Endless Knots

What did the hyacinth say to the daffodil?

Bloom, baby, bloom

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 28

Page 28, “The Persuasion”

“So you are Jewish. You’ve got a Jewish mother.”

“Technically, yes, except I was brought up Episcopalian. My uncle converted and once Erika walked into St. John’s, she never looked back. Too bad for me. No dreidls or Chanukah gelt.”

He undid his collar button and ran his hand along the back of his neck. Hairy just under the Adam’s apple like my father. He might as well have taken off his shirt. “So I’m talking too much. What about you? Parents, grandparents, country of origin?”

I wasn’t used to being the interviewee—“you ask so many questions,” people said—and I was particularly reluctant when it came to family. “When were you born? You first.”

“May 23, 1947. When’s yours?”

I didn’t know what to say. If I spoke too quickly, he’d think I wanted to make something of it. If I didn’t acknowledge it and he  found out later, he might think I actually lied sometimes. Later?

I nodded.

“So? Yours?”

I nodded again.

“You mean...”

I nodded and pushed away a curl that creeping toward my mouth.

“Really. How cool is that? We’ll celebrate together next year.” He pumped my hand. "Deal."

“Stop it.” I pulled back and pointed to the book he’d had under his arm with the Herald Tribune. “What’s with the Chekhov?”

“It’s honest. I didn’t bring it to impress you. Double degree from The Sorbonne, Russian literature and architecture. I started this year at Columbia, by the way—hey, we might have seen each other last summer. Were you there?”

I nodded again. “Can’t you tell a story without interrupting yourself?”

“There’s so much to say, Lois Lane. We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

“Try chronological order.”

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 27

Page 27, “The Persuasion”

“Which means Erika Bentoff is your mother?”

A Barnard legend. They told her story to incoming classes and I’d taken notes the first time I heard it. Like me, the Erika of the story had no parents, only Erika had been on the last train of Jewish children out of Prague before the Nazi invasion, children transferred from train to boat to Palestine, kids who’d built their own kibbutz hand over hand. And I remembered that had it not been for her uncle, her mother’s brother, she would have been one of them.

“Indeed. Erika Bentoff.” He poked his thumb into his chest. “My mama. So you’ve got your count on one side…” He ran his thumb from his forehead to his stomach, then swept his hand off to the left. “And your Holocaust survivor on the other.” He sliced down his torso again and brushed his hand to the right.

“Grandparents, great-aunts and uncles, cousins galore,” he motioned left. “Ma famille, pas de tout,” he motioned right.

“Uncle Antonin, get it, Tonin, Antonin.” I noticed that one hair in his left eyebrow was curled, while the rest were straight. “Went to Columbia in the late-1920s to teach chemistry. Another family folk-hero. A mensch. Took a cut in his Columbia salary to get her into Barnard. Plan had been for my grandparents to follow but… not survivors. So that’s how she met Janos.”

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 26

Page 26, “The Persuasion”

Our time in the café that day lasted long enough for Tonin to recount three centuries of his families’ histories, two world wars, persecution, migration, and bloodlines that linked him to names familiar to anyone growing up in New York in the Fifties and Sixties—U Thant, Millicent McIntosh, Calder, and many more.

His grandfather was a Czech count born in 1895. “Papa” married “Babi,” whose family manufactured printing presses, in 1923.

“They could see what was happening,” he said. “Got their money and families out by ’38, opened accounts in London and New York, bought the place on 86th Street.” He spoke as if he’d been party to the decision, as if he’d been there when the papers were signed. He knew exactly when they’d moved to London, the date they had flown to New York to settle there, precisely which furniture dealer Papa had contracted with to provision his office at Broadway and West 58th. “His name never made it into the papers for his role in forming the U.N.,” Tonin said, “but Janos more than made up for that.”

“Janos? What’s he got to do with it?”

Janos was responsible for The Lone Emperor, the famous photo of the penguin, standing sentinel on an outcropping of ice, the Pegasus Berg in the distance. I knew the picture, everyone knew the picture—ever since it appeared on the front page of The Times. The original, in color, first was shown in an exhibition of Janos’s Antarctic work at the Metropolitan where everyone, including me, clambered for tickets. The black-and-white version was on posters, T-shirts, bumper stickers. Even I, who hated fads, the last of my friends to buy a Beatles album, the sole holdout in kneading bread, had the Emperor in my card collection. The solitary penguin, noble in a barren world, an emblem of hope.

“Yes. He’s my father.”

Internet stats, c. Sept 2009

The numbers always astonish me.

 

The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas

A new meaning for wirehead

Speaking of robots, this one puts the lie to those who thinking that being present isn't possible when you're not, how to say, there. Willow Garage (where else do they come up with such things) has, I believe, cracked the virtual nut. Watch it all the way through, notice the casual stance of the guys watching the robot appear, and then imagine a whole room full of these things having a meeting. I love this thing!

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 25

Page 25, “The Persuasion”

“Sorry.” I picked up the pen and dropped it again. “Excusez-moi, excusez-moi,” I kept saying.

“Oh, not to bother, my dear,” the woman said. She resembled the teenager in the Breathless café. Did all the women in Paris look alike? But this one was older, hipper, more American. “I’m just composing some thoughts about twin stars that mutually circle in heaven.”

“Listen to her.” Tonin took the pen from my hand and pulled my notebook out from under my elbow. “And for the record, you’re zero for zero. And you won’t be needing these.”

I thought he would put my things on his newspaper, but he placed only the pen there. He slipped my notebook under him. “Now interview me.” He leaned on his elbows—and shifted his gluteus maximii on my precious pages and grinned.

I saw sludge in my cup. Stop. No more men. Nor did I like the woman at the next table mentioning twin stars. I hated the interpretation of life as an endless treasure hunt, whereby each moment, each word, was so weighted with meaning that it could sink you. This was Red Bird’s way, not mine. Every copper penny she spotted on the street was another earth-shattering clue to her future, which connected directly to the color of the shirt on the man who passed while she was picking up the coin. For me, raised as a “gastronomic Jew”—my mother’s description of our household theology—there were coincidences, yes, but life did not play out as if it had been scripted, as if I were reading the lines from a part written for me in a different dimension. Life to me was choice, benefiting from wise decisions in the here-and-now, not strange, invisible providence.

“So if you must know, I’m a count.”

“You’re a what? A count? Like Dracula?”

“I’m a Czech count, actually, sometimes in Papal favor, sometimes not.”

“I’ve gotta write this down.” I reached across the table for my pen but he caught my hand.

“You’ll remember.”

Ten rules for writing (fiction) via The Guardian

My friend Doug Lea has a good eye for fresh material. "Ten rules for writing fiction" from The Guardian is purportedly about writing fiction but...take a read and you'll see why I put the word in parens in the title. Novelists of note list their pointers. Having just read and loved Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood (despite my aversion to dystopian fiction, this novel is barely a quarter-inch off reality), I went right to her ten:

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.

5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10 Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

**

Yes! Ability to lead remotely is next 2.0 skill

Dan Pontefract, who, though he lives in Vancouver, was able to tear himself away from the games long enough to write "The Ability to Lead Remote Employees Will Become the Next 2.0 Skill," provides a list of questions for you, leaders, teamers, and followers, to ask yourselves. In an increasingly crowded field of me-too posters, Dan's got some original ideas:

• Do you set up time in your calendar to randomly phone, email or instant message team members?

• Do you create idea factory web-jams over asynchronous means to instill a sense of virtual brainstorming?

• Do you post quips and updates on your whereabouts, initiatives, questions or thoughts?

• Do you track project updates and discuss options in an open manner with all team members?

• Do you post illustrative thoughts, issues or ideas about the team, the business, etc. for discussion?

• Do you post short, informal videos about anything business related that the team could benefit from?

• Do you engage with your team face-to-face, even if not physically face-to-face?

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 24

Page 24, “The Persuasion”

By early evening, we were seated next to each other, at a different café off Boul St. Mich, him on my right sipping a Rosé d’Anjou, me running my finger around the rim of an espresso, noticing my ragged cuticle.

We were sailing with the sudden wind that had come up in the last moments of waiting for the no-shows in the Breathless café. His hand was steady on the rudder but mine was not. Mon ami was still so close I could smell him. Another man in my life, even, no, especially, a committed, intelligent, good-looking one, was too big a wave to navigate.

I had the hubris then to believe I knew the formula for turning myself out successfully into the laboratory of life. There was specific knowledge to acquire in literature, history, and politics, stories I had to write to become a credible journalist, to make a name for myself. Everything else was a detour, including the boy to my right, unfastening mother-of-pearl cufflinks, rolling up blue-and-white striped shirtsleeves, and causing me to wonder about the origins of that small scar on his ring finger.

I balanced my weight on the back leg of the chair then tipped it forward, maneuvering a few inches to the left. “So you’re Jewish and from New York?” I reached into my satchel for my notebook and pen, mindlessly elbowing the shoulder of the woman at the next table, who in turn dropped her pen. We bent down to retrieve it and bumped heads.