BlogLily

Writing confession time. Actually, the church now calls it reconciliation. Isn’t that what accountants call it when they settle the books? Anyway, I write about writing over in the page called (no surprise here) “writing.”

This comes from Marie. You’re supposed to bold which of these 100 canonical books you’ve read. I’ve added comments. I couldn’t help myself.

Here’s what I’m wondering — does it count if you’ve seen the movie, or if you’ve seen the movie and it wasn’t by Disney? What if the movie had songs in it? What if the movie had Daniel Day Lewis in it? You can see the trouble here.

Also, in this list I lay bare certain reading prejudices, some of which I didn’t even know I had. Please don’t think less of me because of it.

In fact, do this yourself and tell me you don’t have your own prejudices and don’t feel the strong urge to explain that the reason you haven’t read, say, The Stranger, is because it was never made into a movie with Daniel Day Lewis.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family (I read the other one — the one with pictures, the one with Walker Evans)
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain — ok here’s one I need to read.
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger (I believe this is about the plague. Of course I didn’t read it.)
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop (I re-read this recently on a trip to the southwest and loved it even more the second time.)
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales — in college, and then I had to memorize the prologue, which comes in handy when there’s a lull in conversation
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans — surely the movie counts? Let me just say three words: Daniel Day Lewis. (Okay one more: shirtless.)
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage — I probably have read this, because it’s the kind of thing you have to read at some point if you’re a student but honestly I can’t remember a thing about it.
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment — I did, however, see an intense movie version of this when I was in my twenties and inclined to be depressed and it was awful. I think it’s time to revisit this one though. I’m a lot cheerier than I used to be. I think I could even read all of Native Son on a good day.
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy — I think Sister Carrie is THE Dreiser book, but that’s just my, you know, opinion. I love Sister Carrie and don’t want to read any more Dreiser and ruin my admiration for him by finding out why it is that one critic described him as a guy who wrote like a person who didn’t have a native language. ouch.
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury — Couldn’t read this, and don’t know why. I’ve tried the first ten pages at least five times. But I loved Absalom, Absalom. Maybe you have a Faulkner limit and mine is two.
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones — movie! (Wasn’t it a movie? You know, with Ryan O’Neal when he was gorgeous and filmed by candlelight?)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier (I keep thinking this will be good, but then I always put it back on the shelf…)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame — the movie! I saw the movie! okay. it had songs in it. Yes, it was a cartoon. Perhaps that should not count.
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World — this is fiction? I always thought it was a travel memoir or some kind of long essay.
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll’s House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis — I mean, I do know what it’s about. But it’s never interested me. Did anyone ever make a movie of this?

Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt — I don’t like strident realist fiction. I know, I know. How do I know if Sinclair Lewis writes strident realist fiction if I haven’t read it? Wasn’t he responsible for that really, really long movie that Daniel Day Lewis was just in (see Last of the Mohicans above for other sort of unreadable books that made good Daniel Day Lewis films.)
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain — do the first twenty pages count? I was afraid I’d be stuck in the sanitarium forever if I didn’t make a run for it right then.
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener — people love this. I have never been able to get past the first page. It depresses me.
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago — the movie, I love the movie!
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49 - no way. I do not like Thomas Pynchon. I don’t know why. Maybe it is because I am afraid there will be no plot and a lot of Symbols.
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front — this I must read. Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac — movie! With Daryl Hannah and Steve Martin, remember that one?
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep — I keep seeing things about Henry Roth. DIdn’t he wait fifty years between novels?
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion - movie! I could have danced all night!
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — is this any good? It looks so… long. But then he is Russian and long is his job.
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island — yes, I know, the movie doesn’t count, because it was, yes, by disney.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin — does the King & I count?
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five — I do need to read this. But I avoid it, along with Catch 22 because I am afraid it will be ironic and not entertaining.
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple — I happen to have an autographed first edition of this book. It is autographed in purple. I did not see the movie, which looked awful.
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories (Not all of them — nobody reads every single one of the collected stories of anybody unless they wrote, you know, six stories.)
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass (could someone please explain to me why Leaves of Grass is on this list? I mean, these are mostly novels and plays and Homer. Last time I looked, Leaves of Grass was a super long poem. Okay, some of Shakespeare is poetry, and Dante too. But if poems are okay to include, then this list would look a lot different.)
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son (Okay, I quit when Bigger Thomas stuffed the body into the incinerator.)

Well that was fun.

I mean, you might think it’s the other way around and the angel comes out better than the dorf. Go here to the May 23, 2008 entry and tell me who you think comes out better in this literary exchange: William or his third grade teacher. (Two sentences! A two sentence post! A miracle of brevity!)

Okay, okay, a third sentence: I actually do read books, and I’ve updated my “reading” page up there at the top to prove it, and discovered at the very end of that update that I actually don’t like Hemingway’s early short stories (okay, I HATE them), and I’m mystified by that discovery, so pretty soon I’ll update that page and talk about that. (Whew.)

The Civic Center Farmer’s Market (Wednesdays and Sundays) is one of my favorite things about working where I do. There’s no avoiding it (although who would want to?) because it’s right outside the entrance to the BART station. Just as there’s no avoiding the fact that it really, truly, finally is spring. Peaches are here! And how about that use of the word “rich”? 

It has indeed been a rich May around here.  When you look up from the peaches you can see the State Building, which is where I work, adjacent to San Francisco’s golden domed City Hall and the Asian Art Museum, which represents THE finest example of how to turn a grand library into a really beautiful museum.  One floor above the court where I work is the California Supreme Court, and haven’t THEY made this a richly happy month? 

If you happen to be visiting San Francisco on a Wednesday in the spring, all you have to do to check out these many riches is hop on BART and get off  at the Civic Center stop.  Buy some fruit, and maybe a tamale.  Go into the Asian Art Museum, which is ahead of you and on the right.  If you can’t afford to pay the entrance fee, you can ask for the red chopsticks pass, which gets you into the cafe, where you can have a cup of tea and sit on the lovely veranda overlooking the farmer’s market.  And you can still see the beautiful job they’ve done converting the library into a marvelous museum space. 

Don’t forget to visit City Hall – and the Main Library, which is across from the Asian Art Museum.  There’s cheap food to be had down Polk Street, which is officially “Little Vietnam.”  And in another three weeks or so, the Supreme Court’s marriage decision will be final, and they will begin to marry people at City Hall.  You can sit in the grass and congratulate people, while you’re eating your tamales, or your fruit, or your vietnamese food. 

Some people find this extraordinarily rich neighborhood a little scary.  The tenderloin is home to a lot of people who are right on the edge of being okay — and many people who’ve fallen off the edge.  And no, they’re not always pleasant.  But they’re part of who we are, and there’s no denying their existence around here, and that is as it should be, I think. 

Tonight, I overheard one of our children — the one who had to stay up late to work on his science project — telling my husband he had a headache. “Maybe I should take some advil, dad. Or some tylenol.” There was a pause. “Or how about some morphine?”

Clearly, it’s time for summer vacation. It’s also time to answer litlove’s questions about being a mother. Always happy to help with scientific and literary research, I provide my answers below:

How do you view your role as a parent? What are you there to do?

I’m here to keep them from being killed crossing the road, and from chewing with their mouths open when they’re having dinner with the first person they’ve ever loved. Beyond that, I’m pretty sure I should be standing out of their way, and letting them become the people they’re meant to be. Being a terribly bossy woman, I have an awfully hard time with that, but that’s what I aspire to.

In your social circle, are mothers expected to work or are they encouraged to stay home with the child?

Every mother I know well (and those are the mothers I think of as being in my “social circle”) has a sense of herself as having work in addition to her work as a mother. Even if she is currently staying home with her children, the women I know are still thinking about this work, and how to fit it in with their lives. So, I’d say, the women in my social circle are expected (because that’s what they expect of themselves) to have pursuits in addition to caring for their children.

As for physically staying at home, rather than going out to a paying job, that’s a very fluid thing in my community of friends.  There’s a lot of in and out — being home for a while when the children are very young, working part time, working from home are all common choices.  Very few women I know who have children my children’s ages (middle and elementary school ages) work full time at those terribly high powered jobs where they travel a lot and wear clean, pressed clothes — the kinds of jobs where you don’t have time to have much time with your children.   I have noticed though that as my friends’ children get older, their clothes are getting cleaner, and they are traveling more for work, and getting to put more time into the things they like to do besides raising children.  One thing I do know is that most of the women I know are too smart and too busy and too aware of how hard it is to parent and work to buy into the false dichotomy that is the stay-at-home mom vs. working mom thing. 

How do you feel about your child’s education? What’s good about it, and what do you wish could be done differently?

I have three children, and what their early educations all have in common is that they have involved the acquisition of a second language because I think that is a hugely important thing for Americans to do for reasons that should be obvious. In the case of my twins, that language was French, which was acquired at a private French school. My youngest child is fluent in Spanish, a language he learned completely free of charge, courtesy of the Spanish immersion program run by the Berkeley Public Schools. What’s good about their education is that we have lots of choices about how to educate them, both public and private. In some ways, that’s also what’s bad about their education. They don’t all go to the same schools with the children in our neighborhood and that makes their social lives a little scattered.

How do you share the childcare with your partner (if it is shared)? Do you tend towards different activities or different approaches to parenting?

We’re into being “equal.” What that means is that my husband does the morning childcare jobs (lunch making, breakfast making, dropping off at school) and I do the afternoon childcare jobs (picking up, homework browbeating, taking people to lessons and sports). I tend to specialize in instilling them with a love of reading and a little bit of religious education, despite the fact that I don’t actually believe in God most of the time. He specializes in making them fabulous skiers and windsurfers (and rock climbers). We’re nothing alike, and we think that’s probably good for them.

What are the most important virtues to instill in a child?

To keep their eyes open for the thing they love, and to figure out how to do that thing for a living — or to find a decent day job so they can do the thing they love the rest of the time. Is that a virtue? Yes, in fact, it is.

The other important virtue is a skill as much as a virtue. It is learning to really see other people — to listen to them, to try to understand why they do what they do, and in so doing to become a compassionate and loving person.

What’s the relationship like between mothers at the park and the school gate? Would someone you didn’t know help you out in a stressful moment?

I rush in and out of school so much these days I can hardly tell. I probably feel guilty at some level that I’m not participating in the mother-life of my childrens’ schools. But I feel ruthless these days about doing the things I want to do and not getting sucked into running the school auction. But yes, even though I’m not so great about school participation these days, and so am a virtual stranger to many of the mothers at my children’s schools, I’m pretty sure that anybody I asked for help would pitch in and help me. And I’d do the same for them.

What do you fear most for your child?

That they won’t ever find the thing they love to do.

How do you discipline your child and what are the errors you would put most effort into correcting?

I don’t think anybody learns anything from being punished except to sneak around and to be afraid. That said, I have the terrible flaw of yelling at my children when they fight with each other, or are rude to me, or do other stuff that bugs me. I apologize, and try not to hate that about myself too much. How do you get children to do what they should? Well, you model it, of course. Unfortunately, even though I do know this, I still lecture them like crazy. Poor things.

The errors I tend to focus on beyond table manners?  In giving freely, without expecting things in return, there is an enormous amount of happiness.  So, I try to model that, and try to encourage them to be that way.  It’s a work in progress.  I’m not always as generous as I could be, that’s for sure.

Do you think the life of a child has changed much since you were young?

Well, their childhoods look different from mine, with much more privilege and a different style of parenting, but no, I don’t think the fundamental nature of being a child — the imaginative life, and the way children develop — has changed one bit.

What’s the best compliment your child could pay you for your parenting skills?

You might have yelled at us and lectured us and never made brownies like the other moms, but we know you love us and we’d like to invite you to come see us do the thing we love. (Oh, and by the way? We know how to chew with our mouths closed. We always did know how. We just pretended like we didn’t to bug you.)

Thoughts about my writing week are over here. And be sure to check out litlove’s post about her week of thinking about and working on her new book about mothering.

If you are feeling the need to do some confessing (whining, moaning, bragging, fantasizing are all okay too!) about your writing week, go sign up at the Literate Kitten’s blog. I like reading these posts. They’re fun and inspiring.

And one other thing:  You’ll notice there are a lot of pages at the top of my blog.  I’ve added a new one called “Reading.”  It’s a list of what I’m reading, with some notes about why I’m reading what I am and what I find there.  Much of my reading is related to my writing — for example, I’ve been thinking a lot about short stories, and about clean, clear, third person narratives (which is what I aim for).  The Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner (and I picked up Recapitulation for good measure) seemed to speak to that.  My next novel has a lot of echoes of Shakespearean comedy, and the only one I haven’t re-read recently is The Taming of the Shrew, so I checked that out.  If you’re interested in this sort of thing, that page will be updated every few days.

It’s a lovely day in San Francisco, a day so warm it feels like summer. A perfect day to issue an opinion, if you happen to be the California Supreme Court, in which you say that it’s no longer acceptable for the state to call committed, loving, gay relationships anything other than marriages.

The opinion’s here, on the court’s website. To find it, you just have to scroll down to “In Re Marriage Cases.”

Today I am so proud to live in California, and very proud of our court system.

This is a post about criticism: how to do it well and not so well.  It begins with an illustrative anecdote:

I feel for the poor bloggers among us who click the “publish” button and send out into the world a post so misguided and poorly targeted that it opens them up to a storm of fury in the blogging world. I wish there was a way to spare bloggers like that — well-meaning, innocent blunderers — from the churning stomach-ache they’ll have to endure for about a week while they get yelled at by a bunch of really mad people.

You want to go check out that car accident don’t you? Okay, here’s a summary. Waldo Jaquith over at the Virginia Quarterly Review, which is a literary journal, posted a bunch of the mean comments their editors have made about fiction submissions. They’ve since been removed, so you’ll have to trust me that they’re not the meanest thing I’ve ever read, and some of them aren’t even all that original. (I’m sorry, but “barf-o” is not a critical term I have much respect for, perhaps because I hear it out of the mouth of my three sons — who are 12, 12, and 8 — all the time).

Still, the post touched a nerve. Okay, it ripped the skin off some people. Readers responded, here, and here and here and here.

One of many points made was that airing the negative reactions of the people who are, essentially, judges in a highly competitive game in which the participants suspect there is already a lot of unfairness (elitism and cronyism being the big two) is a no-no. It comes off as disrespectful, arrogant, mean-spirited. In my view, it is also a breach of an implicit promise of confidentiality a journal makes to its submitters. It’s other things, some that aren’t so bad. But you have to read those links to find out.

In his defense, Jaquith isn’t an editor — he’s the web guy. And he’s got a great name. He was just trying to amuse and entertain. In the law, there are some crimes where you do a lot less time if you didn’t intend them to turn out the way they did. Like murder. (If you hide out in someone’s garage, and then shoot them and maybe also steal a bunch of stuff, that’s way worse than if you’re the PG&E guy and you mistakenly turn on the gas in someone’s garage and kill them because, unbeknownst to you, they had chosen that inopportune moment to take a nap in their car).

If Jaquith is guilty of anything, it’s a misdemeanor. Lashes of the wet noodle rather than the solitary confinement at Pelican Bay with people blaring Ted Nugent at you (which is what he got). Not everyone would agree, but it’s my blog, and I’m the Legal Professional, so I’m going to go with me being right about this.

Jaquith then made an effort to be nice about it and apologize (sort of) by posting some of the good things people at the VQR have said about writers. Whew. I’m glad to hear that over at the VQR they know how to be nice. That effort didn’t really get him all that far, though, because people were still mad at him, so pretty soon, an editor at the VQR posted his own response. It’s a deliciously weird non-apology — the kind of thing that starts off apologizing and then goes on into a sort of blame the victim defense (you know, when a defendant says, well, I wouldn’t have killed the victim if the victim hadn’t asked for it by writing such a stupid story.) Anyway, sometime, check it all out (the link above to the VQR will lead you to the first, second and third posts). The whole thing is smoldering and just about out.

Me, though, I have no interest in that smoldering pile. I’m more interested in telling you about somebody who really DOES know how to condemn and praise, a guy who’s a real critic. I started thinking about him partly because of the whole VQR controversy, but also because of a post over at Ward Six about good writing that comes from unexpected places.

Now, if that isn’t the longest damned introduction to a book review about a book that illustrates How To Write Beautifully and Be a Proper Critic in an Unexpected Place, I don’t know what is. I love blogging. Digressions, smoldering controversies, strong words, mad people — I feel like we’re all in a smoky coffee house in London ready to draw swords over the things we feel passionate about, but unable to do so because we’ve had too much (a) coffee (and our hands are too shaky) or (b) wine (ditto) and, anyway, we sort of like each other. Fortunately, we have all the time in the world to wander around the coffee house yelling about this and that, and then maybe getting to the point before everyone falls asleep, but maybe not, which is okay too, because we are not in a hurry here at BlogLily.

Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s Perfumes: The Guide is a messy, opinionated, and very smart collection of reviews of more perfumes than I ever knew existed. Turin and Tania Sanchez smelled a lot of stuff, wrote about it, alphabetized it all, added a couple of good essays about perfume (how to wear it, its history, for example) and sent the whole thing out into the world.

It’s a great book. I don’t even care that it’s so badly indexed you have to rely on karmic convergence to find some of the perfumes you want to know about. Or that he dismissed a Guerlain perfume that was described by the New York Times perfume critic Chandler Burr (there’s another whole long coffee house discussion of a blog post about what the Times is doing with a perfume critic on their staff) as “a crepuscular, rose-inflected darkness suffused with a luminosity that floats on the skin.”

I asked for that perfume for Christmas, being in the market for a little of that inflected darkness suffused with luminosity. Luca Turin gave it a respectable, but mere, three stars and summed it up as “handsome, striking, but a little tiresome in the long term.” Apparently, crepuscular gets old. It’s just that it’s a HUGE bottle of crepuscular. Still, I do like it, and I’m going to keep wearing it when I want to be luminous and yet plan to depart the party before I grow tiresome.

The thing I love about Turin as a critic (and this applies to Sanchez as well) is that he has a huge amount of respect for the past — he obviously knows and has experienced great perfumes, ones that still form the basis for what he thinks about things people are making today. I like that. I think it’s hard to be a good critic in a vacuum. 

Another thing I like about him is that he’s an enthusiast. If he likes something, he REALLY likes it. There’s no tiptoeing around it.  It helps here to be French.

He’s also unafraid to champion things other people won’t have anything to do with because that thing happens to be sold at Target.  That’s one of the hallmarks of a true critic — he thinks for himself and he finds wonderful things where other people are too good to look. I mean, really, have you tried Tommy Girl?  I have.  It costs $28 or so and it smells lovely. 

Qhen he hates something, he’s very funny, and a little mad. I like this one:

Delices eau de toilette (Cartier) * vile fruity

Probably called Delices the way the Furies were called Kindly Ones, for fear of upsetting them. This is a woody-vanillac fruity so loathesomely potent and crass that I cannot find a bad word to say about it. On second thoughts, I can: it’s not even vulgar.

Now that’s good stuff there.  FIrst, it made me laugh.  The whole thing about the furies was not something I knew.  Second, the idea that there is something even worse than being vulgar surprised me and made me think.  There’s a lot going on in this little tossed off paragraph.  It’s way better than “barf-o,” although that is exactly what he’s saying here. 

He does all this wonderful work in a paragraph, or even a sentence. When he gets up to three paragraphs, you know you’re reading about a perfume he considers a work of genius.

I’d recommend this book for anybody who cares about how we praise and condemn that which we love, which would include short stories.  I’d also recommend it for anybody who wants to smell good. And I think that somebody should send it to Waldo Jaquith, completely for free, because he deserves a little pick me up after the smelly week he just went through.

Aw. William made me breakfast in bed this morning. He burned himself on the sausage, thus demonstrating his utter devotion to his mother, and his willingness to risk his life for her. (He would like to say that, in fact, there’s no way he’d risk his life for me. That’s my job. That’s why I get breakfast in bed. Because I would, in fact, risk my life for him. In a pinch, I’d ask his dad to do it. That’s why, on father’s day, he gets double breakfast in bed.)

Signing off for now, using William’s favorite phrase, “Burp you later, dude!”

The literate kitten has proposed this terrific idea of a weekly confessional moment all over the blog world where people talk about what they’ve written (or not) the week before. Mine is up in the page called “writing” — a page I update a lot more often than this one, by the way, in case you’re wondering what on earth I’m doing. (I also update that other page, the one about submitting, every day or so too. It’s not for the faint of heart because it is a chronicle of pretty much unrelenting rejection.)

I’d like to say, though, that in addition to revising The Secret War, and thinking up some new stuff to write, I’ve also written a blog post that is complete except for some illustrative excerpts from the book I’m talking about. As soon as I FIND the book (it was just here somewhere….), I’ll post that.

Have a lovely weekend all of you.

Heard around the BlogLily household this morning, father to son, “Dude, you’re ten poops away from a tech deck.”

Translation? Well, we’ve instituted a little reward for doing what you should be doing anyway program — the idea is if you walk Archie ten times (over a one week period, the week being written down on a little anal piece of paper with squares for eligible walks, a picture of which I might even post at some point), then you get something called a tech deck, which is a ridiculous remarkable toy that’s essentially a small skateboard that kids do tricks with, using their fingers. That ridiculous amazing toy is the object of much desire among 2/3 of the BlogLily children, the other being more interested in getting to go to Dark Carnival, our neighborhood bookstore, and buying a comic book.

So. In what can loosely be described as an inspiration, I decided to throw in the chance to get a walk credit for every five Archie poops picked up in the backyard. Don’t work too hard imagining our backyard, okay? Some are willing to scoop poop if it means they’ll get a tech deck. Others need to be reminded. That’s what their father was talking about this morning.

Which brings me, as usual, to something profound. Okay. Profound-ish.

Rewards are not a bad thing. I mean, really, there are just some jobs that don’t float one’s boat. And there’s nothing wrong with a little incentive to get you going.

I’d love to hear about reward programs in other households. In fact, if you leave a comment about a rewards program, I’ll SEND you a reward of some kind. I have a lot of stamps. And a lot of books/cool papers/pens/pencils/rulers/paper clips/paper objects. I promise not to send you a poop. I couldn’t, really, even if I was that much of a weirdo because they’ve all been pretty much scooped up.

Happy weekend all!