If it doesn’t fit, it’s probably a blog post.
Is it the restraint of love? Is it reverence? Amid the effervescent joy of buildings that look like music; the muscular formality of a 50-foot-high gate on an ancient wall; the fleeting intoxication of wafting jasmine: Why, exactly, amid these things, do I feel the contrary impulses to stop and snap an iPhoto yet not snap an iPhoto? It’s reverence is what it is, no? Reverential surrender...
Is it appropriate, in a work of autofiction, to ask, Which part is the fiction? I think it is. Because of how people read. The great thing about fiction is it frees the author of the ethical considerations of autobiography and memoir. When people read something that’s about something that actually happened they read one way. When they read about something that’s not supposed to have...
I write from passion and desperation; my heritage is as a punk and a hippie, a fan of visionary and beat poetics, a lover of revolutionaries and rebels. I also am drawn to the severe aesthetics of writers like Nabokov and Wallace Stevens. I straddle worlds. But let’s have a little context. The Friday before the Jan. 10, 2015, Poets and Writers Live event at the Brava Theater in San...
I felt so strongly about reaching out to San Francisco writers at the Poets & Writers Live event, such a strong sense of localness that I found myself staying up late the night before writing this long screed, pouring out my heart in the matter of what it’s like to be in San Francisco today, having moved from the Mission to the Outer Sunset, having seen Salon.com move its operations to...
I do realize now that writing the column has been an aesthetic and spiritual practice. But a spiritual practice must be supported. It was kept in balance by the salary. When we adopt certain practices if they are not supported they lead us to imbalance. That is what I am struggling with now. If I continue to spend four to six hours a day doing this aesthetic and spiritual practice, my life will...
I love you, O person who is unknown to me. That is what I send to you. I send my love. This is a rare thing to be able to do. I am not being paid for this but still I am sending my love. When I was being paid, in the many times in my life where what I was writing was a product purchased by a company, such as all writing is when we are paid for it, I still saw my job as one of sending love out...
The advice column has a quality to it that is of a person speaking directly to another person. That quality flows out of the form of it, that it is epistolary in form. What I can do, even if I am not writing the column is I can still speak directly to you. What I can do is to speak directly to you, the person who is seeing this. I may not be able to untangle entire lives in the time I have to...
What a radically dangerous pledge it is, to pledge oneself to writing. You must be willing to let everything else slide. (Or must you?) If I decide that today I am answering a letter from a person who is suffering, that might be all I do today. If I put limits on it, if I say that because I am not being paid then I can only spend one hour on it, that may cheapen it. What I need to say may...
At times I feel that if I am a person of great faith and serenity I can simply continue what I was doing and everything will fall into place. Because I practice the 12 steps and am deeply connected to a community of faith and recovery I am sometimes in that state of mind where everything will be fine. But also I am in that place where I am not the only person living in this house. If the house...
There is an editor’s letter in the current Poets and Writers Magazine in which the editor takes issue with the idea that it makes a difference whether you write for money. He seems to think that there is such a thing as writing for writing’s sake. I know what he means but I wonder. I wonder if he realizes that the reason he can afford to entertain the notion of not writing for money...
What is public and what is private confuses me. I turn my life into writing. That’s my material. So now in this life I am faced with a situation that is part personal and part political and economic. As a columnist I felt it was my job to share with you whatever I could of my personal life as long as it did not injure anyone else. So, for instance, things that would embarrass my wife I...
I used to write a column five days a week for a salary from Salon. In this column I practiced a particular kind of literary art whose purpose was to affirm the dignity of individual suffering. This required a particular kind of writing, one that could sustain and encompass an individual’s dramatic situation. That dramatic situation included both personality and social forces. My aim was to...
What is it about bullet points? I thought I should write everything in bullet points because I was worried about Internet attention spans Also just having fun Then I decided bullet points were stupid because they debase language they are very very boring they don’t tell a story they are just a summary a summary is like an obituary sitting in a corporate meeting is like going to a funeral...
I sent a piece to “Fence” and they said it wasn’t for them. “Thanks. OK. That’s cool. I can handle it. It’s not a big deal. It’s not like I’m going to go out and cut myself or anything.” A meditation on submission and rejection ——– Original Message ——– Subject: RE: [Fence] Wading in Shallow Water with Architects From:...
Judith, abstract expressionist, El Farolito on 24th Street in the Mission for lunch after the meeting, talking about William James, the God thing, William James says, Look, we are scientific men, Christian men, honest men, and we cannot deny what we see: People are having experiences; they have these experiences of another world and then they change. What are we to call this? How can we, as...
It was at one time understood that to be noble one must not draw unseemly attention to oneself or glorify oneself or make oneself seem, in a crowd, to be the most important person, or to seek glory only for oneself at the expense of others, nor to seek to draw the fame of others toward oneself for one’s own gain. But today, all good citizens must tweet and tweet widely. One must take...
Not to be postmodern or self-reflexive or self-conscious about the form but just to say that I’m going through a process of discovering what I love and in the process of discovering what I love I realized as I was exiting the bathroom that the reason I didn’t feel comfortable in the comments section at Salon for the whole 12 years I was writing those 2,300-odd Since You Asked advice...
I’m so awakened by Ifemelu in Americanah, her blogging, that after the doctor, whose first name was Tennessa, which I had never heard before, and which, when I mentioned it to the medical student who had amazingly white teeth, got me a blank and slightly fearful smile as if she did not know which way I was going with this simple acknowledgement that I had never heard the name Tennessa...
I just had a weird thought. Weird but lucid. More like a vision. I just thought, what if we are producing a generation of people who are going to solve the planetary problems we have created? What if the whole system, not just the human race but the planetary system itself, the biosphere, is producing the cure for its ills, in the form of a generation of humans agile enough to use technology to...
Into my awareness a few weeks ago came this strange, unbidden thought: My reading is private. I don’t really want to talk with you about the books I love. I just want to love them in my own way. I mean, I like you and you’re interesting to me, but the reading I do is mine, all mine, and I don’t even all that much want to share it. Is that bad of me? The truth is full of paradox...
Journalists are like firemen. They aren’t needed all the time. But when they’re needed, they’re needed fast and you need a lot of them. They have to do a lot of things all at once. And it helps if they know each other too, so they don’t fall all over each other and make a mess. I think the San Francisco City College closure threat makes it clear what happens when a city...
On Thursday nights I play music with some friends while my wife, Norma, takes a singing class at City College. Norma has taken classes there for years. She has studied painting, Russian, Italian and other things. City College has been a great life-enriching place for her. She is smart. She knows the value of a community college in a city as rich and varied as San Francisco. She has taken full...
Walking up to the cafe on Thursday morning the day before the Mavericks surf contest down the road at Pillar Point, remembering last night’s weather news about the buoys going off along the coast, watching the big surf, and I see a guy walking up the beach with half his board under each arm. “That’s not a good sign,” I say. “I’m just glad I got to shore,”...
Wow. I just completed my online application for health insurance in California, and I am amazed how easy and trouble-free it was. And now I can’t believe so many Republican politicians worked so hard to deny me this. As a person who survived a potentially fatal cancer in 2009, who had surgery and a long recovery, who has fought to get the care I need and was concerned after losing my job at...
Judith Lindbloom, abstract expressionist, El Farolito on 24th Street in the Mission for lunch after the meeting, talking about William James, the God thing, William James says, Look, we are scientific men, Christian men, honest men, and we cannot deny what we see: People are having experiences; they have these experiences of another world and then they change. What are we to call this? How can...
After the Saturday workshop I settle on the couch reading The Maverick Poets, that book edited by Steve Kowit, who I was lodging next to down at the Sun Esalen thing. But the thing I love after the workshop is that feeling afterwards like we’ve all been together in this room dreaming out loud together. So then I read that poem by Bukowski about the cat, “The History of a Tough...
Yesterday in my intro to the column I mentioned “how we need to fill the January getaway,” and that apparently set off some worries, like, it won’t be cancelled, will it? Of course not. The Creative Getaway Jan. 17-20, 2014 at Marconi Conference Center is definitely happening. It’s just that some people who were hoping to make it found they couldn’t come, so there...
I’m starting to think of the Rob Ford phenomenon as a rare performance-art spectacle in which the tragic and doomed performer, seeking the death of his own ego, effects a feat of topological magic in which he turns his own id inside out. Like a DayGlo 3 a.m basement tattoo of his ravaging animal being, the awful, voracious, unquenchable id of desire appears on his red, bursting skin: Will...
I found out how truly unsystematic I am by setting a schedule for myself and not following it. That happened because I invented Finishing School. I invented Finishing School because I wanted to finish things I start. I wanted to finish things I start because I feel crummy when I don’t. Crummy is a polite word. Also I’m too hard on myself. I had two therapists in one day tell me that...
Dear Friends, I have left Salon.com after 14 years. My unique advice column, which ran on Salon.com as Since You Asked from October 17, 2001 to Sept. 30, 2013, just shy of 12 years, will now run on my own site, carytennis.com. For now, it doesn’t have a new name. I am open to suggestions. Once I get started (letters are already coming in) it will run weekly but if I find a way to make it...
Please join me at Idlewylde Community Hall, 6301 Sherwood Road in Baltimore, Md (See on Google map), Saturday Oct. 12 and Sunday Oct. 13, 2013, for two special morning Amherst Writers and Artists-style writing workshops, 9 a.m. to noon each day. The program is being put on in conjunction with a local effort to bring the Amherst Writers and Artists method to military veterans and survivors of...
The June 2012 issue of The Sun features a generous excerpt of Citizens of the Dream, my book about creativity. It runs after a fascinating interview with painter Ran Ortner and a lovely poem by Alison Luterman, and right before a poem by Tony Hoagland! What humbling and awe-inspiring company! It says quite a lot that The Sun saw fit to showcase the book. After you read the excerpt, I suggest you...
I find it hard not to work. It’s a Sunday afternoon, Norma and I did brunch at Zuni with Karen, then hung out at Green Arcade Books, enjoying the poetry and the cool local books and talking with Dave about labor history and how the minute there’s a museum about your movement you know you’re in trouble (“Fossilized Bongos in the Haight!”) and about the business of...
Rooming with Sy Safransky. We got to talk under the stars Friday night about this and that. Talking with Sy it’s never about this and that but it’s always kinda about this and that which makes it akin to the lightly ordered musings you find in the magazine. Writers giving workshops included poet Chris Burks, whose performances and performance-art-type gifts — a stone, a bell...