Category Archives: Reading

Genre Queen

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It could, of course, be Genre King.

I am not an ambitious woman.  Well, not any longer.  It  is true that, at one time, I wanted to be either the pope or the president, career paths I am clearly unsuited for, one by reason of biology and the other by reason of being utterly unskilled at making any kind of enterprise involving more than one participant run well.  Very briefly, I also thought I might become a partner at the big law firm where I landed when I graduated from law school, but the work was so soul suckingly boring, and I was so spectacularly bad at it, that this ambition ended ten minutes after I hung up from my first phone call with a lawyer on the other side.  ”You’re unethical,” he hissed.  ”You lied to me.  Where are my documents?  You said I’d get them all.  I didn’t get them all.  You’re unethical.”  It went on and on and on.  At some point, I should have said, “You’re an asshole,” but I didn’t.  Instead, when the horror was over, I hung up the phone, put my head on my desk and moaned and vowed that I would never again harbor any ambitions of any  kind.  I would be an underachiever.  People would be pleasantly surprised when I managed to do anything of note.

But you see, it’s also true that for my entire life — ever since I knew this particular job existed — I’ve wanted to write stories.  And it turns out I do indeed have an ambition.    It came to me the other day when I was reading an article about a kerfluffle in the literary community involving a woman who writes literary fiction.  Her advice to young writers?  Aim high.  Do not write derivative crap.  For some reason, this made people who write genre fiction mad because they felt insulted and made people who write literary fiction mad in her defense.  And me?  I just thought, “Okay, then.  I  will write the BEST genre fiction there is.” I will never be a literary innovator because I am not interested in literary innovation — but I can certainly aim high enough to write really terrific genre fiction.  So, that got me to thinking about whether there was such a thing as excellent genre fiction, and that got me to thinking about the day when fiction was not divided into genre and literary.  Wilkie Collins, for example, just wrote fiction.  It was mystery-type fiction, but it was shelved in Victorian libraries (if they even shelved things in any kind of order), relatively close to Dickens, who wrote just fiction too, fiction which also often had secrets and mysteries at its heart.  Like, who’s my real mother?  Who’s my father?  And what happened to all my money?

Really, all I want is to write stuff that’s so entertaining and so beautifully written that people will close my book and think,  ”Wow.  That was worth the money.  Plus, what a nice cover.”  I do not want them to close the book and feel sort of bad, the reading equivalent of eating a big mac, plus fries, plus some frozen dessert thing.  That is what it feels like to read crappy derivative fiction and we all know that that sort of stuff is filed both in the genre section and the straight on fiction section.

Genre Queen.  That’s what I want to be.  And how do you achieve THAT?  Well, first you write the things you love to read.  If you happen to love genre fiction, as I do, particularly spy books and mysteries, then you write that.  And you learn how those stories are structured by reading them carefully.  And then you write one of your own, but you tell your own story, the one about a place you lived when you were a child, or a man you loved once, or an event that has never left you.  And you ask questions you’re afraid to ask, and then you go ahead and try to answer them, all the while using the form you really like to read as a way to answer them.  That’s what I do anyway.

It turns out that the great thing about becoming Genre Queen is that you don’t have to marry Genre Prince and wait for his grandmother to die in order to achieve your goal of being Queen.  Also, you will never have to worry that people will find out what your wedding dress looks like before you show up in your Rolls Royce and step out to the oohs and ahs of the world.  (Gack.  Who ever would submit to that kind of thing?  Crazy.)  It turns out there can be a couple of Genre Queens and Kings.  PD James is one.  So is Dorothy Sayers.  Eric Ambler.  Sometimes John LeCarre.  Me, I’m a Genre Scullery Maid at this point.  I’m aiming for Genre Lady in Waiting next.  After that, who knows?  There’s a lot of room on that throne.

Mother Ghost

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I’ve been doing a lot of writing, but very little writing here on the blog. I have been shy about discussing my writing career because I haven’t really known the rules about what you should say and shouldn’t say. Having never had any rules at all in writing this blog, it’s really shut me up to think there might be some rules I don’t know anything about.

This morning, I e-mailed my agent to ask him if there WERE any such rules. So, we’ll see what he says. I’d like to talk about The Secret War and the loooooong road to getting that book ready. And maybe I will. (I mean, how much of a surprise is it to know that it’s been a looooong road to finishing that book?)

For now though, I wanted to say that I’ve been reading a really fun book about creativity — it’s by Lynda Barry, the cartoonist, and it’s called What Is It. (Or is that what it is?) Because she is fun, she has invented a fun exercise for doing some image-based writing that I’ve really enjoyed. It goes like this: pick a word(don’t worry — she has plenty of words)/flesh out the word (asking the famous who/what/where/when/why questions you learned before you knew you didn’t want to be a journalist)/orient yourself in the word  by doing a very cool thing:  asking what was below you, above you, to the right, to the left, and behind you? Got all that down?   Well, then, write for seven minutes about the word.

I did this.  I did it mostly because I was so sick of typing and the instant I realized you could do this on notebook paper in a three ring binder, my heart was full of love for Lynda Barry.  Plus, you can use colored pencils if you want.

I figured out how to use our scanner (who knew we even HAD one? — but we did). And because it’s almost mother’s day, I’m going to start posting Mother pieces, because the word I used was “other peoples’ mothers”). Okay, it was a phrase.  Shoot me.  It’s about the mother of a boy I loved once. Don’t worry, though, this is not about to become a blog where I post my seven minute writing exercises. I wouldn’t like to read that (well, I would, actually, if the pieces were short and illustrated).

PS:  That first line begins “I was in her dining room.”  It might be mistaken for a sentence that suggests I was in some kind of herding room.  I was not.

Bask, dude

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If those boards weren't so hard, I'd totally be out there basking with archie

While Archie’s out there acting like there’s nothing to do (and there’s not.  not really.  He’s a DOG), I thought I’d record what’s happening here in the bloglily house at 2:58 p.m. today.

First, though, I thought I’d mention that I have, in fact, been reading.  A book called  The Information Officer.  It’s set in Malta during WW2.  Pretty good.  Every once in a while you get a couple of pages written from the point of view of the murderer, who’s very creepy.  I don’t think I’ve seen that ever.

Speaking of narrators, the novel I’m writing has a first person narrator so I’ve been thinking of who’s written a book that has a worthwhile (as opposed to creepy or, worse, boring) narrator.  Which means I read some of Huck Finn.  I love this, from the last paragraph of Huck Finn:  ”there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it and ain’t agoing to no more.”

Me, I’ve got to tackle it.  It’s too late to do anything else.   I’ve written 30,000 words or so and there’s no going back.  This is all part of my goal this year which is to earn some money from writing, and I’ve got to SELL SOMETHING to do that. Stay tuned.  My agent is going to be sending me some notes one of these days (like soon, he says), and I’m going to make every change he wants (even sooner, I say), and then …. hold your breath here …. maybe he will SELL IT!

when they lit out for the territories, did they already know how nice it is here? Well, it is. It is spring, baby.

And at 2:58 I was listening to Shakira who is, in addition to being an ambassador of good will around the globe, wakes up 2:58 like nothing else.  Particularly, after Matt Nathanson who is so sad, so very, very sad.

2:58. Shakira. And right after that, the f* you song, which I love and will not apologize for loving.

Let’s see.  In addition to dogs, literature and music, we also have ART in the bloglily household.  Okay, not exactly art.  Decorative art.  (Isn’t that what they call rugs?)  So, my current big project involves making our house look relatively normal, a place where we can actually be comfortable, which, I will admit, we often have not been.  Presently, I am tackling the room formerly known as the-storage-closet-where-mom-and-dad sleep, a room I have now taken to calling “my bedroom.”  We have lived in this house for almost 15 years and I finally put curtains up.  Also, I ordered a rug.  And it came today.  And it is going in my bedroom.  Yup.  The same place where the stuff on a stick lives.

curtains on right; and yes, the stuff on a stick has so weighed down the stick that it looks like a safety patrol captain telling everybody to stop right there so the earrings can cross without getting hit by a truck

It’s now 3:16.  The river that is life continues to flow.  Only Archie knows how to stop it, because he lives in the timeless place where all dogs live on sunny days.

Stuff on a Stick

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Stick in a Vase .99 (excluding cost of jewelry)

I spent an hour this morning looking for something that would restore order to the heap of earrings and necklaces I usually keep in, well, a heap.  It was a Sunday morning kind of inquiry, the kind that’s not really all that important, but you’re drinking tea and the computer’s right there, so why not?  I found something really quite beautiful to hang my jewelry on — a manzanita branch nestled in a wooden base. It was 98 bucks.  No kidding.  Almost ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS.  Yes, beautiful.  No, not that beautiful.  I mean, even if I happened to have a spare 98 dollars, I wouldn’t use it to buy a manzanita branch nestled in a wooden base.  Anyway, I went outside to clear my head and calm down and noticed that a twig had snapped off our azalea bush.  (I think it’s an azalea, anyway.)  How did it get snapped off?  I wondered about that for a minute, but I’m pretty sure it was the same kid who was, earlier today, looking at a youtube video called “Rugby Fight” that had, no lie, almost three million views.   Kid + Rugby Ball + Inspiring Youtube Video.  Enough said.

Yes, I know.  You know exactly what I did.  I took the 99 cent vase I got at IKEA, put all my ceramic pie weights in it (cost zero because next time I make a pie I can dump them out of the vase and use them) and stuck the stick inside the vase.  HAHAHAHA.  And then I hung my jewelry on it.

Stuff on a Stick

And to make this a book/reading post that is at least marginally related to the topic of where to put one’s jewelry, I’d like to say that Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra was really wonderful, told as it is from a more feminist perspective and giving Cleopatra her due as a very smart woman, an amazing tactician, and a pretty charming diplomat.  If Cleopatra kept some of her earrings on a stick, it would definitely  be a gold one and it would be be loaded down with a lot more impressive swag than my own.  Still, she ruled Egypt.  Me, not so much.

Cheating on Paper

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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.

Parrot and Olivier

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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.

In an Utterly Unprecedented Move

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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.

Can You Bake a Cherry Cake?

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cherry cakeEvery 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!

One Advantage of Having a Bookcase in Your Office

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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!

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baker44Raise 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?

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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.

Flash!

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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)

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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

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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

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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.

Womanizer

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Lately, whenever I turn on the radio, there’s Britney Spears, singing, in her weird techno-baby voice, about how  thoroughly she has repudiated the charming womanizer she spends an awful lot of time cooing over in that song, which is, of course named after him:  Womanizer. 

Ah, but if she had ever met Tomas, the womanizer at the center of Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, well, she’d obviously be singing a different tune.  But for that to happen she would have to become someone she is not, which is to say, a character in a twentieth century European novel of ideas, one of the few places I can imagine Tomas existing and not getting roundly punished for his philandering ways.  

Say what you like, but I love novels in which people behave in ways that are conventionally seen as bad (I don’t mean murderers or rapists, I mean people who don’t behave according to more workaday social norms), and yet they don’t end up being punished. Instead,  they’re seen as interesting.  They aren’t always happy, and they don’t always make other people happy.  Bad things happen to them, mostly because they return to Prague from Geneva and get kicked out of their medical practice and are crushed by communism.  But you get no sense that what happens to Tomas happens because he is a bad man who sleeps around. 

This is not the moral world of most novels.  I thought it might be interesting at this point to give you a catalogue of all the ways writers do women in after they decide to take lovers, or appear to have taken lovers:  they are run over by trains; they poison themselves (quite a few end this way, for some reason), they drown, they are choked to death and they lose their children.  And that is off the top of my  head in thirty seconds. 

Obviously, when women take lots of lovers they get punished.  But that’s not always true.  Mary Wesley for example,  never does that judgmental  punishment thing.  For her, as for Kundera, the interesting questions about promiscuity (I can’t think of a better word for it at the moment), have nothing to do with conventional morality, but more to do with how we love, how long love must last, and whether love and sex always must go together. 

And so what you discover about Tomas is that he takes lover after lover because he’s interested in what’s unique about women and sex is how he discovers that.  This behavior is painful and damaging to the woman he really does love, although she puts up with it without seeming like an idiot.  And, in the end, Tomas and Tereza seem to find some way to get beyond all the sex. 

There’s a lot more to this novel than sex — it’s about the Prague spring, and its aftermath, for one thing, and there are also other, very interesting lovers.  But today, I only have time for the womanizing part and my observation that there’s something refreshing about a book that can look at this stock character, the Womanizer, and see something different and quite complex, a vision that’s only possible when you write to understand rather than to judge, as Kundera so beautifully does.