Women: Get us while we last!

If I've got this right, we men are on our way to extinction. The Y chromosome, the only thing that keeps Us from being like You, has been decaying ever since the first Homo sapiens (Latin for "smart dude") hooked up with the first Mulier sapiens ("Eve"). So hurry! No telling what will become of us over the next millennium.

The same new study, made possible by the recent mapping of the entire human genome, reveals something I'd always suspected: men are (genetically) as different from women (1.5 to 2% of our genes) as we are from chimpanzees. No surprise there. But chimps may be smarter. Every time I start to pound my chest, I lose my grip on the tree limb. (See today's NYT article by Nicholas Wade.)

William Packard

"What do I myself mean by poetry? The mysterious charge of language that takes place when passion combines with consciousness to create rhythms, the inevitable and intuitive rhythms of the bloodstream, ear and eye and voice." -- William Packard, craft interview, NYQ (The New York Quarterly) 40, reprinted in NYQ 59.

News of Bill Packard's death (Nov. 3, 2002) reached me late -- I don't remember now which of my writer friends told me about it. My memory of him was buried deep among other layers of memory of writing efforts and contacts and barely stirred. But then this weekend, at the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses' "Lit Mag Marathon," I met Raymond Hammond, his successor editor at NYQ, the poetry journal that Bill had founded in 1969, and then read Bill's words in interviews, essays and poems in NYQ 59. Confronting his ghost reminded me of how frightening I had found him, when he came to lecture at the New York University Summer Writers Conference one year when I was also an instructor.

How could such a gentle, love-projecting, wild-eyed, dissheveled old bear frighten anybody? Especially when he was seated behind a desk at the bottom of the auditorium and I was safely seated in one of the back rows? I wouldn't have admitted I was frightened, but now I think that is the only explanation of my confused reactions as examples of poetic devices poured out of him in long heartfelt renderings of passages from the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Auden, Rilke, and maybe a dozen other poets. Bill Packard would look at you and into you, no deeper than he needed to, but far enough to probe your first line of defense, and challenge you like Rainer Maria Rilke's "Apollo" in a poem that Packard translated (also included in NYQ 59): "You must change your life."

NYT obit | NYQ obit (much fuller, and with a wild-man photo that Packard himself liked to use) | Council of Literary Magazines and Presses

Interview with Deborah Treisman

On The Connection with Dick Gordon. For all of us who hope one day to see our work in the New Yorker, this is important.

New Yorker Debut Fiction issue

Some of my writing colleagues are burning with jealousy of the three new authors whose stories made it into this issue. But so far hardly anybody has said anything about the stories themselves. They're pretty good, and very different from one another.

Heather Clay, "Original Beauty" is the weakest of the lot. Two old high school girlfriends, to whom nothing especially interesting has happened since high school, get together to reminisce about something that didn't happen. The narrator recalls that a guy had sneaked into the girls' bathroom and looked longingly at her while he masturbated and she brushed by him to get out. Basically, a non-event, but one that suggested eventfulness. My reaction was, So?

Lara Vapnyar's "Love Lessons, Mondays, 9 A.M." is another thing entirely. It's very funny, and even though not much happens in the visible, exterior life of the young apprentice schoolteacher living with her aunt in Moscow, enormous things occur in her interior life. Physically, she gets laid, finally (she had feared it might not happen for a long time), but that turns out not to be especially exciting. What really happens is that she gains a suddenly mature insight into the pretenses of others and liberates herself from the gloom of always trying to please. Besides enjoying this bright young woman's company, we get to see details of life of modern Moscow's working poor.

The real prize in this collection is Daniel Alarc�n's "City of Clowns," tagged in the table of contents as "A life of crime in Lima." Brilliant. And, like Vapnyar's story, takes you far away from the boring routine of American suburbia. You can smell and feel Lima in this story, and get to experience its class conflicts as vividly as in the first novel by Alarc�n's elder countryman Mario Vargas Llosa, La ciudad y los perros -- which must have been part of the inspiration for this tale.

Anyway, I'm not jealous, though of course I'd be delighted to get one of my stories in the New Yorker. But for the Debut Fiction issue, I wasn't even eligible -- because I have already published a book of fiction, Welcome to My Contri. So I'll just pretend that that's the reason they didn't pick the wonderful story that I've been trying to get them interested in. (You can read City of Clowns on-line.)

What every modern author needs to know

Before submitting, be sure to study carefully Quick and Easy Tips on Professional Manuscript Submission by Roger MacBride Allen. Boy, and I almost made the mistake of sending out my manuscript on paper and in a cardboard box! Now I just have to hunt down those ex-aerospace engineers to help me rig up the laser etching.

For telenovela connoisseurs

I'm hooked. The culebrón now playing on Univisión (at 7 EDT) is witty and up-to-date in its themes, which include violent capitalist greed with a sure-sell product, Internet porn, and a cast full of easy-to-look at actors with exquisite comic timing. Check out Las Vías del Amor. (P.D. Mi compinche Oso me dice que no ha habido culebrón que valiera la pena desde "Betty la Fea", pero lo que pasa es que Oso, a pesar de ser muy buena gente, es demasiado oso para apreciar el humor que no sea obvio.)

More reflections on "the First Cities": To a friend who was waxing nostalgic

Yeah, the good old days. I really miss those clay tablets that we used to press with our cuneiforms to do our lessons. Everything started going downhill when they introduced papyrus, and pretty soon, even common people were scribbling nonsense and reading and misinterpreting the sacred texts. I miss those gladiatorial contests, too. And slavery. Boy, that sure was a labor-saving device, except of course for the slaves.

Fortunately, the Republicans have taken the right steps to take us back to those good old times. Wiping out all remnants of corrupting culture in Iraq was a start, and then letting those people know that democracy is too important to leave to the people.�In a similar vein, Tom Delay has decided that money is too valuable to give it to people who don't have enough of it. They'd probably just waste their $400 checks on groceries and shoes for the kids, instead of spending it on big-ticket items to boost the economy.

Favorite New York Times quote of the day

"The New York Times will be in great hands no matter who leads." - Gerald Boyd, announcing his resignation as managing editor. (What? You don't believe he said that? See today's article by Jacques Steinberg.)

5,000 years of churning

We just got back from viewing the show at the Metropolitan Museum, "Art of the First Cities," with statuary, clay accounting and story tablets, personal ornaments and fragments of architecture from Ur, Urek and their successor cities, beginning around 3,000 BC. The show is a fragment of what it might have been, because so many of the greatest treasures have just been looted from what remains of their bombed out homeland of Mesopotamia. Still, it's mighty impressive to be reminded that we human beings have been struggling to civilize ourselves for over 5000 years, without making any progress. For signs of stupidity and destructive arrogance to equal any known to Nebuchadnezzar or Ozymandias, see the truly scarywww.probush.com.

I, Simurgh

From as early as I remember, I have known that I could fly. All I really had to do was truly believe, to unlock the chain of doubt, and soar. You can, too. If you don't already know this, you will after seeing the marvelous movie, Winged Migration.

When I told a friend how wonderful it had been to leap from the top of S�o Conrado peak in Rio de Janeiro beneath the delta wing of a hang-glider, to fly beside the pelicans over the great favela and the valley and the country club and finally the sea, before circling back to land softly on the beach, he stared at me in panic. Just the idea of it made him gasp -- he suffers from acrophobia. Well, then I guess I must suffer from acrophilia. I loved it! And a year or so later, when my son took me climbing up a sheer rock face in the Shawangunk Mountains, and we stopped for a breather after the second stage of the climb and I looked down at the circling buzzards -- waiting for one of us to fall, no doubt -- I felt tired but very much at home, believing (against all logic and experience) that even if I lost my grip, the air currents would support me as surely as they did those feathered wings.

The Simurgh is a gigantic and magical four-winged bird that nests in the Tree of Knowledge, wherein grow all the fruits of the Earth. When the Simurgh flaps its wings in take-off from the tree, it scatters the seeds in the direction of the downdraft -- which is how pineapple ended up in South America, and cherries in Japan. In the 13th century, the Persian poet Farid al-Din Attar discovered its true nature, through the twin sciences of etymology and analogy. "Si" in Persian happens to be the word for the number 30, and "murgh" -- well, I don't know what that means in Persian, if anything, but Farid thought it must be "birds." In his delightful poem, the birds of the earth, seeking the simurgh to be their leader, go on such a long exhausting flight that only 30 of them remain aloft. It is then that they realize that they themselves are the simurgh. We must be our own leader. Go see this movie, "Winged Migration," and you too can be part of the simurgh.