BlogLily

Last week was the week when all good parents take their children to do something vigorous and fun, like skiing, or hiking, or maybe to Disneyland.

Some other year we might do that. But this year, we went to my mother in law’s farmhouse in the San Joaquin valley to help her clear it out in preparation for her move into something much smaller.

This turned out to be far more interesting than we’d expected. For example, the boys now know what a cigarette lighter looks like. And we have acquired some unusual information that might come in handy some day, such as the many, many, many things you will need if you’re going to have proper cocktail parties.

We have heard stories about people long dead, people whose handwriting and pictures and books and dishes and vases are still with us. I have learned that I should probably burn my diaries from college because when I die a grandchild or great-grandchild will learn what a silly person I was when I was in my twenties.

I’ve written about it (our week, I mean, not my diaries) here.

I hope you’ve all been well in the last week. I’ve loved seeing all the writing places you’ve posted and am feeling very inspired about getting back to mine.

There’s another installment of A Not So Hidden life here.

And if you’re so inclined, how about posting on your blog a picture of your favorite place to write — or a description of it? Leave a link in the comments section below when you’ve done it. Be warned, if there are no responses to this request, I’m going to start tagging people, or showing up at your house with a camera.

Nosily yours,

BL

(And have a lovely Chinese New Year today, okay?)

My dear reader,

I don’t intend to make a habit of diarizing my days for your reading pleasure. But, inspired by Our Hidden Lives, a book I write about here, I wanted to try a little experiment (which will be located on a tab at the top of my blog called A Hidden Life with the exception of this post) in diary-writing, one that involves describing life in 21st century California. Here it is, for what it’s worth.

2/16/07. A belated valentine’s day dinner at Chez Panisse. We rarely go out anymore, being so preoccupied with children and work. It’s good to remember that we once did this sort of thing, liked it, and will do it –someday — again.

Upstairs at the cafe, we walk by the open kitchen, and see a crowd huddled over what appears to be pizza dough on the counter. A woman with a cap of dark hair and a nice smile — Alice Waters — appears to be teaching the neophytes how to make a really good pizza. This is a good sign.

We ate oysters (all oysters served at Chez Panisse are identified by their homeland, in this case, Hog Island, which I imagine Alice Waters goes to frequently, just to make sure that the ones she’s going to be serving me are up to snuff as the briney pieces of perfection they’re supposed to be. In fact, that’s just what they were.) W had a spring time ravioli, with peas — it was perfect and jewel-like. (Note to self: Lucette is making pasta from scratch. I should try that again after my effort ten years ago.) I had the thing everyone has, but I never do: the mixed lettuces salad with little rounds of baked goat cheese that have been rolled in some kind of crumb mixture. This used to be unusual; now you can get it at Costco. But it’s lovely, because it’s dressed by someone who loves lettuce and knows how to make vinaigrette.

Best of all, though, was the tisane. It’s such a simple thing really, but there’s no restaurant I know of in the United States where you know for a certainty that they boil the water they put over your tea (in most places it comes straight out of the espresso machine water tap). And how lovely to see those mint leaves become incredible tea. W had apple tart (pink lady apple, I’ll have you know). I shared my tea with W, because it is Valentine’s Day and that is What You Do. I want to grow mint and lemon verbena and have a glass teapot in which to make tisane.

One of my favorite things about Chez Panisse, oddly enough, considering that it’s a temple to gastronomy, is the bathroom. Someone, a lapsed catholic, a penitent glutton, installed what look like little confessional windows over the light fixtures that’re directly above the toilet paper. I’ve never actually taken a picture of the interior of a bathroom before, but this seemed to call out for memorializing.

The movie we saw — Dreamgirls — was memorable only because it featured an Eddie Murphy who is so clearly enjoying himself. Everyone else seemed ‘way too earnest. This is, after all, a story about the rise of Diana Ross and the Supremes. I loved the audience though, a mixed group racially, with lots of African American women ranging in age from teenager to grandmother and lots of couples on dates. People clapped at particularly rousing numbers by Jennifer Hudson and I did too. I like that sort of participatory cinema far better than the artsy movie theater in downtown Berkeley where people glare at you if you dare to shift in your seat a little bit.

I’ll admit to a moment of wishing I could, like Pepys, now write “and so to bed” — in fact, it was “so to home in order to put children to bed.” First, though, a terrific meltdown by smallest boy, who was reprimanded for yelling “bastard” at the game he was playing, and for calling the woman who has cared for him so lovingly since he was a baby “fatso.” He is, all accounts to the contrary, not a total monster. Not yet. But if we don’t continue to be very, very strict with him about things like this, he will be.

Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a Forgotten Britain 1945-1948 is a wonderful, and wholly unexpected delight. It is what it sounds like — excerpts from diaries kept by five remarkably ordinary, and remarkably interesting people, right after the war. The journals were kept for something called “Mass-Observation” — a scholarly project in which British citizens from all walks of life were asked to keep journals of daily life after the war.

I am always enthralled by things that deliver lives I don’t know anything about. That’s why I love to read blogs. It’s why I’ve posted a picture of the precise place where I’m sitting as I write this post. For some reason, I wanted all of you to know where I often sit when I write.

But back to those hidden lives.

Here’s Edie Rutherford, a South African woman in her forties, who seems to have begun the war a Tory and ended it a socialist: “One short at work yesterday. What a mess we’re in when one is away, now we are already short-staffed. In my next incarnation, if I have a say, I’m going to be male. They leave dead on time always; draw the big salaries; sit down to meals prepared for them and put up their feet while some female clears it away . . . talk about equality of the sexes. Women are for the most part far superior to men.” (Friday, June 8, 1945.)

And here’s George Taylor, accountant, and self-improvement enthusiast: “Nine from Sheffield, nineteen from Rotherham and twelve from Worksop took part in the joint WEA rambler to Roche Abbey. At Maltby we had the most shocking tea we have had for a long time. The caterer had been informed of our visit, and of the numbers to be expected. We arrived on the minute, but found nothing ready. Scarcely had one cup of tea each been served, when we were informed that the milk had run out. For this we were charged 6d. each.” (Friday June 15, 1945)

Herbert Brush, enthusiastic gardener, not very good poet, retired engineer, on vacation in Cornwall: “Today we went to a beach and stayed there all afternoon. The sands here are really composed of small grains of granite and are painful to walk on with bare feet for a man of my weight. A mother left her small son in my charge while she went to get her tea, and for the first time in my life I looked after a small boy to see that he did not drown himself in the sea, of which he seemed to be very fond. I was not sorry when his mother returned.” (Monday, July 23, 1945)

and Maggie Joy Blunt, a woman in her thirties, well educated, not married, and longing for something to do that’s not publicity for a firm that makes some product so boring she can’t bring herself to discuss it: “June and I had birthdays in October so we decided to celebrate together and throw a joint party in her Hampstead flat. . . . We had more than enough to eat and drink. Plenty of sandwiches, fillings as follows: liver sausage, watercress, delicatessen savoury, scrambled egg and tomato, cheese and onion. Someone sent a jar of prawns and June had bought a jar of pickled sardines and these I arranged on plain cream cracker biscuits and small scones split open, decorated with watercress. There was more than enough to drink too….” (November 6, 1945)

I keep hearing these people in my mind, their preoccupation with food, and politics, what they’re watching at the cinema, and hearing at concerts, the way the women darn everything and they all make do, not without a lot of grumbling, but grumbling that’s almost always amusing. It makes me want to keep a better journal of these times I’m living in, a journal that delivers a similarly evocative picture of what’s it’s like to live where and as I do in the twenty first century. I think the fact that these diarists knew their identities would be kept confidential and they didn’t know the people to whom they were sending the journals makes them astonishingly intimate and honest. And the fact that they were for others to read might have made the diarists stretch a little for the telling detail, the best anecdote, the most honest assessment of themselves and their world. It is this confluence of factors that makes these diaries more than the sum of their parts, a moving record of a world that no longer exists, in the words of people who are no longer with us, but who will nevertheless stay with us for a long time.

I didn’t realize how much I have in common with Jimmy Swaggart (the disgraced American evangelical preacher) until I got an email from Lucy at BooksPrice a few weeks ago. Some of you might have gotten one too. Check out BooksPrice, she said. It’s a site that lets you search the web for the book you want (all except ebay) and it’ll tell you where you can get it for the best price. And, to thank you for looking at BooksPrice, and maybe writing about it, here’s a book.

Naturally, being an easy sort, I clicked on that link. It’s a nice site, although I think it only gives you price comparisons for U.S. booksellers. (*Nope, I’m wrong there — it does do a UK search!)

The trouble with BooksPrice isn’t the site. It’s the offer to give me a book for looking at it. In some odd way, the offer of the book made my positive reaction to Lucy’s site feel kind of sinful. It’s a silly response, in some ways. I send and receive books all the time (and thank you Anne for Winter’s Tale — I love the edition you sent!) and so Lucy sending me a book isn’t such a big deal.

Anyway, I forgot all about that particular little dilemma as soon as I noticed the page on the site where BooksPrice’s editors recommend a book every week. Now I don’t know about you, but I always look at things like that. I use it to gauge what the recommender’s like. It’s a way to see into their soul. Sort of. (It would be helpful to also know what they put in their cart at the grocery store before forming a definitive opinion of the state of their soul.)

So here’s what I found out when I looked into BooksPrice’s soul… I mean, their weekly recommended book page. There are some good recommendations on it but the last one (Pamuk’s great novel, My Name is Red) was posted in December. It was as though they had at one time seen the light of the good book, and then suddenly stopped bearing witness, maybe lured away by some worldly temptation. Or maybe they were just busy fixing some part of their site that had mysteriously broken. Whatever the reason, it came to me, as though from some divine booksource, that it was my calling to illuminate that little corner of the web, to encourage more people to read good books, books I think are good, I mean.

So I emailed Lucy and told her I’d write some blurbs for her to put on her site if she wanted. I want to bear witness to the world (or at least the people who use BooksPrice)  about the illustrated Elements of Style, and Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, and Sandi Shelton’s wonderful, wise and very funny book, A Piece of Normal. I’d like to preach the good news of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which sounds like bad news, but at least it’s well written, and like Revelations tells you some stuff you need to know. I want searchers after the truth to pick up that new translation of The Three Musketeers when they’re at BooksPrice looking for a repair manual for their car. I want them all to come to books, to the good news of good books and be changed forever.

Lucy’s no fool — in fact, she’s a lovely woman, very kind, and interesting and generous. Seeing a free, enthusiastic source of content for her site, and most likely unaware of the evangelical nature of my offer, she very nicely said she’d love to have my blurbs. So I’m about to send Lucy five recommendations — enough to last her through to the spring, if she does post them over there once a week. (I am aware that it is really not going to be spring in a lot of places for at least five weeks.)

Lucy also offered to send me a few books I’m interested in reading and maybe posting about over at her site.  Just tell her what I’m interested in, and she’ll see what she can do. Thinking this over after my initial shock of delight, I continue to feel uneasy about receiving free books from Lucy. In fact, I feel a little like Jimmy Swaggart, considering whether he’ll use the church’s resources to buy drugs and fast women for himself. He loves the church, and its people, and the word. But he loves the worldly pleasures and wants them for himself. His hand hovers over the collection plate and trembles.

Me? Maybe I’ll let myself fall from grace. Maybe I won’t. I’m here to tell you that I’m sorely, sorely tempted. I want to read that new Jim Harrison book that was on the cover of the New York Times Book Review last week. And I don’t want to wait until it comes to my local bookstore.

Your tempted but not yet fallen sister in the holy word,

BL

How lovely it is to be up and about. How lovely all of you are to have sent such nice notes and thoughts in the last four weeks. It helped immeasurably in those moments when I really thought I couldn’t bear another session of being zapped by laser-wielding technicians.

The whole experience was a little like being a target in a video game, and I’m sure everyone can see how THAT would be a good thing to finish. I’m relieved and happy to be moving on to new things.

While I was gone I didn’t read Ulysses. I barely listened to the Aeniad. In fact, I did not do a single worthy thing, book-wise.

What I mostly did was listen to the radio. Around here, that means KFOG. (Isn’t that a great name for a San Francisco radio station?) I love the radio. When we lived in Germany a long time ago, if the stars were properly aligned and we had the radio set up in exactly the right place, we’d get these great radio shows on the Armed Forces radio station. We’d hang over the edge of our parents’ bed, apparently because that was essential to good reception, and listen to comedy shows from the forties, chilling science fiction stories, and cowboy cliffhangers, a subgenre of action hero cliffhangers that the people at Armed Forces radio seemed to have gotten a good deal on, because there were a lot of them.

Toward the end of January, I started to fantasize about being one of those people on the radio. One of my sons mentioned that I could in fact sort of be on the radio. All it takes is a headphone, some software, his help, and things you’re dying to talk about. That last part? Not a problem right now. I’ve been lying around and not talking very much. I’ve got a few things saved up.

There were only two possible names for a podcast. And then just one, because my husband vetoed the other possibility. (LilyPod is not a good idea, he says, looking up for a moment from the penultimate Master and Commander book, a series he has been living in for the last four years. He adopts the tone that’s sort of a cross between Russell Crowe and Mr. Rogers and says, It would be embarrassing.) So, the podcast will be called PodLily and that will just have to do.

I’ve put some program notes here. If you can’t or don’t want to fiddle with a podcast, you might still want to read some of the content. The first podcast is a valentine — for you, dear reader.

Here are some directions to the podcast. It’s located on Odeo. There’s also a player that’s supposed to appear below — but it doesn’t always seem to show up. One of those two methods should get you to a five minute piece in which a BlogLily child sings a little song and then you’ll hear some Valentine’s Day poetry.

It’s likely that there will be more little podcasts. We all loved making this one, so you won’t be able to keep us away from the microphone.  Although I sound very odd to my own ears (who knew “procure” would be such a hard word to pronounce or that a weather report could sound faintly ridiculous), as time goes on, I’m guessing it’ll be easier to sound like me, rather than sort of me.

It’s going to be a wonderful spring.

Cheers,

BL