No, in fact, the anemia did not kill me
I’ve been back from writer’s camp in Florida for exactly 72 hours and so have been able to gauge whether the massive doses of iron I’ve been taking have actually done me any good. I had to wait to get home to do that because it’s utterly useless to try to figure out if the iron is making you peppy when you are in a setting that would make anyone feel remarkably cheery and alert, because in that setting you don’t have to (a) cook, (b) pick up dirty shorts that have been thrown so they land precisely NEXT TO the laundry basket, or (c) tell people (aka teenagers) to get off Facebook. In that setting — New Smyrna Beach, Florida, in fact, where I’ve been for the month of October, more or less — you can’t feel tired. Well, you can, but that’s only because you stayed up until really late drinking tall gin and tonics and that doesn’t count as tired. That activity falls under the heading of “Fun Things I Did at Writer’s Camp.”
Anyway, I made it home after a night of doing Fun Things At Writer’s Camp, and unpacked. And then I dealt with a number of ordinarily exhausting events, including finding out that some friend of my kids knows the password to my itunes account and has been ordering things like DOOM! version 1.0, apparently under the illusion that I’d think maybe I’D ordered that and just, well, you know, forgotten about it. Also, I made it through a Halloween weekend distinguished chiefly by how much my children would prefer it if I wasn’t around them while they roamed the streets of Berkeley. I’ve also confronted the fact that in my absence at least one child managed to go without eating a single piece of fruit for three weeks (and no, it wasn’t the child who has refused all his life to eat fruit on the theory that he could eat vegetables and leave the fruit eating to his twin and by some magical twin science thing they’d get the nutritional benefits of both, as though they were still in the womb, which they aren’t: see above, regarding not wanting me to follow them around on Halloween). Sound tiring? I know.
The take home here: I’m actually kind of energetic. The iron pills are working.
How have you been?
Bring That Woman a Steak!
Comments (27)Last November, I gave up all the things I don’t really like to do anyway, including eating meat. Unfortunately, my decision to replace meat with cookies turns out to have been somewhat unwise.
I could have guessed that I’d made an unwise nutritional decision, but in fact the extent of my unwisdom was brought to my attention by my doctor, who called the other night to tell me I am severely anemic. (I thought she was calling to tell me that they’d finally voted on a new health care bill and it required all doctors to actually follow up on blood test results that they’ve had since June, but in fact, she managed to stumble on my results without any kind of government mandate. Whether that gives you solace in your concerns about health care legislation I cannot say. All I know is that I’ve been about the same degree of tired for 14 years, and that hasn’t gotten worse since I stopped eating steak.)
When I heard about the severe anemia, my first thought was how I could use THAT news to my advantage. I am here to tell you that in my family it counts for nothing. My husband first checked, of course, as husbands will, to be sure that the chances are zero that the anemia is related to something that will trigger the need to cash in my life insurance policy. After that, well, you still have to do the dishes.
Soon, though, maybe I will be given something that will make me feel totally fired up. And then look out. For one thing, I will beging posting at a rate of greater than .7 blog posts a week. And I will be organizing my bureau drawers and then coming over to your house and alphabetizing your spice rack.
And this is also to say to the fourteen lovely, lovely blog readers who left comments cheering me on in the quicksand also known as revising-your-novel-yet again: I ADORE YOU. And my husband, who really just wants to be sure I am well, I adore him too. And those who read and don’t comment, like the lovely Mari (and her lovely soon to be baby?) but hope for the best in the quicksand? Yup. I ADORE YOU also!
The Neverending Story
You know the novel I’ve been writing for as long as I’ve been writing this blog? The one with forty-four (44) chapters? The one I’m revising for my agent? I am just beginning chapter 11.
God.
I have a deadline: October 7. Wish me luck. And know that I am never, ever, ever going to revise this book again. Well, that’s not true. If someone buys it, you’d better believe I’ll revise it again for them.
I don’t know if this much effort goes into every book you pick up at a bookstore or if I am just a slow, sucky writer. But this is one big thing I’ve learned about writing a book: that effortless sentence, that flowing paragraph, that interesting, quick aside? If it’s in my book, you can be certain it took me a really long time to get right.
I suppose that’s one of the great pleasures of your first book, though. I mean, if you get lucky and someone wants the next one, usually they want it faster than forever. But I’m hoping with the second one I won’t need forever to get it right.
Waiting for the Glue to Dry
CalTrans — the mighty California Department of Transportation, home of lighted cones, and hard hats, and workers in reflective vests – promised that the Bay Bridge would be up and running by this morning at 5:00 a.m. That it isn’t ready yet — because they found a crack up there and have to fix it before they let us loose on the bridge — is one of those great moments in steel and glue that, secretly, many people completely love. Me included.
I mean, look — sure, there are 250,000 people who’d like to get their cars across that bridge today so they can go to the airport, or to work, or to visit someone who’s sick. But there are another million or so of us who, like the public informaton officer for CalTrans, are riveted by and can barely contain our excitement at, well, the rivets they’re sticking into all that steel so the whole damned thing doesn’t come falling down into the bay.
Who, exactly, loves this stuff? First, and most obviously, are those who never really grew out of their early devotion to all things construction-related, the people whose very favorite Christmas present was a battery operated crane that they could use to lift pretend girders over the prone body of their father, who’d had a leetle too much to drink at Christmas dinner. For this group, the sight of all that steel being lifted onto the bridge, and the heroic repair effort that’s being undertaken is Christmas Day, only a lot bigger.
The second group are those of us who drive over that bridge — those of us who aren’t engineers, I mean — who really can’t believe the thing works, and stays up, and is so beautiful while it’s at it. I’m in that group.
My feeling is that if they need a little more time for the glue to dry on the crack, well, they should have it. Because I secretly think every time I go over the bridge, “Man, I hope this thing stays up.” And anything they can do to keep it working, well, I’m happy to let them do it.
But wait!!! I just checked the website. They managed to fix it and it’s open!! Yay caltrans.
High School! Musical!
Jack and Charlie, my fourteen year old twins, started high school earlier this week. William, who is 10, started rehearsals for Oliver!, the musical that comes with an exclamation mark at the end, no matter where in a sentence you put it, which is weird, except for the fact that we’re pretty damned excited about the whole thing, so we’ll go with the exclamation mark for now.
Those things — High School! Musical! – have only in common that they’re the beginning of something B-I-G for the boys involved. Lockers! Taking the bus! Open campus! Girls! (for the boy who went to a boys’ school for all those many years before high school.) Orphans! Dancing! Gruel! (But not dancing gruel. Those things are separated by the mighty exclamation mark. Dancing with bowls of gruel in your hands, though, I understand that’s on the menu.)
It just occurred to me that I could write an entire blog post punctuated only with exclamation points, except I also plan to write about my own life, which tonight anyway requires the opposite of the exclamation point, a punctuation mark I just invented called the “downer point.” It looks like a downward facing arrow. I’d add it right here, but I’m no good at that kind of thing. You’ll have to imagine it.
Here’s the downer: the boys are beginning new things. But I am not. I think I said a month or two ago that I found a really great agent to work with. Really good guy. Sells a lot of books. Writes books about how to write books and they make sense and are inspiring. This is so not a downer. This is wonderful and I am thrilled. The downer is that he won’t be selling my book until I revise it. The whole thing. That’s a lot of chapters, blogfriends. All chapters that could be better and all chapters I have to think really hard about in order to make the better. Have I mentioned how this is HARD? Waaah. Plus I’m scared. AND I’m BUSY. I have to drive people places and work at my job and cook and clean and …. you know. I’m whining. I’ll stop.
Also. Finding your locker and not getting egged by seniors and learning how to talk to girls and having to eat a steady diet of gruel and then getting sent out in the snow to be sold to the highest bidder is actually, when you think about it, way way worse than tightening up each and every scene of your book for a guy who’s waiting patiently for you to get on with it so he can maybe sell it for you. Just look at my kids. They get on with it. In fact, they’re getting on with it with so much verve and excitement and mad confidence that a new punctuation mark needs to be invented for their acts of crazy, getting-out-there-in-the-world behavior. Something wild-eyed. That’s how I should revise my book, don’t you think? Like them: full tilt, knowing it’ll all work out one way or another and whatever happens, it’ll be interesting and fun and, if you keep your head down, the chances are pretty good that you won’t get egged by a senior.
Dispatch From The Happiest Place on Earth
Before you check into the Disneyland Hotel, they send you a little informational packet that tells you, among other things, that you should not under any circumstances bring the ashes of your loved one to the Happiest Place on Earth. Ditto firearms, and costumes on those over the age of 10. So, if you feel the urge to scatter the ashes of your beloved off the side of the Matterhorn while you, dressed as a cowgirl, shoot twenty-one rounds from your rifle, this is not the place.
Don’t say I’m not good value in the travel tip department here at BlogLily.
Otherwise, Disneyland’s a pretty good venue for your tenth birthday if you, like William, enjoy half a dozen not too scary rides, a half hour spent exploring Tom Sawyer’s island, a cheeseburger and fries, the chance to watch a little television in your hotel room and then a trip to the movies in Downtown Disneyland, a place that really does exist.
The thing I love about William, by the way, is that he’s not really put off by the immensity of this place. It’s true that you could spend a lifetime here going on all the rides, and watching all the shows, and seeing the fireworks from the perfect spot — and some people (the ones in the lanyards with all the pins, wearing the mouse ears and wishing they’d change that rule about having your ashes scattered near the It’s a Small World Ride), apparently do. But when 3:00 comes around, and it is clearly a blazing 107 degrees out, well, why trudge around trying to see a performance of songs from High School Musical when you could go to your room and drink some ice water, eat grapes, and watch tv?
I learn things all the time, you know. No ashes at Disneyland. No Disneyland after 3:00 p.m.
Hope your summer’s winding down with one or two small learning experiences. xo
PS: I was so sorry to hear about Ted Kennedy’s death. A few years ago, I wrote about his concession speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention. It’s here.
All’s Well
Filed under: Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare, all's well that ends well |
Comments (14) A few weeks ago, I went to Ashland with some friends and, in what can only be described as a frenzy of playgoing, we saw — over a two day period — a musical (the Music Man), a brand new play about Shakespeare and the Bush administration (Equivocation), and a production of All’s Well That Ends Well that was terrific, but wasn’t actually the play Shakespeare wrote.
This last thing is what I want to talk about today, because I’m still turning over in my head what happened between the time Shakespeare wrote All’s Well That Ends Well and a couple weeks ago, when the Oregon Shakespeare Festival staged it. If all goes well, I’ll actually have a point at the end of this post, and if all doesn’t go well, at least you will know the plot of a lesser-known Shakespearean comedy, which I figure is good value, given that this is, after all, a blog.
Many people (including me) don’t know the plot of All’s Well That Ends Well. This is because it’s a comedy that’s not staged very often, probably because the plot — if believed — isn’t all that comic. Also, very few people read Shakespeare and so why should anybody know the plots of the plays, although there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that the closer you get to Ashland, Oregon, the less true this is. Ashland was teeming with Shakespeare groupies. Everywhere you looked, there they were, proclaiming their love of Will in t-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, hats, and key chains. In fact, so deep does bardolatry run in Ashland, that it has spawned an entire category of theater-goers, people known as “canon clickers.” A little like a train spotter, the canon clicker is unable to die until he has seen one of each — in the case of the canon clicker, that would be a performance of every play in the canon. The festival’s director received two cases of wine this year from a canon clicker because they staged Henry VIII, which is a bad play to stage, but did enable some guy to go to his grave a happy man.
Anyway, the plot. The play’s heroine is named Helena. She’s the daughter of a renowned, and lately dead, doctor. Her guardian is the countess of some French-sounding place, and the countess has a son, Bertram, who ALSO has a guardian, in this case, the King of France. So, there you have it, your lovers are clear from the get-go.
Helena loves Bertram. Bertram is an ass, and does NOT love Helena, because her father was only a doctor. (Clearly, he is not living in the United States in the present time, when doctor’s daughters in comedies generally are perceived of — or were until we elected Obama and ruined our fully functional health care system, if you believe the crazy republicans, which of course, none of us do! — as in high demand. Lots of money there, right?)
Helena is not put off by the fact that Bertram is an ass. She, it turns out, is incredibly resourceful, has made up her mind to have him, and she has a chest full of cures that were left by her father and, apparently, she hasn’t given a thought to them (although they could have cured half of France if she’d been thinking about it) until she decides she wants Bertram for her own.
The King of France, it turns out, is very, very sick. He has an illness Shakespeare calls a “fistula,” which I love because it’s very specific and really disgusting, which you too can discover simply by googling “fistula” (this is what the internet was invented to do, by the way). Anyway, Helena offers to cure the King in return for being able to choose a husband. The King agrees, is cured, and Helena picks Bertram. Bertram is not at all happy to be chosen, but he caves, in an ill-tempered way, and off he goes to the Tuscan Wars (conveniently invented by Shakespeare to allow Bertram to flounce off the stage in an Italian kind of way, and also to participate in a very funny subplot I won’t go into here). Before Bertram flounces off he taunts Helena with how much he hates her — he tells her he won’t treat her as a wife until she gets the ring from his hand and herself with child by him, which isn’t ever going to happen, so there. Now, this is classic comedic bad behavior, which we have little trouble seeing as bad behavior, although of course in real life, what’s wrong with being unhappy about an arranged marriage? But we’re led to believe by the play that Bertram is an ass, and so it’s hard to work up a head of steam about his predicament.
As I was saying, off he goes. Helena, being Helena, packs up her stuff, and goes after him. On the outskirts of Florence, she meets a lady who houses pilgrims and has a beautiful daughter named Diana and immediately offers Helena refuge. Bertram has been wooing Diana (who resists him, of course, because she’s not that kind of girl, and she knows an ass when sees one). Helena convinces Diana (well, actually, she pays her three bags of gold) to pretend to give in to Bertram’s desire to sleep with her, but only if Bertram will give her his ring. They perform what I have recently learned is a literary plot device called the “bed trick,” where a man thinks he is sleeping with one woman (usually someone he isn’t supposed to be sleeping with, like Diana) but in the dark, this woman is replaced by another woman (the one he IS supposed to sleep with, Helena). And that usually works out, believe it or not, which is because in the dark all women are alike to men, something I think might actually be sort of true.
Eventually, everyone gets back to the countess’s palace, Bertram is confronted with his caddish behavior, Helena reveals that she is pregnant and has the ring, and Bertram basically gives in and grumpily agrees to acknowledge her as his wife.
Okay, then. I defy anyone to read this play and find in it any hint of growth on Bertram’s part. He’s caddish and grumpy from beginning to end. And I sort of liked that, because really, isn’t it worth saying that we love who we love, even if they’re not always such fine fish? (Bertram is handsome, good at wars, and going to inherit a dukedom — worse men exist.) And that women will go to great lengths to get the men they have decided they love? And that men are lucky they do, because things usually turn out well for men when women look past their flaws to their better selves, which we all have, even if they aren’t on display at the moment (a truth that turns out to be equally applicable to women)? All these things are true, worth saying, and basically the point of All’s Well That Ends Well. (The title, of course, is another way of saying “the ends justify the means” — Helena’s trickery, though troubling, ends in the marriage she wants.)
So. If you are still reading, and many of you probably gave up at the fistula part, here’s the thing. In Ashland, the play was staged in such a way that you were led to believe that Bertram loved Helena from the very start, but he didn’t know it. Since this isn’t in the text, you see in the way he looks at her, and holds her hand, even, these nascent feelings of love. And we also see him changing, again through non-verbal cues, becoming ashamed of his behavior, until at the end, he behaves as though he embraces his marriage with a full heart, when really, if you read what he says on the page, his heart is hardly full. I think if Shakespeare wanted Bertram to grow and change, he would have given him and Helena a lot of lovely speeches where he does just that. The person who wanted Bertram to grow and change is the play’s director and, of course, us, the people the director staged this play to delight. (It WAS delightful, by the way.)
My point is a small one, but it is a point: apparently, the requirement that characters change and are redeemed is one that has made it impossible for this play to be what it really is. I think modern cinematic romantic comedy is responsible for this staging — in romantic comedy, the lovers who begin the film are stubborn, wrong-headed, silly, headed in the wrong direction, as romantic comedy lovers general are, and they are NEVER the same as the lovers who end the film by recognizing their true love, being chastened by their bad behavior, redeemed into being their finer selves by the power of love. Shakespeare’s point is indeed that we are redeemed by love; it’s just that he also seems to be saying that we don’t actually change that much sometimes during courtship, that love is truly blind, and yet so generous as to be given to us in spite of our churlishness and bad behavior. This is a powerful point, tricky and unattractive though it might seem at first glance. But that’s why we read Shakespeare — to have our thinking challenged, which is certainly what this play does and what this production, though an entertaining and wonderful romantic comedy, does not.
This doesn’t mean that the play wasn’t terrific — it was, featuring as it did, wonderful actors, lovely costumes, and a plot that was entertaining and interesting — it just wasn’t the All’s Well that Ends Well that Shakespeare wrote. No harm in that, in the end. It seems churlish to fault a production for not being faithful to its source, the way people get mad at movies because they’re not like the book. In the end, I was entertained for the two hours I spent in the theater, and that is more than enough for me.
A Day So Happy
Back in the olden days, when this blog was new, I would, without any hesitation, write an entire blog post about why this morning at 10:43 a.m. (which is the time as I write this) I found myself so incredibly happy. But something happened, maybe a year or so ago, and I began to be afraid of my blog, afraid that what I was writing was ridiculous, or not worth anyone’s time, and who was I to give nothing of value to the people who come over here other than a few words about my own personal happiness?
I’m so over that this morning.
I’m happy because the eagle landed yesterday, and because buzz aldrin, a man not known for being poetic, described the moon’s “magnificent desolation” and it was right there on twitter, coming to me over my cell phone in little bursts, like I was simultaneously Houston, the apollo 11 spacecraft and the eagle. I remember when I was a child the summer of the moon landing was such a happy one. My mother rented a television, my father was in Germany, setting up things for our move from Maryland to Bavaria in the fall, and the ordinary rules of the house seemed a little more relaxed. You knew the astronauts were up there, overhead, and that made the sky and the moon look different, more magical and possible. That’s what people like Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury knew and felt and delivered, in the only kind of science fiction I’ve ever read and loved.
I’m also happy because I’ve discovered that tapioca pudding, which I hated as a child, is delicious when you make it yourself, as an adult, and you get to eat it while it’s warm, and also drizzle it on fruit. I discovered this because my neighbor, Helen, who is in her late 80s and dying of cancer, and right now is in a nursing home getting strong so she can come home for her last fall in Berkeley, asked us to bring her some one evening a week or two ago. It is not a happy thing when your beautiful and kind neighbor is dying, but it is an extraordinary gift to be able to be of assistance to her, and to witness how a woman of grace and strength approaches her final illness. It is true that we all die, but as I might have mentioned here before, we die only in a moment and the rest of the time we are here, alive, engaged in life, part of things. And so, just as it did that summer of the moon landing, knowing that while you go about your everyday life, someone else is engaged in a heroic and extraordinary endeavor, makes you reach for, insist on, and recognize the happiness in your everyday life.
Time for Everything in the World
Shakespeare wrote 12 comedies (14 if you count The Tempest and A Winter’s Tale) over the course of 16 years or so, an output that seems even more prodigious when you realize he was also turning out tragedies and histories at the same time.
There’s something about the chronological list of the plays (which I looked up because I’m spending a lot of time reading the comedies, and I keep forgetting which one I’m supposed to be on next) that I find enormously interesting.
It’s clear that Shakespeare’s first preoccupations were with the question of how we learn to love well — an obvious enough first preoccupation. And then (and also at the same time) in the histories his concern is with what is, essentially, the next important thing that comes up in becoming an adult — mainly family, both public and private, which is what drives the histories.
It’s the tragedies, though, where things sort of blow apart. I mean, obviously, the tragedies are linked by the fact that they all end in death rather than in marriage. But they’re each so beautifully and particularly about life itself, and its problems — with love, certainly, but also jealousy, fidelity, and language’s failure — and our own — to say what we mean. In the comedies, and in literature that mirrors the comedies, like Austen’s novels, the curtain falls on marriage. What’s wonderful about Shakespeare is that the curtain lifts again and again on what happens afterwards. Sure, people end up dying, but then don’t we all?
Today, though, I’m still reading the comedies. Maybe because it’s summer, there seems today to be time enough to get to those other preoccupations.
Here’s the list, in case you’re interested:
1589 Comedy of Errors
1590 Henry VI, Part II
Henry VI, Part III
1591 Henry VI, Part I
1592 Richard III
1593 Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
1594 Romeo and Juliet
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love’s Labour’s Lost
1595 Richard II
Midsummer Night’s Dream
1596 King John
Merchant of Venice
1597 Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part II
1598 Henry V
Much Ado about Nothing
1599 Twelfth Night
As You Like It
Julius Caesar
1600 Hamlet
Merry Wives of Windsor
1601 Troilus and Cressida
1602 All’s Well That Ends Well
1604 Othello
Measure for Measure
1605 King Lear
Macbeth
1606 Antony and Cleopatra
1607 Coriolanus
Timon of Athens
1608 Pericles
1609 Cymbeline
1610 Winter’s Tale
1611 Tempest
1612 Henry VIII
A Murder for You
I read today someplace that if you are a writer, you should have an entire website, which should display excerpts from your work. Good heavens. How is it possible that I’ve written this blog for more than three years and never posted a single bit of my fiction (not to mention the utter absence of a website)? Well, except that one time when I was trying to write about sex, and thought, “Now, THAT’s an interesting thing to post,” so I did. In 2007. Otherwise, nada.
But I am indeed a writer, and I have in fact written an entire novel, and a number of short stories, one of which will shortly be coming out in a fine journal (in a separate post, I plan to flog that journal like mad, encouraging all of you to buy it, so they will know that I do have a few friends, despite the weird subject of that story). So, I’ve decided I will follow that somewhat random piece of advice, and here post an excerpt from The Secret War, which someday might actually be for sale at your local Barnes & Noble (not to mention your local independent bookstore) if all goes well.
I picked the shortest, most coherent thing I could excerpt, which is the part where the first murder takes place. This murder occurs in an interesting location, because all murders should. The book itself is set in a small town in Bavaria, on the border of East Germany, West Germany, and Czechoslovakia. From the names of those places, places that no longer exist, you might also guess that it is set in the past. If you did, you would be correct. It is set in 1969, in fact. The village is home to a small American military base — on top of the highest hill on the base is a listening post. There are a lot of antennas on that hill, and a mushroom shaped hut where guys sit around with big black headphones over their ears eavesdropping on the enemy.
What are they listening for? Well, the main idea was that if a lot of planes started to head from, say East Germany, to Western Europe, the guys in the headphones would let people know. The listening post is not very secret –the antennas are hard to hide– but it is still not a place just anybody is allowed to be on. And that’s why it’s good to have someone murdered up there who isn’t supposed to be there. So, with that in mind, here it is — an excerpt from my novel.
Chapter 6
Every night, a few hours before the end of his shift at midnight, the soldier ran between the two buildings at the top of the hill, clutching the rubber pouch full of the night’s reports, eluding the spotlight that slashed the darkness with streaks of light. When he’d been a boy he’d played a game like the one he played tonight. Coming home late from a friend’s house, he’d cut around the puddles of light created by streetlamps, passing cars, and porch lights, eluding the lights as though they were his enemies. Darkness meant safety. Tonight he was not far from boyhood as he ran toward and through the darkness on this foreign hill in this foreign place, like a swimmer moving through clean, cold water.
Before he’d come here, when he’d thought they would send him to Vietnam instead, he had often dreamed of death. But he had never dreamed of the actual dead, only of their sudden absence. In his dreams, a loved one would fall silent or no longer be in the room. He’d notice their silence and know they were gone. Sometimes his dreams would be of the event right before death — the explosion, the burst of gunfire, the menacing face of the enemy. And so, before tonight, he had never seen the dead, not in repose and not in the moment immediately after they make their passage from life into death.
At first he thought the body was a bulky pack left on the path by a soldier during a march that had ended abruptly. He bent to move the object out of his way and saw it was a man, sprawled across the path as though he had known the runner would come this way and help him. But the young man knew instinctively it was too late to do anything to help.
He touched the body and his hand came away warm and sticky. The spotlight fell across the body and illuminated the dead man, the spreading pool of blood beneath him and the truth that our skin only just barely keeps at bay our blood’s desire to free itself from our bodies, the way a weak dam barely contains the water behind it.
The dead man — for the young soldier knew without a doubt the man was dead — was almost his age. His angelic face under a mop of light hair stared wordlessly at the dark night sky. He wore black trousers and a t-shirt that might once have been white, but was now soaked and dark. The sharp object that had ended the man’s life had slashed through the t-shirt.
But the young man didn’t think about any of this until later. At this moment, he thought immediate and terrified thoughts, chief among them being whether whatever dark and angry thing was out there in the night might be coming for him too. He turned from the sight he’d dream about for the rest of his life, and ran back toward the light of the listening hut, no longer a stranger to death.
Words and Pictures
I love blogs that tell stories AND make pictures.
Like Maira Kalman and this guy. (You really must go and look at these blogs — Maira Kalman is a genius. And the ode to coffee on the second link is really terrific. It is an inspiration to see what truly creative people can do with a blog post.)
Sometimes I wonder why I can’t draw. About five years ago, in an effort to overcome that deficiency, I decided that, at the very least, I could at least learn to draw things that could best be described as symbols of objects, rather than representations of the objects. I did it with the help of Ed Emberley. In no time, following carefully his directions, I was producing very attractive, sketchy things that could definitely be identified as: Lawn Mowers! Barns! Typewriters! It was wonderful.
The only trouble is that I can never remember how to draw these things unless I have an Ed Emberley book with me. I learned this when I was visiting my friend Debbie, who is a fabulous artist, and I discovered I couldn’t produce an umbrella in a game of Pictionary. It was deeply embarrassing.
I think I will go back to Ed Emberly and try again. Isn’t that what summer is for — learning new skills?
In an Utterly Unprecedented Move
Filed under: Books, Reading, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Writing, fiction |
Comments (11) I’m going to blog instead of refreshing my e-mail in box. And what, you might be asking, is SHE going to write about? Does she even read books, the ostensible purpose for this entire blog? How could she possibly find the time, so busy is she obsessing over why no one is e-mailing her editing suggestions for her book, or giving her news of her stories!??
But it turns out, dear readers, that I do indeed read, and what a pleasure it is to have that to hold up as a shield against anxiety. I gave my camera to a child to take on a trip, so I can’t actually document the book I’m reading, but I’ll just tell you here and now that I picked up E.B. White’s Letters (with a very nice introduction by John Updike) at Moe’s Books in Berkeley yesterday and I am in the happiest of reading experiences: thumbing through the personal papers of someone I admire.
Ever since I received my first letter from an author (come to think of it, it was my only letter and was written in response to my gushing fan mail), which was from Noel Streatfield, the author of Ballet Shoes, I have lusted after the casual writing of people I admire — writers mostly. The only thing I learned about Noel Streatfield from that letter was that she used a fountain pen to write her name in that proper up and down English writing, which is not at all the same as the kind of cursive you learn in the United States in the third grade, because it is far SMARTER, but well, that was good enough for me.
It’s a weird kind of nosiness, this snooping around in the letters, diaries and notebooks of writers. I think I do it because I want to know who these people are, and how they managed to get so much real life down in a story. But until today, when I began to refresh my inbox for the six millionth time, and decided instead it would be better to write about what I’m reading, I have never really given much thought to the charm of the diary, the letter, the notebook.
I’m pretty sure what gets me about these kinds of things is the possibility that you’ll edge closer to the magic in fiction, that by knowing something true about the person who created it, you will somehow be invested with that magic yourself. But most of the time what you discover isn’t magic, exactly, but more that the person who wrote something you loved was sort of weird, or very funny, or even more anxious than you are. And that is just as good as the whole magic thing.
Here are some discoveries I’ve made reading letters and diaries, because that is what this blog post is about to become: a compendium of my favorite bits from the letters, diaries and notebooks I’ve read over the years.
Well, first, there’s Rilke, whose Letters to a Young Poet is not really a book of letters, of course, but more a guide to the writer he probably once was. But the tone of it is so confidential and kind, that even though the young poet isn’t a real person, which means these aren’t really letters, any more than Plato is talking to actual students in those dialogues, it’s still a great book. My favorite thing in it? The news that good things are difficult. I cannot tell you how many times I have repeated this information — usually to my children, but to myself also. And I aso rely heavily on its reverse: if it’s difficult, that’s probably a sign that you’re working on something worth doing. (Except of course, if what you’re trying to do is turn a nozzle ON by turning it in the direction that turns it off. THAT is difficult because you are being stupid. It’s important to know the difference.)
Let’s see. Who else? Oh. Wallace Stevens’s notebooks are collected in a very cool facsimile edition called Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book. Have I mentioned how much I like to look at the handwriting of great writers? And how sad I am that my generation is the last to actually write things down and not type them? (And most of us don’t even do that.) Anyway, this book is full of things Stevens copied down about other writers, because he was sort of nosy too and liked to read things artists said about doing their jobs. I am particularly fond of this, which is actually something Henry James said in a letter to H.G. Wells, back when letters were written down in ink:
It is art which makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
And then there is Henry James, himself, whose notebooks I have been reading in no particular order. One thing I love about them is how James would sketch out the plots of entire short stories, as though he was describing the story to someone, and in fact, you realize that people told Henry James weird and interesting stories all the time, and then he’d steal them and make something really terrific of them. Which makes me understand how it can be that people would sue someone like JK Rowling, because they too once thought it would be cool to set a story about some underage wizards in an English boarding school and maybe they were talking about it in some cafe in Edinburgh and a woman with a baby in a stroller who was sitting next to them was scribbling in anotebook the whole time they were talking and well. .. The thing is, you have to be Henry James (or JK Rowling) to really make that work; those stories you hear from people aren’t fiction until you apply some magic to them.
And although there is much, much more, I see that this is where I can put my favorite thing from Virginia Woolf’’s Diaries, which are very long and have a lot of great things in them, but this is one of the best and most beautiful of all those things and a good place to end this post, which has done two things: made me realize how much I love books and kept me from that obsessive inbox refreshing thing, which is not refreshing at all:
to suppress oneself and run freely out in joy — such is the perfectly infallible and simple prescription. And to use one’s hands and eyes; to talk to people; to be a straw on the river, now and then — passive, not striving to say this is this. If one does not lie back and sum up and say to the moment, this very moment, Stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough.
June Report
It isn’t June anymore is it? I love the summer, but July always makes me a little nervous — you’re suddenly in the MIDDLE of summer, and you feel some urgency to get your summer things done, which is crazy because the whole point of summer is to not do much, and to enjoy the not-doing of much.
In contrast, June was a month when a lot happened. Because I am spending more and more time writing 140 character accounts of myself on twitter and facebook, I have fallen a little out of practice with the longer form that is a blog post. So I am going to make a list of what June looked like, thinking I might fool myself into thinking that a blog post is as simple as stringing together small accounts of yourself, which, in a way, it is:
1. I discovered this month that death and sickness, which are with us always, need not be disasters. My Uncle Martin died early in the month, and then two weeks later, another uncle, a lovely man we’d just seen on our way down from my Uncle Martin’s funeral, also died. Jim Berlin was his name — a man whose preferred form of communication was the three line joke, a guy who drove a truck for a living, fished and hunted and camped and swam and loved my aunt and my cousins, who were just toddlers when they married, and who are now grown men with trucks of their own. His funeral was a few days ago in Colusa — one of those places in California where it gets really hot in the summer and people grow things like rice and tomatoes, and the gathering after the funeral is in the park in the middle of town, under huge shade trees, right next to the municipal swimming pool. People bring macaroni salad and five hundred different versions of chocolate cake. And a lot of cold drinks.
What I learned in June is that small communities are rich places.
2. I spent a lot of time in June refreshing my e-mail inbox, waiting to get editing suggestions from my new agent, waiting to hear about a writing residency I applied for, waiting to hear about stories I have out. The results: new agent is a terrific editor so far and really busy, as all people who sell books for a living are; I will be doing this great writing residency with Antonya Nelson in the fall in Florida for three weeks; and no one at the remaining literary journals that have my stories is alive anymore. I can only hope that in small towns across America people are eating macaroni salad and chocolate velvet cake with cream cheese icing to celebrate the lives of those literary editors who are no longer with us.
What have I learned about waiting? That if you aren’t careful, and don’t guard against it, you can divert your attention from the stories you want to tell to the business of writing. I’ve spent far too much time in the last year doing that, and am slowly weaning myself off the e-mail inbox refresh button. Maybe I will write a blog post instead of opening my e-mail to see what’s in there besides offers to grow the penis I don’t have.
More things than that happened in June: my oldest sons are off to high school in the fall, and there is a lot of new teenage energy in our house, and then there is the next novel, which has to get in a higher, faster gear, now that I have come close to settling the business of the last one. Also, if I am going to be sitting around a table with a woman who actually writes amazing fiction, shouldn’t I be producing something that could at least be described as a credible effort?
But in July it would be lovely if there could be a day or two here or there when nothing at all happens, except lying around and reading and dreaming. I hope that’s the kind of July all of you are getting to have.
Funeral for a Basque
Last week, I went up to Susanville with my mother to help bury my uncle, Marty Paguegui, who lived on the eponymous street you see pictured above. I’ve never been to Susanville, not being close to my uncle. It’s a wonderful place.
On the surface, I don’t belong in a place like Susanville, not at all. Susanville is about 80 miles west of Reno. It’s in the mountains — 4,200 feet — it snows up there. People ranch, and they work construction (which is what my uncle did), or they work at the High Desert Prison, one of those huge new prisons the state of California’s thrown up in all kinds of out-of-the-way places. When you drive out to Paguegui Lane, you can see the prison from a long way away because it has so many lights outside and there aren’t that many lights on in Susanville at night so nothing competes with it.
Me, I’m from a place that’s easy to get to, any season at all. And people here don’t ranch, let’s just leave it at that. Side dishes with mayo, particularly ones with macaroni? Not much in evidence in Berkeley. But surprisingly yummy when eaten in the parish hall of the catholic church in Susanville after mass, or at my Aunt Vicky’s house, in Maxwell, which is off I-5, on the way home from Susanville. I’m not sure you’re supposed to discover how much you love a place when you’re on a funeral mission, but there you have it: that was mostly what I did.
My uncle — who was in his early 70s — had a lot of friends. The funeral mass was crowded with them, and the amount of help they gave was huge and without any hesitation. It was lovely for my mother and my cousins to have people volunteer to do things they couldn’t do. For example, my uncle left his important stuff in a combination safe. He’d given the combination to two different people, but on the Sunday when we needed to open it, the combination was nowhere in evidence. So, how do you get a safe open on a Sunday in Susanville? Well, you take it to the local locksmith, a heavily tattooed ex-con, and he drills it open in about two seconds so you can get the instructions for the funeral, the will, and the cash he didn’t want to put in the bank.
My uncle was a handsome man, in that way Basque men can be handsome, with a white smile in a dark face, the kind of guy who loves to dance, and has a way of talking to women that makes them feel that they might possibly be the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world. As a result, he was not that successful with women long-term, but he clearly had a lot of short-term fun. So much so that when it became evident that one of his wishes for his funeral was to have women pall bearers, the rush to volunteer was immediate and fierce.
Here are some other facts about Susanville:
- Things start early. Starbucks is open at 4:30 a.m. That’s so the prison guards and the ranchers can get a latte on their way to work.
- The local AM radio station, KSUE, has a very popular swap program every day, a program in which you can, for example, let people know you’re willing to swap your used generator for a ride-on lawn mower. And if you show up at 4:30 a.m. at that radio station, which is in a little house by the fairgrounds, there will be a guy there who’s wide awake, and he’ll read the announcement of your uncle’s death and the funeral mass to come a couple times a day, just to make sure the word gets out.
- You’ll discover, when you walk outside your room at the Best Western, after your mother’s woken you up to go to the radio station, that the air is cleaner and fresher than any air you can remember in a long time, and the moon will just be sinking beyond the edge of the horizon and you’ll notice that the sky is huge and open and so beautiful you want to stand there in the parking lot and not move because you know it’ll be a while before you see the morning in quite that way again. And you’ll see this is why your uncle spent most of his life up here. Because it is beautiful in a way few other places are.
- When the Irish priest in Susanville is on vacation, his place is taken by the Rwandan priest whose parish is up the road. This Rwandan priest will hug your mother more than a few times, and he will give a remarkable homily about life and death, which you know he’s seen a lot of, even though he looks like he’s barely thirty years old.
- People will invite you to come back to Susanville because your uncle was their friend. And you will come back — to a party in a few weekends, and to the big lamb barbeque your uncle gave every year, the one where the old Basques stand around telling jokes, charming women, living a good, full life. You’ll come back because you like this place, this early-rising, kind, surprising place.
And that is where I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing, since I last posted about how good the food at the Berkeley Bowl looks in the summer.
The Old Bowl
When I first moved to Berkeley — in the early 1980s — my roommates at the time were old (in their late twenties) and sophisticated (they knew their way around an artichoke). They shopped at this place they referred to as “the Bowl.” I imagined it was named after a big bowl of fruit, because that is what they usually brought home after they went shopping. They also brought home this wonderful cheese I’d never heard of before. It was called Havarti.
Berkeley was a paradise in those days. Now you can buy havarti at Costco, so paradise is more widely available in America, which can only be a good thing. I mean, even in this wretched economy, you can still afford the occasional good thing to eat and you have a much better chance of being able to find it than you did in the early 1980s. Cheese has a way of making the worst things seem a little bit better. At least that is what we believe here in Berkeley, which is why I live here.
Anyway, it turned out that the Berkeley Bowl was actually an old bowling alley that had been turned into a fruit and vegetable market which also sold cheese (at a long, exciting cheese counter) meat, seafood and, sort of as an aside, things like recycled paper towels and earthy moisturizers made by people who lived in Ukiah. To successfully shop there you really did have to have some skills, just not with a bowling ball. Basically, you had to be aggressive with your shopping cart, and willing to snatch fruit out of the hands of elderly ladies who wanted it too. But you’d go cart-to-cart with these ladies because you wanted those raspberries MORE, having grown up in a place where fruit (and tomatoes!) just did not taste so real, and fresh and amazing, thus making your desire for them really strong. At the time, I didn’t have a car, so I had no idea the real challenge of shopping at the Berkeley Bowl was finding a place to put it.
And now there is a SECOND bowl in Berkeley. It opened today (it is called “Berkeley Bowl West”) and it amazes me that this could be so — mostly because this means there will FINALLY be a place to park at the Berkeley Bowl in my neighborhood because all the shoppers who wanted my parking spot will be at Berkeley Bowl West. And I will not have to get into unseemly altercations near the apricots to score the perfect ones that have my name on them. Still, in honor of the time that has passed since I first discovered havarti and artichokes, the Bowl in my neighborhood is now called the Old Bowl. (At least that is what I’m calling it.) I am now the old lady you have to face down to get to the apricots first. (I will add that I am not really that old, and I imagine the ladies I thought were so old probably weren’t either. It’s funny how perception depends a lot on where you stand.)
Summer’s almost here. Three years ago, when I was just beginning to write this blog, I was up to my arms in raspberries, making jam. A day or two after I wrote about that, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and I haven’t boiled fruit and sugar together since then. This is to say that my hiatus from jam is over. Raspberries at the Old Bowl were .99 a basket when I was there tonight — I swear to God. And the apricots, which are slightly more expensive, are so beautiful this year.
This weekend, it’s jam time.
