Stuff on a Stick

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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

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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

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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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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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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.