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On Writing: Ten Dollars Worth of Crazy

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I spent about an hour on Sunday morning trying to calculate what kind of travel experience I could have for ten dollars. I figured I could take the bus downtown, get a drip coffee and maybe a cookie, and then, take the bus back again. I could drive to Tacoma and back in my car on about ten bucks worth of gas, I might also be able to get a soda or a candy bar, but not both, from a 7-11. There’s some stuff I could do locally for free — walk over to the park or ride my bike down to the beach or hey, there’s the library, it’s a godsend, right? But travel, on ten dollars? What could I finance?

Van Gogh was poor all of his life, if I’m remembering my art history correctly. Crazy and poor. Gauguin, there’s a guy who had the sense to bug out to the tropics, but I read his letters home while I was hanging out at friend’s place in Italy and he was always hitting up someone, I think it was his brother, to send him money and materials. Vermeer used to cozy up to his mother in law for loans. Sure, all that work became valuable later, but while those artists were alive, they suffered unintentional vows of poverty. [We're told that] Mozart died poor too, tossed into an anonymous grave while now his likeness graces countless money making souvenirs and schemes. Who can name all the artists — be they writers or musicians or painters — who left their lives poor because art, like crime, does not pay.

On Sunday morning, I slouched on the sofa for an hour, maybe it was longer, thinking about these underpaid artists. I thought about how, when I used to paint, (I did not suck as a painter) I paid for materials and a place to work and when I’d ask for 300 dollars for a painting, potential buyers would walk away — perhaps 50 was more a fair price? They’d happily leave me with not enough money to pay my rent, not enough money to cover the time I’d taken to make a painting, or the weird immeasurable part of thinking things up and finding that a drawing of a bird on a scrap of paper stuck into a notebook two years ago was exactly the right thing to use as a stencil for the upper right corner. Then there was all that education, learning how to mix color and how to see and stitching together the back story for a painting out of the wallpaper in my grandmother’s apartment and failed gardening attempts and waking up in the middle of the night knowing you are in the wrong life.

I don’t waste a lot of time feeling outraged about writer’s wages. It’s not a good use of my time — of anyone’s time. Plus, it turns out that in spite of all the outrage, someone, perhaps you reading this right now, will write for less than I do and do so joyfully. Perhaps you are keen to have a soapbox on which to stand and that is more important than cash in your pocket. Perhaps you are new to the written word and figure writing for small change is a temporary step in your path to the big bucks, it’s the publishing equivalent of doing your time. I also know that as a “real” writer, I’m supposed to devote a certain amount of time to pursuing publication opportunities — the artists equivalent of sending out your portfolio and hoping for a gallery to charge you an arm and a leg for framing while keeping 50% of your sales as commission — “Oh, but we bring in the buyers, you know!” I’m no good at marketing, I’m a writer, not a salesman, and I’m aware that being a salesman is a critical part of being a successful writer.

I have a sophisticated enough understanding of the game to understand why there’s no money in writing, especially now, as publishing collapses. Hand set type was eclipsed by digital publishing and paper is losing to online writing and now, anyone who hits publish can call themselves a writer. Words are a commodity and so cheap, too — your six or seven figure Internet start up guy knows that Google likes words, it eats them as a snack from Costco sized packages and writers are everywhere, eager to have their writer’s vanities catered to by the thrill of seeing your luscious words under the weighty shadow of a digital masthead not your own. We feed the machine now, cranking out endless boxes of lunch sized essays but we can not feed ourselves on the resulting income.

Sunday morning found me feeling bleak and sorry for myself and truth be told, a little bit angry. The source of this gray black mood was an ad seeking travel stories from “real” writers; the pay for said stories was ten dollars a piece. Ten dollars. What kind of travel experience could I have for ten dollars? (I should be clear — it was not so much this particular ad that pushed me down the well, it was the realization that what the publisher was offering was quite common.) Surely there are places in India or Tanzania or Guatemala where ten dollars could get me an amazing experience, be it a taxi ride across town or entry to a local theater. It’s three dollars, I think, to attend the Honolulu Poetry Slam and that could potentially make for a great story, but even in low season, and from the West coast, a plane ticket is about 300/USD round trip. This potential ten dollar story would put me 290 dollars in the hole and I have not had a meal, taken public transit from the airport, paid for a bed, given myself one thin dime for my writing time, or paid the three dollars to see the poetry slam.

Once, a long time ago, I was paid a dollar a word to write a 750 word piece about a very fancy hotel in Vienna. My hotel stay was comped but my travel was not — a plane ticket from Seattle to Vienna was about 900/USD at the time. And then, there were tips and the subway and coffee and so many other incidentals, my profit on that piece ended up negative. The guidebook I wrote to Hawaii netted me 400 dollars after expenses and I spent about two months working on it — that’s right, that’s 200 dollars a month. Sometimes I feel that perfectly understandable craving to get my work off of this little blog into places that will wrap it in a veneer of credibility. When that hits, I call on the painfully logical part of my brain to explain to my writer’s fragile ego that it makes no economic sense at all to pursue travel writing gigs elsewhere. The internal writer pleads with the internal accountant — “But we have to do more than just BLOG!” — as though blogging were a dirty word — and the writer always loses. The accountant, she writes the checks and both sides of me like a warm, dry, place to sleep and regular meals and the fictional comfort of a very crappy health insurance plan.

It was not raining on Sunday morning, but it might as well have been. I felt so saddened by the idea that the kind of writing I like to do has been utterly devalued. It’s a good living for a select few and for the rest, perhaps they’ve taken that unintentional vow of poverty. Or they have patrons or a modern kind, wives or husbands or magical income from some unknown other source, an inheritance, perhaps, combined with a modesty of lifestyle. Maybe they’ve made a deal with the devil — the devil isn’t a great business partner, but man, can he sell the idea — and that’s how they manage groceries while writing stories about travel. I sent the devil packing, lowered my expectations for what my writing could bring me, and got some skills that let me earn an okay living while not eating all my time. It’s not a bad compromise, most days, but on Sunday, I sulked on the couch thinking about how ten dollars could not begin to compensate me for everything that comes with me when I sit down at the keyboard. Ten dollars felt like an insult, the compromise felt like a sell out, and writing… writing… Van Gogh was crazy. He loved to paint, you can see it when you look at his work. I love to write. I really love to write and sometimes, sometimes, it makes me just a little bit crazy.

Van Gogh’s Starry Starry Night poached from Flickr via Creative Commons. Vincent, wherever you are, I’m sorry.

19 Comments | Posted in » Werk

Recycled: A Very Short Trip to Antwerp

I don’t know that I’d have picked Antwerp as a destination were it not for the generous invitation of Di and her Belgian. Ryan Air is annoying but undeniably cheap and what am I doing in Austria that’s so important? Nothing. I booked a ticket and drove myself to the airport. Anything I have to say about the city is about the city only – I’ve got nothing but hearts and flowers for Di and her Belgian.

The old center of Antwerp is very attractive with cobblestoned streets and tall skinny guild houses in fancy Flemish style. But sadly, the charm of the city fades as you wander away from the center. It’s interesting, to be sure and it’s wildly cosmopolitan compared with any of our Austrian cities but Antwerp appears to be in the grip of a renovation/destruction frenzy – it’s hard to tell which. The tramways are being jackhammered at every third intersection. There’s a certain dinginess to the place that may come from the pollution or the aging of the city, it’s hard to know. The sun rises and sets in a blaze of orange that’s caused by all the exhaust in the air – Antwerp is a shipping center for some crazy percentage of Europe’s freight and trucks circle the city nonstop making a noise that sounds like the tide.

If Antwerp isn’t really pretty in a touristy sort of way, it is really real. And it’s interesting. A walk through the city’s diamond district reveals nothing to see for windowshoppers or sightseers, but if you have an eye for odd environments, it’s something. A fiftyish man with a big beard, a yarmulke, knickers and stockings, and an odd shiny jacket strolled in to the neighborhood, looking both authoritarian and comic. The heart of the diamond exchange is a plaza where a bunch of guys stand around in groups of three of four talking in hushed tones. They’re almost all Indians and Chassidic Jews, though here and there a stylish woman strides through in high heels or a bulky security guard stands scowling in a doorway. It’s an insider scene all the way and instead of being glam, it’s kind of seedy and weird.

A few blocks away from the diamond exchange is the Jewish neighborhood. We ducked in to Hoffi’s, a charming place to have lunch and a primo spot for people watching. The kosher menu is okay, I wouldn’t call it spectacular, but the back of the dining room had decorations up and a reed mat ceiling – Hoffi’s nod towards Sukkot – and the folks that work there are friendly. A young Chassid with the demeanor of an old man and a woman who must have been his mom sat across from us, a big table of boisterous Israelis had a feast, in the back room a smaller family – including a woman in a festive turquoise hat – dined and talked on cell phones.

Di and I wandered the city without any particular plan or destination. We went through the old downtown, the graffiti park, the shopping mall (as a shortcut) down to the river… then we stopped in at The Eleventh Commandment for a beer. The goal was to have raspberry beer but they were out – I had the cherry instead. I liked the taste quite a bit, but it didn’t sit well and I had to walk away from most of it, a three euro tragedy.

I love supermarkets in foreign countries – they are the ultimate in cultural wonders. We stopped in to get some fish so I could cook Fish Wednesday, Belgium Edition and were flabbergasted in the meat department. Belgians eat horse, you can buy elaborately prepped baby pheasant, and the organ meat offerings were beyond anything I’ve seen in the west, ever. They’re certainly economic, these Belgians.

On the second morning we went for a short walk through Di’s neighborhood before I had to jump on the train back to Brussels and the airport. Di’s neighborhood has lots of postwar housing, big blocky numbers without much greenbelt. I suspect the apartments are nice enough on the inside – her place has big windows and a vast balcony. But I think of going for a walk around the ‘hood like I do in Seattle – even downtown – on nice days when I’m feeling like a wander. I can’t picture it. (I couldn’t picture it in Vienna either, for the record.)

On the train back to the airport, I looked out the window at more urban decay mixed with reconstruction. I made vast mental generalizations about Northern Europe, which I should not do. On a funny-to-me aside on generalizations and stereotyping, I learned from a local that the Dutch and the Belgians don’t like to be mistaken for each other. Supposedly, Belgians are kind of stupid and the Dutch are terrible cheapskates. Whatever. None of the Belgians I interacted with were stupid at all. And I can’t say for the Dutch because I am too stupid to tell them from the Belgians.

I believe in the value of first impressions and I did not love Antwerp (though I certainly adored my hosts). This isn’t to say I wouldn’t go back there – I’d go in an instant to hang out with Di again and there are other places to visit — I hear Leuven is very pretty.

The draw to a place is the people, of course, though there’s something to be said for setting. The alps looked very attractive on the drive home – but I ask them this: Are you a substitute for the good company in Antwerp?

There are a handful of pictures here.

5 Comments | Posted in » Passport Travels

Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

I was saddened to read about the death of ‘Masa’ Murakami in yesterday’s Seattle Times. The Murakami family ran the Higo general store on Jackson Street in the neighborhood that used to be called Nihonmachi, or Japan Town. Before Higo became the design conscious place it is today, it was a complete hodge podge of a place, selling flip flops and kitchen ware — there were hat mannequins that looked to be from the 40s on high shelves on the west wall. We used to go in there to browse the chopstick rests and soup bowls and dish scrubbers and giant metal woks.

I still drop into the fancified Kobo at Higo, it’s a gallery of a different kind with Asian inspired artwork, coffee table books on Japanese design, both elegant and funny, graceful tschotkes that cost 12 times anything that Higo ever sold. Last time I was there, I read the history of the store from sheet in a plexiglass stand that tells how the Murakami family handed the keys to a Jewish optometrist who looked after the place until they returned from their imprisonment in an interment camp in Idaho.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is Jamie Ford’s novel about a Chinese boy and a Japanese girl who become friends. It’s set at the start of that shameful period in history when we interned our citizens, patriots who went on to fight for the US in WWII, because we were afraid. It also takes place in my home town, in places I know well and Ford’s portrayal of these locations made this story real for me.

The Panama Hotel plays a critical role in the plot, it’s where Henry, one of the primary characters, finds objects left behind by Keiko’s family — she’s the girl that becomes Henry’s friend. When you visit the Panama Hotel — which is a lovely tea house now — you can look down through a thick glass panel in the floor to the basement, where Japanese families did indeed stash their stuff in hopes they would one day return to reclaim it. The dusty record store where Henry flips through old albums is real, but sadly, Bud’s closed a few years ago — I always loved walking by there to hear jazz wafting up the stairwell. The fairgrounds that served as a transit station for local Japanese families is real too — I’ve gone to there to eat deep fried twinkies and pet award winning llamas without knowing that the barns were once holding pens for humans. Jazz master Quincy Jones once called Seattle home, so Henry’s sax playing street musician friend walked out of local history too.

You know this story, we all do. Henry and Keiko are strangers in a strange land — Henry’s family clings to a traditional Chinese past, Keiko’s family are forward looking immigrants, and the backdrop is a time of change. Henry is devoted to Keiko, colorblind for the time, trying to be a modern American and still appease his traditional parents. When Keiko’s family is relocated, Henry’s outrage causes him to break with his family and follow his heart. And as an old man with a grown son, he finally reconciles with his past. You know the story. You’ve heard it before.

I’d probably have given up on this book had the places not been so real. Ford’s detail in recreating Seattle — I KNOW these places — is so perfect that I can stand in Seattle’s International District, on the line between what used to be Nihonmachi and Chinatown, and see Henry and Keiko’s story unfolding. I was unsurprised by the plot, but I couldn’t look away from what was happening — what had happened — in my home town. We were so awful to the Japanese and it’s important that the story be told. The family that ran Higo is gone, the horse stalls at the fairgrounds hold show horses — I’ve never seen any signage that mentions the fairgrounds’ inglorious past. It would be easy to forget. Ford’s book doesn’t let us. I was both sad and grateful for the reminder.

Bon Odori dancers in Seattle’s Japantown

Want a copy? Leave a comment, I’ll draw a winner at random and get it sent out.

7 Comments | Posted in » Seattle, Travel Reads

Review & Giveaway: Westport Weekend

Disclaimer: Our stay at Vacations by the Sea and our dinner at the Half Moon Bay Bar & Grill were comped.

I did not think that I was stressed out, but nothing will help a person unwind quite so fast as a view of the ocean. While I am very much a land creature — I get seasick — I love the ocean with my whole heart. I love the way it smells, I love watching the surf, I love it when a beach is covered in thick white fog and when the sand is so hot it bakes you completely when you stretch out on it. I’m crazy for the coast and think the Pacific the grandest of sights. As much as I love living on Puget Sound, I still dream that one day I will live where I can walk to the Pacific and stand on the edge of that great vast water that reaches out all the way across the globe.

More…

32 Comments | Posted in » Pacific Northwest

Coconut Humu

So, um, yeah, I’m in this ukulele group. And you could come see us play and help raise money for a Good Cause. Get your tickets here.

1 Comment | Posted in » Uketopia

Tell Me a Story @ TBEX 2010

TBEX is the Travelblog Exchange, a conference for travelbloggers. It’s in year two and this year, I’m co-hosting the community keynote with Mike Barish.

1. At a guest house in the Austrian Alps, I met an old farmer who sat out WWII because he was captured by American soldiers his first day in uniform. He spent the entire war in a POW camp in Texas and loved it so much he didn’t want to go home.

2. My sister in law did not believe the things I wrote on my blog about crossing the street in Hanoi. After we returned the US, she called my husband and I overheard him retelling how we stepped off the curb into moving traffic and the scooters and cars went around us like a river around stones. I still think about crossing the street in Vietnam’s cities as the ultimate act of faith.

3. When I returned from India, I could not go to the supermarket without bursting into tears. A trip to Costco sent me into a depression that was diagnosed as suicide risk though what I really suffered from was culture shock so severe as to prevent me from buying shampoo or cereal for months.

I met Elvis in Alaska, woke up to a pink sky and a symphony of birds at a watering hole in the Australian bush, and from a balcony in Northern Israel watched the sky light up with what I thought was fireworks but was really the opening salvos in the Israel/Lebanon war.  So many stories fill my unwritten autobiography, so many places and people, sometimes I pull them out of a dusty mental shoebox into the light and think, yeah, that really happened. THAT REALLY HAPPENED.

And while it is a privilege to have those things in my past, I realize that I am not so special, that there are loads of other travelers out there with loads of stories that are equally unbelievable, others who remember walking across the Himalayas in cheap sneakers or asking for help in the back streets of Alexandria and receiving, in perfect English, the words, “I can not help you, you are lost.”

These are my stories and if you ask me about, say, Vietnam or my last trip to Oahu, or so many other places, I won’t shut up. But I’m not trying to tell my stories, I’m looking for yours. The absurd and frightening and funny and unbelievable — that moment when the ground went out from under you or you were in the waking dream or you met someone who changed what you thought about history. I want to see what’s in your shoebox of memories that, when you take it out and look at it, makes you think, “Yeah, that really happened. IT REALLY HAPPENED. ”

The TBEX Community Keynote is your chance to share your story about the magical thing — and I don’t mean only good witch magic, I mean all kinds, voodoo curses, tiny blessings, unexpected saints, and monsters from the deep included — that happened because of your travels. The story that REALLY happened, that sits in your storage locker but never loses its secret powers. We want the story that makes you ask yourself, “Wow, did that really happen? ” And then, the answer, “I was there, I know. THAT REALLY HAPPENED.”

All the details for submitting your story to the TBEX Community Keynote are here.

3 Comments | Posted in » Administrivia, Passport Travels

Crabby

“I fished crab until last year, I got injured, my eye,” says the muddy guy at the turnout above the beach. “But hey, go down to the pier and wait for the boats to come in. You’ll get a whole crab for six — maybe eight bucks from those guys.” He points at a boat that’s crossing the water. “It’s a good deal, no soft shells. You like crab, right?”

It’s high tide at the dock and there are lots of people swinging crab traps into the water. The last time we were here, we walked around on the sand below the dock, looking up at the big wooden posts. This time, there’s no beach, the tide is all the way in, all the way up.

“His name is Frederick,” the kid says to me. I’m looking into a big plastic bucket that holds a crab. “You named him and now you’re gonna EAT him?!?” I asked the kid, and his Dad, standing behind me at the rail starts to laugh.

Crabs have to be six inches across to keep, so when the guy in the rain suit pulls his trap and none of them are big enough, he sweeps them off the dock back into the water with his feet.

“They’re dredging out there to make it easier for the boats to get into the marina,” he says, “and the crabbing hasn’t been that great. Usually, they come in when the tide comes up and they go back out when it starts to go out, but they’re small and there aren’t that many of them, so maybe they’ve gone elsewhere.”

A couple of guys compare crab gauges — a measuring gizmo used to make sure your catch is regulation size. The kids — the ones with Frederick the Crab — are playing with a few smaller crabs they’ve separated out into a cardboard box. They’ll throw them back before the day is done, but as we walk away, one of the girls is holding a crab up by it’s front pincer arms while her brother tells her, “Be careful, you’re hurting it” “No I’m not,” she insists, “you’re SUPPOSED to hold them like this!”

4 Comments | Posted in » Pacific Northwest