cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
WRITING
I think the single best line of advice I ever heard on being a parent, a writer, a seeker, an anything, is something the great E. L. Doctorow said years and years ago, that writing is like driving at night with the headlights on: you can only see a little ways in front of you but you can make the whole journey this way. This may not be verbatim, but for me it has rung true in every area of my life.
— Anne Lamott
photo by Scoo
Park Avenue
56th Street
Grindr
meditation altar
Central Park
NATURE
Here in the country beauty and death surround you. They’re that close. The hummingbirds whiz in and out sipping the Kool-Aid in the feeder for them. The cat races back and forth in the garden climbing higher and higher in the tree. I see her at the doorway with something in her mouth, it’s still struggling. I yell and smack her, and a quail runs away into the garden. It doesn’t fly away. I go to see if it’s hurt. Ostensibly it’s not. Legs not broken, neck not broken. It stands breathing heavily, eyes darting all about. I decide it’s just in shock at narrowly escaping death. I talk to it, I point out that it’s still alive, it can walk, it can fly, it’ll be fine. The cat, of course, can’t stay away and comes prowling. I pin her to the ground a foot away from the bird. The bird doesn’t move. Still catching its breath. I hesitate to pick it up and move it somewhere safe – doesn’t human scent ostracize a bird from the pack? I pick up a stick and try to get the bird to stand on it. It jumps slightly, so it does seem to be able to move. It just doesn’t want to. Now I’m feeling restless and foolish. How long can I hold back this cat, prevent nature from taking its course? Maybe this is something I need to watch, the dance of predator and prey. The instant I release the cat, the bird flies away, out of reach.
And then: the next day on the path outside the gate is a dead bird, perhaps a quail, perhaps the same one. The head is missing. Do cats eats birds’ heads? The body of the bird has been torn open, and a swarm of bees, perhaps two dozen, partake of it in a literal feeding frenzy. I can’t look. I look.
— Don Shewey, diary entry, 9.23.92
Grapewine Springs Ranch, rural Mendocino County, California, 1992
I first saw Spalding Gray performing with the Performance Group and doing his solo work in 1979. I wrote about him a lot in the early days, interviewed him several times, and got to know him a little bit. I just unearthed for my archive the feature story I wrote about him for the New York Times in 1986, as well as the chapter on him that appeared in Caught in the Act: New York Actors Face to Face, published the same year. My collaborator for the book was photographer Susan Shacter, who took this beautiful picture of Spalding.
Of course, reading these interviews — especially the one for the book — is incredibly poignant now after he’s gone.
Also, I remember editing the Times article over the phone from a post office in Paris and fighting with my editor who told me that the word “horny” could not appear in the august pages of The Newspaper of Record, even in a direct quote. The compromise we arrived at was “randy.” I’ve changed it back to “horny” on my archive, but you can still read the original published version on the Times website here.
The travel issue surprisingly didn’t excite me much. I read without interest Basharat Peer on the hajj and Lauren Collins on Croatia as destination for drunken revelers from Britain. I skipped Julia Ioffe on Russian borscht and Daniel Mendelsohn on the Titanic. The high points for me were Patricia Marx’s fascinating piece on CouchSurfing.com — never heard of it! must make note! — and Bruce McCall’s great cover, “Carry-On Luggage” (above), which reminds me (like so many things these days) of Louis C.K.’s neo-Seinfeld episode on that subject. Hilton Als writes about a couple of plays in Chicago by intriguing writers new to me. And although I’m often happy to follow Sasha Frere-Jones wherever his musical enthusiasm leads him, I remain unconvinced by his take on Spiritualized, whose new album “Sweet Heart Sweet Light” strikes me as pretty yawny. If you hurry, you can check it out free yourself on NPR’s First Listen page.
another eye opens 