Thing of Beauty (n): Twin A does a push-up while Twin B releases skateboard UNDER Twin A and jumps over him, and then lands on the skateboard, after which all spectators (except mother, who is frozen in place) and Twin A and B shout, "Man. THAT was a Thing of Beauty!"
We all know it’s a joy forever. (And if you didn’t, you do now.) But have you actually READ those lines recently? You should. They’re here, at the end of this post.
Earlier this morning, the California Supreme Court released its decision in the marriage cases. It’s been pretty clear for a while that they would uphold Proposition 8 and refuse to nullify existing marriages. I’d like to talk about why that is not necessarily a bad thing, a position that I know is sort of unpopular, but which is not an endorsement of bigotry or stupidity, qualities I don’t actually think California’s citizens are guilty of en masse.
You wouldn’t know that, by the way, if you, like me, worked in the State Building, where the Supreme Court is located. The sign-waving people were out in force this morning. But then they always are. Today, they were hating California’s gay and lesbian citizens. Last year, it was women who wanted abortions. A few decades ago, it was African-American Californians who wanted a decent public education. All they do is switch out the slogans and pictures — but the message is the same. Those who are different are scary and hateful.
But those people are so clearly a minority. Having skimmed the court’s opinion, it’s obvious from its tone that the court feels no sympathy for the social views of those who passed Proposition 8. In fact, their earlier opinion in the marriage cases, the opinion in which they announced that the California constitution is violated when marriage is made unavailable to gay Californians, makes their views about the civil rights issue quite obvious.
I’m not sure what I’d have done if this was MY issue to deal with, but I’m going to guess that their limited view of their role in this debate is not a tragedy. Look at one of the great civil rights decision of the 20th century, Brown vs. Board of Education, and then ask yourself whether the public schools in the United States are still segregated and you will see the limits of a court’s ability to change the way Americans think about those who are different. Judicial efforts to integrate the schools have not been huge triumphs, at least not at the local level. Even in a city like Berkeley, where I live, the public schools, particularly in the lower grades, are largely filled with children from poorer households, children who are overwhelmingly African-American and Hispanic.
Why is this? It’s complex, but my guess is that parents — even in places like Berkeley — didn’t like being told to drive their children across Berkeley to kindergarten. And they are no more comfortable with racial and economic differences than their counterparts in less obviously liberal communities across the country, a discomfort that cannot be mitigated by a judge telling you that you must ignore your fears. This discomfort can only change with familiarity with difference and good will — something we are all capable of, I’m certain. When California’s generous financing of public schools was dismantled by Prop. 13, private schools became even more attractive to wealthier, white Californians, and gave well-meaning, liberal, white people cover for pulling their kids out of public schools, and, well, there you have it, a story that’s true across the country and one I think is still being told.
My point is this: there’s only so much the judiciary can do and California’s Supreme Court has done about all it feels institutionally capable of doing. It’s announced an important principle, one that isn’t popular with some Californians. The thing to remember is that our attention is now very much focused on this issue in a way that it hasn’t been for decades. And most of the people who are now thinking about whether it’s okay to say gay people can’t marry are not in front of my building wavy nasty signs. They’re thinking about how Mr. Sulu from Star Trek married his partner last year and how they’ve always liked him and that show. Or about the teacher at the school where their kids go who got married last fall and looked really cute in those pictures where she was wearing a tux, and really, why shouldn’t she wear a tux? I think it’s undeniable that we have begun to see that we are not so different from each other after all.
Today the message is really that the courts cannot force social change to happen, not alone, anyway. The thing to focus on is that the people can do and should do a lot more than the judiciary in this area. The Proposition 8 opponents ran a poor campaign. Much thinking needs to be done about how to run a better one. It’s clear that the majority of Californians did not support Proposition 8. They need to make that point much clearer, the next time this issue is on the ballot.
And then somebody really needs to think about the wisdom of running our state government through initiative, an experiment in populism that has so obviously failed us — everywhere you look, you can see how California’s institutions have been weakened and even ruined because of whimsical and short sighted initiatives — Proposition 13 being the most obvious. A proposition that bans the whole initiative process is looking very good to me at this moment.
There’s more to be said, and more will be said, on this issue. But I am going to guess that in the next five years, there will be another initiative, one amending the constitution to reflect the views of most people in California and that initiative will not look like Proposition 8.
Every week, I teach a creative writing class at William’s school. The class consists of me, ten boys, and their teacher Brenna. I love this class. They sit there, their pencils clutched in their hands, squirming around in their chairs, writing wild, wild stuff. When you’re nine or ten, you still have a fully intact imagination — most likely no one’s told you yet that your story violates the laws of physics (what would I know about that?) or that your inability to spell “rocket launcher” means you won’t make it as a writer. I will not be the person saying those things, that’s for sure.
It’s cherry season, and the class is today at 11:30 — right before lunch. I’m bringing them cherry cake. Really, it could be blackberry cake, or peach cake, or apple cake. Basically, it’s a very thick batter with fruit on top and powdered sugar on top of all that. I love this cake, make it all the time, and have even written about it before on the blog. For those who don’t know about it, you really should. Here’s the recipe. Easiest thing in the world.
Happy Almost Friday!
Eleven years ago, when I discovered a child had chewed his way through My Antonia, I put away my books, the ones I accumulated during graduate school. And I also got rid of the not-so-nice pine bookcases they were stored in. I had lots & lots of books back then, and I did not want them to become a staple in that child’s diet or the diet of his brother, or of the brother to come.
Last week, I installed the first ever BIG bookcase in my office, the place in our house where I write and I put a bunch of books into it.
I have discovered a few things about bookcases, things I’d never have noticed if I hadn’t been away from them for a decade. So I share one of them with you, because this is a blog, and that’s what you do when you have a blog.
1. When you have a bookcase, and your books are more or less organized in it, and you are writing a description of encroaching weather, in what you hope is a poetic passage, but not one that goes on so long that your reader slams the book down and picks up the closest magazine and gives up reading your novels forever because you suck so bad, and you think you need to read someone who does this well so you will have readers one day — well, you can just pull To The Lighthouse off the shelf and there it is, the great middle section “Time Passes” :
So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left—a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes—those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.
And immediately before this passage, this amazing moment, a parenthetical that breaks your heart:
[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]
There are other advantages to having bookcases, but I am so overwhelmed wtih the beauty of this piece that I cannot think of what they are. How lucky am I, to have all these uneaten books to open up and read whenever I want? I feel like my life is entering a different phase, one of even more beauty than I thought possible. Being without books for so many years, I’ve had to rely on my memory, and the library, and copies I bought when I could remember what I wanted to see again. But now the books are coming back — all of them. And that is the loveliest thing to happen in a while.
Raise your hand please, if John Baker is on your blogroll. Yikes. The rush of hands created a huge draft of wind and nearly knocked me over. Most of us have been reading John’s blog for as long as we’ve been reading book blogs. For those who don’t know him yet (the few of you who were also knocked over by the show of hands), John’s written eight highly regarded mysteries and he’s been blogging about books and book-ish subjects since, well, before most of even knew blogs existed.
John’s newest book, Winged With Death, isn’t a conventional mystery. It moves between Uruguay in 1972 and England in the present. There’s a really elegant narrative at work here — the story’s first strand is the tale of the narrator’s arrival in Montevideo when he was eighteen, at a time when Uruguay was in political turmoil. The boy takes on a new name — Ramon — and finds himself absorbed in becoming a Milonguero – a tango master. The second strand occurs in the present where, from the perspective of his life in York, and in the face of a crisis precipitated by the disappearance of his teenage niece, Ramon sees how the past, both personal and political, reappears in the present. The book’s a departure for John in terms of the story he sets out to tell, but like all his books, it’s finely written and so smart about how we live and love. I liked it very much, and was so pleased when he said he’d actually have time to come over here.
While we had our virtual visit, John and I had a virtual conversation. I wish you were all here, drinking tea and eating cookies. But this post really is the next best thing. Come to think of it, it might actually BE the best thing. After all, to get here you don’t have to pack your liquid goods into ziplock bags or take your shoes off to go through security, or suffer any of the indignities of air travel. You just have to turn on your computer, and then you get to hear John on the book, the tour, and how on earth he managed to parent children who still read his interviews. So… here it is:
When I’ve done author interviews in the past, readers have been very interested in the intersection of personal history and fiction. Can you talk about how you transformed life into fiction in Winged With Death?
That’s difficult. Winged with Death is fiction, I’m quite clear about that. But there, of course, aspects of my own life and my own experiences tucked in here and there quite consciously, and equally, there will be aspects of my life experience which are in there without my knowledge.
I never consciously write into a fiction a picture of someone I know, or have known in real life, and the characters in my novels, as in most novels, are made up out of bits and pieces of a multitude of real characters, fictional characters from books and movies, and, I often suspect, from shadow parts of my own personality which I have suppressed in my personal life for one reason or another.
The central character in Winged with Death is Ramon, and he, like myself, is an Englishman. He has spent part of his life out of the country, in South America, and I have spent part of my life out of the country, but in my case the stay abroad was in Europe.
Perhaps the main similarity is that we are both tango dancers. But he is a teacher and a master of the dance, whereas I am merely a social dancer, often with two left feet.
I don’t have the fraught emotional relationships that Ramon has, though my emotional relationships have not always been entirely stable.
Something else. Ramon is involved in writing his own autobiography, something I would never consider attempting.
Perhaps there are more similarities between the two of us that I am still unconscious of. I honestly don’t know. I’m concerned that my fictions resemble real life enough to convince me and my readers that they are dealing with real human beings like themselves, involved in a variety of relationships. But beyond that I am mainly concerned with ideas and with language.
Winged with Death takes on important political issues. It is also hugely entertaining. Writing a book that is not didactic, but still delivers a powerful message about and against a repressive regime is no easy feat. How did you manage that?
The book took a long time to write. For most of that time it wasn’t working the way I intended it to. Fiction only works when it is specific, when it depicts the struggles of individuals in a truthful way. Getting hold of that truth and pinning it down in a novel is never easy. But I suppose when one chooses a real location and a real span of social or political history, there is always the tendency that the individual’s story will be overtaken by the momentous events involved.
The job of the writer, then, is to keep plugging away, a little like someone mining for gold, until the thing starts to shine from the inside out.
Two of the most important characters in the book are teenagers, about whom you write with sensitivity and authority. Many of the people who read this blog are parents of teens. Could you talk about your experiences as a parent and as a teenager — any advice?
Questions are supposed to get easier, you know, not more difficult. I have had five children. They are all now well past their teens – (thank you, Jesus) – and have left home and formed relationships with others and for the most part live far enough away that visits have to be planned in advance. I remind myself that that was the object of the enterprize – their independence.
I have no advice.
There were good moments and there were others; all in all I think things improved dramatically once the teenage years were left behind, or perhaps it was the mere act of moving away from the parental home.
With hindsight it seems to me sometimes that each of my children arrived with an agenda, and there was little that I did that made any changes to that. They were, each of them, aimed right from the start to the places in life they now occupy. The role of myself and my partner was only to feed them and keep them safe so they could arrive more or less intact.
And my relationship with them now? Sshhhh. Most of them will be reading this.
You’ve been on tour for quite some time with Winged With Death. How was your trip? Any surprises or common experiences? (By the way, John’s touring reviews can be found here.)
No real surprises, apart from the fatigue. It was a little like actual touring, relating to new people two or three times a week, answering comments, coming up with original answers, striving to listen – really listen – to the questions. The blogs I toured were a very mixed bunch. Some were popular sites with many commentors and a busy atmosphere. Others more like personal sites, with little happening. But I arranged it like that, as I wanted to elicit a variety of responses from different groups of people. It’s been good. I’d do it again. Better than actual touring – you get to sleep in your own bed.
I’ve been reading your blog since 2006, when I first noticed that things called blogs existed. Could you talk about how you came to blogging, and how your blogging has evolved? Longevity in blogging interests me very much, because I’d like to keep writing for a long time — how do you keep it up?
Committment. I started blogging in 2002, quite near to the beginning. I’d always kept a journal, and there was never anything in it that was too personal to talk about. I used the computer every day anyway and it struck me that I could do both things together. I designed my own blogging software to start with and modified it to suit for the next three years. Eventually I moved over to the open source software by WordPress and for much of the time I blogged every single day. Now I only blog when I’ve got something to say; it doesn’t have to be much, anything I’ve learned or heard that strikes my own interest seems to me to be worth passing on. I’m especially interested in words and writing and reading so I blog about those things. Then I get involved in wider cultural issues, film, theatre, exhibitions, etc. Sometimes politics, but not often.
I suppose I keep it up because I don’t see a divide between blogging and the other writing I do. It’s all writing. Sometimes it’s a novel, or a short story, and sometimes it’s blogging. When I get up in the morning the only single thing I’m absolutely sure about is that I’m going to write.
