This was a benefit for Carnegie Hall’s children’s music series so you could pay $150 or $300 or a mere $8. We paid eight. Great. We had pretty bad seats, but it was a great hootenanny. Dan Zanes came out in a very, very bright red suit and sang “The Wonder Wheel,” his new old song about riding the Coney Island Ferris Wheel with all his friends.
I love Dan Zanes and I love his music—the new stuff that sounds old and the old stuff that he reminds you of: hearing him and Natalie Merchant sing “You take the high road and I’ll take the low road” was moving and fun and beautiful all at once. And when Barbara Brousal—who has every bit as much star power as Natalie Merchant—came out to sing her gorgeous “Malti,” she brought the house down.
This was the third time my older daughter and I have seen Dan Zanes; the second for my husband, too. The formula is so winning and great: lots of homespun special guests come out in quick succession to sing a mix of new and old folk songs on old-time instruments. We were sitting with a bunch of eleven year-old boys who whooped and hollered when their friend made his Carnegie Hall debut, playing trumpet alongside his father and Anna Zanes. Father Goose comes out toward the end and leads everyone in his Jamaican dub-style medley of nursery rhymes and the band slowly marches off-stage in a waltz through the crowd.
I’m not a good singer but I love to sing. When I was little, the other kids at summer camp let me sing only because I learned all the lyrics. So, out of tune, I could carry the other campers through the tougher verses. Dan Zanes’ happy open attitude about music—everybody sing along, everybody dance—helps keep me singing with my girls now. We sing all the time.
This morning, my daughter said she wished she could go back and be a baby again but this time she would try to remember it. She is jealous of the infant and feels like things would be better if she could remember how I used to tend to her as I now tend to the baby. So we talked about how no one remembers being a baby.
“Except you, Mama.”
No, I don’t remember being a baby.
“But you remember all the songs, Mama. All of them.”
Monday, November 13, 2006
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Opera for All
I was interested & excited to learn about recent efforts by the Metropolitan Opera and CityOpera to bring younger audiences to the opera. I like opera—love it—but am not an aficionado. Friends and I used to pile into a Honda and make the drive from New Haven to the Met a couple times a year for $25 nosebleed seats. I dragged my husband to Eugene Onegin in Indianapolis and an amazing production of Dialogue of the Carmelites at Glimmerglass.
Still, I was shocked and thrilled to catch the ad in the Times for CityOpera’s Opera For All performance of Carmen. All seats in the house $25. I got on-line. We got two seats in row D for $50. (Not even $59.95 with "handling fees.") Row D. Amazing. And for Carmen--not just any opera but the opera—happy and sad, dancing and singing, lots of red satin. No elephants, I know, but still, what’s not to like?
In any case, I have two recordings of Carmen on my iPod and listened to them constantly. Then, last Friday, we went to Carmen. Even with the lasting, constant exhaustion of mothering two children under four, the first two acts just flew by. I loved it. My fatigue caught up with me in act three, but still, the sparkles! the fluttering petals! the singing children! Toreadore! En garde!
For all the operas I have attended, for all the Sundays of my girlhood spent with “Sunday Afternoon at the Met” playing in the background on the radio, for the “Bravo Opera!” sticker on my little red wagon, for all the times I saw my father poring over a libretto, this is the very first time I remember just truly loving it, not mostly loving it while sometimes wondering if I had the sophistication to muscle through the performance.
Opera for all indeed. Bravo opera.
Still, I was shocked and thrilled to catch the ad in the Times for CityOpera’s Opera For All performance of Carmen. All seats in the house $25. I got on-line. We got two seats in row D for $50. (Not even $59.95 with "handling fees.") Row D. Amazing. And for Carmen--not just any opera but the opera—happy and sad, dancing and singing, lots of red satin. No elephants, I know, but still, what’s not to like?
In any case, I have two recordings of Carmen on my iPod and listened to them constantly. Then, last Friday, we went to Carmen. Even with the lasting, constant exhaustion of mothering two children under four, the first two acts just flew by. I loved it. My fatigue caught up with me in act three, but still, the sparkles! the fluttering petals! the singing children! Toreadore! En garde!
For all the operas I have attended, for all the Sundays of my girlhood spent with “Sunday Afternoon at the Met” playing in the background on the radio, for the “Bravo Opera!” sticker on my little red wagon, for all the times I saw my father poring over a libretto, this is the very first time I remember just truly loving it, not mostly loving it while sometimes wondering if I had the sophistication to muscle through the performance.
Opera for all indeed. Bravo opera.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
More on Sideshow
Largehearted Boy has a great Sidney Thompson post: a soundtrack--one song per story in Sideshow. It's a fun idea and a nice way to look again at that LBC-nominated collection.
Election Day Shorts
The day began at 6:00. I got all my ducks in a row--formula mixed, some of it stirred into rice cereal flakes, coffee made, yogurt smoothie poured into sippy cup, showered. So, when the girls awoke at 7 (bless them for sleeping!), I was ready to go.
By 8:30, one was at preschool, the other, at daycare, and I was voting. #82 in my little precinct which, I was told was a lot for so early in the morning. Good. I want lots and lots of people to vote. Good.
I promptly turned my ankle-badly--on the uneven walk, nervously remembering previous election days. Not good.
CNN had some crazy "Democracy Bus" out in front of the TimeWarner building: cameras, a grafitti board, etc. Goofy but festive, even at 9:30 in the morning. It was very festive indeed when I was limping home at 3:30. Strange.
Then, in Starbucks, there was Leslie Stahl, getting her mochachino or whatever she drinks and a Ray Charles cd. Full make-up, black ballerina flats, and New York Times. Seeing her always cheers me somehow: it's nice to think that these television journalists spend at least some time sitting in Starbucks reading the paper and thinking about their stories. That seemed good and exciting. As I stood next to her, I wanted so badly to say something, but what? That seemed good, too.
So here I sit, exhausted and watching the results.
I am amused and occasionally engrossed by politics but I pray for peace. I hope for peace.
By 8:30, one was at preschool, the other, at daycare, and I was voting. #82 in my little precinct which, I was told was a lot for so early in the morning. Good. I want lots and lots of people to vote. Good.
I promptly turned my ankle-badly--on the uneven walk, nervously remembering previous election days. Not good.
CNN had some crazy "Democracy Bus" out in front of the TimeWarner building: cameras, a grafitti board, etc. Goofy but festive, even at 9:30 in the morning. It was very festive indeed when I was limping home at 3:30. Strange.
Then, in Starbucks, there was Leslie Stahl, getting her mochachino or whatever she drinks and a Ray Charles cd. Full make-up, black ballerina flats, and New York Times. Seeing her always cheers me somehow: it's nice to think that these television journalists spend at least some time sitting in Starbucks reading the paper and thinking about their stories. That seemed good and exciting. As I stood next to her, I wanted so badly to say something, but what? That seemed good, too.
So here I sit, exhausted and watching the results.
I am amused and occasionally engrossed by politics but I pray for peace. I hope for peace.
Monday, November 06, 2006
Firmin week at the LBC
This quarter’s Read This! pick from the LitBlog Co-op is Firmin by Sam Savage. I really can recommend that you read it: if you’re reading this, if you like reading enough that you read lit-blogs, you’ll likely be charmed, as I was, by this fable about a rat whose born into a Boston bookstore and learns to read.
Really.
The book is beautiful and full of charming little pen-and-ink illustrations. Hungry, Firmin gnaws on paper and then surprises himself by learning to read. As he works himself through the books by the great ones, the gap between his life and the glamour of the lives he reads about grows ever more painful and poignant.
There is some discussion at the site about whether or not Firmin is really a rat—eavesdrop or chime in as you wish. (I think he’s a rat…).
I was inspired to contribute my own reminiscence of Boston area bookstores.
Really.
The book is beautiful and full of charming little pen-and-ink illustrations. Hungry, Firmin gnaws on paper and then surprises himself by learning to read. As he works himself through the books by the great ones, the gap between his life and the glamour of the lives he reads about grows ever more painful and poignant.
There is some discussion at the site about whether or not Firmin is really a rat—eavesdrop or chime in as you wish. (I think he’s a rat…).
I was inspired to contribute my own reminiscence of Boston area bookstores.
Friday, November 03, 2006
Blogging Woolf
I’m back to working on Woolf—the break of a month or so really feels longer than it has been because, well, the book is done. Woolf has been on my mind 24/7 for years and years and now, even as I return to her, I can go for hours at a time without the nagging buzz of "must finish Woolf manuscript" in the background. Someone described this as a Woolfish blog and that seems about right to me. It’s not a Woolf blog and it won’t be. Still, I find myself wishing for more Woolf in the blogosphere, wishing for something like the Bronte Blog for Woolf.
When I took over as the bibliographer for the International Virginia Woolf Society, I had hoped to really expand the “Passing Glances” which my predecessor Sally Greene began. (If you search around on the IVWS website, you can find the page. Click on bibliography, then click on one of the earlier years and scroll down….barely worth it, I know…) She asked readers to submit mentions of, allusions to, and debts to Woolf in contemporary culture. Instead of expanding the idea, it died on my watch. Sorry! This idea, I see now, of course, would be ideal blog fodder. Any takers?
Still, there’s been some great Woolf stuff around the blogosphere this month and it feeds my enthusiasm for the return to Woolf. I even found, amazingly, an entry on Woolf and Hakluyt (the subject of one of my chapters) by my old friend Sally! After reading To the Lighthouse, Mark Thwaite has turned to Mrs. Dalloway which he seems to have liked a lot. Ana Maria uses her knowledge of Woolf to help her through Robbe-Grillet: it’s always such a pleasure to read her thinking through her readings and this is a really mart entry about how we approach experimental writing and what it feels like to have a brain abuzz with tons of reading. And, as I mentioned before, A Curious Singularity continues to blog Woolf’s amazing short story “Kew Gardens.” There are lots of bloggers, lots of opinions over there—including a very funny entry from someone who couldn’t even bring him or herself to finish the (very short) story.
My next project will be pretty tightly focused on Mrs. Dalloway. So, as a warm-up, I’m going through David Bradshaw’s notes to the Oxford edition of Mrs. Dalloway. What have I learned? Lots. Among the tidbits, this favorite: early in the novel, Mrs. Dalloway thinks about houses she has visited, about all the parties she’s been to. She lists two famous houses and then “the house with the china cockatoo.” This refers apparently, to the “home of Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, Baronness Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906), an indefatigable philanthropist, friend of Charles Dickens, the Duke of Wellington, and a host of other Victorian notables…[At her London home,].a white china cockatoo ‘hung “on a level with the top of a passing omnibus” on a circular perch in the big bay window…Like the Royal Standard at Buckingham Palace, the bird’s purpose was to indicate that its owner was in residence’” (Bradshaw, quoting Diana Orton, Made of Gold).
Now, that is rich. “Like the Royal Standard.” Imagine thinking that about yourself! “What I really need is something like the Royal Standard!” And then, that degree of vanity reached, coming to the next thought, “I know, we’ll put the white china cockatoo in the bay window upstairs!”
When I took over as the bibliographer for the International Virginia Woolf Society, I had hoped to really expand the “Passing Glances” which my predecessor Sally Greene began. (If you search around on the IVWS website, you can find the page. Click on bibliography, then click on one of the earlier years and scroll down….barely worth it, I know…) She asked readers to submit mentions of, allusions to, and debts to Woolf in contemporary culture. Instead of expanding the idea, it died on my watch. Sorry! This idea, I see now, of course, would be ideal blog fodder. Any takers?
Still, there’s been some great Woolf stuff around the blogosphere this month and it feeds my enthusiasm for the return to Woolf. I even found, amazingly, an entry on Woolf and Hakluyt (the subject of one of my chapters) by my old friend Sally! After reading To the Lighthouse, Mark Thwaite has turned to Mrs. Dalloway which he seems to have liked a lot. Ana Maria uses her knowledge of Woolf to help her through Robbe-Grillet: it’s always such a pleasure to read her thinking through her readings and this is a really mart entry about how we approach experimental writing and what it feels like to have a brain abuzz with tons of reading. And, as I mentioned before, A Curious Singularity continues to blog Woolf’s amazing short story “Kew Gardens.” There are lots of bloggers, lots of opinions over there—including a very funny entry from someone who couldn’t even bring him or herself to finish the (very short) story.
My next project will be pretty tightly focused on Mrs. Dalloway. So, as a warm-up, I’m going through David Bradshaw’s notes to the Oxford edition of Mrs. Dalloway. What have I learned? Lots. Among the tidbits, this favorite: early in the novel, Mrs. Dalloway thinks about houses she has visited, about all the parties she’s been to. She lists two famous houses and then “the house with the china cockatoo.” This refers apparently, to the “home of Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, Baronness Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906), an indefatigable philanthropist, friend of Charles Dickens, the Duke of Wellington, and a host of other Victorian notables…[At her London home,].a white china cockatoo ‘hung “on a level with the top of a passing omnibus” on a circular perch in the big bay window…Like the Royal Standard at Buckingham Palace, the bird’s purpose was to indicate that its owner was in residence’” (Bradshaw, quoting Diana Orton, Made of Gold).
Now, that is rich. “Like the Royal Standard.” Imagine thinking that about yourself! “What I really need is something like the Royal Standard!” And then, that degree of vanity reached, coming to the next thought, “I know, we’ll put the white china cockatoo in the bay window upstairs!”
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Birth and Marriage
I’ve just finished a book on birth (for pleasure) and marriage (for work). Neither book is great, but both are interesting for the way they treat subjects about which we are all “experts.” Everyone has lots of ideas about birth, it seems, how it should best be done, who should be present, what it ought to mean (or not) for mother and child. So, Tina Cassidy’s engaging (and surprisingly not-too-political) book, Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born excites all kinds of thoughts, reminiscences, and opinions.
Birth and marriage are interesting. I remember how I used to blush when my mom would say that sex is interesting—usually as a cue, I think, to keep me from running away from an embarrassing conversation. But, of course, sex is. All of these big things are. What makes Cassidy’s book effective is that it’s simply a journalistic history of how we get born: there’s a chapter on C-sections, a discussion of forceps, etc. (She tells the same sorry story that Atul Gawande told in The New Yorker recently of the history of forceps: the inventors kept their tool secret for generations—profiting mightily from their monopoly.) What makes the scholarly book on marriage less successful is that it attempts to put forth an argument about how marriage has or has not changed with reference to a very small handful of novels.
Marriage has changed, I have no doubt, but charting that change needs large samples punctuated by salient in-depth examinations. Novels are obsessed with marriage. In fact, you could argue that the genre flourished through its dependence on a modern idea of romantic, companionate heterosexual coupling. But novels are idiosyncratic, strange, amazing, and individual. This makes them a bad foundation for a sweeping generational argument.
Birth has changed in a different sense, but it has changed nonetheless. The Times review found Cassidy's book gory. I love medical writing and I found it pretty tame. It is, however, overlong and plagued by an irritating tic: each chapter ends with a little scene involving that chapter's topic (say, c-sections) and a coy anticipation of the next (say, the role of the father). So, we get a little perky uptalk along the lines of [I'm making this up--it's not a quotation] "Prepped for her c-section and strapped to a table, the modern mother turns to her husband, who may be green at the gills at the sight of his flayed wife. Who let the husband into the room in the first place?..."
Reading along in both books, my mind continuously wandered off to other birth stories—especially my own—and marriage stories—especially my own. I imagine many, many other readers of these books will have the same response, all of which leads me to feel rather cynical about the books. They gain so much of their interest from anticipating our own interest and expertise in the topic.
I’m having trouble getting at the nub of what I’m trying to say here—what interested and bothered me in both of these books—but it seems like neither one fully got to their point, either. The one, too broad, the other, too narrow, both relying too much on the way that these two huge words, so applicable to all of us (even in our non-participation in the latter), neither sufficiently acknowledging that it's in the wholly personal version, the unique and crazy individual story of one little family's life, that these words take on their weight.
Birth and marriage are interesting. I remember how I used to blush when my mom would say that sex is interesting—usually as a cue, I think, to keep me from running away from an embarrassing conversation. But, of course, sex is. All of these big things are. What makes Cassidy’s book effective is that it’s simply a journalistic history of how we get born: there’s a chapter on C-sections, a discussion of forceps, etc. (She tells the same sorry story that Atul Gawande told in The New Yorker recently of the history of forceps: the inventors kept their tool secret for generations—profiting mightily from their monopoly.) What makes the scholarly book on marriage less successful is that it attempts to put forth an argument about how marriage has or has not changed with reference to a very small handful of novels.
Marriage has changed, I have no doubt, but charting that change needs large samples punctuated by salient in-depth examinations. Novels are obsessed with marriage. In fact, you could argue that the genre flourished through its dependence on a modern idea of romantic, companionate heterosexual coupling. But novels are idiosyncratic, strange, amazing, and individual. This makes them a bad foundation for a sweeping generational argument.
Birth has changed in a different sense, but it has changed nonetheless. The Times review found Cassidy's book gory. I love medical writing and I found it pretty tame. It is, however, overlong and plagued by an irritating tic: each chapter ends with a little scene involving that chapter's topic (say, c-sections) and a coy anticipation of the next (say, the role of the father). So, we get a little perky uptalk along the lines of [I'm making this up--it's not a quotation] "Prepped for her c-section and strapped to a table, the modern mother turns to her husband, who may be green at the gills at the sight of his flayed wife. Who let the husband into the room in the first place?..."
Reading along in both books, my mind continuously wandered off to other birth stories—especially my own—and marriage stories—especially my own. I imagine many, many other readers of these books will have the same response, all of which leads me to feel rather cynical about the books. They gain so much of their interest from anticipating our own interest and expertise in the topic.
I’m having trouble getting at the nub of what I’m trying to say here—what interested and bothered me in both of these books—but it seems like neither one fully got to their point, either. The one, too broad, the other, too narrow, both relying too much on the way that these two huge words, so applicable to all of us (even in our non-participation in the latter), neither sufficiently acknowledging that it's in the wholly personal version, the unique and crazy individual story of one little family's life, that these words take on their weight.
Monday, October 30, 2006
ManBug
It's Manbug week over at the LBC. Boy, it's a weird book and it's compulsively readable. Once I got into it--and I initally just thought, "oh , dear, this isn't going to work,"--it was an unexpected pleasure. It's the story of a love affair between two men, narrated by the one who suffers from some kind of mild Apsberger's syndrome. This, itself, makes him charmingly pedantic about his surroundings. Check it out.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Five Questions
If you’re looking to expand your horizons and your blogrolls, I hope you’ve been visiting John Baker’s Blog and reading through his many, many mini-interviews. You can find my rather terse answers to his five questions here. But it’s worth poking around in the archives for others.
I’ve updated my blogroll here, too. I have gotten so in the habit of reading via bloglines, that I’m slow to add links from here. Still, there are some excellent places to visit over in the right hand column, so do poke around. For all the linking I do to Light Reading, I don’t quite know why it hasn’t appeared over to the right until now. More recent discoveries include Geoffrey Philp’s blog—great for reading about poetry and Caribbean literature, Bookfox--John Fox’s unapologetically literary blog with a great “mix tape” feature (a cluster of paragraphs on the same theme from different authors), Kate’s Book Blog—because everytime I pop over there, I’m glad to have done so, and Pinky’s Paperhaus—which is just a really peppy, smart, postmodern funhouse of a place to visit. And you probably already know this, but You Cried for Night is now reeling and writhing: this AusLitBlog is always worth a visit. (The address is the same but, as Genevieve notes, the title is a little less despairing...)
I’ve updated my blogroll here, too. I have gotten so in the habit of reading via bloglines, that I’m slow to add links from here. Still, there are some excellent places to visit over in the right hand column, so do poke around. For all the linking I do to Light Reading, I don’t quite know why it hasn’t appeared over to the right until now. More recent discoveries include Geoffrey Philp’s blog—great for reading about poetry and Caribbean literature, Bookfox--John Fox’s unapologetically literary blog with a great “mix tape” feature (a cluster of paragraphs on the same theme from different authors), Kate’s Book Blog—because everytime I pop over there, I’m glad to have done so, and Pinky’s Paperhaus—which is just a really peppy, smart, postmodern funhouse of a place to visit. And you probably already know this, but You Cried for Night is now reeling and writhing: this AusLitBlog is always worth a visit. (The address is the same but, as Genevieve notes, the title is a little less despairing...)
LBC Autumn Pick--Firmin
The LBC is doing it again: discussing the three nominees for this quarter, including the wonderful and strange winner, Firmin, a novel about a highly literate rate chewing his way through the contents of a Boston used bookstore.
So, whilst I juggle two adored but tearful babes, hop on over to the LBC and check out the discussion.
Up this week: Sideshow. The author, Sidney Thompson, will be guest blogging today and throughout the week other LBC'ers will be offering up short critiques of individual stories from this eery collection.
So, whilst I juggle two adored but tearful babes, hop on over to the LBC and check out the discussion.
Up this week: Sideshow. The author, Sidney Thompson, will be guest blogging today and throughout the week other LBC'ers will be offering up short critiques of individual stories from this eery collection.
Monday, October 16, 2006
Food, Magical Food: Madhur Jaffrey Edition
Yesterday, cooking up some ground beef (it was a lamb recipe, but we’re on a budget this month after the birthday bacchanal and beef was in the freezer) with tomatoes and peas, I had a real sense of the magic of cooking. It’s a Madhur Jaffrey recipe from her Quick and Easy Indian Cooking: a cookbook that has been utterly dependable for me. The recipes are genuinely easy and I am always amazed to discover, after forty minutes or so, that I have put together something that tastes like Indian food to me.
Her recipes are great the way that Julia Child’s are: she describes clearly and concisely each step of a recipe that is truly alchemical. Patricia Wells writes great recipes, as do the folks from Cook’s magazine, but the food they’re asking you to cook doesn’t metamorphose in front of your eyes. They just help you take a chicken that’s raw and turn it into a cooked one. No small feat, but not magic. Magic is going from butter, flour, and milk to a perfect béchamel.
Jaffrey consistently amazes me. It’s as if she’s working magic through me, so little do I know about Indian cooking, so good does her food taste.
Take the beef recipe. You pulverize a bunch of garlic, ginger, and onions into a finely chopped paste and throw them into a generous bit of heated oil. Already, the kitchen changes. But then, you add two spices (tumeric & cayenne) and two seeds (cumin & cardamom) to the mix. It changes color. There’s suddenly depth to the flavor befitting eight ingredients—but, for all the opening of jars and measuring, it’s not super hard. Then, you add another layer: yogurt (always magical heated, I think) and tomato. Only then do you add the meat, salt, and more spice (garam masala). After twenty minutes, it’s chile, cilantro, lemon, and a whole bunch of frozen peas (a decidely underrated gem, I think). And that’s dinner.
When I was in college, I remember going through the cafeteria line with my friend from Pakistan. We were trying to figure out what was edible that day. She complained that all the meat had an unpleasantly meat-y taste, that she was not used to eating meat that tasted like meat. My friend is one of the smartest people I know. One of her great gifts to me in our youth were little wayside observations like this—suddenly something about American cuisine (haute and low) was clear: we like meat-flavored meat and not everyone does.
I admire Jaffrey’s powers of translation: she helped me make my very ordinary ShopRite 85% lean meat taste less like meat.
I see from Michelle that Jaffrey has a memoir out. I’ll have to add it to my wishlist…
Her recipes are great the way that Julia Child’s are: she describes clearly and concisely each step of a recipe that is truly alchemical. Patricia Wells writes great recipes, as do the folks from Cook’s magazine, but the food they’re asking you to cook doesn’t metamorphose in front of your eyes. They just help you take a chicken that’s raw and turn it into a cooked one. No small feat, but not magic. Magic is going from butter, flour, and milk to a perfect béchamel.
Jaffrey consistently amazes me. It’s as if she’s working magic through me, so little do I know about Indian cooking, so good does her food taste.
Take the beef recipe. You pulverize a bunch of garlic, ginger, and onions into a finely chopped paste and throw them into a generous bit of heated oil. Already, the kitchen changes. But then, you add two spices (tumeric & cayenne) and two seeds (cumin & cardamom) to the mix. It changes color. There’s suddenly depth to the flavor befitting eight ingredients—but, for all the opening of jars and measuring, it’s not super hard. Then, you add another layer: yogurt (always magical heated, I think) and tomato. Only then do you add the meat, salt, and more spice (garam masala). After twenty minutes, it’s chile, cilantro, lemon, and a whole bunch of frozen peas (a decidely underrated gem, I think). And that’s dinner.
When I was in college, I remember going through the cafeteria line with my friend from Pakistan. We were trying to figure out what was edible that day. She complained that all the meat had an unpleasantly meat-y taste, that she was not used to eating meat that tasted like meat. My friend is one of the smartest people I know. One of her great gifts to me in our youth were little wayside observations like this—suddenly something about American cuisine (haute and low) was clear: we like meat-flavored meat and not everyone does.
I admire Jaffrey’s powers of translation: she helped me make my very ordinary ShopRite 85% lean meat taste less like meat.
I see from Michelle that Jaffrey has a memoir out. I’ll have to add it to my wishlist…
R. W. Apple
“I envy the Swedes their social conscience, their gift for design and urban planning and their fish. Especially their fish.”—R. W. “Johnny” Apple
The Times correspondent R. W. Apple died a couple weeks ago, when this blog was slowed by my birthday, my parents’ visit and the orgy of eating that accompanies them. I can’t claim to have noticed his writing on my own—or to be a great follower of his news and political reporting—but, when I learned that he was a Princeton classmate of my father’s and known as “Johnny” Apple, I took notice. My father has some good Johnny Apple legends, and even without Apple’s presence, stories about him have a way of livening up a dinner.
So, as he has been doing more and more food writing over the past few years, we took to comparing favorite stories about him—be that his derring-do in VietNam (where, I am told, his expense reports made as good reading as his journalism) or his account of eating from street vendors in Hong Kong with restaurateur Jean-George Vongerichten. Best of all, I thought, were the accounts that combined both—as in an article about finding good food in a war zone.
When we heard of his death, we talked about his gifts. What made him such a great food writer? His gusto, his generosity, and the sense he imparted in every piece that what you had missed was not just a great meal but a really fun time. But reading him did not excite envy, for, as many of his friends and associates note, he was not secretive about his finds. His willingness to share a tip extended far beyond his cronies at the Times. His references to “my wife, Betsey,” would make for an easily parodied tic if they were not accompanied by such a genuine sense that he had a better time because she was along.
Adam Nagourney has a lovely reminiscence that shares much of what I admire in Apple’s writing and he aptly describes Apple’s gifts. Reading this, listening to some of the audio slideshows, and reading his piece on ten restaurants worth a plane trip give me but a pale sketch of what surely was an amazingly charismatic, big, fun person. Nagourney writes of a dinner in L.A. during the 2000 Democratic Convention:
He goes on to write of Apple’s equal delight in street food and eating home-cooked meals with friends.
I find this, also from the Nagourney piece, heartrending:
The Times correspondent R. W. Apple died a couple weeks ago, when this blog was slowed by my birthday, my parents’ visit and the orgy of eating that accompanies them. I can’t claim to have noticed his writing on my own—or to be a great follower of his news and political reporting—but, when I learned that he was a Princeton classmate of my father’s and known as “Johnny” Apple, I took notice. My father has some good Johnny Apple legends, and even without Apple’s presence, stories about him have a way of livening up a dinner.
So, as he has been doing more and more food writing over the past few years, we took to comparing favorite stories about him—be that his derring-do in VietNam (where, I am told, his expense reports made as good reading as his journalism) or his account of eating from street vendors in Hong Kong with restaurateur Jean-George Vongerichten. Best of all, I thought, were the accounts that combined both—as in an article about finding good food in a war zone.
When we heard of his death, we talked about his gifts. What made him such a great food writer? His gusto, his generosity, and the sense he imparted in every piece that what you had missed was not just a great meal but a really fun time. But reading him did not excite envy, for, as many of his friends and associates note, he was not secretive about his finds. His willingness to share a tip extended far beyond his cronies at the Times. His references to “my wife, Betsey,” would make for an easily parodied tic if they were not accompanied by such a genuine sense that he had a better time because she was along.
Adam Nagourney has a lovely reminiscence that shares much of what I admire in Apple’s writing and he aptly describes Apple’s gifts. Reading this, listening to some of the audio slideshows, and reading his piece on ten restaurants worth a plane trip give me but a pale sketch of what surely was an amazingly charismatic, big, fun person. Nagourney writes of a dinner in L.A. during the 2000 Democratic Convention:
Johnny offered Mr. Puck a challenge — “We are in your hands,” are the words I recall — and thus began a four-hour blur of plates and platters and bottles of wine the likes of which I had never seen before, or since, at a Puck restaurant. Two hours into our bacchanal Mr. Puck proved that he knew his Apple: out from the kitchen came a plate of pig prepared four ways, precisely the kind of unpretentiously rustic and absurdly rich dish that could make Johnny literally rise from his chair and yelp in delight. That’s just what he did, before proceeding to correctly guess the farm in Pennsylvania where Mr. Puck had purchased his pork.
He goes on to write of Apple’s equal delight in street food and eating home-cooked meals with friends.
I find this, also from the Nagourney piece, heartrending:
His very last e-mail message, sent the night before he died, was a response to a Times food writer looking for suggestions on pancake recipes for a magazine feature. “Just very quickly since I don’t have my files here,” Johnny wrote. “1. American pancakes — Overrated, as you say. You might try the Bongo Room, in Wicker Park, north of Chicago. 2. Don’t forget Breton buckwheat crepes. 3. From South Asia (states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in India): they make great dosas.”
Friday, October 13, 2006
The One Book Meme
Fun to read, intimidating to do for all the reasons Ana Maria states, but I get this from an impressive little chain—Ana Maria, who got it from Bud, who got it from James Marcus. Clearly I must play along.
1. One book that changed your life? Anne of Green Gables: I remember coming down to the kitchen and asking, “Mom? What’s a kindred spirit?” I listened to her answer, which filled out the description of Anne’s feelings for her best friend and then declared the obvious: “Anne of Green Gables is my kindred spirit.” But that was the first time I remember finding a friend inside a book.
2. One book that you have read more than once? A Room of One’s Own. I resisted Woolf for years because she was the favorite of my exacting Yankee grandmother. I turned to her at twenty-two just out of a sense that I must and I have never looked back. A Room is my favorite—beautiful, smart, unapologetically feminist, lyrical, intense, funny.
3. One book you would want on a desert island? The Complete Works of Shakespeare. I hate loneliness and boredom. I love writers who seem to create a world, writers who can appear to give you the full palette of human experience. Joyce does this; so does Dickens. Still, for me, there are only two: Woolf and Shakespeare. Shakespeare offers consolation and distraction and I would need both, I think.
4. One book that made you cry? It’s been a long time since I cried from reading a book. The burning stables in Black Beauty are devastating.
5. One book that made you laugh? I laughed out loud a couple times at Michael Martone, last quarter's LBC pick. There are laughs this quarter, too, so stay tuned...
6. One book you wish had been written? A novel by Katherine Mansfield.
7. One book you wish had never been written? That does seem a little mean, but I wasted far too much time on D.H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious. I love Lawrence—and can tolerate him even in the late, hateful Mexican phase—but the fake psychoanalytic stuff is really horrible tripe and doesn’t add anything to the world but meaningless meanness.
8. One book you are reading currently? People I Wanted to Be by Gina Ochsner.
9. One book you have been meaning to read? So, so, so many of these—my whole apartment feels like a giant to-be-read list. I like Bud’s approach to the question and will copy it: On my nightstand is Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, which never quite seems to rise to first spot. But every change of season, I think that perhaps this is the moment to get further than eighty pages into Proust. I would love to read Remembrance of Things Past. Soon.
10. Pass it on: Carolyn because she's funny & doesn't pull punches.
1. One book that changed your life? Anne of Green Gables: I remember coming down to the kitchen and asking, “Mom? What’s a kindred spirit?” I listened to her answer, which filled out the description of Anne’s feelings for her best friend and then declared the obvious: “Anne of Green Gables is my kindred spirit.” But that was the first time I remember finding a friend inside a book.
2. One book that you have read more than once? A Room of One’s Own. I resisted Woolf for years because she was the favorite of my exacting Yankee grandmother. I turned to her at twenty-two just out of a sense that I must and I have never looked back. A Room is my favorite—beautiful, smart, unapologetically feminist, lyrical, intense, funny.
3. One book you would want on a desert island? The Complete Works of Shakespeare. I hate loneliness and boredom. I love writers who seem to create a world, writers who can appear to give you the full palette of human experience. Joyce does this; so does Dickens. Still, for me, there are only two: Woolf and Shakespeare. Shakespeare offers consolation and distraction and I would need both, I think.
4. One book that made you cry? It’s been a long time since I cried from reading a book. The burning stables in Black Beauty are devastating.
5. One book that made you laugh? I laughed out loud a couple times at Michael Martone, last quarter's LBC pick. There are laughs this quarter, too, so stay tuned...
6. One book you wish had been written? A novel by Katherine Mansfield.
7. One book you wish had never been written? That does seem a little mean, but I wasted far too much time on D.H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious. I love Lawrence—and can tolerate him even in the late, hateful Mexican phase—but the fake psychoanalytic stuff is really horrible tripe and doesn’t add anything to the world but meaningless meanness.
8. One book you are reading currently? People I Wanted to Be by Gina Ochsner.
9. One book you have been meaning to read? So, so, so many of these—my whole apartment feels like a giant to-be-read list. I like Bud’s approach to the question and will copy it: On my nightstand is Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, which never quite seems to rise to first spot. But every change of season, I think that perhaps this is the moment to get further than eighty pages into Proust. I would love to read Remembrance of Things Past. Soon.
10. Pass it on: Carolyn because she's funny & doesn't pull punches.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Kew Gardens
Ana Maria was kind enough to send me over to A Curious Singularity where a lively and smart discussion of Woolf's story "Kew Gardens" is ongoing this week. "Kew Gardens" is one of Woolf's first breakthrough modernist works and an early publication from her own press, illustrated by her sister. It's got a long and storied history in the world of Woolf and in the world of modernism. It's moving and wonderful to read so many writers grappling with it today.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Lady Ott
Exciting news from the Guardian (via the Woolf listserv):
The Guardian quotes generously from a letter from Woolf but does not indicate how large this cache might be.
Lady Ott is always interesting and she seems to have been so for many, many interesting people. The caricatures of her in modernist fiction are both cruel and loving: one wants to have had the privilege of going to Garsington and deciding for oneself to mock or simply enjoy the hospitality.
Bertrand Russell’s comment seems to me to capture a kind of sexual frankness that’s very different from anything current today (except perhaps in campus brochures from the Dean’s Office): "For external and accidental reasons I did not have full relations with Ottoline that evening but we agreed to become lovers as soon as possible."
Duly noted.
A cache of unpublished letters from the novelist Virginia Woolf and scores of first editions inscribed by leading writers and poets of the early 20th century has emerged in the contents of the library of Lady Ottoline Morrell, the society hostess who became one of the most flamboyant, loved and mocked associates of the Bloomsbury group.
The Guardian quotes generously from a letter from Woolf but does not indicate how large this cache might be.
Lady Ott is always interesting and she seems to have been so for many, many interesting people. The caricatures of her in modernist fiction are both cruel and loving: one wants to have had the privilege of going to Garsington and deciding for oneself to mock or simply enjoy the hospitality.
Bertrand Russell’s comment seems to me to capture a kind of sexual frankness that’s very different from anything current today (except perhaps in campus brochures from the Dean’s Office): "For external and accidental reasons I did not have full relations with Ottoline that evening but we agreed to become lovers as soon as possible."
Duly noted.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Where I’ve been…
I had a bunch of October 1 deadlines and, miraculously, met nearly all of them because I wanted to be free to celebrate my birthday. So, I worked like a bee the whole last week of September, anticipating Friday the 29th.
I turned forty.
That’s very hard to believe.
But the shock was significantly leavened by the surprise arrival of my parents from Seattle. The popped in to the bar at the Algonquin on Friday night and we moved from there on to dinner at Per Se. That, in fact, had been my fantasy of the perfect fortieth birthday—dinner with my parents and my husband at Per Se. I am still reeling from the strange, thrilling pleasure of having a fantasy come true. My husband engineered it--wow!
Those October 1 deadlines don’t slow down the blogging while I’m working—writing a quick blog entry is often a good way to keep me at my desk even if I cannot still work on the task at hand. But the orgy of work followed by the shock of a new decade, accompanied all the while by the demands of the gorgeous, funny, demanding daughters, and leavened by all kinds of treats from my husband and my own parents made the next week one in which I couldn’t really get to Fernham. There has been a lot of eating (more foie gras!) and a lot of reading in the intervening time. I look forward to sorting it all out in prose in the coming days…
I turned forty.
That’s very hard to believe.
But the shock was significantly leavened by the surprise arrival of my parents from Seattle. The popped in to the bar at the Algonquin on Friday night and we moved from there on to dinner at Per Se. That, in fact, had been my fantasy of the perfect fortieth birthday—dinner with my parents and my husband at Per Se. I am still reeling from the strange, thrilling pleasure of having a fantasy come true. My husband engineered it--wow!
Those October 1 deadlines don’t slow down the blogging while I’m working—writing a quick blog entry is often a good way to keep me at my desk even if I cannot still work on the task at hand. But the orgy of work followed by the shock of a new decade, accompanied all the while by the demands of the gorgeous, funny, demanding daughters, and leavened by all kinds of treats from my husband and my own parents made the next week one in which I couldn’t really get to Fernham. There has been a lot of eating (more foie gras!) and a lot of reading in the intervening time. I look forward to sorting it all out in prose in the coming days…
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Alice Munro
I picked up the latest Munro story collection sometime recently while sitting in a relative's den. It's so well-written, it's hard not to admire at first--you're in such good hands. But I was alone in the house, it seems, and sitting in that suburban cul de sac in a quiet Northern town reading about Munro's lonely women filled me with rage and nervous energy. I wanted to get in the car, turn Nirvana up loud and read about death or joy--anything intense. Too much quiet desperation. This, from Lydia Millet in the Globe and Mail puts its finger on that sense of intense claustrophobia:
All of this reminds me of Mark Thwaite’s comments on Roth: among the few excellent, established, prolific writers, there are going to be very few whose books are a must-read for any one of us. Most of us are not “completists” and would rather read the best of Alice Munro than all of her. For those of us who are not fans, it can get exhausting to be reminded of a new trip to that tiresome world that we visited once and where we are glad not to live, whether it’s the breakneck wondrousness of Rushdie, the wry sophistication of Atwood, or the bleak railway stations on Canada’s plains.
I got the link from Jenny who got it from Ed.
And yet -- and yet -- given that what Munro does, she does with immaculate precision -- why always, with such a richness of skill, this insistent choice on the purely personal, the proximate world of the self and its near relations? In the cosmology of this world, the personal, social world, the individual is seen delicately negotiating a balance with friends and family: Her journey is the steady sun around which all planets revolve.This is a fair criticism and I agree. It also makes me feel a little bad: she is so much a better writer than most and I am so overwhelmed by the maleness of the blogosphere this week, that criticizing a woman for being small, domestic, and minor rubs me the wrong way even as it is true that Alice Munro is starting to give me a mild case of the Anita Brookners.
All of this reminds me of Mark Thwaite’s comments on Roth: among the few excellent, established, prolific writers, there are going to be very few whose books are a must-read for any one of us. Most of us are not “completists” and would rather read the best of Alice Munro than all of her. For those of us who are not fans, it can get exhausting to be reminded of a new trip to that tiresome world that we visited once and where we are glad not to live, whether it’s the breakneck wondrousness of Rushdie, the wry sophistication of Atwood, or the bleak railway stations on Canada’s plains.
I got the link from Jenny who got it from Ed.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Derived from...A Corruption of...Jamaican greats
Reading around on Bud’s lively Metaxu Café, I found Geoffrey Philp’s blog. A Jamaican writer who’s teaching and writing in Miami, Philp’s been publishing mini interviews with other Caribbean writers at Bud’s site and on his own site. Going to his site, I found a great birthday tribute to “Miss Lou,” Louise Bennett Coverley who died in August. As I wrote here upon her death, her courage to write in Jamaican was an inspiration to many, many. You should go read his tribute for yourselves, but I couldn’t resist re-quoting this brilliant quotation comparing “corruption of” and “derived from” from Bennett’s “Auntie Roachy,” the wise woman persona of her work.
What’s not to love here? The humor is warm even as the anger and frustration is real. I can’t wait to read her again…
Like my Auntie Roachy say she vex any time she hearing the people a come style fi we Jamaica language as 'corruption of the English Language'. You ever hear anything go so? Aunt Roachy she say she no know why mek dem no call the English language corruption of the Norman French and the Greek and the Latin where they say English is derived from. Oonu hear the word: English 'derive' but Jamaica 'corrupt'. No, massa, nothing no go so. We not corrupt and them derive. We derive, too. Jamaica derive!"
What’s not to love here? The humor is warm even as the anger and frustration is real. I can’t wait to read her again…
Monday, September 25, 2006
The Middle of Everything
Mark Thwaite opens his lukewarm appreciation of the latest Philip Roth (Everyman, ambivalently received all around) with a speculation on what it means when, in a blogging life, a certain book never does make notice on the blog. This happened to me with Michelle Herman’s lovely, moving The Middle of Everything and not because I thought it a worthy secondary work. Instead, I loved it, thought about it, talked about it, and spent so much time describing its merits to some of my friends that by the time I turned to my blog, I was done. Paradoxically, then, a certain kind of book that really excites my enthusiasm might just escape mention here.
Sadly, reading around here is so slow, that I mention almost everything I read.
Sadly, reading around here is so slow, that I mention almost everything I read.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Inside the TLS, 9/1/06 edition
What got me excited in the September 1, 2006 TLS?
Somehow, more than any other book review, reading through a week's TLS makes me feel smart and hopeful. It's that New Year's Day feeling I sometimes get: the one in which I actually believe that I'm going to be the better person of my resolusions.
- A negative review of David Lehman’s Oxford Book of American Poetry by Marjorie Perloff. Her expertise, her vast knowledge of the field and, most importantly, of the anthologies of the field, allows her to compare his approach against others. His attempt to side-step identity politics in favor of aesthetic criteria is revealed to have serious blind spots and deficits of its own. (That passive is weird--I don't have the patience or energy to rise to Perloff's operatic grandeur. I don't have the knowledge to do anything other than stand back and admire. The review has great power--but I'm powerless to put my finger on its source. I think it's because Lehman is trying to sidestep a p.c. approach and she attacks him on other grounds where the easiest thing to have done would have been to call him out for not beign p.c.--a charge he anticipates.)
- A very funny account by Michael Greenberg of the monthly polyamory meeting down in the West Village: “I pull The Kreutzer Sonata from my shelf, Tolstoy’s diatribe against sex, to read on the subway ride downtown…:”
- A great review of Claire Messud, whose book awaits.
- A strong review of Rachel Cusk, too, whose book sounds good, but I read Tom Perrotta’s Little Children already. Do I really need another book about how dull it is to be a mom in the suburbs?
- A totally gorgeous photo of Miriam Makeba in the “In Brief” pages.
Somehow, more than any other book review, reading through a week's TLS makes me feel smart and hopeful. It's that New Year's Day feeling I sometimes get: the one in which I actually believe that I'm going to be the better person of my resolusions.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
A plague of essays
Why, now that I have a blog—even a seldom-updated one, even one that never ever pretends to be keeping abreast of the “news”--do I keep a pile of periodicals by my desk as potential blog fodder? Why, in particular, do I comb my alumni magazines for things to write about? At first, I tell myself that others who did not attend my schools might be interested in this or that literary tidbit. But, of course, these tidbits are skewed to reflect glory back upon alma mater. And all of us alums, of course, already get the magazine. It’s a kind of madness.
At times like these, the blogosphere feels strangely Victorian to me. I think about those reviews of reviews, those huge periodicals now mouldering in the basements of university libraries everywhere, that brought together long book reviews—many of which were very, very long summaries—and digests so that print seemed to multiply and multiply.
At times like these, the blogosphere feels strangely Victorian to me. I think about those reviews of reviews, those huge periodicals now mouldering in the basements of university libraries everywhere, that brought together long book reviews—many of which were very, very long summaries—and digests so that print seemed to multiply and multiply.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Inside the TLS
I am a big fan of the TLS. I like its former editor, John Gross, and his book on the "man" of letters. I know a bit about its history and origins through my work on Virginia Woolf. For Woolf, the TLS was the major outlet for her short essays and reviews. Many, many of the essays in The Common Readers began their life as TLS pieces. And, as a privilege accorded to Woolf and Woolf alone, the editors doubled their usual fee for a contribution from her. In the 1920s for a woman to be held in such esteem by a totally mainstream publication is really cool and remarkable.
I got a deal on the TLS this year, so it's been coming for about ten weeks now. I've read two or three of those ten issues. I gobble them with delight and am full, bursting, with the desire to tell everyone--to at least blog--about what I read, what new book is coming out, what catty thing got said (Jenny Davidson had a great post recently about an appallingly mean review there--I may be less kind toward authors than she because there's something I like about the energy of a bad review.), etc. I just can't believe that this conversation has been going on all this time without my attending to it. And I can barely find the time to attend to it now...
I got a deal on the TLS this year, so it's been coming for about ten weeks now. I've read two or three of those ten issues. I gobble them with delight and am full, bursting, with the desire to tell everyone--to at least blog--about what I read, what new book is coming out, what catty thing got said (Jenny Davidson had a great post recently about an appallingly mean review there--I may be less kind toward authors than she because there's something I like about the energy of a bad review.), etc. I just can't believe that this conversation has been going on all this time without my attending to it. And I can barely find the time to attend to it now...
Monday, September 18, 2006
Howells' women
Initially I was more enthusiastic about Howells’ women then I am now. He does a better job with women than Dickens. Still, in a Dickensian way, they remain a bit more like types than characters. The advantage is that he has a rich imagination for types, so, in Hazard there are many types of women.
Howells wrote the novel shortly after his daughter’s mysterious death in early adulthood from something that biographers, as I understand it, now think was anorexia or some kind of autoimmune disease. Knowing that, it makes it all the more poignant that Howells is particularly good and generous at imagining all kinds of possibilities for young women of his daughter’s generation. At the same time, he cannot really see feminist world and he finds it impossible to imagine strong women as wives. But, in 1890, are we so surprised that he could not?
There is an artist who turns down her feckless young teacher (the man of the Chianti) for a life dedicated to art without any certain prospect of marriage; there is the young Virginian belle, all wiles and charm, the wild Western heiress who attacks a suitor with her nails when he fails to propose, and the Manhattan socialite who gives up a life of recitals and days at home to join a sisterhood and devote herself to charity.
Most interesting of all, however, is Basil March’s wife, Isabel. She is such a great wife. At the beginning, when the move from Boston to New York is an open question, she is full of opinions and ideas, all of them expressed with comic emphasis. (I could never live in an apartment! Well, if Tom must give up Harvard for Columbia, I suppose sacrifices must be made!) As the novel progresses and life in New York becomes a settled fact, she settles into the background.
By the book’s end, she functions as a kind of flattering conscience for her husband, soothing his ego and bringing him back to their shared principles or reminding him of the moment when it might be pragmatic to bend one principle in favor of another. In this, she seems most wifely to me, and least like a separate person from Basil. And is it any wonder? After all, Isabel is an anagram of Basil with the addition of that lovely feminine e.
Howells wrote the novel shortly after his daughter’s mysterious death in early adulthood from something that biographers, as I understand it, now think was anorexia or some kind of autoimmune disease. Knowing that, it makes it all the more poignant that Howells is particularly good and generous at imagining all kinds of possibilities for young women of his daughter’s generation. At the same time, he cannot really see feminist world and he finds it impossible to imagine strong women as wives. But, in 1890, are we so surprised that he could not?
There is an artist who turns down her feckless young teacher (the man of the Chianti) for a life dedicated to art without any certain prospect of marriage; there is the young Virginian belle, all wiles and charm, the wild Western heiress who attacks a suitor with her nails when he fails to propose, and the Manhattan socialite who gives up a life of recitals and days at home to join a sisterhood and devote herself to charity.
Most interesting of all, however, is Basil March’s wife, Isabel. She is such a great wife. At the beginning, when the move from Boston to New York is an open question, she is full of opinions and ideas, all of them expressed with comic emphasis. (I could never live in an apartment! Well, if Tom must give up Harvard for Columbia, I suppose sacrifices must be made!) As the novel progresses and life in New York becomes a settled fact, she settles into the background.
By the book’s end, she functions as a kind of flattering conscience for her husband, soothing his ego and bringing him back to their shared principles or reminding him of the moment when it might be pragmatic to bend one principle in favor of another. In this, she seems most wifely to me, and least like a separate person from Basil. And is it any wonder? After all, Isabel is an anagram of Basil with the addition of that lovely feminine e.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
More on Hazard and Howells
One of the reasons, beyond my enthusiasm, that I wanted to write about A Hazard of New Fortunes and Howells this week is that the book I read was so different from what I expected.
Having heard my husband talk about it for years, I knew to expect a story about conflicting values in the Gilded Age. In fact, while this is the book’s climax and its central message, it’s not what dominates the first two-thirds. I knew, too, about the famous apartment-hunting scene (and I’d even read much of it), in which a middle-class family tries to find a place to live in Manhattan and is shocked at the high rents and pervasive squalor. I wasn’t particularly surprised to find myself more interested in some of the minor women characters than he was. (I’ll write more about these women tomorrow.) Two things did surprise me, however: the pervasiveness of the humor and the attention given to the setting—in the offices of a literary magazine.
The editorial meetings at Every Other Week, especially those just before the launch are so deliciously familiar and exhilarating. I have never worked on a glossy magazine, but I have worked for all kinds of ill-fated little periodicals and Howells (who was editor of The Atlantic after all) captures the mix of ambition, vision, and pragmatism of the early days. Everyone wants it to be totally new and different and no one can really think of much that’s all that different from what’s gone before. All the most thrilling and strange innovations turn, upon closer inspection, to be totally impractical and, in the end, the magazine is a really good version of what already exists.
Almost every scene with Beaton, the magazine’s artistic editor, is comic. A pretentious prodigal son (his father is a poor stonecutter in Syracuse), Beaton constantly finds excuses for not sending money home. My favorite scene has him morosely drinking Chianti in a restaurant, thinking that if he gave up drinking, he could send home three dollars a week. Two sentences later, he’s off with a scheme—if he switched to half-bottles and got the waiter to set aside what others leave behind, he might be able to send home two dollars. Of course, if he hadn’t bought that fur coat…
These two qualities of the novel—the powerful, insightful and humorous depiction of literary work and the humor overall—elevate it to a very high rank with me. I cannot figure out why its reputation is not higher than it is. When people describe Howells as a realist, reading him sounds like a chore. I expected to feel that I was getting a dutiful and dull snapshot of New York in the 1880s. Instead, I got a lively, funny insights. Why don’t people tell you this?
All of which brings me to a thought for another day about the experience of admiring—for totally different reasons—something a loved one also admires.
Having heard my husband talk about it for years, I knew to expect a story about conflicting values in the Gilded Age. In fact, while this is the book’s climax and its central message, it’s not what dominates the first two-thirds. I knew, too, about the famous apartment-hunting scene (and I’d even read much of it), in which a middle-class family tries to find a place to live in Manhattan and is shocked at the high rents and pervasive squalor. I wasn’t particularly surprised to find myself more interested in some of the minor women characters than he was. (I’ll write more about these women tomorrow.) Two things did surprise me, however: the pervasiveness of the humor and the attention given to the setting—in the offices of a literary magazine.
The editorial meetings at Every Other Week, especially those just before the launch are so deliciously familiar and exhilarating. I have never worked on a glossy magazine, but I have worked for all kinds of ill-fated little periodicals and Howells (who was editor of The Atlantic after all) captures the mix of ambition, vision, and pragmatism of the early days. Everyone wants it to be totally new and different and no one can really think of much that’s all that different from what’s gone before. All the most thrilling and strange innovations turn, upon closer inspection, to be totally impractical and, in the end, the magazine is a really good version of what already exists.
Almost every scene with Beaton, the magazine’s artistic editor, is comic. A pretentious prodigal son (his father is a poor stonecutter in Syracuse), Beaton constantly finds excuses for not sending money home. My favorite scene has him morosely drinking Chianti in a restaurant, thinking that if he gave up drinking, he could send home three dollars a week. Two sentences later, he’s off with a scheme—if he switched to half-bottles and got the waiter to set aside what others leave behind, he might be able to send home two dollars. Of course, if he hadn’t bought that fur coat…
These two qualities of the novel—the powerful, insightful and humorous depiction of literary work and the humor overall—elevate it to a very high rank with me. I cannot figure out why its reputation is not higher than it is. When people describe Howells as a realist, reading him sounds like a chore. I expected to feel that I was getting a dutiful and dull snapshot of New York in the 1880s. Instead, I got a lively, funny insights. Why don’t people tell you this?
All of which brings me to a thought for another day about the experience of admiring—for totally different reasons—something a loved one also admires.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
A Hazard of New Loves
It’s been a longstanding joke of my husband and I, that I know more about William Dean Howells than almost anyone who has never read him. The longest, most substantial, and most erudite chapter of his book is on Howells. He was working on Stephen Crane when we met, but quickly moved to the Howells chapter. I remember sitting on his futon in his apartment in a Somerville triple-decker, faint with hunger, dressed for a date, listening to him work out a reading of Sewell’s sermon on complicity in The Minister’s Charge. He would read a passage to me, ask me what I thought of it, refine my thoughts, connect them to his argument, refute me, and then move forward, painstakingly, carefully, to the next bit. I hugged my knees to my chest and wondered when we would ever get to eat dinner!
Still, I admired his tenacity—even his apparent ability to work through dinner, something I cannot do—and his ability to make an argument. I would contribute a thought about the significance of a word, a metaphor, the order of a list, and he could shape it into a larger picture about charity and complicity in the Gilded Age. And, of course, you know the end of the story already: Reader, I married him.
Nonetheless, I was not all that eager to read Howells. That chapter took a lot out of me. My mom and I called it the “howls” chapter since it seemed to cause us all such pain. But, when my book came out, my husband reminded me: when his book was published he read Mrs. Dalloway.* Now, that mine was out, I owed it to him to read Howells.
I loved A Hazard of New Fortunes so much, that I’m declaring it Howells week here at Fernham. A blogging experiment. Let’s see how it goes.
*I protested, meekly that he had not finished it. But, he replied, he read the first three-hundred pages, enough to get the gist. [Mrs. Dalloway is 296 pages long in the old paperback. Ed.]
Still, I admired his tenacity—even his apparent ability to work through dinner, something I cannot do—and his ability to make an argument. I would contribute a thought about the significance of a word, a metaphor, the order of a list, and he could shape it into a larger picture about charity and complicity in the Gilded Age. And, of course, you know the end of the story already: Reader, I married him.
Nonetheless, I was not all that eager to read Howells. That chapter took a lot out of me. My mom and I called it the “howls” chapter since it seemed to cause us all such pain. But, when my book came out, my husband reminded me: when his book was published he read Mrs. Dalloway.* Now, that mine was out, I owed it to him to read Howells.
I loved A Hazard of New Fortunes so much, that I’m declaring it Howells week here at Fernham. A blogging experiment. Let’s see how it goes.
*I protested, meekly that he had not finished it. But, he replied, he read the first three-hundred pages, enough to get the gist. [Mrs. Dalloway is 296 pages long in the old paperback. Ed.]
Monday, September 11, 2006
Thinking is my fighting, William Dean Howells edition
For reasons I’ll explain more fully tomorrow, I’ve declared it William Dean Howells week here at Fernham.
Still, I can hardly let this grim anniversary pass without comment even as I know how little I have to add to the discussion. Certainly, the circumstances of my personal connection to the day are too trivial to dilate on. Sitting in my farmhouse in Fillmore, Indiana, I decided to watch a bit of the Today Show before heading off to the airport to pick up a visiting speaker from Princeton. I watched as the second plane hit. As for my visitor, his plane had been due to leave Newark around ten. Of course, it never left the ground.
William Dean Howells does, it turns out, have something to offer us—those of us whose world has changed even as our grief is indirect—in thinking about how we carry on. A Hazard of New Fortunes is a novel that makes an argument: it pits a philistine capitalist against a cultured socialist. In short, this novel of 1890, pits two prominent and incompatible world views against each other. This, I think, is the position that nice people, good people, small-d democrats who had, thus far, lived fairly nonviolent and comfortable lives, now find ourselves facing: the fact that democracy must work to accommodate people whose ideologies strive to exclude each other.
The setting of Hazard is a literary magazine in New York and caught in the middle is Basil March, the editor, a good-humored man from “the West” (in this case, Indianapolis). The capitalist funds the venture as a sideline; the socialist works as a regular freelance translator. When the two meet, sparks fly. March’s efforts to keep the peace show us the difficulty, perhaps even the futility, of such efforts. And he (Howells, March) by no means splits the difference or is in any way stupid or blind about the imbalance of power or ethics. The power is all on the side of capital; the ethics, in this case, is almost entirely on the side of socialism.
It’s not hard to imagine translating this conflict into contemporary terms. In fact, it’s a conflict that plays out daily. An oilman, from Wyoming or Texas, funds a creative venture without much thought until he gets wind of the Palestinian on his staff, or the Saudi feminist, or the Venezuelan socialist… Caught in the middle is some good-natured liberal whose job is suddenly on the line. What should the editor do?
Distressed by the hanging deaths of anarchists in the Haymarket Affair, Howells wrote A Hazard of New Fortunes. Though the novel pits capitalism against socialism, it is the socialist Lindau with whom March has the prior connection (Lindau was his German and fencing tutor as a boy in Indianapolis); it is Lindau who is learned, intelligent and a linguist; it is Lindau who fought in the Civil War (losing a hand in the fighting) while the capitalist bought a substitute. There is no question as to where Howells’ sympathy lies, even as Lindau is annoying, impolite, impolitic, and often wrong. For all of us who are writers, thinking is our fighting, as Woolf said, and we must fight on towards peace.
Still, I can hardly let this grim anniversary pass without comment even as I know how little I have to add to the discussion. Certainly, the circumstances of my personal connection to the day are too trivial to dilate on. Sitting in my farmhouse in Fillmore, Indiana, I decided to watch a bit of the Today Show before heading off to the airport to pick up a visiting speaker from Princeton. I watched as the second plane hit. As for my visitor, his plane had been due to leave Newark around ten. Of course, it never left the ground.
William Dean Howells does, it turns out, have something to offer us—those of us whose world has changed even as our grief is indirect—in thinking about how we carry on. A Hazard of New Fortunes is a novel that makes an argument: it pits a philistine capitalist against a cultured socialist. In short, this novel of 1890, pits two prominent and incompatible world views against each other. This, I think, is the position that nice people, good people, small-d democrats who had, thus far, lived fairly nonviolent and comfortable lives, now find ourselves facing: the fact that democracy must work to accommodate people whose ideologies strive to exclude each other.
The setting of Hazard is a literary magazine in New York and caught in the middle is Basil March, the editor, a good-humored man from “the West” (in this case, Indianapolis). The capitalist funds the venture as a sideline; the socialist works as a regular freelance translator. When the two meet, sparks fly. March’s efforts to keep the peace show us the difficulty, perhaps even the futility, of such efforts. And he (Howells, March) by no means splits the difference or is in any way stupid or blind about the imbalance of power or ethics. The power is all on the side of capital; the ethics, in this case, is almost entirely on the side of socialism.
It’s not hard to imagine translating this conflict into contemporary terms. In fact, it’s a conflict that plays out daily. An oilman, from Wyoming or Texas, funds a creative venture without much thought until he gets wind of the Palestinian on his staff, or the Saudi feminist, or the Venezuelan socialist… Caught in the middle is some good-natured liberal whose job is suddenly on the line. What should the editor do?
Distressed by the hanging deaths of anarchists in the Haymarket Affair, Howells wrote A Hazard of New Fortunes. Though the novel pits capitalism against socialism, it is the socialist Lindau with whom March has the prior connection (Lindau was his German and fencing tutor as a boy in Indianapolis); it is Lindau who is learned, intelligent and a linguist; it is Lindau who fought in the Civil War (losing a hand in the fighting) while the capitalist bought a substitute. There is no question as to where Howells’ sympathy lies, even as Lindau is annoying, impolite, impolitic, and often wrong. For all of us who are writers, thinking is our fighting, as Woolf said, and we must fight on towards peace.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Contemporary Art
Last May, we went to DIA: Beacon for the first time. It was a transcendent experience. So, when we planned our end-of-summer jaunt to New England, we had high hopes. We came away disappointed. Where the Beacon museum, a converted box factory, makes large-scale contemporary art gorgeous, accessible, and meaningful, everything at Mass MoCA, a converted textile factory, seemed over-thought and over-theorized. The exhibit about post-9/11 history had all kinds of goofy curatorial theatrics. (“In this time after history we find that the time of history is a time out of time…”) Some of the art was all right. I loved an installation by Peggy Diggs—a bunch of jars of ephemera from her life, all labeled (e.g. “my father’s press pass, 1967”; “tea bags from the best conversation my sister and I ever had”). But some eighteenth-century European dresses fashioned out of African kente cloth left me cold: once you’d figured out the trick, what is there to say?
I was the only one in the family who liked the Huang Ying Pong retrospective, however. And my attraction to that taught me something about my aesthetic. Way too complicated. Pong is a Chinese artist, born in the fifties and working in Paris. A lot of what was on display was not so much art as divination tools used to make decisions about how to make art. From what I gathered (not much as we were shepherding the two children), he takes Chinese and Western tools of divination (I Ching, tarot, astrology, etc.), and uses them to guide his aesthetic decisions. In short, there were lots of very complicated wheels within wheels. I had trouble tearing myself away. Very Matteo Ricci...
I love things that are way too complicated. For all that I try to simplify my life as I live it (short commute, groceries by delivery), I am consistently attracted to the most baroque, most colorful, most intense design. When I first learned about memory palaces, I became obsessed—I eventually wrote an essay on them.
When I was much younger, my mom helped all of the neighborhood kids make papier mache masks out of grocery bags for Halloween. There were bears and pumpkins. I was a wizard. The front of my mask was his face. The back was a portrait of him taming a unicorn with the first line of a never-to-be-written short story written above the sunset scene. Crazy. Far too complicated.
I’m less patient with this side of myself lately. But I was very happy to see that Mr. Waggish found echoes of hermeticism and memory palaces in the work of a contemporary graphic novelist. He’s readier to figure this as a kind of genius. I’m so aware of it as a potential rabbit hole that I fear falling into that I don’t quite know how to judge it.
I was the only one in the family who liked the Huang Ying Pong retrospective, however. And my attraction to that taught me something about my aesthetic. Way too complicated. Pong is a Chinese artist, born in the fifties and working in Paris. A lot of what was on display was not so much art as divination tools used to make decisions about how to make art. From what I gathered (not much as we were shepherding the two children), he takes Chinese and Western tools of divination (I Ching, tarot, astrology, etc.), and uses them to guide his aesthetic decisions. In short, there were lots of very complicated wheels within wheels. I had trouble tearing myself away. Very Matteo Ricci...
I love things that are way too complicated. For all that I try to simplify my life as I live it (short commute, groceries by delivery), I am consistently attracted to the most baroque, most colorful, most intense design. When I first learned about memory palaces, I became obsessed—I eventually wrote an essay on them.
When I was much younger, my mom helped all of the neighborhood kids make papier mache masks out of grocery bags for Halloween. There were bears and pumpkins. I was a wizard. The front of my mask was his face. The back was a portrait of him taming a unicorn with the first line of a never-to-be-written short story written above the sunset scene. Crazy. Far too complicated.
I’m less patient with this side of myself lately. But I was very happy to see that Mr. Waggish found echoes of hermeticism and memory palaces in the work of a contemporary graphic novelist. He’s readier to figure this as a kind of genius. I’m so aware of it as a potential rabbit hole that I fear falling into that I don’t quite know how to judge it.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Sexism and DNA
I’ve just read The Double Helix (1968) as it’s the freshman book at my university. I must say that, having been warned that I would hate its sexism, I did not. In fact, I loved the book. It’s a kind of nonfiction Lucky Jim, I thought, and I found the whole thing fascinating, riveting, and hilarious.
I did like Lucky Jim and was interested to see that Maureen Corrigan did, too. She writes with some disappointment that no woman has yet written an academic novel as hilarious as Amis’. That is the kind of challenge that gets me going, for at least an hour or two on thinking that perhaps that will be my next book.
In any case, my enjoyment of Amis and Watson and Corrigan’s of Amis got me thinking about what it means for feminists to like openly sexist books. Where is the line? (One kind of answer might lie in the apparently appalling enfant terrible behavior of Harlan Ellison, groping the breast of a woman introducing him. I found Ed Champion’s accounts of this event while I was composing this post.)
Brenda Maddox’s biography of the great scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose photographs of DNA were central to Watson and Crick’s discovery, is a necessary project. I’m grateful that it exists and applaud her for uncovering the history of a woman who appears in The Double Helix as someone who leads Watson to daydream “how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair”! I read that and am momentarily aghast. But then I think about what it’s like to be 24 and in a lecture hall, expecting to be bored, and I’m fascinated by the transition, too, “Then, however, my main concern was her description of the crystalline X-ray diffraction pattern.” This seems like grad school to me: I remember sitting through one seminar and alternating between intense thoughts about the legal status of free speech and peering under the seminar table to see if I could figure out how expensive my chic male professor’s shoes must be. Did his fancy lawyer-wife buy them for him? Now, that’s different for all kinds of reasons of history and power, I know, and perhaps these reasons of history and power make me willing to grant Watson a pass. There is no doubt that Watson is a jerk. He is not very smart about women and he is particularly cruel to Franklin—as he himself seems to dimly recognize in the somewhat ham-handed epilogue.
But the overriding feeling I had in reading The Double Helix was delight. The account of what it feels like to find a really interesting problem—the structure of DNA is certainly that—fascinated me. I am less troubled by his lack of ethics than I am interested in the eager, rapid, magpie mind that saw the virtues in both the x-ray photography of Franklin and the model-building of Linus Pauling. And I find the account of Crick’s error at a fancy dress party—he came dressed as G. B. Shaw, realizing only too late that no girl wants to be kissed by that scratchy beard—hilarious rather than upsetting.
Why, I wonder, is this so? When I read some accounts of people passing off their bad behavior as charming, I’m offended and appalled. But, reading this, I was very willing to give Watson a pass.
I did like Lucky Jim and was interested to see that Maureen Corrigan did, too. She writes with some disappointment that no woman has yet written an academic novel as hilarious as Amis’. That is the kind of challenge that gets me going, for at least an hour or two on thinking that perhaps that will be my next book.
In any case, my enjoyment of Amis and Watson and Corrigan’s of Amis got me thinking about what it means for feminists to like openly sexist books. Where is the line? (One kind of answer might lie in the apparently appalling enfant terrible behavior of Harlan Ellison, groping the breast of a woman introducing him. I found Ed Champion’s accounts of this event while I was composing this post.)
Brenda Maddox’s biography of the great scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose photographs of DNA were central to Watson and Crick’s discovery, is a necessary project. I’m grateful that it exists and applaud her for uncovering the history of a woman who appears in The Double Helix as someone who leads Watson to daydream “how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair”! I read that and am momentarily aghast. But then I think about what it’s like to be 24 and in a lecture hall, expecting to be bored, and I’m fascinated by the transition, too, “Then, however, my main concern was her description of the crystalline X-ray diffraction pattern.” This seems like grad school to me: I remember sitting through one seminar and alternating between intense thoughts about the legal status of free speech and peering under the seminar table to see if I could figure out how expensive my chic male professor’s shoes must be. Did his fancy lawyer-wife buy them for him? Now, that’s different for all kinds of reasons of history and power, I know, and perhaps these reasons of history and power make me willing to grant Watson a pass. There is no doubt that Watson is a jerk. He is not very smart about women and he is particularly cruel to Franklin—as he himself seems to dimly recognize in the somewhat ham-handed epilogue.
But the overriding feeling I had in reading The Double Helix was delight. The account of what it feels like to find a really interesting problem—the structure of DNA is certainly that—fascinated me. I am less troubled by his lack of ethics than I am interested in the eager, rapid, magpie mind that saw the virtues in both the x-ray photography of Franklin and the model-building of Linus Pauling. And I find the account of Crick’s error at a fancy dress party—he came dressed as G. B. Shaw, realizing only too late that no girl wants to be kissed by that scratchy beard—hilarious rather than upsetting.
Why, I wonder, is this so? When I read some accounts of people passing off their bad behavior as charming, I’m offended and appalled. But, reading this, I was very willing to give Watson a pass.
Monday, August 28, 2006
Around the Web
Some really great things around the web lately.
Black Looks links to a literary magazine by South African lesbians. A lot of the little things are only ok, but one or two pieces are really moving and very much worth your time. There's an amazing story of a woman who became a fourth wife and, while training to be a healer, discovered--acknowledged to the woman training her--her lesbianism. It's really gripping. You can download the whole ‘zine here.
On the issue of reproductive rights, the Cardiff feminists at Mind the Gap ask their American readers to participate in Ms. Magazine’s I had an abortion petition campaign. Women who have not had abortions but support access to this important right can sign an ancillary petition.
In more literary matters, John Baker’s blog has been features answers to his five questions all month: there’s a whole array of mini-interviews with litbloggers to page through. No doubt you’ll find, as I have, links to lots of new blogs to check out in the coming months.
If you need a late-summer pick-me-up, head over to Summer Pierre’s always interesting blog, An Accident of Hope. She’s doing these really cool Lynda Barry inspired fliers every day this month, picking an everyday word (toothpaste, babysitter) and making a flier for it, a kind of prose poem. Very nice. Lynda Barry, the Seattle cartoonist, has long been
Finally, a big congratulations out to my friend and fellow Seattleite-turned-New Yorker (but she’s REALLY a New Yorker—Brooklyn!) AND new mom, Megan Kelso, who’s graphic novel, The Squirrel Mother has just come out to great acclaim. We’ve been commiserating over the long, long gestation (of our books—our babies just took the normal amount of time) when we see each other from time to time and it’s fun and funny to have had daughters and books both born within weeks of each other.
Black Looks links to a literary magazine by South African lesbians. A lot of the little things are only ok, but one or two pieces are really moving and very much worth your time. There's an amazing story of a woman who became a fourth wife and, while training to be a healer, discovered--acknowledged to the woman training her--her lesbianism. It's really gripping. You can download the whole ‘zine here.
On the issue of reproductive rights, the Cardiff feminists at Mind the Gap ask their American readers to participate in Ms. Magazine’s I had an abortion petition campaign. Women who have not had abortions but support access to this important right can sign an ancillary petition.
In more literary matters, John Baker’s blog has been features answers to his five questions all month: there’s a whole array of mini-interviews with litbloggers to page through. No doubt you’ll find, as I have, links to lots of new blogs to check out in the coming months.
If you need a late-summer pick-me-up, head over to Summer Pierre’s always interesting blog, An Accident of Hope. She’s doing these really cool Lynda Barry inspired fliers every day this month, picking an everyday word (toothpaste, babysitter) and making a flier for it, a kind of prose poem. Very nice. Lynda Barry, the Seattle cartoonist, has long been
Finally, a big congratulations out to my friend and fellow Seattleite-turned-New Yorker (but she’s REALLY a New Yorker—Brooklyn!) AND new mom, Megan Kelso, who’s graphic novel, The Squirrel Mother has just come out to great acclaim. We’ve been commiserating over the long, long gestation (of our books—our babies just took the normal amount of time) when we see each other from time to time and it’s fun and funny to have had daughters and books both born within weeks of each other.
Friday, August 25, 2006
Pat De Caro’s Bookcover
My publisher asked me to provide an image and give them some input into the design of my book cover. The moment they asked, I felt burdened and exasperated by the request. I was tired and pregnant and ready to be done with the project. But I had promised myself to follow through until the end and so I tried to look upon this unexpected task as an opportunity. After all, complaints about not having input into cover art are a familiar kind of complaints about publishers. What to do?
I called my mom.
I knew what I did not want: no image of Woolf and nothing too girly. So many feminist books end up clad in pink and purple with flowery script. I wanted the book to look strong, intelligent, but not confrontational. After a few minutes, she suggested I use the Pat De Caro print she gave me a few years ago. “Quietude” has hung in our home for years. Pat is a Seattle artist and a dog-walking friend of my mother’s. The print of hers I have is a lovely one of a young woman with bobbed hair sitting alone in a bedroom, reading. It’s simple, quiet, unsentimental, with a really lovely Bloomsbury feel to it. Perfect!
I took the print down off the wall and carried it into Manhattan on the train. The good folks at the frame shop in Columbus Circle took it apart for me and I got it scanned at Kinko’s. The framers put it back together, free of charge, and I was on my way.
My publisher accepted my ban of pink and purple and chose a lovely chocolate brown and oatmeal with silver accents. They even made the back cover and flap into a darker detail of the image in chocolate and pale chocolate so you can see the woman echoed from behind the blurbs.
One totally unequivocal good of my book is the cover, thanks to my mother and Pat De Caro. Hurrah!
I called my mom.
I knew what I did not want: no image of Woolf and nothing too girly. So many feminist books end up clad in pink and purple with flowery script. I wanted the book to look strong, intelligent, but not confrontational. After a few minutes, she suggested I use the Pat De Caro print she gave me a few years ago. “Quietude” has hung in our home for years. Pat is a Seattle artist and a dog-walking friend of my mother’s. The print of hers I have is a lovely one of a young woman with bobbed hair sitting alone in a bedroom, reading. It’s simple, quiet, unsentimental, with a really lovely Bloomsbury feel to it. Perfect!
I took the print down off the wall and carried it into Manhattan on the train. The good folks at the frame shop in Columbus Circle took it apart for me and I got it scanned at Kinko’s. The framers put it back together, free of charge, and I was on my way.
My publisher accepted my ban of pink and purple and chose a lovely chocolate brown and oatmeal with silver accents. They even made the back cover and flap into a darker detail of the image in chocolate and pale chocolate so you can see the woman echoed from behind the blurbs.
One totally unequivocal good of my book is the cover, thanks to my mother and Pat De Caro. Hurrah!
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Pique
The troubles with copyediting have been well documented here at Fernham. And, in spite of them all, I am genuinely delighted with my book. It feels kind of surreal, amazing, and good to truly be that thing that I meant to be: an author, a person who has actually written a book. And there it is, a thing in the world. A book. It’s funny how much these material things matter even to those of us who live the life of the mind. I am a mother: look, two daughters over there. I wrote a book: hold it in your hands.
But…
When I received the proofs the second time, there was a query from the copyeditor next to the word “graft”: “Do you meant grants?” I wrote “No. STET” and then, a bit piqued, I copied out the OED definition of graft in the margin to show the copyeditor that I was, indeed, using the word correctly. This definition now appears in main text! The sentence now reads: “But they do have privileges: they have been away, they have drivers, they are on the receiving end of government graft (OED graft n.5: The obtaining of profit or advantage by dishonest or shady means; the means by which such gains are made, esp. bribery, blackmail, or the abuse of a position of power or influence; the profits so obtained).”
Words fail me.
How could a thinking person imagine that I meant to include this note to the copyeditor in my text? Why is a non-thinking person doing this job? The incompetence is staggering. The mind boggles.
But…
When I received the proofs the second time, there was a query from the copyeditor next to the word “graft”: “Do you meant grants?” I wrote “No. STET” and then, a bit piqued, I copied out the OED definition of graft in the margin to show the copyeditor that I was, indeed, using the word correctly. This definition now appears in main text! The sentence now reads: “But they do have privileges: they have been away, they have drivers, they are on the receiving end of government graft (OED graft n.5: The obtaining of profit or advantage by dishonest or shady means; the means by which such gains are made, esp. bribery, blackmail, or the abuse of a position of power or influence; the profits so obtained).”
Words fail me.
How could a thinking person imagine that I meant to include this note to the copyeditor in my text? Why is a non-thinking person doing this job? The incompetence is staggering. The mind boggles.
Monday, August 21, 2006
Tim Tams
Our peerless babysitter is back from a month in Australia and New Zealand and, when she came to sit on Friday, she brought a bag full of gifts: a boomerang, very cool stickers of aboriginal art, a koala t-shirt for the dear one, and a sheep bib for the babe. She also brought a package of Tim Tam biscuits for my husband and me. She explained to the dear one and me how to eat them: you bite off opposite corners of the chocolate covered biscuit and use it like a straw, sucking your tea or coffee through it.
The next day, the dear one and I were showing off our bounty to my husband. As I explained how to eat the cookies, his expression was amused and skeptical. The dear one didn’t miss a beat. Stepping up on tiptoes, she whispered in my ear, ‘You can share them with me, Mommy.”
The next day, the dear one and I were showing off our bounty to my husband. As I explained how to eat the cookies, his expression was amused and skeptical. The dear one didn’t miss a beat. Stepping up on tiptoes, she whispered in my ear, ‘You can share them with me, Mommy.”
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Michael Martone
Michael Martone's Michael Martone is this summer's read this. The very funny book is a whole series of contributor's notes--of varyiing degrees of (suspected) fictionality. You can read the bloggers' versions and you can now also read a back-and-forth between Kassia Kroszer of Booksquare and myself. I don't know Kassia; she lives on the West Coast; we had so much fun emailing each other paragraphs, asking each other questions about the book. As we both agreed at the end of our conversation, it was a different--and I think better--post than either of us could have come up with singly.
I know I've been sending you over to the LBC all week--but I'll be back in the saddle at Fernham with, I hope, stuff to say about William Dean Howells, Julia Child, and more on Michelle Herman...
I know I've been sending you over to the LBC all week--but I'll be back in the saddle at Fernham with, I hope, stuff to say about William Dean Howells, Julia Child, and more on Michelle Herman...
Monday, August 14, 2006
Michael Martone
It’s Michael Martone week over at the LBC. His new book, Michael Martone by Michael Martone, consists of several dozen contributor’s notes. Each one begins conventionally enough: “Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana,” but then, from there, each takes a turn. In celebration of the goofy brilliance of this conceit, lots of litbloggers have tried their own hand at contributor’s notes, too. They’re quite funny and very Martonian, to coin an adjective. If you’re amused, then you should definitely pick up the book: it’s a quick, happy, fun late summer read.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
White Spirit
Last week was White Spirit week over at the LBC. I wrote up my thoughts on the author Paule Constant’s connections to Conrad here but more interesting –really thrilling to me—are her answers to my questions, which you can find here.
Even in an electronic age, it seems very cool to be able to ask a question of a French novelist—one whose stature, I’ve since learned, is quite great—and get a reply within the week. The process was not simple—it was positively old world. Dan Wickett heard from the translator Betsy Wing that she’d be willing to play along. Dan asked us if we had questions for Constant. He passed those questions on to Betsy who sent them to Constant. Wing then translated Constant’s replies into English, sent them to Dan & he posted them over at the LBC. Fascinating.
The punch-line: she’s never been able to finish a book by Conrad.
Even in an electronic age, it seems very cool to be able to ask a question of a French novelist—one whose stature, I’ve since learned, is quite great—and get a reply within the week. The process was not simple—it was positively old world. Dan Wickett heard from the translator Betsy Wing that she’d be willing to play along. Dan asked us if we had questions for Constant. He passed those questions on to Betsy who sent them to Constant. Wing then translated Constant’s replies into English, sent them to Dan & he posted them over at the LBC. Fascinating.
The punch-line: she’s never been able to finish a book by Conrad.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading
Maureen Corrigan believes that books find you when you need them. How appropriate, then, that a copy of her memoir, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, showed up in my mailbox with a post-it on it. Our upstairs neighbors just read it and passed it along.
At a moment when I’m finding it hard to find the time to read and finding it harder to get into a book, I devoured the opening pages and finished it in a snap. (These days, that means two weeks…) Corrigan is the book critic on NPR’s Fresh Air. I like her voice—both her literal voice and her enthusiastic, warm writing and it is interesting to learn more about her: a feminist, a Catholic from Queens, a Fordham graduate with a Penn Ph.D. who teaches at Georgetown now.
The feminism was the most interesting angle for me because she wears it with such grace. She writes movingly about the complicated feelings of being an unmarried, in her late-twenties, and teaching at Bryn Mawr where an older generation of unmarried women welcomed her into all-female community that was at once wonderful, stimulating, intellectual and a little threatening. I remember those feelings well: you want to fall in love and get married; you see the pain that’s part of the lives of women of a generation whose lives forced them to choose between family and career; you feel the richness of the lives of older unmarried women; you’re still determined to try to find a partner.
Like a lot of these books about being a reader, it’s a lot of fun even if, ultimately, it makes you feel not so much like you’re reading as like you’re talking about intending to read. I grew eager for more analysis, greater depth. The first chapter is the weakest—too bad, as it’s about the process of adopting her daughter. But there, just where you want reading and life to be most integrated, they never fully come together. Even so, she writes in a way that’s both wry and moving about why she was reading a grisly true crime novel in her hotel room in China instead, say, of soft-focus books about motherhood.
There are lots of really good ideas—the difference between male extreme adventure (Shackleton nearly freezing to death) and female extreme adventure (the Brontes spending decades and decades in complete cultural isolation), the popularity of Catholic martyr stories (a genre represented by Marie Killilea’s Karen books, which I’m sure I read as a girl)--in this book, but they’re not really developed. It’s too journalistic for my taste—I don’t wish for a scholarly treatment, but I’d like things to be developed beyond, well, a clever blog entry…
At a moment when I’m finding it hard to find the time to read and finding it harder to get into a book, I devoured the opening pages and finished it in a snap. (These days, that means two weeks…) Corrigan is the book critic on NPR’s Fresh Air. I like her voice—both her literal voice and her enthusiastic, warm writing and it is interesting to learn more about her: a feminist, a Catholic from Queens, a Fordham graduate with a Penn Ph.D. who teaches at Georgetown now.
The feminism was the most interesting angle for me because she wears it with such grace. She writes movingly about the complicated feelings of being an unmarried, in her late-twenties, and teaching at Bryn Mawr where an older generation of unmarried women welcomed her into all-female community that was at once wonderful, stimulating, intellectual and a little threatening. I remember those feelings well: you want to fall in love and get married; you see the pain that’s part of the lives of women of a generation whose lives forced them to choose between family and career; you feel the richness of the lives of older unmarried women; you’re still determined to try to find a partner.
Like a lot of these books about being a reader, it’s a lot of fun even if, ultimately, it makes you feel not so much like you’re reading as like you’re talking about intending to read. I grew eager for more analysis, greater depth. The first chapter is the weakest—too bad, as it’s about the process of adopting her daughter. But there, just where you want reading and life to be most integrated, they never fully come together. Even so, she writes in a way that’s both wry and moving about why she was reading a grisly true crime novel in her hotel room in China instead, say, of soft-focus books about motherhood.
There are lots of really good ideas—the difference between male extreme adventure (Shackleton nearly freezing to death) and female extreme adventure (the Brontes spending decades and decades in complete cultural isolation), the popularity of Catholic martyr stories (a genre represented by Marie Killilea’s Karen books, which I’m sure I read as a girl)--in this book, but they’re not really developed. It’s too journalistic for my taste—I don’t wish for a scholarly treatment, but I’d like things to be developed beyond, well, a clever blog entry…
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Louise Bennett, 1919-2006
Louise Bennett has died. This great folklorist, singer, actress and poet was, as obituaries from Kingston, Jamaica, New York, and London attest, an inspiration to Bob Marley, Harry Belafonte, and many, many more: an icon of Jamaican culture.
I first heard of her from Jahan Ramazani’s book, The Hybrid Muse--a really readable and smart effort to bring postcolonial criticism to poetry (there are chapters on Yeats, Walcott, Bennett, and others). Jahan’s book made me interested enough to take a chance and include her in a class. It was tough to get ahold of her work, mostly out of print, but I got a copy of Jamaican Labrish (1966) and photocopied bits for my students.
If you want to read poems from the Windrush generation—that first group of emigrants to England after WWII—Bennett is your woman.
As you can see here, she also made a point of celebrating Jamaican English—something that gave Marley and Belafonte the courage and model to follow suit. She deserves to be much better known outside Jamaica.
I first heard of her from Jahan Ramazani’s book, The Hybrid Muse--a really readable and smart effort to bring postcolonial criticism to poetry (there are chapters on Yeats, Walcott, Bennett, and others). Jahan’s book made me interested enough to take a chance and include her in a class. It was tough to get ahold of her work, mostly out of print, but I got a copy of Jamaican Labrish (1966) and photocopied bits for my students.
If you want to read poems from the Windrush generation—that first group of emigrants to England after WWII—Bennett is your woman.
What a joyful news, Miss Mattie
Ah feel like me heart gwine burs’
Jamaica people colonizin’
Englan’ in reverse
By de hundred, by de tousan
From country and from town
By de shipload, by de planeload
Jamaica is Englan’ boun
As you can see here, she also made a point of celebrating Jamaican English—something that gave Marley and Belafonte the courage and model to follow suit. She deserves to be much better known outside Jamaica.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Thinking Back Through Our Mothers
“Oh damn,” said Julia Hedge, “why didn’t they leave room for an Eliot or a Brontë?”--Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
Woolf didn’t have children. She buttressed her disappointment by noting that none of the great four women of the nineteenth century (Austen, Eliot, Bronte, and Bronte) had children. Still, she insisted on the importance of “thinking back through our mothers.”
So, having read these two memoirs by writer-mothers a decade older than me this month (Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading and Michelle Herman’s dazzling The Middle of Everything), I noticed two things: first, both write about girls playing at being the Beatles and both spend some time contemplating the significance of their own favorite Beatle. I must say, I can’t relate. I always vacillated between Steven Tyler and Mick Jagger in my fantasy life: if you’re going to rock, why be sensitive?
Second, both Maureen Corrigan and Michelle Herman celebrate the existence of mothers who write. This seems like a pantheon worth erecting, worth adding to. We all know—too well—about the generation of women who chose between writing and childbearing. It’s time, they say, to rethink that “wisdom” of either/or and to notice a new fact: that many contemporary writers are both. Corrigan wishes she had Laurie Colwin before she adopted her daughter. Herman lists Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro, Alison Lurie, Lore Segal in her “mental list of great women writers and artists who had managed to have children (and do right by them—for I didn’t feel comfortable including famous suicides on such a list).” I’d add Atwood, Morrison, and perhaps the once great but now loony Alice Walker.
(For more on Herman, hop over to the Collected Miscellany archives!)
Now, it seems, we can think back through our mothers by thinking back through mothers. Do you have favorite mother-writers? Do such lists, such facts matter to you?
Woolf didn’t have children. She buttressed her disappointment by noting that none of the great four women of the nineteenth century (Austen, Eliot, Bronte, and Bronte) had children. Still, she insisted on the importance of “thinking back through our mothers.”
So, having read these two memoirs by writer-mothers a decade older than me this month (Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading and Michelle Herman’s dazzling The Middle of Everything), I noticed two things: first, both write about girls playing at being the Beatles and both spend some time contemplating the significance of their own favorite Beatle. I must say, I can’t relate. I always vacillated between Steven Tyler and Mick Jagger in my fantasy life: if you’re going to rock, why be sensitive?
Second, both Maureen Corrigan and Michelle Herman celebrate the existence of mothers who write. This seems like a pantheon worth erecting, worth adding to. We all know—too well—about the generation of women who chose between writing and childbearing. It’s time, they say, to rethink that “wisdom” of either/or and to notice a new fact: that many contemporary writers are both. Corrigan wishes she had Laurie Colwin before she adopted her daughter. Herman lists Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro, Alison Lurie, Lore Segal in her “mental list of great women writers and artists who had managed to have children (and do right by them—for I didn’t feel comfortable including famous suicides on such a list).” I’d add Atwood, Morrison, and perhaps the once great but now loony Alice Walker.
(For more on Herman, hop over to the Collected Miscellany archives!)
Now, it seems, we can think back through our mothers by thinking back through mothers. Do you have favorite mother-writers? Do such lists, such facts matter to you?
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Edie Meidav's Crawl Space
You can read my post on egotism and ergotism here.
[Ergot, it turns out is a fungus that can cause all kinds of bad things, including hallucinations, in those who ingest it...]
[Ergot, it turns out is a fungus that can cause all kinds of bad things, including hallucinations, in those who ingest it...]
Bummer
Some words, while not onomatopoeias, still immediately convey their sense. “Bummer,” it seems, is such a word.
A week ago, the dear one (3 ½), fell out of bed in the middle of the night. We watched her nurse a swollen, bruised arm for twelve hours before taking her to the hospital down the road from great-grandma’s camp: both bones in her forearm are broken and she is in a cast for six weeks.
Bummer.
She was brave to the point of eerie stoicism. She was appropriately insistent on a pink cast and genuinely thrilled to have that demand met. Still, she was in a lot of pain all last week.
“Bummer,” I said to her, trying to conceal my distress at the beloved, perfect girl being broken and hurt. “Big bummer.”
“Big bummer,” she said, mocking my intonation perfectly. She knew just what I meant.
But, I heard myself adding, this is the kind of bummer that turns into a really good story. Maybe even, I heard myself adding, it’ll be your first memory! We’ve been working on that story ever since: how she fell out of bed (sometimes she adds an embellishment about the intruding dragons who were bothering her), how we went to the hospital and got an x-ray, how we went to another doctor two days later and got a pink cast and some stickers…
I don’t know what else to do. She has new clothes (halter dresses and fetching tanks to fit over the cast), a high-tech swimming sleeve with rubber gasket for summer water fun, and lots of stickers, but, otherwise, I’m working the literary angle. Words may not fix the broken bones, but they can help turn the pain into a good story. Sometimes I feel a bit like a tabloid journalist, exploiting her pain, but mostly I just think this is the right approach both for me and for my dear little wordsmith.
A week ago, the dear one (3 ½), fell out of bed in the middle of the night. We watched her nurse a swollen, bruised arm for twelve hours before taking her to the hospital down the road from great-grandma’s camp: both bones in her forearm are broken and she is in a cast for six weeks.
Bummer.
She was brave to the point of eerie stoicism. She was appropriately insistent on a pink cast and genuinely thrilled to have that demand met. Still, she was in a lot of pain all last week.
“Bummer,” I said to her, trying to conceal my distress at the beloved, perfect girl being broken and hurt. “Big bummer.”
“Big bummer,” she said, mocking my intonation perfectly. She knew just what I meant.
But, I heard myself adding, this is the kind of bummer that turns into a really good story. Maybe even, I heard myself adding, it’ll be your first memory! We’ve been working on that story ever since: how she fell out of bed (sometimes she adds an embellishment about the intruding dragons who were bothering her), how we went to the hospital and got an x-ray, how we went to another doctor two days later and got a pink cast and some stickers…
I don’t know what else to do. She has new clothes (halter dresses and fetching tanks to fit over the cast), a high-tech swimming sleeve with rubber gasket for summer water fun, and lots of stickers, but, otherwise, I’m working the literary angle. Words may not fix the broken bones, but they can help turn the pain into a good story. Sometimes I feel a bit like a tabloid journalist, exploiting her pain, but mostly I just think this is the right approach both for me and for my dear little wordsmith.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Lockhart’s Criticism
When you first read Keats in college, as I did, you learn that he died not just of tuberculosis but that he died of bad reviews. The cruelty of Lockhart’s reviews of the Cockney School of Poetry, of labeling the young genius by his class rather than his talent, are legendary.
Virginia Woolf’s love of Keats was as intense and loyal as that of any passionate English major. Still, she’s the one who taught me to think with sympathy about the demonized Lockhart. She explores the difficulty of judging one’s contemporaries in “Lockhart’s Criticism,” her review of a collection of the writings of John Gibson Lockhart. Lockhart was Walter Scott’s biographer and son-in-law, editor of the Quarterly Review and, as a twenty-three year old contributor to Blackwood’s, the author of the “Cockney School of Poetry,” a series of six articles which famously and virulently condemned Keats. Keats, who stands consistently among the very highest writers on Woolf’s Olympus, lies at the center of “Lockhart’s Criticism” and of Woolf’s exploration of her own prejudices.
Of Lockhart’s job as a reviewer, Woolf writes:
This, in miniature, is how I feel when I sit in judgment of books for the LitBlog Co-Op. It is an intimidating and thilling task. I started writing book reviews in graduate school because I felt like I needed to flex my critical muscles on untested books. It's one thing to find greatness in Shakespeare, it's quite another to read the latest novel by Nadine Gordimer or a new book by Kellie Wells and decide, unaided by professors and reputation, where it stands.
When I read Toussaint’s Television, for example, I can’t tell if it’s pale Beckett, bad Beckett, or some other, more interesting good new thing that I’m too ignorant to understand. Is my dislike of the sado-masochistic scenes in Gina Frangello’s novel a sign of my prudery (I am a bit modest) or part of a smarter judgment about the way the novel fit uncomfortably and unsuccessfully between genres.
Lockhart's failure, of course, is that he judged Keats by his social class--a "cockney"--not his poetry. That we must strive not to do. I read a review of the World Cup in the New Yorker that noted the disconnect between Ghana's conservative playing style and descriptions of the team as "exuberant, spirited, energetic, passionate, musical" that seemed to be more about prejudices about Africa than actual observations of the team.
I love reviews that take their gloves off. It’s a lot more fun to read a review that really and frankly expresses and opinion than to read someone who sounds like their straining to be quoted for the blurb in future editions. It’s harder for me to be frank now, in the LBC, because I “know” the writers, nominators and publicists. So, I think about Keats and try not to write a thumbs-down review that would kill a young genius. And, I think about Lockhart and try to remember not to judge literature by my own prejudices but, instead, to judge it on its own terms. For me, that means following the lesson of Woolf, who always tried to discern a book’s own goals for itself. What is it trying to do? Does it do it?
Virginia Woolf’s love of Keats was as intense and loyal as that of any passionate English major. Still, she’s the one who taught me to think with sympathy about the demonized Lockhart. She explores the difficulty of judging one’s contemporaries in “Lockhart’s Criticism,” her review of a collection of the writings of John Gibson Lockhart. Lockhart was Walter Scott’s biographer and son-in-law, editor of the Quarterly Review and, as a twenty-three year old contributor to Blackwood’s, the author of the “Cockney School of Poetry,” a series of six articles which famously and virulently condemned Keats. Keats, who stands consistently among the very highest writers on Woolf’s Olympus, lies at the center of “Lockhart’s Criticism” and of Woolf’s exploration of her own prejudices.
Of Lockhart’s job as a reviewer, Woolf writes:
When Lockhart, we have to remember, saw ranged on his table the usual new books, their names conveyed nothing to him. Keats, Hook, Godwin, Shelley, Brontë, Tennyson--who were they? They might be somebodies, but they might, more probably, be nobodies.
This, in miniature, is how I feel when I sit in judgment of books for the LitBlog Co-Op. It is an intimidating and thilling task. I started writing book reviews in graduate school because I felt like I needed to flex my critical muscles on untested books. It's one thing to find greatness in Shakespeare, it's quite another to read the latest novel by Nadine Gordimer or a new book by Kellie Wells and decide, unaided by professors and reputation, where it stands.
When I read Toussaint’s Television, for example, I can’t tell if it’s pale Beckett, bad Beckett, or some other, more interesting good new thing that I’m too ignorant to understand. Is my dislike of the sado-masochistic scenes in Gina Frangello’s novel a sign of my prudery (I am a bit modest) or part of a smarter judgment about the way the novel fit uncomfortably and unsuccessfully between genres.
Lockhart's failure, of course, is that he judged Keats by his social class--a "cockney"--not his poetry. That we must strive not to do. I read a review of the World Cup in the New Yorker that noted the disconnect between Ghana's conservative playing style and descriptions of the team as "exuberant, spirited, energetic, passionate, musical" that seemed to be more about prejudices about Africa than actual observations of the team.
I love reviews that take their gloves off. It’s a lot more fun to read a review that really and frankly expresses and opinion than to read someone who sounds like their straining to be quoted for the blurb in future editions. It’s harder for me to be frank now, in the LBC, because I “know” the writers, nominators and publicists. So, I think about Keats and try not to write a thumbs-down review that would kill a young genius. And, I think about Lockhart and try to remember not to judge literature by my own prejudices but, instead, to judge it on its own terms. For me, that means following the lesson of Woolf, who always tried to discern a book’s own goals for itself. What is it trying to do? Does it do it?
READ THIS: Michael Martone
Michael Martone’s eponymous new novel (Michael Martone, natch) is the summer READ THIS! selection of the litblog co-op. I loved it. I didn’t think it was the best of the four this time, but it was one of my favorites and it’s certainly the easiest to recommend. It’s very, very funny.
Every chapter is a “contributor’s note” of several pages, with varying degrees of fictionality, about Martone himself. One such note, a very funny meditation on the etiquette of giving and hosting readings on college campuses (where to get the water? bottled or in a glass? where to dump the left over water? how to shake hands while holding said water?) was in the Best American Essays for 2005 volume.
So, be sure to stop by the Litblog Co-op site often over the next few weeks as we’ll all be discussing Martone and the three other nominees—Kellie Wells’ Midwestern magic realism, Paule Constant’s comic revision of Heart of Darkness (yes, that’s what I said), and Edie Meidav’s strange, epic memory novel of Vichy France.
Every chapter is a “contributor’s note” of several pages, with varying degrees of fictionality, about Martone himself. One such note, a very funny meditation on the etiquette of giving and hosting readings on college campuses (where to get the water? bottled or in a glass? where to dump the left over water? how to shake hands while holding said water?) was in the Best American Essays for 2005 volume.
So, be sure to stop by the Litblog Co-op site often over the next few weeks as we’ll all be discussing Martone and the three other nominees—Kellie Wells’ Midwestern magic realism, Paule Constant’s comic revision of Heart of Darkness (yes, that’s what I said), and Edie Meidav’s strange, epic memory novel of Vichy France.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Allez Les Bleus?
I’ve never been a soccer fan but the timing of the World Cup matches, especially in the knock-out rounds, matched meal times for the beloved infant pretty well, so I caught a lot of games. An all-Europe final four wasn’t as exciting as I’d hoped, but I loved watching Zinedine Zidane, loved his handsome intensity and his age and that great, great name, and I love France, so I plumped for them.
When it turned out they were facing Italy in the final, I questioned my choice. I have loved France since I was seven, but it’s not done much to love me back. In fact, loving France is hard a lot of the time. When I went to France at sixteen, my French was fluent and I was treated well—often mistaken for Swiss or Belgian, there was something not-quite-us-but-very-acceptable about me. In later visits, my French rustier and rustier, I was treated with more disdain. On my one visit to Italy, by contrast, I got off the train without a word of Italian and bluffed my way through with French and Sesame Street Spanish and was welcomed as a prodigy. Besides, two of my dear friends are married to Italians.
French racism is an uncomfortable mirror of our own: they mistreat their African immigrants and welcome African-American with open arms where we, as I heard a Haitian woman observe recently, are much more willing to accord a black person respect if we learn they are not African-American.
Watching Zidane head-butt the Italian player in the final moments of the final was heart-breaking. Now, speculations rage about what provoked him. Initially, I imagined the Italian player had just been trash-talking and, in the heat and fatigue and stress, he heard one “your mama” too many. While some speculate that Zidane, who is the son of Algerian immigrants, was called a “terrorist,” it seems that, my first guess may have been closer to the truth: the Italian player has admitted to making a crack about Zidane’s wife…
Sigh.
One of the great pleasures of learning French, of loving France, of loving any other country is the ability to sigh wistfully on occasion and say, “Well, if we were in France, we’d be….drinking Lillet on the terrace…discussing Beauvoir and smoking Gitanes….enjoying oysters on a bed of sea salt…attending the opening of the new exhibition…instead of stuck being here in the U.S…” Of course, it turns out that loving France is a lot like loving the U.S.: it's not always an easy break from life's warty complexities. I still like Zidane and I still love France, but Sunday didn't do anything to nurture my affections.
When it turned out they were facing Italy in the final, I questioned my choice. I have loved France since I was seven, but it’s not done much to love me back. In fact, loving France is hard a lot of the time. When I went to France at sixteen, my French was fluent and I was treated well—often mistaken for Swiss or Belgian, there was something not-quite-us-but-very-acceptable about me. In later visits, my French rustier and rustier, I was treated with more disdain. On my one visit to Italy, by contrast, I got off the train without a word of Italian and bluffed my way through with French and Sesame Street Spanish and was welcomed as a prodigy. Besides, two of my dear friends are married to Italians.
French racism is an uncomfortable mirror of our own: they mistreat their African immigrants and welcome African-American with open arms where we, as I heard a Haitian woman observe recently, are much more willing to accord a black person respect if we learn they are not African-American.
Watching Zidane head-butt the Italian player in the final moments of the final was heart-breaking. Now, speculations rage about what provoked him. Initially, I imagined the Italian player had just been trash-talking and, in the heat and fatigue and stress, he heard one “your mama” too many. While some speculate that Zidane, who is the son of Algerian immigrants, was called a “terrorist,” it seems that, my first guess may have been closer to the truth: the Italian player has admitted to making a crack about Zidane’s wife…
Sigh.
One of the great pleasures of learning French, of loving France, of loving any other country is the ability to sigh wistfully on occasion and say, “Well, if we were in France, we’d be….drinking Lillet on the terrace…discussing Beauvoir and smoking Gitanes….enjoying oysters on a bed of sea salt…attending the opening of the new exhibition…instead of stuck being here in the U.S…” Of course, it turns out that loving France is a lot like loving the U.S.: it's not always an easy break from life's warty complexities. I still like Zidane and I still love France, but Sunday didn't do anything to nurture my affections.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Thao Nguyen
They call her the Rosa Parks of street harassment. That might be going a bit far, but she deserves our admiration. Nguyen is the woman who used her cell phone to snap a photo of a man exposing himself on the subway. When the police didn’t respond, she sent it to the local papers. The response was immediate and led to his arrest. Hurray!
The HollabackNYC blog is now a place for anyone to speak out against street (and underground) harassment. It's about time.
In kindergarten, I was followed home from school by a man who exposed himself to me. A vigilant neighbor noticed me on the wrong side of the street, and came and chased him away. In sixth grade Home-Ec the luck of the alphabet put me between two boys who spent the hour shooting their pencils into my lap or under my chair so they could dive under the desk and grope me. Years later, when I told friends about the kindergarten incident, they treated me with kid gloves as if I were a survivor of horrible, ongoing abuse. In sixth grade, my teachers dismissed my complaints as weakness, a failure to understand what boys are like. What I love about Nguyen’s response and the whole HollabackNYC phenomenon is that it seems to have found the appropriate middle ground of outrage.
When the website founders were interviewed on NPR the other day, a woman called in with a shout-out to all the Catholic and Yeshiva school girls whose uniforms made them daily targets for lewd comments.
Three cheers to Thao Nguyen and those who’ve spoken up since! Here’s a little bit of guerrilla feminism that helps make the world better, that makes it less and less possible for us to accept annoying nonsense and worse in public.
The HollabackNYC blog is now a place for anyone to speak out against street (and underground) harassment. It's about time.
In kindergarten, I was followed home from school by a man who exposed himself to me. A vigilant neighbor noticed me on the wrong side of the street, and came and chased him away. In sixth grade Home-Ec the luck of the alphabet put me between two boys who spent the hour shooting their pencils into my lap or under my chair so they could dive under the desk and grope me. Years later, when I told friends about the kindergarten incident, they treated me with kid gloves as if I were a survivor of horrible, ongoing abuse. In sixth grade, my teachers dismissed my complaints as weakness, a failure to understand what boys are like. What I love about Nguyen’s response and the whole HollabackNYC phenomenon is that it seems to have found the appropriate middle ground of outrage.
When the website founders were interviewed on NPR the other day, a woman called in with a shout-out to all the Catholic and Yeshiva school girls whose uniforms made them daily targets for lewd comments.
Three cheers to Thao Nguyen and those who’ve spoken up since! Here’s a little bit of guerrilla feminism that helps make the world better, that makes it less and less possible for us to accept annoying nonsense and worse in public.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Post-partum
It’s my husband who used the term post-partum to describe my post-book slump and it’s true. I do have the odd moment of the baby blues but it passes, like a swift lonely little cloud. The book blues, however, have set in, complete with ominous clouds, lightning and thunder. Bummer.
This won’t become a baby blog, I promise, but I understand the temptation: I want to desperately to think again, to write again, but the book is off my desk now and the infant is a gobbler. Divine as she is, she does eat up my reading time most days. When I still had the book to finish, I was torn and distressed but that final push was focused and important and I could do it. I don’t have the stamina to invent or even really to enter deeply into the imaginative world of another.
Much television is being watched.
There are a million things that I want to write about and, in the middle of the night sitting up with the infant, I sit and think about what to say about HollabackNYC, the World Cup, how I feel like Lockhart (the Romantic-era reviewer not the Boston Pops conductor) when reading for the LBC, how finishing a book and giving birth are and aren’t alike but the tank is empty. It’s not just the book of course: the cumulative effect of three months without much sleep make my life and my brain function more interrupted than Virginia Woolf ever imagined. I can’t even be bothered to get the hyperlinks for these things…
On a day like today, when it’s horribly humid and the infant is only happy when she’s in the front carrier, plastered to my chest, I think that perhaps I can try to write standing up, putting the laptop on the mantle. Perhaps I can assemble some of these scattered thoughts into a complete one. The thought of composing upright immediately reminds me of Hemingway and I think, yes, “just like Hemingway!” and feel a moment of hopeful ambition, which, just as quickly, is clearly completely absurd and hilarious. I doubt Hemingway spent hours wearing a BabyBjorn…
This won’t become a baby blog, I promise, but I understand the temptation: I want to desperately to think again, to write again, but the book is off my desk now and the infant is a gobbler. Divine as she is, she does eat up my reading time most days. When I still had the book to finish, I was torn and distressed but that final push was focused and important and I could do it. I don’t have the stamina to invent or even really to enter deeply into the imaginative world of another.
Much television is being watched.
There are a million things that I want to write about and, in the middle of the night sitting up with the infant, I sit and think about what to say about HollabackNYC, the World Cup, how I feel like Lockhart (the Romantic-era reviewer not the Boston Pops conductor) when reading for the LBC, how finishing a book and giving birth are and aren’t alike but the tank is empty. It’s not just the book of course: the cumulative effect of three months without much sleep make my life and my brain function more interrupted than Virginia Woolf ever imagined. I can’t even be bothered to get the hyperlinks for these things…
On a day like today, when it’s horribly humid and the infant is only happy when she’s in the front carrier, plastered to my chest, I think that perhaps I can try to write standing up, putting the laptop on the mantle. Perhaps I can assemble some of these scattered thoughts into a complete one. The thought of composing upright immediately reminds me of Hemingway and I think, yes, “just like Hemingway!” and feel a moment of hopeful ambition, which, just as quickly, is clearly completely absurd and hilarious. I doubt Hemingway spent hours wearing a BabyBjorn…
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Index
I send off the (many) corrections to the page proofs tomorrow. Strangely, in addition to many good and useful queries and changes, the folks in Chennai lopped of the –ue of all words. You heard it here first: that suffix (is it a suffix?) is on the way out. I’m holding on, however. Analogue, catalogue [British, I know, but it is a monograph on Woolf], dialogue, and monologue have all been restored to their full glory. But I will cease the plaints with that.
I hired an indexer to do the index for my book. I’m so pleased with the result! Somehow this compressed list captures what makes me proud of the book (embarrassing to admit) and what made it fun to write: the list still looks rich, fertile, and surprising to me--full of things I like and things that interest me. That's a hard thing to write without sounding immodest. Still, it seems really cool to have an outside reader come up with this list: not quite as good as a Borges catalogue, but still rich and miscellaneous. And so, for your reading pleasure, a preview: the index for the letter A:
To see the other 25 letters, you’ll have to wait until the fall.
I hired an indexer to do the index for my book. I’m so pleased with the result! Somehow this compressed list captures what makes me proud of the book (embarrassing to admit) and what made it fun to write: the list still looks rich, fertile, and surprising to me--full of things I like and things that interest me. That's a hard thing to write without sounding immodest. Still, it seems really cool to have an outside reader come up with this list: not quite as good as a Borges catalogue, but still rich and miscellaneous. And so, for your reading pleasure, a preview: the index for the letter A:
- “Addison,” 86, 96-99, 102
- Addison, Joseph, 11-14, 78, 86, 89, 91, 163
influence on Woolf, 95-103
in Orlando, 105-6
spectatorship and, 109-10, 112-14 - African writers, Woolf’s influence on, 14, 161-65, 167-68
See also Aidoo, Ama Ata; El Saadawi, Nawal; Lessing, Doris - Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 19-20, 35, 40
- Aidoo, Ama Ata, 14, 161-63, 167-68
- “Am I a Snob?” 2, 96
- Anderson, Benedict, 5, 12, 162
- androgyny, 79, 107, 117, 119, 126, 141
- Antigone (Sophocles), 17-20, 29, 34, 43-47, 49, 166
- Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom), 5
- “Anon,” 55, 82-83, 87, 158
- anonymity
as creative outlet, 13, 83
fame and the loss of, 134-35, 157-59
public debate and, 86-88
Woolf’s impatience with, 93-95 - arcades, 80-81
- Arendt, Hannah, 104
- “Aurora Leigh,,” 151
- Austen, Jane, 5, 42, 91-92
Woolf on, 95-96 - authenticity, 83, 114, 149
To see the other 25 letters, you’ll have to wait until the fall.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Overheard: Eliot redux
I had to go to the dear one’s new preschool this morning to sign a form for the fall. In the lobby, I met a mom and dad with their dear one. They were on the same errand. We exchanged a few quick greetings. They told me that Miss -- would be right back. The father insisted on their staying to say good-bye and thank her for her help. Then, suddenly nervous, the mother straightened herself up:
“Dear! I’ve been remiss. I’ve neglected to bring a juice for our son. Shall I head off in search of one whilst you remain here to wait for Miss --?”
I detected a stiffness, an attempt at pontifical solemnity, that I found rather tiresome.
“Dear! I’ve been remiss. I’ve neglected to bring a juice for our son. Shall I head off in search of one whilst you remain here to wait for Miss --?”
I detected a stiffness, an attempt at pontifical solemnity, that I found rather tiresome.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
T. S. Eliot
Here’s what Eliot said, in retrospect, about the tone of his contributions to the Times Literary Supplement: “There are, it is true, faults of style which I regret and especially I detect a stiffness and an attempt of pontifical solemnity which may be tiresome to many readers.”
Indeed.
Indeed.
Monday, June 19, 2006
The Einstein Option
There were two ways to earn an A in my high school chemistry class: you could maintain an average of 90 or more or you could impress our teacher, Mr. Kunselman, with your genius. He called this latter the Einstein option, explaining that he did not want to be in the position of Einstein’s physics teacher, inadvertently famous for giving a genius a D in chemistry.
I’ve been thinking about the Einstein Option today as it applies to spelling and grammar errors. I’m correcting my page proofs and today’s project was a chapter on Woolf and Byron. Ironically, then, I find myself poring over my own comma usage in a chapter full of quotations that preserve the charming, speedy genius of Woolf and Byron’s idiosyncratic punctuation.
But errors are neither charming nor a sign of genius in a first book, are they? It’s only posthumously, with fame secure, that an editor can opt—as Byron’s and Woolf’s have—to preserve the author’s idiosyncratic spellings etc., as evidence of the trajectory of their minds. My own errors, I fear, are more likely to be viewed with the skepticism that rightly greets Mr. Bingley’s admission of speedy, error-filled prose, in Pride and Prejudice: claims of sloppy prose are not confessions of error but boasts of a rapid (and thus occupied, intelligent, interesting?) mind. I hate my errors and hate having to comb over them; each one I find—and those that remain, I think, are minor—gives me the chills.
I’ve been thinking about the Einstein Option today as it applies to spelling and grammar errors. I’m correcting my page proofs and today’s project was a chapter on Woolf and Byron. Ironically, then, I find myself poring over my own comma usage in a chapter full of quotations that preserve the charming, speedy genius of Woolf and Byron’s idiosyncratic punctuation.
But errors are neither charming nor a sign of genius in a first book, are they? It’s only posthumously, with fame secure, that an editor can opt—as Byron’s and Woolf’s have—to preserve the author’s idiosyncratic spellings etc., as evidence of the trajectory of their minds. My own errors, I fear, are more likely to be viewed with the skepticism that rightly greets Mr. Bingley’s admission of speedy, error-filled prose, in Pride and Prejudice: claims of sloppy prose are not confessions of error but boasts of a rapid (and thus occupied, intelligent, interesting?) mind. I hate my errors and hate having to comb over them; each one I find—and those that remain, I think, are minor—gives me the chills.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Page Proofs
I’m correcting the page proofs to my book this week. The first look at them was a shock. I was upset—not happy or sad or angry, but upset. It’s so strange and amazing after all these years to see actual proofs, to glimpse the book as it will look when it’s published. Deep inside there was a little tiny me jumping up and down with a huge bouquet of balloons yelling “yippee!!!” Surrounding that exultant being were layers upon layers of caution, trepidation, and fear. It was such a confusing feeling that when people asked me how the proofs looked I could only respond in monosyllables like a sullen teen: “Fine. O.k. Good, I guess.”
Fortunately, as promised, the folks in Chennai gave it a proper copyediting this time and the text is cleaned up. I’ve been answering tons of reassuring queries: “Reading Room has been inconsistently set in capitals and lower case. Ok to make all references in capitals?” So now I have a seven-page list of changes to be made and unmade, queries, etc. I’ve made an appendix and added citations to the bibliography. It’s terrifying and exciting.
I promised myself long ago that, when the book comes out, the anticlimactic feelings are banned, for a bit anyway. Believe me, I can list a million anticlimactic and disappointing things about the book but I plan to put them to rest for a big bash. Now that I’m truly in the final stretch, I can feel that little tiny me with balloons growing, getting ready to celebrate. I need to stock up on champagne…
And yes, for those of you keeping score at home, it’s been a busy six or seven weeks: I gave birth, we moved to a glorious new apartment, and now I’m correcting page proofs. All good, exhausting changes. Soon enough, the pictures will be hung, the boxes unpacked, and the proofs corrected. When that day comes, perhaps I’ll get to read a book again…
Fortunately, as promised, the folks in Chennai gave it a proper copyediting this time and the text is cleaned up. I’ve been answering tons of reassuring queries: “Reading Room has been inconsistently set in capitals and lower case. Ok to make all references in capitals?” So now I have a seven-page list of changes to be made and unmade, queries, etc. I’ve made an appendix and added citations to the bibliography. It’s terrifying and exciting.
I promised myself long ago that, when the book comes out, the anticlimactic feelings are banned, for a bit anyway. Believe me, I can list a million anticlimactic and disappointing things about the book but I plan to put them to rest for a big bash. Now that I’m truly in the final stretch, I can feel that little tiny me with balloons growing, getting ready to celebrate. I need to stock up on champagne…
And yes, for those of you keeping score at home, it’s been a busy six or seven weeks: I gave birth, we moved to a glorious new apartment, and now I’m correcting page proofs. All good, exhausting changes. Soon enough, the pictures will be hung, the boxes unpacked, and the proofs corrected. When that day comes, perhaps I’ll get to read a book again…
Monday, June 12, 2006
Microclimates
I was skeptical when I first heard a winemaker describe microclimates to me. The idea that the weather could vary from one side of a valley or hill to another, that within a field there could be certain rows that would yield a sweeter, richer, plumper grape, seemed just the kind of pretentious niggling nonsense perpetrated by wine snobs.
We moved to a new apartment three weeks ago. It’s just six blocks from the old one, but a world away. Where our old neighbor was a senile man who told me “I made 82 yesterday” over a dozen times in the 20 months we were there, our new neighbors work in the theater. Last night, I strapped the infant into her carrier and headed next door to watch the Tonys with others from the block. We all cheered when our hosts’s friend (and JC resident), John Lloyd Young, won for Jersey Boys.
I’ve moved from the kind of neighborhood that spawned Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons to one where my neighbors are assistant directors on Broadway, friends with the star of show inspired by Valli's life. I feel sweeter, richer, and plumper already. Microclimates indeed.
We moved to a new apartment three weeks ago. It’s just six blocks from the old one, but a world away. Where our old neighbor was a senile man who told me “I made 82 yesterday” over a dozen times in the 20 months we were there, our new neighbors work in the theater. Last night, I strapped the infant into her carrier and headed next door to watch the Tonys with others from the block. We all cheered when our hosts’s friend (and JC resident), John Lloyd Young, won for Jersey Boys.
I’ve moved from the kind of neighborhood that spawned Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons to one where my neighbors are assistant directors on Broadway, friends with the star of show inspired by Valli's life. I feel sweeter, richer, and plumper already. Microclimates indeed.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
I’m so glad
Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Lee, Mary McCarthy, Quincy Jones…
Like many alums of Seattle’s Garfield High School (including,as dedicated readers will know, Dave over at WordMunger), I am deeply, deeply proud to be an alum. I roll that list of the four most famous students around from time to time and marvel at how, in its diversity, it reflects the main reason for my pride: the whole time I was there, I felt so lucky to be part of a working, thriving multi-racial community. Now, in an article about a long-overdue renovation, I read of the very, very long history of that pride: "The nineteen hundred and thirty eight Arrow [the yearbook] is dedicated to the student body of Garfield, whose friendliness stimulates racial understanding.”
Situated in Seattle’s Central District, a largely black residential neighborhood bordered by white and mixed neighborhoods and not far east of downtown, Garfield was, when I was there in the early eighties, the high school that the local black community most closely identified with. The administration was largely black and the student body was just over half black. Acquaintances at other schools had heard rumors of the ongoing influence of the Black Panthers. To me, this was crazy racial, racist fear, an insane anachronistic hysteria. But I was surprised and fascinated to learn something of the actual basis for this rumor from the Seattle Times article:
Hard as it is to describe the pride that comes from living in a thriving and diverse community it’s harder to overstate the times in my life when I have understood something, connected with someone who expected to find me hostile, been moved by something where I was expected to be cold because of my time at Garfield. As we used to sing in the stands after every football game, win or lose, “I’m so glad, I go to Garfield High / Singing glory hallelujah, I go to Garfield High!”
Like many alums of Seattle’s Garfield High School (including,as dedicated readers will know, Dave over at WordMunger), I am deeply, deeply proud to be an alum. I roll that list of the four most famous students around from time to time and marvel at how, in its diversity, it reflects the main reason for my pride: the whole time I was there, I felt so lucky to be part of a working, thriving multi-racial community. Now, in an article about a long-overdue renovation, I read of the very, very long history of that pride: "The nineteen hundred and thirty eight Arrow [the yearbook] is dedicated to the student body of Garfield, whose friendliness stimulates racial understanding.”
Situated in Seattle’s Central District, a largely black residential neighborhood bordered by white and mixed neighborhoods and not far east of downtown, Garfield was, when I was there in the early eighties, the high school that the local black community most closely identified with. The administration was largely black and the student body was just over half black. Acquaintances at other schools had heard rumors of the ongoing influence of the Black Panthers. To me, this was crazy racial, racist fear, an insane anachronistic hysteria. But I was surprised and fascinated to learn something of the actual basis for this rumor from the Seattle Times article:
Things got so rough that Michael Dixon, the 1970 senior-class president, tennis-team captain and a member of the Black Panthers, said that after school he would escort white friends home to their Madrona neighborhood and Asian-American friends to their homes down by Yesler Way. He even worried for his own safety.It’s not that things were perfect—there was prejudice, discrimination, and harassment in my day, too—but we all worked hard to get along and we loved those times when we did, when we came together as a community in spite of the fears and low expectations of the world around us.
Hard as it is to describe the pride that comes from living in a thriving and diverse community it’s harder to overstate the times in my life when I have understood something, connected with someone who expected to find me hostile, been moved by something where I was expected to be cold because of my time at Garfield. As we used to sing in the stands after every football game, win or lose, “I’m so glad, I go to Garfield High / Singing glory hallelujah, I go to Garfield High!”
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Annie
As an Anne, I went through an especially intense Annie phase: I even ran for class president once (9th grade?) with an “Annie”-themed campaign. The dear one has the dvd and it’s in heavy rotation here now. I find that the same lines that delighted me years ago still delight me now, though I hear some of them differently. I think, on reflection, that my love for the movie is less sophisticated now then it was twenty five years ago. Unchanged is my love of the couplet “No one cares for you a smidge / When you’re in an orphanage.” The dear one loves it too, though her sense of the meaning of both “smidge” and “orphanage” is a little vague.
I remember loving these lines from “Little Girls” that seem so a propos now—
The sarcasm is delicious and I know I loved it at ten or fourteen as much as I do now. The humor is less subtle, less abstract, however, when I am literally draped in girls—with a babe in arms and a toddler nearby, insisting, that she, too, need be fed by hand.
I remember loving these lines from “Little Girls” that seem so a propos now—
Some women are dripping with diamonds
Some women are dripping with pearls
Lucky me, lucky me, look at what I’m dripping with—
Little girls.
The sarcasm is delicious and I know I loved it at ten or fourteen as much as I do now. The humor is less subtle, less abstract, however, when I am literally draped in girls—with a babe in arms and a toddler nearby, insisting, that she, too, need be fed by hand.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Lists and Piles
The beloved infant will be six weeks old on Thursday. I’m told that six weeks is the peak of fussiness—it is meant to decline then over the next six weeks so that, by twelve weeks I will have a “settled” baby.
Madly, I take these observations far too seriously (as seriously as I took the due date for both girls) so, with each crying jag (of hers) I remind myself that, come Thursday we’ll be on the way to less crying as if she herself knows that Thursday is her high water mark.
To be fair, she is not at all a fussy child, simply one who still wishes to be inside. As long as I’m wearing her in the BabyBjorn or holding her in my lap (she lies across my stomach on a pillow as I type), she is lovely, sleepy, hungry, and dear. But set in her in the bassinet and, boy! you’ll hear about it.
So, my life is comprised of lists and piles--lists of things to do when and if she lets me set her down (or, say, falls asleep in the car seat and stays so for an hour or two after) and piles of things I need to have at arm's reach for those many hours a day when I’m trapped in the chair. The pile doesn’t change much—it just moves from room to room—cell phone, a novel, a section of the Sunday Times… The lists, however, are like concentric circles: what must get done (worth risking waking the infant), what needs to get done (worth letting her cry a few minutes more), what should get done (worth trying to do with her in the Bjorn or the minute she’s settled somewhere), what I’d like to get done (thus far, a complete and utter fiction). So, I think about blog entries or reading an essay or book I’m meant to review, I look at the cover of Mockingbird, the new biography of Harper Lee, or, for that matter, the cover of Newsweek, and imagine with great pleasure, an hour in their company, reading, writing, but the fact is, often all that I can manage is a quick run to the bathroom with a dash past the fridge for some yogurt and seltzer water before, once again, I’m at the beloved’s beck and call.
Madly, I take these observations far too seriously (as seriously as I took the due date for both girls) so, with each crying jag (of hers) I remind myself that, come Thursday we’ll be on the way to less crying as if she herself knows that Thursday is her high water mark.
To be fair, she is not at all a fussy child, simply one who still wishes to be inside. As long as I’m wearing her in the BabyBjorn or holding her in my lap (she lies across my stomach on a pillow as I type), she is lovely, sleepy, hungry, and dear. But set in her in the bassinet and, boy! you’ll hear about it.
So, my life is comprised of lists and piles--lists of things to do when and if she lets me set her down (or, say, falls asleep in the car seat and stays so for an hour or two after) and piles of things I need to have at arm's reach for those many hours a day when I’m trapped in the chair. The pile doesn’t change much—it just moves from room to room—cell phone, a novel, a section of the Sunday Times… The lists, however, are like concentric circles: what must get done (worth risking waking the infant), what needs to get done (worth letting her cry a few minutes more), what should get done (worth trying to do with her in the Bjorn or the minute she’s settled somewhere), what I’d like to get done (thus far, a complete and utter fiction). So, I think about blog entries or reading an essay or book I’m meant to review, I look at the cover of Mockingbird, the new biography of Harper Lee, or, for that matter, the cover of Newsweek, and imagine with great pleasure, an hour in their company, reading, writing, but the fact is, often all that I can manage is a quick run to the bathroom with a dash past the fridge for some yogurt and seltzer water before, once again, I’m at the beloved’s beck and call.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Television
It's Television week over at the LBC and I've posted my thoughts--composed before the beloved infant's arrival and only slightly tweaked (likely for the worse) today--there.
I've been watching a goodly bit of television myself these days but am gradually rejoining the land of the reading. I'll be back more regularly soon, I expect...
I've been watching a goodly bit of television myself these days but am gradually rejoining the land of the reading. I'll be back more regularly soon, I expect...
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Jeff Ford Week
It's Jeff Ford Week over at the LBC. The whole book-blogosphere has turned out: tons of posts from writers who are Ford admirers and a couple of posts from the author himself. I didn't know Ford before this book, but many others do and you can sift through their thoughts on his work and this book in particular. You can also check out my first LBC post here.
I loved The Girl in the Glass: to me, it was the most successful and accessible of the five spring nominees. Other books may have had more ambition, more insanity, but this one just works at every level: a really good, fun read, a book that made me happy. Check out the posts and then get yourself a copy of the book!
I loved The Girl in the Glass: to me, it was the most successful and accessible of the five spring nominees. Other books may have had more ambition, more insanity, but this one just works at every level: a really good, fun read, a book that made me happy. Check out the posts and then get yourself a copy of the book!
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Intimations of Immortality
Wordsworth says it best:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
Last Thursday, the dear one, her husband, and I were joined by a beloved baby girl. Trailing clouds of glory indeed.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
Last Thursday, the dear one, her husband, and I were joined by a beloved baby girl. Trailing clouds of glory indeed.
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