I live in a bubble of my own creation. It is for the most part a peaceful, quiet, happy place filled with wonderful and inspiring people. It is impervious to golf. And to drama. And to folks who voted Republican in any of the last three presidential elections. It’s a good bubble.

I stay inside of it because it allows me to be optimistic in the face of everything that is going on in the world. Everyone is inherently good here inside my bubble, and they all have excellent grammar.

But sometimes the bubble makes me forget about what the world is really like and how distrustful and wary some of its inhabitants are of the rest of us. I just got the following email from a woman whose photo I starred as a favorite on Flickr:

Re: [Flickr] blocking you
hi, J.B.~
while i thank you for liking my work, i’m not willing to
have it saved by “collectors”.
sorry,
_____

I composed the following note back:

Hi ____,
I’m not exactly sure what your message is in reference to. I am a writer and am brand new to Flickr. I use it to find images that inspire me and awaken something in me that I want to write about.
I believe I recently starred a photo of yours that I found particularly beautiful and which spoke to me. I seem to have offended you or upset you by doing so, which is very unexpected and was of course never my intention.
Good luck to you in all of your artistic endeavors,
-J

As I clicked the send button, I was told by Flickr that I was unable to reply to her message because she has blocked my ability to contact her, to comment on her photos, and to favorite her photos. All this because I starred one of her pictures.

I believe that she looked at my profile and saw that I had not uploaded any photos of my own. She probably noted that I had starred quite a few photos and assumed that I was doing something untoward, like exposing myself to them or letting them listen to rap music. I don’t know.

It reminded me that there are people out there who view the world through disappointment colored glasses, who automatically assume the worst in people, and who are looking for anything that will confirm to them their suspicions, even if they have to make up the details themselves.

So I suppose she lives in her own little bubble just like I do. But if I had to bet on it, I’d say the food tastes better over here.

Every afternoon I drive Joshua to work. And every afternoon he is too polite to ask me for a ride, for fear of interrupting my writing. So he packs up his backpack, puts on his winter coat and makes like he is going to walk. Then I say, “Baby, I’d be happy to drive you to work.” And he says, “Really!? That would be great. Thanks, honey,” as if it were the first time I’d ever offered.

Reason #481: He says “trousers” instead of “pants.”

Over the holiday break I met a woman who started a charter school in inner city Boston. It’s an extremely competitive college prep school (6th-12th grades) that serves the most disadvantaged students in the area, many of whom are not at grade level when they arrive. Admission is free.

Because it’s a charter school, it acts like it’s own district and makes its own rules: The school day is nine hours instead of six. They all eat breakfast together. Everybody wears a uniform. Kids who are not doing well must attend school on Saturdays. The curriculum is designed around building the virtues of courage, compassion, integrity, perseverance, and respect. In short, it’s totally bitchin.’

They have devised a complicated system of merits and demerits, which if I understand correctly, goes like this: Each merit is worth a certain number of points, say +7, and a demerit is worth another, say -4. (A merit is worth more positive points than a demerit is worth negative points because doing good in the world is more powerful than doing bad.) If you have three or more demerits at the end of the week you have to serve a detention after school on Friday that is longer than Lawrence of Arabia. The following week your demerit slate is wiped clean.

They also have something called a Merit Bank that tallies up all your positive points and subtracts from it your negative points, giving you, essentially, your Total Awesomeness Score (TAS) for the week. That TAS can be used for tender at the school’s canteen/gift shop where students can buy things with their virtuous behavior.

This got me thinking about starting an International Merit Bank (IMB), whereby everyone could travel, shop, pay their bills, and support their family on their acts of kindness alone. Imagine a world where the CEOs of oil companies would be forced to live in shacks by the side of the road while teachers and aid workers sipped mai thais poolside at their sprawling villas upon returning home from school or from a mission. Imagine a world in which good deeds were commodities, in which you could buy a Lamborghini with community service, in which all those who were rich on the inside would be so on the outside too.

Flickr is a surrealist’s dream. I search for “dictionary,” I get a picture of a lion. Where’s Dali when you need a high five?

I just applied for a staggeringly large writer’s grant. The application was grueling and involved many essays, one of which was a response to the following quote by Virginia Woolf:

“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”

My response:

It is undeniable that women have emerged at the forefront of countless fields in the last decades, years, even months. We read articles in the newspaper about the glass ceiling being shattered into a million pieces. We now have women running multi-billion dollar corporations, receiving the most prestigious awards in the arts, and occupying high government office (who can forget the first time George Bush uttered the words, “Madame Speaker”?) Women enjoy more power now than in any other time in history. But if we look closely, we will see that theirs is a conditional power, one that has not reached full maturity.

First, it is such a salient event in our minds when a woman achieves unprecedented prominence that it gives the impression that equality is more a part of the culture than it truly is. In fact, women are woefully underrepresented in the highest echelons of most fields. According to National Census figures, women living in this country began to outnumber men as early as 1999. And yet an informal online search for the names of influential women in the field of postmodern architecture, for example, reveals something quite interesting: nothing. Not a single name. A similar search for influential postmodern artists and authors shows that women comprise about 15-20% of the names noted. In politics the numbers are similar: about 16% of U.S. political representatives are women.

Even more important than the numbers, though, are the qualities of the women whom we have anointed in this country. Politics is a good microcosm in which to examine this issue. Certainly women in politics are at the front of everyone’s minds and on the tips of everyone’s tongues at the time of this writing. The women who have emerged most recently—Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, Condoleezza Rice—are as divergent in their politics as they can possibly be from one another. But in the context of women’s roles in America, they are merely four faces on the same body. They wear the same suit, the same pearls—they are expected to look like ladies on the outside—but their feminine qualities are to remain in the aesthetic and superficial realms only. They have reputations for being “tough,” “fighters,” and “ballbusters.” They must be single-minded, unemotional, and unflinching (even better if they can appear somewhere carrying a gun). In short, they must behave like men. But isn’t this to deny the creative power of women? In her book A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf writes that “…[women’s] creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place.” Doesn’t the masculinization of our women in politics hinder and waste their true creative power, and so deny their contribution to society?

A woman’s strength lies in her ability to be intuitive, receptive, collaborative, and emotionally intelligent. But unfortunately, we have been conditioned to think of these traits as a crack in the armor of professionalism, power, and accomplishment. When Senator Clinton became teary eyed on the campaign trail speaking about how much she loved and respected her country, how passionate she was about helping people, some felt that it was her truest and most authentic moment. But the media eviscerated her for it, calling into question how fit she could be to govern (never mind that Joe Biden broke down more recently when speaking of his son’s death, and was perceived as sensitive and sympathetic).

Imagine if women were given the opportunity to rule in a way that was more aligned with their basic nature. Imagine a president who sat down with her country’s so-called enemies to find common ground, who brought people and nations together, who did not lead with her power but with her heart. Imagine a president who was allowed to become emotional, to be overcome by emotion, and to use those feelings to govern with empathy for those who are suffering.

We have not yet come to a collective reckoning about the value of what women have to offer the world. And our confusion is not limited to the sphere of politics.

Women in business face many of the same challenges as women in politics. And women in the arts, while given more latitude for expression by the nature of their pursuit, are still subject to the predilection of the critics who tend to give more attention to men. In writing and publishing—the facet of the art world I am most interested in and qualified to comment on—there is a prototypical author and a prototypical style of work that continues to be most lauded. Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers—post modern writers of the Literary Tome—are celebrated in a way that their female contemporaries are not. These men are the decendents of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, Faulkner, Miller.

When I think of the most decorated female authors of recent times, Joan Didion comes to mind. She is a writer of indescribable talent possessed of a clipped, surgical style highly revered in this country. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking about the time immediately following her husband’s sudden death won the 2005 National Book Award. It is a study in stark, dispassionate prose, as evidenced by her description of one of the worst moments of her life:

In outline.
It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004.
Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death.

Didion is a highly effective storyteller, but one cannot escape the masculine quality of her writing. If you were to compare her style to that of Mary Morris, for example, who wrote the memoir Nothing to Declare, you would be struck by Morris’s spectrum of expression. Her prose is round and full, soft and warm, but it is also strong and centered. It embodies, for this reader, the great strength of women:

Women remember. Our bodies remember. Every part of us remembers everything that has ever happened. Every touch, every feel, everything is there in our skin, ready to be awakened, revived. I swam in the sea. Salt water cradled me, washing over all I had ever felt. I swam without fear in the line of moonlight radiating on the surface of the sea. The water entered me and I could not tell where my body stopped and the sea began. My body was gone, but all the remembering was there.

Unfortunately this type of writing is not as well regarded as the lean, pragmatic prose of male authors. We tend to take the qualities of men more seriously than the qualities of women, perhaps because they fought or posed imminent threat over the course of history. But now that we are at a time when we have the luxury to honor women’s contributions, our appreciation is often misguided. When women captivate our attention in mainstream culture it is very often a prurient or dismissive attention. A feminine style of leading, like a feminine style of writing, is seen as impotent at best, and a liability at worst.

Women are not the cracks in the armor of this country, though they are often portrayed as such. They represent the possibility that perhaps we might be better off without armor in the first place, that we can value vulnerability over protection, creativity over destruction, and emotion over reason. And this possibility, this force, “has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.” And though women have begun to chip away at the glass in the ceiling they are, alas, still bound by bricks and mortar.

So I am at the chiropractor’s last night and he is working on C5, where I tend to keep all my problems, worries, and that Twinkie I had in third grade. ¹ I mention to him my exasperation at always getting a stiff neck whenever anything remotely stressful happens in my life.

      ”Part of it is cultural, you know.”
      ”You mean Americans tend to store more stress in their necks? How interesting.”
      ”Not exactly.” He leans in. “You’re Jewish, right?” (He says Jewish real softly, like my Grandma would say, “I heard that Doris Goldberg’s son has Cancer.”)
      ”My neck pain is from the holocaust?!” I exclaim. He doesn’t think I am funny.

He goes on to tell me that by the age of eight children have already adopted a strategy for dealing with stress and trauma, which they have learned from their parents. So when you take a chronically persecuted people like the Jews (the Burmese, the Armenians, the Tibetans, the Gays, et al.) they tend to pass coping mechanisms down to their great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren even though the great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren are out of danger and don’t need them anymore. And this is how we continue to shoulder the burdens of the people who came long before us.

I remember going to my therapist a year ago, feeling agitated and overburdened, generally ill at ease. When he asked me what was troubling me I couldn’t put my finger on anything. Life was good. Work was good. Everything: good. He told me that some people come into the world with a heavier emotional burden. Others absorb the worries of their parents. Some do both.

It’s not that I believe we should abdicate responsibility for our own suffering. On the contrary, I think regardless of whether a trauma was hard won or whether it rode in on your back when you got here, it’s still yours to learn from and work through.

But there is also something to be said for the idea of a collective pain. As human beings we are brought together by lots of things–joy, catastrophe, triumph, oppression–and it is a constant reminder that we are never insular, that our thoughts and our actions affect people we have never even met and will continue to do so long after we’re gone.

I just returned from my semi-weekly pilgrimage ¹ to the library where I picked up a book I requested four months ago, which had just come in.

Oh, but it is not just a book. It is an experience. It is in a box. It looks like it might be filled with candy. It is filled with candy! Literary candy! Like a Whitman’s Sampler for your brain!

It is The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson ² and the inside of the box reads:

NOTE
This novel has twenty-seven sections, temporarily held together by a removable wrapper. Apart from the first and last sections (which are marked as such) the other twenty-five section are intended to be read in random order. If readers prefer not to accept the random order in which they receive the novel, then they may re-arrange the sections into any other random order before reading.

I of course do not accept the random order in which I have received the novel and have pre-randomized it for my own enjoyment. I am also choosing to read the Introduction before the first chapter because my need for information and order supersedes my need to follow directions.

Wanted to let you in on the excitement. Here, have some vicarious literary delight. Me to you. Happy Friday. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I recently became acquainted with the wonders of Flickr, ¹ where I searched through innumerable ² photos to create a library for this blog. To my surprise, the majority of the photos I loved had certain settings disabled, which made the photos visible, but very difficult to download. ³

I understand that photographers want to have control over their work, that they don’t want bloggers altering, adulterating, mangling, or making a general mockery of their photos–as well they shouldn’t–but doesn’t this reticence to share hinder the creative back-and-forth that propels our culture forward?

I’m reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde whom the NYTimes magazine profiled in an amazing article a few weeks ago. He believes that by treating art as an offering, that by circulating it, by allowing it to become part of a dialogue, its value increases far more than it ever could as a commodity. The more hands that touch a work of art the more precious it becomes. He is not saying that artists shouldn’t be compensated for their work or that they should give away all rights to it, but he makes the argument that our greed and our copyright and licensing laws have run amok.

I was listening to the commentary track of Forgetting Sarah Marshall the other day and the producer, Shauna Robertson, was talking about how much Paul Rudd, who plays a surf instructor in the movie, likes to ad lib. Every take is different with him. Unfortunately, in the take that made it into the film, Rudd says offhandedly, almost under his breath,  “Let’s go surfing now. Everybody’s learning how.” Robertson notes, her voice dripping with vitriol, that they ended up having to pay ten thousand dollars for the rights to use the Beach Boys’ lyrics in the movie. Ten thousand dollars for a two sentence throw away ad lib. This, I believe, is the kind of thing Hyde would take offense with.

I know what it means to be precious about one’s work. I become suicidal on the day I get edits back from an editor–She changed my semi colon to a comma?! Should I take my name off the piece? I don’t want my stuff hijacked by strangers anymore than the next guy. But the more I read Hyde’s book the more I see that my work, even in it’s most pristine form, isn’t adding to the conversation by sitting in a folder marked Brilliant on my desktop. Perhaps there is something to be said for putting oneself and one’s art and a little bit of one’s heart and soul, in whatever form that takes, out there.  And once it’s out there, there’s something to be said for  letting it go.

The internet has made it impossible to keep things to yourself. Information is everywhere. It is undeniable, unavoidable. Songs, movies, photos, articles, drawings can be downloaded in the click of a button, regardless of whether their creators want you to or not.

So if there is a certain inevitability to the uncontrolled dissemination and repurposing of information and art, what if we try something revolutionary. What if instead of calling it stealing, we call it sharing.