So this is what I came home to this morning out doing chores. Maria is beaming from ear to ear and Joe the Tile Man did show up and is busy laying plywood. Now, she wants him to do the bathroom as well. It seems to me he is removing his arm from her shoulder, pretty cozy for a tile man and an artist. I suppose he is an artist.
But I am not a small man, I am trying to be a big man and I am the trusting, not the jealous type. Maria is free to be pals with anyone she wants, and Joe is an awfully nice and competent guy. I wonder if he washes dishes well?
Maria is happy too, her ugly kitchen floor is already covered up with plywood,
Monday got off to a rocky start, the tile man hasn’t shown up yet, Maria got a bit grumpy and launched into a biting critique of my dish washing, which she was was “horrible.” In an outburst that perhaps signals another phase in our previously happy three-year marriage, she said she had to re-wash all of the dishes I did, they were greasy and had pieces of food on them. This followed my suggestion that she wasn’t the most domestically-inclined person I knew.
I didn’t take this personally, she came up last night with three pairs of cleaned socks, and said, “see! socks,” tossing the laundry basket on the floor. I think the outburst was a response to her disappointment in Joe the Tile Man, who stood her up again today. She was eagerly awaiting Joe on Friday, and then again, first thing this morning. You see?, I said, he’s not the right guy for you. Writers are more dependable than tile men.
I deny that I can’t wash dishes well, she just has this idea that my housekeeping chores are not always meticulous. Maybe she is controlling, I suggested (not a good idea.) I pouted and retreated to skim through my new book – Maria got it for me – “Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean,” a book that has astonished me and raised whole new questions about my identity.
My grandmother, a stout Russian peasant immigrant with royal airs and a fierce devotion to me, had some fixed ideas about the world.
1. Christian women don’t make good wives. They can’t clean or cook and their husbands look gaunt and starved. (I see she might have had some insight on that one.)
2. Richard Nixon was a dybuk, an evil spirit. She spoke almost no English, knew nothing about politics, but didn’t like his shifty eyes.
3. Jewish boys do not commit crimes. No Jewish boy has ever committed a crime, she said. What about Meyer Lansky, the architect of the modern mafia, I asked her one day? He couldn’t have been Jewish, she said, probably a gentile they gave a Jewish name to so they could blame the Jews for what he did.
4. Jewish boys do not play baseball, they do not run around and hit balls with sticks, or throw footballs at one another. They study to become engineers, doctors, lawyers.
My grandmother’s views of the world were unshakeable, fixed in granite, she never changed one of them. I thought of her while reading this morning about Moses Cohen Henriques, who was Bar Mitzvahed in Spain in 1616 and not a dozen years later was running a pirate ship in the Caribbean, seeking revenge on the Spanish Empire, which had driven the Jews from Spain. Henriques was a different kind of Pirate, he discussed his targets thoughtfully, gathered intelligence in great detail, abhorred any more violence than was necessary and was generous to his captives, refusing to sell them as slaves but releasing them at the nearest safe port.
His great claim to fame was that he was the only pirate in fifty attempts over two hundred years to capture a Spanish treasure galleon, taking it’s incredibly valuable cargo without harming a soul on board. He also went on to be a friend and adviser to the great Pirate Henry Morgan.
This is a different kind of Jewish boy than I ever heard about, and in his honor, I am getting a Jewish Pirate tattoo Thursday on my birthday. It is a Star Of David with some skulls embedded in the points. Maybe I will be fortunate enough to get to show it to a rabbi. It is, of course, already controversial on Facebook, where many people abhor tattoos and some think the tattoo would evoke the Holocaust. Not for me. “What does Maria say,” asked one horrified woman. “Sure,” she said, “why not?” This seems to her a perfectly normal thing to do.
I am celebrating this unexpected bit of cultural identity and I will also be thinking of Grandma Cohen (perhaps I am related to Moses, my grandfather was a Cohen). Jews can grow up to be pirates, and I can not imagine that Captain Moses Cohen Rodriguez’s wife gave him a lot of guff about the dishes. I guess I am no pirate. We’ll get back to that later.
When I started bedlamfarm.com on Memorial Day weekend in 2007, it never occurred to me or my Web designers to put my name on it. Blogs were not much respected in publishing, they were considered an annoying and intrusive necessity, something writers reluctantly had to do to buck up book sales and establish a presence on the Internet. None of us even remotely imagined what digital publishing would do to our lives, our work, our identity.
A blog was not something you put a name on. Blogs were named after farms, places, topics and ideas. They weren’t really considered personal expressions of real creativity. And I was in a different place. I was not happy with myself, proud of myself, sure of what the blog would be. At the time, in my rapidly deteriorating emotional and co-dependent state, I gave pages on my site away to many people that I knew – a half dozen people had their own pages on my website which was as much about them as me.
Things have changed. I have changed. Publishing has changed. The internet has changed. The blog has changed. I loved it from the beginning, it was eventually to become the truest expression of what I call the authentic self. The blog no longer exists to support the book, the blog is becoming a book all its own, my continuing memoir and more. This morning, I got an e-mail from my friend Leslie Parke, the gifted and well-known artist. Like me, Leslie has been experimenting with technology and creativity for some time. Like me, she is not clucking about the Internet, but trying to figure it out.
She was sharing something I wrote about publishing with her cousin, a poet and she noticed that my name didn’t appear anywhere on the blog, not in the masthead, not in the posts. “So when I saw that your name was missing where I expected to see it,” she wrote, “I wondered if this wasn’t the tiniest retreat of your own.” Beyond that, Leslie wrote, wouldn’t it be important to have my name attached to the site and to individual posts.
Leslie’s e-mail shocked me on several levels. First, I had no answer. I never thought of putting my name on the blog. I never thought of attaching it to posts. No one had ever suggested it to me, asked me about it, or mentioned it to me. It never once occurred to me. The blog and the site has always gone under the heading of “Bedlam Farm,” and yes, I realized, it was not a tiny retreat but a major one. I talk to people all the time about blogs, about their giving voice to people, connecting artists and writers to their readers in a newly significant and essential way. On the Open Group and elsewhere I constantly preach about the new centrality of the blog and it’s place in the lives of creative people, of personal expression. And here I was, with my own blog – more than 175,000 people a month visit bedlamfarm.com – without my name on it. Sometimes you are given a deep window into your own psyche, especially if the observer is sharp.
This was one of those suggestions that didn’t need much debate, I saw it right away, I am no longer retreating, not even in the tiniest way, I am even turning to a subscription model that people are enthusiastically accepting and that is an elemental part of my writing life and future and also, I think, the future of writers and artists like me. I am figuring out how to get paid for my work – insisting upon it – at a time when the old models of payment are being eroded and washed away. My writing is not being eroded or washed away, thanks in great part to the Internet and the way in which it has connected me to my readers. It is more vital to me than ever, and, I hope, to you.
I called Mannix Marketing, my Web partners from the beginning (I do nothing online without them, they are the architects and co-conspirators of my blog) and talked to Chris Archibee, a grand poobah there. If anyone in the world would ever want to write about my life, Chris would be the one He has been through it all with me and seen too much, a great friend, a wizard at growing blogs. We have built bedlamfarm.com together, he has always been there. I told him about Leslie’s e-mail and he said right away, “of course, it has all changed.” He saw it right away. If the blog is my book, then what book does not have the author’s byline? Christ agreed, In the next day or so, my byline will appear right under the heading “Bedlamfarm.com” at the top of my blog. My name will appear at the end of each post I write. A step forward for my own identity, my own voice.
Thank you Leslie. The short answer to your question is that the world is changing, and I am changing with it. Retreat is not an effective marketing tool, it is not creative. I appreciate the nudge. The first death is when we stop learning and listening.
