BlogLily

The video of Hussein’s execution is making its way around and around the globe, raising in its wake howl after howl: he deserved it, this is the way all evil people should end, I can’t believe you can see him dying right there on the screen!

The spectacle of a public execution has always been one way people in power try to distract us from what’s really true. And what’s really true, and has always been true in one way or another, is that those in whom we’ve entrusted the power to act on our behalf haven’t deserved our trust. In fact, those people are the ones who’ve put into motion many of the things they’ve been charged with fixing.

And while that video plays on millions of computer screens, Iraq plunges deeper into civil war, children die from preventable diseases, genocide continues in Africa, and the polar ice caps melt just a little bit more.  But the person watching the screen is distracted by the spectacle of an actual video of a man being hanged, and fails to see that evil goes on about its insidious business while he is turned the other way, transfixed, watching something that has changed not one single thing for the better.

But here’s something else I know, something lots of people know, either deep within or right on the surface. It’s this: No evil in the world can be fixed until you call it by its proper name. So let’s start things off by calling Hussein’s execution what it really is: smokescreen. Not justice. Having done that, we can then call what’s happening in Iraq a civil war for which Americans are responsible. Not public infighting. The fact that children die from preventable diseases? Wrong. Not regrettable.

If you’re going to resolve to do anything this year it should be to insist on the right names for things. Because when you do, you will stand up to the people who want us to forget how much there is to be done, the people who this week would like us to think that this execution fixes any of the things that are tearing Iraq apart, that it has anything to do with true justice. And when you do that, you will quiet for a moment the insensible howl of the mob and replace it with the sound of your voice saying clearly the right names for the things that are wrong. And maybe then we will be able to get on with making right some of the things in the world that are wrong.

What is it about the cold, clear light of late December that makes us all start barking orders at ourselves? Things like: learn Chinese, get a new job, lose weight, exercise more, save more money, find a mate, be a better parent, friend, lover, worker, blogger. YAGH.

Except for the occasional moment when I think to myself, I’d better set a goal or two here or I’ll be 600 years old before I find an agent for my novel, I try to avoid bossing myself around. Lord knows, I have enough people (children, I mean) to boss around already. And so, in place of resolutions, I give you one of the simplest, loveliest pieces of advice I know. Here’s Mark Twain on getting things done, a few words that have the elegant simplicity of something that is absolutely true:

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
- Mark Twain

You know what your dreams are. Now find one small, manageable thing you can do to make them come true. And then begin.

Happy New Year to all of you.

xo, Lily

Here they are then, laid out on my bed this morning, the things I’ll be reading in the next six months or so. I used to be a fast reader, but children, job, and editing The Secret War into something that resembles a novel takes all the time I used to devote to reading. I don’t lament the loss of all that time I used to have. This decade is simply for other things. Still, I look forward to these books:

• Letters of Wallace Stevens. I’ve read these before, and loved them, written as they are by a man who was in full control of himself and his life, and his poetry. I’m wondering, this time around, where the cracks are in the persona he displays in these letters — the fault line that runs through the image he creates of the bluff lawyer, man of the world, and seasoned poet. I have another motive for reading these letters: there’s a character like Stevens in the novel I’ll begin this year, so the letters will be useful in filling in the outlines of this man.

• Peter Hennessy’s Never Again. A book about post-war England. The novel with the Stevens character is set partly in post-war London. I’m not going to read a ton of books, but this one looks quite good.

• A Woman in Berlin. A memoir about post-war Berlin. Can you see a pattern emerging? I’m curious about this time in general, and have heard this is well worth reading. Last summer I read Philip Kerr’s great series of mysteries set in Berlin (Berlin Noir), and wanted to read more about this time and place.

• The Aeneid. This new translation, by Robert Fagles who did wonderful translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad, is a handsome book. And I’ve wanted to re-read this for some time. As I’m driving to San Francisco for the next five weeks every day for radiation treatments, I’ve checked out some books on tape about the Greeks. I’ve loved hearing the bits from the Odyssey and wondered how the Aeneid would read next to those.

• Stories, Katherine Mansfield and Collected Stories, Dorothy Parker (the Modern Library edition from the lovely Ella’s box of books). I want to read more short stories this year. These look terrific.

• Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land. I liked Independence Day and although I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction, I’d like to read more this year.

• Joyce, Ulysses. I picked up this wonderful Modern Library edition at the San Francisco Public Library Book Bay a few weeks ago and began looking at it this morning. As I read it, I’ll be thinking about how Virginia Woolf called Joyce “underbred” and looking with glee for those underbred bits to share with all of you.

• Poet of the Appetites. A biography of M.F.K. Fisher, whose work I like very much. This biography looks well-researched and isn’t that book jacket beautiful?

• The Three Musketeers. I began this over the summer, got distracted and want to get back to it. It’s a terrific translation, and a ripping story. Maybe I’ll try reading it out loud to my boys. When they’re not playing nintendo.

• Charms for the Easy Life, Kay Gibbons. I think I read Ellen Foster, but it made absolutely no impression on me. Remember that thing I said about not reading very many contemporary writers? (Except mystery writers, come to think of it.) I’ve got to do something about that this year.

• The Elements of Style. This was a Christmas gift. It’s illustrated! I can’t wait to write about it. In simple, clear sentences, of course.

• Proust. Swann’s Way. We’ll see. It took me six years to get through this the first time around.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’ll be easier in a different translation.

And William Boyd’s Restless — I’m reading it now, so it didn’t make it into the photo.

I learned a couple of interesting things this Christmas and share them with you in the spirit of … well, sharing:

• An eleven year old boy’s wavering belief in Santa will be extended by at least one year if Santa brings him something his mother has vowed, many times, on her grave, to never, ever let come into her house. Despite much wailing and gnashing of young teeth, it has — until this Christmas — been a nintendo (ds lite in this case) free zone in our house. (Why, you ask?  Because I hate the way perfectly normal children look hunched over the damned thing, the way they can’t hear  me say, it’s time for dinner and because  I feared, for a while anyway, they might not ever discover how great reading is if they spent all their time hunched over the game thing.)  So, knowing what a hardass their mother is on this subject, my boys are now utterly certain Santa exists, because I would never allow any real human being to put something like that in their stockings, much less do it myself.  Man, do they love this gift.  As for me — who am I to argue with the man in the red suit, who knows that children, like adults, could use a little escape via super mario kart, which doesn’t, as far as I can see, involve killing a thing and does not keep them from dinner, as long as dinner is something yummy, which is what it should be anyway.

• My 76 year old mother loves the nintendo.  In particular, she was quite proud of the fact that her brain age is way, way younger than mine.  Too proud, I’d say, if I wasn’t trying to forget that my brain age is about 136.  She’s thinner than I am too. (We need not go into the issues around that, not this time of year anyway.) She also kicked my butt at quiddler, a word card game I loved until I lost. (Actually, she beat me by a mere three points, although listening to her you’d think it was three thousand.)
• My mother is way, way bossier than I am (which my children found very amusing and sort of stunning at the same time). She also has a killer instinct when it comes to games. But I still loved having her for the week. She really keeps things in line and she never forgot to administer the antibiotics that boy number three needed to take to get rid of a sinus infection. Plus, she’s fundamentally easy going (except when there are cards or a stylus in her hand), having seen it all in her time. And she loves my boys, and is nice to my husband.  She’s never even tried to boss him around.
• Book stacks? Huge hit. In particular, when nintendo playing got old, the bookstacks were right there, and actually dipped into by children who were tired of going round and round the track with mario.
• Those little stylus things? Very easy to lose. Good thing Santa gave us, like, sixty million extras.

Hope it was a great holiday for all of you.

Minstrels, William Wordsworth

The minstrels played their Christmas tune
To-night beneath my cottage-eaves;
While, smitten by a lofty moon,
The encircling laurels, thick with leaves,
Gave back a rich and dazzling sheen,
That overpowered their natural green.

Through hill and valley every breeze
Had sunk to rest with folded wings:
Keen was the air, but could not freeze,
Nor check, the music of the strings;
So stout and hardy were the band
That scraped the chords with strenuous hand.

And who but listened?–till was paid
Respect to every inmate’s claim,
The greeting given, the music played
In honour of each household name,
Duly pronounced with lusty call,
And “Merry Christmas” wished to all.

Merry Christmas if you’re celebrating that holiday — a peaceful day to all.  (By the way, the template turns back into itself around the beginning of the year, as do I.  For now, I’m floating along on a sea of gift wrap, and good will.  Love, Lily )

My brother-in-law is none too fond of the people in the White House. Okay, he hates Republicans.  (Actually that’s not quite true:  it’s the current Republican party that gives him so much trouble.) 

This does not cause much of a stir among us at Christmas, since almost everyone gathering together on the big day pretty much agrees that the current president is the worst president of all time.

The problem is that this gives my brother-in-law absolutely nothing to talk about. Poor thing. You’re absolutely right is a non-starter when you want to have a decent conversation about politics. So what do you do when you can’t get a good political argument going? (After all, isn’t the point of Christmas to get families together so they can discover how much they disagree about basically everything? Oh, peace on earth, you say? Ha.) Anyway, the answer is to give him a bunch of books that’ll take his mind off the concord in the house.

Here they are:

I’m going to take these from the bottom up, as a small gesture of resistance to the top down nature of the party in power.

• The Nastiest Things Ever Said About Republicans is pretty self-explanatory. I’ll just add that what’s in there struck me as pretty tame. That’s one reason why we’re in as much trouble as we are right now. The Democrats just aren’t mean enough.

• Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father should inspire him. I haven’t read it. But I like Obama and I’m hoping Randy’ll give it to me next year in MY bookstack — the one I want everyone to make for me.

• Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting By in America. (For those who might not know this book, it’s written by a woman who spent a year trying to live on minimum wage jobs. Things didn’t go all that well.) I read some of this earlier in the year and thought it was pretty good. My guess is that my brother-in-law will love it. It’s gritty and interesting and makes your blood boil. Great for right after the pumpkin pie when you might otherwise fall asleep.

• What Were They Thinking. I can’t remember the subtitle, but it’s something like, “really bad ideas people actually thought were good ideas.” Given how comforting it is to see how ridiculous people can be, this would be a nice thing to read right after you’ve picked up the paper and seen yet another day of horrendous bloodshed in the middle east.

• The last two books –Roget’s Thesaurus and the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations — are what Randy actually did ask for for Christmas. I’m guessing he’s looking for synonyms for “idiot” and “evil.” As for the quotations, I’m not sure what’s that about, but I wouldn’t mind being treated to the occasional concise word of wisdom.

And now, I take my leave, with a breathtakingly useless piece of information. It’s this: plastic snowmen, the kind that wind up and waddle around, look really frightening close up.

Today I went to several used bookstores, $20 in hand, to buy books for a Budget Bookstack. (This in response to Sulz, who commented that it all sounded great, but awfully expensive.)

I’m here to confess that she was sort of right, except for different reasons. The budget bookstack wasn’t so terribly expensive (it was, in fact $22, because I couldn’t resist Absalom, Absalom, at $5). The thing is, I was swept away by all those books, kind of the way you might feel at the pound, except at a used bookstore you can actually bring 40 books home, whereas if you brought forty puppies home you’d get in a lot of trouble. So yes, I’ll just tell you right now that I ended up spending $164 or some number like that, and came home with about 40 books.

A lot of people are getting bookstacks this year, is all I can say about that. Well, it’s not all, because I could also say in my defense that I recently got a raise, the first in about five years, and some of it was retroactive, and it seemed to me that this money should be pumped right back into independent bookstores, like Book Zoo, and worthy causes like the San Francisco Public Library Book Bay, both of which were the beneficiaries of my greed largess.

The budget bookstack, the one that cost only $22, contains six books. It’s for my little brother Mike, who’s eight years younger than I. Mike lives in Seattle, and he is far, far cooler than I am.

How cool, you ask? Well, he’s a computer whiz (like my sister Sue and my brother Ed) and his first big job was at Microsoft, a job that didn’t last too long because he’s a little bit of an anarchist and I’m guessing he just couldn’t resist saying what he thought about things. Whether he quit or was fired, I don’t know — but I hope he doesn’t mind me mentioning this short-lived stint at Microsoft. After all, it’s sort of a badge of honor to try Microsoft’s patience, considering how much they have tried ours. After that, he ended up at Amazon in its early days and although he worked way too hard, at least there was some reward for that. Now he works at a very cool sounding startup, and I think he might be working way too hard there. Of my three brothers, he’s the one who never writes in to set the record straight. That’s because he’s working too hard.

Mike’s a quirky, smart, interesting, kind, very funny guy, and I don’t think he has enough time to choose books or read them. This is what I’m sending him:

• Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 ($5) It was very hard for me not to keep this for myself or to spend the evening reading it rather than wrapping it. It’s all about the power of books, and Ray Bradbury’s such a fine writer.
• Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (free, my copy) I liked this very much. There was one section where the heroes ended up in the cold, cold north that seemed odd and out of place and could have been edited, but it’s still a very good book. And it’s good for vocabulary building. That’s because Michael Chabon has never met a weird, unusual, interesting word that he hasn’t wanted to take home and tuck into a sentence. If little-used words were puppies, Chabon would be in a lot more trouble than I would be if used books were puppies. After all, where’s he going to put 6,000 or so puppies?
• Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom. [$5] This was one of the most powerful books I read when I was in college. It’s less confusing than other Faulkner novels, has more of a story-line, and is achingly beautiful in places. Everyone should read this novel.
• Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From [$5] This is a substantial collection of clean, bracing short stories. I read this last year, and it’s one of the few books I’ve held on to from my year’s reading, which is why I parted with $5 for another copy of it. Even if you don’t want to write like Carver (whose style is so distinct that he’s easily copied/parodied), you should read him to see how you can do a lot without saying very much.
• Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely [$4] What fun to get to read Chandler in the winter. (Farewell My Lovely was missing when I took the picture of the books. A boy had grabbed it and was well into it before I could recover it.)
• Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections [$3] I read this before Franzen made a bit of an idiot out of himself. I liked this novel — and would have liked it even if he hadn’t been such an idiot. I don’t know why anyone was surprised that he’d rebuff the most powerful woman in America by saying that he’d rather his book not be read by tons and tons of people. After all, if the book’s even the least bit autobiographical, it’s pretty certain that he comes from a long line of people who don’t function all that well socially. Also, the price had been reduced from $6 to $3. I wondered if that was because of the Oprah thing or if they had so many copies of it at Book Zoo that they could afford to let it go for so little. No matter, it was too good a deal to pass up.

Yes, I’ve noticed there’s not a woman among these books. In fact, half of them are by guys named Ray. I’m not worried about it. Mike’s an enlightened person, and anyway, the last bookstack I sent him (when I was in graduate school and writing a master’s thesis on coming of age stories written by wonderful African American women like June Jordan and Paule Marshall), was full of great women writers, among them Zora Neale Hurston and Virginia Woolf.

Next up? My brother-in-law Randy who really, really, really hates Republicans.

Bookstack (n): 1. A gift, generally given at Christmas, comprised of many books, each book wrapped in tissue paper, the entire stack of books tied with a bow. 2. The last thing opened on Christmas day. 3. A whole bunch of books given all at once, the pleasure of which is in the sheer generosity of so many words, and the plethora of covers, the amount of time it takes to unwrap the stack, the discovery that you’ve got hours and hours of wonderful reading ahead of you on Christmas day, long after the turkey’s been eaten. 5. A gift that does not need batteries, a power cord, or a software update. 6. Heaven.

The bookstack is one of those ideas, like velcro or the twist tie, that’s so simple you can’t believe you didn’t think of it yourself. The trouble is I can’t remember where I read about it, so I can’t give credit to the brilliant woman who did this every Christmas for her children. (It that was your mother, would you speak up please?)

This one is for one of my older boys, a boy who likes history, sports, and has a great imagination.

And here’s a key for those who’re squinting right now. Beginning with the upper left hand corner:

1. John Madden’s Heroes of Football; 2. Dave at Night; 3. Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly; 4. Orlando Bloom Has Ruined Everything; 5. The Great Turkey Walk; 6. The Leopard Sword; 7. Whittington; 8. The Book of the Lion; 9. Eragon; 10. Across Five Aprils.

I hope nobody minds a few days of bookstack posts. There are books everywhere in my office, waiting to be wrapped in tissue paper and stacked: some for my other two boys, for my husband, for my mom, and even one I made for me, me, me!

I’ve been feeling less than literary these days, which is one of the occupational hazards of teetering on top of the work/life balance.  I’ve noticed that when you’re up there on that precarious perch, it’s hard to keep your balance if you have a book or a pen and paper in your hand.   I’ve also noticed that it’s particularly difficult to keep yourself from crashing to the ground during the holidays, a time when there are more than the usual number of things to do that I’m not particularly good at doing.   Like sewing.   

Since I’ve been on the subject of household management lately, I want to discuss sewing with all of you.  First, let me say that I do know how to sew.  I’ve never thought of myself as being from any particular generation, much less one that’s been around for a while, but it turns out that I’m from the tail end of a generation of women who had to take home economics in junior high, which makes me a person who’s lived in a world that many young women don’t know anything about.

If you missed it, home ec is what you took when the boys were learning to weld in shop.  It was where you learned to make coffee cake, muffins (don’t stir too much) and dresses.  They waited until the spring for sewing, wanting to make sure they could trust us with dangerous objects like knives before setting us lose on machines.  My sewing project was a dress that had six zillion darts in it.  To this day, I can’t see a dart without having a shuddery flashback to myself, c. 1974, hunched over a dress that, even by the very low standards of that decade, was terribly, terribly ugly.  

After that one dress, I put the sewing machine away for a few years.  Until 1976, in fact, when for some reason I am unable to quite fathom, I became a high school cheerleader and actually had to sew an entire uniform to wear during basketball season.  Apparently, it wasn’t enough to have one expensive uniform, the skirt and sweater you wore to football games.  Nope.  You had to have another entire get-up for the sport that mattered more than football in our town, which was basketball.   

So there I was, 16 years old, a recovering seamstress, with a pattern and a lot of red and blue and white material that I’d stuffed under my bed the instant I brought it home from the fabric store right before Christmas vacation.  It was clear to me that I was on my own when it came to sewing that basketball uniform.  My mother was busy working as a bookkeeper at J.C. Penney’s and she really didn’t want to hear about my issues with the uniform, a piece of apparel that was way more complicated than anything I could handle, involving as it did buttons and fabric that was slinky in that way only a 1970s cheerleading uniform could be slinky. 

Part of the problem in getting help with this whole uniform issue was that neither of my parents understood or approved of cheerleading.  (I don’t blame them, I don’t approve of it either.)  My mother was sort of circumspect about it, and just didn’t mention it, the way you wouldn’t mention somebody’s obvious physical handicap.  My father, on the other hand, routinely referred to my fellow cheerleaders as the vestal virgins, a phrase I found really embarassing and hoped he’d stop saying in that loud snorting way.   I was pretty sure if anyone I knew heard him using the word virgin (ick) or that whole phrase, my cover as a sort of normal girl would be totally and utterly blown.  I couldn’t talk to either one of them about the uniform, that was quite clear.

Adding to my angst over this uniform problem was that the other girls on the squad were named things like Cindy and Debbie and Tracey and Vicki and Linda and they were perfectly normal girls (not like me with my weird grandmotherly first name) and every single one of them had a mother who happily whipped up a perfect basketball uniform during Christmas vacation.  Still, I didn’t really expect anyone to come to my rescue, because I never even mentioned the problem this presented for me.  I just ignored it until it was almost too late. 

And that is how it happened that the night before the first basketball game of the season, a cold, rainy night in January, after the heat had ben turned off in our house, I stayed up until about three in the morning, like Dr. Frankenstein, piecing together odd bits of this and that, all the while holding my breath and hoping against hope I’d end up with something that sort of looked like a basketball uniform. 

Let me just say that a more misshapen thing was never worn by a Washington Patriots cheerleader before or since.  It was too big in the places where it was supposed to be snug and too snug in the places where it was supposed to be loose.  I kept it together for almost three months, and a series of championship games, using a combination of safety pins,  masking tape, and hope.  And now I’ll close the curtain on that episode in my life.

Which brings me to last night, to the Secret Santas, and to the Christmas on the Prairie. 

At the very nice school one of my older boys goes to, they do Secret Santas during the last week of school before the Christmas holidays  The children pick names out of a hat and then Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week, they give their secret friend a gift.  Okay, you’re thinking, no problem.  Five bucks, a few hairclips, or a bunch of chocolate, or a paperback book. 

But nooooooo.   That’s not how it works.  The children, you see, are meant to learn about giving from the heart.  Which means they have to make the damned presents.  Themselves.  Except they don’t really make the presents themselves.  We do.  Apparently, people like my parents no longer exist, and so no child actually has to do this project on their own while their parents are busily balancing the books of the Penney’s at the Tacoma Mall, or sitting in the brown chair in the corner of the living room reading Nietzsche, which is how my parents occupied themselves during the Christmas season.  Or at least I am not capable of being like my parents and ignoring the whole secret santa week and making my son deal with it in his own special way.  (Which would be to give the girl who’s his secret santa old baseball cards.)

My son (aka me) made his secret santa person some brownies the first night.  I thought that was pretty good, and we (me) even put them in a nice cellophane bag with a cute ribbon.  The report on the brownies’ reception was lukewarm, however.  They got crushed, he said, and were only “okay.” 

Instead of thinking, okay’s pretty good, I thought, Jesus, we’re (me) going to have to think of something genuinely charming, handmade, rough hewn and useful.  Something Laura would make for Mary in the Little House books.  (Aha!  A literary allusion.  Whew.) 

We (I) looked around, considered and disgarded hand made stationery (no nice paper in the house), more food (not special enough and besides we’re out of sugar), and came across the Martha Stewart website which is a very bad thing for a person like me, a person with a history of handmade failures, to come across at times like this. 

Too late, we (this time, both of us) saw the Christmas stockings.  Too late, we (both of us) committed to the project.  Too late, the sewing machine happened to be out (for hemming pants, something that doesn’t involve darts).  Too late, too late, too late.

And so, dear reader, we made the stocking you see at the  beginning of this extraordinarily long and rambling post.  Surprisingly, my son did a lot of the stocking.  He sewed the button ornaments on the little felt tree.  He downloaded and printed out the stocking and tree templates.  He cut stuff out.  He admired my erratic sewing.  (Mom, you’re like, so fast with that thing.)  The end result looks like it should:  utterly handmade.  But this time, thirty years later, handmade is really okay.  It’s good, in fact.  I don’t want people thinking I made it, for heaven’s sake! 

The odd thing is that making this stocking was actually a lot of fun.  Maybe it was having my son’s help, and company.  Maybe it was the fact that my son now knows how to sew on a button, something his father can’t do. Whatever it was, this project seems to have exorcised the memory of being alone in my room on a cold January night, hunched over all that red and blue slinky fabric.  I know making a stocking was a hugely inefficient way to spend a Tuesday night.  It messed up our living room, and everyone got to bed half an hour late, and I probably should have let my son have a go at the sewing machine.  (I didn’t let him.  It was too much fun to do it myself.)  But among the many redemptive things about being a parent yourself, is that you get to correct for your children a few of the things that hurt more than they should have when you were young.  Were I to come up for air from this sentimental paragraph, I’d also observe that in so doing you add a few problems of your own — in this case, maybe it would have been better for my son to do more of this for himself.  Still, having said that, I’m okay about it all.  And you know what?  I stayed up another hour after they were in bed and made another Christmas stocking.  For my son.  From his secret santa.  Me. 

Have you ever heard of that de-cluttering principle where, for each new thing you bring into your house, you’re supposed to get rid of something that’s more or less its equal?

Well, yesterday, we put up our Christmas tree and threw away our couch. Since the tree’s only a temporary resident of our house, that means we can import some really, really big things and still be ahead in the de-cluttering game.

Throwing away that couch has put me in the most marvelous mood. It’s older than our children (the couch, not the mood), and once lived a cushy life in my father-in-law’s office at a fancy law firm in San Francisco. Alas, that was the pinnacle of the couch’s existence. It’s been a downward spiral since then.

Like the Velveteen Rabbit, the couch (which also began its life a beautiful plush brown object) fell from pride of place when it was disgarded by its original owner. As often happens, with a change in scene and the passage of time, the couch gradually lost all its plushness. Where once its chief function was to cushion the tailored suit bottoms of corporate clients, the couch was forced to toil (for years and years) as a climbing apparatus for three young and wild children. In fact, so skilled have those children become at launching themselves over and off the couch that just the other day someone was able to demonstrate that it is entirely possible, while holding a guitar in one hand, to leap almost across the living room from the arm of the couch and still sing the lyrics to that great rap anthem, Chicken Noodle Soup Wit’ a Soda on the Side. The poor couch.

I hadn’t realized until the couch left the house how much anxiety I felt on its behalf every time someone would visit us. A friend would walk in the door, and I’d hold my breath, hoping they’d sit on the nice armchairs I’d put seductively by the fireplace. And if they did ignore my mental pleas, and sit on the couch, I’d pray to a higher power that they wouldn’t have the bad luck to sit on the spot where the boys, after a particularly vigorous display of musical and gymnastic prowess, managed to liberate a nest of sharp springs from whatever ordinarily keeps those springs from poking you or your guests in the bottom. More than one person has sat in that spot and winced and then made some excuse to get up and do something else before re-entering the living room and sitting gratefully in an arm chair.

With the couch gone (to couch heaven, of course), our living room looks large, spare, and clean. We have beautiful random plank hardwood floors and, because one of the rap gods/couch leapers is allergic to dust mites, there aren’t any rugs on them. I can only surmise that it will be a matter of moments before my boys discover that the floor is the ideal surface on which to play hockey.

But I haven’t been finding that possibility all that worrying. I suppose that’s because I’ve been having so much fun deciding what object might best replace that couch. No, it won’t be another couch. (Why would I do that to another innocent piece of furniture?) We’ve been thinking for quite some time that we’d like to buy some kind of television, something larger than our laptop computer screens on which to watch dvds. Something large and thin, but portable enough to take out and put on a table for viewing, but then put out of sight when we’re done. We don’t want to actually watch television itself (the kind you get from the networks and through cable). We just want to put in a dvd and not have to tilt the screen back and forth until everyone can see the Beverly Hillbillies. Everything I’ve looked at seems so slick and lovely and hd tv ready (whatever that means) that I can’t tell what the difference is among all these beautiful televisions.

I’m guessing though that someone among you has recently made such a purchase and will have wise things to say about what might be the best of all televisions for a family like ours. Yes, I’m soliciting your advice here! I’ll take it too. And then we’ll have to hold our breath and hope that no one decides the television could double as a piece of sports gear in a pinch.

I’ve finished re-reading Eminent Victorians and sit here in a fog of spice cookies and lemon glaze to make my report. I’ll begin by saying that twenty years ago my first reading of this wonderful series of biographical sketches was impoverished by the fact that I had no idea Strachey’s brand of biography was in the least unusual. And that, dear reader, is what I’d like to talk about today.

Strachey’s subjects are four Victorian notables, people who accomplished remarkable things in their lives, and who were models of probity and seriousness. I imagine that before Strachey came along these sorts of notables were written about as exemplars of virtue, as heroes. And although Strachey did see them this way, his contribution to the art of biography is that he also found all that energy and probity amusing and he wasn’t afraid to say so.

His piece on Florence Nightingale, the one woman in this group, is my favorite because he manages to give us her story straight and with sympathy and also to get across just how terrifyingly efficient and single-minded she was. This comes across throughout the sketch, but it gets particularly funny when Strachey talks about the period late in her life when Nightingale became interested in philosophical and theological questions or, as Strachey puts it, “Having set right the health of the British Army, she would now do the same good service for the religious convictions of mankind.”

And so she did, but in her own unique way. Here’s what Strachey has to say about that: “Yet her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains. As one turns over these singular pages, one has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if He is not careful, she will kill Him with overwork.”

The Victorian age also saw the conversions of Newman and Manning to Catholicism, a serious enough topic. What’s wonderful about Eminent Victorians is that Strachey finds the ecclesiastical establishment as amusingly hypocritical as Trollope did. Here’s a description of Cardinal Manning’s machinations in Rome, as he maneuvered himself closer to power by ingratiating himself with the Pope’s private secretary, Monsignor Talbot. It’s a long passage, and I don’t want to just dump it on you, but it’s worth reading, because it’s very typical of the sort of thing Strachey does so well:

“Monsignor Talbot was a priest who embodied in a singular manner, if not the highest, at least the most persistent traditions of the Roman Curia. He was a master of various arts which the practice of ages had brought to perfection under the friendly shadow of the triple tiara. He could mingle together astuteness and holiness without any difficulty; he could make innuendoes as naturally as an ordinary man makes statements of fact; he could apply flattery with so unsparing a hand that even Princes of the Church found it sufficient. . . . With such accomplishments, it could hardly be expected that Monsignor Talbot should be remarkable either for a delicate sense of conscientiousness or for an extreme refinement of feeling, but then it was not for those qualities that Manning was in search when he went up the winding stair. He was looking for the man who had the ear of Pio Nono; and, on the other side of the low-arched door, he found him. Then he put forth all his efforts; his success was complete and an alliance began which was destined to have the profoundest effect upon Manning’s career, and was only dissolved when, many years later, Monsignor Talbot was unfortunately obliged to exchange his apartment in the Vatican for a private lunatic asylum at Passy.”

This is a description worthy of Mark Twain, who was a master of the deadpan moment at the end of a passage, and of the deployment of the rhetoric of seriousness to show just how utterly ridiculous a person or idea really was. The only thing is, Eminent Victorians is not fiction. And that’s Strachey’s achievement: he chose to be biting and amusing in a genre that, before he arrived, just didn’t do that kind of thing, or at least not as far as I know. It was as though he’d showed up at a society wedding wearing a swimsuit.

Although that was shocking then, we’ve pretty much come to see this sort of thing as the norm now, almost 100 years later. (Eminent Victorians came out in 1918.) There are, of course, outposts of high mindedness that could do with a little infusion of wit: academic writing (and no, I’m not talking about our academic friends like litlove, dorothy, ms. make tea, kate, the hob, my friend Catherine) and children’s textbooks, come immediately to mind. My own work writing about the law also calls out for more recognition of the ridiculousness of the human condition.

Okay, so here’s where I get to The Daily Show. If I had to point to someone who I think is a descendent of Strachey, I’d choose Jon Stewart (for those who don’t know: Jon Stewart is the very funny anchor of The Daily Show, the Comedy Central send-up of network news programs so good that many people use it as their primary source of television news.) Jon Stewart’s appeal is that he’s working in a medium that demands its subjects be treated with gravity, and he refuses to deliver that. He gives us something better, of course: he gives us the raised eyebrow.

Stewart’s subjects, of course, aren’t anything like the Victorians, people who, though flawed and full of themselves, had some sense of ethics, and the public good. Instead, Stewart’s material includes people like George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, people about whom there is no greatness, just banal and tragic incompetence. I suppose that might explain the absence of linguistic wit on the Daily Show. Words aren’t really necessary in the face of people like these. A laugh is guaranteed simply by repeating what they’ve said or done in public, and then raising an eyebrow and looking straight into the camera. Night after night, all Jon Stewart has to do to get a huge response is show someone from the Bush administration speaking and then ask, did he really say that?

So here’s my final thought.  One wonders: if Jon Stewart had different subjects with which to work, might he be able to rise above the eyebrow and really exploit his talent for wit, as Strachey did? As it is, ours does not appear to be the time for words, but a time when the raised eyebrow and the straight look are more than enough, because words are both too much and too little for the un-eminent figures of our new century.

yes indeed … for a cookie recipe. That’s because I can’t tell you about Eminent Victorians until I tell you about the spice cookies you might want to consider eating while you’re reading this wonderful book. In a moment, I’ll be putting one on a plate, taking my tea and book and sitting by the fire to finish up.

For those who aren’t cookie-makers, take heart — there’s nothing hard about these cookies. They’re easy to make and their texture is wonderfully yielding. And I will not go further down this descriptive road because it’s starting to sound a little too racy for a blog post about cookies. (The recipe comes from Sunset magazine — an unpretentious source for some very nice food.)

• 1 cup granulated sugar (plus extra for rolling the cookies in)
• 3/4 cup butter, at room temperature
• 1 egg (also at room temperature)
• 3 tablespoons molasses
• 2 cups flour, sifted
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon each salt, ground cloves, and nutmeg

For the glaze:

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 tablespoon water
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, cream 1 cup granulated sugar with butter until light and fluffy (about three minutes). Mix in egg and molasses.

2. In a medium bowl, stir together flour, baking soda, and spices. Add to butter mixture and blend well.

3. Fill a shallow bowl with granulated sugar. Break off walnut-sized pieces of dough and roll into balls; roll the balls in the sugar. Arrange on greased cookie sheets and bake until golden brown, about ten minutes. Transfer to racks to cool.

4. Make the glaze: Combine powdered sugar with water and stir until smooth. Stir in lemon juice. Drizzle glaze over cookies.

And there you have it:  the easiest and most delicious spice cookies I know of.

Okay, for starters, I know it’s Eminent Victorians. But it’s next up on my list of books to write about and so …. you know. (Sorry. Nothing is un-funnier than a pun somebody tries to explain.)

I’ll begin by saying that Eminent Victorians is part of a larger reading plan for this month, a month when I’d like to re-read a few things I first read in my twenties. I wonder how well those books will have worn twenty years later. I did this a bit over the spring and summer, and even gave it a name: the Madeleine Project. But I haven’t done as much of it as I’d like, and since it’s cold outside these days, and the fireplace looks so warm, and I’m taking things a little slower, it seems like an ideal month to re-read.  (In fact, I’ve just noticed I’m in great company:  Dorothy and Danielle have both written about books they’d like to re-read.)  

And now, on to the book: Eminent Victorians, for those who don’t know, is a series of biographical sketches written by one of the Bloomsbury notables, Lytton Strachey. I’ve always wondered how his last name is pronounced, so I googled it. It’s strakey, which rhymes with flakey. (As in, doesn’t post on a regular schedule, doesn’t stick to the same topic and has been known to make really stupid jokes.)

When I read Eminent Victorians twenty years ago, I loved the piece on Florence Nightingale (I even wrote down something about how Nightingale saw God as a glorified sanitary engineer and so she felt free to boss him around just like she bossed everybody else in Victorian England around.) And I had no idea things went so badly for General Gordon, having never heard of General Gordon and not knowing the British military had such a hard time of it after the American Revolution.

I was also unaware at the time that these sketches were considered sort of shockingly modern, something I’ve since discovered, mostly through reading about Strachey in the context of Virginia Woolf, who thought at one time she might marry him. (Good thing that passed, is all I can say.)

The copy I’ve got this time around is illustrated, so there are interesting pictures of the notables Strachey writes about. They certainly look stuffy –especially the ecclesiastical figures he spends a good part of the book talking about. Or maybe the pictures were chosen to emphasis all the Victorian stuffiness that Strachey was reacting against.

The question I’d like to answer is this: just exactly what did Strachey think “un-stuffy” looked like? Strachey, at least from his photographs and the things I’ve read about him in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, was a bit of a piece of work himself. So how he goes about kicking aside the traces really interests me.

I hope it interests you, too, because that’s what I’m devoting my next post to. (By the way, the sketch of Strachey you see at the beginning of the post is on the cover of his letters, which look quite interesting.)