If writing could ever be construed as a 'holy' business, a dissertation on the nature of day to day reality, a study of "That Which Is," Chekhov, surely, would be up there, as a kind of Noah in earthy human form. His study of Sakhalin Island, along with accompanying letters to friends and family, has been brought together in form of travelog, a complete picture of going somewhere far away and alien, even bizarre, and coming back. The piece stands as a picture of a writer's reality. (Can't put my hands on it at the moment.)

It was a rugged journey for a man not well, a harsh land and sea voyage that he found strangely invigorating to the remote penal colony to document. It seems he interviewed, or at least counted, the entire population. A candor rings through the letters, perhaps heightened by confidentially and of being personal in nature, that is distinctly his in tone. Great stories like "The Steppe," and "Ward No. 6" reverberate in its open spaces and the small details of dealings with local officials.

The piece seems to suggest a kind of form, a template that fits over the life of one is a writer. Personally it reminds me of my life as a writer, which I must admit is spent largely as a barman, a life of odd hours and odd people coming and going, while offering expanses of the necessary time alone to come to terms with things. The whole of Chekhov's way of handling life makes me suspicious that a writer is a particular sort, a reincarnation of a previous life spent in similar fashion, simply all the details changed. I am reminded of the same helpless way we travel, caught in between this and that, as in, indeed on a rugged steamer somewhere far away from home. All one can do is keep a sense of humor about himself, a tolerance for the oddities and individual personalities, eccentric neighbors, strange conditions that befall all of us and to those maintaining the illusions of the writer.

Being a writer is a matter of finding the proper attitude to face life, and then to be open and honest and clear enough about getting things said. Chekhov observes without whining. He must have had a lot of energy and endurance, and for an American in the 21st Century, he is a very interesting read.

Reading the story, "The Steppe," one is struck by the autobiographical, the personal element, the direct experience, of a man becoming a writer, brought to fruition in so many places, including, Sakhalin Island.

But any writer--what a pretentious term--must admit that he is like the physicist who can never prove anything. He may have intuitive sense, but any claim of his of some holy understanding of the world and people is ridiculous. (Fault holy men and women for establishing such a mistaken pattern.) If he, or she, comes up with anything it will be by dumb luck and coincidence, a matter of looking in the right place at the right time. He can only shrug at the worthlessness of his chosen profession, and wish he had some other sort of job by which to serve mankind more honestly.

This is akin to what Fellini is telling us in "8 1/2," that he, Guido, played so wonderfully by Mastroianni (himself a true hero of art), has been an obsessive fool in his creative mode, various women, Claudia Cardinalle's character, etc., putting up with him, and come up with nothing as far as a film, and that here, only realizing that does he 'get it.' He realizes that people are people, not roles to play. Indeed, Fellini, and Mastroianni, nail it. The modern equivalent of Adam's finger reaching out to touch God's by Michelangelo.

Thus, the squirrelly nervousness and awkwardness, lack of confidence, a pained shyness that mark the life and character of the creative type, even as he is a friendly and generous person (if a bit overly self-protective.) Treated best with yoga and aerobic exercise and some form of job to occupy himself with.

Being down with himself for being who he is isn't much of a solution. What can he do but move forward, hoping that he has helped a few other people understand their own form of the condition, helpless as they are to completely prevent it. That's probably too tolerant a view to take for a lot of people, but... Know thyself--maybe there's enough shame in that already, when you try to become an adult--and you shall understand the Universe.


{INTERLUDE, a good long bike ride in Rock Creek Park on a beautiful day, into evening, as I don't have to tend bar tonight.}

The writer reveals himself not through holiness, but through his own faults.

And in revealing himself, his faults, his foibles, he is bastion and butress of democracy and constitutional liberty, much moreso than the clever moralizing simpleton who would claim perfect strength over his weaknesses. The writer is the first line of defense for freedom and commerce, is both guide and teacher. His is the Western disagreement with moralizing religious law and totalitarianism.

And maybe you can't be a writer until you admit to yourself the uneasy truth of your being a male, a lazy turd, a little brother more irresponsible than he should be, a libertine, etc., etc., etc.

The writer is a democrat, not for following rules so much, even though he would so much like to.

It takes a long time for him to be at peace with his state. Which doesn't get any easier with age, but by some wisdom.

How to fix things? Less Glen Beck, more Shane MacGowan. Is Joyce so far away from Jefferson and Franklin?

If I may say so, trust me, you wouldn't want to be a writer, at least as far as I can tell. However, if called, you don't have much choice, to continue revealing yourself as the awkward and confused person you are where others just know what to do and go do it. Keith Gessen, he's done a fine job with capturing that.

Maybe that's some of the meaning behind the opening of In Our Time, the Nick Adams stories, when Nick trails his hand in the water, quite certain that he would never die. There has to be some basic fallacy of assumptions, otherwise you wouldn't be a writer.

Tolstoy describes his brother, who was not a novelist: "All of the talents. None of the necessary faults."

Once you can understand that, life begins.

A bird's feather resembles a cat's claw, the same form, but in reverse.
The bird has many, a single point fanning out.
The cat has few, strength narrowed to a point.
Out the feather goes, protecting;
Inward the claw goes, holding, in its function,
both a grip on life.
One, the air, the rain, the wind.
The other, prey, a fight, a tree.
An old couch pillow,
a carpet, examining table of all.

It's an interesting and unintended facet of being a writer that the process may well make you an outsider. Odd job to pay rent, odd hours, etc. What's interesting is the way that this unintended life style, call it what you will, offers the writer an interesting perspective. It's as if there is a law of nature that says that no great commentary on life and society can be born from the middle of it.

Let's take Updike. Great writer, no doubt about it, a fine draftsman. He is cleverly positioned within the norm. Sure, he goes through some stuff worth writing about, very much so. He goes through angst and deep stuff. But while certainly not Victorian, he strikes one sometimes as a mannerist. He's not an earth-shaker, a great challenge to the way people may generally see things. He writes from within society, and his stories don't venture from basic forms of social norm. Know what I mean? Am I crazy for saying so? Well, he can create a wild safari out of that seemingly benign trip to the grocery store, so well that whatever I am thinking here at the moment doesn't stick so perfectly. I merely offer a thought to entertain, and I needed, like all arguments do, an example.

Let's take Melville, or Kerouac, or Hemingway. Here you have more of an outsider, a traveller, someone gone somewhere different. The road took them there. And they end up writing something that offers a perspective you don't get elsewhere. They say very interesting things. They create the world a little bit differently. They offer a critique about some basic daily assumptions, and they end up making art.

Where does that art lead them? It seems it can lead such a writer further out, further outside, in a very different place, in a place that's hard to judge or figure because it is so unique, so different. Are they still human? Do they still belong? Can they fit in ever again with the kinds of relationships that people normally have? Are they tainted by their portrayal of things people consider to be avoided? Are they to be like Icarus, flying too high away and toward the sun to places where they don't belong?

As often the case, Kundera to the rescue with a new book of essays, reviewed last Sunday in the New York Times Book Review, a defense of art.

And also a timely New Yorker article from the August 30 issue by Ian Frazier, "On the Prison Highway, the Gulag's silent remains." Here we have the issue a little more clear cut, starkly so. The photo caption: ''The labor camps took citizens the Soviet Union did not need and converted their lives into gold and timber, for trade abroad." The writer, like Solzhenitsyn, outsider to 'society,' is the useless person. And unless he's making elevator music to keep the working masses shuffling forward through their productive days, well, his opinion, his take on matters, is not needed, and in fact counterproductive.

Maybe the unwillingness to conform neatly comes out of a writer's habit of keeping writing, an unintended consequence given that he wished indeed to belong very much from the start and all along, to be a pillar of society, just that things went a little differently than he might have expected. And maybe it becomes a bit of a hard thing to face, the fact that he will not find it easy to change his ways, that a die has been cast. Like the submarine captain in Das Boot, he knows the score. He would want to change a few things, he would like to belong, like the normal person seems to be able to do, but ever finds it increasingly difficult to do so.

A Hemingway, a Kerouac, a Melville can be dead-wrong both in the way they live, and in what they write. Yet, by some weird natural possibility, somehow they, through a back door, have an odd way of finding something right to say, like Ishmael observing Queequeg.

It's a hard balance for a writer to get work done while remaining social. Anthony Bourdain is a very social person, though his comments would have you believing differently. Claiming to be a misanthrope, he thrives in social circumstance, from kitchen to dining room to bar. The kitchen was a way to support himself as he followed his subliminal dream to be a writer.

Writing in the cafe has been one classic solution, of course the modern equivalent being Starbuck's. Enough background noise and people going by to satisfy a basic human urge, enough being left in peace to let the juices flow. Someone starts to pry, asking 'hey, what are you writing,' you have to shut them down. You need to protect your creative sphere. The talk will come later. As Hemingway put it, replenishing the well.

A conspiracy theorist might offer that between canned music tracks that hijack the brain and a lack of sidewalk cafes in the old Paris style, it's hard to write here in America, on top of whatever other complaints a writer might classically have, of struggles for pay and time enough to write. (Poverty, lack of a mainstream job, it all can make you a loner.) Interesting to note, that instead of the considered thought that writing for it's own sake brings, the bandwidth of the American mind is given over to the shouted agendas and hatreds of Limbaugh, Beck and Palin. Lincoln is turning over in his grave today. "Let us bind up the nation's wounds," he wrote.

A problem for me, when I get done with my work week manning the bar until they've all gone home, is feeling social enough to want to go out on a Friday night. You also have to feel you have enough money to go blow. And a city ain't cheap.

That's always been my mistake, not being able to balance the time needed alone, with the time of work's imposed social hour. Shyness is a problem. Not helped by the fact that a writer can seem to other people a really weird person, enough so that the writer begins to feel a little self-conscious of the clothes he is wearing, the air of being a bit apart from the rest. This is Bourdain's gift; he doesn't give a crap what the mainstream might think. He has self-confidence, doesn't mind being a little gonzo weird.

But the rest of us, we have to care what other's think a bit too much. We have our natural gentlemanly constraints as well, conversation with a passing neighbor, even as we're on our way off to write what we don't know we're going to write yet, thinking of somewhere, holding a fragile thing with care, hearing it, but not yet getting it down yet.

It's a real fault of his if he can't stick to a schedule, allowing peace and work by day, a social life at night. And odd hours, like those of a chef or barman, can be tricky.

Ahh me, a writer is a lazy person, who thinks his craft is enough to add to society.

Bourdain is an interesting guy. He observes, in his new book, if he hadn't fallen into drugs, he never would have had the string of lousy restaurant jobs to write Kitchen Confidential, experiences that must make the book what it is.

He was a classically trained artist. As a kid. An old fisherman, a partial nude, with artistic wisdom and clarity, sitting for the young artist, barely a teenager. And yet, a fine painting. A Picasso. Of course.

And then, to start his career, the Blue Period. Simplified forms. How to describe them... shadows? figurative? sketch? cartoon--no. The Saltimbanque, thin, and his family. Hardship, tragedy, the leanest of times, and no future what so ever. Nowhere to go then, if you were. Today, not much better. Here, the Blue Period, a short-hand, simplified. No, not the brushstrokes of detail and realism, but the form done as if quickly, as if 'all you get to say, and have to say it quick.' A morally freighted suggestion, a call to make forth some form of distribution of resources.

A phase artists go through, and actually, it's them hitting their stride. The desire, the ability, to see simply and direct. Hemingway follows suit. Simple childish basics, put together, still telling a story, as well as any method or practice. Carver, same.

The training in form and color and capturing graceful from has come, has gone, and now, it's time.

You do wonder from time to time why be a writer. Why do you keep odd hours, have a fondness for seclusion. I'm good at bartending, I suppose, because in a way I don't mind it. I don't mind the hours and the isolation, a life lived drifting against the tide of a city and all its people who work by day, off at night. I must not. I've been doing it a long time. No, I'm not trying to be dramatic, I'm just sorting out why such a marginal life.

It's a hard job, though it wouldn't seem to be, front of the house at a restaurant. Dead dog tired at the end of the shift as the last few chores are done, you get yourself home, and then, even if you've had some already, you need some wine. Oh, sure, in a perfect world, you wouldn't have had the drink at work to combat the mental fatigue at the end of a night talking with people, being on, as on a stage, and you'd just go home and go to bed. Hell, you almost fall asleep in a chair sometimes at the end of the night, when you just wanted to stop and catch your breath for a moment. Anyway, you'll be up for another five hours after you come home, and I haven't found a way around that. Nine to fivers don't fall asleep straight away either. I might envy that their bodies don't have to fight against the natural cues of daylight.

Yes, it's a tiring job, and the shifts of a week add up, just like they do for everyone. I must admit that sometimes I don't get up much before I have to. Meaning that I don't write much those days I work, shamefully enough. I used to be a bit better at it. Maybe a certain discouragement comes with age. Maybe you find exercise, a little yoga, more essential to maintain.

In an ideal world, we'd write like Updike. Up, go the office, break for lunch, back at it, then finally home. Brilliant. Then, of course there's the Dostoyevsky model, of getting up at one in the afternoon, and finally after the house has gone to bed, sitting down at the desk by the light of candles (having a hatred of electric lights), rolling cigarettes that he's not allowed to smoke to pass the time when inspirations run back out to sea.

You begin to live this way, and it easily becomes your life, who knows why. Maybe you should completely change everything, be a schoolteacher or some form of worker with some form of pension. Yet, all those intricacies seem to intricate, and the writer prefers a job to be at least mentally simple, or am I wrong. Yes, you could look at the bar man's job talking to all those people kind of an interruption, but yet maybe they feed him too, in a way he's not so aware of, even as he gets tired out.

No, maybe it's just that he isn't fit for any other job but writing, and that he'll do anything just to keep his claim staked. Even if that job drags him away far too often, takes his energy away.

Clint Eastwood, now he gets being a writer. You can see it the characters he creates, the cop who works at night, who doesn't give a fuck about normal doings. A musician, an athlete, an actor, an inn keeper, a director... he's found out how to make it work for him. Not too far off from the way Shane MacGowan does what he does, knowing that all his life he wanted to be a professional musician and would do what it took.

Yeah, with any path or following, as they say, any dream, comes some punishment that you just have to live with and be grittily proud of.

Now, of course there is a certain amount of masochism in it that a lot of people just want no part of. But that apparent masochism of going through a performance of a song of, say Brendan Behan's, The Auld Triangle, is a way of working through the stuff of life. That's just a matter of taste, but it could be such stuff a writer needs.

Realizing that you/he/she a writer, that is the greatest act a writer will be able to pull off. There comes a feeling of no longer needing to apologize for who you are, for what your tastes are, for what you can read from the soul, and all that is bedrock. After that, maybe, it's easy.