Blog (front page layout)

I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.

—Duke Ellington

Here’s a deadline: publish something inspired by Duke Ellington’s quote above by the end of the day today.

Each morning for the past month or so, I have been picking a quote as my parting thought for the end of a thirty-minute session of free writing via Zoom with the D.C. Writers’ Salon. This “morning poppins” ritual started with the pandemic — 560 days ago — but I only recently took over facilitation and quote curation from the Salon’s founder, Ali Cherry, when her schedule changed in August.

This routine gives me an opportunity to mine the collection of quotes, writing prompts, and odd fragments of language and inspiration I’ve been collecting over the years. Sharing these fragments with other people reawakens the language and I find that I have more questions, more desire to explore the concept and author than there is time for in the closing moments of our Zoom sessions. Today’s quote from Ellington inspired me to set a deadline for this blog post. Perhaps I’ll keep writing on the daily quote in the days ahead.

Ellington’s name and face are all over my neighborhood, the U Street corridor in D.C. He was one of the major figures of the jazz age that thrived here on “Black Broadway.” I pass the apartments he lived in and the remnants of clubs, hotels, and theaters he performed at a century ago.

I don’t know what deadlines Ellington faced, or what kind of creative blocks and distractions he confronted when he didn’t have a deadline, but I imagine a big concert or recording session coming up in a day or two would help anyone’s creativity flow out of necessity. I know I’ve found academic deadlines and filing deadlines for arts opportunities to be highly motivating.

In recent years, Ellington’s legacy has been complicated by questions of authorship. Many elements of his most famous works can be traced to his collaborators and bandmates. Sometimes he “bought” these songs for an insignificant sum, other times he transcribed the way a player in his orbit improvised a solo, giving the public the impression that the sound was Ellington’s alone. The charitable view is that this was the birth of “remix culture,” or was a continuation of eons of artistic collage and borrowing that predates the advent of the modern record industry.

Certainly some of what Ellington was doing when he was not on deadline was listening to and absorbing what his peers were doing; jamming with friends; assembling ideas in his mind, if not on paper. When the deadline came, perhaps all that was left to do was to spill everything out on paper.

But a deadline is no excuse to cut corners, and it is never cool to present your colleagues’ ideas as your own. Those less-famous, less-compensated players and arrangers who walked these same D.C. sidewalks do not have statues, murals, plazas, bridges and schools named for them today: Billy Strayhorn, Jimmy Rowles, Lawrence Brown and many, many others.

And here, I must cite my own sources by giving credit to write-ups of Terry Teachout’s book Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington from Maria Popova, Alex Belth, and Adam Gopnik. All three are worth a read, and I am curious to pick up the book itself soon.

Kasey Thornton’s debut novel Lord The One You Love is Sick takes place in a fictional southern small town called Bethany. That name, and the title of the book, are references to the Biblical story of Lazarus’ resurrection. At one point, the shortest verse in the Bible — also from the story of Lazarus — is referenced by a pastor recruiting for a grief counseling group as, “He wept.” And there is much going on in Bethany to draw tears: addiction, domestic and child abuse, poverty, homelessness, mental illness, suicide. Whether there is new life after the tribulations is left for the book’s ending.

Each character’s predicament intersects with that of several others. A lonely young man sequestered in his mother’s basement renews a grade school friendship when a woman leaves her abusive husband. Another man has a mental breakdown. As the cloud lifts in treatment at the psych ward, he remembers that the nurse is married to the troubled car mechanic in town, and promisees to look in on her and their children.

These are not problems unique to small towns or the south, but Thornton is from North Carolina and fills these stories with details unique to her experience. Wealthy outsiders from the north or big cities are both a source of income and resentful amusement for the locals.

Early in the book, a local talks with her date about her deceased husband, “things used to hurt” him, “he didn’t like watching the news or reading too many books. He had an empathy problem.” Her date, the husband’s would-be replacement, latches on to a break in logic rather than the emotion in her story, and proceeds to define empathy and sympathy for her:

Sympathy means you understand what people go through and you feel bad for their misery. Empathy means you put yourself in the shoes of another person.

Never mind that dictionary definitions differ on these terms, the man has just confessed that he is autistic, so the ironic turn toward mansplaining and away from exhibiting either empathy or sympathy is the point. It is also telling that this man is the only significant character in LTOYLIS from out-of-town. Thornton is concerned with how small towns in the South process grief, what is talked about and what goes unspoken. Outsiders have different ways of avoiding pain.

Sympathy and empathy are important parts of a writer’s toolkit. Thornton puts herself in the shoes of these characters because she has experience with much of what she puts them through.

Lord The One You Love Is Sick came to me through The Nervous Breakdown book club (the book’s inclusion of a nervous breakdown is coincidence, not the club’s literal theme). In an accompanying podcast interview with Brad Listi, Thornton discusses personal experiences that parallel those of characters in the book, including a childhood as a free-range urchin, experiences with the mental health system, alcohol addiction and chronic pain.

Every writer must empathize with their characters’ lives. A reader’s ability to feel sympathy for characters’ misery (or joy) depends on the writer’s ability to do so. Thornton’s ability to get inside the heads of so many characters awed me in this debut. As I turn away from a season of nonfiction election anxiety blogging back to my own novel, Thornton’s debut is inspiring me to explore the interior lives of my characters in new ways, and to consider more deeply the ways their experiences and emotions mirror situations I’ve lived through.

You can support writing like this by buying Lord The One You Love Is Sick by Kasey Thornton on Bookshop.org through this affiliate link.

In this month of skeletons and zombies and pumpkin spice (link), it felt appropriate to watch Paz Fábrega’s minute Costa Rican romance Viaje from 2015 begin at a costume party. It was this month’s pick for Las Kikas Cine Club.

As Viaje begins, a lonely young man in a bear costume hits on a woman on the stairs at a house party. It’s not clear what her costume is, or if she’s wearing a costume at all. She rejects his advance, but a few minutes later returns and corners the bear in the bathroom. They kiss and leave the party together. A drunken romance begins.

Pedro (Fernando Bolaños) is the bear and Luciana (Kattia González) is the “girl” — spoiler alert — it turns out the young woman’s costume is of herself wearing what she would have worn in kindergarten. Nobody gets it without her explanation, which she finally gives to a stranger at the end of the film. So, is this a tale of goldilocks and the bear? Red riding hood and the wolf?

Leaving the party, the two flirt in the back of a cab. The conversation turns to a rejection of monogamy and the construction of an imagined life together with queer polyamorous couples taking care of their children on the weekends so that they can still go out with other people, or each other. The cab driver interjects, calls this attitude selfish, and suggests that when Luciana has her first child her mothering instincts will kick in.

In the morning, Pedro has to leave for work. He is a graduate student in forest research and needs to travel to a remote forest outpost. He invites Luciana along. She can take a bus back into town after the first leg of the trip. And the journey of the title begins.

Before leaving, Pedro brings a pet fish in a plastic bag to be taken care of by a friend at a local aquarium shop. The fish in a bag was a nice callback to the theme of entrapment embodied by a goldfish in last month’s Las Kikas film pick, Pelo Malo. In the next scene, the two are talking about condoms. Pedro doesn’t like to be wrapped in plastic any more than the fish does. Is this Pedro turning in to an animal? Is Luciana in danger? Is the child predicted in the taxi about to be conceived. Or is this more of the flirtatious sexual exploration that started in the taxi earlier?

Soon the two are in the jungle, brushing their hands over a bed of plants that contract when touched. As the two disrobe in their tent and later at a swimming hole the story risks becoming a tale of Adam and Eve among the wonders of the Garden of Eden. Though it is unclear what the forbidden fruit is, or if there is an impending fall for indulging in this spontaneous journey. Will the two turn into animals? Will real animals come for them?

This is not that kind of story. The viaje is as much an internal one for Luciana as it is geographic. Luciana might want to rewind her life and play the part of a little girl, but we learn that a major change in her life will begin soon. She has a boyfriend on the other side of the globe that she hasn’t seen in a year. She is about to fly away to be with him. Following Pedro deeper into the jungle is not compatible with these plans. Our lovers must live in the moment.

Viaje is shot in a beautiful black and white that brings contrasts forward. The jungles of Costa Rica and the bodies of Pedro and Luciana might have been overwhelmed and lost in lush green if presented in color. The dialogue is sparse. Much is unsaid, revealed only through the movements of actors Bolaños and González.