Find a Chair and Get In Treatment

It’s not TV.

It’s not.

Well, technically it is, but it’s so far and away better than most of the drivel that’s broadcast other places, it’s like it’s not even the same thing. In that way, it’s like religion. You don’t have to look very far to find two people who practice the same religion, yet one is consumed with hate, judgement, self-righteousness, fear, phobia, and is absolutely closed and defensive, while the other is consumed with compassion, filled with peace, fighting for an end to injustice and oppression, and is open and humble. They both may call themselves Christian or Jew or Muslim of Sikh, but they are not the same.

I said all that to say this: When they say, It’s not TV. It’s HBO. Though technically wrong, they are nonetheless accurate.

I’ve been a fan and faithful viewer of HBO’s original series for quite a while now, going all the way back to my favorite New York girls, Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha. I also enjoyed spending time with the Fisher family, visiting Seth Bullock and his foulmouthed frenemies, and even to a lesser extent enjoy Sookie Stackhouse in spite of the actress’ truly atrocious accent.

Now that “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under,” and “Deadwood” have gone the way of all flesh and other great shows like “Buffy” and “Gilmore Girls,” I find that my favorite show next to “House” these days is “In Treatment.”

Flawed and fragile, Paul Weston is a wise, insightful, patient counselor, and a session with him is as therapeutic as any on TV. In the best tradition of wounded healers, he’s a broken man in crisis, ministering out of his need—“Look at my hands and feet. It is I. Touch me and see.”

That Paul is also in treatment, that the counselor becomes the counseled, gives the show a whole other dimension, showing us, therapy voyeurs, another side of him—a vulnerable and neurotic side his patients never see. After all, the man behind the curtain, the one we’re supposed to pay no attention to, is always more interesting than anything else.

Shakespeare did it first, then much later, Hemingway reminded us. In the right hands, unalloyed dialog can be downright devastating—dramatic, suspenseful, intense, and interesting.

Conversation. Two people in a room talking. And it’s as riveting as anything on TV.

In its second season right now, “In Treatment” is worth paying the extra ten bucks to get HBO (maybe it’s more than that. Seems like that’s what I pay, but whatever it is, it’s the best value on my outrageous cable bill). The first season is available on DVD.

Paul’s patients—both from season one and two—are so sad and beautiful in their fractured humanity, in their longing (ultimately for love, though they may not know it), in their need for help to pick up the pieces and put them somehow back together again. Do you recognize them? They are lonely singles. They are miserable marrieds. They are sick and hurting. They are in crises. They are reevaluating. They are me. They are you.

I believe in counseling, have done a good bit of it over the years—both inside prison and out—and have so many intimates who are counselors, that I feel like I’ve been in treatment my entire adult life. Few things are better for us, more therapeutic, than a safe, nonjudgmental place where we can say absolutely anything we need to, where we can bring forth the monsters in our minds and, in the light of love and understanding, see how very small they really are. Is there anything we humans need more than to be heard and understood? That’s why the art of counseling, like the art of friendship, is mostly about listening. Sure, an occasional question or insight is helpful, but nothing compares to being heard and accepted, and knowing what we say will be taken to the grave.

Some of the best counseling I’ve received over the years has come from books by or about counselors—particularly the gentle, tender, Thomas Moore, who truly does the work of caring for the soul. It was he who taught me that our word “therapy” has “chair” in its etymology, and how very appropriate that is, how very Zen (When sitting, just sit). In this, to sit with someone, to share their burden is to care for their soul, is to give them counsel and treatment. It’s something we can all do for each other—and something Paul Weston is doing for me each week in our sessions on Sunday and Monday nights. Feel free to join us.

Poetry, Play, and the State of the State

First some Font:
“Wound in the Sun”

My dear friend and fellow local writer, Lynn Wallace, has a new book of poetry out, and since I can’t describe the collection any better, here’s a bit about it from the back of the book: “Containing poems written over the last 30 years, “Wound in the Sun,” explores some odd corners, places visited while afflicted with the benign disease of thinking, feeling, and living in the modern age. Each poem is a sun-streaked room somewhere, or an overlooked moon of a bruised and bustling planet, or a comet apt to break apart soon but before doing so will leave a bright vaporous tail that is barely more than nothing.”

That’s a fittingly poetic way to describe this thoughtful, subtle, brilliant work of poetry.

Lynn’s felicity with language sparkles like sunshine dancing on the still surface of a secluded lake, every page shimmering to life, dancing toward illumination.

But that’s not all. So does his intelligence and his insightful observations. Out of a lifetime of honest introspection, Lynn says, “Look at this. Listen to this. See the world through my eyes for a moment.” And what a world it is!

The title of the collection—and the collection itself—calls to mind one of my favorite Latin phrases: Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat: All wound, the last kills.

Legend has it, there’s a how-to manual for the best way to read “Wound in the Sun” that isn’t in print, so I’ll share with you the heart of its instructions here. In brief, it urges that you go outside and lie on your back, doing your best not to move. Know that blood is racing through your veins, the surface of the earth on which you lie is zinging along at several miles per minute, the planet is zipping around the sun at many miles per second, the sun is whirling on this galactic carrousel. Read poems. Lie as still as you are able. Never stare directly at the sun.

There is indeed a wound in the world, in the sun, and one of the best ways to deal with it is by reading. I recommend, “Wound in the Sun.”

When he’s not writing thought-provoking poetry, Lynn serves as an English professor and Director of Developmental Studies at Gulf Coast Community College, where he teaches creative writing, literature & film, and composition while supervising various programs. He had the distinction of being awarded Professor of the Year in 2006.

Lynn will reading from and signing “Wound in the Sun” this Friday, April 24th at Joey’s Coffee in downtown from 5:00 p.m. until 7:00 p.m. Please join us.


Now some Film:
“State of Play”

“State of Play” is a well-made thriller with at least two thought-provoking topics, which I’ll get to in a moment. The movie is based on a BBC miniseries I saw a few years back and liked a lot. The series is available on DVD, and watching both it and the American movie it inspired is interesting and instructive. Each has its strengths—the miniseries more time to take a novelistic approach; the movie, slick Hollywood production value and big movie stars. I like the miniseries better, but, to my surprise, the movie was an extremely faithful adaptation. And though the movie has Russell Crowe and Helen Mirren, the miniseries has Kelly Macdonald (one of my very faves) and Billy Nighy.

The story is this: A rising congressman and an investigative journalist get embroiled in a case of seemingly unrelated, brutal murders. The two are old friends and more recent frenemies (yes, there’s a woman involved). The reporter, Cal McCaffery is assigned to sniff out the story and steps into conspiracies and cover-ups that threaten to shake the nation’s power structures. Revelation upon revelation pile up, ultimately bringing to light the corrupt dealings of major corporations and the federal government, and no one is safe when billions of dollars are at stake

The fast-paced “State of Play” works well as a thriller, but where it really excels (and could have done more with) is when it looks at the dangers of Black Water-like private mercenaries for money program and the demise of newspapers, and ultimately, far more tragically, real reporting. These two things—functioning illiteracy and the corruption the love of money brings—perhaps more than anything else, are destroying our culture and way of life.

Not all, but many of the powerful puppet masters pulling the strings behind the anti-government, anti-tax, and separatist movements have profit motives. Their desire to privatize various functions of government is for profit—for them and their close friends. They claim to serve the same Fundamentalist god many of their foot soldier do, but it’s mammon and only mammon they kneel before. And of all the things that can be corrupted by being driven by the bottom line, the most dangerous by far is war. (I realize most wars are fought over money, but here I’m talking about those who fight them.) Soldiers for hire, accountable only to shareholders, is Orwellian in implication, and it’s already here—and the film claims they’re now being used domestically.

I left the theater feeling heavy and saddened by the death of journalism—obviously something I’ve been thinking about long before I saw the movie (which barely touches on it). Every week brings news of another daily shutting its doors, of the end of an era, as advertisers pull their advertising dollars from printed news, where journalism in America is dying a not-so-slow death. It’s a true tragedy, one that threatens our democracy as much as anything else. And it’s not just that professional journalism is in ICU, but more so that people are getting their news from crackpot partisan blowhards meant to bolster what they already believe and comedians who go for a laugh above all else, including the truth, but that We The People have stopped reading.

Thomas Jefferson once remarked, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

We are not informed, we are not enlightened because we are not reading. As Mark Twain said, “The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the one you can’t read them.”

Little Miss Sunshines

As I watched the remarkable and resonate “Sunshine Cleaning,” the phrase that kept coming to my mind was “woman’s work.” In our sexist world, where fearful, power-clutching little men do everything from undervalue to actually oppress women (and worse), we have continually been told that certain things are woman’s work. Cleaning, for instance.

“Sunshine Cleaning” is all about woman’s work—and not just in the all-too-obvious way in which it is truly never done, but in that this moving movie about motherlessness and the open, bleeding wounds it causes, was written by a woman, directed by a woman, and features pitch-perfect performances by two talented young women. The work that all these women do is as good as any being done by their male counterparts—and far better in ways only work done by women can be.

Perhaps, moving forward from our shameful sexist past and present, we should, instead of dispensing with the phrase “woman’s work,” use it in the future not as a designation of certain limited and limiting tasks, but to describe the extraordinary quality femininity brings to all forms of labor and creation.

“Sunshine Cleaning,” which might help us take a step toward that end, is the story of Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams), who finds herself a single mother attempting to support her son Oscar (Jason Spevack) and her unreliable sister Norah (Emily Blunt) while working a mundane job as a maid. Once the head cheerleader in school with plenty of prospects, Rose now has little to show for her years, and while she still sees the former lead football player (Steve Zahn), it is little more than a despondent affair. When Oscar is expelled from public school, Rose takes a job as a bio-hazard crime-scene cleaner to help pay for a private education and brings Norah on to help in her steadily growing business. As the sisters work to clean up the messes left behind by the chaotic lives of others, they must learn to reconcile their own differences and overcome a troubled past if they hope to prosper in their newfound venture.

Though the film is so textured, and has many, many themes, I keep coming back to motherlessness, and see it as not just the emptiness so profoundly felt at the core of the film, but of our time, as well.

I happen to be reading Thomas Dumm’s “Loneliness as a Way of Life” right now, which heightened my experience of “Sunshine Cleaning,” for in using Cordelia and King Lear to explain the current culture of loneliness, he says, “We live in the matrix of the missing mother, in the paradoxical context of no context, in the open world of storms into which we moderns have been cast.”

Perhaps the mother we’re missing most is the one we most need. The loss of the feminine face of God, of the mother hen who wants to gather us like her little chicks, of the compassionate womb who can nurture us in the way only the one who gave birth to us can, causes us far more despair and loneliness and anxiety than we can even fathom.

The film uses an extremely simple, but effective device with a CB radio in which a couple of characters use it to speak into the void—into emptiness, motherlessness, into Job’s whirlwind of isolation and loneliness.

Rose does the woman’s work of cleaning up after others. She cleans up the messes other people make not merely as a maid in rich people’s houses or as a forensic cleaner at crime scenes, but as a woman in life, because it’s generally women who have the strength and grace and will to do so—something deserving of honor not derision. Mostly, Rose is cleaning up the mess her own mother made—mothering herself, her little sister, her young son, and even, to some extent, her own father (a well-intentioned, but often unreliable, mostly lost man played by the extraordinary Alan Arkin).

“Sunshine Cleaning” is a chick flick, not in the normal Hollywood sense when women are attempting to find something ultimately only men can give them, but in the very best sense—one in which a film written and directed by women features women in the strength and vulnerability and beauty and complexity of womanhood. It’s a film only women could make, but one which both men and women should see as soon as they possibly can.

Reading in the Time of Technology

As I write this, I’m seated in my library surrounded by some of my most intimate and long-term companions—thousands of them.

Books are some of the best friends and truest counselors I’ve ever had. They ease my existential anxieties, providing comfort and care. As C. S. Lewis said, “We read to know we’re not alone.” It’s within books that I’m able to get inside the hearts and minds of others, to share life’s journey with them, to be encouraged by the similarities of our struggles, failures, and triumphs.

I have journeyed across the world, vicariously lived a thousand interesting lives—all without ever doing more than turning the page. As Mary Schmich said, “Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.” But it’s not just that books transport me across the wide world, but that they take me deep into the hidden heart of another human being. “Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own,” is how Charles Scribner, Jr., says the same thing.

Reading teaches compassion. There is no better way to feel what another feels than to read yourself inside his or her heart and mind. Through reading I have come to appreciate and respect the journey of others no matter how different from my own.

Reading is the truest education—and that of head and heart. I have learned far more outside the classroom than in. The best thing school, especially college, does for us is to teach us how to learn—how to think and how to read. A good education is one that makes us students for life. As Thomas Carlyle said, “What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us.”

Reading has changed my life more thoroughly, more profoundly, than anything else save love. And it’s not just me. Books have changed the world.

Now, the world is changing books and reading.

The reasons we read, the reasons we write words and string them together to be read will never change, but the ways in which we read and what is called a book is undergoing a sea change.

What is a book? What is reading?

Many of the books I “read” are actually read to me by professionals. Rarely am I without my ipod and the thousands of unabridged audio books it and Audible.com give me access to.

I realize most people view the ipod as a portable music and movie device, but it’s as a book that it really excels. Thanks to Apple and Audible I’m able to read hundreds more books each year than I would otherwise—listening to them while I drive, work, workout, lie in bed sleeplessly.

The ipod revolutionized the way I read books.

Then, along came Kindle.

Amazon.com’s upgraded ebook reader is amazing.

The versatile devise offers a highly readable display in the size of a paperback, the ability to store and search hundreds of manuscripts, and look up words in an onboard dictionary, on the web, or through Wikipedia. Its free wireless connection to the Amazon Kindle store gives readers access to some 250,000 books (as well as magazines and newspapers)—each able to be downloaded directly to the unit in about sixty seconds.

The Kindle 2—the only Kindle I have experience with—has 2 gigabytes of memory, enough to store more than 1500 books, and has a very powerful built-in battery. The new Kindle lasts four to five days with the wi-fi feature on and up to two weeks with it off. There’s also a very cool new feature that allows you to synch your reading among other Kindles and other mobile devices—meaning you could read 50 pages of my new novel, “Double Exposure” this September, shut off the device, and when you open the Kindle application on your phone later, it will start you on page 50. (Of course, I’m hoping you won’t be able to stop on any page save the last!)

The new Kindle’s “text-to-speech” feature has generated some controversy as authors and publishers fear it will hurt audio book sales, but, trust me, the robotic voice of the computer-generated “reader” coming out of the tiny speakers on the back of the device will not, cannot replace the perfection that is Will Patton reading James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels.

My favorite book to read is a handsomely produced hardback, but it’d be foolish to limit my reading experiences to just that.

I live in the rural South, in a small town with no bookstore. Audible.com gives me nearly instant access to thousands of audio books and the Kindle gives me nearly instant access to hundreds of thousands of ebooks. But even if I lived next door to a bookstore, I’d still want these new form books on my ipod and Kindle to be part of my library.

If reading isn’t just entertaining or informational, but transformational, why wouldn’t I read any and every way I can—hardbacks, paperbacks, audio books, ebooks?

The printed book is perfection—the printing press the greatest technological invention of all time—and nothing will ever replace it, but other types of books have their place, which with all the technological advances, of the web, of audio and ebooks, means we’re living in the midst of a reading revolution.