exhausted. This situation may be due to poor air circulation.
If you decide to attend one of the $40 breakfasts featuring celebrity author speakers, eat first. The orange juice looked orange but tasted like water. The bagels were the feel and consistency of Wonder Bread. Coffee wasn’t good either but many wouldn’t know that because the wait staff didn’t refill coffee, juice or water pitchers.
There’s no logical or centrally positioned space that works as an organizing location for incoming participants. You must know a lot about what you intend to do or see in advance and then follow signs to get there.

Gloria’s Song

2011-03-11T08:31:00.000-08:00

"[Each young woman] is already a unique and valuable person when she’s born; every human being is. Inside each of us is a unique person resulting from millennia of environment and heredity combined in a way that could never happen again and could never have happened before. We aren’t blank slates, but we are also communal creatures who are born before our brains are fully developed, so we’re very sensitive to our environment. The question is: How to find the support and the circumstances that allow you to express what’s inside you?"

Gloria Steinem. She has been my living lesson plan.

Steinem’s early years weren’t easy. She lived in a small travel trailer with her family. They moved around so that her father could sell antiques on the road. There were lots of untethered salesmen in those days. Traveling salesmen fed their families as they whetted America’s appetite for things — early pollinators of the economy.

My own father and his brothers sold record numbers of natural bristle hairbrushes door to door. My significant other told me his father and mother sold pots and pans at house parties by using the pans to prepare a home-cooked meal. This was at a time when they could barely afford food for their two boys and, post war, a scarcity of metal made filling orders difficult. Business was personal back then. It had to be. No television hocked wares. Still, most salesmen did not usually bring their families with them.

Steinem’s mother, Ruth, had a psychological breakdown, after which she was beset by anxiety, depression, delusions, occasional violent behavior and agoraphobia. It was because of this breakdown that Steinem’s father walked away from his family. Steinem, 10 at the time, stepped in as her mother’s caretaker. That was in 1944. They lived in Toledo. To pay for college, Ruth sold the house. Steinem, already a feminist, chose the all-women’s academically demanding Smith College.

My mother was also depressed, violent and agoraphobic, though in my case my mother forbade college. I’d already been given early admission. She wanted me home to care for her. I moved from Santa Barbara to the Florida Gulf Coast and stayed hidden till I turned 18.

I read Steinem’s famous essay about her mother — “Ruth’s Song” — long after I knew of Gloria Steinem, the beautiful and brilliant co-founder of Ms. magazine. The essay stunned me. Steinem was the most powerful, most confident, most articulate and self-composed woman I’d ever known of. As I read “Ruth’s Song,” I compared her disadvantages with mine and saw that hardship and deprivation weren’t necessarily the kisses of death my own mother assured me they were. It’s like I was given another chance.

Things other than a crazy mother allowed me to feel connected to Steinem, too. She is a journalist. So am I. She likes to have a good time. I do that. She made risky choices, such as posing as a Playboy bunny to do an article on what the infamous bunnies had to endure. She took flack for that. My recently published book, “Free Fall,” is, among other things, an attempt to bring to life an immensely erotic experience.

I was one of those women who savored every early issue of Ms. magazine. The biggest and best “click” of all was when Ms. came out for the first time. How wonderful to have this kind of support and all this like thinking at my fingertips. How wonderful to simply know that others out there, like me, existed. Their struggles were my struggles, too.

At the University of New Hampshire in the mid-’70s I joined with an outspoken, some would say radical, group of single mothers, all non-traditional college students on welfare, to help me get through college with an infant daughter in tow. I was their paid spokeswoman and I was a proud member. We boycotted classes taught by professors who used the (unbelievably) sexist textbooks they’d written. We rallied at the State House when Gov. Meldrim Thomson threatened to reduce our welfare grants by 25 percent. My own monthly grant was $129 and my rent was $127. We started a day care, produced a TV documentary of sorts, and provided counseling and referral services. Our group, Disadvantaged Women for Higher Education, was a forceful, positive presence back then, ushering into the mainstream, just like Ms., a new level of expectations for the quality of women’s lives.

And yet, what I most love about Steinem, what connects me on the deepest of all levels is something absolutely elemental. I love the sound of her voice. The minute she begins speaking, it feels as if the voice of reason has arrived. When Steinem enters a conversation, a “ta da” moment is about to explode. We are about to be enlightened.

I saw this phenomenon again recently. She was a panelist on Bill Maher’s talk show on HBO. Her voice is fairly low and she has a way of cutting through and holding her own, regardless of the testosterone-fueled babble or the ego-driven competition. But even there, one of the most competitive seats on television, she carved out her space quickly, efficiently and graciously. The men on either side of her and Maher, too, shifted to a more conversational mode and engaged.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s substance behind that voice of reason. She’s well informed and prepared. She always brings new ideas to the table. She intrigues and educates. Everything is seated in reams of fact. Best of all…her brilliant statements and observations are given entrée to a world stage by way of a voice that is deep, commanding and, most importantly — gloriously confident.

The sound of Gloria Steinem’s voice empowers me. It’s that simple. When she says that women deserve equal pay, for example, it’s not a question. It’s a statement of fact. It’s a lesson for me on trading shame and cowering need for confident assumption of what’s right.

Question: Can the sound of someone’s voice empower?

Answer: When I was preparing to give readings from “Free Fall,” I listened to Steinem’s voice and worked to capture that confident, assertive energy. Yes, it empowers.

Don’t get me wrong. Steinem does not walk on water.

About 18 months ago, I attended a discussion that Steinem participated in. She was a panelist with several other feminists including Isabella Rossellini, More magazine editor Lesley Jane Seymour, and author/editor Suzanne Braun Levine. The women discussed regrets at one point in the conversation and Steinem said, “I still have trouble saying no.”

What?

After all that assertiveness training I made myself endure? After all that pressure to confront? After all my failures and all the guilt that trails after?

On the other hand, she let me off the hook. I was 59 at the time I saw that panel. From that day forward I had a “live” version of Steinem’s voice to replace all those televised appearances and I had permission to falter. Having trouble saying no is still vastly different from not saying no. Yes, saying “no” is hard, even for those with the voice to pull it off.

In talking with a young female law student, I mentioned I’d seen Gloria Steinem. “Who’s that?” she asked. More recently at a dinner party, I mentioned that I was writing a book about a woman who was both a Muslim and a feminist. A young woman at the table asked, “What’s a feminist?”

Here I explain neither feminism nor Gloria Steinem. Those efforts take years and books. Here I try my best to simply say thank you, Gloria Steinem. I’m one of the lucky ones who found a connection in your example. It has helped.

Retrain the brain to expect movement

2011-02-16T13:45:00.001-08:00

I love turtles but I don't want to look like one.

Inertia: A body at rest tends to stay at rest.

Don’t I know it. Especially since my comfort zone — where I live these days — is something akin to a hypnotic state: fingers on keyboard, words sliding from brain to laptop monitor with pauses for “delete.” The only thing is motion is the fizz in my Diet Coke.

With deskwork, especially deskwork when you’re alone at home without others to enliven the atmosphere, you must resist, resist, resist this state of rest. Inertia feels good but it has unfortunate lasting effects. To slip unawares into that category fitness experts term “sedentary” is not good.

Biologist, author and ultra-marathon runner Bernd Heinrich studied metabolism in animals such as the insanely hyperactive hummingbird. He applied what he learned to his mid-life goal of running a 50-plus mile race, something he’d never done before. He substituted running for walking in his day-to-day life. Instead of walking to his car in the morning, he ran. Instead of walking to classes (he was a professor of biology in Vermont at the time), he ran. He ran into the market for milk. He ran from the garage to his house. His body’s default mode, then, became running.

Can desk-bound workers be anything other than sedentary?

I think so. Set your digital watch to go off every hour, get up, move around, lift some light weights, stretch. Good. Now you can sit down and go back to work. Also, try to join me for this 100-day “break a sweat” challenge so you work out at your own pace for 30 minutes a day, as well. And stop loving your office chair.

Fun or depression? This one is easy

2011-02-14T05:10:00.000-08:00

The new Frank Gehry building (directly above)
in Lower Manhattan is quite spectacular
and especially photogenic. On my morning runs,
I often pass by a Gehry building on the West Side Highway (top photo).

I am glad to have made the 100-day anti-inertia pledge. It saved me from what could easily have been a Lost Weekend.

Sunday morning I re-injured my knee after months of knee rehab I devised and conducted on my own. I had carefully, slowly worked up to my old 3-mile jogging loop. I achieved that goal only last week. And…on Friday night just before Jim and I were to make a martini toast to the upcoming weekend, I got one of those emails that make you afraid to read email ever again.

Because of the injury and the email, I wanted to pull the shades and open up “Townie,” the mesmerizing book by Andre Dubus III I’m reviewing this week. Reading, especially when a book review is due Wednesday, is a great excuse to duck out for a long break. Another attractive option was a 12-hour Law & Order marathon. And the Saturday night dinner invitation I had once been looking forward to began to feel like maybe I’d be doing everybody a favor if I just pulled the covers over my head and waited to see if, as Jim suggested, “this too shall pass.”

But I’d just started this “break a sweat and defy inertia” vow. Wasn’t the pledge made for days just like these? The pledge: 30 minutes of sweaty activity daily. It is meant to keep me and those who join me moving because there isn’t enough time spent in mindless, joyful moving each day. The pledge gets you out there, doing things that approximate living beyond the desk and the couch. It should feel like play. The point is to get a little sweaty, feel good and have some fun doing it. Try not to think of it as exercise but as fun.

So, wanting to put the email behind me, I asked Jim if he’d like to take a walk on Saturday morning. We went all over Greenwich Village. We picked up roasted coffee beans at Porto Rico and fresh vegetables at Chelsea Market and doughnuts at Donut Pub. Undoubtedly the doughnuts were the best part. I had, over the course of the day, 3 or 4 doughnut holes, and it was great. When we got back to the apartment I spent at least 45 minutes cutting up lots of veggies for a salad I promised to bring to dinner — not that green pepper, cukes or sugar snap peas could offset the fat in those crispy doughnut holes. (Theory: doughnut holes are more delicious than a doughnut because there's more surface area to absorb hot fat.)

Sunday after my knee injury, I took naproxen to reduce the swelling and then we set off for Lower Manhattan to see the breathtaking Frank Gehry building under construction and the progress of the ground zero memorial. September marks the 10^th anniversary of the destruction of the twin towers and the plan is to have some part of the memorial completed. More on this another time, but here’s a link to an article about the new Gehry building, published last week in the NY Times. http://nyti.ms/eDeVIW

Good luck to everyone this week. I intend to keep posting about fun activities that get me up and away from the desk and the emails I can’t do a thing about.

If you would like to make a guest blog appearance to write about something fun you, please let me know. I’d like for others to share this space. Snow shoeing in Vermont or Dixville Notch? Line dancing in California? Kayaking in the Keys? Tennis in Montecito? There’s room for you here! I know you’re out there having fun!

Office chair or butt suction cup?

2011-02-11T11:32:00.000-08:00

For Jack LaLanne: 100 Sweaty Days

Day No. 2

Beware the term "ergonomically" correct.
What that really means is comfort so fabulous
that you want to work and work and work....
and never get off your spreading hind quarters

My anti-inertia campaign — get up and get moving — is really about defying gravity. Today I’m paying tribute to one of the greatest gravity enablers of all times: the office chair.

If your livelihood has anything at all to do with a chair and a desk, for instance, you know that pleasant feeling of a butt nicely settled into a molded seat. Even the thought of a trip to the bathroom or lunchroom might encounter a bit of resistance. Oh, but I’m sooooo comfy right here.

In fact, the office chair is right up there with the French fry as a work of genius meant to do us in. An office chair conspires with inertia. An office chair is the boss’s suction cup: holding you tight to the task at hand.

In this amazing time of revolt and change, I say: Put the office chair in its place. Get up and move. 30 minutes of activity today during which time you note a bit of sweat percolating forth. Show that chair who’s really boss.

Day 2:

Today I did 20 minutes of upper body exercises (some on the floor) with Kathy Smith (ancient DVD). Next time I try this I’ll vacuum the rug first. To come today: 10 minutes of ab crunches. I promise.

For Jack LaLanne: 100 Sweaty Days

2011-02-10T11:31:00.000-08:00

Jack LaLanne said he never liked working out.
He did it to stay fit and healthy.
Dying, he joked, would ruin his image.

Sweaty Day No. 1: 2.10.11

In winter it’s just too easy to blow off exercise. If you read Mark Bittman’s blog (my favorite food writer and a runner but not much of a blogger) on the Runner’s World website, you’ll see that even people like Bittman, who are very much in the public eye, can go embarrassingly inert. Not good.

This winter I have maintained a sluggish habit of jogging three days a week and that’s only because everything is so easy when I’m in Manhattan. There’s a fabulous path that’s snow and ice free along the Hudson River mere minutes from the apartment. And there’s a gym that costs me $10 a year that’s just around the corner. It even has free yoga. Once in a while I actually go there and run on the treadmill or try out the Stairmaster, which I don’t understand but it still hurts.

But my exercise is sluggish because I have a knee injury and because I am lazy and because it is cold. For me, cold is no excuse because I have all the right gear. For example, it’s cold and breezy and feels like 12 degrees right now. On my sluggish trot just now, I was way too hot. I had become a mobile sauna and my glasses fogged up.

I tallied up my activity this morning and I learned that I move fast — relatively speaking — about three hours a week. I walk a lot, but I don’t count that because days can go by, as well, when I don’t leave my desk except to eat and sleep. I tell anyone who will listen to me complain: I’m embracing my inner lump. I’m lumpish. I’m rolling to a stop.

If I consult activity charts, I’m told I’m sedentary.

The other day I made a Facebook posting that said: I’ve spent the better part of the past 24 hours in front of my computer. And my butt didn’t even hurt. Since my bed is next to my computer I literally don’t even have to stand up straight to move from sleep mode to writing mode. I just sort of roll to work.

This, of course, has to stop. We already know that the more time you spend sitting, the more likely you are to die. Robert Parker, the Boston mystery writer, died at his desk. It’s an honorable death but wouldn’t you rather die running and old? Or at least older than you are right now?

So I’ve decided to declare a “100-day Jack LaLanne Tribute Challenge” in honor of that very likeable and committed “father of the fitness movement” who died on January 23 at the age of 96, and who once showed me how to lift weights — not that I do that with any regularity, either.

I’m going to go outside and work up a sweat every single day for 100 days in hopes that I can reboot myself and in hopes that I can wrestle my inner lump back into its lump cave. I figure if I post this resolution on my blog, which I had abandoned along with everything else because of deadline work, at least I’ll have that pressure to perform. Also, it would really really be fun for others to join me in this challenge and make comments about what it’s like.

Want to?

I’ll post updates now and then about the joys of living vertically. Please feel free to join me. Sometimes maybe we can even go outside and play together!

A Weight Watcher’s Reverse Resolutions

2010-12-29T09:41:00.000-08:00

1. I won’t eat cold beans from a can.

2. I won’t hide in the pantry when I lick icing off the beaters.

3. I won’t complain about audacious fast food. That would be lying.

4. I won’t condemn that new Friendly’s 1,500-calorie grilled cheeseburger melt — a burger encased in two grilled cheese sandwiches. They’ve installed defibrillators under the seats, worst-case-scenario.

• • • I wish I'd thought of it • • •

5. I won’t store a Snicker’s bar in my glove compartment to prevent starvation in case I’m stranded in snow or have to wait a long time at a red light.

6. I won’t buy canned frosting and ask my boyfriend to eat it while I watch.

7. I won’t substitute Spam for my Easter ham. Period. End of discussion.

8. I won’t serve poutine (more when you get to No. 13) to guests.

9. I won’t pry the lithium battery out of my Weight Watcher’s scale again this year.

10. I won’t buy peanut butter. Sorry. Scratch that.

11. I won’t eat peanut butter from a butcher knife. A bread knife is OK though.

12. I won’t promise anything I can’t do. So No. 2, the one about poutine, I’m having some second thoughts. Cooking Light has a great recipe for poutine, an ingenious French Canadian dish made of French fries, brown gravy and cheese curds. It’s a good workout for the heart muscle, I’m pretty sure. So poutine’s OK too.

Happy Birthday Jim! and Happy Anniversary Rae! and a little more Free Fall

2010-12-02T12:26:00.000-08:00

A fabulous picture of Jim,
who celebrates a birthday today.
Credit: Ruth Schneider,
photographer and good friend

Jim:

Our first time alone together was on the phone. It had never been just you and me.

I was at the beach in Rockport and you were in your Chelsea apartment eating toast. Hurrah for the cell phone. We planned the call after you sent an email on December 2, 2005, that said, “I want to talk.” I thought, “Oh how sexy is that?” Two days later, December 4, we talked. It was, as you well know, unseasonably warm.

Before I forget the obvious: Lots has happened since. Lots has changed.

What has not?

Try this exercise: Say anything. Go ahead. Say it’s raining. Say you are running out to put quarters in the meter. Say my vegetable soup is fuckin’ delicious. I look at you and think, “How sexy is that?” You talk. I like.

I credit your 67^th birthday with our love affair. It’s the anniversary of your birth, yes, but also of ours. For as long as we are a “we,” I will love your birthday. Cake! A martini!

So sad that I’m in Rockport and you are in Chelsea. What’s a martini without Jim? You know the answer. I abstain.

2010. Five fast years hence. I knew it would be like this, speedy and fun and a little daunting with all the changes.

2010, where “new” is supplanted by “cherish.” Where the sound of your voice lives in me like a second heartbeat. Where “voice” continues to be the glue. Where, when I hear your tired voice on the phone saying “sleep well” late at night, I hear your sexy bed voice.

December 2. Happy Birthday. Happy Anniversary. Happy. For as long as we are.

That loving feeling!

2010-11-28T13:30:00.001-08:00

During the holidays, we go
to great lengths to recapture
that sense of joy and connection
we first experienced as children.

Here we are once again. The holidays. They bring us home. We might not really travel home and we might not define the destination as home. But we are programmed to want those places in our hearts and our thoughts where love resides. We want to re-experience old and pleasing connections to community. We need and want that feeling of belonging. And though most of us move on, relocate, create new families and select new friends, we invest great energy in building familiar networks. And now here we are, for a month or so, returning to the touchstone. It’s as if we can really go back – to that feeling of kin all about us. The warm bed. The full belly. The prospect of another incredible tomorrow. That place where we learned how to love.

Holidays slow us down enough so we can notice that, in fact, such feelings of community exist all about us. I found it again last night at Cape Ann Cinema in Gloucester, Mass. The cinema is located in a big room above a used record store. It’s a quirky movie theater run very well by a young man named Rob with longish hair and a passion for cinema.

Here are five reasons to celebrate places like this, where the makings of a joyful community are generously and cleverly provided. Forgive the political statement, but it’s a perfect fusion of commerce and community. More like this, please!

(1) Multi-purpose movies

Improves reading skills (subtitles): The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Transports us to new places: The Secret of Kells. Makes us think: Freakonomics. Helps others: Race to Nowhere (education fundraiser). Provokes laughs: Four Lions. Gives us art: Shakespeare in Cinema—Love’s Labour’s Lost and Opera in Cinema—Valkyrie.

(2) Something for every body

A big room full of couches, comfortable accent chairs, recliners, even wooden desks for those with perfect posture or type A personalities. You can’t help but get comfortable!

(3) Popcorn

Per the owner: “Half the oil, organic, delicious.” More to the point, per me: I’d go to this theater just to eat the popcorn. It’s also half the price of the chains and includes about 20 types of seasoning. There’s a stack of big bowls so you can each have your own bowl of popcorn. For popcorn buffs and control freaks, this feature alone is worth the price of admission.

(4) Feeling “tucked in”

No blinding overhead lighting. Floor lamps strategically positioned. As previews draw to a close, proprietor quietly moves about the large room, turning off a lamp here and there. A gentle refocusing and there you are, in the dark and engaged with your movie. Wait a minute, is that a fleece blankie I see on the back of the recliner in front of me?

(5) Among friends

We sit among neighbors, family, friends. This is quite different from stadium seating that positions us so we don’t even see each other. Here we are just one big living room of like-minded people. When we leave, we help each other with our coats and hold the door for each other.

And we all say thank you to Rob, who, it seems, never lost that loving feeling!

How I Review Books — or — Do I Need a 12-Step Program?

2010-11-18T12:50:00.000-08:00

• • •
You can attend readings every night in New York City.
More, if you are so inclined. This reading, at Word in Brooklyn,
was in a hot, crowded basement. The editors came
with the authors and served wine and cookies.
Jim & I were lucky to get seats.
• • •

Anna Quindlen, the former NY Times columnist, once said that her work gave her the opportunity to deeply consider what might have otherwise been a trivial or passing moment, event or experience. Writing — thinking in a careful and deliberative way — allows you to draw out the significance of what interests you in that moment. Otherwise, she said, whatever it is would pass as unnoticed and unremarkable.

The same can be said for reviewing books. It’s a great way to get into the book and formulate a considered understanding.

The process is labor intensive. I saw this from a new perspective last year when I attended a few panel discussions led by some of the country’s leading book bloggers. They are a lively and passionate group. Many are young mothers who squeeze the work into crazed schedules. Authors and publishers seek bloggers out because they can get a buzz going. To help that along, authors like to arrange “blog tours” in which a different blogger reviews their book each day or week. Managing requests and scheduling reviews are among book bloggers’ tasks, along with the hard work of getting review books from publishers.

This blog entry explains my system for reviewing a book a week. Other freelancers perform a version of this method. What I detail is but one small part of an enormous writing/production/marketing effort that concludes when you reach for a copy of “Decline of Fishes” by Gloucester, Mass., author Peter Anastas, the book I reviewed this week.

One. Finding out about new books

Most people review books that have come out within the last few weeks — while they’re still on bookstore shelves and in the “new” section in libraries. I relax that rule on occasion because most books can be purchased online.

I usually get to one reading a week. Here in Manhattan, authors on book tours pass through like water under the George Washington Bridge. My hometown library and Toad Hall bookstore — in Rockport MA — also present excellent and ambitious reading series. Sometimes I hear the author I am about to read. I take notes and quote him or her if it’s appropriate.

To stay one step ahead, I subscribe to Publishers Weekly (around $170 a year) and I also read the NY Times book reviews during the week and on Sundays, along with a host of other publications including the NY Review of Books, Time Out New York, Entertainment Weekly, the New Yorker, New York, and more. It takes a big chunk of time to go through the papers and magazines I’ve accumulated over the week. Friends, NPR, authors via email, conferences, and the entire online world provide information on new books. I still go to libraries and bookstores and enjoy browsing. Despite all this, many local and regional books never get any notice at all. That’s where I come in.

Two. Ordering books

Requesting books from publishers requires a system. Publicists, publishers, email and mailing addresses come and go. Finding contact information from a publisher’s website is sometimes like mining for coal. You have to go deep. Some still want requests in writing – faxed or mailed on your publication’s letterhead. Others accept emails but reply only if the book is in trouble. Publishers are far more careful about who they mail review copies to in these hard times. Time, patience and persistence are key to the reviewer’s success obtaining review copies.

Three. Reading the book

If I don’t get the book I ask for, often I’ll buy it. I review books I want to read. It’s fun and easy to write clever negative reviews but I see myself as an advocate, not a teacher or critic. I do include criticisms and I do review the books of people I know.

I start reading the book I select on Wednesday evening or Thursday. I divide the number of pages by the number of days I have to read the book. If I skip a reading day, I have to read twice as much the next day — usually late afternoons and after dinner. As wasteful as it is, I mark up books.

Four. Writing the review (more on this next time)

It takes me two or three hours to write a review. I save the last chapter to read before I write so that I can get my head back into the book and I look over my notes. I file my review before noon on Wednesday.

Five. Posting the reviews

Once my review is published, I’ll often post it on Amazon, Scribd, my own website, etc. When papers outside of the area publish the review, I get Google Alert notices. I go to one of the websites displaying the review, copy the URL, shorten it using bit.ly and then post the link on Facebook, Twitter, etc. I must send the link, and sometimes the hard copy to the publishers, though they, too, use Google Alerts to track books/authors.

Six. Distributing surplus books

I donate books I don’t review or haven’t marked up to the Rockport library. They can shelve these or sell them at one of their fundraisers. Books I’ve marked up, I take to the fabulous Rockport transfer station. They have a small building dedicated solely to book swaps.

For most professional reviewers this process is rote. Many take book assignments and do not go through this process. I prefer selecting the books I review so that I can pay attention to some of the local and regional authors who might otherwise go unnoticed.

Why I review books every week for free…and usually pay for them myself

2010-11-10T13:01:00.001-08:00

The Happy Hooker and friends at a reading
to sell books at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan.
Many books are sold outside of bookstores.

We want to believe that good books rise to the surface, that good books will find the readership they deserve. Yet I know that’s asking a lot of books these days.

Consider the following (culled this morning from the Web):

o About 300,000 books are published each year in the United States. Approximately half this number includes textbooks and other non-consumer books.

o Publishers Weekly, a go-to publication in the industry that reviews books about 3 months before they come out, reviews about 7,000 titles a year or less than .04% of new consumer books.

o A handful of large publishing companies account for nearly 80% of all U.S. book sales. A successful fiction book sells 5,000 copies; nonfiction 7,500 copies. The “average” book sells 500 copies.

o About half of the books meant for retail sales are sold in bookstores. Less than a quarter of new books are sold online, though this number does not include e-books.

o A typical Barnes and Noble store stocks about 150,000–200,000. Only half (or fewer) books aimed at consumers get into bookstores. And even if the bookstore carries a new book, it probably won’t stay on the shelf for long.

Note: I didn’t fact check though I used figures I found cited in a number of sources. I also noted that Web users quote from each other. One number, reported authoritatively, can wind up in untold number of documents. Further, I looked at postings from 2008 on. As you know, what’s listed above is changing as we speak. I’ve read this week that Amazon/Kindle claims great strides in e-book sales and further declines in “real” book sales. On the other hand, some in the industry claim that Amazon’s figures are misleading. FYI: Re. paid books available at Amazon: For every 10 books Amazon sells, it sells 6 Kindle editions.

Yet I point to these numbers for the statement they make, generally, about getting a new book into readers’ hands.

What the numbers suggest is that most books get very little attention from “traditional” print media sources — magazines and newspapers. And a large number of new books never make it into bookstores. Despite the realities, most authors are sorely disappointed when they realize no one is going to review their book and they can’t even find their book listed on Amazon, much less sitting smartly on a B&N bookshelf.

Authors need help getting the word out. Even the local papers, as desperate as they are for readers, refuse to publish book reviews. This lack of advocacy for the written word perplexes me. Shouldn’t newspapers and magazines be in the business of celebrating books and writers? Isn’t a book reader more likely to be newspaper reader?

I once interviewed a bookstore proprietor in New England. In the course of our discussion, I mentioned that a new book by a writer just down the street from her store had just been published. She had no idea.

True, the author could have stopped by but this conversation made an enormous impact on me. Publishing a book is way too much like that proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it.

An author spends years of his/her life writing a book. An editor takes it over and spends a good many months on the review and editing process. Other experts — marketers and booksellers and graphic artists — are called in to further the publication process. Trees are cut down, ink is poured into press reservoirs and books are printed, packaged, shipped and …. sold??? A book is perhaps one of the most undervalued products in our degraded economy.

Why are newspapers and magazines important to authors? There are plenty of arguments that say social media is the way to get the word out these days. Yes, it probably helps, especially if you’re savvy in these ways and more so if your audience is tweeting and posting to Facebook regularly.

But printed book reviews are still very important because many book readers still read newspapers and magazines. Did you know that as many as 80% of families did not buy a book this year? The pool from which authors draw readers is already ridiculously shallow. Authors need a hand from the obvious places, places where readers already turn.

Since that discussion with the independent bookstore owner, I’ve made it my mission to review books by local and regional authors. For years I received a stipend for my weekly reviews but that has since changed. I work for a different, larger newspaper chain now and I no longer ask for compensation for my reviews because I am afraid my weekly column will no longer appear if the newspaper editor is expected to pay for it from her dwindling budget. Further, because of cost cutting at book publishers everywhere, getting review copies is much more difficult. I end up buying most of the books I review for free!

Next time

I’d like to write my next column about what goes into producing these weekly gratis book reviews. I’ll do so if I’m not distracted by something else that requires blogging.

If you have something to say about book reviews, by all means, please post a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

Hairdresser Appreciation Day

2010-10-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

The first person I told about my love affair was Jeffrie, my hairdresser.

Jeffrie was 250 miles away from where I was conducting this secret, inspired affair, so I stopped everything, found a note card in a corner market, and wrote him.

Jeffrie. Thank you for the gorgeous haircut. I’m in NYC — just went to a Fifth Avenue gallery opening — and everybody had great hair. I want you to know that mine’s better. But, oops, it’s getting a bit roughed up at the moment. Wait! Yes! It still looks great! More later.

If context is needed, here it is: My mother, upon giving birth to me, took one look and screamed. “Good god. I’ve delivered an ape.” It was the only time she ever fainted.

I come from a family where hair has a mind of its own. It’s more untamed mascot than crowning glory. Hair billows from our heads at the rate of an inch a month. It explodes up and out and not so much down. The hair goes in all directions like … well … like nothing else, though tornadoes and grizzly bears come to mind. We could smother a lover with a toss of our head. The Padilla elders, therefore, had no choice. They seized one of the daughters, smuggled her out of her college dorm, and forced her into hairdressing school. She was installed in a special room they added onto the garage and put in charge of Padilla hair. My mother drove me there on Saturdays and said: Do something. My resentful aunt threw scissors into the maelstrom and we Padillas got one version or another of the family shearcut.

Jeffrie, though, never flinched when I walked into his salon after an especially bad drubbing on Boston’s renowned and pricy hairdresser row — Newbury Street, of all places. “I can make you look prettier,” he said. I loved his attitude and I loved the thousand layers that seemed to say to my Padilla hair: I see your inner beauty. But you must comply.

My mother, upon giving birth to me,
took one look and screamed.
“Good god. I’ve delivered an ape.”
It was the only time she ever fainted.

I tended to Jeffrie like I would an African violet or a slow-stirred risotto — dutifully and with great regard. I made a habit of searching high and low for the best birthday card on the face of the Earth. I did this once a year for one person only: The man who knew how to cut my hair. He got 20 percent tips, even if he was the salon owner. He got my best stories. He got all the praise I could muster. He got 100 percent of my loyalty.

Well. The love affair moved from secret to out-in-the-open to cohabitation. During this three-year period of the total destruction of my old life and the slow and scary restructuring of a new life, I realized: Rae, you can no longer afford to make trips of 250 miles just to get your roots touched up or your bangs trimmed. You are going to have to find another Jeffrie.

Women. Believe me, I know the score. I’m a submissive in the Padilla school of hair control, otherwise known as complete and total annihilation of hair. Hair style, in my lexicon, didn’t exist before Jeffrie.

I thought there could be no other Jeffrie. Women have their Jonathans and their Suzanne’s and their Paulo’s. I had my Jeffrie. These are constants, like breath or chocolate or William Shatner. Pardon me. Hasn’t there always been William Shatner?

And there must always be Jeffrie. Unless you quit your job and move in with your lover 5 hours by trains south of Jeffrie’s salon beside a not-so-great sub shop.

After more than a year of transitional haircuts of all sorts, I’ve come to a state of peace with my newest hairdresser, a true artist named Lam. He is a sculptor of hair. He cuts three dimensionally, surrounding his client with mirrors and checking all angles as he works.

When I first began to talk with Jim about quitting my job and living on less, he asked me what expenses I thought I’d have. I didn’t say mortgage payment or car insurance, I said Jeffrie.

We all need the help of a few others to live our best, most accomplished life. I need an editor. A handful of amazing friends. My lover. My daughter.

And I need my hairdresser, the person who takes a look at me and says, “I see you as you want to be seen. I get it. I’m investing my effort, my reputation, all my considerable talents in you. Toss that head of yours. Go ahead. Forget yourself. I’ve got your back.”

Book Rave: "Better Than I Ever Expected"

2010-10-22T07:23:00.000-07:00

I am pretty sure that none of Joan Price’s books should ever go out of print (she writes about fitness and sexuality), but the one I value most right now is “Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex after Sixty.” I am her audience and I love the way she talks to me. She’s heartfelt, smart, caring and she knows herself and her subject extremely well. I wish everyone could own a copy of this book and I’ll explain why.

First -- “Better Than I Ever Expected” was published in 2006. I should add that Seal Press also published my book “Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair” and I admire this publisher very much. My enthusiasm shows but, the way I look at it, we owe it to the world to share good and worthy things.

What man who wants good sex wouldn’t read this
from cover to cover and then send Joan
a thank you note, chocolates and flowers?

Joan’s topics in “Better Than I Expected” include dating, “sexually seasoned women,” our bodies, fitness and exercise, sex as we age, sex toys and solo sex, ways to spice up your relationship, resources, lovemaking strategies (“stoking the fire”). And more.

Joan’s book is supposed to be about sex after 60, but a good deal of what Joan talks about has value no matter your age. If you think about sex and wish you knew more, if you value your sexuality and want some kind of orientation as to where you stand among your peers, or if you would love a little nudge to help you act on your sexuality a little more assertively, then log onto Amazon.com right now and order this book. Joan’s insights and her research will supply you with important support, grounding and knowledge. She writes from her own experience and from the point of view of the many people — regular folks and experts in the field — she’s interviewed for this book.

“Better Than I Ever Expected” is also a fun and engrossing read. Once you have it in hand, you’re not going to be able to put it down.

The day that Robert walked into my line-dance class, my hormones thought they were twenty years old again. His smile, fit body, and grace of movement caught my eye immediately.

Then, when he started to dance, his years of tap, modern dance, and ballet training were revealed in every movement, and I was lost at sea. His nimble feet, muscled thighs, and sensually mobile hips commanded my attention. I wanted to touch the inviting curl of chest hair that peeked through the open top buttons of his shirt. I met his dazzling blue eyes and pretended to breathe. For the rest of the evening, I kept losing my place in the dance I was teaching because I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

Robert kept coming to class and danced into my heart.

And though Seal Press’s amazing books are for women and by women, I highly recommend that men interested in good hot sex pick this up. It’s a treasure trove. There’s a wealth of information here, but also, there’s a smart and well-informed woman who knows herself well explaining sexuality, physicality and sensuality from a woman’s point of view. What man who wants good sex wouldn’t read this from cover to cover and then send Joan a thank you note, chocolates and flowers?

I love books. I am quite happy when I have a book in my lap and a cup of tea or a glass of wine at my side. This is my comfort zone but it’s also a lively place of great discovery, adventure and entertainment. Naturally I think that books that have been out a few years — be it “Moby-Dick” or “Better Than I Expected” — retain and often increase in value. Joan has a new book coming out in the spring of 2011 and I’m excited for her and for her readers. But I hope no one loses sight of what we already have in hand.

Verboten? Not really

2010-09-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

The "Exposing a Difficult Past" memoir panel
at the Brooklyn Book Festival Sunday.
From the left, Darin Strauss, Kathryn Harrison,
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Nelson George and Piper Kerman.

What is unmentionable in public is, nonetheless, fair game in print.

This past weekend I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival. One of their first panels sounded especially intriguing. A group of well-known memoir writers was to discuss what it was like to write about events most people don’t even speak of out loud.

I’m talking about such matters as a secret battle with depression and drug addiction, a family torn apart by AIDS, an upstanding woman’s year spent in prison, a cyclist’s death after veering into a writer’s car (from the writer’s point of view) and, most horrific of all in terms of societal taboos, a young woman’s sexual relationship with her father. Kathryn Harrison did this last thing and wrote about it in “The Kiss,” a book I’d reviewed in the late ‘90s when it came out. I also referenced “The Kiss” in my book proposal for “Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair” and considered it one of my models.

I couldn’t have known, but Harrison and I have more in common than just telling very personal things to the whole world.

When explaining why she wrote about her incestuous relationship, she said: I was blessed. I was totally unconscious about what I was doing to myself. I wrote without thinking about it and I didn’t think about what would happen.

People I meet are similarly curious: What were your intentions? What do your friends think?

I was a little more cognizant about my purposes than Harrison. I wanted to include erotica in “Free Fall” because I was having what could only be described as a torrid affair. And sexual activity was a catalyst to what followed — a total jettisoning of life as I had been living it for the past two decades.

The sex was fun and sobering at the same time. The element of abandon, something my lover Jim was aware was happening to me during sex, was something I could recognize as important and transformative. I could stop thinking, let go and just be. How novel is this state of being for a middle-aged woman! How pleasurable! Jim gave me this opportunity to let go of a very challenging existence and our sexual activity showed me the way.

The sex scenes in “Free Fall” are strategically placed and though brief they are explicit. I describe them not in graphic terms but in emotional and psychological terms. Sex, in this type of literature, is metaphor. I loved writing it and admit that I was and am very turned on by my own writing. I loved the times, as well, when I could present a completed chapter to Jim, with its erotic parts, to see what he thought. It was fun but, like Harrison, I simply didn’t think too much about it.

That changed when I discovered that my book had been classed as “erotica,” as I’ve written about before. My worries had to do with marketing my book, making use of my mostly male network of published writers and figuring out how to transition intellectually from selling a memoir to selling erotica. I was doomed with that classification, or so I thought. My publicist and editor did their best to help me adjust my thinking: Things are going to be fine. Not to mention, sex sells. It will be OK. You’ll see.

I’ve handled it. My male writer friends/colleagues disappointed me. They stayed away from endorsements or public gestures despite promises of help. Many men friends, on the other hand, wrote thoughtful letters about their own sexual lives and their positive responses. I’ve been interested and impressed by their openness. One thing I still worry over and work at: How do I stimulate sales? Well, we are all trying our best. Promotion, too, is another story for another day.

I still don’t dwell on the erotica in “Free Fall.” When asked how I feel about having such personal information shared publicly, I answer truthfully: I don’t. It was writing. I did it. It’s all there, between the covers, so to speak. And I’m out here, writing, living, moving on.

The sex belonged there. I did what a writer would do, or I should say, what I needed to do as a writer. There was and still is an unconscious aspect to it. I occasionally wonder if those sexual revelations are in any way defiant, anti-social aspects of behavior. I may appear contrite and conformist and gushy-grateful, but I’m counter-culture all the way.

A few months ago, I asked our library director in my town of Rockport what people were saying privately to her. Her answer: I’ve heard people wonder why you couldn’t have written it as fiction.

Like Harrison, much of my fiction is informed by my life. But I wanted to tell this story as truth in case there was one woman out there trapped by circumstances she thought she couldn’t escape. I wanted to show that you take what’s given and you use it to make a change. I wanted to show the value of sex. I wanted to say that sex matters and be heard. I own this story.

Sex is important. Or it can be. It is often the start of a new beginning whether or not we openly acknowledge it. Sex is, for women, probably one of the greatest of all life-changers right up there with education and having children. We meet a man (or a woman), we are attracted, we get intimate. Whoa! What power. What force. It’s all too much. So we create some rules around sex. Society gets a toehold. Order is established, more or less.

And books get written that challenge our tidy constructs.

A little like Durga

2010-09-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

Durga has 10 arms, great compassion
and an ability to soothe
in times of stress. In other words,
like women everywhere, she is a equipped to multi-task.

Rae right now: Happy. Anxious. Focused. Hungry. Sore. Frustrated. Guilty. Tired.

Guilt is never not on the list. Pretty much the same is true of hunger. Always guilty. Always hungry.

I’m not bad at playing host to joy and misery all in the same 5-minute span. My memoir “Free Fall” is a good example of simul-emoting but I contend that most women are pretty good at simul-anything. This skill takes many forms, from multi-tasking to multi-emoting to multi-perception. Yes, children, we do have eyes in the backs of our heads.

Out of necessity (that is, because no one else is taking care of important business) we developed that part of our brains that allows us to multi-task. We routinely walk around with 50+ to-do items of unequal importance in our heads. Tasks range from remove rubber band from wrist … to blog (doing that) … to get plums and sea salt … to pee immediately … to get this cat hair off my black T-shirt before heading out for said salt … to inquire as to the status of my book proposal. And so it goes, from the petty to the life-altering all right here right now.

Think yoga: We are masters of the multi-task form. Do we not console and assert simultaneously? Do we not frost the cake as we lick the bowl? Do we not love a good simultaneous orgasm when we can get one? And whenever feasible, we seek the singular experience made up of eating and talking and drinking with friends. This experience is called Joy, with a capital “J.” If a kid or a lover calls while we are so engaged, sure, no problema, lay it on me.

Women don’t have to be told: We personify the mode known as many. Or, think myth and religion: Medusa, Hydra, the goddess Durga, Teotihuacan Spider Woman. Not all positive, to be sure, but when you’re multi-tasking the smile tends to strain. People notice.

Have you never seen a woman drive and apply mascara, for instance? Not recommended, to be sure, but there it is: X-treme multi-tasking as the world is my witness.

Mixing it up can be a healthy thing. Studies show that people who eat just one food at a time, protein, for instance, from their dinner plates before digging into the next thing, the starch component, for instance, have a greater probability of being psychotic.

I contend that researchers have a disproportionate need to identify links between food and behavior. Worse, they scour our psyches to find links between our mothers and our psychoses. So, caution, please. A pinch of salt when espousing scientific theories about eating behaviors or moms.

Just a few hours ago I realized I was experiencing what was looking more and more like a sleepless night. Oh well. I got out of bed at 4 am, stretched out on the couch, fidgeted, thought about things, got up, fed the cats, washed last night’s remaining dinner dishes, mulled the situation, petted a cat, on and on. I pouted. I sighed. I fretted. I enjoyed a good cup of coffee.

Life is complicated, more so as we age. Yet I’m calmer. The goal, perhaps, is an overlay of contentment as we push on, vacillate between conundrums, appreciation, guilt, frustration, pleasure. It’s all there all the time. Durga, with 10 arms and the wherewithal to intervene in stressful situations, lend me a hand.

Afterbite™, please

2010-09-01T08:11:00.000-07:00

Q: Who goes to movies
in NYC these days?

A: Bedbugs

We are having a bedbug infestation here in NYC. It’s a fairly clandestine menace, worse than the Invisible Man, by far, but not as bad as that salmonella there in your egg whites.

To make matters worse, I’m scratching all the time. I hasten to add, it’s poison ivy. I got a case of it this past weekend while felling small shrubs, yanking out entrenched bittersweet and weeding the Rockport backyard. Like everything else, poison ivy has taken on a new vigor due to global warming. It’s more poisonous and more prevalent.

I look like a bedbug dining hall. Not good.

Even though it’s going up to 97 degrees today, I wonder: (A) Should I wear long sleeves? (B) Should I go to see the new George Clooney movie I had promised myself as a reward for waking up, going straight to my computer and dashing off an honest review of Tess Gerritsen’s newest suspense novel “Ice Cold”? For good measure, I cleaned the cat litter, worked on (this) blog and sent a book proposal to my agent. I deserve George Clooney.

Why all the hand-wringing about movies and the heat index?

(A) If you admit to bedbugs or look like you have bedbugs, your social life is over. I need a social life. Bedbugs are the modern-day version of shunning. Got bedbugs? Go away.

(B) Movie theaters have bedbugs and one in Times Square had to close to properly fumigate. Some people refuse to go to movies, or at least refuse to sit down once there.

Routing out the bedbugs is expensive and exhausting, I would imagine. I’m not up to the task and therefore insist that no bedbugs traverse either of my thresholds. You would need to summon the zeal of a Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau if you intend to rid your domicile of the tenacious bedbug. You must hunt them down where they sleep, which is in dark crevices in secret places. They are the size of a lentil or thereabouts when mature and they are red, redder if they’ve just feasted on you. They can live a year without eating! And coolest of all, according to Wikipedia, they are traumatic inseminators:

All bedbugs mate by traumatic insemination. Because the female has no genital opening, the male pierces her abdomen with his hypodermic genitalia and ejaculates into the body cavity. Especially desperate males sometimes mistake other males for females and fatally wound the latter in the abdomen.

Oh please! Hypodermic genitalia!

Why are we worried about a little itching when there are hypodermic genitalia on the loose?

It gets worse. If you read this carefully, you will come to realize that there is such a thing as a desperate male bedbug, one that stops at nothing to ejaculate. These pierce-able carapaces we humans slather with moisturizers? They are ripe for the taking. For all we know, the male could be inseminating humans as we speak.

I cannot curtail my life in fear of the bedbug, however loathsome. I will probably get them. One in every 15 New Yorkers supposedly battled bedbugs last year. It’s probably worse now. But I’ll never tell. And if Jim tells he’s catsup to my bedbug. There are worse things than stealth inseminators, I guarantee.

Tips for Better Literary Readings

2010-08-25T13:44:00.000-07:00

• • • • •
Author and audience members
at a recent reading
at Half King in Chelsea
• • • • •

Sitting through a literary reading when you can’t hear and the author isn’t really into it, as I did the other night at Half King in Chelsea, is more punishment than pleasure. I’m a bit of a literary event junkie. Readings are often free of charge and since I’m a book reviewer with a weekly deadline, it’s fun to scope out for myself what’s new and interesting. This accessibility to new books and authors is a genuine perk for those living in NYC.

I’m afraid that this style of lackluster presentation by authors is more common than you’d expect. A literary reading may be one of the last places where nose-thumbing at the all-mighty dollar is in full view. The anti-sell attitude, if you will, looks and sounds like this:

“I don’t need to notify friends and family of this reading. I don’t need to tuck in my shirt. I don’t need to think about what I am going to say. I don’t need to bookmark what I plan to read nor do I need to know what I will read. And I certainly don’t need to speak up or look up. Frankly I don’t need you people. I’m a published author, after all.”

That last sentence is, admittedly, mean-spirited supposition. I don’t actually know what compels authors to come to their own readings so unprepared and uninspired.

I’ve grown quite a bit as a reader, thanks in part to the honest feedback and help of friends. I’ve reversed my focus from putting my stage fright first to making it secondary to caring about my audience and wanting to entertain them. Luckily this effort was possible and my own way of managing is to dramatize the text as I wrote it and want it to be read by my readers.

On April 9 of this year I read briefly at my book launch in Rockport. It was — ta da — my first “Free Fall” reading. I barely looked up and I didn’t put energy into the reading. I heard about it afterward from friends. The basic message was: Try a whole lot harder.

A blogger who commented on the Half King reading Monday night (the performing author shall go unnamed here) interpreted the man’s demeanor as sincerely humble. How two people sitting in the same room could read a man so differently amazes, intrigues and delights me. This is proof that there is no truth, that there are a million stories for every second in time, that my well shall never go dry.

Some additional thoughts on reading out loud:

1. I need to get this off my chest. The Half King is a great venue for literary readings with one enormous caveat. They almost never invite women to read. Should I return? Should I give them my money for food and drink? Should I continue to review Sebastian Junger’s (one of the owners) books, as I have since he began publishing books? For me, this male orientation is serious bad business.

2. Now for the tips. Author: Look up. Take note of your audience. See who’s there and stay connected. Is someone getting antsy? Does someone dare look away from your scintillating story for even one second? Retrieve him! Read to him! Entertain that wandering mind till you have him safely back in the fold.

3. Apply due diligence to summoning the crowd. Consider filling the room your responsibility. Send out postcards, e-newsletters, news releases, emails, postings on Twitter and Facebook. Make fliers. The work is hard and you can never do too much.

4. Smile the minute you walk in the room and keep smiling. You can stop when you get to the passage about the baby seal being gutted by the great white shark. But when you turn the page, smile again. Let people know you’re happy to be there and happier still that they are there with you.

5. Do you tend toward unkempt appearance or physical ennui personified by slouching or a failure to shave? Take a hint from Lee Child, who has a furious reading schedule every year in the late spring. Buy one good shirt and one well-fitting pair of pants. Consider this your road show outfit and reprise it when called upon to address the public. It becomes something of a talisman that signals “Performance!”

6. Do you tend, as a jaded author, to wear a pall of ennui? Do you save your passion for the page or the sack? Give it up. Get lively for your tribe.

7. Use your finger, if necessary, to mark your place in the text so that you can LOOK UP. You need to know who’s listening and who’s not. You need to make genuine connections.

8. Read favorite passages that work. Read the same passage at other venues. Dramatize. People really enjoy being read to and entertained.

9. Don’t read for more than 10 or 15 minutes because people’s limbs start to fall asleep and their butts hurt. Also: Remember to start off by very briefly introducing your excerpt and explaining the characters and the setting.

10. There’s an odd whole-room pause the second you finish reading. If you want to take a few questions, wait for the applause and then wait a little longer. People need time to collect their thoughts and formulate their questions. I often try to help out by saying something like: One of the most often-asked questions I get is…. That always gets the questions coming.

11. Know in advance how you will inscribe the book. I now write: Enjoy the free fall. (It’s a line straight out of the book.)

12. Never forget that people have traveled to see you. Leave your humility at home and work for them.

13. If you are a man, and you happen to score a reading at Half King, here’s an extra tip: Authors must compete with a thunderously loud drinking crowd on the other side of the wall. And the sound system is not very good. Practice projection and articulation. Make good use of your manly voice.

14. Follow up with thank you notes to the bookstore or library, the person responsible for choosing to book you, and anyone who helped you make the event a success. Sometimes I even bring some wine and cheese when I know I’m going to have a crowd that’s made up of primarily friends and colleagues.

15. Finally, the reality is that you are one of the key hand-sellers of your book. Even seasoned, best-selling writers call up their regional libraries and ask for readings. You do this not just for the book, not just for your readers but for your long-term platform as an author worthy of consideration.

Mad at Runner's World

2010-08-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

Fabulous running
along the Hudson River Parkway
at the newly restored Chelsea Piers #61 and #62.

Women who exercise and age — and I’m guessing that’s a fair number of women — don’t have much to go on beyond common sense when it comes to determining safe and healthy ways to stay fit.

Magazine articles about women’s fitness avoid anything that remotely suggests there could be an arc (an upside and a downside) to the body’s ability to condition, train, and strengthen or that there may be ways to adapt to the realities as we age. And when I say downside, I mean the inevitabilities that come with living a long life such as arthritis, use of oxygen, changes in metabolism, etc. I believe magazine editors avoid such articles because they think it’s bad for circulation — readership numbers.

Is it wrong to suspect that the only valuable readership is a young readership?

Case in point: Runner’s World (online) just published a column (http://bit.ly/cGltWX) by Kristin Armstrong (Lance’s ex-wife). She complains about age-related problems like a spot of fat somewhere in the hip vicinity but she vows to go on running, regardless of age-related infirmities such as this. She’s 36 years old. Aging is only acceptable if it’s not very old.

Runner’s World deserves serious censure for this sort of tactic but they are hardly the only ones. Even magazines like More, which is aimed at older women, target not exactly older women but women in their 40s at the oldest.

Commentary on Armstrong’s piece was predictably polite. Even in disappointment, women lead with grace. We need to get a lot more vocal if this is the best the magazine we’ve subscribed to for most of our running careers can do.

Sidebar: Stuck with a less-than-perfect running bra

I am a feminist who would never think of burning her bra. And from what I’ve read, bra burning was more myth than fact.

In fact most women runners embrace the bra though finding a good running bra isn’t easy. You have to turn to catalogues and reader reviews for the most comprehensive selection, which means trying them on and finding a good one can take months.

Most women with large breasts (I know whereof I speak on this matter) are not thoroughly pleased. Recent studies clarify what we’ve known for years. Our breasts aren’t easily contained! With continual impact they move in a figure 8, which isn’t the up/down motion bras were designed to handle. [note: I remember seeing such a figure 8 performed by a stripper in “The Graduate.” Who would have guessed we all have that capability?]

While these clinical studies and facts don’t enhance the romantic notion of the breast, we must muscle on. The study of the breast is important and with this particular finding, perhaps a better bra is not far off. Here’s the whole story: http://nyti.ms/adNYIg

Goodbye, again

2010-08-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

Some of Betsy and Ed's guests
are pictured at a reading in their home.
Jeanne Peterson, who wrote "Falling from Heaven,"
and I read from our books and answered questions.

Thirty-five years is a long time. It’s a lifetime, for example, as far as my daughter is concerned. It’s also the amount of time Betsy and I have been friends. I mark this time less in years and more in seconds. Betsy has been a continual presence, even if she now lives in San Diego — a good 2,500 miles West as American Airlines flies.

There’s no such thing as always but that’s the way I think of Betsy. “Betsy and I always eat good food when we get together.” “We talk a lot.” (always is implied) “Betsy and I have a phone date at 4,” I tell Jim in such a way as to mark the occasion sacrosanct. “Here we go again,” I tell Betsy, “speeding up every time we talk and walk.”

Continuity is not really part of my life experience. I carry almost nothing from the first 17 years of my life. Running away from home and staying hidden till you reach 18 meant, for me, taking whatever I could carry in one small suitcase. Since then, I’ve made major moves across several states, changed jobs several times, and practiced serial monogamy most of my life.

Without a grandmother’s attic in which to find the old clothes and photographs and artifacts that stitch continuity into a life, I tend to think more in chapters than scenes, more in ends and beginnings than in transitions.

Betsy is far more than a yardstick, of course, though today I’m not wise enough or awake enough to think deeply and creatively about the rich and complicated nature of our friendship. That’s more of a book, actually, and Betsy and I have, in fact, read books about long friendships like ours.

I should clarify: Betsy’s not a yardstick in any metaphor I use to think about our friendship other than the comforts of continuity. I do see how I’ve grown whenever Betsy and I have a rare chance to be together face to face. On this visit I thought: I’m almost worthy now. That’s saying a lot.

It may not be friendship enhancing to say this, but Betsy is a lifeline. I wouldn’t know what to do without her. She knows me. She supports me. She comforts me. I don’t want it to be one-sided. I try to give back. The other day I gave her a nifty roll of doggie poop bags. Another time it was some dessert wine from a winery in central California and a delicious olive oil from Los Olivos. I give her things I value — exalted status of best friend, an introduction to Jim, whatever time she should ever want to discuss the novel she’s working on. Anything, really. Just ask.

The trip West is complete. Betsy and her husband Ed are more deeply embedded in my heart than I imagined possible. As I turn my attention to far less interesting matters than Betsy and Ed’s incredibly meaty, sweet heirloom tomato varietals, I do so feeling a little stronger and a little humbler at the same time.

Safe on Sunset Cliffs

2010-08-15T11:23:00.001-07:00

Now that I’m in San Diego, I go out early in the morning for my runs. I’m up and cruising down the hill shortly after sunrise. I make a left at the bottom and I’m on Sunset Cliffs, here in San Diego. Jim is behind me, walking.

Theses cliffs and environs are good for both early exercise and sunset viewing and lots in between, such as surfing and pervert antics and hailing the wonders of whales and/or the green flash. The green flash may be myth or maybe not. It’s a purported flare up that happens just as the last of the sun slides below the Pacific horizon.

Though I’ve never seen the green flash, I’m pretty sure I saw the pervert who’s lately been harassing women runners on Sunset Cliffs. He’s an idiot who likes to try and humiliate women.

I sighted him a couple of days ago at 6:30 a.m. Granted I was stiff and tired from all the travel and anxieties I play host to, but I recognized the man and his suspicious behavior.

He has a bit of a baby face, wears a stocking cap and pulls down women’s running shorts and their underwear. While I’m sure that my own underwear are going to stay exactly where I put them, given my age, I retain the vestiges of female wariness. Tell me there’s an underwear-puller-downer in the neighborhood and I am going to keep my eyes open and my iPod volume lowered to a whisper.

My friend sent me a composite drawing of the man that the police issued just before we got here. I studied the picture and saved it to my laptop, should I need to refresh my memory before a run.

I was on the return trip to my friend’s home, still on Sunset Cliffs, when a beautiful, muscular young woman with blond hair passed me going in the same direction. She got out in front of me by a few yards when a man with a stocking cap appeared from one of the parking lots and began walking toward us on the path.

What I deemed suspicious was the way his eyes covered every part of her. If nothing else, he was rude to the point of belligerence. Aggressively scanning. Taking possession. Offensive. Disgusting.

Then he caught sight of me, noting his stocking cap, his baby face, his predator’s stench.

The young woman sailed past him, unaware, lightly breathing the delicious salt air. Her vision was trained on her panoramic view as she experienced that exhilarating sense of powerful self that comes with physical activity well done. Today there would be no blindsiding, no rude shock, no deconstruction of self.

Me, I had rehearsed this moment and did as I had tutored myself should I happen to run into this creep. I lifted my ear-bud speaker to my lips and said, “Hello? Hello?” Not original but effective all the same. Western women are fortunate. We have the support of friends and police and society. If we are abused or feel endangered, we can ask for protection and we get it.

There will always be predators and perverts. But there is a system of fairness and rules in place here in the United State. It hasn’t been easy. I remember a time when an accusation of rape was heard with suspicion and blame. But much has changed since the ’70s when I worked with women in my city to help educate our local police force.

What can we do, here in our gorgeous enclaves, to help other women much less fortunate? A recent Time magazine cover showed the mutilated face of a beautiful young Afghan woman. Her husband has sliced off her nose and ears because she tried to leave him after he’d abused her. His actions were supported and sanctioned by the locals, who helped hold her down. Afterward she was left to bleed to death.

Here some jerk in a cap pulls down a woman’s shorts and police issue an all-points bulletin. As it should be, of course, but consider the inequalities among women still.

So on I ran, past the perverted man and the danger and the need for hyper-vigilance. Intoxicated by the endorphins, I moved to reinforce the moment with a large shot of espresso at the small café. Jim met up with me and we made our way back to Sunset Suite and our dear friends.

Intolerant Voyager: Notes from the Pacific Surfliner

2010-08-13T11:42:00.000-07:00

There’s nothing like travel on a crowded train full of Dodger’s fans to force you to turn your vision inward and think profound thoughts. Such as:

I just invented desperation meditation. I do this in a hurry when the little wired man in the train seat in front of me bounces in his chair. As a consequence, his seatback pummels my laptop lid as if it were a basketball. Mr. Bouncy goes at it for six hours. (Oh, pity the girlfriend.) I don’t need to be told this, but he announces on the 5.45-hour phone call he’s conducting — in such a way as to include all of us in the scintillating conversation — that he quit his psyche meds. And he feels much better now. Phew. That’s a relief.

Messages on Facebook and on my blog site from friends who’ve taken the time to read my blog or book are better than Christmas presents. Materially I have everything I need and want. What writers need is a two-way conversation between their work and their readers. Thank you. And, yes, it’s possible to read bouncy text between cleansing breaths.

It pays to travel business class on Amtrak when you’re in sardine mode. You get free wine, something fun wrapped in a big cellophane bag called snack packs that have great nuts and fruits and a smiling conductor who walks by and says, “Help yourself to the coffee in the urn in the front of the car.” Hey, Amtrak makes delicious coffee! Hide it from Mr. Bouncy.

We pass San Juan Capistrano. There’s a restaurant dug into the cliff and hundreds of people crammed together in similar sardine fashion, though their chairs appear to be plastic and mine is quite comfy. They await the sunset, at which time they will rise up, cheer and clap. I see they are geared up and ready because they wave and holler as our train of travelers zips past.

Why would anyone cram into a plastic chair amid hundreds of plastic chairs to watch a sunset when there are hundreds of miles of empty coastline from which to view the recurring miracle?

We love our fellow man. We crave proximity. Why didn’t we build the extended family into our lifestyle? Why are we so all alone?

Alone? Look around. Who’s alone?

Nevermind. Look at that gorgeous ocean. Good lord. That unique turquoise-blue water. That soft warm sand that firms as you near the surf. Look at all those runners and walkers and cyclists, hundreds of them, exercising their bodies on a hard, dusty path on the other side of the road. Does this make sense?

When did moving the body get put into a 45-minute slot between dental hygienist and paying bills?

For the record, you go numb from the feet up when you are wedged into a seat for six hours, no matter how comfy the seat. It takes about two hours for the paralysis to reach your brain. No prob. I keep my lips going with regular sips of free California Cabernet. This is good stuff.

There are too many people. Jim says it too. I see thousands upon thousands of coastal homes of all sorts (mobile and otherwise), from LA to San Diego. And on the decks and porches and front yards of these homes I see people in bathing suits. Lots of bikinis. One possible naked person. The people recline, for the most part, on chaise lounges. They have suntans and a week to decompress before revving up again. Did we mean for this to happen to us?

And now, encamped, finally, in the spacious Sunset Suite, at the home of my best friend of 35 years. Wow. Amazing. I arrive with a radical haircut I hate and didn’t ask for, much like the asymmetrical Sassoon cut I had the day we first bumped into each other at UNH with babies and fulltime college course loads. What’s really amazing is that she loves me because of my stupid haircuts, slew of crises and all the eccentricities. I love her for her brains and beauty and hard work and her drive to give back the best she has to offer, which is a lot.

Yes. Made it. Safe now. In the arms of loved ones. Where we all long to be.

Selective Recall

2010-08-12T10:04:00.000-07:00

Let me set the scene:

Chaucer’s Books, Loreto Plaza, Santa Barbara. 7:07 p.m. Wednesday, August 11. I’ve begun my reading with three pages from “Free Fall” that describe a pleasant visit I had with my father two years before he died. A nice audience has gathered amid the tables of books and I stand and read to them.

And now, the story:

I look up now and then and see, watching me, a man who had positioned himself just slightly away from the rest of the crowd. He was well dressed and fit and had a look on his face that told me he carried a secret, something important. I would have to be patient and wait.

After the reading people came forward, one at a time, picked up a book and we chatted as I wrote personal notes and signed the title pages. The last one to approach was Alastair, the man with a secret.

“You and your mother wrote me a card, do you remember that? It was addressed to “The Lepidopterist.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I was your brother’s best friend. We used to hunt butterflies together.”

“Oh! Scott taught me how to hunt butterflies.”

“And I taught Scott.”

Thus…The Lepidopterist. A man who brought some beauty into the lives of a family bent on ruin.

Alastair was one of several who approached after having read an essay I had published the previous Sunday in the Santa Barbara News-Press. They came because they had some connection they wanted to share, some memories about our distant past. I had to tell every one of them: I don’t remember.

“I understand,” said Alastair. “I saw what was going on there. I had some idea.”

People were kind. “I am the gardener’s daughter.” “Your father could throw a ball, I must say.” “You moved to my neighborhood just when your father…he was a Marine?...came back from the [Korean] war.”

They never mentioned the neglect, the doors kicked in, the little girl who crawled out of her window in the middle of the night to get away, the police – six at a time – showing up at 2 a.m., or even that they, probably, were the ones who called. These recollections are like shadow memories – not inscribed in great detail but cast in broad dark strokes.

I took their email addresses and phone numbers. “Can I write?” I asked. “Can I call?”

Can I remember? Will you tell me?

Afterward Jim said, “You should come back for a couple of weeks or months. Interview everyone.”

I see that the city I ran away from, Santa Barbara, was also the city that saved me. “You were such a free spirit, running around on the grass, playing in the park by yourself, doing whatever you wanted to do.” The gardener’s daughter told me that.

That’s the Santa Barbara I come home to. She gave me joy and beauty and companionship. So lucky I connected back then. Now that I’m back, that’s the part I remember most.

We're home

2010-08-11T17:13:00.001-07:00

Jim in Long Beach, where his family
rented one side of this tiny duplex
for a few years before moving to Garden Grove.
He poses with the current occupants.

Three of us traveled 3,000-plus miles to go home to California. There we were, all together in the car, saying things like:

“Look! I rode my bike down this hill every day after school. In those days, everybody rode bikes everywhere. Nobody does that now.”

“Look! Sepulveda Boulevard. I remember that. Wow. Cool. Sepulveda [pronounced say-pull-vay-dah though Ms. Garmin says sip-ul-vee-da].”

“Look! That’s my old house. See that window there on the left? That was my room.”

“Look! There’s my high school. Go Argonauts!”

“Look! This is all new.”

Some of our houses are gone, replaced by others that are now gone as well. It’s an enterprising region, we see, with little respect for the aesthetics of our landscape. Oil derricks pump away between trees and in the middle of shopping malls. Anyone spending two days in LA will get this immediately. Beauty is the lost art. Thus Hollywood and Fantasyland, as if to compensate or perhaps to provide alternatives.

“What a blight, a sprawl, so deadly to the spirit.”

OK. So we’re not poets.

It takes time for this sensory overload to settle down. You see and do a lot in a day. We don’t so much sleep as pass out. Then, due to the three-hour time difference and solidified circadian rhythms, eyelids fly open at 2 am. What the …?

So much to weigh. This is where I came from. This is how far I’ve traveled. This is what I got done. This is what I didn’t do. And. This is what’s left.

I’m home now. Santa Barbara. This oak. This eucalyptus. This salt air. This chaparral. They may have taken away the Copper Kettle and I can’t find See’s Candy but I recognize that light shining on that stretch of ocean. I know how eucalyptus smells. And I know just how it feels to run in the sand.

That, I do again. It feels better than ever.

Getting to Know John

2010-08-09T18:14:00.000-07:00

Jim’s friend John resides directly under one of the airplane approach patterns at LAX. This living situation, as you can imagine, has its moments.

Shortly after our arrival from NYC, we drove our rental car over to John’s house, a typical little Southern California bungalow that shows its age with a certain unapologetic candor. In its defense, the place is under continual assault from noise and exhaust. Not to mention the earthquakes that periodically rough it up. But the little bungalow was looking quite smug and cute with all its quirky nooks and alcoves and the shades drawn for better viewing of the golf game on TV. In California, dare I say, there is almost too much light.

We called John after touching down and he said, “I know you’re here. I heard you fly over.”

Yesterday was the first day of a 10-day trip home — Southern California — for both Jim and I, and our first trip to California taken together since we began our love affair. This ‘going home’ has been long awaited but once arriving here, I see that it’s not momentous. It’s just a trip. A good trip. An anxious trip in some ways. Mostly, a trip of small revelations that I might miss should I not pause now and then for thought.

Jim made friends with his super lively friend John when they were together at the Gurdjieff Foundation in NYC. Their friendship outlasted their Foundation participation. Both rambunctious men continue on, pushing social tolerances, laughing as they go.

At Venice Beach yesterday John walked up to a black man who was not wearing a shirt. His body was, without question, the envy of anyone with a breath left in him or her. Either you want to be like him or you simply cut to the chase and want him.

“Hey man,” said John, reaching out a hand. “I used to have a body like yours.”

The man’s body was great but his social graces were not. “Well, some days, despite this,” he said making a sweeping gesture that took in the length of his magnificence, “I feel just like you.” Hilarious. This is what happens when you are shamed by a compliment and not skilled enough to just let it ride with a thank you.

Upon returning home from our Venice Beach excursion, John, who has lived in Paris and NYC and India, announced with much passion that he loves his sweet neighborhood under the planes’ shadows. They pass over every two minutes. LAX was told it had to seal the homes on this street and install air conditioners in order to prevent the toxic exhaust from ruining the health of the people living there.

“They got within three houses of mine when the recession hit,” said John. Perhaps it’s less of an issue for John anyway, as he’s still smoking half a pack a day. And his habit is enabled by the fact that cigarettes are only $5 a pack.

John’s one of the few white men in this neighborhood made up mostly of Mexican families who, among many other things, we saw pushing their babies in strollers while they held on to their toddlers’ hands and negotiated the cracked sidewalks. Yesterday we also saw one man plant flowers along the grass in the front of his house and others made our meal in a restaurant. They bend over backwards to make sure we are happy. “Are you OK?” “How’s the food?” “Do you want more coffee?” I feel like I’m home when I’m eating out.

This morning we went to a diner at 6 am and the waitress, Mexican, was cook, hostess and waitress. Her cook and manger hadn’t shown up for work. We had the most delicious home fries, full of peppers and onions, buttery eggs and grits that we may ever have eaten in a restaurant — despite of her sizable challenges. “I can do this,” she says, smiling and rushing from customer to customer with coffee and hot sauce and steaming bowls of grits.

John is friendly and upbeat too, despite his challenges, none of which I surmise other than the obvious lack of enough money.

“Are you happy?” he asks me three times during our first visit. Wow. This was the very same question I asked Jim, the question that catapulted us from friends to lovers. Jim thought my question was a boundary violation. He appreciates boundary violations and makes them himself, part impudence, part mischief, part curiosity.

John’s version of the question struck me as a groundbreaker, though certainly one most people don’t use. It was interesting to experience how it felt to have my actions played back to me. That, it turns out, was one of the techniques used at the Foundation.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m happy.” Or maybe not. I suffer a lot. Live an anxious life. Wonder about my future. Am getting old. Don’t always like what I see in the mirror. Running is harder. “Are you happy,” he asks later. “I guess so,” I say. And then I think about the difficulties publicizing a first book and what this bodes for my future as an author. And my sister, from whom I’m estranged and who is suffering from chemo treatments and who lives nearby but will receive no visit from me. And the fact that for the first time I’m going to Santa Barbara without my father because he died in November. Am I happy? “It’s complicated,” I say the third time I try to answer his question.

Last night after dinner John and I walked to Walgreens to meet Jim. When paying for our purchases, John asked the young woman how she was.

“Pretty good,” she said.

“Ah,” I said. “Pretty good is usually code for not so hot.”

I’m just as emotionally invasive as John, I guess

She said, “Well, actually, I’m tired and exhausted.”

“You’re young and beautiful. How can you be tired and exhausted,” John exclaimed.

“She’s tired and exhausted because she is young and beautiful,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said.

If you keep at it, if you prod relentlessly, there’s no end to the information you can pry from people. And you really don’t have to pry that forcefully. People connect as naturally as moths to light. Little neighborhoods cluster despite the difficulties, fend off the toxins, plant flowers, walk their babies and offer sincere greetings and good wishes. If you happen to extend yourself even a little, ask one impertinent question — best done smiling — you may make a new friend.

Thanks. I Needed That

2010-08-05T06:36:00.000-07:00

It’s been a week since the prostitute slapped Don Draper across the face, but I’m still in wonderment. It’s not the slapping that’s got me interested but people’s opinions about why a man like Draper needs someone from the weaker sex, as women were thought of back then, to abuse his handsome face.

Sex workers, like Xaviera Hollander
a k a The Happy Hooker,
on right at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan,
have been hired by many a man in need of pain.

It’s only TV, I understand, and “Mad Men” is a period piece, to boot. What could possibly be inferred from scenes depicting a good-looking man decades back in time ordering, not a martini, but a rather impatient sex worker to just do it, for god’s sake. Slap me, he orders. Again. And again.

Draper didn’t look good in the season premier. Way before the slapping ensued, the man looked sallow, wiped out, bedraggled. Even his attire seemed slightly less fastidious. I guessed that it had been an exhausting hiatus between seasons. Perhaps he’d made a couple of movies instead of hanging at a pool. Draper didn’t project the ruddy glow I admired when we recently watched Season 3 on DVD.

The slapping incident provoked a lot of discussion in my household, where two 6-foot, 5-inch men (Jim, the father and his 42-year-old son) told me why they thought men, especially men who are important bosses, want dominatrices to slap them. As far as I know, they are not speaking from personal experience but that doesn’t stop them from proffering conjecture. And though I haven’t slapped any man myself, it hasn’t stopped me from countering their conjecture with some of my own.

According to Jim, the greater your altitude on the corporate ladder, the greater your need to be slapped into submission. A man bosses people and wants some bossing in return. Thus, the necessity of the dominatrix. It’s simple.

Maybe, but that’s not what’s happening to Don Draper.

Draper hates himself. Some of us, in fact, have a love/hate thing going with Draper as well.

He’s responsible for his brother’s death. He cheated on his wife so often it got boring, even to him. He’s awfully mean to wonderful Peggy, the one person with real talent at the firm. He just stole a lot of customers from his former employer. He sulks for reporters. And he has hissy fits with important clients. Of course he needs a good slap.

Frankly, he probably didn’t need to pay for it. There are plenty of people at his new company who would relish the opportunity.

Here’s where I differ with the CEO-needs-subjugation theory. Draper is not likely to relinquish control. The most he’ll do, probably, is get naked, flop over onto his back and let the goddess he pays handsomely for take the power position.

“Do it,” shouts the commander. And she does it. Whap. “Again,” he demands. Whap again. She looks disgusted. Well, there’s physical pain and emotional pain. He’s so bad he requires both kinds.

Whap.

Gosh. That looks like it hurts.

Good, thinks Draper. This is all good. There’s enough pain generated here tonight for another round or two of ethically questionable shenanigans. Rest assured, folks. There will be a Season Four.

We humans do engage in all sorts of self-inflicted pain. In Draper’s case, he pays for it and he asks a woman — a gender of lesser value to him — to hit him. He gets the full gamut of abuse, from the slap to the humiliation.

Some people cut themselves, eat to excess or put themselves in harm’s way with a mate who’s abusive. There are all kinds of ways we can hurt ourselves. Eating a few too many Big Macs is harmful. But the kind of hurt Draper craves, requiring a witness and a violent act, pulls the self-loathing from some dark well in the psyche to the light of day. The sting is akin to comfort. It puts Draper in touch with his feelings of guilt. It’s the closest he gets to cause and effect.

When, in all the affairs we’ve seen him engage in, did he evidence the slightest twitch of discomfort? Never.

Draper takes his medicine and gets on with it. It feels like confession — a brief encounter with an arbiter and then you’re off to live your life in much the same ways you did before. A slap is recompense. The permanent loss of something valuable, like your family or your competency, is more cathartic. But Draper is not ready to change.

Advice to Draper: Get a facial. That face workout seems to be turning your skin to leather.

Emotion Ocean

2010-07-29T13:03:00.000-07:00

Emotions. Don’t ask me. Just toss me a life preserver. It’s just one big upheaval and under I go. Hey. Somebody. Help!

Recently, Jim’s daughter told us that her friends held a “Free Fall” event at a restaurant. There, the lot of them treated her to a spirited reading of the sex scenes between Jim and me that I detailed, with some specificity, in my memoir. Father and daughter shared a hearty laugh over this incident. Tears of hilarity welled in their eyes. She retold the story. And retold it again. All good fun. He dabs at his eyes with the corner of a napkin. She smiles. A good storyteller can’t help herself. And she has a hum-dinger.

Uh oh, I thought, looking on at the two of them. This is going to be a problem. Why? I’m not laughing, is why. I’m the opposite of laughing.

I can diagram the mechanics of an emotional reaction with the accuracy of a scientist. Think of it as the physics of a hissy fit. I just can’t do much about containing it.

Here, in Part II of the restaurant incident, I detail the 12 stages of emotional meltdown. Whether 62 or 2, it’s terrible.

1. Trigger: Something dreadful happens, like my lover’s daughter relates an abhorrent incident, and my lover bellows laughter. Contagion. Others guffaw.

2. Confusion: Huh? What just happened? I feel a little strange. Alienation.

3. Chaos: Impulse in. Reason out. Wild energy — adrenaline? — shoots out the top of my head. I am lightning. I crave discharge.

4. Freeze: Ow. Holding it in hurts. But something, a kind of emotional rigor mortis, has turned me rigid. Mortification.

5. Cognition: Adrenaline rush subsides. What’s this? I think I’m pissed off.

6. Choice: Quick. People are wondering where my guffaw is. What to do?

a. Display anger — “In my next book, worm man, you couldn’t lure a dogfish.”

b. Play Miss Congeniality — “Very funny, dudes. What did you love most, guys, the blow job or the Orange Motion fantasy?”

c. Deliver The Look — “Tell me the truth, girl. You learned a trick or two yourself, right?”

d. Detach and Move On — “Hey sweetie. Have you stopped going to the gym or what?”

e. Drink — Alter one’s consciousness till sanity catches up to you. I choose “e” and keep my mouth shut.

7. Go Passive: My affect flattens. I circle my psychic wagons. Put on a neutral face. Relax hands. Make level eye contact. Bite tongue and loosen only to imbibe.

8. Phew: Surfacing now. Breathing again. A modicum of self-control restored. I suspect that I will not say anything I regret. On the other hand, I will not say anything.

9. Reckoning: I start to wonder: What precisely am I feeling? What don’t I like about what’s happening? What should I do? What are the words needed to convey my distressing message? Shit. Must I?

10. Snickers vs. martini: Some truths require a soothing tonic. Pause here for a treat.

11. Emboldened: Say it.

12. Free Fall: No regrets.

Jim is the rod to my lightning. I light up his world. Not necessarily in a good way.

'Free Fall' Gets Passed around the Table

2010-07-22T07:22:00.000-07:00

A group of young adults read sexy passages
from "Free Fall" out loud in a restaurant
while Jim's daughter sat and listened.

A newspaper editor I worked for said, and I paraphrase: Once you write the words down, they no longer belong to you.

I understand what he means. Whether it’s an e-mail or a book or a journal, once I create it, it’s out of my hands. This is true of many of our most valued works, from the children we bear to our signature recipe for coq au vin.

I should not be surprised, therefore, by what happened to my erotic memoir, “Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair,” a few days ago.

The book is, among other things, a candid and passionate portrayal of my love affair with Jim. The long-distance affair began when Jim was 67 and I was 58. “Free Fall” celebrates adult sexuality and explores major life changes, especially those prompted by increasingly untenable situations. As you can imagine, Jim and I had plenty of life under our belts when we came together, including four grown children.

One of these young adults recently sat at a table in a restaurant with a group of friends (my imagination insists they were intoxicated). The friends took turns reading aloud the graphic sexual passages to Jim’s daughter. My imagination also insists there were plenty of snickers and loud guffaws.

There’s a lot to be said about this incident, from the disrespect paid to the young woman whose cherished father and new lover were the butt of their joke, to the lack of consideration to the literature and the other restaurant patrons, to the possibility that this may have been done while the young woman remained in their highest esteem.

Another of our children, a librarian, had a very different experience. My daughter’s friends bought, read and posted reviews of the book on Web sites like GoodReads. They wrote both of us, sending along congratulations and rave reviews. One of her library manager friends invited me to her library to read to patrons. It was one of the best nights of my life: my daughter, Jim, my daughter’s good friend and a group of interested and open-minded patrons together sharing stories.

Jim was amused and unbothered by what his daughter’s friends did. It’s something men do to each other all the time, he said. They jam you up, test your mettle, play a form of psychological chicken.

As a woman, and the author, my take is different. There are numerous short but graphic erotic scenes in “Free Fall.” A group of young men and women taking turns reading these sex scenes aloud in a public place feels akin to a verbal assault. We all knew that Jim’s daughter had no interest in reading about her father’s sexual activities.

When I asked my daughter what she thought, the first thing she said was, “This is how it is with books. Once you write it and publish it, it’s no longer yours. It’s like a book burning, only mockery.”

In “Free Fall,” I write a lot about letting go, staying open, not holding on so tight to what I think I know. Once again I find there is no such thing as a lesson learned for keeps. You learn a lesson in the moment and relearn it, when the need arises.

Good luck, “Free Fall.”

You can find this blog post on author Joan Price's blog this week. Joan is a leading authority on senior sexuality and fitness. Find out more! http://www.betterthanieverexpected.blogspot.com/

A CAMPFIRE READING: It was too hot to light the fire

2010-07-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

Question of the day

If a writer gives a reading in a forest, will anyone hear it?

Answer

I told my friends beforehand: My campfire reading in the vast and wild northern New Hampshire is going to stand as the pinnacle of my career as a published author.

Pinnacle reached Friday night. Prediction accurate.

The township of Pittsburg NH, geographically the largest in the country, only has a population of around 800 residents. By the looks of things, there are more moose per square mile than people and more lakes than any other place in the United States. More exploits. More feistiness. Here’s one example: In the early 1800s Pittsburg formed its own militia, made its own money, appointed its own Supreme Court, passed its own constitution.

What book experience could touch a campfire reading up there on the Canadian border, where newspaper articles and events listing, fliers posted kindly by libraries and hotels from Lancaster north did little to pull in the crowd. Not even word-of-mouth worked. It was Facebook, a tool (however sketchy the Internet) that builds lifesaving virtual networks in long winters that did it.

Ask an author to choose: Oprah vs. reading to people in a circle in the woods accompanied by the cry of the loon and the winking of fireflies and the wilds encircling us like a dark and wondrous fairytale.

Question: What am I getting at? Answer: This place and its people are magical.

What do I know about being on Oprah? Nothing. But in terms of sheer fun and novelty, a reading by a campfire in Pittsburg NH, way up north on the Canadian border, is as good as the hot fudge sundae you get at Moose Alley Cones a half mile north on Route 3.

I can go no further until I talk about Lisa and Tim Savard, owners of the Cabins at Lopstick. They need to write their own memoir detailing their exploits as successful and hospitable lodge owners, fishing and hunting guides (Lisa was the first licensed female fishing and hunting guide in New Hampshire), commanders of fleets of snowmobiles in winters, branders of business, artful decorators, adept at survival in a deep freeze seven months of each year. I thank them both profusely.

Tim gave me a reading lamp hooked up to electricity, there in the woods. He gave me a leather chair from which to hold forth and a circle of chairs upon which our guests sat and listened. Lisa provided homemade sangria and a platter of gorgeous bruschetta. She posted the event and talked it up and people came: an ER nurse practitioner who stands in for doctors in that lone hospital in the North Country, a psychologist, an advertising and branding specialist with advanced digital tools and expertise, a newspaper owner, etc.

One woman snowshoes alone in the deep winter woods at night with a lamp clamped onto her forehead. They’ve been known to face down bear. They toil long hours coming up with yet the next ingenious enterprise to help make ends meet. I love the creativity and the zeal for life.

I share passages from my memoir. I read about love and sexual attraction and they think it’s grand. One woman says she gives little vibrators as party favors, ensuring her popularity and lots of invitations. Another talks about the lively smut shop she’d love to run in New Orleans. Another acts out a bout of womanly hysterics, the turn-of-the-century cure for which was a prescribed course on the doctor’s large vibrating machine. A couple’s little dog wriggles out of its collar, clearly annoyed by the antics of the humans, and escapes into the waiting woods. Party ends. We hightail it after baby frou-frou, bow affixed to an exuberant topknot. Hurry! She’s the perfect tidbit for the wry coyote or sage fox sneaking about on the periphery.

As a child I was the transfixed onlooker at many a lively campfire. That was out West in the deserts, the high Sierras, the arid mountains and campgrounds inland from my hometown of Santa Barbara, and on beaches late at night when I should have been home in bed.

Bonding around a campfire over a good story is something I still crave.

There’s nothing quite like the smell of pine, the sound of the loons floating up from the First Connecticut Lake, the rustle of varmints in the brush, the crackling fire, the blood red sangria, the people gathered around, mere miles from Canada, in a huddle under a stew of stars so thick it seems that you could reach out and scoop them up. Fireflies zig and zag to form a perfect sphere of twinkling lights — that we inhabit — from rich earth to North Star. Quiet little words spoken from my book drift into the mix. Who better to understand Free Fall than these daring and hardy folk?

Summary

If a writer gives a reading in the Pittsburg woods on a lovely summer evening in July, interesting people who’ve checked Facebook will come. Some will bring their pets, sangria, friends, a sense of adventure. All will go home thinking: Yep. Anything can happen here. A moose running through the garden. Two adolescent foxes frolicking on the side of the road. Great views from Mount Magallaway. An erotic reading. That’s why I came to Pittsburg. You just never know.

Free Flow

2010-07-01T09:46:00.000-07:00

There’s a lot of debris clogging this harbor, metaphorically speaking. Something has to give.

I’ve been reading a new book called “Seven-Tenths: Love, Piracy, and Science at Sea,” by David Fisichella. He writes about the ocean’s many layers of currents, the volume of water in each current, temperature, speed, salinity, water density. There’s even a special nomenclature (Sverdrup) for describing water volume because there’s so much of it. That book had me thinking as I slogged through my 8 a.m. run on Sunday. It was 78 degrees, 62 percent humidity, and the Hudson River Parkway smelled like the inside of an exhaust pipe.

Nature is where I get my best lessons and I never have to look that hard.

Oceans are deep, vast and complex organisms. Sometimes I sit on my Rockport deck, as I did the other night, and look out over an Atlantic Ocean so flat and still I cannot believe a wave could be tweaked out of that expansive lethargy. Air’s movement across the surface abrades, piques, teases ripples that join other ripples. Waves crash at our feet. That’s all just surface activity responding to external forces.

Fisichella tells us that waves can travel in opposition to current direction. Rogue waves — unexpectedly large and powerful aberrant waves — derive from this phenomenon and they can be troublesome.

So, too, women’s internal workings and surface responses can be at odds. I speak of women of my generation. We grew up feeling responsible for our fellow man and woman. From that orientation, many of us find ourselves striving for unity, harmony and compassion among friends, family and colleagues.

It’s not easy being nice all the time. I, like others, have engaged in a long and frustrating struggle to reconcile opposing forces: my valued role as humanitarian vs. my responsibility to my singular voice.

Does this sound familiar? Like something in assertiveness training we never really caught on to the first time we heard it in the early ’70s? Only a year or so ago I heard Gloria Steinem and Suzanne Braun Levine admit to a large Barnes & Noble crowd that they still had trouble saying “no.”

Saying ‘no’ — code for direct communication — feels counter-community.

About a year ago I met one of my clients in a train station. I was just coming into Boston from New York City and, after weeks of doing business by telephone, we were going to have lunch and discuss face-to-face the events we were planning to promote his new documentary film.

I recognized him and approached. Immediately the 6-foot, 5-inch man began yelling. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “You,” he shouted. “You are what’s wrong.” He stormed off to the Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk to order a few doughnuts and coffee. When the non-English-speaking server got his order wrong, he shook a long stick-like doughnut in her face and screamed obscenities. The doughnut broke off and flew across the counter. Everything she did enraged him more but when she handed him a pink frosted doughnut instead of a Boston Crème concoction, I thought he would smash it in her face.

I shoved money at her and dragged him by the arm to a seat in the station. “Where’s your wife?” I shouted, desperate for help. She was across the country and I was there, stuck with this madman, just a day before a long weekend full of events I’d already been paid to publicize and oversee was about to commence.

My job shifted from arts publicist to psychiatric nurse as he trained the invective stream back on me. Any minute the police officer I saw out of the corner of my eye was going to arrest him.

My one overriding reaction while the encounter was taking place? As absurd as it seems, all I could feel was this: The man is suffering.

At least I had the common sense to cancel lunch, though I sat with him 40 minutes as he settled down and explained his concerns about getting an audience, getting bloggers to cover the events, getting interviews in all the big newspapers. He was a man of little faith and enormous rage. The last leg of my train trip to Rockport from Boston was spent managing my PTSD-like shakes. It had been a truly horrid time and yet I never did the one thing that could have saved me. Instead of walking away, as I should have, I stood and tried to help him calm himself and avoid the embarrassment of a confrontation with police.

I could have said: I quit. I could have said: Goodbye. Call me when you’ve got a grip.

Diplomacy takes precedence and my form of diplomacy clearly isn’t as forthright as I want or need it to be. This problem, I suspect, is surmountable. It has to do with knowing what we want, what we want to say, and finding a way. I am of the school of problem-solvers for which there is always a way. But we have to factor in the reality: For women there’s a nuanced art to speaking honestly, being heard, helping and not offending. When we activate our voices, we are doing so in the context of community.

I call myself ‘politic,’ but that way of thinking has become a rationalization for a form of verbal cowardice or confusion.

Since my memoir Free Fall has been published and since I no longer report to a day job, I’ve had the privilege and time to take a deeper, closer look at myself. Believe me. This was nothing I would have volunteered for. It hasn’t been fun or easy. I’m not distracted, like I was, by a contentious boss or the ongoing threat of a loved-one’s suicide. I wake up and the first thing I think about is not work but the knot of anxiety in my gut. Why is it there? What is it?

Now, with nature in front of me once again as a model, I see what needs fixing.

The gradual clearing out I desire has to do with opening up the harbor, letting the waters flow in and out as conditions shift and change. I want currents to align with surface activities, to say what I mean.

The next time my client wields a doughnut as if it were a weapon, I would like the presence of mind to hand him a cup of coffee and say, “Dunk it.”

Fantasy Shared

2010-06-25T08:17:00.000-07:00

If I had my way, I’d make “Free Fall” assigned reading for every man interested in or currently engaged in a relationship with a woman. In other words, I’d like you men to read a book about a woman in the throes of passion.

After, I’d demand (since I’m in control of this fantasy, I can demand) an essay. The essay question: What scares you most about what you’ve read?

I know, it sounds like torture. Perhaps an exercise like this is torture because no one, especially men, want to admit to fear. And anyone reading this can guess where I’m going: Men, some anyway, fear certain things about women. It may look like disdain or discomfort or anger or dread or impatience, but I’m saying fear plays a role in the man/woman dynamic. I’m saying something else, too. We fear what we don’t fully understand.

Here’s how I see my fantasy assignment working: I’d lock each male into his own little room. Men, you’d have all the comforts: a couch to stretch out on, a good reading lamp, lots of munchies, a couple of bottles of wine, and a sock. A sock? One thing you may not know is that “Free Fall” is hot.

Want some music? Sure. A bag of chips? Fine. A little break for a televised baseball game? All right. But you can’t leave till you’ve read “Free Fall” and written your essay. An honest essay.

Here’s what I think the essays would suggest, not in these words exactly, but the message would be clear:

Before I read “Free Fall,” I could feel myself growing anxious when my wife spoke because her language contains words that reveal emotional content.

I don’t want the bother of a woman’s emotions because it makes me nervous.

I’m uncomfortable knowing what my girlfriend feels. I don’t know what to do!

I fear that what she’s saying is going to require that I do something.

I fear that I won’t be able to meet expectations.

I fear I won’t be able to understand what is needed.

I’m afraid of complications. I want out of here.

Or: Damn it. Why can’t we just keep it simple?

Believe me, I’m not finger pointing. I’m trying to understand.

The difference between “Free Fall” and “Deep Throat,” between erotica written by me, a woman, and a pornographic movie is that in “Free Fall” I please Jim and Jim pleases me but … I allow access not just to my body but to what’s going on in my head. In “Deep Throat,” one of the few porn movies I’ve seen, it’s sex minus thought or feeling.

My last book-related event took place at the Rockport Public Library on Wednesday evening. It was a panel discussion I organized and the topic was writing memoir. One of the panelists I invited was Amy Ferris, a fellow Seal Press author, with her own new book out titled “Marrying George Clooney: Confessions from a Midlife Crisis.”

Amy is a soul mate, as I see it. She’s taken on menopause the way I’ve taken on passion, and she’s dug into the weeds on it. Attendance that evening was excellent and people were very interested in Amy and what she had to say. Men, too, asked lots of questions but I am sure they will not buy and read her book. It’s about women. It’s about menopause.

And here’s the thing: The book is a delight. It’s entertaining. It involves men, in particular her wonderful husband Ken. Men, if you read “Marrying George Clooney,” think how much better prepared you’d be when your own mother or wife experiences menopause. I’m here to tell you, menopause is a group experience. Why not get a jump on it?

So I’m rethinking my fantasy. It now goes like this: You men must go into that room, not just for the 8 hours or so it takes to read my book, but for a week. Inside the room is a bookcase filled with “women’s” literature. You must read our literature just as we have read your literature. Your literature, in fact, has been assigned to us over the many years of our education and beyond, by our teachers and professors and Publishers Weekly (last December, their top books of 2009 contained not a single book written by a woman) and the New York Times book reviews and on and on.

All right. All right. I’ll allow conjugal visits.

But before I do, I’d like to see a rough draft of your essay. It will be a much more equitable world when men read women the way women have always read men.

Fantasy concluded.

Pajama Party!

2010-06-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

When you're in love, sunsets have more colors

My “Free Fall” readings and especially the discussions afterward remind me of pajama parties.

A combination of things contributes to this post-reading — shall we call it ambience? — including the type of book I’ve just published, the make-up of the audience, and the wonderful way readings in local libraries and independent bookstores are warm and intimate. It almost can’t be helped. For now, though, I’m leaving my actual pajamas at home.

Case in point: the reading at Jabberwocky Bookshop in Newburyport last Thursday night.

After reading for 15 minutes, which is about as long as people really want to sit quietly on aluminum chairs and listen attentively, I stop and grope a bit for a few remarks that reference what I’ve just read. I do this to give people time to exit their passive listening state, send a little blood to their glutes, and allow their questions to percolate up to consciousness.

On Thursday we talked about the fact that we don’t talk about this stuff (i.e. sex). Then we launched in, beginning with anecdotes — older friends and relatives who are in their 70s and 80s and enjoying burgeoning love affairs. Said one woman, “She’s so giddy, like a schoolgirl.”

Yes indeed. Good sex can be a little like speed: you can’t stop talking, your smile pulses “Hello there!” and everyone comments on your luminosity, you lose 50 pounds and your desire to complain. You drink wine, burn candles and suddenly notice the spectrum of colors in sunsets. What you need to watch out for, however, is the tendency to run on empty for days and weeks. When you emerge from this hormonally induced state, you’ll probably be exhausted. The older you are, the harder this is for your body to handle. You won’t care.

We talk a little more about passion, available to anyone at any age, and more join in. A sensitive issue comes up: What about married people for whom sex is not necessarily as exciting? Not only is the sex not new, but the two main players know what irks and what riles — death to passion, really. Are we to leave this out of the discussion? The book is about passion but the discussion leads to maintenance issues or, worse, ‘working’ at the sexual relationship. Oh please, I caution myself, never make this part ‘work.’

I point to Jim — I call him Exhibit A these days — and he smiles on cue. “We’ve been at this for three years now. We make adjustments, as well, to honor the sexual part of the relationship we discovered late in life. We’ve talked about this. We like sex and want it to last. Thank goodness for candles and martinis and date night.”

And, I think to myself, thank goodness for Jim. For here is another thing: Paying homage to your loved ones so they can hear you is essential. As Jim once said to me, “Almost nothing is as seductive as being adored.” Tell each other what you really like about him or her and make sure some of the items on your list have to do with their sexuality and the ways they turn you on.

Jabberwocky Bookshop is special. Owner Sue Little has set aside a room set for readings. It’s large enough to accommodate 50 or more people, but the chairs seem to wrap around like a circle. I like the feel of the conversation that comes to the fore here in the green room, as it’s called. People freely associate. One thought leads to another. One question prompts the next. I don’t have anything to teach here; the role I take on is that of writer with info. Because I’ve written a book that touches on gender issues, sex, career and power, mental illness, passion, creativity and more, I can at least share what I’ve learned from writing, thinking and talking about these issues with other people.

So we talked. It felt intimate, friendly, curious, open. In the same ways being a journalist allows me into other people’s lives with the probing and personal questions I sometimes have to ask, writing and publishing a book give me access. Access like this is a gift. Here, in this dedicated room, people pull up their chairs and speak. We compare notes. We share intimate thoughts. Guess what? You’re never too old for a pajama party. Books are like pajamas, I guess. They open the way to deeper conversation.

Reading Erotica to a Crowd

2010-06-02T06:03:00.000-07:00

Or, Sharing Your Sex Life With Strangers

Two free drinks, free copies of Penthouse, free cupcakes, too

I probably won’t have to do this again — thank god — but the other night I read a very erotic scene from my book “Free Fall” to a large and lively crowd in a dimly lit bar in SoHo. The scene, from pages 238 to 243, features me as the actor and Jim as the happy recipient. It’s Jim’s favorite sex scene in the book.

What happened was more of a performance than a reading. I hasten to say, I didn’t perform the scene but I performed the reading, liked a staged reading in theater or like I did back in college in my class called Oral Interpretation of Literature. I am shy and the class taught me to slow down, enunciate, broaden the vowels so I sounded less “Western.” To prepare for my erotic bar reading, I rehearsed several times in advance, made notes in the margin, underlined words I wanted to emphasize. Too bad, in a way, that I won’t be reading this again out loud because I worked hard on the preparation.

I expected this to be the reading from hell. I agonized over what to wear. I made a special trip to the colorist to be sure my roots were the same color as the rest of my hair. I taught myself to keep smiling regardless. I should have mentioned first thing that those in the audience were at least 20 or 30 but more likely 40 years younger than I am. I wrote this book, with glimpses into my erotic life, in a vacuum. I didn’t know what other people do in bed so I had no idea how different sex at 58 was from sex at 21. People tell me all the time that it was courageous of me to write about my sex life but, no, that part was fun. It’s courageous to be 61 and read about your sexual activities to kids to whom you could have read “Hop on Pop.”

Oops. Maybe “Hop on Pop” is the wrong reference to make here…

When I was writing that scene, it never occurred to me that I would one day be called upon to read it aloud in a bar in lower Manhattan called Happy Ending where, in the low light, I would encounter tables thickly strewn with stacks of porn magazines free for the taking.

I hadn’t looked at porn in years so what I saw surprised me. For instance, women no longer grow pubic hair and most of them now have sex with other women. Men are incidental to the sex act, it seems, except for that one super-enormous male body part that occasionally crops up, sans the rest of the male body. Oh wait. I get it. This is what men want to look at, not necessarily what they want to do.

Seeing all this, I immediately fortified myself with a gin & tonic with one of my free drink tickets (my payment) and found the last two seats in the place for Jim and I. I had no choice but to rest my sweaty drink on the cleavage of a woman featured on the cover of Penthouse “Variations.”

Something else balanced atop the stacks of magazines: tiny cupcakes, little Barbie confections, each distinctively frosted. They seemed completely at odds with beer, gin and tonic, the Penthouse “Forum” and the red wine but, in fact, no. The cupcakes, generously iced and very sweet, suggested lavish excess, over-the-top indulgence, a night of abandon. The event’s organizer, Rachel Kramer Bussel, made the rounds with spicy tortilla chips and petite cupcakes a couple of times. Enjoy, she urged. Have another. Don’t hold back.

It was a standing-room-only situation at the Chinatown bar. As a newly published author, I suppose this was one indicator that I had officially arrived. Hello Happy Ending. Many well-known writers have read here. It was my turn. And it was up to me how I would view (as in ‘spin’) this reading. This is a tough world for shy authors — brand and opportunity and innovative selling require continuous hard work and a deep reservoir of chutzpah.

I am shameless. I wear skinny jeans. I tell the crowd that my book is true and it has sex in it so I must belong here, on the night dubbed “True Confessions.” I try to ‘own’ what started with a call from my book’s publicist. I read sex scenes to the possibly virginal. I smile at Jim and say, “Thanks, Jim, for the material.” I read, the word “penis” passes several times through my lips. None of it is forced. This, I have to admit, is all my own making. I wrote the book. I do what’s needed. Actually, I have a little fun.

I have to be realistic about another thing. For this crowd, a happy ending means only one thing — enthusiastic erotica that in real ways preps one for that important ‘happy ending’ eventuality. My job, here at the In the Flesh reading series, was to titillate. I did my best.

Oddly, it wasn’t so bad.

I spoke into a microphone. I rested my book on a lectern. I squinted into blinding lights and took note of the video camera a reporter had aimed my way. I read, just as I’d practiced, hitting the words I’d wanted to emphasize, rounding my vowels for dramatic effect, and smiling because this was fun as long as I didn’t think too hard. Like giving birth, I wasn’t about to picture what I was actually doing. A baby’s head squeezing through a cervix dilated to 10 cm is just as absurd as a 61-year-old woman describing sexual techniques to twenty-something men.

When it was over, I stood to receive a few cheers. I recall hearing laughs. A few men came up afterward to compliment my writing. I appreciated this. It was the man, after all, to whom I paid homage in that scene. Perhaps I got something right.

The readers that followed were more performer than I was. An obscene folk duo, a storyteller who’d been on “This American Life,” a woman lamenting how oral sex with her well-endowed husband had reshaped her jaw and caused a need for braces. Had I known ahead of time, I might not have had half the bravado I’d managed to summon.

I am still the same writer. Fame and fortune elude me, as they do most of us. But I got through another writer challenge with a certain dignity. I call this a happy ending for me, too.

Choose Yourself

2010-05-18T08:02:00.000-07:00

One of the first questions I’m asked at “Free Fall” readings: How is Eli doing?

People want to know that Eli, my former significant other, is OK. I’m grateful that I can answer in the affirmative.

After what Eli has been through, it’s easy to believe that his recovery and re-emergence after a year of hospitalizations is close to miraculous.

“Free Fall” describes how Eli was diagnosed with a mass that had spread throughout his digestive tract. On top of all that, the doctors withdrew the lithium he took for his bipolar condition because of kidney problems. No medications seemed to work and he spent a year seriously depressed, in and out of hospitals. I wrote about Eli’s hard year in my book.

Yes, Eli is doing well. He lives in a small, government-subsidized apartment with a very sweet dog. He’s made a few new friends and has some contact with his family. Both Eli and I have established new lives. It’s been slow going, with lots of small steps. When I take the time to pull back for a broad look, I see that each of us has greater independence and more peace. This couldn’t have happened if I continued to assume that Eli could not exist without me at his side, even if I did have good reasons for my assumptions.

Eli is now going about his business with far fewer of the mental health crises that challenged him before. Eventually some of the medications the doctors tried, along with electro-convulsive therapy, began to make a difference. Now Jim, Eli and I spend time together whenever we can. Eli comes to New York and we travel to New England.

While I stay in touch and find ways to stay in Eli’s life, Eli told me he would be fine if that were to change or if something were to happen to me. This information is a gift. He gave Jim and I his blessing when he learned we were together. Recently he told Jim he’s happier than he’s ever been. Eli’s generosity is the highest level of compassion.

I could never have guessed that the three of us would find ways to make all this work. It wasn’t easy and it took a couple of years. One lesson I take from my experience is that we must be responsible to ourselves first. This isn’t just lip service or New Age jabber. It’s just as the Buddhists teach: We must take care of ourselves before we can help others.

In another blog posting, I would be happy to cite examples of how this worked for Eli and me. For now, I suggest that we slow down and contemplate what we are doing with our lives. Spinning wheels? Working all the time? Sacrificing everything for ideas of what it means to help others? First, we must consider what’s most important to us. Writing? Sculpting? Peace? Health? Look for ways to get there. Ask others for help. Persist.

As Jim says, we must choose ourselves. If we let assumptions about others get in our way, we may waste precious time and possibly, hurt the people we are trying to help.

How Sex Found its Way into 'Free Fall'

2010-05-12T17:36:00.000-07:00

Part I of an occasional series on writing about sex

I didn’t set out to write about sex. I wanted to write about a cathartic love affair in the context of a life swamped by mounting complexities. I had a story to tell and themes I wanted to explore and comment on. Because I’m a journalist and have a journalist’s desire to share important information, no sooner had I grasped the significance of the affair than I began to draft essays about it.

The “context” I mention — the details — included a combative relationship with a hair-trigger boss, a significant other who wound up in ICU — the first of seven hospitalizations in 2007, a creative and fulfilling career in an art museum, euphoric runs along the ocean near my home in Rockport, writing projects, reviewing books, frequent travel, good friends, aging, mental illness, music, joy. The fact that sex ended up in the book doesn’t surprise me since sex was a big part of the love affair. And sex was the model for letting go, for having a free fall and, ultimately, for making change. It seemed essential to the story.

One journalist who read the book and wrote an article afterward said, “It’s a unique book. I’ve never read anything like it.” As a book reviewer and the writer of the book proposal that included a “survey of literature,” I came to see why she made that statement. “Free Fall” is 100 percent me, in my free-falling voice, written in the most honest way I could find. I wanted to paint 2007 for readers as sensually and as impressionistically as I had experienced it. This took work and numerous rewrites.

I recently looked at a blog titled “Bespoke Erotica” that Harpers.org linked to in May. The writer, Joshua David Stein, barters with readers who would like their own personal erotica. They provide him with three words and he writes an erotic story for them.

From his April 25 story on Tumblr, he begins:
Rhys felt the warm Caribbean breeze against alabaster ass cheeks, exposed westerly as Abel knelt also westerly with Rhys’ knob betwixt his lips. Things were going well for the lovebirds. Rhys moaned contentedly; Abel hummed and drooled. To read more: http://bespokeerotica.tumblr.com/

In “Free Fall,” there’s no cum or alabaster ass cheeks or fantasy islands, though breasts and a penis are referenced a number of times. But I had to be careful because I didn’t want jargon and the mechanics of sex to get in the way of what was going on emotionally or psychologically. On the other hand, the act of sex was how I found my way to some of the deeper issues I’d begun to reconsider, such as my penchant for control, dependence vs. independence, the experience of joy. Not to mention, the mechanics of sex, presented with less grit and more authenticity, can be erotic but challenging for most writers to pull off.

With regard to Joshua David Stein, I would not barter for one of his personalized stories. Why did Harper’s link to his erotica? Do men like different erotica than women? Why are some people offended by writing about sex while not about watching sex in movies and on television? These are questions for other essays in this occasional series of writing about sex.

I couldn’t have guessed that sex would trigger major life changes. I didn’t pay attention when reading Freud in my sociology classes and I hated it when my mother espoused Freud. I was naïve. I thought I was going to have a fling. Think again. Sex causes big things to happen, like babies and marriage and the end of marriage … and everything I wrote about in “Free Fall.”

Almost Friday night

2010-04-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

It’s Friday, the easiest day of the week for me to let go. My body pulls one way and duty pulls another. By Friday around 6, duty loses. As it should.

It’s 2:30 and, already, I feel the pull. Sooner or later, I know I’m going to give it up. It’s late April. The sun is now west of me and my keyboard and laptop screen are caught in hot-white light. I reposition my workspace tools to keep on task.

On my lunch hour, I cleaned up the apartment a bit. I gave some thought to what I’ll prepare for this evening’s “picnic” as we call our Friday night feeding ritual. We pull together little portions of many tasty treats: some Basque and French cheese from Chelsea Market or Murray’s, a head of roasted garlic, a few rosemary crackers, five or six endive leaves to fill with a seafood salad I made, hummus, delicious meaty olives in a light brine. Oh yes.

Wait! Here’s a letting go I’ve orchestrated. Can this make sense?

Think of it as letting go with a safety net. Ritual is activity with expectations pre-set. The Friday night ritual — food, drink, talking and laughing, sex (fun of all kinds) — is pushed up to 10 on the pleasure scale. Behavior and expectations are prescribed by habit, desire, intent.

Do not let this part of our love affair go.

Our love affair is still new but we’ve already made a few rituals that serve our desire to honor what we found. We want to honor each other. We want to refresh the chemistry between us.

There’s a martini. There’s Jim. There’s that delicious feeling of stopping, of taking a sip of the icy drink, of tasting delicious bites of food, of putting my feet up. Sooner or later all this promise draws me off task.

Friday is also our antidote to the hard stuff we’ve confronted all week. It’s our reward for muscling through. I sense a kind of cerebral lactic acid mounting. It threatens to burst, more or less gently but to burst all the same. Our psychological structures, built for order and smooth function, are not necessarily made of steel. Sometimes on Fridays Jim will say, at 4 o’clock, “Time to make the martinis?” To further delay, to further tantalize, I’ll say, “Wait an hour. I’m not quite ready.”

OK. Now. It’s cash-in time — my reward for a week well-lived.

10 things I learned at this weekend’s American Society of Journalists and Authors NYC conference (April 23-25, 2010)

2010-04-26T05:32:00.000-07:00

1. If you are at a loss for what to blog today, remember that people love to read lists.

2. People (readers, interviewers, the world in general) want salient quotes and relevant anecdotes.

3. At a conference, I have determined that you must make it your business to come away with gold you have mined from at least one workshop, connection or experience. At the end, you will have spent hours on hard chairs (unless there are no chairs left) in stuffy rooms listening to some you will not enjoy. And you will have spent a lot of money and time on this experience. You must make it your mission to leave with at least one significant thing that you feel will change the way you do things. For me it was social media expert and Columbia Journalism School dean and professor Sree Sreenivasan: @sreenet. A bounty of riches can be found at http://bit.ly/sreesoc where there are links to his class notes, articles, videos, and more.

4. It’s probably time to buy and use a Flip camcorder. Video is now being submitted in conjunction with queries to editors to pump up the pitch.

5. Set Google alerts for all your fields of expertise so you are on top of all the breaking news. Scan Google news just before interviews to be sure you’re current, whether as interviewer or interviewee.

6. On Twitter: follow your editors and the people who represent your interests. And follow the people they follow.

7. On Facebook: Protect your privacy. You must revisit your privacy settings often to update because Facebook makes changes.

8. From @sreenet: Tweets, postings and comments of all kinds should be: helpful, useful, informative, relevant, practical, actionable, entertaining, fun, occasionally funny. Details of your personal life probably don’t fall into any of these categories.

9. Some well-known authors with popular blogs have cut back frequency of their blogs and they tweet (microblog) more with improved connectivity.

10. Tweet no more than 120 characters so there’s room for people to retweet your tweet and keep your tweets to about four or five a day, well spaced.

Bonus: Go to #ASJA2010 to read what gems others took away from the conference.

Part I: Men I’ve Run Into With Exceptional Bodies

2010-04-22T10:57:00.000-07:00

It seems I’m always running into startling-looking men with exceptional bodies. Some of these incidents I will share here today; others, like the naked man in the ladies bathroom in Oak Park, I’ll save for Part II — Crazy Men Who Use Their Exceptional Bodies to Ruin Women’s Appetites Including Peeping Toms and Roadside Pee-ers, Drive-By Exhibitionists and Nudists Who Shouldn’t. Keep in mind: There are lots of ways to define ‘exceptional.’

I encounter men with exceptional bodies in the karmic sense, like maybe I was Michelangelo in a past life and infatuation with the male physique isn’t entirely out of my system yet. It’s something I do, like being the first one in a carful of leaf-peepers to spot a ceramic gnome in the woods or being the only Padilla in my Mexican family to understand that cilantro tastes like soap.

Once, I ran smack into Mr. America in a Sears and Roebuck in Santa Barbara. He was talking to some men fans about weightlifting but it wasn’t easy for him. First, he could not gesticulate. Balls of muscle mounded at elbow and shoulder joints. Tendons were taut as towlines. And since stretching exercises probably hadn’t been invented yet, the trunk of a live oak was probably more bendable than Mr. America’s knees.

Mr. America traumatized me. I was an innocent 7 prone to panic. When he opened his mouth to speak, all that came out was a raspy squeak. You must strategize placement of muscle. You cannot pile it on, willy-nilly. Bulging neck muscles can strangle as surely as a noose. Mr. America was a freak. I bolted with a shriek when he slowly shifted his bulges toward me, the only one shorter than he was, and squeaked, “Would you like to see my biceps?”

Another time, again in California and again while quite young, I strolled a back street toward home when lo and behold, there was Jack LaLanne (or his doppelganger) lifting weights in a carport. This, a post-Mr. America sighting, was quite intriguing. I didn’t know who Jack LaLanne was at the time, but I liked standing there, watching him change the weights on the bar, then lift, squat, lift. Stretch. He was working hard in an industrious and upbeat way. He caught sight of me and asked if I’d like to give weightlifting a try. “This is enough weight for you,” he said, placing the bar in my hands, sans weight. “Now, lift.” I did and he seemed very satisfied. “Good job. Good job.” Maybe weightlifting wasn’t’ so bad.

Another amazing muscle man is Mountain Bike Steve. I read his book about mountain biking on the hilly Pittsburg NH logging roads — no man’s land — using a specially made one-speed mountain bike. Enthused by his passion, I wrote him. I love Pittsburg NH and the logging roads, though even with my 12-speed, I can’t begin to approach the feats he performs in the wilderness. We maintained a correspondence for several years. I still recite his important mantra: “Weight-training is the fountain of youth.”
Today it happened again, the sighting of a startling-looking man with an exceptional body.

Jim and I were leaving Border’s bookstore on 7th Avenue and 33rd Street in Manhattan. At the bottom of the stairs I noticed a small, swarming hive of paparazzi encircling its prey. I’ve seen lots of movie stars — gorgeous, famous, and otherwise — on NYC sidewalks, walking alone, unnoticed, but never this kind of frenzy. I expected Angelina Jolie adopting street urchins or the Pope apologizing.

But, all I saw were 10 or 15 male photographers positioning and repositioning themselves, snapping, flashing, eddying, squatting. Whatever they had square in their viewfinders was down close to the sidewalk. Lassie? We were at Madison Square Garden. Maybe it was copulating clowns. Arty from Glee?

None of the above.

When I worked my way into the fray, I was startled by a man with an exceptional body. He was about 5 feet tall and weighed around 110 pounds. He was poised, tough, perfect, mostly muscle. He’d raised his knuckles and radiated ferocity. He moved like a caged tiger. Wary. Slow. Eyes wide. Head rotating imperceptibly. He held out a thick belt with a dish-sized gold emblem in the middle. This thing was proof of his world championship. Welterweight? Bantamweight? Lightweight? There are many boxing championships and many weight categories. I embraced my near-6-foot Amazon, stretched tall to get a better look (and perhaps to flaunt my advantages a bit), and he accessed his inner fisher cat and narrowed his eyes.

We inhabit our human selves some of the time, our mythical selves at other times. Having witnessed this silent dance between accomplishment and adulation, I walk over to my towering Zeus, another of the startling men with exceptional bodies I’ve run across (and latched onto). We leave the champ to the eddying photogs. He reigns — silent, serene, unabashed. Maybe he’s silent for a reason.

The visit to Barnes & Noble

2010-04-04T08:13:00.000-07:00

‘Give this writer a break’

There are lots of ways to drink in spring in NYC. I like Union Square. It’s a gathering place that wears the moment the way Lady Gaga does. Warm and sunny? Masses in dark glasses, the farmers’ market, free M&Ms, break-dancers, a thin wheezing beggar who rasps, “Help me. I’m homeless. Have osteoporosis.” Almost in counter-balance, a man with a guitar strums and screams: “America the Great.”

My book is out. My friend Jackie sent an email that she found it in a Barnes & Noble bookstore on the upper west side and bought one of the three copies they had.

Oh. This is good and bad. The big moment has arrived. Will it sell? Will the Web site and the tweets and the blogs and the coming-to-terms-with-Facebook, the video and the press releases, the readings, the book group study guide, the radio interview, the postcards and emails and friends’ word of mouth help get a buzz going? Will all this money and work even sell one book to someone who isn’t a friend?

This isn’t my usual carefree romp through Union Square. We step out of the springtime sunshine and into the flagship B&N in Union Square. It’s not dark but it’s a sobering moment.

Avoidance

As if in denial, I look for a book to buy and review for this week, since none of the publishers sent books I’d requested. I pick up nonfiction writer John McPhee’s new one, “Silk Parachute,” because I’m a longtime fan. I once heard him talk and the take-away for me was: When researching and interviewing, once you hear something three times, it can be counted as true.

On impulse, I grab “I Am Not a Serial Killer” by Dan Wells because I admire the idea and the cover. But the big moment belongs to Jim. He goes over to the service desk and asks if they have my book. Yes, he’s told, but it’s at a higher elevation, so to speak, in the sexuality section a few escalator rides up. He goes up for a look. Take a picture, I say. It’s not an overstatement to say that I’ve lived for this moment.

Sexuality? Why there? And why not down here, on floor one, where a book has a chance?

Together we go back to the service desk and I say to a man who seems to be in charge, “Please, help to give this writer a shot. Display “Free Fall” here, on the ground floor. My book belongs right here, next to “Eat, Pray, Love” and these other books that are fun and profess erotic overtones. My book has a beautiful cover, I say, and will sell on the aesthetic merits alone. I am quiet but persistent. This whole thing takes no more than 90 seconds, tops. “I’ve got readings coming up here in the city.” And I take a deep breath for the next part, which is absurd but I can’t stop myself: “I hear, time and again, that once you start, you can’t put it down.” He bows his head and smiles, bearing my shame at having to go this far with gentle compassion. He makes notes in the computer and says he’ll recommend ordering a few more copies and bringing it downstairs but he isn’t the decision-maker here.

With Jim there with me, the sales pitch wasn’t so hard. We’ll have to come back. See what happens, we say. And then we go outside for more sunshine. The sweat evaporates soon enough.

Toughening up

I need to gear up more. Do this everywhere. Selling your book is nothing like writing your book. Writing is easy. You sit — winter, spring, summer, fall — in a decent chair, facing a window, something liquid for hydration within easy reach, cats crowded around with inspirational purrs, and you tell stories that amuse you. You work these stories over till they are little Madonnas, all tight and muscular and adorned with just the right amount of flourishes. When everything is just so, you release the stories, pulled together as manuscript, and hope for miracles.

Next? You switch personas, step into the blinding sun, and make your presentation. I don’t have osteoporosis but my pitch is every bit as critical to my livelihood.

The Girl Comes To

2010-03-28T18:27:00.000-07:00

I cannot separate myself from my church, even now, fifty years after I swore it off.

I was in the fourth grade. A nun, my teacher, ignored my doctor’s orders for half-day attendance and endangered what had been a slow, tough recovery from pneumonia. On my first day back to school after a month spent fighting the virus, and despite the note and despite my grandmother sitting in the car in front of the school, the nun refused to let me move from my desk. At 6 p.m. I was finally rescued.

I’d had no lunch, of course, because I was supposed to leave at noon, and by then I was late for dinner. “You will never catch up unless you stay,” this nun said, typically tight-lipped, correcting my papers as I completed them. “You’re going to flunk out.” Why can’t I remember her name?

It was a face-off, just she and I alone in a large empty classroom. The papers rustled back and forth between us as the hours crawled by. I got weaker. I despaired as she shoved one history lesson after another at me to read, as if it were possible to make up more than a month of missed lessons in an afternoon. After each lesson she tested me. It was like being force-fed or made to run endless laps in the pitch black. I remember when the words stopped making sense.

This isn’t a metaphor for sexual abuse. It wasn’t sexual abuse. It was how the nuns at this school operated, with the full knowledge of the parish that supported the school’s operation.

In a way, I was lucky. That wintry afternoon in southern California, as bad as it was for me, ended my connection with the Catholics. I sat at my desk in a puddle of sweat, needing to pee and drink water. I worried, like only a child could do, that I would disappoint my mother and my grandmother for not following the doctor’s directions. He had been so firm. And I worried about my poor grandmother, sitting outside in her car wondering where the hell I was. She would never have presumed to come into the classroom and question the nun.

I knew I was locked into something dreadful with that sister. This wasn’t another fever dream like those I had during the pneumonia. This nightmare was real and I sat three feet from it. Most of her was hidden. Everything except her hands and her face were blacked out by the yards of cloth. She was hard to look at. Contrasting white cloth wrapped tight around her face, pushing and pinching. I never saw a pretty nun. Their faces were fleshy and contorted. They were soft, hairy-browed animations of disdain, rage, unmet expectations. Jowls quavered. Lips pursed.

She couldn’t care less whether I flunked out of fourth grade. This was punishment, not schooling and not make-up sessions. And I was too helpless to do anything but comply. Compliance was part of the training there, no matter the perversion befalling you. We took it all.

When my mother walked in, I was weak and sweaty and had a fever of 102. My grandmother, an Irish Catholic taught to fear God and the church, didn’t budge from her car till my mother found her and sent her home in disgust. When I tried, finally, to stand up, my knees buckled and I collapsed back into my seat. Thank god my mother was an atheist. Eventually that same church excommunicated her for divorcing my father, a man who beat her and held a gun to her head. He remarried in the church. When he died, recently, the priest at the funeral claimed my father was special, that a brilliant light shone from his eyes as his passing neared.

The church was my first and most influential culture, a magical place where eyes glowed from holy cards and the fires of hell raged in lunatic story hours. It was medieval and savage and sensually acute. This is where I steeped, absorbing a rich infusion that, as I look back on it, crafted a gorgeously ornate and rich world that transported me time and again to Jesus and Mary’s loving arms.

This is the world I inhabited six days a week. It reprogrammed me and made me who I am, highly attuned to the sensual and the perverse. That world was dark and echo-y. There was the suffocating fog of incense, pain from endless kneeling, graphic crucifixes in your face replete with streams of Jesus’ blood and the scarlet holes where thorns pierced his forehead and giant nails pinned him to the cross. There were the coloring books with pictures of hell we labored over with red crayons while a nun narrated what happens in hell — “your nerve endings burn,” “even your ashes burn.” We starved on Fridays till high Mass around noon. My classmates made little cooing sounds as they wilted from hunger and the choking incense.

The golden goblet sparkled through the incense fog as the priest lifted it up in the candlelight toward heaven.

Nuns slapped boys and girls and shoved the children under their desks. These little people, dressed in their uniforms, crouched under there, facing 50 or 60 classmates way too shamed to make eye contact. Shame was universal there, easy to learn and close to impossible to unlearn. I had a nun who made students wear a dunce cap. Sometimes she walked a small child into the paper storage room where that little 6- or 7-year-old stood till the day was over, dunce cap balanced on top of tiny head. There was my year of first grade that never seemed to end. We spent hours writing the asinine letter “a” till our hands ached and cramped up. Only the poor saps who didn’t understand how sadism worked allowed themselves to cry.

I read a column in the New York Times. Maureen Dowd says let there be a female pope. The men have done enough damage, she says. Yes, they have, all under the auspices of a complicit institution.

Let the church collapse. Free those workers, the nuns and priests who still have goodness and desire to help. We’ve been victims of its methods and its culture for far too long.

With all its pomp and ritual and ceremony, my church mesmerized me. There is something wrong with a posture that is prostate and compliant. I, like my grandmother, was intoxicated by the imagery, denial, punishment, sacrifice and hours of draining worship. Maybe it happened to many more than I realize. Maybe that’s why we still haven’t been able to put an end to the Catholic Church as we know it. We are still hypnotized.

My friends are reading 'Free Fall'

2010-03-11T12:05:00.000-08:00

I wonder what my friends are really thinking right now.

A few pre-purchased "Free Fall" on Amazon in December when the pre-order option first became available. This week "Free Fall" arrived by mail, almost a full month before the official release date. I'm getting e-mails as I blog, so I know they're reading the book.

"Wow"

"Whew"

"OMG"

Friends Ruth and Matt photograph a sculpture by Richard Recchia
located in the Pleasant Street Cemetery in Rockport.

A handful of copies of "Free Fall" are now strewn about, mixed in with the rest of the world's published literature. Someone may, at this moment, hold the book in her hands as she rides the commuter rail to work. Perhaps it's balanced on a girlfriend's lap as she nibbles a piece of toast and reads. Or, it's
left on a nightstand, under a glass of water, till bedtime. I wouldn't be surprised if a copy or two gets tossed across a room. I did this myself with "The World According to Garp" and "Rosemary's Baby." No doubt there's one or two copies still in their envelopes, buried in stacks of mail in the hallway. Worst case scenario — it's already stuffed in a bookshelf between an old edition of "Miss Manners" and "Anna Karenina." From there it will make its way to the recycling center or, if this person is thrifty, to a used bookstore in the boonies.

Aye. I've been to those dank make-shift shops in old barns where mold blossoms on book spines and the inspirations of creative souls languish, silenced between damp covers. I have have seen my share of well-intentioned inscriptions, a flurry of dashes and curlicues made with a proper pen, hushed, mere whispers now: "To my dearest friend Bart. With all my love on your birthday." How could Bart let this sweet gift go? Perhaps Bart died. Or is he on the outs with his friend? Rendered blind, maybe, by some horrid disorder? Or did our Bart merely purge his bookshelf to make room for his new flat-screen TV?

Twice I've seen inscriptions made by writer friends of mine who have, in friendship or love, presented a book of theirs to a valued friend. These are shocking finds. Fortunately my writer friend is not there with me as I freeze in recognition, bent over a table of used books, rubbing my hands together in the chilly barn, caught mid-search for a good read, diverted from my travels because I spotted the handmade sign offering up "cheap books," its arrow aimed toward a gravel back road in rural Maine. I pick up the book and think of my writer friend inscribing a personal note to a friend. He wrote and paid for this, he probably wrapped it up in thick paper, and he made the trip to the post office where he paid to mail it.

I grab the book and give it a good home.

Is there a worse kind of humiliation for a writer?

Probably. With my own book now out of my control — no more last-minute edits, no more tweaks to the back cover blurb — and now in other people's hands, I wait to see what's worse than rejection.

As I write this blog, I get a message from my very good friend Matt, with a subject line: "Ruth refuses to get out of bed...till she finishes Free Fall."

Ruth writes: "I'm 'roiling' in delight." She uses the word "roil" because it's a word used in my book.

Another friend writes: "Good heavens, Rae, what an extraordinary book you've written."

Wait! This is fun. More! I want more of that. But there are silences, too, deep long silences, and I feel those. I tell myself: Live with it.

At this critical moment, it's easy to forget that I like my book. I liked writing it. It was a privilege to be given a contract to do something I really wanted to do and I did my best to honor the opportunity.

Every word in "Free Fall" belongs there. Round after round of edits, both before I released it to the editor and afterward, were acts of purpose. The words left standing are the ones meant to be. It's as I intended. When someone in an editorial office moved a word or replaced it with another word, it sometimes rang faintly false. I crossed it out, restored the sentence or rewrote it, all the time working toward something closer to final. All this to say: No regrets.

What's different, though, what makes me wonder how my friends are feeling as they read, is that "Free Fall" is intensely personal. I tell things about myself I had to dig deep to discover. I have to remind myself: Live with it.

In "Free Fall" there are scenes where I am naked. Literally naked. What is now a book was once a series of actions. I was aiming all along for free fall, a stripping away, where finally — after years of distractions, after way too many back roads taken — I get down to who I am and what the hell I'm doing. Now it's "Free Fall" the book, and my friends have it in their hands.

When you're doing the writing, you aren't usually thinking about who's going to read the book and how they will react. Writing, like any creative process, lacks that kind of self-consciousness. You're tuned into the words. You're listening to how the sentences sound as you read them back to yourself, again and again, in the countless iterations, till the words sound like they belong on a printed page. There. It's done. Now it's someone else's turn to enjoy "Free Fall."

Appetites

2010-02-19T08:14:00.000-08:00

Jim and I knew that the Meatball Shop at 84 Stanton, between Allen and Orchard in the Lower East Side, was about to open for business. We'd been reading about it everywhere: Daily Candy, the New York Times foods section, Time Out New York. I couldn't help but wonder how my book Free Fall, coming out in April, might garner such notice. PR like that must be pricey.

The idea of a place that features meatballs — chicken, pork, beef, etc. — is too good to ignore. Good ideas get notice all on their own. Jim and I knew the Meatball Shop was going to be a destination for the two of us even if the chef and co-owner, Daniel Holzman, was not an old family friend of Jim's.

I must pause, momentarily, to pay tribute:
Hail, fabulous meat ball. You perfect bundle, pumped up on protein and open to infinite flavor permutations. Saucy. Sassy. Spicy. An ethnic wonder. Swedish, Italian, or mongrel in my kitchen where identity reveals itself in relationship to the larder. Raisins? Cilantro? Nub of Parmesan? No pasta as grounding necessary. No sub roll enfolding my treasures. I take my meat balls unencumbered. Wonder of wonders, so, too, does the Meatball Shop, though there are certainly options for those insistent on muting their pleasures with dull and simple carbs: pastas, hero rolls, slider buns. End of reverie.

On a recent Monday evening, after we'd heard author Jonathan Dee read from his new novel "The Privileges" (here's a link to my book review: http://bulletin.aarp.org/states/de/2010/7/articles/book_notes_family_values_its_privileges_jonathan.html) at Half King in Chelsea, Jim and I planned to head to a pre-opening party at the Meatball Shop.

We ate at Half King, however, a place well known for its creative, tasty comfort food. We split a burger, a sort of meatball without ambition but delicious when you're hungry, especially with a slab of red onion and a few freshly cut fries and a talented writer at the lectern reading to us. Perfection is the confluence of food and literature and wine and people, though there were only a few of us that night despite a starred review in Publishers Weekly and a big, positive piece in the New Yorker that day. After reading, Dee asked if there were questions and Jim queried, "Is that the best part?" to which Dee immediately rebounded with, "It just builds from there." Jim, reliable for his impertinence and hearty laugh, jumped up, bought the book, asked for an inscription, and once home, read it in a day and a half.

Already well fed, our arrival at the Meatball Shop would satisfy another appetite, that of curiosity. I never got past the front entrance area. The place was mobbed, as expected, and among the people seated at the long tables were many from the Gurdjieff Work in Manhattan, where Jim had been a participant for 25 years.

For Jim, there were lots of familiar faces including the chef's brother Eli Holzman, whose new CBS reality show Undercover Boss was already, after just one episode, generating a great deal of buzz. I saw the first show, about a waste management company, and found it commendable in the way it reminds us how important the workers are in any successful organization. In our country, where the middle and working classes are devalued and shrinking, shows like this are important. And there was its canny, young, subversive creator and producer, just a few feet inside the front door. Jim burrowed on in but I stayed put in order to to acquaint myself with the boys' father, John, also a longtime friend of Jim's who now lives in Southern California.

I'd heard a lot about John, and knew that he'd been interested in what Jim was up to. He'd asked about me and followed the progress, if you can call it that, of our relationship. John had come East last year, but I'd been in New England.

John was flying high. And why not? He'd been in a sky box at the Super Bowl 50 yard line the night before and on this night he was witnessing incredibly exciting and promising moments in both of his sons' careers.

I conclude this blog posting, another one that is too long and for that I apologize, with the stunning words John uttered in that hot loud deliciously fragrant full-of-laughing place where we stood, face to face, straining to take each other in, straining to hear, bending, smiling, noting Jim as he reached Daniel, shook his hand, spoke his congratulations.

I could tell John wanted to say something. "I hope you don't take this the wrong way."

"All right," I said warily.

"I've known Jim for a long time. He's a good man. Here's the essential thing about Jim. Jim's a lover. But I think you know that. I think you must be, too."

I hadn't expected anything like this. A good friend protecting another friend? An urgent message before it's too late. Jim a lover. Such an unusual way to describe the essence of a person.

I breathed, finally, and smiled. "Well, then, you'll have to read my book."

The message — "Jim's a lover" — in John's hands, had seemed sacred, important. I must have understood what he was trying to say because I'd written a whole book about that one thing.

Time out

2010-02-07T10:25:00.000-08:00

My Sunday morning was spent reading and relaxing after Saturday night's dinner party. For me, making dinner for friends requires several hours of advance work: recipe research, an inventory of staples, list making, and, if I'm in NYC, some truly contentious shopping and waiting-in-line angst at one of the city's mobbed Trader Joe's. After that, I put in a full day of cooking and Jim did some serious cleaning. What followed on Saturday night was a great time spent eating slow-cooked food, drinking wine and sharing all of this with new friends from NYC. Food and friends. There's magic there.

The food was tasty but not inspiring, which is too bad since there were two restaurateurs and another two serious foodies at the table. Luckily I hadn't really thought this through in advance. Had I, I would have made myself crazed as the day of chopping, browning, stirring, blending and tasting began to reveal the lackluster nature of the dinner I would be serving. Sometimes a little more salt just can't rescue your baby from the doldrums.

The coq au vin would have benefited from a more robust red wine. I found the recipe for the ricotta pie (I had wanted to replicate the ricotta cake from Mike's Bakery, now closed, in Gloucester, but I couldn't find a recipe.) in my old "Joy of Cooking." James Beard gave the recipe to Irma Rombauer, but I am neither of these master chefs. The crust, with its 2 tablespoons of brandy, was chewy not flaky. I blame myself since I don't even eat pie crust and I doubt you can create something as tricky as pie crust without a little enthusiasm. While rolling out the dough, however, I recalled how my friend Linda, another master pie maker, used to produce beautiful pies any time the need arose and with an ease that belied her expertise. She died in childbirth, young and beautiful and suddenly gone. Food, with all its sensual components, has the power to provoke wonderful memories like Linda laughing and talking as she shaped a soft, pliable ball of pie dough and rolled it out in seconds flat.

Among the subsidiary items on my menu was a zesty green goddess dip. I spotted the recipe in last week's NY Times Food section. Happily, the bowl of dip the color of a meadow in springtime lent the whole spread a needed jolt of color and a lively garlicy edge. Outside, it was bitterly cold and windy, with flakes of snow flying about and guests arriving half-frozen at our front door. Vernal green looked awfully good.

In the course of our conversations, I learned a lot about Fela from Ayo, our Nigerian friend whose family knew Fela's family (The musical, now playing at the Eugene O'Neil Theatre, is astonishing. I've seen it twice.), and even more about the art of coffee making from Ayo and Ross, co-owner of the fabulous Chat 'n' Chew in Union Square, and David, who has put his many years of coffee research into satisfying practice.

Sunday morning Jim and I were up by 7. We finished washing the dishes, had toast with real Irish butter left over from dinner, and cups of coffee that, we realized, were not going to be nearly as good as the coffee Ayo and David and Carol were having. Alas.

Dinner parties require a certain post-party period of rest and rumination, which explains this blog post. But rumination is important. That's when we fully appreciate the friends we have, assess the recipes we use, and recall the pleasure we got from our conversations. If you like good conversation, by the way, check out my book review this week. The book is titled "A Good Talk" and you can find my review posted on Amazon and at the Wicked Local newspapers' Web sites. Engrossing conversation is like breast feeding and orgasm, says the book's author Daniel Menaker, in that it produces neurotransmitters that make you feel awfully good.

Bolstered by my intake of calories and my fill of very good talk, I turn again to the ubiquitous to do list and greet Monday morning in good spirits and well fortified. Sometimes it takes a little special effort to feed the spirit, especially in winter.

With the help of friends....

2010-01-31T07:11:00.000-08:00

For me, writing is solitary and, once engaged, pleasurable. I like to be in a quiet place, alone, and I like to keep at it for three or four hours at a time. Even if I stop to pour a cup of coffee, I avoid anything that could break my concentration. I don't turn on the radio while reheating coffee. I don't check e-mail. I don't glance down at newspaper headlines. I don't even let the sound of my own voice escape. Silent sneezes! Toilet flushes? OK, I do that out of courtesy to Jim. Cats meowing? Well, I haven't tried muzzling them yet but I have made Lila a bed beside my computer to keep her off my keyboard and by extension, off my

Lisa, Scot and I get ready to record a clip for YouTube
and my Web site (to come mid-February).
Here, we talk about the questions Lisa will ask.

hands that are working to export my thoughts. A 12-pound cat that insists on napping on my forearms can be accommodated for maybe a graph or two, but after that, enough.

There's something I do in my head, too, a kind of brain activity holding pattern where I stop thought momentary while I tend to my physical needs. Then, once back at the computer, I open the spigot again. If I do it right, I can re-enter right where I left off.

The part of the writing process I'm thinking about this morning has to do with how you get your writing to be read by an audience. Writing must not remain a solitary experience. The process isn't complete until you publish and subsequently interact with your readership. Publication and readers inform the process, like a circuit that completes and reinvigorates itself. Until "Free Fall," I've had ready-made audiences — through a magazine or newspaper's circulation, for instance. "Free Fall" has no readership awaiting when it rolls off the presses. It's up to the publisher and me to let people know that "Free Fall" is available and worth checking out (publication date: April 6).

A lot of this is done, not on book tours, but virtually. It's a proven tactic and I need to embrace it and find a way to develop social media habits that feel authentic. That's hard when you've not done this for yourself before or when you aren't even sure if your friends, often Baby Boomers, tweet and blog and create Facebook pages. It turns out some do and it occurs to me that part of the process is educating others like myself who are sandwiched between work and parenting and significant others and parents who need their attention, as well.

This post-writing process with "Free Fall" has been much harder than I expected. I have amassed hundreds of links — "you should read this before you start tweeting" or "develop a presence on this Web site" or "get to know these excellent book bloggers" — that are important to be aware of when you start publicizing your book. Also, Jim and I bought a bunch of books from Amazon about marketing books, blogging, tweeting, Web site design. One book alone provided a lifetime's worth of excellent tips. Combine all the research and learning with getting a Web site up, a blog or two going, figuring out how to get a Twitter following when most of your friends don't tweet, etc., and my reliably calm, organized and systematic functioning exploded. I've been a zombie, groping about, day-in, day-out, in a state of paralytic static. It's been awful.

There's simply too much to do that's new. And (this is huge) one link leads to another link to another link and before you know it, a precious hour has passed and that first task on the to do list is still unchecked.

So I picked up my phone and began calling friends and asking for help. The Web site alone has been a major stumbling block because I vacillated between using an iWeb template and designing it from scratch. I attended several iWeb workshops in SoHo and realized there was no reason for me to re-invent the wheel when all I had to do was use the software I already had. My very creative friend George (his design business is called, in fact, Courage Creative) agreed to help and since then we've made great progress. I think I'll have the Web site up in another week or so.

Every person I've turned to has said or done something I feel I couldn't have thought of or done on my own. My daughter Ardis, a feisty and smart library manager who has a large Twitter following of authors, bookstores, librarians and others, and uses social media often and deftly, came to Chelsea and sat next to me for three days as I got this blog, my Twitter and Facebook accounts up and running. I'd still be spinning my wheels if Ardis hadn't conducted this rescue mission!

I got a great idea for a Web page from Lisa. That one idea takes my Web site from "normal" to something fun and playful. Stephanie told me to be sure to work in the right search words and more importantly, she advised me about how much is too much. George is doing a second round of wonderful, colorful design. Hope, our library director in Rockport, has given me many of the most important and useful of all the links I've come to amass, as well as names of author Web sites to check out, and so much more.

And last night Lisa and Scot, two editors and journalists I've known and worked with for years, came to my house in Rockport. I provided a Tex-Mex repast, Jim made the fine martinis, and Scot taped the interview Lisa conducted. What I thought would be scary and downright impossible turned out to be easy and fun. From his winter digs in the Florida Keys Rod Philbrick (just awarded the Newbury Honor Award for his book "The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg") has been sending me suggestions for proven publicity tactics. Lynn, Rod's wife and a good friend, calls and writes and offers stabilizing assurances and information I act on.

Jim is the best cheerleader on the face of this earth. Last night he stood beside Scot, as Scot set up the camera, to help out. He reads my book reviews, even via pdf from his truck on a construction site, to make sure there are no typos. He brings me coffee when I won't do it for myself. He cleans the cat litter and washes the dishes and takes my side, even when I screw up.

My publicity agent Andie from Seal Press has given me hours of her time and made numerous calls and conducted investigations on behalf of "Free Fall."

Authors of first books and readers everywhere: Moving the book from the printing press to the hands of not just any reader but the readers for whom the book is intended is a big and daunting task. For me the paralysis wouldn't have relaxed had it not been for friends, family and the help of Seal Press.

This blog post is one way I can say thank you this bright Sunday morning.

Describing "Free Fall"

2010-01-22T10:57:00.000-08:00

The 'erotica' tag

I've publicized books, events, art exhibitions, plays and even a movie. So when the time came to help with the publicity of my own work, I wanted to be an asset to my publisher. My own expertise was only a part of why I thought I could be helpful. I quit my job to become a full-time writer. I need to prove to myself that the last two years were worth this investment. And I, like most of us, need to earn money. I've earned very little in the last two years and cannot afford to put my home or my life in financial jeopardy. Finally, "Free Fall" is my baby. I want to work hard for her.

Writers can certainly help, if not drive, their book's publicity campaigns. But before that can happen, they need to step back from their work a bit and look at it from varied perspectives. I wrote "Free Fall" as a story about a love affair that ignited as my 18-year relationship with my mate flamed out. One of the themes has to do with the vulnerabilities we all experience when mental illness touches us in some way. After I wrote "Free Fall," I ran a focus group in NYC, only to discover that the participants disagreed with my take on the book as the story of a passionate love affair. They said the book was about a heroine's struggle to make moral choices under chaotic circumstances, when nothing seemed black or white. They were more drawn to the themes of mental illness than to the love affair, it seemed.

Then, more recently, I noticed that on the back cover of the bound galleys, my book had been categorized as erotica. In future postings I want to talk about what has been like to write erotica and how erotica is seen in this society. "Free Fall" will become available on April 6. Then I will begin to see how it's received and how I will deal with it.

For now, though, I need to stick with this one thing: "Free Fall" is erotica and that changes things for me. A month ago, I sent several authors I know, some fairly well, requests for endorsements for the back cover. Many have not responded, which I find uncharacteristic. Now I realize they may have seen what I did not, that the book is erotica and they are not in a position to endorse erotica.

To properly market anything, whether it's an artificial sweetener or a baby diaper, you need to understand the product's intrinsic value and create the brand from that core understanding. I needed help understanding what "Free Fall" was about.

A friend, also a marketer and a writer, talked to me about this the other day. "That 'Free Fall' is classed as erotica is to be expected." I agree with her. Intense erotic bits wind through "Free Fall." "Free Fall" is a year in which I lived an erotic life, after all. I was highly sensitized, sexually. The substance of my sexual experience — a certain relinquishing of personal power — was the metaphor for the new way I had chosen to conduct my life. "Psycho-sexual" is an apt descriptor of my mindset, the world I inhabited, the view from me, so to speak.

Yes, I wrote "Free Fall." And, yes, I write a book review every week that runs in newspapers around the country. Writing book reviews means that in 500 to 1,000 words I try to glean a book's essence and pass it on to people interested in reading about books. But artists can never really know how their own work is going to be perceived. In the twelve years I wrote a weekly personal essay called "Opening Remarks" that ran in some of the Ottaway newspapers, I was often surprised when readers would come up to me or write me about something I wrote. What they took from my essay and what I intended were sometimes quite different.

So now, no doubt, my mission will be to find a way for "Free Fall" to take its place, at least in the way I present it, side by side with other contemporary literature. I think its value is in the way sexuality is integrated with day-to-day life. It's said that women think of sex once a day while men do so every 54 seconds. In "Free Fall," I hope to remind Baby Boomers how much pleasure our bodies can bring us. To do that, I have to come to terms with what my book is about. I'll be a better marketer and messenger once I can comfortably discuss the book's intrinsic value.

Free Fall with bounce

2010-01-20T10:39:00.000-08:00

Every day, it seems, I'm starting over. Why? In large part because I don't have a "real job" to go to anymore, I have a new lover and I spend more time at his place in Manhattan than my place in Rockport.

Before, my life was defined by my responsibilities. To-do lists, sticky notes and various computer and smart-phone calendars took me by the hand and walked me through my day. Partly because of habit, I still use all that stuff but it no longer occupies a place at my core. It's like a motor without gas. If I want to use it, I suppose I can fuel it up, add volition to the exercise of penning "want to's" that magically transform to "to do's" should the need arise. That stuff can structure a day and a life. It's lucky but it's scary to live a day without it. Try a couple of years...

— In Free Fall, you get used to the feeling of vertigo —

Nowadays, to-do notes can be ignored with little consequence. I'm starting over, not just today but every day. Continuity, like meaning, is something I have to invent. Or, should I say "reinvent" since nothing is the same and what happened yesterday is relegated to simply that — yesterday.

In Free Fall, I've learned continuity doesn't come naturally. Life for me is more random, though I find I move from association to association as if problem-solving. I find a recipe I like on Epicurious, for instance, look for something yummy I want to serve with it, head down to Chelsea Market to buy ingredients, cook, eat — a food chain of sorts! This is also how I write and think. It may frustrate some of my readers because I like to grab these associations when they happen, fill them out, move on. I can't write chronologically and I suppose I'm saying I'm finding it hard to live chronologically. Can you live like one of those super bouncy balls, careening from one thing to the next. Order? Process? No, it's free fall, but with vigor.

I haven't imposed much discipline beyond the essentials: feed cats at noon; go running sometime during the day; read the paper (if I get to it); submit my book review by 10 a.m. on Wednesdays. There aren't hard links that draw me through the minutes of my life like before. I didn't leave behind a half-filled cup of coffee or a magazine proof that needs a third review or a boss pacing, waiting to deliver the next big job. Continuity, then, is something far more amorphous, than I've known. Nowadays, staying confident requires a strong component of faith (not religion).

If you read Jim's (my lover) blog (Jimat70.blogspot.com), he says the same thing. He's starting over. But he's 70 so maybe starting over at 70 and being a man is different than starting over everyday at 61 and being a woman in waiting for the next really cool thing to happen. And it always does.

See freefallrae.com for a related blog, where I share my day-to-day adventures. You never know what you'll bump into when you're in free fall.