writers-blog

"Pavlov's Man," a flash fiction story

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 23:30:31 +0100

Pavlov’s man is my friend. We worked together for several years in an office in Seattle, Washington. In fact, we started there on the same day. He got the big corner office, and I got the office next door. His office came equipped with a large saltwater fish tank and four fish. I only recall four of them: A fairly large fish with a beaked mouth named Pavlov, a blowfish named Yoda, and a smaller red-and-black striped fish that kept well out of Pavlov’s way. My friend told me Yoda and the striped fish were new, as Pavlov had eaten his former tank mates. Yoda didn’t have to worry about Pavlov; all he had to do to put him off was blow himself up into a large, spiky ball, and Pavlov left him alone. But not the small red-and-black fish. In spite of the fact that Pavlov saw him as his next meal, he was faster and more streamlined and would dart out of Pavlov’s way in time to avoid one of his sneak attacks. His usual procedure was to follow Pavlov around the tank, positioned just behind his tail and out of his line of vision. The fourth fish, which didn’t have a name, was a small, gray nondescript-looking fish that lasted about a week before ending up in Pavlov’s stomach.

When my friend inherited this quartet, his job was to feed them each morning to keep them happy and to keep Pavlov and his appetite away from his tank mates. Not that Yoda had to worry, but since Pavlov was twice his size and had a sharp-looking, parrotlike beak, it was best not to take any chances. So when my friend walked into his office each morning, he took off his coat, put his briefcase down, and went down the hall to the kitchen for the packet of dried brine shrimp kept in the refrigerator. By the time he walked back into his office, the fish were waiting for him, and the minute he opened the feeding slot on top of the tank and began pouring in the shrimp, they attacked, Pavlov and Yoda getting the lion’s share. Of course, as they were getting their share, the little red-and-black fish darted about, eating what they missed, which was quite a lot.

Before I go much farther, let me explain how my friend came to be known as “Pavlov’s Man.” It happened this way. One morning the telephone rang as he walked into his office, so instead of going to the kitchen for the brine shrimp, he answered the call and spent the next fifteen minutes or so talking. Shortly after beginning his conversation, he heard a metallic “tic-tic-tic” that persisted as he talked. Annoyed, he cast his eyes around the room and discovered the source of the tic-tic-ticking sound. Pavlov, hungry, was at the top of the tank hitting its metal cover with his beak: “tic, tic, tic, tic!” My friend excused himself, took the caller’s number, hung up the receiver, ran down to the kitchen to get the brine shrimp, and fed Pavlov and his friends.

From then on this same scene repeated itself each morning: the minute my friend entered his office, Pavlov began his “tic-tic-tic” reminder, sending my friend down the hall for the brine shrimp. It didn’t take long before everyone in the office knew about Pavlov and my friend. And that is how my friend became known as “Pavlov’s Man.” “There goes Pavlov’s Man,” people would say as he walked past. One day when we were sitting at lunch with two of our coworkers, he suddenly got up and began walking toward the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” I asked, stopping him in his tracks.

He sat back down as suddenly as he had gotten up.

“You must have heard that woman over there clicking her knife on her plate,” I said.

He looked appalled. “Jim, I think I’ve been trained by a fish to respond to whenever I hear that sound. I’ve become like one of Pavlov’s dogs. I’m Pavlov’s man.”

And he was. Even five years later he gets to his feet whenever he hears a tic-tic-ticking sound. Pavlov? He’s been dead for years.

The cloak of victimhood

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:38:13 +0100

Going through some old papers yesterday I ran across a poem that I wrote on September 11, 2001, then filed away and forgot about it. I think it is as applicable today -- and perhaps more so -- as it was on the awful day when I wrote it.

"The Cloak of Victimhood"

Every time I
put
it on

people
throw things
at me.

Attention comes
at a high
price.

Too high.
Give it up

walk on
without it

free.

Capturing the moment

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 00:04:52 +0100

Our days become so crammed with activities and preoccupations that it is easy to miss the little things, which seem so insignificant . . . but are they? As a writer, it's important that I stay in the moment as much as possible in order to catch the magic that is there.

One day while sitting reading in a shopping mall, I noticed something moving near the floor to my left. Glancing that way I saw a tiny boy, his face beaming, waving at me. I smiled back and waved at him as he passed me by, still smiling and waving, then smiled at his mother who stood nearby waiting for her son. Had I been so wrapped up in my book, I would have missed him and the gift he had to give me.

I also find story lines, characters and poetry there.

Poem

The days move
swiftly by

while the nights move slowly
and are filled with dreams.

A late September day

The sun is out

On the veranda
my wife hangs laundry

In the distance
thunder.

Favorite things

One of my
favorite things

is watching
my wife
and her nephew

talking and laughing
in the kitchen.
-- at Shigeru's, Kushiro, 12/15/2007

Snowbird

Today the old red macaw
is on his perch munching seeds
as the arctic wind whips past.

Does this out-of-place bird
dream of steaming tropical
forests?
-- Kushiro, 12/13/2007

Another gorgeous, sunny day.
Three hawks circle silently overhead.
-- Kushiro, January 2008

The ocean
is magnificent

sun sparkling
on its calm surface.

Spring poem

This morning walking
to work
I saw
leaves
backing out of the
branches of a hedge.

One of my profoundest joys

One of my profoundest joys
is listening
to my wife sing
as she cooks.

I am lifted.

There is a sound

There is a sound
that grandmothers make
that is full of memories.

I heard it on the bus today
returning from Sapporo Station.

Three bell-likek sounds
in descending order,
ha,
ha,
ha,

just
like
that

Can you hear it?

Monarch

Yellow
Veined
Poised
Upright
Un-
Moving
Lifting
Lofting
Dancing
Weightless
Wings

These are the gifts that moments bring. They are many, and we have the gift to capture and share them. A year or so ago after listening to the song "Don't worry about a thing" (from the album"Playing for Change, PFC-2, 'Songs Around the World') I wrote the following poem in celebration of that particular moment.

Celebration

If I have life to live
over again,
I will learn music.
I will play a string'd instrument --

an oud, a laúd, a Mali harp,
a banjo, charango, Okinawan sanshin,
a samisen, an Ainu tonkori
and a harp.

I will be a street musician, and I
will play in cafes and concert halls.
I will take up the flute, kena, shakuhachi,
the Irish tin whistle and Andean panpipes.

No one who hears me
will be able to sit still.

* * *

Such is the blessing of the moment when we allow ourselves to notice it.

Enjoy the day and all the moments in it.

George

Small press book fairs and other such events

Thu, 30 May 2013 23:54:52 +0100

Small press book fairs and other such events

Small press book fairs are interesting and sometimes boring experiences, depending on where they are held. I participated in several of them between 1975 and 1979 while a member of Board of the Minneapolis Metropolitan Arts Alliance. For some reason that I was never able to understand, small press publishers were adamant about holding the book fairs on college campuses, where the only people coming round were students and professors. Why they insisted on it I never understood. Did it give them a sense of cachet other venues might not? It certainly didn’t result in book sales. In spite of that, my idea of holding these book fairs in public places like an atrium or shopping mall fell on deaf ears.

After a particularly sparsely attended fair that was hosted on the campus of one of our local colleges, where I remember selling one or two books, I went to a nearby Chinese restaurant for dinner and penned the following poem, complete with liner notes for an album cover. I hope you enjoy it and makes you laugh or at least chuckle.

Lament of a small press publisher after having attended a small press book fair. For oboe, viola da gamba and tenor voice, slowly.

— dedicated to small press publishers everywhere.

After sitting a long

day and-a-half,

I went round to

some of the other

publishers

and asked: “How’s it going?”

and got answers like:

”Oh, slow. I only took in

forty bucks yesterday,” and

“thirty-five bucks since I set up

this morning. Not much,”

and I went back and

sat down in my booth,

depressed. After a long

day-and-a-half, I’ve

sold one book and one

poster for a total of

four dollars, twenty-five cents.

It’s enough to make

a person ask

philosophical questions of himself.

If I sit here much longer,

my rear end

will grow moss on it

and my eyes will disappear like moons.

Already my elbows have sprouted roots

and my feet, grown flat from

disuse, have fallen asleep.

Outside, Waterman’s kid

is playing Frisbee in the court,

while across from me

his dad is smoking a cigarette and staring

at the stack of books in front of him.

When the red-haired poet

comes by with a bullhorn

announcing: “Lar Burke of the

Lake Street Review is reading in

the Fine Arts Lounge, come and hear

Lar Burke!” and there are only five

or six people standing around, not counting

Waterman and myself, I begin thinking

of Sartre, Camus and Sisyphus and

“What’s it all about, Alfie?”

The most activity around here is

Waterman’s kid, leaping after the

Bright red soaring saucer and the arc

Waterman’s cigarette makes as it descends

to the ashtray, caught between the fingers

of his left hand.

Liner Notes

“Lament of a Small Press Publisher” was originally intended as an opera in the Romantic tradition of Beethoven, Wagner and Rossini. However, after considerable difficulty in casting it in so grand a scale, the composer decided to put it in the mode of a cantata for male voices and baroque ensemble. Since this, too, proved to be too complex for so simple an idea, he settled on a small work in Renaissance style for tenor voice accompanied by oboe and viola da gamba, thinking that such could “profitably be sung at Renaissance Festivals and art fairs.” The result is a hauntingly beautiful song reminiscent, in its rich harmonic textures, of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. The song may also, according to the composer’s notes, be accompanied by fiddle and guitar (or flute) “without losing a thing.”

The composer was born 42 years ago in Santa Barbara, California, and has held a variety of jobs throughout his career. Of his musical training, he says: “I listen to an awful lot of music.”

G. P.

Dragon City Café

Minneapolis, MN
October, 1976

And there you have it. I'm still for putting it all out in a public venue, as frustrating as that sometimes is. Oh, by the way, I remember the food at the Dragon City Café as being pretty good. The place was full too, usually a good sign for eating establishments, small press and indie publishers and writers.

As Woody Wooddpecker used to say; "Th-Th-That's all folks," at least for now.

Creating stories and poems by filling in the blanks

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:57:30 +0100

The other day a writer friend showed me a simple formula for writing a story, or a novel by filling in the blank spaces in a sentence: "When a [ ] [ ] is dragged into [ ] s/he is forced to [ ] in order to [ ]." Character, situation, conflict and story are all set down in those simple steps.

Looking at it, I was reminded of a writing assignment my youngest son had when he was eight years old. He and his classmates were required to fill in the blanks in the following sentence: "You see [ ] men walk down [ ] streets wearing [ ] suits with [ ] ties." He completed the sentence like this: "You see fat men walk down old streets wearing pig suits with hog ties." I looked at it and said "Wow, that's brilliant!!" It was also compelling. Sitting down at my typewriter, I composed the following poem in which I used his sentence. The title of the poem was "For Jonathan, Who At Eight Is a Poet," which was published as a Broadsheet by Smith Park Poetry Series in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1975.

In your eyes
leaves turn into
butterflies
& trees turn into
men that
move to the edge of the
field,
leaving footprints in the grass.

You see
fat
men walk down
old
streets wearing
pig
suits with
hog
ties. No one
ever talks
to them
but you.

They look at you
like sleepy barn owls
slowly
blinking big
round eyes,

then turn &
fly
away on
purple
pillow-feather wings.

Your imagination is
a wonderland
where roosters strut
in overcoats
& cows cavort
in ballet
skirts, & dogs
play chess together
on the grass.

You stand
on a hill by
your grandparents' house,
& your mind unbends
the river running past
& makes it
nine miles wide.

You jump aboard a golden boat
& sail across
& back
eight time, & as you do,
a golden moon rises,
sizzling
from the river & climbs
into the sky. Your boat
is pushed
by sails that flap in
the stillness
like big bird's wings.

It's a poet's river you
are on,
& a poet's boat. You
look over the side
& see
goldfish swim in schools
through herons legs
& a silver whale
glide slowly toward the moon.

When finished
with your eighth trip,
you go ashore, bend the river
back, & go up on
the hill again
where you write down everything
you've seen.

Your grandparents
come out of
their house remarking:
"Why, Jon, what a
wonderful thing you've done!
We saw you make our river
nine miles wide,

& saw a golden moon
rise sizzling
into the sky! We saw
you sail far away, then come back
again in a golden boat
with herons flying from
the mast! Then we saw
you bend the river back again
the way it was!"

They ask you how you
do such
things, &
you shrug & tell them:
"I dunno."

It's a poet's way,
& unexplainable.

One of the most fascinating things about creative writing is the way the unexpected sometimes leads to a poem, a story, or a novel. I had no intention of writing a poem when I looked at my son's completed assignment. But, reading it, I was compelled to sit down and write the poem, which just flowed forth, image by image and stanza by stanza until I not only had a poem, I had a story.

That's all for this post. Enjoy

The enchantment that writing is

Sat, 18 May 2013 22:57:15 +0100

One of the things that enchants me about writing, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is the way surprises pop up. Recently, on the fifth edit and rewrite of my novel "The City Has Many Faces", a novel about Mexico City, I headed into a chapter and almost immediately got bored. That is a huge signal to me that I'm not paying attention to the main character and allowing him or her to guide me. The trouble here was that I included an element in the story that fit another context, but not in this one.

What happened? The character got out of his car and stopped. No amount of prodding would move him on. So I did what I'd seen my mother do with a painting she was working on: stop, stand back, look at it (often with a brush in her hand), then step up to her easel and either make a small adjustment, or take some white paint and paint over an entire section of the painting and redo it. So that's what I did this morning, the story began to flow, and Joseph Manning (the main character) is enjoying himself. And so am I.

Simple, isn't it? If you hit a roadblock like this, listen to your character or characters. So you have to rewrite a chapter or maybe even a whole novel. So what? You'll come up with a much better outcome when, as editor, teacher and author Shelly Lowenkopf says, "you sit back and watch the kids -- the characters -- do the work."

All for today. It's a beautifully sunny Sunday morning in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan. I'm headed out for some more photos later on, as the cherry trees are all in bloom, and so are many of the flowers. Whee!

A story and a song

Sat, 18 May 2013 22:35:14 +0100

The ancient bird

We were in the midst of one of those late winter storms that Minnesota has when I saw him. It was one of those storms that dumps heavy, wet snow and blows it around in blasts of icy needles that sting your face and takes your breath away. As I stepped out through the door of the hospital where I work, the wind lunged at me, and I set off running for the bus shelter with one hand on my hat and the other gripping my briefcase. My face burned from the cold. Behind me the big flag, whipping and snapping on its tall pole, sent out loud rifling reports as the wind tore at it. The cold wind was bitter and biting.

When I reached the bus shelter, I went inside and pushed the button on the heater. There was no one in the shelter but me, and no one on the street but a few drivers who went slowly by hunched over their steering wheels, staring straight ahead, jaws clenched. I turned and looked back at the hospital, and it was then that I saw him, a very old man, coming slowly down the walk from the medical office building, lifting one heave-booted foot and then the other in a slow old man’s way. He was dressed in a long black overcoat that hung to his boot tops, and a hat on his head with flaps pulled down over his ears. He stopped, stamped his feet, struck his mittened hands together and looked back at the building as if wondering if it would have been wiser to wait until the storm subsided. Then he turned and continued toward the bus shelter. When he came to the ridge of snow that lay between him and the street, he stopped and looked at it. He stamped both feet. He lifted one foot way up and lowered it, then raised and lowered the other one. Then, holding his arms out like wings, he stepped up onto the ridge and, waving and waving his arms, hopped down into the street where he stamped his feet again and looked back at the medical office building one more time. Then, as if satisfied, he turned and walked down the street toward the bus shelter.

The old man’s feet were inside enormous buckled black rubber boots. As he walked, he moved them up and down in a deliberate sort of way, stopping every now and then to stamp each one on the packed snow, then moving on, the big boots going up and down, up and down, like slowly-driving pistons. Looking at him I could see that he was very, very old; his face was thin and gray and nearly swallowed up in the hat that came down to his eyebrows. As he came nearer, I saw that he had no teeth, and that he held his mouth in a tight O like a knothole in a tree. His eyes receded back into their sockets, from which they looked out like small wary animals from inside their burrows.

As I watched him, two women hurried into the bus shelter, holding their collars around their faces and exclaiming at the fury of the storm. The wind shook the plastic walls of the shelter, causing the older woman to exclaim that she hadn’t seen such a wind all winter, most people have better sense than to be out in it, to which the younger woman replied, “Yes, but look!” The old man, having reached the intersection near our shelter, paused for one last look at the medical office building, then came stamping his feet across the street toward us. When he got to the high ridge of snow that blocked his path, he stopped and gave it a long, hard look. Then he lifted one big foot and put it down, and repeated the motion with the other. He waved his arms. He struck his mittened hands together. Then, lifting one booted foot high into the air and looking straight at us with his bright black eyes, he came up the ridge like it was a long steep hill, picking up his booted feet and waving his arms, with his head thrust forward and his stubble-covered chin jutting out and the dark circle of his mouth pulled tight and the big boots slapping-slapping the snow.

At the bottom, he stopped and looked at us. Then he came stamping his feet into the shelter, all out of breath from fighting with snow banks and wind. He said something to us that sounded like “fuff-fuff-fuff” and “heh” and sent his eyes darting around over us, saying A”heh-heh, fuff” until the older of the two women turned to him and said, “Here, why don’t you sit down right here, Grandfather?” and guided him over to the long wooden bench at the rear of the shelter, under the heater. The old man backed up and started to sit down, but he straightened up again and looked at the woman with his whole aged face and reached out a hand and patted-patted her arm. She turned and looked at him and said “What?” and “Oh,” as he crinkled up the corners of his eyes at her, said “fuff-heh,” and sat down.

When the bus came a few minutes later, the women helped the old man to it through the roaring wind, then the rest of us got on. There were only the four of us waiting for the bus that afternoon, and only two or three on the bus. I sat toward the back and watched the old man. He got off a few blocks later and stood on the sidewalk waiting for the light to turn green. When it did, he was off, moving his huge booted feet up and down and holding his arms out from his sides, looking very much like a big black flightless bird.

* * *

Now, a lovely song/poem by the great Chilean folk singer and songwriter, Violetta Parra, because thanks is a fitting response to the privilege of living and encountering people along the path, and the song is a fitting tribute to the people in this book, and to the life and art of señorita Parra, who was persecuted to death by the regime of Augusto Pinochet, who persecuted so many who did not agree with him.

Gracias a la Vida (Thanks to life)