The Last Post of the Year

            Santa Barbara. 

I once wrote a poem where I compared the light in Santa Barbara to palomino horses galloping down the arroyos into the sea.  It was a wild image, and I'll stand up for it to naysayers and meteorologists and simile-haters alike.  Now, however, I just want to play a game with that city's initials: Santa Barbara, Silver Barnacles.  Salamander Barbecue.  Second Bassoon. 

            When I first thought seriously of describing Santa Barbara again, I wrote, “It would be an interesting post, but I’d much rather talk about pirates.”

            You can’t always choose your memories or obsessions, though.  Santa Barbara, that affluent city between the Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific, was the place I grew up—not in the sense that I lived there as a child, but in the sense of what is sometimes called (yech) ‘blossoming.’  I feel a bit like Winnie the Pooh, having had episodic adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood—except that my friends weren’t ornery owls and gregarious gophers.  And my Hundred Acre Wood was Isla Vista, the tiny, packed, overpriced borderland between the University of California and the rest of the world.  Isla Vista is a town that stinks when the sun goes down of sweat and cheap vodka, where the streets closest to the sea are packed from Tuesday to Sunday with scantily dressed drunkards who wander from house to house, searching for something they can’t name. 

            All right, I’m being melodramatic.  I can’t help it—Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean writer whose works abound with paradox and dead-ends, might have invented Isla Vista.  When I think of it and Santa Barbara (and I apologize for any confusion that might arise from how I lump them together), I think of driftwood fences, cold water, and substance abuse.  I think of Pirate, the homeless man who lives off of the UC students’ excess booze, and speaks with a gruff, nautical growl.  When I was a freshman, he tried to impress me by lifting his eye patch and smoking a cigarette out of the empty socket.            

            A lot of things happened to me in Santa Barbara.  I made friends and lost friends, learned how to craft essays, rode an orange bike up and down the seashore, drank bloody marys, ran across beaches full of snowy plovers, became a feminist, became a caffeine-addict, saw a few brush-fires, climbed a few mountains, slept on a few dorm room floors. 

The Pacific surges against the dark horizon, and the cliffs that line it erode a little bit more each year.

The hobos and the crazy people epitomize Isla Vista.  When Greg and I were twenty-two, just after we graduated, we rented an apartment where, for six months, we were routinely awakened in the middle of the night by the man who lived downstairs hurling himself against our door.  He pounded the door so hard that a piece of wood around the jamb cracked away from the rest of the plank.  When we called the police, the man defended himself by saying that we were always “tapping on his walls.”

            I suppose someone who hasn’t been to Southern California might not know what I mean when I say that So-Cal has its own special kind of despair.  It’s a glitzy, narcissistic kind of despair—maybe it’s not a despair at all, but a type of recklessness.  I’ve seen a young man throw himself against the hood of a moving taxi and yell, “Fuck yeah!” as he bounced off.

            Isla Vista can be sweet, too, with its unrestrained hordes.  Election night of 2008, people yelled “Obama!” across the town until three or four in the morning, and were always echoed by an equally exuberant “Obama!” from somewhere else in the dark.  The UC won a free Coldplay concert because, out of any college in the nation, the highest percentage of us voted.  My friend Evan spent that Tuesday grumbling about being the only Republican within city bounds.

            Isla Vista is a city of bike theft.  Everyone flits about on two wheels, and individuals with mad eyes leap from bushes offering to sell purloined bikes for five dollars.  I spent my first two years of college walking places, but finally caved and bought a swift orange Beach Cruiser—which is still the only concrete image I have for the word “freedom.”  It got stolen on the day after I graduated, as if to emphasize that, when one door opens, another closes.  

            In another instance of subtext from the universe, the bittersweet lyrics of “Scarborough Fair” drift down from the apartment above me as I write.

“Remember me to one who lives there…

She once was a true love of mine.”

            So good evening, fellow travelers on this murky highway of words.  This is, I suppose, only a partial post—a fragment of what it could be, but a wee bit more than nothing.  I find this fizzling ending somehow appropriate for December 30th--one day short of December 31st, the fizzling end of the year, when it's goodbye to 2011 already and guten Tag to the Year of Our Lord two thousand o-twelve.

I promise to come back and talk about pirates later. 

Potpourri

            The winter solstice.

            Despite my dislike of the cold, winter is my favorite season.  I love the way the hills in Northern California turn green, and my parents’ house spends the mornings cloaked in white mist.  I love the way birdcalls echo sharply through the air, and the smell of plants intensifies after the passing of storms.

            Winter is the time for hibernation or storytelling, depending on your particular species' inclination.  December 21^st, the winter solstice, is the shortest day and the longest night of the year.  Last year’s solstice was accompanied by a lunar eclipse, and that is when my nephew was born.  He’s a wizard, to be sure.

            I once rose at dawn on the solstice, and climbed up a mountain with my brother to greet the sun.  Unfortunately, that particular mountain was drizzly and swamped with fog.  We sat with a man who called himself “Gatherer,” then climbed home, where I, for one, went back to sleep.  I dreamed that I was eaten by a giant glass alligator, who defecated me into a grocery store for refugees.

            Seeing as the northern hemisphere has made the turn toward light and heat again, I thought I’d use this post to talk about beginnings.  More or less.  I’d originally, in fact, planned to rant about why I’m forced to hear “Santa Baby” every time I go out in public at this time of year.  What kind of joy is that spreading, hm?  What kind of peace and goodwill toward man is engendered by me having to listen to a 90s pop version of “Jingle Bells” in the AT&T store?

            I’d intended, in actuality, to make a thorough case for the Grinch.  He’s an unsung hero, for making those Whoville whatsits realize that Christmas doesn’t come from a store (maybe Christmas means a little bit more).  Take that, capitalism!  So what if he’s grouchy?  I’m grouchy.  My computer crashed this morning after I had this whole post written, and I’m rewriting it at a speed that would impress even the career typists of the 1930s.  I gave my nephew an Eeyore doll for his first birthday, just because it’s important to be cranky and disheartened sometimes.  Oscar the Grouch, and the Grinch, and Ebenezer Scrooge knew that.  Sometimes, in fact, being cantankerous and upset is one of the greatest joys of life.

            Anyway…  Beginnings.

            As a writer, the type of beginning that I know best is the story beginning: the art of the first line.  I’m considerably more adept at first lines than last lines, considering that I start three stories for each one that I actually finish.  Many super, zippity-doo-dah ideas get mugged down when I actually try to stretch them into words—but it would have to be a gobsmackingly-awful story that couldn’t even be begun. 

            One mistake that a lot of novice writers make (I know because I made it myself, not too long ago), is to think that an opening line has to be flamboyant or flashy.  It certainly can be—one of my favorite Agatha Christie novels begins, ‘“Hell,” said the Duchess.'  The only real requirement of an opening line, though, is that it makes the reader want to know what will happen next.  Whether the clocks are striking thirteen (1984), it’s the best of times and the worst of times (A Tale of Two Cities), or Catharine Morland was never meant to be an heroine (Northanger Abbey), all the beginning of a story needs to do is make the reader wonder what will happen next.

            To celebrate some of my abandoned beginnings (and in the spirit of giving), I’ve decided to display them here.  Take them and run, Dear Reader.  Maybe they’ll become something in your hands that they never could have been in mine.

            This first one is the start of a story that Greg and I invented while imbibing way too much caffeine.  Enjoy…

            “Last call for supper on the City of New Orleans!” a stentorian voice commanded, upsetting Humphrey’s dreams.  He recognized the voice’s cadence—but from where?  The stretched vowels, the clipped beginnings, had they belonged to his father?  No.  No, they belonged to Hollywood, to the hundreds of the films he’d watched to stuff up the gap in his life where there should have been a personality.  He rose woozily, and realized with his fine, thin eyelids still closed that the ground under him was moving: a steady rattle, a steady quake.

            He was on a train.

 

Gracias.  And another…

            There was magic in the kingdom of Riddle, but it was usually the sort that knotted shoelaces together, or switched sugar with salt.  In the neighboring kingdom of Enigma, now there were some bonified curses: Enigma had princesses whose hair fell out as soon as they turned thirteen, wicked damsels with the teeth of crocodiles, and a king who would lose his toes if he ever said the word “of.”  Their maladies had style, and they were proud of it.  The citizens of Riddle, who only had to worry about their dentures being replaced with soap replicas, were really much less content than their neighbors—because their neighbors could actually claim, with reason and relish, to be enchanted.

And a third…

            The blind queen will gather everyone into the great antechamber, and call me Anoctel the Traitor--even though another has worn that name before.

            To her it will be the Truth.  To the children and the line of children after them it will be the Truth.

            And let it be the Truth!  I will content myself with other words.

            I’m going up into a world of wind.

And lastly (but not leastly)…

            I am a well-traveled tree.

            Intrigued?  I could explain the plots that follow each of these nuggets, but where would the fun be in that?  Make of them what you will.  I’m off to the computer repair store, and a happy Boxing Day to all!

Confusion, Discontent, and Elizabethan Drama

            The first time I was in Oregon was for a tour boat ride on the Rogue River.  I was fifteen.  We boarded—it was an open-topped jet-boat—found seats, and set out across the gray water.  On the bank opposite the landing, a woman and a man leaned over and mooned us, the man’s buttocks bare, the woman’s garnished by a red thong.  A lady behind my seat chirped (without any great surprise), “Welcome to Oregon.”

            The second time I went to the Beaver State was when I was twenty, for the Ashland, Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Ashland is a small town, in the low hill country just over the Siskiyou Pass, east of the Rogue River.  Here’s something for you history buffs: the inland area surrounding Ashland, including much of southeast Oregon and a large chunk of northeastern California, once tried to become a separate state.  Its state-name was to be “Jefferson,” because Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clarke on the Oregon Trail.  Other proposed monikers were “Siscurdelmo,” “Bonanza,” and “Discontent.”  The proposal was backed by enough earnestness to get a turn before Congress—but the attack on Pearl Harbor drove energy and effort away from the secessionists.  The movement, though still smoldering today in back-country kitchens and saloons, never truly regained its blaze.

            (And by the way, can I just say how much I love the west coast?  Where else would you find a serious proposal to form a state called Discontent, or have a band of politicos hold up traffic on a major highway and issue a proclamation claiming they were “in patriotic rebellion” against Oregon and California, and would “secede every Thursday until further notice”?  It happened.  November 21^st, 1941.  Look it up.)

            Ashland, however, is not so famous for its political leanings, as much as for its literary ones.  The Shakespeare Festival isn’t a one-day event: oh, no.  It’s a year-round brouhaha, with a staff of highly trained actors and about eight plays showing per day.  The heart of the town is a complete reproduction of an Elizabethan theater: a round, roofless gray structure with (unfortunately) very uncomfortable chairs.  Since the non-noble spectators in Shakespeare’s time, however, would have been forced to stand, I’ll cut the plastic seats some slack.

            There are several other theaters, and a gift shop where one can buy playbooks, guides to theatrical accents, costumes, and various other baubles of a thespian bent.  There are hotels and motels and inns.  Greg and I stayed in a campground, though, because we didn’t have much money—but we spent most of our days in town, mingling with the crowds.  Camping in Ashland was awful: summer heat baked us dry, and the only division between our campsite and our neighbor’s was a tan log.  We very much enjoyed taking refuge in the Ashland Starbucks, and in a charming bookstore/coffeeshop called Bloomsbury (named after the Bloomsbury group, a collection of intellectuals headed by Virginia Woolf).  Bloomsbury, I remember, was where I ordered a chai tea and the barista, leaning over her counter confidentially, said, “It’ll kick you in the ass.”

            It was very strong tea.

            We saw three plays, all for moderately low prices (the cheapest was $20): Henry VIII, All’s Well That End’s Well, and Equivocation, a modern play about the elusive character of Shakespeare himself.  Two of the plays involved an actor whose last name was Tufts.  This caused me no end of delight.  It just seemed like the perfect name for a Shakespearian actor, seeing as Shakespeare was the man, after all, who named characters “Bottom”, and “Sir Henry Belch.” 

            And another thing that made me happy: nowhere did we encounter any of that Anti-Stratfordian nonsense.  The Anti-Stratfordians are the people who insist that, despite a great lack of evidence, Othello and Juliet and the rest of the merry band were not, in fact created by the man we call Shakespeare.  These scurrilous scholars put forward a lot of other candidates ( i.e. Sir Francis Bacon), all of whom were members of the ruling class--as if a peasant could never have been brilliant.  I find the Anti-Stratfordians almost as aggravating as the 19^th century folk who insisted that Bramwell Bronte, not his sister Charlotte, wrote Jane Eyre. 

I had a professor in college who trounced the Anti-Stratfordians roundly in the ongoing battle of wits.  She was a blond with a deep Southern twang and crooked teeth, and whenever an Anti-Stratfordian accosted her, she’d say two words: “William Faulkner.”  William Faulkner was another Southerner, one who wrote such disjointed modernist novels as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.  He was as common-born as they come, and had no formal education after middle school.  “I would have liked,” my professor often said, “to get a look at William Faulkner’s brain.”

Her point was that some people, whether forced through a school system or not, are just really smart.

As you can probably tell, I’m quite a bit protective of good old William Shakespeare.  Maybe it’s because he invented the word “eyeball.”  Maybe it’s because of all the cross-dressing women in his plays, like Viola in Twelfth Night, and Rosalind in As You Like It.  Maybe it’s because of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are dead.

I can tell you that my favorite line in all of Shakespeare’s plays is when Hamlet leans toward Polonius (leering, I’ve always thought), and says, “Buzz buzz.”  I can tell you that my favorite stage direction in all of his plays is when, in A Winter’s Tale, a character is directed to “exit, chased by a bear.”

Where did the bear come from?  This question has puzzled scholars for centuries.  The bear waited, a shadow in the wings, ready to lumber into the story and take a bite from the Player, as it will from us all…

But I digress.

The drive to Ashland was pretty, especially taking the route through the coastal redwoods.  Near Crescent City, these ancient trees closed in on the road, giving me the eerie sensation of being transported to the Third Moon of Endor.

That drive was also when Greg and I stumbled upon Confusion Hill.  Confusion Hill, as some of you may know, is one of those zany West coast tourist attractions (of the same caliber as the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot and the Oregon Vortex) where something has purportedly gone wrong with the laws of physics.  I’m not exactly sure what they claim has gone awry with the laws of physics: there was a tour, but Greg was too freaked out and disgusted to want to take it.  I think what really got his goat about the cluttered little stop were the numerous signs saying “Confusion Hill: Home of the Chipelope!”   Not to mention the gift shop full of stuffed chipmunks with antlers.

In fact, we ate mediocre burgers at Confusion Hill, then sped away through the forest.  If we were characters in a play, the stage directions would have surely been, “Exit, chased by a chipelope.”

&

I could end this post by talking about why I think Shakespeare has such an enduring place in our culture.  That, however, is one of those questions that can never be adequately answered; and far greater scholars than I have tried.  Instead I’ll just say, “Zounds!” and have done with it. 

The course of the Intergalactic Coffeeship never did run smooth.

High Times in Nevada

This post is largely a continuation of the last one—because I realized, about three minutes after I’d finished the last one, that there was a lot I hadn’t said.

So I’ve taken all the scraps I cut out of “Time, with the Canyon”, and woven them into their own story.  This story, appropriately, ends where the other left off: when we’d turned the car back toward the sea, and were zooming through the deserts towards home.

Nevada announced itself with casinos and dusty hills.  Welcome to the Hoover Dam.  When we’d finally escaped the bottlenecked traffic across the Hoover Dam, Welcome to the Fabulous Boulder City.  It was only an hour between the Fabulous Boulder City and the Fabulous Las Vegas (and might I point out here, Nevadans, that a word used too often degrades in meaning?).

I drove us to Las Vegas, but, after Greg’s GPS again led us astray (blithely insisting that Caesar’s Palace was out in the suburbs), I let him take the wheel.  Thank god, he was the one who drove us into the street of hotels known as the Strip.  What with seven lanes, abrupt turns, and taxis zipping back and forth like ping pong balls, it was an automobilist’s nightmare.  None of this was helped by the omnipresent, gigantic billboards looming at us with pictures of Cher and Carrot Top, nor by the fact that other billboards were embedded in the backs of trucks.  Seriously.  I can just imagine some publicity exec getting up one day and saying, “You know, we just don’t advertise enough…but I’ve got a swell idea!  Let's make it so that drivers can never escape pictures of Cher and Carrot Top!”

Saying things like “Urgh,” and “Stay calm,” we finally managed to find the vehicle-entrance to Caesar’s Palace.  We opted out of valet parking.  Later, at the reception desk, the concierge betrayed some surprise at this.  Self-parking was quite a faux pas. 

We stayed at Caesar’s Palace for one night, and then, because the next day was St. Patrick’s Day and prices skyrocketed, we moved to the low-budget Luxor.  That’s the casino shaped like a pyramid.  It was at the Luxor, in fact, that we saw an extremely drunk, disgruntled leprechaun wandering dazedly across the casino floor.

Caesar’s Palace was a megalithic labyrinth.  Our first night there, we searched for half an hour to find an exit onto the street.  Finally spotting a panel of dark glass doors, I yelled, “Quick!  Before the walls change!”  Unfortunately, those doors just led to the pool.

We finally found a back entrance (near the much-espoused valet parking), and straggled from there, eventually, onto the main drag.  Along these sidewalks between casinos, after dark, rushed a wave of giddy, intoxicated humans.  The wave carried us as far as the casino Treasure Island (or, as it now wants to be known, “T.I.”), where Greg heard the sounds of a pirate show in progress.  He glanced back at me, wide-eyed, and started running. 

When we breasted the front of the crowd, however, he was already bristling in anger.  Above us on a fake ship, a few women wiggled striped-bikinied hips—and Greg hissed, “Those aren’t pirates.”  

&

One archetypical instance was on the second night, when Greg and I were on a semi-deserted sidewalk near the Venetian hotel.  A man dressed exactly like Captain Jack Sparrow leaned out of the darkness of a nearby alcove and said “Ello love” to me. 

“Surreal,” Greg said.  He was right.

                                                                    &

The Southwest desert—as described by Barbara Kingsolver in Animal Dreams, Leslie Marmon Silko in Ceremony, and Willa Cather in The Song of the Lark (among others)—has made a special burrow into my imagination.  Because many of these books play with the mythology of the Ancient Pueblo peoples and other indigenous groups, I think of the Southwest desert as coyote-country, jackrabbit-country.  Land of the great tricksters. 

In many Native American cosmologies, the god Coyote made the world—but Coyote, being a bit of a rascal and far from omniscient, always gets himself entangled in misadventures.  Las Vegas seems to me like one of Coyote’s mistakes: an alternate reality of perpetual daytime and insincerity and fogged mirrors…  Coyote would trot away with his tail low, but his tongue still lolling, not having learned his lesson very well.

Las Vegas is a skin-deep place.  All the gaudy hotels had themes, like New York, or Paris, or Clowns—but once inside, they were all the same: grungy, smelly casino floors, blinking slot machines, and uber-chic restaurants with names like “Areola.”

Last week, I talked about how so many of our historical travel records are narratives of conquest.  My favorite type of travel narrative, on the contrary, is one that respects the places it visits, and tries to understand them from multiple perspectives.  I’m trying my best to respect Las Vegas, but, my oh my, it’s harder than usual.

In fact (if you must know), I spent the whole trip being miffed that none of the slot machines were educational.

Fabulous, indeed.