BlogLily

Oh, so long ago, I said I’d be writing about reading Shakespeare for profit, and then life intervened and I went off on a long jag of Elizabeth Taylor reading, and a lot of novel and story writing, and re-writing, and some other stuff, and well, really, it’s time to get back to Measure for Measure, for profit’s sake.

The word “profit” is one I love, just as I love the word “rich.” I have long felt compelled to point out to those who have to listen to me (aka my children) the non-monetary meanings of words like this. Think of it as a little bit of vocabulary subversiveness. “Rich” doesn’t mean rolling in cash; it means replete with something. It’s a good word, describing as it does the quantity of good things we should all have in our lives: we should be rich in laughter, in books, in words, in love. Same with profit. We profit from things not just monetarily, but morally and spiritually, intellectually and entertainment-wise.

Whenever I think of the word “profit” I think of Tennyson’s Ulysses, a poem so old-fashioned that it shows up in Ted Kennedy’s speeches. It begins: “it little profits that an idle king….” And, on the subject of random word association, I noticed this last week, as William was preparing for his First Communion, that when my kids think of profits they think of guys with long white beards who are messengers from an angry old testament god.

Okay, here comes the Shakespeare part. (Aren’t blogs great? They are one big digression. And nobody nails you for it!)

Sometimes, the thing you’re reading perfectly fits your current preoccupations. In the case of Measure for Measure, I found myself thinking that Shakespeare knew there is no better set up for a comedy with a slightly tragic edge than that of the righteous man who is himself doing the thing he so vigorously condemns.  And how that is SO Eliot Spitzer.

Shakespeare’s Spitzer is Angelo, who, moments after he is put in charge of the kingdom, gets right to work handing out death sentences for having sex without being married. And then, just moments later, he is busy trying to figure out how to seduce the play’s number one virgin who also happens to be a nun. You can tell that Angelo is in for a big fat fall.

How does it end up? It’s a C-O-M-E-D-Y, so after the proper amount of chastisement, everybody marries somebody and things are good.

It profits an idle writer like me to read Shakespeare not only because you realize that there are no unique plots, but also because once you are freed from the scariness of making stuff up, you can look around you and see how all you have to do is just steal what you need. And that’s what I did. I STOLE part of Measure for Measure for my new novel, for a subplot set in the Marks & Spencer food hall at Paddington Station. I even have a nun character. She’s Swedish. She looks severe. She’s a traffic expert. She knows a lot about snow. I think that’s very nun-like, to be an expert at things having to do with winter. The Marks & Spencer manager is a righteous guy. And that’s all I needed to get going. Thank you, Will.

My husband picked up my copy of Measure for Measure a couple of nights ago. “This isn’t so bad,” he said. “I think I can read this.” He asked me for some advice about how to read the plays, or he should have, which amounts to the same thing, so I am going to tell you what I told him. I also know that many of you readers, literate men and women that you are, have in fact already read many or most or all of the plays, plus seen the movie, and you don’t need to hear what I told him. But bear with me, or I’ll have to write another two sentence post.

Basically, I’d advise against reading Shakespeare at the rate of one page a night, which is how my husband is doing it. He read Emma this way also. As a result, it took him several years to find out that Emma was going to marry Mr. Knightly. What I find amazing about his reading of Emma is that he really didn’t guess that Emma was going to marry Mr. Knightly until she actually did. Every night, I’d say something innocent like, “So honey, who’s Emma going to marry?” And he’d say, “oh, I don’t know. But not that Mr. Knightly guy. She really hates him.”

So that’s my first piece of advice.  Try to finish the play quickly enough that you can still remember what happened in the beginning. 

This brings me to my second piece of advice, which I know will be a little controversial. It’s this: read a summary of the play before you begin. Yes, this will ruin the ending. But you know what? You probably already know that both Romeo and Juliet die and that things don’t go well for Hamlet. How do you know that? Because they are tragedies. And yes, in fact, they all DO get married at the end of the comedies. It isn’t going to ruin a thing if you figure out ahead of time which couples end up together and maybe some of the more complicated stuff about who gives the gold chain to whom. You’ll be more relaxed as you read because you won’t be trying to figure out the plot. You can expend your energy on thinking about why it is that some people speak in verse and some people don’t and considering what tune those songs in the comedies might have been sung to.

My third — and final — piece of advice has to do with where you should read Shakespeare. In fact, it is my main suggestion this morning. That is because I am about to get on the train, and it just occurred to me:

Read Measure for Measure standing up, while commuting to work. Read it while standing over a young man who should have gotten up and given you a seat, seeing as how you are engaged in heavy intellectual lifting and he is reading Gamer’s Weekly. Actually, he is not reading Gamer’s Weekly. He is staring blankly at you, and not doing a thing.

He is also barely out of high school, and perfectly able to stand up and give you his seat. I know this is retro and not cool, but it has begun to bother me quite a bit when men do not offer to give their seats to the women who are teetering over them trying to keep their balance as the train throws them back and forth. The woman I am thinking of is teetering around because she is carrying a lot of stuff and is also trying to read Shakespeare.

It is not mandatory to give up your seat, but it’s such a nice thing to do, and I have come to the decision, after years and years of commuting, that giving up your seat should be part of every man’s repertoire of charming things to do.

There are good reasons to do this. The main reason is that the reward for giving up your seat to the woman who is trying to read Shakespeare and not kill herself trying to hold a book and a really heavy bag full of the computer she doesn’t get to use to write her novel with because the train is so crowded, is that doing so will cause every woman on the train to look at the seat-giver-upper and smile. And if the man is single, maybe this will include a woman who might otherwise not give him the time of day. If he is married, this will remind him that he once won a woman’s heart by being a good guy and so should say something sweet to his wife when he gets home because her heart is still his.

It is good for men to feel like they’ve been helpful. (Yes, it is good for PEOPLE to feel like this. But as it happens it’s always a guy who’s sitting down reading something stupid or staring into space with his mouth open while I’m standing up trying to maintain my dignity and get in some reading. Okay, sometimes I’m staring into space because I forgot to bring a book. But my thoughts have redeeming value.)

One other thing: Be sure to flip the pages of your edition of Shakespeare at a rate of more than one every twenty minutes. Even if you aren’t reading, flip the pages fast. He won’t notice, probably, but it will make you feel better.

So. That was the fun part. Tomorrow (or as it goes in BlogLily time, in a few days) I’ll get to the profit part.

In an effort to write my shortest blog post ever, and to keep myself (and you) amused, I’d like to report that the next thing I post is going to be called How to Read Shakespeare for Fun and Profit.  Stay tuned. 

I’ve just had the most amazing library experience, one that surpasses the Amazon experience in terms of (a) instant gratification; (b) use of public resources; (c) complete lack of any cost and (d) did I mention instant gratification?

Here is how it works. I’m going to guess you can do this in your own city, so give it a try.

I was browsing around the Boston Review, whose fiction editor is the wonderful Junot Diaz, this year’s winner of the Pulitzer for fiction for what is, by all accounts, a truly fine book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Many journals have available, online, some of the things they have out in print. In this case there was a long, really nicely done, review of Elizabeth Taylor’s work, a review which, charmingly enough, talked about the first thing I thought when I realized there was a writer with that name (this is obviously the first thing pretty much anyone who is twenty-five or older thinks): “I thought she only made movies and perfume and marriages….”  (The Elizabeth Taylor review, by the way, was written by Neel Mukherjee, whose first novel, Past Continuous, just came out and sounds really good.)

And then I decided I really need to read her. Like, now. Particularly her stories, but anything really. The truth is, though, I’m broke. Totally. (Have I not mentioned the three-children-who-must-be-sent-to-college problem?) And that’s when I remembered the San Francisco Public Library, an institution that’s basically across the street from my building.

I went to the website. I typed in Taylor, Elizabeth. I didn’t get an ad for the perfume or any references to dvds of National Velvet or Cleopatra. They know what people are really looking for, those geniuses at the San Francisco Public Library cataloging department. There were a lot of Elizabeth Taylor books available.

The thing I loved the most about the library’s site is that they’ve set up the catalog so it’s kind of like an e-commerce website — there are little shopping bags (they look like they’re paper, which is a nice eco-touch) and you can, basically, put your chosen books in these nice shopping bags.

The best thing of all though is that you can ask for the books to be put on hold — what that means is that someone at the library will go upstairs to the fiction section, take the books you want off the shelf and bring them downstairs to the main desk. All you have to do is stroll over there, on what is looking to be one of the nicest spring days on record here in the City by the Bay, and pick up your books.

It’s faster than Amazon. It’s cheaper. Anyone who lives in California can become a patron of the San Francisco Public Library. They’re incredibly generous about handing out library cards. And the cards are fabulous. Many of them feature colorful illustrations by local children. The artist behind my card is “Wing, 4th grade.”

After I pick up my books, I’m going to go over to the local independent bookstore in Opera Plaza, Books, Inc. and buy a copy of Junot Diaz’s book. Yes, I know I’m broke. But I just saved all that money borrowing four Elizabeth Taylor books. If I go without take-out lunch for four days, I’m even.

Don’t you love the library?

Gift, by Czeslaw Milosz

Poets are like that.

The lovely agent I’ve been speaking to about my novel, The Secret War, offered to represent me Saturday morning. Yes, she works on Saturdays. It’s because she likes being an agent, and working with writers. She is one herself. She referred to my book in the same sentence as she mentioned Heinrich Boll. And it wasn’t a negative comparison. Good heavens, what a gem she is!

Like much change that comes into our lives, this new good thing looks different than I’d thought. For one thing, this agent is not the gin-swilling, cat-eye-glasses-wearing, incredibly busy and hard to get in touch with, Manhattan agent of my imagination. She’s in Sacramento, not in Manhattan — in my own time zone. How great to have someone represent you whom you can go & have lunch with if you need to.

The other agents she works with are experienced, committed and smart. The agency does a lot of commercial non-fiction, but not exclusively. They’re very nice people, very professional, and my new agent, Verna Dreisbach, is enthusiastic about my book. She e-mails me back when I have a question, and she’s a perfectionist. I’m going to have to clean that book up a lot before she sends it out to editors. You only have one shot with them, she says. So make sure it’s something you’re absolutely proud of. I realized, as I was speaking to her, that an agenting relationship is made up of a lot of things — they need to be able to get editors to look at the books they send them, but that’s just one part of it. They also need to see you and your book the way you see yourself, or — even better — as something you’ll be one day, if you work hard enough. And that is what I really like about Verna Dreishbach. Because after talking to her a long time, it was clear that she sees me in the way I want to be seen. Plus, she used to be a cop. How cool is that?

It didn’t take me very long to say yes.

What’s next? Well, after you write the novel, and then find the agent, you have to: get your book in impeccable shape, and then sell it to somebody who’s going to be a good match for you. Yikes. That’s not easy. And then if you make it past that hurdle, you promote the heck out of it, all while you’re working on that second book, the one you love so much you can’t believe you have to go back to the first one for a while. But you know what? None of this seems like a pain in the neck. I’m totally excited about doing it all. I’ve never felt like that about any work I’ve done before — okay, I did love working in the Parkland Branch of the Pierce County Public Library putting the books back on the shelves. But I was 15, and I was making $2.20 an hour. Okay, it’s EXACTLY like that job. I was so thrilled to get the job, I loved everything about it, I wasn’t going to get rich, but I would have done it for free, so I didn’t care (shhh, don’t tell anyone about the free part. We want a big bidding war for my book, you know!) And now, on to the next step. Making my novel even better, so it’ll make some editor in New York sit up straight, really straight, and fall in love.

Everyone has. In honor of National Poetry Month, I want to go out on a limb and say that this is really, really okay. Even more, it’s great –no matter how adolescent, how much they make you cringe, how good they look in your drawer, the poems you write over the course of living your life really matter. The act of writing poetry is an important one, and one more people should undertake. (At some other point this month, I’ll talk about the act of reading poetry. But that’s for later.)

People write poetry because they instinctively know what Emily Dickinson actually knew how to put into words — that poetry is the distillation of experience, and sometimes it is the only form that will do for what you want to say. Or maybe you just liked the way those violets smelled. No matter. We all have something we need to distill, even if it’s that not-so-great-smelling ex-boyfriend, like the one who inspired this poem, the first few lines of which I give you, perfectly free, in honor of National Poetry Month:

I am not a service station,
he said,
when I asked,
What about me?

Now I know you’re thinking, NO! She really dated someone who said that? Why yes, I did. And worse. What could I do but write about it? By the end of the poem, I realized that all the bad stuff from that long ago time could not be laid at his feet alone. Mine were involved too. If you write honestly, whether you choose a sonnet or a limerick, even if you write not so beautifully, you find yourself staring down some hard truths. And that’s all to the good.

Here’s another one:

The Cigar

Sometimes it’s what men smoke
when they want to be men.

Sometimes it’s the haze in the air
that obscures a man’s face.

Sometimes it’s what he’d like to do
with the woman across the room.

Except he can’t;
he can only blow smoke.

Okay. I know it’s not Lycidas. Still, it amused me to write it and if I had time, I’d tinker with it, remove some words, figure out the line breaks and it would be more amusing still.

This was fun. All over the web, people are writing poetry (some secretly). And they are encouraging others to talk about poetry. And I think this is just great. Bring on the poims, I say! Go look here and here for some more.

Because I firmly believe it is just fine and appropriate to revel in words — to begin by putting them down in the more abbreviated form with line breaks we think of as a “poem,” and then maybe moving on to rhyming stuff if you feel like it, or counting syllables and giving the world (or at least your journal) a sonnet — or figuring out how to spell out something like Happy Birthday Ed, with each letter of those three words standing for something you like about that person, such as “helluva guy.” This is not a post about quality or value or judgment. I think if people write for fun, eventually, they will want to figure out how to make their fun writing the best writing they can. But if they never get around to writing for fun, well, they certainly aren’t ever going to get to the good writing. And they’re not going to read it either, I’m pretty sure, not for fun anyway.

I thought a lot last week while I was away about the many stories you told, dear Readers — stories about how you went about making changes in your lives.  Many things struck me — the courage it takes to pick up and strike out for something you only hope will be better, the number of places a person can live in a lifetime, the remarkable variety of jobs people have had, the decisions to say no to material things to do other things that matter. 

I also noticed another current in those stories, one that’s about subtler changes, things that don’t look like change at all because you can’t actually see much outward motion.  Sometimes what you need are just little course corrections, small adjustments.  And sometimes all you need to do to really make a change happen is to get something right at long last and then do it over and over again.   

Many readers made the very sensible point that you shouldn’t change anything in response to a vague feeling that things aren’t what they should be until you diagnose your problem. 

So that’s what I’ve done.  My problem?  Well, beside the fact that my husband and I will have to each work until we’re the age of Moses (500 I think) so we can put our children through college, my biggest problem is, I’m pretty sure, that I don’t have enough separation between myself and my family. 

Which seems a little weird to say, because I love my family – all five guys (including Archie).  But lately I’ve been feeling like they’re standing between me and my soul — which is a dramatic way of saying that I can’t write in my own house very well, or at least I can’t without making everyone leave it so I can have some peace and quiet.  And I’ve also gotten into the not very nice habit of opening up my computer on the dining room table (especially on a day when I didn’t get to write on the train) and telling them to leave me alone.  Believe me, they hate that. There is nothing worse than having your mother right there.  And not right there.  It is stressful for all concerned – for those who would like someone to help them with their homework and for those who are trying to write about love and loss and longing and strippers who look like rotisserie chickens.  So far, all I’ve been able to do about this is tell myself that it’s fine to write on the train and work in more writing when I can and won’t it be good for the boys, in the end, to have seen their mother concentrate so hard on her writing that she can’t actually hear William playing the drums?  Not really.   

As it turns out, change is the thing that waits for you when you get back from your roadtrip. 

In my case, it came from my husband, who decided while I was gone that change would come about in our family life and in my writing life if he turned over to me the little apartment under our house, the one we rent out to UC Berkeley students, the one with the (gasp) completely separate entrance.  He carpeted it and painted it and removed all the stuff in it and then moved my writing table (the one I don’t write on because it is the place pn which we put our bananas and oranges and stone fruit) and two lovely chairs from his mother’s house, chairs that are very old and very pretty, and a bookcase, and some curtains, and a nice new, small fridge into this space.   We have agreed on office hours.  They’re times when he’ll be with our children – afternoons on Saturdays and Sundays, after family mornings on those days.  And early mornings, before the school rush, which he is in charge of dealing with.  If someone needs to know the capital of Tibet, he’ll let them know.   

And in return, all I have to do is leave my writing life down there and not plunk my computer down on our bed, or the dining room table and try to write while children are trying to get me to help them with their homework or he is trying to talk to me about how we are going to pay for college — much less that expensive trip to Washington D.C. Jack’s class is taking next fall.

It’s true that I have been thinking about this writing room for a while.  My idea was that it would be great to have a writing studio time share thing for other bay area writers who need a space to work — including me –  one where they won’t be tempted to clean out the fridge or make chocolate chip cookies.  But I was not anywhere near getting close to executing that idea before he went to work on it.   And that is what comes of marrying a practical Swede — he might sometimes not know the right thing to say, but he almost always knows the right thing to do.