Is it Mee-Mee or Meam?

Posted on July 31, 2006

I confess, I don’t know what a meme is, or how it’s pronounced. I see it used a lot, and I think it’s like the word “meta” — something I wouldn’t like, something sort of ironic and self-conscious and twenty-first century. I’ve never even looked the word meme up, fearing it will make me feel inadequate and uncool, like semiotics.

So, when the sweet Miss Almost Bluestocking asked me to answer some questions about books, and called these questions a meme, I had a moment of weird anti-technology poo-pooing. The kind of thing I shouldn’t admit, come to think of it. But since I’m being honest here, I’ll just say that when I do this I generally think, “a forty-six year old woman does not [fill in the blank -- in this case it's meme]. “ You know, it could look undignified.

And then I thought, well goodness, how is it going to hurt you to do something new, missy? They’re just questions. I answer questions all the time. (Mom, how much was a penny worth when you were a kid? is the kind of question I’m called on to answer all the time. That, and “Who has the world’s biggest army?”) And at least these are questions that have nothing to do with weapons or candy. And they’re interesting (and Ms. Bluestocking has interesting answers.)

Here are the questions. And here are my answers. Come to think of it, though, I’d actually rather hear YOUR answer, Dear Reader, if you want to give this a go.

Here’s what I want you to do. Imagine Terry Gross, of National Public Radio, is asking you these questions on her radio show, the one where she only interviews people worth hearing from. You’ve just won a Pulitzer, or some such honor. You’re feeling humble, a bit besieged by all the interest in you, but secretly hoping the guy (or girl) who dumped you in college is listening and regretting his behavior. By the way, you’re actually not really besieged, you’re just acting that way because it seems properly modest. In fact, you’re beyond thrilled that Terry Gross cares even the tiniest bit what you think about anything at all. Got that? Okay, I think we’re ready for the mee-mee. Wipe the cream cheese off your nose. Okay. We’re set.

One book that changed your life.
No book. I don’t think books change your life. I think they do something even better: as they teach you to be a better reader, books help you acquire skills to live a happier life. Two examples: Mysteries help you learn to spot the bad guy. Poetry helps you learn to express yourself succinctly. I could go on, but I think these answers are supposed to be succinct.
One book that you’ve read more than once. The Odyssey. Every fall for about ten years, I would re-read the Odyssey. I loved the fact that I found something new every time I read it. I also love the way it’s structured, with the framing device of Telemachus’s journey. And although I’m a peace loving woman, I really like that scene where Odysseus and his son give the rotten suitors what they deserve.
One book you’d want on a desert island.
Shakespeare. Collected Works. I hope that’s not cheating. It’s all there: history, comedy, tragedy. Poetry.
One book that made you laugh.
That very funny book by David Sedaris, the name of which escapes me — the one where he describes learning to speak French and what an idiot he is. I like him very much, and have adored him ever since I heard him describe on National Public Radio his adventures as a department store elf during the holiday season.
One book that made you cry.
Oh, definitely, that would be Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. I think it’s seeing the truth through the eyes of a repressed narrator that did it for me. I found it unbearably sad to be in the head of a man who didn’t know how to secure his own happiness.
One book that you wish had been written.
What a great question. I think the answer to this is almost always the last book of a writer you didn’t know had died until you asked for the next book and found out there weren’t anymore. The most recent sad example of this is Sebald, the great German writer who died not long after Austerlitz came out — such a wonderful and important book. And you just knew he had more to say.
One book that you wish had never been written.
I’m a first amendment absolutist. There’s no such book.
One book you’re currently reading.
Trollope’s Barchester Towers.
One book you’ve been meaning to read.
Swann’s Way. I actually have sort of read this before — through the gestation and births of three children. By the time I got to the end I had no idea what had happened in the beginning. I wonder if it will be different now that I’m not sleepless and nursing. I have a new translation, a Penguin one. We’ll see.

So, okay, that wasn’t too bad. I was sipping a champagne cocktail while I did that, could you tell? And I was wearing a great pair of sling backs. And a slick pencil skirt. I looked famous, and properly fit (not too thin, not too plump — but clearly able to sword fight my way out of the radio station if necessary.) Even though it was a radio audience, everybody could tell there was a pencil skirt involved. Terry kept smiling at me and refilling my glass. (Were you listening, college boyfriend? Are you sorry now??) Anyway, Dear Reader, it’s your turn. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

Under the Princess Plant

Posted on July 30, 2006

This is the view from our living room window. The purple flowers grow on a bush called a princess plant. It looks more like a tree, but you realize it’s a bush because sometimes it will get too high for its support system and topple over. Like everything in our yard, it’s incredibly hardy, and prolific. (Note added a day or so later: Were I to write a story about a princess, I’d want her to be like this plant. Gets up when she topples over, hardy, prolific, looks good in purple. I’d like my sons to be that way too.)

There are a lot of people who spend a lot of time and money on their yards (which they then call a garden), but we are not one of them. We just let our yard do what it does and get somebody to lop things off every once in a while. One of the most wonderful things about living in the Bay Area is that the sorts of things that grow here like weeds are astonishingly lovely: bougainvillea (that’s what’s on the header of my blog), star jasmine, Meyer lemons. It’s a sort of Garden of Eden, the snakes being things like traffic, the high cost of living and the occasional earthquake.

The photo reminds me that I never really sit in our living room and read, although it’s a very comfortable place to do that. (My six year old son plays under this window every day of the year. He has a complex game of action figures going on at all times and he talks to himself. It’s soothing to hear him at work, like listening to a stream.)

I used to read on the train to work (I read War and Peace on my commute, and Anna Karenina, and tons of Dickens and Thackery and Trollope and Anne Tyler and things I don’t even remember now.) But then I started to use that time to write and I never really did make a consistent reading time to replace the one I’d given over to writing.

It’s wonderfully clear from reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries that she had a time (I think it was the evening) set aside just for reading. She treated it as a necessary part of the writing life, in part because she made money writing reviews, but also because she just liked to read. I like that about her.

I know it’s a digression, but Woolf’s diaries also made me realize that the only reason she can be such an icon in America, a writer virtually a saint, is because we don’t really have the same sense of class the English do. She had her blind spots about class, and the diary entries about the women who helped in her house are exemplars of the huge divide between the upper and lower classes in England. It’s tragic in a way that such a perceptive writer wasn’t able to see the people who worked for her as real people, but instead wrote about them as types, unpleasant types.

The diaries are, nevertheless, a wonderful inspiration for creating a life where writing is not only possible, but really pleasurable. That’s one of my hopes for this week, to get a little more reading done — to finish Barchester Towers and start Suite Francaise. And to write, of course.

Short:Sweet (and a little Shakespeare, at the very end)

Posted on July 28, 2006

Today, I’ve been thinking about brevity. Brevity in writing and in speaking. It’s a continuation of yesterday’s thought, the one about how it is more effective to show than to tell. It’s also true that it is sometimes more effective to say something once, and with wit and brevity, than to repeat yourself or twitter on about something you’ve already said. If you want people (here I am referring to readers and to children) to follow you up the steep hill, you have to make it look like an easy hike.

Metaphor Switch, for those who do best when food is invoked: We cannot eat Thanksgiving dinner every night of the year. Nor can we survive on evening meals that consist of nectarines, yogurt and raspberries. We need both sorts of nourishment.

This is today’s:

The container I keep my yogurt in has a little bit of Shakespeare on it (I’ll leave you to guess, along with Edwin, whether the reference to oranges and fruits is Shakespearean or not). But in tiny writing underneath the oranges and fruits, you’ll find this, which is more assuredly Shakespeare:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

And if you’re curious, here’s the rest of this sonnet:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Enjoy your day, or your evening, depending on where in the world you are.

Yours,

Show:Tell

Posted on July 27, 2006

You generally hear the piece of advice I’m about to talk about within the first six minutes of any decent writing class. It’s this: Show, Don’t Tell. Show your reader what you mean, don’t tell them.

A good writer does not say, “I was irritated.” She says, “My palms twitched. I looked at Donatella’s cheek and wondered if it would smudge her blush if I hit her with the badminton raquet I was carrying. Or maybe I’d just slug her with my new tote bag, the one she’d used to store her twenty pounds of ice in. Either way, if she continued to use the word “hot” as a term of praise, things were going to get ugly.”

The same principle obtains in parenting: you cannot tell your children the important things about life. You must show them.

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a bigger problem for a parent than it is for a writer. A patient writing teacher, constructive criticism and a little practice makes a teller into a shower in almost no time. Not so with parenting.

Why? This is the moment I dread in blogging. I ask a question, and then I actually have to answer it. I have no elegant answer. Perhaps you, dear reader, will be able to straighten me out in an elegant way in the comments section. (That, by the way is what the comments section is for. It is not a place to tell me where I can find teenage pornography or cheap pharmaceuticals.) But I will give it a try, utilizing the calming properties of the bullet point list.

For starters, it’s hard. It’s hard to show your children how to behave rather than to tell them because it means you will have to start showing some things you might not know how to do very well. For example, if you want your children to stop shouting, you will have to stop habitually screaming at them to be quiet. You will no longer be able to utilize the volume that can be heard by the man who lives six doors down and recently died. The volume that works so well at securing their compliance. Nor will you be able to tell your kid to save his money. It is not that simple. Instead, you will have to stop buying cds, and new cars, and shoes, and cookbooks, and well, you know, the stuff you just bought about fifteen minutes ago.
Writers tell rather than show because they don’t quite trust that the reader will get it without being told. This stems from an inherent bossiness, sure. But it also comes from forgetting that one of the pleasures of reading is getting it for yourself.
It could be that we tell our children what to do because we are frightened they might not ever stop yelling, hitting, spending their money on pokemon cards unless we mention these problems all the time. As with the writer/reader mistrust, the parent fears the child will not get the lesson unless it is constantly given. The parent, however, has clearly forgotten or has never understood that children do not actually hear them when they speak. Remember the adults in Charlie Brown’s world? Did you ever hear one of them speak in any of those holiday specials? No. Adults don’t speak real words. They do a weird murmuring entreaty children don’t get because they don’t want to. This explains how they forget their lunches every other day of the week even though you say, as they leave the house, “Did you bring your lunch with you?”
We do not really want to change our habits. No, that’s not strictly accurate. It’s hard to change our habits. It’s about as hard for us to change our habits as it is for children to learn to control their impulse to grab all the dessert and blame it on their sibling. I know, I’m repeating myself. This was actually the same thing I said in bullet point one. It is hard.

The Show Don’t Tell Rule is an offshoot of the Golden Rule, which , like showing rather than telling, is a rule that emphasizes doing the right thing.

In our house, the Golden Rule is expressed like this: You Get What You Give. Unfortunately, this has come to mean I Give You What I Get From You. That means, if someone hits me, I get to hit them back. If someone breaks my toy, I’ll get to break theirs. Quickly, it becomes the middle east around here.

The problem with showing and telling and getting and giving is that we have made them into result-oriented rules. We do unto others so we’ll get them to do unto us. We show rather than tell so people will understand things. We practice both rules because we want a certain result. And worrying about the result, about whether we will get back what we give, about whether our children will ever learn to clean up their rooms, save money, stop hitting their siblings, and put the toilet seat down when they’re done, can make us freeze up, do less than we might otherwise do freely. At its worst, worrying about the result can lead to horrendous results (see I Give You What You Gave Me.)

Perhaps if we simply do and show, not worrying about where it will lead, we will find ourselves enjoying the doing of right, however we have defined “right.” We might like the way the house feels when we’re not shouting. We might enjoy saving money, the absence of clutter. We might start looking at proper behavior as a pleasure rather than an obligation. This is only a theory. It’s one I’ll have to show myself for starters. But I wonder: If I stop worrying about whether the children will do the right thing and just go around doing it myself, to please myself, is it possible that the journey to my children’s adulthood will be more pleasant for us all?

The Picture Pretty Much Says It

Posted on July 26, 2006

for today. All’s well. (Note added several months later: I’ve deleted that picture, having decided it’s not really so great for my children to have even distant pictures of them, given how long stuff like that lives on the internet). Surgery’s over and all’s well. Now, I’m going back to sleep!

Lunch at the Brazil Cafe

Posted on July 24, 2006

Lunch on a hot day at the Brazil Cafe: a mango smoothie a little bit of chicken and rice, but not much. Mostly, we just wanted the mango smoothie. My youngest son, who is six, said several times how much he liked it here. Maybe it was the Brazilian music, the picture of a footballer in a uniform he recognized because his brother gave him an old jersey from this team (ac milan, he says, like I would know what that is. I don’t.)

The Brazil Cafe is basically a hut in a parking lot, but it’s so transformed by layers of funky and colorful paint, and fabric, and signs, that you don’t actually know what’s under it all. Something magical, is my guess.

Across the street is the Berkeley Ace Hardware — the entire second floor of which is full of models (tanks, race cars, air planes — if it ever moved, or dreamed of moving, it is here). We spent a lot of time in there, and then went to the comic book store, Comic Relief, and then we came back and looked around the second floor a little while longer and then we thought, you know, we should have lunch and how about that amazing looking place right across the street.

And so we did. And it was great. For a moment, looking at my son sitting back in his chair taking in the scene I realized I was in the middle of someone’s childhood. It was a good one to be in.

Tonight, the Writing Cafe is Serving

Posted on July 22, 2006

something cold. For those of us in the northern hemisphere who are VERY HOT right now.

The Snow Man, Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

(photo from Christine Breslin’s Elizabeth Park Series; Elizabeth Park being where Wallace Stevens often walked, composing poems on the way to work)

12 Cedar Drive

Posted on July 21, 2006

My sister took this picture recently — it’s the house we lived in the year I learned to read.

I remember a lot of things about this house — it’s just that none of them are in this picture. In 1967, it was a green place — there was a gnarled mulberry along the side and climbing roses and a weeping willow and a grassy lawn. There was a lot of shade. There was no fence. It didn’t look like a place where poor people live. The front porch wasn’t messy and it was a lot bigger.

We lived there for just a few years, maybe only one. Maryland summers were hot and muggy. You could walk down the road and buy an ice cream for almost nothing and eat it on the way home. And then, you’d walk inside and it would be shady, clean and cool.

Around my birthday that year, I stood at a table turning the pages of one of my father’s books, a big thick book, and noticing that the page numbers went from six to seven or seven to eight and thinking, I’m a year older; getting older is like turning a page in a book. This was the place where I read to my mother, sitting on a chair in the kitchen while she made fried chicken, See Jane run. Run, Jane, run. It was the place I read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Had I been asked before seeing this picture, I could not have described the house itself. But it turns out I know this house well. It is the house I point to in every small town we drive through: the little white house with the peaked roof that promises shade and silence for reading and writing. It is the house I stopped in front of in Quincy a few days ago and coveted. It is the house I have always said I will live in when I get old, the house where I’ll read books on the porch in the summer evenings, where I’ll write novels in a cool room with a slanted ceiling. It is the house of my dreams. It’s just that I never knew I had lived in it already.

It Was Like Driving in the 1930s

Posted on July 20, 2006

Or so my son said, not quite understanding that neither his father nor I were even alive in the 1930s.

The air conditioning in our volvo station wagon stopped working ten minutes after we left home for family camp earlier this week. Once you get out of the bay area it is very hot. On the way up to camp, everyone spent a lot of time complaining about the heat. One child spent a lot of time asking us how we could possibly have survived a childhood spent driving without air conditioning. Was that what the 1930s were like, he asked. Neither my husband nor I found this amusing. We drank a lot of cold water from the cooler we’d supplied with ice when we saw the trouble we were in. It was a long four and a half hours.

On the way back home today, we took action. We supplied each passenger with a large spray bottle full of ice water. We allowed them to spray themselves but not each other; too long a drive for that kind of conflict. It was a little bit like being a head of lettuce in the produce section at Safeway when the mist comes on. It might not have been any cooler than on the way up, but it was a lot more fun.

Now we are home. It smells like jasmine. it’s cool. There aren’t any mosquitoes. We put the water bottles away, with the mosquito netting, the sleeping bags, the camping lantern. I figure next year, even if the air conditioning is working, we’ll use those water bottles again.

Reading as a Writer

Posted on July 19, 2006

I’ve been re-reading Barchester Towers this week. As often happens when I read, I spend a lot of time thinking about how the writer is going about the business of telling a story: what hook does he use, how does he pace the story, what’s the dialog doing — that sort of thing.

Trollope is a wonderful writer. I’ve gotten about 100 pages (maybe less) into the novel and already there’s a fully formed cast of characters and a conflict that’s perfect for the comedy to come. First, the characters — I like it so much when a writer is fond of his characters, but knows their shortcomings so well. Dr. Grantly is a good example of this — he’s a man who’s quick to anger, to revenge, but also a gentleman and a man of the world. He’s flawed, he’s angry, and he has power. That’s the sort of character you want to see in action: what’s going to win out, you wonder — his quick temper, his sophistication? And maybe he’s not the one who’ll put things right. If that’s true, will he be chastened?

And then of course, there’s his enemy, the oily-tongued Slope (like Snape, you imagine his hair in need of a good wash and trim): a man who’s a lot smarter than his boss, the Bishop, but whose skills don’t extend as far as they should — women like him, men don’t. How far will he get in his project of teaching Slopian ways and worship to the lovely town of Barchester?

And the conflict? A new bishop comes to town, bringing with him two of the finest conflict creators I know — the awful and deliciously greedy and power-hungry Mrs. Proudie and, of course, the oily Slope. Put these two down into the green world that is Barchester and, well, that’s how you set a terrific novel in motion.

There’s so much more here, but I just wanted to record how interesting it is to watch a great writer like Trollope creating characters and setting up his story.

Miss Grace

Posted on July 18, 2006

We’ve made three trips to the camp nurse in the last 24 hours. Her name’s Miss Grace. Someone is going to have to make her a character in a short story. She’d be the hero — the woman who can cure any ill.

I went first. Last night after dinner I walked into the little store they have at camp, the place where you can get ice cream, ping pong balls and t-shirts. Miss Grace was in there, wearing her nurse shirt, which is a light blue tunic with pictures of the faces of happy children on it. She was showing the people who worked in the store a picture of her family and giving them their mail. I looked down and realized the rash I’ve had on my leg for four months (a little patch of what could be poison oak, except it’s not) wasn’t going to get any better from my ignoring it. So, I asked Miss Grace if she would look at it.

Best thing I’ve done in a long time. Her office is air conditioned. She is in her fifties, a woman with a soft southern accent. She showed me a picture of her two brothers and sisters, taken to commemorate her brother’s induction in to the football home of fame in Jackson Mississippi. The first black man to be given that honor, she said. And they’d also named the football field after him. She and her sisters look exactly alike. The same gentle faces, lovely accepting eyes. Her other brother is a minister in a church in Oakland. She put aloe vera (pure, organic aloe vera ointment called Desert Lily) on my rash. I know it will be better.

Maybe because they envied my experience with Miss Grace, but today, one of my sons got a bee sting for Miss Grace to care for. And about two hours later, another of them slipped in the dining hall and had to be cured of a gash behind his ear. Bee sting ointment, blueberry flavored advil, a bandaid with some kind of superhero on it, antibiotic ointment and aloe. An ice pack. Air conditioning. Miss Grace could cure pretty much anything with her voice — but with those other tools, she’s invincible. She would know what to do about Lebanon, I’m pretty sure.

We’ve decided we love Feather River Camp — even if we don’t like the mosquitoes and it is too hot here. We still love it. Next year we’re coming back for two weeks.

A Postcard From Plumas County

Posted on July 17, 2006

GREETINGS FROM THE PLUMAS COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY

Quincy Library

This is what I love about life: going into a small town like Quincy, California (population: not very high) where you expect people to listen to a lot of talk radio and believe fervently in the right to bear arms and all that goes with that (motorcycles, for one thing).

And then you discover that the Plumas County Public Library provides: air conditioning, silence, books, and free wireless internet access. And it’s a nice building, with good lighting and a functioning copy machine and a librarian who’s thrilled to give you the internet wireless password. No, you can’t drink coffee in here. Yes, you can write your novel and send postcards to your friends, virtual and otherwise.

What to read?

Posted on July 16, 2006

Say you’re going somewhere and need to bring paperbacks, leaving your nice editions of Suite Francaise, Digging to America and The Foreign Correspondent behind. What’s portable?

Barchester Towers. I’d like to know if it’s as good twenty years later as it was the summer I spent lying on the couch, studying for the bar exam, reading M.F.K. Fisher and Trollope.
To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ve never read this. But it begins with something from Charles Lamb, “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.” I almost never read novels that go anywhere near the courts. (Although I re-read Great Expectations a few months ago and so enjoyed the portraits of lawyers.) The edition of To Kill a Mockingbird is wonderful to look at.

I used to bring so much more than this on trips. Now, I like to travel light. I’m not at the point, though, where I’m sawing the ends off toothbrushes to keep things from bulking up. Two novels, plus the one I’m writing, seems about right.

Au revoir, BL

Family Camp

Posted on July 15, 2006

We’re off to Feather River Family Camp tomorrow.

It’s possible that family camps are unique to California. If that’s true, then here’s a little bit about them: During the Depression, cities in northern California acquired land in the Sierra, did a little bit of clearing, and put up simple tent cabins (the ones we’ve stayed in have wooden floors and canvas sides), and a central dining hall. And then they opened them up for nature-starved residents. Family camps are almost always sited on rivers, so people can swim. They’re not terribly expensive. Berkeley has one — so do San Jose and San Francisco. The University of California sponsors one too.

We’ve been to several of these camps in our time. I’ve complained a lot in the past about the dust and having to eat at a communal table on picnic benches. But the boys and my husband love being at Family Camp. And so we usually go. Family Camp is a little like labor — the memory of just how bad it was leaves you (you remember you didn’t like it, but there’s no way you can dredge up the specifics of that feeling) until you return. I digress. We go because it is good for everyone to go.

This year, we’re going to a new camp: Feather River. My Thursday night writing group instructor, the wonderful Clive Matson, holds a writing workshop this week at Feather River Family Camp. I’ve never done anything productive at family camp before, beyond sweeping the floor and playing ping pong. Complaining doesn’t count. It is not productive. This week, it’s possible that I’ll get a lot of writing done. I think there’s an internet connection in the nearest town — Quincy — and I might post a few pictures. But if there’s a silence at BlogLily until Thursday, it’s because, well, that didn’t happen. Happy Camping.

Oh, and PS — Saturday Morning Blogroll is up at Best Blog. It features a very nice site called A Fool and His Words are Soon Parted. The day before, I posted about another wonderful site, by a watercolor artist, Jana. If you’re hanging out at home and scrolling around, take a look.

BlogLily

“it must give pleasure” — Wallace Stevens

Monthly Archives: July 2006