Archive for March, 2009|Monthly archive page
Moving To Guilford
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I’d like you to be the first to know that I’m going to move my family to Guilford, Connecticut, preferable to a house that’s right on the Green, and across the street from the Guilford Free Library, which is where I am at this exact moment.
The only trouble is that I can’t actually move, having a job I like in San Francisco, and a husband with a job HE likes in the Bay Area, and three children in schools they like in Berkeley and a dog, well, the dog could move to Guilford. Maybe. The thing is, though, he has a friend in the neighborhood, a sporty dog named Dash, who can actually play with Archie without giving in to him or getting into a big embarrassing dog fight. Archie would probably want to stay in Berkeley too, I‘m thinking.
What this is, of course, is what always happens when I travel to see friends. When I do that, I always discover thatI want to live in the places where they live. Although this isn’t possible, it is possible to list the reasons, which is what I’m going to do.
Why I Want to Live in Guilford:
If I lived in Guilford, I could be near my friend Debbie. And then I could watch her talk about her books with her beautiful long fingers making motions in the air to describe what she’s talking about and every once in a while I could even look into her office and see the drawings on her drawing table and know that here, where Debbie lives and works, wonderful books are being written for children, books that will entertain them, make them think, and make them love books even more than they already do.
If I lived in Guilford, I could be near Sandi Shelton. And then I could go for a walk with her on the beach at Hammonasset and she’d give me advice about my next book that would not only be correct but would also be inspiring. Plus, I would laugh a lot and so live a really long time, so I could take full advantage of her good advice. Also, I could watch her type, which is what I’m doing at this exact moment, and because she types fast, I’d always feel like things were good, because Sandi’s typing someone a really great, long, funny and inspiring e-mail.
If I lived in Guilford, when spring came, I’d be so incredibly grateful that I wouldn’t quite know what to do with myself. Because after months of winter and then months of mud, flowers and green things would really mean something. I say this now, just as spring is about to arrive in Connecticut. What would it be like to actually live through these New England winters? I’m really not sure. Maybe it would be hard.
If I lived in Guilford, I could come to the Guilford Free Library, where there are just an amazing, amazing number of tables with plugs and lights and surface space. Not to mention, carrels, and little offices, and even, in the teen section, two of the kind of booths you see mostly a soda shops in tv sit-coms. Across from the booths in the teen section there’s a bunch of board games. Who ARE these people in Guilford who love library patrons so much that they even have a little table in the children’s library with a tea maker and coffee maker and an honor box where you can put in your dollar after you make yourself a cup of tea? If you were a tired parent, and it was the middle of deepest darkest winter, well, you could come here with your child and you could drink some tea and read a book because the children’s section has books for miles, plus a little yellow house where a child can sit and play for hours and hours.
If I lived in Guilford, I could walk the mile and a half down to the shore and then back again — the perfect three mile walk. I could do it every day, all year long, because that is what Gortex is invented for and so even if it was cold or icy, there are winter clothes that would make this intrepid behavior possible.
And if I lived in Guilford, my family would be wth me, and they’d be doing all these things too (well, maybe not the part about writing in the Free Library, although William might find that pretty tempting), plus W, who is a windsurfer, could windsurf out on the Long Island Sound, which is where he learned to windsurf in the first place.
I am leaving in two days, and I know I am not going to be able to move to Guilford. But I am at least able to be happy for Sandi and Debbie, and all the other people who live around here, because even though you can’t always live where your friends live, at least you can know after a good long visit that they are, in fact, living happy lives, which is pretty much why you travel to see your friends: because you need to know that they’re happy, and you need to live alongside them for a little while so when you go home their lives will feel just that much closer next time you find yourself missing them. So, I now have a good picture of the library and the Green and the way winter becomes spring, which should sustain me when I get back to Berkeley, which is a pretty fine place to live too, now that I think about it.
In Transit
On my way to the Oakland Airport this morning (I’m going to Connecticut), we were passed by — and then stopped entirely for — the longest funeral procession I’ve ever seen. Mostly, the procession was made up of police cars. But there were plenty of motorcycle cops, and firefighters and ambulance drivers, and park rangers, and anyone else who does a job where they protect people from harm. All of them were on their way to the Oakland Coliseum, which is one exit before the airport. Today’s the day for the funeral of the four police officers who were killed last week after a routine traffic stop went wrong.
Being a cop is a dangerous job. Mostly, I don’t think about that. My general experience with the police as a citizen is to feel mad about the ticket I just got for turning left when I wasn’t supposed to, or to feel grateful that someone’s directing traffic.
But there are ways in which the police let us down and these disappointments are what you often see when you encounter the police in the media — police officers who extract confessions through coercion, hide evidence or manufacture it, use physical violence out of frustration or take bribes.
This morning, I just thought about how brave you have to be to pull somebody over, and how much more courage it probably will take in the weeks to come to do that. And I also hoped that the men and women going to that funeral will remember that young black men aren’t the enemy and that even when you’re afraid, you still have to do the right thing by everyone in the community you serve. And I hoped that the young black men in the community will remember that the police aren’t their enemy and that many of them, particularly in Oakland, are not so different from they. This is what courage looks like today: seeing each other more clearly, and realizing that we are more alike than we are different.
Flash!
I don’t get flash fiction. 500 words! Good grief! How can you even begin to tell a satisfactory story in the equivalent of six paragraphs? By the end of the sixth paragraph, you’ve basically managed to introduce the unhappy family, the way the sea looks from the porch of their house in the summer, and the smell of the strawberry jam the little sister is making in the kitchen, without knowing how, because her mother is out on the ocean photographing sea life and her father isn’t paying attention to any of the children anymore.
And texting! Texting eludes me. 160 characters (for a long time I thought that was 160 WORDS. I suppose I thought that because I found it unbelievable that any unit of writing could be measured in characters. That messages are indeed measured that way breaks my heart.) 160 characters isn’t enough to do anything other than say no, an unsatisfactory no at that, because you can’t tell a joke after you say no, or explain your no, or make your no into a no-but-yes-to-you-because-I-really-like-you-even-though-I-can’t-go-to-that-thing-with-you.
Right now, all I know is that I don’t want to read 500 word stories. If I’m going to read a story, I want it in the conventional short form (say 4,000 words or more), or I’ll take it long. I mean that. I’ll take it Victorian, three volume long, I’ll even take it Russian three million volumes long.
As for the 160 character no, I want my nos to go on and on and end in yeses or at least devolve into something so interesting you forget about the no. That takes more than 160 characters, I think we can all agree. If I am going to get a message, I want it to come in a letter, a really good, long letter with lots of descriptions and funny stories. In a pinch, an e-mail will do. Okay — an e-mail will more than do.
And if I do want to read 500 words of meaning, then I want a poem. A world can live in 500 words. A no can become a yes in much less than 500 words — in half of 500 words, in fact. That is what John Donne is expert at, for example.
But here’s a thought: What if there really is something wonderful about short shorts and I am missing the boat? Yikes. Could be that the problem isn’t the form at all. I mean, every form — whether it is a sonnet, or a short story, or who knows, even short-shorts and, what the heck, text messages — has its brilliant practitioners, artists who need the form to give birth to what’s in their heads. Take the Shakespearean sonnet, for example — 14 lines. A lot happens in those fourteen lines, but almost always at either the ninth line or in the couplet at the end of the sonnet there is a turn, and the thought that’s been extended through most of the sonnet is resolved, or turned on its head. I think some people must think like this — in iambic rhythms, maybe even the rhyme scheme makes a kind of innate sense to them, and the way a sonnet reasons also is the way they like to think. And this could be true of the short short (maybe even the text). Maybe there is a sort of thought that really sings when it is placed in the short-short form. And maybe the Shakespeare of Texting is out there right now, sending texts that are miracles of language.
And so, today, I have resolved to work my way out of my aversion to flash fiction. I mean, really, who am I to diss any written form? After all, I am the woman who thought of the short story — for an embarrassingly long time — as a failed novel. (I admit this because I am Catholic, and can only be absolved of my idiocy by confessing to it, except I don’t go to confession and I don’t think having bad ideas about literature is officially a sin….). And I was very wrong about that. Very wrong.
So, fortuitously, today I had tea with a lovely fellow blogger, who recommended I read Lydia Davis, which I’m going to do. And then I had lunch, with another blogging friend, and I realized she writes 100 word pieces — so I’m going to look at some of hers.
It might turn out that narrative is my thing, and that I will be unable to enjoy something that looks like it should be narrative, but isn’t. But I will find out, and that will be fun to do.
Slow Blogging (or, My Google Feed Reader has Taken Over My Life)
My GAWD! Slow down the blogging! I got home from a weekend of cross-country skiing (okay: confession: we only skied one day. I had to get home. My google feed reader was shouting at me to come and see what it had waiting for me) and there were hundreds of new posts waiting to be read. Wonderful posts. Posts I am so happy to read.
It’s spring out there in blogland — all that snow is melting and the blog posts are pushing their heads up like mad, reviewing books, commenting on politics, talking about writing, taking photos of the throw pillows they’ve put on their couch, showing me ways to combine tough jeans with girly tops, reminding me that there are a million ways to go green save the earth stop wasting gas raise my children listen to music watch movies ….. aaaagh.
Still, even though there is a lot of wonderfulness out there right now, it’s also a little overwhelming. I’m thinking there needs to be a Slow Blogging movement, some kind of pact among those who feel like it’s required that they post every day — a pact that it’s okay to post less often and spend more time sitting around and chatting with our families, and making slow pots of soup, and watching stuff bloom. Unless, of course, you post every day because you love it. And if that’s the case, I will always be here to read it. But I think it would be acceptable to many if the posting is less frequent. I don’t want to read fewer blogs, you see. I’d like to read every blog on my blogroll, and new ones besides. But if there were fewer posts, then I’d have more time to leave longer and better comments. More time to read the things people talk about. More time to cook the soup someone’s just described.
SO — Slow Bloggers of the World, maybe sometime we could unite and slow down. I’m not in a hurry for that to happen. I’m here for the duration — but it seems like things will last longer if they don’t move quite so fast. I know that’s not physically true, but it’s sort of metaphysically true, don’t you think?
Paper Love
I’ve been noticing for a while now that there are a lot of stories out there about the demise of print — stories that have the same trajectory: news of some paper substitute (the Kindle being the most recent), news of some grand paper institution going under, and then something about how MUCH paper means to us and how awful it would be if it disappeared.
I ignore these stories. Really. I’m too busy reading the next book on my list of things to read and writing more things for other people to read someday. But today I am thinking more about them, because I have been reading (in print, I’d add) about the dire straits many print newspapers find themselves in and also about National Geographic being in trouble. What kind of world would it be if we didn’t have National Geographic to bring us beautiful pictures of what we can’t go and visit ourselves? And what would we do without newspapers to dig up the dirt on people who’re doing bad things and hiding behind powerful institutions? So, today, I am taking stock of my relationship to words on paper and words online. Why? I’d like to know whether I’ve deserted my paper love without even knowing it.
It turns out, I get plenty of words electronically (blogs! pictures of celebrities wearing bad clothes!). But they don’t replace the things I get on paper. I still read newspapers in their print form, because I like being reminded that there is, in fact a world turning one day at a time. There’s something about having the paper hit my porch that makes me feel like I’m part of that world. I rarely look at the news online, unless it’s a story that’s developing more quickly than it can be covered in a daily paper (the election, for example). But it’s been years since I’ve looked up the starting time for a movie in the paper. It’s faster to do that online. And I’m afraid that what’s happened to newspapers is that maybe they haven’t figured out how to replace their money making stuff (like theater ads and classifieds) with other ways of getting people to pay for the news.
As for books, I’m devoted to paper. I recently decided that I don’t need to get a Kindle. I only read one book at a time when I go out of town, or at most two, and I don’t want to spend over $300 on something that basically compresses books so you can carry a lot of them around with you. But someday, if the Kindle can give me something that expands on print, I might buy it. Many magazines are already doing this “print plus” thing beautifully —- every magazine I subscribe to has a really terrific website, which I think is the most successful way for a magazine to stay vital — by using the web as an adjunct to the magazine, rather than a replacement.
The New Yorker, for example, has a great website — the fiction podcasts are just one of many cool features. And my favorite cooking magazine, Cook’s Illustrated, has a really, really good website, which I even paid extra to access because I love its search function. Poetry Magazine? Another fine web presence. The Poetry Tool is particularly wonderful. (Want to find a poem appropriate to celebrate your friend’s engagement? This site will lead you to John Donne’s The Bait. You should read that poem today, you know. Life is short. John Donne matters.)
So, today I subscribed to National Geographic. One of my children is a non-fiction, magazine reader. I think he’d like National Geographic. Our subscription ran out some time ago and I didn’t renew it because they were too young for it. Now, they’re not. Do they have a good website? Yes, they do. How much does a subscription cost? $15. That’s really, really cheap, if you think about it — $1.10 a month for a lot of pictures and articles you can read in bed at night. The funny thing is that I have no idea where I read that National Geographic was having trouble — all I know is that I’m glad I thought about it yesterday, because my kid is going to love getting it.
I am certainly not representative of the public as a whole. A lot of people don’t read. But, among people who do read, I’m going to guess that I’m pretty typical in my love of both things on paper and things online. They’re different media, and so it makes sense that they fill different needs. But what I’m most interested in is seeing how they can enhance each other — how one’s love of paper need not be diminished by one’s love of the online world. I’m in favor of marriages — where paper and the web make beautiful music together, rather than one killing the other off. There’s a long, weird metaphor in there, but I’ve got a lot of reading to do today, so I’ll stop right here.
Recent Reading
Since the beginning of the year, we’ve made it part of our routine to spend Wednesday nights at the Claremont Branch of the Berkeley Public Library. The library’s open until 8. I love the random nature of library nights, how browsing the shelves unlocks the titles you’ve stored up somewhere in your brain, and you remember you really like Philip Kerr, and you’ve been meaning to read Laurie King, and we’re going skiing this weekend, and it would be fun to listen to Jeeves, and there’s The Sister, which I stuck in the photo because it’s a library book I got in San Francisco a few weeks ago, but it IS a library book. And then the other books are ones I picked up for twenty five cents from the little sale shelf, and which will do very nicely for next Christmas’s book stacks.
Beyond displaying my library choices, I wanted also to mention something — although I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice this, it’s still worth saying: I rarely, if ever, choose books anymore because of a print review. Thinking about what I’ve read in the last couple of months, I see that 75% of my choices came because of something I read about on one of your blogs, dear readers. From Kate and Dani, I discovered the wonderful Spanish mystery writer, Alicia Giménez-Bartlett. Rhian, at Ward 6, recommended The Summer Book (which I’ve just ordered) and JR, her husband, recommended Fakers, a book about creative frauds (which I’ve also just ordered). Philip Kerr, whose novels about Bernie Gunther, a German detective during the Third Reich are really terrific, is someone I happened across by accident, I’m pretty sure. Laurie Hall? That would be Dani again. The Sister? Litlove, of course. I think I must have discovered from reading the NYT book review that Dennis Lehane has a new book, The Given Day which I’ve just begun reading, but it’s entirely possible I just noticed it at Books, Inc. the bookstore in my work neighborhood. The Great Gatsby? Matt recently read this, and I realized it’s been a very long time since I’ve read Fitzgerald. Cold Comfort Farm? Wasn’t that a good sounding movie? I never got around to seeing the movie, but I can tell this is the sort of book I’d love. I read a lot of Malamud short stories earlier this year because the free New Yorker fiction podcast featured a Malamud story. Molly Panter-Downes? Pauline. Murakami? Jade Park.
You can see where this is going, can’t you? A committed reader who spends a lot of time online is far more likely to be choosing books based on the recommendations of people who aren’t professional reviewers than, say, based on what Michiko Kakutani promotes or destroys in the New York Times. And I can say, based on my unscientific sampling, that these recommendations rarely go wrong. I’ve run out of time to say more, except to speculate that the reason online book reviewing works so well as a way to figure out what to read is this: people who blog about books almost always talk about what they love and why they love it. And they know that people they’re accountable to — people whose blogs they visit and who visit them — rely on their recommendations. So they’re going to be as accurate and honest as they possibly can. There are no axes to grind in these blogs, or there almost never are. Just people who love books. And people who love books are terrific people to know when you’re standing around in the library on a Wednesday night trying to figure out what to read next.
The Anatomy of a Truly Awful Day
The day in question being over in about an hour, I feel I can own up to it. I do this in part to counteract any suspicion that I am a weirdly cheery person. I am not. In fact, I have been in a place of despair for a few days, probably because it has been raining a lot and that gets old.
- The day’s awfulness has a sneaky beginning — with numb fingers and toes — it is so cold in our house that I lose all feeling in those extremities. I actually run hot water over them to see if I can restore them to their normal state. When that doesn’t work, I make tea, because tea solves pretty much everything. (And I am not even British.)
- Then I spill the tea, all over a stack of books. I look at the books and think (I swear to God), when I die, my children will look at these books and think, “What a mess. These books have stains on the pages. Let’s throw them out. WHO CARES IF THEY WERE MOM’S FAVORITE BOOKS?’”
- Did I mention that I cried when I thought of my children throwing away all my books, after my death?
- I mop up both tea and tears and go to work. Many hateful signs in the hands of protesters in front of the building where I work in San Francisco and where the California Supreme Court will, tomorrow, be holding oral argument on the question of whether it is at all constitutionally permissible for the voters of this state to say that gay people cannot get married. Bad feeling in throat and in stomach. How can people exist who insist that the only way to “save the children” is to keep my friends from marrying each other? Far better that the children should be saved by specifying in my will that they MAY NOT THROW AWAY MY FAVORITE BOOKS AFTER I DIE.
- It is time for the Stegner people to call the lucky few who will be paid a $27,000 stipend next year for simply sitting in a seminar room once a week and talking about their fiction. I see, on a website, that these phone calls have already happened. Did anyone call me? In fact, no. I am embarrassed to discover how much I mind this.
- I buck up, make a list in which I yell at myself to be a better writer and better person and, while I’m at it, to stop eating bad food. And then I go outside to go home, semi-bucked up.
- All for naught. More insane people have gathered. They are wearing white t-shirts over their outdoor clothing and holding creepy, mean signs. I see a gay friend outside the building on his way home from work. I hug him. And then I walk by a rental panel truck that has a picture of an innocent child on it who must be saved from my friend. The child looks suspiciously like those pictures of embryos they wave around in front of abortion clinics, only aged a little to look like she’s exited the womb, totally shocked to find herself in the Sodom and Gomorrah that is San Francisco in 2009.
- I can’t find my ticket to get out of the parking garage and I believe I burst into tears. Okay, I did.
- I get home and the person who’s invited all of us out to dinner to celebrate my birthday tomorrow decides he isn’t going to be having dinner with us after all. Do I burst into tears again? Why yes, I do. By this time, it has become a regular part of today’s routine. Momentarily wonder whether maybe all this crying is good for dry skin. Decide that’s unlikely and feel depressed.
- I pull myself together and we all walk to Gordo Taqueria, which we love, and then go to the library, which we also love. Dawn, the world’s best children’s librarian beams at all of us. Our Wednesday night library nights are becoming a regular event. I find good books — a picture of which is at the bottom of the post, or will be tomorrow after I find my camera. On the way out of the library an officious jogger brushes by us on the sidewalk. We are obviously in her way. She has a blinking red light pinned to the back of her shirt. Jack says, “Good thing she’s wearing a light.” He pauses. At 13, he has already begun to remember the importance of a pause. ”That’ll keep cars from running her over on the sidewalk.” I love my children.
- Upon returning home, I learn that another literary journal has rejected one of my stories. I do not cry. I believe I emit a moan and use an obscenity.
- Oh, do I have to go into the fact that when I returned home I couldn’t figure out how to get the wireless network connection to work on the new mini-computer I’ve given myself for my birthday to replace my laptop, the one that was crushed by a skateboard about two months ago, an event that has led to a notable decrease in the amount of writing I’ve been doing? Or how I spent an hour looking up “what do you do when the little wireless icon disappears” and got nothing and then spent half an hour on hold waiting to be told something, anything? Or that the answer to the problem is to hit the function key and the F2 key simultaneously? Or that I said, in a tart and not very thankful way, that maybe this company could have a little bit better help documentation because that’s kind of a basic thing? Okay then, I’ve told you pretty much all. Except that I’m a very lucky woman to have a job and to be able to afford to replace my crushed computer. That is not something I plan to forget.
It’s almost midnight. The day is almost over. Tomorrow, I will be turning 49, a number that brings me no joy tonight, for reasons I cannot quite fathom. I have never minded being whatever age I am. I figure I am just me, and that will not change, ever. Still, something is not quite right here. I’m hoping it will pass. Like me, my blog is also having a birthday. It is only turning three, an event that gives me an enormous amount of pleasure. My blog has never rejected me. There are no tea stains on it. My children cannot throw it away when I die. It has never held up a hateful sign. It has mostly been optimistic and happy and celebrated what is good in the world. If I’m lucky, it’ll be around for another few years of days that are anything but truly awful. I think I will put the spilled tea and the rejections and the hateful signs and the pain in the ass that is poor computer documentation out of my mind and focus on that instead.
