BLUE VOICE

I confess that among many other such thoughts, I worry that I'm slipping when I find typographical errors in my writing that I missed after reading the sentence a time or two.  Sometimes those errors find their way into my Internet posts, or in drafts meant for publication.  And sometimes I don't catch those errors in posts for a long time.

I suppose it should reassure me, or at least make me feel better, that I spot such errors in published books and especially online.  Just now I've read two articles on the New Yorker site.  I spotted two obvious errors in one, and one in the other. I recognize how they were made--a sentence is rewritten or a thought is redirected but an errant word remains, usually a small one: an "in" or an "a" or an "a the." These are byproducts of how word processing works--all this deleting and inserting.   Or a word is just misspelled--the kind of misspelling that eludes the spell-checker. Those sorts of things.

But for many year when it was a magazine and nothing else, the New Yorker was the standard for copy editing and perfectly proofread prose.  I personally never found a typo in any issue I read from the 1960s to the late 1980s, when they began appearing after the magazine changed ownership and editor.  They soon stopped, but the typos that I saw in at least a few issues seemed utterly unnatural in that distinctive New Yorker typeface.

But typos as well as bad grammar and other copy writing errors are depressingly frequent in heavily monetized online publications.  But the New Yorker?  The New Yorker!

So while I am a little reassured about myself, I am at the same time depressed by a different sign that perhaps this is no longer my time.  

II

It occurs to me there is a possible reason for these typos appearing on the New Yorker site and other sites that post writing by professional writers, besides just slipping standards or sloth, or even the usual excuse of the need to feed the beast with copy at a fast pace.

That possible reason is that the standard, or even the ethic, of online posts is that once posted, nothing in them is changed.  If changes are made, they must be indicated at the end, with a catalog of the revisions.

Apparently there is something unethical about correcting mistakes once the publish button is pushed.   I'm not sure why, except perhaps that this is just the Internet tradition.  Maybe it began with dated web logs, which also are apparently sacrosanct.

To which I say, sorry, but it seems like nonsense to me. Isn't the capability of changing what's published online a major advantage?  I'm pretty sure any of us who saw our mistakes permanently preserved in print would have appreciated the chance to correct them, then and there.  Changes in substance online (correcting facts, etc.) might merit an appended note, especially if in response to a comment or correction from outside.  But style matters?  I don't get it.  Maybe it's part of the aura?  Internet posts are supposed to be so spontaneous? And nothing provides the aura of spontaneity like sloppy writing. Maybe the lack of copy editing isn't just an economy, but an ethic.

In any case, I routinely change what I've written after I've posted it, to correct errors, to rewrite sentences and paragraphs in the effort to make things clearer or just better written.  I may do so several times until I am satisfied.  I've made revisions on this post, for example, at least six times so far.

The ethics of this seem clear to me.  If I have annoyed readers with typos and misspellings, or confused them with awkward writing, I don't see the point of continuing to annoy or confuse future readers if I can correct the errors or improve the writing.

In the end, I suppose both parts of this post refer to the same set of standards.  And that they are part of my identity as a writer, because I make corrections even when believing that it's unlikely many or any readers will know or care.  I'll know, and I care.

I don't have a smartphone.  I don't watch new television programs, seldom see new movies, though a few on DVD.  I don't know who the celebrities are that the supermarket tabloids and their internet counterparts get all exercised about.  I don't listen to new pop music.  And so on.

This fits the profile for my age, and a lot of it surely is about age. But it's not mindless.  Some of it is about exploring past music etc. I missed, or in more depth, and some about revisiting books, tv shows etc. for what they now say that's different from the first times around. Or reminding me who I was then, and maybe who I forgot I was since.

Of course, that I don't like a lot of new TV, music and movies does make it easier to ignore.

 Apart from the comfort level, there's the tendency to want to have a deeper experience and find more meaning in what flashed by in the past.  That seems like the natural work, play and purpose of being this age, and in sound enough mind to try feeling the breadth and depth of my whole life while I've got it.

 (And in fact I use some new technology in these activities.  But why should I give up the advantages of the desktop computer just because they aren't fashionable anymore? Or the stereo, the record player?  Or the physical book off the physical shelf ?)

Though I take a certain amount of elder abuse for skepticism of new technologies and so on (which, by the way, I also exhibited when younger), I have my additional reasons. There's expense v. utility, for example. As interesting or enhancing as they might be, smartphones and multimedia packages are too expensive for what I need.  Besides, nobody calls me on the home phone or the flip phone now, so why would that be different? And the screen is too small and the sound too poor for much of anything else.

 So it's partly aesthetics, too: one of the major reasons that so far I haven't been able to bring myself to do Facebook is that it is so ugly.

Bad design, inferior materials also turn me off.  Some new tech is so obviously designed for younger eyes and fingers that it's the height of effrontery to expect I'd shamefacedly accept it.

The other element that is related to age is that the smartphone and related technologies are largely about marketing and selling things, and I'm not interested in that, nor are the marketers and sellers likely to be much interested in me.  In my demographic, and especially my income level.

 But there is a larger sense in which this is a choice, and I know what I'm doing.  What I am doing is concentrating on the past and the future.  The present makes its demands anyway, I don't have to cater to it.  People in youth and middle age, people with children or even actively involved with grandchildren, have reasons to keep up with the fast-changing present.  I don't, not nearly as much.

If I don't need to, I don't want to waste the time.  I am engaged in experiencing the past in more depth, and learning from it.  I apply that to concerns about the future.  Big concerns, about the big picture future.

That's my choice, my concentration, and it's meant to be my contribution.  It may well be futile.  Still, chances are a little better on something good coming of this, than from the distractions of the smartphone.

On and around my 69th birthday recently, I had three birthday thoughts.

 The first was on the day, when I hiked up Trinidad Head. Unless you know the Head (in Trinidad Bay, far northern California), the thought may not mean anything, so I've included some photos from a subsequent walk, on a sunnier day. On my birthday there was considerable fog blowing in from the sea. Still, I wish I'd taken my camera that day.

 The thought was simple: my birthday present was that I hiked Trinidad Head--the experience itself (I even got quite close to a young rabbit on the trail) and the fact that at 69, I could still hike up Trinidad Head. That's the best gift.


It's not a climb in any mountain-climbing sense, it doesn't require equipment or training--it's not that kind of accomplishment. It's an ordinary climb--rigorous enough especially at the start, and a workout as the trail winds up. I've been hiking it for about 19 years, though not often enough. And I still can.

 It overlooks the Pacific on one side, and Trinidad Bay on the other. It's quiet and beautiful, and for now, it's available to me.

 That was first thought. The second thought, which came the next day or so, was more complicated. It had to do with success and failure.

 "One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake," Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter. Maybe, but for an American man the basic criteria for success are pretty clear.

You're a success if in your life you make a sufficient living to raise a family, or if you produce work that receives honors and earns you a recognized place among peers as well as some more general community, or preferably both. You can be a success in your life, or a success in your work, or both. You are failure if you accomplish neither.

 I have accomplished neither. The failure is not absolute, I did accomplish something in each area. But not enough really to count me a success by these criteria.

Yet looking back, I have some satisfactions. So the second thought was: if I failed, at least I failed big. That is, the failure (however complete) was not spectacular, but my aspirations were big.

 I was remembering an acquaintance I'd once worked with who I last saw a long time ago in southern California. He showed me a script he'd written for a sitcom then on TV. I never saw him again. Though it appears he had some achievements in the movies and TV, it wasn't as a writer. There are other similar cases I know.

 I made compromises in my working life. But at least I did not try to write scripts for sad sitcoms or pathetic or loathsome movies, and failed. I failed trying to write the most ambitious works, the best works I could dream up, in whatever form. What I failed at was big.


The third thought is perhaps a corollary. If I were to describe, as simply as possible, what I did all my life, I might say, "I made sentences." (Nobody has asked me that question, nor any like it for quite awhile, but at least I have the answer ready.) I also made music, and dreamed up images, wrote dialogue and so on. But basically, in the range of work I did for love, a larger duty and for hire, I made sentences.

 John Banville began his review of books on Emerson this way:"Surely mankind's greatest invention is the sentence." Of course in addition to sentences, I made paragraphs and pages and so on. I thought about and worked at all these forms, but they are basically built with sentences. So I'll make my stand with the sentence.

 And if it is indeed humankind's greatest invention, it matters less what those sentences were about than the fact that I worked at making them the best sentences I could. While trying to lead an honorable life. It was not a bad way to use a life. So I think I'll keep doing it.

Martin Amis is a writer I've admired mostly from afar.  I've enjoyed the novels I've read and the non-fiction collection about the 80s, The Moronic Inferno, a title that describes the 80s and a lot of the ever since.  But I haven't read a lot of his work, for often his most urgent concerns are not mine--at least not of the same moment. 

Maybe it's just that his life has been so different from mine.  But he was quoted making an observation that I've not only never read anybody else making, I've never heard anyone else say.  He was describing something that happens to him, that I thought that for all intents and purposes, only happens to me.

He said that he is often caught offguard by a memory of something that attacks him with regret and chagrin, seemingly out of the blue, just walking down the street or in any daily situation.  In fact, I referenced this on this very blog:

 Several years ago I was pleased to hear novelist Martin Amis admit that small regrets hit him suddenly every day, to the point that they stop him in his tracks, literally, as he walks down the street, and he involuntarily winces and mutters to himself because of some small memory that emerged with the peculiar force of shame and the pitiless, bottomless thump of regret. I was pleased because I thought I was the only one this happened to.


Now he's done it again, in a recent interview (published at Smithsonian online and flagged by Andrew Sullivan's site.)  He has identified something I am dimly aware is happening to me--that in recent days I've become more conscious of.  Here's what he said:

"Your youth evaporates in your early 40s when you look in the mirror. And then it becomes a full-time job pretending you’re not going to die, and then you accept that you’ll die. Then in your 50s everything is very thin. And then suddenly you’ve got this huge new territory inside you, which is the past, which wasn’t there before. A new source of strength. Then that may not be so gratifying to you as the 60s begin [Amis is 62], but then I find that in your 60s, everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again. And it’s imbued with a kind of leave-taking resonance, that it’s not going to be around very long, this world, so it begins to look poignant and fascinating.”

Yes, there is that "huge new territory inside" which is "the past."  But especially, "in your 60s, everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again."

It does.  It's a bit easier to appreciate the moment.  I'm very aware that this is a golden time--I'm reasonably healthy, I am without physical pain, temporarily secure--well, the sense that it is certainly all temporary.  But it is, right now.  And the day is easier to appreciate.  People, relationships that are good--and the blessings I have here, of this lovely air, especially in the sunny autumn of the North Coast.  It is fascinating and it is poignant, and it's sharpened by the awareness not only that it will all soon end, but you don't know when it will start ending, or how.

Seventh Inning Stretch

Apart from these personal reflections (below) on my birth and that year, I feel an urgency that given my status in life is faintly embarrassing. Although nobody else seems to care one way or another whether I accomplish anything more, or leave anything behind, it matters a great deal to me.

I want to make something of my past, so that it survives for those who may not be all that interested at the moment, and may never be interested, but at least they'll have the evidence, the opportunity.

But also, I want to contribute to the future.

Since no one is expecting anything from me really--any more writing, other than press releases and reviews of other peoples' creations, or anything in any other form I've worked in over the years--it seems quixotic, if not pathetic.

But apparently I'm not alone. Here are a few quotes I've lifted from a recent web column by Patricia Zohn. She writes mostly about women she knows (these are my emphases and edits):

"The Boomer women are the most ambitious of my acquaintance. They are working harder than anyone else, desperate, it seems, to claim a place for themselves, aspirational to an unimaginable degree, as if they had spent so much time serving (children, husbands, politics, being the best, ideals of one sort or another) that a new kind of ticking clock has emerged, one about leaving your mark on the world and not just your genetic material in the form of offspring. ."

She concludes: "And by the way, it's not just women: a good friend, male, who used to run publishing companies and is now a best-selling author says it's because we are all finally having our moment. "

Now I've got a lot of caveats about Zohn's point of view, and her social milieu is miles from mine. There is an undeniably personal quality to this urgency, but it can't be dismissed as simply egotistical anxiety. There is something about meaning in all this, as well as about making a big noise before the big sleep.

I saw Lewis Black (comic and author, best known perhaps for appearances on the Daily Show) on some TV program about self-centered Boomers, and while he admitted that the Boomer generation accomplished a lot less than we hoped or thought we would in the 60s, that we still have some time to pull it together. He said it's the seventh inning stretch, and we can still win it in the late innings--but it's going to take concentrated effort.

That's how I feel about it, even as the time goes winging by without my urgency being reflected in my day, and certainly not in the eyes of others. But the urge is there, and this is the defining task.

I'm especially conscious of how quickly my current level of strength can turn into real old age by a serious illness or injury--not to mention the impossibility of paying for it. Still, I suppose I'm fortunate in one respect. It doesn't take much in the way of resources--like money or the belief of others--to write things down. To tell a story or two.

In the Middle


"In the middle of the journey of our life, I awoke in a dark wood, where I had lost my way."

Or words to that effect, depending on the translation (of Dante's "Inferno" as it begins.)

This passage has been used to help define what in common parlance is called the "mid-life crisis."

It seems to me every time we pause---or are forced by circumstances to "re-evaluate"--- we find ourselves in the middle of the journey, and most of the time it is in the middle of a dark wood.

Clearly I am in that second half of my life, maybe even in the middle of the second half. I don't know how much time I have left, and how much of that will be with relative freedom and reasonably good health and energy. I face as well a very uncertain immediate future. So I am looking at what I need to do and want to do, assuming I can clear my own path.

The most obvious sort of project, and the one I've been fitfully yet consciously engaged in for several years, is to pass on in the best form I can what I've learned and what I've experienced in five decades plus of sentience. That project continues, and I see it moving into a new phase, in which I share more specifically the elements of my own story.

Publishing a new edition of my mall book was one such effort, especially since it included a personal account of my experiences in the course of writing it and its first publication. So far I can't count those chapters as a stunning success in terms of response, which makes the future look bleaker, but you need a lot of stubbornness in this game. Sometimes people wonder why I'm not more gratified by praise. I am gratified, but I am often puzzled because I never know why I'm praised for one thing and not for something else that I believe is just as good if not better.

I've also been posting old articles and columns on one or another of these blogs, with contemporary comments and contexts. Eventually, if I'm able financially and otherwise, I'll publish a collection in book form.

Also, if I'm able, I want to take this a step further with some personal essays, and eventually go back to fiction and dramatic forms. These are hard. It's easier to be topical and riff on politics. But the journey of my life, if it is my life, should include these.

Besides these and other efforts that have to do with personal history and history in general (I told my first 'historical society' audience that I got really interested in history when I'd lived long enough to have some), I find myself in another place it's becoming apparent I've been moving towards for the past several years.


Jung wrote of changes, some of them revolutionary, which often occur in the second half of life. I don't think I've experienced the flip into the opposite, from extravert to introvert, for example. I'm as introverted as ever, and probably more so. But I do detect one change in emphasis.

I've seldom been accused of optimism. I've been called "cynical," which I'm not, and "skeptical," which by nature and on principle, I am.

I don't trust optimists, as a rule. If they're not conscious or unconscious con artists, their innocence is often unearned, and they can be dangerous. Cheerful people are nice to run into, but I wouldn't necessarily want to live or work in a building designed by an optimist, at least of the kind who believes things will just work out for the best, with or without fireproofing and emergency exits.

Optimism really lets you off the hook. If you say the glass is half empty, they laugh at you and call you a pessimist. But if they drink half a glass and there's no more water, they throw up their hands and say, "We didn't know! Don't blame us!"

Still...the truth is that bitterly enumerating everything that's wrong with the world, proving there's no hope and all is lost with incisive despair, is all much easier when you're young. You may channel your hormonal anger into apocalyptic pronouncements, but your skin tone is telling you that you will live forever and be immune from every disaster that befalls others.

I've been living with the analysis of apocalypse since the 60s. And yes, as Abbie Hoffman said, "We were reckless, we were headstrong, we were impatient, we were excessive. But goddammit we were right." And the decades have rolled out one analysis after another showing just how bad things are, how complex and intertwined and embedded the destructiveness is, how powerful the agents of destruction are.

There will be hell to pay, and there was a moment when I thought I might not live to see it, and that was good enough. I wasn't the only one doing that kind of calculation. I took boxes of my LPs to a used record place in Pittsburgh shortly before I left for California (hauling with me, it must be said, other boxes of old LPs). The place was run by a guy roughly my age, a fellow early baby boomer. At some point in the conversation he mentioned the crap to come we all know is coming and said, "but fortunately, we'll be dead by then," and we both laughed.

I don't think the calculation has changed much since then, in terms of when, for instance, the climate crisis wreaks pervasive havoc, but I don't feel much comfort in that, if I ever really did. For it was at about that time that I really started trying to put together some meaning, some pattern, that could possibly sustain a future, that could be a direction for hope.

Somewhat by accident, or at least coincidence (which should make Jungians etc. all warm inside), I found some directions to at least pursue a pattern of hope. And that became more and more central to the work I wanted to do. It’s not what you would call optimism, but it is an attempt to leave behind a way of hope, which has me in the odd position of accentuating the positive.

Again, I found writing about it, writing that way, is difficult. And again, I'm not getting a lot of positive response to being positive. My first efforts have been in the "Soul of the Future" projects. I've worked hard and written a lot, and so far with little to show for it in finished work. Just a lot of unpaid for time that’s gone.

My most recent efforts in a different but related area are going to show up in some form here and there in the coming months, all concerned with what I've been calling the "skills of peace." Just as waging war requires knowledge and practice, strategies, concepts and attitudes, so does making peace. These skills of peace have little to do with organizing demonstrations or petition drives, though they do bear significantly on how people talk about war. They are the skills required for peace in schools and the workplace, peace in the home, and peace of mind as well as peace on earth.

They are tools of compassion, skills of empathy, strategies of cooperation, tactics of conflict resolution, paths of facing up to the good and evil in each and all of us. I've talked to a number of people engaged in such activities in the past couple of months, and if things work out I may have a book proposal on the subject soon.

Unfortunately, this project is going to have to be more sustaining financially than it has been so far. Or something else has to materialize if I'm going to be able to continue with this program. Or be in reasonable control of just about any program.

Pausing in the middle, you try to look ahead. But you wind up looking back, and wondering how you got so lost, or at least you wish you used your time better when the way was clear. I wonder if I tried too hard to stay in the middle, being too stubborn and at the same time not ruthless enough.

But then, so what? Is the intense masterpiece so important, and kindness isn't?


The difference between publishers and writers, some wise person once said, is that publishers care about markets, while writers care about readers. Which implies that the readers don't have to be many. You don't have to know who they are. They don't even have to be alive until after you aren't. You don't make any money that way perhaps, and you maybe don't get to live as a consequence of your writing and its contribution, but the writing that gets done has some possibility of that life.

But at least one form of publishing---in the sense of making it public, even if there's no financial reward--- is available and not dependent on markets, and you're looking at it.

Doing these blogs and posting on the Internet has been vitalizing. Thanks to the Internet and email, I'm now back in touch with old college friends I haven't seen in decades, and far-flung extended family, including the first person I ever corresponded with, one of my cousins in Maryland. I'm in touch with writers I've read, people I've just met briefly, and people I've never met at all. My writing becomes part of a dialogue, it prompts a response in someone else's thoughts, feelings and memories. And sometimes I find out about it, very quickly.

I hope I can continue. I hope I can continue a lot of things, resume others, and do some new things. I'm sending out chapters of a novel for young readers (I figure middle school through high school) and proposals for a couple of biographies for the same age group. It takes me back to when reading first became really important to me. It would be nice to be able to do some of that. But the chances aren't real good. Saving the postage and putting that into lottery tickets is probably a sounder investment than sending out this stuff unsolicited.

Gee, did that sound cynical, pessimistic? Some say the glass is half full, some say it is half empty. Some say the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. Some say it is half full of bilge water and half of hot air. Some say it is entirely empty of fossil fuel. Some say the glass is half full of milk and half full of cream, which makes it entirely full of half and half. Some say the glass is half-naked, some say it is half-crazy.

Here is an opinion on a similar subject by Shunryu Suzuki. Asked the old favorite of philosophy students, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?", he replied:
"It doesn't matter."