August 20, 2012 First Person Letter from India: The Permit, Part 1 By Amie Barrodale We were on our way to a small Tibetan colony in Himachal Pradesh. I lived there for about a year in 2008 and wanted to show it to my traveling companion, Clancy. Also the house where I stayed is very peaceful and nice, and I thought it would be a good place for Clancy to finish the book he is working on. We had about ten days to spend there and were in agreement: no cars, no roads. I wrote to the manager of the house, which is called Old Labrang. It is a guesthouse, but you can’t really stay there unless you get the okay from the manager. In the past when I stayed there, it was during the off-season. Since my last visit, the place had undergone major renovations and is now, by any standard, a desirable place to stop. Palazzo floors, an interior garden with flowers and orange trees. It costs eight dollars a night, and as a result I had a feeling that this time there would be a problem securing a room. I didn’t want to sit down and write the request. Read More
August 14, 2012 First Person Someone to Watch Over Me By Nica Strunk When I was twelve and my parents’ marriage was falling apart, my dad explained to me that he never actually wanted to get married and have kids. The only reason he did it, he said, was because it would make him less likely to be drafted into the Vietnam War. It never occurred to him that telling me this might hurt me. He was a successful musician and an esteemed jazz scholar, but he had virtually no ability to sense another person’s feelings. If he were growing up today, his diagnosis would have been obvious: Asperger’s syndrome. I shrugged this moment off as another instance of my dad’s profound insensitivity, which was so much a part of my foundational world that it didn’t feel shocking. I knew he was clueless about the emotional bonds that connected us, but they were real to me anyway, and reacting would have been pointless. I had watched my mother pour her heart out to him, and he never once heard her. She could never make him understand how the things he did affected her—his charts analyzing how much money she spent on different categories of groceries at the Safeway, his refusal to break his routine when she needed to talk. “Make an appointment,” he told her, and the emotional response that followed didn’t even pass his notice. He didn’t get that channel. Read More
August 13, 2012 First Person The Clown Continuum By Monica Drake A strange man asked if he could hit me in the face, straight on, with a pie. He said he was a clown, pies were his thing. “Sure!” I emailed back, complete with the seemingly uncontrollable enthusiasm, perhaps a little forced, implied by an exclamation point. “You’re a good sport, Monica,” he wrote. His words unnerved me. When I tell people about the story, I want to talk about the clown. I want to say that Jusby the Clown has a degree from Evergreen State College. A degree! He’s worked to forge “a bridge between Eastern and Western forms of clowning.” He’s interested in “the special healing role of the clown around the world” and “the organic link between the clown and the shaman.” I want to build his credibility because that builds mine: I didn’t just meet a strange man in a park to let him smear my mascara in his whip cream in front of children. I opened myself up to a spiritual experience. But the truth is, I didn’t know his credentials when I said yes, and before I ever get that far telling the tale my friends, my audience, stop on the first part. You said yes? Why would I say yes? A woman I know, a writer, recently published an essay that starts out, “At the very beginning of what I now know was a mid-life crisis, I let a guy pee on me.” And I found myself at a party spilling my drink as I leaned over to insist, “It’s entirely different! It was a pie! He’s a clown! He teaches laugh yoga, for God’s sake.” Really the only thing I knew about Jusby, when I agreed to his plan, was that he’d read my novel Clown Girl and quoted from it. That was plenty. This is what it means to be a first-time novelist: I’d spent ten years writing and revising a novel about clowns, clown community, and the creative struggle. Now a member of my newfound readership wanted to offer me that big, physical comedy kiss of a pie in the kisser. How could I turn my back? Booksellers tell me the best way to move a book is to hand-sell it, one person urging it on another. When Clown Girl came out I said yes to everything, always for that chance to hand-sell. I drove across state lines and read in chain bookstores. One night I read to an audience of empty orange chairs and a lone man in a trench coat who yelled over my words then tried to touch my hair. I drove my little Nissan through dark streets to a tiny radio station for an interview where the late-night host hadn’t read any of my writing. I flew to the heart of the country, slept in a stranger’s house, and taught workshops in exchange for a bottle of water. My friend of the golden-shower essay writes, “I was desperate to know I was desirable.” She says, “The man who would pee on me … he’d read my memoir.” Oh, booksellers! Oh, honorable Best Seller list! Those sweet enticements. Somebody tell me there’s a difference between dating and marketing, between seeking readership and a relationship, blind dates and the ongoing literary conversation, because I have lost track. Though the secret truth is, I may be made for the life of the reclusive writer merged with risk taking. I’ve been both shy and a hand-raiser my whole life. I was in a theater class, ages ago, when a stranger sent a note through our teacher that he needed clowns. There was money in it. I raised my hand. That job led to more clown work, the way one decision stumbles into the next. That experience led to my novel, and the novel led Jusby the Clown to me. Pie throwing could be a valid act of cultural criticism in the clown world. Maybe it’s a necessary baptism or a hazing. Going along with the role of willing victim, I chose the time (daytime, definitely) and the place (public). We’d meet in Peninsula Park, one of Portland’s many urban green spaces. I arranged my own blind date with a clown. People who say they’re afraid of clowns oversimplify the demographic. There’s plenty to be afraid of, more in some corners than in others, but clowns aren’t a single species. It’s a continuum, and ranges from the Evangelical arm of Christian clown ministries to the hot and bothered corners of the fetish scene. In between you’ve got birthday parties, business promotion, political activism, and rodeos. Depending on how you do it, clowning can have a built-in drag-queen glitz or a transformative, outsider appeal. There’s been a serial murderer or two behind the paint, John Wayne Gacy–style, but that’s not the norm. And then there are the Juggalos, latchkey followers of Insane Clown Posse, a branch of youth culture with no actual clown skills, not even when it comes to eyeliner. The day I said yes, for all I knew Jusby could be anywhere on this continuum. I rounded up a crew, my backup, who’d serve as witnesses, partners, and a roving party. I invited three friends, all of them at the time also first-time novelists. They were the willing. I invited Lance Reynald, James Bernard Frost, and Kassten Alonso. Kass is my husband. Whatever tricks Jusby the Clown had up his silky sleeve, my husband and I would be in it together. Our troupe arrived at the park first. We gazed out between towering cedar trees, then over the concentric rings of a manicured rose garden, past a giant classical fountain. Kids played on the swings and slides. It was Oregon’s best weather, with blue skies and a reasonable sun. I wore a retro nylon maxi-dress salvaged from the seventies, a cross between a muumuu and prom wear, fancy yet synthetic enough to clean up in a basic wash. We scanned the perimeter. What to expect? I looked for a fetishist creeping up behind me, stalking a pie virgin. Then I saw our guy. He loped across the park sporting a red rubber nose. Jusby has a soft, manly face, made for the role of a rugged clown. He came in full paint, his eyes highlighted with a heavy white arch over each lid, and a classical clown smile that crept up onto his cheeks. His lapels were festooned with buttons, around a mix of black and white stripes and polka-dots. Under that he wore layers of red against red. A workingman’s white Hanes T-shirt poked out at the neckline. He’s a bear of a man. “Aboriginal clowns called [pie-ing] entering the Creamtime, in Old French the Tarte Blanche, ancient Romans had Cobbler Rasa.” Jusby poured out a quick patter that gave the impression he’d done this a dozen times. Turns out, he’s done it upwards of 560 times. He handed me a clipboard and a pen. A man with a camera trailed behind him. It was all more formal and ritualized than I expected—formal to the point of involving forms. The clipboard held a waiver of liability. I signed away photo rights and legal rights, as though I were an extra in some improvised theater. He passed another set of the same forms to my husband, then to Lance and Jim. With the camera involved, I had new reservations. I was in makeup. Not clown face, but ordinary woman’s war paint. My skin would totally blotch under whip cream and the social pressure of anything like audience. I’m a blusher, big time. James Bernard Frost, aka Jim, gave it up fast. He got down on his knees near a flower bed in a supplicant’s position and made the universal bring it on gesture with both hands. Jim could go first. Jusby has rules about his pie work. He also has beliefs. Later he’d tell me, “The pie gets a sensory experience that’s also a ritualized initiation.” He tipped a pie in front of Jim’s face, moving with a grace and strength I know now was developed through studying Butoh dance and Poekoelan, an Indonesian fighting art. He says, “The pie represents crossing into dreamtime, into a lucid euphoria, a liminal space between ordinary states, neither the known world nor the unknowable … ” He works with anticipatory anxiety, extending that moment of knowing a pie is on the way, like a sneeze coming on. A Latino woman and a pack of what may have been grandchildren paused to watch, held by the energy of an event about to happen. And in that moment it happened: Jusby offered Jim a dose, a hit, a big smack of clown pie, whip cream in an aluminum tin. He welcomed Jim into the unknown of dreamtime, and there, indeed, was the euphoria! Jim broke into a grin, wiped his eyes, fumbled for a towel. He laughed out loud. Maybe he laughed at himself. Lance Reynald stepped up next and chose his own corner of the park. Fine by me. The audience for our little pie-an-author event grew. We still had the grandmother and kids, joined now by a pair of hot Portland-style hipster lesbians, a white guy in a basketball jersey, and somebody’s golden retriever. They got in line as though Jusby was an amusement park ride. They wanted to be hit! They asked for it, begged for it, recruited each other, and willingly signed waivers of liability. Could it be they sensed the possibility of a transformational magic through public spectacle, a moment out of time, carving a significant experience out of an otherwise fleeting, incidental slice of existence? Maybe not. Maybe we were in a modern day town square, lining up to be pied by the village idiot. Who, exactly, was the fool then? Jusby bent and swirled whip cream into another aluminum tin with the hiss of a whip-it. He didn’t actually throw the “pies,” but pressed them into each face. Lance was sticky with whipped cream. A guy in sideburns and skinny girl jeans slid into his place, in the new official/unofficial pie-ing corner. I’d lost my spot in line. And I thought, this guy, was he even a writer? Had he published? If he had, was it with a vanity, indie, or corporate publishing house? I mean, I was the one who brought everyone together. I’d worked for a decade on a book about clowns. It was my pie party. Jusby slapped a little boy with a pie, at the boy’s request and delight. The photographer took pictures of every mom and baby, duck, and dog—but I was the author who’d been sought out for this! It was up to me to make a move. So why did I hesitate? Sure, there was the makeup question, my own vanity, and a photographer’s lens trained on each pie recipient. Mostly, it was just easier to take on the audience role. As TV watchers, we’re trained for it. I could stay witness or step into action, take a spot on that fleeting stage, a place defined only by the eyes of the crowd. I said, “Okay.” We’d do it, while there was still space on that camera’s memory card. Jusby waved Kass forward. “Husband and wife, let’s do this together.” Kass stepped up with me. We stood side by side and held hands. Jusby rolled up his sleeves, reached into his duffle for a fresh pie tin. The photographer raised his camera. I felt in my stomach a familiar flutter of trepidation. It was our wedding all over again. Who were those strangers in the crowd? They made me self-conscious. I’d been eight months pregnant at our actual wedding, that’s how shy we’d been about having a ceremony. I waited until the last moment I was willing to put on a dress. I was thirty-nine before I had a child, that’s how long I hesitated—until my last good egg. A plane cut across the blue sky, leaving its white line of toxic exhaust. Jusby tipped the nozzle of a whip cream canister to his pie tin. Everything I’ve ever done that matters has been through saying yes, haltingly, in the face of doubt. Jusby managed to balance a second pie tin in the same hand as the first, one for each of us. Lance smiled at me from the crowd. His hair was sticky and in spikes. James Bernard Frost had gone off to duck his head in the park’s do-not-swim-here chemical-laced water feature of a fountain. And I saw the hipster-girl couple, their eyes on us. If they ever wanted a wedding, they could have one! At least this kind—the clown kind, which is to say not the legally binding sort, not the religious version, the kind considered “real.” They too could have a moment in a park. The sun gleamed off the whipped cream and the edge of the aluminum tin as Jusby put down his canister. And I felt in my body the beauty of saying yes against doubt: it’s necessary. Yes to the future, and to this moment, and to our daughter, the most important decision we’d ever made. I wanted to give back to the world. I was in love, in that wedding ceremony way. Everyone should have the right to say yes, wildly, within the law. The crowd smiled back at us. I beamed into the camera. I wanted our lives to have meaning, our actions to take on a narrative shape. “A messenger arrives and the recipient becomes the message,” Jusby said. The camera flashed. The world went dark. I couldn’t breathe. He’d caught me off guard. The aluminum pan pressed against my face, my nose, my mouth—the whip cream was giving, but the pan wasn’t. My nose flattened. I was drowning! I’d suffocate under cheap whipped cream. It was no way to go. The audience roared. They laughed. This was the end. I’d made a mistake, said yes once too many times. I heard a child yell, me next! And I wanted to tell that child, Go back. Don’t do it! I flapped an arm, tried to drop my husband’s hand, but he held on. Then the pressure on my face subsided. I blew whipped cream out my nose, opened my mouth to gasp for air. Somebody put a towel under my fingers. The sun came back, while my eyelashes were heavy and clotted. I gulped for air and laughed out loud, and now the laugh was at my own fear of death. My heart knocked against my chest. “You may kiss the bride!” I was newly baptized, married, initiated. I was the fool and the folly. Maybe I’d hand-sell one book out of this. My books weren’t even there. It wasn’t about books. It was about the careless freedom to make random adult mistakes and see what would come next. When the whipped cream pies were gone, and the sun sat low over the roof of a Java Hut across the street, I pulled a bottle of red wine and cups out of my bag. Jusby accepted a cup with a nod, that silent clown language of the body, then found a bench. My friends and I were tourists in the pie world, high on new experience. Jusby was spent, and deflated. It showed in the slope of his shoulders. He sipped wine with the calm energy of a bartender after hours. Our friend of the golden-shower essay writes a redemptive tale: She wised up, she says, and found instead the life and experiences she really wants. My experience wasn’t so sordid, and perhaps that’s why my break hasn’t been so clean or clear. I have photos of that day. They’re as lovely as any from our wedding. Over a year later, I’m still sorting out why the pie-ing was important. Jusby’s explanation goes like this: “When the clown comes … you’re participating in an event that lasts seconds but whose residue lasts quite a bit longer.” That’s exactly how I’d describe our wedding. “When the clown comes … ” Maybe that’s one way to describe that sex act, the moment that led to the birth of our daughter, to ballet classes and tantrums and sticky kid hands. The residue lasts much longer. Monica Drake is the author of Clown Girl (soon to be a major motion picture) and The Stud Book, out in February, 2013. She lives in Portland. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 8, 2012 First Person All in a Single String By Maria Konnikova There’s a black-and-white photograph of me in my grandparents’ old Moscow apartment. I’m wearing a hand-knit wool dress, two white stripes down the front. My hair is a mess of tight curls around my head. A lopsided smile exposes my teeth. With my right hand, I’m petting a guitar that looks like it might be taller than I am. It is polished wood, dark around the edges, growing lighter toward the center, an intricate garland along its bottom edge. It’s my grandfather’s. It has seven strings. “A guitar with six strings isn’t a guitar,” my grandfather tells me. “You can’t play on it. You can’t sing to it. It’s worthless. A guitar must have seven strings to be worth its name.” He stops. He closes his eyes. His voice takes on a new tone. “The seven-string guitar, that’s the real guitar. Its voice sings. That, that is the Russian guitar.” I don’t quite understand—to me, a guitar is a guitar—but I know enough to realize that the difference is real to him and that I should abandon my attempts, later, to get him to buy a regular guitar in any old American music shop. As much as he might love me and want to make me happy, he will never play a standard-issue instrument. He will keep searching for his lost seventh string—and if he doesn’t find it, I’ll never again have a chance to hear him play. The decision is final. Some say the seven-string guitar, the semistrunka, was born with the Central European gypsies. A child of the lute-shaped torban, carried back by Ukrainian Cossacks from Flanders after their mercenary stint in the Thirty Years’ War. The torban, whose familiar bass notes distinguished it from other members of its family. Some say it came from the Turks, during their thirteenth-century migration from Abkhazia to Poltava—a descendant of the kobza, that other lute-like instrument that could have as few as three and as many as eight strings—and might not the number have been seven? Some say it is a child of the Renaissance, the flat-backed cittern—an instrument akin to the mandolin and the English guitar (the latter perhaps its closest relative). With its metallic strings, its popularity in song, and its quick spread over Europe, it seems not altogether unlikely—though the cittern had four strings or six, sometimes five. Not seven. The seven-string guitar has many creation myths. But the most accepted version is that, whatever its origins, it first came of age as a uniquely Russian instrument. Read More
August 7, 2012 First Person Letter from India: When the Cat’s Away By Amie Barrodale The Pin Valley is near the Tibetan border. In fact it was a part of Tibet. It was given to India in the fifties, to protect it. In winter it is snowbound. In summer, at three miles elevation—above the tree line—it is a stone bowl of dust. Two years ago, I was following a seventeen-year-old around the world, trying to get permission to write about him. I followed him from Kathmandu to India, and that was when I heard of the Pin Valley for the first time. Westerners living in India were going up for the last ten days of a month-long program for the monks in Pin Valley. There were no guest houses there. People who wanted to attend the program would stay in Kaza, the nearest town. They would ride in and out by car daily, an hour and a half each way. This year, 2012, was different. An enterprising Westerner had partnered with a Tibetan tour operator—a trekker by trade—to build a camp a kilometer and a half from the monastery, on a piece of unused farmland with a well. Read More
August 2, 2012 First Person Love and Poetry By Maura Kelly My first date with Luke started at four in the afternoon—and at midnight, we were still going. Sitting on stools at Frank’s Cocktail Lounge (a bar that feels like a holdover from the seventies, right down to the occasional fedora-wearing patron), we were bent over the carefully folded piece of paper Luke had just taken out of his wallet. As he smoothed it out on the bar, I saw the seven poems, in tiny font, that he carried with him at all times—and I braced myself. This guy wasn’t just so charming and handsome that I’d already trembled once or twice, near him. He was also “haunted by verse.” That was a description an English professor had once applied to me, after I’d run into her while crossing campus one night; drunkenly, I’d begged her to remind me which poet had written, “Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball.” (Andrew Marvell, for the record.) Read More