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Love and the uncanny

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, poetry, Uncategorized on April 4, 2007| 2 Comments »

Formal verse has been out of fashion since before I was born. There are strong reasons for this trend, but I think that anyone with an ear for language has to regret it at times. For all its limitations, there’s no genre like formal verse for teaching you about writing.

The switch to free verse was part of the modernist movement in the arts. However, in English poetry, the switch to modernism was even more urgent than in most of the arts. English is just not a very good language for rhymes. For instance, when you think of it, centuries of English verse have been shaped by the lack of good rhymes for “love.” If you eliminate false rhymes like “cove” and “prove,” and ones of limited use like “gov,” all you are with are “above,” “dove,” “glove” and “of” — hardly a vocabulary to inspire. Yet the same is true of dozens of other common rhymes.

Some early twentieth century poets did their best by using more enjambment (letting the sense spill over the end of the line) and half rhymes like “lave” and “love,” but you can’t blame poets for finally losing their patience and giving up the whole idea of rhyme. It was a reaction like that of the German designers who gave up black letter and upper case alphabets in favor of using entirely lower case letters.

And, just as with the designers, you can’t hold poets responsible for the abuses of their revolutionary ideas in later generations. It’s not the modernists’ fault that anyone who writes in short lines can call themselves a poet today, any more than designers are at fault because trendoids today write their names in lower case without understanding why.

Paul Zimmer, the fantasy writer and Bay Area poet, used to suggest that another reason for the change was that, around the turn of the twentieth century, people stopped listening to poetry. The rhythms and rhyme of formal poetry work best when spoken, and hearing them when you read is a skill that you have to develop. So if most of your audience are going to read your verse, not hear it, why bother with what they aren’t going to notice anyway?

Paul’s answer was to read his work at every opportunity, so that his audience would notice. And I, for one, am grateful that he did, because listening to a expert poetry reader like Paul was not only a pleasure but a a lesson in how powerfully regularly structured language can play on your emotions.

However, I think there’s an even more basic reason: writing thrives on the challenge of technical restrictions. Faced with the problems like the lack of rhymes for “love” poets have two choices. One is to stretch themselves to work with the limitations, by making the standard set of rhymes unobtrusive. The second is to strain to find ways around the narrowness of choice — for instance, by using multi-syllable rhymes like “get rid of” and “mid-love.” Either way, it’s good artistic discipline.

I have nothing against free verse, especially when it becomes a way to explore an alternate rhythm like the alliteration of Old English poems or the structural repetition of the psalms. I’ve written more than my share of it, too. Still, every now and then I like to try my hand at formal verse, just for the discipline.

For instance, here is a sonnet I wrote many years ago, trying to recapture and express the emotions of a crush I had in elementary school. I call it “Love and the Uncanny”:

You trouble me with hints of the uncanny —
Like depths of silence where somebody waits,
Like houses flexing every beam and cranny,
Perturbing me with omens and strange fates.
I sense you now, just at the edge of eyes,
Like scurryings through leaves beneath my feet,
Like hunts that bay above me in the skies,
Like lightning just before it unrolls in a sheet.
Like wolves’ wild wailing, drawing down the moon,
Like presences that walk behind the trees —
Around midnight half-seen, half-guessed by noon,
You trail the hush and grace of mysteries,
And all that thrills with awe, awaking fear,
Must pale and fade when ghosts of you appear.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the readers to decide whether in the end I am expressing an emotion about a person or talking about the effect of poetry. Really, poetry is an example of the uncanny, although generally a benign one. And that’s an effect that formal verse generally achieves more easily than free verse.

As for my exercise, I admit that some parts of it have a Shakespearean echo, especially the last two lines. But no one in the last four centuries has written a sonnet in English without thinking of Shakespeare in some way.

Anyway, I’m not writing to claim original artistic merit, but to sharpen my writing skills. A sonnet is one of the most challenging forms in English, and if I can write a sonnet that is even borderline respectable, I’m convinced, then all my writing will be better for the practice — even writing in forms as far away from poetry as an online article.

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Time-travel by paddlewheeler

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, history, Personal, Uncategorized on April 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »

On Saturday evening, I went time-travelling. Not through Dungeons and Dragons or the Society for Creative Anachronism, although I’ve done both in my time. Nor did I get a temporal lift, which, despite its name, is not a form of chronic hitchhiking, but a form of cosmetic surgery for those who want to revisit their starry-eyed youth. Instead, this jaunt was up the Fraser River by paddlewheeler to the annual Candlelight Tour of Fort Langley, where historical re-enactors create an illusion of time-travelling to 1858 and the night before the declaration of the Crown Colony of British Columbia through series of vignettes around the fort.

In keeping with the illusion, we took the paddlewheeler The Native upriver from New Westminster. In the days that we were travelling to, paddlewheelers were the main form of transport through the largely roadless interior. These paddlewheelers were not the grandly appointed queens of the Mississippi, but smaller, shallower-draft vessels built for work, with few cabins and a mixture of passengers and livestock as often as not. Originally built as a yacht and just refurbished, The Native is more luxurious than the boats it is modelled on, with amenities that include a kitchen and washroom and comfortable seating for maybe fifty passengers.

Tens of thousands pass over the Fraser River everyday. Thousands more drive along each bank. However, if they haven’t been on the river, they probably don’t know how much of a working river it is. The Fraser is not one of those picturesque rivers surrounded by cobblestoned walks and dockside patios where you can sit under an umbrella and watch recreational boaters zoom by. Recreational boaters do use the Fraser, but they are outnumbered by the tugs and the barges pulling containers. Many channels and shores are floating banks for the forest companies, and the shore is crammed with heavy industry. The canneries that lined its shores for much of the last century are long gone, but in the rotting pylons and shorings that litter the shore, you could still read their history.

Hearing that history, and watching the industry gradually recede as we passed upriver, I could almost believe that we were moving back through time, safely ensonced in a cabin where we could eat and drink the afternoon away while looking for herons and eagles out the window.

Arriving at Fort Langley, we found the gateway to the dock locked, so the paddlewheeler reversed itself for a hundred yards and tied up at the rowing club dock – a flimsy ramshackled built on two logs that was probably much closer to the spirit of 1858 than our original mooring.

In previous years, the tour started at sunset. The conceit was that visitors could go back in time to watch, but could not interact with the inhabitants of 1858 in any way. Both the dark and the conceit added greatly to the atmosphere, but this year both were gone. Daylight saving time came earlier this year, and, to compensate, the tour was more interactive, with the re-enactors talking to the guests and even dragging them into a barn dance led by a half dozen fiddlers.

Yet even these handicaps could not destroy the gentle fantasy of the evening. Travelling in groups of fifteen with a couple of guides, visitors were met at the entrance to the fort by members of the Royal Engineers, the regiment sent out to construct an infrastructure in the new colony. In 1858, they were the only group capable of keeping order as the Barkerville Gold Rush brought a flood of miners and hangers-on – mostly Americans, who were darkly regarded as the forerunners of an attempt by the United States to take over the territory.

Assured that we were neither unregistered gold miners nor Americans, the Royal Engineers let us in. Inside the fort, we passed from building to building, witnessing such vignettes as a cooper’s apprentice arguing with his mother about travelling to the gold fields, and a blacksmith teaching an apprentice to make nails. We heard a boat-builder who doubled as the fort’s schoolmaster talking about tomorrow’s proclamation of the new colony, and, at The Big House, the Chief Factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company – formerly the chief official in the region – announce his resignation and express his appreciation of our work as his underlings. In a warehouse, we heard pre-adolescent girls of the period talking about the men they admired and their prospects for husbands, while nearby in a parlor, whose out-of-tune piano had been carried upriver by canoe, mothers talked about the lack of cultural prospects at the fort. In the center of the fort, newly arrived voyageurs gossiped and grumbled, while, outside the fort, good time girls from San Francisco and a disreputable miner in a slouched hat talked about their plans.

The tour took an hour and a half, but all too soon we were back in the world of flash cameras and cell phones (both had been banned on the tour). We descended the rickety – and railess – gangway to the yacht club dock, and boarded the paddle-wheeler for desert, more wine, and the trip back to New Westminster.

Despite the lights on either side of the river, the return trip was dark. The stark ugliness of the industrial sites was made mysterious, and around us the river swirled like black oil. Inside the main cabin, pop hits of the last forty years were playing, and a few people were dancing.

Most of us were content to watch and talk, but one couple in their sixties danced to almost every tune. They would have been young in the 1960s when the earliest of the tunes first came out, and every now and then you could see from a smile or a dance move how they must have looked forty years ago when they first danced to them. I suppose, in their way, they were time-travelling, too.

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The mad monk

Posted in Bruce Byfield, friendship, Personal, reunion, Uncategorized on March 28, 2007| Leave a Comment »

If friendship went by logic, then I would hate Brother Charles. Where he is Quebecois, I am le maudit anglais. He sounds like a Boston Brahmin, while I come from a long line of dissenting ministers and trade unionists on one side and small tradesmen and farmers on the other. While he writes books on the history of rum and the papacy, my publications are articles that are here today and gone tomorrow. Worst of all he’s not only a political and social conservative while I am decidedly leftist, but he’s an ordained monk and Catholic apologist to my Protestant upbringing and adult agnosticism. By rights, we shouldn’t be able to tolerate each other in the same room without shouting. Yet, despite everything, we remain friends over the distance and the years.

Part of the reason is Charles’ combination of innocence and charm. He seems to assume — apparently with never a doubt — that everybody he meets will be enchanted by his friendliness and slightly old-fashioned glibness — and, as a result, everybody is. Time and time again, I’ve seen him draw out people from whom I’d be lucky to get a non-committal grunt. Another large reason is that he is one of the half dozen best-read people I’ve met, and can talk knowledgably and engagingly on dozens of topics.

But the main reason is that Charles is an eccentric, and in my experience that always trumps politics and beliefs. Since he’s an original, I can almost forgive him for being an imperialist running dog lackey.

I first noticed the mad monk at a Mythopoeic Conference, the annual academic conference devoted to Tolkien and other members of his circle. He had some of the better material at the roundrobin bardic circles run by Paul Zimmer, and knew how to deliver it, too. He later made himself conspicious by constructing a food sculpture and parading it around the tables during a lull in the banquet. We had a mutual friend in Paul, but, even without that connection, he was offbeat enough that we would have hooked up sooner or later.

Over the years, we’ve learned that visits with Charles are always as unlikely as our first encounters. Since he’s a monk, he can’t make women part of his holidays except in the most fraternal way — but wine and song always are, and who knows what else besides.

At another Mythopoeic, we joined forces to give long-suffering children’s writer Sherwood Smith a history as an international truffle smuggler, with a heroic pig as a sidekick, just because we thought her daughter deserved a mother with an adventurous youth. I remember we serenaded Sherwood in the hotel lobby with a tale of her adventures set to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd.” But maybe you had to be there.

Another time, Charles visited Trish and I in Vancouver. I still remember trailing behind him through Vancouver’s more-radical-than-thou east end with him in full morning dress and top hat on way to a folk concert. He affected a lordly disdain for the catcalls of the locals about his costume to encourage them; we shuffled behind and hoped we were unnoticed as we almost doubled over laughing.

He was in morning dress because, with his belief in the mystical power of monarchs, he had cajoled the Monarchist League of Canada into letting him be aide-de-camp to the exiled king of Rwuanda for a few days while his majesty raised money to stop the genocide in his country. Inevitably, this escapade drew us in, and we staggered out to the airport at 3AM so that Charles could greet the king as he came through customs. The king, a tall thin African who apparently lived with his secretary in a small apartment in Paris, was more than a little bemused to get royal treatment for once, and kept looking at Charles as though he couldn’t quite believe him. When we got to the Bayshore Hotel, the entire staff turned out in the lobby to greet the king while we watched our lives get a little surrealer.

That was the same visit where Charles dragged us to a performance of “Ain’t Misbehaving,” a Fats Waller revue before we had time to eat after work. At the time, few restaurants in Vancouver were open after midnight on a Monday, and, in our half-starved state, we must have reached the door of a dozen eateries just in time to see the Closed sign flipped over. We finally found a fabulous northern Chinese hot pot restaurant.

That’s another key to Charles: luck seems to attend him in the little things. Left to ourselves, we probably would given up and bought chocolate bars at a corner store, just in time to witness a holdup.

For a while, we went through a period where our main contact was our annual Christmas cards: Charles’ inevitably religious and usually depicting the Virgin Mary, and ours a joke one with “Season’s Greeting” crossed out and replaced by “Season’s Gratings” and a baggie of cheese parings.

But, last summer, he descended upon us again, and our lives became tipsy again for a couple of days. One night, we watched him charm first the waitress and then the manager of Rasputin’s, both of whom swore that he should be a standup comedian (he already had been). The next night, he used his club’s reciprocal dining privileges to treat us to dinner at the Vancouver Club, where even the formal waiters were no match for his aimiable chatter. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we would have preferred an ethnic restaurant that was more casual and had better food, although the way I discarded my shoes for sandals and shucked my tie before we went on to a Celtic Night at a local pub probably tipped him off. But the conversation was the point, and, when we dropped him at the hotel room he was sharing with his monastery’s prior, he gave us a copy of his encylopedic history of the papacy. The next day, he was scheduled to go to Victoria to give a copy of his book the lieutenant-governor of the province, so we were in select company.

Who knows when I’ll see Charles again? But, when I do, I can be assured that our conversation and relationship will pick up exactly where it left off, and, for a few days, my life will become stranger and more exausting.

It’s people like Charles who shatter my incipient misanthropy after experiences like trying to get in touch with my high school friends after my reunion. Unlike them, people like Charles know what friendship is about — and, for that, I can forgive even starry-eyed conservatism.

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Exercise room cultures

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, Personal, Uncategorized on March 25, 2007| 1 Comment »

In the past few weeks, my increasingly creaky knees have forced me to replace much of my running with an exercise bike. Since our townhouse doesn’t have room for a bike, the change means jogging over to the recreation center about half a mile away. More importantly, it means that exercise, which for years been solitary and meditative for me is now a public activity, a fact emphasized by all the mirrors placed on the wall in an effort to disguise how crowded and dingy the exercise room actually is. I’m not comfortable with the change yet, but it has allowed me to observe the two main approaches to exercise.

No matter what time of day I go to the exercise room, most of its inhabitants are one of two kinds of people: bodybuilders and aerobic trainers. The bodybuilders are mostly teenage boys or men in their early twenties, with a scattering of middle-aged men. The aerobic trainers include women of any age and middle-aged and elderly men — more or less everyone else.

The bodybuilders know that the exercise room is meant for them, and the number of weight machines compared to the bicycles and treadmills reinforces the idea. They hang around in the aisle, so you have to be arrogant to push through them, and they don’t put their weights away. Worst, few of them ever wipe the equipment after using it — a habit that makes everyone else grimace in disgust.

The bodybuilders aren’t in the room to exercise, although occasionally some will do a few reps with too many weights for a sensible program. They’re there to talk sports, and to make sure everyone is aware of exactly what weights they are working with by talking as loudly as possible about their progress. When they actually start lifting, they sound like a class of actors warming up with basic emoting, grunting and yelling as if they are in pain. If using loose weights, they are apt to let them clatter to the floor — ignoring the signs requesting that they don’t — with grimaces and exclamations of pain (some of which turn real, as the weights bounce on to their feet).

The reps finished, the bodybuilders turn to their real purposes. For a few, especially the older ones, that purpose is striking a brooding pose on the bench, often with loose weights on the floor, looking like each of them is imagining himself to be Conan the Barbarian in melancholy contemplation of his sword and the mayhem it is about to cause. This mayhem inevitably involves a half dozen reps on another weight machine before they strike their favorite poses again.

However, for most of them, the real purpose is preening in front of the mirror. If you’re a woman and you don’t think that some men enjoy seeing themselves in a mirror, then the bodybuilders will be a revelation to you. Making muscles, strutting up and down with rolledup sleeves while coyly glancing sideways at their reflections, they look more like adolescent girls who have just discovered their sexuality more than the macho strongmen they seem to be imagining. Occasionally, one or two will compare muscles, a process that inevitably turns into a wrestling match in which the goal is for one bodybuilder to get the other in a headlock.

By now, you should have guessed that I am using the word “bodybuilder” facetiously. Once or twice, true bodybuilders have stopped by, and they have all the quiet dedication of any other athlete.

But what I enjoy about the usual run of so-called bodybuilders, with their self-assurance and all their lordly ignoring of everyone else, is the fact that they never notice that it’s the aerobic exercisers who, stepping around the bodybuilders — in women’s case with a hint of nervousness — who are doing the serious exercise. They do long, hard slogs on the treadmills and stair climbers or low weight, high rep routines on the weight machines. Many of them cool off with calisthenics afterwards. They’re in the room long after the bodybuilders have clustered around the TV mounted near the ceiling that always seemed tuned to a hockey game, or gone home. And, unlike the bodybuilders, by the time they’re finished, they need their towels to wipe themselves down afterwards. Yet I doubt that the bodybuilders have ever noticed that the people whom they dismiss have a better claim to being hardbodies then they do.

I still miss the quiet contemplation of solo exercise. But I’m thinking the amusement value of comparing the toughness of a tiny Asian woman going about her exercise routine to the slackness of the steroid-addled bodybuilders who get in her way might almost compensate.

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The eclipse of the reunion

Posted in Bruce Byfield, friendship, high school, Personal, reunion, Uncategorized on March 24, 2007| 1 Comment »

“Days when we lost it laughing,
One thing was kind of clear,
Whatever it was you’re looking for,
You wouldn’t start from here.”
– OysterBand

I couldn’t wait to leave high school. It wasn’t unpleasant; it just lasted about two years too long. Come graduation, I bolted. I avoided the university that most of my classmates attended, and, within two years, I left my home city, coming back only to visit family. But last year, I started wondering whether I’d missed anything. When my class reunion arrived in October 2006, I decided on whim to go.

That’s one mistake I won’t be making again.

Like high school itself, the reunion wasn’t unpleasant. Contrary to my brother’s predictions, the event wasn’t full of people boasting of accomplishments and children — just people out for a good time. I was greeted warmly by several women who had been in my class all through school, many of them miraculously unaltered since their teen years — at least to my eye — and by men whose younger selves had been close enough to me that they still make guest appearances in the occasional dream.

I revelled in the petty vanity of observing that I was in better shape than most, and the satisfaction of realizing that people who had once secretly intimidated me were now simply tiresome. The adult version of a girl I’d often chattered at in elementary school turned out to have had a similar career path to me, and we spent about half the evening talking, and later split a cab fare. All in all, it turned out to be the most pleasant evening out I’d had in months. For a while, I even managed to believe that I had effortlessly brought my past and present together.

My mistake was thinking that the warmth expressed throughout the evening was anything other than nostalgia mixed with alcohol.

After the reunion, I tried to keep in touch with a dozen people with whom I’d spent time at the reunion. I emailed some of them directly, and others through websites like Classmates and LinkedIn.

Not one of those efforts resulted in a lasting correspondence, let alone a renewal of friendship.

One or two never responded to me. My best friend when we were growing up was uncomfortable with email and gave up the correspondence after a single exchange. A former friend I’d protected against bullies lasted two emails. Several lasted a little longer. One bestirred herself enough to suggest who might have reunion photos, but ignored a LinkedIn invitation. One said she would accept an invitation from her home address, but never did. Still others accepted invitations to LinkedIn, but without comment. Once everybody was sober and back in their daily routines, keeping in touch with somebody who was no longer part of their lives was unimportant to them. Some of them may have planned more of a response, but chose to be too busy.

(I say “chose,” because, when people say they’re too busy, what they mean is that they don’t want to shift from their habits. People who say they are too busy to read, for example, inevitably spend free time they could use to read parked in front of the TV.)

For several months, I did scrape together a correspondence with the woman who’d befriended me at the reunion, but the exchange was ruined by differences in expectations. She thought an email a week made me high maintenance, while I, after a decade among geeks, who consider email slow compared to IRC, thought that rate exceedingly casual. For my part, I was wary about what her exaggerated praise of my writing concealed. She seemed to nurse an idealized image of me that I was too full of human faults ever to match.

For her part — well, I’ll never know, now. Did she worry whether my scattergun friendliness masked deeper feelings? I’m an old-married, so I overlooked such possibilities at the time. All I know is that, faced with problems at work, she chose to be busy. Her emails became full of icy thank-yous, and the correspondence faltered. Finally, in a flash of temper — possibly caught in a lie — she formally closed the connection.

Compared to the trauma I’ve experienced and witnessed, these failures hardly register. I have no shortage of other correspondents, after all. Still, after the last failure, I deleted the emails I’d received and purged my address books. I cancelled my Classmates registration and severed some LinkedIn connections. I started working out daily at the gym. I noticed that the cherry blossoms were adding the first dash of springtime color to the city. In short, I moved on. But the experiences leave my world a colder place, and I regret the wasted time.

Most of all, I regret my quixotic efforts to look back. I should have known that I lost touch with my acquaintances for a reason. The accident of going to the same schools was simply not enough for friendship. Nobody’s to blame for that fact, but it didn’t go away because I ignored it, either.

In the end, for all my good will, my former classmates and I were like planets in eclipse. From a narrow perspective, our shadows might fall on each other, but, fixed in our orbits, we could never actually touch.

That’s why I won’t be going to another reunion. I may change my mind ten years from now, but why should I? I’ve been there, done that, and long ago worn out the T-shirt.

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Writing to Avram

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, friendship, Personal, Uncategorized on March 21, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Writing letters has always been part of my life. It started with a pen pal cousin in the second grade, and continued in high school with long letters about literature to like-minded girls and what at the time I thought was a steamy exchange with a girl I met on holidays in Montana. Later, emails became another form of letters for me, although I still miss the anticipatory thrill of recognizing a friend’s handwriting on an envelope — recognizing someone’s email address just isn’t the same. Yet of all my correspondences, the one I value most was my correspondence with the American fantasist Avram Davidson in the last few years of his life.

Avram was one of the best unknown writers of the twentieth century. In books like Adventures in Unhistory and The Enquiries of Dr. Esterhazy, Avram perfected a style of story-telling with a sharp ear for speech patterns, a digressive style, and a dry sense of good-natured humor. Only Avram could get away with starting a story with a page and a half of irrelevancy, or write a page long sentence with six colons and six semi-colons that was perfectly coherent, or carry off a punch line like, “I tell you what the problem is. They let anybody into Eton these days.” The rules other writers learn about what to avoid were challenges to him, and he inevitably overcame each one he faced.

What made Avram’s letters special was that they were had all the characteristics of his stories, but were private. Written, as often as not, on postcards or the backs of old posters, they were almost illegible when handwritten, and not much better when typed because Avram had a cavalier attitude about typos. But because Avram was so observant and so full of a sense of the absurd, his letters were always worth deciphering, down to his inevitable sign off of “Yoursly.” They were the sort of letters that you carried to show to other people, and that made me stretch to produce replies that would entertain him in return.

Was I outclassed? Completely. Avram was not only a genius in the truest sense of that often abused word, but had thirty-five years of experience on me. But he tolerated me, and allowed me to learn.

The letters ranged over all sorts of topics. Avram had lived briefly in Canada in the 1960s, and retained a fondness for it, listening to CBC radio from whatever small town in Washington State he was currently living in. He usually started with some insulting reference to me as a Canuck (I retaliated by calling him a DamnYankee, knowing full well he was a Jew from Yonkers), and would talk about whatever he was currently reading. For a while, we discussed the merits of him moving to New Westminister, where the difference in the Canadian and American dollars at the time would make his small income go further.

Another time, he sent me scurrying to the library (this was pre-Internet) to find whether the First Nations chief Poundmaker had ever been pursued – all so he could mention an imaginary book called In Pursuit of Poundmaker in one story. I was able to tell him that, if you squinted, Poundmaker had, in fact, been pursued at one point. I still get a small sense of ownership when I come across that reference.

But the truth is, Avram’s letters sounded so much like Avram in person that I am not sure whether many topics were raised in conversation or in a letter. Was it in a letter that Avram told me about his one attempt to learn to drive when he lived in Belize – an effort that ended quickly when he looked up from behind the wheel and saw a tapir glaring at him, about to charge, and decided that being a driver wasn’t part of his karma? That he told me why he wouldn’t accept the Grand Master Award from the World Fantasy Convention? That we discussed the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company? That I learned that, even in the 1990s, he wouldn’t ride in a Volkswagon because of the Holocaust? Of his habit of buying writers a drink at science fiction conventions when their first novel was published? Of his pride in his son Ethan, who was proving a playwright? I could probably find out if I were to rummage through his letters. But the point is that it doesn’t matter. Whether in person or in letters, Avram was an entertainer.

Remember the princess in Rumpelstiltskin, condemned to spin straw into gold? If Avram had been the princess, and the goal a story, Avram wouldn’t have needed the title character’s help. Avram could spin a story out of anything.

One of my strongest memories of him is visiting him at the veteran’s home in Bremerton one Memorial Day, and watching him hold court surrounded by a dozen guests around a table on the lawn long after everyone else had left or gone inside. All of us were spellbound, and we listened to him for hours.

Our correspondence ended in 1993, when Avram was found dead in his basement apartment in Bremerton (by mutual agreement, he’d moved out of the veteran’s home, being too eccentric for the bureaucrats to handle). A memorial service was held in Gasworks Park in Seattle. Preserving some of the industrial equipment that was originally on the site, the location was one that I’m sure Avram would have appreciated for its offbeat whimsy.

What I learned from Avram was the same as you learn from any original writer – just how good a story can be, and how often we settle for something less because it tells us comforting lies, or just because it is adequate.

But every writer who delivers that lesson does so differently. Avram’s way was to suggest that everybody, without exception, is at least slightly eccentric. Most of us, Avram proposes (and he wouldn’t exclude himself) are downright dotty, and the only thing to do is sit back and enjoy the entertainment. I’m too idealistic to share that worldview for long, but, with Avram as a guide, I still enjoy exploring it.

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