Byron in Missolonghi 2

Some days the writing flows. Some other days the mind gets busy preparing classes, grading papers, integrating little aspects of life with the Big Capital Life. At some points, all of these work at once.

I find myself in such a fecund season. It’s a happy, even ecstatic time, but it’s overwhelming.

On top of everything, I’ve been fighting a cold. Tonight I realized that triple sec is the answer. There’s orange, vitamin C in there, and I’m not coughing anymore. So I’m going to to bed, but first I’m taking a few more sandaled steps into Greece. I’m kidding. I never wore a pair of sandals in Greece. But my traveling companion did, because women have many more footwear options. But that’s not the point. Let’s focus.

New essay – “Super Bowl Sunday on the Seine”

I went to Paris, ate a few falafels, and decided to write about it. The essay showed up in The Montréal Review today. For a look, click here.

Roddy Doyle

Truly a pleasure. And Roddy Doyle couldn’t care less if you finish your beer.

http://vimeo.com/m/55813198

Byron in Missolonghi

 

The Reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi. Theodoros P. Vryzakis. Original in the National Gallery, Athens.

I promised Byron several days ago and didn’t deliver. Sorry. I’d plead the excuse that these have been busy days, but they haven’t been. Expectant days, yes. I’ve been spending a lot of time working on things I need to get done for the near future, talking to people far away who I need to stay in touch with, shopping for groceries, making appointments to get cats spayed and neutered, but none of those are excuses. Words on the page, dammit. That’s what’s expected. Or at least words on the screen.

Lord Byron’s obsessed me for a while. I hated the guy when I was an undergraduate. That’s complicated. I didn’t even know he existed in my first undergraduate existence. Back then, I was a trombone player. I hoped for a career in a symphony orchestra, practiced hard, and had a fair shot at making it. I only applied to four schools out of high school. Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, the New England Conservatory, and Eastman School of Music. I didn’t get into Eastman, but that was all right. Juilliard was all I wanted. I’d practiced a couple of hours a day for a lot of years to get it. Byron came to me then in Schumann’s “Manfred Overture,” Strauss’s “Don Juan,” and a few other Romantic pieces. I didn’t know the texts behind the music, though.

Next stop … Missolonghi, Greece

Rosa Florou, president of the Missolonghi Byron Society, with me and a statue of Byron out by the town’s marshes.

Lord Byron died in Missolonghi, Greece, from medical treatment he received for a fever. His doctors bled him too much.

He’d gone there to fight in the Greek Revolution for independence against the Turks. His biographers seem to agree that he’d tired of a frivolous life of playing around, and had finally found something heroic to do.

A friend and I spent three days wandering around the city, looking at the Byron city there, having a few (too many) beers, and enjoying the place’s general weirdness.

Pistols for pistoleros

I’ll start posting about the trip tomorrow. All I’m going to say right now is that I’m always going to regret, and yes, I mean until the day I die, not buying one of these replica wooden pistols. While we all know it would be sitting in the back of a closet right now, that doesn’t lessen the perpetual regret. The shop windows in Missolonghi are filled with silly things like this, and I should have picked up something, anything, to put in the back of a closet.

Escaping Venice, Part 6 (finale)

The art historian and I got to the ticket window quickly. The clerks had Xeroxed sheets that served as tickets for the special train. When they ran out of sheets, the train was full. We were close enough to the front that it worked all right for us. I imagine a lot of other people never heard about the train, or maybe heard about it too late.

I tried to bargain my way into children’s fares for the kids, and the ticket sellers talked it over. They were making this up as they went along. But they decided ‘No,’ it was one price for all. So, I was out another 300 Euros. But we were going to Paris.

Maybe. By this point we were, like every other stranded traveler, doubting anything was going to work right. At first we got on the wrong train. Two of the trains leaving Milan were headed to Paris.  But the one we settled into first was not the special one, and soon we were sent off to track 27. My son was getting edgy at this point. He’s rarely like that. He wanted me to ask several people to make sure we wouldn’t have to move ourselves and our luggage yet again. I wasn’t in the mood to bother a lot of Italians, but finally did. They said go away. I think. They said it in Italian. But clearly they wanted everyone just to go away. They were being pulled in to work extra hours to deal with the crisis, and none of them were any happier than they ought to have been. I slinked, slunk, slunked away.

Brahms and the Barista

Once I recognized Brahms
on the speaker over the coffee grinder,

the work of a minute, not just a moment,
of an entire bag of beans in the maelstrom,

I thought: what confidence it must have cost
to grow such a full beard. People would have called him

a prophet. A beard like that demands support,
or, at the barest minimum, its semblance.

And just then I started realizing
writing symphonies for eighty musicians

to play in a hall half the size
of a medieval cathedral, for an audience

dressed in late nineteenth-century Vienna’s
richest fabrics was – possibly – just as messianic

as all that facial hair. Before
I could finish sorting it out

the woman behind the counter turned
the dial like she would turn a century

over an ocean
and a voice at near yodel bled its Tejano heart out

across the tubas, the accordion’s keys,
all over the dusty blue linoleum.

Taking stock of the new blog

An alleyway in Père Lachaise Cemetery, one of my favorite melancholy spots on Earth. Yes, “Earth,” uppercase. It’s a planet.

This isn’t my first blog, but it might be the first time I’ve started one with a clear idea of where I was starting and where I wanted to go. I’ve been writing creative nonfiction and poetry for years now. I wrote three novels in my early 20s. I just found two of them in the bottom of a filing cabinet. One of them was good enough to get me an agent, but it never got published. The next one was self-consciously literary, and the agent didn’t want it. She called it “a quiet book.” So I started the next one with a guy screaming while dying from some mysterious disease. No, it was a malady. Much more melodramatic than a simple disease. That one didn’t go anywhere either, and it’s all for the best.

After all of that I turned to academic work for 15 years. Now I’m trying to juggle the two, and have started a new novel. I’ve been writing travel essays for a while. A few of them can be found online:

This one about waxing my back and swimming in London and California, somehow because I’ve read too much Byron: “Body Waxing, Lord Byron, and the Long Way to Turkey”.

One about Wordsworth, the Shelleys, and a really nice experience I had urinating: “Les Houches is Very Complicated”.

Another’s showing up in a few days, or maybe next month. The editor didn’t have a clear date yet, but I like him, we work well together, and so on. 

Escaping Venice, Part 5

See the first four parts of the essay at:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Things did not get better. The sky stayed blue, Venice remained beautiful, somewhere Jason Wilson was finding that the Prosecco and soft-shell crabs never ran out, but the airspace showed no signs of opening. I was making obsessive trips to internet cafes by this point. I had found three grocery stores – finding one twice in that maze was harder than finding the second, then the third, that’s why three – and brought bread, Nutella, cheese, for us to eat in our hotel room or out in the little piazzas. We were doing Venice on the cheap and making it, but we weren’t going to be able to do that indefinitely, and indefinitely was the schedule for the volcano on all the websites. Maybe tomorrow, maybe three or six months from now, the skies would open to air travel.

It was hard to tell if my kids knew the seriousness of the situation. My daughter’s main focus was finding a teddy bear with a straw hat wearing a t-shirt that read “I ‘heart’ Venezia.” We found bears with hats, and hatless bears in t-shirts that read “I ‘heart’ Venezia,” but it took two days of scanning souvenir stands to find one with both.

My son wanted a carnival mask, maybe two. There was some diversion in this shopping for bears and masks, though for me there was also pricing involved, and gentle ways of suggesting smaller bears and less elaborate masks. I was always calculating those train tickets into everything we spent.

Crab Crossing, Portobello, Panamá

The savage in you went away
the year he died, heart ripped open
on the floor of the front seat of his car.

But I think of the day
an hour out the cratered way
to Isla Grande. You do not remember

crabs scuttling across the mud
and you and him jumping out, grabbing sticks
before I could even stop the car.

You herded them from their holes
down the crumbling road bank
that tries to angle again to the sea.

We brought a plastic hatch filled
with clawing desperation home
to Panama City that night to scare

your cousins with, your frantic cousins
who would not come out from behind
each other and their own giant eyes.

Next morning the two of you sat
sucking the juices from hand-cracked shells,
your legs spread wide on the linoleum,

in your aunt’s sun-streamed kitchen
not so far from the equator
as the pot on the stove kept boiling.