mathiasbfreese.com

I’d like to mention a few recent reviews which are making me feel quite light-headed. See http://thefix-online.com/reviews/down-to-a-sunless-sea/ for a story by story analysis; quite impressive. Aeron Hick’s review is at http://metamorphosesonline.blogspot.com/2008/07/aerons-review-down-to-sunless-sea-by.html and is generous in nature. Harry Markov lives in Bulgaria and is only nineteen and his review is at http://templelibraryreviews.blogspot.com/ And today Maureen Nixon writes a rave at http://randomdistractions.blogapot.com/2008/07/down-to-a-sunless-sea-review.html. All in all, I feel enriched by these reviews, not agreeing with some judgments, agreeing with a few others. Only Maureen Nixon in all these reviews realized that the mother in “Herbie” is a prick. (if the sites don’t click on, as I am not proficient in this idiocy, you can google the .com names.)

Today Jane and I will go over Sojourner again; I will rewrite at points that Jane feels are unclear, et al. And then she writes her introduction. The genesis of this novel was a short story I wrote between 1969 and 1972 which I later expanded into a novel, my very first. Gruffworld, which I am now “editing,” is become tedious — not a good sign. I may hire an editor to clean out the deadwood and quicken the pace, although I feel it has a lot of merit to it, greased as it is with Freud and Krishnamurti. It contains some of my best descriptions. So publication of Sojourner first and then I will follow up with Gruffworld.

While I’m at it, if you wish to have me review a book of yours take a look a few days back to my announcement of a litblog. Details and requirements are listed. By now, if you have returned to my blog here and there, you sense that I am from another era and another sensibility. I am serious about my own work and I will approach yours with due diligence.

I would like to end my years on earth with a shelf laden with several books that complete my story here on the third planet from the sun. I write for me and my family. In this way I am not contaminated by the teat of materialism and authorial avarice. In September I will attend the yearly Society of Southwestern Authors Conference. It runs for two days and has many workshops given by pros. Other than the usual human behaviors at conferences like these, one sees the neediness and the angst to be published at any cost by some attendants. It is more sad than pathetic. And grist for my own mill. As far as I am concerned, the only task for a writer is to be free and if he or she is free, what they write is free as well — authentic and real and passionate.

For a take on me which reflects my general attitude, see http://www.gvnews.com/articles/2008/07/12/columns/columns04.txt which apeared in a local paper on 12 July. I was at play with the reporter.

As I reflect, given the two books now out, Sojourner is a departure, although it was written years before. The short stories were written over a period of 30 years. I learned my craft while writing short stories. I became terse and concise, something which I am on occasion criticized for. Go know. As I’ve written before, I write, let us say, 20 pages knowing that I will cut back to 10. I allow my unconscious to spew, to erupt and then the superego kicks in to censor and restrict. If i hadn’t been through my own therapy and had not gone on to be a shrink, I don’t think I would have attained that self-liberating quality. You know as well as I do a writer is very lucky if he or she has a sentence or paragraph in his or her book that is solely the creation of the unconscious. When I trust the unconscious I am free, like the prometheus Djinn in The Thief of Bagdad.”

I am moving from editing Sojourner and Gruffworld, to scouring for bloggers to review my book, to reading about n-scale model trains as I am returning to an interest from childhood, to reading, to riding  my Dahon, a folding bike. While working as a shrink I remember a story I would tell clients who became fixated on only one thing and so were stuck. I would ask them to describe the ocean at a beach. I would ask that they describe the waves as the broke upon the beach. At last not a few realized that water came upon the beach at different places and with different energies, so that some water ran into the dry sands and other water just lisped upon wet sands. And then I’d asked them to comment on all that, and then with a little help by me we reached the understanding that much of life was like that; that water does not come upon the beach in a horizontal and perfect line; that while you are waiting to make coffee, you break the eggs, you put in the bread for toasting, you take your morning vitamins. And thus I was trying to educate them to be flexible, varied and to exercise all kinds of options while they go about living. And thus the sage ends this blog.

Often I go to blog and the damn essay vanishes, often because I don’t save it or whatever Gates has perversely devised. The last few days I have not felt the urge to write, for whatever reasons. I wrote a short piece which you can read in Pages called “The Artist Is Never Poor.” The upshot is that the well of the artist is continually flushed with writing water. So it isn’t that I have “dried” up. It is something else, a disinclination, if you will. I just associated to my birthday which is tomorrow. I will be 68. What is fire? What is love? What in the hell is 68? In Our Town Wilder talks about the passage of time in his homely and earthen way. I recall a line in which he says that the person across you in the morning at breakfast has eaten with you for about 50,000 times. Suddenly, you are there; suddenly you are old; “suddenly” which has taken years to manifest itself.

Well, I just saved that paragraph. I hope it doesn’t vanish. Of late I have been querying bloggers and reviewers about review copies often sent many months ago. Some of the responses are empty, unkind or insensitive, some dramatic or some odd. To wit:

“I decided not to write a review since it would have been mostly negative. It’s subjective I know, and I’ve seen several positive reviews and note that you have won several awards for your stories. But for me they read more like a pyschologists [sic] case notes than stories. I’m sure it’s just me and not the stories, since as I’ve noted it appears I’m alone in my disappointment.”

Go figure. As I said in my announcement that I will review books, I don’t buy into a non-review. I can take the heat. Life is short, nasty and brutish, good old Hobbes opined.

And then I receive this response.

“Matt,

“I am so sorry. I have fallen extremelly ill over the increasing months and have had to move home to be taken care of. Sadly it is more serious than I would have liked and I am not sure of my status. I hope that you can forgive me.

“I will try to rewrite a review soon but just to warn you I may be hospitalized in the near future. I apologize for my lack of professionlaism in this matter.”

It tears your heart out, doesn’t it. I sent him a few kind words; perhaps if he writes back I will direct him to my blogs on the colonoscopy. In this case fuck the review and take care of yourself, Doug.

It all comes down to priorities; that is why I am no longer bent out of shape by the weird responses I get to my work. Some bloggers, I sneakily detect, pile up books like Don Quixote so that they can admire them on their shelves, show others how “learned” they are. The job of a reader is to give the book away to another. I’ve become aware of blog “challenges,” in which — and I may have this altogether wrong –  bloggers try to read as many books as possible under the challenge of a set amount of time. I resented that when my book was part of a reading challenge. So it isn’t what you read so much as it is how many books you read under the gun. Americana. Good old capitalistic competition. Nauseating.

Sixty eight years ago, a few months before Pearl Harbor, my mother in a hospital ward spread her thighs and a random presence was born. In August 1945 I dimly remember her getting excited about Japan’s surrender. And so time adds up.

At Harry’s Bar & American Grill, Papa said, an epiphany comes late to each man and best of all in a clean, well-lighted place and best before dawn before the heat of day is best gone and the shadows stretch long and far into the night, la noche misterioso.

“Hombre, nada mucho,” Papa said.

He sat there under the light and the heat of the bulb was weak but it gave off a burnished glow much too weak.

“The light is good and bright and pleasant but the bar floor goes unwaxed,” the waiter said.

Papa sat off in a corner in the shade by the side on a bentwood beneath the bulb that gave light and a shot glass left its ring on the tablecloth. Across the way and through the wooden beads the hills looked like white rhinoceri. Papa brought the glass to his lips.

The waiter looked with despair at the unwaxed floor, and he thought of how Papa of late, now barrel-chested, grown gray, had looked in the shade off in a corner by the side on the chair beneath the bulb that gave no light.

Our papa who art in papa as it is in papa. Give us this papa our daily papa and papa us our papa as we papa our papa and papa us not into nada but deliver us from papa; pues papa. Hail nada full of nada, nada is with thee.

The waiter’s reflection was caught in the expresso machine.

All is well. The biopsy was benign. I need to see the doctor next year for another scope. I am being watched, I suppose. Otto Rank, a disciple of Freud, and a kind of genius — bedmate of Anais Nin — tells a story of his youth. Planning to shoot himself during a bout with Sturm und Drang, at the last moment he moved the weapon away from his head. He later observed, later that same day, that he felt so remarkably alive and vital; that he was again engaged with the world, and that the experience was more than relief, but ecstatic. I do not do the anecdote justice, but when I read it years ago I chose to remember it. I later incorporated it into a long article that was published about Rank in Pilgrimage.

I have been given a reprieve — until next time. Like trying to gather up a small bead of mercury on the floor, I cannot wrap my mind about this experience. Threat comes to self, threat is removed — all by chance and happenstance. I am left spinning like a skewed dreidel. I did not pray to god, irrelevant, immaterial, non-existent, a fraud perpetrated upon man and woman. I thought more of Rochelle and asked for her assistance. A prayer to an immortal which only made me feel better. Better a prayer to a passed loved one than a prayer to an idol of the mind.

I fall back upon myself in such dreadful instances and the few loving people about me, my son, Jane, she of the compassionate and practical mind. I believe I could blog about this all day, giving threads of associations, philosophical disquistions. But it all comes down to fear. It is fear that must be dealt with for it cripples and weakens resolve. Oh, one more thing, to those of you younger than I — the more a situation is repeated such as the one I just had, the less prior experience can help you with it. The past is dead in these cases. The answer is in the moment or, better still, the question is better posed in the present. So, when dire news comes again I just hope that I can handle it freshly, new, and look upon it as if it were for the first time. In this instance prior learning is useless. The event is too new, too pressing, too threatening. My appreciation to Cinderkeys for her thoughtfulness.

On 7 July I had my second colonoscopy within 8 years. Supposedly I could have waited 10 years; however, the PA and I decided after a few words about the necessity of having it at all, to go ahead since I had initiated the doctor’s visit. I had no symptoms. I was being vigilant. After all, I want to be in the best possible health when I come to die.

The procedure went well, the nurses attended to me more than competently, things explained along the way. I associated to Soylent Green as I was being readied and “processed.”  I had a choice of doctors and I went with a gastro man who had interned at Mount Sinai in the Bronx. Anyone trained there or in a New York hospital pays his or her dues. We chatted before the scoping about how he enjoyed New York pizza and he remarked that his 10 years in Manhattan was an experience he thought invaluable. And then the sand man put me to sleep.

I was roused from a sleep that was much like I imagine death to be like, complete non-existence. Ain’t bad. It is the leaving that is painful. The nurse said, to my displeasure, that 2 or 3 polyps were discovered and removed and that they would be biopsied. The doctor came by to tell me much the same and to call back on Thursday for the results. He did tell Jane that they looked benign but that if I had not attended to them they most likely would have turned cancerous. It was the randomness of the event, the circumstances by which I asked for this procedure that quite frankly shook me.

On Thursday i couldn’t get the results and was given a kind of run around which in hindsight was unavoidable; late Thursday the doctor’s assistant called to tell me that there were too many specimens to biopsy but on Friday morning she would call before noon to share the results. The perversity of waiting.

From Monday to Thursday I was unsettled, doing my drama queen material. I am writing this Thursday evening so I still don’t know. If it is not benign, what then? if it is benign, I need to report back next year, I believe the doctor told me. I don’t believe there is anything I can do to stop growing polyps. The nurse told me that some patients have a “farm” in their colon.

Quite frankly, I experienced fear, I am still experiencing fear, and there is nothing I can do except to feel it, which is unpalatable. I am less tense tonight and I don’t know why. I am not resigned to the results whatever they may be. I am not that kind of personality. I dwell in me in such situations. I am of an age that symptons and maladies will soon start showing up. I will be 68 on 23 July. I know a kind of paralysis comes over me –perhaps you, when one discovers such threats to the self. I had this occur when Rochelle was killed in an automobile accident. It is trauma that cannot, for the moment, be absorbed. I am trying to allay my anxiety, but trying to allay my anxiety is much like turning straw to gold, a fairy tale “reality.”

I have not had the will, and that is the word, to sit down to write this blog or any blog. The air of self flew out of me. I don’t know what the morrow will bring, but I do know I will now have to “watch” myself as if that is not what we all do all the time on levels unknown to us. The impending threat to self-existence is crucifying. I am not a person of equanimity; I am a high strung individual and a fighter, or I hope I am. The threat of a malignancy hovers this evening. I can only deal with it with reason and emotion, for there is nothing I can do to change the course of events. I am only a mere rudder. I’ll end here as I have no ending to come up with. I am in a sea of dread.

I have thought about reviewing specific books on these pages. Quite frankly, it is to encourage a give-and -take between readers or writers and this writer, who has expertise in some areas of the human soul.

If you wish to have a book reviewed by me, I will give it the attention it needs. I do not want to be rushed. You take a risk as I have experienced risk with bloggers. I will not be mean-sprited in the reviews although I do not suffer fools. I will not pull my punches. Some book review bloggers give me the option of not reviewing the book if they do not like it. Crapola!

To be a writer requires guts. So, I have my interests — I would like to review books about the Holocaust, historical fiction as well as non-fiction; collections of short stories interest me as well as collections of sci-fi stories such as Harlan Ellison produces. I favor fiction that moves me emotionally and then cerebrally, in that order. I like my writers brave.

I am attentive to detail so that I will get back to you quickly. If you peruse the queries I wrote for The i Tetralogy and Down to a Sunless Sea in these pages, forward a similar query to me. (In this way I get a sense of you). I am new at all this, but I am not new at living. For example, how would I put your review up on Amazon? I haven’t the slightest. So if you would enlighten me I would comply. In this exchange we share a writerly collegiality. No, you need not read my books unless you are inclined to. No, you needn’t pull your punches with me, for I am human as much as you are. It is all in how you express yourself — well, that is your job as a writer, isn’t it?

Finally, I am open to suggested parameters for running this litblog.

I look forward to hearing from you.

If you would go to blogcritics.org/ and read the interview with Mayra Calvani and then to pifmagazine.com for another interview with Derek Alger, editor, you will get a better sense of who I am. Work it out from there, friend.