Should You Go to Law School?

Posted on
21

Bonus points if you can guess who this is

My answer:  probably not.  Here’s the e-mail I just sent to a kid who asked me for advice about whether he should apply to law school.

Dear Young Wanna-Be Lawyer,

Thanks for your note! Teach for America sounds like such a good program — good for you for doing it.  As for law school, here’s my advice: the market is incredibly tough for all kinds of entry-level jobs, from law firm jobs to government positions.  The days of people with English degrees going to law school, doing well, and getting whatever job they wanted, are long gone.

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.  After all, if it’s THAT hard to get a job, maybe it will make you wonder, as it’s making you wonder, whether this is something you REALLY want.   If I had to do it again, I’d only go to law school if I loved the law, or thought I did — or if I had something I really wanted to accomplish as a lawyer and felt driven to do it and saw the law as the proper instrument for that.

I don’t know if you’re the person whose destiny it is to be a lawyer, but I think it’s worth spending some time really thinking about what kind of work you’d do for free because you love it so much. That’s the kind of work you should pursue. And if what you love doesn’t come in job form at all, because maybe what you love pays nothing, then you might want to consider getting a job that allows you to pursue the thing you love, a job that isn’t going to demand all your time (which is very much what being a lawyer requires, at least in the beginning.)

The truth is that being a lawyer in the wrong job is hell. Being a lawyer doing work you really believe in and enjoy is heaven. The latter is a rare situation, but if you’re that person you WILL find a job — a job that doesn’t pay much, but a job nevertheless. But whatever you do,  stay out of debt, keep your expenses to a minimum and do the thing you’re pretty sure you love.  I wish someone had told me this when I embarked on my own legal career, which is why I tell it to you.

All the best to you,
Lily

So, here’s my question, dear readers — are you doing what you love?  If so, how did you get to that point?  What advice did you get that got you on that track?

And if you’re not, how come?  I could write volumes about my own twisting trail to becoming a lawyer and THEN a writer, when maybe I could have skipped the lawyer part altogether and gotten right to the writing part.   But this morning, I’m really interested in what you have to say.

Beds! Beds! Beds!

Posted on
12

Some Bed

Yesterday,  I bought three beds.  I know.  That’s a shitload of beds.  Maybe I shouldn’t have had so much coffee and increased my dose of antidepressants.  Still, talk about good deals.  I bought them all on craigslist, which I think is not capitalized, because it is the invention of 30-something people who don’t capitalize anymore.  They also end declarative sentences with question marks.  A tentative bunch,  don’t you think?

Well, I’m here to tell you that, under the influence of caffeine, antidepressants, and a tax refund, I bought three bed frames and two mattresses for $900.  Total.  Not tentatively at all.  Now, that’s a lot of money, but I will tell you that if I’d been insane enough to buy those beds in the actual stores they come from, I’d have paid $4,000.  Also, the people in this family have not slept on real beds and/or beds that fit them for YEARS.  It’s time for some changes around here.

As it turns out, there’s a trick to this kind of shopping — and you can scale it down, if you don’t happen to be under the influence of the above-mentioned stimulants and/or all you need is, say, a bike you can ride around town with, a bike for which you have, say a $100 budget, and your eyes on a $500 bike.

I give you this information totally free, although I really should be selling it on the internet.

Get yourself on craigslist.  You have to live in a big city to do this, by the way, although if you have friends in big cities, they could act as your agents, although how you’d get your new bed to your small town, I’m not sure.  But it would definitely work with a bike.  Your friends will, without a doubt, be coming to visit you in your small town, which we all know is mellower and more beautiful than a big city.  And they will schlep your purchase to you.  In fact, if you live in a charming small town I can reach in a car without a ton of trouble and you would like me as a visitor, I’m happy to be your craigslist agent.  For a bike, or a bike-sized piece of furniture (aka ottoman, desk, and/or chair).  Maybe not a bed.

Step one:  Know what you want.  The name, the retail price, or at least the style and type of thing.  Know how much you’re willing to spend.  Don’t deviate too much because you think you’re getting a great deal.  It’s not a great deal if it’s something you don’t need.

Step two:  Scope out the sellers.  The best sellers are people who (a) have suddenly come into a lot of money (software startup people,  recent biz school graduates with no family,  college students, whose families have decided — wrongly, in fact — to give their kids a lot of cash to buy stuff to furnish their first apartments and people in jobs that require them to leave the bay area to go to some other metropolitan area to work in a soul sucking,  but money producing job), (b) have to leave town fast (because they, just for example, sold their startup to google, are moving to Manhattan to further destroy the world’s economies, got  kicked out of school and have to return home), (c) never liked the stuff they bought anyway.

You don’t necessary have to have all of these things, but it helps if you have two.  I will also say that I don’t mean to sound cynical or snarky about craigslist sellers.  The three people I bought my beds from where (a) a charming and generous Italian software startup guy who’s moving back to Italy; (b) a very patient, business-like, thirty-something guy with great taste who’s moving in with his girlfriend and doesn’t need his BEAUTIFUL bed, and (c) a very hip guy in the Castro who was incredibly sweet and is moving into a less noisy, but smaller apartment.   One thing these people have in common is that they are all (a) guys and (b) on the move and (c) without a family.

Step 3.  And then you find what you want, waiting until you do, and then you offer immediate cash and immediate removal of the item.

Step 4.  Safety.  I like to think of this as recycling, in which objects do not have to continue being made just because somebody’s moving to Manhattan.  I also like meeting new people.  Sure, occasionally I think I am going to be murdered, or someone tells me I am (bargains can be dangerous!) but really, it’s so much fun that I’ll take the risk.   (Plus, I google the people first, and/or visit them in public in the daytime or with a bodyguard, aka, the husband.)

Now, here’s the real safety tip:  I have one inviolable rule, one that has turned out to work beautifully in my craigslist adventures, which I have obviously lived to speak about.  I only buy stuff from people who can write a decent e-mail.  They must know how to punctuate and spell.  They must write in complete sentences.  For some reason, I just don’t think that somebody who knows how to write a good e-mail, one that doesn’t give off a whiff of  ”I’m nuts,” will kill me when I show up to buy their Room and Board bed.  I could be wrong.  I’ll have my heirs let you know if that happens.

Yes, I am aware that buying beds raises the dreaded bedbug issue.  I’m going with unlikely on that one, but I’ll tell you if it happens.  Although, would you want to know?

Finally, in news unrelated to beds, my agent sent me his notes on my book.  Great ideas.  He’s such a smart guy.  And I’m working through them.  They seem to require that I change the ending and give characters slightly different motivations and fears.  It’s fun.  It’s also terrifying.  Plus, I gave a couple of characters new names.  I enjoyed that — it’s sure not something you can do in real life.  I just hope the people I know who happen to have those names don’t get mad at me.

Genre Queen

Posted on
16

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

Posted on
17

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

Posted on
14

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

Posted on
18

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.

Carnival

Posted on
6

someday we'll wrap something with those ribbons

First of all, I’m aware we’re supposed to be in the ashes-on-the-forehead part of the Lenten season, if you’re one of the people who participates in that particular religious season.  But I don’t have any ash pictures to festoon this post, and also I believe in festooning, and ashes just don’t do that.  Ever.   But there is the bowl full of Christmas ribbons and the masks a kid brought home from a trip, so what better festoon-ish thing than THAT, I ask?

Second of all, I’d also like to say that I’m not very fond of the ashes-on-the-forehead anyway.  Probably this is because my mother never took us to the Wednesday mass where they rubbed the ashes into your forehead.  This wasn’t because Wednesdays were inconvenient either.  After all, she took us to everything else, being a woman who totally touched all the bases as she hit the grand slam homer that is the Catholic mother who gets five children to church ever single Sunday of their childhood.  Plus, a couple of us were confirmed, even though I’m pretty sure we weren’t really feeling it.   My small act of confirmation rebellion was to give myself a boy’s name (I believe I chose Nathan), just so I could bug the bishop who was there to confirm us.  My friend, Margaret Daheim was, I believe, Nicholas.

I’m pretty sure my mom didn’t like the ashes because they were a downer.  Lent’s enough of a downer, what with all the fish and the giving up of chocolate.  This Lent, I figure it’s enough to plunk the bowl of ribbons and the mask right in the middle of the living room, so we can all remember that life’s a silly enough affair, and we should never take anything too seriously, and never so seriously that we smudge burnt up things on our foreheads.

Which brings me to Montaigne (a book!  yes!  a book!  It’s like I’m sneaking ground up carrots into your jello or something.)  I recently read Sarah Bakewell’s really terrific biography of Montaigne (Michel, de). And one thing I wrote down, because I liked it so much (and I ended up liking HIM so much) was this thing he said, which is directly applicable to not taking oneself too seriously:

“If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense.  Get rid of it, I cannot without getting rid of myself.  We are all steeped in it, one as much as another, but those who are aware of it are a little better off — though I don’t know.”  -Montaigne

So:  Don’t take yourself too seriously.   Change your mind every once in a while (“though I don’t know”).  And eat some chocolate.

Have a fabulous weekend.

Cheating on Paper

Posted on
19

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.

It’s Endless Until It’s Over

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14

Summer.  I keep wanting to photograph it, but my camera disappeared into teen world, where it’s being used to document gravity-defying skateboard tricks.  Surely, the looks told me when I asked for it back, a mere peach cannot compete with anti-gravity.

Maybe not.  But they are everywhere, these peaches.  And even though I know that one day in a month or so from now they’ll be gone, they feel permanent.  That’s what the deep middle of summer feels like.

Why I Love the French

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6

far better to have a silver bee land on your tea pot than the real thing

Happy Bastille Day.  Bastille Day is not, actually, why I love France and the French.  I love France and the French because of our friends P and M, who I met when I was in my twenties. I spent a lot of time in M’s kitchen, drinking un-English tea (it was fruit scented black tea, and I loved it almost as much as I loved her) out of an old silver teapot that had a bee on its lid.  I adored that teapot, the way the lid lifted back on a hinge and the bee seemed to be looking around and approving the whole set up.  I spent years trying to find one like it, and I never did.  I did find the tea, however, on a trip to Paris.  You can buy it in the supermarket, as it turns out. 

It was a long time ago, but I can still remember how shocked I was to meet someone my age who owned objects with patina.  By the time I was twenty-four, this is what I had left from my childhood:  my high school yearbooks, a button from a pink robe my grandmother gave me one year for Christmas, the copy of Wuthering Heights the librarian at Hof Army Base in Bavaria gave me when I was in the fourth grade, and a small tin with a silver lid that was engraved with Rembrandt’s Night Watch, which I found on the window sill of the house we rented in Bavaria when my dad was stationed there. 

M had, in addition to the aforementioned tea pot, what seemed like hundreds of family pictures, some in very nice frames.  She also had marble obelisks on her coffee table along with big wooden balls, whose only function was to be large and interesting, as far as I could see.  She had a little bar cart and nice glasses. She was not afraid to have a large purple couch, which was actually more than a little shabby.  The pillows on it were made out of something that looked to me a lot like a rug.  I imagine these possessions were the tip of the iceberg, given that most of what she owned was back in Paris.  She also had a château and a title, both courtesy of her husband, which was news to me because I hadn’t been aware that titles even existed anymore, not after all the heads were chopped off.  So, I loved her, because she was One Hundred Percent Not Me.  And she was One Hundred Percent Her French Self. 

I also loved the way she looked at things.  In her dining room, she hung twenty four botanical prints she’d found in a book at a used book store ($1) and framed with frames from the Big Longs Drug Store, where you could buy anything.  Those botanical prints looked as good as everything else in her house. 

The funny thing is that they loved us too. In their eyes, we had nothing weighing us down.  We were “mellow,” we did not worry, we were spontaneous, we weren’t in a hurry.  They liked the way we dressed, particularly my husband in his uniform of levi 501s and t-shirts.   

 But mostly, we loved each other because we had so much in common.  M and I were readers.  Serious ones.  She, of course, had twice as many books available to her for reading purposes than I did because she could read in both English and French.  We were also talkers.  We liked to discuss why the French see things the way they do and the Americans, well, the Americans don’t see them that way.  We talked about taxes, and child rearing and medicine. We talked about our husbands, who were obviously not ever going to talk about us to each other, being so similar themselves.  P and my husband were windsurfers, and skiiers and cyclists.  Neither of them liked to delve into the emotional.  They mostly just liked conquering water, snow, and roads, which they did together for a long time. 

Now they live in Belgium, and we see each other sometimes, but not very often.  I miss them.  I miss seeing myself through their eyes, and I miss that teapot.  Happy Bastille Day, P&M.

David Mitchell’s Thousand Autumns of the Dutch Accountant Whose Name I Can’t Remember

Posted on
9

Here follows a demonstration of what happens when you write a book review after you’ve both finished the book and managed to misplace it, which is what has happened to me in the last 48 hours with David Mitchell’s Thousand Autumns of Jacob Somebody or Other.  Also, this is what happens when you write a book review without even once using the internets to verify your facts.  (Why am I not using the internets?  I don’t know.  I thought it would be fun is the closest I could come to an answer.)

But most likely you, dear reader, have been hearing about this book and don’t need me for facts.  It’s certainly easy enough to find the book — just google the phrase “thousand autumns” and bob’s your uncle.  (I just now realized that I have no uncles left.  It is the one year anniversary of my Uncle Martin’s death.  My Uncle Marin was a classic:  a basque from Susanville.  I have his thermos, the heavy duty one he took to the many construction jobs he worked on, and it reminds me that it’s good to have caffeine when you labor.  But goodness, how I digress.)

Anyway, back to David Mitchell.   First, I’ll say that without question the most tedious (both to write and to read) part of a book review is the plot summary.  For years, I’ve been trying to get away with not doing these in the reviews I write on this blog.  I know, I hardly ever write reviews.  And the ones I do write are so slim on plot details as to be maybe useless.  Which is why it is a constant source of amusement to me that publicists send me emails every week or so asking me to review what look to me like very, very good  books.  Every once in a while I ask for them to send me one, but then I don’t review it because, well, there’s the plot summary hurdle.  I can’t get over it.  That’s why I’ve been yammering on about my uncle and the people who want to send me free books.   I’m procrastinating.  (I would like to add, however, that I would review those books, except I’ve never received one I really loved.)

In a few words, David Mitchell’s book is about a red haired Dutch accountant who finds himself in a Dutch trading outpost, a little no man’s land of an outpost, outside of Nagasaki, which the Dutch aren’t allowed to enter.  Not much anyway.  It is set in the 18th century.  Naturally, the red haired Dutch accountant falls in love with a Japanese woman.  In a Shogun-like plot development, he woos her, and in a further Shogun-like plot development, this wooing leads him to a greater understanding of Asian culture.  Also, things go wrong, as they do in novels.  Is that enough plot description?  I hope so because it’s all I have the strength for.

Did I like it?  I did indeed.  I wasn’t so crazy about the bad guy, whose badness credibility is established by (a) his ability to kill people with mysterious hand waving and (b) his leadership of a weird (shinto, it is said) cult, which spirits women away to be brood mares, and worse.  Really, I could have gone all summer without weird sexual rituals popping up in the books I read.

Other than that, and the occasional overwrought writing you kind of expect in books about Europeans going to Japan in the 18th century and falling in love with women who’re midwives, and scarred but still beautiful, it’s a totally captivating book.  I will not go on and on about how Mitchell is an up and coming literary writer, because I did not read Cloud Atlas (not liking to have to handle six different narrative voices at once) and because I don’t think it’s necessary. Worse than plot summary is too much yammering on about the author’s (a) age, (b) book jacket picture, and (c) fights with Oprah, which, I’m fairly certain, Mitchell has never had, being English, and looking quite young and sort of sweet in his book jacket picture.

It’s a good summer book.

And that’s what a review that skimps on plot summary and is written without internet assistance looks like.

on waiting for the bus

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9

we waited 20 minutes -- and this wasn't actually our bus. I was too excited when our bus arrived to take its picture.

I’ve spent roughly 620 hours of my life waiting for buses, and at least 375 of those hours involved waiting for the number 51 bus in Berkeley, CA.  I took that bus all through grad school and law school at Cal — the stop is right across the street from a fraternity, which provided either an entertaining way to while away time while waiting for the 51, or excrutiating, depending on the day of the week, the level of drunkenness at the frat, and how late the bus was running that particular day.  I’ll let you guess how many hours fell into each category.

One clue:  I’ve never longed for the time when I could go back to using the bus for all my transportation needs.

It turns out I’ve become less impatient, and apparently I’ve seen so much public drunkenness that I don’t even notice it anymore.  As a result, when we were in Seattle, and had all the time in the world, waiting for the bus that took us from downtown Seattle to the Fauntleroy ferry terminal was not a problem.  In fact, because it was the day of the gay pride parade, it was pretty entertaining.  Although really, I think the S&M contingent could have toned it down some.  The guy with the multi-color painted penis?  Needed to stay home.  Ditto the ladies with the targets painted on their breasts.  After William and I walked away from that, and I said I didn’t think I’d be able to scrub those images out of my head, he advised me to think about ballerinas.  Apparently, it works every time.

We waited a long time for that bus.  And even though I’ve become mellower about waiting, I still love that moment when the bus comes into view.