Archive for April, 2007|Monthly archive page
“After we said billuns of suarewords,”
Comments(38)That is how chapter 3 of my son William’s book begins, the book he’s been writing for the last few days, pencil clutched in his seven year old fingers, red composition notebook already a little sweaty and bent from the effort of making real his dream of being a novelist.
His book is a doozy. I don’t want to give things away (although the title, The Revenge of the Kids, pretty much tells you everything you need to know), but there’s a lot of violence and a lot of swear words, also known as “suarewords”.
Which brings me to today’s topic: what do we say to other writers about their work when it veers wildly into a place we think is ill advised, particularly when we have been placed in the position of teaching them (not a job I’m qualified for, but I am the only one handy in the afternoons when the red composition book comes out). William’s a novelist just beginning on the road to acquiring his craft. He recently learned to read, and he can print pretty well, so there’s not much to keep him off the ladder that leads to the Pulitzer. His motivation for writing appears to be, in equal measure, a desire for power, and a desire to make a lot of money, which I’m guessing is somewhat typical of those who fill the ranks of creative writing classes throughout the country. That these things don’t actually happen need not concern us today. I am more worried right now about the suarewords.
They are in that story because yesterday afternoon he asked me if it was okay if he used “bad words” in his story. Remembering how shocked I was when my own mother told me that I shouldn’t write stories where there were bad mothers (how, then, I want to know, do you write ANY story at all?), I told him he could write whatever he wanted to write.
I should have added, however, that he could not actually read his stuff out loud at the dinner table, but by the time he’d read all the bad words to us, it was too late. William’s novel is full of cusswords. Billuns of them. They are not spelled correctly, but it is quite clear what they are. Read aloud, there is no doubt of them. Plus, lots of people are shot in cold blood and they die with nary a tear shed for their fates.
My husband was shocked by William’s work. He told him he didn’t like it and didn’t want him to use those words anymore. I stuck up for William, but I was a little worried about it myself and wondering if maybe I’d gone too far. So I pointed out to William that publishers of children’s books do not buy books that have lots of cuss words in them, and that, moreover, dying in droves is not always looked on kindly either. His reply: Even in middle school? He seems to have done some market research when he was not busy assembling his opus, one suareword at a time.
But I think I have hit on a solution. Do you remember that Francine Prose book I talked about a while ago? It’s called Reading Like a Writer and in it she talks about how the work of other writers can sometimes be all the help we need when we encounter issues with our own work. Want some help on dialogue? Try Hemingway. Don’t know how to get people in and out of rooms? Check out George Eliot and Jane Austen.
Want to use billuns of suarewords, but still want to sell your book to Scholastic Books? Then you do as Cecil Day-Lewis does in the Otterbury Incident which is the book we are reading out loud at bedtime these days. You say this, “He swore up and down something fierce, using words that are unprintable.” Cecil Day-Lewis is now William’s muse and inspiration. Your characters can swear, and you can still sell your book to the juvenile market. As a teaching technique, particularly when you don’t want to be judgmental or intrusive, it is very helpful to be able to point to someone else to back up what you are trying to say. It’s a little like having your brother tell your child it’s not a great idea to sneak cigarettes in the bathroom at school. It just seems more effective to have advice come from a third party sometimes.
I am still thinking of the dying in cold blood with nary a tear shed problem. I’m sure, though, that somewhere in the library my answer is waiting for me.
All in Together Girls
Earlier today, the doorbell rang downstairs about a million times. We never have to sign for packages, but that’s what the ringing was all about. Maybe the letter carrier knew what I was shortly to find out and felt it only safe to get a signature — because in that package was Kate Sutherland’s sizzling new book of short stories, All in Together Girls.
I’ve only had time to look at one story, but it was a great one: Making Love While the Kettle Boils. Lovely writing, terrific characters and a sense of a real place where the drama plays out. And, besides, I’m a sucker for stories that celebrate words (in this story cross-words) and give you some insight into sex.
It’s a happy day when a good new book like this one rings down your house. It’s a thrill when it comes from someone whose blog you’ve been reading for the last year.
Wonderfully enough, there are other books from bloggers and friends coming out (or already out) and I’ll be talking about those in the next couple of weeks — Kate’s really impressive new collection of stories heralds what looks like a great season of fine books.
The House Where Jeeves Lives
Comments(11)The most recent evidence of the complete hold Jeeves and Wooster have taken on our life is the long conversation we recently had about who we’d rather be: Jeeves or Wooster. Careful consideration was given to how smart Jeeves is, and how Bertie Wooster’s head is frequently referred to as a “lemon.” Still, it IS Bertie’s fabulous car, after all, and he does get to eat a lot of awfully good food when he’s at his Aunt Delia’s, and he doesn’t seem to ever have to work. Plus, Wooster appears to be kind of rich, although it is not at all clear how he got that way. Three votes for Wooster. I vote for Jeeves, because he has such an objective way of looking at the antics and silliness of Bertie Wooster and his friends. I would so like to be that objective.
But the truth is, we love them both. We love Jeeves because he does not say everything he thinks, but manages to express great truths with a raised eyebrow (if you are watching Stephen Fry in the great television adaptation) or in a “Very good, sir” (if you are reading the books). Bertie is our beloved because, although thick as a board, he is sweet, and generous, and never seems to get really put out when people tell him he’s an idiot. He knows who he is, except when he decides to solve a problem without Jeeves’s help. They are perfect together, these two.
And so, every night we eat our dinner in front of the really big television I bought at Christmas time. We all dance around to the introductory jazzy music. William has developed his own little hand waving, toe tapping expository dance thing to this wonderful music. The episodes are long — at least 45 minutes — and deeply, deeply satisfying. Things go wrong, and then things go right. Cue the jazzy music.
I didn’t actually look this up, so I’m not sure I’m right, but I’m going to guess that these stories, many of which were written after the Great War, offered solace and escape to people whose faith in an ordered world had collapsed. For us, in the week after the event at Virginia Tech, Jeeves and Wooster have done something similar. This is one of the things art does, I suppose. It delights us, offers us solace and order — and sometimes, under its influence, people will bring you a cup of tea in bed in the morning, and listen to you sympathetically when you’re having trouble with your aunt or the chorus girl you’ve falled in love with. We cannot hire Jeeves, having no evening clothes to speak of for him to care for, but we can BE him a little bit, I think, and Bertie too — kinder, more generous, in the case of Bertie, and more sensible and rational, in the case of Jeeves.
This morning, someone brought me a cup of tea in bed. They did not glide in noiselessly, and they slopped the tea around a little bit, but it nevertheless worked its magic on me. I’m up and about, and off to figure out how to finish my story. Maybe I’ll introduce a Jeeves-like character, and let him do the work. But in the end, what matters most is that in the house where Jeeves lives, kindness and cups of tea reign. I hope your house is like that this weekend.
The Pornographer
That’s the title of a short piece I wrote this weekend — not an entire story, mind you, but half, up to the point where something new must happen between the two characters. It’d be nice if you could put a story in your gleaming stainless steel pressure cooker and have it come out all seasoned and mellow and finished. I haven’t tried it, but think this is unlikely to work.
So, while I’m waiting for inspiration about how to go on, I’m posting a little bit of it. And all I have to say about it, really, is that it’s awfully hard to write about sex very well. Here is the first part of my effort. The story begins with a letter. It is sent to a woman who has been widowed recently. She lives with her three teenage boys. The letter is from a man she had an affair with a long time ago. It is an erotic letter, although we don’t know much about its contents. This is what happens after that letter, and another like it, arrive:
It is not hard to find out where to reach him. He is, by this time, a law professor at a university in the southern part of the state. He writes books and gives lectures on things she could not remember him ever caring about. He might still be married. He might not. They don’t talk about that on his school’s website. She writes his email address on top of one of the envelopes, puts his letters into the box with the wedding picture and her passport and tries to forget all about it.
Maybe it is all the sex in the fraught teenage air of her house, or maybe it is all the sex out in the world, or maybe it is all the sex contained in his letters, but she discovers that she cannot forget him or the things he has described.
In fact, the more the days go by, the more she sees that he has colonized most of the words she hears or uses during the day. “Pull,” and “hold,” now belong to him exclusively, as do “your,” “my” and “I.” But these are the least of her problems. More concerning is that he has used the words “take” and “put” at least four times in one paragraph and she finds herself growing warm and distracted every time her boss tells her to take a paragraph out of a report or put something on his desk before he leaves, things he says with alarming frequency. But most difficult is a string of words with no commas — “you me that room” — which makes it almost impossible for her to concentrate on her work as an auditor for the state government, a job in which these words are used on a regular basis, although obviously not with the same intention of arousing her interest.
One afternoon, when her boys are outside practicing tricks on their skateboards, she pulls the computer toward her, trying not to think about the way he has said he will pull her toward him, and begins to type. She decides on “dear” and “surprising.” She decides not to use “amusing” but does work in the phrase “give it some thought” which she has never used in quite this context, not that she recalls anyway. Without giving herself time to reconsider, she uses “love” and “hard” but in separate sentences and then, thinking it might be best to keep some things in reserve, she sends it all to him, to tell him what she thinks of that.
In his office at the law school, he hears the email beep that signals he has one more thing to do. When he sees her name, he gets up and locks his door. He has not wanted to think about whether she will answer but now that she has all he can see is that she still punctuates beautifully and never spells anything wrong. This does not frighten him the way it used to because his wife, now his ex-wife, once told him in a friendly way that as long as you use the right words at the right time, people will look the other way at how you spell them. She never lied to him, not even when she told him that she did not love him anymore, and so he believes her about the spelling.
Her email is more funny than heated, but he is glad she has decided to start that way. He has not wanted things to go too quickly from words to the room he has already told her about. He is pretty sure she will have more to say. That’s what “give it some thought” generally means. He writes one sentence, enough to keep her mind off the wrongdoing in the Department of Transportation for an entire week, and waits for her to come a little closer and tell him what she is thinking about.
It takes her three days to do so, but when she does, he discovers he cannot breathe and think about her at the same time. He tells her this and other, more specific things besides. And so it goes, for a month or two, until there are no more words in circulation in the everyday world that they have not already used to describe the many things they have done and would like to do with and to each other. The atmosphere between them, the entire corridor from the southern part of the state to the northern, buzzes with words.
One sunny afternoon, when he is in his office, absent-mindedly thinking about what she means by the word “effective,” she calls him.
There is more, but I’ll leave off here.
Wordless Week
Filed under: Blogging, Pressure Cooker, Spring, T.S. Eliot, Words, Writing, erotic prose |
Comments(31) My mother likes to tell people that she cannot remember when I learned to talk because it seems like I have always been talking. Others — my notably silent husband included — would agree.
Blogging has been a great place to locate all that chatting energy. Not just in the posts, but in the conversations that occur in the comments. But lately, I haven’t really felt like talking. I don’t think this is permanent –it’s not as though nothing is happening to me. I’m still reading and writing and working and parenting and cooking and hiking and finding out things I never knew before.
So here’s my plan to ease myself back into chattiness — I thought I’d list the six things I haven’t written about, things about which I normally would have told you more than you could possibly want to know:
1. Our new pressure cooker. I bought a pressure cooker last week, an appliance so weird, but so incredibly useful (and, as it turns out a terribly European thing), that it cries out for appreciation, for some sort of paean to the wonders of this sort of kitchen efficiency that, unlike the microwave, doesn’t ruin your food, but improves it. I did cook in it by the way — two vegetables, because I haven’t had a chance to consider the issue of meat. The broccoli cooked in about four minutes; the brussels sprouts in four and a half. Now that’s not a huge improvement over the normal cooking time for broccoli, but I will tell you here and now that the brussels sprouts were FABULOUS. I don’t really like that vegetable, but they were cooked in some sort of stock and thyme mixture and then a little butter and flour was mixed in afterwards and they were amazing. I’ll get back to you on the meat.
2. Erotic prose. I’ve been thinking about this particular topic a lot lately, as I’ve been warming up, so to speak, for the next novel I write which is about, among other things, sex. The trouble is that I don’t want to — and in fact cannot — write very good erotic prose. But this weekend, I wrote a short story that represented a huge breakthrough in this area. It was both funny and sexy, like the best sexual encounters. If I had time I would write about Lawrence and Joyce, and Anais Nin and Henry Miller, and how not to write a sex scene. And maybe I still will.
3. Jeeves and Wooster. We’ve been watching the BBC series, the one with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, and we love them both. We love how stupid Bertie’s friends are, how good humored he is, and how magically Jeeves sets things to rights. We also like how Jeeves keeps Bertie’s wardrobe miscues under control. Are the books as good as the series? We’re going to have to find out.
4. Colm Toibin’s Mothers and Sons. I’ve only read the first story, but I can already tell that this is a harrowing, beautifully written, wonderful book. I heard him read one of these stories at Stanford a few months ago, a story about a boy whose mother was a famous singer, and had abandoned him (or so he was told) when he was a baby. It’s the sort of story that makes you wish you were alone in the room so you could cry and not bother the people around you. By the way, his name is pronounced like this: “Call-um, Toebean” — I think)
5. Spring. Asparagus. Strawberries. April Showers. Lemons.
6. T.S. Eliot’s Preludes, and why I loved this poem when I was in my twenties. (Because it was so wonderfully grim, and so romantic — that part about the “infinitely gentle/infinitely suffering thing” particularly) It is here, if you are interested:
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimneypots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That times resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Canterbury Bells and Hot Cross Buns
How could it be that I’ve lived forty seven years and never seen this particular flower except in my dreams? Canterbury bells are the ideal spring flower — they look like something that’s sheltered in the earth through a cold winter, and then bloomed after a warm spring rain. Sitting on our piano, they smell like April’s fresh, clean air.
And may I say that there is no more perfect Easter morning food than the hot cross bun? I know you’re supposed to eat them on Good Friday, but really — who has time to make yeast bread on a Friday, the day reserved for finishing up a little work and buying a lot of chocolate Easter eggs? Anyway, it seemed right that the risen Bread and the risen Christ should happen at around the same time. These are perfect toasted lightly and spread with butter. If I could find the book, I’d give you the recipe, but that will have to wait until the haze of glazed ham, asparagus vinaigrette, scalloped potatoes, and lemon cake with strawberries has worn off.
I hope it was a lovely Easter, that most hopeful of holidays.
The One Hundred Poem Project
You might remember, if you’ve been around here for a bit and you’re the remembering sort, that there was a time when I was posting my favorite hundred poems. I think I did five of them, and then … well, I got busy making jam and writing about my couch.
So, I’ve got 95 to go and I thought that, instead of posting entire poems, I’d post the lines that stick in my mind and see if anybody knows the poem, or wants to go and look for it or would just like me to post a link to the damned thing.
So, I’ll begin with this lot:
95. There are too many waterfalls here
Okay, okay, I’ll just tell you. Click on the number for the entire Elizabeth Bishop poem. I love the question she asks in the end — would it have been better to have stayed home? Sometimes, I think that is the best question you can ask about your life, and the hardest to answer.
94. We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan/Grayed in, and gray
I wrote a lot about Gwendolyn Brooks when I was in graduate school. And I heard her read once in Chicago. She is a remarkable poet, a great poet. Another poem, The Mother (#93), is also on my list of best poems of all time. (It is at the bottom on the link.)
92. Complacencies of the peignoir, and late/Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
Wallace Stevens. A poem everyone should read on Easter morning.
91. But what could we know, tanned white boys,
Wiping sugar and salt from our mouths,
And leaning forward to feel their song?Not much, except to feel it
Ravel us up like a wave
In the silk of white water,
Simply, sweetly, repeatedly,
And just as quickly let go.
I read this poem in the New Yorker when I lived in Los Angeles a long time ago. I love “ravel us up like a wave in the silk of white water /simply sweetly repeatedly and just as quickly let go.”
So, there you have it. A bunch of really good poems.
The Perils of Empathy
Filed under: Good Housekeeping, The Art of Living, wisteria, work/life balance |
Comments(25) (This is what spring looks like in Berkeley — wisteria blooming everywhere. This post, though, is not about wisteria, in case you are wondering. It is about the work/life balance and the way you have to shore it up all the time. But there is a wisteria metaphor in the post, because it seemed like a good idea to have a goal in writing it: to work in my favorite vine somewhere.) 
It was a phone call I’ve been putting off returning for weeks and weeks, a call to a woman I don’t know, a woman with whom I have in common a single person: our lovely housekeeper and general childminder and morning helper, Lucy.
Lucy works for us at various times during the week. Every time she walks into our house I want to hug her. She’s hugely helpful and she is the reason I’ve been able to work, and have children, and write a novel, and be relatively sane through the year of having cancer. Lucy also works for the other family. Let’s call the woman in that family Tessa, shall we?
The message Tessa left was that she wanted to “close the loop” on “scheduling matters.” I hadn’t known the loop was open. In fact, I didn’t even know I was inside a loop. My heart sank. It was obvious what Tessa really wanted. She didn’t want to get clarity about something, and she didn’t want to “check in” as she said. She wanted my permission to rearrange the arrangement that’s been working so well for us.
My first thought, after deciding that I don’t like Tessa because she is not straight up, was that changes in my schedule are between me and Lucy, not me and Tessa. If Lucy wants to do something different, then she is perfectly capable of changing things with me. We’ve done it before. I am not scary.
After this weird loop-closing message, I asked Lucy if she wanted to change her schedule. She made a face, as if to say, that woman is making me nuts. She did not want to change anything she said. She is fine with her work and her timing.
Having learned that the person who does this work is happy with it, I ignored Tessa’s call (and the one she made a few days later) for twenty two days. What I found more difficult to ignore is that I know she has two young children, is on maternity leave and is going back to work pretty soon. She also has a husband, a guy I suspect doesn’t do much to help out around the house and who sees the work/life balance as her problem. He also yelled at Lucy once (she blurted this out one day when I asked her how she was), so I am not inclined to feel charitable where he is concerned. I know that this whole weird “closing the loop” call is Tessa’s way of trying to arrange things so she can work and parent. The trouble is that she’s trying to work out this balance by unbalancing my own teetering effort.
And that’s where empathy becomes perilous. For a very long time, I responded to the knowledge that someone is having trouble by becoming so invested in helping them get out of it that their trouble became my own. My own troubles and needs? They did not seem to exist anymore.
This is the sort of thing that made me a terrible litigator. When the client’s trouble became my trouble it was as though I was the one being accused of terrible wrongdoing. I would be defensive and upset every time I responded to the lawyer on the other side. Never mind that I was not the one who displayed the poor judgment that got the client to the place where they needed to hire my law firm to defend them. Their mistakes felt like my own. Their setbacks? Mine.
Gradually, and mostly because I stopped doing that kind of work, it dawned on me that someone else’s trouble was not my trouble. It was generally not my fault, and although I could feel sympathy for the person in trouble, I did not need to become them. I could say, you and your lawsuit live over here — in a place that is not mine. You got yourself into this mess, not me. There is a hand gesture that goes along with this thought. If you have trouble with this issue, you might want to try it:
Cup your hands together, and place the trouble you have been taking on inside the space in your hands. (Obviously, you must pretend, this being a symbolic exercise.) Now stretch your hands as far away from you as you can — across my desk is where I mostly do this. And then gently deposit it all at this far away place. Now sit back and repeat after me: This is not my trouble. This does not belong to me. It is not of my making, nor is it my fault. I can help, if I choose to, but only if I am clear that this is not my trouble.
Knowing where I end and others begin has been the single biggest challenge I have faced as an adult. That, and learning not to eat every last bite of the chocolate cake just because I can.
And so it is with Tessa (the trouble being her own, I mean — not the cake problem). Her work life balance troubles live in her house. Mine live in mine. And in this case, I will not unbalance my own house in order to make her life easier.
And that is what I told her on the telephone. I could feel her efforts to entangle me in her world – to ask me about how I had arranged things, to see if maybe I was not needing what I think I need, to ask if I could do without a little of what I’ve arranged so she could have some of it too. Wisteria is like this. It’s a vine — if you look closely at it you’ll see the wonderful way it’s been engineered, with little sharp hook-like twigs all along it, hooks that grab on and don’t let go. It’s beautiful though, and it drapes itself around the front of your house in the places you’ve decided you want it to be draped. If you don’t want it someplace, you cut it back. You are in charge of it, as you are in charge of most things in your life, because that is what it means to be an adult.
I know it sounds cold, but I did not give Tessa much more than an inch of frontage to hook onto. It has taken a long time to achieve some serenity and balance in my life. I will not give it up.
There is, of course, another subtext here, which is how it can even be the case that Tessa and I can decide something like this. I said, over and over, this is not really our decision to make, although I am happy to tell you that things are working beautifully for me. Lucy is the master of her work and her schedule. If she wishes to make a change, then she and I will discuss it. Not you and I. This is another topic for another day — how we should behave in the face of the fact that we cannot control what other people decide to do. And in writing about that, I will try to work in some reference to the Meyer lemon bush that is also ripe and beautiful this lovely spring day, and has been well worth waiting for through the long, cold wet winter.
Cafe Roma
Of the three places in our neighborhood where you can get coffee, Cafe Roma is my favorite. It’s a bit further than Semifreddi’s, which is a one minute stroll from our door. But at Semifreddi’s the coffee is indifferent, the tea is truly awful, and the workers are generally sullen and sometimes stupefied by even the simplest food order.
Peet’s, our other choice, is my husband’s favorite, based purely on the strength of the coffee. It is Hercules-strength coffee. I am not so crazy about Peet’s, though, because the seating is all wrong. For one thing, the only places to sit are benches outside. And the benches are shared by people with such disparate and clashing lounging goals that those who wish to sit and read cannot possibly do either. That’s because your neighbor on the bench is likely to be an impatient woman, waiting to get into Rick & Ann’s, the restaurant next door to Peet’s. People with dogs and toddlers mill about, unable to sit and read because they must keep their dogs from eating someone’s croissant and their children from dashing into the Bread Garden, next to Peet’s, and making trouble.
But the real deal killer is the regular appearance of groups of middle aged men who have just gone on group bike rides in the hills behind Peet’s. This is their post-ride gathering place, these few benches and the space around them. They loom over me, dressed in those lycra body gloves that may help them fly up and downhill but, in the pedestrian world, make them look disturbingly banana-like. I find myself eavesdropping (although one could hardly be accused of eavesdropping on conversations conducted in voices loud enough to reach Oakland) and my sitting and reading reverie is at an end.
At Cafe Roma, though, the latte I order is always a perfect balance of foam and hot milk and espresso. And the guy who serves me this perfect latte is something of an artist with his little squirt bottle of chocolate. When the boys are with me, it’s a wry little happy-ish face. When I’m alone, it’s a sweet sketch of a flower.
And when you have finished drinking your latte, in the large open space where no one chases after dogs or looks like a banana, you can look in the window of Tail of the Yak next door, or the bookstore that sells books about how to improve your life, or the world. But really there’s no need to do any improving on a Sunday morning when you’ve been handed the perfect latte, complete with flower or smile. Things are just quite good enough.
And one more thing: if you’d like to see a lovely cup of coffee, here’s one particularly luscious example.
