The Art on the Street

I promise a short post today. I usually think this whenever I open a blank template to fill in with words and color for whomever you are out there reading this and relating to it in some way, as is ever the hope with what I write (be it fiction or nonfiction). As with most everything I write, I usually end up with a lot more of those words. This go around, I’m true to, well, my word.

The poet. On the mural-ed wall on the street leading up to La Chascona,
 Pablo Neruda’s Santiago Casa.

Speaking of audience and relationship, I have a feeling the majority of you are literally related to me or at least related via friendship, and that’s just fine by me. After all, it’s you, dear friends and fam, I have in mind when I draft these letters from afar, letting you know how we’re doing, how the Spanish is (or isn’t) coming along, and the amazing things we’ve seen because we got this awesome opportunity to check out life in the Southern Hemisphere.

Across the street from the above. The musical one in the house took this one.

For instance, I’m peppering this post with colorful shots of recent murals I’ve fallen in love with around the city. Most are from Santiago’s Bellavista and Bellas Artes barrios. Because I’ve also posted these to facebook, one of my Chilean friends educated me about what many of these images represent. I’m grateful. It’s a wonderful reminder of how technology, at its most basic, allows us simply to share. Thanks to her, I now know:

The Selknam, who lived in Patagonia. They are among the last people
indigenous to the region to live untouched by Western expansion.
Araucarias, the national tree of Chile!
These evergreens are also known as Monkey Tail Trees.
The Huemul, the national animal of Chile!
In English, they are known as South Andean Deer
and they are currently an endangered species.
The way this temporary wall is peeling is
an apt reminder of how fragile our wildlife is
and how short-lived street art is meant to be.
I think this one speaks for itself… across languages.

I suppose any one of these murals is a post unto itself, albeit a lot bolder than my version. But they are messages all the same: to stop and daydream for a minute, to respect, to preserve, to remember, to get fired up, and maybe to walk on and do something, to create something. Who knows for sure? That is the elusive, taunting, inspiring question one gets to wonder about any piece of art. For instance, could this next one represent me and Ryan taking on Chile?!

Almost… 🙂

These days, that looks a little more like this:

Happy ten months of marriage, love!
And thank you for taking me on this fan-flippin’-tastic ride.

Qué es esto? A bird? A plane?

Some Spanish from the street.
I know this means something somewhere to somebody.

After joking that I might just end up being the one girl who moved to Chile and didn’t learn Spanish, I recently told you I’ve finally enrolled in Spanish classes. I know what you’re thinking. Move to Chile, wait four months, then get down to the business of learning the language. Smooth move, Jenn! Well, I have a rationale behind this.

When you move abroad (as with many larger-than-life changes you decide to undertake), you might also discover that there needs to be a new order of operations. You are no longer the person you knew so well a matter of days or weeks or months ago: a person with a lot of friends, who knows her city inside and out, who can get in her car and go whenever she needs to, who can speak the language to anyone, and who can pick up the phone and call her mom/cousin/best friend on an unscheduled whim (and receive said spontaneous calls as well). Well, for a while there, I had to pretty much cross all that off the list or otherwise alter each identifier in significant ways. As you might have guessed, making friends remained at the top of my personal list of how-to-adapt-to-Chile. Sorting out directions, technology, and language skills could all come later.

I still see you, SF, and all the dear friends who
live there, when I walk the streets of Santiago.

So I set about Operation Find Friends in Chile. I emailed friends of friends, signed up for women’s professional groups, tracked down spouses in similar situations as mine, and eventually started a TEFL program that would earn me a job as well as new friends. Along the way (and thanks to one of those random emails), I made a dear new friend my very same age, on a similar page in life, and well established in the ESL industry. She taught me how to order my first ever Piscola (evidence below), and as we both happen to be reading/creative writing junkies, she had the brilliant idea of forming our very own writing group. And nothing makes me feel quite so at home as a writing group!

We rallied up two of her other dear friends, who also happen to be poets, and the Language of the Birds was born! Our name appeared fairly obvious to us at that first-ever gathering over my first-ever Piscola. For one, pigeons were darting about the outdoor terrace, one of the poet’s was reading and had in his possession At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien, and I introduced Portlandia’s “Put a Bird On It” video as a must-see. For these, and a few other writerly coincidences, we officially christened ourselves and have been meeting every two weeks ever since in order to give feedback on our respective stories and poems. Leaving the bar scene to, well, the birds, we gather in a most lovely Santiago backyard, where yes, a bird or two has still been known to join us. As you might have guessed, any number of bird/nest/flight-related puns are included among our creative endeavors.

First Piscola =
Pisco + Ice + CocaCola and serve.

In addition to the puns, the group has also given me a purpose beyond English vs. Spanish when it comes to language. It has allowed me to rewrite past stories from a new vantage point, and best of all, generate brand new ones that get to take off from the city I’m writing from.

So, now that I have friends, a job, Skype/Gmailvideochat/Google+/FaceTime for communication overseas, and a handle on at least two of the metro lines in this fair city (not to mention the whole moving in with my husband bit!), I knew it was time to learn how to say it all in Spanish. This week, Paolo and Chacha didn’t make an appearance in class, but you know I’ll keep you posted.

What’s in a Name?

A lot, right? I’ve changed mine twice, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

When it comes to our first name, it might also be the first word we hear in our mother or father’s voice. It might be the first word we recognize and respond to and even write in our native language. Over our lifetimes, we come to identify with it so strongly and personally even though we didn’t have any hand in picking it. If it’s hard to pronounce or spell (as my name, being THE most popular girl name of my birth year, certainly is not), you might even feel more solidarity with your name because it’s challenging, complicated, interesting, unique… qualities we all like to embody at some point in our lives. Our maybe you’re a namesake… in honor of someone or in homage to a place. Maybe your mother has liked the name since she was nine years old, and there’s certainly something to be said for that, too.

My first ever name plate from my first ever publishing job.
Yep, I kept it. To the right, is adorable pen pal and fellow editor, Laura Lee.
Check out her wonderful blog at: www.atadbookish.com

The act of naming in and of itself has a long history and deep meaning that I’m sure academics in various lecture halls or workshop rooms around the world are discussing in much more detail as we speak. For instance, when we read a story, and a character is un-named, that can still carry just as much meaning as iconic names like Pip or Estella. Because what does it say about the identity of the character (and the writer, English Lit. Masters) to deny a name?

What about nicknames? I recently taught my beginners “nickname,” as each member of the class prefers to go by his/her nickname rather than full first name. I do, too, when I’m around friends and close family. When I publish, I use my full name exclusively. In this and other ways, I think the nickname is a fairly common gatekeeper between our personal and professional lives.

When it comes to our last name, surname, or “family” name, as I’ve also taught it, we’re used to having just the one in the United States–or at least we have been. Nowadays, women are choosing to keep their maiden names, take and/or hyphenate two last names, or do what I’ve done, move the maiden name to the middle and take the new name as the last. (Anyone who’s made the latter two choices knows it’s no easy feat nowadays given the dozens of online platforms, bank accounts, loans, etc., that require updating.) Guys, you have it so easy!

I mean, I’ve just got to share a name with this guy!
Photo Credit: Jack Hutcheson, www.jackhutch.com

Bestowing and taking family names certainly differs depending on where in the world you are. Here in Chile, for instance, you never have to change because you get two last names! One is from your mother, and one is from your father and that is that. When you get married, you keep them both (it’s actually considered rude not to). Then you give the name through the mother’s line and the name through the father’s line to the children you may bring into the world. So, technically, everyone in a three-person nuclear family could have different sets of last names. (Chile’s also keen on giving a first and a middle or “second” name, so that brings the grand total to four!) I like the individuality and the homage to family implicit in the way Chile does it.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, while I legally took my husband’s last name because I also like the traditional idea of sharing a family name, I keep my maiden name front and center because it’s my published byline and I like consistency. In this searchable world we live in, I want everything I’ve written to come up under the same name.

But I’m also invested.

You see, it’s not really my maiden name. I already changed my name when I turned 18, electing to take my mother’s maiden name in lieu of my own. You may imagine all sorts of reasons why I would want to do something like that, and I’ll leave you to it. Regardless, the name change was as wide an embrace I could imagine around my mom’s side of the family, our Italian heritage, and the name I fantasized, even then, seeing under an article heading and one day (fingers crossed) along the spine of a book.

Baxter, Dunn, Puchner, Collins, Moore, Nixon…
Those are some solid last names for
some amazing authors and poets.

So, you don’t just kick a name like that to the curb. It may have only been my legal last name for twelve years, but those years happen to also line up exactly with the number of years I’ve had my name in print. From here on out, it may be my middle name, but it will still appear.

I love my new name, too. It also happens to be Italian (lucky me), and when strung all together, my full name sounds straight from the script of a European soap opera, but it also sounds familiar, like family… and now like two families.

When my husband and I are fortunate enough to name another human being, the Chilean forms will ask for four names and U.S. forms will require three. To me, this kid is already sounding pretty interesting. And he or she already has a story to tell about a name.

You Got That on Cassette?

I am the owner of exactly one cassette tape. Okay, a few other things first…

I’ve started taking real Spanish lessons. (It was time to start getting real.) This morning, I have to prep my English classes: break apart the present perfect, string it out on a timeline that will make visual sense, make worksheets for test review, make sure all the new vocabulary is covered and then covered again, so that my students know the difference between “Logistics” and “Training.”

But right now I’m interested in the point-of-view I again share with my students. For, I too, am reading helpfully contrived conversations to reinforce the new words, the new grammar… in Spanish, that is. In my case, I’m reading about Paolo and Chacha (yes, Chacha). In their world, it’s the mid-80s and they’re talking about their occupations (arquitecto and fotógrafa, respectively). Based on the video exercises that line up with the workbook, it’s fairly clear they’re hitting on each other. Chacha’s sunglasses are also amazing.

I love to take pictures of really old things that used
to be so useful and ordinary.

Subplot and style aside, and perhaps because my textbook is stuck in the ’80s (the nostalgia fiend in me simply loves it), last week I found myself struck by the fact that “cassette tape” will no longer be included in the dictionary, at least not the abridged version of the Oxford English Dictionary. As reported by the The Mommy Files on SFGate, “cassette tape” has simply run its course. Cars no longer come with tape decks, nor do stereos.

I had a big sidewalk sale before I moved to Chile. And like you used to be able to find classic vinyl in some cardboard box on some fold-out table in some garage, I unloaded my cassette tapes. I know, what is an obsessed-with-the-past girl like me doing getting rid of such recorded relics?! Well, I mentioned the move to Chile, right? That cut a clear path between what was worthy of packing and what had to stay behind, be given away, or sold for a buck on my sidewalk. So shoeboxes filled with Madonna, Paula Abdul (I was 11 in 1991, just FYI), and Erasure, among others, went on sale.

I gave the old typewriter away to a cousin,
but that didn’t stop me from framing a picture
of one. This sits on my desk… next to a computer.

Let me pause to explain Erasure’s “The Innocents,” which was, dare-I-say, a rather hip choice at the time. The tape was a gift, courtesy of the coolest babysitter I ever had. I was 7, she was 21. We were both named Jennifer and her birthday was the day after mine and the tape was my birthday present when I turned 8. By then, I was well obsessed with the band, which would come through the tape deck (gasp!) of her forest green VW Bug. As would The Cure, Depeche Mode, and other Live 105 staples of the day, which would stream out of the car’s manually-opened windows after she picked me up from school. I would extend my arm to catch the breeze and pretend I was older and we were best friends and I had finally arrived in the passenger seat of the life I was waiting so earnestly for. My love of music may well have started right there.

By high school, Erasure was no longer in the circulation when it came time to make the mix tapes that seemed to define my generation, as I came through middle and high school and even the beginning of college all in the ’90s, where music and technology collided on tape. There in the shoeboxes were songs by the Grateful Dead, R.E.M, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Beatles, and Led Zeppelin all scrolled in my 14-year-old bubbly handwriting. Girlfriends and I exchanged the tapes more often than boys and I ever did, which seems to be the tradition mix tapes (and later CDs) are remembered for and perfectly archived in films like “High Fidelity.” Given our slice of available technology, we would record the songs from CDs or from another cassette tape that we used to dub songs off the radio, and swap mix tapes like letters between pen pals we just happened to see every day at school.

Said antique pencil sharpener.

I’m writing about the divide between nostalgia for the past and future gains thanks to technology more than I ever thought I would. Sure, I can go gaga over an iPod Touch just as much as the three-year-old in your life, but when I scrolled through that list SFGate’s Mommy Files compiled to pay homage to the pieces of the past our children may never know about: the typewriter, photo film, pay phones, car window cranks (like the kind I remember vividly from that VW Bug), rolodexes (I still have two from my early career days), analog clocks, or even cursive writing, I couldn’t believe how few years had to pass for me to be one of those people pining for the past. I thought this wave of nostalgia would come much later in life, but perhaps it’s always been there, as I stake out antique shops, collect things that aged well before my birth, and want to talk to older generations about what they saw and did. Not all the now-obsolete things I’ve collected (an old-school pencil sharpener, a compass, a typewriter) made it to Chile, but some did. Maybe my future kid will pick one of them up some day and stare it in absolute wonder, as he or she might of the bronze-embossed spines of a World Book Encyclopedia.

This past weekend, The New York Times‘ Technology section ran an interesting piece on the local Waldorf School back in California, which is eschewing early exposure to technology in the classroom in favor of paper books, wood pencils, drawing, and what I’ve come to call “realia” (real life objects brought into the classroom to see and feel, such as an actual apple instead of running a search for images of one online). I’m not judging here on whether or not or when children should be taught via technological devices. I understand the pull some parents must feel — you don’t want your kid to fall behind what all the other kids are learning and working with, but (and maybe this will end with my generation… in fact, I’m confident it will), isn’t there some part of you that wants to protect the child from all that for a little while? Make it possible for them to live offline for as long as possible!? Before they, like we, are chained to a series of screens… phone, computer, iPad, iPod, and whatever else is coming down the pipe.

What’s a cassette tape worth?

So, after all this, you think I would have kept the Erasure tape? For posterity if nothing else, right? Or the mix tapes? Wrong. Suitcases are only so big. What didn’t sell was left out overnight where it was soon swooped up by the swarms of SF sidewalk scavengers that hunt down disguarded relics on any given weekend, and the empty shoeboxes were recycled. (Plus, I have a vague recollection of listening to Erasure so many times, the filmy, squeeky black tape actually broke. So what I recently had on hand may well have been the broken tape or a replacement… nostalgia only takes my memory so far.) I did keep one tape… Pink Floyd’s “Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” I have zero recollection of acquiring this one (it may have again been courtesy of babysitter Jennifer), but I kept it for three reasons:

1. I’m married to a serious Pink Floyd fan.

2. A neighbor checked out the tape and said I should keep this one, that it was the most valuable. I offered to give it to him, but he wouldn’t even buy it. There was something in the way he told me to hold onto to it, so I listened.

3. I thought we might just have a tape deck in the old stereo that came with our Chilean apartment. It turns out we don’t. So we have no way of actually playing the tape. But I have it, 6,000 miles away from where all those mix tapes scattered with Ocean Beach winds. I like that image. That “playlists” I compiled with such effort in the mid-90s are being played somewhere.

Said compass. So much is north these days.

Maybe that’s why I’m so stuck in the past. Will we ever feel this way about our outdated iTunes libraries? Versions 1-5 of the iPhone? Old digital cameras that no longer work? The tangled bouquet of power chargers, USB cables, and the like that also usually end up at a sidewalk sale if we no longer recall or need what connects to what?

Maybe it’s just me, which begs the question: Anyone got a tape deck they’re not using?

What Do I Do?

The past… the future?

Today, one of my students asked me what I did for a living. Well, technically, she asked me: “What do you do?”, which is the way we recently learned to ask about someone’s occupation. It struck me as funny because here I am at the front of the class, right? But I knew what she was really asking was: What is my trained profession? What else am I capable of doing? What else do I get paid to do? In essence, she was asking what I did before this. (Keep in mind we haven’t learned the past tense yet.)

I told her I am a journalist, that I’ve written for and edited magazines. She wanted to know how I got there, so I drew arrows on the board and tried to explain the order of what came before teaching…. University, magazine editing, graduate school for creative writing, Chile.

I am still a writer. I hope I am more a writer than ever based on sheer volume of output, which fortunately now amounts to this here blog, guest posts and essays for teaching sites, short stories that I send out as 10-page word documents and get returned as short emails (some of which are personal at least), and I’m also officially writing the “second” draft of a novel.

But am I still a journalist? This is more of a profound question than I realized. I’ve been a working writer for nearly twelve years, publishing work in magazines mostly (see above), but this is the first time I’m not in some capacity earning any money for my writing. It’s either all for free or all for me. I have an iron or two in the fire, so I hope that this will soon change, but for the most part the written word is expected to be consumed for free these days. In the past, I’ve linked to excellent analysis (courtesy of a smart friend) on why exactly this is. We all know the basic reason is that with the fatal wane in print advertising, magazines get smaller and smaller until they disappear altogether or move online, where production costs are closer to nil than ever before so you no longer have to pay writers and photographers healthy fees as you no longer have–or need–the advertising revenue to do so.

I’ve gotten my hands dirty in debates with smart friends about why publishing is moving toward content aggregation rather than well-paid, well-written stories. I have a feeling we as writers messed up a long time ago when we let our content go up on the Internet for free. I remember paying for an annual subscription to Salon.com in 2002/03, but that wasn’t the norm. I realize we can’t limit the Internet. It’s beautiful, truly beautiful, that people the world over have free access to information, books, and technology. At the same time, a certain contemporary entrepreneur can pocket upwards of $350 million off the content of writers who haven’t seen a penny. That, to me, is not beautiful.

I’ll admit my paper-loving heart sunk a little when I recently watched this piece of brilliantness about a toddler’s impression of a magazine being a broken iPad. Then again, one friend said purchasing the iPad has meant he reads more than ever AND he pays for it. So maybe the same technology that virtually ended the advertising revenue model for magazines and the classifieds for newspapers is also turning things around. Maybe.

Another friend said how the writer must now embody a “circular reference,” wherein they must come to the table with a functioning website and an online following, a gaggle of unique visitors, tweets galore, AND street cred. So, you wrote something beautiful, good for you. Fewer and fewer publishers will take a risk on you unless you come with a built-in audience. That’s why so many passionate scribes are throwing up their hands and making it easier and easier for Amazon to cut out the middle men and women like agents and editors and publishing houses. (I know any of us either worried or excited about this saw this piece all about it.)

I also talked to a former employer who has seen a massive sea change at the very top of the game, with seasoned editors and designers taking their talent out of publishing altogether to go in-house at design firms or archives. That’s great for the photo editors, but what do us writers do?!

Ocean Beach, SF. A writer’s hood for sure.

The answer? Keep writing. I suppose it’s time to stop whining about how hard it is for the independent writer to make a buck. The ocean is not pulling this wave back. I’m going to retire the soap box, but I’m not necessarily going to like it. I mean, I can spend a good 1-2 weeks writing and re-writing a travel piece on say, Mendoza. I can spend another week’s worth of 1-2 hour chunks researching online outlets that might be interested, drafting cover letters, and sending off email pitches. Then if an editor no doubt much younger than I am likes what I have to say, he/she might pay me $25. Yep, $25 bones for close to a month of work. Sure, it’s spread out, and if you have all the time in the world, you could build up an impressive “rolodex” (oh, what a dated word… more on that another day). But who has all the time in the world when hardly anyone is paying?! I may as well just throw it on the blog. Eek, might have tip-toed back onto that soap box.

I know writers, like most artists, have always had to work hard and pay their dues until they made it. But I’m not an intern anymore. I’m not desperate for clips though I may be desperate for a decent word rate. Still, I’ve published for free in Chile because I’ve needed new connections (and have made great ones) and have been able to diversify my material so that I now also write about teaching and education. Making a new in professionally, promoting my blog, and reaching a new batch of readers on Twitter all make it worth my while as I build the base I’ll need when it is time to query literary agents. That and that alone is why I’ve decided to write thousands of words for free. Though I still shake my head at how often I’ve heard “We can’t pay you, but…” I mean would you ever say this to your plumber or roofer or mailman or dentist or department store clerk?

My fear is that nowadays when “everyone” is a writer or photographer or blogger or tumblr or tweeter or content pusher, no one has to vet the process anymore. I’m a girl who likes to play by the rules. I want to finish my novel and query agents and then find an editor and then revise and then publish. The whole writing part aside, the official publishing process can take up to a year or longer all on its own. I know everyone may not have that patience, not to mention the stomach for all the rejection that comes along the way. But it’s this process that convinces me a book is worthy when I pay for it. Perhaps it’s also what I need to convince me my own book is worthy. Nothing against self-publishers out there as I know you are fierce and you are many and mainstream success has come your way because you had the chutzpah to put your book on the Internet. But when 90% of that process is striped away, isn’t there now an exceptionally low barrier to entry? Who vets now?

I have a feeling the answer is you and I do. The people online. The people with eReaders who scroll what a math equation has recommended for them based on their past searches and purchases. Some of those recommendations may very well be books by new self-published authors who wouldn’t get read otherwise. Bravo to that.

The Novel.

In the meantime, I’ll be here, writing for me and hopefully not always for free. I am, as Orhan Pamuk wrote, “imposing on myself the discipline of working on a table all day, enjoying the smell of paper and pen in a lonely room–habits that I will never lose.” (The Paris Review Interviews, Volume II.)