Reading at Cedars

Suzanne and I went to the reading at Cedar's last night. Maggie Anderson was supposed to read, but she wimped out on us, due to snow. I mean, yeah, there was a tiny bit of snow, but there's always some snow. I mean it's winter in Ohio. But maybe it's best she didn't come. I mean, there weren't many people there. But the reading was so much fun anyhow. Among the readers , there was Mel who read a nice selection from the book she is writing about growing up in Malasia. Steve Reese read a really funny anniversary poem. Phil Brady recited a poem from Neruda that made the poem almost better than Neruda. (Okay, maybe you can't get any better than that, but it was beautiful.) And Chris Barzak read from his new book, The Love We Share Without Knowing--a selection from a love story in which the protagonist was feeding on the life stories of his beloved. He kept asking for more stories until he knew the other's life stories better than his own.

I can't wait to read Chris's new book. I just bought it . .

Like the narrator in his book, I love to hear people's life stories, as much for what they say about that person's life as for what they don't say. After all, it's impossible to tell your story without editing. Without framing, without deleting, creating and recreating . . .

Otherwise there's too much information. For me that's always been the experience anyhow. Life is such an overwhelm. You can't take it all in. There's too much pain, too much beauty, too much meaning, too much meaninglessness . . .

Even in the simplest moments. I remember once in a high school art class, I was painting a tree in spring. It was an assignment. And while everyone else was done in a day, I kept painting and painting day after day, trying to recreate every leaf and shadow before it changed . . . In the end I finished about a quarter of my picture. The teacher called my style pointillist and made me stop after a few weeks. He praised my eye for detail.

For me, it was just a good example of my particular form of frustration or neurosis or myopia. My ablity to obsess on small details and not get to the whole.

Which is probably the reason I write in small forms. If I compose a piece more than three pages, I think it's too long. And I start to whittle it down to size.