Archive for October, 2006|Monthly archive page
In Defense of Halloween
There’s a funny article in this morning’s New York Times about the British reaction to Halloween. (Unfortunately, it’s behind their subscription firewall so I can’t link to it. It’s by the wonderful Sarah Lyall.) As far as I can tell, our neighbors across the Atlantic don’t at all care for this holiday which, it seems, involves hordes of demanding, poorly behaved British children, howling for candy, and roaming the streets, making ordinary citizens feel a little nervous. In Britain, householders cower in the back of their houses with lights turned out and just wish the whole thing would end.
A.N. Wilson’s grumpy response to Halloween is: “Trick or treat? I don’t know about you, but my answer to this question, if I’m honest, would be unprintable in a family newspaper . . . Let’s say it’s stronger than ‘push off.’ Yet the little beggars will soon be round, banging and ringing at our doors with this irritating refrain.”
Faced with this sort of grousing, I wish to write today in defense of Halloween. One objection to Halloween that got me thinking was the notion that the children aren’t doing enough to justify that candy. One citizen said something like, you’d think they’d at least sing or tell a joke or be charming before you give them the candy.
Good heavens. Has this woman never seen a child prepare for Halloween? Around here, weeks of strategic planning go into the preparation of the costume. It’s as much work as planning a Broadway show, or a wedding. After all, the point of that costume is to entertain or charm or seriously disturb the adult who sees you. When the door is opened and the person standing there clutching their bowl of Snickers bars looks you over, you do NOT want them to say, in a quizzical tone, what are you? That’s bad. You are stifling hot in the ghoul costume you spent a lot of time putting together out of old sheets and a flashlight and that cobwebby stuff that costs almost nothing and the idea is that they will shriek and say, my god, what has happened to children these days!? Or, if you’re the parent of the two year old child you’ve taken great pains to dress up as an M&M you want to hear how adorable before you take that Snickers bar as your reward for sewing the M&M logo on a pair of red sleeper pajamas, something that is not simple in a sleep deprived state. (I did this with twins, so I know what I’m talking about. I ate every one of those Snickers bars with great satisfaction over the course of the next several months.)
This year, in my house, one twin dressed up as his brother, a sort of homage to the skater, athlete, hip kid his brother is. He spent a lot of time figuring out just which items were truly representative of his twin, a process that actually brought the two of them together in a very nice way. The skater brother dressed up as a more extreme version of himself — pink hair goo, a ripped-up t-shirt that took as much work to deconstruct as it did to construct, mandella tattoos strategically placed to have maximum effect, converse all-star hightops, ripped jeans (carefully ripped to look accidental), safety pins through everything (except skin: I drew the line.) And the smallest boy dressed up as…. well, a general. He’s as militaristic as they come, and although it’s a little embarrassing to walk down the street with a small person dressed like a guy in the R.O.T.C., he looked more cute than fierce, because he’s seven and that’s his lot in life. Anyway, I’m used to his choices, which are instinctively transgressive choices for a child who lives in Berkeley. Last year he was a cop. Next year, I’m guessing he’ll be Dick Cheney.
The military costume was acquired after much looking around at a huge flea market held — where else? — at a decomissioned naval base. The uniform belonged to a guy named Strickland. He was, apparently, a short fellow because the shirt and jacket pretty much fit a larger than average seven year old boy perfectly. There was a lot of speculation around here about whether Strickland’s uniform was for sale because he’d died (the uniform was carefully examined for evidence of combat death), or if it was for sale because he became a General. (He started as a corporal, so the latter seems as unlikely as the former.)
As for the candy itself, it doesn’t hurt a child to have a day of excess. In fact, Halloween reminds me of other holidays — European in origin, if I’m not mistaken — where the idea is that it’s good for people if there’s a day when all the normal roles are subverted. And so it is on Halloween. Children get to scare adults. Children get to decide what gets eaten. Children get to be out at night while adults stay home in their beds, afraid of what’s out there in the dark. Children get to wear weird and inappropriate clothing, which is to say they get to dress as adults. I honestly cannot see how anyone could object to that, but possibly it’s because they didn’t start life out dressed as an M&M or a bumble bee, like most American children, and so this wonderful ritual isn’t in their blood the way it is in ours.
Mid-Century Pleasures
Filed under: 1950s, Fountain Pens, Office Supplies, Tape Dispensers, The Art of Living, Utopian Thoughts, Work, Workplace conditions, Writing Instruments |
Comments(28) 
Generally, the 1950s conjure up images of frozen women dressed in poofy pastel party dresses, lips composed in tight smiles, valium or booze keeping them still and uncomplaining, men with pipes in their mouths, absolutely dominant in the workplace and at home, lots of cardigans and golf on the weekends, and white faces, everywhere you look.
In fact, as Patrick of Anecdotal Evidence recently pointed out, huge things were happening in the 1950s, subversive things, fun things. And so this got me thinking — if I was allowed to import a bit of that time into this one, what would I chose? Well, I’d pick midcentury office supplies — and midcentury work habits.
In my office I’ve got the sleekest, sweetest tape dispenser, one that says something important about that time. Which is that sex can exist beautifully under the surface. It’s there in the curved line of this object, dispensing tape and eroticism at the same time. (There’s something a little scary and weird lurking in that sentence, but I’ll just leave it there, in a 1950s kind of way.) It was certainly a time when sex was not in your face every time you turned around. And yes, I know, repression is bad — but so is the sexualization of everything and everyone under the sun.
And then there’s the fountain pen. It says, I’m not in a huge hurry. I can take my time thinking about what I want to say. In a world where writing tools consisted of fountain pens, sleek ballpoints and really stylish typewriters, and idea distribution was pretty much limited to stamps and envelopes and slow boats to Europe and the occasional very expensive phone call, no one would be able to instantly deliver a hasty ad hominum attack on a work colleague. If someone in Brussells wants to tell me what an idiot I’ve been, that news won’t arrive for weeks and weeks, well after everyone’s forgotten the incident (or maybe after it’s already been fixed) And the sender will most likely have forgotten too, so in all likelihood such messages just wouldn’t be sent. And if the colleague was a bit closer, there was still a code of communication that made ad hominum attacks much rarer than they are now.
And how about working habits? We’d all be heading home at 5, from jobs that are relatively secure. (And because this is the 21st century, we’d all be able to interview for and secure those jobs, never mind our color, or sex or country of origin or religion.) And we would never, ever work on the weekends. Ever. Unless we loved our work so much that we wanted to, which is different from having to.
Thank you for allowing me to indulge in this utopian moment. I’m sure there are as many holes in my argument as there are in Ward Cleaver’s cardigan (the one he’s been wearing since the late 1950s.) The weekend awaits and I hope you’ve got at least one pleasure ahead of you. (And one other thing: A post related to this topic can be found over at What We Said, if you’d like to chat about mid-century sexuality.)
Room to Read
The title of this post should actually be: Where I Would Like to Read, If I Ever Manage to Finish Doing the Dishes.
This is our living room, on a day when the fog came in and never left, when we found one of those presto log things in the back of the closet in the hall where hockey sticks and toy lightsabers migrate. The people in the picture over the fireplace are the heirs to this living room. They do read in here. Most often, they can be found lying on the couch or the floor with their feet up in the air and a book above their heads, kind of the way a beetle might read were it to find itself upside down on its back with a copy of TinTin in its hands.
Over at Susan Hill’s marvelous blog, there’s a lovely discussion of the places where people read. I paid attention to this question yesterday and discovered that I read: on the train (no surprise there), sometimes on the train platform if the book is really compelling (Half a Yellow Sun, the book I’m reading these days is that compelling), at the dining room table while the children are doing their homework (setting a fine example), on the kitchen counter, while I’m waiting for the pasta water to boil, sitting in a chair next to my smallest son while he falls asleep, and on the edge of my bed in the morning, right after I’ve taken a shower. And sometimes I do read in that nice chair by the fire at night. I’d like to do it more often and, now that I’ve pointed this out to myself, maybe I will.
Five Things My Husband Is Pretty Sure You Don’t Know About Me
Being a chatty, disclosure-oriented person, I can’t think of a thing I haven’t already told you about myself. I’m Catholic, but I think I’ve mentioned that before — it makes me inclined to confession.
So I asked my husband what five things he’s pretty sure very few people know about me. Turns out, he’s been making just such a list since 1984, when we first met. Here is his list. It’s not terribly flattering, but then I’m a bit of a pain in the neck. But you already knew that.
- People probably don’t know what kind of driver you are. You’re a good driver, as long as you’re moving forward.
- They don’t know whether you have a mountain bike or a road bike or no bike or a city bike. (You have a mountain bike.)
- They don’t know what irritates you. The fact that you can’t find the tops of the containers you use to put food in for the boys’ lunches irritates you. This is not high on the list of important things to worry about. (We don’t want to get into the things we have to worry about.)
- When I first met you, you didn’t know how to cook. Well, you could cook, but just in the most basic way. It once took you four hours to make risotto.
- I haven’t had any success teaching you how to change the oil in the car or clean it out.
- Do they know that you really like office supplies a lot? (Yes, honey, they do.)
I realize this meme is supposed to be your chance to disclose that you know a lot about, say, Sumerian history. Or that you can juggle something besides making three lunches in the morning. I have no skills to speak of. Unless you count typing. I’m a fast typist. (I was a legal secretary for a few years before I went back to graduate school and law school. Ah, there’s a little known fact and skill. Also, when I think I’m going to lose at a game, I’m tempted to cheat, and sometimes do, which I suppose is both a skill and a character flaw.)
(With thanks to Helen, Charlotte, Emily, Ms. Make Tea, Danielle, Kerryn, Litlove, Dorothy, Kate, RelaxedDad, and many other people who’ve disclosed far more interesting things about themselves than the fact that they own a mountain bike, can’t change the oil in the car to save their lives, but can type really, really fast.)
What’s Up With That?
Laughter, at its most basic, is the physical experience of being surprised. You gasp and then you let the gasp out and there you have it: a laugh. Lots of things accomplish this: puns, Mark Twain, John Cleese, and the bored people who make window displays in charity shops in San Francisco, south of Market, where things are always a little more interesting.
A lot of what surprises and intrigues me has to do with the roles we play in the world, and how those roles are subverted. That’s why this window, the one with the two weirdly medical mannequins made me laugh. It’s a display that calls out for a feminist reading, but all I could do at the stoplight when I saw it was take a picture of it and file it for later thought.
For a long time, feminism was the tool I used to figure out my response to what I was reading, to things I’d see in the media, and to the world of the law I was just entering. I can’t put my finger on when I stopped articulating these ideas and applying them to the things that surprised me. But I do suspect it was when I got tired of being a deadly serious feminist. My work in this area didn’t make me laugh.
I know that sounds frivolous, and maybe it is, but it’s my working theory, so bear with me. It’s just this: if laughter is surprise and maybe even a little delight, then we’re going to stick with things that deliver laughter. I simply never looked for that and so never found it in feminist thinking. It’s not that it isn’t there to be found, and it’s not the case that feminism must be deadly serious, without any wit or playfulness. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the image of the deadly serious, scary feminist is one that deserves to be picked up, and looked at and given a good, healthy shake. I think what I’d find is that this image is there to make you stop thinking.
When Emily recently dropped the anvil on Abercrombie & Fitch, my response was “what she said.” Not much more than that — I’ve gotten out of practice seeing the world through this lens.
But then Emily proposed a kind of group blog, a notebook really, for people to record their thoughts about 21st century feminism. And I realized how much fun that might be. It’s a place to put pictures of mannequins, and don’t you think the world needs something like that? Litlove, and Dorothy, and Courtney and the Hobgoblin were there for that conversation, so they’re going to be posting some things, along with Emily and me. I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say.
It’s called What We Said: Reflections on 21st Century Feminism. It’s not meant to be a weighty project for anyone — it’s a notebook, a place for anything anyone has to say about feminism. If you want in, email me or leave a comment here. I’ll add you to the site and it will become your very own moleskine also. Or come by and comment at some point. We’ll see what happens. I’m pretty sure, at a minimum, there will be things said that surprise all of us.
Pink
I didn’t actually know until the wee hours of the morning that today is wear pink for breast cancer day. My first thought when I heard about it is that I like displays of solidarity. I loved it when people wore white for the immigration marches. Here in San Francisco, the march was enormous and you could tell from the sea of white that the people marching were as one in what they had to say. A march makes sense to me — a show of numbers is an effective way to say something that needs to be said, something the government isn’t hearing. A march can say, a lot of us don’t like this war. Or gay people are people too and deserve to be treated like everyone else. Or we aren’t going to sit in the back of the bus anymore.
My second thought, though, was that breast cancer is different. It’s not like the government has said women with breast cancer can’t get married or have to be educated in separate but equal schools. And all areas having to do with our health as a people aren’t adequately funded — not just breast cancer.
On a personal level, I’m a little embarrassed to think that anyone I know would wear a pink t-shirt because they think I need them to do that. Really, I don’t need that. I already know my loved ones care about me. I can’t imagine anyone not caring about someone who’s been told they’re ill. Actually, I can, but then that person could not be convinced to wear a pink t-shirt anyway. In truth, the pink t-shirt makes me feel a bit like an abstraction and a cause. And that brings me to my point: the pink-wearing day is part of a narrative about illness that doesn’t match my own experience.
Although no one gives you a script when you learn you have cancer you can’t avoid learning your lines. They’re spoken in unison by so many people of good will, people who want to help you, that you find yourself saying them too. When you are diagnosed, you’re told, you are a fighter. And after your treatment, they say, you are a survivor. After you die, the obituary says, she carried on a brave struggle, but in the end she lost. And so it seems my job is to fight and struggle and my reward is that I will be a survivor. In light of this narrative, it makes sense that people wear a ribbon or a certain color to cheer you on: that’s what we do in this culture for anyone engaged in a contest — whether it’s an athletic contest or a war or cancer.
This may be inspiring and helpful for many people. I just want to say that for me — in my own experience of being diagnosed with breast cancer — I do not find this narrative helpful or accurate.
To begin with helpful, I’d say that if someone wants to be helpful to women with breast cancer, I think they should just quietly give money or time to an organization that does cancer research or helps people who don’t have health insurance. And they should remember that there are lots of cancers, lots of sick people, lots of problems. And every time we attend to one loudly, we’re drowning out the others. So give to lots of good organizations. Don’t talk too much about it. And if you know a woman with breast cancer, bring her a cheesecake, or a good book, or some nice soap, Battlestar Galactica videos, an orchid, soup, pesto, flowers, chocolate. Organize a carpool in which she only has to drive one out of the ten shifts. Bring her something frivolous. Give her sexy underwear. Tell her a joke. Flirt with her. She knows why you’re doing that and it’ll make her happy and feel supported. If she’s me, anyway. That’s all helpful. (And don’t forget, if she has a family to be nice to them. They’re not feeling so great right now either.)
This is as close as I can come to accurate: The cancer surgery I experienced was not a fight. It was a series of careful and elegant incisions and the deft removal of cancerous pieces of tissue. Dr. Hwang did that. I slept through the whole thing.
Nor can I call my encounter with anxiety, and sadness and anger a fight. There isn’t an enemy here. Certainly, my body is not an enemy. It has done what it was fated to do. The anxiety, sadness and normal thoughts about mortality I’ve experienced are not an enemy. And if I fight them as though they are, I suspect it will be the way it is when someone falls into one of those traps where the more you struggle the worse it gets. The best I can do, really, is to watch those emotions gather, like storm clouds. And I suppose then you have to let them wash over you. You stand out there in the rain, and you get wet, and you feel it and you’re a complete pain in the ass for other people to be around because you’re sad, or worried or angry or so distracted you can’t be relied on to feed youself, much less your family. And you and they will just have to wait it out.
As you do, maybe you will see something about yourself or the way life works that you didn’t see before and maybe that will help you feel better. Maybe you never will feel the same sense of security you felt before you knew you had cancer. No one said you were entitled to have everything about your life seem inviolate or that all things could be made better. But I’m pretty sure if I don’t do what I’ve described, I’d just bury all the things I’ve been feeling and I’d be a lot angrier and more anxious and a way huger pain than I already am.
So now you know, I’m not a fighter or a survivor. There’s no need to wear pink for me. But if someone you know would be honored or heartened by it, then I salute your decision. And if it means you’ve put pressure on people in our government to give money to cancer research, then I’m really all for that. If someone I knew felt better seeing me in pink, I’d be dressed in pink from head to toe. Because that’s something else that I’ve learned. No two of us are alike in the way we experience the world. And if we want to understand ourselves and other people, we have to listen and watch and be quiet for a while before we act. That’s really all I want from the people who love me and want to help me and that’s what I hope I can give to the people who need that from me.
This Morning the Writing Cafe is Serving
Filed under: Poetry, Readers and Writers, Reading, The Writing Cafe is Serving, Wallace Stevens, Words |
Comments(2) 
Wallace Stevens’s lovely poem, Sea Surface Full of Clouds. I haven’t thought of this poem in a very long time, but I was reminded of it recently by this terrific writer.
I guess my affection for Stevens is clear. He was the first poet I felt like I understood — maybe because the poems I first read were the accessible ones and so gave me the illusion of mastering a difficult poet: Sunday Morning, The Snow Man, and Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.
Stevens was a lawyer. He wrote his poems while he walked to work through Elizabeth Park in Hartford and then he had his secretary type them up. He kept his life as a poet and his life at the insurance company pretty much separate. He loved France and the French. He also really liked good food, and he loved Key West, and he wasn’t above asking people to send him parcels of interesting objects from places like Ceylon and Japan. He didn’t travel, not physically anyway. The next book I write (after I finish radiation therapy and get done with the elusive last few chapters of The Secret War) will be about him.
Here’s the poem:
Sea Surface Full Of Clouds, Wallace Stevens
I
In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And in the morning summer hued the deck
And made one think of rosy chocolate
And gilt umbrellas. Paradisal green
Gave suavity to the perplexed machine
Of ocean, which like limpid water lay.
Who, then, in that ambrosial latitude
Out of the light evolved the morning blooms,
Who, then, evolved the sea-blooms from the clouds
Diffusing balm in that Pacific calm?
C’était mon enfant, mon bijou, mon âme.
The sea-clouds whitened far below the calm
And moved, as blooms move, in the swimming green
And in its watery radiance, while the hue
Of heaven in an antique reflection rolled
Round those flotillas. And sometimes the sea
Poured brilliant iris on the glistening blue.
II
In that November off Tehuantepec
The slopping of the sea grew still one night.
At breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck
And made one think of chop-house chocolate
And sham umbrellas. And a sham-like green
Capped summer-seeming on the tense machine
Of ocean, which in sinister flatness lay.
Who, then, beheld the rising of the clouds
That strode submerged in that malevolent sheen,
Who saw the mortal massives of the blooms
Of water moving on the water-floor?
C’était mon frère du ciel, ma vie, mon or.
The gongs rang loudly as the windy booms
Hoo-hooed it in the darkened ocean-blooms.
The gongs grew still. And then blue heaven spread
Its crystalline pendentives on the sea
And the macabre of the water-glooms
In an enormous undulation fled.
III
In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And a pale silver patterned on the deck
And made one think of porcelain chocolate
And pied umbrellas. An uncertain green,
Piano-polished, held the tranced machine
Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds,
Who, seeing silver petals of white blooms
Unfolding in the water, feeling sure
Of the milk within the saltiest spurge, heard, then,
The sea unfolding in the sunken clouds?
Oh! C’était mon extase et mon amour.
So deeply sunken were they that the shrouds,
The shrouding shadows, made the petals black
Until the rolling heaven made them blue,
A blue beyond the rainy hyacinth,
And smiting the crevasses of the leaves
Deluged the ocean with a sapphire blue.
IV
In that November off Tehuantepec
The night-long slopping of the sea grew still.
A mallow morning dozed upon the deck
And made one think of musky chocolate
And frail umbrellas. A too-fluent green
Suggested malice in the dry machine
Of ocean, pondering dank stratagem.
Who then beheld the figures of the clouds
Like blooms secluded in the thick marine?
Like blooms? Like damasks that were shaken off
From the loosed girdles in the spangling must.
C’était ma foi, la nonchalance divine.
The nakedness would rise and suddenly turn
Salt masks of beard and mouths of bellowing,
Would—But more suddenly the heaven rolled
Its bluest sea-clouds in the thinking green,
And the nakedness became the broadest blooms,
Mile-mallows that a mallow sun cajoled.
V
In that November off Tehuantepec
Night stilled the slopping of the sea.
The day came, bowing and voluble, upon the deck,
Good clown… One thought of Chinese chocolate
And large umbrellas. And a motley green
Followed the drift of the obese machine
Of ocean, perfected in indolence.
What pistache one, ingenious and droll,
Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery
And the sea as turquoise-turbaned Sambo, neat
At tossing saucers—cloudy-conjuring sea?
C’était mon esprit bâtard, l’ignominie.
The sovereign clouds came clustering. The conch
Of loyal conjuration trumped. The wind
Of green blooms turning crisped the motley hue
To clearing opalescence. Then the sea
And heaven rolled as one and from the two
Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.
The photograph at the top of the post is San Francisco City Hall a few days ago. There were so many clouds, dark clouds, and under them a kind of saturated blue you only see in the fall.
Writing About Children
Filed under: Books, Children, Parenting, Readers and Writers, Reading, Words, Writing |
Comments(18) There’s a temptation in writing about and describing childhood and children to forget that both are most interesting when they are least about us — the adults, that is. There’s a reason why so many great children’s books begin with the death of parents. The true life of a child, the one most children want to read about, is the one in which children have free rein to be the weird, obsessive, imaginative, odd and powerful people they both are and would like to be. Which is to say, people a lot like adults, except the wildness that we’re all capable of flourishes in great children’s literature because, well, because the adults who’d tell you to stop climbing trees or escaping into a different dimension or lifting horses up over your head are all dead. Or on very long vacations or sea voyages. Or have left the children with nannies who aren’t really adults but are instead magical people. Or are away at war.
The books I most liked as a child had very few adults in them. Books like the Chronicles of Narnia (Aslan wasn’t really an adult was he?) and Pippi Longstocking. You wonder, though, who the adults were who remembered to leave themselves out. So much contemporary children’s fiction fails to do this, because it seems most motivated by a desire to teach children how to become adults. And when that’s your goal, then you end up with an adult-child ratio that’s about even. Not what you want if you’d like to eat candy for dinner.
And because I have to leave for the dentist in about half an hour and still have to make lunches and get dressed, I have to cut this meditation on writing about and for children short. I just want to say this: Alison Lurie had it right in her book about children’s fiction: the best writing for children is subversive, writing that doesn’t really have anything to teach children except maybe that they should hang onto who they are and not be in such a hurry to be adults.
When you become an adult, after all, and wake up in the morning, you will discover you have to go to the dentist. When you are a child and wake up in the morning, you will lie in bed looking out the window and wonder how it is that the moon can still be up in the sky and what would it be like to go up there some morning instead of going to school. And you don’t hear your mother downstairs in the kitchen getting ready for the adult day because you’re inventing whatever you need to invent to get yourself out the window of your room and into the adventure that is your childhood.
Security Check
Filed under: Readers and Writers, Words, Writing, internet security, typing |
Comments(12) You know that thing you have to do when you want to leave a comment on a blog or buy tickets to an Oakland A’s game, which you might still be able to do if the A’s hadn’t just totally collapsed and lost in four straight games their chance of going to the World Series, not that we blame them because they’re a young, scrappy team and they looked like they were having fun when it actually SNOWED in Detroit, as they were losing those last two games.
I digress. What happens is you’re presented with a long string of random letters and told to retype them, to prove you’re not a weirdo trying to steal someone’s bank account numbers or push viagra. Everyone knows that spammers refuse to try to retype long strings of letters, particularly if there’s any distortion in them. They’re too busy going after the easy marks, the people who actually will email them back the password to their retirement account so they can get back to buying things on Ebay.
Anyway, it turns out you have a lot in common with the guy in North Korea who wants to sell you some used uranium. Like him, you sit at your computer, staring at something like this – qzxmpwepjoxxcyltvqum – except the string of letters is so distorted that the y looks like a j or maybe a q. I have never, ever retyped those letters correctly the first time I’ve tried. Just like the spammers. And just like the spammers, sometimes I don’t even try. On bad days, I just want to lie down and sleep when I see that string of letters.
I recently learned that it doesn’t have to be this way. BookMooch, for example, has figured this out. On their site, all you have to do is re-type the name of a famous writer. Apparently the purveyors of suspicious pharma and financial schemes cannot type the names of famous writers either. So that’s it. “Cather” I can do. Even if it’s distorted. I’d work hard to find out which writer they wanted me to retype. It’s the exact opposite of what happens when I see qzxmpwepjoxxcyltvqum. If I can’t lie down right away, I consider buying a pharmaceutical product. One that would sharpen my eyesight, make my hands steadier, and help me concentrate. Oh, that’s a latte? Except for the steady hands part. I could do that, but I’d have to step away from my computer to accomplish it.
Wanting to make the world a better place and to make it easier for me to buy things on the internet and leave worthless comments on blogs, I’ve resolved to email the people who run Blogger (if they’re not too busy spending all the money they got yesterday from Google delivered in three semi-trucks filled with cash) and suggest they start having people type in the names of really, really good food as their security check. Creme anglaise I can type. I am good with gorgonzola. And if I don’t know what it is (sweetbreads, for example), I might actually look it up and increase my store of knowledge. I can’t see a Nigerian pyramid schemer sitting still for that. Or maybe they could have us retype the names of great bloggers and blogreaders. (If you are reading this, then that would be you.) But please, let’s get rid of qzxmpwepjoxxcyltvqumo.
And that’s all I have to say about anything this lovely Sunday morning.
What I’ve Stopped Reading
Reading, as Dorothy recently pointed out, has its phases, ushered in and out by one’s attention span, which in turn is influenced by what is happening in life outside the reading chair. And so it is that sometimes I have gone for long stretches happily turning the pages of big books. And then weeks or months go by when all the words I need can be found in the New Yorker and Dorothy Sayers. And quite often, the back of a cereal box is good enough.
This rise and fall in attentiveness is as normal as the change of seasons. But also normal, although a little rarer, is when a certain type of text becomes something we know we no longer need. Like an unreliable boyfriend, some reading material will seem to meet your needs, but then it begins to exact such a toll or bore you to tears, which might be the same thing, and so a break-up is inevitable. Here’s a list of the things I’ve given up, permanently, I’m pretty sure.
- Political Blogs. Before the 2004 election, I read Daily Kos, and The Talking Points Memo and the many links on their sites not just religiously but obsessively. The buzz and hope and hype on those blogs was intoxicating. But then, after the election, people who’d loved John Kerry suddenly hated him. There was a lot of anger and angst. It made me feel awful. But what really made me stop going there was when I posted something and someone was just so gratuitously MEAN to me and then another person did the same thing. It wasn’t a nice place to spend time in. And I didn’t need that. I want kindness mixed in with my political chatter. Now I know that’s not going to be possible and I have returned to the New York Times and a really large dose of scepticism about everything I read there.
- Books about writing. For several years, I read a lot of books about writing. They were helpful, sometimes inspiring, and every once in a while led me in a very wrong direction. But that’s not what put me off them. What happened is that I reached a saturation point with them. I discovered there isn’t any more room in me for more information about how to write a story. Now, what’s needed is story writing.
- Cooking magazines. This might be temporary. But I’ve cancelled my cooking magazines in favor of just, well, cooking. A little like the books about writing category. I can never give up cookbooks though.
- Best Seller, Much Buzzed About, Contemporary Fiction. The Secret Life of Bees, The Three Junes, things like that. After reading several disappointing books in this category, I realized I don’t have time to wade through the mediocre to get to the great. It’s a little like when you’re single and you decide you really, really don’t need to date anymore because you already have a lot of great friends to hang out with (I can always re-read Jane Austen, I mean), and when there’s nothing to do on a Friday, you are fine being on your own (there’s always the cereal box). The truth is, when something really good comes along, someone will point it out to you. Or it will find you. That way I don’t miss things like Sebald’s great book, Austerlitz or the fun of Alexander McCall Smith.
- Legal advance sheets. These are the reports of the most recent cases to come out of our state court and the federal courts. If you don’t keep up with them, they start to multiply, like dust bunnies. A few days ago, I recycled a pile of them and felt great about it. And then it occurred to me that, like good contemporary fiction, the good cases rise to the top. My colleagues tell me about them. Or I’ll find them when I’m working in that area.
- Book reviews. I like the ones I read on your blogs better.
- Fashion magazines. Charlotte has become my fashion goddess. Don’t mix pink and black and you’re home free.
Oh, and one other thing reading related — this morning, I picked up the September 2006 issue of Poetry magazine, a magazine I like because it doesn’t require a huge commitment of time. And there was a review of Seamus Heaney’s new book District and Circle. It’s a book all about something I’m in love with: objects — how they outlive us and contain us. I’m thrilled to have been reminded this is out there to be read, and that I can read it, because I’ve made room for it by abandoning Daily Kos and In Style and The Secret Life of Bees.
Daily Bread
It’s extraordinary, really, how much beauty there is in the course of an ordinary week. Here are some things I found on my camera from this week, one I don’t think I’d remember as being so lovely, but for the evidence of so many tiny moments of happiness.
Naturally, I made lunches out of that bread.
And we celebrated. My husband’s 47th birthday, for which chocolate was the only acceptable gift. From Bittersweet, a nice shop dedicated to exotic, interesting, very chocolate-y chocolate. Yes, dear reader, I led him into temptation.
We also celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary. (That’s us, in the tiny wedding picture. On the bales of hay? My mother and her sister, in 1934. Behind her, my husband’s mother when she was a little girl.) The flowers came from the farmer’s market we went to on Sunday. They’re a wonderful autumn color, I thought.
We went on a hike one evening after work and looked out across the bay toward San Francisco. It became dark very quickly. You can tell fall’s approaching. There are other signs of fall in the leaves on a few of the trees in our neighborhood, but mostly, fall makes itself known by the changes in the air and the light. 
On Wednesdays, in the plaza I cross to get to my office, there’s a farmer’s market. There are still berries to be had, even though it’s October.
Thursday, I got my hair cut in Union Square, sort of ground zero for the cable car line. I never notice them, except today when I heard this one coming down the hill behind me, its bell being rung by an enthusiastic conductor.
I also went to a wonderful exhibit of quilts by the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. And that’s what I’m going to write about this weekend, if I have time. Quilts and race. But this morning, I just want to record that our daily bread, what we never notice about where we live and how we go about our lives, is something for which I’m very grateful.
Ten Cents an A
There are lots of things about being a parent that aren’t so great: breaking up brawls, teaching people how to eat with utensils, waking up in the middle of the night multiple times because someone’s teeth hurt, explaining over and over why you can’t call your brother a bastard, that sort of thing. The sheer physical and emotional drudgery of parenting is overwhelming sometimes — who knew you’d spend a decade between your mid-thirties and mid-forties (having chosen to have children late) actually carrying other people around?
But one of the consolations of being a parent is the many chances at redemption it offers you. If your own parents’ chosen method of discipline was humiliating, you can do it differently. If you didn’t like camping in the rain, well, you don’t have to foist that on your own children. The trouble is, though, that sometimes you are guided by instinct and then you miss completely your moment of redemption.
That’s what happened last night when my eleven year old son told me he’d gotten a “C” on a math test. (A C, for those of you who are not American, is for scores in the 70-80% range.) He hadn’t studied, he said, because his smaller brother had wanted his company. This is the first year they’ve ever gotten grades, and they’re still feeling their way. He honestly didn’t know what the “C” might mean in our family.
But I did. And that’s how I came to say something (several times, in fact, because I wanted to make sure I was understood) I wish I hadn’t: I expect each of you to get A’s. Always.
I knew from the look on their faces, the crestfallen look on the boy who got the C and the look of horror on the face of his twin, who often cannot even FIND his homework, let alone do it perfectly, that I was headed somewhere wrong. It took me a few moments to see it and for that I am grateful, because when you can see yourself heading in the wrong direction, you can sometimes steer clear of the cliff you’re about to throw yourself off.
Let me say that I did get A’s. My entire childhood. I got a dime for each one of them and a lot of parental and teacher approval. I was a younger child and that meant a lot to me. I was quiet and neat and obedient and I watched the adults like a hawk to figure out what would please them. As a result, I was awash in dimes.
My sons are not like this. They’re wild and messy. Sometimes they’re pretty clever. Other times you wonder how they can dress themselves in the morning. I have tried to get them to be otherwise, but they resist with so much gusto, that I can’t quite bear to squelch their messiness and noise with the weapons at hand. (Cutting off food, or access to the computer, for example.) Also, over time, I have seen that my own pursuit of the A meant I missed out on something that really matters to me now. I didn’t write, the way I’d wanted to when I was a child, because I wanted to succeed in the world: I wanted the adults to give me dimes. They did not give dimes for stories. I became a lawyer instead, the career that’s designed for people who know how to and need to get A’s (and the dimes that morph into dollars). It took me years to make space to write. I regret that, but not so much that I’m paralyzed by it, or unwilling to try to fix it.
Yesterday, though, I saw where it started — with my parents’ reaction to my grades and my own hunger to make them happy. And I also saw how that could go wrong for a child who isn’t neat and obedient. This is the place where they begin to define themselves as stupid beause they don’t happen to have the skills that make you a success in school (those skills include the ability to focus on things you’re not always interested in, neat handwriting, a body that can take sitting still, and a natural interest in topics that not everyone finds interesting, like the dates when things happened in history.) I don’t want it to be like that for them.
And so we crafted a makeshift family policy around grades last night, one that I hope makes room for them to be who they are, but also encourages them to develop discipline, a character trait that will help them in whatever they choose to do. It’s this: You must do your homework and study for tests as well as you are able. If you do your best, that is enough. But, while you do that, you must be on the look out for the thing you love to do. Because that’s your real job as a human being: to find something — maybe even more than one thing — that gives you so much pleasure that when you do it (and if you’re lucky, earn your living at it) it doesn’t feel like work, but like play.
And that’s it. The grade is secondary as long as you have done your best. How’s that? It may seem like a small thing, but it was a moment of redemption that more than made up for the nights of being wakened by small people with toothaches. The hard thing now will be handling my discomfort with grades that are not always perfect, and letting my children choose vocations I’m not so sure about. I don’t think that’s going to be easy. I don’t want them to be feckless people, or people who don’t know how to care for themselves or earn a living. I wonder how I’ll feel when they come to me and say they’ve taken a job in Alaska working on a fishing boat so they have time to write music. Perhaps this will be a moment of redemption. That’s my hope, anyway.
(I’d like to add that my own parents’ love of learning and delight in scholary success was also a gift to each of us. They took us to the library every week and never told us what to read or what not to read. My father read all the time and was an example of how much you can discover about the world from books. My mother worked really hard at her jobs with real integrity. And she is very, very good at math. The money for the A’s? I’m sure she thought it would be a good way to teach multiplication.)
This Morning the Writing Cafe is Serving…
Filed under: Anne Sexton, Autumn, Poetry, R.I.P. Project, Reading, Scary Stuff, The Writing Cafe is Serving, Witches, Words |
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Anne Sexton’s wonderful autumnal poem, Her Kind. The recommended menu while reading this poem? Pumpkin bread and hot apple cider. (Tea is an acceptable substitute for the apple cider.)
If you’d like to assume the persona of the writer, then you’ll have to put on a slash of lipstick. Your menu would then be a cigarette and a glass of scotch. Don’t be Sexton for too long, though. It was a lot of work being her and it did not end well. But while she was able, she managed to transform the nightmare of mental illness into art. And that is something to be celebrated this autumn morning.
If you’d like to hear Sexton read this poem, you can do that at the Academy of American Poets website. And if you’d like to know more about Sexton, Diane Middlebrook’s excellent biography is a good place to start. The biography made a little bit of a splash when it first came out because it’s based in part on tapes Sexton’s analyst made of their sessions. It’s a compulsively readable book. And Her Kind is a wonderful, accessible poem made to be read out loud.
Her Kind, Anne Sexton
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
(Without question, because of its chill factor and wildness, this poem is on my list of 100 favorite poems. I’m now up to 5 of 100. Maybe getting up to 25 or so would be a good winter project.)
At the Bottom of the Hill
was the ocean. The Mendocino coast is rocky and wild. In places, the rock formations are eerily lunar. You feel like you’re somewhere no one has ever been before.
The road to Gualala winds north through dairies and ranches and then narrows into the redwoods. But every once in a while, you’ll come around a curve and see the ocean out there, to your left, to the west. The ocean smells like earth, and rain and salt.
The children measured the span of a 2,400 year old redwood by making a human chain, with their arms stretched around it. So huge, but still, something an eleven year old boy can touch, while thinking about how the Greeks were at the height of their civilization when the tree began growing. And there were frogs everywhere — one boy spent a lot of time walking around with a frog on his cheek, then his forehead and finally hanging onto his hair. I should mention that these were very small, friendly, sort of cute and not slimy frogs. Their abundance is a sign that all is well in this environment. On the shore, my son found a small pair of antlers bleached white by the Gualala River. They became his talisman and good luck charm.
On Thursday, we kayaked down the river, stopping for science experiments in the rain (there’s a lot of oxygen in the river, which is a good thing) and then lunch in the rain under a tree. At the end of the day, the sun came out and a small group of us (my son and I, the intrepid teacher, another parent and three children) kept going along the river to where it gave out into the ocean. We pulled up on a sandy beach and walked over a sand dune and there was the Pacific, quite wild, a lot of crashing waves and driftwood. I learned that, with good enough rain gear, you can do almost anything. After a childhood of wet feet and hands, being out in the rain and actually having a nice time was redemptive.
Certainly, I never would have guessed that I’d love kayaking in the rain as much as I did. The kayaks were one person boats — very light, they skimmed along the water, even where it was quite shallow. Ahead and above were canopies of trees, green and gold in the mist and the rain. It was more beautiful than I can say.
I’ve got a bit more to go to the end. As many of you guessed, on occasion sleep and my love of hot showers won out over words. Still, it was exciting and fun and productive enough during the evening I did get to write. But I’m considering the great downhill to be at an end. Now it’s just a cruise to the finish today and tomorrow and possibly Monday, with my children away at soccer games and friends’ houses. I’ll be happy to type “the end.” But first, a quick peek to see what what everyone’s been writing and doing in the last week!
