BlogLily

In a few days, I’m leaving for the Gualala River (on the north coast of California in Mendocino County) with one of my sons. I’m chaperoning the annual sixth grade field trip. I’ll be back in a week.

Here’s a progress report.

Novel: almost done. It will be complete when I return from this trip, which involves kayaking, hiking, and outdoor science learning for the children (and for me too, I suppose). What’s even better than all that worthy wilderness activity is that this trip will also involve the writing of the final chapters at night, when the tired kayaker/hikers are asleep.

Blogwriting: Temporarily on hold. I’ll be back October 7. Until then, I’ll miss hearing all of your virtual voices. Don’t do anything too too terribly exciting while I’m gone!  Oh, and don’t forget:

Last night, I took to my Thursday night workshop a chapter I’d written a few days ago, something I’d had little time to think about after writing. It’s enormously helpful to bring unpolished work in. When you do, you get big comments, very useful for filling in what you need to do after you’ve pushed through to the end of a very rough first draft. That would include comments like: the character doesn’t react to this provocation and really, he should. Or: Perhaps you should move this moment of revelation to the end of the scene, when he is alone, rather than in the company of someone he’d never reveal himself to. That sort of thing.

Because I used to bring in chapters that were already thoroughly worked over, I am accustomed to a different kind of feedback, more micro-editing: this word is confusing, this line might work better earlier in the paragraph.

Which brings me to the subject of editing. My fellow workshop writers have been most helpful when they address the larger issues of a piece of writing. The other things, the word used twice in a paragraph, the unintentional rhyme, I suspect I’d catch anyway on a re-reading. But because there is a bit of turnover among the participants, few of them (maybe only four) have seen my story from the beginning. And so they do not have a sense of the whole, and do not know if what I am writing makes sense in light of that larger whole.

So, that’s the first thing, come November, when I begin editing, I’ll need to do. I’ve never done this before, but I suppose what you’d do is read the whole thing again with an eye to how the story should be shaped, where there is building up and revelation and resolution. I imagine you’d want to scribble down what happens in each scene and figure out if that’s where those events should occur.

That scribbled list would then be your guide in re-shaping and re-arranging and also, while you’re at it, continuity fixing (the hero cannot be bald in the first half of the book and have a healthy head of hair in the end), and maybe the addition of a little foreshadowing you forgot to do because you didn’t know what was going to happen. After that, you’d want to fix the glaringly bad sentences, straighten out the grammar and spelling and collapse on the couch, a wet washcloth pressed to your forehead, but with one eye trained on the kitchen, for the moment the huge chocolate cake arrives — the one with all the sprinkles on it, the one that’s been prepared by people who really, really, really want you to stop typing on your computer and play Parcheesi.

Having never revised a novel before, I actually have no way of knowing if what I’ve described will work or if it’s foolish in the extreme. It’s just my best guess. One thing is certain though: I’ll be glad to have a novel to edit. Which is to say, I’m hoping I’ll get through to the end in a few days — maybe not day ten, but quite close to that.

One of my boys is home sick today, something that slows down momentum like nothing else. He tries hard to leave me alone, but he’s seven, and he has a lot of things to talk about. So finally I rooted around in our pile of Netflix movies and put Pride and Prejudice (the one with Colin Firth) in the computer.

That did the trick. For some reason, when you’re seven, the question of how the Bennett girls are going to find husbands is fascinating. After asking whether there were any guns in the movie (only once, in the shooting scene), he settled in. He liked the parties, the soldiers, the nasty Miss Bingley. I think because he so often feels like the rudest one in our family, he was happy to see a movie in which so many adults are mean to each other. And because there is no kissing, and the search for love is expressed in words rather than scary outfits in which girls show their belly buttons, he was not scared away.

The funniest thing of all though is that when Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth that first time, so rudely and with so much passion, I happened to be looking over his shoulder and then when Elizabeth turned him down, I began to weep. Poor thing, my son looked at me with some concern and said, Mom. This whole movie? It’s about marriage, isn’t it? As though nothing could be sad about marriage, for heaven’s sake. Now, if you fall off your bike, that’s another story entirely.

We’ve got the second part of this movie, the part where things turn out all right, coming in the mail. Neither of us can wait.

I wrote two scenes today and it was so much fun! Honestly, you’d think that awful day of writing a few days ago, when every word was agony and the final result was an embarrassment, had never happened.

BikeProf, who’s busy writing the world’s scariest novel, wrote something the other day about one of the most extraordinary things that happens when you write fiction, something that keeps me going. And no, it’s not the candy I held back from my son’s earthquake kit. (Although, come to think of it, a little sugar, judiciously applied, is sometimes just what’s needed.) But it is something sort of like candy in the rush of pleasure it produces, although I hope not in the crash that comes after consumption peaks.

Here’s how it happens. You’re writing along, up to the point where you’ve sort of figured out you want to go. But when you get to the end of the known, you find yourself continuing. It’s as if you’ve chosen to go over a cliff. But you don’t perish. Instead, you find out there is something under your feet after all. (I have this terrible feeling I might have described this very experience at one point in my blog. The stepping into the air and finding something solid under your feet happens in an Indiana Jones movie, I’ll admit right now. But it happens in writing too.)

What’s under your feet are things like a revelation a character makes that you didn’t think would be made at that moment, but then you see that there is such a powerful motivation in the scene you’ve set up for that revelation to happen that it works right there. Or a character says something about the past that you hadn’t known happened. But indeed it did, and necessarily so. Or your writing suddenly becomes felicitous, and you find yourself blurting out something that could not have been written by a pedestrian soul like yourself.

I don’t do drugs. But I do like the mind expanding quality of stepping off the edge and finding out what’s there.  It’s a ghostly and cool experience. It’s a big reason why I write.

Today I wrote 3,000 words — two scenes. I know they’ll be longer scenes when I go back to them, but for now I’m leaving them as they are. I figure if I can get in two or three more days of this kind of writing, I’ll be knocking at the door that says Exit before too long here.

I’ve been sitting by the road for the last two days, pumping up my tires and putting my chain back on.  Which is to say, I’ve spent the weekend looking after my children and cooking.   

In lieu of a description of the soaring prose I did not write, I’d like to record that the following things kept me from the next two scenes I have in mind: 

• Earthquake kit.  (n.  a gallon sized ziplock bag filled with candy.  To be used by a child in the event they have to stay at school for a while, after a big one hits.)  Friday afternoon, a concerned teacher called to say that one of my sons had failed to turn in an earthquake kit.  Now, it’s an exaggeration to say that those kits are full of candy.  In fact, they are supposed to be filled with nutritious food that will keep for a whole year.  A salami sandwich is out.  Also, water, a flashlight, and a space blanket.  (I think that last item is optional.  I hope so, because that’s not something I’m willing to go and find.)   We have lots of candy at home, but the nutritious food that will not rot after a year threw me a bit, until I realized that could include energy bars.  That, and a can of slightly dodgy beef stew I found tucked behind some marshmallows, a lot of dried fruit, and a flashlight, and I feel I can hold my head up high when I pick up my child after the earthquake that is unlikely to occur during school hours.
• Field Day.  The same child whose school makes you put together the aforementioned earthquake kit, has a huge Sunday family event, one that involves egg tosses and sack races, an astonishing amount of food and an epic tug of war battle between parents and children in which the parents always lose, because they are too busy chatting about their children’s genius and eating when the time comes for the tug of war, so the children overwhelm by their sheer numbers.  I did not feel it would reflect well on either me or my family if I’d shown up with my mac and written a scene or two while everyone else was sack racing and bragging about their children.  Plus, I feel it did me a great deal of good to see how gleeful the head of school was when the parents actually did win one round of tug of war — against the tiniest children at the school.  When they added the teenagers, we parents were toast.  Is this not a metaphor for parenting so obvious it would hurt if it dropped on your toe?
• Work.  Have I ever mentioned that I have a job?  It’s actually a great job, intellectually interesting, wonderful co-workers, a boss with the best manners of any man I know and a very unAmerican amount of vacation time.  So, I actually had to do some work, because I haven’t been as productive as I’d like lately.
• Banana bread.  I made some.  I wonder how many words I could have written while I was smashing up those bananas.  You can’t eat words, though.

Today I don’t have to do any of those things, except work.  After work, more scenes. 

Well, let’s just say that yesterday’s scene was not my finest work. I pushed on, even so, through the irritated voice in my head that says things to me I’d never, ever say to another human being.

The wonderful Susan Ito knows about this sort of day. (Don’t we all?) But she has the good sense to post something very funny about the struggle it can sometimes be to get words down on the page that say something even remotely like what you want to say. Check it out. I’m glad I did, because I have to tell you that even on my worst day of writing, it is not as bad as it is for this little guy.

The moral of the day: Sometimes you just have to keep going. It will get better. And now, I’m off to do just that, because Day Three of the Great Downhill is not over yet and I have another scene to write.

It’s 8:30, my children are in school, and I’m at a cafe in my neighborhood with Bob Dylan and the whoosh of the espresso machine in the background. But for the couple who just sat down near me to discuss their relationship, it’s an ideal place to write. (Oh good, I’m glad they worked that out. They just need to HIRE someone to do the housework.)

I know some of you are writers, and most all of you are readers, and so I hope it will interest you to hear about how someone (well, me) goes about writing a novel, or at least the end of one. And if this is not your cup of tea, I’ll be back to other things in a week or so. But for now, this is it.

It’s very true that you write a novel one word at a time, something people tell you when they sense you’re worrying too much about what you’re going to write, and this worry is keeping you from actually writing. But it does help someone like me (obsessive, anxious, list-making) to at least have a sketch of where a scene is going before I begin writing it. And that’s what a stepsheet is for.

It might not be called a stepsheet (heaven knows I can never remember the words for writing craft techniques), but when I say stepsheet, I mean a narrative I write that describes what’s going to happen in the scene. This is not anything that will become what I write. It’s written in the tone and with the speed you’d use when you send an email in response to a friend’s question: so, what’s going to happen next in your novel? It’s a testament to the tact and delicacy of my friends that no one has actually ever asked me this question. Maybe they know I’m busy asking myself this very thing and so we can turn instead to the interesting question of whether the Oakland A’s might actually win the entire World Series.

But say I had been asked this question. In answer, I’d say something like this in that hypothetical email: The main character begins the scene wanting to make amends for having so thoroughly messed up with the woman he’s discovered he really likes and naturally wants to sleep with. He also knows she might have some information about the victim and he’d like to get her to talk about that. He goes to the cafe where she works (one of those wonderful european cafes with the little machines that deliver candied peanuts, a foosball table, and bottled coke) and tries to get her to sit down. At first, she pretends not to remember who he is. But then her brother…

It’s that sort of thing I’m talking about. Now this would make a terrible novel, because a novel does not narrate events — it dramatizes them, its goal being to get you to feel like you’re within the story. (Unless you’re writing a meta-novel, which thankfully I am not and never will.) But it’s a great way to get yourself into the scene. (A scene, by the way, begins with a character having some goal in mind and, in the end, he or she has either achieved that goal, or been thwarted in an interesting way — either way, this scene should end with your readers begging for whatever follows.)

There you have it then — a sketch of how you go about sketching your chapter. It’s enormously helpful, by the way, to then launch immediately into the chapter itself. That looks sort of like this:

The cafe where Anja worked was like all the other cafes on the square, the same umbrellas advertising [must look up name of bavarian beer], the same [must ask sister what the chairs looked like? rush?], the same mix of American soldiers and German students.

One final note on going downhill without brakes: Even if it’s not perfect, your chapter will most likely be way, way better than you ever dreamed if you, like me, begin with a stepsheet and low expectations and then almost immediately launch yourself into the blank space of the page. Because what will happen — I promise — is that you’ll get to a point where you’re zooming through places you didn’t know were even there, describing a dress or a movement of the air, or a look on a face or a line of dialogue you didn’t know you had inside you. That’s what I love about writing, and the stepsheet gets me there.

Until tomorrow, BL

Perhaps you are too young to remember Robert Redford before he became a craggy monument to independent film, but he was really lovely in the movie Downhill Racer, which was all about a guy who liked to ski fast downhill. I liked looking at him, but I didn’t like the racing scenes. I was afraid he’d get hurt. I just wanted to see him in his nice turtleneck sweater, flirting with healthy-looking women.

Turns out, I don’t like being at the top of a hill on anything: certainly not on skis, or a bike, and not even when all I’m doing is hiking. On my bike, I wear out my brakes and watch my knuckles turn white when I’m going downhill. The whole time, I’m thinking about brain injuries and how I can never get the straps on my helmet to fit and so if I crash there’s no way my helmet will cradle my brain. I’m toast. Or an egg in a defective egg carton. I am also the slowest downhill skiier I know. I traverse a lot. Tiny children whiz by me, singing. I grit my teeth. And even hiking, I slip and slide down the hill, and hate it the entire way.

Uphills are just completely different. It was a happy day when I discovered that the function of a multi-gear bike is to enable you to pedal slowly up almost anything without wearing yourself out. I much prefer the quiet of skiing up a slight incline in the snow on a nice trail through the woods. If I’m in the shade, I can hike uphill pretty much forever. So, if you were to class the world into those who like to gain altitude and those who love the rush of losing it — I’m in the first group.

However, it turns out that the scenes I’m writing now in the novel I’m working on are downhill scenes. They’re the scenes of a rapidly unravelling mystery, of revelations that are significant even if they don’t lead to the answer the hero thinks he is seeking. Each scene of detection in this section of the mystery has the swoosh of the downhill about it. In fact, if you look at the arc a novel makes, the scenes I’m writing take place on the long downhill that comes after the uphill climb of the mystery I’ve been setting up for a terribly long time.

I’ve decided to write them quickly: in recognition of that steep downhill, thinking if I do so I might capture some of that rushing energy. To be honest, I’m also writing them quickly because I’d like to be done with this group of scenes, and maybe even the novel itself by the end of this month. (I have another novel lined up: one that’s in the first person, something I never thought I’d want to do, one that’s set in Paris after the second world war, one that explores the nature of love, one that will involve a lot of good food, sex and maybe some decent clothes.) This means I’ve got about ten days of fast scene writing ahead. That means writing without brakes, without traversing, slipping and sliding downhill. I’m a little nervous about it, but I keep reminding myself: nobody’s ever been seriously injured while writing too fast.

Yesterday morning, on my way into my office in San Francisco, I realized I was no longer in the fog I’d seemed to have fallen into when I learned I had breast cancer. This fog mostly seemed to involve eating a lot of mint chocolate chip ice cream, lying around reading, and thinking about mortality more than I usually do.

Actually it was more than just that. I also felt like there was a big black line that separated me from other people. On one side stood people who were well. On the other side was me. My side was on lower ground than theirs. The ground was boggier and there were more mosquitos. It was a miasmic spot. Foggy all the time. Not one in which you’d willingly take up residence. You get exiled there. Because you took birth control pills, or you don’t know how to handle stress. Or maybe it was those three cigarettes you smoked back in college, or the fact that you don’t laugh often enough. The residents of this side of the line are not happy, that’s for sure.

Late last week, I went to see my surgeon and got a good report. I’m off to radiation in a few weeks, a procedure that’s been explained to me over and over as being a belt and suspenders thing. There’s no cancer in you, but, man, after you do radiation there REALLY won’t be any. And the worst that will happen to you is that you might feel a little tired.

I went home after seeing my surgeon to people who behaved as though I’d won the Pulitzer Prize. It was that happy around here. Me? I kept wanting to say, not so fast, I’m actually still sick, you know.

I’m here to report that the revelation that I am not, in fact, sick, was a gentle one. It didn’t hit me like lightning. It came slowly, the way the fog lifts in the city. Many mornings on my way to work I notice what the fog is doing.  Often, it’s hanging over the golden dome of City Hall, or obscuring it completely, making so much mist you think it might be raining.  Only it’s not.  It’s just foggy.  This morning it was nowhere in sight. And then I saw that I’m not a patient anymore. I’m not sick.

I went into my office and did more work in a day than I’ve done in three months. I don’t feel worried or queasy or angry. I just feel like myself. I just hadn’t realized I’d lost myself so thoroughly. But I’m certainly glad to be back. That page up top on my blog? The one that’s called “How It’s Going”? I’m moving that somewhere else. I’m done. (And thanks to the dear reader who suggested this post be called A Farewell to Harms.  That made me laugh, proving once again that I did not get breast cancer because no one ever tells me any good jokes.)

I’m pretty sure everyone’s been defeated by a book or two, or more, in their reading lives. Certainly this has happened to me on many occasions when, through no fault of a book, or its author, I’ve discovered I’m missing some skill or piece of equipment — something like a reading compass that would have gotten me going in the right direction with a book, and then seen me through to my destination, the end of the book.

For me, most recently, that book has been (gulp) Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m worried about admitting this because people I admire very much like this book. In fact, that’s why I checked it out earlier in the summer. I ended up having to pay a whopping $3.75 library fine because I forgot to renew it as I struggled to get past the first chapter.

As it turns out, I don’t know what to make of books that mingle humans with non-humans, unless the non-humans are in fairy tales, which means they’re basically humans, except disguised as gods or talking cats or Aslan. I kept starting from the beginning of Hitchhiker’s Guide, thinking maybe it would actually be a different book this time. But I never go past page ten. And so …. I gave in, paid my fine, and decided I lacked some essential world view or was seriously deficient in the sense of humor department. The good news is that maybe, when I pick it up again in ten years, I’ll be able to love it. Or, bad news, maybe I’ve missed the moment when it would work.

For no other reason than it makes me feel better to heap on the abuse, or because I’m hoping Ingrid and Edwin will let me change the subject, I’d here like to record other fine books that have done me in as well.

• The Sound and the Fury. I like Faulkner. But I couldn’t get past the opening of this one. It seemed to never start, sort of like James’s The Ambassadors, another book I really wanted to like, but could never get any traction on. I think this means I can’t read books for more than ten pages without having a story of some kind begin.
• Cloud Atlas. People I know loved this. I thought it was odd and frustrating. I abandoned it after two pages simply because it was so long and I couldn’t imagine reading an odd and frustrating book for that many pages. I’m okay with a short story that’s odd and frustrating. But not an epic.
• The Grapes of Wrath. The first time through, I loved it. The second time through, the use of dialect actually made me angry. It seemed so condescending and also, just plain bad writing. Bah.
• Lolita. I love Pale Fire. But I was weirded out by the whole old man little girl thing. This was a long time ago, when I actually, regularly used phrases like “weirded out.” Maybe I wouldn’t be weirded out this time and perhaps I’d actually see that Lolita is beautifully written. It is, after all, written by the guy who wrote the wonderful Pale Fire.
• The Sea, The Sea. This book, which my good friend C. loves, made me sea sick. I don’t like unpleasant people, wall to wall, in my books. I don’t think that’s going to ever change.

When I began this blog, I vowed to praise rather than condemn. The thing is, though, this description of difficult books need not be seen as a condemnation either of myself or the books. It’s more of a yardstick. As I mentioned earlier, I think it’s possible that if I come back to any of these books, I might well be able to find what I missed the first time. And when that happens, I will know that I’ve changed as a reader, and maybe as a person, because they are after all pretty much the same thing.

For example, maybe I won’t be in such a hurry for a story to start now that I’ve parented young children, who are never in a hurry for anything except dessert to start. And maybe one of these days I will suddenly get Douglas Adams, most likely on a day when I wonder why I’m rushing around because, in the end, the earth is such an inconsequential place. As for Lolita, perhaps I’ll be able to see that the subject of a book need not be what the narrator of the book tells you it is. After all, I’ve recently begun to like unreliable narratives, which does not mean that one need grow fond of the unreliable narrator.

I do think that my impatience has been my undoing not only with James and Faulkner, but also Joyce and Proust. I like thinking that, in growing up some, I might be ready for Ulysses and Swann’s Way. Still, I’ll start small. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to take up The Ambassadors again, just to see if I’ve acquired, in the last decade or two, any new virtues. And if I have to shut the book and wait another five years, there are plenty of other things to read until I’m ready for Henry James.

I saw this yesterday, while I was lazing around and it seemed to sum up something essential about where I live. Simply put, people around here don’t like George W very much. And they are fine saying so. All the time.

The car sporting this bumper sticker was an old, dusty Volvo, protected by someone’s Triple A membership. It’s okay around here to drive an old car. Volvos go without saying. Let’s not discuss the latte. (I must say, though, that a child at one of my twins’ school said, when he saw my husband’s beat- up old BMW pull into the carpool pick up line, “My playstation cost more than your dad’s car.” He wasn’t from Berkeley.)

Pretty soon the Berkeley City Council is going to offer some kind of referendum about whether or not we should impeach President Bush. It’s the sort of thing people in the rest of the country love to laugh about. And it really can be terribly irritating and holier than thou around here.

But I still love living in Berkeley. There is the most fabulous food to be had right down the street. We live in a garden of Eden, the place where so many lovely fruits and vegetables are grown, quite a few of them organic. Plus, the view from the hill I hike up is stupendous. There are so many great independent bookstores it’s hard to decide where to go to buy a book. It smells like jasmine at night. And the things that grow like weeds in my yard are actually sort of exotic like Meyer Lemons and bougainvillea. There’s windsurfing out our door, for those who windsurf (all males in our family windsurf. I do not.) The mountains are beautiful. Did I mention the food?

Which brings me to my topic today and no, it is not food: where on earth do we get our political ideas? How did I grow up to be the openly liberal person I am, when several, very smart, kind people in my family are not?

Growing up, I always thought my father was an impressively liberal person. By that, I mean he exuded a distrust of authority (probably because of his experiences in the military) and he believed in the power of the written word. You could tell because he spent a lot of time sitting in a comfortable brown chair reading things like Russian grammars and Nietzsche. He shocked us all when he decided he was an atheist. (It was 1970. My mother had always marched all five of us children to church every Sunday without fail. My father sat in the car and read the paper while we went to mass. It was a fine example of religious tolerance.)

I probably read more into my father’s admiration for Rush Limbaugh and dislike of Democrats than I should. Maybe what he doesn’t like about Democrats is that they’ve failed to really follow through on their promises of creating a better society. The Republicans have never made any such promises, so there’s nothing to resent about them. Not everyone in my family is a Republican. My mother doesn’t say a lot about how she votes except to suggest that she sees her role as cancelling out my father’s vote.

No one ever told me how to vote or which political party to join. Because I live in Berkeley now, I get some grief from a few of my siblings for being reflexively, unthoughtfully liberal. It’s true: it’s never occurred to me to be any other way. I think I’ve chosen my political path for the simple reason that I feel happier being a liberal, when that means being generous, trusting, community-oriented, and accepting of differences. I’m well aware that Republicans can share those very same qualities.  Sometimes the differences lie in how those ideals are executed.  It’s also true that I’m embarrassed by the preachiness and stupid ideas, by the elitism, and the cowardice of the Democrats. But those are qualities shared by both parties, which is to say that Democrats don’t have a monopoly on being sheep-like or stupid.

What interests me is how our children will turn out. My own sons don’t like George Bush, the way you don’t like the “other” sports team. But they haven’t at all sorted out what they think. They’re beginning to though. Yesterday, one of my older boys wanted to go into San Francisco to take part in a rally “against America.” That really bothered me. I told him that he’s an American, and he can’t really rally against his own country. The country is not its government. In fact, demonstrating against the government is as American as baseball. Turns out, it was a march designed to protest our government’s refusal to do anything meaningful to stop genocide in Darfur. And it took place during school hours.

The answer: no last minute rallies, and hardly ever when there’s school. I wonder how many other parents in America had to make up a rule like that, on the spot, yesterday afternoon? And that’s the last thing I love about living here: it’s a rich and complicated environment in which to grow up. My kids have to think about homelessness because they know homeless people, they think about race, because we live in a racially mixed environment, they know about wealth and its problems and benefits because there are a lot of wealthy people around here, and they see it butting up against poverty in a way that just calls out for some kind of explanation. It’s an explanation I imagine they’ll have to come up with for themselves. And maybe it won’t be the one I end up with. But they will get to their political views thoughtfully, I hope. And that’s really all you can ask.

until Robert Service and Roland Barthes were invoked in what is becoming a sort of Laziness Project, although the word “project” does not quite satisfy me. Project is too industrious-sounding for a post that relies entirely on other people to speak for me.

Let’s begin with Robert Service. It cracks me up that a man with a last name like that would become the poet laureate of idleness. This is a top 100 poem too, to prove there is a place in the BlogLily canon for silliness.

Laziness

Let laureates sing with rapturous swing
Of the wonder and glory of work;
Let pulpiteers preach and with passion impeach
The indolent wretches who shirk.
No doubt they are right: in the stress of the fight
It’s the slackers who go to the wall;
So though it’s my shame I perversely proclaim
It’s fine to do nothing at all.

It’s fine to recline on the flat of one’s spine,
With never a thought in one’s head:
It’s lovely to lie staring up at the sky
When others are earning their bread.
It’s great to feel one with the soil and the sun,
Drowned deep in the grasses so tall;
Oh it’s noble to sweat, pounds and dollars to get,
But - it’s grand to do nothing at all.

So sing to the praise of the fellows who laze
Instead of lambasting the soil;
The vagabonds gay who lounge by the way,
Conscientious objectors to toil.
But lest you should think, by this spatter of ink,
The Muses still hold me in thrall,
I’ll round out my rhyme, and (until the next time)
Work like hell - doing nothing at all.

Your reward, dear reader, for making it this far is Roland Barthes who, evidently, gave an interview in which he discussed his views on laziness with an eloquence and vigor that might lead one to conclude he wasn’t really talking about the sort of laying about practiced by people like me, but was really demonstrating the more conscious embrace of idleness practiced by the French which would explain why he’s got an entire theory going here to describe the act of looking out the window for several hours while doing nothing more taxing than drinking a soft drink and writing a sentence that you are too slothful to even bother to punctuate.

Reclining on the flat of my spine, BL

That’s what I’m doing today, as often as I can.

Yesterday afternoon, I sat in the shade at my son’s school, the sounds of soccer practice in the background, and read eight pages of The Three Musketeers, and a paragraph of the Book of Tea (BookMooched! and recommended a long time ago by Ms. Make Tea Not War). This is from the Three Musketeers (the new Richard Pevear translation):

…d’Artagnan turned out to be, morally as well as physically, an exact copy of Cervantes’s hero, to whom we so happily compared him when our duties as historian made it necessary for us to draw his portrait. Don Quixote took windmills for giants and sheep for armies; d’Artagnan took every smile for an insult and every glance for a provocation.

Wonderful, don’t you think? There are hundreds more pages, but I know I’m going to like this. (Underneath The Book of Tea? A Boden catalogue — the children’s clothes are nice, and this is the first time I’ve seen the adult line. I was struck by how much a catalogue is about selling you a way of life. And that Johnnie Boden sounds a lot like J. Peterman.  The catalogue text is very chatty.)

Have you ever noticed that when we make fun of people who multi-task, it’s often in a way that’s a little bit admiring? It’s sort of like how you feel about the guy who juggles chain saws on Venice Beach: I wouldn’t want to do it, but wow, that is certainly amazing. This is the mom equivalent of the chain saw juggler: a woman piloting a mini-van, dressed to the nines for work, throwing juice boxes over her shoulder into the back seat, thrusting her dry-cleaning at someone who runs out to her car to get it so she doesn’t have to stop, talking all the while on a Blackberry and putting on eye shadow with the brush clenched between her teeth. (That last move is not, strictly speaking, possible unless you have a specially engineered, curved eye shadow brush, and that woman probably does. She bought it while she was buying Christmas presents, a late birthday present for her best friend and getting her pants hemmed.)

I think we could all benefit from embracing sinful laziness. And not just the kind of laziness that is actually just a rest between massive efforts to catch up on things, but true sloth, which is without guilt, without an end in mind, without any goal but to have no goal. You can’t see this, but I’ve been looking out the window wondering what that might look like. Maybe because I’m a sort of industrious person, and one who feels guiltily unproductive as a way of flogging myself into accomplishing even more, I am not certain how to go about being more slothful. This has not stopped me from trying. Here’s my action plan (the truly slothful do not have action plans. the rest of us, though, have to begin somewhere):

• Ping-pong. This summer, I bought a competition sized ping pong table. It’s German and it’s beautiful. It took my industrious husband an entire morning to assemble it, but it’s so well made (and it folds up in half for storage under its very well made cover) that it will last forever. We also have enough paddles and balls for everyone to play forever. I mention this because I believe one of the keys to sloth is to have plenty of diversions available when you think you maybe should be alphabetizing your spices. When that urge comes over you, all you have to do is find a person who’s willing to play ping-pong. (Or scrabble, or monopoly or Parcheesi, or poker.) Games. There is always someone in our family who is looking for an excuse not to take a bath, or clean their room, or do their homework. They are the Sloths in Training, the Young Pioneers Who Stayed Home (being too lazy to get on the wagon train). They will always be available to play games with you.
• Never, ever eat standing up. And don’t eat until as many people as you can rustle up in your family are sitting down with you. And then chew your food. Sloth and gluttony (which is really, to my mind, just the normal voluptuous experience of enjoying your meal) are important partners.
• Lose your cell phone. I know many people aren’t good at this. I, however, am. I can never find my cell phone and, periodically, that state becomes permanent. It’s good not to be easily interrupted when you are busy being idle. The people who are looking for someone to bring the snack to the PTA meeting will move on when they see how hard you are to get in touch with.
• Go to the movies. A lot. Enough said.
• Stay in bed. Read in there. I know this isn’t supposed to be good for people who have trouble getting to sleep, but I love reading in bed.
• Engage everyone else in slothfulness. There’s nothing more inhibiting to a good lazy day than an industrious person cleaning up around you. Tempt them into evil. I mean, suggest they go for a good long bike ride, so you can laze around in peace.

That’s it. I’m too lazy to think more about this, or to go look up the origin of the word sloth or to even think about what other deadly sins I would like to embrace.

Wishing you a lazy day,

BL

I read this morning in the Sunday New York Times that people (make that students who have taken leave of their senses) will actually pay over one hundred dollars for a really badly written essay on, say, James Joyce’s great short story The Dead. Well, I’m writing something about The Dead this afternoon, so how about it?

Trouble is, I can’t remember exactly how you go about writing one of those essays, it’s been that long since I’ve done it. In fact, before I arrived at college, I’d never actually written an essay over two pages. Faced with The Iliad, I decided to look up every passage about Odysseus and string them together and write little transitional sentences between them until I got to five pages and, hopefully, that would be considered an essay.

It was not. I got a B and was terribly sad, having never actually received a grade that low in English, a subject I’d been told I was good at. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the professor’s comments on this, or the next ten B papers I wrote using exactly the same method, because I was so horrified that I couldn’t do better. One of my regrets in life, and something I’m teaching my children not to do, is that I didn’t listen to his efforts to help me.

Two years later, an even longer string of bemused B’s behind me (these are apparently English sentences, but I have no idea what you’re saying, I can’t possibly read another one of these and, anyway, who let YOU in?), a frustrated T.A. (I still remember him, his name was Drew Clark and he was a dear. I hope he got a terrific job at some beautiful small New England college and has tenure and is treated really well by everyone) said to me after I’d asked for a six year extension on my paper about Twelfth Night: it would help if you begin by asking yourself a question like, Why is there so much sadness in this comedy? The essay is the answer to your question. There is a lot more to it than that, and not all essays are about explicating an inquiry, but this was the prodding I needed to turn an essay into an act of critical thinking rather than continue to simply retype the great writing of people other than myself.

I eventually began to get better grades, although I never did figure out how to talk about books in seminars. Entire 90 minute periods would go by and all I’d accomplish was a page of doodled made-up names and backstories for my classmates (Sartre was sleeping with Garbo: he ignored her when they were in public)– or a complex series of marks intended to tabulate my fellow students’ idiocy or sexiness or how many times they’d worn that shirt to the seminar before.

With that bit of background, which should dissuade you from buying an essay from me, I’d like to begin by saying that I don’t actually have any questions to ask about The Dead. Instead, I just want to talk a little bit about how much Joyce’s story reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s work, and how surprised I was by that because I thought she didn’t like Joyce very much. Still, she apparently liked him enough to imitate him. Come to think of it, this might be one of those compare and contrast essays, the kind people do shell out good money for. (I wouldn’t try to plagiarize it, because BikeProf will surely catch you and you will be in a lot of trouble which wouldn’t be worth it because it’s unlikely to get you much more than a B- and it will also not be the required five pages, and you’re not allowed to do the meta-essay thing at the beginning like I did.)

I begin with Woolf, who wrote in her diary (in August, 1922 to be exact) that she liked the first 200 pages of Ulysses. She describe herself as “amused, stimulated, charmed.” But, not long after that, she declares herself “puzzled, bored, irritated, disillusioned.” In the end, she decided that Joyce’s masterpiece was “an illiterate, underbred book . . . of a self taught working man.” Take that modernist master, you are UNDERBRED. (I’m sorry that won’t work here in the U.S. of A., where everyone is underbred.)

The Dead, which Joyce wrote when he was still in his twenties and had not yet struck out in quite the wild modernist direction he’d go in Ulysses, is a story that reminded me very much of To the Lighthouse, so much so that I had to keep reminding myself I was reading the illiterate underbred Joyce, rather than the elegant, upper class Woolf. It’s true that the social milieu of The Dead is quite different from that you find in Woolf: Joyce’s people being Irish and mainly Catholic, a mixed lot of genteel and not quite; Woolf’s being much more socially and intellectually aristocratic. But at the heart of both The Dead and To the Lighthouse are parties and then nature — and a meditation on one of the essential mysteries of being human which is that as much as we wish to be connected, we are separate, or maybe not.

In To the Lighthouse, there is the beautiful moment with the beef en daube, which follows an extended meditation on the many ways in which Mrs. Ramsey’s dinner guests are not at all connected. But then something happens:

“Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. Just now (but this cannot last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment while they were all talking about boots) just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there, from husband and children and friends; all of which rising in this profound stillness (she was helping William Bankes to one very small piece more, and peered into the depths of the earthenware pot) seemed now for no special reason to stay there like a smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe together. Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.”

“Yes,” she assured William Bankes, “there is plenty for everybody.”

Several pages later, Mrs. Ramsey, her daughter Prue, and her son Andrew all die in heartbreakingly casual asides. Time passes in that great second book of To The Lighthouse (the one so many people hate), and the forces of time (the wind, the rain, heat, small animals) begin to take apart Mrs. Ramsey’s world.

In The Dead, the party is seen mostly through the eyes of Gabriel, a professor, the favorite nephew of his two elderly, musical aunts who are the hostesses of the party. What I liked most about the party was how generous and amiable it is, just the party you’d expect would be given by two women who “though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout.” I don’t know what three-shilling tea is, but I liked the sound of it.

Despite how amiable the party is, Gabriel is seen as at odds with himself, uneasy with other people. As he prepares to give his toast, something he does every year at this party, Gabriel leans against the table, his fingers trembling (he’s a little nervous). “Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres. He began….” At this moment of connection, we see him moving away from the people in the room, something he’s been doing all night.

And then, later, as he readies himself to leave, Gabriel looks up the staircase and sees his wife. “She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. . . . He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.”

The rest of the story then goes on to explore the gulf between Gabriel and his wife — the ordinary enough distance between all people — that we have loved others, that we do not always want the same thing.

But, in the end, there is a vision of what unifies all of us. It’s not beef en daube, or civilization. It’s death.  The passage is so beautiful that I end with it. I’m not in college anymore, and I don’t have to say anything else, although I would like to say that if you compare and contrast James Joyce and Virginia Woolf you will discover that it’s quite likely, from how lovely the passages about eating and parties are, that both of them got to go to a lot of dinner parties where they actually had a pretty good time, and quite a few where they wished they could be outside, walking in the snow or looking out across the water at the lighthouse or, at least, writing about it.

And here is the end of The Dead, in case you’ve never read it:

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”