Scenes From a Notebook

Finian's Rainbow

2009-12-10T13:51:00.002-05:00

Okay, I'm desperate to see this, even though I don't like musicals.

But I want to see Jim Norton on Broadway again, and I'm willing to sit through the kissing scenes and a lot of corny songs in order to do that. Not sure how we'll manage it, as we're both unemployed, but we will.

What is the Resemblance?

2009-10-06T08:06:00.000-04:00

Larry is working on an anthology that you can buy here. While working on this project, he's had the chance to edit the work of many different men, either in the form of essays or in their answers to quizzes that have been published online. This morning he said he was working on something from one man who is the father of another contributor. Larry said that he could see the resemblance between the two of them in their writing. Both men, father and son, had similar narrative habits, similar quirks. They both arranged their thoughts in a similar pattern. Both made the same type of grammatical mistakes. They had a likeness on the page, despite the vast difference in education between the two of them.

I suppose that shouldn't have been surprising, but it shocked me. Of course, you can resemble your parents in so many ways, in looks and personality and in behavioral tics. I never, never thought that this likeness would extend to the written word, to creativity itself. What a humbling notion. My father never liked to write, but when he did, he was pretty good at it. My mother never wrote at all, and never wanted to--as far as I know. I have always assumed that my career choice set me apart. Perhaps not.

And I watch G, who is 7 now, and who writes on the computer almost every day. He obsesses over Diary of a Wimpy Kid and wants to write a book just like it, chapter by chapter. A year ago, he was writing endless chapter books about a boy and his stuffed dog, just like Calvin & Hobbes. Who is he taking after?

Mister Roberts

2009-10-05T14:00:00.002-04:00

Larry took me to see the New Rep's version of this over the weekend. This was the first half of a birthday present. The second half will be the same theater's version of Speed The Plow.

How was it? Hard to say. The audience was deathly quiet, not a sound in the house. How extremely awkward it is to watch a bit of camp (a row of sailors looking through binoculars out into the audience, talking about and reacting to the naked women they're spying on) while the entire audience just sits and frowns at them. Not a whisper of indulgent laughter. Not even a cough. On one hand I wanted to react to the complexity of the scene. Five guys talking in turn, not stepping on each other's lines, all of it musical and wildly precise in terms of timing. And they're not looking at each other at all. It was amazing, but not a joke on which I cared to join in.

As a culture we may have outgrown campy humor pieces about war. It's supposed to be funny and touching as well. And it's about a man on the sidelines of war who really wants to be in the thick of it. An early reviewer suggested that the premise of the play is dated and I resisted this, but on second thought, it just might be true. What's interesting about the play for me was the fact that it started out as a series of short stories. Then was a Tony award-winning play, and then a highly successful movie--fifty years ago. There would be difficulties in staging something that started out as a series of episodes, trying to string them together into a dramatic arc at which something real is at stake very early on. It didn't happen, and that's the fault of no one involved in the current production. I wonder that audiences didn't notice the play's slow start before now.

Boy Meets Book

2009-09-17T12:15:00.003-04:00

So, the publisher sent along some copies of the boy book yesterday. G happened by as I was ripping open the box. I said, "Honey, look. It's my book."

"Yeah, so?" he said. And then: "Is this some kind of famous book or something?"

Well, no, honey. Not yet.

He took a copy, demanded to know who the kid is on the cover. (Don't know.) And then he sat down and paged through it, reading the subheads aloud and saying "boring" after each one.

He asked me to read some of it to him, and I did. I read the little section about boys loving bad guys and danger, and specifically natural disasters. It's a section about a mom whose boy came home from kindergarten asking pointed questions about the Titanic and how many people died and about drowning. G got a kick out of hearing this, so I got bold and and told him, "You know you're in this book a little bit."

That's a risk, and I knew it. Some kids hate the idea that their parents talk about them, and one mom I know had a complete revolt from her kids when one of them learned he'd been mentioned by name in a book--and it wasn't even her book. It was somebody else's book of essays, and it was just one mention. The kid didn't care. He was mortified that his name had been used in a book. Anyway, G took it okay. He said, "Oh, yeah? Where?" I told him that he was the kid who came home asking about the Titanic. A classmate had brought a book to school about it and afterward all the boys in his kindergarten couldn't get enough of talking and wondering about it. G smiled at the memory. And then he took the book from my hands and said, "Can I keep this?" It's in the bookcase in his room right now.

Secretly, I hope he never reads any more of it. It's not really about boys, after all. It's more about parents and teachers and pediatricians.

Photo of a Bookshelf

2009-09-03T15:17:00.004-04:00

My friend Grace sent this photo as proof that the book is on the shelf in a bookstore. So far, the coolest thing about this whole process is hearing from incredibly generous friends that they've bought the book or recommended it to people they know. No book can survive without this kind of support.

And here in this photo is proof that I have a friend who will drive to the bookstore, buy the book, and then take a picture of the remaining books on the shelf. Life is pretty good.

Amazon Ranking = Crack

2009-08-26T09:47:00.002-04:00

My friend Jack wrote two memoirs, Home Ice and Open Ice, both well-received, along with the novel, Saved, a book that found a large readership among women hockey players. All of them are wonderful books in which Jack's voice and his warmth are forever preserved. In the weeks following each release, I could always look forward to receiving emails from him that would contain his ranking in fantasy hockey as well as his ranking on Amazon.com.

In fact, he would sometimes break down the ranking for handy analysis. It always made me smile to learn that he was at 26,783 overall, but number 6 among hockey books and number 50 among sports books.

Now I know he was practicing restraint. The amazon page just sits open on my computer so I can refresh it every few minutes. In this way, I read a new meaningless number and have a new emotion about it. Micro elation if it goes up slightly, micro panic if it goes down. And all the while, there's bright sunshine outside. Someone down the street is mowing a lawn. Larry and the kids have gone off to the pool. I'm supposed to be preparing to teach tonight. This is crazy, far crazier than the phone call I got from my co-author yesterday announcing that he couldn't find the book in any bookstores. The store owners were insisting that the book hadn't come out yet, or they said they had it but couldn't find it. Hey, at least my co-author was outside, doing something active. We've both gone mad.

It's Out

2009-08-25T08:41:00.004-04:00

The summer is almost over and the release date (different from the pub date for reasons no one will explain) is here. The Way of Boys is available to purchase. You can buy it in hardback, or in electronic versions for the Kindle or the Sony reader thingy. And I think you can get it in installments on a cell phone. (And why would anyone do that? Again, no explanations are available.) When I started writing here the project was a quasi proposal, each draft of which was greeted by our agent with the same tepid response.

Somehow, during this summer I've lost the urge to write here--or anywhere. The only cure for dry spells is reading, so here is a list of books to read when you're wallowing in fear and self-loathing.

1. Tender at the Bone. Ruth Reichl's memoir about growing up with food against the backdrop of growing up with a crazy mother. I read Garlic & Sapphires first, which is much lighter, a fun account of being the NYT food writer. This one is better, a bit darker, as it must be and readable in one sitting. Plus, there are recipes. What strikes me about Reichl is her ability to be so generous toward the people in her past. I've now read all of her books this summer and may make a class prompt based on her work.

2. The Horned Man, by James Lasdun. He has a new book of short stories out (It's Beginning to Hurt) that I'll be reading this fall. It's selling really well in hardback, which is all you need to know about his popularity. In this bizarre and dark novel, Lasdun takes his unreliable narrator all the way to the edge and then pushes him over. The high point of the book comes about 130 pages in when the narrator describes an anecdote about spending time with his step-sister at an exclusive club to which he doesn't belong. He thinks he's getting along beautifully with her and her tony friends, and he's not. It's so beautifully told, with so much restraint, and it's so haunting (and creepy and sad).

3. The Time of Your Life. Okay, it's a play by William Saroyan, and not a book. But it's a lot of fun. Written in that little slice of time between the great depression and WWII, it is a play about a group of regulars at a bar, and the main character, Joe, is trying to help everybody with his money and this kind of New Agey optimism, and all the while despair keeps creeping in. The Broadway Theater Archive has a version of this with a very young Kevin Kline as the longshoreman, available on Netflix.

4. Twin Study. These stories by Stacey Richter have been a kind of lifeline during the past month. They are surreal and funny and cool, and I love almost all of them, which I can't normally say about a story collection. They have served as great inspiration.

Out Stealing Horses

2009-07-01T08:48:00.006-04:00

I'm reading this book right now (in English, of course, I just love the original cover) and it's lovely.

In other book news, a Grubbie friend is sending me her book, newly in paperback (French Women Don't Sleep Alone) so I'll be writing about that here soon. It promises to be a hoot, but an instructive one.

I'm also all set to read another Grubbie friend's novel (Tethered) this summer and will write about that one here, too. She just had her first rave review in a German newspaper, which is highly inspiring.

Summer Reading

2009-06-24T21:51:00.005-04:00

What's funny about vacation and reading on vacation is that it's supposed to be so different from the reading done during the rest of the year, and yet it isn't.

This past week, I started and finished a little novel called In the Shadow of Gotham, which purported to be one of those literary historical fiction novels and just didn't quite make it. The history in it seemed a bit thin, and the chosen time period, 1905, had very little relevance to the plot, and yet it was really very readable. Characters? I wish they'd had more emotional depth. Dialog? Stilted, although not quite as bad as what I read in another historical novel, one that was a runaway best-seller. Plot? Not quite as clever as I'd hoped. Yet, I'm not complaining. Or rather, none of these complaints stopped me from reading the book. Perhaps the only thing required of summer reading is that it can be snatched up and finished inside of 48 hours and it was. This makes me wonder what readability is made of. This book will probably be a success and I see great things in this author, who, if she can solve the problems of characterization, plot and research, will shine mightily. This might seem mean, but it isn't. These are small matters when you have readability on your side.

What's even more interesting is that my husband is now reading this book, and I keep stealing it from him, literally waiting for him to take off to make himself a sandwich so that I can quickly read a few pages. And yet it's a baseball book, and I have no use for baseball. My favorite line about televised baseball is that it's excellent background noise for napping. I've never understood the passion that some people have for it, for the history behind it. We have taken the kids to ballparks because that is a great cultural experience, one you really only need once. Jack and I used to go to Fenway once a year or so when you could still get tickets, which was some time ago. I don't understand the reverence for the players who are punks, nearly every one of them, punks in the rawest sense of the word. Ask anyone who has worked as a sportswriter and he will confirm this. And yet I crave this book. This is summer reading. It's the book you don't want to read, shouldn't read, hate reading, and frankly, can't put down.

The Book Video

2009-06-18T12:22:00.003-04:00

This is a video the publisher made to promote the boy book. I'm not sure how it will be used or where it will appear, but it's really cool. I love the boy they picked for this.

She Reads!

2009-06-11T15:12:00.004-04:00

So, S came home from kindergarten orientation the other day and she was very excited about going to school. She said, "I want to learn to read."

I was all warm inside at the thought of this and I said, "Well, honey, that's exactly what you're going to learn next year."

She was having none of that. "Now," she said. "I want to know now." I stammered and explained but she wouldn't give in. Off I went in search of these literacy books we bought the G-man when he was gearing up for kindergarten. He wanted nothing to do with them, of course and so we sort of forgot about them. After some frantic searching, I found the Bob's Books carton, empty of course. Then more searching yielded the first of several small paperbacks with little three letter words strung together in simple sentences.

S snatched them out of my hands and set to studying them. We went over the basics of sounding out words. After a few minutes, she had it. She read, "Mat sat. Sam sat. Mat sat on Sam." She read the book and was very pleased with herself. That night I found her clutching the books in bed. That's what she really wants. She wants to read by the night light like her brother does.

Finding a new reader is always a miracle.

Words to Write By

2009-05-20T07:33:00.002-04:00

I'm taking a writing class and the instructor likes to post inspirational quotes for us to read. My friend Jack used to do this when he taught writing classes. He would get to class early and write something on the board. I loved those quotes, but I never understood why he used them. I didn't really think that the students cared about them.

Now I'm clinging to these quotes.

One recent one came from poet Nikki Giovanni:

"Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't. ...If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy."

And yet I like this statement of hers even better:

"A lot of people refuse to do things because they don't want to go naked, don't want to go without a guarantee. But that's what's got to happen. You go naked until you die."

Favorite Music

2009-05-14T06:33:00.003-04:00

The kids like to listen to this channel on XM called "Kids Place Live." I've never liked to give in to the kid music thing because it can be so divisive. We have Sweet Honey in the Rock, which sets Larry's teeth on edge. We have another CD that is sort of like those corny old fashioned sing along things in which about 25 kids are singing "Bingo," but they're singing it as funk. The "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" song is like some kind of over the top Sinatra-esque thing. But kids are singing like that. The kids used to tolerate it, but now G shrieks and moans and rends his clothing if we play it.

Kids Place is okay, if you can get past the talking, of which there is a lot.

Their top four songs are:

1. The Butt Song. It's actually called "I've got a butt" and it's by this guy who calls himself Uncle Jim. Their favorite part is when the singer stops the song in order to call his mom and ask if he can use the word "butt" in a song. That and when he says that George Washington had a butt. And Abraham Lincoln.

2. The Mom Who Yells at Her Kids Song. This is the audio version of that mom who tallied up all the nagging that moms do in a day and sings it to the tune of the William Tell Overture. They think this is hilarious. We can't get out of the car when this is on.

3. That Enchanted Song. This is the best song from the movie. It's called a "Happy Working Song." Watching others clean, that never fails to satisfy. It's what being a kid is all about.

4. Henrietta's Hair. This is the only song they know by name. It's by Justin Roberts, and don't listen to it here or you'll be singing the chorus to yourself for days. There's room enough to spare up in Henrietta's Hair...

They also hate certain songs. Who doesn't?

The top four songs they hate are:

1. The Balloon One. There's a group called Lunch Money that does "indie rock for kids." Yeah. That's right. About 60% clever and 40% insufferable. And sometimes it's the other way around. I kind of like the song called "It Only Takes One Night to Make a Balloon Your Friend," but the very first notes of this song are enough to send G into spasms of dismay. That's why it's so fun to sing it loudly and way off tune at the dinner table when certain individuals are getting rowdy and not eating their vegetables.

2. Never Smile at a Crocodile. This is that old song from Peter Pan. I really like this version by Captain Bogg and Salty. It's silly in an old fashioned way. Both kids beg to have the channel changed when it's on, but I never can quite reach the button. Sorry guys. The channel is stuck. Too bad you're strapped in back there.

3. Peanut Butter Polka. This is by the Jimmies, and it's the kind of earnest and inclusive song that kids and parents can hate together. The message is that you can have your sandwich however you like. Well, duh. I'm a kid in suburban America. I have everything however I like. Or else.

4. Harry Belafonte. They hate his music. Are they kidding? First, I'm shocked that they play it on Kids Place Live. It's too cool, too retro, too 1960s. That's what I was listening to as a kid. My kids are having none of that. Too bad mommy needs to turn up the volume and sing along. They're horrified by that.

Nothing Personal II

2009-05-12T06:35:00.002-04:00

A few months ago, I described getting an anonymous acceptance letter from a journal. The journal in question sent me a pre printed card addressed to "Dear Writer." On this little half page, they wrote "We are happy to inform you that," and here they left a space in which the title of my story had been hand-written, "has been accepted to appear in a future issue of" (name of journal withheld). There wasn't a signature on this. There wasn't an address or email address on this paper. They offered no way to reach anyone.

I found online an email address for the publication or so I thought. And I wrote them a nice note saying that the piece had been accepted elsewhere, so they couldn't have first rights. If they want to publish it anyway, that's okay. If they didn't want to publish something that had already appeared elsewhere, that's okay, too. I gave them contact information for me. Nothing. No response for three months. I hear that this is uncommon but not unheard of. Many literary journals are run by college students who are pretty busy, and who may not have a firm grasp of business communication.

Then yesterday a little package arrived in the mail. It was the latest issue of this journal. Interesting. And on page 41 is my story, or at least the first two paragraphs of it, followed by a big blank space. Presumably the rest of the story would have fit in that space if only someone had read the galleys. Like me, for example, or the editor. Or anyone who had read the original. Or anyone at all, really.

The funniest part of this was the letter that accompanied the journal. This letter was again addressed to "Dear Writers" and it was a sort of chatty missive thanking us (I'm going to include myself here) for being "such a pleasure to work with" and further for "being so patient with the arduous publishing process." Uh...you're welcome. I guess.

Unlike the acceptance letter, this letter was signed by an actual person. Still no contact information for her or the journal. I found another email address inside the journal and sent a note to let the editor know that in my case the publishing process could have been a tad more arduous. Then I noticed that it's after May 1 and their offices are closed for the summer. Oh well.

Helen and the Rucksacks

2009-05-08T06:54:00.003-04:00

I've had very bad luck the past few weeks. The writing has been dismal. Awful. And I'm taking a class in which we're studying writers and borrowing narrative techniques from them. That's all well and good when the model text is great. Less so this week, when the model text is a book of aggressively cryptic poetry.

Last night I handed the book to Larry. "See what you make of this." I was sitting up in bed trying to write, trying to get a handle on this nonsensical assignment and I needed a second opinion. He read out loud the first line of the poem in which the narrator is having what must be a one night stand, but who has also decided that she's Helen of Troy. the first line is something like, "We had a drink and got in bed." So far so good.

Then, Larry read the second line which is about how a boat set sail in the narrator's mouth. He sighed. He read it quietly to himself. He read it out loud again.

Me: What the hell?

Larry: Oh, wait. The boat is her tongue and it's setting sail, you know, going out of her mouth.

Me: Yeah?

Larry: So, they're making out.

Me: And? That's it?

Larry kept reading out loud until he got to the line: "I found all the bric a brack of your attic gloom."

Larry: Bric-a-brack. She's licking his rucksack.

Me: Gimme the book. She is not.

Larry: She is! The boat in her mouth is licking his rucksack.

Me: It's Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy never licked a rucksack.

Larry: Are you sure about that?

Me: Do you want me to Google it? Gimme that.

Larry held the book out of my reach and kept reading until he got to the line about "the woven rope tethering me to this rotting joint."

Larry: What the fak is that?

Me: Bondage?

Larry: You gotta tee off on this bullshit.

He's Just Drawn That Way

2009-05-07T07:29:00.005-04:00

This is a line drawing of my husband, in which he looks like he escaped from the most wanted list that hangs in the post office, or from a wall of those tacky caricatures of mobsters and celebrities that you find in some Italian restaurants. It was created for a book project he's working on, which is a good project and one that will likely be published, although nothing is certain these days. Don't know why the contributing writers and editors have to be rendered instead of photographed, but there it is.

I keep telling him that he's thinner in person and much better looking. Not that he's asked.

Halflife

2009-05-06T08:30:00.000-04:00

I've just picked this up. Apparently, reading this isn't just an exercise in studying how an older narrator looks back on an earlier self. Not so, as I've now discovered. There's this article about why everyone hates this writer. And by everyone, I mean everyone who published a book of poems last year that was not gushed over in the NY Times Book Review. While that could be a long list, I have to confess that I don't actually know anyone who would be on that list. And I know a lot of writers. Then! Then there's this article about why this poet is deplorable for...well, I can't figure it out. Something to do with the "Syles" section.

At this point, I'm sort of hoping the poems live up to the anti-hype.

Olive Kitterige

2009-05-05T16:12:00.003-04:00

I just finished this book and it's wonderful. Stunning. Sometimes I read something and then I just have to go in the corner and cry for a few minutes because it's that good, and because I'll never write anything half so good, so generous to the characters. I'm no fan of collections of linked stories, but this one is worth it.

The most chilling story is called "Tulips."

It starts like this:

People thought the Larking couple would move after that happened. But they didn't move--perhaps they had nowhere to go. Their blinds remained drawn, however, day and night. Although sometimes in the dusk of winter, Roger Larkin would be found shoveling his driveway. Or in the summer, after the grass got high and sad-looking, you might find him out mowing the lawn. In both cases he wore a hat far down over his face and never looked up when someone drove by. Louise, there was never any sight of at all. Apparently, she'd been in a hospital down in Boston for a while--the daughter lived near Boston, so that would make sense--but Mary Blackwell, who was an X-ray technician in Portland, said Louise had spent time in the hospital there. What was interesting was that Mary was criticized for reporting this, even though at the time, there wasn't a soul in town who wouldn't have chopped off a baby finger for news of any kind. But there was that small outpouring against Mary.

At this point in the story, there isn't a reader who wouldn't chop off a baby finger to find out what's going on with these two. The rest of the story is worth the wait.

Five Muse Moments

2009-04-29T20:56:00.010-04:00

1. Listening to Ann Patchett give the keynote speech in which she lamented the fact that her husband doesn't care for her work, that it takes him a really long time to read one of her novels, and that she should staple a $20 bill to the text every three or four pages just to help him along. (As S would say, "Is he for real?") And that he defends himself by saying that this proves that he loves her for who she is, not for what she does. And that this sentiment inspired a sentiment expressed by a character in Bel Canto.

Also, the room erupted when she said, "The muse is a bunch of BS. It's not happening. Just let it go. Writing is a job."

2. Listening to Tess Gerritsen talk about writing. This would be what I'd call the opposite end of the spectrum from Ann Patchett in a way. Well, in every way, from style to content to output. This is someone who publishes a book every year and has done so for more than 20 years. (I'll bet she views writing as a job, too.) I'd never read one of her books, but I will now. Why not? She went into a long discussion about where great ideas come from and how she does her research. The discussion about prose she distilled down to two main points. First, action is boring. Second, gross stuff is really cool. For example, she discovered that people bleed differently in space. Instead of spattering, the blood pools in zero gravity, like some giant blood bubble. She said: "I knew right then that I had to have a character bleed to death in space.

Inspiration comes from every corner.

3. Listening to Dinty Moore read an essay about teenagers and evolution and molars. You had to be there. I thought it was from his new collection, the one that one the Grub Street nonfiction award this year, which is why I ran to the bookstore to buy it. But it's not in there. Luckily, what is in there is pretty good, too. He did a great job with the reading. It's not easy to entertain 400 people in a ballroom while they have lunch right in front of them, you know a plateful of food as distraction, but he did.

4. Hanging out with writers. I didn't go to Amy MacKinnon's talk about writing, but I bought her book, anyway. I may have taken the last one. On Saturday she and I found ourselves lounging on a couch alongside an editor, all of us talking about editing and being edited, and handling and being handled by agents and general gossip. Amy traced her novel's progress over several Muse conferences. One year, she went to the Manuscript Mart to get feedback on a few chapters. The next year she had an agent but was stuck in the writing. That year she attended a talk that inspired her to break through. Of course, at last year's conference, she had just sold her book. At this one, it was out at the table. Who wouldn't be inspired by that?

5. Coming home on Sunday night to the kids (who were already asleep) and to Larry (who was watching a game) and curling up with this book, which is astonishing.

A Musing Weekend

2009-04-24T15:02:00.002-04:00

It's that time of year again. Famous and aspiring writers converge this weekend at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston for the annual Grub Street conference.

I'm hosting a panel called "Agents on the Hot Seat," in which four agents will describe the best ways to find, attract, hire and work with an agent.I did this last year and there wasn't one single crazy person in the audience to stand up and carry out an angry, paranoid rant about the state of the world, which is shocking in a way. A good way.

I'll also be manning the kiss and cry area of the Manuscript Mart. That's where writers meet with agents and editors who have read their work and prepared feedback. It's tense and scary in that room, but people love it, and every year several someones get an agent from it. Last year a top editor met with one Grub writer and liked her work so much, she turned to the agent at the next table and said to him, "You should represent her. Now." I'm sure he did. There are also talks and workshops on every type of writing, and there are parties, parties, parties. More on Sunday night when it's all over.

Talk Talk

2009-04-19T08:39:00.004-04:00

Last Friday, G tested for his orange belt. On the way to the "dojo" (which is really a rented storefront in our tiny downtown area) S sat in the back seat talking to her left hand. She held it in a fist up to one cheek and did a passable imitation of a teenager in a chat-a-thon with a good friend, named Honey. She had the sarcastic overemphasis on all the right words. She kept her free hand going in lots of gestures. It was hilarious.

"Honey, what are you talking about?" she asked with great incredulity.

Pause.

"Eating your pajamas! Honey, that's disgusting!"

Pause.

"Well, I know. But still, you shouldn't eat them. They're not food, you know."

Pause

"Yeah, but I've told you and told you not to do that."

This went on and on all the way to downtown, which is just a mile away from our house, but she continued as we parked, walked to the little dojo, all the way up to the door. She and honey discussed which stuffed animals were mad at each other and why, and what they like and don't like on TV. Finally, I told her to hang up at which point she said to her hand, "Okay, Honey, gotta go. Bye."

The end near. She's 5, and all I can think is: What's going to happen when she gets her hands on a real phone?

Possible Cover

2009-04-16T14:30:00.000-04:00

I don't know if I'm allowed to do this, but this is the cover design that will go on the bound galleys to be sent out this month. I like it.

I know it's hard to see here (I don't have a larger version) but the subtitle is "Raising Healthy Boys in a Challenging and Complex World." You can also go here to see the catalog copy for the book and to see a video clip of my co-author, who is so authoritative on this subject.

This is starting to feel real...

Images of Fear

2009-04-14T08:12:00.000-04:00

I'm reading this right now, which is an interesting meditation on early horror stories and how they shaped popular culture in the 19th century. So far, I'm most interested in how certain authors have come up with their material. One section postulates how Mary Shelley came up with the story for Frankenstein. It started as a dream image during the cold summer of 1816. She was holed up indoors, listening to her husband in his long discussions with Lord Byron on matters of politics, technology and philosophy, including the nature of life itself.

In an introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel, she writes, "Invention...does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded."

I love that. A story must be created out of a chaos of impulses and influences. In her case, the primary influence was the contemporary belief, or perhaps the fear, that science would be able to create life. And that's what she did. She gave life to a character that will never die.

The book discusses such characters as Dr. Jeckyl and what he has to do with Jack the Ripper, specifically, how the story informed the public's views of what sort of person could be a serial killer. In fact, an actor playing the notorious Dr. Jeckyl had to cut his run short because people in the audience kept fingering him to authorities as Jack the Ripper. How annoying. In another chapter the book details the relationship between the Dracula story and the attempted liberation of women. Can't wait.

Drifting Along

2009-04-13T07:42:00.002-04:00

We turned in the first pass galleys last week on the boy book, and now we're truly in the lull before publication. Well, I am. My co-author has no lull. He's working with publicists and getting geared up to promote the book, while I sit around thinking about finding some new work.

I've been interviewing with doctors who are in need of a co-author, which depresses me a bit. In the past couple of weeks, I've heard from one doctor who had wanted to work on a book and now wants some time off, not much, just a year or so to think things through. I had a lovely conversation with another doctor who seemed really excited about writing a book on the phone and then sent out an email later saying he doesn't like the idea any more. A third doctor has three writers vying for the position of co-author. We each bid on the project and attend a series of meetings, because it has been explained to me that this doctor wants to feel "truly connected" to the writer. I can understand that, and yet I want a job, not a date.

Meanwhile, I've been reading and writing a lot, trying to catch up on the books I bought in Ireland, but somehow not getting there. Instead, I read Brock Clarke's The Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, which I heartily recommend. And I'm starting to read Arthur Phillips' The Egyptologist on someone else's recommendation. So far, so good.

Watching the Door

2009-03-31T07:00:00.000-04:00

I'm reading Watching the Door: Drinking Up, Getting Down and Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast by Kevin Myers. This on the heels of Here, Bullet, a book of poems by Brian Turner, who served in Iraq after getting his MFA. Both are fascinating meditations on war.

The most striking contrast between the two works (although they probably shouldn't be compared at all as one is by a journalist observing one war and the other is written by a soldier who participated in another) is the distance the narrator has from the material. I often stress to students that they need distance from what they're writing, which can come in the form of time, or in the form of some narrative stance that is distant from what you were feeling when the events occurred. The tone of the work has to be separate from the mood you're trying to create. Myers has first the distance of time. The events he writes about occurred thirty years before the publication of this book. Also, he has taken on an extremely self-mocking stance as a narrator. He seems to truly dismayed by the young man he was, which is a difficult posture to maintain for 250 pages. The book opens with a description of him watching, calmly, while a group of gun toting boys ambushes a group of British soldiers, killing two of them. He explains that he never filed a story on that ambush in part because he could never have explained his presence there or the fact that he made no effort to intervene. This is the eternal moral quagmire for a reporter, one that seems to have haunted him ever since.

He also uses a lot of humor, which is not easy to do when you're writing about people killing each other. One of my favorite anecdotes so far is one about how the young Myers liked to invite friends up to Belfast from Dublin for a visit. In his hubris, he would take them out in his ratty old car at night on a tour of the most dangerous areas in Belfast, presumably so he could enjoy their fear. He describes one of these trips on a rainy night:

We drove through the control-zones between Catholic areas and Protestant areas, where no one but the security forces ever travelled at night--no one, that is, apart from me. Finally, I drove once again down towards Henry Taggart hall, turning off my headlights on my approach, as one always did. With only the sidelights on, the Renault eased over the speed ramps outside the sangar containing the sentry, and then right on cue it backfired--crack!--before stalling, stone dead. Jesus.

Backfires had often attracted fatal gunfire in Belfast, and here was I perched on a speed ramp beside the most fired-at sentry post in Ireland. Grinning through inanely clenched teeth, I turned on the engine. Nothing happened. I tried again, pressing the accelerator hard; and the engine burst into life with a series of short, sharp explosive bangs that sounded precisely like the Browning 9mm my old shoulder-to-shoulder friend used to favor me with. Yards away, invisible, a British soldier was calmly making a decision about my life.

The car moved forward, then backfired loudly, and stalled again. Jesus. What was I to do? I was nearly paralysed with terror, and outside it was dark dark dark, not just here, but across Belfast, and vertically upwards, a deep black to the very edge of the universe. And now in this fathomless vault, lit only by the sidelights on my car, with the frayed rubbers of my wipers forlornly trying to wipe the Niagara from my screen. I had to decide how I should manage this crisis. If I got out of the car, how would the sentry respond? In his shoes, what would I have done? In his shoes, I would already be dead behind the wheel.

I had no choice but to start the engine again. My companion sat rigid as a corpse beside me, whispering in terror, his pallor dimly luminous in the utter dark. I turned the ignition, and the engine burst into life. Then I drove slowly away, sending a single sharp bang in farewell. Behind me stood a young working-class British soldier on sentry-go whose name I will never know, who was sitting in the most fired-on place in western Europe, and who had stoically and unflinchingly endured the gunfire-like sounds from a stationary car at point-blank range, without firing once. By such men is civilization made.

Most of what he describes in the book is terrifying, and appalling, as Myers intends. My one complaint about the American edition is that it includes no map of the region. I'm slowed by my need to google the locations and roads he mentions, hampered by my own ignorance. I suppose it's a small price to pay for this narrative.

First Pass Galleys

2009-03-26T07:38:00.003-04:00

The galleys arrived by UPS on Monday. We co-authors have until April 10 to read and correct them. This is a great step up from the days when I worked on a book on heart disease. I remember giving birth to S, then coming home from the hospital to a 300-page package of galleys and a note from the publisher saying, "You have 48 hours to make any corrections." I read the entire book and marked it up while sitting on an inflatable donut and nursing a newborn. Then I wrote a glossary for it, which is the other thing they wanted right away. My co-author at the time, a really, really nice cardiologist, wrote me an email. It said: "You seem annoyed." I wrote back. "Do I?"

Now we have more than two weeks to read and obsess about every detail. The note attached to the galleys thoughtfully reminds us that any changes we make at this point are expensive and could be charged to our royalty account. Any changes that are not factual in nature or that involve adding more than a few words should be submitted on disk in a certain format. There's a whole tea ceremony involved for that. This is good information, because I read the first page and wanted desperately to rewrite every word of it. I felt visceral, palpable shame while reading those first paragraphs. I thought: This is a disaster. The whole book is a disaster. We have to stop this from happening.

Fortunately, I called my co-author at home. He answered and before I could get into my shame-a-thon he went on and on about how much he loves the book. This is the book he wanted us to write. This is the book he's ready to promote. "Don't the galleys look great?" he asked. And I found myself saying, "yes, yes, they do" while my worry leaked out of me. The good thing about having two authors is that we can take turns being crazy.

Reading in Cantonese

2009-03-24T11:48:00.007-04:00

We had a Memoir Project reading this past weekend, one to celebrate the participants in the project's second anthology, My Legacy Is Simply This: Stories from Boston's Most Enduring Neighborhoods. It was a good turn out. The seniors read their stories and signed each other's books, and even signed those of some people who had bought books.

This reading was in Chinatown, which meant that Alexis and I were the only ones in the room whose first language is English. Almost all of the conversation among the participants and their assembled family members was in Cantonese. The seniors brought copies of their books to the front of the room and read entirely in Chinese to the crowd of onlookers. I introduced each of the four readers in English, while Kwan, our translator, turned my words into Cantonese. This is how the entire class was taught two years ago.

I'd forgotten how exhausting it is to break up my thoughts into bite sized chunks to be translated

into another language, and how disorienting it can be to listen to others speak in a language I can't understand. I found myself staring at the faces of the people reading in vain hope to understand some of what they were saying, to figure out where in their story they were. I also watched the audience, alive to every gesture, every nod and smile, hoping that they were enjoying themselves. Often while teaching the class I felt alone in the room, isolated and

humbled by my ignorance of their language and culture while at the same time grateful that they were willing to share so much with me, so much affection and honesty. I miss them. At the end of the reading, they sang a bit, and opened up for hugs. And one or two of them offered a goodbye in English and a gift of sweets to honor the new year. It was a celebration of story telling and gratitude, just like the class itself.

Prompts in JP

2009-03-20T18:29:00.009-04:00

We started teaching the Memoir Project in Jamaica Plain last week. For the first time in several months, we have a group of participants who really want to write. They write in class for twenty minutes at a time. That's not easy. Try it. And they have great stories. One woman is writing an incredible account of how she became a ward of the state at the age of 12 and went into foster care. Her description of her first subway ride in Boston, alone, with no idea of where she was going, is chilling. She ended up at a wonderful home for girls in the Back Bay run by a woman called "Mother Agnes." Another woman was a young nurse during Boston's last polio epidemic in the mid 1950s. She worked with the most debilitated patients, those who depended on an iron lung to breathe through the night.

I've come up with new prompts for them because they're so inspiring. In general, people have a better time starting a writing project if they start with a list. All writers use lists because they are so much easier to generate than paragraphs of perfect sentences.

This past week I asked them to make a list of every job they've ever had. They had no need to limit themselves to paid work. They should list every job they had in the family, every formal role they played at home as well. Once they'd made a list, I asked them to focus on one job, perhaps a favorite job or least favorite, and describe it in more detail. Then I asked them to describe a memorable co-worker. Finally, I asked them to offer written advice to anyone entering the workforce now. Our participants love giving advice, and they're pretty good at it, too.

Well, the stories came pouring out of them. One man described his jobs shining shoes and selling magazines as a very little boy and how he was expected to strip off his clothes when he came home to prove he wasn't hiding money from his parents. Another woman wrote about her first after school job, which was helping an elderly shut in bake cakes and pastries to sell. She remembers what she baked, how much money she made and what she bought with it.

Try it. It works.

Exits & Entrances

2009-03-19T13:51:00.004-04:00

Larry and I went to see this last weekend. Fitting, as this is a memoir or memory play by Athol Fugard, the South African playwright and novelist. This past winter, I've been teaching a writing class that used lots of prompts to get people to access new personal material. I was shy about asking students to write bits of drama or scenes, but no more. You can dramatize your past as long as you're willing to be aggressive with the form as this play shows.

I had two fears at the start of the play. First, when the lights went up and actor Ross MacDonald, who is the Playwright in this piece, began to write in his diary while reading aloud what he was writing, I cringed. Oh, no. Oh, no. This is so wrong. Writing in a diary is not dramatic. Reading out loud while you write is not something anyone does except in a 1960s era sitcom. No. Make it stop. And the prose itself is so flowery and writerly, and not in a good way. It was a rough moment, but fortunately the playwright moved quickly to addressing the audience. That's still strange in my view, but not as awkward, and the writer uses this technique to set up the rest of the drama by introducing the other character, the legendary actor Andre Huguenet, who is nearing the end of his career of playing leading roles in classical plays. We learn that the actor has just died, and that the rest of the play will be a smooth series of flashbacks.

My second fear was that I was not going to be able to relax and watch Will Lymon, the actor who plays Huguenet. When he opened his mouth and out came the voice that narrates the movie, Little Children, in that oddly deadpan, NFL Films-style voice of God, I thought I wasn't going to be able to shake the association. His voice is too distinctive. Not to worry. By the time he got to his sudden soliloquy from Oedipus, that association was gone. Both performances were wonderful.

Apparently, critics don't like this play because it's not up to the playwright's usual standards of throwing grenades at political injustice. But I found it fascinating as a series of insights about how a sea change in art can coincide with and even lead something similar in society. It also meditates on the artist as an earnest young agitator and shows him alongside an older artist who looks at the young man and knows himself to be irrelevant. The fear of being displaced by an ever-changing world is surprisingly powerful, at least for those of us in middle age. This fear and empathy sneaks up on the audience, I think. At the end of the play I was astonished to find myself in tears, and I looked over to Larry to find him in the same condition. We weren't the only ones, either. So when the play ended with the Playwright reading aloud from his diary again, it was sort of okay. Not that anyone was listening. We just needed time to sit in the dark and mop up before it was time to clap.

OK, I Lied

2009-03-17T19:34:00.002-04:00

Three more things from Ireland. This is the view from the house we stayed in. Every morning I made a pot of tea and sipped and watched the outdoors until the tea grew cold. I said to Larry, "See, it's like Nebraska." To which he said, "No it's not." What I meant, of course, was the tough grasses, the absence of trees, the long horizon, the whole agrarian scene. It made my heart ache. Larry was having none of it, and truth is that there aren't a lot of mosses in Nebraska, and thorny bushes? None. Stone walls built of flagstone are tough to find as well in the midwest, and I saw birds and bushes and weeds in Ireland that I didn't recognize at all. Still, I found it all oddly familiar, no matter what Larry says.
We stayed in this house, which is beautiful.

Inside the house is this ornament, which stopped me cold. Here is the central image from The Seafarer, a plate with an electric flame flickering in front of it. And on the plate is a Jesus who could be mistaken for a very pretty bearded girl. It opens the play and closes it. And here it is hanging on the wall in this house. I felt suddenly as though I understood the play in a way I didn't before.

Ireland, Again

2009-03-17T19:20:00.004-04:00

I'm thinking of Ireland today. Who isn't? The weather is warming in Boston, so I'm wondering how it is in the surf community in Lahinch, which is where we stayed not three weeks ago. Here (above) is the sign on the tourism office in town.

On the Saturday we left town, these folks were parked in the lot by the beach, ready to rescue surfers (on the last day of February) who might have smashed against the rocks. Truly, the EMTs were stalking the walkway while looking grim. No fatalities while we were watching.

But there were plenty of takers on this extremely brisk morning. Nothing would have tempted me into that water. As you can see, they wore full body wetsuits and ran full tilt into the waves. Maybe that reduces the shock.

It's much more fun to huddle in your parka against the wind while gazing at the beautiful green cliffs.

Legacy Reading

2009-03-05T14:34:00.005-05:00

More pics from Ireland to come. But first, tonight Grub Street is hosting a reception (yes, free food is included) for the authors of the latest anthology of the Memoir Project. This volume, called My Legacy is Simply This, features short memoirs from seniors in four Boston neighborhoods: Mattapan, Chinatown, East Boston and Charlestown. It's being held at the Borders in Downtown Crossing, which is 10-24 School Street. Around the corner and down the Street from the Omni Parker House (which is where we hold the Muse conference each year).

Most of the seniors will be on hand to sign copies of the book. We did this same thing last year for the first volume and it's very cool. Last year the bookstore set up little tables with vases of roses on them and we had a huge spread of good food. The seniors sat at the little tables and after people bought a copy of the book, they toured the tables and asked the seniors to sign their memoirs, and they chatted and had a grand time. Yes, many of the people buying the books are relatives and friends of the seniors themselves, but there are lots of people who wander in off the street, too, and buy a book and have a hell of a time talking about old times and what it's like to be a writer. For those of us who teach or coach the seniors, it's a chance to meet their families and friends and chat about the project, which is a very neat project. The room really buzzes. Last year the bookstore sold out of the books, and the people in charge of the event couldn't have been happier about that.

All are welcome.

Frawley's

2009-03-02T23:06:00.002-05:00

The last night we were in Ireland, we stopped into this pub, one of the last of its kind. Our proprietor (pictured above) who is 90 years old, poured us a whiskey the old fashioned way. We'd come in at 9 p.m. and we were interrupting his evening news. He took very little notice of us aside from pouring us a drink. We sat and drank in silence, all of us watching the little TV hanging in the corner. When it was over, we stood up to leave and he held a hand up to stay us. "The weather," he said. And we sat back down. Sure enough the weather report came on. It wasn't good news.

Then he wanted to chat a bit, about Obama and the state of our economy, both of which are favorite topics in Ireland. Or maybe that's as much about America as they care to discuss. Then we said our goodbyes and left and he turned back to the TV. He lives in apartment in the back. At dinnertime, a neighbor brings him food and sits with him. In the photo you can see the rows of bottles. These aren't for serving to customers. They're for sale. It's almost like a pharmacy, but with booze. You can buy aspirin, some over the counter remedies, bottles of soda, and whiskey. But this is a truly old style pub. You can sit at his bar and drink and you don't have to say a word. He might even doze a little while during your stay.

My New Boyfriend Sings a Song

2009-03-01T08:35:00.006-05:00

This is the scene we walked in on at O'Neil's in Newmarket on Fergus after our visit to Ballycastle. This guy brings down the house. Wait until you see him play the accordion. I'm in love. (I've since heard that there was a video glitch on this. I think it works now.)

Whiskey and Song

2009-02-27T09:17:00.003-05:00

I can only get intermittent service here, so the postings are few.

Yesterday we saw Bunratty Castle, which is basically Ireland's version of Plymouth Plantation. Pictures to follow. We didn't want to eat in any of the pubs around there, so we went up the road, wandered into this place in, well, I forget the name.

Pub's name is O'Neils. Tiny place. We thought we could get lunch. Instead we wandered into a storytelling session. One of the historians from Bunratty was singing and telling stories in this old accent, which may have been a Kerry accent. And these oldsters were sitting all around heckling him and the like. It was amazing. It was a bit of a private party for the local senior group, called the Going Strong Club. We heard amazing music. We laughed while this guy told terribly dirty stories. It was great fun. And then Tighe (pictured above, center), who is 90 years old, got out his accordion and began to play. Oh, they whooped and danced in their seats. And then he sang. Beautiful love songs. He played the Highland Reel and the crowd, small as it was, could barely be contained. The shots of whiskey kept coming and we've never been happier. We walked in at 2 and didn't get out of there until 5.

I went to kiss my new boyfriend Tighe (I'm truly in love here) on the cheek, but here's the thing about Irish men. It's right on the lips or none at all.

So that's how it ended. They fed us, and we left a donation for the club. It was the least we could do. And we bought a round or two for the folks who were staying on. It was lovely.

Cliffs of Moher, etc.

2009-02-25T14:09:00.009-05:00

This, on the left, is my mother-in-law sleeping in the back seat of the car on the way from the Cliffs of Moher (which are beautiful by the way) and back to Lahinch, where we're staying. Jet lag is a bitch when you're on the far side of 70, but she's a good sport about it all.

This is Julie and Ellen at the cliffs. I do have pictures of the cliffs, but won't post them here. Suffice to say that they're big, breathtaking and scary when you walk past the sign that says, "Don't go past here," and then look down over the edge. As Julie says, "Chargies!"

The West Coast

2009-02-23T13:54:00.002-05:00

We're here. It's beautiful. We've already been teased multiple times about the weakness of the dollar and one helpful shopkeeper asked of the US economy, Have you hit bottom yet? It's actually good to talk to people who refuse to pull their punches. More soon, when my camera is working and when I find a wifi hotspot. No promises.

Reading on the Go

2009-02-22T06:48:00.003-05:00

I leave for Ireland tonight, after many hectic days of tying up work details. I spent marathon sessions on the phone last week with my co-author to approve copy edit changes. Apparently, this publisher likes each copy edit suggestion to be addressed separately. We were expected to either "stet" each one (write and circle the word STET in the margin to alert the editor to restore the original copy, which we rarely did) or write okay in the margin in blue pencil. Three hundred pages worth. And I was gratified to find five typos and two grammatical mistakes that had been edited in by mistake. My co-author was really good at finding typos. Grammar geeks!

I have another short story ready to send out when I get back. We hosted a birthday party for S's fifth birthday. Very exciting. The work on the house was completed with just one grudge match between us and the contractor. Not bad. Bills, laundry, tidying up. The usual.

All that's left to do is pack. Many people obsess about clothing on trips. I obsess about books. Which books to bring? How many? Yes, they're heavy. Yes, they take up space. But the idea of having nothing to read is too horrible to contemplate. I'm halfway through this book right now. It's wonderful and worth all the praise heaped on it. But it's such a page-turner that it likely won't survive the plane trip.

I want to read The Gathering by Anne Enright. In fact, having read the first page of this book, I now want to read all of her books. So that's in the suitcase already. I briefly toyed with the idea of bringing December Bride by Sam Hannah Bell. It could be an all Ireland theme. Or, I could be practical. I'm supposed to be reading this book for a class I'm taking in the spring, but do I want to carry it across an ocean? And of course, Ann Patchett will be speaking at the Muse in April, and I was able to snatch up her Bel Canto at a used book store. Possibility? I also have been meaning to read In the Heart of the Sea by Nthaniel Philbrick, which is the true story of the whaleship Essex, the inspiration for Melville's Moby Dick. And on the off chance that the jet lag is overwhelming I could bring this little truffle of a murder mystery. I'm too embarrassed to type the title, but it's set in Istanbul and the main character is a drag queen who looks like Audrey Hepburn.

Bad Hair Day

2009-02-18T12:05:00.005-05:00

In four days I go to Ireland, and I'm already having nightmares about being apart from the kids for several nights in a row. Not much time to worry about that, though, because the copyedited book manuscript has to be approved before then, one change at a time for 300 pages. I have student papers to read, a story to write, a birthday party to host (S turns 5 in two days! Alert the media!) and a large check to write to the nice guys who are finishing the roof that replaces the blue tarp of doom. They are pounding away on the shingles right now.

Not much time left over to freak out, but wait...

I came into the kitchen yesterday afternoon to find a pair of scissors sitting between the kids. They were at work on the kitchen table, each of them drawing away. G was writing a picture book about Spongebob. He does dialog and story lines. He draws the pictures. The story had this huge plot full of desires, obstacles, misdirection, puns. He writes better than anyone in the family. S was busy drawing detailed pictures of pirates leaping from a clipper ship. The details are incredible. The pirates have shoelaces, they have ears, they have buttons, they have sleeves. She has put multiple sails on each mast. I try not to show my shock.

As to the scissors: these were not ordinary scissors. These are the scissors that the mommy person keeps hidden in the upstairs bathroom, because they are used for cutting hair. Back when G would let me cut his hair, back when S was too little to preen, I used these on the kids. What are they doing in the kitchen? I'm afraid I asked that question with a little more force than intended. They both looked up, startled, and said in unison, "Nothing." (They both lie now. Gone forever are the days when S will flip her hair and say "Well, of course" to the question, "Did you just pee yourself?")

I used my mommy psychic powers and zoomed in on S. "Were you cutting your hair?" No, she said. "Are you sure?" Why do mothers ask this? This question never yields a confession. Never. Not even in a four-year-old. I'm afraid I asked it twice. No, she said again and again. Then she did this thing that she does when she wants to impress on me how stupid my questions really are. She flipped her palms into the air and shook them at me, bouncing them for emphasis on each word. "We're just using them to cut paper," she said. Every syllable betrayed her frustration. And then she shook her head sadly, as though mommies this dumb should not be allowed out of the house. The only trouble is that huge hunks of hair were missing from her scalp. "Honey," I said. "Look at this. What did you do?" And that's when S screwed her shoulders up to her ears and said, "Well, my hair was stuck together." As though this explains everything.

I started in on the lecture, the one about how we don't cut our hair and how if you want long hair, as she does, then hacking at it with scissors is not a good strategy, but Larry intervened. Let it go, he said. Maybe a few days away isn't such a bad thing.

Saint Updike

2009-02-15T13:12:00.007-05:00

In the "Talk of the Town" section of this week's New Yorker, Roger Angell remembers John Updike, the staff writer. It's one of two snooze-worthy pieces on Updike.

In Angell's piece, we learn that Updike was "an editor's dream" because he was so involved in his own product. I quote:

"My end of the work was to point out an occasional inconsistent or extraneous sentence, or a passage that wanted something more. Almost under his breath over our phone connection, while we looked at the same lines, he would try out an alternative: 'Which one sounds better, do you think?' Sighing, he would take us back over the same few words again and again, then propose or listen to a switch of some sort, and try again. All writers do this, but not many with such lavishly extended consideration."

All writers do this? They do? On the phone? I've been a magazine writer for fifteen years, and I've never had an editor call me to ask about changes he was proposing to make in a sentence, or who would let me loiter on the phone for long minutes while I tried out this phrase and that in order to improve a passage that "wanted something more." Who is this guy kidding? And this is supposed to be evidence of what? Professionalism? Or narcissism run amok in both of them? But he goes on about Updike's involvement in the process:

"He wanted to see each galley, each tiny change, right down the the late-closing page proofs, which he often managed to return by overnight mail an hour or so before closing, with new sentences or passages, handwritten in the margins in a soft pencil, that were fresher and more inventive and revealing than what had been there before."

Lordy, what a nightmare. Look. I've worked as a magazine editor. I married a magazine editor. What any real editor will tell you is that the writing should be done before the page proofs. An editor should rather expect that such a great genius of literature could manage to stumble on inventive and revealing prose in an earlier draft, especially if he's allowed to call his editor and spend hours tying up the phone line while parsing out alternative dependent clauses and questioning every proposed change in order to make his book reviews a tad more vibrant. At any other magazine, this would never fly.

I am reminded of a talk given by Charles Baxter at a recent Muse conference at which he recounted the publication of one of his short stories in the New Yorker. His enduring memory is of the conversation he had with a fiction editor there, quite possibly Angell, in which the editor demanded he remove a sentence from the story, an important sentence in which the narrator notes that the main character can't call a neighbor late at night because he knows that the guy drinks at night and won't be coherent. The editor's statement was "nobody knows that about a neighbor." Baxter said something on the order of: well, in a small town in the midwest, it's the kind of thing everybody knows about everybody else. (Having lived in a small town in the midwest, I say he's right. It's the kind of thing that you can't help but know.) The editor's response was that they wouldn't publish the story unless the line came out.

How interesting now to see that a pet writer, who essentially spent 40 years writing the same short story over and over again, was encouraged to soak up as many of the magazine's resources as he could, while other writers of equal professionalism were told to take bad edits (or else) and in fact to eat them and smile. It's a revealing little story, but it doesn't reveal Updike as much as the entitlement in which he flourished.

Uncertain Times II

2009-02-14T12:59:00.003-05:00

We live in the suburbs, which means that the above magazine arrives on Saturday instead of Sunday. So, we've already read it, or as much of it as we can stand. The magazine is wildly hit and miss, but it did offer one smile of the day. The "Coupling" column, which is by far the most uneven part of the magazine, in which the ratio of the insufferable to the interesting is roughly five-to-one, is about men who love cats. The teaser line for this is something like, "If you're looking for a sensitive guy, look for cat dander on his clothes."

To which Larry said, "So if you're looking for a complete p***sy, check for cat hair." I tried to give him that look, but he wasn't having any of it. "Are you kidding me?" he said. "That's like..." Here, he tossed an imaginary softball into the air and thwacked it with an imaginary bat. "Had to be done," he said.

I couldn't argue. In this economy we're taking our laughs where we can find them.

The boy book has a new editor, and that editor has an assistant. We have the copyedited manuscript in hand and it's due back in ten days. The new editor checked in to say that she loves the book, believes in it, has boys of her own, can't wait to bring it out into the world. We were so thrilled and relieved to hear it. "The biggest concern is the environment it's coming out into," she said. Or something like that. Meaning that book sales are down across the board. Apparently, even good books aren't selling. All we can do is hope.

Uncertain Times

2009-02-11T07:03:00.002-05:00

The news across the publishing industry has been bad and getting worse for many months. I hear from my novelist friends that they've been cautioned against trying to sell something now, that the market for literary novels is bleak, or sometimes agents use the word deadly. In addition, I've heard of top, top editors who have been dumped from their jobs, people who have found and worked on many best-sellers.

Then yesterday, I heard this news and the recession became that much more real for me. The entire publishing division that bought the boy book just ten months ago is gone. I have no idea how many of the good and talented people we've worked with during that time are now out of a job, but it's very possible that they're all gone. It was a little under a year ago that Larry got this same news about his editorial team, so I do know what they're going through. It's awful.

Nothing has happened to our book. It sits and waits, just as we do, to see where it will go and on whose desk it will land. It has been edited, and we've seen the cover design. We were slated to get copy edits on Friday with the understanding that we would turn it around quickly. They had worked so aggressively on this book and we were so impressed with their creative efforts all along. Now, nothing is certain.

Nothing Personal

2009-02-10T07:17:00.002-05:00

The other day I got what I thought was a rejection slip in the mail. These are easy to spot because they arrive in a self-addressed envelope. That means I can see my name and address just as I wrote them when I submitted to this or that literary journal. In the past some of these rejections have turned out to be acceptances. Apparently, some editors are so busy that they can't pick up the phone or send an email to tell you that they're taking your story. Or even to address a new envelope in which to send the happy notice along with the contract. Once I got an acceptance that looked so much like a rejection that I didn't even read it for a couple of months. I just tucked it in a drawer with the rest of the rejections. It was a sad, crumpled little piece of paper and at the top it said, "Congratulations" and then they'd written in the name of my story. And then at the bottom I was supposed to sign over the rights and send the lonely little piece of paper back. Of course, that never happened. I never read it until the editors sent me a little note wondering where my contract was. As my four-year-old would say, "Oops-ees!"

The newest acceptance tops this in terms of anonymity. It's a little preprinted card with the words "Dear Writer" at the top. Then a big space. Then the words "We have chosen to publish" and then another big space in which someone wrote the title to my story in ink and then the rest of the one line acceptance letter "in a future issue of" and then the magazine title. Signed, "The Editors."

That's it. Are they kidding with this? They like the story well enough to publish it, but not well enough to have any contact with the writer. They provided no phone number, no email address, no way to get in touch with them. Never mind that the story has already been accepted by another journal. I'm sort of hoping these folks don't go ahead and publish it without further contact with me. That would be awkward.

Letters to Obama

2009-02-07T14:11:00.002-05:00

G's class is writing letters to our new president. As a parent volunteer, I get to type these up and help "publish" them. They will actually get sent to the White House, and I see as I read these that more than one student is anxiously hoping for a reply.

What's interesting about watching a little boy in early elementary school education is seeing how much and how quickly he develops month to month. A first grader is a kid who still hasto be reminded to flush the toilet and carry a dinner plate to the sink. Don't get me started on the teeth-brushing thing or the idea that dirty clothes go in a hamper. And yet these kids have got a lot on their minds.

What's especially charming about these letters is that the sentiments in them don't seem to have been coached in any way. The spelling, punctuation and grammar are about as inventive as you'd imagine, and some kids seem to have less trouble figuring out how to spell the big words than they do the little words.

One boy wrote:

Dear Presidentobama in our school we votd you wood wen! I dont no what the vot count wus. And please help the economy and stock market do better!! I bileve your dodr sasha is 7. I am 7 too!!

One girl wrote:

Dear President Obama, Please exceped this note. Please help cildrins hospitals and parint hospitals. Also help the pet hospitals. And get subs for docters and get cures for a cancer cure and other stuff they don't have.

Here's what G wrote:

Dear Mr president, some pepol need help because the're poor. they mite need you to help them. they need jobs, homes, food, and money. because if they stayd poor they mite die. Sincerely, G.

Little guys. Big, big hearts.

Ireland or Bust

2009-02-05T12:06:00.005-05:00

This is where I will be spending the last week in February. No, not at the top of a cliff, but hereabouts. A strange string of coincidences led to an impromptu trip. Can't wait.

Zane-y History Lesson

2009-02-03T20:08:00.004-05:00

One of the perks of having two stay-at-home parents is that we get to share visits to our children's schools. If teachers are used to dealing with just moms, well, now they get both barrels. Too bad for them.

Just last week, Larry and I went to G's first grade class for "beach day." It's a day when the kids wear shorts and t-shirts and sunglasses and flip flops to school and shiver in the inadequately heated rooms while pretending it's summer. We were instructed to send a beach towel to school that day along with beach-y snacks and such to complete the illusion, as it were. The only thing missing was actual heat.

There was also a party at which the kids ate the aforementioned snacks and made crafts. They made little crabs out of egg cartons and beach scenes on paper and the like. Larry and I were one of a half dozen parents who showed up to chaperone. Larry was the only dad, of course. We ran the "games" section of the party, which was this sad little bingo game with a nautical theme. There were these oversized bingo cards with pictures instead of letters. The pictures were of things like bivalves and the Indian Ocean and scuba gear and coral reefs. At first Larry took the educational part of this very seriously. He would draw a card and call out the name of the picture, say "stingrays" and then read all the information on the back of the card about where they live and what they eat and all that, when the kids just want the next card. They want to win. Also they pretend to know what you're talking about when they don't. First graders are over everything. Over it. And when you try to tell them something, they say, "yeah, we know," even when they clearly, clearly don't.

So, eventually, the game picked up pace. And the kids were really into it. Seven-year-olds are pretty competitive, it turns out. And they pout when someone else is winning. So, Larry got to the card for the Titanic, and he'd learned his lesson. He didn't read out any of the information. But one of the girls playing said, "We know all about that. We read a book." I said, oh that's great and all. She said, "The boat hit an iceberg and it sank and everybody got on lifeboats." I said, well, that's pretty close. And one of the other girls who was playing said, "Well, not everybody. Just the women and children." And the rest of the kids playing all started nodding. "Yeah, women and children." These kids. They know it all.

And for some strange reason, Larry said, "Yeah, except for that Billy Zane." He was saying it mostly to me, trying to get me to crack up. "Sneakin' on that life boat," said Larry, shaking his head in disappointment. I was holding it together, but then one of the boys shook his head sadly and said, "Yeah, that Billy Zane. Sneaking on the wife boats." And then they all started saying it. And they were serious.

As we were leaving, G's teacher thanked us. She told us that the bingo game looked very intense. Larry said to her. "Um, if you're ever talking about the Titanic and the name Billy Zane comes up, just play along, okay?"

She just stared at him. I don't think we'll be invited back next year.

Just Thrilled

2009-02-03T12:37:00.006-05:00

I have a half dozen books piled next to the bed (as always). They include this and this and this. All important books that I should be devouring in the cold months.

Not so. I've read nothing but thrillers all winter. Shameful. Among them, are this one and this one. They were both pretty good. Interesting narrative stance, good characters, a few emotional surprises.

There's no explanation for this neglect of good books, except that our days are filled with hammering and sudden shots from nail guns all fueled by roaring compressors. At night, the blue tarp of doom covers the half finished renovations. We pray that no snow will fall, and wonder how much money we have left.

Perhaps that's why this book by Morag Joss is such a fun read. In it, the setting of a house is a major character, as our house is for us just now. Also, I think it's ballsy for a thriller to be funny, and this one is. Each clever line is a happy surprise.

The story is about Jean, an aging house sitter on what she knows will be her last assignment caring for an enormous estate while the owners are away on a summer-long vacation. She has had a tough life and a couple of events just send her right over the edge, where she decides that she owns the house. Then she decides to reclaim a son she gave up for adoption years before, even though she acknowledges that she's never been pregnant. She puts an ad in the paper for this son and attracts Michael, who is a petty thief and my favorite character in the book. He steals from churches, and he's not very good at it. There's an early, hilarious scene in which his getaway car breaks down. "The bloody van! On the way here he had been so busy feeling like Jeff Stevenson coping with a dodgy alternator or gearbox or whatever that he had not stopped to think about the van's next journey; it fell a little short of Criminal Mastermind standard for the getaway vehicle to be on its last legs." Michael acquires a stray character, too, a pregnant young girl on the run from her abusive boyfriend. The three of them make up a sort of family on this estate. And yet the way they manage this is through pretty dark means that get ever darker as the story progresses.

But back to the humor. What I love is that the narrator has such wicked fun with the story, and especially the minor characters. Late in the book we meet Shelley, who is Jean's manager at the house-sitting firm and who is not a nice person. She's made an impromptu visit to the estate to check up on Jean and she's likely to learn that Jean has been selling off the furniture and drinking the expensive wine from the cellar. But we slow down as she arrives:

"Jean came out from the back of the house at the sound of Shelley's car on the gravel, patting her tidied hair and intending to give the impression that she knew her place and never used the front door. She had an idea that Shelley would notice and appreciate that sort of observance. But all of Shelley's attention was concentrated on heaving herself out of the hot car. She moved with a sense of grievance, as if she were being made to carry a weight that she considered privately was heavier than anything she could reasonably be expected to shift."

There's a very tense scene in which Jean introduces Michael and his new girlfriend, the runaway, and their ridiculous cover story. Then they walk together into the house as Shelley's phone continually sounds to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy.

"But Michael had started to lead the way down the path between the rose beds and Jean rather delicately dropped back and allowed him to. He was striding along rather fast now. Behind Jean, Shelley struggled along last with a lumpy shoulder bag on one arm and a ladylike black briefcase in the other. There was another volley of Yankee Doodle Dandy, which Shelley this time silenced with a couple of exasperated stabs. Jean turned and watched her. She was wearing low-fronted black shoes with heels like short pencils, which gave the impression that her thick legs ended in hooves. With each step her foot sank deep into the gravel, so she was taking dainty little steps, as if doing so would somehow make her lighter. The effect was of a cow trying to tiptoe."

Sometimes as a reader, I'd just rather have fun.

Some Kind of Monster

2009-01-29T05:49:00.000-05:00

My second favorite music documentary (after Young@Heart) is this one. Larry and I saw it twice, and pretty much giggled and nudged each other all the way through it. It's named after the Metallica album of the same name, and is ostensibly a documentary about how this band puts together an album. The title should really be: Metallica Goes To Group Therapy.

That's what it's really about. And further, it's about Phil, their nerdy therapist, who charges $40K per month, per month, to sit on a sectional couch with these guys and get them to talk about their feelings. The fact that filmmakers were allowed in the room at all leaves me speechless. But thank God they were there to catch it all. Pretty soon Phil moves in and pretty much decides he's part of the band. And then they fire him. And if you think you need therapy, this is the film that will cure you of that notion forever.

Two years later, and a half dozen lines from this movie are still standby quotes for Larry, including, "My lifestyle determines my death style, man."

The Blue Tarp of Doom

2009-01-28T15:19:00.004-05:00

Larry's comment on this was: If we thought this house couldn't get any uglier, we were so wrong.

It started the night before Christmas. We'd had a snow storm and then warmer weather, then more snow, then rain. And that's when the ice dams on our roof made way for rivers of water to come pouring in. We had leaks in every room of the house. Larry emptied the plastic bins of summer clothes we keep under the kids' beds and put them along one wall of the living room. The plop, plopping kept us on edge for two days. And we got to see how we deal with anxiety. Larry turns wite-faced and paces around trying to find new leaks, cursing to himself about how much he hates the house, our careers, this life.

Me? I bake.

I must have made 20 dozen cookies during that one day. Gingerbread men and women with icing and sprinkles. Sugar cookies individually decorated. These chocolate cookies with mint icing (that's really an Andes mint melted on top). I made lemon squares. I made biscotti. Two types of biscotti. I'm a little surprised that Larry didn't slap my face to snap me out of it, but he didn't. He was too busy in his own spiral of panic.

The day after Christmas we called a contractor who drew up the plans we'd asked about for renovating the house. Of course, we can't afford to renovate the house. Still, we're getting the roof done. We'll have to worry about the interior later. Step one: Tarp the house against new snow and rain damage. So we spent about ten days in the blue tarp lockdown pictured above.

S's response was to go outside and refuse to come back into the house. She wouldn't come in here. She took her little sled up the hill and rode down over and over again, squealing her delight. No coat. No hat. No gloves. We told her how cold she must be. We begged her to come in. No dice. She just wanted to sled and sled and keep an eye on the guys with the tarp and the hammers and scrap wood. Finally we carried her in.

I know how she feels.

Young@Heart

2008-12-18T09:09:00.002-05:00

I just watched this documentary this morning. I was so inspired by it in part because of what we're doing with the Memoir Project. Old is the new black, apparently, and that's great. And yet the Memoir Project asks seniors who live in Boston neighborhoods to tell their life stories, which is a more traditional activity for elders. This is celebrating something different. These folks are singing songs written by angry young men, some of them highly privileged, as part of a rather whiny ongoing counterculture. And here are these oldsters singing these songs with real feeling and giving the lyrics all kinds of sly new meanings. They make the Ramones seem insightful, for goodness sake, and they rescue a Coldplay song from its tin-eared emotional entropy and turn it into something poignant. There should be a special grammy for that.

The other thing I like about this film is that it doesn't get so wrapped up in the cutie pie feeling about old people still being active, and let's cheer for them just for that reason. It does show them struggling to remember lyrics and struggling to get around and fighting the illnesses that are going to kill them. It also touches on the real despair the singers face when they can't participate in the group anymore because their health won't allow it. Many times older people are given activities to occupy them, when in fact they need activities that challenge them. That need doesn't diminish in old age or even with grave illness. If you give people a community and a goal, their lives improve. We've seen that in the Memoir Project and I think that comes through more than you'd expect in this film.

Gifts, X-mas and Otherwise

2008-12-17T06:09:00.004-05:00

I spent yesterday looking for one of these for you-know-who for Christmas. It's time. She hasn't asked for one, probably because she doesn't spend any time in any toy stores (thank heavens) and therefore doesn't know that you can buy these. In her mind, they exist only at school. I think she's going to love it and for the first time in a long time, I'm excited about the holiday.

We're at that stage for the holidays where the kids have actual wants. They want things. Before, any toy would do, really. As long as you had to rip paper off of it beforehand, as long as it had been sitting under the tree taunting them with mystery, as long as it was a toy, they loved it. Now...

Now we're in a new world. Garret wants a certain electronic chip to go into the video game he got for his birthday. And guess what? They're sold out. And by they, I mean everybody. You ask for some specific DS game and the clerks at Best Buy and Toys 'R Us and Target just smirk at you. And I'm thinking: Yeah, I know. It's Christmas and I'm a middle aged lady who just crawled out from under a rock. Must there be disdain? Can't there be a shred of sympathy?

I don't quite know what I'm going to do.

I wasn't alone. Many, many women like me, and some older, were on cell phones shouting at some other party on the other end, shouting out game titles and waiting hopefully for some sort of affirmation that this would be okay. I have no idea who might have been on the other end of these calls. People my age and older were running up and down the aisles in the middle of a work day, grabbing up every Wii game imaginable, and it's possible that some of these purchases weren't strictly for the kids. People seem to be holing up for the winter and the long economic winter ahead. Stay at home, they must be thinking, play video games. What else is there to do? The line at Best Buy was at least 40 people long. It's possible that Wii sales are what's propping up the economy right now.

I took enormous, if short-lived, satisfaction in walking empty-handed past that long line and out into the bracing December weather. I went home, wondering what to do about this gift thing, and found what at the front door? A different sort of gift. It was an overnight package tucked into the screen door. And yet it was a little miracle all its own. The editor had returned our manuscript with her edits and instructions to resubmit the edited manuscript as soon as possible, by mid-January. I had never printed out the pages before, so this was my first chance to look at it as a whole piece of writing. It came with the customary letter, saying that we done good, and then listing in bullet form the changes she's requesting. The copy edits so far are light, and the requested changes pretty doable. No major shuffling. We need to turn it around in a month, at which point most of the work on this will be done, at least from my standpoint.

A year ago at this time, we didn't even have a book proposal. Now we have a book.

Literal (Not Literary) Nit Picking

2008-12-10T10:52:00.004-05:00

I got the dreaded head lice call the other day. "We think your child has head lice. Come to the school right now." Ug.

I've heard from other moms that this is just about the worst day of your life. They really say this. They talk about the endless loads of laundry, about the combing the special shampoo, all that. And there's real panic behind it, and a bit of shame, really. And the schools have no sense of humor about this. They are adamant: you need a special comb; you need a specialist; you need to wash every fiber in your house in hot water and dry it thoroughly in the dryer and bag everything you can't wash for two weeks. You need to go over every hair on your child's head to remove every single egg. And then you need to repeat this every day for three weeks. Or else it will never go away.

Strong stuff, huh? Welcome to suburbia, where the manicured lawns and granite countertops are thin armor against the fear that something bad might happen to you. I was given the news about my daughter along with a thick packet of information about lice and the phone number of a professional nit picker and strict instructions to call her immediately to buy a special comb. Right away. Right now. Today. Buy this comb. I'm not making this up.

Okay, so I told myself that I was not going to panic, but of course I did. Who wouldn't under those circumstances? My daughter's preschool teacher said that she would not be allowed back on the premises until every single egg (called a nit) was removed from her head. I wanted to say, "Are you kidding me? Where do you think she got it? While bathing lepers in Calcutta over the weekend? She got it here."

I called the nitpicker who recited a lengthy piece of nitpicking doggerel constructed of just really painful rhymes. (if you have lice, you won't think that's very nice) This was her answering machine message. She called back about four hours later and told me that I really should buy a comb for every person in the family because we probably all had the lice. Only $15 a pop. Okay, what am I going to say? No? I'm not going to buy the one true comb that will remove the infestation from my child? I was given instructions to her house where she would leave the combs in a bag in her mailbox. I would exchange the combs for cash. Like a drug drop.

I asked what it would cost to have her go through our hair to remove the nits. She sounded almost bored when she said that it would take two to three hours per person at $100 an hour. Wait. There are four people in our family. I wanted to say to her, "Honey, that's almost $1000 per family. That's not a treatment; that's a ransom." Instead I asked after her availability. She said she could come over in a few days, but not right away, see, because, "I want to get some shopping done." Now, you have to understand that about 15 kids have been sent home from this one preschool with head lice. They tell you point blank that your child can't come back until the skull is clean. The only phone number they give you is the woman I had on the phone squeezing me in around her shopping schedule. I imagine she did have some ready cash to spend. Talk about a recession-proof industry.

We said no thanks to that. But she was right about one thing: three of us had it. I found that out when I took one of the combs and ran it through my son's hair. We found a couple of the grown up bugs on him, and he started to cry. "I don't want to have head lice," he said. I agreed with him; I didn't want him to have it, either.

We've done the shampoo; we've done the Cetaphil. We've done a prudent course of laundry. Nothing crazy. We're combing, combing. And the kids are good about it. They don't seem to mind. I think we're ahead of this thing. After all: they're just bugs. You can kill bugs.

Cloudy with a Chance of...

2008-12-08T21:47:00.004-05:00

We've had a bit of a good news/bad news vibe going on here. It is the end of the year, a time when people who hustle for work have to think about what income they might have, if any, in the following year. This is the first year that both of us have been doing the same thing, and it's a bit frightening.

The good news is that the boy book is a go. The editor sent a nice little note late last week and said that she was accepting the manuscript. Hooray! Of course there will still be edits and adjustments, but still. Hooray! I believe that about 7. 3 seconds elapsed before our agent sent a note back asking for the next check. I love having an agent. And that's why.

On the bad news side, well, there's plenty to go around. It's in all the headlines all around us. One of the companies that Larry works for now on contract basis just fired five people on Friday. (Oh, excuse me. They enacted a dramatic corporate restructuring that eliminated five positions.) How do we know this? Well, Larry was talking to one of these folks on the phone about a story and the guy said, "Oh, wait. Can I call you back? My boss is on the other line." He never called back. His computer was turned off and he was escorted from the building, we found out later.

Another place Larry works for depends on the automotive industry for funding. Enough said there. It's scary.

Talk to editors and agents now and they describe the book market as either skittish or lethal. That's not good news for anyone who wants to start a book project, as I do.

Still, irrational hope abounds.

Larry walked into the bedroom today holding the above title: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Cute book. The kids like it. But Larry's looking indignant. He points to the book.

Larry: Know what this sold? (dramatic pause) A million copies.

Me: So I should be writing those?

Larry points at me and gives me his famous smirk.

Larry: Cloudy with a Chance of....Poopies.

I start doing the lip chewing thing. It's meant as a deterrent. It never works.

Larry: Everybody Poops? Big hit. How about: Everybody Pees.

Me: That's almost funny.

Larry: We could do a whole line of books about bodily functions. One could be called: Do Boogers Taste Good? Or...or...one called: Daddy, Why Do Farts Smell?

Me: So this is a memoir?

Larry walks out of the room, gets halfway down the hall and yells back.

Larry: It was written by a husband and wife team.

Me: Great.

Larry: One wrote it, and one drew the pictures.

Me: So you'll be drawing the pictures?

Larry: Me? You can draw a turd, can't you?

I think that pretty much sums up our collective career prospects.

Seamus the Kissing Bandit

2008-12-04T07:37:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, while I was putting pony tails in S's hair, she came out with this pronouncement:

"Seamus tried to kiss me yesterday."

I ignored the ping of alarm in my belly and continued combing. I said, Hmmm. Or somescuh. S continued.

"Seamus is in love with Kerry Fitzpatrick."

"Then why is he kissing you," I asked with a little more force than intended. "Why can't this be Kerry Fitzpatrick's problem?" This was a mistake. It's always a mistake to ask these questions. Any questions. There are no rational answers. S is four years old. I want to call the school, but this would make me one of those crazy mommies. It would, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it?

"Well, he is in love with me, too," said S, with her palms up. Right. Of course. Who wouldn't be?

Did you tell the teacher, honey?

"I told him that there's no kissing in school." Good for you, sweetie. That's the spirit.

Can you tell the teacher next time, honey?

"Well, I telled Mrs. Baer, and she telled me to tell him that there's no kissing in school."

Well, okay. You did the right thing.

"But he didn't listen."

Oh, honey. They never do.

Fiction Thingy and Gratitude

2008-12-02T05:21:00.003-05:00

So, a couple of days before Thanksgiving the phone rang. Caller ID said: Purdue University and I thought, "I don't know anyone at Purdue University." And then I answered it anyway, even though these things are usually someone in a recorded voice announcing that my car's warrantee really, really is going to expire and that this is absolutely the last time that this recorded voice will be contacting me to remedy the situation (yeah, if only).

But it was a real person, whose name I didn't listen to saying that he'd like to accept a short story I sent over there. You know, an actual fiction thing that's made up and all. He stunned me into silence, the kind of silence in which you scroll through a list of names of people who might think that a prank phone call is a fun way to spend an afternoon. I think the guy on the end of the phone might have said, "Hello?" into the silence, before I roused myself and said, "Yeah, okay." We shared several more seconds of silence before he said, "Um, do you have any questions for me." I had none. I had no thoughts whatsoever.

I wandered downstairs where I found Larry hanging window treatments. He nests when he gets anxious and so in the light of the advancing holiday season and the end of year scramble for new work, he's spent the last few days trolling the aisles at the soon-to-be-expired Linens N Things. I don't get in his way during these little excursions because nesting is the least self-destructive activity a person can engage in while anxious, and because his taste is better than mine. Here again I married up. (I also caught him watching West Side Story the other day. He seemed to know all the songs, too. Perhaps that's a story for another time.)

"Someone take your story?" he asked and then he got down off the ladder and gave me a kiss. He asked the name of the magazine and I had to admit that I didn't know. I didn't ask.

On the very next day, I got another note from a different literary magazine wanting the same story. I didn't open it because I wasn't home. Larry opened it, and he got in the car with both kids in tow and came to the coffee shop where I was meeting with my co-author. Larry knocked on the window and came in to make the announcement. He was genuinely excited and proud.

The look on his face: This is what I'm thankful for.

Benign Criticism

2008-11-20T14:21:00.008-05:00

This fall, I have been both a student and a teacher. I've been teaching the usual 6-weeks, 6-essays class for Grub Street, and I've been teaching a memoir class to senior citizens in Mission Hill, also for Grub.

In addition, I have been taking a fiction class, in part to see what I can do in that form (so far, not much luck). Also, I've been hoping to hone my narrative skills and this seems like the appropriate way in which to take some aggressive risks. I'm hoping, too, that being a student will make me a better teacher. And it does, in that I give much more direct criticism to students in my classes now that I've been a student. I've realized that students who really want to improve want honesty. But it has to be smart honesty, the kind that makes them want to try again because they feel someone understood what they were up to (even if it went splat).

I used to be too timid about this. When I started teaching I was writing primarily for magazine editors and let me just say that for the most part, they have no manners at all. Editors have written THIS IS STUPID in all caps, in red ink, on paragraphs that I've written. Or they write YOU'RE PUTTING ME TO SLEEP HERE. Or PUH-LEEZE. (Okay, I get it. Rewrite. I can rewrite.) Magazine writing is a factory of sorts. The editors package the text, copy edit it, put a title on it and send it off. They don't spend a lot of time prettying up your feelings.

In my memoir and essay classes, we tend to be much gentler. Not to say that we don't offer comments that might seem bizarre to the uninitiated. In a recent class I remember saying to someone about her essay, "Wow, my favorite thing here is that, you know, while we obviously know your husband is dying, we don't actually know that he's dead until that last line when you walk up to his body. That's amazing." And to everyone in the class (I hope) that seemed like an appropriate way to comment on the story, and on the storytelling at work, which was remarkable. The woman who wrote the story didn't need therapy from our workshop; she needed real advice about--and appreciation for--the savvy way she had constructed her piece.

In a fiction class, the critiques tend to be all over the place. Unlike memoir, the facts of the story are up for grabs. So people might comment on how a character should behave differently or say different things or be a different gender in order to make a bigger splash in the story. It's scary. I'm struggling with this, too. For the first time, I look at someone's story and have no idea what to say, no idea at all what they're trying to do. On top of that, some of us are getting little lectures about how our stories aren't big enough, important enough, how they don't represent an aggressive artistic stance, an attitude about the world. (Yowza! Where can I get one of those?) Anyway, I've gone from confident writer and workshop participant to nervous neurotic in seven short weeks.

Stay tuned.

The Dead Cat Play

2008-11-10T19:05:00.004-05:00

Near the end of this play, which Larry and I saw on Saturday afternoon, a 16-year-old girl in a short haircut and an even shorter dress, raises two guns to shoot her boyfriend in the back at point blank range while he cradles his own headless dead cat. You'd have to see the play to understand. Or perhaps you wouldn't understand even if you did see it. I can assure you that this is one of the least shocking moments the play has to offer. By the time Mairead gives Padraic both barrels, we've already seen people being tortured, having their eyes shot out, and getting gunned down on stage. We've even seen two characters have a chat while they dismember two dead bodies. Padraic's imminent death is just another plot point clicking into place.

What's shocking is the stage blood packets that explode in that scene with such force that they send spatters up through the first six rows of the theater. As we were sitting in the front row, Larry and I got our share. He turned to me after the play, pulling his shirt out in front of him. "This will come out, right?" It was a new shirt. I shrugged. Hard to say. Sometimes blood is made from chocolate syrup and that stuff never comes out. We should have been suspicious of being one of the only people sitting up front. Live and learn.

It's a tough play to sit through, funny as it is, and this might be the wrong moment for American audiences to have a laugh about the absurdity of torture. At one point, Padraic is standing next to a man he has suspended by his feet and is lecturing him about the fact that he refuses to choose which nipple Padraic will cut off. He's standing there, holding a pair of pliers in one hand and a razor in the other and saying something on the order of: If you don't choose, I'll take them both and probably feed them to you. So you might as well choose. To do anything else is madness. (The speech itself is much more clever, but I don't have it in front of me.) And then the phone rings and Padraic answers it, and learns that his pet cat is sick (or poorly). And he dissolves emotionally. And the man hanging next to him has to comfort him, by telling him that the cat probably has ringworm and if he'll just run round to the chemists for some pills, the cat will be all right in a couple of days. The whole exchange is funny in the most shamefully uncomfortable way. Fortunately, the actors were wonderful. I particularly liked Colin Hamell as Padraic and Lynn Guerra as Mairead, two grown ups playing emotionally stunted children who have been hardened to violence but who remain naive about everything else.

I enjoyed the performance, but I was glad for the end and I wouldn't want to have to see it again. And I don't even need a program; I have my bloodstained clothing to remember it by.

Boy Book Update

2008-11-10T18:36:00.004-05:00

We turned it in today.

Oh, my.

It came in at a little under 92,000 words, written starting March 30 or around there. I hope the editor likes it. We all do. But there's almost no time to consider that possibility or its alternatives. Already we're to submit a list of possible titles for the marketing department to chew on. We have a huge author survey to fill out. We have to send them photos of ourselves in a certain trim size. Black and white only, please. Hi-res only please. But a variety of poses in a natural setting.

I said to my co-author: Natural settings? What the hell does that mean? No nudity, right? I'm a nice girl.

The author questionnaire must be a dozen pages long and quizzes us on everything: where we come from, what cities we've lived in, what media contacts we have, if any. On and on. And it asks for a detailed description of where the book idea came from. It's not a problem answering these questions, it just seems to be happening so fast. We turned in the book, and the editor was thrilled. Then she said, well we're working on the book jacket now. I want to tug her sleeve and say, "Psst. What if you don't like what we wrote?" But of course that's not done.

We just give the information they want and feel gratitude.

And we fall down. I sent off title options today and then got up from the computer, crossed the room and started down the stairs to check on S, who was busy making a paper bra for the dog. Pink paper. Don't ask. It was to go along with the paper mermaid tail she'd taped to the dog's midsection. I took one or two steps down the stairs and then my feet went out from under me and I skidded the rest of the way on my back and elbows, one foot twisted sharply under me. The lightheadedness of relief had made me clumsy. I sat on the bottom step saying, oh, oh and watching the red blotches appearing on my skin. S was up in my face in a flash, saying, "You have to hang on to the railing. Otherwise you slip." It was a very stern warning. Then she was waving one of her socks in my face. They're all over the house because she uses them to make mermaid tails for her stuffed doggies. "You slipped on this," she said and shook her head like a disappointed mommy. Then she marched up the stairs to put it in her drawer. When she returned she crawled onto my lap wanting hugs. I was still on the bottom step because I couldn't quite get up. That's when Larry appeared, asking what's going on.

"I fell down the stairs."

"Yeah," he said. "I heard."

So much for the romance of success. I sat with an ice pack on my bruised foot for a while and then took S off to her swimming lesson. It's time to get back to work. The editor's verdict on our book is coming. We just don't know when.

Taste of Grub

2008-11-07T15:14:00.003-05:00

Tonight is Grub Street's annual fundraiser, called the Taste of Grub. It's a swanky party at which some famous and near-famous writers read their work and Grubbies and Friends of Grub all stand around chatting and eating. It's one of those events at which I tend to meet people I've read and admired from afar and then have one of those moments where I try to say something witty and intelligent and just fail utterly. So there's that to look forward to.

We don't always go because nights out come along rather rarely for us, but Larry and I bought tickets this year. It's a good way to celebrate the (near) end of the boy book project. We're at 93,000 words. And the deadline is Monday.

Cheers!

Jack's Hierarchy of Vocational Aspiration

2008-10-24T20:20:00.002-04:00

I was going through some of Jack's old emails, and came across this piece of advice. He used to give this as part of his lectures to undergraduates. He sent it out to one of our mutual friends as part of a rant as to why writers are chronic malcontents. I should post the entire email (it's that entertaining) but it's pretty long.

Anyway, when kids complain that they have to start at the bottom, he says this:

Somewhere at the Herald, a guy is taking classified ads over the phone and thinking, Christ, I could do obits or wedding announcements if they'd give me a shot. Meanwhile, the guy writing obits and announcements is thinking he could be a reporter, the reporter is thinking he could write features, the feature writer wants to be a columnist, the columnist wants to be a novelist, the novelist wants to be a playwright, the playwright a poet, the poet an angel, and the angel wants to be God. For the rest of the story, see J. Milton's "Paradise Lost."

I love that bit. And it's true, no matter where you are in the hierarchy, you're always pining for that next rung.

Political Humor

2008-10-23T07:13:00.002-04:00

I had no intention of writing about the election, because I'm over it already. I don't know a single person who isn't. And yet...

A couple of days ago I was driving the kids home from something, maybe the G man's karate class. The two of them were in the back seat, arguing about who touched who's face (an old chestnut around here).

Of a sudden, the G man says, "Hey, mommy. I wanna play war." To which I said, no, honey. I'm driving.

"Come on, mommy. Please? Let's have a war."

Okay, honey, how do you play that?

"Well, I'll be John McKennedy. And you be. And you be. And you, um. Hey, mommy, what's the brown guy's name?"

That's a six-year-old's perspective of things. The election is a war between McWhatsit and the brown guy. It would be funnier if not for the fact that this is exactly how the election has been presented to us on so many fronts.

When I offered up his name to G, I said it carefully so he would remember. And S, who is four, said it right back to me, just as carefully and said, "That's who I'm cheering for, mommy." Of course you are, sweetheart. He's very popular with the ladies.

Draft One is Done

2008-10-17T10:59:00.006-04:00

The first draft of the boy book is done. It came in at 82,000 words, most of those were written in the past seven months. Hard to believe. Tony is looking at the first draft of the final chapter today and we'll likely edit over the weekend. Then we'll print out the whole thing and edit it together in a series of cookie-fueled meetings.

All the worry about whether we would finish or not has evaporated. Now I worry about looking at those old chapters we wrote back in the spring. Those chapters have been gathering dust for 5 or 6 months. Early drafts rarely age well. And I anticipate terror-filled dreams in which the editor hates it, really hates it, dreams in which the manuscript gets lost somehow and we have to rewrite the whole thing in a single day. Stuff like that.

Writers are nuts. Just nuts. But for this moment, I'm happy. We will finish this thing and turn it in on time. Whatever changes the editor wants, we'll make them. No problem.

Also, a finished draft means time to start thinking: What next?

Feeling the Pinch

2008-10-13T08:30:00.006-04:00

The new issue of the Pinch is out, and my essay "How to Work a Locker Room" is in it. The sample copies came in the mail a couple of days ago.

The best part was reading the other essays and stories in the magazine, all of which are wonderful. I was especially excited to read "Sylvia Plath and Truman Capote" by Brian Kiteley. In it, he used parts of Plath's published diaries as a jumping off point for an imagined encounter between Plath and Capote. The narrative captures her voice well in that it is equal parts beautiful and disturbing.

But I was first excited to see his name in the magazine because I love his book The 3a.m. Epiphany. It is the best writing book I've ever encountered. Instead of posing exercises that purport to teach a specific skill (describe a rock in order to practice description), he uses highly specific prompts that get you out of the normal rut. I don't leave home without this book.

One of my favorite exercises is #61, Character Building. In it, you write a story in which two people create a fictional character over the course of several conversations. It's a chance to use the urge to gossip in an artistic way. I love it and have used it several times. The whole book is like that. There is a story under every draft, every attempt to create. It's an antidote to this notion that every story is a failure and that the job of a writer is to fail better next time. When I use this book, I have the opposite feeling. I feel that every draft is a partial success, that it is at the very least a fun and exciting way to spend some time.

Anyway, he and I are in the same magazine. I feel elevated and important today.

Stranger on a Train

2008-10-06T11:27:00.010-04:00

Larry and I went to New York a couple of weeks ago to see two plays. We did this for the very first time last winter, going all that way to see the Seafarer, and it was worth it. We went back in the spring to see Port Authority, and that too was worth the expense and the time away from work and home. We aren't rich. No writers are, but going off to see people performing at the top of their profession in drama feels less like an extravagance and more like a pilgrimage.

In this past trip, we didn't have quite as much luck. Not true. The pilgrimage was different and enlightening in a new way. First, we found magic. Standing on the platform in Boston, waiting for the Accela, I noticed Larry looking grim. He's always worried about getting a seat. I don't know why he worries about this, but he does. I patted his belly and his cheek. I smirked at him and then kissed him, hoping to chide him a bit and to comfort him. I don't know why but men prefer to be teased a bit while they take comfort. Perhaps they don't like to feel coddled.

Anyway, there was an older man standing next to us on the platform and he exclaimed to his wife, "Look. That woman patted her husband in broad daylight." He was leaning on a cane and wearing a Red Sox hat, but the letters looked to be in Hebrew. He went on and on about belly patting and how much men need that. I couldn't quite figure out how to take him, and this fuss. But the train came. As it turned out, we couldn't find a seat. And wandered to the front of the car, and found ourselves sitting across from each other and across the aisle from this man and his wife. He recognized us. Said to his wife, "Look who that is, the lady who pats her husband." Or some such.

I took out my notebook and began to write. The best part of the trip is the train ride and having all those hours in which to write undisturbed. I saw the man take out what looked like a small plastic kit of some sort. He unfolded it and it had compartments and inside that a little tiny flask of water. I went back to my writing. Turns out that he was unfolding a small watercolor palette. Two hours later he handed me the above picture, one he painted on the train while we rode. He does this all the time. He carries this little painting kit and these 5 by 8 cards and he paints people he sees every day. He paints them at Fenway Park and on the Common. "Usually, they don't even know they're being painted."

On the back of the picture he wrote in pencil, "Jane Austen finishes chapter 19 on the train to NYC." Afterward he asked if I was writing a book. I said yes. "I knew it," he said. He seemed happy to have guessed it. We were on the train just a few days after attending my friend Jack's funeral, and I was still selfishly very sad about my own loss. To me, the picture felt like a blessing for the trip. I couldn't get over it, and I couldn't quit looking at it.

The plays themselves were somewhat less exciting, although I shouldn't complain. We saw this as a matinee. And that's really the only time you should go to one of the big blockbuster-type comedies. If you're not surrounded by 70-year-old Rotary Club members from Madison Wisconsin who are laughing so hard at the par boiled laugh lines that their contact lenses are popping right out of their eyes, well, you're cheating yourself. Truly.

We walked out afterward and Larry said, "What did you think?" I said, "I miss the Carol Burnett show." No snark intended. It's like a really long, but pretty good skit of the old Carol Burnett show. Not till we got home did I look it up to find that it's the most exported play of the French theater. Ever.

That night we saw Three Changes. The acting was good and there were several astonishing emotional moments, but I didn't quite understand what was going on or why. I'm going to come right out and admit this. It's very disappointing to be facing a long train ride home in which to ponder one's own inadequacy as a viewer or appreciator of drama. Fortunately, there was a klatch of ancient ladies behind us in their sensible sweaters and chunky jewelry who were just as confused as I was. It was somewhat cheering to overhear them parsing out the plot after while waiting to file out of the theater. (So the gay boyfriend became the man's son? Yes. But he wasn't the son before, right? I don't think so. And the brother became the husband? Right. How did he do that? I don't know. Who was that girl talking in the corner? That was the girlfriend. No. Really?Whose girlfriend?)

Better to console ourselves with Carol Burnett-style comedy.

Ransom Note

2008-09-28T20:33:00.003-04:00

Around here, we sometimes have trouble getting the kids to go to sleep. They share a room and like to spend at least a half hour, sometimes an hour, enacting dramas in the eerie glow of the Spongebob night light. I hear giggling in there even now. It's good that they get along well, but not so good that they keep each other up so late. And sometimes they fight. Still, a few weeks ago, we told them that we were thinking of renovating the house, adding a bedroom. "You can have your own rooms," we said brightly. They looked at us with horror. "No!"

One night recently, the two of them were jumping off their beds, clutching pillows to their bellies to cushion the fall. We heard thumps and giggles, and then a scream when one of them landed on a toy. We told them to knock it off, but it continued. When Larry had had enough, he marched up the stairs. He threw the door open, and in his best Darth Vadar voice, said, "That's it. No more toys." And he scooped up all their stuffed animals--all of them, including the prized ones from infancy that have had half their fur rubbed off, including the little red dog that G calls "Cakes." Larry scooped them up and marched out with them. The kids cried; they wailed, but Daddy's heart is like ice when he's been pushed too far. Finally, they piped down.

Silence for a few minutes. Then the door opened and the G-man threw a paper airplane down the stairs and into the living room where we were sitting. Larry got up, unfolded it and found a carefully written note.

It said:

"Daddy. I do not like you. But if you give me my Cakes dog back, I will like you. And I will give you money. Love, G."

Apparently, he'd found a piece of paper and a pencil in his room and he had written the note while hunched next to the night light.

Larry had to cover his mouth to keep from laughing out loud. He said, "I have to reward this initiative." He took the Cakes dog back up the stairs and emerged a minute later with G's other prized possession, an oversized fake $20 bill. "He gave me the twenty," Larry said with pride. Seems like a fair trade.

Losing a Friend

2008-09-23T11:04:00.005-04:00

My good friend Jack died the weekend before last. The news came as a complete shock. He died in his sleep, quietly. I knew him for 19 years. We met when I was a graduate student. In those years, he taught me how to be a writer, how to work as a freelancer, how to deal with editors, how to keep going when things go wrong. He introduced me to my husband, and attended our wedding. He asked about Larry every time that I saw him. He worried about Larry, but then he worried about almost everyone. I found out recently that he liked to brag a bit to his other friends about having introduced us. He was right to do so.

Jack was a sportswriter for years and he described the world almost entirely in sports metaphors, so that an altercation with an editor became, "I stood him up at the blue line," or "I backed him up to his own goal." Once, he met one of my relatives, one who was nervously backing up to the door while she talked and said later, "She takes quite a lead off first base." After he turned 50, he began to refer to himself as "being on the back nine" of life. He sometimes referred to himself as the Wiley Veteran when dealing with students who tried to whine their way out of a deadline. And yet he had very few altercations with editors and very few run-ins with students. That's because he was always thinking and planning. I got many emails from him detailing his plan B in case an editor was going to turn down a manuscript or if a student was going to make another lame excuse about missing class and the deadline. His ability to anticipate the worst and plan for it (while obsessing over it) was legendary among his friends.

He used many of those same sports metaphors in his classes. He believed in the lessons of the sports world as guides to behavior off the field. He liked to say that playing sports doesn't build character, it reveals character. You don't get to make excuses or ask for rules changes on the field because you stayed up late or forgot to practice, or are having a bad day. Players learn to deal with bad luck, bad bounces, and their own failings. He told students that showing up every day, on time, matters. Making a deadline matters. Following directions matters. He docked them, docked their grades if they violated these rules, and they loved him. For undergraduates in their first or second class in writing, lessons that teach character are crucial, at least as important as learning how to avoid the dangling modifier. In fact, these lessons might me more important because no one else is teaching how to think, how to plan, how to show up every day with a good attitude, how to deal with bad luck and keep going. Few professors have the energy to reward those things. Those students who had the character or developed character along with their ability to write, those students he helped. He opened his rolodex to them and found them great jobs and great opportunities. And he invited them to be his friends. He had friends of every age, and that is an incredible fact on its own.

I didn't just learn how to write from Jack. He gave me lots of advice about life. I watched how he behaved in his marriage in order to learn how to be happily married. Many times he wrote to me about how he planned to spend a day. Jack was always up early, sometimes at 4 a.m. and he would go in to work by 6, and be home by noon. He always taught in the mornings so that he would have the afternoon off. He would make a huge ritual about shopping for groceries for dinner. He loved to cook and he loved to have the right music playing while he cooked. He would detail for me the things he bought, or was planning to buy and the rotation of music that he would play while making dinner. His dinners with his wife, Barbara, had that sense of ceremony. He was very French, in this way. (He would say French Canadian, but that's another story). But I saw from him that time spent cooking and listening to music, or doing anything that gives you joy, is not wasted time. These pleasures are important.

He also wrote every day. He would frequently send emails, the subject line of which contained the word count of whatever book he was working on. (Of course there was that one season in which every email contained his ranking in Fantasy Hockey.) I got lots of emails that detailed his struggles to write a novel at the age of 62. Had he ever written a piece of fiction before? Nope. But his solution was to sit down and write a story at 500 words a day until it was done. It was done in 6 months. Six months later he had an agent, and a few months after that he had a book deal. Hey, not everybody does it that way, but it can be done that way.

After that he talked about writing a screenplay. "I read a couple of them. It doesn't look too hard," he wrote to me one day. And then he noodled around on another novel. I admire that. I want to do that myself. Always thinking, planning, showing up early every day with a good attitude, and dealing with whatever bounces you get, good and bad. And finding a little rest and time for a pleasurable hobby in the afternoon.

There are worse philosophies to use as a guide in the writing life. I miss Jack. I'll probably miss him every day from now on.

Stage Fright

2008-09-13T13:39:00.004-04:00

The boy book manuscript is at 66,000 words. In a little less than two months, we quaking co-authors must turn in a manuscript that is at least 75,000 words long. Back at the end of March, when we were on the phone, in conference call, with the editor and she announced to us the short deadline and the massive word count, it was all I could do to take a big breath and say, "No problem."

No problem. After we hung up, the phone rang again and it was the agent, saying, "You were so cool about that." She seemed impressed.

No problem. Calmly promising the impossible is an essential skill for a writer. And it has been no problem, so far. We have about 3 more chapters to go, and we keep scratching away at the sections we have yet to write. And yet, instead of speeding up, I've felt as though we've slowed down. It took five weeks to eek out the last finished chapter--instead of 10 days. At this rate, we won't finish in time. Sure, most of that included August and dueling vacation schedules and the yawning gap between summer camp and the first day of school. And the chapters we're working on now are about how much trouble boys can get into at school, how they can misfire in a classroom and how they can be herded into special ed by mistake. These are delicate issues. We want it to be right.

Those are all good reasons why the writing is so slow, but they don't cover the real reason. The real reason is stage fright. It's the literary version of it, anyway.

I remember years ago listening to a novelist (whose day job was editing nonfiction books) talk about this very thing. He said he always hit the wall at about 150 pages into the first draft of any novel. At about that point, he would stop writing and have to sit on the urge to throw the whole thing into a landfill somewhere and forget about it. There's a point, he said, at which the whole project stops being a lark that you can joke about (even to yourself) and starts to become something serious, something you can be judged on. And the fear that comes with that shift is almost overwhelming.

We're nearing that point, although it's much later in the process. We can't stop now, and we can't sit around hoping that we're just going to find the inspiration to finish on time. Tony and I jokingly say to each other, "I wonder what she's going to think about this?" And then we sit in silence for a minute. Truth is, we don't know. The editor won't have seen a word of it since the day she bought into the project back in March. It seems inconceivable that this is how it's done, but this is how it's done. An editor doesn't want to see a book piecemeal. She wants the whole thing to look at all at once.

And so we need to rev up. Keep going. Ten thousand more words to go.

No problem.

It's Snot Remorse

2008-09-12T13:58:00.003-04:00

I opened up the G-man's backpack yesterday and among his drawings of giant insects engaged in battle with hapless planets was a note from a fellow classmate:

Dear G.

Sorry about the booger.

Lucas

So, I showed the note to G. "What's this about?" I asked. G squinted at the note and went back to his Legoes, because he can't be bothered with the details of things in the past. He's a now-centric sort of kid. If it happened three hours ago, It might as well have happened in a previous life.

I pressed. "What does this say?"

He sighed, and said, "Sorry about the booger." Like I can't read.

"Yeah," I said. "What's it about?"

G sighed heavily again. Like I'm stupid.

"He just put a booger on me. That's all."

Right. Okay. I think I could infer that much. But the point here is that I don't think I've ever received a note of apology from a man before. Not ever. And not to make this about me, but geez. Do first graders routinely write notes of remorse? First grade boys?

"So, the teacher made him do this? Did she catch him?"

G smoothed out his little pile of Lego pieces. The one he wanted wasn't readily at hand. He has this way of combing through them with his fingertips. Spreading them out, lightly grazing the tops of the pieces as though the one he wants will feel different.

"No," he said.

"No?"

"No! He just wrote a note, okay?"

Okay. Kids these days. What are you going to do?

Copley on Revere

2008-09-09T10:24:00.004-04:00

Reading a book set in the 1790s makes me think of this painting that sits in the MFA. Copley was known (I think) for attempting to capture some of the character and personality of his subjects. Some of the people depicted in his works seem unusually sad or haughty. At any rate, he knew the people he painted. At the very least, he knew what was said about them.

And I ask you: Does this seem to be a nice guy?

The Whiskey Rebels I

2008-09-08T13:20:00.013-04:00

I always giggle a bit when I see a book described as a "historical thriller." I love history, but I don't think of it as thrilling. I think the word thriller should be reserved for books that involve stolen diskettes, secret formulas, international conspiracies engineered by evil spies and viruses run amok. I recently tried to read one of those true thrillers, and couldn't get past the first page, which was a wildly flowery description of a butterfly fluttering at high altitude near a super-secret government research building in the mountains. And then the little butterfly crashes and is revealed to be a super-spy flying thingy. Government-employed brainiacs shriek their panic. Oh, wait. I did get past the first page. On the second page, a ruggedly handsome man climbs in the Alps with his wife. Tragedy ensues. I gleaned from the back cover blurb that she'd been unfaithful to him, so we readers are to be horrified but not overly sad when she plunges to a splattery death. I closed the book at that point. (Will it surprise anyone to learn that this same book is a major best-seller?)

Anyway, by robotic insect standards, The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss is no thriller, although it's plenty exciting. It's set in Philadelphia and rural Pennsylvania in the 1780s and 90s, a period of history not visited often by novelists. Even romance novelists seem to shun this era. Historians these days love to write about the founding fathers, but they tend to cast the great men in bronze. How dull is that? I worked at Yankee magazine many years ago as an editor, and history, specifically Colonial-era history, was something the other editors knew quite a bit about. More than once I sat in a meeting and heard a fellow editor refer to John Hancock as a moneyed boob inexplicably blessed with a beautiful and shrewd wife, to John Adams as a moody and pompous ass, to George Washington as a bit of a heartthrob (his presidency and advancing middle age notwithstanding) because he was one of the best dancers in the country. I once heard an editor go on at length about how Paul Revere was really a psychotic lapdog invited to the revolution not because he was assumed to be the equal of the blue bloods around him (he was not) but because he had what the rich boys didn't. He had connections to the sort of people who could be counted on to harass, torture or kill troublesome royalists when the occasion arose.

Now, that's history. I've never looked at that Copley painting of Revere in the same way since then.

Fortunately for me, this book contains the grittier brand of post-colonial history, the one I prefer. The story does involve financial conspiracy. (And here's my one complaint about that: I don't get it. I'm only about 200 pages into this book and I'm hoping my brain can sort it all out, the conspiracy part, and how financial ruin is imminent for the country. But so far, no go. I'm sure it's me.)

Never mind that, though. The story is told with two narrators. The first is a Ethan Saunders, a former soldier and spy for Washington, who was accused of treason in the waning days of the war and drummed out of the service, and who is drunk for much of the first few chapters. We meet him stealing a watch and contemplating his own imminent death at the hands of a man he has cuckolded. When this man confronts Saunders, beats him badly, and stands ready to kill him, Saunders does and says this:

I cleared my throat. "Dorland, I am sadly disappointed with the man I hve become. I am drunk not only at this moment but perpetually. I have had no steady source of income in half a decade, and I am incorrigibly addicted to gaming, so that the money I steal or borrow or, on those rare occasions, earn, is gone as soon as it is in my hands. My clothes are old and tattered and frequently pungent to the nose, and above all of that, I believe that during your attack I lost control of my bladder and pissed upon my person."

"You think this should make me spare you?" Dorland asked. "Do you think your pathetic condition will stay my hand?"

"No, I only wished to make note of the sort of man your wife admitted into her bed."

Okay, so likable, daring loser on the one hand who is rescued and sent off in search of a missing person. And on the other is Joan Maycott, the book's second narrator, a woman who is young when we meet her first. (Here, the book goes back in time, and many readers will miss this jump and misunderstand what's going on because of it.) Maycott is forceful and smart and knows what she wants. What she wants most is to be a writer, to write a uniquely American novel. This is a major narrative risk, and it's almost a red herring, but that it gives this woman reason to study all the things she's going to need to know to take part in this national banking crisis later on, many years and chapters later as she either aids or hinders Saunders when they finally meet. Of course, that's not for many, many chapters. In the meantime, we follow Maycott and her husband from New York City out to the hinterlands of western Pennsylvania, where they hope to do some farming. They are cheated and find themselves as near slave-labor on an unworkable plot of land. There are several chapters in which their lives are threatened again and again, not just by the elements but by the corrupt men who run their settlement. In this lawless settlement, certain men think nothing of raping a woman in her own home as a way of intimidating her husband. Joan Maycott is a wonderful character and readers have to stand by and watch her driven half mad by all she endures in these few years in this settlement. To avoid starvation, the Maycotts turn to making whiskey, like so many of their neighbors.

This part of the story is the most interesting, for my part, as it shows how people could be so cheated by the system, under what circumstances this territory was cleared for farmland, where that labor came from, and also why people made whiskey in the first place. Why would farmers turn grain into whiskey? Primarily because crops could not easily be transported to cities and sold, but booze could find a ready market anywhere. The better the booze, the higher the price. When the volume and the price are high enough, a tax will follow. All of this is at the heart of the plot.

Above all this information hovers another set of ideas about how a revolution cannot create a country. In the wake of the war, crucial decisions had to be made to create and maintain an economy, a banking and monetary system. The story (so far) also highlights the bitter feud between Hamilton and Jefferson over federal versus state rights, and what a federal government has the right to do, and which friends of the important decision-makers will be allowed to line their own pockets. You can draw a straight line from that feud to the Civil War and to presidential politics today.

Somewhat less interesting for me is Saunders' story (again, so far), although he continues to be witty and swaggering and troubled and drunk, and he meets with Hamilton, runs into Adams, and faces his own set of dangers and heartbreak, too. He is an easy companion to lead a reader through the part of the story that takes place near this new federal government. What I always want in an anti-hero is for him to have a chance at love and redemption. (I'm a sap, so sue me.) I have hope for him on the redemption front. Love? I'm not so sure.

More on this when I've finished the book. Meantime, I like it a lot. It's smart and scary and entertaining almost all the time.

Mad About Money

2008-09-07T08:26:00.003-04:00

There was a little email thread that shot through the Grubbie community a few weeks (or was it months?) ago. In it, one writer tore off on a riff about how he didn't quite understand this business of writing for literary journals that don't pay. He confessed, or perhaps boasted, that he had never published any piece of writing without getting paid for it, and that he considered those who did such a thing were giving their talents away, and encouraging the entire publishing world to devalue writers. He went on and on about it, and I may be exaggerating his arguments in my memory.

Someone wrote back to say, "Hey, you're channeling my mother." And we all had a laugh (I hope) and went back to our desks and our private neuroses.

I remember feeling annoyed and implicated in this, and on both sides. I do write for money. I have written for glossy magazines for $1 a word and $1.25 a word, and for $1.50 a word. No more than that. (And I spent years and years writing for much less.) And yet I've never felt honored by the publishing world, or even noticed. In fact, I've felt held back because I don't like and can't quite get the hang of the hustling part of magazine writing. I'm not very good at coming up with ideas for stories or pitching them. I may have already taken advantage of all the lucky bounces I'm going to get in the magazine world, and that doesn't disappoint me.

On the other hand, I took a couple of writing classes last year to do some experimenting on my own. In one of them, I wrote an essay about one incident in my time as a sportswriter. I sent it out to lots of little literary magazines, none of whom pay writers, and one of them took it. It should be out this fall. So on that side, I've given away, if that's the phrase, one of my best and most personal stories. So, I was a little annoyed by the notion that this might make me a loser of some sort.

Why is money the thing that most validates work?

This would be a silly question except that my son spent the better part of yesterday taping coins to a piece of paper. Some other kid at school had given him a dollar. No matter how many times I asked, he wouldn't give me the full story on why this other kid had given him a dollar. But he put the dollar in the center of the page and taped it down. Then he taped down a bunch of other coins he'd found or been given. He made a huge piece of art about money and he wanted to keep it with him all the time. We went to grandma's house for dinner last night and the G-man brought his artwork. He showed it to grandma and she fussed over it, telling him it was beautiful. He said to her, "It's for you." And we all sat up in alarm.

Grandma said, "No, honey. I can't keep this. It's your money."

But it wasn't money to him. The coins and paper were just that. They were cool, decorative objects to tape to a piece of paper. Grandma offered to count it for him. She counted the coins and said, "You've got seven dollars here."

Larry and I looked over and said in unison, "What?"

"Seven dollars," she said. "That's right." At this point G was insisting that grandma keep the moneyed paper and she was thanking him and hugging him and telling him what a good boy he is, and at the same time, saying, "You keep it."

And then I realized that G was measuring our reactions. He was taking it all in, noticing our shock and alarm over $7 in change. He was storing up all this information about how coins make people feel.

We didn't leave that piece of paper at grandma's house. G brought it home with him. I suspect it means something different to him today than it did yesterday. It does to me, too.

The King of Kong

2008-09-03T17:32:00.002-04:00

Last night I watched this documentary, and it is hilarious and also a bit sad. It's about the rivalry between the two best Donkey Kong players. As a sportswriter, I find it even more funny because the guys in this film, all of whom peaked emotionally 25 years ago, often speak of themselves in the third person, as big sports celebrities do. One of them has a sort of entourage of folks who like to refer to him as a big deal, as a Jedi knight for example, and all sorts of other nonsense. And they defer to him as though he is some kind of celebrity, as though someone outside this tiny group has ever heard of him.

The Killer in the Garden

2008-09-01T09:08:00.001-04:00

Killer Kowalski Dies at 81

2008-09-01T07:15:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I heard about the death of this young man, and it made me sad. I'm no wrestling fan, but I did have the chance to do one wrestling story for OAG about ten years ago and Killer Kowalski was at the center of it. I'd heard from my husband (who grew up watching wrestling) that Kowalski ran a pro wrestling school in Malden and I thought that would make a great radio story. It did.

The main reason why it did was Kowalski himself, who was in his early 70s at the time, still towering at 6 foot 6, and not quite ready to admit that he was getting old. It's hard to imagine how famous he actually was in the late 1940s through the early 1960s, how he and the other wrestlers traveled all around the country to play to packed venues, and then to different television stations around the country to wrestle in tiny studios under hot lights.

Back then, wrestling was just as much a spectacle as it is now, and yet it was forbidden to admit that they rigged the outcomes or choreographed the fights. The wrestlers had their own jargon. A good guy who was expected by the crowd to win every match was called a baby face. The bad guy who was expected to lose was said to be "on the job." If a manager told a wrestler that he was on the job for the upcoming match, he knew that he had to lose. Kowalski in his 70s never admitted to any of this to me. I think he still considered it bad form to talk about the theatrics of the matches. He considered himself to be an actor, and that this was his life's role. He was the Killer, all his life. And he could recount moves from three decade old matches from memory. He could tell a great story, and put on the mean face as though it were still happening.

Not that he wasn't polite. He may have been a great villain in decades past, but he was unfailingly sweet and courteous. He spoke of his lifelong vegetarianism, how he felt that all people were essentially good, that we should treat others with love and more importantly think of them with love, even those we dislike. We should tell people that we love them all the time, he said. He was vehement on this last point and discussed it until my tape ran out and after. At the time, he believed in the power of vitamins and supplements and took dozens of them every day. He showed them to me. He also acted as a kind of guru to his students. He gave them advice about how to get along with co-workers and friends. He advised them on their diets, how to deal with injuries and medical conditions. He insisted on polite and professional behavior, on courtesy, in his gym.

And he coached his students on their acting, on choreographing the sound effects of matches. He had specific techniques for stomping while pretending to punch someone so that there was a real sound to go with the fake punch. This is harder to coordinate than you might think. He showed them how to double over after a punch, how to grimace in agony while your opponent twists your arm behind your back. And when they didn't get it right, he'd climb into the ring,and do it himself with his wide, but now skinny shoulders and his haggard, hawk-nosed face, and he was the best one among them. He was still a star.

There are many reasons why I remember doing that story so well. One of them is that I went to a pro wrestling match and saw some of the newly aging stars of the, uh, sport. King Kong Bundy picked me up and shook me during our interview. And Greg "The Hammer" Valentine was really funny during our interview. Here is this guy, all pumped up, shaved chest, wearing a fake tan, reeking of Ben Gay. When I asked him if he was looking forward to the match, I expected Killer Kowalski's professionalism. I expected a man to give me a little of the tough guy villain talk. Instead, he hugged himself and said, "Not really. It's cold in here."

Also, Killer Kowalski kissed me during our interview. I'll never forget it. I was letting him lead the discussion, as I always do. He was charming and entertaining. He told me that on his 13th birthday, he announced to his mother that he would not eat any more meat. That was the day he became a vegetarian. October 13, 1939. I said, "October 13? That's my birthday, too." The expression fell off his face. And he suddenly looked mean. Or mad, or something. I thought he was upset because I'd interrupted him. He leaned forward, never breaking eye contact, took my face in both hands and kissed me lightly on the mouth. He was very serious about the whole thing. He called it a spiritual connection because we were born on the same day. Then he went back to talking about vegetarianism, and I did what any midwestern girl would do. I pretended it hadn't happened.

The day after the interview, Kowalski called me at home. It was fairly early on a Saturday morning. He told me that he regretted one or two of the things that he said that he felt might be considered critical of the WWF management. He asked me not to use them and I agreed. "Thank you," he said. And then he said, "I love you."

I knew what he meant.

Love Sick

2008-08-24T07:23:00.005-04:00

I just finished this book. I don't tend to read this type of memoir that has at its core childhood sexual abuse, for a bunch of reasons. The fact that I started and finished this one in less than 24 hours must say something about the writing or the subject, though. I'm not sure what. I think the book does a good job of skirting the prurience that you might expect from this subject. While it is the story of a woman who goes into treatment for what she calls sex addiction, the story is always about the emotional struggle, it is always about her need for sexual attention from men, rather than the encounters themselves. In fact, the strongest scenes are the ones where the narrator puts us in the room with her marriage. The scenes between the secretive wife and the husband who has no clue about the affairs and yet is filled with anger and disappointment about their marriage are wrenching.

There is also a long section of the book in which the narrator details her involvement as a teenager with a much older married man and how she tries to become part of his family, or to think of herself as such, after his wife invites her to stay for dinner. She writes, "I imagine they will urge me to move out of my dorm. They will ask me to live here. I can type Forrest's correspondence. I can place my necklaces in the Chinese jewelry box. I can help Shirley cook dinner. I can be Scottie's sister. I can be Forrest's..." Of course all of this loops back to her own father who molested her. Yet, the scene continues through dinner with Forrest's wife and son. It really shows the dynamic she's struggling with and how it is replicated in so many families, not just the ones with abused daughters.

I have more trouble with some of the recovery speak in the book, which is a necessity, I suppose. Or the remembered details of emotional transformation. She writes in a later chapter, "Why does this territory labeled "body," this geography of skin, cause such distraction and destruction? How can this same body now live in a hospital while it attempts to become a different body, learn different routines and movements?" This type of therapy speak, when it popped up, left me flat, as though the real audience of the book is people who are also in recovery for this addiction, and not general readers.

The author, Sue William Silverman, also teaches writing, and I found her theories about memoir to be fascinating, in that they reveal how to tell ultra personal stories like this one. Basically, she feels that there are two voices at work in this type of memoir. One is the voice of innocence, the voice that relates the "what" of what happened. The details emerge in cinematic form. The other voice is the voice of experience, that voice that looks back on the experience to say what it really meant. She has five stages of this that move from pure description to the emotional experience of what happened to the fully developed, reflective narrator of experience. Not every story hits every one of these five notes, but it's a really interesting theory of how to effectively layer pure experience alongside reflection.

Three Changes

2008-08-21T06:22:00.003-04:00

We're thinking of going to see Julie's friend, Maura, in this play. We first heard about it from Julie when she was in town a few months ago, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The playwright is great, the director is Wilson Milam, the guy who helmed the Lieutenant of Inishmore from London to Broadway (yikes! genius alert!)

Funny thing is that about a month after we heard about it, the producers (or whoever) announced the cast's players to be named later. About a thousand press releases appeared online to announce that this guy would also be in the play, and he was described exclusively as a "TV heartthrob." No seriously, it appears before his name as some sort of title. I don't suppose you have lots of time to appear on stage if you're job is TV heartthrob. I realized that I would pay cash plus a pint of my own blood to have been in the room for the first rehearsal in which the aforementioned long-haired genius director guy meets the TV thespian to test drive the script. Add one neurotic playwright. Sprinkle in a few stage-savvy actors who round out the cast. Ah, yes. That one scene suggests a whole play.

Free Books!

2008-08-18T14:06:00.006-04:00

Came home from vacation bearing garbage bags of laundry to face a week's worth of bills, newspapers on the stoop, and that musty, un-lived-in smell the house takes on when we're away. It took the kids about 45 minutes to take every last toy out of their playroom and distribute them throughout every other room of the house. Toys are like old friends, I guess. As Larry and I were sorting and washing and folding and unpacking, the kids were gleefully making a mess in every corner of the house.

Fortunately for me, the post-vacation blahs have been offset by two packages from publishers. I signed up to be an early reviewer at Library Thing, and it worked. One is by John Banville, who writes sometimes as Benjamin Black. I loved his first foray into genre writing, Christine Falls. Well, I loved almost all of it. His account of Dublin in the 1950s is wonderful; he describes a wildly tangled family mess, and a mystery of missing babies and old grudges, all fascinating.

He has one character in there, aptly named Mal, and there is one scene between the main character, named Quirke and Mal in a bar and I have the urge to memorize it because it manages to be funny and sad and suspenseful all at once. And there's another scene between Quirke and and Irish poet, also in a bar in which they are both drunk, and it has this wonderful quality of being a friendly conversation that is at all times about to erupt into a brawl. The thing I didn't entirely love, apart from the abrupt way in which some of the loose ends found themselves tied up, was the way in which he characterized the non Irish people of Boston in the 1950s. Granted, I didn't live here in the 50s. Or anywhere else for that matter. But these people have the feel of Texans rather than Bostonians. One of them is even nicknamed Tex. That just doesn't feel right, does it?

Anyway, the new one is called the Lemur, and so far it's pretty good. More cynical still, in subject matter, but still the evil father figure who dominates his family, still the confusion of an Irishman in the US who has lost himself somehow. And the prose features the same witty insights delivered by a third person narrator. I don't much like the characters, but they are interesting enough to follow around for the 120 pages of the novel. It's a skinny little book that doesn't take too long to read. I fear that it lacks subplots, and other points of interest. Final verdict to come.

The second one is called The Whiskey Rebels and it's about Colonial-era whiskey runners. I think. More soon. It's by David Liss, who wrote A Conspiracy of Paper and I loved that. Loved it.

I love books.

Twilight Encounter

2008-08-14T22:54:00.004-04:00

Sitting at the pool at our last summer vacation experience with this book next to my chair. The kids were happily playing in the pool with Larry. I was making notes in a notebook, listening to the kids splashing around and playing "toilet" with Larry. Don't ask.

Then this guy walked by. Seemed like a nice guy. He looked down at the book. Looked up at me. Got excited. "How do you like that?" he asked. He was really happy. I said, "dunno." I was just a few pages into it. Having trouble getting traction, actually. The subject is intriguing, but the style is...well...less so. But it's summer and I have it on good authority that there's something here. So...

So the guy starts gushing. "It's so great. Really. Give it a chance. My niece gave it to me. I've read three of them since last week."

Holy moly. In a week? Three of them? Uh. This is a story about a teenage girl who has a crush on a vampire, right? One of these is about 500 pages. You read three? I couldn't help myself. I said, "Wow. I've never heard a man say that." The woman who was with him, who might have been his wife, actually turned and snickered. She might have been his sister, though. He's a round-faced, ruddy guy in his early 30s. Quick to smile, soft around the middle. He never blushed but he did look bashful when he admitted going to the author book signing for the latest one of these a few days ago. "Ninety percent women there," he said. Um, yeah. How many of them were older than fifteen?

He gushed more and urged me to keep going with it. "It's a great story. You won't be able to put it down." Uh-huh.

Larry heaved himself out of the pool, dripping heavily. He reached for a towel. "Nice job calling him a fag," said Larry.

I was incredulous. "I never said that."

"You might as well have."

"Not true." I was truly astonished. That's all.

And I've run into this guy twice since then. We go to the little pool here a lot. He taps on the chain link fence around the pool as he's walking by to get my verdict. In fairness to him, I have had the book with me each time. "It's good, right?" he says through the fence. Yep. You betcha. Best blood sucking girlie crush book in I don't know how long. It is, too.

No Country for Old Readers

2008-08-11T13:16:00.003-04:00

The usual vacation reading binge has brought me, finally to this book. Can't say as I understand it. The first 30 pages just scared the bejesus out of me. 'Cause it was pretty clever and all about the antelope hunter becoming the hunted. You know, clever. And then after that, I was struggling to figure out what the point was.

I asked Larry about it every fifty pages or so. I'd say, "What the hell is this thing, anyway?"

And he'd say: You think you know what's going to happen, but you don't.

And to that I'd say: Sure I do. Some other poor sods are going to get their faces shot off. And this gentle reader will be hanging out over the body against her will, while the narrator preens over the blood gurgling out of the throat or the hand that's been half shot away and this narrator will even wax what you might call rhapsodic about the life draining out of the person and the light going out of their eyes and all. And then we'll walk along with the killer while he drinks orange juice and sits for a long time thinking and going through the phone bills of the deceased.

People do things for a long time in this story. That's the PN's favorite phrase. They sit for a long time. They sit bent over their wounds for a long time. Oh, excuse me. They don't sit. They set. They just set there. Or rather they don't just set there. They get up and shoot each other. A lot. They don't do things. They fix to do things, or they are fixing to do things. And they use words like kindly. That's how we know them to be plain good folks mixed up in evil doings.

If I sound annoyed, well...

I think your best bet for finding this a masterpiece is to be about sixteen and a boy and drunk on a certain type of B movie.

Finally, Larry said that when he read it he had the thought that it was some kind of practical joke played by the author on the publishing business. (But in Texas, they'd call it the publishing bidness.) Given that one of the back cover blurbs refers to the writer in question as "our greatest living writer," I'd have to concur. I finished it an hour ago and I've already forgotten most of it.

Still, it would be fun to copy the style. Just to test drive it. Not all is lost.

Baklava? Not quite.

2008-08-05T22:51:00.007-04:00

Two thirds of the way through this book, I stumbled across the word "balaclava" and had no idea what that was.

The scene features a bad guy breaking into a house. He's planning to kill someone. (Yeah, it's not high art. Workaday potboiler set in Glasgow.) The paragraph reads: "He spat silently onto his fingertips and rubbed the exposed hinges on the gate, trying it tentatively at first until he was sure it made nothing louder than a mild creak. Pausing only to pull his balaclava on, he adjusted the eye holes and slid through the gate into the garden. "

Okay. Must be, a ski mask, but what's the reference?

It's a close-fitting garment that covers the head and face, but with eye holes. Usually made of wool. Was used in the Crimean war. Named for the city of Balaclava (above). Apparently troops stationed there in the 19th century needed face masks to protect them from the winter cold, and English wool did the trick. Still used by skiers. It's especially popular for outdoorsy types with asthma, because it traps exhaled moisture where it can be recirculated into the lungs. Its like having a private humidifier in the bitter cold. At least Wikipedia tells me so. Wonder if any of it is true.

Learned something new today. Proper vocabulary for the attire of criminals and terrorists and outdoor enthusiasts everywhere. Running to the dictionary is one of the great pleasures of reading. Especially this book in which young men are "yobs," people are described as "prole" or "proddy," (generally the f-bomb is dropped first) the police are "polis." I have keep my desktop dictionary widget handy at all times.

Depths

2008-08-04T09:16:00.000-04:00

While visiting the Cape in June, I saw this book by Henning Mankell. I read several of his Kurt Wallander mysteries last year and liked them. The author has a very spare style, at least in translation. His inspector Wallander is taciturn and yet prone to angry outbursts. He is matter-of-fact about everything, every detail of every crime, every mistake he makes in his personal life. I love the silences in the scenes and the way the social culture between the characters is laid out. It's set in Sweden, and I sense nuances of that culture as described by Mankell that seem midwestern, that is, oddly familiar.

Depths is set in 1914, and its main character is a man who is taking depths readings of the sounds around Sweden as the country contemplates taking a side in World War I. This is not a nice man, this character. He is a stranger to his wife, to the officers serving with him, and even to himself. In the course of his work, he lands on a small island that should be uninhabited and he meets a young widow living there alone. He develops an obsession with her and plots to return to the island to be with her, and yet he wants to maintain control of his wife as well.

The chapters are short, one or two pages each, and these short bursts of story make the characters and the action seem more disjointed, even fractured, like the main character's personality.

The book begins, oddly enough, in the wife's point of view, where we learn that she has been living in an asylum for many years, quite insane, and uncommunicative and that when she can clear her head she remembers her husband. The rest of the story is from his perspective. The narrator maintains this spooky attention to detail and these rhetorical questions about the main character's inability to understand himself or his own motives.

This is from Chapter 3

The gangplank swayed under his feet. He could just make out the water between the quay and the hull of the ship, dark, distant.

He thought about what his wife had said when they said goodbye in their flat in Wallingatan.

"Now you're embarking on something you've been aching to do for so long."

They were standing in their dimly lit hall. She had intended to accompany him to his ship before saying goodbye, but as she started to put on her gloves she hesitated, just as he had done at the foot of the gangplank.

She did not explain why the leave-taking had suddenly become too much for her. That was not necessary. She did not want to start crying. After nine years of marriage he knew it was harder for her to let him see her crying than to be naked before him.

They said goodbye hurriedly. he tried to reassure her that he was not disappointed.

In fact, he felt relieved.

He paused halfway along hte gangplank, savouring the almost imperceptible motion of the ship. She was right. He had been longing to get away. But he was not at all sure what he was longing for.

Was there a secret inside him of which he was not aware?

He was very much in love with his wife. Every time he had to leave for a tour of duty and said goodbye to her, he unobtrusively breathed in the scent of her skin, kissing her hastily. It was as if he were laying down that perfume, as you do a fine wine, or perhaps and opiate, to take out whenever he felt so forlorn that he risked losing his self-possession.

His wife still used her maiden name. He had no idea why, and did not want to ask.

A tug boomed from the direction of Kastelholmen. A seagull hovered in the updraught over the ship.

He was a solitary man. His solitary nature was like an abyss that he was afraid he might one day fall into. He had worked out that the abyss must be at least forty metres deep, and that he would leap into it head first, so as to be certain of dying.

Happy Birthday, Dog?

2008-07-30T14:23:00.004-04:00

We're doing a lot of spelling around here. S has decided that she's a writer. Naturally. The other day she came home from a birthday party with a goodie bag that contained enough candy to keep her awake until she's 7, as well as a small notebook and a pencil. She spent the better part of an hour scribbling doodles in the pages. "Mommie, I'm writing," she said to me and I felt a swell of pride. Of course, that was deflated as soon as she turned to her doggies and said, "I can't play with you right now. I'm writing."

Is that a pang of guilt or am I having a heart attack?

She asks endlessly how to spell things. How do you spell boots, and carrots and cat. Then she asked how to spell dog. I was transported back to my own childhood. My parents worked and my little brother went to daycare at this little trailer park, where a woman lived with her four kids. I'm not sure how many she took care of. I think my mother paid her $30 or $35 a month to keep my brother during the day. I went over there, too, in the summers. I remember that she had a husband but he was a truck driver and therefore never around. When he was around, he was moody and withdrawn and slept a lot. The kids were two boys and two girls, all about my age. And there were several kids she cared for. Now when I think of it I don't know how she did it. The trailer was a tiny thing, two bedrooms with little more than a galley kitchen and a small front room. The kids' bedroom had two sets of bunk beds in it. I remember this woman joking with her friend one day on the phone. She had a big blonde beehive of teased hair. She was not a big woman but she was thick-waisted, and wore tight, tight clothes and heavy make up, and smoked, but everyone did back then. I think her name was Karen and she was telling her friend that her daughter was writing a birthday card to her father. The girl was asking how to spell everything. When she asked how to spell Dad, Karen had told her, "D-O-G."

So, here's Karen on the phone with her friend saying, "You wouldn't believe his face when he opened up the card and it said 'Happy Birthday Dog'."

Somehow that story is even funnier now.

The Deluge III

2008-07-28T20:41:00.002-04:00

Last one on this, but I can't resist.

Mid story, the Cardinal, who is a major character in the story, lectures Miss Malin about the conceit of wanting to be God, or rather, the conceit of wanting to create a world. Although he doesn't say it, this is what writers do, or try to do. In this way he (and the narrator who created him) lectures all writers in every genre.

"Every human being has, I believe, at times given room to the idea of creating a world himself. The Pope, in a flattering way, encouraged these thoughts in me when I was a young man. I reflected then that I might, had I been given omnipotence and a free hand, have made a fine world. I might have bethought me of the trees and rivers, of the different keys in music, of friendship, and innocence; but upon my word and honor, I should not have dared to arrange these matters of love and marriage as they are, and my world should have lost sadly thereby. What an overwhelming lesson to all artists! Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous, solution. Be brave, be brave! Ah, Madame, we have got much to learn."

The Deluge II

2008-07-25T22:24:00.002-04:00

I love this story. Early on we meet Miss Malin, an aged spinster, who was never very pretty and had not a penny to her name as a young woman, and who had the guts to be extremely prudish to boot. Jane Austen would have had nothing to do with this woman. Miss Malin would have been a throwaway line at best to her. But Isak Dinesen is made of sterner stuff. Her narrator compares Miss Malin to: Sigrid the Haughty, the ancient Queen of Norway, who "summoned to her all her suitors amongst the minor kings of the country, and then put fire to the house and burned them all up, declaring that in this way she would teach the petty kings of Norway to come and woo her."

And I dare say that would make an impression on any man who comes calling with a box of chocolates and a dirty mind. It's no shock to learn, then, that Miss Malin never married. (It is a shock to learn that Sigrid the Haughty did marry, after all that.)

Then we learn:

"Yet Miss Malin had not escaped the common fate of human beings. She had her romance. When she was twenty-seven, already an old maid, she decided to marry after all. In this position she felt like a very tall bitch surrounded by small yapping lap dogs. She was still prepared to burn up the petty kings who might come to woo her, but she picked out her choice."

"Malin, for her part, picked out Prince Ernest Theodore of Anhalt." We learn then that he's fabulous in every way that a man can be fabulous in the early 19th century. He's a handsome, monied nobleman. A great soldier and a sensitive new age man, such as there was at the time, meaning when a woman died of grief over him, he probably composed a poem or two about it.

So, how did this poor ugly spinster rate a guy like that? Read on.

"This young man had obtained everything in life--and women in particular--too cheaply. Beauty, talents, charm, virtue had been his for the lifting of his little finger. About Miss Malin there was nothing striking but the price. That this thin, big-nosed, penniless girl, two years older than he, would demand not only his princely name and a full share in his brilliant future, but also his prostrate adoration, his life-long fidelity, and subjection in life and death and could be had for nothing less,--this impressed the young Prince."

So here we have the audacity of the character, and the audacity of the storyteller, in one stroke. And it's all explained away by the Prince's love of riddles. All his life he has loved riddles and puzzles, and this woman is both. "When, therefore, he found this hard nut to crack, the more easily solved beauties faded before his eyes."

Never mind that men don't really act like this. It doesn't matter. Nor does it matter that Miss Malin isn't the subject of this story. She's one of several characters, each of whom has a compelling and startling story to reveal. This is just a couple of pages out of a 78 page story. The narrative is astonishing. It's worth reading twice.

The Deluge

2008-07-24T19:41:00.006-04:00

It has been raining for four days in Boston and so I picked up a copy of Isak Dinesen's "The Deluge of Norderney," which so far is wonderful. The prose style is dense and languid. There's so much backstory that we seem to be continually jumping from present to past and then careening back to the flood itself. I could never construct a narrative as tight and yet as chatty as this one, but it would be fun to try. Here's a tidbit of the flood itself:

"The farmers were awakened by the plaintive bellowing of their animals. Swinging their feet out of bed, int he dark, they put them down in a foot of cold, muddy water. It was salt. It was the same water which rolled, out to the west, a hundred fathoms deep, and washed the white feet of the cliffs of Dover. The North Sea had come to visit them. It was rising quickly. In an hour the moveables of the low farmhouses were floating on the water, knocking against the walls. As the dawn came, the people, from the roofs of their houses, watched the land around them change. Trees and bushes were growing in a moving gray ground, and thick yellow foam was washing over the stretches of their ripening corn, the harvest of which they had been discussing on the last days before the storm."

And that's just page 4. More to come....

Donut Crap

2008-07-21T10:02:00.004-04:00

Yesterday was a scorcher. Late in the afternoon, we all found ourselves lolling in the kiddie pool and watching the approaching storm clouds. Larry went inside the house and emerged a few minutes later holding a fistful of almonds, with predictable results. Sammie asked to try some, then the G-man said, "What are you eating?"

Rolling his eyes, Larry said under his breath, "Dog crap." G perked right up. "What? Donut crap? What's donut crap? I want some donut crap, too."

I shot Larry the spousal glare of death, but he just smirked. G wouldn't give it up. "What does donut crap taste like? Please? Please can I try some?"

I pinned Larry with another glare. I may even have cocked a finger gun at his face and said, "Bang."

Larry said, "He doesn't know what crap means." To which I said, "That's why he'll say it indiscriminately." This made Larry sigh. Then he handed G the rest of his almonds. Whether it was an act of penance or an attempt at distraction is hard to say. But it worked.

Sharing

2008-07-19T08:12:00.007-04:00

Now that Larry's working at home, we have to share a lot. We share a phone line and a printer. We share the house, naturally, but it's a lot smaller with two people in here. And we share clients, which creates a lot of interesting situations. For example, I can say to him over morning coffee, "Have you heard from Joe lately?" And when he says, "I got a note from him yesterday," I snap back, "What? He answered your email and not mine?"

Exceedingly petty? You bet.

Also, I'm now the tech guy for all of Larry's computer problems, even though he has a PC and not a Mac, and even though I've never owned a PC, not once, and can't stand them. Larry is the smartest guy I know. He can remember anything, fix everything, and figure anything out. But Larry is a two-finger typist. His understanding of computers is moored in that stage where he thinks the keyboard will crumble to dust if he pushes the wrong button.

So when Larry was designing a newsletter for the aforementioned Joe and couldn't figure out how to turn it into a PDF file, mostly because he doesn't own a program to do that, I got to spend three hours coaxing him through the process of downloading said software.

Larry: This is so stupid.

Me: Okay, okay, now click on the word "download."

Larry: It's not doing it.

Me: Yes it is.

Larry: This is so stupid.

Then I gave up, moved the file to my computer and spent even more time finding a way to make a PDF file that wasn't too large to send via email, while Larry stood behind me saying over and over again, "This is so stupid."

And for the record? My printer is stupid. Gmail is stupid. The whole freaking internet? Stupid.

A couple of weeks ago Larry wanted a powerpoint presentation transferred to his computer. I put it on one of my little flash drives and handed it over. Easy peasy, right? Nope.

Larry: Where does this go?

Me: In the little port-thingy on the side.

Larry: Now what?

Me: Now you open it.

Larry: This is so stupid. It won't open. How do I open it?

Me: It's your computer; How do you usually open files?

Larry: (pointing to the window for the hard drive) I don't know, they're always over here.

At this point, I was standing behind him. I slapped at his shoulder and said, "Move, move." But he wouldn't yield the chair. A little window popped up, listing all of the files on the porta-drive. The one at the top was a MP3 file, and it asked him what to do with it. And to choose what program would open it. Larry panicked.

Larry: What do I do? What do I do?

Me: Click ignore.

Larry: No!

Me: Why not?

Larry: It says it'll do this to all the files.

Me: Move. I'll do it.

Larry: No!

Then he wanted to know what it was, what a music file was doing on the disc, anyway. Actually, I knew it was a stray track from my audiobook of dirty boy D.H. Lawrence's novel, Lady Chatterly's Lover. Great book. But I was hardly in the mood to listen to two depressives having sex or nicknaming their genitals or whatever while trying to pry Larry's keyboard out of his hands.

Fortunately, the phone rang. In our new domestic situation, this solves all disputes. On second thought, maybe we should have played the file. It's possible that our computers would engage more fully, if that's the phrase, if we nicknamed them John Thomas and Lady Jane. Worth a try.

The Proper Garden Party

2008-07-13T09:24:00.007-04:00

Having attended recently a large and elaborate outdoor birthday party for a small child, I thought it might be fun to read from an old etiquette book about the proper way to entertain outdoors.

This is from Manners and Social Usages, by Mrs. John Sherwood, published in, well, the book has no date on it, but I would guess the early 1880s. The section begins with ways to ensure good weather, and to deal with bad and then proceeds to deal with amusements and food.

"A hostess should see that her lawn-tennis ground is in order, the croquet laid out, and the archery tools all in place, so that her guests may amuse themselves with these different games. Sometimes balls and races are added to these amusements, and often a platform is laid for dancing, if the turf be not sufficiently dry. A band of musicians is essential to a very elegant and successful garden-party, and a varied selection of music, grave and gay, should be rendered. Although at a dinner-party there is reason to fear that an orchestra may be a nuisance, at a garden-party the open air and space are sufficient guarantees against this danger.

"If the hostess wishes her entertainment to be served out-of-doors, of course all the dishes must be cold. Salads, cold birds, and ham, tongue, and pate de foie gras, cold pates, and salmon dressed with a green sauce, jellies, Charlottes, ices, cakes, punch, and champagne are the proper things to offer. A cup of hot tea should be always ready in the house for those who desire it.

"Ladies always wear bonnets at a garden-party, and the sensible fashion of short dresses has hitherto prevailed; but it is rumored that a recent edict of the Princess of Wales against short dresses at her garden parties will find followers on this side of the water, notably at Newport, which out-Herods Herod in its respect to English fashions."

Strange that there's no mention of barbecue grills, Jello salads, or Wiffle ball. These must appear in a later edition.

Zingo!

2008-07-09T12:13:00.004-04:00

We're working hard on the boy book these days. This week is the chapter on competition, and in it the doc talks about what the deal is with boys and competition. Why do they compete over everything all the time? Why is playing games such a nightmare? Why do they cheat?

Of course, the G-man provided inspiration for some of this. But I see now that Sammie the bamster is pretty competitive, too. Her need to win is tempered by other things, such as getting along with the other players and being very nurturing to them. When we play a game, she often likes her stuffed doggies to help. This means holding them up and talking baby talk for them in a squeaky high voice. The dogs themselves have plenty of questions about how to play. The dogs are easily confused, you see, and they make a lot of baby talk complaints about how hard it is to wait your turn. And she patiently answers all these questions in her own voice and coaches them through the game. Rarely does she get annoyed with them when they ask too many questions (unlike a real parent) but she does allow herself the occasional weary sigh as if to suggest that being a mommy isn't just fun and games. I nod to her in agreement. Kids, what can you do? (Larry says she's crazy, but I say to him: this is girlhood; suck it up).

But when it comes to winning, well here she doesn't mind dropping the gloves. Zingo is her favorite game these days and it's a kind of bingo game with pictures instead of letters. Best thing about it is the little pez-like dispenser that spits out two tiles at a time and then you match the icons with those on your card. A round is over in two or three minutes and because it spits out two tiles at once, there's no turn-taking. Brilliant. The idea is that you have to know the images on the card and then grab the tile that matches one on your card before the other player. We don't do that. I give her first dibs on everything. Why not?

Still, she takes great pride in beating me. Great pride. She counts how many tiles she has left after every turn and shouts "I'm winning, I'm winning!" Once, I accidentally had more tiles than she did during the game (miscalculation on my part). She counted up the tiles for both of us, looked at me for a long moment, horrified, and then said, "Well, I think I'm still winning."

She has never lost this game. Never. And yet she cheers for herself every time she wins as though stunned by her great fortune. She pumps both fists into the air and jumps to her feet, shouting "Zingo!" It's true joy. I tell her how great it is. Then she turns right back to the game, very business-like, and says, "Okay, you have to win, too." That means we're going to keep playing this round until my card is filled up, too. And when it is, she throws fists into the air again (and I'm expected to do this, too) and together we shout, "Zingo!"

That's the girl style of play. I'm going to nurture my doggies while kicking your ass, and then we're all going to be happy and celebrate together. Or else.

The Third Policeman

2008-07-08T09:28:00.004-04:00

The back matter for this novel describes it as, "Flann O'Brien's brilliant comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to 'Atomic Theory' and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road) and de Selby's view that the earth is not round, but sausage-shaped. With the help of his newly found soul, named Joe, he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policemen present to him."

Yowza.

What the back matter doesn't mention is that it's a very talky narrative. Hugely entertaining chatter, but for long stretches not much happens. The writer can spend a whole page talking about how roads have personalities, making jokes and puns of every stripe along the way, but at the end of the page, the folks in the scene, if that's what we're calling them are in exactly the same spot that they were in the beginning. A thriller, it's not. Luckily, I'm not reading this, I'm listening to it as an audiobook, narrated by Jim Norton (lately a Tony Award-winning actor), who is as hilarious as the text. And that's saying something. My favorite bit so far is when the narrator reveals that he has forgotten his own name, and he reels off a list of possible names to his new best friend who is also his soul, Joe, who makes fun of the names by making up stories about the lives that might go with such names.

"Signor Beniamino Bari, Joe said, the eminent tenor. Three baton-charges outside La Scala at great tenor's premiere. Extraordinary scenes were witnessed outside La Scala Opera House when a crowd of some ten thousand devotees, incensed by the management's statement that no more standing-room was available, attempted to rush the barriers. Thousands were injured, 79 fatally, in the wild melee. Constable Peter Coutts sustained injuries to the groin from which he is unlikely to recover. These scenes were comparable only to the delirium of the fashionable audience inside after Signor Bari had concluded his recital. The great tenor was in admirable voice. Starting with a phase in the lower register with a husky richness which seemed to suggest a cold, he delivered the immortal strains the Che Gelida Manina, favorite aria of the beloved Caruso. As he warmed to his God-like task, note after golden note spilled forth to the remotest corner of the vast theatre, thrilling all and sundry to the inner core. When he reached the high C where heaven and earth seem married in one great climax of exaltation, the audience arose in their seats and cheered as one man, showering hats, programmes and chocolate-boxes on the great artist."

What a fabulous cartoon. For that, you have to get off the treadmill to laugh in earnest. And that's only half the bit. Joe has another name at the ready and another funny story. Following this the narrator walks along and meets a man and tries to figure out who he is. He asks a bunch of questions of the odd little man with the pipe and he gets strange answers. Finally, he says to the man, "What is your objection to life?"

The reply is this:

He blew little bags of smoke at me and looked at me closely from behind the bushes of hair which were growing about his eyes.
'Is it life?' he answered. 'I would rather be without it,' he said, 'for there is a queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon.'

Funny, right? It's even funnier out loud.

Asthma Camp Update

2008-07-03T17:07:00.003-04:00

Here's the thing about expectations: they're often so very wrong.

I was sweating out my time up at asthma camp, in part because I was afraid to interview 9 to 13 year old kids. I mean, what are they going to say? How am I even going to approach them with a microphone? And these are kids struggling with severe asthma, who've spent nights in the hospital, who sometimes can't breathe, can't run and play with the other kids. Some of them have multiple ongoing problems in addition to their asthma, such as poverty or morbid obesity. One of the participants in camp arrived with a Ziplock freezer bag, a big one, overflowing with meds.

And here I am with my microphone and cheesy pseudo-hip, I-was-a-kid-once-too type questions. Disaster, right? And the last radio story I did involved Broadway actors, some of whom could barely hold it together long enough to answer even one question coherently. And these are kids. Could be a short day for middle-aged housewife type reporters.

No so.

I wandered around the craft cabin and found the girls working on some sort of teepee. They were coloring and gabbing. When they noticed me, one of them nodded at my microphone. "What's that?" I told her. She brightened.

"Yeah? You gonna interview me?"

I said, sure. And before I could unfurl the first question, she was going on and on about the friends she'd made and how much she loved it. And I mean on and on. Within five minutes, all the girls were up and doing the cheer they'd made up. Then they each wanted to be interviewed in turn. One of the girls told a story about how she was laughing so hard during the canoe ride that she farted. And she was laughing so hard while telling it that we were all holding our noses in anticipation. Two of them grabbed my microphone and sang songs.

"Too bad you guys are so shy," I said. They looked annoyed.

"We're not shy," one of them said.

Best quote was when one girl told me that she didn't miss TV. I said, "Really?" I couldn't help it. Then when I was interviewing the boys during their cookout, I said to one of them, "Hey, one of the girls told me she was having so much fun that she didn't miss TV."

He smirked at me. "She's a liar," he said. Then he got up, walked away from our interview and over to where the other boys were sitting. He said, "Hey, some girl said she didn't miss TV." They looked up from their plates. "What?"

The S&G Journals

2008-07-01T22:03:00.003-04:00

I bought the kids journals this summer. Well, it's the G-man who writes and writes and writes. About ten minutes after he learned that letters could be strung together into words, he was writing away, working laboriously page after page. We have some of these pages. Goodmarneengmynameis

is the usual greeting, followed by his full name, and whatever was going on in his mind. One details his distress that it's a holiday, and mydaddyworksfarrawayfrommetooday. He wasn't big on spaces between words. Still isn't.

My big plan was to give him a composition notebook that he could write in during the summer and tell stories and draw pictures. He's forever doing that, detailed line drawings of large insects engaged in battle with rocket ships circling planets. He goes in for surreal space opera.

He loved the journal. He wrote his name on the front, and his grade. He put Spiderman stickers on it and on the first page he wrote, "My favorite sea creature is" and then he drew a picture of a jellyfish. I was all misty-eyed when he showed it to me. Sammy got a little journal, too, and she put Dora stickers on hers. She likes to write squiggles and pretend they're stories. And she draws like you wouldn't believe. Birds. Birds and princesses.

They're having a lot of fun with it, and I'm jealous. So I dug through my old pile of blank notebooks, and found one that I got for 25 cents at Building 19, a composition notebook with graph paper instead of lined paper. I put stickers on the front, like they did. And I cut up some of my playbills from the plays we went to see this past spring and glued pieces of them on the covers. It now looks like something that could house mash notes from 7th grade. I carry it everywhere, like a secret friend. I even took it to asthma camp. This is what I want to do this summer with my notebook. I want to draw ridiculous pictures of Purple and Brown and space aliens and birds. I want to make lists of favorite sea creatures, and bad rhyming couplets, and squiggles that I pretend are great stories. I want to have fun.

Sarcasm of Destiny II

2008-06-30T08:53:00.000-04:00

I'm having trouble getting a handle on this book. So far, the first page is missing. Any introductory paragraphs that might hint at the structure of the novel are unavailable. After that we get an introduction to the Nina of the title, or rather her father who is a wealthy Irishman, a man who was early widowed and married again but made a poor second choice. "There are some men who have but to open their mouths and the golden plum drops in. Mr. Fitzgerald was one of these: He was gay, witty, could make a beautiful speech about nothing, which is the rarest of talents, he wrote pretty verses, was an excellent musician and the dear delight of Urania parties, drew tastefully, spoke French without an accent--or, rather with that Irish roll to the r which is better than the original--all as if by nature."

The narrator of the book seems to be an old(ish) maid named Miss Brown, a snoopy sort from the neighborhood who is in everybody's business and full of entertaining opinions. Nice choice. We learn that Nina loves to care for sick orphans, and that she has caught a fever from this, all in one sentence. The narrator comes to visit the bed-ridden Nina who has hired herself a handsome young unorthodox doctor. Hmmm. Our narrator, Miss Brown, gives him to us in romance novel detail. "There he stood, six feet in his stockings, more in his boots, a considerable and rather handsome tenant at will of certain very threadbare and not elegant garments, with the dust and disarray of a country doctor about him. His face, I was reluctantly compelled to admit, was very good; firm brow, large brown eyes, good chin, a masculine, well-curved profile.

But before we get the sense that the doctor and Nina are destined for each other, we see a scene in which they treat each other with indifference. He's rather rude to Nina, peeling up one of her eyelids to look under it and then accusing her of taking too long to recover. This offends the narrator greatly. "What a brute! Here I had come to find an adventurer making love to my Nina, and I found a mere medical machine looking at her as a case, handling her beautiful eye as if it were that of a dead dog..."

Than the doctor offers Miss Brown a ride home, and during this ride he treats her to his views on women. His complaint about Nina is that she, "has too much brain. It is a great misfortune for a beautiful woman to have a brain; it will impair her beauty, and shorten her life; and then she has a conscience, totally unnecessary adjunct--that is to say, she has too much of it." Then the doctor nods at a woman on the street and says of her, "There goes the sweetest woman I know; plain, rather stupid, but comfortable; very sure to make a good wife." The doc compares women to cart horses, thorough-bred racers suffer because they must pull a cart uphill their whole lives. When he sees a plain, dumb, uninteresting woman, says the doc, he thinks to himself, "There is an animal fitted to its work."

And this was written by a woman. This conversation is interrupted when they are both hit by a runaway wagon, and while the doc is unhurt, Miss Brown suffers a broken arm and bruised face. I have no idea where this is headed, and I'm a little frightened by it. People were afraid of the author, Mary Sherwood, when they had to deal with her in person. She would say anything to anyone and could provoke anyone at any time. I'm beginning to see why.

My Latest Assignment II

2008-06-27T13:41:00.005-04:00

I'm going to asthma camp. There are several summer camps around the country that provide a sleep-over camp experience to kids with moderate to severe asthma. The kids swim and kayak and do crafts and the like, all supervised by a team of volunteer docs and nurses who dispense meds and keep their lungs working. It sounds cool. The story should air in mid-July. I'm already reading up on asthma meds, and the studies about the efficacy of such camps, and the issues faced by kids and parents dealing with the illness and formulating questions. And getting nervous. The usual.

Sarcasm of Destiny

2008-06-25T08:27:00.004-04:00

While going through some old files on my computer, I found the PDF for this book. With the subtitle "Nina's Experience," it looks like it might prove to be Victorian-era porn, with the Nina in question being that genteel ingenue just arrived at boarding school where she learns to conjugate more than her Latin verbs. If only.

It's actually a novel written by Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood, who was a best-selling American author (they would have said author-ess, I'm sure) of her day, and her day was the 1880s and 90s. Post-Austen, post-Edgeworth (remember her?), post-Brontes, post-Eliot, but pre-Woolf, pre-Chopin. Okay. So, this is 19th century chick-lit. And it's not very good, but for a few glimmers. Still, I'm newly interested in this first person persona business and so I'm looking at it again. Also, this author was the pre-eminent authority on manners at the time. She'd written several books on the subject and she was also a celebrity in her own right and a world-class social climber. She was from New Hampshire and married into one of the most prominent New York families and basically drained them of all their money. And boasted of being a personal friend to Queen Victoria. Her vast ego was matched only by her intelligence, and she was considered formidable in her quick wit. She micromanaged the lives of her sons and grandsons, told them what to do, where to live and whom to marry. She fascinates me and so I read her work. I have one of her books on manners and her autobiography, which is hilarious in what she leaves out as much as what she puts in. More on this later. Next post, I'll quote from Sarcasm, because in it she paints a picture of Irish gentry in America. Very unusual. And her descriptions of men and women? Priceless. She's trying to be Austen or Edgeworth, and not quite making it. But she is doing something interesting.

Persona Angst

2008-06-22T17:35:00.004-04:00

I've been taking a writing class, something that's good for clearing the cobwebs. I've learned in the past couple of years that I'm no good as a teacher unless I can remember what it's like to be a student.

In this class, we students have to take on wildly different voices. The philosophy of the course is that the instructor presents writing samples from published stories (and poems) and we students copy the style. We use our own stories and ideas, but we have to take on the style, or persona, of the writer. That means everything from point of view to sentence style to mood. I've wanted to take this class for more than ten years, even though it's taught in another part of the country. Now they offer it online. It's described as a kind of high caliber boot camp for stretching your range. When I signed up, I thought it was going to be campy and fun, and instead I'm awake nights parsing out the style of this poet and that novelist to reconstruct it. Write a story in first person as a narrator of whole scenes. Write a story in first person as though writing a letter to someone, and use scenes. Write a story in first person but make another character the focus of the story, so it's really third person yet the narrator still (always) has to have a distinctive personality. Write in first person describing the actions of someone else in minute by minute detail but as imagined by the first person after having been described to him or her in the past by the other character. Okay, so the scene is present tense yet it happened in the past? My brain hurts, and it's only week four. I was awake last night from 2:00 to 5:00 working sentences over and over, and sort of crying off and on, not unhappily, just trying to grasp at something that was continuing to slip away, so I could finish the assignment today and post it. And after all that effort and spent emotion, gentle reader, I can now confess that the story I wrote wasn't very good.

Time to go back and read some more Conor McPherson plays. That first person persona thing is a skill he has down pat, ghosts and devils aside.

Vacationland II

2008-06-19T08:25:00.002-04:00

Even when you're on vacation, the world goes on. I've learned that my favorite actor (Jim Norton) won a Tony Award last Sunday as best featured actor in a play--for the Seafarer. Here he is looking handsome and dedicating his award to his cast-mates. Very classy.

Also, there was something about a basketball championship. I'm fuzzy on the details, though. In the wake of this event, if that's what we're calling it, there were 22 arrests in Boston for excessive public partying (also known as vandalism) and general mayhem. Glad we're here instead.

The G-man lost a tooth on Tuesday, which is the real headline by my lights. It has been loose for a while, and then he just reached in there and yanked the sucker out. That's my boy. First question, while the blood was still wet on his lip was this: Is the tooth fairy real or fake? Okay, now this is moxy. I wanted to say to him: buddy, I'm with you. It's a total fabrication, but please, let the adults have our fun. Also, he was hoarding the damn tooth, putting it back in his mouth and yanking it out again. Acting it out in the mirror. He was seriously going to choke on it or swallow it. By the end of the day, I was willing to tell any number of lies to get the thing out of his hand. Yes, my friend, the tooth fairy is so freaking real. Please, you gotta believe me. And his response was this: Is it a girl? And she goes under my pillow? Why would anyone do that? Won't she wake me up? I'm thinking: kid, your IQ is a burden to us all.

Vacationland

2008-06-15T18:26:00.005-04:00

We arrived at "vacation" yesterday, which is what the kids call any time away from home. The term denotes any place in which we stay, any hotel, any inn, and any beach we visit. We got to Cape Cod, or The Cape of Cod, as the kids call it, mid-afternoon and soaked up the last few hours of sunshine. Today, alas, has been rainy and quite cold. Sammie and G got a swim in late yesterday afternoon, despite the fact that the mommie person forgot to pack the kids' swimsuits.

We are sequestered here tonight, far away from television, meaning no Celtics game and no Tony awards. How will we survive. We'll hope for a win for the Seafarer, playwright and one of two cast members, and we'll root for the big green. Larry is trying to figure out how to get streaming video of the game, and he thinks there's some way to find a pirated broadcast. It will probably be in Hindi or Portuguese, but he won't care. I'm not as resourceful about the Tony Awards.

I think it's a function of the modern world that we're staying in a cabin with no TV, no phone,no heat, no working toilet or shower to speak of...and yet it has wifi.

Like Clooney, But Taller

2008-06-13T11:14:00.001-04:00

Larry's in the Herald today. Nice photo. Handsome guy.

Co-Writing

2008-06-12T05:40:00.002-04:00

Larry now refers to my co-author as "your other husband."

He has a point.

Most people write by themselves, alone in a room. The upside is that you're alone, and for those of us who enjoy our own company, being alone in a room works out great. No one interrupts to ask about the latest episode of a TV show you've never watched. No one borrows paper clips. No one goes on and on about a never-ending breakup or a mother-in-law who doesn't get it. One of the things that shocked me when I took the G-man to his first playgroup was the stunning amount of small talk I was expected to generate for two straight hours. I was not equal to the task. We mommies gathered in the basement of a church with tons of toys and stood around talking. Women went into great detail about what their kids would and wouldn't eat, about real estate values, about finding a good contractor, about where they'd bought their shoes. They complained about their husbands. One woman talked endlessly and with great intensity about these people in a contest. She discussed their likes and dislikes and the feuds between the judges to a small clique of people who seemed very interested in the saga. I couldn't keep it all straight, mostly because I wasn't very interested. It was three months before I realized she was talking about the TV show "American Idol" and that Reuben and Clay were not people she actually knew.

My first few attempts to work with a co-author were similarly odd, and oddly suited to my communication style. The great thing about working with doctors is that, aside from the urge to heal, they very often don't like people very much. They don't chat. The first doctor I worked with would email me references of studies about statins or ACE inhibitors. Off I went to the library to look them up, read them, and fashion them into a chapter. After I had a handful of chapters, he would read them for me and make his comments via email. I spoke to him twice over the entire course of the project. The second doctor I worked with just dictated stuff to me over the phone. I would get these staccato bursts of information about sports injuries. Once, he did this while out to lunch with his family. That's right. I listened to the treatment for a dislocated shoulder and in the middle, he excused himself to order a tuna melt on wheat and to tell his daughter to sit up straight. The third doctor I worked with wanted to schedule regular phone calls late at night. I fought to stay awake and to listen to his heavily accented English while he went on and on about receptors inside of fat cells. Finally, I put the kibosh on these and just sent him chapter drafts to comment on. To my mind, these were successful working arrangements.

Now, I'm doing a different book, and the doctor I'm working with wants to be the co-author for real. So we have face-to-face meetings once a week, soon to be twice a week. We discuss every paragraph, and brainstorm paragraph ideas. During our meeting on Tuesday, we got stuck on one subhead and the information to follow it. I started writing, and read aloud to him while I wrote. He picked up the thread and kept talking and I typed while he talked. Then he looked at a different part of the chapter while I cleaned it up and then read it to him. And it worked, and I marvel that it works, every time.

When we worked on the proposal together this past winter, he would call the house multiple times per week. Larry would hand me the phone and I'd rush off with my laptop behind a closed door to work on the chapter summaries or the overview or whatever. Also, we chat and laugh a lot. The other day I told him about my second cousin's little boy, who wore the same cheerleading outfit for four months straight. And about this pornographic mommie's blog I ran across last month. We were howling over that one. I know about his car troubles, his sister's baby, his vacation plans. This is some of what I've missed all these years by not working in an office.

Larry doesn't mind all this, and he's a bigger person than I am. When his co-workers call the house, I have often bristled. I feel invaded when they call, and a bit jealous when I hear him talking on the phone and sharing inside jokes with people I hardly know. I hope that will change now that I have my own working relationship. Okay, it's only one person, but it's a start.