Lying Fallow, or Burn Notice Obsession Explained

This delightful cartoon is not me. I have a kick-ass work ethic when it comes to writing. I will write on vacation, in a hospital bed, in the middle of the night, one-handed with my arm numb from jiggling the fussy baby, on a playground chasing after a hyperactive child. I write on computers, notebooks, napkins, scraps of toilet paper. 
(Yes, I have run to the bathroom when an idea hit me, and jotted things down on there.) If I'm stuck on one book, I'll work on another for a bit. Stuck on both, I'll do some blogging. This work ethic is not true for other aspects of my life (see cleaning/organizing) but as far as the creative process, I'm in it all the way. 

So, when I find myself Not Writing, but instead, obsessively watching Burn Notice--me, a person who has spent great chunks of her life without a television--it can take me a bit to figure out why. Like I did yesterday. Yes, I'm procrastinating. And the minute I realized that, boom, out poured the beginning of an outline for the problematic novel revision, not to mention a rough draft of a query letter for same. (I start working on my query letter at about the same time as the novel, because a) I hate writing queries, b) they are so danged hard it can take me years to polish one and c) my writing does not tend to fit a standard mold/genre, so I have to spend a long time finding comparable works and studying their jacket copy.) 

Probably the Muse Clio

Creativity responds brilliantly to the old nailing your butt to a chair routine. Yes, you can light candles at the altar of the votive muse, but you're better off hitting the page every day and writing anything--even something terrible--than waiting for that lightning bolt of inspiration to strike. 


And yet--sometimes, you just have to let the field lie fallow. Or perhaps a better metaphor would be let the fountain build up some water pressure. 

Then you sit down to work and boom--the stuff comes bursting out. 

Okay, I'll Admit It--Writing Avoidance Techniques

Okay, I'll finally got it. The Burn Notice obsession, the attempts to clean and organize the house, the decision to take up running--they're all about avoidance. 

This is because I am working on revisions of a novel that I both love and hate. It's got such wonderful parts, and I know what I'm trying to say matters, and yet, I do not want to approach it yet again, trying to fix it. 

Even though, this time, I can not only see it clearly, but I have this fabulous critique group to give me outsider eyes and pinpoint precisely how to fix the issues that have dogged this novel since the beginning. 

Or, I could just blow the damn thing up. 



P.S. This was not a How To post. I'm sure you are just as capable as I of writing avoidance--or any other kind.

Richard Burton reading Shakespeare.

I have just this moment discovered a recording of Richard Burton reading The Tempest, Act I, Scene 4, Prospero's marvelous "Our Revels Now Are Ended," speech. Suddenly, I am in love, with not one, but three men: Burton, Shakespeare, and of course, Prospero, who lives on forever, while the other two's far-from-little-lives, have indeed, been rounded with sleep.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, 
As I foretold you, were all spirits and 
Are melted into air, into thin air: 
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. 

William Shakespeare 
From The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1 

Burn Notice Explosions Part 2

Okay, so I'm obsessed with these Burn Notice explosions. Because there are hundreds of them. I know Miami is a big city and must have a lot of crime, but really? Nobody notices these hundreds of explosions? No one from the fire department has begun to clock their much-discussed bomb-maker fingerprints? 

I read the paper. Our local throwaway paper has a crime report, and the fire department report, too. Even I would start being suspicious after awhile if I kept seeing these explosions and fires. 

Oh, and the concussion thing? Like, hospital bed time? Like stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Poor Michael, Sam and Fiona, dying young of chronic dementia, their brains rotted away and full of holes. 

In other words, do not try this at home. 

More Burn Notice Thoughts

Watching Burn Notice with a concussion provides an odd framework. Nearly every episode, our heroes and heroines blow something up, and we watch them leap--or get blown away--from the blast.

Nobody, however, gets a concussion, or if they do, they don't complain about it for more than a minute.

Your brain is soft, squishy stuff that floats inside the hard bone of your skull. When you are moving, brain and skull move along together. When you stop suddenly, skull stops, but brain keeps moving. This shears away connections at the base of the skull, but it gets worse. Brain hits side of skull, is knocked backwards, hits other side of skull, and winds up bruised all around. It's kind of like what happens to a house in an earthquake. Earth moves, house starts moving. Earth stops, starts going the other way, but house keeps moving in the first direction and either the walls flex like crazy and things fall down inside, or the house simply falls off foundation and everything goes boom.

I can speak about concussion now from experience, and I didn't even get blown up. I was ice-skating on a public rink where kids were breaking the rules and racing. (I had just told them to stop.) A tall teenager, going full speed, lost his balance and slide full speed into the back of my skates. I went up, then down, flat on my back. The helmet could protect some of the back of my head, but still, brain sheared, went front, went back, went up went down, while neck muscles got some pretty bad whiplash, ribs were bruised, elbow black and blue, etc. So, I know, really know, how dangerous being blown off your feet can be.

Of course, your brain isn't the only thing that would get messed up in an explosion. Hearing would be destroyed. Each time. 

But Mike, or Fiona, or Sam, or Jesse, all get up, and run or walk to someone important, who usually says something softly to them--some of the actors in particular have adopted that recent: "if I whisper my lines, I will sound more intense," school of acting. And our recently blown off their feet hero can hear them.

And we're not even talking about the times people slug someone in the head.

My little ones and I have enjoyed watching another show, Chuck, which has a lot of this stuff, too, but my husband doesn't like Chuck, preferring Burn Notice. "Chuck is a fairy tale," says my husband. Huh. Don't get me started.

Research Overload: The Crime and the Silence by journalist, Anna Bikont

A.P. photo--the dedication of the memorial at Jedwabne, attended by only a handful of locals.

You may have noticed a gaping hole in my blogging. This was caused by my immersion in The Crime and the Silence, a riveting, grueling book by Polish Journalist, Anna Bikont. It's about the Jedwabne-Lomsa region of Eastern Poland, an area that, long before the Germans ever arrived, was steeped in Jew-hatred by the Nationalist party and the local Catholic church, and remains, it seems, passionately filled with Jew-haters even now.

In this region, there were pogroms (an organized massacre of Jews) before the Germans showed up. After their arrival,  locals gleefully rounded up and murdered all their local Jews and any who happened to have fled to the area, in several cases herding them into a barn and burning them alive. They did this, sometimes over German protests, and despite many witness statements that there were often only two German officers in a town.

In 2001, a Polish-Jewish guy named Jan Gross wrote a book, Neighbors, about one such massacre in Jedwabne. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, new information was coming out from trials of perpetrators, which Gross put together with the testimony of those few survivors and of a few Yizkor books, books to memorialize the dead from those communities.

Gross' book was met with outrage by the local and national Polish community. Poland had suffered badly under the Nazis who viewed the Poles as sub-human, but not quite as bad as Jews, Roma and Gays. Many of them worked at forced labor, or were shipped to concentration camps, though they were often not exterminated there.

The area had also suffered under its brief possession by Stalin, with many residents, both Jewish and Catholic Poles, being shipped off to Siberia. In the collective memory of those who murdered their neighbors or those who simply enriched themselves off their belongings--including, sometimes, women stripping their Jewish female neighbors to their underwear as they were put in wagons to be taken a train station, or flipping an infant out of a baby blanket--he won't need it when he's dead--the Jews were the ones who collaborated with Stalin, and therefore, the orgy of murder was fair punishment for their crimes.

What Bikont did parallels the powerful, painful documentary about the Cambodian genocide, called "The Act of Killing," except that no matter how Bikont probes, how she works to relax her interviewees, they are almost without exception, willing to admit that they murdered or plundered, organized, or stood by without objecting. Just the opposite--although many, when relaxed, reveal details that are confirmed over and over by others in similar situations--I saw him batter him there, rape her there, bury him there, bash her there, saw off his head with a tree saw over here--even major Polish historians continue to insist that it was trucks full of German soldiers who either committed or forced the murders at gunpoint, this despite the Germans being very, very busy expanding the Russian front far too quickly, with no commander being willing to leave that many soldiers behind their own lines.

In fact, those who are willing to discuss what happened are forced from the community by ostracization and threats, except for two previously Jewish women, who converted just prior to or during the terrible times and lived their whole lives under terror of reprisals, including one woman who was threatened with murder simply because she asked to buy back a cabinet that had belonged to her family.

Bikont's book includes a journal of her research, as she works to recreate the crimes, not only in Jedwabne but in neighboring communities. It also discusses her discovery that her mother's mother was a Jew, parts of her own active participation in Judaism, and the virulent reaction as that knowledge seeps into the region. It appears that the publication of Neighbors and the public knowledge of the crime this forced on people has led to a sharp increase in Jew-hating, as well as a rabid attempt to cover or justify the crimes by Catholic clergy, right-wing politicians, journalists, and historians, all taken up enthusiastically by the families and descendants of those who committed the crimes--even those who admitted their crimes, were found guilty by the Soviet courts and served time for them--even those who themselves have been proven to have been Soviet collaborators, more responsible for shipping even their Polish neighbors off to Siberia than the five Jews the records show were active under the first Soviet occupation.

The book is simply told, and very dark, an exploration of the worst parts of the denial, envy, tribalism and rage that can lead to the worst of human crimes. It refutes the notions that "if only the Jews had fought back," they wouldn't have been murdered, and also introduces us to the handful of community members with the courage to brave the fierce tide of resentment and mind-wiping to stand up for those who lost their lives and the resourcefulness and  courage of those very few who survived.

Marianna Ramatoska, nee Rachela Finklestejn
with her husband and rescuer, Stanislaw
Ramotowski.

Marianna and Stanislaw
Ramotowski in 2001

According to Bikont, the local school continues to promulgate Jew-hatred--a term I find I prefer to anti-semitism, which seems so hermitically sealed to me. This despite a tour promoted by a group working against genocide, which was supposed to include trips to both the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Disneyland. Due to protests by the parents, the students at the school never toured the Holocaust museum. In the end, as in the beginning, it seems that this region continues to stew in Jew-hatred. Only two citizens from Yedwabne attended the unveiling of a monument near the burned barn. Both were politicians and both were immediately throw out of office and ultimately moved away from the town.

Krystof Godlewski, Mayor of Jedwabne in 2001

When reading the book--which I highly, highly recommend to everybody over the age of maybe twenty-two--the courage of a few people creates light in the darkness: an illiterate peasant woman, Antonina Wyrzykowska, who, with her husband, saved seven Jedwabne Jews under a pile of pig shit, and kept them safe until the end of the war; Stanislaw Ramotowski, a peasant from neighboring Radzilow, who married his Jewish schoolmate, Rachela Finkelstejn (conversion name, Marianna Ramotoska) and saved her life; Krystof Godlewski, the Mayor of Jedwabne, who refused to reblind himself when presented with the truths of the past, and fought to have them acknowledged; Jan Skrodski, who witnessed some of the murders as a child, and wanted to learn the truth even if it turned out his father was one of the killers, and Radoslow Ignatiew, the special prosecutor who insisted on acting as a true investigator for the nation of Poland and diligently uncovered facts that affirmed almost everything in Jan Grosses ground-breaking book--the number murdered still remains at issue, as observant Jews halted the exhumation of the barn site.

Radoslow Ignatiew, IPN Prosecutor 

One thing that fascinates me is that throughout everything, the events are presented as a schism between Jews and Poles, even though, as Bikont points out, Jews had been living in Poland for over 700 years at the time of the massacre.

I will also state that this story has a personal connection for me: My husband's grandfather was a roofer who was murdered in the mid-1930's by Polish workers he had hired. They beat him, stole his tools and his coat and left him in the snow. He died a few days later of pneumonia caused by exposure. Because of the Holocaust, no one has a photo of him. His last remaining living son is in his early nineties, and soon the memory of his face will vanish from the earth, like most of the people of this area near Lomza who were murdered by ordinary folk hungry for a feather pillow, a down comforter, a fur coat, a ring, a horse and cart, a house, a mill, whatever it was that their Jewish neighbors had.

Horses and carts in Jedwabne, Poland, after WWII.

Whew! I Need a Break--Tradition! (or How Fiddler on the Roof Got Made)

So, after plowing through Anna Bikont's brilliant, grim, The Crime and Silence, I took a break and read a confection called, Tradition! a book about the making of Fiddler on the Roof.

It's about as heavy as the powdered sugar (though the powder-sugar snow falling outside my window will be very heavy to shovel.) It's still fascinating, because of the sections about Jerome Robbins repeatedly pushing the creators (Joseph Stein, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock) to identify "What's it about," forcing them to move from the simple, from a story about a family in a village--to the universal--a story about a parent and a community struggling with repeated blows to the ancient and treasured traditions that they believe have kept them safe for centuries.

At the end of the book, as it becomes more and more self-congratulatory, the discussion turns to how very beloved and universal the play has become, selling out for years in places as varied as Japan and Poland.

Yes, Poland. And it occurred to me, juxtaposing the two books, remembering the passionate resistance to believing that Jews had any right to be in Poland and the refusal to acknowledge wrong-doing in the passionate pogroms that exploded in the region, that a production of Fiddler might be just what is called for, performing someplace local, or better yet, being put on by the local school. Of course, somebody would have to produce it, through death threats et all, but perhaps if the people of the Jedwabne-Lomsa region could relate to the people of the village of Anatevka, they could come face to face with their own demons of hatred. Art can often reach where logic cannot.