• view the full blog archive •
"A friend asked yesterday if this blog is addressed to anyone in particular? I said yes– it’s a love letter to someone I haven’t met yet."
CarrollBlog 08.31
It is a given that almost every time I see X, we will talk about her nutty family.
Most people have several abiding themes in their lives that preoccupy them , whether they are aware of this or not. As a result, they incessantly return to them in different guises and conversations. Someone I know is always agitated about the difficulty of everyday life. Nothing seems to fit right for them; nothing really functions the way it should. Another friend obsesses about the ongoing challenge of finding the right life partner. Yet another talks about real estate and where is the best place to buy property. I am convinced that if I were to say to any of these friends do you know we have talked about this subject from different angles a zillion times over the years they would be flabbergasted. An interesting experiment is to step outside yourself and ask what are my ongoing themes? What rattles endlessly around in my mind and heart like a marble(s) in a clothes dryer?
CarrollBlog 08.30
I don't understand why anyone would want to buy a thousand dollar satellite navigation system for their vehicle, unless of course they are long distance truckers. How often do you even need a map when you use your car? I don't think I've taken one out of the glove compartment in five years. And the way these gizmos are located in the middle of the dashboard or even further to the right naturally means that any number of accidents will happen when drivers rear end other cars because they have taken their eyes completely off the road so they can see where they're going on the navigation screen.
CarrollBlog 08.27
"It is the poet's purpose to put the world into words, and, in that way, hold it steady for us."
-William H. Gass
CarrollBlog 08.25
Somewhere in everyone's inner city is a cemetery of old loves. For the lucky contented people who like where they are in their lives and who they're with, it is a mostly forgotten place. The tombstones are faded or overturned, the grass uncut, brambles and wild flowers grow everywhere.
For other people, their place is as stately and ordered as a military graveyard. Its many flowers are well watered and tended, the white gravel walks carefully raked. All indications that this spot is visited often.
For most of us our cemetery is a hodge-podge. Some sections are neglected or fully ignored. Who cares about these stones, or the loves who lie beneath them. Even their names are hard to remember. But other stones are important whether or not we like to admit it. We visit them often, sometimes too often, truth be told. And
one can never tell how we'll feel when these visits are over-- sometimes lighter, sometimes heavier. It is entirely unpredictable how we'll feel going back home to today.
CarrollBlog 08.24
One of those days that give you a preview of the next season, the year's next chapter. Very cool. Cloudy then clear then cloudy again, windy. The tang of late fall is on the air. Some of the racing clouds are winter purple. The reassuring summer blue sky is right behind them. Still, once you see those clouds, you recognize their color and remember. Cold rain lives in that color; sometimes even snow.
Walking out the door you take a light sweater with you. Or if you decide not to, a few minutes later you're buttoning up your shirt. Out on the street dogs are friskier, walking faster. The slow paws and floppy tongues of yesterday are gone. The ice cream parlor is only half full for the first time this month. Windows in many of the passing cars are rolled up. Tomorrow summer will return but today is an hors d'oeuvre of the meal to come.
CarrollBlog 08.23
Those small stores, the side street stores, Mom and Pop markets with one aisle, two heads of wilted lettuce, a sixty watt lightbulb overhead for illumination. The "vintage" record shops with two men (never more than three) poring through the stacks looking for that one "Zombies" 45 or the rare Charles Mingus album on the Blue Note label. How many of these dark and empty stores have these collectors visited, always looking for undiscovered treasure? The stationery stores that have had the same three cheap Parker fountain pens and curling notebooks in the window display for years. The narrow stores, the half empty ones, unpainted, unloved. The stores that sell plumbing fixtures and toilet seats, brown-green work clothes and uniforms, Chinese specialty markets that sell only canned goods stacked to the ceiling. Toy stores so small and sad that never in a million years would you bring a child in there, even just for a look. How do any of these stores make money? How do these people survive?
CarrollBlog 08.20
Today's oxymoron: A kid on the street comes up and asks if I have any spare change. The only trouble is while asking, he's talking to someone on a cell phone.
CarrollBlog 08.19
A beautiful August day, I take the dog for a long walk in the Augarten park and then stop for lunch at a favorite garden restaurant nearby. The place is half filled, mostly with lone morning drinkers. Dog and I sit down, order and then settle in to enjoy the moment. Bliss. The kind of bliss you have on a late summer day when there is nothing to do but hang around and enjoy the sun on your face. No time at all later, two very dolled up old women come over and ask if I'd mind sharing my table with them. Startled, I look around at all of the empty tables nearby. That look must show on my face because one of them says "We like to sit here."
So I say sure and they plunk down. Silence. The waiter brings my meal and they order drinks.
Long silence.
Eventually one sighs and says "Poor Hansi."
The other sighs along "Now he's dead. Prostate cancer. It must be hard on a man."
I look up and both women are staring at me. I quickly look down again.
Longer Silence. I glance up again and they are still looking at me.
"And how is Elfi?"
"Dead. You hadn't heard?"
"No! How did she die?"
"Colon cancer. Very tragic."
"What exactly happens when you get colon cancer?"
"Well--"
As her friend goes on in great, vivid detail about colon cancer, colonoscopies, colonostomy bags, etcetera I'm looking at my half eaten lunch, thinking maybe it's time to go.
CarrollBlog 08.18
Part of life is a quest to find that one essential person who will understand our story. But we choose wrongly so often. Over the ensuing years that person we thought understood us best ends up regarding us with pity, indifference, or active dislike.
Those who truly care can be divided into two categories: those who understand us, and those who forgive our worst sins. Rarely do we find someone capable of both.
-from GLASS SOUP
Part of life is a quest to find that one essential person who will understand our story. But we choose wrongly so often. Over the ensuing years that person we thought understood us best ends up regarding us with pity, indifference, or active dislike.
Those who truly care can be divided into two categories: those who understand us, and those who forgive our worst sins. Rarely do we find someone capable of both.
-from GLASS SOUP
CarrollBlog 08.17
A Rumanian man told me a great story about growing up in Bucharest in the last days of Communism under Ceaucescu. He described how insanely paranoid the State was about anything that might threaten the status quo. Once a Russian telecommunications satellite malfunctioned and broke up in space. There were wild rumors that huge pieces of the satellite would rain down on the earth, particularly on Bucharest for some odd reason. To combat this, the Army stationed soldiers all over the city for days with ominous looking guns to... What? No one knew exactly what they were meant to do-- shoot down pieces of the satellite? Or shoot people who were hit by the pieces of satellite? Or...State run television continually reassured the populace that the soldiers were there to protect them from any threat of satellite.
CarrollBlog 08.16
I was reading an article in the paper today about the actor/director Vincent Gallo and all the trouble he's had with his new film, BROWN BUNNY. The last time I was in Los Angeles I was sitting in a hotel lobby waiting for someone. Gallo stomped very loudly in on a pair of industrial strength cowboy boots. He's quite short and frail but his "ten miles of rough road" boots made him a little taller but not much. There was no one in the lobby but the people behind the reception desk and me. Gallo checked us out with half-interested/half-impatient eyes. Upon realizing we weren't who he was looking for, his eyes went absolutely blank, like a parking meter clicking over to "Expired." I smiled, thinking "I'm back in Hollywood."
CarrollBlog 08.14
"Yet the only tattoo I want
is of a fist and a rose, together.
Fist, that helps you survive,
Rose without which
you have no reason to."
-Tony Hoagland
CarrollBlog 08.13
I am walking by one of Vienna's many fountains when I see a man washing himself with an orange. I'm so shocked-- yes eyes, it's true-- that I take a seat on a bench nearby and watch. An old man with a scruffy, unkempt white beard, he is shirtless on this hot August afternoon. His long pants are drooped down so low that they are almost falling off his hips. You can easily see the black elastic of his underwear.
He is standing next to an ornate bubbling fountain with half an orange in each hand. His washing method is to dip an orange half into the fountain and then rub it over his upper body as if it were a bar of soap or a washcloth. He works diligently for a while with one of the halves, then without a moment's hesitation shifts to his other hand and the other orange piece held there. Dips it into the water, then rubs it rub-a-dub-dub over the part of his torso he hasn't gotten to yet. He is very thorough. Finally he is done and throws the orange halves on the ground. All I can think is what does he smell like now?
CarrollBlog 08.12
Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. -Rilke
"She stops at a cafe to rest. A man sitting at the window reads a book, scribbling intently in the margins. She wishes for a book like that. One that she could carry with her, writing notes in the white spaces, turning down the corners of the best pages. One that would offer itself up to her, making sense of things. She would turn to any page and find the answers to her questions. A sort of bible."
-from "How the Blessed Live", Susannah M. Smith
CarrollBlog 08.11
More Estonia Women's names:
Teevi Soop
Tiina-Liina Lepasepp
Touliki Poom
Tinc Pincel
Elo Kukk
CarrollBlog 08.10
I finished the final corrections on GLASS SOUP yesterday and sent them in to Ellen my editor. Basta Finito, the new book is done. I can never decide what that feeling is like-- do I like the fact the labor of two years is done so now I don't have to think about that #%%& book anymore? Or horrified that my friend the manuscript, whose secrets only I knew for so long, is now out there in public facing the music, vulnerable as hell? Is it an annoying guest who has finally FINALLY left and now you can breathe a big sigh of relief, or is it a child who doesn't know a thing but must now go out and fend for itself, whether it likes it or not?
CarrollBlog 08.06
One of the most interesting websites I've come across is www.moleskinerie.com It was created by devotees of the Italian "Moleskine" notebook, but it is much more than that. Almost every day it offers, among other things, links to intriguing often fascinating websites. Ernest Hemingway's handwritten notebooks, spectacular photography, Danny Gregory's "Everyday Matters," even genuinely interesting daily blogs (a real rarity now when the word blog is usually synonymous with verbal diarrhea). Moleskine is by all appearances a website created by and for people who are obsessed with certain matters in the best sense of the word. Obsession with anything (other than ourselves and our plight) tends to fade as we grow older for all sorts of reasons. But websites like this one remind us this needn't be so.
CarrollBlog 08.05
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms-- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." - Viktor Frankl
CarrollBlog 08.04
"People write because it seems like it'll be an easier job than carpet laying, or that they might meet more girls. And they write because the world strikes them as being a marvelous place, and they want to keep bringing that to everyone's attention. You know, a scary place, a menacing place, an exciting place because it's scary and menacing. But mainly, kind of glorious." -Warren Zevon
CarrollBlog 08.02
I was invited over the weekend to a party at the house of a very rich woman via a mutual friend. The friend had been trying to introduce us for a long time because the woman loves fiction, loves all art. Loves it so much that in her villa she has a private gallery where she mounts a new vernissage every month. The purpose of this party was the opening of a new show. Very chi-chi and exclusive, supposedly. I went because what the hell. The house was astonishing, the party goers what you would expect at that sort of get together. I wanted to leave after ten minutes but my friend insisted I wait till we saw the show. Eventually the hostess gathered us all together and brought us down a floor to the gallery. She gave a little speech about how excited she was about the artist and the show and how she was sure we were going to love it. We walked in slowly to see mounted on the wall small wooden boxes about ten inches by ten inches. When you got up close you saw glued to the front of each box a few random words clipped from newspapers. "Popcorn bunny parade." Words like that. Then you realized these words were mounted on little doors that swung open. Inside in the middle of the box were another few random newspaper words. "Trite chicken toothpick" I went from box to box looking to see if all of them were the same. They were. As I was looking at perhaps the 6th, I heard this soft, smoky sexy voice say in awe "Aren't they brilliant? I've never seen anything like them." I glanced over and there was a beautiful woman, really a stunner. She was looking at me expectantly, waiting for an answer. Slowly a strange and evil smile grew on my face that I realized only after she'd fled was similar to the smile on Jack Nicholson's face in THE SHINING when he bashes his axe through a door while trying to find his wife and kill her.