Picutre of Dorian Gray,
I read a lot. But I tend not to give myself credit for it. I imagine that people who are dedicated to being writers, like I am (even going to school for it) make reading their priority form of entertainment—the most common way they spend extra time. But it’s not that with me, I read some, probably more than most, but I watch TV far more than I read, I play video games, and I read about sports far more than I read literature. But, keep in mind that I’ve so far avoided having a traditional job, so this gives me more time than most.
I have a friend who is a painter who keeps disciplined hours in a studio. His painting is his singular goal. Its not that way with me. I write and I translate. I travel with USANA, I’ve spent a week of June in Mexico city working with my USANA group there. One week in June I spent in San Diego fleshing out the outline of a financial book I am co-writing with my father. I’ve got my fingers in a lot of pies, and frankly its hard not to envy my friend and his singular focus. But rather than loathe my multi-tasking—the way ADD makes me wander, I’ve decided to try and embrace it, to see if I can transfer any of the “qualities of disjointed thinking” over to my writing.
On that note I’ve been reading many books at the same time, looking for convergences in the disparate things I am reading, and letting my attention span wander where it will. Currently I am reading 5 books:
Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
North of Boston by Robert Frost (his second book of poems)
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
Fablehaven book V by Brandon Mull
And an indie guide book to New York called: Eat. Shop. NYC.
I just finished reading Chronicle of a Death Foretold my Marquez, so I guess you can add that to the mix as well.
Interesting things happen when you jump around in reading. Convergences. You read about the perfect, flawless youthful picture of Dorian Gray and then you put the book down and pick up the guide book to read about the hyperbolically described flawless charcuterie of an underground Brooklyn eatery and you realize that both, in reality, are ultimately unsustainable and tragically impossible ideals.
Or you find a quote like this in the INCREDIBLE author’s dedication from the Hour of The Star, talking about art: “and we must never forget that if the atom’s structure is invisible, it is none the less real. I am aware of the existence of many things I have never seen. And you too. One cannot prove the existence of what is most real but the essential thing is to believe. To weep and believe...amen for all of us.” And you contrast that with Wilde’s own introduction to Dorian Gray: “No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style....all art is quite useless.” Two different writers, expressing the polar opposite belief about art, yet ironically I find Wilde’s book to be the ethically sympathetic, from the gut, humanistic one, and Lispector’s to be the most “crafted” and “artistic”. But it just occurred to me that maybe Wilde was being ironic himself. He has a habit of swinging both ways....ZING!
Anyway, you find these sorts of things when you read concurrently. And I find them all to be beneficial for me as a human being. In fact, the more you read the more you realize that the experience of humanity is a shared one. There’s a Wilde like aphorism for you. I was in Mexico City last week, and like everyone should if/when they go, I went to the National Anthropological Museum, probably the finest museum in the world for Maya and Aztec (and Toltec and Olmec) artifacts. The wall you see as you leave the museum, huge and imposing, has a poem carved on it, whose basic message is “pay attention, you who leave here, for you are no different than them”. It is the same message as John Donne’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I find it to be a very true message, and not in the nostalgic sense of mourning their lives as a way of fearing your own death, but in the sense that I can see their motives for action, or at least the best conjectures of their motives, and I can contrast that with my motives for action. Another convergence, and in this case, not a divergence. That gives me a great sense of community. And, if you have a belief system like mine that holds to an afterlife, a great hope at being able to realize that community one day.
But I have just finished Dorian Gray and I think it is one of the most amazing books I have ever read. I wanted to blog an exegesis on how I read a book like that, on what parts effect me as a human and then on what I take away as a writer, like a mechanic would if he were pulling apart an engine piece by piece to see exactly how it worked. But I’ve been long winded enough with this blog already. I’ll just say that Dorian Gray worked for me on all the levels. It made me want to be a better person, AND the quality of its technical craftsmanship, especially on the character development and allegory level, made my jaw drop in places as I read it as a writer. Everyone talks about Wilde’s wit and his dialogue, which is great, but I was amazed at the descriptive lyricism of his prose, of how he matches his metaphors with the scene to set the mood....but now I’m rambling and promised I would stop. Read it if you haven’t and notice how effortlessly he seems to set up the characters in the first 100 pages. When I realized the allegory I was amazed at how smoothly I had been brought there. I had to go back and read it again. And finally, I’ll say that critics are foolish, which Wilde often said. They absolutely panned this book, mostly for moralizing reasons, while anyone who reads this book with half a brain, even if they wholly disagree with its message, has to give credit to its technical ability. Bummer that it was his only novel.
Also, do you ever do this? but I love to match music to books. I was thinking that Dorian Gray would match perfectly with Rufus Wainwright, for his "baroqueness", but then I tried it and it didn't fit. What fit perfectly was Andrew Bird. So next time you read it try to have some Andrew Bird on in the background and see if it enhances your experience. It did for me.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Translation reading and blogging from a plane
In the air on a plane from jfk to lax. On my iPhone. Pretty cool that I can blog from a plane. Eventually headed to Morelia Mexico. Also watching paranoid activity right now on the plane. Not a good idea. Just half saw the ending while trying to focus on this blog. Uhhhh. Bad idea.
Moving on: Ive been invited to read at an event for the Columbia Center for Literary Translation. I don't know if I've mentioned here that I've been in workshops and doing lots of translation from Spanish to English. So far I really enjoy translation. It absorbs my mind completely.
Apparently my teachers have taken notice of me and a few of my other classmates. They want me to read some translations and some original work and also to talk about how translation work informs creative work and vice versa.
I'll keep everyone posted on how it goes. I still have no idea what o read on both accounts.
But right now I think I'm gonna wake up the sleeping lady At the end of my aisle and make her talk to me so I forget about paranormal activity.
Moving on: Ive been invited to read at an event for the Columbia Center for Literary Translation. I don't know if I've mentioned here that I've been in workshops and doing lots of translation from Spanish to English. So far I really enjoy translation. It absorbs my mind completely.
Apparently my teachers have taken notice of me and a few of my other classmates. They want me to read some translations and some original work and also to talk about how translation work informs creative work and vice versa.
I'll keep everyone posted on how it goes. I still have no idea what o read on both accounts.
But right now I think I'm gonna wake up the sleeping lady At the end of my aisle and make her talk to me so I forget about paranormal activity.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Big Reading, and some Sloths.
Hey Myself. (let's not kid each other here) :)
So the big reading at Columbia went down the other night. I was the last reader of the evening, which I want to think is an honor, but might just be because I told them I was going to be late. Whatever the reason, it worked out great. There's lots of free booze at Columbia, that's one of the things they do really well over there, so everyone was pretty loosey goosey by the time I read and I really think they enjoyed it. I got a lot of really serious compliments afterwards and I can't tell you how good that feels.
I was just talking with a friend today about how graduate writing programs are such dour affairs...We walk around all day talking about how much of a lottery it is to crack into the publishing world and "make it". It's really a downer to any kind of ambition. There's obviously a lot of reasons why it happens, among them pure capitalism and certainly a large measure of false modesty and self defeat. But it's pretty ridiculous when you think about it. My friend and I resolved to be more positive, to try and change the "suffering under the burden of our calling" mindset that roams the halls like a frikin ghost.
So, it was good to get some validation from my peers. Plus, I wasn't sure how the dialogue in the story would read out loud, and it went over really well. I read a slightly different version of Cameo, but before that I read a story called "Sloth" that I haven't posted up here because it's always been in a state of flux. But my workshop last semester loved it, and now that I read it again, it does a lot of things I really really like. I imagine I have to post it here now with the big buildup.
Note: No profanity! Yaay. it was beginning to feel like a shipyard in here.
Note #2: Lots of italicized dialogue that might not come through on this stupid platform. Should be pretty apparent though
Note #3: This story was taken from some interesting real life experiences,(namely being on a boat cruise in Brazil) and I used my name and the name of an old friend in it. I have this weird thing with authenticity, and even though none of the people in the story actually did anything near what happens in the story, when I just make up names it seems fake. Maybe I'm doomed to use the names of people I know and care about, even if the stories have nothing to do with them. Makes it easier to write for me somehow. Enough notes, enjoy.
Story #8
Sloth
In the morning a wooden dinghy pulled alongside with a sputtering motor. It was two kids with a three-toed sloth. The sloth was cinched around the girl like a baby, ear to ear with her. It was as big as her whole torso with its arms around her neck and the fur of it greenish with fungus and matted and dark down on it’s back.
Gershon came out to the back deck and spoke to the kids. His portugese sounded quick and it was early. But it was warm and I was watching the kids. They smiled and the girl shrugged the sloth towards Gershon. The boy held the dingy alongside against the pull of the river. I went down to the cabin to wake Joanna. The sloth looked like something worth being woken up for.
I had a romantic plan to kiss her til she woke, but she was up, sitting up in the bed curling loose hairs between her fingernails.
When we came back up Gershon had the sloth and the dinghy was tied to the yacht with both kids standing in it, steady on their feet. The girl looked so thin and frail without the sloth in her arms and the boy smiled up at us, probably because by now he knew the trip had been worth it. They were dark kids, and short, and the boy had missing teeth.
When Joanna saw the sloth in Gershon’s arms she sucked in her breath,
Oh, is that what I think it is? Oh, look at its little bum!
It was part of her charm to always seem surprised. I had told her already about the sloth, and about the way it looked in the arms of the girl.
Oh, Gershon, can I hold him, is it dangerous?
No, it is super safe.
He reached behind his head to loose the sloth’s claws, to peel it off of him. It moved slowly. Everything about it was languid, like it was trapped in solution. Gershon too moved slowly when he took its arms from around his neck. He went up to Joanna and stood by her side, shrugging the weight of the sloth off of him, towards her. She took it in the same way. They both took their time in the exchange, both infected by the languid care the sloth seemed to give to the world. It was amazing to watch. The river going by regular speed and the breeze, and their delicacy with the sloth in a bubble of slowness that seemed to cover only them, with the sloth reaching one arm up around Joanna’s neck, and then the other, cinching to her torso in the same way it had held Gershon and the girl.
When Joanna had it she tried to bounce it like a baby. You could see the sloth tighten on her with the bouncing.
It’s so warm and so strong. Aaron you’ve got to hold him. He’s squeezing me everywhere.
He probably thinks you’re a tree trunk.
No, he knows me. Then to the sloth, to the back of its head, You know me don’t you? You know just who I am.
I turned to Gershon,
Gershon, is it a boy or a girl? Will you ask them?
With certainty.
Then he turned to the kids, steady in the boat and spoke to them in portugese. The boy answered in Portugese and I could tell it was choppier for him, a second language. He made a gesture to the sloth and laughed and Gershon laughed too, then turned to us to translate.
It is a girl, he says. He says it is clearly a girl because it has no…you know…
Gershon looked sheepish and did not continue.
And where did they find it Gershon, will you ask them?
He answered me without asking them,
They live in the jungle all along the river, super high in the high jungle.
Oh, but will you ask them particularly where they found this one? This particular one?
With certainty.
Then he spoke again to the kids and the boy again answered in rutty portugese, making gestures high above his head and then pointing to the girl. Gershon turned again to translate,
In the trees near their home, he found it. It was very high and he thought it was a nest of bees on the tree trunk. He climbed up the tree and gave it to his sister. This is his sister.
I looked at the boy and the girl. The boy looked at me and was proud.
And Gershon, do they live here? Do they take the sloth out to visit all the charters?
Yes, they live on the river. They are from a village closer to Manaus, I believe. It seems that way from their speak, from the way they speak. To take the sloth out is a normal thing. Those that want to hold it give them a small money or pay them to take away the boat trash, the trash from the boat. But don’t worry, it is taken care of. Everyone is happy. Yes?
Joanna spoke,
I’m only happy if Aaron holds him. You hold him, hon.
Love, it’s a girl.
I know. Here, you take him.
It was also part of her charm to act contrary. To fight those little battles, and win them.
She came up to me with the sloth in her arms. She moved across the white deck surface of the yacht. She braced at my side in the same way Gershon had done with her. I could smell the sloth, mold like old pillows and the smell of the river and the tops of trees. It was the strangest thing when it touched me, the fur more coarse than I had imagined, and I felt a tinge of careful slowness in me in the immediate presence of it. Like a whim. Like the smell of the sloth brought from far away on a breeze.
Wait, Jo. I don’t think I want to. I know it won’t make sense but I think I’d just like to watch you hold her. I guess it almost seems sacred.
She stood to process this, the sloth still touching my side, the slowness of it all around us, like humidity. Joanna spoke down, to the sloth.
It’s because he knows we’ve got a good thing going, you and me. Don’t you think we got a good thing going?
The sloth didn’t answer. They stood there and I stepped away and Joanna moved across the white deck surface of the yacht to where the dinghy was tied. She moved like she knew I was watching her.
She made eye contact with the girl and the girl reached up for the sloth. The sloth, on its own, took her arms from around Joanna’s neck, one at a time, and reached for the girl. It must have known her by her smell. Joanna leaned down and bumped her hips outwards to give the sloth something to stand on as it reached. For a moment, with its arms around the neck of the girl and its feet on Joanna, braced, the sloth stretched between them like a conduit of slowness. Like a filament. Stretched between the two of them and in that moment, I swear it, a power was loosed, what I had seen with Gershon and Joanna, what I had felt when its coarse fur touched my skin. A languid bomb of slowness epicentered out from their connection to swamp that whole scene.
The river almost stopped moving, it slowly scraped its wide banks. The mud of it eternally churned the shallows brown in slow eddys. The million leaves of the jungle all along that corridor of water stopped oscillating in the breeze and instead moved like slow dancers, back and forth. A split tailed swallow hung in the air above the river.
You could hold this sloth and stop everything. You could hold this sloth and the world would stop. You could carry this sloth wrapped around your chest like a time machine, calming your blood, making your heart beat slow enough to live forever.
It was the most beautiful thing. The ageless kids in the dinghy smiling and braced imperceptibly against the not-pull of the stopped river. Gershon caught in a smile he couldn’t erase because it would take an eternity to do so. And Joanna, her wit and suppleness braced on the deck in all youth forever passing that kind talisman to the girl. And the smell of the river and the smell of the tops of the trees.
So the big reading at Columbia went down the other night. I was the last reader of the evening, which I want to think is an honor, but might just be because I told them I was going to be late. Whatever the reason, it worked out great. There's lots of free booze at Columbia, that's one of the things they do really well over there, so everyone was pretty loosey goosey by the time I read and I really think they enjoyed it. I got a lot of really serious compliments afterwards and I can't tell you how good that feels.
I was just talking with a friend today about how graduate writing programs are such dour affairs...We walk around all day talking about how much of a lottery it is to crack into the publishing world and "make it". It's really a downer to any kind of ambition. There's obviously a lot of reasons why it happens, among them pure capitalism and certainly a large measure of false modesty and self defeat. But it's pretty ridiculous when you think about it. My friend and I resolved to be more positive, to try and change the "suffering under the burden of our calling" mindset that roams the halls like a frikin ghost.
So, it was good to get some validation from my peers. Plus, I wasn't sure how the dialogue in the story would read out loud, and it went over really well. I read a slightly different version of Cameo, but before that I read a story called "Sloth" that I haven't posted up here because it's always been in a state of flux. But my workshop last semester loved it, and now that I read it again, it does a lot of things I really really like. I imagine I have to post it here now with the big buildup.
Note: No profanity! Yaay. it was beginning to feel like a shipyard in here.
Note #2: Lots of italicized dialogue that might not come through on this stupid platform. Should be pretty apparent though
Note #3: This story was taken from some interesting real life experiences,(namely being on a boat cruise in Brazil) and I used my name and the name of an old friend in it. I have this weird thing with authenticity, and even though none of the people in the story actually did anything near what happens in the story, when I just make up names it seems fake. Maybe I'm doomed to use the names of people I know and care about, even if the stories have nothing to do with them. Makes it easier to write for me somehow. Enough notes, enjoy.
Story #8
Sloth
In the morning a wooden dinghy pulled alongside with a sputtering motor. It was two kids with a three-toed sloth. The sloth was cinched around the girl like a baby, ear to ear with her. It was as big as her whole torso with its arms around her neck and the fur of it greenish with fungus and matted and dark down on it’s back.
Gershon came out to the back deck and spoke to the kids. His portugese sounded quick and it was early. But it was warm and I was watching the kids. They smiled and the girl shrugged the sloth towards Gershon. The boy held the dingy alongside against the pull of the river. I went down to the cabin to wake Joanna. The sloth looked like something worth being woken up for.
I had a romantic plan to kiss her til she woke, but she was up, sitting up in the bed curling loose hairs between her fingernails.
When we came back up Gershon had the sloth and the dinghy was tied to the yacht with both kids standing in it, steady on their feet. The girl looked so thin and frail without the sloth in her arms and the boy smiled up at us, probably because by now he knew the trip had been worth it. They were dark kids, and short, and the boy had missing teeth.
When Joanna saw the sloth in Gershon’s arms she sucked in her breath,
Oh, is that what I think it is? Oh, look at its little bum!
It was part of her charm to always seem surprised. I had told her already about the sloth, and about the way it looked in the arms of the girl.
Oh, Gershon, can I hold him, is it dangerous?
No, it is super safe.
He reached behind his head to loose the sloth’s claws, to peel it off of him. It moved slowly. Everything about it was languid, like it was trapped in solution. Gershon too moved slowly when he took its arms from around his neck. He went up to Joanna and stood by her side, shrugging the weight of the sloth off of him, towards her. She took it in the same way. They both took their time in the exchange, both infected by the languid care the sloth seemed to give to the world. It was amazing to watch. The river going by regular speed and the breeze, and their delicacy with the sloth in a bubble of slowness that seemed to cover only them, with the sloth reaching one arm up around Joanna’s neck, and then the other, cinching to her torso in the same way it had held Gershon and the girl.
When Joanna had it she tried to bounce it like a baby. You could see the sloth tighten on her with the bouncing.
It’s so warm and so strong. Aaron you’ve got to hold him. He’s squeezing me everywhere.
He probably thinks you’re a tree trunk.
No, he knows me. Then to the sloth, to the back of its head, You know me don’t you? You know just who I am.
I turned to Gershon,
Gershon, is it a boy or a girl? Will you ask them?
With certainty.
Then he turned to the kids, steady in the boat and spoke to them in portugese. The boy answered in Portugese and I could tell it was choppier for him, a second language. He made a gesture to the sloth and laughed and Gershon laughed too, then turned to us to translate.
It is a girl, he says. He says it is clearly a girl because it has no…you know…
Gershon looked sheepish and did not continue.
And where did they find it Gershon, will you ask them?
He answered me without asking them,
They live in the jungle all along the river, super high in the high jungle.
Oh, but will you ask them particularly where they found this one? This particular one?
With certainty.
Then he spoke again to the kids and the boy again answered in rutty portugese, making gestures high above his head and then pointing to the girl. Gershon turned again to translate,
In the trees near their home, he found it. It was very high and he thought it was a nest of bees on the tree trunk. He climbed up the tree and gave it to his sister. This is his sister.
I looked at the boy and the girl. The boy looked at me and was proud.
And Gershon, do they live here? Do they take the sloth out to visit all the charters?
Yes, they live on the river. They are from a village closer to Manaus, I believe. It seems that way from their speak, from the way they speak. To take the sloth out is a normal thing. Those that want to hold it give them a small money or pay them to take away the boat trash, the trash from the boat. But don’t worry, it is taken care of. Everyone is happy. Yes?
Joanna spoke,
I’m only happy if Aaron holds him. You hold him, hon.
Love, it’s a girl.
I know. Here, you take him.
It was also part of her charm to act contrary. To fight those little battles, and win them.
She came up to me with the sloth in her arms. She moved across the white deck surface of the yacht. She braced at my side in the same way Gershon had done with her. I could smell the sloth, mold like old pillows and the smell of the river and the tops of trees. It was the strangest thing when it touched me, the fur more coarse than I had imagined, and I felt a tinge of careful slowness in me in the immediate presence of it. Like a whim. Like the smell of the sloth brought from far away on a breeze.
Wait, Jo. I don’t think I want to. I know it won’t make sense but I think I’d just like to watch you hold her. I guess it almost seems sacred.
She stood to process this, the sloth still touching my side, the slowness of it all around us, like humidity. Joanna spoke down, to the sloth.
It’s because he knows we’ve got a good thing going, you and me. Don’t you think we got a good thing going?
The sloth didn’t answer. They stood there and I stepped away and Joanna moved across the white deck surface of the yacht to where the dinghy was tied. She moved like she knew I was watching her.
She made eye contact with the girl and the girl reached up for the sloth. The sloth, on its own, took her arms from around Joanna’s neck, one at a time, and reached for the girl. It must have known her by her smell. Joanna leaned down and bumped her hips outwards to give the sloth something to stand on as it reached. For a moment, with its arms around the neck of the girl and its feet on Joanna, braced, the sloth stretched between them like a conduit of slowness. Like a filament. Stretched between the two of them and in that moment, I swear it, a power was loosed, what I had seen with Gershon and Joanna, what I had felt when its coarse fur touched my skin. A languid bomb of slowness epicentered out from their connection to swamp that whole scene.
The river almost stopped moving, it slowly scraped its wide banks. The mud of it eternally churned the shallows brown in slow eddys. The million leaves of the jungle all along that corridor of water stopped oscillating in the breeze and instead moved like slow dancers, back and forth. A split tailed swallow hung in the air above the river.
You could hold this sloth and stop everything. You could hold this sloth and the world would stop. You could carry this sloth wrapped around your chest like a time machine, calming your blood, making your heart beat slow enough to live forever.
It was the most beautiful thing. The ageless kids in the dinghy smiling and braced imperceptibly against the not-pull of the stopped river. Gershon caught in a smile he couldn’t erase because it would take an eternity to do so. And Joanna, her wit and suppleness braced on the deck in all youth forever passing that kind talisman to the girl. And the smell of the river and the smell of the tops of the trees.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Manila, no envelopes
Call it reverse jet lag, my body preparing to go back to east coast time after two weeks of Malaysia and Philippine time (my father and I building our USANA business).
I should be so exhausted. Up 24 hours now after a text from a NY friend (not knowing I was in Asia) woke me up at 3am yesterday. Functions all day today with the USANA people in Manila. Such wonderful people. Tonight Bob (the venerable daddy-o) and I gave a presentation to a group of 150 of our newest Philippine associates. Man these people love dinner parties, 5 hour dinner parties, and they love raffles. And they are such a humble and incredible people. All travel opens eyes, but travel to countries like Malaysia and the Philippines, where most of the people live below the poverty line, is especially humbling, eye opening. Not in the ways you'd expect either, Not because I see poverty, but because I see so many people overcoming it through hard work, a work ethic that makes Bob and I cringe when we compare it to the standard American Work ethic. I mean, i've never seen people as hungry for success as they are here and in Kuala Lumpur. It's really stunning.
Highlights:
Waking up in KL every morning at 6 when the Muslim call for prayers would come blaring across loudspeakers from the mosque at city center park. Something powerful and sacred about a call to prayer in a language you don't know, the singing and intonations fuzzed and partially muted through the walls and windows.
Sneaking a break with My dad during a seminar last monday in KL, in an abandoned conference room. Him passing out on the floor and me on a set of chairs, just totally worn out from work and from so many goodwill dinners and functions arranged by all our generous hosts. Then waking up with a perfect set of memories of a cameo factory I visited in June on a vacation. Like I had dreamt it. But I hadn't. I wrote it all down on my Iphone and then revised it a bit, took it away a bit from the direct personal level of experience and, tadaa, a short story. Timely too, cuz I have a huge reading for all the columbia writing students/faculty on the thursday I get back, and I was beginning to despair at having new stuff to read. We'll see if I like it after a full night's sleep. I'll post it here, Enjoy, -Aaron
Cameo
In the bus heavy with old people, with the potholes bumping us all along. And out the window where I was looking the light blue of the water and the breakers and the coral flashing by like an old filmstrip, broken by moments of thick banana leaves and the raised capillary roots of banyan trees.
We stopped in the gravel parking lot of a roadside cameo workshop. It was on the tour. The sound of gravel under the tires when we finally stopped. All of us getting gingerly off the air-conditioned bus and the blast of humidity. And most of us then shuffling into the cameo shop to be back in the AC again, but there was none and then men fanning themselves with their tourbooks and women taking off their straw hats with floral patterned bands and fanning them.
The owner was happy, he had a deal with the buses I guess. He met us in the lobby and directed us to a table in the corner with all the shells laid out on it. Conch, snail. In pinks and greens and indigos. Then standing behind the table with cursory waves of his hands over the shells, and the being in the family for generations, and the shells laid out in front of him in various stages of preparation, some full cameos, some with half formed women’s faces peeking out in profile from the smooth surfaces. And some of the women, the ones that lived wealthy lives, who had really traveled, peeling off from the margins of the crowd before he had finished.
Then with a sweep of his hand turning us to the showroom where what must have been his grandaughters were waiting behind the glass display tables. The air moving with hats and tourbooks and the spinning of an off balance acacia wood fan. And throughout that afternoon the glances of old women at mirrors to see themselves peeking out in profile.
When we came out the driver sitting on the concrete parking curb saying yes, yes ready to go? Yes. And putting out his cigarette on the concrete before he stood and looked us over to see who he could name. Mr Thompson. Miss Shirley.
Back to the air conditioning and the potholes, the gentle curve of the island road that, if you took it long enough, would eventually take you back to where you started. That was where the tour ended. But before that, the looking out the window at the banyan roots and the banana leaves and every once in a while peeking out, on cue, the indigo blue of the lagoon and the deeper blue beyond the breakers, and the women that bought cameos swearing they looked just like that when they were young.
I should be so exhausted. Up 24 hours now after a text from a NY friend (not knowing I was in Asia) woke me up at 3am yesterday. Functions all day today with the USANA people in Manila. Such wonderful people. Tonight Bob (the venerable daddy-o) and I gave a presentation to a group of 150 of our newest Philippine associates. Man these people love dinner parties, 5 hour dinner parties, and they love raffles. And they are such a humble and incredible people. All travel opens eyes, but travel to countries like Malaysia and the Philippines, where most of the people live below the poverty line, is especially humbling, eye opening. Not in the ways you'd expect either, Not because I see poverty, but because I see so many people overcoming it through hard work, a work ethic that makes Bob and I cringe when we compare it to the standard American Work ethic. I mean, i've never seen people as hungry for success as they are here and in Kuala Lumpur. It's really stunning.
Highlights:
Waking up in KL every morning at 6 when the Muslim call for prayers would come blaring across loudspeakers from the mosque at city center park. Something powerful and sacred about a call to prayer in a language you don't know, the singing and intonations fuzzed and partially muted through the walls and windows.
Sneaking a break with My dad during a seminar last monday in KL, in an abandoned conference room. Him passing out on the floor and me on a set of chairs, just totally worn out from work and from so many goodwill dinners and functions arranged by all our generous hosts. Then waking up with a perfect set of memories of a cameo factory I visited in June on a vacation. Like I had dreamt it. But I hadn't. I wrote it all down on my Iphone and then revised it a bit, took it away a bit from the direct personal level of experience and, tadaa, a short story. Timely too, cuz I have a huge reading for all the columbia writing students/faculty on the thursday I get back, and I was beginning to despair at having new stuff to read. We'll see if I like it after a full night's sleep. I'll post it here, Enjoy, -Aaron
Cameo
In the bus heavy with old people, with the potholes bumping us all along. And out the window where I was looking the light blue of the water and the breakers and the coral flashing by like an old filmstrip, broken by moments of thick banana leaves and the raised capillary roots of banyan trees.
We stopped in the gravel parking lot of a roadside cameo workshop. It was on the tour. The sound of gravel under the tires when we finally stopped. All of us getting gingerly off the air-conditioned bus and the blast of humidity. And most of us then shuffling into the cameo shop to be back in the AC again, but there was none and then men fanning themselves with their tourbooks and women taking off their straw hats with floral patterned bands and fanning them.
The owner was happy, he had a deal with the buses I guess. He met us in the lobby and directed us to a table in the corner with all the shells laid out on it. Conch, snail. In pinks and greens and indigos. Then standing behind the table with cursory waves of his hands over the shells, and the being in the family for generations, and the shells laid out in front of him in various stages of preparation, some full cameos, some with half formed women’s faces peeking out in profile from the smooth surfaces. And some of the women, the ones that lived wealthy lives, who had really traveled, peeling off from the margins of the crowd before he had finished.
Then with a sweep of his hand turning us to the showroom where what must have been his grandaughters were waiting behind the glass display tables. The air moving with hats and tourbooks and the spinning of an off balance acacia wood fan. And throughout that afternoon the glances of old women at mirrors to see themselves peeking out in profile.
When we came out the driver sitting on the concrete parking curb saying yes, yes ready to go? Yes. And putting out his cigarette on the concrete before he stood and looked us over to see who he could name. Mr Thompson. Miss Shirley.
Back to the air conditioning and the potholes, the gentle curve of the island road that, if you took it long enough, would eventually take you back to where you started. That was where the tour ended. But before that, the looking out the window at the banyan roots and the banana leaves and every once in a while peeking out, on cue, the indigo blue of the lagoon and the deeper blue beyond the breakers, and the women that bought cameos swearing they looked just like that when they were young.
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