Cheating on Paper

Posted on February 15, 2011 by bloglily

i luv u

Your affair with the Kindle begins innocently, the way many affairs do: you wonder why so many of your friends dislike it so much, why they treat it like it’s a handsome guy who can’t stop glancing at them lasciviously and appraising their interest and availability. Your friends tell you — “he’s interesting, but he’ll never be as good as what I have at home.” You feel sorry for this stranger, and think it needs a friend. You.

You edge a little closer. You do the equivalent of a coffee date. You buy one. It’s dirt cheap, and you feel a little dirty asking it out. $139. How can you resist finding out what’s under that rock-hard exterior?

Little by little, you get to know it. Okay. Lie. You gulp it down when it shows up at your door looking handsome in its gift box. Turns out you’re an electronics slut. If it plugs in and moves, you’re all over it.

You find out it’s way better than the paper you have at home. It’s always ready to go when you are. You can have some while you’re waiting for the orthodontist to tell you your kid’s teeth are going to make it impossible to ever go to London again. No more theater for you. You seek consolation in it. You discover Shakespeare’s Collected Works are free. That makes you feel a little better about the ortho. Dickens is free. Joyce, Gaskell, Hardy, Austen, Trollope, George Eliot, early Virginia Woolf, Twain, the Brontes — all free. Alice in Wonderland, the Moonstone, the Woman in White, Vanity Fair. Yeats! (You can look up An Irish Airman when someone mentions it on NPR.) * OMG. It can give you anything and everything. Soon, you carry all of Western literature in your purse. Free. Translations are not free. But by then you throw caution to the winds and load up on the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations of War and Peace and the Three Musketeers. You dabble in the hard-core that is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. But you only sample it, because you don’t know if you want to go down that kinky looking road. Although you can — with one click — if you change your mind.

You cheat on paper so many times and in so many places you lose track. You feel like you’re in your thirties again, reading books people are actually talking about, books that just came out: The Warmth of a Thousand Suns, the Imperfectionists, that new Cleopatra biography, the one of Montaigne. You read the Room, and Pictures of You, half of Freedom (because it is not as good as you’d hoped), Brooklyn, Keith Richards’ Life, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, half of The Finkler Question half of Cutting for Stone (there will be time for it later, and while it sits around waiting for your return, it does not wrinkle, the way the book would, the way Tinkers, just for example, which you bought pre-Kindle, read half of, set aside, and spilled tea on, would.) Your friend Thaisa Frank’s new, really wonderful book, Heidegger’s Glasses is FREE on Kindle for a very short time. (How could that be — you already own it in paper because it’s so beautiful, just like you own Antonya Nelson’s Bound in paper because you can’t bear not to have paper every once in a while.) But you get Heidegger’s Glasses for free too because you are greedy. You stop blogging because you are so enamored with it. Also, you do not have time to blog because you’ve also downloaded the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Autobiography of Mark Twain. You can’t write anymore. Good thing you sent your revised novel to your agent before the affair (BTA to you). All you want to do is be with your new toy.

You get a nice cover for it so it doesn’t look quite so hard and inhumane. So your friends will not edge away from it when they see you with it. The cover is orange and a thing of beauty. It makes you want the Kindle more.

You try to introduce your friends to it, thinking that if you love it, they will too. They don’t. They sigh and talk about their books, their loyalty to paper and ink, their feeling that the institution of the book is under attack from that thing in the orange cover you’re stroking in such a very weird way. They look away, embarrassed for you.

After a few months, you begin to realize that your new toy has its limitations. You never really know when you’re approaching the end of a great night with it — all of a sudden, the story ends. There’s no warning, no slowing down, no physical sign that the toy is getting smaller and you will soon be finished with it. You try not to think of wham bam thank you ma’am because that reminds you too much of your college years. But it is true and you can’t hide from the fact that the kindle does not have page numbers. It has percentages. You cannot get used to being 80% through with a book.

Your bank account is dwindling. The ease with which you can buy books — one click ordering on Amazon — is beginning to exhaust your funds. You find one month that you don’t have any money left to buy meat. Your family, which is decidedly not vegetarian, has to make do on pinto beans and brown rice. They are not happy. You begin to buy things you really won’t ever read, just for the thrill of buying them. Books about fashion. Presumed Innocent, which you think you should re-read because your second book (if you can ever get around to writing it) is about lawyers, and doesn’t Scott Turow know about them? But you forgot — you’ve already read it and you know you can do better. You buy a book set in the 16th century that is way more full of sex than you ever thought they had in the 16th century, or at least in the books you read in the 9th grade about that century. It also describes in a really icky graphic way how people were drawn and quartered. You begin to feel hollow eyed and worried about your standards. Others notice and express concern about how trashy you’re getting.

You tentatively go back to buying a book or two. You start with a hot new cookbook with great pictures. You can’t get the thrill of that on a Kindle! You tentatively try out Poetry. Slow, meditative, lovely, not-so-popular, poetry. The Kindle can’t do that either — the words don’t look so good on the screen. It will never be able to tell you the jokes that you get from Maira Kalman’s books, of which you now own two, with amazing, quirky, genius illustrations.

You discover that the Kindle is not very flexible. It doesn’t really like to flip back six pages and start again. Once it gets started, the do-over does not appeal to it.

Your friends decide you’re ripe for an intervention. They hide your Kindle’s power cord. Sure, it can last three months without a charge, but eventually it will wear out. And when it does, you discover that the book has been waiting for you all along, sure you’ll get over your infatuation. The book is sexier than it used to be. It doesn’t ever run out of power. It’s willing to go slow or fast depending on your mood. You begin to remember why you fell in love with it in the first place. It doesn’t bore you as much as it once did. And it makes an effort. Maybe it’s gotten a little lazy too. It gets better pages and nicer pictures and starts to look more attractive. When you find the Kindle’s power cord, you’re more careful about your assignations with it. You only turn it on once in a while. You’re more careful about what you do with it. And you stop bragging about it with your friends. You decide it will be your dirty little secret from now on, the one you keep for vacations and commuting only, when no one will find out and, if they do, well they will forgive you for wanting portability and ease. Because it turns out that there is room for both, that you can love two book forms at once, that they each have their place, and their role in your reading pleasure.

Turns out, Yeats looks way better on an actual paper page, with all the other poems right there, easily available.  But here it is, e-version:
 *I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Summer Reading

Posted on June 20, 2010 by bloglily

charlie + skating + summer = happiness

Summer’s arrived here at the bloglily household. There is general happiness, and a movement spearheaded by the non-parents to suspend all routines, including the one that gets everyone into bed before the sun rises. So far the adolescents and the ten year old who’s actually 40 are winning that one.

If you’re surly enough, and I’ll admit that this describes my general demeanor about half the time, you might trudge through summer without acknowledging its wonderfulness because you, after all, don’t get to suspend all routines. But at least you get to read summer books, which is way, way better than going to see summer movies. Summer books, at their best, leave you satisfied. Summer movies, even at their best, make you feel like you’ve eaten at McDonalds, and although maybe it was okay at the time, you really wish you hadn’t.

So. Summer books — for me — mean spy books. I love spy books. I like the whole noirish atmosphere of a good spy book. I love the lone operative, the hero who behaves well, but somehow all the odds are against him. (Why can’t I think of any spy books where there’s a decent woman spy?) A couple of days ago I spent the whole day reading, which meant that we had frozen costco lasagne for dinner (here in Berkeley, that’s when they send the child protective services to your house). What kept me from whipping up an organic, vegetable-filled dinner was Alan Furst.

I really like Alan Furst’s books. They’re all set in dark, rainy corners of Europe, on the eve of the second world war. There aren’t any Americans in these books, or hardly any. The most recent one is called Spies of the Balkans. I will not tell you what happens in it because you could probably guess. Okay, I’ll tell you some things. Is there a spy who’s a Greek police officer, who’s ethical, but not above trickery when it’s necessary to protect the innocent? Check. The occasional furling and unfurling of an umbrella because it’s always raining in the countries Hitler’s about to invade? Check. Sex? Check. Daring rescues? Check. A general atmosphere of a world going to hell, during which tremendous acts of courage occur? Check.

Like I said, I read the whole thing in one day. I never do that. Happy Summer!

Parrot and Olivier

Posted on June 2, 2010 by bloglily

I'm pretty sure that must be Olivier

Books with two narrators are hard to pull off. I almost always prefer one narrator to the other, which means I almost always have the following poor reading experience with two-narrative books, to wit (as they say in books written a while ago and in legal documents still):

So there I am, reading along, and then the great story I’ve been loving slams to a stop and some other story starts up, and it turns out to be one I don’t care about at all. It’s sort of like what happens at parties when some guy steps in between you and the person who’s telling a great story about, say, the time their mother tricked them into going to the United States so you wouldn’t get your aristocratic behind in trouble, and the boring guy starts to relate to you the tale of how he bought his Prius. Bad. I always wonder how the writer failed to see that the narrator I like is so much better than that other narrator to whom the writer handed over big swathes of the book. It is not a question you can ever get answered.

These problems are not present in Peter Carey’s new book, Parrot and Olivier (they go to America, and that’s part of the title too). It took me 24 hours to read it. Both Parrot and Olivier are equally wonderful. You might want to pick it up.

A Murder for You

Posted on July 13, 2009 by bloglily

I read today someplace that if you are a writer, you should have an entire website, which should display excerpts from your work. Good heavens. How is it possible that I’ve written this blog for more than three years and never posted a single bit of my fiction (not to mention the utter absence of a website)? Well, except that one time when I was trying to write about sex, and thought, “Now, THAT’s an interesting thing to post,” so I did. In 2007. Otherwise, nada.

But I am indeed a writer, and I have in fact written an entire novel, and a number of short stories, one of which will shortly be coming out in a fine journal (in a separate post, I plan to flog that journal like mad, encouraging all of you to buy it, so they will know that I do have a few friends, despite the weird subject of that story). So, I’ve decided I will follow that somewhat random piece of advice, and here post an excerpt from The Secret War, which someday might actually be for sale at your local Barnes & Noble (not to mention your local independent bookstore) if all goes well.

I picked the shortest, most coherent thing I could excerpt, which is the part where the first murder takes place. This murder occurs in an interesting location, because all murders should. The book itself is set in a small town in Bavaria, on the border of East Germany, West Germany, and Czechoslovakia. From the names of those places, places that no longer exist, you might also guess that it is set in the past. If you did, you would be correct. It is set in 1969, in fact. The village is home to a small American military base — on top of the highest hill on the base is a listening post. There are a lot of antennas on that hill, and a mushroom shaped hut where guys sit around with big black headphones over their ears eavesdropping on the enemy.

What are they listening for? Well, the main idea was that if a lot of planes started to head from, say East Germany, to Western Europe, the guys in the headphones would let people know. The listening post is not very secret –the antennas are hard to hide– but it is still not a place just anybody is allowed to be on. And that’s why it’s good to have someone murdered up there who isn’t supposed to be there. So, with that in mind, here it is — an excerpt from my novel.

Chapter 6

Every night, a few hours before the end of his shift at midnight, the soldier ran between the two buildings at the top of the hill, clutching the rubber pouch full of the night’s reports, eluding the spotlight that slashed the darkness with streaks of light. When he’d been a boy he’d played a game like the one he played tonight. Coming home late from a friend’s house, he’d cut around the puddles of light created by streetlamps, passing cars, and porch lights, eluding the lights as though they were his enemies. Darkness meant safety. Tonight he was not far from boyhood as he ran toward and through the darkness on this foreign hill in this foreign place, like a swimmer moving through clean, cold water.

Before he’d come here, when he’d thought they would send him to Vietnam instead, he had often dreamed of death. But he had never dreamed of the actual dead, only of their sudden absence. In his dreams, a loved one would fall silent or no longer be in the room. He’d notice their silence and know they were gone. Sometimes his dreams would be of the event right before death — the explosion, the burst of gunfire, the menacing face of the enemy. And so, before tonight, he had never seen the dead, not in repose and not in the moment immediately after they make their passage from life into death.

At first he thought the body was a bulky pack left on the path by a soldier during a march that had ended abruptly. He bent to move the object out of his way and saw it was a man, sprawled across the path as though he had known the runner would come this way and help him. But the young man knew instinctively it was too late to do anything to help.

He touched the body and his hand came away warm and sticky. The spotlight fell across the body and illuminated the dead man, the spreading pool of blood beneath him and the truth that our skin only just barely keeps at bay our blood’s desire to free itself from our bodies, the way a weak dam barely contains the water behind it.

The dead man — for the young soldier knew without a doubt the man was dead — was almost his age. His angelic face under a mop of light hair stared wordlessly at the dark night sky. He wore black trousers and a t-shirt that might once have been white, but was now soaked and dark. The sharp object that had ended the man’s life had slashed through the t-shirt.

But the young man didn’t think about any of this until later. At this moment, he thought immediate and terrified thoughts, chief among them being whether whatever dark and angry thing was out there in the night might be coming for him too. He turned from the sight he’d dream about for the rest of his life, and ran back toward the light of the listening hut, no longer a stranger to death.

In an Utterly Unprecedented Move

Posted on July 6, 2009 by bloglily

I’m going to blog instead of refreshing my e-mail in box. And what, you might be asking, is SHE going to write about? Does she even read books, the ostensible purpose for this entire blog? How could she possibly find the time, so busy is she obsessing over why no one is e-mailing her editing suggestions for her book, or giving her news of her stories!??

But it turns out, dear readers, that I do indeed read, and what a pleasure it is to have that to hold up as a shield against anxiety. I gave my camera to a child to take on a trip, so I can’t actually document the book I’m reading, but I’ll just tell you here and now that I picked up E.B. White’s Letters (with a very nice introduction by John Updike) at Moe’s Books in Berkeley yesterday and I am in the happiest of reading experiences: thumbing through the personal papers of someone I admire.

Ever since I received my first letter from an author (come to think of it, it was my only letter and was written in response to my gushing fan mail), which was from Noel Streatfield, the author of Ballet Shoes, I have lusted after the casual writing of people I admire — writers mostly. The only thing I learned about Noel Streatfield from that letter was that she used a fountain pen to write her name in that proper up and down English writing, which is not at all the same as the kind of cursive you learn in the United States in the third grade, because it is far SMARTER, but well, that was good enough for me.

It’s a weird kind of nosiness, this snooping around in the letters, diaries and notebooks of writers. I think I do it because I want to know who these people are, and how they managed to get so much real life down in a story. But until today, when I began to refresh my inbox for the six millionth time, and decided instead it would be better to write about what I’m reading, I have never really given much thought to the charm of the diary, the letter, the notebook.

I’m pretty sure what gets me about these kinds of things is the possibility that you’ll edge closer to the magic in fiction, that by knowing something true about the person who created it, you will somehow be invested with that magic yourself. But most of the time what you discover isn’t magic, exactly, but more that the person who wrote something you loved was sort of weird, or very funny, or even more anxious than you are. And that is just as good as the whole magic thing.

Here are some discoveries I’ve made reading letters and diaries, because that is what this blog post is about to become: a compendium of my favorite bits from the letters, diaries and notebooks I’ve read over the years.

Well, first, there’s Rilke, whose Letters to a Young Poet is not really a book of letters, of course, but more a guide to the writer he probably once was. But the tone of it is so confidential and kind, that even though the young poet isn’t a real person, which means these aren’t really letters, any more than Plato is talking to actual students in those dialogues, it’s still a great book. My favorite thing in it? The news that good things are difficult. I cannot tell you how many times I have repeated this information — usually to my children, but to myself also. And I aso rely heavily on its reverse: if it’s difficult, that’s probably a sign that you’re working on something worth doing. (Except of course, if what you’re trying to do is turn a nozzle ON by turning it in the direction that turns it off. THAT is difficult because you are being stupid. It’s important to know the difference.)

Let’s see. Who else? Oh. Wallace Stevens’s notebooks are collected in a very cool facsimile edition called Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book. Have I mentioned how much I like to look at the handwriting of great writers? And how sad I am that my generation is the last to actually write things down and not type them? (And most of us don’t even do that.) Anyway, this book is full of things Stevens copied down about other writers, because he was sort of nosy too and liked to read things artists said about doing their jobs. I am particularly fond of this, which is actually something Henry James said in a letter to H.G. Wells, back when letters were written down in ink:

It is art which makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

And then there is Henry James, himself, whose notebooks I have been reading in no particular order. One thing I love about them is how James would sketch out the plots of entire short stories, as though he was describing the story to someone, and in fact, you realize that people told Henry James weird and interesting stories all the time, and then he’d steal them and make something really terrific of them. Which makes me understand how it can be that people would sue someone like JK Rowling, because they too once thought it would be cool to set a story about some underage wizards in an English boarding school and maybe they were talking about it in some cafe in Edinburgh and a woman with a baby in a stroller who was sitting next to them was scribbling in anotebook the whole time they were talking and well. .. The thing is, you have to be Henry James (or JK Rowling) to really make that work; those stories you hear from people aren’t fiction until you apply some magic to them.

And although there is much, much more, I see that this is where I can put my favorite thing from Virginia Woolf”s Diaries, which are very long and have a lot of great things in them, but this is one of the best and most beautiful of all those things and a good place to end this post, which has done two things: made me realize how much I love books and kept me from that obsessive inbox refreshing thing, which is not refreshing at all:

to suppress oneself and run freely out in joy — such is the perfectly infallible and simple prescription. And to use one’s hands and eyes; to talk to people; to be a straw on the river, now and then — passive, not striving to say this is this. If one does not lie back and sum up and say to the moment, this very moment, Stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough.

One Advantage of Having a Bookcase in Your Office

Posted on May 17, 2009 by bloglily

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.

Winged With Death: John Baker is Here Today!

Posted on May 12, 2009 by bloglily

baker44 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.

Paper Love

Posted on March 13, 2009 by bloglily

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

Posted on March 7, 2009 by bloglily

recent-books1

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 Gu nther, 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.

Friendship

Posted on January 1, 2009 by bloglily

alice-mattison

Of the many reasons we read, to be shown something you haven’t seen before is at the top of my list. Alice Mattison’s novel, Nothing is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, does just that. This book has at its center a mysterious friendship between two very different women — flashy, confident Marlene, and quiet, worried Gert. From the outside, which is the way Mattison shows us the friendship, they seem an unlikely pair. Gert’s daughter, Con, whose story this mostly is, watches the two women, longs for something like her mother’s friendship with Marlene and worries – about her own daughter, her work, her lost purse, her mother’s health. These are familiar concerns, but Mattison is such a careful, brilliantly thoughtful observer that you see these people with startling clarity, the way you see fish at the bottom of the ocean on a calm day.

Mattison’s great subject in this novel and in her earlier work is friendship. Although I have written and thought about many things, it’s never occurred to me to look too closely at friendship. But for days after finishing this wonderful book, I found myself thinking a great deal about my friendships. There’s a lot to say, but it seems appropriate, on this first day of the year, to begin by saying how grateful I am for my friendships, which are rich, interesting, comforting and helpful. In the three years I have been writing this blog, many of you have become my friends, if you weren’t already. That I would find friendship here is an unexpected pleasure of blog writing.

Happy New Year to all of you!

Author, Author: Lisa Alber

Posted on December 29, 2008 by bloglily

lisa

This is the fourth of what I hope will be many interviews in the Author-Author series.

I’m grateful to the many readers of this blog for posing most of the questions I’ve asked in these interviews. Without that help, I’m pretty sure nobody would have agreed to be interviewed. So, thank you, dear readers and I hope you enjoy the fruit of your labors.

Lisa Alber is a novelist and short story writer. One of Lisa’s stories is forthcoming in a collection edited by novelist Elizabeth George called Two of the Deadliest (HarperCollins, April, 2009). Another of Lisa’s stories has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Thanks to a grant from Elizabeth George, whose workshops Lisa attended, Lisa is taking a year off from work to concentrate on writing.

Lisa graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in economics and a minor in Spanish literature. Later, while writing her first prose in the form of vignettes, she worked as a financial analyst in South America. Many years and many jobs later, the writing finally took over her life enough that she quit pursuing a “real” career altogether. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with a dog and a cat who appreciate that she’s home a lot.

How’s your work coming along these days?

I feel like I’m in a holding pattern at the moment. Trying to figure out the next step and asking myself a lot of questions. This is one of the difficulties of pursuing a career as a novelist: the need for patience and perseverance and a quiet mind. I recently completed the first draft of a novel, that, unfortunately, follows on a previous novel that my literary agent was unable to sell. So, what does that mean? Do I alter the current project so that it stands alone, or revise it, as is, with faith that both of the novels will find their public in the future?

Meanwhile, I’m reading through and revising an older novel that’s been sitting around awhile. I’m hoping that with revisions, it will be worthy of a send-off to my agent.

People love to hear how writers overcome difficulties- the long slog of getting from a brilliant idea to the end of a work, the strings of rejection so long they could circumnavigate the globe, the mean reviews, the weird reactions of loved ones to your work, the moment you see your book on the remainder pile. Can you talk about the dark nights of the soul and how you kept going, even though the lights seemed to be out?

Oh, man, I’ve got a story for this, but, unfortunately, I can’t tell you the villain’s name because he’s a local novelist of renown with many a groupie from his various workshops and writing groups. I wouldn’t say I was a follower, but at one time, I thought to learn something from him so I signed up for an weekend writing workshop in which each participant started off reading the first pages of a work. I had just begun my first attempt at my first novel. I was a babe-in-the-woods, trying to find my way, knowing nothing. To make a long story short, this renowned novelist provided no helpful feedback. Instead, he proclaimed the novel little better than the “trash” you’d see in airport bookstores.

There, in front of a room full of strangers, I cried. I managed to haul my tush back for the rest of the weekend, but my heart wasn’t into it by then, and I didn’t write for a long time after that. I was crushed. (What’s worse, the renowned novelist had the gall the psychoanalyze me, telling me that I certainly had daddy-issues – can you imagine?)

That period was a dark night for my writing soul, but in the end, after a long while, I took the novel up again as naturally as a baby learns to walk after falling. Some things can’t be denied, can they?

I kept a souvenir from the weekend that helped: a note that one of the workshop participants passed to me while I cried. She’d written: I think this is terrific. A glimmer of hope that I still have.

Why do you suppose so many people want to know where you get your ideas?

The way I figure it, some folks wonder about writers the way I wonder about math brains. It’s that fascination with people whose synapses fire in ways that seem unfathomable and almost magical.

I imagine that people who don’t write fiction might think WOW about us because writing stories could seem as impossible and magical to them as generating formulas does to me. Creating stories is kind of like magic, isn’t it? Who doesn’t want to know the magician’s secrets?

On a personal level, I suspect that people who know me wonder what’s going on my head because, truth is, in person I’m rather reserved, more likely to listen than to talk, and not likely to reveal too much of myself. I’m much better in writing, in other words, so sometimes I get the feeling that people wonder how it is that mundane-old Lisa has story ideas!

So then, where do you get your ideas, if I may ask?

I don’t know! That’s one of those questions I get a lot, and that I don’t know how to answer. In fact, I tried to document the idea-development process when I started my latest project so I could answer this very question. Here’s what my notes says:

1. Started feeling fear: what to write?

2. Started collecting “shiny things” – reading, reading, reading.

3. Eventually, an image stuck. The image included two people walking down a lane.

4. Asked myself: Who are these people?

5. Brainstormed like crazy – a messy process for me what included the age-old “what if?” questioning – and eventually ended up with a decent story idea.

6. Brainstormed on the initial story idea until it expanded out enough that I could do character analyses.

7. In-depth character analyses. It’s like the method-acting approach to story development. I do so much work on character development that I have oodles of material that doesn’t make it into the novels. During the analyses, plot points suggest themselves.

The business of being a writer – finding an agent, placing stories and poems in literary journals, getting a publisher to buy your stuff – can be difficult to navigate. What do you wish you’d known starting out?

This question is easy, and it was huge lesson to me: Do not rush to find an agent or publish your novel until you’ve revised and revised and revised! In fact, forget about the business-side of writing all together. Concentrate on learning your craft, take your time. The first novel I wrote didn’t land an agent because I sent it out too early. For the second novel, I did the opposite and landed an agent.

How do you balance the rest of your life with your writing life?

At the moment, I have an easygoing lifestyle with few responsibilities because I’m living on a writing grant. However, I don’t balance well. I have to live a simple life or I get too scattered and mentally fatigued. This is because I tend toward depression. I admire people who work and raise kids and clean house and workout and socialize and still manage to write write write.

But, I’m not like that, so I had to leap and leap big-time away from financial stability and career, and into the part-time freelance world. Since boundless energy isn’t one of my strengths, this was the balancing decision I made so that I’d have the energy to pursue fiction.

Do you think most writing is autobiographical?

Nope, and I may be a minority opinion. I have a narrow definition of what makes for semi-autobiographical fiction. Obviously, aspects of the writer litter her work, and I would bet that people who know me well would see me in my stories – flashes here and there. But is this autobiographical? Not to my mind. Is John Grisham, the former lawyer, writing autobiographically when he writes his legal thrillers? Not to my mind.

To me, using facts gleaned out of our lives isn’t necessarily autobiographical writing. That’s just writing what we know – in Grisham’s case, lawyering. However, taking the emotional resonance of an experience, place or time and centering a story around that, to me, is semi-autobiographical.

I have a friend who expressed amazement because I create my plots from scratch – they have nothing to do with my life. She, however, uses her life experiences as jumping-off points to generate plots. She said she’s not creative enough to come up with plots on her own (so to speak). I’m not an autobiographical writer, but I would say she is.

Lisa can be found online at Lisa’s Words at Play.

Skinny Dip

Posted on December 27, 2008 by bloglily

I can’t think of a better book than Carl Hiaasen’s Skinny Dip to read on vacation. I remember seeing this reviewed in the New York Times a few years ago and then I forgot all about it, until I found it sitting, absolutely free for the taking, on the bookshelf in the hotel where we’re staying.

The trouble with vacation books is that they’re often so poorly written or constructed that it’s impossible to enjoy them. This one isn’t like that. It’s an amusing, beautifully put together story of a woman whose husband tries to kill her while they’re on a cruise off the coast of Florida. He’s too much of a doofus to get it right, which is good, because the rest of the book is concerned with the revenge she wreaks on him, revenge that is both funny and breathtakingly appropriate. Let’s just say this: if the person you want to get revenge on is someone who lives and dies by his reproductive organ, then the best revenge is to make it increasingly difficult for that organ to function properly. Now, this could be incredibly un-funny, but Hiaasen doesn’t make a single misstep. He manages to find redemption for a character who seems impossible to rescue, the bad are punished appropriately, the good get the things they need. Along the way, there are pythons, and deeply tanned former police officers, and police officers from the midwest, and alligator road kill, and a whole host of Everglades descriptions, some of which make you want to weep when you see the stupidity of the people who participated in the despoilation of this part of Florida.

And now, I’m on to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is proving to be wonderful, but in a different way and Nothing is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, which is equally wonderful, but also in a different way.

Know, sweet love, I always write of you

Posted on December 4, 2008 by bloglily

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been writing a lot of new fiction and sending old and new fiction out to a lot of places. I keep thinking about my blog, and how much I love writing it and how lucky I am to know all the interesting and fun and smart and kind people who come over here and say stuff. But I haven’t posted, even though I have a series of great interviews to put up (Ingrid, the girl in the cafe is next, and then Lisa Alber and then Debbie Freedman…), which I’ll do this week. Mostly, that’s because every time I go to write something here, I think to myself that I always seem to write about the same things. That’s true of my fiction too.

And then I found this sonnet, one I’ve not read before, and it made me realize that it’s okay to write, over and over again, about the things that matter to us. It was okay for Shakespeare to do. And it is okay for me too:

SONNET 76

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

On Reading

Posted on November 15, 2008 by bloglily

I’ve spent my life reading fiction and poetry — anywhere from an hour, two hours, three, even six hours a day. I’ll bet a lot of us are like that: we’re the back-of-the-cereal-box readers, when we were kids, we walked home from the library while reading a book, we were late into the night readers with a flashlight under the covers (or, like my friend, C, the kid who read in the closet with the door closed after lights out). Some of us were driven to book stealing when we ran out (will my brother really notice I’ve taken his Captain Underpants book?)

And then we became adults and found even more things to read — Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Dickens, you know big fat wonderful books. Not to mention short stories and poetry.

Anyway, that’s what I was like until about four years ago, when I went from reading War & Peace in a week to reading a dozen books a year. It was writing that led to this stunning change in my relationship with words. There’s only so much time in a day, and the little time I had to devote to reading became the time I devote now to writing.

But you know what? Something great happened last week. I finished my novel edits. (And Barack Obama — oh how great is that? I still feel incredibly moved every time I think about him.) And I had time to read. With impeccable timing, Sandi Shelton’s new book, Kissing Games of the World, came out on election day, and arrived in my office, with the help of Amazon, the very next day.

You know, if you know anything about her, (that’s a link to the interview she did for this blog), that it’s a great book, but it’s made even more wonderful by the fact that Sandi has been such a lovely, approachable, encouraging presence — on her blog, on mine, and in my life. She writes me e-mails every once in a while; wonderful, inspiring, funny, interesting ones that give me heart and make me think I can actually accomplish things as a writer myself.

The great thing about Sandi’s book is that it’s both fun and beautifully written. You never feel like you’re being cheated when you’re in her generous hands — the characters are interesting, full of life, troubled, funny. And my goodness, that woman can pull you in. The book’s about a single mom whose life is turned upside down when the older man she lives with, a man who’s raising his grandson, dies and his son returns home to kick her out of the house and take his son home with him.

Now, that’s not the kind of book my husband ever reads (if they were on a boat while this was happening, maybe this would be different), but he picked it up the other night and he loved it. He laughed more than he ever has reading those books about grim sea voyages. And he e-mailed Sandi without even telling me, to tell her he really liked her book. He’s in good company. The book is getting terrific reviews, and rightly so.

So. Go out and buy it. Give it to people for Christmas. We need to support each other’s endeavors! Even more, we need books like this, books that remind us of what it was like to walk home from the library, glancing occasionally at the ground to make sure you aren’t going to trip, but mostly feeling like you are the luckiest person in the world because you’ve found a great, interesting, fun book and it was taking you to a different place, a place you liked being in. That’s how it felt to me, for the first time in a long time, and I’m so grateful to Sandi for her terrific timing and her wonderful book, which have reminded me again just how much pleasure there is in a story well told.

Me and Barack

Posted on November 3, 2008 by bloglily

Oh, it’s been an exciting month. Mostly for Obama, but for me too. I’m a few chapters shy of being done editing my novel for the FINAL time. In fact, I’ve set myself a goal: I’ll be finished by the time Obama is elected President. If he loses — well, he isn’t going to lose, that’s all I can say about that. The time to get stuff done is right now. Not four years from now.

Nothing like hitching your very small wagon to a juggernaut. I regret that I am unable to come up with any better metaphor for my slightly ridiculous and possibly unlucky goal — it’s the best I can do while I’m whacking away at my keyboard, trying to make sure that I didn’t call people by one name in the beginning and a different name in the end. I’ve wiped out one entire relationship and replaced it with a far, far better one, even if it doesn’t seem to be about to end happily. People are having more sex than they did in any other draft of this novel. It is suggestive, rather than anatomical sex, I’d like to assure you, in case you’re worried I’ve taken a month off to write porn. The minor characters are now, officially, a lot more real, even if they don’t get to be real for a lot of pages. The weather changes more, as do the points of view of some of the chapters. People drink an awful lot of coffee and ice water and beer in this book. They eat sausages and candied peanuts more than any other kind of food. (Brown bread and leberwurst make an appearance. So does a cake.) An adolescent appears and re-appears. Spelling? Check. Grammar? Check. German words? Check. Czech people? (sorry, that’s not really funny — but there are a lot of Czech characters. )

So that’s it, then: I’m typing, typing, typing. I’m also eating Halloween candy and hoping I didn’t jinx the entire presidential election by confidently predicting that both Barack and I will be finished with the thing we’ve been working on for a long time by midnight tomorrow. I think hope is a great thing — and I’m going with it today. I know many people feel it is best to be restrained and concerned today, and some are even spinning out scenarios in which McCain will somehow snatch this victory from Obama. That strikes me as terribly unlikely. This feeling that good things won’t happen, that people won’t vote out of the best in them, but instead will go into the voting booth and suddenly become racist and fearful makes a lot of sense given the nightmare that has been American politics in the last eight years. But bad things aren’t going to happen tomorrow. It is Obama’s singular achievement to have made that unlikely to occur, and it is one reason he is going to be a great president. So, while I am not celebrating something that hasn’t occurred yet, I think it’s equally important to go into the next day or so paying attention to something that’s so new and different it’s hard to believe it’s happening. But it is. Obama marks a paradigm shift in American politics, an enormously hopeful one. And that is something to be proud of and confident about, for the first time in a long time.

And how have all of you been?

(Wednesday I have lots of exciting writing news about OTHER PEOPLE to report. Interviews to post. Books to write about. It’s so lovely to almost, almost, almost be where I want to be.)

BlogLily

\”it must give pleasure\” — Wallace Stevens

Category Archives: Books